5 Things Inception Taught Me About Self-Improvement (And No, I’m Not Dreaming)

I’m not a movie hyper. I don’t rush to the movie theater at the first trailer, shaking my head in an uncontrollable enthusiastic crisis. On the contrary. I saw Titanic 3 years after it was launched. Matrix, 2 years after (please forgive me for that, I still took the redpill). Even Fight Club came to my DVD collection pretty late. (There is one exception though: Kung-Fu Panda. That one was pretty hot when I saw it.)

Anyway, you got the idea. Well, knowing that, I was seriously taken by surprise by my own drive to go to see Inception. I really don’t know why I felt this urge. I don’t even remember in what context I first heard about it. I just know I did and from that moment I really, really wanted to see it. Now, after I saw it, I suspect that this movie was in fact launched a few years ago. Somebody came into my dream, planted a seed, and that seed grew into an uncontrollable desire to go see the movie… An inception to make me see Inception…

I’m joking, of course. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a few years from now, the marketing campaigns will start in our dreams first.

Anyway, fact is I really liked Inception. Not only I liked it, but, following my uncontrollable passion for self-improvement, I also isolated 5 things the movie taught me. As always, these things are just my own interpretation of the events, and may not be taken as a review of the movie. If we’re talking only about the artistic impression, suffice to say that I liked it. Now, let’s see what can we learn from it too.

1. Reality Is When You Say It Is

In the dream snatchers arsenal, one very important weapon is the “totem”. An artifact which behaves in a certain way, and it can only be witnessed by its owner. It’s your connection to reality and as such, it cannot be infected with other people (or projections) presence. It’s your own proof that you’re not dreaming anymore. Cobb’s totem is a spinning top. Every time he spins that top and the top behaves as expected, he knows he’s out of the dream. Back to reality, here comes gravity.

That made me think. Not the reality checking process in itself, which is pretty straightforward: you do something expecting a certain result and if it checks, voila, you’re in reality. But the mere fact of choosing that reality hook. I mean, you could be in a dream too when you pick that totem. It will still obey the rules of that specific dream-based reality. Every time it will check, it will of course enforce a reality, but that reality could be in fact, just a dream.

Reality is when you say it is. The moment you agree that a spinning top should go round and round until it stops, instead of breaking up into pieces, for instance, you sign a contract with that kind of reality. You anchor yourself in a certain time space continuum. That point will become the gravitational center of your entire world. And that’s because YOU made that decision.

Your world is built by you. You’re making the rules. If there are parts in your life which aren’t in sync with what you want, you have the power to make them disappear. Spin your top and see if it checks.

2. Time Is Irrelevant

For a dream snatcher, time is behaving differently. Time in a dream will flow slower than in reality. Time in a dream within a dream will be an order of magnitude slower. And a dream within a dream within a dream could make you spend there dozens of years. And for the dream character, that time would not be subjective, it will actually make that character older. It will have real effects.

Whenever you’re immersing yourself in something you really enjoy, like a dream you love dreaming, time will expand. Our perception is that it is slow down, somehow. Even more, every time we’re doing something we really enjoy, time will actually seem to stop. I’m sure you know the feeling: “oh my, god, I’ve been doing this for 5 hours? This couldn’t be!”… You will be in fact out of time in our normal, sequential perception.

We’re used to think that time “flows” in sequences of seconds, hours, days, weeks. But the deeper you immerse in life this perception of times weakens, and a new one, quantum based will take place. Time will manifests itself in bursts. A day can last a week. An hour can last a month. And a second can last a lifetime.  In a way, time seems to be our measurement unit for things we don’t enjoy. Because when we really like something, time will disappear. The more we love doing something, the less time we’re “consuming”.

Passion is the time killer. Passionately living makes you immortal, in the sense that time will become irrelevant. In other people’s realities you may be there for an hour, but within your passionate dream, you will be there forever.

3. You Live In A Web Of Relationships

Allegedly, a dream snatcher could sneak in, plant a seed into your mind while you’re dreaming, and that seed could expand into an idea. An idea that could change lives, build empires and reboot the world. That idea will feel like it’s emerging from your own consciousness. You will treat it like it was your idea. In a way, a dream snatcher could manipulate your consciousness through your dreams.

We’re not alone. We’re not individual entities, like we think we are. We’re interlinked in a web of relationships. We’re part of something way bigger than ourselves. We’re in a continuous interaction. And this interaction can lead to incredibly huge transformations. Every information you access is in fact a seed that could become an idea. All you have to do is to believe in it, like it was yours.

This has an incredibly impact on your life. Now, that you know that every interaction has the possibility to change your life, you will be much more careful. Or at least I hope you will. Every contact you made has the power to influence your dream. Every seed you plant into your brain can become reality, regardless of who let that seed there. Pick your peers wisely.

You can influence other people and other people can influence you. The smallest piece of information, like this blog post, could change your life. I may have planted a seed into your mind right this second.

4. What We See Is What We Project

If you enter somebody else’s dream, you will notice a lot of persons there. Those persons are not individuals, they are merely projections of that person subconscious. They have human shapes but they are in fact just projections of that persons fears, frustrations, ambitions or repressed feelings. Everything you have in your subconscious will take shape in a dream.

And the ugliest part is those shapes can have a life of their own. Everything which is not processed, dealt with, acknowledged, learned, will stay in your subconscious mind until you will confront it. To an extent, that would make sense: you will deal with those situations later. But it’s not that simple. Those projections, those lose ends, those stubs will interfere with your conscious reality. They will mix in. They will obfuscate your vision.

What we usually call reality is made almost entirely by our own projections. There is no such thing as an objective point of view. If two persons are looking at a flower, they will both see different things. Because they are projecting different subconscious messages to that flower. For one person, that flower could take the shape of a long time repressed frustration while the other one could see there just a flower.

We’re creating our reality by mixing in our own unconscious projections. The ultimate honesty is not to accept someone else’s point of view, but to understand that what we see is what we are unconsciously projecting. Other people may not even see what we’re seeing.

5. Kill Your Fears, Free Your Soul

In Inception, one of the main characters lived in somebody else’s mind, namely the main character, Cobb, a dream snatcher. Every time Cobb started to dream, he reactivated the presence of his lost wife in that dream. And, as I already mentioned, his lost wife had a life of its own. She often interfered with the other characters and made things really complicated for everybody in those dreams.

It took a lot of courage and patience for the main character to solve this mental presence. It took a lot of personal power to accept his own guilt and release that presence from his mind. But without this hurtful process, the remains of his own unsolved problems kept him prisoner in an endless power struggle. He couldn’t break free. He couldn’t even imagine his own freedom.

We’re not prisoners of walls, we’re prisoners of our own fears. And that type of captivity is much worse. We can’t even imagine how we could break free. All we know is that we’re facing an obstacle we can’t overcome. We take that obstacle for granted, we accept it, we even think we deserve it. By shame, by guilt or by social pressure. Until we can’t stand it anymore and take the courage to kill our own fears.

Every time you kill one of your fears, something will go away from you too. You will lose something in the process. But that’s the way it should be: the lost part is the part that kept you from flying higher.

***

Are you still in my dream?

Balls Of Fire

What happens when you’re in a hatred environment? What happens when you’re threatened? How’s your reality changed by this? What is your first reaction in case of aggression?

The standard answer when you’re threatened is to respond in kind. To fight back. To protect yourself. Responding to hate by hate, to threat by threat, that’s what we’ve been taught to do for centuries. It’s like you’re receiving a hot ball and in order to avoid getting hurt, you’re passing back the ball, possibly with even more heat on it. That’s the standard answer.

The “smarter” answer (as opposed to standard) is to observe the ball thrown at you and do nothing. Yes, you will get burned if you touch it, that’s right. So, why touching it in the first place? Why letting it reach you? Instead of accepting it, switch your focus from the reaction state, to the witnessing state: just observe it, see where it goes, don’t interact. You’ll have the breakthrough of your life.

Because the ball doesn’t really get to you, if you don’t allow it. That’s amazing! I know it sounds pretty strange and voo-doo-ish, but it really works like this. Once you start to just observe the things, to witness with detachment, you will see them in a very different way. Even more, by observing things instead of accepting them into your reality, you reach some kind of power over them. You will be able to allow or disallow them to reach you.

This is something really difficult to perceive and even more difficult to accept. I confess it took me a lot to even understand that. Reading about this really helps, that’s true, and I read a lot about how witnessing, observing your reality, without interaction, can actually change it. But you have to do it, not to read about it, in the first place. And it’s the direct experience of this attitude which reveals this incredible mechanics. (By all means, do not consider I’m a master on this technique, I just know enough to write a blog post about it. All I know is it works.)

Observing versus Giving Attention

There’s a huge difference between observing something and giving attention to something. Since we’re going to use those terms a lot in this post, let’s make a quick round up.

Observing means witnessing something, without any involvement. Giving attention to something means acting on that thing somehow: reacting emotionally to it, rationalizing it, comparing it with past experiences, doing something about it, anything.

Observation is stillness. Attention is focused movement.

Observing is non-action, attention is always seconded by action.

Gravity and Reality

Now let’s get back to our balls of fire.

You can’t receive something you don’t want. Every time you’re receiving something is because you accepted it. Being it a present, a relationship, your job, money, health… Or anger, illness, scarcity… You let it into your life. If you step back and look at the world from an observer place you’ll have this image very close to the planets and satellites: all the stuff that surrounds you is kept together by your own personal gravity. And the gravity which keeps your world together is your attention. The stuff around you, what you call your reality is orbiting around only because you accepted it and focused on it. You make your world living by giving it your attention.

Now if you’re not giving any attention whatsoever to some stuff, you’ll actually observe it floating away. There’s no more gravity to keep it close to you. Just think at something you didn’t think for a long time and you’ll have this feeling of distance. That thing seems so far away. Yes, that thing really is far away, because you didn’t offer it your undivided attention. The moment your focus shifted towards it, the thing started to get close to you.

Without your attention, things are just floating around. You create your environment by attracting stuff into your life the same way planets are keeping things on their surface with gravity.

So, now you realize that the ball of fire doesn’t have any direction of all. It is just a meteorite wandering through space.The author of a threat doesn’t direct the ball at you. Yes, he may use your name, he may use his mental projection of what he thinks is you, but it cannot make the ball land on your planet. Unless you give him permission to do this. The ball doesn’t really have any direction, it floats around, like any other thing which doesn’t receive your attention. It’s you who’re giving it mass and shape, by shifting your focus towards it.

What Goes Up Must Go Down

Now, what really happens when you’re not accepting hate at all? When you’re just observing the balls of fire and not allowing them into your reality? They drop. Most of the time. Most of the hate you receive or you get exposed to is circumstantial. It’s a result of chaotic situations, confusions or misunderstandings. This type of hate will just drop off. It’s like interplanetary meteorites lost in space. Consequences of small accidents, debris of violent but short and blind interactions.

But when the hate or threat is calibrated, ignoring it creates a surprising consequence: the ball goes back to the sender. When a ball of fire is calibrated it gets an extra weight. It’s not incidental anymore. It’s like a volcano erupting from a planet with so much power, that the ball of fire actually lifts off from the atmosphere and is thrown away in space. It’s something way bigger than a meteorite. It’s not floating around like a light, circumstantial ball. And it’s exactly this weight which makes the ball finding its way back to the sender. The ball is attracted by gravity. If it doesn’t find a suitable place to land (meaning: you’re not giving it the benefit of having a physical mass by your attention, you’re just witnessing it) the ball will look for the closest planet. And of course, that’s the sender.

In real life, this is a somehow hidden process. Not always the threat one sends come back to him in its exact form. Most of the time, the hater goes through a painful process without any visible connection to his initial threat. It may be an accident, an illness, some bad incident or any other kind of difficulties. The sender doesn’t really knows what hit him. In his reality system, he got rid of the ball, or so he thinks. He eliminated something from his system, and the only form he’s expecting that thing came back to him is your version of a ball of fire. If you don’t throw nothing back, he’ll assume his threat finished its cycle. Only it didn’t.

I saw this process from both ends. I was both the hater and the hated. And it worked on both situations. While I was hating somebody, and that person either ignored me, either didn’t really pay any attention to me, I found myself in violent circumstances. Accidents, violent incidents that I didn’t deserve to be part of. Or so I thought.

And when I was hated and let the hate pass me by, the perpetrator faced the same situations: accidents, illness or pressuring surroundings. At the first sight there wasn’t any logical, rational connection between the ball of fire and the violent incident. Only at the first sight.

Love and Hate

An ignored ball of fire will always land of the sender. It may be in a different form, the energy of that meteorite has been somehow modified by circumstances, but it will always come back to the sender. If no one wants it, it will come to the source.

But if you really want something, if you put all your attention and love in that specific thing, it will finally be attracted. Your attention made that thing slowly come to you. Love is acting in the same way.

In fact, love and hate are the same force, only with different polarity.

Hate is what loves sees in a twisted mirror. Hate has the same power and it will change your life at the same level love will. Except hate is destructive and love is fulfilling. They both use the same energy. One is building, the other one destroys. They are both powerful gravitational fields around you. And they attract their kind.

Why Is This So Difficult?

If things are really as simple as described, then why is it so difficult to manage a violent situation? Why hate is still there? Why people are getting hurt every day?

Because pain is real. Being hurt is real. You can’t always avoid a ball of fire thrown at you. Hitting one every once in a while is part of the game. Accept it or not, believe it or not, you do have parts in yourself which are attracting balls of fire. Most of them are placed under the surface, in what we call “the unconscious mind”. This is why you’re not always aware of the cause. But just because you’re not aware at the moment, that doesn’t mean you didn’t attracted it.

This is why is important to observe yourself instead of act upon those balls of fire. In time, you’ll start to see some patterns. You’ll start to identify similar situations. You start to find continents on your planet which are attracting balls of fire. And the only way to avoid other balls of fire is to start working on those continents. Because this is all you have.

Your reality is the only thing you have control on. You can’t control other people’s realities. All you can do is to work your attraction fields. Understand why are you attracting those balls of fire and how you can manage them. You have total control of your planet. You are the one who built that ecosystem, and you can still modify it whenever you want.

Maybe you won’t be able to solve it instantly. It may take years. But if you accept that you do attract some balls of fire into your life, you’ll be at least aware of that. You’ll understand that pain may be unavoidable, but suffering is optional.

At some point, those balls of fire you used to receive day and night, burning your forests and drying your oceans will stop landing on your planet.

All you’ll see will be some trails on the sky. Maybe somebody just thrown a huge ball of fire at you. But since your focus is somewhere else, all you’ll see will be a trail on the sky.

Training Your Focus

How is your focus? Do you find it easy to concentrate for longer chunks of time or are you easily distracted? Do you enjoy doing the same thing at the same focus level over and over again, or are you easily bored?

I used to think that focus is a function of pleasure: I can concentrate on this because I like it. I do some stuff better than other because I like it. While loving what you do can keep your concentration high, at least in the beginning, maintaining a constant, high focus is not a function of pleasure at all. It’s a function of will.

Focus can be trained. It can be enhanced, it can be shaped the way you want. It can serve you well, if you treat it well. In today’s post I’ll share some of my observations regarding focus and how one can work this tool the same way you work your muscles in your daily workout.

Detach From Pleasure

To like something is a great “do” igniter. It really puts you on the road. Starting something you don’t like is usually slower and less energizing. But after the initial thrill, even if you do like what you’re doing, keeping yourself in the flow requires a lot of effort. Your focus will start to weaken.

The best way to ensure a constant flow of focus is to detach from pleasure. To treat every single task emotionally equal. Might sounds “robotish” and totally not fun, but in fact it’s just a way to trick your focus into a better approaching method.

If you’re constantly doing only things you like, your focus will develop a sort of addiction. It will unconsciously start looking for nice stuff, and will ignore difficult, or boring things. It will not discard it and put it aside for later, the boring stuff will simply disappear from the radar. You’ll end up as a hedonistic prisoner of “only nice stuff, please”.

Detaching from pleasure doesn’t mean you will refrain from enjoying what you’re doing. Detaching from pleasure means you’ll start doing things regardless of their niceness level. You’ll just do them. Detaching from pleasure means you’re also detaching from boredom. If you can observe yourself doing stuff, pleasure and boredom are just choices. You’re doing that thing anyway, so you can chose how you feel about it.

Assess Results

Whenever you keep your focus on something for longer chunks, take your time to assess results every once in a while. Take your time to see how were you at the beginning of the task and how are you now. Especially in difficult tasks, assessing results is a great focus enhancer.

It does this by progress showing. If you’re caught in solving a longer problem, you might forget where you started. You start circling and stumbling. You get caught in a pattern of “I’m getting nowhere with this” and your focus will start weaken. The hedonistic part of you will ask for something nice to hang on, and you’ll step away form the problem and go grab a cookie, for instance.

If after the cookie your focus will be higher, it would be great, but your focus is usually thinner. You didn’t assess any results, you just tried to escape a difficult task. Your focus will want again to the cookie.

Assessing results is easy, is a matter of saying: “I started this journey 15 minutes ago, and I’m doing ok, regardless of the fact I’ve done only one single step. I’m ok. I’m on it.”. Your focus will be forced to stay there until you solve the problem. You assessed your position, you acknowledged the fact that you’re making progress.

This works regardless of the focus time span. You can assess results of a 15 minutes cooking session, or of a 5 years goal. Maintaining your focus is equally important in both.

One More Second

I took this habit from my fitness session. Whenever I do pushups or abs, I establish some goal, let’s say 50 abs. When I’m close to 49, I stretch myself out and go over 50, usually 51, or 52. I do the this all the time. The goal is clear but I always try to stay in there for one more second.

I also did this in business. Whenever I was close to finish a project, I did something extra, a feature or an addition of some kind. It was not in the specs from the beginning but I felt the need to put it there.

Staying “one more second” in a project, in a workout, or in a relationship is a fantastic focus enhancer. I always know that I can do more abs after that second and I always know that my project will be a success, after that last feature. I am in there, I know it, I stay focused.

“One more second” is also good for assessing wrong paths. Even if you feel it’s wrong, take one more second to assess that and let your focus decide. If it’s a bad relationship, stay one more second in it and make sure it’s really bad for you. Next time, your focus will warn you from the beginning, and you won’t have to go through tough times again.

Balance Your Senses

Your focus is channeling the reality by using your senses. Each person have a specific distribution of these senses in their focus. Some are visual, some are functioning well by really touching stuff, some are reacting better to voices. Your senses are the gates and your focus is the gate opener.

Focus likes diversity. If you’re a visual guy, try using some sounds in the next working session. Put some music on, tap the table from time to time. If you’re doing something related to sounds (you’re a musician for instance, or working on a movie soundtrack) try to balance this by using some new lights around you. Change your seat, light a candle. It will instantly make you focus better.

Your focus will always appreciate a new balance in your senses. It’s not about boredom, we talked about that already. What you’re doing is sending a complementary signal that will make your focus trying to recompose the big picture. And that will keep it on the current task.

Your Focus Is Your Reality

Ok, I cheated a bit. I started with all those tips about focus enhancement and kept the focus definition aside. And I did this for a reason.

I strongly believe that your focus is in fact your reality. You cannot experience something outside your focus. Everything you do is driven by focus, it’s like a handle to keep and master your environment. It’s the only way you actively experience your life: whenever you’re not focused, you’re drifting away, whenever you’re focused you’re sailing.

Let’s make a short experiment now. Take a look at the wall in front of you. Yes, like right now. Take a look, I said, don’t cheat. After several seconds come back here and read on.

Where was your focus while you looked at the wall? Outside this blog post, of course, what a silly question. But where was the blog post during this period? You’ll answer that it was there, right in front of you, waiting for your to get back. It was in your mind. But I will say this blog post was completely outside your reality.

You might have think it was there, but it was on a virtual space and time. Your real space and time was filled with the wall. You were focused on the wall, and the wall took precedence of everything else in your life, including your thoughts. You might have think you were thinking at the post, but instead you were focused on the wall.

Everything in your life works like this. You might think you’re doing something, but your real focus is somewhere else. You think you’re happy, but instead of real happiness, your focus is in useless, shallow thoughts. You give to your thinking mind the benefit of reality, instead to give this to your focus. You might spend your entire life thinking you’re doing just fine, but your focus will be on a wall. You’ll be in fact experiencing a wall, not a happy life.

This is why training your focus is far more than a productivity technique. At a certain level, focus mastering is a magical endeavor, is an esoteric, almost secret art.

The one who masters his focus will master his own world.

Are you with me here? Or are your drifting away?

What You Know Is What You Get

They say you cannot really enter a Universe, without modifying it. This sentence is especially frequent in quantum physics and it witness a very simple fact: whenever you go, whatever you do, you’ll be influenced in your perceptions by whatever you already know at that moment. Every Universe you enter will be shaped by your prior knowing about what a Universe should be. If you think the Universe should be round, all the Universes which you will explore will have the roundness property. If you think the Universe is flat, all the places in the known world will have just one dimension for you. At least, this is what they say…

This is very important especially when you translate it to personal development. If you think at the next level of your personal development like a Universe you want to explore, then you have already an approach for working with it. You’ll know that every level of your personal development will be actually shaped by your prior knowledge about it.

I take this in 2 ways:

1. there is an intrinsic limitation of the Universes you may explore, because your knowledge is limited
2. there are no limitations whatsoever to the Universes you may explore, as long as you first know them, or you have the power to imagine them.

There are decent arguments to sustain both approaches.

Most of the skeptics would go with number one, and prove that your experience is fundamentally limited because your knowledge is limited. Your knowledge is fed within the current world, so the next world should be more or less identical with this one. As long as your input is limited to this environment, it’s impossible to expand it to new, completely different environments.

Those left after the skeptics have spoken will attach to number two, and state that you can actually imagine everything and then experience it. I must say that I lean more towards this part of the world. The part who say that you have unlimited power to tune your imagination for unlimited Universes and then experience them physically, because you already knew them in your mind and made them possible.

I wrote this small and somehow abstract introduction because I recently experienced something related to these concepts. It’s a series of encounters and logical deductions which strongly pushed me to accept the second way of experiencing the world. Let’s start the story first, and then the revelations.

(more…)

The reality within: beating Sundays

We talked several days ago about the Reality Within, the way your memories and habits are dictating your actual behavior. Let’s make it a little more exact, let’s talk about a specific reality: the Sundays reality.

You have inside of you all the memories of your Sundays: since you were a baby, since you were a child, since you were a teenager… Is all there, forming a heavy energy vortex that is keeping your energies in a certain configuration, and letting out only parts that are conformed with the initial model.

I don’t know about your Sundays, but mine were a total inactivity realm, doing nothing, waiting for nothing, or, at the best, watching a 3 hours TV show at the only TV station allowed in Romania at that time, a mix of old comics and propaganda. No socializing, no travel. We were not allowed to use the cars – the lucky guys that had a car – unless we respected a strange algorithm: those with the license plate ending in even number, one week-end, those with the license plate ending with a non-even number, the next week-end. Some of you could consider that a very ecological approach. Maybe. At that time I wasn’t judged things this way, I just wanted to go out.

From time to time we were visiting our grandparents, who had a country household, with house pets: cows, pigs, chicken. All that we can do was to talk and eat something, because on week-end there isn’t much to do in the country side.

This is my Sunday inner reality. This is what is emerging every Sunday and dictates my attitudes and overall feelings about Sundays. No surprise that every Sunday I feel tired, overcome and somehow lazy. My inner reality of Sundays is rising an inactivity wall around myself.

How can I beat this:

1. First of all, try to get out as much as I can. Most of the time without a precise goal, just erratic rides, with my girlfriend (in the beginning) and with the family (now that I become a little more mature)…

2. Do stuff. Any kind of stuff. It helps me forget that it’s Sunday and let me focus on the immediate reality. I try to clean the house, work on my computer, or shop for the next week.

3. I make a conscious exercise about those Sundays by telling to myself: “well that was then, now it’s another story… it’s a completely different reality, you better start doing something and let that ball of attracting stillness in yourself to dissolve, because it’s not needed anymore…”.

I basically try to put in perspective what is formed inside of me, by talking it out loud, and compare it with what’s outside, what makes me really move now. I do know that the Sunday reality inside me is a heavy mechanism, it can’t be moved only by thinking or talking or blogging about it, but all of these are surely weaken the mechanism.

Escaping the reality within is the only way to put me in the “here and now” reality. Where all the fun is, by the way