Great Crisis inspires Great Leadership

Have you ever participated in a great crisis? Probably the answer is no. Most of the people in control of the Western World as we know it, have never seen a great crisis. Or as Tyler Durden would say:

We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.

We and everyone else around is enjoys a comfortable sedentary lifestyle. Even if there is individual crisis and the associated trauma, it has been a long time that there has been a collective crisis. And why is this a challenge for us, and for the western civilization? Because great crisis is a good teacher, it requires and therefore develops great leadership.

Have you been to the Moon recently? No? And neither was anyone else. The last manned Moon landing was in 1972! About ten years before I was even born. At that time a publicly accessible Internet wasn’t even available yet. Still, this incredible feat of engineering was accomplished.

What was driving those people at those times, how did they get the capable leadership and vision to pull through such an unimaginable project? One of the driving forces was the cold war, the result of World War II, which inspired a sense of competition between superpowers. But World War II also allowed produced a vast population of veterans, pilots and officers. People that were very capable precisely because the had gone through such a great crisis. They had a sense of what was possible through conducted cooperation, and they learned to release their knowledge and energy for the good of humanity, and made the moon landing possible.

And now Civilization is at a crossroad again, we are slowly losing that practical knowledge, the world lacks people and understanding of the forces that drives it. Beneath the surface is a vast network of machines, structures and organizations, that are for a large part on autopilot operated be the ants and bees on its levers and buttons, but without any oversight or insight.

I like to compare this to the scene in Matrix 2, where Neo goes to see Councilor Harmann in the underbelly of the secret underground city. The look at large machinery, that keeps the city running, and the Councilor laments how he does not understand what exactly it is that they do, but that he knows they keep the system up.

So now we have this challenge, on the one hand, there is the desire to avoid such a gruesome experience like a worldwar again, but there is on the other hand a lack of human beings, that carry the experience of overcoming such a crisis. So how do you learn what can only be learned through crisis, and at the same time work to avoid such a crisis?

Well, that is a good question, but it is a question for another time, as I have to leave know.

But maybe, I will feel inspired to write a follow up, or a part 2.

-Richard

Spiritual Enlightenment for non-believers – Expanding your intellectual toolbox

If you are coming from an atheist, highly intellectual culture, like I do, where science and facts are given the uttermost emphasis, you might find it hard or ridiculous to even consider thinking about or discussing something that could be labeled as “Spiritual Enlightenment”.

So did I, because through family values, my upbringing, education and things I learned at university I was never seriously confronted with such a concept.

Today however, after many experiences, traveling, reading, interacting with the world around me, I’ve come to find a technique and understanding of what I might call “enlightenment”. There might be other words to describe that experience, but lets stick with this term for now.

The idea of enlightenment, as I understand it has nothing to do with magic or god or religion or any other kind of abracadabra that might sound ridiculous to you. I simply view enlightenment as just another tool in the human intellectual toolbox. Very much like logical reasoning, reading or writing. Albeit it is a powerful and eventually even dangerous tool.

But then again, think about how the skill of reading and writing was once a jealously guarded secret by those who considered themselves to be higher up and in control. And even today, the written word is feared and restricted by certain authorities.

Enlightenment can give you a level of freedom, that you might not be aware exists, but don’t think it might make your life any easier or less complicated, rather the opposite. And I am sure there are people that might fear the prospect of widespread adoption of this knowledge, because it questions and undermines their positions of power. They might ridicule and even fight it.

However, like you were able to learn how to read and write, you can learn to enlighten yourself. And it is not much of a secret either, there are plenty of people who learned to do this, and there are many books and lots of information readily available.

Learning about enlightenment will mainly be helpful to you when you are somehow stuck in your life, when you have desires and wishes that you find unable to fulfill, be it financially, socially, romantically or intellectually. But it is not a shortcut and it does not mean that things will magically fall into place. It is just another tool that can show you the light at the end of the tunnel, and how to get there.

And it is also not a skill that can be learned in a day, or that I can fully explain in this short blog posting. Like learning how to read and write, it might take you a year or two to gain an understanding, and a lifetime to master it. But you will likely experience a number of “aha” effects and significant progress throughout the process.

While you go through this process, you can expect to experience the following sensations. You will become much more aware of your feelings and instincts and you will start to rely upon them to guide you. So for example a lot of the current industry is geared around selling you some stuff that promises to fulfill some desire. However, quite often you’ll fail to get the level of satisfaction and happiness that you desired so much. You will learn to let go of physical things and learn to go for the feeling you want directly.

You will gain an increased sense of your own power over yourself, your surroundings and others, and you will gain an insight into why it is unnecessary and even counter-productive to abuse that power over others to do harm.

You will also find that some goals you expected to be hard, almost impossible to reach, to be suddenly in sight and attainable. You will develop a much deeper understanding of human nature, how people interact, and why things are the way they are, how to change them, and why this is often not even necessary.

Lots of these things are happening with body language, the words we choose to express ourselves with, and also about cultural habits, fears, expectations, etc. In short everything that is characteristic of  human nature can be used as a starting point. And conveniently enough, many of these things can be observed, explained and understood scientifically too, if desired. But the goal for enlightenment is not to understand things in a intellectual/scientific way, but rather to develop an additional intuitive understanding that results from “real” and practical interaction with actual people.

So as a first step for learning about enlightenment, you can read about something, and then go out and interact with human beings, observe what you feel, and why, learn what makes you happy, angry, what frightens you, and how the people around you might feel about a situation. Ask them if necessary. 😉

You see, there is nothing magic or mysterious about enlightenment. You just have to continue looking, and learning. See enlightenment as a way of understanding theoretical knowledge in practical human interaction.

Have fun,

Cheers

-Richard

Do Phantasy and Reality collapse? – Live or let live?

Fighting for the good, experiencing love and romance, going on adventures and withstanding great dangers. Where do we have all those exciting things in our life. Who still lives this kind of a life?

In many western societies, at least as far as my experience goes, many individuals allow themselves such excitements only in one place anymore. And that is the cinema, or the home cinema/TV. While they long for the emotional ups and downs of a well made movie, they prefer to do so from the safe perspective of their chairs, using their empathic abilities to drain the fears, excitements and the happiness of the characters on the screen into their own heart.

And who has never felt the joy of being so emotionally touched when the final twist of a movie unfolds itself, and you cannot hold your tears anymore?

While we leave the cinema, this euphoric feeling might still hang onto us, while it eventually wears off in the coming days, leaving us longing for the next kick.

Being an Actor – The new Adventure?

But how would it feel to be on the other side of the camera lens? Isn’t the actor in a much more interesting position than the movie watcher? Isn’t what he does a real adventure? He travels to foreign and exotic locations, he learns new skills, he engages with the most experienced and exciting specialists in his field.

Lets assume for a movie it is necessary to mime a sword-fight. This means the actor has to learn how to fight with a sword. He will be thought how to fight. He will hold a most realistic replica, he will sweat out all his worries and fears during an exhausting fighting training, until he sinks to his knees in the evening, collapsing from the excitements of the day. Viggo Mortensen for
example, he is known to have taken his sword with him all the time during the shootings of the “Lord of the Rings”, whether on camera or not. He became so emotional attached to his role that he could not let go for a second.

Or take Jackie Chan, is he not doing all the Stunts, dangerous Jumps, unbelievable fighting scenes himself. As far as I know, he has injured himself many times, he is not playing the fighting hero, this is actually himself. He is doing this for real. He has dedicated his life to improve himself, his strength and his ability to move, to a level that is unbelievable and feels as if it was unattainable for many people on this planet. He knows the dangers and the fears before a jump, he has his heart pounding in excitement and terror.

But lets not underestimate the emotional part of playing a role. Isn’t it that many actors thrive to become so involved in the part of a play or movie that almost become that person for a moment or a while. They walk, talk, interact and live the life of an adventurer, hero, superhero for the time of the shooting. They feel through all the worries of the character, they laugh when there character laughs, the run when their character runs, the love when their character loves.

Have you ever played a good game with your friends, at a social occasion maybe, where you became so involved in the game that you forgot everything around you, that you immersed yourself and time just ran by? Isn’t this a real experience, even if it was only a game?

This is likely what an actor experiences when he immerses himself in a role. For a moment there is nothing else that exists.

Isn’t this a real adventure, isn’t this more than just doing a job for which one is payed?

Is a movie just a reflection of our World

But there is maybe even more to this. Is it not that the author of a story puts many of his lives experiences into a book or script? Isn’t it that his upbringing, the challenges in his life, his travels and adventures, everything he has heard and seen throughout his years contributes to the stories he comes up with.

Isn’t it that many books and stories are just a codified reflection of an author about his life and this world? So isn’t it that he just reflects his image of this world? And isn’t it that we enjoy diving into the world the author has created, unaware that it is actually the same world that we are living in? Maybe some years have passed, but still many old sayings and wisdoms remain true in our days.

But where does this lead ourselves? What are we and what are we doing here? If a movie is in a way just a reflection of reality, how come we believe the reflection in the mirror is more exciting than the present?

Is it that we have just turned a blind eye to reality? Isn’t it possible to look around us with the same curiosity and sense of surprises and adventures that we use to look at a movie?

Isn’t it just as exciting to explore an unknown place alone, as going to a yet unseen movie? Isn’t it just as exciting to talk to a stranger and listen to his stories from a country far away? Isn’t it exciting to feel your heart pounding while you walk over to a beautiful girl to find out how to engage in a conversation? Isn’t it satisfying to learn a new skill, to take a course in something you’ve never tried, meeting strange and new people from walks of life you’ve never known? Doesn’t it feel dangerous to go to a bar you’d “normally” would never go? Talking to people you would “normally” never talk? Isn’t there surprise, curiosity and adventure waiting for us around every corner?

Have fun,
-Richard