The Secret Art Of Keeping Cards Castles From Falling Down

You know how to make a castle from deck cards? Once you learn how to do it, it’s very easy, actually. You take two cards and make them hold one against the other on the top edge. Near this triangle you make a new one, using another pair of cards. And then you lay out horizontally a new card on top of those two triangles, which will hold them together. On top of it you put another triangle. Voila. You have a deck cards castle. The smallest one, of course, but still a card castle.

The hard part comes when you want one of these to last longer than 2 or 3 minutes. These types of structures are very sensitive. Just a little bit of wind and they’re all down. Very, very sensitive.

Our Life Structures

There was a time when I was thinking that only castle cards are sensitive structures. That the vast majority of the other things in my life are much solid than a card castle. But, as I grew old, I realized this is just an illusion. At a very deep level, our life structures are pretty much identical with a card castle. We may think they aren’t so easy to broke down, but in fact they are.

Let’s say you’re running your own business. You got your stuff together pretty well, you have a little bit of market share, paying customers and loyal employees. You have a pretty neat and shiny castle built there. Then, out of nowhere, a financial crisis hits in. Your customers are running out of money, you can’t pay your employees anymore and you have to close the business down. Your castle is literally falling apart.

Or, let’s say you got yourself a pretty solid relationship. A marriage, for instance. You communicate well with your partner, your life is unfolding peacefully in front of the two of you and you act like a team. Then, one day you wake up and realize you’re in somebody else’s dream. Not in your own dream. And you decide to end that relationship. All your shiny castle will fall down in a few months.

A business, a relationship, even a house. They can fall down anytime.

As I grew old, I realized that keeping your life together is pretty much a question of keeping your card castles in good order. Do anything you can to make them as solid as you can. I call this the hidden art of keeping the castle cards together. And today I’m going to share with you some of my secret techniques.

The 4 Secrets Of The Hidden Art Of Keeping The Castle Cards Together

Something like this... (A real cards castle on Waiheke Island, New Zealand)

1. Build It In A Safe Place

Always look for a good foundation for your castle. Find a quiet place, with not too much wind.

In other words, pay close attention to your surroundings. And by surroundings I understand pretty much everything that surrounds you, not only space. Pay attention to the relationships you’re building with this castle. Are they usually stormy? Unpredictable? Sometimes we like the unpredictable, it gives us a sense of thrill, but when the unpredictable hits our castle, we’re sad. So think things over.

Also, be careful at the outside conditions, is this a stormy place? In business, this would mean that your market has a lot of ups and downs. In relationships, it means your partner friends: are they in the same league as you?

A castle card built in a windy place won’t last more than a few minutes.

2. Build It With Quality Cards

This always goes down to picking the best available resource you may have access to. It involves the best people you may have access to for your business. It involves a reliable and trustworthy partner for your relationship. It involves the best materials for building your house, if that’s the castle you are building right now.

A castle built with poor quality cards will not even stand, regardless of the surroundings. You may have the best place, the best conditions, but if you’re not paying close attentions to your cards, your castle won’t grow. For instance, your cards may be too soft, not able to hold on to the responsibility of the card on top of them. Or they may be too slippery, not really willing to be part of a fixed structure.

Just do whatever you feel like to put your cards to a stress test before starting to build a castle together. It will save so much trouble later on, when you’ll be focused on the actual building process.

3. Build It With Care

Pay attention to joints and the distance between cards. Make them optimal. A far fetched business will equal to a bigger distance between two triangles. It will weaken the whole structure. A relationship in which you wait for the other person to “grow up” or to quit an addiction has the same effect. It affects the whole structure resistance.

Leverage your structures. If you built a triangle here and then another one a mile away, it will take years to build the intermediary triangles, until everything will be linked. Whatever you built in your life and you’re proud of, use it. Don’t throw it away in search of another thrill, as spectacular as it may look like to build a new beginning in a far away place.

A card castle build in a safe place, with good quality cards and with a lot of care will last far more than you believe. I have build cards castles which lasted years and I know I can build others again too.

4. Prepare For The Fall Down

This is the last one. It took me a lot of time to get it, but I consider it to be the most important secret of this hidden art.

Keep in mind that everything you build is subject to decay. No matter how safer the place, how good the cards and how perfect the structure, there will be at some point something that will shake it down. Accept it. Even more, wait for it. The subtlest thing in the secret art of building deck cards castles is that they are meant to go down.

And they do this for a very food reason: to give you room to start a new one.

The joy is always in building those castles, again and again, and not much in keeping them from falling down.

Hence, this post is a little bit useless.

Being Vulnerable

A few weeks ago I met a fellow blogger for a live interview. We knew each other from the Internet for quite some time and we both thought it could be an interesting idea to meet each other in real life too. I always try to balance my online relationships with real life encounters.

I won’t talk about the interview though, in this post, but rather about something that came up during the interview. At some point, as I was answering questions and opening up to the whole interaction process, my friend told me something surprising:”You are surely opening a lot, Dragos. Aren’t you afraid of being vulnerable?” Nope, I wasn’t. And I gave him a few reasons (you can go ahead and listen to the interview, it’s in Romanian, though).

Part of my answer for being vulnerable was an image that is still circling inside my head: vulnerabilities are like handles. Whenever you open up and leave some spots of your inner being open to the light, you’re offering to the other person a bunch of handles. They can literally get access to you through those handles.

Now stop a little and think about handles. Where do we find handles in the real world? In tools, of course. We interact with our tools through handles.

And here comes the interesting part, the one that keeps spinning this image inside my head: you can either use, or abuse a tool. You can use a knife to cut your way out of the jungle, or you can use it to cut somebody else (or yourself).

Every time you open up to somebody, you create an opportunity. You offer a handle to the other person. You start an interaction. And, of course, you can be either used or abused by the other person.

Vulnerabilities And Abuse

Many people choose to avoid vulnerability after being abused. I also used this strategy. Why open up, if you can get bitten?

And then I realized there are other approaches too. For instance, avoid abusers.  Yes, it may take some time until you realize somebody is trying to abuse you. Yes, you may get hurt in this process. Happens. But in time you’ll get better at identifying those abusers.

And you’ll see how avoiding them, while still maintaining your vulnerability, will create some sort of invisible shield between you and them. And that’s because you are continuing to be genuine, authentic. And when you’re authentic, everything in you is working as it should be. Your intuition. Your capacity to take action. Your senses and your memories.

When you’re disconnected, when you close up, you can’t function properly. You don’t have enough data to feed to your intuition. Not enough info comes to your senses. You’re handicapped by your own decision to block all the entrances.

But as long as you keep yourself open to new experiences, you will realize that being abused is simply not possible anymore. Nobody can’t do anything to you, unless you agree. If you feel you’re abused, you can just move away. Turn your handles to the other side. Or even better, turn your handles to somebody who can really appreciate you and do something nice with you.

Competition versus Connection

A lot of the weakness associated with vulnerability comes from the “competition” approach. This is especially frequent in business or sports. If you are vulnerable AND you are in a competition, than your chances to lose that competition are dramatically increasing. This is why all the businesses are focusing on hiding, masking or eliminating their vulnerabilities. An incredibly huge part of a daily business operation is focused on how to hide your vulnerabilities from your competition.

In all honesty, this is a very good thing to do. If, and only if, you are in a competition.

But when what you’re after is connection, then being vulnerable stops being a liability. It becomes an opportunity. In fact, you can’t even create a connection without being vulnerable. You can’t use a tool without grabbing it first by its handles.

As a general approach, connection is a better place to be than competition. We’re all craving for connection. We’re opening up to our friends, to our loved ones, to people we trust. And we do this because we want to offer our handles to them. We’re telling: “here I am, offering something to you. My love, my support, my knowledge. Use it.” And, most of the time, if the connection is really working, we get back something valuable too. That’s what a connection is, after all, a two way highway.

But if you don’t offer your handles to the world, you’re simply useless. You can’t offer anything. Your lane is blocked, nothing runs on it. You may feel secure, but you’re not contributing. And our real sense of happiness comes from creating, from sharing, from contribution. Not from security.

Security gives us contentment, at best. And as much as we’d want to replace happiness with contentment, deep down we know this is not possible.

***

People are not afraid to be vulnerable, they are afraid not to be abused. And they are right. This is a real risk.

But the other alternative is also real. Believe it or not, your vulnerability may give to the other person the chance to do something beautiful together with you.

And you have no way to know this, until you open up.

How Not To Feed Your Daemons

Everybody has daemons. And I’m not talking about those small, dormant, discrete programs running in the background of your computer (I know a few programmers are reading this blog so I thought to cut any ambiguities from the start). I’m talking about real, active and powerful forces which are acting in a disruptive way.

Sometimes those forces are taking the form of people. Abusive people who are restricting your choices, violent people who are constantly threatening you or simply unknown persons who are abusing you all of a sudden. Sometimes, those forces are inside you. Addictions, compulsions, irrepressible actions which are dragging you down without any opposition from yourself.

Whatever the form, those forces exist. And they play their part in our lives.

Meet Your Daemons

When faced with those forces, some people choose to take the victim position: “Why me? Why am I confronted with these forces? I’m not deserving this. There must be a mistake.” Nope. It isn’t. As unexpected and undeserved as it seems, that situation is there. Playing the victim won’t make it disappear.

Other may choose to take the karma position: “I lived many lives and in some of my lives I did some ugly stuff to somebody else. Now it’s time to pay my debt”. A daemon would then be the way life forces you to pay whatever you own.

Other way to see them are like teachers. They’re here to point you to some very specific areas in your behavior which needs adjustments. It may be that those areas are so hidden, so hard to be perceived by you, that the necessary force to point your head into that direction should be out of proportion. It may be that you’re avoiding to learn some lessons, or you’re ignoring them. Then, disguised as daemons, those forces are pushing you to become more humble, more quiet or more helpful. Somehow.

In my experiences, these positions are following a certain hierarchy. The victim position is the first level, followed by the karma position and then, after you’ve been both a victim and debtor, you can’t find any plausible explanation other than there must be a lesson to learn. I followed this pattern too. First, the victim and the complaining, then the karma part, then the lesson part.

But, and here comes one of the most incredible discoveries I made in the last few months, you can face the same daemons again and again even after you’ve been through all those levels. Yes, you overcame the victim position and you can take it in your face. Yes, you paid your karmic debt, even with interest. And yes, you learned your lesson again and again. And still, you’re facing those unstoppable, ugly and destructive forces.

The truth is there isn’t any logical explanation for their existence. For a while, those victim, karma and teaching explanations are good. They keep you sane under pressure and they give you a little bit of mental comfort. But after you’re above all those levels you realize that, as frightening as it sounds, those daemons are out there  (or inside yourself) for the same reason you are here: they have the right to be. They have their own life. They have their own choices. They have their own existence.

Yes, their temporary role may be to point you to some vulnerabilities in your life, yes, they may act like karma triggers, and yes, they may teach you some tough lessons, but they’re as alive as you are. And I’m talking especially about people here. Because it’s easier to spot that in people. Many daemons are manifesting intermittently through other people (I guess in some areas this is called “to be possessed”) and you can sense them manifesting long after all your lessons have been learned. Those people don’t realize they’re carrying with them other energies. They don’t even know they’re daemons for you. They think they’re doing the “right thing”.

That’s frightening. It really is. But it’s also liberating, in a subtle way.

Because it suddenly puts you in a position where you gotta take action. You gotta make and maintain some boundaries. You gotta protect yourself. You really do, otherwise you’re going to be consumed. You’re going to cease to exist.

What Keeps A Daemon Alive?

At this point, and that would be the second discovery I made in the last few months, a fundamental question exploded right in my face. If daemons are alive and have their own existence, what keeps them alive? They’re part of this universe so they must obey to the same rules. In order to be alive and act as they act, they have to feed themselves with something.

If at this point you’re going to think “are we going to see a Twilight trailer now?” you’re wrong. I know the most common icon of a daemon is a vampire, and, to some point, it’s a correct image of a daemon. But the fact that you must feed a vampire somehow is the only resemblance with what I call daemons. The rest is just literature, movies and gibberish. So please, don’t read away if you’ve been drawn here by a vampire-like vibe in this article. Because if there is one, it’s completely unintentional.

Back to my question, after a few weeks of playing back and forth with it, the answer emerged. Clear and elegant. Simple and surprising at the same time. Because I realized the correct question was not “what keeps a daemon alive”, but “who keeps a daemon alive”. And if you look at it this way, the answer is obvious: YOU. The daemon is fed by you.

To be more precise, by your reactions. Let’s try some examples here.

Suppose you’re the victim of an abusive partner. He or she may abuse your time, your affection, your body or your money. Whatever the object of their abuse, they keep doing it for as long as you

1. allow them to connect with you
2. react to those interactions, releasing some energy

So first you must accept to play that game and second, you gotta allow them to make an impact. Be sad, or frustrated or angry. These are the energies that are actually feeding the daemon inside your partner. The more you release them, the more he or she will continue to do what it does to you.

In a magic and almost epiphanic way, I witnessed this a number of times in my life. Never been able to put my finger on it, so to speak, but looking back (without any anger) I can see it clearly. Every time I avoided connection with some of my daemons and preventing any energy to be released, those daemons disappeared. Interestingly enough, they only disappeared from my life. In their own circle of life, they found other sources of food. And they’re continuing to feed themselves off of other people hate, sadness or anger as we speak.

How Not To Feed A Daemon

So, after making some knots and pulling some strings, after putting together all my experiences with my own personal daemons, I was finally able to share my experience in making a daemon hungry (and eventually making him disappear from your life). It’s not a manual. It’s just sharing my personal experience.

1. Identify The Daemon

That’s the toughest part and it takes some time to master it. Because, as I said, those daemons are not manifesting 100% of the time. Or if they are, we’re talking about icons of destruction like Hitler or Stalin. Most of the time, these daemons are taking the form of repeated behavior, habits or approaches from some people around you. The closest the people, the easiest to identify those groups of actions.

In other terms, this would be the stage in which you’re trying to assess what exactly is making you an abused person in that relationship. It’s something like: “well, my partner doesn’t have a job, so I have to work for both, but at the same time my partner doesn’t really do anything to get a job”. You may be in love with that partner, but the fact that he or she is putting you on an abused position (being the only support of your common life) may be the sign of a daemon manifesting. That would be the “I’m living off of your resources because I’m too lazy/scared/negligent to create my own resources” daemon.

Another example is when other people are questioning (or even destroying) your accomplishments. Again, they may be “normal” people but they’re constantly trashing your life, your successes, your breakthroughs. This would be the “I’m minimizing your life because that makes me feel better” daemon. In this case, it may be that your success is so visible that it scares other people out. Doesn’t really matter that you’re not intending to scare them, they’re just scared and they’re allowing to that daemon to manifest.

2. Assess Your Behavior

If you’re sure that you identified the correct daemon, it’s time to pass it through the 3 levels test, the victim, the karma and the lesson.

But first, try to see if that’s a real situation. Most of the time, the daemons are pointing to real life situations, stuff that you’re currently doing, or that you’ve done in the past. They’re able to track you down because you’re leaving a visible trail. Try to see if you’re really abused or it’s just your imagination. It takes a lot of time to clear all the potential confusions, but it’s an important step in making your daemon hungry. Because if they’re referring to a real life situation and you didn’t take care of that, they’ll have all the rights to come back and hunt you again and again. It’s like raising a flag: “hey, I’m an egotistic bastard, come and hunt me”.

But if you’re 100% sure that you’re innocent, go through the 3 levels test.

First, the victim. If people are abusing you, get rid of the victim behavior. Yes, they may shout at you. Yes, they may throw ugly words at you or do painful stuff. Stop questioning “why me?” because this won’t go anywhere. Take it right in your face. And move on.

Second, the karma. Do you feel like you deserve this, in a subtle and reconciling way? Do you feel like you’re actually owning something to somebody? If the answer is yes, pay your debt. But don’t get too comfortable paying debts. Any debt is limited in scope.

Third, the lesson. Can you see the process from the outside? Can you see what triggers the daemon and what validates his approach? If yes, it means you learned your lesson. And if the daemon still comes after you, then it’s because you still throw some food at him.

3. Avoid Contact

Ignorance is highly underrated. I wrote it before and I will write it again: the art of ignorance should be taught in schools. The first and fundamental step that you must take in order to get rid of your daemons for good: avoid contact. But it’s also the most difficult to take and here’s why: daemons are not manifesting 100% through people, as I already said, it’s just parts of the people which are under that control. So the most common reaction is to avoid the person altogether. Which will not work as expected. You’re throwing the baby with the bath water, as they say.

You gotta learn to ignore only the daemon part. And that’s the hardest one because you’re dealing with a person as a whole, not with a few discrete parts. It’s difficult to make them understand that you created new boundaries. But that you’re still willing to engage with them in interaction as persons. It’s difficult for you to do it and it’s confusing for them. But it’s fundamental.

At this point, the daemon will start to worry. Without an outlet for his traditional actions, it will start to act erratically, making the person who are hosting it even more confused, unsure and vulnerable. It’s sad to witness this from a distance but I suppose it’s also a necessary healing process. Usually, it can ends in only two ways: either the daemon finds himself another outlet, either the person itself gets rid of the daemon. The last one being the most uncommon.

4. Re-channel Energies

But what makes this contact avoidance even harder is that you’re not living in a world composed only by two entities: you and the other person. You’re living in world made by thousands of connections, many of them common between the two of you. So, you may try to avoid the direct contact with that person, but their energies may reach you through other persons. For instance, you may have common friends or partners. Or, and this case is excruciatingly painful: you have a child together. That child will become the innocent carrier of those daemonic energies and start to move them back and forth between you two without even knowing it.

So, what can you do when you avoid contact with the parts you’re not willing to deal with anymore, but you still get those abusing energies? The normal answer is sadness, frustration or anger. Those emotions are pure energy. And that energy will get back in the subtle field of energies, feeding the daemon as he or she expects. So, avoiding contact is not enough. The only chance to make the daemon go away for good is to re-channel those energies. Not reacting is impossible. That will be the equivalent of being dead.

But as you face the abuse through other messengers and identify its source, you can choose how to react. You can re-channel your responses. Instead of anger, choose physical exercise. Instead of sadness, choose joy and laughter. Instead of frustration, choose party. Yes, you reacted. But your reaction was on a different frequency. The daemon couldn’t get it. They’re fed with sadness, anger and frustration and if you choose something different, it means you’re actually condemning them to starvation.

A Hungry Daemon Is A Weak Daemon

But it’s also a furious one. A daemon ready to do anything to get a little bit of energy from you. So, the weaker your daemons are getting, the more desperate their actions to re-connect with their preferred source of food will be. Keep that in mind whenever you’re ready to think: “starving a daemon it’s not a good strategy”. It’s actually proof that what you’re doing is getting results and the daemons are becoming really, really hungry.

***

So, daemons are real. They’re feeding with our anger, frustration and sadness and they’re playing only the game of abuse. Most of the time, they’re pointing to our real flaws, our real mistakes, our real stupid steps. Most of the time, they’re just a finger pointed to our own problems.

But, once you solved your problems, you realize they’re as real as you are and they have this habit of getting addicted to you. Yes, you may have been played the victim, yes, you may have had some karmic debt, yes, you may have to learn a hard lesson, but after you’ve been through all these, after you solved your own problems, it’s time to stop. It’s time to kill your own daemons by starvation.

And then move on.

Personal Mission Statement

I’m writing this post under quite a pressure. This is coming from my personal life, where apparently we reached a point when things must be changed. It was never a totally transparent personal life, there were always some closed windows, and I never wanted to look through those windows. I totally believed that those windows were closed for good. I assumed that everything was exactly as shown, no hidden windows, but apparently I was wrong. Whatever must come out of this, it should be for the better. It’s a crossroad I must solve.

I won’t go into further details about that. I don’t think that my personal life is worthy enough for public exposure, and even if I would, I won’t make it public out of shyness. Or decency, call it what you want.

What I would do though, it’s to continue my chosen path in regard with this blog. I established a schedule and I intend to keep it as much as I can, even under stressful events. Maybe some of you will think that this is strange, and I should focus on solving those problems first, and then work on this blog again. While I totally agree with the fact that I should solve those problems, I don’t think that I should focus only on that and let other parts of the mechanism to fall apart.

I think that we’re made of different commitments and that every commitment, being personal, social or business, must be fulfilled. If there is unbalance in one category, keeping the other categories working is a must in order to keep the machine working. Otherwise the machine will stop for good, and everything will be lost. It’s hard to do it, don’t get me wrong, the pressure I have right now is really hard to describe and I don’t wish for anybody to go through this. Anyway, to make a long story short, I might post smaller articles and not keep up with the intended pace, but I’ll do whatever it takes to keep my commitments.

It’s funny how the synchronicity in our life can manifest. Today I scheduled a blog post about “Personal Mission Statement”. I wrote earlier about the necessity of a personal mission statement, and today I’ll outline mine. (more…)

Taxonomic Twitter

In another post about Twitter I wrote extensively about the implications of this service from a behavioral perspective. It seems that I’m quite in a “twitter mood” lately since I’m writing another post so close to the first one and I’m planning another one for the upcoming days. Right now I would like to share something more technical about this.

It’s about an attempt to make Twitter even sharper and thinner, by using some sort of taxonomy, or in plain english, a method of grouping together posts by putting “labels” on them. Twitter already has a max limit of 140 characters for each post, and chances for this to grow up are likely to be zero. At least for now. So, in order to increase the readability of the tweets, all work must be done “inside” this 140 characters limit. And the way they’re trying to this is by using some extremely scaled down mark-up language.

They’re called hashtags and they are a way of identifying zones of related content. For instance, if you’re going to tweet a lot about raw food, you can insert somewhere into the tweet something like this “#rawfood”. The “#” sign will have the role to identify the string after it as a marker. Everything with a “#” in front will actually become a label. So every time you will be tweeting about raw food, you will group your tweets into a larger category of possibly related tweets. If somebody else will tweet about the same things and they’ll use the same marker, your tweets will be grouped together.

Using Hashtags Implications

First of all, there will be less room for the actual information. Every hashtag will eat some space out of the 140 characters, leaving less space for the original content. Chances are that your content could be grouped in more than one category, or marker and you’ll be inclined to use more than one hashtag in your tweet. If a consistent API would be provided for working with those hashtags – and chances are that there will be some hooks sooner than we think – then a lot of applications would be using that. Turning Twitter into a searchable catalog is just around the corner. There is a great potential for advertisers and even for people who are trying to promote their blogs or products. It would be the easiest way to direct your tweet to the intended category of readers. (more…)