I was talking with a friend about motivation, competence, and Zen focus. We were comparing these actions in modern times to more primitive years, when if you did not work smart, hard, and strong, you did not survive. My contention is that man seeks to satisfy his desires by the amount of least exertion, and that we are just naked apes in a space age world. His contention was that the lack of motivation and competence was just based on being spoiled and stupidity. We might both be right or wrong. Then we saw this entertaining video. What do you think? https://youtu.be/IJMu0JZF7s8

My exceptional friend Richard Mavrovich sent me an email with the subject line, “The difference.” The message was an image of two panels shaped like the dashboard of a jet fighter. One-labeled WOMAN was covered with knobs, buttons, diodes, switches, and dials, complex, and almost unfathomable. The MEN box had but a single switch, labeled on and off. The “message” certainly makes men look simpler than women. Perhaps it is true, since most women associate sex with family, children, new life and new relationships, whereas men associate sex with life itself. For a man, being with a woman and making love, with all its intensity and intimacy, is a way of affirming a primal instinct of procreation and refuting death.

Do not make culmination type choices when you are too young, too inexperienced in life’s variables or too unsophisticated to understand all the permutations, because they can set the course of your life in a troubled direction. Especially, in the choice of relationships. Shop around.

Satoru

Everyone wants more money to have more disposable income to spend on goods and services to make them happier, making consuming the definition of progress. But we have excluded values such as leisure time, volunteer work, clean air, low crime and longer healthier lives into the calculations of more and happier. We have also turned the planets resources  into things we can consume, whether renewable or not. The real world has art, truth, wonders to satiate both the sophisticated and gross, beauty, and love, that should be enough. But everyone wants more. We only have to open our eyes to see that we already have everything we need. The world has too many unawares, all demanding exotic baubles and using too much of society’s energy to satisfy frivolous cravings, upsetting the exquisitely delicate balance between ecology and society.

Taste the Now, smell the infinite, feel the smooth skin, hear the silence and the music of the wind, develop a Technicolor mind, be blinded by the rainbows and see forever.

Satoru

Nations, companies, corporations, cooperatives, businesses, and most of all, people, do not appreciate what they have. So, the thrust is always, more, better, enhance, give me, get me, buy me, do me, more. If one can stop, and appreciate what we have, relax, and just try to modify what we possess to improve our lives, fine. But no. We totally wreck it, to the point that we jeopardize what we have. When we lose what we had gained after working so hard, we enter a life of regret. But it is too late to learn, it is done, over, finished. The lesson is that we have to be somewhat content with what we have, achieved, value, and possess. We can strive to obtain more, in a multiplicity of variables, but beware of extending your desires to demanding what is too difficult, unreasonable, untimely, and without thought of others, and the ultimate consequences.

Satoru

The more successful you are the easier it is to lead. If you have success you can afford better advisors, food, health care, and most of all you have more energy. Seek out an older successful person and ask their advice. Consider the information they give you with a view toward change and having a vision. Stop everything and listen to the quiet to have contact with your intuition and creative thoughts. Forget about multitasking and focus on doing one thing with quality and excellence. Life is action, but do not confuse activity with progress.

Satoru