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Correcting the language
This article tries to explain something I heard 30 years ago, and it took, till today to understand. So it’s not easy, but it has the answer to the question in the title, and it has the key you’ve been looking for, though you didn’t know what exactly you were looking for.
The reason you are unhappy, lonely, and afraid because language directly leads there.
Only people who don’t live in their heads to have ever escaped the trap that language sets for the unsuspecting and idle multitudes. They escape the trap because they have a bigger job outside to put their attention on.
Which means: there are the people who are engaged in something big and involved, and then there are people, 99% of us, who are not engaged in something big, and therefore have all the time to live in the mind, which is a collection of language built to make you miserable.
When I examine what about language that does that, I find that language does not distinguish, does not differentiate, does not tell apart action and being, feeling and being, emotion and being. Not even feeling and emotion.
It says: you are silly… when your action is silly…
It says you are happy… when your emotions are exuberant.
And it says you are stupid… when your actions don’t match the questions life is setting up. and so on…
The second thing you must understand is that these things are not separate from you… not separate. But they are distinct from you… meaning: NOT YOU.
Distinct, i.e. distinguishable. Distinguish means telling apart.
So the emotions, the feelings, the thoughts, the body, the soul!, the will, the attention, are not separate from you, but they can be told apart, actually with certainty. If they are distinct, they are not you. If they are not you then the language is wrong: it is not who is fat, it is your body. It is not you who is anxious, it is the feeling that is anxiety.
There will be, I predict, confusion and arguments about the last statement, because we don’t know what feels… because it is a little more complicated than the rest. Candice whatever her name was, in the molecules of emotions, say that the emotions are chemical compounds with receptors on the cells… let’s call it ’emotional body’ for further distinguishing, ok?
It is like the front of your hand and the back of your hand. They are not separate. They have to move together, like Siamese twins. But while you can separate Siamese twins and then they will be not only distinct but separate, and can go their separate ways, the front of your hand and the back of your hand cannot.
Part and parcel… but not the same
They are like the front of your hand and the back of your hand. Emerge together.
This was the example Werner Erhard used, 30 years ago. I had no idea why, until this morning. I am slow in the uptake… I hope you are better. Or if not… not yet, just hang in there. Trust my conclusions, and you’ll get there. I promise, in much less time, and costing you much less than it has taken me and cost me… Although I don’t regret the journey: it has earned me the knowledge, and that is the only way I like it… Hey, I am built that way.
If you disregard the goriness of the example, you’ll get it. If you sliced off a thin layer of your palm… and looked: it is now separate, but it is not your palm any more. And you can keep on slicing… only what remains is the last piece but it still has the front and the bad… Darn.
And so are your feelings, and your thoughts and your actions.
They are the front of the hand with the palm… and you, your being, your self, is the back of the hand, with the bumps we call knuckles.
The front and the back cannot be separated, but they are distinct. And they deserve to talk about them in a way that gives them justice.
So when your language can only speak of the hand, as if it didn’t have a front and back, like in ‘I am worthless’ or ‘I am afraid’ then there is no chance for you, the human to become a human being. Get to the next level of evolution. Why? because being is collapsed into feeling, because feeling is collapsed into thinking.
Being is the back of the hand. Treated as if it were not distinct. As if it were irrelevant for the front of the hand… but the opposite is true.
Or it has a chance to be absolutely and positively true through distinguishing.
The moment you can get this, and put it into practice, you can begin climbing the tree of life, and become god-like.
In the mid twentieth century, there was an attempt to do something about language, but the people who did it, were either evil or clueless…
They created positive language… positive/negative is a subjective, thinking mode, and has no anchor in reality.
In reality nothing is positive and nothing is negative.
In reality… the more you follow the ideology of positive thinking, positive speaking, the more cut off of reality you must be, and the more ineffective, and impoverished you become.
It will be tough to come back to reality.
Let’s look at an example: your body is five foot four tall standing, and your body weight is 160.
Are you fat?
Of course in the faulty language the answer is yes, no, or a little bit, or very… but no matter what the answer is, if and when you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer.
When you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer.
YOU are not fat… unless, of course, your beingness is fat… I can’t imagine it, because fat is so strongly connected and associated with the body, that I can’t see that there can be a beingness: fat.
So the question is: is your body fat? And then you answer, whatever you answered.
Those are, by the way my current body height and body weight.
I, personally, see no value in putting energy into changing my body weight. It is what it is. So I keep feeding my body whatever is on my list. My body loves it, my brain seems to love it, and I don’t care if anyone else loves it, it is enough for me that my body supports what I am up to by giving me no grief.
The holidays are coming, when people get very depressed, distraught, and there are lot of them that kill themselves.
I felt it last night, intensely. It felt like it was mine… and my thoughts went to planning my own demise.
When I woke up around five, the emotions were gone… I guess people are busy or sleeping.
When I went to the bathroom to pee… I glanced into the mirror, and suddenly it dawned on me: even when I give you the exercise, the mirror exercise, you still think you are your body…
And when I work with you in webinars, you think you are your thoughts and your emotions are you…
And then all my work is wasted on you, because your beingness can’t put a word in edgewise…
My work, DNA capacity activation, works on your beingness, the back of your hand, that you don’t even know about.
And nothing changes apart from a few days of bliss… because you continue to speak the same way, whether out loud or in your head… and there you have it: you think you haven’t changed… because you have no idea you have a you that is distinct from the feelings.
The YOU lives in the dominion of being… the vertical dimension of reality. Feelings and thoughts are in the horizontal dimension of reality. In the horizontal dimension of reality where you are always the effect, never the cause.
Where you cannot be happy, because you have no access to BEING happy…
It seems that the capacity of flexibility, the beingness of the reed, the beingness of being in both worlds but returning to the vertical, is the crucial capacity to open up, to activate.
Someone with the capacity of flexibility can be with family, have a good time, overeat, get tipsy, and return to the world of beingness unscathed, unchanged, unaffected.
Someone with the capacity of flexibility can experience setbacks in the horizontal. Experience judgment, shaming, and yet, effortlessly, return to the world of beingness, unscathed, unchanged, unaffected. Ready to do it again. Ready to go for what they want for themselves. And ready to build skills. Ready to build empires. Ready to create a meaningful life.
And no, you don’t create your beingness, willy nilly, with words. You may create your beingness through setting a direction, can be called ‘possibility’ but speaking a possibility will not create a beingness. It does create an attitude that is a temporary beingness. Being that for the time being.
Beingness is both learned and not. Beingness is encoded in your inactive DNA capacities. I mean it.
Just because you know the word, does not make you capable to BE anything. The words are in horizontal dimension, designed to keep you in the horizontal. Keep you buying stuff.
An aside: in the Second Phase Activators course we get closest to Beingness through teaching you to FEEL the feelings that come from the being.
A Bill Gates, a Warren Buffet, a Steve Jobs have 40-50 beingness capacities.
An amazing character, Frank Reagan, police commissioner in the series: Blue Blood, has 20 beingess capacities. So does Madam Secretary in the series of the same name.
Most people alive on earth today, have between one and two beingness capacities.
It’s like being able to see only five to seven colors, or 2-3 shades of gray. Impoverished. Everything looks like everything else… no precision, no astuteness, no bulls eye… No distinction.
A medical doctor needs twenty capacities active. A chiropractor, an optometrist: 13. The chiropractor, an optometrist need to be able to recognize and identify much less than a medical doctor. And they do. And they don’t see what they don’t see. And they have no idea what they don’t see.
When you go to a healer who has seven capacities… it’s like going to a surgeon who uses a kitchen knife set to operate on you.
Same with a therapist. Or a coach.
I once had a coach… someone who volunteered to coach me to be able to put that she coached me on her resume. She had five capacities active… could she be an effective coach… hell no. I fired her after three calls. She had no idea what was my issue. How could she? So she called me names in her head… Just like you probably do. Do you?
Call me nasty, blunt, uncaring, selfish, ego driven… How would you know? You can only see what your capacities allow you to see. You can only see yourself. Your own beingness reflected on me.
So it is time to open up more capacities and go from simpleton to someone who can see the richness of the world.
Start with flexibility. And when I activate it for you, you have only one job: practice telling feelings apart from you. Sensations apart from you. Emotions apart from you. Thoughts apart from you. Actions apart from you.
Meaning: practice the language.
The body is full. The body needs to pee. The body needs to go to bed. The body is tired.
The mind is thinking that this is stupid. The mind is thinking that this is great…
And the emotion is sad, happy, calm, busy, confused… or fearful, anxious… whatever the emotion is.
Not you! the emotion!
There have been many attempts to distinguish this Not separate/distinct phenomenon to people, but, as far as I can see, it hasn’t worked… language trumped it all.
I do not have the power to change the hundreds of languages, with billions of published works.
But I can attempt to knock you conscious, so you, often or rarely, catch that your language is what holds you back from becoming an expanding human being.
So the saying ‘for you everything is the same as everything else, except not always’ won’t apply to you.
I think this is a linchpin capacity for everyone. good luck working it.
ok, thank you and I will work like hell on it.. have a feeling this is a lynchpin capacity, for me anyway.
Rebecca… your job now is taking it from being an event, a rarity, and make it your beingness…
Much appreciate this article Sophie. Last night, after we came home from 2 days of family holiday fun, I went to bed and cried. Emotions and thoughts were trying to take me out, like they pretty much do all the time.
The difference about this cry was for the first time being able to pay attention to the fact that it’s only emotions, my core was still there and so were the emotions. I was able to be with both at the same time.. idk,ego has probably shut down flexibility, like it has in the past. But something is different, even if only slightly and I like it.
oops – I did get defensive. OK, dropped it. To answer your question, it really does seem to me that I’m standing in beingness when I observe my feeling. I’m peaceful and I see with that amusement that you talk about. And I don’t get caught up in the feeling. In contrast, when I try to observe my feeling from my mind, I fail. I get completely caught up in it.
ok. you are the last judge of that. keep it up, for 3 days, so the capacity can open back up fully
harshly stated, but the truth. I see I still didn’t get the difference between separate and distinct. You downloaded flexibility to me in last week’s webinar and I have been experiencing differences so I thought it was active and I thought I was exercising flexibility when I was observing my feelings instead of getting caught up in them.
don’t get defensive Kathryn. that closes you down.
the distinction you need to get, and I am sorry for using use as a brave volunteer, is the distinction between coming from/standing in, and going to.
What I was observing is that you were watching and catching from the mind, from being bothered to not being bothered.
When you stand in flexibility, you see only clouds, with amusement.
If I was misunderstanding, I apologize.
The capacity is halfway open, so you could have stood in beingness and I was misjudging … what do you say?
I have bad news for you: unless you practice it as part of your flexibility capacity, in about three days you’ll stop, because you are DOING it, not coming from “nothing that feels, nothing that thinks is me”, because LISTEN UP, I am distinct from it, NOT SEPARATE
I think you just pointed out the two mistakes that cause that up till today no one is getting this: one is thinking that the word separate and distinct are interchangeable, after I spent two hours explaining how they are not, and the second: trying to practice this independent of the capacity, thinking that doing will lead to beingness…
Too bad it doesn’t, too bad it hasn’t.
Am I being harsh?
“practice telling feelings apart from you”. Thank you for this advice Sophie. I started looking at each feeling as it comes up, looking at it separate from me and identifying it (instead of getting all caught up in it like I usually do), and that’s already helping me not get dragged into the drama. What a great gift!