Saratoga’s Blog

There are two main platforms upon which to live your life. The one you choose will determine whether you are happy or sad, fulfilled or unfulfilled, successful or unsuccessful. One is the platform of a creator and the other is the platform of a victim.

There are certain simple laws of physics that correspond to each of these platforms. They have to do with which direction your energy flows. On the platform of a creator, your energy is sourced from within you and flows outward to enable you to create your world. You decide what happens to you and what you experience.

The platform of a victim is very different. If you live on this platform, the physics of your energy will change dramatically. You will be randomly bombarded with the energy from the world around you. In this case, that same outside energy will determine your inner experience.

If you pay attention to the news, you can see that the world is virtually in flames with suffering. This includes human beings along with plants and animals. In fact, did you know that along with our own human troubles, we are at the beginning of the sixth mass extinction event on planet Earth? (The last one was the dinosaurs.)

Perhaps positive thinking dictates that we don’t ponder such obvious atrocities. Yet those of us on this planet who are better off than most have a moral obligation to do so.

The majority of people on this planet may be experiencing too much suffering to have the luxury of contemplating human and planetary evolution. But there are a great many of us who can certainly afford to do so.

How many times have you tried to solve a problem in your life and ended up feeling completely discouraged and frustrated? There is a reason for being unsuccessful at solving problems, and I will explain to you what that is. I am also going to share with you a much better method that will actually work!

The first thing you should know is that approaching a problem as something to be solved doesn’t work. What this does is cause you to focus on the problem. Whatever you focus on gets amplified.

Solving a problem is actually not your real goal. Your real goal is to experience what you want. A problem is something that stands in the way of that. If you focus on what stands in your way, you may lose sight of your original intent. In this case, the problem becomes a major distraction.

Have you ever felt discouraged, tired, and run-down when trying to produce positive change in your life? You might be overlooking the single, most important thing that you need to have the courage and energy to accomplish the changes you want. It’s called the power to be yourself.

This power is something that we are all born with. The problem is that we are encouraged from a very early age to snuff this power out as quickly as possible. Why? So we can fit in with the larger, uniform group called society.

These attempts at uniformity come at a very high cost to the individual. The result is that we each become very insecure and confused about who we are. We learn to be afraid to take risks. We come to believe that it’s safer to blend in with the crowd.

There is much good to be derived from religious practices, where humility and love, plus acceptance and respect for others remain a central theme. Where this is the case, religions have no doubt done a great deal to contribute positive benefits to our civilized society. The problem arises, however, when religions take an imperialistic approach to all of humanity.

I do not claim to be a religious scholar, and frankly I wouldn’t want to be. Instead, I speak from my own observations and personal experiences. I would suggest that something becomes a religion any time there is an attempt to dogmatize a belief as the ultimate rendition of the truth, whether that something is related to lifestyle or spirituality. A key ingredient in this dogmatization is to deem everyone else on Earth to be wrong.

The most important thing in overcoming procrastination is to understand what it is and learn how to recognize it. Let’s begin by taking note of where procrastination always shows up. It always occurs related to something positive that you intend to do in your life. Notice that you will never find yourself procrastinating about doing something harmful.

Here is a common example. Imagine you are starting a healthy diet to lose weight. Let’s say that a bag of potato chips sitting in your cupboard is just beckoning you to finish it off. Would you ever find yourself procrastinating about eating the whole bag? Of course not. The only thing you’d be procrastinating about is embarking on the new, healthy diet. It would go something like this: “Well, I can wait one more day to start my new diet. What’s one more day? Besides, I don’t want those yummy chips to go to waste. That would be wrong!” No procrastination problem when it comes to those chips, right?

Procrastination always acts as an impediment to bettering your life in some way. It does not seem to have any problem staying out of your way when you are in the process of making things worse.

Let us enter into the great debate about fear. To be sure, this is an evolutionary debate of exceedingly large proportions. In order to address this topic, we must enter the realm of planetary evolution on a much bigger scale. We must view ourselves as powerful beings who wish to evolve to our highest potential, rather than as weak people trying to cope with a less-than-optimal situation.

The first thing to note is that fear is indeed a part of our biology. The experience of fear arises from the infamous amygdala in the ancient, reptilian portion of our brains. But I do not want to debate our biological structure. I will leave that to the scientists and anthropologists of our time. Rather, I wish to challenge the experience of fear in principle and ask the following question: Is fear really necessary?

Life is a journey. What kind of journey is your life? Are you inspired, creative, and excited? Or are you bored because everything seems so routine and predictable? And finally, what makes the difference between these two experiences? It all has to do with the context that you establish for living.

There are two main ways to establish a context for life.The first way is to see life as a profound, unpredictable journey of evolution where you are divinely guided by a love that is bigger than yourself. This is the way of seeing life as a magical, mystical event that unfolds with the beauty of daily unexpected surprises. This is the way of curiosity, exploration, and feeling altogether conscious and alive! It is the way of miracles. In this context, you walk hand-in-hand with the Divine. You live a purposeful, exciting life as a co-creator with God.

The second way is to see life as a journey whereby you attempt to master the art of doing what you are supposed to do according to society and other people. Your goal is to please others and get as much positive feedback as you can. The only way you know that you are doing a good job is when other people tell you.

There are two sides to our lives in the modern world, and one side is winning out. There is our natural side and then there is our technological side. The technological side is definitely ahead. We are slowly transforming ourselves from natural, biological creatures in tune with the natural world, into a strange hybrid of sorts. We are still physically anchored in the natural world of our planet, yet our minds and even our spirits are becoming more and more comfortable with technology as our base.

This duality creates a conflict that can be extremely detrimental to our health and well-being, plus significantly compromise our spirituality and inner peace.

Let’s refer to the world of technology as the world of machines. Now let’s discuss why our attempts to interface with that world are fraught with peril, if we don’t do it consciously and honor the type of natural beings that we are.

Prosperity can include many things, but it is fundamentally a lifestyle and a mindset. Most people have prosperity associated with money. But thinking about money alone is never enough. If you see yourself as a poor person who is desperately in need of money, this is not likely to lead to a dramatic change in your situation. And feeling financially poor is relative. You could be making $100,000 a year and still be unable to pay your bills.

On the other hand, there are people making far less money than that who are perfectly content with their situation. It’s all about balance in your life and what is important to you. There are no rights or wrongs. It simply has to do with how you see things for yourself, and what kind of life you want to experience.