How Can We Improve Our Self

 What could you do to improve yourself? Well, let's step one step backward. The first question might be: Why should you even bother improving yourself? Also, I think the response to that is something like so you don't endure any more idiotically than you need to. And maybe so others don't have to either. It's something like that. You know, like, there is a real adjunction at the bottom of it. It's not some casual self-help doctrine, it's that if you don't organize yourself properly: you'll pay for it! And in a big way. And so will the people around you. And you can say: 'Well, I don't care about that!' but that's not true, you DO care about that.

Because if you're in pain you will care about it. And so you DO care about it even if it's just that negative way, you know. You can rarely find someone who is in excruciating pain who would ever say'Well, it would be no better if I was out of this!'This sort of pain is one of those things that brings the idea that it would be better if it didn't exist along with it. It's incontrovertible. So you get your act together so that there isn't any more stupid pain around you than necessary. So then the question might be: how would you go about getting your act together? And the answer to that - - and this is a phenomenological idea, too - it's something like: Look around for something that bothers you and see if you can fix it. So now you think, well... Let's say you go into... You can do this in a room, it's quite fun to do it. Just when you're sitting in a room - maybe your bedroom -

you can sit there and just sort of meditating on it and think: 'Okay if I wanted to spend ten minutes making this room better, what would I have to do?' And you have to ask yourself that. It's not a command, it's like a genuine question. And things will pop out in the room like there's a stack of papers over there that's kind of bugging you and you know that maybe a little order there would be a good thing. There's some rubbish behind your computer monitor that you haven't attended to for like six months. The room would be slightly better if it was a little less dusty and the cables weren't all tangled up the same way. If you allow yourself just to consider the expanse in which you exist at that moment there will be all sorts of things that pop out in it that you could just fix.

And you know I might say well if you were coming to see me for psychotherapy the easiest thing for us to do first would just be to get you to organize your room You think: 'Well, is that psychotherapy?' And the answer is: it depends on how you conceive the limits of your being. And I would say start where you can start! You know, if something declares itself to you - which is a bizarre perspective about it - as 'needing fix' that you COULD fix at that point, hello! Fix it! You fix 100 things like that, your life will be a ton extraordinary. Now, I often tell people to: fix the things they repeat every day. Since individuals will in general consider those paltry.

 You get up, you brush your teeth, you have your morning meal... You have the schedules that you go as the day progressed. Those probably constitute fifty percent of your life!  Furthermore, individuals think: 'They are commonplace, I don't have to focus on them.' No, no, that is by and large off-base.The things you do every day: are the most important things you do. Hands down, all you have to do is do the arithmetic. You figured it out right away. So, a hundred adjustments to your broader domain of being and there's a lot less rubbish around a lot fewer traps for you to step into. And so that's in keeping with Jung's idea about erasing this...Once you got your mind and your emotions together and once you're acting that out, then you can extend what you are willing to consider yourself and start fixing up the things that are part of your broader extend.

Now, sometimes you don't know how to do that. Imagine you are walking down blur street and there is this guy who is alcoholic and schizophrenic and has been on the streets for ten years.  He kind of staggers towards you and ambiguously murmurs something. That's a problem! And it would be good if you could fix it but you haven't got a clue about how to fix THAT. You just walk around that and go find something that you could fix because if you muck about in that, not only is it unlikely that you'll help that person, it's VERY likely that you'll get hurt yourself! Just because you're experiencing things announce themselves as in need of repair doesn't mean that it's YOU right then and there that should repair them. You have to have some humility.

You don't walk up to a helicopter that isn't working and just start tinkering away with it. You need to remain inside your space of skill yet more often than not if individuals take a gander at their lives... You know - it's an exceptionally fascinating thing to do. I like the idea of the room because you can do that at the drop of a hat. Return to where you reside and plunk down and think: 'Alright, I'm going to improve this spot for thirty minutes - how would it be advisable for me to respond?'You have to ASK and things will just pop up like mad and it's partly because your mind is a very strange thing and as soon as you give it an aim - a genuine aim - it'll reconfigure the world in keeping with that aim. That's actually how you see, to begin with. So if you set it a task... You have to be genuine about it which is why you have to bring your thoughts and emotions together and then you have to get them in your body so you're acting consistently. You must be certified about the point however once you point the world will reconfigure itself around that point, which is exceptionally odd. It's technically true! The best illustration of that - you have all seen this video where you watch the b-balls being thrown to and fro between individuals from the white group versus the black team and while you are doing that a gorilla walks up into the middle of the video and you don't see it. If you thought about that experiment for about five years, that would be about the right amount of time to spend thinking about it.

Because what it shows you is that you see what you aim at. And that - man! - if you can get one thing through your head as a consequence of even being in university THAT would be a good one: You see what you aim at. And so, because one inference you might draw from that is: Be careful what you aim at! Right? What you focus on decides the way the world shows itself to you So if the world is showing itself in an exceptionally adverse manner one thing to inquire is: Are you aiming at the right thing? You know I'm not trying to reduce everybody's problems to an improper aim. People get cut off at the knees for all sorts of reasons. They get sick, they have accidents. There's a random element to being, that's for sure, but -You don't want to take anything, even that particular phrase, too far You want to bind it with the fact that random things do happen to people. But it's still a great thing to ask.