Month: February 2017

In the last chapter I talked about the butterfly affect for two reasons. Firstly, it’s very cool. Secondly, it’s a chaos theory.

It doesn’t matter if a butterfly flapping its wings causes a hurricane or not, the only thing that matters is what you believe. If you believe that the hurricane was created by the butterfly then this is your truth, and if you believe that it wasn’t, then this is also your truth. Yet I have already explained this so let’s continue moving forward.

A while ago, one of many events occurred in your life which began one of many butterfly affects. As stated a couple of chapters ago, it could be in an area of negativity towards your job, finding a partner, making friends, finding a house, getting to better health, viewing the world as a bad place and so forth. We all have something.

Part of meditation, yoga, self-analysation, awareness, enlightenment, duality and so forth is about focusing the mind to the present. And once you are present you start questioning why you are thinking/doing certain things which don’t make sense. Inevitably, you trace these thoughts/acts back to an event that occurred in your past. It is then that you realise that your past butterfly affect is dictating your current and inevitably future decisions.

For many of us we don’t need the aid of ayahuasca to pinpoint these changing moments in our past. We know the most dramatic moments, and unless it was so intense that we have supressed the memory, this awareness opens a door to a great opportunity for change.

Let me simplify. A while ago something happened in your life (the butterfly flapping its wings). When it occurred it had an impact on your belief system. This created a negative focus towards others, yourself or your abilities. Since, the focus has been limiting your life via disempowering you through asking yourself negative questions. The negative questions (which contain presuppositions) make you give negative responses, and now you feel hopeless. As a quick example, you may ask ‘why am I so stupid?’ which inevitably guides you to the answer ‘because you’re an idiot.’

So how do we change these limiting beliefs? Well, if you know where those beliefs started it is actually a simple process.

By taking yourself back to a pivotal moment in your life you can re-write what this part of your story means. It is important to remember that a failure or mistake is nothing more than a learning curve or a change of direction in your life. And now, what we want to do is ensure that the change is a positive one for you in the present. To do this we not only need to apply a different meaning to the event, we also need to have faith.

Faith may be an interesting term for some, though it simply implies the following. What you went through in your past has a greater meaning than what you currently believe. You just don’t know what the greater meaning is yet. The original meaning that occurred naturally was not of your conscious control and was tied up within your ego. Yet now that you have learned from this experience and you are wiser, you can create a deeper meaning for what has happened in your past, which in return enhances your current perception of life.

So let’s do it in the next blog which will be the final for this chapter. See you soon.

The butterfly affect is much more than a crappy B grade Hollywood film (although I did kind of like it). It’s a theory about life which holds a lot of weight, and it goes like this…

The basic premise in chaos theory was created by Edward Lorenz. Simply put, he explained how a hurricane can be traced back weeks earlier to something as simple as a butterfly flapping its wings in the right direction. Of cause, the butterfly did not have the strength to start the hurricane on its own, though it can start a chain of events that inevitably end up to such an extreme possibility. And this is where it gets cool.

In Yellowstone Forest within America there were some Elk which were destroying the land. They had bred to great numbers and were now eating all of the vegetation and destroying the ecosystem. To stop this, wolves were introduced into the park which had originally died off over half a century ago. From here the math was simple. Enter wolves into the park, the wolves kill the Elk and therefore the vegetation grows. Simple right! Well, it worked a lot better than that.

The wolves didn’t just kill the Elk, they spread them out. Right away the vegetation grew by 84%. The trees got larger, the land was strong and the beavers began to come. The beaver population went from one colony to nine, and they themselves affected the river by building dams and creating ponds. This cleaned the water, brought even more vegetation and therefore more animals into the forest. Small insects and animals such as rats were growing in population which brought in hawks and many other wild life birds. And suddenly, this forest that was struggling to maintain itself, was now flourishing with life without any further assistance from human kind.

This story can be easily found on the web if you wish. We have all heard the sayings about how a stone throw in the pond creates many ripples, or, how a pebble thrown down a mountain can cause an avalanche. In many ways we look at these things as being simple, though the truth is that it is not that straight forward.

Although the butterfly affect is linked to chaos theory it really isn’t a far stretch to believe that one little act of kindness can go a long way. What sucks is that a random act of kindness can also end up equalling the demise of an entire nation. That all being said it can also be the one thing that saves it.

The choices we make in life have so many ongoing ramifications that it is impossible to see the final outcomes. In fact, all of our actions moment to moment are creating ripples which could go in multiple directions. Maybe it will just affect you, though eventually the affect that it has on you will lead to a future decision that will inevitably affect others. That affect will then keep rippling further and further out to what might be a never ending affect.

Given the fact that there are seven billion people right now taking actions every second which lead to endless possibilities, it makes it very hard to track anything. Actions from over a thousand years ago could be affecting you regularly today. And I am not talking about the big ones such as the invention of electricity. I’m talking about Miss Betty who dropped her shopping, which caused others to assist her, which in affect may create the next Hitler, or for argument’s sake, Dalai Lama. Yet with all of this hectic crazy clashing and impacting going on, do our positive actions make any difference at all?

Let’s use the example of dropping the stone into the pond which creates ripples. This works well with quantum mechanics (which I will describe in a later chapter), as life is full on unseen particles and waves. Now the first and most important impact within the pond creates the largest ripples  Therefore, if that impact is a positive one, it will affect many people before it collides with other ripples from other directions. And yes, maybe the ripple you are watching gets taken out by a bigger negative splash. Yet remember, a ripple in a pond does not head in one direction, it heads in all directions. It will have affects that you will never see. And of cause, the more ripples you make, the harder it is for other ripples to affect you… Confused yet?

The world is in a chaotic state at the moment. And although I don’t like to get political, the powers that be are scaring the living crap out of most of us. Yet by meeting anger with further anger we only create what we are trying to fight against. And once something consumes us it owns us. We get lost within the chaos theory and forget a simple rule, we create our own reality.

Life is not easy and it’s not supposed to be. We get many ripples coming our way which we did not ask for. And if we don’t pay attention, these ripples will consume us. That being said, there is one sure way to limit the affect they have on us, and that’s to create many ripples of our own. We don’t have to scream our cause via a megaphone at Flinder’s St Station, though a simple smile to a stranger can begin a ripple which affects multiple people far beyond ourselves.

We need not worry about those that create negative ripples as every positive will have a negative, and this is the way of all things. Remember, every Superman has their Lex Luther whilst every Batman has their Joker. Luckily for us we don’t have to engage into battle, though creating our own ripples will create truth, justice and the Amer…. Errrrr, scratch that…. Peace and love.

So what does this have to do with the past? Good question. I’ll explain it within the next and final blog in this chapter.

I left the previous chapter with the following question: If we change the way we view our past, will that interrupt preconditioning, and therefore change our fate in the future? I believe that the answer to this is yes. Most of our lives we are on autopilot, and once we change the autopilots destination, we can head to where we want to go automatically, without having to think about it. But of cause, how do we do this?

Humour me by undergoing a 24 to 48 hour experiment. It goes like this:

Pick an aspect of your life that you don’t like or would like to improve on. This can be to do with your job, finding a partner, making friends, finding a house, getting to better health, being more positive and so forth. Make it a biggy!

Secondly, each time you realise that you are thinking about your topic, be aware of your negative questions surrounding it. Don’t worry so much about the answers, instead focus on the questions which put yourself down. For instance ‘aren’t you too fat to wear that’, ‘isn’t she too hot for you to talk to’, ‘surely you don’t deserve _______’ and so forth.

If you do this and nothing else I believe that I will make my point. You will see that your psyche is putting itself down to justify its reasoning that you are not worthy of the topic you selected. The reason you believe this is based on a past experience or multiple thereof. But why just lay witness to this, why not take steps to stop it? Try this…

Each time you catch yourself asking a negative question, I want you to call yourself on it. Take your mind aside and say ‘what the f%&K!’ and don’t pull any punches. Don’t be angry at yourself, if anything, just laugh at the fact that you have found a preconditioned question that is limiting your life. And now you have found it, you can change it. That’s right! You can now change your question to something positive. Change ‘your too fat’ to ‘your beautiful’ or ‘I don’t have a hope’ to ‘I can do this’ and so on and so forth. If you keep self-aware and constantly recondition your questions by doing this, eventually it will become natural. Though don’t think it’s that easy. You not only have to create a new question and reinforce it over 48 hours, you also have to believe what you say as well.

I understand that step 3 for some people may be a little too much positivity. I get it, I once thought the same. That was until I realised that I was putting myself down all the time and enforcing my depression and anxiety. I mean seriously, what the hell! Why would we do this to ourselves? Why would we ask such demoralizing questions that limit our own life? And why would we do this daily?

Some people think that this is just calling ourselves on our truths, and that this type of thinking is stopping us from being cocky. That is a very interesting argument though it is outright crap. If you chose any of the topics I listed above, there is nothing wrong with having some confidence in yourself within these areas. And if you do find yourself asking negative questions then you are so far away from cocky you may as well be beating yourself over the head with a stick.

Okay, if we are doing negative questions then maybe we’re not physically hurting ourselves, though emotionally we are setting up limitations. Before we even apply for a job we can be telling ourselves that we won’t get it. By doing this we restrict our confidence, get nervous and maybe we don’t even apply for the position. We do this because we figure what’s the point? We have been beaten before the race even started.

The greatest wars are in our mind, not on the battlefield.

So yes! I have stepped out of my comfortable realm of philosophy and suggested some positive life changes. But what is the point of talking if we are not learning, and what is learning without acting, and what is acting without failing and learning even more. Philosophy is just as much about challenging the mind as it is about thinking about stuff… So at least give it crack. Have a go and pay attention to how your mind works this week, I am sure you will find the results fascinating if nothing else…  Good Luck…

Usually when people talk about fate they are discussing the future. We will leave that topic of discussion for the next chapter. Though personally, I believe that fate should be referenced to the past. And this is the main purpose of this chapter.

Fate is defined as a predetermined state of events taken out of control of the individual. It is also worth stating that fate (when referencing to the future) can be linked to a higher spiritual power, which makes sense. It’s much like the question ‘do we have free will?’ If we believe in fate then we must accept that along with this belief are spiritual influences.

So how can I reference fate when discussing the past, especially when part of the definition of fate is predeterminism (which links to things that have not happened yet). Well firstly, because the event has already occurred in the past and we can’t travel back in time to change it, in many ways it must have been destined to happen the way it did. No matter how much we regret it or want to change the past, it’s done and dusted and is now a part of our greater story. Yet this doesn’t explain the future aspect of fate… To understand this we need to look at the events that have occurred in our past. We also need to acknowledge that the past has given us the wisdom to make decisions and choices, and therefore dictates most of our decisions in our present and future self…

Now I am not knocking out the idea of having free will. But part of free will is paying attention and being self-aware. And let’s face it, how often are we paying attention to every aspect of each day? Furthermore we are not aware of what is occurring in our subconscious. In most of our days we are on autopilot and working from past influences. Hence the past begins to influence us.

To give you an example of what I am talking about, it has been suggested (by Deepak Chopra for one) that the mind asks over 60,000 questions per day. Although some people have suggested it might be only 20,000 (which is still a lot) it has even been suggested that there are upwards of 600,000 questions per day. Yet I digress. This is the type of neuro work that is constantly going on within our mind. And to make things even more interesting, it is said that out of the 60,000 questions we ask each day only 1000 of them are different questions from what we asked yesterday. Wow!

Obviously the above estimates take into consideration questions from the subconscious mind and the way we form words/thoughts. Yet I didn’t give you this information as just something cool to place on your twitter page (yet if you do please tell them how awesome The Lonely Spaceman is). I tell you this to let you know how much programing is going on within your brain. Even when we walk without thinking about it there is still processing within the mind which is dictating these moments. We simply just don’t notice they are there because we don’t have to consciously think about them.

Okay Spaceman (if you are really a space man which I think you are NOT!). What is your point?

The quality of the questions we ask about life is equal to the quality of our life. And now that we know that the majority of these questions come from our past and not the present moment, this opens up a door to one of our most important questions.

If we change the way we view our past, will that interrupt preconditioning, and therefore change our fate in the future? I believe that the answer to this is yes. How? I will talk about that in the next chapter, and there is no question about it 🙂