I am a Dream

I am a Dream

If only a figment I truly am
In another’s dream that flows so free,
Then I’m impressed as to a diamond
That another could dream up me.

And if I’ll vanish when he wakes,
And my whole world fades away,
I hope he’ll write me down for heaven sakes
And upon me ponder and pray.

For if he does, again I’ll be real,
More so than his waking world,
For the things I’ve thought in him he’ll feel,
And more of me will be unfurled.

It excites me to know that he’ll
Ponder on the things I’ve thought,
For if I’m in him then he’ll know I’m real
For I am, and also he’ll know what’s not.

And if he dreamt me up then I’m proud to be
Within the genius’s thought that streams
And if I think on him while he thinks on me
I’ll not cease e’en when he wakes from dreams.

For I’ll have inspired him to due action,
Within his world where people see,
And through his deeds I’ll live on
Through my ripple on through eternity.

Regardless of whether I’m real or a dream,
(The line is fuzzy if you ask me,)
I know my existence is as sweet as cream,
And that I am what I am, and I’ll be what I be,

And that is goodness and that is grace,
And that is pure intent,
It’s our perception of our place
And it’s us that makes us just a figment.

-Jacob Winterfeldt

Pondering The Universe

I tried to upload this pic with my original, "Pondering The Universe," passage but for some reason I couldn't upload it until now. I think this best captures my pondering state. :)

Pondering The Universe

Pondering the Universe, one of my favorite past times. This is at the Kennedy Space Center and let me tell you it is absolutely incredible everything that we’ve been able to accomplish with space flight. This experience changed my opinion on a lot of matters concerning NASA. I was looking at an old schematic layout of one of the shuttles and there were names of all of the complicated machinery parts with lines pointing to where they were on the shuttle. There were all these complex technological names for all the different parts that went into the design of the ship and then I saw a line coming out of it and at the end of it, it simply said, “Tape Recorder,” haha. Now I would never want to be hurdled into the vacuum that is space with even a tape recorder on board, let alone have it be an important part to the shuttle I was on! It’s unbelievable what we had back then and was able to get to the moon with it. We toured the area where the NASA team actually monitored the flights going up. You know the room you see in Apollo 13. All those super old computers that go beep and boop and then light up when something goes wrong. I don’t have much more to say on the matter other than it was an incredible journey. Now I’m back in little old, New London.
“We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon! We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
-President John F Kennedy

Who wants to live forever?

There is a scent in the air I would say. What is it? So refined and so delicately placed all around us yet those not looking for it will easily pass it by without a second thought. Some things of great value are not to be found for those who would not at least ponder on it in the first place, and if they did happen upon this gift, I would say not all, but the majority would not appreciate it for what it is worth for they didn’t take any thought upon it in the first place. For, the pondering leads to searching, and searching leads to the treasure but the treasure is not what is at the end of the rainbow, it is all you’ve learned getting there. The physical treasure is simply a symbolic representation of all you have gained from your voyage and journey to find it. Sadly it is so innately inherent in us to think the physical treasure is the only thing that matters because we think it is of substance and value. One thing I know is that the spirit and the soul is a reality and a physicality. I often think that we try to separate our physical bodies and our spirits into two completely different categories, in the wrong categories, like our physical body is what we are, and our spirit is this thing inside of us that can feel another spirit or the Holy Ghost when we talk about truth…this is completely backwards! We are not our physical bodies, we are our spirit bodies and this thing that we occupy is a machine that we need to learn to operate, control and master. When a child is born it is not a dumb little baby that doesn’t know how to do anything like what you and I have learned to do and are second nature for us like walking and talking, no this baby is filled with an intelligent spirit that has existed for who knows how long. Imagine being placed inside the most complicated giant robot you can imagine. It’s got thousands of buttons and levers and gadgets that do a million different thing and then try to press all the right buttons to get it to walk and talk and be like all the grown up giant robots! Our bodies are more complex and involved than any computer machine robot thing that any one has ever invented. That is why babies can’t just walk and talk right off the bat. Watch a child if you can, scrutinize their movement and see what they do, they are learning and taking in everything around them and trying to figure out how to coordinate their bodies to do the things they inherently and naturally want to do. They are intelligent spirits that have existed as long as you have but received their bodies later then you. Have a staring contest with a baby and look into their eyes when they are calm and you can easily understand that they are incredibly intelligent beings with innocent souls ready to take on the world. We, our souls, are eternal intelligences that act and our bodies are eternal elements that are to be acted upon by us for we are in control and have dominion over it and all the elements that make it up. This is such an incredible topic I am getting into and I could honestly write pages about it but I am so tired now. I heard a talk in sacrament meeting once where the mother was talking about their dying child and the father was inspired to give a divinely guided blessing to the baby. It was paraphrased something like this, “By the authority of the Priesthood I command the elements that make up the body of this child to repent and to fulfill the measure of their being.” The child who was going to die in a matter of weeks was healed of his ailment and became strong and healthy. The child wasn’t sinning or in the wrong for he couldn’t, rather it was his physical body, the elements that made him up that were not acting according to their design making the child sick. Elements don’t act mechanically, they are not machines that are given one task to do and then do it and only it, they choose what they will, their restrictions are great but they still choose to do what they will, if they didn’t we would live forever and never die, and that is the question anyway, Who wants to live forever?

The Word

I think a reason I am so fascinated with words is because it is the main form of communication that we humans use so predominantly, but yet I don’t believe words in and of themselves can illustrate a tenth of what we humans actually feel. Certain emotions can’t be described with the word itself but yet I believe one can uniquely arrange words in such a way to give more meaning and depth to the surface meanings of the words singularly, which is why I love to write poetry. It’s almost like putting together a delicate puzzle when trying to bring more depth and understanding in the way one arranges words.
You know, it’s like how the scriptures say, the pain and joy that can be felt in this life and the one to come for the most part we truly can’t understand or even fathom until those certain emotions fall upon us. We know not the pain or the joy. There was a time in my life when I couldn’t believe that it was possible for a soul to feel how I felt and I’ll never in this life be able to describe it one tenth to anyone else no matter how hard I try and the thing is, even if I had the ability to I wouldn’t.
The word though is fascinating, it is incredible how languages evolve and grow and become more unique and efficient in describing our emotions. What we write and what we speak are us trying to portray to others what we feel. Though the word itself might have some aspects that can almost come close to describing certain feelings I think that the word itself,(at least how we comprehend the word) is a median freely given us for us to use how we may. People can use and manipulate this form of communication to fulfill their desires for good or for evil, and being less than completely honest is so naturally inherent in us and the word is the perfect tool to do so. However, this type of front is not true feeling, I believe that emotion and feeling itself is the original and truest form of communication. Instead of when you feel happy you open your mouth and say, “O, I feel happy today,” you let others feel your happiness by actually letting them feel the same sensation that you are feeling so they can truly understand what it’s like for you. This might be a hard thing to understand but if we could flip this around and come at it from a different point of view let me ask this question, what was it like in the spirit world before we came to earth and gained a body? Now first of all I don’t believe we had telepathic abilities in the way you see it on tv but did we speak a verbal language? Did we use our mouths? Did we have air in our lungs to help us speak? And if we did, did we speak English, or Spanish, or was it the Adamic language given Adam and Eve to speak? What was it? How did we communicate? I’m not saying I know but I defiantly have thoughts on the matter. We had thoughts then, we had intelligence and we had the ability to choose. It talks in the scriptures about having eyes to see and ears to hear. While obviously we have eyes for vision and ears to hear things but that is not the connotation of its meaning. Do we have eyes to see? See what? I say it is to see what is real as opposed to that which makes us unhappy. It is not simply meaning the things that we visually see around us all the time, it means can we recognize something good when we see it? Same with hearing? Now vision and hearing are things that go into us for us to comprehend and to learn and to feel it’s truth when we have eyes and ears to see and hear, now, speech, our words are what come out of us to portray what it is that we have learned and feel with what we have seen and heard. Now, I ask the question, do we have mouths to speak?
Isn’t this language unreal and unbelievable when you start to think about it in this way? I absolutely love it. One thing that I need to get better at is figuring out how to get to the point of what I am trying to say without diverting off on so many other things that intertwine and connect with my original intent which are just as fascinating and interesting to think on but stray away from my original point or intent. It’s difficult for me to balance and weigh what it is that I should say and not say in order for my point to be solidified at the end of any given passage.
When I start writing I don’t mean to preach or intend for all of my words to be taken as complete truth or doctrine, more so for me to express my quandaries and thoughts. More so for my own learning, often I’ll write something and then months later go over it again and change my opinion on a certain thing that I wrote. When I write it is just a means to get thought flowing in ways that natural thinking doesn’t usually flow which is a great means to find truth. To balance and weigh the more deepened and intricate parts of our existence by asking what is our existence, and not simply that, but going further and asking what is our perception and thought of existence and why do we think the things we think and what was it like before we had the veil placed over our minds, and what was our perception and thought process then? I envision it as water from a river flowing over ground that the river carved course does not naturally take it. Flowing over new dirt and trees and brush and rocks to find a truer course as opposed to that of where the rest of the water is flowing. Pondering over new thoughts, new ideas that the majority of people simply don’t think about and continue on in their original flow, not ever reaching out to more understanding or enlightenment which we have been commanded to do, and simply continuing on in the rut of their understanding that the river has carved and been flowing through for eons.
Take the things you know to be true and travel new ground with them. Never exploit your truths or justify your wrongs in the search for this new enlightenment. When you start to do this a whole new world opens up to you and it is up to you to find that more truth and knowledge that is unfathomably abundant, and like I’ve said so often it is in the air, it’s everywhere. The church is true and a basic faith in that is key but we must continue to progress with new thoughts and enlightenment and never stop building our bank of knowledge and in so doing this it expands the foundation of our faith until it can no longer be doubted or broken no matter how terrible the wind blows and no matter how dark the skies get. We are designed to absorb information at rates incredible, this in and of itself is a testimony to me that God is there and wants us to know things and wants us to come to understandings of our experiences and what they are doing for us. Even the most incredibly hard experiences of our lives He’s said will be for our benefit and shall give us experience. Why other reason would this be so important than to continue us on to Godhood and to what He has.
I cannot say enough that the church is true because there is absolutely no doubt that it is and I only pray that those who read my words can feel that it is so profoundly that they can’t deny the feeling of my testimony. Why is it so hard for us to believe? I don’t believe it is hard for us to believe, rather it is hard for us to do, which within our ever intricate and complicated minds causes us to think it is hard to believe in what is true. I recently told a good friend of mine that it is not a matter of not knowing what is true, but it is a matter of understanding what it feels like when we do. Then to add onto that, do it.

Truth is truth and it never changes,
It can’t be bought or sold,
Though exacting in certain occasions,
It is if understood more precious than gold.

Chillin' with John Curtis,

Click on the pic to view a better quality version of it.

Who did I run into in Orlando Florida while helping out with Habitat for Humanity? Yup, John Curtis, the Mayor of Provo himself... Unbelievable, what are the odds in that. Well, anyway you'll notice that I am wearing his name badge sticker and that is a funny story.

While in the midst of painting the house in the background,(the one with the brown trim...yeah, I did most of that trim because I unknowingly picked up the one and only small, perfectly sized roller for that specific job, everyone was a little jealous of me I think:) ) I somehow lost my name sticker and when I realized it I exclaimed out loud, "I lost my name!" John Curtis heard me say it and replied, "O, you'll get it back." A few hours later I still hadn't found my name and we were in the garage eating lunch. He was leaning down to pick something up and his name sticker fell off his shirt and onto the ground. I was sitting nearby and he picked his name up and stuck it on me! "There you go," he said. "So does this mean I'm the new mayor of Provo?" I asked. He laughed and said, "Good luck!" haha

So needless to say I am currently mulling over my next step as Mayor of Provo. First thing's first, demolish that skate park west of the freeway and rebuild a Skate Plaza in its place! We're voting on it this coming November.

Thoughts of a Poet

Thoughts of a Poet

What is it today I desire to write?
Something that others have never of heard,
Like can I switch words to help them rhyme right?
Or would that be so completely absurd?

I conclude it doesn’t matter for what is the word
If it cannot describe what truly is me?
Silently in the night I write free as a bird
The words how I may and that’s how they’ll be.

Even now as I write this verse my mind
Is stewing over this ode as I say
That a part doesn’t flow perfectly how I’d like,
But I feel how it is, is how it should stay.

The second verse I admire and how it does work
If I say so myself and as well this next rhyme,
Though, not yet it’s been written I funnily smirk
Because now it has, O, how funny is time?

In this quatrain I’ll rhyme about thought,
And the things in one’s chest that can be heard,
And of consciousness, wow, I rewrote that a lot
Because I’m not even sure how to utter that word.

Truth in the air is like a poem well written,
You feel it as it in your chest so grows,
Many only see words and with them aren’t smitten
By the feel of its love and the way that it flows.

But yes, and is, and isn’t, and all
Are only words, I’m sad for the mind
Of those who see them as opposed to the call
Of the intricate message laying gently behind.

There aren’t words unique enough to portray,
And there aren’t words to describe the touch
Of love when a couple does kneel and pray,
And a whole slew of other mushy things of the such.

I write and wonder of who’ll understand
The thoughts of a poet who silently tries
To write truth in a way the only way that he can,
As he stares out the window at the stars while he sighs.

-Jacob Winterfeldt

Actual travel as opposed to that fanciful time travel thingy...

Well, here I am a hundred billion feet above the earth and headed to Orlando and all I can think about is my strange confliction of thought. I love witnessing the earth from such a high view but it is difficult for me to have a sure faith in the two guys at the head of this massive piece of metal to get me back down safely. First of all I am not afraid of heights or flying but I would much rather prefer to drive places, but yet I absolutely love looking down on the planet and seeing the flipside of my regular existence. It’s simply incredible being so high over the clouds and seeing them from a completely different point of view. I also marvel at how these complex, massive pieces of metal can fly so high through the air, an experience and exhilaration that grizzled flyers I’m sure tend to get used to and take for granted. I believe the reason I like driving more than flying is a term I believe that I just made up in the mere moments before typing it to try and describe my thought, “The Control of Imminent Danger Factor!” or CIDF… when I drive I am the one in control of my life for the most part and honestly car accidents are much less dreadful then when a plane goes down. Now I know that flying is extremely safe but it is a matter of control and possibly faith than anything else. Though I am certain more of this fact than almost anything else, I know I’m going to live a long life but it is still slightly nerve racking to let two guys at the head of this massive piece of metal shoot me through the sky at a thousand miles an hour. It is incredible at any rate though.
Recently my understanding and knowledge of how a plane can actually stay in the air has been enlightened which has caused me to feel more confident about them. Now, we know the wing is one of the most important parts to a plane but do you know how the shape of the wing actually creates lift and why it can continually keep the plane up? The topside of the wing is curved and the bottom is flat. When the air splits around the wing, one current of air goes along the bottom and the other along the top and because the top side of the wing is curved the air going on top actually speeds up to catch up with the bottom flow of air which creates a vacuum that actually sucks the wing upward when being propelled forward through space. Your forward motion is keeping you sucked up into the sky and tilting different portions of the wing gives control of your altitude. Because of the shape of the wing the plane is actually being sucked upward and that suction will always be there as long as the wing is intact. Isn’t that fascinating? Maybe I’m just learning about this a little late but I love how that works. It just gets my mind turning about so many other concepts and it starts to blow my mind a little.
One thing I love about the gospel is that, and I’ve said this before because I love how true it is, is that everything is a testimony of true principles. Forward motion when under the right design will lift you up. The very nature of the universe testifies of Goodness and of the things we can do and become, and enlightened men who figure out this law to propel an object upward and keep it in the air aren’t just learning how aerodynamics work, they are learning principles of truth when thinking on it. It is incredible, if only more people could understand this, it just gets me so excited and I want to shout it from the rooftops! Alright that might be a little extreme but I love it none the less. It’s the very reason why Christ used so many parables and analogies to teach true points of doctrine and principles of truth. This world and our universe were created with truth so it naturally is governed by truth and that is how everything functions! I just want people to understand this so badly so we can understand how things really are. It’s so exciting because when you understand what I’m saying in the slightest degree you can come to the knowledge of things in ways that you can’t fathom at this time. You can learn from the past and you can literally have foresight to matters of your heart if you follow the natural testimony or principle of the Earth and how it works.
I truly hope any who read this can understand what it is that I am trying to say. I know that I am not good at describing and explaining things but I think I am getting better since I have been writing more.
I could seriously write a book about my excitement over this type of thing that I’ve just been talking about…hey, that’s a good idea I might just do that…

More Time Travel!

I have an explosion of thought for you to ponder on.
First of all, what would you say if someone asked you what time is? Not what time it is, but what time is?
In a previous entry I talked about time being completely surrounding as an ocean and how our physical bodies are a submarine being propelled forward through this ocean of time. Now I want to talk about why the submarine is being propelled forward. Why can it not, like our consciousness turn, reverse, or go faster through time?
I was driving to Buffalo today which is about an hour and a half away and I fell upon a conclusion that to me makes so much sense. But like so much of what I write I need to let you know that it is just my own thoughts on the matter and I in no way am suggesting to you in any manner that this is without a doubt how it is. But hear me out on this because it is so interesting to think about.
If there are parts when reading this that don’t make sense just keep reading because in my mind it makes sense but it is so difficult to explain using words as a tool of communication, but I will do my best so bear with me on this.
We as human beings measure time, but what is it? Seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, we rotate around the sun and it gives us our form of reckoning time, but the more I think upon this matter the more I don’t think time how so many of us perceive it even exists. A person is born and they grow up and get old and die. They spend a good deal of time on this planet.
Alright, follow me on this. Time is not time, time is movement, distance traveled. I don’t know that we ever occupy the same space in time ever in our entire lives. One might say that of course we do, we walk out our front door every single day and we are occupying that same space in time every time we walk out the door. Well, on earth we do occupy the same place in time all the time, but earth is constantly spinning and constantly rotating around the sun, and to bring it into an even grander scale the sun is not stationary either, our solar system is hurdling through space never letting even our planet occupy the same place in time ever. If you could pause the very movement of our universe, not pause time how we think of it, but stop the world like how we would stop a car and then put it into reverse and let it reverse through the very same space that it just was coming from, our submarine,( our bodies) could go back in time. Time doesn’t exist, it is such a strange concept but we as humans created it to help us to measure distance traveled without even knowing it. We implemented this form of reckoning time to help understand why things get old, why we are in one moment one moment and then in a next moment the next moment, but we are pressing forward in moments not because of time, but because we are constantly changing where we are in space, and things don’t get old, they are simply moving forward in space. I hope you can understand what I am trying to say because I don’t feel like I am doing a very good job. I think it is a principle of truth, not a law that we made up to define all of the oddities that surround us constantly. I believe the universe is governed by true principles as opposed to regulated laws that we assign it to bring some sense and understanding to our minds. It’s why miracles can happen, but that is another topic of interest that I’ll write about later.
Moving on, we read in several passages in the scriptures(2nd peter, Alma, Abraham,) how God’s time is corresponding to ours. It describes one day to God is one thousand years to us. Now this could be how we interpret time or measure it but let me continue on with this being the set standard. God lives one day to our thousand years.
If you were to look down on a planet and witness one thousand years of a people in one of your days, you might be considered to be going extremely slow, because the people you are watching will be zooming by with their lives in mere seconds.(I’m not using exact calculations but that would be interesting to figure out.) Now, I in no way believe that God is a slow person, so how do we make up for this. Well, let me go on, if we forget everything that we know about time and implement my theory on the matter that time is not time how we know it, time equals distance traveled and not a period of length in time, if time is distance then we standing at point A looking at point B which is a thousand years away for us would take God only one day to get there. Now that is fast. When our bodies grow old, it is not father time, it is father distance. Our cells, our bodies our bones are not aging because of a length in time, they are just traveling through space continuously and changing.
Let me go on, did you know that we can actually time travel with our physical bodies to a small degree comparatively speaking. We can slow down time for ourselves. This, in and of itself perplexes the whole how we measure time appropriately but ties in perfectly with my theory. I’ll use this example but I am not limiting this experience to just these types of events. If you have every been in an accident, specifically for this example a car accident, through the intense shaking and crashing of everything around you your body goes into a survival mode. Your body redirects energy away from less important faculties of body toward the most needed senses at the time. In a lot of situations it is sight and basic awareness. Think of your eyes like a camera that continually record at a set frame rate that send images to your brain for translation. In these intense car accident situations your eyes increase their frame rate rapidly to take in more of what is going on around you to help you survive and get through the intense situation which in turn to your very being slows everything down; it slows down time for you. So would days be twice as long if our eyes were continuously shooting at a frame rate twice of what they normally do? To us it would seem twice as long but to others whose eyes are still unrefined it would seem like a normal day and their days in the eye of the describer (me) would zip by. So the faster our eyes send images back to our brain the longer our day is but not to others. And if our eyes got to such a high, refined speed of celestial purity as God’s is would we not get to a point where our day would be so long that it might turn out to be one thousand years for others that haven’t achieved this state yet, they would zip by at an incredible speed but it’s not that we are going slower, we are simply absorbing more into our minds so days seem for us to be much longer. It is all how we measure time and our perception of how it goes by. Then ultimately when our eyes reach that point of speed to where time is stopped and then go beyond that, all things past, present and future are before us as how God himself sees it, and time is not time but distance traveled so He with His single physical body is all encompassing and all knowing for it is all before Him. And though we zip by, we are not faster than Him, we are simply not taking in as much as His celestialized, purified, sanctified mind and body, and we all have this ability already built into us to testify of true principles and the way the universe actually works.
It is really confusing I know, and I’m not sure if even in this passage I’ve worked out all the bugs but I know it can work and fit together perfectly. It is just a matter of thinking and pondering and figuring it out through prayer and scripture study…and watching documentaries on quantum physics and the universe on the discovery channel, then combining the two… scientists, as smart as they are, they are really missing out on a huge key of understanding, faith in true principles as opposed to cold, hard scientific law. I often think of the Prophet and Apostles as true scientists that understand how things really work. If you understand the spirit, you can understand quantum physics, you can understand the universe and the things that regular scientists can’t answer.

There is a science of the soul,
And one of the plan God has for us,
It’s not that we can’t understand,
We, just on it haven’t thought enough.

Time Travel?!

Driving today for twelve hours to Mason city, Iowa, gave me way too much time to think. But alas I am too tired to reiterate in any form all the fantastic ideas that flow through my head. I am completely exhausted now and just as I am writing these very words I am experiencing a strong sense of déjà vu.
So strange the mind, why does it seem to remember things that have never apparently happened? Does it simply recall similar situations that have previously happened and then through all its complex corridors bring an almost scent to the mind as particular memories and then pull it all together as a complex puzzle, and then trick itself into thinking the current time in space has happened before? Maybe that didn’t make any sense to you but it made sense to me well I wrote it so I’m keeping it…
Well, I was actually thinking about this very topic about three hours in to my drive today. So I suppose I will share this, only because I am still currently remembering me writing about this experience.
I have a hunch; I kind of believe that time is not a straight line or like a river how it is talked about a lot. But I believe time is… if we could follow along the same analogy format as the river, I would say time is more of a completely surrounding ocean with all of our experience, past, present, and future all before us and all around us all the time and we are under the water in a submarine. The submarine in this example will represent our bodies. The submarine is being propelled forward in a straight line and the people inside of the submarine represent our spirits or consciousness. It’s our physical bodies that make time travel an impossibility, however to send thoughts and energy and our very consciousness through time is something that I believe happens all of the time. When the people inside the directly forward propelled submarine get their scuba gear on and enter freely into the water that is when one can witness or feel such as in déjà vu circumstances and events that may not have happened yet because it’s in the ocean as a possible current of future. It is our corruptible bodies that are locking us into a straight forward motion through time, but I say that our thoughts, our emotions, our feelings, our desires, our prayers, our ideas, our dreams, our souls, our minds all flow freely back and forward through time and it is up to us to understand this and ponder on it. This is why I believe people can behold visions of future events. Time is all before everything and the spirit of God is refined enough to sanctify our mortal bodies to testify to us in those very thoughts, feelings, emotions, dreams, visions and any other ways it would be expedient for us to come to specific knowledge whatever it may be.
I do say that all of this is just my hunch but I do believe that is how this whole time thing works. The river analogy would be dead on if it were just our bodies, but the conscience flows freely through my example of the ocean. Well I’m sure we’ll all find out how it all works one of these days but for now this is what I’ll believe because it makes sense to me.
Well, goodnight everybody. Sleep tight.