One of the hardest things for anyone is to know themselves.
And not knowing yourself is the cause, not just correlation, of the most misery.
Why you don’t know yourself? Thousands of reasons… knowing yourself also obeys the Anna Karenina Principle.
This article will not be about that. This article will be about the price you pay for not knowing yourself.
What makes Sophie cry?
Some people like rants, others hate them. For many listening to rants is entertainment. For others ranting, yours or someone else’s is a release, like a good dump.
I hate rants, I hate ranting, and yet, occasionally getting what bugs you out to the open can be therapeutic. This article… I guess, is a rant.
First let me digress… If you search this question of google, you’ll find out that not many people even know what this question means, what awareness means… They confuse and collapse consciousness and awareness… It’s like they don’t know shit from shinola…
OK, back on track: If you went back to your high school class and were given the opportunity to pick one person. And you would get 10% of their earnings for your lifetime. How would you pick? Would you pick yourself?
There are many criteria you can choose by.
According to the 67 steps, the level of awareness is the most telling of how well a person will do in life.
Read the rest of the article
The other day I used the free community van to get to stores I cannot get to easily on my own.
Note: in the illustrations I am not taking sides. I am illustrating that there is confusion and disagreement in what race. what is racist. what is racism, and what it does is it makes people rigid, lie about what they think, and vote for Trump… ugh.
The driver of the van has a PhD in sociology He asked me if it bothered me if he continued to listen to NPR radio, National Public Radio. There was a public debate on Trump and on the question whether he was a racist or not.
Read the rest of the article
Want to get more? Grab less… The counter intuitive way to “do” life that works.
I once had a very good friend. We met in Landmark, and all we talked about is Landmark stuff… Landmark Education works through distinctions… and it is hard to explain what a distinction is, but I will give you examples, hopefully you can get it. One distinction this friend of mine was in love with is “slow down.” And another one, an outgrowth from there: “chew on it” or “chew”. I knew this guy for about seven years, and these were the distinctions that he spent all his time practicing and deepening. Exactly the opposite of what most people do.
When it comes to your life, Are you a race car driver or a hop-into-the car grocery shopper
Said in another way: If Your Life Were A Car, Who Is Driving Your Life?
This article is about your relationship with your life. It is fundamental, it is at the root of you never amounting to all you can be, it is at the root of why most people can only evolve a little bit in a lifetime (many go backwards!)
Mastering this area of life is the difference between a winner and a loser, and it is so subtle, that without someone pointing it out to you, you would notice no difference.
Let’s start at the beginning: in life you accomplish some stuff (right?) and don’t accomplish some other stuff. You win some races, and you lose some others.
Let’s call all the stuff that you get done an accomplishment, and all the stuff that you don’t (but would like to have done) stuff that you don’t accomplish. OK?
Read the rest of the article
It was 1991. Georgia… some miles from Atlanta, in a hunting lodge. November. Communication Commando Course.
Just the name was enough to put the fear of god in me. But then they ushered me in this little room where I needed to answer some questions about myself, name, age, where I live, who I live with… in front of a camera.
Now, by that time I had been on television twice, seen and recognized by millions of people. And yet, I was terrified.
What was I afraid of?
This is what this article is about… what is it that you are afraid of, that you cannot tell what it is, but it is as real as that if they keep you underwater long enough, you’ll be dead. Dead dead….
Read the rest of the article
I am working on something important to me. In fact two things I have two things I am working on: what I teach and how to put myself in the position to have more people to teach… These are important things to me.
So I get up, as always, shuffle to my computer, make my first come of tea with hemp and butter, and tackle my students’ emails…
But then I make a mistake. I look at my email from Medium, and I can feel as I am being dragged away from what is important to me. I am not on the strait and narrow… I am on someone else’s agenda.
And although that agenda may be informative, helpful, close to mine… it is still their agenda… and the further I go from what is important to me, the harder it will be to find my way back there.
If you are in the 67 step coaching program, what you said with that, signing up, that what is important to you is becoming all you can be, by doing tiny steps converging in a life worth living.
Or here is another question for you: Who are you?
If you asked back: What do you mean? you did the smart thing. Because the question: who are you? can be asked from so many vantage points, we can spend hours exploring that.
Read the rest of the article
I wrote this article five years ago. I never published it… Enjoy.
I am using my squeamishness to learn from it.
How I find the next leg of our journey.
I turn a controversy into a guidance.
How I keep on growing… and you could too… but you forget to do it.
I always take a mental note when I quit watching a certain movie. A movie that until that point I liked…
Today that diligence in watching has led me to a rule, and a principle I didn’t know about.
I am trying to remove a rule every day… this is a new practice I’ve started)
I can’t tolerate, can’t watch, can’t stomach someone putting mind altering drugs, heroin, crack, etc. in their bodies.
It has something to do with my ancestry. Being of a tribe who, unless we were aware, and awake, and beware, were killed, annihilated, burned to the ground.
I probably take it to the extreme.
In 1970 I was offered two full ride scholarships to Princeton, and another University I didn’t even consider. I spent almost a year trying to decide, and in the end the usual scene from an American movie: the husband arrives home. Puts down his hat and walks to the drink cabinet, makes two drinks and walks to his wife and says, then: hello.
Really, I did not want to study in a country that was running from being sober, from being aware, from being all there.
I am not against drinking… I just don’t drink. And don’t want to deal with people who like to live in unreality.
It is mighty strange, if you ask me how I ended up with nearly every client and student a TLB 1.
Freud says in Civilization And Its Discontents:
The life imposed on us is too hard for us to bear: it brings too much pain, too many disappointments, too many insoluble problems. If we are to endure it, we cannot do without palliative measures. (As Theodor Fontane told us, it is impossible without additional help.)
Of such measures there are perhaps three kinds:
–powerful distractions, which cause us to make light of our misery,
–substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it, and
–intoxicants, which anaesthetize us to it.
Something of this sort is indispensable. Voltaire has distractions in mind when he ends his Candide with the advice that one should cultivate one’s garden; another such distraction is scholarly activity.
Substitutive satisfactions, such as art affords, are illusions that contrast with reality, but they are not, for this reason, any less effective psychically, thanks to the role that the imagination has assumed in mental life.
Intoxicants affect our physical constitution and alter its chemistry.
It is not easy to define the position that religion occupies in this series. We shall have to approach the matter from a greater distance.
Now, after reading again Freud’s words: I have, I experience the same aversion to the other ‘palliative measures.’
xxxI am observing my students. Not much escapes my awareness.
One of the things I noticed, that what’s missing from
Read the rest of the article
