The Present

Your Power is in the Present

If you’re going to effect change, any change whatsoever, you need to be in the present (at least in the moment you’re doing it).

If you’re not, mistakes can be easily made. Case in point: car accidents. These happen usually because the person wasn’t even “there” on the road when the accident happened. They were off in mental wonderland.

Also, both your power and ability to communicate become restricted when you aren’t in the present. Did you ever try to talk with or listen to someone who didn’t really even seem to know you were there?

The present is the only spot (time-wise) that really exists. Everything else requires mental gymnastics to bring it forth into your reality.

The Power of Communication

What is communication, if not the conveying of ideas from one being to another? The person who speaks or writes publicly (or privately as well) often makes a mistake by dwelling too much on the past or future and not noticing or being in the present enough. A speaker or writer should have empathy for their listeners or readers. Having empathy requires being in the present; seeing the person (people) in front of you; and framing your communication in such a way that the listener can understand you and be helped in some way by what you say.

Speakers and Writers

• If you’re speaking or writing from a specialty niche (not common knowledge), don’t assume your listener or reader knows what you’re talking about or understands your terms.
• Be comprehensible. If your knowledge base is so full of specialty-information, that you can’t possibly fully explain yourself to a novice, then you can at least provide your listeners and readers with a way to get that data. Whether it be links for definitions, examples or other resources to acquire the specialty-information, it is only considerate and wise to do this.
• Speak or write with a purpose and stick to that purpose. Don’t go off track in all directions. Doing that will only confuse your listeners or readers.
• There should always be an end game of benefiting (and not confusing) the listener or reader with everything you say.

Listeners and Readers:

As a listener or reader, you share some responsibility for the communication. You read or listen because you want to share the realities of many different people. Right? Reality is the world or the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idea of them. Use your own judgement when you’re reading or listening to determine what is real and what isn’t.

• Stop listening or reading (or skip that section) if you aren’t being helped by the data or if it has no basis in reality for you.
• What is real for you is real for you. Yes, learn new things. But, it is not productive of anything to try to absorb all data from everywhere. Always keep in mind the usefulness of that data.
• Don’t allow yourself to stay confused for very long. What is your purpose for listening or reading if not to understand? Make attempts to understand. Pause the video to look up a word you don’t know or read a reference for further data about some specialty-information that the speaker or writer is referring to.

Negative Emotions

Negative emotions usually only come into play when you are not “in the present”. Hate, fear, and grief come from being in the past. You’re not really in the “past”, because that exists no longer, but you are doing a lot of mental gymnastics to keep yourself focused on past long enough to feel (and even get stuck) in these negative emotions. [Note: When one “forgives the trespasses” of others it helps the person release their negative emotion which stem from the past.]

There are negative emotions related to the future too. For instance lust, greed, envy and pride come into being when a person is not happy or satisfied with his or her present and then dwells (mentally) in a world of imagining or “wishing” different “realities”.

In the end, if new “facts” don’t seem true, confuse you, or bother you, you can always just skip it. There’s no use worrying about what already happened in the past or what hasn’t happened yet, unless we want to. There should be something good to come out of everything we do.

Helping Freedom Win

See my home page, https://www.helpingfreedomwin.org, for more information about how to help yourself and others in these confusing times.

Also read “What is Reality?” a related post.