“A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.”
~John Ruskin
When you have a narrow cone of vision, or watch something to close to it… so close that you identify with it, what you see is largely useless.
Try this: try to see your palm clearly while your eyes are only a centimeter from your skin. You can’t. And everything there will fill you will dread… without a larger context nothing makes sense, and everything feels threatening.
When you look at your feelings, your thoughts like you just looked at your palm, we call that introspection.
Some of my students go there, from time to time, instead of keeping distance between the observed and the observer, distance physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.
The Amish Horse Training Method, the Playground method (the meaning), the Memes (Tree of Knowledge), the Attitudes (Approaches), and, of course the whole science of being able to tell a feeling from an emotion… aka the Marker Feelings… They all need you to keep a healthy distance and a neutral attitude… i.e. observe them from the “Observer or Witness” position. From Outside of yourself.
My webinars, my workshops, train you to distinguish for yourself what it feels like to create a distance, what it sounds like, what it looks like… to you.
What it feels like to be in Plato’s Cave… and what it feels like to be outside.
Life, thoughts, emotions, relationships, life’s purpose, liking… all look different in the “light of day”… i.e. outside of Plato’s Cave.
I am still learning to teach creating distance… teaching it with simple words…
It is, in my experience, the hardest thing to teach. You cannot connect to Source unless you can create that distance. You cannot muscle test accurately, unless you can create that distance. You can’t have a life that works, unless you can create that distance.
And I can’t explain to you how to do it… I even had a whole course once on just that… It was called “Detached” and it taught the participants, unsuccessfully, to step back.
So this is a work in progress… to teach it with words.
Participants who took my Playground, the Amish Horse Training, and the Money Attitudes workshops learned it through osmosis…
But how do you translate it to words… Sigh…
One of my students implemented a new practice: becoming an idea machine. He has committed to write 10 new ideas a day. I have tried: wicked hard… but gets you out of the cave. Why? Maybe because reality is a lot bigger than your cave? lol.
I hear the odd teacher or writer mentioning this issue… but they, so far, haven’t written anything that would help me help you.
OK… let’s see what are your options:
If you look at the illustration on the top of this page, you see four quadrants. The “archetypes” are 10% accurate… the truth value is what phd’s can create… low, but maybe we can use it for discussion.
The first category or archetype it talks about
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