I am on my eighth round of the 67 steps.
Obviously I am following what I learned when I was nine: you can spend a whole vacation reading a book, a lifetime listening and working with 67 audios and not get bored with it.
Or the way Bruce Lee says the same thing: I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
I have grown more in these 19 months than in any similar period in my life.
But…
Most people I watch are not present to what they are doing: it is habitual, which means mindless, stuck, plateaued.
Obviously there are things that you don’t care how you do… but if there are too many of this sort in your life, your life is a mess. Unless each action was perfected to a level of mastery, at some point.
That each action you perform on any given day has been given enough attention to be economical, fast, and effective.
Early on in Landmark Education, even before the company was called Landmark Education, there was a teleseminar with Werner Erhard himself on creativity.
I remember one thing from the series. It was worth the admission: “bring creativity to where it’s needed, not to where it isn’t… Don’t try to brush your teeth creatively.”
Creativity in mundane stuff really means: no rhyme, no reason, no system. No order. No predictable result.
Creativity, and many other “things” life requires of you are in short supply, because it depends on some chemical supply of energy. Tai calls it glycogen, and I don’t care what you call it, the phenomenon is obvious: it is in limited supply.
Unless you set your life up in a way, like Werner said, that you don’t need creativity for every action, because… listen up, this is important~
Because you consciously set your life up like a factory, like a system of clockwork precision, you’ll never have glycogen for what really needs it.
But this is only possible if you establish routines in your life that are well designed. For nearly everything that happens regularly.
How you make your coffee, how you make your meals, how you do your shopping, your bedtime routine, your morning routine, your intimacy routine, your social routines, making your energized water routine, your supplement routine, your doing the 67 steps routine…
Mindset doesn’t change unless the doing changes.
I know “they” teach the opposite, but they are mistaken.
And unless the doing is perfected, anxiety accompanies it… and anxiety, among others, takes your attention from it away.
I watch “feel” people as they come to a webinar, or as they come to a call and I know almost everything about them, about their lives, everything I need to know.
Because if you bring anxiety to those few first minutes, then that is the story of your life!
If you are late, or almost late to a call… then that is the story of your life: you like to be the superman, cutting it dangerously short.
The secret of the 67 steps is that it is almost as meditative as the ten thousand kicks Bruce Lee talks about. Meditative as in going within, meditative as in slowing down, meditative as in connecting to yourself. To the place where your power comes from, your power to be you, your power to do great things, or to do small things greatly.
The place from where a life worth living comes from.
Excellence.
As a human living in society you need to bring these “routines” or systems to every area of life.
The most treacherous area is your relationships.
Why? Because no one is interested in you and your perfected life.
Everyone is interested in themselves, what they want, and depending on their level of “desire to receive for the self alone”, they are also interested in disrupting your life, destroying your systems, uprooting you… because that is pretty much what “desire to receive for the self alone” means.
Having something at YOUR expense.
When you met your significant other, you were a set of “desire to receive for the self alone” activities yourself. And you picked a match for those… for your soul correction, for your rackets.
And as you attempt to become a person instead of those disharmonious energies packaged into one, your greatest challenge is your relationship.
They don’t want you to change.
Bruce Lee married her wife not from his rackets, I surmise. How do I know it? Because his career did not suffer a sudden setback… or hiatus.
But rare is the student whose environment allows them to grow.
- You find your water energizer audio turned off or set to inaudible? Don’t be surprised. It’s normal.
- Do you find your spouse setting you up with stuff to do? Nagging you all day all night? Making you incoherent, and ineffective in your life? It’s normal.
That seems to be their societal role… to hold you in the chicken coop. Sick, stupid, and unhappy.
Don’t blame them: you may be doing the same thing for them!
I am reading Aristotle… He lived when Philip the Macedon lived. He was tutor to Alexander the Great. I am saying this to say: he lived a long time ago. 1
Aristotle said something most significant that my students should internalize:
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. 2
I would reword this statement to “It is the mark of a person who can hold a thought and its opposite, and not get confused, or take sides.”
I don’t know… I may reword it again before the end of this article.
I am reading the collected works of Aristotle, 2,500 pages.
I am reading his reasoning that the command center of life, each individual life, is in the heart. 2400 years ago that was good knowledge.
Aristotle considered the brain to be a secondary organ that served as a cooling agent for the heart and a place in which spirit circulated freely. He designated the space in which all the spirits came together as the sensus communis — the origins of our much more metaphorical term, “common sense.” Aristotle had famously written, “There is nothing in the intellect that is not in the senses.” As we can see, he meant this quite literally.
It’s fascinating reading. All the facts are the same, yet our conclusions, nowadays, are so different. Even though we still consider the heart an important organ… “feel with your heart”… which, to me,means that in ways we haven’t accepted that the heart has nothing to do with any of that.
In certain areas of our current knowledge we are as misguided, or clueless as Aristotle was 2500 years ago.
We have theories. But no means to test them… or not really.
One of the questions theories deal with is how, with what means does the chicken coop communicate the universally expressed energy: don’t let them escape!
And where do we receive the messages?
And are these messages blockable? Is the Amish Horse Training Method and effective tool, and if it is, why can’t my students do it?
And where are the ideas that you should not do anything, that you should just imagine and it will be created for you… and other nonsense stored, so it seems that there is no escape from that bullshit? 3
And why are certain people able to separate their own thoughts from the common and stupid thoughts of the day?
These are all very valid questions, and they have answers… but at present we only have theories we hope to test.
One type of question is the question Warren Buffet poses: if you look at your high school class: how would you determine who will be successful and who will be a failure?
What would be the distinguishing characteristic of a person who will be a winner? And is the opposite is also true: a foolproof bet that that person will become a loser?
I have been continuously pondering this question for 19 months…
I am of the opinion, now, that it is consistency that matters the most.
What is the opposite of consistency? Inconsistency… but what do inconsistent people do? They are impulsive. Their “solution” to problems always comes as an impulse, as a good idea, as a stroke of genius, or a failure at that.
But can someone be consistently afraid? Consistently stupid? consistently boastful?
Muscletest says “no”… Why? Because those states, those activities are coming on the heel of wanting to do something and failing at it. So they are all the results of some impulse…
Consistency means: freeing yourself from impulses. From unneeded “creative” impulses.
From setting up a system, practicing it until it is smooth and perfect, and then living life with that.
In my high school class this was obvious. The consistency carried them past high school, past university, and into their profession.
My base nature is to be VERY impulsive. But I have created habits that counter that, so professionally I have always been successful. An overachiever.
Nowadays I add new practices to my repertoire, and perfect them.
The times where it is chaotic are rare… whereas my life used to be chaotic as a rule.
I am looking for the order even when there is chaos… and I get glimpses of it.
Yesterday, as i was filling the orders for the mini speakers, I started to see the order in the chaos.
There is even a soul correction for that missing capacity “Order in Chaos”…
There is a soul correction for nearly every missing capacity. Why? This is one of those questions that at the level of our knowledge we only have theories.
It all begins with theories. For those who are willing to exercise their command center for discerning. Consistently.
- Born: 384 BC, Stagira, Greece
Died: 322 BC, Chalcis, Greece - he also said: We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Apply them to this article, consistency, systems, excellence, and you’ll see that they apply… maybe more than the main quote…
- I do have a theory, I’ll write an article about that soon.
