Realityhead.com Interview Name of your website?Realityhead.com Your name? Charles Louis Your Location (city, etc) Los Angeles Please give us a short summary of your website? Realityhead.com is a site where we explore inner reality and spirituality from a different perspective, a perspective that's neither traditional nor typical of contemporary alternate spirituality. ~~ What inspired you to launch your own website? The desire to help others better cultivate creativity and joy in eveary part of their lives. When did you launch your first website, and what was it? This is our first effort at creating a website. How did you decide on a name for your website? We wanted a name that's both meaningful, i.e., that gives people some idea what our site might be about, and a name that is different and interesting. The name we chose, Realityhead, actually has a double meaning. First of all, it's a play on the old world Godhead, which means the essence of God. In this vein, realityhead means the essence of reality. Secondly, terms ending with the word head can mean someone who's an enthusiast for something, such as term chilihead, which means an enthusiast for chili. Used in this fashion, a realityhead would be someone who's an enthusiast for discovering his/her inner reality. When used like this realityhead is our synonym for a spiritual seeker. So, realityhead can refer to both a seeker and what he's seeking. And this comprehensive double meaning works out nicely, since it's our view that the ultimate truth sought by spiritual seekers resides within us, not in some otherworldly realm. Yes, realityhead seemed like a name that conveys something about our spiritual worldview, and in a slightly clever way. What makes your website different from other, similar offerings? Our picture of reality is neither materialistic nor supernaturalistic. This puts us out of step with the majority of both theistic and non-theistic religionists. To clarify, our metaphysical perspective is that physical reality and nature is the only reality, but that the inner truth of physical reality and nature transcends gross matter and substance. In other words, transcendence is something that's intrinsic in nature and the world, it does not derive from an outside supernatural source. Therefore, a spiritual attitude toward the universe and life is appropriate, but belief in an otherworldly deity is not. It's also our analysis of human mental suffering that much of it is due to our superficial and naive attachment to the outer appearance of the world and ourselves, to material things and to our needy-greedy egos. And that it follows that "liberation" from suffering mainly involves developing a deeper mindset about existence and ourselves, a deeper mindset that dispenses with naive and nescient attachment to external appearances. Actualizing our latent potential for joy is simply a matter of realizing that ultimate reality is sheer experience and creativity itself, and that the universe is fundamentally just the creative self-expression of this ultimate creative reality. Genuine and ultimate "liberation" is nothing other than discovering that creativity and joy are the core of who and what you really are. And genuine spirituality is cultivating this liberation, and cultivating creativity and joy in every area of our lives. Promoting this understanding, and helping men and women better cultivate creativity and joy is the basic mission of our site. What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?) The goal of our website is to promote what we consider to be an accurate and liberating spiritual perspective to spiritually searching and starved citizens of our modern materialistic mass culture. How does your investment of time and money balance against your success? Well, we've only just launched our site, so it's of course too early to be able to gauge our success. If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site? Perhaps we would make it more visually captivating. After all, if you're going to capture visitors with the quality of your content you first have to hold their attention long enough, and a visually impressive site does that more effectively. If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand? We'll answer optimistically and say yes. Let's just hope that we find ourselves faced with such a problem! What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with? The nuts and bolts of constructing a website, even with templates, is still somewhat tedious and time consuming. I personally prefer writing content, but much time also has to be spent building a site to hold that content. What has been your biggest challenge? Learning the basics of building a site from scratch. Well, not exactly from scratch, we've used a template, but there's still been a bit to learn. What method has been most successful for promoting your website? It's too early to say. How has running your website differed from your expectations? Some aspects of it's appearance aren't quite what I had in mind. How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity? We only published our site about two weeks ago, and only really began trying to optimize its search engine visibility a few days ago. So, it hasn't really been noticed by web-surfing spiritual seekers yet, and we really have no idea how fruitful our efforts will prove to be. If we are successful and begin reaching a decent number of people we'll keep the site up and running indefinitely. But if we still aren't reaching many fellow-travelers of the spiritual path after two to two and a half years, then we'll channel our creative energies in a different direction. Why seek to share our take on spirituality with strangers via the World Wide Web? Why do we wish to share our understanding of spirituality with the world? The sanctity of all living beings dictates that we each do our modest but important part to liberate others from suffering, and the most profound and perfect liberation is spiritual liberation. Therefore, it's cosmically incumbent on all spiritual individuals to share any liberating and joyful wisdom they've cultivated with their suffering neighbors. What is your website address? Realityhead.com | 
