Category: attitudes

Should you strive for leaving a legacy to be remembered by?

footprint in the sandThis is continuing the theme I started in my last post, looking at your life and priorities. This is a politically incorrect article… The footnotes are really important in this article, don’t miss them.

Let’s take a near posthumous look at your life… so you can see what was important, and do it while you still have time.

If you are afraid of death: this is especially for you. 1

Someone who lives fully and does what is important to them, isn’t afraid of death. They weren’t afraid of life, they aren’t afraid of death. That doesn’t mean they want to die… they are just not driven to panic by the sight of an life that never happened.

Yesterday I spoke about wanting to get my work out… but upon further examination, I realized that I fell for the cultural, societal mumbo jumbo, that is designed to have you be unfulfilled, and lose your self interest.

What am I talking about?

About legacy… What is your legacy? Can you feel the cold hands of dread squeezing your heart?
Continue reading “Should you strive for leaving a legacy to be remembered by?”

Make consciousness guide you and other important stuff

yoda-feel-the-forceAs you may know, I work with consciousness… Let me rephrase that: I send consciousness to do research for me before I choose a path.

Of course, consciousness is not some entity independent of me, so it cannot go far… in essence, consciousness is on a leash: unless I go, it cannot go. So, I am talking about working together: I go, consciousness looks.

So it is like a seeing eye dog.

It comes back with lot of options… and it is up to me what paths I can take, and what paths I cannot take.

Can, cannot… can’t I take any path?

After all the saying says: you can be anything you put your mind into… but it is a stupid suggestion for two reasons I can see:
Continue reading “Make consciousness guide you and other important stuff”

The deathbed exercise… death nearing focuses the mind

The deathbed exercise… death nearing focuses the mind

There is a step in the 67 step program that wants you to look at what would be your obituary if you died today.

But there is a much better test, the test:

imagining yourself being on your deathbed: a thought exercise.

Until today I’d thought that what it drives up is all the things you haven’t done, all the things that are important and maybe you can do now… tell people you love them, and other trite things like that.

But today of all days I had an insight.

The insight came because I was trying to figure out what is in common in people who do the 67-step program well, and people who rush through it, skim the surface.

I was trying to categorize them, but I could not see any consistency.

While I was looking, I asked consciousness to look for me too. Continue reading “The deathbed exercise… death nearing focuses the mind”

Frustration… or pushing on a string

bang head hereMy dominant emotion is frustration.

Of course frustration lacks humility… frustration is when you are trying to force your will on reality.

things take as long as they do, people do whatever they do, and you’ll screw up, like everybody else.

But, of course, my soul correction is Forget Thyself… meaning allow life to unfold.

That, allowing anything, is the hardest thing for a human… And allowing and yet feeling powerful is even rarer.

We want to make things happen, rush things along, push, pull… and yell in frustration.
Continue reading “Frustration… or pushing on a string”

You get back what you put in… unfortunately for most.

You get back what you put in… unfortunately for most.

sow-reapDid you notice that I said what, and not how much?

Did you also notice, that you heard: how much?

Do you notice that people seem to say the things you already know?

But you never noticed that they say what they say, but you hear what you have already heard!

When I said: you get back what you put in, I meant: you plant a corn seed, you get a corn plant.

The things you plant are mostly your attitudes. The attitudes that hide just under your conscious level, the attitudes that you lie to yourself and anyone who questions you.

You hope they stay hidden… but they come out in the result.
Continue reading “You get back what you put in… unfortunately for most.”

The many ways to be unhappy, the only way to be happy…

I am out of here attitudeI mean this article to be the first installment in a series.

The underlying principle is the Anna Karenina principle

The Anna Karenina principle

The Anna Karenina principle is: good systems must meet simultaneously a number of requirements. All good systems are alike, bad systems are bad in their own way

Tolstoy said: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

Aristotle said: success/failure: …it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited, as the Pythagoreans conjectured, and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult — to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue;

good/bad: …For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.

But under the Anna Karenina principle there is an even deeper layer, the cause of the principle, and that is what we are interested in here. Continue reading “The many ways to be unhappy, the only way to be happy…”

Do you have free will? What is the ego’s role in that?

Do you have free will? What is the ego’s role in that?
Genetic determinism and the ego’s role in it.

Genetic determinism is the mechanism by which genes, along with environmental conditions, determine looks and behavior.

  • I could also have made the title: your horoscope and your ego’s role in it, or
  • your soul correction and your ego’s role in it.

Continue reading “Do you have free will? What is the ego’s role in that?”

The dangers of having empathy…

understandI saw something really important this morning.

One of my students is planning to build a business that he can do while working for a big corporation full time.

He knows what he wants to do. He knows why he wants to do it. He has the skills: he is good at it. If he gets a client: the client will be happy.

But… having a product, a service, is one thing. Selling it is another thing.

To sell anything doesn’t need you to be good at doing the service, or creating a good product.

Selling is a whole other business.

You either need a partner who can sell anything, or you need to become good at sales. Not easy.

Why? Because to sell anything, an idea, a relationship, intimacy, sex, going on vacation… anything, you need to be able to be in the other person’s head and speak from there.
Continue reading “The dangers of having empathy…”

What do I know that you don’t, that I don’t often get upset? In spite of my peppery constitution…

you live in a world of your own designOne of the things I learned in Landmark Education, 2 is that there is physical development, and there is emotional, ethical, moral development each person needs to go through to become a fully functioning adult.

It was brand new information to me and it blew my mind.

It was new to me in spite of the fact that I was educated, having read thousands of books… even about child psychiatry, and yet, it was an earth shattering revelation to me.

I, like other people, thought that children were born with the capacity to understand why certain things are harmful, etc.

I’d thought that the inability to comprehend and appreciate responsibility for your own actions, for example, was not inability, instead it was unwillingness. Ability as programmed by the genes wasn’t becoming clear to me until about 13 years later. Continue reading “What do I know that you don’t, that I don’t often get upset? In spite of my peppery constitution…”