Tag Archives: Coping Strategies

The Will to Work is The Will to Live

September 14, 2014 The Extropist Leave a comment

Life is movement. It has momentum. It has a rhythm and when it stops – life stops. We have to keep playing the game of life otherwise we will fail to exist and this is core to every living thing in the Universe. Atoms have to keep vibrating. Photons have to keep pulsating. Trees have to keep breathing. Animals have to keep beating and humans have to keep creating.

This rhythm is true to everything in the Universe because its counter-point is entropy, which describes the inevitable decline of every system into chaos and disorder. This decline exists because no system is perfectly balanced and so there is always an energy leak. The leak is catered for by this rhythm of life that we all create. It is the desire to keep moving, to push forward. To do the work we have to, to give the system more energy, and even more energy than from where we started. We have to be inspired enough to take another step even when we have nothing left.

Power of Purpose

So often we hear of people who retire and live without passion, without purpose and then they very soon leave this world. Too often we hear about a person, who has fought the good fight and continued to live on only until they decide to rest. Studies have shown that people in there 80’s who had a daily practice of stagnant resting had close to a 50% mortality rate of surviving over a 6 month period, compared to people who actively engaged through a mindfulness practice that had nearly a 100% survival rate over the same period. What this tells us is that we have to continue to be present to our system, continue to work for our life and our lives.

Will is your Life Force

We turn work into energy that can then translate into many different areas of our lives. When we put work into our relationship, and think to bring gifts, provide help and show our appreciation for the loved ones in our lives – those relationships grow stronger. When we do nothing they wither and die. When we put work into our bodies through exercise, eating healthy, and maintaining a consciousness practice – we live longer. When we become lazy and indulgent with our bodies – we put needless stress and pressure on the system causing it to fail sooner. When we work for our job, go the extra mile, and help out our coworkers, letting them know that we are appreciative of them and respect their efforts – we excel at our jobs. Yet if we lounge around and create discord, we no longer progress and often lose our place.

Energetic Credits of Money

Interestingly much of this energy we put back into these systems of our lives – relationships, work, health – is facilitated by money. And what is money, but merely the easiest and most transferable form of energy. We turn work into energy, which we then can transfer through money. It allows us to buy and grow our lives through credits we have done for work. All this work that we do in our lives results in money and this money we can transfer into each system to help maintain the overall human system. So as you can see every system in your life requires work and energy to fight the natural tendency of life to break down. And while its hard it’s up to you to maintain these systems, to keep the plates spinning so they don’t fall, to keep the balls in the air so they don’t drop and break.

But know this: Your will to work starts with you. This work is for you, not for others. Work on yourself and others will reap the rewards. The will to live is generated from the work within and the will to work from you will only then extend beyond the current form. The exciting thing about this work is that it never stops. When we have mastered the current rhythm, we invite ever greater intricacies to the systemic patterns of our life in order that we can continue to expand our repertoire, increase the complexity or our life’s rhythms and grow the breadth of our consciousness to make us ever more creative and effective human systems for the world. So the next time you feel overwhelmed by the work you have to overcome know that you are growing the systems of your life to ever higher places with each and every step forward.

ELEVATE

I Love CHAOS! And YOU asked for it? (The Extropist Series – Part III)

October 18, 2013 The Extropist 1 Comment

I have often pondered over chaos and control. What is the point of chaos? Why do we have it in our lives? And how does it relate to being an Extropist? Then one day it came to me. It’s there because we ask for it to come into our lives. And when I understood this I realized that I love chaos. This new idea about chaos came when I learnt something about evolution. EVOLUTION REQUIRES CHAOS. When something in the environment is destroyed and removed from the eco-system it creates space for new beings in this system to come in and take advantage of the change. The new being evolves to then thrive in this new system structure and be more effective and powerful than before.

This is the same thing that happens in our own lives. Something comes along and throws the stability out of our world by changing the environment. It is then up to us to best develop and evolve ourselves in order to better handle the new environment. We are forced to reassess the structure and workings of our world, tear it down and rebuild it as a new and stronger, more effective system. So you might begin to see that chaos is a good thing, but people don’t see it that way.

The Problem of Chaos

Several things make chaos seem like a bad thing. Firstly, we are hesitant to break our world down as we have become comfortable in the world that we have created. Next, rebuilding the system of our world takes energy and work. Energy that we may not have or are reticent to spend on reconstructing our world to take into consideration the change in our environment. And finally, it is the resistance that we have to the chaos and change that limits our ability to properly function and motivate ourselves to use our energy in the most effective manner to make change.

Calling Chaos

The only difference to what we see in the larger phylogenic (or species) evolution is that people can consciously create change from an ontogenic (or individual) evolution that feeds the change for the species. What this means is that we call chaos into our lives so that we can evolve our individual system. That’s right! You literally ask for chaos to come in and mess up your world. WE CREATE CHAOS! Chaos is simply disordered energy. We need more energy to increase the size of our life and perpetuate our evolution. But this energy wont just come on a platter as a ready to plug-in battery pack. Sadly, that’s not how it works, nor would it be fun if we didn’t have to solve how to evolve.

When chaos enters into our lives, there is a greater overall amount of energy now in our lives. However this disorder is causing the current system to become inefficient, as it has not been calibrated to handle the new energy. This is why we often feel unstable and out of control with it’s introduction and so we often have to completely change the whole system in order to handle the new incoming energy. It is this reordering that causes the system to be more evolved as it has learnt how to better work with the new energy in the system. This can then have a trickle down effect for the whole species because then when another person sees how this new way of being is more advantageous they may choose to follow the new system. Then another. And another until critical mass is reached and there are more people using the more advanced system than the old. So you see that chaos might actually be a good thing for not only you, but everyone.

Karmic Chaos

But you may ask “how can we call chaos into our lives? And why would we?” Well, I’m certainly not advocating forcing chaos into your life by doing something dangerous such as jumping off a cliff, but rather begin to listen to the natural ebb and flow of life. Chaos is partially karmic, as it is a consequence that mirrors the amount of energy that you have put into your life. You are actually asking for the injection of new energy because you have used up all your energy in the system and now you are getting an equivalent amount of energy back to work with. Its kind of like pushing the pendulum. When you push it away from you, you get the fruits of the upswing, but slowly it reaches the top and eventually stops moving. So we need more energy to bring into the system to continue the growth and that comes back to us in the form of chaos. It is this energy from the back swing that you get to work with to evolve the system.

With each swing you get stronger and so you can push the pendulum farther. This in turn creates a greater experience and use of the energy in your life. A bigger swing also brings back more chaos into your life. You, however, are now stronger, wiser and more able to handle the introduction of greater chaos into your life. Some people resist and deny the chaos in their lives while others embrace it. There is a great saying, “Small life, small problems. Big life, big problems.” But know this: You can only bring into your life as much chaos as you are able to handle and never more. This is a very important point. This is because you can always handle the force of the return swing because you created the first amount of energy. Therefore the only time chaos can overwhelm you is if you feed into the old way of thinking and tell yourself that chaos is a bad thing due to one of the three points earlier. This will limit your ability to work with the new energy, to evolve the system and create a more amazing life.

So you can see that chaos is intrinsic to creating anything in our lives. Progress requires chaos. We must not be afraid of chaos, but understand it as a natural part of the growth process in life. When you feel the all too familiar feeling of change in the air, that something is happening that is out of your control, trust ultimately that you can handle it. You don’t need comfort and security all the time if you know things will turn out for the best. When you can trust in life and the process of it, you will be able to control the chaos. You can KNOW this because you called for chaos to come into your life. Instead of shying away from the small problems and living a small life, embrace the big problems when they come so that you can live the biggest life you can dream of.

ELEVATE

Transform your cycle of chaos and become an Extropist

March 19, 2012 The Extropist Leave a comment

Often we are caught in a rut and face a trial in our lives that tests our true character. As the weight of this hardship continues to bear down on us, we are left feeling despondent and down. We don’t know where to turn and we feel we are being closed in on from all around. Some people may say, “Don’t worry. Be happy”, but this misses a grave point. You should never deny an emotion. Every emotion needs to be expressed in some form. Instead, acknowledge it and see if you can transform your thinking around whatever this problem may be. Transformation can come in many different forms: through writing, painting, and movement. It doesn’t have to be artistic but in other endeavors such as sports and giving back like volunteering.

There are many different ways to transform your chaotic situations in life (See “How to Make a Mistake“) but I am here though to talk to you about one particular way different from all the ways I have mentioned. By using this technique, you create opportunities to see change and by giving yourself enough space from the weight of the situation to open yourself up to new possibilities. I am referring to the transformative power of gratitude. Gratitude is an amazing way to transform any problem because it allows us to find the hidden gems that lay dormant in something, even when we were just taking that thing for granted. Taking it for granted as something unimportant or something that was a thorn in our side. There are always moments of true beauty that exist in all of the minutia. In death, in life and in everything in between, there is always a space for us to find the gems that lie within and open us up to the transformative power that will begin to move us away from the chaotic spiral down.

When we truly give our thankful attention and energy to something, we open ourselves up to the greatest potential that exists in it. We also open ourselves to the greatest growth and the fastest path of growth or as it is known the path of least resistance. That is not saying there is no resistance, simply the least amount that we will feel. Everyone has growing pains, in all aspects of our lives: physical, emotional and mental. It is up to us to change the cycle of our lives. We get caught in the spinning downward momentum of the entropic spiral into chaos and disorder. The only way to make a change in direction is to inject enough energy into the cycle in order to, not only slow down our ultimate destination untoward chaos but also to, actually reverse the cycle’s direction all together toward an extropic upward direction.

Extropy is the opposite of entropy (downward spiral to chaos and disorder) and instead involves us moving toward greater harmonious and more organized complexity in which we have greater functionality in order, to not only handle the trials in our lives but, to flourish. We can find this magical energy through gratitude. Gratitude is the energy we inject into the system that reverses us away from chaos. It shines a light on what normally appears destructive and gives us hope and energy to work though that, which normally has left us feeling empty and alone. Gratitude fills us up with the needed motivation to move through the tough times and keeps our wits about us in order to remain conscious enough to learn the lessons and evolve. Gratitude is the energetic tool for mankind to make an evolutionary leap in consciousness. So when you are facing a trial and your faith and focus is waning, and you are feeling overwhelmed by fear, look for what you can to be grateful for. Even when you are caught within what some may consider the muck and the mire you can lift yourself high above the place you are in to be the best person you can be and move powerfully towards finding your joy.

EXPLORE

The Ego trips

December 9, 2011 The Extropist 1 Comment

How interesting the reaction one person can make upon their feelings being hurt. They lash out in some futile manner trying not to heal but instead to harm. They want to take what was taken from them. What is it about an eye for an eye that is so consuming? The ego or personality is a place of immense power and control in our lives. It is thought to exist as personality and contains all the programs necessary to exist in the world. The same way that the muscles around our spine have learnt to compensate for injury in order to keep us standing tall so too does our ego implement behavioral programs in order to protect us. Often though we protect ourselves at the detriment of ourselves because are we really trying to protect ourselves or our ego. Because if our ego fails our world feels like it will all come tumbling down.

Our ego deliciously forms early in life. Some say from before the time of birth, but I like think to about it from the perspective of the rule of 7. The rule of 7 states that approximately every 7 years we move into a new stage of being. The first (0-7) is about learning the social norms and about how we exist in the world. The second (7-14) is our learning of control in the world. This means we understand ourselves relative to another and the power we exert of others. We start to learn about relationships with things and people. The next seven (14-21) further identifies our purpose and inclinations in this world for who we want to be. We can can begin to look at the development of the ego in each of these stages. Our parents and guardians in the first 7 years help guide how we handle mistakes and understand who we are. The ways that we need to act in this world. As we progress we learn from our now friends and family how we are to relate to people and what we get from them. By gaining these wisdoms we define who we are. We ultimately learn to understand ourselves through the actions that we have attained to operate in the world. And when these lines of controlling the world are violated we lash out in order to invalidate the people who are highlighting the way that we know how to live is faulty.

This is the reason why people who subscribe to religion are so vehemently opposed to criticism, because religion explains the meaning of life. The way to operate in life. It explains the finer purpose and gives a definable construct about life and existence in a way that enables a person to feel like they have control. Science does exactly the same thing. It gives us a verifiable way in which to understand life so that we may feel that there are rules that we can follow to survive. That there are lines and objects that we can give definitions to so that we can know what things are and feel safe about them. When we lose that control we lash out. When we feel unsafe we feel alone and vulnerable. That we don’t have a connection to anything or anyone. We want to take the power back in order to provide that stability again to our understanding of life. It is the behavioral programs that provide the feeling of stability and control. But ultimately when we implement the programs we are left feeling more hurt. More empty. a greater level of dissatisfaction. We have maintained the status quo. Our ego is still intact, but at what cost? How do we handle our life in a win-win manner? So what to do?

Well there might be a way. What if the norm wasn’t “an eye for an eye” but instead “human to err, divine to forgive”. We must surely heal and move through the hurt so much smoother if we were to easily be able to forgive. But our ego steps in and asks for it to be recognized. Acknowledge me. See me. Hear me. Tell me that I matter. Tell me that I am real. Well there is another place that we can hear all that and it doesn’t rely on any connection to a person or group it relies on your connection to you and you’re giving to something bigger than yourself. You exist whether someone sees you or not. Whether someone shows you affection or not. It is from that space of connecting to something bigger that we can hold conviction. That we can hold integrity. It relies on trust and faith. In ourselves. In our dreams. I trust in the future and I hope you do too? Thank you.

ELEVATE

Calculating the Love Connection

December 6, 2011 The Extropist Leave a comment

Isn’t it wonderful that there is someone in life to think sweet thoughts about, whether or not you are in a relationship with them. I was at my best-friend’s wedding, and in his speech I gained an amazing insight into what the feeling of love really is. He helped me understand that this person you are focussed on is a person that inspires you to want to be the best person that you see yourself becoming. It is that feeling of inspiration, of wanting to be the best that you can be for this person and the world that we call “In-Love”. But it is equally important for you to realize that it is not the person themselves, it is the connection between the two of you. You are the person that feels the love “IN” you. Love is not given to you, it is conjured within, and is up to you to accept and acknowledge that experience of it within. You recognize love from your connection with another person. This is because whatever you put out you always get back.

The Love Equation
Newton’s third law of motion and force states “Every action always has an opposite and equal reaction”. Love is an e-motion or a force that motivates us. This means that the only way you can experience love is by giving love. It is reflected back to you. Therefore the more love you give, the more it will reflect back.

The Love Mirror
The amount reflected back to you depends on the reflective surface onto which you are shining. The person that you are sending your love to needs to be able to accept the love within themselves in order to be able to reflect it back. You will only be able to receive the amount of love reflected back to you as the person is able to absorb. It is the same as saying “you can only love another as much as you love yourself”. For example, let us say that you are providing a stadium light worth of love but the person only has a mirror the size of you palm. You wont actually receive that much back. Furthermore their mirror might actually be directed at someone else so that even more will be lost. Therefore it is important to make sure you are always giving to yourself as much as you are giving to your partner.

Give without Expectation
Here is one trick to ensuring you will get love back though. Give without expectation. If you give love without expectation of receiving back, you will always walk away with a smile in your heart because you have not limited yourself to the single connection but given for the sake of the whole universe, of something much bigger than the both of you. When you give for something bigger than yourself you will always and truly receive that which is equal to that which you have given” You can use this love equation for anything, for a connection with a person, for a connection with a thing, for a connection with an action, for a connection with a thought, for a connection with anything and everything. Lets say you love playing guitar. By giving to the action of playing you are getting a much richer love for yourself and the music than if you merely listened to it on the radio. You will find new understandings about where the music can go and where it can take you. This is all because of the millions of different variables that exist between the player and the music: The tone, the pitch, the timbre, the rhythm, your emotion, your content. So many different ways that these variables can come together that you will be able to create such a rich and fulfilling experience. Now think about this connection and all the variables that exist between two people and you can times the richness of connection by infinity. Which is why I might add it is so difficult to define “Love”, because there are literally infinite ways for it to be experienced and it is the same for wisdom.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3gMgK7h-BA&w=420&h=315]

The Love Connection
When we think of romantic love between partners, we can see how the love connection is developed from your experiences and interactions, your support and intimacy, your absorption and your teachings, from anything and everything that bounces between you two between each of you individually and the outside world and between both of you together and the outside world around you. All these things add up and build the love connection. I like to think of it like an internet connection. The more experiences you share, the more intimately you get to learn about yourself, your partner, what they want and what you want. And as we know more information you have access to, the more bandwidth you have built into that connection. The greater the connection the richer the experience and the more mature the love that you will feel.

Equating your Love Connection
Upon deciding on our partner, we take into considerations the things that have worked for us in the past that we have built and we ask for those things to be equally present. We also acknowledge those things that haven’t worked for us and it is when we have shone the light on these things that we can then better help understand what we need to build a connection this next time to better serve us in creating a richer love connection. Sometimes we aren’t always aware of what does and doesn’t serve us and other times we believe we want things built from a reactive state. The only place you create your life from is your present not your past. Therefore build your love connection from this moment. (For more on this see Shifting paths – Shifting lives). When you have found this someone that your unconscious has calculated as matching the requirements that you need to satisfy the building of the love connection you are looking for, you will begin to feel stirrings of wanting to connect with this person. This feeling is so exhilarating and profound that we naturally feel it is the person that is causing such feelings. Please remember, that they are merely the conduit, the mediator the mirror. Treat it kindly and shine the light of love on it and you will feel the experience of love. Build the connection by learning about each other and you will have ever-richer experiences of love.

The Love Connector
The best way to create and connect to an experience of finding the person that can satisfy the personality variables you are looking for is through a love poem. Write a love poem about the perfect partner. Imagine this perfect partner is on their way over to your house and you want to give it to them as a sign of love and gratitude. Do not have any one person in mind but simply write about how grateful you are for them. Write about the way they make you feel. Write about what things you adore about them. Write about the things you do, say and share with each other. Write about how you communicate and how you support each other. Write it so that you feel it as the Truth within you. When you have finished writing you will be one step closer to your partner. Whether it is a person you have your heart set on or another unknown in the Universe that you know you will attract, because you will be clear in what you want. Your subconscious will have revealed to you what is meaningful and what makes up your current love connection. When you are clear on what you want, you won’t fall into pitfalls of connecting with people that don’t make up the values you are looking for and so you will save yourself time and heartache. When you finally connect with your partner it doesn’t hurt to rewrite the poem of what new love connections you are building at the moment so that you are clear within yourself as to how you want it to grow. The fun part here is that you actually get to give it to the person that you love!

So remember your love exists within you. You build a love connection between you but the love always exists within. The trick is to build a big enough connection that the sharing is quick, easy and inspiring. Give and be open to receive. This goes for anything you do. Walk into any situation by giving without expectation to receive and you will always walk out with a mile on your face. Live from a force of love and you can create anything. Just write exactly what you want and why as if it’s on its way to your door and you will open up to your dream life.

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How to Make a Mistake

December 1, 2011 The Extropist Leave a comment

Often we feel overwhelmed by a situation. We have done everything right but still our plans go awry. We look around us and blame it on the world. This person screwed me; the conditions were not right; etc. And saying this is fine. Sometimes it might be smarter to drop something and forget about it. But sometimes it may be worth stopping for a moment and looking at the situation, and asking yourself whether you can take responsibility for what happened?

Taking responsibility reveals the lesson

It is only when we take responsibility for something do we provide ourselves the opportunity to change the outcome. If you refuse to look at the outcome and say it was someone else’s fault you will never be able to properly see what went wrong and understand how to solve the problem and learn the lesson. It has been said that “What we resist persists, and what we look at goes away”. So maybe you can see that as you open yourself to something rather resisting it, the problem might fall away when you realize that maybe it wasn’t a problem. Maybe what happened was exactly what needed to occur in order for you to move forward and grow into the person that you dreamed of becoming. We live in a society where we have been taught that to make a mistake is “bad”. We spend our whole lives trying to be right but here is something we all need to learn, being right all the time is actually “bad” and learning how to make a mistake in a constructive way is actually so right you wouldn’t believe.

Mistakes you want to make

It has been shown that taking yourself to the limit where you make mistakes is the greatest way to learn, if you deal with the lesson appropriately. Instead of reacting, slow down. Don’t take the mistake as a failure, as a personal attack on your sense of self-worth, but realize that this is one step closer to reaching your goal. This mistake is not an error but instead an opportunity to learn. The more our minds and bodies create impulses that experience and overcome difficulties, the better we will be able to handle these problems in the future. The better we handle problems, the faster we can deal with them to the point where they are no longer problems but a momentary challenge, just like the way a baby learnt to walk. At first even crawling was a serious problem but eventually the baby learnt how to crawl, and then how to steps. Walking suddenly became only a challenge and ultimately it was so automatic that not only did the baby not have to even think about walking, but as the child grew up it could do things like running and surfing as easily as breathing. Without these mistakes the baby would have never made it past the first step.

Outside of now

So ask yourself could this problem be a part of your lesson in order to reach your goals. Try looking at the situation from a higher perspective, one that is outside of only the present moment. Instead think about what this experience means to you in a year’s time or five years time. Now look back and look at how relevant this problem in the scheme of your life that has been. By looking at the problem at hand as a lesson to learn rather than a mistake, you create your space as the actor not the reactor of your life.

Acting or reacting

When you react, you are reacting from an emotional space. There is a difference between feelings and emotions. You actively generate your feelings. Feelings guide your actions powerfully and are the best space to make decisions from as they come from a place of control and clarity. Feelings can take form when you practice gratitude. Give thanks for what you have and where you are in your life and give thanks for your dream and what you are trying to create. Even try and appreciate yourself. Name five things you are thankful for about yourself. (Learn more about gratitude in “Gratitude gets you Zen Continue reading How to Make a Mistake →

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Success lies beyond what you can see

November 10, 2011 The Extropist Leave a comment

If you want to truly attract money. Dont focus on the how. Trying to attract money is a ‘HOW’. Instead focus on your joy. Focussing on the money is telling the universe how you want to reach your passion. We look for money because that brings us control. Control over our lives, over problems, over the external world. But control is not happiness and neither is money. Even with the control from money, you will still attract problems into your life.

People often say when things are looking up, “something outside of my control comes in and knocks it all down again”. That ‘outside of your control’ is actually the very thing that is in your control. You are inviting that into your life because that is your belief structure: Every time you set something up it will be taken from you. Because that is your chaos, to see for yourself whether you believe in yourself and your dreams. Because that is your lesson, to believe in your dream beyond what you can see.

Try finding humility in the good in your life and don’t resist or resent the changes that inevitably come. You will find your peace, you will find your stability and you will find your growth. I always find it interesting that there for some people when things go wrong suddenly there’s always a silver lining and for other people when things go right there’s always a storm cloud around the corner. I don’t believe these people are cursed but instead they curse themselves. Follow your joy, trust the universe and have the faith to keep striving when storm clouds gather.

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” Albert Schweitzer (1875 – 1965) Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

When you follow your passion, when you follow your joy, you will find that life is effortless and you will not need to try to protect yourself as much because you can trust that life and the universe is actually a friendly place. So please know this, the universe does not need to be told “How”. It can see much further in the future than you. So let go of your need for control and money, instead focus on your passion and have faith in yourself and trust that the Universe will know how to get you there.

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Find control by letting go

November 9, 2011 The Extropist Leave a comment

Your life is falling apart around you. Your partner has left you for another person. You’ve been made redundant at your job. Someone close to you dies. Your house got broken into. These are tragic life circumstances. But guess what…? You can still be happy amidst the life chaos because you can “trust in the process”. You can trust in the universe. You can understand that even when everything is falling down around you, you know that this is one moment in a billion moments of life and that it is there to teach us a lesson.

We live in a friendly Universe. Life is a place that grants us so much. Without the bad we would never know the good. Life would be a plateau, like an eternal warm pool that never gave us the feelings of exhilaration and excitement but instead consistency. We all strive for consistency, in one way or another, through the form of control but once we accept that we don’t have control the way we think we do, we actually gain control. This new way of understanding control is that we attract into our lives the perfect thing we need so that we can move forward. So that we can grow. So that we can find our next step.

So often we lose one job, which gives us the courage to follow our dreams and do what we really want to do. Our partner leaves us, only to find the next partner shows us a new way fo feeling love. A loved one dies and reenters into the fabric of the Universe, teaching us about the miracle of life and the true eternal magic that we as people bring into this world. We often resist the change that we have brought into our lives and instead blame those events and people that surround us. In psychology it’s called the actor observer bias. Stop blaming that which is around you. Accept and embrace that which you brought it into your life and move forward and through it. When you finally, breathe a courageous breath and take that step forward you will find a bigger and brighter world in front of you. Remember… There is always a light at the end of the tunnel!

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Creating the next step

July 28, 2011 The Extropist Leave a comment

Many times in our life we are at a cross-roads of what to do. So we pick a direction on what feels right, and “good”, and we take a step for the best. However there are times when we have absolutely no idea of where to go and what to do. So often we are given the question, “what do I want?”. What do I want? What do you want? and so often we are left with no answer. We know there is somewhere to go that isn’t where we are but where is that?

Well here are some things to help. First of all get grateful for where you are currently. You can’t change your emotional frequency to a higher place (and move to a better place in your life) if you are not on a solid ground of appreciation. Appreciation is key to opening yourself to the possibilities of your dream life. Why you might ask? The trick is that you are readying your mind to be aware and take notice of the positive potential in your life, rather than the negative things that surround. Its like when you are buying a car, suddenly the car that you are thinking about buying – you are seeing on the road all around, all the time. The same works for your emotional state. If you are happy, you have prepped your mind to firstly be aware of those positive situations that exist around you. The easiest way to get positive is to get grateful.

Find what serves you in your current situation, what you are grateful for. If you are having trouble seeing the good in your life because of your surroundings, try to reframe the perspective of those around you. You need to get a better view of where people are coming from in order to find what you can appreciate about them. Who are they? What is their situations? Where are they coming from? It may help get clear on the true beauty inside them?

Next put the question out to the infinity of the Universe of what you want. Just ask “What do I want?”. The answer is sure to come if you stay aware and listen inside yourself. notice what things people say around you and you will feel things that resonate positively. Next you take action to get you there. Please note it is not important how you get there but the answers that come to your mind may provide ideas for your next step. The conscious mind is an extremely limited processor, only really able to process things one at a time. The mind only ever properly allows us to see the next step. It is our heart that sees all the way to our dreams. So keep your mind on the next step and your heart well out in front. Now imagine yourself in the role of your dreams. What things would you be doing if you had your dream? How would you be feeling emotionally if you had your dream? Create a space in your life as if your dream existed. The Universe naturally wants to fill that space. The great quantum physicist, Niels Bohr stated, “Nature abhors a vacuum”. You create a space as if something exists and the natural workings of the universe have to fill that space. That’s all the action you have to take. Some call it coincidence, others synchronicity or serendipity. Whatever it is, it works!

Trust in the Universe and trust in yourself. Find patience and love for where you are and where you are going and don’t try to tell the universe how to get you to your dream but instead notice the signs and movements of the world around you and let yourself flow with what it presents. Good luck and enjoy the journey.

As Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi says, “At first the ends justifies the means , but in the end the means justify the end.” Which means you may think that the job is what will make you happy but in the end you will realize it was all you did to get there that was most rewarding 🙂

ELEVATE

Be a Circle and Be Yourself

February 27, 2011 The Extropist Leave a comment

What is it about the modern-day metropolis and its subsequent elements that have left the average person so disenchanted with their life. One element that is noteworthy in creating disharmony in our lives is the concept of how integrated we are as people. The modern person exhibits a form of schizophrenia in which they have split their lives into different people for different situations. We have one personality for our work, another personality for our friends, for our partners, for our family, for our leisure time and ultimately we are left in the dark from ourselves, not knowing who we really are.

Not only do we not properly know ourselves but we end up fighting with ourselves about which of these people is going to get the most of our time. The currency for our personality is time and we shell it out often so haphazardly that we don’t really end up investing properly in any of ourselves. Imagine yourself as if you are a point in the center of a page sending out lines of energy to each of the different personalities you are fostering. Each time you give to one personality however it means you are taking energy away from another person. We end up wrestling with ourselves trying to give out to all these elements and ultimately we don’t really give anything authentically or optimally.

“Living optimally” is an interesting idea. What does it mean to live optimally and what does optimally mean to our lives? To live optimally means that we are giving the most to our lives that we can in the shortest and easiest way that we know. We are using all of our resources effectively and efficiently without the waste. In entering the green age of sustainable resource management, we understand that we need to think how to ever increase the sustainability of what we do by increasing the longevity we get out of anything we use and do. We too need to think about how we can use our mental resources as effectively as we can. Many people don’t realize but we actually have a type of mental fuel which we can use up the same as a tank of fuel in our car. In a car we can waste a tank of fuel by riding around not really planning our route to the shop or we can work out the best way to get to our destination and then take the most direct route there. This is the same for our minds. We need to work out the best way of performing our task in order to use our mental fuel most effectively.

One way of living optimally and using our resources effectively is integrating our personalities. We can organize our lives so that we aren’t fighting for resources but instead we can have it so that all our activities are giving to the things which make us most happy. Instead of compartmentalizing your life into many small things, simplify your list of who you are to the things that you most care about in ways that allows you to be able to give more to your life. Which things bring you the most joy?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP4abiHdQpc]

Try this as a practice:
1) Write out all the ways that you are creating yourself, all the things you are giving your time to.
2) Cut out all the things you don’t like doing. You may actually find that there are things you aren’t even doing that you now have room for doing by removing things that no longer serve you.
3) Look at the list and see if there are things that you can fit together like friends and work. Here you could create a work environment in which your dealings with your colleagues leave you as satisfied as if you had been hanging out with good friends. In the video, the man is ripping up bills and a rejection letter at the same time as bonding with his child.
4) Finally pick your top 3-4 things on the list. You can know these by thinking which ones would you want to be doing for the rest of your life. It doesn’t mean that you will have to but it is just an idea to help you get moving.

Now that you have simplified your list, give authentically to these for the next month. If a month is overwhelming try 2 weeks and if that seems like too much, start with a week. Only work within the limits that you feel comfortable working within. Change is hard enough and you want to make it as comfortable as possible. By setting a goal that you think is possible to reach, you create a momentum of change that makes it possible. To give an example, when I have exam I would set a goal to clean the kitchen first before exam study. Something I know I could do. This then gave me the momentum of being productive and gave me the satisfaction of completing a task which gave me the momentum to complete another task, like study. You use way less fuel moving a rolling car than you do moving one from standstill.

Create your life as a community of your personalities. Make sure that all your personalities are giving to you and not taking away from yourself. By doing the things that make you happy, everything you do is giving back to you. Every personality is contributing to the whole. It is as a happy whole that you will be most effective in your actions and you will have more energy than you ever knew. Because every act gives back to you, you will only be getting more energy rather than sending out into the world like a space heater you will create a fully integrated system that will feed back into the system and create optimal living. We are a circle, not a dot. All the personalities should be giving back to the center rather than the center having to give out to every point of the circle. This is an inefficient way of living and ultimately unsustainable which leaves us burnt out. Burn out leaves us without enough resources physiologically thus breeding disease, and emotionally leading to personality and relationship distress. Ultimately we can become a full, unified and harmonious person in which all points of ourselves are connected and each giving to the other. You will truly be a unified person. You will truly be YOU.

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