Personal Best: How High Is Up?

How High Is Up?

Have you ever asked yourself, “Just how high is up?” or “Just how successful is successful?” or “Just how good is good?” Have you ever thought about the different “Yous” within yourself? Most of us have, at sometime, considered our own path to personal growth and desired to improve upon improvement.

There is a simple, yet powerful, way to evaluate many personal characteristics and thereby gain additional access to who we are and what we truly wish to be. If life is essentially a school, which I believe it is, then we not only have our course work cut out for us but our objective for which our "learnings" specifically prepare us. Get a piece of paper and try this little exercise.

First, write down all of your strengths, all of those characteristics about yourself that are good. Begin with the obvious, perhaps you’re very honest, or friendly, or cooperative and so forth. After you have completed this list, write down some characteristics that you would like to improve. Perhaps you wish to overcome some fear or stop being jealous, or end gossiping or release anger and so forth. So, you’d like to be more courageous or more accepting and trusting, or more confident and so forth. Now, with both of these lists completed, think about yourself as having four inner aspects (IA) of the same you.

The first IA is your actual self--who you are, what you do, etc. The second IA is your concept of an ideal-self. The ideal-self for most of us is just that, an ideal—but usually too ideal to be realistic. “Under no circumstances will I ever become angry,” may be one such ideal. Okay, the third IA is the ought-self. The ought-self is that collection of things typically foisted upon each of us during maturation. The collection of “you ought to do this” and “you ought to do that” statements we all have heard particularly from our parents and family members. Last, but not least, is our desired-self. The desired-self is attainable, not so ideal as to be impractical as a goal. With these four IA’s, take another sheet of paper and write down characteristics that apply pressure to how you feel about yourself, positive or negative, under each IA heading. That is, use a separate column or sheet of paper to list the items (including feelings) that you may have about each category. When you’re done, compare the categories.

The question, “How high is up” has no answer unless there is some reasonable estimate as to the ceiling. Personal improvement is much the same. Self-examination can assist all of us in obtaining reasonable goals and that can provide at least some clear steps on the way to our ceiling.

Fantasizing your way to your goals.

In a recent News Brief, I related the research that showed one could obtain the same gains from imaging exercise as from exercising. Years ago I reported a study in my Wellness book (which is free to download in our e-book library) where basketball players improved their free throw shots as much by practicing mentally as the group that shot free throws everyday of the thirty day study. Current research tends to suggest that the scripts we fantasize, that is, our daydreams, rehearse our worldview and in that sense predispose our experience. Repeating themes such as those around “getting even” and/or emerging victorious at someone’s expense, probably tend to create scenarios in many peoples lives that may lead to violence, anger, and so forth. In short, our mental daydreams may become rehearsed scripts seeking an opportunity to be played out.

By contrast to the above scenario, whenever I have spoken to a successful person, a champion athlete, or anyone else truly at the top of what they do, they have informed me repeatedly and universally that their daydreams were about their success. You can choose what to daydream about and you can end a daydream if it’s not something you want rehearsed and thereby a part of you.

Knowing this, it is incumbent upon each of us to think about the goals we wish to achieve. Look back at your lists, and set up a day-dream that is truly self-serving—one that rehearses your success and achievement according to your goals—your highest best.


A Matter of Mind

Not too many years ago the idea of mind affecting matter was a discussion one might have in metaphysical circles, not one seriously undertaken in scientific gatherings; but not so today. Many new books, and even more serious discussions, focus on the quantum view of mind, matter, and space/time. Mind creating reality appears to be a paradigm that promises to change the worldview in ways that are reminiscent of what it must have been like to be present with the practical discovery of fire.

Mystics from all traditions have long held that mind creates, or at least, co-creates. As long as we have recorded history, we have tales (myths) of mental creations. Moreover, inside each of us is a general sense that transcends the limitations of classical physics. Few people have failed to notice at some time in their life a feeling of dejavu, or a precognitive type of experience like a dream that later seems to come true, or a sense of knowing something about the past or future but not knowing how the information was derived, and so forth. Further, it would be uncommon if a person were to think of their mind as being in their foot, or some other strictly local area of the body. Indeed, it is uncommon for any of us to think that our mind is not somehow separate and more than the body per se'. Still, explaining the matter of mind in terms of the quantum is not the usual option for explaining events and feelings of this sort.

Think of mind as a quantum generator. In the quantum, everything is potential and wave or frequency. For many scientists, even the so-called packets of matter are but units of stored light (wave form/energy). Einstein's famous mass-energy equation suggests a constant flux somewhat analogous to the ancient Greek philosophy of Heraclitus. If mass is stored light, then it is also essentially a creation of energy/wave form. The mind appears to be a transceiver that it is continually propagating waveforms and much of this is measurable by today's sophisticated brain scan tools.

Ideas just seem to pop into our heads. Inspiration creates/but that is only a metaphor. Until recently, creation itself has been a metaphor and scientists avoid "first principles" because science is based on verifiability. The creation of anything is something untestable. Even the Big-Bang theory is inherently unprovable, albeit, hypotheses can be derived from the general theory and those can be tested.

Pursue this with me for a moment. Think of mind as time, an idea suggested by sages for centuries. Einstein showed us that a clock moving at a high speed actually keeps time slower than a stationary clock. The faster the clock goes, approaching the speed of light, the slower time would go. In fact, time is a product of the speed of light. The event horizon surrounding a black hole is thought to be a place where light stands still, neither moving away nor falling into the black hole. Now as counter intuitive as this might initially seem, try thinking of it this way. Mind enters into thought and time is lost. A subject in hypnosis loses their sense of time. What seems like 10 minutes can in fact be a matter of hours. Meditators lose their sense of time. Children daydreaming lose their sense of time. In the alternative, it seems that we can all make the proverbial clock stop. Watching time pass is a sure way to extend the sense of time. Take an airport delay where you are stuck on the plane waiting. Minutes seem to drag on as though they were hours. "A watched clock never ticks," is the saying. Okay/suppose that time and mind is relative. Let's then think of time as mind/time that enters the body and we sense an inner and outer boundary that we can think of as space. If we seek to find some simple hypothesis somewhat akin to flying a clock very fast, and this was actually done in the last century, we might hypothesize that regular meditators would live longer than non-meditators. A quick cursory evaluation of the available data suggests just such a correlation.

In his marvelous book, Mind into Matter, the physicist Fred Alan Wolf, asserts that the body knows itself through mind. In fact, according to Wolf and many of his colleagues, there is no such thing as matter without mind. Two Nobel winning physicists laid down fundamental principles of the quantum years ago. Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity essentially require an observer in order to condense a material anything and of all possible potential, only one can be observed. Let me see if I can make this clearer. According to the uncertainty principle, all that exists in the quantum is potential. This principle explains why quantum events cannot be determined on the basis of cause and effect, past, present or future. Further, according to the complementarity principle, I cannot observe both an object and its trajectory. The act of observation (mind) condenses the "expected" outcome. I have put expected in quotation marks, simply because the nature of any observation presupposes an instrument or method which presupposes the nature of that which is observed. So if I design an experiment to find waves, I detect waves. If the experiment is designed to detect electrons, then electrons are what I find.

The relevance in our context of all of this can be said simply and eloquently, and in Wolf's words, said this way, ". .the physical universe can never be known independently of the observer's choices of what to observe. In fact, complementarity affects how we all see, think about, and feel about the world and perhaps more importantly how we see, think about, and feel about ourselves. How do you imagine yourself?..In a similar manner, our choices alter the physical body. How do you think about your body?"

The quantum view is necessarily and appropriately integrating itself in matters of mind and body. As it turns out, perhaps it is the quantum perspective that will provide the tools to change a so-called reality in the body and/or our relative position in the universe. It's not science fiction, myth, fable or deep esoteric mysterious stuff anymore. The quantum view already enables explanations to many anomalies surrounding the human condition. How the blood chemistry or even the eye color of a multiple personality disordered patient can change with the snap of a personality switch, simply cannot be explained any other way.

What if the mind creates matter? What if the belief of a person, the memory of a person, literally enrolls the mind in a sort of servomechanism creating and re-creating a time line we think of as reality? What then if I choose to remove the script that expects to age? What if I choose to create a new memory, perhaps even a beneficial but synthetic memory? What if I dare to imagine---is that what all of this mind power training is about and how it works for those who use it?

According to the quantum reality, there is a mirrored matter for all matter and that is known as anti-matter. If you add up all the matter and anti-matter in the universe, the sum is zero. However, if you add up all the information in the universe, the sum is infinite. Many physicists believe that matter consists of small packets of light. Light is a waveform energy. The mind continually transmits a waveform energy. Indeed, it may be that mind is itself light. The mind is in every cell of your being. When matter and anti-matter are brought together, the resulting annihilation gives off light (mass less energy/photons). Could it be that the electron charge involved in stored memories, feelings like hate, could be annihilated when brought together with their mirror image? We know that the saying, "What you resist you become," has merit in matters dealing with the human condition. Could it possibly be that the best way to annihilate a negative is to meet it head on with its opposite? Merge hate and love?

Dr. Wolf puts it this way, "Hate, for example, is explained as a quantum statistical property of electrons/and no two electrons will ever exist in the same quantum state. While love, on the other hand, is explained in terms of the quantum statistical behavior of photons/and all photons tend to move into the same state if given the chance." Wolf adds something else particularly germane to our focus. He says, "The old adage 'you are what you eat' has changed into 'you are what you know' and since your knowledge ultimately depends on what information you accept as 'fact,' you are what you believe."