MAKING YOUR LIFE GREAT DESPITE NOT GETTING ALL THE BREAKS

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Created July 23, 2021

Forgive me, I must admit I wasn’t thinking of you, my regular readers, when I wrote this. I was writing this to your kids, or grandkids, or more likely to young people you may know who didn’t grow up nourished by your wisdom. Please do pass this along to anyone you know whom you feel could benefit from it, people who are having a hard time. Thanks!

67.7% of people with a net worth of $30 million or more today were not born into rich families. They made it on their own.

More than ever, some people born in poverty are making it. It’s the best time to be alive if you’re an average person without all the breaks. With the internet all of knowledge is available to you.

Now that I’ve gotten your attention by talking about money, let’s be clear that it isn’t the most important goal, it’s just something you need because of the way the world is set up. California is already beginning to move by cautious partial steps toward a guaranteed minimum income for everyone. Someday that may be the way the world works. For now, money is something to take into account in your planning, but it’s not the purpose of your life.

What’s really important is finding and doing your passion work. That also happens to be the way that you will be happier, more fulfilled, and more effective at everything in life. And it may also wind up making you the most money too, although you’d be happier doing your passion work and just getting by as far as money is concerned, than if you end up doing work that is just so-so for you, while making more money, having more one-night stands (which the culture has brainwashed young people to highly value), and owning more trophy things than your crowd.

While they may all continue to go down the other path of impressing others with mundane things, you ought to take the route that will make the most of your life, and of your gifts.

If you don’t think you are gifted, you haven’t made enough of an objective study of yourself. We all have things that we do better than most people. Things that you enjoy doing and which you do well are the clues to what you are alive to do.

Once you have studied yourself enough and have a vague glimmering or a specific idea of what you want to be doing for the rest of your life, then you need to set a first firm direction in life, select the kind of organization or the specific organization you want to work for, or you want to create. You may change course later on or not, but you need a first base to run to.

You just figure out where you could show your skills to the greatest degree, and go there, humbly learn the ropes, then stay humble.

Humility is another side of nobility.

Human collective unconscious probably programs the brain to enable humans to sense noble people. Such people are respected and their opinions sought.

How can you be noble?

Just take responsibility for doing good in every moment.

Be grateful every moment for being alive.

Be kind to everyone.

That’s all it is!

To summarize, you follow your strengths, envisioning the target state, act nobly with kindness.

A few simple rules that will take you to your destination.

Best to all,

Bill

Don’t Work Against Yourself

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Created July 16, 2021

The above title seems obvious. “Who would knowingly work against one’s own best interests? Masochists maybe, but no normal person.”

Unfortunately, that is not the case. Practically all of us work against ourselves on a daily basis. The reason we do it is because we don’t realize the power of our own thoughts and feelings to program our behavior in ways that can seriously limit our success.

For example, we may feel and have thoughts about being jealous of another person or persons. As the clock ticks on and we let ourselves stay in that mental/emotional state, we don’t realize the damage we are doing to our self, and so we let it go on, as if there is no cost or consequence involved in spending time that way. The more time goes on without our actively curtailing that state, the more damage it is doing.

Jealousy is defined as “The thoughts or feelings of insecurity, fear, concern, and envy over relative lack of possessions, status or something of great personal value, particularly in reference to a comparator, a rival, or a competitor.”

Every second we allow ourself to dwell in that state we are sending signals to ourself, not only our conscious mind but also our subconscious, not only our left and front brain but also our right brain, not only our cortex but also our limbic system and cerebellum, that we find ourselves to be inadequate (insecurity), fearful, and lesser individuals to those we envy.

Our entire being, our body as well as our mind, get the message. In ways we don’t notice, we project those signals out to the world in our posture, facial and bodily gestures, we are broadcasting our perceived inadequacy to others as well as to our own inner being. If we do this often enough it becomes a self-refueling cycle that mounts and can destroy the achievement of our highest visions for ourself.

We owe it to ourselves to have at least a vague notion of the gifts we have which should determine the kind of work we want to do in the world. And armed with this compass, vague as it may be, to not allow any vagaries of mental habits to delay or destroy our chances of reaching the actualization of those dreams.

Once we form a notion of the direction, that must be the means by which we discipline ourselves to actualize, every second of every day. To do otherwise is to potential casually throw our lives away, and any time we spend in such a mode, is sending signals to our entire being that we don’t believe in our own gifts, we’re just going through the motions but are pretty sure it’s never going to pan out. That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and not just because we are sending giveaway “tells” of our own lack of self-belief.

Any negative thought or feeling means you are not in your clearest state. If you were in the Flow state you obviously wouldn’t be thinking at all, just acting in total internal external synchrony. If you were in the Observer state you would be able to see that your negative thoughts are the opposite of constructive and that you are wasting time, you should thank your negative feelings for causing you to detect and focus on the solution of some real world problem, and then immediately get on to analyzing and coming up with the best plan of action so that such negative feelings at some point in the future will not arise at all.

If for example jealousy is internally detected, the first question is “If I could trade lives with that person, would I?” That usually brings the jealousy into a clearer context in which you can think about what you might do differently in order to have the things the envied person has without having to become them in any way, since you are likely to like yourself better, and not want the full package of that person’s entire life, you just envy certain things they have, like more money. This turns a fruitless and self-defeating morbid period of thinking and feeling time into a constructive Observer state higher clarity use of time that leads to test actions. A far better way of running your life, more creative, not petty, which makes your mind, resolve, and self-confidence stronger, your ability to achieve stronger. It gets you what you want if you never give up. You are not using your energy against itself.

The optimal moods are gratitude and kindness. Negative moods automatically give more power to the things that hurt you. Cultivate only positive use of your time and nothing can stand in your way.

Love to all,

Bill

What Is the Meaning of Life? – Revisited

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Updated July 9, 2021

When I was younger, I would ask this question whenever anyone, even a tour guide in a museum, asked me if I had any more questions.

The greatest thing you'll ever learn

Internally, it’s the question I asked myself multiple times a day all my life until I felt sure of the answer, which occurred sometime in my 30s.

The underlying question is “What is the meaning of ‘meaning’ in this context?”

The intent of the question is to understand what life is, what its purpose is (if any), what the universe is, what its purpose is (if any), why we are here, who we are, how we are to behave, what our relation is to one another, is there a God, and why are we compelled to consider any of this as relevant or meaningful to the second-to-second management of our personal business of existence.

One alternative to asking and answering this question to one’s own satisfaction is to go about life happily without caring about the question (which could be a Zen-like answer in itself, essentially filing the question away into the “Overthinking” file). Another alternative is to consider life meaningless, which many existentialists did in the last century.

Other than an intuition I had at age 12 that “I am God and so is everyone else”, which I tucked away as an interesting but unexplained aberration, the meaninglessness of life was my own position for the first 30-odd years of life. Around age 20, as I studied philosophy, I put reasoning around this earlier intuition, deciding that one took positions like this based solely on aesthetic preference, since knowability of the answer to What Is the Meaning of Life? was apparently beyond our scope.

In my 30s I had some unusual experiences that also reminded me of similar experiences in my childhood, at which point I felt as I do now — a very strong conviction that I actually know the answer.

The way I see it, all that exists is a single consciousness of such great computing power as to know everything that goes on within itself instantaneously at all times (though God or the One Self is above time). Since we don’t share this omniscience, God gets to play our roles with more drama and excitement. So the meaning of life must be to realize and enjoy this game as our true Original Self does, and thereby re-merge into the Original Consciousness.

I talk about this theory more in my book You Are The Universe: Imagine That.

From a practical standpoint, life becomes most meaningful for us to the extent that we realize our own unique gifts; we love doing the things inspired by those talents; we develop a life plan around sharing these things with others, and then we go forward with that plan without being attached to the outcome.

We then have a Purpose, a Mission, which satisfies the thinking mind of our own meaningfulness. Just as I go into meetings with awareness of my preferred outcomes, I set them aside at the last minute so I can go with the meeting flow, taking the standpoint of simply trying to help out everyone else in the meeting as best I can. Pragmatically and empirically, this appears to work best in balancing out the complexities of life as well.

So “What is the meaning of Life?” Enjoying it, loving it, loving all, and helping others to do the same.

“The greatest thing
You’ll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return.”
— “Nature Boy”, by Nat King Cole

Pragmatically, one’s philosophy of life – i.e., one’s values – will tend to lead to the most rewarding outcomes, to the degree that it does not contain seeds of negativity. For example, if our worldview includes the tendency to sit in judgment of other people, this will create situations of unhappiness for ourselves in the long run. This realization is why Jesus said “Judge not, lest ye be judged”.

The founders of the great religions were, at minimum, seers, visionaries, who grasped the way things work in life, and shared these observations to help others.

The Perennial Philosophy is the synthesis of all this wisdom.

Game Theory leads one to recognize that in the game of life, one is always making bets. If one is betting that the universe is benevolent not accidental, one will live a happier, more fulfilling life. Pragmatically, that is the bet to make, according to Game Theory, whether or not the universe is an accident in reality.

At this time of great crisis in the world, what we all really need the most is the spirit of cooperation and sharing.

Ideologies we have become attached to, groups we have become identified with down to the core of our being, the deification of competition as a perfect Good, the Marxist dialectical materialist love affair with contradiction, mindless devotion to an authoritarian leader, lazy subscription to ideas of others rather than one’s own contemplation of personal empirical experience, are baggage which must be left behind in a deep mind cleanse and reset that is open to new learning from attentive worldly experience, the scientific method applied to life, rising up above the pettiness of one’s own robotical negativity to embrace higher states of being which come with pure unclouded observation as if seeing everything for the first time.

I propose that if you are not yet in that state, to allow it a try. If we all do it starting now, events will unfold that will take us away from the spiral of doom now seemingly at our doorstep.

Love,

Bill

Follow my regular media blog contribution, “In Terms of ROI“ at MediaVillage.com under MediaBizBloggers. Read my latest post.

What’s a Non-Trump Republican to Do?

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Created June 25, 2021

The latest (May 17-19) Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that 53% of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen, down from 68% in a January 28 poll. The stolen election belief appears to be dropping about a percentage point a week. A straight-line extrapolation suggests that pollsters may soon find that the majority of Republican voters no longer believe the election was stolen.

Many of those who “changed beliefs” in the 17-week period may actually never have truly believed, but their party loyalty caused them to adopt that stance. Making a more accurate projection requires being able to make an accurate estimate of how many of the original 68% were actually loyalty driven rather than true believers. Why? Because beliefs are extremely hard and slow to change, whereas postures may be easily changed overnight.

Assuming for the sake of argument that two-thirds of the original 68% were loyalty believers and a third true believers. If that were the case, all other things being equal (which they never are), about 30 weeks from now (mid-December 2021) the percent of Republicans who say they still believe the 2020 election was stolen may be down to 23%, where it could remain for a long time.

But I would bet against it going down that far that fast, especially given the mid-term elections coming up. Those upcoming elections are the main reason the party is clinging so desperately to what almost everyone else sees as a big lie. And why the Grand Old Party is doing what it can to interfere with Democrats voting in those elections, despite the obvious risks of driving away support from all but the most fanatical Republican core.

This is all so sad.

Saddest of all for the remaining Republicans who are aghast at the behavior of their party but who feel impotent to do anything to save the party.

Psychiatrists might tend to explain the current official actions of the party as an attempt to rationalize the recent past and remove the black eye that Trump gave the GOP in the eyes of most of humanity.

But as a parent, if you heard your son or daughter saying things that were untrue and non-credible as a way of covering their ass for something they had done, what would you say to them?

Most parents would say, “If you keep doing that, no one will believe or respect you, and people will avoid you. You better fess up as soon as possible, people will forgive and respect you for doing that, and in the end you will gain much more by confession than you would gain by trying to keep up pretenses forever.”

It’s not too late for “normal” Republicans to raise their hands. That’s the best thing for the party, for Americans, and for the world.

The downside scenario for clearheaded Republicans is for the party to be split into two parties, which could happen if, for example, that 53% stat above for any reason gets locked in and doesn’t change at all for the rest of the year. Eventually the other 47% is going to have to start thinking about the long term, and some will bail and become independents (this has begun). Natural leaders will step up and it could cause party fission.

A new party might call itself the Independent Party. Or it could call itself The Center, implying the mental freedom of a Moderate without religious attachment to either progressive or conservative knee-jerks. How it positioned itself would drive how big it became.

But it wouldn’t matter. The remnant parties would find it very hard to make their way against the Democrat party because of relative sizes. The story would become one of backroom attempts to re-form coalition between the pieces of the GOP. That is what the Republican party is headed toward if it continues to use duplicity and guile in such utterly obvious ways. The fessing up scenario is the only way out.

Let’s say you are a non-Trump Republican and want to do something about this, what is there for you to do about it? Create a movement. Call it anything you want, Republicans For Reality, or whatever.

But do it soon. Contact all the people you know (even non-Republicans can help, if you let them), license use of lists and compile the contact information for as many Republican officials and voters as you can, send out frequent eblasts of posts written by members of the movement. Raise money and run public service advertising.

Focus on the immediate future not on the past. Focus on what should be done, not on what should not be done. Don’t condemn anyone, get past all that, be the beacon of reason that will magnetize other Republicans to take off the Halloween masks and get down to the work of cooperation with all Americans and like-minded people everywhere to solve the pressing problems we all face together, which I won’t list here again as I know everybody knows the list already.

The one thing I advise above all else: if you really love the Republican party and want to see it rise again in public esteem (including self-esteem), if you want to see the Grand Old Party of Lincoln be able to attract new members from all social classes, stop the attempts to restrict voting rights. The blowback on that issue will sharply reverse recent trends of the party attracting lower-income people and minorities, and will turn off the many older people in the party who need the vote by mail option. A betrayal takes decades to heal, or centuries, or millennia. Restriction of voting rights is a betrayal of the 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Republicans loyal to American Principles, Arise!

Love to all,

Bill