Category: Creating or Dying

  • Top-10 Beliefs That Are Ruining Your Life

    Top-10 Beliefs That Are Ruining Your Life

    Wait a sec. How can a belief ruin your life? It’s just a measly little set of biochemical connections in your mind, no way can it have that kind of impact…. right!?

    What if you believed that all water is toxic? If you truly believed this, deep-down, you’d avoid all sources of water… and soon, you’d die. It’s not the water that is toxic, it’s the belief.

    All beliefs are that way. Most of us are comfortable in our beliefs because we’ve surrounded ourselves with other people who hold similar ones. That helps us feel “safe,” because most of us have a herd-like evolutionary (unconscious) belief of “safety in numbers.”

    But being part of a herd doesn’t mean that our beliefs are supporting our progress towards things that matter. Whether the things you want are better work-life balance, more recognition, more money or funding, or whatever – it is most likely your own (toxic) beliefs that hold you back from having those things.

    1. I’m nobody important, and I’m not sure why they gave me this position/accolade/promotion! In a world of over 7 billion people, it’s sometimes hard to feel important – and that means it’s much harder to achieve anything big. When we’re younger, most of us have our parents filling the role of seeing us as important. Then there’s a transition to adulthood, and most of us never replace the parental role with our own inner sense of importance. Believing in your own unimportance leads to self-sabotaging behaviors that will slow or halt progress towards things that you care about.
    2. There’s never enough time to get it all done This time-scarcity belief causes its holders to rush around, always hurrying, cramming and jamming into every possible moment every possible action until exhaustion comes. Yet, if you’re trying to achieve a new situation or goal, that doesn’t come from frenzied activity and lack of sleep. No, the source of change is always clarity, and clarity generally only comes easily to a rested and relaxed mind. A single action made in clarity can be as effective as 100 actions taken without clarity. Stop. Breath. Get clarity, then act.
    3. It’s a dangerous world out there Fear is a paralyzing feeling. How much can you accomplish towards your goals when you’re paralyzed? (hint: none). The more you believe in the world being a dangerous place due to politics, violence, environmental destruction, or whatever, it’s the belief in danger that will hold you back from making things happen.
    4. I’m better/smarter/wiser than my colleagues When you get a rejection, it’s easy to start pointing fingers at “stupid” colleagues that “don’t get it.” Yet that ego-driven attitude also subtly places you in the role of victim and pawn to “them.” This is a disempowering belief, because it prevents you from seeing the blind spots in you where improvement may be needed to get the results you want. Humility is essential to self-improvement, and ego gets in the way.
    5. There’s never enough money or funding to go around This belief in money scarcity reproduces itself in your life when you carry it around. Just look at the facts: there are trillions of dollars and other currencies flowing around the world. Some people (including some of your colleagues) are better at diverting a bigger portion of that flow (both in And out). However, if you’re caught in scarcity, you’re often focused on tightening down the outflow. Think about this: what happens when you turn a faucet — which regulates outflow — to a trickle? You get a trickle of an IN flow. Now, let’s say your faucet is wide open but the flow isn’t very good. It requires a totally different set of mental and physical tools to increase the inflow than it does to reduce outflow. However, if you have a belief that the in-flow is scarce, your focus will be mainly on limiting out-flow, and you’ll be forever caught in a loop of limitation.
    6. Great work speaks for itself There’s this belief amongst idealists that if you do some great work – whether it’s a scientific breakthrough, a new invention, a novel, or whatever – that you’ll get recognized for it. While it is true that some people do get recognized for such greatness posthumously, the question is whether you want to wait until you’re dead to get the rewards for your work. If you’d rather have some of those rewards here and now, then a belief that “Great work speaks for itself” is toxic. It is exceedingly rare that “great work” alone is enough to speak for itself. No, great work must have an effective spokesperson to get it out into the world, and that spokesperson is always one and the same as the originator of the work. (Unless you happen to be a billionare, and can hire a full-time PR team). It is only by embracing the idea that you are responsible for “marketing” your work to the world, and learning how to do it more effectively, that your cure/invention/idea/novel/etc is likely to get into the hands of other people where it can have its intended impact – and bring you recognition/money/reward as a result.
    7. It’s dangerous to be “vulnerable” with my colleagues Many people are extremely guarded around their colleagues, because they believe if they show any “weakness” it will be exploited by hostiles. However, research by Dr. Brené Brown and colleagues has clearly shown that it is psychologically unhealthy to exist in a closed-in cocoon of guardedness. It prevents us from making deep and meaningful connections with people in our lives, and it also prevent us from acting boldly. Doing anything great requires “putting yourself out there” and being willing to be criticized. If you’re locked in a guarded shell, you’ll be unable to make the bold leaps that are required to accomplish anything truly great. This means being forever locked in a cycle of mediocrity. Vulnerability is essential to great accomplishment.
    8. I have to do exactly as my boss/chair/dean/supervisor says in order to succeed If you work at a big-chain-fast-food-joint, then perhaps it’s essential for you to do exactly as people above you say. But when you’re in a position that requires leadership – such as being a faculty member or entrepreneur – you must be willing to follow your inner drive and your own vision, even if it means going in a different direction than someone else thinks you should. Often well-meaning advisors/mentors/bosses tell us things such as “you must apply for more grants.” Many of us try to be people pleasers and therefore to follow such advice. However, at the end of the day, leadership is one of the most essential attributes we must develop, and leadership always means listening to your own inner authority first and foremost. This doesn’t mean ignoring input from others, but it does mean that as a leader you make your own decisions and take full responsibility for them.
    9. I’m struggling because the system is messed up The system may well be messed up but this is never why any individual is struggling. Even in terrible systems or bad economies, there are always people who do well. It is tempting to believe that that’s due to luck, but it rarely is. Instead, it’s due to a spirit of entrepreneurialism, creativity, and fearlessness. While TV and movies would have you believe that its only the greedy, power-monging manipulators who succeed in rough environments, the reality is quite different. The Great Depression produced a large crop of millionaires, many of whom made their fortunes by ignoring the “depressive” sentiment of their time to act boldly in starting new businesses. The choice of whether you thrive or not has everything to do with your own attributes of entrepreneurialism and creativity, and very little to do with the external environment around you.
    10. I’m just a meaningless blip in a vast, cold, universe Humans thrive on meaning and purpose. All great works throughout human history have resulted from people who felt driven by some bigger purpose. So, if you believe that the universe is a hard, cold, meaningless place, that belief will stand like a big cement wall smack dab in your path to achieving important things. It doesn’t matter whether you believe that there’s something bigger/deeper than the material world we see or not, but if you lack purpose and meaning you will be ineffective and mediocre. So, getting rid of this belief and finding your own personal sense of meaning, purpose, and even wonder is like rocket fuel for great accomplishment.
    11. That all top-10 lists should only have 10 items I included this one just to show you the power of your own belief… and to demonstrate the automatic cognitive dissonance that occurs when a belief is violated. I also included it a a tribute to the movie Spinal Tap 😉

    There are plenty more where those come from, but if you found resonance in one or more of these, going to work on them will yield a tremendous bounty in your life.

     

     

  • Lighten up, Life is an experiment

    Lighten up, Life is an experiment

    This is a first. I’ve not been very open in the past about my own spiritual path over the past few years – one that has led me from a very atheist point of view to now believing that there is much more to our universe than the material “stuff” that we see.

    It is not a journey that I undertook readily or with enthusiasm. I grew up to think of many religious people as a bit “nuts,” and by association, any form of spirituality was suspect.

    Yet my own path, my own questions, forced me to ultimately face up to this idea: we are far more than just the flesh-and-bones in these bodies, and we are more than just a random, meaningless lump of flesh in the universe.

    This is not about religion, it is about spirit. It is about finding meaning in an often difficult world, and finding a path that leads to peace, fun, love, and enjoyment of life. It is a very practical path indeed, and yet one that I – like many others – often resist due to our own biases and beliefs from the seemingly never-ending debate between religion and science.

    When you are willing to step aside from that debate, and go on an open-minded exploration of what our reality is really about, amazing things open up for you. One of those things for me has been that I have found I can get very quiet and still, and “tune into” some deeper voice, some deeper consciousness, that has a “knowing” that seems to go far beyond what I in this body could know about things. It has been incredible for me to start asking that voice questions about my life and our world, and to get some amazing answers back.

    Here I share one of those with you, that was spawned by a debate I saw a friend involved in about a rape that had happened, and whether the victim had somehow “attracted” that into her life or not. The flamethrowers came out… and it was not pretty. I wanted a deeper insight into what this was all about, so I asked the question, and here is what I got.

    Q: What about people who suffer severe traumas?

    A: Life is an experiment. Each event is one of a series of never-ending, eternal experiments, trials-and-errors, that happen to a soul over its eternal trajectory.

    For each “bad” thing that happens there is always a comparable “good” thing that happens, though not always in the same lifetime or in a way that is obvious to the person from their perspective at the time.

    You humans could do to lighten up, to chill out, to have fun with this ride you call Life. It is not much different than a play with actors, taking on different roles and trying different perspectives.

    A soul cannot reach it’s full potential if it never experiences pain, or what it is like to be a victim. Nor can it reach full potential without experiencing the opposite, being an oppressor or victimizer. These each lead to expansion and clarity of what is not wanted, which leads to more of what is wanted.

    All paths ultimately lead to Love and to Source (or what some of you may call God). And yet if the path was just a straight line, it would be boring. There would be no point, and certainly no fun.

    The only true thing that is “wrong” is the perspective you humans adopt into the “bad” (or “good”) things that happen. Rather than just letting those things be the past, you bring them into your present by focusing on them and recapitulating them over and over again. You like to think about them, memorialize them, teach history lessons about them, debate about them, stew over them, seek therapy to revisit them….

    And each time you re-live these so-called “bad” things, you bring more things like them to you. That which is like unto itself is drawn.

    So instead of experiencing relatively isolated incidents (or single lifetimes) of “bad,” you often experience a long-term perpetuation of the “bad.”

    We use that in quotes, because in the end, all of this is just an experiment. It’s an experiment that you agreed to participate in, joyously and willingly. How will it go? Will you as a species destroy the Earth? Or will you figure out a way to “make it work?”

    Either way there will be learning and growth and expansion. Neither way is a “dead end” in an infinite, evolving universe of possibility. There are other, countless, realities in which different scenarios play out, and it is never “done.” So if things go “bad” here, things will go “well” elsewhere.

    It is your choice. You do not need to fret or worry over what happens to others. Your job is to learn joy, love, and ultimately, your connection to source – to see as though through the eyes of your Source or your God. To see with love, connection, beauty, and truth, all things, all places, all occurrences.

    This does not, it cannot happen in one lifetime. This is a very grand undertaking, and again, one that leads to your soul’s expansion.

    This is not a “serious” game as so many would have you believe. The whole point of this is, shall we say, a step aside from “boredom.” Imagine an original state where there is nothing but perfection. Imagine that lasting forever. Imagine that perfection never changing. Imagine being a consciousness trapped in that state, aware, and yet trapped. Imagine the agony of that.

    How does one escape? By engaging in creation. Creation involves duality. You cannot create if there is not the thing you call contrast.

    Good/bad. Up/down. Right/wrong. Black/white. Male/Female. There are many, many contrasts that arise, and they are all part of the richness and complexity of this experiment you call “reality.” You cannot have the good without the bad, though some think that you can. The “good” is just as dead and lifeless as the “bad” without the other.

    Contrast leads to more contrast. For each refinement, there are further steps of refinement enabled. For each “BAD” there is new “GOOD” that arises. For each “GOOD” there is new “BAD” that becomes possible.

    It is a game. Kids know this, until you talk them out of knowing it, then they forget it and turn into “serious” adults like you.

    Kids know how to play, to imagine, to relax, to be in the moment, to have fun.

    You could learn from your kids (collectively) a lot about what life really is, but most of you are too busy “teaching” them what you know about life, much of which is bogus.

    You teach them the details of “how the world works” and yet the world changes at an ever-increasing rate, due to the expansion of consciousness that is occurring. How the world worked 10, 20, 30, or 40 years ago when you were growing up is different than how the world works now.

    They are wise, they can learn how the world works through play, through presence, through their own exploration of the “good” and the “bad” – unless you get in their way.

    Find the good in every bad. Find the bad in every good. Know that they are just two sides of the same coin, and that they are neither good nor bad, they just “are.” Your judgements are the only thing that make them so. And your judgements are never made from the higher perspective of your soul, because you cannot, in your daily life, see its whole, eternal, trajectory.

    So here you are, in daily life, judging and deciding, and each time you decide and judge, you separate yourself, you slow yourself down from that alignment with Soul that you seek. It is not a problem, because your soul is eternal – it will far outlast this universe you see around you. And yet, you could have so much more of a fun life if you weren’t slowing it down.

    Why waste your life that way? It’s certainly up to you if you want to. You can throw away many lives in that way, and there will be no problem, except for that in each of those lives you “threw away” in worry and doubt and fear and being a victim or whatever, you are not experiencing anywhere near the fullness that you could in that life. It is a choice and there is no right or wrong in it.

    When you see those “bad” things happening to others, do not judge them. Do not judge the people doing the “bad” things, either. This is not to say that someone who violates the rules by which you’ve agreed to play here on this Earth should just be able to do whatever they want.

    But there is a difference between saying: “you’ve broken the rules and there are consequences” versus saying “you hurt this person and you are therefore bad/evil/wrong.” The first is a simple matter of finding a consequence that is appropriate for the rule-breach, and carrying out that consequence, and letting the perpetrator’s soul grow in the way that it is here to grow from that.

    When you get into the judgement about bad/evil/wrong, however, you then involve yourself in those energies. To think about those things, you bring those energies into your system. You attract more challenges with those things that you are giving those labels to. Is that what you want?

    Let’s take the example of the rape that was discussed recently. Both the victim and the perpetrator’s soul have grown from this incident. Was there another way to produce the same growth? Many of you seem to act as if you think there is. And yet if you, the reader, thinks about all the times of major growth in your life, was it not *always* on the heels of a major challenge you overcame? Is that not what every good story, movie, tv show, or book is based upon?

    It is a silly, utopian notion to think that souls can truly expand without challenges like this.

    Now, you may be thinking, “but I don’t want that in my life!” You don’t have to have that. Your soul has a trajectory here, but that trajectory evolves through the power of your choice.

    From an external perspective, often those “bad” things seem so random, so strange, so unfortunate, and so different from the “perfect” person you observe who had that happen.

    Yet you are not a mind reader. You do not see what is happening inside of the person’s conscious mind, nor at the soul level.

    People in your world have become very good at putting on acts. Acts as if everything is wonderful – when inside – there is turmoil, worry, fear, and other things you might call “karmic baggage.”

    So when someone has something you consider “bad” happen for “no good reason” – you are judging that from a very ignorant point of view, without nearly all the “facts”.

    The best that you can do in your life is to focus on your own soul’s trajectory in this body, finding ways to maximize that, and letting other souls do the same. If you do that in joy, in fun, in love, you can have a very expansive, clarifying, wonderful life experience.

    Either way, whether you choose to do that or not, your soul grows.

  • Morgan's über-fantasy world (how about rewriting YOUR story?)

    Morgan's über-fantasy world (how about rewriting YOUR story?)

    This is a blog post about my fantasy world.  Before you click away into the nether lands of cyberspace, let me tell you why this might be important to you.

    We all live in a fantasy world.

    From the most brilliant scientists to the most fundamentalist religionists, our fantasies define who we are.

    In this second decade of the third millennium, we like to pretend that we’re “data driven” – that we are smart and savvy – supported by the latest info-overload purporting to tell us who we are and where we come from.

    It doesn’t matter whose data you use or where it came from. Data are neutral. Data have no meaning apart from the meaning we give them. In science, we tell stories about the data based on our hypotheses and theories. Some of those are some pretty darn smart sounding stories. So smart sounding that we often confuse them for the “TRUTH,” so help you God.

    In other areas of our corner of the vast Universe, people tell very different stories about their world. They look at different data, or they choose to tell a different story about the same data. Or both. This results in sometimes very different stories about who we are and how we came to be.

    You grew up telling yourself a story, and so did I. Everyone does. That story defines everything about how we show up in the world.

    There’s no problem with having a story. It’s how we make meaning out of the vast reams of data that we are exposed to in every moment. The problem occurs later on, after the story gets fixed – cemented like Krazy Glue – into our psyche. Not to be rooted out or changed, we cling to our story as if it were the TRUTH, never again allowing any information to come to us that doesn’t fit with that story.

    Then it often goes South. Many of these stories we glue into our minds impose upon us self-inflicted misery, disconnection, judgement of others, lack of self love, and worse. Despite those problems they cause, we cling to the stories as if they were some kind of “unchangeable TRUTH.” We cling to our stories, and we cling to our misery, lack of self love, judgement, and disconnection.

    I got sick of that and decided to change my story.

    It wasn’t a conscious decision. It would have been a much faster transformation if I had recognized my story for what it was, and intentionally rooted it out. Alas, I was not that lucky. (I was going to write “smart” there, but smart people are just as prone to telling themselves stories as the not-as-smart. Telling stories is an equal opportunity habit).

    So, my story began with growing up in a scientific household. My father was a famous chemist and my brother is a well known physicist. In our household, there was the truth as laid out by “science”, and there was all that “bogus crap that other people believe.”

    Little did I know that there were people all over the world looking at us scientists, and lumping our stories into the category of “bogus stuff that other people believe.” I suppose that it dawned on me at some point in mid-childhood that ours wasn’t the only story out there. But it didn’t matter, because our story was RIGHT and theirs were obviously WRONG.

    I was so wrapped up being RIGHT that I paid no attention to whether my story was bringing me any joy, love, fun, or peace. According to my story, emotional stuff like that was just a bunch of side effects of biochemistry that weren’t all that important.

    What was important was SCIENCE. What was important was Figuring It All Out (TM). What was important was being smarter than those ignoramuses who hadn’t yet Figured It All Out.

    My Ego was bloated with facts and figures to PROVE my case, a bit like one of those dead cows I’ve seen floating in the Colorado River. Yeah, it was that gross.

    And what did I figure out with my high-minded story?

    It’s a Random Universe and We Are Meaningless Players

    In that so-called scientific story I’d adopted, the universe started out for some unknown reason, and since then, everything that happened has been a product of randomness.

    My story about our random universe was based on ideas about what happened a very very long time ago. That was long before any humans were around to measure things with our fancy instruments. There were no weather vanes on Saturn to tell which way the wind was blowing… So to call it “scientific” is assuming that we know far more than we actually do about what was going on back then.

    Anyway… in that story, you and I and everyone else came from something a bit like green pond scum. Chance pond scum turned into chance human beings. By chance we were the fittest in a brutal, harsh, dog-eat-dog world. We out gunned and outsmarted the other species to ascend to the top.

    And the prize? A sort of clinging, tenuous survival on this planet, where at any moment we could be wiped out by war, meteorite, or other disaster… and then the cockroaches will ascend to replace us.

    Worse, because we wiped out so many other species (and later, races) on our clinging way to the top… guilt for our sins is mandatory. We are just selfish, brutish beings… not much more than a blight on the planet. It would all soon come to an end, a just dessert. When I was 13, I dreamed that my dog Bear and I were going to go live in a cabin in Alaska to wait it all out. Bear was the perfect companion for my plan, a stout St. Bernard – German Shepherd mix who could probably outlive me in that kind of scenario. He just needed a keg on his neck to carry our food and drink for the apocalypse.

    My daughter recently came to me and said: “I think it would be nice if we could just have a big reset and start it all over with far fewer humans.” WOW.  Now she’s carrying around a similar story, even though I didn’t consciously pass it on to her. That particular story of humans-as-blight is a prevalent one, especially in liberal/progressive circles**.

    (** I’m only picking on this story because it’s the one I’d adopted. There are plenty of other just-as-dysfunctional stories that people tell themselves, like the one that says we were all perfect until some rib-cum-woman came along, got hypnotized by a snake to bite into an apple, and that perfection was permanently ruined by this heinous act. Implicit in this particular story is the sin and temptation inherent in humans – especially women).

    That story led down a dark path for me. The more I reinforced it as I pursued my professor job as a bigwig scientist, the more it translated into dysfunction in my relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. “Things could collapse at any time” – I lived in constant fear due to this story. I perused the economic and environmental websites daily to reconfirm just how bad things were becoming. That focus on collapse became a personal reality for me. In 2010 UNC pulled the rug out from under a big project without notice, and that led to my angry resignation. According to my story – as just one more sign of how bad things were, they’d screwed me over for space for years, and things were just getting worse and worse.

    That story led to a lot of personal turmoil. It led to turmoil with my family. It led to bouts of depression. It was unfun and unhealthy, and I’m still recovering from it all.

    And it gets worse…

    My story also said I am unlovable. My story said that since I grew up with a peculiar birth defect, “I’m not going to be accepted.” It came from a childhood where my mom walked out the door…never to return. Whenever I saw something I didn’t like, I projected onto it a sense that “it is personal, against me…” instead of realizing that most people are just living each in their own world. My mom didn’t leave because of me, she left because of her own issues. Yet my story for all those years had been telling me that I somehow caused that.

    This story didn’t allow me to believe in LOVE. I mean, I believed in the concept of a biochemically-derived love, but it was just a function of neurotransmitters, and nothing more than that. Loving myself wasn’t on my radar, because it seems pretty odd to love oneself when love is just a bunch of chemicals in the first place. And….I was suicidal at times. It was bad.

    Why share so much? I do it to illustrate just how a story can paint you into a corner, like that story did for me.

    Then something happened and I got a new story

    Over the past six years, I adopted a completely new story. I took the same “facts” that I did before, and I chose to interpret them in a whole new way. I chose to tell a new story, one that has led to a profound change in my life.

    For a long time, I was afraid to share this with anyone. My new story very different than the previous “scientific” story I carried around. I felt like I would be laughed at for sharing it.

    But it is Just A Story

    Then one day it dawned on me. This is just a story. No more, no less. It is not a matter of who is right or who is wrong. That is a totally unimportant ego distraction that I had been caught up in  (as are many, many other people). I’d been so caught up in the Ego of my story, perhaps because I was a non-Mormon who grew up in Mormon Utah. I felt like I needed to defend my particular view against the very strong views of the nearly all-pervasive church influence around me.

    Yet it’s not just me. Nearly all of us adopt these stories, and then we go out into the world with a sort of missionary zeal for defending our story. We ttry to constantly prove to others that it is right, and we make judgements of those who’ve chosen a different story.

    All the while, we separate ourselves from what’s really important: finding and holding the best story that works for our joy, our peace, our prosperity, our love.

    So, I’m going to tell you my new story – a fantasy I created

    I make no claim about its “rightness.” I make no judgements about the very different stories that others hold. It may offend both some of the hardcore materialist scientists and many of the religious. That doesn’t matter.

    What matters is that you use my story transformation as an example, an illustration of how you can examine your story. You can figure out whether YOUR story is serving you, or whether it’s holding you back from a deeper sense of joy, love, and fun in your life.

    Since I spent my whole life around a scientific worldview, my new story is based on the best I can make of the evidence (not just the mainstream). You may not need as much evidence or data or “logic” for your story, and that’s ok. Those are things I need to justify my story due to my curious upbringing.

    It goes like this:

    In the beginning there was consciousness. It was aware of itself, and of possibility, but there was no medium in which to express itself. It was like a painter without a canvas. It was frustrated and forlorn, until it figured out a way to create a canvas out of itself.

    The canvas (our universe) is part of that awareness, and yet the universe, its canvas, has its own independent existence and progression. It is free to evolve by its own course – and yet all the while is supported through LOVE by that which created it.

    Within that canvas is a vast universe of universes, and there are also a vast series of “intelligences” – only a small fraction of which inhabit physical bodies like ours.

    Our own being came through a process that resembles the Evolution written about by Darwin, but with one difference*. It is not entirely random. Rather, it is driven by a creative process, expressing itself on the tableau of DNA as its canvas. It is driven by a process that has LOVE for its creations – all of its creations – at its core.

    It is not an old white guy with a beard planning out the “perfect scenario.” Far from it. No, it is an awareness that constantly grows and expands, and is joyous at each new development. It paints on the canvas through each evolutionary development. It paints on the canvas through each human idea. It paints on the canvas with each new star system that explodes into being. Sometimes those new developments don’t work, and can’t be sustained. Sometimes they work too well, and take over – squeezing out others.

    *note: remember, this is my own fantasy. If you want to get into a debate about evolution vs whatever (creationism, intelligent design, etc), I won’t join you. That is not the point here. It’s finding a story that makes us happy.

    With each new advancement, it opens up even more new opportunities for further developments. There is no “good” vs “evil” in all of this. The artist loves all of its creation. Evil is only a human creation, a product of people who’ve become disconnected from the love, the creativity, and the joy.

    The artist loves all

    The artist who created the canvas loves all of its creations, even though many of them have become so disconnected from it that they think they evolved randomly from pond slime. Even though they think that the artist doesn’t exist. Even though these creations have forgotten that they are love, and that they should start by loving themselves.

    A conscious being who does not love itself cannot give deep love to another. One cannot giveth of that whicheth one doth not have.

    We came here to explore and to create. We came here to build upon others’ creations. We came here as artists, much like the original artist, to see what great things we can do with the canvas of our life. It’s the canvas we’ve been given, yet many of us devalue it, minimize it, and feel unworthy of it.

    Sadly, like me with my former story, many of us have forgotten. We’ve become lost in a story that says we have to work really really hard to succeed, and if we don’t, we are not worthy and we’ll be left behind in the dust. We’ve become lost in a story that says we are insignificant, unexceptional, and unimportant in this vast (and cold) universe. Many of us get lost in a story that says we are here only to serve others, rather than to live our life to its creative fullest – while serving others through living our lives to their fullest.

    We have the free will to build upon creation with joy and love, or to unplug from it and destroy small parts of it with our hate and our fear. Though a lot of humans have chosen the course of hate and fear, our world is a resilient place. It will take a lot of hate to truly destroy it. Meanwhile, there are more and more of us who are waking up and embracing our true purpose here. We are gaining momentum to displace the hate and the fear. We are likely to triumph, as long as we embrace a better story.

    I like my new fantasy much better.

    It has begun healing my psyche and my relationships, without psychotherapy or pharmaceuticals. It has led me out of depressive episodes, and out of withdrawal from other human beings. I’m not 100% of the way there yet. The painting is by no means complete. We are never done. But I’m making great progress, because of the new story I’ve chosen to tell myself.

    So now it’s your turn. What story are you telling yourself? Is that story helping you be a happier, more connected human being? Or does it have you lost in despair, dysfunction, overwhelm?

    If it’s not serving you, perhaps it’s time to start rewriting that old story into something new. If you need help with that, reach out.

     

     

  • Fear in the Gym, Fear in Life

    Fear in the Gym, Fear in Life

    Today in Lake Tahoe, I felt like a lazy ass because my relatives were up at 5:30 am, clanking around in their bike shoes in the early morning, getting ready to head out to ride 70 miles around the lake, while I lay in the comfy bed…. Finally, the feeling that I needed to do something set in, and I roused myself at around 6:50. I donned my biking gear, filled the pack with cool water, and hopped on my bike to go exploring.

    It is a mountain bike meant for exploring – for crossing nearly any kind of terrain you can throw at it. I’ve had it on mountain peaks and desert valleys, along with many roadways chock full of exhaust-spewing traffic. I got that bike for free. I was visiting a friend who’d bought it on a whim. He’s a surfer and Internet Marketer (with initials FK for those of you in the know…). He’d bought this $4,000 bike, taken it out once or twice, and proceeded to have some kind of wreck which he described as “totally embarrassing” near a busy intersection.

    The wreck didn’t damage the bike or its rider – except for his ego. That was enough to relegate the bike into disuse, out-favored by the 60-some-odd surfboards in his arsenal. Nothing like being in 61st place for favor. For some reason, this conjures the image of a polygamist with 61 wives, who never has time to get to them all… I don’t know where that came from. Can I put that image back into the bottle now, please? No… too late.

    So anyway, there the bike sat, stashed behind the quiver of surfboards and a beautifully restored VW bus, until I came along. It’s the kind of thing that happens in movies. I was in Frank’s place, and saw a water bottle on the counter. Knowing not of the bike, I asked innocently enough: “do you ride much?”

    His answer: “oh, I got a bike and rode it a few times, then totally embarassed myself. Do you want it?”

    I stammered a bit… “what kind of bike is it?” I managed to get out before the silence became embarrassing. As I’d processed the offer, images of old Schwinn cruiser bikes were flashing through my mind, as I calculated whether it would be rude to turn down the offer of a bike – even if a junky, rusted out one. I should have known better. Frank only does things with style. He said: “It’s a pretty good one, I think, I bought it new and just haven’t used it. We can go check it out! I’ll bet it’s about your size.”

    “Okay,” I responded, as I followed him into the surfboard-stuffed garage overlooking the beach in La Jolla. As he dug his way through the piles upon piles of surfboards, I wondered what was going to emerge. The bike finally revealed itself amongst the surfboards, and I beheld a full-suspension 29er Titus mountain bike. If you’re not a mountain biker, here’s the translation: this was a damn fine bike, far better than what I owned at that time. He said: “here you go, want to take it for a ride and see if it will work?”

    “Sure…” I was still doing mental math. “Does he expect me to pay him for it?” I was thinking? Nobody had ever given me anything worth that much before (or since)… After riding it for 30 seconds, I knew that this bike didn’t suck. Those are code-words for: “awesome!”

    I rode back to the place, and asked him “what do you want me to pay you for it?” I still couldn’t wrap my head around getting something like this for free. His answer: “Nothing. take it – it’s yours. Otherwise I’d have to deal with putting it on Craigslist and all the weirdos coming by and looking at it.”

    A price I can’t refuse

    Okay, we can accept that price. And so I became the proud new owner of a fantastic bike at the best price I’ve ever paid. That bike has been all over the Western USA with me, and I’ve ridden it 1,000’s of miles. Occasionally I send Frank pictures of me and the bike – but I think he’s getting tired of random pictures of the bike that he never really grew fond of in the first place.

    Flash forward to now, like one of those 70’s television shows where someone has a reminiscence then returns to the present via a cheesy shimmering effect… and here I am riding my bike around South Tahoe, exploring the trails and roads near the lake to see what’s around and enjoy the morning views.

    Beautiful morning, perfect temperatures. My map of the trails was sketchy, so a couple of times I followed trails through the woods that tapered out into swampland, and I had to turn back before the buzzing mosquitos got to me. Exploration at it’s finest, as I burnt hundreds of calories climbing and descending Tahoe’s hills.

    The pattern interrupt: a gym chock full of people

    At one point, right after I was treated to some incredible lake views, with geese in the foreground and shimmering mountains in the background, I came across a sight that was a total pattern interrupt: a gym whose parking lot was nearly full, boasting “great views” on its sign.

    On my ride, I’d seen, at most, three other cyclists and maybe a handful of runners out enjoying this gorgeous morning. And there at the gym were at least 30 people, packed into a small space with other sweating people, breathing in the sweaty smell as they clanked their weights and pounded the rubber of the treadmills – probably consuming the latest news about the war in the Middle East on the built-in TV screens.

    Wow… really? How could anyone want to be in a gym right now, rather than out enjoying this awesome morning? I was flummoxed.

    Then a thought came to mind. You know how sometimes your mind just speaks a judgement before you can get hold of it and tell it to shut up? (okay, I admit, I like the voice in my head, most of the time).

    Well, in this case it spoke one word to me: fear. Followed by: Fear breeds fear. That’s the only explanation I could come up with for why someone would be in a gym on a day like this.

    Non-judgement is hard

    I try not to judge. I do my darnedest. So instead of deciding that they’re all crazy and weird and screwed up, I went into reflective mode. “They’re not bad people,” I tell myself, “they’re just confused by fear.”

    Fear of the unknown of the outside world. You might get rained on (I did). You might get lost. (I did). God forbid, you might even have a mechanical problem (I didn’t, fortunately!). Worse still: you might be embarrassed by having a wreck or something. You could even get bitten by a mosquito carrying the dreaded West Nile virus, then it’s all over in a blur of fevers and coughs.

    I get it. It’s safer and more controlled to go to a gym. You can get the same workout, every time. In it’s perfect, climate-controlled environment, not much can go wrong. There is almost no risk of any kind of failure.

    And yet… there’s no risk of coming across stunning mountain landscapes… a flock of geese and their goslings, walking the bike across a sandy beach, feeling the morning dew and a few raindrops on your face, smelling the fresh new mountain air. There is no risk of hopping the bike across a fallen log and maybe screwing it up… or maybe not – and feeling the exhilaration, either way. There is no risk.

    You get a certain, prescribed amount of exercise and it’s almost guaranteed. Yet – where’s the joy? Where’s the adventure? Where’s the excitement? Where’s the newness?

    The robotic nation takes over

    I find it bizarre that we humans used our creativity to create great empires and great machines to help us keep those empires running – and then we decided to fall in love with those machines by becoming more like them.

    We plan out every moment of every day to assure climate-controlled comfort at all times.

    God forbid if a new idea should strike us – that’s just “crazy talk” to be dismissed by the more sane and robotic part of us.

    Worse still if we happen to go on an adventure like a mountain bike ride… and run into some kind of challenge. We might not be able to handle it – and our ego would be in shreds.

    Besides, machines are just machines – no different than any of the other machines – and don’t have any special privileges, nor do they deserve a “great life!” – because they’re just machines. So, since we’re trying to be like machines, why should we feel “deserving” of anything great? We shouldn’t: that’s just selfish for a machine to want. Stop it now.

    This gym phenomenon is just a tip of the iceberg in machine-dom. Machines aren’t flexible, creative, and adaptable like humans*. Hell, the other day I saw an article about bacteria that evolved to eat electricity for their energy. Now that’s flexible and creative. Life is spontaneous, creative, adventuresome. Robots are not.

    So why do we pack ourselves into places like the gym, going there for a precisely defined workout, followed by a precisely-defined diet to assure the precisely healthy body fat percentage as specified by the precisely measured statistics coming from the latest studies?

    I have no damn clue, really, except to say that it’s dismaying that many of our lives have come to this. We are not machines!

    We are creative, beautiful, loving beings, meant for more than just living a daily life of machine-dom. We are not here to avoid any variation in circumstance – we are here to adapt to the variations, to roll with the punches, to seek and have adventure and fun.

    We are creators, not robots. Let’s stop trying to live like robots, and start reclaiming our creative, spontaneous humanity.

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    * – this is referring to humans who haven’t already become too robotic….

    ** – Sorry to gym owners and friends of mine who go to the gym. Like I said above, I do not judge you. However, I cannot follow your path, I must create my own, and it doesn’t involve a gym.

  • Got something to create? Watch out for toxic green slime.

    Got something to create? Watch out for toxic green slime.

    This post isn’t for everyone. It’s not for people who want to live a life of consumption or complacency and be content with that.

    No, it’s not for those. If you want to do that, I don’t have any words of assistance for you.

    I do, however, have words for you if you know, deep in your heart, that you want to create something great, but you’ve been holding back all these years because of fear.

    That “something great” can be of any type, shape, or variety.

    Maybe it’s a new business.

    Maybe it’s making a new toy named smudgie-dolls.

    Or perhaps it’s creating great gospel-rock music. Or perhaps even great scientific breakthroughs. Maybe even a grant proposal that rocks the reviewer’s world.

    Who knows.

    It doesn’t matter what the what is. Because all people who have something unexpressed inside struggle with the same issues.

    A sea of toxicity for creators

    The industrialists were creators. They created great factories that churned out widgets that were designed to enhance our lives.

    Ironically, their creations had the effect of generating a whole populace that is deathly afraid of real creating and creativity. So, while the creators of those industrial empires got to express themselves – generations of people who have gone to work for them and been influenced by them have had their creativity stifled by the creating that the industrialists did.

    Just go tell your relatives that you’re going to be in a rock band. Or that you’re going to start a business. Watch their sympathetic, patronizing reactions as the look on their face turns to horror, like you might expect after a cancer diagnosis.

    “Find a real career, like medicine or engineering, so that you can support yourself and your family.”

    I’m not kidding about this. I’ve recently helped someone start a new business to work on a cure for a major disease. This person has suffered from anxieties both internal and external. Externally, she’s felt judged and pressured by colleagues who act like she’s a traitor for doing something positive with her work. Internally, she frequently worries about “what if it fails and I can’t support my family.”

    (She probably would have given up on this journey if it hadn’t been for having the support of a mentor – going it alone in confronting these fears is very difficult).

    Schools fuck it up

    Our education system these days is totally fear driven. In the US, a lot of it comes from politicians and pundits who look at Asia, where they see students accomplishing higher test scores in subjects like math and grammar.

    “We have to get rid of that useless art crap, and spend more time teaching them the basics, so that we can keep up with them damn foreigners…” All the creative stuff gets thrown out the window as “useless” in this fast-moving world.

    Yet that’s the stuff of which all progress is made. It’s the stuff of genius. New cures, new technologies, new works of art – they don’t come from hitting the books harder. They come from unleashing more of the creativity.

    Very few schools focus on helping students with that. Instead it’s all about becoming subservient, listening to the teacher, learning the subject material “correctly” and regurgitating it on the next exam.

    That stuff teaches young people the screwed up lesson that success is all about getting the answers “just right.” Hey, when you’re doing something like creating a new business, there is no “right answer.” If you search for the right answer, you get paralyzed.

    I’ve seen it happen to more than one entrepreneur friend, who goes to seminar after seminar, seeking the “answer” to how to make their business successful… when the answer was inside of that person the whole time, and just needed an expression of creativity to let it out.

    How many world-changers went to Ivory Tower University(ITU)?

    (I almost wrote a university whose name starts with H – but decided their lawyers and/or marketing department might get in a kerfluffle if I mention them by name).

    So, I don’t have fancy statistics to prove my case, but I quickly thought to myself, who are some of the most influential people of the past 100 years that come to mind?

    Some random names that pop up for me are: Mother Theresa, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gahndi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, The Dali Lama, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford…

    Of the names that came to mind, not a single one of these world-changers attended Ivory Tower University. Of the university that they did attend, it was a minor contributor, if at all, to their world-changing creations.

    Point is: universities don’t focus on creating great creators. In fact they usually do the opposite, which is to stifle the creativity. (That’s why I’m no longer with a university).

    The typical approach that universities take to education is to scare students into conformity, via grades, an endless series of exams, and a pre-digested view of the “facts.”

    Now, for my academic friends who are riled by this statement, don’t worry. I realize that there are some of you who do things differently. Some of you encourage students to develop their own independent thinking and creativity. Some of you teach classes by supporting inquisitiveness. Kudos to you, seriously! At the same time, realize that you are in the tiny minority who actually cares about this stuff, and that the overall momentum of the system is very much in the direction of conformity. That’s what I’m speaking about.

    So it’s time to make it a wrap, by encouraging you to let that creation out

    Creating is a bit like giving birth. It’s a long period of pregnancy, followed by an often painful delivery, and finally, relief!  Many of us stay “pregnant” with those unborn ideas for our whole life… and the result is never healthy.

    If you’ve got something great to create, now is your time. Don’t hold it back any longer. Find a way to move forward on your creating, of whatever kind suits you – and close your ears to the endless naysayers you may encounter along the journey!

    Treat their input as you would treat toxic green slime mold growing on food – get rid of it!

     

     

    Dr. Morgan Giddings

     

    Morgan

     

  • The feedback on Create or Die is in, and it's badass

    The feedback on Create or Die is in, and it's badass

    I sent out preliminary copies of the book Create or Die to some people, and the feedback I’ve had has been badass. Here’s some of it:

    “Morgan! That was soooo good! And yes I read it ALL.
    I am a voracious reader. There are times I read 3 books a week.
    This is one of the best books I’ve read all year.
    I was inspired from the very first page of chapter 1.”

    – Travis Sago, Entrepreneur

    And this one:

    “One of the most important and provocative books I have read in years. A guide to how to live your life without being manipulated, scared or influenced by others. A cross between Stephen Hawking, Art Bell and Napoleon Hill. Highly recommended.”

    – Geoff Ronning, founder of Stealth Seminar

    Oh, another:

    “I absolutely loved it and your message “To be Healthy, Happy and have financial Security ” is absolutely in ‘your’ hands as long as one taps into their ‘own unique creative abilities/talents’. Your ability to drive home this message was Powerful & Clear. Your chapter on the mechanistic way of functioning in a society coming strictly from the left brain only versus the coming more from the Creative perspective which includes tapping into Love and Beauty is explained really well – I love how you explain how this shows up in peoples outwardly expression: mechanical deprives people of feeling and expressing happiness and joy. I also love how you point out : robots & computers can simply never ‘out-create humans’…… Very well explained in your book – and I know so many ‘out there’ will agree! I resonated deeply with most all of your chapters and I believe your book and all that it addresses is very timely…”

    – Debra Capranos, Holistic Nutritionist

    And how about:

    “You have faced your internal struggles with great courage, and as a result have produced a book that sounds a clarion call to rethink our cultural values. This is a great achievement.

    We both found it easy to read and stay with the text. The underlying ideas are excellent, interesting and well put with plenty of helpful metaphors and analogies.

    I love the emphasis on the value of failure and a vision of where you want to go. (There was a great diagram on Facebook a few weeks ago that illustrates this — see it attached)

    I love that you are writing about the fact that as humans, we can’t NOT create. It’s in our genes. We MUST create – ideas and/or things. The two are inextricable, it is how the life force is evolving through us. By creating ideas, we develop our individual reality. By creating things, we develop our collective reality and culture. And, we CAN control our creativity. These ideas are BIG.”

    – Pat Watt, Retired teacher

    We’re not done…

    “Dr. Morgan Giddings put her own brilliant mind and shared her wisdom and expertise on creativity. As an academic scientist, creativity with integrity is the core to pursue scientific excellence. I enjoy reading this book and agree with the center message of this book: “If you’re not creating, you’re dying.”

    Dr. Gladys Ko, Scientist, Texas A&M

    Oh yeah, oh yeah, another one:

    “This is a home run in so many ways. Most don’t understand the difference between living life asleep in your shoes and being awake creating and changing lives! You covered it so well! Hopefully more readers will wake up and find their creativity and change the world!”

    – Robin Gerhart, Entrepreneur

    And that’s just from a small group of preliminary readers, before any kind of public release.

  • The Real Problem With The Economy

    The Real Problem With The Economy

    Over on Fearless Creators, there’s a new blog post: the Real Problem With The Economy. Here’s the link: http://fearlesscreators.com/blog/the-real-problem-with-the-economy

  • The Mint-Bacon Cake

    This is an excerpt from my upcoming, nearly completed book Creating or Dying.

    You may wonder, “Am I really in charge of my beliefs?”

    Most people never even ask that question. They don’t even realize that they have a set of beliefs that are affecting their entire experience of reality, and that those beliefs can change.

    Instead, they let the news, their preachers, their parents, and their friends form their beliefs into some random mix.

    It’s like baking a cake blindfolded. You feel your way to the cupboard, randomly picking out oil, flour, oregano, salt, bacon, sugar, and mint flavoring. You end up with some horrible concoction that nobody wants to eat. And then you say, “Well, that’s what we got, I guess we just have to live with it.”

    In the world of baking, nobody would put up with that. They’d throw the mint-bacon cake in the trash and start over.

    Yet in the world of our mental belief systems, which are just as important to our existence as those ingredients are to the existence of that cake, we rarely question them. We don’t go through the mix, throwing out the ones that aren’t working, and creating new ones that work better.

    So, we end up with a random selection of beliefs. They may conflict with each other, and cause conflict with other people in our lives. They may cause monetary or even spiritual poverty. They cause kids to be brought up with all the wrong priorities. They even cause wars and other large-scale disasters.

    Ultimately, the random selection of beliefs that most of us end up with, then never really question, lead to random results from our lives. Ask: what beliefs benefit me, and which ones harm me?

    By asking that question, you can take charge of creating a set of beliefs that’s more beneficial.