Читать книгу The Power of Being - Андреас Грубер - Страница 14

Did you ever drive someplace and when getting there, you couldn't remember which roads you took? Did you ever read a book and at the end of the page, you couldn’t remember what you just read? Or you may have listened to a discourse, and after a while you realize you could not remember the last five minutes of the talk? We call that being absentminded. You are there, alive, driving, reading or listening but your mind isn't there. Your body is on autopilot. What we mean is, that our mind is distracted. However, metaphorically speaking our mind goes away, it is absent.

To fly a jumbo jet without autopilot these days is possible, but there is no reason to do so except for take-off, landing, and for emergencies. The autopilot does an excellent job and subsequently it is now the most frequent mode of operation. We are very much like those jumbo jets, flying around on autopilot.

When it comes to our lives, it serves us to make use of our autopilot to coordinate body movements, complex routines, etc. But if that autopilot also implies absent-mindedness, it may go too far for some of us. Personally, I never thought of this as a problem, because I didn't know it could be any different. So why to bother about something we have accepted as a given fact. Please consider, that the same mind that loses itself while reading a book is leading your company. And the worst of all is, that it is yours.

How cool is that to make love absent-mindedly? How about talking to friends absent-mindedly? To watch the most beautiful sunset with your loved one beside you, but absentmindedly. I'm quite sure we can get by, and live an average life with only 10 percent awareness, the mind being on autopilot 90 percent of the time. We may have allowed our autopilot to take over our lives, but we are paying a price for it. In autopilot mode, the aware and conscious part of the mind doesn't have much to do, and it starts drifting. Our awareness even tends to drift off where we don't want it to drift, such as when we read, drive, work, eat, make love, etc. We end up doing things, actually living our lives, without anybody being at home up there. The owner is on vacation, and the guests have taken over the house. Your habits and reactions very much correspond to the autopilot, and they are running your life. They have not only taken over, but they have also outnumbered you. When were you last able to change a habit of yours? When you think about it, you may realize that even if you have substantial willpower, it's not easy.

As long as you indulge in your autopilot way of life, you are not really in charge of it. And if you are not in charge of your life, how can you then claim to lead others? Therefore, awareness needs to be one of a leader's prime qualities. Everybody should live a life with a high degree of awareness, but for the leader that is not an option.

Do the simple things with great awareness

The easiest way to go about it is to do simple daily tasks with awareness. Stepping out of your bed in the morning, sipping your coffee, brushing your teeth, locking the door, walking, you name it. This represents a small but significant beginning.

"Concentrate every minute on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions, (...) you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life."

Marcus Aurelius , Roman emperor

The rudder is a small but essential part of an ocean liner or a freight ship. To change the direction of such a massive ship, the captain adjusts the rudder by a few degrees, and very slowly and gently this enormous giant will make a turn. It will not turn immediately, as your car does when you turn the steering wheel. No, it will take some time. But a captain would never consider a rudder useless, just because it takes time. However, we tend to get restless, expecting immediate results, therefore, we use our willpower. Actually, we not only use it but tend to overuse it.

Recent studies indicate that if we overuse our willpower, we start doing irrational things as well as taking bad decisions. Ego depletion is the scientific term describing this phenomenon.

Having the power of the rudder in mind, we can start adjusting small things. In this case, we start doing daily, simple chores and activities with awareness. Even if it is, just to observe how your fingers move over the keyboard as you write an email. Touching the keys, while being aware of that touch. All that sounds highly unproductive for achievers, for everybody except that captain, who trusts the unfailing power of his small rudder. We should take on that quality of a captain, to be able to start taking charge of our very own lives. This tiny but firm adjustment will represent more than just the first steps of change. It will change the course altogether. Just remember the captain. It all starts right there, with the trusting captain and the unfailing rudder. Personally, when working with awareness, I combine it with curiosity, because it produces a sense of joy in me, which keeps me going. We must never make life boring.

Different types of awareness

Awareness is what separates the wheat from the chaff. It makes all the difference. Without it, we will daydream through your lives, and never even know the difference between wants and needs. Even worse, we will not know the power of being.

It is important to make a distinction when it comes to awareness, because there are two types. If we learn to stay in touch with the first one, our lives will improve substantially, but if we establish contact with the second type of awareness, it is likely to give our lives more depth, and may even change our lives on a profound level. The first one is to be aware of the most obvious things, the things out there around us. The second and infinitely more precious, is the awareness of the subtle things of life, the world within. It's like a paradigm shift.

(A paradigm shift , a changed way of seeing things. As identified by American physicist Thomas Kuhn , a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. Since the 1960s, the concept of a paradigm shift has also been used in numerous non-scientific contexts to describe a profound change in a fundamental model or perception of events. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift )

So the first one is the view outward, the second is the view inward. We know the first type of awareness all too well, we are aware it is imperative to live what we call a normal life. The second type doesn’t correspond with our usual ideas about awareness. People like Albert Einstein were fans of the second one. One of the principles that go together with the second type of awareness that I tend to call inner awareness in this book is that it is the key to understanding the world out there. This is closely connected to the timeless advice "know thyself".

The sages never wanted us to know ourselves intellectually, but they urged us to know ourselves on an experiential basis, originating from within. Therefore without awareness, and especially the inner awareness, we will never perceive who we are, but we will always tend to fill our lives with substitutes.

According to studies the average person has up to 50,000 thoughts per day. Most of them are repetitive. I think they are not only repetitive, but also rather random and out of our control. The problem is that we often identify with them. We tend to regard them as real and ours, while it would often serve us to consider them as the daily dream or movie of our mind.

It may serve you to question the very thoughts that are flowing through your mind. As I went out on my quest, the wise men and women I met on my path initially reminded me to check my intention. I was slightly annoyed about that at times. But I knew for myself, that I had not gone out in the search for answers, only to ignore the first advice that came. So I started to question my intentions about my journey, about the very desire to find answers, about the desire to be or become something. Initially, I didn't know how to go about it, how to be able to question my mind. Today I just have to become aware of the fact, that it is part of a kind of movie I'm in. At that moment my intention becomes visible, and mostly I can clearly see the desire behind it. This matters, because what we call desire and attachment are strongest when subconscious.

Another aspect of interest may be to watch for the difference between wants and needs. What we call need is often not more than candidly wanting, and there is a big difference. We may end up chasing the wrong thing if we don't care about that difference.

Do I want it, or do I need it?- is one of those magic questions for yourself.

To rest and clear your mind, may be illustrated by the following metaphor. Let's say you are renovating a table in your garage. You fix it, smooth it and sand it, and now you want to paint it. Due to the dust in the air, you know the paint will not come out well if you paint it under these circumstances. How do you get rid of the dust? You probably shut all doors and windows to prevent draft. Then you wait for a while and let the dust settle down all by itself, and the air becomes clear. In short a) you become aware of the dust, b) you close windows and doors, c) and wait for it to settle down. The mind works pretty much the same.

 Clearing and resting the mind, by letting the dust settle

 Become aware of the "dust" in your mind

 Close down for a moment

 Let the "dust" of your mind settle

As long as you keep on doing, the dust cannot settle. The crucial point is to become aware. To ignore the dust is not likely to solve the problem. You end up with spoiled paint on the table, and if it's bad, you'll have to redo the whole thing. As you read this, it may seem to be so self-evident that you risk overlooking the practical application. Awareness is NOT the same thing as intelligence or intellect. Intelligence can be like watching something through a pair of binoculars while awareness may be more like taking them off to have a look around, and realize where you are and what's going on around you.

High intelligence can’t make up for low awareness, any more than increased speed can compensate for wrong direction.

Your intelligence is not likely to help you without awareness. At work, we do our job, and our mind wanders off for a moment, especially if our job is repetitive. We often do not even notice this happening to ourselves until we "wake up." Something happens around us that brings our awareness back home. We've been disturbed in our dream. It doesn't matter, does it, because it's just a matter of minutes, and we are in the middle of the next one. We may call it something else like "my shopping list," "my next weekend," "my new girlfriend," etc. but it's probably not much more than another dream of our fleeting mind.

Most of our thoughts are just by-products of an idle mind.

As we drift off, it seems that our mind indicates tiredness. Resting the mind, to us, practically means distracting the mind, to DO something else for a while, in the hope that our mind is fit when we return. Other than that, our way of resting the mind mostly means sleeping or letting the mind drift. However, to let the dust settle is much more efficient if you really wish to regenerate.

We resent change that we can’t control. But, you have a more control than you may think. You can choose how you want to deal with your flickering mind, your absent awareness, but also how you will deal with change as such. It is within your power. In the same way, you can decide to bring your mind home, again and again, until it becomes a new habit of yours.

Raising awareness is what this chapter is about. In corporate life, we do raise awareness for different projects, problems, or products. This may be done through PR or marketing. And we know, that a customer who is seeing a product only once has little value. Repetitive exposure in interesting settings seems to be the key to winning customers over to you. Work with your mind in the same way, and you'll be just fine.

Repetitive exposure in interesting settings is what shapes new patterns in the mind.

A potential is something latent, which is not used to its full extent. What would you do as a leader, if you knew about an enormous potential that was accessible to you? I bet you would act upon that! Of all the things you have, your awareness has by far the largest potential.