The Nature of Reality

The Nature of Reality

Liquid gold
Moss Jackson, PhD
Psychologist and Success Coach

As a Success Coach, my purpose is to teach people how to live extraordinary lives of success, accomplishment and satisfaction. It is great to achieve your goals, make something happen and to enjoy the fruits of your efforts. I also think people can redesign their minds and brains to live less stressful lives, reduce the incidence of inflammatory disease, and increase their lifespan by 10-15 years. Much of my clinical work and research over the last ten years have increased my confidence that we can lead extraordinary lives, thriving more than surviving, thereby creating greater personal health and well-being.

However, I recently read a NY Times article about the rising level of stress, anxiety and conflict people are experiencing, along with a decrease in feelings of safety and connection to others. The political debate over who will be our next President appears to have slipped into a swamp of mutual accusations, distrust, arguments, nastiness and character accusations. Consequently, many of us feel that we have lost our confidence in our leaders, both at the national and local levels. Rather than participating in rational debate, we instead hear tense and angry personal attacks toward individuals’ racial character, religious devotion and diversity.

I think most of us look toward our national leaders as role models for finding common ground, ensuring national unity and fostering mutual respect. We have not seen that sense of spirit for close to a decade. In many Eastern philosophies, health practitioners suggest it takes about seven to ten years of chronic stress to manifest disease or breakdown. I have a large concern that on a national and personal level we have slipped into the breakdown phase. Our leaders, both Republican and Democratic, have demonstrated a deplorable level of responsibility in taking care of their citizens, choosing instead to take a “Right/Wrong” attitude toward each other. Whoever started it may not matter as much as the rigid addiction to trying to prove who the bigger cheat, jerk, or bigot.

As someone once said, “Gold flows downhill, but so does mud!” It would sure be nice to see some gold coming our way and less mud. Hopefully, our next President and leadership representatives will become sick and disgusted of the mud they have produced and initiate a healing process for our nation.

Perhaps I have also seen and experienced too much nastiness and mud-slinging, like many of you, and do not hold much hope for a transformational style of leadership to reverse the tide of the last seven to ten years. I also think many of us have followed this national trend and become nasty, petty and hateful like many of our leaders. It might be a useful practice, however hard it might be, to do your own reality check and confront your own levels of personal judgement, blame and hatred. Personally, I am not very happy with my own state of intolerance. I notice a strong visceral reaction when I listen to Donald Trump, many Republican leaders and Fox News. I have some personal healing to do this coming year regardless of who our next President is.

 But I also have a confidence that you and I can step into a more powerful stage of listening, trying to understand each other and to seek a common ground of mutual respect and cooperation that could bring a little more “gold” into our lives. By gold I mean what most of us desire and need to prosper in our lives, i.e., a sense of safety, connection and personal power. In subsequent posts, I will lay out the reason for these three psychological needs and what you can do to enhance these life-enhancing qualities in your lives.

I suggest that rather than waiting for someone to take care of us and to lead us out of what I call a “Death Psychology” of despair, reactivity and victimization into the “Promised Land” (where we will once again experience feeling safe, connected and personally resourceful), we un-attach ourselves from being rescued and instead grow up and learn to do it for ourselves and help each other. From the Bible, I understand it took Moses over forty years to lead the enslaved Hebrews out of slavery into freedom. I have little interest in waiting for such a leader or, to follow for the next forty or so years. Perhaps we are not so needy that we have to keep looking for our Rescuer. Sometimes our situation or reality gives us the opportunity to grow up, take personal responsibility and do some redesigning of our interdependent identities so that we, the citizenship, start to do the leading.

I think that is what I mean by Life Leadership: living a radically long life of success, accomplishment and satisfaction. No one can give it to you! You have to claim it and learn the principles and skills of collaboration, taking care of each other, compassion, generosity, grit and courage. We can do a better job together than trying to do it alone. I do not think the individual hero ethic is the way out of the desert we find ourselves in, so stop looking for a mythical hero. As someone said a long time ago, “We will either hang in together or hang alone!” Mammals seem to thrive better when they bond and work together. We do not have to live in a world of scarcity and mutual fear, but we have some work to do.

I hope you will find value in these sentiments and my future posts. I am looking at how we can further evolve and navigate our extraordinary lives and build the reality of our great future together.  I think we each possess extraordinary power to evolve if we can create a common vision and learn the tools to work together for a common good.

We all deserve to live extraordinarily long lives of success, accomplishment and satisfaction. We deserve to feel safe, connected and powerful. Let’s make this mission into a reality.

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