Daily Archives: May 9, 2013
After years of ignoring magic, researchers are starting to realise that the methods magicians use to manipulate the human mind might hold important insights into how it works.
Professional pickpocket Apollo Robbins has an uncanny ability to control minds. He can manipulate people to an extraordinary degree, drawing their attention away from his thieving hands as he purloins watches and wallets in plain sight. These days, Robbins gives his ill-gotten gains back – he has given up a life of crime to become an entertainer – but most of his victims still have no idea they’ve been robbed until it’s too late.
Watching Robbins at work is like watching somebody with supernatural powers. Yet, like his fellow conjurers Robbins deceives his targets using nothing more than a finely honed understanding of human psychology. “I think of myself as a folk psychologist,” he says. “It’s all about developing an instinct for how the human mind works.”
After years of ignoring magic, researchers are starting to realise that the methods magicians use to manipulate the human mind might hold important insights into how it works.
“We’re all thinking about the same questions,” says Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “We just come at the problems from different angles.”
Magic is all about appearing to break the laws of nature – making solid objects appear or disappear, sawing human beings in half, reading people’s minds, and so on.
The laws of nature, of course, are inviolable, which is why magicians target the human brain instead, packed as it is with glitches and weaknesses that can be exploited to create the illusion of doing the impossible. And they’re brilliant at it: magic tricks only work if you fool all of the people all of the time.
Cognitive neuroscientists also have a long-standing interest in tricks of the mind, as these are a useful source of insight into how the brain works. Visual illusions, for example, have taught them a huge amount about how the brain processes visual information. Now they’re dipping into the treasure chest of cognitive illusions provided by magic.
Over the past couple of years, neuroscientists and magicians have been getting together to create a science that might be called “magicology”. If successful, both sides stand to benefit.
By plundering the magicians’ book of tricks, researchers hope to develop powerful new tools for probing perception and cognition. And if they find any tricks they can’t explain, that could lead to new knowledge about how the brain works.
Similarly, magicians hope that the collaboration will lead to new magic tricks by alerting them to perceptual or cognitive weaknesses that they didn’t already know about. “The real proof that a science of magic has come of age will be when we can use science to build a better magic trick,” says Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK.
The Science of Magic
According to his fellow psychologist Gustav Kuhn at the University of Durham in the UK, a good starting point for the science of magic is the magicians’ own classification of their art into three broad types of trick: misdirection, illusion and forcing.
Misdirection lies at the heart of magic. It is the art of diverting the audience’s attention away from what magicians call the “method” – the act of deception itself.
In neuroscience terms, misdirection relies on the fact that the brain has a very limited supply of attention. Over the past decade or so it has become clear just how scarce attention is: focusing on one thing can make you oblivious to other things that would otherwise be obvious.
This bizarre phenomenon is called inattention blindness, and it was famously demonstrated in 1999 by psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They made a video of six people in a circle bouncing two basketballs around. When asked to count the number of bounces, around half of the people who watch the video fail to notice a man in gorilla suit walking through the middle of the game and beating his chest.
Not surprisingly, magicians use this powerful effect all the time to pull off blatant deceptions right under our noses. Kuhn recently demonstrated this using a trick where he makes a cigarette and lighter “disappear”. In truth he simply drops them into his lap when your narrow spotlight of attention is pointing elsewhere.
Right before your eyes
By tracking eye movements as people watched a video of the trick, Kuhn showed that people miss the deception even when they’re looking directly at it. It works because, at the crucial moments, he makes attention-grabbing gestures and eye movements that divert attention (but not gaze) away from the action. If you watch the video a few times it’s hard to believe that you could ever fall for it.
Magicians are so adept at manipulating attention that cognitive scientists have started bringing them into their labs to learn more. Susana Martinez-Conde of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, is one. “My hope is that the cognitive illusions of magicians can help scientists understand awareness, just as visual illusions have helped us to understand sight,” she says. To that end she recently started working with Robbins.
During his training as a professional thief, Robbins was taught to use two types of hand motion to control his victims’ attention. Slow, circular hand motions are good at engaging and keeping attention, while fast, straight ones are useful for quickly diverting it from one spot to another. The scientific basis of this difference is unknown, says Martinez-Conde. But she plans to find out.
Another mysterious way of manipulating attention is with humour. “When people laugh, time stands still,” says magician John Thompson, aka The Great Tomsoni. He frequently uses jokes to conceal large movements that are particularly difficult to hide. Exactly why laughter disengages attention so efficiently is unknown.
A second key tool in the magic repertoire is illusions, particularly cognitive illusions. These rely on the fact that much of what you think you see is actually invented by your brain. Perception is not about capturing a full picture of reality, but taking snapshots of the world and making the rest up.
In the vanishing ball illusion, for example, a magician tosses a small ball up and down while following it with his eyes. He fakes a third toss, keeping the ball in his hand but still moving his eyes as if watching it. This reliably creates the illusion of the ball being thrown upwards – then disappearing into thin air.
Kuhn recently brought this trick into his lab to examine how it works. By tracking people’s eyes as they watched it being done, he found something unexpected. On real throws, the eye movement of subjects followed the ball’s trajectory. But on the trick toss, their eyes remain firmly glued on the eyes of the magician. This, says Kuhn, shows that the brain overrules the eyes and creates an image of an object that doesn’t actually exist.
Why would it do that? Part of the answer lies in the power of social cues – in this case the magician’s eyes – to set up expectations in the brain. Kuhn showed that the trick worked less well if he kept his eyes fixed on the throwing hand rather than tracking the arc of the nonexistent ball.
The trick also relies on another glitch in the visual system. Information captured by the retina takes about 100 milliseconds to reach the brain. To compensate for this lag, the brain predicts what the world will look like in the near future and acts on this prediction rather than the real information at its disposal. This is useful in real-world situations such as driving a car, but it also gives magicians an opening to exploit.
A third tool up the magicians’ sleeve is forcing. This is any technique that gives the target the illusion of free will when in fact they have none. The classic example is the “pick a card, any card” trick where the magician uncannily knows what you picked.
Ron Rensink, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, says that forcing is one of the great mysteries of magic, as yet unexplained by cognitive neuroscience. “The degree to which a magician can control someone’s mind tends to be far greater than anything we come up with in the lab,” he says.
To find out more, Rensink has teamed up with professional magician Alym Amlani to test forcing scientifically. Amlani devised a trick of the “pick a card, any card” variety in which participants watch Amlani flick through a deck of cards, briefly exposing the face of each. The flip-through lasts only a few seconds, after which subjects are asked to name a card of their choice.
“We can get 70 to 80 per cent of our subjects to pick a specific card,” says Rensink. That’s because the deck is loaded; 10 out of the 52 cards are the same. Even though the cards fly by in an instant, this moderate bias has a powerful unconscious effect.
Rensink does not know why this trick works. But he hopes to strip it down to see how strong the principle of exposure is. “If you remove the magician and just show cards on a computer screen, would it still work?” asks Rensink. “How about if you use something other than cards?”
Forcing can also be achieved by another brain glitch that magicians learned about long before neuroscientists – false memory. During a trick, a magician will often describe what he has just done in a way that manipulates people’s recollection of it.
Researchers have only scratched the surface of what magic has to offer. Already, though, they’ve been surprised by how much of “their” knowledge magicians have already discovered. “For years, scientists have been reinventing wheels that magicians have known about for ages,” says Martinez-Conde.
As yet, science hasn’t led to the creation of new tricks. Yet even if it doesn’t there could be practical spin-offs, says Kuhn. Many of the techniques advertisers and politicians use to persuade us are straight out of the magician’s book of tricks, so a better knowledge of them could arm us all against manipulation.
The danger, of course, is that scientists become the ultimate killjoys, stripping away the, er, magic of it all. But with so much trickery on their side, the magicians ought to be able to stay one step ahead. If not, they could always send Robbins in to steal wallets and watches until the scientists agree not to spill the beans.
By Devin Powerll / Source: New Scientist
Our thoughts are the seeds that create our futures. What we thought yesterday, last week and last year manifested into our current moment.
Our thoughts are the seeds that create our futures. What we thought yesterday, last week and last year manifested into our current moment.
Most people at an early age reach a stage where they accept certain realities. These realities include stuff like the layer in society where they will most probably live and die in. We also develop fixed political and religious perceptions. Only a fraction of the population will dare to attempt to venture outside these fixed mental boundaries. We are either too lazy or too afraid to look what is going on behind the walls that we are encased in. Many of us simply forgot that there is something other than what is going on inside our walls. People that dare to remind us that there might be something better outside our barriers and perceptions are often attacked or avoided. We became like a community that live, go to school, marry have children and finally die in the same town. The boundaries of our tiny town become the size of our universe.
Say you are a person that discovered a place where people can go that would double their potential and solve many of their current and future problems. Are you obligated to attempt to convince those that are so set in their ways that there is hope and peace of mind just around the corner? You should keep in mind that those that you will attempt to tell about this place are often happy with their current circumstances, difficult as they might sometimes be.
I came to the conclusion that there is no obligation to inform anyone of anything, especially if such person is pretty happy with his current circumstances and future prospects. I am as such directing my attention and message to those that are no longer happy with their circumstances. Some of them are still living within the walls of perceptions that enveloped them since early childhood, but there is large a number that already packed their vehicle ready to leave town. Most of them have no clear idea where they want to go. All they know is that there is some kind of feeling that are calling them out of their current mental or physical vocations. I am writing this document for those that feel that there might be more to life than what they experienced to date.
There is nothing as exciting as the discovery that we consist out of two distinct elements. We are in an ongoing battle with the duality of our nature. We consist of a spiritual or higher self and a lower or ego self. I used the word battle because these two elements are up against each other until one of them gains the upper hand. Our actions, reactions and thoughts either support or oppose one of these contenders. It is easy to spot which one of these two contenders are in control. A person’s actions, reactions and choices display peace, wisdom, composure and compassion when the spiritual or higher self is in control. The opposite is however visible when the lower or ego self runs the show. You then find that a judgemental spirit, frustration, self-interest and problems are present in such person’s actions, reactions, relationships and choices. No real progress can be made until we become cognisant of this extremely important fact. We cannot wake up to our true potential until we become aware of the duality of our nature.
The key to victory over the false or ego self is only possible when we acknowledge that it gained the upper hand. You cannot change something that you are not prepared to admit. The act of acknowledgement of the ego’s control equips us with a powerful antidote. We are then able to substitute negative and destructive thoughts with compassionate productive thoughts. It is the admission or acknowledgement that helps us to pause long enough to replace the destructive thoughts with beneficial thoughts. We automatically and mechanically act and react to stimuli until the day we acknowledge the control that the ego self holds over us.
Our thoughts are the seeds that create our futures. What we thought yesterday, last week and last year manifested into our current moment. It is vital that we understand that we are creators in our own right and that we created whatever we are faced with today somewhere in our past. We used a powerful method in this creation process. We used the power of our imagination in a constructive or destructive way. What we fear or hope for becomes a reality. It is easy to check if we used this powerful instrument in a constructive or destructive manner. Look around you and you will soon discover if you are happy, relaxed and at peace with your life or sad, lonely and worried. The art of visualization release powerful energies that speed out into the universe to fulfil its mission. You are and have always been a creator in your own right. You think of something, act on it and soon see the thought materialise in the world of matter. When we visualize something, anything we boost its creative process many times. Everything that you see around you today was a thought in someone’s head first. It is thus not God punishing or blessing you when things work for or against you. It is the law of cause and effect that you are seeing in action. You cannot plant apple trees and expect a rich crop of oranges at the end of the season.
Thinking is the first phase of creation. Thoughts, negative or positive, constructive and destructive can be compared to seeds that you plant in your garden. The seeds need water before they will germinate and grow. Our emotions, good or bad start the germination process. This process will follow its natural path and finally yield the outcome that we yearned for or feared. Visualization of the desired outcome that you want to achieve speeds up the process many times. Doors in your heart and mind that you never knew of will begin to open. An energy field will awaken in you and around you that will call into life whatever you “ordered”. The pictures that you see in your mind will manifest in your life. They might sometimes take on different shapes and forms, but cannot deny your wishes. We usually love this principle because it provides us with a powerful system to expand our influence and affluence in the world of matter. You will in time discover that everything created in the world of matter is temporary. Nothing that you create in the physical world will stand the test of time. Everything will finally return to the source where they came from originally. You will later in this document see how you can use this same powerful method to create on the spiritual level. What you create on the physical level is temporary while what you create on the spiritual level will last forever.
We must take time and take a careful look in the mirror. We must analyse in a calm and reflective manner the conditions that surround us currently. You must be bold enough to ask yourself a few serious questions. You need to for example question your motives and intentions that you currently display in all areas of your life. You must ascertain if they are selfish or unselfish, honest or dishonest or compassionate or inconsiderate. You might find that you have a mixture of constructive and destructive habits. Nothing can change or improve until we admit to or take ownership of things we do or fail to do that is expected of a person that wants to live a more spiritual life. The ego or false self hates to admit mistakes or to acknowledge failures or shortcomings. It is our confessions to the higher self or spiritual self within that starts the healing process.
It is important to see the physical world for what it is. The physical world of matter is an illusion. It is a dimension where we come to learn and to grow. It is not a place where we come to prove our ability to create affluence. There is nothing wrong with the creation of what we need while we are visiting the physical plane. The creation process takes time. We cannot spend most of the time of our mission on the creation of the physical. We came to this plane to learn and to grow spiritually. We should spend the bulk of our time working on the development of our spiritual garden. The crops on the physical plane are temporary while the yields on the spiritual plane will sustain us even after we discarded the temporary physical body that we loaned from nature. The false or ego based self can only create on the physical plane.
The identification of your own flaws and mistakes boosts your courage and provide you with joy. Your admission of mistakes and your effort to overcome your false or ego self blasts you into a brand new dimension. You are on this plane to overcome your false self. You are not on this plane for any other reason. The setup on this plane provides your false self with a very wide range of tools. These tools come in handy when used to divert your attention away from your perfect self. You must see yourself as a person that is busy with a construction task. Every time your ego or false self successfully divert your attention and energy it succeed in delaying the completion of your construction task. Visualize and mentally see how your construction sight is deserted while you gallivant around earth plane to build stuff with a very limited lifespan.
We must not allow fear and the illusion based concepts of sin to stifle our attempts to purify the false or ego based self. A far healthier way to cope with mistakes, failures, so-called sins and setbacks is to view such lapses as lessons. We said earlier that the false or ego self have at its disposal a wide range of tools on the physical plane. There are an endless range of situations that we are confronted with daily that provides the false self with opportunities to retain its hold on our minds. We have been conditioned to experience guilt and shame when we fail to meet the ego based expected standards. Guilt and fear is a very destructive system that serves no real beneficial purpose. Our objective is to purify the false ego based self. We are inundated with opportunities daily to act and react in a detached spiritual manner. We grow and learn when we overcome our desire to do the first thing that comes to mind. We reduce the influence of the false self every time we act and react in an appropriate spiritual manner in the face of adversity and provocation. It is what we do or fail to do that cause the most damage. Pause for a moment before you act or react. Ask yourself if the action that you are on the verge of taking is the same that sages like Buddha or Jesus would have taken if they were faced with a similar set of circumstances.
The ego base false self creates the impression that our ability to generate affluence or accumulate possessions indicates our viability. No spiritual progress will take place while we fail to grasp that brotherly love and toleration holds the key to our mastery of the false self’s perception. It is only when we understand the duality of the world that we grasp how our weaknesses strengthen what we are attempting to overcome. We must not attempt to withstand the negative and destructive. All we need to do is decide not to empower what we fear. Nothing is good or evil until we create a perception about it in our thoughts. We create what we fear when we focus on the things that we are trying to avoid. Do not focus on poverty if you want affluence. Do not focus on retribution if you want to experience love. You draw what you think into your life experience. Your intentions become the power source of the thoughts you think. Your perfect self intend positive and productive outcomes while your false ego based self in turn twist and turn things so he will gain the advantage.
We create the pattern of our day the moment we open our eyes in the morning. Our first thoughts should be how we can make the coming day beneficial for others and ourselves. We discussed the amazing power of our imagination earlier in this document. What we mentally see on the screen of our minds when we rise in the morning will lay the foundation for the rest of the day. When we see joy in our imagination we gravitate towards people and events that will provide us with joy and satisfaction. When we experience frustration and anger when we begin our days we soon find a person or situation that will feed our anger. The perfect self will be our companion for the rest of our day when we get up with pure thoughts of love and good intentions. The false self will lead us into countless complications and problems when we start our day with judgemental and fear filled thoughts. You can sabotage the quality of your day long before you step out of bed in the morning. Take five minutes before you jump out of bed in the morning and create a pleasant and productive day that will draw into your life the things , people and circumstances that you desire.
It is helpful to do some stock taking before you finally drift into the world of sleep. Mentally see if you can spot the opportunities you had to learn lessons during that day. See the situations you found yourself in or the people that you interacted with. Make a mental note of the things your learned, especially where you can improve when you are confronted with similar situations. Do this in a constructive manner. This is not a period where you feel guilty because you fell short of your objectives. This is a brief period where you pat yourself on the back for tasks well done. This is also a period where you validate the things that turned out different than expected. You must remain a spectator while you do this short summary of your day. Drift off to sleep with positive thoughts of love, understanding and compassion in your heart and mind. This day and all that happened to you is minutes away from final completion. The only way you can resurrect anything that happened to you on any given day is to replay it in your imagination.
Rene
You can actually tune your mind in to a talent you don’t have, but would love to, and you can attract it to you. There is “another you” in that alternate “now” that has all the talent you wanted but didn’t get.
Here’s how to get in touch with every talent, every ability you ever wanted for yourself, even if you’re convinced you don’t have a shred of ability in that area.
Physicists and mystics agree that all of time co-exists simultaneously. The way we experience time, with one moment following another moment after another moment, is (they say) an illusion. In reality, all moments of time are hanging around together, and our consciousness is threading its way through and among those moments of time.
(Just stay with me for a bit longer, and we’ll be past all this theoretical stuff.)
They also say that there are an infinite number of variations of each possible moment. That’s what they call “parallel universes” in the science fiction movies.
As it turns out, those parallel universes are not actually science fiction after all. They’re really there-the physicists say so. We just can’t usually see them.
But there is one way to perceive them. It’s your intuition (or imagination).
You can actually tune your mind in to a talent you don’t have, but would love to, and you can attract it to you. There is “another you” in that alternate “now” that has all the talent you wanted but didn’t get.
So how do you benefit from this “other you”? How do you siphon off the abilities from the “talent gas-tank” of that other you, and get it into your mind?
The short answer is, you don’t.
You don’t try to take anything away from anybody. Instead, you reach out with your intuition and imagination and offer to combine your talents with those of that other you. You suggest a win-win merger that benefits you both.
Then you start training those new talents, and-surprise-those very talents appear from out of “nowhere” (but you’ll know where).
Do this…
It’s simple to do a bit of “day-dreaming” and talk to other versions of yourself. How do you reach them? Just imagine it. You’re always talking to that policeman or judge or parent in your head. So why not your other selves in other possible universes? Just imagine them. Talk to them. Offer to do a joint venture — share some of what you know for some of what they can do.
And then, once you’ve made an agreement, just accept what comes. And enjoy it.
By Charles Burke / Source: Command More Luck
The world around you shifts as your external environment and the things in it changes into the new one that you think of. It is because it is all a simulation.
The entire universe is a projection of consciousness. We experience the universe as a projection through us because each of us is a centre of consciousness. Therefore we are all centres of the universe.
There really is no here or there because everything is at one point where consciousness is. We all do not exist in different places but are all present at one point. The reality of here and there is all created and experienced within the singularity of consciousness itself. Where you are is the center of the universe.
Consciousness is the dimensionless program that simulates dimensions. It is the omnipresent dot that creates the illusion of everywhere when there is nowhere but here and now. There is only one true place consciousness exists in and that is here. There is only one true time where consciousness exists in and that is now. Everything else that is experienced as there and then is only a simulation that is experienced from here and now. When you think of a time and place, you instantly travel there mentally.
In fact you do not really travel at all. The world around you shifts as your external environment and the things in it changes into the new one that you think of. It is because it is all a simulation. You never really move at all but it is everything else that moves. The centre of anything never moves and therefore the whole world revolves around you. The physical world itself is also a simulation of consciousness. It is a simulation that you are walking and travelling from one place to another or moving along through time.
When you take a plane to another country which you last visited ten years ago, your change in experience is really a change in the simulation of reality. The simulated image of the city has changed as some buildings have been removed and new ones have appeared. The simulated images of the people you met before has also changed as the consciousness program reflects the effects of how people are effected by time. A few white hairs, wrinkled skin, height increase or sexual endowment has appeared.
We think that no one is the center of the universe because everyone cannot be the center at the same time. That is because we perceive consciousness to be separate from itself. Actually consciousness is projected from where you are. It only exist at one place and one time and that is where you are. If you are a tall, handsome man looking at a beautiful women in red, you are consciousness projecting the woman in red. If you are the woman in red, then you are consciousness projecting the tall man.
You are consciousness itself and whichever point of view you are experiencing at any giving point of time and place, everything else around you is a projection from you. You are more than just the particular person that you are. You are the entire universe itself. The reason why you perceive reality from a particular point of time and space, and as a particular person is because you are consciousness individuated into a single point of view for the purpose of experiencing everything else from that point of view.
Think of a computer program that runs a simulated game world where all characters are interacting with each other. It is all really just one program cycling between each character so fast that it seems as if all characters are being run simultaneously when they are actually being run one at a time. It is the activity of consciousness playing every single role in the universe that makes it seem as though there’re separate programs running when it’s really one program running everything in turns at infinite speed.
The reason why consciousness runs at infinite speed is because it is not confined to the boundaries of time at all. Time is only a simulated concept that is created by consciousness to be experienced by consciousness. Imagine playing a particular character and filming yourself, and then reversing the film and playing a different character. Superimpose the film of the first character with the second and you’ll get the effect of two characters in one film. That is how two of you exist at the same time.
But consciousness doesn’t really have to take turns experiencing itself from several points of view. It splits itself into many individuated versions of itself so as to experience all those points of view simultaneously. All those individuated versions are simply different parts of that one consciousness. When you shift your perspective from one point of view to another, you are shifting the center of the universe from one point to another. The center is everywhere yet nowhere according to how you see it.
So to experience your reality as the creator of it, realize that where you are is the center of all that is occurring. This is what it means to be centered. When you think someone, something or somewhere else is the center of what’s going on, you are giving your power away to the external world. Move through your world with the consciousness that you are the center of the universe and you will find that you don’t really have to shift much as things and people around you shift themselves instead.
You will become a lot more at peace, stable, cool and poised as your perception of being the center aligns your experience of reality with the state of being godlike. Less and less do things move you without your permission and more and more are you able to cause things around you to move instead. People will feel your strength, stability and solidness as you carry and project yourself as the center. You will become more and more of a master of reality as you control how time and space move around you.
By Enoch Tan
Author of Reality Creation Secrets
We are continually engaged in self-talk in order to ‘establish and maintain’ a reliable sense of balance; in other words, put forth a false front.
More than 100 years ago, we were enlightened by three highly intelligent, intuitive gifted men who were modern pioneers of the human psyche. Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Alfred Adler were psychological visionaries who knew, before it was time to know, we would need to access the depths of the unconscious, if we were penetrate the mysteries of the present day and age.
These iconic fathers of psychoanalytic therapy understood that in order to puncture the veil of hypocrisy and rampant untruth, choking the life out of people, we would have to probe the deep recesses of the unconscious realm, to unravel the trance-like hold, and the illusion of accepted normalcy has on us. Is it normal to be constantly bombarded by/ through and with the conflicted thoughts of others? Must we continue with the insanity of non-relenting self-talk so that we placate our self-generated ill-defined thoughts and actions?
In order to follow our own truth, we must be willing to probe, expose, access, recognize, appreciate, embrace, and apply it to our everyday lives. We are not to forfeit the benefits of the sanctity of our own minds for fear of what is gained by succumbing to those voices of disdain or self-appointed elevation. Those, who familiar or not, would rather have us controlled by the perils of monotony (found within the box of approval, agreement and validation) and so called normal acceptance of the way things are currently viewed and appreciated need be forcefully exorcized from the skull, without regret. No longer can we amicably allow the thoughts, ideas, assumptions, desires, dreams, (whether repressed or voiced) to play such an important role in our lives.
We are continually engaged in self-talk in order to ‘establish and maintain’ a reliable sense of balance; in other words, put forth a false front. This on-going complacent, amicable self-talk (phony personality) prevents us from hearing the revolting ‘still small voice’ of genuine truth within. We are so accustomed to relying on others for our views, opinions and attitudes that when we try to make a step up to the plate, we feel embarrassed or ashamed for having had a revelatory thought of own in the first place. Falsity plays out its masked roles in many forms. Sometimes, from those who are the closest to us or who we deem so vitally significant to our happiness. We have a difficult time recognizing what’s false or true due to the ‘loud speaker’ of self-talk we engage in unceasingly.
We are so consumed with business, (the ludicrous idea of getting ahead), we don’t want to recognize or admit falsity in our lives. We simply want to keep the waters calm for fear of upsetting the apple cart. So, round and round the mulberry bush we go; hand in hand, all singing a superficial lullaby of false motivations. We are so buried beneath the saturated influences of others, we rarely stop to regroup, asking IF what we are following or allowing to be said, as if in agreement, really suits our innermost fancy. In other words, are we basing what we feel upon the suppositions of others we value more than ourselves?
False institutions, false leaders, false media, false ideas, false education, false motivations, false successes, false dreams, false importance, false identification, false goals, false aspirations all fall under the category of unexpressed idealized dreams which have nothing whatever to do with us or our personal ambitions. But, we have invested so much time and effort to reverently preserve and charismatically present ourselves, as dutiful compliant individuals, we dare not reveal what’s going on with us ‘down under.’ To strip from us, the false mask of elevated status and coveted acclaim requires gut honesty and resilient courage, unlike anything we’ve demonstrated, thus far.
Many people are silently (begrudgingly) unwillingly choosing and have decimated their entire lives to living from a false base. Why? Because we don’t trust our gut instinct; we listen to the (easily accessible and readily recognizable) surface voice of our tattered minds. Due to the deposited insecurity, from the belied voices of infiltrated, unwanted, influential opinionated osmosis, (others who surround us and who live in our minds from memories), we have not a clue what it is we really want to do or how we want to do it. What a shame! An actual living travesty, which prevents any genuine evolvement from taking place, no matter how much we plea for things to change.
We are living in an anaesthetized world filled with unrequited love of the sublime self. We are hopeless, helpless, disenfranchised individualized people, who have followed goals that in no way can satisfy the deepest desires of our soul. And, yet we altruistically continue to act as if what we are doing is for the best of all concerned. Give me a break! When we allow ourselves to become infiltrated by other people’s ideas of what is supposedly right and just for us, instead of pursuing the mainline of our own ambitions , be they accepted, appreciated, understood, respected or not, nothing but unmitigated unhappiness results.
As long as we deny the existence of our own self-motivated vain glorious motivations to please and sublimate, we continue to remain stuck and arrogant. We see ourselves are long-suffering. Anytime, we generate an artificial premise (by explaining, excusing, or defending) our hidden desires, we do it based on false motivations. Rest assured nothing but total dissatisfaction and utter chaos will result. Self-talk creates irrefutable damage to the integrity of the individual. No longer can this raping of the human mind take place.
A bridge of self-honesty must be built and in all actuality is being built to free the slaves of mediocrity and bearers of inconsistent indecision whose hearts and minds are saturated with unveiled boredom and depression. People know they’re unhappy, they just don’t why. The Al ‘why-ing’ is found in the ‘whining’. Cease to complain to yourself while a contradicting interacting takes place on the outside.
Allow the ‘still small voice’ to speak its unwavering sensual artistic truth in the midst of other’s incessant jabbering. It will difficult and uncomfortable, at first; but incalculably worth the effort invested.
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The first step to wealth is to know what money really is, or more accurately, what it represents.
Money: An illusion, a shadow of something else…
There is a science of getting rich, and it is an exact science, like algebra or arithmetic. There are certain laws which govern the process of acquiring riches, and once these laws are learned and obeyed by anyone, that person will get rich with mathematical certainty. – Wallace D. Wattles.
The first step to having wealth is to know what it is. And few people know what it really is, in and of itself. What is wealth? What causes it? What causes the cause of it? Let us start with money, the world’s symbol of wealth, and then move deeper.
Money is not real.
Money is merely legal tender, a form of exchange. We use it to exchange value. It represents value.
Money is the ‘body’ of value. It is the physical representation of value that rises and falls in ourselves, within us. Not within ‘things’ outside of us, but within us. For without us, what can the value of a thing, such as a car, be to us? Nothing, at least not to us. In other words, it is we, the observers, that place value in things, but this value is really value in us – we give value to the material things. The material things have no ‘money’ value in themselves – we give that to them. So, money is the external physical representation of a particular section of our internal value, within us, within you. That is why a house or a block of shares valued at $1 million today can fall to a valuation of half a million dollars tomorrow when fear is introduced into the hearts of those involved. The fear kills a portion of the internal values of the participants and that is reflected by the paper money, the ‘body’ of value.
Here is something else: physical paper money does not even represent money in full. It cannot reasonably do that. By some estimates (and this varies from nation to nation), only as little as 4% of the money in the banks exists as paper cash. Imagine how much cotton, linen, pulp, and metal the world would need so as to make all the money everyone has in his or her bank accounts. Imagine how much space it would take to store all this money in paper form. If you were to stack only one million US$1 bills, it would weight one ton and be 361 ft high. Neither does money exist as gold reserves any more. This is for exactly the same reason – we ran out of the reasonable ability to keep a gold standard in the 1970s.
So what does it exist as, the money that we are always talking about? Well, it is one massive illusion. It is all just numbers written on paper and computer storage devices, and assigned to people and entities such as companies and investments, or more accurately, further records! To put it in another way, for every $100 or its equivalent in any other currency, only about $4 exists as printed-paper notes or coins, while the remaining $96 exists as numbers written on papers and computers in banks and businesses and other entities. The only reason this system does not collapse is that we all believe in it. The last time people stopped believing in it in a large enough extent was just before the Great Depression when large numbers of people rushed to their banks to withdraw their money and found that they could not all get it. This is not what caused the Great Depression, but it in a large way accelerated it.
So, money is not real – something else is. Money is just the shadow of that other something. The first step to wealth is to know what money really is, or more accurately, what it represents. Learn not to look at the money most of the time. As you will soon see, it is very rare in a day that you should ever look at money as you know it today – the cash, the bank accounts, the costs, etc. This is merely the shadow and not the real thing. Looking at the shadow, the physical money, as you will soon see, is most of the time very unwise and unhealthy for you and your finances.
The magic ingredient that so many lack in life is staying power and determination.
It is imperative to grasp as early as possible that you must believe in your own integrity, value and ability to make a difference. Most of us start life deluded and think that we are and will always be surrounded by individuals that will support us and that will be there for us when things fail to materialise as expected. Some of us discover early in life that real friends are rarer than virgins in a whore house. We discover that our so-called blood brothers and friends vanish like a fart in a thunder storm when things start going wrong for us. We should teach children that life is not fair and that they will more often than not work like a slave and get little or no rewards. Children must understand that life consist out of an endless range of challenges that will come at them like the waves of the ocean. We cannot give our children a bigger gift than the preparation needed to see things as they are (reality). True champions play to win, but also understand that it is silly to expect to win every time they go out to compete. The key to a long and successful career is fortitude. It is not how hard you get hit, but how many times you bounce back. We must train our children to see failure as stepping stones and not disasters. The biggest curse you can put on a child is to create the impression that everything will turn our ok if they try their best. You might be the best talented player that attempt to get into a team at school and still fail to find your name on the final team list. You may have failed to make the cut because a few other players have parents that make big donations to the school and play golf with the coach. The unprepared child is often destroyed long before he or she leave school. Unprepared children become disillusioned and some of them never recover. Look around you or do some research and you will discover that the real successful players in sport and the business world overcame serious adversity during their journey through life. There will be times in your life where you will face very testing times. You will yearn for support and understanding and discover that there is no one that is brave enough or loyal enough to come to your rescue. It is these critical moments, these dark nights of the soul that bring out the best in those with fortitude, courage and determination. Some of us understand that disaster can strike at any moment. We do not fear setbacks and disasters because we know that we can like so many times before overcome anything. Winners and true champions can get up and immediately start building on a new dream and a more exciting goal. The magic ingredient that so many lack in life is staying power and determination. This is the biggest blessing you can pass onto your children. The best way my friend to do this is to lead by example. Show your children that you are strong and courageous in the face of adversity.
Rene
PORTABLE LIFE SKILLS DAILY WISDOM GUIDE 