Tag Archives: Reality

Tap The Power of Realistic Expectations for Incredibly Happy Relationships

Today in my neighborhood, the weather is unseasonably warm. Which is nice, because it’s still winter (or at least it was when I wrote this, now.) It’s nice to have a warm day every now and then when you don’t expect it. It breaks up the monotony of the coldness that I’m used to when I wake up in the morning. And since I try to wake up early every day, I enjoy having the sun just a little bit warmer than I expect it to be.

It’s like when I go to the movies. I am pretty easy to impress and entertain. Sometimes I read the reviews of movies I want to see, sometimes I don’t. An interesting thing that I’ve found was that when I read a particularly unflattering review of a movie, it allows me to enjoy this more, because I go in with less expectations. Like when you really expect to enjoy something, you sometimes can have an unconsciously higher standard that is harder for something to live up to.

I guess that is why on the stock market they always wait and see if earnings beat the markets expectations. Even ones that don’t make a lot of money, if they make more than the analysts have expected, then the stock will go up on that particular day. I remember a company I used to work for had a stock that performed tremendously well. The company had earnings in excess of one dollar per share, which is a lot. One particular day, when the earnings came out, they were only 99 cents a share instead of a dollar a share. Any company that earns 99 cents a share is a very financially stable company, so imagine the surprise when the stock went down almost 4 percent that day because it “didn’t meet the analysts expectations.”

It reminds me of a book I read on self improvement. If I remember correctly, it was a relationships book. And they key to having a happy relationship was having accurate expectations on what to get out of the relationship. Because when you are with somebody, and you find this person interesting, you have to make sure that you like this person because of real reasons, and not imaginary ones. Because when you start to expect reality to behave based on your imagination, and not an accurate assessment of what is out there, you can run into trouble. The book went on to say that one of the best ways to have a really good, solid relationship with somebody was to establish solid expectations based on communication, and your own observations of each other’s behavior in certain circumstances.

My friend, who is married with three kids told me about this. As soon as he learned to plan ahead for his family taking almost an hour sometimes to get ready to leave the house, he was able to make plans, carry out these plans, without having the added stress of expecting his family to meet unrealistic expectations. He said that in the beginning, when it was only him and his wife, he could kind of push for her to be ready earlier, but the more people they added to the family, the more impossible this got. So he naturally realized that the best way to reduce stress, when other people are involved, is to stand back, and watch their behavior, and plan your activities based on reality rather than fantasy.

Which I have gotten down to a science. I used to rush to the movies, buy my large popcorn and coke, then rush to the theater to sit down. It took me about three months of willpower to not eat all my popcorn before the trailers finished showing. Now I usually get to my seat just as the real movie is starting. I’ve learned to ignore the stated start times in the newspaper, and use my experience as a guide. I find that is much easier, because I’d rather enjoy my popcorn while watching the movie I came to see, rather than the movies I’ll most likely come to see in the future.

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The Unstoppable Power of Silence

If you are a smoker, or a drinker, or an overeater, and you’ve ever decided to cut back, or quit, you’ve probably heard the advice that you should tell as many other people as you can about your goal, in order to give yourself some social support to keep going, and some social pressure in case you backslide. This can be great advice. Many times I’ve had weight loss bets with friends to keep motivation high. I’m sure you can remember a time when you wanted to achieve a goal, or stop or cut back a habit and have been able to enjoy support form friends and family.

Other, more lofty goals, may require a different tact. These might be better left secret. There is an ancient law of magic that goes as follows:

To Know

To Will

To Dare

To Be Silent

Let’s break them down, shall we?

To Know.

Sounds simple enough. You want to do something. It helps if you know what you are doing. Skills. Techniques. Where to get resources. Many places can help you in this regard. Library. Friends. Mentors. Websites. Humans are by nature, very curious creatures, so finding information can be the easiest part of creating a reality that you desire.

To Will

This is where the fun begins. You have a vague idea of what you want. Happiness, wealth, sexual and emotional intimacy. To will you need to create a plan and make a decision to bring it into being. This is different from a wish, or a hope,  or a longing. This is a strong decision to create what you want, by hook or by crook. Or as the character in Apollo Thirteen put it so succinctly, you must decide that “Failure is Not an Option!”

To Dare

This is the scary part. You’ve decided you want to create a relationship. You’ve studied material on how to be socially adept, how to flirt, how to ask the right questions. You’ve made the decision to make this happen. Now there he or she is. You must walk over and introduce yourself. What separates the Bill Gates and the Tiger Woods and the Oprah Winfreys from the rest of the wanna be hacks is your ability to try and try and try again and again until you get it right. To be able to take action, over and over again, until there world is exactly how you want it. When you realize that life affords you as many chances as you are willing to take, this can be easier. The opportunity of a lifetime comes along just as often as you are prepared to take it.

To Be Silent.

This is where the metaphysical cool stuff starts. Some say that by keeping your goal silent, you build up psychic energy that will increase the your will and your ability to take action over and over again. Some say that you shouldn’t tell others about important goals, because they might give you reasons that you hadn’t thought of as to why you can’t achieve it. Sometimes this can be a blessing. When I was in high school I had decided to run a marathon. I told my best friend, and he told me, with as much good intentions as possible, that he didn’t think I could finish, and I might injure myself. I took this as a challenge, and allowed his disbelief in my ability to spur me on to finish. And hobble around in pain for a few weeks, but that’s another story. 

This is a rare case. Many times when you share your goal with somebody, unless you are a hundred percent decided that you will succeed, even the best intentions can derail you.  Another theory is that if you have a huge goal, even support can derail you. It works like this. Say you want to start your own company. You have this fantastic image in your mind with yourself being successful, with people giving you all kinds of props because of your great business. You use this visualization to pull you through rough patches of doubt. If you tell others, and they believe you and support you, their support and well wishes might take away the attractive pull of your visualization. If people in the present are giving you props for your dreams, the props you imagine receiving in the future might have less effect, and give you less incentive in those times of doubt.

So it boils down to the type of goal you want. If you want to lose weight, or give up a habit, it can help to enlist the support of others. If you want to create something fantastic in your life, be careful who you tell. Perhaps it’s better not to tell anybody until after you’ve already achieved success. If you are lucky enough to have a special relationship with somebody that will support you as much as you support yourself, teamwork can be a great asset. 

Otherwise, be silent. An powerful goal, unspoken to others, can grow to enormous proportions, giving you more power than you’ve ever dreamed. And you may be surprised how being able to tap this power will automatically give you an incredible mastery over reality unknown to most, and envied by many.

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Dig Into The Meaning Of Life One Hundred Percent

One of the reasons I like to study Chinese Characters is because each particular character has it’s own individual meaning. So even if you don’t know how to pronounce a group of characters, you can sort of figure out what the meaning by guessing the combinations. Although sometimes, due to historical anomalies, you get some strange combinations. For example, the combination of “parents” and “cut” yields “kind.”  Most make a bit more sense, but they are interesting nonetheless.

English words, on the other hand, may require a bit of etymological investigation before breaking a word into parts (if that’s the kind of thing you are into.)
For example, ‘century,’ which means one hundred years, is based on the same ‘cent’ which is one hundredth of a dollar, and the ‘cent’ in the centigrade that means one hundred grades (between freezing and boiling of water.) Also in centimeter, and centipede. ‘Ped’ of course meaning foot, as in ‘pedal’ and ‘pedestrian.’

These are just some basic examples, but words are really fascinating when you look below the surface. You can really discover interesting things if you stop and think of the story and history behind things.

Like when I was taking the bus the other day. I was sitting next to this really interesting older woman, who was telling me about her granddaughter who just became engaged to this guy from Bangladesh. And he comes from a very large family, I believe she said six brothers and four sisters, if I recall correctly. And one of the brothers was showing her recently how to make this really spicy Thai dish, but that’s another story. Anyway, this guy was saying that each moment in time space continuum (those are his words, not mine) is an opportunity to really dig underneath reality to discover what is really there.

If you take the time to stop and watch the ‘unfolding’ as he referred to it, you can catch the moment when your thoughts and reality merge. When humans give meaning to events. He said that it is a lot better to stay open as long as possible when interacting with reality, because once you give meaning to something, while it’s not set in stone, it’s a lot more efficient to create the possibility for a more resourceful meaning beforehand, rather than waiting until after the fact.

I wasn’t sure I understood her when she was describing this too me, and I don’t she was able to completely understand it either, because it sounded a lot like some Eastern Philosophies that I’ve read about. I think the gist of it was to stay open, and make sure you don’t give away any meanings to events unless you are really one hundred percent sure you know what happened. And since we are almost never one hundred percent sure of what really ever happens, it’s best to keep an open mind.

Like when you pass by somebody in the hallway, and you say “hi,” and they don’t say “hi” back, it would be best to give the benefit of the doubt, and not assume they are angry at your or something. Otherwise you might get your feelings hurt over something that was only in your head. 

Although the fellow described this in eastern philosophical terms which might have been a bit esoteric, I think we are all talking about the same concept. And because you are reading this, you are likely wise enough to have known about this anyways. I’m sure you already know that giving people the benefit of the doubt and assuming they are most likely operating from some kind of positive intention is usually a good idea.

I just think that the concept of standing back and watching the unfolding of reality is a beautiful concept, one that we don’t take the time to really appreciate, since it is happening all around us, all the time.

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How to Use Different Models to Create Your Reality

When I used to study physics, I learned about a breathtakingly awesome new way to look at things. It was developed by a bunch of physics geeks who were studying the movement of particles in very dense particle environments. Which sounds strange in and of itself until you realize that normal matter is largely empty space. The distance between atoms and molecules that make up your arm, your cell phone, the chair you’re sitting in now as you read this is mostly space. Even the eyes you are using and the brain that is processing these letters into words into sentences into ideas, is mostly made up of space.

But in the realm of solid state physics, matter starts to behave a little differently. Because the atoms are packed in so tightly, there is a lot less space. And when scientists try to describe the matter, using the language of physics and mathematics, it gets incredibly complicated, incredibly quickly.

Add on top of that subatomic particles have characteristics that are completely out of the ordinary experience of what you see everyday. Size, shape, color, density taste, and all other descriptions we use to describe what we can see don’t apply on the sub atomic level. So they need to come with descriptive names like spin, charge, charm, strangeness and other goofy names, not goofy because the scientists are goofy, but because the nature of matter itself is goofy. And when you think about it, the only reason things we can see seem normal, is because we are so used to seeing them all the time.

Of course everything behaves just like it is supposed to, according to the laws of physics, but that which we are not familiar with seems strange and magical.

So these scientists are trying to study this system of particles, all packed closely together. When they try to describe the movement of one particle, they have to take into account all of it’s neighbors. And of course for each neighbor, you need to take into account all of its neighbors. You can see how this can fry the world’s fastest computer in a jiffy.

Until one scientist had a fantastic idea (which is what scientists do.) He suggested that instead of looking at each particle, with all of its strange qualities, and use that to describe the system, he had a better solution. Why not look at the holes instead? Why not assume that instead of  a kajillion particles bouncing around off each other, why not just look at the movements of the few thousand holes that are in there? And assume the holes have zero mass, zero spin, zero charge and zero whatever other characteristics that are used to label the particles.

What? His fellow scientists asked him. Are you crazy? Study the movement of holes? But holes don’t move! Holes are only there because of the other particles!
Try it, he persisted. So they tried it. And it worked. Beautifully. By describing the holes, which made the math incredibly more simple, they were able to describe the particle system to a T.

Think about that for a minute. Let it sink in. These guys, these highly trained physicists, decided to describe something in terms of something that they knew wasn’t true, and yet it still worked to describe the system so they could predict how it would behave under various situations.

What they did was create a new model of what they were looking at. A model is something that you come up with when you aren’t sure of the rules. You can use different models, and see what works best.

People do this every day. In fact developing models is so ingrained in our neurology, that we do it all the time and don’t even know it. In the movie “The Jerk” with Steve Martin, there was a scene where some crazy sniper had decided to kill somebody at random. Of course, he chose The Jerk. When he missed, and starting hitting a stack of oil cans, The Jerk looked at the situation and decided “He hates these cans!” While that was pretty funny, and obviously wrong, it illustrates what happens. Something happens that we don’t understand, so we immediately make up a reason to explain what is happening around us.

Normally what people do is see something, and then quickly and automatically come up with a model to explain how what they are seeing fits into their already pretty well defined version of reality. Unfortunately, a lot of times the model is not created to come up with a beneficial way of looking at the world, or even an accurate way of looking at the world, but to protect our ego and our feelings.

And we almost never stop, take a step back, and see if our model is really accurate or supportive of how we would like to experience life.  Many people can see the same thing, and come up with vastly different meanings for what they see and experience.

Think of what the physicists did in the experiment above. They purposely created a model to make life easier. They purposely created a model that made it easier to understand what is going on. It didn’t matter to them at all that the model was obviously not correct according to reality. All they cared about was how their model was able to help them get what they wanted out of the experience they were looking at.

Of course we don’t live in a physics laboratory. The life that we experience on a daily basis is a million times more complicated that a test tube filled with particles. But if you can just take a step back, from time to time, and see if you can come up with different explanations for things you think are set in stone, you’ll be amazed at how incredibly more rich and abundant your reality becomes.

Because I find the concept of models and trying on different models so fascinating, I’ll be posting several more articles on different specific models for the nature of the universe and life in general. So when you read them, you’ll at least have a couple different ideas as starting points to choose from when you decide to create your reality the way you like it.

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Shadow Acting

Have you ever stopped to realize that something in your experience wasn’t exactly quite what you thought it was? An event or a situation that you interpreted one way, but as you look back, it takes on a new light?

For example, think of something in your past, something that happened, say five or ten years ago. And imagine as you were, just before that situation took place. And now imagine yourself as you were going through that situation. How does that feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

What meanings do you choose to give the events unfolding around you, now, as you remember what happened to you in your past? What was the one element of that experience that you chose to define it for you? Was it the way something appeared, or what somebody said, or something about the way somebody looked at you? Perhaps it was the way you felt afterwards?

For example, once I saw a guy talking into a mirror at the gym. He was standing really close, and he was really animated.  Talking with fluidly changing and almost chaotic facial expressions, arms flailing around. The meaning that I chose to give to that situation was that the guy was crazy. I could have given another meaning, since I really didn’t know what was going on, but that was my best, my quickest guess.

Now what happens if you take your earlier situation, and then move forward in time  a couple of years, or even right up until recently. Can you find another similarly structured situation, but with a completely different meaning that you decided to give it? What was different? Why was the second situation, which was similar to the first, different in the meaning that you gave it? Were there different, more familiar people involved? Was the setting more comfortable? Had the weather changed for the better?

In my situation, I saw another guy talking to himself in the mirror. I didn’t know him, but I surmised he was practicing for a performance, because he was standing outside of a theater that I go to sometimes. I saw two different guys, that I’d never met before doing the same thing, but I gave them two different meanings. One guy was loony, and one guy was a professional actor practicing his craft.

What was different for you?

One of the more interesting things about this, is that as you increase your understanding of your experience, and naturally apply different realizations, it follows that you can vastly increase your potential for flexibility in your perception. And when you can apply this flexibility in real-time, so you discover different choices for the meanings that you used to give automatically, your world will astoundingly open up.

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How do YOU know?

“No, dude, you’re wrong. I promise.”
“Um, I think we should maybe…”
“I’m telling you, I know what I’m talking about.”
“Do you? Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure, you know I’m a crappy poker player. I never bluff.”
“Yea, but that just means you’ve convinced yourself that you’re right. You haven’t convinced me.”
“Whatever. I know I’m right.”
“How do you know?”
“What the bananas does that mean? How do I know?”
“Just that. How exactly do you know?”
“I just know.”
“You just know? How exactly do you know? If I didn’t know anything about the situation, nothing at all, how exactly would you be able to describe to me in detail, so that I would, without question, agree that you are correct, and this other guy over here, which is actually me, is wrong?”
“Dude, what?”
“How exactly do you know that you are right? Please explain.”
“Well, I don’t know, know, but I know. You know?”
“Actually, I don’t. Can you do any better?”
“Dude, are you messing with my head?”
“Are you messing with your head?”
“Huh? Ok, now you’re just being silly.”
“Does me being silly change the fact that you’ve convinced yourself that you know something so much that you can’t describe it to an imaginary person, standing right over here?”
“No. I don’t think I know it, I just, wait, what?”
“Are you starting to doubt yourself? Or are you just now finding out that there was doubt there all along, and you are just now realizing it? Or perhaps that the doubt was never there, and you are merely having questions regarding your own knowing?”
“Ok, I’m gonna go watch TV or something, you are giving me a headache.”
“So do you concede? That you aren’t really sure?”
“Sure about what?”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“Dude, I don’t… I mean… I just… Ok. Fine. You win.”
“I didn’t realize we were fighting.”
“Ok, Ok, please. Just stop. You’re right. Of course. Now I can see it. Thank you.”
“My pleasure.”

Please come back often to read tips and insights and other explorations into the structure of thought for your personal improvement and entertainment. And please share this site with your friends, as many others have done.

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