Time to relax

Imagine you come home from a long and tiresome grind at work. Your boss has been complaining all day, traffic jams have made you irritated, a boatload of work that you didn’t complete today is waiting for you tomorrow or that annoying guy on a phone call that just didn’t want to listen to you. Work can feel like such a drag sometimes.

So obviously we want to get away from that as fast as possible and give our mind and body some well-deserved rest. So what do we do? We plunge ourselves on the couch and turn to our favorite soap to pass some time. We pretty much turn of our minds and our subconsciousness is therefore left vulnerable to all the messages we receive from tv.

We watch hours on end of useless commercials that give us the wrong image of how we “should” look like, subconsciously influencing ourselves to buy stuff we don’t need in order to “fit in”.

We watch brain-numbing soaps, aggressive movies or negative/disturbing facts in the news. We keep dumping our brain full of irrelevant information like the latest gossip, events, news facts or other things that cloud our thinking.

Here’s a nifty, fitting cartoon made by Doug Savage;

(c) Doug Savage – www.savagechickens.com

What’s wrong?

Now what’s wrong with this? On the first sight it might be a really relaxing pass-time. But I believe we should be very conscious about what information we allow in our life. I believe we should be mostly focused on what is going to help us grow the most in the long-term. Is this information relevant to me? If not, does it affect me? (consciously or subconsciously)

If we always end our days with an unproductive escape in tv-land we block ourselves of from any further growth after our working hours. It’s ok to select a show/movie once in a while if you want to relax a bit. But then you need to select it from advance and don’t use tv as an escape or excuse to waste your time. Tv should be used as a means of relaxation or learning and not a mere pass-time activity.

It is far to easy to get stuck in a rut of the same tv shows day in and day out until we don’t have any time left in our lives to do the things that could really benefit us in the long term. Focus on the things that allow you to grow in life. Watch some documentaries about the things that interest you, watch some inspiring movies or relax with a well-deserved episode or two of your favorite tv-serie.

News

Especially the news in general is a topic that I try to avoid at all costs. The news is loaded with negative influences like war, terrorism, murder, rape and other stories that create for you a false image of reality. These articles provide for you the belief that the world is bad and therefore you accept that as reality.

The news provides references on which we can build the belief that our world is evil, corrupt and a dark place. And that positive things rarely happen if at all.  Here are some screenshots of today’s (11/06/2014) headlines on some major news-sites;

CBC

BBC

CNN

Fox

I didn’t cherry-pick these headlines but just googled the sites and took a screenshot of their homepage. When we start analyzing the page we can clearly tell what they choose to focus on. (Although I like the CBC one, that’s the most neutral one)

You Create your own reality

Ignorance, Knowledge, Subjective Reality

Mainstream media is unbalanced and rarely covers inspirational, empowering and constructive messages to their viewers. I truly believe that mainstream media is poison for your mind. We can create our own reality if we want to see it that way by shaping our own beliefs.

Positive beliefs can be found everywhere around us if we are on the look-out for them. There are as much positive events in this world as there are negative events (if not more). People aren’t inherently evil although that’s the image that’s getting passed around of our world.

Now how do you create your own reality?

Connect yourself and your mind with uplifting and inspiring messages. Block yourself off from all the negativity in the world because there’s literally no positive impact that those messages have on your life. Connect with media outlets that bring you up instead of the ones that bring you down. The ones that inspire and provoke constructive thought. Some good examples;

http://www.amazers.co0/
https://facebook.com/positiveoutlooks?ref=ts&fref=ts
http://positivenews.org.uk/
http://www.highexistence.com/
https://facebook.com/letsThinkPositive1?ref=ts&fref=ts

Critical

Wait a minute… You’re just blocking yourself of from reality. You’re running away from all the bad things in the world and live in your own fake world! You’re missing out on the real things!

What am I missing out on? What’s the point of focusing on negative things that have no impact on your life? It only brings you down. If there is something truly important happening in the world you’ll probably hear it from somebody else. And even then it probably doesn’t affect your life that much.

Reality is just a matter of perception. Like Gustave Flaubert alreay said;

“There is no truth, only perception”

Our reality is the way we look at life. Constructed by the references (controllable) we allow to support these beliefs in our mind. The glasses trough which we see our life.

This doesn’t mean we should ignore the bad in the world. But we shouldn’t obsess over it either. There’s a great imbalance of destructive and constructive messages in mainstream media and therefore I take my liberty to choose not to follow these streams as they lead to no place I would like to go. And I wish the same upon you.

Essence

Allright, what to take away from this? Be conscious of what kind of information you allow in your life. Step away from the messages that only bring you down and focus on the ones that actually lift you up and inspire you to do greater things. Remember that you create your own reality and you can decide the way you look at life.

One last question before I leave you guys; Would you rather live in an depressing, subjective reality or create your own happy subjective reality?

Anyway, that’s all for today guys. If you have anymore thoughts or questions you would like to share with me on this post, feel free to do so in the comment section below.
Take care,

Love

Simon