Webmasters and Actors

I had a moment of inspiration on the drive home today. I had to scribble it on the back of a receipt so I wouldn't forget it. If only my cell phone had a recorder so I could tell it my greatest ideas that happen only when I'm driving!

At work today, I decided to validate my work website with the w3c.org site. That involved putting a few of the depreciated tags into style sheets. If you're not familiar with the concept of style sheets, play around with this site, css zen garden in a new window or tab. Today's webmaster can separate the content of the site from the design of the site. One file has the html content, or the words the site will hold. Another file, linked to the first, holds the design elements, so all you have to do to change the design is change the style sheet. This concept of separating content from style took hold around 2000. The original way to design web pages was to glob everything all together, and it made for a large file size; a "heavy" page that took a long time to load.

My eureka moment today happened when I realized that humans can learn, metaphorically speaking, to change their style sheet, too. You see, earlier this week, my 16 year old asked, "What is a soul?" The quickest answer I could muster was, "A soul is the part of you that lives on even when your body dies." The soul is your real "self", not subject to the whims of your emotions and visceral reactions. If we can learn to separate the "self" from our emotions, then we have learned how not to be attached to certain emotional states. You'll see what I mean if you watch "What the bleep do we know?" I think the best example of this is to look at a good actor. A good actor can cast aside his/her personal opinions for a moment and play another person; one who may or may not believe the same way the actor does. When the actor is in the middle of a role, he has changed style sheets and let the emotions of another define his personality temporarily.

As we go through different phases of our lives, as normal everyday people, we take on different style sheets of emotional reactions to situations. Most of us think our style sheet defines us. You'll hear excuses like, "that's just me", "if you don't like who I am, then forget you", or "I can't change". However, if you look at css zen garden, you'll see that the design of a single style sheet doesn't define the purpose of the site.

Yes, our behaviours do define us, because men are judged by their actions. But our true self, the one behind all the reactions and mistakes, anger and vices, is the one that is our source. Let's rise to the occasion and cast off the extra weight of unnecessary emotions; the ones that clog up our creativity and weigh down our freedom. The best tool for doing that is at Centerpointe. I have been using the Holosync CD and I recommend it if you want to make your spiritual/emotional work transparent, like it's not even work at all!