Tag Archives: Wisdom

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.

ELEVATE

Failures are openings to our Greatest Creations

April 16, 2012 The Extropist 2 Comments

Many times throughout our lives we try to create an opportunity, an idea, a dream but end up without a ‘positive’ result. We look at the outcome as a failure either on our own part or that of the external world. But, what if this was not a failure but an opening? What if you actually believed whole heartedly that everything you experienced was your own creation and that embedded in the outcomes that you think are “bad” are actually such greater gems of wisdom that you could have only gained by not having a dream realized.

In this world we are taught to win and have more, have the most. However, do you really think your highest purpose, the meaning of your life, is to accumulate physical wealth and leisure or do you think that there is something far greater in store for you that you are unconsciously working toward. Do you think you would have greater life satisfaction with truly loving and knowing your life purpose or being able to afford a trip to Hawaii? I’m not saying that this definitely exists in your experience, but I am saying that if you spend the time to look at your life mishaps you may find understandings that are far more valuable than the trip itself.

I like to think about it like this, if a toddler was given everything they asked for would they gain all the lessons they needed in life? Or do you think the fact that they learnt about things like delayed gratification, about being thankful for what they have, that then they will have a far more balanced look on life.

If you have become discouraged, that is fine, but the very fact that you have become discouraged means that you didn’t truly believe. You may be able to visualize Hawaii but that doesn’t mean that you have a knowing that you are going there. We most powerfully create our lives when we have a true belief that we are not attached to the outcome. When we know something is going to happen that we don’t even question what the outcome will be.

The same way a pen falls to the ground we know that we can pick it up. We don’t even question that the pen can’t be picked up. And even if we had a sore back, something that limited our progress and couldn’t quite reach it we still trust completely in ourselves that the pen will be picked up. We understand that despite our limitation of not being able to pick it up now that once moving through the limitations we are experiencing we will again be able to complete the task we began earlier. Remember we have the soreness in our back to protect us from further injuring ourselves. Our limitations are often our greatest teachers. Love the lessons and you will gain the greatest knowing.

Hold more than a belief, hold a knowing within yourself and trust in your dreams, as if they are as possible as picking up a fallen pen. Look for the truth in the ‘limitations’ that we create that temporarily stop the reaching of our dreams because with the greater understanding of ourselves comes the greatest experience of life and the richest expression of our dreams.

So please KNOW this despite the long journey ahead: Dreams Come True! They really do!!!

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/40000072 w=400&h=225]

Caine’s Arcade from Nirvan Mullick on Vimeo.

This impressive 9 year old boy followed his dream fearlessly with a true knowing, and undoubtedly with life’s help, he made his dreams come true!

ELEVATE

Transform your cycle of chaos and become an Extropist

March 19, 2012 The Extropist Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

ELEVATE

Whale Wisdom: “Give Thanks!”

Gallery February 16, 2012 The Extropist Leave a comment

Some people think that they have days where they don’t have a reason to smile, that their lives are void of love and so they look to the outside world to get it. They want people to give it to them. They want products to give it to them. They want drugs to give it to them. They look for anyway they can find it outside of themselves. But we are always FILLED with the highest potential of experiencing Love. Love is essentially an emotional experience that makes us feel whole and satisfied about who we are at that moment in our lives. Good feelings such as the feeling of love can only be felt by you. It only exists inside of you. And that leads us down a path bound for confusion when we look outside ourselves for something that only exists within.

When we feel a lack of love in our lives it is because we are blocking love with our unconscious thinking. We say and focus on thoughts that do not serve us or make us feel good about ourselves. They are not real! Our thoughts are one a train of possibilities and its up to us to choose the reality that we want. Love is always with us and it is just about working with it in a way that serves us. One powerful way to clear the blockage and change your thinking is through Gratitude – when you give thanks for the things in your life, you open yourself up to a new way of experiencing your world and you open up the potential to get happy. Real happy! You provide an opening to see life form a different angle; you have found an altered state of consciousness. So get high on thanks!

Life is a realm of parallel realities. There is so much going on in the one scene of your life in this moment that you can’t possibly be aware of it all. So you get to choose upon what you focus on. Some realities that you focus on won’t serve you and leave you feeling unsatisfied, whereas others will leave you feeling filled to the top with love. Our brains can be set to look for and connect to things that are at our emotional frequency. For instance sad people connect to more slower emotionally heavier songs whereas happier people will tend to connect to upbeat and livelier songs. So start with gratitude and you will preset your brain to an awareness that will allow your mind to be attracted to those things going on around you that are at the same emotional frequency of what you were grateful for. You will be attracted to focussing on all the wonderful thing that will leave you feeling satisfied and you will have gained control of a large part of what leaves you sad and empty. Your smile will be contagious as you connect with people on your emotional frequency and your Joie de vive will lift people up to your level rather than have them pull you down to theirs. So give thanks for the amazing things in your life and you will have an amazing day filled with all things love surrounding you!

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

Calculating the Love Connection

December 6, 2011 The Extropist Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ELEVATE

Success lies beyond what you can see

November 10, 2011 The Extropist Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

ELEVATE

Creating the next step

July 28, 2011 The Extropist Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

ELEVATE

Be a Circle and Be Yourself

February 27, 2011 The Extropist Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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”.

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