Revise certain thoughts

Neale Donald Walsch suggests that destructive thinking may overwhelm you.  He believes part of our greatest spiritual challenge is to decondition certain ingrained thoughts.  Consider your point of view on each of the following five points and what you might do to revise your mindset:

1) Human beings are separate from each other.

2) There isn't enough of hat human beings need to be happy

3)To get the stuff of which there isn't enough, human beings must compete with each other.

4) Some human beings are better than other human beings

5) It is in appropriate for human beings to  resolve severe differences created by all other fallacies by killing each other.

Logic of a hermit

People will go to great physical, emotional, geographic and other lengths to stretch themselves. For devoted students of enlightenment, the idea of living in a cave may have immeasurable appeal. If you truly wish to understand yourself and the world beyond, you're taught to separate yourself from the familiar and from possible influences which prevent you from deep learning. 

Try as outsiders might, they do not always share the enthusiasm for self-imposed hunger, filth, extended solitude, anti-sociability, extinguished material ambition, abstinence or asexuality and denial of other responsibilities.  Not everyone thinks imposed thirst and hardship will invite a better sense of existence. People like Patanjali, Siddharta, Tezin Palmo and others will disagree.

Maybe the logic of a hermit isn't meant to be understood based on how you've come to think about your life thuis far in other places. You can get your hands on travel books written by individuals who made efforts to share their journeys. Yet, how close do these portrayals come to the real experience? Do you get a sense of connection or disconnection with your own reality? Will you ever know the difference? Do you have the will and inclination to change that?

Consider Robyn Davidson walked 1,700 miles across the Australian desert accompanied by four camels. Tracks is the book about this adventurer's relationship to her own ambivalent quest. She never directly identifies motives, but she was driven by things so profoundly powerful that she may not grasp them herself. Curiously, the financial backing of the National Geographic, resulted in her private journey being invaded. Did she not seek only to redefine her independence? She admits: "I was beginning to see it as a story for other people, with a beginning and an ending."  Photographers followed her. People approached with their own questions and interpretations.   Perhaps Davidon's ultimate confrontations are with her own personal and cultural views of racism and misogyny, and with the challenges she brings on herself in the depths of rural Australia?

In less extreme cases, people will hide themselves away in an office and pretend to be hermits.  They often like the idea of a temporary experience and fear the dangers of greater unknown in the longer term. Maybe the idea of confronting those things that scare us most is one of the best ways to improve our character. If you're afraid to climb a rock face, find a way to do it and that fear will no longer control you. The logic of a hermit invites each of us to take steps to enrich our inner soul, wherever that may take us. What we discover or bring back will be priceless.

Shape your life

How many people do you know who don't like to make their own decisions or don't know how? These kinds of people ask someone else what to do or ask someone to do it for them.  Maybe you generously help someone with decisions, not realizing that you may actually prevent this person from developing key life skills. 

If you're having a tough time, and feel very vulnerable, you may prefer to lean on someone.  You may have lost a loved one, be in a destructive relationship or feel stuck in a self-defeating situation. You may ask people to guide you, tell you what to do, and eliminate your bad choices.  Yet, not facing things on your own means you permit fear or uncertainty to control you.  This may prevent you from learning to seek professional help you need.  Unless you figure out how to leave a destructive situation, or grow from what you now see were bad choices, you may become dependent on people for judgments and self-assessments you need to learn to make yourself. 

Maybe you have a conflict looming, where you're definitely in the right, yet, obtaining more just and ethical treatment isn't easy.  The experience may be an ongoining trial of patience and inner strength.  You may fear losing faith in the process, losing faith in yourself and wonder about the implications of any decisions. What would be the best thing to do now?

Rest assured that you're frequently being given new opportunities to change, to learn from mistakes and then, to try again and make better decisions.  It's all in how you look at the situation.  You have power to take charge of your life, to learn to read your intuition.  We all benefit from learning to look at ourselves to see where and when we have grown,how we have contributed to the lives of others, and why we have had a sense of failure. Learning to deal with the truth of why we evade choices and situations enables us to shape our lives for the better.

Gotta have impatience

Patience, like time, is a commodity in great demand.  Impatience is experiencing an epidemic.   Many people make much ado about 'little things,' about where they're not, and don't take advantage of what's right in front of them. If this sounds familiar, you'd benefit from reviewing why you're impatient. Why not rethink how you could make more effective use of your time? 

If you drive a car, you've heard a horn blowing behind you when you're in no position to go anywhere. How does this help the honker? What about the person who accelerates past you only to stop at the red light just ahead? And, then, the driver does the same thing to be stopped at the next intersection.  These drivers don't necessarily feel better when they vent steam. They only annoy you if you let them, but they still get nowhere fast. Which driver sounds like you?

If you go into a shop, and nobody serves you, and you wish to get going somewhere else, how does that make you feel to be ignored? Perhaps you feel the world should revolve around you when it doesn't. People aren't often mind-readers. Is that fair? Could you invite this treatment?  Wherever you work, are you more attentive to the clock and the prospect of leaving than dealing with taks at hand? Consider the kinds of pleasures and useful learning you're missing.

If your boss tells you to stop what you're doing and to perform another task when it doesn't really need to be done right away, this may stress you out. Your boss may be impatient and may also wish to take advantage of the authority he or she has over you.  Or, you may exaggerate how difficult the situation really is. Why might you be impatient to do what you think is a priority?

What is about wishing that certain experiences were already over so we can get on with something else? Yet, we don't take the time to enjoy what happens as it does.  Kids often dress as grown ups and wish they had the privileges that adults have, like staying up late.  Then as adults, we wish to go to be earlier or relive parts of our childhood, but we are taught to be too serious.

What about traits of your partner or close friends who drive you bonkers? They may be impatient for you to get yourself together so they can get on with things. Or, you may be impatient for someone to get ready when that person often makes you late. How could you react differently?

Impatience is a quality that creeps up when we least expect it. Why sputter explatives? Does this make us feel better or have we been conditioned to think we have to react in a particular way?  Consider what life would be like if you learned to enjoy being stuck in traffic, if you saw being forced to postpone some of your own plans as a blessing, if you could see impatience as a teacher meant to temper your passions, if you could see advantages you didn't initially recognize. As you decide you wish to better understand and improve yourself, you love whatever happens. 

Strengthen your concentration

What can you do to strengthen your concentration? Turn off the blaring music or change over to some more peaceful of meditative. Switch off the television. Put down the phone and turn on an answering machine if you have one.  Tear yourself away from those addictive computer games. Stop talking about doing things that are unrelated to the task at hand. Adjust your environment to suit your task or move yourself to a setting which will permit you to focus. Collect all the items  and information you need to accomplish your task. Put them together in one place and sort them.

It is never too late to revise your approach to concentration. You can start where you are. Decide if staying where you are in your current circumstances will enable you to move ahead.  If this is not the case, then it's time to take the necessary steps to accomplish more in new ways.