Browsed by
Tag: navigation

Reorienting into Your Own Path: Belief Self-Torment

Reorienting into Your Own Path: Belief Self-Torment

Comments 2 comments

For a number of reasons, I haven’t posted anything about Jehovah’s Witnesses for a while. There have been some horrible events in the news, and all sorts of doctrinal and organizational changes, but I find myself more interested these days in some of the larger questions. I’ve been trying to write something about that, but nothing I wrote was satisfactory to me. It turns out that I needed a real question for my thoughts on this to spill out. In trying to help ease someone else’s suffering, the words ring true again. Thank you for being the messenger for this lesson! I preserve the questioner’s privacy, but you know who you are. Big hugs.

I seem to be struggling with my relationship with God. I find myself so confused about what to believe. I used to be absolutely convinced that the Bible was Truth. Is this normal for a person in my situation. Any input that you might have would be appreciated.

It is totally normal for you to feel as you do. I do have some thoughts on this in terms of biblical scholarship and the history of the religions of the book(s), but that’s not what will help you most right now because you need first to find your bearings, your balance, and the (for lack of a better phrase) direction of your attunement to God.

Start with what you solidly know and experience for yourself. Be observant and pay attention and even “hold fast to what is fine.” That place where your mind and spirit and soul all connect in gratitude and admiration is where you start. Think of the qualities of the spirit – where do you see caring and forgiveness and love and thoughtfulness and creativity and all those things that you can just feel are *good* things? Let yourself be drawn into that world. Learn from and enjoy the presence of that “energy” in any moment where it happens. Even just noticing it changes you.

Then – and I resisted this one for a long time – think about service. Not big, cosmic service – just little bits of service. Be a little kinder, think of someone else’s feelings, do something nice for someone else, be a listening ear to a friend. Anything that puts your own needs to the side – even for a moment – changes you.

Think of things that you *truly* admire about people you know or have known or have read about or seen. Everyone is complicated, a mix of darkness and light, so you have to think of specific things, how someone made a good decision, how someone manifested an incredible skill, how someone calmed a situation. Those are things that speak to your inner self, to your inner directionality, and they are worth hearing.

For a while, move away from the questions of belief in this or that. That question will always be there for you, but that doesn’t mean you have to address it and be tormented by it right now. Come back to it when you are in a place of spiritual groundedness.

Your body can help you too, and in ways that you might not expect. Sit quietly and relax, listen to yourself breathe. When you are upset, take a few breaths and consciously let it go. Imagine blowing the seeds of an old dandelion into the wind. Self-torment seems to be part of the deal – but you can choose not to do it. Look again at these things when it isn’t self-punishment. Torturing yourself does nothing for you right now except prevent you from insight and focus your energy on everything that would overwhelm you. Love doesn’t want that, and you need to focus on that central thing. Open your heart and listen. Listen.

Try different body positions. Bow your head, raise your arms up to the sky, imagine your feet taking root in the ground, pretend to be blessed by the stars. Your body-imagination is always trying to help you. If you feel comfortable, reach out to the God *above* the God that is caricatured by the witnesses and ask for guidance in love.

Be authentic, be truthful, see beauty, learn when to trust and admire. Start there. In time, the beliefs will sort themselves out. The list of “I believe in this” and “I don’t believe in that” is really not the primary aspect of spiritual understanding. Assume, for a little while, that all the cosmos needs of you is that you pay attention and appreciate whatever you really, truly can. Go a little on that footpath, and see if you get reoriented.

I feel very strongly that each person’s spiritual path is their own, and cannot be regulated or mandated. This is about your own spirit and soul and heart and mind, and nobody else’s. And in that spirit, take what you find useful for you here – and disregard the rest. These are things I’ve learned for myself and from the experiences of others, so they may be very very helpful for you right now. Or not. You are the only you.

Geeking Out

Geeking Out

Comments 3 comments

Here at VirusHead, I have a different host than at work. If any of you use WordPress at Yahoo Small Business, this post will interest you. If not – really – skip it.

I had to spend almost two days addressing the problems of upgrading WordPress at Yahoo Small Business hosting. Even now, I can’t really update any of the plugins that came with the Yahoo installation because of some funky permissions thing they do.

The first time I tried to upgrade, I could no longer access the blog at all. All that came up was a blank screen in the browser. I couldn’t find a solution. I gave up. I backed up the database with MyPhpAdmin, and recreated the blog at Yahoo.

I was only able to upgrade thanks to the resources at the WordPress codex and users’ forum and some very helpful advice from the comment left here by Ray on the previous post,. WordPress has upgrading instructions here, with common installation problems here.

I’m not sure I would recommend that you even try to upgrade unless you’re really comfortable with the things on the following list. Yes, it’s very much out of date, and so are the plugins. It might make more sense just to have more people giving Yahoo some feedback on servicing their WordPress client offer. Believe me, I would rather have done a one-click update like I do on my own host!

I’ve documented all the bits and pieces. In case you really need to do this, here’s how.

  • First, update your plug-ins (Akismet will update itself in the upgrade).
  • Use the WordPress backup plugin to do a backup of your WordPress directory. Download it for safekeeping. You can also use your friendly ftp program to download the entire WordPress directory onto your hard drive, too. You’ll need this if – after all – you change your mind about upgrading.
  • Use MyPHPAdmin to export a back up your WordPress SQL database, too. Make several versions if you are unfamiliar with this. Make sure that use the right character set for export. If the upgrade fails, you’ll need this.
  • Go to the WordPress dashboard and disable all your plugins.
  • VERY IMPORTANT: From your WordPress backup on the hard drive, open the current wp-config.php file in the main directory. Delete the line “Define(’WP_CACHE’, true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager” and then save the file. Also save a copy of it under another name, like wp-configorig.php. You’ll need this file later.
  • Edit wp-config.php file in the main WordPress directory that you downloaded and change DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD with your yroot user and yroot password (the username and password you set up to administrate your databases. Ftp the new wp-config file.
  • Now run upgrade.php by browsing to http://YOURSITE.com/YOURBLOG/wp-admin/upgrade.php. It should succeed, in theory.
  • However, before you go any further, look at your blog and make sure it’s there. If you get a blank page, then you’ve put the wrong yroot user and password in the config file. Make sure it’s right and try again.
  • You may have to play with the permissions settings in MyPhpAdmin. Make sure that you have any needed permissions. Customer Care can help you with this part if you run into trouble.
  • If none of this is working for you, you’ll have to download the latest version of WordPress, ftp it up, and then run upgrade again.
  • Assuming that your blog is up, check to make sure that your category links and other links are displaying. If you see an error like [Unknown column ‘link_count’ in ‘where clause’], you’ve got to detour at this point (a web search on the exact phrase of that error will give you a sense of how many blogs are affected). If you’re upgrading from the version at Yahoo, there has been a major change in the way categories are indexed. I haven’t been able to find the perfect fix for this if the upgrade doesn’t do it, but there are two suggestions. The first didn’t work for me in MyPhpAdmin on Yahoo – perhaps because of yet more permissions issues, or maybe an older version of MySql – but you could try it because it’s probably the better fix:
    Run this SQL query:
    ALTER TABLE --database--.wp_categories ADD COLUMN link_count BIGINT(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 AFTER category_count,
    ADD COLUMN posts_private TINYINT(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 AFTER link_count,
    ADD COLUMN links_private TINYINT(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 AFTER posts_private;
  • The second suggestion did work on Yahoo, but I hope it doesn’t mess anything up:
    First, save your home copy of wp-admin/upgrade-functions.php under another name, like you did with the wp-config file. Then, edit the original file and delete where it says
    // We are up-to-date. Nothing to do.
    if ( $wp_db_version == $wp_current_db_version )
    return;
    Ftp it up and run upgrade.php again. Then upload the original version of the file to restore it.
  • Now, go get the wp-configorigin.php you saved earlier. Rename it back to wp-config.php and ftp it up.
  • In your blog template, replace the current call for your blogroll with < ?php wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); ?>. Some of the older tags have been depreciated.
  • Enable your plug-ins one by one to make sure they are compatible. If something breaks the blog, use ftp or the online file management at Yahoo to delete the applicable folder from the wp-content/plugins.

Another problem that surfaced: The bottom navigation on the index page disappeared. Some think that it has to do with plugins as well. I’m not running a “sticky post” plugin, which seems to be the primary problem for others. There is also a thought that there might be an incompatibility between the upgraded Akismet plugin and the Yahoo hosting. In my case, I finally figured out that I needed to remove a hand-coded call to the FAlbum plugin (which isn’t enabled) on the Index page.

I still have minor problems. Do not attempt to use the newer version of the WP Cache plugin or the Yahoo version of the Customizable Permalinks Plugin! Keep them disabled or they will break the blog, and you’ll have to go back and do a lot of this again. You’re pretty much stuck with the versions of third-party plugins that Yahoo gave you. If they included them, it’s probably because they have set it up in some special way – if you update the plugin, it probably won’t work anymore. If you know workarounds, please comment.