August Goals:
– Each week review monthly goals.
– publish book 2
– run 15km
– release ep3 ep 1
– app ideas
last week’s goals
– run 10km
– release ep3 ep 1
– narrate chapter 1 adn 2 of audio book
– extra
– finish chapter 3 book 3
– design cover book 2
Magic
I’m going to teach you how to do magic so your dreams come true.
The thing about magic is I’m of the Arthur C Clarke school of thought on magic. It is technology that is sufficiently advanced, or in this case unexplained. There is so much that we do and that happens around us that if we did’t have an understanding of what was going on we’d call it magic for sure. Computers, mobile phones, television, diabetes and even exercise are things that with just a little less understanding would be magic. Heck some of that still is magic for many people.
But what I’m going to talk about is often thought of as magic and dismissed because magic covers a great many different things and with such a variety and range it is true that most magic is just make believe and fairy tales. The magic I’m going to talk about, which will transform from magic to common sense once I’ve told you about it, is of a more practical and real variety. It is the magic spoken of by people such as Joe Dispenza in his book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. Instead of using his words to talk about it I’ll paraphrase and discuss it in the way I’ve come to understand it. If you want to learn more detail or get a fuller sense of what I’m talking about I recommend reading the book Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. You’ll find a description and link to it on shop.gravityundone.net/books/
So, what is this magic? It is the magic of metamorphosis. It is the magic of conjuration and manifestation. You’ve heard variations of it called the law of attraction and the secret. But I’ve got a more grounded and reasoned approach because I’m a more grounded and reasoned person. This does require you to undbind your rigid thinking and allow your mind to drop from a beta state of mind to an alpha state. Remember from a few weeks back I was talking about the different mind states we can be in? Beta is the logical, ordered, analytical state we are in when we are awake and doing things we understand and have rules and boundaries that guide us. Alpha state is a relaxed state more conducive to learning and inuition because we don’t have the active boundaries restricting our thoughts. So go alpha, let what I say sink in and look for connections and abstract relationships more so than trying to directly relate the terminology I’m using to scientific or rational boundaries.
Got it?
Let’s begin.
Imagine I’m drawing on a white board. I draw a big dot at the top of the board and from there draw to diverging lines to the base of the board forming a triangle. The dot at the top is you. It is your current situation and context. It is the culmination of all your past choices, actions and reaction. It is you as you are now. The height of the board from you in the present to the bottom of the board and thus the bottom of the triangle I’ve drawn represents time. The further down the board we go the further into the future that space represents. the base of the triangle then represents all the possible reasonable future states of you. We could say that absolutely anything is possible but in reality there is a finite number of future situations you can possibly, reasonably find yourself. While it may be possible that you spontaneously teleport to the moon the likelihood of that happening is so small that you could probably run through as many versions of the universe as there are seconds that have passed since the big bang and still not have that happen. So We’ll restrict ourselves to a set of reasonable future states. The danger here is that what you think of as being reasonable may actually be a small subset of things that are genuinely possible. let’s not concern ourselves with that level of specific just now.
So You are at the top of this triangle and you will be at some point at the bottom of the triangle after some amount of time. It doesn’t matter what that period of time is. The diagram will work for any time period, just the range of possiblities will vary. Lets consider this possible set. We’ll draw another dot in the centre of the base of the triangle. This is the most likely situation you will be in if nothing changes during the period of time represented by the gap beteween the top dot and the bottom dot. That is, if you did nothing different to what you do now then you will most likely find yourself at that second dot in the centre of the base of the triangle in the future.
The thing is you probably want to be toward one of the bottom corners of the triangle. You probably want to be in a better or at least different situation. I know I do. But the further from the centre point, the less likely we will end up there, all other things being equal. So we will need a little magic to skew things in our favour.
Why do we need magic? Because every second of every day we want things better but we don’t get them do we? No. That’s why we think the base of our triangle is narrower than it really is. We need a way to change our moment to moment reality so that dot in the middle of the base of our future triangle shifts from the centre toward the outer edge.
Now imagine one of those carnival games where you drop a ball in the top and it falls down hitting pins and bouncing to the left or the right. If it bounces more to the left than the right it will end in a higher score position at the bottom. If it bounces left and right an even amount it will end up in the middle low score position. That ball is you and the pegs are the situations, events and people you encounter. You bounce to the left or to the right depending on how you react and what your perceptions are. So you can see if you don’t change your habits, thoughts, perceptions and skills you will continue to bounce left and right more or less evenly and end up somewhere near the middle. Joe Dispenza’s book presents a way you can confront your habits and beliefs and alter them to favour a different outcome. That’s the magic. If it were obvious how to do things differently and end up closer to where you want to be then we’d all be doing it right?
How does this work?
Imagine you had a time machine and you could go back in time to witness and interact with the past. I think we all know that we’d have to be very careful because the further back you go the smaller the change required to effect momentous change in our present day. The short story A Sound of Thunder has a time machine that goes back to a time when dinosaurs walked the earth. A character steps on a butterfly and when they return to their present day, everything has changed. and we all know about the grandfather paradox which was essentially presented to us in Back to the Future where Marty McFly accidentally changes a critical moment in his parent’s past which leaves him in danger of not being born. We can all agree then that even small changes in the past can have big effects in our present. But we need to also realise that our present is the future’s past. Small changes we make now can snowball into big changes.
The magic is this: to be in the future situation that you want to be in you have to become the sort of person who is in that situation. You must think and act like the sort of person who has that desired context as their everyday context.
Let me explain: you are at the top of the triangle on the white board. I said that you are there as a sum of all the decisions you’ve made of all the reactions and actions you’ve taken and the actions you haven’t taken. You are the sort of person who is in the situation you are in now. You have all the things associated with a person who is just like you. And this is the start of taking responsibliity for your life of course, but I don’t want to get into that discussion just now because it is easy for that to initially sound like victim blaming and i don’t want to go there. But suffice to say that you are where you because of who you are and you are who you are because of where you are. Right?
So if I wanted to be in your position I’d have to act and think more like you vice versa if you wanted to be in my situation. If I want to run a marathon in under four hours I have to do the things a person who run marathons in under 4 hours does. Does that make sense?
This is what Joe Dispenza means when he talks about breaking the habit of being yourself. Even small changes have a compounding effect on your life.
What am I doing to position myself where I want to be?
i’ve discussed this before so I’ll summarise here:
1. Be mindful. I have taken up the practice of being as fully aware of myself, my thoughts and my actions as I can be. Every day, multiple times a day, I take time to consider how I feel and what I’m thinking. This then allows me to more often consciously choose how I react and how I perceive things. You can’t change the wind, but you can adjust your sails.
2. Choose health. Being mindful I choose to be healthy. I have committed to running and exercising regularly. I choose to eat the foods and in the manner that experts say I should.
3. I commit to executing what I know I should. I have read countless times from reputable sources that writing your goals down makes you 1.4 times more likely to achieve them. So I am doing that because I want to achieve my goals.
4. I tell myself better stories and refuse to repeat bad stories. Anytime I might say “I can’t do that” I have changed to “I can’t do that yet”. That’s growth mindset vs fixed.
5. I actively visualise myself in my new situation. I imagine what it feels like to accomplish the things I want to accomplish. I take time to feel that I have already done what I wanted.
And so on. This is the magic spell i use. Does it work? It has so far. I’ve gotten a good job that pays well but gives me the after hours time to work on my own things. It has put me in contact with people I feel aligned with. It has meant I’ve published a book, in the process of editing and publishing my second book and part way through my third. By the end of this year I’ll have published three novels. By the end of next year I’ll have published another three books at least. By writing my goals down and tell you about them here on My Creativity I am more often acheiving them. And I feel so full of passion and drive to keep going that i know I will move away from that centre position. Heck, more oportunities than I thought i had are starting to surface.
I urge you to learn and practice this magic of becoming the sort of person who has the sort of situation you want. Read Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself with an open mind and let the knowledge flow in.
– to learn more check out shop.gravityundone.net/books/ and click on Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself.
– write your goals down and send them in to me and we’ll be accountable and more likely to achieve our goals together.
– follow @gravityundone on twitter
Next week
– 10km
– release ep3 ep 1
– narrate chapter 3 and 4
– reformat book 1 + improve cover