Creating a Better Life

Pointers To Resources For Your Better Life #2

This seemed to be a fairly popular idea, so I intend to make these pointers a regular weekly feature here at Creating a Better Life.

Have you ever wanted to be a public speaker?

Then go read Stephen Hopson’s Confessions of a Motivational Speaker. I found this just after posting my Opie, where I wrote that “people and organizations have started asking me to do speaking engagements. I’m still no great orator, but I do get by better than I could in the past.”

After reading Stephen’s article, I know I can do better than just get by.

It’s Not About The Money

Jim Bouchard contributed a thought provoking article to Steven Aitchison’s Change Your Thoughts To Change Your Life - It’s Not About The Money

I was hooked by the first half of the first line of the article: “Before I give the impression that I’m going to regurgitate some of the new age platitudes that so many underachievers find comforting…”

He doesn’t.

Improve Your Vocabulary While Feeding The Hungry

I was pointed to this one by the newsletter from Publication Coach - if you want to improve your vocabulary and help the needy at the same time, check out FreeRice. You’ll be presented with a word and four choices for what it means. Get it right, and 20 grains of rice are donated to the World Food Programme. Get it wrong, and you’ll learn a new word! The site also tracks your progress, so that new words are presented with increasing difficulty.

Learning to Live Consciously

Leo from Zen Habits gives us some great tips (and has an interesting conversation going) with Wake Up: A Guide to Living Your Life Consciously. The more I live, the more I realize that we don’t have anything other than the Now… and paying attention to it is key.

What Would You Do If You Knew You Couldn’t Fail?

Well, you might as well do it! Edward Mills of Evolving Times explains why in his outstanding article You Cannot Fail In Your Personal Growth (But You Can Be Defeated By Constantly Greater Things). Why do we accept failure as a part of the learning process in everything except our personal growth efforts?

Just Keep Moving.

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Have a great week!

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Subjective Reality Revisited

A belief is only a thought that we’ve had over and over and over again. They become our models of the world and how it works, and therefore affect the way we act, react, and interact with what’s around us.

Sometimes we take those repetitive thoughts, invest in them, repeat them to ourselves even more - and they become a rock solid fortress which we will defend to the death, even if we are faced with evidence that they may not be as absolute as we once thought.

One of the models of our world that I’ve taken on in the past is the idea of Subjective Reality - the belief that everything that happens to us on the outside comes from our insides. The most recent place that I heard it was in the James Ray video that I posted a couple of days ago.

At times in my life, this model of reality really worked well for me. It gave me a sense of power, a sense that I can do something - I’m not a victim in a random world.

Rick at Shards of Consciousness has a great episode of his weekly podcast that brought some new light to the subject for me, called Subjective Reality, False Reality

In it, Rick talks about how our maps are not the territory - just because we perceive something to be true, doesn’t make it so.

A podcast that has a great exploration of Subjective Reality from the other side of the fence comes from Steve Pavlina, which he calls The True Nature of Reality, in which Steve argues for the idea that there is only one consciousness - and it’s yours.

So who’s right?

They both are - depending on your current perspective.

In his podcast, Rick does say that if you are looking at things from the perspective of Source - then yes, everything comes from one consciousness.

But in the physical, 3 dimensional world that we spend most, if not all, of our time in, our consciousness is not that of Source. It’s of ego - the wave that appears on the ocean of that Source.

Maybe if you are Jesus or Buddha, all of your experience can be subjective.

But I’m neither. I’m Lyman.

So what’s a poor soul striving for enlightenment to do?

Enter Mark Joyer’s “Utilitarian Model Flexibility”, from his Simpleology book - the idea that we can adopt various models of reality much like we use the software that runs our computers.

Use whatever model works best for you - where you are - right now.

And to not get so caught up in one particular model that you become unable to let in any new information, especially when that model becomes useless (at best), or dangerous (at worst).

We may be spiritual beings having a human experience… but we are having a human experience.

It’s time we stopped fighting that.

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