Perspective

The angle from which we view our world determines what we see, and how we see it, and therefore it heavily influences what we do with our time and energy, what we do and what we do not believe in, what we have faith and hope in, what motivates and inspires us and what attracts and repels us. 

Our perspective then, sets the tone for what we think, how we feel and where we focus and invest our attention and energies. Our perspective directs our intentions, thoughts, choices and ultimately the direction of our lives and our experiences here.

Our perspective is actually an extension of our beliefs and forms the psychic construct of what our world is and our relation to it. 

Our cognitive, perceptive and emotional development, are all inextricably linked to one another, and are in fact one phenomenon, (no matter how much one may prefer to separate them into individual phenomena), and the ultimate breadth and depth of this development determines the angle of our worldview, or Perspective. 

Our perspective is either more objective or a more subjective, depending upon the extent of our overall development and strongly influences our attitude towards the importance of whether or not we actively continue our own personal development.

If our experience has taught us that we are able, and that we can trust ourselves sufficiently, then we are granted access to the control mechanisms of our own inner workings that allow us to deliberately trust, develop and utilize our natural subjective endowments such as intuition.

If our experiences have taught us that we cannot trust ourselves, then we must rely upon the strategies that we have learned from others to navigate our worlds, and we tend favor a less risky life experience that relies upon a more objective observant life strategy. 

Our certainty of what is real and true, is provided us through the reliability of what we can sense in our environment, what we can measure, and what we can see in front of us. As a result our ability to subjectivity choose becomes clouded, atrophies, and ultimately much of our creativity is sacrificed as a result. 

We have no choice but to decide objectively, as our ability to choose for ourselves from within ourselves, no longer provides us with sufficient motivation to do so, we reluctantly settle.

Clearing Things Up

Emotionally charged unresolved problems, cloud our vision, no matter how acute our eyes may be otherwise. 

The only cure is uncoupling the emotions attached to the memory and meaning of the event, through the forgetfulness of time, denial, an internalized reconfiguration of the events, intentional forgetfulness, or truly through elucidating and coming to terms with the blockage of your flow.

Commitment

To help change yourself or another, commit (or ask another to commit) to a new way of doing things for three weeks. Tell yourself, or the other, that they can go back to doing things the old way, if they fail in their endeavor. It takes the pressure off, as we have light at the end of the tunnel (certainty), and it only takes three weeks to change or learn.

If you cannot commit for 21 days, you cannot commit and you do no value yourself enough!

Temptations or Inspirations

Beauty, youth, glory, power, control and the other psychically fueled passions and self-deceptions, at first provide us with a false sense of temporal security and confidence.

But along the way, as a result of actually engaging in and feeling our experiences, their motivating energies provide us with a set of instructions for constructing our own ever expanding mirror, revealing ourself to us.

And although it be the most frightening of all monsters peering back at us, with courage, perseverance and commitment, our mirror reveals to us those parts of ourselves that can never truly be hidden.

With our own jealously fought for and won faith, and with enough love, we can come to truly know what lurks in the shadows and unwittingly torments us from within, as they are the very parts of us which we must express to become us, as surely as the air that we breath must be drawn into our souls to light the fire that gives us life and keeps us truly living.

Let Me Think About It

An “I need to think” or an “I do not know”, out of the mouth of those who can understand if they so choose to means; I do not believe it, I do not want to believe it or I do not believe you, but most importantly and always, it means “I do not feel it” and therefore “I do not see it”, so I will not honor it until viscerally convinced otherwise.

Only through the act of our own aware experience can we come to actually feel, know and believe this truth, and only then can we begin to possess the necessary internal power to choose awareness, truth and honesty over pretensions, ambitions and dramas in our life.

My wild ride, so far…

“People say that what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.”—JOSEPH CAMPBELL

Why this and why not something else? This was my earliest recollected thought, and one that I’m still perplexed over, some 46 years later. As result of the very unique set of circumstances that helped to create a person such as myself, I’ve been blessed with a very diverse range of experiences, knowledge and insights, that are usually best kept to myself, but that may shed some light upon the way that some of us view, behave and interact with our worlds.

One of the most basic of truths of all, and fundamental to the human experience itself, is that we are all truly alone and separate from each other in this life, but that we also want to love and be loved so desparately that it can physically hurt us at times. I know this is what I have always felt so strongly personally, and from the very beginning of my life.

As a small child I would sit and concentrate on a self-directed task for many hours, sans the want or need of any human company. While I have always been fascinated with and loved other people, even from my earliest remembrance, I’ve never found myself needing them in the same way that they seem to need me. We are all inherently social creatures, but what that means to us individually, can have quite disparate meanings from person to person.

The ability (and need), to focus upon and comprehend things accurately with no external guidance, like all other human talents and gifts, is both a blessing and a curse. This particular ability, and the integrated memory ability that supports it, is both wonderful and horrific at the same time, and as I’ve discovered, truly only comprehensible by those who share a similar gift and affliction. It takes one to know one, and only through conscious experience can we possibly comprehend such truths, and not all of us are blessed or cursed with the same things in our lives.

It is true that we can never truly know another person, but we can deliberately attempt to come close to understanding them, as I’ve personally found that empathy is a muscle that can be exercised and strengthened, no matter what anybody thinks to the contrary. I’ve also discovered that the many do not consider empathy as vital to human connection as I do, as the more “normal” one tends to be, the less they feel misunderstood and hence the less motivation they feel for truly knowing others. 

Most of us want to be understood very strongly, but do not feel strongly about wanting to understand others. It’s much less energetically expensive to act “as if” than to actually do, and therefore the appearance of compassion and emphaty usually suffices for most of us most of the time. 

My own motivation for actively wanting to understand others came from my deep childhood need for being understood, which itself is one of the deepest longings of the human soul, though I’ve also discovered that the more we want something, the less of it we seem to experience.

In the end all we can do is our best, the trick is doing our best when the world yells at us that we are wrong, and still holding onto that truth inside that is us cheering for what we know to be right and true.

Watching Time

“Until you figure out how a watch works, you best just keep track of the time.”-Gump