“When you give yourself wholeheartedly to what you truly believe, the world forms around that giving you everything you truly need and want”.

Rob first what does it look like to “give yourself wholeheartedly” to what you believe? And second, what does it mean when you know what you believe and yet act in defiance of it.? Here’s why I ask.

Since my own “cauldron of difficulty”, I’ve come to see things about myself that I’d ignored for years. Selfishness, needing to be right, control issues and fear dominated how I lived and led to a divorce I never wanted. However the awareness and new-found truths that I’ve come to see and believe, haven’t moved me near enough. I still have the anger and bitterness and am as short tempered with my ex as I ever was. I’m not processing through it, even with a considerable amount of new-found clarity.

What has taken hold, is that I’ve become sure I will always be sad about losing the family we had and how it’s taken so much from kids. I can’t imagine in any new life, not feeling the weight of that loss, the guilt for my part in it and the regret that it is unalterable. It feels like the unsheddable burden.

I’m going to address the part of acting in defiance of what you believe here and the rest in a separate post.

I can really empathise with this question.   Much of the time I am very calm and patient.  But at other times, when I’m tired, preoccupied with something else or in a hurry I am aware of being short tempered.  Especially to those I am closest to.

The more I have come to understand about us as a species, the more I see that our basic nature is savage.  Sure we are capable of great kindness and altruism, but also pettiness and viciousness.   Thinking on this question clarifies in my mind that there are two groups of people in relation to this issue.

photo credit: aerodesign.pl

The Two Types Of People

The first, and by far the largest group, are vicious savages and are completely unaware of it.

The second are like us, reforming savages, becoming more aware of our nature.

Ghandi’s quip when asked what he thought of Western civilisation and he replied that ‘it would be a good idea’, comes to mind here.

Our society is so puffed up with arrogance about it’s own importance and achievements that it fails to see the hypocrisy it is based on.  It amazes me that almost no-one seems to learn from history.  When I discovered what now seems like the foolishness of believing the world was flat, of believing that God wanted sacrifices, of believing that a dance could bring rain, it was a lesson to me that much of what we currently believe must inevitably become laughable to more sophisticated, future civilisations.  So I wanted to find the flaws in my beliefs.

When the last recession happened in the eighties I read up about it’s causes to understand it and found out that this has happened in cycles for about the past four hundred years.  Yet Politicians and Economists, still want to believe that they, in their brilliance, have managed to turn around or compensate for human nature.

In exactly the same way people are butting their heads against brick walls complaining about the state of the world, other people’s incompetence and so on.  The cause of most stress is the belief that ‘everything is fine with me, it’s just the other people I have to deal with’.

Brian has now reached the point, where in his more reflective and considered moments he is honest and aware enough to recognise what is.

So now with that known what do you do about it?

We need to start a little further back to be able to pull all the pieces together so that hopefully,  it will all make sense in the end.

In the last post I said what we see is just the tip of the iceberg.  I want to emphasise this in more detail now by examining the stages of awareness.

In our lives, we spend our time in three zones.

The Auto-Pilot Zone

Much of our time engaged with the world.  And most of this is routine in the Auto-Pilot Zone.  We go through our day doing much the same things in a semi-automatic pattern.  We greet people the same way, have the same kind of conversations and do much the same tasks.  We slip into a patterned groove.  Like a conveyor belt where habits take over.

The Artistic/Creative Zone

Then there’s the parts of life that bring us our greatest joy.  The parts where we create and fashion new grooves.  These are the aspects where we have to really focus on what we are doing.

The Contemplative Zone

photo credit: Ed Yourdon

And finally there’s a small part of our day, where we spend time reflecting on what we have done, what we want to do and where we want to go.

Awareness develops as we spend more time in reflection.  Gradually we notice more and more of what governs and determines our auto-pilot zone hours.  That is how our levels of awareness develops.

The Artistic/Creative zone is never a problem.  It’s here where we love to be, where we carve out and discover who we are and what we are all about.  It’s you being you time.

The Problem With Living On Auto-Pilot

The problems all come about in the Auto-pilot zone.  If you examine when you are most angry, bitter and so on you’ll find it is in those moments when you are caught up in the auto-pilot zone.

To understand this we need to ask why do we do, what we do?

In order to function we learn and then act from lots of automated programs and knee jerk responses.  These are a complex mix of genetics, social conditioning, learned responses and previous personal decisions.

We are the hard wired product of billions of years of evolution.  We have instincts that originated to help reptiles survive and out of which we evolved.  We have customs from thousands of years ago that have become deeply etched in our cultures, which became the framework from which we look through out into the world.

From these two sources, someone could function for their entire life.  Most people spend 95% of their time operating from these bases.  But it is a deeply, unrewarding and robotic existence.  And as it plays out, the hypocrisy and conflict in the flawed logic shows up as problems.  The problems get your attention.  They require contemplation and so make you aware of a problem that has been there all along.

Now when you notice the conflict and resolve it, you upgrade your Human Operating System.

The key to your success in the world and your effectiveness and so your level of happiness is determined by the quality of your Operating System.

If you observe general life, you’ll notice that much of it doesn’t work.  If you have to deal with big bureaucracies, you’ll find that many of their systems don’t work.  What was designed and planned for maximal efficiency turns out to be so flawed that we wonder how anyone could ever have hoped it would work.  Even in small businesses and our own households, we find that what we were certain was a great idea was hopelessly flawed.

These are all caused by our Operating System and reality clashing.  Failure, in all of it’s forms,  is due to a bug or glitch in the Operating System.  This in turn is caused by some habit or belief which lives in the dark and unexamined area of the iceberg.

That’s really the way I think of it as a Human Operating System.  But now I want to put this in a slightly different way, that might make it a little clearer to you.

What Enlightenment Really Is

Often people talk about enlightenment and becoming enlightened.  So that means that they see more of the iceberg.  More aware of themselves.  They see the flaws and in seeing them they unravel them and transcend them.

Now the pressures of the world keep you in the auto-pilot zone.  It’s deeply unfulfilling, but it seems to be what you should do.  And so you operate from that deep, murky basis without ever really examining what you are doing or why.  Just keeping ahead of the treadmill so you don’t fall off.

That means that you are riddled with conflicts and problems.  Most that you have no idea about, but are all lined up and waiting for you to reach them.  Each of the conflicts is heavy and burdensome.  Even if you are unaware of them, they are a weight that holds you back and slows you down.

Each that you resolve and so clear, results in you becoming more enlightened and therefore, emotionally and mentally lighter.

If you ever meditate or get engrossed in exploring ideas, you’ll notice how much lighter you feel emotionally.  It’s because you have shaken off the shackles of these conflicts that you carry around with you.

So enlightenment is really a process of purification.

photo credit: Freddy The Boy

It’s much along the lines of what Environmentalists want for our planet.  Only to complicate things we have two basic systems that determine how we react and behave.

Our nervous system is an outgrowth of billions of years of evolution.  Yet what worked marvellously for reptiles or chimps doesn’t always work so well for us in today’s world.  For example, the stress response is a fantastic instinct in the wild where stress is, as Dr. Robert Sapolsky puts it, either over in 20 minutes or you are.

Stress, or the stress response, is never a problem.  The real problem comes from prolonged stress.  It’s when the stress response goes beyond 20 minutes that it literally begins to destroy the body to maintain a state of readiness.

The second system is that of our social conditioning.  It’s the way we learned to make sense of the world.  We have progressed from living in Caves to our current high tech lifestyles.  But each progression came at a cost to the environment.  And later we found less toxic ways to achieve the same result.

For example, initially cars were huge gas guzzlers.  Now they have reduced their emissions and it is almost certain that they will one day cause only a fraction of the toxicity they have historically.

In exactly the same way, we have progressed our society, but at a cost.  It is known that our way of life increases mental illnesses.  Groups working with developing countries to become more materially successful plan in for the costs of dealing with increased levels of stress and depression.

As an example, much of our wealth comes from the concept of specialisation, so trumpeted by Adam Smith.  Henry Ford made his fortune from the efficiency of his assembly line production methods.  Yet despite paying workers more than they dreamed of earning, his factories were the scene of literal battles.  Even today, there are sweat shops that exploit workers in order to bring us products.  Then you have slavery and many other historical ills.

Though thankfully as a society we are becoming more aware of the toxic side effects to our progression, our culture and so the conditioning that we learned has been developed from this framework.  So the society that allows slavery is built from individual minds that believe that others can be used for their own good.

It is in removing toxic beliefs that we become enlightened and so purer.  To be in the world, but not of it, is to be pure.  To live in a complete (or almost complete) state of transparency and awareness as opposed to the darkness of  our inherited conditioning and nervous system.  It is to override instincts and conditioning in favour of choosing our actions and responses.  It is to live consciously, now, in this moment.

The Human Problem - Knowing What To Do, But Not Doing It

Now we can look at your original question in a new light.  So why do we not do what we know would be best for us?

It’s because in our moments of reflection we can see clearly.  Intellectually it’s easy to accept and know what to do.   However somewhere from 70 - 90% of our lives are lived in the auto-pilot zone, where we do not have the mental time or space to be in the moment and consciously choose our response.   Therefore we act primarily from instincts and habits.

Intellectual understanding is rarely enough to create behavioural change.  It can happen instantly, if the lesson is emotionally powerful enough, if the person has reached a tipping point where the pain of the old way is too much to bear any longer or if there are no deeper bonds clutching at that behaviour.

Typically though, there are deeper rooted fears, insecurities, perceptions and flawed beliefs that hold onto old habits.  To change a behaviour, you have to address these.  The intellect is like a leaf on a tree.  It is the most obvious and visible, but it exists as an extension, an outgrowth, of the roots.

The core of the system is not controlled by the thinking mind.

What the thinking mind can do, is promote awareness and detoxify the system.  Then the purer system will respond with habits that get the same or better results, but without the toxic side effects.

How difficult purification is, obviously depends on a number of factors.  Let me digress for a moment to make a point that might put this in perspective.

How To Achieve Purity

photo credit: star5112

The quality of a pint of beer is determined by it’s purity.  I recall reading, how in the 1920’s Claude Hopkins was amazed by the process Schlitz Beer used to go through to ensure their beer was as pure as possible.  Actually all beers go through a similar process.

Even though the factory was right on the shore of Lake Michigan and the water was at that time unpolluted and a cheap ready source, they still dug 4,000 feet deep artesian wells to provide the purest possible water.

Then he was taken to the laboratory to see the mother yeast cell, from which all yeast used in the beer making process was developed.  It was created from 1,200 experiments to bring out the robust flavour

He observed beer dripping over pipes in plate glass rooms that were filled with filtered air to ensure that it cooled without any impurities.

Then he was told how every bottle was sterilised 4 times before being filled.  He saw huge and expensive filters that were filled with white-wood pulp to provide a superior filtering process.  Every pump and pipe was individually cleaned twice daily.

If we go to this extent for beer, should we not be as vigilent of our own mind.

Purification comes from eliminating all possible sources of toxicity.  One sloppy element in the beer making process can lead to a foul tasting beer.  In exactly the same way, one element of toxicity in your Operating System can lead to behaviour that intellectually you don’t want.

Every action is preceded by perception.  And perception is dependent on mood and the thought structure your Operating System is based on.  So our actions and habits have a long chain of thoughts and effects.  Most of them are below our level of awareness.  So you have to uncover the process, the chain of thoughts and beliefs from the action that is the leaf of the tree back through the branches and to the root.

That is what the beer producers did to perfect their product.  They analysed the entire process and purified each step of it.  And so when you are as stringent about the process from an incident happening to your response to it, then your actions will be as pure as a top quality beer.

So now let me finally answer your question of how do you react more positively?

There’s  really six steps to enlightenment on a given issue or conflict.

The Six Steps To Enlightenment

photo credit: batintherain

Step 1 - Symptom

This is the stage where you become aware and notice that there is a conflict or a problem.  Typically it’s after a problem, but you can develop the skills of awareness to see it before it physically manifests.

Step 2 - Diagnosis

This is the stage where you identify and diagnose what the problem is.  Initially the problem might be X.  Later in the process you might find that Y keeps you doing X.  So these steps can be cyclical, until you have really got to the root of  the issue.

Step 3 - Prescription

Intellectually you can see what the solution is to the problem.

Step 4 - Treatment

It’s one thing to know what the problem and the prescription for it are, but you have to have the awareness in the moment to apply the treatment during a flare up.

Step 5 - Reaching The Tipping Point

To change a habit requires numerous applications of the treatment.  There are times when you will react without being consciously aware in the moment.  And so you have to bring your focus and awareness to the situation so that you consciously choose your response.  Again and again, until you reach the tipping point for your new habit to become the new default.

Step 6 - Purification

Your new behaviour now is the new automatic response.

The Problem With Hypnosis, NLP And Other Tricks And Techniques

It is possible to change behaviours by techniques such as Hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic-Programming.  I used to do it.  But I became disheartened because in my experience, all that happened was people developed new problems.  There was no real growth in character or a sense of someone becoming more enlightened.

These tools can be great for someone that is debilitated by something like a deep fear or phobia.  But life is not about the absence of problems.  It’s about transcending problems and transforming them into stepping stones for growth.  Just as a caterpillar cannot turn into a butterfly without struggle, we cannot grow without adversity.

There are always lots of huge promises with this or that new technique that’s going to make life easier.  But we are still grappling with the same essential human issues that were written in the ancient mythologies.  Our environments and lifestyles may be more comfortable, but the essence of being human hasn’t changed.  There are no shortcuts to enlightenment.

The people that I really admire and aspire towards are people like Buddha, Lao Tsu, Jesus, Socrates and Krishnamurti.  No-one has ever reached anywhere close to their level by hypnosis or any other method or technique.  Because life must be understood.  It all comes as a holistic package.  Everything affects everything.  It’s all part of the one.  You cannot cut it into segments and piece it together perfectly.  It’s an organic, living thing.

Our actions are a reflection of our current level of enlightenment.  It is, what it is.  It is the judgement of good and bad that hampers growth.  Fear, of looking or feeling bad, leads people to waste their efforts and energies pretending to themselves and everyone else that they are something other than they are.

Accepting where you are, frees your energies to heal and so move to a new level of growth.  And that is why Brian’s openness and honesty in his assessment of himself will move him past this issue.

The only way that you get to be more enlightened is by spending more time in the contemplative zone.  If you look at the six steps they are all based on contemplation.  The actual change happens by pausing life by bringing your awareness to the moment and applying your pre-planned prescription.

What you are doing in your contemplative period is training and preparing yourself to be fitter, stronger and better prepared, so that you are ready when the tough challenges of life occur to treat them as the opportunities that they are and knock them out of the park.  But most people never think of this as training.  And so they never go about it in an organised and structured way.  It’s all out when they have a big problem and nothing when the sun is shining.

It is to create a more organised and structured basis for growth that I have been working to create a place where you can train and prepare to be ready to seize the opportunities in life.  This question has made me see how important this is to get out immediately.

And though, it’s not as polished as I would have liked it to be, I feel I should open this up now and polish it as we go.  So you can read about the new Coaching Club here.

how do you know of all the options, which one is the authentic you?

I’m going to start my reply by looking at the foundations and then the answer should make much more sense.

Have you ever noticed that Toddlers tend to play to a much greater degree with stuff like sand, play dough and plasticine than older kids?

photo credit: AmandaLouise

These are all open ended play that allow lots of possibilities.  There’s no set outcome, just a sense of curiousity and exploration.

Then as they get older they play more with dolls, action men and so on.

And as they get older still their play becomes more organised by rules and regulations.  Until eventually we squeeze all the fun out of life and end up sat in meetings about point 4 in paragraph 2.1b.  Then worrying that because it bores us, maybe we have ADD or something.

Society is set up to train us to believe that there is a right and wrong way to do things.  There’s religious commandments, moral obligations, social duties, professional responsibilities and on and on.  And often they collide with one another.  Yet before we learned ‘the rules’ we loved to just play with lots of opportunities.

What happens when people seek to find themselves, is that they get all serious about it and believing they need to find the one true path, they go on a quest to find their ‘authentic self’.  As if it is a treasure hunt for the ‘holy grail’ that has been hidden from them.

What Exactly Are You?

Let’s back up for a moment.  First of all, we need to be more explicit about what the authentic you is.

It’s not your physical body.  Your body is nothing.  It’s just your current mode of transport.  It is your spirit, your energy that animates this hairy bag of chemicals into a physical expression of the deeper flavour you are.

You are a flow of energy.  Living in a body means living in a world of perception.  And so we can only see a reflection of what we are, through our actions and words and other people’s reaction to those.

Much like an echo.

Of course, there is much more to us.  We all know that we have more potential inside us, don’t we?

But that potential is like the Toddler’s playdough.  We just see a bunch of goo, until someone makes it into a form that we can recognise and appreciate.

In exactly the same way, you may have a vision, but all anyone else sees is a mass of goo.  They can only see the vision, when you start to form it into your vision.

The biggest mistake people make is to quest for their authenticity.  There is not one authentic you, there are many possibile authentic you’s.  Just like play dough, you can create a form and then reshape it.  Over and over again.

Think of it this way.  You know how on the beach, there’s someone who’s been buried up to their head.  So all you can see is their head.

Well, that’s analogous to your authentic self.  What even we ourselves see,  is just the tip of the iceberg.  Let alone anyone else.  It is only when we are put into new contexts that challenge us that we are able to discover more of ourselves.  Because until then it is just goo.  Waiting to be formed.  And it is your decision, in the sense of what you prioritise and what you discard, that crafts it into the sculpture you become.

photo credit: hans s

A Blacksmith plunges iron into the forge so that he is able to mould and shape it into the form he wants.  Likewise we become what we are through the cauldron of difficult situations.  Hero’s are not made from mundane situations or conscious decision.  They are born from difficult situations in perilous times.

When you go about the routine parts of your everyday life on auto-pilot, you only see what has already been set.  It is in the moments of strife that we become able to be transformed.

Healing The Fractured Psche

Robert in his comment on the last post, pointed out that the Psyche isn’t integrated.  It’s fractured into lots of conflicting parts that don’t fit together peacefully.  So we are continually finding ourselves faced with difficult choices.  I want this because I think it will be good for my relationship, but then I want that because it sounds more exciting.

We hate the tough decisions, the awkward moments and heartbreaking conflict. Our instincts tell us to run from and avoid such situations.  But it is in that conflict, that we have the chance to heal our fractured Psyche and so makes us what we become.

We evolve, grow and develop only as fast as we integrate and transcend conflict.

Let’s use Jeff’s case as an example.  His conflict comes out of his thought structure.  He cares for his Fiance and wants to live up to what he perceives as his obligations to her.  But equally he wants to live his own life.  They are both very powerful wants.  It’s checkmate.  A stale stand-off with no clear winner.

Yet sooner or later, he has to move in the direction of one choice.  His life is paralysed in limbo, until he does.  But which one?

This is the point when people most seek answers.  Some certainty to grasp hold of.  So they seek advice or look for sources of wisdom to find the answer or inspiration.  Some people give up and just take the easy route because they cannot bear the tension.  But the easy route leads to inauthenticity.  And sooner or later the conflict will play out again in some form or other.

The truth is there is no right or wrong answer.  Either can be an authentic choice.  Let me explain why.

photo credit: ?

Right now, Jeff is facing the fork in the road.  Both paths can lead to equally beneficial outcomes.  They might even intersect later.

Whatever he chooses, will change his entire thought structure.  It will determine how he will integrate the two parts and heal the conflict.  In doing so, he will create the Jeff he will become.   As long as he truly believes in his choice rather than settling to avoid the conflict.

In other words, Jeff could decide that he’s trained to be a Dentist and it’s a good comfortable living.  It enables him to live to a nice standard and though he doesn’t enjoy the way he’s currently doing his job, he will focus his energies on bringing more of himself to the role.

Just because up to now, people have seen a Dentist in a restricted conventional pattern, doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done differently.  Jeff could decide that he will heal the conflict by bringing more of himself to the traditional Dentist role.  In which case, Jeff needs to dig deep into his sense of identity and decide what he’s really about, what he sees as the problems in  Dentistry and how it could be improved.  For what makes you most unhappy is that which jars most with your sense of identity.  Therefore identifying that conflict and healing it leads to you expanding the field and indelibly leaving your mark on the world.

It is through such conflict that innovations is born.  There actually is a Dental role model for Jeff.

Paddy Lund was driven to the point of suicide by his work, until he decided to revolutionise his work and the field of what is possible in Dentistry.  It’s an inspiring story, you can read about it later here, but don’t go yet or you’ll lose the thread and miss the point of this article.

Or Jeff could decide that work is a big part of his life and he really can’t stick Dentistry.  There’s nothing about it that suits him and continuing would just make him more and more unhappy and affect his relationship anyway.  So he’s going to investigate some other paths and find something that can pay the bills and put a smile on his face.

The decision is neutral.

It’s Not Which Path, But How You Choose The Path That Matters

You can jump either way and be authentic and have everything work out perfectly.  However the key is that you believe wholeheartedly in whatever you decide.  This only comes from really grappling with the issue to a conclusive decision.  Then as you leave the furnace, your new thought structure sets and you become a new upgraded version.

If however you do not fully resolve the issue.  If you choose one and yet still flirt with the other, you remain in the furnace.  Not in the centre, but just enough to remain malleable.  And so when tested in battle, you are the sword that breaks.

photo credit: busbeytheelder

When you believe wholeheartedly in something, you make it happen. You have hardened steel at your core and that will outlast every obstacle you face.

It is your authenticity that creates your experience of life.

Many people who like to talk of the Law of Attraction, misunderstand it.  They tell you that you must think positively and believe in what you want to create it.  Actually they have it back to front because they believe the result is more important than what you are.  They are saying, become what you have to, to be a match for what you want.  The rub is that often the things we think we want, are not the things that satisfy us.

It is better to understand what you truly believe and live in congruence and integrity.  Then techniques and tricks are unneccesary.  When you give yourself wholeheartedly to what you truly believe, the world forms around that giving you everything you truly need and want.

Our authentic selves are not something we live up to or achieve, they are something we create from our conscious choices.  Like our muscles they grow stronger upon the battle scars of our erupted Psyche.

You see, your mind is broken.  Insane.  Mine too.  And everyone else’s.

If you observe yourself or others closely, you will soon realise that we act completely irrationally.  But we only get to be aware of that when we encounter some context in life that allows us to see that the insanity of our beliefs.  So in this case, Jeff has had this conflict lying dormant for years.  Yet it’s only when the conflicting ideas are able to play out sufficiently to their breaking point, that we are able to see the conflict that was always there.

If you want to grow and become enlightened, evolved, actualised, reach your potential, be the best version of you that you can, then you need to speed up the velocity of your life experience so that you integrate more of the conflicting parts that make up You.  Some people do this by great highs and lows in their experiences.  They learn from lots of bumps and drama.

How To Develop Your Own Authenticity Quicker

photo credit: hitchhicker

Personally, I prefer a quieter life.  And I’ve learned that a conflict in my mind is just a problem lined up waiting to happen.  So I try to become aware of it and deal with it before it ever develops into a problem.  It’s much like car crashes.  They only happen when we, or the other Driver, don’t pay attention to the warning signs.

If you can resolve conflict mentally, then you don’t need to have it play out in your life physically.

That’s the real meaning behind the name of this site, Live Without Conflict.  It’s not that you won’t ever have conflict, you always will, but that you reconcile it so quickly, that it doesn’t hang around long enough to bother you.

I have been working away at developing an online membership club that is designed to help you to do this.  It’s almost ready to open it’s doors.  So if that sounds interesting to you, keep an eye out for an email invitation.

On the one hand we have passions that inspire us and on the other we have fears that prod us into states of stress and anxiety.  Our experience in life is determined by how well we can maintain our balance in this continual journey.

Everyone naturally gravitates towards happiness.  The problem is that to reach anything, that we think will bring us happiness, involves walking through the valley of fear.  Those that are not happy, are those who have lost their balance walking through the valley of fear.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Happiness is essentially the recognition that you are free.  Stress and frustration are the feeling of being trapped and limited.  Anxiety is the fear that you may be limited and vulnerable.

I would like to talk a little about the structural basis of stress and anxiety, so that we are able to see more clearly how to ovecome them.

Our entire experience of humanity is the perception of limitation.  We are limited in what we can do because of time.  Limited by space.  We are limited by our physical capability, our mental capability and our emotional capability.  Time after time we meet barriers and seemingly insurmountable obstacles.  Our experience is truly defined by the boundaries of our perceived limitations.

Yet what one believes is impossible, another can do again and again.  Not so long ago, it was believed that it was physically impossible for human’s to run a mile in less than 4 minutes.  However once Sir Roger Bannister achieved that feat, it became commonplace.

Some people believe it is impossible for them to make new friends easily.  Some believe it’s impossible to make money easily.  Some believe it’s impossible to get their kids to behave.  But there are others who are able to make these things happen time after time.

You see, what you believe is possible is determined by your thought structure.  What I like to call your Human Operating System.  And this thought structure, coming through the limitations of your perceptions is inherently flawed.  So unless you ‘upgrade’ your Operating System, you limit what is possible in your personal universe.  The more limited the possibilities in your universe, the more problems you get, as the the true universe conflicts with your personal version of it.

The diagram below shows this visually.

So the more aware you are of what you believe and perceive and the more you challenge your view, the more you’ll update and so expand your Possibility Zone.  As a result, there will be less and less problems in your life.

However what many people find is that, while they believed expanding their possibility zone would achieve a blissful state, there is still issue after issue to deal with.

What actually happens is that there are less problems, but you develop a much more refined level of sensitivity.  Therefore you become aware of minor problems that never previously registered.  There is a perfect physical analogy to this that might make this clearer.

In the last 80 years, medicine has been one of the areas that has made most significant advances.  We have identified and found solutions for hundreds of new diseases and ailments.  I think we can agree that our general level of health is better.  We live longer and are far less likely to suffer from debilitating illnesses and chronic pain.  But take a look at the following statistics.

In the 1920’s there were 8 reported incidents of sickness per 10 people.

By the 1980’s that had risen to  21 reported incidents of sickness per 10 people.

That’s a 160% increase in reported sickess.  So are we less well?

The difference is one of suffering threshold.  How much pain or discomfort we are willing to put up with.  Previous generations grew up watching people suffering and dying from terrible diseases such as Tuberculosis and so on.  When others around you have such serious and easily observable conditions, it seems churlish to complain about feeling a little lethargic.

When the standard for being ill is having a serious illness people are less likely to notice or complain about niggles.  But when you take much of those big illnesses out of the picture, people begin to notice anything less than perfect health.  So despite objectively being in much better health, people now actually report more ailments and niggles.

Likewise, some people live in states of great turmoil.  Yet others who live in relative peace can suffer a relatively equal or greater amount of stress from incidents that wouldn’t even register to the other.  It’s all just a case of where your thresholds are.  And this is what is at the root of anxiety.

Anxiety is often confused with the symptoms it brings.  The real issue is not the sweating, the palpitations and so on.  Nor is it even the incident that triggers the symptoms.  The real cause of stress and anxiety is the level of your thresholds.  With a higher threshold the incident wouldn’t cause an anxious response.

Life is continual movement.  Inhaling and exhaling.  Up or down.  Contraction and expansion.

So in every area of your life, you are either growing and expanding or shrinking in your status or capability.  You are either becoming more confident or less confident.  Richer or poorer.  Healthier or less healthy.  Closer or further apart in your relationship.  Happier or less happy.  Better able to handle stress or less able.

The thing is that the less that you do, the less you are comfortable doing.  Conversely, the more that you do, the more you are comfortable doing.

Perhaps the most common source of anxiety comes from social interaction.  What typically hapens is that people feel shy, or anxious, and so they avoid interacting.  Maybe they do interact, but they interact through proxy.  By which I mean they put up a shield, a defense mechanism, that they hide behind.

But without facing their fear and moving through it, they haven’t raised their threshold and so the same things still frighten them.

Reaching your fear threshold is like walking up to a fire.  Your temperature increases, your heart beats faster, your mouth goes dry.  The closer you get to the fire, the more amplified the fear becomes.  And so it feels that if this is how bad the fear of it feels, well the feeling of it actually happening must be enough to annhiliate me.

Actually though, what happens is that you discover that the fire is a mirage.  You don’t get burned because because once the event is here, the anxiety is gone.  Anxiety can only be based on anticipation.

Sure sometimes it’s replaced by intense embarrassment or pain.  But that is just another threshold.  And going through the experience will raise your threshold, regardless of whether it turns out well or not.  So next time, the same event won’t cause the same level of anxiety.

However, if you shrink from the fire, you never find out that it is just a mirage.  And so you get stuck by the heat of the approach.  You become stuck.  Debilitated by your inability to get beyond your fear.  Because you never venture closer to the fire, your thresholds lower.  Therefore more and more frightens you.  Until your entire life becomes surrounded by fire.  A prison of fear.

Your quality of life, in every area, relationships, finances, social life, career and so on is determined by your thresholds.  By how low a quality you will accept and by your willingness to face your fears and raise them.

Everything that you want, but don’t yet have is gained by raising your thresholds.

Everything that you don’t want and currently have, in your life, is eliminated by raising your threshold levels.

Part of the bitterness might be caused by talking to you about it.  Here’s what I mean…

People are very invested in their social image.  They care a great deal what other people think of them.  It’s something we’ve been trained into from birth.  

Now when a break up happens, when we feel in some way that we have failed, that we might have lost face, we feel a need to salvage our esteem in the eyes of others.  Not necessarily consciously, often it’s just a response that we aren’t even aware of.

Now due to the way we tend to look at relationships, the sanctity of marriage and so on, there is a lot of pressure on people to make them work.  

So when a relationship breaks up, people often feel a level of guilt and shame that complicates an already difficult issue.

photo credit: garlandcannon 

So there is a certain amount of defensiveness in the way we deal with publicly getting over a relationship.  It might be that the Individual in themself does not feel that bitter, or it might be that they do and part of that bitterness is because they blame the other for bringing shame on them.  For making them fail.  For making them seem gullible or fallible.

But either way, now it has happened, they have to protect the image that people hold of them, much as a Politician has to spin stories to make them more saleable.  It was by reading the work of Steve Duck, the pioneering Psychologist in the field of relationships that I came to understand this.  His research found that the main impact of Relationship Counselling was not to heal relationships, but to give people a story to make them saleable in the dating market.  

In other words, who wants to date a serial abusive, adulterer?   

But I would go further and say that in publicly getting over a relationship, you are also concerned what implications this has, for the way people judge you as a person.  Beyond whether they have any interest in dating you.  

So as they come into contact with people they have to frame the story in a way that shows them in a positive light.  Sometimes that will necessitate admitting their mistakes and so the story will show them as rehabilitated.  And therefore now worthy of esteem and a second chance.

But often it involves putting themselves in a mode of victim.  Rationalising why they were so believable.  So sometimes, for the purpose of protecting their ego (or to portray themselves in a certain light to others), people will have to explain their experience, their history from such a framework.  

However working from that framework, will cause the Individual to experience more bitterness and anger.  Just as anyone who puts themself within any framework of being a victim, in order to make others pity them or to justify their actions, makes themself less and less capable. 

It’s All About How You Frame The Situation

Every emotion and perception we have is caused by the framework we filter our experience through.  So whenever something upsets you, stresses you and you want to change the way you feel, you just have to change the framework you look at the situation through.  Let me explain a little deeper what I’m talking about when I say framework, so that it might make a little more sense to you.

You know how cultures are very different, right?  

photo credit: chany14 

So someone brought up in a remote Amazon tribe will have a very different God.  A very different way of life.  A very different perception of nature and probably a different way of looking at relationships.

You can see these cultural differences in more subtle ways between the Eastern and Western world.  Within Europe there are big differences between the cultures of say the France, Spain and Italy.  Even in the U.K, the U.S and Australia, which essentially stem from the same cultural basis there are noticeable differences.

These differences clearly aren’t genetic, they are caused by our environment.  This can be seen by people who have left one culture for long enough and immersed themself in their new culture.  Their behaviour and standard of what is normal changes by the standards around them.

What is at the root of these cultural differences and standards is the framework through which life is seen.

What Is A Framework?

Life is too big for us to be able to perceive and digest holistically while we are involved with it.  So like viewing an elephant that is right in front of us, we take in one bit at a time.  

photo credit: muztiko 

This is why it is so important that often we detach from the cut and thrust, to get enough distance to see the big picture and put each piece in perspective.

photo credit: quinn.anya 

A framework is a way of structuring what we see around us in a logical, organised sequence.

Perhaps the most powerful and universal framework is of time.  It is in fact so powerful and so pervasive that people forget that it is a framework.  The past and the future seem to happen linearly.  And so we place our experience in a chronological sequence.

Then there are geographic frameworks.  Good and bad frameworks.  Skills based frameworks.  And so on and on.

The point is whichever framework we use, determines our emotional and behavioural response.  Use one and the break up will be prolonged, bitter and painful.  Use a different one and it can be amiable and a relatively positive learning experience.

In other words, caring what others think has a price.  A big price.  

You can either get over the relationship cleanly and with minimal stress or exacerbate the bitterness in return for the hope that you can show yourself in a better light.

Or in my own framework;

You can be right or you can be happy.

What do you think?  How does your experience relate to this concept?  Share your thoughts below and we can delve deeper into this topic.

Now the topics that I generally write about would tend to be classed by many as personal development, so it might seem strange for me to say such a thing.  The problem is that I don’t really fit into an existing category.  And neither do you.  

I think personal development is flawed.  In truth, I write about the same things as spiritual writers, but I don’t typically use a lot of esoteric language, because I don’t see any distinction between physical and spiritual and so I’m not classed in that group.  So this post, which is a kind of manifesto for my philosophy of following your bliss, might disturb a few people, but hopefully it will clarify and explain why I believe it is a sounder basis than personal development.

Why Personal Development Is Screwed?

We are naturally multi-dimensional beings.  We react differently to different people and different contexts and we seek multiple goals.  

• We want to be healthy.  
• We want to be rich.  
• We want to be loved.  
• We want to do things that are meaningful and significant.  

So, often life seems like a delicate balancing act.

The traditional cultural belief is that happiness is the result of some kind of equation.  The equation changes depending on your beliefs, but most go something like this.  If you reach great health and have lots of money and people to share it with, then life will be perfect.  So most people would agree that we need at least;

• Health
• A satisfying career
• A rewarding relationship
• A smooth running household
• And probably some degree of spiritual meaning.

Let’s plot out that belief visually.

Now to achieve each aspect of that equation, we would have to take into account lots of different aspects of each factor.  For example, to be happy with our relationships, most of us would need;

• At least one intimate relationship,
• A healthy relationship with our Parents (Maybe Step Parents and possibly Grandparents)
• If we have Children (Step Children) to get along with them,
• Extended family, such as Aunts, Cousins etc
• Some trusted Friends,
• The ability to relate to those we meet socially,
• To get along in our career, we’ll need to be able to get along with people we interact with professionally and also acquaintances like neighbours and so on.

 So this would probably look like this visually.

In dealing with our health, we’d need;

• To pay careful attention to our diet,
• To take some exercise,
• To avoid or limit consumption of toxins, such as Alcohol and drugs,
• If we’re on medication we should be aware of the side effects and the best treatment for conditions we have,
• We’d need enough sleep and fresh air,
• And we’d need to manage our stress levels and general emotional wellbeing.

Visually, it would look something like this.

Then we have to manage our homelife, doing such chores as;

• paying our bills,
• doing the shopping,
• balancing the accounts,
• dealing with schools, sibling squabbles and other Parenting issues,
• keeping up with housework and maintenance and so on.

Here’s the visual of that.

Now each of those elements can then be broken down into more detailed steps, you need to be aware of and increase your competence levels at.  If you were to take just one aspect of one of those Relationships, for arguments sake, the ingredients of a successful intimate, personal relationship, you’d need to consider lots of other aspects to be sure the relationship was working for both sides.  Questions such as;

• Are you paying the other person enough attention?
• How is the communication between the two of you?
• Are you still physically attracted to each other?
• Is the sexual relationship still working?
• How open are you both, or are their barriers between you?
• Is there trust between you?
• Do you have the emotional intelligence to work through issues?
• Does your relationship work for your social life or are friends and your Partner completely separate?
• Do you have common goals and interests?
• Does the relationship still allow you to maintain a sense of personal balance?

Visually it would look something like this.

The default perspective on this is that if we get a big tick, next to each goal we will automatically be happy.  And so it seems that we have to run around keeping lots of plates spinning at the same time.  

Today, when we have reached a point where just Youtube alone has 20 hours of video uploaded every minute, we are exposed to such levels of information overload that it is impossible to keep up with almost any topic.  

And so almost all of us are stressed, exhausted and burnt out from running to keep everything we are juggling in the air.  Because once we stop everything will come crashing down to earth.  

It’s crazy.  So to put this into perspective, let’s look at just some of the plates we are trying to keep spinning.

And that’s without breaking down most of the main factors into more detail.  And when you consider that it takes 10,000 hours to develop excellence at anything, what chance do we have of mastering more than one of these tasks?

Is it any wonder that people are so burned out trying to keep up with everything they think they need to keep up with?

Conservatively, depending on how complex your life is, that’s something like 180 - 300 plates spinning in the air.  Can you really be aware of and develop all those aspects in your life?

The problem is that much of the areas that people are spending their time developing their skills is because they are trying to fit a cultural ideal rather than what is truly them.

This is why people end up taking expensive holidays to exotic locations and end up in a different location, but their time and attention are still stuck miles away through their mobiles and laptops.

The irony is that even when they reach the threshold that they thought they’d get the tick marked off, they find it doesn’t fulfil them anyway.  Because their fundamental assumption was flawed.

Here’s Why So Many People Find That Despite Running Faster To Get Ahead, The Treadmill Just Keeps Speeding Up 

If you pursue great health and achieve it, you will get healthy.  

If you pursue a loving relationship and attain it, you will get a rewarding relationship.  

If you pursue and create a rewarding career, you’ll end up with a rewarding career.

But great health does not equal happiness.  Nor does a loving relationship.  Or a rewarding career.

You see, people have misunderstood this distinction for so long that it is a foundational flaw in our cultural mentality.  

Happiness is not an equation.  It is a state of being.  An emotional location of consciousness.

There are many people that are happy in poor health.  And many that are radiantly healthy and unhappy.

There are lots of people in a happy relationship, that are still unhappy.  And many people who are deliriously happy without a relationship.

And again there are people happy without a rewarding career and those unhappy with one.

So Why Are There Unhappy People Who Seem To Have It All And Happy People Who Seem To Have Little?

The first and second commandments that Moses gave are;

ONE: ‘You shall have no other gods before Me.‘ 

TWO: ‘You shall not make false idols.‘ 

In other words, I’m the one to focus on and don’t get distracted by worshipping false idols.  I propose that the cultural pursuit of happiness has been one of worshipping false idols. Let me explain.

We set off along a path, our path, in the journey of life, that we hope and believe will lead us to happiness.  And as we travel along this path we meet crossroads that signpost great health, wealth, relationships and so on.  At the end of each path seems a prize so bright, that we are drawn to it.  

The challenge of life is how well we can deal with the temptations of false idols.  Most of the time we fall into the trap of believing that if we can just contort our life out of shape for a little while, until we attain the glittering prize, we can then put everything else straight and life will be perfect.

And that is how we lose ourselves.  

We throw ourselves into our careers headfirst and sacrifice our homelife, our health and sanity.  ’If I can just get that promotion’.  

Or maybe your achilles heel is in relationships.  Do you lose contact with your friends and own interests to develop a relationship?  Do you give up your own interests, pursuits and aspirations for the sake of a relationship?

Some people get so obsessed with what they should be eating, what their exercise routine should be and delving so deep into their health and appearance that they lose all sense of balance in their life.  

Buddha covered this well with his idea of the middle way.  You can get a grasp of most issues, enough that will affect you by using the 80/20 rule.  

Now let’s deal with the God issue.  What is the idea of worshipping God?

That you can join with him and become complete, thereby achieving a state of blissful ecstasy.   Therefore aren’t the promise of the two states, being at one with God and happiness, the same?

So then if you replace the word happiness for God, the first commandment says to pursue happiness before every other goal.     And the second warns against falling for the temptations of false Gods or false goals.  

So now if we look at the path to bliss in a new light, we can see that those oh, so tempting diversions cause us confusion as we are focused on too many targets.

The truth is that there is no equation or no single path to happiness.  Happiness is the result of you being you.  It is the idea on which personal development is based on, that you have to be better, that makes you get off your own path and follow someone else’s.

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”

Joseph Campbell

It might sound a little confusing if this contradicts everything you’ve previously believed.  It is not that happiness cannot co-exist with good health, happy relationships and a fulfilling career.  It’s just that you cannot ever place any of those things in front of your own happiness without losing your self and sacrificing your happiness.  

And yes, personal development can be a part of your evolving happiness.  But it’s not your business to be perfect.  Your business is to be perfectly yourself.  And being yourself might mean obsessing about a particular topic.  My path is to obsess about the nature of finding and following your bliss.  

The difference is that you do it, not because you think you should or it might make you happy, but because it takes you deeper into what you are.

So when the topic of health comes up, don’t fall for the media’s fear stories or medical doctrine,  find where you stand relative to that issue and carry on your path.

When your relationship has your attention or you begin a new relationship, don’t lose yourself to please another, find your centre and act from that.

When your Employer or major Customer demands X, Y or Z, don’t bend yourself out of shape to pacify them, act from who and what you are.

“For what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul.” 

Let me explain some of the things that brought this to light for me.  This is quite a ramble and might seem to go off on a tangent, but at the end it should tie together the strands.

One was reading the comments where some people, quite a lot actually, had misunderstood what I meant and taken me to be intolerant of depressed people as opposed to the state of depression.  

What I said was how terrible it felt to think and feel as someone feeling depressed did, when I entered their world and experienced their thoughts.  Not how terrible it was to be around someone depressed, but how terrible it was to feel trapped in a depressive mindset.  I believe anyone in a state of depression must be best served by getting out of that state as soon as possible.  And that begins by being so intolerant of misery that you will change anything to get out of that state.  

Secondly, while this was playing out in the back of my mind there was coincidentally a local event that was generating the most media interest and buzz in our town since the Suffolk Strangler serial killer was on the loose.

Perfectionism And Compassion

The reason, Roy Keane, renowned ex-footballer and eternally controversial figure has just been appointed Ipswich Town F.C’s new Manager.  So there has been a lot of speculation as to how he will do.  Having been asked my opinion by people, I consider that he will do great initially, but will eventually end in turmoil.  

My reasoning.  I think it’s sad, but there are some people that are technically brilliant, but lack the ability to relate to people or accept them as they are.  And then that becomes a block to them achieving their goals.  Glenn Hoddle, another rumoured to be in line for the Ipswich job, is a classic example of a technically gifted Manager whose ego seemed to get in the way of being able to relate to his players.

Having read Roy Keane’s biography and interpreted the stories around him, it seems he has an unrelenting drive for perfection that will in time, prove impossible for players at a club such as Ipswich.  

Ipswich are by many standards a good team.  However they are not and will never be great in the sense AC Milan, Barcelona, Manchester United, Real Madrid and Liverpool are great.  They don’t have players of the calibre of Roy Keane, Kaka and Steven Gerrard.  They have, to be brutally honest, second and third tier players.  The kind that Roy played with for the Republic of Ireland.  

I read in his biography that many of the other International players were unhappy at the way that Keane passed the ball, thinking he hit it to them too hard for them to control easily.  You see, he was used to playing with people like Beckham and Giggs who could control a ball perfectly.  But when he dropped down a level to play for his country, his team-mates were less skilled.  And he was not prepared to drop his standards.  

Ultimately, this led to his acrimonious International retirement, when he stormed out of their World Cup bid because he felt the set up wasn’t professional enough.  

So there is a gap between Roy Keane and the previous manager Jim Magilton, a former club player who graduated to managing the club, that is not just about technical skill.  There’s something in the make-up of the person.  Something that drives them beyond the point where any normal human would give up.

What would drive any sane human to want to win a football match so much that they would risk their life by playing on with a broken neck as Bert Trautman did?

How can someone dig so deep that they can inspire a mediocre team playing the best in the world to come back from three goals down to win despite all the odds as Steven Gerrald did in the European Champions League final?

Or then follow that up the next year by picking himself up, barely able to walk from cramp and exhaustion to score two goals to win the FA cup?

Or how about Rocky Marciano, one of the smallest and lightest heavyweight Champions, but the only one to ever remain undefeated.  In one particular fight he was battered and bleeding so profusely that the Referee wanted to stop the fight, but after pleading agreed to give Marciano one more round in which he got up and knocked out his opponent? 

In other fields look at someone like Robert De Niro, who is so driven to perfectly portray the Character he plays that he takes on their personality and characteristics.  

Or someone like David Blaine who seems to push his body beyond all reasonable limits.

What drives and enables someone to want to and be able to dig into an extra level of resources and  to such extreme dedication to their art?

It’s clearly beyond the bounds of logic or ordinary enthusiasm.  It’s about becoming so gripped and consumed by a passion for something that you delve beyond the ordinary, and perhaps, into the zone of madness.

Ultimately therefore, I believe that Roy Keane, unless he has radically reconstructed his psychological DNA will not be able to tolerate his players inability to commit or dedicate themselves as wholly as he is.

So as I thought about this, with the comments and views people expressed in the back of my mind, I realised that there was a similar dynamic going on with me and the state of depression.

The Drive To Understand Life

Einstein said that he was driven, not by the love of physics or even science, but by the need to understand God’s thoughts.  I can understand that.  Probably since birth I have been driven by a similar need to understand.  So now as a result I am not too far away from 4 decades on this planet and have absorbed and consumed so much information, observation and experience on a relatively narrow focus that I see the world significantly differently than almost everyone else.

Some people refer to this as being more evolved or further along a path.  Someone even recently suggested that I was on a higher level to them.  And I know a lot of Author’s and Speakers try to create an aura around themselves to suggest that they are somehow further along a path.

But that’s not true.  

To think in those terms is only a trick aimed at putting oneself at the centre of the universe.  None of us are any more enlightened or evolved as a person than anyone else.  There is just life that can be experienced on many levels.  Which you experience depends on your perceptual focus.  But that does not in any sense make one person better than another.

Some of us have just focused so narrowly and for so long that we have a highly evolved and developed skill in a specific area.  It is one thing to master a domain specific skill.  But it is entirely another to take that skill from one narrowly focused domain to translate it and generalise it to everything in your life.

That is why there are many genuises, but so few in the class of Buddha, Lao Tsu and Jesus.

The only way to understand life, to know God’s thoughts, is by making sense of the patterns it leaves behind.  Having seen and considered Life, happiness and the way we live for so long and so deeply, I tend to see patterns easier and earlier than most people.

photo credit: nagillum

In other words I have an evolved skill to notice and point out some of the patterns of life.  There is just something hardwired in me that drives me to be more driven to do this than any normal sane person.  And so I cannot understand why other people are not equally driven to pursue such an understanding of life.   

When I have talked with people in what you might describe as a Coaching situation, it is almost always them that wants to end the call.  I am just getting going, but they say it is like their head is exploding with ideas and insights and they need to digest them.  It becomes uncomfortable to expand too much, too quickly. 

Now if there is a character trait that is the polar opposite of mine, it is that which the chronically depressed hold.  Depressed people have little interest in understanding Life, they generally just want the result of feeling happier without wanting to change and don’t see the correlation between the two.

So much like it will be hard for Roy Keane to accept less than total commitment to footballing excellence, it has been hard for me to understand that some people want a slower route to happiness.  

So lets tie up all these strands and see where compassion fits into all of this?

The Two Components of Compassion

My updated thoughts on compassion is that there are two parts to it.  

The first is wanting the best for the person.  With best being defined as achieving the highest possible level of attainment.   And the second is accepting that they reach that, if and when, they are ready.

It’s much like travelling to a certain destination.  You work out where you want to get to.  Then you travel to it at the speed that is most comfortable for you.  Some will travel  along at 100 miles an hour.  Others will poodle along at 20 mph.  It all depends on your comfort levels.  

And just as fast drivers get frustrated behind slow drivers and vice versa.  So too do people get frustrated at people travelling along their emotional paths at different speeds.  People such as myself and Roy Keane love our art and want everyone to see the beauty that they could achieve.  More than the person concerned actually wants or can conceive of for themselves.  And this leads us to want them to go faster than they are ready to go.

photo credit: Thowra_uk 

So there are two parts to compassion and along with these comes two pitfalls in being compassionate.

The first is in knowing people can do better and wanting them to go faster than they are comfortable doing so.  The second is (as we spoke about in the last post) in empathising so deeply with the person that you feel their pain and join them in believing the obstacles ahead are bigger than their capability.  And so they stay stuck.  

So maybe we need a balance between acceptance of the Individual’s comfort level and still wanting more for them.  What do you think?  Share your thoughts below.

I have long believed that the concept of ownership is an idea that is mistaken and outdated.  It is at the root of all conflict and until we come up with a refined upgrade we will never live in peace.

photo credit: gjofili 

What I find particularly exciting about the time in which we are living, is that so many of our long cherished and almost unquestioned precepts on which our civilisation has been built are reaching their breaking point.  

Our financial system is crumbling, we have discovered that we can no longer declare war on someone when we don’t like what they are doing and succeed easily, our penal system is already oversubscribed and authority everywhere is losing control.  All of these are glitches in our collective Operating System and all are due for a major upgrade.  

Let’s just think about this for a moment.

photo credit: indichick7 

The planet we live on is thought to be about 4 and a 1/2 billion years old.  

Our species has existed for about 100,000 of those years, maybe 500,000 if you take a looser idea of what being human is.  

The longest a single person has lived for is 130 years, give or take a few years.

Yet we have convinced ourselves that we have a God given dominion over our planet.  What is it that makes us believe that we have any more right to breathe than any other creature or plant?

There are many species that have lived happily long before us and there are species that will live happily long after us.  I wrote recently in the post on depression and compassion about how we slant our view of the world to put ourselves at the centre of it.  Well, our cultural view of ourselves, works to put ourselves bang at the epicentre of the universe and anything else we can conceive of.

Older religions were based on an idea of Gods taking a very active concern over our activities.  Maybe they wanted sacrifices, (note the sacrifice was always someone lesser than us that we owned, an animal, a virgin etc) or were squabbling amongst each other about our destiny.  

Current religious views from the Judaic path, ie Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are all based on their followers being the Chosen Ones.  And therefore at the centre of concern and importance.

As we have become more educated about the world around us and discovered that the sun does not revolve around our planet and that actually we are merely one, of literally billions of planets, we have clung for dear life onto the idea that our planet is special because it is the only one with sentient living beings on it.  

Have you noticed how everything is based around the idea that we are at the centre of importance?

Life is all a story we tell ourselves.  And we naturally choose the story that meets the needs of our ego.

Let us look at the history of our species with the facts as clearly as we can.

It looks like we evolved out of Africa.  And so one day, in search of a more bountiful source of food, some walked and settled in different parts of the world.  With climate and geological changes, the land mass became more fractured.  As a result people became more separated and developed their own individual civilisations, religions and cultural myths. 

After mastering the art of agriculture, people began to settle and so about 10,000 years ago the first societies started to take shape.  

The Nomadic perspective of living off the land changed to a view of mastering the land.  A significant shift in perspective.  And so was born the myth of ‘Man’s dominion over the earth’.  Instead of being seen as a bountiful provider, land was seen as property, an object that Man could manipulate.  And so began the objectification of the world.  

photo credit: babasteve 

Over time, fear and insecurity led to the notion of formal ownership of property.  As the idea of Nation States were born, borders were set.  And so Man became foreign to his Brothers and Sisters.  What was once free for all to roam became fenced off and separated from each other.  Some are allowed in, if they are deemed useful, but others aren’t.  The entire basis for this discrimination, segregation and infringed freedom is force.

The only thing that contradicts the power of these Laws is, if someone with a bigger stick is able to come in and claim ownership.  Then they get to set their rules.  Just like the law of the playground. 

When new land was found, such as the United States and Australia, land became a free for all.  Whoever can reach an unclaimed piece of land owns it.  Sonds very like the rules of the games I played as an infant?  

Who really owns the land to grant it to another anyway?

And today people are selling plots on the moon and ownership and naming rights to stars.  On the Internet we are sold domain names.  In our shops we are sold the flesh and skins of animals.  Many pharmaceutical companies are alleged to have bought up certain healing plants so that they control and profit from their use.  And as Susan Jeffers did, companies can buy the rights to certain words and images. But who really owns these?

If someone mugs and kills someone for their wallet and gets caught they go to prison.  But if someone kills and conquers a country, she becomes Queen, or Emperor or whatever, becomes worshipped and can set the rules and tell the story that gets passed down and becomes the new cultural myth.  

Isn’t there something a little flawed in this picture?

I understand the argument that you need order or chaos will reign.  And that all of our lifestyle, which allows us the time and ability to progress, is built on these principles.  Clearly communism and revolutionary alternative systems are not the answer.  However we do and will need to consider the basis of our ideas of ownership in our own minds.

Why?

photo credit: bob watt 

Because all conflict originates with a dispute of ownership.  Ownership of property, of God, of sovereignty and of perception.  Essentially the conflict boils down to who owns the correct version of reality.  In other words wanting to be right.

Out of the belief we are right comes the idea that we are sovereign over.  Not very long ago, Wives and Children, were (and in some cultures still are) considered the property of their Husband and Father.  Wives pledged to Love, Honour and OBEY.

It is the idea of ownership that causes us to look at people and animals as objects, things that we can do with as we please.  Because they are ours.  This then leads us into a world where slavery and abuse can exist.

We are giving birth to a new idea of the world.  Our growing sensitivity to the pain and suffering of others is pushing for these changes.  The specific example I gave is one of many cases that demonstrate that our current view does not work.  So too is the music industry’s losing battle with piracy.  Ditto Hollywood.  Ditto Prada and every other form of property.

Peace can only come when we stop trying to be God.  We do not own anything, not even our body.  We merely borrow for a relatively short period of time.  Then it returns to the Universe’s recycling centre.  

The world is not ours to change.  It is ours to experience.

But what I see, so often, are people wanting to shield others from the harshness and unfairness of the world.  Our society has developed a complex system of many interacting elements , including the welfare state, political correctness and charities, that is well meaning and intended to save people from the harshness of our world.  But it is often misguided and can actually hold back people’s development.

photo credit: Daquella manera 

Buddhists tell us that all of life is suffering.  To suffer is an unavoidable side effect of humanity.  We are human and so because we perceive from a place of attachment, we are bound to misperceive.  All suffering is rooted in misperception and so our suffering is a result of our inaccurate view and understanding of the world.

You only have to look at an optical illusion to realise how easily our eyes are fooled.  Equally our other senses can be just as flawed.  The world is completely illusory.  It appears to be one thing on the surface, but seen through different eyes or heard through different ears or felt through a different touch it changes.  

Life is to experiences, as a supermarket is to food.  It is possible to make thousands of dishes and recipes from the same basic raw ingredients, but each will have a very distinct end result.  

In the same way, our experience of life depends not on the objective reality, but on where we focus our attention and the recipe we use the raw ingredients around us to make.

Put differently, life is a story and some stories are heartwarming and inspiring, while others are cold and heartless.  Whichever story you tell, determines how you feel and so the quality of your life.

To summarise where we’ve got so far, life is suffering because we misperceive and how much we suffer depends on how deeply and which misperceptions we believe in.  So hopefully now, we can agree that we are fallible in our beliefs?

The obvious next step then is to understand how we misperceive.

Why We Don’t See The Truth 

I recall from my days studying Sociology that one of the founding Fathers of that field, Auguste Comte, believed that Sociologists were uniquely placed to understand and govern society.  This really encapsulates the problem with perception.

We see, hear, feel, smell and taste the world through our bodily senses.  And so we identify with our physical sense of self enormously, often completely.  Emotionally, we desperately need to feel a sense of belonging, a sense that we matter, that we make a difference and that people care about us.  So our ego’s job is to make a story out of the raw materials all around us that places us at the centre of the universe.

As a result, Psychologist’s think all of life is based around what we think.  Nutritionist’s believe we are what we eat.  Physician’s believe we are a machine that they can engineer.  Likewise, our view of what is valuable and important is based on placing what attributes we hold at the centre of the universe.  

About 400 years ago Galileo Galilei was given an ulitmatum; recant his observation that the world was not the centre of the universe or be put to death for blasphemy.  Stephen Hawking says that, “Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science.”  Because whilst every piece of physical data led to the logical conclusion that we were at the centre of the universe, Galileo went beyond perception to discern the truth.  

It is this impersonal scientific approach of hypothesise, test and refine, over and over again, that can free us from the prison of perception.

So why was Galileo such a threat to the religion of his time and place?  

Because if he was right and people believed him, the Guardians of the Church would have to change their viewpoint and so no longer hold their source of power, status and authority.   

So now, let’s relate this to the topic of depression.  

When people make up, not consciously of course, their interpretation of what life is and why it matters, they value certain attributes.  Businesses strategise and call this a Unique Selling Proposition.  It’s the reason why you buy a $50 item from one Vendor over another at $45 or $75.  Individual’s do this too, but mostly without realising it.  Without a personal USP, how would you ever feel that someone would be interested in you or care about you?

So if someone is slim and attractive, they will value physical beauty and see someone overweight as negligent in not caring about their appearance.  If fat or unattractive they will look at physical beauty as superficial and a sign of narcissism.

photo credit: Chesi - Fotos CC 

If they are rich, they will value the acquisition of wealth and believe it to be a sign of status, intelligence and positive attributes.  If poor they may see the rich as selfish, manipulative and possibly criminal.

If clever, they will highlight the importance of intelligence, believing it makes them better.  If less bright, they may look for absent-minded Professors or talk up the value of practicality and common sense.

If they believe themselves to be spiritually evolved, they may downplay worldly concerns and materialism to highlight their other worldliness.  If believing they lack spirituality they might see it as airy fairy nonsense and an escape from the realities of the here and now. 

In other words, people have to find a way of bolstering their self worth by either seeing themselves as positive, or by downplaying the importance of others.  

If they are sick and/or depressed they may make suffering and persecution the way in which they get to stand out from the crowd.

So whenever you identify and attach yourself to a certain attribute and reality, and the world shows you that this is only a misperception, it feels much like someone is rocking your world and shifting your sense of importance from the centre of the world to the periphery.  It feels like someone is trying to eliminate you.  Therefore it feels as if you must fight to stand your ground or you will no longer matter or exist even.

photo credit: epSos.de 

No plant will ever hide or shield itself from the light, but that is exactly what the depressed do.  They shrink and avoid contact with the truth.  For they fear that if the truth were revealed, they would be revealed as worthless, or evil, and cast out and therefore they must hide from it.  That was the point of my post on the secret behind stress and depression.

Yet it is only the truth that will ever save them from the prison of their own mind. 

So now we need to examine what is compassion?

What Is Compassion?

Superficially compassion seems to mean understanding that the Individual has had a hard time or is lacking the development of certain skills and qualities.  Therefore we should be understanding of the difficulties and obstacles they face and expect less of them.  In short, it seems we should accept, it is unreasonable to expect that they can ever be as happy or well adjusted as we can be.  

To me, that’s just another way of slanting the universe to put ourselves at the centre and so make ourselves feel superior.  It is the patronising attitude of many Idealists and Politicians, that in essence say,

‘I, who am more capable than you, will do this for you, because you cannot do it for yourself’. 

To me, that is not truly compassion.  The person is trapped in a prison of illusions and to agree with their misperceptions is to make their illusions seem more real and so bind them even further in their self made prison.  

photo credit: __pereztonella 

I do not care where you have been, what you have done, or where you are right this minute.   I believe that all of us are equal and despite different starting places, I believe in the power of the human spirit to transcend any, and all, circumstances.  I believe know you can be happier and live to a far greater extent than you have demonstrated up to now.  

No-one needs to hide behind excuses.  They hide only from the fullness of what they could be.

Yes, it is harder for some people than others.  But I did not make it harder for those people.  The forces of life, or if you prefer God, did.  Therefore there must be some greater purpose behind the disparity in starting points than we see.  The world we encounter is our interaction with Life, or God.  Therefore for another to mediate between that connection is to distance the Individual from their source.

I share the truth as I see it.  Obviously it is inherently flawed and biased through my own perceptions, but only words nonetheless.  They have no power to hurt, in and of themselves.  So if they cause offence, as did Galileo’s it is only because they threaten a viewpoint you are attached to.

My writings are for the purpose of sharing quicker ways to live with less stress and more happily.  I can only say the steps that need to be taken or the dynamics that hold us back.  I cannot change what must be done in order to reach a place of happiness because someone feels it is too hard for them to achieve.  I can only share the quickest and easiest path that I can see.  That does not change because of  the person wishing the world were different than it is.

My intention is to point out the light, that someone might become aware of it and so have the option to move towards it when they are ready to.  And if that makes me seem offensive, uncaring, unfair and unreasonable then so be it.  

To me that is true compassion.

But of course, as with all things it is a temporary view based on perceptions that may be flawed to value my perspective other others.  So what do you think? 

Share your comments and together we can develop a better understanding and definition of compassion than we have used to date.

Joe had grown up in the same small village all his life and people had always nodded to the mountain when talking about the town on the other side.  He’d often wanted to visit it, but was put off by the mountain in the way.  But he had decided now was the time for him to make the expedition and prepared all his gear for the trek.

photo credit: anne_jimenez 

For four days he walked and climbed.  Eventually, drained from the experience, he arrived at the hotel too late for dinner.  His feet were so sore that when he dipped them in the bath the sting almost made him hit the roof.  He slept soundly that night and in the morning went downstairs looking forward to a hearty breakfast.

As he sat down though, he was astonished to see James two tables away reading a newspaper.  He walked over and, after greeting him, enquired why he had changed his mind and come earlier.

‘I didn’t’ said James, ‘I got the train yesterday’.

photo credit: cliff1066 

The moral of the story is that there are easy and difficult ways to do things.  Life can be a struggle or it can flow.  

It depends whether you want to climb the mountain or go around it.  When I say, you can be happy or you can be right, it is another way of asking if you want to climb the mountain or take the train to go around the mountain.

In our little story, Joe didn’t realise that he had a choice and so his journey was much harder than it had to be.  

What We Can Learn From Depressed People

My last post on the root cause of stress and depression angered at least one person, who saw it as a personal attack on them.  It wasn’t personal and it wasn’t written for depressed people.  It was written because the way to understand the subtle things that we do most clearly is to look at extreme examples and observe the same dynamics that we have, but in a much more exaggerated fashion.  Depressed people are at the extreme of choosing being right over being happy.  And so every day they climb the mountain, rather than take the train around the mountain.

First though, let me explain the dynamics that I have noticed.  Then hopefully you can relate these to your own life and see where you make the same mistake.

We all have access to a range of emotions from depressed to joyous.  And for most of us we visit them all, or most of them, at some point.  It is part of the cycle of life to go through them all.  However some people live much, or most, of their life in depression.

Feeling depressed or despairing can be great.  But only in small doses.  Being able to look at a situation from all sides allows us to make much better judgements.  Because then all options are open to you.  

A well rounded person has lived and seen from each perspective.  Someone who only ever looks from a joyous point of view, lives in a Pollyanna world of peeking out and pretending everything is hunky dory, when it clearly isn’t.  

When I was starting out and finding my feet writing, I used to write about happiness.  I got labelled in with the ‘think positive’ bunch.  And there are so many people who have jumped on that bandwagon and are going about getting people to clap and sing and laugh to artificially make themselves happy that quite frankly, I was embarrassed by it.

The World Sucks And We Are The Children Of Barbarians

The fact is the world sucks.  

Buddha gave us the first noble truth, that all living is suffering.  And it is.  As King Midas discovered, there is really nothing in this world that you really want. 

Honestly look at nature.  It is utterly barbaric.  I used to have this mousemat that reminded me of that fact every day. Every animal wakes up each morning and has to run and/or kill to survive.  

photo credit: Shahrokh Dabiri 

Our society is the result of those who were the most aggressive, the quickest to react most violently to threat and those who were the best at killing.  The peace loving civilisations got conquered and destroyed.  The gentlefolk were butchered.  

And every day you can see the same dynamics in business, politics, financial markets and in our inner city gangs.  A fool and his money cannot walk safely through much of this world.

Even in our homes, many people live with abuse in it’s many forms.  In our workplaces we work amongst deceit and political maneouvering.

In the day and age when we can almost colonise other planets, when we can destroy much of the world with a push of a button, we still would rather squander money on a futile military arms race than feed the starving in Africa.

photo credit: hdptcar

There is no way that all the clapping and singing can disguise these facts for long.

However whilst being aware of these facts, I still want to spend as much of my time in the more positive emotional zones as I can.  Yet I must do it in spite of so much being wrong in the world.

All of life, though it appears in many different forms, boils down to a journey.  I am here and want to be there.  Our emotions are determined by whether we tackle the journey by going over the mountain or by going around it.

The Four Basic Emotional Zones

I see there being four basic emotional zones in life.  

Depressed and despairing. 

Stressed and frustrated.

Finding your purpose and meaning.

Following your bliss.

My time is devoted to helping people move through these more quickly.  Because the natural resting place is in following your bliss, unless you get stuck in an earlier part of the cycle.  

The only stage I typically have nothing to do with is the depressed state.  The reason is that I’ve found I can’t relate to depressed people.  There is too much of a gap between them and I.  We have entirely different goals and ways of looking at the world.  I find it too uncomfortable.  And they are looking for something that I can’t give them.  

And critically, it is hard for them to deal with brutal honesty. 

Now if you look back through the comments of the last post, you’ll see a number of people relate how they hit hard times and became depressed.  And some explained how they found a route out.  That is the key differential I’m talking about here.

Everyone can get depressed, but some people get stuck there and refuse to believe there is any other reasonable response they could have to the world.  If you really want to overcome depression or anything else than you can.  But you have to want it so badly that you are willing to give up any notions you hold on being right.

Depression As A Badge

photo credit: Ptit@l 

I will happily admit that I am no expert on depression.  However I have noticed some patterns with depressed people.  And lacking the ability to be able to keep quiet, I have to share the truth as I see it regardless of the consequences.  It’s certain things that those labelled depressed say that made me wonder what was at the cause.  Things like;

“I wish I had physical symptoms, so people could see how I suffer”.

“I fight so hard, harder than anyone else, but it’s so much harder for me”.

“People don’t understand that it’s a disease”.

Now I noticed these patterns and they baffled me.  Why would so many people use exactly the same terminology?  And more to the point, why are they more bothered about other people recognising their pain, than actually dealing with the pain?

If I have a mantra it is,

you can be happy or right, but not both.

What this really means is that your internal model of how the world should work, fits with what you believe is right.

Accepting the way the world is and adapting your model around that, is what leads to being happy.

Now some of the time the world will coincide with how you believe it should be.  Sometimes you will win.  Sometimes you will get the girl (or boy).  Sometimes things will work out the way you want them to.

And in these times everyone is happy.

But the real test of life, that determines whether you will live happily or be depressed, is what do you do, when life is not how you want it to be?  

When it seems to be all wrong, the first thing that people do is try to change it.  

A natural response.  

But you can only change circumstances in maybe 5-15% of the time.  The rest of the time you can burn yourself out trying to swim against the tide.

And that’s what depressed people do.  

They bash against brick walls, burn themselves out and give up in despair.

photo credit: dno1967 

We all go through despair and it can give birth to greater insight or to ingenuity.  But you then have to change your perspective to find the way out.  But for some they are stuck there waiting for the mirror to smile before they will.  

Happier or more successful people adapt their model of the world to fit in with the reality they see.  In contrast, depressed people get furious at anyone or anything that challenges their model of the world and take it as a personal affront.  

Despite the pain it brings them, they hold on to their model for dear life.    They look at others and convince themselves that their situation is just bad luck, or persecution, and there’s nothing they could possibly do to make it different. Others, they believe, got the good cards.  ’It’s easy for them,’ they say.  And so they play at being the victim.

That is why they want others to recognise their suffering.  Because if they suffer, then life must be harder for them.  Life is picking on them.  Making them a victim.  And so if they are being picked on, they must be special.  And so actually they are the better ones.  

To these depression is not an emotional state.  It is a badge that marks them out as special and gives them the value and recognition they sought from the world in vain.  It’s as if they haven’t learned to wrap themselves around the world and instead are trying to wrap the world around them.  

Depression Is The Natural Response To The World.  Happiness Is A Creative Response. 

That is why I say that happiness comes when your focus is on ideas or people beyond your sense of self.  Because when you go beyond yourself, you go beyond needing to be right and in harmony with the flow of life, you become happy.

Examine when you are happy or unhappy for yourself.  You’ll find that when you are happy, it is because you have lost all sense of yourself in the pursuit of a goal or in exploration.  

Think about the first throes of a romance.  The excitement is all in discovering about someone.  

The bits before the breakdown are all related to how what they are doing, affects you.

No-one is ever happy, when they look at situations through the eyes of ‘how does this affect me’.

Depression is NOT a disease in the medical sense.  Sure, some people are naturally more inclined to a depressive reaction, but they are not without choice.  It is not having learned to lose your attachment to your sense of self that causes chronic depression.  

Depression is a natural response to the world.  To be happy is a developed skill.  

Tto live joyously, is to adapt to this monstrous environment that we are in and to still love life.  That comes by creating your own world.  This is an advanced skill.

As Jesus said ‘be in this world, but not of it’.  

You just have to love life.

If you want a great relationship with your Partner, you don’t need better communication skills or seduction tips or whatever else, you just need to love them.  Not love certain parts of them and wish other aspects of them were different.  But love them completely as they are.

photo credit: nessadoll77 

If you want a fulfilling and rewarding career, you don’t need certificates, job titles and permission, you just need to love what you are doing.  Again, not certain parts, but the whole enchilada.

If you want to be slim and that’s not what you see in the mirror, you have to love the idea of being and becoming slim.

You see, the problem is that most people don’t really love.  Not really.

They have this wishy washy, luke warm ‘I’d like to. but it’s so hard’ desire.  I remember reading in a book by David Deida a line saying something like ‘You have to f*** life as you would your woman.’    

Most people think, ‘if only I didn’t have this problem or if only that person was…’  And so because they are busy whining about the parts they wish were different, they end up contaminating the whole thing, in their mind.  

It’s never enough to get rid of problems.  There isn’t a set formula or recipe for life.  You just have to love it so much that you never push it away from you.  

You see, what happens when we fall out with people is that a gap grows between us.  And in that gap, grows up emotional weeds.  Bitternesses, grudges, resentments and so on.  These keep us apart from reconciling our differences, until we end up on opposing sides of a battleground.  Then we get into a defensive mode and ascribe the other with evil motivations and attack, in order, we justify to ourselves, to defend ourself.

photo credit: jonathanb1989 

There are rows and rows of problems lined up along each of our individual path’s.  Any one of them could upset our emotional equilibrium.  So  it is never enough to get rid of problems.  Because all you end up then with, is a problem-free life.  And while that may seem peaceful, it’s boring.  It’s just the respite before the next problem.

You have to love life so much that you want to stay close and connected to it even when problems hit.  To love life enough to go full pelt and carsh and still keep going.  Because then, you do not leave space for the emotional weeds and debris to grow and separate you from your wellbeing. 

If there is a group of people that I find it most difficult to relate to and work with, it’s depressed people.  The way I am, when I talk to people I explore the way they think and sort of walk around inside their mind.  

My God, that feels terrible with a depressed person.  Being in the mind of a depressed person is like being in prison.  Every glimmer of hope is jumped on and smothered.  It’s constraining and claustrophobic.  Just feeling it for a few moments is horrible. 

photo credit: amandabhslater 

But I have a theory of what is at the root of depression (by depression, I mean chronic, climical depression) based on my limited experiences.  It is that depressed people inherently and deeply believe that they are a bad person.

So deeply do they believe this, and so fearful are they of this being uncovered, that they will go to any lengths to avoid looking at themselves.  Every slight perception or feeling of this being pointed out is quickly attacked and denied.  And the person will go to any lengths to avoid the truth, because they believe to reveal the truth is to reveal their evil to the world.

And so as they run off on their endless wild goose chases, they distance themselves from the source of life.  Into the gap grow the emotional weeds, resentments and bitterness.  And so they feel attacked by everyone.  Constantly bombarded.  And exhausted by fighting life.

But the real problem is that they do not love life.  Instead they fear life.  Everything is seen through the perception of how can this harm me, rather than what is lovable about this.