Have you ever felt that time is speeding up? Well, you’re not alone.

It certainly is getting faster for me. Perhaps some of that is related to my getting older. When I was a kid, a year seemed to be an eternity. The school year was really long. The upcoming summer was but a glimmer of hope in the distant future.

The second graders were so much older than the first graders. Adults were ancient people from some other world.

But something is going on in addition to physical and mental aging. Something far more pronounced.

For a point of reference, let’s look at an example from my own life.

Throughout a good part of my life I made a living as a software developer contractor. When I was programming the Alpha Micro computer back around 1980, the programming documentation was about ten or twenty pages long. And it was clear and quite complete.

These days programmer documentation for a specialty might be a stack of books a foot or two high.

A computer programmer’s livelihood depends on his / her skill set. What set of programming tools does the programmer know? How many years of experience does the programmer have with that particular set of tools? This is especially important for a freelancer.

If the skill set is in demand, the programmer lives the good life. If the skill set is not in demand, the consultant does physical labor in exchange for a place to live. I’m writing this from my own experience.

This situation gets even more complicated with the rapid evolution of computer technology.

The same situation is true for many professions. We seem to be living in a high tech world. And the evolution of technology is accelerating at a breakneck pace.

People can graduate college in some specialty only to find that there is inadequate demand for that specialty.

Embarking on a career path seems like spinning a roulette wheel.

Our current “trickle down economy” complicates life to astronomical proportions. But ranting about that won’t help our personal, immediate situations.

In addition to making a living, there are many other areas of potential overwhelm.

There are more social opportunities than ever before.

Families scatter in different directions.

Our hobbies can get more complicated and costly.

It seems like a challenge prepare healthy meals. That seems to take so much time and money. It’s quicker to drive through Taco Bell.

Then we’re tired because of poor diet and lack of exercise.

Many of us are exhausted working in jobs we don’t prefer. And we have to keep learning more boring stuff in an effort to keep up.

All this stuff can be overwhelming. So what can we do in our own personal lives?

What do we do?

Well for one thing we can look at the well known analogy of the calm presence in the eye of the storm. Ok. How do we do that?

There are a few general approaches.

1. We can do consciousness work.
2. We can step back from the overwhelming confusion. Essentially we can get rid of clutter. This includes physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, commitment, social, and entrepreneurial clutter.
3. We can adopt simple, dependable points of reference in our lives.

Consciousness Work

This website is filled with resources that help your consciousness work. So we don’t have to expand on that here.

Handling MultiDimensional Clutter

We all know about handling physical clutter. Many of us, including me, wait until the clutter get’s overwhelming. Then we roll up our sleeves and handle it until we have a reasonable amount of peace. I’m repeatedly amazed by how uplifting this can be.

There are many ways to reduce mental clutter. We can do various forms of releasing such as the short not-trying meditation. Releasing other types of clutter will also reduce mental clutter.

We can do an inventory of our lives and identify what people or situations drag us down emotionally. We can then reduce them, or eliminate them, to scale down our emotional clutter.

And yes, there can be spiritual clutter. The majority of spiritual paths are not all that empowering. They can be a way of making ourselves right and others wrong. And they could simply be spiritual entertainment. If you know someone who is good at muscle testing, you can determine if a spiritual path is empowering or not. You can choose spiritual paths that are empowering.

Modern society seems to present an endless parade of situations that need fixing. We need to save the food supply. We need to save the seals. We need to handle pollution. We need to … The challenges can be totally overwhelming. In other words, we can have commitment clutter. We can narrow this down to one or two causes that resonate with us. And we can volunteer a reasonable amount of time and energy to those causes. Or we can shift energy by seeing everything as perfect the way it is. You’ve probably heard that what you resist persists.

It seems that we have to say yes to every social invitation. Maybe all of them are good. Maybe not. If our lives are swamped, we can limit out social activity to that which is the most uplifting for ourselves and our friends. In other words, we can reduce social clutter.

Today, more than ever, there are invitations to get desperate about making money. So we want to start new business ventures. One of my repeated mistakes is to jump in and create some product without any real assurance that anyone will pay for it. Yet marketing basics include testing market acceptance first before pouring huge resources into a business venture. I’ve wasted many thousands of hours of my life by creating entrepreneurial clutter for myself. The idea is to do market testing before embarking heavily into a business venture.

Adopting simple, dependable points of reference in our lives

In our accelerating world, we need to master ways of being and doing that are reasonably timeless. We need to master skills that will be useful now as well as ten or more years from now.

Mindfulness is quite basic. There are always opportunities. We just have to notice them.

Personal presence is vital in all economic and social situations. You can actually increase the magnitude and quality of your personal presence. This doesn’t mean that you have a strong energetic suit of armor and overpowering energetic output. A soft loving presence can be quite welcome in almost any situation. An inspiring or commanding presence can be vital when action is appropriate. A strong ethics presence is sometimes necessary in the face of unethical behavior. There are many ways to enhance your presence. Some of them could be fun. Acting classes anyone?

Sales and marketing beingness, knowledge, and skills are one of the best guarantees of success in any endeavor. We need to let go of any resistances we have in the area. Got great ideas? Want more friends? Better relationships? Sales and marketing expertise helps.

Communication skills play a major part in any situation. They are vital to sales and marketing. This includes subtle body language communication, verbal communication, written communication, and multi media communication. And it wouldn’t hurt to have your own blog.

Creativity can be learned. It’s fun. It’s extremely empowering. And it can be a complete spiritual path. It applies to all areas of life in all economies.

Self-Education has technologies similar to creativity technologies. We can multiply our abilities to learn well and quickly.

Leadership requires all the above abilities and characteristics. It also requires the ability to make good choices, the ability to create and hold a vision in the face of obstacles, and the ability to get others to hold that vision.

The calm in the eye of the storm

In our accelerating world we need to get into the eye of the storm and learn to stay there.

It involves letting go and raising our consciousness.

It involves cutting down multidimensional clutter.

It involves adopting simple, dependable points of reference in our lives.

How do you feel about all this? What do you think? Any more ideas?

Please write a comment below.

Are we making a good living or not?

Are we perceived at our true value or something less?

Do we have happy, loving relationships or not?

This all depends on our self-expression. And it depends on our willingness to honor other people’s self-expression.

This short video gives you a simple exercise that will vastly improve the quality of your life.

Please express yourself by writing a comment below. I would love to read it.

With appreciation,
Jim Kitzmiller

Recognition of Divine Essence is possibly the highest service. It sparks others’ recognition of their own Divine Essence. We don’t have to say anything.

This starts a chain reaction of consciousness expansion.

You might like to check out the Divine Essence Meditations on this blog.

Here is a small sample of the feedback. This does not include recent testimonials.

obfsteve – Jim, Deceptively simple but profound. I started with this one and then found others and your website, Meditation Vacations. I found the information there interesting, valuable, and generously given. I’ve told many friends of this video. I’ll let them discover more of your work from here, as I did, if they choose. I’ll not try to force feed them, although I did them a heads up for this as starting point. I’ve been around the block with meditation stuff, and this is just the best!

Timgfan – Whenever I do this meditation, I have tears streaming down my face. I weep with the beauty of the potential that this feeling could bring love to the world. I imagine people I have difficulty tolerating (like George W) doing this or being surrounded by this love (I imagine a mother’s love) and I just convert it to “God’s” love. It’s the most powerful organic thing in the world.

djm6402 – voila! /// INSTANT RELIEF

Peaches111A – ditto…i feel sooooo content…i think i’m gonna do this during math class just before i test. then i won’t need to worry about flunking ^^

FaceVentura – i am sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oo relaxed that was seriously amazing

GreggaryPeccary – Wow, that was the most effective meditation I`ve ever had!!! You sink into the Self immediately!

mayasem – Very good meditation!! Thanks!!

dreams2manifest – Wow that was amazing! Thanks! You know it made me think about quantom machanics when you said the word observing…I remembered them saying something about when a particle is observed…it changes. Thanks!

jenandjuice22 – This was the best part of my day! Thank you!

mayasem – This feels good!! thx for sharing this.

unis2006 – wow this was great…I dont meditate but it made me feel so peaceful.
peacepalace – Thanks for the meditation, very simple and relaxing. Everything including our body is just the way it is. That’s all their is to know.

akintock – Thank You very much!!! it initiated my all inner spiritual levels.

Mawachi – Thank you. That took off a lot of my anxiety.

grantas1983  – thank you very much, it helps me alot.

megalosauru  – great, we observe our inner soul

clearviewmind  – Great. On observing my outer sourroundings i began to see clearer that everything is mere imputation of mind – The external things of my room are’nt actually external, but an internal reflection of mind experienced through the 5 senses.

rappersdelyte  – great. thanks.

JUSTRELAXANENJOY  – …it

We want to get through that pile of papers. We want to eat healthy food. We want to force ourselves to study so we can do a better job.

Yet somehow we can’t bring ourselves to do it. It isn’t interesting.

We want to pay attention to our spouse or friends when they’re talking to us. But we’re mentally churning on problems that consume our attention.

We know that we need to discipline ourselves and pay attention. Parents and teachers hammered that into us when we were children.

We beat ourselves up because we can’t seem to force ourselves to do what we feel we should do. Our self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-image take hits over and over again.

What is one to do? What is going on?

Often we don’t have much interest or passion for doing the things that are really important.

We know that finishing that pile of papers will bring us a surge of energy and a feeling of freedom. But we can’t seem to bring ourselves to do it.

We know that making those phone calls will open up new areas in our lives.

We know that keeping attention on our spouse or friends while we’re conversing will improve our relationships. But we keep thinking about some problem.

How do we manage our attention?

We can do it the easy way. We can create our own interest.

Interest is senior to attention. And it’s easier to manage.

We can deliberately create our own interest in anything we choose. We can select the most important things in our life and deliberately create interest in those things. We can then act accordingly. This is beyond self-discipline.

We can create our own interest in preparing healthy meals and then act accordingly.

We can create our own interest in our products and services. And we can act accordingly. We learn more. We do a better job. We do more.

We are interested when we talk about our products and services. There is no need to shout. Other people pick up on our interest. They become more interested in buying our products or services.

We succeed. We get our work out into the world.

And who knows? Could we make more money this easily? You can try it. Let me know how it works for you.

How do we create interest?

One way is to use the amazing power of imagination. We can imagine that we’re interested in something of our choosing. Voila! We’re interested.

You can try it. You can choose something that’s not overly inspiring, perhaps organizing papers. Just imagine that you’re very interested filing those papers in a file cabinet. Keep on imagining that you’re interested. See it in your mind. Or, if you wish, feel how interesting that is.

You do have this power. It is amazing.

We can create our own interest in what’s important and act accordingly. That’s senior to self-discipline.

This can bring success. It can raise your spirits.

It can restore self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-image.

We can practice this frequently and become more and more interested in the important things in our life.

Please let me know how this goes. I care.

Your friend,
Jim Kitzmiller