khissable thoughts by khiss

2012-02-07T18:55:00.001+02:00

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How to...stop?

2010-03-28T01:38:00.005+03:00

Wow, it's been a long time since I have written here. Sometimes life speeds by so fast. It's great.

It's funny though how sometimes in 6 months more things happen to you then in several things put together. Life comes to a still and then it just speeds up, but to such a rate that you can't keep a grip on things. Is it fun? Maybe. Sometimes however you feel it's too much. You don't have the time to reflect on things, on all the changes that are going on day by day.

Breaks are important. Getting perspective... It should be mandatory, but sometimes you get so caught up in events that when you get to the point to reflect on what happened you are overwhelmed by the shear amount of changes.

It is fun though, living your life this way. It's fun at least for a while, however you then get the sensation that you might be getting off track, that you aren't living true to your deeper purpose, but you cannot be sure. Even your deep purpose seems to be a mystery, a thing that you start to doubt and question. Is the purpose I had 6 months ago the same as the one I have right now.

Stop!!

...when?

Reflect!!

...on which of the 100 events?

How can I get a grip on my journey when I'm travelling at this speed? How can I figure out where I am and where should I be heading? What was an absolute fact a week ago, today isn't valid any more. So what is relevant and what isn't in the big picture.

Maybe none of these matter at the end of the day. Maybe the only thing that matters is to be completely present in every moment, like Tolle sais. I doubt it however. Everyone has a larger purpose, I do as well. Am I on the right path towards this purpose? I don't know. No clue what my purpose is.

David Deida would tell me, lock yourself in a room and don't leave until you figured your purpose out, but what if I just remain on the train that I'm on right now and I enjoy the journey further. Would that bean optimal solution in the long run? I don't know.

Some would say it doesn't mater, as long as your happy on the journey you are on. Am I happy? I guess so, at least most of the time. But will the direction that I'm on lead me to a place that will offer me happiness in the future as well? THIS is what I don't know.

I have signals that say I'm not on the right track, but to be honest I am living one of the most relaxed and filling period of my life. It's a dilema for me, because I'm generally happy but something inside me, deep inside is telling me that I'm "asleep" and I need to "wake up"

Maybe it's time to stop...but... I don't have the time. The challenges in my life are difficult, they require attention and they take up the little time I have...so...what's the solution.

It seems that I don't know. Not really. Maybe you have a clue, maybe you were at this point and figured out a direction out of it

In any case if this post makes any sense to you (and I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't) leave a comment with your thoughts, if you have any :)

Thank you

Being there - what do you think?

2009-06-27T20:23:00.000+03:00

Why is it so hard for many o us, including myself to be there for the ones you love, and I don't mean being there when they have a problem, but being there when everything is going ok, paying attention to their lives and experiences on a day to day basis. Why do we forget or pure simply not even do these things?

All of us have people in our lives that we love and who are dear to us: mom and dad, brother or sister, our children, our lover, our best friends etc. Deep down we all hold these people very close to our heart and losing one of them would cause us a very grate amount of grief.

Still even though we care and love them, many times watching the latest episode of Prison Break is more important to us then calling them up and asking them how they are, how their day was. I can tell you from personal experience that this can cause a lot of pain to people in certain cases.
I'm pretty sure that if you sit down and let it process in you for a while, you will realize that deep down there really isn't anything more important than how the people we love spend their lives

So why don't we do it? Why don't we call them everyday?
- society doesn't teach us
- my parents didn't do it
- they don't call me, why should I call them
- why should I even care, I have my problems

There are so many superficial explanations to this subject, but I suspect, that deep down, something totally different is happening...not sure what though....

What do you think?

Trust

2009-06-06T13:52:00.005+03:00

It seems that I'm on a roll lately, just can't stop writing :) Many interesting things are happening in my life lately, which bring me to different realizations. Some of them might be obvious others less obvious, but whatever the case is, I would like to share them with you.

Today I will talk about TRUST and its dynamics.

An obvious truth about trust is that it's a key component of our civilization and how we interact with each other. Trusting someone allows us to know what to expect from them in a particular situation.

However, when we do the opposite of what they were expecting, people lose trust in you and gaining that trust back is almost impossible in most cases. So why is that? Why DO we lose trust and why IS IT so hard to gain it back?

What I came to realize is that betraying someone's trust, always comes from a point of weakness. When we first meet somebody we start communicating, on all levels and we start knowing each other on all levels, by noticing certain cues and listening to what he/she is saying. Based on this information, we learn who the other person is and we pretty much expect them to be the person they present themselves to be.

However life is tough and we are by far not perfect creatures. Many things happen in our life that affect us, make us scared or insecure and in these precise moment something happens that leads to the destabilization of trust.

Today's humans aren't very in touch with their true essence. Somewhere along the way of evolution we lost the touch with who we really are (and it keeps getting worse), instead our brilliant mind started creating personas for ourselves, images of who are mind thinks that we are. This images are never accurate, they can not be accurate since our mind, even with his great power is still very flawed. Anyway, what happens is that when we meet another person, we start communicating to them that "we are our persona" and most of the time people actually believe us and don't see trough to our true essence.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. When something unexpected or difficult happens, which isn't integrated into our persona, we get scared. Our mind is very very scared of the unknown, his quite pathetic actually, when it comes down to these kinds of situation. And what these situations do, is start a chain of events which ultimately affects the trust of the people who surround us.

In those moments, those tests of life, we lose the sense of who we are, not knowing how to handle it, we do something that is completely out of character, or more exactly something that doesn't come from our deep selves, but from our mind. In these moments we betray ourselves, we lose congruency with who we are, we become another person, a persona that is created out of the flawedness of our mind.

Of course, people who trust you, they trust either your deep inner self or the persona you presented to them. But in any case, the lack of character that arises from the weakness inside you, in the face of a challenge, will completely destabilize this trust. They will realize that what they thought about you that was real, isn't and in the future they will know that they cannot expect that particular thing from you.

One of the more interesting things that surrounds trust, is its depth. When you mess up a small thing, people will lose their trust in your ability to that particular thing, but it's not that big of an issue and they get over it, pretty quick. However when you betray somebody's trust on a deep level, you show them that deep down you are not the person you presented yourself to be and by doing this, you not only create doubt regarding that particular subject, but you also put question marks around everything that comes above it. When you really mes up, people will have a hard time trusting you in anything, because if you're flawed at such a deep level, there is a very high chance that you are a weak person and that you will betray them in many other places.

Unfortunately, like I mentioned before, we are not perfect creatures. We do make mistakes, we do hurt the ones around us and we do by betray their trust. It is unavoidable.

And that's the beauty of it, that's the beauty of being humans. Whenever we fail, a chance arises for us to know our selves and grow. And this is exactly what you need to do if you ever desire to regain people's trust.

What society, more exactly politics teaches us, is that with careful communication and arguments, it is pretty simple to get back people's trust. And this is what WE try to do as well. When we fuck up, we go apologize and present arguments on how you will try to avoid the situation in the future. Now due to the compassionate nature of the human race, we tend to convince ourselves to believe them over and over and over again. But what will happen again and again and again (I loooooove repetition today :) ) is to repeat the same mistake in a different way, since the true cause is still there. The persona is flawed and instead of going in and fixing them we try to cover it up.

Unfortunately, whatever we do, until we handle it, real trust will never exist again. More then that, if you betray someone's trust and you manage to somehow, gain it back, that person will probably test you over and over again to see if you are really trustable.

And here is where it gets really really messy. You betray your true self and in consequence the trust of somebody who's close to you. You realize what you did and you decide to try to work on yourself, however you will face a new obstacle. The weakness of the person you betrayed and yes, they ARE WEAK.

Why do I say this? Well once your trust is betrayed, you get scared and afraid to suffer the same fate again. Now the person who betrayed your trust might really start to work on himself and try really hard, but you sabotage him from your own weakness. Working on yourself is a hard and difficult process in its own, but when someone is putting a tremendous pressure on you, by testing you, the process becomes almost impossible.

People are week no doubt about it. Others betray you because they are weak, and that you make it impossible for them to handle the situation, because you're scared and week.

Trust can be gained fully back under only one condition, by removing the cause, by becoming true to yourself in difficult situations, especially in the type of situation where you messed up before.

Giving trust back is very hard also, we are always afraid of getting hurt again. However this is just an excuse for being pathetic and weak. If you are a strong person and your trust gets betrayed, you will stand by the other person if you seem him/her make real tries in getting to be true to him/herself.

This is of course not an obligation, but if you do care about the person, you will help him/her grow.

For any type of relationship between you people to work, strength is needed. If both sides are weak...well then you need to find someone who is strong enough to stand by you when things get rough.

How to avoid betraying yourself and the trust that other people have in you?

"Know thyself"

It's that simple. When you are present and aware of yourself and not some persona or image created by your mind you will be strong and trustable by all who care about you.

A small video about our senses

2009-06-05T23:20:00.003+03:00

Well as you can see I still haven't got to finishing the abundance of the universe post. For some reasons, I've gotten into a mind activity which, slows me from appreciating all the wonders. I still go and see them, but the connection is filtered, my mind is kinda blocking me from appreciating things for more then their face value.

Any way, I just ran over this video recently and thought it would be quite relevant to the subject, especially the RAS and how exactly our mind processes and filters the information that the universe offers. Be sure to watch this when you have some focus, since it's kinda mind blowing. Enjoy

"You don't see anything" it's all created in your mind, based on what you've learned throughout your childhood...so do you think it might be possible that we learned to appreciate the wrong things and to ignore some other stuff that might be very valuable to us....?

Who knows... But maybe it's time to put some question marks around the things we "KNOW" are important and have value, cause there might be a chance that we missed something. (since we probably weren't surrounded by world renowned geniuses while were growing up...but by simple people who not that long ago thought the world was flat and humans couldn't fly...not to mention the moon...)

PS: The guy who is talking, his name is Eben Pagan and his an entrepreneur and human interaction genius (pretty much).

The abundance of the universe

2009-05-08T15:44:00.006+03:00

Did you ever feel, even for a moment, that the universe is a hostile place. That it gives nothing or very few things to you?

For some it's hard to identify with that question, for others it's easier, during our lifetime however we face many challenges, many difficult situations and a good part of these won't end up the way we like it. Heck, many people go into a state of depression because their life isn't working out the way they would want it to. And when they do get in a depressive state, they have that incredibly strong feeling that the universe is a hostile place, that there is nothing to live for nothing to appreciate.

If you ever were close to somebody who was really down and you suggested to them to appreciate a certain thing, they probably looked at you as if you were stupid, as if you just don't understand them.

Why is that? Why is it that we forget that the universe is an incredible place, filled with miracles, which we can't even begin to comprehend. How is it even possible to forget that?

Well this is what this post will try to uncover. What is the reason behind the fact that we slip into a state where we disconnect from the wonders of the world in such an intense way, that we begin looking at it as if it was a "bad place". And I'm not referring only to the extremes here, all of us, including myself, have periods when things don't work out as they should and we get so caught up in it that we lose focus, lose perspective.

WARNING: Topics mentioned in this post, might get a bit weird and sound crazy for some, so continue reading at your own risk

Is the world an abundant place filled with incredible events?

Some people might say yes to this, some might respond no, but it all comes down on whether you take the time to notice them or not.

Recently I've been experiencing something very interesting, or more correctly remembering it.

Do you recall when you were a little child, when everything was new, when every single experience was incredibly interesting, going just 2 blocks away from home was an adventure? Remember when you were still incredibly amazed by seeing the trees blossom in the spring, or when the first snow falls down in the winter?

That's what true appreciation is. Seeing something incredible, witnessing something that's way beyond of what your brain can comprehend.

Well we do get the same sensations even now when we are older. For some of us, it's when we arrive at the beach for the first time during the summer and we dive into the sea. For others by climbing a mountain and witnessing an amazing landscape. Or even more close to home when you fall in love, see a child's birth or gain a new friend.

All of these are natures miracles, the wonders that surround us on a day to day basis.

Don't believe me? look up at the sky and watch a bird fly, notice it's grace in the air, the way it's wings move, the freedom and the power that it has. Go out to the park on a sunny day and watch the children playing, see their innocents and happiness, their joy to be their, their smileys, their laughter and of course the tears when they fall down and themselves.

Unfortunately those of us who spend a good amount of time in our heads, rationalizing, thinking planning about tomorrow, or remembering yesterday, we miss out on these things. We miss out of the marvels of the present moment and the more we do this the more disconnected we get, the more we start to have a sensation of emptiness inside, a sensation of being lost.

And we don't like being lost, so we try to run after things, objects, events, money, power, cars, house, hot women etc. you name it. We try to find ourselves in them, we try to fix the sensation of being disconnected from the universe, with objects who's values exist mostly in our brain.

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with these objects, but they can never compensate for the pure marvels of the universe. If you ever experienced the loss of a person who you really loved, you probably would give away your car, if it would bring him back to life. And of course this is an extreme example, but if you ever felt a deep connection to one of the wonders of the universe, you know that no material object can replace it.

Think about a really strong friendship, a deep, passionate and loving romantic relationship, a child playing in a park or a hatching of an egg. There is no material thing that can give us the same amount of deep value then these things can.

And still, we move away from them, we forget about them. When we look at a person we look at his car, wallet and clothes and ignore the inner beauty. When we look at birds we see that they crap all over the place and get pissed, instead of seeing how glamorous they are. When a child knocks over a drink and stains the table cloth, we get pissed at him, scold him, instead of realizing how innocent and pure he/she is.

We disconnect from these simple yet incredible thing.

How do we get so distant from all these wonders from time to time?

Well even though at a deep level most people can really appreciate these things, at a mental level things are different, since our brain LOVES to filter.

What do I mean by filtering? Well basically the brain tends to only absorb things that serve its immediate purpose. This is what's behind the Reticular Activation System as well, which is a phenomenal function of the brain in my opinion.

When you are focusing on getting a job, being promoted, putting food on the table or whatever else it might be, your mind will be an excellent tool in helping you achieve them and it will basically filter out all the things which do not serve this immediate purpose. And when you do it for an extended amount of time, your mind will start getting lost...

And this is how the breakage from the universe starts. You get lost in activities, in thoughts, in ideas and you start only noticing the bills, the money, the car which are your immediate objectives. The more you do this, the more empty you start to feel and the LESS you will appreciate anything, the harder it will be for anything to fulfill you and the more lost you will feel.

So what do you do? You try to get more money, another promotion, a better car or a hotter, younger girl/guy to cheat on your spouse with. And guess what this results in!?

Yes, you are correct! More disconnection from the "simple" things, a bigger emptiness and of course a stronger sensation of being lost. The more you go at this rate, the more miserable you will be and the more hostile the universe will seem to you, since it "never gives you anything", you can never fill the emptiness, with the objects you have thought so much for.

The objects, the material things can offer you a brief satisfaction, no doubt. I myself adore cruising in a convertible, with the top down during the summer. But I also know that there are much more deep places in me and in all of us, which will never be truly fulfilled with material objects, places which only budge when I take the time to pay attention to one of the gifts of this universe.

What can we do to get back in touch with the universe again?

This shall follow in a future post.

As always, you're comments are welcomed.
Thank you for reading this, I appreciate it.

The emptiness of the moment

2008-11-21T00:31:00.004+02:00

So, it's been quite some while since I sat down to write something here. The reason is pretty simple: I didn't having anything to write about.

Did you ever notice how sometimes, our lives get on such a fast rhythm, that nothing remains constant. The truth of yesterday is the lie of today, what yesterday you liked today doesn't stern any kind of interest inside of you...it's the weirdest thing.

If in case you don't know what I'm talking about, can you recall 3 weeks of your life where one the first you were totally happy, then pretty miserable and happy again on the 3rd week.

Sometimes I get the feeling that my life has a mind of it's own and I'm just a spectator in it.

But enough off this bullshit.

The fact is that we all like to ground our reality in something, so when the situation changes, we have a solid anchor point.

Most of us tie their reality to external elements (I am rich, have a nice car, a good job....this is WHO I AM), the problem with this is that external elements are not fully in our control (think about how many rich people became poor over the past year, due to the global recession). When we tie our reality to external elements, we risk a lot, because they can disappear over night, and our reality, concept of who we are with it.

This is how most of us westerners live our lives, but if you go to Asia, you will notice a different tendency. People have their reality anchored inside of themselves, who they are is not determined by what they poses. So when the exterior world changes, their identity and the perception they have about themselves remain constant.

This perception of life was adopted in the movie Fight Club as well. Some of you might remember this quote from the movie:

"You are not your job.
You are not how much you have in the bank.
You are not the contents of your wallet.
You are not your fucking Khakis.
~Tyler~

This is what I've been trying to achieve during the past few years. Detaching my sense of identity from objects and placing it back into myself where it belongs.

However....there was and is a simple question in my mind:

What the F*** does it mean to place your anchors inside yourself???

It's a weird concept and a hard one at the same time.

The best direction I found was to define my reality, by what I want, what my purpose is, what I believe is right and wrong, how I think I should live my life and other concepts (some of them I mentioned on this blog).

The truth is that finding yourself in yourself, is much much harder than I would have thought...

Whenever I think that: "YES, I'm finally on the right path" Something comes up and makes me realize that at one point I made a mistake in my rationalization.

In the past few months my reality has been challenged quite a lot (thanks to a special friend :) ) and also had a lot of challenges, which resulted in me having to spend time deciding if what I was doing and how I did them, were right or wrong, beneficial or not for me on the long term.

And you know what? On many occasions I realized, that I wasn't doing things the right way and that I need to change things. A couple of times my entire reality was shaken from its roots.

Was it pleasant?...no, not at all.

Was it beneficial for me and my sense of identity/reality?...I sure damn hope so.

The thing I start realizing while I'm writing this post is that, if I want a strong reality and sense of identity, I need to challenge it as hard and as often as possible.

But there's a downside to this.

When you challenge your reality, you will lose many things, including your self confidence and desire to obtain different things.

I presume that you have to balance out how often you push yourself to grow your reality and how often and for how long you take the time to benefit from your reality, before you decide to push it again. You can't do both.

How ever the catch is that you don't really decide, when you are going to be challenged, so you need to know how to handle it.

Will you profit from the challenge and let yourself grow, or will you ignore it for a while and continue doing what you were doing in your current reality.

To be a bit of a social critic, most people tend to do the second and that's why their perception of reality is so so so messed up and bad.

However, it seems that I went a bit overboard and let my reality change way too much recently and let it go a bit out of control? Not sure.

All i know is that, I'm not really sure where I am in my life, what I want to do and where i want to go. And I need to do something about this....I need to find myself again.

The fear of losing comfort

2008-08-24T15:02:00.003+03:00

As i promised in my last post, I will more into detail why we choose instant over delayed gratification most of the time. The key concept for this is: The Fear of Loss of Comfort (FLC)

Pretty much all people (including you) make a very big part of their decisions based on fears. Be it

the fear of getting hurt (physically or emotionally),
the fear of going hungry (when you eat),
the fear of dying (when you choose not to go bungee jumping or skydiving),
the fear of being rejected (when you meet someone new),
the fear of not being loved (when you try to be nice to people you like),
the fear of hurting someone that you love (when you are not up front and you don't speak your mind if you don't like something that the other person does),
the fear of getting fired (when you suck up to your boss),
the fear of gaining weight (when you go on a diet),
the fear of financial instability (when you take a job you don't enjoy doing),
the fear of losing something you own (when you refuse to lend something to someone),
the fear of being cheated (when you go into an expensive store to buy something, while you can get it on EBay for half the price),
the fear of being useless (when people never ask for your opinion)

..............

As you can see we have a huge amount of fears and this list is only a small part. All of us make many of our decisions controlled by at least one of these fears. You may call it our instinct for survival, which 50,000 years ago, when we lived in caves, were the one that kept us alive day by day based on these fears. Today however things have changed quite a bit, and many of these fears became either obsolete or counterproductive. If you know a person well enough, you can lend him your stuff without too big of a risk (some people still refuse), or if you meet someone new and they reject you, the consequences are usually nonexistent (50,000 years ago if you upset someone who you didn't know, chances were that you could have gotten killed by that person).

The same is true for mos of the fears and even though having a healthy sense of fear is many times useful, you cannot let yourself be controlled by them, you cannot afford to make your decisions based on fears, because most of the time, they are incorrect. You need to keep an objective perspective on the situation.

So you might be asking yourself: "How do I get away from acting on fears? Heck, how can I tell if I'm acting on a fear, if there are so many of them?"

This brings us to our key concept, the fear of losing comfort (FLC). Why is this a key concept? Well to put it simply, because this is the only true fear that we have. All fears come down to avoiding some form of comfort loss. We have a situation that we're comfortable in and we don't want that to change, since we MIGHT not like the consequences. At least according to our instinct of survival, which as I mentioned, is very VERY outdated.

So let me repeat this, when we are in a situation that we like, we will resist any kind of change, due to the fear of losing the state of comfort that we're in. Even if the change would assure us of a 95% chance of improvement to our level of comfort, the FLC will start screaming about that 5%, and if you're not able to control your fear you will act on it, and chose to stay in your current state.

To make it more clear how lose of comfort is the common element for all fears, I'll give you a few examples:
the fear of dying (when you choose not to go bungee jumping or skydiving) - what bigger discomfort is there then to be dead

the fear of being rejected (when you meet someone new) - you are currently in a state of comfort, if you try and meet somebody and get rejected, you will feel uncomfortable

the fear of not being loved (when you try to be nice to people you like) - being loved is a very comfortable state you're in, losing that love would create huge amount of discomfort

the fear of getting fired (when you suck up to your boss) - losing your job would create a very uncomfortable situation for you

All fears come down to some kind of loss of comfort, thus the only true fear is the fear of losing comfort(FLC). So every time you're in a situation that you're comfortable in and a certain action would require you to lose that state of comfort, you can be pretty sure that a fear will pop up and try to talk you out of making the action that will make you lose comfort, that would deny your INSTANT GRATIFICATION.

Instant gratification (IG) is pretty much a form of FLC. IG gives you instant comfort and satisfies your FLC or at least avoids the loss of comfort.

So every time you act on IG you are acting on a fear, on the FLC.

This is a very bad tendency, since delayed gratification is usually more profitable in the long run.

Delayed Gratification vs Instant Gratification

2008-08-03T13:46:00.003+03:00

Why are we so prone to choose instant gratification over delayed gratification, even though delaying the gratification usually brings greater satisfaction and happiness?

Well lately I've been struggling with another dilemma, to which I couldn't find an accurate answer, regardless if I asked average people or psychologists. The answers that I got, only explained this tendency in a limited environment or for a specific situation, but when you tried to apply it in general they usually failed.

Well after boggling my mind with this, this morning I came up with a concept, that in my opinion links all the theories together and can offer a general explanation.

However before I continue, I think it would be best to describe what I mean by "instant and delayed gratification".

The simplest way for this would be through an example:
Let's say, when you were a kid, you're mom was making you're favorite pie and you loved it so much, that you couldn't wait for it to be done so that you can taste it. So what did you do? When the pie was done and your mom took it out of the oven, smelling that incredible smell, you ran there took a piece of the hot pie and stuffed in your mouth, even though you knew that it's gonna burn your tongue and that it's gonna be soar for a few days after (maybe even so much that you wouldn't be able to taste the rest of the pie).

I'm pretty sure that most of us are familiar with this story. Some of us (including me :) ) still do it to this day. We choose to be gratified in the instant when the pie is still hot, even though we are conscious that it will burn our tongue, instead of delaying the gratification, waiting a bit for the pie to cool down, and enjoy the same grate taste without the added suffering.

We know, that if we delay the gratification, it will serve us better, but we are so overwhelmed that we choose to do something that satisfies us less in the long term.

This tendency shows up in countless situations and what we usually choose is the instant gratification over the delayed one. Be it a choice between watching TV and cleaning the room (the 2nd would offer us more comfort in the long run), eating fast-food (+taste, -health) over salad (+health, -taste) etc.

The common element in most of these, is feeling instant discomfort or less comfort, if we delay the gratification. If we choose to eat the salad, we will enjoy less taste in the moment, if we clean the room it will be less comfortable since we will need to invest some energy and if we eat the pie later, the wait will create a lack of comfort for a period of time.

On the other hand, if we chose to gratify ourselves in the instant, we will feel an instant rush of good emotions, an instant "reward" for our actions.

So it is pretty obvious why instant gratification would seem the better choice at first glance. You reduce instant discomfort and feel instant pleasure. It doesn't sound like a bad deal, does it?

.....Well IT IS a bad deal, in fact a horrible one in most cases.

I'll go into the details in my next post.

Emotional Connections - part 2

2008-07-13T16:37:00.003+03:00

After my post yesterday I've meat up with a few good friends of mine and went to have some fun. During our discussions I've pretty much came to the conclusion, that one of my friends, is the type of person who almost never creates emotional connections with other people. Being a brilliant thinker he tends to limit himself to mostly pure intellectual connections.

This got me thinking even more deeply about the subject, which brought me to a realization on why we humans hold emotional connections so highly and allow ourselves, to trust people, with which we have these types of connections, more easily.

Most times when we're making decisions, especially in difficult situations, we tend to get influenced by emotions and feelings like fear, hate and love. Weak and emotional people tend to rely a lot more on these influences, ending up making decisions that lack sense and logic, while strong people manage to control their emotions a lot better, making better decisions.

In order to be able to trust somebody at a deep level, it is my belief that people need to know the emotional integrity of the other person at an unconscious level. We have to know how deep the other person is, in order to be able to estimate how they would act in different situations.

By no means are these estimations made consciously, they all happen in our deep unconscious. Just like when we look at the body language of another person and make automatic and unconscious judgments based on the information we perceive, when we come in contact with the emotional depth of the other person, we make automatic estimations on what their reactions would be in difficult situations.

If we "like" what we feel the we will be able to trust the other person more, but if we feel a lack of emotional integrity and dept, we will automatically become suspicious and cautious.

Of course how well we can understand the value and the meaning of other people's emotions, is based on our life experience and how emotionally savvy we are. This is why many people let themselves get hurt by others, even though they came in contact with the other person's emotional depth. They have access to the "information", but they just don't have the knowledge to understand the meaning of it...but I feel that we are going a bit off track here.

To rap it up, people need emotional connections, not just because it is the only way to blissful happiness, but because it's a direct way to understanding the emotional integrity of the other person, giving us the chance to trust the other person.

Any comments regarding this subject are welcomed. Use the comment button below. Thank you.

Emotional Connections - manipulation or sensation?

2008-07-12T13:43:00.008+03:00

What is an emotional connection and how do you create it?

This question has been on my mind a lot in the past few weeks, but the trouble was that wherever I searched, the answers that I found were either way to complicated or you could just tell that they were inaccurate, not fitting into everyday's reality. So I had no other choice but to analyze the dynamics of it and create my own concept about the subject.

So what is this thing that we like to simply refer to as "emotional connection"?

Well a "connection" between two people happens when they share a common thought or feeling and through this element you unite your intellectual and/or emotional energy. For example let's take Bob and Bill who are complete strangers to each other.

One day both Bob and Bill go to the same club and sit next to each other at the bar. While enjoying their drinks, they get into a conversation about cars, since both of them enjoy this subject, and they talk about manufacturers, reliability, prices etc. During this conversation an intellectual connection is created between them based around a common element (cars), through this connection they share their intellectual energy, by both expressing their thoughts about the subject. Through this sharing of intellectual energy, a synergy is created giving excellent value to the conversation and the life of Bob and Bill.

So, what about "emotional connections"?

Well it is my belief that, this happens when people share feelings. This can be done by:

sharing your emotions about a certain subject or experience, the stronger the emotions you experienced the stronger the connection
sharing an experience that awakens the same emotions in both person (watching a comedy or horror movie together, experiencing a horrible or very pleasant experience, going to a social gathering where you only know each other)
telling a story that awakens strong emotions in the other person
doing something that leaves a deep and pleasant emotional mark on the other person (helping in need, conveying to the other person his importance, making her/him feel good about her/himself)

Basically anytime you share a deep enough emotion/feeling with another person, the emotional connection between the two gets stronger. And like the examples point it out, these sharing can be unilateral or bilateral, meaning that it is not necessary for both participants to share their emotions in order for the connection to get stronger. But if it's bilateral the effect will probably be much more stronger.

So, what are the effects of emotional connections....(and I always refer to positive connections, they can be negative as well, but they aren't very useful)

Well first of all if there is an emotional connection between two people, the two will prioritize each other over other people (many times even over themselves). So basically if a person takes the time to create an emotional connection with someone, there is a high likelihood that this connection will be very productive for him, as long as it's sustained.

Now, if we think about this effect, emotional connection in marketing and sales can be incredibly valuable. If you can skillfully manipulate the communications between the company and client, you can quickly create a connection, making the selling of the product a lot easier.

Also if you look at people who are considered users and manipulators, we can notice that they all have exceptional skills in manipulating the emotions of others by using the methods mentioned above. So if you want to obtain something from someone, the easiest way to do it is by creating an artificial emotional connection.

Now chances are that if you read the last few paragraphs, you might be thinking, well if I can be so easily manipulated through emotional connections, I should close my self up and become emotionally isolated from others. And unfortunately a lot of people do this, when they get hurt, when their connection gets severed by the other person. They lock themselves up so that they don't get hurt again.

In my opinion, anyone that does this is pretty much a retard....and this brings us to the other and more valuable effect of emotional connections: the sensation.

Us humans have a relatively short life span (around 27,000 days). The element that make these days invaluable are emotions, feelings and happiness (I won't argue why here, you either get it or you don't).

When there's an emotional connection between two people, something incredible happens. Just like in the example of intellectual connection, a synergy is created between the emotional energies of the two. This synergy can result in levels of emotions that are over ten times higher than the combined values of their individual energy, thus multiplying our greatest resource.

Through emotional connection, a situation is created, in which both of the participants gain an indefinite boost in their most prized possession: emotional energy.

But you have to take into consideration that a surge like this in your energy level can be very hard to control and this is why many relations between people end violently. If you are not an emotionally strong person it is recommended to ease into the intensity of the emotional connection, so that you can accommodate to it. But if you are powerful then you can jump into the deepest point of the "pool" and enjoy the "swim"

So if you want to manipulate someone, your best might be in creating an emotional connection. but if you truly want to enjoy the greatness of life, then you should invest as much time as possible, into creating emotional connection with the people that surround you and enjoy the incredible fruits it produces.

Any comments regarding this subject are welcomed. Use the comment button below. Thank you.

Part 2

You deserve little credit for what you are

2007-12-02T14:36:00.003+02:00

"You deserve very little credit for being what you are"

Dale Carnegie

This quote really changed the way I'm thinking about myself.

What it's trying to suggest is that anybody could have the same results in life as we do, if they would received the same genes, grew up in the same environment and have the same experiences as we had.

I'm not trying to say that we are not in control of our decisions, what I'm saying is that although we are the one who decides which way our life will be heading, the reason why we make those decisions, comes from our past experiences.

Thus even if we have a successful life, we have no reason to be arrogant about it, because it's not really our achievement. If anybody else was born with your exact genes, raised in the same way and had the same opportunities, they would end up living your exact life.

Life is not about you and how brilliantly smart or talented you are, it's about opportunities and how you deal with them. The great soccer player Pelé said in a recent interview that he doesn't really like the fact that he's being considered the greatest soccer player of all time :

"Back when I started playing football, children didn't have the same possibilities as they have now. I was lucky to have a father that was a football player also, because this gave me the possibility to follow my dream. But most young people had to go to work as early as the age of 10. Who knows how many great football players the world has lost because of this, some probably even better then me"

Although there is still some amount of chance involved, today we all receive countless opportunities. The ability to recognize and profit from these opportunities, is what creates success. And the more you do it, the more opportunities you will get and you will have even more success, and even more opportunities....and so on. It's like a rolling snowball, which gets bigger and bigger.

But this snowball has to start somewhere, and it does. It starts from your genes and the way you were raised, since this is where the true ability of spotting opportunities is born and where the snowball starts rolling.

But now think about this, if you take two snowballs which are exactly the same in size/weight/composition and you roll it off a hill in the exact same conditions (starting point, weather, hill angle and so on), the end results in the case of both snowballs will be the same. And the same is true for us people.

I believe, when you reach this success, it is important for you to realize, that you realize that YOU deserve little credit for this. If anybody had the exact same conditions in life(genes, parents, schooling etc.) they would end up having the exact same success as you had.

It is alright to be proud of your achievements, but getting arrogant about it...it's like getting arrogant about winning the lottery and how good you are at it.

Any comments regarding this subject are welcomed. Use the comment button below. Thank you.

First Post

2007-04-16T03:54:00.001+03:00

"The greatest of human abilities, is the ability to change, adapt and evolve. The human being is the only living thing that is capable of radically changing his habits and beliefs between birth and death"

David Deangelo

I truly love this quote. What it basically says it's that a person is able to challenge his fate, and change it if he has sufficient determination. It sustains the idea that if doesn't mater where you came from you can achieve a lot in life, by changing yourself to be more competitive, more sociable and more influential. By concentrating on improving yourself, you can eliminate many stupid mistakes that you make over and over again, improving the quality of your life and making you more happy by your own standards.

Although many people criticize this ideology, it IS proven real by NLP and books like "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill and "How to Win Friends and Influence people" by Dale Carnegie (both were written in the 1st part of the 20th century and are regarded as The Holy Grail of self-help books).

The thing that saddens me the most, is how a very large part of people are extremely afraid of change. I see a lot of people who actually lie to them selves saying that their life is good on a daily basis, because they are afraid to challenge them selves, cause they are afraid to realize that they've been making stupid mistakes. They are like butterflies who choose not to break free from their cocoons.

It really grieves when I see some of my best friends doing these things, mostly because it's practically impossible for me to change them, unless they really want the change. Sitting back and watching people that you care about walking down the wrong path is basically torture.

Hopefully one day our society will evolve sufficiently to embrace change. Until then I guess I'll have to go and fight against the wave :)

Any comments regarding this subject are welcomed. Use the comment button below. Thank you.