This article is about using guidance, but not for its truth value, but in spite of its truth value. 1
Tai’s 67 steps program coupled with my coaching is the perfect growth program.
It’s not because of me, it is not because of the steps either but because of its structural essence.
It is, the structure, like Tai’s “knowledge”, goes everywhere, deals with everything, reads a little bit of every book, and if you can see, if you have a life, if you have a coach, then it is like becoming that hundred handed goddess the Indians so like.
- The first cycle… one step a day, or one step every two days… is to show you that your world is tiny, that your cone of vision is very limiting, fixed, and forceful. It loosens you up, and allows to look at life and events and what you want with relaxed attitude.
- The second cycle is now with that relaxed attitude: taking inventory, feeling what’s important, a little hint of growing here and there.
- The third cycle can be amazing: you may have sawed some seeds, and they are starting to peek out of the soil… maybe you are in spring, and maybe just a February unseasonable heat wave… but either way, you can feel that spring is coming.
I am going to talk about some of the steps and how they look at different stages of self-evolution, but before i do that, I want to speak about the people who don’t experience winter… and without winter spring can never come.
One of the biggest factors in robbing you of being in winter, where you are in a seeming hibernation, and nothing changes outwardly, but inwardly you are starting to take shape, is doing the steps of Tai as HE intended them. Taking his teaching at face value.
Don’t forget: his vibration is 170, his stuff’s truth value is 30%. And he himself is a shyster. So learning the things he says is not the thing to do. He even misquotes his authors when it serves his purpose: sell you something.
The way you know you have this hindrance is that you don’t carry any learning about yourself from one step to the next.
So what happens that prevents the learning to be taken forward? It is getting pleasure from doing the step, as if each step were a mountain to climb, and you did it.
If we wanted to use the mountain analogy: each step is a step, a camp on the way to the top.
A staircase is a better example: each step takes you a flight higher to seeing life and yourself.
If you don’t carry the questions, you don’t carry the pondering over, then you always start from where you are, and the where you are doesn’t have a chance to rise with the steps.
You are trying to force spring, summer, and fall in every step. (This is the CHEAP CLOSURE NOW way of doing the steps.)
And you remain the same ineffective weakling who you were at the beginning.
So what do you need to be able to move from flight to flight without having a “harvest”?
Your TLB score is your most important ally here. If you can’t hang out with an uncomfortable, puzzling, or confusing question, and you are unwilling even to consider, you won’t grow, because without winter, without extended winter, there is no growth.
All the high achievers, whatever their field of achievement, had a long winter.
Child actors never become good actors: they didn’t have a winter.
Child prodigies etc.
Once you get hooked on success… like having the answer, like a teacher saying: good answer, you will have a really hard time going back to winter, where there is no feedback.
- You will raise your hand every opportunity to ask a question, to answer a question, because you need that rush of pleasure.
- You will eat snacks instead of meal, because you need that rush of pleasure.
- You will masturbate often.
- You are on the pleasure wheel of life… and you are not going anywhere. (This is what is called hell! Or inferno)
Seneca says: scorning pleasure is the ticket out.
Scorning is an old style word for despising. Or avoiding. Or snubbing.
Snubbing pleasure.
It’s a virtue. Probably the first virtue that most of you need to acquire. Especially if you are the talkative type. 2
You harvest before you saw. For the pleasure of it. And you are surprised that you are walking in place.
OK, some examples of steps and how they show you the 360 degree world:
- 1. Funeral test.
If you are the pleasure seeker never moving type: you’ll be, obviously, hooked on others’ opinion of you, whether you admit or not.So looking from that despicable, no-self place, you will get that you need to increase your significance. You will want to make a difference (all pleasure seeking! all about you), or be famous, do something extraordinary.Of course pleasure seeking and building anything don’t go together, so you’ll be a disappointment. But fantasizing about the future comes to the rescue… and you’ll make it another day.
Now, if you have moved above the pleasure seeking, you see that what others think about you is their problem. You may even see that the most revered figures with the largest number of mourners were fakes.
Anything that is popular is also worthless, because the majority is always wrong. Always.
So being a lot of people’s darling is a sure proof that you lived for that, and not for yourself. That you have virtues for show, but not practiced.
When you see that what gives you a life you can love is a life of virtue… Then you can keep your attention on growing those.
- 2. The Sitting Bull step: courage
Buckminster Fuller’s perspective: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”This step is about fear. What our relationship to fear, fear of death, fear of life is.
You can listen to Tai and start taking cold showers… Maybe even yell out, like he says “Be brave”.
How much difference do you think it will make for you? Still pleasure seeking to the max.
The other thing you can do is complain about being a small little turd, too afraid… and that is pleasure seeking too. Complaining is pleasure seeking.
Fear is an instrument of Evil…
Once you get to a place of seeing that, you can start including fear, and not giving it power.
If you can get that there is fear as a feeling, and then there is fear as an emotion… the moment you get the distinction between the 13th floor and the 15th floor, you can choose what floor you want to live on.
On the 13th floor fear as a sense that life is dangerous is very useful. It makes you employ several virtues to stay as safe as you can while you do what you do.
And that includes experimenting. Experimenting in putting yourself in situation where, were you on the 15th floor, you would not be caught dead… Really. And the difference is suddenly tangible, and your life will never be the same!
Seneca says, I paraphrase: don’t allow anything to influence you, anything that is not yours.
Anything that can be given to you or be taken away, including your health, is not yours. Including your life… it can be taken away.
Now, most of you probably won’t be able to let go of worrying about death… I am there, but hey, I am also old.
But here Werner’s words start making sense: you are not your history, you are not your body, you are not your emotions, you are not even your thoughts, written or spoken or silent.
All can be taken away. And what is left is Self practicing virtues.
As long as you consider yourself all those that can be taken away, you don’t have a Self.
If you live in your head, firmly on the Tree of Knowledge, eat with it, exercise with it, drive with it… you can’t have a Self… because you have nothing that cannot be taken away.
Soul correction, the concept, is from Kabbalah, and Kabbalah teaches that your soul lives after your body and your mind die.
Whether this is so or not: we have no idea. We choose a belief that helps us…
But if there is a soul that survives the body, that soul will carry with itself the virtues that you built and practiced. Your Self. To eternity.
Virtue, the word, suggests that this is not an everyday occurrence. Virtue, the word, suggests that it is hard. And it is. Hard. Difficult.
If you go for the “cheap closure now” life, for the pleasure you can derive from every action, thought, piece of food you put in your mouth, and you shrink away from hard, arduous, boring, tedious, unpleasant, or maybe even NORMAL, or natural, then you probably have no Self, no virtues, and you’ll disappear without a trace.
- I am using pictures of Dante’s Inferno… but I could use picture by Hieronymus Bosch… or Orpheus. Those pictures warn you of a life of pleasure and the suffering that goes with it. Pain and pleasure are the two sides of the same coin… one can’t exist without the other. The virtuous life neither pursues pleasure nor runs from pain.
Ulysses had himself tied to the mast of his ship, and made his crew put cotton in their ears… so they can avoid jumping for the promised pleasure of the sirens… You expose yourself and you get hooked… You need to scorn pleasure… or else… Just look at your life!
