All posts by Sophie

Can you see without words? Can you love without words?

How deep does the rabbit hole go?

Helen Keller didn’t become human until she could connect things in reality with words. Does this mean that Adam and Eve weren’t human until they began naming the flora and the fauna of the garden? Yes.

Humanness is to put word between the thing and conscious awareness…

There is this popular conundrum. What was first, the chicken or the egg?

It is an interesting question, but not a thing depends on the answer. It is a ‘who cares?’ type of navel gazing question, taking the attention off more important things.

Famous Indian (from India) preach to relate to things without saying anything… Like look at a rose or look at a sunset and not name them…

Good luck with that.

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How did you end up in the quadrant of Beauty, Truth, Goodness, or Power?

How? You choose it… and you choose it by your early life experience.

Of course, it is not what happens to you, but what you say about is, is what is your life experience. And it is influenced by your intangible capacities, even at that early age.

Let’s see an example or comparing two similar incidents, with two different choices.

Little boy wants to go left in the street, parents want to go home, which is straight… parents go straight, little boy is left on the corner.
Little girl goes too slow for mother’s taste, or maybe she is running late. But the mother decides to go ahead at her own pace, and leaves the little girl in the street.

Obviously both kids were picked up and taken home.

The boy said: there is no truth. I have no power. I have to manipulate them better… I will choose beauty.
The girl said: I am heavy, I am worthless… I choose goodness. I don’t need to be carried. I’ll go it alone if I must.

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Case Study #4: Landmark Education and its programs

I first participated in what is now called Landmark Education back in 1985, the last weekend of August, in Haifa Israel.

I lived in an immigration hostel, I worked as an architect and town planner in Jerusalem and I was miserable.

In quick succession two Russian immigrants killed themselves: I knew and liked them both. One of them was so determined that she manage to hang herself from the window bars, even though the window sill was only about 20 inches… Knee high.
I was going to be next. Except that someone invited me to something on a Wednesday evening.

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Awareness… When you are here… be here. But you aren’t…

If you found out in which quadrant you chose to live in, beauty, truth, goodness or power… and now try to argue, or you are worried, or you are resigned… consider that you are just doing what you are doing: you want to be where you are not… or more precisely: you never what to be where you are, you never what to think what you are thinking, you never want to feel what you are feeling.

So you do what you are doing, think what you are thinking, feel what you are feeling only so-so… A student of mine coined the phrase: in the neighborhood of truth.

If you can’t physically stop doing what you are doing, etc. then you withdraw into the cave of your mind, and languish there.

It is a safe prison… more like a tomb. You don’t have to be with yourself.

Why don’t you want to be with yourself? Because when you look into yourself, you find evil inclination, you find ugly, and ultimately you find empty. Not empty as in nothing, but an abyss. You get scared and you run back to your periphery, where it is so busy, you don’t have time to even contemplate that there is nothing inside… that there is no you.

One of the big interruptions, potentially, are the times when you get sick.

When you are sick, your job is to be sick. And be sick. Allow the body to do the work, it is equipped, 90% of the time, to do the work with proper nutrition, proper hydration and no medication, not even herbal.
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What is the difference between identity and Self? Do you have a Self?

Let’s talk about identification a little more… the identification that gives you the illusion that you are a person, but in fact it what is standing between you and becoming a person.

So what is a person? A person is someone who has a consciousness, a Self, that guides their actions, their relationship to life. When you ask: who is he? show is she? what comes up is not what they do for a living, what awards they won, how well or poorly they do their job… but something deeper and constant… They are that everywhere, on the job, in the public, in the bedroom… everywhere.

If you identify yourself with stuff on the periphery of your being, on the horizontal plane, what you say about yourself, what you want people to know is that you have won an Emmy, three time…

Or that you have had HIV for twenty years going
Or that you are gay
Or that you are black

And alas, it leaves you with no Self. The stuff you identify with has no consciousness, and have no defining power on your character.
Let’s do a little quiz: Which of these people/characters have a self?

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How many people it takes to turn H.Sapiens into Human Being?


The title sounds like the beginning of a a joke, like how many philosophers does it need to change a lightbulb?

Four; one to change the light-bulb and three to say ‘Yes, Socrates,’ ‘Well done, Socrates,’ ‘Good job, Socrates.’ Funny as hell… but not exactly what I wanted to do… although that joke talks to me deeper than it probably talks to you.

But I digress…

This morning I stumbled on a page from Dan Millman’s ‘The Life You Were Born To Live’ a quasi Kabbalistic astrology book.

I have always disliked it, but today I came to hate it.
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What do you need to learn to become a Self?


No one looks at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as showing you what you need to work on next.

And given that only a minuscule percentage of the population ever reaches the higher levels of the needs, that is a stupid thing to do.

You don’t automatically advance to the higher levels, no matter how much “high” desire you have, no matter how empty you feel, how locked in you feel, how much you hate that you are meek, or abused, or have no freedom.

It takes work, courage, and ingenuity. f… RIGHT?

Ingenuity? You surely don’t have that. You can argue, you can fight, you can yell, you can complain, you can run away… but ingenuity? Not something you engage in.
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Without the Big Bundle I would be…


Some 10 days ago I ate some food from my suddenly broken refrigerator.

I was on a coaching call, so I was distracted. Turns out the meat was tainted and I fell ill.

Not your usual bacterial type of food poisoning where you get diarrhea and maybe vomit… no, this one was from dead bacteria… And it promptly proceeded to destroy my intestines.

Have you ever seen roaster red peppers? The charred skin over the succulent flesh of the pepper?

Imagine this happening in your intestines… and unless you can remove the charred skin, unless you can keep the “flesh” from being eaten alive, you are going to die.

Of course no sane medical doctor would know what to do with that, or even that this is what was happening, without cutting you open, and killing you by exposing that virgin “flesh” to pathogens.
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How To Stay Broke Forever


If you ever wondered where guidance comes from, here is a great example, from about 10 minutes ago.

In an email conversation, one of my “interns” was commiserating with me… because the refrigerator died again, and this time there is no excuse: it needs to be replaced.

But… in order to bring in a new one, I have to push stuff aside, clean the old one from now rotting stuff… and I feel very weak to even contemplate doing it.

So she says (my intern): “and everything feels heavy when you’re weak.”

Lucky formulation of a sentence… because it woke me up. This, what she says, is true across the board. It is true in the physical realm, and it is even more true in the “psychological” realm: if you feel weak you’ll do little.

And most people feel weak all the time. Their intellectual and physical exercise is from the car to the grocery store, or from the couch to the refrigerator.
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If you get successful you’ll have to give back? Why? What?


I used to know this guy, a chiropractor, who had a son with a wife he divorced.

He charged little for his sessions, made all his money in cash, all to avoid paying child support. He could not stand the idea that much of his work went to his ex wife.

When the boy was 16, he came to live with his father… and miracle of miracles, the father started to look how to get rich, how to make more money.

If you are successful you have to give back? Why? What? How?
He preferred to have nothing to having something to give…

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