Category: Psychology
Intention combined with detachment leads to life centered, present moment awareness. And when action is performed in the present moment awareness it is most effective. Your intent is for the future, but your attention is in the present. As long as your attention is in the present, then your intent for the future will manifest, because the future is created in the present. You must accept the present as is. Accept the present and intend the future. The future is something you can always create through detached intention, but you should never struggle against the present.
The past, present, and future are all properties of consciousness. The past is recollection, memory; the future is anticipation; the present is awareness. Therefore time is the movement of thought. Both past and future are born in the imagination; only the present, which is awareness, is real and eternal. It is. It is the potentiality for space-time, matter, and energy. It is an eternal field of possibilities experiencing itself as abstract forces, whether they be light, heat, electricity, magnetism, or gravity . These forces are neither in the past nor in the future. They just are.
- Don’t exercise – No matter how rich, how poor, how well off your family is, who you know and so on…if your heart isn’t trained to work under certain circumstances – well, just imagine the consequences.
- Don’t eat well
- Don’t waste your time in bed - In other words just sleep.
- Give 100% at your work
- Retail therapy - Materialistic goods do not create true psychological happiness nor do they solve any problems.
- Do what you feel like doing - As long as you enjoy it.
- Exist on hope - Our new president’s entire campaign based on this but the difference is that its not just hope with zero action, its hope with actions that will deliver results.
- Install a negative filter in your brain – try to be optimistic, think positive, and surround yourself with positive people.
- Do downwards comparisons – the ego loves this!
- Be informed, watch the news - The new is depressing, murder this, recession that, foreclosure this. The more you listen to it the more likely you will attract it. We have a no CNN rule in our family household.
- Be fashionable, not stylish - styles constantly change, therefore you’re spending money every season.
- Improve yourself - There are over a billion self help products out there. Don’t try to learn every little thing so you can become the perfect human being. Wait a minute is there actually a definition of a perfect human being? Nope! Just focus on what you do best and produce results.
Here is an excerpt from a book I am reading that I thought visitors to this website would enjoy:
I feel that there is still a great deal I need to learn about the workings of my mind before I can get anywhere near full consciousness or spiritual enlightenment.
No, you don’t. The problems of the mind cannot be solved on the level of the mind. Once you have understood the basic dysfunction, there isn’t really much else that you need to learn or understand. Studying the complexities of the mind may make you a good psychologist, but doing so won’t take you beyond the mind, just as the study of madness isn’t enough to create sanity. You have already understood the basic mechanics of the unconscious state: identification with the mind, which crates a false self, the ego, as a substitute for your true self rooted in Being. You become as a “branch cut off from the vine,” as Jesus puts it.
1. Take a 10-30 minutes walk every day. And while you walk, smile.
2. Sit in silence for at least 10 minutes each day.
3. Sleep for 7 hours.
4. Live with the 3 E’s — Energy, Enthusiasm, and Empathy.
5. Play more games.
6. Read more books than you did the previous year.
7. Make time to practice meditation, yoga, and prayer. They provide us with daily fuel for our busy lives.
8. Spend time with people over the age of 70 & under the age of 6.
9. Dream more while you are awake.
10. Eat more foods that grow on trees and plants and eat less food that is manufactured in plants.
11. Drink plenty of water.
12. Try to make at least three people smile each day.
13. Don’t waste your precious energy on gossip.
14. Forget issues of the past. Don’t remind your partner with his/her mistakes of the past. That will ruin your present happiness.
15. Don’t have negative thoughts or things you cannot control. Instead invest your energy in the positive present moment.
16. Realize that life is a school and you are here to learn. Problems are simply part of the curriculum that appear and fade away like algebra class but the lessons you learn will last a lifetime.
17. Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a beggar.
18. Smile and laugh more.
19. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone. Don’t hate others.
20. Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
21. You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
22. Make peace with your past so it won’t spoil the present.
23. Don’t compare your life to others’. You have no idea what their journey is all about. Don’t compare your partner with others.
24. No one is in charge of your happiness except you.
25. Forgive everyone for everything.
26. What other people think of you is none of your business.
27. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
28. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.
29. Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or joyful.
30. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
31. The best is yet to come.
32. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
33. Do the right thing!
34. Call your family often.
35. Your inner most is always happy. So be happy.
36. Each day give something good to others.
37. Don’t over do. Keep your limits.
By: Vijai P. Sharma, Ph.D
A fierce controversy is raging these days over how much influence parents really have over their children. Judy Rich Harris, author of “The Nurture Assumption,” draws an unsettling conclusion from her analysis that parents have no lasting effect on the personality, intelligence or mental health of their offspring. That’s quite a statement, huh? According to the U.S.A. Today, Harris’ book has “launched the hottest debate over nature and nurture in years.” Newsweek recently did a cover story on her work.
According to Harris, children are most influenced by their peers. They adopt many behaviors of their peers in social settings in order to be accepted by their peers. She goes on to say that children’s interaction with their peers permanently modifies their inborn psychological characteristics. Thus, what they learn outside the home remains steadfast with them thorough adulthood. So, if there is a psychological characteristic or behavior that you don’t like about yourself, don’t blame your parents because you might have acquired it from your peers.
From the days of Freud, the foundation of psychological work has been based on the theory that parents are a major influence on children and that they significantly contribute to the psychological characteristics that children acquire as adults. Folk wisdom also supports the experts on this one.
All of us, sometime or the other make such statements as, “As the father is, so is the son or, as the mother is, so is the daughter.” Thus, we have psychological theory and folk wisdom on one hand that emphasize the importance of nurturing, and Harris, on the other, who totally minimizes the importance of child raising methods and the family genes. This is confusing. Who do we believe?
We live in the world of sound bytes. “Blame your peers and not your parents,” grabs everybody’s attention. It induces people to make impassioned pleas for or against this position. But, the truth often lies in the middle and often happens to be somewhat bland. In this article, I will try to separate the hype from the facts. Facts, I should warn, as they appear to me.
We human beings are obviously social beings. Babies are connected with their social world even before they are born. Later, parents, relatives, teachers, and peers all influence a child’s behavior until he or she has a “mind of his (or her) own.” When a person becomes independent minded he or she is capable of selecting and rejecting external influences. Most people gain such independence and autonomy fairly early. The fact is that we decide who we would let influence, inspire, or corrupt us.
It is true that children adopt or mimic certain behaviors in social settings in order to win acceptance of their peers. How desperate children get for peer acceptance and approval depends on the sense of individuality (or lack of it) their families cultivate in them. Children whose parents encourage them to think independently learn to question rather than to blindly follow. Such children might be less influenced by their peers.
It can be argued that parents exercise significant influence on children’s choice of peers. Children who are taught to be responsible are more likely to choose responsible peers. In the negative instance, children join gangs because they don’t have a close knit family. In a family in which siblings are close to each other, they may be more influenced by their siblings than by peers.
Parents influence at-home behavior and peers influence behavior outside the home, that is, the behavior in the social setting. We learn how to make friends and influence others by first experimenting with our peers and then we transfer these skills to the adult world of coworkers and friends. But, how we behave as partners and parents is more likely to be shaped by what we observe in our families as children.
Parents and other significant adults in our childhood may serve as negative or positive models in our adulthood. For example, people spank their children because their parents spanked them and that “helped to straighten me out.” An equal number of people say that they would not spank their children because they hated to be spanked during their childhood. A similar family experience, but some people use it for positive modeling and some for negative modeling.
So, the truth that is bland and lies in the middle may be a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Peers influence our behavior but parents play a part in which peers we choose to associate with. Our behavior in public and at work is largely determined by our childhood peers but our family behavior is determined by the early lessons we received at home.
Someone said, “Whatever I need to know, I learned in kindergarten.” When it comes to our role learning as parents and partners, we learn it even before we go to kindergarten. As adults, we either decide to follow it exactly as we experienced it or modify it according to our preferences.
Besides characteristics such as wealth, health, and government, is there more that can affect national happiness? Can culture influence happiness – the beliefs, values, and traditions that also differentiate groups? Several dimensions of culture influence happiness beyond the stability and wealth of societies.
Prioritizing Groups versus Individuals
When most people consider culture, they think about the most visible aspects, such as language, religion, dress, and food. They think about French and Urdu, crucifixes and the call to prayer, loincloths and tuxedos, taco, and pasta. And while these elements of culture are interesting, psychologists understand that culture is something deeper. Culture is a set of shared beliefs, attitudes, self-definitions, and values. Researchers analyzing the psychological dimensions of culture tend to examine how people relate to one another, how they understand themselves, their words, and the things they hold most dear.
One way of understanding cultural groups is to divide them into “individualists” and “collectivists.” Individualistic societies are those that think of the individual as the most important basic unit. People in individuals societies are typically seen as separate, unique, and free to make personal choices, even if they conflict with desires of the larger group. Members of the individualistic societies can usually choose their own spouse, profession, and living quarters. Each person is seen as unique and special. Sound familiar? if you’re a reader from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or Western Europe, you hail from an individualistic society. Collective societies, on the other hand think of the group as the most important basic unit. People living in collectivist societies are seen as connected to one another through powerful ties of duty and obligation. Collectivists often work to promote group harmony, even if it means sacrificing their individual desires, because the group is seen as more important than the individual . The group, in fact, defines who the individual is. Individualistic societies tend to suffer from more social ills, such as divorce, suicide, and homelessness, whereas people in collectivistic societies can feel frustrated by their personal sacrifices. But it’s not all bad news. Individuals tend to feel creative and enjoy more social freedoms, whereas collectivists often enjoy more extended social support.
This is an exert from: Happiness – Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth
When getting into comparing consciousness and unconsciousness the primary difference the two stages is in consciousness the organism is able to interpret thoughts, feelings, emotion of itself and its surroundings. Whereas in unconsciousness the organism’s mental state has been altered due to little or no data coming in about self and surroundings.
Consciousness defies definition. It may involve thoughts, sensations, perceptions, moods, emotions, dreams, and an awareness of self, although not necessarily any particular one or combination of these. Consciousness is a point of view, an I, or what Thomas Nagel called the existence of “something that it is like” to be something. Julian Jaynes has emphasized that “Consciousness is not the same as cognition and should be sharply distinguished from it. … The most common error … is to confuse consciousness with perception.” He says, “Mind-space I regard as the primary feature of consciousness. It is the space which you preoptively are ‘introspecting on’ or ‘seeing’ at this very moment”.
Ned Block divides consciousness into phenomenal consciousness (similar definition to subjective consciousness), which is subjective experience itself (being something), and access consciousness, which refers to the availability of information to processing systems in the brain (being conscious of something).
The issue of what consciousness is, and to what extent and in what sense it exists, is the subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill individuals to what extent non-humans are self conscious; at what point in fetal development consciousness begins; and whether computers can achieve conscious states.
In common parlance, consciousness denotes being awake and responsive to the environment, in contrast to being asleep or in a coma.Unconsciousness, more appropriately referred to as loss of consciousness or lack of consciousness, is a dramatic alteration of mental state that involves complete or near-complete lack of responsiveness to people and other environmental stimuli. Being in a comatose state or coma is an illustration of unconsciousness. Fainting due to a drop in blood pressure and a decrease of the oxygen supply to the brain is an illustration of a temporary loss of consciousness. Loss of consciousness must not be confused with altered states of consciousness, such as delirium (when the person is confused and only partially responsive to the environment), normal sleep, hypnosis, and other altered states in which the person responds to stimuli.
Loss of consciousness should not be confused with the notion of the psychoanalytic unconscious or cognitive processes (e.g., implicit cognition) that take place outside of awareness.Loss of consciousness may occur as the result of traumatic brain injury, brain hypoxia (e.g., due to a brain infarction or cardiac arrest), severe poisoning with drugs that depress the activity of the central nervous system (e.g., alcohol and other hypnotic or sedative drugs), severe fatigue, and other causes.
