If you have your own God then it’s very easy to defer any kind of responsibility for your actions. In fact, God is the perfect scapegoat. He is your imaginary friend whom you can blame for pretty much anything that you do. If you do something naughty, you can always say that God told you to do it. If you have any kind of success then you can always say it was God’s fault as well – after all, who wants to know that success takes years of hard work. And why would you want to tell people that the reality of life is that anyone can be hugely successful? Why create more competition for yourself? Tell them that God chose you as his special one instead – it will make you look divine.

Use God for all kinds of things. If you want to say something controversial and don’t want people to question your sanity then simply tell them that it’s the word of God. That way they can’t blame you for anything – and if they do blame you then you just say “well I didn’t say it – God said it. Go speak to him.” It’s the perfect bureaucracy – the delegation of responsibility. As they call for God and try to speak to him repeatedly without getting any answers, they will eventually give up in frustration and you will be the winner. And if they come back to you and complain that God doesn’t want to talk to them then just tell them that their belief is not strong enough.

God is amazingly useful. Since God is basically the ideal of how things ought to be, you can also unite people using God. All you have to do is create a God that has a lot in common with what many people already believe in. Basically, people with the same ideals will always be attracted towards each other. It’s like having similar interests – although people don’t usually market themselves well enough so if you can verbalize their ideals to them they will look up to you as though you were some kind of a messiah. Use God as the perfect way to unite people. Many people have done this throughout history already.

All you have to do is tell them that you are the messenger of their God, and then you simply tell them what their ideals are. And because their ideals are already in their minds, they will all go “wow – you really understand us”! It doesn’t really matter if you are lying – the main thing is that you address their ideals and verbalize them into words.

And another reason for telling them that you are the messenger is in order to remove your own ego from the picture. Obviously if you simply tell them that you made the whole thing up they’ll just think you are crazy. Tell them instead that God told you to speak to them about whatever-it-is-that-they-want-to-hear.

I love God.

It’s really just a way to look at things. An empowering perspective that gives you a lot of answers to why things are the way they are. And the main reason why it is empowering is because it puts you in the center of all the events that take place in your life – which is a lot more liberating than believing that you have to be dependent on other people. And it’s not so much about physical dependence either – we are all dependent on somebody for our physical needs. It’s more about mental independence. When you see yourself as being the center of your own universe you will be much more likely to make your own decisions without asking others for their permission first (Master, can I think for myself? Please!)

If you look closely at all the people who really set the pace in this world and live their own dreams – they are all very much aware of the fact that they are completely in charge of their own thoughts and ideas. They put a mental bubble around themselves and use that bubble to fend off any negative influences that others happen to throw at them. We got to learn this in sales – just put a bubble around yourself and maintain your positive attitude. It’s really just for your own good so you don’t even have to listen to me if you don’t want to.

I personally find the painter perspective to be much easier to grasp. You can even see yourself as a performer and the whole world as your stage. Now you know what Shakespear meant when he wrote that “All the world is a stage and all men are merely players in it.” It doesn’t really make any difference how you think about it and what angle you use as your observation point. The only difference is that every single one of these perspectives empowers you to take control over your own life and to do whatever you feel is right for you without worrying too much about what others might think.

All these perspectives are really just variations of the same thing. Since you are the only one person in your own world who is conscious (subjective reality perspective), everybody else is simply a projection of your own consciousness. Since you are the painter painting your own picture (painter perspective), everybody else is simply a tile on the picture of your own life. Since you are the performer on stage doing your own show (performer perspective), everybody else is merely a member of the audience.

If you add your own God to the mix things get even more fun. Cause now you have a custom God to worship so you don’t even need anybody else’s generic deities. But since God is merely a projection of your own subjective ideals it kinda makes sense that you would have your own God if you are a subjective painter/rockstar/whatever.

Can’t get any better than that – can it? ;-)

The History Of God

If you look at the history, you will see that people have had Gods for about as long as we have written records to support this fact. Even ancient Greeks had their own Gods. And Gods have probably existed for hundreds of thousands of years before that as well. We just don’t know about it because people could not write back then and record their experiences. So Gods have existed for ages and will probably exist for years to come.

What happened was that man created God as the ideal image of himself. People have always had ideals. Greeks had their own gods to inspire them. They prayed to their Gods of war to inspire them to do their very best at war and they preyed to the Gods of love to inspire them with that feeling of perfect love. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s just the way our minds work. We simply perform at our best when we have an image, an ideal, to adhere to. You basically create your own image of what you consider as the best ‘you’ and then you do your best to be that person.

So God was created as the ideal image of a ‘good’ man which was widely accepted as ‘good’ by the standards of the times. While Devil was created as the ideal image of the ‘evil’ man by common standards. It’s quite simple really. We then wrote books about it and put this image down into writing in order to spread this image among our crowd so that they could also learn what this ideal image looked like. And also so that we have some hard evidence to refer to when we are being asked questions about our God. That’s how religion was born.

The Common Ideal

Over the years I have had the chance of getting to know several Gods while doing my own research. I’ve read a lot of literature which was inspired by the Christian God and I have even looked at Hare Krishna. I’ve even researched The Church Of Satan for a while – although I didn’t find it to be as inspiring as I thought that it might be.

What I found was that all of these religions are simply based around different ideals which are then widely accepted by the group as being ‘the right way to be’ and endlessly preached within their own church. Many of those ideals have a lot in common because we have some kind of natural sense as to what it means to be a good person, regardless of which part of the world we come from.

The problem is that it’s a generic ideal which is designed to be suitable for everybody. Why would you ever want to worship a generic ideal when you can just as easily create your own which better suits your own personality? It just doesn’t make any sense to me to believe in an ideal which was created by somebody else. Why not just create your own? It’s not that hard really.

Create Your Own God

Yeah – create your own God. What are the qualities that you value most in other people? What are the qualities that you most value in yourself? Since you are the most important person within your own world, the only person you should be listening to with regards to your own choices is yourself. Create your own image of the ideal self that you want to be and you will have your own God to worship.

It’s so simple. Then you write your own book to yourself on how to live and you will have your own bible. Pretty cool. And if you want to have followers then you can teach your stuff to others and build a religion – but that’s mostly an extension of the basic idea. The basic idea is to have your own God. Whatever God you have – keep working on him and developing him further. God is amazing when you start modifying his qualities.

You are pretty much in complete control of your own life because you are always in control over your own thoughts. And remember that nobody is more qualified to say what you should believe in than yourself. Stop expecting other people to make your own decisions for you. Become a little more independent and start thinking for yourself.

Advantages Of A Custom God

The benefits of having your own God are amazing. You are free to change your own God however you want. There is nobody you ever have to council with when changing any feature of your own God. There is no bureaucracy involved in making changes to you God. So the moment you get an idea of changing some feature of your God then you just change it. It’s as simple as that.

Another great benefit of having your own God is that you are not tied by any single religion. You can literally take all the belief systems that you know of and combine them into your own personal belief system which you design based on what you want to believe in. That way you are in charge of your beliefs and you can modify them at will without having to feel that you are doing something naughty.  Whatever you choose to believe has always been and will always be under your own personal control.

Disadvantages

Obviously there are some disadvantages of having a custom God too. The biggest disadvantage is that believers in the common God will not fully agree with you on everything – but that’s ok – it’s their problem and not yours. They have their own collective God so let them believe whatever they want to believe. It’s their choice anyway. After all, you know better what’s best for you. Don’t you?

I can’t really think of any other disadvantages. I guess I will come up with a list along the way. Right now I’m liking this custom God path very much. Perhaps I should create a custom heaven too. And maybe a custom hell. That would be cool. I’ve been quite depressed since about the age of 13. But not so much anymore. I feel much better now. So perhaps I can call depression a hell of my own making. Because it was the hell of my own making after all.

Conclusion

I wish you luck with your own God. Make sure you create a God that benefits many people. Remember, it’s in your own best interest to consider the interests of others. Make yourself useful. That’s an important observation that I’ve been making lately. Other than that you are free. Do whatever you want to do and don’t hurt yourself. ;-)

You are basically a painter and all other people around you are the little tiles of your painting. As you interact with them and tell them different things, you are basically painting them into different colors. You are painting the pixels upon the painting of your life. You are a performer and the whole world is your audience. You are the painter and the whole world is your painting.

How would you paint your world is you were to decide what it was going to look like?

All the people whom you talk to are essentially part of your personal audience which you can paint into different colors depending on what you do and say to them. If you bore your audience then they leave – if you find new ways of entertaining them then they stay.

Even your closest friends are your audience. They are sitting in the front row of the theater and you have the chance to paint them in more details. But every person on this planet is part your audience and you are the star of your own show regardless of where you come from and who you are. You are still a person and you are still able to share something valuable with somebody.

It’s pretty cool when you think about it. What this means is that you don’t have to feel any kind of fear or any worries about what you say to people because they are simply part your audience. Your show is your own and so you decide where you will be taking it and what you will be doing with it. All you really have to do is just find more creative ways of being what you already are. Be more of who you were made to be. Be more of yourself. You know much better than me what you should be though and what kind of show you want to do for the world – so I’ll leave that up to you to decide.

You are free to decide which colors you choose to paint with on the canvas of your life. If you paint too many people with dark colors then your whole life will be a dark painting. Perhaps that is what you wanted all along – in that case you are fine and quite successful. Even a black square is a work of art in itself. If you are not happy with your dark life then simply paint something brighter on your painting. A black background is great for some really bright colors which will stick out from the darkness. Although every painter is different and so every painter decides for themselves what they choose to paint. Some choose dark and some choose bright. You decide what you should paint.

You can even choose not to paint at all. If you choose not to paint then your life will be gray. It will be neutral. This is what happens when we don’t talk to others – when we don’t share our ideas. When we don’t do any show for the audience. It’s fine as long as you are simply waiting for an inspiration. But it’s still not as nice as having a painting on your canvas. What would you tell your kids that you have painted on the canvas of your life? What would you tell me that you are currently painting? Do you even know what you are painting or are you just blindly putting colors on the canvas without knowing what you are doing?

You see, most people have gray lives simply because they are not sure what they want to paint. They never take the time to figure out what they want to paint. They never decide and so they end up painting lots of different things without having a clear idea about the image which they are working to produce on the canvas. They get along alright – some have very rich paintings composed of many different smaller landscapes – some have not painted much yet. And some people have really beautiful masterpieces.

Obviously before you start painting you need to have an image in your mind of what you are going to paint. When you know what you are painting then your actions seem to flow effortlessly and you simply know what color you want each tile to be painted in, making them fit perfectly into the overall picture. You become like an inspired artist always motivated to do more. Always looking for ways to add depth to your painting.

Don’t worry about your lack of skills. You’ll learn that along the way. All painters make mistakes. All painters have to start somewhere. Sometimes you will paint some tiles with entirely wrong color. Don’t worry about it. Since you are the painter, you can easily correct any errors that you make. You simply let the colors dry and then you paint right over them with a different color. Don’t try to erase all the errors you have painted before – you’ll just smear the painting. Let some time pass and then set things right again using some brighter colors of your own choosing.

What do you want to paint on your painting of life? What would you like to do with your audience?

Think about it! ;-)

Cause here is the thing: you can never reach your goals unless you consistently produce whatever the final result is made of on a day to day basis. In order to do that, you have to already be the kind of person who is suitable for reaching the goal you have set – otherwise you will find it hard to produce the right “stuff”. Therefore, it’s better to set goals based on what you are, instead of doing it the other way around, setting arbitrary goals and then trying to change yourself.

That’s also why your personal values are actually more important than your goals – as I wrote previously in my article on values. A value is basically a timeless character goal – like truth, love, mastery, knowledge. A personal value is a goal aimed at yourself instead of at some result outside of yourself. You can’t really say, for example, that by the 31st of dec 2010 you will be a person of perfect truth and love – it’s simply an ideal that you strive for but will never fully reach in your lifetime.

Based on your values you can then set external goals that stem from these values just to keep yourself motivated and happy – but it’s the development of your character based on your values that matters most as you strive to reach the external goals that you set for yourself.

In fact, the striving itself is merely an illusion as well. You are not really striving – you are just making your brain release endorphins by thinking of your future goals and imagining them in your mind. Although it’s not these visions alone that make you reach your goals – instead it’s your day to day habits that get you there.

Imagine a wheel. A wheel can get from point A to point B because it is round. In order to get from A to B, a wheel has to roll. Now think of a rocket. A rocket can fly from A to B – a wheel can’t fly. Although the rocket can’t roll like the wheel can – it can only fly. The wheel gets from A to B because of what it is – because of being round. A rocket get’s from A to B because of what it is as well – flying is more natural for the rocket than rolling.

This is why a method of staring a business that has worked for one person may not work for another – they are simply different people with different traits.

Each one of us reaches our goals in our own way because of what we already are. It’s very difficult to reach a goal that does not “consist” of what we already are simply because it would mean that we would have to change our personalities to reach it – which is nearly impossible to do, and only produces unnecessary anxiety, friction and misery as we struggle to become someone else.

So it is better to set goals based on what you are – ironically you will reach them regardless of whether you set them or not. Because they are based on your character, you already are on your way towards reaching them anyway. And you will reach them, although much slower, even if you consciously force yourself to work on a different goal that you don’t really want.

The truth is that you are being successful all the time simply by being the person you already are. You may not be accumulating what you truly want to accumulate – but you are accumulating something (be it knowledge, or money, or social connections, or computer games, or tv series).

So setting goals is not really that important. All you have to do is consciously work on developing the person that you already are. Set that as your single goal and you need no other.

There is nothing wrong with adopting a perspective. The world consists of many different perspectives that you can choose from at will. Some of these perspective are religious and others are more modern and scientific – yet anything that you know, or think that you know about the world, is part of a certain perspective that you have created. Each perspective allows you to see the world from different angles and to see patterns that are not present in the other perspectives.

Before I started reading books (other people’s perspectives), I was highly skeptical of most written material. I considered it to be unnecessary for me to read books because I already knew everything that I needed to know (or so I thought). When I started reading, however, I have completely changed my attitude towards books.

Information is absolutely invaluable to anyone who aspires to gaining a better understanding of themselves and the world around them and to live a more integrated and fulfilling life. You can learn virtually anything and become anything that you want to be – if only you are willing to learn.

Keep an open mind towards everything that you read, absorb the information, then make your own personal conclusions based on your own experience.

When we learn, the learning does not take place in a linear fashion. Rather, we accomplish a great deal and make a lot of progress at the very start of our endeavor – then the progress curve evens out and moves in a more horizontal direction. The shape of this learning curve is very similar to the shape of an amplification curve.

What often happens is that we get really excited by the progress and start setting followup goals that are based on the assumption that this curve is never going to even itself out. When it does even out, we get frustrated and disappointed with ourselves – even if we do hit the goal that we have initially set for ourselves.

The key is not to go past the goal that you have initially set for yourself. Hit the goal – then stop and regroup your thinking for a while. There is no reason to hurry. If you look at all great empires in history – all of them have fallen when the leader has gotten overconfident and tried to accomplish too much in a short period of time. This has usually led to the weakening of the empire and it’s eventual fall.

Your brain grows in the same way. If you make your awareness expand way too fast and set new and higher goals when you have not even completed your current ones, you will eventually crash – ie. get really depressed and disappointed. Instead, consider hitting the top of the curve – then going for a while until you feel that the curve has evened itself out, and then stop.

Do something else and let your mind do the background processing of all the previous knowledge that you have absorbed. Switch your context. Some people do this by taking a vocation, although you can simply do something else that creates a contrast to what you have previously been doing.

When you then go back to the original task, you will find that you have a far easier time making progress than previously. This is because you are at the bottom of the next progress curve and on your way to shoot up yet again. All you need is a little push and you will find yourself making progress.

You are like an electron that is about to jump orbits – all it needs is some energy and it will jump to the next level – and while an electron needs energy, all you need is some extra knowledge that will help you connect together seemingly unrelated ideas that you have acquired from different contexts and expand your awareness.

Nobody can really teach you how to live your life – it’s in fact something that you already know. You just have to bring that knowledge to your conscious awareness.  We are never taught how to be ourselves – yet deep within we all know what we should be and how we should be without needing any external input. The hard part is putting in the effort into developing these mental faculties to really understand who we really are.

If you at any point in your life feel anger, disappointment, fear or any other negative emotion without having the skills to control these emotions then you don’t really know how to live. What most spiritual teachings have been aiming to do for centuries is to teach us how to connect with the core of our being and to effectively control all negative emotions so that we can be free from them.

Religion is like mental jujitsu where you learn to use your inner forces for your benefit instead of going against their flow and limiting your potential. Then of course there are several styles that you can learn – but the underlying philosophical principles are always the same.

And I think that a large part of learning how to live our lives fully is becoming that self that we already are – ie. flowing with the inner currents of our being – to do the things that we are most likely to enjoy and to be the way we want to be without resisting ourselves.

Think of your philosophy as code that you write for a computer. A philosophy is the code that runs inside your brain. You can write down your philosophy into text to make it easier to comprehend and debug. You can also extend your philosophy over time and add new features to it in much the same way that you would extend and rewrite code.

If your philosophy is not working well – perhaps causing your brain to make mistakes and get stuck then you need to refactor your philosophy. If you find something that is not working then you are always free to change the way you think. Much like it is wise to throw away old and inefficient code – it’s also wise to throw away thoughts that are found not to make any sense.

The most elegant solution today may not be the most elegant solution tomorrow. Perhaps today your philosophy is working out well for you, but as you add more features to your life your philosophy might require an upgrade to accommodate for all that extra stuff.

It’s been exactly one year now since I have started doing direct marketing and sales on a full time basis. I loved it a lot in the beginning because of the personal growth aspects of sales as a profession. When I first started doing sales I had no clue as to how sales profession worked. Gaining direct experience talking to so many people every single day was an immencely exciting experience. However I have always felt that sales was incredibly mentally demanding type of work for me. It was challenging in terms of having to interact with so many people on a daily basis. I loved the challenge, but the work made me feel disconnected with my true self.

This is a very important point for you to take note of. If you are doing something that you are not naturally made for, you will feel as though your life is becoming more and more challenging and unfulfilling with every day that you continue moving along that path. It’s not that I can’t sell. I know that I can do 12 sales in one day because I have done it before. But it doesn’t make me feel as though I have accomplished something unless it contributes my life philosophy. And there is nothing wrong with sales as a profession either. I know people who make $3000-$4000 per month doing door to door sales and others who are making $20000 per month running a door to door sales company. There is definitely a great amount of money to be made in direct marketing.

However it’s not for everybody. When you have a profession that has great money manking potential and very low entry barrier, it naturally attracts all kinds of people. The thing with sales is that you need to have a certain amount of empathy and emotional intelligence to be good at it. If you are not very emotional then you will find it hard to trigger emotional response in others. It would largely be a blind business for you. You will feel as though you are shooting in the dark. However if you can experience emotions and express them freely then sales would be perfect for you because you will find yourself at home manipulating other people’s emotions to your advantage. I have seen many people doing this who have been absolutely amazing at it.

The interesting thing that I have noticed is that I feel immensely energized when I’m writing – both when programming and when writing plain text. I honestly don’t need anything else but a notepad and a pencil in my life to feel good about myself. If I have these two things I feel completely fulfilled. All other things I can be without. There is simply nothing better than sitting and writing all day long while listening to music. It’s an absolutely amazing kind of work.

If you are feeling suck in your current line of work then you should reconsider what you are doing. There is money to be made in any profession – the key is NOT to jump into a profession where you think that you can make the most money. The key is doing what you love – doing what rubs you the right way. I see articles from time to time telling young people which professions will offer the best pay a couple of years from now as a guidance for choosing their path of higher education. All that stuff is complete bullshit. You can not reasonably make a lot of money in any profession if you are not naturally made for doing being in it. The top guiding principle for success in any field is doing what you love doing so much that you see no difference between your work and your play.

Consider this: in every profession you are being paid for the results that you can deliver to your clients – whether your client is a company that you are being employed by or your customers. Even if you are being paid by the hour for your services, you are still being paid for the results that you deliver. If you don’t deliver the results then there is no reason for the company to pay you for your services. Your job security is not so much determined by the ups and downs in the economy as it is determined by your competence at what you are doing. And your greatest success potential lies in the profession that let’s you exercise you own natural talents to the highest possible degree.

Stop looking to other people for guidance as to what you should be doing with your life. It does not matter if your friend has failed in sales. You can still be incredibly good at it and make millions while doing it – if you are a social person who loves human contact above all else in life then sales is perfect for you. I know many people who are really good at sales and I can tell that their personalities are typically extroverted and feeler oriented. These people are successful because they are naturally very emotionally skilled and outgoing. It is very difficult to experience feelings if you don’t have the predisposition for being emotionally sensitive. The same applies to being extroverted as well.

You need to do what best suits your personality and if you are introverted then do work that does not involve much direct communication with other people. If you are a thinker then you will feel most natural doing work that requires you to think and organize abstract concepts. In fact, you will feel as though you are wasting your time when you are not engaging in intellectually challenging work. If you find it difficult and uninspiring to do intellectually challenging work then you should not be doing it either. There are plenty of people who are making good money in professions such as sales. Go with your natural flow instead of using your willpower against yourself, pushing yourself in the wrong direction.

I absolutely love what I do and there is currently nothing else that I would rather be doing.