My thoughts on “gay”

Society in general abhors abnormality or so we are led to believe.The LGBT community is out of the ordinary so we should hate them right? Well what about celebrities, people whose lives we celebrate. Their lives are abnormal. Why don’t we hate all of them?

 

I am a heterosexual male. Many of my friends are either gay or bisexual. In my local group my preferences are abnormal. Should my friends tear me down for my choices? They are open and loving and accepting of my way of being just as I am of theirs. Having different sexual preference just means that we are not compatible sexual partners. We can still be good people and good friends.

 

My point of view, I realize is very liberal. As long as you aren’t trying to enforce your way of being onto me and saying that I have to be just like you, I really don’t care what you do behind closed doors. And I don’t think anyone else should either. It’s not like homosexuals are going to out breed the heterosexuals. So what’s the problem?

 Click here to read on

Hypothetical question

Hypothetical question.

 

Would you rather pay ten thousand dollars for a new car or get that very same care for five thousand dollars. It seems like an easy choice right? Why pay twice as much if you don’t have to? But what if instead of being cut and dried like that we complicated matters a little. You can pay 10k for the car all up front. Or have 1k withdrawn from your bank five separate times at random intervals, sometime over the next six months?

 

Suddenly, it’s not so easy anymore? Why is that? Logically if you have the ten thousand now you could just leave at least half of it in the bank so that no matter when the 1k payments come out, it is covered. But, logic isn’t home right now. It is being chased away by fear of the unknown. We added one random variable and suddenly the illusion of control is gone.

 

So what’s the point of this example? Click here to read on and see.

What about your potential?

Most people tend to go through life doing what I call sandbagging, just doing the minimum that is needed in order to survive. But then, they tend to complain about their lot in life, about how it is so much less than it could be.

 

Each and every single one of us has greatness within us. It is not something that we have to learn or something that we need to cultivate. It is there inside just waiting to get out. If every person stopped letting fear run their lives and making them play small the world would be a much different place.

 

Psychologist William James, put it this way. “Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and behaves below his optimum”.

 

Note here that he was talking about not a specific person, but people on the whole. All of us.

 

We all do it, but why? Click here to read on and find out.

Does fear run your life?

Fear.

 

It’s such a simple short little word. Yet it can evoke some pretty scary nightmarish images within our minds. Many people’s lives are nearly completely run by their reactions to it. The things they do or avoid doing as part of their daily routine are tailored specifically around the things that they are afraid of. With all the horror movies and Fear Factor type TV shows, it is certainly a topic that we as humans are fascinated with exploring.

 

Fear is a perfectly healthy, natural response to things that have the potential to be harmful to us.  It is what tells us to run when we are in the wild and encounter a bear. In that case fear is both useful and appropriate. But when the fear reaches a certain level our logical minds shut down and we just start randomly lashing out and reacting in whatever way we have to in order to get away from the object that we fear. Or worse yet it can literally cause both physical and mental paralyzation, complete shutdown.

 

Neither of these responses is helpful or good. What can be done about this?

 

Click here to read on and find out.

Fear of the dark

There are a great many things in life that do not make sense to me. Most of them have to do with a thing that I see in others that I do not see in myself. Fear due to being surrounded by a lack of light is one of those things.

 

I do not understand this. Nearly half of the world is covered with it at any one point in time. It’s mentioned or shown just about everywhere in books, movies,television shows, and songs. Why are so many people afraid of the dark?

 

For most people, it seems that fear of the dark is really a fear of not knowing what is out there. Or in other words, when we can not see what is happening we invent or imagine things to fill in the gaps. We superimpose our thoughts onto reality, literally taking something that is inside our head and planting it firmly within the darkness. People that do this are using their imagination in an unhealthy deconstructive way.

Click here to read on and see why I just don’t understand the fear of darkness.

Courage and fire

You awake from a deep slumber not sure at first what woke you. You take a few deep breaths and begin coughing as you realize the air is hot and filled with thick ash and smoke. Your eyes pop open with alarm as you realize the building is on fire and the heat and the crackling of bright orange flames all around is most likely what woke you.

 

You are still not fully awake yet and you begin to panic. There are no windows in your bedroom. There are flames all around you and the door is extremely hot to the touch. You are trapped inside. You are paralyzed with a mind numbing fear that death is just around the corner. You can’t breath and all around you the flames are getting closer, seemingly reaching out towards you, licking at your flesh. You begin to regret all the thing you meant to do but never got a chance to. And then…

 

Just when all hope is lost, a superhero wearing a flame retardant suit, including a helmet and breathing mask, bursts through the door with axe in hand. The firefighter sees you cowering there on the floor and quickly rescues you, carrying you outside to safety.

Firefighters really are super heroes. But what is courage? Read on by clicking here

Day tight

While doing some reading the other day I came across a phrase that I really liked. The subject matter was about conquering worry. The phrase was “living in day tight compartments”  or locking each day off in your mind from every other day that happens.

People tend to have fear, doubt and worry over decisions that might need to be made in the future. That worry dampens our spirits and in some cases even our physical health. When we do this, our mood darkens and we do not enjoy our life. This is not a momentary thing. It goes on from the time that we become aware that whatever issue exists until the appointed time to handle it occurs. Even worse, quite often people worry over things that are not ever even going to happen, or things where the odds of them happening are so close to zero as to be not worth the time spent pondering it. But still their lives are filled with suffering while they wait for this terrible thing to occur.

Other times we agonize over choices we have already made thinking, feeling or believing that we should have done something else. This is even worse than worrying about something that has yet to happen because there is no set time limit for how long we will continue to cause ourselves to suffer over it. Countless millions of people are constantly bringing their lives to ruin over things that have already happened or that might never happen

This isn’t useful. But what would be? Click here to read on

The mind-killer pt2

But what about trained martial artists,warriors and soldiers? They train for years to know exactly what to do in practically any given situation. Surely they are not afraid of anything. Right?

 

Wrong. They are just as afraid in a given situation as you or I would be. But, they are confident that they have the tools and training to come out on top, to survive. Brave men are not men without fear. Brave men are men who are afraid and move ahead with what needs to be done anyways. Fear is a healthy thing until such point as it prevents you from acting. And then it must be defeated.

 

How is this done you ask? The answer is somewhat cryptically given above in the Litany Against Fear. “I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.”

What does this mean? Click here to find out

The mind-killer pt1

 

LITANY AGAINST FEAR

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

The preceding was a quote from Frank Herbert’s fictional book series Dune.

 

The mind killer. While a bit overly dramatic it is very close to the truth. Often while we are fearful our mind seems to shut down and nothing but the fear remains. Adrenaline begins to pump and we prepare for what is called fight or flight.

 But fear is a useful tool. Click here to see why I say this.

Avoid the resistance

Most people have a tendency to resist that which is new. Why?

 

There are many different answers, but on the whole, they pretty much boil down to fear. What is old or traditional is something familiar. It can be counted on quantified and measured. Things that have been done a certain way for a long period of time create patterns and routines in the lives of the people that do them that certain way. Pathways get ingrained in the minds of people following tradition.

 

The “normal” way that people do things is something they are comfortable with because they know exactly what to expect as a result. It usually does not really matter to them that the result is inefficient, painful, difficult or only just barely gets the job done.

 

Quite, often a logical thinking person can point out all kinds of flaws in the “normal” way, things that actually make the thing more of a burden than it needs to be. Even if you can prove that the new way to do a thing is better in every way most people will still resist it kicking and screaming and look for every reason to hold onto tradition.

Click here if you’d like to understand why people do this.