thinking

Practice getting triggered and how fast you can recover

| johnas9000

I think this will work for most people. We have all gone ape shit visceral allowing a lousy cable channel to trigger us. So watch whichever one you hate and viscerally disagree with and then after you are triggered, see how fast you can recover. Its a friggin muscle. the ability to recover from being triggered, not go down the rabbit hole, not speak in absolutes ( ie they always say that do that). PS this applies to your closest relationships as well. You need to learn how to control your emotions and I cant think of a better way then to trigger yourself with something innocuous like politics and then see how fast you can recover. Then when something really important happens, like your husband crashes your Porsche, you will not get upset. You might have noticed what I did there, ladies, LOL

Am I allowed to say ladies. Sorry if that triggered you I cant help you. You are way beyond help I suggest heavy drugs, sedation and 24 hour a day medications.

PS Did you notice that Fox had the pretty female anchor? Ok now I am really asking to be cancelled.

Your worst upbringing created your greatest talent

| johnas9000

So far 100% of the people I know personally and or famous people on line are a product of really shitty upbringing. We have infamous Andrew Huberman. He said his dad was so violent, that he needed to read him in a few seconds to know whether to hide his mother and sister from what he read as a potentially violent night. I have a wonderful partner that I work with practicing the Sedona method. Her voice is so loving. Her caring and taking notes and wanting to dig a little deeper and try another method is simply unmatched by anyone. She is going to be, or already is a fabulous loving coach, due to her upbringing. We dont go into detail because there is a lot of pain, but we do general releasing and accepting.

I desperately wanted “approval” Approval shows up in many ways. My dad always worked 3 jobs until he had his own business, then he merely worked 18 hours a day. I was desperate for my dad to spend time with me or listen to me. As a result I will always try to please everyone to a fault. I even go out of my way to make friends with vendors and everyone I deal with. Whatever went on in your childhood made you who you are. Maybe your parents demanded straight A’s. Maybe they were impossible to please. Maybe they were alcholics. Maybe they separated. Whatever they did made you who you are. But for most of the people I know, it has become their greatest strength.

Many a successful person has articulated that they wanted to prove something to their parents, or one of their parents. Enjoy your greatest talent, that is my message with this blog. Dont be upset, dont be resentful. If you grew up poor, be grateful that you are motivated to be rich. If you grew up without love, notice how you are probably the most loving person you know. Enjoy your strengths, just be sure no one is taking advantage of your strengths and turning them into weaknesses.

20 minutes Meditating vs 23hr 40 min negativity

| johnas9000

And you expect to manifest anything? LOL, seriously think about it. If we all have 80,000 thoughts a day, how can that stand up to your itty bitty meditation? This is a no brainer, pun intended. You know we are hard wired to survive, right? You know for millions of years we were the prey animal. If every one of the thousands of your ancestors were not hard wired to “worry” you wouldnt be reading this.

Why would you expect 20 minutes, or even 90 minutes a day of meditation compare to 22 or 23 hours of negativity? Can I trademark this as my original thinking? People you need to drop the negativity to make some room for what you want. This is simple math. It is way more than 10 to 1 that would be 2 hours of meditating vs 20 hours of negativity. Yes you have negative dreams too.

Practice “awake meditation” Seriously I just googled that. Am I the only person amongst all the geniuses with millions of followers to propose this?

Ok so here it is. Assuming you have meditated, you know the instructions. If a “thought” passes, just let it go. I am proposing while you are awake, if a negative or repetitive thought passes, let it go. It should be even easier while you are awake. If it is something you absolutely have to attend to, write it down, or put it in you calendar. The other day I was dealing with some really difficult stuff I was worrying about. But I went about my day and promised myself I would think about it later around 7pm and let it go so I could enjoy a happy productive day. Get it?

You program your brain every day

| johnas9000

If you were given a computer at birth that would be your operating system for life, instead of a “brain,” and that would be the only one you would get for your whole life, how would you care for it?

How would you take care of the software? Would you allow strangers to program it? Would you allow people who hated you to program it? How would you take care of it physically? What type of fuel would you give it? Would you regularly take out the trash? .. Would you install the best programs? Would you have a virus protector? If there were any programs installed that do not serve you, would you remove them? Would you install faster software better operating systems when they become available?

Have I said anything that isn’t true about your brain? Would you install harmful software? Would you install negative software? Wouldn’t you have some helpful default programs and shortcuts?

This is easy stuff people. Easy to explain. But it might require a plethora of software to execute. There is the meditation software. The physical exercise software. The prayer software. There are surge protectors to insure the energy is clean (lousy food) Do I even need to explain how everything is the same? By the way as your computer ages is it possible to continuously update it?

If you took really good care of your computer, will the sound and the camera and the speed still work? Can you add peripheral devices to speed up your computer? Can you bring in information faster? Can it be programmed to communicate better LOL.

There are a plethora of courses on “communication,” including listening courses, NLP, the Sedona Method, and Dale Carnegie, Toastmasters, Unblinded. This could be the most straightforward blog post I wrote.

If you are running it at top speed processing power continuously will it get damaged? If you program it with bad information will you get bad results? If you find more efficient programs will it run more efficiently? If you put a huge weight on it will it get damaged? If the energy you put into it is too strong or weak will it operate properly? Would it get damaged?

You are in control of all of these choices which you make unconsciously every minute of every day of your life for that thing on top of your head that you call a brain. It cant operate efficiently until it is purged of negativity and poor programming. That might be a lot of people’s biggest obstacles. How many of us mindlessly scroll through, negative, BS, and sales pitches to make us feel bad about a physical aspect of our being or an object we dont have, or a car, home, kitchen appliance, device, or a supplement that will change your life? I could write about the 40,000 ads you see every day to give you “pain” for something that you are supposedly, “Lacking”. But the totality of the ads you see in one day would be more than my total blog, or pretty much any book ever written.

If your brain is programmed correctly and not fed negativity, the unbelievable things it can do are beyond your comprehension. Most of what you need to do is just take out the trash, and stop feeding it trash. The imaginative capabilities of your brain is beyond astonishing.

The worst brain damage is Emotional. Protect yourself

| johnas9000

Physical damage heals rather quickly. If its merely a head wound it might be just days or weeks. Emotional damage can take more than a lifetime to heal. Talk to anyone even in their sixties and seventies. I promise you they will still bear the scars of childhood emotional trauma and even those they allowed themselves to endure throughout their life.

You will hear stories of abusive spouses, neglectful parents, lousy boyfriends and girlfriends, business failures, lousy bosses, teachers and people who told them they were worthless. The scars last forever. Some say we are even healing from a previous lifetime.

So why do we not protect ourselves? We all wake up every morning and the first thing that happens is as our brain realizes it is now awake it begins to think. Or what you allow to pass for thinking. As a human being that has evolved on this earth for millions of years as a prey animal, you are hard wired to look out for predators. So of course the hard wired tendency is to look out for the modern day predators, the bills, the mortgage, the food and gas prices the stability of the world, safety of your children and the neighborhood. Or the same 50,000 thoughts you had yesterday.

So you have just created a mountain of stress for you brain. And you wonder why so many meditate in the morning or have a morning ritual or exercise or whatever to get out of their heads? But its really an inside job. Because you can even worry while you are running. It takes “thought discipline”. You literally have to stand guard at your brain.

Everyone reading this has done it at least once and probably a thousand times in their life. An awful thought or worry pops into your head and you just gently let it pass. If you have ever mediated you know what I am talking about. And if you are a human with a working brain of any sort, there had to be a time where you said to yourself, I will deal with this later and got on with your day.

So the point of this post is to not allow any new injuries into your brain. We can and will always work to relieve our brains of every little and big trauma we have experienced in our lives. But why in Hell or God’s name would you allow new injuries in?

Lets define new injuries. It happens every single day. Your best friend calls you and asks you if you saw the news and literally ramps you up about politics, a war, some humanitarian crisis, immigration, inflation, fuel, food prices. Take your pick. We have a ton of stuff to create negative energy about.

I am not saying we shouldnt do something. Vote your conscience, donate an extra dollar work an extra hour, but also dont forget the serenity prayer. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I. cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

What I am saying today is do not allow additional brain damage. The worst brain damage in the world is emotional brain damage that can take a life time to heal. I sincerely believe that some is so severe it indeed may be more than a life times worth of damage.

The good news is that you can heal. Its actually almost easy. Find a method to heal or let go of your traumas and pain. But the big butt is do not allow new damage every day.

Monitor every one of the 50,000 thoughts coming into your head today. Immediately release the negative ones. Because you can not begin to release the past ones if you are merely heaping bad negative thoughts upon a foundation of bad negative thoughts and feelings.

Its like any damage. You will never get to the core so you can start repairing if if you are constantly adding damage. Or its like bailing out a ship full of negative water. If there is bad water still flowing in faster than you are bailing your ship will sink.

Start today by stopping the flow of bad thoughts ideas and feelings. Its absolutely existential to a happy existence.

Deviant from the Norm or Pet Peeve?

| johnas9000

I dont know about you but I almost never get angry when its expected, but unexpected is another issue. How do you like it when you decide to leave late to avoid traffic and the road is completely closed and there is a three hour back up? I expect snow in the winter, but what the hell is going on today, Its late April? I guess I am just like Brad Pitt (heart throb). Or is it Larry David (angry old fart)? Or maybe I am just an anti nihilist.

The world does need order. As Brad Pitt said how can we survive when some Bozo is in the fast lane going slow? Or maybe its just survival. OK this is a big can of worms now opened can crawl in any direction. But I am OK with that, how about you? I love to “THINK” vs regurgitating the same thoughts as yesterday.

You do know that most of your thoughts, all 50,000 or 90,000, are the same as yesterday, right? So why did you even bother waking up if that was all you were going to do with today? Seriously the quality of your life is the quality of your thoughts. If your thoughts today are the same as yesterday, why did you even bother to wake up today? PS it gets worse. Not only are the thoughts the same, they are mostly negative. They actually have to be negative or you would’nt be reading this.

Sorry to repeat, but we need a basic understanding of our brain, as it relates to evolution, and being here, as a predicate to this conversation. So whether you believe in evolution, millions of years, or religion, thousands of years. You are not the first of your family line to be here.

Every one of your ancestors, maybe hundreds or thousands, needed a sweet tooth so they didnt eat poison and die, and they needed to store fat efficiently, and not waste energy ( be lazy). They also needed to worry about predators. We didnt always have guns, so you better worry all the time 24/7 about getting eaten

So we have established that you are a fat, lazy ice cream eating neurotic sitting on the couch, because you had to be. Its in your genes.

Today lets explore why you are fat, lazy, anxious and angry to boot. PS almost forgot, probably alcoholic too. Talk about getting glucose into your blood stream. Although a yo yo effect, hmm addicted anyone?

Sorry my brain is a little ADD. But so is yours. It is all wired together so every thought leads to another thought? The only difference is my brain is thinking. Your brain is jumping from one problem to another. Cant believe how much the brain actually does creative thinking when its not involved in protecting you by worrying about that animal ready to pounce on you. You do know that todays animal is not a lion, tiger or bear, its next months mortgage payment, the kid’s tuition, your boss, or if you are lucky, huge business loans, and your retirement account or lack of.

Wow what a bunch of interesting ideas to pursue. I believe I just gave myself a years worth of blogs. However lets finish this thought. As you can tell I have gotten good at not thinking of the dozens of real life challenges I could be worried, about and the expected doesnt make me angry, but I, and I am willing to bet a lot of us, get angry when people deviate from the norm or violate societal norms.

Heck Larry David’s whole persona on Curb Your Enthusiasm is based on that guy. 47 Emmy Nominations and 5 million viewers, and thats behind an HBO pay wall.

So here is my theory. Society does’nt exist without order. Seriously it is as big a threat to your life as the predator, running out of fuel (dont lose fat its the most efficient fuel) and your brain needing glucose or avoiding bitter, potentially poisons.

For me it feels like an aha moment. I know for all of you with what you think is bigger problems maybe not. I am totally vexed why I can be happy all day except for when that one asshole calls to sell me something and refuses to identify himself. I also agree with Larry David when the person on line for ice cream is trying 5 different ones. What the hell? that is a complete break down of society.

I expect murderers to murder, crooks to steal. But I dont expect District Attorneys to let them out of jail.

(the whole raison d’etre for Fox News. We might be on to something a lot bigger here. We all want society to work so we dont get killed. So when something deviates from the normal we absolutely are triggered to worry. It is existential.

Now if I can just remember that, so the next time I get a spam call selling solar and I ask three times what he is selling, just spit it out and he insists he is not selling he is offering me something great, I dont have to yell at him. Nor do I have to tell the next caller, “didnt your mother teach you manners? You are supposed to identify yourself when you call another person, or are you merely a bastard”. Hey Larry David, your protege is waiting, or is it Brad?

But seriously what do you think? I am going to start welcoming and publishing comments. We have a lot to think about. And I seriously wonder if others think or should I say feel, the same.

I think its wired into survival there must be some order and asking for 7 samples at the ice cream counter or driving slow in the fast lane will surely kill us. OK maybe not the ice cream samples. But if you have ever driven on the no speed limit autobahns in Europe, driving slow in the fast lane will kill you.

Google it. To this day people drive on the average 150 mph on the autobahn. I remember driving there when I was 17 and just wished when I got home that the asshole in the left lane here driving 49 miles an hour tried that shit in Germany and experienced the near death experience of someone coming up his butt at 150mph or more, and just maybe was able to slow down without killing him or her. Maybe they would think twice about self righteously sitting in the left lane even at 59 mph thinking they are the traffic cop of the word.

Life needs order and meaning it is not Nihilistic. In fact I prefer flow.

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi takes on the problem of how to live a happier life. A meaningful life is one where the person spends his time in a state of optimal experience called Flow. To live a great life, all your goals must be unified in a way that produces the maximum amount of flow.

Flow doesnt happen when people deviate from the norms or sit and shit in the left lane of your life while you are trying to finally get in the flow and enjoy your life.

Osho. The Best Wisdom you will ever read

| johnas9000

How could I forget him? For those who have heard about him, he gets a bad rap. Some call him the sex guru. I heard his retreats are free-sex romps. I don’t know; I have never been. I disagree with his free-sex advice. But what he says is stunning, and he never wrote a book. All of the books are his speeches that people transcribed into books. They couldnt have been written more perfectly. It makes me wonder if his genius was channelled. I have never read words so perfectly put together with great effort, let alone in extemporaneous speech.


The reason he included sex in his retreats was because he believed Westerners had no idea what bliss is, with the only exception being orgasm. His goal was to teach us how to get to bliss. But reading what he said is so profound. He never wrote a book because he believed that if you are following anyone, you are already off the path. As you know, all religions are entirely narcissistic, and the leaders are often fraught with scandals. I am just suggesting that you read some of his extremely profound statements.

The fact that he never wrote a book speaks to the unique honesty in what he was teaching. No other spiritual or religious leader ever said, Don’t follow me, don’t praise me, follow yourself.

A tiny sampling.
“The greatest fear in the world is the opinion of others, and the moment you are unafraid of the crowd, you are no longer a sheep. You become a lion. A great roar arises in your heart, the roar of freedom.”

“Listen to your being. It is continuously giving you hints; it is a still, small voice. It does not shout at you, that is true. And if you are a little silent you will start feeling your way. Be the person you are. Never try to be another, and you will become mature. Maturity is accepting the responsibility of being oneself, whatsoever the cost.”

“Drop the idea of becoming someone, because you are already a masterpiece. You cannot be improved. You have only to come to it, to know it, to realize it.”

“Life begins where fear ends.”

“The moment you start seeing life as non-serious, a playfulness, all the burden on your heart disappears. All the fear of death, of life, of love – everything disappears.”

These quotes reflect Osho’s emphasis on individual freedom, self-awareness, and the exploration of one’s true nature beyond societal conditioning.
He represented a real danger to society and organized religion. I can easily see why he probably was eliminated. He was jailed just long enough for a specific poison to be undetected in his autopsy. Makes sense to me. Everything I read that he said makes sense to.I have to put more here. Each one is magical.


“Truth is not to be found outside. No teacher, no scripture can give it to you. It is inside you and if you wish to attain it, seek your own company. Be with yourself. ”


“The real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before death.”


“Be — don’t try to become”


“Life in itself has no meaning. Life is an opportunity to create meaning.”


“The great appeal of drugs in the West is only because the West has succeeded in destroying the right hemisphere completely because of compulsory education.” I agree 100%. Look at all of the geniuses who dropped out.


“Everybody is born creative, but very few people remain creative.”


“To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.”


“Be realistic: Plan for a miracle”


“Intelligence is dangerous. Intelligence means you will start thinking on your own; you will start looking around on your own. You will not believe in the scriptures; you will believe only in your own experience.” hmm do you think they killed him?


“The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it.” I know a few of those people


“Courage Is a Love Affair with the Unknown”. Exactly


“A certain darkness is needed to see the stars.” even better than it is always darkest before the dawn

You chose that

| johnas9000

Probably a bad choice to make my point. Because now you are focusing on so many different things. But maybe accidentally it was the perfect choice. What are you thinking?

Did you choose what you are thinking about? Of course you did. And everything about who you are brought you to making that choice. Are you thinking, “what a slut” or your a guy, “thats hot” or “I would never wear that”. Funny this could be a post I did not intend to create.

Indulge my ADD for a moment. The point I wanted to make in this post was that we choose what we think about just as certainly as we choose what to wear. This probably only applies to women. But women get it. They can pull a red or a blue dress out of their closet as easily as they can pull a positive or a negative thought out of their brain to focus on.

What if your closet is merely a metaphor for you mind? So you can pull out a happy thought or choose a shitty thought out of the closet of your mind.

That was the point I wanted to make but by my choice of photos I landed up opening up this post to a plethora of other thoughts and ideas. So it was probably a bad choice. Because the simple point of choosing what we think is no different then choosing what to wear for the day.

That particular dress probably brings up a whole bunch of thoughts unrelated to simple choice. But maybe its the perfect metaphor for how difficult it is to make a simple choice. Because we have a plethora of memories connected to everything we see and hear all day long that will hijack our brains.

So yes, you get to choose. No its not always simple and straight forward. It often is. And when it isnt you still need to make choices that work for you. I still maintain happy thoughts are a choice as is red or blue dresses. Think about what you want to wear or think today. PS assuming you have all meditated, why not let the negative thought simply pass, as you do when you are meditating and focus on something positive, something you are grateful for, or something that gives you joy.

If you dont worry you DIE!

| johnas9000

I alluded and discussed this in the last post. But it is worth repeating and reiterating. If you believe in evolution. If you even believe that we existed and or evolved before guns were invented. Then you have to acknowledge that any of your ancestors that werent hard wired to be constantly “vigilant” aka as worrying every moment day and night would not have survived. They would have gotten eaten generations ago and you wouldnt be reading this.

If you want to go a little bit deeper on that I think its safe to assume that some traits are so deep they are hardwired. Or lets call it subconscious. Or you can call it whatever you want because all words are simply made up. Concepts about our brains are made up as well. I choose to believe at least conceptually we have hardware and software.

In John’s definition. Hardware is what we all have in common. So that is the brain matter the lobes, whatever they do and the general way that it works.

But I also truly believe that we are hardwired to be fearful and wary so. we dont get eaten. Lets look at what seems to be another quality that is universal or pretty much hardwired. Dont we all have a sweet tooth? Isnt it possible that any generation that preceded you when we were hunter gatherers that didnt have one ate something bitter aka poison and died? So that is also something we all share.

We accept that premise. Most of us also understand that we are the ones that survived and reproduced thousands of times. So we were the ones that were great at storing fat for the lean times in between hunts and kills.

By the way we all know someone that managed to be with us today that maybe doesnt have a sweet tooth or doesnt store fat as quickly as we do.

But here is my proposal THE MAJORITY of us that are here today that have survived generation after generation for at least thousands of years since man kind first set foot on this planet or millions of years has these basic survival mechanisms, for all practical purposes hard wired.

If we go with the computer analogy. At least these qualities must be part of any operating system for a human being today.

So yes you are hard wired and or your operating system must have been built to avoid poison predators and seek sugar and fat.

Here in lies the problem. You dont need to think 50,000 negative thoughts a day. There is no lion or bear chasing you. It will be as difficult as ignoring your sweet tooth. But the process is simply the same. IGNORE all of your negative thoughts.

If you have something to attend to schedule time to deal with whatever problem or worry you need to address. The rest of the day you can then allow the negative thoughts and worries merely pass. Just like you do when you meditate. I am sure you have all done that at least once.

As you know when a thought pops up you let it pass. So in your waking hours, when you are not meditating and a negative thought about the past or fear about the future pops up let it pass.

If you can do this your life will change Immediately. You will have you first day of pure joy!

You might want to try this on a Saturday when you dont have a lot of “work” distractions and phone ringing. You probably need to stay off your phone and social media so you are not attracted to whatever disaster is occurring somewhere in the world every single day.

So take the challenge live one day of pure joy and bliss. Dont “think” Which by my definition means let go of that chew toy you call a brain.

PS you are allowed to be creative. Because, guess what? When you free your mind from the 50,000 BS thoughts for the day, your brain will begin using the creative ideas that come together as only they can for you. Because no one on this planet has had the same experiences as you.

I am not saying this all touchy feely. That is bullshit too. I am just saying factually no one has the same experiences that you have you might know accounting and music. Or law and medicine. Or maybe you understand drug addiction and withdrawal and supplements. Whatever you have done, the experiences you have had will gel in your brain and will come forth as you unique creation.

PS in todays world you might just be the expert on the Brady Bunch or Batman. In this crazy connected world you can monetize anything.

Just understand what you brain is doing so you can begin the fight. The first step is to acknowledge there is a problem. It is a problem. I dont know why all the great minds I listen to on youtube dont talk about this more. This is fundamental to life. And we therefore all share this problem.

You can not have a happy life if you are mired in fears 50,000 times a day.

Have a great day and when some stupid modern day fear pops up just let go of it. If you need to schedule time to deal with it. If it is about the past and you cant let go try the Sedona Method or go to a shrink or meditate or try hypnotism. But there is no reason to live the majority of your life in misery worry and pain.

PS to be clear you might be one of the lucky ones. You might not have a sweet tooth, you might not be good at storing fat. Also forgot to mention your default setting is also to conserve energy aka be lazy. And you might also be sitting here not having evolved from hyper vigilant ancestors that avoided predators. But I think ita safe to say we all have at the very least these “default settings” So dont beat yourself up just step one recognize it and two develop your own method for dealing with it.

You also might be one of the lucky ones that only needs to hear this once and just being aware of it will simply let it pass.