"We Are All At The Right Place At The Right Time"
We've heard the cliches time and time again ... everything happens for a reason. We all look for signs from the Universe. We all look for the things that lead us to the next step, the next path, to provide some clearer direction to this uncertain life, this unknown journey. What should I do? Where should I go? Who should I be? Where should I live? What is my purpose?
But, who should we trust and what should we believe?
Philosophers, artists, poets, scientists, great thinkers have all asked this question for centuries.
Marcus Aurelius was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 and a Stoic philosopher. He was the last of the rulers known as the Five Good Emperors, and the last emperor of the Pax Romana, an age of relative peace and stability for the Roman Empire. He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161 A.D. Stoicism is a philosophy based in the practical.
In short, if you can control yourself, that is all that you need to be concerned with and all you need to focus on. Stoicism has three main disciplines: perception, action and will.
Perception: how you perceive, act and see the world around you.
Action: the choices and decisions that you make according to that.
Will: the belief of how you are portrayed within the world
Aristotle, taught that "cause and effect" is by which one process or state, a cause, contributes to the production of another process or state, an effect, where the cause is partly responsible for the effect, and the effect is partly dependent on the cause.
In more modern times, Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology. He is best known for his theories of the collective unconscious, including the concept of archetypes, and the use of synchronicity in psychotherapy.
Synchronicity holds that events are "meaningful coincidences" if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.
Philosophers, artists, poets, scientists, great thinkers have all asked this question for centuries.
Today, in this day and age, in quantum physics, The Law Of Entanglement, teaches us that this is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the state of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance. So, in other words, in great distances, if you stimulate one, the other reacts. This is proof that we're all connected. We are a collective. TOGETHER WE ARE ALL ONE.
In essence, thousands and thousands of years of philosophy really still doesn't provide all of the answers to us but taking a moment to focus on three main areas of life, one can see life through a different lens:
1. Our relationship to things
This is our perception. How we see things? How we see the world? This was how the Stoics saw things back in 141 A.D. as well. What is happening that we see? If we buy a book about butterflies and we read it, chances are we are more in touch with seeing butterflies and we will, in turn, see more butterflies.
We can choose what we have in front of use and how to perceive it. This is a radical concept that, in practice, will change the trajectory of a person's life. It is true, you can choose what you have in front of you and how to perceive it. With thousands of pieces of information hitting our brains per minute, you can really see the need to collate the information to suit our needs. Like working out in the gym, we give our bodies, our muscles a fair amount of time to exercise and grow. Are you doing that with your mind? How do you collate your thousands of pieces of information?
2. Choice
With choice, we have an incredible opportunity to expand our perception so big that we choose what we want to collate and what we do not. We also choose to have our perception to be based on exactly what we want.
How do we know now that we're getting what we want and that we're on the right path with our awareness wide open? This is when we are follow our emotional guidance system and our feeling of connection.
3, Our Feeling of Connection
Syncronicities happen! These mystical, causal seemingly connected events begin to appear and bring something to widen our perspective. Now this is when things get exciting.
Navigate your actions to cultivate your joy
So how do you apply these practices into you life to get what you want? Well, first and foremost, since all of this has been "in play" for thousands of years, it's been happening right up until this point and it always continues forward for eternity.
First, STOP and take a moment to take stock of where you are and what you have right now. Do a bit of inventory and determine what you choose to keep relating to and what to let go.
Next, Identify what you want. Take a stance. Stop and declare, this is what I want. Begin to form thoughts and visuals in your mind about what you want.
How do you feel?
In my former blog entitled, "Ah-Ha. Wherever you go, There you are" we touch upon the subject of our feelings and how they guide us. I share the emotional guidance scale in this blog and it better illustrates the upward and downward motion of our feelings and emotions. Embrace your intuition. Embrace your excitement. Embrace your feelings for they are what guides you.