Steve Pavlina recently wrote an article on Achieving Peak Motivation through use of polarity.

In it, he writes:

Love polarization means you adopt the mindset of unconditional love for everything that exists.  You center your life around serving the highest good of all.  This commitment stems naturally from the decision to align yourself with the polarity of unconditional love.  Think of this as an outward flow of energy.  Your focus is on giving and on making a contribution.

Fear polarization means you become unconditionally self-centered, driven by greed, power, and lust.  Your commitment is to make your life the best it can possibly be, purely for your own self-gratification. Think of this as an inward flow of energy.  Your focus is on acquiring and absorbing all that life has to offer you.

While I don’t disagree with his two types of motivation, I disagree with his labels.  I think that what he is really describing is a positive (what he calls love) and negative (what he calls fear) aspect of the love polarity.  I think the real love and fear polarities go deeper than that, that they have a more fundamental difference than whether you love yourself most or all people equally.

When you orient yourself toward the love polarity, you look at things from the perspective of wanting to bring certain things INTO your life, whether it be love, money, or something else.  You are seeking an inflow of energy, of life, bringing things into yourself.  Your focus is on bringing the good things to you.

When you orient yourself toward the fear polarity, on the other hand, you are looking at things from the perspective of wanting to keep something OUT of your life.  This can be loneliness, or poverty, or any number of other things.  You are expending your energy outward, pushing things away (though you may be doing it by trying to bring certain other things into your life, your focus is on keeping the bad things away).

As Steve says when talking about polarities, love and fear can both be incredibly powerful motivators.  If you understand them, and use the power of conscious choice to make one a cornerstone of who you are, it can provide sustained high motivation in a way that little or nothing else can.  Choosing the one that conflicts with your natural tendencies (read subconsciously learned tendencies) is one of the most difficult decisions to make stick, but it can still be done, you just have to keep at it.

If you choose the love polarity, you can then choose within that polarity from the two aspects Steve presents.  If you choose the fear polarity, though I’m not certain that anyone would ever make that choice consciously, then there are probably similar positive and negative aspects, though I have chosen love, so I can’t be certain.  Either way, make the choice consciously… don’t leave it up to your subconscious, or you may not like the results.

You are who you choose to be.  That can be a difficult pill to swallow.  It means that you are responsible for yourself and everything that you do.  All the good parts about you, and all the bad, are of your own choosing, though you may not be specifically aware of the choice (or choices) that led to specific traits.

It is also difficult because it is difficult to accept the power that gives you.  If you have the power to control who you are, then anything you can no longer blame anyone else, including your parents, for whatever traits you don’t like about yourself.  If you can control how you react to any given situation, then any time in the past that you have responded poorly, it was 100% your fault.  That’s a very unpleasant concept, and makes it difficult to accept the power of conscious choice.  If you don’t accept it, then you can continue to deny the blame… though that doesn’t mean it belongs any less to you, you can at least deny it, even to yourself.

You’re making the choice of who you want to be already, whether you know it or not.  Your conscious mind makes the choices, but it can lie to itself, though not to your subconscious.  You can tell yourself that you want to be this way or that way, but not really mean it, down at the level where thoughts turn into concrete decisions and actions.  You may say you want to be generous, for example, but below that, you may have a fear of scarcity that keeps you from acting out what you say you want.

When you accept the conscious power of choice, you take the power from these lower layers, where such fears dwell, and bring it up into your awareness.  Now you can take those things that you say you want to be and consciously examine them to determine if that really is who you want to be, rather than something you think you should be because others tell you so.  If it’s truly who you want to be, then you can take it from just words, and turn it into a decision, and embed that decision in the bedrock of who you are.

How long it takes to do that depends on how truly you have let go of the concept of powerlessness.  When you have truly let it go, and completely understand and accept that you are who you choose to be, change, even drastic change, can be nearly instant (referring to a change in who you are, not what you are… changes to your physical body will still take time, though quite possibly considerably less, since you will not be conflicted and fighting yourself).  If you are just beginning, it may take several times making the decision to add or remove a trait to really embed it deeply.

Once you accept this power, it also leads you to the knowledge and acceptance that all of your emotions come from inside you, too.  You choose which emotions to feel, and how strongly, though often your choice may not be “I’m going to be extraordinarily happy right now”, but something more like “Those circumstances will no longer bring anger or pain”.  That’s not to say that you can’t make decisions about how to feel and make them instant, but it takes more work, more energy, and therefore is not as common.

After you’ve accepted the power of conscious choice, and experienced it for a while, you are almost certain to be more at peace.  In fact, it’s hard to NOT have that as your default state.  After all, if who you are, what you do, how you feel and react, if everything about you is your choice, what is there to be conflicted about?  You may lose your peace from time to time, when you slip and give up your conscious choice, letting your subconscious back into control, but as soon as you return to conscious awareness of choice, your peace will return.

Incidentally, when you have this state of conscious awareness of choice as your normal state, other people will notice.  People may turn to you for leadership, since they can see that you have it together.  They may come to you with questions and problems, some of which you may wonder why they thought you could help.  They are likely to give you trust, often trust far beyond what they should give someone they know to the extent they know you… you may find strangers telling you things they would be better off keeping to themselves.  Most of all, they will see you as someone they should emulate, which can bring positive or negative responses.

Acceptance of that awareness, the power of conscious choice, is good for you and good for others.  It can bring peace and harmony to you, as well as improving your ability to make choose the path that is best for you in any number of circumstances (the best for you in the sense that it fits who you are the best, not in the sense that it brings the most gain to you in the eyes of the outside world).   It shows other people that “people” can learn to respond to situations in the way they choose, rather than just letting their subconscious respond.  It shows them that ongoing, lasting peace is attainable by someone they know, not just some Tibetan monk chanting in a Buddhist temple.  It might even lead them to the knowledge that they, too, are who they choose to be.

Update:  On a personal note, I went through this process of realization and becoming aware the first time around ten years ago.  At the time, I had been suffering from severe clinical depression for years, though I had never been treated for it.  My depression caused me to sleep very little, until I was down to about 45 minutes per night, which causes all sorts of interesting experiences after a few days (or weeks).  It got to the point where I was hospitalized, and for the first time given medication to help (I think the medicine they gave me to let me sleep helped nearly as much as the anti-depressants).  I was given a month’s worth of Prozac, and that really helped… it pushed back the funk far enough that I could actually think clearly.  It was at this point that I began (I still have slips) to acknowledge control of my own thoughts, feelings, and actions.  Since then, I have had one major backslide into depression (which was around seven years ago), where I needed medicine to help.  Again, I only needed one month’s worth of aid from the pills, and I got my mind straightened back out.  Since then I have had a few slips, including one just the other day, but now they only last hours.  I have taken ownership enough that it has changed my subconscious mind’s natural reaction to bad things, where instead of dwelling on them, I consider them and let them go.  I can’t even begin to accurately describe how much of a difference that makes… it’s an absolutely amazing change.

Most people can barely find a moment’s peace in their hectic lives, yet others, who accomplish the same amount, simply radiate peace at all times.  There is a simple but difficult step that will move you from the former group toward the latter.

It is hard to find peace.  There are few, if any, people who will deny that.  There is a reason why it is hard to find peace… and that’s because you lose the peace in your seeking.  Peace is inside you, in your heart and in your mind.  By seeking peace, you are looking at it as outside of you.  Since it is, in reality, inside you, you will never find it by seeking it.

Yet those people mentioned in the first paragraph have “found” peace.  They did so by learning that it was inside themselves, and giving up seeking it.  You have control of virtually everything inside you, and can have more or less of it.  Yet when you move it outside of yourself, you lose control of it.  This is true for peace, happiness, sadness, anger… even mental focus and creativity.  As soon as you make it something other than you, you lose the ability to control when you will have it and how much of it you will have.

When you seek for something to bring you happiness, you are, by that very act, placing the happiness outside of yourself.  You’re saying “If only I had that, I would be happy”.  When you say that, you are wrong.  Even if you are happy when you have “that”, by tying your happiness to “that”, you allow someone else to take it away by taking away “that”.

It works similarly with anger.  When you allow something outside of you make you angry, you are giving up control of something internal.  Others can control you by doing whatever it is that makes you angry.  You can take that control back by understanding that it is truly your choice to allow them to make you angry, that if you merely reframe the situation, it would not make you angry at all, and therefore it is not the situation that is making you angry, it is your perception of it, thus taking control back for yourself.

When you look inside yourself, to who you truly are, and accept that true self, you can have peace and happiness at will.  All you have to do is turn back to the you that is inside, rather than the outside persona that you assume for the benefit of others.  Any time you turn away from that internal self, and seek validation from outside yourself, you are giving up control of your own internal self.  You are giving it to people or circumstances outside yourself, allowing them to decide whether you are at peace, sad, happy, angry, focused or distracted.

To move from always seeking and never finding to never seeking and always having, take control back for yourself.  Understand that everything that you do, and everything that you feel, is inside you.  Everything is your own choice… and if everything is your own choice, then all the power to choose who you are is yours, too.  You are that which you choose to be.

Remember that…

You are that which you choose to be.

While schools teach many useful things, there are some things they regrettably do not.  It is good to know science, history, and mathematics, and English is essential for those of us who live in the United States, but one of the most important things of all for any male to learn is left in the dust.  One of the most important things to learn as a boy is how to be a man.

The first place that you learn what it means to be a man is your father, and you learn more by his example than by his words, though you DO still learn from his words.  That puts children whose father never “grew up” mentally and emotionally at a serious disadvantage.  If the person from whom you are learning to be an adult still acts like a child, then that is what you will learn.

That means that if you are a father, you need to be especially careful, because your children, and your sons in particular, are going to be watching you.  They will learn from what you do, learning what is right and what is wrong, what is acceptable and what is not, so it is essential that you make sure that you behave the way you want them to learn to behave.  It is also essential that you spend time with them, to give them the opportunity to learn from you.

So what happens to children who do not have a father from whom to learn?  They must find someone else to teach them.  Unfortunately, children have no way of knowing who is a good choice and who is a bad choice, so they will mostly simply find whoever is most convenient.  That’s one reason that mentoring programs are such a great thing… they can provide a good example to learn from.

With all of the above said, what is it that distinguishes a man from a boy?  What can you look at to say whether someone is a good man?  Most importantly of all, for the males reading this, what can you look at inside yourself, and what can you learn, in order to be that good man?   Here is a list of the core attributes of a man:

1. Honor

   This is the core, the all encompassing attribute of what it means to be a man.  It includes all of the other attributes, blended into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.  Honor means you tell the truth, even when it hurts.  Honor means you take care of your responsibilities.  Honor means you live up to any committment you make, even when it’s hard.  Honor means taking care of those weaker than you.  Honor means all of these things and more… and you know it when you see it, whether in a person you meet or in a character in a movie (think Leonidas in 300).  Maintaining your honor is essential to being a man, but part of maintaining your honor is knowing which of its components is more important when they are in conflict.

2. Integrity

   Integrity is all about truth.  That means being truthful everywhere and to everyone, including yourself.  It means don’t pretend to be something or someone that you are not.  It means accepting the truth of who you are, and if you don’t like it, accepting the responsibility of changing it, not just acting like it’s not even there.  A man of integrity is true to himself, true to others, and true to his word.  He doesn’t need to swear an oath or make a promise, because his yes means yes and his no means no.

3. Responsibility

   Responsibility is another essential component.  A man must take responsibility for his own choices, both to himself and to others.  That means that you cannot blame others for things you do, or the way you are, because they can only influence you to the extent that you choose to allow them.  If you accept responsibility for something, it is up to you to make sure it is done, and to accept the blame if it is not, regardless of why it is not.  If you cannot be sure that you can do it, then do not say that you will.

4. Respect

   A man gives respect to those around him until they show that they are not worthy of it.  And even then, he gives them the opportunity to earn it back.  All interactions with others should be done inside the framework of respect… even if someone has shown that their behavior is not worthy of respect, you can respect their knowledge and/or expertise in whatever areas they have it.  Also keep in mind that regardless of whether someone is worthy of your respect or not, you should still treat them with respect… just be aware of it in your expectations of them and their behavior.

5. Faithfulness

   Responsibility is about following through on what you say you will do.  Faithfulness is about following through on the things that you should be doing whether or not you have said you will.  Faithfulness is about going the extra mile to do the right thing in the right way, even if it means going beyond what you said you would do.  Faithfulness is what comes after responsibility… when you don’t just do things because you said you would and you feel like you’re stuck with it now, but instead do them because they are the right thing to do.

6. Compassion

   Compassion is one of the primary things that differentiates man from animal, and man from machine.  When you feel that other people are individuals, with their own worth, and their own value, worthy of your help, your work, and your consideration on their own merit, then you have compassion.  Compassion isn’t feeling sorry for people, it’s feeling that they are worthy of your time and effort, and then giving it to them.  You shouldn’t just feel compassion for those in worse situations than you, you should feel it for everyone.  Everyone should be worthy of your time and effort when they need help with something.

7. Strength

   Strength is another part of being a man that is commonly misunderstood.  Strength isn’t about not admitting your weaknesses (or mistakes), it’s not about not having or showing emotions, and it’s not about how much weight you can lift.  Strength is about following through on all of the things above.  Strength is doing what you should be doing, regardless of how hard it is or how you feel about it.  It actually shows far more strength to admit your weaknesses and mistakes, and then do something about them (I cannot emphasize that enough… admitting weaknesses and mistakes may be hard, but the real sign of strength is that you then do something to fix, or compensate for, them), than it does to try to hide them or pretend they don’t exist.

That’s what it takes to be a man instead of an adult boy.  Every male has it in them to do the things listed above, and every male will fail at each of them at some point.  The difference is that for a man, the failure is the exception, not the rule, and when they fail at one of them, they pick themselves back up and get back to it.

Do you have bad dreams, whether nightmares of being chased or just those really intense, weird dreams that leave you more drained than before you went to sleep?  There’s a really simple process that, when done regularly, will very nearly eradicate such dreams, leaving you sleeping like a baby.

As you probably already know, dreams are generally related in some way to events that happened or things you thought about during the day.  While your mind is at rest, your subconscious starts bringing up all these little things from the day that didn’t quite get taken care of, and the conscious mind, since you are sleeping, tries to piece all these small, mostly unrelated, things together into something coherent.  Since most of the stuff is not particularly related, trying to force it into something coherent can leave you with those really weird dreams.

Nightmares generally come about when one of those things that you didn’t finish during the day is particularly intense and you perceive it in a negative manner.  That could be something like financial worries, or feelings of being stuck, or fear of being rejected.  Pretty much any thoughts that are emotionally charged in a negative way can cause bad dreams.

The intensity of your dreams is generally determined by the intensity of the emotions that you associated with the things that you didn’t resolve during the day.  If a really negatively charged event happens, or if you are feeling very strongly negative about something, you can have some very intense nightmares.  Losing your job, or fearing that you are likely to do so, can result in some nasty dreams.  So can having a relationship end, or the belief that it will.  Anything that is that strongly charged with negative emotions can leave you in bad shape when it comes to dreaming.

So, now that you know where bad dreams come from, what can you do about it?  Well, it’s actually very simple, although not always easy, to do.   And it only takes about fifteen minutes.

The process is simple.  Start off by finding a comfortable and quiet spot where you can be by yourself about fifteen minutes (the time it takes can vary depending on you and how intense your day was) before you go to bed.  Make sure that the lights aren’t too bright, although you don’t really want it dark either… light about equivalent to a 40 watt bulb works well for most people.  When finding this spot, try to avoid it being your bed, and in fact, try to find some place you can sit, rather than lay down.

Once you have your spot, let your mind start to drift.  Do NOT try to control what you think about… don’t actively TRY to think about the events from the day, just let any thoughts that come up float about until they leave on their own.  The same goes for emotions that come up… let them come up, float around, and drift off on their own.  What you are doing is allowing your subconscious to bring up all the things it needs to bring up, but while you are awake, instead of asleep.  This allows you to deal with them in a way that actually makes sense, instead of trying to piece them together into some sort of story line.

Let this continue until the flow of thoughts, feelings, and images slows down, hopefully even coming to a stop, where you reach internal quiet.  If you reach this point, you will find that you have more peace throughout your life, not just more peaceful sleep.  Even if you don’t quite reach the point of quiet, though, you’ll still have dealt with much of the stuff that would generally cause your bad dreams.  You DO need to keep at it until your thoughts slow, though, because the surface, shallow stuff will come out first, and what you need to get rid of is the deeper stuff that only comes up once all the little stuff is dealt with.

This process will generally take about fifteen minutes, but the time can vary.  If you do it regularly, especially if you do it more than just before bed, the time necessary can drop considerably.  On the other hand, if you had a really eventful and stressful day, it may take longer, as you have more things to deal with.  Just keep at it until your thoughts slow or stop.

One last thing… this has to be some place that you feel safe and unlikely to be interrupted.  Interruptions can cause you to have to start all over again, even if it’s from someone you love, like your wife or child, as they interrupt the flow of thoughts.  You also likely won’t relax enough if you expect to be interrupted, even if it doesn’t actually happen.  Same goes for feeling safe… if you don’t feel safe, you won’t relax enough to let the stuff start flowing.

If you do this every day, you will essentially never have nightmares again.  You’ll also find that you get better sleep, and likely even need less of it.  You’ll feel better rested and more focused.  With all of that waiting for you, and only costing fifteen minutes of your time, what are you waiting for?

The Law Of Attraction, or LOA, essentially says that whatever your dominant thoughts are about, more of that thing will manifest in your life.  One of the common examples is having an “abundance mindset”, or to use a better known phrase, seeing the world as your oyster, waiting for you to pluck out the pearl.  What’s interesting about the LOA is that it actually works.

So why do some people use mysterious, unexplainable terms to describe a process that has a simple, common sense explanation?  Because it sells.  If you explain something, even something new and useful, to a person in terms so simple that they feel like it’s common sense, they won’t tell anyone else about it.  Why not?  Because they don’t want the other person to think, or worse yet say, “Duh, everybody knows that.”

On the other hand, if you DO use mysterious, unexplainable terms, they will tell all KINDS of people, because they think it makes them sound like they know something special, that they are knowledgeable in an area where most people are not.  This make them feel special and smart, which is a good thing to make someone feel if you want to sell them something (ask anyone who knows anything at all about marketing).

How does this apply to this article?  Well, there are sources out there, like The Secret, whose logo appears above, that explain the LOA in the way mentioned above.  They use terms like “universal intelligence” (meaning a single awareness that encompasses all of existence) or “secret teachers”, intending to instill exactly the feelings I mentioned.

There is an easier, non-mystical explanation of the LOA.  If you think about something more, you become more aware of it, or things that affect it, around you.  Have you ever noticed that right after you or someone close to you buys a new car, you start seeing a lot more of those cars around you?   Or, more applicable to the topic, have you noticed that when something is on your mind, like you think maybe your significant other is cheating, that you notice all sorts of things related to that thought?

When we think about something, we are telling our subconscious that it is important, and should be brought to our attention.  The more we think about it, the more we are reinforcing this message, giving whatever it is more and more priority in terms of having it and things related to it brought to our conscious awareness from the jumble of constant input from reality.  It becomes more and more likely to get past the filters that the subconscious has in place to keep our conscious awareness from being flooded and overwhelmed.

Since more things about the thought or related to the thought are coming to our attention,we perceive things in a way that is colored by that thought that keeps coming up.  This means that if you have been thinking, as in the example above, that your wife is cheating, when you smell a new perfume on her, you may perceive it as being an attempt to impress “the other man”.  If you hadn’t been thinking that, you might instead think “Oh, she smells good.  I’ll have to ask her to wear this one more often.”  That’s a pretty huge difference.

So what happens when you start perceiving things through the lens of whatever thought has been dominant lately?  It changes which actions seem to make the most sense, which ones are better suited to achieving your goals, be they conscious or subconscious.  Again from the example above, the choices which bring you toward the subconscious goal of “don’t get hurt”, which nearly everyone has,  are very different when you don’t trust your spouse.  This obviously affects which choices you make, thus affecting your actions, and bringing about the manifestation of your most dominant thoughts, as the LOA says will happen.

So, to summarize, when you think about something more often, you are telling your subconscious to alert you to things related to it.  As it does so, this affects your perception of the situations around you.  This changing perception, in turn, causes certain choices to look more appealing, making you more likely to make those choices and take the actions associated with them.  Taking these actions then brings about the manifestation of your originating thought.

What this boils down to is that the LOA is real, actually works, and you can make use of that in the way that the people who use mystical terms teach.  It WILL work, because it’s still the same process, just as pushing the power button will turn on your TV, whether you think that’s because it flips an electrical switch or because it prods a little hamster inside to start running on its wheel.  It doesn’t really matter what explanation you use, if you follow the same process, you get the same results.

But if you want people to spread the word, use mysterious and unexplainable terms to describe that process.  (D’oh!  I guess that means nobody is going to spread the word for me!

People have all different ideas about pain.  There is a well known phrase, especially among bodybuilders, that says “No pain, no gain”.  That concept is not only incorrect, it can be dangerous.  Some people associate pain with growth, as in growing pains, but the truth is that the pain that is associated with growth is usually a result of trying to grow too much too fast.

Pain is a warning that we are doing something that is going to require healing.  The degree of pain is determined by the amount of healing that our subconscious predicts it is going to require.  These predictions are not always accurate… for example, paper cuts hurt far beyond the amount of healing that is going to be necessary.  Pain can range from a mild discomfort for something that just needs a bit of down time to disabling, where you cannot function properly, to incapacitating, where your subconscious actually shuts down your consciousness due to the severity (by the way, although I appreciate this function, saving me from experiencing the most excruciating pain, I find it disturbing that my subconscious can shut down my conscious mind).

When you can refer to it as “pain” rather than pain, a mild discomfort can be merely a sign of strenuous activity.  This is essentially your subconscious saying “Okay, we’re doing something, putting out effort, and we’re capable of doing it, but we’re going to need to rest to restore the energy we’re using”.  This can be a good thing, depending on the circumstances.  It is a positive sign when working out, for instance, or when you sink a lot of energy into a new project.  You end up, as long as you don’t push it too far, with that “good tired” feeling, where you’re satisfied that you have accomplished something worthwhile.

When pain goes beyond that mild discomfort to something more severe, however, that is your subconscious telling you that need to stop because you are inflicting damage, not just using up energy.  This is true whether it’s physical pain or emotional pain (emotional pain contains pretty much all negative emotions… depression, anger, sadness, etc.).  If you are working out, and you start feeling sharp pain, that means that you need to stop right when you feel it, not push through it, as you’re no longer building, but tearing down… you might be hurting your joint, tearing a muscle too much, or something else, but you need to stop.  The same goes for emotional pain.  If you start feeling depressed, for example, it means that you’re doing something that is inflicting damage to your self.  You need to stop, clear your mind, take a bit of quiet time for yourself, and figure out what exactly it is that you’re doing that’s causing the injury, so you can stop doing it and find another way to get to where you were trying to go with the action that is bringing you pain.

If you are severely depressed a lot of the time, then you probably have both old injuries (which can be healed), and currently existing patterns of behavior which are causing it.  The same goes for anger, hatred, fear, or other negative emotions.  They are caused by your own behavior or thought patterns, though they may, and likely do, appear to come from outside.  This is because you can only be mentally affected by outside factors to the extent you allow it.  For instance, if someone always finds ways to bring up your weight, and it makes you depressed, that is because you are allowing that person’s words to shape your own self image.  You do not have to do this… your self image is your own to shape as you desire.  If you find yourself feeling negative emotions due to other people, make sure you take a look at how much you are allowing other people to define your own image of who you are… who you are inside, which is again affected by who you are outside only to the extent you allow it to be.

The truth about pain is that it’s a wake-up notice from your subconscious.  Sharp pain, or long lasting dull aches, are a warning that you need to stop and evaluate what you are doing to find the problem.  Once you find the problem, you can go to work on correcting it.   Mental pain, which is what I know best how to heal, is almost always a factor of letting something other than you conscious mind determine who you perceive yourself to be.  This is most often either mistaking what you do for who you are or allowing what you think other people think about you (which is at best an educated guess, as even what they say they think may not be what they really think) to determine who you think you are.  If you can take the time to change those two behaviors, most negative emotions (or mental pain) will dry up and go away.

You’ve heard of the seven deadly sins?  Well, they are deadly no longer.  With the (relatively) simple techniques listed below each of the “deadly” sins, you will reduce their damaging power.  Once you have mastered the techniques, the once deadly sins will be only slightly injurious.

1. Lust
   

   Lust is actually one of the easiest sins to reduce in power.  All it requires is that you picture how you will feel one week after you actually achieve whatever it is you lust after.  Lust is purely a desire for things, and things never truly fulfill desires.  It is often driven by the temptation of forbidden fruit.  Once you picture having had what it is you’re lusting after for a week, the intense feelings of lust are likely to fade away (assuming that you actually get your mind PAST the point of achieving the desire).

2. Gluttony
   

   The solution for the sin of gluttony is actually very similar to the one for lust.  Lust and gluttony are very closely related… lust is strong desire for one thing (this can include people… when they are the object of lust, you are viewing them as things, not people), where gluttony is strong desire to have one thing (see note above) over and over until the point that it is all used up or you have had so much of it that more will make you sick.  The solution is basically the same, but not so distant in the future.  Imagine how you would feel at the point that you have completely stuffed yourself (either literally, in the case of food, or figuratively if your gluttony applies to something else), and then being forced to do whatever it is five more times.  It will most likely make you sick at the thought of even doing it once.

3. Greed
   

   Greed is not quite so easy, though it’s certainly not impossible.  It, too, is related to lust, but it is a lust after more and more things, rather than after one thing, or after one thing repeatedly like gluttony.  This one is more difficult because it involves changing the way you look at things.  In order to beat greed, you have to take a look at what actually brings you enjoyment.  If you are honest with yourself, you’ll find that having things never brings long term enjoyment.  It is the journey toward achieving goals (such as having this or that) that brings more long term enjoyment and fulfillment… but if you only focus on the having this or that, you’re throwing away the enjoyment of the way there.  Greed never leaves you happy, because as soon as you achieve one thing, you become greedy for the next.

   A simple technique to learn this different mindset is to write down every night what three things brought you the most enjoyment, made you the most happy that day.  If you continue this for any length of time, not only will it make you happier (as you realize there are good things every day), but you will notice that “things” rarely end up on your list, with it being far more likely that experiences vastly outnumber things.

4. Sloth
   

   Sloth, or laziness is hard to banish but it is easy to remove the sting.  Sloth can easily be countered by learning two new habits:  first, find a place for everything to, as I usually put it, “live”, and second, take care of every task you can as soon as you become aware of it.

   Having a place where everything “lives” means having a place where that specific thing, like your keys, or that type of thing, like bills, go any time you’re not actively using them.  This virtually eliminates lost keys, misplaced (and therefore late) bills, etc.  It keeps where you live and where you work relatively neat and tidy, and makes it easy for you to find what you’re looking for quickly when needed.

   The other half of this, completing tasks as soon as you become aware of them, does away with the laziness part of sloth.  I, personally, am a procrastinator by nature.  I have generally removed the detrimental effects of this on my life by not allowing myself to put off tasks at all.  That means not even for a few minutes, and especially not until the next day.  If I put it off a little bit, then it’s easy to keep putting it off.  This is also true for getting up out of bed in the morning, from my experience… if you get up immediately when you wake up, you are alert immediately, and have no problem functioning.  If you delay, hitting the snooze button, it makes it harder to get up, even if you purposely allow yourself thirty minutes for this “waking up” time.

5. Wrath
   

   Wrath, generally referred to as rage today, is essentially very nearly mindless anger.  It is anger that is so overwhelming that it outweighs your common sense, causing you to overreact.  It usually is caused by suppressed mental or emotional pain (which can be any negative emotion or hurt).  The solution is to deal with these suppressed issues, and once you have dealt with them, deal with any new issues that come up as soon as they come up (see the procrastination part under sloth, above).  If you don’t have any suppressed issues, you will find very little anger at all, let alone so hot as to deserve the name wrath.

6. Envy
   

   Envy… envy is the result of a mindset saying that you can’t have something.  It is very difficult to be envious of something that you feel like you can have, if you want it and are willing to work for it.  If you have a Ferrari, you don’t envy someone with a Mercedes.  If you have a beautiful, loving wife, you don’t envy someone else that has a hot girlfriend.  Defeating envy is like defeating greed, in that it requires you to change your mindset.  You need to make two changes, the first being stepping back and looking at what you really want, which is often not the same as what you think you want if you don’t take the time to actually think about it.  The second is to realize that you can have just about anything you want, you just have to deal with the work necessary to achieve it and the consequences of acquiring it.  If you shortcut the work by stealing it, for instance, there are consequences of that action.

7. Pride
   

   Pride, the seventh and final sin on this list… pride is a result of thinking that people are of different values, and that those values are related.  What this means is that you think that one thing or another makes someone better than another person.  It could be intelligence, money, good works, or social status… it could be pretty much anything, if you think that someone with more (or less, for that matter) of whatever standard it is is a better person because of having more (or less) of it.  The secret of defeating pride, then, is to realize that each person is a complete individual, and that their value is not related to anyone else.  That even includes yourself… your value has no relation to anyone else’s value.  The only method of evaluating yourself that makes sense or is useful at all is how close you are to becoming who you choose to be… and this is true for others as well.  You cannot truly evaluate the value of someone else, as their true value and even who they truly are cannot be measured by external things, not even using their attributes (like intelligence) and actions together, as you cannot know the true extent of the former, or the true reasons behind the latter.

   Since you cannot compare your worth to anyone else’s legitimately, there is nothing about which to have sinful pride.  Pride only comes from thinking your value, at least in a certain area, is higher than that of others.  If you give up that idea/belief, there is no pride (other than pride in one’s progress towards one’s own goals, which is not sinful, I think).

So there you have it:  seven sins, and seven ways to defeat the power of those sins.  There are even a few links scattered throughout to more in-depth writings on the topics.  So the promise given at the beginning is now kept.  If you do what has been suggested above, you will soon see the benefits/results.

Perception is what we are presented with once our internal filters are applied to reality.  If you’ve been with me so far, you have learned how filters are formed, and how to become aware of the filters you already have.  Now we’ve reached the most crucial part:  learning to create, replace, and discard your filters.

If you’ve put into practice some of the techniques from the previous article in the series, you now are aware of what at least some of your internal filters are.  Once you are aware of a filter, you can, at your choice, either replace or discard it.  You can also create new filters, but let’s save that until the end, as dealing with filters that you already have is usually more urgent.

If you don’t like a filter you already have, you can either replace it with another, or discard it entirely.  The first step to either result is to become aware not just of the filter’s existence (obviously you’ve already done this or you wouldn’t know that there is something you want to change), but to become aware of it’s implementation.  That means becoming aware of every time it gets called, every time something passes through it.  The best technique I’ve found for this so far is some sort of reminder.  This could be putting a coin in a jar, tying a knot in a string, or one I’ve read about recently, switching a bracelet from one wrist to the other.  Each time you do one of these things, it’s teaching your subconscious to alert your conscious mind when whatever you’re trying to become aware of happens, in this case the usage of the filter you’ve chosen.

Now that you’re aware of each usage, you can either consciously apply a different filter that you would like to replace your current one, or you can work on trying to perceive whatever it is without the filter at all.  For example, if you want to remove a filter of being scared of dogs, each time you see one, and feel that filter kicking in, you can do your reminder task and then make yourself stop and see that the dog is not a threat, perhaps even going so far as asking the owner if you can pet it, depending on how great your fear is and how far in the removal process you are.  If you want to replace a filter, say to go from seeing the world through a scarcity filter to seeing it through an abundance filter, you can do your reminder task, and then make a conscious effort to perceive the same situation through the new filter you want.  In the example of scarcity vs abundance, for instance, if you notice yourself looking at something as something that you can’t have, make a conscious effort to change and see it as something that will take more effort to have, and evaluate it in the context of effort versus reward instead of simply seeing it as something you can’t have.

Creating a new filter is very similar to replacing an old one (in fact, replacing one involves creating the replacement filter).  Basically, you need to become aware of situations where the filter you would like to acquire would apply, and then make a conscious effort to see that situation through the new filter.  There is another way to acquire new filters, though, that is easier in some ways, and more difficult in others.  The simplest way to acquire a new filter is to be around someone, or even better multiple people, who already have that filter.  This is even more effective, as I mentioned in part 2 of this series, if you consider that other person (or those other people) to be an authority in the part of life to which the filter applies.

Creating, discarding, and replacing filters is generally not an instant process, and the time it requires is directly related to how deep the filter is set (for discarding and replacing) or how deep you want the filter set (for creating).  Very shallow filters may take very little time or effort, while very deep filters may take weeks, months, years, or even decades.  On the positive side, while deep filters may take a long time to complete the process (whichever it is, creating, discarding, or replacing), there is generally noticeable progress along the way, so that you don’t get too discouraged and give up.

Well, that covers the basics of internal filters and biases.  You now know enough to consciously change how you see the world, and through that, who you are.  If you put into practice what you’ve learned, you will find it becomes easier as you go.  You will also probably have insights that help to make it even easier.  This process of becoming who you choose to be is what I’m talking about with the slogan at the top – Intelligent Self Development.

Articles In This Series:  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4