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If you love yourself, you love your life.
It sounds so good, but how could you? How could you love yourself, knowing all the horrible things you have done?!
Last night, after the Playground, after I turned the light off. memories of those horrible things started to revisit.
After about 10-15 minutes of that I was feeling really horrible, doubting that I can do any good in the world. And then it hit me:
none of the horrible things I said I did ever happened.
What? was I lying to myself?
No.
I am going to teach you the One Ring Method that Controls it All of the Playground, or maybe even the process to evolve into a human being.
The Big Kahuna.
I learned this method in the Landmark Education Forum. 31 years ago. It is the first thing you learn there. and no one completely gets its importance, not even the teachers. Or maybe they just don’t want to teach it, because once you have the One Ring, you won’t spend all your money on Landmark Education, or other courses.
Landmark Education, and most businesses that I know, make money only if a customer buys a lot of products. And this may be one reason that they don’t give everything in their courses, maybe not even to their fabled Forum Leaders. And a little bit of knowledge is dangerous. 
It’s a lot like an incomplete course of antibiotics: the bacteria that survives mutates and becomes wholly resistant to the antibiotic.
In the case of personal development, the ‘Opponent’ is a shape-shifter, and will make itself not recognizable. It will sound like, it will feel like something else. and there you are again: low vibration, self-hate, misery, procrastination, baaahhhh. The human condition is designed to be the Valley of the Shadow of Death. misery. Did you/did they think that a little spot-cleaning will do the trick?
They don’t teach you how to do it, and they don’t teach you that if it is taught as ‘spot-cleaning’, it is like using a supercomputer to add up 7+14. lol
But really, until last night I didn’t, myself, use it to its full power.
OK, I am going to teach you the principle, the process. It will be up to you to practice, to utilize, to get good at it.
It is going to sound simple, easy, and ‘so what’. and if you give in to that notion… you just bought yourself more of the misery, self-hate, and ineffectiveness you are now experiencing.
OK. here you go.
When you speak, what you say happens in two distinct and distinguishable domains: in the ‘fact’ domain and in the ‘story’ domain.
In Landmark Education there is a distinction: occurrence.
Occurrence is the way you speak and think normally. unaware and unconscious about the facts and the story is entangled to the degree that it takes astuteness to disentangle them. and bring some reality into your speaking and your thinking.
The facts are simple with simple words. words that even a Martian can get, even if he just got off the ‘boat’.
The words have to be words that don’t carry marker feelings. Feelings that carry no emotional content.
Words like hurried belong to the right side. Because hurrying is, simply going fast.
The second domain, the story has a lot of emotional content, emotional words. big words, complicated words, like betrayed, or abandoned. or raped, or abused, or whore. or shameless, or lonely, or ugly. And (listen up!) the words: never, ever, no, impossible, etc.
Your job, if you want to become a powerful person who can love yourself, will retell what happened in your life. what is happening in your life. and as you retell it you’ll separate what happened from the story.
You want to get to a point where you are fully responsible. where you see that you are fully responsible. that all the drama, and all the bad things only happened in your speaking. or you buying into another’s speaking and then speaking it the same way in your head.
When you get to this point: full responsibility, the world will become brighter
the weight of guilt, shame, or self-righteous indignation, regret, self-pity will fall away. and when you look in the mirror you’ll find a person there who is innocent like you. and you’ll give your heart to them.
And when you return to your life, you’ll have spring in your steps, and you’ll see clearly that your life is up to you.
And finally the 2000 year old Hillel quote will make sense to you:
If I am not for myself, who is for me?
But if I am only for myself, who am I?
If not now, when?
Let’s look why you need to first do the work with the One Ring to get this Hillel quote correctly?
The first line ‘If I am not for myself, who is for me?’ indicates that you can be for yourself…
That you can do for yourself, love yourself, maybe even respect yourself (gasp), honor yourself, take care of yourself, etc.
When you look at your life (and your Starting Point Measurement) you don’t see that. You do an awful lot of things that dishonor you, that hinder you, that disrespect you. that express that you hate yourself. or if that is too strong a word, dislike yourself.
Before you can benefit from the first line, you need to get to that magical place where you have done nothing wrong. where you are complete. where your integrity is whole and complete.
Let’s look at the second line: ‘But if I am only for myself, who am I?’
Most people live in an either/or world, an object in the world of objects. Objects that stand in the way, can cause hurt, enemies.
So their actions are consistent with this suspected animosity. They behave as if they were always in danger. they behave as potential victims. Always put upon, put out, pouting, self-protecting. attacking or defending themselves, explaining, etc.
In the One Ring method you find out that other people, albeit they are self-serving, they don’t specifically set out to antagonize you or attack you or abuse you. You start to see that no one has ever done anything to you, and you can thus become like the wind, or the water in the rapids. free.
And if the ‘other’ is not the enemy, then you don’t have to protect yourself. and (gasp) you may even become inclusive. kind, and caring without giving up caring for yourself.
And now that you are free… maybe, and just maybe, you’ll have the ability to give your life to something. Something that is larger than yourself. a purpose, a meaning. that until you are free, you can’t really do.
And then the third line: If not now, when?
When you are free, you can live with urgency. Not emergency, not urgency that other people or circumstances impose on you, but urgency.
This is the place where rocks have higher priority than pebbles or sand. whereas to someone who hasn’t done the work with the One Ring, it is just a nice concept. A concept that makes sense. while their actions show that a concept is not what defines how you live.
I had a conversation with a student of mine, who asked: isn’t this the same as ‘If it is to be, it is up to me’
Honestly, they compare like tin to gold.
You can think ‘if it is to be, it is up to me’ at any vibration level. At any level of self-love and self-hate. Acting on it even…
But it will never take you to the promised land where you are a human being…
Just like Hillel’s three lines. unless you have done the work of removing the filters, removing the story from as many things as you can.
So you can have a fun life…
