Archive for the ‘Intentions’ Category

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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Beliefs and Context

Friday, August 20th, 2010

I’m really looking to ramp this blog up.  By that, I mean seriously working much harder on it.  By that, I mean putting in conscious effort to create meaningful and lasting content that truly makes an impact.  I like where I’ve taken this blog in the last couple of months, and I wish to continue that trend, only with more focus and intensity.  I feel that blogging is a real contribution I can make to this world by expanding people’s minds and hearts to new ideas that may or may not be outside their comfort zones.  I really want to make a difference in people’s lives.  That is my main motivation.  I want to challenge people to think outside their box and to move beyond close-mindedness into a new way of thinking that allows for multiple perspectives.  This will, in turn, create a field of perspectives from which to make decisions more accurately, rather than relying on one context alone.  Challenging?  Yes.  Impossible?  Certainly not.

There are so many perspectives you can take when looking at reality.  There has to be millions if not billions.  Your perspective, or context, is what defines how you approach certain situations.  For example, if you are a Christian, you may believe that everything that happens in this life is a result of God’s will or other divine being.  So you surrender your life to a higher power and live knowing that whatever happens, some greater intelligence meant for it to happen.  How would that affect your life?  I would say that it would absolve you of some personal responsibility and make you feel good inside, but at the same time it would make you feel that you are not in control of your own life, that some super-intelligent being is.  A super-intelligent being you’ve never seen or heard from (unless of course you have).  Another part of Christianity is the concept of Hell.  That if you do certain things, after you die, you will be placed into a place with torture, pain, suffering, and the likes until the end of time.  How loving of our compassionate God, huh?  Using fear to control the masses.  Sounds more like human planning, not divine.  But if it works for you, adopt it.

On the other end of the spectrum, you could adopt a perspective that says that there is no God, no afterlife, and that this life is all we have.  Another fear-based context, but a valid one nonetheless.  If you never know when you are going to die and this is the only life you have, it would make sense to try to prolong it as long as possible as long as you are enjoying yourself.  Otherwise, it would be best just to put an end to this awful nightmare.  Because there will be no suffering beyond life, ending it is a guaranteed way to end suffering.  At least from this perspective.  Another thing is that there will be no consequences after death for your actions on Earth.  It may feel liberating, but deep down most of us still have a moral code and would not harm others just because we feel that after we’re dead, nobody can hurt us.

There are beliefs that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.  That there is no such thing as death.  That life is nothing but a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.  That it is simply just a  ride that is fun, for awhile.  That one day, when we supposedly “die,” we will finally see the true nature of our existence.  We will still exist, in some spiritual form and still be able to develop our consciousness even after our “avatar,” or physical body, dies.  This perspective seems to be very popular in the spirituality movements and creates the notion that we are all one and that we should cooperate instead of fight, that life should be enjoyable for all, because we are all the same, all together in this experience.  And what a wonderful experience it is.  It gives us a feeling of unconditional security, meaning that no matter what happens, we are safe.  It is a very empowering belief system that definitely benefits humanity, rather than detract from  it.

There are tons of belief systems, and tons of times when each one will work better than another.  Practice makes perfect in these areas.  What’s better for a certain situation will be up to you to decide.  But calibrating your decisions over a long period of time will eventually lead to becoming an expert on which context to use in which situation to the best effectiveness that you can perceive.  It is really an  experiential procedure that takes a lot of trial and error.  Of course, you may find one belief system works for most of the situations in your life and that only on rare occasions do you have to step outside that box and into another.  And that’s great.  It’s all about living to be the people we want to be.  But being aware of all the other belief systems is important because you never know when they will come in handy.

I’d like to say you should do this process gradually.  Don’t try out 10 belief systems in one month.  Take your time to really absorb each one and take the good and leave the bad.  That is, take what resonates with you, and drop what doesn’t.  There are no rules that dictate what you must believe.  But it is better to believe things that you actually feel are true than to try and convince yourself of something you feel to be untrue.  And you have to immerse yourself in new  beliefs.  You have to truly feel that  you believe them, otherwise, you will just know of them, but not truly understand them.  I have to say that no belief system is entirely wrong, but no one belief system is entirely right either.  Reality is perceived through filters (i.e. our senses, our beliefs).  It all depends which filters you are using that determines what kind of reality you will experience.  Of course, we all live in the same reality, but our differing beliefs create for an interesting variety that makes the world different in every being’s eyes.  And that can make for some pretty interesting conversations.  And wars, but hopefully one day we’ll get past all that.  I believe it.

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Brain Tumor Experiences and Inspiration

Friday, August 6th, 2010

Brain cancer sure takes a lot out of you.  I’ve been cured for seven years and I still can’t exercise without having to take pain medication afterwards.  My eyes and head flare up at the first sign of cardiovascular activity.  That is what happened today.  I figured I would go for a walk for about 30 minutes.  I hadn’t gone for a long walk in awhile, but I just wanted to see if I had progressed at all in the exercise field.  Sure enough, about halfway through my walk, which was not a brisk walk, just a garden-variety walk, I noticed pressure behind my eyes and a general overall headache.  I had to keep walking or I wouldn’t get back home.  So I kept walking and now my eyes feel really stiff and strained.  I guess I should really get to accepting my limitations.  But I want so badly to be able to exercise.  It seems we have a catch-22 here.  I don’t have problems if I walk a short distance slowly, but any strenuous activity puts me feeling much worse.  I guess it is the price I paid for having brain cancer and this has been a constant for seven years.

Being a brain cancer survivor comes with positives and negatives.  There are things I probably will never be able to do again.  And there is wisdom that I have gained from this experience.  I no longer sweat the small stuff.  The small stuff is inconsequential to me.  It has made me into more of a big picture type of guy.  It has made me think all the questions of why we are here and what consciousness itself is.  I’ve had a lot of time to think about so many things concerning the nature of this reality.  I’ve been able to read online via ReadPlease2003 (to prevent any further eyestrain) thousands of articles about a variety of topics that I have an interest in.  While it is extremely difficult for me to read pages of a book without experiencing pain and eye strain, I have the whole Internet at my disposal.  Life has not been easy, but there is always some way to adapt.  I’ve heard stories of blind people using the Internet using a program called Jaws.

I’ve maintained a full-time job for about a year now.  I have benefits and vacation time.  I work the night shift, mostly because it is easier for me on so many levels and I don’t always have to be 100%.  It’s easy to fix up shelving and take care of the occasional customer even if I’m not feeling my best.  It is a job that I can do with the conditions that I have and it has worked out very nicely for me.  I always get great reviews from my boss and supervisors.  I am even en route to becoming a supervisor.  So, I’m making decent money and working full-time, which is a hell of a lot better than I thought my life would turn out after all the problems I’ve had after cancer.

I have had periods of months where I was in severe pain in my eyes and head 24 hours a day with no relief in sight.  I have been discouraged, depressed, and frustrated to no end.  But I always seem to come out of those periods to a functional existence.  If I push myself too hard, I will pay for it for at least a couple of days with severe headaches.  My tumor is gone, but for some reason, my brain never healed completely.  I have a dural leak in my brain that is very vulnerable to opening after any strenuous activity.  Life has not been easy for me these past 8 years.  But I’m still standing.  I’m still strong.  This has to be the best year I’ve had since I was 15, which is saying quite a lot.  That was before I had the tumor.

Now that I’ve got all this positive momentum going, a lot of times I want to push myself harder, but every time I do, I pay for it.  So I just ride the wave I’m riding.  I wish I could do more, but unfortunately, unless I want to totally destroy what I’ve got, I need to play it safe when it comes to doing things.  I need ample time for relaxation.  I need to get good sleep.  If I don’t, the same rules apply as when I overwork myself.  I feel kind of fragile for someone so young (24).  But, like I’ve said, I can’t change what happened to me and it has afforded me benefits as well.  I inspire others by my actions.  I overcame something that was potentially fatal to become a productive member of society.

I just thought I would write something that shows how I live after brain cancer.  It may not be all roses, but at least I still have my mind and for the most part, my overall health.  I could have had a relapse and more radiation or even chemotherapy.  I can say that for what happened to me, I’m pretty damn lucky.  I could have ended up in a nursing home if they botched my 9 hour surgery.  The surgery where they actually separated both halves of my brain to get to the pineal gland to extract a piece of the tumor.  My headache seems to be subsiding now due to Fioricet.  Thank the Lord for that.

I think somewhere down the road I’d like to become some sort of motivation speaker for cancer patients.  Of course, being humorous in my speeches is second nature for me.  I’ve got plenty of material.  I want to show people that yes, there is life after cancer, even if it isn’t always easy.  The fact is that you survived.  You beat the odds.  You are living proof that cancer can be contained.  It may be hard to eradicate cancer, but the rewards are timeless.  Your perspective will change dramatically.  If you’ve beaten this, what else can you overcome.  What else can you accomplish?  Your fear should no longer hold you back.  If it isn’t life threatening, then what are you so afraid of?  You’ve beaten cancer, so you can do anything.

My speeches would go somewhere along those lines.  I know that my calling is to raise people’s awareness and allow them to become who they feel inspired to become.  It may not always be possible to become what you most want to, but to not even make the attempt is foolish and cowardly.  I know that we all could become greater than we are just by committing to becoming a better person each day.  Small steps or large steps, you decide.  We can all move away from fear and towards love just by deciding to.  And what an amazing world we will have once everyone is on the love side.  Imagine a world without fear.  Imagine how wonderful such a world would be.  That is my ultimate goal.  It would be paradise.

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Hope

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Is hope inherently dangerous or is it helpful?  Well,we could start by looking at the definition.  Hope means to cherish a desire with anticipation.  I’m not sure that is entirely accurate, though.  Hope is more of a wanting of something that you have no or little control over, such as “I hope the war comes to an end,” or “I sure hope I get that promotion.”  It places the outcome on external events and not in your control, so is it empowering or disempwering?  To hope for something is to divert control away from yourself and to place it on something that is not you.  I find hope to be incredibly naive and childish, but it is helpful to those who truly believe they have no control and have to rely on all these external things going right to have what they hope for come true.

You can spend your time hoping or you can spend your time creating.  When you are creating the life you want, hope is not a part of it.  You are taking the steps to create what it is you want.  You aren’t sitting around, waiting for things to snap into place.  Even if your attempts are not perfect, you can calibrate them later.  The most important step here is action, not hoping something will just happen for you.  Hope is almost like a wish.   “I wish I won the lottery.”  Hope is a fleeting emotion, always in the back of our minds, but never fully present.  It is always fixated on the future, and what may happen.  It is a fantasy for the most part, simply because it hasn’t happened yet.  You are far better off with certainty than hope.  Certainty is king when it comes to actually getting what it is you want.

On the other end of the spectrum is hopelessness.  Is that better or worse than hope?  I would say that hopelessness can either be truly realistic or completely false based on your experiences.  If you are living in a third world country and live on less than $1 a day, it makes perfect sense to be hopeless when it comes to your future life, because what are the odds you will instantly become a millionaire or start your own business?  Very low.  But if you are given tons of opportunities every day to excel and succeed, why would you ever be hopeless?  Sure, the world may be going to hell, but that doesn’t mean you have to as well.  You can still live your life with purpose and find plenty of meaning in life.  There is no law that says you can’t.  You can have a little hope, but no more, no less.  A little hope is slightly better than having too much or no hope at all.

But having a little hope has to be rooted in reality.  You have to actually believe what it is you are hoping for.  You have to be on the right track towards who it is you hope to become.   None of this sitting around, hoping something will just happen for you.  You need to be an active participant in your life in order to actually attain what it is you are wanting.  What bothers me is that most people choose to remain stuck in Fantasyland.  They are not actively pursuing what it is they want, so how in the world could they still expect it to come to them?  You have to put in the work and be committed, otherwise the universe will conclude you don’t really want what it is you say you want.

Like I’ve said before, you are the author of your own life.  Nobody else is going to solve all your problems for you, attain all your goals.  Hope may serve as a motivator, but don’t use it as a goal-achieving mechanism on its own.  Just hoping some situation will get better on its own is pure delusion.  You have to, at some point, put in the work to make things the way you want them to be.  You are simply a creative being that was placed here on Earth to create whatever it is you desire to the extent of your beliefs and the world around you.  You are capable of doing great things, doing bad things, or doing nothing.  It is all your choice.  Every action we take is a choice.  Every inaction we take is a choice.

I’m not slamming hope here, just putting it in its proper context.  When you are truly on the right track towards your goals, you don’t need to hope for them to happen, you realize that the achievement is an inevitability.  You know deep down in your heart that you will achieve whatever it is you set out to do because you have actually put in the work to achieve your goal, not just sat around visualizing what it would be like.  You may have done that in the beginning, but you knew that action was required.  For those of you who think visualizing a million dollars in your bank account is going to make you an instant millionaire, I have news for you, stop sitting around and find a way to make that money actually get there.  Otherwise, the only way you’ll have that much in your account is through a bank error.  Which means it won’t be there for long.  If you truly want to lose 40 lbs., do you really think it is going to happen overnight because you imagined yourself at your ideal weight?  Or you hoped it would just melt off in the shower?

Instead of the word hope, let’s replace it with want.  If you want something to happen, you make it happen.  You intend for it to happen.  You take the necessary steps for it to happen.  You don’t sit around and hope it will happen because you’ll be waiting forever if you don’t actually do something about it.  Even if the problem is large, like world hunger, you can take steps to better the situation and keep moving up the ladder.  Even if you don’t solve the whole problem of starving people, you will have fed thousands, maybe even millions by the time you leave this Earth.  That will be a gigantic net positive effect on the Earth.  It won’t come from hoping the problem is solved, it will be from you taking direct action towards creating what you want.

This may take some time, possibly even your entire lifetime, to work hard at your goals in pursuit of achieving them, but think about how you will feel about your life at the end vs. how you would feel if you spent your whole life hoping these things would happen for you.  Even if you fail at every goal you try to achieve, at least you gave it your best shot instead of wondering what could have been.  You learned much more about yourself than you could ever from visualizations and journaling.  You actually went out into the world and lived.  You’ve lived a life they make movies about, not a life where you’re simply an extra.  Become what it is you truly know you can be.  Don’t just imagine who it is you want to be, get up and make it happen.  And even if you don’t fully succeed, you will still find the experience far more rewarding than doing nothing.  Believe me, we are nothing without our experiences.

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The Act of Creation

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

We all have the power to create things.  We can create what we want.  We really can.  Seriously.  But we have to truly want it.  We have to accept the consequences of our creations.  We have to acknowledge that everything we experience was created by us.  We need to take responsibility for what we have created and if we do not like what we have created, we need to move in a different direction of creation.  We are naturally creative beings, us humans.  I say this as I create something right now, this blog entry.  We can create power or weakness.  We can create certainty or doubt.  We can create confidence or low self-esteem.  The choices are up to us in this very moment.  We have the power.  But most people never use it.  Why?

Because it takes a lot of work to harness this power.  If you start thinking about what you do not want, it shall come to you.  The more thought and time you put into something, the more prominent it is in your reality.  I know this because I see it all the time.  People who complain tend to attract negative things into their lives.  People who stay positive tend to have much better lives all-around.  If thoughts are creative, then wouldn’t it make sense to only think about what you want and not think about what you don’t want?  Even if thoughts are not creative, why bother thinking about what you don’t want in the first place?  What would that ever do for you?  It would only create a state of fear, worry, and depression, which is hardly optimal for conscious living.  We all are much better off thinking more positively because then we create positive ripples out into our reality.

No matter what you are experiencing, you have created it.  Do  not deny your creation.  That only puts you further away from being conscious.  If you don’t acknowledge your reality for what it is, how can you move forward to a better one?  You simply cannot.  You must accept your reality for what it is, and intend for it to be what you want it to be.  You must work for what you want it to be.  You must capitalize on opportunities that are swung your way to create the reality you want.  It’s all you anyway, so you might as well make something of it.  Consciousness is ever-present and to shift your consciousness to a more empowered state is good for everything and everyone.  That is, as long as you are conscious enough to not use that power for less than desirable gains.

We are immensely powerful creatures that have the ability to perform great acts and create real change in the world.  We just need to learn about tools to help us get to where we want to be.  This is no easy task.  To become true conscious creators, we must train our minds and our souls.  We must become beings capable of not only changing our realities, but making the right changes to impact the world towards the greater good, whatever we envision that to be.   Through the subjective reality paradigm, what is good for consciousness is good for everything.  Because in reality consciousness is all there is, and we are experiencing it subjectively.  It’s just a ride, folks.  Why not make it fun and exhilarating?

It’s Just A Ride is from Bill Hick’s stand-up act.  Very enlightening piece of material if I do say so myself.  I really encourage you to listen to that if you’ve never heard it.  He was one of the most thoughtful comedians ever to grace this world and sadly, he died way too young of pancreatic cancer.  There have been countless documentaries made about him and how much of a great human being he was.  He truly cared about humanity, even if he didn’t always show it in his act.  A truly conscious human being, someone far beyond the haze of social conditioning.  He created a legend from himself that still lives to this day.  He may not be as well known as George Carlin or Seinfeld, but he sure has touched a lot of lives, or at least the intelligent ones.

Just think about what you could do with your life if you truly did something that actually mattered on a deep, conscious level.  Just think if you changed the global consciousness for the better.  There have been many who have done it before and there will be many who will do it again.  We all have this power within us.  But not all of us has the skills or courage to pursue this dream, to open people’s eyes and change their ways of thinking to create a better world.  It is very challenging and will be met with much resistance.  But the resistance is only there to scare away the timid adventurers.  I’ll give you a quote that truly sums up what I am talking about:

When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is a great quote about fear and how when you face your fears, they turn out to be much less than you imagined them to be.  The quote “the only thing to fear is fear itself” also rings true here.  The only thing that holds us back from creating the world of our dreams is fear itself.  Once we transcend fear in the global consciousness, we will live in a world of love and compassion.  It will be a dream world.  But it’s always about getting there that’s the hard part.  But the time is going to pass anyway, isn’t it?  And we owe it to humanity and all-life-on-Earth to get to a place where fear is gone and we can consciously create a world far better than the one we have today.  I believe it is worth a try, to use our creative powers to create heaven on Earth, don’t you?  Or would you rather just keep creating what you are getting?

A simple choice, but not a simple one to make.  A great ideal, with a lot of work to accomplish.  But I have faith in humanity to get where we need to be, eventually.  We all just need to wake up and have the courage to live consciously.

Thanks for stopping by.

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