Why do we have an ego, and how can we make it really useful? You don’t have any part that is not useful!

he-who-doesnt-laugh-probably-didnt-get-the-joke
I just had a “conversation” with a student, where I suggested that she uses ego to support her growth.

From her answers it has become clear that “using ego” is not a commonplace conversation, and that it needs instruction.

So let’s see what ego is, and what it isn’t.

Ego is a lot like a kitchen knife: you can use it for good, for useful, or for harm… kill with it. You can also use it to clean it under your nails… somewhat useful, but not the right tool…

You can also call it bad, and ban it from your house. ((It is also a lot like a nail. It concentrates the energy so it can go through thick planks

Skeletons in your closet… suppressing them suppresses all your life

it-is-better-to-have-skeletons-in-your-closet-than-walk-with-no-bonesI completed the third round of the 67 steps, and my intrinsic Self told me: it is time for another kind of practice.

So I have been curiously waiting for the “thing” to show up, and today it did.

Actually it started two days ago, but I noticed it today.

I need to get on the chiropractic table periodically to adjust my hip, or it goes out of shape to the degree that my thigh bone jumps out of its socket. That is very painful.

So I got on the table today… and it’s a long process… and somehow I was looking into what started my hip pain, whe

Intelligence… what is intelligence, and how can you become more intelligent?

dogs-unseen-venn-diagramThe quality of your life depends on your overall intelligence… intellect, body intelligence, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, the ability to lie a full life, with a range of emotions, and to conquer difficulties, adversities successfully.

You are born with certain DNA defined potentials. No doubt about that. Your ancestry and its habits lead to your DNA being allowing and restrictive, and yet, all human capacities are encoded in your DNA… but what is not needed, what was not needed by your ancestors is dimmed out… “not needed”, Nature decided…

The next phase is as crucial a

Pleasure seeking behavior… or more aptly let’s call it: avoiding pain behavior

illo-brainThere are two kinds of pleasure.

  1. Pleasure that is immediate, impulsive, and requires no or little sustained effort and
  2. Pleasure that is the result of work… sustained effort.

No matter what pleasure you seek, what makes it pleasure is the contrast: there needs to be pain for pleasure to exist. ((Hunger makes food pleasurable… lust makes sex pleasurable… tiredness makes sleep pleasurable…))

Although I could write about pleasure that you earn through hard and sustained work, and I have written hundreds of articles about it, people with too small capacity for pain rarely turn around and become people who want to earn their pleasure.

So in this article I’ll a

All you can do is all you can do, but all you can do is enough… but what if you are not doing what you can do?

I have been curious why certain things I could do, like certain marketing moves, but I am not doing them. Actually, there are quite a few things that I know I can do, and I don’t do them. What’s there … Continue reading → Related Posts: Agrimony: the perils of unexpressed grief. Are You Willing […]

The many ways to be unhappy, the only way to be happy…

I am out of here attitudeI mean this article to be the first installment in a series.

The underlying principle is the Anna Karenina principle

The Anna Karenina principle

The Anna Karenina principle is: good systems must meet simultaneously a number of requirements. All good systems are alike, bad systems are bad in their own way

Tolstoy said: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

Aristotle said: success/failure: …it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the

Thought experiments: the wise’s way to learn, the wise’s way to win in life

einstein thought experiment

  • The stupid makes the same mistake, over and over, expecting different results.
  • The normal person eventually learns from his mistakes, but he first has to make them, a few times…
  • The wise person learns from other people’s mistakes.

Did you notice that we are not talking here about IQ? About ability?

No, the behavior ascribed to the stupid and the behavior of the wise can and often come from the same IQ.

The ability to do things differently can’t be accessed without a modicum of humility. Modicum means: a little bit.

Humility is a capacity, an attitu

One reason you have no peace inside… And how you could…

awarenessI just discovered that the version of the Freecell game is “forgiving”, i.e. you can go back more than one step… “start over again” without a penalty point.

This makes the game an even better modeling tool than it used to be.

I always suspected that the first step really decides the rest of the journey… but being a Quickstart… jumping-without-thinking-type-of-person, this would not have

Another way lack of humility screws with you

To be unattached is not to renounce the world. If you renounce the world you are attached to the world; otherwise why should you renounce it? What is the point in renouncing it if you are not attached to it? Only attachment renounces. If you are really non-attached there is no question of any renunciation.The Detached/Unattached ((I am starting to realize that a better name would be: Unattached… but then,

Powerful, powerless… how can you tell?

being-an-adult or being a sissyI have been getting attachments. I am noticing, they come mostly on the weekends.

So the sender or senders are working slobs… and tormenting people is their hobby.

They are, I think, using voodooo techniques: making a model of me, and pushing pins in the model.

The reason I think it is a voodoo doll, because they are getting very precise, whereas a healer who intends to heal, is very sloppy, otherwise why would they connect to another they intend to heal in their eyes, throat, of sinuses… would make no sense.

So yesterd