Archive for the 'Beliefs' category
Smearing beliefs
April 14, 2007 11:10 pm
We see the world through our belief systems. Often when we seek change, we pretend to believe such a change is possible - but dig deeper and we don’t. It reminds me of a quote from the movie What the Bleep Do We Know?:
“It’s a wonderful idea, positive thinking… but what it usually means is that I have a little smear of positive thinking covering a whole mass of negative thinking.”
If you want to manifest something in your life, you need to not only believe it is possible, but believe it is already coming into being. And truly believe. I can pretend to believe I can fly… but I know physics doesn’t work that way. I can believe I can win the lottery… but I still know the odds are very slim. I can’t truly believe either.
I think manifestation is most effective in small steps. Looking for small changes in your life that are achievable and then focusing on them. When you truly believe, you start acting as appropriately, and you naturally make it happen.
Become the change you desire
April 11, 2007 8:26 pm“Become the change you desire.” triggered the thought for the day - thanks to Zen Chill on instant manifestation referring to a Steve Pavlina podcast.
What was the last thing you tried to change in your life? How well did it work? Did it have a lasting effect?
Did you say, “I want to lose ten pounds. I must go on a diet.”
Or, “I want to be productive. I better start working hard.”
Or, “I want to be rich. I need to a better job and to start saving.”
These three have something in common: they require you to force yourself to change behaviors to achieve your goal. They reinforce that you are not what you desire:
- you are overweight (or why would you need a diet?)
- you are unproductive (or why demand the extra effort?)
- you are lacking money (or why would you need more?)
Attempts to change behaviors usually fail. Why? Because they aren’t in line with your belief systems about who you are.
Instead, become the change you desire. Imagine it. Start acting like it. Your behaviors will naturally reflect yourself and bring you goal to you effortlessly.
Effortlessly does not mean without work or action. It means you stop forcing yourself to be something you are not.
Perception overload
April 6, 2007 7:51 pm
Wikipedia describes perception as the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. Organizing is important, especially considering the overload of messages coming to us through advertising and these hyper-communication networks (e-mail, IM, SMSes, blogs, myspace, and now twitter). We have built up a culture of distractions - but what does it achieve?
Anxiety.
An interesting article from 1999, discussing the negative effects of Change and Information Overload concluded:
It seems that the biggest problem facing present-day society is not that there is too little progress, but rather too much of it. Our mind, physiology nor social structures seem fit to cope with such a rate of change and such an amount of new information. Unfortunately, change, complexity and information overload are abstract phenomena, which are difficult to grasp. Therefore, few people have as yet understood that they contribute to the anxiety they feel. When trying to explain their vague feelings of dissatisfaction, they will rather look for more easily recognizable causes, such as unemployment, pollution, crime, corruption or immigration. These phenomena, which have become much more visible because of the attention they get from the media, play the role of scapegoats: they are blamed for the lack of quality of life which people experience, while being only tangentially related to it. This reinforces an atmosphere of gloom and doom.
Changing change
April 5, 2007 9:40 pm
I went to university in Baltimore, Maryland, and used to speak with the local homeless. I remember once, I was riding home on the bus, and got into a conversation with a beggar. He had an interesting request… he wasn’t asking for money, but for an exchange. He wanted to change his quarters for dollar bills.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because, once I get back to the shelter, and the others hear the change jiggling around in my pocket, I will have to share it with them. I am saving up to buy a new pair of boots to help me make it through the winter, and if I can hide away the dollar bills.”
This man had no job to worry about, no demands from society… other than the expectation to share his earnings from the street. All he wanted was that pair of boots, something I could have easily gone out and purchased for myself without thinking. But that didn’t seem to bother him. In fact, he seemed quite at peace with the world. He was working towards a goal, and seemed quite content to work for it one step at a time.
It’s amazing how many big issues I have in my life - problems which seem insurmountable, that keep me stuck and trapped in my day to day life. How many of these problems are necessary? Compared to this man, are they really that threatening?
Urban legend of the Eskimos
April 4, 2007 10:09 am
There is an old urban legend that Eskimos have an extrordinarily large vocabulary for types of snow. Apparently the myth is usually blown out of proportion, but in its essence there is some truth: The more important a particular subject is to us, the richer our vocabulary will become to describe it.
For example, my flatmate, Viktor Bijelovic is a classical pianist. With my delicate ears, I can distinguish “soft” and “loud”, and can describe music as “yup, sounds good” and “uhhhh…”. (Okay, so I am exaggerating.) Viktor, on the other is able to critique the music he plays and listens to on a much finer level.
It is not just that he has a richer vocabulary, but he has significantly more experience observing music and paying attention to it. From his experiences he has learned to notice differences that I simply have not yet learned exist. By paying more attention to what we are experiencing in the present moment, we open ourselves up to understanding our reality at a deeper level.
Illusionary world
April 3, 2007 3:07 pmDid you know that your eye is constantly processing what you see? What you think you see has already changed from what light has actually reached your eye. Here is an image I was sent in an e-mail a long time ago that demonstrates this:
- If your eyes follow the movement of the rotating pink dot, you will only see one color, pink.
- If you stare at the black + in the center, the moving dot turns to green.
- Now, concentrate on the black + in the center of the picture. After a short period of time, all the pink dots will slowly disappear, and you will only see a green dot rotating.
It’s amazing how our brain works. There really is no green dot, and the pink ones really don’t disappear. This should be proof enough that we don’t always see what we think we see.
Learning to see
April 2, 2007 3:13 pm
Much of learning to draw is about learning to see. One of the first things I learned when I started to draw with pencil were contour drawings. In a contour drawing, you take a large pad of paper, put your pencil down on the paper, and trace a complex object without looking at the paper. You trace the object with your eyes, and refrain from looking at your drawing until you are done. The purpose is not to create good art, but to train yourself to look at the fine details of what you are drawing, instead of the drawing itself.
It is important to remember that what we think we see is colored by our beliefs about how the world is. More often than not we are seeing from our memories of how we have experienced the world, not how the world is right now.
New perspective
April 1, 2007 5:15 pm
Today I am going to see the world from a different perspective.
Ha ha. Just kidding. April fools.
I’ll save it for tomorrow.
Billions of realities
March 17, 2007 11:57 pm
There are billions of people on this planet. Each person creates their own view of what this world is about. That’s billions of realities. Can you imagine what this means? I guess not, because you are still bounded by your own mind and experiences.
What I really want to know is… of all those billions of possible realities I could create in my head - why the heck did I choose this one?!? I tend to run around in world where I feel stuck in a lot of different ways. I have created the way things are to be… quite limiting. So why do I hold on to this? Why don’t I just drop this reality I have created, and pick up something better?
Winning the lottery
March 16, 2007 8:55 pmSo how do mental models work?
Here is a quick example of my model for getting rich:
- Pick the right numbers.
- Buy a lottery ticket.
- Win the lottery.
Easy, right? Unfortunately, this is in conflict another mental model of mine:
- My chance of getting hit by a bus are orders of magnitude greater than winning the lottery.
- I live in London, with lots of buses, some of which drive extremely close to the side of the road.
- If I play the lottery, chances are I’ve been hit by a bus.
- I’d better not play the lottery.
If you think this is a bit far-fetched, you should see my normal mental models. But that’s okay… mental models don’t need to make sense, they just need to work. The important thing is to ask the questions:
