Hello, All (or, rather, One)

I'm Tim, and I discovered the My Big TOE trilogy by what must have been some synchronicitic means (randomly finding a link to one of Tom's lectures somehow via Facebook). I started watching it, and as soon as he said to be both open-minded and skeptical, I knew he was on to something, and the whole theory makes so much intuitive sense. I've watched, rewatched, re-rewatched, and re-re-rewatched the lectures on YouTube and have read about halfway through the book (I do plan on finishing it... Eventually. I'm a painfully slow reader, though).

Anyway, yeah, I've always been one to think outside the box (often so far outside it I almost get lost), and my thinking has been getting deeper and more intuitive over time, so much so that it's often difficult for me to relate to the relatively shallow-minded people around me (but I still try). So I'm glad I've finally found a place full of people who share the same deep desires for understanding, expanding consciousness, enlightenment, growing spiritually, or whatever you wish to call it.

Okay, as for the "Something of a Question" part- so one thing I've been trying to do as of recent is to "figure myself out", so to speak. Sometimes I feel my mind is like a knotted labyrinth of great potential that is seemingly never fully reached due to some kind of blockage (fear and ego, I presume). One manifestation of this blockage of potential is the fact that I'm a pretty good artist and writer (at least, I've been referred to as such, and I prefer to think better of myself than worse), yet I can't seem to actually produce anything. I get ideas all the time, almost perpetually, and they're usually pretty darn good ones, too. Yet, when I actually try to put forth some kind of effort towards realizing that idea for others to enjoy, I either get overwhelmed by the sheer size of the project or come across some unfortunate snag in development and become discouraged. I feel this is some kind of test, but I'm not entirely sure of the exact nature of it. So, I suppose my question is- What are some ways to really dig deep into oneself and find all the problems there in order to work towards getting rid of them? Or something like that. Any sort of answer or response will help.

So anyway, yeah, I exist (probably), and now you know.

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"The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man."
-- Carl Jung

Hi Timothesium and welcome to the forum.

Maybe you can start writing about your own difficulties with writing. Give it a chance and you may have quite a surprise.

Take one step at a time and do what you can. Don't feel too discouraged. This happens because you want a certain outcome from it. This is an ego issue. In order to feel safe the ego will do whatever it takes to keep it in the comfort zone. Be bold and explore the unknown. Plunge deeply and never look back.

In my experience, what you need to do is to evaluate all of your good ideas and concepts for projects and weigh them against feasibility, inherent problems of completion, perhaps expense of completion or time to completion and decide upon the one or two most promising. Then work on the best one in potential and keep the next best in your mind. Do not deviate from that best one because of difficulties. Keep concentrated on that one project. Knowing that you have another almost as good in mind may help to keep you from feeling that all your eggs are in that one basket.

This in opposition to starting a dozen projects as you skip to the next as you hit a snag in each successively. Your efforts are dissipated by this tendency of too easily getting started, to ready to be tripped up and too hard to complete approach.

Ted

Do you meditate? If not, I recommend you do.

It's a valuable tool for many reasons, one of which is self-discovery. It is a great way to "dig deep into oneself".

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Mike

excellent advice above!

based on personal experience and observation of persons close to me, my advice is find a way to pay the rent based on using the left hemisphere of your brain (linear thinking, logic, discipline), and find a creative outlet for your right hemisphere (arts, writing) that is not tied to generating money, at least as a starting point for the adult portion of the simulation. Over time these separate efforts will start to merge.

If you are one in a million that is exceptionally gifted, the creative portion of your activity might become a profit centre, but this is rare unless you end up gearing toward the commercial aspect instead of the creative aspect - and you end up a sell out regardless in this aspect.

pick an academic discipline (engineering, software, medicine, accounting, law, physics, economics, business...) that will have a job at the end of it, or take a stab at entrepreneurship when young and can take chances, which will develop your left hemispheric and self discipline muscles. The student years are good for taking long breaks and doing challenging adventures into lands that are a bit outside your comfort zone.

for writing, book some time on the keyboard not far from waking up, and sit there and start writing anything...even if it is garbage. Meditate just before. Like in meditation, try to let your subconcious take over your writing...sort of like channelling...write from the IUOC level rather than the mental level, which is a process of letting go, getting out of the way

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Does this PMR make my butt look big?

Hi Tim and welcome to Tom's MBT dicsussion forums. You said something about thinking outrside the box wihtout getting lost, that's great. I say have an open mind but not so far open that your virtual brain falls out. I am writing a book. I've started maybe 5 books, but this book is "the one" for me. It is "the one" because I have personalized it to that it contains things I love to think about. I am creating two different Reality's in this book of one about 20 years from now, and one at the start of human with a completely different start of society with my loved ones and self in the story fractally making it even more fun to write. When you find the project, the one, it will be fun working on it. When I want to paint I need to have a picture to paint from, with this writing I am painting from scratch basically while combining the best out of three different "pictures" of the Clan of the Cave Bear books, The Left Behind Series for survival techniques, and MBT. What was the question? :)

Write down your idea quickly. I have probably forgot several life changing ideas already. Have you written a book before? Is it fiction, are you creating characters and story lines because you need to take notes as you go to maintain integrity in the story line. Write a short story if you haven't finished anything before because when you finish it you will get a good feeling that you will want to make happen again. That is my advice. Welcome again.
Love to you and yours,
Bette

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All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

Wow, so many really good welcomes and responses! Thank you so much, I appreciate all of them :D

@ ingerul9

I do that sometimes, be it through a very left brained analysis of my psyche or a very right-brained automatic writing (erm, typing). And I do have a tendency to have very specific expectations for the outcomes of my projects on a level that hasn't gotten past the intellect yet. I once came to the realization that the broader a desire, the more likely it is to obtain it, and conversely, the more specific, the less likely it is. Maybe I should broaden my desire more and not be so specific with it.

@ Ted Vollers

It's almost uncanny how accurately you described what I do (starting dozens of projects and jumping from one to the other each time I come across a snag of some sort). But anyway, that's really good advice. The biggest problem I have, or one of the biggest, is my near total lack of concentration. Sometimes when I jump from one project to another is simply because I get bored with the one I'm working on (no matter how exciting or interesting it was at first), and this other one is beckoning me to it, and I slowly drift over there after a while. It's a lot like being pulled in a thousand directions, you never wind up going anywhere. I guess I just need to discipline myself in this area more, focus on a single direction. At least then I'd make some headway in some direction.

@ msagansk

Not in any conventional way, but I do go into altered states of consciousness when I go walking and listen to the myriad music on my zune. In fact, that's where I get most of my most creative ideas, they just kinda come to me. Also something I've been doing as of recent is doing active imagination (from a mostly Jungian perspective), where I write and sketch out all the spontaneous unconscious imagery that comes to me and then later attempting to make sense of it, as if interpreting a dream. And I have found strange patterns of mythic symbols and archetypes, but I'm still in the process of making sense out of them.

@ kroeran

I suppose I could go into the field of psychology (as that's perhaps my favorite relatively left-brained field of study) and work on more artistic and creative projects on the side, or something. As for entrepreneurship, that actually really interests me, and I even have some ideas for starting a kind of business. As for writing, especially recently, I've been trying to write from a deeper level of intuition rather than having my intellect dictate everything (besides, it's not a very good writer anyway). It is definitely better to let the Muse possess you than to force the writing to be just the way the intellect wants it to be.

@ bette

Yes, I mostly write/draw fiction. I say "write/draw" because I don't do straight prose (usually) but rather combine words and pictures into what might be described as "comics" or "graphic novels" or what have you. I haven't finished any yet, but I've started a bunch. As for your advice, it's really good, I'll try using how fun something is as a kind of gauge or compass to guide me to "the one". I think I often forget the whole having fun part entirely. Hmm... Maybe that's why I haven't really stuck with anything. I forget to have fun!

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"The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man."
-- Carl Jung

Sydney Sheldon, one of the most successful and proficient writers of our time, once said, the difference between himself and most other writers is that he would wake up in the morning and sit at his desk for 8 hours every day, 5 or 6 days a week. So his advice seems to be: Just keep working.
Another idea that pops into my head is that you dont have to do it all by yourself. You may need to collaborate. I have found that we all have different strengths and weaknesses, and just like all the fingers on the hand are different, they all work together so well that the whole, seems to be, much greater than the sum of its parts.

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LOVE is the answer

peace
patrick

Tim,

Seeing more information from you now, I have the feeling that you are among the young victims of the way that our culture has gone. You acknowledge a short attention span. This has been done to you by the twitters and sound bites and video flashes and the superficiality of like/dislike of facebook culture and such like. It is why so many say they are bored in school. If you were a farmer in the primitive development of society, you would have died as you could not maintain the required long term/year long cycle required of agriculture with its soil preparation, tilling, planting, cultivation, weeding, on and on for months before you can reach harvest. At the same time, you would have failed as a hunter, often compared to the attention deficit sufferer, prepared to hare off after game and as required by the chase also prepared to wait motionless and at the ready for hours for the game to show upon the game trail or in the seal hole to shoot or thrust with spear. You cannot permit boredom to be a part of your efforts. You must have an attention span to be productive. Get angry at what society has done to you. Do not permit it to make you a victim of the butterfly mind syndrome.

Consider as an exercise reading My Big TOE instead of just watching videos that you mention. When you become bored, sit yourself down and tell yourself that boredom is unacceptable behavior when you are in the process of producing. Get control of yourself in this way. Don't end up unhappy over a life that could have included creativity and productivity but did not.

Ted

Tim,

In addition to all the above, here's my 2 cents. There's nothing mysterious here, you only need two things: Technique, and stict-to-it-iveness.

Technique is simple: Observe how you get ANYTHING done: You size up the project (the first few times at least, after which it becomes automatic), map out the task set in order of completion, and then DO it. For example, there was a time when you learned top tie your shoe. The first step was to put the thing on your foot. The second step was to draw your foot close enough to your hands to reach the laces. The third step was to grasp the laces and pull them tight. The fourth step was to cross them. The fifth was to take either and tuck it underneath the cross. The sixth step was to pull tight again. The seventh was to bend one of the laces into a loop. The eight was to take the other lace and wrap it around the base of the other loop. The ninth was to take the wrapping lace close to knot and pull it through the wrap. The tenth was to pull them both tight. It sounds enormously complicated (a ten step process! Gah!). But now it is automated.... you only think of needing to do it and go on autopilot thinking about the next thing and presto, it is done. But in the beginning you had to step it all out in an orderly fashion.

With writing or with drawing, it is much the same, though there are some differences. Writing: One considers one's objective(s); Then one lays out an outline. Most writers will then set that outline aside for a little time and then come back to it and revise, or else revise as they begin to write and realize that other things need to be in there, or perhaps order of presentation needs to be changed, etc.

And then, as per PG above, you sit down at your desk and just DO it. It is very much like writing computer code: Once the systems analyst has outlined the flow chart, it is basically monkey work. Just DO it. Also, as per PG, I have seen many times that writers say that one of their secrets to success is a methodical, daily, sit-at-the-damned-desk-no-matter-what-comes-of-it, everyday at the same time. Sometimes they will sit there for hours and not write a word, but sit there still is what they do.

Also I have observed a lot of what Ted referred (culturally induced short attention span) to, both in myself and in others.... if you subject your consciousness to much TV, internet, or especially cellphone/texting ... you are conditioning your consciousness to process things in a shallow, brief, inconsequential style of processing. Instead, try subjecting your consciousness (and thus training it) to larger informational processing chunks. Something that worked for me was reading </ .... senses Ted ready with the tomatoes, downloads tomato-proofing app for aura> Proust </powers up app>. The sentences are so long, so clause-infested, and so packed with meaning that is only implied that, if you have a short attention span, you'll find that by the time you get to the end of the sentence, you've entirely forgotten what the beginning was about. You re-read, and then re-re-read, and finally put the whole thing together. It's great training as well for learning to get comfortable thinking large, complex, heavily nuanced thoughts.

Happy trails,
Motnana

@ pgtrue

Speaking of collaboration, that's an idea that's struck me recently, harder than it ever has before. I've noticed that these stories and other projects I come up with, even the tiniest of them, seem to explode into something so grand that I alone could not handle. And also (this may seem random but I'll tie it back to this in a moment) I am incredibly frightened of social situations of all kinds. Always have been. In fact, it took me about an hour to muster enough courage to post my very first thread here. Logically trying to analyze the fear, it makes no sense, just as irrational fears often do. This social-phobia is quite clearly a major problem to overcome, a kind of test I think the larger consciousness system has thrown at me. And the fact that my projects grow into something I could not do alone, I think, really accentuates that fact. It's almost forcing me to work with others in order to do something I once thought I could do on my own, to realize my full potential as an artist/writer/creator.

@ Ted Vollers

You're absolutely right. I do tend to get bored easily due to a very short attention span that was more than likely due to the influence of a culture that really needs to lay off the amphetamines. In fact, sometimes I think it's even outrunning me, as I sometimes still feel about a half a decade behind, but I digress. Yes, I definitely need to lengthen my attention span significantly. I wonder if this lack of attention span has anything to do with my being somewhat obsessive-compulsive? I'm obsessed with getting as much done as possible in the most optimal amount of time possible, yet ultimately wind up doing the exact opposite. I can't decide on what to do because my attention is constantly flickering between ideas, and I procrastinate and get easily distracted. I'll try that exercise while meditating on the virtue of patience.

@ Montana

Writing and drawing (particularly drawing) has pretty much become automatic for me now. It's the planning and whatnot that tends to overwhelm me, fretting over what should or should not be in a story or something. But yeah, the hardest part, it seems, is just to DO something, anything. I think it might have something to do with me simply trying to decide on what to do, so much so that I never actually DO anything. Setting up a particular time to just DO something is a good idea.

I don't watch TV anymore nor do I ever text, but I can safely say that I'm addicted to the Internet, always jumping from one thing to another (I have at least ten tabs open at all times), hardly ever really focusing on any one thing for an extended period of time. I guess I really do need to do stuff to help meditate on patience.

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"The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man."
-- Carl Jung

I have always found that 2 or 3 individuals, working together, can do more work, and accomplish greater things than the same 2 or 3 individuals working separately. You are not alone in this social phobia.

It may be the greatest obstacle the human race needs to overcome in order for us (as a species) to move to the next stage in our (collective) evolution.

_________________
LOVE is the answer

peace
patrick

Montana everyone learn things different, and teaches things differently. I learned to tie my shoe when I was almost five and going to school already when my mom put me in my room and said I could not come out until my shoe was tied. I am sure she had shown me many times though. I did it, and got out.
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

Hi Tim and welcome.

I'm an arty writy type also.

We have a tendency to procrastinate and are quick to become bored or rather hit a stumbling block.. as soon as this happens we find a good reason to procrastinate again. I used to feel that I couldn't finish a project... this seemed to resonate through other aspects of my life. I could never finish a course... see something fully through. I once even thought that this problem fractal was a symbol for how my life might end up... only half way. :) Silly of course.

I did spend years procrastinating about doing something about it... but putting it off. because I knew deep down that I could I developed an arrogant streak that fell short of any power because i was afraid to fail. fear and ego say it all.



This may be a small part of the problem; you are projecting what you feel spiritually passionate about onto other peoples expectations... or you feel that you have to.

Are these screenplays and concept illustrations for your ideas or is the art separate from the writing?

I have an American sister in law who is a psychologist. One thing to consider, certain professions, and this is one of them, can be very draining if you are not highly highly syntropic and mentally and emotionally wealthy. Do you know what I mean by that? Spending every day with broken souls is not for the faint of heart.

There are people that have this strength, and psychology is a great outlet for their surplus energy. Sadly, most in this field are persons who can barely keep themselves above water in these regards, which is why they were attracted to the field in the first place, and end up replicating this emotional poverty. You have to be very honest with yourself.

Most of us seek to create an identity through our job or profession. We want to be something. The actual work is another thing. I woke up to this on a bus ride from the east to Boulder Colorado several decades ago...checking into a Buddhist grad program in social work...where I realised, what I needed was a trade, not an identity, so I switched tracks.

Getting a trade, and that could mean anything from physics grad school to space law to an electrician's ticket, means being honest about what you actually have an aptitude for and the type of work that fits your personality.

It means thinking about where you want to live and what is the low hanging fruit of that area, or being prepared to move to a city that has jobs for the work you want to do.

If you don't get this practical aspect clear in your mind, you will spend your entire life playing financial defense, with an increasingly narrow financial decision space. I am sure that your IUOC and AUM will benefit from such a stress test, but do you want to live that way?

I would prefer to be practical and get control of my simulation, and then self modify with stress tests of my own design - and have an escape button (cash in the bank), but perhaps this is self defeating in the big picture.

_________________
Does this PMR make my butt look big?