Taking Control of Your Life February 20, 2007
Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Consciousness, Personal Growth, Philosophy, Purpose, Relationships, Beliefs, Time , 4 comments
Life is undeniably a pretty complex term. When we look at all the different aspects of a human being’s life, what we are responsible for and what we can or can not control, the list can grow quite long and into many layers of details. Take for instance circumstances, emotions, skills, diseases, other people’s behaviour, luck, success and happiness. How many of these, and to what degree would you define to be within or beyond your control? An even greater question that I’ve been battling lately is the question of how much we as human beings are supposed to take control of in our reality in the first place.
Some books and teachings say that we should just let go of our desires, live simple lives and give up the thought of taking control of our destiny - that everything is going along just as it is meant to, which means that trying to alter things is futile and a waste of energy. In other words, life is meant to be a humbling experience where the solution is simply to enjoy our stay on this planet and live with care and love toward ourselves, others and the Oneness of all that exists.
Another way of thinking is that this whole reality is your own creation and you (read I) are fully responsible of all that goes on in it. Therefore, it’s obvious that there’s a lot of cleaning up to do with all the misery and catastrophes that occur every single hour and minute of every day. This revelation either breaks you if you don’t even have the strength to take care of yourself, or it has the power to create a great human being out of you that actively improves the world - through internal or external means (self-improvement or altruism).
Option 1 resembles more of a theistic approach and option 2 an atheistic approach, but it doesn’t have to be that cut and dried. The underlying question is if you have the full control of your reality or if it’s beyond your reach, found in something or someone else’s control. It’s all a paradox that seems to circle on endlessly when you think about the human levels of consciousness as explained by David Hawkins. In broad terms, people below the consciousness of 200 are denying the responsibility of their own life and need to grasp this revelation to reach neutrality. However, to get past the mid levels and reach unconditional love and enlightenment, you have to more or less again give up the control that your ego and corporeal body has access to. So what then is the answer, should a human being strive for control or not?
I wasn’t able to push this question forward until I started asking myself what the word control really means and comprises of. The traditional explanation would for instance consider having control of a car. It then means that you’re the master of the car’s movements and nobody else is able to influence it. This I would name ‘direct control’ and it follows in suit with the subjective reality perspective that everything is happening due to your own thoughts and actions - that circumstances, emotions, skills, diseases, other people’s behaviour, luck, success and happiness are all within your control.
However, I’m also convinced that ‘indirect control’ is an equally powerful concept and a very acceptable mind-set as well. This is the power of being a master at how you relate towards everything - even though you accept that everything is beyond your control. Your control is therefore strictly internal and in a way, you control the external occurrences because of your own relationships towards them. In this case for instance, cold weather does not have control over you because it does not bother you. You are in total acceptance of your surroundings and thus, you are the one in control. It’s still a kind of control after all even though the outcome is beyond your reach.
So what this all boils down to is a separation between internal and external control. Now if we look at the small list of concepts I presented earlier (circumstances, emotions, skills, diseases, other people’s behaviour, luck, success and happiness), we notice that all of them are within one of our ‘controls’ and that in the end, you don’t have to choose one form of control over the other. They can both co-exist and you just choose one according to the nature of the issue. I’m sure you’ll find out which concepts require direct control and which require indirect control.
Many people find themselves out of life balance when they only rely on one form of control. They get mad at the universe or themselves when there’s no single solution to all of their daily matters that they want to control. Fortunately, there is a solution for how to take control of life, but it takes time and effort to master both kinds of controls for improved life quality.
Or were you more inclined to find an answer to which of the two introduced teachings are more correct? Life isn’t a goal or a destination you strive to reach. It’s a path and an experience where there is no past and no future - only an endless amount of the present moment. Life wouldn’t be very exciting if all our questions were answered, but I hope that you start to recognize the two kinds of controls that you may use and slowly master from now on to make the best of your life and the present moment. This matters more to me than finding answers to all the questions I can think of.
(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
How to Blog - 3/8 Plugins February 19, 2007
Posted by The Probabilist in : [Articles], Productivity, Technology, Blogging , 16 comments
The third step is to use appropriate and effective plugins on your blog. This is neither a top list nor a required list where you need to use them all. It serves more of as an introduction to plugins that show what kind of functionality and accessibility your blog may lack if not used. There’s a lot of variation to be found when you want a certain kind of key functionality to your blog - the differences are then found in the instalment, use and appearance. WordPress comes with a few plugins to start with and Akismet is a plugin that you should definitely use.
All links are to the plugin homepages and they all come with guides on how to install and use them, so there’s no point that I retype what’s already found documented elsewhere. The standard deal is to download and extract the files to the plugin directory. Then you just go to the plugins menu in your administration panel and activate the plugins. But it’s always recommended that you first read the instructions found on each plugin homepage or the install or read me file that comes with the plugin. Some are more tricky to install than just to activate and some add their sub-menu to the options panel where you do the plugin tweaking.
Adsense-Deluxe
I like this plugin not only because it automates the insertion of Google AdSense ads, but also because you can use it to automate any code you want to add to a post with a simpler maneuver. It adds a sub-menu to the options menu where you name a new code block and enter the full code in a box. The plugin then generates a tag that you insert in the post.
Brian’s Threaded Comments
This plugin adds the option of replying to a single comment so that it’s clear to whom you’re responding as it boxes in the previous comment in yours. I didn’t get this plugin to work, but there’s another plugin for the job as well, called the Quoter that is presented later on.
Category Replacement Widget
The Category replacement widget lets you change the category view in the sidebar into a drop down bar as presented in the sidebar of my blog. You need the sidebar widget plugin to use this.
Clean Archives Reloaded
This plugin is found in action on the Archives page and includes the dates and comment counts automatically. Since the latest WordPress upgrade, it also includes the pages you create, but this should be fixed in the next plugin update.
Comment Karma
If you want to add the option of voting a + or a - to other people’s comments, this plugin comes in handy. It’s a bit tricky to install, but works fine when you get the hang of it.
Contact Form ][
This plugin displays the contact form found in the page and may need some fine tuning to get it to show up as you want it to. This way you’re less prone to get spam mail since your e-mail address remains hidden.
Count_posts
Count_posts is a really simple plugin. It displays the total amount of posts you’ve published, as shown at the bottom of the Archives page. It just displays the number, so you’re free to add any text you want just by typing it out on the page.
Digg This
Digg This displays a similar button on your post that can be found on the Digg website to the left of the link headlines. It won’t show up until at least two people have dugg your entry and the plugin generates an e-mail to you notifying that this has happened. The downside is that you can’t really test if the plugin works or how it shows up until you’ve got dugg. Here’s what it looks like. You can also enter the code in the index.php file instead of the suggested post.php.
Drop-down Archive Widget
This plugin shows up the same way as the category replacement widget as found on the sidebar, but it doesn’t require you to have the sidebar widget plugin to use it.
Feedburner Feed Replacement
You need to have a Feedburner feed to use this plugin. It’s a simple install and it boosts your feed count number because it taps into many sources that feedburner statistics doesn’t automatically count in, like Firefox Live Bookmarks.
Google Sitemaps
This plugin is part of the Google utilities entry I’ll post next week. It generates an XML sitemap of your blog so that Google can index it for better targeting.
MyAvatars
A simple plugin that checks if a comment poster is registered to MyBlogLog and then places their picture/avatar in the comment box.
Quoter
Quoter functions like the quote button in forum posts. A blog reader can also highlight a text from your entry and by the click of a link, quote the text and reply to it in the comments. It’s a bit tougher to install than most plugins, but I got it to function properly. I might install it on this blog.
Related Entries
This plugin is found in action at the bottom of this post, below the ad banner. It’s a great plugin since it gives the reader some place to go after reading a blog entry. You can’t keep all new readers, but this plugin helps a bit.
Sidebar Widgets
This is a pretty basic plugin as it enables the widgetizing of your sidebar. It comes with its own menu where you drag, drop and order your widgets as you want to them to be displayed.
Subscribe To Comments
Subscribe to comments simply adds the check box way down where a reader enters a comment. It adds a stickiness to the blog as it sends an e-mail whenever someone else has replied to a user’s comment.
Ultimate Tag Warrior
I personally don’t use this plugin, but it’s great to add tags to your posts. There are a few other plugins that go hand in hand with it too.
WP-PostRatings
This is the rating plugin I use for people to vote on my posts and also to display them on each of the four pages in an descending order. It’s a nifty plugin, but don’t rely on people using it actively because only a very small fraction will. It took me over two months to get my first rating, and now I’m at 68.
WP-PostViews
The WP-PostViews plugin is only visible to the blog admin. It shows how many times a post has been viewed when you go in to edit/manage a post. It comes in handy if you want to see which posts fare well on your blog.
WP Category Posts
I’m using this plugin in the Categories page, but it requires you to manually enter each category to the page to make it display as it does there. The post count is automatic though.
I’m happy to include more plugins that anyone suggests, and although I’m not an expert at using them, I’ll do my best in helping out how to get them to work if the plugin homepages don’t provide sufficient info. There’s no checklist for this step. Just try installing any plugins in your offline blog that seem interesting and delete the ones that you don’t end up using to avoid clutter. There are lots of plugins to be found at the WordPress plugin database link directory.
In the fourth step of this “tutorial” (Friday, February the 23rd), we’ll be changing permalinks for better search engine optimization, looking into css and html tweaking and how to add more media rich content to spice up the blog appearance.
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