Developing Equanimity

Equanimity is one of three qualities of mind that we want to develop if spiritual enlightenment is our goal. The other two are focus and clarity. Equanimity as a quality of mind is helpful not only for meditation and insight but also for life satisfaction in general. With equanimity, we remain in a peaceful state regardless of the experiences we have at the moment. When pain arises, we are not swept away by our stories around it and remain aware of the sensations that arise and pass from moment to moment. 

How To Deal With Desire

How should we deal with desire in the context of spirituality?

Desire is as natural to our human nature as breathing and eating. This is where we start out when we start to explore spirituality. Desire is the natural way in which our mind creates motivation. Desire makes us do things, get things done and accomplish our goals. At least that is what it seems like on the surface. 

Mindfulness for busy people - Karma Yoga

Is the spiritual path one of the five most important things in your life? For most people, it is not. Spirituality is something they do on the side. When life is quiet and not stressful. In this article, we will explore why it is so difficult to make meaningful progress if spirituality is not one of your top priorities and how you can fix it. 

All You Are Trying To Understand Is Yourself

Are you on the spiritual path to knowing who you are? Have you asked the question: what is this all about? Maybe you are trying to understand the world and find an answer to the biggest question one can ask. You can find the answer when you understand, that all you are trying to understand is yourself. 

The Multiplicity Of Paths To Spiritual Awakening

The following interview gives a great insight into the nature of the spiritual path. There is a multitude of possible paths that can lead to enlightenment. 

It is interesting to note that they all agree on the highest truth, the emptiness or non definable presence of your highest self, which is beyond all form.

I highly recommend you listen to this interview and let it open your mind to other paths besides the practices you have currently chosen. 

Show Me The Line Between Internal And External

The close observation of your experience will reveal the insight that there is no real difference between the inside and the outside. What is the inside supposed to be like, compared to external experience? Internal as well as external experiences have certain qualities. They differ from each other in certain aspects. 

For example, one significant feature of the internal experiences is their privateness. This may be enough to define the difference between the external and the internal experience. We share with others what is on the outside and we experience only for ourselves what is on the inside. But in this article, you are going to see that the differentiation between inner and outer experience is illusory. 

Internal external reflection.

Developing True Character

Modern personal development advice is very often based around the central question of how you, the individual, can be more successful. In this article, we are going to explore, where this development comes from, when it started, and dive deep into the practical implications of the more impactful approach taught by the ancient philosophers.

Existence is form and distinction. Character is one of them. 

Spiritual Transformation

Spirituality is a difficult topic to discuss with people who are only slightly aware of what its essence is. Even if you are beginning to be interested in spirituality, it is difficult to get a clear idea of what spirituality actually means. We all come to this with our own ideas and notions of what we can expect or what spirituality is about. Once you dive deep into this topic you can expect that all of your ideas about religion and spirituality can be transformed. 

It's in the flow of the river...

The Necessity And Beauty Of Challenges

Every animal on the planet is almost constantly subjected to the demand of the environment. For survival, animals need to be active most of their day. Every activity serves one of three purposes: gathering food for energy, producing offspring, and avoiding being killed. This puts tremendous pressure on them and they need to be efficient, healthy and strong, otherwise, they do not survive.

Cold-Water Swimming: A Way Of Deliberate Challenge

The Relationship Between Effort And Happiness

There are probably as many visions of the perfect life as there are people on this planet. As human beings, we plan our future. With varying degrees of consciousness. Whether we plan consciously or unconsciously, we easily forget one thing. How well are we actually able to predict, what will make us happy in the future. What we think we want now is often completely different from what would actually return to us the best experience long-term. What follows is a clarification of the requirements of our psyche to flourish over a lifetime and a strategy for personal development.  

Your career may lead you to experience flow long-term

Is Happiness The Goal?

When we struggle to find happiness, we rarely ask whether happiness is the right goal. In our search for a future state of inner happiness, we easily forget one fundamental aspect of reality. That it is always now. Why do we hope for a better future, when it is always now? What are the cognitive consequences of this false thinking? Therefore we can only get what we ever wanted now. Therefore the question turns into: what is keeping us from our desired state now. And is that state happiness in the conventional sense? Like a pleasant feeling or a beautiful sight? 

I would argue it is none of these. In order to achieve a state where we feel content with our overall life requires us to construct a path of constant improvement in one way or another. Our psyche is designed to grow and learn. It is not meant to remain static. We need mental resistance as much as our bodies need physical resistance in order to stay healthy and strong. 

Some people do that naturally, but most people don't. It requires effort, just like physical exercise requires effort. Especially if it is consciously designed to yield long term improvements. How do we design a life that covers our need for personal development?

Grow Yourself And Happiness May Follow

What we need is a trajectory to our life that presents us with challenges on a regular basis. A career could be the source of new challenges. Unfortunately, most jobs are not designed to provide new tasks that are more challenging on a regular basis. Tasks become routines and workers get bored but remain in the job because they need the salary. 

It is in our own interest to keep an eye on how challenging our work feels to us. If it becomes too easy, we stagnate and it is a sign that we are ready for the next step. Taking on new tasks that are a little more difficult will allow us to remain in the flow-state more often. Which in itself is a great strategy that produces in us feelings of achievement and happiness. 

Grabbing this concept and turning it into a strategy to design our whole lives trajectory around, will lead to the best long term outcome. 

Change Requires Effort

There are many potential paths available to achieve this goal. Designing a life path that supports personal development is achievable by anyone. But anyone who is serious about it has to expect that it will feel really difficult at times. The feeling of effort is like that physical feeling of heavy resistance training. Only the person who learns to like the feeling of burning muscles while training will realize is full potential and become a great athlete. Only the person who learns to like the feeling of effortful activities will realize his full personal potential. 

If we recognize that we haven't done challenging things in a while, it is a good indicator that we need to stretch ourselves and search for new activities that will enable us to grow. This could be in our jobs or in side-projects, in our family lives, or in the community we live in. Let the preception of effort be one of the guiding factors in major career or life decisions. Effort is the resistance required for personal development.

As we spent most of our time working, the best bet is to focus on that area first and foremost. Searching for new ways to challenge oneself in the working environment ensures that we remain engaged with our work over the years. A really long-term perspective is required here. With some decisions, it will be important to think decades ahead. Will a certain trajectory serve you not only in the immediate future but also in one and ten years down the road?

I hope you gained an understanding of how effort and happiness go hand in hand. Rather than following our intuitive, reflexive behavior to avoid effort, we should seek it out and use it to guide us in our big decisions. 

Why routines are better than habits

If you have a goal that requires some changes in your everyday behavior you will need to work with new routines. If you successfully stick with your new routines for long enough you will build new habits. By that point, routine actions have become a part of your personality. And here a critical distinction needs to be made between routines and habits.

As long as you work on building new routines, you are actively working to improve yourself. But once an action has become too easy to require any effort, it does no longer challenge you enough to change you. Habits are not actively improving your skills, routines, on the other hand, are a framework that can be used exactly for such purpose. 

Achievements through routines, but not habits. 

The point of this post is simple. Work on creating positive routines that, with time, turn into effortless habits. And then, keep on adding new ways of challenging yourself. It has to be a deliberate process of evaluating your routine. Look for the things that have become second nature to you. Be proud of yourself for that, but also look for the areas where you can level up even further. Which habits have become too easy for you? Could you increase your skills by making them more challenging or adding other activities to them?

Apply this process to your routines from time to time. Look at the two levels of your routines. The framework and the content. First, what does your general time-management framework look like? Are you efficient with your time? Do you have parts of your day where you apply a laser-like focus towards your goals? Have you made room for your creativity to unfold?

One level below that are the actions themselves. Where is your mind while you are executing your routines. Questions to ask yourself: Are your actions effective towards your goals? Are you mindful when you meditate? Are you concentrated when you study? What is the quality of your work? Are you distracted? Do you think about other things while you executing the routines? Or are you present with what you are doing? And do you enjoy and love what you are doing? 

If you have high goals and you know you have to improve to become the person that matches your ambitions, then working with routines in that way is essential. But even more so it is essential to enjoy the process. And how you do that is my core teaching.

To train the mind to be fully connected to the present moment at all times. This releases your superpowers.

If you want to learn this strategy to apply mindfulness towards your goals, go to the Coaching-page and contact me through the message box on the right.

Is Your Spiritual Practice Worth The Effort?

What do you hope to gain from spiritual development? Is it a practice that will benefit you in any way? And is it worth the time you have to invest into it? To answer these questions, we have to become clear about two things. First, about the you (the ego) that you identify with and secondly what a benefit to that ego structure actually is on a fundamental level.

In other words, gaining clarity about what you are and how spiritual practice can benefit you, in the context of this new understanding. With a clear understanding about the ego and what can benefit is, are you able to create a solid basis of motivation for your spiritual practice.

Who is dreaming?

What you are

The idea of being a separate entity is something that developed over time in your early childhood. As you learned to separate one part of your experience from another, you gained the ability to survive. For basic survival it is necessary to make the distinction between you and other, so that you are able to distinguish between beneficial and harmful objects. We get so used to this helpful distinction that we no longer recognize that we even do it. Once we have become more or less conscious beings we have already many years of training in this way of perception under our belts. To perceive our true nature, the consciousness that contains all of experience, we have to overcome this automatic function of our nervous system. And that requires work. That realization brings us to the second point. When we see that the ego is fundamentally no more than an automatic response of the nervous system to distinguish between self and other, the question of a benefit for that distinction becomes even more interesting.

Your life in one goal

One way to look at what you are trying to achieve in all activities is to define it as the striving for benefits for yourself. But what is a benefit?

A benefit to a subject can be defined as circumstances that support its persistence and as something that helps to overcome obstacles to its survival. For biological systems this is obvious in our needs for food, water and staying physically intact.

Spiritual work though happens in the mental sphere. The ego is not limited to the physical level. Much of it's survival requires certain mental behavior. And here we come to the point where the question of receiving a benefit out of spiritual practice gets to the root of what spirituality is. When the goal of spiritual work is to overcome the separation between self and other and to eliminate the illusion of an individual ego, than we are exactly doing the opposite of what we defined above as a benefit.

Successful waking up eliminates that thing that could receive a benefit. Certainly the thing we identify with when we ask this question. Even though that thing always was an illusion to begin with. Which is the reason all of our effots to achieve lasting happiness for that illusory ego are predetermined to fail. Something that has no substance can't hold on to any lasting circumstances that would lead to happiness.

Trading the ego for the solution?

So why then engage in spiritual practice? Why spend all the time and effort on something that is of no benefit?

The solution that spiritual enlightenment promises to deliver is simple but uncommon and generally not easy to achieve. Enlightenment eliminates the illusion of being an autonomous and separated identity that has the need to mold it's experience to it's benefit. In enlightenment there is not a hint of resistance left over. No resistance to whatever is arising. No struggling, no effort. A natural flowing in and out of the emptiness that is the center of the universe.

Time

Time is so essential to our existence, we usually overlook it.

Dogen watching the moon.

Here I will present an interesting viewpoint from Zen-Buddhism. Dogen writes about this in his book Shobogenzo. What follows is my interpretation of it.

Time can be seen as fundamental to reality. Everything can only appear as moments in time. Time is what we observe as the pattern with which the present moment changes.

If everything exist, it exist as moments in time. Infinite possibilities are unfolding as a seamless band of individual moments in conscious experiences. This band we call time.

Interestingly, time itself only exists as a concept. The only real thing about time is the everlasting moment. Time is never experienced outside of now. The concepts of past and future emerge as functions of our minds, always in the now.

Truth is only found now. There are all kinds of different experiences happening in the now. One day there will be enlightenment happening in the now, where the human concept of individuality is seen through and is replaced by more genuine understanding of being. On the other hand, there are many moments, in which the flow of events has no knowledge about it's own nature. This is the ordinary human experience.

Time after enlightenment. After enlightenment, time is seen for what it truly is. The change of events in the moment are still going to occur, but the awareness will always stay in the now. Concepts of future events are recognized as such. Plans can still be made and memories are still useful and nice. But the present moment will no longer appear as a tiny sliver of time, in between the seemingly infinite past and future. Instead it will be the eternal now that it actually is. Time being a property of what happens in it.

There is only being-time. All time occurs as moments of being. Nothing exists outside of it. Time both encapsulates all of existence and does not exist at the same time. This is one of the paradoxes of reality.

Essential Spiritual Practice: Zazen

According to the Shobogenzo, which is the best resource of Zen-Buddhism, the practice of Zazen is the only real practice that is required to achieve the realization of truth. While we are sitting in the clear awareness in an upright position, we are cultivating the qualities of the buddha-mind or no-mind. The practice is simple yet effective. You sit with your legs crossed or with your feet under your butt. In both of these positions the spine stays straight without muscular contraction. These positions become comfortable for extended periods of time after the first few weeks.

Zazen is the only essential spiritual practice.

Then the whole practice is to remain as awareness, which is aware of itself. You could accompany this being aware with the question: "What am I?". This question emphasizes the empty nature of awareness and denies our commonly held believe that we know who we are, when in fact our true self has none of the qualities we attribute to our self.

Sitting in Zazen is therefore an exercise of remaining aware of the nothingness that it is. Over time this will increase our capacity to stay in this clear state of mind and detachment naturally develops. A detachment from the false self which we identify with.

Even though this practice sounds simple, it has many nuances and should be evaluated and discussed regularly with a teacher to avoid the various traps of wrong practice. For example, it is easily possible to do ones daily practice in a state of day-dreaming, where one is almost entirely absorbed in thoughts about ones life. Which actually achieves the opposite of what Zazen practice is about.

To start the practice of Zazen it can be helpful to choose an object in ones experiences to focus on. This will train the ability to concentrate without interruption for extended periods of time. In my own practice I have found constant objects, like sensations to be best to develop this concentration. I start out every meditation practice with about 10 minutes of concentration on the sensation of my hands which lie on top of each other in my lap. This concentration requires effort and silences the mind. When I feel that my concentration has deepened and lengthened, I shift over to concentration on awareness without objects. Remaining aware as awareness of itself, as mentioned in the beginning.

I wish you much success with your own meditation practice. Please feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments, or book a Consultation with me, if you want to discuss your progress in detail.

Create your own best life

This is a list of a few concepts and action-steps that I have found to be helpful for personal development. This list has developed in my journal over time and is likely to change and grow in the future. But at this point in time is is worthwhile to share. Enjoy, adjust and implement!

Becoming your own success story is hard.

First, an example for why we should engage in continuous improvement and personal development:

• See yourself as the boss and the employee of your own life
• and then consider yourself to currently be the worst of both: you tell yourself strictly what to do but you never do it, right?
• how can you become a good boss and employee?
• by designing a negotiation-process for continuous improvement for yourself
• strive for continuous but step-by-step improvement
• Develop a profound routine:
• why? better to have a plan than to drift aimlessly through your life
• work on improving your routine over time, test different styles and see what works for you
• get up every day at the same time, even on weekends (more energy through solid circadian rhythm)
• do one hour of meditation daily. Suggestion: 40min in the morning and 20-30min in the evening
• pick the times when you work, when you exercise, when you study
• remind yourself every evening before going to bed what you are thankful for that happened that day. Maybe start a journal.
• set weekly goals of new things and challenges you want to do.
• Set a certain amount of time that you dedicate towards caring for your relationships
• Live your life as though you are already the version of yourself that you want to become
• Visualize daily, where you want to go and which goals you want to achieve
• Goals need to be kept alive. Ever wonder why you tend to forget about your motivation behind your goals? They die without constant reminders that keep you on track.
• Acting the way you want to become is the only way to get there. Change is inevitable.
• let your journey for personal development be guided by the best version of yourself
• constantly remind yourself of how you would think and act if you would already be that person and then, slowly over time, you will develop those habits and skills.
• In Buddhism they teach that you become free by letting go of your attachments
• Giving up materialistic possessions and attachments is only one side though
• Giving up attachments to who you currently are is the other side
• That means having no attachments to your current state of being because a lack of freedom is largely a conceptual limitation
• That is a tricky thing to do, because changing the self feels like letting parts of yourself die
• Seek out your errors
• Confront them in a way that does not crush you
• ask people of their opinion and listen with a non-judgmental, open mind
• When you feel fear, see it as an opportunity for growth
• Fear is the imaginary border off your comfort-zone, behind which, growth-opportunities lie
• Beyond that, the self imagines danger. Which feels very real, even though it usually is not

Why Conscious Exploration Entails Suffering

"The magnitude of the benefits of spiritual and personal development are equal to the suffering it causes."

This is the beauty of personal development. You become free to choose the degree of your happiness. If you are not yet fully present and content with existence, you are not enlightened yet. Than you know you have not yet gone through enough spiritual suffering. The suffering on the spiritual path usually comes up during meditation as distractions in the form of memories of your life.

In meditation you want to still the mind and turn awareness in on itself.

Step by step you are discovering that non of those things were ever actually you. You continuously detach from the identification with the illusory self. That means to dis-identify with what you previously thought was you. That is painful as it can feel like you are step by step dying. But at the end of that process or in an instant you will realize your true self and die into the whole of existence.

That process has an in-flexion point, where the emptiness inside turns into all of existence. A realization will happen where you see that you are in fact larger than the entire universe. But until then, the spiritual journey can feel painful, because it is a process of continually letting go of false believes, which make up who you currently think you are.

How can you enjoy this process of self discovery, if it entails so much suffering? 

Because suffering is the byproduct of discovering your own delusions, that are actually the root cause of your suffering. A deep interest in the truth will over-shine the falling away of attachments to the illusory self. Pulling out the illusions reveals their full depth. It will reveal to you how you are pushed around by their emotional force.

But, because delusion is what the false self is at it's core, discovering those very deep truth is a painful process of self-transformation. The self wants to remain as it is. You right there, you want to maintain the status quo of who you are. Revealing the delusions in yourself is like cutting away parts of yourself, with the intention to discover that you never were those parts to begin with. Or rather that you never were those parts exclusively. Finally you will come to understand that your illusory self is part of the mind of god, which is the unchanging ever present emptiness that you are. 

The Irony of Reasoning

The irony of reasoning is hidden in its own blindspots. Every line of reasoning has its origin in faith.

Maybe you remember the time when you were a child and it seemed appropriate to always continue to ask "why?" no matter the reason your parents told you.

I remember having that period in my childhood, where I wouldn't spot asking why and probably driving my parents crazy. I just never stopped asking for a deeper meaning and why things are the way they are. But at some point we stop and usually settle for some answer.
An answer that usually explains how some event is caused by some other thing.

To be practical we have to stop at some point of abstraction that is appropriate for the situation. We don't dig deeper. In our daily life, we usually settle for very shallow answers.

We settle for one or two levels of reason. If it fits into our model of the world, we are happy with the answer. Therefore reasoning is rarely practiced consistently to the deepest levels and is instead based on faith. One thing is caused by another and that is enough to satisfy our curiosity. But what is the consequence of this? 

I suppose that we hide deeper, uncomfortable truth about reality from us. To be a philosopher in the truest sense of the word means to be committed to the truth on a deep level. To love truth for it's own sake. To be a philosopher also means to be an advocate of reasoning, but not only at the shallow levels of daily discussions. Exercising it on the deepest levels is instead the way to apply reasoning in order to obtain true insights. 

This is self-inquiry. The exercise of applying curiosity and reasoning to one's own self. This can lead to interesting experiences and I find it worth exploring.

The Survival of the Mind

Psychological survival has become more important than physical survival and is the reason for most things we do. 

Modern times make it harder to become enlightened. Distractions are plentiful.

This is the hypothesis we are going to explore in this article and discover why survival is still the driving force behind most of our actions. Consumption, travel, entertainment and most forms of distractions beyond that which is demanded by physical survival is a direct extension of this drive to survive. Our need to survive indeed extends beyond securing physical survival. You might wonder what I mean by this and why this is the case.

If we dig deeper into the nature of reality, we find that all experience is an illusion. Including our physical body and the sense of separation between us and the world. By definition an illusion needs to employ some mechanism by which it becomes invisible to the one who is deceived. We could think of this illusion as a metaphysical entity with it's own drive to survive. In eastern traditions this illusion is called ego and is the center of our being. We are literally deceiving ourselves into being. How marvelous is that?

In our modern world, most work and most activities are far removed from immediate survival. And even though we have to earn money to survive, this is only partially true. Much of what we work for is not contributing to this end directly. Only to the degree that it feeds our own self-deception. 

But with that deception comes also a lot of trouble, suffering and the covering up of Truth. This illusion has an easier time to maintain itself when we are distracted of course. When we are not even asking any suspicious questions. When we are so caught up in what life presents us with that we are not bothered to take a closer look or become serious about discovering Truth for ourselves. From this point of view, all action could be considered distraction. There is nothing wrong with that, but we have to be aware that is also the root of all suffering in the world. With a firm realization of Truth there is no suffering. Fully realized beings perceive all experiences of life as the perfect manifestation of the infinite nature of reality.

To solve this issue I recommend following the practice of all-day-awareness. Training the mind to be fully present in every moment. With the full spectrum of sensory experience, without slipping into conceptualization and thoughts our mind is constantly coming up with. Over time this will quiet the mind and facilitate the state of no-mind. A state where the joyous nature of reality shines through in every moment. Beware though, there will be no you anymore. But then, you could say, there was no you to begin with. The veil of illusion will have been lifted.

Characteristics of a Total Illusion

In this article, we are going to explore the psychological process of an Illusion. We will discover how Self-Deception works in every one of us and how it arises from deep underlying mechanisms that are interconnected with reality itself.
With that understanding we will be able to make the connection to spirituality and what are the difficulties that make true enlightenment so rare.
And in the end, we will see why this is ultimately a good thing and how we can use this knowledge to our advantage.

The deception in video games

Let's take a look at the shallow illusion of video games. This technology offers an experience that many of us today can relate to. To discover the characteristics of a total illusion we will first have to define what makes an illusion shallow and obvious. The historic development of video games reveals that the illusion becomes more realistic the closer it is to what we are used to experiencing in real life.

Game designers work very hard at giving characters more life-like movements and the overall behaviour of real humans.

It is also easy for us to imagine that at one point in the future video games will have surpassed the resolution of our senses, eventually becoming indistinguishable from our real sensory experiences.

So what else would it take to make us believe in the illusion? If we might join with all of our senses into such a game of the future we still bring with us our memories. From that, we can conclude that a total deception must also include our own memories besides a perfectly simulated sensory experience.

If we ask what makes video games so popular, we reveal another interesting aspect of psychology. What benefit do we get from spending our time in those virtual realities while obviously achieving nothing of value in "real" life?
Their appeal may lie in their ability to trigger our reward centres without requiring exertion of physical effort. They reward/cost relationship is high.

On another level they have become so good at presenting a life-like scenario that some people may be able to completely forget about their life. Usually only for a limited amount of time though.
An additional aspect of the illusion of video games is their storytelling. Great games not only have great graphics but also a great story. Some goals are presented to the player that seems to be of value to achieve within the game world. The background of the characters become ever more complex. For the players to identify with them even more, in-game decision influence the development of the story and it's outcome.

If all these aspects seem to you as representative of real life, than now you can contemplate the difference between an obvious and a total deception. You may want to ask yourself the question: What is missing in these perfect game scenarios that we can still distinguish them reality? 

Self-Deception

In order to make the illusion whole and difficult to uncover, all of our own being must be included in it. Which, again, doesn't mean that this is a bad thing. It just means that reality does not work the way that materialism makes us believe. The very mechanism by which reality comes into being is through an illusion. That is how it works. So in a sense, we could also say that it is real. Just not in the way we previously believed.

In order for the self-deception to be completely convincing, our own thought process is part of it. If you tend to disagree with me here, then ask yourself, what are you listening to, when trying to find out about the illusion? The answer is likely, that you rely on your own reasoning and your own thoughts. But beware that you have no "objective" background against which you could compare your thoughts and then say that they match reality.

This is why waking up is so tricky. It is a long and difficult process to reveal all the self-deceptions of the ego. But the reward is incomparable joy and bliss that exceeds all human expectations.

Why would we lie to ourselves?

I want you to think about a past experience when you lied. What made you use a lie in that situation?
It's purpose was likely to serve you in some way. You felt threatened by something and lying seemed to be a solution to avoid that thread. So it served you or your agenda.

So why would we deceive ourselves?
First, who is deceiving who if the individual we thought we are does not exist? We could answer, that only god exists and therefore god is deceiving himself.

Similar to the Movie "The Game", we might say God became bored with resting in it's own infinite existence and wanted to feel what it is like to be a part instead of the whole. To have a limited existence and feel what it is like to identify with a part of himself.
So the ego came into existence and is believed to be limited to the human body. That very thing, the ego, must be deluded in order to become a limited thing when in reality there is only one infinite whole. If that thing wants to survive, it has to feed the lie and keep deluding itself to stay alive... 

Decision Fatique - Not Another Piece Of Information

You came across this blog looking for answers, right?
You opened up your browser because you had some kind of question?
Your curiosity led you to search for experiences of others on the web, experiences you can relate to and learn from.
You want to reach a desired outcome by implementing what worked for others.
This is probably not the first time you used this method. This might have become your new normal.
You have a question or a problem? It surely is already out there; somebody has already lived through it and has come up with a solution. So, clearly, the most efficient way is to look it up.

Information overload? How confusion can help us see more clearly.

This is, in fact, not only you whom I describe, but myself.
I grew up with the internet and with Google. When I was younger, I still had to use a computer every time I wanted to look something up and do it at home, but it was not much different from asking Google through a smartphone.


What is this new environment doing to the way we think, and especially to the way we come up with solutions? How is our creativity influenced, and has it changed our decision process?
How can we know what is right for us? Among all the different ways people live their lives and have made it visible through social media?
When do we reach the point where we can say we have read enough to make a decision?


How do we discriminate the honest from the dishonest?
Who is stuck in his story because he has created a product around the information he provides?
What resources are worth taking into account?
Can we judge the value of the information by how we feel about the person who is providing it?


You probably think that all of these questions make your decision more difficult instead of easier.
You are right and wrong at the same time. Because the resources to deal with any deep and meaningful problem in your life lie mostly within yourself. So you are right in the sense that the search for deep and meaningful answer from others are never going to fully apply to your own situation and is therefore highly confusing and very complex. And you are wrong because you can rely on your own insights to be fully applicable to your current situation.



I guess you have noticed now what I did here. Instead of giving you another answer or another personal life story you can compare your own to, I leave you with open questions. I hope that you embrace uncertainty and let yourself be guided again by your own creativity. I hope that, the next time you want to look for an answer on Google, you pause for a second and remind yourself to tap into the intuition and inner intelligence that lie already within you.
That is all we are doing here in all the blogs and videos anyway, we inspire each other and help each other learn faster and to avoid mistakes. But in the end, everyone has to craft their own unique path with it's own unique challenges and solutions. I guess that's why it's called Life.