I brought up the Hero series topic because I wanted to explore what it was that we are all really striving for.  I think that though we are looking to manage stress better, or build up our self-image, or have better relationships, I think we are striving for something beyond just the relief of problems.  

photo credit: h.koppdelaney

Because when you get rid of problems what are you left with?  

Emptiness.  

Now I know this is the goal of many, such as Zen Buddhists.  

While I love peace, it’s more fulfilling to throw yourself wholeheartedly into something.  I truly do not believe our whole purpose in being here is to eliminate the chatter of the Ego.  There must be something more.  Something beyond neutral and purely positive. 

Let me share my personal experience.  About 5 or 6 years ago, all of a sudden the constant mundane chatter in my mind went.   

There was no great event or anything, but I just noticed my mind wasn’t constantly providing a running commentary as it previously had done.  Soon after I found that my mind was occupying itself with the most inane of thoughts.  I realised that it was a type of mental fidgeting to occupy the gap created by the silenced mind.  In time this quickly passed and now, unless I think about something, my mind is largely silent.  

I enjoy this state of mind.  I love silence and tranquility.  And in comparison to anxiety and meaningless chatter it’s great.

But that’s much like being in neutral is better than being in reverse gear to get somewhere.  I believe that the next stage has to be to move forward and accelerate.  But what exactly is that state called?

I think that we want to be heroic.  To be recognised, even admired.  To achieve great things.  

We aren’t looking for a Partner that likes us, we want one that adores us.  We don’t want cordial relationships with our Colleagues, we want them to recognise our brilliant genius and love our work and us.  

photo credit: Foto43

If you ask people what they want in their life, most will say to be happy.  But while we can describe our negative emotions more specifically as despairing, depressed or irritated, we really don’t have that range for more positive emotional states.  Or not that sound like any sane, well balanced individuals would use without feeling at least a twinge of embarrassment.

It seems telling of where our focus lies, that we are easily able to describe anger and frustrations perfectly and yet struggle to put together the words of what it is we spend all this energy pursuing.

I’ve been trying to sum up that end goal in one or two words and I can’t find any that do not sound over-dramatic or cliched.

Happy, doesn’t really mean anything.  Or it means so much that it’s lost any specific focus.  Emotional well-being sounds too clinical.  Ecstatic, rapturous, bliss, ‘in the zone’, flowing and so on are more of a temporary state than a way of living.  Nirvana and enlightenment are pretty close, but they seem so unattainable and otherworldly, that I don’t think many could relate to them in their own life.  

Following your bliss is probably the closest that I can find and feel comfortable with, but I’d like to have a word or short phrase that everyone can grasp and understand.  I’ve been searching through thesauruses, but I still can’t grasp the word.  Here’s a word cloud I made that analyses the words in this blog to make a graphic representation.

Image courtesy of wordle.net.  Click here for larger image.

So my question for you today is; 

What is this thing that we are striving for in life?

The ultimate goal, not money, position or anything like that, but the essence of what life is about.  What is the end state, the goal?

How would you describe it?

No-one ever interferes with your ability to be happy.  Your happiness is entirely down to you.  Here’s the formula for true happiness;

The perception of freedom to be yourself + a focus on something greater than your sense of self.

Now the world is a crazy, screwed up place filled with crazy, screwed up people.  If you stop and think about almost any aspect of it, logically and deeply enough you’ll realise that little of it makes actual sense.  But there is this pressure to keep moving, to never stop and think.  Got to keep moving, being productive or you’re wasting your time, your talent etc.

But really look at any other form of nature, plant, fish, bird or other animal and you’ll see they spend much of their time resting and relaxing.

photo credit: Hello, I am Bruce

But not humans, because we’re all so smart rushing around so that one day when we’re old and our body (and possibly our mind) starts to wear out, we can then relax all day and contemplate what’s important in life.

Society never wants you to stop and think about anything more meaningful than Britney’s latest escapade because if you thought about it, Society would have to change.  So it keeps pressurising you to keep moving.

But the challenge of life, and the secret to happiness, is whether you can be true to yourself when all else demands otherwise.  You see, the conventional wisdom of Society is the collective thoughts of us all.  The lowest common denominator.  It is the outward manifestation of our collective Ego.

Why then, do we conform?

We conform because the world says this is what you should do.  You’re a bad person if you should want to do something for yourself.  You should want to do something for me.  And because there is strength in numbers we look at what they say and even though our inner guidance screams ‘No. No. No’

We say that is just our selfishness.  That is just a signal of our evilness, our poor design.  We must be as the book, the Teacher and Society tell us is good.

photo credit: Jef Poskanzer

And so we train ourselves out of our inner wisdom.  We struggle to contort ourselves into shapes that are unnatural.  We get confused because this teacher says this, that book says that.  Our mind becomes amaelstrom of swirling contradictions.  A whirlwind of rules and regulations we should obey.

And yet all sense of solid grounding has gone.  We have no measure to judge by.  So we live in the dark.  Filled with doubt, insecurity and confusion.

photo credit: JTHammond

From this place we have, seemingly, lost control of our destiny.  And so what others do, or do not do, seems to hurt us.  And so we feel bitter when we see the greed and selfishness of others.  Believing that their weakness could lead to our unhappiness.

Yet the truth is that we do not need others to get their act together before we achieve true happiness.  We can achieve true happiness, right now, if we get our act together.

But to get our act together will require two things.

Greed and selfishness.

Yes.  Those much maligned traits.  But we need to look at them in a slightly different way.

Conventionally the view of life has been that comfort, material possessions and so on were the necessary ingredients of a happy, fulfilled life.  And obviously since there are only so many material possessions to go around, someone having more than their fair share is taking away from someone else.

It turns out that the truth is that comfort deadens the soul.  Happiness is an emotional state that is almost entirely unrelated to material wealth.  It is possible to be happy in a hovel and depressed in a palace.

So let’s look at this in a different light.  Happiness comes from being yourself as fully as possible.  Yet other people do not know you and do not really know what they want.  They think they want comfort, but they really want to be themselves.  So these misguided souls pressurise you to fit in with their view of what will make them happy.  If you go along with them, you validate their perspective and compound their erroneous thinking.

And if you refuse to go along with ‘those who know not, what they do’, then you weaken and challenge their viewpoint.  To them this feels like an attack and so they will ‘defend’ themself from your greed and selfishness.

So now you have a decision to make.  Do you want to appear unselfish and yet assist, and even join, them on the path to greater misery?  Or do you appear selfish and greedy and offer them a hand to reorient themselves to a happier life?

photo credit: Ivan Peplov

To be happy requires the selfishness to make being yourself and sharing yourself the main priority of your life.  And it requires the greed to want happiness above all else.

This is why you have the instinct to be selfish and greedy.  All instincts are built in to help you find your way.  It is only through their denial. mistaken perspectives and false assumptions that selfishness, greed and other similar emotions become distorted into something ugly.

Some people can get through this process much quicker than others. And so can you. It all depends on 2 things.

1. How effective your process for dealing with change and loss is.

2. The velocity of your life.

There is a process to everything. A certain sequence of events that have to happen before you let something go. Some people have it down so effectively that it’s just like stepping on an escalator and waiting as it passes through the stages. For some it’s like being stuck at the bottom of a deep well, without ladders or steps. Every inch they claw up by their nails is another painful exertion.

The velocity of life is a term I use to mean how much experience you pack into your life. Say someone has been stuck in a cell with little contact or stimulation. They are going to have a much lower velocity of experience than most.

It’s relevant because the process you have to go through, needs certain situations and experiences to move onto the next stage.

The process determines how many stages, experiences and situations you need. The velocity of your life determines how long it will take for them to happen.

The central theme of the Happiness 2.0 report was about the need to be right rather than happy. And part of that is that when people perceive failure in themselves, whether it’s a failed result, a failed judgement or a failed theory, they beat themselves up for not being perfect. No one gets it right all the time and you really wouldn’t want to be perfect. Perfection means the games over. Imperfection means you get to try again.

So here’s a video to bookmark and return to when you fail.

I talked a while back about the 10,000 hour principle. The idea that to become a true expert at something takes 10,000 hours of practice. That’s true in every area of life.

Professional athletes work every day for years to condition themselves and their mental co-ordination so that on a set occasion they can bring out the very best performance.

Musicians and artists spend years honing their skills and getting in the right emotional state to perform at their highest levels.

Image By http://www.flickr.com/photos/babasteve/

Becoming skilled at life takes just the same practice.

We walk into situations with our attention scattered in ten different ways, with our hormones pulsing around us and then beat ourselves up for not being perfect.

If you want perfection, then you have to do what Olympians do in their discipline, go spend 15 years away from the world training your brain, set up some situation, prepare for it by making everything just right and then walk into the situation.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hi-tekznologik/

Even then they’ll always be another level, just as every athletics record is broken eventually.

The more you practice and the more you prepare, the better you will respond. But it takes time to change habits.

Say someone of 40 years old has been responding with a certain belief, from habit. Then when you give the idea serious thought you realise that actually the belief is false. So intellectually you believe one thing, habitually though you act a different way.

I read something recently that our capacity to hold things in our heads is either lower than previously thought or is shrinking. It used to be that people could remember 7 items (+/- 2). New research suggests it might only be 4. The point is we are easily distracted from an idea by the events in our life.

Intellectual knowledge is only of any value while you are giving it attention. That’s why so many books and seminars have no effect. Because you go off and do something else and you go back to your old habits, because that’s how your brain is wired up.

So you have to consciously change directions. Again and again, until the new idea becomes more habitual than the last.

The brain works from one neuron firing to another. Imagine someone in an adventure film, being chased at full speed on rooftops and jumping from one to another. They don’t stop and wonder which is the best roof to jump on. Any roof will do, preferably the next available one.

Now when you think as you normally do, your brain will follow the path it usually takes because that’s the way it’s wired up. When we moved home a couple of years ago, I missed a couple of turn-offs because I wasn’t paying attention and I just drove the way I’d got used to driving.

So while you might intellectually be capable of being more evolved, when you’re caught up ina situation, before you know it, you’ve trod down the Ego’s path and you feel bad (jumped the same rooftops).

So to make a different chain of thoughts, a new neural pathway, you have to be able to change directions, and jump to a different rooftop. To interrupt the sequence of thoughts before they take you where they usually do

That’s why I asked everyone to put down their thoughts on the survey before and after reading the report. Because the more involved you become, the more it stains your neurology. You have to catch yourself quicker and quicker, so that it becomes an effort for your brain to think the way it used to. Then you have a new habit.

Do this a few times and that will become the default way of thinking on this topic.

There’s an idea called the Triune Brain Theory developed by Paul MacLean. His theory is that the earliest animals had a reptilian brain, then as species evolved others needed a Limbic brain, to moderate emotional responses and eventually a Neo-cortex that could handle language and abstract thought.

It is more complex than we need to go into, but if for our purposes we simplify it, it can help us to understand why we seem weak willed or fail to live up to our principles.

If your life seems to be, under threat, the Reptilian brain will send you into fight or flight and override your more evolved thought. But you don’t have to be in mortal peril. The threat of embarassment or loss will have much the same effect.

If you really, really want that sumptious chocolate cake, but know your hips say no, the emotions can make you feel you have no willpower. Really it is just your emotions overiding your logic.

So how do you prevent this happening. You have to so much want peace, happiness and growth more than that which the Ego promises that, it stains through to the core of your brain. That you hold the idea of wanting to be happier over being right, in the forefront of your mind in any circumstances.

People generally want this intellectually. But emotionally they are more tempted by the Ego. That is why allowing is so important.

When someone continually chooses the Ego over their more evolved thought and no-one interferes between their choices and the consequences, they get to link the Ego to pain. But what often happens, is that some well meaning person interferes. So any resulting pain, either gets prevented or, the person has the Interferer to blame for any negative consequences.

So you have to learn from pain. Or you can learn from other’s pain or you can review situations from your past in the light of Ego choices and the consequences. Eventually this will have a sufficient impact that you’ll link the Ego’s choices with pain and more evolved choices with pleasure.

In case you haven’t yet read it, here’s the Happiness Report.

While I was doing this, I thought of another idea that I think could help you. Let me put it into context first.

I’ve always read a lot. When I was a kid I used to read a book a night. I started with Bobby Brewster (a kids story), then the Famous Five, then the Secret Seven. When I’d read all the children’s section, I started reading Footballer’s biographies. By the time I was 11 I’d burned through them and I started reading Peter Drucker and other Business books. Up until about 4 or 5 years ago I’d always read a lot.

Now though, I don’t actually read that much. But whenever I do read, I always have a pen and paper by me. Because after a couple of pages, I’ll start getting ideas of new concept and ideas. Just a little stimulation will spark off my own thoughts.

So I thought we could collect the insights you and everyone else got while reading the report. Then if there are enough, I’ll publish the responses. It could be very interesting.

Reading can be a passive activity and bring you little reward. Or it can be active and with a little more effort bring you a much greater return. Reading is just entertainment. But when you get involved, it then has the power to change your life.

You might think the report sucked. You might think I got everything wrong. It doesn’t matter whether you liked it or agreed with it. What matters is what insights it triggered in you. In the right frame of mind anything can trigger insights.

To get in that frame of mind then, write down your biggest insights, realizations and new perspectives you got while reading the report. Here’s a form I made to capture your thoughts;

Do it now while it’s fresh in your mind and it will be like sowing seeds for your future happiness.

Just so we’re clear. Questions or comments go below. Insights go in the form at;

I just need to leave it a couple of days to detach a little from it so I can read through it again and check it makes some sense. I’m hoping it will be ready for you for Monday. But in the meantime I have an idea for a mini project that I think will benefit you greatly.

I’ve given a lot of thought to this report. Not just the writing of it, but the way to deliver it, so it has most impact on you. You see, I think I know what’s going to happen to a lot of people who read it;

• Some will read it quickly while they are checking their email, having a conversation and eating their lunch. They’ll miss most of the subtle insights and never look back at it because they’ve read it.
• Others will read it, find something they disagree with and disregard the rest of it because of that one piece.
• And some others will read it nod along and do nothing with it.

I know that for a few these insights will change their way of thinking and so their lives. And so I want to do as much as I can to make a bigger impact on you. And the biggest part of how this impacts you doesn’t come from my writing, but from how involved you are in actively reading it.

So, I have come up with a way that you can get your brain ready to make best use of this report. And I think it could be a really interesting project for us to do for a lot of reasons. I’ve set up a short, anonymous survey asking you a few questions to get you thinking.

The idea is that this will set your views on the subject and then when you get the report you’ll already have an opinion and so you’ll be more discerning.

Plus then I’ll publish the aggregated results. It’s an anonymous survey and so I won’t see your individual answers, just the total figures. Then we’ll have some information to work on more practical steps to really make it sink in. I think this could be very valuable to us and so I hope you get involved today or over the weekend.

You’ll find the form here;

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pneWRKNL9dICXMsJ9MRa_VA&email=true

It’s a cliche for men to complain that their wives don’t understand them, but it is also true of writers, philosophers and pretty much everyone. I can recall reading about Karl Marx distancing himself from Marxism because they had misunderstood him. I think it’s true that every great idea and philosophy has been misinterpreted to some degree. That’s why we have 33,820 different denominations of Christianity, many types of Buddhism, Islam and every other major philosophy.

Here’s a clip of my favourite comedian, Ricky Gervais, tackling this exact issue.

I also remember reading a humourous part of Richard Bandler’s book about Neuro Linguistic Programming.

Bandler was sitting on a plane and got talking to the passenger next to him. He asked where he was travelling to and it turned out he was flying to attend the course Bandler was delivering. Without disclosing his identity, he questioned him to see how well his ideas and philosophies were understood. The Student was not a beginner, he was well versed in the subject, but he had completely misunderstood the nature of NLP.

He believed it was about techniques and strategies to get certain outcomes. When really Bandler had intended and saw it as a framework for a deeper understanding of the way that people’s brains work.

Many times we think we understand someone, but we really don’t. That’s why I wanted to write this post. You see I, and people like me, spend a lot of time focused on impressing on people that money won’t lead to happiness. That’s only because the natural default thinking of the world is that happiness is a simple equation.

It isn’t. Money has little effect on happiness.

However, the stark truth about me and money is that;

I LOVE MONEY

• I would love to have cupboards filled with cash.
• I’d like the postman to deliver sacks more every day.
• And I’d like to sleep on a bed with the mattress filled with cash.

There I’ve said it. It’s out in the open now.

Seriously though, the most common problem, challenge or conflict people have in their live relates to money. Let’s be honest we all want it, don’t we?

Whether it’s to feel secure, to have more time, to avoid certain tasks, whatever we want money to help us do it.

Oh sometimes we’ll struggle without it and say ‘I didn’t really want it anyway’ as a justification.

The fact is, is that money is a part of our experience. And the secret to living happily is to live without hate or conflict. You have to love every part of life, the good or the bad. Whenever you try to cut a whole chunk out of your life, you diminish your integrity. It is actually the least ’spiritual’ thing you can do.

Love all, does not just relate to people. It relates to every idea, symbol, object and so on that you come across.

To say I don’t like money or whatever else, is in effect the same dynamic as a white person having had bad experience with black people saying ‘I don’t like Blacks’. Or vice versa.

Let’s do our bit for political correctness and stop the moneyism that is endemic in our society.

The path to happiness, nirvana, Godliness, or whatever you want to call it, is through wholeness. Life is holographic. The whole is encapsulated in each aspect. So once you reject one element of it, you reject it all.

We must work to understand what money means at a deeper level, so that we use it as the tool it is supposed to be rather than as our Master.

Money is an idea. An idea that represents;

units of appreciation

Over time people have gone to war, martyred themselves and so on for the right to vote. Yet every time you spend money, you are voting more specifically and more powerfully than you will ever be capable of politically. Products, ideas, and businesses live or die by your economic votes. The landscape of our society is shaped by your, minute by minute, economic decisions.

Of course it is not a perfect tool. Sometimes you will pay out lots to someone who promised far more than they delivered. And sometimes we pay money in anger, from fear and with heavy hearts. But this is a reflection more of our confused operating systems and relationships than of the idea of money itself.

A great drill won’t make perfect holes with a hopeless DIYer. A great car won’t drive safely with a hopeless driver.

Money is magnificent. It means that anyone, in western society at least, can work at a minimum wage rate for one hour and feed themselves. Much more efficient than hunting for a day to hopefully eat.

But the real reason why we have such a powerful entwinement with money is that we crave appreciation and validation. Money is the default way that we can measure this appreciation. Sure it’s nice that the Boss congratulates us, but when the lazy bugger down the corridor gets a bigger payrise, we feel unappreciated.

The problem with money is that it reflects our true nature. We can lie ourselves into believing what we say, but where we spend our money shows our true thoughts.

We might prefer Open Office (an open source version of MS Office), but donate little or nothing. Yet when we need Microsoft software we pay hundreds because we need it. It is for this reason that Machievelli wrote that, politically, it is better to be feared than loved. Because fear guarantees compliance. Appreciation is too infrequent, too weak and too fickle to be trusted or effective.

It is not the love of money that is at the root of all evil, it is the lack of integrity. It is the fear of not having money, of not being worthy of money that causes people to compromise.

And underlying that…

coming to this blog soon

When I was young and we were going on holiday my Dad would put our suitcases etc on the roof rack.  And he would strap them down securely with those elasticated clips that catch on the sides.  Since he was worried that the bundles might fall, he would strap lots around them.  We would always joke about how many he was using.

In whatever situation you are in, you are bound by your past decisions.  Particularly by your successes.  Say you start a business and become wildly successful.  You probably take on staff, sign long term contracts and so on.  Now you have strapped yourself securely into a certain position, which is going to take some effort to free yourself from.

Say you start a new job and achieve huge success at some project.  Well now you’ve set a level of expectation and a standard that you’ll be expected to live up to.  Plus you may be tied to certain tasks.

Maybe you craved a relationship and a family.  You succeed, but now your time is tied up and your freedom curtailed.

None of this is to say that these aren’t worthwhile goals.  However it makes sense to be more aware of the consequences of your goal, if it is achieved.  It’s one reason people who succeed wildly still end up unhappy.

To be happy, requires freedom.  Or more accurately, the perception of freedom.  No-one is ever unhappy while meditating.  They might not be able to meditate because they are so distracted by their thoughts.  But they feel peaceful while meditating.  Why?

Because in meditation, their consciousness has freed itself from the bonds that tie us to our reality.  The bonds are only really placed there by our mistaken beliefs.  These beliefs, developed in the overall framework of our thoughts in the course of achieving or striving for certain goals or as residue from past goals, imprison us.

A prison is there to trap you into a confined space.  These mental binds imprison your consciousness.

One reason more doesn’t make us happier, is the habituation factor. We get used to whatever level we’re at It’s like a set point on a thermostat. It’s the zone where we feel comfortable.

Someone from a very aggressive, confrontational environment will be used to a lot of conflict. If someone, from a more genteel background, saw their life they might wonder how they ever coped with all the stress. But to the person used to that kind of interaction, it’s just natural. They are conditioned for it and so it doesn’t have anywhere close to the emotional impact it would have on the other.

That’s why you can never truly judge or compare another. Because without their cognitive wiring you cannot begin to understand how they feel about something. People react to death in very different ways. Conventionally people expect a Widow, or Widower, to be devastated after the death of their Partner. And because of social pressure, they are expected to grieve. But having sometimes been the Confidant, in a number of these incidents, I know the actual reactions vary greatly. Some are pleased or relieved. Some are lost. And some just don’t know what to feel. But they feel a great pressure to meet certain expectations.

There was recently a popular TV drama on here in the U.K called Life On Mars. It was based on a young, modern Detective Inspector who was knocked unconscious by a car. He wakes up and finds himself a policeman in the 1970’s.

I think part of the appeal was it showed us a world that those of us in our thirties and over can remember to some degree, yet it was like a completely different world. His boss is a chauvinistic, hard drinking, chain smoking, no-nonsense copper. Women are only there for making the tea or for sleeping with. It’s a world free of political correctness.

Today television channels won’t or can’t broadcast many sitcoms from the seventies because they would be deemed racist.

Here’s an example from my past. I can vividly remember when I first moved from London, to Lowestoft, a small, slow moving town, to open my Health Club. I went to a Barber’s, when I still had enough hair to be worth cutting, and after a while I noticed the Barber sizing me up.

He paused and said, ‘You’re not local are you?’

When I confirmed his suspicion he asked where I was from. I told him and he paused before saying ‘I suppose you have a lot of them Darkies there?’

I nodded, dumbfounded. He then looked curious, bent in and asked, ‘What are they like?’

I was shocked, this was 1993. I couldn’t believe there were still people who spoke like that. But it wasn’t from maliciousness, more from curiosity.

In the fifteen years since that day, political correctness has gathered pace and momentum. 170 years ago in England slavery was abolished. According to the 1860 U.S. Census one third of the population in the fifteen states that hadn’t abolished slavery were Slaves. In other words they were legally viewed as lesser humans because their skin had habituated to intense sun rays.

Women have only been given the right to vote, here in the U.K for the last 80 years. Homosexuality was only legalised in the UK in 1967.

Yet today a racist, sexist or homophobic word could be reasonable cause for dismissal. That’s a huge change in social standards in a very short amount of time.

Today many would say that political correctness has gone too far. To the point where some people feel that it’s wrong to celebrate Christmas because it excludes non-Christians and many other ludicrous examples.

But what is behind this, is the Habituation Factor. In it’s original form, it’s an intention to care about the feelings of others. But thoughts and movements build momentum and take on a life of their own. And so people become more sensitive and what they once didn’t notice becomes a big deal.

In other words if you’re used to seeing someone as less worthy, then there’s no big deal to mistreating someone. But once you accept someone as your equal, every slight hint of inequality becomes jarring.

If you become happier, your standards for living get higher and so more minor things will begin to disturb your equilibrium. However you can’t go backwards. Once your consciousness is raised, you have to up your game to meet it’s standards or you’ll feel bad.

I think that’s why so many people feel stressed and unfulfilled today. Standards and level of consciousness have raised, but mostly we haven’t upped our game. At least not enough. That’s why I describe this blog as updating the human operating system.