Here is a quote from Rob Brezsny’s weekly newsletter to illustrate that “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong”.
Answers that sound like solutions… but aren’t… they just hide the problem deeper… so we get further away from the truth.
Our ability to pursue our dreams can be inhibited by four addictions:
1. an addiction to what other people think of us;
2. an addiction to creating melodrama in a misguided quest for excitement;
3. an addiction to believing we’re imprisoned by what happened in the past;
4. an addiction to negative thoughts that fill us with anxiety.
(Thanks to success coach Tom Ferry for these ideas.)The good news is that it is your birthright to beat all four of those addictions. The work won’t come fast or early, and it may never be perfect. But it’s quite possible
The above is an example of how coaches teach us. It’s all surface. Simple, easy, and not true. 99% of what you find in books on the internet, in articles, is simple, easy, and not true.
Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong. H.L. Mencken
Have you noticed that no book, course, or even treatment by a psychologist makes much of a difference in how life feels, how you go about creating a life that is worth living?
Because all these stay on the surface.
I am re-reading Osho’s book on freedom, and although it is good, it also stays on the surface.
The depths are so murky, that you can’t see them with your eyes… and I guess, unless you are an empath, you need to see something to know what’s going on.
And even in things, behaviors, where the “researcher” can see, hardly anyone knows how to get your life on healthier footings. What exercises to do, that will free up the enslaved you to be free to be yourself.
Why is that?
Of course, I don’t know. But my hunch is that because we live on the Tree of Knowledge, on the Tree of Symbols instead of what they represent: Life, reality, things, we are once or maybe even twice removed from reality.
I remember in my first year as an architecture student, we were asked to make a model of an apartment in 1:10 scale, or was it 1:20? I don’t remember. But we were to make it like a box, without the top, and furnish it.
It was a great beginning of becoming an architect who deals with symbols. Things look good on paper and are horrid in reality. But most never actually learned it. A lot of my classmates have built monstrous buildings over the past 46 years.
One of our professors shared with us, that when he graduated he had the same sense of being removed from reality, so he spent his first five years as a set designer for a theater, where he did what architects do, but next day he could see it in reality, the proportions of elements, the protrusion of a balcony, or roof… and could create a stronger sense between the symbols and reality.
We all need a similar training of sorts in life, because we, on the Tree of Knowledge, live through symbols. And the elements of our creation, through words, are so far from reality, most of us create monstrosities… very far from what we intended.
If coaches and psychologists were involved in what their clients and patients build from their advice, they would be mortified. But they aren’t. The feedback they get is all words… again… and therein lies the mischief.
On the Tree of Knowledge it is words that battle it out… and reality is never closer than one step removed.
And in all that torrent of words, most of them threatening, big words, and many of them awaken bad feelings, you are lost, never to be found.
And when you interact with the physical reality, you are interacting with words. Words you have heard. You shop, you eat, you have sex by words. You avoid feeling.
On the Tree of Knowledge everything becomes the same as everything else.
Sometimes I observe people in cool weather. They say: it’s cold. But they are dressed warm enough. They could just experience the cool on their skin under the clothing… but anything that is colder than warm is too cold for them.
I watch the people in my exercise class: fully dressed in the heat of summer… And no one raises their hand when we are offered a water-exercise class… the water is too cold…
Yes, that is you, once, twice, thrice removed from reality… living in a world of symbols, not alive, not really.
But if it were only you so removed, but your teachers are also once or twice, or thrice removed.
Who is going to guide you back to life?
Sometimes I feel beaten, sometimes I feel that I can’t make a difference.
But at other times I feel the wind on my skin, and I imagine that you could too. You could enjoy being alive, instead of complaining that the wind is cold… instead of thanking you for invigorating you.
Students of mine that have been doing the Amish Horse Training Method fairly diligently, have been on the way of finding their way to reality through the maze of voices, the wanting to, the needing to, the having to, and the should.
Through the judging voices, and the blaming voices, and the shaming voices, voices upon voices. Through the voices that explain and narrate what they see. The voices that compare what they see.
The voices that are the vehicle, the instruments of making reality one, two, three steps removed, so you stop being an intelligent human… and stop noticing that you are in a cage, fed manufactured foods, and manufactured lies.
Truman in The Truman Show has nothing over you… your world is just as artificial as his was…
How did he get out of it? he started to notice the repetition, the incongruency, the fact that it did not bend to his will, did not respond to his actions.
And finally he broke out of the small world… and entered a bigger one… a bigger one where he was a mystery.
The goal is to be a mystery.
As long as you are an “IS” a fixed thing with fixed characteristics, you are not a mystery, you are a puzzle. Many times removed from reality. A construct.
As long as you are an “IS” or an I, you’ll spend most of your time protecting that I, comparing that I, fretting about that I and will do nothing else with your life.
As long as your I will only be happy if the circumstances are just so… you are not a person, and that is that.
OK. What would make a difference? Or how could you return to the Tree of Life?
The Tree of Life, where you can be a human with the curiosity of a human, the resilience of a human, the drive of a human… And, unfortunately be only one in a million… but the seed of the survival of humanity.
Warning: if you need to babble about your transformation, if you are uncomfortable being a human among machines, if you need to bring your whole tribe with you or you won’t go… you’ll fail.
You need to have the courage to go it alone.
I am learning this the hard way myself. No one to talk to…
OK… I am off topic again… lol.
The question was: why can’t psychologists, therapists, coaches, spiritual teachers, etc. take you back to being human?
The simple answer is: they are making money because you are NOT human.
A tad more complicated answer is: because one cannot teach what one hasn’t experienced themselves.
You can spout truth-sounding phrases, sentences, whole books, like Eckhart Tolle, who obviously haven’t gone through what he says you should go through… because there are no steps…
Or any of the millions of gurus, healers, teachers… all mouthpieces… no reality behind their words, once, twice, thrice removed… and therefore ineffective.
I once was where you are, tried every method known to man (or so I felt) and yet I was miserable, I was always angry, and quite ineffective in my activities.
I climbed out of, what felt like a deep hole, like a deep well, with the help of energies and practices.
And an obsessive observation of the results… experiments galore.
Because those energies are available to you, and because the practices are available to you, you can do what I’ve done. And because I get paid when you do well… I will do more than my share to help you climb, and help you become a person.
So help me god… or whatever is there… Life? Life Force?
