"GOOD" GOVERNMENT

I have a message about governance to anyone who fancies him/her self making decisions that affect the lives of others whether it be at a federal, state, municipal, corporate or community level.

Try this on for size.....

The purpose of worthy government is --
To gather a nation together
And lead it from where it is
To where it wants to go..

The purpose of government in Australia, however, has become to stay in government, by hook or by crook, regardless of the cost to the people it pretends to serve.

Do not be surprised, therefore, that the herd is fractious, bristling, afraid for its welfare, and mightily pissed off at the paucity of leaders on offer..

I learned this stuff on Anna Plains, a cattle station in the Kimberly. No amount of testosterone, horses, bull-wagons, cattle prods, bulldust (aggressive or florid), righteous paternalism and cracking stock whips will ever make up for lack of Leadership.

I'm looking, I fear in vain, for a leader..

PS. The first step is to "gather a nation together". Until that is done, it is absolutely pointless trying to move to the next steps. You do not gather any group of sentient beings together by splitting them up – by perpetuating Position and Opposition, by pitting groups of beings against each other. Those are the mechanics of Control, not of Leadership. Too much of the misrepresentation, obfuscation, manipulation, fear-mongering and outright bullying that presently passes for leadership is excused on the grounds of “I'm doing this for your own good. This is what's right for you.”

I mentioned above that a leader seeks to lead the herd where it wants to go. To do otherwise is to court resentment and eventual failure.

Back to Anna Plains.....a bore broke down in the Great Sandy Desert. Without water, cattle will perish within two days. Repairs were going to take longer than that, so the cattle were driven for 8 hours over the stony terrain to another bore, where water was plentiful, and grass grew up to their bellies. The next day we drove straight to the broken bore to begin repairs only to find the cattle herd back there! Overnight the cattle had left an oasis of food and water and hiked back to possible death – because that bore was their territory -- it was familiar. I learned that day that cattle are nearly as stupid as humans.

If your herd doesn't want to go where you want to take them, you have a pre-selling job to do before you even take the first step in creating any permanent shift.

What’s the Point of Being Human for Humans- Being?

What’s the Point of Being Human for Humans- Being?

My Best Answer (So Far)

With thanks and acknowledgement to Deepak Chopra, MD

Some 3 decades ago my life had pretty much turned to shit and I was left stumbling around in the dark, bumping into the furniture, and leaving a trail of excrement and a bad smell behind me wherever I went.

Then life said “Hey, you could grow something with all that shit, you know!” “Luck” intervened. Through an impossible sequence of chances and coincidences I met two people – Colin Hayes and Gail Leppard – who seemed to have whatever it was I was looking for. Following their example, I stepped into a number of questions in order to get experiences that I might otherwise miss. Well, I was desperate enough to try anything, and the world they had gathered around them radiated a lightness that was unfamiliar but attractive to me, and those who populated their world had light in their eyes that announced “Somebody at home here!.” So, having failed so spectacularly up to this point, I did something I'd never really done before -- I followed instructions.

From the experiences that followed (I was assured they would – and they did, and still do) , I hoped to get some insights into why the hell I had once bothered being born, not only as a human being, but as this particular one.

Thanks to a woman called Sheila Powers, I phrased my question thus - “What is the experience of being human for this human being called Barrie Barkla?” I figured that, if I could get some answers to some basic human-type questions for myself, then I might discover WHY – and maybe even get answers for the similar, familiar-looking beings surrounding me who seemed to have the same questions hanging over their heads. The only difference I could see between them and me was that they seemed to place a higher priority on things like getting recognised, getting promoted, getting laid and being right. I had already been through that stuff and had come up very empty, so I chose to commit, for as long as it took, to questing and generally poking my nose into philosophical, moral and psychological places most people don't want to look into.

This was going to be my Big Adventure. As tough as it has been sometimes, I have never regretted it. And for thrills it sometimes beats groundbase jumping.

Oh, the questions I committed to stand in? Nothing remarkable – "Who/what am I?"  "Why am I here?"  "Why is all this other stuff here, how did it get here, and how come I got landed with it?"  "And who the hell are all these people? What are they doing in my life? Who invited them?"  And for that matter, "Did anyone invite me, or did I wander mistakenly into the wrong party after taking a wrong turning coming back from the toilet?" I sure as hell didn't feel like I belonged where I was. I wanted to fit in – desperately, but no-one seemed to want me. After two decades of relentlessly pursuing a dream and a career, I felt like a lost punchline that had somehow got into the wrong joke and fallen flat.

One of the first possibilities I explored was that “human-ness” is a context – a way of being in this world (as distinct from being a baboon, a boab tree or a lump of rock). But it's a context that has long since divorced itself from the moment when it was Chosen, when someone or something asked “What would you like to be when you get born, sonny?” Divorced from the moment of aware chosing, being human had become a default-context – a Condition, in the same way as a fish is born into water. It's given. I was born into this condition called “human-being”, so much so that when the question “What would you like to be when you grow up?” was posed, the idea of being a firefly, a planet, or even just plain “happy”, didn't even occur to me as a possibility. I came to this Mardi Gras called Creation  dressed as a human, learned and adopted the dances and --- voila another variation on the theme of Human Being.

And, what's more, I discovered to my utter despair that, thanks to my ignorance, this “being-human” condition, and everything hat seems to go with it, was using ME in order to survive Itself. It existed before I arrived. Simply by being human I was perpetuating what I was born into, and it would go on just the same after I die. While the supply of human beings keeps on coming, Being Human will continue to survive. And all the conditions of being human keep leeching off most other people, too. The horse is riding the poor bloody jockey, and we can't get the damn thing off our back!

Well, that realisation stirred up the black dog in me alright! I spent all of ten minutes wondering if I could find someone to mercifully put me down. THEN – out of that despair came a possibility, followed by blinding flash of something so bloody simple and obvious it took my breath away........

The Possibility occurred to me that my purpose in being human might be to transcend the condition of being human. And I already knew from previous work that all I had to do to escape from being the victim of a condition is to choose it to be exactly as it is. Could it be this simple? Instead of resisting being human, fighting it, denying it, wanting it to be something else – all I needed to do was to surrender, to give up all that dodging and weaving, be fully warts-and-all human, and explore all the nooks and crannies of being human and say “Yes. OK. Thank you. I am this. Let's see what I can create with it.”

That meant my past up to that point was no longer a liability; it was an asset. My next step was to stand in the Possibility that the point of being human is to push the envelope of being human. Stretch the boundaries. Defy the borders. Dig deeper and dare higher. I find this well worth remembering when times are tough and my self-confidence wobbles. As far as I know so far, no other creature on earth has the capacity to redefine itself. We do.  I've done it, and do it again and again every other day. By actively accepting and taking a moment every now and again to find gratitude for progress made, then moving on to once more redefine another aspect of my experience, I ensure that I am still a work in progress, and hopefully remain so until I draw my last breath. My daughter did it, and prevailed. My eldest granddaughter has done it and is now utterly unlike the way she was 8 years ago. And yes, for her it is also a work in progress.

How humans gained this ability to reconstruct their “selves” remains a total mystery. Looking at physical remains, it’s possible—although controversial—to outline the evolutionary march from ape to hominid, from hominid to Homo, and finally from Homo to our specific species Homo Sapiens. But that orderly progression doesn't take into account quantum leaps that also happen along the way – sideways jumps that just happen, defying logic. Nor does it take into account the numerous similar species that co-existed with us Homo Saps until relatively recently.

Because of illogical happenings the physical evidence is blurry at times, and even a simple achievement like the discovery of fire is up in the air; estimates could be off by hundreds of thousands of years. Things like “wheel” and “fire” I stick in a tray labelled “Ideas Whose Time Had Come”, and am quite comfortable with the probability that each did not happen in one place and spread from there, but happened in many different places at around the same time -- there is solid evidence that this phenomenon of multiple birthings is quite common.

Back to the here and now, not a single physical trait explains why we are self-aware. We just are, each of us to a greater or lesser degree, but that seems to be less down to capacity than to our personal willingness to put our capacity for self-awareness into practice. 

It is Awareness gives us the ability to push the envelope of being human. Ten thousand years ago the higher brain, the cerebral cortex, was a finished structure, more or less. In other creatures, once their brains are finished, that’s the limit. An elephant’s huge brain allows, we think, for emotional empathy. Elephants grieve over the dead and are emotionally tied to one another. But an elephant’s brain can’t do mental arithmetic, write poetry, or invent the atom bomb. But then, maybe an elephant never had to write a sonnet to ensure its ongoing survival. Considering the time elephants have been around, maybe we're not so smart as we like to think we are.

The human brain is part of the secret, physically speaking, behind our incredible abilities with language, tool-making, art, and weaponry. But no one knows the secret behind how the mind uses this brain. And what is this no-thing called Mind that's driving us? On the one hand, we remain totally confused about who we really are, and on the other hand we impose our selves upon the landscape as it we're God's chosen creation. Good Lord, we don’t even know if we are basically good or bad. At the moment, original-sin religions, fear of lack (greed) and so-called “opinion” have turned us into baddies destroying the environment. But that’s a lopsided view, given the fact that no matter how horrible our behaviour, some people can look in the mirror and change it, while others remain utterly powerless to do so.

We cannot even agree amongst each other about a simple experience, let alone what is “good” and what is “bad”. Maybe the Mind has something to do with the confusion and right-fighting??? Maybe the human mind is the Problem, in which case it will never be, on its own, the Solution. If that is so, what is pushing – or drawing – us to ask with some desperation “What is the point of being human?” And is the search worth our while? Just because we can do something, it does not follow that doing it is a good idea.

If this is true—and it seems very likely—then what’s the next stage in pushing the envelope? Although some pushy people would like to dictate the direction the rest of us take – “for our own good”, of course – the fact remains that no one knows what the best course should be, because the whole point of human evolution is that no-one can predict where it’s going. Indeed, none of us knows what our next thought will be. We plunge into the unknown at every second. But in the face of confusion, uncertainty, and low morale, one possibility remains untarnished -- if we are willing, we are likely to become even more self-aware. That’s the pattern that has held good for all of recorded history, and despite every catastrophic setback and horrifying turn of events, the march of awareness continues in the hearts, minds and bodies of those who are willing to engage creatively with change.

Some people have even made Awareness their life’s work. They take it upon themselves to push the envelope into higher consciousness. What they report back to the rest of us then becomes the new frontier. “Wake up!" they say. "Here’s what we can become. Now choose.” That’s my message repeated over and over again. Until you become aware, though – as Dr. Phil says – “The best predictor of future behaviour is past relevant behaviour.” Put another way, without developing and exercising conscious awareness, we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Such human life is pointless. What stretches my tolerance is the possibility that the unquesting individual may well have come here this time in answer to a question: “What does it feel like to live a pointless life?” In which case, who am I to interfere?

Recently Dr. A. K. Mukhopadhyay of the All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences, has developed a model for where aware human beings are headed, based on his theory of an ever-renewing theme of purifying Awareness and higher-frequency consciousness.  In a sense Mukhopadhyay has picked up the thread offered by Jonas Salk, whose later career after achieving worldwide fame for the vaccine that eradicated polio was devoted to the future path of humanity. Decades before we got ourselves into the present ethical, economic and ecological crisis, Salk saw that the evolution of our species would no longer be physical. The only way forward would be mental, emotional and spiritual. The force of evolution, which for millions of years has pushed us along a physical plane, has now been internalised. Salk sees the inner world as our future. If he's right, and I hope he is, politicians, bishops and lawyers the world over had better start looking for some radical de-briefing and a new day job before they too find that they have long been hurtling into a terminal redundancy.

The good news is that higher consciousness isn’t a spiritual aspiration open to a few gifted or annointed saints, sages, and gurus. In reality Awareness is a universal trait, not limited to humans; nothing could be what it is without awareness. And even the most unaware bozos are being unconsciously carried along by it, much to their growing bewilderment and resistance. I am synopsising here, but the essence of Mukhopadhyay’s insight and theory lies in the term “supracortical consciousness,”

The old, standard view of human consciousness is physical, based on primitive life forms that exhibit no-mind to evolved species like reptiles that have an advanced nervous system but still (presumptively) no mind, then lower primates, higher primates, and finally Homo Sapiens—in short, a 4-billion-year evolutionary march that saw mind emerge very gradually. Some humans feel guilty about many things, from war and crime to our despoiling of Nature, and we still arrogantly see ourselves standing on the highest rung of evolution, when the only real fact is that we were probably the last to arrive – so far. Until we evolved, we claim, mind was totally or partially undeveloped, as witness our unique “higher brain” (our term, not God's). When I read “higher brain” tripe like this I realise scientists know diddley-squat about Intelligence. It's the same kind of ignorant arrogance that assumes that extra-terrestrial forms of life will turn out to look vaguely like us, with 4 limbs, a head and a body. Scientists sometimes amuse me. Look at the lather of excitement they worked themselves into this week after they detected for themselves that matter and energy travel in waves. I can almost hear Albert Einstein yawning in his grave and muttering to himself, “I knew that ages ago, and told you so, too. But instead of getting on with it, you've spent decades and squillions of dollars to prove it for yourself, and you're no further advanced. Ho-hum.”

The problem with this physical view of consciousness is that it’s like saying that a better computer will make you smarter. In reality, it’s the other way around. When you’re smarter, you can build a better computer. That is exactly what nature did. Higher consciousness built a better brain, and using this ever more intricate mechanism, it pushed the envelope of mind—a process that hasn’t ended and never will. He assumes there has always been an organising intelligence higher (supra) than the cortex. Hence Mukhopadhyay’s choice of “supracortical” to describe it. I have a problem with this view because it appears to confuse “brain” with “mind”, which is a bit like confusing a car with its driver. And it takes no account of mental and emotional intelligence, which are something else again, but absolutely integral to how we handle and express our Being (drive the car).

The notion of a cosmic mind that human evolution is trying to reach isn’t new. It lies behind every spiritual tradition, even though the name for this supracortical consciousness has shifted. Sometimes it’s called God, sometimes Atman, Brahman, soul, or simply spirit. Mukhopadhyay unabashedly links his thinking to India’s spiritual past, which is not surprising since that's wher he coms from. But his overarching aim is merely scientific. In this regard he has offered a challenging hypothesis, which says that current sciences, including biology, chemistry, physics, medicine, and even the “soft” sciences of psychology, cannot explain what makes us human unless his “supracortical” consciousness is introduced. I'm not tied to that connection.

Whatever may be, a host of mysteries remain to tantalise and awe us:

1.     Why did Homo sapiens’ self-aware mind evolve? There doesn’t seem to be a need for it, since other species have thrived without recognisable self-awareness for billions of years. But just because we can't see evidence of self-awareness in other creatures does not mean, I contend, that it does not exist. Human sight is a long way from the be-all and end-all of vision. I say the same about Awareful Insight. In fact, if the current crop of human “leaders” is anything to go by, we could all be a lot closer to the vibrating frequency of a rock than a dragonfly. Fancy a herd of elephants lost in the West African desert, without water or food. Now imagine them getting together and voting for the hungriest, thirstiest, least experienced, most lost elephant in the group to lead them out of trouble! It just wouldn't happen in the elephant world, but in the world of humans? Every day.

2.     How did the human body learn to self-organise? We know the mechanics of the messages and instructions that go on in the womb to guide the kind of being that will develop, and we know a lot about chromosomes and genes, but what intelligence “thought up” genes and “told” them how to get the job done? Every cell has self-interest in surviving and reproducing. Yet there is no physical structure that contains the invisible ability to have a self in the first place. Not a surgeon on earth can yet go into the body and say “There it is. There's reason for being human under my scalpel”. Or any other being for that matter. Every time we think we've found “the answer”, more questions arise. The closer we get to a “solution” the further away it gets. God, I love a good mystery!

3.     Why do our bodies hold on to energy? For that matter, why do minds hold on so tenaciously to everything they hold dear? To survive. To “save” themselves, and anything they consider themselves to be, from dis-integration. Which is problematical because creation is a continuous process of integration, dis-integation and re-creation. But the human mind does its best impede that flow – the dharma.

4.     Where did evolution come from? Science says that the universe began as a swirling chaos, a kind of quantum soup that had no reason to evolve. But evolve is exactly what it did. Embarrassing ain't it? Maybe because the universe did not ever begin. Whoah! Now the finite mind is reeling, yes? A finite mind cannot encompass Infinity. OK, mind is the wrong tool for investigating this.

But something did happen in this void of Nothing -- Nothing being a code word for Infinite Possibility. Thought thought about itself, lowered its frequency from thought waves into ultra-violet waves, then into white light waves, infra-red waves and so on down into gross matter. BANG!! Sooner or later, something happened. A bump, a spark perhaps, and the Butterfly Effect came into play.

And Awareness watched to see what would happen next.

Entropy already had the infant cosmos in its grip, but something else said “No”. In the tension between counterbalancing opposites, a few constants perhaps allowed primitive matter to clump into atoms and molecules.

The journey from interstellar dust to human beings exhibits no logical reason. That may be because logic and reason were not there at the time and, possibly, never have been. Because we have learned to “mind” everything, we like to believe in logic and reason, and we worship whatever we identify as being “reasonable”, but that, too is as dicky and variable as the person creating it. Whatever happened because it happened. That's it. Am-ness changed and diversified its form. For no reason. To no end. No meaning. And it doesn't mean anything now that there was no meaning then.

And the rest would one day become history, and speculation, and theory, and mystery.

5.     Why is the universe fine-tuned? Fine-tuning is the term for how the various aspects of time, space, matter, and energy mesh to sustain a viable universe. With a change of less than a millionth in any constant, sometimes less than a billionth, the infant universe would have either collapsed in on itself or flown apart too fast for atoms to form. Well, how do we know that it didn't? Time was never a consideration. Who knows – what we're living in now may be god's version of Windows 10. What I experience now, however, is an exact, self-balancing universe that will one day curve in upon itself, disappear up its own fundamental black hole and the whole thing will start all over again.

Or maybe not.

No branch of science has yet been able to explain why reality is what it is, and I'm not holding my breath for that to happen. Rather than look for an “explanation”, I'd far rather look at the pictures from Hubble as large as I can get them and play Mozart and Beethoven full-blast while I gaze at the wonder of it all. Let the pointy-heads beat their brains out against dead ends. Sooner or later they, like me, will wake up in a process we call “dying”.

Physics cannot explain the origin of space and time, perhaps because it's outside the limits of physics, ot maybe because there  just isn't one. Biology cannot explain the spark of life and why it caused simple sugars and amino acids to become living entities. Psychology cannot explain where thoughts come from. In fact it took a mystic to point out that the thoughts that plague and the thoughts that nourish us are not “ours”, and that we are not even the thinker of those thoughts. We're being used, played with like and audience at a screening of “Deadpool”. Neuroscience cannot even explain how the dark, silent, watery recesses of the brain create a four-dimensional picture of the world filled with light, sound, and colour. Not the foggiest notion.

Am I losing any sleep over that? Does my ignorance stop me from exploring the mystery? Not likely. Curiosity is the better of me.

Now, you have a choice – a) Spend your term as a human obsessed with trying to figure out how the trick is done; or b) enjoy the ride; or c) both a) and b)! I'm just glad that this is the way it is. It's one helluva playground!

The only way to get past intellectual dead ends is to find a single organiser that knows what it is doing.  Has it occurred to anyone yet that the idea of an omniscient organiser is so attractive because we desperately want to find one, and maybe the discovery of one hasn't happened because such a”god” does not exist? All our searching for such a First Cause may have drawn a blank because there has never been a First Cause. There never was a Beginning. But we keep looking, because at the level of cosmic mind, only an all-encompassing vision that attends to the smallest subatomic particle and the vast reaches of outer space could possibly link us meaning-fully into a dynamic, coherent whole. Our tiny, unkind minds cannot abide the concept of meaninglessness, and they insist on creating god in their own image – a god that has known all along that evolution, life, creativity, intelligence, and Homo Sapiens would emerge to rule the kingdom. Then this god will one day turn to all His doubters (the goats) and say “See, I was right!”

Well, I don't know if that's how it will pan out, but I think not.

With all this in mind, I now suspect why human beings keep pushing the envelope of being human. Like other sentient beings, we're curious. Thanks to certain bodily and mental coincidences, we're able to indulge our curiosity a bit further than, say, an amoeba. But with that freedom to indulge comes a responsibility to heed the Law of Consequences, and the possibility that our profligate indulgences may lead to self annihilation. We now know that, just as the dinosaurs self-destructed because of their inability to modify and adapt, so we might go the same way for the same reason – our inability to change combined with a curiosity untrammelled by responsibility.

I think, though, there is still time.

The present moment is still a laboratory of possibilities. Infinite possibilities are embedded in pure awareness, and glimpses of them are available to those who develop a higher level of consciousness. It’s our destiny, while we are here enclosed in time and space, to unfold them one by one, to be amazed by what it means to be human, to grow in insight and wisdom, each day transcending our memories of yesterday, and then to move on to whatever happens next. 

As Arthur C.Clarke wrote at the end of “The Sentinel”....”He wasn't sure what he would do next, but he knew he would think of something.”

And I think that's the point.

LISTEN HEAR!

LISTEN HEAR!

Bottom line, there are only two major causes of personal crisis. One springs out of one or more kinds of Fear: the second arises out of a perception that our emotional needs are not being met.

The Royal #1. Emotional Need is the need to BE HEARD.

Whenever you feel you are not being listened to, you feel unsupported by your environment and unable to interact with it to get your other needs met. That leads to perceptions of aloneness, inadequacy, confusion, anxiety, rejection, alienation, insignificance, meaninglessness, overwhelm and an inability to cope.

FIRSTLY, BE A GOOD LISTENER

To feel you're not being heard is one helluva smack in the face. I find it hard to think of a more devastating one. That being the case, the first skill to acquire may well be to learn how to listen.

Rare indeed is the effective communicator who did not first learn to be a good listener. Adolf Hitler comes to mind as one exception, but he did not last long. Neither do other bad listeners. No matter how gifted you may be with the gab, the time comes to shut the orifice that dominates your face, and use the two on either side of your head. While your lips are moving and your mind is working out what you're going to say next, you're not learning anything.

Unlike Hearing, which is an innate sensory resource that most of us were born with, Active Listening is a skill that does have to be learned. Listening involves intentionally creating space inside our-self to receive unconditionally whatever is being offered. In listening mode we turn the volume down on any expectation we may have of what or how the offering should be. Listening focuses on the speaker, seeks to enter the space he/she is coming from, and consciously allows the message and its context to filter easily through our judgemental defences.

Listening means attending to the Speaker, as well as what is spoken. In Listening mode we openly meet the speaker and what is being said and how it is being said and we wilfully allow all of that to lie alongside our experience up to date. We consciously create a temporary “Maybe” file in which what is being said can lie, unmolested by our Inner Judge for the time being.

Listening means giving your ego a break and taking in the whole message before any comparing, evaluating, believing, doubting, accepting or rejecting robs the process of its transforming potential. Any thinking about what is being said stops us from hearing what is being said while the thinking is going on. No-one can do both at once. Don't believe me – try it for yourself. Set yourself a difficult mathematical problem to work out in your mind, and have someone read you something at the same time. Watch how your mind has to flick from one to the other – the instant thinking starts, experience and listening stops everywhere other than precisely where you're focused in the moment. That's why we're widely advised to ignore the mobile phone while we're driving

Until recently I had a friend who, in time, revealed an annoying habit of listening to the first few seconds of what someone else is saying to him, then I'd see him switch off his ears and start compiling his response, waiting for the other to pause for breath so that he could jump in and take over control. Needless to say, he is no longer on my “friends” list. If you have such an acquaintance, you might try getting an agreement from him/her to hear you out until you have finished, then NOTHING is to be said for the next 60 seconds, at least. Both of you allow the echoes of what has been said to quietly reverberate, and the thoughts contained to percolate in silence. At first you will find this task impossible to do without “losing it”. Most people cannot go more than 7 seconds in silence; a minute will feel like eternity, during which your mind will wriggle and squirm like a tortured eel. Persevere. With persistence, it will get better to the point where you actually enjoy the pause.

In Listening mode, we agree to allow ourselves the possibility of being affected. If you're addicted to being “right” about your own concepts, beliefs and opinions ,and who isn't, “listening to be affected” is going to be the toughest of challenges for you.

After moving to Perth television, my career morphed into hosting and interviewing. If I had not already learned how important it is as an actor to really listen to the other actor so that I could catch and bounce off nuances in rhythm, inflection and body language, interviewing sure taught my very quickly how immensely important a skill is active listening. Being a good interviewer is not just about asking great questions – anyone can do that, especially in TV shows where researchers and writers prepare the questions for you. It's too easy, especially as a rookie, to ask one question and then jump straight to the next question. Danny Kaye, on the Midday Show, once caught Mike Walsh doing that. He leaned across, took Mike's clipboard off him and flicked it to the back of the set, and then said “Now, let's you and me just talk.”

I still hear the answers to too many interview questions go in one ear and out the other of the interviewer. Countless opportunities for follow-up questions and real exploration go begging because the interviewer is simply not listening. At it's worst, and this is becoming depressingly more common as journalists are replaced by “presenters”, questions are asked of the interviewee after he/she has already given the information. I've been in this situation too many times as an interviewee, and it's very hard to reframe what you've just said so that it sounds as if you're saying something new. I for one resent being put in that position, simply because the interviewer is not listening. I find that disrespectful in the extreme.

OK, let's get onto listening in everyday discourse.

Ground rule – if you want to be interesting, first be interested. Preferably more interested in the other person than you are in how you look and sound in a replay.

Becoming a better listener is no strain – the sounds will come to you just as clearly whether you try or not. But efforting creates static that makes listening harder. Relax.

Active Listening will help you in almost every aspect of your life. It will make you a better conversationalist, a better spouse, a better manager, a better leader. Listening also makes you more like-able. As distinct from the person who commands central position in any group, the most popular person at a party will always be a good listener.

What can you do to become a Good Listener? Well, if you want to be a professional listener – counsellor, teacher, interviewer, journalist, public speaker -- enough to challenge you for the rest of your life. But to raise your acceptance levels in everyday situations, three disciplines mastered will see you well on your way:-

1. Reflect back what you're hearing;
2. Ask questions and, yes, listen and watch uncritically to the feedback you get;
3. Focus your attention.

1. Mirror what you hear being said to you. This is more than mere parroting. This repeats, in the form of a question, what you've just heard so that the other person knows that you have heard what was intended to be heard. It can also be done with an inflection that says “Tell me more”. You've made a friend in two or three sentences.

If the conversation is via telephone, it helps if you occasionally drop an “Hm-hm” into pauses so that the person on the other end doesn't start to wonder if you've left the room.

These things need to be practiced until your sincerity is unimpeded. DO NOT EVER pretend to listen; the other person will know, and possibly take offence. In every facet of communication, be real.

2. Ask questions. How many conversations have you been in where someone says something that just doesn't make sense to you? And you let it pass either because you hope it will make sense shortly, or it seems like too much trouble to ask about the point of your confusion. Don't do that. Get the conversation back on the rails before there's a major crash.
   People sometimes make remarks that seem nonsensical, not because they're stupid, but because they have entered the conversation with you on a wavelength different to yours. Actually, it happens 99% of the time, and leads to protestations like “I thought you understood!” If you want to be a Good Listener, you must take 100% of the responsibility for putting yourself completely in their space, so that you can fully understand what they're trying to say, from their perspective. There's a challenge for you. Yes, I did say 100%; not 50-50. The other person probably won't be as fluent a communicator as you. When you stop at a point of confusion, it shows the speaker that you are indeed listening.
   If, however, the person is running on endlessly about something of no real interest to you, you can signal that you've left the room by – looking around the room. Which leads me to the 3^rd principle of Good Listening....

3. If you want to be a good conversationalist, stay 100% present and available to the person you're with. Do not let your attention, and then your gaze, wander. I am struck by the number of times a person who has been in the presence of a good communicator says of that experience, “She talked to me like I was the only person in the room.”. That experience is so rare that people do not forget it. Make this one rule a habit and you will not only be noticed, you will be remembered and sought after.
   Five minutes spent fully engaging with one person is more satisfying for all than 100 times that amount of time half-heartedly twittering on about the dullest inanities.

Try these three techniques and you'll find you can be the life of the party without having to apologise to someone next morning.

There is a blessedness in giving others the gift of Unconditionally Receiving what the others say. You can disagree or say what you think later, but first hear them as unconditionally as you possibly can.

When I'm counselling, I ask open questions to get feedback. I listen to their experience and listen for clues in words and vocal quality that display any social and cultural conditioning and assumptions that may be shaping their experience of what I'm saying. I get them to describe how the world looks and feels from where they stand. I reflect what I am hearing back to the client so that he/she is reassured they are being heard. I then work from there.

When it comes your turn to speak in a live presentation to an audience your training as a good listener helps you to get to know who you’re communicating with. It helps you tune in and be appropriate to them. In every meet-and-greet situation ahead of your presentation, use the opportunity to get a handle on their language, style and speed; you may even pick up references and anecdotes that you can use in your presentation. The greatest exponent of this art I've ever met is comedian Barry Humphries. For at least an hour before every performance he is in the foyer, listening and getting a feel for his audience that night. It's hard to spot him; he has developed a talent for being almost invisible. But he is there – watching and listening for anything and everything that will help him connect with those who have come that night.

We can't all be a Barry Humphries, but we can be an empowering listener.

Isn't that enough for you?

WHAT'S YOUR EMOTIONAL E.Q.?

Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is the “something” in each of us that ensures effective communication between the rational and emotional processing areas of our brain.

It is a bit intangible – we don't actually know what it is, but we know from our own experiences that it exists, and from science some of the neuro-chemical mechanics it triggers to exert its influences .

We also know that it is a faculty largely acquired through awareness of its existence and practical training “on the job” as it were. This is where there's a rile for conscious, deliberate, educated parenting. As you improve your emotional intelligence, you improve your ability to understand and manage the primary motivations for your behaviour, which reaps dividends in everything you do every day. A developed Emotional Intelligence is powerful and efficient—it allows you to focus your energy on a single skill with tremendous results.

What Does Emotional Intelligence Look Like?

It looks like nothing. Like electricity, we cannot see it, but we can see the effects of where it has been. It affects how we manage behaviour, navigate social complexities, and make personal choices and decisions that achieve the kind of short-, medium- and long-term results we prefer. It is a precursor to another equally elusive trait – Maturity.

Emotional Intelligence is made up of four core skills that pair up under two primary competencies:

TWO PRIMARY COMPETENCIES

Personal competence comprises your self-awareness and self-management skills, which focus more on you individually than on your interactions with other people. Personal competence is your ability to stay aware of your emotions and the thoughts that arise as a result, and manage your reactions into responses, and thus manage your behaviour and tendencies from those of a reactive brat to those of a cogitative, considerate, response-able adult.

• Core Skill #.1. = Self-Awareness is your ability to accurately perceive the emotions and the thoughts as they arise, which ones you entertain, and stay aware of them, and their effect upon your mood and efficiency as they are happening. But self-awareness is often (wrongly) confused with “self-centredness”. Nothing could be further from the truth. There's an Australian aboriginal teaching that goes something like this – “Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love.... and then we return home.” In true Awareness, you cannot be self-aware without becoming more attuned to “otherness”. Awareness isn't just catching; Awareness is all that is. In its active form, this principle is known as “The Butterfly Effect”.
• Core Skill #.2. = Self-Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions and thoughts, and any repeating patterns you've created, and the effect those patterns have on the choices and decisions you make about how to interact with your environment. Aware self-management of your habitual thinking patterns shines light on your understanding pf why you react the way you do to situations, and the kind of person all of that turns you into. Skilled self-management allows you to stay flexible and productively deploy your resources to act in the best interests of everyone involved. You also become less the victim of existence and more it's author. A self-aware, self-managed person exudes an air of quiet authority – someone who knows what's what, and doesn't have to proclaim it from the treetops like some toey alpha-elephant in musth.

Social Competence can be defined as the level of your ability to empathise with other people’s moods, behaviour, and motives in order to respond effectively and improve the quality of your relationships. Social Competence is made up of your social awareness of the moods, agendas and needs of other people, combined with the relationship management skills you've learned in the process of growing up with family, schoolmates, friends and acquaintances.

• Core Skill #.3. = Social Awareness -- your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and, through self-awareness, get some insight and differing perspectives of what is really going on.
• Core Skill #.4. = Relationship Management is your ability to use awareness of your emotions and thinking, and the others’ emotions and thinking patterns, to manage interactions creatively and successfully.

While working on your emotional intelligence will improve a lot of different skills, there are four in particular that people tend to set goals around whenever the yearning for some kind of life-change surfaces. I'll explain how you can improve each of these skills solely by exercising your emotional intelligence. It doesn't matter whether you have honed you emotional skills to a high degree, or you still have you “L” plates on, paying attention to the following disciplines will pay off for you – and those who interact with you.....

A) Managing Your Time

In this age of abundance, time is the one thing nobody has enough of. And now that I'm older, I'm more acutely aware that time wasted is time that I will not get back. It seems that I'm not alone either – Google receives 111 million searches a month for “Time Management”. Few people recognise how time management depends upon the emotional intelligence skills of Self-Management and Relationship Management. Until you learn that, you have no hope of differentiating between what is “Important” and what is “Urgent”. Nor will you have much success in accurately identifying your hierarchies of what's more or less important/urgent, and even less awareness of how your hierarchies change according to who you're dealing with at the time.

Creating a good schedule is a very rational thing, and some people's personalities are better at it than others'. But sticking to a schedule is decidedly an emotion-based thing. Many of us start out every day every week, every month, and every year with the best of hopes, blisslessly unaware of intentions we've long forgotten we have, hidden leftovers of a more primitive time in our lives when bad choices were made, and have not since been un-made – just papered over. Those unresolved and forgotten remnants are the gremlins that sabotage our declared present intentions to manage our time wisely. We're fighting against our selves. Look in the closest mirror. That's you enemy.

We start out in fair weather and the breeze behind us, but then we receive a complicated email from a co-worker, a consuming phone call from a friend or relation, a rash of “beeps” from Facebook, or otherwise get sidetracked until our well-laid plans disappear into a fog of distractions. We spend the rest of the day trying to put out somebody else’s brush fires, or working to resolve issues that weren’t there in the morning. Before you know it, the day is gone and you’re completely off schedule – if you can even find it under the pile of accumulated spoilers. So you either stay behind and miss dinner with the family - also high on your hierarchy of “What's Important” - or you tack today's schedule onto the end of tomorrow's. And the further you go, the behinder you get.

When the needs of others try to impede upon your plans, it takes deft relationship management to finesse the relationship while ensuring that your priorities are still addressed. When the distractions are your own, sticking to a schedule requires self-management, prioritising, and finessing the relationships you have with each of your Selves. It will make your life a lot easier if you have become acutely aware of, and on pleasant working terms with the competing needs of your different “selves”. The more “onside” each of them are with You, the more assured and comfortable you will be, and so will others in your presence.

B) Embracing Change

Show me somebody who claims to love change, and I’ll show you a well-intentioned liar. There's a very good reason why Change is the basis of so much that is funny – Change is something that afflicts every one of us. Change is uncomfortable for everyone at times, and for many of us, real change makes our anus tighten and our skin crawl. Those who apply well-honed self-awareness and self-management skills tolerate change much more successfully than others. Those who don't, get forced into change that they resist, overtly or covertly, along the way adding resentment to the baggage they're carrying. This dynamic explains why so many people may resent you and punish you later for something they felt “forced” into, even if you did “for their own good”, and which they appeared to embrace at the time. (They did that, not out of spite, but out of their own poverty of self-awareness. They didn't feel the resentment under the rug. This is why I say often “You cannot ever know anyone else on the planet unless and until you know your self.)

Self-awareness enables you to adjust comfortably to change because it gives you the perspectives and the space you need to realise when change is coming, how it's affecting you, and how to make ample room for it. Some changes may be discomforting for some , but Change itself does not hurt – it's your resistance to it that hurts.

Self-management keeps you cool in the moment—often with a reminder that the most stable, trusted facets of your life are not completely under your control. Surprises and challenges are on the menu right up until you settle the bill and go home. If you find yourself incurably change-averse, develop the antidote of self-awareness and the skills of self-management, even set aside a small amount of time each week to list possible changes and blue-sky on what actions you might take in response.

C) Managing Assertiveness

Assertive people are often criticised, sometimes unfairly, for being “rude”, “negative” and/or “not-nice”. This is not surprising, as it is rare indeed to find people in positions of power in this country who do not indulge in obfuscation or equivocation. Most people are quite taken aback when somebody speaks straight from a heart and mind in concord. To a liar, straight truth is a direct and overt threat to dishonesty and an assault on shifty doublespeak.

It is my view that there is a marked difference between the extremes of Assertiveness at one end and Boorishness at the other. A boorish person seeks to impose his views, opinions and beliefs by browbeating, quarrelling, blustering and bearing down upon smaller or weaker people. An assertive person has an informed, considered and balanced wide-angle view of a situation, delivers it without equivocation, deceit, archness or duplicity, and listens politely and openly to dissenting views.

The most emotionally intelligent response to a situation in dispute is often one where you either say nothing, or openly and directly express your truth. If you choose to speak, you say what you mean, and mean what you say. You do not avoid responsibility for the words that come out of your mouth, or the nature of the energy that punctuates the content by hiding behind cowardly cop-outs like “I didn't mean it”, or “I was only joking”, or “I've been taken out of context”.

To paraphrase Aristotle, getting upset is so easy. It's a habit ingrained from centuries of habit as a means to control what others say and do. Getting upset is evidence of a chronic condition of low self-esteem and Self-Importance – “I'm far too important that you should make me feel this way. Apologise and pull your head in immediately.” Getting angry with the right person, at the right time, and to the right degree requires emotional intelligence. Emotional Intelligence doesn’t resort to either lashing out, or covertly manoeuvring, or rolling over to become someone else’s doormat. To be assertive, you have to know what you’re feeling, read the other party accurately, and express yourself in a way that garners the best result. People with high EQ's do this naturally.

To be “nice”, more often than not, requires you to “pull your punches”. The result is confused perceptions and outright mis-communication. I have known Chinese Whispers to work better than this current flurry of “nice” political correctness, where no-one says what they really mean, nor really mean what they say. Nicety also leads to deeply hidden resentments because, when you are not straight with someone, your miscommunication is coming with a hidden subtext, which sounds something like “I think you're such an idiot that I don't think you can handle the truth from me.” This is one of those things that come under the heading of “what you don't know you're doing (things you don't know that you don't know)” that will sabotage you every time.

D) Making Effective Decisions

It has taken the world far too long to wake up to the fact that emotions simply cannot—and should not—be ignored when making choices and down-the-line decisions. Neuroscience shows us that sometimes the most rational thing you can do is trust your emotions when making a decision. But in order to make this work, you have to be aware of the emotions you’re feeling, know why you’re having them, and see how they factor alongside logic and reason into the situation at hand. Here, there is no substitute for self-knowing (intimacy – “into-me-see”) and emotional intelligence.

To sum up – If you ever want to have any traction in this world and derive any satisfaction from your time here, you had better develop Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and Maturity. If your parents didn't have EQ to pass on to you, find someone who has it and do whatever it takes to spend time with them so that you can pick up on it. I don't recommend “coaches” because they try to impose “integrity” and “sincerity” from without, as an act, and most of them, I suspect from their showy displays, are about as real as a Bangkok watch.

Getting real is best done from the inside out.

PUT YOUR SELF ON NOTICE

PUT YOUR SELF ON NOTICE

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

Attention is crucial.

Attention/Awareness is the basis – the only basis of existence. Attention is being a-live. Do you remember “alive” ? That was the bit you experienced before “deadening” set in.

Attention is even more proactive than that. When you notice something, you enliven it. When you ignore something, you separate and deaden yourself to it. When you just plain “don't notice”, it doesn't exist.

We even have agreement now from the metaphysicists: without Attention, nothing exists. A thing only becomes “real” for you when and while you give it your attention. In that instant, No-thing becomes Some-thing. Awareness is creative. Creation is the art of bringing something forth from nothing, by giving it your attention, by noticing it.

Both the quality and the direction of your attention deserve examination, because whatever you pay attention to – grows; wherever you choose to head, you will get to. If you focus on your job, your relationship, or a favourite hobby, wherever you direct your attention, it is nourished by that feedback loop.

But you need to know exactly what it is that you're homed in upon. Most people display a stunning ignorance of what they really want, and why. They have no idea at all about who they really are. And they haven't the foggiest about where they're going. They think they know these things – or, more accurately, they are being deluded and directed by ideas about who/what they are and why they're here. Most people have led themselves so far up the “think-about” garden path, they have no idea any more which way is up, let alone what happened to the horizon.

But wherever you are, lost or found, you HAVE to take your next step from where you are, not from where you think you might be, or where you'd like to be, or where you'd like others to think you are. For example, Cardinal George Pell, ensconced in his suite at the Vatican, has not the slightest idea how perilously close to hell he is. He has even less idea how he got there. So he clings to Right-ness. As the flames of hell lick around him on his deathbed, he will be heard to protest “But I was right!”

Politicians claim to be doing “what is right for the country”, when what's really going on is they are claiming to do what they think is right for the country. No wonder their efforts end too often in failure – because they are coming from an abysmal disillusionment, and failure to see any difference between “What I think is “right” versus “What is the most appropriate out of all known possibilities.” It's the “thinking about” that is the problem, and most human never examine their thinking. In fact, the surest way to get a stunned look is to ask someone directly “What are you thinking?” They'll tell you their opinions and beliefs, but what they're actually thinking in the moment – they haven't a clue.

What about you? Would you rather be right – or aware? This is where your Choosing comes in: whatever you choose to attend to is strengthened or weakened by the kind of attention you give it. (Your mind reinforces or weakens in specific areas depending on the input you feed it, and paying attention provides concentrated input.)

When you give anything your attention, you give it form, substance and energy, and endow it with the quality of your attention. What you notice – matters – in more ways than one. Whatever you notice – materialises, faster than the speed of light. So fast in fact that not one of us is quick enough to pick the gap between noticing and materialising. But it is there. And the only thing that can get into that gap is another thought. The trick is to make sure you are the author of the thought that breaks the habit and, like pressing F-9, keep at it until the command registers.

It's one of my Ruthless Rules of Reality that you always get more of what you focus on. The corollary is also true – if you want to know what you've been focused upon, look at what you've got.

This is not rocket science but it can be, for some people, incredibly difficult to get. Some habit, some belief, some old opinion, some out-of-date viewpoint has to be surrendered before you will see it. But once you've seen it, you'll wonder how in hell you could have missed it!

Here's the bottom line – If you focus on what you want, you'll get more of it, in one form or another, from one direction or another. If, on the other hand, you focus on what you DON”T want, you'll be rewarded for your efforts with more of what you don't want. Hadn't you noticed? You hadn't? Then you might benefit from paying attention to the next few minutes.....

Do you give your attention away to whatever or whoever grabs it? Of course you do – we all do. Something happens, and the next thing is that we have been suckered into “thinking about” what just happened, or what might happen next, while what IS happening is slipping past – unnoticed. If you're wise and committed to outgrowing your shell, you'll have a constant reminder (F-9) habit going for you that gently notices “Oh, I just left the room!” and draws you back to the here-and-now.

Or do you invest your Attention in something worth the while you put in?

And include your Self in that “Things Worth My While Being Aware of” tray..... Get to know this non-thing you call your Self. It will help to assume that you do not have a single valid notion of “who” you are. When I ask most people “Who are you?” they tell me their christian name????? That's a joke. Your name is just an ID tag. Your name is no more who you are or what you are than the word”rose” has colour, softness or perfume. Even the name you call yourself was given to you before you had any say in it. Wake up – whatever you think you are started as an impractical joke, remains a joke and the joke's on you. Now, are you going to laugh at the joke, or be off-ended?

Don't be offended –we all fell for the same joke. It's how this particular “reality” show that we call “Life” was set up. It is a setup, you know.

Now, what about the activities this “you” is putting its time into while you're acting out this oddball pastime? Time is energy in potential form. Time is measured in the amount of your Here/Now that you invest with a particular awareness, or focus on a particular activity. That investment involves energy. Notice how much energy you use, and from where you source that energy. Do you create that energy, or do you leach it off others? Are you a creator or a consumer?

People who are self-aware, ie. switched-on to what they notice and dwell upon and whence comes the energy involved, are more generally conscious of and responsive to how they affect the world and others around them. Aware people are alive to much more of what is going on around them. People who intent-fully develop their awareness become conscious of shifts, forces and presences that elude most others. They miss less. They “pick up on” stuff. They're harder to catch “left-footed”. Not because they're “on guard” (a state of tension), but because they're sensate (a state of equanimity).

Aware-full people express their selves kindly and appropriately. They tend to be relatively free of self-importance. They are subtly, effortlessly, guilelessly notice-able in any company.

But before you go running off at the ego at this heady thought, please spend some time differentiating between self-awareness (healthy), and way-off deviations like self-absorption, self-centredness, selfishness, and self interested, self-seeking self-indulgence (unhealthy).

How do you become aware of the difference between self-awareness and its synthetic pretensions? One way is to deliberately do something self-absorbed, then try doing something self-centred....and so on. With each act, remain aware of what happens inside you. Notice the subtler internal changes. It you feel any tightening, hardening or stultifying anywhere in your body or being, then that was not in self-awareness. When you are self aware, you become more relaxed, allowing, relieved, grateful and generous of spirit – quite the opposite effect.

Don't expect awareness to suddenly become a permanent feature of your mien. We slip quickly back into the habit of distracting ourselves from the here and now. I'm doing it now as I write this – there's a whole world just slipped by, unnoticed. It's gone now – let it go. And you're doing the same now while you're reading this. Look up. Notice? Oops! 

Noticing is a way of being in the world. A sometimes lonely way - being in a world in which most other humans-being do not notice what is happening within and around them. How else do you think accidents happen?? Why is it, do you think, that a lot of what passes for “entertainment” these days is actually distraction? How futile. Something to take your mind off what your mind is bugging you about like a swarm of mosquitoes on a hot night. That “something to take my mind off” is just one more thing for the mind to claim as its own, and further load you down.

Know this: your mind does not want you to get this. Have you noticed what it's been saying to you over the last few minutes? Mind “minds” very much if you look like becoming aware. The more you notice, the less your mind can dominate and hold you down. The more you notice, the free-er you will become. And your mind, like all other authorities, does not want you to be free.

If you want something to change, you have to change something. I'm suggesting that one of the things you might consider changing could be the kinds of things you give your attention away to.

Attention cannot be be faked or forced for very long. When a frustrated schoolteacher scolds an unruly class with, “Pay attention, people!” he may get results for a few minutes, but the demand loses its effect very quickly. Asking a restless mind to settle down and pay attention is even more futile. It's a bit like asking a firefly to stop being a firefly and take a holiday.

The secret to directing attention is to know how attention really works.

Attention is Awareness that is focused. There are some basic requirements to be met. The first requirement is to be centred – balanced between opposing and buffeting forces. A mind full of fluff'n'stuff is no way to be Mindful. I will deal with the current “Minfulness” fad in a few minutes. For the meantime, it's important to know that there is no such thing as single-mindedness, and any distractions are self-defeating.

Secondly, your awareness focuses more naturally and easily when you have a Desire and a conscious, clearly communicated Intention. We focus on what we want at the deepest core of our being – always. When we don't get what we want, that may be because we have not yet told our selves the truth about what it is we're pining for. Or it may be that we have to deal first with what's in front of our nose before we can get a clearway to work on the main game. Rule of thumb = deal first with what's on your plate – until it is no longer a hindrance. Life has this (annoying) habit of knowing what you need, when you need it, and in what time frame. But you do have to clearly signal to life what you want to take away with you when your time here is done. And you need to be unambiguous about that. Vague intentions deliver vague results. Life will simply notice where you spend most of your attention, and gie you more of that.

Thirdly, attention works best when combined with intention – envisioning a way to fulfil your desire. I often ask people when they engage with me “What is your intention in talking with me now?” I'm still amazed how few people have a cogent answer to that. Here's a question for you now – What outcome are you expecting to derive from reading this now? If your answer is ready and firm, you'll get it from me. If your answer is hesitant, confused or pointless – that's what you'll get from me. I'm that flexible! Ain't I marvellous!? You get back what you put out for - AND - you're putting out whatever it is you're getting back.

When these three ingredients come together – you are centred, you have a consciously chosen desire, you willingly intend to fulfil your desire – your attention becomes extremely powerful. Anyone who has fallen in love at first sight knows the definition of laser focus. The air cracks with it! For some people the same focused attention applies to ambition, money, and power. For others it's survival, safety and control. Whichever way, Willing Attention is like the advent of the rainy season in the the tropics. Ka-boom! Fireworks!

The resonant frequency of your Attention tends to match the vibration frequency of what it is you're wanting. Low-frequency addictions like security, ambition, power, or jealousy produce a heavy, elephantine aura around you. Some people's bodies even bloat up in sympathy with the heaviness of their “vibes”. Higher-frequency desires like wonder and curiosity emanate a lighter radiance.

Almost everyone has wondered “Who am I?” but the people who actually find out are driven by a burning curiosity to know. This desire is just as strong as other people’s desire for more money, status, and power but a helluva lot more enlightening.

If you ask spiritual questions casually, they amount to very little. But if you ask a question like “Why me?” with some emotional kick behind it – God sends you a flood of emails and home-delivered answers -- and you don't get it? Nothing changes in your life because you're not paying attention, either to the question or to the answering mail (No, that's not meant for me.) Colin Hayes used to say – and probably still does – “If it's in your face, it's your case.”

Your path must be driven by Open Willingness to follow through on possibilities. Since you've probably already tried the more likely possibilities, why not try out some that look least likely?

Let’s say, for example, that you experience one of those moments of inner peace that has crept up upon you without expectation. Suddenly you realise it’s just there, appearing in the midst of an otherwise ordinary day. You might casually notice it, or a train of thought could begin, as follows:

I’m at peace. How unusual. I like this.

(I wonder where it came from?) The very act of “wondering” will hoik you out of the experience in less than the blink of an eye. Let the urge to analyse go through to the keeper.

I want to have this experience for as long as it's available, because it would be good to be at peace for longer and more often. I'm going to stop what I'm doing and have a soak in this for as long as it lasts. When it passes, I’ll follow through on it. It’s too valuable to forget.

This is a natural train of thinking, and every self-aware person I know has followed it, from moments of inner peace, sudden joy or similar special unifying moments that left you feeling protected and looked after, or sensing a spiritual presence that caught them totally by surprise. The same applies to separating feelings – have them while they're on offer. What self-aware people have in common is that they really pay attention to whatever experience they are having, while they're having it.

NOTICING #101

The process of Noticing can be simplified into three steps. The next time you have an inner experience of peace, joy, love, inspiration, upset or insight, pause for a moment and become the observer of the experience.

Step 1: Notice what is happening. Sit quietly without distraction. Soak up the experience without commenting or interrupting it by thinking about it. Thinking about any experience takes you out of the actual experience. Save that for later. While the experience is there, have it. You don't know how long it will last. You can be assured, though, it won't be forever.

Step 2: As the moment fades, don’t rush away from it. Allow it be potentially significant; to be worth noticing still, even in its twilight. You may not find out its true significance for some time to come. That doesn't matter. Enjoy what is happening for its own sake. Put it into context, noticing how different you feel from your ordinary self. When I was supervising the tavern at the Cable Beach Club in Broome, I was amazed and disappointed that most of the tourists who came in their hundreds every afternoon to watch the sunset, shot through as soon as the sun dipped below the horizon. They missed the best part – the 90 minutes of ever-changing pastelled afterglow that always followed. To me, that's a bit like dashing off after sex – you're missing something wonderful.

Step 3: Give the experience value. Consider how transformed your life would be if you could have the experience again, maybe in another colour. Ask how might that feel? Even more, think about a life filled with joy, peace, and love. See it in your mind’s eye; feel how beautiful your life could become.

Notice what's happening, stay with it, and give it value == in these three steps you are activating the emotional area of your brain, and the cortex, or higher brain; the emotional area by fully feeling your experience, the higher brain by applying thought and reflection. Involving these two areas together is how dreams come true. You combine a vision of possibilities with the kind of focused intention that creates new pathways in the brain, and related pathways begin to show up in the outer world. The world “in here” is connected always to the world “out there” -- I don't know how, but it is, probably because there's really no difference. The laws of creating do not recognise conceptual niceties of “one” and “other”, or “inner” and “outer”. In practice it follows that you can’t seize an opportunity without being aware of it as a possibility,and you can’t nourish any possibility without wanting to.

When Awareness, Willing Desire, and Intention come together, you are mastering the skill of paying Attention

THE MINDFULNESS MOVEMENT

FASHIONABLE FAD OR FAIR DINKUM?

One of the founders of Mindful Therapy describes it as “a simple yet effective form of meditation that enables you to gain control of unruly thoughts and behaviours.”

So, as far as this definition takes it, I'm all for it. The definition itself healthily assumes that “you” are not the thoughts you harbour or the behaviours you indulge in. “You” is that which can become aware of them and do something about them. Yippee! If you only get that separation – that you are not your stuff – you have taken your first step to freedom. If your worries and woes are something you have, like your favourite teddy bear, then you are free to do something with them, without fear of losing anything of your Self. And there is no need for awesome temples or months of chanting to accomplish that, unless you want that experience, too. In which case, go for it.

I'm a huge fan of meditating and of doing day-to-day things meditatively (aware-fully). Huge. In fact, I wish there was more of awareness going about – especially on the roads!

But I have two carping problems with their definition of “Mindfulness”, and it's more than mere semantics. My first twinge is with the term “Mindfulness Meditation”. My problem, and I suspect I'm not alone here, is that my mind is already full – full to bursting with what professor Higgins derisively described as “cotton, hay and rags”!

I'm more attracted to some Space – mind-emptiness would be preferable. Perhaps what these people have to offer will give me that, instead. I think it will, but first I have to deal with the second “spoiler” in their definition – “meditation that enables you to gain control over unruly thoughts or behaviours.”

I agree that thoughts and the feelings that accompany them are unruly – I've tried controlling them, and that's akin to trying to herd thousands of cats into a holding pen.

I also allow that thought control can be done, but not by anybody I know. The level of required discipline and training (sometimes brutal) is such that I suspect it's beyond me when I have to also support myself and converse occasionally and normally with other mere mortals. I rather feel that the number of people who should attempt to rein in thoughts and feelings by sheer discipline is probably about the same as the number of people who should try to cross Antarctica alone and without woolly underwear and footwear of some sort.

For most of us, I hope there's another way. And there is. And the Mindfulness people are so close! My take on what they're doing is that it's very close to a process that has been around in the consciousness growth movement for at least the last 60 years. When I first came across it in Inward Adventure, Colin Hayes called it “Thought Awareness”. In short, we eventually got to act out “our” thoughts as they popped up. In a group it was chaotically hilarious. I really got how insane head-fucking really is.

Let me lead into this now by proposing that the goal of meditation could be, not to control thoughts and thinking etc., but to stop thoughts, thinking, etc. controlling you. How does that appeal to you?

This is where Noticing comes in. Noticing requires no temples or cathedrals, no robes, no chanting, no monks, nuns or priests to interpret or interfere (sorry, intercede) for anything. No flagellation or contorting of the body is needed. The only discipline required is a gentle bringing-back of your awareness when it wanders off from what's going on in front of your nose and around you, seduced by your ever-demanding mind and its shenanigans.

People who practice Noting naturally become more focused, even when they are not “meditating”. I've found Noticing to be an excellent, pleasing habit that reduces stress because it stops me from feeling totally helpless and completely useless. Noticing stops me from jumping from one trailer-thought to the next in the endless road-train of thinking – 50,000 of them every day, give or take a few. And we've gotten into the habit of trying to ride them all in turn in the name of “keeping control” and “this is living!” Noticing what thoughts, beliefs, ideas and behaviours distract and bring you down helps you to get to know this “persona” you've created, and helps you cover the day's doings in a more calm, alert and productive manner.

Harvard University psychologist, Ellen Langer, herself a student of this Mindfulness phenomenon, described it in this way: Mindfulness is the process of actively Noticing new things. Now I'm getting more relaxed and comfortable with this. Pure Noticing happens in the here and now. There is no “minding” in it. It just notices this, then this, then this, then this...... like a wide-eyed toddler. Bloody annoying when you've got five minutes to pick up the dry cleaning before getting the older kids from school. But that's not a toddlers “concern”, is it? Why is it SO important to you that you miss something really cool like a caterpillar undulating across the footpath?

Noticing stops when Mind kicks in and starts making commentary on what you've just noticed. That's it. You're out of the here-and-now, and sucked into the past. Yet again, life (always in the here/now) passes you by – un-noticed, while you get towed around by your unkind mind. Then you remember and, shocked awake, you start noticing again: back in the Present. Noticing makes you more sensitive to lost elements of Context and Perspective. Noticing re-minds you.

The mistake most people make is to assume that Noticing is stressful and exhausting – noticing all this thinking. Wrong! Noticing the thinking is nowhere nearly as exhausting as doing all that needless thinking. Sure, changing any habit requires some willingness, application and perseverance, but it is possible to persevere with or without stress – that's your choice. And the more practised you get at Noting, the more you'll quickly see how stressful once were all the mindful negative evaluations and commentary, and the worrying about problems that you might encounter and not be able to solve. Now no longer. You simply notice, and let be.

Noticing in the workplace

There's good reason for high-performance companies like Google to embrace Noticing into its performance training regimes – it's effective. Ellen Langer's studies indicate that the habit of Noting improves your performance levels in all manner of activities.

But there are other more important reason why I recommend you start making the Habit of Paying Attention a personal priority. Here are five of them:-

1. Noticing puts you slap-bang in the only happening place – here and now
2. Noticing improves your ability to focus your awareness.
3. Noticing pollinates creativity
4. Noticing improves your emotional intelligence.
5. Noticing makes you more aware, alert and alive.

1. Note that all through this article I've used the active verb “notice” rather than the passive “be noticed” or the imperative “notice me!”, progenitor of the selfie craze. Noticing what's going on in and around you is not stressful. Stress comes into it through our reactions to what we notice, when we stop just noticing thoughts and feelings, and instead go chasing after them like clowns at a rodeo.

If we don't react – no stress. No stress = reduced chances of cancer, high blood pressure, autoimmune diseases, heart conditions, insomnia, depression, anxiety. That seems to me to be enough good reasons to at least try it. What have you got to lose by being more “with-it”? What is the payoff supposed to be for being a dopey-dick? In your book who gets to be deservedly punished if you remain a dysfunctional zombie? Who gets let off your emotional hooks if you get relaxed, clear and calm?

2. The human mind can not dwell upon more than one thing at a time but it can, and does, flit from one dwelling to another with a speed that even light cannot catch. Noticing gives you real, gentle practice at shepherding and focusing your awareness on the task at hand. Your increasing ability to apply your awareness with consistency naturally carries over into everything you turn your intention towards. Noticing helps you identify internal and external distractions, and get a profile on what distraction pattens you've developed – patterns that surreptitiously sabotage your sincerest endeavours. While you may have fallen prey to multi-tasking in the past, noticing what is easier, and what makes things difficult will help you kick this nasty, productivity-destroying delusion/habit.

Time is energy. Time is the quantity of here/now that you invest in a particular pointing of awareness and apply to a particular activity. Wasted time wastes energy. A focused awareness is a more productive awareness.

3. Noticing is creative. Your level of ability to create affects the quality of the here/now you are investing. Creativity hinges on your mental and emotional state. A mind in turmoil creates confusion, misunderstandings, and mistakes. An awareful mind dissolves the limiting thoughts, opinions, feelings and beliefs that stifle groundbreaking creativity and self-expression. Just the fact that “noticing” puts you in the Now helps new ideas to flow naturally to and through you. An unaware mind repels creativity and freshness.

4. Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is that intangible “something” within us that affects our ability to manage our behaviour, to navigate complex social interactions, and to make personal choices and decisions that achieve results that work. Your EQ is a measure of your ability to recognise and read emotions within your self and other selves, and to use this awareness to manage your own behaviour and relationships.

It seems from research in the USA that 90% of top performers in all types of jobs also have a higher-than-normal Emotional Intelligence score. While I would not recommend that statistic as any kind of definitive proof, it seems obvious anecdotally that those people who can clearly identify, feel, understand and manage all of their emotions are far more likely to be effective as colleagues, friends, parents, managers and leaders. Similarly, those who have made insufficient effort to develop their EQ are far more likely to have a destructive influence on the environments they blunder through.

5. Noticing enables you to attract healthy supporters and mentors, organise yourself and create and communicate plans, self-heal old parent thoughts, limiting feelings and habits that brought you undone, assume responsibility for your own growth and evolution, and become a healthy mentor to others.

Self-healing is a trait of people who Notice. This applies specially to those who are practiced enough to catch thoughts we all entertain about our selves, uncritically look at each one, then quietly stand in the question about each thought – “Is this true about me?”

People who take moments to uncritically observe tend to show 50% more genuine kindness and compassion than those who don't. There is something in feeling present, available and interested that brings out the best in people who have a “best” that they'd like to improve upon.

Putting your self on Noticewatch improves your wisdom and insight, your performance now, and your capacity to perform in the future.

Do what I did – give it a try. You'll be surprised at what you've been missing, and you might just find out where it will take you.