Source:  http://www.hectorcasanova.net/art/pain.jpg

Excruciating pain, yet I haven’t reached that emotional threshold…

It is my umpteenth attempt to get to grips with my life.  I do procrastinate.  I do associate more pain with looking for a job than abstaining from it.  Well, starting tomorrow… Right!

“Morgen, morgen, nur nicht heute, sagen alle faulen Leute.”

The Force That Shapes Your Life

Anthony Robbins “Awaken the Giant Within”, Chapter 3, page 52

“Men live by intervals of reason under the sovereignty of humour and passion.” (Sir Thomas Browne)

What creates a hero, a heel, a criminal, a contributor?  What determines the difference in human actions?  Throughout my life, I have passionately sought the answer to these questions.  One thing is clear to me: human beings are not random creatures; everything we do, we do for a reason.  We may not be aware of the reason consciously, but there is undoubtedly a single driving force behind all human behaviour.  This force impacts every facet of our lives, from our relationships and finances to our bodies and brains.  What is this force that is controlling you even now and will continue to do so for the rest of your life?  PAIN and PLEASURE!  Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure.

So often I hear people talk about changes they want to make in their lives.  But they can’t get themselves to follow through.  They feel frustrated, overwhelmed, and even angry with themselves because they know they need to take action, but they can’t get themselves to do it.  There is one elementary reason: they keep trying to change their behaviour, which is the effect, instead of dealing with the cause behind it.

Understanding and utilizing the forces of pain and pleasure will allow you once and for all to create the lasting changes and improvements you desire for yourself and those you care about.  Failure to understand this force dooms you to a future of living in reaction, like an animal or a machine.  Perhaps this sounds like a complete oversimplification, but think about it.  Why don’t you do some of the things you know you should do?

Source: http://scottthong.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/demotivators-depressing-anti-motivational-posters/

After all, what is procrastination?  It’s when you know you should do something, but you still don’t do it.  Why not?  The answer is simple: at some level you believe that taking action in this moment would be more painful than just putting it off.  Yet, have you ever had the experience of putting something off for so long that suddenly you felt pressure to just do it, to get it done?  What happened?  You changed what you liked pain and pleasure to.  Suddenly, not taking action became more painful than putting it off.

[that is, of course, just a story of my life]

“A man who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than necessary.” (Seneca)

“The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you.  If you do that, you’re in control of your life.  If you don’t, life controls you.”  (Anthony Robbins)

[I love when the author quotes himself!  Well, I am being sarcastic]

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” (Marcus Aurelius)

“Men, as well as women, are much oftener led by their hearts than by their understandings.”  (Lord Chesterfield)

Though we’d like to deny it, the fact remains that what drives our behaviour is instinctive reaction to pain and pleasure, not intellectual calculation.  Intellectually, we may believe that eating chocolate is bad for us, but we’ll still reach for it.  Why?  Because we’re not driven so much by what we intellectually know, but rather by what we’ve learned to link pain and pleasure to in our nervous systems.  It’s our neuro-associations – the associations we’ve established in our nervous systems – that determine what we’ll do.  Although we’d like to believe it’s our intellect that really drives us, in most cases our emotions – the sensations that we link to our thoughts – are what truly drive us.

Many times we try to override the system.  For a while we stick to a diet; we’ve finally pushed ourselves over the edge because we have so much pain.  We will have solved the problem for the moment – but if we haven’t eliminated the cause of the problem, it will resurface.  Ultimately, in order for a change to last, we must link pain to our old behaviour and pleasure to our new behaviour, and condition it until it’s consistent.  Remember, we will all do more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure.

“I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.”  (Michel De Montaigne)

 

Source: http://image.healthhaven.com/Pain.htm

Remember, too, that it’s not actual pain that drives us, but our fear that something will lead to pain.  And it’s not actual pleasure that drives us, but our belief – our sense of certainty – that somehow taking a certain action will lead to pleasure.  We’re not driven by reality, but by our perception of reality.

“Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure… they govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.”  (Jeremy Bentham)

Source: http://www.joyonthejob.info/transformingpainintopower/

Let’s make some changes right now

[I consider it my homework]

First, write down four actions that you need to take that you’ve been putting off.

Second, under each of these actions, write down the answer to the following questions:

-         Why haven’t I taken action?

-         In the past, what pain have I linked to taking this action?

Third, write down all the pleasure you’ve had in the past by indulging in this negative pattern?

Fourth, write down what it will cost you if you don’t change now.  What will happen if you don’t stop eating so much sugar and fat?  If you don’t stop smoking?  If you don’t make that phone call that you know you need to make?  If you don’t start consistently working out each day?  Be honest with yourself.  What’s it going to cost you over the next two, three, four, five years?  What’s it going to cost you emotionally?  What’s it going to cost you in terms of your self-image?  What will it cost you in your physical energy level?  What will it cost you in your feelings of self-esteem?  What will it cost you financially?  What will it cost you in your relationships with the people you care about most?  How does that make you feel?  Don’t just say, “It will cost me money: or “I will be fat.”  That’s not enough.  You’ve got to remember that what drives us is our emotions.  So get associated and use pain as your friend, one that can drive you to a new level success.

The final step is to write down all the pleasure you’ll receive by taking each of these actions right now.

Make a huge list that will drive you emotionally, that will really get you excited:

-         I’ll gain the feeling of really being in control of my life, of knowing that I’m in charge.

-         I’ll gain a new level of self-confidence.

-         I’ll gain physical vitality and health.  I’ll be able to strengthen all my relationships.

-         I’ll develop more willpower, which I can use in every other area of my life.

-         My life will better in all these ways now.

-         Over the next two, three, four, five years.

-         By taking this action, I will live my dream.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/technowannabe/562918256/

In the spirit of the Family Day

From the web-site www.parenting-boys.com

Are You Ready for Children?

Mess Test: Smear peanut butter on the sofa and curtains. Now rub your hands in the wet flowerbed and rub on the walls. Cover the stains with crayons. Place a fish stick behind the couch and leave it there all summer.

Toy Test: Obtain a 55-gallon box of Lego’s. (If Lego’s are not available, you may substitute roofing tacks or broken bottles.) Have a friend spread them all over the house. Put on a blindfold. Try to walk to the bathroom or kitchen. Do not scream. (This could wake a child at night.)

Grocery Store Test: Borrow one or two small animals (goats are best) and take them with you as you shop at the grocery store. Always keep them in sight and pay for anything they eat or damage.

Dressing Test: Obtain one large, unhappy, live octopus. Stuff into a small net bag making sure that all arms stay inside.

Feeding Test: Obtain a large plastic milk jug. Fill halfway with water. Suspend from the ceiling with a stout cord. Start the jug swinging. Try to insert spoonfuls of soggy cereal (such as Fruit Loops or Cheerios) into the mouth of the jug, while pretending to be an airplane. Now dump the contents of the jug on the floor.

Night Test: Prepare by obtaining a small cloth bag and fill it with 8 – 12 pounds of sand. Soak it thoroughly in water. At 8:00 PM begin to waltz and hum with the bag until 9:00 PM. Lay down your bag and set your alarm for 10:00 PM. Get up, pick up your bag, and sing every song you have ever heard. Make up about a dozen more and sing these too until 4:00 AM. Set alarm for 5:00 AM. Get up and make breakfast. Keep this up for 5 years. Look cheerful.

Physical Test (Women): Obtain a large beanbag chair and attach it to the front of your clothes. Leave it there for 9 months. Now remove 10 of the beans.

Physical Test (Men): Go to the nearest drug store. Set your wallet on the counter. Ask the clerk to help himself. Now proceed to the nearest food store. Go to the head office and arrange for your paycheck to be directly deposited to the store. Purchase a newspaper. Go home and read it quietly for the last time.

Final Assignment: Find a couple that already has a small child. Lecture them on how they can improve their discipline, patience, tolerance, toilet training, and child’s table manners. Suggest many ways they can improve. Emphasize to them that they should never allow their children to run riot. Enjoy this experience. It will be the last time you will have all the answers.

Questions are never indiscreet.  Answers sometimes are. (Oscar Wilde)

Victor Pelevin “The Sacred Book of Werewolf”

People often argue about whether this world really exists, or is something like The Matrix movie.  It’s a very stupid thing to argue about.  All problems of this kind derive from the fact that people don’t understand the words they use.  Before discussing the subject, the first thing people ought to do is get to grips with the meaning of the word ‘exist’.  Then a lot of interesting things would become clear.  But people are rarely capable of correct thinking.

Of course, I don’t mean to say that all people are total idiots.  There are some among them whose intellect is almost the equal of a fox’s.  For instance, the Irish philosopher Berkeley.  He said that to exist means to be perceived and all objects exist only in perception.  You only have to think calmly about the subject for three minutes to realize that any other views on the matter are like the cult of Osiris or belief in the god Mithras.  In my view, this is the only true thought that has visited the Western mind in its long and funny history: all the Humes, Kants and Baudrillards are only embroidering the canvas of this great insight in a fussy satin stitch.

But where does an object exist when we turn away and stop seeing it?  After all, it doesn’t disappear, as children and Amazonian Indians think, does it?  Berkeley says that it exists in the perception of God.  But Cathars and Gnostics believe that it exists in the perception of the diabolical demiurge, and their arguments are no worse than Berkeley’s .  From their point of view, matter is an evil that shackles the spirit.  By the way, reading Stephen Hawking’s horror stories, I often used to think that if the Albigenses had had a radio telescope, they would have declared the Big Bang a cosmic photograph of Satan’s rebellion…  There is a middle way through this morass of idiocy – to believe that part of the world exists in the perception of God, and part in the perception of Devil.

What can I say to this?  From the point of view of us foxes, there never was any Big Bang, just as the Tower of Babel that Breughel painted never existed, even if there is a reproduction of the painting hanging in a room that you dream about.  And God and the Devil are simply reproductions that are dreamed by some people to hang in a room of the tower on the picture hanging on the wall in a room they dream about.  Berkeley assumed that perception has to have a subject, and so the coins that rolled under the cupboard and the socks that fell behind the bed were solemnly interred in the cranium of the Creator specially created for that purpose.  But how do we deal with the fact that Berkeley’s God, in whose perception we exist, Himself exists mostly in the abstract thinking of certain representatives of the endangered European race?  And he doesn’t exist at all in the consciousness of a Chinese peasant or a little bird which is unaware that it is God’s?  How do we deal with this if ‘to exist’ really does mean ‘to be perceived’?

We don’t, say the foxes.  Foxes have a fundamental answer to the fundamental question of philosophy, which is to forget this fundamental question.  There are no philosophical problems, there is only a suite of interconnected linguistic cul de sacs created by language’s inability to reflect the truth.

But it is better to run into one of these cul de sacs in the first paragraph, rather than after forty years of searching and five thousand pages of writing.  After Berkeley finally got the point the only thing he wrote about was the wonder-working properties of the tincture of bitumen that he’d come across in North America.  And as a result, ever since then he has been mocked by various philistines, who aren’t aware that in that distant time bitumen was produced in America from a plant called Jimson Weed, or Datura.

Religious hypocrites accuse us were-creatures of addling people’s brains and distorting the Image of God.  The people who say this have a rather poor idea of the Image of God, since they mould it after their own sanctimonious mugs.  In any case, talk of ‘distortion’ and; addling; is too judgemental; language like that shifts the question on to the emotional plane and prevents any understanding of the real nature of the matter, which is as follows (please pay close attention to the following paragraph – I have finally reached the most important point).

Since the existence of things consists in their perceptibility, any transformation can occur by two routes – either through the perception of transformation or the transformation of perception.

In honour of the great Irishman, I would like to call this rule Berkeley’s Law.  It is absolutely essential knowledge for all seekers of truth, gangsters and extortionists, marketing specialists and paedophiles who wish to remain at liberty.