Category Archives: Spiritual Practice

A counter-intuitive strategy you’ve been missing…


Sometimes you just do what you do… but you can’t see the forest for the trees… until someone puts a label on what you do… I am talking about myself…

This is what happened today… what a glorious day!

Because unless you see the forest… you may be doing the right thing, but

1. cannot teach others to do the same
2. cannot start a new “forest” in a different area

Create the habit first… That is the principle… Unless you know the principle, you can’t teach it… Unless you can teach it, it is not conscious enough… it is not guiding enough.

Most people start doing things wanting instant results. It is like building the penthouse first… It is not going to work.
Why is this revolutionary?
When you tackle one thing at a time, you are doing simple things easy. That is another principle: do simple things easy!
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Look for it where it is, not where the light is on

Everyone is looking for the lost key under the lamppost…
The current state of humanity is: no one is looking…
Instead, if they do anything, they try to think it out.

It is like trying to think out soup… no ingredients, none.

The only way to be effective in life is through looking IN REALITY, where the ingredients are… and not just for soup, but for everything.

The Streetlight Effect

The streetlight effect is a type of observational bias where people only look for whatever they are searching by looking where it is easiest. The search itself may be referred to as a drunkard’s search.

Taken from an old joke about a drunkard who is searching for something he has lost, the parable is told several ways but typically includes the following details:

A policeman sees a drunk man…
…searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, ‘this is where the light is.’
David H. Freedman apparently coined the phrase ‘streetlight effect,’ but the story and concept were used in the social sciences since at least 1964, by Abraham Kaplan, where he refers to this as ‘the principle of the drunkard’s search’

Science is divided. There are the Creationists who say that god created the universe, designed everything and all we can do is go with it.

And then there are the scientists who say: man is a machine, life is an accident, and their inquiry and methods are consistent with this context.
As you may notice, I am not going to support or argue with either of them: both of them are theories from the limited perspective of the human mind. They all look under the streetlight.
What I am intending to talk about is what both miss.
Although in my coaching practice I see it clearly that NO ONE IS LOOKING… even when all the pieces they should look for are on the board… they look inside, in their minds… supposing that the answer to any question is there… ugh… talk about ineffectiveness…

But the difference between the two camps is most visible, when they talk about intrinsic motivation.

That small part, or aspect of a human that isn’t connected to the mind, isn’t connected to anything physical.

Call it the spirit, the spark, the divine part of a human. It shines through the eyes of a child, and then slowly dims in most people…

That part that knows that you are imbued with something that doesn’t come from the survival game of the genes, from the horizontal plane of dog eat dog world.
That you are in the world but not of the world
But it is also not part of the ‘positive thinking’, pious, all mind stuff. It is NOT mind. It is not even brain. Not thinking. It is what can be called Consciousness.

It is what can be
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Worldviews: Tree of Knowledge knocking out the Tree of Life

Your worldview is invisible to you. It’s like the floor you walk on… the foundation of your life.
You need to understand that your dislike of certain people makes you a moron if you also decide that THEREFORE what they say must be stupid…

Or you like how someone looks, and therefore they must be smart. Ugh.

You need to be able to tell the difference between a person, an idea, a behavior, and see them as independent from each other… That what the person says is important. To look and choose with discernment, and after consideration.
Of course 99% of humanity was never asked to think…
…was never taught to think, and this discernment and this consideration I am asking for will not land as a valid request, because you can’t…

This is why in the past 3-4 days a good chunk of my followers sloughed off… unsubscribed, withdrew. They don’t agree with the worldview I talk about.

I remember when I was younger I also thought that being around people who believed reality different from me were like a disease I could catch because I listened to or read what they said.
I was young. And I didn’t feel safe in anything different from what I was told ‘the right worldview’ was.
I was a communist, or socialist, or Marxist… that was the right worldview in mid-20th century Hungary.

Worldview is like the floor you walk on. Any change in worldview makes your floor dissolve… so it’s frightening. Only the mentally tough risks it… And those snowflake people who left me and my teaching are not.

This article won’t be different: it will clearly delineate one worldview from another… and we’ll lose more snowflakes, I predict.

As people round the steps in the 67 step coaching program, as they begin the second cycle, they start to see new things, or they keep on seeing the same things…

Some see the things from memory. Comparing. ‘Knowing’. And some, a very few, from actually seeing.

Step two (in the 67 steps) introduces the idea of the Selfish Gene, and ess, an evolutionary stable strategy.
This point is where people diverge: one goes in the direction of the Tree of Knowledge, the other goes in the direction of the Tree of Life.
It is really amazing to watch them go, unaware that they chose because they are unaware of the other path.

In certain areas I recognize myself. I recognize the ‘there is only one right way’ view of the one who wears blinders, so they cannot look wide… they can see only where the ‘already always’ path lies. The worldview.

The view of the world, the view of people… and themselves among those people in that view of the world.

I will illustrate this with their own words… but before I do, I want to set down some principles:

Naturally, unmitigated by culture, society, memes, genes like to EXPERIMENT and arrive to new evolutionary stable strategies. Evolution, the desire for evolution is innate to the genes…  Evolved species start to use the edge effect: get more out of life.

Except
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How to build a life worth living, if yours is not like that

Today I got struck with an insight.

I have written 613 articles on building, that is roughly 10% of all my articles, and yet I have noticed that building didn’t, hasn’t become part of the vocabulary of clients and readers of my articles.

Why is that?

I am not sure, but I think that it is a mindset issue.
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How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives…

I am reading a book, The One Thing. Tai recommended it, but I had been resisting.

But like most of the books Tai recommends, it does have a kernel of gold… Maybe more than one kernel.

One of these is what he says about will power. Quite fascinating and very useful.
He says, that just like glycogen, brain food for thinking, will power uses energy, food, and can be depleted.
I don’t have to rely on will power, because about a year ago I started to reorganize my life to habitually do the things that serve me, and remove the opportunities for doing things that don’t serve me.

It did take will power to establish the habits, but I did it one at a time, and one at a time it was easier to see that the new habits served me.
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Spiritual Practice: ask What is it that I am not seeing? It gets you out of the mind

Most things that hide in plain sight are crucial to your success in life. You may be staring at them, but like a color blind person looking at the colored dots that hide the number… you cannot see.

Between you and me: you probably have never asked yourself “What is it I am not seeing?” have you?

Why don’t you ask, why don’t you don’t look?

If you think that you know everything: you won’t look.
If you think you see clearly what’s in front of you… you won’t look.

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The Law of 33%, or why you resist this as if your life depended on it?

One of the brilliant ideas from the 67 steps that hardly anyone considers as applying to them is the idea of spending at least one third of their discretionary time in the company of people who are ahead of them. Preferably by 20 years of experience and wisdom and results in a certain area of life.

These people will be able to teach you something, and you will feel small, ignorant, and maybe even worthless.

But you’ll have a chance to learn something useful.

Instead people prefer spending time with ignorant people they can feel smarter than. This is one of the main reasons you can continue feeling a lot more valuable than you actually are.

In my article “democratic” says more about this…

One of my students in the 67 steps coaching decided to start listening to me. That was a huge step for him… This happened after a whole year of pretending that he did in fact listen to me.

As a result he observed his environment and found that his boss is one of those 20 years ahead of him guys.

He went and talked to him.
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There is a Science to life… and if you want more life, you need to follow it

There is a Science to Life… and if you want more life, you need to follow it, you need to work WITH Life.
But you, and most everyone else, think yourself smarter than everyone else… and your mantra in life is “Don’t tell me what to do!” or “I’ll do it my way!” and you follow your mantra, not Life.

And your life is a true mirror to that attitude: nothing is done exactly, no rules are followed exactly, and your life is shabby, hodge podge, and you are wretched.

Why is it that not every person get the promised results out of reading the book, The Science of Getting Rich? Or any other course or program? Really, that less than 1% do? Is it always the fault of the teacher?

Here are a few things about The Science of Getting Rich, the highest truth value book I have ever measured…
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How to find your real self… instead of honoring your false self as yourself

As I have written before, the book I am reading now is the Metaskills.

The author is a designer, and looks at life through a designer’s glasses.

The article “You live in a world of your own design” is one of the favorite articles on my site. People want to design their lives.

The popularity of the program, Mind Movies builds on that desire to design… but the requirements for design are not there, not there for 99.99% of humanity… What is there is something else, something that doesn’t allow for design.
The basics of being a designer is what is most missing in life… if you really look, you can see it.
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