I was whining to my girlfriend about how Barack Obama is ignoring the advice of economists who predicted the financial crisis (video), and she said it sounded incredible to her, because he struck her as a rational individual.
That got me thinking about how rational you can be and still be wildly successful. My hypothesis is that in order to become among the very best in the world at something competitive like politics or sports, you have to have a certain ability to eschew rationality when the odds are against you. You have to be willing to gamble a little, to take a few risks.
I’m going to use Obama as an example here, but only to illustrate my point. This post isn’t about him.
Logically, even deciding to run for president of the United States is a very big gamble even for a member of the ethnic majority. There are going to be a whole bunch of guys in the running, several of them will be very skilled and experienced, and chances are many of them are going to be richer than you are. Under those circumstances, putting down the kind of money and effort to even get a campaign off the ground is a huge gamble. At worst, you could end up embarrassed, broke and politically friendless.
In an ideal society, the leaders would be the persons with the best rational decision making ability in matters of economics, foreign relations and crisis management. They’d be the kind of people who could explain to you which scientific theories are most prevalent in their chosen field, and point out the weaknesses and strengths of each theory. In western society, those people are professors, CFOs, company leaders and researchers. They aren’t politicians.
In today’s entertainment-saturated world, where most young people have the attention span of a goldfish and an inflated confidence in their own limited knowledge, successful politicians are the persons with the best connections, the most charisma, the most determination and the strongest political convictions. They are workhorses and charmers, not intellectuals. They are people with the willingness to put rationality and personal beliefs aside in favour of mass appeal.
The best proof of this is that there has yet to be an agnostic or atheist candidate in the US. The US population is highly religious, so the politicians have to claim belief in superstitious nonsense in order to even be considered at all. Not even religious moderates pretend to believe in the crazy stuff, yet if a presidential candidate was honest and said “I think certain passages in the bible are bullshit”, then his campaign would probably crash and burn soon after.
Barack Obama could be the best president that could logically have been elected in our current circumstances. I’m just not convinced that’s good enough.
So I wrote in a previous post that one of the best habits you can have is to observe smart people and copy them. Let’s take a look at that in a little more detail.
I submit that regardless of how you define intelligence, you will usually find that the smartest people are doing the following things:
1. Working with things they enjoy.
2. Ignoring rules, laws and social taboos that they disagree with.
3. Spending more time doing things they are good at than the average person does.
4. Achieving success in their own definition.
In other words, the smart people are individualists. They have learned to put their own wishes above the wishes of others, and they have learned to focus on what they enjoy. This is something I’m constantly working towards. Alan Watts had a rap where he discussed how, in western society, we’re tricked into believing there’s some big reward just over the horizon all through our childhood, and then we suddenly wake up in our 40’s and realize we’re working at an accountancy firm. Floating along with the expectations of the culture around you is one of the most dangerous things you can do, from the perspective of your total happiness in life.
It took me years of searching to find out what I wanted to do in life, though I could have probably shortened it a bit if I had used psychedelics back then. Anyway, my point is it’s worth it. If you’re not happy with your everyday life, make a break for it. Travel. Move to a new city. Try a new sport. Learn a language. Meditate. Get high as a kite. Whatever it takes, just do whatever you need in order to find out what you really enjoy the most, and then figure out a way to live off it.
In my experience, you’ll never regret taking the risk, because you acted in accordance with your true wish. I know this sounds preachy, but I’m trying my best to practice it. I’m gearing down at my office job in order to make more time for MMA. If I end up regretting it, I’ll let you know.
Recently I’ve been working in the daytime and studying Buddhism in the few hours I’ve been awake after work. I’ve always had a distaste for most religions, but Buddhism stands out from the rest. Unlike the monotheistic religions, it is supposedly all about expediency rather than morality, and I found that refreshing. Up until I ran into Alan Watts though, I’ve had a hard time understanding it. In fact, I had basically given up on it a few years ago, so there’s a feeling of accomplishment attached now that I am extracting valuable lessons from it.
If you skip mysticism and legends, Buddhism is more like a philosophy than a religion. It deals with how the world fits together and what behaviours are effective. It is essentially a guide on how to increase existential enjoyment by reducing existential pain.
I’ve been practising two Buddhism-related tricks lately; a type of meditation they call mindfulness and the conscious act of not clinging. It sounds like some new agey fairy shit, but it’s actually really useful for cleaning out your mental cobwebs. Any system needs flushing, and the more advanced the system, the more cleaning it needs. It just so happens that the human brain, that fleshy lump behind your forehead, is the most intricate physical construction in all known existence. Forget supercomputers, the are guys out there who can do math by synaesthetic association and define PI to infinite accuracy, given the time to relay the numbers. There are guys who can read a book with one eye on each page, and repeat the whole story to you verbatim ten years later. People think autism is a dysfunction, I see it as proof that there’s way more potential to unlock inside our heads than we have any idea of.
So anyway, back to these techniques. The first one is about achieving more mental focus and taking control by reducing input and focusing inward on your thoughts. The reason is the same as for taking psychedelics alone in silent darkness instead of at a party. The more input, the more games your mind has to concern itself with. At a party, you have to play the social game, you have to play the verbal game, you have to play the emotional game, and you might have to move around too. All of those things require mental effort, and spread out your focus.
When you reduce sensory input, you increase mental capacity. What you do is you sit down, you close your eyes, and breathe calmly. Next, you focus your mind on the fact that thoughts are not what define you. Thoughts are not your personality or your true self, they are just information passing through your consciousness. What really defines you is which thoughts you choose to act upon. It’s cliché but true, you are the sum of your actions. At least in other people’s minds that’s what you are. Only you know what you are to yourself.
The second technique is less of a technique and more of a realization. One of the main tenets of Buddhism is that suffering comes from craving. If you’re in mental anguish and you can’t put your finger on why, chances are you’ve got a hangup. You badly want something to be in a way that it isn’t.
The way I’ve been implementing this is that whenever I’m unhappy about something, I’ll make a quick decision on whether it’s worth the effort to try to fix it. If so, then I do it. If not, I let go of it. More often than not, the choice falls on simply realizing that it’s not that important. Sounds like a recipe for apathy, but that’s not the case. Instead, it leaves you more relaxed and free to focus on the things you do find important.
Today I’d like to share some simple logic that will make your life better. It did for me, anyway.
In life, there are three kinds of phenomena: Phenomena that you can control, phenomena that you can influence and phenomena that you have no control at all over.
It obviously follows that it’s better to have your stakes riding on the outcome of events that you can control. Unless you’re really clumsy, that is. So in order to become happier, it is healthy to regularly examine how much of your emphasis is on factors that you cannot control, or that you can only partially control. For example, unless you are an aspiring politician, the intelligent approach to the US Presidential election is to vote (if eligible), but to accept that your candidate might lose. If you invest a lot of emotion in the idea of “your guy” winning, then there is a pretty big risk that you’ll be disappointed.
So what are the factors that you CAN control?
1. Your thoughts
2. Your emotions
3. Your actions
What are things that you CAN’T control?
1. The past
2. The actions of others
3. The laws of nature
In other words, shit happens. Shit happens, and it’s your job to respond correctly. A lot of the time when you’re in a bad situation, it helps to make the division in your head, so that you can concentrate your energy and efforts on the factors within your sphere of influence.
In fact, it helps to keep this in mind in all situations. A lot of people who aren’t “doers” suffer from confusion in this area. They devote too much of their efforts to trying to affect things that are outside of their control.
A Buddhist might say “How people treat you is their karma, how you react is yours”.
The hottest fires make the hardest iron. Tempering is the practice of refining a quality in an object by putting the object through elements of trial, burning away the unnecessary parts.
Tempering and conditioning the body is essential to athleticism, you must put it through stress and pain in order to make it tougher and more able. Physical pleasure-seeking is a way to weaken the body, to decrease its life span and quality.
To achieve true excellence, the mind must be similarly tempered. You temper it by asking uncomfortable questions, and then wrestling with the cognitive dissonance until it submits to you and you reach a new level of understanding, from which you can survey all of your old knowledge under a new light. Removing false assumptions and illusions, you gain more detailed knowledge. Adding detail and definition to your view of reality is the way to achieve excellence in all fields.
This is one of the most essential habits to keep. You’ll never become a star quarterback if you don’t enjoy juggling the ball while talking to your friends or walking to work, and you won’t reach your intellectual potential unless you keep looking for new perspectives.
This post was written under the influence of cannabis sativa.
Back in 2005 when I decided to turn my life around, one of my first priorities was to try to gain more control over my own emotions. This turned out to be a key element in achieving happiness. I examined my emotional reactions and the results they had given me in the past, and came to the following conclusions:
Regret is a waste of time. The past is history, it cannot be changed. Learn from it, and move on. Any time spent on regret is time that could be spent enjoying the present. Intellectual regret is perfectly fine, as it is required to learn from one’s mistakes. I made the rule to regret each mistake only long enough to realize that I would do things differently should the situation arise again. After the mental note is made, I waste no more time on regret.
Shame is an obvious candidate for removal. Nobody wants to feel ashamed, but very few people have realized it’s possible to minimize the emotion from your life without being a conformist. Shame is always caused by social missteps, it is a mechanic put there by evolution to facilitate flock cooperation. If the leader could use shame his subjects into the fold, he didn’t have to use violence. Violence is risky, it may cause injuries that would impair the ability to hunt.
The key to eliminating shame is the realization that everyone else is just people. Governments, organizations, corporate structures and social groups are all comprised of humans just like yourself. They all shat in diapers as babies, they all pissed their beds at some point, and they all have insecurities. Everyone has the same basic human value, regardless of money, social status or job. In other words, they’ve got nothing “on” you as long as you’re honest. Your own intellect is the highest authority in your life. It is the only authority worthy of deciding what you ought to feel about anything.
Jealousy is directly counter-productive. It’s like an educational blindfold. The persons who have achieved what you desire are the ones who possess the most relevant knowledge to you. If you allow yourself to be jealous of them, you will fail to see their good sides, which will impair your ability to learn from them.
Those are the ones I realized right away. Next time I return to this subject, I’ll discuss fear and hatred.
A man who asks is a fool for five minutes. A man who never asks is a fool for life.
Supposedly, that’s a Chinese proverb. More importantly, it’s 100% undiluted, weapons-grade TRUTH™. One of the most common mistakes I see people make is pretending they know more than they do. I’m guilty of it as well, which makes it even worse, because it’s dumb.
Do you really think people are going to judge you as a fool for not knowing the capital of the Maldives, or the meaning of defenestrate? Personally, I base my self-worth on more solid stuff than that, and I hope you do as well. In most of the western world, there seems to be this misguided notion that ignorance is somehow connected to stupidity. This is far from accurate. If you look back at history, you will find that some of the smartest people who ever lived were ignorant about things most of us would laugh at someone for not knowing today.
Ignorance does have a connection with one unattractive trait, and that is lack of curiosity. Thirst for knowledge is a sign of a healthy mind. However, correlation does not imply causation. Even though a lack of curiosity leads to ignorance, ignorance alone is not proof that you lack curiosity. In fact, you dispel that notion the moment you reveal your ignorance by asking.
Your homework for today is to ask someone about something you don’t know. I would advise you to make a habit out of this.
Filed under: Understanding — jackthescrapper @ 2:16 am
All fear inhibits freedom. If you are afraid of sounding stupid you can’t interact with people, if you’re afraid of flying you cannot travel fast, if you’re afraid of your government then you cannot feel in control and in my opinion, if you’re afraid of death you cannot enjoy life. I find that the more I work on getting rid of fears, the richer my everyday experience of life is.
The point is: Eliminate your fears and you’ll have more fun, and you’ll be more fun to be with.
So how does one eliminate a fear? Facing it is the only way. Luckily you can choose how much of it you want to face at one time. Choose an amount that you’re comfortable with. If you’re afraid of physical confrontation, don’t go start a fight at a bar just to face your fear – take a martial arts class. If you are afraid of heights, don’t go bungee jumping – stand on a chair. Work your way up the ladder. “Baby steps” is the key. Just make sure there is constant progress. You can slow the progress down or speed it up according to how comfortable you’re feeling, but never let it stop.
Some fears are healthy up to a certain degree, but harmful past that exact degree. One such example is the fear of failure. Failing at things you want to succeed at is never good, so a reasonable fear of failure is healthy. It keeps your ambition for success intact. However, if you fear failure so much that you stress holes in your stomach wall over it or miss out on life opportunities because of it, it is an unhealthy fear. The way to understand which amount is healthy is to study the failures of people you define as wildly success in the total tally.
For example, I study the failures of Fedor Emelianenko, because I understand MMA and Fedor is the most successful Mixed Martial Artist in the history of the sport.
How much does Fedor fear failure?
Enough to avoid fighting with a broken hand, unless the offer is very attractive.
Enough to advocate never accepting a fight one is not sure one will win.
Not enough to look worried while stepping into the ring.
Not enough to avoid risky techniques inside the ring.
Not enough to avoid staking his economical well-being on a fighting career.
The idea is that the most successful people in the world are the ones who find the perfect ambition level. The level that doesn’t burn you out, yet is fast enough to keep you excited and fascinated. I bet it varies from time to time, but it’s obvious that some people have discovered habits that will keep you in tune with its fluctuations. Otherwise, how do you explain a guy like Anderson Silva? Buakaw Pramuk? Marcelo Garcia? It is always fascinating to see someone who truly excels at something, no matter what it is.
Imagine the possibilities if the whole world learned these habits. This is why I believe the pursuit of excellence to be the highest goal there is in this world.
So I guess I lied about that hiatus. Read this warning before you go on reading this post.
Now I’ll tell you what’s got me so passionate about psychedelic drugs. It’s not the physical experience. It’s not even the short-term mental experience, although that is pretty damn attractive. It is the long-term mental benefit.
I have only taken two drugs that are illegal for adults(unless you count the time I used my mother’s prescription pain killers without a prescription), so I won’t speak for any drugs besides cannabis sativa and psilocybin mushrooms.
There is zero doubt in my mind that taking these drugs has helped push up my intellectual development along at a pace that would have been all but impossible without them. The last year has been the happiest in my life, not counting those years between birth and leaving Kindergarten. How did drugs help with this? By teaching me a hundred little things about myself and the world, and by sparking the interest to learn more about bigger things.
Here are some examples of things I learned as a direct result of taking psychedelics:
*Why I was afraid to grow up when I was a kid
*To balance instant gratification fun with long-term preparation to have more fun
*How to activate my imagination in a new way
*How positivity breeds positivity
*How fascinating science is when approached the right way
*Just how much control I have over my enjoyment of life
*The negative effects alcohol had on my life
*The nature of immortality
*The importance of changing perspective.
And I’m just scratching the surface. There is so much more to say, and so much left to learn, and not just about the self. There seems to be an infinite amount of knowledge to be gained from these altered states of mind, because they displace the consciousness to different frequencies of thought than those normally inhabitable. They are agents for examining mental habits, among other things.
How? I don’t know. It is a massive mystery how these natural compounds can create such reality-altering and intense experiences. Saying “they alter brain chemistry” is no kind of explanation. Of course they do. But that is only the surface of it. Our scientific understanding of the brain is quite rudimentary compared to most of our anatomical research. Even if we can see which receptors are affected by which chemical compounds, and which nerve endings start firing, we cannot explain how eating a little bit of something that grows in the dirt can lead to the experience of communicating with an entirely otherworldly and incredibly wise intelligence. There are still so many questions to answer.
Are the “entities” one can contact while tripping on various drugs real, or simply reflections of the self? If they are reflections, how can they seem to teach so many foreign things?
Is the human consciousness infinitely variable? If not – what are its limits?
How many altered states are beneficial, and in what situations?
How deep into the unconscious is it possible to probe?
Why do the teachings of the plant and the mushroom seem so much more relevant to me than any other inquiry?
What could I achieve if I was able to always operate in the highest state of consciousness?
What could we achieve, as a race, if we were all operating on the highest level of consciousness possible?
How much of reality comes down to interpretation, and how much is universally true data?
The problem is that research on these plants, which by all credible accounts seem to have been used by humans for as long as art and religion have existed, is now restricted or taboo in most of the western world. So where can you get answers? The only ones with real knowledge are the few surviving shamans, the masters of religious ceremonies among certain indigenous peoples from Latin America and Africa. But the shamans speak in riddles. They have many things to teach, but their perspective of the plants is coloured by their culture. The shamans can teach you how to use the plants safely and productively, and how to return with your sanity. But if you ask about the nature of the experience, they start to tell stories about spirits, ancestors and gods. I have no patience for magic. I love to explore magic, however.
So where can I turn for some verifiable knowledge? The intellectual hippie scholars who grew out of the 60’s – notably Terence McKenna, Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary – have a lot to offer, but even their understanding is limited, and they all seem to have had a propensity for going too far out on an intellectual limb in many cases. Additionally, their language is often geared towards an audience which has shared their experiences.
So where can you go for simple, verifiable facts and explanations? The only remaining authority is the experience itself. To me, it seems like whatever it is that I have the impression of communicating with while in the altered state, it is certainly a being of immense wisdom. Its body of knowledge appears deep and wide beyond my ability to grasp, but its language is that of an adult talking to a child. It is bringing me along at a pace that I can handle. When I ask it to be frank, it begins to explain something so incomprehensible, so large and all-encompassing that my mind strains to take it in, and I say “stop, I’m not ready for this”. Every day, I try to understand more, to widen my consciousness and connect the dots so that one day, I may understand all of what the mushroom has to tell me. I make missteps and incorrect assumptions from time to time, and it requires a lot of heavy mental lifting, but I am making progress.
That is the essence of my exploratory journey. I have become addicted to learning more about my human condition and my mind, and the psychedelic trip happens to be the teacher with the best curriculum and the most credentials.
Now, I turn the mic over to Graham Hancock:
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Written partially while sober and partially while slightly high on cannabis.
