Author: Scott

Recently my son and I went to CarMax to shop for his first car.  My co-workers had told me nice things about CarMax and I wanted to see for myself.  Right away, I enjoyed how we were able to “walk the lot” without being bothered by a sales person.  In fact, we found a car we wanted to drive within about fifteen minutes without once being bothered by a CarMax employee.  We walked from the lot into the main lobby to find some help and approached the main desk where a man was answering the phone and talking to employees on the intercom. He found us a sales person and I remember thinking he reminded me of an air traffic controller.

Our sales person, Chris was a nice guy who appeared to be about the same age as my son.  We learned on our test drive that I wasn’t far off.  He had just graduated from college and had been working at CarMax for only two weeks.  But, he was very professional and respectful and seemed to know his way around the process of getting out of the lot and test driving the car.  We decided to buy the car and Chris took us back into the dealership to his desk to start the buying process.

The simplicity of everything is the first thing I noticed.  We logged on to the same CarMax website everyone can access from their home or office.  Chris found our car online just like I could have found it from home.  He entered his CarMax employee credentials and he, my son and I started walking through the steps of buying the car.  I answered a few simple questions while the car was being prepped, we finished and Chris escorted us to the back of the building to sign a few papers.  I was handed a folder of my copies and Chris led us outside to my son’s first car.  We were there for less than an hour and a half.  I’ve been buying cars for 35 years and this was absolutely the best car buying experience I’ve had.

But, that’s not why I’m taking the time to tell this story.

My son drove us home to show his Mother and siblings his new car.  The excitement was what you would expect.   A boy’s first car is a big deal.  Later in the afternoon he left his car at home and went with a buddy to visit another one of their friends.  I decided to park his car in another spot and after I moved it, I found a big oil stain on the driveway.

I was totally deflated.  I didn’t want my son to come home and wonder what happened to his car, but I knew I had to take the car back to the dealership.  So, I drove the car to CarMax, found Chris, took him to the parking lot and asked him to look under the car.  He could see the oil dripping and he stood up and said, “that’s not right.”  He told me he was worried because the service center had closed for the day and all the technicians were gone.  But, he didn’t want me to have to leave the car until Monday, because he knew it was my son’s first car.  He asked me to wait in the lounge area while he asked his manager for help.

To be honest I didn’t think a kid out of college with two weeks of tenure would have much pull in a car dealership on a Saturday.  But, within a couple of minutes he walked into the lounge with who appeared to be another sales person and the air traffic controller I had first spoken to earlier in the day.  I learned he was Tracy the sales manager.  Apparently, at CarMax they don’t bury the sales manager somewhere in the back only to appear when they’re going to “do a deal.”  At CarMax the sales manager is front and center directing traffic and solving real problems.  And, here he was now to do just that.  The other young man introduced himself as Mark, a car appraiser.  Suddenly, all three of them were on the ground looking at the dripping oil under my son’s first car.

They got up and Tracy told me the service center was closed and all the technicians had gone home for the day, but that Chris had told them this was my son’s first car and they all wanted me to be able to take it back home.  Tracy wanted to drive the car over to the service center, put it on a rack and see what they could find.  I was impressed, I agreed and Mark jumped in the car and the rest of us walked to the service center.  Mark told me that he had been a licensed technician for 7 years prior to appraising cars so he knew what he was doing.  He didn’t want me to think some shade tree mechanic was poking around under my car.  I thanked him for that and thanked him for going out of his way and putting so much effort into something that obviously isn’t his job.

The whole time we were in that service bay I couldn’t stop thinking about how normal and expected it would be if they had just told me the service center was closed and I would have to come back on Monday.  I couldn’t stop thinking about how this young guy Chris wouldn’t have any pull at all at most car dealerships.  The sales manager wouldn’t want his sales person or his car appraiser off of the sales floor while customers were crawling all over the place on a Saturday.  This simply wasn’t their problem and they would have been totally justified in not doing what they were doing to help.

But, they kept mentioning my son and how exciting it is to get your first car.  They were going to find out if they could fix the problem because they wanted him to have his car.  They could all relate, because they could all remember their first car.  Chris mentioned to all of us how impressed he was with my son and how grateful he seemed to be getting that car.  Everyone made comments about how I needed to be able to take that car home.

Mark quickly discovered that the oil filter was the culprit.  It wasn’t loose, but after he unscrewed it he found a tiny piece of plastic stuck to the rubber o-ring gasket.  It was one of those tiny tabs that sometimes get stuck to plastic and rubber parts at the factory.  He pulled it off and tossed it on the floor, reseated the gasket, screwed the filter back in, reattached the cover, wiped everything down, lowered the car and was done.  Everyone shook my hand and told me to tell my son congratulations on his first car.

I’m confident CarMax fosters a corporate culture of superior customer service.  That’s obvious to anyone that does business with them.  But, Chris, Tracy, and Mark took it a step further in my opinion.  They made their help and service personal.  Because they did more than anyone would ever expect them to do, I’ll be buying my next car at CarMax.

Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.

~ Eckhart Tolle

Tell me how deeply your heart has broken, how your twin childhood terrors of abandonment and intimacy have melted into rivers of heartbreaking grief and grace and love beyond understanding; how all your concepts of what it means to be ‘spiritual’ or ‘awakened’ have crumbled to ashes, leaving only this mysterious life in all its raw, undivided, unfiltered, naked brilliance.

Tell me who you are, friend, but do not give me any mental conclusions or concepts removed from your lived experience.

No teachers, no books, no tall tales of your awakening or spiritual transformation will help you here, on the threshold of this great Mystery.

Stay silent if you must.

~ Jeff Foster

The real problem with humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.

~ Edward O. Wilson

For a long time I’ve misconstrued the problem of ego. Like most people, I’ve often heard someone has an “ego problem” or people would be better off if they would keep their ego “in check.” Many spiritual adherents even espouse “killing” the ego.

But, recently a good friend explained to me why we shouldn’t try to kill or even fight our ego. First of all, it’s not possible. Ego isn’t an object, like a faulty component of an appliance to be disassembled or discarded. Ego is merely a set of habits, an expression of our experience and a reaction to “what’s happening” right now.

More importantly though, rather than fighting our ego, we should show our ego the same compassion we should be showing other people.  To understand the appropriate compassion required, we can follow Thích Nhất Hạnh’s advice about how to deal with anger – we can visualize holding our ego’s hand like a little brother.

In other words, the problem is not having an ego, but how we express ourselves via our ego. More often than not, people express themselves from an ego based in arrogance, fear, or even self-loathing. The appropriate expression, of course, is from a genuine state of humility and compassion.

Our problems with ego actually arise when we cling to an inappropriate variation of our ego to the point that it becomes a Personality. Persona, the Latin word for “mask”, is that layer of ego we apply on top of our true, underlying Self. To live and behave appropriately, within any given moment, we must apply the appropriate Persona. We then must “hang that mask up on the wall” and apply the next Persona which is appropriate for the next moment.

We get into trouble when we cling to one Persona and use it inappropriately. When we experience stubborn people acting inappropriately, we are witnessing an example of an ego problem, someone clinging to a Persona which is wrong for a particular moment.

Being our “true selves” or “ego-less” or “in the present” are all variations of the same thing – expressing the Universal Self through a Persona which is appropriate for that moment.

Now, some people may find all of this complicated and stressful; visualizing the selection, application, and discarding of all these different masks, trying to figure out how to “act” moment-by-moment. And, described that way, it does sound exhausting.

But, I’m not suggesting anything that crazy or contrived. Simply put, when operating our daily lives, we simply need to be a friend, partner, teacher, student, child, parent; whichever Persona is appropriate, moving from expression-to-expression as needed and as appropriate for that point in time.

We should try to remain free of mental clutter, simplistically confident, pure-minded, without “baggage,” receptive, present without distraction, so we can react appropriately to whatever comes our way. We must avoid clinging to some inappropriate mask and dragging it along where it doesn’t belong. It’s what people mean when they tell you to stop putting on an act and just be your Self.

When we practice this successfully, ego is no problem. We can dispense with the delusion that ego is something separate which must be controlled or extinguished (which will never happen.) Ego is then manageable and likened unto a little brother who merely requires our care and guidance, instead of an out-of-control monster who must be slain.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

~ Herman Melville

After a while you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
And company doesn’t mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
And presents aren’t promises,
And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes open
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,
And you learn to build all your roads on today
Because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
And futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight.
After a while you learn…
That even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your garden and decorate your own soul,
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure…
That you really are strong
And you really do have worth…
And you learn and learn…
With every good-bye you learn.

—Jorge Luis Borges

Personality. The word personality comes from the word persona. In Greek, Persona means “drama” — they used to use a mask to play a certain role, because the same actor used to play multiple roles in the drama, so there are different masks here.

So, you want to play a particular role, you take the particular mask, hold it this way with the handle, and speak in a particular way. Now, the next role you want to do, you sit this mask down, take another mask, and hold it, and speak. So that’s what a persona means, a mask. Personality means the mask that you are holding, got stuck to your face!

To play a certain role, you put on a mask, and after some time, you’re not able to take off the mask. That is a personality! You should have built your personality very consciously, but unfortunately for most people, over 90% of their personality is built unconsciously. It is molded by the situations in which they are living and they’re exposed to.

If one becomes truly meditative, one of the basic qualities of meditation is, it creates a distance between you and your personality. Once there is a distance between you and your personality, then you can make your personality as it is necessary for a particular situation.

~ SADHGURU

Gather the stars if you wish it so
Gather the songs and keep them.
Gather the faces of women.
Gather for keeping years and years.
And then…
Loosen your hands, let go and say good-bye.
Let the stars and songs go.
Let the faces and years go.
Loosen your hands and say good-bye.

~ Carl Sandburg (with Marilyn Monroe in 1961)

Consciousness can be represented by neural frequency (vibrational energy of neurons interacting with other neurons causing like vibration). The vibration of a neuron cascades to other neurons affecting their vibration. So, 1 neuron influences another by wave energy generated by vibration.

Here is the kick. The cerebral neural vibrational energy influences the objects in the measured surroundings. So the thought of the observer (measurer) affects and changes the object being measured. When you expect to see an electron representing itself in a certain way you are translating that vibrational energy to the electron and it acts in accordance. The conscious thought of the observer has an influence on matter.

Matter is shaped by consciousness.

~ Posted by Turritopsis on phys.org