Cup Half Full or Empty?

Cup half full or empty?
Urgh!!!!
Shuddup and drink the tea.


Thinking is the source of suffering, not the drinking...

Focus

Thoughts become things. What you think manifests. It all starts with  a thought. This is the Law of Attraction.

But why didn't some of your thoughts come true?

To be more exact, only strong thoughts that you truly believe in can manifest. Everyday we have thousands of thoughts in our mind every minute competing to manifest . So only the strongest manifest. The weak ones fade away.

However, your thoughts can only be strong if you believe in them.

For instance, if you shout aloud every morning that you are a billionaire hoping that you will become one on mere affirmation, you  are unlikely to succeed. Fact is that you know how much you have in your bank account. In fact, effectively you are telling yourself, "Who are you kidding?..." So, instead of a positive affirmation to move towards your goal, you have helped yourself moved away from your goal unwittingly.

A more workable affirmation can be something like, "Ï have more than enough money to spend everyday!" This will work whether you have a million dollars left in the bank at the end of each day or just a few dollars. It is something you can believe wholeheartedly without feeling like a rotten liar. Particularly if you had realised that you are persistently lying to yourself.

Once you believe in your thoughts, you will have to be able to focus on your thoughts. Focus will add energy to your thoughts so that they will become forms. Monkey minds that jump around from one frivolous thought to another will not succeed. Focus is probably the hardest part.

Meditation increases focus and cuts out clutter. There are different meditation techniques available. Try out several techniques and choose one most suitable for yourself.  For instance, if you are physically hyperactive, you may like to try walking meditation. If you are musically inclined, listen to classical music but follow the sound of one instrument. If you are sensitive to vibrations, try chakra meditation. Some techniques focus on the photo of a guru, some the tip of a candle flame,...etc. Whichever method, they all teach you to focus.

I learned a technique recently that focuses on a humble black dot on a white surface. I find it more effective than using the other objects, as it is something so simple and mundane that it is easy to move your eye away if you are not focusing

A black dot is more mundane than the beautiful tip of a candle flame and more neutral than the face of a guru. There is nothing interesting about the black dot other than using it as a focusing exercise. Using a beautiful or profound object on the other hand distracts you, but fool you into believing that you are focusing well.

Practise focusing. For unless you can focus, you cannot have strong thoughts and therefore they will not manifest. Instead, other thoughts that are relatively stronger will manifest. And they can be any other lingering thoughts that you are not aware of.

The dangerous part is that we are mostly unaware of what  we are thinking of, until it is too late. In other words, it is difficult to track the mind with the mind itself. So harbour healthy thoughts. Allow yourself to react to situations and even be angry about them, as being positive does not mean that you should become blind to negative things around you. Observe, but not judge.  But after allowing yourself the spontaneous emotions, tell yourself not to allow those unwanted  thoughts to fester.

Set yourself some thought checkpoints and motivations. Tell yourself that you don't want to have ugly thoughts because it will give you an ugly face. Ultimately, it feels better to be positive than negative and it is easier to love than to hate. Positive thoughts energise. Negative thoughts wear you out. When you are tired, you also run the risk of poor judgment and slipping down the slippery slope into  calamities. So have enough rest and sleep too. They are essential ingredients to success.

I find acting and role playing an effective method for self realisation. As it allows me to go through the emotions and results of a scene sincerely.

If acting is  too hard, you may like use the state of your bedroom or house as a measurement of how clear or cluttered your mind is, as what is outside is inside, and vice versa. Clear the clutter outside and the inside too clears. This is an easy checkpoint.

Some people go into hypnosis to understand their subconscious thoughts. I simply record my dreams when I wake up in a diary. I find it very useful to check my thoughts and to  make the necessary corrections.

Minimise the use of technology where possible, particularly the use of smartphones. They are one major cause of monkey minds in today's world.

All the people that I have met that are successful are those who are able to focus on their thoughts that they truly believe in. None of them have monkey minds.

So why are gurus only teaching you the Law of Attraction skin deep? I suspect that they may not know some of the finer points which I have discovered the painful and hard way. Most gurus are money motivated. They are mostly selling generalised motherhood statements. Some boast of very successful students out of their large cohorts. By the law of big numbers, if you put enough people there, some will come out successful accidentally.

What we want is a method that works consistently. I have discovered that it is mostly to do with the ability to focus. If you can focus well, everything will fall in place smoothly. If they are not falling in place smoothly, that means that you are not focusing well enough.

IMPORTANT: Do not confuse being 'focused' with being 'stubborn and attached'. They are mutually exclusive.

NOTE: I am not trying to sell you any motivation seminars or magic crystals, but just sharing something I have discovered recently and have found them to yield the results I want. In fact,  you are likely to  have already known of what I have shared, except that may be you have not put them together clear enough such that your mental gears engage.

Thoughts, Words and Action

There are a few Hokkien spewing uncles behind the bus I took today. They sweared at each other to say "hello". Then they proceeded to chat at full blast volume about 4D lottery numbers and karaoke go-go girls, in between spicing their lines swearing their mother's fannies away.

By the time they were getting off the bus they had already fucked up their entire clan and ancestry. Then finally, they bade each other farewell like best friends or brothers.

What a show?!

Evidently, they didn't mean any of the profanity they hurled at each other. In other words, their thoughts, words and action didn't really match totally. Life would be simpler if our thoughts, words and actions matches I think.

For the case of these uncles, they were all eager to let out their penned up frustrations the moment they see each other - their best friends. That's my explanation for their odd mismatches. I would check my thoughts if I were them, for they become words and the danger is when they manifest to become actions. They probably will not manifest as in their words, but their harsh thoughts wouldn't do them good. Why risk it?

I know of someone who once said that he was not concerned if nobody turns up for his weekly meetings at a time when there were record turn outs. I think he said that to sound as if he is detached about the turnout numbers. Fast forward a few years, now he has hardly anyone turning up for his weekly meetings. The thing was that he planted the unwanted seeds for the action to manifest.

In another case, there was a woman who consistently said that she did not like money and that the husband was not giving her money. The latter which infuriated the husband as he was giving her a lot of money regularly. Again, fast forward a few years, and now she gets nothing from the husband.

So be careful with your thoughts and words, for they wil become true in action and manifestation. 

I am going to re-examine what I say, then trace them backward to my thoughts, from today. If they are thoughts I want to seed, then I will check if I can find richer and more specific words to represent them. For then, they will manifest more precisely with less pain -  if at all.

 

 

 

Sufi Meditation

I have always been intrigue by quotes from Sufis like Rumi and Khalil Gilbran.This one from Rumi may touch your heart:

“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.”
― Rumi, The Illuminated Rumi

When I was a kid, I loved to swirl round and round like sufis do. Then I will lie down on the floor after that to enjoy the blissful detachment from my own mind. Nobody taught me that. I just did it instinctively.

Last Sunday, I attended my first Sufi group meditation. It is different from other methods of meditation in that it does not require one to focus on anything. And so it required a little bit of getting used to in the first few minutes. :)

Jeff Ma's talk at the Singapore Expo

Buddhists abhor gambling, as for one to win, many have to lose. All other religions I know of forbid gambling. Personally, I don't gamble, as they cause unnecessary anxiety and awakes the greed in me.

It is therefore surprising that in a seminar that I attended recently stretching two days with about six prominent speakers, I ended up learning most from the gambler among them, Mr Jeff Ma. Jeff is a well-known card counter and it is said that many casinos ban him from playing blackjack in their premises.

He said that people are generally averse to losses, they are not averse too winnings, which leads them to 'bias omission' or 'inactivity', ie. the decision not to make a decision. This must never be an option. That he learned when his mother had a stroke and the doctor that normally wouldn't do a brain surgery to old people. At that point, he knew that an 'inactive' decision (not to do anything) would normally mean that his mother will not live pass another sixty days. Against normal practice, they decided to get her to the operating table and the result is that his mum is still living and well today.

His method is data-driven and not based on gut-feeling.

He related to us how he lost $50,000 in one round of black-jack, even though his decision was data-driven. Then he went on to lose another $50,000, in yet another round of black-jack, in yet another data-driven decision. Dejected, he went to his room, slumbered on the floor, stared at the ceiling and contemplated quitting. Then curiously, after long thoughts, he decided not to quit and go back to the tables and subsequently won $100,000, and then later, another $70,000. 

He said that he won his rounds based on data-driven decisions and lost also based on data-driven decisions. In other words, the right decision made based on data, need not always end up with the desired outcomes. That said, we have to continue to make the right decisions although sometimes they don't come up with the desired outcomes. In other words, we must be able to separate right decisions from outcomes, and not be discouraged by the latter if they don't turn out desirable. So we must learn to embrace 'failures' and not be disheartened by them.

I think one of the reasons that I learn more from Jeff than the others is that he was purely sharing his experience and was not trying to sell me anything. In an act as if sarcastic of the other speakers, he did playfully asked the audience to take out their smart phone to go to Amazon to buy his book, "Bringing the House Down".

In group work, he said that there must be trust, transparency and communications. Of which he told us that they use code words to get around other people knowing what they are communicating to each other. For instance, the word 'paycheck' means something. So one of their team members would said out loud to the dealer, "Hey! You are taking away my paycheck!"

Yet another code word is "sweet" for "sixteen". And one of his team member is so happy whenever he utter the word "sweet", that in one time at the end of the game, he was paid some winnings, even though he had lost.

Finally, he related how he was sharing his experience in Silicon Valley among venture capitalists and other financiers, when suddenly, a billionaire VC who didn't seem to be listening and was busy with his Blackberry most of the time, said, "I don't believe you...". 

"What do you not believe?" Jeff asked.

"I don't believe you wanted to quit," he quipped.

Recounting the time he was lying down on his hotel room floor, despondent and starring at the ceiling, he said that, that billionaire was right, he never wanted to quit. And so he didn't quit. Had he quit, he wouldn't have gone back and won some money, had the book written, a movie made and his talking to us at the seminar.

Here are some clips:

Kid's Play - The Child in You

.A friend of me sent me this video from Evian. I am not related in anyway to their marketing, but this ad reminds and inspires us to live the child in us. Enjoy!

Rich Church Poor Church

In Poor Church, I watched a Christmas skit on their makeshift stage. A church goer next to me commented that it will be nice to have a real backstage where the actors can prepare themselves and emerge into each scene more seamlessly. I replied that it wouldn't really matter as this is a church and not a professional concert hall. Besides, the message conveyed through the skit was entertaining and clear - that we should celebrate Christmas with God in our hearts and not be overwhelmed by the frills of Christmas shopping and parties. Before the service, there was a simple buffet dinner. After that, we had a nice dessert buffet for everyone to get know each other better.

In Rich Church, we watched a Christmas musical on a collosal stage with props of an outlandish and stately American home complete with a winter fireplace; a huge back-up choir and live orchestra in the backstage, their silhouette focused by  cleverly positioned and synchronised lights and colours, visible through a translucent screen. The auditorium seats 3,000 odd of us with a professionally lit stage, pristine sound system and two large video screens magnifying the performance delivered by two camera cranes. It was an entertaining performance. The singing and entertainment were cleverly orchestrated with preachings in between and eventually culminating in a hard sell to convert non-believers. It was cleverly done by asking everyone to close their eyes and raise their hands if they so wish to be converted, to overcome their shyness. There was also peer pressure to ask believers to look at non-believers and say, "I will accompany you if you would step out to accept Jesus".

I am never a fan of hard sell of any product, religion included. Sadly, religion is a product and all religions are man-made without exceptions.

As the hard sell made its assault, I couldn't help but imagine how Jesus would have felt if he sees all these bright lights and sizzle displayed before him in the name of converting non-believers into believers. Couldn't it be done the same way as he did under the canopy of a tree in an open ground without any frills? Can we truly enlighten people about their spirituality inside by exploiting the crass materialism outside? Can we solve the problems of this material world that tempts us to stray away from God, with the same mind that had created them?

Big churches need big funds and these come from church goers. But should these funds be channeled to the teachings of Jesus and the Bible, or to commercial outlets and glitzy auditoriums?

May be among the thousands recruited in Rich Church, some will see the Light and experience salvation. However I suspect that many will be led into many blind alleys and meanders. Poor Church is materially poor, but I find its congregation warmer and its size of a more human scale. It also does not hard sell, or sell at all. It treats its congregations and guests as seekers of the Christian faith.

Of course, being spiritual does not mean that one has to be poor. We need material to survive in this human journey. However, if we are overwhelmed by material and lose ourselves in the insanity of the material world, then we will be led further and further away from our heart and God. That is my discomfort with Rich Church. This is my opinion. I am not imposing this on anyone. Rich Church goers will continue to do what Rich Church goers do. Ultimately, whatever we do, whether we are conscious of them or not, they are on our journey towards self realisation and salvation.

Have a Merry Christmas everyone!