The two brothers lined up next to each other in front of their teacher who lifted his hands to his katana (samurai’s sword).

“Today I will teach you about combative distancing. I want you dodge my cut as best you can.”

The students looked nervously at each other as the teacher unsheathed his sword, it glinted at them as the sunlight danced along its razor sharp edge. It had seen many battles in the olden days and the boys had seen how even now it cut through bamboo with barely any effort.

The first student steeled himself, staring at the blade now raised above his adored teachers graying scalp.

Without notice the cut came and at the last moment the student dived backwards, stumbling as he regained his balance. Relieved to be untouched he went to his knees, gathering his breath.

The teacher motioned for the next student to come forward as he prepared himself for another deft cut.

Tension built in the room as the teacher observed his students composure, more relaxed than the first this student stared directly back into his face.

Again without delay the stroke came down flashing like lighting in the fading sunlight. The peacefulness of the summer afternoon was shattered as the sword ripped through the woolen uniform presented to its edge.

“Brother!!!”

The first student leaped to his brothers side as half of his uniform fell to the floor, cut from its owner.

As he grasped at his brothers body his teacher sheathed his sword, to the boys astonishment he found his brothers flesh untouched. The teacher sighed,

“There is only an inch between life and death, both of you knew this and avoided my cut”.

He pointed at the first student, “But you moved halfway across the world to avoid my cut and consequently gained nothing”.

“Your brother on the other hand only moved the inch required to choose life. Sacrificing everything but his life he gained everything possible from the encounter.”

Gaining the Most from Every Encounter

Many people believe that living life to the max means to be always taking risks and staying busy doing things, not letting fear stop you from achieving your goals.

While there is some value to this I think it is a little misguided.

I like the above story because I believe it illustrates perfectly how to live life to the maximum.

The first student took a risk and faced the blade with great courage. To any thrill-seeker he indeed lived to the max.

But what distinguishes the two students is their attitude.

It would appear that the first student was focused just on protecting himself. But deep down he was also protecting his clothes and his fear. Consequently he dived so far away to avoid the blade. Such a large movement was required in order to save those elements of himself.

The second student on the other hand had shed his clothes, his fear, his pride and all else. Because he had put all those aside he could face his teacher and only move far enough to protect his life. As such he was left in the best position possible for any counter-attack.

Bringing this to our life we consider our everyday interactions.

Whenever we interact with someone a blade is being swung. If we hide in our insecurities, doing just enough to get by in the expectations of our society we will be living half the world away from our authentic life.

If on the other hand we live protecting nothing other than our life then in our interactions we will allow our partners the full range of their swing and we will present our truest self fully.

In interactions like this you are not hiding anything, not protecting any prejudices or preconceptions. Then you and everyone else will gain the most possible from every encounter in life.

Like the edge of the katana’s blade, it is most effective when nothing is clinging to it.

The two types of learning are:

• Learning in the area of study [Substance-learning]
• Learning about how to learn in the area of study [Method-learning]
  

Now these may seem obvious but most people will let them blend together as one and this hampers our ability to learn efficiently.

An example is necessary.

When we want to learn about the effects of anger in our life there are a multitude of methods around. All of them provide Substance-learning when applied to our lives. Taking retrospection as one method, we wonder(as all good learners do) if there is a more effective way to learn about our anger.

So we engage in some Method-learning and discover the method of self observation during our day. We apply it and discover some gains as we gather some more substance data about our anger.

This an example of Method-learning in it simplest form. But the realm of Method-learning is much greater than this and benefits even more so.

Methods of Method-Learning

1. Discovering new and improved methods

   This is the method used in the above example. It is a method of discovering and utilising the knowledge of others who have gone before us.

   I have just started learning Japanese and consequently I have been diving into the research areas of language acquisition and memory (There are a lot of chinese characters!). The rate at which I can learn jumps every time I come across a fundamental discovery in the material.

2. Extracting general principles

   Whenever we are studying a particular area there will be many different ways to learn about it. Among these different ways there will always be some common principles. When you can identify commonalities among methods that bring results you can start to do two things. Throw away the excess edges that don’t benefit the methods and you can focus your effort on improving your utilisation of the effective principles.

   When I was learning to play the guitar I was taught to practice slow lots and independently I read about the concept of muscle memory. Looking at both of these methods there was a clear overlap. They both emphasised the importance of training the muscles to do the right thing. Consequently I learnt that the fastest way to learn to play guitar was to practice perfectly lots.

   Sometimes I like to think of common principles as Super Methods that others are a subset of. This is because too often ‘principles’ are forgotten, thought of as having only theoretical value. Calling them super methods reinforces their supreme power and effectiveness.

3. Fine tuning for personal use

   Everybody has different learning strengths and learning weaknesses. Because of this it is necessary to look at our methods and consider how we might tune them to be more effective for us. It is important to note that just because we all learn differently that it is not an excuse to say some methods do not work for us in cases where we simply have not invested enough time in learning how a method works.

   Fine tuning is largely a combination of experimentation and application of general principles. We have to take our current methods and tweak little aspects of them in order to see if we can improve them for us. The tricky part here is consistently trying our modification for a long enough period of time to see if it benefits us.

A Learning Formula

Amount of Substance Learnt = ∑t Effort Perseverance during t * Invested Effort in Method Learning at t

Excusing my poor attempt at a mathematical formula in wordpress this is what I am trying to say.

The amount of substance that we learn is a function of how long we persevere multiplied by how much we have already learnt about how to learn in our desired area.

If we just keep exerting time and effort we will basically learn at the same rate. If we invest time in learning how to learn better then our time and effort spent learning will be more effective now and in all future efforts to learn.

This is key, don’t neglect explicitly putting in time to learn about learning and reviewing the results.

The thing that stunned me most was that I was holding people both as being equal and not equal at the same time.

In my mind I was putting people at different levels in different categories. Then depending on which category I felt was prominent about I judged the person.

The Many Sliders of Classification - Examining the Thought Process

The mind works by segregating, grouping and contrasting. Whenever you see, meet or hear about someone your mind wants to organise the data so you can make yes and no decisions.

I was discovering that everyone is equally awesome through moment to moment observations of direct interactions with people. So while I was interacting with people I always looked at and treated them (to the best of my ability) as equal.

What I realised was that my awareness of my mind was not so sharp when there was a level of indirection involved.

When my friends would tell me stories about their friends my mind would try to put together an idea of what they were like with the purpose being to be able to better understand the communication at hand.

Mistake #1: You cannot know another person from what you hear about them, don’t even try guessing

In trying to imagine this person my mind would project traits and habits of my friend onto them. From this point it would be using a few select categories to evaluate the person.

My mind was most concerned with whether they would be a good match with who I am. How do they value other people? What is their view of spirituality/personal development? What activities do they enjoy?

Within my mind I would place them on a slider bar in each category, in which there would be a marker with my own belief. If they rated higher then where I held myself then I felt inferior, conversely if I felt they were focused on unimportant things or wrong ideas than I would secretly feel superior.

As an example, if others appeared to be exerting more effort in personal development I would feel inferior, if they seem to be focused purely on worldly goals I would feel superior.

Mistake #2: The mind is made of categories and it can only hold a few categories in attention at any time. Consequently any decision made in the mind will only be based upon a small subset of elements and judgment will be made on an incomplete basis.

What you can also see from this is that in judging my friends friends my own judgments about my immediate friends were brought to light. Which were offcourse also based upon selective judgment.

Mistake #3: Just because we are all different does not mean we are not equal.

Discover for Yourself

Sit yourself down somewhere, relax your mind and pick any person.

Project an image of them into your mind, wait and watch.

The mind is much like the internet, it loves to link to related places.

With your chosen person in your mind keep your relaxed attention on them. Soon either a thought, emotion or image will appear within you.

Let this new element sit with you, observe it. In no time another related element will appear and so on you follow the chain as deep as you want to go.

Everything you see is related in someway to this person.

To begin with if you are not used to this sort of attention your mind can jump to unrelated things, if you are watching attentively then in your heart you will know if you are on topic or not. If you have shifted off the person then bring your attention back to them and start over.

Repeat this with people you know very well and those who you barely know personally. Particularly interesting is to try this with people you only know through internet forums or blog/blog comments. Chances are if you are like me you will see things about yourself which are so unexpected that it will feel like a slap in the face.

Things to Remember

• Always listen to your heart(intuition), it knows correct action even when your mind should not even be allowed to guess with the information at hand.
• The mind and the external world differentiates between people. Humans are humans, we are all the same.

Have you unexpectedly caught yourself thinking inferior or superior?

I want to take this opportunity to elaborate further on this topic as it is something that is easy to misunderstand and draw incorrect conclusions from. For the purpose of this post I will have evil refer to the notion of incorrect or wrong action.

Here is what we need to understand:

• Everything is awesome at the core
• Thoughts and Emotions wrap awesomeness
• Action is spawned through compulsion

Everything is Awesome at the Core

Underneath the labels, the preconceived notions and the ideas everything and everyone is awesome.

This is the pure natural state of things. It can only really be appreciated and understood however when you yourself reach within and find your own natural state.

Discovering this was the topic of my last awesomeness post which is worthwhile reading. If you cannot discover your own awesomeness it will be impossible to see the awesomeness of someone doing something evil.

Thoughts and Emotions wrap Awesomeness

Our natural state is one of awesomeness. Throughout our day thoughts and emotions come up and these obscure our view of awesomeness causing us to lose our grasp on it.

The awesomeness does not however disappear. It is always present.

Consider awesomeness as a lightly glowing ball.

Whenever a thought or emotion captures us it is like putting the ball into a plastic bag.

As thought after thought piles on the ball becomes further obscured until it is so well hidden that all that can be perceived is a crinkly mass of plastic.

Thoughts and emotions are not awesomeness. They are additions like magnets on a fridge. It is important to be able to distinguish between them and realise that they are separate entities.

Only when you strip away the layers of thoughts and emotions can you see awesomeness.

Action is Spawned through Compulsion

If you watch yourself carefully you will see that a lot of your own actions are driven by the thoughts and emotions inside of you. We are often compelled to do certain things.

The classic example is when insulted we get irritated and say mean things back. Another example is that when we see yummy food we feel like eating even if we are not really hungry.

Many of our little actions during the day are created through this sort of cause and effect compulsion, from thoughts and emotions. It is an interesting experiment to watch yourself and verify this.

It is important for me to add that not all action is driven in this way from thoughts and emotions and nor does it have to be. But many actions do come to be through this.

The Action may not be Awesome but the Person Still Is

What I am getting at here is that no matter how evil a persons actions are they are still a human being. At the core there is something that is the same in everyone and that is perfect.

When someone has their headphones in and bumps through you without a sign of remorse their awesomeness is simply not evident due to them being captivated by thoughts and emotions.

I have not talked to any criminal offenders but I would expect that everything they did was for a reason (thought) or because they lost control (through emotions), the same goes for all of us on a smaller scale.

Every single one of us is equally capable of great evil and acts unbecoming of being human but regardless we are still human inside.

With the understanding of how thoughts and emotions effect our actions then we can look past the external elements of a person and appreciate what is on the inside.

We are absolutely responsible for our actions, thoughts and emotions. But everyone is awesome behind these and that is something we should all remember.

There is no charge for awesomeness

The thing is, it is so true!

If you just take the time to see, awesomeness will be there.

Here are 3 different ways to experience awesomeness.

Lazy Once In a Lifetime Guide to Awesomeness

Go on a holiday to some wonderfully remote place of nature and do absolutely nothing but laze around for periods of time at the recommended tourist destinations.

Bring no technology, alcohol or other fancy things to distract you.

By forcing yourself to wait around in beautiful places there is a very small chance that you might get to experience the awesomeness of what is around you.

The idea is that your mind gets so bored that it eventually gives up. When this happens you will either fall asleep or realise that ‘hey that place is pretty cool’.

The other thing that could happen is that you will be immediately struck with a wonderful view and your mind will collapse for all of a few seconds, experiencing awesomeness. Then you will probably lose that sense.

Smart Guide to Awesome Living

Drop away your mind and leave it behind.

Thoughts are like a cloud and you will not be able to see awesomeness due to all the fog.

You have to change your mindset from one of the world being the place where you are born, work and die to the place where everything is awesome.

It probably sounds silly to hold a belief that the world is awesome. But it is just as stupid if not more so to hold the belief that the world is not awesome.

Think about that for a moment.

Then you realise that both views are equally invalid or valid. So pick the one that works best… Awesomeness!!!

Using this method you will be far more ready to appreciate the awesomeness around you. It will just be a matter of looking around without using your mind, trusting that life is awesome and then you will realise that life is awesome.

Being Pure Awesomeness

This method takes the last one a bit further. Here you stop seeing awesomeness and you just feel it.

The difference in this way is that you don’t believe the world is awesome, indeed you have no concept of awesomeness.

Yet even without being able to conceptualise the sensation you can feel it in every step and every reflection in the world.

To reach this stage you have to drop the idea of what a rock is. Forget what the sky looks like, see the pavement for the first time.

When you see your friends next time look into their eyes with curiosity, as if you have never seen a human before.

If you can hold your curiosity for a couple of seconds and the other person doesn’t freak out you will discover something amazing.

Underneath the fear, the joy, the anger, the pain, the glee you will see something else, pure awesomeness and you will realise everyone deep down is awesome. You are awesome, they are awesome and before long you will see everything is awesome.

As long as you live you will then know how to see the awesomeness of everything, and be awesomeness.

Recent Standout Awesomeness Experiences

Here are some of my experiences from the last couple of days.

• Seeing a star-filled sky out in the country, followed 3 hours later by a shooting star
• Watching chocolate sauce being beautifully laid out onto a bed of pancakes
• Gazing at the sky as the clouds displayed an ever-changing flavor of rainbow (apparently similar to a circumhorizon in motion)
• Watching as the salads are added to my subway roll
• Inspecting the curls of the waves that gently crash up against the beach sand
• Looking up at the sky in the city as I step off the busy peak hour tram

Providing you don’t take the lazy way to awesomeness, then awesomeness really has no cost.

What are your experiences with awesomeness?

While I was in India I was lucky enough to be staying in a serviced apartment. What amazed me was that every single day when I came home something had changed, an improvement had been made.

I started off with two tiny single beds, hard mattress and a blanket. Over the course of a few weeks I went through the following progression:

• Two beds together with a double bed quilt
• Double bed (nice mattress) with existing quilt
• Nicer double bed

Similarly one day I got a tabletop stove, the next a gas bottle, the next a connection between the two, the next a bunch of pots. To begin with the power to the apartment was always dying. A few weeks in we had a whole series of batteries chained up and the power was a whole lot more reliable.

In a period of 6 weeks so many things were improved in that apartment, all of them little by little. In my life I have never seen a clearer example of continuous improvement.

What makes this continuous improvement possible?

I think it was two things:

• Planned set of actions
• Clear progress feedback

Planning to Maximise Internal Development

Clearly there was a plan for the improvement of my apartment. It was like watching an invisible to do list being ticked off day by day.

By having clear action steps of a size that can be completed in a single day, everyday something was done to improve things.

But how can this be applied for internal development?

I find most of the techniques I use I have been applying very broadly, so it has become difficult for me to gauge their effectiveness from week to week. The evidence of improvement seems to come over months as a general improvement.

But I don’t believe that progress for internal development is something that cannot be planned for on a daily basis.

The most important element is to try and improve in every single moment and this must not be forgotten. However you can make an extra effort to improve in particular areas of your life.

In a day there are generally a few events that we know are likely to happen. We may know there is a high likelihood of driving to work today, or that we will talk to our boss.

Each day we can pick a few of these to focus extra development effort on. Today I will watch for anger while driving, I will look at how authentic I am being when talking to my boss.

The way to gain the most from this method is to pick activities that you know you have problems with. So you may know that your emotions get out of check when talking to your spouse or that you tend to enhance the truth when talking to friends out of pride.

By targeting these areas in particular each day you can chip away at yourself and become more authentic faster.

Sometimes the problem with just trying your hardest in each moment is that you don’t adapt enough to big challenges. It is like sweeping a path, you clear away all the dust with your broom but sometimes there is a rock on the path that cannot be shifted with just a broom and regular brushing. So you partially ignore it and focus on all the other areas, keeping yourself busy.

This is why targeting problem areas allows you to tackle aspects of yourself that you may just brush over in your day as you try to cover the whole path.

Plan to make extreme progress in some areas of your life.

Internal development does not happen through effort, internal development occurs through extra effort.

Feedback: The Cornerstone of Continuous Improvement

In the case of the apartment it was very easy to see progress. Either a better quality bed was there or it was not. The feedback was explicit.

Improvement is not so simple to measure when it comes to our internal goals and personal development.

We cannot simply drop in a component and become more peaceful or honourable.

So how do measure our progress? How do we ensure that we are heading in the right direction towards our internal goals?

This is something that I wanted to ask you all.

I judge my own progress based upon two factors.

• My general levels of happiness and peace throughout the day.
• My internal state during particular activities that I have previously identified. These are the activities that I mentioned in the planning section of this post.

How do I evaluate these on a daily basis? A session of retrospection at the end of each day.

Relax somewhere and close your eyes. Now watch your day from start to finish without making any judgments. If you watch openly as each event of the day plays through you can see how you were internally during those events. The areas in which you acted badly will become obvious because the emotions will arise again. Your memories hold a taste of how you were internally at each moment, which is a good tool to evaluate yourself with.

Using this retrospective you can plan new activities for the next day to exert extra development efforts into.

How do you ensure you are making continual daily progress?

It does not take a whole lot of effort to do good work and stay at pretty much the level in which you are at. However as I mentioned in Life Change is Hard Work, making fundamental alterations to yourself and contributions to society take real effort.

In trying to plan my actions I have been plagued by trying to satisfy all of lifes demands. I want to become a better person, I want to be really good at my job, etc, etc.

These are 2 reasons why I have not been able to go beyond and figure out a plan for myself.

1. Compromising on my single most important goal/purpose. Trying to extend it to fit everything that I could possibly want.
2. Complacency with my current progress, previous ’successes’.

Both are equally catastrophic but in this post I want to focus on point 2. The summation of my past.

The Past is Useless

It is easy to think ‘I am a good person’.

Easy to acknowledge that ‘I have come a long way’.

Easy to believe that ‘I always treat people kindly’.

Easy to comfort ourselves by ‘helping others the best we can’.

Indeed these statements have a certain amount of truth to them when seen from a particular viewpoint.

However all of them have at their root, complacency and laziness. They are self-serving, making us feel content with our efforts.

What they lack is the necessity of improvement.

When we say we are kind, then we consider ourselves good enough. When we help others to the best of our ability we think we are already doing all that we can possibly do.

It is with this background that I say that anything I have achieved today is useless to me.

Anything that I have learned in the past is already ingrained into my existence, I need not consider it.

The moment we have succeeded is when we finally fail.

When improvement stops we can be replaced by a machine; and should be for our arrogance.

Improvement is all that I need to concern myself with.

Is it the ability to think and analyse?

Is it the ability to gauge our progress?

Is it the ability to observe our thoughts and emotions?

Is it the ability to just be?

Is it the ability to question if this is all life is?

Is the most important skill different when we are at different stages of understanding?

Is there a time when no skill is necessary?

I don’t have an answer to these, in fact I probably benefit the most from not being able to conceive an answer.

But what do you think? What is the most important skill for you?

So there I was, walking down to buy some pizza for dinner.

It was dark and cold, the wind biting through cloth and skin alike. It reminded me of walking through a freezer with the fans on. With hands in pockets to stop them turning purple I continued towards the little pizza shop on the corner of the arcade.

Entering inside the warmth is comforting. It really is a small shop, with about 3 tables inside before reaching the counter. The shop clearly focuses on take-away sales.

I stand at the counter, waiting to be served. The staff are about a meter away from me, mostly high school kids, chatting loudly as they make pizzas. They don’t seem to have noticed me.

I notice a bell on the counter, ‘ring for service’. Consider the staff is so close to me I feel it would be unnecessary to ring. I remember how it used to make me feel when a customer would make a fuss when I was moments away from them.

Waiting I watch myself carefully. No emotions are active in my chest, a good sign. I used to feel irritation(anger) when I was waiting unnoticed before, progress has been made.

One of the staff sees me and comes over apologising briefly for keeping me waiting and then asks me for my order. He is covered with flour, unkempt hair and a face contusion that indicates a short temper.

When he gets across from me I notice a sensation in my chest, cramping me up. Fear. I maintain separation and it starts subsiding quickly. I speak my order carefully, watching for re-occurrences.

Taking a seat to wait for the pizzas to be cooked I look around, seeing everything and listening to all the sounds. It is quite interesting all the different sounds that go on, the feel of the table under my hand.

The chef starts singing loudly. My enjoyment of peace is shattered not by the singing but rather by the emotion that bursts into my chest. It is like when I was being served but stronger, it shoots in and makes me feel like I am shrinking. My perception of the room changes and there is a sensation in my chest that suggest that the room is very oppressing. I notice my shoulders raise a little and my arms coming closer to my body.

I remain separated and start removing each element. It takes a bit longer than it did at the counter because I did not catch it in the very first instant and it is stronger. The emotions reduce until they dissapear all together, my body relaxes.

The room returns to its original size and peace returns to me. A smile creeps onto my face as I listen to the dissonant harmony between the chef and the oven. The fear doesn’t return.

Analysis of the Event

As you can see, my fears occurred totally irrational. The pizza chef meant no harm in his boisterous singing, yet if I had of let the emotions continue to build they would have been mildly crippling.

This is a simple example of what happens every day in life. It could be in the crowded que of a supermarket, the entrance to your new job or on public transport.

There are little events scattered throughout our days that bring up lots of tiny fears. If we don’t notice them they steal our energy and take away our peace and happiness.

We retire to our homes feeling safe again, somewhat. Wishing we didn’t have to go through those events that make us feel uncomfortable even though we don’t realise why.

Watch yourself and you can learn how to set yourself free.

I am writing this because quite a few people have asked me what is the background behind what I say. All I will ask is that you keep in mind that throughout the process I have been growing and transforming dramatically. So what I understand one day can radically change with new experiences, as it has done many times over the years.

Experience is exactly what I try to base my understandings on. Any other information that I take and present is purely to try and provide a context in which other people may be able to intellectually understand what I am saying.

But onto my history.

The Early Days

In high school I would have been classified as the smart nice guy. My interests were like everyone else, sport, games and social interactions.

But slowly I became troubled as I saw people consistently doing things that would make others unhappy.

One particular event I remember involved two friends of mine who were also good friends. One was teasing the other about a girl he liked and this broke out into a fist fight.

How could this happen? That two good friends could get physically violent, to go from friendship to hate in the matter of seconds.

Is this the fragility of happiness that humans are destined for?

It was at this stage that I began searching into the nature of happiness.

A Journey Begins

At the time the only avenue I knew of to explore this issue was psychology so I made sure I took those classes at school.

But psychology didn’t have any answers for me. It told me that people think differently because of their history and personality and that emotions and stress produced physical manifestations. However it did very little to answer the question of how to be happy and why people were not happy.

At the same time I started studying philosophy and religions from the east. In particular buddhism and its associated practices were of interest.

Along with my own investigations I started to come to the conclusion that all the pain and suffering that takes us away from happiness is caused by our thoughts and emotions. That only we are to blame.

While this in itself was a good realisation I could not figure out any way to create lasting change in my thoughts and emotions, in order to maintain happiness.

I tried out meditation and found the experiences great but within an hour after meditating I would be back to pretty much the same state as always with thoughts and emotions running amuck inside me.

Finally some Progress

While researching the general topic on the web I happened across the following site: www.gnosticweb.com

The site offered free online 9 week courses in self-discovery and so I figured I may as well sign up and have a read seems what I currently had wasn’t working for me. At the time I was still very hesitant at the word ’spiritual’ so I was quite skeptical of the site.

However after working on each of the new techniques presented each week I found what I was looking for. A way to really deal with those thoughts and emotions.

Through those techniques I discovered a freedom I could always access if I was willing and a level of peace and happiness that I did not know existed.

So when you read this blog, most of what you hear from me comes from what I have experienced by practicing the techniques from that website. Here I only discuss the beginning of those techniques because they are the basis for change.

If you are interested in learning more about what I talk about I would recommend you go to the website, signup for one of the free courses and make use of the course forums where people with much more experience than myself are around.

The next round of courses actually starts on August 24th (9 week courses) so if you sign up very soon you can get in this round. Otherwise the site also sells some book versions of the online courses which take the material a little further but obviously lack the interactivity.

For those who asked I hope this provides some information on the background that has formed my current understanding.