‘During every moment of our lives we make choices.’
Despite most people saying they want to be financially free and live a lifestyle of choice, especially in their retirement years, few actively do anything about it.
If you consciously observe the subject matter of general banter, you will notice that basically most people live in a culture of subtle or overt complaint. Conversations suggest that most are, by and large, dissatisfied with their current life circumstances and would love to change them sooner rather than later.
Despite their desire for improvement they take minimal, if any, action to advance their lot in life. They seem happy to support the culture of complaint and seldom employ proactive behaviours for change. As a consequence, they have no strategies for obtaining the life they desire and no strategies for escaping the ‘rat race’.
Have you ever wondered why this is so?
According to Roger Walsh, Professor of Psychiatry, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of California, part of the reason for this is that, through society’s conditioning practices, most people slumber through life in a kind of trance like state in much the same way as those who are hypnotised suffer a constricted state of mind. In this trance like state their awareness and behaviours are largely limited to the suggestions of other people.
In Essential Spirituality, he suggests that people who live their lives in such a way neither recognise their state, nor their limitations, nor the fact that they are actually hypnotised by the conventions of society.
During every moment of our lives we make choices and these choices lead to certain results. Yet most choices are not consciously made and simply spring from habit. And the results of these habitual choices are ineffective in terms of an emotionally well-balanced, forward thinking, non-judgemental, entrepreneurial, happy and financially free abundant lifestyle of choice.
It is the results that people get in life which are complained about the most.
More often than not the causes are assigned to external factors such as: ‘The bloody banks, the lying politicians, the thieving tax man, the stupid umpires, the crazy drivers, the bosses who wouldn’t know how to organise things if they tried or the idiots at the weather bureau.’
In short it’s always ‘somebody else’s fault’, or ‘circumstances beyond their control’ and the trance like state continues.