PNTV - The Art of Life by Ernest Holmes

You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Nerds tv. Today, another great book, the Art of Life. The Art of Life by Ernest Holmes. Ernest Holmes, old school, new thought guy, early 20th century. He created something called the Science of Mind. You may have been to one of his churches in this country and around the world. Super optimistic guy, all about connecting to that power that's bigger than us and letting it flow through us more powerfully. En theos, connect to the divine within experience, radiant enthusiasm. That's the essence of all of his work. Philosopher's notes, bunch of big ideas. Five of my favorite ones here. A lot of these are going to be recaps of ideas we've explored in different places, as we typically do, but particularly today. So the first idea is this idea of flipping on the light switch. And Holmes, as I said, is super optimistic. And his basic idea is, look, it doesn't matter how long you've been living in a suboptimal way. It's kind of like when walking into a room and flipping on the light. The moment you flip on the light, there's light in the room, the darkness is gone. He says that's how it works with your life. It doesn't matter how long that room was dark. The moment you flip the switch, it's light. He says, same thing goes with our lives. You could have been living a certain way for a long time, but. But the moment you commit and then recommit and recommit and recommit to living optimally, to flipping on the light and to allowing the best within you to come through the lights in the room. Doesn't matter how long the room was dark or how long your life was dark, you now have light. Now I take a little more conservative approach to that. And the reality is that if you've been spending decades in the dark, yes, you can flip on the light. But if you haven't been in that room for a while, there might be some dusting that needs to happen and some cleanup. Generally. Open up the windows, let in the fresh air. Right. There's some other work we need to do, but the essence of the idea is so profound. Flip on the light switch. And that brings us to the second big idea. How do we do that? How do we flip on the light switch? Well, you can probably guess what I'm going to say by now, which is you live with Arete. Remember the whole one negative, one thing, right? So we're talking about Moment to moment to moment, you have a choice. You can step forward into growth or you can step back into safety. Negative one or plus one? Well, you can kind of think of it like flipping on the light switch, right? So when you step forward into growth and you do something that is an expression of you at your best, right. In any given moment, it's kind of like you flipped on the light switch, a bit of light right? Now if you don't and you go back into old habitual patterns and addictions and you fall short of what you could have done. Not the end of the world, but it's kind of like you flipped off the light. Okay, so what can you do in the next moment? Flip it back on. And then get this great continual streak of doing your best and experience that divine force flowing through you more and more consistently. We talk about this again throughout the notes. In the note, this particular note, I talk about Don Miguel Ruiz's four agreements. The fourth agreement is always do your best. Yes, this first three. Right. And then the fourth is always do your best. And he makes the important point that your best will vary depending on where you are in your life for the hour of the day or the day of the week or whatever. You're not always going to have a rock star. 10 out of 10, this is you. Some days your best is going to be right there. But that's better than this. And we need to embrace that and realize that, again, our best is going to vary. But can we do our best? And if we don't do our best in any given moment, recover, get back to balance. As Marcus Raelius says, if you find yourself off balance, see how fast you can get back on balance. Make it a game. I call it the equanimity game. A sign of fitness. I was just talking to Alexander about this idea. I'm doing a lot of interval training these days. I have for a while, but more consciously and deliberately. And one of the signs of fitness and health is how quickly you can recover. So when you intensely push yourself, how quickly can you recover to your baseline? It's a sign of fitness and health, right? It's the same thing emotionally. If you don't do your best right, and you fall a little bit short, how quickly can you get back to your centered point and recover? That's a sign of your emotional well being. And if you can get that down from, wow, I was unconscious for a decade or two to a year. I kind of was off to a month. I was kind of off to a week to, well, you know, I have a bad day every once in a while, you know what? I might have a rough patch, but I know how to recover. I can still have bad moments, but I know how to get back on. And when I do my fundamentals, consistently, me personally, and when one does it consistently, you meditate, you exercise, you eat well, you rest properly, it's hard to have a bad day. It's much easier to recover to the inevitable speed bumps. So do your best, build on that. Good things happen. Third, big idea, mental gardens. So again, I like giving different metaphors that these different teachers talk about. And so many of them come back to mental gardens. Imagine your mind like a garden. Now, if you allow the weeds, negative thoughts to take over your mind, your garden, your. You're not going to harvest much of anything you want. You can have a weed garden. It's kind of a bummer. Pull out the weeds, the negative thoughts, when you see them sprouting up, pull them out and plant good thoughts. The stuff that you want to see come to fruition. And know that as you do that, again, the neuroscience says when you attend to certain thoughts, you rewire your brain just like you would if you were a gardener working a garden. Fourth, big idea related to that, mental hygiene. So, mental hygiene. We talked about Tim Sanders in Today we are Rich. We talked about the fact that he was a healthy thought nut and that you need to have a healthy mind diet. So just like you're very aware of what foods go into your mouth and your body, right. You need to be aware of what you're feeding your mind. Nice way to think about it. Well, here's another one. The mental hygiene. You shower and take care of your basic physical hygiene, hopefully. And if you don't, it's because you haven't taken care of your mental hygiene. You're feeling a little stressed or depressed. You just don't even have the energy to do that. Well, that's a mental hygiene issue. We want to clean our minds with the same attention and regularity that we clean our bodies. So simple idea, but a big one. And how do you do that? Well, you notice when you have negative thoughts. He's vigilant, like belligerently vigilant about keeping your mind right, not letting negative thoughts spend any time in your consciousness. Notice them, escort them in the toughness training for life. We talked about the fact that negative thoughts or negative feelings like a phone ringing, that are communicating a certain message. So take the message. You're feeling anxiety. Why? Oh, because I'm ignoring this. Okay. Let me take that note down. Let me do what it takes to resolve that anxiety and then get back to work and get into a positive state. Meditation is obviously a great way to practice mental hygiene. When you sit down, you meditate for 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes or whatever. It's literally like giving your consciousness, your mind a nice shower. You let all the negative thoughts bubble up and you witness them and let them go. It's literally like giving your mind a nice shower or a luxuriant bath. Fifth big idea to get your hygiene on. Fifth big idea is let life flow. As I mentioned in the introduction, Holmes is all about letting the divine within us, flow through us, en theos, God within. When we do that. And again, this is why we do everything in my work is to help us connect to the highest within ourselves more consistently so that can shine with a radiant enthusiasm. And he says you need to let it flow. If you have a 2 inch pipe, you can only allow 2 inches of water to flow through that. Now, there might be an infinite supply of water that could flow through it, but if you only have a 2 inch pipe, that's all you get. If you go to the ocean with a thimble, that's all you're going to be able to capture is a thimble full of water or maybe a gallon full of water. But why not bring a barrel or why not bring the biggest object you can and fill it up? It's there, it's waiting for you. Orson Swett Marden described it as candle power. Right. Early 1900s, candle power was how they described the wattage in that era, right, of an electric light bulb. He said, look, the electricity is there, it can give you a ton. But if you're only a five candle power light bulb, that's all you can handle. If more tries to come through, you're going to blow up. You may have experienced that by being really inspired by life and everything's great, but then you kind of fall flat the next day. You can't sustain that level of enthusiasm. Why is that? Because we need to build the structures by doing our best, such that we can allow more of that positive energy to come through us more consistently. We need to increase our wattage. So we go from being a 10 watt flickery bulb that sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, to 100 watt, to a 250 watt, to a thousand plus watt lighthouse bulb, whatever the wattage is of those. But you get the idea and you do that again through consistency on the fundamentals, showing up, taking steps forward again. And again and again and letting that essence flow through. There you go. Mental hygiene. Mental gardens. Tend yours. Do your best, go arete and flip on the switch consistently. Doesn't matter how long the room's been dark. Flip on the light and experience the goodness that comes with that. Alright. Hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that Philosopher's Notes TV episode. If so, I think you'll enjoy everything else we offer at BrianJohnson me. Two basic things one our free newsletter. It's called the Optimizer. 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