Source: http://miroslodki.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/steps.jpg

“When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.”  Confucius (China’s most famous teacher, philosopher, and political theorist, 551-479 BC)

“Four steps to achievement: Plan purposefully. Prepare prayerfully. Proceed positively. Pursue persistently.”  William Arthur Ward (American dedicated scholar, author, editor, pastor and teacher)

“The heights charm us, but the steps do not; with the mountain in our view we love to walk the plains.”  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German Playwright, Poet, Novelist and Dramatist. 1749-1832)

“The simplification of life is one of the steps to inner peace. A persistent simplification will create an inner and outer well-being that places harmony in one’s life.”  Peace Pilgrim  (American Teacher and Spiritual leader and Peace Prophet, 1908-1981)

“Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.”  Ayn Rand (Russian born American Writer and Novelist, 1905-1982)

Source: http://harrietdevine.typepad.com/harriet_devines_blog/art/page/2/

One morning the husband returns after several hours of fishing and decides to take a nap. Although not familiar with the lake, the wife decides to
take the boat out. She motors out a short distance, anchors, and reads her book.
    
Along comes a Game Warden in his boat. He pulls up alongside the woman and says, “Good morning, Ma’am. What are you doing?”
    
“Reading a book,” she replies, (thinking, “Isn’t that obvious?”)
    
“You’re in a Restricted Fishing Area,” he informs her
    
“I’m sorry, officer, but I’m not fishing. I’m reading”
    
“Yes, but you have all the equipment. For all I know you could start at any  moment.  I’ll have to take you in and write you up.”
    
“For reading a book,” she replies,
    
“You’re in a Restricted Fishing Area,” he informs her again,
    
“I’m sorry, officer, but I’m not fishing. I’m reading”
   
“Yes, but you have all the equipment. For all I know you could start at any  moment.  I’ll have to take you in and write you up.”
    
“If you do that, I’ll have to charge you with Sexual assault,”  says the  woman.
    
“But I haven’t even touched you,” says the game warden.
    
“That’s true, but you have all the equipment. For all I know you could start at any moment.”
    
“Have a nice day ma’am,” and he left.
    
    
MORAL: Never argue with a woman who reads. It’s likely she can also think.

Source: http://smartlemming.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/abstract-waves.jpg

No particular reason for picking this song.  Or there is a possibility that there is a reason for everything.  As one of my new acquaintances put it “there is a reason for my insanity”.  So there must be a reason for mine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgYgpoZpOK0

Bob Dylan “Things Have Changed”

A worried man with a worried mind

No one in front of me and nothing behind

There’s a woman on my lap and she’s drinking champagne

Got white skin, got assassin’s eyes

I’m looking up into the sapphire-tinted skies

I’m well dressed, waiting on the last train

 

Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose

Any minute now I’m expecting all hell to break loose

 

People are crazy and times are strange

I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range

I used to care, but things have changed

 

This place ain’t doing me any good

I’m in the wrong town, I should be in Hollywood

Just for a second there I thought I saw something move

Gonna take dancing lessons, do the jitterbug rag

Ain’t no shortcuts, gonna dress in drag

Only a fool in here would think he’s got anything to prove

 

Lot of water under the bridge, lot of other stuff too

Don’t get up gentlemen, I’m only passing through

 

People are crazy and times are strange

I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range

I used to care, but things have changed

 

I’ve been walking forty miles of bad road

If the Bible is right, the world will explode

I’ve been trying to get as far away from myself as I can

Some things are too hot to touch

The human mind can only stand so much

You can’t win with a losing hand

 

Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet

Putting her in a wheelbarrow and wheeling her down the street

 

People are crazy and times are strange

I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range

I used to care, but things have changed

 

I hurt easy, I just don’t show it

You can hurt someone and not even know it

The next sixty seconds could be like an eternity

Gonna get low down, gonna fly high

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie

I’m in love with a woman who don’t even appeal to me

 

Mr. Jinx and Miss Lucy, they jumped in the lake

I’m not that eager to make a mistake

 

People are crazy and times are strange

I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range

I used to care, but things have changed

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.  ~Ambrose Redmoon

 

 

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.  ~Winston Churchill

 

 

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.  ~Mark Twain

 

 

People are made of flesh and blood and a miracle fibre called courage.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

 

 

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.  ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

 Source: http://dwhamby1.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/courage.jpg

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.  Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar, 1894

 

 

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.  ~Ernest Hemingway, Men at War, 1942

 

 

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.  ~John F. Kennedy

 

 

There is no such thing as bravery; only degrees of fear.  ~John Wainwright

 

 

To him that waits all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light.  ~Coventry Patmore

 Source: http://www.phillwebb.net/History/TwentiethCentury/continental/Marxism/Fromm/Fromm2.jpg

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self.

Man always dies before he is fully born.

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

Man’s biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process which creates man.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.

Source: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3125/3149942255_1325221807.jpg

One has just to be oneself.  That’s my basic message.  The moment you accept yourself as you are, all burdens, all mountainous burdens simply disappear.  Then life is a sheer joy, a festival of lights.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

We are meant to midwife dreams for one another… Success occurs in clusters.

Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Take heart, truth and happiness will get you in the end.  You can’t lose in this game.  Have fun.

John and Lyn St. Clair Thomas

A human being is a part of the whole…. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical illusion of… consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

Albert Einstein

We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

Joseph Campbell

It took me a while to pick the best idea for the post on March the 8^th, the International Women’s Day.  What do women cherish the most?  Careers?  Perhaps… But love is always the safe bet, so I decided to talk more about love and meaning of life because this is the most important thing for me.  And for the rest of the world?  That is for the rest of the world to decide.

From Katherine Woodward Thomas “Calling in “The One”

Are you frustrated by stymied relationships, missed connections, and the loneliness of the search for someone to spend the rest of your life with?  Are you ready, instead, to find “The One”?  In Calling in “The One”, Katherine Woodward Thomas shares her own personal experience to show women that in order to find the relationship that will last a lifetime, you have to be truly open and ready to create a loving, committed, romantic union.  Calling in “The One” shows you how.

Based on the Law of Attraction, which is the concept that we can only attract what we’re ready to receive, the provocative yet simple seven-week program in Calling in “The One” prepares you to bring forth the love you seek.  For each of the 49 days of Thomas’s thoughtful and life-affirming plan, there is a daily lesson, a corresponding practice, and instruction for putting that lesson into action in your life.  Meditation, visualization, and journaling exercises will gently lead you to recognize the obstacles on your path to love and provide ways to steer around them.  At the end of those 49 days, you will be in the ideal emotional state to go out into the world and find “The One”.

An inspirational approach that offers a radical new philosophy on relationships, Calling in “The One” is your guide to finding the love you seek.

From the Chapter 13 “Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall”

Source: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/uimages/ny/3-11-fiction-mirror-1.jpg

An ordinary man behaves like a dog which, upon entering a hall of mirrors, barks at all the other dogs.  The sage, entering the hall of mirrors, sees only himself.”

Gurunathan

I no longer try to change outer things.  They are simply a reflection.  I change my inner perception and the outer reveals the beauty so long obscured by my own attitude.  I concentrate on my inner vision and find my outer view transformed.

Daily Word

Like attracts like.  Whatever the conscious mind thinks and believes, the subconscious identically creates.

Brian Adams

A loving person lives in a loving world.  A hostile person lives in a hostile world.  Everyone you meet is your mirror.

Ken Keyes Jr.

Page 84

We often have more faith in the act of assertion than we do in the Law of Attraction – trusting more in trying to make things happen by taking actions than we do in drawing things toward us and allowing them to happen.  This doing-ness could be called the masculine aspect of the creative process; that part that goes out and gets what it wants.  It is the hunter in all of us, both male and female.  The masculine creative principle is largely how our Western culture works.  It is the principle that we are most familiar with and the one that we trust in the most.

The feminine aspect of the creative principle, however, draws toward itself that which it is actively creating from within.  We often mistake this stillness as passive and static.  Women, who are usually cast in this inactive role, are often frustrated by the “sit and wait by the phone” thing.  However, this is a misunderstanding of the power of the feminine creative process, which conceives by cultivating a strong inner vision and then working internally to draw that vision in.  Feminine creative energy is like a barber role.  It alternates between the red and the white with no beginning and no end.  The internal vision is the magnet for the external condition and they dance fluidly and in harmony with one another constantly.

[…]

Many of us feel so desperate and driven to find love.  But the feeling of desperation is really a panicked response to inner belief that you will not get what you want.  This belief then causes an anxious ambition to have this not be so, and we start trying to push, manipulate, and cajole the events of our lives in reaction.  But there’s absolutely nothing you can do externally to prove that your own internal belief is wrong.  Because it’s neither right nor wrong.  It’s simply your belief.  As such, it has the power to magnetize that which does – and that which does not come into your life.

[…]

What can’t come through you, can’t come to you.  If you want to attract in the people, situations, and circumstances that support the manifestation of love in your life, then you must feel love, believe that it is possible for you, and claim it as your own.  Because we draw toward us that which is most compelling within us, believing with all your heart that you can and will have love is the single most important thing that you can do on this quest for fulfillment.

Kaliente

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWEOBWiD42o&feature=related

Americo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvKNm3B0Ss4

From Robert Greene “The 48 Laws of Power”.

Law 48 – Assume Formlessness

Page 419

Judgment

By taking a shape, by having a visible plan, you open yourself to attack.  Instead of taking a form for your enemy to grasp, keep yourself adaptable and on the move.  Accept the fact that nothing is certain and no law is fixed.  The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water; never bet on stability or lasting order.  Everything changes.

Source: http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/eduoff/vt-2004//mt-2003/mt-mercury-map6-normal.jpg

In martial arts, it is important that strategy be unfathomable, that form be concealed, and that movements be unexpected, so that preparedness against them be impossible.  What enables a good general to win without fail is always having unfathomable wisdom and a modus operandi that leaves no tracks.  Only the formless cannot be affected.  Sages hide in unfathomability, so their feelings cannot be observed; they operate in formlessness, so their lines cannot be crossed.

The Book of the Huainan Masters, China, Second Century B.C.

Character Armor

To carry out the instinctual inhibition demanded by the modern world and to be able to cope with the energy stasis which results from this inhibition, the ego has to undergo a change.  The ego, i.e., that part of the person that is exposed to danger, becomes rigid, as we say, when it is continually subjected to the same or similar conflicts between need and a fear-inducing outer world.  It acquires in this process a chronic, automatically functioning mode of reaction, i.e., its “character”.  It is as if the affective personality armored itself, as the hard shell it develops were intended to deflect and weaken the blows of the outer world as well as the clamoring of the inner needs.  This armoring makes the person less sensitive to unpleasure, but also restricts his libidinal and aggressive motility and thus reduces his capacity for achievement and pleasure.  We say the ego has become less flexible and more rigid, and that the ability to regulate the energy economy depends on the extent of the armoring.

Wilhelm Reich, 1897 – 1957

Observance of the law

When you want to fight us, we don’t let you and you can’t find us.  But when we want t fight you, we make sure that you can’t get away and we hit you squarely…and wipe you out… The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.

Mao Tse-Tung, 1893 – 1976

Keys to Power

The human animal is distinguished by its constant creation of forms.  Rarely expressing its emotions directly, it gives them form through language, or through socially acceptable rituals.  We cannot communicate our emotions without a form.

The forms that we create, however, change constantly – in fashion, in style, in all those human phenomena representing the mood of the moment.  We are constantly altering the forms we have inherited from previous generations, and these changes are signs of life and vitality.  Indeed, the things that don’t change, the forms that rigidify, come to look to us like death, and we destroy them.  The young show this most clearly: Uncomfortable with the forms that society imposes upon them, having no set identity, they play with their own characters, trying on a variety of masks and poses to express themselves.  This is the vitality that drives the motor of form, creating constant changes in style.

The powerful are often people who in their youth have shown immense creativity in expressing something new through a new form.  Society grants them power because it hungers for and rewards this sort of newness.  The problem comes later, when they often grow conservative and possessive.  They no longer dream of creating new forms; their habits congeal, and their rigidity makes them easy targets.  Everyone knows their next move.  Instead of demanding respect they elicit boredom: Get off the stage! We say, let someone else, someone younger, entertain us.  When locked in the past, the powerful look comical – they are overripe fruit, waiting to fall from the tree.

Power can only thrive if it is flexible in its forms.  To be formless is not to be amorphous; everything has a form – it is impossible to avoid.  The formlessness of power is more like that of water, or mercury, taking the form of whatever is around it.  Changing constantly, it is never predictable.  The powerful are constantly creating form, and their power comes from the rapidity with which they can change.  Their formlessness is in the eye of the enemy who cannot see what they are up to and so has nothing solid to attack.  This is the premier pose of power: ungraspable, as elusive and swift as the god Mercury, who could take any form he pleased and this ability to wreak havoc on Mount Olympus.

Human creations evolve toward abstraction, toward being more mental and less material.  This evolution is clear in art, which, in this century, made the great discovery of abstraction and conceptualism; it can also be seen in politics, which over time have become less overtly violent, more complicated, indirect and cerebral.  Warfare and strategy too have followed this pattern.  Strategy began in the manipulation of armies on land, positioning them in ordered formations; on land, strategy is relatively two dimensional, and controlled by topography.  But all the great powers have eventually taken to sea, for commerce and colonization.  And to protect their trading lanes they have had to learn how to fight at sea.  Maritime warfare requires tremendous creativity and abstract thinking, since the lines are constantly shifting.  Naval captains distinguish themselves by their ability to adapt to the literal fluidity of the terrain and to confuse the enemy with an abstract, hard-to-anticipate form.  They are operating in a third dimension: the mind.

Image:

Mercury.  The winged messenger, god of commerce, patron saint of thieves, gamblers, and all those who deceive through swiftness.  The day Mercury was born he invented the lyre; by that evening he had stolen the cattle of Apollo.  He would scour the world, assuming whatever form he desired.  Like the liquid metal named after him, he embodies the elusive, the ungraspable – the power of formlessness.

Authority:

Therefore the consummation of forming an army is to arrive at formlessness. Vitory in war is not repetitious, but adapts its form endlessly… A military force has no constant formation, water has no constant shape: The ability to gain victory by changing and adapting according to the opponent is called genius.

(Sun-tzu, fourth century B.C.)

From Robert Greene “The 48 Laws of Power”.

Preface, page xvii

The feeling of having no power over people and events is generally unbearable to us – when we feel helpless we feel miserable.  No one wants less power; everyone wants more.  In the world today, however, it is dangerous to seem too power hungry, to be overt with your power moves.  We have to seem fair and decent.  So we need to be subtle – congenial yet cunning, democratic yet devious.

This game of constant duplicity most resembles the power dynamic that existed in the scheming world of the old aristocratic court.

[…]

The successful courtier learned over time to make all of his moves indirect; if he stabbed an opponent in the back, it was with a velvet glove on his hand and the sweetest of smiles on his face.  Instead of using coercion or outright treachery, the perfect courtier got his way though seduction, charm, deception, and subtle strategy, always planning several moves ahead.  Life in the court was a never-ending game that required constant vigilance and tactical thinking.  It was civilized war.

Today we face a peculiarly similar paradox to that of the courtier: Everything must appear civilized, decent, democratic, and fair.  But if we play by those rules too strictly, if we take them too literally, we are crushed by those around us who are not so foolish.  As the great Renaissance diplomat and courtier Niccolo Machiavelli wrote, “Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.”  The court imagined itself the pinnacle of refinement, but underneath its glittering surface a cauldron of dark emotions – greed, envy, lust, hatred – boiled and simmered.  Our world similarly imagines itself the pinnacle of fairness, yet the same ugly emotions still stir within us, as they have forever.  The game is the same.  Outwardly, you must seem to respect the niceties, but inwardly, unless you are a fool, you learn quickly to be prudent, and to do as Napoleon advised: Place your iron hand inside a velvet glove.  If, like the courtier of times gone by, you can master the arts o indirection, learning to seduce, charm, deceive, and subtly outmaneuver your opponents, you will attain the heights of power.  You will be able to make people bend to your will without their realizing what you have done.  And if they do not realize what you have done, they will never resent nor resist you.