Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life (Extended)
    Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life (Extended)
    Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life (Extended)
    Ebook119 pages3 hours

    Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life (Extended)

    By Marcus Freestone

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Are you plagued by negative thinking, indecision and guilt? Would you like to transform your life with positive thinking skills and effective stress management and eliminate negative self-talk? Have no fear, this is not your typical self-help book. This is a collection of practical, down to earth tips and techniques gleaned from psychology and philosophy that can help you transform your thoughts and actions from failure to success. Learn how your brain actually works and the processes that control your thoughts, actions and emotions. You will learn that it is very easy to rewire your brain and gain new levels of motivation and self-confidence. Replace self-doubt and sadness with self-esteem and happiness. You will also discover that the meaning of life is no big deal after all.
    Expanding upon the free book we also look at social interaction, consciousness, alienation and that fact that we're all much freer than we think. We also take a more in depth look at the meaning of life and see how it within the power of each of us to define our own meaning and values for ourselves.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMarcus Freestone
    Release dateMar 6, 2014
    ISBN9781310584978
    Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life (Extended)
    Author

    Marcus Freestone

    My main work is the T14 series of thrillers about a futuristic, high tech counter terrorism agency headed by a man with a computer implant in his brain. The first book "The Memory Man" is permanently free in e-book. I also have a series of novellas on the subject of mental health and psychology. My most popular book is "Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life" which has had 200,000 downloads. It deals with psychology, philosophy, depression, anxiety, mental health in general and the human condition.I have also released more than 50 albums, ranging from metal and rock to jazz and ambient/electronica. And last but not first I also produce the "Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life" podcast and "The Midnight Insomnia Podcast", a comedy show with ambient music and abstract visual images.

    Read more from Marcus Freestone

    Related to Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life (Extended)

    Related ebooks

    Psychology For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Vex King

      Mar 3, 2021

      Vex King
      2 min read

    • Article

      Mind Over Matter

      May 2, 2022

      Mind Over Matter
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Kind Space

      Oct 27, 2020

      A Kind Space
      2 min read

    • Article

      Positive Vibes

      Jun 16, 2022

      Positive Vibes
      4 min read

    • Article

      Change Your Inner Script

      Jul 29, 2019

      Change Your Inner Script
      2 min read

    • Article

      Alone Time

      Jul 15, 2021

      Alone Time
      5 min read

    • Article

      Why Finding Focus Matters

      Apr 12, 2022

      Why Finding Focus Matters
      2 min read

    • Article

      The 8 Rules Of Nunchi

      Mar 23, 2020

      Empty your mind and leave all preconceptions and prejudices behind when entering a room for the first time. Euny explains that when your mind is full of assumptions about situations or people, you will have difficulty seeing what is really in front o

      2 min read

    • Article

      True Love Means Loving Yourself

      Sep 26, 2016

      True Love Means Loving Yourself
      3 min read

    • Article

      Bryan Stevenson

      Nov 18, 2019

      Bryan Stevenson
      2 min read

    • Article

      20 Food Craving Hacks

      Apr 12, 2023

      20 Food Craving Hacks
      5 min read

    • Article

      How To Be Happier

      Aug 30, 2022

      How To Be Happier
      2 min read

    • Article

      You Can Find Another Way

      Jun 8, 2021

      You Can Find Another Way
      2 min read

    • Article

      What’s Your Motivation?

      Oct 22, 2021

      What’s Your Motivation?
      2 min read

    • Article

      An Eye On The Future

      Jun 4, 2019

      An Eye On The Future
      2 min read

    • Article

      Everything Is A Practice

      Dec 30, 2021

      If this is the year you want to take up yoga, then you’ve made a great choice! Yoga is the perfect way to keep on top of everyday life; it’s good for your body, mind and soul. No one regrets rolling out their mat and doing a short practice, even just

      1 min read

    • Article

      THE POWER OF Being Your Own SO

      Mar 2, 2020

      THE POWER OF Being Your Own SO
      3 min read

    • Article

      Fill Your Life WITH JOY!

      Jul 29, 2021

      Fill Your Life WITH JOY!
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life (Extended)

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life (Extended) - Marcus Freestone

      INTRODUCTION: WHAT THIS BOOK IS AND ISN'T

      I am not a therapist, I'm a writer and musician who happens to have an interest in psychology and philosophy. This book is an exercise in collating various ideas and revelations I've had during the past few years which have proved very helpful to me and may also be to you. All I have done is talk openly about things I've discovered, techniques I've used, mistakes I've made and successes I've enjoyed. Some of it consists of direct quotes from the journal or notes I kept on a particular course. In some cases I have kept the integrity of the spontaneous thoughts and avoided any rewriting in order to maintain the original insight.

      This is not an academic work and these are my own personal views on what I've encountered. Other people may view the same material/ideas in a different way. I have encountered many books where simple concepts are verbosely extrapolated in an off-putting manner. Therefore I have done my best to be as concise as possible throughout.

      Not only am I not a therapist, I am emphatically NOT A SELF-HELP GURU. This book is not a padded out marketing tool to persuade you to spend $1000 on a weekend conference to learn about the healing power of yoghurt worship. This book is not accompanied by a DVD promoting my $2000 one-to-one course on how harness the power of your inner gullible. I sit at home, I write books, I make music, I produce podcasts - that's all I do.

      As you'll discover throughout the book, I do not believe in any kind of metaphysical or spiritual system. I believe in human consciousness and that we can use basic psychological, philosophical and neuro-biological truths to improve our mental experiences.

      I do not believe, as Wayne Dyer says in 'Stop The Excuses!' that ... when we change the way we think, and learn new ways of perceiving, we can actually change our DNA!. We categorically CANNOT rewrite our DNA. However, we CAN rewire our own brains and fundamentally change our view of the world and ourselves. Some readers may not see any distinction between these two statements but they are totally different.

      I have never wanted to believe in something false in order to feel better, quite the reverse: I've spent my whole adult life seeking out untruths and eliminating them from my world view. I constantly challenge my assumptions and have jettisoned many in recent years. Therefore, a part of my motivation in starting this whole 'Positive Thinking And The Meaning Of Life' thing - firstly by writing the free e-book, then starting the podcast, and now continuing and expanding the work with this paperback - was to cut a swathe through all the hippie bullshit and get to the basic truths of the mechanisms that govern our thoughts, emotions, decision making and behaviour. So everything you read in this book is solid, practicable and down to earth; there are no myths or fairy tales in these pages.

      My main motivation, however, comes from my own struggles with depression, anxiety and a sense of being overwhelmed by the daily business of just living a life. I wanted to better understand my own brain and the things it was and wasn't doing. While I cannot honestly claim to have 'cured myself' of all depression, anxiety and obsessive and unwanted thoughts, the knowledge and ideas contained within this book have been of great practical use to me and enabled me to solve many of my problems. My personal life and creative career are still not what I'd like them to be but nowadays I at least have the belief that I can improve myself and that I am making positive, useful progress. When things are going awry in my brain it is a great comfort to understand the biological and psychological processes behind this activity and know that there are things I can do to get myself back on the right track. [3rd edition note: in the four years since the last edition I have made enormous progress in both my career and personal life. All this positive stuff will be detailed in later sections.]

      It has also, more broadly speaking, been a comfort and a joy to learn more about my own mental processes and about psychology in general. This has made me far less of a slave to my mental processes and more in control of my life overall. Hopefully, it will do the same for you too.

      A final note. You don't have to 'believe' in this book. If you disagree with something herein, or it just isn't working for you on a practical level, then reject it. That's the empowering, autodidactic approach I've taken to psychology, philosophy, even science, and I encourage you to grant yourself the same freedom with this book. Just bear this caveat in mind: if you disagree with or are hostile to an idea, is it because something about it is 'pushing your buttons' - triggering you in some way - and it is in fact something that you need to take on board? Many examples of this have come up during my own life (see the section 'Why I Didn't Believe In Addiction'). Much of the progress I've made has resulted from challenging some of my most deeply held assumptions and prejudices about myself and the world: I encourage you to do the same.

      DECISION MAKING AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CONSCIOUS AND SUBCONSCIOUS COGNITION

      I've know for years through studying mainstream psychology and Gurdjieff and Ouspensky that the subconscious brain does most of our processing but I hadn't realised the huge disparity between the processing power of the conscious and subconscious. Whilst the subconscious brain can process 11 million bits of information a second, the conscious brain can only process 11 bits a second. That means the subconscious is a top range quantum computer whereas the conscious is a ZX81 that's been dropped in the bath and hit with a rock fourteen times.

      This means that if, as I have done for years now, you try to take conscious control of much of your subconscious decision making, you will overload your poorly equipped and already overcrowded consciousness. Our conscious mind has an elaborate system of filters that allow us to ignore most of what goes on around us, and it is there for the very good reason that our consciousness is already operating at full stretch. We are enmeshed in a constant loop of thoughts>feelings>actions because we always think about and react to our actions afterwards.

      It seems that the latest results of neuroscientific inquiry indicate strongly that in depth analysis of decision making is the prerogative of the subconscious brain. It is irrelevant why or how this imbalance between conscious and subconscious cognition has come to be the case – it is simply a fact and these are the parameters that we have to operate within as conscious entities.

      I recently heard a scientist say that the job of therapy should be the reverse of its current preoccupation – it should actually discourage people from thinking about themselves. If the subconscious does the vast majority of our decision making (indeed, it has long been established in psychology that subconscious decisions and memory function are almost entirely accurate, whereas conscious ones are hugely error prone) then we should 'disengage' and let it get on with these processes. In that sense, it seems that much of the 'new age' idea of letting go of your conscious self is actually correct, but that many forms of 'inner work' are in fact counterproductive and actively harmful. Our brains are the result of three billion years of evolution and it is therefore arrogant folly, even dangerous, to think that we can improve upon that. I myself spent several years consciously going over and over hundreds of major life decisions with the result that I made hundreds of disastrous decisions and brought my life to a standstill. The other result was that I overloaded my conscious mind with masses of unnecessary information and impaired my conscious cognition significantly.

      It seems therefore that people who are successful and get where they want to be in life are good at sitting back and letting their subconscious, instinctive decisions inform their actions, whereas I kept on messing it up by conscious interference. It seems that good decisions are subconscious ones that are presented to our conscious awareness as a fate accompli – we go against them at our peril! It goes against everything I've ever believed about human existence, but it now seems unavoidable that the best way to live is to trust your instinctive, emotional reaction to situations and 'go with the flow'. I've lost count of the thousands of times I've prevaricated over a decision that was presented to me by my subconscious because I had some intellectual objection to it. I've argued with myself in bad faith many times and often actually chosen what I knew to be the wrong decision because for some nebulous reason I didn't like being told what to do, even by my own mind! I was so obsessed with the idea of freewill that I fought against all ideas of our subconscious being in charge and wholeheartedly signed up to the ideas of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, which state that we should devote our lives to wrestling away control from our 'subconscious robot'. However, I now realise, rather late in the day, that we in fact are subconscious robots for perfectly valid evolutionary and biological reasons and that we should not, indeed cannot fight against it.

      However let us not despair. Despite our lives being ruled by our subconscious SCRIPTS, we can counteract them by consciously instigating new scripts. There will be more on this in two pages time so bear with me.

      In bed last night I had the sudden revelation, after starting to read yet another psychology book and realising I was no longer interested, that I'm still in the cognitive patterns of a former self. I'm still thinking in terms of studying and needing to learn more about the human brain and the universe - but why? I've outgrown all that now, neither my mind nor the universe hold any more mysteries for me; I understand all I need to understand, so why am I continuing to accumulate further information?

      I began studying, essentially, to have enough intellectual ammunition to argue against religion and superstition and to sort out the mess in my head - I've achieved both of those goals now

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1