I wasn’t going to write an article today.
I had four calls yesterday, and I expected myself to be tired, and running on empty.
But I am well. Not tired. The Days of Power must be really working… lol.
The fear, the uncertainty is never quite extinguished in a healthy brain: nothing is certain… even what you see or feel can be mirages.
Anyway, I am putzing around, and find an old Landmark Education notebook… and it triggers an issue I will need to deal with.
So I’ll start it in this article, and take it as far as I can:
The issue: what to do with, how to coach people who have done the word-based (Tree of Knowledge, 14th Floor) programs of Landmark Education and others) so they can too move to the Tree of Life, the only place where you can be happy.
My notebook shows to me that I wasn’t a typical Landmark Education graduate: I could not find any indication of Tree of Knowledge. But I am not the standard. And I need to deal with what is.
One of the tools of word based programs is to “speak the future into existence”.
The goal of this is to create the beingness that is consistent with that future, but it, of course, misses the mark.
One of my Landmark Education graduate students sent me a well crafted “laundry list” of how his life looked if it were perfect.
The beingness of that life is “attending to everything”, but who he is, who he has been, and who he probably will be, inside this imagining the perfect life, is a windbag… talking about it.
There is another not so obvious trap hidden in this methodology: the desire trap.
While you are imagining the perfect future, you get pleasure. The pleasure of that perfect future. And then you come down from that high, and you find yourself in the wretchedness of your life the way it is.
And it is now horrible. And you don’t like it. So you go back to the fantasizing…
The Desire Trap…
At no point the fantasy indicates that you need to do something.
At no point the fantasy involves reality where 90% of everything is mechanics, the grind, that you never calculate, and therefore you hate. 1
This is the problem with goals, this is the problem with vision boards, declaration, etc.
The bridge between where you are and the “vision” is work. And unless you get back on the Tree of Life, work is not what you want, it is results that you want. They are sexy, showy, and you can just imagine them.
I am hard pressed to find anyone who fantasizes about sitting in a cubicle working for ten thousand hours, so one day they can become Bill Gates.
No, people fantasize about the 60 bedroom house, the charitable activities, the fame and the fortune.
All this futures created by words, or by pictures are a Tree of Knowledge life, and a misery maker.
You and your life are never where they are at… they are, instead, “not there yet”.
The sentence: “Every journey starts with the first step” makes no sense on the Tree of Knowledge: there are no steps, stepping, no journey on the Tree of Knowledge.
The typical person has no knowledge, no skills, nothing to build a life with.
Why? Because any knowledge, any skills, is all grind.
Now, on the Tree of Knowledge the fact that everything is 90% mechanics and 10% anything else is really bad news, and must be ignored. Because on the Tree of Knowledge the journey, the path, the activity is completely forgotten. La-di-da
On the Tree of Life people are happy because loving 90% of life is loving life.
In my work, now and in every work I have ever done, the mechanics was actually more than 90%, it was more like 95%.
While I was an architect: I hated it. I wanted a job that used only my talent, not my brawn. This was probably because some hidden brain errors of mine: grouped under dyslexia… not knowing left from right, disorientation, and not being able to see the order of things.
All very essential in being an architect, and I simply have a hole in my brain for those.
But every other job: I was OK doing the meaningless, repetitive, brainless work… washing the dishes, handing 100 websites every day, or corresponding with hundreds of people.
Really, no job is glamorous, and unless you live on the Tree of Life, you hate all jobs… because they are 90-95% “nothing to write home about”.
And it is not just jobs: learning anything.
My famous “color exercise” is an example that has been clearly not learned by anyone I know.
In that exercise you pick a color on a portable object in your house, and you carry that object around for weeks, months, finding object with matching color, until it seems everything has the same color.
One important thing is to not name the color.
The moment you name it, you are done. Game over. You failed. Pick another object with a different color. Don’t name the color. Not even in your head. Don’t send me an email telling me what color you picked… Get off the word-tree.
The second important thing is to find the matching colors while you are doing other things… instead of making it an “Easter Egg hunt” style event. This behavior is what has rendered you uneducated: you learned for grades not for life.
The exercise is designed to activate non-verbal brain activity, non-verbal awareness, being in the present, alert and ready.
Every animal has that, otherwise they would not survive, but on the Tree of Knowledge you lose it.
So it needs to be re-learned. It activates a sense of self, activates your spacial awareness, activates a sense that you are tiny in a big world.
It is a simple exercise, but everyone thinks that just by finding colors that match the object’s color is the victory… they go for the 5% and do none of the mechanics: so nothing gets activated.
Where the exercise, and the different skills it develops prepares for use is going to be invaluable in every area of life that you can imagine.
- It makes a sleep-walker into an alert, alive, vibrant individual.
- It makes one a virtue-noticer and a virtue-learner.
- It makes one an excellent listener… etc. etc. etc.
- And it makes you someone who is now equipped to grow. And enjoy it.
My Landmark Education notebook has about 100 “colors” to distinguish and find in my life, to get aware of it, and start seeing it everywhere.
One of them I what really triggered this article: a young conversation: “I don’t know how”
This one I haven’t seen since that particular course, but I am sure it is hiding underneath the surface.
So I am going to do the “color exercise” in search of that particular “color”
I am trembling of excitement. I haven’t been this excited it a long time. I wonder where I’ll find it. And how many times. So far I can’t think of any.
But I am almost certain that one of the things people say when they have no skills, no knowledge, but big dreams is this “color”…
What a catch! I’ll give this a few months to show all its shades of color.
PS: I taught this method yesterday, again, in the Feelings webinar. Want to watch it? It’s free if you are subscribed to my subscribers only site
Of course you need to register, or log in… whichever applies
