Damn self-promotion

Sometimes I am so tired of myself, really tired of certain themes that have been around since the beginning of my time. Just today, bicycling across the windy Mediterranean island with my wife, I realized (again) that all my talking, all my communication is actually a method of my self-promotion. Every word, every gesture, every single bit of my reaching out into the world is actually my ego trying to impress people, trying to sell them a certain image about myself. Why do I want to share anything, why do I try to be funny, entertaining, smart, why do I ever choose to utter a single word? Why do I write this blog?

It is always in order to sell an image about myself, a certain story of a certain Robert, to make you people buy something I want you to buy. It is an endless self-promotion and there does not seem to be any sort of a way out of it. This is sad, so sad. The reason behind this is simple, of course. It is my need to be accepted, my need to be loved.

But, man, am I tired of that. I do not want to be in this sort of interaction anymore in my existence, yet whenever I open my mouth, it is my personal commercials that come out. I can try to purify myself and my mind, but I am existentially locked in my perception and my mind, so this is going to be with me as long as there actually is me. The only way of connecting with people without self-promotion seems to be simply asking and listening to them with my heart. No talking.

But sometimes I am tired also of asking and listening. So… To remain silent until the end seems rather appealing.

You see, my vision, the one I have been carrying with me for about twenty years now, since my first encounters with the deeper nature of myself and the life, is to strip naked, to throw all the ballast away and to enter this life and this existence fully, directly, without any filters, with no impression management whatsoever, with no games and bullshit. Just pure existence, co-existence.

With years, though, the reality is slowly dawning on me that this is not fully possible in this world. My ego will always be around and every single quark of my being will try to impress people. I guess this is what is called human life. And I guess this is what is called human need for acceptance and love.

And perhaps there’s nothing wrong with it.

When the cat’s away…

With my wife being on a humanitarian project in North Ossetia for two weeks, I found myself with no time to write this blog. Now, how come, you might be wondering, having all sorts of dirty images on your minds. To tell you the truth, I was curious too, since I had expected to write a lot during this time.

After a carefull analysis of the matter I managed to come up with three possible reasons for this weird occurance:

• I am doing all the food shopping myself. I do not like shopping at all, I do not like consumerism and my energy is terribly low when I manage to force myself to dive into this terrible experience. My teenage monsters do not help, but they do eat a lot, so I go often.
• being without my wife to boss me around and tell me what to do, how to do it and when to do it, I am, of course, helpless, confused and overwhelmed with abundance of freedom from and freedom for. Basically this means a lot of time spent in trying to figure out what to do next, being existentially terrified of the possibility of forgetting something really crucial.
• and last but not least, when the cat’s away, mice will play, so there’s a lot of pizzas-and-movies evenings with kids. Yeah!

So, when my wife comes home she will actually have to start another humanitarian mission in our house.

And, yes, we will need to talk and cuttle a lot in order to catch up, so…

p.s.: In the meantime, may I humbly suggest you read some of the tragically neglected stuff on this site, like things on safety, perception, zen, being the best, children and fatalness.

A vow observed

I am so excited about this new phase of my life. As I vowed in my post Live now, work later, I actually did cut down on my work about 30 % and, oh boy, is this life different now.

I mean, I feel great! I get enough rest and I am starting to enjoy life again. I can see the dawn again, notice weather, enjoy sunsets, hear birds, I am becoming a bit less antisocial again…, and most of all, I am not tired. As much.

Actually just now I am starting to realize how damn exhausted I was six months back: I was practically on the edge all the time, gasping for air and life energy, with – due to the constant and intensive interactions with groups while leading workshops after workshops, trainings after trainings – my emotional field being like a Swiss cheese. And me being happy when starting holidays like a school kid. And this is not OK for somebody who is actually doing what he likes to do.

It’s incredible how my perception of life has shifted just by getting some more rest. I am starting to feel whole again.

But it is as well true that I need to keep my eye on my inner wolfs that are howling some classic songs somewhere at the back of my mind. The top three being:

• I need to be of use all the time (I guess there’s a need to feel worthy and accepted underneath that).
• I must first do all my duties and responsibilities, and only after that I can rest (meaning that I will finally be able to rest just after my funeral.)
• Suffering is a more proper way to live than to simply enjoying life and taking it easy (the heritage of the beautiful socialist-catholic cultural discourse within which I was growing up)

Yet the truth is that, to my great relief, the voices of these inner wolves of mine are much weaker than they used to be.

So, my advice people: work less, enjoy more! But you already know that, it is just me being that thick-headed.

I guess now I can move to my next vow, the one I wrote on Robin’s blog: about spending more time in nature and less between walls.

The Question of Fatalness

What makes a certain person in our lives fatal? What makes somebody so special that our hearts melt, our minds go blank, we feel overjoyed, overwhelmed, over-everything? Why is it this person and not that one?

There are many theories about that, from very spiritual ones about soul-mates and journeys of souls and reincarnations, to very depressing psychoanalytical theories that it is actually nothing but our subconscious mind searching for the compatible persona out there, the one that will represent our father as well as our mother, the good stuff as well as the bad one, and enable us to continue with acting out whatever games and roles we have learned to interact through. And, yes, there are even more down-to-earth theories, about the chemistry in our brain, about the neurons and hormones and synapses and all that stuff.

But, what really bothers me is the same questions as Forrest Gump attempted to answer: “I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it’s both. Maybe both is happening at the same time.” So, it is the question whether there is an objective fatalness or am I myself making a certain relationship a fatal one in my life, by adding certain qualities to it, be it consciously or unconsciously. Is it me choosing to open up widely and deeply to a specific person and thus experience an intense fullness of our contact and connection, or is it that there actually is, objectively, something special between us, something that is becoming alive now, overwhelming us with its energy?

If it is an objective fatalness, than life on a planet with billions of individuals really sucks. It’s like searching for a needle in a hay stack. In this case I certainly hope we do communicate also on subtle and very spiritual levels, otherwise there’s no way to find each others in one life time. On the other way, if it is us who are, by shaping our perceptions, literally creating fatal people around us in our lives…, well in that case you can just grab the first one on a street, define him or her as the fatal one, and live happily ever after.

Oh, yeah, they will need to see you as a fatal one too, so this complicates things a bit.

Anyway, be it this way or the other, I can count myself as an extremely lucky guy since I have been living with my fatal one. It settles so many questions and brings so much peace and bliss. Having your goddess, your fatal one here, around, with me, I mean, isn’t that a paradise? I can look at her, smell her, touch her, hug her, interact with her in every way, every day…

Well, I guess tomorrow it is going to be a fatal day for me, when she comes home from her business trip and reads what kind of stuff I have been posting about her on my blog.

Sounds of Silence

Today I woke up with a headache and things got worse in next two hours, so I decided to go back to bed. Lying there with a fever-like dizziness, I started to get extremely sensitive to sounds around me and everything was so irritating; the distant sound of cars, the sound of refrigerator switching on somewhere far bellow, the sound of the roof getting warmer from the sun rays and expelling some sort of cracking sounds… It was driving me crazy, but somehow I managed to relax and fall asleep for another couple of hours.

Sitting later with a cup of tea in the kitchen, feeling much better, I grabbed the new issue of the Ode magazine, the magazine for intelligent optimists (the level of my intelligence is still OK, but my optimism is definitely going downhill), and realized that it was a special issue, The Silence Issue. Reading articles about the noise pollution and the importance and the meaning of silence in our lives, it dawned on me just how much I have been suffering from the lack of silence in my life.

I guess this is why I go to Zen seshins and actually enjoy them from the first until the last second (who cares about hurting knees, just give me some silence and I will not complain…). This is why I almost don’t even listen to music in my car anymore. This is why I tend to run away from people, sit in my room alone… I need silence. It is like air and water and food for me. When I do not get enough of it, I start biting.

There is less and less of silence in our lives. Shopping music everywhere, traffic noise, TV-s turned on 24/7, everybody walking around either talking over the cell phone or with their ears stuffed with i-pod music. Couple of weeks back me and Marjeta stopped in a tiny little Albanian town, sat on a bench and enjoyed the local scene, with people outside on the stools and benches, talking to each other. And I felt something was really weird, but couldn’t tell what it was, until I realized after about ten minutes that there was no background noise at all. No cars, no music, no nothing. NOTHING! Just voices of people speaking. In the middle of a town. It was a bit spooky, but it was great too. Being in a place where just interacting was perfectly good enough, no need to stuff in more noise. It was beautiful, so pristine and primal.

So, yes, I guess I need to seriously consider this need of mine for silence, and start planning how to bring more of it back into my life.

About five years ago I attended a seminar about awareness of the body and of the moves of the body and within the body. The seminar was held by a French ex-ballet dancer, deep among the sand dunes of Moroccan Sahara. We were sleeping in improvised nomad tents and haven’t seen, for about 10 days, nothing but the dunes around us, stretching out to the horizon. I don’t know if you have an experience of what the sand dunes do to the sound and human perception of the sound, but just having been surrounded with this sound of silence for days after days, with only being able to see endless dunes and nothing less, had a tremendous impact on my perception of my existence in this time and space. At least for a whole week it was so damn clearly obvious that this life was not what it seems to be. And I completely understood an old Tuareg proverb:

God created lands full of water so people can live in

and God created the desert so people can find their souls

Why travel?

While struggling with choosing, scanning and uploading photos to my newly created travel pages, many memories from various travels came back, making me think about what has actually been making travelling so meaningful for me through all those years. Yes, it was sometimes just to relax, or to see something, or to be with somebody, or to be alone, but I guess there is much more to it than just collecting photos and souvenirs in order to show off in front of friends.

Travelling means getting my butt out of the safety zone into the less controllable environment and circumstances and, along with that, letting the life have more influence on me. Yes, it is a choice to be willing to be influenced – just as they say what the real communication is all about. To be willing to be influenced. So, by travelling I could say I am stating my willingness to be influenced by life; so that my experiences and understandings may deepen and my horizons may widen.

But, of course, this only applies to the travel that is not organized so well that I would not have to move out of my safety zone – in other words, travelling in aircon vehicles with bodyguard-like travel guides with open umbrellas…, heh, that does not count.

Even more; the less my mind likes the travelling experiences on the very spot, the more my horizons are widening right there and than. And in case I like it and feel utterly comfortable, than I guess I am missing out a big opportunity and my perception of life remains untouched.

I am not trying to say that the best way to travel is to make it intentionally an ultimately suffering event, but I am pretty much sure that what works for me is to, while travelling, seek diversity rather than similarity. Diversity can enrich me, while similarity just makes me doze off.

So, how was Albania? A bit of dozing off in similarities and a lot of challenging, enriching and heart warming differences. In simple words: it was really great. Next year we are going back there.

No world out there

I find it very natural to just sit and observe people, at airports, in restaurants, cafes. Yet the other day I realized that I do not know what do I observe really: other people or myself. Let me explain.

When I am centred, at peace with myself and my life, all I see is beautiful, wonderful people, carrying wounds and pain in their hearts, being soft and fragile within, full of love… I see their sincere attempts to do good, to be fulfilled, to make sense of their lives. My heart melts in warmth, my eyes get filled with tears and I am all empathy.

On the other hand, when I am feeling nervous, under pressure, frustrated, in inner conflicts and stress, I do not see that scene at all. All I can see than is egotistic, pushy, aggressive, ugly and terrible people, being nasty to each other, torturing their children and spouses. And my mind goes cynical. No empathy. Nothing.

It is obvious that my perception is utterly shaped by the state of my emotional being.

So what am I seeing really?

Nothing out there.

All I can ever see are merely my projections, my own emotional colouring, my subconscious patterns, cultural discourse, mental patterns and expectations… I do never communicate and interact and live with such and such people, with individuals and their objective attributes. No, I live among people that I am creating inside my head, shaping them this way or that way, arbitrarily.

That’s why my wife is sometimes divine Goddess, and sometimes…, well, something rather different. It is me who keeps changing her, inside my head, not her. In other words, if I want to see you ugly, there’s nothing you can do about it. And in case I choose to see you beautiful, you are trapped again… The same applies for everything; I am the creator of the world I live in and I keep re-creating it moment by moment.

So, you and me, we do not live in the same world. Pretty scary, isn’t it?