"Minute by minute"

"You are what you think about all day"
Tony Robbins

Scary thought?

Amazing advances in communications technologies, allow us to project our voices and images around the world in seconds, allow us to snap a picture with our cell phones or access the internet to send and retrieve our e-mail or make an online banking transaction from the very same cell phone from which we are busily SMSing the latest joke to our circle of friends.

These same technologies allow us to witness the slaughter in Baghdad market from the comfort of our armchairs, keep abreast of the crime statistics, the road death toll over the holidays, the latest hi-jacking techniques, the sky rocketing AIDS epidemic and the dizzy petrol price fluctuations linked mysteriously to the Rand/Dollar exchange rate. On a personal note your bank manager, the tax man, your dentist and your friendly neighbourhood mother-in-law all have direct and instant access to you and the uncanny ability to sense the most awkward time to call you on your cell with alarmingly urgent news.

All day long we are bombarded with newsworthy horror stories and headlines, gossipy skinder about colleagues and acquaintances, advertising campaigns designed to make Twiggy feel obese and what new thing has been discovered to cause cancer. All this is exacerbated by our own internal monkey chatter of self-doubt, fear and limiting, sabotaging beliefs.

So if this is what we are bombarded with all day it is only natural that our focus not only is scattered, distracted but influenced by the Dark Side as well. If we are what we think about all day long, what are we?

Given that the Universe gives us what we ask for, what are we asking for? Simplistically put we are asking for on a sub-conscious level- more of the chaos in the world to manifest in our personal lives - and it does! Go figure!

So what can we do about it? We have to live in the world after all.

I love the symbolism of the Lotus flower in Eastern and Egyptian mythologies. The lotus lives with its roots in the mucky pond soil, its stem in the murky pond water, its leaves on the surface in the air and its flower centered on the sun. It lives very much IN the world but its entire exterior is covered with a waxy substance which insulates it from its environment. It lives literally IN the world but is not OF the world with its focus on the source of its sustenance, the mechanism of its photosynthetic survival, the sun.

Here is a lesson for us to live in the world but not be products of it. To fix our minds, hearts and actions on the principle around which our lives are based. To focus on our own purpose and to draw ourselves towards our own Higher Quality of Life.