Creamos nuestra realidad (we create our reality)

This has been an intensely reoccuring theme here lately. Everytime i am compelled to throw myself a pity party, everytime i want to play victim, everytime i cast a judgement...not long after i experience the sobering reality that i am creating the whole thing. I am customizing all the emotions, i am giving birth to feelings....its like i twist the knob increasing power or decreasing power depending on what i believe about _______! The reason i see this is because of the huge varience of importance people place on things. Each person is deciding (or been conditioned) how they view life.
I went to a rodeo last night. I was looking for my friends in the stands and caught myself being captivated by the other people there. They were all in their own world.....some on their cell, a dad tending to a baby, kids watching the animals, teenagers staring into their lovers eyes. Everyone had an agenda, everyone was measuring and remeasuring themselves according to a standard...their standard. We are making "these rules" up or either we are agreeing to someone elses rules....either way we own them. We are deciding everything all the time but somehow we are very unconcious to this idea. We react, we blame others, we depend heavily on our past to tell us what to feel, we deflect responsibility whenever possible, but true empowerment starts when we own our lives, emotions, and actions.
We begin to create what we want instead of expecting it to fall from the sky. Things happen the way we want because we become intentional with our time. We channel our energy (which is very very powerful) in such a way that we CREATE.

Great book recomendation

I am reading the greatest book ever written...The Power of Now. I cant really describe the impact it has had on my mind but lets just say there is no going back....i will never view my life in the same way from this point on...i may choose to revert back to old ideals but i will still have the knowledge of something else. That "something else" is the freedom gained when we live in the NOW.

The author explores all the issues that arise when we "become our mind". We are not our thoughts. Our thoughts are mutations of a dead past and an imaginary future...neither having any real impact on the moment. Yet we have so identified our self with our thoughts that it is difficult to separate from them. This union creates an ego, which takes us on a journey of fear....the ego fears death. To guard against death the ego creates some really destructive systems to cope with the inevitable (jealousy, fear, anger, worry, insecurity,etc) And we live in these systems with momentary relief that comes when circumstance meets our approval (which is rare).

True relief can be found by simply being in the now....just being! He points out that we are in an unconscious state of mind when we are controlled by our thoughts. We can shift from unconsciousness to consciousness simply by becoming a "watcher". We begin to listen, without judgement, to our thoughts. This wakes us up from the nightmare and we begin to see that nothing is wrong! We created all the drama!!!

the security of knowing our insecurities Part two

A fan of ElectricMilk raised an interesting point in a comment on Part 1 with regard to insecurities being good or bad. Let the record stand that i believe insecurites are for the most part negative influences in our lives, however, i believe they stem from primal instincts that once helped us to survive. Those instincts kept us alive long enough to develop insane mental capacity and now they are somewhat no longer needed (until survival is threatened again...then we'll be glad they are around) Looking at the animal world, emotions like jealously, greed, fear, anxiety, anger....actually keep the strong animals alive and ensure they reproduce with other strong animals. The difference is they dont (not that i am aware of) lay in their bed all night feeling depressed or carry those emotions very far into the future....we do. I think they have limited imiginations keeping them from going too far with survival emotions. We, on the other hand, have developed very complex imiginations that respond to any stimuli we give them. I think this is where insecurities are born! Everyone is insecure because it is easy...its instinctual (literally). It takes disipline, education, concentration, and time to overcome insecurities. I think knowing this about our insecurites helps us to forgive ourselves for being insecure...we are only products of species evolution. In a way, knowing this removes the guilt we feel for being insecure and lets us make peace with the demon. We can begin to understand ourselves instead of fight ourselves. I am not my enemy and nothing inside my brain is my enemy...if something is giving me problems...it is probably because i dont understand its purpose or origin. We tend to fear what we dont understand!!! Another instinct kicking in....lets be afraid until we figure out if this is friend or foe...we default with foe so we dont DIE!!!

The security of knowing our insecurities Part 1

I constantly have to remind myself that there is no arrival point when exploring my conciousness. We never stop growing!! I have been experiencing some recient growing pains as i try to sort thru my insecurities as a human. The deeper i dig into my mind the more i realize the expansiveness of my insecurities. As soon as i think i have them contained another root emerges and leads to another tree of anxiety that can be very uncomfortable sometimes.
I am slowly getting a grasp on what insecurites are. Insecurity is our attempt to avoid the pain caused by life and others by creating mental copeing systems. The types and sources of insecurities are endless and the way they manifest themselves into "our actions" is extremly varried. Insecurity is tricky because it really means well. By that i mean, its intention is to protect us from getting hurt. The problem with insecurities are they are not flexible...they do not adapt to different situations. They become our default method of handling all high risk situations (situations where our ego might get hurt). Our inability to adjust is what gets us hurt. I am not placing all the blame on poor old insecurity...when we get hurt emotionally be assured it is a very complex blend of ego, instinct, past experience, and fear that causes us to percieve hurt. I say ''Percieve" hurt because that is all it is...our perception. We cant get hurt...we choose(unknowingly) to get hurt because our ego percieves a threat or our insecurites kick in. And there is nothing wrong with this reaction at a base level, survival level. It is an instinct that has allowed us to exist this long, but we are poor masters of our powerful brains. Either because of laziness or lack of evolution we allow our minds to control us.

to be continued....

Thoughts on Control

Today on my eternal quest with peace i stumbled on an idea that i haven't spent a lot of time with. I noticed here lately i have had a spike in anxiety and overall discontent with life. It has been mild but definately a shift. Okay sound the alarm...time to ask the questions that get to the heart of this. So i went down the list and discovered that i have really been on a control rampage. There are a few situtions that i have been mulling over and over in an attempt to bring about the outcome i desire...the outcome most favorable to me....the outcome that gives me value and purpose. My first error is assuming that i need a paticular outcome to give me worth and my second is the illusion that i could control it anyway (this is not to say dont set goals...goals are okay...attachment to the outcome of those goals is where the problems begin). So i took a little walk with Mr. Control and we chatted. I realized he is not the bad guy i made him out to be. I assumed that if i eliminated my desire to control life or circumstances then that would solve my anxiety issuse, so i imagined doing that. In my mind, "i let go of everything". To my suprise i felt better but then i realized i didnt let go of control though. I was still controling my anxiety by taking control of my inability to control. I took charge by not taking charge. I know that is strange to think about...very paradoxal. And maybe its not so much about letting go of control as much as it is letting go of outcome....it is easy to mix the two up, because we think we are "controling" things in order to bring about a specific outcome. So we get frustrated when all our efforts dont bring it about. Honestly i dont think we can escape our desire for control, but we can decide not to attachment ourselves to outcome.

Little girl and the cookie jar experiment part 2

We can obviously see how our brains might do this given this experiment with the little girls. However we are largely unaware that we do this same thing about 100 times a day. The sad thing is we hold resentment toward others when they conflict with the way we see things. It really comes down to judging others based on information they do not have or judging others based on information we think they have. An example: being frustrated with someone when they aren't excited about the things we are excited about, thinking when someone offends us that the person knew they offend us, being angry when we think we are ignored.
Taking offense and being angry with people seems quite silly to me when we apply this information. We are holding people to something they are completely clueless about, but even if they are fully aware we don't know their interpretation of the same information. Crazy!!! Not so much crazy as it is useful to living in peace in our own mind. This gives us the potential to never be offended again. To never be in conflict with another person in our own personal world. How many world views are there? Let me see....how many people are there?....that is the answer!!!

Little girl and the cookie jar experiment

I am reading an interesting book...called "Stumbling on Happiness". A lot of the information in the book is not new for me as much as it is from a new perspective. It has a very scientific feel!!! The book is trying to answer one central question...Why is it so difficult to accurately predict future happiness? We often find ourselves in the exact spot we imagined but without the feeling of happiness we imagined or a lesser degree than we imagined. To answer this question the author takes an indepth look at how our brains work or dont work when it comes to imagining the future. He explains the difficulty with abstract things like happiness. Happiness is highly subjective. It all depends on our interpertation, our interpertation, depends on our experiences and our experiences are as varied as lotto numbers. Not to mention we operate in a closed environment. What i mean by that is that my brain, my experiences, my imagination, my everything inside my head is closed off to everyone elses heads. I have been toying around with this idea for a while now in my own way. In my opnion this is the single greatest source of conflict among humans. We assume everyone sees the world the way we do!!! There is conflict when people dont see it my way and there is harmony when they do (but that only occurs in my mind) The unfairness is that others cannot know fully what i see in my world, and vise versa. By unfair i mean i cannot hold anyone to my world if they are unaware and i should not be held to someone elses either(again this is how i see it).
The book offers this simple example to illustrate the point (children are great guine pigs because they are so new to life). The experiment is with two little girls, both playing with toys in a room. There is a jar of cookies in the room. One of the little girls is taken out of the room. While she is away, the psycologist takes a cookie from the jar and hides it in the drawer. The little girl is brought back into the room. The girl that was in the room the whole time is asked does the other little girl know where the cookie is? She replied yes. She believed the other little girl had the same information she had dispite having not been in the room when the cookie transaction took place.
........to be continued