A witch said to me words along the lines of, "This advice that people give about how you should be yourself and just relax is absolute rubbish. It's the surest route to nowhere. Don't relax - do the absolute opposite, get yourself all keyed up. The keyed up, emotionally turned on individual is the best the world will see. Too many people are so relaxed they never accomplish anything they want to do. They spend their lives wandering around in the equivalent of hair curlers. Ugly!" She was a female witch!
And there's some truth in what she said as we can easily turn ourselves into bundles of habits, performing the usual routine without thinking or questioning.
George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff taught along similar lines: that we are asleep and have to wake up. Most of us, he claimed, fall into an habitual way of life, which means our day-to-day activities become so repetitious that our unconscious mind can almost go off duty.
Gurdjieff went even further saying that most of us hardly have any meaningful existence as we are only a mass of impulses and emotions, which change from hour to hour. We wander about in an almost hypnotised state for most of the time with only flashes of what we could possibly become.I also wonder about some forms of meditation and how this could turn people into almost zombies - if they don't, that is, wake themselves up properly and fully re-join this world once their session is finished.
Going back to Gurdjieff's thinking, we automatically grow and develop physically and inwardly for about 18 to 21 years. Then we stop and are on our own whereby we need to put effort into our continued development and awakeness.
We need constant stimulation, new experiences are necessary. Look how we can wake up and feel alive when we travel to new, exciting places for instance or maybe meet someone special.
It's so easy though to soon fall back into habit and routine, when time - as we know it - flies past so very quickly. Life once again becomes robotic.
What I suppose I'm saying is that perhaps we should check occasionally to make sure that we aren't simply that bundle of habits and routines acting on impulse without a second thought.
The choice is always ours. Habits can be broken or made. I remember reading how Paul McKenna suggested we should smile at least twenty times a day, even if we didn't feel like it or there is no one else about. The very act of doing so over a period can make us happier.
Life should be exciting, meaningful, a learning adventure. It's up to us to make it so, or whatever else we wish it to be. Alternatively we could simply sleep our way through our allotted years - zzzz zzzz zzzz ...
Further Reading:
Puritans Diary And The Devil Woman
How Rituals Combined With Action Can Cure Illness
The Magic Of Our Ancestors Can Bring Us Success
