On my mind
M: Exploring my backpack, how much of who I am is a choice and how much is related to the past?
P: “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” Mary Oliver
Most of our decisions are based on the unconscious mind, bearing that only a small portion is exposed to conscious introspection. Given this fact, it’s important to understand that our personal interpretation of events is based on past experience. It requires stoic and purposeful attention to turn our present selves into a more aligned version of the persona we wish to embody.
M: Ok, then how can we correct behaviours connected to past curvatures?
P: Every time we make a decision, there is a window of awareness. It’s a small effort that journaled and imposed leads to a change of behaviour. Meditation can have a strong role in that process, putting us into an alpha state of alertness.
Four steps of habit creation:
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M: What is the difference between love and attachment?
P: Let’s start with the basics. Passion is temporary, replaced by love. When driving a relationship forward, we should be passionate about the other person’s destiny/ path.
Attachment is what happens when you want the person to be yourself. It’s selfish, irrational, dangerous, and deemed to be illusionary connections.
Love happens when you simply want the person to be doing well, independent of your egocentric barriers.
By using the law of abundance, you replace the singularity of attachment with multiple lower levels of love. Only after a while, you can funnel down and attachment will be lower and healthier.
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M: How to prevent superego death?
P: The superego serves the ethical foundations which provide the standards in which the ego operates. High-functional individuals crave control of their sober state, by attempting to influence external events. When taken to an extreme, any intoxicant will cause release. The higher this state, the more the superego may want to go to sleep, provided small levels of external supplements.
There are two solutions: leverage the sober state of being to be more carefree and control the induced state by doing constant and timely awareness checks when the process is in place.
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M: How can we rank priorities at each point in time?
P: The goal is not to rank them, but to understand how they can co-exist since there are multiple priorities to be taken into account and we can’t neglect them. Think about the person you want to become, not where you want to be (life is not linear). Give weight to the things you prioritize (separately) and add the factor “intuition” or “I feel like it” for each stream of events.
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M: How to balance the fear of engulfment vs. abandonment anxiety?
P: Whereas fear of engulfment entitles those who are scared of losing themselves and their freedom, abandonment anxiety is more predominant in those who are people-pleasers and give too much. It creates an underlying anxiety when their love is not validated. Everyone has to manage the dance between one state and the other. It’s about being compassionate and aware of your attachment style towards others and how coping mechanisms emerge, so you can position yourself in the middle ground, even if you tend to succumb to a more extreme place given the other person’s behaviour.
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M: What is the relationship between highly functional individuals and self-worth?
P: “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”– C. S. Lewis
The separation between achievement and worth. The binary spectrum of self-worth (I am worth/ unworthy) creates a fluctuating state of being and inflates as you progress in life since goals only seem to increase in dimension and weight. It’s a dangerous place to be.
Self-worth does not fluctuate. All beings are at the maximum level of worth at all points in life. Self-love might change, but worth is constant.
People who tangle their worth to external events may become highly functional individuals, rewarded by the community they live in. Understand your default mode before you start each task, in order to separate your actions from reward systems. That way, you only put at risk your performance in that specific task and not your emotional stability.
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Dialogues
Reversing back to Marcus Aurelius when he said “The habits of your thoughts will become the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”
So much of what we live is therefore an illusionary stream of unconsciousness, a fried conquered abstraction of timeless lines. As for the life we don’t live, it’s based on the present moment. Everything else is in the past or future. The present is a compilation of past moments that led to today, and whatever we are building now are future foundations. By any means, that’s to dismiss consciousness as an ultimate goal, as the stoics have failed to explain.
Why do we get angry with those with smelly armpits, as that’s a natural odour coming out from such thing? Whether we grow to become famous, an external name will echo for as long as the tunnel lasts. And who will ever remember the earthly cavities one encounters on the journey?
Zeno instilled paradoxical approaches to everything life-related. Aristotle called him the inventor of dialect. Everyone that followed dived into different branches but still dusting the same quest. Epictetus remarked that it was a rule in life ... to do what was in accordance with nature. That’s most likely what Discourses is about. And inner dialogue as a guiding force. Would that be the blurry line separating Seneca & Epictetus and Robin Sharmas of the XXI century?
If good is a virtue that evil lacks, all the rest is indifferent. Okay. So, if we use evil and bad interchangeably, missing my flight is not bad. It’s indifferent to the wise. And if good and evil are in the will? It’s a human virtue, the “mental faculty by which one deliberately chooses or decides upon a course of action.”
[useful quote from Meditations]: Take away the complaint, “I have been harmed,” and the harm is taken away.