This morning I received an email from a young man who paid me to measure his starting point measurements.
He could be speaking for you.
I need to take better care to my physical body. Like you said, drinking more water is the first step.
I don’t take care of my body, and I can’t understand why.
I feel like I’m missing gratitude. I hate to say it but I don’t feel grateful, and I don’t understand why.
Gratitude probably will come up to everyone, at least in the United States, where this week is Thanksgiving week… and you are supposed to be grateful. Or pretend that you are.
The more lavish your Thanksgiving, the more money you spend, the more food on the table, the more you do it to cover up that you are pretending. And pretense is the killer of the spirit.
You fill the hollow with gorging yourself. 1
Gratitude is a spiritual capacity. One out of 100,000 has it. One per 100,000. This means there is maybe another person in Syracuse, NY, population around 140,000 plus the university students, another 30 thousand.
Gratitude is not the only spiritual capacity people throw around casually if it were obvious that they have it, or even know what they are talking about.
Generosity has come up on my radar the most frequently. Or better said: the lack of it.
I spent a lot of energy mining the depth of the spiritual capacities I saw I lacked. For the past 32 years at least. Each spiritual capacity at least a year, some, like authenticity, three years. Generosity took me two and a half years to mine as fully as I have. And I bet I have not turned it on 100%. Let me muscletest: 94%.
For a while I had the arrogant idea that I can turn on spiritual capacities for people, and suddenly they will be able to think, work, live with them… use them.
But I was wrong. I didn’t consider cluelessness, and disinterestedness as a barrier.
When I muscletest people, I find that 99.9% of them has one capacity open. Thinking of themselves.
Generosity and gratitude are like the yin and the yang, one needs the other, either you have both, or you have neither.
Why? Because without a recipient there is no giver.
When you look around (it is easier to see on others! you look at them and you see yourself), you see lack of generosity and lack of gratitude all around you.
Gratitude and appreciation is one capacity.
People don’t even waste a second to think of you the giver, to even look at you. Children need to be told: say thank you to the nice lady… to grandma… or they won’t.
But saying thank you is not gratitude. Paying someone is not gratitude. Reciprocating a gift, an invitation, is not gratitude. Unless there is appreciation.
Appreciating the gift, appreciating the person who gave the gift, appreciating what it took for the other to give.
And generosity? Generosity means having no ego, having no I in the giving. Putting it aside.
Listening to another person without caring what you will do, what it means to you, without wanting them to shut up, or get to the point, or let YOU speak is generous.
Can you listen like that? If not, your issue is lack of generosity… also lack of appreciation and gratitude.
The twin capacities.
The biggest issue is that like with any distinction, until you see it you don’t.
Until you have a little inkling within… you can’t even see it’s missing.
The way Landmark Education says it: It is missing that it’s missing.
I have ex students who have this “missing that it’s missing” in spades. I am going to guess that my missing 6% is being unable and unwilling to work with someone who is totally and “genetically” incapable to see that they are ungenerous and unappreciative.
By the way: giving is not necessarily generosity.
Most giving follows an agenda or a should.
The same way as saying thank you is not appreciation.
I find it utterly predictable that the dominant non-god religion in the world is the religion of attraction, the law of attraction.
That religion says: you need to be able to appreciate what you have to get more.
But only one in 100,000 can appreciate. That is about three thousand people in the United States of America, and seventy thousand in the world.
Christianity says: unless you can love your neighbor as yourself, you are not allowed into the Kingdom of God.
My next door neighbor is a Christian, so she decided that she wanted to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, so she shoveled my sidewalk yesterday. And smiled at me.
I guess she takes the next door neighbor thing seriously. But next door neighbor means every person on the planet… can you, should you love everyone? You don’t even love yourself! How do I know? You don’t take care of yourself, your body, your brain, your money, your life!
So from one impossible religion to the other… you are like a stranded, beached whale, my friend.
I feel for you. Compassion… I am going to help you here: You are trying to reach for capacities that are out of your reach. Neither of those intangible, spiritual capacities are available to you until you reach the vibration of 500.
495? not yet… lol.
So what can you do at the level where you are?
Judging from students that do the work: being able to get curious. Especially curious of how the world is for another.
Moving from your shoes to their shoes, or maybe even bilocate.
Listen while you speak.
You cannot get to the 15th floor without going to every floor first and live there for a while.
The Tree of Life is a model. It says what capacities need to open up for you to go to the next level up.
Is the model fully accurate? I haven’t muscletested it yet. The model is accurate, the details… I’ll get to it.
The model is used by savvy teachers, Landmark Education, Blair Singer…
In Landmark Education, the Wisdom Course area, teaches the seven stage model of a project.
The brilliance of that model is that it says clearly WHAT you need to conquer before you can go to the next level. Just like the Kabbalistic model. The path to one sphere to the next has a word written on it…
The first stage is when you have an idea. Until you conquer the barrier, expressing it, freely and concisely, and in an enrolling way, you can’t go to the next level. For some people this is easy. This stage is called Listen/express. The idea needs you to listen… Listen to what another is saying.
The second stage is to remember that you have a project. This seems obvious, but obviously it isn’t… many splendid ideas died because they got no energy infusion. What needs to be conquered here is the propensity to forget. To take something for granted. Like a plate you set in motion with your expression.
The third stage is called “Strengthen/build support”. The challenge is fear… and you need to conquer fear of failing. If you don’t… you’ll be stuck on this level… If you do conquer it, then you can get into the stage of flow, where … where I forgot what to conquer… lol. I’ll find my notes, I promise.
Because your whole life is organized to avoid failing, very very very few people ever go past this third stage.
Without the willingness to fail, without the willingness to hear “no”, you are stuck there.
No matter how much doing you do… unless you can go through these stages, you won’t get anywhere worth getting.
I have noticed that most students are stuck on the first stage. They are unwilling to express, because once you express, your failure will be public. So you see… you are dreaming of fifth level up… without doing the work on the first four levels.
And it is work. The work that creates the epigenetic changes where the needed capacities get unlocked.
Being a teacher is a thankless job. I mean I have to generate all the generosity and appreciation myself, because I will get none of it from the students, unless and until they get up to the fifth level…
In the What’s missing exercise we hunt for what is missing that you don’t even see as missing, so you can turn around your life.
The exercise does not give you the capacity, but it points it out as missing.
Depending on who you are, where you are, what you are up to, you’ll consider the missing capacity as a project… and take it through the stages… That is what I did. With all the capacities i have.
Considered them a project.
I like work. I hate idle wishing, pining, yearning, wanting, hoping… I consider those an illness. Deadly.
PS: I have never heard of a person who could do it alone. Without a mentor, without a guide, without someone to catch them jumping ahead, or pretending, or skirting an issue. Get yourself a guide, please.
I am starting an experiment, where I offer a “strategy session”, a 20-minute conversation, where both you and I can decide if we can work together. It is nominally free… You have to get your complete starting point measurements to qualify.
- I don’t do Thanksgiving. I don’t have to. My whole life is thanksgiving… every day. Every hour. A deep gratitude… 99% of my time. 1% when I am disgusted… About a minute a day.
