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Too Late!
As a result of studying the works of many spiritual teachers , I try hard to be consciously aware of my thoughts as they occur in real-time. I try to be simultaneously both the observer and the observee. However, I’m always too late in recognizing self-defeating behaviors triggered by negative thoughts. I have a negative thought, spout out some toxic verbal diarrhea , and then recognize my stupidity after the fact. It almost seems like I’d be better off if I stayed blissfully unconscious and unaware of my thoughts and behavior.
Internal thoughts produce internal feelings, and internal feelings drive external behavior. You can’t control which thoughts magically appear in your head, but if you’re vigilantly aware and awake, you can consciously choose to let hurtful thoughts naturally float away without taking action. The more ego-dominated you are, the less likely you are to release the negative thoughts and preempt stupid behavior. Having said that, I realize that I’m totally dominated by ego. How about you?
Gym Notes
I go to the gym everyday (before work) and exercise for an hour. While exercising, sometimes lots of ideas magically appear in my mind. I read somewhere that an average of 50000 thoughts manifest in a person’s head every single day. Depending on what your definition of a single thought is, that’s about 1 thought every 2 seconds.
About a year ago, out of the blue, the simple but idea of bringing a small notebook to the gym came to me, so I did. Ever since, then, I’ve captured lots of ideas from the ether, jotted them down on paper, and followed through on many of them later. On some days, the ideas would flow so freely that I would spend quite a bit of time writing them down. Often, it would take me an extra half hour to workout, or I’d often forget where I was in the workout and repeat some exercises. On the other hand, there would be many days where I’d leave the gym and my notebook would be empty. I’d write NADA on those pages.
Looking back on those days where nothing was/is written down, I’d realized that I was always using my internal mental energy to complain about, or criticize, something or someone in a seemingly endless loop. My ego mind was blocking my “conscious awareness” from shining through and revealing itself through productive and creative thinking. The clouds obscured the ever present sun.
I still bring a notebook with me every day to the gym and I still have (many) days where I leave with the word NADA written in the page du jour. That’s life.
Battle Of The Blahs
Awareness, pure consciousness, egoless, no self, spirit, god, the peace that passeth all understanding, universal energy, eternal essence, eternal bliss, universal intelligence, mind, formless energy….. (add your own favorite word or phrase here).
All these words and phrases point to the same thing (or no-thing?) and attempt to describe what’s indescribable via words or thoughts. People argue endlessly over which is “right” or “correct” and miss the whole purpose of using them to communicate. It reminds me of the famous spiritual (Buddhist?) saying that goes something like this: “I’m pointing at the moon but you’re looking at my finger.”
As E. Tolle has said: “The analysis of pointers is pointless.”
What’s your favorite word or phrase that describes the indescribable?
A Shift In Perspective
At birth, everyone is egoless. We are pure awareness, a manifestation of universal consciousness. We have no agenda and no desire to make ourselves look good at the expense of others. We don’t get into zero-sum games and our outer purpose is directly synchronized with our inner purpose. When we get labeled with a name, start accumulating “credentials” and “expertise”, and we begin to internalize the human-made concepts of “I” and “me”, our heads expand in order to accommodate ego growth. As ego expands, consciousness contracts and we lose touch of the infinite source of energy that comprises our inner core. Our behaviors and actions become increasingly dominated by the artificial need to selfishly accumulate “things out there” and consume way more than we need. How do I know this? Because like you, I’m a perfect example of ego-domination. Give “me” more, “I” need more, it’s all about “me”, “I’m” smarter than “you”, “I’m” better looking than “you”, “I” have more and nicer things than “you”, “you” should want to be like “me”, to hell with “you” and to heaven with “me”. Duality and separation settle in.
As the lower graph in the above figure shows, some people may, by an unknown and humanly-uncontrollable act of grace, experience a shift in perspective at some point in their lives. The ego starts to deflate, consciousness starts rising, and the artificial mode of good/bad, dual thinking starts dissolving. For some people, the slope of the ego curve instantaneously flips to negative infinity at the point of transition and an “epiphany” occurs. Jill Bolte Taylor, Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, Sydney Banks, and the Buddha come to mind as examples of people who’ve experienced epiphanies.
Becoming aware that one is ego-dominated is not enough to trigger a transformation back to our true nature and a realignment of our outer purpose with our inner purpose. How do I know this? Because I’m aware of the fact that I’m dominated by the constraining, finite, and toxic force of the ego. The ego is brilliant in that it can argue with anything at any time and rationalize any action, no matter how horrendous the end result is.
So here “I” am, recognizing the fact that I’m a slave to “my” ego and hoping that an instantaneous shift in perspective will happen to “me”. Since I don’t have a clue on how to trigger the shift, I’m on a constant intellectual search for enlightenment. However, feverishly accumulating intellectual understanding is not the way to realize and experience “the peace that passeth ALL understanding”. Bummer.
Lost In Thought
The Beauty Of Quotes Is…
that they are both dense and concise. When I hear a quote that hits close to home it rocks my world like a Mike Tyson power punch (when he was in his prime). Sometimes the effect is positive and sometimes it’s negative, but it’s always impactful. Here’s a top 10 list of my current favorites:
- “Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself.” – A. H. Weiler
- “An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.” – Robert A. Humphrey
- “A picture is worth a thousand words. A metaphor is worth a thousand pictures.” – Ben Tamari
- “Comprehensiveness is the enemy of comprehensibility.” – Martin Fowler
- “Creation is an intimate act of communication between the creator and the created.” – W. L. Livingston
- “Facts are useful because they give the conscious mind something to do while the emotions decide what’s true” – Dale Dauten
- “I hold great hopes for UML, which seems to offer a way to build products that integrate hardware and software, and that is an intrinsic part of development from design to implementation. But UML will fail if management won’t pay for quite extensive training, or toss the approach when panic reigns.” – Jack Gannsle
- “If I had an hour to save the world, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions” – Albert Einstein
- “I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.” – Socrates
- “It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.” – William James
What’s your current favorite list?
Serendipity
Don’t ya just love serendipity? After hearing the oft-repeated “why does software take so long?” question for the bazillionth time in my career, a fuzzy version of a quote I heard a long time ago came to mind. It was something like “anything is easy for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself”. I fuzzily thought that Mark Twain was the originator of the quote. For at least 20 minutes, I googled “Mark Twain” and various phrasings of the quote in an attempt to try and find the exact version of it. Alas, it was not to be and I moved on with my life.
A couple of days ago, guess what happened? Serendipity came to the rescue via my RSS reader. One of the blogs that I subscribe to is called “Quotes Of the Day”. Sure enough, this showed up as one of them:
“Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself.”- A. H. Weiler
Kool huh? I was so thrilled that serendipity paid me a visit that I incorporated the quote into my e-mail signature.
The Space Between Thoughts
Bing, bing bing. One thought after another arises out of somewhere (do you know where?) and manifests as an image or string of associated words in our head. Where do thoughts come from, and why does someone think the specific thoughts that they do? What determines the frequency of thought production? Is it good to be engulfed in a state of high frequency thought production? How is wisdom related to thinking?
As the figure below shows, I think that wisdom arises out of the space between thoughts. If you agree with me, then being ensconced in a high rate of thought production is in general, not a good thing. There’s no time for wisdom to shine through the continuous train of thought.
How does one lower the frequency of thought so that we can experience wisdom? I think that we can lower the frequency and create holes to appear in the thought train by not attaching any emotion to each thought. Since we’re human, we all attach meaning to each thought and we experience the feeling that accompanies the thought. If we don’t amplify that feeling into a personal emotion, we perform a 180 degree turn and look inward at our true nature . We then experience what we really are at our core – the pure awareness; the nothingness out of which all objects are created. The glorious process of creation itself.
Wisdom is not intellectual understanding, it’s experiencing/realizing. It’s “the peace that passeth all understanding”. By creating gaps in our thought train, we give ourselves opportunities for wisdom to arise.
Emotional Messaging
I don’t know about you, but when I feel strongly about topic that I know pretty well, it’s difficult for me to talk about the topic without mixing emotional meaning together with the verbal content of what I’m trying to communicate. Is that a bad thing? In the standard business mindset of a bygone era, it IS a bad thing. It’s “not professional” to show emotion. Those who can keep their emotions in check are annointed as leaders of the corpo castle. Robots rule and there is no room for humanity. Since all leadees watch their leaders closely, and most of the leadees naturally tend to emulate their leaders in the hope of moving up the corpo pyramid to success, mechanistic leaders innocently and unconsciously create mediocre “oatmeal” organizations.
In this day and age of knowledge commoditization, openness, and candor, emotion may be exactly what is needed to catapult an organization to the top. In order to lead, you must not only be competent, but passionate and inspiring. Those words imply the requirement for emotional communication to me.
Without emotional involvement, project outputs tend to be “meh” – cold, bland and mediocre. Classic MBA managers prefer the measurable over the meaningful. Not me. How about you?
My UCB
My Unshakeable Cognitive Burden
A few years ago, I first heard the phrase “Unshakeable Cognitive Burden”, or UCB. The UCB is a collection of deeply rooted beliefs, opinions, and values that color a person’s view of life. It serves as the foundation for his/her behavior. We all have a UCB, and we start unconsciously building it from the ground up as soon as we are born. If we remain unconscious and unaware of our UCB as we age, it starts to harden and stagnate.
The UCB is shaped like a pyramid where the lower layers become incredibly difficult to displace and replace over time as we innocently, but deliberately, filter out those circumstances and events and experiences that go against it. Since the top UCB layers are under less psychological pressure than the lower layers, they may be easy to displace and replace. However, depending on how unconscious and entrenched we are in our personal belief system, even the top layers can become immutable.
Trust me, it’s not good to have a UCB. I struggle with mine all the time. Rigid attachment to a UCB leads to a life of frustration, disappointment, and constant suffering. You get stuck in an arrogant, “I’m right and you’re wrong” binary mindset that can lead to violence or worse. Instead of living in the moment and enjoying life, you spend much of your time defending your UCB and attacking everyone else’s. It’s you against the big bad world. The Buddhists call this “the illusion of duality”.
The only way out of the UCB trap is to awaken to the fact that you’re living in a self-woven cocoon of lies based on “thoughts”. If you ever come to the realization that thoughts are just temporary formations of natural energy that arise out of nowhere in your consciousness, then your stance will soften and life will become lighter, breezier, and more peaceful. You will become more open and accommodating of others thoughts, ideas, and feelings.
So how do we awaken and become consciously aware? Is there a step by step procedure? I wish I knew. Do you?
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