Tag Archives: Silence

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.

EXPLORE

Truth has no answers for you

November 14, 2010 The Extropist Leave a comment

Truth has no answer. There is no form that Truth can take. Truth exists in a space outside of form. It can only be realized in the silence.

It is in this infinite potential of Truth that we see resemblance of the universal structure. Truth (akin to and interchangeable with the words Love and God) is formless and infinite. It is Absolute and ALL. It cannot have form because the second we give it form it collapses into a single perspective and Truth cannot have one perspective it can only have all perspectives. This infinite multitude of perspectives is needed because consciousness is always evolving and changing. Advancing and growing we take one truth for a while until we drop it for another. It is the freedom of Truth that affords growth and movement. So what we typically conceive of, as “the truth”, is really only an element of truth from a particular perspective, in a particular place, at a particular point in time. Thus, all life and its truths are really a subjective experience.. We try to tell ourselves that life is objective by getting many people on our side to look at the piece of truth from our perspective. Because we have all these people now agreeing with us, we determine that this is the real Truth because everyone agrees with us. Over and over again we have seen throughout history that what we believed was the Truth, and agreed upon by others, really was the truth of a group of people until it wasn’t. Whether it was that the earth was flat, the center of the universe or that races are superior to others. Time and time again these truths are shown to be untruths. Please watch the video to have this illustrated for you.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBqgr5xZLz0&feature=related]

It is our minds that creates the fracturing of Truth into relativistic perspectives. The mind operates serially, from a linear perspective, one point in time after another, after another, another and so on. This means that ultimately our mind creates the conscious experience of our relative world, in which things are defined as different from each other. This difference is what gives things lines and a timescape in which events can be before some and after others. It affords us definite answers, but it slows down our processing, when we work in a world built on lines. What happens when we shut off the conscious mind? Let us consider a person in a state of extreme danger. Their body will release adrenalin; their body and mind is completely centered in the moment of now for survival. This is apparent in the mind, as there is no chatter, no mind that exists outside of the moment (this is often evidenced by the person unable to recall what happened during the actual escape). The person will experience many different perspectives simultaneously and the world may have a warped feeling of time.

This is different from our normal lives when we have the space to think. Our mind chatter can exist outside of the moment. This chatter takes you into the future or feeds back to the past. It is here that our resources are divided and dwindle as we assess how to handle the situations that may or may not occur in the future or ruminate on the past. Our cognitive energy is spread out thin into many directions unfocused and ineffective. It is this chatter, this activity of the mind that gives form to Truth and limits the perspective our true self can take. The true strength lies in our focused energies of our feelings in the now. Trust in the intelligence that will appear from the silence felt in the space of only the now.

We can see the mechanics of Truth in the comparison of the quantum world with the physical world. Every possible perspective exists for a photon until we measure it; because once we measure it we define it in space and time, which gives it form. The second the photon collapses into a physical form, by being observed, it is forced to have a particular perspective of the universe. The photon now only knows the universe as one element of the universe in a particular space. This photon is now only a single element of the Truth. The reality for that photon is akin to the form each human consciousness takes. Consciousness collapses life and concepts into a relative form in order to give a perspective of truth. When we observe ourselves and our existence we immediately collapse our perspective into only a single element of the truth. Our consciousness affords us only a limited perspective of the world, it observes the world like a flashlight that can only see and comprehend the elements of the world that are illuminated by conscious thought and attention. When our minds look into, and acts from, the potential of the future or perspective of the past, it immediately collapses those times into a form that exists in space and time. It has been recently shown by a group of Harvard scientists that people spend 50% of their time mind wandering outside of the moment and the task in which they are meant focused on. This mind wandering outside of the present has been shown to typically leave people unhappy and unsatisfied. The mind is best used to allow for the experience of the moment and trust in the outcome. Therefore the trick is to exist in the moment in silence.

It is in silence that we can have a greater experience of Truth because silence is experienced not in the mind but in our feelings. Our feelings, unlike our mind operate from that which is called our subconscious mind. This mind does not follow the same relativistic rules as our mind does, in that it processes experiences not serially, as one event after the other, but from what is called a parallel process. This means that there are many different lines of information being processed that are coming in at the one time. This subconscious mind therefore doesn’t have to obey the rules of time relativism but can experience the past, present and future all at once. It is worth noting that our subconscious mind is extremely logical and powerful to the point of being more than ten thousand times more powerful than our conscious mind. This superior processing is due to the parallel processor but it has one limitation. Words are too limited for the subconscious mind to communicate with the conscious mind so it uses feelings and images (a picture is worth a thousand words) in which to convey its understandings of the world.

Feelings and intuitions are very subtle and this is why we need the silence in order to properly hear the greater wisdom from our deeper selves. Therefore it is here in our feelings that we may truly connect to greater perspectives of Truth not forcing us to view the world from a particular place but instead from a much higher parallel perspective. It is from this higher space that we can see all people’s perspectives. That we can experience empathy. That we can show compassion. That we can love unconditionally because our view of the Truth is not limited to one particular perspective but is able to see from all sides. Our heart is the metaphorical and energetic feeling center of the body and enables us to utilize the full power of our beings. It is through our feelings and their higher perspective that we can live to our full potential. It is not the physical form that our answers come in but the shape of our feelings that give us true insight to what we need to know from the questions we ask ourselves.

We realize our true self when the mind is aligned with, and centered in the body, and its happenings in that moment. The moment of Now. It is here when our mind is in the space of now that it allows for the silence of our heart to be heard by our body. It’s the body’s enactment and activation of the full potential of the holistic organism that we can then enter into these ultimate states of our True self and really know the meanings of the TRUTH.

ELEVATE

The Space Between Space: The Wisdom of Silence

October 1, 2010 The Extropist Leave a comment

This inspired film by Jeff Scher is an example of silence. It’s funny how even in silence we find noise, but many a time the only way we can find silence is to have noise. So why silence? And why noise? Lets start with silence. But first please click on the image and explore this short and powerful piece.

Silence is the space in between all our thoughts. Like the space between the rain drops and the sound between the notes of a piano. Silence is where our wisdom and intuition reside. This wisdom is the collective power of our whole body system, and thus is the accumulated efforts of our subconscious. The subconscious is infinitely more powerful than the conscious mind, because it is not restricted to form but instead understands the universe in a logical, but non-linear fashion. It doesn’t require lines, labels and definitions of the forms that it is working with. Anything and everything exists in all time and space and so it is in silence that our complete biological system realizes its full potential of the computing power of its entire energy structure which enables it to fully understand this world.

We recognize this world through our feelings and subtle images, not through the incessant self-talk that churns through our thought space, distracting us from a greater thought. This incessant talk is noise. But it is a chaotic noise; it is a reaction to our experiences. A noise without structure it bubbles up haphazardly from the stories we have of ourselves from our multiple identities of who we believe ourselves to be. These stories constantly reaffirm our reality, ensuring that we keep to the illusion of who we are. We have these identities so we can feel safe, so we can be in control, so we can know what is and what isn’t. But this noise does not serve us. We need noise to give shape to the world and help us know what is from what isn’t through the use of words and thoughts but often this is merely a distraction and for the most part a farce. Noise forms us but doesn’t necessarily serve us. However noise has another role if we condition it through our breathing, through a mantra, a repetitive motion or any other meditative form you desire. By using this structured noise we can quiet the chaos and create a space in which we can connect to the silence. We remove the typical overbearing chatter that drowns out the subtler feelings that contains so much wisdom.

Silence exists in the present moment. Whenever you are thinking of the past or the future you are in a space of thought. Thoughts of who you were and who you should and could be. In the present moment you can create a white place; a clean slate. It is from this place free of the untangled world of the past and the future that there are no preconceptions, existing forms and ideas that you have to adhere to in order to create. Instead your canvas is free to create afresh and anew any world that your deepest self dreams to be true.

This space, induced by structured noise, is often associated with slower frequencies in our brain. When considering sleep, the slower our frequencies get the deeper we are into sleep and the less our conscious faculties are in play. Early on in sleep we often reach a stage in which our waves slow to what is called Alpha frequency. This stage is a powerful stage as it has been to show that we can operate powerfully without the use of our conscious mind getting in the way. We often use our conscious mind to understand things, which are great for when we are first learning something so we can build the necessary neural connections, but then we continue to rely on this conscious mind rather than trust the wisdom that exists beneath this conscious process. A much more powerful processor. There is research which shows how mind when wandering or day dreaming we often reach our greatest moments of inspiration, so too in that period just before we wake, where we look at the world in the borderland of our sleep and waking worlds. It is in this space that we are in the Alpha wave state and it is in this period where we have shut down enough of our conscious faculties to open ourselves to the power of silence.

Find a moment to yourself when you are ready to discover yourself or something in your life. Take a breath and then take another and listen and feel what happens in your breath and between the breath. Listen to the rain and see the rhythm of it in motion or stop for a moment and play this piece and find the peace you need to move to a powerful place. So don’t think you need to think your way through life all the time, but instead take a moment and access the space of silence. And remember, “Silence is Golden”.

Just another WordPress site