I have started to put my old videos on my video site
I also listened to one… how you lose your creativity, how to get it back…
Brilliant. I mean the video. I like it.
I talk about how you leak your energy…
Social media, constant talking, texting, browsing, playing video games, all leak your energy.
And it is not just you, it is almost all of humanity.
Leaking your energy… none remaining for creativity, creating life, growing, being a human.
Machines running out of energy, robotic, and not knowing that you did it to yourselves.
What is near invisible, at least I could not see it for decades, is this:
On the Tree of Knowledge, by design, speed trumps everything.
Speed trumps (trumps: in card games, or reasoning: ranks above the others, takes it all, wins.) thoughtfulness, speed trumps creativity, speed even trumps doing things right.
It is hard to distinguish, because it happens so fast, and so reliably. Always.
I said: it is “By design” and I meant it.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, maybe I am. But I don’t believe that evolution, Life, our DNA wants us to behave in such self-defeating ways. Or if you are religious, I don’t believe that your god would want us to prefer speed to everything else.
You want to reduce someone to sheep? To effect?
Suggest to them that they have to do things fast, without thinking. That snappy, quick, is what constitutes winning in life, not the results. (Was it your mother, your father, your uncle who did that? Your school teacher?)
That you are supposed to know, without looking, without recognizing, maybe even without understanding the question.
This is the story of your life: you feel inferior because you don’t see without looking, you don’t understand without contemplating, and that means that you are <gasp!> SLOW! <gasp again.>
I am one of you, with the only difference that I pay attention. And, at least some of the time, I look before I leap, I contemplate before I answer.
Some of the time.
Used to be never.
I have a sneaking hunch that what made architecture not enjoyable for me is the fact that it has only 5% need for brilliance, and 95% for sitting and drafting. Smart people don’t have to work hard! Screamed something inside me.
I hated that.
I hate filling orders, that is the nowadays equivalent of drafting. I never would have guessed that this Tree of Knowledge mindset is underneath that dislike.
I have been training myself for about a year now to stop and to look before I start a Freecell game. It is obvious that it is a losing strategy to just start moving the cards.
Today I “heard” the internal conversation, “IT” saying: “smart people don’t have to look…”
But the truth is:
- Nothing worth doing is worth starting fast, without looking or research.
- Nothing worth doing has ever been created fast.
- No creativity is possible without first looking, and looking and looking for a long time.
- No skill will ever come to you instantly.
All this instant and fast and smart stuff comes from the Tree of Knowledge mindset… which underlies the fixed mindset.
Tedium… Tension… Fear….
The answer, the reaction is swift and instant… you run from it.
My TLB is 70. That is 70 on an exponential scale. And yet, I can see this all the time on my own behavior.
I run to have a cup of something or other. I run and play Freecell. I run and just walk around. I run from the discomfort.
I run from the tedium. The tension. The unpleasant pain and tightness starting in my stomach and going all the way to the tips of my fingers.
Breathing becomes difficult, and it takes minutes to let go of it. Long minutes.
It is as if there were an alien entity inside me wanting to wrestle away control from me… and do life his way.
- Kabbalah calls it the Opponent.
- Landmark Education calls it “IT”.
- Christianity probably calls it the Devil.
To the extent that the “entity” wins, your life is crap or crappy.
- You are fat… because you don’t breathe. Oxygen is what burns your fuel and makes you thin, etc… If you don’t breathe, you HAVE TO become fat.
- You are unaccomplished. Because you only want to do the things that are instant and make you feel brilliant.
- You are silent in my webinars, because you don’t know the answer to my questions… and you don’t even have the habit of getting the meaning of the question, so that you can look…
As long as you don’t even start wrestling back the controls from the “Beast”… you are stuck on the Tree of Knowledge.
So how do you do it? How do you wrestle back the controls?
I don’t know. I can only tell you how I’ve done what I have done. You can hear that I am not near on top, not near winning all the time.
But whenever I recognize the situation, which is getting a little more frequent, I can win. Which points to the most important “to do”: to recognize the situation where the Beast wants you to do fast.
I know I can win. The discomfort feels like it can kill me… But it is a lie. It is just a feeling.
And I can win. And you can win.
After all I am real. The “Beast” is a construct. A shadow. An idea planted in our minds.
