We have to be willing to change

A seed is destroyed in the process of being a plant. We have to be willing to #change our old identity to transform into a new being. .. #quotes #inspiration

"Consciousness is everywhere"

 

 

Neuroscience Is Learning What Buddhism Has Known For Ages: "Consciousness is everywhere": 

 http://buff.ly/2gS5GfB 

 

 

 

Unchanging Man

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  Rory Sutherland ‏@rorysutherland
  Bernbach said it all, really......

  6 Jul 2014

Dover, England 

The Wisdom of Bill Bernbach

Despite access to more customer information than ever before product messages are clicking less often with customers. The inescapable truth is we know less about customers than we should, given the $6 billion a year companies spend trying to figure out what makes them tick.

Bill Bernbach, one of advertising’s greatest minds, would understand the problem:

“Human nature hasn’t changed for a million years. It won’t even change in the next million years. Only the superficial things have changed. It is fashionable to talk about the changing man. A communicator must be concerned with the unchanging man – what compulsions drive him, what instincts dominate his every action, even though his language too often camouflages what really motivates him.”

Bernbach was not a psychologist, but had an uncanny intuitive grasp of human behavior. While most of us may lack the intuitive competence of Bernbach, we can get to know our customers better by acquiring a deeper understanding of unchanging man. But we cannot get that understanding through traditional customer research.

Renown brain scientist Richard Restak has observed that "We have reason to doubt that full awareness of our motives, drives, and other mental activities may be possible." 
Cognitive scientists tell us that with the aid of new brain canning technology, they’ve learned that about 95 percent of the mental activity going into our decision-making takes place behind the curtains of consciousness. Yet, most consumer research concentrates exclusively on the contents of consumers’ conscious minds.

The roots of motivations lie beyond the knowing reach of our conscious minds. When people tell researchers’ why they do what they do, they can only speak to what appears on the screens of their conscious minds. Those images are often at odds with their more primal sources of motivations.

Marketing mostly ignores the silent 95 percent zone in the brain. Why? The “superficial things” that show up in the conscious mind are more visible, measurable and quantifiable. Companies feel more comfortable with the measurable, so they spend vast sums researching customers’ superficial attributes. Procter and Gamble alone conducts 4,000 to 5,000 customer studies a year.

It’s harder to quantify “what compulsions drive customers, what instincts dominate their every action.” To fathom the unchanging man requires understanding behavior at its roots in human biology.

Ever wonder how cravings develop? Be they for sex or chocolate, they are not consciously created. It’s 3:30 PM. Your energy is sagging. A small organ over your kidneys senses a sugar shortage and sets off a flow of neuropeptide Y to alert your brain of a need for carbs. The plea reaches your conscious mind as a craving for chocolate. You ponder whether to stick to your diet or give in, then say to yourself, “What the hell,” pop a piece of Godiva in your mouth and resolve to eat salad for dinner. You enjoy the moment by giving into the craving.

While you exercised free will (hopefully!) in reacting to the craving, the action you took had its roots in your biology. So it is with behavior in general. 

That’s lesson #1 in understanding unchanging man.

September 15, 2005 in Advertising, Consumer Behavior, Marketing | Permalink

 Link: http://agelessmarketing.typepad.com/ageless_marketing/2005/09/the_wisdom_of_b.html

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Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah

Leonard Cohen Credit Dominique Issermann

  Leonard Cohen: Darkness and Praise

By LEON WIESELTIER 
 NOV. 14, 2016 

The email from the boy began: “Did anything inspire you to create Hallelujah?"

Later that same winter day the reply arrived: 

“I wanted to stand with those who clearly see God’s holy broken world for what it is, and still find the courage or the heart to praise it. You don’t always get what you want. You’re not always up for the challenge. But in this case — it was given to me. For which I am deeply grateful.”

The question came from the author's son, who was preparing to present the hymn to his fifth-grade class. The boy required a clarification about its meaning. The answer came from the author of the song, Leonard Cohen.

Cohen lived in a weather of wisdom, which he created by seeking it rather than by finding it. He swam in beauty, because in its transience he aspired to discern a glimpse of eternity.

There was always a trace of philosophy in his sensuality.

He managed to combine a sense of absurdity with a sense of significance, a genuine feat.

He was a friend of melancholy but an enemy of gloom, and a renegade enamored of tradition.

Leonard was, above all, in his music and in his poems and in his tone of life, the lyrical advocate of the finite and the flawed. 

Leonard sang always as a sinner. He refused to describe sin as a failure or a disqualification. Sin was a condition of life. 

“Even though it all went wrong/ I’ll stand before the Lord of song/ With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah!”

The singer’s faults do not expel him from the divine presence. Instead they confer a mortal integrity upon his exclamation of praise. 

He is the inadequate man, the lowly man, the hurt man who has given hurt, insisting modestly but stubbornly upon his right to a sacred exaltation.

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”  

He once told an interviewer that those words were the closest he came to a credo.  

The teaching could not be more plain: fix the crack, lose the light.

  

Here is a passage on frivolity by a great rabbi in Prague at the end of the 16th century:

“Man was born for toil, since his perfection is always being actualized but is never actual,” 
he observed in an essay on frivolity.
“And insofar as he attains perfection, something is missing in him.  In such a being, perfection is a shortcoming and a lack.”

Leonard Cohen was the poet laureate of the lack, the psalmist of the privation, who made imperfection gorgeous.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/opinion/my-friend-leonard-cohen-darkness-and-praise.html?ribbon-ad-idx=3&src=trending

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