Perfection: Flawless or whole?

Trying to perfect yourself is good.  That is, if you don't define perfection as "without flaw".

"Flawless" is an impossible to achieve standard. Worse, trying to avoid mistakes (oh no, flaws!) can prevent creativity.

The correct standard of perfection is "being whole".  Think of a circle.  All circles have flaws.  Get critical enough, look at them under a microscope and you'll find the flaws.  Be a circle, be whole, and let it be enough.

Also, be the size you need to be.  A bigger circle is not a better circle.

Choice and conscience

I choose conscience and make conscious choices.

Follow your mind or follow your heart?  I find that life works best when both are in alignment.  Conscience connects us to others and hopefully to God.  Choice is an antidote to groupthink – whether in religion, society, or ancestry.  Combine them to create a personal path that will enhance every life it touches.  

More about choosing order.

I changed the intro from “a preference for order” to “a need for order”.   Too often a choice for order seems to come not from a conscious choice, but a deep psychological need.  This doesn’t mean we don’t have a choice. We make choices based on our understanding; better understanding leads to better choices. 

I see the need for order in:

Abused spouses staying with their abuser.

The explanation “It’s always been done this way”.

Avoiding a small loss instead of pursuing a large gain.

More pain from having a loved one that is missing than being dead.

Ignoring physical evidence that contradicts belief. (Religion yes, but law enforcement as well.)

The creation of myths to explain things not understood, e.g. the weather.

The tendency to resist change.

Some people are natural risk-takers, but these people stand out because they are the exceptions.

What should we do when we find the spirit taking us in a direction that we don't want to go?  Sometimes the choice is between what we want to do and what we should do. The answer is that you have to figure out a way to want the thing that you should do.  Then you'll be able to do the things that you should do.

Be the kind of person that people will find inspirational.  It doesn’t matter how many people you inspire so long as the work you do is capable of inspiring  people.  Inspiration is about quality, not quantity.  If you inspire only one person, that one person may use the inspiration to go and inspire millions.  But you might be the only one capable of providing that one person inspiration.  So the millions are just as indebted to you as to their direct inspiration.

It is a paradox of life that when you focus on the quality you are more likely to achieve the quantity, but if you focus on the quantity you are likely to get neither.

3 reasons we don't connect to the divine (within or without).

I hope that nobody expects that these topics will be in order!  One reason for this blog is so that I can write things down as they occur to me.  I also want these topics to be parts of the book, but it may take a while for the topics to have any kind of "flow".

I was thinking today about God and my religious beliefs.  I'm one of those people that believes we can have actual revelation from God and receive guidance that way.  I've also done a lot of work on listening to my inner voice and letting that guide me.  The thing I've realized is that although both of these sources are divine -- and ultimately one -- I haven't been perceiving them as the same.  I listen to both, but I don't perceive the connection.  There is a gap.  I don't know if that gap is ego or a lack of understanding.  It may be neither or both or something else.  I need to work on letting both sources flow into each other

I also realized that there are three major reasons people don't feel a connection with God and use it as a source of guidance.

1. Resistance.  Whether active or passive, some people block out the guidance that is given to each of us.
2. Ignorance.  Some people just don't know what God wants.  You might not have a solid connection or you may be at a point where God wants to figure it out on your own.
3. Confidence.  Sometimes we know what God wants us to do, but don't believe that we are capable.

As for myself, it's #3, #3, #3.  I've known for years what I need to do.  And until recently there have been aspects of #1 and #2 as well.  This blog is helping.  The best analogy I can give is that I've taken my first few steps on a long hike over difficult and rugged terrain.  Up until now, I've been packing and repacking my backpack, unsure that I'm ready to go.  The symbolic end of the hike -- or maybe just this part of the hike -- will be when I have a completed book that will have something worth reading.  I'm nowhere near that, but at least I've started.  Hooray for that!

There is a problem with the way we view chaos and order: the tendency to view order as good and chaos as bad.  After all, nobody wants chaos, right?  Nobody wants destruction or disorganization.  But what about creativity and innovation?  And everybody wants to be organized and clean.  But what about stubborn or inflexible?  If you have too much order you can't adapt; If you have too much chaos nothing makes sense.  A balance is needed -- you can't have too much order or chaos.

Again, a balance is needed, but this is not a stationary balance.  It's more like a pendulum swinging.  Sometimes it swings to the left, sometimes it swings to the right.

A new start.

I'm not quite sure why I've decided to start a brand new blog here on Blogger.  I know what I want to do with it: I'm going to be posting my ideas that I'm hoping to distill into a book.  Or rather I'm going to (I hope) start writing it and posting my efforts here.  I'm just not sure why I'm choosing to do that here, rather than at livejournal where I have my regular blog.

Anyway, here's an outline of my book.  It's not complete, but does give you an idea of where I want to go with this.

This book is an attempt to understand how the world works.  It starts with some observations about chaos and order.  It goes into rules that apply to any skill that we want to master.  It explores how these same rules apply to spirituality as well as practical skills.  It tries to develop a method for seeking happiness s that will work for both the atheist and the believer; the eastern spiritualist and the western materialist.  Finally, it shows that we have free will or, at the very least, it is reasonable to believe that we have free will.

This is a lot of ground to cover, I'll try to go through it step by step.

1. First, people often think of order as good and chaos as evil.  This isn’t correct.  Stubbornness, bigotry, and ignorance and problems with order.  Creativity, change and surprise can be good things from chaos.
2. Order and chaos can build on each other.   Think of a house being built.  At the beginning (trees, foundation, old house) there is order.  At the end (the new house) there is order.  In between, there is chaos. 
3. So…order à chaos à higher order.The building process proceeds through six levels: Awareness, Learning, Understanding, Creativity, Results, Maintenance.  In the case of the house, the first three levels would lead to the blueprint, the fourth and fifth levels are the physical building process and the last to keeping the house in good shape

I think that's a good start.