In the old Landmark Education Forum, or in the old 4-day Forum, the old Advanced course… the course leader came in yelling: “for you everything is the same as everything else…” or alternatively: “You don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground“.What are distinctions and what they have to do with a life worth living?
What they meant to say is that you don’t have distinctions and therefore life is a mess of undifferentiated stuff… and you have no power with it.
Distinctions are the different ways to look at things. There are a lot of those… most of those you don’t have.
In the normal course of events you judge things looking through the distinctions you have. Why? you don’t have a choice about it.
How many distinctions you have in life will decide for you how rich and rewarding life you can live. How well you navigate life. How accurately you see what you see. How far you can go.
Interestingly but not accidentally, the more distinctions you have the more intangible capacities you are able to use.
Most of you have 5-7 capacities, which means that your life cannot be rich, and your judgment of things cannot be layered, precise, or even have a choice… You are like a one-track pony. 1
One benefit of doing the 67 step program combined with my 67-step coaching is that you, through my questions, are forced to look at what you are looking at, through different distinctions.
I know people who do the program without my coaching, and this is not true to them, not true for them.
In a conversation today with someone who is doing the 67 step program on his own, I found that his concept of learning from a mentor, is learning as in through osmosis… much like Indian gurus say you can get higher vibration, through sitting with them… hogwash.
The 67 step program is packed with distinctions, the different keyholes through which you can look at life and your life in particular. But no matter what distinction Tai is offering, you’ll still look the same way… because until what he says becomes a distinction… it is not a distinction for you.
How do I know it? Simple… but before I go there, let me explain something:
Most of us learned life through examples. We were left to our own devices to decide, to interpret what happened, of maybe even worse: some adult’s explanation: political correspondent, journalist, politician. All two-bit people with very few distinctions.
Which means we learned life as a continuous flow of events, no rhyme and reason, other than the few distinctions you have: good, bad, right, wrong, fair, unfair, mostly systemic value distinctions.
Reading some books, books that are worth a damn, teach distinctions… and you either get the distinctions, or you continue looking, reading through the impoverished set of distinctions you already have.
Listening to gurus teach distinctions… but the distinctions are slanted to justify you paying through your nose, or staying a groupie.
I started to learn distinctions in Landmark Education. My experience was the 99% of the participants did not ever learned distinctions… only the examples.
Examples don’t distinguish distinctions.
Seeing how Landmark Education is failing to teach distinctions, I tried a different approach in using the color exercise… and I largely failed.
People were left with an example… the colors… not the distinctions.
And I am afraid the same thing will happen with the 67 step program, unless something happens, like a miracle.
When you look at life through examples, you see the differences. When you look at life through distinctions: you see the sameness.
Distinctions give you different questions, and therefore different levels of power.
The more power you have the easier, more manageable life becomes.
That is the goal. That you can put your attention on something interesting and worth exploring, worth pursuing, instead of struggling with life.
If you wanted to get good at distinctions, you’d start watching out for them. Especially if you are in my coaching program. Ask questions, inquire into, ponder, puzzle…
Distinctions are the building blocks of any expertise.
Medical doctors need 20 capacities to be able to see and use the many distinctions they need to successfully do their jobs.
Chiropractors need only 13 capacities… they are only interested in the bones, and such.
Bill Gates, Charlie Munger, the brain behind the Warren Buffett success, Zuckerberg have lots of capacities, 30-50 each…
I find that biographies are horrible. They contain NO distinctions, so they leave people, me, with a puzzle that we don’t have enough pieces to solve.
I teach through distinctions. You read through examples and understanding. We are like two trains on a parallel set of rails… going in different directions.
If I ask you: what is the distinction: perpetration/withhold, I bet you don’t know it.
If I ask you: what is extrinsic value: you probably don’t know it.
Until you get a bunch of distinctions by getting what a distinction is, my teaching will be useless to you.
I know, I should not tell you that. But I am not good at lying…
If you are in my 67-step coaching program, you should really listen FOR distinctions.
And if you aren’t… please know that unless you have an aptitude for distinguishing, I probably won’t take you.
I speak that language, almost exclusively. I won’t even make sense to you… 🙁
- Spiritual teachers are not much better off than you: most have 7-10 capacities working… not a lot of room for distinctions. One example is how they interpret one-ness… Impoverished, dumb, blind, stupid… are the words that come to mind.
