A Celebration of Life

Chapter 1

Literature

The Legend of Bagger Vance

Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need To Know Now

Kate Remembered

Worker In The Light: Unlock Your Five Senses and Liberate Your Limitless Potential

Don’t Know Much About Myths: Everything You Need To Know About The Greatest Stories In Human History But Never Learned

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

One Last Time: A Psychic Medium Speaks To Those Who Have Loved and Lost

This Is My Story

Our Daily Bread

Still Me

Expect Nothing: A Zen Guide

Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered

Shibumi I

Shibumi II

Temple of Gold

Outliers: The Story of Success

The Hour of the Cat

Divine Encounters: A Guide To Visions, Angels and Other Emissaries

The Death of Superman

The Silva Mind Control Method For Getting Help From Your Other Side

The Superbeings

Ask Your Angels

Siddharta

The Aladdin Factor

50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.

How To Read The Aura

The Gunslinger

The Canterbury Papers

Manananggal Terrorizes Manila

Arturo B. Rotor

Bienvenido Santos

Jose Garcia Villa

Chapter 2

Movies

Ninja Assassin

127 Hours

The Pirates! Band of Misfits

Get Smart

Men In Black 3

Finding Forrester

Trance

Kingdom Of Heaven

Ocean's Eleven

Terminator 3: Rise of The Machine

Ultraviolet

Wreck-It Ralph

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Taken 2

Barbershop

Confessions of A Shopaholic

Bicentennial Man

Ice Age

Iron Lady

The Hobbit

Bewitched

Wuthering Heights

The Rock

Bourne Supremacy

Up

Men In Black

Chariots of Fire

Maid In Manhattan

On Golden Pond

Home Alone 2: Lost In New York

The Campaign

Bless The Child

Batman Forever

Some Kind of Wonderful

The Perfect Creature

Vampire Sucks

Splice

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

1408

Insidious

Reel Steel

Amistad

Shutter Island

Paano Ko Sasabihin?

Batman & Robin

The Land of The Dead

Sleepy Hollow

Daredevil

Twilight

The Road

I Am Number Four

The Green Hornet

Rent

Green Lantern

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows 2

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tide

X Men: First Class

Thor

Astro Boy

Tanging Yaman

My Househusband

Narinig Mo Na Ba Ang La8est

Unofficially Yours

Bakit Pa?

Ako Si Kiko, Ako Si Kikay

Paano Ko Sasabihin?

Mayor Latigo

Rakenrol

Serbis

Di Na Natuto

Chapter 3

Movie Heroes

Lou Salvador Jr.

Sean Connery

Robert Redford

Johnny Depp

Daniel Day Lewis

Dolphy

Luis Gonzales

Eddie Garcia

Nora Aunor

Oscar Obligacion

Paquito Diaz

Ishmael Bernal

Marilou Diaz Abaya

Deo J. Fajardo Jr

Raymond Red

Lav Diaz

Aureaus Solito

Dante Nico Garcia

A.J. Perez

Alden Richards

Heath Ledger

Harrison Ford

Jet Li

Sylvester Stallone

Chapter 4

Television

German Moreno

Angelo Castro Jr

Nomer Lasa

Goin’ Bulilit

Party Pilipinas

Angelito: Ang Bagong Yugto

Pintada

Lokomoko U

Luna Blanca

Walang Hanggan

Makapiling Kang Muli

Maalaala Mo Kaya

Magic Palayok

Willing Willy

Imortal

Serangoon Road

Charlie's Angels

S.W.A.T.

History Channel

Glee

Starsky and Hutch

The X-Files

Taken

Supernatural

Chapter 5

Music

Jose Mari Chan

Freddie Aguilar

Pepe Smith

Binky Lampano

Martin Nievera

Charice Pempengco

Eric Arceneaux

Bruce Springsteen

Roy Davies

Robert Ryker

Guy Lombardo

Marie Osmond

Chapter 6

Radio

Jaime Licauco

Salvador Royales Jr

Johnny Midnight

Boots Anson Roa and Willie Nepomuceno

Vic Jose

Ted Failon

Rey Langit

Raffy Tulfo

Ariel Ureta

Chinkee Tan

Danton Remoto

Joe D'Mango

TsongkiBenj

Anthony Pangilinan

Lourd De Veyra

Carl Balita

Elizabeth Oropesa

Chuck Swindoll

Charles Morris

Eric Metaxas

Greg Laurie

Chuck Colson

Chuck Colson (2)

Todo-Todo, Bigay Na Bigay

Relasyon

Dear Jasmin

Dear Jamie

Inner Mind

Ibayong Pinoy

Radyo Negosyo

High 105.9

BusinessRadio

The Voice of The Philippines

Friday Magic Madness

96.3 W-Rock

Pinas FM

Heard On Thursday

Pinoy Flavors

Morning Rush

Twisted Tag Team with Stan and Cage

Usapang Kapatid

Chapter 7

Newsmakers

Noynoy Aquino

Gloria Arroyo

Jesse Robredo

Jun Lozada

Jonas Burgos

Rolando Mendoza

Hayden Kho

Manny Pacquiao

Manny Pacquiao II

Frank Chavez

Renato Corona

Merceditas Gutierrez

Leila de Lima

Willie Revillame

Pol Medina Jr.

Joseph Estrada

Samuel Ong

Loren Legarda

Richard Gordon

Angelo Reyes

Serafin Cuevas

Juan Ponce Enrile

Medeo Cruz

The Philippine Dragon Boat Team

Migs Zubiri

Koko Pimentel

Isko Moreno

Pilar Pilapil

Angel Locsin

Judy Ann Santos

Mikey Arroyo

Antonio Leviste

Reynaldo Carcillar and Antonio Lalik

Apryl Dalmacio Eppinger

Jimmy Sieczka

Moammar Ghadafi

Chapter 8

Heroes

Abraham Lincoln

Jose Rizal

Andres Bonifacio

Manuel L. Quezon

Ninoy Aquino

Chapter 9

Beautiful Minds

Buddha

Marco Polo

Peter Pan

Wayne Dyer

Wayne Dyer II

Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins II

Choa Kok Sui

Francis J. Kong

Francisco Colayco

Wilson Lee Flores

Ishmael Bernal

Meryl Streep

Wilson Lee Flores

George Santayana

James Lovelock

Carl Sagan

Moses

George Santayana

Literature

Finding My Authentic Swing

August 23, 2014

I am a man in search of meaning. Yet I know I'm more than who I am.

The most profound revelations that transformed my life came from within.

The real me transcends time and space.

My greatest agonies came from forgetting my true nature.

I had it all, all this time, but I have been blinded by illusions. I thought that I needed to learn, until I realized that all I had to do was to remember.

This is the story of Rannulph Junah, a man torn apart by his own private demons, and of his enigmatic companion, Bagger Vance.

I have read more books than a lot of men in their lifetime, though only a few has touched me to my soul.

I identified with Junah in Steven Pressfield's The Legend of Bagger Vance, and I have never found a character as mesmerizing as Bagger Vance himself.

Junah's search for inner peace is like my own quest for enlightenment. He has traveled to Tibet and India on a spiritual journey, seeking that elusive Oneness with the Source of All Life.

I have felt a sense of that ephemeral bliss in my own sport, swimming, when I dive alone deep into the sea or float on the waves under the stars.

As a testament of hope at the height of the Depression, the now historic match between golf legends Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen was held in May 1931 in the new course built on Krewe Island in Georgia.

The local officials had forced Junah, a war hero and scion of one of the revered families in the American South, to join to uphold their hometown's honor. He had reluctantly agreed when Bagger Vance, whom Junah calls his mentor, offered to be his caddie.

Bagger's mere presence radiates healing and empowerment even as his past remains an impenetrable mystery to everyone except Junah.

Sports is about transcendence - the conquest of one's own weakness. All sports is sacred, says Bagger Vance, but golf is supreme because it is a close mirror to the path of self-realization. Golfers call penalties on themselves, as it is impossible to lie to the Self.

But Junah was losing. His formidable stumbling block, says Bagger Vance, is that Junah thinks he's Junah.

Each of us possess our True Authentic Swing, and we need to chip away all that is false-and then hit the ball.

I care about finding my place in this world. I care about my fellowmen, even if at times I'm assailed by cynicism about humanity. Then I realized that I cared too much. I get blinded by my runaway emotions. A lot of times I seemed to just drift away at the mercy of the tides.

Bagger Vance inspires me to once again stand outside myself and find that crucial sense of detachment.

Act but be not attached to your actions, says Bagger Vance, as the sun will shine and the rain will fall on all men no matter who they are.

Life is about action, as Krishna, in his guise as a charioteer, teaches the warrior Arjuna. Respect your opponents even as you defeat them with all your strength. There is no contradiction - all is in harmony with the eternal truths that binds the universe.

Wisdom Moves In Mysterious Ways

February 21, 2015

I have become increasingly convinced that everything that ever happened to me had, not only a reason, but also a purpose.

I think friendship is not coincidence. I have a friend whom I'll call Judah to honor her privacy. Judah and I were in a training class near the end of 2013 in Cebu.

I would chill with my buddies and she would go out with her girlfriends but I saw that she was one of the genuine people there. That alone, for me, made her stand out. She's also a musician who plays the guitar and one of the few who appreciates classic songs.

I realized there are only a handful in that class of almost forty people who likes to read books. What I found most amazing is that she was the only one whose love for literature is nearly equal to mine.

Judah was the one who lent me Expect Nothing, a book about Buddhism. I found it remarkable that she appreciated it though she's a Mormon.

I have such a profound respect for other people's beliefs. I also have an even deeper admiration for those who are not bound by their creeds.

I've read almost all the books of Dan Brown because of Judah (and also because I'm too cheap to buy my own). She has also lent me Ender's Game and a lot of other novels.

I was really moved by one her books, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need To Know Now by Gordon Livingston. This is what I meant when I wrote that friendship is not coincidence. Perhaps my path was meant to cross with Judah's, if only for that brief in time, for me to find this heartfelt memoir.

The death of the author's child drove him to write Only Spring: On Mourning The Death of My Son. I could somehow feel the pain still flowing from the pages. I know, only too well, the agony of losing the most important people in your life. It was all the more poignant when he quotes Gregory Peck who had gone through the same agony.

I don't think of him every day, said the screen legend, when asked about his son. I think of him every hour of every day.

I found so many beautiful insights in this book. Happiness gives our life both meaning and pleasure, says Livingston.

I try to avoid making judgments but I do have the sensitivity to discern character. I learned from the author the way to measure a man: by how they behave and not by what they promise. I wish I learned that when I was fourteen when I began living alone.

There are three components of happiness, he says. I agree because I'm happy: I have are something to do, I have someone to love and I have something to look forward to. What we are prepared to give is only what we are entitled to receive. That is a quite an accurate description for how the popular but misunderstood Law of Attraction really works.

I like to think that most people are willing what it takes to become persons. It means identifying then meeting your own emotional needs without any harm to others.

I have been to so many funerals that I've actually lost count. I never say empty words of comfort. I learned from the author that sympathy, no matter how sincere, is misplaced kindness if you do not offer them hope.

I love this poem from Raymond Carver which the author quoted. It would be perfect for my tombstone but I'd rather be burned to ashes and scattered to my beloved sea. Still, the words rings true for me.

"and did u get what/

you wanted from this life, even so?

i did.

and what u want?

to call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved of the earth.

I really admire the author because he had the courage to defy authority. Gordon Livingston is a war hero, honored with a Medal of Valor and a Bronze Star. There was an incident with his superior where he stood his ground and - he was proven right.

If the map doesn't agree with the ground, he writes, the map is wrong. At that moment, he would recall years later, he knew he had discovered a profound truth.

My own profound truth, the lesson that resonates most with my soul, seems a paradox but it is not.

We gain control, he says, only by relinquishing it.

The Spirit of Independence

March 7, 2015

A friend of mine, a musician who is in one of my amateur short films, likes biographies. When we went to visit his house by the sea in Cebu after my marriage last May, he regaled us with the oft-repeated untold stories of Imelda Marcos and Marilyn Monroe. My birthday gift to him is A. Scott Berg's bestselling Kate Remembered, the touching story of the immortal screen icon Katharine Hepburn.

Kate Hepburn is perhaps the most successful, and many say is the best, actress in the history of Hollywood. She still holds the record as the winner of an unprecedented four Academy Awards for Best Actress. A rebel at heart, she defied convention by never attending the ceremonies except once. During the 1974 Oscar Awards, the entire industry was electrified as she appeared to present the prestigious Irving Thalberg Memorial Award to Lawrence Weingarten. One of her long-time close friends, Weingarten is the producer of George Cukor's 1949 classic Adam's Rib, which starred what may be the most beloved and most enduring screen partners in the history of film: Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The audience, among them some of the most famous movie stars in the world, rose as one in stunned awe.

Hepburn's other cinematic achievement was the only sustained film career as a lead star for over five solid decades. All throughout, she has built a reputation for brilliant acting in both film and theater that inspired generations of actors. She is an icon of women's rights, long before feminism became vogue, with her supreme self -assurance and a clear sense of what she wants and what she's capable of doing. Kate's friendship with Berg came during the last two decades of her singularly distinguished life. Berg, who has become Hepburn's confidante and unspoken chronicler, had won a Pulitzer for his biography of the legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh.

It just so happens that I've also read Berg's Lindbergh. What a small world because I had a copy of Lindbergh's own memoir before it got destroyed in the 2009 Ondoy flood. Lindbergh's Pulitzer Prizewinning autobiography, The Spirit of St. Louis, is named after his plane where he made the historic first solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. I'm amazed at his incredibly pitch-perfect gift for the written word. I think of Charles Lindbergh as one of my spiritual mentors in writing, along with Teodoro M. Locsin Sr. and Winston Churchill.

I first read this intimate portrait of Hepburn around late April 2014. I feel as if I've gotten to know her through the gallery of personal glimpses. The story of the book itself is also special. I usually stay at home and read during weekends when I'm not traveling. This was different.

I went through it during the weekdays, a couple of chapters before going off to work. I'd be in the past, in the Golden Years of Hollywood of the 1930s, then I'd be back in the present as quick as greased lightning, finding it still fueled by intrigues but with a lot less glamour. This is what Berg must have felt: just a regular guy going through his daily life but having a unique connection to someone so extraordinary.

Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born on May 12, 1907 in Hartford, Connecticut, scion of one the finest blue-blood families of New England. She got a degree from the elite Bryn Mawr in a era when women are expected to just stay at home. With her breeding, education and achievements, she symbolizes the best of America, says the larger than life movie mogul Louis B. Meyer. Hepburn was known for being outspoken and independent, but she was also famous for her charm and intelligence. She forged a career without a manager, unfazed by the patronage system of the male-dominated showbiz industry.

A true inspiring story is how she revived her ruined career on her own terms. She had suffered a series of flops and was dismissed as box office poison along with, of all people, the screen goddess Greta Garbo. Just when they thought she was out, she came back as a Broadway phenomenon. She took her character from the stage to the screen as the play became a movie, George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story in 1940, with Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. The formidable Hepburn has returned in triumph.

The story of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy is the stuff of legend. Some of greatest actors of all time had been her leading men: Clarke Gable, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Peter O'Toole. Above them all is Spencer Tracy, her on-screen partner and the love of her life. What I find most poignant is how she took care of him during the last five years of his life, even at the expense of her own career, until his death in 1967. Hepburn had left the limelight just to be with him. She never talked about it, but she once mentioned that those years were the most unforgettable in her life.

Katharine Hepburn, after a lifetime of trailblazing achievements, died on June 29, 2003, in dignity and grace.

I've been reminiscing with these stories during the Independence Day weekend. I was about to let go of the book that gave me so much insight about how to be the best you can be, yet still remain who who you are. I find Hepburn's story resonant in a culture where admiration wears a mask of envy, in a world where conformity is the yardstick of acceptance. I'm married now, though I still have the need to spend a quiet evening with a good book or two.

Only this time, I share it with the one with whom I will happily spend the rest of my life, that special person who mean more to me than all the acclaim in the world.

Working In The Light

November 8, 2014

I hold it as a mark of honor that a lot of people trust me. I'm there for them as they open their lives, even reveal their deepest secrets, just to help ease the burdens of their souls. Sometimes I feel like radio love gurus Joe The Mango or Jun Doctor Love Banaag.

I tell them that I find inner peace when I listen to my heart. I've lost count of the many times my instincts have been proven right. I also tell them that my most painful experiences came from the times I stifled that still, small voice, as the Bible calls it.

I feel a sense of inevitability when I heard about another radio star, one who wrote a book that shows how intuition, not to mention remote viewing and astral projection, can be developed. I knew, even before halfway through George Noory's Worker In The Light: Unlock Your Five Senses and Liberate Your Limitless Potential, that I'll read it over and over again.

I was right. My last act before falling asleep is to jump from page to page like a teleport, absorbing by osmosis. It's now one of my boon companions in my inner journey. I have my share of the otherworldly just like the author, Noory, the host of Coast To Coast AM, the late-night paranormal call-in radio program aired throughout the United States and Canada.

By coincidence, Jose Mari Chan Loud and Clear On The Huggybear Show, my one-act play, part of my first fiction anthology, is also about an occult radio program. Huggybear, my nickname-sake hero and host, interviews a ghost, a neurotic and an angel. He plays original Filipino music with the opening theme from VST & Co. Huggybear is like Edu Manzano meets Martin Nievera meets Rex Navarette.

My play is inspired by parapsychologist Jaime Licauco and his Inner Mind On Radio which was my Sunday night ritual for years until I lost signal when I left Luzon early last year.

Just recently, I was tuned into another Sunday night supernatural radio show, Kasindak Sindak hosted by Benjamin TsongkiBenj Felipe, while reading about how the U.S. and the USSR have sent out psychics for espionage during the Cold War.

The study of the paranormal is one of my major interests since my teen years. It's now a part of my life, like the more wholesome influence of my idols Aga Muhlach and Gary Valenciano, not even including James Dean and Bruce Lee.

Worker is like a reunion with some figures from my youth like Edgar Cayce. There's also Ingo Swann and Uri Geller, both of whom, by coincidence, I have written about in one of my magazine articles last December - months before Worker called out to me from the bottom of a pile in BookSale in Elizabeth Mall in Cebu on February 2014.

One of the most prominent characters in the book is Don Juan Matus, the Yacqui Indian sorcerer who's also one of the stars of My Most Unforgettable Literary Characters, one of my earliest published works which appeared in January 2005 in Philippine Panorama, the Sunday magazine of The Manila Bulletin. I first knew Don Juan from Carlos Castañeda's Journey To Ixtlan, which is the first to open my eyes about the infinite mysteries beyond the everyday world and made me see Death in an entirely different way, as I said during my author profile interview for my eBook publisher SmashWords.com.

I'm learning a great deal from Noory. One is a technique while meditating, supremely priceless, that took me to a higher (and deeper) level. I now get rid of intrusive thoughts by enfolding them in my white light of protection then gently breathing