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What's Up With Ming

"Did you ever feel like an alien who somehow became stranded on a planet called Earth where nothing seemed to make any sense?" A quote from "Ming The Merciless"

Civilization Rehab

Recovering from civilization can be brutal but neccessary if we are to become truly free from it's influence. Kick the civilization habit here!

Being Human

The Condition Of Our ConditionArticles on the Human condition and how we might improve it.

Uncertainty and Insecurity

The worldwide economic situation is having an effect either directly or indirectly on almost everyone these days, and those effects can manifest themselves in many ways. Worry, anxiety, depression, despair, anger, you name it. But the question is, 'how do we deal with it?'

Ironically, one of the sources of our difficulty in dealing with uncertainty, is related to the unnoticed consequences of a long and reliable period of comfort and security that, at least we here in America, have experienced over the past 5 decades.

How can this be a problem? Of course, comfort and security themselves aren't the real problem, the real problem is found in what we do, or more precisely, don't do with long periods of comfort and security.

What we don't do, is continue to learn and grow and develop our skills and abilities. The Human life form seems to think that the activity of learning and growing is only appropriate when struggling towards the goal of comfort and security.

There are two problems here. First is the assumption that comfort and security are high value goals rather than pleasant experiences. The second is the assumption that the struggle to improve ourselves is somehow no longer necessary once we achieve a certain level of development or achievement.

Indifference and Complacency

These two false assumptions can and do have corrosive consequences, they are part of the formula for individual and social decay because they tend to promote indifference and complacency.

One of the tradeoffs we make for long periods of comfort and security is in our ability to adjust and adapt to changes, especially sudden changes.

It's almost as if being too comfortable for too long dulls our survival instincts, we allow ourselves to become ridged and inflexible and somehow go into a trance state, where awareness of course, is not a high priority.

Dreaming

Have you ever had an experience in your life that jarred you into the here and now in such a way that made you wonder where you had been before? As if you were in a dream?

This is not uncommon. However, we don't look into those experiences very deeply because we instinctively suspect that we might encounter one of those rabbit holes that we spend so much of our energy trying to avoid looking into.

The good news here is, there are some relatively easy basic mindsets we can adopt to help us through difficult and uncertain times.The first and most important thing for us to remember, is that we are Human life forms.

The most powerful adaptation of life to ever appear anywhere, ever. Even though the majority of the Human population occupying the planet is afraid of their power, acknowledging that power can be a wellspring of hope during hard times.

With that in mind, here are some suggestions to get us through the rough spots.

• Ours and our family's happiness should not be based on the possession of the physical objects of this world. With your heart, take a long hard look at your values, find the courage to be honest with yourself here. What is really important in life?
• One of the failures of our culture is that it does not encourage the development of emotional intelligence which included the ability to recognize and manage our emotional responses to our thoughts, and of course, this includes our thoughts concerning the uncertainties of life. Practice being aware of what you are feeling when you are feeling it. Practice being the unattached observer of your thoughts and emotions.
• Choose optimism over pessimism. Realize that hard times are temporary, that you will get past them, you will find solutions, you will survive.
• You can achieve the understanding that knowledge can bring in order to overcome all obstacles. That knowledge is out there, from the relaxation techniques that can get us through the stress, the thinking exercises to get our thinking skills up so we can make high quality decisions, techniques that can pull us out of depression, mind exercises to help us change problematic thinking habits. The information is out there, don't just sit around and surrender to defeat. Get up and take control of your life because you have the power to do so.