Discoveries

By Sandy Sims / April 13, 2010

Having been in the advertising business for a career I could never quite shake off David Spangler’s comment that the best example of practitioners of black magic in the 20th (and obviously now the 21st) century are advertising executives. Perhaps there can be some redeeming efforts. I’ll try.

I don’t know about you, but I used to be dragged into church as a youngster and found myself being subjected to a lot of platitudes without many convincingly good reasons to buy in.

Take the subject of “Forgiveness.” I was told that in the long run if I were wronged it was better to forgive than to resent. Or what about revenge. I could feel pretty worked up about getting back at that SOB for what he did. So just telling me what I ought to do didn’t seem to cut it. I was more likely to resonate with my lawyer’s sly comment that “Revenge is a dish that’s best served cold,” or “Get even not angry.”

It wasn’t until I became ill that someone brighter than me pointed out that anger, stress, worry, anxiety, etc (even the thought of getting even) are constantly releasing a cascade of chemicals inside us that are doing us in at a far faster rate than all of the diet, exercise, and other well intentioned programs can rectify. Being more left brained at the time, the necessary appeal to me was “ good internal chemical management” much like “good financial management.” In other words it just wasn’t smart to feel so lousy. And if I considered myself smart then I should learn how to control the flow of these negative chemicals.

As much as I might resent the initial idea, I had to admit that lack of forgiveness is like leaving the spigot open for negative chemicals to pour in. I had to think about closing the spigot. What would that take? I had to realize that first of all my health was more important than what anyone had done to me. Once I began to dwell on this concept it became easier to do. It was entirely about me, not those who had wronged me. It was about my health, certainly not theirs. It was about cutting this toxic mental umbilical cord.

Once I began thinking like this it became easier. I looked around for sympathetic points of view to reinforce this new found realization. The Eastern philosophy of Karma is one. Think about it this way: It’s a matter of arithmetic. Let’s say you get punched. The natural reaction is to strike back. According to Karma the first lick is simply something that maybe you had coming from some past transgression of some sort way back when. Doesn’t matter. If you let it go, that’s the end of it, one lick. If you strike back, then Karma says you have another lick coming to balance out this last strike. So instead of calling it a day with one lick, you have another one on the way, either now or down the road. To protect yourself ie. your health, you’re better off to let it go, to forgive it, to give yourself a big dose of selfishness.

Now just to set the record straight: this is not to say that if someone steals from you or causes you bodily harm that you might not take corrective measures. It simply means that your attitude of personal ill will has been eliminated. I hope we can at least see more of this kind of selfishness.

Discoveries

By Sandy Sims / April 12, 2010

One of the main tenants of the book and guidebook is that we do have alternative realities we can explore and relay. Hopefully as people report we can gather insights into the fabric of our intuition and living in the flow.

Here is one such report:

feed://feeds.feedburner.com/WeAreAllOne

Discoveries

By Sandy Sims / April 8, 2010

Revelations About Our Intelligence

Our society has long rewarded those with a high IQ. School was designed to reward those who had great linear computing skills. They got into the best universities and moved into the lead positions in society. Later EQ, or emotional intelligence, gained recognition as people skills in a rapidly changing society became essential. People with high EQ’s seemed to blossom as they possessed the ability to solve challenges in which multiple outcomes could be acceptable. Here it was apparent that IQ alone did not measure one’s ability to handle complex relationship skills, and that as these skills became isolated and studied on their own merit a whole new band of the intelligence scale would be formerly recognized. And finally SQ, or Spiritual Quotient, has arrived as an even further refinement.

Zohar and Marshall in their book, SQ, Connecting With Our Spiritual Intelligence imply that it is that part of the intelligence spectrum that measures our ability to reframe, one of the great keys to achieving a state of happiness and balance. I should expand upon this a bit.

Lets say a person loves everything about their job, except their boss. From an IQ point of view one might decide that the answer to one’s problem is that the boss has to go. The fixation is to get rid of the boss and that one decision consumes one’s efforts. Even if successful, there are no assurances a new boss will be better and even could be worse.

From an EQ viewpoint you see options. You could try to get rid of your boss or you could change your own behavior to give your boss a “new you” to respond to, thereby creating a new dynamic. The issues between you and your boss might dissolve. You might have solved the problem.

From an SQ point of view, not only are you able to employ the EQ options, but no matter what happens you are able to go a step further: you can accept your boss’s behavior as the best your boss can do, and therefore his or her behavior is to be expected. You have found a way to not let your boss’s behavior bother you at all.

The Oracle At Delphi urges us to know ourselves. We may find that we struggle to pick up linear solutions. We have to apply more effort. I felt that way in school. Yet our gifts may lie in other bands of the intelligence spectrum. A person who has a high EQ or SQ possesses a way to make relationships smooth and that part of life gracious. Finding out where you are on the intelligence band at least lets you know where your gifts are and where you need to apply yourself.

Uncategorized

By Sandy Sims / April 4, 2010

This is the second post in a series of the construction of the Frank Lloyd Wright home on the Island of Hawaii. This construction began in 1992. The ground had to be leveled by using a hoe ram to break up blue rock, and a bulldozer to grade the surface. Then fine compaction was brought in so that the final structure would move on the compaction as one unit if there were an earthquake. (It turned out that once the structure was complete there was an earthquake of 6.9 on the Richter scale. Not so much as a crack appeared on the cement floor.) Then forms were made for all of the footings. Frank Lloyd Wright designed on the unit system. This house was based on the circle with the design incorporating intersecting circles. To obtain the right measurements a large pole was installed in the back center of the front yard so that the large sweeping arc of the back of the house could accurately be scribed from string attached to the pole. The picture is slightly deceiving because the arc in the rear is much larger than it appears in the picture. The round footing area is the cylinder which would house an two upstairs bathrooms and a downstairs bathroom and utility room. In the far distance, covered by cloud, is the base of Mauna Kea volcano.

Discoveries

By Sandy Sims / March 28, 2010

I play doubles tennis in a group here in San Miguel de Allende made up of residents and visitors. Always interesting people. As a theme of my blog I am mindful of who is showing up in my life and what the encounter will bring. Today one of my partners was Dennis McCullough, M. D. He is a Harvard trained geriatrician on the faculty of the Department of Community and Family Medicine at Dartmouth medical school. Turns out he was giving a lecture in the late afternoon discussing the principles in his recently released book, My Mother, Your Mother, Embracing “ Slow Medicine”-The Compassionate ApproachTo Caring For Your Aging Loved Ones. I attended.

While I have not read the book yet,( and I shall) he advocates a new approach: “slow medicine,” a careful anticipatory attendance to an elder’s changing needs rather than waiting for crises that force acute medical interventions.

Many people in the United States do not finish life in a very satisfactory way. Our culture is such that families are scattered and everyone is working. The elderly are shunted off to facilities as they face ravages of age where the staff turnover maybe extremely high and thus impersonal. Many of the retirement communities or assisted living facilities are long on the value of the physical amenities, but short on the services that aging people require. The costs are prohibitive now. Their world can become an unpleasant drama as they and their family members wrestle with how and what to do.

I am 67 and retired now, visiting a mother on a regular basis who is 98. Her situation has been fortunate. Yet it came with conscious planning. The lecture tonight brought to the surface the other main theme of this blog and that is how we can consciously and creatively use our mind to set in motion the way we want to personally experience this last part of life. Not so much in concrete detail, but emotionally as that seems to give the universe a wider set of options.

For me I realized I want to feel comfortable and content, to appreciate the miracle of small things I have been too busy to notice, whether it is a great cup of coffee, a sunset, or the spring flowers. I want to make sure I am not questioning, but moving in the direction of those intuitive urges that give me energy and vitality, whether it is taking up a new endeavor, learning a new skill or repotting myself physically. As Carlos Castenada said, “ All roads lead to nowhere, so follow the one with heart.” Perhaps as I find myself physically challenged I shall begin to explore my dream world, meditate more, become an explorer of the inner domains as the Eastern mystics have done for ages.

Most importantly I realized today I needed to set these intentions now.

Thinking Patterns

By Sandy Sims / March 16, 2010

I had the good fortune several years ago to spend a week in the presence of astronaut, Edgar Mitchell, a national hero by any measure. He is an explorer of both the outer and inner worlds. I can’t think of a better presentation for gaining a useful contextual perspective of perhaps why life for our species is the way it is. Below is a summary of the short audio lecture available through “betterlisten.com. While this talk was made over a decade ago, it feels even more timely now.

Global Mind Change: Paradigm Shift 102 by Edgar Mitchell

Dr. Mitchell explores humanity, science, and fulfillment in this recording on what it means to be a human and our place in the universe. Part of a three-lecture series recorded in the 1990s, the messages Dr. Mitchell brings us are perhaps more relevant today than ever. 
Excerpt from recording: “I suggest to you that the way we need to look at it is because we are not really physical beings yearning for a spiritual experience. We are in reality eternal creative beings. Creating a physical experience and it takes quite a shift in mindset to get yourself around that one…. For those of you who haven’t heard me before, why is this important? What is it about now, that I would bring this up? What is it about the contemporary period that we live in that perhaps makes this a vital alternative viewpoint to think about and to look at? I will tell you that in the last year I have seldom spoken with a person who did not think that something very strange was going on, who did not think that the world was in a rather major crisis and it seemed to be deepening.”

https://www.betterlisten.com/

Thinking Patterns

By Sandy Sims / March 10, 2010

I don’t know how it feels to you but if there is any one group that is alive and well it is the “Time Bandits.” I think we can lay this squarely at the feet of technology. Response time is a vanishing luxury. When I first entered the advertising world, several decades ago, we had three weeks to put ads together. When I left, the joke was we had three hours.

In this new environment we are all being forced, like it not, to rely on our intuition, to trust the process by committing to a course of action not knowing how the components will come together. And this is happening on a large scale. General Motors committed to the Chevrolet Volt electric car manufacturing process knowing that the battery had not been designed, but trusting that it would be when it was finally required.

If we must follow our intuition or begin action trusting that the right components will show up when needed, this territory becomes more important than it ever has. What are the maps and what are the rules? The hope for this site is that it will be a place to report on the challenges of figuring out the dicey area of intuition versus desire, what seems to work and not work, how synchronicity can be a helpful tool. Maybe this is one of the reasons the social media are becoming such a comfort. we can all hold hands in real time.

The further hope is that by sharing these experiences, the processes will become more concrete, more reliable and more natural. It seems like Jung’s, “Collective Unconscious,” or Rupert Sheldrake’s “Morphogenetic Field” is where some of the the answers might reside.

Sandy