Chapter 1 – Traveling into the past and back home again.
All of our memories about the past, at least the ones that are still available to us, can be recalled audibly and replayed visually within our minds, but only to the extent and accuracy that our minds will allow us to remember them. All of our memories have been colored by our personal perspectives, preferences, and the emotions we were feeling at the time the memory was stored. It seems to me that excessively painful, or exceedingly pleasurable, memories take longer to fade, but they are also more likely to be distorted by the emotions we were feeling when we experienced the actual event. Another person who was present and experienced the same event may have an entirely different recollection of what happened. In my opinion, that is one of the most wonderful things about memories – they are not an objective portrayal of the event, but instead they are mental constructs – reenactments that have been specifically designed to help each of us process our life experiences in the most effective way possible. If we learn to seek insight through the painful memories and then willfully release them, knowing that we have gained all the potential for understanding locked in those memories, we can set ourselves free from the pain of our past and bring ourselves closer to being present in the current moment. On the other hand, we can choose to nurture and hold on to the memories that bring us joy and remind each of us of who we truly are. We can learn to archive and selectively preserve memories that serve us well whether they are painful or pleasurable but grounding ourselves in the present moment is the key to using our memories for intentional time travel.
“An Object in Motion”
This is the first chapter of a three-part series describing An Abstract Theory of Intentional Time Travel. Skeptics, cynics and critics, feel free to speak your minds. These thoughts were brought to you by the collective consciousness of humankind.
Update: I’ve added a second film to my YouTube channel. It’s a promotional film about the “Return to Hope” bronze sculpture that I recently repatined and put up for sale. Here is the link in case you’re interested – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyS4elkdsyg&t=46s
Traditionally, concepts of time travel seem to be centered around movement of a physical form, namely the human body, from one specific moment to another along a timeline. The timeline imagined may include multiple dimensions, but more often than not, the concept is simplified by its adherence to a widely accepted belief that there is only one timeline, the timeline of our shared human history. The most common imaginings of time machines have included dials and switches that allow the time traveler to select a specific time, either in the past or the future, that they would like to move their physical form to within the time-space continuum. Usually, this movement cannot technically be equated to movement at all, considering the fact that the time traveler is consistently imagined as arriving at another point along the timeline in the exact same location as they were when they initiated the travelsequence. At this moment in time, I invite you to imagine a whole new theory of time travel – one that is as simplistic and realistic as it is complicated and extraordinary. Based on the concept of a continuous now, this new theory of time travel is available to every human being who is willing to explore the connection between our conscious awareness and what happens next on the timeline of our individual and collective life experiences.
There was a time in my childhood when I thought this was a magic river. Every time I visited its banks, I would be filled with giddy anticipation as to what color the water would be this time. As I matured, I realized that the colors were waste dyes from the textile mill upstream. I revisited this river when I was shooting scenes for the film “Return to Hope” (see link at the bottom of the page). While shooting this photo, I remember feeling both saddened and hopeful simultaneously. It made me sad to see all of the rubbish thrown in the water over the years, but also hopeful, noticing that nature was reclaiming the river itself – restoring the quality of the water and reviving the abundance of life that inhabited these waters before they were polluted by the irresponsible acts of a few misguided individuals.
In this moment of now, a moment that we are all experiencing simultaneously, yet experiencing it in as many different ways as there are human beings on the planet, there is a constant and undeniable movement of energies. We are each perceiving these constantly moving energies from our own limited perspective and through the limited capabilities of our five senses. If we allow ourselves to be adventurous enough to include a sixth sense, that of our conscious awareness, we immediately broaden our perspective, and we effectively open our third eye to the true nature of the energies in motion during each and every moment of now. When we witness these energies in motion, and we recognize that we are indeed traveling with time itself, then each moment of our lives becomes much more meaningful. If we learn how to read the energies we are experiencing as we move from the past into the future within the moment of now, then we can more accurately predict what is going to happen next on our timeline. As the moments pass, while we are retaining a conscious connection with the energies in motion, and we also remain present and aware, it becomes apparent that we are traveling through time involuntarily, and we always have been. With our new understanding of the abstract theory of time travel embraced, it becomes so much easier to relax and enjoy the ride.
This contemporary philosopher, William MacAskill, penned a decidedly positive prediction about what our collective future has in store for us. I truly enjoyed the book because it was helpful in relieving basic fears about our tendency to destroy more than we preserve.
Update on my own perceptions of the current moment: I’m a bit discouraged and frustrated by my own inability to raise the funds I need to travel from St. Pete, FL back up to Hope, RI during July and August. I’ve been focused on earning money while I’m here at Mike’s studio, but I’ve also been making promotional videos for each of my bronze sculptures in an attempt to make a sale (see headliner photo “Return to Hope” the bronze). So far, my marketing attempts have fallen short of a sale, but I refuse to give up hope. If you would like to support me in my creative journey there are a number of ways you can do just that – there’s the Donate * Contact page on this website – the GoFundMe campaign for the “Florida to Maine Expedition to Gather Film Content” https://gofund.me/9285192b – or you could communicate with me directly through the YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh2eSJsfi9K63NiLp6Tuhxg or Facebook Messenger https://www.facebook.com/scottjoseph.moore/
I am sincerely grateful that you’ve taken the time to read this online journal. Thank you for being here in the moment of now!
Chapter 3 – The Future is a Succession of Present Moments
The first time I attempted to be mindfully present, I was only able to stay in that state for a few seconds and then my mind returned to its usual whirlwind of habitual thinking. But, for those few seconds, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. Instantaneously, I realized that life wasn’t as serious or complicated as I had always believed it to be. I came to the understanding then, that the present moment was not nearly as intimidating when it was emotionally detached from the past and the future. Previously, every moment of now had been engulfed in regrets from the past and fears of what might happen in the future. Now that I could see the present moment in its simplest form, without all the weight of past and future, I found it much easier to accept whatever each consecutive moment had to offer. As I became more practiced at the act of staying present, I also learned how to separate and evaluate the pains and the pleasures as I was experiencing them, during each passing moment. This made both the pleasurable and the painful experiences easier to appreciate emotionally. Knowing that a hardship in the moment does not need to be compounded by dredging up and attaching every similar moment from the past, gives us an opportunity to treat ourselves with empathy and compassion, even during our most traumatic or tragic moments. There is an amazing feeling of peace that comes when you learn how to unburden yourself of regret and worry, especially if you’ve been carrying around the weight of that emotional baggage for most of your life. In my life, even pleasurable moments were often spoiled by past and future. If I was feeling pleased about anything at all, I would seek out memories of past failings to justify why I didn’t deserve to be happy now. If that didn’t bring me down enough, I would look forward in fear to when the feelings of pleasure would end. Because, eventually, they always end. Or that’s what I thought back then. Now, the act of being present has become a choice that I make over and over again, in each passing moment, not because it’s habitual, but because it is a much more enjoyable way of life. And that’s not all. The moment of now has the potential for a much greater payoff than just making our lives more peaceful and enjoyable than they were when we were filling them up with all of that bad mojo from the past and future. The present moment can also aid us in the fulfillment of our goals and promote the manifestation of our most treasured dreams.
“Beach Gnomes in Paradise” sculptures by S.M.art Castings & Sculpture Services, LLC Photo by Kevin Moore.
The more you live in the now, and consequently, the less you live in the past and the future, the easier it becomes to perceive the causal nature of your thoughts and actions as you work through them. Practicing mindfulness in the now, we can learn to watch ourselves as we live out our life stories. If we want to achieve a particular goal, we understand that we must move in the direction that has the best potential of getting us there. Before we can even move though, we must decide that we are willing to face certain challenges along the way. Is it worth the effort? Bringing that question to our past experiences to help us decide whether it may have a favorable or unfavorable outcome is certainly a valid course of action. As long as you are not looking back to find excuses not to move forward. So many times, I’ve talked myself out of something, because I’ve either failed to achieve it in the past or looking back I see that I’ve never had the courage to attempt it in the first place, so I decide to abandon the goal and settle for less. Looking to the future, while staying firmly grounded in the now, we can make wise choices and take the appropriate actions to get us where we want to be. The more goals we achieve, the more practiced we become at seeing the road signs of success as we are painting them. The present moment becomes a time machine, having the potential to transport us into a more predictable future. And still, the only time we really ever have is now. I’ve chosen to be present, right here, right now.
Presently letting go of the “Anonymous Self-Portrait” (1994). Speaking of excess baggage from the past, I’ve been carrying around this handsome fella for almost thirty years. If you would like to know more about this piece and hear the story behind it, just click on the link to see the short promotional film I produced in an effort to market this sculpture. I’m motivated to make this sale!
“Anonymous Self-Portrait”
Thank you for spending your now, here, on the “Grand Providentia United” blog site. Stay tuned for some extraordinary manifestations in the moments to come. I haven’t yet been able to raise the funds to embark on the “Florida to Maine Expedition to Gather Film Content”, but within the coming week I’ll be heading north, to Savannah first, and then hopefully toward Hope to spend the final weeks of summer with friends and family in Rhode Island. The fall is just ahead, and coursework will begin in early September at the Savannah College of Art and Design. I am extremely excited about what comes next! For now, I will continue to march through this life transition with patience, persistence and flexibility, from one moment to the next, until the future is now.
Fresh Perspectives Harvested ~ Post 1 – Introduction
If you are one who has never wrestled with low self-esteem, and if you’ve never felt unworthy or even felt a little less worthy than others, the topic of discussion in the following blog entry may seem trivial, and quite possibly, utterly meaningless. As such, it may be frustrating to read this in its tediousness. If it annoys you or you simply cannot relate to it, then it must mean that it isn’t time for you to read it, or at least not in this moment it isn’t. You are always free to surf away to another site, as I’m sure you are aware. The freedom of expression that I enjoy as being the sole author on this site is, in my own estimation, earned by being honest with myself and you all. So, this journal entry is where I intend to earn some of that freedom.
There were two separate occurrences that arose during the past week and each of them pointed directly to my continuing struggles with self-worth. I’ll only be discussing one of the two situations in detail on this blog, because the other one involves personal family matters, and therefore, private relationships. The peculiar thing is, that the family issue that happened later in the week, pointed to how far I’ve come on the journey toward healthy self-esteem and the other one, at the beginning of the week, showed me how far I have yet to go. Due, in part, to my history of painful experiences in dealing with self-worth issues, I’ve apparently adopted the automatic expectation that the events should have transpired the other way around. In other words, first would come the uplifting circumstance, and after that would come a lesson in humility to knock me down a couple of notches. Put me in my rightful place, so to speak. I’m beginning to understand that humility and self-esteem are not mutually exclusive, though. A person can have a high and healthy self-esteem, while also being humble in spirit, thus feeling no better and no worse than anyone else.
I chose this photo and the one at the top of the page because I felt as though they were representative of times when I was feeling good about myself and thinking that I had overcome all the problems concerned with low self-esteem. Read on, if you want to know my true feelings about these particular photographs.
Let’s back up to early last week. I started a new job last Monday as a second shift employee in a local warehouse. I arrived on time at 3:30 PM, because I’ve been conditioned to believe that promptness demonstrates overall integrity and an upstanding work ethic. Being prompt is also a courtesy that I asked for from the people that I employed at Moore Art Expressions. More often than not, I didn’t have to say anything about being on time though, because we had so much fun being there and being creative, that most employees preferred to come in early and leave late. At least, that’s the way I remember it. And yes, I am allowing myself that short digression. Now, back to last Monday. I was having some serious misgivings about accepting the warehouse job during the hours and days before I walked into the building, but I chalked that up to dreading the actual labor and fearing that I was too old to handle such a strenuous job. I am about to be fifty-nine years young, after all. In the past several months, I’ve remained focused on eating well and stretching and exercising daily, and as a result I’ve been feeling better physically than I have in the last decade. As I am writing this down tonight, I can see where my dread and fear were not only well founded, but more precisely they were intuitively realistic. The job description online didn’t attempt to gloss over any of the gory details of the work, so I knew reasonably well what to expect. I would be unloading boxes by hand from overseas containers, some in excess of 50-75 lbs., and loading them on to a conveyor belt in a non-climate-controlled environment. Many of you may be wondering whether I’ve lost my mind. Wondering why I would accept a menial labor job like this, especially considering the expertise I’ve attained in the molding and sculpture casting industry. As it often seems to be, the answer to that question is complicated, so I’ll come back around to it after describing what happened next.
Photo: Chris, Morderchai and Fred worked tirelessly in scorching Florida heat with me to cast 100 of these life-sized dog sculptures. It was a difficult learning curve to master the process, but we each became extremely skillful at performing our individual tasks as part of a unified team. In retrospect, I must conclude thateach of us personally enjoyed certain aspects of working on the project and we each considered other aspects of it, well, not so enjoyable.
Monday, my first night working at the warehouse, went fairly well, all things considered. The air inside the shipping containers was much hotter and more humid than I expected. The hot sun of the Savannah daytime hours had really settled in on the interior of the steel box, and the seawater that had seeped its way inside and saturated many of the cardboard boxes had no place to evaporate to, so as soon as I started moving, I started sweating. I kept moving. I was trying to pace myself, but I was also trying to prove myself. The conveyor belt was demanding to be fed and I kept feeding it. I unloaded 1,400 boxes to empty the first 40-foot container in about three hours. There were many times during the first load that I needed to cool my body and hydrate, so I walked outside the box and just inside the warehouse to take 30 second breathers. It was still very hot inside the warehouse, but rather than 110 degrees Fahrenheit it was more like 90. I finished off the shift on Monday moving from one container to the next, sometimes with help from coworkers when the boxes were oversized or heavy, and sometimes moving them on my own, until at last, the midnight hour arrived. I drove home for some highly anticipated sleep.
Photo: Another contract that I truly appreciated for seven enjoyable years during the Moore Art Expressions days, involved the restoration and upkeep of patinas on 24 monumental bronze sculptures for Raymond James Financial in Saint Petersburg, FL. The bronze sculpture photographed here is titled “Invocation” by the sculptor Buck McCain.
I returned on Tuesday afternoon, a little bit tired but still determined to prove my physical abilities to the team. As I got busy moving boxes, I had to keep reminding myself of the lessons I’ve learned over the course of thirty years in the blue-collar workforce. Lessons learned about keeping a reasonable pace no matter how fast others appear to be moving; about not comparing myself to others around me, they have their strengths and shortcomings just as I do; about not needing to prove myself to anyone other than myself; and most important of all, about taking breaks as often as you need to when you’re performing strenuous work in extreme temperatures. All of these thoughts were running through my mind, but my body seemed to have a different strategy it was running with regardless of my mind’s considerations. My body continued to lift and release boxes onto the conveyor belt. As many of you may have already surmised, I was soon overcome by heat exhaustion. My head was spinning, and I nearly passed out a number of times before they rang the bell for lunch break. I ate a little bit of food, but it tasted like poison, so I stopped eating and lay down on the picnic table bench for the remainder of the break. When my thirty minutes were up, I went right back to unloading the container where I had left off. Looking back on this it seems like complete foolishness. I was already having all of the symptoms of heat exhaustion and the potential of dying from heatstroke was growing more likely by the moment. I would like to report that I informed the warehouse managers of my condition and then I went home for the rest of the evening, but I did not. I would also like to tell you that I didn’t understand what was happening to me; that I did not know about heat exhaustion or the type of symptoms one might experience when they’re suffering from it. I would be lying to you all, if I made those false claims. Having worked in southwest Florida in extreme heat conditions for over a decade, I am fully aware of the symptoms and potential health risks that come along with heat exhaustion. Even having all this first-hand knowledge, I continued working hard until midnight and went home to get some rest.
I suppose this is a good place to end the narrative for today. Tomorrow, I’ll finish the story and explain why this incident and the other one involving my family were not only interrelated, but they seemed to be fully entwined, and together they rang out a resounding wakeup call to my body, mind and spirit.
My current feelings about the top two images – The top one was taken during the peak of our successful times at Moore Art Expressions. I had nine team members working with me to help raise us to that level, so I always felt a bit uneasy about being the public spokesperson when the media asked for an interview. As for the second photo – I swear to you, it was the photographer’s idea! I would have never agreed to it if he didn’t suggest that I might become endowed with superpowers following the shoot! In all seriousness though, I look back on those times with sincere gratitude and appreciation for all the good times we experienced together in the MAE studio!
Below is a link for those who would like to see more photos and videos of the work we did at Moore Art Expressions. The business website was taken down when I closed the business, but this Facebook page will give you an overview of the art we made there.
During the second night of my new job in the warehouse, I crossed the threshold of being a dedicated company employee and passed deep into the territory of being a foolish steward of my own sacred temple (body). I was now suffering from heat exhaustion. When I left the warehouse last Tuesday at midnight, I remember thinking I would be okay, everything would be okay, I just need to get home and get a good night’s sleep. Well, it didn’t turn out that way. When I crawled into bed after a cool shower, I was so disoriented, nauseous and dehydrated that I never really had a chance at getting even a few hours of sound and restful sleep. Instead, I just kept rolling around, trying to find the magic position that would ease the throbbing in my overheated head and body. I barely slept that night. On Wednesday I tried to recuperate some energy and hydration by drinking as much water and electrolyte sports drinks as I could stomach. Having cut way back on my sugar intake during the past few years, I needed to seek out something other than Gatorade or any of its overly sweet sports drink lookalikes. I’ve learned quite a bit recently about how to take care of my physical health, and that makes last week’s unhealthy decisions even more upsetting. I should not have gone in on Wednesday night, but again, I did.
“Angry Eyes” from the Hope Mill collection
When I arrived at work on Wednesday, I was well prepared with lots of water and energy drinks, pain medications, and the types of food that my intuition told me I could handle without feeling nauseous. But the one thing that really made a difference was that my outlook and attitude had changed between the moment I fell into bed the previous night and 3:30 PM the following day. Somewhere during those hours, I saw through the conditioned insanity of my wage worker mindset. I had been trying to prove myself to the company and all of my new coworkers, and I’d even been trying to prove to myself that I still possessed the physical prowess I once had, and meanwhile I had somehow forgotten to take care of the physical body that I had been using like a machine to try to prove myself. I am so grateful to be able to recognize the madness in some of my behaviors these days. It took me many years to see with any kind of clarity, the dysfunctional and self-defeating qualities of my own actions and intentions. For me, it has always been extremely helpful to write through the issues I’m up against, so once they are laid out before me, I can pour over them, looking for the moment where my thoughts began to lead me astray. I have almost entirely recovered as I’m writing this today. I’m still feeling some lingering adverse effects from the partially self-inflicted illness which came on a week ago. It looks as though I’ll be continuing on down the winding pathway in this wonderful journey, we call life!
“The Path” 2011 by Scott Joseph Moore
To finish off this exploration into the irrationalities of my own self-defeating behaviors, I would like to make an attempt to move to a higher level of self-care. I’ll do this by touching on the other situation that happened toward the end of last week (the one involving family). Here’s the gist of it. A member of my family, someone that I’ve grown to love and respect, made a series of unhealthy choices and ended up in the hospital. It was a motor vehicle accident. As you would expect, there were attempts at denial and the shifting of blame by this family member, even from the hospital bed, but it was obvious to everyone around this person, that the bulk of the responsibility for what happened was on their shoulders alone. How does this relate to my story about suffering from heat exhaustion? Because we both knew in our hearts that we were making these unhealthy choices, and yet we made them anyway. We can offer ourselves as much self-worth as we want. We can tell ourselves that we are as worthy as anyone else. We can even fool ourselves into believing that we are more worthy than others. But at the end of each moment, we can only accept the amount of self-worth that we’re feeling we deserve.
"Grand Providentia United" 