[There is a later and more compact version of my Manifesto here]
Continuing very strong, but some caffeine issues (tea). I am giving myself the next two weeks to sober up completely, even if I decide to continue drinking tea after the two weeks. Even so the fact that I’ve been 11 days off coffee is a miracle.
Over the last week I finished processing 1500 emails, networking like crazy the whole way (email, Linkedin, Facebook, Meetup.com), and cleared 12 months of clutter from my personal spaces. I had already (in the last month), conducted extensive research and networking around polyphasic sleep, built myself a new office space, a new computer, completed two smallish e-learning contracts, done some work on finding a job, and did extensive writing and updating of my personal websites.
This has been, without a doubt, one of the happiest and most productive times of my life. Moving forward, I have very substantial work to do. On the personal front, taxes, finances, initiating a lawsuit, diet changes, and ongoing networking around the Basic Sensuality course. On the professional front, I still need to find a job, make a definitive decision about my professional training and development, and begin it (ie PMP, .Net or whatever).
This is a lot to do, but I feel myself moving ahead, with a certain sense of inevitability, towards a near-complete resolution of my current personal and professional work backlog, of my historical disorganization and overwhelm around these issues, and my long-standing issues around career and money. With an available 12 hours a day of useful focused intellectual work, this occurs as inevitable.
I can say therefore, that this experiment has been a spectacular success so far, and it can only get better as I fine-tune my personal well-being strategies (diet, exercise, addictions, and spiritual practices). 11 days is an extremely short-time to be reporting deep permanent lifestyle and consciousness changes of this nature. Quite amazing actually – at this stage I really want to take a step back, review what I’ve accomplished, and give myself a big “Wow”.
For all these reasons I am not planning a big day today. All of my life I feel I have been pushing, pushing, driving, driving, fighting, fighting, with a perceived sense of urgency around business and psychic survival. For years I have felt a sense of despair around these issues. This is a very ADD / ADHD thing actually, but I am not classically ADHD (although I could be wrong in this). I relate more to Barbara Sher’s “scanner” category – people who are interested in everything but have not yet been able to identify a single income-generating primary interest:
“… If you’ve ever said these things to yourself, chances are good that you’re a Scanner, a very special kind of thinker. Unlike those people who seem to find and be satisfied with one area of interest, you’re genetically wired to be interested in many things, and that’s exactly what you’ve been trying to do. Because your behavior is unfamiliar — even unsettling — to the people around you, you’ve been taught that you’re doing something wrong and you must try to change. But what you’ve been told is a mistake — you have been misdiagnosed. You’re a different creature altogether. What you’ve assumed is a disability to be overcome by sheer will is actually an exceptional gift. You are the owner of a remarkable, multi talented brain trying to do its work in a world that doesn’t understand who you are and doesn’t know why you behave as you do. And unless you know who you are, you’re going to agree with them! Not only would that be unfair and inaccurate, it could prevent you from developing your gifts and making your contribution to the world. The stakes are very high… “ – Barbara Sher
I particularly like “the stakes are very high”. This is exactly what I have been trying to communicate to people for some time, and not fully getting their understanding. A great number of people think that I am anxiously and frantically grasping at straws in the form of imaginary solutions to my current challenges. But the truth is, that I am conducting a radical experiment in consciousness that is designed to greatly enhance my happiness, quality of relationships, effectiveness in the world, and contribution – an experiment that appears to be dramatically successful. I have major gifts to offer the world, I have profound thoughts to share on many important issues directly affecting the quality of people’s lives and the defining myths of our culture, and to die with “my song still inside me” is not how it is going to go. Sorry. To say it like this is not selfishness, on the contrary it is the highest form of selflessness:
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
But if I am only for myself, who am I?
If not now, when?” - Hillel
There will always be a need for balance in terms of inner vs. outer work, but I think that hardly anyone gives this work the attention it deserves by creating a strategic plan for their own development, and therefore they are missing out on unusual levels of happiness, connection and personal effectiveness. I basically believe that all physical manifestations flow from inwards (consciousness) to outwards (real-world physical reality, the world of form). At certain levels of consciousness (levels that I have occasionally touched), the world of form doesn’t even exist at all – it is just a manifestation of consciousness and of love (love being nothing other than positive attention or focused consciousness). I believe in the possibility of perfect manifestation (thoughts creating form, instantly). This is classic so-called “Law of Attraction” (LOA), but my ideas on this go further. Classic LOA as described by Esther Hicks has a fair amount of magical thinking in it. The point is to focus all of one’s resources – physical, emotional, intellectual, financial, network and relational – on the goal, and then to let go and watch it begin to take form in front of one’s eyes, taking enormous delight in all stages of its creation. Classic LOA says that to think pleasurably about the goal is sufficient, and that is my critique with LOA. It’s a good beginning, but it is not enough. We have been given a brain, God wants us to use it.
Anyway, this is what is happening to me right now. With all my emotional ups and downs, with all the challenges I am facing, I am currently living (and I have been for 7 months now) a near-continuous kind of deep happiness and ecstatic / euphoric creative expression. Call it pathology (hypomania) or genius, and you would both be right. However, this is my destiny:
As I get older (and hopefully wiser), there is one fundamental belief that wells up inside me with the same power as “we hold these truths to be self-evident”: that until I can fully own the “courage of my convictions” and start to pursue my passions and dreams with the entire force of my being and with all the intelligence, resources and determination that I have been endowed with by my creator – until that truly happens I am fucked. I would rather die than live an ordinary life or attempt to medicate myself into being satisfied with mediocrity (even if such a thing were possible, which it appears not to be – I have tried). The package I come in has elements of pathology and elements of genius. Which one will win out only the future will tell, but if I don’t go full-out here the end-result is guaranteed.
