spirit

The Voice of the Soul

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

Hey, you guys wake up. You see this?

What?

She’s just sitting there again.

Like before? Just sitting there thinking about all the things that she doesn’t like about her life? Why does she do that? It’s like putting us in prison. Doesn’t she feel how much it hurts us?

Oh she feels our hurtin’ bad kid, she just doesn’t understand.

Doesn’t understand what?

See, unlike animals, humans have language so they develop this framework they call ‘psychology.’

Psy…cholo…gy…?

Yeah. See, they can use their mind to talk to themselves, and they mistake their own talking for us.

Why would they mistake their own talking for their soul?

Well, see, they’re kind of loving their pain more than they’re loving us. That’s where they’re focus is. They don’t get that we’re a collection of experiences to be lived. When they’re lost they think that a soul is like this perfect shining thing, and so they keep sitting still and then they use their thoughts to compare themselves to their other thoughts about whatever their personal idea of perfection is.

Perfection?! And they each have their own ideas of perfection???

Yeah. Some wanna be skinny, some wanna be smarter or more popular or richer.

And they think if they get that they’ll get closer to us?

They think those things are us. Like I said, they think we’re a thing.

I’m still confused. What do you mean a “thing?”

Like, uh… an entity. They think we’re like a blob of glowing perfection or something.

A glob of…?

I know. But you gotta understand, they’re innocents. They all start like that. The boss figures if we lose them early, then they have their early life to learn to relax when they’re lost. When they do that they’re immediately home. It actually works pretty good. They call it, surrendering.

So if they go quiet they surrender then we start getting lived, but instead they’re trying to find the peace of surrendering by thinking about some blob of perfection?

They’re ‘better self,’ yeah. And, usually they won’t use the blob, they’ll use some other person –which is even crazier I know –but look– I’m not explaining it good. See, they think we’re like this thing that stays forever. They don’t get that we’re a collection of experiences that leaves oneness and returns to oneness. They don’t get that they have to spend us. They think they have to expose us, or be like us, or be pure, or extra nice or something. They think we’re a thing they get or achieve and not an activity they do.

So why don’t you just tell her!? Otherwise she’ll cry all night again for no reason and then we never get lived!

I know. It’s painful. But that’s all we can do is make it hurt. That’s us yelling as loud as we can. She’s the one that has to get up and walk us toward some unhurt. It can be anything. Peace, relaxation, kindness, generosity, fun, laughing, togetherness, love. She could use the legs and move toward any of those things, but we can’t just whisper in the ear. Her thought-words would drown us out. We talk in feelings.

I dunno why she wouldn’t listen. Otherwise she’s just letting us die inside her for no good reason.

I told you, it’s not like I can turn our feelings into words and then whisper them in her ear.

Then let’s signal someone else and get them to tell her.

Sure. Right. Now how the hell do you propose we do that?

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.

Peace of Mind

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

We have a lot of questions we want answered and yet there’s no one we ask more than ourselves. We wonder why we cannot generate an answer, but the asking is ironically what is preventing the reception; because we think our answer is an idea and not an action we keep looking for a word-based solution to a living of life problem.

All of that self-talk can sound like it’s doing something, but it’s not. There’s no such thing as crazy, there’s just how much you talk to yourself and how much weight you give your own voice in your own head. Go too far down that rabbit hole and you can get lost, and yet the way out is always available. It’s this moment. This very moment.

But we cannot find our answer by talking to ourselves about our need for an answer. We simply need to act. All of the self-talk is being lost. Quiet impulse, mysteriously motivated, without second-guessing, is what you seek. But you cannot have it until you will get intimate with now, and the voices in your head are the form of your resistance.

Surrender. We associate it with defeat. Indeed. A defeat of the ego. We want that answer. We want the key to unlocking a happy life. But in the end that is our problem. We are searching for key that isn’t there, to open a lock that isn’t there. We have no problems. They are all made by our thinking. We have always been free. You don’t need anything once you can see who you really are.

People get lost because they’re looking for their path, when their path is wherever they are. Their path isn’t a destiny, it’s a fulfilment. You don’t find your way you make your way. No one left you breadcrumbs leading a room filled with treasure. The path is your treasure, and your freedom shapes its value. It’s possible to use your freedom to do nothing, or worse be self destructive. But even that is strangely part of your freedom.

If we stop all of the questions all that remains is living. This verb, this action, this motion through life is life. You have to give up that you’re going somewhere. In fact, you’ll have no idea which way to truly go until you give up all of your ideas about where you should be. Outcomes are not your job. You handle the moment. Your mind’s attachment to an outcome is the only thing preventing you from being in the moment.

Take today. Surrender. Forget trying to figure it all out. Just take a day off. Give up. Let go. Surrender all the self-talk and go peaceful. It’s not hard, it’s tricky. The more you do it the better you get at it. Start now. Go. Quiet. Inside.

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.

Surrendering Ego

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

People fear death so much that they’ll throw their whole life away, yet everyone knows what it feels like to experience the tug of the real you. Despite the fact that the motivation shows up entirely naturally, egos talk themselves out of pursuing the decisions that lead to a full and rich life.

Most failure happens inside the confines of your own ego. It’s not like a thing in the universe, it’s just some thoughts you’re temporarily thinking. Having those stop you from fulfilling a natural impulse is nothing short of bizarre. That is not what your gift of language was intended to be used for. It wasn’t some bullhorn to reduce your spirit to a shadow of itself.

You can feel the tension associated with not being yourself. Any time you get too far away from who you truly are you literally feel lost. This is almost always because we’re trying to satisfy someone other than ourselves. It’s great to love and care for others, but you can only be yourself. But to fully be that person you have to stop putting time and energy into being a modified, reduced, diluted and hopefully accepted version of yourself.

You feel the impulses you just don’t act on them. There is no magical answer that lets you stay all safe and secure and yet also test your personal limits. You must be willing to let life go before you can live all of it. You can’t be invested in being admired or desired, or important or discreet. Your life is not a performance. You’re not worried about protecting anyone or anything. You let go. Let them think ugly wrong things about you and you’re free.

Don’t live in a cage of opinion, where your entire sense of worth comes from others approval of you. Don’t approve or disapprove, simply live out the person that you truly are in the moment that you are in. The rest is all busy thinking about fleeting things that no one will ever think about again.

No one remembers many of their thoughts from High School because they seem so meaningless, and yet while you’re making those statements they can feel like they’ll create or kill your entire life. Perspective. If only we would just live knowing that it always makes things seem easier and less scary and then trust that.

No one walks around cursing themselves for something they did ten years ago, so even the worst thing you can imagine is still something you can get over and recover from. So stop trying to be impressive and be you instead. Because the really healthy people love to meet new open and aware brothers and sisters of this deeper understanding. But first you have to be willing to sacrifice the ego that most people invest their lives in defending and protecting.

Today. Be free. Let go. Embrace your existence. It’s a beautiful thing.

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.

Pick Your Poison

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When we’re looking for change we almost always want major change. We want some big part of our life to be different, or rather to give us cause to feel differently about it. But when talking about the change of all changes, the shift is very subtle and the effect very simple. What is remarkable is how profound such a small change can be.

The other day on the radio I heard a woman talk about a blog she had written under a false identity. The perspective she wrote from was strong and capable and she had a voice. The woman then lamented that she wished she personally could live her life more in alignment with her character than the person she was choosing to be.

Imagine that. She created that person and lived that person’s reality when she wrote the blog, and she could feel the joy associated with that person’s freedom, and yet she would say that she is someone else. She would tell us that she isn’t strong like her character. And someone like me would think that was bizarre. Why suffer being someone you don’t like when you know who it feels truly good to be?

Picking poisons. That’s all it is. We all re-create situations because we have coping skills that emerged from our experiences. We prefer the situations that match our skills and we feel uncomfortable being in ones that don’t match. But being good at being an ego is like being good at punching yourself in the face. You don’t want the life that you know, you want the want the one that feels good to live.

By choosing a life that the blog writer found stifling; one where she surrendered opportunities too quickly and failed to gain her own self-respect, she was doubling down on her lack of belief in herself. And yet there’s the person she wants to be, contained within her, writing to the world every day. If she would be willing to learn that person’s life skills she could step into the life that excites her spirit. But instead she stays safe and misses out.

You’re ego’s right. There will be people that will stop liking you if you change. If someone used to complain with you all the time and you don’t want to complain anymore, they’ll feel like you’ve changed for the worse. But while you lose those people, you find others, because the real matches to you can now see and recognise you for who you really are.

Seek a safe, encouraging, supportive environment with no violence or abuse and then find your nature. Because if fear or control take your ego over, you will live a life that is a thin shadow of an existence. But if if you are willing to accept the consequences of being the person that it feels truly good to be, then you will experience life’s challenges as that strong person. And that is much more rewarding than volunteering to be someone less capable and confident; someone who repetitively suffers through familiar problems.

It’s all just self-identity thoughts. The strong ones don’t use more energy than the weak ones. They’re not harder to  have. So be strong. It’s allowed. The crap was always going to come anyway. If you can’t avoid that then you might as well accept it and be who it’s most enjoyable to 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.

Cooperative Opposition

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

The reason you worry about you and your life and I don’t, is because you think you’re a Jennifer or a Sam or a Julie, and I see the you that you are before your parents named you. You were still a being then. You were awake and aware. But you had no identity. You hadn’t been taught to be anyone yet, so you were simply present. So I’ll talk to Sara about Sara’s life, and I’ll engage in its dramas, but it’ll all feel a lit like TV to me. Like even if we get it wrong it’s only on a stage.

After the real you was born into your body, slowly people told you who you were. You were Kelsey, or a girl, or smart, or finicky. And you believed them, so you started watching the world less generally and more specifically. You weren’t going to be satisfied with any path now. Now you wanted your path.

Meanwhile, who’s learning all this? Who learned to be you? Where did the being go that was there before the name and definitions went on? Are you your name? The sum of your thoughts? Are you your brain; an accident of biology? A byproduct of electrical signals moving through cells? Or is that just more story you told yourself?

How would you know one way or the other anyway? Who would you ask? And how can you be sure they’re not misleading you or that they’re even real? You can’t. So what’s left? What do you do? It’s a reasonable question, but you’re asking the wrong person. I don’t mean by asking me, I mean the person that needs to exist before you could do something.

Doing is ego. Being is reality. As egos do, they are someone, somewhere and they accomplish or fail to accomplish something. All those some’s are definitions. Beings happen. They aren’t limited by definitions. They just are, so their being and their doing are unified. The thinker and the thoughts are unified. This is what it is to be in flow.

How this works in practice is that if you’re talking to someone there’s two reasons ways in which you can disagree with them. The first is when your ego feels uncomfortable being isolated from the other person. Your being knows you’re still linked, but your ego feels you need to reunify you, so you try to get them to agree with you, or it’s like they’re questioning your very existence. The problem is, their ego feels the same way. Hence arguments that can escalate and if not faced with clarity, will devolve into grudges. You can’t be clear-headed and have a grudge.

The other way is to not be opposed to them, but to be doing something entirely independently from them that includes them. So what your being is doing is that it’s exploring the universe and this other being is cooperating with you like two tentacles on one octopus, as I like to say.

When you hold a soup bowl in front of you, your hands work in opposition to accomplish a joint task that benefits both of you. So it is with debating spirits. They’re not against each other, they’re leveraging each other for the sake of mutual exploring. This is how both science and co-writing music should work.

You’re not attached to your idea, so the argument doesn’t get into personal ego-based personality, but you do act as a representative of a perspective. The other person represents another idea. And together you give each other a leg up until you both find a mutual way out of the cave they’re trapped in together. Viewed from a healthy perspective, a conflict done well can help expose more of the universe to us. Every time you were proven wrong your ego might have shrank, but your world got bigger.

Your mind isn’t in some location. It looks through your eyes and hears through your ears and touches with your fingers, but you are just a visitor in your body. You’re an avatar that is slowly realising that it is not itself, but rather the product of another unknown being that you act on behalf of.

The point isn’t to know who that other being is because that is unknowable. The point is to be grateful for being and then be. Your avatar can trip and fall, but the real you is always safe at home. So there’s no point in fighting with, or feeling uncomfortable around what are apparently opposing avatars. Just always remember that the being inside your avatar is the same one that’s in everyone else’s avatar, and that being is simply treating all of us like the arms of itself, as it works together to create a unified expansion of all of us.

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.

None of You

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

What do all of these quotes have in common? No matter who you are, you will be judged. Even if you get every step just right people will hate you, because they don’t see the you that you see, they see a different you. All of them see their own you relative to their own them. As I noted yesterday, your friends largely agree on essentially who you are–but so do your enemies.

So if you’re going to be judged that harshly even for doing a fantastic job at life (that is one of the ways to attract the most criticism, by the way), then what are you supposed to do? Yet if you stop to think about it: if it’s an absolute you’ll get judged either way regardless, then you might as well just be yourself. But who’s that???

That’s the tricky part. You have been told who to be for so long that it’s really hard for you to remember who you were at three years old, before you had an ego. You yak at yourself so much that you can’t even hear 99% of it and yet everything you say to yourself can only be programmed ideas jammed into whatever form the languages you know will permit. Your spirit lives your actual life, your ego labels it and discusses it.

Most of what your ego discusses is your performance compared to others. Maybe all others, maybe only one other, but there’s a real or theoretical person that you want to beat or be. You’re striving. You’re incomplete without this victory. You need to prove yourself to yourself. That’s ego. A spirit isn’t guessing. It knows.

If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of spirit just think of it as the thinker versus the thoughts. The former is your spirit and it conjures the latter, your ego, by creating it from words. People with missing identities are merely people who forgot who they were supposed to be, so they were an identity-less person. What an opportunity!

You have to respect how much conformity has been trained into you. Even you call certain people weird when really they’re just choosing a rarer or more harshly judged route through life, but it might be realer than your existence. Einstein looked pretty weird, remember?

1137 Relax and Succeed - The value of identityEinstein’s mind was so busy on the stuff he thought about that he would apparently sometimes absentmindedly give lectures in his wife’s pink bedroom slippers. If he wasn’t Einstein and you saw that you’d think he was weird. Surely students in non math or physics-related faculties did when they saw him on a campus.

But Einstein wasn’t trying to be impressive, or beat any other physicist in a competition. There was just this problem he wanted to solve…. He didn’t even get great at mathematics before he tackled it. He had no credentials. He just sat and imagined things. How dare he! Imagine that: can you believe the gall of that patent clerk to think that his imagination had a value….?!

Most people get criticised into shape. They act like a robot that was programmed by the people around them. Rather than sitting in their spouse’s slippers trying to figure out something important out, they perform a well-dressed, well-behaved character in the hopes of being liked. It’s just too small.

1137 Relax and Succeed - Get rid of the selfThey work jobs they dislike for money they need to look impressive or complete to others. They raise their kids according to their fears about other parent’s judgments. They spend their time in places their society says has value even if they totally feel unnatural there. Most people are egos living in fear rather than spirits living with possibility.

Free your Self from your yakking self. Stop listening to the words and start watching for your natural impulses. They’re still there. But you’ll need to actually listen to them before they’ll start speaking loud enough to drown out the crazy voices of ego.

Start now. Stay alert. Quell your voices. You only need to focus on the ego. If you shut that up, your spirit will show up all on its own. It’s always been there, it’s just been waiting for your ego to stop trying to be liked so that you can be your Self instead.

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.

Egos and The Great Unknown

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

1051-relax-and-succeed-dont-look-for-me-in-human-shapeMy students/clients see me for one of two reasons; for psychological struggles and for spiritual growth. Part of the problem is that everyone gets taught to see our spiritual selves as separate from our psychological selves. In truth one is a product of the other, as ego is to soul.

They’ve recently been doing a lot of brain research and after all of these years they are now finally serious conversations by neuroscientists regarding the idea that our consciousness may not be a product of our brain but rather it may be a separate entity, as-yet undefined by science, that has a relationship with the brain but is not the brain itself. You’ll often see me referring to the electricity in your brain as being separate from your brain and I mean the same thing. The trick is there’s no words for some of these things and in a way we don’t want any.

Words are symbols and can be assembled into narrative stories that lead us to have emotional responses, but those responses are not reality, rather reality allows you to see your actions as both being from an individual, and the actions would exist within some kind of logical framework.

1051-relax-and-succeed-the-moment-i-am-awareYour spirit is a strange thing that is both small and immense at the same time. The reason that can be true is that it is simultaneously you and yet you are just one tentacle of the Universal Octopus; a beam of light from the Great Universal Mirror Ball. Everyone thinks that’s what they want: Enlightenment. But it’s not, trust me. Even if you get it you’ll immediately know you don’t want to stay there. Can you imagine it’s boring in a way?

Imagine feeling like God. That’s Enlightenment. But that all-powerful feeling that goes with that all-powerful energy in that all-powerful non-space is doing everything, and everything at once is like trying to watch every channel at once. Lots of it can be amazing but it’s not very enjoyable.

The individual seemingly linear lives that we lead are just the universe weaving paths through itself. You take the sense of infinity and you filter it into a world using some base concepts which also live within infinity. Once applied, they become like the six formulas that essentially describe our entire universe. That’s our “space” as humans. That’s our realm. That’s somewhere we can build a narrative track. We can appreciate our three dimensions but others we can only prove; we can’t experience them directly.

1051-relax-and-succeed-we-are-the-witness-through-whichThe problem has been that you want to control your character through the TV and you can’t do that. You can’t deal with a post-thought world and expect to accomplish anything except for when your ego happens to go the way you wished it would. But even that’s fine because the ego-world is where there’s up and down and winners and losers; that is like the playing field and those formulas are the rules and from there we’re free to roam, but it’s important to keep in mind you’re the actor not the role.

You’re not actually on TV, that’s a character. You’re the actor back in a studio performing that character. The rest is a transmission, reception and interpretation. Any good actor is fully invested in their role, so in relation to the other characters in this play called life, you can all take the words in the script literally. But once a performance is over it’s important for the actor to drop character and just be themselves, lest they go crazy.

You don’t have to figure everything out. You can’t. It’s too huge. Relax more. Just observe. Others. You. Just observe the game. Trust me, you’re part of the Great Void as well. You have unimaginable wisdom within you if only you’d quiet your thoughts so that you could hear the universe.

Go ahead. Genuinely try to win your life-games. But do not mistake that for your larger journey, for that would be like taking the entire life of an actor and reducing it down to a single role. You’re much bigger than that. Have a great day.

peace. s

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