I looked at pictures of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi… who wrote the book Flow, and is an expert on talking about happiness. Not being happy, mind you, on researching happiness.
He doesn’t look happy, doesn’t feel happy (remember, I am an empath).
I even went and found videos where he speaks Hungarian… hoping to find a picture where he is joyful.
Didn’t find any. Not even one.
His insightful quote: “People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.” is what was missing for him, and what is missing for most people most of the time.
The current model of psychology and self-growth is barking up the wrong tree. They are trying to control the mind… but the mind is not the issue. They are trying to control their environment, but environment is not the issue. They are trying to control their thoughts, their vibration (haha), their speaking, but the issue is not there… Wrong tree: no results.
Without tooting my own horn, life needed a true empath who can feel the nature of reality, the inner workings of things, so Life can lead humans to the next evolutionary level: human being.
It seems to me that I have been in training most of my life.
What is training? Training to become someone who can know what they feel is through a life that is turbulent, with situations that don’t repeat, lots of different environments, lots of different occupations, challenges, people.
Every time I shared some parts of my life with someone, they invariably said: you should write a book about your life.
Why? Because compared to most people’s life, my life was full of story-worthy incidents.
That is how a life of training is for an empath who needs to become really good.
Now, I can say this only in hindsight. In the middle of it, it was difficult. And I complained a lot about it. Until I invented, through inversion, a purpose for myself that allowed me to see what’s happening in a different, a new context.
I was living on the edge, generating (through distinguishing!) distinctions of transformation for humankind.
Same life, different context. No more complaining. Actually more than that: it made me live my on-the-edge life even more with open and sober eyes than before.
Things weren’t happening to me, weren’t done to me, things were experiments and studies.
In that process I started to control my inner experience and with it the quality of my life, the quality of my reactions or responses to it.
I invented that purpose in 1992. 26 years ago.
And at some point, I started to teach my methods… but they did not communicate… and therefore the results were small or none.
I spent a lot of time, a lot of money, penetrating different modalities, guru teachings, etc.: all of them had a bit of useful sounding advice… but none of them did anything really… at all.
Like with Csikszentmihalyi, it is sufficient to look at the person who is supposedly knows what they are talking about. Look inside… and you need a true empath for that.
None of them succeeded with their own methods… because the methods are flawed.
Fast forward to February of 2016. I bought an inexpensive course, the 67 steps from Tai Lopez.
It is obvious that the creator of that program is not a good example of someone who can control their inner experience. But because the program is eclectic, because it takes you all over the place, it is a great substitute to having to put yourself into “on the edge” situations, and still learn “on the edge distinctions”… about the world, about people, about yourself.
An effective environment to change the who. To become a who who can be trained, who can become worth a damn.
I said: environment.
Honestly, the content of the steps is not the gold there. Their truth value is 10%… Everything comes through Tai’s interpretation, and Tai’s personal vibration is 170…not even the level of integrity and responsibility, the minimum to consider oneself in training.
In this work of learning to control your inner experience so you can become a human being, so you can live the excellent life, the role of the 67 steps program is invaluable, and cannot be replaced with much of anything: no one will be able to cram that much diversity into a day as listening to a different aspect of life and business, as each step does.
My life calmed down since I’ve been doing the steps. No more drama, or not more often than once or twice a year.
I can now live on the edge through the 67 steps, and see what I see, and come back ready to share.
A blessed change, especially because I am getting older, and don’t have the stamina for the whirlwind life I used to live.
Of course people, zombie-like, think that answering the 3-4 questions at the end of each step will magically transform them into a high vibration person. The vibration of the questions is 130… ordinary human. They put the emphasis to the wrong place… not on where I want your attention to be.
Learning the steps is not what makes the 67 steps useful. It is the stuff in them that triggers the voices and the memes in you.
Let me explain: We all live listening to voices that sound like us. We all live listening to memes that sound like wise counsel.
And the 67 steps trigger them pro or con… There is a whole lot of buzzing that you think is preventing you from hearing what Tai says.
But the buzzing is the “main event”. That is the goal: that you can practice the Amish Horse Training method on them, hearing them and working on creating a distance between yourself and them, so they have no chance to create a “marker feeling” in you…
This is how you learn to control your inner environment. By creating a distance between the voices and you. Between the memes and you.
Not by trying to learn Tai’s 10% truth value words.
The same is with reading: if you consider the content of the book as the main event, you are missing the benefits of learning.
If you read for learning the content of the book, you miss the real main event: finding out what voices you listen to, what memes you consider laws or good guidance, and then distance yourself from them.
No knowledge is worth having unless you have yourself, unless you know yourself, unless you are your own person, not owned and jerked around by voices or memes.
Csikszentmihalyi is ultimately right in his quote: the quality of your life is only increased by the quality of your control of your inner experience.
Unfortunately he has no clue how to do that… Neither him nor the thousands of other experts.
To the degree the voices and the memes stop sounding like you are speaking, to the degree your can be OK with the fact that A is A, and the Playground distinction: your skill at separating what happened and your narrative about it, all four as a system will lead to a life worth living, a life that you can live powerfully. Joyfully. In a fulfilling way.
Not many people are willing to invest this much work into anything that doesn’t come with a degree… lol. There are lots of PhD’s willing to invest in a future job and salary, but there are only very few people who are willing to invest in a future that is worth investing in.
Even if life, the way it is, is the Valley of The Shadow of Death.
So what should you do? What should you do to what end?
You want to try your hand becoming someone who can control your inner experience?
The path to become my student is simple:
1. get your Starting Point Measurements
2. raise your cell hydration to 30% consistently.
3. apply to the coaching program. I will have a 20 minute strategy session with you where I decide if you are a good fit for the program.
Here are a few quotes that resonate, somewhat, with what I am saying.
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
“In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them — those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn.”
“A natural response when people feel overwhelmed is to retreat into various forms of passivity. If we don’t try too much in life, if we limit our circle of action, we can give ourselves the illusion of control. The less we attempt, the less chances of failure. If we can make it look like we are not really responsible for our fate, for what happens to us in life, then our apparent powerlessness is more palatable.”
“The problem with all students, he said, is that they inevitably stop somewhere. They hear an idea and they hold on to it until it becomes dead; they want to flatter themselves that they know the truth. But true Zen never stops, never congeals into such truths. That is why everyone must constantly be pushed to the abyss, starting over and feeling their utter worthlessness as a student. Without suffering and doubts, the mind will come to rest on clichés and stay there, until the spirit dies as well. Not even enlightenment is enough. You must continually start over and challenge yourself.”
It is one thing to say smart things, and it’s another to be able to do it… To this date I haven’t met ANYONE really who could. Even Zen masters can only do Zen when they are in a special place.
The job is to be able to manage your inner world any time, anywhere.
