Our Worldview

Understanding how our worldview informs our beliefs and thoughts is the key to living our lives on our terms. It is easier than you think.

Negative Thoughts

Negative thoughts alter our brain’s biochemistry and how this leads to an epidemic of anxiety and depression. It stands to reason if negative thoughts impact us physically than so do positive thoughts.

So, if we can understand and change the foundation upon which our thoughts and beliefs are based then we can change how we deal with the everyday challenges.

We are not powerless! We are not weak! We can be happy becuase happiness stems on how we cope with the everyday, even when things are bad.

Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving presentation, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.

Jill Bolte Taylor Stroke Video

I found this story on TED  a while ago and after watching the video was simply amazed. Jill Bolte Taylor is the neuroanatomist who studied her own stroke as it happened. Click here to watch the video.

What Changes Your Mind?

 

When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.

What changes your mind?

Human beings are complex entities. You may have a propensity towards faith, maybe it is science, maybe something else; no doubt, we rely on many things to get through our day. Whatever works for you, that’s what matters.

Overcome Anxiety and Depression Without Drugs

I am offering a 6-week telecourse on overcoming anxiety and depression without drugs starting July 29th and July 31st. Click here for more info.

A Shift of Mind

My new blog A Shift of Mind now officially lives at blog.melschwartz.com. I may still post some desultory thoughts here time to time, especially interesting items I may stumble upon. 

I am also working on a new book Emergent Thinking and of course continue to write articles (click here for complete list of my psychology articles).

What is Emergent Thinking?

Emergent Thinking is a transformative  process that I have developed to assist people in their personal evolution and self-actualization. The foundation of this approach is based very simply upon learning to utilize and integrate many of the remarkable discoveries of the emerging sciences (quantum physics, complexity theory).

 I have come to see that most of our struggles and impediments are due to the manner in which we see reality. Regrettably, most of us still cling to the truths of 17th century science, fostered by the teachings of Sir Isaac Newton. Although very helpful in catalyzing industrial and technological advances, this worldview has severly constrained many aspects of our humanity.

A worldview informs the way in which we see reality. Over time, new worldviews usher in new pictures of reality.  Newton’s paradigm suggested that the universe was to be pictured as a giant machine (mechanistic) comprised of separate things (thingness) only causally connected. From this vantage point, predictablity, determinism and redcutive, analytic thinking became the epsitemological bias that shaped our reality. And in so doing our life experience was put into a straitjacket. We became the cogs in the machine, disconnected from one another and the universe at large. Moroever, our thinking became burdened by a relentless tendencys is analyze and measure. As such, we lost the flow of life and partitioned ourselves from a participatory and flowing wholeness. We essentially lost our sense of belonging, depriving us of meaning and purpose. The manner in which we were trained to think, to see and to live became a reductive exercise, forever rupturing and fragmenting the richer flow of life.

From this servitude to analytic, reductive and mechanistic reality, we became the victims of our own worldview. The epidemic of anxiety and depression that engulfs our experience may be traced to this outmoded worldview. The inexorable measuring, analyzing and fragmenting of our thinking will undoubtedly lead to these and othere psycholigcal and emotional dysfunctions.

The solutions to these challenges lays in shifting our worldview, coming into harmony with the natural flow of the universe. To that end, the Emerging Thinking process integrates this new worldview into our thinking and our lives, liberating us from the limitations that so constrain us.