Tuesday, April 22, 2008

The most important knowledge is self-knowledge.


Knowing what's important to us requires good, honest introspection. Changes in self-awareness lead to changes in behavior followed by important improvements in time management and work-life balance.

Zone in on your passion by knowing your life signature.

Itdoesn't matter what you have your sights set on...but they must be seton something. Hopefully, you have decided that just getting the jobdone and earning a paycheck is not enough. If you don't know where you want to go, it's unlikely you'll succeed in your career and life. If your goal is vague, seek specificity.

Lifeis not a dress rehearsal. It is the actual performance and you deserveto live your life by utilizing the best of your intentions andabilities.

The Source of Human Emotions

Becausehuman beings remember with neurons (the cells of nerve tissue), we aredisposed to see more of what we have already seen, hear anew what wehave heard most often, think just what we have always thought.

Withinthe brain, every mental activity consists of neutrons (electricallyneutral subatomic particles) firing in a certain sequence. An"Attractor" is an association of ingrained links that can overwhelmweaker information patterns. If incoming sensory data provoke a quorumof the Attractor's units, they will trigger their teammates, who flareto brilliant life.

An Attract or can overpower other units so thoroughly that the network registers chiefly the incandescence of the Attractor, even though the fading,firefly traces of another pattern initially glimmered there. A network then registers strikingly new sensory information as if it conformed to past experience. In much the same way, our sun's blinding glare was the countless dimmer stars from the midday sky.

The limbic brain(i.e. the emotional brain) contains its emotional Attractors, encode dearly in life. Primal bias then forms an integral part of the neural systems that
view the emotional world and conduct relationships.If the early experience of a limbic network exemplifies healthyemotional interaction, its Attractors will serve as reliable guides tothe world of workable relationships.

No individual can think his way around his own Attractors, since they are embedded in the structure of thought. And in human beings, an Attractor's influence is not confined to its
mind of origin.The limbic brain sends an Attractor's sphere of influence exploding outward with the exuberance of a nova's gassy shell. Because limbic resonance and regulation join human minds together in a continuous exchange of influential signals, every brain is part of a local network that shares information--including Attractors.

Limbic Attractors thus exert a distorting force not only within the brain that produces them, but also on the limbic networks of others--calling forth compatible memories, emotional states and styles of relatedness in them. Through the limbic transmission of an Attractor's influence, one person can lure others into his emotional rituality. All of us, when we engage in relatedness, fall under the gravitational influence of another's emotional mind with ours. Each relationship is a binary star,a burning flux of exchanged force fields, the deep and ancient influences emanating and felt, felt and emanating.

The limbic transmission of Attractors renders personal identity partially malleable---the specific people to whom we are attached provoke a portion of our everyday neural activity. Ongoing exposure to one person's Attractors does not merely activate neural patterns in another--it also strengthens them. Long-standing togetherness writes permanent changes into a brain's open book.

In a relationship,one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain's inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them.

Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.

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