Open your horizons Part 2

The constant preoccupation with one’s self prevents one from having experiences, real, enriching experiences. Affirmations of being good, or getting “gooder” by the day, is such a preoccupation that too often turns into self-criticism, intensifying the labels of what’s wrong with oneself. When that’s the main theme of one’s existence, then what do you think this person experiences? Occupy yourself with experiencing things.

Turn your attention outward rather than toward what you think to be your deficiencies. You may be unhappy because you don’t have: you don’t have money, you don’t have youth, you don’t have health, you don’t have beauty, you don’t have a sex-partner, you don’t have parents, you don’t have a job, and the list goes on and on. Life can pass you by and you won't notice that you forgot to live and experience. As if this wasn’t serious enough, the consequences of focusing on what we miss are even more morbid.

About 99% of humans fear uncertainty and lack of stability. However, when you look at the lack, then that is what you increase since you create your own reality by focusing. By putting your attention on things, you make them real. So when you put your attention on a lack, you increase that lack. In order to feel stability — which is a feeling, an attitude, and not something objective — you ought to change your attitude. You are not confronting immediate life threatening problems. You are afraid of the future, afraid of how you will perform in the future. To solve this problem, think of uncertainty in a different way: try to learn to live with uncertainty

 How? Through faith in knowing you belong; faith in yourself. The wider your scope of activity becomes, the more uncertainties you will face. Learn to live with uncertainty and then you won't need to shrink the sphere of your activities and interests in order to entomb yourself in certainty. Expand, have faith, and then you can live with uncertainty and live well, feeling stable in spite of uncertainty uncertainty.

Know that you, the real you, can never be hurt, only the role, the possessions, the temporary part. That is indeed a leap into the spiritual realm. Faith. When you have faith, your attitude changes, and you won't view uncertainty as an unwelcome guest. When you have that attitude, then you will have freed attention to work with and expand into more stability in your everyday life, without pressure, without feeling that doom hangs over your head, which was placed there by your own self in the first place.

Stability is due to control. Life is one big uncertainty, which you cannot control. What you can control is your attention, which when controlled can guarantee your stability even within uncertainty. This ensures that you can live well in uncertainty.

Happiness could be a few blocks down the road, once you can control your attention and when you know where to direct it. If you are bored, uncreative, or you feel life is a drag because of all those things you have to do, put your attention on things that really interest you, and then you will be able to enjoy your life in full. However, this is not always as simply done as said, because you may feel you have to do those things you don’t enjoy and you have no choice.

The main lesson to learn is to handle energy, which includes knowing where your attention is aimed at and controlling it. This teaches you to look and observe, to see others including their problems and desperation. This is exercising control over your energy.

When you are familiar with the techniques of controlling your attention, you can become a virtuoso with abilities that may seem supernatural to those who don’t know how to observe. Your memory and intelligence will improve as well as your creativity. First, however, you need to learn to focus. Focusing is the ability to concentrate on one thing for a long time (long defined as relative to you). It is putting attention on something, investing your energy as stated above. It is also paying attention to detail. When you can lock out the automatic mind chatter, then you can start splitting attention and focus on more than one thing at a time, thereby creating a kind of field, which is very creative in all respects. That’s when you get insights, connect between things you have not connected before.

Splitting your attention allows you to trigger things within an area in which you focus and then things happen. This focus allows you to see the nature of things as a process, the relations within a certain complex structure, and from there you can easily create changes by changing the dynamic aspect, the relations of the complex structure. Then the whole structure changes somewhat as seen from your point of view. Try to visualize this paragraph, even in meditation, until you get it. This is the result of the ability to focus, which of course starts, as I have stated, with a laser-like ability to center, locking out all other noise.

Controlling the wanderings of one’s attention is controlling awareness, which is the access code of consciousness. Our attention is the most basic dynamic aspect of our creation