I see the egos’ flashing around me and I feel the desire of my own ego to claw its way back to its former glory and then I feel that calming feeling that you can only feel once you have learned what the ego is an how damaging its claws can be. And then I realise and remember and feel, and feel sorry for, all those around me, that will spend the rest of their lives, most likely, chasing their tail trying to make themselves appears greater or bigger than what they are. When I feel these feelings, I also deeply remember that in feeling them, there is a part of me that is judging those people and thinking that I am better because I do not feel them in the same way, for a sizeable portion of life-time, any longer.

Of course, that is my ego

We are never far away from it. My ability to keep my ego in check has been challenged recently through certain events at home, at work, and just in general but the one thing that I know, is that I have immeasurable inner strength and this strength keeps me pushing and trying. It especially keeps me from saying what you sometimes want to say certain people, when you see their ego and it’s personal self-destructive nature coming to the fore.

I can’t say what I want to say to them.

Each of us needs to find our own path and come to realise these concepts (or never realise or acknowledge them or accept them) over the course of our lives.

We may choose to accept or to reject and either option may work for us and thus allow us to conclude that the option is irrelevant because hey, we’re successful, our approach worked and yours, therefore, didn’t. What do we mean by “worked”? Does this mean wealth and career success? Does this mean great friends and relationships? Does this means we are right and you are wrong?

In all our rightness, how often are we ever really happy? Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be happy?

I am so happy that we are doing an EQ course…All the prodding and pushing the right people, with the right words, in the way that they needed to hear it, has paid off….manipulation and job done haha

You see….that was my ego, right there. It wants you to know what I did. It’s wants you to know how clever I was in manipulating the people I needed to, to achieve my goal.

That’s why we all need it, because we are never free from it.

So you tell me, so what if we all have a massively giant ego? “I don’t care, I am happy” you say. You will never know what happiness is until you understand what your ego is. And even then, you will struggle to control it most of the time. It will get the better of you and when it does, you will revert into your old patterns of attention desperation, chasing the future but never living in the present (the future brings salvation and a better life) and being unable to let go of what others said or didn’t and should have said.

I have come to terms with the fact that I will never be able to truly subside my ego fully.

And I think, I am finally ok with that.

It’s very interesting because we are all very interesting, full of our own agendas and mind games which seem to hurt us when they backfire and deflate our sense of self.

Not that we know how to change nor desire to. If we did, what would there be without all the mind games, strategies and innuendos. Well, maybe not much. Would it be more whole though, more complete or would the desire to win come through regardless.

Can we win without aiming to win? Can we fight without ever fighting? Should we bother trying?

Why am I talking about this and why does it matter to me? Well, for no other reason than it does.

Why does home ground advantage mean so much? How does this affect our mindset? Its the same field isn’t it?

What is this post about, is there a point? I have absolutely no idea. Is there a point in this for you? Does something resonate with you?

Is the downer worth the upper? Is my upper, your downer and vice versa?

Would life be simpler if these questions didn’t matter at all to me? Probably….

Is there ever truly a right way or a wrong way? Surely it’s all relative?

Is the colour that you were told to recognise as red, the same as the colour that I was told to recognise as red? Couldn’t we ever know?

Is there something that matters more than the people we share the moments with? Are the people more important than the moments? If you took the people away, would the moment still exist? Would you want it to exist if you were experiencing it on your own?

Are you a tourist or a traveller? Is there a difference for you?

How did I learn to read and write and do basic maths? I can’t really figure it out yet I seem to be able to do it.

If we only aim for things we understand, will we ever achieve anything? Doesn’t stepping outside of your boundaries require you to master things you don’t understand or so you already understand them and need them to be brought to the surface?

How does something move from short term to long term memory?

What happens when we are gone? Are we still omnipresent? I believe so…

Is this post getting longer than it needs to be? Define how long something is. Define how long a piece of string is. Is it as long as this post?

If people don’t consider these questions, are they stupid? If people do consider these questions, are they stupid?

Stupid is relative isn’t it?

I guess I must be stupid.

The most basic error is the belief that you are seeing the truth and you know the truth because you see it. Seeing is a sense, like other senses, its hard wired through the mind and therefore influenced by the mind. Seeing, as we are talking about here, is not the action of sight but rather the interpretation of the sight.

Let me give you an amusing example. For those you watch rugby in South Africa, you will know that we have a variety of magazine shows each week where they analyse the weekend’s games and discuss the upcoming fixtures. On top of this, our tri-nations rivals, Australia and New Zealand have similar shows and we see theirs and they see ours. Now if there happens to be a big moment in a particular game from the weekend, such as a controversial referee decision, try or yellow card, all the shows will discuss it. The most laughable thing is how all the rugby experts will look at the exact same evidence, they will replay it over and over and nine times out of ten, each side of the pond will see the identical events in completely opposite ways. If a South African player got the yellow card, the South African rugby experts will say that the ref was being tough and unfair and it should not have been a yellow. The New Zealand rugby experts will say that it should have been an immediate red card and the player should be banned for life.

So why do you think this occurs? Do you think it is because one or both sides are not experienced enough to know the rules or know what is happening? Of course not, the panels that make up these magazine shows are usually famous ex-players, couches and the like so of course they know the rules, far better than any of us.

The issue, of course, is that even in the action of watching some piece of live footage and actually “seeing” it unfold in front of you, we are still unable to remove various bits of conditioning, bias and even patriotism when looking at a situation. It is neither a good nor a bad thing, it just is.

I see it every day, in almost every conversation around me, at work, at home, with friends, with colleagues, with parents, with everyone.

We like to believe that we are somehow objective and impartial but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Being genuinely objective about any situation is truly a rare feat and if was able to it, I would tell you how but since I am human, it is probably impossible to remove all the shackles of societal, cultural, religious and financial conditioning.

To a certain extent, it does in part, aid to defining who we are and makes us unique. It is part of having a definable opinion. After all, if we all saw things from an objective standpoint, we would all see things exactly the same and life would be pretty dull.

The important thing here is to try be aware of when an opinion is designed to hurt/diminish/see the failure of/degrade others or prove others wrong for the sake of making yourself look right. What is needed is more genuine, albeit different, opinion, whose value is measured by each others success.

IMAGO is an area of psychology which deals with our perception of what love means, as passed to us by our parents primarily but also influenced by our environment…the whole nature and nurture thing.

At the time, we were both about 24 years old and the youngest there by at least 15 years. If fact, most couples that were there were either divorced, separated or pretty close to it and so we did feel pretty uncomfortable initially because unlike everyone else, we were coming there very happy in our relationship, but looking for further ways to enhance our lives together. All of the other couples, seemed to be there as a last resort to somehow get that spark going again.

I’ll start with the results first, at the end of the weekend, all the couples that were separated and even divorced actually got back together. Nuff said!

So what makes the course so amazing and why would doing it bring you closer together? Well, it all has to do with your parents….Whether we like it or not, our perceptual image of love, money, sex, men, women, religion and other racial groups are heavily controlled by the way we were raised. Ever read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki? It’s the same idea but with reference to money and how the rich stay rich because of how they think about money and how the poor stay poor, as well, due to how they think about money.

Now the image that our parents give us about love and what it means in this world has an enormous bearing on not just the rest of our lives, but also every aspect of our lives. Much more so than anything else. Why? It’s because for the first 18-25 (or sometimes even longer) years of our life, our entire mental picture of what it means for two people to be in love is entirely contained by the way that our parents love or don’t love each other. Above this though, the way they act towards each other in terms of how they speak and behave and under which scenarios and contexts also shapes everything we think and believe about love.

Have you ever found it interesting that:

• The child who was beaten, often beats his own children.
• The person who always picks the bad boy/girl, continues to do so and never gets why they keep getting hurt.
• The child whose parents got divorced when they were young, has serious commitment issues as an adult.
• The child whose parents were known adulterers, often becomes one as an adult.
• The child whose parents were together forever, often has no trouble committing to one person for life.

Now if these examples seem stereotypical or even clichéd, then we need to ask ourselves, why are they stereotypical? Is there some truth to them that makes them so common in society? I know people from each of these example and the amazing thing is that every single one of them conforms to the cliché. It’s not really a hard mental step to grasp really, what you see as a child, you believe as an adult. Whether you believe it or not.

So how this specific IMAGO course tackles this is by making you confront each and every issue that you have with your parents in a manner of highly engaging role playing and powerful psychological tools. It forces you to bring up, acknowledge and discuss things from the trivial to the most serious. The role playing is difficult but powerful. To give you an example of how it works…At one point, my wife and I had to sit on the floor together facing each other, we had to look straight into each other’s eyes and remain that way for the entire duration of the exercise. We took turns being the others parent and in doing so we had to give answers to concerns around a specific issue that the “child” was asking.

The whole idea behind this is to firstly get answers for and then have closure on why something is as it was. If you think you have no issues with your parents, wait till you do this. Let me assure you that every person ends up in tears, it is very traumatic and very healing.

There are many different psychological exercises that you will do with your partner to unearth everything related to how love was represented to you by your parents.

Over the course of the weekend you begin to really, truly understands who your partner is and why they do what they do, from leaving their clothes on the floor to the need for a boys/girls night out to issues such as cheating, children and life.

The reason why those couples got back together at the end of everything is that for the first time in their lives, they understood each other and why they do things. In most cases as well, if one partner was continually doing something that was unintentionally sabotaging their relationship, they also realised, probably for the first time, what they were doing and why they were doing it. In realising all of that, they now know how to stop doing it.

This makes all the difference.

My journey has brought me to a place where I believe most will never reach due to their obsession with money, greed, fame, lust, desire for power and all the other symptoms of the ego.

I have had many helpers along the way and as I continue to grow to become a better, more caring, more genuine person I wanted to acknowledge those helpers who have played a cardinal role in what has become a life worth treasuring.

Now besides from my wife, who is obviously the most influential force and person I have ever had on my life and who, over the last 10 years, has made me into a man that I respect and love, I have some secondary influences in the form of pieces of literature.

Now you might be thinking, what can a book do to change your life, well, you need to read these books and then you will understand. These books will help you understand how poisonous you are to yourself. If you are not so obtuse and ignorant that you cannot look deep into yourself, then these books will change the rest of your life for the better. Without further ado my top 5:

1. A New Earth – Eckhart Tolle

This is the most life changing book I have ever read. This is the source of dissolving your ego. Your ego, which you may or may not realise is the everything and anything upon which your apparent life is created. It is why you say and do practically everything and you have no idea how much it has polluted your life.

It creates that niggling little voice which is making you insane, every second of every day (though you may not realise your insanity until it’s gone). Every conversation you have, every thought, every thing you do, is affected by your ego’s desire to attain more.

Those who think they have no ego, are some of the most egotistical people alive by virtue of the fact that they use their apparent higher plain of consciousness to perceive themselves as better than everyone else. This of course, is the ego. It is only we you can be truly non-judgemental that you will understand this fully.

One day, although I suspect it will take a lifetime, I hope to be non-judgemental and ego-less from a purely genuine place.

If you think you do not need to read this, then you are precisely the person who needs to read it. Everyone on earth needs to read this, simple.

Does the following mean anything to you:

When I do well, it is because of my intelligence, but when others do well, it is because of their environment.
When I do badly, it is because of my environment but when others do badly, it is because of their intelligence.

You know what your answer is to this, that is why you need to read this book.

2. The Power Of Now – Eckhart Tolle

This book is by the same author as above and although written first, I believe should be read after you have read and absorbed the first book. This book conveys another side to the ego that we all struggle with every single day and most importantly how you overcome it.

For most people, the future will always be better, brighter and greater. We will achieve all our goals in the future and we will be happy, fulfilled and successful in the future. On top of this, most feel defined by their past. Their past shapes their abilities, their reactions, their lifestyle and their ambitions.

The problem with this, is that if this is how you define you life, you will spend the rest of you life blaming the past and wishing for the believed to be better, but never attainable, future.

Again, this is the ego’s desire to be better and in the same way as described previously, it completely poisons you out of your own future. This book provides the same solution as the first one, because it is the only solution to the same underlying problem.

You need to understand that the message in both above books takes years to understand and digest and it is not something that you just read. It is something you need to live. But after merely reading, the transformation will have already begun. You will be staggered at how much happier you are and how much more comes into your life.

3. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Steven Covey

Possibly the most famous, “self-help” book in the world. The definition of effectiveness. An absolute master-class of how to create everything you want, practically.

7 life-long habits that will take you a life time to embrace. These habits make you believe that anything is possible and if you are naive like me, then you will certainly welcome this way of thinking. If you are a glass is half-empty kind of pessimist, then you need to read this in order to not spend a life wishing for what you can only blame yourself for not attaining.

4. Emotional Intelligence – Daniel Goleman

Emotional Intelligence has nothing to do with how well you handle pressure or stress at work or how nervous you get in a job interview. This is what MBA students are taught to understand it as, but that is not it.

EQ is related to everything spoken about already and it is all of the above. This book discusses both the physiological and psychological aspects of EQ and if you love science like me, then you will find the biological aspects of the brain and mind discussed in this book, incredibly interesting.

This is the authoritative work on the subject by the man who first understood it and while it is a challenging read, you will feel incredibly awakened by the notions of how pointless and meaningless things like IQ really are. If you love the fact that you are clever and all you think of is shallow financial success, then you need to read this because you need to understand that clever has nothing to do with getting you the materialistic props that you seek so badly.

5. Gut Feelings – Gerd Gigerenzer

Superb. If you want to trust every decision you ever make and know that it comes from a place of depth so far beyond what the primitive, conscious, logical mind can fathom, then you need to read this. I think we all know, intuitively that all the best decisions, that we all make, are not those that come to use by way of logic and deep analytical thinking.

I have tried to live my life avoiding logical thinking for as long as I can remember and I have always made the right decisions for better or for worse. Note, that your gut may not always lead you along the path of least resistance. It may not even lead you on a pleasurable journey, but, it will lead you where you need to go, because there is a message and life-lesson for you in that journey.

This book is fascinating in that the author actually shows you how, though a multitude of verbal and thought experiments, just how powerful and correct your intuition is. It is staggering and provoking. It will make you understand that life is not as serious as we all wish it to be. Life is as fun as we make it and life is everything that we think it is. If you think it is bad, it will be bad.

So how have these 5 books (amongst many others) changed me? Well, everyday I am living the life I want, I am happy, I have all sorts of amazing opportunities coming to me, money always seems to make itself available to me when I need it and most importantly, I have a soul mate to share it all with.

Couldn’t ask for anything better really!

Why shouldn’t they have favourites is my question? I mean we all have favourites regarding almost anything and everything, right? A favourite cat, a favourite music genre, a favourite food, a favourite colleague, a favourite friend and definitely a favourite extended family member….so why not a favourite kid?

Why do we assume or even expect that the laws of society and human dynamics don’t apply when we talk about kids and their relationships to their parents?

I am not saying that it makes being the less favourite any easier. All I am saying is that it is what it is and it is what makes us human, we have a tendency to like and dislike.

Anyways, my brain fart for the day

Us jews are seen as somewhat a thrifty bunch. Knowing a few jews I can both confirm and deny this stereotype in equal amounts but of course, the collective mind likes to generalise about a few examples and in a secondary fashion, generalise about the most recent occurrences as well. By this I mean that most people will take the most recent memory of something occurring such as a person being sick and go make the generalisation “you are always getting sick, what wrong with you”. In fact, all that needs to happen is that the mind attaches the stereotype of sickness to that person when it happens in recent memory and perhaps once before, possible even quite a while before.

The generalisation powers of the mind are some of our greatest strength and greatest egoic weakness.

Based on partial information we are able to generalise a system, situation or action to the point where we can plan, strategise and apply logic. Our ability to do these things is why we are so successful as a species. We are able to generalise the action process needs to track a ball travelling through the air and actually catch it through a reactionary instinct that has taken millions o years of evolution. It sounds so trivial but try get a robot to do the same thing. Yes you are right, it hasn’t been done yet because the mind’s parallel computer and vision system and mechanism by which actions performed over time become “common sense” are pretty hard to replicate.

Of course, the greatest weakness comes in when the stereotypes lead to a desire for separation and an incorrect feeling of superiority caused by the ego’s need to distinguish itself from others. With specific references to the Jews, the Holocaust is an easily identifiable case in point.

But between both extremes lie some of what effects most of our life. Those little generalisations that come out after a few too many drinks or in casual conversation. Those stereotypes of jews, blacks, whites, women, homosexuals etc etc. You know those ones, you have them too. We all do at some time.

Of course they affect how we interact with people who are part of that generalisation and it is pretty difficult firstly, to realise that a certain reaction is due to the stereotype you have and then secondly, to acknowledge it and try make a decision independently of it.

I have a particular issue with a very specific person at present and although I am aware of the stereotype in my mind and the effect it’s having on our interactions, I still choose to act in a certain way because of it. That is my fault and I need to resolve it. I cannot change them but I can change myself and how I respond to this person. Again this is my ego’s need to separate at work in trying to prove to me that because I do not act like them, I am therefore “better” than them. This is all ego, this is not me.

Hopefully this will be the last post on this current theme that I seem to be on, I will probably be boring all 3 of my readers to death by now J

I have been reading the 2 famous books by Eckhard Tolle namely, “The Power of Now” and “The New Earth” and of course they are life changing, mind altering and truly revolutionary. I have been on the quest of self-improvement for a number of years now and at this point, I have been able to reach a good place in terms of ego balance yet I am still battling a bit with acceptance of The Now, acceptance of what-is.

It is a difficult thing to comprehend because our entire lives, upbringing and culture is fixated on making you, effectively, the conglomeration of the past who constantly yearns for the future, believing that the future is better and the grass is greener.

I see this around me mostly because I am now able to see it in myself. I want to help those around me get out of this train of thought but I know it would be too condescending to mention. Of course, my emotional awareness also makes me realise that I want to make it aware to them because at some level, it would satisfy the always present need to have my ego scratched, due to the ego’s desire to prove a separation between them and me. I am aware of it. The work place seems to be where people need the most awakening but it is also the one place that would probably never understand.

The trick is to not be too hard on yourself for having the egoic thoughts. It is merely to acknowledge them. Acknowledgement does 2 things. Firstly, it stops the thought in its tracks. Secondly, stepping outside of the thought, over time, will stop the egoic thoughts from happening in the first place because that’s just part of how the mind seems to work.

I love where I am right now in terms of my consciousness but ironically the world seems simpler when you let your mind run on auto-pilot and never truly thinking about what you are thinking or feeling.

My true aim for the next while is to be able to completely focus on the now without needing to focus on the now. If what is, just is, then, well….I have reached that point where few will ever tread.

Amongst the thousands of issues I have with the man of today, the one that I feel like speaking about at the moment is how much of his useless life is filtered through his jealous mind.

It’s as if he was put on this earth to rape, pillage and plunder the life and soul out of anything that could infer a weakness in own ability, wealth or status.

One of the best places to see such effects, are in your typical business meeting, you know the type where we try to impress you by metaphorically dragging our dicks across the board room table, taking out a ruler and measuring the mighty sword that has fucked up much of this world.

It’s all about me versus you, us versus them, haves or have nots, the hottest girlfriend, the most woman, the best car, the best LCD TV and the sad excuses at the end of the debauchery.

Now I am not going to sit here and say woman are not like this because that would be bullshit! Woman are are slowly treading the same paths by trying to beat men using the same game, instead of playing their own game, to their own strengths and being better than men by virtue of the fact that they are better than men.

The same clichés, the same stereotypes are more prevalent than ever and will continue to further dominate the increasing divorce rate until people learn to break free from the way they were raised and the excuses they continue to make to justify their behaviour.

You do not have to be the person that everyone else is, you are responsible for your actions and you can change to be a better person. It’s taken me many years to break free from my upbringing’s indoctrinations but I did it first and foremost by realising that indoctrinations existed.

That has to be the first step but of course, the world is too ignorant and selfish to realise a problem in itself so never mind, waste of time….

Its quite sad actually how our real world life is being replaced by our Second Life or one of our 150 profiles on all these sites. I am no longer Doron Dusheiko, I am in in fact, www.facebook.com/DoronDusheiko and that URL apparently has more meaning than who and what I really am.

I recently have written a few articles for a some blog sites and have decided to stop writing for anything but my own blog mostly because of the realisation that 99% of everything I read is all bullshit! It’s all about inflating weak ego’s, associating one’s pathetic self-lack-of-image with something that is supposed to be important. In truth, no-one cares about what they write, they say and increasingly, what they do. This worries me and I do not want any part of it. Blogging has become entirely about numbers, promotion, dollars and has completely lost its original purpose of expression. I will not put AdWords or AdSense on my site as it is fucking ridiculous! Who cares if no-one in the entire Internet reads this. Who cares if my SEO descriptions and whatever are not appropriate! Fuck it! It’s all bullshit!!!

Becoming hooked on who is looking at your Twitter account is only going to ensure that you miss out much you could discover in the real world. I dunno, maybe I am a realist, a naturalist or just the usual cliche of wanting to return to the “good old days”. Well, fuck you I am! The good old days meant that people actually communicated, corporations actually did some work and each of us valued our first life more than our virtual life.

To paraphrase something from the movie, Good Will Hunting…”You can read, study and understand everything about the Sistine Chapel, but until you go there, you will never know what it smells like”

For me, success in my passions and for that matter, even the enjoyment of my passions is stupidly, but nontheless, actually, self-limited by the time in which things are achieved or discovered.

I keep imposing limits on myself to the point where I rationlise that I am already too old (at the age of 27) to achieve what I really want to in life. I have actually managed to reason myself into believing that because many of the examples I gauge my success against, started on thier voyage at the age of 14-15, that I have somehow missed the boat by starting on this late in life. That’s the biggest pile of steamy, smelly bullshit I have ever heard!

The worst part about it all is that in deciding that I am too old, I also make myself think of what I love as a chore because of course, if I am too old, what’s the point and if there is no point, then there is no desire for the journey or the discovery.

Wow I amaze myself sometimes with how convoluted my thoughts can become…Thankfully though, I try keep myself ever vigilant on what I am thinking and why.

It’s time for a change. I can and will achieve what I want to. Age is nothing but a number or so I have heard…

Is it possible that we will find every excuse in the book not to trust the people around us? Why?

Well, my theory is that if people we actually know personally, like work colleagues or even loved ones, have that great eurika moment, or even worse, they succeed at something, then the shallow amongst us feel somewhat deprived of the moment, to the point where they rationalise that thought that “OMG if he is successful and he is not Mark Shuttleworth or someone famous, then holy shit, what the fuck am I doing with my life?!”

It’s a wierd concept but I actually believe that some of those around us would rather see us fail then succeed because if we succeed, then it means it’s possible to succeed from nothing more than the same as what we are made of…which is quite scary if you haven’t succeeded yet…

So what can one do when part of a purpose has a relatively long duration to maturity? Patience is a virtue isn’t it? Hmmm, perhaps I am without that virtue. In honesty, I have always fallen into the trap of planning for the next before finishing the current. Now that might seem a reasonable way of going through life, if not admirable, but every now and again, I have to ask myself, does that way of thinking come at the cost of not enjoying the moment? not throwing oneself completely and honestly into what one is doing at the time?

I mean if you are always plotting for the future and forgetting that the best plans are the ones you never made (which in my case is absolutely true) then surely hindsight would suggest to fuck the plans and LIVE LIVE LIVE!!

I am both trying and getting better (despite the obvious paradox of trying to be spontaneous). In the last few years I have definitely started to acknowledge that the best things in life are truly free and on top of that I am slowly beginning to enjoy each and every moment and see every step in the work flow, every part of the process, as a journey and not a destination.

As the sugar packed says, life is a journey, not a destination…I try to remember that every day.

In fact, in an earlier post I actually praised myself for my enhanced emotional development that I believe I had spawned over the course of the year, only to realise towards the latter part of the year, that much of my self-prescribed improvements were in fact, merely syntactic sugar and band aid around some far greater characters flaws and deficiencies.

In my short period away from work, I endeavoured to correct some things, re script some paradigms and create an environment which fosters change…My idea was that instead of trying to tackle the problem itself (which I haven’t figured out yet) I would rather change my environmental frustrations as well as take greater charge of the things I have some control over. In other words, I am focusing on my Circle of Influence instead of my Circle of Concern.

Already I have seen vast improvements in my view towards the things which I felt were upsetting me….I was predicating that I did not have a fundamental problem with the specific thing itself but rather the sugar which surrounds much of life….by improving my acceptance of the sugar and also adding sugar to taste I actually feel better and even excited to tackle those things which I believed, only 2 weeks ago, were eating my soul.

Time will be the truest critic of whether or not I have actually made a lasting improvement but I believe I am on the right path again and I am really and honestly looking forward to 2009.

I hate those people, I hate those concepts and yet despite my best efforts so far, I am becoming them. It is frustrating and depressing and I don’t know how to get around the bills, the career expectations, the way we have been told it should be done.

I am not that person, I have so many dreams and desires and yet I can’t find a way to live them. Life is hard but I have always said and believed that it shouldn’t be, you are doing something wrong if it is, yet I am completely guilty of failing to listen to my own advice. Human nature is amazing isn’t it.

To say that the “coming” was accurate is a complete understatement. Names, places, emotions, histories, events current and past and everything in between reared their presence. It could only have been real and the amazing feeling that I had that I am being watched over was quite something, even for an atheist like me.

Since that day, I am not devastated to visit the graveyard, nor am I unable to reflect deeply on what could have been. The reason for this is that once the physical realisation that they are not actually gone, but merely physically departed, has set in, ones sadness is somewhat subdued due to the knowledge of their presence. In essence, they are still there, not just passively, but actively watching over you.

The replacement on the other hand, is much harder to come to terms with.

If all reasons, all why’s were obvious and available, there would be no need for and no ability to evolve. Why should drive us, but shouldn’t hinder us. Why should provoke us, but shouldn’t excuse us. Why should not agree with us, but should’t create false illusions.

Why oh why!

Perhaps you should be asking what you know the answer can’t possibly become, so that you couldn’t forgive yourself for knowing less about more when yesterday is greater than the day before. Confused? You should be….

Instead, release the bird from captivity whence it came regardless of Nitrous Oxide.

But you did what was told of you, and now you were told you what was but you.

Words are illusions, a word can mean anything, we choose to give them a particular definition but that doesn’t mean that that word defines that object or emotion. An apple is not an apple, we don’t actually know what it is, we may call it an apple so that we can all identify it and have common knowledge when referring to everyday objects or emotions or concepts, but, this does not change the fact that the thing that fell on Newton’s head, is not an apple.

Why do we try over analyse what people say. Its not about what anyone is saying, its about how they are saying it….the tone, the tempo, the volume and most importantly, the look in their eye. One can make any sentence mean any other sentence with enough thought on how to mimic the non-verbal communication that such a sentence would invoke. Give it a shot.

Most belief systems that I created for myself, I did so when I was 6 years old. Time since them has allowed me to refine them but remarkably, none of them have been shaken…….I am still atheist, pro gay marriage, pro abortion and pro death penalty. These are the very surface level issues which my intellect concerns itself with. The more important stuff needs more blog posts…

If you only rely on your IQ, even a high one, to get you through life, you are bound to run into trouble. Intelligence without cause or more accurately, intelligence without emotional control is like calling yourself a freedom fighter, period. You can have all the brains in the world, be capable of creating the most beautiful strategies but without a good dose of emotional stability and intuition, you will be never understand how and why you do what you do, react the way you react and make the choices you do. You will commit yourself to a lifetime of self begrudging and mutilation because you fail to understand your own soul, hence how the hell are you gonna understand anyone else’s with enough clarity that you can make lasting and powerful relationships??

Having a high EQ means you understand how and why you react, how and why you have the opinions you do, how and why you have the relationships you have, and most importantly it allows you to make corrections in the above, not only in yourself but also in others. This is because you can figure them out better than they can figure themselves out. This runs the risk of manipulation of others but fuck why not……

So does this mean I possess all this, give me 5 minutes with you and I may or may not use the information against you. It is quite funny though to notice the lack of EQ around you. Just look at your friends and family, watch their reactions to everything, their body language, how they need to have their ego stroked every 5 seconds. Make special notice of how it perturbs them that you don’t. The greatest threat you can pose to a weak ego is to let them insult you or try and think they won the argument without any fight back from you. They don’t realise it consciously but deep down something says to them, this person will fuck me up…Sorry I’m listening to very aggressive Techno at the moment…….

Now don’t read this and think this guy is an arrogant prick, yes I know that’s exactly what you are thinking. All that means is that while reading this you are thinking to yourself, “shit maybe this guy is smarter than me, this cant be, we need to hate him or call him arrogant to settle our ego a bit, or perhaps we need to make ourselves believe his beliefs and knowledge are a product of his environment, not his IQ or EQ, I dunno, which is it, I’m confused”. Sound familiar, this is the same reaction you have to anyone who challenges you in an argument, says something clever which you didn’t come up with and generally every few seconds.

Now you know, fix it.

I treasure those electronic sounds to a level of pure infatuation because without them I would not know how to define myself. I think in terms of memorable song moments and indulge in the richness of its symphony. It gives me that adrenalin rush that I need to calm my intelligence and to sober up to the realisation that I have to act like everyone else.

How could I live without it.

You see they are all the same, they are all driven by the same sort of phenomena….their undying quest to ensure that their ego is scratched at least 100 times a day! Obviously this is something shared by all of us, but what I have always found so startling is the range to which the uber intelligent are willing to expose themselves to exploitation just for a little bit of self indulgence. They will work enormous hours, absorb mountains of punishment and go back for seconds all because they need to feel smarter than the next person in order to extract an ounce of fulfilment from this life. When will they realise my favourite quote: “The smartest man in a room is the one who gets all the clever people to do the work for him”.

We are an army of morbid disciples whose entire self-worth is wrapped up in those few occasions when we get to snigger at the person who the boss craps on for something which we did yesterday….very sad indeed. Its like something which I read in some book…..When we do well, its because of our intellect, when we do badly its because of our environment. When others do well its because of their environment, when others do badly, its because of their intellect. I love it!!

If the average Joe could just realise that ego and its self deluded obsessions are without doubt the greatest waste of energy, waste of money, waste of talent and waste of time then we could become a more harmonious civilisation, one whose aim is to achieve the best result for the group, not the individual. Can you imagine a society where men ask for directions, people ask questions when they don’t understand, people trust the judgement of others implicitly because they realise that there is always someone better, faster or stronger…..this is where I wanna live! Boring you say, perhaps a bit, but aren’t you a bit sick of all the survival of the fittest BS??? All one has to do is look to the US for a few thousand examples of how to fuck up a society and you soon realise that we are gonna need all the ascended masters in existence to get us out of this one….