Power4Change ebook

Marek Kamiński

POWER4CHANGE

Instytut Marka Kamińskiego

“Being is not accessible to reason…it becomes reason through actions.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands

All rights reserved. Unauthorized distribution of the entirety or portion of this book in any form will violate the copyright of this publication.

Copyright © Marek Kamiński 2021

English translation and proofreading: Tom Geba

Editing: Barbara Gancarz-Wójcicka

Proofreading for the first Polish draft: Adriana Urgacz-Kuźniak

Illustrations: Magdalena Alszer (based on hand-drawn illustrations by the Author)

E-book: Michał Latusek

ISBN 978-83-958861-5-7

If you have any remarks or simply want to contact with the autor, please send email at: [email protected]

or join Marek Kamiński on social media:

@MarekKaminskiExplorer

@marekkaminskiexplorer

@MarekKaminski

@Marek Kamiński Explorer

@Marek Kamiński

CONTENTS

WHY?

1. The Elements

1.1 Truth is the measure of all possible worlds

1.2 Intuition helps us make choices and decisions

1.3 God is the awareness of something greater than man and the world

1.4 I am the one who thinks, acts, walks and sleeps

1.5 Visualisation is creation using all available senses

2. The Principles

2.α. The principle of balance

2.β The principle of conservation of energy

2.γ. The principle of the paradox

2.δ. The principle of the uncertainty of language

2.ε The principle of less is more

2.ζ The principle of flexible determination

3. The practices

3.1. Acceptance, gratitude and mindfulness

3.2. The Energy of Words

3.3. Resilience, courage and humility

3.4. Narrowing down

4. The five steps

4.1. Step One: Discover your Polaris

4.2. Step Two: The roadmap

4.3. Step Three: It’s the road, not the destination

4.4. Step Four: Polar opposites

4.5. Step Five: Know Yourself

5. The rituals

6. The pathways

Appendix

Acknowledgements

About the author

Bibliography

My special symbols

The greek alphabet

WHY?

The world is change itself. Sometimes changes are almost unnoticeable, everything occurs at a snail’s pace and we think that tomorrow will be the same as today. Or we believe the future will differ only in miniscule details. Some say: “nothing new under the sun.” Sometimes time speeds up and rushes like a raging river. Suddenly, the world we know so well becomes completely alien to us. It looks differently and works differently, while the future that seemed all but a consequence of the present becomes an enigma. One moment, we seem to think we’ve gotten to understand the world so well, we’ve become accustomed to it and comprehend it completely, and then one variable changes our reality, every area of our lives, rendering the next week, month or year impossible to divine.

Change is the essence of the world, while our experience-based behaviours, wisdom accrued over a lifetime, and blueprints of coping with reality and with time that is about to come turn out of little or no use. Fear engulfs us and suddenly we no longer know if we’ll make it in the future, what our life will look like and whether we’ll be able to provide for our loved ones and for ourselves.

What is essential for a sailor to survive an oncoming storm?

Their skills, competences and know-how about the reality around them. The sailor cannot influence the weather, the intensity or direction of the wind, nor the height of the waves. When the elements are raging, the sailor doesn’t get a say about the condition and seaworthiness of the vessel they are aboard, nor their food, water and fuel supply. They can’t replace their crew — like it or not, they will have to face the storm together. They would have had plenty of influence on the above factors a week, a month or a year before the event. Perhaps even the day before. They could’ve chosen another ship, a different crew, a new destination. They also could’ve decided not to sail in the first place.

But now the storm has come, and many things are now outside of the sailor’s influence. But they can still manage the resources on hand and put them to the best possible use. If they’re not alone, their crew will weather the storm and thrive, as long as the right decisions are made.

Expressions like ‘to stand up to’ and ‘to face’ may at first imply a confrontation with nature, going against the reality we have found ourselves in. But standing up to something can carry other meanings as well. It could imply that we’re able to use the energy of the elements to survive and keep going towards a goal we’ve chosen.

Standing up to something doesn’t mean declaring war on every part of the reality we’re in. It means choosing to act in a way that captures the momentum and carries us towards a destination we’ve set earlier or one we’re defining presently.

The Chinese word for ‘crisis’ consists of two characters that mean ‘danger’ and ‘chance’. The world and our lives alike offer us difficult choices and sometimes even painful defeats, with every such occurrence bringing with it these two components, risk and opportunity. The way to a new solution may lie off the beaten path, be turbulent and even demand major changes in our lives.

Coping with change is a path and change is like going through a door when we don’t really know what’s waiting on the other side. When we’re dealing with non-linear change in our world, there are numerous doors and paths to go through, which means making a lot of choices with limited time and incomplete data.

There are many important words and concepts on this road. Understanding them and the wealth of consequences they carry, reaching under their surface and penetrating the nature of the paradox hidden within them will help us navigate, overcome challenges and reach our desired goal or destination. Keep in mind that during the journey the goal itself may change.

These words are: Me, dreams, reality, values, destination, roadmap, visualisation, mindfulness, acceptance, gratitude, failure, success, falling, hope, one, limitations, fear, anxiety, motivation, intuition, destiny, presence, structure, metrics, method and habit.

The questions we’re going to ask are important too. Sometimes they’re more important than the answers. Answers change and will continue to change, but the questions remain the same. Sometimes new questions can pop up, but it pays to recognise the significance of simple questions and keep coming back to them.

The ability to ask questions is paramount.

Find one simple question and ask yourself that question every day.

The three simple questions worth asking are:

• Who am I?

• What are my values?

• What is most important to me?

There are also principles that guide our knowledge and our path. These will help us deal with chance encounters and new information better and faster. The fewer the principles and the simpler they are, the better.

The two sentences we can begin with are:

• The road is more important than the destination.

• Know yourself.

The world is change, which brings with it energy in the form of words, events, people and information — and that energy changes our life trajectory. This can happen consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly.

Here lies the question: does being aware of the energy of change, being mindful and goal-oriented and knowing ourselves to some extent allow us to harness that energy and use it to go where we want to go?

I’ll answer this question a bit later, by first expanding on and explaining the meaning of the words, questions and values I mentioned earlier. The core part of my answer will centre around the Polaris1 Method, which I discovered and developed on my journey to the true North – the North Pole.

I set off on a journey to reach the North Pole, but I ended up discovering myself and realising that the real destination was myself.

My method has given me the strength to keep re-orienting myself to the destination I had resolved to conquer and to reach numerous destinations – the different Polaris – in my life.

Are you ready to obtain the power4change and begin the journey to your Polaris?

Then I say to you fram!2, which is Norwegian for ‘forward’. Onward, then!

THE ROAD TO POLARIS

1. THE ELEMENTS

Since I was a child, I’ve been a keen observer of the outside world and my own being, my inner self. I credit this to the chance occurrences and failures I’ve experienced and finding myself in new environments and new realities.

As a kid, I didn’t have enough knowledge and data to make informed decisions. Thanks to reading books, and my personal experience, I gathered that the grown-ups and peers around me didn’t always tell the truth. Despite that, I always felt like I could trust people, the world and myself. There is no conflict in the approach that you can generally trust people while being aware that they will sometimes lie to you.

When looking for the core elements that were important to me, that were unchanging and that I could rely on to guide me through the unknown, ever-changing and often alien world, I discovered truth, intuition and God.

For as long as I can remember, I would always try to not only think, but also understand what my thought process was like. Even when I wasn’t always able to name them, the three elements I’ve listed above had always been with me, no matter the circumstances I was in. Like three stars in the heavens, they would offer me guidance and aid when I needed it.

Truth, intuition and God are my foundations, the three cornerstones I was built upon. I discovered these foundations before I even began to know myself.

This is where it all began.

1.1 Truthis the measure of all possible worlds

I admit that, at times, I would wander off the path of truth in search of easy shortcuts. But, in the end, I would try to get back on it, because I would always know where to find it.

1.2 Intuition helps us make choices and decisions

Intuition has been one of the few constants in my ever-changing world and I’ve always felt I could depend on it.

1.3 God is the awareness of something greater than man and the world

God is that which is unspeakable, impenetrable and unimaginable, and yet it is present. You can hear Him and speak to Him. You can talk to Him in different ways.

He has many names. Some people prefer to use the term ‘Universe’ and I’ll stick to this word from now on, so as not to use His name in vain.

My road to the North Pole began with these three elements. Soon after I began to discover the next one: Me.

1.4 Iam the one who thinks, acts, walks and sleeps

I would be joined by another, who would ask me questions, observe me and give me suggestions in the form of thoughts and conclusions.

Perhaps this dialogue within me had been influenced by my six-month stay at the hospital when I was just five years old? Back then, I was told by other children that Mum and Dad would never come back, and I would be alone forever. Perhaps that’s when the other appeared, to help me deal with being alone among other people. The other doesn’t have a name. He, she or it isn’t part of me and I have never attempted to name it. It’s simply there.

As I’m writing these words, my intuition tells me I should call it ‘the First One’, because it’s always been around, even before I came into existence. I’ll use that name from now on.

Through constant questions and suggestions, the First One allowed me to explore the meaning of I – its limits, what is important to it and how it works. Slowly, over time, I’ve become accustomed to the inner workings of I and me. The First One taught me how I react to the outside world and its affairs, and how they can be shaped and influenced.

It’s hard to believe how malleable I can beand how many personalities can be moulded from the same material when I am guided by so many principles! The First One took me on a journey into I, a journey that turned out to be infinite. Thanks to the First One, new knowledge, ideas and sentences began to manifest within me. Sometimes I felt like they had always been there and had been waiting for me to discover them, while sometimes I reasoned that perhaps the First One had brought them from another dimension.

It was thanks to the First One, all the books I had been reading and the events that had been brought upon me by the outside world, that my journey within myself could truly begin. It turned out that I wasn’t empty, nor was I a desolation or impoverished.

I discovered that the world of I is just as interesting and tangible as the outside world. It can be explored and even fallen in love with. I don’t mean to say one needs to fall in love with themselves but fall in love with the world entered through the door that says ‘I’, provided one isn’t afraid to open it.

Thanks to my stay at the hospital, at an age that would prove so crucial for my development, as my life foundations and scaffolding took shape, I managed not to be swayed by the belief that the outside world is paramount, that the only thing that matters in life is your reputation and success in the outside world. Thanks to my brief separation from the outside world, I skipped that lesson. After that, it was simply too late.

Had the First One not appeared in my life on its own, I would’ve invented him as a role model sometime later in life (you can do the same). It was a ground-breaking paradigm shift, a Copernican revolution in my mind.

The First One slowed down the merry-go-round of the outside world and convinced me to hop on!

Let’s sum up this zeroth step in my journey to the North Pole — in the beginning there was the First One and then I appeared. With the First One’s guidance and suggestions, I began to discover and shape my world. There was a problem with reality, because the real world turned out to be the world within, still well-connected to the outside, though now existing a bit further in the background.

At the age of 12, I would go out in the evening to get some milk, which required walking through a dark park and up an equally shadowy hill. I was scared and, in order not to think about my fear, I imagined I was on an adventure with my childhood book heroes. I would pretend I was sailing around the world aboard the Nautilus with Captain Nemo, trekking with Roald Amundsen to the South Pole and climbing Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. I would then go a step further and imagine I was embarking on these journeys on my own: at age 14 I was the youngest person to sail a yacht around the world, at age 16 I conquered the North and South Poles and then I climbed the highest mountain in the world.

That’s how I eventually discovered the fifth element to reaching my destination — visualisation

1.5Visualisation is creation using all available senses

Visualisation encompasses seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting every event and process experienced during the journeys, meetings and conversations carried out in our world, in the world of I. Visualisation can be a roadmap to the goals and dreams within this world, and to any of their stages and milestones.

Using a few examples, I’ll show you how I discovered the power of visualisation during my journey to the North Pole. I’ll then explain how the process of visualising works.

As a child, I began to use the power of visualisation intuitively to access those elements of the outside world that were unavailable to me. For instance, I would dream of sailing around the world and doing so as soon as possible. I had read in books that being the first to achieve something — or doing the seemingly impossible — tends to draw the attention and support of other people, so I dreamed of breaking world records and setting the bar really high. I set myself a defined goal that hadn’t yet been realised by anyone — to sail the world as the youngest person in the world, at age 14 — carrying it out in my mind.

Using parts of the books that I had read, I would construct my journey step by step, scripting the entire road to setting off and the actual cruise. For visualisation to work, it was important for it to entail the journey from square one (where I had been at the time) to reaching my dream destination (or even a day later). For any part of my journey that wasn’t so obvious, I would make up some content, even if the map was blank to begin with.

In the above example, my mind went through all the motions required to prepare to sail around the world and then do it. These steps involved joining a sailing club, getting a yacht licence, pitching an idea for a cruise, negotiating vessel lease; and then I would be on my way, navigating Cape Horn, talking to seagulls, eating spaghetti alla puttanesca and almond shortbread; and then at last, I would reach my port of destination, drop the line, jump off the yacht and then, finally, doze off to peaceful sleep in my own bed, in my family home.

I visualised myself sailing around the world maybe a hundred times. Most often, I would visualise not the cruise itself, for it wasn’t a mystery to me, but the road from the here and now to being at sea. I knew enough about sailing from books and films. I was more fascinated by the script I had to write, to make it so that a teenager from a small Polish town and an average, not-so-well-off family would, within two years, find himself aboard a yacht named Hope and set sail on a solo voyage around the world.

Because the First One had been observing me, asking questions and suggesting answers, I instinctively knew that these imaginary voyages around my inner world were good. By that time, my daily milk runs had become engaging and my fear of the dark had vanished, for how could I fear the dark when, in my mind, I was sailing at night among the roaring waves the size of a house! The wisdom and experience gained during those fictitious endeavours could be applied in my everyday life, with practical applications in the here and now.

Visualising every cruise required obtaining knowledge from the outside world, from books and by talking to others, allowing me to fill the gaps that would appear when I didn’t know what to do next. That’s how I explored my capacities, observed myself and got to know myself better. When I reached my inner self, I realised it was far from empty. My inner self was not a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper. There was wisdom to be found. Perhaps some of that wisdom had already been there since the beginning of my existence or perhaps it trickled into me in a way I failed to notice. It used a path beyond my consciousness, beyond the I channel, which connects me to the knowledge outside of me.

One way or another, I discovered that my imagined expeditions around the world, my solo winter climbs to Mount Everest and my treks to the North and South Pole in one calendar year were good experiences across the board. I resolved to continue and improve the practice of visualisation.

When I shared my inner world adventures and ponderings with the outside world, most people would disregard them. Intuitively, I found there to be more truth within than on the outside.

It’s true that the mind perceives its thoughts as reality. The mind can definitely tell the inner and outer realities apart, but the border between these worlds is a fine line. For the mind, thoughts are factual. These facts are things, trees, other people that the mind knows exist ‘on the outside’, but also concepts and dreams that the mind definitely knows exist within.

The more these thoughts are grounded in the outside world, rooted in its qualities (one could say they are wrapped in the outside world, in the here and now, they are tangible to the senses), the more they can be manifested in the outside world and reality.