Creating a Better Life

Pointers To Resources For Your Better Life #4

Do Something

Here’s a great way to participate in the spirit of giving… without spending a dime. Pass The Torch is donating $1 per comment to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. It’ll only take a minute of your time to comment, and you’ll feel great after doing so. Don’t worry, go ahead… I’ll still be here when you get back. Thanks to Karen for making me aware of this.

We all have a choice. The choice to allow our feelings about war and violence to dictate how we feel - or - to get up and DO something about making this a better world. Come see how powerful just a few clicks of your mouse can really be: http://www.tenmillionclicksforpeace.org

Free Audio Resources

The Power of My Way has a bunch of free audio interviews up from some real thought leaders in the field of personal and spiritual development, including a few from some friends of mine - Aaron Potts’ and Jerry Loper’s are up, while Lorraine Cohen’s is “being repaired” - I hope it gets up there soon! I haven’t gotten through all of them yet, but what I’ve heard so far is fantastic. Thanks for the pointer, Aaron!

After pruning back my podcast listening, I’m down to three that I still listen to regularly - the Alan Watts Podcast, the Audio Dharma Podcast, and Rick Cockrum’s Shards of Consciousness Podcast. This week, Rick really got me thinking about both my own goals and how I perceive others with his exploration of What Do You really Want.

Free Ebooks

Brian Tracy is offering his ebook “Million Dollar Habits” to us in exchange for subscribing to at least one of his newsletters. This is 315 pages from one of the masters of personal development. To get your copy, just use the signup form on his home page.

If your day to day responsibilities keep getting in the way of your creativity, check out Time Management for Creative People. It’s got some real gems of ideas to help you manage your life while keeping that creative juice flowing. Thanks for putting it together, Mark!

And now, a little horn tooting!

Creating a Better Life is an Outstanding Blog, according to Troy Worman. Thanks, Troy! There’s a lot of, uh… outstanding blogs on his list… why not visit a few of them?

Have a great week, and a Merry Christmas!

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Discuss this post at Personal Development Partners

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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Playing with the Blog

I’m working on updating the blog and it’s theme… stuff may not work quite right for a bit…

Listen to this fantastic podcast from Shards of Consciousness while you wait… I’ll be writing about some of it in my next post an upcoming post.