terence: Blog

Project Wonderland

terence — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:12:21 +0000

As Big Kev would say, "I'm Excited". Yeah baby!

I have invited a select group of individuals (a dozen or so) to come out and execute a fashion shoot. It's, er, causing quite a stir on the local scene. The idea is to have the shoot sponsored by business, but the shoot goes ahead regardless since everyone who is on board is there for the experience, fun, and portfolio enhancement.

I hope it goes well because I want Project Wonderland to be a broad project which provides a framework for expression in the fashion industry. We can create our own mandate and organise audacious and creative expedition which is ultimately very suited to the essence of the industry.

I have a professional film maker on board for this one to document the experience. I am also in the process of getting a writer so we can have a magazine that releases an issue for every artistic shoot (I want to organise commissioned shoots as well as artistic shoots).

I'm using my project management skillz to the max here (my previous professional incarnation). Everyone involved so far is loving the Base Camp project management facility that is being employed to coordinate the whole thing.

So wish me luck. You'll be able to see all the lovely photos after the shoot and buy the DVD :)

http://ProjectWonderland.org

"The truth? You can't handle the truth..."

terence — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 08:38:45 +0000

Reality is associated with neither pessimism or optimism both of which are human conditions. Reality and truth can be thought of as the same thing, and humans can only protest relative proximity to truth - none of us can claim to be it's keeper.

My proximal claim to to truth is that you are closer to it when you experience the human condition of humility.

Use your imagination

terence — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:32:50 +0000

If I was to start on about how imagination is important, I'd probably lose your interest. We all suspect the importance of imagination, but few of us really internalise this value to make it part of our response pattern. Possibly because we don't understand what it really is.

Imagination is probably the product of someone accessing their subconscious ideas pool from their conscious mind. Our brains are ideas mashup machines. If it can be said that we produce anything original, it can only be the way we've rearranged past experiences. But this is a powerful thing. Your ability to construct arragements is really a measure of your intelligence. Memory (past experience) is not enough.

Some of use have the ability to respond to powerful stimuli with a creative arrangement of ideas on how to respond. We're not all wired this way, but I believe it can be practised. All you have to do is choose to think about things rather than simply accept external ideas and be content with an experience.

There's a lot of truth in the assertion that we [the majority of us] are "creatures of habit". That is to say we are limited to our current and past experiences, cut off from original ideas [which our subconscious minds are rich in] to respond to situations. Part of the reason for this could be that we don't see things as a whole so we are not situationally aware. For instance, eating a hamburger that is bad for you is experientially more satisfying than staying hungry until you get home and prepare a nutritious meal. It doesn't see the whole truth, it only sees the immediate truth of the current experience. Waiting until you get home and eating well is seeing the whole truth and then responding lucidly to it.

In life we are called on to argue our case as to why we have made certain choices. Some people fear the vista of the whole truth because they suspect deep down that it will convict them of error. Because we have been conditioned to fear conviction, we dread the experience of it. Rather we will construct arguments to support our past choices. So here's something to ask yourself next time you find yourself doing this, is it based on past memories? or is it based on original thought (indeas/intelligence). Leonardo DeVinci once said
"Anyone who conducts and argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory".

You are your own authority because your choices are in your hands. If you want the ability to respond lucidly to your current situation, then you need to not rely on experience, but on original thought for how to respond.

Use your imagination.

After losing after loving

terence — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:23:29 +0000

I have loved and lost - like most people. My love was never perfect, but it never died. It was but a flickering flame.

Why would you not want your flame to burn brighter the second time around. Why would you diminish it by saying "I've been hurt, so next time I am going to give less".

Your personal growth is not given to you through suffering alone. It is your chosen response to the suffering that determines how much you grow. So last time you loved, life kicked you in the arse. What is your chosen response???

Burn brighter?
Burn more dimly?
or just not burn at all?

"between stimulus and response there is a space, in this space lies the freedom to chose your response. in those choices lie your growth and your happiness."

If you've been lead to believe that you have no choice, that you are "too damaged" to choose vulnerability again then you have been tricked. And it is a mean trick because the way out of loneliness and unhappiness is not to choose the easy thing, but to choose other thing (vulnerability, divestment of self). There is a precursor to choice, and that is awareness. Don't allow faulty ideas about personal entitlements and your source of security to rob you of your awareness about choices that would lead to joy and fulfillment which is what you were designed for.

You are not a rat destined to live your life on the tram track of "fear of pain and desire for pleasure". What makes you uniquely human is that space between stimulus and response. But that space needs to be exercised. If you get choice atrophy, then you forfeit that space which is the gift of being made in God's image.

Remember I said "My love was never perfect"? Well the more perfect you make your love, the less room there will be inside you for fear. And we have nothing to fear but fear itslef.
"There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love". 1 John 4:18

What would you give up for everlasting love

terence — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:43:03 +0000

Most people won't ever get it because they are thoroughly distracted with self-preservation. Most people have weak character because they are fear motivated. The one unique thing about the human species is that we have the ability to transcend self - and this must happen to achieve the miracle of everlasting love.

Love is an outward expression, not an inward one. LOVE IS NOT IN YOU. It can't be because love is a verb - it's something you DO. The closest synonym I can think of is "give" - which is also something you do. Giving love is a choice. It is a response that you choose. It's not a noun, it can be with-held but it can't be "contained" [in anyone].

Love is when you focus on fulfilling the other person and making them happy is enough for you not to have to be concerned about yourself or harbor any fear of personal loss.

If any of you for one minute think that "true love does not ask anything of you", then you are in fantasy land. LOVE NEVER STOPS ASKING OF YOU - which is actually a great thing, because when you are really in love, you would search out excuses to give to it.

So because love is the focus on the other person - it is the antithesis of self. You give your whole self to the other with no thought of anything in return and without hesitation. One of the reasons why this is difficult to understand is because we are examining one half of the equation. If you think for a minute about what would happen when two people give themselves completely to each other.

ok... did you think about that for a minute? You back now?

Yeah that's right, it's nothing short of a miracle. An atheist counselor said to me "you know marriage is a miracle, because at any given moment, one of the two can decide not to give themselves to it - and then it is broken. The miracle of marriage is that each partner CHOOSES each other day after day after day."

The giving is total (your whole self), it is unreserved, it is complete, and it is unqualified. It doesn't give with one hand and take with the other.

The person who gives in this way thrives on it. There is no way to measure the value of the love they give because the love contains all of them. and there is no way to measure their value because their worth is derived from what they give - which is all of themselves.

Again, take a moment, and think of this going both ways in a relationship. Now you may go cry yourself to sleep ;)

"There is no Justice" - there is only choice

terence — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:43:01 +0000

No one deserves to live and no one deserves to die. No one deserves love, no one deserves forgiveness - yet both are given. Justice is a contrived concept. I would propose stop wasting our time and energy in trying to find it or implement justice and perhaps instead focus our attentions on being thankful for our fortunes and being compassionate to those who've been through hardship. The laws of cause/effect and our fallen nature are not an excuses for us to divest ourselves of our personal responsibility to connectedness. That is to say, we should never sit back and say "they brought it on themselves".
Because you are human, because you are imperfect, justice is NOT your friend. One thing you should be thankful for is that life gives your respite from justice. Think about this the next time you feel like dealing out your own bit of justice in however a small or big way. Think about that the next time you feel hard done by.

There no magical equalizer. There is no karma. But there is the freedom to choose your response.

"There is no justice"... welcome to reality, now here are your choices for the future. Lets get on with it.

Are some people are meant to be alone?

terence — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:21:59 +0000

There are many statements that peple make about how they are meant to be alone and that they are OK with that. They are all manifestos. People speak the "relationships are not for me" idea into being. They make it "manifest". They talk themselves into it.

It's like a disease. Many mental diseases are fear-based and this one is no different. For whatever reason people need to develop a more robust character. I'm certainly not going to contribute to the fog of blind validation of such thinking.

There's nothing wrong with being alone for a time, but there is something wrong with programing yourself to exclude the possibility of being with someone.

When you experience failure in life of any sort, you can either learn from it (adapt) and profit, or you can use it as a trajectory and be a passenger to that. Being a passenger is certainly easier - but it brings no joy. There is a useful abuse of a useless truism that says "YOU WIN SOME, YOU LEARN SOME".

Waiting for true love

terence — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:06:10 +0000

I think wisdom is having the benefit of experience and intelligence, but then knowing where the theories begin and end.
When we have create a "dream person" image (proforma), I think we lose sight of the beginning and ending of our relationship inputs/outputs. We sabotage ourselves through too much trust in our own knowledge. We forget where the knowledge begins and ends in it's application to real life. We RELY too much on the head, and we don't free up the heart. The good thing about children is that they are not loaded up with programs taught to them by the world. Their hearts run wild and relationships come naturally to them.
I was standing up at the blues concert yesterday and this baby started playing peekaboo with me. She didn't have any parameters. So our relationship was fleeting, but a resounding success. Her smile was literally "disarming". I had to forget about my masks representation. She took the lead, and I was the follower. She was about 1 year old.

I think the concept of a bar being raised to a certain standard is not a useful paradigm to use in relationships. It brings with it a bunch of implications and limitations which are certainly absurd. I don't know how these impoverished analogies survive so well in our vernacular. The first problem with the bar analogy is that it is linear - this implies a polarity (presumably between good and bad) of how well a person fits your proforma (which is also assumed (that you have to have it)). The lowering of the bar then implies an integrity deficit which casts a pall on the relationship which would almost certainly be a fatal flaw. It is in fact a curse. This dooms either party to feel unfulfilled in the relationship.

Another constraint that we put on relationships is the expectations of inputs and outputs. This almost cirtainly destroys the part of the dynamic which makes a romantic relationship romantic in the first place. The inevitable occurrence of a shortfall in someone's expectation will lead to unnecessary disappointment. This dooms either party to feel unfulfilled in the relationship. Why not leave the expectations at the door, find someone who lights you up when they walk into the room and consider every good thing, that comes out of spending more time with them, as a bonus.
Pretend to be a child again, and imagine that you never learned any of the other bullshit that led you to those expectations in the first place. People with "high expectations" outsmart themselves. They are their own worse enemy. The fear of compromise is an irrational fear. Nothing good comes out of a fear-based directive.

Learn to love who you are - take your loved one's word for it. Then learn to love others. Don't think too much, but focus on the expression of love - giving it rather than receiving it. Get off this website and just get out in the world where you can regularly rub shoulders with all sorts of people (of the opposite sex) of roughly a compatible age. Change jobs if your existing one is stealing your life. Be willing to relocate.

There is certainly no "waiting" to be done. You need to get your arse out there in amongst it. You should be too busy meeting people to think about waiting for true love to show up.

Better to surrender

terence — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:53:39 +0000

When in doubt, act in good faith. Better to surrender your heart and have it broken every now and then with everything to gain. Rather than never having gained anything. Toughness and strength is having the courage to continuously make yourself vulnerable in spite of the risk. The only thing to fear, is fear itself.

Don't plot a fixed and choiceless trajectory of your future.

terence — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:19:52 +0000

The past is there to inform. We might use the information to form strategies to direct our future, but the past should not be used to plot a fixed trajectory moving forward.

It's about preservation of choice.

Every present moment is a fulcrum on which to exercise your freedom choice. The future should always be "NEW", promising, and exciting. It should not have to be so easily predictable.

Now go an apply this theory to broader issues of character such as romance, spontaneity, forgiveness, warm-heartedness, influence on others and see what a difference it makes.

About emotions and the future:
Emotions are there for providing feedback on how things affect you, they are not there to direct your life or project the future.

Exercising your power of choice when responding to situations often means acting counter-intuitively because you subscribe to a higher (more principled) ideal. Invariably, this ultimately benefits YOU anyway. It's how you grow. You don't mature by simply getting older. When you let emotions run amok, you give up your right to choose a better response and you forfeit the opportunity to make your life (and the life of others) better and to grow (mature).

My first post

terence — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:14:17 +0000

OK, so here's what I'm gonna use this blog for, every time I come up with what seems to me like an original thought, I'm gonna post it to trig. You'll have to forgive me some of these thoughts will just be tiny so this may be somewhat of a micro-blog.