Let me ask you something: do you have to deserve a body? Did you have to deserve to be able to read?
No. Deserving is much more basic, and much more profound than that kind of deserving, which would equate the word with earning.
Earning is a mercantile world’s word: it measures your work, or your merchandise against the asking price… earning.
But deserving is different, regardless how crazy that word drove me when I was a kid. My kid brother whining that he deserved whatever he was whining about.
I didn’t think I deserved anything, so he asserting that he deserved whatever, emphasized for me that I didn’t. He said he did, and I said I didn’t. It bothered me. A lot.
People around you will tell you what you deserve, but they are lying. They are playing god… Deserving comes with Life.
You deserve everything that comes with life. What you will do with what you got will depend on you.
What you will do with what you got will depend on whether you know you are deserving of not.
In the movie, Trading Places, the black dude, played by Eddie Murphy, even though they tell him everything in the house was his, didn’t believe it. It didn’t make sense to him that it would be his… And it doesn’t make sense to you that your life is yours, your body is yours, your brain is yours.
So you treat your life, your body, your brain as stolen goods, poorly. You hoard it or you waste it, squander it… Just like lottery winners… Just like go-go dancers treat their hundreds of singles…
Do you rejoice that you breathe, do you get that it is your right to breathe? How about your body, how about your work, how about your growth?
They don’t feel like they are yours… and you reject them. You refuse to take care of them, grow them, like you would if you felt like the owner… if you deserved them.
When you are deserving, you feel at home. In the home you are the owner, you have the right and permission to be there. You feel big and a match to life.
But that is not how you live… You live on borrowed or stolen time…
I am talking about almost every single adult living today…
It must have started with language, with words, with society, that there were those deserving and those not deserving. And that should was born… the beginning of interacting with should reality, not with what is. Should and should have… Future and past… no present moment.
I don’t see it with animals, or with aboriginal tribes: they don’t seem to abuse themselves, punish themselves: they treat themselves and their lives as theirs. With honor and respect.
Animals need to fall into apathy and depression to neglect their body… while most humans do it from the time they can remember.
There are no fat animals in nature… but there are many fat animals around people. People have no respect for nature, for natural things, only for what they want…
Being deserving is an interesting way of being: being deserving is on one hand deserving more and on the other hand deserving less.
Being deserving is the capacity for growing along the lines of the DNA… not against the DNA.
A fat person grew against the lines of the DNA… being fat is a sign of aberration.
A lazy person, a hoarding person, a pleasure seeking person behave in a way that is against the DNA.
So being deserving is obviously a dangerous DNA capacity to activate, because it means stepping back, towards your natural state, where you use what is given to you to strive towards personal growth, to strive towards fuller use of your capacities, maybe even turn on some with your actions.
Unimaginable, isn’t it?
Reading about the Mongols was useful for me in many ways. Pitting the behavior of the people in their natural state, and then seeing them enjoying the spoils of killing, getting greedy, fat, and useless.
A Mongol has all his teeth at his death… how he lives, how he eats, what he eats makes sure of that.
That is the time, 12th, 13th Century, where I could see an entire society living a life of deserving.
Deserving is DNA over mind. DNA over others’ opinions. Allowing DNA to guide one.
It’s not a feeling. It’s a knowingness.
Feeling deserving is probably entitlement. Ugly. Entitlement gives to one and not to the other. Desire to receive for the self alone…
But when we look at the desire to receive for the self alone, there is another group of losers: your soul, and your body, even ego.
It is the mind, the words, that make you deviate from being deserving, that allows another to be just as deserving as you.
Is there a way back? I don’t think so. Individually, maybe. As humanity: no.
So what will happen with evolution? Die.
It is not an accident that great sages all came from royalty.
Great sages came from princes and kings. They started out having it all, and renouncing title and wealth, they arrived to the state where they needed nothing more than what DNA says you need to live.
The multitudes, we, are starting from a sense of lack, that we fill with food, and sex, and towering over another…
So, what can you do, given that there is no way back? That it is impossible to go from thinking to flying?
And ultimately, what can I do, with all I got, that would make a difference?
And is there any integrity in me doing anything else?
Maybe.
One of the behavior that comes from the mind is the refusal to retreat, to return to a previous state or position… Because the mind, it seems, only wants to go forward, or if not, it wants to resign… It doesn’t know how to handle going back to a previous state and look for a different direction.
So, all of you, you think (mind) that you can get further, happier, more successful, from where you are.
But you have hit a wall, and the wall is real.
I know everyone says it isn’t a real wall… and you should push, but it is actually real. On the path you are on, you got as far as one can…
So what do you do? Tell the truth about that, without resignation, without sadness, without defeat, and retrace your steps to a stage where you were still happy, joyful, and had energy.
It is both an exercise in your imagination and action in reality.
For me, when was I last joyful. For me it was 40 plus years ago. I didn’t have my path set yet… I will tell the story in another article, maybe… I need to weep now… So I can remember… So I can be there…
When I watch ANY movie, any TV series, I realized that I have been paying no attention to the sadness. Every actor, every moment, shows the microexpressions of sadness, devastation, despair, hopelessness… Even when they laugh. Even when they kiss… It is the actor, not the character.
The older the actor, the more it’s there.
The age when it becomes permanent… it’s at about the same time when I lost my way. Around 22 years old.
Every step you took, every decision you made, took you in the direction of having more, of greed, and hoarding. Away from home.
Could it happen earlier? I guess.
For me, it was the week, at age 22, maybe 10 days, when I had a deadline and I stayed, illegally, at the university, sleeping on a cot in the corner of a classroom, got up and cleaned myself up in a sink in the girls bathroom. I didn’t even have change of clothes with me. But I was happy. My own person, in that old building, roaming the corridors. I was pregnant at the time. I threw up every morning, and felt sick (and happy) every day.
One morning I took the bus to the hospital and had an abortion. The ob-gyn doctor, turns out, performed her last surgery on me, she was retiring that day. She didn’t put me to sleep, and she didn’t give me much to dull the pain. Then she showed me the fetus she removed… in a dish.
After the surgery I had to stay in a room for an hour or so. Then I took the bus back to the university.
I never felt home again except for brief moment being connected to something larger than me. I was never happy again. I began to protect myself.
OK, I see, it is time to purge this experience from my cells, from my memory.
The question is: can I go back to where it all went wrong? Can I return to loving life?
I’ll let you know.
Wow Sophie, I was expecting to feel offended by what you just said but instead I just felt comfortable. Every word you said rings true.
So that explains why each time you’ve managed to motivate me to move toward expanding human being, I’ve only stayed with it a short time and then fallen back.
So frustrating for you to be trying to turn me around – kind of like trying to push a wet noodle.
You’re not going to like my response, but you’ll say it’s predictable: My response is that I recommend you write me off for now. If I grow a backbone, I’ll let you know.
One more thing Kathryn: I LOVE your response. It is further proof in the experiments I have been running. It was as predictable as the night comes after day.
I have already written you off. That doesn’t mean I don’t love you, that only means I expect nothing, so I am not upset when I get nothing.
Wet noodle… I like that. lol
I see what you’re saying about my tendency. I do have a lot of things that I’ve gotten to “no big deal” on and a lot of things that I haven’t gotten to “no big deal” on. So it looks like I’m following my tendency and stopping generating the process on some, but continuing on and completing the process on others. Why the difference? It feels like I have a different attitude toward the ones I follow the process through to completion and the ones I don’t. I need to change that so I can get to “no big deal” on all of them.
Some you consider part of your identity, and are unwilling to let go. You also, probably, have lots of “proof” and maybe lots of payoffs… You are dishonest about those.
You go as far as you need to go to reduce the pain level, but no further.
You seem to have a commitment to be a wuss…Landmark calls it “undeclared commitment.” I can see that it earns you a certain reputation, but no freedom… which, for a wuss is also a “benefit.” You never have to be found out.
Bottom line: it would cost you something to get to “no big deal”, most likely ego. You’d have to discover yourself, you could not just be “oh this is how I am”…
Sophie – Is there a process we can use to purge an experience from our cells, from our memory?
yes and no. It all depends whether you truly have the flexibility capacity active or not.
Flexibility allows you to look at things truly from different angles, to find what belongs to you, and own it.
When you own what belongs to you, purging happens.
If you don’t have a strong core, if you insist to keep the pain and what doesn’t belong to you part of your core… purging won’t happen.
In this article I have a lot to own. And none of it is painful. It is what I wanted, what I did, what I expected, what I felt… but there is no victim there. No one did anything to me, it just appears so. There was a conflict between what I expected and what happened… so what? It happens all the time. I expect people come to a webinar and they don’t come. I expected a product to sell like hotcakes and they didn’t… So?! No big deal.
Only when you can get to “no big deal” that it is purged. You, I think, have a tendency to stop generating the process before it gets there… that is my experience of you.