I often turn to this site hoping to get something.  Guidance from others, some wisdom.  What am I offering?
I have searched around a little and am in need of a forum of people in the social services realm who are working to serve the whole person.  I need help understanding how to serve others, without creating dependecy or working with some ulterior motive. 

I vacillate between the thinking that everything is as it is.  I think I can get that.  We are here to save the world, but when you have been given the gift of knowing we all have gifts, shouldn't we share that somehow, and in the most expansive way possible.

The town I live in just succeeded in kicking out a homeless shelter that had begun serving the poor here about a year ago.  The campaign against it was led by a group of predominantly gay men and women.  Asbury Park was a place of darkness and blight for many years.  The gay community has been extraordinarily successful in pushing AP back to being a desirable place for wealthy people and real estate developers.

We've lots of problems here.  Shootings, drugs, a painful and screaming racial divide. (white people on the east side of the tracks, everyone else on the west...generally) As well as a history of corruption, it's jersey after all.  I moved here because it's funky, diverse, close to the beach, great place to cruise around on a bike and I came here as a kid when my grandparents were members of the methodist community that neighbors AP.

Yeah, in many ways, simply another gentrification story, but the campaign against the shelter was ugly, hateful and full of many mistruths.  For me it made it more baffling that it was waged by people so horribly ostracized by other communities.

I know our own little mental machinations play a part in our perceptions.  Pro peace makes more sense to me than anti war and I sense and have been told that fighting the ugliness only makes you a part of ugliness.  But...Is it ever ok to call people on their bullshit? 

I found a friend in my loathing of materialism.  Adbusters.  But what good is it to loathe materialism?  Even with a friend.  Do I secretly love hating the folks who have appear to have taken the "The label proves the worth" pill?  My last post was annoying for me to read.  What does it matter what other people do? 
What is it in me that wants to make fun?  I know it isn 't cool to label people but what about when they paste it all over themselves?  They are funny...

i am sort of obsessed by superficiality and materialism.  i am dumbfounded every time I see  women carrying a purse covered in advertising.  i am amazed by really bad bleach blonds, insane makeup.  obvious plastic surgery blows my mind.  how did we get here?  is it bad?  is it safe to make assumptions about people who carry their desires and neuroses strapped on their bodies like armor or medals, i am not sure which?  i like the way people look when they are real. when is real going to be hot?  when are we getting over this?

Visiting Zaadz, a "place" where people generally and genuinely see the world as a place of opportunity...not just economic (though its a great one) but also opportunities for peace, love and caring community, is wonderful!  BUT...sometimes it makes facing the non-Zaadz world a little lonlier.  I get jazzed on all the truth beauty and goodness and seem like more of a kook than ever.  My enthusiasm is percieved as naive, my hope makes me a "dreamer".   I am a "nut" for filming a public hearing on a homeless shelter and questioning the chairman.  Told what reality is by the old, unhappy and experienced.

I spent nearly 6 years working in am organic, vegan restaurant.  My working days were spent in the luxury of deliscious, lovingly prepared food with little to no suffering attached.  Now I am an assistant to an investor and philanthropist.  I feel almost like I am coming out as a believer in goodness, truth and beauty and feel more ridiculous than ever!

How do you live in the non-Zaadz world?

Not unusual I am sure...but a man I fell deeply and mysteriously in love with 13 years ago.  The only man that has ever permeated my life that way.  I love men more because of him.  He, or our experience together, made me consider the possibility that what happens between man and women is so much more that what the average coupling exhibits.  I now consider my relationships with men to be a meeting of masculinity and feminity, a mingling of those energies that we each share and loving them no matter what, the only possibility (if sometimes from a distance).

The heartbreak, the fallout, was more painful than I thought possible, but it led me to greater understanding and openness.  It was that confusion and pain that I was in when I stumbled onto Wilbers work.  Fairly recently I watched a youtube video in which a woman asks Wilber what a path to enlightenment would look like if women had designed it?  His response was, shortly, love until it hurts. 

I started reading Wilber in 94.  I was desperate for meaning and understanding and came across  a Brief History of Everything.  I was excited and overwhelmed, though I knew I found something valuble.  So much has happened since then and Wilber is now a superstar with a collective of others in II. 

A Zen practitioner I know from the SF Zen center laughed when I showed him Wilbers site.  "He's a product", was his comment.  "He's for sale"  He was even more irritated when I sent him a link to Genpo Roshi's Big Mind site. 

"The school of zen (San Francisco Zen Center) started this expression of "big mind" - Dennis Merzel and his fellow L.A. schoolers are always trying to ride off it and make money.  If you read the style of the S.F. group on the web, www.sfzc.org or www.everdayzen.org you may see the subtle differences in the self-promotions and vast global claims that the L.A. folks make.  I can't stomach them."

I hear what he is saying and have been a little curious about the number of photos on Wilber's site.  Perhaps they simply know that Americans love cult of personality.  Who knows,  I am grateful to Wilber for showing me a map that makes sense.  I will take what is useful and leave the rest behind.

I have been lazy with my space here but realize how much I need it.  Believing in ongoing evolution and the possibility for positive transformation of self, politics and culture doesn't exactly spark much interest in NJ.  I have sat at many progressive meetings trying to discover how to make an impact and be a part of justice, but there are so many hang ups in all the ways the greens are known to fall into.  So many folks disturbed by the world and the politics of their communities, but unwilling to look at their own issues.  Victims, righteousness, finger pointing.  Reading Wilber has helped me see it, but I need to know how to effectively function.

I see how the green meme blocks itself.  How do I live and act so that I can create change and expansion?

And then there are the folks who are just so ethnocentric and hating.  Dishonesty, the faliure of little politicians to recognize their duty to serve.  Sitting in town meetings and hearings is like visiting a zoo.  The bullshit laughable. 

Currently dealing with a mean group of gay men and women who are greedy and paranoid about a homeless shelter.  The lies and fear are so thick I ache for them but I also want to tell them to fuck off.  I want them to know how pathetic they are, how ugly they behave...so what does that say about me? 

How would someone at yellow or beyond act in a city council meeting?