Is Effort Un-natural? The Effortlessness Of Real Balance & The Art/Science of Allowance.
The conditioning in humanity that says that 'hard work is the only way to success' and that 'without putting in effort we are lazy' is strong currently - so much so that many are convinced there is no other way. However... Another way absolutely exists!
Even in the face of the evidence of those with what is often called 'natural talent', who succeed without much difficulty at all (Mozart being a great example - he was composing complex music as a small child) - many will still cling to their cherished beliefs that hard work makes them who they are and without that hard work they would be irrelevant!
The reality is that similar principles that we see in physics also apply to our own consciousness and thus our own creativity and success. If we have resistance inside of us to the free flow of energy, then we are inefficient and are less able to direct our own will/intention and thoughts in the direction they need to go if we are to be the best and more successful version of ourselves.
Resistance
It is possible to resist entire realities, simply by thinking in ways that prevent us from experiencing them. There is not just one version of reality and each moment is it's own version of reality. The optimal version of reality is an energetic construct and so too are our own thoughts. The interconnectedness of all things is just one of the aspects to our absolute reality that supports us in our ability to draw realities to us or to repulse them. Before physical reality is dense and 'physical' it is non-physical energy - as is our own consciousness - so while the physical matter reality appears 'strong' to our mind, our own mind is actually from an essence that is stronger - or at least as strong.
Resistance can come in the form of beliefs and thinking which state that a certain reality is impossible or 'wrong'. Simply by thinking that you cannot create and experience what you truly need and desire without the involvement of 'effort', you create the experience whereby you appear to truly need effort. Effort, though, is only a sign of resistance - so by believing that effort is necessary, you are actually inserting a massive amount of resistance and difficulty into your life.
Belief in the necessity of effort ranks as one of the most self limiting beliefs and one of the primary causes of suffering.
Effortlessness
So what then is life without effort? Won't we find that everyone just sits on the floor and nothing changes? No!
Achieving aims and doing 'things' still occurs without effort. Effort is defined by dictionaries, typically as:
Exertion of mental or physical energy
So, effortlessness, is simply a highly efficient use of energy. The key here is to realise that most humans are currently only considering the mental and physical, they are not considering the spiritual and emotional as being valid sources of energy in their own right. This absence of a holistic acceptance and understanding of all of our wider aspects is part of why life seems so hard and that so much effort is needed. We cannot enjoy balance while in denial of such huge aspects of who we are.
When we are aligned through the heart, to be balanced in all ways - we are powerful creators of destiny and have the capacity to change reality at will in a more fluid way. Such balance not only makes creativity effortless, but also feels good too.
In short, balance is the key to heaven on Earth and it can be ours right now.
By clearing out all habits, judgements and denials that block our energy from going and doing what is needed - we become dramatically more efficient, happy and capable. On a simple level, anyone who has stopped drinking alcohol or smoking tobacco will know how much more balanced and energetic they were afterwards - yet while they were using the substances, they probably believed that the substances were helping them balance something else (which in truth they were not).
As we optimise our internal reality, our external reality cannot help but reflect that. This connection of inner and outer is key to understand when living effortlessly. When you know that your inner world is reflected by the outer world, you know you can change internal aspects and find life improves organically without you having to reach outside to control or manually adjust things in the 'outside'.
In truth, there is NO outside.
Allowance
Allowance means allowing the preferred realities to manifest for you. Allowance is not a blind allowance of everything since, obviously, there are things and realities that are not preferred and it is natural to have a felt response that rejects them for us. However, how we respond to the things we don't like is key too. If we are putting up constant energetic resistance to something, it zaps our energy and also implies that we believe on some level that this thing is more powerful than we are. It may be true in some cases that some things do appear to have more power than us (such as a military force, for example) - but is that really true?
Power is the ability to act - but what if the highest concentration of power is only inside of us and only available through compassion and loving enlightenment? I happen to know that that is true, so I know that the dysfunctional, control agenda of military forces is nowhere near the highest power available. The details of how this will play all play out in your own life is down to your own will, however, so I cannot give a precise description of how internal alignment and self acceptance will protect every unique individual from military overpowering. Answering these questions for yourself is part of empowering your own will and part of the actual solution too - it is all a process and a mental image of understanding is not enough.
Vastness
I can talk on these topics for a very long time as there is so much to say, but it suffices right now to just nudge in the direction of effortlessness and away from the path of struggle that effort brings. Besides which, my arms have some discomfort building from typing and it is becoming an effort - so I need to move to bring balance and return to effortlessness ;)
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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After reading you post it made me remember about the Pareto Principle(80/20rule). Once we found our passion the 20% of our effort will result to 80% of the output, no wonder why many more talented singers and boxers are getting paid huge amount is because of their talent.
In real world 20% of the population owns the 80% of the wealth in the world. They used the current of the river to leverage effortlessly to go into their distination.
Awesome article, fully agree. It's not an easy principle to relate, but you've done it beautifully. From my time in India on an ashram, one of the understandings I got which have helped me most is that of integrity. Which starts as always fulfilling the words you give to others and yourself, but also results in having a single aim. All resistance we experience is a struggle within ourselves, because we are not single in what we want to achieve. If we work out our own lack of integrity, then the gap between our intentions and our experienced reality resolves.
Having the full understanding that any experience of struggle is unnecessary, helps to just drop all that nonsense. Seeing the effects of those teachings on my day to day life has completely amazed me. Still, it helps to be reminded and remind yourself of these kind of insights again and again. Many people in the world around us take their struggles so seriously, anything we can do to support them (and ourselves) to live life a bit lighter is awesome. So thanks for your great article :)
Excellently stated - thankyou!
Integrity is also the ending of denial and the allowance of self acceptance. When aligning all aspects of self, we have to first know all of our aspects and also what is needed to ensure that none are being overpowered. The emotional parts are the ones most commonly over-ridden, so feeling is in many ways the missing key to our own truth and self empowerment.
<3
Thank you! True, we first need to know all the aspects to our intentions. Putting it like that, it always feels complicated - how can I ever know ALL the aspects to my intentions? The interesting thing is, if you sit down to do it, it just becomes possible.
At that same ashram, we did exercises for remembering all the words that in our life we gave and left unfulfilled. You'd think it's not possible, but sit down to do it and they just come back to you - all of them. The more time you take, the more subtle and little moments will come back. Same way, we did an exercise for writing down all your desires. And just take a few hours, you'll actually just find them is my experience, the emotional parts too. Then once they are all spelled out, it becomes so easy to see what among those desires is contradicting, and what you want to prioritise. Really, really helps for gaining that singular intention.
Maybe the biggest surprise I took away from India is that the problems we think have, or the (emotional) burden we think we carry, the worries of our life - that before you actively work on them they seem bigger then all the mountains of the world combined. Sit down to clear things up, and yes it takes a few hours, but that's actually all. I think it comes back to what you stated in your post - that hard work is hardly ever required, and that hard work just means we're resisting something somewhere. Goes for inner work too, luckily! :)
Love your articles :)
Excellent! When we also use emotional expression to activate our stagnant energy systems - the feelings and experiences that we have held for so long that we think they are just 'normality' can change quite quickly.. Even feelings and perceptions that have been with us for many lifetimes can shift and new doors can open in this way. <3
Many thanks. Your post has been included in my latest AAKOM Curated Resteems post.
Bertrand Russell wrote In Praise of Idleness, with a similar theme, that the obsession with doing and achieving, without commensurate thought, can lead to misplaced activities.
Thanks for your support. Bertrand Russell appears to have written some conflicting things in his time - sometimes he sounds enlightening and sometimes quite the opposite!
Wonderfully written. Thanks a lot!
My experience over many years has finally lead me to the conclusion that whenever we set goals we insinuate searching for something we haven't yet. Goal-setting is the strategy of focusing on lack instead of abundance, detesting the beauty of the pathway and each moment's noteworthiness.
In a way, we then tell ourselves that without reaching a goal we embody lack. Not being good enough, and our body responds to that from the inside out.
There was a time where I was working hard, but my results were worse than ever before. It was my Soul telling me in a roundabout way that I don't need to struggle through life. So my Soul did not resonate with this hard work method, hence my work was to no avail.
"Laziness" doesn't exist. When we are "lazy" it merely implies that we need a break from hard work or don't have Heart resonate with a system in the first place. This is a good sign!
My definition of discipline is defined by potential outcome as the exclusive motivation to keep us on track with the execution of an occupation which is against our Heart's passion.
WE know best what is good for us and what not!
You are welcome, thanks for your reply too.
I agree about goal setting, yes - there's a reason why 'gaol' is the old spelling for 'jail' ;)
Yes, space for rest is sorely needing to be given acceptance now - we cannot expect to constantly pressure the physical body and emotional body without having them need rest.
☺interesting fact, the "gaol" and "jail"
Thanks!
I appreciate your view about the positive sides of effortlessness, but something is still quite unclear to me.
According to the dictionary, effort means
This proves your point
However another definition says:
I understand that the need for effort can mean the thing can not be naturally done, so thinking of putting effort has an adverse effect on the mind which affects the physical, however does the inability to put effort into something not limit the maximum potential at which that thing could reach?
The definition of effort as 'The result of an attempt' is one that I have not heard before. We need to think about what an attempt is if we are to understand this definition.
'Attempt' is defined as:
Now let's look at the word 'try':
So there is a loop occurring here and not much sense ;)
There is another variant on the word 'try' that explains part of the situation here - which is 'trying':
If something is trying, it causes stress and hardship. To 'try' is to also cause stress and hardship and trying requires effort.
Effortlessness, on the other hand, is the absence of trying and stress. Effortlessness is a balance that means that we respond to life in such a way that we do not pressure or stress ourselves and by doing so we open doorways to alternatives that were not seen previously due to us being so caught up in our own thoughts that had us rigidly stuck in a certain way of perceiving - able only to see a limited set of options.
Stop trying = More success, not less.
There is no time for trying when cutting a bullet from the air.
Hahaha your analysis is brilliant, i could have argued that for one to be best at somethings requires effort, but people like Mozart already nullified that.
Thanks for your inspiration, it sure deserves more brainstorming
That samurai has got to be Samurai X The Batousai
Awesome post as always my friend. There's always a golden nugget of inspirations in your post.
By the way I think you have missed a few html editing
Just some minor editing.
Bear with my upvote as im still waiting for the 30 minutes for the curation on your wonderful post.
Ah yes, fixed! Thankyou!
No worries, always a pleasure to help.
By the way, I spent 1 of my 2 invites to get you an invitation to be reviewed for Whitelisting in MB
As you very well know their the best in town for post promotion.
With the quality of work you put in you there is no doubt you'd be whitelisted soon.
Good luck!
Oh thankyou - that's not something I have looked into much - will they contact me via a reply to my post on Steem?
So what happens is a whitelisted person invites you to be reviewed
then 5 other whitelisted guys check your posts for good quality
and then finally an admin from MB does the finally approval
once you get approved you should have access to MB 's high upvote values and upvote limit and it it gives you a higher profitability return on your boost. Its 46% more profitable compared to 18% profitability with non whitelisted minnowbooster's votes., its the best in the market and no other promotional sites or bidbots can match that at the moment
Once you get approved yes, they send you a congrats notification on your wallet.
More infor here
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Oh great, ok - I didn't know any of that. :)
I see you are already taking advantage of MB. Good for you and have a great day! :)
Thanks, yes, I'm still experimenting, it seems to offer a small guaranteed profit once curation is removed - but that 's certainly better than the risk of using other services.
@ura-soul you have spoken well. Effort isn't the basics of great accomplishments.
I know most times when I try to put in much efforts in accomplishing a task, not only does it feel extremely stressful the work is always below standards. But when I free my mind of all forms of thoughts while doing a task, everything goes smoothly and easy.
Thanks @ura-soul for sharing this with us.
Is effort unnatural?
I'd insist not at all. Your Mozarts of this world are able to do what they do with apparently very little effort because their nature / nurture has seen them head along a path which their brains / minds were particularly well suited to.
A lot of apparent greatness though has taken years and years of toil to pull off. You may see a wonder goal in a game of football (soccer) that in and of itself might not have been that difficult to score. However, when we consider how good the opposition may be, how fatigued the goalscorer may be and all the other vagaries, we understand why it is only a select few go on to earn fame and fortune playing the sport on the stages that they do. Earning the vast sums that some will argue they hardly deserve while others (even those with no vested interest) insist they are more than worthy of.
A lot of it depends on the nature of the task at hand. To write a song (for some) involves juggling a few words around on a chosen subject to build the chorus. Then find a few verses to go with it. They can write a song in minutes whilst others will never produce one in a lifetime.
And then there is nature itself. Humans and their closest ancestors have only been around for a few million years and it's only very recently that human culture has really taken off. I'd say it's practically exponential nowadays. Before us, it was all kill or be killed. Evolutionary arms races. Survival of the fittest.
Staying alive requires a great deal of effort or at least certainly did not that many decades ago. (The majority of people would probably argue it still does.)
Talent needs a mention as that's what it all boils down to half the time, ultimately. The better you are at things / certain things, the less effort you'll have to expend doing them. The fact is some talent comes naturally to some and some tasks just really can never be that difficult to do, regardless. For other things, you'll need lots of practise to ever be able to do something apparently effortlessly. And for some, they'll never succeed at making the task look easy no matter how many hours they put in, practising.
The world and all the jobs that need doing and all the pleasurable tasks worth doing is very much varied, is it not? Especially, in this world of modernity we've created for ourselves. The luck of the draw in how you turn out will certainly contribute to how easy you can make something look. But the simplest law of physics shows that nothing can or ever will be truly effortless, all the same. Other than sleeping / dying, say. Which are hardly tasks when all's said and done.
Not all toil is beneficial. The message I am sharing here is that the moment of the 'great goal' in the football match can be said to be the result of the absence of resistance to that experience. The resistance to the experience can come from a lack of openness to allowing the body to be nurtured enough to be strong enough to do the deed, but also can be said to be a lack of internal alignment towards accepting that the experience is possible.
"Can you score a goal that's among the best in the world ever?"
"I don't think so - that would be way too difficult for me."
While practise is certainly part of the process for most people in achieving their goals (pun intended), the practise itself can still be practise with or without effort - with or without balance.
Society does not yet have the experience of living without denial and therefore, all that has come before is not a good signpost to what is possible.
Thinking that you are incapable of playing the piano is a building block in the solid wall preventing you from playing the piano. When you stop inserting self defeating programs into your reality, reality changes and you find that suddenly 'beginners luck' is 'normal'.
I think I can mostly agree with that. Negativity is one of the very worst things in the world. However, some of us are apparently 'designed' better than others. At least for certain things. That can hardly be denied. To play snooker, for an example from the top of the head, it has to be so much easier if you're tall, have extremely good eyesight and can hold yourself damned steady. Whilst they're all physical attributes of course, they contribute to a person's natural talent for the game. You've either got it or you haven't. Of course, if you haven't but still enjoy the game, you can no doubt still get to be as good as you could ever potentially be (roughly, anyway) having lots of fun along the way, putting in lots of effort in the process. And if that makes a person happy, great. Self-defeatism is as you allude up there with the most pointless of thought processes, though. Effort (and talent) makes us competitive. Or at least capable of being so. Whether we wish to be or not is for another time and place, I guess.
Well, negativity is the mother of change - it is not wrong or even 'bad'. Limitation is formed by denial, which is itself neither positive or negative - denial is nothing.
Our physical form does determine what we can and cannot do to some extent, yes - however, the fact that we are experiencing a fixed physical form at all is itself the result of denials that are so ingrained into our being that we typically don't even think that an alternative is possible. When we figure out how to unlock our own codes internally, we will see a rapid change in what we understand ourselves to be and what 'human' means ;)
I'm going bed tonight telling myself I can be ten-feet tall by the morning.
I'm quietly optimistic about this, now! ;)
Congratulations! Sweet dreams!
I will look out for a story of a many who outgrew his house on the news tomorrow ;)
Thanks. I find it really helpful when people share their very own, personal experiences with these principles. I definitely tweaked and expanded my beliefs around this by reading some of your personal take here. Something new clicked in me when I read about the nonphysical being more powerful than the physical. It's something I've heard a billion times, but said in a certain way, in a certain context personal to the writer at the right time does something new. Felt that click. Thanks! Re-steeming. About to make a post for today, and I'll bet it goes along these lines now that you've activated it in me this morning. :)
I'm glad to be of service - thanks for letting me know. I'll keep my eye out for you flying through the heavens ;)
Great post. The context of the way you are using effort appears to lean to efficiency. Living a efficient life is a interesting concept and may unfold into the areas people find as virtue.
The reality is that we are all carbon based life forms and that has us directly interfaced with the efforts of life interacting with a physical world.
To what ends and means our spirit, thoughts and soul are woven into our physical life is subjective.
Effort is required of physical existance. The lion in nature doesn't wake up to a pile of meat at its feet. Nor does the elk wake up to a pile of fresh straw. They expend the effort to survive and thrive.
There very much is a outside so much so it is difficult to make a perfect vacuum. Energy reactions, sub atomic particles dancing in the voids that man attempts to create. Our energy is mixed with the outside, as the outside energy is mixed with ours.
The physical form we express through as human (the human vehicle) is just one of many forms that we may express through. Our roots are not carbon, rather they are in essence electromagnetic. The more we come to understand the nature of spirit and will (soul), the less subjective things become - however, there will always be a subjective element - yes.
My understanding is that the original cause of these life forms involved significant denial and imbalance - thus their experience is reflecting that original imbalance. We cannot understand balance by looking at great imbalance and declaring it 'normal' or 'natural'.
How do you know that the continuum of energetic interaction and movement that we call 'life' is 'outside' of you?
Maybe we are talking past each other in terminology. Carbon is the root, if you would like to describe carbon as a tangible form of organized energy within a different context i would be open to the nuance. Still, the energy form would empirically hold the parameters of carbon. So to with hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.
This in the frame work of biology exists in the DNA and RNA. The energy of life being based on photosynthesis surrounding these elements(carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,nitrogen). I don't limit life to only photosynthesis, but the vast majority of life as we know it is fueled by the sun and chemistry involving these elements.
Consciousness in the brain itself requires vast amounts of energy based in chemistry from the natural world. Even neurons require the physical pathways for the electrical impulses to flow.
If you are saying consciousness (or some quantum there of )happens outside the brain in some form of electromagnetic condition, I am open to seeing the empirical evidence.
I don't fully grasp life in a continuum requires conditions of denial or imbalance, maybe we again are missing finer points of efficiency. I hope this is going some where that balance and awareness are a different path than death.
The requirements to sustain life are outside of me. Observation of areas with no light and no photosynthesis show more non-life than life. Places where photosynthesis is occuring and the presence of elements that exchange the energy show a abundance of life.
I can feel the sun on my skin, the existance of energy, not radiating off but radiating inward. The opposite in cold weather, the energy of my body radiating away into the cold. The way my hand melts the snow.
The 'raw ingredients' of carbon on the sub atomic level and beyond are the same as the ingredients of the other forms of matter. There is no inherent requirement for us to embody forms based on carbon, as far as I am aware - it's just that right now our form is structured in that way. Change is possible.
If life on Earth is apparently fueled by the local sun, isn't our sun therefore alive too? Is the sun carbon based?
There are numerous forms of evidence, the more you look, the more you will find them. You can look into the world and find research projects on ESP and remote viewing, for example - you can look at russell targ's work with the CIA and remote viewing (his talks are on youtube) or you can look at the farsight institute (also on youtube). You can join groups of people who do astral travelling (out of body travel) - you will find literally 1000s of people in some facebook groups actively travelling out of body and meeting up in the astral levels. You can learn to do this yourself. You can also explore your subconscious and unconscious self to start to be connected with your own past lives - I have done this and it is very real in a way that you will find if you want to.
I think you mis-interpreted what I wrote here. I was not saying that life requires denial and imbalance. Denial and imbalance create death.
How do you know that 'you' start and end with a human body?
Do humans live in a universe? Or is a universe 'Humaning'? :)
While it is true that all elements are energy it is the way the energy organizes that makes each element specific. If you think of the sub atomics components of a element having frequency, and amplitude, the arrangement of those is different between, say oxygen and carbon. So the two elements though they are made of energy, have specific compositions.
I have no problem seeing a change in the future, but currently this is the reality as I know it.
I can't tell if it is a rhetorical question on the sun or not. The sun is mostly hydrogen in various processes of fusion. The best we can figure is that gravity and mass is the driver of fusion. I often consider the primary natural basic requirement of life is not electromagnetic, but gravitational. That leads to a different question of: what is gravity?
Nothing would end all life on earth faster than the removal of gravity from our solar system.
ESP and remote viewing appear to have some following, and from a social objectivity perspective i have no conflicts in how energy functions to deny or support its existance.
How do I know that i start and end with my human body? Subjectively i feel my experience occurs from me being in my body. I don't even a fraction of the time feel out of body. Again i say this as subjective experience. If someone feels different then they feel different. It may eventually lead to disparity in epistemology, which i have no problems in the human condition variations.
One of my big disagreements is that life does take considerable effort to sustain, i know of no one who has farmed or foraged 100% of their own food supply by human power that says there is little effort to sustain life.
I cannot prove it to you at this point, but based on my research I think that there are some people who demonstrate the ability to totally bypass the 'human condition' in terms of how they process and receive energy. They are called 'Breatharians' and while some have been found to be frauds, at the same time there are some who have not. I might not pay much attention to them as it sounds too 'crazy' to be real - but the thing is that I have had my own experiences that might have seemed actually more 'crazy' than theirs to me - until I had them. Because of my experiences I am aware now that physical reality is definitely not the root of anything at all - rather it is the end of the chain of the process of manifestation. Basing our understanding of life on study of matter is a bit like studying humanity by watching a movie.. You might be deceived into thinking that the movie is the whole reality, but if you go up in to the projector room in the cinema, you will get a different idea.
This is a clip from the best documentary I have seen on the topic:
For me, experiencing reality is no different than experiencing energy, and experiencing energy is no different than experiencing reality. So there is no condition that the physical world is apart from anything else.
If there is more energy out there i have no problem saying there is x+(more energy) if that better defines reality.
(What might be interesting is a study of 80 or more days of someone not consuming with no physical contact of water or fluid. A body can eat itself as fuel for 10 days)