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If we have a chance to talk for a few minutes, I’ll see the predictor of your success, or the lack of it in a minute or two. I will see what are your chance for success and fulfillment.
What am I looking at? What clues me in?
This is what this article is about, and also about how to change what’s predictable, so you can get successful and fulfilled. Keep on reading.
Every so-called guru talks about the subconscious mind, and such nonsense. None talks much about your conscious awareness.
They talk about being in the present moment, but they don’t say: be in the present moment with conscious awareness, do they?
What they don’t talk about is how much of what is happening, what is real, what is in front of you is making no impression on you… how little of what is around you, what you are reading, watching, listening to reaches your awareness.
You watch but you don’t see. You listen but you don’t hear.
And whatever you do is based only rarely on what you are actually aware of but a lot more often on your interpretation of what you hear and what you see… and you think you have all the facts.
Everyone operates and makes decisions based on their current level of awareness.
This is why your level current level of awareness is the most predictive of you success.
Here is the sequence of perception, action etc. creates what you have:
seeing+words–>being/feeling/attitude–>do–>having
Without words you actually don’t see… Your eyes do, but only words make it conscious perception: seeing. Your state of mind, your being, your attitude will result from what you see. And then your actions follow from your beingness… and create what you have.
Your actions’ success depends on the accuracy and completeness of the ‘seeing+words’ you base your decisions on.
You don’t see, or you don’t identify what you see accurately. And most often: you don’t even bother to look outside: you sleepwalk or you ‘already know’. Or you are too busy in your mind mulling things over to look or listen.
I am totally stupefied at the low level of awareness. I am stupefied at the minuscule amount of my message getting through to my readers.
Do you know you miss things?
Probably not. You are not even aware that there was more there…
One of my students has no idea that his attention wanders while he supposedly listens to the instructions that could, potentially change his life. He is not there… talking to him is a lot like talking to my kitten. Or a dog.
We all laugh at the cartoons of the man talking to his dog, scolding him. In the cartoon the talk bubble is ‘blah blah blah blah blah blah Ginger blah blah blah’ He hears not much more than the dog or the cat.
But why?
I am using ‘this guy’ to demonstrate and do my thinking, but this guy is you.
You have no idea what you didn’t hear. Why? you didn’t hear it. Maybe you heard some noise, but that’s it… for you it was noise.
You may have a sense that the whole thing doesn’t make sense. But you suppose you heard everything. Almost without exception, the mind will think it heard everything and if it doesn’t make sense, it will blame the speaker, or it will fill in the missing stuff with fillers. Interpretation. Stuff like that.
You don’t know what you don’t know. And you don’t know that you don’t know 99% of what could be known.
But you don’t know what you missed.
That is everybody, only the amount of stuff you missed we differ. Some miss more than others.
I have been listening to the 67 steps. I have now completed each session nine times. I am going for the tenth. Why? Because there wasn’t a session where I wasn’t wondering if I had really heard it before…
Terrifying.
I am sharing this so you see that it is everyone.
We hear what we hear, and it steals our attention… and for minutes we hear nothing else, because the mind is busy with what it caught.
This is easier to experience when you are reading. You are turning the pages, and at some point, when your attention goes back to the book, you realize that it doesn’t make sense… because you missed pages after pages. Your eyes were reading it, but you weren’t there to hear it.
Most people I know get discouraged and stop reading altogether. They declare that it is useless…
Instead of…
So I am back looking at the student whose attention wanders… Now you can see that he is not alone: you are just like him.
So what happens? What is the cause of this phenomenon I’d call: cluelessness?
If you watch a puppy… it is all over the place. It bites, it chews, it breaks things.
You send the puppy to obedience school. We could call that ‘discipline’ training.
Every living thing does best in life, has the most chance for success, if that thing is disciplined.
Being disciplined does not come naturally.
- Marshal arts is the art of discipline.
- Gymnastic is the art of discipline.
- Meditation is the art of discipline.
You can train discipline at any age. It is a long arduous process. Not fun. But neither is fun being a bumbling idiot.
Ultimately these are your choices: being a clueless waste of space or discipline.
I am still training myself. You can’t stop training, because the undisciplined puppy in you will take over when you stop.
The mind is not disciplined. It needs to be kept in line by the will. The will is an aspect of the ‘orchestra’ you are.
I was knocked conscious, again, to the importance of exercising my will on my mind and my behavior while I re-read the book by Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age.
In the book the young heroine is in school where every subject is wonderful except a class taught by Miss Stricken. She makes it difficult to stay focused… and then she punishes you when your attention wonders, when you scratch your nose, or doodle.
The headmistress explains to our heroine, Nell, that every school needs a Miss Stricken,
‘Miss Stricken is not someone I would invite to dinner at my house. I would not hire her as a governess for my children. Her methods are not my methods. But people like her are indispensable.
‘It is the hardest thing in the world to make educated Westerners pull together,’ Miss Matheson went on. ‘That is the job of people like Miss Stricken. We must forgive them their imperfections. She is like an avatar—do you children know about avatars? She is the physical embodiment of a principle. That principle is that outside the comfortable and well defended borders of our phyle is a hard world that will come and hurt us if we are not careful. It is not an easy job to have. We must all feel sorry for Miss Stricken.’
The reason you think you can afford to be so casual, so not-together, so la-di-da because you don’t understand the world. You don’t understand that in the cushy comfortable world of ours you become dull and lazy and useless.
Nell in Diamond Age ‘found that her wits became dull when she got too cozy.’
And being cozy is not conducive to growth, to discipline, not even to sharpen your wits, or keeping them sharp.
You bumble through your life, and take control of nothing, least of yourself.
Your life passes you like sand falling through your fingers.
How do I practice discipline?
When I go to bed, everything itches. So my discipline is to notice the itching and not move.
A few years ago in the Peak Potentials Warrior Training Camp my group was in a sweat lodge. On the way we stopped for some instructions. After about 10-15 minutes the pile of dry leaves started to move, and outpopped a young man… covered with insect bites.
He had been in that pile, motionless, for at least 15 minutes.
I was inspired. I have, all my life, slept bad, and it’s always taken me a long time to settle down and fall asleep.
I have been practicing this discipline… and I can control the urge to move, scratch, or fidget longer and longer. It is near impossible.
This is my daily practice. Sometimes I remember it during the day, and I do it with my posture. Or my breath.
A constant struggle against the undisciplined base nature of a human.
Am I disciplined? On a 1-100 scale I am a 10.
In some things I am a 50, in others I am a 1.
I started late.
But believe me: anything and everything that isn’t going well for you, including raising your vibration, is a result of you having never trained yourself to bring your physicality and your mind under your conscious control.
Scouring for articles on developing self-discipline… I found some gems:
The first millionaire I knew well told me that the secret of success, in any endeavor is consistency.
So whichever way you choose to grow your muscle of will power and self-discipline, the key to success is consistency.
Sporadic practice won’t do it.
And lastly, here is a different take on discipline: the author says: discipline is a myth. The truth is motivation. If you have motivation then the subtle pull of that motivation will counter the laziness…
The motivation of my practice at night is to fall asleep fast.- The motivation of my practice at my computer, when I pay attention to my posture, is to avoid the inevitable back pain.
- The motivation of my practice to avoid social media, my smart phone, texting, is to amount to something, instead of being just another train wreck.
My motivation is almost always to avoid something I don’t want.
You may be different… you may be pulled by a dream.
I am a shouldn’t person… you may be a should person.
Find what has a more consistent pull… it doesn’t have to be a strong pull… only consistent enough to counter the equally strong pull of ordinariness.
Ok, we’ve made a huge circle.
But if your issue has been similar to the issue of the guy who can’t hear anything… and is oblivious about it… I hope you heard that the thing to practice is the consistent small actions that do look like self-discipline.
Where your will obeys you not the triggers from the lower self or the outside.
You can do it. You know you can.
And once you do it, life will start to become brighter. Hell… isn’t that worth it?
I train you all this in the Integrity Workshop that starts this Saturday, March 27 and is scheduled to take place on the last Saturday of every month… until we are done.
I just added a new bonus to the course, making it irresistible to you if the course is a good match: Not one but two avatar state activators that can support you in learning self-discipline, with is essential to build integrity and self-love, and the activator: Nothing wrong, nothing to fix that will help in resisting the knee jerk reaction to hide, run, or force, which are antithetic, unhelpful to integrity.
You’ll get the activators right after the first session… and you can play them in the background to provide you with energetic support to do the work of building integrity.
By the way: the payments for the workshop are monthly, so you have to commit every month… I like to test your commitment, it serves you best, takes you out of your dutiful behavior.
Register in the Integrity workshop and get all the extra goodies
