What Matters Most?
Neuroscience confirms we are all products of the thoughts we have; our predominant thoughts permeate through every cell of our brain and body creating the person we are. What we intensely focus on with passion creates powerful energy and scientists can physically measure this energy transmitted by our brains. There exists a myriad of visual and aural displacements. Many people do choose to prioritise time spent in these trivial displacements rather than authentically living. Each of these displacements ultimately drags us further away from fulfilling our potential. Reaching our goals. Any time we spend locked-into one or more of these displacements results in us passively falling into inaction. And we stop all the good stuff we would love to welcome into our lives from ever manifesting for us, because our attention is too busy elsewhere on trivia! There are six major displacements. There are countless other minor ones, but for our purposes here we will talk about the six major ones that impact so dramatically upon so many lives! Yet there is a flip side here, we have a choice to gain knowledge rather than lock-into displacements. We all have easy access to either knowledge or a displacement anytime we choose. All the time we spend absorbed in any one of these displacements ensures we opt to be passive passengers through life rather than being the captain of our own destiny… Displacement Number One - Reading Choices The guy wakes up and before he even gets properly out there into his day he takes his breakfast while working his way through his choice of daily newspaper (or news vlog) reading all about who is killing who, which z-list celebrities have fallen from grace this week and how we are all collectively heading straight into another global recession. Our guy then walks out of his front door with all this stuff running through his head. Not exactly the personally empowered way to begin his day… What we choose to read powerfully shapes the way we perceive the world. Whichever form our reading literature takes will add to our expectations from life and influence our thinking. Children act out the characters from their books or comics, adults are the same. As a youth I read spy novels and for sure they influenced my thoughts and behaviour at the time – if I saw a man wearing a tuxedo he was obviously a spy, with a hundred concealed gadgets about his person and if someone had a generic Eastern European accent they were clearly intent upon global domination. Ironically, I eventually fell in love with Mimi as my life partner, an Eastern European woman (although she seems content with being an English teacher, rather than attempting to rule the world!). Reading personally inspiring literature daily helps keep us on-track to our goals. For over thirty years I have put aside some time for reading every day. If serious about personal growth I am convinced this is essential. Even looking across the room in my creative space at my personal library of all the books I have already absorbed inspires me, happy that knowledge is within me to call upon whenever required. Our personal library is one of our greatest assets we possess, more valuable to our future than the smartest smartphone. Reading though not only adds to the breadth of our knowledge, more crucially reading books we find personally inspirational, listening to audios or watching vids/vlogs on a day-to-day basis helps keep our actions centred on our own self-set goals. Consciously keeping us aware of just how important all this is to us. It is all too easy to get distracted and for the mundane to take centre stage once more in our lives, studying by reading or listening to audios each day is the perfect anchor to constantly re-adjust our radar and keep our inner mojo working. I am not going to recommend specific authors to inspire you. I believe we all need to follow our own intuition when choosing those books which are going to inspire to us. Other than to suggest any books or audios by Jim Rohn are timeless. There are many more thousands of choices of self-realisation, wellbeing, and autobiographical inspirational books out there. Check them out at libraries or bookstores and you will immediately know which ones speak to you. Displacement Number Two - Television
What we view on television is not called a programme for nothing. Everything we watch on television is passively programming us with usually fictional dialogue and images created by other people we do not personally know. By the way, rather alarmingly our brain does not necessarily register this experience as fictional and treats the input essentially the same as any real-life experiences! The programmes we watch, the characters we habitually welcome into our life via television become our crowd. Just like in real life, those main people we hang-out with we either come up or down to the same level as. Rule of thumb here is would we personally wish be friends with those characters we welcome directly into our heads via television or engage in living exactly their kind of life? No? Then quickly choose to tune into another channel or turn it off. Just 4 hours spent each day watching television over a week = 28 hours So 28 hours every week over a whole month of watching television = 5 whole days Then 5 whole days a month watching television across an entire year = 2 months’ worth of lost days Imagine how amazing it would be if you were offered gratis a whole sixty extra days this year? How much further forward towards fulfilling your own dreams would you be right now if gifted those whole two free months to pursue your goals? Displacement Number Three – The Internet The internet obviously has the potential to be wonderfully informative and enlightening. There are some amazing people out there the internet affords us often direct contact with. My own personal network around the world includes incredible pioneering individuals, fellow free-thinkers one and all. Through communicating globally, we ensure we are all collectively raising awareness of the same principles. Those eternal codes for constructing a life of our own making. Those very same codes which have proved their effectiveness through the validation of amazing results time and time again, right down through the centuries. I am one voice, thankfully there are many more and personally I feel constantly grateful for the platform afforded by the internet which has allowed me and my message to become globally known. At the other end of the scale, a well-known car magazine recently conducted their own independent survey of the videos posted online showing any budding amateur mechanic viewers how to fix the braking system of a popular make of car. They were horrified to discover nearly 50% of the videos were either incomplete or erroneous in some way and around 10% of the advice offered, if followed, would prove lethal! As they commented in their editorial “anyone with a camera can post a vid offering words of wisdom about fixing brakes, without any bona fide experience or mechanical knowledge and there is not a thing anyone can do about it”. Imagine the consequences should similar health advice be followed… Practically anyone can post anything to the internet. Right now, I could start posting videos offering my uninformed opinions on thermo-dynamics or perhaps even more catastrophic for my viewers, run a blog giving out fashion advice! All too often many of us tend to unconditionally believe what we see on the internet, trusting that what we are reading or watching must be established fact beyond ever questioning its validity or the motivation existing behind the message. Whilst there are some amazing websites and vlogs out there, informing and entertaining; there are also some ludicrously ignorant and seriously ill-informed people posting stuff online. Then there are those who find it amusing to intentionally mis-inform viewers or possess a nefarious desire to negatively mass manipulate others. Well publicised court cases recently confirming how frighteningly easy it turned out to be for those sad individuals to unfortunately make others take actions way outside of their own best interests. Vloggers are fertile hunting ground for companies wanting some useful product placement, especially if the vlogger they target has enough followers. If our favourite vlogger talks up a make-up line, fashion brand, car, computer game, food/drink or indeed more or less any other consumer item, chances are they will be getting paid fees in exchange for the exposure. Successful vloggers do reach many millions of followers every time they post a vid, what a responsibility! Let’s hope they don’t have any hidden agendas as they are so well respected by our youth for their opinions… Displacement Number Four – Music Choices Music creates feelings and feelings create our reality. The energy music gives off directly affects the cells of our body and minds. This one has been scientifically proven beyond any possible doubt. Famous experiments conclusively showing how various types of music directly affects the wellbeing of plants and water molecules in a positive or negative way. Imagine then how music choices will also be affecting the more sophisticated form of life known as you? Many of us download music directly into our heads through noise-cancelling headphones. If your pleasure involves listening to music which actually has pretty poor or unevolved messages in the lyrics, sorry to have to be the one to inform you, but you are dramatically self-limiting your personal potential by directly programming your subconscious with trash! I am not suggesting you need to now go and delete or sell your entire catalogue of music if you are into thrash-metal, emo bands or whatever; but you will definitely do yourself a great favour if you buy-out of listening to for at least a week and then see if you feel any different. Inspirational contemporary music or from the amazing back-catalogue of classical composers created with metaphysical awareness, motivates us rather than keeping us down. As with books, I am avoiding suggesting specific musical choices here, we need to trust our intuition, and anyway we all have our own preferences for genres of music. And furthermore, I am convinced that we do really always truthfully know what is best for ourselves, even if sometimes we tend to ignore our gut instinct. I ignored mine for years with my own choice of music… I would drive along in my car singing away to certain long-term favourite bands and what’s more I already knew how self-limiting some of their lyrics were! Eventually, through the course of writing the book this article originally appeared in I finally went through my entire music collection in a more discerning way, discarding all the negative stuff I did not want to programme my subconscious mind with. I have been aware of the power of music to influence our mindsets for well over three decades; walking our talk takes as long as it takes! Displacement Number Five - Gaming Computer games, such as those with brightly coloured quickly moving images designed to keep us playing on, are also stopping us from doing things to positively take charge of our life. You know the score, we are talking here about the ones widely marketed via television and pop-ups or sidebar adverts on websites, enticing us all to join in the fun to carry right on addictively playing to reach infinitely ever higher levels. A few years ago, a friend asked me to child-mind her seven-year-old boy for an hour as she had some errands to run and they would be easier to accomplish if temporarily child free. Sitting with this boy I asked him what he wanted to do, and he told me he was unhappy he did not have his mum’s laptop, because what he really wanted to do was play his favourite computer game. I suggested instead we build something with the well-known brand of various coloured plastic interlocking bricks and begrudgingly he agreed. Getting out the bricks and making a start, all the way through our construction he constantly mimicking the noises of a computer game. And I mean remarkably realistic imitations of people being shot, explosions and from time to time he would proclaim himself dead. Attempting to engage him in normal conversation was a challenge as he replied in video game speak and wanted me to join in with his acting out role-playing the different characters from his favourite game. I sensed he must have wondered which planet I had beamed-in from, when it became clear to him, I had no idea what he was talking about. That was one exceptionally long hour as I waited for his mum to return. And it did disturb me more than a little the level at which he partly existed all the time within this well-known game. When I have been to parent evenings for my stepdaughter, often the subject of computer games does come up. She shows little interest in them. Her teachers have all said year after year as she progresses through school, without exception, they can always tell the children in class who spend a lot of time playing computer games, in terms of their attention span, their communication skills and the level to which they are able to interactively participate with their peers in class. Displacement Number Six - Smartphones Imagine creating this device which could pacify massive swathes of the population who live in most technologically developed countries. The people would voluntarily spend most of their time investing their attention on this device to the detriment of observing the reality of genuine life going on around them. Regardless of this being direct interaction with fellow humans, changes in their rights as citizens, enjoying nature, life going on in the city or indeed that truck heading right for them as they blithely stand right there in middle of the street absorbed in their screen. Better still how about we get the user’s fingerprints/ scans of their faces/eyes as part of the process and gather all of their personal details - like who they communicate with and every email they send; who they bank with and how they spend their money down to the last penny; where they are geographically located to within a metre at any given time, their interests and social media posts; if they are away on vacation and where they went; where they work or not; who they hang-out with and where they hang-out with them; what they had for lunch or even what time they usually go to bed and who with; then is all starts again when they get up the following day and eat breakfast! And how about as part of this process we make this device so addictive to the users they consider it essential to their very survival, a vital part of their identity and day to day functioning. Their life. Even better still let’s make the users pay out their own pockets for the privilege of being indoctrinated. Talk about a masterplan! You really couldn’t make it up… At my talks and seminars, I can virtually guarantee at some point, as I actively encourage audience interaction and a two-way dialogue, someone is going to bring up the subject of smartphones. This discussion will generally proceed along the lines of many audience members denouncing smartphones as being intrusive, time stealing and over-priced, some even going so far as to confirm they feel these devices control lives. You get the picture, the majority of those who contribute to these group discussions will have an inherent distaste for this piece of technology. After we have all talked for a little while I ask my audience to raise their hands if they have a smartphone upon their person. You guessed, almost 100% of audience members will put their hand up! Then usually follows laughter. Naturally, I ask why. Their answers reveal they feel that if they don’t use their smartphone, they will be missing out on what their friends are up to and consider themselves to be out of the loop. I personally don’t own a smartphone. I haven’t used one for over ten years now. I do possess a phone; it has just got a seriously low technological IQ. I can make or receive calls, which is about all I require it to do. I usually bring out my own phone to show everyone at these seminars, when the inevitable subject rears its head and there is collective amazement that a writer, broadcaster and public speaker can function with such a dim-light of a phone here in the 21st century. I am happy to share a collective laugh at the expense of my little phone, yet I also hope it might open a few eyes. I show options, it’s for others to decide what truly matters to them. There are now clinics existing in most developed countries to treat teenager’s and the even younger, for their addiction to smartphones. Ongoing studies by universities across the world are universally confirming that using a smartphone directly affects the user’s brain. Think about your still-developing child’s brain, is even the slightest possibility of any potential harmful side-effects from long-term smartphone exposure worth the risk? It is clearly sensible and logical for minors when out and about to be able to keep in contact with their parents and vice versa, to also communicate with their peers. How about restricting the use of smartphones to those under sixteen years old? Those younger than sixteen can still have phones capable of making calls and sending texts, but with safely mega-low electro-magnetic emissions and no direct access to surf the internet. When we are a teenager or even in our twenties living on our phone may well seem like a perfectly legitimate use of our time…how about in our forties or fifties? Will we be happy at fifty years old to look back and reflect upon the lost years we spent absorbed in our phones rather than building an amazing life to enjoy when we are that much further down our timeline? I am not suggesting for one moment it is too late at fifty or even later to turn our life around. Many wonderful examples confirm that we can build an exciting new future at any point in our lives. Only would it not have been rather cooler to have already given ourselves a brilliant head start by climbing on to our personal ladder of success three decades earlier to now be reaping the rewards? A Personal Choice It is all down to what we want from life. That word choice again. The more we do anything, the more engrained it becomes within our neural pathways. Yet, even with the most powerfully habitual of our actions, if we stop doing them for even a short period of time, the neural pathway becomes less predominant and predeterminate to our actions. If we can replace any self-displacements with something more constructive the chances of falling back into those old patterns of behaviour are dramatically reduced. To make any changes stick we crucially need to replace our old paradigm with a massively more engaging new one we can enjoy living instead. Dean Fraser says “Anything we want from life that is literally physically possible in any way at all must by its nature be achievable. It is all too easy for who we truly are to get a little lost. What we really want to get put aside. When growing up the natural desire to fit in and be who parents, teachers and peers would wish us to be can take us right away from our core essence. Into adulthood the pressure to forge a career and be responsible can take us further away from our true selves. Reconnecting to our long-lost Authentic Self brings happiness, inner healing and success on a scale you could never have even dreamed of...” https://www.deanfrasercentral.com Dean Fraser |
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