Abraham Maslow was a psychologist who studied a selection of the finest and most successful people who had ever lived to find out what they had in common. Read on to find out the common factors of people such as Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln and Albert Schweitzer and how they apply to your life.
Recent economic events and increasing unemployment indicates that a recession is looming. A recession can potentially impact your economic freedom, which affects many other parts of your life. I know this from my own experience when I was made redundant from my job after 16 years back in 2003. Since that time, I have learned a lot about surviving and thriving in uncertain times.
How can the free person survive during an economic downturn? This post covers some of the principles that you can use to protect yourself during hard times.
This posting is about our lifelong struggle to regain lost treasure. This is based on a dream I had where I saw a large shimmering pearl that I somehow knew that I must have. I believe that this represents a treasure that was ours, that we no longer possess but must regain.
When we are young, we are innocent of the world and at peace with both it and ourselves, but as time goes on, we lose two things – firstly the feeling of being whole in ourselves, and secondly the sense of wholeness and order in the world. The world no longer makes any sense to us and there no longer seems to be a benevolent sense of order behind it. Similarly, our innate sense of rightness and harmony in our spirit is fractured by conformity to others.
This posting is about the evolution of someone’s thought patterns as they transition from unfree to free person. I propose that the person goes through four cycles based on what they are focusing on at each stage: acquisition, inquiry, practice and meditation.
I’ve loosely based this on the Futures100 study into the luxury market which was commissioned by American Express. The pursuit of luxury is often a (poor) substitute for the search for self actualization, so I think the study is appropriate to this case.
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I hardly need to define mediocrity – it surrounds us on all sides – but I think that a description of it being the quality of ordinariness, of being only average or being second rate sums it up well.
Whilst it is nothing new, our society increasingly celebrates the banal, promoting false celebrity in place of true greatness, valuing “fitting in” over standing out.
Rediscovering freedom involves regaining a feeling of comfort in your own skin. The awkward layers that have been assumed to please others are shed, and the real person is revealed – an authentic person. What does this mean, and how do we regain our authenticity?
This posting is based on information in the book “How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World” by Harry Browne (which I highly recommend).
Browne’s book is about what we can do to immediately gain freedom and overcome obstacles to our own growth. The major obstacles are not political, but cultural – we are conditioned to think in ways that unintentionally limit our own freedom.
This posting is about how what we perceive as real is often a distorted of the underlying truth. This means that in order to find truth, we must search beyond what is immediately obvious to us and challenge our preconceptions of the world.
We read a lot about how we should be more tolerant. Tolerance is commonly considered to be essential for living harmoniously together. This posting is about why intolerance is a virtue and how we should all aim to be more intolerant. If that’s not bad enough, we should also try to be more impatient. We definitely need more intolerance and impatience in our lives.
Abraham Maslow proposed that self actualization is the highest state that a person can achieve in a hierarchy of needs. I believe that to achieve our highest potential as humans, we need to understand self actualization, and how we can practically achieve it.