Podcast: Play in new window | Download
I wrote this article seven years ago.
Two things about it: I write better today… yay. The second: lots of water has flown down the river… and some nuts we’ve cracked… and yet, a lot of people are stuck in their misery covering it up.
In the story on Netflix, The Guardian, the lead character finally shows his true colors…
I saw outward signs of it, but didn’t see the emotional side. Maybe because they picked the wrong actor for it, that didn’t match for me.
The story is about a young lawyer who gets caught using drugs. A lot. Because of his family, instead of sending him to jail, they sentence him to 1500 hours of community service, to work as a lawyer. A lawyer to help children who need the system to help them.
Simon Baker says about his character: ‘I thought I could walk a line with Nick, that I could make the character very internal, where he wasn’t likable but the audience would still root for him. There was this challenge: I thought I could play this sort of thing where you’re hoping he makes the right choices and you feel for him when he makes the wrong choices.’
The signs: he doesn’t open up, he doesn’t look people in the eye, he keeps incredibly busy… they are signs of a deep seated issue, unresolved.
The duality, the Janus persona:
- He liked cocaine, because the person, under the influence, was courageous, joyful, dynamic, and felt acceptable.
- The person, without the cocaine, is afraid of intimacy, afraid to open up, afraid of looking people in the eye.
Now, why am I sharing this with you?
Because we all want to get where we want to get to, fearlessness, peace, balance, serenity. We want worldly success and fulfillment, love, without actually doing the work, cracking the tough nut that we’ve built around our wound.
It’s not going to work. It is, maybe in the eyes of others, is going to be beautiful, but you are inside that tough nut. Your essence is trapped there. Your beauty, your humanity, your peace, your love is trapped there. And unless you crack that nut, all that you’ll ever achieve is going to be unfulfilling, and will not last.
You won’t enjoy it.
So, what’s the problem?
Cracking the nut is a very delicate issue. And it needs looking, grieving, feeling your feelings that got trapped, and
- few people are willing to feel what is trapped in that nut. I remember being in therapy. I was afraid that if I let go and feel what I never allowed myself to feel, I’d die, or other people would die. For me, it seemed that it was anger. But when I finally let go, underneath the anger I found desire, attention seeking, the willingness to be used so I can feel wanted, useful, deserving to live.
It is not a simple one-step operation, and it requires you to not be alone, to have someone there who helps you to be reborn. It’s a rebirth, a return to innocence. Maybe not quite THE rebirth, but a rebirth without which you can’t get to THE rebirth, The rebirth that results in you becoming ONE, instead of the duality that is the source of pretense and misery.
- The person, the midwife, will have to have gone through their own rebirth, otherwise they will lead you astray, and the nut will close again. (Actually the nut needs to be opened several times. After each insight it tends to close again. But after a while it cracks and stays reasonably open.)
It is almost impossible to find anyone who is suitable…
For example it takes five to seven years to train a Landmark Education Forum Leader. Sometimes they let a person lead who didn’t actually return to innocence… they didn’t go deep enough. And there are only around 50 forum leaders, and billions of people. There is not a lot of opportunities to do a one-on-one interaction.
One of the problems YOU face, is courage deficiency.
Most readers or students I have on this site don’t have the courage to do a program like the Landmark Education Forum. Why? Because they are afraid of what might come up. They are afraid of not being in control.
Working with someone who doesn’t have the courage is neither rewarding nor effective. It takes a lot of courage to do this work.
I have a student who has done Scientology. And although I don’t like what the church does, the underlying Dianetics methodology is aimed at finding the tough nut, so the participant can start growing.
She brought me an issue, to a private session, that her Dianetics person discounted, and yet it turned out to be her nut.
Since then she has been gathering courage for a followup, so it is not a one-time event.
After you see what you see in your nut-finding session, it takes quite some time to actually really get to the core of it… own it, and bring Witness to it.
And Witness is the secret. Most what could make life work is being able to bring Witness to it. (The Driftwood capacity.)
Learning to stand in the Witness position, from where you see that things are not what they ought to be, but you are not touched by any of it. You are witnessing it.
You see, when you try to make what is wrong right, you are still in the midst of it, and you are lying if you say it’s not wrong…
Lying doesn’t make life beautiful.
I have another student whose husband is an a-hole. She is trying to make it right how he is… but it is not right. She is trying to make right how people judge, or how people live, but it doesn’t right.
The opposite of wrong is not right. The opposite of wrong is ‘so what?’. Neutral.
So she is forced to lie… and of course that increases the duality that is making your life miserable.
Instead of lying, if she could stand in the Witness position, there she would see what happened, and would be untouched by the wrongness, the emotional reaction to wrongness. She would have no reaction. No emotion that says ‘wrong’. It is a ‘So what?’
It is just what it is. Just what is happening. The feeling is not there, looking from the Witness position. It is not visible… it is personal, and it is not there looking from here. So there is nothing wrong. Nothing to do, nothing to fix. It is as significant as the weather… it’s raining. So what?
I found the Witness position for myself in 1987…
…but 4-5 times a year I have to return there, because I got pulled off of it…
No one can live there permanently, those who say they can they are lying.
You attain to a capacity not a state. No such thing as enlightenment, it is a live process, stepping back and stepping back and stepping back.
The most important learning for a human is learning what is reality not.
Distinguish reality… Remove all the things that don’t belong to reality, so they end up with what it is… and can see clearly that wrong is not in reality. Wrong is in their head. In the words. In the emotions, and not in reality.
When someone can finally see that, they they can become free. Free from whatever they decided to compensate for the wrong they said.
Lying, pretending, judging, hoping, forcing, extorting… all the ugly human things that you only do because that pesky wrong is still there, and feels real, but wasn’t.
Reality looks the same from every person’s vantage point… and what happened to you didn’t… so it wasn’t real.
It never happened that you didn’t belong. And it never happened that you didn’t matter. It never happened that you were abandoned, wanted dead, or that you were not enough.
In the upcoming Invent your Self, your ‘who I am’ workshop (2 sessions) we’ll identify your original ‘wrong’ statement, and attempt to look at it from different vantage point, including the Witness. I’ll activate the Driftwood capacity to help you with that.
The goal is that you, at least, have a sense that what you said about that incident isn’t real… it only happened in your head that way. That what you said was wrong only happened in your head.
And then we’ll attempt to look how you would be, who you would be without that stuck view of the world that says ‘something wrong was done to me’.
Invent your Self, your ‘who I am’
