It never occurs to the squirrel that it is an oak murdering machine.

Understanding Survival Part 1

This is going to be a two, maybe a 3-part mini series on survival.

And this topic here is going to be utterly foundational, utterly foundational

to any kind of personal development work that you ever do in your life and to any kind of spiritual work that you ever do.

This is the essence, this is the root of all behavior change in humans humans because all human behavior ultimately is rooted in

survival and by the time we're done with this mini series this will change how you

understand your entire life and how you see the lives of everybody around you.

Let me give credit here to Peter Ralston who's been a pioneer in this domain

and really instrumental in helping me to understand the extent and the importance of

survival in any kind of behavior change.

Also let me read a quote to you from Peter Uspensky. Now this is a different Peter not to be confused with Ralston

and he's got a great quote that goes right along with our theme here of survival.

Peter Rspensky says quote, man is a machine which reacts blindly to external forces and this being so he has no will and very little control of himself if any at all.

What we have to study therefore is not psychology but mechanics."

End quote.

I love that. and that's exactly what we're going to be discussing over the next two episodes is a lot of mechanics showing you just how mechanical you are.

This word mechanical is a really good word because it describes why people behave the way they behave. They behave very much like chimps or like

animals or like robots. And even though I can tell you that and you can agree

with me, the depth of it and the extent of it has not dawned on you yet until we really

go through these explorations and I'm going to give you some homework assignments that are

going to help you to start to discover just how mechanical you are in your life. And of course mechanical

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