Society and The Future

A blog about how this all affects today and tomorrow.

Optimistic Nihilism

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1272 Relax and Succeed - What is reality to youA lot of my students come to me with an issue or a problem. In most cases, their attraction to solving that issue will cause them to see most of the lessons through that lens. But every now and then I get a more philosophical student, who comes with a problem but quickly finds themselves, like me, fascinating by these very ideas themselves.

I recently worked with a gentleman who was having challenges activating his own life due to an honest sense of nihilism. The simple fact was, he had legitimately noticed a fact about reality but he didn’t see how it was possible to do much with that discovery and so it had trapped him rather than freed him. I recently ran into the video below and thought it was quite a good technical explanation of most of the process he did before he came to me, and it also includes a lot of what we focused on after we were working together.

It’s not all here of course, or I’d have just shown him this video, and even having done it personally, that doesn’t mean all of his problems are solved of course. It simply means that he no longer things they’re a problem to be fixed, but rather that they form the landscape he’s negotiating as he lives his life. In the end, it’s going to rain. The only question is; will that keep you from living your life, or are you prepared to get wet sometimes in your pursuit of meaningful experiences?

Are you prepared to be responsible for your own life? If you are, you are freed to have

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations locally and around the world.

A Balance of Needs

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1268 Relax and Succeed - Mindfulness is the aware.jpgMaybe it’s a few friends of yours. Maybe it’s you and you know it. Maybe it’s you and you aren’t aware of it; but we’re all somewhere on the self and other spectrum. Regardless of how various individual people define us, we can all appreciate that some people will be more selfish than others, just as we know some will give beyond their capacity to give.

Notably, either extreme appears pathetic from the middle. To be fair, the people on the extreme ends also don’t often have many good opinions about the people in the middle, and notably; they’re often viewed as the least-informed about life.

The most balanced people rarely experience their balanced nature because they have so little variation to compare it to, and so the experiences they do have tend to be filed under shocking, unpleasant or maybe bad simply because they’re so comparatively big. In that way life kind of works the way a lemon does, where it shocks you when you’re a baby, but lots of experiences with something means that today you can convert that lemony tartness into refreshing enjoyment.

1268 Relax and Succeed - There seem to be two kinds of searchersMost of you will know these varying spiritual states as political distinctions. People seen as over-generous and foolish by one side are seen as compassionate and generous by the other. Likewise, the ones viewed as selfish and careless are seen by their own side as focused and successful. Each of these opinions and every single one in between are all largely valid, which helps us realise the truly meaningless nature of opinions, because what we’re really talking about is the many ways people are.

There’s no correct place to be on this spectrum. You’re not healthier near the middle and sicker on the extremes, although those can be byproducts of being in those positions. Everyone on that spectrum suffers, just for different reasons. The two far ends of the spectrum find each other’s pure existence to be painful. In between people argue about what the priorities in life should be and how they should be accounted for. And in the very middle a bunch of people are pretty good at intellectually appreciating all the various positions taken, but they’re all a little lifeless due to a lack of extreme experiences.

This idea can be disappointing to a spiritual seeker because it indicates that a common theme is true; you are already home. The reason this idea gets confused is that we see our spirit as a thing, on its way somewhere, when it would be better to think of ourselves as a principle in motion. So it’s like we’re the principle of gravity and the body we live in is doing the falling that we call living. Yes, your nature is to pull toward the center–to fall–which also explains why the center can be confusing and disorienting to those born too close to it, making their subsequent lives feel shallow and often unlived.

1268 Relax and Succeed - It is not outer awarenessCan you accept that your nature is to move toward balance and that is the pull of life you feel each day? And can you simultaneously accept that your nature includes the idea that where you’re headed isn’t better than where you are, it’s just a different balance point with different challenges? The point isn’t to get anywhere, it’s to go; to live; to be. External outcomes ultimately don’t matter. It’s what Shakespeare meant with that “To be or not to be,” stuff.

Are there different types of prices for experiencing the various positions on this spectrum? Indeed there are. But pain is pain. It’s the part of life that allows you to contrast your joy, so there is no point in avoiding it. There are enlightened beings living all over the spectrum. The trick isn’t where you are, it’s how aware you are.

Wake up. Know yourself. And know that others are themselves too. And then work toward a less judgmental world where, more and more, you simply let them, and yourself, fully be.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations locally and around the world.

Ultra Spirituality

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JP Sears
YouTube: AwakenWithJP

We need more of this in moden spirituality because true spirituality is humblingly pedestrian. As I’ve written many times, Eckhart Tolle is the real deal–he is describing the same thing I am here, which is the same thing Wayne Dyer, Marianne Williamson, and the Dalai Lama are all talking about. But it’s a mistake to think that everyone has to end up sounding profound like Eckhart.

Healthy people will appear to us as individuals, but that doesn’t mean we will personally like the manifestation of their true selves in that moment. But that’s not them lacking spirituality, that’s them not giving any attention to your opinions about the living of their moments.

Don’t look to be lofty, or even calm. There can be great activity in the calmness that’s being discussed here. You can play a sport or be on stage as a comedian and be calm in a spiritual way. But there is no singular ‘way’ to be spiritual. When you’re truly being spiritual there won’t be a ‘you’ for ‘you’ to define as anything at all, and free of those egocentric barriers we can finally relax into being ourselves.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Have a wonderful weekend everyone.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations locally and around the world.

Create More Unity in Your Community

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1247 Relax and Succeed - If you want others to be happyWe evaluate, we name, we label, we judge, we value. Totally lost in ego, we use words like truth to represent what is really only our personal view. Reacting more to our own thoughts about things than the things themselves, we seek to remove all of our opportunities for personal growth by removing any and all offending ideas from our daily experience.

Is it any wonder that the world feels fractured when most individuals are walking through it with the constant urge to subdivide it down into groups rather than behaviours? How does it help to either subdivide or be angry at the perpetrator of domestic violence for instance? To be angry is to add even more negativity. It’s fine as an initial response, but once that washes over us our job isn’t to have a personal emotional reaction, it’s to do something constructive for our community.

Unity is created in a community when people from all walks of life can feel safe that they will be met with compassion and understanding when they’re struggling. That means the wealthy elderly lady walking her dog is equal to the strapping young man with the sort of childhood that leads him to be violent. People find it easy to be sympathetic to the little old lady even though (like every human being), she’s certain to have done some truly terrible things in her life. But our personal speculation about her will often be quite generous.

1247 Relax and Succeed - There are too many of usMeanwhile we have difficulty expressing compassion for a fearful or angry young man with equal challenges and his own set of mistakes. Our job isn’t to look at his clothing and terms of speech and his behaviour and then evaluate him, label him as an offender and his wife as a victim, and then dole out our compassion according to those judgments. Our job is to care about each of them in conjunction with their relationship.

To help we need to understand what in his life would lead him to be violent, and what in her life would lead her to stay for that violence. Our initial judgments are uninformed and useless. They happen inside our head. Even if they do externalize, they’re often just as ugly as what they’re judging.

The world does not benefit from our thoughts, it benefits from our actions. And that action should not be to judge and divide people into good or bad groups, our role is to support anyone struggling, whatever that struggle may look like. Right now, people are inclined to hate the very people that they should be loving the most.

1247 Relax and Succeed - Look out for each other

When we’re unhealthy and locked in ego we’re going to talk about how bad things are and who needs to change. We’ll start filling our social media with angry recriminations of this or that group, or we level this or that judgment about this or that social media post; or we comment on the news, on the behaviour of athletes, and politicians, and celebrities, and on and on and on. Meanwhile children watch us make those judgments, and we pass on to them a world more ever more steeped in the useless egocentric personal views that populate most people’s social media.

Those children deserve to see us offer them examples of where we find our own way past a negative judgment to find some positive sort of action, but instead we offer them endless examples of our judgments of how the world should be, or how it’s supposed to be. Even most television shows now involve someone actively judging someone else in a way that actually determines that person’s fate. It’s all built to appeal to our egos, not the unifying best that is at the heart of who and what we are.

We all have to drop that arrogance. It’s not our job, nor does any one of us know enough to be able to singularly know what the right answer is in any situation. We all need to stop casting judgments and making suggestions, and we all need to start getting to know our enemies better. We have to move toward the people we dislike the most, because the conflict is happening within us, not in the larger external world.

1247 Relax and Succeed - Compassion is a verbIt is we who must lower our sense of right and wrong and instead ask how we can help situations traverse the distance from tense and unpleasant to calm and rewarding. Remember, every time you either consistently negatively judge, or universally accept another person, you are engaged in the very deepest and most destructive state of ego. That’s like failing to throw a life preserver so you can instead scream at a drowning person about how they should have learned to swim many years ago. It’s cruel and it does not serve the larger community.

As Roger Waters said, (it doesn’t just apply to formal schooling), “We don’t need your education, we don’t need your thought control.” Indeed. Stop putting bricks of judgment between you and others. If you want to prove you’re developing spiritually, try tearing down your own wall, be vulnerable, and connect. Because while your judgments only serve to make the world worse, you compassion is the glue that can hold a society together through it’s most difficult times.

Trade in your judgments. Be a positive, constructive spiritual citizen in your community. If everyone learns how to do that, then when it’s us that’s struggling, we too will benefit from the compassion of those around us. Let’s all take immediate action to improve ourselves and the world in this way. I do hope you’ll join me.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations locally and around the world.

Momentous, Monumental Experiences

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1242 Relax and Succeed - Roger Waters Us and Them 1You know them. You’re excited before they happen, you’re fully involved in the moments they’re happening, and afterwards you glow with excitement. That immediate sense eventually subsides into a deep appreciation that the event ever took place at all. In fact, the secret of the whole thing is that we value it so much that we slow down to give it our full and undivided attention. During these times our inner thoughts are completely silent.

These are the monuments of our consciousness. These represent aspects of our lives that stand tall and permeate everything else we do. It might be the day you escaped a war, or the day you got your citizenship, or your marriage, the birth of your children, the day you opened your business or your first trip overseas. Sometimes it’s just an arresting sunset with someone you care about. No matter what it is, these are the moments where gratitude and appreciation are at full volume. They create our sense of life’s richness and it is those feelings that drive us to make even more of our lives feel like those wonderfully wide-awake moments.

These events can happen in conjunction with other people and sharing that excitement with others feeling the same way is both beautiful and unifying. Despite that, these experiences remain deeply personal, existing only within our own consciousness, interconnected with virtually everything else in our lives precisely because they affect us so much. I recently had such an event in my life and the feelings around it reminded me of how exalted every day life can be when we’re deeply in a state of gratitude, and that feeling of inspiration lead to this piece of writing.

1242 Relax and Succeed - Roger Waters Us and Them 2I’ve always said I have a few heroes in my life. They’re the people in my life and the influences I’ve had that inspire the very best in me. Anyone who’s a friend of mine is like this. I’m always friends with people I admire for some reason that’s important to me. But there’s also key people I’ve modelled myself after; people like my parents, or my best friend, a particular aunt, a particular uncle, plus the fictional character Hawkeye Pierce from the TV series M*A*S*H and Roger Waters, the composer and creator of Pink Floyd‘s sound. This particular momentous, monumental experience involved Waters’ final concert tour.

Waters’ music is extremely artful, and yet it is deeply social and political poetry. The audience was understandably wildly varied, with people ranging from 14 to 80, and there was everything from a groups of nerdy looking political men, a group of girls in niqabs, a Sikh fellow with his father, a row of old ladies in outrageous clothes and some aging rockers. And everyone was on the same open page. Not a wisp of judgment from anyone. In fact, it was particularly accepting and welcoming. The influence of that kind of milieu has informed many of the ways in which I conduct my life and my own art.

I was attending the concert with a dear friend who is also a long time fan. His connection to Waters is like many Eastern Europeans–around the time of the fall of The Wall (Berlin’s, not Waters’), many states descended into dark nationalism and my friend witnessed first hand what propaganda and belief can do to otherwise excellent human beings. Mere thoughts could turn good friends into lethal enemies and he values Waters’ vigilance against such ugly motives.

1242 Relax and Succeed - Roger Waters Us and Them 3
Being his last tour, I will choose to miss Roger with a joyful poignancy.

For my part, Waters’ was inspired to write about peace by his father’s death in WWII. I was inspired by my father, who survived the war, but who maintained the same dim view of conflict and the same hopeful view of humanity that Roger Waters shares through his music. With that kind of awareness and motivation, I feel like we had similar childhoods strangely enough.

My friend and I deeply share Waters’ distaste for things that confine human freedom or that assigns labels and values, and we also share the love he feels for other people of all types. We connect with the idea that humanity is always at its best when things are at their worst, and that in the end we are all in this together. The affirmation of that, with tens of thousands of your fellow citizens, is like going to the most celebratory peace rally you could possibly imagine.

Waters is 74 and he’s announced that this will be his last tour. Knowing that, my friend made it all that much better by securing us seats dead center, in row two. My seat was even my “lucky  number;” the one I put on all of my hockey jerseys. It got even better when the four people in front of us turned out to max out at 5’2″ (155cm). They could stand and we could stay seated and still see the entire stage perfectly.

1242 Relax and Succeed - Roger Waters Us and Them 4
Roger feeling grateful over a 10 minute standing ovation.

As I watched Waters perform from such a close distance, I found myself in a deep state of gratitude, knowing not in words but in feeling that from this man’s life had grown weeks if not months of joy, of solace, of discovery and inspiration. I was in tears at times due to the gratitude I felt for even being able to have such an experience. It felt like my entire being was in a state of saying thank you for the entire show.

It all culminated in something that neither my friend and I could have expected. Early in his career, Waters had misunderstood audiences and hadn’t always been charitable–something he’s always regretted. That being the case, and it being the final show, Waters descended from the stage and he walked along in front of it, he proceeded to fist-bump about three quarters of the people in the first two rows.

I’m not one into celebrity at all, but this felt like touching the hand of the doctor who gave birth to a beloved child. From that very hand, a pen had scribed some of the most powerful moments in my life. That I got to ‘shake the hand’ of the man who gave me all that was deeply rewarding. It couldn’t have had a more fitting ending and fills me with gratitude.

1242 Relax and Succeed - Roger Waters favourite quote
Roger carries this with him like a talisman. I love seeing the handwriting from The Wall liner notes, and I’m also with him on the philosophy.

Despite my personal sense of fulfillment, what I love most is that I know with certainty that feelings like this lay in the future of virtually everyone reading this. No matter where you are right now in life, just remember that if we keep our eyes open and we live with the knowledge that life is abundant, it is only a matter of time before life rises up to remind of us of the incredible value of simply being present.

Thank you Roger Waters. Thank you so much.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations locally and around the world.