image: akcija

Choices are the axis around which a self electing life revolves.

 We make choices and stand or fall by the positions those choices place us in. It can be seen that the path you have followed in your life has been defined by the choices that you have made. Significantly it may also be seen that where your life will lead you will be guided by choices you have not yet made.

Strangely enough, the choices you have not yet made are already there, waiting to be actuated by you. How can I say this? It’s quite simple really; we all play roles in our lives. We play roles much as we wear our clothes, they’re not all the same.

There is the professional you, the serious you, the playful you, the dramatist you and many more besides - you could fill a book with the different roles you play. When we are young we do play, children love to play, and what they play is to summon roles that exist in the collective consciousness of all humans and act out according to the role. So young kids might play mummies and daddies, cops and robbers and any number of different character portrayals they have been exposed to.

Over time these roles are absorbed subliminally. Almost as though we wear a path through a virgin territory, and if we consider Descartes description of us as a tabla raisa or a blank slate, that is how it is. We start empty, or at least the character portrayal bank does, and we deposit impressions and situations we have been exposed to in there.

Here is the crucial bit. Over time a critical mass develops and instead of us choosing to play roles, they start to play us. We become consumed by the role and end up doing things, finding ourselves in situations that we had no idea or inclination about. This is the role, it compels us to act in certain ways.

This is why I can make the statement that the decisions you will make are already made for you by the role that you will play. This should be a little disconcerting because it means, if it’s true, that you are not in control of your own life. It means that your time, energy and your faculties have been in a sense held to ransom by the roles you play.

So we get people doing jobs they never wanted to do, marrying people they never wanted to be with, committing themselves to things they don’t really have a compelling relationship with. This leads to disquiet, discord and disharmony. The net result of which is a background noise of things not being quite as they should be.

This does not mean that there is anything wrong with roles, it is saying that you owe it to yourself to be in control of them and to manage them according to the life you want to live rather than struggling to cope with the existence you discover yourself a part of.

The single most difficult thing in life is personal development because it dominates everything you do. Your responses, your choices, your assessment of situations, your understanding, cognizance and perception. The person you are is defined exclusively by the level of personal development you have managed to attain in your life. This is done through intense study of self, modelling the person you are quite literally as a sculptor models a piece of clay or hews a piece of marble.

It is a lifetime’s endeavour and is only ever undertaken thoroughly by the few. It is not for the faint of heart or the weak of will. The world is an arcade of distractions that will allow you to live out a hedonist’s lifestyle without so much as a backward glance. To tackle this requires huge reserves of character and strength, personal integrity and a desire to change and improve what you already have.

I was speaking with a young person today. We talked about characters in computer games, heroes in particular and I asked the young person: ’What compels a hero? What makes them do the things they do?’

He wasn’t sure what I meant so I explained: ‘These guys fight evil, they perform extraordinary feats and so on but why? Why do they do what they do? If they want to save the world, why do they want to do it? What is it about the world that they want to save in particular, because it’s not all good? If they’re defending the weak from some malevolent baddie: why? What drives them? What has been the inciting incident in their life that makes them suddenly change or forces them to make a decision?’

We moved on like this and the young person started to get the idea that people are like they are for some reason, whether it’s a choice they’ve made or a situation they’ve found themselves in that’s backed them into a corner.

That person is you. It’s me. It’s all of us. It’s a component of the human condition.

The decisions we make define who we are. The choices we make determine how we will travel. 

 image: visualpanic

What is the synthesis and distillation of all knowledge? What is the most profound thing you have ever heard?

Think about it for a moment…

Well, what did you come up with? Anything?

This, my friend, is the ultimate description of the human situation at this time, on this planet; it is contained in the words thou mayest. Two small, slightly archaic sounding words that sum up our lot in totality.

What, you might wonder, do I mean? Contained within thou mayest is the crook and the flail, the agony and the ecstasy because it brings into play those most potent concepts choice and responsibility.

Thou mayest fundamentally says, you can choose, you may select that with which you shall engage and, furthermore, have executive prerogative over how you react to those things.

In a word it is permission. Permission from the Universe, from Creation to go out there and explore, to be according to your own choices and inclinations. What follows is a matter of semantics but you are here and you are allowed to be and determine your own outcomes and your own path.

I could expand upon this at length but it is not necessary here. Simply have the thought, think about it, consider it, ponder the infinite and your place within it, give the permission your consideration and see whether you agree with it. After all, you have the choice…

 image: shapeshift

Tell me something: what will you be remembered for?

Let me surround this question with irresistible reasoning. The Mayans, now they are remembered for stepped pyramids in what are presently jungles, complicated mathematics and also for disappearing from the face of the earth without a trace. The Spanish at the time of Phillip II as dogmatic hysteria prone bigots, if you feel that’s harsh read some of the works of Sepulveda, their spin doctor at the time, to have your eyes opened. The Romans at the collapse of the Empire as feeble, weak and unworthy of their heritage. The British at the height of their Empire as ruthless power brokers. The Germans of the 1920s and 30s as somewhat gullible and susceptible to fanaticism.

Whether we like the idea or not, and yes there are exceptions to every rule, history views events, places and people with a very precise sextant that dismisses the grey areas mercilessly.

It begs the question, how will our age be viewed by those who look back on it? Will we be seen as responsible, enlightened or developed? Are we to be the Generation Xers, the Me Generation, the post war baby boom first trans-global community emancipated from the tedium of national boundaries? Or will we be seen by history as something else? Americans call the generation of men and women who rallied to the call of resistance to fascism in the 1940s and who paid, in many instances, the ultimate sacrifice, the Great Generation. What will we be?

Narrow this down to the personal, how will you be seen when you have gone? Shift the temporal aspect and ask yourself, how are you seen now? How would you want to be seen? What would you like the abiding view others have of you to be?

Where do you see yourself to be limited in your expression of the hopes and ambitions that you would wish to fulfil? Here is the killer blow, history views that which is passed, the defining characteristic of history is that it is a done deal, it’s gone, events that have graced the stage of human affairs have taken their bow and been relegated to the already as opposed to the yet to be. You are still here, if you’re reading this, you are not yet history but very much in the here and now with the ability to define the as yet unappeared.

History will view you perhaps as a big noise, perhaps not. The ace in your hand is that you are here now and still have the option to choose. Exercise your option well.

 image: cstein96

Suppose for a minute that your life was not just an arbitrary happening. Suppose you came here for a purpose, that you were some intergalactic traveller with a specific reason to be here and a specific set of objectives that you wanted to accomplish.

What happened?

It’s easy to forget, it’s easy to get wrapped up in something you never chose. Develop a strong will, do not sublimate yourself to another’s destiny whether an individual or an organization. Most of the people killed in wars were young men, barely past adolescence, have you ever wondered why?

Ponder these things deeply. Make time to meditate upon them and to contemplate your own purpose. Satisfaction is derived from choices made not fortuitous happenchance. Any person who seeks to live their own life has to make demand at the entrance to the treasury, otherwise they may float upon the eddys of what passes and become the creature of circumstance.

We control only one thing: the way we react to the situations we are in. All else is fantasy, only one thing in this life is real and that is your own personal development journey. Only along this path may the riches of existence be gathered.

image: denis collette

What is clear, clearer than anything is that we are conditioned and programmed by what we are exposed to. Over the years, perhaps the greatest cry I have heard from individuals is that they want to change.

What makes change so difficult? It is habit, or more specifically ‘bad habits’. In reality there are no such things as bad habits or good habits, there are simply those that locate you where you want to be and those that don’t.

The older you get the more difficult it becomes. Why? Well, the saying “It’s in my blood” is actually not so far from the truth. If we consider that a human starts, as Descartes put it, as a tabla raisa or blank slate then it is going to be filled by something. Nature abhors a vacuum and will fill any empty space. This is where the element of engineering becomes critical, the prudent individual will create or engineer circumstances that are favourable to themselves or specifically to the most propitious developmental opportunity that their life can muster.

What is being referred to here is the development of habits or ways that are beneficial in a positive way. So we learn social etiquette and those things that enable us to function within society and not become an outcast or a pariah. We learn skills that enable us to ply a trade or practice a profession, which establishes a reciprocity between ourselves and the society in which we live; we become useful to society and society remunerates us.

The problem or the flaw is that we learn just about everything, from the moment we are born we take in huge amounts of data and store it away. This is all persuading upon the character that we develop and influences powerfully the person that we become. So far so good, the knotty issues arise in the development of those things that we don’t want, the so called ‘bad habits’, and eradicating or overlaying those is a tall order.

It is a tall order because each time you walk or read or write or get in a car and drive you don’t have to learn it anew, the skill or the art is stored in you, they become habitual things. The more you do something the more it is strengthened or confirmed. Doctors and psychologists use the term ‘chronic’ which describes an affliction or a disorder that becomes so established that it is no longer an occasional or arbitrary visitor but takes up permanent residence within an individual’s constitution. 

In a curious way what I am saying here is that we live our lives and become chronically programmed, hopefully in a positive and beneficial way, so that things enter our ‘blood’ and we don’t have to re-learn them every time we engage with, say, walking or reading.

The $64,000.00 question is, how do we change habits that we don’t want? How do we superimpose those things that are ‘in my blood’ with alternative programmings or habits that bring positives and benefits to our lives? I’ll address that in other postings, to follow, and, as ever, if people send individual questions and I have the time I will respond in private.   

image: yoshiko 314

Like most things, there are two states of happiness. Those that are circumstantial and those that are induced. Circumstantial can be seen as fortuitous and not really the result of any conscious process on the part of the individual. Induced is where the individual has actually taken the time and made the effort to engineer the state at a conscious level.

Serendipity may well characterise the journey that leads to the first state. It is a state of happy chance and good fortune on the part of the individual and is, I suspect, given the nature of our contemporary world, an increasingly rare phenomenon.

Take the simplest route to induced happiness, exercise regularly and as vigorously as you can. Why? Because your body secretes endorphins which are known euphemistically as ‘happy hormones’ and raise your sense of well-being. It is a quick fix and places you in the driving seat. Try to avoid making major decisions without doing some form of exercise beforehand, whether it be a brisk walk or a full on aerobic workout at the gym.

The release of endorphins into your bloodstream will colour your critical faculties and enhance your mood generally and is far more likely to result in your decisions or meditations being positive.

 Some people love the esoteric, so here’s something for you to try for size.

Two agents, serotonin and melatonin influence us in subtle yet powerful ways. They can be seen as precursors to various states ranging from tiredness to euphoria. Psychedelic drugs, the things that hippies championed and claimed lead to altered states of perception, have been found to trigger serotonin release. Serotonin is also known as a happy hormone and is cited as a cure, among other things, for depression.

Drugs such as the psychedelics are referred to as the lazy man’s way to enlightenment. And this is true, enhanced perceptions, awareness, understandings and ‘heightened consciousness’ are accessible through the effects of the drugs. The thing is that the perceptions are soon forgotten because they are artificially triggered altered states and for most people are a meaningless splash in a pool of well-being.

In esoteric lore the pineal gland is often ascribed as the seat of the third eye, a name to describe enlightened perception. The pineal gland, a small organ at the centre of the brain, releases melatonin which also regulates serotonin secretions, this in response to varying intensities of light. Dimming light leads to sleep, brightening light leads to awakening and so on.

The antecedent to these chemical releases is the mediator tryptophan which is a naturally occurring amino acid that has to be sourced externally, the body doesn’t produce it. Various foods are rich in tryptophan, certain fruits are good sources.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. Siddhartha Gautama was meditating in his usual spot beneath a bo tree, a fig, when he received enlightenment or was awakened (became Buddha). The fig is a rich source of tryptophan and being within the emanation of the bo tree would more than likely have enhanced the process of an individual upon a conscious development journey.

When exposed to bright light, melatonin levels decrease which causes an increase in serotonin secretions. Illumination or enlightenment is the way in which an elevated level of consciousness is described, with the caveat that such a state is transcendental to language and can only be suggested or hinted at. 

Curiously the cartoon character Popeye is also, knowingly or unknowingly, a reference to the pineal gland or third eye becoming active. Popeye’s method was to transfer himself from mediocrity to superhuman by eating spinach - another of the superfoods -  which triggered a sequence of extraordinary transformations that made him temporarily invincible, capable, strong and so on.

The art for the personal developer is to be able to access these different states in a conscious and self electing way rather than to be subject to the whims and vagaries of a world beyond your control.

The study of these bits of esoterica is extremely rewarding and opens up a huge territory here for those of you who are looking for clues.

image: joseph lane

Sitting in the sun room at home I am caught by the statue of the Buddha’s head on the marble floor. There is a graceful line to the nose from the brow that the sculptor has captured with skill and finesse.

I am reminded of the saying from Eliphas Levi, “Refine, all can be achieved by refinement.” Development is a matter of engineering your circumstances so that the outer portrayal of your life is a manifestation of the inner state that you occupy. This means creating a symbiotic approach to your life so that there is a resonance or a frequency of sameness throughout.

It’s about consistency, it’s about integrity. The outer state is a representation of the inner state. It is in this way that you can read people, you can tune into precisely what is going on in any given situation according to the outer expression of what is actually at play.

People make excuses, we all do it and that is a part of living, we excuse ourselves and among family and friends we make allowance for the imperfections of each of us. The question is, of course, how far do you go with it? And, critically, do you make excuses to yourself?

You are the one who knows your inner state best of all, you are the one who has the greatest insight and are best placed to assess whether you are being true to yourself or not.

What you choose to surround yourself with, what you are attracted to, who you mix with, the thoughts you have, the things you do are all expressions of that inner state. That place which is closer to you than anything else.

If you are cold reading a person you will observe textures, movements, postures, speech patterns, clothing, hairstyles and so on. All of this will give a picture of where the person is coming from and where they are in themselves. What’s important to them, what do they emphasise or even what do they make a big play of not emphasising?

Reflection is everything. To understand yourself better, use the method I have described elsewhere of detached viewing and then look at yourself and your environment as though it were the very first time.

image: fotopusch

Happiness is not so much a destination as a journey. It is the culmination of a series of processes, namely growth and development, fulfilment and the inevitable state that summons. We struggle in the developed world with this equation because the pressures upon us are immense. The society we have created is far more complex than anything else that has existed so far in the human story and the need for success and to excel within that society is huge.

It baffles the best of us and you will meet few, if any, people who do not realise that there has to be a seed change in attitude, expectation and the method we employ to go about our lives. Happiness, it seems to me, is a fundamental requirement of all human beings. I believe that we are entitled to happiness but that this view is out of step with the engines that drive our culture.

Some philosophies would have you believe that the purpose of living is to suffer and to feel the suffering of all things. Some would have you believe that a messiah sacrificed their life to absolve you of sin and that you are therefore indebted to that messiah for your life. I believe that the purpose of life is to grow and to develop. To personally evolve and become the best that you can possibly be at whatever it is that you do. How you achieve that is a matter of choice, something else that I believe is a fundamental principle to being alive. Also that there is responsibility within that, responsibility toward others, to do no harm to other living things and to uphold a set of values that promote the best in others. 

Naturally I only touch base here. This area is, for anyone serious about their life, huge and requires a lifetime’s endeavour. Not a lifetime of graft and uncomfortably, but a lifetime of stretching to reach the next level from where you are at. It’s like a stairway, isn’t it? Each step has its preceding step, its step beyond and the step itself. They exist within an inter-connectivity that defines what they are.

There is an Irish joke about taking a journey. An old codger is asked the way to Kerry by some lost travellers and having given it some thought he says, “You know.. if I was going to Kerry, I wouldn’t start from here at all.” And that is what it’s like, development is a journey. We probably wouldn’t start from where we started but it’s our only point of departure and everything we do is relative to that originating point.

Why do I say that? Someone asked me what made me qualified to talk about happiness in a way that wasn’t a patronising, ‘I am happy, you should be too.’ It being that there is no formal qualification in happiness, no degree course or doctor of happiness PhD to be studies for the matter is one of subjective assessment. However happiness is, I believe, a fundamental requirement of all human beings in order that they flourish and prosper.

Development is not an easy option. Self improvement requires going through one’s life with a fine toothed comb and challenging whatever that process delivers up that is at odds with your intention to improve yourself. You are the author of your own story, you create your own reality and the truth for you is whatever you want it to be. That can be a main road to misery or reveille to wake up and live the life you truly want to live.