Ep. 2: Helpful Ideas that Make the Experience of Life Better
What are you willing to throw your life away on? With Andrew Reed and The Liberation. It's a serious question, one worth pondering. Am I living the life I want, an intelligent life, or something else? How can I have a better experience of life?
Speaker 1:These are some of the questions explored in this series of messages without the brag in the advertisement. Getting beyond even human institutions and society into the wilderness, nature, the reality of how life actually operates on this planet. These messages range from intimate recordings from the awakened forest to concerts, national conferences, and broadcasts on a wide array of philosophical topics.
Speaker 2:Here we are at the game house in the Awakened Forest. It's another brilliant day. And, again, as I think about it, this is the type of message that helped me in my journey. And I figured if it helped me, it may help you as well. I'd like to basically give what I call my best advice for people, and there's a number of points that can be helpful in your respective journey.
Speaker 2:The first is relax as life is a process. Everything is nature. Here I am sitting, again, in the wilderness surrounded by 13,000 acres. And I've been doing this for twenty some years. And you go back to episode one, and you'll hear a little bit about that story or my story.
Speaker 2:But all is natural in my world, even anything that we would make as as humans. We come from this earth. Right? I mean, we weren't just dropped here. And so life is a process.
Speaker 2:We notice that everything is changing all the time, and there's nothing we can do about it. All is in flux. All is in movement. And so one of the things we can do is rather than have anxiety about that or continual anxiety, it's not wrong to have anxiety from time to time. That's normal.
Speaker 2:Even a bird or a deer is startled from time to time. But recognize that this movement, this change is happening, accept it, and relax. You're gonna have ups and downs in life. There's gonna be this oscillation of up and down. That is life.
Speaker 2:That is pulsation. So just relax. And I think of my two children that passed away in tragic sudden accidents. My son drowned late at night in a storm, rainstorm. My daughter passed away being rear ended late at night in a rainstorm.
Speaker 2:And both, I suspect, were in states of mind that were filled with anxiety and worry. They were not in great states of mind. So I think one of the first things is just relax. Slow down life. There's no point in just rushing through life and not tasting your food or not feeling what it is like to have the sunshine hit your skin when you're taking a walk or taking in that fresh air of the morning just like I am today.
Speaker 2:Relax. Slow life down. There's no point in rushing through life, as my uncle Earl used to say, that great Alaskan. Next, cultivate a positive attitude. Attitude is one of those almost miracle type things that I I think doesn't get enough attention because attitude will change your life.
Speaker 2:You know, some silly people talk about thought control and and taking over your thoughts and all that. That's all an illusion. Illusion. I mean, nobody can just shut down their their minds from thinking. Why?
Speaker 2:We are thinking beings. It is what a human being does. We think. We wanna work things out. We have this brain that's a problem solving machine.
Speaker 2:It that's what it does. It it tries to work out the most efficient ways of of doing things. And there's no getting around that. Or, you know, it tries to go to benefit again, away from pain towards some benefit. And so if we can't control our thoughts, what can we control?
Speaker 2:Our attitude. Our attitude towards things. So when we start to cultivate with our will, which is at least half of the equation in life, and we say, you know, I'm going to have a better attitude about my job. I'm gonna have a better attitude about this relationship. I'm gonna have a better attitude about whatever, my illness, especially negative things.
Speaker 2:Suddenly this starts to trigger what? Better thoughts. What happens to those thoughts that we start to dwell on? They become, I'll say, a thought habit or a belief, and we tend to act upon our beliefs. And so if we have better beliefs, they turn into better actions.
Speaker 2:And what do better actions do? They cause, obviously, better results, and we get what? Better life. But it starts with the cultivation of a more positive attitude. So I think one aspect of being successful or attaining things or whatever, have a great attitude.
Speaker 2:Nobody wants to work around somebody with a crappy attitude, especially in society or in the human domain. Heck, I suspect that the trees and rocks that I pass by here in the forest appreciate a good attitude as well because I feel they're alive as well. It's just a different type of consciousness. Then I would say, real after relax, cultivate a positive attitude is make good decisions. If you make good decisions, it equates to you have a better life.
Speaker 2:Good decisions equals good life. And this is a little bit of the cause and effect paradigm that we do this and we get, you know, x result be because of that. Not that that explains all of life. If everything was just cause and effect, basically, a new Tony and paradigm, it would just all be dominoes or billiard balls as some people say. And, basically, there would be no accountability because we could just blame everything we are today on the past and say, well, you know, I'm an alcoholic because, you know, my parents beat me or, you know, they locked me in my room one time or whatever.
Speaker 2:Or, you know, of course, I'm this way because this and this and this happens. And and so it'd always be this world of blame and excused. And and we know that that leads to victimhood, which is really again, it's a it's something that holds people back. As long as people are crying in their beer and feeling sorry for themselves, they're not making much advancement. And I'm not demonizing it.
Speaker 2:There's a place. There's a time to cry on your beer. I mean, when I've had huge losses in my life, catastrophic losses, yeah, there's a time to grieve. There's a time to, you know, completely get undone. But then there's a point where, you know, this isn't really serving much purpose.
Speaker 2:I'm not feeling that good about where my life is now or where the trajectory is going. I'm going to do something about it. And so this introduces the other half of the equation, if you want to simplify it, is the human will or drive. So you have the cause and effect aspect, which is true, And then you have another truth of there's an aspect of human will where if I say, hey, I want to grab this cup of tea and drink it and magically my arm moves and I get it and I get to taste it. That's an act of the will.
Speaker 2:And so I'll see say in the balancing of the equation, it's almost yin and yang that there's almost a dualism or a multi ism that I suspect is more the truth, but we can get our heads around two variables that we have a bothness or two things happening at the same time, cause and effect, which we call, again, the external world or or or whatever, and then the product of the human will balancing that out. And there's also some scientific backup behind that, but we won't get into that today. Another thing that we can do to have a better life again is to study happiness. This is a topic I I think there's a lot of confusion about. What is happiness?
Speaker 2:Well, happiness is obviously an inner state, a state of consciousness, a self assessed state. And I think a lot of the confusion comes from thinking that happiness is fun. And what I'm talking about really is a deep satisfaction. For example, you go to the carnival or fair or whatever, and you take the ride, and it's exciting and all this. And and, yeah, you're happy in that moment.
Speaker 2:But then when the ride's over, it's like, oh, you know, I'm I'm I'm back to whatever. You know, my boyfriend just broke up with me or whatever. Girlfriend, whatever. Whereas if you, quote, you know, sacrifice or put effort, time into, let's say, getting a degree or an advanced degree or learning how to play an instrument or attain some skill, There's this pain element or discipline where you're having to forego doing other things to focus on this singular thing. And when that's attained or that's completed, there's this deep level of satisfaction, this contentment that arises from accomplishment.
Speaker 2:And I think that's more of the happiness that a lot of us are seeking. So it's a strange thing that so much of our true happiness, our true contentment comes through the valley of pain or loss or sacrifice. And even I'll just say this. Knowing you're happy, you know, being happy and knowing it is a strange thing, but those are the happiest people. And I'll just say this.
Speaker 2:And again, I'm sitting in nature here as this is so much of my life. It informs me about everything, at least how I suspect life should be lived, is that perhaps we're all happy all the time and just don't know it. Oh, Andrew, that's scandalous. How can that be? You know, we look up at the sky and we see that it's blue sometimes.
Speaker 2:But then sometimes there's clouds in the way, but then the clouds move away. The blue is always there. So I'm suggesting and I'm not saying that analogy is perfect or anything like that, is that perhaps we're always happy. And in that we're in this journey of life with its ups and downs, its heartaches, its struggles, its joys, its victories, all that. And that is life and accepting those ups and downs, accepting when the wind blows and saying wow you know that's great that's part of it part of being happy is that again that that pain part and being okay with it, that not all things are gonna go exactly the way you wanted.
Speaker 2:And if they did, let's say everything happened exactly according to your dictates. Everything happened as planned. You would hate that life after a while. After a while, you want some surprise. You want something different.
Speaker 2:I mean, do you want to eat your favorite meatloaf every day? No. It's like, no. Let's do spaghetti. Let's do whatever food variety.
Speaker 2:But we don't want the same thing all the time. None of us would. So study happiness. What is it? Who are the happiest people in this world?
Speaker 2:You know, places like Okinawa. You know, I think Denmark has another high happiness equation. But who are the happiest people, and what are they doing? Another point that merits some consideration in this best advice or possible best advice is discover what you're really interested in. And here, there's no straight line to what your interests are.
Speaker 2:I find that they change all the time. I have all these collections. I mean, I just collect things from I mean, golf clubs if I'm into golf, guitars, properties. I mean, I I buy things. And I I really like old things, games, toys, all kinds of, of course, outdoor things, knives, collections of these things.
Speaker 2:And I'm not interested in all of them at the same time. I mean, they're they're phases. So again, this change of life is just it just happens. And so your interests will change over time. But, again, whatever you're interested in, throw yourself into that, like, 100% learn everything about it.
Speaker 2:If if you're doing the golf thing, learn everything about golf. If it's shooting or whatever, you learn everything about how to do that. If it's playing guitar, you learn everything about that instrument, how it works. And, again, that's great advice. And as I've said in different messages, it's been found that people who will take five years and learn everything, just throw themselves morning and night into studying that topic, they will find themselves in the in the top 5% in that field.
Speaker 2:So that's a very short period of time. And usually there's great economics that follow that. Another point is the value of focus. Focus is key to success. Now it can be languaged as self regulation, self control, discipline.
Speaker 2:It could be even languished as love. But to be good at anything involves really developing just intense focus where, basically, you take your consciousness and and, like, a laser beam, direct it towards some topic or an object to the exclusion of all the other stimulus that are happening in your environment. That pretty much assures success. And you think about it. We live in a world that is the antithesis of focus.
Speaker 2:We have cell phones that there's pop up messages. There's texts. There's phone calls. There's emails. All these things that disrupt us from having this this intense focus that guarantees success.
Speaker 2:And so it's one of the the benefits of of the wilderness experience, you know, where you isolate. And this has, of course, been a trademark of myself for years. I had to retreat back to the wilderness at different times just to different of the losses and things that have caused different breakdowns, which is, again, is a strange combination of emotions with the loss of, you know, my loved ones and work over occupation, you know, whatever. But the retreat into the wilderness setting is is is like medicine. It, again, it forms us it informs us of the truth of how life operates on this planet.
Speaker 2:It calms us and gets us away from society so that, you know, we're just face to face with the truth and we look at things and we have those gaps where we just see the brilliance of life. Right now, I'm looking at this tiny little salamander just coming across a branch. And the fact that I even notice it and go, man, that is brilliant. This guy is, like, perfectly colored for it and and all this. But the wilderness just lets us know there's this all these different worlds and creatures and all this stuff.
Speaker 2:And so our our focus goes to a a a different place where maybe we can realign. And you think about the wilderness. I know we're talking about focus here. And this may be again, some some people may say, well, you're talking about focus and then you're going out in the wilderness and going in a completely different direction. Yeah.
Speaker 2:To gain focus. On what? Your central desire or the things that you want to accomplish in your life to get clear. And a lot of times, those flashes of brilliance or whatever are gonna happen in very odd times, times that you don't suspect that you're gonna have an illumination about your life. And once you get that focus, that vision, boy, you can have a lot of things that are not working very well in your life.
Speaker 2:You can be addicted to drugs. You can be in bad relationship, in a bad job, whatever, and that vision will carry you out. But all that is wrapped up in focus. And the other thing about, I'll say isolation, you think about all kinds of shamans and holy men and what have you, holy people maybe I should say, that go off into the wilderness for this very thing. Another point that I'd to mention is this is to create a written list to help you keep focused.
Speaker 2:The power of in Six Sigma, we would call it visual control. In the multi view world, we would call it the IRM, an image recall mechanism. But I find this by having a written list that helps to keep you organized, you look at it, you reprioritize almost every day because that list can change. But having something that can keep you on track because you're gonna have all kinds of distracting personalities and events and communications and whatever that are happening. And all those things will what?
Speaker 2:Will dissipate your focus. So that written list is key. And you'll find that as one of the things that some of the most successful people have used. And I will say this, I wouldn't keep it on my phone because here's your antithesis of focus, again, because of the the text, the notifications, the emails, the phone calls, or whatever. And so you wanna stay away from that.
Speaker 2:And that written hardcore list on a clipboard is what I use. Works really well or a yellow pad. The next point, develop your communication skills. You can only advance as far as you can effectively communicate, especially in any group enterprise. For example, you'll find that CEOs and your top leaders are usually the best communicators.
Speaker 2:And to me, this communication is more than even verbal. You know? It's how you dress, how you present body language, all these types of things, your tone, mannerisms, your polish, your sophistication, all those things. Obviously, all also written. And I find that when you start to develop your writing skills, usually your language follows that.
Speaker 2:So developing these communication skills. And let me just focus this a little bit more. These communication skills, of course, are are needed in society, that is among other human beings, and has to do with teaching, selling, empowerment, as we say at MultiView. Because almost everything in life you know, the world is transactional. You take a look at the natural world.
Speaker 2:It's a completely transactional world, a meritocracy. And so in society, you know, we've got to convince other people of our ideas, of the direction that we're going. Like to look at the idea of selling as teaching or empowerment because really that's what you're doing. You're communicating the value of whatever and human beings are what gonna go in the direction of benefit. They're gonna go away from pain and discomfort or frustration.
Speaker 2:And so the more effectively that we can communicate that value, the better. The more we're gonna have people rally behind, you know, what we're doing or what we're selling or whatever our place really in society is. Another point I'd like to mention is to develop your organizational and prioritization skills. We've already mentioned having a written list, this tangible thing that you can see and reference preferably on a clipboard. But your ability to organize things.
Speaker 2:If people are disorganized, it is not an efficient way of doing things. Helene, Hurricane Helene, of course, wiped out this mountain. I mean, for the last five months, I've been strapping on my backpack and boots, and and we've been having to go across the river on foot because there's no other way off the mountain. And so we've been living fairly primitively. And one of the things I found out right after everything was devastated here is I had this, of course, great stockpile of things I prepped, you know, medical supplies, everything that people would need.
Speaker 2:And I, of course, you know, knowing me, I always had an abundance of this. And so I would go around and check on my neighbors to make sure that they were okay. And, you know, people, of course, were being injured in accidents, chainsaw things or rashes or whatever from poisonous plants or whatever as we're trying to kinda dig our way out. And when I'd go down into my store area, my prep room, I couldn't find something I knew I had. And so I'd be ripping the whole place apart looking for whatever medicine or bandages or whatever I had.
Speaker 2:And it's like, boy, this needs to be organized. So you go down there now, the burn kit isn't a specific spot. The the trauma kit, everything's organized for really maximum efficiency because in the time that it would take for me to find one of these things, someone could die, right? So efficiency or organization is a big thing. And whenever you look at an organization, which has the word right in it, that's what it is.
Speaker 2:How is this thing put together? How is it organized? And the world is, of course, perfectly organized. But the more that you know where things are, the better you are. Now with that, the skill of prioritization I throw in here too, because that really has to do with the ability to distinguish higher value items from lower value items.
Speaker 2:Okay? So, you know, to keep your big things kind of on top or somewhere around the top of your list and then your lower value things towards the bottom. Now with that said, sometimes there's things that are not high value, but you can accomplish them quick. Okay. They might be at the top and that kind of builds an emotional feeling of progress.
Speaker 2:And so or what I might call a quick kill, you know, check that off and it always feels good to take that red marker and mark through it. But you always wanna have your what are the things that are going to benefit yourself, your organization the most? What is the the highest thing that you could achieve on this day? And have that towards the top of your list. Now I'd like to throw out a idea that's probably a little bit scandalous or controversial, and that's to see that the nature of the universe or the underlining energy of the universe is that of entertainment or excitement.
Speaker 2:As I've said before, we live in this world of infinite color and variety. Again, no two snowflakes alike. No two particles of dust alike. And why is this? Well, nature must like variety.
Speaker 2:And this variety, what, produces entertainment. I suspect that one of the major problems in the world is that of boredom, that, you know, things can be going along. We can be in paradise or what we perceive as paradise. And then we're looking around and seeing what pickle we can get ourselves in. Oh, that looks great.
Speaker 2:So we take the relationship risk or the business risk or whatever or, you know, we want more. And that causes some great excitement. So this idea that the foundational energy of the universe is that of excitement and entertainment, to me explains a lot. It explains why the stars twinkle. It explains why there's a thrill right before the tiger eats you.
Speaker 2:It explains why we watch the news and go, oh my god. That's, you know, that's bad or whatever. And why we would tune off the happy news network because it's so boring. It's just like positive every day and whatever. After a while it's like, no.
Speaker 2:I wanna see the dark side of the mountain too. And and you think about this, this this dualism, this light and dark. And this creates what? Movement. Excitement.
Speaker 2:We're moving what? From pain towards gain. Well, that's exciting. That's a journey. So we're in the wilderness, you know, going through nature, the desert, you know, whatever wilderness we're in, you know, and and we're looking for the oasis.
Speaker 2:You know? And so after all the struggle, we finally get to the oasis, and we're having our Mai Tais and Bloody Marys and whatever. And after a while of sitting next to the pond under the under the palm tree, we go, this is kinda boring. I think there's another oasis over here, and we need to go through the desert, the wilderness to get there, and that's exciting. I think we all want movement.
Speaker 2:And at some level, even though some people say, I don't want change or they're resistant to change, they all want change. They all would like to have a better life. They'd all like to have more, more life. And I think this is a great motivational thing. Another point, and we're getting down the last couple here, is to learn how to sell or market.
Speaker 2:This is great advice for people because, again, we live in a transactional world, a transactional universe, in fact, where there's always a give and take because everybody's always going somewhere. So we look at this and go, In society, learning how to sell things is great. And what do we know? Marketing people or people that have the ability to sell make the most. I mean, your marketers make more than CEOs because that's what that's about.
Speaker 2:So that ability to communicate, to learn how to teach or how to show people value as a great benefit, a great asset for a person to have in their life. And then the last point in this message of really helpful advice is to evolve what I'll call a reconciled mind, a mind that values both the positive and the negative. And this is really a central theme through all of my thinking. And to me, the more and more I sit in nature, I see this as more and more the truth or become more convinced of it. I mean, here I am.
Speaker 2:I'm sitting. I have two hemispheres of my brain. I have a right brain, which is goofy, you know, spatial in nature. I have a left side, which is concrete numbers. And they operate very differently.
Speaker 2:I know that the mountain that we have, the studios and the executive conference center has a light side. It also has a shadow side or a dark side. I know that we have a male female. I know we have Republicans and we have Democrats. We have blue hats, we have red hats.
Speaker 2:We have day. We have night. This dualism seems to be everywhere and almost in all things. And to me, it seems like the frustrated people of this world, and of course, I've been bad and still am sometimes, are the people that just want the half life or have a halfness mentality where they only want the sweet. They only want the light side.
Speaker 2:They only want the happy. And they fail to recognize the value in the manure, in the dark side, in the pain. Just like when we talked about happiness, the road to true satisfaction and contentment often comes from some type of sacrifice, some type of pain to create a more lasting fulfillment. That's a reconciled mind or approach. So that's something that I contemplate a great deal.
Speaker 2:Right now, I'm building a church on the property. And we're calling it the church of the reconciliation, where you're bringing together both sides of life, not favoring either one, and saying, This is the way it is, and accepting that. And again, I find that when we accept the dark side of life, the illness in our life, the injury in our life, the loss, We know that it's a phase, and it doesn't last forever. And there is something that's going to be produced by it. And, normally, with a good attitude, that will end up being a good thing.
Speaker 2:But a lot of times, you have to almost hit rock bottom before you kinda get the memo that, hey. Maybe I better think about this different or maybe I better change my approach. So the reconciled mind and those that are biblical, I mean, you can take a look at Isaiah 45 verse seven or point seven as I'll say sometimes, that I am the Lord God. I created both the light and the dark, the good and the evil. Oh my god.
Speaker 2:So there's our author of the way it is. So there's no escape that both of these exist. And I'll just say this. We we think in terms of bothness. And I I I think that people that seek, for example, the one-sidedness of life, they want simpleton, single explanations to questions, which we all know or should probably hold suspect if we're intelligent and think about this, is that single explanations or singular explanations are incomplete at best as there are millions of things going on beyond our consciousness that we're not aware of, that every single action has all kinds of different outcomes, and that the answers to our questions are often multi or at minimum both.
Speaker 2:There's the cause and effect aspect, and the other 50% or approximately 50% is the will. So it's not just one thing. And I think that helps us have a better experience of life. So there are some things to consider, and I hope that they're helpful. From a place of love and appreciation for all expressions of life, thank you for listening.
Speaker 2:This is Andrew.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening. If you need anything further, just go to MBI.life.