Survey Result - 2nd Top Question

There were so many responses to my recent survey that I wanted to address the number two question I got.

In my previous blog post, I talked about the number one question. The number two question was, “why do I still have bad thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.” Of course I am distilling down a number of responses to their essence. The questions sounded a lot like when Paul said, “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

My answer might surprise you. We are being hijacked! Human nature is a mechanism, and we can learn how that mechanism works. Once the hijacking has taken place, it’s too late to do much about it. So we need powerful tools of insight and understanding to battle this hijacking. The best tool we can have is Awareness.

Awareness trumps thought, feelings and behavior. So rather than battle the hijacking, we need to lay in wait for the hijacker. And, yes, there is an easy way to dramatically increase your awareness and move toward Mastery in your life.

If you would like to hear the rest of my answers about creating your own reality, affirmations, and the law of attraction, I will be holding a free teleclass where I will answer all the questions I can.

If you are interested go to this page to learn more and sign up.

Survey Result - Top Question

WOW you blew me away! Over the last week or so I have been conducting a survey. The question I asked was, “what is your greatest question about creating your own reality, affirmations and the law of attraction.” The number of responses I got was well above what even I had hoped for. This tells me that a lot of you are interested in this topic.

So what was the number one question? Many people articulated it in many different ways, but it all boiled do to one question; “why don’t they work?” or rather “what does it take to make them work?”

Here is my radical and controversial answer. They do work! They are working now. We just don’t like how they are working! When people discovered that the Buddha said, “With your thoughts you create your world,” everyone ran off and started to try to create the life they wanted. People totally forgot what he said next which was that we need to purify our minds.

So we need a way to very clearly see what our thoughts already are. That’s both the problem and the missing key. The issue is not creating new thoughts; the problem is to discover the thoughts that are already there that are manifesting our reality.

If you would like to hear the rest of my answers about creating your own reality, affirmations, and the law of attraction, I will be holding a free teleclass where I will answer all the questions I can.

If you are interested go to this page to learn more and sign up

Survey - I need your help

I need your help. I'm planning a teleclass on Personal Growth and Self Development and I need to know your biggest question about it.

If you could take 2 minutes and click on this link Survey and answer my question, "What is your biggest question about Creating your own Reality, Affirmations, and the Law of Attraction?" I would really appreciate it.

In a few weeks I will be hosting a free teleclass where I'll be answering as many questions as I can.

Here is the link again: Take Survey

By the way, I will be revealing the results of the survey in my newsletter. If you would like to sign up for it, here is the link:

sign me up

Life with Howard Cosell

Many of you reading this may be too young to remember an American icon of sports casting named Howard Cosell. "I'm telling it like it is," he would say about his style. I remember Howard Cosell as an irritating, grating, and raspy reminder of what one’s ego mind might sound like who would drone on and one in a nasally tone that made you want to turn down the TV. My apology to Howard Cosell fans the world over.

My point about Cosell is that whenever the man opened his mouth you knew it was Howard Cosell. There was no way to deny the tone, timbre, and quality of his voice. At sporting event after event, his unmistakable voice could be heard and heard and heard.

Now, for those of you that can remember Howard, imagine the following scenario. You and I have gone together to a football game. You are completely taken by the smell of the fall air, the pageantry of the crowd, the play on the field. You are taking it all in.

On the other hand, I am sitting next to you listening to the broadcast of the game through a set of earphones. And after every play, Howard Cosell is telling me what just happened, how it happened, and more importantly what it all means. In other words, I am listening to the commentary about the game.

So ask yourself this question, “Who is experiencing the game you or me?”
The answer is simple; you are. I am experiencing the commentary about the game. I am listening to Howard Cosell interpret the play by play is his pompous self important tone. Everything about the game that I am seeing is being distorted through the lens of the commentator coming through the ear pieces.

This is a metaphor for how we live life. We are so enamored with the internal commentator, so inured that we are thinking life instead of actually living it. Our experience of life, and therefore of one another, is filtered through the commentary. We talk to ourselves and then we talk some more. Then we have an internal dialog about self-talk!

Are you tired of having the irksome commentator dictate your experience? Join me and so many others in breaking free from the internal commentator. Life without Howard Cosell is a new life and then the real adventure begins.

The Monkey Brain Strikes Again

My upcoming book, Mastering Thought, has a subtitle, Loquacious Simianus. Many of us know what loquacious means. It means talkative. But Simianus may be a bit of a mystery. It is a Latin word that means monkey. This is what I call the Limbic System. It is the part of the brain that we share with other mammals like dogs and cats and primates. Since it is all about fight or flight, anger/fear, and survival, and since it is in charge of all emotions in the brain, I call it the monkey.

Now the missing piece that ties together the monkey and “talkative” is that the Limbic System is the driver of the voice in your head that sounds like you talking to you. Therefore we all have a loquacious simianus in our heads! Yuk!

But this particular monkey has some specialties; namely rationalization, regurgitation, and recapitulation. Rationalization is the process of constructing a logical justification for a behavior that was originally arrived at through a different emotional process. In other words, it is a story we tell ourselves to make us feel okay about something we did that we probably shouldn’t have.

Regurgitation is the rehashing of something said or done that we simply cannot digest in its original form usually because to digest it in that form would make us sick!

Recapitulation is a brief summary of what we did. The beauty of recapitulation is that is allows us to leave out key facts from our summary thus making us look better.

You notice that the three “R”s of the monkey are about the past.

There is another specialty the monkey has about the future; anticipation. Anticipation is the building of a scenario of what will happen in the future. Anticipation is almost totally useless since the future can never be predicted, but it gives the monkey a sense of control over what we cannot control!

As long as we believe we are the voice in our heads, the monkey has its way with us, and we have lost our way. This is where Witness Thought Transformation™ comes in. It frees us from the monkey. To be sure, the primitive primate doesn’t necessarily die, it just becomes irrelevant and we go free of its influence. Oh loquacious simianus – take a hike!

Tiger Woods - Sex or The Finger

I have been wanting to weigh in on this Tiger Woods thing ever since we all read that he was being treated for sex addition. My experience as a therapist give me a very different view on this. I look at it through the lens of my theory on relationships - the Dance of the Lion and the Unicorn.

Infidelity is more often an act of anger than about sex. Tiger Woods is a Unicorn. As such, his sexual acting out has more to do with his viewpoint that he is being pressured and dominated and that someone is "telling him what to do." This is always about a parental relationship that has left an imprint of rage on the young child.

"You can't tell me what to do." What better way to act out than to violate the trust in a relationship. Oh, you asking what has this to do with his wife. Nothing, to the Limbic System, a very primitive emotional part of the brain, the wife is a surrogate for the parent that was demanding and dominating.

So infidelity more often is a way of giving life the finger - over and over again. Without this insight, I am not hopeful that a sexual 12 step program will cure this kind of passive aggressive behavior.

Julie & Julia

Just wanted to pass on what a delightful experience Sheila and I had watching this movie. What a wonderful 2 hours and what a nice evening. I would encourage anyone to go. Just a whole lot of fun.

And if you don't believe that Meryl Streep is Julia Childs, get your eyesight and hearing checked immediately.

letting go (of the non-Self)

Why watch thoughts? Because when we do something wonderful emerges to take its place. I ran across a quote from David Hawkins that says this better than anything I have ever heard. He says, “It is not necessary to know about the Self but simply to become it by letting go of the non-Self.”

When we practice Witness Thought Transformation we literally watch the non-Self melt away. We are not thought – we are the Self that remains when thought dissolves into awareness.

My Arguement with J. Krishnamurti

Oh my gosh, what am I thinking? Arguing with J. Krishnamurti?

Here is my beef with the old sage. Actually it is a point of contention I have with most of eastern, new age, new thought – er thinking. Here is what Krishnamurti says:

When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.

Okay, so what is the problem with what he is saying? First off let me state categorically that I agree with everything that he says. It is the absolute truth. So where’s the issue? My issue comes in the first sentence: “When a man becomes aware of the movement of his thoughts.” This sort of statement has been made in various forms for thousands of years. So what’s the issue?

The issue is so obvious that we never question it. What exactly is the movement of thought? More precisely; what is thought itself? This is never explained. In fact, it is left to the ego-mind of the reader to fill in the blank. This turns out to be a very dangerous thing. The role of the ego is to trick us into thinking we “get it” when we don’t really get it. In the process, the ego becomes spiritualized and then we are pretty much lost forever.

The key to understanding thousands of years of eastern thought and spiritual teaching is to confront the question what is thought? And, in Krishnamurti’s case, how do we become aware of its movement? For without this little gem of truth, the rest of what he is saying is not only irrelevant to our growth but dangerous fodder for the ego-mind.

This is where my work comes in. A number of years ago I made a startling discovery that produced and almost immediate awakening in my clients visiting me in my therapy office. Today I call that teaching Witness Thought Transformation™ and it is an amazingly simple practice that makes the movement of thought and the mind obvious. And I don’t just mean in the setting of meditation or some spiritual practice. I mean walking around in everyday life.

Our new age culture is full of people who think they understand what Krishnamurti is saying. This is intellectual understanding. But the fruit of actualizing this revelation comes in the form of better relationships, experiencing joy even when there are problems, and a personal quality of life that others enjoy about us. If we are instead still in the drama and the struggle then clearly there is no awareness of the movement of thought.

Conference Call

Saturday's Conference Call set a record for us. Not only did we have a lively group on the call, but we had an overwhelming number of people who asked for the download. So here is a link to download the call!

Mastering Thought

The Buddah said, “All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, We make our world.”

Too many in our day have totally misunderstood what the Buddah is saying. What he is pointing to are the thoughts that are already there. But the ego mind wants to take this principle and rather than do the work of cleaning up the mind, it wants a new Cadillac or relationship, or more money so we need to learn the “Secret.”

This is not the truth at all. The Buddah says, “If a man's mind becomes pure, his surroundings will also become pure.” “We are what we think. A wise man, recognizing that the world is but an illusion, does not act as if it is real, so he escapes the suffering. We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.” So the emphasis is to purify the mind, not layer goals onto an already polluted mind.

A Stroke of Insight

Every now and then something really important appears on the internet. Sometimes it takes me a long time to find it. But when I do, I want to share it. You must watch this video and then think how it applies to Witness Thought Transformation. Click the title and have your life changed!

All my best,

Mark

Buddhists Blunder

There is a wide spread belief that Buddhists can do no wrong. This latest bunch of violence aimed at Tibetan liberation is wrong headed and potentially exposes Lama Buddhism as a fraud. But not so fast! The Dalai Lama has stepped up to the plate and shown wisdom in denouncing any form of violence. In fact he has threatened to resign if the nonsense doesn’t stop.

So what is going on here? Should we all want social justice? Don’t we have the right to fight for world peace? If you want to live from your ego, of course you have all kinds of rights. This reminds me of that well worn phrase; “Be the Change.”

Being the change means changing from the inside out. It does not mean rushing to the Chinese border and having a bloody confrontation with their army.

Shame on those Buddhists. They should know better!

The Super Bowl of Life: Go Deep, Go Long

Yes, this is inspired by the Giant’s Super Bowl win. They started the season with losses and came into the playoffs as tremendous underdogs. But they won. We think of going deep and going long as tactics used to win football games. Having a running game is important, but these days it usually serves to set up the passing game. So every team must be able to go deep and go long to be a serious threat.

Life is very much like that. In order to win, we must go deep and stay at a depth for a long time. Today, many of us are confusing money, success, and achievement with depth. When I tell people that they need to go deep and go long, I am often told that the message is “off-putting.” Few want to answer the call to depth. Many of us have confused depth with being very serious about our superficiality.

So I wanted to put this going deep into perspective. Perhaps some sobering facts might serve to motivate.

Every year over two thousand children, most under the age of five, die as a result of child abuse. 18% of us are alcoholics or alcohol abusers while 8% are drug users. 816,000 of us attempt suicide every year and about 33,000 of us succeed. If ever there was a case for going deep, those statistics tell it all. But I could go on. I could go on to the divorce rate, teen pregnancy, and a depressing number of other topics.

The bottom line is that the world we live in is not in good shape. It is not in good shape because people are acting out their pain. We lie, murder, we are greedy, judgmental, intolerant, materialistic. By the way, the murder rate is about 5.7 for every 100,000 people.

Now you are saying to yourself, that’s not me. I’m not a murderer. I don’t hit my kids. It is what happens inside of us that makes all the difference. The world on the outside will only change if we each individually take responsibility for what is on the inside. But we don’t want to look inside. Why? Because there is pain in there! Inside of many seemingly very nice people are thoughts of violence, hostility, anger, rage, hatred, and enormous judgment, not to mention fear and an overwhelming sense of rejection.

Witness Thought Transformation™ frees us from the tyranny of thought and releases us into the flow of life. From this vantage point we can witness the pain instead of becoming overwhelmed by it. Witnessing our thoughts takes us deep and long in a way that is not burdensome, but is uplifting and fulfilling.

I want to tell you the benefit of going deep and going long. It is a life of peace, free of struggle, without the need to become something or achieve something to feel like a complete being. Mastering Thought releases us from drama, ego patterns, and the need to prove something. With clean motivation, we can now step into the world and make a real difference.
I am a therapist. I know your pain. I have seen every kind of misery. I know the only way out is going deep and going long.

Do you find this message “off-putting?” Good! The more uncomfortable the better. No one in the history of human kind has ever gone deep and gone long until they were very uncomfortable with going nowhere.

The Witness Consciousness Two-Step

I am finding that Witness Consciousness has two distinct steps to it. The first of course is the initial thought watching. This leads to a huge breakthrough in awareness and a “knowing” that is easy to experience. But then I have observed that without practice people go back into their ego and the drama of the world. The knowing that comes with the initial breakthrough never leaves however.

This requires step number two. In a way, this is more work than the first step. Practice! Yes, we need to keep watching our thoughts in order to stop the slide back into the ego mind and the patters of unconsciousness that we all have. This requires a sustained effort at “watching” over a period of a year or two until it becomes second nature. That’s why building a community of watchers is so important in order to support the practice.

Does anyone else have thoughts on this two-step process?

Video Book Review

Here is my video book review of "A New Earth" by Eckhart Tolle.

Click here to play video...

Open Mouth insert Britney

Lord I apologize, but I just can't resist a comment on the recent Dr. Phil, Britney Spears debacle. For those of you who have been lost on a Pacific Island for the last few weeks, let me bring you up to date. Britney, it seems, had some sort of mental issue and ended up in Cedars-Sinai for what I assumed was a 72 hour hold. This is what we call in the shrink business a 5150. Whatever it was, the family reportedly asked Dr. Phil as a personal favor to visit her in the hospital and see if he could lend her a hand.

Two things happened that prompt my need to comment. First, Dr. Phil made plans for a TV show featuring Britney's misery. Second, he issued a statement to the press on leaving the hospital that assessed her mental condition. Both of these actions were huge mistakes and an incredible breach of trust in any one's book.

Let me just say that Dr. Phil is no longer licensed as a psychologist. So he can trample all over some one's privacy and confidentiality with impunity. So he is not subject to sanction by some licensing board somewhere. He is a private citizen behaving in what ever way one behaves these days.

But let me comment on the two things he did. First of all, planning a TV show was grossly premature. The respectful thing to do would be to tuck that idea in Dr. Phil's back pocket until such time as Britney had recovered. Then a show about the whole affair would be helpful to people going through similar issues. But to plan a show as some kind of intervention is a little like allowing Frontline to do a special on your wife's visit to the gynecologist. All this could do is further Britney's pain and embarrassment.

Secondly and perhaps equal in importance was Dr. Phil's commenting to the press. The bottom line is that any comment is a gross breach of faith and trust. He should have kept his mouth shut if he really wanted to help. He should have known that anything he said would have just made the situation worse. I understand that as I write this, he is vehemently defending what he said. Well, if he had remained silent, there would be nothing to defend.

As a licensed therapist, I take my legal and ethical obligation for confidentiality seriously. But as a human being I know when I am stepping one someone else to move up the ladder. Dr. Phil may not have set out to exploit the situation with Briney, but he did - pure and simple.

The Secret without The Sacred

Life has its ups and downs. Life has its pleasure and pain. But it is all the Divine Expression. I hate to use the word God since so many have a reaction to it, so let me use the term the Divine Expression. The Divine Expression is life. There is nothing in existence that is not the Divine Expression. What we like is the Divine Expression. What we hate is the Divine Expression. Everything – the infinity of the present moment, the expanse of the universe, the neighbor that irritates us – all is the Divine Expression.

To say that Life is Sacred is accurate. It is like the ocean. The ocean has depth, but on its surface there are waves and swells, highs and lows. When the ocean is active there are white caps and steep drops to the furrow between the waves. Regardless of the surface of the ocean, all is still the ocean. To say that waves are the ocean and the troughs between waves are not the ocean is nonsensical. The ocean is the ocean and the Divine Expression is the Divine Expression.

Our lives have highs and lows – pleasure and pain – blessings and misfortunes. All of these things are the Divine Expression. The question here is really our willingness to allow the Divine to be the Divine. This leads me to the Secret, the Law of Attraction and all of that.

Without the Sacred, the Secret, goal setting, and attracting wealth – all moves us away from the Divine Expression of Now. They become the ego’s efforts to gain the upper hand, get an advantage. Until we realize the Divine, all of these other efforts move us away from What Is. In fact, it is a clever way the ego has of saying “no” to the Divine. “Yes, Lord, I realize the present moment is the Divine Expression, but I am waiting for a better moment. Thank you very much.” It is hard to express in words the arrogance of this attitude.

The Divine Expression can be realized through surrender, radical humility, and true acceptance of What Is. These are characteristics that are totally foreign to our thinking. So we want the Secret without paying any price for the Sacred. Surrender, humility, and acceptance don’t help us advance or get what we want. After all, if God didn’t want us to get what we want, why would he give us two big hands to grab it with? Right?

The fact that the Secret is secondary to the Sacred as a principle of life should be self-evident, but sadly it’s not. To discover the Sacred the destruction of everything “we” hold dear must take place. The false self, the ego and its tricks must be exposed for what they are – diversionary tactics.

There is sweetness to the Sacred. It satisfies fully. Mastering Thought through Witness Thought Transformation™ opens the portal to the Scared. Without the Sacred we are convinced the problem with our minds is negative thought and self limiting beliefs. Through the lens that we get from Witnessing our Thoughts, we realize the problem is the mind itself and our fascination with thought.

Can we still set goals? Work hard for our dreams? Try to change the world – our personal world? Of course. But paradoxically, there is something about realizing the Perfection of the Sacred that makes the effort all the more satisfying. It’s like a horse and carriage. The Sacred is the horse that pulls the carriage containing the Secret. You can’t have one without the other. The Sacred is the Secret of the Secret.

The ego is: The Grinch that Stole Christmas

“Peace on Earth, good will toward men . . .” so says Luke 2:14. And this is that season, isn’t it? Of course, as we look around the earth we see very little of either. Why is that? Why is it so hard to find peace and good will? Oh to be sure, there are many who feign peace and goodwill. They appear to be the “good” people, but too often it is an act; an ego defense. So good and evil are really two sides of the same coin- some sort of compensation for personal, societal, or national pain.
So where did human kind go wrong? How did the wheels come off the world’s bus in such a profound way?

Believe it or not, it all starts around 3 to 5 years of age in each individual. As we learn language we develop two distinct styles of communication. One style is designed to communicate with other people. But the real problem lies in a type of speech called “ego-centric” speech. What is ego-centric speech? It is a running commentary that children of around two years of age have that describes what they are doing and why they are doing it. At this age, the child is acting on impulses from the limbic system and nonverbal emotional messages from the limbic and right hemispheric formations. The child assumes there must be some logical explanation as to why they are following these impulses. So they use their newly discovered talent for language to explain why they are doing what they are doing. In other words, ego-centric communication is an elaborate form of rationalization for the ongoing behavior that is being dictated by more primitive and nonverbal parts of the brain.

Well, things get pretty scary at around 3 to 5 years of age. This ego-centric communication becomes internalized. This overt thinking gradually becomes internalized eventually becoming completely hidden to everyone but the commentator, a five year old child. At this point the child is not only speaking in words, but is thinking in words. This ego-centered speech becomes more and more complex and more and more addictive to the point where as adults we cannot shut off the constant commentary.

What’s at issue here is not that we talk to ourselves, but the quality of the communication. The impetus for this internalized view of the world is impulsive, emotional, and self serving. The quality of this does not change with age. The internal commentator is concerned with one and only one thing – self enhancement!
This is bad enough, but then something even more sinister happens. Because this internal commentator is so ubiquitous and continuous, we make a fatal assumption. We believe that this internal voice is me! By identifying with this voice and giving it credence we become what only can be described as “lost souls.” We are forever in the grip of the emotional distortions of a five year old who is concerned only with him or herself.

This internalized ego-centric speech becomes what many writers and teachers call the “ego-mind,” the “false self,” the “thinker.” It’s proud, it’s arrogant, it’s ignorant, and most everything it says is bullshit. It is easy to see why there is no peace on earth or goodwill toward men.

Witness Thought Transformation™ will set the world free from the voice in the head that is masquerading as “me.” It is simple, it is fast, and it is a revolution. To hear some testimonials about it, go to my home page and set yourself free from ego-centric speech.

Learning Annex

I did my regularly scheduled Learning Annex workshop yesterday at the Creative Chakra Spa in Marina Del Rey. As always Sandy was a wonderful host. We had a great group. Many seemed to get it. It was my first opportunity to use my revise power point program. I liked the new format and it seemed to have a better impact. Those of you who attended, feel free to comment here.