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  • Deep Connection With Others Makes You Grow As A Person

    My soul needs to connect with those who are also awake. I do not understand how people can exist each day without a true connection. No, I do not want to talk about illness or money. I want to talk about love, passion, and spiritual things.

    Soul connections are not often found and are worth every bit of fight left in you to keep.

    Deep connection with others makes you grow as a person. And then when you have taken the lessons you can leave each other with LOVE and GRATITUDE.

    We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honour the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.

    Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.

    Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged and healed.

    ‘Soulmate’ is an overused term, but a true soul connection is very rare and very real.

  • Control The Options: Get Other’s To Play With The Cards You Deal

    To deceive people, seem to give them a meaningful choice. But sharply limit their options to a few that work in your favour regardless of which they choose. Your victims will feel in control, but you’ll pull the strings.

    We all like having choices, and often don’t notice that the choices we have can be very limited, whether in elections, our jobs, or the marketplace. We accept this, even though it isn’t fair, because the alternative, unlimited freedom of choice, is too overwhelming to contemplate. A limited range is easier to deal with and provokes less anxiety.

    The fact that most people aren’t bothered by limited choices creates great opportunity for deception. People won’t feel they’re being deceived if they have at least a small amount of choice.

    Here are some ways to control the options for your benefit:

    Spin The Choices: Henry Kissinger often used this technique with President Nixon. He’d propose three or four choices presented so that his favored option always looked best compared to the others. This works well with an insecure boss like Nixon.

    Advocate The Opposite: Present what you don’t want as your favored option, and people who are contrarians will choose the opposite (what you do want). This technique works with children as well.

    Alter The Playing Field: In the 1860s, John. D Rockefeller set out to create an oil monopoly. If he tried to buy up smaller oil companies they would figure out what he was doing and fight back. Instead, he began secretly buying up the railway companies that transported the oil. When he attempted to take over a particular company, and met with with resistance, he reminded them of their dependence on the rails. Rockefeller altered the playing field so that the only options the small oil producers had were the one’s he gave them. In this tactic your opponents know their hand is being forced, but it doesn’t matter. The technique is effective against those who resist at all costs.

    The Weak Man on the Precipice: Cardinal de Retz, served as an unofficial assistant to the Duke of Orleans, who was notoriously indecisive. It was a constant struggle to convince the duke tot ake action — he would weight the options, and wait til the last moment. But Retz discovered a way to handle him: He would describe all sorts of dangers, exaggerating them as much as possible, until the duke saw a yawning abyss in every direction except one: the one Retz was pushing him to take. Work on their emotions — use fear and terror to propel them into action. Try reason and they will always find a way to procrastinate.

    Controlling the options has one main purpose: to disguise yourself as the agent of power and punishment. The tactic works best, then, for those whose power is fragile, and who cannot operate too openly without incurring suspicion, resentment and anger. Even as a general rule, however, it is rarely wise to be seen as exerting power directly and forcefully, no matter how secure or strong you are. It is usually more elegant and more effective to give people the illusion of choice.

    There are situations in which it is to your advantage to allow your rivals a large degree of freedom: As you watch them operate, you give yourself rich opportunities to spy, gather information, and plan your deceptions.

  • Play on People’s Need to Believe to Create a Cult like Following

    People have an overwhelming desire to believe in something. Become the focal point of such desire by offering them a cause, a new faith to follow. Keep your words vague but full of promise; emphasize enthusiasm over rationality and clear thinking. Give your new disciples rituals to perform, ask them to make sacrifices on your behalf. In the absence of organized religion and grand causes, your new belief system will bring you untold power.

    Not only will your followers worship you, but they will also defend you from your enemies and voluntarily take on the work of enticing others to join your fledgeling cult. This kind of power will lead you to another realm.

    This phenomenon can be observed through many large celebrities and influences. Their dedicated fan base will be there to defend them whenever someone speaks down upon them.

    You might think it a gargantuan task to create such a following, but in fact, it is fairly simple. As humans, we have a desperate need to believe in something, anything. This makes us eminently gullible. Dangle in front of us some new cause, elixir, get-rich-quick scheme, or the latest technological trend or art movement and we leap from the water as one to take the bait

    The History Of Charlatanism

    Charlatans have been around for centuries. They sold elixirs that would promise immortality and superior health and peddled alchemic shortcuts to wealth. “They originally focused on small groups — until, by accident, they stumbled on a truth of human nature: The larger the group they gathered around themselves, the easier it was to deceive because people were more emotional and less able to reason. Any deficiencies in the charlatan’s ideas were hidden by the zeal of the mass. Passion swept through the crowd like a contagion, and they reacted violently to anyone who dared to spread a seed of doubt. Through decades of studying this dynamic and experimenting the charlatans perfected the science of attracting and holding a crowd, moulding the crowd into followers and the followers into a cult.

    5 Ways to Organize Your Cult-Like Following

    1. Find a way both elevating and comforting.
    2. Create rituals for your followers.
    3. Organize them into a hierarchy, ranking them in grades of sanctity, and giving them names and titles that resound with religious overtones
    4. Ask them for sacrifices that will fill your coffers and increase your power.
    5. To emphasize your gathering’s quasi-religious nature, talk and act like a prophet.

    In the late 1700s, a French doctor, Franz Mesmer created a mass following with claims he could cure people of all ills by using magnetic forces. He invited people to his apartment for demonstrations; with a background of incense and harp music, people sat around a pool of supposedly magnetic water, from which rods protruded. Visitors touched their bodies with the rods and held hands with their neighbours to channel the magnetic force.

    Mesmer’s assistants sprinkled water on participants and rubbed the supposedly healing fluid into the skin. Participants experienced trance-like states or hysteria and felt a strange power moving through their bodies.

    Word of Mesmer’s powers spread, and his fame and wealth grew, even attracting royalty. A cult of “Mesmerism” was born and societies formed around the country to experiment with magnetism. Eventually, however, a French commission investigated and debunked his practices and theories. Mesmer’s reputation was ruined and he retired, but a few years later his cult revived and spread again. Mesmer knew how to create a cult-like following.

    With the right mix of spectacle, message, and religious fervour, you can get people to believe anything, and make you powerful and wealthy.

  • Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability

    Because people crave predictability and a sense of control, you can throw others off balance and even terrify them by cultivating an air of unpredictability. While your opponents are stressing themselves out by trying the explain and anticipate what you’re doing, you can achieve your objectives almost unnoticed.

    Unpredictable, sudden events like tornadoes and flash floods terrify people, leaving them in fear of the next one, you can have a similar effect on people by cultivating an air of unpredictability.

    We want other people to be predictable, and we ourselves follow patterns and routines, out of laziness, a preference for comfort, or a desire to keep the peace. Animals follow patterns as well, which allows us to hunt them successfully.

    But unpredictability is an important tool for wielding power — by suddenly doing something no one expected you create fear and confusion, which keeps others off balance, allowing you room to manoeuvre. It may also prompt them to make mistakes.

    You can use this tactic effectively even if you are the underdog. For instance, during the Civil War General Stonewall Jackson confused and stymied the much larger Union forces that were marching on Richmond, by repeatedly moving north and then back south again. In response, Union General George McClellan slowed his forces, while trying to figure out what was going on, which gave the South time to reinforce Richmond.

    Understand: A person of power instils a kind of fear by deliberately unsettling those around him to keep the initiative on his side. You sometimes need to strike without warning to make others tremble when they least expect it.

    This reminds me of a story Tony Robins told in his book ‘Awaken The Giant Within’. Every time Tony would go on his walk he would give a particular homeless man some money. He decided to make this a habit. One instance when he went to reach for his wallet he found he didn’t have any cash on him. Tony apologized, but the homeless man became aggravated and upset. Tony had conditioned the homeless man to receive money every time he passed him. The one time the homeless man didn’t receive it, unstable emotion and a minor conflict resulted.

    If Tony had been more unpredictable with his actions and intermittently given money to the homeless man, than the above situation may have never occurred because he wouldn’t have known when to expect the stimuli. If the money was given sporadically then the habit is never created as your constantly left on edge not knowing when the next reward will come.

    Scrambling your patterns on a day-to-day basis will cause a stir around you and stimulate interest. People will talk about you, ascribe motives and explanations that have nothing to do with the truth, but that keeps you constantly in their minds. In the end, the more capricious you appear, the more respect you will garner. Only the terminally subordinate act in a predictable manner