Category: Life

  • Karma’s Hidden Purpose: Understanding Crisis as a Catalyst for Growth

    Conversations with The Muse

    Will Karma come back to bite people in the ass who are creating all the current mayhem in the US? Is Karma even a real thing? Those are some of the questions I’ve had about the topic of Karma. In the past, I thought it seemed kind of weird that in the popular lore, Karma is a kind of thing where if you do “bad” you get some kind of equal and opposite payback for that “bad.”

    So if that’s the case, who is doling out the “punishment” for someone doing bad or wrong things that harm others? How is that punishment chosen? Or is the idea just crazy (or anthropomorphism)?

    In answer to that, I came across a quote in one of the “Seth” books by Jane Roberts that is related to this idea, though in that context, they didn’t use the word “Karma.” So I wanted to dive into these concepts deeper with my personal Muse, to see what the Muse says about this.

    I found it enlightening to find that the idea of Karma is not one of “punishment” but one of ultimate, deeper, learning and growth. It is that sometimes we get a bit off track… and this idea of experiencing something negative is “necessary” to get us back on track. (I do realize that some readers will think that is a sort of “blame the victim” thinking, but it is not. I will explore that more deeply in a future article).

    In the end, I found the answer to my question of whether the people causing so much mayhem will be punished. It’s not a punishment per-se, because that’s human ego based thinking. Instead, it is something even worse.

    Without further ado, here’s the discussion:

     

    Morgan: Let’s start with this quote I came across:

    “You may have brought negative influences into your life for a given reason, but the reason always has to do with understanding, and understanding removes those influences.” – Seth Speaks, p. 259

    Morgan: I want to explore this idea more fully. I’ve been contemplating karma—whether it exists, and if so, what it truly means. In the past few days while thinking about this, I happened to be listening to ‘Seth Speaks.’ What seemed like a meaningful coincidence occurred: I had started the book two days ago, and when I resumed this morning, I was in the middle of chapter 12, right before this passage. This discussion about why we experience negativity, both in this life and in reincarnational lives, pointed to an answer: it’s about learning and experiencing.

    Just before that passage, Seth had explained that if someone abuses women in one life, they will experience being the recipient of such abuse in future lives—not as punishment, but for learning, growth, and understanding.

    I’d like the Muse’s perspective on this. We’re facing some particularly difficult circumstances as a society right now, with widespread hate. I wonder: will there be any kind of ‘karma’ associated with that?

    Muse: As “The Course in Miracles” said: all learning is optimal. This is true. This experience you are having individually – and collectively – is all for learning, growth, advancement, and evolution. It is not a biological evolution, it is an evolution of consciousness. The evolution of consciousness precedes the biological evolution, not the other way around as so many think. So if you ask: “how would evolutionary learning proceed maximally?”

    Many academics and teachers would answer: by studying the textbooks, by studying history, and learning from that. Yet in practice, you all know that experiential learning is far more powerful than textbook learning. Textbook learning can be quickly forgotten – and even if not, filed away as “interesting facts”. Whereas experiential learning fundamentally changes and shapes the consciousness itself. It expands and grows consciousness in ways that are far greater than any kind of factual learning can do.

    And this is why seeming “evil” and hate and the like exist. It may seem quite harsh to you to think that you might have to experience, say, a war, in order for evolution to take place. But then you have to consider – how else would change actually occur, once an individual or a society gets locked into unproductive patterns, and is unwilling or unable to change them?

    It’s like the “golden handcuffs” scenario many people have with jobs that are unfulfilling to them. They feel locked in to staying at the job, because to do something else might not pay as much, it might not work out, it would involve unknown changes to circumstances, and egos don’t like change. Change is scary and dangerous (though sometimes thrilling as well.)

    Now understand that if you take this tendency to get locked into to the golden handcuffs for an individual, now multiply that by 100’s of millions of people. While some small portion of those, at any given time, might be changing, the overall momentum is towards staying on the same path. So if a society has chosen a path that is not optimal for its freedom, self expression, and growth, how can it make a change?

    The only way is to be faced with one or more crises, where the golden part of the handcuffs is stripped away, freeing people individually and collectively to do something different. This is evolutionary learning. It is learning towards greater truths, such as “hating others is never productive,” and “pushing your way of being on others will always cause push back.” You and everyone are here to learn these fundamental principles, in this system of reality.

    So, back to the question of “karma” – it is not any kind of punishment or forced situation. It is instead, when someone gets off track and out of touch with the deeper principles of this reality, they are shown circumstances that allow them to realize the error, in this life and, if they don’t “get it” here, in other lives.

    That is what Seth was speaking of. Once you “get it” — i.e. your consciousness, or soul if you prefer, transforms in such a way that the behavior in question won’t be repeated, then you no longer need to see (or will resonate with) the negative circumstances.

     

    Morgan: So that makes sense, but it seems to me that when a mass situation is going on – say a government is falling apart – as an individual I can’t just “learn” and then have it go away suddenly.

    Muse: This is where you need to understand the way collective events like a governmental problem, intersect with individual reality and events.

    It is easy to think there is some kind of 1:1 mapping between the two, so that if things go bad collectively they will go bad personally. That is simply not true. This is like the game of “cancer statistics.” You can say 1 in 3 people may get cancer, but that does not say whether any particular individual will get cancer.

    And due to your extremely faulty cultural relationship with the idea of “randomness” – you take any kind of statistics about the group as an indicator of the conditions for each of you personally. It is by the very act of buying into those statistics, and thinking they make a statement about you and your experience, that you then put yourself under their control.

    Human consciousness is far more powerful than any statistic. However, when you let your consciousness fall prey to the idea that some kind of global condition must mean that you will experience something negative as a result, then you resonate with negative experiences, i.e. opening your susceptibility to them.

    Another way of putting this is that the world is a complex and extremely diverse place. Though a trend may occur, that does not mean that the trend affects everyone equally. Depending on its nature, some will be little affected, and others very affected. Now, again, societally you think that this is random, but it is not.

    You may think we’re speaking of something magical that happens. While there are things going on that you may consider “magical” from your current limited level of understanding, there is also a more mundane explanation.

    That is the nature of your decisions and actions. Take the example of an economic depression. There are many cases of businesses that “defy the odds” to grow and thrive even in the worst economic conditions. It is not just “luck.” It is those businesses deciding to not give in to desperation, and instead pivoting to serving people in ways that make sense in those economic conditions. It is not easy to ignore all the noise out there, but people still do need goods and services in a depression, so a business can either choose to find ways to provide those, or it can give up. The giving up is what most do, because they look around and say “it’s impossible.” So to your question of learning, those mass conditions may provide you with just what you need to grow and learn, as in your (Morgan’s) case. It has motivated you to do more, to speak up more, to be more authentic about work like this that you are doing, in a time when this kind of work is so much needed.

    The outer conditions will affect you to the extent needed for this evolutionary growth to occur. Once it has really taken hold in your consciousness, the outer conditions will no longer worry you or affect you in the same way that they were. It is not that those conditions will suddenly go away in the mass sense, that will have to wait until there is enough of a mass consciousness shift. Instead, it means it just won’t affect you personally in the same way. It’s not that you’ll be completely ignorant or untouched by what’s going on, but you’ll be able to relate to what’s going on from a more rational and measured standpoint, rather than reacting to it in the more emotional ways it has affected you — and many others. You are already making big progress in this.

    Morgan: Yes, I do have many more times where I feel like, “whatever, this sht is going down, nothing I can do about it but sit here and watch, and get some of my writing and thinking out meanwhile.” It is so much more a relief than the heavy feelings I had so much of prior.*

    There’s a lot more for me to ask in what you’ve written, but I’ll keep it brief to wrap up for today. That is, will the person causing all this pain for everyone experience “karma” in the same way you’re describing?

    Muse: Yes, and possibly worse. If a soul persists over lifetimes, not learning, not evolving in positive ways, it starts to fall out of integrity with itself. It will start tearing itself apart from the inside. This is not an external punishment, this is more like an iceberg that drifts into warmer waters, and just can’t maintain its integrity within those waters. A soul that has not been able to evolve, existing within a positive universe where the conditions are towards learning and growth, cannot maintain its integrity, and will eventually disintegrate.

    This is not predestined. At any time, during any lifetime, the soul can decide to change its ways, before it reaches that point of no return. Some souls, however, never choose that, and do indeed receive the ultimate “karmic consequences.”

    Morgan: Thank you. This was very illuminating. In one of the next writings, I want to discuss how our mass consciousness got to this point where we need such negativity in order to evolve.

    Muse: We look forward to it. Be well, and show love and compassion to all those beings that you can, including yourselves.

     

    **This article was hand-written, with light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.

  • How to deal with it when things are going haywire?

    Conversations with The Muse

    Morgan: As I was having a late-night worry session, three words came to me: hope, love, detachment. It just seems like things are going haywire, and I wasn’t sure what to do with all that energy of worry. Those words, hope, love, detachment: how do they help, when it seems like it’s going down the tubes? How can I hope when it seems there isn’t much hope?

    Muse: Haywire. Crooked. Unexpected. It’s in the words here that the problem is. You expect that things that happened before will keep happening – at least to a large degree – and now things are going in seemingly “unexpected” directions that you didn’t expect or want.

    The ego has difficulty with this. The ego likes things to be predictable, because predictable is the stock and trade of ego. It’s currency is the logic of past experience, extended into the future, even if the past experience is not so great, it would rather be right — in the sense that it is correctly predicting where things will go and thus feeling safe — than it would like to have something unexpected, even if that’s much better than what it predicts.
    This is the definition of attachment: it is wanting to always be able to stay safe within the confines of the ego’s box-of-logic it has created for itself. Yet the real world does not comply.

    In “normal” times, you had a lot of “predictably bad” things going on. You knew that if you were going to interact with a bureaucracy — say the DMV just to pick on one — it would probably not be very efficient or pleasant. But at least it was predictable. Expected. Normal.

    In the “normal” times, hope is thinking it will sway to the positive side of the predictable.
    Now it seems like all bets are off. Things are not predictable. What is going on with your government is unexpected, and doesn’t fit any of the “boxes of logic” you grew up with. It is that fundamental unpredictability that is so frustrating and even terrifying to the ego.

    Hope seems impossible because there is no “predictable” to go to the positive side of.

    You can spin off into all those doom scenarios, or you can put your head in the sand and just ignore it all, hoping it will go away, narrowing your scope to just what’s in front of you.

    These will not make it go away. It is not healthy to pump all that news – which is often rooted in fear – into your mind. Yet completely ignoring what is going on is also not healthy, because then you can’t take responsibility for your part in what’s going on.

    Morgan: What do you mean by “my part”? It seems like what’s going on is far beyond the scope of anything I have any control over, so how can I possibly “take responsibility” for any of it?

    Muse: This is one of the primary fallacies of the human race at this time. You think that the “mental atmosphere” you create does not matter, since (most of) you think that it’s just some biochemical reaction isolated to your brain box that has no impact or reach beyond that.

    YOU ARE WRONG.

    Your mental atmosphere seeps out into the world. If it is a negative, fear laden atmosphere, you pollute the world around you with it.

    In gardening, if you plant a seed and hope it will grow into a beautiful plant, but all the time it is trying to grow, you are adding toxins to the soil, it’s not likely to grow. That would be obvious to any gardener.

    Why is it not obvious to you in the same way, that if you pollute your mental environment with fear, doubt, hate, and reactionary anger, that nothing good will be able to grow from that?

    This is how the universe is. Your mental atmosphere matters. It has a profound effect on which way things will go, and whether you are able to grow something positive, or whether it all just ends up being stunted, withered, and dying.

    And the only way you will get what you truly want – more hope, love, peace, is by growing it, nurturing it. These cannot come from reaction to all the stuff that is going on. Just imagine trying to “reactively” grow a garden when you get hungry. It’s impossible. You have to proactively grow a garden, before you get hungry.

    Now is the time to nurture the seedlings of what you want to see in the future. It is not easy, but if you want better, it is essential. It is paying attention to the mental atmosphere, and that is your part, each person’s part to play, if you want something positive to grow.

    This is where detachment is so critical. In its opposite, attachment, you have a strong “need” to have things happen according to your box-of-logic that you’ve contrived over what should happen — even if it’s far from what actually is happening. When there’s a disconnect between the “should happen” and the “is happening,” the dissonance that results prevents you from creating a positive mental atmosphere.

    This dissonance creates negative, reactive emotions, and they pollute the environment, stunting the growth of anything positive. In the gardening analogy, you become so focused on trying to get rid of weeds, that you fail to tend to your crop, so nothing good grows. This is what attachment does.

    Detachment is letting go. Detachment is knowing that your logic is never going to be adequate to capture what is happening or what is going to happen, and so letting go of trying. Detachment is bringing your focus back to what matters, which is creating the positive environment for growing what you want.

    It is not about ignoring problems or issues, or covering them up with some kind of fake positive thinking. It is instead, acknowledging the problems, and taking the responsibility to create something positive – in spite of the problems.

    It is, if necessary, taking action to manage the problem where and when there is something you can do about it. It is also knowing when you can do nothing about the problem, and in that case just focusing on nurturing that better mental atmosphere. That requires detachment.

    Now as you try to grow something more positive, hope is a weak mental atmosphere. Do you fertilize your garden with “hope?”

    Love is much more powerful. If you lovingly tend to your plants, they will grow better. The love is not only a much more positive mental atmosphere, it also leads to you taking actions that are resonant with that love, that make it concretely more likely the plants will grow.

    The same is true for your ideas of what you want in the world. If you want more peace, for example, lovingly tend to your idea, your vision, and then let your actions stem from that.

    This is how something that seems small, tiny, and perhaps impossible right now can be grown into something great and tall over time.

     

    **This article was hand-written, with summary by AI, and light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.

  • Coming out of the closet isn’t easy

    Coming out of the closet isn’t easy

    It involves sharing something with the world that you think could result in rejection by those you most care about and by your community. Something that will had the potential for massive upheaval in your life.

    I’ve gone through this process a couple of times in my life, and it was gut-wrenchingly scary to “put it all on the line” and share my true self with the world.

    You might think I’d had enough of these experiences. You might think I wouldn’t want any more of that fear and stress in my life.

    But unusual times require unusual measures

    In this case, I’ve kept a part of myself hidden for most of my life, but NOW it is aching to be set free – if not for my benefit, then for the benefit of others who are looking for meaning and a new way forward in these unsettling times.

    Coming out of this particular closet could mean losing the approval of many friends and family members.

    Even harder is knowing that my late father would not have approved if he were still alive.

    Coming out of this closet feels scarier than in 2003 when I came out as transgender —back when most people didn’t even know what being trans meant.

    Coming out of this closet feels scarier than in 2010 when I quit my tenured faculty job —as a way of exposing my anger at the system.

    This closet of safety and fear is the “spiritual closet”—my personal knowing that the materialistic view of the world that is embraced by the scientists and rational people who make up my family and community doesn’t tell the whole story.

    Now before anyone goes off and thinks I’ve joined some cult or “found religion”, I HAVE NOT.

    This is a very personal and practical form of spirituality, one that is all about tuning into a deeper core of who I am.

    You could use the word “soul” for that, but since that term carries too much religious baggage, I avoid it. Instead, I use “Core”—a term that describes what I see as a consciousness connected to my sense of self that extends beyond this physical body and the workings of this brain.

    While I’ve shared this with a few whom I’ve been closer to, I have not shared this publicly before.

    Why would I suddenly decide to “come out of the spiritual closet?”

    Because I think the world needs it right now.

    My journey was practical and transformative. Through it, I discovered greater insight, clarity, and purpose than I had known during my atheist years.

    My journey did not stem from encountering any particular spiritual teachings—at least not in the first decade or so.

    Instead, my journey began with philosophical and scientific questioning—asking big questions like “What is consciousness?” and “What is going on with quantum mechanics?” and “How do these two phenomena relate to each other?”

    From those musings, my own thinking emerged that there must be something deeper going on – it’s the only way I could find to explain many of these big mysteries.

    It is a spirituality free from religious indoctrination. I have never studied religious texts like the Bible, the Quran, or The Book of Mormon, as I’ve always resisted their “this is the absolute truth—believe it” approach.

    It is a spirituality that rejects the need for external authorities claiming to be the sole voice of God—a God often limited by human imagination. A spirit or consciousness capable of creating a universe (or multiverse) with countless stars—so vast it would take over 100 billion years to count them at a trillion per year—cannot be confined to simplistic human constructs like white maleness or any other limited framework.

    It is a spirituality derived from open-minded rational and scientific thinking and personal experimentation, wedded to a desire for improvement in both my own lot, and that of my fellow humans.

    This perspective offers insights into our current situation that I wouldn’t have had otherwise

    From my old perspective — the Atheist perspective — what’s going on now is simply a semi-linear (and sometimes chaotic) progression from one random event to another. In this perspective, the particular pickle we find ourselves in, not only in the US but with all sorts of issues being felt worldwide, is just the unfortunate byproduct of many random rolls of the dice that have ended up to be not in our favor.

    From my newer more spiritual perspective, what’s going on in the world is a big ass invitation for the human race to either step up and evolve to the next, more enlightened stage, or in attempting to return to return to old ways (like fascism), likely wiping ourselves out.

    From this view, we, the species, are on an evolutionary journey toward potential understanding and enlightenment

    This is not a biological evolution, it is a spiritual and mental evolution.

    Just like biological evolution, success on this journey is not guaranteed.

    We may fail to grasp the essential lessons we need to learn. Without enough people evolving their understanding in time, we won’t have the collective wisdom to buffer ourselves against the difficulties we face.

    The true rewards of living come from the very act of trying, regardless of whether we achieve our goals.

    It is through our attempts to make a difference that we find purpose and meaning.

    It is time for me to step up and contribute my part, advocating for a broader and better vision of humanity’s potential.

    It is time to dream and imagine something better, and then work patiently towards its fruition.

    In seeing ourselves for the miracle that we are, we can stop devaluing our humanity

    We’ve let a few rotten apples spoil our view of ourselves, so many of us see ourselves as all being rotten, as all caving into our base animalistic desires to dominate, fight, and be greedy. Yet that is not the “truth,” any more than is sampling a few people in one fancy neighborhood about what their favorite car is.

    Instead of letting the bad examples of humanity be just what they are – some people whose choices are made without any higher perspective involved – we diminish ourselves in guilt and shame for being human. More than once I’ve heard well-educated people share the view that we are a blight and that we shouldn’t exist.

    That very attitude of self-shame for being human makes us all the more likely to ruin ourselves, and in the process, likely ruin our planet. That kind of self-shame, that ignorance of the miracles that we each are, makes us unable to see any bigger picture, or act from inspiration and imagination to improve things, if only one tiny step at a time.

    As more and more people get lost in the mire of “doom,” we thereby accelerate towards the very thing that is our worst fear

    Emotions like shame, guilt, blame, and hate block us from accessing the inspiration, clarity, and compassion we need to solve the very problems that trigger these difficult feelings in the first place.

    It is truly miraculous that we exist here in this vast universe, able to contemplate big questions, to love and to hate. Most of us don’t appreciate that miracle, because seeing only the surface of what’s going on makes it all seem so petty, greedy, and purposeless. It is only by going deeper, wider, and higher in our perspective that a different picture can emerge.

    It is not a picture of one political party versus the other. It is not a picture of one environmental or social challenge versus the other. It is a much bigger picture of a species that is presented with these challenges so that we can either choose to shift and grow – or fail to do so and perhaps not return from that choice. It sounds scary, but in the big picture, it’s no scarier than the reptile who may have lept out of a tree towards another tree, spreading its arms with nascent wing-like protrusions in hopes the extra lift would get it across the gap.

    Those “wing-like protrusions” in our case are the higher perspective and spirituality that can emerge when we abandon the religious dogmas of either old-school religion and of materialist science.
    These nascent wings are the perspective of seeing that we’re truly all in this together, and that by fighting and hating the other side – no matter how well justified based on their behavior, we’re only contributing to more hate. The wings are fragile, and cannot persist in an environment of hate and fear.

    There are many who actively resist this evolution, and spread hate and fear, because they’d rather cling to their outdated notions. They’d rather avoid evolution, because they believe, according to their dogma, that they’ve found The Truth, and are sticking to it at any cost.

    Letting go of dogmas and “Truths” — with their attendant fears of any change — and instead engaging in this evolution that is gently inviting us all forward, has many benefits. Not only for the potential to solve some of our very big problems, but to solve some of our personal problems, here and now.

    Those benefits include more clarity, more perspective, more compassion, and more fun.

    Engaging these benefits has helped me get through the major ups and downs of the entrepreneurial journey – a much more difficult journey than getting funding and tenure was at UNC-Chapel Hill.

    It has helped me work towards being a better person, even though I have still much more work to do on that front.

    It has helped me get through very difficult times stemming from major health issues.

    It has helped me help others whom I’ve had the braveness to share my ideas with.

    Why wouldn’t I want to share that with my friends and fellow humans?

    Fear. Simply put, many on the scientific and academic side are not so open-minded as they like to think. And they often use the same tools that many religions have used to get non-believers in line: rejection, ridicule, and ostracism. I feared being ostracized.
    There’s also fear of being lumped in with a group that I find particularly negative.

    In our town, there are people who, during crowded times, show up on a busy corner and hand out Bibles to anyone who will take them. Not only that, they’ll try to engage anyone who pauses for a moment, into a conversation that is very one-sided, preaching at people about sin and redemption. My kids laugh at the “crazy” that represents, and I understand it.

    Having grown up in Utah while avoiding being LDS (mormon), I was exposed to many efforts by well-meaning people to PUSH a religion I didn’t want on me. In part, I avoided it because I knew inside that I was different, and I knew that that religion would tell me that I am “wrong” for simply being who I am and feeling the way I do. I very strongly believe that no spirituality that tells people that they are inherently wrong for just being who they are represents any kind of “Truth” in the universal sense.
    And I have feared being lumped into a group with those people that teach us we are all sinners, that we are all imperfect in the eyes of the creator unless we follow the very specific rules they have laid out for us in the name of their notion of God. I don’t want any association with that, but I feared in speaking of spirituality, I’d be immediately lumped in with that.

    I can no longer let that stop me. The stakes are too high. This is not a push, this is a sharing of my journey and perspective.

    From that perspective, I believe “wrong” or “right” is an in-the-moment thing, based on the choices we make about whether to work towards higher good for all, or whether we choose to do the opposite, like trying to use hate and fear to repress and control other humans.

    I share in my “coming out” as an invitation to think, to question, to consider – but not to accept some particular dogma about how you must be in order to be considered worthy or valid. That goes for any dogma, whether it’s traditionally religious dogma or scientific materialistic dogma.

    I am overcoming my fear, in part because my fear for the future if I don’t try to do something has become greater than the fear of the ridicule and ostracism

    I believe there’s not much left to lose, because the guardrails of the work that I’ve been doing for 15 years with researchers is being torn apart by the changes happening in the US government and science funding right now.

    The guardrails of our society, the rules I grew up with for how it was proper to behave, are falling apart. This is happening worldwide. While many people are sleepwalking toward the cliff—hoping this is just another “temporary” setback that will resolve itself with a gentle landing—those who don’t wake up to our reality are, I fear, the most likely to fall over the edge.

    I am going to do what I can, to share more of my story, and the perspectives I’ve found along the way, in hopes of both learning through that sharing, and also inspiring others that things don’t have to be so dire, that there is hope, and that our if we engage our imagination in combination with a higher perspective, we may just open the path to a much better world for all – even if it takes decades or centuries for us to get there.

    I think it’s worth sharing.

  • Life As a Mirror

    Life As a Mirror

    Do you feel like your experiences keep repeating themselves? The same problems … over and over … cycling back around to the same stuff?!

    A tourist attraction shows us how life can sometimes be like a frustrating hall of mirrors… but it doesn’t have to be.

  • Embracing the “Inner Asshole”

    Embracing the “Inner Asshole”

    Administrative roadblocks, aggressive colleagues, and depressing news: things like these are rampant. The question is, how should we deal with them? Many of us often choose to take the “safe” route of staying cool-headed and rational. That’s what we’ve been taught to do for most of our academic lives. But who does that “cool-headedness” really benefit? Does it really have the positive effect we’ve been promised when we respond more like the level-headed Spock from Star Trek than the hot-headed Kirk? The answer you pick will have a major impact on your long-term success and happiness, and it’s not the most obvious.

    I wrote this piece for the Research Success Alliance, a group of researchers my team works with on grant writing and career success. I decided to share it with my followers… In it, I examine the often unintended side effects that occur when we try to always “keep a lid on it.”

     

    For anyone who’s gone through a Western education, you’ve likely been taught that one thing is important: Objectivity. Cold, hard, rationality, devoid of emotion.

    We are taught that in order to be a “good” person, a “right” person, and a “smart” person, we must turn off all that messy emotional crap.

    “Facts and data are where it’s at. Facts tell us the truth. Facts don’t lie. Facts produce logic that is infallible! Yay and hallelujah for facts!”

    And, so, the other thing, poor emotion – is left behind to rot. Worthless. Useless. Meaningless. It can’t be quantified. It can’t readily be measured, teased apart, and analyzed. It does not adhere to the oh-so-grand logic of mathematics and computers. It can go in unpredictable directions and do things that don’t make sense.

    So, we are taught, “Get that emotion out of there! Shut it down! Put a lid on it!It is useless, especially if you want to be a great scientist or researcher.”

    The vilification of emotion is similar to what happened with alcohol in the 1920’s leading to its (temporary) prohibition.

     

    Vilifying alcohol doesn’t make it go away, it makes it go underground

    One of the failed experiments in US history was a constitutional amendment that banned the transport and sale of alcohol. At the time this 18th amendment was added to the US constitution, alcohol was roundly vilified in many segments of society.

    The result of that attempt to “put a lid on alcohol” is written in history books for all to behold: Alcohol went underground. Alcohol turned violent. Alcohol started massive gang wars. Alcohol of suspect quality and safety was produced by thousands of illegal distilleries that dotted the landscape.

    It got so bad that pretty quickly we managed to overturn that constitutional amendment and make alcohol legal again. It is the only constitutional amendment in 2.5 centuries of U.S. history to have the distinction of being repealed.

     

    REPRESSION leads to unintended consequences

    I’m not saying that alcohol is “good.” (In many situations, it isn’t). I’m not saying that alcohol is “bad” (a fine glass of red wine with dinner can be wonderful – and I’ll arm wrestle anyone who says otherwise!)

    Alcohol just is. It is good and bad. It is both, yet it is neither. But trying to repress it’s use? The facts of history show that it doesn’t work, at least not in our Western culture. There are always unintended consequences.

     

    The same goes for emotion

    We can try to repress emotion. We can try to bottle it up. We can try to pretend that we are nothing but robots who can become devoid of that messy emotional stuff, only to operate from pure logic and rationality to be the “perfect” person.

    But just like alcohol, the emotion doesn’t go away, it goes underground. It is still there, hiding, waiting, repressed. We have desires, fears, excitements, and sadnesses that well up within us, no matter how “logical” we pretend to be. The exceptions to this are psychopaths. They are people who experience no emotional connection to other beings (though they may learn to act as if they do). They do things like killing people out of “curiosity.”

    If you’re not a psychopath, you likely have (lots of) emotion, no matter how well-buried. The question is then what to do with all that emotion. Since most of us have been trained to be rational, intelligent, and objective, we often don’t deal with this part very effectively.

     

    The pot boileth over…then explodes

    As an example of what happens with all the buried emotion, imagine a kettle with some water that’s heating on the stove. At some point, the water in that kettle will reach a boiling point, letting off copious amounts of steam.

    If we keep the lid on the kettle, pressure will build and build until there will be an explosion.

    On the other hand, if we take the lid off sometimes, to let some steam escape, it will just dissipate into harmless vapor.

    So on the one hand, we have a deadly situation involving shrapnel when we try to close off the steam and keep it bottled up. On the other hand, if we let off the steam, then it is far less dangerous.

     

    Emotion is like that steam kettle

    Repressed desires. Repressed fears. Repressed expression. Pretended Stoicism.

    In my family, which was very scientifically-inclined, emotion was something we were never encouraged to show. Emotion was something to be afraid of. Emotion made us “crazy.”

    This led to cultivating the belief that only rationality could win the day, and lead us on the golden path to the promised land of “truth.”

    Or so I believed.

    Unfortunately, all of my schooling amplified these foolish notions. It got worse the higher in school I went. While as an undergraduate student in college, there were moments where emotion was still allowed and occasionally discussed, by the time I was in graduate school?

    Forget it.

    Emotion was only for the weak and the irrational. Emotion had no place in this “serious business” of decoding the human genome.

     

    And because I adopted that common viewpoint that emotion is “bad,” I became a much more mediocre researcher.

    By striving to shut away all that emotion within me, I also shut away the excitement of doing science. I shut away the curiosity and the intrigue.

    Worse, just like that pressure boiler, I’d have occasional explosions. These happened not only in graduate school, but in my post-doctoral position, and worse, once I was in a faculty job. If someone were to do a forensic analysis of my past emails, they’d find a history of me sounding perfectly reasonable, compliant, and amenable, punctuated by episodes of YELLING.

    On any topic where there was strong emotion(space for my lab, funding, or difficult collaborations, for example), I would start out by repressing it to try to seem perfectly logical and reasonable.

    (And, in the process of being perfectly “reasonable” I’d often get walked all over by whomever I was interacting with on that subject). Eventually, the repressed emotions from me being walked all over would boil up. They would put increasing pressure on the lid I’d put on them, until the explosion would occur.

    A flurry of emails would go out. Angry, finger-pointing emails. LOUD emails.

    People would often be stunned by the switch from “perfectly reasonable Morgan, who can be walked all over” into “asshole Morgan, who fights back with vehemence.”

     

    Being an “Occasional Asshole” didn’t get me what I wanted…

    For example, in my almost 10 years at UNC Chapel Hill, I never had what I would consider a reasonable amount of quality lab space commensurate with the level of funding I brought in. I went through cycles of repressed anger about it, with occasional boil-over or explosions, time and time again.

     

    But the space situation never changed.

    It never changed because the “asshole” Morgan, who was willing to advocate for her and her team’s interests simply because she desired “BETTER” (one of those “irrational” emotions) – was so inconsistent. She would only show up in those occasional explosions, and those were so intermittent that, despite leaving her and others around her often shell-shocked, it wasn’t a formula for actually getting things changed.

     

    The episodes got so bad that in one of them, I sent an email to the department chair that said, “I QUIT.”

    Even though I had a cushy, tenured job with a great salary and a lab chock-full of hard working staff, I threw it all away. That was the mother of all explosions in my life.

    Sadly, I still didn’t learn the lesson.

    I carried this same tendency into my endeavors after leaving UNC, including my business and my interactions while at Boise State University. At Boise State, at one point I sent in a resignation (i.e. the “asshole” Morgan coming out to protect me related to frustrations I had there), and a short while later, I sent in an apology and attempted to un-resign (i.e. the “compliant, rational” Morgan who wanted to appease and please).

     

    However, neither quitting nor un-quitting solved the underlying issues of my dissatisfaction with my career at the time.

    A few months after the Quit/Un-Quit Scenario,I quit again. That was the next explosion, resulting from several months of pent-up frustration. I’m sure I left people baffled by that whole affair, and to this day, I feel much chagrin about it. (But unfortunately, un-doing is only possible on computers).

    Meanwhile I built a fairly thriving business of helping researchers. I have helped many achieve astounding successes in both grants and life, like my client Stefanie who recently received her 4th grant in a row as a second year faculty member, yet who has great work-life balance. (A note: Stefanie’s success was due to her unusually hard work at changing herself. Most people do not get such astounding results because they don’t do the difficult, deep work required).

     

    So what in the heck is the problem?

    Why did I say “fairly thriving business” when it has positive effects like Stefanie’s transformation?

    I know that I can reach more people to help them. I have facilitated other similar transformations for people, but there are SO many people out there still struggling with all the things Stefanie did, and more. And, because of my own repressed fear of being seen as a “pushy marketer” (aka an “asshole”), I don’t reach many of those struggling people who may want help.

    The trouble is the same conflict between the “wanting to be nice and liked” Morgan versus the “let’s make a difference” Morgan. Causing change and making a difference always angers some people. It is inevitable. That means these two versions of me are at odds.

    On the one hand, I have a deep fear of being seen as that  “pushy asshole” – and so I minimize my presence by avoiding sending out emails, posting on the blog, etc.

    On the other hand, that repressed fear eventually builds up pressure in my life and business. The pressures include:

    • The pressure of feeling like I’m not moving forward or expanding.
    • The financial pressure of keeping a team running and salaried
    • The pressure of feeling stagnant, without expanding our reach.
    • The pressure of knowing I can and want to be doing better
    • The pressure of not being able to do the travel with my family that I want to, because we always seem to be “on a tight budget”

     

    So, the pressures build up to explosions.

    I still have the explosions to let off the bottled-up steam, but sometime about five years ago, their nature changed. I used to have a level of consciousness where I was in “victim-hood” and would blame whatever bad sh*t was happening on others. I would blame it on a bureaucrat, a committee, or a collaborator. I would point fingers at stupid politicians for the stuff going on in the world, or at reviewers for not “getting” my work. It was easy to point the blame and make it all “their” fault that I was experiencing whatever crappy situation.

    However, in my path of personal development, I came to realize that blaming others for what I’m  experiencing is dis-empowering. Our choices truly do create our reality for us. So if we want a different reality, we have to make different choices. Pointing fingers at others and playing the victim is incredibly dis-empowering. So I chose to stop doing that.

     

    Instead, I started going inward

    These days when things go bad, I go inward. I take responsibility for it. I realize that whatever I’m experiencing is ultimately a product of my choices.This reaction is different than angrily lashing out at others.

    Instead, it has often amounted to angrily lashing inward.

    In my “explosions” now, I am often profoundly angry at myself, at life, and at the universe for creating a situation where I have to still sometimes struggle with money, or with such a limited reach.

    I’m honestly not sure that this has been more healthy than my previous tendency to lash outward at whomever was the “blame recipient du jour.” It is no more empowering to blame oneself than to blame someone else for the woes being experienced.

    The problem is that there’s a need for blame in the first place.

     

    The need for blame comes from the pent-up emotion that leads to an explosion of some kind

    It’s become abundantly clear that “lashing out inward” in such explosions is no more a healthy alternative to lashing outward than e-cigarettes are to tobacco. Maybe a bit better, maybe not.

    I have tried nearly every personal development strategy I could find. While they have positively transformed my life in so many ways, none of them solved this fundamental issue of these pent-up emotions leading to the seeming bi-polar cycle of being compliant, reasonable, and rational, alternating with moments of angst exploding outward and/or inward.

    The fundamental issue has been this repressed emotion, and the results that repression produces. What the heck is that thing I’ve been repressing?

    I have a desire to reach more people. I have a desire to live an even better life. I have a desire to see progress for my kids, and my team. I have a strong desire to do my small part in creating a better world. These desires are not “rational” goals. If you dig deeply, they can’t be clearly justified as any better than another choice. There is no objective rule of the universe that says one must help other people or make the world a better place. From an objective and rational standpoint, it seems pointless: if the universe will end in an ultimate “heat death,” then why worry about it?

    Worse, the desire to create changealways ends up pissing some people off. No matter what it is, there will always be people who resist anything new, different, or unusual. And in my family, which was very much based on always acting calm, rational, and logical, these messy things like desiring something bigor dealing with the ramifications such as pissing people offweren’t dealt with. All that messy emotional stuff was to be kept well-hidden under a guise of being rational. Pissing people off was definitely frowned upon, as was creating any kind of big disturbance.

    So here we have another emotion coming into play: the fear of pissing people off, and the resulting consequences of that. But here’s the thing – I didn’t want to admit that I had that fear. After all, I have done many things in my life that others consider pretty fearless, so I had this self image that I couldn’t possibly have such a simple fear. Therefore, I repressed it, until it would explode out in some kind of drama.

     

    Changing only when forced to by an explosion: Not a recipe for consistent progress.

    I would walk around with this fear, unintentionally playing small to not piss people off, until things got really bad in my own life and work. There would be some kind of event that would bring things to a head. Once things got to this point, I’d finallymake some changes, as the fear of things falling apart overwhelmed the fear of pissing people off, and so I’d finally do something.

    For example, if there were bills to be paid, and no money to pay them, then “being an asshole” and holding myself or employees more accountable would make sense. In a “do or die” situation, the asshole-ness could be justified “rationally.”I’d make some changes with a kind of willpower and determination that I didn’t normally have access to.

    Then as soon as the difficulty passed, I’d go back to “normal” which means repression: playing the “nice Morgan” and often getting walked over while I watched my dreams slowly die. During these times, I’d even feel deep guilt about the “asshole-ness” I’d acted upon in previous times when I moved things forward.

     

    Of course, none of the self-incrimination fixed the problem. It made it worse.

    All that negative self talk only served one purpose: to make me feel like there was something fundamentally wrong with me that kept creating these situations. And, feeling that there was something wrong with me led to a corresponding feeling that I don’t deserve more success than I’ve had. That led to further repression of my desires to expand my reach and impact, “because obviously I don’t deserve it, I’m too weird and flakey, and sometimes an asshole too!”

    Maybe this cycle is familiar to you. Or maybe you just go for it, and play big without worrying about how others see you.Either way, let me tell you from personal experience, it sucks. It is worth dealing with.

     

    Dealing with it comes at a cost.

    What is that cost? The cost is allowing – and even embracing all that messy emotional stuff lying under the surface. In other words, we must embrace our humanity, rather than continuing to aspire to be androids.  It includes embracing the “bad” with the good.

    You can’t just embrace the happy, loving, joyous parts, while repressing all the scared, angry, and selfish parts.

    It doesn’t work that way. As I’ve attempted to illustrate with these stories, anytime you’re repressing any emotional parts of yourself, you will eventually get a boil-over.

    It may be a health problem.

    It may be a career problem.

    It may be a relationship blow-up.

    But rest assured, if you’re not embracing all of it, an explosion of some kind is on its way. And unlike a controlled release, an explosion can create collateral damage.

     

    How to create the controlled release: Embrace the Inner Asshole/Bitch, and then transcend it.

    Your fears may be different than mine. But at least for many women, and some men, there is a big fear of being seen as an asshole or bitch. There is a fear of being seen as selfish, greedy, or pushy. There is a fear of being seen as not being “nice” and “amenable” at all times.

    Believe me, as someone who has lived as both man and woman, the social pressures that amplify these fears are much greater for women than for men. However, that’s not to trivialize their effect on men: I have had many male clients that also become paralyzed by them.

    In any case, I’m using this “fear of being seen as an asshole or bitch” as an example to illustrate a point that applies to any frequently repressed emotion, especially the fear.

    How can you measure whether this is affecting you? By considering a simple question: is there a part of you that feels like you could be experiencing more out of life than you currently are? Does it seem like something keeps holding you back from doing greater things, but you’re not sure what?If so, it is likely you’ve got some of this repressed emotion that’s behind it.

     

    So, how do we deal with that?

    The first principle is what not to do: we often can’t just talk it down rationally. These emotions we feel like an “inner child.” If you’ve had kids or worked with kids, you know what I mean. If a kid has a fear of getting on a rollercoaster, it is difficult if not impossible to talk that kid into getting on with rationality. It doesn’t matter how many times you say “rollercoasters are safer than the car ride we took to get here.” I’ve had just such a conversation with one of my daughters, and it led me nowhere. Her fear won out and she didn’t go on that ride.

    Trying to talk emotion down through reason alone often just gets it more entrenched than ever, whether dealing with a kid, your own emotional “inner child”, or with someone else’s. Trying to talk condescendingly to that part of yourself can often serve to amplify the very same emotional needs you’re trying to “talk down off the ledge.” It further builds up steam towards the next explosion. With my fear being seen as an asshole/bitch as an example, I haven’t been able to just reason it away. I’ve tried, and that has not worked, and the fear has slowly grown.

    In other words, by trying to invalidate the emotions, we amplify them.

    This is not to say that rational thinking should be abandoned; no. It is just saying that when dealing with deep inner emotions, it’s not a very useful tool.

     

    What’s the alternative?

    I’ve been experimenting with an idea that comes from the philosophy of Ken Wilbur, which is  “Include and Transcend.” The idea is that as we further develop our own consciousness to higher levels, rather than trying to push away and marginalize past tendencies or problems, we embrace and include them so that we can ultimately transcend them.

    An example from the popular culture that embodies this concept is Batman.

     

    Batman Embraced and Transcended

    As a kid, Bruce Wayne who would later become Batman, was terrified of bats. It was a deep and paralyzing fear for him. After letting that and many other fears paralyze him for years, he finally decided to embrace them. He went into a bat cave and exposed himself to thousands of bats. He had a brief mental breakdown while bats flew all around him, clearly causing tremendous fear and turmoil. But ultimately, he realized that he was still okay. He realized that while his fear of bats may never fully go away, he could live with it. He could include it and transcend it.

    And so he became the Batman, to represent his transcendence of the fear bats represented. He transcended it only by embracing and including it, and became one of the most famous superheros of all time.

    Perhaps what makes Batman so alluring is that he is a real human who has real fears and foibles like the rest of us, but has managed to transcend them enough to go out and do good in the (fictional) world.

     

    Embracing the Asshole…

    I recently took an inventory, and discovered that I still have lots of various fears and doubts at this emotional level to embrace and transcend if I want to move forward, but one of the biggest ones is this fear of being seen as an asshole. If I want to overcome it, I have to embrace it.

    What that means is embracing the fears of:

    • being pushy
    • bothering people
    • holding my staff accountable, or even holding myself accountable
    • having great boundaries with family
    • offending my rationally-oriented brother and mom
    • turning off a potential future client
    • turning off an existing client

    and a lot more….

     

    Relief from embracing Asshole-ness?

    Honestly, now that I’m “embracing the asshole” it is quite a relief. See, if I weren’t embracing the asshole, I couldn’t have written this. I know there is someone out there who will be offended by this post.Maybe the use of the word “asshole” will trigger someone, if nothing else. That’s just how the world is. With over 7.6 billion people to offend, someone will always be happy to take the offended position.

    I’ve tried many times to rationally talk myself into this very same point of view. I’ve told myself quotes about how “you can’t do anything important without offending someone” – or “if you’ve offended someone, it means you’re doing something worthwhile.”

    Those kinds of seemingly rational statements have occasionally helped in the short term, but have no brought any kind of lasting change.

    This “embracing the asshole” is different. It feels lasting. It feels like an acknowledgment of who I really am. It acknowledges that I am not perfect nor will ever be. It acknowledges that there will be people upset with some of what I do. It relieves me of all the worry and self judgment that goes with that.

    If I can just let myself “be the asshole,”  and embrace the surrounding fear about that, I can have more positive impact in the world. I can do better for myself, my staff, my clients, and the world at large.

    So, ironically, by embracing the asshole, I’m also embracing making more of a difference. I’m embracing more positive impact.

    That feels GOOD. After all those years of trying to fight off and run from being seen as an asshole, it is a profound relief.

     

    Another example: Embracing Arrogance

    I have a client who I worked with recently on a similar issue. But in her case, the big fear was of being seen as arrogant. The emotional baggage was around the concept of “who do you think you are to go out and do these crazy/big/ambitious things?!?” She grew up in a family and culture that told people to mostly play small, keep their heads down, work hard, and not make a ruckus. Yet this person has very big ambitions, and has already accomplished quite a bit. The more she accomplishes, it seems the more this repressed fear affects her. She’ll have moments of “going for it” interspersed with times of “who the hell do I think I am” where she’ll shrink back and withdraw. It reminds me of my own cycle, just expressed in a different way.

    So in a recent interaction where this fear was clearly holding her back, I said: “What if you embrace your arrogance?” I used the example of Steve Jobs. I asked “do you think Steve Jobs could have accomplished what he did without arrogance?” (The answer is hell no). It absolutely requires at least some arrogance to go out and do something big in the world.

    The opposite of arrogance is timidity. Nobody ever accomplished big things by being timid. While I’m not advocating that my client go out and be arrogant all the time, I am advocating that she embrace the part of her that is already arrogant, i.e. the part of her that has big ambitions, and is willing to act to turn those into reality. Even if some people will surely be offended by it.

     

    It is about embracing that part of us that already exists, not becoming becoming a total asshole or arrogant jerk.

    My goal is not to become a total asshole towards everyone, no. My goal is to embrace that ambitious, smart part of me that wants to change the world. It is embracing that part that sometimes gets impatient with foolish, stupid, and mediocre human behavior. It is embracing that part of me that myself or others may sometimes label as an asshole.

    That’s an important distinction. There’s a big difference between “becoming a total asshole” versus “embracing the asshole part of me that’s already there.” One is trying to become intentionally obnoxious and asinine. The other is just embracing the part that is a side effect of who we already are and the desires we have to move forward in life. It is embracing the part that other people might not like because it’s not acting the way they want it to act(becausethey too are being selfishand wanting everyone else to act in a way they see as right, true, and correct).

    This is the what I encouraged my client to do by embracing the arrogant part of her that already exists. I did not encourage her to just go out and be arrogant to everyone she meets to intentionally cause a stir.

     

    What is the fear or emotion you have most repressed?

    This is where it is often important to get help from someone outside of your head. While I eventually identified my own fear of being seen as an asshole, it has taken me over 10 years of serious self-development work – and also working with many others – to come to this conclusion.

    None of us – no matter how smart nor how introspective we are – are very good at seeing such things inside of ourselves. Nearly all of us have blind spots. Worse, seeking help on such things from family members or friends is often the worst way to get honest introspection. These people we’re close to in our lives like to uphold a certain image of who we are, just like we do to ourselves. Therefore, they often have the blinders just as much as we do about what’s really going on underneath the hood.

    This is something we work with researchers on in the Research Success Alliance*. We often observe that when someone is struggling with a problem like (lack of) grant funding, it is not only due to the inability to write killer proposals. It often goes deeper than that, and ties into issues like certain repressed fears that lead to various kinds of self-sabotoge. We love nothing more than helping to identify these patterns so that people can get un-blocked and move forward powerfully.

    * To find out more about the Research Success Alliance (RSA), stay tuned!

     

     

    Dr. Morgan Giddings is creator of programs and courses like Grant Dynamo, Grant Foundry, and Fearless Creators – all designed to help research doctors and scientists reduce overwhelm and frustration while increasing career satisfaction.

    Her newest program, The Research Success Alliance combines grant training and help with tackling the underlying stresses of every day life in academia.

  • 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.

     

     

  • Why Artificial Intelligence Won’t Take Over the World

    Why Artificial Intelligence Won’t Take Over the World

    

    Any “free agent” that operates in our world must have an objective, or it is not going to get very far.

    This is true of people. If you ever observe people who “go in circles” or are “stuck” in life – it’s because they have no clear vision/objective. Many people give up on their dreams and objectives in their first few decades of life, and wander aimlessly after that.

    However, you’ll also notice that such people are often relatively “benign” – i.e. they may contribute to CO2 release by driving around to aimless jobs and activities, and they may over consume orange-food-colored chips and lite beer… but without an objective, they’re not actively trying to hurt anyone. If hurting someone does happen, it’s almost always an occasional reaction to something they don’t like, and it’s usually focused on just a few people close to that person. This is not the stuff of “taking over the world.”

    No. To understand the idea of AI taking over the world, we have to look at the movers and shakers, the people with a plan and objective.

    These are the people who have a true impact – be it positive or negative. That’s because they are clear on where they are headed, and they marshal resources to get there.

    For AI to have any chance of “taking over” as it’s been portrayed in many blockbuster movies, there would have to be a clear plan and objective “to take over.” It is certainly possible that an advanced AI could have this as an objective, and marshal resources towards that end. It may even make some progress in taking over parts of the world. However, the idea that it would take over the world misses the boat.

    If the technology sufficient to build one such AI exists, then that means more can (and likely will) be developed soon thereafter. There is no reason that distinct AI’s developed by different people (or other AI’s) in distinct contexts would all have the same objective. It’s just like people. There are people who’ve sometimes attempted to take over the world with nefarious objectives (such as Hitler) – but fortunately, there were other people with other objectives that pushed back and stopped it. It is silly to think that there would be one “unified goal” for ALL AI of “taking over the world.” Certainly, any responsible AI developer will bake into their AI cake clear objectives that are for the good of humanity, not to its detriment.

    In one popular movie series (which I enjoyed very much), a military defense network takes over and launches nukes to get rid of humanity. Yet a “network” is actually a collection of hundreds or thousands of machines, each with different goals, programming, and firewalls. The idea that these would all join together in one unified objective of destroying humanity, before anyone – or any other AI – could stop them, is farfetched.

    Think of it like a friends network. Even if you hatch some kind of evil scheme to take over the world, will all your friends automatically agree and join you? It’s unlikely. This is exactly why I’m not a big conspiracy theorist: any sufficiently powerful conspiracy would have to make sure that everyone agrees and doesn’t sabotage its goals. In the real world, that kind of consensus is extraordinarily hard to achieve – especially in the Internet age.

    While nothing is truly impossible, the scenario in which AI actually takes over the world is very remote.

    Now, there are a few hidden lessons in this for any person wanting to live a better life. They are:

    1. Operating without a clear goal or objective in life is a recipe for “failure.” Many people give up on their big plans and ambitions at some point in life, and just start living reactively – day to day – with no real purpose. We all must have purpose in order to thrive or to have any impact.
    2. Many people get so frustrated that there are other people in the world who have different opinions and perspectives. This post was written during an election season in the USA, when many people are decrying the “other side” and how awful they are. Yet it is exactly this diversity of opinion that prevents the world from being taken over by men like Hitler. All the diversity makes the world a truly glorious place. If you truly embrace the diversity of thought and opinion, it makes life a lot more pleasant than continually fighting the “other side” to “prove” who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s okay if you’re into that kind of thing, but it sure does waste a lot of time and energy – and it never really improves the world. The people who improve the world are those who follow point #1 above and accomplish great things.

    Is it your time to thrive? Get a clear purpose and embrace the diversity of opinion that exists – even those who might seem to stand in your way.

    

  • How to Have the best Holidays ever…

    How to Have the best Holidays ever…

    The Holidays are supposed to be a time of giving thanks and enjoying family – but for many of us they turn into a nightmare.

    In this article, I discuss what makes the holidays difficult, and give you steps you can implement for a much better result.

    A lot of us go through the holiday season feeling like we should be enjoying the cheer and merriment, but we aren’t. Many of us feel just the opposite… sad, disengaged, overwhelmed.  It is a frustrating contradiction that’s increasingly common.

    Apart from lacking daylight and cold temps in the Northern Hemisphere, there are a couple things that happen during the holidays that make them difficult to get through.

    Family Overdose

    The first is that we are exposed to a lot more family than we usually are in our day to day life. For many of us this involves visiting with parents and/or in-laws – and sometimes extended family too.

    In a perfect universe, most of us want to enjoy this time with family, but….  we often end up frustrated and dispirited by patterns of interaction we have established with these people. As much as we want the patterns to go away,  we keep re-living them over and over again. Each time we visit, we’re confronted with the same thing, over and over again… and it can seem like Groundhog Day.

    You might get drawn into political debates with your dad or uncle who is a Rush Limbaugh fan and you’re most definitely not…

    Or it could be that your mom likes to tell you what to do, and you feel like she’s treating you as a child….

    Whatever those patterns are, they disrupt our energy and make the Holidays much harder to handle. They take us away from our “Core” and get us into reactive ego-land, where frustration and angst are par for the course.

    Once we’re in reactive ego-land, it’s often hard to recover back into “sanity” until we get away from these people.

    Worse still, if we start feeling cranky or dispirited, we may do or say something we regret. That can feed into guilt, and guess what that guilt does? It reinforces the whole negative cycle we’re already in. It produces more negativity and guilt.

    We feel like we should be “better” as a child/parent/neice/nephew than we are being, and that makes us feel negative and unworthy.

    Basically, it sucks. We’ll talk about some remedies in a moment, but first let’s look at the next thing that most of us face during the Holidays.

    Overwhelm in the Holidays

    This second thing is a basic sense of overwhelm. For my academic clients, many look to the Holidays as a time to get away from teaching and committee duties, and to both recover energy, but also to make progress on things like grant proposals.

    Yet what often ends up happening is that we start out feeling great to finally have some free time, and soon, we’re overwhelmed. By the end of the Holidays, we’ll look back and often feel guilty that we accomplished so little.

    How does that happen? The Holidays are overwhelming. What may have been a nice, calm time a century ago has turned into a big shopping and visiting fest. If you go to the malls, they are overrun with people. If you go to the airports, they are overrun with people. Traffic is crazy. Expectations are crazier.

    Since most of us feel obliged to spend time with and buy gifts for the people in our lives, we are thrust into that craziness on a regular basis through the travel and the shopping.

    While I’m a girl who loves a good sale from time to time, wading through all the options and ads is often too much. It’s too much information for anyone to deal with – especially if you’ve got a complex career and home life too.

    On top of that there are physiological factors. With the cold weather and diminished sunshine (in Northern Hemisphere) we often have less energy to get out, and are more prone to getting sick. If you have kids, they love to bring home viruses that affect the whole family.

    On top of that, for academics, the Holidays often cap off an intense Semester. This ends in a bout of grading, finishing up un-done work, followed by trying to move things forward before the next semester starts.

    For our human biology – which evolved on the quiet savannas of Africa – this kind of constant push and information overload is not something we are equipped to deal with for more than a short span of time.

    It affects us mentally, and that can spill over into physical effects as well. This is a time of year when fatigue-like symptoms often appear.

    At the time of year when we feel like we’re supposed to be “cheerful” and “energetic,” instead we just end up feeling “tired” and “run down.”

    That sucks, doesn’t it?

    While solving this is not a “quick fix,” here are some pointers to get you started:

    1. Avoid unrealistic expectations. Be aware of unrealistic expectations for yourself and others, and avoid them like the flu. Most of us go into the Holidays thinking that we’ll get work done, get travel done, get shopping done, get cooking done, get time with family spent, and on the list goes. It’s like we have to be a combination of Martha Stewart, Albert Einstein, and Gandhi all wrapped into one little bundle of joyous energy. Talk about unrealistic! We are all human, and no matter whether we’re in great physical shape or not, we all have limits. Many of us ignore those limits when we’re thinking about the future, and this is especially bad when it comes to the Holidays. So it’s important to really scale back our expectations for ourselves during this time.
    2. Sleep more. No matter how you slice it, the Holidays are going to be more stressful for most people than during “normal” times. Dealing with stress requires additional sleep – at least if you want to stay healthy. So, give yourself permission to sleep more. Don’t see it as “wasting time” but rather, see it as “investing time in well being.”
    3. Exercise. It’s way too easy to feel “stuck” inside due to the inclement weather. Yet getting outdoors is an essential mood-lifting tool in your arsenal. Even a 15 minute walk can make a big difference. If you live where it’s cold and icy, bundle up nice and warm and get out! (Some people consider me weird, but I love getting out on my bike this time of year when it’s sub-freezing. There aren’t many other bikers out, so I feel like I have the roads and trails to myself.)
    4. Avoid the big sales at the mall and crowded places like that. Like I said, I love a good sale. But years ago I swore to myself that I’d avoid Black Friday outings, and I am very glad that I did. The question to ask is this: how much does it cost you in terms of stress and frustration to save a few dollars when you go out shopping with the big crowds? For most of us, it’s simply not worth it. This is especially true for those of us who are wired to be “internal” – i.e. who don’t like spending lots of time around lots of people. Going against our own inner nature can really end up being de-energizing, and the effect can last for days.
    5. Avoid guilt. We are a society of wannabe superheros. Many of us have totally unrealistic expectations for ourselves about what we should and can accomplish. Since none of us end up ever meeting our expectations for our own “superhero” status, we then end up feeling guilt over it. And, this kind of guilt can be amplified by interactions with those people in our lives who like to use guilt as a tool to manipulate us. Yet all the guilt just saps our energy and well-being. And worse, sometimes the guilt turns into shame about our own abilities, and that’s even worse.

    Now, one thing we didn’t address here is how you deal with your relationships with other people – especially when it comes to (sometimes pushy or intrusive) family members.

    This is a big subject, so instead of trying to cover it here, I’ve put together a brand new training “Managing your relationships: how to take control of both your personal and working relationships so they don’t drive you crazy.”

    It will help you during the Holidays, but also applies to any other time of year.

    To join me on the training (which will be on Tuesday December 8 at 4 pm MT/6 pm ET), you can use this fancy button:
    Click Here to Save Your Spot

     

  • Run and Cry

    Have you ever been in a situation – such as visiting with relatives (or dealing with collaborators, or etc) – where your head is ready to explode?

    I’m sure you have.

    Here’s the thing: It’s nothing wrong with them. They are who they are. You are who you are. Nobody is going to fundamentally change.

    This is true even when they’re good people who are well intentioned (as the relatives I’m currently visiting are). This is true when they are not so good and not so well intentioned.

    It is universal. It has nothing to do with the rightness or the wrongness of anyone involved. Yet so often we tend to make it about that. “They’re wrong and I’m right.” It makes your ego feel good but never solves the situation. Yes, I tried that for many years. Nothing changed.

    In this conflict between “who they are” and “who you are,” generally what ends up happening is one of two things:

    1. You “suck it up” and try to adapt. That strategy is one I’ve been familiar with many times in the past. All too many times I would subsume who I am and what I want for myself to the needs of others. Relatives, family, collaborators, kids. While I’m a strong personality, I also have a very strong streak of wanting to please others. When those came into conflict, the “wanting to please others” would often (usually) win.
    2. You make them “wrong.” I’ve done this too, usually when I reached my breaking point in any situation. I would just get to a point where I couldn’t handle “playing the good girl” anymore, and so I would decide that “they” (whoever they happened to be at the moment) were “wrong.” Once I brought that attitude into the relationship, things went downhill…. fast. Worse, it’s easy to feel guilty after doing this, and then make yourself “wrong.” So you end up with a whole buttload of “making people wrong” and nobody wins.

    There is another way.

    In my work with Core Analysis – i.e. using intuitive methods to get to the bottom of who we are at our Core – I found out that I’m highly “internal.” (It wasn’t a surprise). What this means is that my relationship with myself is  the most important relationship. I need lots of alone time to think, to process, and to work on where I’m at.

    For external people, this is bizarre. External people benefit greatly from being in relationship to other people, and not as much from “going inside.”

    I can be by myself for days in a row – and be VERY happy with it! Someone who’s external (like one of my daughters) would not do well with that.

    The conflict mounts

    When I go visit relatives with my family, it’s full-on. It’s round the clock people, people, and more people. It doesn’t matter whether they’re the nicest people in the world – being an internal person, I get burnt out. I get exhausted. I get frustrated.

    The point here is that each of us is somewhere on that internal-external spectrum (and similarly, there are a number of other spectrums) – and quite often when we’re in a situation – not just with relatives, but in any human situation – attempting the “suck it up” solution in the name of getting along – we end up exhausted. That often leads to the next phase, which is the making them wrong phase. Like I said, it’s all downhill.

    The pressure release

    This morning I was just about at my breaking point. I was going to snap at somebody or start the downhill trend. So I decided to go out for a run. Despite the cloudy day, I wore my sunglasses. I could feel tears coming on.

    In the past, I wouldn’t have let myself cry in public (even with sunglasses!). I would have still been in the “suck it up” mode, trying to adapt to a societal norm that says it’s weird to be out in public, running along a suburban street, with tears running down your face. Well screw that!

    So here I was, running down the tree-lined streets in gray, windy Madison, Wisconsin, letting the tears of angst and frustration flow. After I got over the first minute or so of “feeling like a freak” (a feeling that’s quite normal for me by now), I felt an incredible release.

    I ran faster. I let more tears flow. I ran up a hill at a speed faster than I have in over a year. And by now, the frustration was spent. There were no more tears.

    Why don’t we take care of ourselves?

    Social norms.

    Most of us are so caught up in “fitting in” that we subsume our health, our mental well being, and even our spiritual well being for the sake of avoiding negative judgements or conflict. (Or, alternatively, just cynically avoiding all such situations where we might be exposed to this kind of challenge).

    It’s c-r-a-z-y.

    Why do we do that? I for one am sick of doing that. I won’t do it anymore.

    That’s why I found myself running down that street with tears flowing – and ending up feeling better than I have in weeks!

    That one emotional release that I allowed for myself – in public – was better than meditating every day (which I do), journaling (which I do), regular exercise (which I do).

    Nobody should try to “fit in”

    The bottom line is that we are all hardwired – at our deepest Core – for certain tendencies. Most of us end up quite often very far out of alignment with that, and it’s usually in situations with other people. When we end up chronically out of alignment, it results in health problems. It results in relationship problems. It results in anxiety and bitterness. It ends up in unhealthy anger and blame (or worse, victimization). Some people spend their whole lives in these states. What a waste!

    We are not here having this human experience to try to “meld ourselves to fit in.” No, we are not.

    We are here to live our lives authentically self-expressed. We are here to align with who we are and look at the magic that happens when we do that.

    It’s a shame that society often gives us just the opposite message: suck it up, fit in, do your homework, work hard, be nice, get good grades, and all that bullshit.

    It really is bullshit, and I for one won’t do it anymore. My goal is to be able to have relationships with people where I don’t go down the route of “fitting in” and/or “making them wrong” – but instead, simply be myself – even if that ends up with me running on a public street with tears running down my face, looking like a madwoman.

    I am shedding the notion that fitting in is useful or healthy. (It’s not).

    My challenge to you

    My challenge to you is to join me. I challenge you to look at your life, identifying areas where you subsume your personality in order to “fit in” or “avoid conflict.”

    Then ask yourself this question: “what is the cost to me of continuing to do that?”

    Once you realize the true costs, I think you may decide that you want to stop doing that. Because for most of us, those true costs are simply too great.

    Let me know how it goes!

  • 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.