It'd be interesting to see how your experiment works. I've created lists like that before, but they fell out of regular usage.
Thanks for reading!
I like the idea that if you could easily distinguish between needs and wants, you might be a little less stressed.
I'm going to experiment with this. I keep a giant todo list. But I should keep two: one for needs and one for wants. I think the needs list would be really small.
I also tend to elevate wants to the commitment level of needs to make sure I get them done. But that usually backfires since it then feels like I have to do it. I must know somewhere that it's not really that important.
I really like your blog.
This is something I notice when I'm feeling more together.
Usually, I take things literally and want to answer questions as factually as I can. But I notice when I'm more aware, less socially awkward, etc, that I tend to take the question more as a queue and less as something to answer directly. I can the obliquely answer in whatever way I want.
The question is leading. Are you afraid? I could always search around in my experience for something that could be called fear. So I'd have to answer yes. But when I'm more conscious, I answer much more based on context.
Your posts are very interesting. Thanks for writing them.
I think we have those thoughts that can be random especially in those moments when you beginning to wake up from a nights sleep. However, I would think that once you have a meaningful day and your life becomes more meaningful then I would believe your random thoughts may dissipate.
I actually read Loner's Manifesto and it really helped me feel better about having a few close friends and light social contact. I wrote about it here:
http://self-programming.com/2009/06/how-a-book-like-the-loners-manifesto-works.html
I would like to meet those who are like me and are hiding..because I can relate to what you're writing about. I can't seem to fit in, and when I try to I get bored/restless. You name it. Comes a time that I would be depressed to think, am I really just a loner that has no life?
Right on, glad you enjoyed the post!
This is great! We too often ignore the symbolism of our own environments. Our thoughts are transformed through new data from our senses. We may as well pay attention to how we interpret it through the archetypal lenses of our minds.
That's a very interesting idea. And it certainly explains lulls in my own behaviours.
I think the people who keep moving from self-help book to self-help book or more specifically diets often lack discipline and patience. They read the book and expect immediate results and don't have the discipline to stick with it and impatiently move on to the next book / diet.
apathy sucks
These are both good connections, thanks for this.
Becoming an expert requires becoming aware of the territory and making a personal connection to it. By seeking out info where I have recognized a flaw in myself.. I am letting my experience of interfacing with the world lead to the lessons I am requiring. Personal connection to a subject increases our ability to remember and use the info. I think this has a lot to do with coming from the heart, being genuine.
u are welcome--I got the title slightly wrong, so note the correction please: "The farther reaches of human nature"
ISBN 0140194703
It does make me think of Freud's concept of "active mastery" ie., the drive to be competent or take control over that which we passively experience, especially areas in which our ego is slighted or traumatized.
Thanks for that recommendation Jane. Added to my reading list!
Read Maslow's posthumous book "Beyond the reaches of ..." to learn that achievement and talents are not the "self" of actualization, but rather one becomes the best human possible, actualizing meta-values like Plato's truth, goodness, beauty OR "learning for learning's sake", one of Maslow's favorites.
Hi! I agree with your analogy of the human mind as software. I've found a master at helping to change people from the subconscious. He is a network chiropractor and practices kinesiology. (sp?) He is immensely effective. It is easy and quick. If anyone would like to contact him, his name is Ray Gin, DC. He is located in SoCal. His office phone is 949.458.6728.
Yeah. A mind trap I often get into when thinking about self-actualization is obsessing too much over my past successes, when so much of living the good life is jumping into unknowns and discovering new potentials.
My vote is that any conception of yourself that tries to fix you as an actualized self is probably going to make you unhappy because it's either based on the past or the future, when we're all different every day. We are actualiz*ing* selves really, and sometimes that means we need to be a webmaster for two years, or quit that job to paint dorms or teach sunday school or something. Freedom IS free. And so are our many selves. At some point, the career becomes less a way of identifying that than how you speak to your neighbor in the grocery store.
"The blood-brain barrier".. opens up a flood gate of thoughts for me.. one thought is of the synaptic connection and dendrites that make thoughts possible, which reminded me to check where we are on the computing power singularity ascent.
I recall we're now only 2 orders of magnitude away from achieving human brain processing capabilities in computing (I believe the IBM road runner hit 1 petaflops sustained last summer).
The second thought it sparked for me was that as intricate a mechanism of nature as the blood-brain barrier is, the one interesting part of our organ that does not function behind it is the Pineal gland. Which interestingly enough floods our brains with dimenthyltriptamine at the time of both birth (when our skulls are crushed to go through the birth canal), and death (when our mind is flooded with what many experience in NDEs as "the tunnel of light"). Oh, and happens to also occur naturally when psilocybin metabolizes in our system through ingestion as psilocin, found in certain strains of naturally spawning mushrooms around the world.
You pose a very deep and possibly unanswerable (from this state of being) question: "why would -it- create entities like us that behave and define ourselves so separately from itself?". Again, this reminds me of one's definition of "itself", or "self" as in self-actualization. If I assume the "itself" or "self" is a non-physical, non-thinking, yet self-aware and self-conscious "something", out of which super strings wiggle and supernovas explode, it would seem that like the poet who self reflects with his own words on a personal journal, perhaps existential creation is the "being-ness" self reflecting and self-recognizing itself, that it itself is. Maybe creation itself, the entire universe, is a feedback loop, and through it, it can experience and grow itself, and become even more "itself" than it already is?
For some reason the word "blood-brain barrier" popped into my mind toward the end of your comment.
I like the questions that your posture brings up. Why would all this material evolve consciousness and observe itself? Why would it create entities like us that behave and define themselves so separately from itself?
Another interesting thread Phil.. experiencing oneself through a feedback loop of one's own creation and reinforcing the ontological nature of epistemology. It's interesting.. that those things one writes down in a dairy are thoughts transformed into physical manifest.. things which were ephemeral and non-physical as an idea or thought, moved through neurons in your mind organ, to twitch your nerves in your tissue pipes of your fingers to carve out images that represent those thoughts, which through light refraction, go back through the optical nerves to make sense again, and recognize, "self-realize" in a sense, that that which it is seeing on the piece of paper hence forth is in fact the same as that which allows the mind to see and better understand what it only just knew seconds ago itself, as solely in the mind?
So it makes me think.. are not all things in the physical construct, the physical matrix, all ultimately creations of thought? Things that were purely non-physical that through it's on volition somehow became manifest to experience itself? The chair, the house, the neighborhood, the city-state, the society, all physical objects, but an extension then of some other higher octave of vibrational existence that somehow figured itself to swim down the duct of the birth canal to procreate itself so it can.. self-experience itself.. to what end?
It's a very interesting stream of thought Phil. The concept of self-actualization.. makes me think.. do we not first need understand what the "self" is, so you know what it is you are actualizing? I suppose by your post, the "self" is the personality self, or the self that you think of as the collection of your thoughts, your memories, your preferences, your creativities and so forth. Both your mention of the athlete example and your own creative example seem to point to this construct. But.. there is a "self" that exists that can observe oneself having those thoughts.. or even just experience the moment of stillness without any thoughts.. the space or field of the "now" as Echkart Tolle describes. If this was in fact one's definition of "self", this being-ness that is an awareness outside of thought, what could actualization of such a "self" be? Is it not unlike Aristotle's concept of "potentia" then, the field from which all creative existence manifests from, and from where there is endless potential? Perhaps when we reach that level of self-actualization.. we would be so at peace with outselves, that therein we will "be" the potential of all things?
Yeah, that probably should have read the other way around. Like, "Dr. Phil is a twisted abstraction of Reality Therapy."
FYI- Glasser wrote Reality Therapy in 1965, a bit before Dr. Phil became a "hit." I've thought Dr. Phil has been using Reality Therapy quite badly for years. I use RT in my practice and am an instructor of Glasser's ideas through his institute. It's great stuff. Check out my website at http://www.realitytherapycentral.com.
Thanks for the link Stephan! Dan Gilbert's a great writer. The video inspired this post: http://www.self-programming.com/2009/04/we-can-be-good-at-happiness.html
Hi Philip.
I just saw a nice video on being happy. I think you'll know the video, but if you don't, I think you'll find it interesting :-)
http://video.ted.com/talks/podcast/DanGilbert_2004_480.mp4
Regards!
The tarot opens the door to the universal mind that we all share, but many have forgotten. It is true that if we follow the heart then we cannot go wrong. It is when we kid ourselves that we can just live on the surface and deny our true nature that happiness eludes us.
I really enjoyed this article! Nice analogies. The Tarot is my favorite tool of self-inquiry...
Nice!I really liked that analogy with the fishermen..Strangely I had a tarot card session with a couple of friends on Saturday and it was kinda amazing..
Cool, I'll have to check those out.
Thanks! Other people on Twitter were telling me that they were exactly the same way. They were only into "dyads" or one-on-one pairings.
What your explaining is the coolest way to be!!
Reading Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Shirky's Here Comes Everybody brought this phenomena to my attention.
haha, that's a good way of putting it. Yes, yes he did.
I like how you buddy Rusty turned your question into a form of rock-paper-scissors!
I can relate to your character. I suppose the word would be "Non conformist". It can't be an individualist, as you had pointed out. Any extrovert may be an individualist.
Databases... I'm sure you could mine a lot of universal ideas from that field.Come to think of it, sometimes programmer-speak becomes so second-nature to me that I had forgotten that the "local change vs. global change" expression comes very much from my computer science background.
I like that principle, especially from a programmer's perspective, and not from a "think globally, act locally" perspective (which I imagine is where most people's minds might go). I bet there are a lot of things that I've learned from database development that I never thought to apply to my "real life."
Hi,my name is Bartolomeu and i'm from Brazil, Very good job and i believe that. I really like SCovey and your theory.Best regards
Good post! If we don't focus on our own programming we can fall prey to someone else's programming that may not be in our self interest. Most people I think are in a trance most of the time and being programmed to what the the programmer wants.
Well, I reckon that if it comes down to it, gut instinct, intuition, and answers from 'God' would usually be the same one and should be taken over rational thought anytime. Just an opinion of course :-)
the product of the product is meaningful, lasting life change.
What are the benefit of self-programming? In other words, what is the "product of the product"?
link was cut off. search for Time magazine 10 Ideas Changing The World. #1.
You will appreciate this: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1884779_1884782_1884749,00.html
I get what you're saying with the balance of the 2 methods and yet trying to end chatter in my head, seems to add to the chatter.One of the ways I have found helpful to decrease chatter is to take time to write it down. I write down what I'm feeling and thinking without judgment. It helps clear my mind. Then I get even clearer by breaking down my thoughts/feelings into what I don't want, what I do want and how I want to feel instead. I wrote an article about this process which I call "The Chatter Stopper."http://www.prosperitylighthouse.com/blog/5-steps-to-getting-beyond-procrastination-and-overwhelm/
Thanks for the encouragement!