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THE PERFECTION OF THE MOMENT

If you operate out of the foregoing assumptions, you will begin to recognize how every moment becomes a perfect indication of your state of development and what you need to do to improve yourself.

For example, let's look at a hypothetical trader whose goal is to make money from his trading. He perceives what he believes to be an opportunity to do so and puts on a trade. However, he is operating out of a fear of being wrong. As a result, his fear will act on his perception of information to block from his awareness any evidence that would indicate that he is wrong. Remember that fear is a natural mechanism to warn us of threatening conditions so that we can avoid them. Now what is threatening about being wrong? In this case, as in most all cases, it is all the accumulated pain and humiliation inside of him from his past experiences.

 If the market—or anyone else for that matter—presents him with any information that conflicts with what he wants, his fear will cause him to distort it perceptually or he will angrily scream at the person who offered such information "Don't tell me that" so that he can avoid feeling the pain already inside of him from his past. In effect, his fears will create for him the very experience that he is trying to avoid because he is avoiding information that would indicate what the markets have to offer in relationship to what he wants or expects. If the market does move against him, he probably won't confront the evidence until the pain of doing so is less than the pain of not confronting it, meaning that his losses accumulate to the point where it is easier to admit he is wrong than to suffer any more losses.

A goal is an intent that we have projected out into the environment. It is a need to be fulfilled in some future moment. The need arises out of a recognition of some lack. Recognizing the need automatically focuses our attention to scan the environment for ways (paths) to fulfill that need. The environmental information we perceive (quality and depth of insight) will be a function of the number of distinctions we can make minus any information that gets blocked by any fears we are operating out of. How we express ourselves to fulfill the need will be function of (1) our perceptions, (2) the steps that we choose as a result of those perceptions, and (3) the skills we have developed minus any conflicting beliefs, memories, and associations, making each moment that we interact with the environment a perfect indication of what we know and how well we can act on what we know.

When we refuse to acknowledge or accept the perfection of each moment in our lives, we deny ourselves access to the information that we need to expand ourselves. Any skill that we need to learn to express ourselves more effectively has a true starting point. To find that true starting point requires our acceptance of each outcome as a reflection of the sum total of who we are so that we can first identify what skill needs to he learned and how we might go about the task of learning it. Without this true starting point, we will operate from a base of illusion.

Illusions result from beliefs that we know more than we do and can do more than we can. Illusions are the difference between accepting each moment as a perfect indication of who we are so that we can identify what we need to learn to move forward and believing we are already perfect the way we are, in which case we need learn nothing. Certainly if any of us were in a perfect state of knowledge and abilities, then we would never need to complain about anything or make excuses, rationalizations, or justifications for why things didn't turn out as we planned.
Every "should have," "could have," "would have," or "if only" is an indication of the degree of illusion in which we are indulging ourselves. If we could have, we would have, meaning that at each moment we are doing the best we can when taking into account all the components—both conscious and subconscious—that affect what we perceive and do.

Acknowledging and accepting this perfection will always give us our true starting point to indicate what we need to learn so that we can perceive the conditions differently or what resources we need to develop to respond differently.

If our hypothetical trader wants to develop into an effective and consistently successful trader, he will need to engage in some selfimprovement. He will need to understand that the market is always right and that he can profit from that tightness if he doesn't impose a rigid mental structure on its behavior. He needs to release himself from his fear of being wrong so that he can observe the market's behavior from an objective perspective. Otherwise, his fear of being wrong will have the effect of making him wrong. He will also need to establish some definite trading rules to guide his own behavior and learn how to adhere to those rules. If he had been operating out of a definite set of trading rules he would have never let the loss accumulate sufficiently that his pain would take him out of the trade. If, however, he refuses to acknowledge and accept his current state of development by blaming the market for his losses or trying to convince himself that somehow he wasn't responsible for what he ended up with, then he would be indulging himself in illusion. He would be denying who he is and, in effect, cutting himself off from the information he needs to become who he wants to be.

We have to be willing to confront the truth about ourselves so that we can confront the truth outside of ourselves. The less illusion we indulge ourselves in, the more our perceptions of the outside environment will reflect the actual conditions, because we won't be blocking so much available information. The less we block, the more we learn. The more we learn, the easier it is to anticipate how the outside environment will react or respond under any given set of conditions. Otherwise, we will not allow ourselves to perceive in the environment what we refuse to know about ourselves.

None of us likes to acknowledge what we perceive to be our weaknesses. Yet it is exactly what we need to do to grow beyond them.

Confronting the truth in the environment or the truth about ourselves is no more painful than are the forced awarenesses that result from these illusions. It's just more immediate. However, when we do confront what is inside of us, it is the first step in the process of breaking a cycle of dissatisfaction to turn it into an expansive cycle of success. What better form of goal achievement could there be than to confront conditions as they exist, identify what we need to learn to operate most effectively, and then go about the task of learning it, making our adjustments along the way?  

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