The reason we fear certain things is rarely because we’re worried about something going wrong, it’s because we’re trying to get something from a person or situation.For example, the reason people get nervous for job interviews is usually because they want to make a good impression on the interviewer. If you prepare as much as you can for the interview and then just completely accept whatever the outcome is, your anxiety will diminish greatly or even disappear altogether.
When I think back to the best moments in my life or even sometimes when I’m just sitting by myself, the feeling far surpasses what anyone else can give me. I enjoy being out with girls in clubs, but they can’t ‘give’ me anything more than I already have.Even this moment right now cannot really (we’re talking on a very core level here) be topped by success in any form.
To help you really connect with this, the first thing I recommend you do is think about the best moments in your life. Do they include a birth? An anniversary? A present? An achievement?
Whatever your best moments are, just become aware of them. Now look at best moments from the perspective of getting something from other people. Unless you’re very material, the only thing you get in these moments is the presence of the event or the situation.
Yet in the majority of times where you feel anxious, lower value or out of place, it’s simply because you’re looking to get something from the situation. You want the job, you want the girls phone number, you want people to like you and so on.
If you stop looking to get things from life and realise that your best ever experiences have just been the total presence of the moment, all negativity and doubt just drifts away. This doesn’t mean you don’t try for things or make changes in your life but that you genuinely don’t care whether someone likes you or what is going to come out of a situation.
Showing posts with label SPIRITUAL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SPIRITUAL. Show all posts
Sunday, October 12, 2014
Sunday, August 3, 2014
SPIRITUAL: TRYING TO ACCEPT WHAT IS
We create our problems by wanting things, or people, to be different
Have you ever stopped to think that we create our own problems by the simple strategy of wanting things to be different to how they actually are?
We want other people to be different (especially our partners!), we want situations to be different, we want ourselves to be different. And they, and we, can't be other than what we are. It is like wanting the weather to be different. But the weather is what it is. We can accept it and enjoy however it is, or we can complain about it and make ourselves feel miserable. But anyway, it is not going to change the weather, is it? And yet this is what we are doing every time we have a complaint about something (which, let’s be honest, is quite often). We may as well be bashing our heads against a wall.
The other thing we never consider, is that it is actually disrespectful to want to change things, especially others. In a subtle, unconscious way, we are saying we know better than the other what is good for them, and this naturally creates a wall of resistance. In a relationship, it is like taking on the role of a parent and diminishing the other into the role of a child. Is it any wonder we get negative reactions from the other, even though we are convinced we are acting in the best intentions?
And in fact, if we are really honest, our intentions are always in our own interest. If we really respected the other, we would accept them as they are, we would dignify them by letting them decide how to live their own lives, even if it doesn’t fit with our ideas. Even if they are on a path of self-destruction, it is their decision.
And anyway, what right, what business, do we have to assume we can interfere in someone else’s life? And it is the same with ourselves – wanting ourself to be different is like saying to existence that we know better. And this creates such a tension in us. It is like saying to Picasso that one of his paintings is wrong – the nose should be different, the shape of the body, the colour of the eyes, etc.
We are all unique - we are all unrepeatable, incomparable masterpieces of existence. If existence has so much respect for us, who are we to question ourselves? But of course we do it all the time. And that is how we make our lives miserable.
Acceptance, is not resignation. It is enjoying, celebrating ourselves and others as the utterly unique, and imperfect, beings that we are. And that is the basis of much of my work. It has often been said that the issues we group leaders choose to work with are in fact our very own issues. For sure, that is the case with me. Forget about self love – my self acceptance was so low at one point in my life that I was suicidal – I could no longer see the point of getting up each morning. I now wake up with a huge ‘thank you’ to existence .
The only difference between me and you is, you don't say okay to yourself and I have said an absolute okay to myself - that is the only difference. You are continuously trying to improve yourself, and I am not trying to improve myself. I have said: Incompletion is the way life is. You are trying to become perfect and I have accepted my imperfections. That is the only difference. So I don't have any problems. When you accept your imperfection, from where can the problem come? When whatsoever happens you say "It is okay," then from where can the problem come? When you accept limitations, then from where can the problem come? The problem arises out of your non-acceptance. You cannot accept the way you are, hence the problem. I have accepted the way I am, and that very moment all problems disappeared. That very moment all worries disappeared. Not that I became perfect, but I started enjoying my imperfections’.
From the moment I decided to test this concept, it changed my whole attitude towards my ‘problems’. I confess it was not easy for me to sit down and examine the things that my mind was continually chewing on. My mind much preferred to run on and on with all its fears and worries. But the interesting thing was that, once I managed to crystallize the issue – to pin down what was really going on, and what was the worst thing that could go wrong – suddenly it was no more a problem.
However, the mind is incredibly persistent. It needs ‘problems’ to chew on, and the more complicated, the better. In fact, the mind can make a problem out of anything, can’t it? It is really ingenious. So you dissolve one, and immediately the mind starts searching for another.
When I realize I am in the middle of a major mind-fuck, the trick I learned is to say, ‘This is the mind’. Just like that, without any judgment, condemnation or fight. This simple statement of fact never fails to bring me instantly into the present moment, with a deep and relaxing inhalation. Then I realize I have the choice – I can go on being absorbed in the ‘problem’, unconsciously getting involved with all the fears and projections my mind is creating, or I can have a very direct and clear look at the facts of the situation. What is the actual ‘problem’? Is it real? Would it necessarily be a problem for anyone else, or is it just a problem for my ego? And the beauty of being honest with yourself, and looking clearly and directly, is that the answer is always there in the situation itself.
In my experience, it takes courage to question and look at a problem from a different perspective, it is much easier to stay in an unconscious complaint about it. It also takes courage to accept the reality of a situation and its inherent solution – it is usually not what the ego wants to see and hear.
And, we are very attached to our problems – in a way they are part of our identity. Who would we be without our problems? But the rewards of dropping this unconscious identification are immediate. The deep inner relaxation that comes with acceptance and understanding brings space and new eyes to see everything afresh. To see that life is simple and easy when you go with the flow, when you stop fighting for things to be different from what they are.
Have you ever stopped to think that we create our own problems by the simple strategy of wanting things to be different to how they actually are?
We want other people to be different (especially our partners!), we want situations to be different, we want ourselves to be different. And they, and we, can't be other than what we are. It is like wanting the weather to be different. But the weather is what it is. We can accept it and enjoy however it is, or we can complain about it and make ourselves feel miserable. But anyway, it is not going to change the weather, is it? And yet this is what we are doing every time we have a complaint about something (which, let’s be honest, is quite often). We may as well be bashing our heads against a wall.
The other thing we never consider, is that it is actually disrespectful to want to change things, especially others. In a subtle, unconscious way, we are saying we know better than the other what is good for them, and this naturally creates a wall of resistance. In a relationship, it is like taking on the role of a parent and diminishing the other into the role of a child. Is it any wonder we get negative reactions from the other, even though we are convinced we are acting in the best intentions?
And in fact, if we are really honest, our intentions are always in our own interest. If we really respected the other, we would accept them as they are, we would dignify them by letting them decide how to live their own lives, even if it doesn’t fit with our ideas. Even if they are on a path of self-destruction, it is their decision.
And anyway, what right, what business, do we have to assume we can interfere in someone else’s life? And it is the same with ourselves – wanting ourself to be different is like saying to existence that we know better. And this creates such a tension in us. It is like saying to Picasso that one of his paintings is wrong – the nose should be different, the shape of the body, the colour of the eyes, etc.
We are all unique - we are all unrepeatable, incomparable masterpieces of existence. If existence has so much respect for us, who are we to question ourselves? But of course we do it all the time. And that is how we make our lives miserable.
Acceptance, is not resignation. It is enjoying, celebrating ourselves and others as the utterly unique, and imperfect, beings that we are. And that is the basis of much of my work. It has often been said that the issues we group leaders choose to work with are in fact our very own issues. For sure, that is the case with me. Forget about self love – my self acceptance was so low at one point in my life that I was suicidal – I could no longer see the point of getting up each morning. I now wake up with a huge ‘thank you’ to existence .
The only difference between me and you is, you don't say okay to yourself and I have said an absolute okay to myself - that is the only difference. You are continuously trying to improve yourself, and I am not trying to improve myself. I have said: Incompletion is the way life is. You are trying to become perfect and I have accepted my imperfections. That is the only difference. So I don't have any problems. When you accept your imperfection, from where can the problem come? When whatsoever happens you say "It is okay," then from where can the problem come? When you accept limitations, then from where can the problem come? The problem arises out of your non-acceptance. You cannot accept the way you are, hence the problem. I have accepted the way I am, and that very moment all problems disappeared. That very moment all worries disappeared. Not that I became perfect, but I started enjoying my imperfections’.
From the moment I decided to test this concept, it changed my whole attitude towards my ‘problems’. I confess it was not easy for me to sit down and examine the things that my mind was continually chewing on. My mind much preferred to run on and on with all its fears and worries. But the interesting thing was that, once I managed to crystallize the issue – to pin down what was really going on, and what was the worst thing that could go wrong – suddenly it was no more a problem.
However, the mind is incredibly persistent. It needs ‘problems’ to chew on, and the more complicated, the better. In fact, the mind can make a problem out of anything, can’t it? It is really ingenious. So you dissolve one, and immediately the mind starts searching for another.
When I realize I am in the middle of a major mind-fuck, the trick I learned is to say, ‘This is the mind’. Just like that, without any judgment, condemnation or fight. This simple statement of fact never fails to bring me instantly into the present moment, with a deep and relaxing inhalation. Then I realize I have the choice – I can go on being absorbed in the ‘problem’, unconsciously getting involved with all the fears and projections my mind is creating, or I can have a very direct and clear look at the facts of the situation. What is the actual ‘problem’? Is it real? Would it necessarily be a problem for anyone else, or is it just a problem for my ego? And the beauty of being honest with yourself, and looking clearly and directly, is that the answer is always there in the situation itself.
In my experience, it takes courage to question and look at a problem from a different perspective, it is much easier to stay in an unconscious complaint about it. It also takes courage to accept the reality of a situation and its inherent solution – it is usually not what the ego wants to see and hear.
And, we are very attached to our problems – in a way they are part of our identity. Who would we be without our problems? But the rewards of dropping this unconscious identification are immediate. The deep inner relaxation that comes with acceptance and understanding brings space and new eyes to see everything afresh. To see that life is simple and easy when you go with the flow, when you stop fighting for things to be different from what they are.
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
SPIRITUAL: I AM A FIREFLY.....
It goes something like this: I am one person among 6.5 billion people on Earth at the moment. That's one person among 6,500,000,000 people. That'a lot of Wembley Stadiums full of people. And we live on an Earth that is spinning at 67,000 miles an hour through space around a sun that is the centre of our solar system (and our solar system is spinning around the centre of the Milky Way at 530,000 mph). Just our solar system (which is a tiny speck within the entire universe) is very big indeed. If Earth was a peppercorn and Jupiter was a chestnut, you'd have to place them 100 metres apart to get a sense of the real distance between us.
And this universe is only one of many. In fact, the chances are that there are many, many more populated Earths - just like ours - in other universes.
And that's just space.
Have a look at time, too. If you're in for a good run, you may spend 85 years on this Earth. Man has been around for 100,000 years, so you're going to spend just 0.00085 percent of man's history living on this Earth. And Man's stay on Earth has been very short in the context of the life of the Earth (which is 4.5 billion years old): if the Earth had been around for the equivalent of a day (with the Big Bang kicking it all off at midnight), humans didn't turn up until 11.59.58 p.m. That means we've only been around for the last two seconds.
A lifetime is gone in a flash. There are relatively few people on this Earth that were here 100 years ago. Just as you'll be gone (relatively) soon.
So, with just the briefest look at the spatial and temporal context of our lives, we are utterly insignificant. As the Perspective Machine lifts up so far above the woods that we forget what the word means, we see just one moving light. It is beautiful. A small, gently glowing light. It is a firefly lost somewhere in the cosmos. And a firefly - on Earth - lives for just one night. It glows beautifully, then goes out.
And up there so high in our Perspective Machine we realize that our lives are really just like that of the firefly. Except the air is full of 6.5 billion fireflies. They're glowing beautifully for one night. Then they are gone.
So, Fuck It, you might as well REALLY glow
We innately know that everything is impermanent that we so desperately cling to it. But cling we do.
We know that our youth vanishes that we and our loved one will die one day, that whatever we have accumulated can easily be taken away from us, that one day our skills might not be wanted, that a day may come when our love might not be reciprocated. But we go on clinging.
Everywhere we turn we are faced with impermanence. (..) The more we cling - of course - the more pain we feel as things fade, disappear, die around us.And sometimes the more we cling, the more these things happen. (..)
The key to being able to let go of all the stuff you're holding on to is knowing that you'll be okay if you don't have it. And that's the truth. You can survive with very little. And though the passing of people and things can be painful, you will survive
And this universe is only one of many. In fact, the chances are that there are many, many more populated Earths - just like ours - in other universes.
And that's just space.
Have a look at time, too. If you're in for a good run, you may spend 85 years on this Earth. Man has been around for 100,000 years, so you're going to spend just 0.00085 percent of man's history living on this Earth. And Man's stay on Earth has been very short in the context of the life of the Earth (which is 4.5 billion years old): if the Earth had been around for the equivalent of a day (with the Big Bang kicking it all off at midnight), humans didn't turn up until 11.59.58 p.m. That means we've only been around for the last two seconds.
A lifetime is gone in a flash. There are relatively few people on this Earth that were here 100 years ago. Just as you'll be gone (relatively) soon.
So, with just the briefest look at the spatial and temporal context of our lives, we are utterly insignificant. As the Perspective Machine lifts up so far above the woods that we forget what the word means, we see just one moving light. It is beautiful. A small, gently glowing light. It is a firefly lost somewhere in the cosmos. And a firefly - on Earth - lives for just one night. It glows beautifully, then goes out.
And up there so high in our Perspective Machine we realize that our lives are really just like that of the firefly. Except the air is full of 6.5 billion fireflies. They're glowing beautifully for one night. Then they are gone.
So, Fuck It, you might as well REALLY glow
We innately know that everything is impermanent that we so desperately cling to it. But cling we do.
We know that our youth vanishes that we and our loved one will die one day, that whatever we have accumulated can easily be taken away from us, that one day our skills might not be wanted, that a day may come when our love might not be reciprocated. But we go on clinging.
Everywhere we turn we are faced with impermanence. (..) The more we cling - of course - the more pain we feel as things fade, disappear, die around us.And sometimes the more we cling, the more these things happen. (..)
The key to being able to let go of all the stuff you're holding on to is knowing that you'll be okay if you don't have it. And that's the truth. You can survive with very little. And though the passing of people and things can be painful, you will survive
Sunday, June 1, 2014
SPIRITUAL: YOUR BASIC NEEDS ARE NOT BEING MET
Have you ever had moments in which you asked yourself “Why am I unhappy?”
Me too.
But I can tell you why you are unhappy.
And I don’t don’t even know you. I’ve never seen you. I’ve never spoken to you.
So then how? No, I’m not psychic or anything like that. And neither am I trying to fob you over with some ridiculous claim that I know everything about everything,
The truth is there are probably several apparent reasons why you feel unhappy. Things which are specific and individual to you. The conditions of your life, your relationships, your finances, or whatever. I don’t know anything about any of that.
The thing is these conditions are what you see and experience on the surface. Below the surface there are psychological forces at work in your life, unconsciously pulling you this way and that. And these forces are universal for all humans. When you learn about, and understand these psychological tendencies you can develop practical strategies to change the conditions in your life that are perpetuating your unhappiness.
Unhappiness arises as the result of not being aligned with your authentic self.
As the intelligent, responsible, and thoughtful person I’m sure you are, you have some sense of values. You know what’s important to you. You have standards. You know what kind of person you aspire to be, even if that’s just in a vague sense. These ideals, or qualities represent your values.
The problem is that what we ideally want to say, do, or be is frequently not what we end up saying, doing, or being.
And it is there that unhappiness starts to creep in. Deep-rooted, and subtle, this sense of dissatisfaction niggles away at us on an unconscious or semiconscious level. That nagging feeling of discontentment harasses us, and shows up in the negative conditions of our life that we mostly create for ourselves.
You will often know intuitively when you are living your life out of sync with your authentic self. You may try to ignore it but that sense of being out of alignment with who and what you aspire to be bubbles away just beneath the surface.
So why do we often end up doing things that go against our higher ideals?
Because, as humans, we have needs.
And needs are, by definition, near impossible to resist.
They are stronger than values or ideals. Whilst it requires a conscious decision to act in accordance with your values, your needs will unconsciously and involuntary drive you towards certain ways of behaving.
According to Human Needs Psychology there are six basic needs which are universal, and always manifest in varying proportions.
Your Six Human Needs
1. Certainty. The need for security, stability, and reliability.
2. Variety. The need for change, stimulation, and challenge.
3. Significance. The need to feel acknowledged, recognized, and valued.
4. Love and Connection. The need to love and to feel loved, and to feel connection with others.
5. Growth. The need to grow, improve and develop, both in character and in spirit.
6. Contribution. The need to give, to help others, and to make a difference.
These basic needs will often be hidden behind the appearance of some other motive.
For example, an unfaithful spouse may feel the need to be understood, or to be satisfied sexually. But a closer look would reveal that this person needs to feel more love and connection, or perhaps to be acknowledged (significance), or even simply wants more interest and excitement in their life (variety).
Your needs ultimately drive your behaviour, with or without the consent of your better judgement.
It is when your needs take you down paths that go against your ideals that you are setting yourself up for an unhappy life. In the case of the unfaithful spouse, trying to meet their needs in that way goes against their values (at least by the standards of most normal people!), and is destructive. That path will only lead towards more unhappiness.
While this example may be a little extreme, the same principle can be seen in just about any aspect of your life, small or big.
So if our needs are unconsciously directing us, what hope is there for taking control of our life?
Don’t worry, there is hope for you! All you have to do is “trick” your needs, by creating the conditions in your life to meet those needs in a more positive way.
Once you understand which are your most important needs, and how they are manifesting in the different areas of your life, you can take action to fulfil them in a way which is not destructive. You can think of activities and strategies to meet those needs that are in line with your higher ideals. When you are satisfying those most important needs you will no longer end up doing things against your values. That will make you feel good about yourself inside, and you will then be able to create the conditions for happiness.
This may not necessarily be easy. In the case of the unfaithful spouse it would require finding out how to get more love and connection from their partner, or to be more valued by them, or even to find ways to add more variety to their relationship.
But, as I’m sure you’ll agree, the result would be more than worth the effort… a happy and fulfilling relationship without cause for infidelity.
Accepting and giving permission to your needs is a basic part of being human.
Me too.
But I can tell you why you are unhappy.
And I don’t don’t even know you. I’ve never seen you. I’ve never spoken to you.
So then how? No, I’m not psychic or anything like that. And neither am I trying to fob you over with some ridiculous claim that I know everything about everything,
The truth is there are probably several apparent reasons why you feel unhappy. Things which are specific and individual to you. The conditions of your life, your relationships, your finances, or whatever. I don’t know anything about any of that.
The thing is these conditions are what you see and experience on the surface. Below the surface there are psychological forces at work in your life, unconsciously pulling you this way and that. And these forces are universal for all humans. When you learn about, and understand these psychological tendencies you can develop practical strategies to change the conditions in your life that are perpetuating your unhappiness.
Unhappiness arises as the result of not being aligned with your authentic self.
As the intelligent, responsible, and thoughtful person I’m sure you are, you have some sense of values. You know what’s important to you. You have standards. You know what kind of person you aspire to be, even if that’s just in a vague sense. These ideals, or qualities represent your values.
The problem is that what we ideally want to say, do, or be is frequently not what we end up saying, doing, or being.
And it is there that unhappiness starts to creep in. Deep-rooted, and subtle, this sense of dissatisfaction niggles away at us on an unconscious or semiconscious level. That nagging feeling of discontentment harasses us, and shows up in the negative conditions of our life that we mostly create for ourselves.
You will often know intuitively when you are living your life out of sync with your authentic self. You may try to ignore it but that sense of being out of alignment with who and what you aspire to be bubbles away just beneath the surface.
So why do we often end up doing things that go against our higher ideals?
Because, as humans, we have needs.
And needs are, by definition, near impossible to resist.
They are stronger than values or ideals. Whilst it requires a conscious decision to act in accordance with your values, your needs will unconsciously and involuntary drive you towards certain ways of behaving.
According to Human Needs Psychology there are six basic needs which are universal, and always manifest in varying proportions.
Your Six Human Needs
1. Certainty. The need for security, stability, and reliability.
2. Variety. The need for change, stimulation, and challenge.
3. Significance. The need to feel acknowledged, recognized, and valued.
4. Love and Connection. The need to love and to feel loved, and to feel connection with others.
5. Growth. The need to grow, improve and develop, both in character and in spirit.
6. Contribution. The need to give, to help others, and to make a difference.
These basic needs will often be hidden behind the appearance of some other motive.
For example, an unfaithful spouse may feel the need to be understood, or to be satisfied sexually. But a closer look would reveal that this person needs to feel more love and connection, or perhaps to be acknowledged (significance), or even simply wants more interest and excitement in their life (variety).
Your needs ultimately drive your behaviour, with or without the consent of your better judgement.
It is when your needs take you down paths that go against your ideals that you are setting yourself up for an unhappy life. In the case of the unfaithful spouse, trying to meet their needs in that way goes against their values (at least by the standards of most normal people!), and is destructive. That path will only lead towards more unhappiness.
While this example may be a little extreme, the same principle can be seen in just about any aspect of your life, small or big.
So if our needs are unconsciously directing us, what hope is there for taking control of our life?
Don’t worry, there is hope for you! All you have to do is “trick” your needs, by creating the conditions in your life to meet those needs in a more positive way.
Once you understand which are your most important needs, and how they are manifesting in the different areas of your life, you can take action to fulfil them in a way which is not destructive. You can think of activities and strategies to meet those needs that are in line with your higher ideals. When you are satisfying those most important needs you will no longer end up doing things against your values. That will make you feel good about yourself inside, and you will then be able to create the conditions for happiness.
This may not necessarily be easy. In the case of the unfaithful spouse it would require finding out how to get more love and connection from their partner, or to be more valued by them, or even to find ways to add more variety to their relationship.
But, as I’m sure you’ll agree, the result would be more than worth the effort… a happy and fulfilling relationship without cause for infidelity.
Accepting and giving permission to your needs is a basic part of being human.
Saturday, May 31, 2014
THOUGHTS/ SPIRITUAL: FREE WILL
Identity: who am I?
Every year 98% of the atoms of my body are replaced: how can I claim to be still the same person that I was last year, or, worse, ten years ago? What is (where lies) my identity? What is "my" relationship to the metabolism of my body?
Derek Parfit once proposed a thought problem: what happens to a person who is destroyed by a scanner in London and rebuilt cell by cell in New York by a replicator that has received infinitely detailed information from the scanner about the state of each single cell, including all of the person's memories? Is the person still the same person? Or did the person die in London? What makes a person such a person: bodily or psychological continuity? If a person's matter is replaced cell by cell with equivalent cells is the person still the same person? If a person's psychological state (memory, beliefs, emotions and everything) is replaced with an equivalent psychological state is the person still the same person? The question eventually asks what is "a life": is it a continuum of bodily states, whereby one grows from a child to an adult, or is it a continuum of psychological states? Or both? Or none?
The most obvious paradox is: how can reality be still the same as we grow up? Do two completely different brains see the same image when they are presented with the same object? If the brains are different, then the pattern of neural excitement created by seeing that object will be completely different in the two brains. How can two completely different brains yield the same image in the two brains? The logical conclusion is "no, the tree I see is not the tree you see, we just happen to refer to it the same way so it is not important what exactly we see when we look at it". But then how can we see the same image yesterday, today and tomorrow? Our brain changes all the time. Between my brain of when I was five years old and my brain of today there is probably nothing in common: every single cell has changed, connections have changed, the physical shape of the brain has changed. The same object causes a different pattern in my brain today than it did in my brain forty years ago. Those are two different brains, made of different cells, organized in different ways: the two patterns are physically different. Nonetheless, it appears to me that my toys still look the same. But they shouldn't: since my brain changed, and the pattern they generate has changed, what I see today should be a different image than the one I saw as a five-year old. How is it that I see the same thing even if I have a different brain?
This thought experiment almost seem to prove that "I" am not in my brain, that there is something external to the brain that does not change over time, that the brain simply performs computations of the image but the ultimate "feeling" of that image is due to a "soul" that is external to the brain and does not depend on cells or connections.
On the other hand, it is easy to see that what we see is not really what we think we see.
We have to keep in mind that when we recognize something as something, we rarely see/feel/hear/touch again exactly the same thing we already saw/felt/heard/touched before. I recognize somebody's face, but that face cannot possibly be exactly the same image I saw last time: beard may have grown, a pimple may have appeared, hair may have been trimmed, a tan may have darkened the skin, or, quite simply, that face may be at a different angle (looking up, looking down, turned half way). I recognize a song, but the truth is that the same song never "sounds" the same: louder, softer, different speakers, static, different echo in the room, different position of my era with respect to the speakers. I recognize that today the temperature is "cold", but if we measured the temperature to the tenth decimal digit it is unlikely that we would get the exact same number that I got the previous time I felt the same cold. What we "recognize" is obviously not a physical quantity: a image, a sound, a temperature never repeat themselves. What is it then that we recognize when we recognize a face, a song or a temperature? Broadly speaking, it is a concept.
We build concepts of our sensory experience, we store those concepts for future use, and we matched the stored concepts with any new concept. When we do this comparison, we try to find similarity and identity. If the two concepts are similar enough, we assume that they are identical, that they are the same thing. If they are not similar enough, but they are more similar than the average, then we can probably establish that they belong to a common super-concept (they are both faces, but not the same face; they are both songs, but not the same song; and so forth). We have a vast array of concepts which are organized in a hierarchy with many levels of generalization (your face to face of you and siblings to faces of that kind to face to ... to body part to ...). A sensory experience is somehow translated into a concept and that concept is matched with existing concepts and eventually located at some level of a hierarchy of concepts. If it is close enough to an existing concept of that hierarchy at that level, it is recognized as the same concept. Whatever the specific mechanism, it is obvious that what we recognize is not a physical quantity (distribution of colors, sound wave or temperature) but a concept, that somehow we build and compare with previously manufactured concepts.
Add to these considerations the fact that experience molds the brain: I am not only my genome, I am also the world around me. And I change all the time according to what is happening in the world. "I am" what the world is doing.
Identity is probably a concept. I have built over the years a concept of myself. My physical substance changes all the time, but, as long as it still matches my concept of myself, I still recognize it as myself.
The importance of being warm
When speculating about consciousness, identity and free will, it is important not to forget what bodies are and how they work.
Among the many bizarre features of living organisms, one is often overlooked: each living organism can live only within a very narrow range of temperature. Temperature is one of the most crucial survival factors.
Temperature also happens to be an important source of "identity": water and ice are made of the same atoms, it's the temperature that determines whether you are water or you are ice.
It's the temperature that determines whether your body is dead or alive, and it's the temperature that determines whether you are lying and shivering in bed or are playing soccer outside. Our identity does change with the temperature of our body (from no identity to "regular" identity to delirious identity).
Most of what our body does has nothing to do with writing poems or making scientific discoveries: it is about maintaining a stable temperature.
Free Will
Some scientists (and Albert Einstein with them) have argued that consciousness must be fabricated by reality, that what we feel is simply an unavoidable consequence of the state of the universe, that we are simply machines programmed by the rest of the universe.
Other scientists believe the opposite, that consciousness fabricates reality, that we have the power to alter the course of the events. They believe in free will.
Do we think or are we thought?
The question, while popular, is misleading. The question is, in a sense, already an answer: the moment we separate the "I" and the body, we have subscribed to dualism, to the view that spirit and matter are separate and spirit can control matter.
A free will grounded in matter is not easy to picture because we tend to believe in an "I" external to our body that controls our body.
But, in a materialist scenario, the "I" is supposed to be only the expression of brain processes. If that is the case, then "free will" is not about the "I" making a decision: the "I" will simply reflect that decision. What makes the decision is the brain process.
This does not mean that free will can't exist. It just needs to be redefined: can a brain process occur that is not completely caused by other physical processes?
In a materialist scenario, free will does not require consciousness: consciousness is an aspect of the brain process that "thinks". The question is whether that brain process has free will.
If consciousness is indeed due to a physical process, if consciousness is ultimately material, does this preclude free will? For centuries we have considered free will an exclusive property of the soul, mainly because 1. we deemed the soul to be made of spirit and not matter, and 2. nothing in Physics allows for free will of matter.
If we now recognize that consciousness is a property of matter(possibly one that occurs only in some special form and configuration of matter, but nonetheless ultimately matter), the second statement must be examined carefully because the possibility of free will depends on its truth: if motion of matter is controlled only by deterministic laws, then free will is an illusion; if matter has a degree of control over its own motion, then free will is a fact.
The question is not whether we have free will, but whether the laws of our universe (i.e., Physics) allow for free will.
Purpose
Why do living things do what they do?
The purposiveness of living organisms is simply a consequence of evolution by natural selection. Living organisms have a fundamental goal, survival, and have inherited a repertory of behaviors to achieve that goal. But the concept of "survival" can be better qualified as self-regulation.
The 19th-century French psychologist Claude Bernard "discovered" the self-regulating nature of living organisms. Bernard realized that each living organism is a system built to maintain a constant internal state in the face of changing external conditions. The regulation of this "milieu interieur" is life itself, because it is this stable state that gives the organism its independence from the environment, its identity. This is the dividing line that separates animate and inanimate matter: inanimate matter obeys Newton's laws of cause and effect, animate matter tends to maintain its state no matter what external forces are applied. Unlike objects, whose state is changed when a force is applied, the state of a living organism is not changed by an external force. The living organism, as long as it is alive, maintains its state constant.
The "purposeful" behavior of a living organism is the reaction to environmental forces: the organism needs to act in order to continuously restore its state. A body seems to "want", "intend", "desire" to maintain its internal state (either by eating, moving, sleeping, etc), a state that, ultimately, is a combination of chemical content and temperature. Living bodies appear to act purposedly, but they are simply reacting to the environment.
For Bernard "freedom" is independence from the environment. Control of the internal state allows a living organism to live in many different environments. The living organism is "free" in that is not a slave of its environment.
Bernard's idea of self-regulation extended to all living organisms. Humans are not the only ones to have "goals". Animate behavior "is" control of perception.
Will, not necessarily free: a materialistic view of free will
The problem with free will is that it does not fit too well with the scientific theories of the universe that have been developing over the last three centuries. While those theories are fairly accurate in predicting all the natural phenomena we deal with, they don't leave much room for free will. Particles behave the way they behave because of the fundamental laws of nature and because of what the other particles are doing; not because they can decide what to do. Since we are, ultimately, collections of particles, free will is an embarrassment of Physics.
On the other hand, a simple look at the behavior of even a fly seems to prove that free will is indeed a fact and is pervasive. Free will is a fundamental attribute of life. A robot that moved but only repeating a mechanical sequence of steps would not be considered "alive". Life has very much to do with unpredictability of behavior, not just with behavior. Or, better, behavior is behavior inasmuch as it is unpredictable to a degree; otherwise it is simply "motion".
Whether it is indeed "free" or not, "will" (the apparent ability of an ant to decide in which direction to move) appears to be an inherent feature of life, no matter how primitive life is. A theory of life that does not predict free will is not a good theory of life. Somehow, "free" will must be a product of the chemistry of life, at some very elementary level. In other words, obtaining the right chemical mix in the laboratory would not be enough: that mix must also exhibit the symptoms of free will.
The origin of free will, therefore, appears to be life itself.
Free will and randomness
Free will is often associated to randomness: a being has free will if it can perform "random" actions, as opposed to actions rigidly determined by the universal clockwork. In other words, free will can exist only if the laws of nature allow for some random solutions, solutions that can be arbitrarily chosen by our consciousness. If no randomness exists in nature, then every action (including our very conscious thoughts) is predetermined by a formula and free will cannot exist.
In their quest for the source of randomness in human free will, both neurophysiologists like John Eccles and physicists like Roger Penrose have proposed that quantum effects are responsible for creating randomness in the processes of the human brain. Whether chance and free will can be equated (free will is supposed to lead to rational and deterministic decisions, not random ones) and whether Quantum Theory is the only possible source of randomness is debatable.
Since we know that a lot of what goes on in the universe is indeed regulated by strict formulas, the hope for free will should rely not so much in randomness as in "fuzziness". It is unlikely that the laws of nature hide a completely random property; on the other hand, they could be "fuzzy", in that they may prescribe a behavior but with a broad range of possible degrees.
Free will and Physics
Whether we exercise it or not we do have free will: at every point in time we can choose what to do next.
Do animals also have free will? Or are they mechanisms, machines, that move according to formulas?
There is no evidence that at any point in time one can predict the next move of a chicken or an ant. No matter how simple and unconscious animals seem to be, their behavior is still largely unpredictable. You can guess what the chicken will want to do, but you can never be sure, and you can never guess the exact movements. There are infinite paths an ant can follow to go back to the nest and the one it will follow cannot be predicted. At every point of that path the ant can choose where to do next. Two ants will follow two different paths. Each ant seems to have its own personality.
Even the movement of mono-cellular organisms is unpredictable to some extent. No matter how small and simple the organism, a degree of free will seems to be there. Free will seems to be a property of life. What triggers the next move of bacteria, ants and chicken is not just a Newtonian formula. If they are machines, then these machines do not obey classical Physics. There is a degree of freedom that every living organism seems to enjoy. And it doesn't require a sophisticated brain. There is a degree of freedom that just shouldn't be there, if Newton was right.
If these are machines, they are machines that cannot be explained with our Mechanics because at every point in time there are many possible time evolutions and all seem to be possible, and none can be exactly predicted, pretty much like a quantum wave.
There is something missing in our Mechanics to account for free will of the machine.
Free will and choice
As usual, some misconception may arise from vague definitions. Is free will the consciousness of making one action out of so many possible ones, or is free will the ability to select one action out of so many possible ones? Why do we claim that a machine has no free will? Usually, because a machine can solve only the problems that we program it to solve. We, on the other hand, can solve novel problems in unpredictable situations (or, at least, give them a try). And that's because we can make actions that we have never done before and that nobody ever told us to do, whereas a machine can only do what it has been programmed to do.
This narrower definition of free will is interesting because it actually refers to the "architecture" and not really to the awareness or any other special property of human minds. Machines are built to solve specific problems in specific situations, simply because that is what humans are good at: building machines that solve specific problems in specific situations: we humans like to "design" a machine, to write the "specifications", etc. This is not the way nature built us. Nature built us on a different principle and it is no surprise that we behave differently. Since in nature we never know what the next problem and situation will be like, nature built us a "Darwinian" machines: our brains generate all the time a lot of possible actions and then pursue the ones that are "selected" by the environment (the specific problem and situation). Nature built us on a different principle than the one we use to build machines. The main difference between our mind and a machine is their archectures.
The lack of free will in machines is not a limit of machines: it is a limit of our mind. If we built a machine the same way nature builds its cognitive beings, i.e. with the same type of architecture, it would be a rather different machine, capable of generating a huge amount of random behaviors and then picking the one that best matches the current problem and situation. One can even envision a day when machines built with a "Darwinian" architecture (descendants of today's genetic algorithms and neural networks) will "out-free will" us, will exhibit even more free will than we do. After all, most of the times we simply obey orders (we obey publicity when we shop, we obey record labels when we sing a tune, we obey our mother's education all day long), whereas a machine would have no conditioning. And it may be able to generate a lot more alternatives than our brain does. Free will is simply a folk name for the Darwinian architecture of our mind.
The substance of our brain may not be the reason that we have free will and machines do not. It may be possible to build machines that also exhibit free will, even if they are built out of electronic components.
Do we think or are we thought?
Every year 98% of the atoms of my body are replaced: how can I claim to be still the same person that I was last year, or, worse, ten years ago? What is (where lies) my identity? What is "my" relationship to the metabolism of my body?
Derek Parfit once proposed a thought problem: what happens to a person who is destroyed by a scanner in London and rebuilt cell by cell in New York by a replicator that has received infinitely detailed information from the scanner about the state of each single cell, including all of the person's memories? Is the person still the same person? Or did the person die in London? What makes a person such a person: bodily or psychological continuity? If a person's matter is replaced cell by cell with equivalent cells is the person still the same person? If a person's psychological state (memory, beliefs, emotions and everything) is replaced with an equivalent psychological state is the person still the same person? The question eventually asks what is "a life": is it a continuum of bodily states, whereby one grows from a child to an adult, or is it a continuum of psychological states? Or both? Or none?
The most obvious paradox is: how can reality be still the same as we grow up? Do two completely different brains see the same image when they are presented with the same object? If the brains are different, then the pattern of neural excitement created by seeing that object will be completely different in the two brains. How can two completely different brains yield the same image in the two brains? The logical conclusion is "no, the tree I see is not the tree you see, we just happen to refer to it the same way so it is not important what exactly we see when we look at it". But then how can we see the same image yesterday, today and tomorrow? Our brain changes all the time. Between my brain of when I was five years old and my brain of today there is probably nothing in common: every single cell has changed, connections have changed, the physical shape of the brain has changed. The same object causes a different pattern in my brain today than it did in my brain forty years ago. Those are two different brains, made of different cells, organized in different ways: the two patterns are physically different. Nonetheless, it appears to me that my toys still look the same. But they shouldn't: since my brain changed, and the pattern they generate has changed, what I see today should be a different image than the one I saw as a five-year old. How is it that I see the same thing even if I have a different brain?
This thought experiment almost seem to prove that "I" am not in my brain, that there is something external to the brain that does not change over time, that the brain simply performs computations of the image but the ultimate "feeling" of that image is due to a "soul" that is external to the brain and does not depend on cells or connections.
On the other hand, it is easy to see that what we see is not really what we think we see.
We have to keep in mind that when we recognize something as something, we rarely see/feel/hear/touch again exactly the same thing we already saw/felt/heard/touched before. I recognize somebody's face, but that face cannot possibly be exactly the same image I saw last time: beard may have grown, a pimple may have appeared, hair may have been trimmed, a tan may have darkened the skin, or, quite simply, that face may be at a different angle (looking up, looking down, turned half way). I recognize a song, but the truth is that the same song never "sounds" the same: louder, softer, different speakers, static, different echo in the room, different position of my era with respect to the speakers. I recognize that today the temperature is "cold", but if we measured the temperature to the tenth decimal digit it is unlikely that we would get the exact same number that I got the previous time I felt the same cold. What we "recognize" is obviously not a physical quantity: a image, a sound, a temperature never repeat themselves. What is it then that we recognize when we recognize a face, a song or a temperature? Broadly speaking, it is a concept.
We build concepts of our sensory experience, we store those concepts for future use, and we matched the stored concepts with any new concept. When we do this comparison, we try to find similarity and identity. If the two concepts are similar enough, we assume that they are identical, that they are the same thing. If they are not similar enough, but they are more similar than the average, then we can probably establish that they belong to a common super-concept (they are both faces, but not the same face; they are both songs, but not the same song; and so forth). We have a vast array of concepts which are organized in a hierarchy with many levels of generalization (your face to face of you and siblings to faces of that kind to face to ... to body part to ...). A sensory experience is somehow translated into a concept and that concept is matched with existing concepts and eventually located at some level of a hierarchy of concepts. If it is close enough to an existing concept of that hierarchy at that level, it is recognized as the same concept. Whatever the specific mechanism, it is obvious that what we recognize is not a physical quantity (distribution of colors, sound wave or temperature) but a concept, that somehow we build and compare with previously manufactured concepts.
Add to these considerations the fact that experience molds the brain: I am not only my genome, I am also the world around me. And I change all the time according to what is happening in the world. "I am" what the world is doing.
Identity is probably a concept. I have built over the years a concept of myself. My physical substance changes all the time, but, as long as it still matches my concept of myself, I still recognize it as myself.
The importance of being warm
When speculating about consciousness, identity and free will, it is important not to forget what bodies are and how they work.
Among the many bizarre features of living organisms, one is often overlooked: each living organism can live only within a very narrow range of temperature. Temperature is one of the most crucial survival factors.
Temperature also happens to be an important source of "identity": water and ice are made of the same atoms, it's the temperature that determines whether you are water or you are ice.
It's the temperature that determines whether your body is dead or alive, and it's the temperature that determines whether you are lying and shivering in bed or are playing soccer outside. Our identity does change with the temperature of our body (from no identity to "regular" identity to delirious identity).
Most of what our body does has nothing to do with writing poems or making scientific discoveries: it is about maintaining a stable temperature.
Free Will
Some scientists (and Albert Einstein with them) have argued that consciousness must be fabricated by reality, that what we feel is simply an unavoidable consequence of the state of the universe, that we are simply machines programmed by the rest of the universe.
Other scientists believe the opposite, that consciousness fabricates reality, that we have the power to alter the course of the events. They believe in free will.
Do we think or are we thought?
The question, while popular, is misleading. The question is, in a sense, already an answer: the moment we separate the "I" and the body, we have subscribed to dualism, to the view that spirit and matter are separate and spirit can control matter.
A free will grounded in matter is not easy to picture because we tend to believe in an "I" external to our body that controls our body.
But, in a materialist scenario, the "I" is supposed to be only the expression of brain processes. If that is the case, then "free will" is not about the "I" making a decision: the "I" will simply reflect that decision. What makes the decision is the brain process.
This does not mean that free will can't exist. It just needs to be redefined: can a brain process occur that is not completely caused by other physical processes?
In a materialist scenario, free will does not require consciousness: consciousness is an aspect of the brain process that "thinks". The question is whether that brain process has free will.
If consciousness is indeed due to a physical process, if consciousness is ultimately material, does this preclude free will? For centuries we have considered free will an exclusive property of the soul, mainly because 1. we deemed the soul to be made of spirit and not matter, and 2. nothing in Physics allows for free will of matter.
If we now recognize that consciousness is a property of matter(possibly one that occurs only in some special form and configuration of matter, but nonetheless ultimately matter), the second statement must be examined carefully because the possibility of free will depends on its truth: if motion of matter is controlled only by deterministic laws, then free will is an illusion; if matter has a degree of control over its own motion, then free will is a fact.
The question is not whether we have free will, but whether the laws of our universe (i.e., Physics) allow for free will.
Purpose
Why do living things do what they do?
The purposiveness of living organisms is simply a consequence of evolution by natural selection. Living organisms have a fundamental goal, survival, and have inherited a repertory of behaviors to achieve that goal. But the concept of "survival" can be better qualified as self-regulation.
The 19th-century French psychologist Claude Bernard "discovered" the self-regulating nature of living organisms. Bernard realized that each living organism is a system built to maintain a constant internal state in the face of changing external conditions. The regulation of this "milieu interieur" is life itself, because it is this stable state that gives the organism its independence from the environment, its identity. This is the dividing line that separates animate and inanimate matter: inanimate matter obeys Newton's laws of cause and effect, animate matter tends to maintain its state no matter what external forces are applied. Unlike objects, whose state is changed when a force is applied, the state of a living organism is not changed by an external force. The living organism, as long as it is alive, maintains its state constant.
The "purposeful" behavior of a living organism is the reaction to environmental forces: the organism needs to act in order to continuously restore its state. A body seems to "want", "intend", "desire" to maintain its internal state (either by eating, moving, sleeping, etc), a state that, ultimately, is a combination of chemical content and temperature. Living bodies appear to act purposedly, but they are simply reacting to the environment.
For Bernard "freedom" is independence from the environment. Control of the internal state allows a living organism to live in many different environments. The living organism is "free" in that is not a slave of its environment.
Bernard's idea of self-regulation extended to all living organisms. Humans are not the only ones to have "goals". Animate behavior "is" control of perception.
Will, not necessarily free: a materialistic view of free will
The problem with free will is that it does not fit too well with the scientific theories of the universe that have been developing over the last three centuries. While those theories are fairly accurate in predicting all the natural phenomena we deal with, they don't leave much room for free will. Particles behave the way they behave because of the fundamental laws of nature and because of what the other particles are doing; not because they can decide what to do. Since we are, ultimately, collections of particles, free will is an embarrassment of Physics.
On the other hand, a simple look at the behavior of even a fly seems to prove that free will is indeed a fact and is pervasive. Free will is a fundamental attribute of life. A robot that moved but only repeating a mechanical sequence of steps would not be considered "alive". Life has very much to do with unpredictability of behavior, not just with behavior. Or, better, behavior is behavior inasmuch as it is unpredictable to a degree; otherwise it is simply "motion".
Whether it is indeed "free" or not, "will" (the apparent ability of an ant to decide in which direction to move) appears to be an inherent feature of life, no matter how primitive life is. A theory of life that does not predict free will is not a good theory of life. Somehow, "free" will must be a product of the chemistry of life, at some very elementary level. In other words, obtaining the right chemical mix in the laboratory would not be enough: that mix must also exhibit the symptoms of free will.
The origin of free will, therefore, appears to be life itself.
Free will and randomness
Free will is often associated to randomness: a being has free will if it can perform "random" actions, as opposed to actions rigidly determined by the universal clockwork. In other words, free will can exist only if the laws of nature allow for some random solutions, solutions that can be arbitrarily chosen by our consciousness. If no randomness exists in nature, then every action (including our very conscious thoughts) is predetermined by a formula and free will cannot exist.
In their quest for the source of randomness in human free will, both neurophysiologists like John Eccles and physicists like Roger Penrose have proposed that quantum effects are responsible for creating randomness in the processes of the human brain. Whether chance and free will can be equated (free will is supposed to lead to rational and deterministic decisions, not random ones) and whether Quantum Theory is the only possible source of randomness is debatable.
Since we know that a lot of what goes on in the universe is indeed regulated by strict formulas, the hope for free will should rely not so much in randomness as in "fuzziness". It is unlikely that the laws of nature hide a completely random property; on the other hand, they could be "fuzzy", in that they may prescribe a behavior but with a broad range of possible degrees.
Free will and Physics
Whether we exercise it or not we do have free will: at every point in time we can choose what to do next.
Do animals also have free will? Or are they mechanisms, machines, that move according to formulas?
There is no evidence that at any point in time one can predict the next move of a chicken or an ant. No matter how simple and unconscious animals seem to be, their behavior is still largely unpredictable. You can guess what the chicken will want to do, but you can never be sure, and you can never guess the exact movements. There are infinite paths an ant can follow to go back to the nest and the one it will follow cannot be predicted. At every point of that path the ant can choose where to do next. Two ants will follow two different paths. Each ant seems to have its own personality.
Even the movement of mono-cellular organisms is unpredictable to some extent. No matter how small and simple the organism, a degree of free will seems to be there. Free will seems to be a property of life. What triggers the next move of bacteria, ants and chicken is not just a Newtonian formula. If they are machines, then these machines do not obey classical Physics. There is a degree of freedom that every living organism seems to enjoy. And it doesn't require a sophisticated brain. There is a degree of freedom that just shouldn't be there, if Newton was right.
If these are machines, they are machines that cannot be explained with our Mechanics because at every point in time there are many possible time evolutions and all seem to be possible, and none can be exactly predicted, pretty much like a quantum wave.
There is something missing in our Mechanics to account for free will of the machine.
Free will and choice
As usual, some misconception may arise from vague definitions. Is free will the consciousness of making one action out of so many possible ones, or is free will the ability to select one action out of so many possible ones? Why do we claim that a machine has no free will? Usually, because a machine can solve only the problems that we program it to solve. We, on the other hand, can solve novel problems in unpredictable situations (or, at least, give them a try). And that's because we can make actions that we have never done before and that nobody ever told us to do, whereas a machine can only do what it has been programmed to do.
This narrower definition of free will is interesting because it actually refers to the "architecture" and not really to the awareness or any other special property of human minds. Machines are built to solve specific problems in specific situations, simply because that is what humans are good at: building machines that solve specific problems in specific situations: we humans like to "design" a machine, to write the "specifications", etc. This is not the way nature built us. Nature built us on a different principle and it is no surprise that we behave differently. Since in nature we never know what the next problem and situation will be like, nature built us a "Darwinian" machines: our brains generate all the time a lot of possible actions and then pursue the ones that are "selected" by the environment (the specific problem and situation). Nature built us on a different principle than the one we use to build machines. The main difference between our mind and a machine is their archectures.
The lack of free will in machines is not a limit of machines: it is a limit of our mind. If we built a machine the same way nature builds its cognitive beings, i.e. with the same type of architecture, it would be a rather different machine, capable of generating a huge amount of random behaviors and then picking the one that best matches the current problem and situation. One can even envision a day when machines built with a "Darwinian" architecture (descendants of today's genetic algorithms and neural networks) will "out-free will" us, will exhibit even more free will than we do. After all, most of the times we simply obey orders (we obey publicity when we shop, we obey record labels when we sing a tune, we obey our mother's education all day long), whereas a machine would have no conditioning. And it may be able to generate a lot more alternatives than our brain does. Free will is simply a folk name for the Darwinian architecture of our mind.
The substance of our brain may not be the reason that we have free will and machines do not. It may be possible to build machines that also exhibit free will, even if they are built out of electronic components.
Do we think or are we thought?
Thursday, May 29, 2014
SPIRITUAL: YOU HAVE TO ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
I began noticing a disturbing pattern: I frequently asked questions that were inadvertently structured to produce negative answers.
What do I mean by this? Well, for years, I CONSTANTLY asked questions such as:
What the F is wrong with me?
Why does this bad shit keep happening to me?
What do I need to do for this problem to go away?
What’s missing?
Why do I fuck up so much?
WOW!! No wonder I had been so miserable for many years. No wonder these journals made me feel burdened. They were packed with self-cursing questions that I asked over and over again.
Notice that each of the questions above is structured in such a way that it implies something negative exists: there’s something wrong with me; bad shit happens to me; a problem exists; something is missing; I fuck up so much. It’s like a secret command telling your mind, this is how it is.
Not once did it ever dawn on me that the questions I repeatedly asked myself were producing my reality.
Not once did it ever occur to me that my life was “bad” simply because I was asking “bad” questions.
I made it a priority to begin asking more positive questions. The theory is that the human mind automatically searches for the answer to any question asked of it. By default, questions automatically engage the mind to begin working to find an answer.
So if you ask yourself a question – any question at all – you’re ultimately going to find an answer. Your mind will work tirelessly to find the answer, so it can file the question away as “answered.”
If you ask yourself, “What’s wrong with me?” your brain will begin to search for an answer. You’ll subconsciously begin to collect information that answers the question, which implies that something is wrong with you. Evidence will begin to pop up everywhere that will support the underlying, hidden statement behind the question.
If you ask yourself a question such as, “Why am I so successful?” then your brain will begin searching for an answer to that, too. You’ll find evidence that supports the underlying assumption behind the question: that you are successful.
The second I began asking better questions, my life started to turn around. I’ve been experimenting with positive, goal-oriented afformations for the past several months and have been blown away by some of the great things happening in my life
(As someone who spent most of her life entrenched in negative beliefs, surrounded by people who not only adopted a victim mentality but also encouraged it – this has been HUGE for me.)
Oh, and I can pretty much guarantee you that the majority of people in this world are asking bad questions – that’s why they’re stuck in a rut. Heck, maybe you’ve even asked a few bad questions yourself. I’m convinced now that bad questions are the #1 thing keeping most of humanity stuck in a place where they don’t to be.
If you want to attract more positive things into your world:
A) Start asking better questions.
B) Get rid of all physical objects that produce ANY sort of bad feelings in you. Old photos of exes, old junk someone gave you as a gift that you never really liked, anything that reminds you of something bad from your past – just get rid of it. Throw it away, recycle it, donate it – just get it out of your home. Watch as all kinds of amazing things start coming into your life – because now there’s actually room for them to appear!
If you don’t believe me, just try doing one or both of these things for 30 days. See what happens. If it doesn’t work, what did you lose? A few minutes of your time? If it does work…think of everything you’ll gain.
What do I mean by this? Well, for years, I CONSTANTLY asked questions such as:
What the F is wrong with me?
Why does this bad shit keep happening to me?
What do I need to do for this problem to go away?
What’s missing?
Why do I fuck up so much?
WOW!! No wonder I had been so miserable for many years. No wonder these journals made me feel burdened. They were packed with self-cursing questions that I asked over and over again.
Notice that each of the questions above is structured in such a way that it implies something negative exists: there’s something wrong with me; bad shit happens to me; a problem exists; something is missing; I fuck up so much. It’s like a secret command telling your mind, this is how it is.
Not once did it ever dawn on me that the questions I repeatedly asked myself were producing my reality.
Not once did it ever occur to me that my life was “bad” simply because I was asking “bad” questions.
I made it a priority to begin asking more positive questions. The theory is that the human mind automatically searches for the answer to any question asked of it. By default, questions automatically engage the mind to begin working to find an answer.
So if you ask yourself a question – any question at all – you’re ultimately going to find an answer. Your mind will work tirelessly to find the answer, so it can file the question away as “answered.”
If you ask yourself, “What’s wrong with me?” your brain will begin to search for an answer. You’ll subconsciously begin to collect information that answers the question, which implies that something is wrong with you. Evidence will begin to pop up everywhere that will support the underlying, hidden statement behind the question.
If you ask yourself a question such as, “Why am I so successful?” then your brain will begin searching for an answer to that, too. You’ll find evidence that supports the underlying assumption behind the question: that you are successful.
The second I began asking better questions, my life started to turn around. I’ve been experimenting with positive, goal-oriented afformations for the past several months and have been blown away by some of the great things happening in my life
(As someone who spent most of her life entrenched in negative beliefs, surrounded by people who not only adopted a victim mentality but also encouraged it – this has been HUGE for me.)
Oh, and I can pretty much guarantee you that the majority of people in this world are asking bad questions – that’s why they’re stuck in a rut. Heck, maybe you’ve even asked a few bad questions yourself. I’m convinced now that bad questions are the #1 thing keeping most of humanity stuck in a place where they don’t to be.
If you want to attract more positive things into your world:
A) Start asking better questions.
B) Get rid of all physical objects that produce ANY sort of bad feelings in you. Old photos of exes, old junk someone gave you as a gift that you never really liked, anything that reminds you of something bad from your past – just get rid of it. Throw it away, recycle it, donate it – just get it out of your home. Watch as all kinds of amazing things start coming into your life – because now there’s actually room for them to appear!
If you don’t believe me, just try doing one or both of these things for 30 days. See what happens. If it doesn’t work, what did you lose? A few minutes of your time? If it does work…think of everything you’ll gain.
SPIRITUAL YOU DON'T HAVE CONTROL OF ANYTHING
We feel we’re in control, with plans like this.
But it’s an illusion, as I’ve said before.
We cannot control our lives to this degree, no matter how we try. Things will always come up to spoil the best-laid plans, and the more detailed our plans the more of a guarantee that something will go wrong.
And what happens when the plans go wrong? We are stressed out, because things get out of our control and don’t live up to our expectations. This is one of the greatest sources of stress for most people, actually.
Think about how often your days actually go according to plan, exactly — it’s pretty rare, because we have no way of predicting the future. No matter how hard we try. There’s always an email that will disrupt things, a last-minute meeting, cancellations and postponements, emergencies and fires to put out.
So if plans will almost always go wrong, and when they do we get stressed out, isn’t all the time we spend creating the plans a bit of a waste?
But what’s the alternative? Giving yourself to the moment. This will not work for everyone, I’ll admit: there are those who will have a hard time giving up the illusion of control, and others who are controlled by their bosses or peers and cannot work or live this way.
Still, it’s something worth considering. Here’s how to do it — starting with the don’ts:
Don’t plan. Planning is an attempt to control the world around us, but it’s a futile attempt. Throw out your plans, for now at least until you’ve decided this method isn’t for you. What do you do instead? More on this below. For now, just stop planning.
Don’t worry about the future. Will something bad happen? Are there things coming up that we must anticipate and prepare for? Of course, if there’s a massive hurricane headed your way, you should probably get ready. But otherwise, just realize that the future is unpredictable, and worrying about it is a waste of time. Focus on right now, and you’ll always be able to handle what comes.
Don’t have expectations. If you expect people to act a certain way, or hope that things will turn out a certain way, you’ll always run into problems. Forget about outcomes for now. Go into things without expectations, and they will always turn out perfectly (if a bit messy).
Don’t get annoyed when others act a certain way. Don’t expect people to act any way other than how they actually act. They are exactly the way they should be — even if that’s selfish or weird or aggressive. Those are their problems. Your problem is figuring out how you should act. I’d also advise you to try to understand others — why do they act the way they do?
Don’t overreact. This is a major problem when people plan and things go wrong — they overreact, and get upset and emotional and blow things out of proportion. Stay calm, because if things “go wrong”, they didn’t actually go wrong — they just happened. More on how to react below.
Don’t try to be proactive. This is a common prescription (being proactive) in management and business literature. And while I think the general idea is fine — do something to prevent problems from recurring rather than just fixing them after they happen — one of the problems this creates is always worrying about what might happen. And creating solutions before there are problems — if there never is a problem, you’ve wasted a lot of time creating the solution, and a lot of energy worrying about the future.
And now for the dos:
Do be open. What would it be like to go into each day without a plan, but just to see what happens? A bit scary, because of the lack of security and control, a bit chaotic perhaps, a bit like we’re a piece of driftwood floating in the middle of a churning sea. But in truth, this is what it’s like to go into each day *with* a plan — it’s just that we normally fool ourselves about the amount of control we have. So start the day with no plan, and be open to what emerges in each moment.
Do act, in the moment. Giving yourself to the moment doesn’t mean being passive and just letting life happen. It means acting, but doing what is best at this moment, what you are excited about right now, what needs to be done, in the present.
Do respond appropriately. Life happens, and we must respond. But instead of overreacting, we can respond calmly and appropriately. We can take the action that’s required, fix the problem, do what’s necessary to prevent it from happening again, and move on without it ruining our day.
Do accept. Accept what happens. It might not be what you considered ideal, but it’s what life has given you, what has resulted from your actions in an unpredicatable world. Accept it, respond, act, move on. Don’t get caught up in things not going your way, but accept that’s what has happened.
Again, this way of living won’t be for everybody. Some don’t have the freedom to live this way, and others just won’t give up control. Some will think this is a passive way of living, but it really isn’t: it’s just a way of living in the moment without being caught up in the future (or the past) so much.
And when we live in the moment, we’re really living life to the fullest. This is the gift of the present.
But it’s an illusion, as I’ve said before.
We cannot control our lives to this degree, no matter how we try. Things will always come up to spoil the best-laid plans, and the more detailed our plans the more of a guarantee that something will go wrong.
And what happens when the plans go wrong? We are stressed out, because things get out of our control and don’t live up to our expectations. This is one of the greatest sources of stress for most people, actually.
Think about how often your days actually go according to plan, exactly — it’s pretty rare, because we have no way of predicting the future. No matter how hard we try. There’s always an email that will disrupt things, a last-minute meeting, cancellations and postponements, emergencies and fires to put out.
So if plans will almost always go wrong, and when they do we get stressed out, isn’t all the time we spend creating the plans a bit of a waste?
But what’s the alternative? Giving yourself to the moment. This will not work for everyone, I’ll admit: there are those who will have a hard time giving up the illusion of control, and others who are controlled by their bosses or peers and cannot work or live this way.
Still, it’s something worth considering. Here’s how to do it — starting with the don’ts:
Don’t plan. Planning is an attempt to control the world around us, but it’s a futile attempt. Throw out your plans, for now at least until you’ve decided this method isn’t for you. What do you do instead? More on this below. For now, just stop planning.
Don’t worry about the future. Will something bad happen? Are there things coming up that we must anticipate and prepare for? Of course, if there’s a massive hurricane headed your way, you should probably get ready. But otherwise, just realize that the future is unpredictable, and worrying about it is a waste of time. Focus on right now, and you’ll always be able to handle what comes.
Don’t have expectations. If you expect people to act a certain way, or hope that things will turn out a certain way, you’ll always run into problems. Forget about outcomes for now. Go into things without expectations, and they will always turn out perfectly (if a bit messy).
Don’t get annoyed when others act a certain way. Don’t expect people to act any way other than how they actually act. They are exactly the way they should be — even if that’s selfish or weird or aggressive. Those are their problems. Your problem is figuring out how you should act. I’d also advise you to try to understand others — why do they act the way they do?
Don’t overreact. This is a major problem when people plan and things go wrong — they overreact, and get upset and emotional and blow things out of proportion. Stay calm, because if things “go wrong”, they didn’t actually go wrong — they just happened. More on how to react below.
Don’t try to be proactive. This is a common prescription (being proactive) in management and business literature. And while I think the general idea is fine — do something to prevent problems from recurring rather than just fixing them after they happen — one of the problems this creates is always worrying about what might happen. And creating solutions before there are problems — if there never is a problem, you’ve wasted a lot of time creating the solution, and a lot of energy worrying about the future.
And now for the dos:
Do be open. What would it be like to go into each day without a plan, but just to see what happens? A bit scary, because of the lack of security and control, a bit chaotic perhaps, a bit like we’re a piece of driftwood floating in the middle of a churning sea. But in truth, this is what it’s like to go into each day *with* a plan — it’s just that we normally fool ourselves about the amount of control we have. So start the day with no plan, and be open to what emerges in each moment.
Do act, in the moment. Giving yourself to the moment doesn’t mean being passive and just letting life happen. It means acting, but doing what is best at this moment, what you are excited about right now, what needs to be done, in the present.
Do respond appropriately. Life happens, and we must respond. But instead of overreacting, we can respond calmly and appropriately. We can take the action that’s required, fix the problem, do what’s necessary to prevent it from happening again, and move on without it ruining our day.
Do accept. Accept what happens. It might not be what you considered ideal, but it’s what life has given you, what has resulted from your actions in an unpredicatable world. Accept it, respond, act, move on. Don’t get caught up in things not going your way, but accept that’s what has happened.
Again, this way of living won’t be for everybody. Some don’t have the freedom to live this way, and others just won’t give up control. Some will think this is a passive way of living, but it really isn’t: it’s just a way of living in the moment without being caught up in the future (or the past) so much.
And when we live in the moment, we’re really living life to the fullest. This is the gift of the present.
Monday, May 26, 2014
SPIRITUAL: LIVING FOR NOW
There is no 'problem' as such in getting excited about the future, but it is a bit like playing a broken record. We're always getting excited about the future. We're always looking for that quick fix to make us happy. I'm writing this on a Saturday night (I have lots of work to do) and I'm already thinking about my parents coming over to my house tomorrow.
Just think about all the quick-fixes for happiness or entertainment we have in our lives that we wait for. This is just a short list but there are many more things that we commonly look forward to:
Sex / Porn
Holidays
Meeting Friends
Fridays
Weddings
Births
There is nothing wrong with any of these, and nothing wrong with the nature of looking forward to things. I'm sure you all agree that it's nice to know enjoyable events are coming up in our schedule. The thing is, once this event we've been looking forward to is upon us, we're already on the lookout for the next one; the next high.
Once the baby is born, we look forward to the Christening or Birthdays
Once it's Friday we can't wait until Saturday to hit the beach
If you look closely at your current life situation, you'll probably be able to relate to the points above. If you're 'lucky,' it's also likely that you have some awesome event that just can't come soon enough. Chances are though – just like the examples above – once it has arrived, your attention won't be there to enjoy it.
I don't think anybody could say this better than Zen Buddhist, Thich Nhat Hanh:
In the United States, I have a close friend named Jim Forest. When I first met him eight years ago, he was working with the Catholic Peace Fellowship. Last winter, Jim came to visit. I usually wash the dishes after we've finished the evening meal, before sitting down and drinking tea with everyone else. One night, Jim asked if he might do the dishes. I said, “Go ahead, but if you wash the dishes you must know the way to wash them.” Jim replied, “Come on, you think I don't know how to wash the dishes?” I answered, “There are two ways to wash the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes to wash the dishes.” Jim was delighted and said, “I choose the second way–to wash the dishes to wash the dishes.” From then on, Jim knew how to wash the dishes. I transferred the “responsibility” to him for an entire week.
If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not “washing the dishes to wash the dishes.” What's more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact, we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can't wash the dishes, the chances are we won't be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.
Just think about all the quick-fixes for happiness or entertainment we have in our lives that we wait for. This is just a short list but there are many more things that we commonly look forward to:
Sex / Porn
Holidays
Meeting Friends
Fridays
Weddings
Births
There is nothing wrong with any of these, and nothing wrong with the nature of looking forward to things. I'm sure you all agree that it's nice to know enjoyable events are coming up in our schedule. The thing is, once this event we've been looking forward to is upon us, we're already on the lookout for the next one; the next high.
Once the baby is born, we look forward to the Christening or Birthdays
Once it's Friday we can't wait until Saturday to hit the beach
If you look closely at your current life situation, you'll probably be able to relate to the points above. If you're 'lucky,' it's also likely that you have some awesome event that just can't come soon enough. Chances are though – just like the examples above – once it has arrived, your attention won't be there to enjoy it.
I don't think anybody could say this better than Zen Buddhist, Thich Nhat Hanh:
In the United States, I have a close friend named Jim Forest. When I first met him eight years ago, he was working with the Catholic Peace Fellowship. Last winter, Jim came to visit. I usually wash the dishes after we've finished the evening meal, before sitting down and drinking tea with everyone else. One night, Jim asked if he might do the dishes. I said, “Go ahead, but if you wash the dishes you must know the way to wash them.” Jim replied, “Come on, you think I don't know how to wash the dishes?” I answered, “There are two ways to wash the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes to wash the dishes.” Jim was delighted and said, “I choose the second way–to wash the dishes to wash the dishes.” From then on, Jim knew how to wash the dishes. I transferred the “responsibility” to him for an entire week.
If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not “washing the dishes to wash the dishes.” What's more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact, we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can't wash the dishes, the chances are we won't be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.
Monday, May 19, 2014
SPIRITUAL: OVERCOME SUFFERING
The stress and frustration you’re experiencing has nothing to do with what’s happening right now in this minute. Really, truly.
AND,
The stress you’re experiencing is nothing more than resistance to what is. That’s it. Yes, your resistance to what is is the sole cause of your discomfort, unhappiness, and flat-out stress.
Pretty interesting, right? Here’s what to do with this.
Your stress isn’t now. Let’s start with the fact that stress doesn’t exist in the present moment. Hold up, I sense your doubt but just hear me out. When you’re stressed and resisting your current situation, what’s the focus of your thoughts? I’ll guarantee it’s not focused on the right-here-now moment. The focus of your thoughts is in the projected and imaginary future state in which your current situation is the same, or worse. The focus of your thoughts is around an idea that this stress, pain, discomfort, and/or struggle will not end for a while and your stress is coming from the anticipation that the end in sight is maybe not that much in sight.
Check it out. Take any stressful situation you have going on — anything that is causing any amount of misery and ask yourself: “Where does the misery exist?”
Is it right here in this exact moment NOW as you’re reading this, or is it when you’re thinking about the imminent journey that this situation may travel, extending the misery and strife?
It’s anxiety from the imagined future state. It’s not right now.
Now get really present, shift your attention to your body and just drop your thoughts for a second. Look around you, what is real right now this very second? Nothing really stressful, right?
Ok, now even if you’re reading this from your phone while giving your kids a bath, both screaming and splashing, the smoke alarm is going off, the dog is barking, the doorbell is ringing with an urgent package that must be signed for, and your homemade soup is boiling over I’d STILL argue that any stress you’re feeling is not caused by the what-is-ness of right now, it’s the resistance to the what-is-ness AND the idea that it’s not over. (Meaning, it’s in your imagined future state.)
Here are 3 REAL ways to change your frame and remove the stress you’re feeling from your current situation:
-Feeling overwhelmed? Stressed? Miserable? Simply acknowledge that you’re resisting what is. Many times this simple acknowledgement will transform your resistance into acceptance. But let’s be clear — I’m not talking about resignation where you’re not going to do anything about your situation. By acknowledging your resistance to what is you can shift from reaction to response (see a recent post for more on that). When you’re responsive you can act. When you’re responsive you are present and powerful. When you’re responsive you’re not stressed.
(Practical example: next time you’re stuck behind a really slow driver and get angry, simply acknowledge that you’re resisting what is and see what happens to your anger.)
-If this doesn’t do it for you, then acknowledge that your stress does not exist now. It’s in your imagined future. Don’t paint a miserable future, tell a different story and get present NOW. Forget the past, drop the future, and simply be with what is right now. It is a moment. And every moment is manageable.
-Bonus step (and definitely my favorite if you want to do more than just find relief): Fast forward to the vision you’d like to be true whenever that future state for you is. Tomorrow? Two months? Three years? See the perfect scenario that would make you happy. Now tell the story backwards and explain to yourself how the current situation was absolutely necessary, absolutely on purpose, to get you to this vision.
Painting backwards is AWESOME because it doesn’t just remove the stress from the current circumstance (i.e. the imagined future state) but it puts the current situation in a light where you automatically shift into gratitude and purposefulness.
AND,
The stress you’re experiencing is nothing more than resistance to what is. That’s it. Yes, your resistance to what is is the sole cause of your discomfort, unhappiness, and flat-out stress.
Pretty interesting, right? Here’s what to do with this.
Your stress isn’t now. Let’s start with the fact that stress doesn’t exist in the present moment. Hold up, I sense your doubt but just hear me out. When you’re stressed and resisting your current situation, what’s the focus of your thoughts? I’ll guarantee it’s not focused on the right-here-now moment. The focus of your thoughts is in the projected and imaginary future state in which your current situation is the same, or worse. The focus of your thoughts is around an idea that this stress, pain, discomfort, and/or struggle will not end for a while and your stress is coming from the anticipation that the end in sight is maybe not that much in sight.
Check it out. Take any stressful situation you have going on — anything that is causing any amount of misery and ask yourself: “Where does the misery exist?”
Is it right here in this exact moment NOW as you’re reading this, or is it when you’re thinking about the imminent journey that this situation may travel, extending the misery and strife?
It’s anxiety from the imagined future state. It’s not right now.
Now get really present, shift your attention to your body and just drop your thoughts for a second. Look around you, what is real right now this very second? Nothing really stressful, right?
Ok, now even if you’re reading this from your phone while giving your kids a bath, both screaming and splashing, the smoke alarm is going off, the dog is barking, the doorbell is ringing with an urgent package that must be signed for, and your homemade soup is boiling over I’d STILL argue that any stress you’re feeling is not caused by the what-is-ness of right now, it’s the resistance to the what-is-ness AND the idea that it’s not over. (Meaning, it’s in your imagined future state.)
Here are 3 REAL ways to change your frame and remove the stress you’re feeling from your current situation:
-Feeling overwhelmed? Stressed? Miserable? Simply acknowledge that you’re resisting what is. Many times this simple acknowledgement will transform your resistance into acceptance. But let’s be clear — I’m not talking about resignation where you’re not going to do anything about your situation. By acknowledging your resistance to what is you can shift from reaction to response (see a recent post for more on that). When you’re responsive you can act. When you’re responsive you are present and powerful. When you’re responsive you’re not stressed.
(Practical example: next time you’re stuck behind a really slow driver and get angry, simply acknowledge that you’re resisting what is and see what happens to your anger.)
-If this doesn’t do it for you, then acknowledge that your stress does not exist now. It’s in your imagined future. Don’t paint a miserable future, tell a different story and get present NOW. Forget the past, drop the future, and simply be with what is right now. It is a moment. And every moment is manageable.
-Bonus step (and definitely my favorite if you want to do more than just find relief): Fast forward to the vision you’d like to be true whenever that future state for you is. Tomorrow? Two months? Three years? See the perfect scenario that would make you happy. Now tell the story backwards and explain to yourself how the current situation was absolutely necessary, absolutely on purpose, to get you to this vision.
Painting backwards is AWESOME because it doesn’t just remove the stress from the current circumstance (i.e. the imagined future state) but it puts the current situation in a light where you automatically shift into gratitude and purposefulness.
Sunday, May 11, 2014
SPIRITUAL: THE SIGNS OF LIFE
What if life was one big metaphor? How would you know? Would you have a hard time believing that? But if your subconscious understood symbolism and metaphors more easier than your conscious, wouldn’t your life make more sense? Maybe you don’t believe in metaphors, or maybe you do believe them, but in small doses.
I must confess when I heard that life was a metaphor, I was just as skeptical as you are. Of course, we can only rely on our eyes. Our eyes are rather simple tools. They are a basic converter, and that’s it. They convert light photons into a nerve impulse that our brain translates into an image. And guess what part of our conscious helps that? That’s right, our subconscious.
Of course, if you solely believed what your eyes are saying to you, you could miss some of natures tricks of the trade. For example, you can’t see in a dream, yet some people claim to have divine insight or premonitions. You can’t see your intuition, yet how many of you haven’t had Déjà vu, or some other psychic experience. And talking of psychics, what if there was a way to develop your own psychic ability, and as a result peer into the future moment of now.
Also, it is scientifically proven that our eyes only see a tiny minute fraction of the total light spectrum. It has been compared to seeing just a grain of sand, whereas the total light spectrum is a tall skyscraper.
So, as you can see (or not;-) your eyes don’t give you a full view of the world in front of you. They can’t. They are just basic converters, and that’s it. Sure, we need them, but we also need our 6th sense, our intuitive-self just as well as our emotions as other tools to direct and experience our life.
And we also know that our subconscious understands symbols more better than our conscious does. Don’t believe me, think about dream interpretations There is a whole niche on interpreting what dream means, and this can often help someone explain their life and highlight areas for improvement. Dreams are most commonly understood to be nothing more than the subconscious filling away memories and experiences of the day, like a filing cabinet. And while some of this is true, there are ways you can understand your life more by merely writing down what happens in your dreams.
Keeping a dream journal is a great way to know yourself more intimately. How often have you had a striking dream, tried to trivialize it saying it was just a dream, only to look at a dream dictionary and realize it may contain a truth. Some dreams have even been responsible for people to make discoveries and help the evolution of humanity.
I used to have a frequent dream where I would be chased by people in authority figures. It would start of ok, but then I would sense a threat, and would need to run quick. And of course, I would be tired (like in waking life) so I would mentally have to struggle running up hills in going though corridors in buildings. It was so mentally exhausting.
In my waking life, I wouldn’t confront people with an emotional issue (still have a hard time doing it to this day). Instead, I would choose the passive, ‘let it go over my head’ approach, and all because I didn’t like verbal fighting. The only problem about not speaking your truth, is that you ultimately repress those feelings which can turn into rage (I went though a period where I would be angry for a melodrama created in my mind, which never took place. The punch bag would come in handy then). Thankfully, I didn’t live with anybody, and kept it all bottled inside, while trying to smile and act of sweet and light on the outside…not a great combination!
So dreams are a surefire metaphorical way to understand problems and solutions in your waking life. But your subconscious works during the daytime as well as the nighttime, so wouldn’t it make sense that everything around you is also a metaphor of some description?
Now anybody who has had an out-of-body experience will be the first to tell you several things: Firstly, the objects, people, and situations are an aspect of mind. That is to say, all subconsciously generated. Secondly, you are in the inner dimension of the multi-verse and therefore not in the space-time continuum. As a result, your thoughts manifest almost instantly. This means you have to be really controlled in what you think, say and do (not a big issue for people who practice mindfulness meditation, they can simply be in the, ‘now’ which helps mental control).
So, you are floating around being directed by your soul, and bumping into places and people and events, which are nothing more than just figments of your subconscious imagination. Oh, the non-physical people are real, don’t you worry, but they are still aspects of your subconscious. This though begs the question, ‘If the only difference is time, wouldn’t the same be true in your normal waking life as well?’
This is where we come full circle and back to the age old question, of whether life is one big metaphor. Of course, if you believe in the illusion of separatism, dreams probably would hold little significance for you and as a result, you probably wouldn’t care about the wonders of life.
If on the other hand, you are on the spiritual path and believe that we are all one, that we are one consciousness, and that what you see in one person is what you ultimately recognize in yourself, your dreams and your life would make perfect sense.
I was pondering this very question while re-listening to Conversations with God Book 2 (By Neale Donald Walsch). They were talking about how time wasn’t really linear, but more like a spindle. It began to get me thinking on how we really should be viewing life and came to a few metaphors.
Metaphor 1- Trees are like time.
They are everywhere, aren’t they (unless you live in a desert!). Yet metaphorically, trees could be likened to time…or lack there of. There is no such thing as time. The hands on your clock is nothing but that, a hand, measuring a perceived field. All there is are, ‘now moments’. Even most scientists say that what we have is a space-time continuum.
So when you look at a tree, you could say that it is a reminder that time is more like a spindle, allowing you to make your next choice into a reality (a reminder, if you will, of choosing your thoughts and the images in your imagination more carefully). If you see a tree as a spindle of a, ‘now’ moment, and all of the leaves/branches as possible, ‘choices’ in this, ‘now’ moment, you could arguably say that a tree is a great metaphor on the moment of now, and the quantum field of infinite possibilities. Arguably…
Metaphor 2 – Clouds are like your thoughts.
The next metaphor I got was when I read Ken Elliott’s, ‘Manifesting 123′. In the book, the author describes how he is told that your thoughts begin to form as bits of smoke, before added concentration allows that smoke to form into a reality.
I thought that the sky beautifully demonstrates this. How does a cloud form, through water vapor. What happens when there is a lot of vapor, it gets heavier, condenses and physical droplets begins to develop. Then what…it rains! Just like what happens when you think about thoughts. They start of as bits of smoke, while added focus and thought increases the smoke in the non-physical subconscious, before finally forming into a 3D hologram, forming into physical reality.
Having had both lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences, I can personally testify that your thoughts do form on the other side really quickly. I once had an obe when I was slightly above my body. I then tried to command the power of the multi-verse to enable me to try to self heal. I saw a wisp of whitish color start forming into a small dot, quite white in the center, above my body. But due probably to the excitement of having an obe, I quickly stopped this, and went on to have other adventures.
Needless to say, when I look into the sky, I am often reminded on how thoughts form, and how they manifest into physicality. Food for thought (no pun intended…well I tiny bit maybe;-)
Metaphor 3 – The sun is like your soul…non-judgmental and powerful.
I’ve had this metaphor in my mind for some time. Essentially, you could argue that the sun is like your soul…always shining in its unconditional love and infinite power and creativity. The clouds that cover it, arguably could be seen as your negative thoughts that stop the light from shining (or even a better one, thoughts itself, stopping you be in the, ‘now’. Two metaphors for the price of one). While it may somehow contradict the above metaphor on thoughts, it’s still a great reminder that when you look near the sun (obviously don’t look into it due to health and safety!) you are reminded to be unconditional, forgiving,nimaginative and creative.
When you think about it, the sun gives power to everything on the planet. It is always shining, come rain or wind, and it is extremely warm. Could you not think of a great way to think about your soul?
Metaphor 4- People are your inner personalities.
This is one that I’m still sketchy about, yet it does (to some degree) make perfect sense. Ok, coming from the point of view that we are all one, and if you’ve read that by seeing people as extensions of yourself, you can open up your heart chakra and raise your inner consciousness; see people as parts of your own inner personality shouldn’t be too far a stretch.
They do say, that what you see in somebody, you have in yourself. Let me explain…next time you see yourself being angry at somebody else, due to a perceived character flaw, ask yourself the ultimate question: Am I reacting because I see this in myself? This of course takes into account that you are honest, and that you can go deeply within…traits that not everybody can do. If you learn to practice this exercise, you’ll discover (to your amazement) that you can discover more about yourself by how you criticize others.
When I’ve noticed this, I’ve realized that I can be quite the narcissist, and also arrogant. Of course over time, I’ve tried to heal those aspects of myself, and allowed myself to try to accept other peoples opinions and points of view. This hasn’t been easy, I grew up in a cynical atmosphere, it began to dawn on me that nobody was going to listen, so I would just shut up, listen, and do as I was told. These days, I only try and speak when I am spoken to. I try not to force my opinions down other peoples throats (I let other people do that;-). Only when somebody actually speaks to me directly do I then speak. I’m not perfect at this, but I’m getting slowly better.
Of course, you could look at this list and say that I have it all wrong. And you would be absolutely correct in that reaction. Why? Because whatever happens, you will always be led to your truth, and; you’ve been led back to your own truth. And that is the key, to finding out your own inner personal truth, and then trying to live it.
Because at the end of the day, what is the point in life otherwise?
I must confess when I heard that life was a metaphor, I was just as skeptical as you are. Of course, we can only rely on our eyes. Our eyes are rather simple tools. They are a basic converter, and that’s it. They convert light photons into a nerve impulse that our brain translates into an image. And guess what part of our conscious helps that? That’s right, our subconscious.
Of course, if you solely believed what your eyes are saying to you, you could miss some of natures tricks of the trade. For example, you can’t see in a dream, yet some people claim to have divine insight or premonitions. You can’t see your intuition, yet how many of you haven’t had Déjà vu, or some other psychic experience. And talking of psychics, what if there was a way to develop your own psychic ability, and as a result peer into the future moment of now.
Also, it is scientifically proven that our eyes only see a tiny minute fraction of the total light spectrum. It has been compared to seeing just a grain of sand, whereas the total light spectrum is a tall skyscraper.
So, as you can see (or not;-) your eyes don’t give you a full view of the world in front of you. They can’t. They are just basic converters, and that’s it. Sure, we need them, but we also need our 6th sense, our intuitive-self just as well as our emotions as other tools to direct and experience our life.
And we also know that our subconscious understands symbols more better than our conscious does. Don’t believe me, think about dream interpretations There is a whole niche on interpreting what dream means, and this can often help someone explain their life and highlight areas for improvement. Dreams are most commonly understood to be nothing more than the subconscious filling away memories and experiences of the day, like a filing cabinet. And while some of this is true, there are ways you can understand your life more by merely writing down what happens in your dreams.
Keeping a dream journal is a great way to know yourself more intimately. How often have you had a striking dream, tried to trivialize it saying it was just a dream, only to look at a dream dictionary and realize it may contain a truth. Some dreams have even been responsible for people to make discoveries and help the evolution of humanity.
I used to have a frequent dream where I would be chased by people in authority figures. It would start of ok, but then I would sense a threat, and would need to run quick. And of course, I would be tired (like in waking life) so I would mentally have to struggle running up hills in going though corridors in buildings. It was so mentally exhausting.
In my waking life, I wouldn’t confront people with an emotional issue (still have a hard time doing it to this day). Instead, I would choose the passive, ‘let it go over my head’ approach, and all because I didn’t like verbal fighting. The only problem about not speaking your truth, is that you ultimately repress those feelings which can turn into rage (I went though a period where I would be angry for a melodrama created in my mind, which never took place. The punch bag would come in handy then). Thankfully, I didn’t live with anybody, and kept it all bottled inside, while trying to smile and act of sweet and light on the outside…not a great combination!
So dreams are a surefire metaphorical way to understand problems and solutions in your waking life. But your subconscious works during the daytime as well as the nighttime, so wouldn’t it make sense that everything around you is also a metaphor of some description?
Now anybody who has had an out-of-body experience will be the first to tell you several things: Firstly, the objects, people, and situations are an aspect of mind. That is to say, all subconsciously generated. Secondly, you are in the inner dimension of the multi-verse and therefore not in the space-time continuum. As a result, your thoughts manifest almost instantly. This means you have to be really controlled in what you think, say and do (not a big issue for people who practice mindfulness meditation, they can simply be in the, ‘now’ which helps mental control).
So, you are floating around being directed by your soul, and bumping into places and people and events, which are nothing more than just figments of your subconscious imagination. Oh, the non-physical people are real, don’t you worry, but they are still aspects of your subconscious. This though begs the question, ‘If the only difference is time, wouldn’t the same be true in your normal waking life as well?’
This is where we come full circle and back to the age old question, of whether life is one big metaphor. Of course, if you believe in the illusion of separatism, dreams probably would hold little significance for you and as a result, you probably wouldn’t care about the wonders of life.
If on the other hand, you are on the spiritual path and believe that we are all one, that we are one consciousness, and that what you see in one person is what you ultimately recognize in yourself, your dreams and your life would make perfect sense.
I was pondering this very question while re-listening to Conversations with God Book 2 (By Neale Donald Walsch). They were talking about how time wasn’t really linear, but more like a spindle. It began to get me thinking on how we really should be viewing life and came to a few metaphors.
Metaphor 1- Trees are like time.
They are everywhere, aren’t they (unless you live in a desert!). Yet metaphorically, trees could be likened to time…or lack there of. There is no such thing as time. The hands on your clock is nothing but that, a hand, measuring a perceived field. All there is are, ‘now moments’. Even most scientists say that what we have is a space-time continuum.
So when you look at a tree, you could say that it is a reminder that time is more like a spindle, allowing you to make your next choice into a reality (a reminder, if you will, of choosing your thoughts and the images in your imagination more carefully). If you see a tree as a spindle of a, ‘now’ moment, and all of the leaves/branches as possible, ‘choices’ in this, ‘now’ moment, you could arguably say that a tree is a great metaphor on the moment of now, and the quantum field of infinite possibilities. Arguably…
Metaphor 2 – Clouds are like your thoughts.
The next metaphor I got was when I read Ken Elliott’s, ‘Manifesting 123′. In the book, the author describes how he is told that your thoughts begin to form as bits of smoke, before added concentration allows that smoke to form into a reality.
I thought that the sky beautifully demonstrates this. How does a cloud form, through water vapor. What happens when there is a lot of vapor, it gets heavier, condenses and physical droplets begins to develop. Then what…it rains! Just like what happens when you think about thoughts. They start of as bits of smoke, while added focus and thought increases the smoke in the non-physical subconscious, before finally forming into a 3D hologram, forming into physical reality.
Having had both lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences, I can personally testify that your thoughts do form on the other side really quickly. I once had an obe when I was slightly above my body. I then tried to command the power of the multi-verse to enable me to try to self heal. I saw a wisp of whitish color start forming into a small dot, quite white in the center, above my body. But due probably to the excitement of having an obe, I quickly stopped this, and went on to have other adventures.
Needless to say, when I look into the sky, I am often reminded on how thoughts form, and how they manifest into physicality. Food for thought (no pun intended…well I tiny bit maybe;-)
Metaphor 3 – The sun is like your soul…non-judgmental and powerful.
I’ve had this metaphor in my mind for some time. Essentially, you could argue that the sun is like your soul…always shining in its unconditional love and infinite power and creativity. The clouds that cover it, arguably could be seen as your negative thoughts that stop the light from shining (or even a better one, thoughts itself, stopping you be in the, ‘now’. Two metaphors for the price of one). While it may somehow contradict the above metaphor on thoughts, it’s still a great reminder that when you look near the sun (obviously don’t look into it due to health and safety!) you are reminded to be unconditional, forgiving,nimaginative and creative.
When you think about it, the sun gives power to everything on the planet. It is always shining, come rain or wind, and it is extremely warm. Could you not think of a great way to think about your soul?
Metaphor 4- People are your inner personalities.
This is one that I’m still sketchy about, yet it does (to some degree) make perfect sense. Ok, coming from the point of view that we are all one, and if you’ve read that by seeing people as extensions of yourself, you can open up your heart chakra and raise your inner consciousness; see people as parts of your own inner personality shouldn’t be too far a stretch.
They do say, that what you see in somebody, you have in yourself. Let me explain…next time you see yourself being angry at somebody else, due to a perceived character flaw, ask yourself the ultimate question: Am I reacting because I see this in myself? This of course takes into account that you are honest, and that you can go deeply within…traits that not everybody can do. If you learn to practice this exercise, you’ll discover (to your amazement) that you can discover more about yourself by how you criticize others.
When I’ve noticed this, I’ve realized that I can be quite the narcissist, and also arrogant. Of course over time, I’ve tried to heal those aspects of myself, and allowed myself to try to accept other peoples opinions and points of view. This hasn’t been easy, I grew up in a cynical atmosphere, it began to dawn on me that nobody was going to listen, so I would just shut up, listen, and do as I was told. These days, I only try and speak when I am spoken to. I try not to force my opinions down other peoples throats (I let other people do that;-). Only when somebody actually speaks to me directly do I then speak. I’m not perfect at this, but I’m getting slowly better.
Of course, you could look at this list and say that I have it all wrong. And you would be absolutely correct in that reaction. Why? Because whatever happens, you will always be led to your truth, and; you’ve been led back to your own truth. And that is the key, to finding out your own inner personal truth, and then trying to live it.
Because at the end of the day, what is the point in life otherwise?
Sunday, May 4, 2014
SPIRITUAL/ THOUGHT: HOW TO TURN SELF HATRED TO SELF LOVE
People filled with self-loathing typically imagine they dislike every part of themselves, but this is rarely, if ever, true. More commonly, if asked what specific parts of themselves they dislike, they're able to provide specific answers: their physical appearance, their inability to excel academically or at a job, or maybe their inability to accomplish their dreams. Yet when presented, for example, a scenario in which they come upon a child trapped under a car at the scene of an accident, that they recoil in horror and would want urgently to do something to help rarely causes them to credit themselves for the humanity such a reaction indicates.
It's life's secret sauce—what makes you comfortable in your own skin and acts as a powerful attractant to others. And it's possible to give it a boost.
Why do self-loathers so readily overlook the good parts of themselves? The answer in most cases turns out to relate not to the fact that they have negative qualities but to the disproportionate weight they lend them. People who dislike themselves may acknowledge they have positive attributes but any emotional impact they have simply gets blotted out.Which makes learning to like oneself no easy task.
The circumstances that initially lead people to dislike themselves do so by triggering a thought process of self-loathing that continues long after the circumstances that set it in motion have resolved, a thought process that continues to gain momentum the longer it remains unchallenged, much like a boulder picks up speed rolling down a mountain as long as nothing gets in its way. For example, your parents may have failed to praise you or support your accomplishments in school when you were young—perhaps even largely ignored you—which led you to conclude they didn't care about you, which then led you to conclude you're not worth caring about. It's this last idea, not the memory of your parents ignoring you, that gathers the power within your life to make you loathe yourself if not checked by adult reasoning early on. Once a narrative of worthlessness embeds itself in one's mind, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to disbelieve it, especially when one can find evidence that it represents a true account.
But a narrative is just that: a story we tell ourselves. It may very well contain elements of truth—that we are unattractive, that we do fail a lot of the time, or that our parents didn't find us all that lovable—but to proceed from facts such as these to the conclusion that we're deserving only of our own derision constitutes a significant thought error.
We ground our self-esteem in things about ourselves we perceive as unique: typically our looks, our skills, or our accomplishments.But we only need to experience the loss of any one of these supportive elements to recognize the danger of relying on them to create our self-esteem. Looks, as we all know, fade. Unwanted weight is often gained. Illness sometimes strikes, preventing us from running as fast, concentrating as hard, or thinking as clearly as we once did. Past accomplishments lose their ability to sustain us the farther into the past we have to look for them.
I'm not arguing that basing our self-esteem on our positive qualities is wrong. But we should aim to base it on positive qualities that require no comparison to the qualities of others for us to value them. We must awaken to the essential goodness— if we want to like ourselves we have to earn our own respect. Luckily, doing this doesn't require that we become people of extraordinary physical attractiveness or accomplishment. It only requires we become people of extraordinary character—something anyone can do.
A simple thought experiment supports this notion: think right now of your favorite person and ask yourself, what is it about them that attracts you the most? Odds are it isn't their physical appearance or their accomplishments but rather their magnanimous spirit; the way they treat others. This is the key quality that makes people likable, even to themselves.
Treating others well, it turns out, is the fastest path to a healthy self-esteem. If you dislike yourself, stop focusing on your negative qualities. We all have negative qualities. There's nothing special about your negativity, I promise you. Focus instead on caring for others. Because the more you care about others, I guarantee the more in turn you'll be able to care about yourself.
It's life's secret sauce—what makes you comfortable in your own skin and acts as a powerful attractant to others. And it's possible to give it a boost.
Why do self-loathers so readily overlook the good parts of themselves? The answer in most cases turns out to relate not to the fact that they have negative qualities but to the disproportionate weight they lend them. People who dislike themselves may acknowledge they have positive attributes but any emotional impact they have simply gets blotted out.Which makes learning to like oneself no easy task.
The circumstances that initially lead people to dislike themselves do so by triggering a thought process of self-loathing that continues long after the circumstances that set it in motion have resolved, a thought process that continues to gain momentum the longer it remains unchallenged, much like a boulder picks up speed rolling down a mountain as long as nothing gets in its way. For example, your parents may have failed to praise you or support your accomplishments in school when you were young—perhaps even largely ignored you—which led you to conclude they didn't care about you, which then led you to conclude you're not worth caring about. It's this last idea, not the memory of your parents ignoring you, that gathers the power within your life to make you loathe yourself if not checked by adult reasoning early on. Once a narrative of worthlessness embeds itself in one's mind, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to disbelieve it, especially when one can find evidence that it represents a true account.
But a narrative is just that: a story we tell ourselves. It may very well contain elements of truth—that we are unattractive, that we do fail a lot of the time, or that our parents didn't find us all that lovable—but to proceed from facts such as these to the conclusion that we're deserving only of our own derision constitutes a significant thought error.
We ground our self-esteem in things about ourselves we perceive as unique: typically our looks, our skills, or our accomplishments.But we only need to experience the loss of any one of these supportive elements to recognize the danger of relying on them to create our self-esteem. Looks, as we all know, fade. Unwanted weight is often gained. Illness sometimes strikes, preventing us from running as fast, concentrating as hard, or thinking as clearly as we once did. Past accomplishments lose their ability to sustain us the farther into the past we have to look for them.
I'm not arguing that basing our self-esteem on our positive qualities is wrong. But we should aim to base it on positive qualities that require no comparison to the qualities of others for us to value them. We must awaken to the essential goodness— if we want to like ourselves we have to earn our own respect. Luckily, doing this doesn't require that we become people of extraordinary physical attractiveness or accomplishment. It only requires we become people of extraordinary character—something anyone can do.
A simple thought experiment supports this notion: think right now of your favorite person and ask yourself, what is it about them that attracts you the most? Odds are it isn't their physical appearance or their accomplishments but rather their magnanimous spirit; the way they treat others. This is the key quality that makes people likable, even to themselves.
Treating others well, it turns out, is the fastest path to a healthy self-esteem. If you dislike yourself, stop focusing on your negative qualities. We all have negative qualities. There's nothing special about your negativity, I promise you. Focus instead on caring for others. Because the more you care about others, I guarantee the more in turn you'll be able to care about yourself.
Saturday, May 3, 2014
SPIRITUAL: YOU ARE NOT YOUR THOUGHTS
Your THOUGHTS are never the real YOU. Why? Because thoughts come and go, but you are always present. YOU are aware of thoughts, thoughts are not aware of youThoughts report to you, you don’t report to thoughts.
This is why believing our thoughts leads to suffering; because we are putting our attention/identity on a temporary and fleeting mental appearance. Because thoughts are inherently unstable, we feel unstable when we identify with them.
So what’s the alternative? Here it is: Stay home. Don’t leave your center. Don’t move. Be still. Let your attention merge into the silence. Zero point. Note that since you already are pure Consciousness, there can be no talk of becoming it. And since you already are it, there can be no talk of going somewhere to get it.
Simply put, thoughts need YOU to exist, but you do not need them. Therefore in order for them to become a full blown belief, they need your cooperation. Or more specifically, your energy. Why? Because they get the energy to become a belief from the only power source available: your ATTENTION! Stop giving your thoughts power (via your attention/interest) and what happens? Like a fan that is unplugged, the blades start to slow down and will eventually stop.
The thing is you can’t fake it. If you are still believing your thoughts, and thus suffering, it’s because you are interested in them at some level. Remember, we have been believing them for decades, so be patient with yourself; it can take a while for thoughts to lose their allure, their stickiness.
Why is it so hard to detach from our thoughts? Because we mistake them for who/what we are. It is how a parasite exists in nature. It tricks the host into thinking that it is part of itself, and so no alarm bells go off. If you think something is you than you simply accept it and the matter is closed.
But what we forget is that thoughts are made of language. And language must be learned—and learning takes time. And so, for the first few months of your existence, you had no awareness of thoughts and yet you existed perfectly well! This can mean only one thing: You are NOT your Thoughts!
This is why believing our thoughts leads to suffering; because we are putting our attention/identity on a temporary and fleeting mental appearance. Because thoughts are inherently unstable, we feel unstable when we identify with them.
So what’s the alternative? Here it is: Stay home. Don’t leave your center. Don’t move. Be still. Let your attention merge into the silence. Zero point. Note that since you already are pure Consciousness, there can be no talk of becoming it. And since you already are it, there can be no talk of going somewhere to get it.
Simply put, thoughts need YOU to exist, but you do not need them. Therefore in order for them to become a full blown belief, they need your cooperation. Or more specifically, your energy. Why? Because they get the energy to become a belief from the only power source available: your ATTENTION! Stop giving your thoughts power (via your attention/interest) and what happens? Like a fan that is unplugged, the blades start to slow down and will eventually stop.
The thing is you can’t fake it. If you are still believing your thoughts, and thus suffering, it’s because you are interested in them at some level. Remember, we have been believing them for decades, so be patient with yourself; it can take a while for thoughts to lose their allure, their stickiness.
Why is it so hard to detach from our thoughts? Because we mistake them for who/what we are. It is how a parasite exists in nature. It tricks the host into thinking that it is part of itself, and so no alarm bells go off. If you think something is you than you simply accept it and the matter is closed.
But what we forget is that thoughts are made of language. And language must be learned—and learning takes time. And so, for the first few months of your existence, you had no awareness of thoughts and yet you existed perfectly well! This can mean only one thing: You are NOT your Thoughts!
Sunday, April 27, 2014
SPIRTUAL/THOUGHT: HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH PEOPLE WHO GET UNDER YOUR SKIN
Resist the urge to be defensive. Understand very clearly that you cannot beat these kinds of people; they’re called “impossible” for a reason. In their minds, you are the source of all wrongdoing, and nothing you can say is going to make them consider your side of the story. Your opinion is of no consequence, because you are already guilty, no matter what.
Do not call out the other person. Bluntly stating the problem will not improve your relationship with someone who is impossible. Instead of reaching a reconciliation, he or she will likely just become more difficult. Recognize that you can’t handle this like you would any other personal conflict — it’s a special situation.
In some ways, they need to be treated like children. Give up all hope of engaging these folks in any kind of reasonable conversation. It will never happen, at least with you. Remember what happened in the course of the last fifty times you tried to have a civilized discussion about the status of your relationship with this person. Chances are, every such attempt ended in you being blamed for everything. Decide now to quit banging your head against a brick wall.
Accept the situation. Impossible people exist; there isn’t a thing you can do about it. The first step is all about facing reality: if you think you might be dealing with an impossible person, you’re probably right. When in doubt, proceed as instructed below. The headaches you save will be your own.
Remember to “detach, disassociate and diffuse.“ When you’re in the middle of a conflict with an impossible person, use this strategy:
Detach: Staying calm in the heat of the moment is paramount to your personal preservation. Spitting angry words, reacting with extreme emotions such as crying, will only stimulate them to do more of the difficult behavior.
Disassociate: Remove yourself from the situation and treat it with indifference. Do not, under any circumstances bad talk to their face or to anyone else because then you are sinking down to their level. Add something positive by redirection such as by focusing on something, anything, positive in the situation or in the conversation. Whatever you do just stay calm!
Diffuse: It can help to realize that the side of a conversation that contains the most truth will always win out, and it’s best to “name the game” that an impossible person is playing, usually by asking them or the group a question that starts “Why…,” (rephrasing their “impossible” position to illuminate the consequences). You will move the conversation to a higher level, and the group, or even just the impossible individual, in a one-on-one, will respond to this “higher truth,” although the individual will usually respond by (more) obfuscating.
Understand that it’s not you, it’s them. This can be surprisingly difficult, considering that impossible people have complete mastery of shifting the blame. Chances are, the more often they blame you, the more they themselves are actually at fault.
Keep in mind that this is not to be used as a way to blame them. Blaming is what impossible people do, and they do it well. Instead, you are only facing the facts, for your own sake.
That being said, here’s a simple way to tell: if you accept responsibility for your own faults and resolve to improve yourself, it’s probably not you. Remember, impossible people “can do no wrong.”
Prepare for projection. Understand that you are going to be accused of much (or all) of this behavior yourself. If your impossible person gets a look at this text, to them it will look like a page about you. Prepare yourself for the fact that the impossible person’s flaws and failings will always be attributed to you.
Remember, in their minds, you are at fault for everything! They will have an endless supply of arguments to support this, and if you make the mistake of encouraging them, they will be more than happy to tell you why you are the impossible person, and how ironic it is that you are under the mistaken impression that it is them.
Guard against anger. If it helps, consider the fact that your anger is actually aprecious gift to the impossible person. Anything you do or say while angry will be used against you over and over again. Impossible people tend to have amazing memories, and they will not hesitate to use a nearly endless laundry list of complaints from the past against you. Five years from now, you could be hearing about the angry remark you made today (which you didn’t even mean in the first place). Impossible people will seize anything that provides them the opportunity to lay blame like it was gold.
Long-Term Management
Be a manager. Until it is over, your task in the relationship is to manage the impossible person, so that he or she deals less damage to you.
As a manager, your best resources are silence (it really is golden in some cases such as this), humoring the other, and abandoning all hope of “fixing” the impossible person. Impossible people do not listen to reason. They can’t (and even if they could, they wouldn’t).
Recognize that you can’t convince them that they have any responsibility for the problems between you. They don’t recognize (or if they did, wouldn’t try to improve) their flaws for a very logical reason; they don’t have any flaws. You must understand and manage this mindset without casting blame and without giving in to anger. It’s far easier said than done, and you will slip from time to time, but as time goes on, you’ll become a better manager.
Don’t get cornered. Avoid one-on-ones with this type of person, actively; in other words, when you see them coming to corner you, suggest, and then demand that at least a third party be brought in. This will often thwart the impossible person’s plans, and a typical response from them will be to unilaterally decide that “we don’t need anyone else.” You are perfectly free to claim your need for a third party to help your understanding, and insist upon it. Bullies never stand up to a crowd.
Consider that it might be a question of compatibility. Sometimes, a person who gets along with everybody else quite well is an impossible person for you personally. Most relationships between people contain many shades of gray, but some people simply mix as well as oil and water.
It is common to hear your impossible person proclaim “Everyone else likes me.” This is an attempt to shift the blame to you, so don’t buy it. It doesn’t matter how this person interacts with others. The fact is, the way the two of you interact together is terrible. Remember that blame never changes the facts.
Prepare to part ways. Understand that eventually, you’ll have to create a separation between yourself and an impossible person. Whether they are a friend, a family member, a parent, even a spouse, the time to leave will eventually manifest. Maintaining a relationship with an impossible person is, literally, impossible.
If you can’t (or won’t) make a physical departure immediately, make a mental one. In your mind, you’ve already left the relationship. The only thing left to do is wait for physical reality to reflect that fact.
If this person is a spouse, and you plan to stay with them, try to recognize the places you cannot tread (i.e. The subjects that make the person impossible). Avoid, as completely as possible, bringing up these subjects. Keep to yourself. Find a truly wonderful hobby, and focus on it. If you are religious, focus on your religion. Read about Narcissistic Personality Disorder — this is a definite possibility. Even if it seems to you that they do not have NPD, read the articles about how to deal with them, because following the advice in the articles you find may help you.
Protect your self-esteem. If you have regular dealings with someone who tries to portray you as the source of all evil, you need to take active steps to maintain a positive self-image. Focus on the people who validate you. Realize that this person is hurting you on purpose to improve his or her self-image. When he or she comes out with a statement that is designed to hurt you, realize this; realize why he saying that — to get people to tell him that he’s awesome. You are bigger and better than this person if you’re not lowering yourself to this level.
Remind yourself that this person’s opinion is not necessarily the truth. Understand that oftentimes, impossible people are particularly “fact-challenged.”
If the attacks have little basis in raw fact, dismiss them. You can’t possibly be as bad as this person would like you to believe you are. Do not defend yourself out loud, however. It will only provoke the impossible person into another tirade.
Avoid picking up impossible traits. If you aren’t careful, you could find yourself adopting much of the offender’s own behavior, even if you aren’t voluntarily trying. Issue blame entirely by understanding that this is just the way the other person is. These things define the impossible person’s actions, and nothing you do can change any part of their past.
Be the opposite of them: a possible person. Live as an example of tolerance, patience, humility, and kindness.
We are all influenced by the people in our environment — they don’t have to be perfect all the time and neither do you. Give respect because you are human. If you don’t receive respect, that’s -sadly- their problem. Give understanding, and you get understanding. Ultimately this sort of behavior is probably the only thing that might get through to them. They may not change in everything, but you can safely expect a change.
Protect your privacy. Impossible people will use any information on your personal life however small as a trump card against you. They can spin stories about you to other people (especially those close to you both) on a simple comment you made over lunch. Since they are specialists in manipulation, they are very good at making you talk.
Impossible people are good at seeming normal, and unless you are very convinced of who you are and where you stand in relation to the slight madness of this person, there will be times where you think “Hey, she’s not so bad after all. I guess I could tell her what I am going through these days….” Big mistake! It will come back to you when you least expect it, in the most dirty and manipulative way. Things shared in confidence late night at the office between the two of you can be used in an ice cold analysis in front of the whole company in a moment where the impossible person needs to get on top of you. He/she will spare no information to prove to others how well they know you, and such know what the best way to “handle” you is.
TIPS
When you make your escape from the impossible person stay away. Don’t ever go back once you break away — no matter how much you love them or they say they’ve changed.
When the impossible person is abusing or slandering you, other people will start to show sympathy towards you. You don’t need to do anything to make them look bad; she/he just digs his/her grave with no help from you. If s/he is angering you, others are also likely to be annoyed.
Be detached from anything they say whether it’s a compliment or criticism. If you give them power to build you up, then you also give them power to knock you down. Learn to develop a sense of self worth from within
Do not call out the other person. Bluntly stating the problem will not improve your relationship with someone who is impossible. Instead of reaching a reconciliation, he or she will likely just become more difficult. Recognize that you can’t handle this like you would any other personal conflict — it’s a special situation.
In some ways, they need to be treated like children. Give up all hope of engaging these folks in any kind of reasonable conversation. It will never happen, at least with you. Remember what happened in the course of the last fifty times you tried to have a civilized discussion about the status of your relationship with this person. Chances are, every such attempt ended in you being blamed for everything. Decide now to quit banging your head against a brick wall.
Accept the situation. Impossible people exist; there isn’t a thing you can do about it. The first step is all about facing reality: if you think you might be dealing with an impossible person, you’re probably right. When in doubt, proceed as instructed below. The headaches you save will be your own.
Remember to “detach, disassociate and diffuse.“ When you’re in the middle of a conflict with an impossible person, use this strategy:
Detach: Staying calm in the heat of the moment is paramount to your personal preservation. Spitting angry words, reacting with extreme emotions such as crying, will only stimulate them to do more of the difficult behavior.
Disassociate: Remove yourself from the situation and treat it with indifference. Do not, under any circumstances bad talk to their face or to anyone else because then you are sinking down to their level. Add something positive by redirection such as by focusing on something, anything, positive in the situation or in the conversation. Whatever you do just stay calm!
Diffuse: It can help to realize that the side of a conversation that contains the most truth will always win out, and it’s best to “name the game” that an impossible person is playing, usually by asking them or the group a question that starts “Why…,” (rephrasing their “impossible” position to illuminate the consequences). You will move the conversation to a higher level, and the group, or even just the impossible individual, in a one-on-one, will respond to this “higher truth,” although the individual will usually respond by (more) obfuscating.
Understand that it’s not you, it’s them. This can be surprisingly difficult, considering that impossible people have complete mastery of shifting the blame. Chances are, the more often they blame you, the more they themselves are actually at fault.
Keep in mind that this is not to be used as a way to blame them. Blaming is what impossible people do, and they do it well. Instead, you are only facing the facts, for your own sake.
That being said, here’s a simple way to tell: if you accept responsibility for your own faults and resolve to improve yourself, it’s probably not you. Remember, impossible people “can do no wrong.”
Prepare for projection. Understand that you are going to be accused of much (or all) of this behavior yourself. If your impossible person gets a look at this text, to them it will look like a page about you. Prepare yourself for the fact that the impossible person’s flaws and failings will always be attributed to you.
Remember, in their minds, you are at fault for everything! They will have an endless supply of arguments to support this, and if you make the mistake of encouraging them, they will be more than happy to tell you why you are the impossible person, and how ironic it is that you are under the mistaken impression that it is them.
Guard against anger. If it helps, consider the fact that your anger is actually aprecious gift to the impossible person. Anything you do or say while angry will be used against you over and over again. Impossible people tend to have amazing memories, and they will not hesitate to use a nearly endless laundry list of complaints from the past against you. Five years from now, you could be hearing about the angry remark you made today (which you didn’t even mean in the first place). Impossible people will seize anything that provides them the opportunity to lay blame like it was gold.
Long-Term Management
Be a manager. Until it is over, your task in the relationship is to manage the impossible person, so that he or she deals less damage to you.
As a manager, your best resources are silence (it really is golden in some cases such as this), humoring the other, and abandoning all hope of “fixing” the impossible person. Impossible people do not listen to reason. They can’t (and even if they could, they wouldn’t).
Recognize that you can’t convince them that they have any responsibility for the problems between you. They don’t recognize (or if they did, wouldn’t try to improve) their flaws for a very logical reason; they don’t have any flaws. You must understand and manage this mindset without casting blame and without giving in to anger. It’s far easier said than done, and you will slip from time to time, but as time goes on, you’ll become a better manager.
Don’t get cornered. Avoid one-on-ones with this type of person, actively; in other words, when you see them coming to corner you, suggest, and then demand that at least a third party be brought in. This will often thwart the impossible person’s plans, and a typical response from them will be to unilaterally decide that “we don’t need anyone else.” You are perfectly free to claim your need for a third party to help your understanding, and insist upon it. Bullies never stand up to a crowd.
Consider that it might be a question of compatibility. Sometimes, a person who gets along with everybody else quite well is an impossible person for you personally. Most relationships between people contain many shades of gray, but some people simply mix as well as oil and water.
It is common to hear your impossible person proclaim “Everyone else likes me.” This is an attempt to shift the blame to you, so don’t buy it. It doesn’t matter how this person interacts with others. The fact is, the way the two of you interact together is terrible. Remember that blame never changes the facts.
Prepare to part ways. Understand that eventually, you’ll have to create a separation between yourself and an impossible person. Whether they are a friend, a family member, a parent, even a spouse, the time to leave will eventually manifest. Maintaining a relationship with an impossible person is, literally, impossible.
If you can’t (or won’t) make a physical departure immediately, make a mental one. In your mind, you’ve already left the relationship. The only thing left to do is wait for physical reality to reflect that fact.
If this person is a spouse, and you plan to stay with them, try to recognize the places you cannot tread (i.e. The subjects that make the person impossible). Avoid, as completely as possible, bringing up these subjects. Keep to yourself. Find a truly wonderful hobby, and focus on it. If you are religious, focus on your religion. Read about Narcissistic Personality Disorder — this is a definite possibility. Even if it seems to you that they do not have NPD, read the articles about how to deal with them, because following the advice in the articles you find may help you.
Protect your self-esteem. If you have regular dealings with someone who tries to portray you as the source of all evil, you need to take active steps to maintain a positive self-image. Focus on the people who validate you. Realize that this person is hurting you on purpose to improve his or her self-image. When he or she comes out with a statement that is designed to hurt you, realize this; realize why he saying that — to get people to tell him that he’s awesome. You are bigger and better than this person if you’re not lowering yourself to this level.
Remind yourself that this person’s opinion is not necessarily the truth. Understand that oftentimes, impossible people are particularly “fact-challenged.”
If the attacks have little basis in raw fact, dismiss them. You can’t possibly be as bad as this person would like you to believe you are. Do not defend yourself out loud, however. It will only provoke the impossible person into another tirade.
Avoid picking up impossible traits. If you aren’t careful, you could find yourself adopting much of the offender’s own behavior, even if you aren’t voluntarily trying. Issue blame entirely by understanding that this is just the way the other person is. These things define the impossible person’s actions, and nothing you do can change any part of their past.
Be the opposite of them: a possible person. Live as an example of tolerance, patience, humility, and kindness.
We are all influenced by the people in our environment — they don’t have to be perfect all the time and neither do you. Give respect because you are human. If you don’t receive respect, that’s -sadly- their problem. Give understanding, and you get understanding. Ultimately this sort of behavior is probably the only thing that might get through to them. They may not change in everything, but you can safely expect a change.
Protect your privacy. Impossible people will use any information on your personal life however small as a trump card against you. They can spin stories about you to other people (especially those close to you both) on a simple comment you made over lunch. Since they are specialists in manipulation, they are very good at making you talk.
Impossible people are good at seeming normal, and unless you are very convinced of who you are and where you stand in relation to the slight madness of this person, there will be times where you think “Hey, she’s not so bad after all. I guess I could tell her what I am going through these days….” Big mistake! It will come back to you when you least expect it, in the most dirty and manipulative way. Things shared in confidence late night at the office between the two of you can be used in an ice cold analysis in front of the whole company in a moment where the impossible person needs to get on top of you. He/she will spare no information to prove to others how well they know you, and such know what the best way to “handle” you is.
TIPS
When you make your escape from the impossible person stay away. Don’t ever go back once you break away — no matter how much you love them or they say they’ve changed.
When the impossible person is abusing or slandering you, other people will start to show sympathy towards you. You don’t need to do anything to make them look bad; she/he just digs his/her grave with no help from you. If s/he is angering you, others are also likely to be annoyed.
Be detached from anything they say whether it’s a compliment or criticism. If you give them power to build you up, then you also give them power to knock you down. Learn to develop a sense of self worth from within
Sunday, April 13, 2014
SPIRITUAL: WHY THE LAW OF ATTRACTION ISN'T WORKING FOR YOU
Maybe you’re a person who totally believes in what the book says – that like attracts like, and that with positive thinking you can create health, wealth and happiness.
Or maybe you’re one of the people who thinks that the whole thing is a big pile of hooey.
I’m not sure which side you might think I’m on. Personally, I think that the idea of “something for nothing”, or getting things just because you visualize them, is kind of ridiculous.
But at the same time – I DO believe in visualizing the things that you want. And I DO believe that through visualization, you can make the things you want real. You CAN turn your thoughts into things.
That’s sounds like I just said two completely opposite things, doesn’t it?
But I didn’t!
What I’m saying is that all the visualization in the world isn’t going to make something come true until you…
TAKE ACTION
To make it happen!
Here’s why I believe that.
Imagine that you want to lose 25 pounds. So you visualize a thinner you. You visualize yourself wearing cute little sundresses and bikinis, and imagine yourself hiking up mountains or going skiing – things the you(-25lbs) will be able to wear and enjoy that the current you(+25lbs) does not.
But all that visualization isn’t going do any good if you keep eating crappy food and sitting around on your butt in front of the computer.
So what’s the deal with that? Part of the problem is that the whole time you’re visualizing a thinner you, there’s another part of your brain that’s whispering “Yeah, remember the last time you tried to lose weight? Remember how you couldn’t stop thinking about food? Remember how much it hurt to exercise and how you ended up gaining 5lbs? You’re a failure and you’re always going to be fat.”
So simple visualization isn’t going to be enough. You need to start with identifying the beliefs that are stopping you; you need to change your mindset and create thoughts that will help you succeed.
And this is where visualization can work wonders – instead of visualizing “I’m 25 lbs lighter” – start visualizing yourself doing 30 minutes of exercise and feeling good about it. Start visualizing yourself eating healthy meals and enjoying them. Keep tweaking those visualizations until they are things that make you feel really good – and that’s when those visualizations will actually start coming true!
But that’s not the only way that “The Secret” works for you.
You may have heard of the “Red Car syndrome” – where, when you buy a red car, suddenly you start seeing red cars everywhere. Or perhaps you’ve heard of the “Blue Feather manifestation”… where you’re supposed to go about your day with the intention of having a blue feather appear in your life sometime within the next 48 hours.
These things are real – and they are one of the many functions of a part of your brain known as the reticular activating system (RAS). This particular function is called “confirmation bias”. You see, every day in your life, you’re exposed to so many BILLIONS of different stimuli that it’s absolutely impossible to pay attention to all of it. There’s so much information around us all the time, it would drive us crazy if we couldn’t filter most of it out. And that’s what the RAS does – it decides what things you need to pay attention to and what things you can let slide.
And by visualizing, focusing and concentrating on a certain object – like your brand new red car or that blue feather – when one of them passes by in your life, you notice it. It’s not because you “created them with your mind” – what you’ve actually done is created the circumstance in which you were more ready to recognize them when they came around.
Get that? You didn’t CREATE the blue feather, you created a mindset that was more attuned to seeing the blue feather when it passed by.
And this is how visualizations, manifesting and setting intentions can bring us wealth, happiness or love. There’s no magic to it – you aren’t making things appear out of thin air. But through your visualizations, you create a mindset where the path to having those things becomes more clear.
So, what The Secret and the law of attraction really do is get you to focus your attention on the things you truly want – goals that make you feel 100% good! – so that you can spot situations that will help you achieve those goals.
Visualizations help you create a mindset that moves you towards your goal, and manifest your desires.
It’s still YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to take action on those opportunities – and being 100% aligned with your goal helps you follow through.
Or maybe you’re one of the people who thinks that the whole thing is a big pile of hooey.
I’m not sure which side you might think I’m on. Personally, I think that the idea of “something for nothing”, or getting things just because you visualize them, is kind of ridiculous.
But at the same time – I DO believe in visualizing the things that you want. And I DO believe that through visualization, you can make the things you want real. You CAN turn your thoughts into things.
That’s sounds like I just said two completely opposite things, doesn’t it?
But I didn’t!
What I’m saying is that all the visualization in the world isn’t going to make something come true until you…
TAKE ACTION
To make it happen!
Here’s why I believe that.
Imagine that you want to lose 25 pounds. So you visualize a thinner you. You visualize yourself wearing cute little sundresses and bikinis, and imagine yourself hiking up mountains or going skiing – things the you(-25lbs) will be able to wear and enjoy that the current you(+25lbs) does not.
But all that visualization isn’t going do any good if you keep eating crappy food and sitting around on your butt in front of the computer.
So what’s the deal with that? Part of the problem is that the whole time you’re visualizing a thinner you, there’s another part of your brain that’s whispering “Yeah, remember the last time you tried to lose weight? Remember how you couldn’t stop thinking about food? Remember how much it hurt to exercise and how you ended up gaining 5lbs? You’re a failure and you’re always going to be fat.”
So simple visualization isn’t going to be enough. You need to start with identifying the beliefs that are stopping you; you need to change your mindset and create thoughts that will help you succeed.
And this is where visualization can work wonders – instead of visualizing “I’m 25 lbs lighter” – start visualizing yourself doing 30 minutes of exercise and feeling good about it. Start visualizing yourself eating healthy meals and enjoying them. Keep tweaking those visualizations until they are things that make you feel really good – and that’s when those visualizations will actually start coming true!
But that’s not the only way that “The Secret” works for you.
You may have heard of the “Red Car syndrome” – where, when you buy a red car, suddenly you start seeing red cars everywhere. Or perhaps you’ve heard of the “Blue Feather manifestation”… where you’re supposed to go about your day with the intention of having a blue feather appear in your life sometime within the next 48 hours.
These things are real – and they are one of the many functions of a part of your brain known as the reticular activating system (RAS). This particular function is called “confirmation bias”. You see, every day in your life, you’re exposed to so many BILLIONS of different stimuli that it’s absolutely impossible to pay attention to all of it. There’s so much information around us all the time, it would drive us crazy if we couldn’t filter most of it out. And that’s what the RAS does – it decides what things you need to pay attention to and what things you can let slide.
And by visualizing, focusing and concentrating on a certain object – like your brand new red car or that blue feather – when one of them passes by in your life, you notice it. It’s not because you “created them with your mind” – what you’ve actually done is created the circumstance in which you were more ready to recognize them when they came around.
Get that? You didn’t CREATE the blue feather, you created a mindset that was more attuned to seeing the blue feather when it passed by.
And this is how visualizations, manifesting and setting intentions can bring us wealth, happiness or love. There’s no magic to it – you aren’t making things appear out of thin air. But through your visualizations, you create a mindset where the path to having those things becomes more clear.
So, what The Secret and the law of attraction really do is get you to focus your attention on the things you truly want – goals that make you feel 100% good! – so that you can spot situations that will help you achieve those goals.
Visualizations help you create a mindset that moves you towards your goal, and manifest your desires.
It’s still YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to take action on those opportunities – and being 100% aligned with your goal helps you follow through.
Saturday, April 12, 2014
ARTICLE/SPIRITUAL:Quantum Theory Proves Consciousness Moves To Another Universe At Death
Quantum Theory Proves Consciousness Moves To Another Universe At Death
The author of this publication, scientist Dr. Robert Lanza who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times, has no doubts that this is possible.
Lanza is an expert in regenerative medicine and scientific director of Advanced Cell Technology Company.
Before he has been known for his extensive research which dealt with stem cells, he was also famous for several successful experiments on cloning endangered animal species.
But not so long ago, the scientist became involved with physics, quantum mechanics and astrophysics.
This explosive mixture has given birth to the new theory of biocentrism, which the professor has been preaching ever since.
Biocentrism teaches that life and consciousness are fundamental to the universe. It is consciousness that creates the material universe, not the other way around.
Lanza points to the structure of the universe itself, and that the laws, forces, and constants of the universe appear to be fine-tuned for life, implying intelligence existed prior to matter.
He also claims that space and time are not objects or things, but rather tools of our animal understanding.
Lanza says that we carry space and time around with us “like turtles with shells.” meaning that when the shell comes off (space and time), we still exist.
The theory implies that death of consciousness simply does not exist. It only exists as a thought because people identify themselves with their body.
They believe that the body is going to perish, sooner or later, thinking their consciousness will disappear too.
If the body generates consciousness, then consciousness dies when the body dies. But if the body receives consciousness in the same way that a cable box receives satellite signals, then of course consciousness does not end at the death of the physical vehicle.
In fact, consciousness exists outside of constraints of time and space. It is able to be anywhere: in the human body and outside of it.
In other words, it is non-local in the same sense that quantum objects are non-local.
Lanza also believes that multiple universes can exist simultaneously. In one universe, the body can be dead.
And in another it continues to exist, absorbing consciousness which migrated into this universe.
This means that a dead person while traveling through the same tunnel ends up not in hell or in heaven, but in a similar world he or she once inhabited, but this time alive. And so on, infinitely. It’s almost like a cosmic Russian doll afterlife effect.
This hope-instilling, but extremely controversial theory by Lanza has many unwitting supporters, not just mere mortals who want to live forever, but also some well-known scientists.
These are the physicists and astrophysicists who tend to agree with existence of parallel worlds and who suggest the possibility of multiple universes.
Multiverse (multi-universe) is a so-called scientific concept, which they defend. They believe that no physical laws exist which would prohibit the existence of parallel worlds.
The first one was a science fiction writer H.G. Wells who proclaimed in 1895 in his story “The Door in the Wall”.
And after 62 years, this idea was developed by Dr. Hugh Everett in his graduate thesis at the Princeton University. It basically posits that at any given moment the universe divides into countless similar instances.
And the next moment, these “newborn” universes split in a similar fashion. In some of these worlds you may be present: reading this article in one universe, or watching TV in another.
The triggering factor for these multiplyingworlds is our actions, explained Everett. If we make some choices, instantly one universe splits into two with different versions of outcomes.
In the 1980s, Andrei Linde, scientist from the Lebedev’s Institute of physics, developed the theory of multiple universes. He is now a professor at Stanford University.
Linde explained: Space consists of many inflating spheres, which give rise to similar spheres, and those, in turn, produce spheres in even greater numbers, and so on to infinity.
In the universe, they are spaced apart. They are not aware of each other’s existence. But they represent parts of the same physical universe.
The fact that our universe is not alone is supported by data received from the Planck space telescope.
Using the data, scientists have created the most accurate map of the microwave background, the so-called cosmic relic background radiation, which has remained since the inception of our universe.
They also found that the universe has a lot of dark recesses represented by some holes and extensive gaps.
Theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton from the North Carolina University with her colleagues argue: the anomalies of the microwave background exist due to the fact that our universe is influenced by other universes existing nearby. And holes and gaps are a direct result of attacks on us by neighboring universes.
So, there is abundance of places or other universes where our soul could migrate after death, according to the theory of neo-biocentrism. But does the soul exist?
Is there any scientific theory of consciousness that could accommodate such a claim?
According to Dr. Stuart Hameroff, a near-death experience happens when the quantum information that inhabits the nervous system leaves the body and dissipates into the universe.
Contrary to materialistic accounts of consciousness, Dr. Hameroff offers an alternative explanation of consciousness that can perhaps appeal to both the rational scientific mind and personal intuitions.
Consciousness resides, according to Stuart and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose, in the microtubules of the brain cells, which are the primary sites of quantum processing.
Upon death, this information is released from your body, meaning that your consciousness goes with it.
They have argued that our experience of consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in these microtubules, a theory which they dubbed orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR).
Consciousness, or at least proto-consciousness is theorized by them to be a fundamental property of the universe, present even at the first moment of the universe during the Big Bang.
“In one such scheme proto-conscious experience is a basic property of physical reality accessible to a quantum process associated with brain activity.”
Our souls are in fact constructed from the very fabric of the universe – and may have existed since the beginning of time. Our brains are just receivers and amplifiers for the proto-consciousness that is intrinsic to the fabric of space-time.
So is there really a part of your consciousness that is non-material and will live on after the death of your physical body?
Dr Hameroff told the Science Channel’s Through the Wormhole documentary:
“Let’s say the heart stops beating, the blood stops flowing, the microtubules lose their quantum state.
The quantum information within the microtubules is not destroyed, it can’t be destroyed, it just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large”.
Robert Lanza would add here that not only does it exist in the universe, it exists perhaps in another universe.
If the patient is resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules and the patient says “I had a near death experience”‘
He adds: “If they’re not revived, and the patient dies, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”
This account of quantum consciousness explains things like near-death experiences, astral projection, out of body experiences, and even reincarnation without needing to appeal to religious ideology.
The energy of your consciousness potentially gets recycled back into a different body at some point, and in the mean time it exists outside of the physical body on some other level of reality, and possibly in another universe.
The author of this publication, scientist Dr. Robert Lanza who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times, has no doubts that this is possible.
Lanza is an expert in regenerative medicine and scientific director of Advanced Cell Technology Company.
Before he has been known for his extensive research which dealt with stem cells, he was also famous for several successful experiments on cloning endangered animal species.
But not so long ago, the scientist became involved with physics, quantum mechanics and astrophysics.
This explosive mixture has given birth to the new theory of biocentrism, which the professor has been preaching ever since.
Biocentrism teaches that life and consciousness are fundamental to the universe. It is consciousness that creates the material universe, not the other way around.
Lanza points to the structure of the universe itself, and that the laws, forces, and constants of the universe appear to be fine-tuned for life, implying intelligence existed prior to matter.
He also claims that space and time are not objects or things, but rather tools of our animal understanding.
Lanza says that we carry space and time around with us “like turtles with shells.” meaning that when the shell comes off (space and time), we still exist.
The theory implies that death of consciousness simply does not exist. It only exists as a thought because people identify themselves with their body.
They believe that the body is going to perish, sooner or later, thinking their consciousness will disappear too.
If the body generates consciousness, then consciousness dies when the body dies. But if the body receives consciousness in the same way that a cable box receives satellite signals, then of course consciousness does not end at the death of the physical vehicle.
In fact, consciousness exists outside of constraints of time and space. It is able to be anywhere: in the human body and outside of it.
In other words, it is non-local in the same sense that quantum objects are non-local.
Lanza also believes that multiple universes can exist simultaneously. In one universe, the body can be dead.
And in another it continues to exist, absorbing consciousness which migrated into this universe.
This means that a dead person while traveling through the same tunnel ends up not in hell or in heaven, but in a similar world he or she once inhabited, but this time alive. And so on, infinitely. It’s almost like a cosmic Russian doll afterlife effect.
This hope-instilling, but extremely controversial theory by Lanza has many unwitting supporters, not just mere mortals who want to live forever, but also some well-known scientists.
These are the physicists and astrophysicists who tend to agree with existence of parallel worlds and who suggest the possibility of multiple universes.
Multiverse (multi-universe) is a so-called scientific concept, which they defend. They believe that no physical laws exist which would prohibit the existence of parallel worlds.
The first one was a science fiction writer H.G. Wells who proclaimed in 1895 in his story “The Door in the Wall”.
And after 62 years, this idea was developed by Dr. Hugh Everett in his graduate thesis at the Princeton University. It basically posits that at any given moment the universe divides into countless similar instances.
And the next moment, these “newborn” universes split in a similar fashion. In some of these worlds you may be present: reading this article in one universe, or watching TV in another.
The triggering factor for these multiplyingworlds is our actions, explained Everett. If we make some choices, instantly one universe splits into two with different versions of outcomes.
In the 1980s, Andrei Linde, scientist from the Lebedev’s Institute of physics, developed the theory of multiple universes. He is now a professor at Stanford University.
Linde explained: Space consists of many inflating spheres, which give rise to similar spheres, and those, in turn, produce spheres in even greater numbers, and so on to infinity.
In the universe, they are spaced apart. They are not aware of each other’s existence. But they represent parts of the same physical universe.
The fact that our universe is not alone is supported by data received from the Planck space telescope.
Using the data, scientists have created the most accurate map of the microwave background, the so-called cosmic relic background radiation, which has remained since the inception of our universe.
They also found that the universe has a lot of dark recesses represented by some holes and extensive gaps.
Theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton from the North Carolina University with her colleagues argue: the anomalies of the microwave background exist due to the fact that our universe is influenced by other universes existing nearby. And holes and gaps are a direct result of attacks on us by neighboring universes.
So, there is abundance of places or other universes where our soul could migrate after death, according to the theory of neo-biocentrism. But does the soul exist?
Is there any scientific theory of consciousness that could accommodate such a claim?
According to Dr. Stuart Hameroff, a near-death experience happens when the quantum information that inhabits the nervous system leaves the body and dissipates into the universe.
Contrary to materialistic accounts of consciousness, Dr. Hameroff offers an alternative explanation of consciousness that can perhaps appeal to both the rational scientific mind and personal intuitions.
Consciousness resides, according to Stuart and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose, in the microtubules of the brain cells, which are the primary sites of quantum processing.
Upon death, this information is released from your body, meaning that your consciousness goes with it.
They have argued that our experience of consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in these microtubules, a theory which they dubbed orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR).
Consciousness, or at least proto-consciousness is theorized by them to be a fundamental property of the universe, present even at the first moment of the universe during the Big Bang.
“In one such scheme proto-conscious experience is a basic property of physical reality accessible to a quantum process associated with brain activity.”
Our souls are in fact constructed from the very fabric of the universe – and may have existed since the beginning of time. Our brains are just receivers and amplifiers for the proto-consciousness that is intrinsic to the fabric of space-time.
So is there really a part of your consciousness that is non-material and will live on after the death of your physical body?
Dr Hameroff told the Science Channel’s Through the Wormhole documentary:
“Let’s say the heart stops beating, the blood stops flowing, the microtubules lose their quantum state.
The quantum information within the microtubules is not destroyed, it can’t be destroyed, it just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large”.
Robert Lanza would add here that not only does it exist in the universe, it exists perhaps in another universe.
If the patient is resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules and the patient says “I had a near death experience”‘
He adds: “If they’re not revived, and the patient dies, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”
This account of quantum consciousness explains things like near-death experiences, astral projection, out of body experiences, and even reincarnation without needing to appeal to religious ideology.
The energy of your consciousness potentially gets recycled back into a different body at some point, and in the mean time it exists outside of the physical body on some other level of reality, and possibly in another universe.
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