Tag Archives: flow

Head to the Heart – the fastest journey to fulfillment

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.

Go with the flow

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.

joy

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.

Why your Dreams Need a ‘Why’ to Come True

It can be difficult to find the joys in life. We are told all you have to do is follow your joy and life will work out. But what if you don’t know what your joy is? Well I will tell you right now what your joy is and where you can find it. Your joy is the ‘why’ you are doing something. If you thought it can be hard finding your joy, you are right! It is hard to find the joy because the ‘why’ you are doing something is not an easily definable goal but it is truly the most important thing to define. The ‘why’ provides you with motivation in achieving what you are doing. Why are you doing what you are doing? Why are you trying to create this dream? ‘Why’ is where the energy of your dreams reside and it is when you have truly found your reasons and embraced them that you will begin to move forward powerfully and unflinchingly towards the creation of your dream.

The ‘what’ is simply the definable goals that have definable limits and values associated with them. We have so many ‘what’s’ in our lives and spend so much time defining them. All these ‘what’s’ though are associated with the external world, all the things that we want, whereas the why is more associated with our inner world, the motivation that drives us towards realizing our dreams in our external reality. The ‘why’ even exists deep in a place in our brain that doesn’t have complete access to our conscious mind. Instead it has to be translated by the cortex, the conscious part of our brain, in order that we can verbalize and understand ourselves what our ‘why’ is. This part of our brain though is heavily connected to our emotions and reward centers which give us the power to follow our dreams. Our ‘why’ is our success fuel and without the ‘why’ we are tapping a very limited energy resource. So we have to spend extra attention and energy in defining our ‘why’, in sitting and being with ourselves. Why am I doing this? Why do I care?

The ‘why’ is then similar in nature to our values. If the ‘what’ is the goal at the end of a journey, the ‘why’ is what drives how you travel along the journey itself. Therefore, as a practice you could imagine how you want people to remember you. People don’t normally speak of the goals (the ‘what’) that we hit but instead how we went about living our life and what was driving us. These elements are key to you understanding why you do things and why you will do things. When you have worked out some of these values you will gain a greater insight into some of these deeper aspects of what is driving you.

However even still sometimes it is difficult to find our ‘why’, even with such practices because people want to know their ‘what’ first. There are many people in this world and all our unique. So for those people who want to know the ‘what’ first I would say this: Follow your joy. What do you do in your week that you look forward to? What do you dream about that you think would be the best thing ever? What thing, when you think about it, makes you feel excited and bursting with happiness? When you have worked out what that thing is, then the next step is the hard one… Take a step towards it. Sometimes that step may feel too big. Too overwhelming. Well then, take a smaller step. Work out what the step is before that step and if that is still daunting, half the step again and work out the biggest step that you are willing to take, but take that step. When you commit to your joy you are committing to your ‘why’.

The good thing about moving toward your joy is that you are never locked in to it. Just because you took a step towards something doesn’t mean that you can’t change your direction. It doesn’t mean that you can’t take a step to the left or do a complete 180 degrees. But you need somewhere to step toward. You need to create that beacon of light, something that draws you to and lights your path. The closer you get the more you feel the warmth from the light. And the more you feel the warmth, the more tactile and real your ‘why’ will become until you will be able to hold onto it and give it a name. From that point on you will be running through every obstacle with the armor of purpose and meaning. For when you have your hands firmly wrapped around these concept of purpose and meaning, when you know the reasons why you are doing something, you can wield it’s awesome power through the darkest moments and create a life worth living in every moment.

“What is” is the way to easy creating

When we end with someone in our lives we often worry about what they are doing? Why are they doing these things? What does it mean to us? It gives us an excuse to talk about it and think about them, but does that really serve us to think on all these things? Why do we need the stories that we make up in order to fill the spaces in our lives we don’t know anything about? And most importantly are these stories real and do they really matter?

What matters is that you move your focus away from your partner and all the ‘What if’s’ and simply focus on the ‘What is’. What is happening in your life now? What is right in front of you? What is it that you are working on now? What is inspiring you in life now? The ‘what if’s’ don’t matter.

‘What if vs what is’ is applicable to all things that matter in our lives. It doesn’t just have to be your partner: It can be a job loss. It can be any pending decision for your career, for you health for a competition. It is anything that you are or have worked at to create, any project, any relationship, any dream. Keep your focus on the ‘what is’ because all the stories of what if’s often don’t serve us. It reminds me of the old Cherokee wisdom story of the two wolves that rage within us. When asked upon which wolf wins, the good or the bad, we learn it is the one that we feed. What we give our energy too we feed.

All those thoughts you have about the ‘what if’s’… they don’t exist except in your mind and imagination. People think every thought is real, well they aren’t! They are seeds of change. They are moments of creation that you can latch onto or choose to focus on something else that better serves what you really want. What you really want to create.

It is the emotion and action that we give those thoughts, which materializes one thought over another. If I am sitting here hungry but I want to finish this piece of writing. I will think to myself, “I want to go get food” but I also think “I want to finish this piece while I am in the flow”. Both thoughts are there but which do I choose to give my energy to, I choose the one that best serves me. Which thought do I feed to give energy to? In this situation, it is finishing the piece. So that’s what I choose for my reality by giving emotion and excitement for the finished piece of writing that lies before me. And in doing so, now I will not need to think on food until after I have finished this piece because my emotion and action has allowed me to give solely to this piece of writing.

So acknowledge that you are having a thought but is it a ‘what if’ or a ‘what is’? Your power of creation lies in the ‘what is’. Your actions are more clear and directed when you focus on the ‘what is’. You are more motivated to create the ‘what is’. You are less overwhelmed by the singular ‘what is’ than the multitude of ‘what if’s’. Get present and focus on your ‘what is’ and your journey will be a lot smoother and you will create a lot easier and a lot faster.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1Mb9tsnYLU]

Seek happiness and success will find you – 21 days to retrain your brain

We are constantly seeing, hearing and reading about people having break downs, how our friends are feeling sad, celebrity couples ending their relationships and the world generally dissatisfied with their lives. Even Heidi Klum and Seal broke up. Seal ended it with a woman who has been consistently thought of as the most beautiful women in the world. How can someone not be happy with the most beautiful woman in the world you may ask?
We know what happiness feels like, because we have all had it but then it just seems to slip away and we are left dealing instead with stresses and pressures rather than basking in the glow of the glory of our happiness. So what is it that constantly leads us to our state of disillusionment with the world? The answer is… The view!

We keep on looking outside ourselves for happiness. Jobs, partners, possessions. However our external world only has about 10% to do with our happiness. Where we need to be looking is at the 90%. This is where the real view is: our inner world. We spend all our time trying to fix up what we see in that outside 10% and leaving the large majority of how we see the world from the inside as unkempt and in disarray. How do we beautify and create an amazing internal landscape? How do you change your thinking?

Oddly enough your happiness and success doesn’t really have anything to do with your head, it has to do with your heart. Back in medieval times the heart was considered the center of consciousness and there may be good reason to start giving some thought to that again. 75% of personal success and happiness has been shown to be accounted for by three things: 1) Optimism, 2) Social Support and 3) Your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of a threat. These three things are what you need to be looking at rather than your bank account and the car you have or the job title or partner that you are showing off currently. This is where our focus is backwards.

Every time we reach a success, we are aware of an even better goal that we want to reach. Got a job, want a better job. Got a car, want a better car. Got a trophy, want a bigger one. The end points are constantly shifting, like trying to catch a rainbow. Happiness seems to be sitting on the other side of that rainbow but this is really a hamster wheel that leaves you eternally chasing. The real truth about happiness is the exact opposite to what we think it is. We have to reach happiness first in order to find success. And lucky for us psychologists and scientists have found some simple exercises that utilize those three elements of optimism, social support and reframing stressors in order to retrain our brains to be able to look at the world and change the view to leave us happy and in control of our lives.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. Albert Schweitzer (1875 –1965) Nobel Peace Prize Winning Medical Missionary

Change you brain in 21 days

Every evening, for the next 21 days:

• Write down 3 things you were grateful for. This starts to retrain your brain to begin to look for those things that leave you feeling good.

Every morning for the next 21 days, rotate each day between these following 3 things:

1) Write a journal entry recalling something good that happened the day before.
• This allows you to relive and remember that your life is filled with good experiences.
2) Meditate – Sit cross-legged with your back against the wall for 15 minutes and only focus on your breath going in and out your nose. Notice as your mind gets caught on a thought and then bring your mind back to your breath.
• This allows to teach your body that behavior matters and helps train your mind to focus on one thing rather than your mind bouncing around.
3) Perform a random/ conscious act of kindness – Send a friend in your social circle a thank you note. Buy someone you don’t know a coffee. Invite a friend out to lunch.
• This will remind you that you are not alone in this world, but that you are loved and you are a relevant member of society. By giving you will open yourself up to receive and you will gain much greater insights into your life and your happiness

Spawning creativity. Borrowing genius

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!

Creating the next step

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 🙂

Be a Circle and Be Yourself

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.

Source: http://www.illustrationsource.com/stock/artist/alberto-ruggieri/?page=3&size=list

“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.
Source: http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-images-arrows-pointing-towards-the-center-image8698369

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.

Truth has no answers for you

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.

Flow is for everyone in everything

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.

HUMANS ARE AN INFINITE SYSTEM

The human organism is made up of a system of cells working together to make a grander system. This system develops from two primary elements: Cultural and Hereditary. Hereditary elements are when the system’s ancestors have donated a part of themselves to help discern the type of system that will develop. This gift will lead to the development of its traits, dispositions and strengths, creating how the system functions as well as its inevitable purpose in life. However there is the cultural element that is also needed to be taken into consideration. This Culture relates to the external world and its influence on the individual cells. The cells are required to adapt and evolve to their changing world. Culture has shown to have a major impact not only on the content but also the structure of the new system. This is evidenced by a group of American researchers who have recently shown how the brain develops differently due to different cultural upbringings. But it is quite intuitive to understand that, by this larger system (or human) living its life, it learns and develops, as it goes to different places and experiences different emotions, understandings, germs, foods and all matter of experience. This experience is what the body needs to learn from and adjust to, in creating new combinations and understandings (or thought technologies) to deal with its evolving world.

The Evolving System

To gain an understanding of a larger system I like to first understand the constituent parts which help make up that system. The benefit in understanding these preceding systems is that they are quite similar to the ultimate functioning of the greater system at hand. For example, we are for the most part an evolved system from our parents. They contained certain physiological and intellectual matrices which they had developed and advanced from their forebears and passed them onto us. We (who are reading this) are now evolving our physiological and intellectual systems to surpass where our parents have developed. While we can look at the ontological story, or the evolution of the individual system, we as humans also develop as a species and share a grander story of a collective advancing system. We started off having evolved from a system of single cell life forms into multi-cell life forms and from there the system has kept on evolving all the way to humans as we know it and inevitably beyond. All systems evolve from systems preceding it and therefore you can gain many understandings of the current system by delving back into the past and looking at where you have come from. You can’t see where you are going without knowing where you came from.

Where it began

So let us look at what we can learn from the single cell – where it all began. The way I best find to understand this is through analogy. What I found interesting is the likeness of the human cell to bee colonies. These share very similar operating systems in that they both have a central nucleus, which in the case of the bee is the queen, as well as many other constituent parts to keep the system running such as membranes, receptors, messengers and so on. Contrary to popular belief the nuclei in the cell and the queen, are not the central processor but instead more similar to the sexual organ. They contain and retain the genetic history of the colony and feed the updated information collected from the male messenger counterparts to understand the true needs of the system or colony. This central unit then proceeds to direct the creation of the necessary elements of the cell that will best serve the system. I would like to reiterate that the reason why I use the term ‘system’ for the cell here is because as the cell is part of the human system, so too is the human part of a larger system like a community or country, and thus the individual parts make up the system of the cell itself. We are therefore an outward expansion of complexity based on ever-increasing layers of symbiotic simplicity. Each advancing level corresponding to its previous simpler counterpart as well as many counterparts before. The human, as part of the global system, feeds back into a national system, a cultural system, a communal system and so on. These parts still feed out into many other systems well past the next advancing stage of the system. Thus again we see the importance of understanding the system from the simplest levels.

So if the queen and the nucleus are not the brain of the system then what is, and how are these systems aware of the changing external world. Bruce Lipton talks of the cell membrane as the main processing unit. (My next blog will be on Lipton’s ideas expanded). He says the membrane (or outermost shell of the system) is that which experiences the external changing world and perceives it, deciding and sending back the relevant information to the entirety of the system which best realizes the reaction, not just a central nucleus but the entire system. Therefore he purports that the membrane, that which is connected to and assesses the outside world, may be the central processing unit. However as the central processor, it is not necessarily that which experiences as the Mind. The Mind is separate from the brain. It is all-pervasive and the culmination of the system which is able to experience itself.

Sum of the Parts

The Mind is a collective of all the parts in the system. A system can be a system in itself (a cell), but it can also be a part of a system (a neuronal cell). Each system connects into other relevant systems to feed and share information and understandings. As a collective sum of all these systems, a level of consciousness arises. With each advancing level of systems connecting into each other, comes greater functionality, and thus greater tools to interact with and understand the world. The tool, or functionality, that we most recently developed as humans is metacognition ,which is the awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes. This has taken up much of our philosophical understanding and religious explorations with names such as the soul, the ego and as many other forms. It is important to remember that each system has its own level of mind. The mind or consciousness of the cell is much less conscious than the Mind of a human as there is a smaller complexity and functionality to the system due to a limited sum of the parts to make such an advanced whole. But the wisdom and functionality of mother earth and the human collective is much greater than the individual human.

One amazing idea that we can draw from this is that as an individual we may be great, but as part of a larger system we are amazing. Many of the world’s great leaders, such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., have created revolutionary change not because they were great men but because they were acting for a system much greater than themselves.  It is why when people work together to make change they will be so much more effective than if they tried to do it on their own. When we look at our lives as an individual many people become overwhelmed with feelings of inadequacy but when we look at ourselves as part of the greater system and a contributor untoward that we find a sense of peace and satisfaction in what we have given. The same way a multi-cellular life form has much greater capacity, and therefore potential to make greater change, so too are humans as collectives in comparison to individuals. That is where our greatest power comes from by working together.

Through the Mind’s Eye

So the Mind exists as the sum of the system and we can therefore make use of this by looking at the ways in which the mind perceives the world. It does it physically through direct contact as in an external element that is touching up against the sense membrane and the system then responds to it accordingly. Whether it be air waves, light waves or a more tangible element, the system registers through the sense organ and responds appropriately. However we are beginning to understand that there is another form of communication in these systems known as indirect communication. We see this in bees that communicate through a special dance to denote what is happening at far distances away from the system and we see this in cells that communicate electromagnetically. It has also been recorded by researchers that our heart has an electromagnetic field that stretches out and can be recorded several feet outside of our body. Over the last few years scientists have been considering the role of quantum mechanisms, in which it has been shown that it is possible for the mind to exist, communicate and perceive from distances outside of itself, through processes such as entanglement, that allow it to still perceive its external world. In its simplest sense it is most probably a combination of the quantum and electromagnetic processes of the system which help to explain some of those intuitive feelings people have like sensing someone’s presence in a room, danger to a loved one and other intuitive understandings that the human system is able to determine outside of the sole control of direct communication.

Intuitive wisdom can ultimately be considered a product of whole body functioning and therefore cannot be understood solely through the brain but by feeling how your body reacts to situations. It depends on the subtle messages and signals that the individual systems in your body are attuned to and how they translate that for your brain to understand. This can occur through gut feelings, dreams, reoccurring themes in your life, etc. there are many different ways that the greater wisdom of your whole body system will be able to communicate with you. Therefore it is important take time, to find stillness in which to feel the movements in your body. Notice the way that the subtle feelings in your body move with the ebb and flow of life. Synchronicities are thus multiple whole body systems operating on a harmonious frequency, communicating and interacting to create greater understandings. A space of stillness is crucial in best creating for your life as it not helps you to better act but also stops you to react. Finding space in your actions and not being so quick to react will mean that your decisions are based on your own consciousness rather than feeding into another persons. Often we also act from a place of the subconscious, when you react; you are simply perpetuating the inherent cycles of your life and not allowing for a space in which to grow. It is by taking a breath and connecting with how you feel in stillness of the moment that you may be able to break non-serving trends in your life and instead sense actions that may create actions that serve you as you create anew.

Mind is the Master-power that molds and makes, And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes the tool of thought, and, shaping what he wills brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills: — He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass: Environment is but his looking glass. – James Allen “As a man thinketh”.