Hello everyone..
As those with whom I correspond via email know, I’ve been traveling an enormous amount this year. I’ve been on several continents, many countries, having a great time, and attending vigorously to my endeavors.
This project, fortunately, continues to run itself, signing up new members each day. We have several thousand member sign-ups to date. Many come in, grab level A, then disappear. However, many stay with the program and report long term results from valuable to phenomenal in their lives.
I continue to appreciate the …
Continue Reading Hello and Update
Just as “certainty” can seriously undermine our transformation, a “blaming” mindset can covertly keep us stuck.
Normal people don’t walk around saying “I blame others for most bad outcomes and don’t take personal responsibility.” It is amazing how few people acknowledge this common pattern, yet how widely it is expressed in everyday life. I’m not here to criticize people for this self deception, but rather help expose the pattern so you can release it and grow. This is a common part of the human machine we can grow beyond, but only with the fortitude to look past our comfort zone.
What do I mean by “blame?” I mean attributing the cause of events, circumstances, and even your own actions and thoughts, as originating outside yourself. Sometimes this involves specifically communicating that others are at fault, but mostly it is an insidious internal habit. The habit creates external causes for your life, particularly the aspects you don’t like. This forms the basis of a — dramatic pause — a victim mindset. In stronger forms, I believe this blame habit is the root of many clear victimization perspectives, wherein people attribute much of their life to other people, the system, the unfair world, the evil human parents, and so on. As with the blame habit, no one thinks they have a victim mindset. Both are subtle infections that undermine our lives from the inside out, rather than appear in our internal awareness.
Sometimes it is reasonable to blame others. You’re eating in a restaurant and someone crashes into your legally parked car. A burglar breaks into a locked building and steals something. Even in these cases, beware of subtle hiding of your participation and power — did you park properly, did you secure your valuables reasonably? Even if you are not the cause, be open to learn and alter the circumstance in the future when appropriate.
Continue reading Release Blame and Choose Responsibility
 Meditation is Beneficial, but NOT a Rapid Transformation Tool As the Omega Mind Program reaches many more people, we frequently get questions about “deep meditation.” Does this program help me meditate deeply? Other programs or software claim I’ll get to instant Zen states or have Monk-like meditation. Will I quickly find true bliss in life?
This is a rather rich and complicated question. Since many people have asked, I thought I’d post my thoughts.
Generally, yes, the Omega Mind Program helps you meditate very deeply and provides the guardrails and on-ramp to get there quickly and effectively. However, our goal with this program isn’t deep meditation. We are trying to transform lives and get brains to rewire themselves. Meditation-like states, for us, are ONE of the tools to help get there.
The Monk’s Life
A Zen Monk may ultimately achieve, or rather, drift into, a state of bliss. They master mind states with mentoring, practice and tuned, gentle, mastery of their will, attention, and intention. These monks often have a lifestyle of simplicity, quietude, meditation, and service. They let go of most attachments to the world, to people, to things, and cease grasping at the concepts that swirl through the world around them. From this baseline, they follow a spiritually informed path that often leads to deep contentment and what we might call bliss. As this is their life’s goal, they often do find what can be called bliss.
Now, Switch to Your Life
Continue reading Why Meditate Like a Zen Monk?
 What do facts and truth have to do with personal growth?
Many books have been written and dance around this topic. I’ll cover a lot of ground quickly and give you the key points to help you escape what I call the Truth Trap. Give me some time, and put aside your doubts while your reading. Understanding the nature of what is in your head is worth the investment of your time and mind. In the end, keep what you like, discard what you don’t.
Our brains are wired to examine our surroundings, draw conclusions, repeat the decisions that work, and replace those that don’t. Early learning, memorization, experience wit h the world, along with our brain’s tendencies, combine to create the fact-based brain. Our schools impart essential shared “knowledge” that is necessary to function well as a society. In an effort to live socially and standardize, we face correct/incorrect, right/wrong, and true/false perspectives constantly. All of this reinforces a fact-based ecosystem of thought. From this environment and the wiring tendency in our brain, we form the basis of the absolute real world in our head. We learn to treat almost everything in our minds as either facts in principal or quasi-facts that serve the same role in practice. We conversationally attest to uncertainty and openness, but we think and act as though our minds are stuffed with immutable facts.
I’ve had to completely rewire my own brain, as I once believed in facts. In very abbreviated form, I held the philosophical view that knowledge is fully possible, since if even one piece of the universe cannot be known, it leads to a problem that nothing can be truly known. I recognized that in practice, much was unknowable, but placed high value on that which I thought I knew. I believed in principal everything could be logically snapped together, even if the logic would be fuzzy in some areas. This perspective seemed more than reasonable at the time.
Continue reading Truth and Facts – Doorway to Freedom
  Just Listen to Reprogram Your Brain There are a wide variety of products and programs that offer to help you grow and achieve in various ways. Many of these programs offer substantial benefits over a period of weeks or months. Very few personal growth approaches offer significant long term change and help you operate at a higher level. The market is also saturated with copycat products and simplistic placebos. This has ultimately convinced many people that the personal development and self-help field is less than wonderful.
I have tried and reviewed many of these and look for the theory and core efficacy in every offering and technique. In every article, book, or study, I look for repeatable gains and benefits. Though many products and individual techniques offer some benefits, none offer the long term potential I believe is possible. I’ve always believed personal development programs could be taken to vastly improved levels. The journey and commitment is still long, but the accumulated results could be much greater.
Over time, I’ve used passionate curiosity and mental rigor as a guide. I discuss and validate the concepts at length, including working with psychiatrists and psychologists to get their perspective on these non-medical products. My current theory and perspective in personal development builds on many great teachers, researchers, leaders, and thinkers.
I have gradually synthesized a hybrid neurological, psychological, and developmental framework for human growth and achievement. For over three decades, I have been creating programs of various types to help people in their quest for personal growth and achievement.
Continue reading Breakthrough Approach to Personal Growth
 Abraham Maslow created a widely referenced hierarchy of needs. There is little doubt that satisfying our basic physical and security needs are a precondition to awareness and growth of higher levels. I’m assuming people who read this have already passed through most levels of Maslow’s hierarchy.
You now seek to grow beyond your emotions, inhibitions, and mindsets, upgrading a few personality traits and behaviors along the way. You’d like to achieve a perfect ‘gestalt’ in your internal and material life – such as open, flowing, evolving, compassionate, spiritual presence, and outwardly successful in areas you choose.
Our society has evolved a background of materialism, reductionism, voyeurism, and a host of other facets that work against the realization of these growth goals. I refer to the full expression of this spectrum of goals and traits as an “emergent” person, in the sense that they have emerged from the background noise of their brain and the world. In a different sense, many people are “emergent manifestations” of our world, rather than full actors that have emerged in the first sense. I refer to emergent only in the positive sense, as none of us want to be just an emergent property of the universe.
I characterize growth into four practical stages, plus one:
- Sleeping – embroiled in life, unaware of growth in the terms described here
- Awakening – aware of the possibility, engages a process toward emergence
- Transforming – experiencing obvious shifts and changes in their evolution
- Emergence – Significant ongoing experiences of openness, flow, and so on
- Enlightenment / Divine Consciousness – A fully emergent being and beyond
Continue reading Five stages of personal growth
 Neural Networks and Myelination I’ve always pondered why personality can seem so fixed and relatively immutable, even when the individual seems committed to change themselves. As with many things I’ve studied about people over time, a strong neurological aspect appears underpin the highly stable personality/psychological constructs.
After reading Daniel Coyle’s book, “The Talent Code,” I see another possible good explanation. The key aspects of his work relevant to us:
- There are two factors that influence brain performance when myelination is strong. First, the nerves transmit much faster, up to 100 times as fast. Secondly, late arriving signals in the brain, those that didn’t take the faster myelin routes, are generally ignored when they do complete, if a substantial number of the faster myelination paths have already fired.
- The effect is that highly learned pathways become super-highways of the brain. The local streets, where you walk around at one one-hundredth the speed, are essentially ignored whenever you activate the super-highways. Once built, the super-highway owns much of your thought and behavior. That may be what you want for golf or violin, where there isn’t time to be consciously choosing each motion, but not so much for your personality.
I’ll now give you my synthesis on what this means to us in our core personality and being.
Continue reading The Learned Self – What’s Myelin Got To Do With It?
I’m about to divide people into two rough groups. Please excuse my stereotyping of the complexity that is inherent in each of as individuals and as a society. The world is not neatly divided into categories and types. I’m using this for illustrative purposes, to give insight into how people grow at the deepest levels. This is not “true” or “right” in any sense. It is not a judgment of people’s value or potential. Interpret this with an open mind and look for a preponderance of characteristics, not a literal interpretation. Everyone has elements of both, but look at the most central issues and desires and see how they fit. Consider the approach and see if it helps you understand the personal growth process and two wildly different sorts of paths.
With regard to personal growth, people seem to fall into two rough groups. The first is a group that stabilizes early in life, from a personality, trans-formative growth perspective. The second is a somewhat smaller group that mixes in varying doses of seeking, reflecting, and thriving on paradigm shifts.
Continue reading The Evolving Person – Are You Static or Dynamic?
There is state of being that I call emergence. It bears much resemblance to terms such as transcendence, flow, heightened awareness, or spiritual awakening. I refer to a balanced gestalt of all these facets and many more. Emergence is the upper band of achievable human conscious attainment.
Although the names, methods, creed, and details differ, these terms all attempt to catch an ineffable state of experience in concise language. It is ineffable is because the experience is very rich, varied, and rare. There would be no easy words for Blue or Loud if the vast majority of people had never experienced sight or sound.
Now that I’ve extended, contorted, and re-coined a word, I’ll get to the topic at hand. I have broken the evolution and growth of personal consciousness into five stages. These include sleeping, awakening, transforming, and emergence. The last stage, which I can’t help with it, is achieving divine consciousness, enlightenment, and similar states. See five stages of growth for more on that topic.
Continue reading Am I Sleeping?
 The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle, is a four star book that deserves an extra star if you track the hidden sub-text. Coyle covers a crucial topic on brain learning entirely from the perspective of developing extreme talent. For example, developing skills such as becoming an extremely talented soccer player, violinist, vocalist, golfer, and so on. He indicates that recent studies show two very interesting properties related to myelin.
Continue reading The Talent Code – Daniel Coyle
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