Something to keep in mind, I believe, when setting out on the path of self development, is that that most philosophies around neglect to teach about a vital and inherent skill, and that we ourselves have also likely let atrophy. We need this special skill; it is like a tree drawing nourishment from water deep down. Without the water, how healthy could it be?
This skill involves the ability to pull back, to engage the vista of our lives in panoramic style. We must become a bit like an eagle, scanning our past, present, and possible future from high above. This part of ourselves is imaginative and intuitive. It allows us to tap into the true ruler of our lives, the part of us that is pulling all the levers, and this part of course is our unconscious mind.
Most times, when not acting purely on habit, we try to solve our problems by thinking logically (or what SEEMS like logic to us) about what is happening, and what to do. Our Western culture is predominantly “left-brained”.
The problem is that our logical mind does not really hold the true keys, and we would do well to learn to form a connection to the source of our power and our dreams. The unconscious mind is the true driver; it is the place to look for our true motivation, inspiration, and emotional integration.
And what if that vast reservoir of knowledge and power called our unconscious mind, was constantly trying to get us on the horn, and we hardly ever seem to understand the messages it leaves for us? For example, we have all heard that when we dream, the unconscious mind is communicating messages in symbolic form. But how do we interpret them? Many people just resort to a book that explains what symbols in your dreams mean. But perhaps there is a way that is much more personalized, and could be like having a direct line of communication.
And what if we could sit down every day, every time we needed to dip into this well of higher wisdom, and do a simple meditation to see what this part of us had to impart?
When I was young I used to read “The Lord Of The Rings”, and at one part in the story, Frodo gets to look into Galadriel’s mirror (which is a bowl of water that she breathes on), which showed many visions to the watcher. And the reader is left with the idea of, “wow that sounds really cool. I wish there really WAS a mirror like that around somewhere!” But what if there actually WAS, and it exists right behind the eyes?
What’s interesting is to realize that we probably already DO use these abilities everyday, but we just don’t know it. Do you ever make pictures inside of your mind? How about times when you meet someone, and you get a “vibe” about them, that they might be good person, for example? Most likely, however, what we use from our everyday mind is the “lower end”, a more haphazard version, of these abilities.
What would happen if we could begin to turn to this part, like consulting with a trusted Gandalf, and hone these abilities in about 10 minutes a day, and that, as we began to take action from this source of wisdom, our trust in it increased?
A lot of times, because of the overarching need to survive, we don’t really ever just pull back to look at the whole canvas of our life, to see the pattern that is emerging. We are too busy thinking from the outside to the inside. The outside need that has been created is the ever pressing need to make money, to pay for the ever increasing number of bills.
Gone are the days shown in, for example, the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, where you might need money, but you only needed just a little, and you could afford to be a tinkerer. You could take your time, and hammer away at your creations, your inventions, to pursue your dreams in your own garage.
Is there something a little out of whack in “positive visualization” or “positive thinking”? Try out the meditation below, and you will find out.
Did you enjoy that? To understand why the unconscious is more powerful than our conscious mind, check out this post. If you’d like to find out more, join our list here, and we will send you a whole series.
There is a secret, lost to mankind for thousands of years, about the way our mind and spirit creates. Find the secret, and life becomes magical; it is like tapping an endless well of inspired manifestation. So says much of the modern self help philosophy today. This is the basic premise of the movie “The Secret” for example.
The way it is described makes it sound like if we only would embody this secret, we would be living in a Shangri-La world, a genie lamp at our every beck and call. Gone are the bad times, the hardship, and all the tough experiences most people live with in the “real world”.
And what is this secret? It is simple. Your outer world mirrors your inner one. Like, after all, attracts like. It is like our thoughts and feelings are magnets which draw towards us the entire picture of our world.
Does life get more syncronistic, as we go forward on the journey of spiritual healing? Are there signs and messages all around us, from every person in our life, and everything that is happening, that become more visible to us the more we become aware of them?
I thought so the other day, when I was cleaning out the storage, and I came across the movie Castaway. For some reason, though I don’t watch too many movies anymore, I decided to watch it again.
In this movie the main character, played by Tom Hanks, gets stuck on a small Island for 4 years after a plane crash, and we see how totally intense it is to live without other humans, and without any of the necessities we use and take for granted today.
And it brought up immediately in my mind the story of Noah’s Ark. Perhaps not the story we have all learned, how Noah built the Ark to save what could be saved of all the animals etc, so that when the rain stopped the earth could repopulate etc.
As we grow up, we spend our years absorbing endless information in school. And now there is mountains more input and information from places like the internet and the TV. All of this tends to entrain the mind and affects the assumptions we have, the way we think about things, solve problems, make decisions etc.
Yet is there a special side of us that has been neglected all this time, and could be much more helpful to guide our way forward?
What if we actually use that special quality all the time, but we don’t even know it? It is as if our training helps us to disregard an entire area of our experience.
But when you are going about your day, do you ever get feelings about what is happening, for example? Do you ever make pictures inside your mind?
All of this information comes from a special side of us which is of course is our unconscious. This part of us processes in a way that goes opposite our training. It speaks in symbols, feelings and visions, and can synthesize all aspects of a situation into a unified whole. (more…)
I recently got into a convo online with a young guy who was talking about the recent movie Limitless, which was about a sort of deadbeat writer who discovered a pill that increased the use of the brain from the normal 20% to 100%. All of a sudden this guy is speaking foreign languages at the drop of a hat, banging hot foreign women in bathrooms, writing his book in only 4 days, and excelling in gambling (using his new-found math skills).
Forgive me if I haven’t gotten all the details correct here, as I didn’t see the movie, just an excerpt that this guy sent me. He was telling me what we could do to access, in some measure, this “peak state” in real life through exercise, affirmations etc. (more…)
Sometime around the year 2007, before the big crash, I remember sitting in Rubio’s restaurant, waiting for the take out order. As I sat, I was watching the faces come into the door, face watching being one of my hobbies. To a person, the faces had a look of entitlement on them, and also a color of anger. And they all looked slightly arrogant. It would’ve been funny if it wasn’t so sad.
I have noticed this at other times, when I have a chance to stop and observe the faces and body language of people around. What has happened to Americans? In the old days, Americans were world renowned for being totally sharp, savvy, and bright-eyed. (more…)
These days it seems the whole world is going crazy fast. A confession: sometimes I like watching old reruns of Magnum PI. I like the pace of the show; it reminds me of how laid back life used to feel.
One of the characters I like is Higgins, the manager of the estate where Thomas Magnum lives. What’s great is that no matter what the topic, old Higgins knows every thing about it, the history of it, even the scientific names of whatever he is talking about.
In those days, sometimes people thought you were SUPPOSED to know everything about everything. It was the mark of being an educated man, or something like that. Try doing that TODAY. (more…)
Do you ever feel sort of…. emotionally dead? As if your life was an endless round of meaningless chores, followed by an ever increasing amount of entertainment demanding to fill your time, mostly by watching the big box? I know that I had felt this dead meaninglessness most of my life. What is the secret that can help us wake up from this bad dream?
About a year ago, I read an article where the author would walk along in the evening, in some formerly bustling part of Europe, and the streets were almost deserted. Where were all the young people, who should be out frolicking around, the author thought? And it turned out that they were all inside, trapped in a virtual world.
Does this new kind of lifestyle, that we all seem to have found ourselves living, really fulfill us? Are we really fulfilling our emotional and spiritual needs through it? Are we getting enough interaction with other live human beings? And since it is virtually consuming our lives, what is the real point to life? And the last question is, how can we escape? What can help us click over to a different track, to find true motivation and passion for life that is not spoon-fed to us in a vicarious fashion? (more…)
When setting out to create a happier life, a person can find a plethora of tips in the form of books, courses, seminars etc. But, interestingly, there seems to be one perspective that all those courses, along with the rest of us in the culture, seem to have forgotten about.
Most of us these days feel like we are driven by outside events. We approach life like managers of our “situation”, and because the world is becoming more complicated and dangerous, it becomes a bigger and more overwhelming task to manage everything that is happening. It is like we are forced into the “crisis management” side of our nature.
I have heard it said that most of us can only handle only so many crises at one time, and after a certain threshold, our ability to cope begins to shut down. After all, doesn’t it all become a bit too depressing? What if a different approach could easily turn things around? (more…)
A few years ago, I was listening to a popular talk show host and funny man, Adam Corolla, talking about how we all have a number in society. We have a score or a rank. And we sort ourselves based on how high our score is. He was actually talking about dating, and how we naturally pick someone with a similar societal score as ours to date, and in fact that we SHOULD do so.
I think back on that show as a point of comparison, for I am of the opinion that the deep underpinnings of society are changing, although I think, as is often the case at the start of a new trend, few in America realize the scope of what might be happening.
Certainly many are writing now of the economic slow collapse that seems to be happening, and the societal shake-up that could happen as a result. Others have spoken about the massive awakening on a political level that seems to also be taking place. So things seem to be changing, and along with such deep-level economic and political change comes inevitable shifts in perspective overall. (more…)
Have you ever had the feeling of being just pulled out of bed in the morning? That you just couldn’t WAIT to do something, and not only just for your pleasure, but because you were hot on the trail? Something was opening you to a new set of possibilities. It was like you were making a breakthrough of some kind. It is this higher level motivation that is missing in our lives these days, and it is not taught well in most self help/motivation courses.
If you HAVE felt this, think back to the last time. How long ago was it? How often do you get that feeling now? My bet would be, most of us don’t have that feeling much, especially as we mature, because most of us had to adapt to working in a world that expresses no new possibilities. In most of our relationships as well, most are just acting out of habit or role-play. We are just doing what we are SUPPOSED to be doing at every level of our lives.
And yet in the background, most likely that part of you still lives, and perhaps it comes out in the hobbies you pursue, the things you daydream about, what you do in your off time. It could be that you are unaware just how much potential you could express, and how motivated, how incredible it could feel to begin to express and develop your unique path and gift to the world. (more…)
Aren’t most of us just flailing around without any clear direction? Or aren’t we just doing what we “just happened” to end up doing for about 20 years? We had an idea to get us by, like working at Applebees, as one friend decided to do a few years back, then after becoming exhausted by work everyday, we sink into the couch at the end of our shift, put on the TV, pop open a brew and whatever food we happened to find in the fridge, and the next thing we know, 20 years have basically gone by.
Or let’s say we were really smart, and we decided to go for a “real career”, and had spent the last 20 years building on the back of a higher paying job (something that might pay better than Applebees), and we accumulated the trappings, in those last 20 years, of a high powered yuppie. What are the odds, though, that we will REALLY be fulfilled deep down?
Why isn’t finding what would really fulfill a person’s life taught anywhere? Certainly nothing could motivate a person more than doing something that pulls you out of bed everyday, all on its own. Where, as you think of what you are doing, your vision fills with new possibilities that are opening up. Is it even possible to find such a thing? (more…)
A person would have to be living under a rock not to realize that big things are happening in the world on an economic/political level. We are living in the onset of what portends to be a period of great change. Yet many in our country DO seem oblivious to all that is happening. They act like we are still living in the 1990′s or maybe even the 1950′s.
Other people I talk to seem to feel a little helpless about it all. After all, the changes are on such a macro level, they are SO huge, that what EVER a person could do might seem like kids playing a game of paddy-cakes. It’s like everything is out of our hands. And so most just continue on with our lives, living in a giant game of pretend, as if nothing big outside the window was happening.
If you observe closely, you will notice that the kind of futility that powers this attitude is actually laced throughout all the fibers of our lives. Don’t most people live like, “well I have this job, and it’s all I could get, and I must do what I am SUPPOSED to to survive in this crazy world after all!” Most of us seem like we are just going through the motions. (more…)
Do you ever feel a bit scattered? Things pulling you in too many directions? Does an excursion through your email sometimes take you off on a two hour distraction journey, researching this or that interesting but ultimately irrelevant tidbit all over the net?
For many of us, aren’t our entire lives lived like that, where it seems almost impossible to get focused, find our priorities and then stick to them, and make any headway? We get to the end of the day, and it feels like having gone through a whirlwind, but what did we really do?
A quick perusal through the “time management help” area of google, showed me the just the kinds of solutions I was expecting. And they are good solutions, and we all should get better at them. Solutions such as, make a list (and check it twice), get into a routine, finish what you have started, make priorities and do things according to it, just say no. (more…)