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(Originally posted 30th July, 2004)

Have you ever wondered about some of those famous mysteries,things like the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs or Bigfoot? Are they real, or are they just figments of our collective imagination?

People have spent inordinate amounts of money trying to get to the bottom of these things and science is always looking for ways to explain them away rationally. But sometimes I wonder if there actually is a rational explanation and what it will mean if we actually find out what it is.

As technology develops, people are figuring out more and more about the world around us. For the most part, this is a good thing. We have better medicines, longer life spans and diseases that used to be completely fatal can now be recovered from. The Internet lets us communicate with people on the other side of the planet in real time, allowing solid friendships between people who have never even met. GPS systems let us know where we are in the world to within a few feet, meaning that people never have to be lost again.

But all this advancement does have a cost. Where is the wonder in people’s lives these days? All this science and technology has completely removed the need to even think about what lies over the next hill. There’s not much in the way of exploring to be done anymore either; just about every square inch of the planet has been mapped by satellite or aerial photography.

The thing is though, not knowing something is what has traditionally driven humans to explore and to dream new dreams. Trying to figure out what might be is actually more enjoyable than knowing what is. Exploring the possibilities of a situation with our imaginations gives us insights into other factors of our lives, and sometimes we can learn some surprising things about ourselves in the process.

I suspect that even if scientists manage to come up with explanations for nearly everything, other things will pop up to provide our imaginations with something to wonder about. UFOs are predominately a product of the twentieth century. Are they super-secret planes, or are they visitors from another planet? Even if the explanation for UFOs is found, I’m sure that something else will take its place.

After all, we’re just one small insignificant planet in an awesomely vast universe. Once we figure out how to get off this rock, there’s going to be a massive amount of exploration and explanation that needs to be done as we head out from our own solar system.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the maps that get produced have the modern equivalent of “here there be monsters!” on them.

(Originally posted 1st July, 2004)

Sometimes, as we travel through our own personal journies, life can throw some really curly things at us. Most of the time, they’re the sorts of things that can cause everything that you held near and dear to our hearts to come crashing down around our ears.

The vast majority of time, it’s a normal human reaction to freak out and bitch and moan and generally complain that life’s not fair and ask “why is this happening to me?”, right?

The thing is, what happens to us in our lives are the direct result of the choices that we make. Sometimes we make good choices and find our lives enriched in way that blows our minds. Sometimes we make some not so good choices and find that we get into trouble. But the thing is, what we get out of any experience — either good or bad — depends entirely on the choices that we make when we’re going through them.

Negative emotions like fear and anxiety aren’t meant to rule our lives. Instead, they’re actually there to wake us up and make us understand that the decisions that we’re making aren’t the right ones and that we need to change what we’re doing if we don’t want the end result to be bad.

But it’s like I said a while ago — an event, in an of itself, is neither good nor bad. Those values come entirely from the way that we interpret the event itself. It’s the way that humans are programmed by our genetic makeup. How we interpret the event is usually a subconscious decision, although sometimes it can be a conscious one.

I’m not saying that disengaging from the emotions you’re feeling in a particular situation isn’t easy. On the contrary, it’s often incredibly difficult when you’re caught in the middle of a situation that’s freaking you out. The trick is to realise that you’re freaking out and trying to understand why. As soon as you can do that, you can normally find another alternative, another way of looking at the event which may not be as bad as you first thought. Sometimes it’s a realisation that the changes the event is going to be bring are going to be better in the long term. Othertimes it may be that it’s just a sense of relief that a not so good situation is over and you’re actually free for the first time in a long time.

When a life change comes along, it’s best to not to deny or resist it. It’s here, and the sooner you can embrace it and move on, the easier your life is going to get. And really, an easy life is what we’re all after, right?

(Originally posted 28th May, 2004)

A few years ago, I received a copy of Sting’s Brand New Day CD. Like most albums, I quickly gravitated to a couple of tracks on it, and in particular, the second track, Desert Rose. As is my wont with such songs, I put it repeat on the stereo and just lay back on the lounge room floor, closed my eyes and soaked up the song’s atmosphere.

Now, those of you who are familiar with the song will know, it’s quite an atmospheric number. It didn’t take me too long before the song had my imagination picturing myself out in the desert at night, staring up at the stars with my arms flung out wide, as the “camera” just circled around and around.

That’s when one of the last lines of the song struck me as being particularly significant: it says, “the legacy of Eden haunts us all.” That one line intrigued me and got me wondering just what the legacy of Eden really is. It also brought to mind a revelation I had had several years earlier.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the story of the Garden of Eden in the Bible, and in particular the story of the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. We often hear of the “original sin” of how Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate the fruit that God had specifically forbidden them to eat.

Back in about 1995, I’d been mediating on this story for a while, looking at it not in its literal sense, but seeing if it was worthwhile examining it as a symbolic parable for the state of the human psyche. That was when I had what was for a startling revelation.

You see, if you look at the story before the serpent convinces Eve that it’s OK to eat the fruit, both Adam and Eve are blissfully happy in the Garden. If you read on a bit further after they eat the fruit, you find that’s when they develop modest and try to cover their nakedness and their imperfections.

The difference is because of the fruit itself: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Gen 2:17, emphasis mine). It’s the name of the tree that struck me as being the most significant part of the whole story. Before Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they had no knowledge or even understanding of the concepts of good and evil, but once they ate the fruit, they started to make value distinctions.

A person, when they are completely mentally, physically and spiritually relaxed, is able to roll with the punches easily and to accept whatever life throws their way without being fazed by any of it. They just adapt to the change of circumstances without worrying and just continue on without getting hung up about it. To my mind, this is pretty much indicative of what the mental state portrayed by Adam & Eve before they ate the fruit.

But as soon as you start putting labels on the experiences we have, and classifying them as either “good” or “bad”, that’s when you can start to run into trouble. You can tend to get blinded by your own beliefs, particularly when you’re in the middle of a negative experience, which can prevent you seeing any other way of looking at the situation.

The problem we all have is that the habit of evaluating everything as good or bad is so ingrained into our psyches that it may even be hardwired into the way our brains actually function. Being able to just accept everything that happens is an extraordinarily difficult thing to constantly achieve, and I think that the people who have actually managed to attain that transcendent level of though would normally be looked on as “enlightened.” While I’m not sure if it’s possible for most of us to ever achieve this in our everyday lives, it is possible to practice conscious awareness of what we’re thinking and how we can change our thoughts to change the way that we see the world.

So for me, the “legacy of Eden” isn’t so much the way the original sin is normally viewed as disobedience against god, it’s the ingrained habit we all have of evaluating everything as either good or evil.

And Sting was right; it does haunt us all.

(Originally posted 16th May, 2004)

Have you ever stopped to wonder how we remember something? Is it more than just a random connection of neurons firing in our brains, or is there something else to it? And where is all the information stored?

I find mysellf constantly amazed with some of the stuff that I can remember. Somehow, information gets stored away in such a way that I can often bring back to my consciousness almost instantly when I need it.

This fact came to my mind when I was wandering a shopping centre last week. I saw a guy I hadn’t seen in probably three or four years. He’s not a friend, but I know him from the gaming conventions I used to go to. As soon as I saw him — which literally was just in passing in the supermarket — his name leapt into my mind.

How does that happen? I started thinking about how information can be stored in such way that even when it isn’t accessed for several years, it’s still available for split second recall as soon as it’s needed.

But there’s more to it than that. Somehow, I can remeber people’s faces and even if I haven’t seenthem in many years, I can still remember their names even if they have changed physically in the intervening time.

Trivia’s another thing that I find pretty easy to remember. I have no idea how I can remember this tuff, but I do find that certain words trigger recall of bits of information that do come in handy at times.

But there’s a lot of stuff that I find very difficult to remember. Shopping lists and small mundane day-to-day stuff just doesn’t seem to stick.

Is it just a function of importance? Are the things that we can remember easily tied to the things that we put the most stock in? Sometimes people wander through their whole lives without realising what’s most important to them, never connecting the fact that the most important things to them are the ones they have the most mental connections to.

Computer Science in recent years has developed artificial neural networks, computer programs that are created in the same way that the human brain works. Each element in the program takes a number of inputs and depending onthe values coming in makes some sort of decision and sends one or more values to the output. If you string a bunch of these objects together you can get the program making some intelligent decisions all by itself.

But is that all there is to memory? I’m not so sure. It seems to me that if memory was just a function of connections between neurons then eventually all of the connections in a human brain would be filled up and you couldn’t remember anything else without forgetting something. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. People, with the right prompts, can apparently remember everything that they’ve ever encountered; it’s just a matter of doing enough digging to be able to get the information out again — the right set of inputs if you will.

We’ve all got a precious thing in our minds, so regardless of the actual mechanics of how it works, let’s tip a glass to the mysteries of the human mind and how it can manage to remember stuff for us, whenever we happen to need it.

(Originally posted 14th May, 2004)

Why is humanity so fascinated with abandoned places? Throughout history, people have been building structures and eventually abandoning them, leaving them to be swallowed up by nature, often leaving few clues about why these things were built and even fewer about why they were just left to rot.

Just about all over the world you can find examples. In the Middle East you have all of the Egyptian temples and monuments of the Ancient Egyptians. In Iraq there is the famous Rose Temple at Petra. In Pakistan, there are the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus valley. In Central and South America there are the remains of the once powerful Aztec and Inca empires, with places like Teotihuacan and Machu Picchu. Then you’ve got the castles and standing stones and the like all through Europe, or the ruins of the Native American populations in the deserts of the Southwestern USA.

Regardless of where these places are, sooner or later, someone stumbles across them and starts to wonder about life there. Excavations begin and scientists start sifting through the remains, trying to piece together what life was really like back when these places were inhabited.

Some people travel halfway round the world to visit the most famous of these places. But normally you don’t have to travel that far to come across abandoned structures. Normally, in any decent size city there are places that have been boarded up and left to rot, simply because it isn’t cost effective to keep these places open any more. Here in Brisbane, I can think of an abandoned power station and an old disused gaol.

In Canberra, around the corner from where I’ve been staying there’s what’s left of the Macquarie Hotel. When I first moved to Canberra, back in 1992, I stayed there for nearly three weeks before I found somewhere more permanent to live. Sometime in the past couple of years, the Macquarie has closed down. There’s a chain link fence all around it and nearly all the windows and window frames have been removed. Fallen leaves have started building up in the doorways now that no one is bothering to keep the place clean. As you walk past, there are noises from inside the building as though someone is in there demolishing the place; whether this is a legitimate demolition or just the work of vandals isn’t obvious.

There’s a certain sadness about the Macquarie now, something that certainly wasn’t there when I stayed there 12 years ago. Every time I go past it, I feel like jumping over the fence an exploring the empty corridors. I don’t expect to actually find anything, but there’s an ambience in an old building that’s has an attraction of its own.

Why do people give up these places and just leave them to rot away? Is it just a matter of economics, or do they fall victim to people’s desires to always have the new and exciting? Do people stop going to these places because they’ve found somewhere else to go that makes them feel better? And given that real estate is becoming so expensive in big cities these days, why is that these sites can often be left abandoned for years at a time without anyone bothering to do anything about reclaiming the site and doing something else with it?

Sometimes I wonder if these abandoned places are a metaphor for the dusty corners of our own minds. Each of us has memories and experiences that we’ve forgotten about. Sometimes it’s because those memories are too painful to look at any more and we’ve walled them up rather than dealing with them; sometimes it’s just because we’ve just moved on and simply forgotten about them. Being in one of these old building can sometimes stir up those memories, which can be useful if you need to deal with something that you’ve suppressed for a long time.

So the next time you’re out and about, keep an eye out for these little abandoned places. They’re all over the place, and most of time we don’t see them because we don’t bother to stop and look. Take the time to soak up the place’s ambience and pay attention to the feelings that being there brings up. Perhaps it could be the past speaking to you.

(Originally posted 2nd May, 2004)

Is there natural value to playing that we as adults have somehow managed to forget? Does it serve some higher function, other than just learning?

Kids seem to figure out play all by themselves. All over the world, young kids will invent games and stuff, playing with whatever they happen to have handy and go at it for hours on end. In the process, they have a lot of fun and happiness, regardless of how crappy the rest of their lives are.

But as adults, we seem to lose that childish spirit and pretty much stop playing games the way we used to when we were kids. If we do play something, it’s often some form of sport, or some other board game that often limits the imagination by having a defined set of rules that has to be followed. More and more these days, people are turning to things like video games, which while they are fun to play, don’t force us to use our imaginations at all.

Kids don’t seem to need to worry about that sort of thing. They’re happy to run around, playing soldiers or cowboys and indians or whatever happens to take their fancy at the time. If they have toy cars, they’ll build elaborate roads and drive the cars around for ages, often with nothing more important than just driving around.

What purpose do these sorts of childish games serve? I think it’s got something to do with developing and using our imaginations. Kids find that creativity comes naturally to them. They’ll build stuff out of whatever happens to be around, or they’ll invent elaborate stories for their games and everything that goes along with that.

Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, talks about his own experiences with play in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He writes:

As soon as I was through eating, I began playing, and continued to do so until the patients arrived; and if I was finished with my work early enough in the evening, I went back to building. In the course of this activity my thoughts clarified, and I was able to grasp the fantasies whose presence in myself I dimly felt.

Naturally, I thought about the significance of what I was doing, and asked myself, “Now, really, what are you about? You are building a small town, and doing it as if it were a rite!” I had no answer to my question, only the inner certainty that I was on the way to discovering my own myth. For the building game was only a beginning. It released a stream of fantasies which I later carefully wrote down.

This sort of thing has been consistent with me, and at any time in my later life when I came up against a blank wall I painted a picture or hewed stone. Each such experience proved to be a rite d’entrée for the ideas and works that followed hard upon it.

I think what Old Carl here is saying is that the value of play is that it seems to unleash something within our own minds that helps us in our day-to-day existence. It may be that it just fires up our own creativity and helps us be more open to different ways of thinking about things. As adults, we stop doing such things and find our minds closed to new ideas and our creativities hampered by rigid thinking and habits, which is usually to our detriment.

So maybe we should all take some time and do what Jung did: get out and start having fun the way we did when we were kids. Throw away the rules and start inventing stuff again, simply for the sheer joy of it. If nothing else, it might help you relax.

(Originally posted 30th April, 2004)

Truth is a funny thing. It’s something that a lot of people can get quite bent out of shape over because they believe that they have to defend the “truth”, sometimes to the death. The thing is though, “truth” is a completely relative concept. Whether or not something is true depends entirely on how you look at something.

To give you an example, let’s take the rain. Some people would say that rain is good. It provides the plants with moisture that encourages them to grow. It also allows people to have water to drink they have a way of collecting it. So, you could say that “rain is good” is a true statement.

But what happens when it rains torrentially for days on end and the everything is flooded: buildings are destroyed, roads and other infrastructure are ruined, lives are lost. Is rain still good? Most people would argue that, no, this sort of rain isn’t that crash hot.

Now, even though this was a particularly inane example, I’m hoping that it shows that the truth of a given statement is only valid when it’s taken in comparison to something else. If you look at something in an entirely different way, it might not be true any more.

That’s what this principle is all about. If you want to determine if something is true or not, you need to figure out how effective it is in comparison to your frame of reference. If it answers your hypothesis successfully, then you could say it was true. If it doesn’t then you could say that it was false.

But even “true” and “false” are relative terms. For the past couple of thousand years, mankind has laboured under the belief that things are either true or false. It has to be one or the other and it can’t be both. But this in itself isn’t a particularly effective position to take, because there are a whole range of situations where something is partly true and partly false at the same time, when it’s measured in a particular way.

Aristotelian logic calls these things “paradoxes” and they tend to break systems based on bivalent logic. But in recent years, there is a new field emerging in computer science — the traditional bastion of bivalent logic — fuzzy logic.

Fuzzy logic says that something can be both true and false at the same time (when compared to a particular premise) and it’s the degree of truth that’s what’s important, not whether it’s true or not. Fuzzy logic systems have been able to achieve amazing things that until now have been impossible with traditional programming techniques. Fuzzy logic has been most widely accepted in Asian countries where it is closer to traditional Buddhist and Taoist modes of thinking.

This brings us back to the corollary to the first principle: that all systems are arbitrary. In order for you to measure the truth of something, you need to have some sort of a system or frame of reference to measure it against. But the choice of a measurement system is basically an arbitrary decision at the end of the day. If you arbitrarily choose a completely different frame of reference, then something that was true before might not be so true any more.

This is a bit of a tough concept to come to grips with, because it implies that there is no one Universal Truth. As soon as you define a frame of reference, you’re automatically limiting your scope to make something false.

What it does mean is that if something isn’t working for you, then it’s usually a sign that perhaps your frame of reference isn’t being particularly effective at the moment and you might be better served by looking at the situation from another angle. By being flexible and choosing the most appropriate frame of reference in different situations can make your life a whole lot easier.

There are good and bad aspects to everything, regardless of what it is. Change your viewpoint and you change what is and isn’t true.

(Originally posted 29th April, 2004)

A lot of traditions — particularly the New Age ones — have the idea that there is an energy that flows through us all and it can be used to achieve all sorts of things. Some people might call it magic; others might call it the Hand of God.

The principle of Mana is closely related to the first and third principles. If the world is what we think it is and energy flows where attention goes, then Mana is the energy that helps to create the world that we see.

I don’t think that it’s worth arguing that mana is a measurable energy force like electricity or heat. It may just a case that we haven’t actually developed an instrument that you can measure it with yet.

I find it much more useful to think of mana as faith or confidence in something. People who have a lot of faith in their own abilities are able to achieve wonderful things. If someone else is lacking in self-confidence, they will tend to give up before they achieve whatever it was they set out to do.

If you’ve ever met someone who has a lot of passion for something, you can usually sense the energy that they have. They seem to be almost radiate power and confidence, and it’s often infectious. Anthony Robbins is a good example. So is Adolf Hitler, who was a master orator and who’s energy could whip a crowd into a frenzy, albeit with a very negative focus.

This is what I think Serge means when he says that all power comes from within. Faith comes from a revelation that something is possible and the more you believe that, the easier it is to achieve something. It’s faith that sustains you when things aren’t going the way that you want them to.

Faith is not something that can be given; it must come from inside you. Other people might say or do something that triggers that initial realisation that you might be able to do something, but in the end, it’s still all up to you.

What often happens though is that people choose to believe what other people tell them. To the individual, it makes more sense to trust someone else than it does to trust their own intuition and instinct. When this happens, you’re handing the power to someone else, particularly if the influence is negative. One of the meanings of the Hawaiian word “mana” is, after all, authority.

It’s also important to realise that when more that one person believes something — particularly if they all believe it passionately — then it’s even more likely that the goal is going to happen. Look at the Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s. JFK promised the American people that an American would walk on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Enough people believed that message and got to working together and in July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin achieved that goal.

So how do you get this confidence and energy? Simple: through choosing to have it. The more you can convince yourself that something is possible, the more likely it is that that thing will eventually come to pass. Your subconscious mind will eventually put all of the right pieces together in the right order to allow you to do something.

Of course, you’re going to run into a whole bunch of other beliefs that are going to make it harder to keep your focus on your goal. Some of those beliefs come from other people who can’t accept that you’re actually going to achieve what you’re setting out to achieve. Some of the limitations are going to come from within your own subconscious mind, as you start to run into your limiting beliefs that have held you back in the past.

The first problem is easier to overcome; be careful who you choose to share your vision with. By listening to the wrong people at the wrong time, you can often strangle your faith before it’s had a chance to take root properly. Overcoming your own doubts and negative self beliefs is a lot harder, and that’s when it’s good to have someone else who is on your side who is willing to offer support and encouragement when you need it the most.

(Originally posted 28th April, 2004)

Love is a funny word in the English language. Over the years, it’s been used and abused and people using it in the wrong context has hugely diluted its meaning. These days, people talk about loving someone, loving sport, loving a good book (or sometimes even things like a good fight). Basically, what they call love is the good feelings that something fosters within them.

To the Hawaiians, love is far more specific concept, that they sum up with one word: Aloha. Most people thing that Aloha is just a greeting people use in Hawaii, but it’s much more than that. It’s a concept of complete acceptance and the sharing of joy with someone or something.

If you accept someone without judging them at all, then you find that you naturally drop into a state of joy. Sure, there might be things about that person or thing that could normally tick you off, but if you understand that those things are just where that they are at right now, you don’t tend to get bent out of shape.

This acceptance brings about a deep connection with the other person. The more you appreciate the good things in them, the more you will appreciate having them around. On the other hand, if you constantly criticise them, or worry what they think about you, then you focus on the negative aspects and you withdraw from them, decreasing your connection with them. In a relationship, this can be so poisonous that it causes the relationship to collapse.

Unfortunately, this sort of acceptance isn’t something that’s taught much anymore. Instead, people seem to focus on the negative aspects of other people, probably as part of a subconscious defence mechanism. This means that very few of our relationships have any real depth to them.

As fear goes away in a relationship, people tend to open up more to one another, an sharing things that they wouldn’t normally trust other people with. If the people involved truly accept one another, this can be a truly liberating thing, as old pain can be brought out into the open and released, bringing everyone involved even closer together still.

Totally accepting where someone or something is at right doesn’t mean that things have to stay the way they are though. Not everything is in a perfect condition – you only really have to watch the news to realise that. But before you can change something for the better, you have to acknowledge the place where that thing is now, so that you can determine the best course of action to take. Trying to pretend that something is different from the way it really is only causes confusion and pain, because you resist the truth.

It’s the same with people and relationships. If you want to improve your relationship with someone, you have to accept the condition of the relationship as it is now. Once you do that, ways to actually improve the relationship will normally become obvious. If you then start taking action on those things, you’re reinforcing the good in it, which increases your sense of connection and things will get better and your feelings of love will increase by themselves.

Criticism in itself can be a destructive thing. Because criticising something decreases your connection with it, it also closes down your own mind to the good that is in it. What happens on the subconscious level is that you start to tense up whenever you encounter something like that, which your mind starts to think of as pain. People naturally pull away from painful situations, so you immediately start to focus on the negative and you just head into an ever-tightening death spiral.

If, on the other hand, you look for the good in something, your mind connects that thing with pleasure and will relax and start to generate all the good chemicals that it needs to create sense of wellbeing.

This is important to realise, because your subconscious mind doesn’t realise the difference between criticising yourself and criticising someone or something else. It just takes everything personally. The more time you spend looking for the negative in things, the more depressed and upset you will become, quite often for no apparent reason. On the other hand, if you praise something, your body takes that personally as well and beings to relax and feel better.

All of this is true for our relationships with ourselves as well. The more we criticise ourselves, the more depressed we will come. This can be a real problem because there’s no way to get away from yourself, which means the source of pain is going to be with you 24/7. But if you can start to accept where you are at now and look for the positives in your current situation, then life will start to get much better, all by itself.

(Originally posted 27th April, 2004)

Very few of us live our lives in the current moment. Most of us a constantly dwelling on mistakes that we have made in the past, or worrying about what’s going to happen in the future. Because of this, we forget to look for the opportunities that come along that will take us to whatever it is in life that we are aiming for.

The problem with dwelling on something that isn’t right here and now is that it takes away our power. We tend to become fixated on something else and because of their first and third principles, will bring whatever it is we are dwelling on into being.

The thing is though, if you stop and actually take stock of where you are right now, it’s usually never as bad as you happen to think it is. But even if it is that bad, you’re at least aware of the situation as it really is. Once you understand that, you can start to take steps that will lead you to a better place,

That’s what the fourth principle is all about. If you live in the moment and you’re aware of what’s going on both inside and outside you at any given moment, you can make decisions that are going to lead you to whatever it is that you are trying to achieve.

There is a lot of power in making a decision and then following through on it. It builds confidence and faith, two things that are essential to changing the world as you perceive it. Your world isn’t going to change by itself and a fairy godmother isn’t going to wave a magic wand and everything’s going to be different.

Although the decision to do something is powerful in itself, the real power comes from following that decision up in the current moment by taking some form of action.

The strange thing that Serge Kahili King points out in one of his corollaries is that everything is relative. What is “now”? Basically, if you accept the first principle, “now” is whatever you happen to define it as. It might be only a fraction of second. It may be a minute, or a day, or the current week or the current month. For some people, it might even by the whole of their current lifetime. The thing is, the longer the period you define as “now”, the greater your focus is going to have to be. Most people have the attention span of a goldfish with ADD, so trying to deal with too big a span is going to render them powerless.

The key to using this principle is to realise that you need to have focus on what you’re doing. You need to pay attention to what your senses are telling you. You also need to start picking up on some of the more subtle things that your intuition and subconscious mind are picking up on, and to be able to act on that information at the appropriate time with the right amount of faith and confidence.