GOVERNMENT NEEDS INNOVATION; INNOVATION NEEDS DIVERSITY

Canberra Gets On The Same Bus Every Day —

At all levels of government in Australia, leadership in sourcing innovative ideas has slid right off the radar and their feeble, phony pretense of pursuing diversity and equality isn't helping.  

Original ideas come from the original experiences of original people, supported by an environment that brims with a diversity of useful, relevant skills, backed in by diversity of genders, national cultures, economic backgrounds, skin colours, ages, and artistic expression. Perversely, the party/oppositional system of governing we've assumed as our model has proved to engender a push to Sameness in the name of “solidarity” The survival of the “government clique” has taken moral and political supremacy over the well-being of the individuals whom those governments have been elected to promote and protect.

I love energy centres like Bellingen and the Denmark and Mullumbimby areas. They are full of small artist spaces, tiny but great restaurants, small but affordable houses, some in the bush on the slopes of the giant volcano crater, and great access to an astonishing number of events ranging from music to film to workshops, celebrations, social, political and self-improvement lectures and workshops. It seems your can take in as much as you want any day of the week. There's palpable atmosphere of “can-do”, “have-a-go” and freedom from status quo.

And there's a tremendous amount of creativity everywhere from the graffiti on the walls, the quirky names on quirky stores, to the individual self-expression on the streets. That includes an un-enforced politeness and consideration between all users of the roads and pathways. Mullum, Brunswick and Byron are universities without limits. They teem with young people mixing and talking with each other. They're a massive incubator of ideas. And they offer a stark contrast to Capital Hill's homogeneous monoculture.

Frictionless living...

Australia is a vast, varied landscape with big problems and complex challenges. But where there is pain there are opportunities to find solutions that solve and salve. Successful start-ups solve tough problems. And that's where organic spaces like Mullum have every advantage over Canberra, which is designed within an inch of its life.

Politicians and their armies of minions get on the same bus every day. Each morning they stand silently on the same doorsteps waiting to be driven to their predigested campus of personal entitlement.

Every day is predictable and indistinguishable...

Every day, State and Federal jocks and their staves are insulated from the everyday experience of everyone else. Their incomes are lavish, their food is free, their haircuts are free, their snacks are free, their apartments are cleaned, their laundry is folded, and their commutes are always on time and the wifi is always fast. Life is made frictionless and painless – in a word – un-human.

Politicians create plans, gather support, solve problems and enable progress  -- well, I think that was the original idea. But if they don't see any pain in anyone who supports their privileged life, there is nothing to solve, is there? No housing for those who desperately need it, no hospital beds, no farming or fishing if a miner wants to prod, poke & dig, nothing beyond sit-down money and instant mashed potato for the original inhabitants of this land. “Fuck 'em. Get me a helicopter will you for the matchplay golf tournament this weekend on Hammy Island. Oh, and organise a pretend meeting so I an charge it to Expenses.” This is why Government at any level is running out of original ideas. All the low-hanging fruit is long gone, the obvious ideas are already done and then done again, and “bugger reaching higher – me and my dicky back. Let the crossbenchers knock themselves out; we've got the opposition onside – No change – no probs.”

How many ranks of email organisers, Cheives of Stuff, political advisers, writers, researchers, knockshop apps (in case that cute intern with the nice rack won't do what's good for her career while she's tagging along with me in Honkers this weekend) How many to-do list PA's, media coaches, spin doctors and called-in-favour hangers-on do we need? To run a country effectively, I mean? What proportion of their everyday busy-ness is spent at actually doing the job, as compared to protecting their tenure in the job and looking as if they're accomplishing something?

Original ideas require original experiences yet, following their election and the obligatory “I'm humbled” speech, pollies do their best to segregate and insulate themselves and their privately contracted creatives from the diversity found in life's daily struggles. The closest they get to real feedback is some pimply intern's report about a tick-one-of-three-boxes focus group. In the meantime, just keep the mantra going - “This is the greatest time to be an (Australian,/South Australian/foreign investor/alive”)...please tick just one, and stand in front of at least 3 Australian flags and two nodding sycophants while you say it.

In contrast, the hinterlands, away from the glossy “Home Beautiful” marinas, overflow with real people creating original experiences, experiments of every type and kind, and with a culture of diversity far more advanced than any PM's simplistic accounting of gender numbers and skin colours.

Urban centres have an advantage...

All cities have similarities to each other. In some general areas it's possible to solve a problem in one and you've solved it in every city -- that's a massive potential for progress. But no, that kind of possibility gets killed before birth by flick-passing such possibilities to isolationist State governments – the dregs of those who know they're not good enough even for Federal parliament.

Constitutional government won't go away -- it'll be there to shield from view hidden business agendas and give the players some position to fiddle with, probably at taxpayers' expense, after they “retire” on obscenely privileged superannuation. But don't expect many original start-up ideas from this self-segregated monoculture of government. And any pollie stupid enough to try it will be crucified. Remember Gough; remember Brian Burke? Remember Don Dunstan?

Innovation is born amidst adversity and is driven by diversity. Governments lack both.

TROUBLING HABITS OF DEVOUTLY UNHAPPY PEOPLE

Happiness comes in so many different forms that it can be hard to define. Unhappiness, on the other hand, is easy to identify; you know it when you're in its presence, and you definitely know when it’s taken a hold of you.

Unhappiness is lethal to everyone around you, just like second-hand smoke. The famous Terman Study from Stanford followed subjects for eight decades and found that being around unhappy people is linked to poorer health and a shorter life span.

Happiness has much less to do with life circumstances than you might think. A University of Illinois study found that people who earn the most (more than $10 million annually) are only a smidgen happier than the average Joes and Janes who work for them.

While you may blame your past for your unhappiness, that doesn't make it responsible for how you feel. Shit happens, and often there's bugger-all you can do about that. But how you choose to feel about that shit happening is ultimately up to you.

Life circumstances have little to do with happiness because happiness – like sunlight -- is available to you – unconditionally. Reaching for Happiness is as futile as trying to reach the horizon –it will always remain out of your reach. Happiness is not a destination; it's your environment. You're standing it it, arms folded, protesting “This ain't it.” Have you ever seen a fish swimming to reach water? Me either, which leads me to suspect that the dumbest fish is more “with it” than most supposedly intelligent humans.

The problem, at least in part, is that in line with your conditioning, your habits, your growth in Awareness and your outlook on life, you pre-conceive what happiness will look and feel like, and you make your acceptance of Happiness conditional – “When I get such and such, or when xyz happens – then I'll be happy.” It's our ideas about happiness that prevent us from ever be-ing happy. And we use our Un-happiness as a weapon. We deliberately, purposefully and habitually withhold our well-being for the purposes of manipulation, domination, or control of someone or something else. We abuse our natural happiness to get – happy.

Here's a theory to test for yourself – “We are all happy – until we think about it.” We are happy, until we ask ourselves, “Am I happy?” Then Mind comes into it. Mind is never happy. Happiness is not something you can mind. Even memories of happiness are sense-memories, not re-minders. The Happiness/Unhappiness continuum contextualises Mind and all of its machinations.

There are psychologists from the University of California who get paid to study happiness. (There's no evidence, by the way, that their peculiar pursuit makes them any more or less happy than their campus counterparts, but I digress). These academics found that genetics and life circumstances only account for about 50% of a person’s happiness. The rest, they say, is up to you. Wow! It has only taken several millennia for them to catch up with the ancient mystics. Well, it's my contention that genetics and life circumstances may be affective for a while, but after age 30, the responsibility for both your level of happiness and the ”face” you put on it, is 100% yours.

“The American Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.” – Benjamin Franklin

Jefferson in the US Constitution spoke of happiness as some kind of “thing” that is capable of being chased or prised out of a hiding place, surrounded and captured. Happiness is no more concrete than any concept about it. I found happiness to be just as fluid and elusive as water in a stream. When I open my hand, it flows in. When I close my hand to grasp it, I lose it. J.S.Mill concluded that making happiness a goal for your life is a bit like luring a cat to sit on your knee; you get better results from ignoring it, rather than by wheedling “Here, puss, puss,puss.” Mill saw happiness as “a shy sort of sensation, sneaking up on you when you least expect it” and sometimes even when you don't want it. Not want happiness? Sure! When you're trying to bawl someone out for one of their sins, “happiness” is the last thing you want to come flooding over you! Without unhappiness, where would your motivation for righteous anger be?

I get better results returning to happiness by offering my unhappinesses to my best version of myself, and inhaling happiness with the air into the resulting space and allowing it to infuse me. Most importantly, I suggest that when you catch yourself in a burst of happiness, leave it be. Don't meddle with it. Don't try to lasso it. Don't try to replicate an old version, nor scare this moment off by courting it. Happiness can be like a flower – pluck it, try to dissect and analyse it, you'll kill it. Let it be. And simply enjoy the beauty and the fragrance.

A certain recipe for dissatisfaction and anxiety is to buy into any ideas that Happiness looks a certain way, is obligatory, or that we are entitled to it, or that we've failed if we can't be happy on demand.

Unhappy Habits. When people are unhappy, it’s much more difficult to be around them, let alone work or play with them. Unhappiness sucks big-time. It drives people away, creating a vicious cycle that holds you back from achieving everything that you’re capable of.

Unhappiness can catch you by surprise. So much of your happiness is put off by your habits (in thought and deed) that you might do well to monitor them and their consequences closely, firstly to get to know more realistically this wonderful “self” you have created and, secondly, to make certain that they don’t drag you down into an abyss that you'll not crawl out of this side of death.

Some habits lead to unhappiness more than others do. You should be especially wary of the habits that follow as they are the worst offenders. Watch yourself carefully to make certain that these habits are not your own. If they are, find a more effective replacement and practice it until it becomes your new habit.

• Waiting for the future. Telling yourself, “I’ll be happy when …” is one of the easiest unhappy habits to fall into. How you end the statement doesn’t really matter (it might be a promotion, more pay, or a particular relationship) because it puts too much emphasis on expectations and circumstances. There's a double trap here; expectations are the seed pods for disappointment and circumstances are often the hand that is dealt to you before you start playing. The other side of the whammy is one of life's greatest pratfalls -- neither improved circumstances nor met expectations produce happiness. Guess what? Those who offer you a better life and/or satisfaction if you buy what they're selling are either appallingly naïve or downright crooks. If this is the road you're exploring, you're setting yourself up for one of life's greatest troublemakers – Disappointment, the parent of Sadness and Bewilderment. Don’t spend your time waiting for something that’s more than likely to have little or no effect on your mood.
  Instead focus on being happy right now, in the present moment, because there’s no guarantee of the future. There's a Law of Reality that goes something like this – Where you're headed is where you come from. If you live in Life's Waiting Room, you're headed for............a Waiting Room of one sort or another.

• Spending too much time and effort acquiring “things.” There is not a single “thing” on this earth that has happiness built into its DNA. I was reminded of this one day when I was driving a taxi cab. A woman got in and asked me to take her to the Retirement Home. Making conversation, I asked, “What's on your agenda this afternoon?” Sourly she replied “Lunch. It'll be roast beef and vegies today!!” At the time I was grabbing a burger whenever I could between jobs; I'd have sold one of my offspring for the same baked dinner!
  People living in extreme poverty experience a significant increase in happiness when their financial circumstances improve, but it drops off quickly above $20,000 in annual income. There’s an ocean of research that shows that material things don’t make you happy. When you make a habit of chasing things, you are likely to become unhappy because, beyond the disappointing lack of bliss you experience once you get them, you discover that even if you’ve gained them, they don't deliver the qualities that they were a code for -- the real things that can make you happy, such as friendship, intimacy, and renewal.

• Staying home. When you feel unhappy, it’s very tempting to avoid other people. This is a huge mistake as socialising, like exercising, even when you're not enjoying it in the moment, is great for your mood. We all have those days when we just want to pull the covers over our heads and refuse to talk to anybody, but understand that the moment this becomes a tendency, it destroys your mood. Recognise when unhappiness is making you antisocial, do whatever it takes to coax yourself to get out there, mingle, and become interesting by being curiously interested. You’ll notice the difference right away.

• Seeing yourself as a victim. Unhappy people tend to operate from the default position that life is both oppressive and out of their control. Well, you're right. Life is hard in places, and it is not under your control; these are facts are on purpose. So what do you do about this?
  The problem with a philosophy that “Life is out to get me, and there’s nothing I can do about it,” is that it fosters a attitude (an angle of perceiving) of Help-lessness. People who feel helpless are less than likely to take creative action to make things better. While everyone is certainly entitled to feel down every once in a while, it’s important to recognise when you’re letting this affect your outlook on life. You’re not the only person that bad things happen to, so you can give up that line of thinking you are in this way “special”; this is a very twisted form of Self-Importance – (“I'm far too important to be made to feel this way”). And you have no more control over life than a surfer has control over the wave but, by the way you surf the present creates influence over your future as long as you’re willing to take action and be a little inventive, daring and playful.

• Pessimism. Nothing fuels unhappiness quite like a pall of pessimism – that habit of taking the gloomiest possible view, and that for instances of evil and pain there are no balancing instances of good and happiness. Pessimism, just like its half-sibling, Optimism, is a loopy, one-eyed way of being in the world that ignores the duality of all things.

One big problem with a pessimistic attitude, beyond it being hard on your mood and everyone else's nerves, is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you expect bad things, you’re more likely to get bad things. Pessimistic thoughts are hard to shake off until you firstly recognise how illogical they are. That recognition on its own, however, is not going to dissolve most pessimism. In my experience, only a very small percentage of people can be reasoned out of any condition that was not reasoned into in the first place. In the face of logic and reason, pessimism says “So f----ing what?” Feelings of pessimism were not logically reasoned into in the first place; they were driven home emotionally, and emotionally is usually how you're going to have to extract yourself. By all means explore how illogical, false and damaging your pessimism is, but be prepared for something more than an intellectual discussion to permanently transmute pessimism into a voice of sensible, stabilising Caution.

• Complaining. Complaining itself is troubling as well as the “victim” attitude that precedes it. Complaining includes Anger – Anger is actually nothing more or less than Complaint with the volume turned up. Complaining is a self-reinforcing behaviour. By constantly voicing persistent thoughts about how bad things are, you reaffirm your negative beliefs, opinions and assumptions - (“This is so wrong. See how right I am?”) While talking about what bothers you can help you feel better, there’s a fine line between complaining being therapeutic (exploring and realising) and it fuelling unhappiness (dumping). Beyond making you unhappy, complaining drives other people away.

• Blowing things out of proportion. Bad things happen to everybody. The difference is that happy people see them for what they are—a temporary bummer—whereas unhappy people see anything negative as further evidence that life is out to “get” them. A happy person is upset if they have a fender bender on the way to work, but they keep things in perspective: “What a hassle, but at least it wasn’t more serious.” An unhappy person, on the other hand, uses it as proof that the day, the week, the month, maybe even their whole life, is doomed to be permanently bent out of shape.

• Sweeping problems under the rug. Happy people are accountable for their actions. When they make a mistake, they cop to it, make amends where possible, and prepare to deal with the fallouts and consequences. Unhappy people, on the other hand, find problems and mistakes to be threatening, so they try to hide them, deny them, project them onto someone else, ignore them, or minimise them. Problems tend to get bigger when they’re not dealt with. The more you don’t do anything about a problem, the more it starts to feel as though you can’t do anything about it, and then you’re right back to feeling like a victim.

• Not improving. Because unhappy people are pessimists and feel a lack of control over their lives, they tend to sit back and wait for life to happen to them – “What next?” - to which God usually replies, “Well I was about to ask you the same question.” Instead of setting goals, risking, digging, questing, learning, and improving themselves, they just keep plodding along. They resist change and then they wonder why things never change.

• Trying to keep up with the Joneses. Jealousy and envy are incompatible with happiness, so if you’re constantly comparing yourself with others, it’s time to stop. In one study, most subjects said that they’d be okay with making less money, but only if everybody else did too. Be wary of this kind of thinking as it won’t make you happy and, more often than not, has the opposite effect. As an old friend of mine used to say – “If someone else has to change for you to be happy, you're fucked.”

Bringing It All Together. In order for anything in your life to change, you have to change something. Changing your habits in the name of greater happiness and well-being is one of the best things that you can do for yourself. But it’s also important for another reason—taking control of your happiness makes everyone around you happier too.

What do you do to make yourself happy?

For my own wellbeing I've quit the pursuit of Happiness. Somehow the idea of a Flourishing Life appeals to me more. Flourishment challenges me to welcome difficult situations where I can practice Courage, become aware of others in such a way that Celebration and Compassion lead me to empathise (feel with, not for others), and defer gratification (which takes me to a birth thing of frustration and panic at having to wait). Every possibility that comes up now goes into a “Maybe” file, just to see what pops up next. Hey, a flourishing life isn't all lollipops and roses. In that respect, nothing changes. But flourishing is way more satisfying than anything else I've tried so far.

And here's the rub.......... even when I'm “unhappy” nowadays, I'm happy and grateful about it. As long as I'm happy about it, being Unhappy beats the hell out of being dead. And “unhappy” passes. Death is a wee bit more permanent.

This is when I discovered that Happiness was no longer a state of being for me; it returned to the status of an Emotion. What a relief! Happiness is at last allowed to be what it was when I was a child – a transient feeling that may be present, and sometimes not. After all, Happiness is not always appropriate or desirable. At my daughter's funeral, for example, I found a helluva lot to celebrate and be grateful about, but I didn't feel like acting up like Ronald McDonald. Expressing 'happiness' is also a cultural thing – when in Rome........

Once I reclaim Happiness as a feeling, I am enriched by surprise, complexity, shades and contradictions. Happiness now ceases to be a bland state of featureless bliss, and becomes, sometimes a contented groan of relief, sometimes a flutter of excitement and fear, sometimes an eerie sense of everything being just-so, and sometimes something that feels like a daring, audacious, scary bridge over troubled crocodiles.

Ah! That's better! 

A HABIT WORTH BREAKING IN 2016!

A new-Year's NOT Resolution.

Broadcast on January 6^th, 2016 on Radio KSA's “Cool & Comforting”.

I'm not a fan of New Year's resolutions, and here's why:

Firstly, the well-meaning, caring, inner do-gooder who made those resolutions didn't consult with the rest of the Board of “You Inc.”, and that person's microphone has been turned off, possibly until you get sentimentally pissed again next year.

Secondly, nearly all of us beat up on ourselves too much as it is, to no real effect other than creating dis-satisfaction and dis-ease. Yet we still expect seeds of dis-satisfaction to yield satisfaction, and seeds of dis-ease to produce ease and contentment. That is insane. Unless you really want to die dissatisfied and disappointed, stop living dissatisfied. Can I make it any simpler for us (me too)?

When the new year rolls around, it's easy to say "This year I'm going to fix my deficiencies! I'm going to get to the gym at least three times a week, I'm going to save more money and I'm going to read more books."

Yes, well we treat our bodies as the donkeys for our minds. We treat our bodies like beasts of burden. We say "Body, work harder! Body, get to the gym! Body, keep my house looking sharp so I don't have to worry about what the neighbours think of me!"

Our fully-compliant bodies know a lot more about us than our unkind minds do. Each of our bodies knows how hard we work and how much we worry. In our minds we pretend that our frenetic pace is fine, sustainable and even virtuous, but our bodies know better. Unfortunately, though, we leave our ego-minds in charge.

Every resolution, regardless of when it is made, is a Position taken up by the mind: it is a Ruthless Rule of Reality that every position creates, in moment it is created, an equal and opposite Op-position. Without unanimous resolve, resolutions will never work. And the human mind is incapable of unanimity.

Skip the Resolutions. But all is not lost if you can gently, gradually and intentionally create a new habit of behaviour by breaking just one old habit.

If you can do that, you'll help yourself much more than you would by flogging the donkey to get to the gym more often, save more money, eat better foods, work harder at the job and keep up with all the other demands you put on the poor beast.

What is the habit you will break in 2016?

The habit to make is to trust your gut. The habit to break is the habit of criticising yourself. Give your Inner Critic a new job description.

You know intimately the habit of criticising I'm referring to. Out of new-born innocence we bought the lie that we are inherently”sinful”, and that we will keep doing “wrong”, unles we “wake up to ourselves”. We do that by inventing an Inner Critic, a watchful, tyrannical “border force” that will get to us before the authorities do, and save us from dire consequences. The socially and religiously sanctioned tool for this kind of abuse is a totally synthetic emotion called Guilt – and over time we have become junkies for it. And it is demanded by society. Just try turning up to court for some misdemeanour and not showing “remorse” for what you've done. Watch the judge give you a loaded sentence and the media scream for your blood.

The Old English word “gylt” derives from an older German word “geld” which meant “to pay”. Guilt demands that we pay for our sins here and now. Bugger waiting for God to do the job, bugger waiting for karma. They're too slow. “I want the shit kicked out of this – NOW!”

In the past, guilt was not a feeling – it was a fact of responsibility. But guilt has now taken over the role of Remorse, and now labels “a ghoulish sort of stagnant feeling and a queasy sensation that keeps reappearing whenever our minds become undistracted or slow down. Feelings of guilt can be hard to work off because we have no bloody idea how they got there in the first place. We were “guilt-tripped” before we had any say in the matter. We were guilt-tripped by parents and teachers who themselves had been guilt-tripped into behaving compliantly. The currency of Guilt is Fear and Dread Guilt is a particular favourite of those who take too little responsibility, and those who take on too much. The familiar face of Guilt is that of your Inner Critic.

The Inner Critic is the one who says things like these to yourself in your head:

Shit! I missed my exit. Now I have to drive an extra five k's to get home. I'm so stupid!

Why did I eat that cannoli? I was already having trouble getting into my jeans.

Why is this credit card statement so confusing? What's wrong with me? I suck! 

It's all my fault mother died. I should have........

It's my fault Mum and Dad separated. I was such a bad child!

I should never have quit my job last year. I'm such an idiot.

Hey! When you spend so much of your time and emotional energy trying to atone for something that was none of your business, you won't get much joy out of life. Jesus the Christ came offering release from Guilt in the most spectacular way. But sometime later the King got the Bishop onside and said - “We can't have this! Freedom is not good for the hoi-polloi. You keep them guilty, I'll keep them poor; that way we've always got them under control.” (Colin Hayes). The deal was done. Church and State secured the compliance of the other institution for domination – Family, and the prison was complete. Guilt is good business for Bishops, Kings and other Control Freaks, but those people leave a trail of suffering behind them that has carpeted the world, wall-to-wall, a thousand times over. They make mining magnates look like sandbox cuties.

You don't have a bobcat big enough to clean up the global mess. Personally I think it's too late for anything but Mother Nature herself to restore balance.

But you can go to work on your own house. If you can catch yourself threatening yourself in your head, you can quiet the nasty little voice you hear by saying "It's fine. There's nothing wrong. This was supposed to happen. Can't tell you why yet – I don't yet have that level of insight. But after this, we will know. Just be patient, OK?"

It's true that it was all supposed to happen, but it's only true when you realise that every cannoli, missed exit and quirk and facet of yours is exactly the way it is for a reason, and for no reason.

Everything that has happened in your life brought you to this exact place to hear these words. None of it was a mistake, and nothing was wasted (except time, which doesn't exist)

Unless there is no reason for this moment, in which case there's been no reason for any of this. But did you have anything better to do at the time? Do you have anything better to do now than read and contemplate this? Yes, you do? Then don't stand here bitching any longer: bugger off and do it. This will be here waiting for you when all else has subsided.

You can shift your perspective right now, and say "I just realised that I have no faults. I have no weaknesses. If , in my mistaken identity, I have done anything harmful, I surrender it now to the Great Silence. What I do have is a trusting, open space in my heart to fill with a new vision for myself, just to see how it works out. If, in the future, I find an even better vision or a better way, then I'll clear my space and set up for a better adventure-experiment.

"Once I see clearly what I want for myself, I can step out of this past and step into the new. All the critical chatter was - and is - just background noise to suck my mojo away and keep me off my path."

You are perfect now and you have always been that way, but a lot of influences going back to childhood have told you that there's something wrong with you. Telling people what's wrong with them is baked into our culture. We picked up on that before we were born, because our mother lived and breathed “There's something wrong with me.” Even when they cut that umbilical cord, they started pummelling and poking you, cleaning you up – and looking for something wrong.

We get what we expect. We expect to get messages about how we fail to measure up -- at work, at home and everywhere we go. And if other people let us down in the race to criticise, we get in first and tell ourselves our faults, too. And we're devastatingly good at that – much better than anyone else – because our Inner Critic has access to all the secret files and knows exactly what our problems are. That's how our minds think, and we're so sure we're right about that!

Then we realise that we chose our “faults” -- that is, we chose to think of them as faults. But what if we were wrong? Maybe they are gifts. Maybe there's nothing about yourself that you need to change -- not your financial status, your looks or any of the other stuff you worry about.

When you notice the critical voice in your brain and take a second to hush it up when you hear it, you will quickly realise that the critical voice in your brain is not you. It's a distant echo from all the people who have criticised and limited you since you were a tiny pumpkin.

Now most of those folks aren't around to keep you feeling bad about yourself anymore, so your ego has taken over the job. Your ego. Yes, that dick whom you promoted to run your life while you went and hid in the basement.

You will never get closer to your goals by flogging the donkey (yourself) forward. That's a bit like strapping yourself into an aircraft seat, then hauling upwards with all your might to help the 'plane get off the ground.

Sometimes we set New Year's resolutions from a place of "Now hear this!!" Your topdog critical brain is in charge at that moment and your underdog, compliant brain is glowering from behind the couch, thinking “Oh, yeah?! I'll get you for this.” This is the reality of Duality. And Duality doesn't give a shit whether you know about it, believe it , or not. Every Position you take, you also hold in Opposition. And you wonder why you keep getting sabotaged?

The problem with a compulsive, law-and-order approach to New Year's resolutions is that there is no one but your Opposite Self to listen to you when you're talking to yourself. And your Opposite Self will resist and resent the shit out of what you're saying and the way you're saying it. And later protestations of “I'm only doing this for your own good” just do not cut the mustard with any downtrodden entity who has a milligram of desire to make their own decisions about what works and does not work for themselves.

You can set resolutions from a place of authority,  like "Now, I'm serious! This year, I'm getting my life together!" as long as you don't expect that approach to work. That's just your “I” and your “Me” doing the parent/child thing, and that stopped working for you decades ago. Real resolution comes from a space of calm and co-operastive willingness, a statement (without John Williams music) of conscious intent, followed by a surrendered “So be it”. Then simply observe what happens next. Allow habits to take their time to overcome the forces of inertia. Be patient, and keep your endgame in view.

Your body will take you to the gym or not. Your body might decide to spend the evening sitting in front of the TV rather than working out. Could it be that your body knows best? If you can accept the decision to watch TV as the right decision in that moment, you can relax. You can stop beating up on yourself. Then your mojo will rise, and the next day you might say "I feel good today," and go to the gym after all.

Be good to yourself in 2016. That's the most important thing you can do. The beaten donkey can't get excited about anything other than a good night's sleep!

You hesitate. Now what's stopping you? Whose permission are you waiting for here? Who are you looking to for The Nod? You're not going to get it. Who/Whatever it is you've sold out to will never say “Yes” in the present circumstances; too much has already been invested in holding you back from yourself. The Big “Yes” for change has to come from You.

You have a lot to get excited about, if you can only take the yoke off the poor donkey and say "I trust you, my friend - we are in this together.

"My unkind mind doesn't always know best. I let my ego run this operation for too long. I'm shutting off the faucet of self-criticism and putting me back in charge this year."

When you shut off the flood of self-critical remarks, something incredible will happen. Your vision for yourself will begin to take shape. And it won't matter so much whether you pay off the mortgage as quickly as you planned to or whether you read enough business magazines in 2016. When you give yourself permission to imagine the life and career you want, your daily to-do list won't go away. It will still be there, but it will take a back seat to your creative process.

As you create a vision for your life and career, many details will fall out of the picture. That's okay -- your vision will inspire you and call you forward much more than your critical brain ever could.

Your job is to stop paying heed to the old recordings and give yourself permission to think about your life from a higher altitude, a vantage point from which anything is possible.

But your fearful brain may try to tell you to stop dreaming so big. Your brain may say "Who do you think you are to imagine yourself with a different life? I'm opposing you on this for your own good?" You can tell the critical voice exactly who you are, and keep saying it over and over. You are mightier than you can even imagine, and your power will grow with every step forward you take.

Here's a good question that requires a pen-and-paper answer. Who, exactly did you ever give permission to put limits on your dreams? Make a list. Allow time for memory to deliver your answers. If you have less than 20 people on your list, you're not fair dinkum; this is a waste of time. Go and do something else.

You have no reason to limit your possibilities for anyone - especially an old, dusty tape playing in your head! The tape may play on, but why would you listen to that annoying voice now? You are flying at a higher altitude, and you are on a mission.

Your time here is limited. Don't waste it; you cannot get it back. Refuse to throw away any more of your time to naysayers and haters – particularly the ones inside your head. Re-programme the inner wasters and the outer ones will miraculously take care of themselves.

VIRTUES OF SILENCE

We live in a cluttered world! Cities are cluttered, towns are cluttered, markets are cluttered… So is our mind. “Too much to do, too much to think about, too much to keep track of and up with, and very little time…” has almost become like a universal phenomenon, creating stress in almost everyone’s life. Even when one is on leave from work, the mind gets no rest because habitual rest-less-ness has become so ingrained that we've forgotten what real armistice feels like. From the moment it wakes up till the time it goes to sleep, the mind is always engaged in defending something it considers “important”. If our minds (both of them) were vehicles and we were the driver, the cars are driving the driver along routes and to destinations that seem to be totally at odds with where we, the driver, expected to be (“Are we there yet?”)

 As it’s almost impossible to reduce the workload and increase the time, the only option left is to increase the energy level within us and work harder, look harder, listen harder, try harder.... In this area of anxiety over not being “enough” is where the snake-oil purveyors of energy drinks, naturopathic, complementary and psychotropic medicines, junk supplements, healing religions, way-out “spiritual” practices and junk food make their killing. In a desperate attempt to avoid sliding out of place, we'll try anything to feel anchored in something, no matter how flaky it really is.

When we have, by whatever means -- prayer, PT or guarana, cranked up enough energy and enthusiasm, we feel able and ready to handle any challenge. But like everything that has to be pumped up to look good, it is an illusion. It may even be that the more we crank ourselves up, the less effective we become and the closer we get to chronic exhaustion and that condition of dread and paralysis we call “chronic dismay”, where we feel our courage and will have been snatched or leached away from us. We sag into faint of spiritual, mental, and psychological fatigue.

And we fight it. That makes things worse. I'm always open to the option that sometimes the wisest response to an overwhelming emotion or situation may well be to fall down and stay there, at least until you get some of your marbles back, obtain a more realistic assessment of just where you are, and find a fresh set of bearings. In short, I recommend you do nothing and allow your self to fall silent.

The Silent Energy

The question is how to increase our avail-ability to energy? Our upbringing has afforded us with a myriad of ways, means and examples of people energising themselves by stealing energy off others. We get caught in a closed cycle of energetic parasitism.

For the more enlightened ones, spiritual practices like meditation, yoga and pranayama do just that. They all lead one to a space of silence, which is charged with energy. That space of silence is the mother of all rest, the mother of all creating.

Inner Silence is the mother of all create-ivity, the wellspring of intuition. It is in the zone of silent no-thing that all some-things, including the great scientific discoveries were made, path-breaking inventions created, wonderful poems and grand symphonies emerged.

Not about just a shut mouth

Silence is not about just keeping your mouth shut. It’s more about withdrawing your senses from outward activities and turning them inward.  Deliberately not allowing the perpetually over-talking mind to get involved in any of the five senses brings a certain amount of quietness inside. Let your senses report instead to a space of quiet, internal Awareness. This encourages a state of no-mind -- contentment. 

As I began training myself to break old habits and be-come more sensitive and aware, I found something quite annoying about contentment --- it didn't hang around for long. Just when the two of us are getting cosy, some battered old piece of past business gets into the "Quiet Zone" whispering "notice me", and contentment sneaks away, leaving me to handle the irritations and itches alone. What the....?

Be prepared for it. this is part of the business of transmuting our lost baggage into -- yes, nothing. More space

And later, when I least expect it, contentment softly and tenderly returns – barefoot and mysterious, to lie beside and beguile me yet again with the knowing that, briefly at least, life is just-so and perfect – again. 

Attempts to lasso contentment and tether it to me don't work. They have the opposite effect. So what is the answer?

To me it came though a surrender to Silence.

 Create a cure-all Whole-ding space.......

From being a source of enlightenment to a balm that heals an estranged relationship, Silence can be also be deployed as a panacea for many a worldly problem. Often, if we can just STOP, cease, desist, discontinue, drop, relax and let go, staunch, interrupt or just “knock it off” for 5 minutes............ and release whatever irks you to Silence.

Be kind and patient with yourself. Changing a habit of a life time can sometimes take time.

Silence is the ultimate answer to everything – the journey's-end for every question. If an answer does not silence the mind, from its carping at some-thing, to no-thing, it is no answer. Such Clayton's answers only pose more questions.

Silence gets you off the endless Treadmill of Doing and into a space of obseving and Be-ing. Silence allows you to witness more plainly the thoughts that you grab from the conga-line and entertain in your belfry. Silence makes thinking-about more coherent and conscious. Silence is intelligence itself. A person who does not practice silence cannot be intelligent at all. What a noisy talker talks about makes little or no sense. If you want to make sense, it has to come from silence.

This is why so little of what passes for "communication" out there makes sense – gossip, social chattery, political doublepseak, criticising, editorialising,  psychobabble, pontifical moralising, academic expert theory and opinion – it's all just blather, bubbling out of chaotic minds that are obsessed with being “right” and imposing that rectitude on others. Tidal waves of noise and fury signifying a global obfuscation and terror of having, eventually, to enter the Pearly Gates of Uncertainty.

Well, that's just how minds are. “Words, words, words.” Don't expect minds to be any other way. Your Mind will not get you to heaven. OK? Got it? That's why most people end up wrapped in their own little Hell -- they will not pay the ticket-price to Heaven -- Uncertainty. They will not give up being Right, not even for Happiness.

If we want silence, we have to find the gaps in the traffic, those open spaces between each thought and each word. Get off your obsession with what you're thinking about, how brilliant you think it is, and what you'd like to say next - if only all the others would shut up for 5 seconds. Drop all that noise and go for the space. At first it seems that you couldn't get the thickness of a ricepaper between the traffic. Persevere gently. Notice something -- just notice it, without following the noticing with an essay on what you've noticed. Allow the space to open up to you. As you surrender to silence and space, wherever and however you find it , you will enter a vast universe (I'm reminded of Dr. Who's tardis – on the outside, a poky booth; on the inside, infinite space to travel.

 Beyond Words

All of us have experienced at one time or the other, an amazing phenomenon. Whether in one-to-one communication, or in addressing a huge audience, something intangible moves people more than just the the words, the sincerity and the emotion. We try to rationalise the phenomenon by attributing it to charm, charisma, presence, body language, etc. Yes, these all do play a role, but the essence of all that lies in a shared Inner Silence.

Silence is not “dead air”: silence charged with Awareness is electrifying.

I once saw a film of a master communicator as he rose to speak at a huge outdoor rally attended by over 150,000 people. The crowd fell silent. For 2 whole minutes (an eternity when most people get tetchy after 7 seconds of nothing) he uttered not a word. In silence he waited. He didn't even move. I could hear the breeze rustling through cloth banners and flags. The silence was deafening, the atmosphere electrifying. Only when everything was aligned did he begin to speak. Why haven't more of us seen such a powerful display of the communicative power of focused silence? Why don't the self-improvement gurus show it? Because the silent man in question was Adolf Hitler. As Albert Windsor (soon to be George VI) observed “I don't know what he's saying, but he seems to be saying it rather well.”

Real communication is beyond the limitations of words. If you are firmly established in the zone of silence, if your mind is calm, you will find yourself suddenly being able to influence individuals, groups, and masses, in a groove where a single glance can convey what a thousand conversations cannot. Why? Because speaker and listener have commune-ited in that Great Silence.

The sound of intelligence

When we go deep into silence, we experience a form of communication without thoughts. This is when all the questions in one’s mind disappear, and the answers no longer matter. The highest intelligence within starts speaking. If one could only be totally in silence and eliminate all the distractive noises of the mind, that intelligence will never fail to reveal the universal truth of the situation and best solution even to the most critical problems.  

 Get on the mat

For short periods of time every day, go to silence. The more you practice this, the faster you will get to it. When you reach that space of switched-on-ness through surrendered silence, you will be prompted as to what needs to be done. Silence enhances one’s inner strength, gives voice to your in-tuition and sharpens intellect; Silence keeps one in a happy frame of mind and invokes joy.

The amount of energy that one gets in meditation is much more than in sleep. I could not have survived drama school without it: I was working 5 nights a week from 10pm to 6am, coming home for breakfast, then off to university until 6pm. A quick tea, then 2 hours of sleep, then I was on my way back to work. I found that twenty minutes of meditation, here and there, can equal to eight hours of good sleep. This formula could easily solve one of the most common problem working people face - working long hours and not getting enough quality sleep.

The Himalayas Within

People often think that “successful” cannot be without “stressful”. We have been encouraged to believe that there is no nirvana without quitting the world. But Indian spirituality offers plenty of ways of rejuvenating oneself without quitting the world! The body dropping you is death; and you dropping the body is meditation.

The good news is there is no one, single, unique way of achieving it (which is bad news for those who like to lay claim to having “The Answer”, set up perimeter fences and gateways and charge for admission. I found countless ways to learn and invent the art of dropping the world for a few minutes every day before it drops us. Do some research, do some experimenting (searches for silence are not going to harm you, unless they involve ingesting foreign substances or hitting yourself with a hammer.) Even if you never “get there”, the rejuvenating effect of any intentional, willful journey into Silence can, and will make us better, and happier players in the world in particular and the Game of Living in general!