This article is about personal evolution… going from where, how, who you are today to a higher level, a higher organization where you can be, have, do more.
Personal development covers activities that improve awareness and identity, develop talents and potential, build human capital and facilitate employability, enhance the quality of life and contribute to the realization of dreams and aspirations… from Wikipedia
As I am browsing the many pages of many self-proclaimed gurus about the topic, what is most striking is this: all think that they are there… up there… And looking from that imaginary height, they claim what the levels are.
That is the problem with imagination. You can only imagine things on your level, inside your paradigm. The higher paradigms cannot be imagined. Bummer, eh?
So you need to trust, and move into the invisible, the unknown, the maybe unfriendly… 🙁
Fear is normal. In fact, fear is healthy. If you are not afraid, you live in your imagination… and will wake up with your hand in the chamberpot… as we Jews say.
So what this means is this: you don’t know where you are going. I don’t know where I am going. I am, at best, taking you to where I have been. And then, if I am lucky, walk with you, trembling with hope and fear… with you.
Recommendation: when you see a website that has a graphic that names the levels: leave. They are lying to you. They are taking you on a ride. They have something to sell you.
Here are a few examples. Click on the pictures to view them full size. 
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It’s November 10, and the ground is covered with snow where I live. My hands are cold, I am contemplating putting on my typing gloves: gloves that the tip of the finger is cut off so I can type.
I started to keep my house cold in the winter a few years ago, but went all hogs with it last winter: my thermostat is set to 47 degrees (9 degrees Celsius) day and night, and I have a heating pad under my desk and a heating pad on the wall about two meters from my right shoulder on the wall in my office. I also have a heating pad in the bathroom that I turn on when I plan to take a shower.
Why am I doing this?
First I was doing it because of money. But then, as I gradually lowered the thermostat to what it is today, I am doing it to toughen up.
Toughening up is crucial if you want to grow.
The enemy of growth is complacency and comfort.
Humanity would have never evolved had they been able to afford complacency and comfort early on.
What is the motive power underneath the need to evolve is discomfort, need, and seeing that with your effort you can produce something better.
And, surprisingly, it begins with discomfort with temperature.
Areas with cold winters created population more likely to use their brain to carve out a better life for themselves. And although this is true, some whole countries don’t fit… like Switzerland.
So there needs to be some more discomfort to spark ingenuity and the desire to conquer the world. Warring, or the scarcity of food… maybe?
I have noticed that if you pay for your own heat, you are more alert, more aware, and more ambitious overall.
Why? because one of the sources of comfort has largely disappeared…
So I use discomfort to nudge myself. I don’t suffer, I am not like the dogs of “Learned Helplessness”… I chose to be uncomfortable and thus stay above the slothfulness comfort creates.
There are all kinds of sloth, all kinds of comfort, and they are all “harmful”… if your goal is to become an expanding human being.
Family, a sense of comfort, a sense of safety, a sense of “I don’t need to do anything to be well” is a “comfort device”.
I have done some research (don’t forget, this is a theory, not the truth!) and found that scientists publish lots of papers before they get married, but barely any after they get married.
Publishing a paper is how a scientist demonstrates that they are growing.
So this theory is underneath my life-setup of creating discomfort.
I am now cranking it up a bit by walking to shop, or maybe taking public transportation.
I don’t know what I’ll think of when I get comfortable with this new arrangement… lol.
One of the ways comfort expresses itself is through overfocus.
I see that in how people drive, and I see that how people do projects. They don’t look left, they don’t look right, they don’t verify the moment to moment reality… they charge ahead.
This is the tyranny of certainty… A really large percentage of men whose wife left them, report that this came as a surprise, things were fine…
Nearly everyone who joins a cult, whether it is a food cult or another, they don’t wake up until the cult did an irreversible job on them. Becoming vegan, becoming fruitarian, etc. are all the results of this “certainty bias” that kills splendid plans…
Interestingly, the word comes from a quote about commitment. Overfocus, rigid, nose to the grindstone focus seems to come from commitment, but it is a sloppy way to view it.
Commitment is a high vibration, flexible, beautiful thing.
“There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills splendid plans, that the moment one definitely commits oneself then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that never otherwise would have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.
Inside commitment one lives in the world. Inside commitment one intelligently checks the environment, the results, the validity of the commitment every so often.
I come out to look around every 15-30 minutes. Or every hour, if I am reading. Check in with the world.
In the Starting Point Measurements, #2 measures your overall intelligence includes this type of intelligence. You see, you can be an intellectually superior person, and an idiot savant. Meaning, an idiot when it comes to Life.
I prefer to have a higher number in my overall intelligence, than my intellect.
Because alertness, having a wider view of reality, and a sense of cause and effect… where my actions take me, are more important to human evolution than superior intellect, which I definitely don’t have.
One of the recurring issues with people is connected to this certainty illusion: if others approve of you then you are safe.
It is not only not true, it also acts as an anchor to your growth: you cannot grow, because others don’t like you to grow.
When you grow you HAVE TO challenge the status quo.
Depending on your soul correction, you challenge your inside status quo or outside status quo.
I don’t have enough data to hypothesize, but my “Memories” clients need to challenge their inside status quo, and my “Finish What You Start” clients have to challenge the outside status quo… at least that’s how it is shaping up.
But whether it is inside or outside, you are on a short leash. The little precious I is what is calling the shot, the I that wants to be validated EVERY SINGLE STEP OF THE WAY.
It’s really puzzling to see that the I isn’t interested in results at all. It is interested in the moment to moment “being right” or “looking good”.
It reminds me of the car I had 35 years ago. A car with tiny wheels. I could feel every pebble on the road on my butt…
I never really cared how I look. I do care about being right.
A friend of mine shared that when someone drives funny on the road, she makes it a point to pull up next to them and take a good look at them.
What she is looking for is a pattern: who is stupid, who is this, who is that.
And although there is NO certainty there, the looking makes her feel superior: after all she is above “them”, gathering data.
Putting people in categories, putting label on people is part of this “wanting to be safe by being right”.
I have that in spades. It is so ingrained that changing it, losing it, seems impossible. Muscletest says it is possible… Unfortunately muscletest does not tell me how…
Anyway, this article was an incomplete picture of what prevents you, what stops you from growing as a person, from evolving on the human evolution scale.
In my humble opinion, unless you cause it, evolution won’t happen.
My coaching program and the personal guidance I provide there, intends to cause you to cause it.
I think it is working.
At least one environment is pulling for you, rooting for you, pushes you on.
It’s a win-win. Without it I would not have anything really pushing me on.
PS: Your food list as an instrument for personal evolution.
In Euclidean geometry the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
Evolution is not Euclidean geometry.
In evolution zig-zag is the normal way, the shortest way, the only way.
The student who decided that the fastest way to go from clueless wage earner to internet mogul is to start a website, hopefully learned from his experience… but I doubt.
The memes, the media bias, the lottery approach to life says: want to go from 1 to 2? Do this… lol.
If you don’t know who is the sucker in the room… then you are the sucker…
OK, the food list: the goal is to get well, be well, in a sustainable fashion. To create a new ess with regards to eating.
If you thought that your food list will be the final and perfect food list, you are the sucker, like my student with hopes to become an internet mogul.
My food list has changed three times, and I am in the middle of the fourth now. From phase to phase nearly everything changes. I am not the one figuring it out, Source does… It is way beyond my intellect to see what phases I may have to go through.
But I have gone from 5% health to 75%… and it is inching up.
Here is an example: when I first started with the food list, I was allowed to eat turkey. Then no turkey, only grass fed beef. Then no beef, only lamb and chicken gizzards. And now, the fourth phase: no mammals, only fish… cat fish (fatty), canned pink salmon (fatty), chicken livers and calves kidneys… Could you have predicted that? Not in your life. I don’t even try to understand. I just trust and observe.
If the first zig (of the zig-zag) tells you to stop drinking coffee… please do. But chances are: coffee will be returned… but your body will already be different.
So don’t be a sucker. Don’t settle into a phase as if it were the end of the journey. It isn’t.
Don’t throw away your coffee maker. Your butter, your anything. Chances are you’ll need them later.
Evolution is definitely not a straight line… Don’t be the sucker!
Oh, one more thing: if you did not follow your food list, then your body hasn’t changed enough for your food list to change… that is my experience. Wishing it did won’t make it so.
And what feels like zig-zag may be the spiral… who knows?
