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Power vs. Force

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

I’m currently reading a book by Dr. David Hawkins called Power vs. Force.  A great book for looking at levels of consciousness and even answers what consciousness is.  The book is very complex and it will take several reads before I absorb all of the messages in it.  It feels intuitively right to me, so I’m going to keep reading it.  I’m about 3/4 of the way done and so far, it has been a very humbling experience.  Whether or not you believe in pure consciousness or what others call “a higher power,” this book is extraordinary in its case for raising your level of existence to the point where you are living more effectively and not only that, with much more wisdom.

There is a scale of consciousness, all the way from shame to enlightenment.  Shame is when you are living so low that suicide seems like the only option and enlightenment is where you are one with everything and live in a timeless manner.  I’ll steal the descriptions of these levels of consciousness from Steve Pavlina’s site because I find that it will be more accurate and detailed than my descriptions, having read this book only once (not yet):

Shame – Just a step above death. You’re probably contemplating suicide at this level. Either that or you’re a serial killer. Think of this as self-directed hatred.

Guilt – A step above shame, but you still may be having thoughts of suicide. You think of yourself as a sinner, unable to forgive yourself for past transgressions.

Apathy – Feeling hopeless or victimized. The state of learned helplessness. Many homeless people are stuck here.

Grief – A state of perpetual sadness and loss. You might drop down here after losing a loved one. Depression. Still higher than apathy, since you’re beginning to escape the numbness.

Fear – Seeing the world as dangerous and unsafe. Paranoia. Usually you’ll need help to rise above this level, or you’ll remain trapped for a long time, such as in an abusive relationship.

Desire – Not to be confused with setting and achieving goals, this is the level of addiction, craving, and lust — for money, approval, power, fame, etc. Consumerism. Materialism. This is the level of smoking and drinking and doing drugs.

Anger – the level of frustration, often from not having your desires met at the lower level. This level can spur you to action at higher levels, or it can keep you stuck in hatred. In an abusive relationship, you’ll often see an anger person coupled with a fear person.

Pride – The first level where you start to feel good, but it’s a false feeling. It’s dependent on external circumstances (money, prestige, etc), so it’s vulnerable. Pride can lead to nationalism, racism, and religious wars. Think Nazis. A state of irrational denial and defensiveness. Religious fundamentalism is also stuck at this level. You become so closely enmeshed in your beliefs that you see an attack on your beliefs as an attack on you.

Courage – The first level of true strength. I’ve made a previous post about this level: Courage is the Gateway. This is where you start to see life as challenging and exciting instead of overwhelming. You begin to have an inkling of interest in personal growth, although at this level you’ll probably call it something else like skill-building, career advancement, education, etc. You start to see your future as an improvement upon your past, rather than a continuation of the same.

Neutrality – This level is epitomized by the phrase, “live and let live.” It’s flexible, relaxed, and unattached. Whatever happens, you roll with the punches. You don’t have anything to prove. You feel safe and get along well with other people. A lot of self-employed people are at this level. A very comfortable place. The level of complacency and laziness. You’re taking care of your needs, but you don’t push yourself too hard.

Willingness – Now that you’re basically safe and comfortable, you start using your energy more effectively. Just getting by isn’t good enough anymore. You begin caring about doing a good job — perhaps even your best. You think about time management and productivity and getting organized, things that weren’t so important to you at the level of neutrality. Think of this level as the development of willpower and self-discipline. These people are the “troopers” of society; they get things done well and don’t complain much. If you’re in school, then you’re a really good student; you take your studies seriously and put in the time to do a good job. This is the point where your consciousness becomes more organized and disciplined.

Acceptance – Now a powerful shift happens, and you awaken to the possibilities of living proactively. At the level of willingness you’ve become competent, and now you want to put your abilities to good use. This is the level of setting and achieving goals. I don’t like the label “acceptance” that Hawkins uses here, but it basically means that you begin accepting responsibility for your role in the world. If something isn’t right about your life (your career, your health, your relationship), you define your desired outcome and change it. You start to see the big picture of your life more clearly. This level drives many people to switch careers, start a new business, or change their diets.

Reason – At this level you transcend the emotional aspects of the lower levels and begin to think clearly and rationally. Hawkins defines this as the level of medicine and science. The way I see it, when you reach this level, you become capable of using your reasoning abilities to their fullest extent. You now have the discipline and the proactivity to fully exploit your natural abilities. You’ve reached the point where you say, “Wow. I can do all this stuff, and I know I must put it to good use. So what’s the best use of my talents?” You take a look around the world and start making meaningful contributions. At the very high end, this is the level of Einstein and Freud. It’s probably obvious that most people never reach this level in their entire lives.

Love – I don’t like Hawkins’ label “love” here because this isn’t the emotion of love. It’s unconditional love, a permanent understanding of your connectedness with all that exists. Think compassion. At the level of reason, you live in service to your head. But that eventually becomes a dead end where you fall into the trap of over-intellectualizing. You see that you need a bigger context than just thinking for its own sake. At the level of love, you now place your head and all your other talents and abilities in service to your heart (not your emotions, but your greater sense of right and wrong — your conscience). I see this as the level of awakening to your true purpose. Your motives at this level are pure and uncorrupted by the desires of the ego. This is the level of lifetime service to humanity. Think Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Dr. Albert Schweitzer. At this level you also begin to be guided by a force greater than yourself. It’s a feeling of letting go. Your intuition becomes extremely strong. Hawkins claims this level is reached only by 1 in 250 people during their entire lifetimes.

Joy – A state of pervasive, unshakable happiness. Eckhart Tolle describes this state in The Power of Now. The level of saints and advanced spiritual teachers. Just being around people at this level makes you feel incredible. At this level life is fully guided by synchronicity and intuition. There’s no more need to set goals and make detailed plans — the expansion of your consciousness allows you to operate at a much higher level. A near-death experience can temporarily bump you to this level.

Peace – Total transcendence. Hawkins claims this level is reached only by one person in 10 million.

Enlightenment – The highest level of human consciousness, where humanity blends with divinity. Extremely rare. The level of Krishna, Buddha, and Jesus. Even just thinking about people at this level can raise your consciousness.

Dr. Hawkins says that these levels are numbered from 20 to 1000, with 1000 being the highest possible level of existence by humans.  This has to do with a science called kinesiology.  It has to do with a test using two people and using this simple test to calibrate the levels of certain people, events, and situations.  It is said that below the level of 200 (courage), you are using force and not power, which is nowhere as strong as power and always loses to power.  After 200, there is a gradual progression all the way up to enlightenment.  At 500, unconditional love is the default state of being.  At 600, nonduality is the default state of being.  At 700 or higher, enlightenment is the default state of being.  Enlightenment can be described as pure bliss, ecstasy, complete oneness with everything and everyone, with a timeless component to it.  One becomes pure consciousness at this point and sees that our inner reality and outer reality are but one in the same.  It is a place without thought, just a deep inner knowing of the connectedness of everything.

Dr. Hawkins says, however, that most people never move more than 5 points in their entire lives.  Why is that?  Because at the lower levels (below 200), there is a ton of denial.  Most states of consciousness at that point are being dictated by circumstance and not from our inner power.  Courage is the gateway to get out of this force-ful way of living and moving into a more power-ful state of being that is much more rewarding.  So, what is it that holds these people back, other than denial?  Fear, greed, guilt, and other negative emotions.  It takes a gigantic amount of effort just to progress to another level above where you are, never mind go from shame to enlightenment.

I find this book to be very comprehensive and well-written.  I’m not going to divulge any more information on the book because I’m not quite done with it yet.  You can use these calibrations for anything, books, music, whatever.  He explains in detail how to do this in the book.  I have to say, thus far, it is a highly recommended book that deserves significant attention.  For those of you who are interested in raising your consciousness and experiencing higher states of being, as well as understanding how to get there, this is an exceptional book that rivals anything I’ve read in the last 5 years.  It is a lot of material to absorb, so you may not get all of it in your head with just one read, but the concepts he presents here are universal to the human condition and timeless as far as I’m concerned.

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Opening Your Eyes

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

Every week now I’m trying to write a blog entry, on either Thursday or Friday, because I work pretty much the rest of the week.  I work nights, so it’s not really practical for me to blog more frequently.  Besides, this is just something I do to express some ideas I have, or expansion on the ideas of others.  I am not someone who is going to post multiple times a day or even more than twice a week, because I feel not only that I would have less memorable posts, but also that it would become a giant time sink.  I would be spending hours, maybe more, every week just to maintain this thing.  And if I’m not making money from it, what is the payoff?  It’s not like I even want to make money from this blog.  I don’t feel like I’m saying anything special, other than the fact that I have a unique writer’s voice.  The ideas are as old as the hills, it’s just I’m expressing them in my own, unique way.  How many people have thought the same things I have and expressed them in their own way?  Millions.  Over the course of human existence, that is.

But I am not my ideas, because those ideas are not mine to begin with.  Nobody can own ideas.  Ideas are fluid.  It is the unique expression of those ideas that can be owned.  That is our gift to the world.  Our own perspective on things, on ideas.  That is what we bring to the table.  That is our uniqueness coming out.  And this is why every human has something to contribute.  (This is another bull shit, everyone is special post, when most people are not special, they are ordinary, but that is only because they have been conditioned not to think for themselves and to let the media and the government do all their thinking for them.)

Now I’m going to lash out at the world at large because that self-help shit really isn’t me.  No offense to those who got value out of  my posts about goal setting and following your passion.  My passion is exposing the world for what it is and how it takes from the wider world without giving back, and allows crimes of epic  proportions and we just sit there and accept it, or remain blissfully ignorant of it.  We accept what we are told by the media because nobody wants to put in the time and effort it would take to prove things wrong.  And when someone does prove that the “official story” or something is wrong, like Bush winning the election, people still believe it.  Or when 9/11 was debunked by quite a few people, they were viewed as heretics and unpatriotic, abominable to think our own government would attack itself.  If you know all the evidence, you’ll know that the WTC was an albatross, inefficient, and would need asbestos removal that would cost more than the original buildings.  Not to mention some guy just bought the building and put an insurance policy on it specifically for terrorist attacks less than a year before the “terrorist attack.”  And let’s not forget that Dick Cheney become head of NORAD, which had never happened before in the history of NORAD.  No elected official was ever put in charge of shooting down planes and for some reason, that was the time and Cheney was all, “Do NOT shoot that plane down!”  They removed all bomb sniffing dogs from the WTC 2 weeks before the collapse.  The buildings fell at near freefall speed, which is impossible for a steel-framed building unless it is being demolished with small charges at ever floor to lessen resistance to zero as the building collapses.

What happened to most of those who said something to the contrary about 9/11?  I’ll tell you what.  The people in high-ranking positions in journalism and politics were made a mockery of, many of them lost their jobs, and were told never to speak of it again.  Others were threatened and changed their official “scientific” findings.  9/11 is not about Muslim terrorists, it is about America wanting a fascist state of control and a reason to attack the middle east to get oil.  The people who are invested in the “official story” have everything to gain, while those who question it have everything to lose.  So it is a risky position, even to say that we trained Al-Quaeda is a risky position.  To say that Osama Bin Laden used to be a member of one of our government agencies is ludicrous.  But all of it is true.  They are hidden truths.  I have this theory that if even 1% of what we don’t know were let out, we would have a revolution.  But most people don’t want to know.  Better avert your eyes.  Why is it so few people truly want to know?

I’ll tell you why.  Because if they lied about that, what else did they lie about?  What other load of crap are they feeding us?  The government lies on a daily basis.  The government is not your friend.  Unless it is a friend who kills people and lies about it.  Big Brother is watching us almost everywhere we go now.  The PATRIOT Act was a total dissolvement of our freedoms in so many ways and we just stood there and took it.  People don’t have critical thinking skills, not even our leaders.  Not anymore.  The public education system, for the most part, creates a population that is a worker  bee, that will go along with the status quo or whatever the government is doing, because in school it is the same way.  Most people get their spirit broken in school.  Imagine 6 year old children forced to sit at a desk for the better part of 6 hours listening to a teacher drone on about mathematical equations when all they want to do is go outside and play and explore their world.  Even things that would be considered fun, such as kickball or singing a song is done under threat of punishment.  We are trained to do what those “above” us say and believe what they say as well.  We are conditioned since birth if our parents were really lousy and placed us in front of the television.  If they actually paid attention to us, we were conditioned since the start of school, the stupidity-manufacturing institution.  No wonder most people don’t really know what is going on in the world.  They don’t know that they don’t know that they are being conditioned and are being brainwashed on a daily basis by all forms of media.  They are told how to think, they believe what the media tells them to be true, even when it could be completely false.

Very few people take the time to question what they read or see on the television.  And that’s the problem.  If we actually did examine and pull the wool off of our eyes, we would see more than we could ever imagine seeing in this socially-conditioned state we are in now.  How the media placates us and gets us hung up on issues like whether or not a mosque should be built at Ground Zero, rather than focusing on the erosion of our freedoms of religion and speech.  The very things that are not reported in the media are the things that bear the most importance.  We never hear about secret societies that control the world on the news.  When was the last time they had the Bilderberg Group on the TV?  Or the Freemasons?  All this secrecy in the name of controlling people, and gaining more and more power, substituted in the form of money and land.  It is a power addiction that has led us to be left in the dark while those in power take everything and maybe throw us a little crumb every now and then.  They commit crimes of epic proportions, right out in the open and blame it on someone else.  As Napoleon said, “To be believed, make the truth unbelievable.”  And he’s right.  Most people can’t believe we attacked ourselves on 9/11 because it would shatter their reality.  It’s easier to believe that someone far, far away that hates us did that horrific act.  Not Uncle Sam.  Not our government, not people who live in this country and have for their whole lives.  It is just easier to believe that some brown people did it who believe in a foreign God that most people in this country don’t believe in or even understand.

It’s just so sad, because human beings have such a capacity for good, but also one for evil.  And when I use the words good and evil, I don’t mean in any religious sense.  I guess you could call them constructive and destructive.  Sane and pathological.  The choice of words is meaningless.  It’s just good and evil are better understood.  Fear and love are also easily understood, and so is love of power.  We have the capacity to create heaven on Earth, but most of us can’t because we would have to quit our jobs and possibly be homeless just to see our visions through.  The system has got us by the balls and we know it.  It is only through transcending the dominant system in small ways to start that we can begin to live autonomously, with the need for less and less from the system.  The system that lies to us and kills people.  Then we can finally begin to do good in ways that are good from every perspective.  For example, buying a piece of land and letting it run wild, like it should be.  That creates diversity and you could also live on it.  But in order to buy that land, you have to spend time in th dominant system earning money to get the land.  But once you have it, it is yours.

Dropping out completely is stupid, but the further you go, the more free you get.  If you no longer depend on your government for subsistence, then you are no longer complicit in what it does.  That is a nice bonus.  It’s not just the government, but those who control most of the world’s wealth.  When you no longer need much money, they can no longer control you either.  They can’t dangle money in front of you to silence you.  You have more integrity than that, now that you are outside the system, although you still take advantage of it in some ways.  I dislike the word dropout, because it still places the primary focus on the dominant, parasitic system, but what’s a better word?  Naturalist?  Minimalist?  Anarchist?  Anarcho-primitivist, although I don’t know if I want to go back that far.  I still want decent  shelter and some form of comfort.  I don’t want to have to try to sleep with bugs all over me.  Yuck.  What I’m looking for is a way forward where we lessen our dependence on government, technology, and hierarchical systems and start focusing on community and truly good values.  Values that come from love, not fear.  Get rid of fear completely and have a world just filled with love.  Will it take time?  Yes.  Are we ready for it now?  No way.  But is it possible?  Definitely.  We just have to make it happen.

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Truly Following Your Passion

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

Nobody knows what they want.  Well, not nobody, but most people.  Most people simply want what they are conditioned to want.  If you ask random people what the purpose of their life is, or what they want to accomplish in this life, the chances are you’ll get a laundry list of socially-conditioned answers, such as, “make a ton of money,” and “become famous.”  Another thing you’ll notice is that most people’s answers are very vague and don’t really have any direction.  There are those few, committed individuals that have the drive and the knowledge to accomplish what it is they truly want, but most people never take the time to acquire that knowledge in the first place.  Most people do what is safe, what will allow them to live comfortably, but not extravagantly.  They live paycheck to paycheck, which in its own right is stupid.  And their lives become one big recurring dream, where one day isn’t so different from another.  There is little excitement and even less passion.

Most people are beaten down by the world, by society.  They had dreams once, but now they don’t believe in them anymore, or somebody else told them it wasn’t possible for them.  Maybe they’ve outgrown their old dreams and have new ones, but don’t have the courage to pursue them.  Or maybe everyone and everything they’ve wanted to be was themselves, but you can’t make a living doing that, so we’re forced to place our unique selves into a box that will fit in society’s mold.  We may find something we are truly passionate about and can make a good living from, but that is the exception and not the rule.  ”Do what you love and the money will come,” is not a complete lie, it’s just that most people don’t love anything enough to put in the amount of time it would take to become proficient enough to make a career out of it.

It is said by some famous author that you need to put in 10,000 hours in a particular field to become an expert at it.  And these have to be quality hours.  Not half-assed hours.  Who here has that kind of commitment, self-discipline, and willpower?  Sure, you could also become a jack of all trades, and a master of none, which could also be useful, but at the same time you don’t really have an identity, other than the fact that you’re good at a lot of things, but not excellent at any one thing.  If you pour your time into one field, one focus, you can become more powerful in that vein than you could ever be from just dabbling in it.  To thrust yourself fully into something and commit to it for a long period of time (hopefully driven by interest and passion) is the very definition of mastery.  And if it is something you truly enjoy, it will be that much more fulfilling.

But how does one stay on a course like that for so long without diverting from it?  How do you stick with it?  You should pick something you love to do and that also can net you a career.  It has to be something that will serve others and will also serve you.  It’s okay to give more than you receive, but no self-sacrifice.  Don’t become another starving artist.  We all have the ability to contribute and to be compensated fairly for it.  We all have (for the most part) functioning brains that can aid us in making decisions about what it is we are supposed to do with our lives.  We know what we enjoy doing, but do we enjoy doing anything enough to turn it into a career?  Would we be able to stomach doing work in a certain field for decades?  As long as it doesn’t get too boring, and there is some kind of learning and self-discovery taking place, I would say yes to most fields out there.

When you dedicate your life to something, you know who you are.  When you pursue your passion, you become it.  You don’t question whether or not this is what you should be doing.  It is what you have to do.  The life inside you is forcing this out of you, and unless you completely ignore the life inside of you, there will be no stopping it once you know what your “purpose” is.  You will be unstoppable.  If you look at successful people, they decided what they wanted and they worked hard for it, but it was  worth it because the journey and the destination were just as rewarding.  It wasn’t just about the destination.  If that’s all that is keeping you on your current path, it is a path without a heart.  If you are not enjoying where you are on your journey right now, then what’s the point?  The point of life is to enjoy it.

The problem with most people is they never even find their passion.  They never even try to find their passion.  They don’t even know why they are here, other than the fact that their parents had sex.  They haven’t found anything worth pursuing, so they end up fulfilling other people’s purposes, others’ passions.  They become the cogs in someone else’s machine.  They become one of the facilitators or someone else’s goals, which unless you are in line with those goals as well, is inauthentic and shows that you truly have no direction, no sense of yourself, and that you are willing to adopt the goals and vision of some other person, whose motives you aren’t exactly sure of.  You are not really the author of your life then, are you?  You are more a supporting character in the game of life.  Which is suboptimal at best and downright stupid at most.

Now, I wouldn’t suggest quitting your corporate job right away, because you read this blog entry.  But what I would suggest is becoming more conscious in what it is you are supporting.  What it is you are actively engaging in.  And then I suggest you look for what truly stirs your soul and start to pursue that, while simultaneously still doing what you have to to make ends meet.  Do some self-exploration to find what it is you think you would most enjoy doing and try it out.  It is very important that you at least try to do this because otherwise, what kind of life are you living, fulfilling others’ goals while standing on the sidelines of life?  Is that really who you were meant to me?  An extra in the movie of someone else’s life?  Why not create a life that people make movies about instead?  It is at least worth a shot, I’d say.

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The Perfect .400 Hitter

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

I’d like to divert from my usual topics to discuss one of my hobbies today.  Baseball.  The national pastime.  For those of you who are unfamiliar, baseball is a game played with a ball, a stick, and a baseball diamond.  I’m not going to get into all the rules here, as I’m sure someone else has already done this.  I’ve studied baseball history for about 15 years now and in that time, no one has come close to hitting .400 (that is, having a base hit in 40% of at bats).  Tony Gwynn in 1994 hit .394 in a strike-shortened season, but who knows which way he would have went if the season went all 162 games?  My guess is he would have ended up somewhere in the .370s or .380s.  No offense, Tony.  It’s just that the media pressure would have driven you crazy, much like what happened to Roger Maris in 1961 when he broke the single season home run record by one in a longer season than the previous record holder.  But if anyone could have done it, it would have been Gwynn.  He was a pure hitter, with little power and a knack for hitting line drives and a good eye.  His career batting average nears .340, which is the highest in the last 60 years.  And there’s the rub.

For the most part, people don’t hit for obscenely high batting averages anymore.  Why?  There are plenty of reasons, and I’ll start with what is the most prominent one.  Strikeouts.  Batters strike out quite a bit more than they did 70 years ago, when Ted Williams became the last baseball player to hit .400.  Statistics show that somewhere between 25 and 30 percent of balls put in play are base hits.  That would add around 20 or 30 points to someone’s batting average if they never struck out.  Pitchers are far more skilled than they were in the first half of the 20th century.  I’m not saying that there were no skilled pitchers back then,  just that there were fewer in proportion to the amount we have today.  They throw harder, have more movement on their pitches, and with the use of multiple relievers in a single game, there are fresh arms pitching the majority of the game as opposed to the 1900-1960s era where most starting pitchers pitched at least 20 complete games in a season.  There are specialist relief pitchers today who come in just to face one batter.  There are more pitches today than ever before.  The hitter is constantly guessing at which pitch out of dozens is going to be thrown.  Thus, there are many, many more strikeouts.

Every .400 hitter struck out less than 8% of the time in that respective season.  How many players today strike out less than 8% of the time?  It would be cumbersome for me to look that up, so I’ll estimate that it is probably between 1 and 5 percent of all Major Leaguers.  Also, it helps to walk quite a bit in a quest for .400.  The less at bats you accumulate, the better chance you have to hit .400.  Why?  Because that means you don’t have to get as many hits.  If you walk 100 times in a season, that is 100 plate appearances that don’t factor into your batting average.  It definitely pays to have a patient presence at the plate if you truly want to hit .400.  If you look at what Ichiro Suzuki did just a few years ago, breaking the single season hits record, you’ll understand what I mean.  He hit .372 that year, which is excellent, but he had over 700 at bats.  Not plate appearances, but at bats.  Granted, he is a leadoff hitter and would not have been able to break the record had he walked 100 times or hit much deeper in the lineup.  But he would have had a much better chance of hitting .400.  But he is not exactly a power hitter.  Pitchers don’t mind giving up a few singles, so I highly doubt Ichiro was intentionally walked much.  He has a threat of hitting the long ball, but for the most part, he is a contact hitter.  His speed and contact ability allow him to collect many infield hits, therefore padding his batting average to higher than your average player.  Speed is a definite advantage when it comes to hitting .400.  So, patience and speed are two other factors that would contribute to the creation of the perfect .400 hitter.  If you can steal some cheap hits with your speed and be patient enough to take a bunch of walks so that your at bats total goes down significantly, you are upping your chances for .400.

I would also argue that in this day and age, a player with respectable power would be more likely to hit .400.  Not your typical slugger, but someone who hits maybe 20-25 home runs a year.  Someone who will occasionally be pitched around to get to a weaker batter.  Obviously, a consistent hitter would also be at the top of the list.  Someone who has similar stats each year would be more likely to be able to reach the .400 mark due to their well-disciplined personality.  Somebody an awful lot like Ted Williams.  The year he hit .400, he also led the league in home runs.  He was known as both a power hitter and an average hitter, and struck out very infrequently.  He walked quite a bit, as his #1 ranking of all-time in on-base percentage shows.  Quite frankly, someone with his caliber would have a hard time hitting .400 today, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible.  Lady luck must be on your side if you ever hope to get into this exclusive club.  Certain flares that you hit must fall in.  You must accumulate at least 10-20 infield hits.  For some reason, you must be a left-handed batter.  Why?  Because left-handed batters have an advantage against right-handed pitching, which is still a majority to this day.  Both Wade Boggs and Tony Gwynn were left-handed batters and they both had the highest career batting averages of the last few decades.

It would also help to miss a small chunk of time if you are going to hit .400 for a season.  As long as you amass 502 plate appearances, you still qualify for the batting title and your record will be official.  I know it could be called cheating to some, as I was extremely mad in the 1990s when Mo Vaughn narrowly missed a batting title to go along with his 40 home runs due to rival New York Yankee Bernie Williams, who had much fewer plate appearances than Mo.  Not only that, Bernie Williams, on the final game of the season, went 2-for-2 and was taken out of the game.  Mo, who had over 600 at-bats, had a batting average that was within 0.2% of Mr. Williams, and came up short.  But for the .400 hitter, there will likely be no one even close in terms of BA.  So, no harm, no foul.  I would say between 550 and 600 plate appearances would be a good number, with maybe a 15 day disabled list stint placed somewhere during the season.  Look at Chipper Jones.  He won the batting title in 2008 with a mere 534 plate appearances due to I believe 2 stints on the 15 day DL.  .364 BA is nothing to sneer at.  He only had 439 at-bats, due to his patience at the plate.  90 walks certainly helps your batting title goal.

So, here are the criteria for the perfect .400 hitter:  A player who strikes out very little, walks rather frequently, has speed to beat out infield hits, has formidable power to attract intentional walks, has fewer than 600 plate appearances (although this is not a necessary requirement), and has to be a pretty consistent hitter, and most likely left-handed.  Or a switch hitter.  This would have to be someone who can avoid cold streaks and be able to rattle off some hot streaks.  It would also have to be someone with very thick skin, as the media can create a ton of pressure.  A player who can recognize pitches very easily, someone with the great eyesight of Ted Williams.  Not to mention a knack for being lucky when others are not.  So the question is:  Is there anyone playing in the MLB right now who I think could hit .400?

Right now, I just don’t see it.  I don’t see a single player who possesses all of these qualities to the extent necessary to truly put together a .400 season.  I could be wrong and someone might get lucky.  There are just so many factors that contribute to a season like this that it would take some sort of miracle for any current player to hit .400 for an entire season and qualify for the batting title.  It’s a long season, and you never quite know what’s going to happen.  Perhaps in the next 20-50 years, we’ll find someone who can accomplish this feat.  But I don’t want him to be handed this .400 crown, like a team out of contention giving him fastballs down the middle because they want him to succeed so badly.  I guess .400 is baseball’s version of the 4 minute mile.  Although, it kind of goes backwards instead of forwards.  The mile record is well below 4 minutes now, but it’s been almost 70 years since someone hit .400, and even before that, very few did.  It’s only been done 35 times, all before 1942.

I think we have a .400 hitter on the horizon, but I can’t say for sure.  If things fall right into place for a player having an already amazing season, then it can happen.  As for hitting .500, forget it.  We’ve got to hit .400 before we can even talk about .500.  Most of the .400 hitters did it before 1900.  That was when baseball was in its infancy.  Whoever eventually does this will have to be a superman.  And be extremely lucky.  But I have faith and so should you.

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Take the Red Pill

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Remember The Matrix?  The scene where Morpheus tells Neo that he can take either the red pill or the blue pill?  The red pill will open his eyes to what reality truly is and the blue pill will keep him living the way he is now, but never knowing the real truth.  I find this to be a great metaphor for conscious living vs. unconscious living.  Some people prefer to live in denial and ignorance (the blue pill), while the  others choose to expand their minds and their consciousness by taking what I’ll refer to as the red pill.  Which would you prefer?  Which would give you the best results?  Is it better to be blissfully ignorant or consciously aware?  I would personally say the latter, but the choice is entirely up to you.

The truth is that most people swallow the blue pill because it is simply easier and requires less effort.  It may give you subpar results, but at least you don’t have to work so hard for them.  You don’t have to grow if you don’t want to because you are running the same patterns over and over, with similar results, what I would call a stagnating life.  You don’t question your reality, you simply accept it and keep living as so.  That hardly sounds inspiring, and it is probably rather boring to keep your life in such a small box that it doesn’t seem to change a whole lot over decades.

Taking the red pill is a risk.  It is not based in security, but rather curiosity.  It is like taking an adventure.  You’ll learn things about yourself and your reality that simply cannot be learned from the perspective of the blue pill.  It is the path of growth, where you are constantly expanding your mind, consciousness, and sense of self.  It is the way of conscious evolution.  You are constantly growing, constantly learning new things to aid you in your pursuit of growth.  You become stronger and more intelligent through this process.  You become more of a human being and realize the true greatness within all of us.  This seems quite inspired, now doesn’t it?  But it is far more difficult than just staying in “normal” mode.  It requires courage, self-discipline, willpower, persistence, and a whole host of other qualities that will take time and effort to develop.

You can choose to take reality at face value, or you can choose to actively participate in the creation of your reality.  What seems more intelligent to you?  What is a better predictor of success in whatever field you find yourself in?  To let the tides of life throw you around or to take control of the ship and start directing your course?  Imagine if in The Matrix, Neo took the blue pill and the rest of the movie was him working in a cubicle for the rest of his tired, wretched life.  What kind of movie would that have been?  A lousy one at best.  He would have been like an NPC in a role playing game, just sleeping through life, not really making a difference.

When you work in conjunction with the universe to manifest your goals, they will be easier to manifest.  Doesn’t that make sense?  Logically and intuitively?  If you either don’t work at all or work against the universe in manifesting your goals, wouldn’t you imagine you’d have a much harder time getting to where it is you want to be?  But what about going with the flow?  That works great for water, but lousy for humans.  If you ever want to accomplish anything in your life, you will need to create your own flow and work with it, not the flow of social conditioning, which is suboptimal at best and self-destructive at worst.  The big question is:  Which flow are you going with right now?  And how can you create your own flow?

You create your own flow by going with what you are passionate about.  It is easier to do something you love than to do something you don’t like.  Even if the work is harder on the love side, it will be intrinsically rewarding as well as extrinsically rewarding if you become successful at it.  Even if you are extrinsically successful at something you do not like, there is no intrinsic motivation to keep doing it because it is not something you are passionate about.  It is better to fail at something you love than to succeed at something you hate.  Succeeding at something you hate is not truly a success.  It is more of a tedious waste of time.  Why devote yourself to something you hate?  You will be working against the flow of your passion, so it will be many times more difficult to succeed, and it will be less rewarding.  Why paddle upstream when you can ride the currents of your passion?

Taking the red pill is consciously following your passion, being committed to it, becoming it.  You live, breathe, and eat your passion.  You do what it is you have to do to become what it is you wish to be.  You ride the flow of passion and inspiration, combined with willpower and self-discipline.  You may not be where you need to be in terms of success yet, but the sheer joy of doing the work you love makes success irrelevant, as you are enjoying the journey, and not just the destination.  You are no longer attached to outcomes, even if you are successful, because it is simply a continuation of the wonderful journey that you are on.  And the more you do the things you love, the better at them you become, and success is all but guaranteed.  As long as you follow your self-created flow, you will get to where it is you wish to be.

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