What is the biggest difference between living on the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life?
Words are not the thing they symbolize. If you write “dog” that is not a dog, that is just ink on paper, or the idea of a dog.
A dog is physical. It had a beginning and an end, a birth and a death, and it even began before it was born.
It is the result of a physical process that takes time, takes ingredients, takes caring, takes doing.
You cannot go from the idea of a dog to dog, or the idea of death to death.
It is easy and fast, lightning fast, to have an idea. And it is easy to think that ideas are the thing they symbolize.
That happiness comes from words, or being comes from words, or health comes from words.
It is easy to be duped like that.
- On the Tree of Knowledge humans are duped. Even the best of them.
- On the Tree of Knowledge it is hard to know that Life is bigger than you, bigger than your thoughts, and also different from your thoughts.
Life has rules, and substance, and processes, while your thinking has made up rules and they can be influenced by any Tom, Dick, and Harry.
When I measure people’s accurate vocabulary, I actually test if they mean by words what the words actually symbolize.
The overwhelming majority of people have very little overlap between what the words actually mean and what they think the words mean.
So they live in an artificial reality that has little to do with the actual reality they live in.
They don’t have a habit of questioning their “knowledge” because if something doesn’t happen by what their “knowledge” tells them it should, they have plenty of factors to blame, except their knowledge: they have no idea of their “knowledge” being flawed.
They read on the top of the words, and the input that matches their warped world lands and confirms the faulty knowledge, and whatever input doesn’t gets ignored.
I experience this with my clients and students daily.
It feels impenetrable, because the student’s I has a vested interest in rejecting any input that invalidates it.
The I on the Tree of Knowledge is all about words. The I on the Tree of Life is impervious to words, it only looks at facts.
One of the biggest issues on the Tree of Knowledge is the illusion that things, results are fast and independent of your doing.
The desire trap, a completely Tree of Knowledge phenomenon consists of thoughts, visions of a desired outcome without a process, without work, without anything done in reality. Jump.
The brain cannot tell the difference between the vision of a thing and the thing. If the “thing” is normally pleasurable, the brain will experience pleasure, If it is painful, the brain will experience pain. And if it is deadly, the brain may kill the organism.
Some experiments that were done with students and basketball, where students what visualized throwing baskets did better in reality, than students who didn’t, resulted in people jumping into conclusion that the only thing that happened is thinking.
So if a student can throw better baskets after visualizing, then you can become a millionaire by visualizing.
What these stupid people didn’t take into consideration is this: throwing a basket is a simple action.
And while you are visualizing it, your muscles move accordingly.
Try it out. You cannot visualize walking without your muscles contracting as if in walking, throwing a basket without your muscles contracting as if in walking, kissing someone without your mouth making the appropriate form for kissing.
But most things people fantasize about in desire traps are the end result of years, maybe even decades long processes… so there is no muscle action to make it easier to do, like throwing a basket.
But YOU think there is such a thing as jumping directly to the end of a long series of different actions, practices, etc… so you keep on fantasizing, and doing nothing.
Most things take a lot of skills that you don’t have.
Or fancy yourself that it can’t be hard, but you are wrong.
When I lived in Israel I fancied myself of having a good working skill speaking Hebrew.
Then I came to the United States and could not have a conversation in Hebrew.
Fast forward 30 years. I am learning Hebrew. I am mortified how little I knew then… how delusional I was.
I could give people that measurement in percentage, and maybe I will… And prepare to be cursed out.
Now, you most likely missed it, glossed over it, because on the Tree of Knowledge all that talk about skills and practice and doing sounds like b.s.
So let’s look at a third thing that is different on the Tree of Knowledge, different in the sense that it leaves you miserable, and not able to do anything about it.
And that is when you find that there is something wrong with you.
Meaning: you are not getting from life what you want.
Big things and small things…
And you ask: what is wrong with me?
And because you live on the Tree of Knowledge, you think that there is a one thing that is wrong with you… so you pick a solution:
- 1. I am fat… I should diet.
- 2. I am stupid… I should quit
- 3. I am unhappy… I should divorce my husband
- 4. I am not wanted… so I should flatter everyone, and be nice.
- Or whatever stupid things you dream up as solutions.
There is nothing wrong with you. There is something horribly wrong though about where you live: the Tree of Knowledge. That doesn’t allow you to see that life takes matching up to what you want to do.
Learning, growing, skills, practice, attention, awareness, humility.
And because you cannot see what is missing: you seeing what you didn’t do, what you aren’t being, you fix superficial things, but the emptiness, the unhappiness will continue.
Because life on the Tree of Knowledge is empty. Empty of YOU.
I started out more unhappy than you. Wretched.
and I started out with more skills than you.
But I didn’t have an I either.
Slowly but surely I moved my life over to the Tree of Life.
It’s taken me all my discretionary income for 60 years. I spent it on courses, books, etc…
And some of those years I made a lot of money. Courses, books, workshops, leadership programs, two university degrees, a third just one credit short from getting a degree. 100 hour workweeks.
But, to tell the truth, the most valuable program I have ever done is this puny sounding 67 dollar program created by this guy whose vibration is 170, and lives on the Tree of Knowledge.
But it took me, daily, to a different view of life where I could assess my knowledge, and make, eventually, tiny tweaks to it, so today I am at 90% accuracy between words and what they mean. In two languages.
And I am not the only one. Every student of mine who is doing it with any regularity, is starting to move.
Of course they also read books, also they also get coaching from me, also they also do occasional webinars with me… But the core is the “puny little 67 dollar program”.
I have a person in my current course, From Upset to Communication, who isn’t doing the puny little 67 dollar program, even though I offered it to her.
She is there for control… and control she is. She is not able to learn, she is not able to dislodge herself from the Tree of Knowledge.
Because she can only look from one view of life… instead of 67.
Q.E.D… Quot Erad Demonstrandum… 1 she is proving my point.
- Q.E.D. is used in science to convey that a fact or situation demonstrates the truth of one’s theory or claim, especially to mark the conclusion of a formal proof.
