• We go in the direction of our dominant thought. Agree? H ow can we use this to our advantage?
  • Why is this also the cause of all trouble and human disaster
  • Why is this the key to success in life.
  • Why do we need to learn how to master our thinking to avoid disaster and illness.

On my third trip to the Himalayas of Nepal, about the same time as they were building the Egyptian pyramids, or thereabouts, I took a friend, ok, a woman friend, ok, my partner at the time, to see what I’d been raving about. I learnt many things on that trip including, but not limited to, that sex at altitude is difficult and exhausting.

On the 10th day we needed to traverse the side of a hill, ok, mountain, and the path was sketchy. The cost of a slip was a vertical flight free fall about 1,000 meters to a valley below that was, for most of the walk, hidden in the thick fog (read cloud) we were walking in. Mid way, after braving the terrain and doing oh so well, a small slip on a small rock sent her nerves into overload. She had what is commonly called, a panic attack. It wasn’t the potential death from the fall that got under her nails but the think, white out of the fog. She hated to be “locked in.”

Now, I had helped many people in panic attacks. They are frequent, more frequent than people know, especially in ashrams and places where you are meant to be calm. But here there was no place to sit and remove her from the fog blanket we were in, there was no warm fire to make her a tea, there was no office to sit and chat. We were in a very precarious place with little oxygen. The more she gasped, the more she needed to gasp. The more she feared, the more she shook and the stronger she got at resisting my comfort. It escalated to the point of a crazy lunatic eyes popping out of her head and mount agape looking for oxygen. There was no time, no change to dig in to eliminate the source of the panic, a rape from youth, no time, so I slapped her across the face, hard with an open palm.

Shame on me yes, it’s the one an only time in my life that I’ve laid a hand on another human being in any form of conscious violence. But what I needed to do was to get control of her mind. The shock of the slap, snapped her out of her bubble of fear, turned her focus on me, long enough to hit me back. The panic attack was over. Her mind cleared. Sadly the fog (read thick cloud again) didn’t clear but at least the “Hunchback of Notradamme” had settled down.

We do go in the direction of our dominant thought. And whether that’s a momentary trigger that flicks us back into the trauma of a past event where trust was broken or whether it shakes us into the fear of the future we all hold deep. We go in the direction of our dominant thought.

Contrary to popular self help rhetoric, there is no remedy. We go in the direction of our dominant thought and in that direction are all the thoughts we didn’t think we could thought. Yes, we march right into our own incompetence. It’s called evolution whether we like it or not.

How many times had my “lunatic panic attacked” friend on that narrow foggy cliff side, processed her past in therapy, in discard forms and all manner of yogic distortions? She’d done 20 years hard labour dealing with it in daily life to the point where she and I would agree, that issue was not, in day to day life, running her life. But here it was again. Same shit, different castle. I’d seen my friend go through a discard process on her rape, and in a blubbering mess, come to completion on it. But, here it was again.

We go in the direction of our dominant thought, but as it is in this case, that dominant thought doesn’t always have to be “dominant” to us. It can be, that little anxiety driving thought, subconscious. Like a tiger waiting for its next opportunity to pounce and feed. Like a flaw in the sidewall of a car tyre, waiting for that crucial moment when the car, fully loaded, takes a corner at just a bit more speed and loads that weak spot and boom, up it come, a blow-out, a potentially life threatening feeling surfaces and can sabotage a ten year long marriage, a business role or our health. As life escalates, so too do the opportunities for those gremlin “dominant subconscious thoughts” to smash out of hiding and wreck the future.

This is why feelings, emotions and reactions are so damn unreliable. We can never know whether they are sourced from our wounds, our learnt memes, our real self or the baggage we carry in our subconscious tiger mind that’s been triggered. And why, the ego, which is the name we give the brown paper bag we put all those thoughts into. The Ego.

So it was my partner’s EGO that was driving her to explore the Himalayas, it was also her Ego that panicked on that ledge. And when I slapped her face, I didn’t slap “her” I slapped her ego out of the zone in which she needed to take back control of her thinking.

This is why the saying “Idle mind is the devils playground.” Alcoholism comes from idle mind, depression comes from idle mind, poor choices come from idle mind. And as you can see from this story, what is meant by “idle mind” isn’t that it’s doing nothing, thinking nothing or hanging out not thinking at all. It simply means that if there is no control, no focus, the mind will dive into your dirty laundry and live in that sewer of reactions, fears, memories, stories and data and you’ll go in that direction.

A slap in the ego to bring you to focus might not be a bad solution on a mountain, but a slap in the ego at work might mean a harsh review, it might mean missing out of that job you applied for, it might mean a partner not acting as you would like or a child being an arse at school. All these demonstrate where you might be going in the direction of a dominant thought you don’t know you have.

We even have names for it. FOMO – fear of missing out. And SS – Slow Suicide – which is eating and drinking too much driven by dominant thoughts you don’t know you have.

Innerwealth has a nature based solution to these dark forces that live within us all. Let me say that you must first learn to not trust your feelings. They are only an indication as to where you are stuck in your evolution in life and love. Those feelings grow from your judgements and many of those, as you’ll read about in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, aren’t even conscious.

  1. Work out where you actually want to go. 99% of people are sitting in the back of the bus complaining about where they are and where they are going. But if you hand them the wheel, they’re just happy complaining and don’t know where they would or could go if they could. They have unrealistic fantasies of the future like “peaceful” or “happy” or “non challenged” or “evolved.”
  2. Deny the merit of feelings, emotions, and ego by pulling weeds and sticking flowers in their place in your mind. This can only be done by the discard process. There is no other way other than panic attacks on cliff edges, ego slaps. Simply put, your subconscious dirty laundry is going to surface and make things uncomfortable so you may as well inject that discomfort one row at a time on a discard sheet than have it randomly screw with things you treasure.
  3. Do the Chinese water torture trick on yourself. It’s a slow dripping water droplet hitting your forehead every second. Drives people nuts in the end. My version of this is: denials, affirmations and visualisations. (see previous blog series, Success Formula). This way you are doing the electrical shock treatment like in “one flew over the cuckoo’s nest” except you end up thinking what will cause what you want in life, planting flowers at the same rate as you pull weeds with the “Discard Row a Day Keeps Chris’ Arse Kicks Away.
  4. GET REAL. Omg did I just write that. The guy who tells you to use your imagination…. but yes, that’s my secret motto for life. What do I mean? Well for me it’s easily said. If it works in nature, it’s going to work in your life. Nature’s universal laws. The laws of the universe. Those and your ego are at war, continually at war. What you feel ain’t REAL. False expectations are, in my experience, the devil in disguise, they ruined everything they were projected on. They corrupt the beautiful and make the most precious hearts turn to poison darts. If you have false expectations those come from your ego and the baggage it carries. Do you want to live life like a game of Russian roulette? No? Then get real. Get real expectations of people, business, life, and the only way to do this is to understand the difference between your ego and its subconscious thinking process, the sewer of life and the universal laws. As an example: In a great relationship 50% of the energy will support you, and 50% will challenge you. If you get pissed at the 50% that challenges you, and don’t enjoy growing from it, you’re the arsehole, not your partner. That’s REAL!
  5. Find your values, your priorities and work on them. While you work on your highest priorities you remain intense, in a hurry, focussed and in your zone and the devil, idle mind, can’t get in and do the Chinese torture on your forehead with rubbish that was meant to stay at the bottom of the bucket. Those who work on low priorities, like taking kids to fun parks and wasting time, attract calamities, disasters and humbling circumstances no matter what Facebook pictures they post to show the world what a great parent or partner they are…..

PART 11.

There is no such thing in the world as intuition. There is an opinion that is usually based on an accumulated mass of data in your mind that some situation reminds you of and gives you some form of a projection about how it’s going to turn out. This accumulated mass is called the subconscious and conscious mind but it’s all one big jumble.

The less jumbled this accumulated mass of information is the more likely that the intuitions are to be clear. But they are never wrong they are instead self-fulfilling prophecies.

Let’s begin with an understanding of the human condition. Every person has every trait. So when we meet somebody who displays certain characteristics in public we know that they display the exact opposite characteristics in private. The more flamboyant person is in public the more likely they are to be manic depressive or angry or sad in private. North American tradition suggests that white people speak with a fork tongue and this is deadly accurate. What we say and who we really are is what we project and the opposite exists whether we like it or don’t.

When we are imagining our next partner in life we have a list of things we would love them to be. That list, as beautiful as it may be, has an exact Darkside called the opposite. If we wish to say I want a person with a kind heart, what we would say if we were being totally honest with ourselves is that this person will have a cruel heart as well but I hope like hell they take it to work.

Where is a syndrome called the yellow Volkswagen. When we are sitting at home thinking I’d love to buy a car that nobody else has and I haven’t ever seen before we might look up the paper and find a yellow Volkswagen advertised and think wow, that’s perfect it’s unique. We go about buying the car, bring it home and on the way home, sure is hell, there it is another yellow Volkswagen. We park the yellow Volkswagen we bought in the street and look across the road and bingo, there is another yellow Volkswagen and suddenly it appears that everybody bought a yellow Volkswagen in the short period between when we were looking at the paper and when we bought ours.

This syndrome is really well known. Basically it says that if you have a list of good things that you think about somebody, does things that you think Good will jump out at you frequently and you would recognise them just like yellow Volkswagens over and over again. However, it works the opposite as well. When you see somebody and you develop a negative impression of them then they reinforce your negative impression, or so it seems, because you see them do that negative behaviour over and over again. The yellow Volkswagen in its negative state.

When we get a negative intuition about something, and other words we recognise some negative unwonted signals about that thing, or person, because we recognise that unwonted signal we will recognise more of them and validate what we call our intuition about that person. So in a relationship of any sort, be at domestic or work, when we get a negative impression that creates doubt about whether we want to work with this person or live with this person, this intuition manifested self by giving us over and over again, yellow Volkswagens, evidence that we are right.

That’s why it’s really hard to change our opinion about somebody. We have sought and found enough information to validate our opinion. If we had sought and found the exact opposite then we might have been wrong and our opinion might change. But that requires us to look for green Volkswagens instead of yellow ones. Most of us trust these intuitions and because they are self-fulfilling prophecies can prove that they are most often right and we are so intuitive

People don’t change. When we marry somebody we see the positive and after awhile we see the negative. If at some point we question whether we should be married to this person, we start to see evidence that the doubts are true and we find the yellow Volkswagens in our daily life with them jumping out and validating our doubts. That person didn’t change only we saw good news for a period and then bad news for a period and made a decision based on this information.

Interestingly however, is the fact that what we like in people we like in ourselves and what we don’t like in people we don’t like in ourselves. So it could be said that these intuitions about other people, our opinions, only reveal how we feel about ourselves and what we are stuck not in self-love. There is therefore a powerful opportunity to move through and evolve our thinking inste trying to work out what the hell went wrong with this relationship where suddenly we only see yellow Volkswagens in them. That person had yellow Volkswagens from the beginning.

The most narcissistic thing we can do in life is to try to change somebody to meet our expectation. The most altruistic thing we can do in the world is to change our expectation to meet somebody. Self righteousness, which is a plague on the earth at the present time, causes people to become frightfully depressed and ego centric in their judgements of partners, colleagues at work, those in the media and others. The opportunity for change is in our own thinking about ourselves as reflected by our own opinions of others.

So there are two lists: THE DuDu LIST AND THE DoNDu LIST.

THE DuDu LIST AND THE DoNDu LIST.

The Dudu list I will qualities we want somebody to be. Now this person could be our partner or it could be a colleague at work or an employee and it is how we want them to be. For example enthusiastic, innovative, creative, handiwork with, non-complaining, inspired. If we were to take this whole list and flip it upside down and reverse every word we would have the DonDu list.

When we say we don’t like somebody or we don’t get on with them or we are having trouble communicating them it’s because we have seen qualities in the don’t do list, those qualities have become yellow Volkswagens and jumped out at us frequently, and we have been confronted by the fact that this person displays qualities that are in opposition to our Dudu list. In contrast, when we say we like somebody and enjoy their company we are saying that many of the qualities we see in them are on our Dudu list and like yellow Volkswagens we see those qualities repeat themselves frequently. This person is no different to any other on earth is only that they are putting on display qualities that are in our Dudu list and hiding qualities that are not until they get home.

Question can become where did these lists come from in the first place and the answer is we inherit them. What we judge in our parents, we judge in ourselves, what we judge in our parents the parents judge in themselves, so it’s all one big happy family of Colin judgements, come and discomfort and Dudu lists. These are called human values and we’ve discussed this already. There is therefore only one way to change the trajectory of your life and stop repeating old patterns and that is to change the Dudu list.

The only way to change the dudu list is to break through the Memes that hold them in place and we’ve also discussed this earlier in a different lesson answering a different question. Or, put in another language, love ourselves more.

With Spirit

Chris