Looking Back, Looking Forward, Being Present

Seven years ago at this time, I wrote about the process I go through at the end of each year, which I call “Closing the year”. A lot of people wrote in saying how much they appreciated the process, so I reprinted it the following year, and the year after that… Taking a few minutes to go through this powerful process is a gift you can give yourself today.

Now

It’s December, and soon it will be the end of 2011. The New Year is a time when people often look back at what they’ve accomplished and learned, and look forward to the year ahead. Once I’ve written this tip and sent a few emails, I’m going to go through a process I do every year, a process I thought I’d share with you.

The process is what I call “Closing the year”, and it’s a simple ritual that helps me to really enjoy my time off, and to go into the new year with maximum energy. I suggest that you do it when you finish work for 2011. I spend 5 or 10 minutes doing each of the following steps:

1) Brainstorm all the things you’ve accomplished this year, the memorable experiences you’ve had, and everything you’re grateful for. Spend a few minutes making a list of everything you’ve managed to achieve. Use a pen & paper for maximum effect (this process is most effective when you actually do it J)

You might be surprised at just how much you’ve accomplished in twelve months (if you are saying “I haven’t accomplished anything”, I’d challenge you – at the very least, you have survived. I expect that as you think about it, you’ll realise that you’ve accomplished much more than that!)

2) Next, brainstorm the things you no longer want in your life; make a list of the things you’d like to leave behind.

We all have things in our lives that are past their ‘use by’ date. Physical objects, unhelpful habits, limiting beliefs, thought patterns that hurt, people we no longer wish to spend time with, etc.

3) Think about your dreams for the future. What do you want to bring into your life? What experiences would you like to enjoy? What new skills would you like to learn? What would you like to do? How would you like to be? Make notes, draw a picture or speak into a tape recorder to help you remember your dreams.

Spend as long as you like dreaming about the future you desire. If you don’t know what you want, you can ask yourself the ‘miracle question’: “If there were a miracle in the night, and when you woke up tomorrow, everything in your life was exactly the way you’d like it to be, how would you know there’d been a miracle? What would you see, feel and hear that would let you know a miracle had taken place?

4) Brainstorm the things you’d like to bring into your life. What are the things, experiences, qualities, and ways of being you’d like to experience more of in the future. Make a list of these.

These can be quite general: Do you want to spend more time with your family? Get fitter? Enjoy earning more money? Spend more time in the present moment? List the things you’d like to attract into your life.

5) Make a list of your goals for the year ahead. What would you like to accomplish? What would you like to learn? What would you like to get? Who would you like to meet?

There are all sorts of claims made about the power of goal setting, but I’m going to spare you the rhetoric. Instead, I’ll make a blindingly obvious point: you have a much better chance of hitting a target when you know what it is. Human neurology is goal-seeking, so get your unconscious on your side, and make a list of what you’d like to achieve in 2012. (For more about setting goals, go to the Salad archive – http://www.saladltd.co.uk/archive.htm – Tips 1 & 2 are particular faves of mine).

6) Read through the your list of accomplishments and congratulate yourself for them. Put this list (#1) on your left. Read through the list of things you’d like to leave behind. Forgive yourself for any mistakes you feel you’ve made, and put this list (#2) on your left also. Take the materials relating to your dreams (#3), and place them in front of you. Review the list of things you’d like to attract into your life, and put this list (#4) on your right. Read through your goals for the year ahead, then put this list (#5) on your right also (if you are left-handed, lists 1 & 2 on your right and 4 & 5 on your left).

7) Sit quietly for a few minutes. Imagine all the good feelings, thoughts and energies from your accomplishments coming into your body (you can visualise this as a stream of light, sparkling dust, or anything else you imagine). Then become aware of any of your energy that’s tied up in the things you want to let go of, and see it returning to your body. Look to your dreams, attractions and goals: any of your energy that is tied up in those (eg. in wishing or wanting) can also return to you in the present moment. Notice how it’s possible for you to feel even better about those dreams and goals when your energy is in the present.

A great deal of people’s awareness is often wrapped up in wishes for the future, or memories of the past. It’s great to have access to these dreams and memories, but it’s also good to have our energy available to us in the present moment.

Allow yourself to be fully present in this moment. Become aware of the fact that all your accomplishments and activities of the past year were accomplished in an earlier present. Become aware of the fact that all your future accomplishments and experiences will take place in a future present. Really experience how it feels to be fully present (For more tips on getting into the present moment, see http://www.saladltd.co.uk/nlp_tip_55.htm ).

Have an inspired year,

To your enlightened success!

Your friend

Jamie

The visions for future scenarios are an unashamedly Utopian outline of some of the new possibilities that a widespread realisation of the Inside-Out nature of reality could bring into being.

Reality Check: I’ve noticed that when I listen to a futurist talk optimistically about the future, they often seem naïve, unrealistic and pollyannaish. The projections below may seem that way to you when you read them, so I’d like to establish a few basic assumptions about Awakened Humanity:

a) Awakened Humanity has realised the Inside-Out nature of life
Awakened Humanity has woken up to the Inside-Out nature of life; we live from deeper feelings, and respond intelligently to the signals of our psychological immune system. We still recognise the importance of the material aspects of life. Food, water and shelter matter, the environment is a priority, and people still enjoy the pleasures of the senses. It’s just that we’re no longer confusing the outer world with the source of our wellbeing and OK-ness.

b) Awakened Humanity recognises innate wellbeing
Awakened Humanity recognises innate wellbeing; we all know that every human being has perfect mental health within them. However… that doesn’t mean that everyone is exhibiting that mental health. No matter how awakened humanity gets, there may still be some people (for instance) who have to be locked up for the safety of everyone else. It may still be utterly prudent to have police and armed forces. We will do what makes sense at the time, but it’s what’s behind what we do that matters; the recognition of innate wellbeing and the Inside-Out understanding of life.

c) Awakened Humanity is guided by wisdom
Awakened Humanity is guided by wisdom; wisdom is the trump card. The same intelligence that stops you putting your hand into an open flame will ensure that we don’t allow our awakened view of each other to obscure our common sense. People who are in a low quality of mind (LQoM) can do crazy, dangerous things. There’s a difference between recognising their innate wellbeing, and letting them do harm to themselves and others. Wisdom is alive and responsive to every situation, so we can act prudently when we allow it to guide us.

d) Creating, progressing and evolving is our nature
One of the fears people often express when they first encounter the Inside-Out understanding of life goes something like this: “If I really knew that my happiness, security and wellbeing comes from within me, I’d never be motivated to do anything.” While the carrot and stick make sense in the Outside-In illusion, it’s not the case when we’re living from an Inside-Out understanding. Awakened Humanity knows that our wellbeing comes from within, so we’re willing to follow our inspiration and live the adventure of life to the full. Just as it’s a child’s nature to explore, learn and grow, it’s Awakened Humanity’s nature to keep creating, progressing and evolving.

The three principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought are explanatory; they explain the experience of living. Just as gravity only works one way (water doesn’t flow uphill and lead weights don’t float), our perceptual experience of life only works one way: Inside-Out. The outline below attempts to point to the role that the Outside-In misunderstanding plays in some of the world’s most pressing problems, and to what becomes possible as we wake up to our true nature, and the Inside-Out nature of life.

To read the rest of this chapter click here to get access – free to readers of my Weekly Tip

You can also follow us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/effortlessevolution

To your enlightened success!

Your friend

Jamie

Jamie Smart

CEO

jamie.smart@saladltd.co.uk

"Everything that can be invented has been invented…"

A popular myth credits the 1899 commissioner of the US patent office with this quaintly absurd statement. And while there’s no evidence that he ever actually said it, the last hundred years have been peppered with shortsighted predictions asserting what wouldn’t be useful, wouldn’t be feasible or wouldn’t be possible. All the way from the first telephone to the world wide web, as each technological revolution is on the verge of dawning, someone goes on record to say it’s not going to happen. Then it happens.

The increasing speed of technological innovation means we don’t have to wait long before we get to laugh at the change-averse forecasts of yesterday. But would our own predictions have been any more accurate? It’s easy to be wise after the fact, but we human beings tend to be rather conservative when predicting the future.

When I was a boy, I loved reading Dick Tracy comics. I thought it would be amazing to have a wrist-radio like Dick’s, able to contact people wherever I was. If someone had told me then that, as an adult, I would carry a tiny handheld device that could be used to make phone-calls, play movies, take photos and accurately pinpoint my geographic location, I doubt I would have believed them.

We tend to think that tomorrow will be pretty much like today. And while that may be the case three weeks from now, it’s definitely not going to be the case three years, three decades or three centuries from now.

The geocentric world
In the geocentric world, everyone “knew” they were at the centre of the universe; that the Sun travelled around the Earth. The idea of a Sun-centred world was heresy. The Inquisition forced Galileo to recant his heliocentric model and placed him under house arrest for the rest of his life.

The pre-Semmelweis world
In the pre-Semmelweis world, it was “well known” that illnesses were caused by miasmas and atmospheres. The idea that disease was being spread by “tiny invisible creatures” (germs and bacteria) would have seemed ridiculous. The proposition that something as simple as hand-washing could save countless lives was not only perceived as foolish and simplistic; it was also taken as an insult (the doctors of the day were gentlemen, and took offence at the suggestion that they had dirty hands.)

The pre-aviation world
In the pre-aviation world, the idea of flying machines seemed impossible;  people “knew” that humans would never be able to fly. Orville Wright himself stated that "No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris." Could he and his contemporaries even have begun to imagine the hundreds of thousands of flights per year coming in and out of Heathrow Airport alone?

The pre-penicillin world
In the pre-penicillin world, death from infection was the tragic norm. People “knew” that certain illnesses meant death. The possibility of today’s world, where routine infections can be handled with a simple prescription would have seemed unrealistically optimistic.

The pre-Internet world
In the pre-Internet world, how many of the things we take for granted today would have seemed fanciful?

• Daily contact with dozens or even hundreds of friends on a site with over 800 million active users (Facebook).

• The ability to select and book flights and holidays in minutes, a task that used to be so complex and time-consuming it was outsourced to travel agents (Expedia).

• A free, searchable encyclopaedia with over 20 million articles created collaboratively, and with over 100,000 active contributors (Wikipedia).

• A free online phone service offering video-conferencing, and serving over 500 million users (Skype).

• The ability to search billions of pages of content to find the information you want in seconds, ordered by relevance (Google).

• a searchable online bookshop with over 10 million books and countless other products (Amazon).

• a searchable video-library with countless millions of videos shared by its users and viewed by millions of people daily (YouTube)

• The ability to send a message to any of the over 2 billion people on the planet who have a unique address (email), or to one of the 5 billion people who have a unique number (mobile phones).

These amazing technologies have been integrated into our businesses, our communications media and our lives. But if you could time-travel and describe today’s reality to a person on August 6, 1991 (the date the world-wide-web was first made publicly available), it would likely seem unrealistic, impractical and fantastical to them.

Humanity’s accomplishments are truly extraordinary. We’ve solved many of the problems that have dogged us for millenia. Our technological powers are enormous, and accelerating rapidly. Billions of human beings are more tangibly connected to one another than ever before. We’ve achieved goals of dizzying complexity, such as organ transplants, manned space flight, and mapping the human genome.

So why is it that many of our other problems seem to have been so difficult to solve until now? Challenges such as…

• Pollution and environmental damage
• War and terrorism
• Addiction and substance abuse
• Divorce and relationship issues
• Poverty and other forms of social inequality
• Unemployment
• and many more..

The reason these problems have been so “solution-resistant” is because they each have their roots in a factor which has been largely invisible until now. These problems are grounded in an ancient superstition that persists to this day: The Outside-In misunderstanding of reality.

The Outside-In misunderstanding doesn’t just give rise to these problems; it also clouds our perception when we try to solve them.

The Outside-In superstition is a toxic virus that has infected humanity throughout recorded history. But every virus has a shelf-life…

To read the rest of this chapter click here to get access – free to readers of my Weekly Tip

You can also follow us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/effortlessevolution

To your enlightened success!

Your friend

Jamie

Jamie Smart

CEO

jamie.smart@saladltd.co.uk

"Now let me ask you something I think we all know the answer to; the test is rigged, isn’t it? You programmed it to be un-winnable…"

In a pivotal scene from the 2009 film, Star Trek, a young James T Kirk (played by Chris Pine) is defending himself against the charge of cheating on the Kobayashi Maru test (a highly realistic battle simulation designed to gauge the trainee’s response to a no-win scenario). Kirk is the first person ever to beat the test, but Spock (the test’s designer) has accused him of breaking the rules. Kirk’s defence is that the test itself is a cheat; that if a game has been designed to be un-winnable, you don’t have to play by the rules of the game.

So how is this relevant?

Here’s how: The outside-in misunderstanding turns life into an un-winnable game. The “I’ll be happy when…” and “I couldn’t be happy if…” viruses promise us that happiness, security and wellbeing are waiting for us “out there” in the distance or in the future. Whether it’s five years, five miles or five seconds away, the outside-in illusion tells us that our heart’s desire is just out of reach, just out there at the end of our thinking. But it’s not true and it never has been. That’s not how it works.

When we look to the outside world for our wellbeing, we’re looking in the wrong direction. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the “there” of material possessions or personal accomplishments, self-improvement or spirituality. The moment we think there’s somewhere to get to, and that “there” is better than “here”, we’ve stepped out of our sanity and into an un-winnable game.

So what does it mean to step out of the un-winnable game, and back into our sanity? What does it mean to live a life you love, regardless of the ups and downs of life?

The search is over

Back in 2005, before I learned about the Three Principles, I used to run a workshop called The Art of Being. At the start of the first day, as people began to get comfortable, I would say something like this:

“You know that thing that you’ve been searching for… your heart’s desire? The thing you’ve been seeking for all these years, on all those courses, in all those books? I’d like to invite you to open to the possibility that you can have it today… Have it here… Have it now…”

The moment they heard this, people would start shifting uncomfortably in their seats, and I would mimic their internal dialogue, anxiously saying:

“I really do want it. And I’m really looking forward to having it. But today’s a bit soon. See, I’ve got a busy month, and rather a lot on my mind. But I was thinking, a few weeks from now is looking really good. It’s what I desire most in the world, so I definitely want it, but if you could just arrange things so it arrives next month, that’ll give me time to do what I need to do. Next month will be just perfect.”

Whether you call it the little mind, the ego or personal thinking, there’s one thing it can’t stand: the knowledge that the life you desire is already here; that you don’t need anything else to be OK; that you can live a life you love, starting now. Of course, I understood that intellectually back in 2005, but I didn’t have an embodied understanding of it. So I kept on seeking. Kept on searching. Until one day I realised something for myself…

The search is over.

As you continue deepening your understanding of the Three Principles, you’ll see that searching and seeking is inconsistent with the knowledge that you already have everything you need within you; that searching and seeking is just another flavour of the un-winnable game. The very feeling we’ve been interpreting as “there’s something I need to search for” is in fact a signal that our thinking has become temporarily untrustworthy; that we’re looking in the wrong direction.

The moment we stop looking outside ourselves for that which can only be found within, our whole world changes. As your worldview shifts from outside-in to inside-out, it’s inevitable that you’ll love your life more and more, whatever form it takes.

Reality Check: Am I saying that understanding these Principles will transform the circumstances of a person’s life into something wonderful? No. I’m saying that when a person sees life from a high quality of mind, they have a deeper, more profound experience of life, whatever their circumstances.

Of course, when a person is living in deeper feelings and allowing themselves to be guided by wisdom, the circumstances of their lives often change too, but there’s the paradox: Once you realise your wellbeing isn’t dependant on your circumstances, it gets easier to change your circumstances.

Example: Two people doing the same kind of work have lost their jobs and are both applying for the same position. Both are equally well-qualified for the new post. The only difference between the two is that one has an embodied understanding of the Three Principles and the other doesn’t. When they go to the job interview, the contrast is huge. One is feeling peaceful and relaxed while the other is feeling anxious and insecure. One listens deeply to the interviewer, and starts feeling connected to them, while the other feels self-conscious and isolated. Who do you think is more likely to get the job? The person who feels peaceful, present and secure in themselves? Or the one who’s feeling anxious, insecure and needy? It’s a no-brainer.

Life responds in a similar way. When we are living in a deeper feeling, being guided by wisdom, life is free to unfold beautifully with each step we take. There will still be ups and downs; that’s part of being human. But we’ve evolved to enjoy life. Our psychological immune system exists to guide us into a natural, enjoyable experience of life. Out natural response to life is love and appreciation, when there’s nothing else in the way. And what gets in the way? Personal thinking!

What follows is a list of gentle reminders to help you stay on track, living a life you love. They are not rules or “how tos”, but they may serve to spark an insight or an a-ha that makes a difference for you at one time or another.

More importantly, they are not something you need to do, practice, or even remember. Everything you need is already right there within you; there’s nothing you need to do to have a beautiful life.

To read the rest of this chapter click here to get access – free to readers of my Weekly Tip

You can also follow us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/effortlessevolution

To your enlightened success!

Your friend

Jamie

Jamie Smart

CEO

jamie.smart@saladltd.co.uk

“Space is not empty. It is full, a plenum as opposed to a vacuum, and is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The universe is not separate from this cosmic sea of energy.” – David Bohm

“Make me one with everything…”

The punchline to the old joke about the Buddhist and the hotdog vendor casts a light on one life’s most persistent illusions. It can certainly look like we’re separate from each other, and from the natural world, but we’re not. Separation is an illusion. In reality, we are all connected, with one another and with the rest of the universe. We are all one, all part of this undivided wholeness.

We don’t need anyone or anything to “make us” one with everything. We already are one with everything; we always have been and we always will be.

However…

Our habitual thinking can give us the experience of separation.

As our consciousness drops, we get caught up in our personal thinking and we experience separation from the whole. The lower our consciousness falls, the more separate we feel.

An example of the separation-illusion taken to an extreme is the person suffering from clinical paranoia, seeing enemies “out to get them” wherever they look. A sense of loneliness, isolation or hostility are characteristics of many mental illnesses, but we all feel that way to some degree when we’re lost in the illusion of our habitual, personal thinking.

As our consciousness rises, our personal thinking falls away and we experience connection and oneness. The higher our consciousness goes, the greater the sense of oneness we experience.

A common example of the experience of oneness is when two people are deeply in love. Their personal thinking drops away, and they experience a sense of oneness and connection, with the other person and often with life in general (“It seems like all the colours are brighter, and the world is a wonderful place!”). We blame it on the object of our affection (“You complete me”), but the feelings of love, oneness and connection are our natural state when our personal thinking isn’t getting in the way.

We can experience the illusion of separation, but the reality is oneness, wholeness, unity.

One body, many labels
A few years ago, I was receiving physiotherapy for a shoulder injury. As I looked around the treatment room, I noticed a wall chart with a figure showing the beauty and complexity of human musculature. Each of the numerous muscles in the body were drawn in detail and meticulously labelled. I told the physiotherapist how amazing I thought the intricate array of muscles was, and she said something that stopped me in my tracks…

“It’s just one muscle”, she said. She went on to explain that, for practical purposes, we label individual muscles, but in reality the human musculature is a single muscle, grown uninterruptedly from a single ovum. Everything in the human body grows in connection to the whole, in relationship to the rest of the body.

As human beings, our ability to dissect, categorise and label the world can be incredibly useful. We can view the world as being made up of different parts, acting upon one another, but we make a mistake when we think that the world “actually is” made up of the different elements we identify. The world is more like the muscles in our body, a single entity that we can perceive as a set of parts, for practical purposes. We divide up the world, then we forget we’ve done it, and we start to experience the world as though it “actually is” made up of the different parts we identified.

We can experience the illusion of parts, but the reality is oneness, wholeness, unity.

Wholeness and the Implicate Order

In his extraordinary book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, quantum physicist David Bohm offers a model describing the nature of reality. He explains that the truth of reality is wholeness; that the world of form we experience – which he calls the explicate order – emerges from (and is contained within) a deeper, formless reality – the implicate order.

Bohm uses the metaphor of the vortices (whirlpools and eddies) in a flowing river. While the vortices may appear to be relatively stable, “existing” over an extended period of time at a specific location, they have no existence separate to that of the flowing river.

Just as a wave has no existence separate from the ocean, the material world of form (the explicate order) in all its glory has no existence separate to the formless (the implicate order). In this passage from the book, Bohm describes the relationship between the implicate and explicate orders…

“In the enfolded [implicate] order, determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are abstracted as forms derived from the deeper order. These ordinary notions in fact appear in what is called the “explicate” or “unfolded” order, which is a special and distinguished form contained within the general totality of all the implicate orders.”

It’s not important to understand this (admittedly dense) passage immediately. What’s important is to realise that one of the world’s greatest physicists saw an understanding of the oneness behind life as essential for science and humanity to continue evolving.

Reality Check: You may be thinking “So what? Until you mentioned it, I always assumed I was separate from everyone and everything, and that was fine with me. How is that even an issue? This ‘oneness’ business is all well and good, but it’s solving something that wasn’t a problem in the first place!”

Here’s how: The illusion of separateness is at the heart of most human suffering…

If we think we live in an Outside-in world, it follows that the deeper feelings we desire (peace, love, wellbeing, security etc) will either be available or not, depending on our external circumstances. It makes sense that we would orient our lives towards securing the circumstances that provide our deeper feelings and avoiding the circumstances that threaten them. Life in the Outside-in world is about maximising acquisition and minimising loss. Of course, what we’re aiming to acquire and avoid losing can vary:

• Love and connection in the form of other people
• Security in the form of money, work and wealth
• Status and approval in the form of achievement and position
• Happiness in the form of a wide variety of things and circumstances

The whole spectrum of “I’ll be happy when…” and “I couldn’t be happy if…” is rooted in the idea of separation; of a world “out there”, external and distant in space, time or both that somehow contains our wellbeing.

The Outside-in superstition turns the world outside us into a set of objects to be manipulated and controlled. It throws us into a world of separation and turns us into unwitting victims of its compelling logic

To read the rest of this chapter click here to get access – free to readers of my Weekly Tip

You can also follow us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/effortlessevolution

To your enlightened success!

Your friend

Jamie

Jamie Smart

CEO

jamie.smart@saladltd.co.uk

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be
seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.”
- Helen Keller

“There’s no place like home… there’s no place like home…”

In The Wizard of Oz, the heroine (Dorothy) gets caught in a tornado, and wakes up in the strange land of Oz. She’s desperate to find her way home to Kansas, and goes on a quest to find the wizard who she mistakenly believes holds the key to her return.

At the end of the story, Dorothy discovers that she has the power she needs within her. She taps her ruby slippers together, repeats the phrase “There’s no place like home” and wakes up in her bed, surrounded by her family. Dorothy doesn’t believe them when they first tell her the adventure in Oz was a bad dream. She protests that it was a real place, but they reassure her that she never left her home; that it was just a dream…

We’ve all had the experience of waking up from a dream so realistic that we thought it had actually happened; all felt the sense of gratitude and relief as the racing pulse of nightmare gives way to the blessed relief of awakening to the here and now. The dream-reality seems so real that we mistake it for a material reality. But all along, the dreamer is tucked up in bed, sleeping soundly, perfectly safe.
Once, just before I was due to share the three principles with a group of students, I asked one of my mentors if he had any suggestions for me. His answer was both simple and profound…
“Show them another world.”

We each live in a psychological reality, generated moment-to-moment by the three principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought. It looks like we live in our circumstances, but we don’t; we live in an inside-out world that has the appearance of an outside-in world.

Sleepwalking
Most people “sleepwalk” their way through life, innocently hypnotised by the outside-in superstition. Occasionally they wake up to a deeper, more profound experience of life, but attribute it to some aspect of their circumstances before going back to sleep. In fact, we all “sleepwalk” some of the time, no matter how “awakened” we may be; we all fall into the outside-in trance on a pretty regular basis – that’s part of what it is to be human.

We walk around with our heads in the clouds, lost in a world of our habitual, personal thinking. But all the time, the ground we are walking on is a world of clear seeing and deeper feelings. Feelings of peace and profundity; of love and understanding. No matter how real and compelling our personal realities seem, a world of deeper feeling is just below the surface, in every moment.

Sometimes, the outside-in hypnosis is so powerful that it seems unbelievable that our wellbeing could be so close by. We mistakenly believe that material-world factors can have an impact on how easily we can reconnect with our wellbeing (factors such as the length of time we’ve been thinking and feeling in a certain way, the intensity of our feelings, how difficult it’s been to solve a particular problem etc). We think our thought-forms have the same qualities as the material world, but they don’t. They’re made of the stuff that dreams are made of, and our clarity and wellbeing is always there, always within reach, no matter how distant it may seem.

A walk in the park

A friend of mine was caught in a painful dilemma, and asked for my help. We went for a walk in the park, and I listened deeply as he described his situation. As we walked together, I felt a deep sense of wellbeing and a strong connection with him. I asked him a question from time to time, and he started to become more reflective. Then I asked if it would be OK if I shared something that I’d found very useful; he said yes.

I explained that no matter how real his dilemma looked, it was in fact an illusion, generated by his habitual personal thinking. I suggested that his painful, agitated feelings about the situation were in fact a signal that his thinking had become toxic and untrustworthy in that moment; that he was mistaking his mind-made psychological experience for an actual material reality.

I told him that as unlikely as it may seem, mental clarity and a deeper, more profound feeling were just below the surface. I told him it was even possible that by the time we walked out of the park, he could be seeing the situation completely differently.

We continued walking and chatting, and 15 minutes later we found ourselves at the park’s exit. To his astonishment, his mood had lifted, and he was seeing his situation with fresh eyes. He’d woken up into another world.

To read the rest of this chapter click here to get access – free to readers of my NLP Tip

You can also follow us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/effortlessevolution

To your enlightened success!

Your friend

Jamie

Jamie Smart

CEO

jamie.smart@saladltd.co.uk

“There’s nothing in this world that you can’t turn into heroin…”

During an unexpectedly moving scene in the comedy “Get Him to the Greek”, drug-addicted rock star Aldous Snow (played by Russell Brand) tries to convince his ex-girlfriend to get back together with him. She explains that she’s drug-free, and that the past few months have been the happiest of her life. He protests that he was clean for 7 years when they were together. She replies “And you did yoga for 5 hours a day. That’s mental! There’s nothing in this world that you can’t turn into heroin.”

“Symptom substitution” is widely accepted in the world of traditional addiction treatment. The smoker gives up cigarettes but starts eating chocolate. The reformed cocaine addict becomes a workaholic. The alcoholic stops drinking and starts compulsively attending meetings. The surface behaviour has changed, often to something less outwardly damaging, but the habitual thought-patterns (and the consciousness behind them) remain the same.

By the same token, we can all think of examples of people who have had a sudden insight; a change of heart that dramatically impacts their life…

• The alcoholic who experiences a “moment of clarity”, stops drinking for good, and proceeds to become a valuable member of their community.
• The smoker who suddenly decides that “enough is enough”, and easily gives up a habit that they were previously enslaved by.
• The workaholic businessman who has a heart-attack, massively re-evaluates his priorities, and changes to working a 4-hour day so he can spend more time with his family.

History also shows us examples of these “moments of truth”, from AA founder Bill Wilson’s spiritual awakening to the enlightenment experiences that led martial artist Morihei Ueshiba to create Aikido. Sydney Banks’ enlightenment experience is an extreme example of this.

These changes of heart are often regarded as psychological anomalies, sometimes labelled as “spontaneous remission” and given no further attention. Yet they are examples of a natural human capacity that we all have: The capacity for a rise in our level of consciousness.

While the examples above are dramatic upheavals, we all experience increases in consciousness from time to time. Sometimes it happens “out of the blue”, while at other times it’s from within a more structured context (the stated purpose of AA’s famous 12 steps, for example, is for the alcoholic to have a “spiritual awakening” – an increase in consciousness that transforms their experience of life, including their behaviour.)

The infinite elevator
Imagine a sturdy, see-through elevator running up the side of an infinitely tall skyscraper at the centre of a crowded metropolis. When you first step into the elevator, all you can see is the cars at street-level and the buildings that surround you.

As the elevator begins to move, you start rising above the smaller buildings, and your sight-line becomes less cluttered. The cars appear to grow smaller and smaller, and you can see the rooftops of the neighbouring office-blocks. Soon, all but the tallest buildings are disappearing beneath you, and you can see far into the distance.

You admire the gentle transition as the population becomes less dense; from high-rises, to low-rises, to suburbs to countryside. As you continue your upward journey, the details of the city streets shrink into invisibility, and your eye is drawn to the sweep of the horizon. Eventually you start to become aware of the curvature of the Earth.

Your consciousness is like this infinite elevator. A rise in consciousness brings with it gifts of peace and perspective, clarity and understanding.

The Principle of Consciousness brings our thinking to life. When we experience a rise in our consciousness, the habits of thinking we previously experienced as a reality suddenly start losing their power. As our consciousness rises, we become more and more able to see our Thought-generated perceptual realities for the illusions that they are.

A rise in consciousness means an overall increase in your level of insightful understanding, and a richer, more profound experience of life.

Penicillin for the mind
A rise in consciousness is like a kind of “penicillin for the mind”. Penicillin can help our bodies to heal infection by inhibiting the growth and spread of illness-causing bacteria. Similarly, a rise in consciousness can transform how we relate to (and can even eliminate) huge amounts of habitual thinking. Just as penicillin acts wherever in the body it’s needed, a rise in consciousness goes to wherever it’s needed in a person’s psyche; a person whose consciousness rises often experiences an “across the board” increase in wellbeing, with issues they’d been perceiving as problems suddenly reducing in intensity, or even disappearing….

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To your enlightened success!

Your friend

Jamie

Jamie Smart

CEO

jamie.smart@saladltd.co.uk

“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” – Albert Einstein

“Behind the London riots a multitude of causes”

The Euronews headline from August 9th 2011 attempted to make sense of the riots that had started that week in London, then spread to other cities in the UK. The TV and newspapers were full of people (ranging from local teenagers to police and government ministers) giving their opinions on what had caused the riots.

• The “causes” they identified included:
• The shooting of Mark Duggan by police
• Poor parenting
• Social media and mobile phone technology
• Moral breakdown
• Poor police response
• Consumerism
• A criminal underclass
• Budget cuts and the removal of social programs
• Gangs and gang culture
• Unemployment
• Economic and social inequality
• etc

In response to this litany of causes came a variety of proposed solutions. The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, put forward a plan to turn around the 120,000 “worst families” in the UK. These families typically face problems ranging from truancy and child-neglect to alcoholism and multi-generational unemployment (issues that often defy attempts at solution). The multiplicity of family “causes” are met with a multi-agency approach, involving social services, probation service, the police and more.
But what if this dizzying array of societal, family and individual “causes” were actually NOT causes, but effects; the emergent properties of a single, underlying cause?

The Lime Solution

During the early 1800s, countless women were dying of puerperal fever, a bacterial infection contracted during childbirth. At the time, the illness was attributed to a mind-boggling variety of causes, with an equally wide variety of measures taken to try and prevent its spread.

In the 1840s, a Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, noticed that women who gave birth at home had a much lower incidence of puerperal fever than those who gave birth in hospital. He had a sudden insight: the illness was being spread by something that couldn’t be seen; something on the hands of the doctors and nurses.

In May of 1847, Semmelweis ordered that all doctors in his hospital wash their hands in a chlorinated lime solution before contact with the patients. The rate of puerperal fever fell from 18% to less than 3%.

The theories of the day had identified dozens of “causes”, but there was in fact just one cause: bacteria on the unwashed hands and instruments of the doctors.

Today, every doctor knows the importance of “scrubbing up”, wearing correct surgical attire and sterilising their instruments. The legacy of Semmelweis’ discovery is that most people today survive routine surgery most of the time.

Semmelweis was less fortunate; despite the massive success of the procedures he instituted, his discoveries disagreed with the medical theories of the day. The medical orthodoxy thought Semmelweis’ discovery was too simplistic and lacking in credibility. He was at first ridiculed, then violently opposed, losing his job and being committed to a mental asylum where he died in 1865 of septicaemia. Semmelweis’ practice of hand-washing didn’t become widespread until after his death.

Today, “the Semmelweis reflex” is the name given to the knee-jerk rejection of new information because it disagrees with an existing orthodoxy, belief-set or paradigm. First ridicule… then violent opposition… followed by widespread acceptance.

Alfred Korzybski (creator of general semantics) served as an intelligence officer during the first world war. He insightfully observed that while the technology of war was progressing at an astonishing rate, the social structures and habits of thinking that gave rise to the war were not. The discipline of general semantics was his attempt to remedy the situation. In the nearly 100 years since Korzybski’s insight, technology has progressed at a dizzying rate. Today we have computers, mobile phones, hydrogen bombs, microwave ovens, life support machines, smart bombs, genetically modified food. Our technology is accelerating month on month, but our societal habits of thought are still in the middle ages……

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To your enlightened success!

Your friend

Jamie

Jamie Smart

CEO

jamie.smart@saladltd.co.uk

“”If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.” – Buddha

“It’s… Uhh… Ahh… Umm…”

It was the third day of one of my Life Transformation Retreats, and one of the participants had just had a profound insight (signalled with a loud “OH!” and a look of sudden revelation). Everyone in the group turned to him, eager to hear him describe the pearl of wisdom that had just been revealed to him. He opened his mouth to speak, and said “It’s… uhh… ahh… umm…” He stopped, furrowed his brow, then tried again. This time, no sounds came out; his mouth just opened and closed as the expression on his face cycled through a variety of emotions; surprise, confusion, puzzlement, amusement, peace…

His habitual thinking had been massively interrupted; he’d woken up to the “now”.

Being in the now

Being in the “now” is often described as having your attention on what’s happening in the present moment. But there’s more to it (and less to it) than that. There are many examples where a person is attending to their immediate environment, behaviour or experience, but isn’t truly in the “now”:

• A person who has a phobia triggered may be acutely aware of the sudden change in their feeling state, but not be in the “now”.

• A ski racer may be very focused on avoiding mistakes, and on the terrain they’re negotiating, but not be in the “now”.

• A coach may have their attention highly focused on the person they’re working with, but not be in the “now”.

The “now” is whatever is happening moment to moment, prior to your habitual thinking.

The grape escape

One morning, before the start of a day’s training, I was sitting in a reflective state, eating some particularly plump, juicy grapes. As I lifted one of the grapes to my lips, I suddenly “saw” the grape. I mean really saw it!

Time stopped. The world became still and silent. In an instant, I found myself simultaneously fascinated and astonished by the incredible work of “biological engineering” I was holding between my fingers.

It was as though I was seeing a grape for the first time, unencumbered by memories, concepts and other mental clutter. My habitual thinking had paused (temporarily), and I found myself having a more primary experience of life. And what was the natural response to this unmediated experience of life?

Appreciation, awe, and wonder.

Life is inherently rich, fulfilling and beautiful when there’s nothing else in the way. What gets in the way is our habitual patterns of thinking.

Think about it…

A) A person can be in a situation they might normally describe as “wonderful”, but be having an experience that is stressed, anxious or miserable because they’ve got something on their mind.

B) By the same token, a person can be in a situation they might normally describe as “miserable”, but be having an experience that is rich, nourishing and profound because they’ve got nothing on their mind.

What’s the difference between the two situations? Habitual patterns of thought. In situation “A” the person is caught up in their habitual thinking, while in situation “B” the person has much less attention on their habitual thinking. The principle of Thought is creating a rich experience of the moment, relatively unperturbed by their personal thoughts.…

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To your enlightened success!

Your friend

Jamie

Jamie Smart

CEO

jamie.smart@saladltd.co.uk

“If following the rules of your culture makes you unwell, it’s a toxic culture.”

My coach’s statement stopped me in my tracks. I’d hired Supercoach Michael Neill to work with me, and I’d started the process by making a list of my top ten goals for the year. All the usual suspects were there – health, wealth, relationships – as well as a number of “peak experience” goals (powder skiing in Kathmandu, adventuring in the Amazon rainforest etc) that fit my picture of what a happy, successful life would look like.

On some level, I believed that if I achieved these goals, I would be happy, peaceful and fulfilled.

As we reviewed my list, Michael suggested that there was a theme running through it; the theme of “I’ll be happy when”, which he explained was based in an Outside-In misunderstanding of reality.
So we made a deal. We agreed that we would go through the list and cross out any goals that were “Outside In”.

Once we’d finished, I was left with a much shorter list of goals; it was short because there was nothing on it!

The Curse of Exceptionality

In one of our first coaching sessions, Michael told me about “the curse of exceptionality”. He explained that in Western culture, people are encouraged to be exceptional, to be “Number 1”. But by its very nature, exceptionality is defined by what most people aren’t; for every person who comes first in a given endeavour, there are many more who don’t:

• For every winner of a championship boxing match, there’s a loser
• For every person who comes top of the class, there are dozens who don’t
• For every Madonna or J-Lo, there are thousands of wannabes
• For every person who’s exceptionally wealthy, there are millions who aren’t

The way this plays out in Western culture is that people end up in one of two groups:

• a large number of people who feel like unexceptional failures
• a smaller group of people feel exceptional, lonely and isolated

The culture of the personal development, self-improvement and “success” industries are highly oriented towards the “carrot” of exceptionality through outer success, but there’s a problem…
If following the rules of your culture makes you unwell, it’s a toxic culture. If pursuing (and even achieving) your goals results in a less rich experience of life, they’re toxic goals.

Toxic goals

Toxic goals are goals that start diminishing a person’s quality of life the moment they set them.

Why?

Because they reinforce the “Outside-In” misunderstanding of life

Because they encourage people to exchange a rich experience of the present moment for a thought; an idealised future concept)

Because they promote feelings of dissatisfaction and not-enoughness in the present moment

So am I saying you shouldn’t have goals?

No! Our human neurology uses goal-feedback mechanisms to accomplish even the simplest of tasks, such as scratching an itch, brushing your teeth or making a cup of tea. Goals can be really useful tools for focusing your attention, marshalling your resources and measuring progress. But just like any other tool, improper use can lead to injury….

To read the rest of this chapter click here to get access – free to readers of my NLP Tip

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To your enlightened success!

Your friend

Jamie

Jamie Smart

CEO

jamie.smart@saladltd.co.uk