Feb
17
The Pillars Of Life
February 17, 2010 | Leave a Comment
What is the best way to live? Many would say that there is no best way to live because everyone is unique. Even if this is true, who can prove that this statement is correct? To know this, that person needs to live through the lives of every person on this planet at every given moment.
So does that mean that we can live our lives any way we wanted? In actual fact, yes, because we are gifted with free will but is this ‘the way’ or ‘our way’? Well, that depends if you are truly happy adopting this kind of living. For me, I would like to live my life the way that I wanted but at the core of it, I still have my life purpose. That would make me more focused, complete, driven and whole…
The Five Pillars Of Life
In search of the way to live in a congruent and effective manner, I’ve come out with the Five Pillars Of Life. It is the result of all the living concepts that I’ve came across and fine tuned to be compatible with my life. I think after you’ve applied some minor personal adjustments, this concept can be applied to everyone. This is mentioned briefly in my first post The Beginning Of Life but I think this time I should elaborate more on how can we apply them in life.
The Five Pillars consist of Physical, Mental, Spiritual, Financial and Social. You can think of them like your five fingers when your palm is facing up. Imagine balancing a card on your five fingers pointing up, even when all of your fingers are of a different length, you will be able to hold the card by adjusting your palm and bending your fingers, but this will become more difficult if the difference in finger length becomes more or maybe you just simply choose not to use a particular finger or two. Doing this might tilt the card and force it to collapse entirely. This is the analogy that I would use to describe the same challenges in life, maintaining balance.
Physical
The Physical Pillar refers to the body, our avatar that we use to interact in this physical world. This is the most important pillar in my life and I am quite confident that it will remain that way throughout the course of my life. If you’ve read Social Omnivore, Excessive Workout Can Kill You and The Cause For Unhealthy Diet, you will notice that I take very much care of the well being of my avatar.
Those who pay no attention to their avatar will make no effort to maintain a healthy and efficient body. There are even some who wants to be fit but they cannot control their diet, simply put, those who’s action are not congruent with what they have in mind. These kind of people needs to strenghten their Mental self first.
Mental
The Mental Pillar is where the mind resides. This is the pillar where you improve on your intelligence, decision making, creative thinking, discipline and anything that relates to the thought process. Even with a healthy avatar, it won’t be efficient if you have a weak mind, after all, your mind is where thoughts are formed. Without a strong mind, you cannot express yourself honestly through your avatar.
A very good practice to improve on your mental self is to go for hiking, the more difficult, the better, especially those trips that needs you to be in the jungle for a few days. For many times, my strong mind is what keeps me going when my physical self surrendered. Your mind provides an energy beyond physical.
Spiritual
My spiritual journey started way before I knew it, as explained in Dream Control . I’m always curious about the universe, the paranormal, life and death, and the way our lives relates to it. I’m also curious as to what happens after life? These kind of curiousity led me to shed away my fears day by day until it got so scarse that looking for fear is one of my hobby now. Without fear, I have the ultimate courage to discover the truth, the answer to life.
Social
The Social Pillar is one of the pillars that I focused on at a later stage in life. I had a very unique kind of childhood experiences (I will explain when I’m ready) that resulted in me having very little (or none) social skill. As life goes on, I have no other choice but to develop them.
If you are still wondering if you can live this life alone, let me answer that now, you can’t. I’ve came to a conclusion that life is designed in such a perfect way that you have no way but to learn to love and live. I also believe in reincarnation and that those who took their own lives (by committing suicide) will be reincarnated over and over again until they finally learn the meaning of life.
Financial
Our society today has given money so much emphasis than they deserve, I have no choice but to include it in as one of the pillars. In my opinion, your financial condition should be very sufficient if your other four pillars are properly strengthened and balanced, but special attention needs to be given to it (a few years, perhaps) should you plan to be financially free before retirement.
Maintaining A Balance
As explained, an effort should be made to balance the Five Pillars to maintain a smooth sailing life with less obstacles. It is very normal for a particular pillar to be chosen as the core pillars and perhaps two other pillars as a supporting pillars, in my case, Physical as the core and Mental and Financial as the supporters. It might be entirely different in your case, perhaps 1 core with 3 supporters, whatever really, as long as it works.
When you begin to feel that there’s a void at a particular pillar, like when I have no choice but to strengthen my Social pillar to move forward in life and also to my Spiritual pillar when I doubt the existence of demons and gods, it is time to focus on them. I encourage for you to pick a pillar to focus on as a New Year’s resolution, different pillars every year.
It is my assumption that most people wouldn’t care about their Spiritual pillars all their life but I think when they are really old and sick, and all they do is sleep on a hospital bed, since they have nothing to do, they will think about it. Imagine, “All my life I’ve believed in God and right until my dying moments I still couldn’t see or feel him/her, have I been mistaken all my life?”.
Perhaps your mastery in balancing these pillars will decide if your life falls under one of these 2 quotes from my Mentor :
“Life is suffering” – Buddha
“The reason to live is to be happy” – Buddha
Dec
31
Dream Control
December 31, 2008 | 1 Comment
When I was a kid, I loved horror movies. I enjoy watching them alone in the living room. Most of the time I would imagine those spirits, ghosts or demons standing just right behind me giving me goosebumps all over. It was scary but fun. I was so young back then to know that more intriguing experiences are waiting for me. The journey begins…
Ghost Oppression Phenomenon
I think I had my first sleep paralysis at the age of 10. The chinese called them the ghost oppression phenomenon because they believed that you are not able to be awake because spirits are lying on top of your body causing you to be paralyzed.
It was around 5pm in the evening when the sun’s position was just right where the ray was able to reach where I was sleeping. I woke up and heard some noises in the living room but I panicked when I was not able to move! I knew that the sun’s ray was right on my face because I can see them through my eye lids, not unlike what you would see when you direct the flashlight to your eyes with your eye lids closed.
As a member of a very superstitious family or race to be more precise, ghost oppression was the first to came to mind. I started to think which spirit is doing this to me and for what reason. After much thought, I decided to force myself to be awake, but to no avail. After spending around 5 minutes figuring out a way to wake myself up, I finally gave up trying. I went back to sleep out of exhaustion.
I woke up around 20 minutes later (as an estimation based on feelings) and I was still in the same state. This time I was getting more pissed off than fearful and I started forcing myself to be awake out of brute force. I tried for around 10 minutes and I finally managed to break out of paralysis. I was sweating when I woke up, mostly due to the direct sunlight and also the amount of energy I used. If I would put it into words, the feeling of waking myself out of sleep paralysis is like lifting a refrigerator that is lying on top of your body with sheer strength. I call this method force wake.
Sleep paralysis still occurred to me from time to time after that but I dealt with them with totally no fear as I already have the solution to deal with it via “force wake”.
Sequential Nightmares
Practicing force wake benefitted me in other areas of sleep, which is nightmare. I can always force myself out of a nightmare at will. So nightmares had little impact on me until when I was 12. Even though I had mastered force wake, somehow my subconscious mind are able to find a way to counter it, by forcing me to experience sequential nightmares.
During this period I was having very vivid nightmares and the worst thing was that they were sequential, meaning to say that those nightmares continue from where they ended prior to waking up. The was a time where I ended up having 6 sequential nightmare even after force waking myself for 6 times in the same hour. It goes like this :-
I took a bus and went to the back seat. It was around midnight and I was the only passenger. The bus went according to the route and then it went off into the woods. I started to be on alert but said nothing. The bus suddenly stopped in the deep jungle, and I stared at the direction of the driver. He turned off the engine and got up from his seat, heading towards me. It was dead silence. He started walking towards me. I had nowhere to escape as the only entrance was just next to the driver’s seat, so I forced wake myself.
Prior to this, after a force wake I will either not dream or in the worst case land myself in another different nightmare. So naturally I went back to sleep. To my surprise, the driver continued walking from where he left off before I woke up. I got really scared at this point and forced wake myself again. I repeated this cycle for 6 times where in the end the driver was only few feet from me. I could see his face clearly, he was an undead with a soft green aura around him.
I was tired of it and I knew he will get me on the next one, so I get off from my bed and joined my other family members in the living room watching TV. After 30 minutes of watching something I had no interest on and due to the fact that I need to go to school the next morning, I gathered enough courage to go back to sleep. Luckily for me, it didn’t continue, but it remained as my worst sequential nightmare in my life.
Joker Demon
At the age of 16, something more disturbing happened. I was having the same nightmare for 2 weeks. All of those nightmares were masterminded by the same joker demon, having the face of a joker. This joker demon sent all kinds of creatures to attack, torture and even kill me as I was rooted to the ground, not being able to move and defenceless. Towards the end of the 2 weeks I got so mad I thought to myself, “Why am I allowing a demon, which is my own creation, to torture me every night causing sleepless nights?”. I told myself that I will do something the next time I see this demon, just something.
True enough, I met with the joker demon again that night but this time a very strange thing happened. Upon recognizing the joker demon, it confirmed that I was actually in a dream, it worked as a dream cue for me. It then activated the logical part of the brain which is usually shut off during a dream. This allowed me to have totally no fear for the first time in a nightmare. Instead of struggling for survival which I always do when I met the joker demon, this time I managed to stare right at his eyes without any signs of fear. I stared for a moment knowing that I was in control, and then I smiled, in the dream. The dream slowly faded and I was still smiling physically.
Lucid Dreaming
Since that day, I had similar experiences but it is not related to nightmares anymore. I call them dream control due to the lack of vocabulary.
I only found out the correct term Lucid Dream in 2001 when I was doing a research on dreams. I found a forum where people exchanged their experiences with lucid dreaming and also on how can we improve this skill. It lead me to have a lucid dream that week itself. In a lucid dream, everything in your dream construct sparkles with life. It is like you are connected to everything. Bring that mindset to the physical world and you will understand why am I behaving the way I am.
Download and listen to this podcast from Erin Pavlina here for a better understanding on lucid dreams, how to practice them (yes, anyone can have lucid dreams!), and how to improve them.
Angels And Demons
Lucid dream changed the way I look at reality. I began to believe that fear is never needed in our daily lives, which led me to begin my quest in eliminating fear from my life.
By eliminating demons from my life I also removed god from the picture. Angels and demons are only a different side of the same coin, one could not exist without the other. Gods are not needed when there are no enemies and vice versa. I ended up throwing the coin in exchange for total freedom, freedom from fear and worship.
Religion is also the cause of the worst war between humans. It forces us to look at others differently. I prefer to look at everyone as a family, without borders, without fear. I don’t have any particular belief but I think being an atheist is natural for the time being.
The Reason Behind
Why am I having these experiences when I can find no one in my country who are having the same experiences as mine? It is not like someone introduced lucid dreaming to me and I started practising it. It just came out of nowhere. Whatever it is, I am actually grateful that I had such experiences. If I do not, I can imagine myself being afraid of ghosts, believing in god who does not exist and believing in superstitious craps.
Please don’t get intimidated by the effect lucid dreaming will have on you. Today I remember the joker demon as a spirit guide more than a demon. I will never be who I am without him. I can guarantee that lucid dreaming will be the best ride in your entire life! 1080 degrees cork screw is piss in comparison! But you will need a lot of work though. Good luck on that!
“Monks meditate daily hoping that they can wake up from a dream we called life”
References :-
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/stevepavlinacom-podcast-010-lucid-dreaming/
http://www.dreamviews.com/