Tag Archives: potential

Head to the Heart – the fastest journey to fulfillment

February 22, 2013 The Extropist Leave a comment

We as humans seek for the highest experiences of life. We strive in many different ways through many different activities, all in the name of reaching our highest peaks.

But what are these peaks made of? And how do we get there? Peaks are made up of highs and lows, the valleys as well as the mountains. If they weren’t, then everything would be flat. So too are our personal peaks made up of polar opposites. These poles exist in our body and given the names the Heart and the Mind. The mind is the active pole and is the engine that drives us toward an end. The heart is the passive pole that stores the passion of our dreams and fuels our drive. These are the polar opposites that have been spoken about for thousands of years across hundreds of cultures. The Yin and the Yang, Shakti and Shiva, etc. These two poles have different requirements to satisfy in order to reach our peak experiences.

Mind: Emptiness is Freedom
Let us first look at the active force. In a battery this is considered the positive pole and its role is to send the electric current to the negative pole. This is also considered the masculine energy and its pinnacle is freedom and is experienced through emptiness. As a person strives for a goal in their activity and works hard in order to complete the task, once they have finished the task they have started they are deserving of a break, of a moment of peace and freedom. A space where they don’t have to think but they simply can revel in the joy of what they have created or completed. This active force opens us up to an empty space in which we can truly experience freedom. A good example of this is in sex for men in which they are often the active force of the task and once they have reached their climax of the experience they move into an empty space, one of freedom, where the built up tension has been released and they can go to sleep.

Freedom is the Mind
Emptiness and freedom is an action of the mind. It is a place where we realize there are no limitations and we embrace abundance and true potential. Our conscious minds role is to constrict, to limit and to process. It weighs up options and says what can and can’t work. Upon reaching a freedom state, people often don’t remember the experience, they feel like they have transcended time and space. This is often called Flow or in the zone and it is here that we move out of our mind and the freest we can ever be.

Filled freedom leads to anxiety
When we are not in a freedom state we feel anxious, we feel overwhelmed and constricted. People often express they are feeling physically squeezed. This is because their minds have the tightest hold on them and they are as far away from freedom as possible. They are wearing the weight of the world on their shoulders. They are obliged and responsible. Of course this is all in the mind.

Freedom Practice
We can begin our journey to freedom through the practice of meditation. It is here that you can observe your thoughts and understand the limitations that you place on yourself. When you are quiet you will literally hear the stream of chatter in which you are telling yourself about how limited you are. About how much responsibility you have. About how you are surely going to fail.

Start with 10 mins, 5 mins, or whatever you feel comfortable with and begin to add a minute a day. Sit or lie down, close your eyes and focus on your breathing. Slow it down and take long deep breaths. Count each breath up to 10 and then start your counting again. You will notice your mind wander to limiting thoughts. Catch your mind and understand these are not real but only thoughts and then bring your mind back to counting your breath. We can look at any experience and feel free in what we are doing. When are free we don’t have those limitations anymore. Anything is possible and we can be anyone, anywhere at anytime.

Heart: Surrender is Love
The second domain is a little different. This is the negative pole in the battery and its role is to receive the energy from the positive pole. It’s akin to the feminine energy and its pinnacle is love, which we experience through surrender. Surrender is the complete experience of receiving without any resistance. When we can truly receive we can fill ourselves up. We are deserving of what we are given and we take it completely and wholly with thanks. This feeling of love is a feeling of whole-ment of fulfillment, where we are full and whole from life and what we were doing.

Love in the Heart
Love and surrender is an action of the heart. It is the opposite of the mind. As the mind is a limited channel that strives for emptiness and freedom, the heart is a truly abundant channel that requires you to open it up as much as you can – To have the courage to be vulnerable. To be free, to love as big as you can, because the bigger you love the fuller you’ll be.

Limiting love leads to Depression
We often see this love and fulfillment stop when a person is in depression. Here a person has closed themselves off from their hearts and they feel empty and worthless. Their life is now without purpose or fulfillment. They block out the light in their life. They block themselves from receiving anything and anyone that they would let into their heart. This is a dark experience and one that hides a person away from experiencing their life to the fullest.

Love Practice
So it is so important to be brave. To have the courage to take a step forward towards being vulnerable and opening yourself to experiences. To life. To love. To learn. By trying new things and being open to the unknown we will most certainly make mistakes. This of course is not saying go from depression to universal love because that is a dangerous and somewhat difficult task. Instead, work out the step that is the right size for you. What can you do today that opens you up one step closer to Love. Write a love letter to someone – you don’t even have to give it to them. Say thank you to a stranger. Smile at the teller at the market. By giving you are opening yourself up to receive. And remember… You deserve it. You are worthy of it all.

Head to Hearts
You may have noticed that there is a natural movement from the head to the heart. This is the same as the energy flow from the positive pole to the negative pole of the battery is the masculine pole of the mind to the negative pole of the heart. The energy naturally wants to flow towards a space that can harness and handle copious amounts of good flowing to it we just need to stop restricting the channel. A wise Native American proverb states the longest journey we will ever travel is from our head to our hearts. I find it amazing because our minds and hearts are truly the yin and yang. We are moving to fill up our hearts and we moving to empty our minds but everything and nothing are the same thing and both have an unlimited capacity for abundance. So move towards freedom by becoming aware of your mind and give to yourself and your world and you will fill up your heart. And with each step you take you will be one step closer to your dreams filled with freedom and love.

EXPLORE

Spawning creativity. Borrowing genius

February 3, 2012 The Extropist 2 Comments

A busy morning, a gaggle of gentlemen, the sound of traffic loudly impresses its presence as each person struggles to hear one another over the ambient sounds. There is one difference today to their meeting… they talk as if they were back in the French Salons of the early 18th century. Amongst them are the great minds of the enlightenment who together in a soup of genius spawned many of the fundamental ideas that built the foundation of today’s society. We call these ideas inspired, and the men, genius for they certainly were, but there was something else that they often don’t talk about and we are rarely aware of it.

As we look back at these men and their creations, many of these inspired ideas did not come from a single source, but in fact from a plethora of ideas spun together over countless hours of idea pondering with their peers, past and present. We often find ourselves ruminating over a thought and then we speak to someone about something unrelated and we creak open another moment closer to realizing the truth of our insight. We read or hear something and our minds open themselves again to it even more. The idea is like Michelangelo’s David, Mike always saw him there in the stone but instead of the hand of the great maestro our ideas come from a thousand hands chipping away at revealing the idea until finally it is revealed by the one man who laid the seed.

Your creativity is literally mental intercourse. It is bringing together two separate ideas from different sources and having them intermingle and spawn a new modified version of the idea. Then from another source an idea comes along and again infuses and impregnates to create another and even more unique form. This may go on and on over time, you are constantly nurturing an idea, this time instead of in a belly, it is inside your mind. It changes form, becoming completely unrecognizable from when you first had the seed of the thought, but you love it even more. Finally without even realizing it, you feel something snap, it comes rushing like water but its something else. It comes unexpectedly but you knew it lay on the horizons… The idea you’d been waiting for!!! How wonderful.

A feeling of elation comes over you and you are filled with such hope and excitement for what lies before this new thing that you have birthed. And so we must give thanks as we remember that it is through our mental intercourse and our mutual respect and love for our peers, past, present and future that they too are the shared progenitors of the ideas that we spawn.

And by the way, once we birth the idea then we have to give to get it up on its feet…………………………… But that’s a whole other story!

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.

ELEVATE

Flow is for everyone in everything

August 21, 2010 The Extropist Leave a comment

Here is a video that is not only inspiring to the point of tears but teaches us something about how connecting to our passion allows us to realise the highest sense of our selves. This is currently being explored in modern science under the term “Flow States”, however it is more commonly known as being “in the zone”. In this state people are able to perform at their optimum level along with experiencing a series of other impressive phenomenon. The amazing thing about Flow is that it is accessible in any and all activities that people undertake. Its simply about finding a way to truly connect to the moment, where you are completely immersed in the activity and all your resources are being focussed on that task in only the moment of now. Watch this video and see how the power of Flow can help us overcome any limitation.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek1iIOTsiRo&feature=search]

After watching this and other films on Autism as well as my own personal experience interacting with autistic kids, it makes me think that while we can all have limitations in expressing our true selves, there is always an avenue that can overcome them and truly tap our connection to life. It’s just about finding what makes that connection flow.

EXPLORE

Knowing your potential of tomorrow, today

June 7, 2010 The Extropist Leave a comment

I am often led to the question “are you a person that knows everything or nothing?” If I were to be asked that question my answer would be “nothing”. I would say nothing because the information I think I know is only on loan until I trade it for newer upgrades on the information. While this information is always building on itself to further create greater understanding of what I think I know, sometimes there are complete overhauls to the system that completely shatter the foundations of the old idea. Therefore by understanding that my ideas of the world are transient and only temporary, then I am a lot freer to move with the changes. By knowing that we know nothing except what we choose to know actually allows us to know everything, if everything to know is already known. We just haven’t chosen to know it yet. It all exists but there’s only so much we can hold as a conscious knowing. So don’t own your ideas just rent them, so that its easier to trade them in for a better model.

Knowing is subjective

The basis for our thoughts are only on rent because we take them on as our own only for a short period until we are ready to move on to a thinking space that better serves us. Think back to how often your opinions of the different aspects on life have changed. How love is supposed to be, what is beautiful, what our dreams are, what is the best way to have your sandwich? Our way that we look at the world is always changing. While we are settled into a particular thought space, we are completely appreciative of it as we are provided with a sanctuary in which to build our lives from. But some people forget that our thoughts are temporary and choose to identify with them as the Truth rather than a guide.

Subjectivity is infinite

Are our thoughts pre-existing or conjured and created? In my opinion, I believe both. The thoughts that we experience, in our conscious world, are synthesized from our experience. But the place where they reside outside of our consciousness is a volatile world of unlimited thought and possibility, dormant in our experience until we move towards its creation. Therefore the place where our thoughts come from exists already, because infinity possibility exists.

The quantum world of infinite possibility

I base my idea of the pre-existence of infinite possibility on the double slit quantum experiment which showed how a photon (a massless quantum particle of light) had the possibility of existing in every part of space-time all at the one moment. It moved in a wave-like manner as it was projected outward and in turn took every known path through the universe before it made it through the slit. What was interesting is that the instance the photon was observed, it collapsed into a finite particle moving out of the wave-like state. This is true for us. You have the possibility of moving your body in any way you choose right now and create unlimited possibility of events that you wouldn’t even consider like kissing your screen. Just think about how many ways you can move your arm in the space around you. But the second you do it you observe the experience of that move and it collapses into a finite experience. Our minds are created to only experience one moment at a time and that is in part why time is experienced in a progressive linear fashion.

A world of potential past the point of now

Ultimately it depends on how you subscribe to the mechanics of the Universe and what you determine the universe actually to be. For instance is the universe only this moment of reality that we are conscious of? If we peer past this moment does anything exist or is it just a void? I personally believe it is a void of reality, a world of formless potential. A foamy sea of quantum fluctuations awaiting the light of our consciousness to collapse infinity into a finite moment of experience which we have chosen for ourselves. When i look at it that way, I see that what lies in that void is one thing and one thing only… possibility. The eternal possibility of anything and everything happening at that one moment and the brilliant harmony of the universe forming to enable that moment is realized as your truth, your knowing, because you chose so. But when you choose otherwise, then no longer will that reality be, but now a completely different one in its place for you. Tired of the old and embraced the new.

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.

Sir James Jeans (1877-1946) English physicist and mathematician

When we are young we may think that all we want to be is an astronaut but then we experience and grow. We learn that there are more possibilities for us that better serve our future selves and we now know that we want to be a musician, completely discarding the old idea of becoming an astronaut, to have a new knowing of who we are. We have been given the opportunity to discard ideas. We live our ideas as true but then we are free to let them go. Therefore we have them as only the most probable possibility at that point in time. We loan our ideas from the sea of possibility as the knowing that best serves us at that time. The more we understand this, the more we are able to create a fluid world, free from the pain of resistance and rigidity.

Resistance can break

It is when we are rigid with our thinking, holding our thoughts as a universal truth, that we create a pain of rejecting new and improved thinking into our lives. This rigidity and resistance is brought about from our attachment to dogma, to comfort and familiarity, to the ruts that we have carved in our thinking and living, so that we can coast along without considering new terrain. A train can only stay on the track. Another way of thinking about attachments to old beliefs is that it is only the brittle reed that breaks. The supple leaf bends and folds with the movements of the violent and erratic forces of the external world because this branch is flexible in its movements and thinking. It believes it can take on many shapes and form, whereas the brittle reed only has one form and if you try to ask it to take on another knowing of its shape it will resist and break itself rather than allow for a change.

I’m not frustrated by not knowing everything i am inspired by it. I don’t need to know everything, where would be the fun in that, and for that matter i know that i have the potential of knowing everything that i need to know. “know more, know less” hehehehe.

Just another WordPress site