PopTech 2009: Michael Pollan from PopTech on Vimeo.

If you haven’t heard Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford in 2005, you must.  It is one of the most beautiful deliveries out there and is inspirational at a deep level.  Read this excerpt:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

At the end of his speech, he talked about the back cover of The Whole Earth Catalog that featured the line:  ”Stay hungry, Stay foolish.”  With that line, he exhorted his audience to do the same.  As do I.  Here is his speech:

Enjoy this whether you have seen it already or you have not.

Tenth Secret:  “Wisdom is Avoiding All Thoughts that Weaken You”

You are what you think is a truism.  If our mind is plagued with negative thoughts, we become a product of that negativity.  Dyer opens the chapter with an example of kinesiology.  When we hold up our arm and say a lie, our muscles go weak and we don’t even know it.  When we tell the truth, our muscles are emboldened and remain strong.  I tried this in the past, and I was shocked that it worked.  At the time I did not even know what was going on but it happened, and I was flabbergasted.  Dyer says if such a simple test can prove to be such a devastating force to our muscle capacity, how do consistently negative thoughts that course through our brains affect our bodies.  Obviously, they wear us down.

When we are focused on peace, love and happiness, that is where we will reside.  When we are entrained on hatred, anger, pettiness, and resentment, our hearts and minds will be aligned in such a way.  If we believe that we will get the flu this season, we probably will.  If we don’t, we probably won’t.  We are a sum total of all our thoughts.  We are truly what we think.  Avoid all thoughts that weaken you, and be strengthened by all good thoughts that can enliven you.

Dyer cites a book entitled A Course in Miracles that divides all thoughts/beliefs/energies in this world into either love or fear.  With this simple dichotomy, we can envision every thought we have as something that can either strengthen us with love or destroy us with fear.  There are no neutral thoughts.  Instead of a fearful, anxious mind, we should replace those thoughts with love, peace, joy, and happiness.  Choose your thoughts, and choose them wisely.

What Suze mentioned was that when we have a situation we are angry at, most likely it has very little to do with the other person or even with the circumstance.  It has a lot to do with ourselves, how we allow anger to engulf our lives, how we allow ourselves to lose patience, how we allow circumstances and people to influence our behavior, reaction, thought and deed.  Next time you get angry, ask yourself what you are really angry at.  You might just find it has nothing to do with the other person or even your circumstance.

Ninth Secret:  “Treasure Your Divinity”

We are so ensnared in our mortal coil that we cannot see past it.  We cannot see the grandeur and beauty that surrounds us.  In short, we cannot see our own divine nature that has been given from a divine source.  We are lost in the mundane.  We are a product of this world.  We are a consequence of habitual thought.  Dyer exhorts us to see our divine nature and to be in touch with divine presence.

He imagines God (not necessarily a defined entity but a divine inspiration for the world or however you choose to believe in that divinity) to be like the ocean.  We are a cup of water from that ocean.  When we are part of that ocean, we are alive and vital and activated by that source energy. When we take that cup of water out of that ocean, it will eventually evaporate and return to its source.  We are all a part of a divine presence.  We just may not look at that part of us on a day-to-day basis.

When we see the divinity within us, we can be the very best of who we are because we entrust that we are divine creatures and not earthbound animals scrounging around for our daily bread.  When we meditate in silence, when we offer our peace and love to others, we can be in touch with our divine spirit and we can be grateful for that enlightened part of all of us.

Eighth Secret:  “Treat Yourself As If You Already Are What You’d Like To Be”

This is a wondrous statement.  We have all heard of the law of attraction, espoused by Rhonda Byrnes in her famous book and film, The Secret.  However, Dyer goes beyond The Secret in many of his thoughts.  We do not attract what we want to attract; we attract what we already are.  We must be focused on who we want to be as if we are that thing or person already.

If we want peace in our life, we must see ourselves already as the embodiment of peace.  Similarly, if we want a peaceful relationship with someone else, we must see that person as a peaceful individual.  When we say we want peace, that is not enough because wanting is a state of absence.  That is the very definition of want.  We must visualize that we already have it and that we are already there.

In short, we set our intention for where we want to be.  When we set our intention toward a goal, our unconscious mind drives us toward completion of that goal effortlessly and at the appointed time.  We follow forward toward our destination without labor or hardship.  Whatever we want to be or want to become, we should see ourselves as a finished image of that self.

Dyer opens this chapter with a story of how he sat in on an Alcoholics Anonymous group and heard one person blaming someone else for his or her woes.  But a sign reminded the individual that In This Group, There are No Justified Resentments.  At our lowest consciousness, we blame everyone around us for everything because it certainly could not be our fault.  We look toward others and see that they are the ones that caused all of our current problems.  In fact, our society supports this blame-oriented thinking.  It is certainly the lowest level of consciousness.

“But, of course, I am justified to think a certain way.  Don’t you understand the way that I have been treated?”  Dyer relates a story of a person who always turned the other cheek in the face of great, apparent adversity and harsh criticisms.  Someone asked him, “How can you do what you do?”  The individual replied, “Quite easily, if someone offers you a gift, and you do not accept that gift, to whom does that gift belong?”  If you do not accept the invective, who does it belong to?  Dyer cites the humorous but truthful expression, “Your opinion of me is none of my business.”

After we let go of blame, the next level of consciousness is to offer in return to all:  peace, love, forgiveness, and compassion no matter what.  That is a much more profound level of consciousness that we all can aspire to attain.  The first step however is letting go of blame.  If we cannot even do that, then we cannot move onward and upward to returning beauty to all in any situation.

Sixth Secret:  “You Can’t Solve a Problem with the Same Mind that Created It”

This is something that we have discussed in a previous blog series dedicated to Eckhart Tolle’s work.  This beautiful paraphrase of a quote by Carl Jung is worth repeating herein.  When we are petty and angry, we can’t solve the problem facing us by remaining petty and angry.  In fact, being petty and angry probably caused the problem to arise in the first place.  When we raise our consciousness, we may at once extinguish the current problem and limit the intrusion of future problems.

Dyer talks about three levels of consciousness.  The first level of consciousness is ego.  When we are enamored with acquiring more toys and being better than our neighbor, we are fully ensconced in our ego.  When we must have a certain reputation that defines who we are so that we can flaunt our egoistic self, we are a victim of ego mentality.  The ego level is consumed with self.  I like Dyer’s idea that ego really stands for Edging God Out.

In the second level of consciousness, we are entrained to think like a group, or a clan.  “We are Democrats so we think a certain way, and I am proud that I voted for …”  “I work for a bomb-making factory.  I don’t believe in bombs but that is what my line of work tells me to believe.”  “I am part of a gang.  I follow their commands.”  “I am Asian so I think in a certain way.”  Group consciousness moves beyond the self but is a very similar level of consciousness since we are beholden to a certain group’s mentality no matter at what price.

The third and highest level of consciousness is known as mystical consciousness where labels like Asian, Hispanic, Republican, American, Southerner, etc. fall away and we are left with more universal associations like human.  We disavow separateness and are joined by our commonality.  When we approach this level of consciousness, we will see the petty desires and foibles of our lower conscious selves begin to melt away.

He talked about his humble origins in a working-class district of Manchester where he said that people with soft hands were looked at as suspect.  He said that the people in his neighborhood thought anyone who delved into the mysteries of books was not genuine like the working class folk that populated that industrial town.  Nevertheless, he went on to study at the University of Manchester School of Architecture and City Planning and followed by the Yale University School of Architecture on a Henry fellowship.  He is quoted as saying, “In Britain the idea one could go from blue-collar beginnings to the university was so far out, it was quite unthinkable.”

He has gone on to win the prestigious Pritzker Prize (the Nobel equivalent for architects) among many other notable accolades.  His buildings are so profoundly creative that they defy easy classification.  The pictured headquarters for Swiss Re in London, known as The Gherkin, showcases his unbridled creativity, among his prolific work.  His projects are also known for their environmental sustainability and relying on local construction teams and materials as part of that strategy.

This week, think of what “humble origins” you come from, and be bold to think big.  Express your creativity and be larger than life.  There are no excuses for one’s life, and your past is no exception.

Fifth Secret:  “Give Up Your Personal History”

Dyer uses the metaphor of a boat to explain how we unfortunately see our lives and how we should see our lives.  Every boat has a wake behind it.  However, the wake does not control the boat.  It is just a trail of foam that has no bearing on the direction the boat is taking.  However, our “wake”, i.e., our past, is oftentimes something that we use to define who we are today.  “Well, I had a troubled childhood.”  “My parents divorced so of course I am having difficulty today.”  “My husband left me for another woman.  That explains where I am now.”  “I never finished college so, of course, I cannot succeed today.”  Our wake should not control our boat. It can’t.

We too often look at the labels that we impose upon ourselves to define who and what we can be. Whatever limitations our past imposes on us we allow them to flourish so that we are stifled and cannot be a product of our limitless, current selves.  We are not our wake.  We are the boat.  All we have is the present time, as Eckhart Tolle admonishes in The Power of Now.  We are only where we are now.

The opposite can also be true of our past.  “Well, it was certainly a happier time for me then.  I long for the good ol’ days.”  “I was happy then.  Today not so much.”  We cannot and should not be our past.  When we live in our past, we are a product of a deathly present.  We must see the glory of right now, this moment, the very breath that we take, the shining time of now of where we are today, that’s it.  Dyer says when we are eating our appetizer, we should not be thinking of dessert.  When we are eating dessert, we should not be thinking of what we just ate.  We are too often all over the place because our minds are not still but hurried and preoccupied.  Be here now and relinquish your past, all of it.