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Perseverance Is Magic

July 21, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 5 Comments

Perseverance Trail Head
Perseverance Trail Head (Photo credit: AlaskanLibrarian)

After creating an intention and choosing a tool or technique to help focus our attention on it, we will surely achieve quick and easy success.

Are you laughing? That was supposed to be a joke. Remember, doing something intentionally and deliberately—and staying focused on it—requires conscious attention. If we’ve already got a habit in place that we’re trying to change, we have to convince our brain to go along with the plan, and that isn’t going to happen overnight.

The problem is that we’d prefer instant gratification, while our brain requires persistent effort on our part to convince it that we really do want X instead of Y. When at first we don’t succeed, we might decide it’s not worth the effort. Why bother? Just go with the flow. Or we might chalk it up to being weak or lacking discipline or having no will power. So we give up—to prove the point, apparently.

Perseverance isn’t the same as dogged persistence. Sometimes there’s a good reason to stop attempting to do something. One of the reasons for paying attention is that we might recognize that it isn’t precisely A we want; it’s more along the lines of B. Or we might realize we’ve bitten off too big a chunk and need to pare down our intention. Perseverance just means we keep moving toward the desired outcome. It’s incredibly simple. We don’t need to chastise ourselves. We don’t need to make up excuses. We just pick up where we left off and keep going. It isn’t a competition or a race. It doesn’t matter when we get where we’re going, just that we get there.

 Continuous effort—not strength or intelligence—is the key to unlocking our potential.    ― Winston Churchill

It helps to have a cheerleader—a person or a group of people—who can encourage us. We don’t need someone to call us out on our failure to achieve instant results. We need someone who recognizes that what we’re trying to do isn’t easy, not because we’re incapable or lazy, but because we’re human and our brain is very set in its ways.

Perseverance gets a bad rap in some quarters. It isn’t flashy or catchy or stylish. It’s often linked with discipline and endurance and sounds like something that’s good for you or that builds character. But perseverance is the key to accessing the brain’s autopilot. It really is magic.Enhanced by Zemanta

Filed Under: Brain, Consciousness, Habit, Mind, Mindfulness, Purpose Tagged With: Attention, Autopilot, Brain, Intention, Mind, Perseverance

Got Change for a Paradigm?

March 24, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

A little something to trip on–I mean think about. Best viewed when wide awake, possibly after ingesting caffeine.

The Mirroring Mind

Created by Jason Silva in collaboration with CITIZEN. Follow Jason on twitter @JASONSILVA

This video is a non-commercial work created to inspire, made for educational purposes, inspired by the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter explored in the magnificent book GODEL, ESCHER, BACH: An Eternal Golden Braid. Learn more: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach

and

Awe Is Good for You

According to recent research, Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being.

Filed Under: Consciousness, Living, Meaning Tagged With: Brain, Consciousness, Douglas Hofstadter, Eternal Golden Braid, Gödel Escher Bach, Jason Silva, Meaning, Mind

Who’s in Charge?

March 10, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Monkey mind
Monkey mind (Photo credit: quinn.anya)

Buddha is supposed to have described our minds as resembling a drunken monkey that’s been stung by a bee. The monkey mind—whether or not drunk, whether or not bee-stung—is a restless mind. It chatters incessantly, shifts from thought to thought, is easily distracted, undisciplined, and most importantly confused. Sounds a lot like ADD or ADHD, but really this pretty much describes all of us to one extent or another. It’s just that many of us are in denial about it. We think we—not some passel of drunken monkeys—are in charge.

There’s not much evidence to support that belief, however. What neuroscience increasingly reports is that our brains are doing far, far more than we ever imagined they were doing. Not only are they keeping us physically alive, they’re directing our thoughts, feelings, and actions. The majority of our “choices” take place at the unconscious level. We only think we’re in the director’s chair because we’re so darn good at spinning yarns to explain why we just did what we did, thought what we thought, or felt what we felt. We are, as one author has called humans, the storytelling animal.

Each of us undertakes the same major creative project, which is the story of ourselves. It’s a constantly evolving work-in-progress into which we weave everything we do, no matter how seemingly inexplicable those things may be. It’s our nature to create this story, so we’re very good at it. So good, in fact, that our audience isn’t even aware of the fiction. Those are the best kinds of stories, right? The problem is that our audience is us.

[T]he intuitive feeling we have that there’s an executive “I” that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along. —Steven Pinker

Our stories help us maintain the fiction that we’re in charge. So instead of recognizing and accounting for the vast expanses over which we are not in charge, we continue merrily along, spinning our tall tales.

It isn’t that we’re never authentic, never conscious, always asleep at the switch. From time to time, we are conscious, maybe some more than others. But the irony is that because we think we’re already always in charge—already always making conscious choices—most of us never learn how to become more awake and aware, never discover how to increase our ability to set our own course and make it so. Why bother learning how to do something when we’ve already mastered it?

Filed Under: Beliefs, Creating, Living, Meaning, Stories Tagged With: Brain, Buddha, Consciousness, Meaning, Mind, Mindfulness, Neuroscience, Steven Pinker

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