image: mafic

There isn’t room for moral ambiguity. Your life is really a one shot deal, semantics and philosophy can lead you some merry dances but this is all we know for certain. Faith is wonderful, belief is tremendous but their foundations are less than empirical, there is a certain degree of trust in agencies beyond our influence that drive these two charioteers and their companion, hope.

That they may exist and that there may be sound arguments in support of adhering to the counsel of these three retainers is not disputed by this writer. What is being alluded to here is the placing of one’s foundations in certainties and absolutes. What we know for certain is that we are here now and have a process going on. That may not always be so, in fact it definitely will not always be so in this form but the unknown there is when.

Therefore it is crucial that you are clear about what you do and the reasons why you do it. This is the true benchmark of where your life is. Not the stuff that is automatic and that you had no part in the genesis of, but those things that are unique to your life and your circumstance. You didn’t create the world, you didn’t create the computer screen you’re reading this on, they were here before you and came into existence despite you so you can’t really take the credit for them.

What you can do is take credit for the way you conduct yourself within that. I suppose it might be known in the vernacular as the arsehole question: are you an arsehole and if so why? There is no obligation upon any of us to be anything we don’t want to be. Even in the most dire circumstances there are still individuals who preserve their own dignity and integrity without succumbing to the law of the jungle.

Your question has to be, how dire are my circumstances? And yes it’s subjective, it’s all a matter of perception, there are some people running around out there very well provided for who’ve managed to shove their heads so far up their own backsides they’re seeing daylight out of their own mouths. If your life and its potential mean anything to you then these are matters you will give time to, meditate upon, consider and come to your own position upon. It’s not what you do that counts, it’s the reason why you do it that matters and likewise it is not your circumstance that matters but how you respond to it.

Be you pauper or prince, a mentor or a knave, at the top of the chain or the bottom, all are brother and sister, we are all defined to some extent by the actions of each of us and the affairs of the human race are what characterize us all.  None of us escapes the human condition, the art is to celebrate it and champion that which is best and progressive. We are capable of extraordinary things and can grasp concepts at the edge of the Universe, we can do and be better. You can do it.

 image: jam343

This is cathartic for me. Currently I am ill. Not debilitatingly ill but ill enough to be pissed off with it. It’s some kind of ear infection thing which gives the impression that you could put your finger in your ear and keep on reaching in like it was a tunnel. Also moving the jaw is painful.

This is why I made three posts yesterday, I’m avoiding things I have to do because my energies are low. I went to the gym and knew that I couldn’t get myself in the place I like to be, the one where I am sweating enough to feel like I’ve pushed myself and am tired but not exhausted from my exertions.

I should have trimmed the hedges and cut the grass on the lawns, I should’ve washed the car, we went away for a family wedding at the weekend so the car needed a freshen up but I managed to procrastinate. That’s not like me so I know that I’m out of sorts.

I attended meetings I had to, and will do so again today. People told me I looked serious, more serious than usual, I went into the office and also arranged a delivery of a consignment that I had to take to the carrier’s depot personally to make the deadline so I’m not on my back but I’m not firing on all cylinders.

The reason I’m writing this is not pure self indulgence, although I’m sure that is in there, but because I want to make the mark of doing this, of writing something and of putting a certain signal out. You become what you think about, you are the synthesis of your efforts and what you want to be is what you become.

Each morning I get up at 6.00am and think about things. I set my mental process for the day, and plan what I will do with that day. That has to fit into a cohesive plan that puts me where I want to be.

I am acutely aware that I live a life of comparative luxury, I can define pretty much what I want to do and what I want my days to be filled with. It’s not something that happened overnight, it’s what we all work for all our lives, to place ourselves in the driving seat and to assert as much self determination as possible. My focus has to be on complacency, I run successful businesses and to many people I would seem to have made it, but that isn’t it, that isn’t enough, they are a means to an end. The end being that I have spent over thirty years amassing a wealth of learning and wisdom. When I was a child in a completely dysfunctional setting I pondered the significance of these things, my setting, who I was, why sometimes outrageous fortune landed itself upon the innocent, why villains got away with it and prospered.

I wondered what exactly made the Universe tick, who had the answers, where and what was the truth. So I began searching hard, since I was very young I was inspired by the masters of the Renaissance and viewed them as friends, companions, I assumed that they were the natural synthesis of what we all become in our lives and so determined to be a renaissance man myself.

I then discovered that there was no need for renaissance men or women in the place where I grew up, a vast industrial city that made its fortune on supplying the paraphernalia of world domination to the empire. The strange thing was I grew up in it as it exhaled and was being replaced on the world stage by the fledgling manufacturing industries of south east Asia. Little yellow men somewhere on the other side of the world who were prepared to work a week for a bowl of rice stole my heritage and robbed me of the opportunity to become apprentice to a metal presser or a machine operator. Thank god for those people whoever they were because it shook up the old order, the status quo.

Now I have lived my life in an era of change, rapid and unprecedented change. Doing things like this is an enigma for the generation that precedes my own yet they did things that had a history of centuries and many generations with little or no change. So my brothers and sisters are like chameleons, we are the shape shifting agents of change who are both witness and protagonists in seismic shifting of the weights and balances of human culture and societies. 

The desire to know and to understand has always compelled me, why do people do what they do, how did we become like this and where to next? These are issues I have given much thought and reasoning to. I had to find out or, as William Blake so eruditely put it, be enslaved by another man’s system.

So here I am this morning, leading up to the start of the working day, my jaw aches and my ear hurts, I don’t feel 100%, yet I live in absolute luxury and am bathed by privileges that most of the human race can only dream of. My question to myself is what will I do today that pays back for the magnificence of my existence and the unparalleled opportunity my life represents?

 image: metropol 21

Ultimately, what defines our lives as adults are the choices and decisions that we make. Upon these do we stand or fall. They may be split second things or they may be the result of a lengthy process of rationalisation, it is these that drive our life and give us direction.

Choice can be a frightening thing because inherent within it is responsibility. It means that you are taking responsibility for yourself. Consider your life as a child or an adolescent and you will see that choice was an occasional visitor and mostly concerned such things as do you want vanilla or strawberry?

Choice is also a dramatically empowering thing, because the exercise of it is life affirming. What you do, who you are, where you end up and the journey that you take are all underlined and given definition by the choices that you make.

Hence our interest in the subject of happiness. The ulterior motive of our decision making process is to facilitate that thing the Greeks called eudaimonia or the good life. Its living is the ultimate preoccupation of us all, and if that is not so then there is a flaw in our basic constitution.

Good decision making is based upon a foundation of good information. The flow of information that we subject ourselves to is a matter of choice. So if an individual gorges on the wrong kind of foods for their physiological assembly, feeds their brain with a diet of soap opera and celebrity gossip then it is clear that their intake is not going to be high quality. Subsequently their decision making process is going to be persuaded by their intake because those are the terms of reference that they have chosen to immerse themselves in.

Good quality information is imperative to the decision making process, your choices are informed by what you know. Your potential is limited or enhanced by the choices that you make. No-one can be held responsible for what they don’t know, but personal responsibility is about defining a basic position that you adopt in your life, a kind of default setting. It is prudent, therefore, to make the decision that you will try to obtain quality information always, even if it means from time to time that you don’t particularly like what you find out.

I learned many years ago to check the source for any information that came my way. This is about putting filters in place so that suspect or biased information does not get past the first gate. It is wise and prudent in the information age to have definite procedures in place that filter what comes your way. Over time it becomes automatic and you will deflect certain types of thing before they even enter your sphere of awareness and conversely you will attract things to yourself that reinforce whatever it is you want.

The choice, of course, is yours.

 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: legacy recordings

Be honest, don’t you wish you’d lived through the sixties in Swinging London or shooting the breeze up at Haight Ashbury? What would it have been like to be there when Elvis first gyrated and sent a tsunami of shock through the sensibilities of upstanding folk throughout the world?

Karl Marx, think of the effect he had on the twentieth century, worked away quietly and unnoticed in the reading room of the British Museum coming up with a thesis that would radically change our world.

Think of the great happenings in world history and how it would have been to be in the wash of them. Whatever for you are the high points of the human narrative thus far, would you have recognised them if you’d been there?

How many people actually recognised the uniqueness of Elvis, Karl Marx, or swung in the sixties? How many people would have stood shoulder to shoulder with Galileo as the Inquisition turned its gaze upon him and forced him to renounce what he knew to be the case?

Listen my friends, the only truth you have access to is now. I read that we are living in an age without ideas, without thinking and perhaps this is so, certainly the writer thought so but then they had copy to shift.

What chills me is the thought of being alive in an age whose only contribution to the human story was to exacerbate its difficulties with an age of unparallelled hedonism. What radical steps forward have we taken in your lifetime? Oh sure, they’re there, but mostly they exist as avant garde or underground movements.

What ideas do you think are going to come from our age that will alter the human story in a positive way?

It’s one thing to be a pundit or a commentator, it’s something quite different to actually contribute and try to create something new and fresh. Anyone can shoot the piano player or be a gilt edged critic, to bring something different to the table is quite different and requires courage, chutzpah, desire and to be driven in ways that don’t require a hedonistic prize at the end.

Life is such an indescribable gift in itself that it is the prize already before time. The greatest gift surely is to be able to add to the consciousness of the Universe. That is all of us who are sentient in whatever form we may manifest and wherever we appear. 

image: pingnews.com

I have always thought that my time was limited. Limited by external factors over which I had no control. I understand now that my time is limited by internal factors over which I do have control. Perception is everything.

Consider the view that time is linear. It is how most of us think of it. A line that travels, and along which we travel, perhaps like being on a train. Another way to think of it is that time is like a stream or a river, the current is the direction it follows, where it has come from is the past and where it is going to is the future. Where it is now is the present.

Let’s expand that idea a little. We have a linear, directional perception of time as a three vectored thing, the past, the present and the future. This perception relies upon the idea of time as having a constant speed and direction, as in it will always be moving forward and it will maintain a regular speed. We go along with it as if we were floating in the current, perhaps as a leaf or a twig might float along in a stream or a river.

Where does a river lead to? All rivers lead to the sea. They merge back into the ocean from which they originated via the process of precipitation. The point at which a river enters the sea is an estuary.

Time is more accurately thought of in this way, that it is like an estuary rather than a stream. An estuary is a combination of currents, directions, eddys, vortices, whirlpools, sudden shifts and rapid changes. So there are temporal variations, there are alternative structures in the fabric or flow of time. Even to the extent that there will be points or zones where it appears to move backwards. There will be places where it seems to alternate its speed and even change direction.

The real leap in cognizance is your understanding that you can be where you want to be within that. Consider your own mind as being an intermediary between the different strata of existence that we are a part of. Your perception is a mediator between the various states that it is possible for it to occupy. It is limited by your beliefs which are essentially a distillation of what you have been told.

Remember the extraordinary young gymnast Olga Korbut who dazzled the world in the Munich Olympics of 1972. She pushed her craft to such an extent that many within the gymnastics world thought that the apex of gymnastics had been reached and there was nowhere left for it to go, perfection had been accomplished. Fourteen year old Nadia Comanici at the following Olympics in Montreal achieved an unprecedented six perfect ten scores. She was the product of a training and coaching system that simply did not tell the gymnasts the things they were being asked to do were unheard of.

These were children and so the luggage of later life did not hamper them. They simply wanted to please their mentors. By which process they became an unstoppable force in the world of gymnastics, achieving things that had been hitherto thought impossible.

Your mind is the same. It is limited by its beliefs of what is possible or not based upon very conservative thinking. The way that you think is not designed to allow you to become emancipated or illumined, it is essentially a means of surviving adequately in the modern world. That is what usually makes the biggest noise. The desire to conform, not in a pejorative sense, to the prevailing conditions is the most acute pressure source we as social entities find ourselves in the wash of.

It’s a little like having the most extraordinary supercar, being sat at the wheel with all the controls at your fingertips ready to respond to your instructions but being stuck in a traffic jam. That’s how it is for your mind, it is restricted and hampered by the situations it finds itself in. 

Like the perception of time as a simple linear construct, we understand most aspects of our lives in a very faltering way. Like Nadia Comaneci it is about believing that you are capable of producing giant leaps instead of tiny shuffling steps.