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archives today January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003  | | Thursday, January 01, 2009 what do you believe in?
before you answer, lets define belief... Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true. a state of mind you hold. very fine line between belief and knowledge, because people who believe in something will also say they ‘know’ it to somehow be true, as in people who believe the sun revolves around the earth, ‘know’ this to be true for them.
so do you believe in god? ghosts? how about yourself? how about that tomorrow will be better than today?
why does it even matter what we believe? because odd as it sounds...what you believe is very often what you get. nearly everything you do is a byproduct of what you believe. our beliefs actually create our experience. consider this...you know what a placebo is? its a fake drug that the patient believes is real. studies show that on average more than 33% of the time the placebo works as good as the real drug and sometimes up to 54%. why? because we believe it will work.
what you believe is very important in what life brings your way. in the morning if you get up and think ‘i just know this day is gonna suck’, guess what? there’s a damn good chance that your day really is going to suck. if your outlook on life is to believe your glass is always half empty, guess what? your will draw more emptiness to you. there are many explanations for this that you may or may not ‘believe’ in that deal with the power of affirmations and the law of attraction. but it’s pretty hard to deny the reality of the placebo effect and if you buy that and consider it, then you ought to consider taking the power of beliefs a bit more seriously.
and when you start thinking about just what your beliefs are, you will most likely find that your life – the reality you live in - is heavily tied to your perception, or your belief, of what your reality is.
ever wonder why some days everything just seems so damn good and some days, even though there may not be many things you can put your finger on to say why, everything sucks? it’s because we humans need to make sense of everything. and if we don’t have all the information (and we almost never do) we make stuff up and ‘believe’ in that so we can make sense of that situation.
for example: “why did dad always beat the crap out of me? i’ll bet it’s because i did something wrong” nooo, little johnny came to the wrong conclusion because he didn’t know enough about the world to know that daddy was a psycho. so he set up an incorrect belief system and carries it around to this day and it contributes to adult johnny having a negative outlook on life and thus a lot of negative things coming his way day after day. its not the the world is a bad place or that johnny is an unlucky person, its that johnny holds a premise to be true that is incorrect and looks at life thru glasses tinted by his belief system. and while this is a rather dramatic fictional example, on a smaller scale we may be able to infer how what we believe is negatively tinting our realities. there’s a lot more interesting stuff to delve into about this and how important our belief systems is in getting our act together, but for now, just see if you can put the power of the placebo to work for you. just pretend (or try to believe) that good things are coming your way soon. there is no one more crippled than the negative thinker. posted by bluematrix at 01/01/09 15:00 | link | comments (1) Sunday, December 21, 2008 another year coming to a close....wonder how many blogs will be writing those exact words in the next week or so? a time for reflection on the triumphs and tragedies of the year. yes, we are creatures of routines, marking off the days, the months, the seasons, it's hardwired into us. but we always have to push off our self improvements until some future date don't we? not going to start that workout regime today and get a jumpstart on the new year are we? no way - overindulge ourselves silly is more like it. same for booze or lack of creativity or relationships or job change or whatever. it's always 'i'm going to start after so and so date and really mean it'. uh huh. and even if we do start new years day doing less of whatever vices we hope to minimize, how long will we keep to it? ah there's the rub isn't it? another year, another resolution, another opportunity. granted, sometimes we keep our promises to ourselves, but honestly now, how often and for how long? c'mon be honest. yea, not often and usually not long. so this year, you want change? you want something different this time? you want real change that has a much better chance of sticking? try something innovative - show some cojones and start before new years. because real change is hard. real change often requires some big environmental push... we get dumped, fired, sick, or hit a milestone in weight or age and get a wakeup call. then we act. but just choosing to act without the world pushing us is damn hard. our brains get physically wired into routines. the habits we have are actually hardwired into our brains. our thoughts are electrical impulses and they shoot quickly down the well troden synaptic paths in our brains. try brushing your teeth with your left hand or putting your left sock then left shoe on before the right tomorrow and you'll see what i mean. but, and being the optimist, you knew a nice positive spin but was coming didn't you, you can rewire your brain and make new habits. yes it will be strange and awkward and probably uncomfortable at first, but getting up an hour or two early and working out or writing or meditating can be a learned behavior and become as much as a comfortable routine and sitting on the couch watching tv and eating ice cream. your brain will actually rewire if you go thru the motions long enough. and if you really want to give yourself a fighting chance with hardwiring a new routine...don't wait until new years. Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny. posted by bluematrix at 12/21/08 13:42 | link | comments (1) Monday, December 08, 2008 I don’t read a lot of fiction, but occasionally a good one falls my way. usually the one’s i like will be written in a very unique style and also contain a lot of facts – sometimes to the point where i end up learning more about real world things than i do from some non-fiction works. i just finished 'life of pi' by yann martel, about a boy stuck in a lifeboat in the pacific for nearly a year with a 450lb bengal tiger. very interesting book. early on in the book the boy, who grew up living near the zoo his father owned in india, talks about how zoo animals don’t really mind being in a zoo, contrary to common belief. he says well meaning but misinformed people think animals in the wild are ‘happy’ because they are ‘free’. these people usually imagine a lion or cheetah roaming on the savannah after a good meal, looking over their offspring proudly and watching the sunset...simple, noble, meaningful.then it is captured by wicked men and thrown in to tiny jails where it then yearns for ‘freedom’ and does all it can to escape. after awhile of being denied its ‘freedom’ it’s spirit is broken. not so says the author. animals in the wild leave lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food low and territory that must be constantly defended. they are ‘free’ neither in time nor space. in theory, they could pick up and go, but such an event is less likely to happen than for a shopkeeper to drop everything and walk away from his life with only the clothes on his back and some change in his pocket after you yelled at him ‘go free!’. if a man wouldn’t go free, why would an animal, who is much more conservative by nature, do it? a good zoo enclosure takes care of an animals needs and is just another territory if done right, different only in size and proximity to human territory. large territories in the wild are a matter of necessity not of choice, just as with humans – we live in small contained enclosures that contain everything we need and we do not need to be ‘free’ of them. now this is not to say capturing wild animals and putting them in cages for us to look at is good thing. but neither is eating all their food and crowding them out of their habitats. so i guess if you think about it...would you rather be pampered in a penthouse suite at the ritz with free room service and unlimited access to a doctor or be homeless? Saturday, November 29, 2008 was reading about language in the book 'lila'... language is more than a medium to convey ideas, more than an instrument for working on the feelings of others and for expressing oneself. it is also a means of categorizing our experiences. a machine would not report on the events of the world as a human reporter would. there is a selection process that occurs. some features of experience are ignored, others are highlighted. every society has its own selection process that says, 'hey look at this!' and 'these things go together' etc. since we are trained from birth in this linguistic selection process, we don't even notice it. until we run across people with a different 'language'. eskimos see 16 different forms of ice and are as different to them as shrubs and bushes are to us. but the hindu's in india use the same term for both snow and ice. hopi indians have no word for time. any culture makes use of certain selected material techniques and traits. there are just too many possible human behaviors for any one culture to use even a small portion of them. without selection there is no culture. and its not just opinions and cultural mores that get filtered, its actual data too. ever buy a new car, and then notice how the roads get filled with that same car? its not that there are more cars like yours, its that you're noticing them more now. your filtering device has been expanded to include your new car model. our selection process can also decrease our awareness too. sometimes when a new fact comes in that doesn't fit the process, we don't alter the pattern, but throw out the fact. it was pretty damn obvious the world was flat at one time. new facts came in and was the pattern altered? not for long while. just as the biological immune system will destroy a life saving skin graft with the same vigor it fights a disease with, so will our cultural immune system fight off a beneficial new kind of understanding. what kind of selection process do you use? posted by bluematrix at 11/29/08 20:31 | link | comments (1) Sunday, November 23, 2008 i haven't written a song in quite awhile. tonight i grabbed some snippets that didn't make it into marys dream, added a bit of new stuff, stirred in a little white wine, and presto...green eyes. we were alone just our thoughts against the skies silent in the dying of the light you lashed out from the pain they said you’d never be the same - yet here you are sitting with your back against a tree up on the hill crying remembering the past when everyone played games enough to drive insane - yet here you are blinding green eyes watching sunset standing in the rain she hopes and prays for sun standing in the desert he hopes and pray for rain really doesn’t matter anymore she's always just out of sight he's always just out of reach the sand of his desert's the same sand as her beach ground up and scattered on the shore - and here you are blinding green eyes watch the sunset turn them to me dry them on your sleeve a man could lose himself in blinding green eyes watching sunset turn them to me overwhelmed by what i see blinding green eyes watching sunset brings me to my knees posted by bluematrix at 11/23/08 19:19 | link | comments (3) Monday, November 17, 2008 funny that i should be writing a post about boredom when my life is crazy busy and i am soooo not bored right now. oh well. berger asks, 'Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?' and kierkegaard called it the 'root of all evil' the state of boredom results when the brain concludes there is nothing new or useful it can learn from what's happening around it, so it gets restless, frustrated and desperate for relief. and it happens faster than you might think...scientists tell us we have about a 10 minute attention span before our minds wander off in search of something new and exciting. are brains are not meant to be lectured to. as a trainer this is important to keep in mind and to make lectures and learning as interactive as possible. there is an old chinese proverb that goes 'tell me and i forget. show me and i remember. involve me and i understand.' as a blogger its good to keep in mind too...very rarely will my entries take longer than a few minutes to read. america is said to have the highest per capita boredom of any place on earth. we have the greatest number of artificial amusements of any country. most people here have become so empty that they can't even entertain themselves. they have to pay other people to amuse them, to make them laugh, to try to make them feel warm and happy and comfortable for a few minutes, to try to lose that awful, frightening, hollow feeling-that terrible, dreaded feeling of being lost and alone. find a friend. find a hobby. take a class. help out those less fortunate. write a letter. turn off the tv. just try to really entertain yourself (or someone else). yes it's more work but its really worth the effort. there's just too damn many boring people and things in the world...don't add to it. posted by bluematrix at 11/17/08 19:46 | link | comments (2) Sunday, November 09, 2008 more than 4 million Americans were at least one month behind on their mortgages and people are losing hope. and without hope life becomes very hard... an out-of-work money manager in California loses a fortune and wipes out his family in a murder-suicide. a 90-year-old Ohio widow shoots herself in the chest as authorities arrive to evict her from the modest house she called home for 38 years. a housewife in Massachusetts who had hidden her family's mounting financial crisis from her husband sends a note to the mortgage company warning: "By the time you foreclose on my house, I'll be dead" and then shoots herself to death. a man in Florida shot his wife and dog and then set fire to the couple's home, which had been in foreclosure, before killing himself. losing hope is a terrible thing. i am a very optimistic person and have led a very blessed life, yet there have times when very dark thoughts have crept in my head. usually they've come after i have suffered a loss of some kind and can not see things getting back to the way they were. my hopes for a good life dimmed. getting beyond the darkness for me was a two step process. first i wallowed in self pity and got very drunk. this got me thru the darkest part and into the next day. and making thru to the next day is the key. somehow the next day always seemed to not quite as bad. and then i found a way to make it thru that day - sometimes by reading about someone who had it a lot worse than me and found a way to make it out of their darkness. sometimes by just looking at the worst that could happen and coming up with a plan B, regardless of how unrealistic in relation to my current situation that plan might be. one i've used a number of times has been to tell myself if everything fell apart i could go wait tables in the caribbean and live on next to nothing with very possessions and just write. i picture the beach and the warm sun, and a simple job and with that in the back of my mind, go about picking up the pieces of my life here in the states. when you start to lose hope, find your plan B, no matter how silly it is, and use it to get thru another day, another week, another month. you can always take the quick way out if things continue to suck...but you can never change your mind once you do. posted by bluematrix at 11/09/08 21:17 | link | comments (1) Saturday, November 01, 2008 well ireland last week was incredibly beautiful. and so damn green as to be surreal. a thousand miles, hundreds of pics, dozens of stories...too much to show or tell here. i've uploaded a dozen of the better shots to my flickr site, but there are so many good shots. beyond the rugged beauty, the friendly people, and the tasty beverages, there was this feeling of ancientness prevalent nearly everywhere. from a stone dwelling over looking the sea from 2000bc to one of the oldest christian structures still standing (1200ad) to 400 year old B&Bs i was constantly sent far back in time. every place we stayed was killer and only 3 of the 9 were planned ahead of time. from our first night above a pub in dublin overlooking trinity college, to a dairy farmhouse b&b, to a resort on the shannon river, the vacation just unfolded into a living postcard each day. the highlight was probably the hard to find ruins of a castle that my families ancestors built in the 1600's. i saw a picture of it on a website earlier this year, but the directions were sketchy and it took several times doubling back and asking directions before we were trudging thru the mud in a light rain thru cow pastures towards the tall castle walls and long crumbled compound. strange trees hugged the walls inside, ivy and moss grew everywhere, but you could still see darkened stones from where the large fireplaces once warmed my great great great (insert more greats here) grandparents. pretty damn cool posted by bluematrix at 11/01/08 21:43 | link | comments (4) Sunday, October 12, 2008 so its time for the weekly blog post again. and i don't really feel like writing one, but its a ingrained in me now. a habit. a routine. and since i leave for ireland on wednesday for 10 days, am not taking my laptop and am going to be crazy busy getting ready to go, i felt i had to take advantage of this slow sunday evening to post. so i perused the numerous personal development books lying about in various stages of completion for a juicy dog-eared page of wisdom. nothing jumped out crying for elaboration and sharing. i didn't want to talk about the financial meltdown last week, its too tiring. and i haven't done much fun out of the ordinary stuff beyond seeing some bands and such. so i went thru my folder of ideas of blog posts and nothing jumped out from there either. but in the folder was a document of odd facts. there was one that stirred my imagination. first the main character had a funny name. and it was about deception. about need. about sex. about paying the consequences for acting on your impulses. about death, and not just a quick death, but a slow painful death. in a more poetic mood, i expand on about the metaphors this fact might inspire. perhaps someday, when i have time for simple pleasures, i'll revisit the fact and make it into a short story. but for now, instead i present the fact unadorned and let you see if it takes you anywhere... The carniverous bladderwort plant is the male water flea's enemy. It looks just like a female flea, but when he jumps on it, it traps and digests him. posted by bluematrix at 10/12/08 20:00 | link | comments (2) Sunday, October 05, 2008 to succeed in a venture takes the same thing you need to start a business...a sense of urgency. no matter how intelligent or able you may be, if you don't have that urgency (or passion) you'd better get it. the world is full of very competent people who honestly intend to do things tomorrow, or as soon as they can get around to it. but they seldom accomplish as much as less talented who are blessed with urgency, that drive to see it through. when something is urgent you become persistent. ever been in a car trip and have to go to the bathroom? as the urgency increases, your body becomes more persistent in letting you know you'd better take action, and soon. but how do we get this sense of urgency? sometimes our environment imposes it on us - we'd better find a job soon or we won't be able to pay the rent. sometimes its other people - you have a week to do this or face the consequences. but often as we try to get new, better routines or things in our life there is no one or no thing forcing that urgency upon us. in fact it can be just the opposite, our routines can be so comfortable they hold us in place. a body rest tends to stay at rest. i wish there was an easy answer. but often it takes some deep contemplation to first figure out what we need to be urgent about and then find the right way to develop it. my friend tim told me that most of the time he feels like he is pushing these giant, heavy projects uphill and then the remainder of the time urgently chasing them down the other side. the chasing downhill part can be pretty exhilarating, but the time spent pushing uphill can be frustrating. having a worthy, realistic goal and outlining the steps on how to get there helps. then assign dates to those steps...and here is the hard part... figuring out how to make yourself stick to those dates. will you respond better to rewards or punishment for making or not making deadlines? and if there is any way to employ someone else to check in with you to see if you're staying on target, do so, it will help big time. and why bother at all? because if you don't keep trying to improve yourself, that little voice inside will keep nagging you. or worse, the voice will stop and you life will pass you by. posted by bluematrix at 10/05/08 19:55 | link | comments (2) |
