Being able to tell the self apart from other things, the not-self. 1
You are not your feelings, not your thoughts, not your history. Not even what you do, or what you have, or what you have achieved!
I didn’t realize that this is such a big issue, collapsing all these and calling it “you”.
This is the source of unclarity, and ultimately it is the source of the delusional self and misery. Utter misery.
What am I talking about?
One aspect of clarity is to be able to tell the person from their actions. The person from their feelings. The person from their story or history. The person from what they have done. The person from everything else…
It seems that at a low level of clarity (low vibration) this isn’t obvious.
As I am teaching some of my students to become value recognizers, some of them can see that the work they do has extrinsic (monetary) value, independent of them. Others consider that their extrinsic value is the one that fluctuates from day to day, when they feel well, or when they don’t.
Your extrinsic value, what you CAN produce in the world, only changes with learning new skills or getting better at the skills you already have. And yes, they get higher if you can manage your attitude towards work and people… because you can produce more value.
But value is in the product, not in you.
A high vibration person whose clarity in telling things apart can see that. And that gives them freedom to tackle challenges with the self and challenges with the work they do.
A low vibration person feels that they are changing and their value is changing with their output, and cannot have freedom to take care of themselves independently of their output.
No distinction.
You got that from your parents, from your teachers, from your peers… that have low vibration.
Your parent called you bad, or a horrible kid, or a lazy bum. Or maybe a great kid. Or beautiful. Or smart.
But either way they collapsed behavior, looks, the effect on them, and perpetuated a level of no distinction that can only lead to an ineffectiveness in life.
It makes you feel invalidated, insulted, humiliated, or valued, appreciated but neither of these is good and neither of these is what is actually happening.
Bringing distinction to life brings happiness, effectiveness, and ultimately a much higher quality of life.
When people get their Starting Point Measurements, they see it as a composite of who they are: worthless, no good, better dead than alive.
Not as a report card on different aspects that can be altered independently, which it really is.
I have been working with people achieving unprecedented shifts by bringing distinction, bringing these different aspects of things into focus.
And teaching the individuals how to increase a “scores” effectively.
When you see yourself collapsed with your actions, your feelings, your story, you can only be ineffective.
It’s like looking at a vehicle that isn’t doing well, and trying to tackle the whole… with a hammer, a screwdriver, or whining… lol.
A vehicle has parts, engine, cooling, brakes, fuel management, electric circuits, starter, etc. I have taken cars apart and I know what I am talking about. And I have “taken people apart” and produce result.
You are trying random things… but without clarity, without distinguishing the parts, without the right tools, your results will be nothing at best, and damage at worst.
No matter what area of life we look at, bringing distinction to it will increase your effectiveness.
But the first hurdle to tackle is being able to see that not everything is about you, not everything is you.
I have students and ex students who are separated from the good life only by this issue.
- If you think that people buy you, not your product, you will be ineffective.
- If you think that when people say “no” to buying your product, they reject YOU, you will be ineffective.
The main difference between highly effective people who are consistently delivering results and from people who take anything personally is this unclarity and no distinction about what is you and what is not you.
Billionaires, most of them, don’t think their results are them. They see their results as their results and therefore they can increase their effectiveness with their results.
And some accidental billionaires, like Mark Zuckerberg can’t see that what facebook does, right or wrong, is not him… and therefore suffer.
You need this distinguishing… aka telling apart things that only correlate but not the same, in the area of health, in the area of social interactions, in the area of fulfillment as well.
You are, obviously, not your habits either. You can change any of your habits if you aren’t collapsing them with your self.
You can change your view of things, if you aren’t collapsing them with your self.
You are NOT your religion, not your beliefs, not your upbringing, not your racial origin, not a refugee, not a victim, not an unloved child, not a divorced/married person, not a father, not a mother, not somebody’s child.
Those things are also distinct from your self.
You HAVE them in your card pack, but the whole card pack isn’t them.
To the degree you can grasp this to the degree you can grow. To the degree you’ll invest time and energy to grasp this distinguishing function you need, to the same degree you can use your energy to carve out a good life for yourself.
For most of you, I am asking you to see something that your low vibration doesn’t allow you to see. But you have the capacity, encoded in your DNA, if you are human. The capacity can be activated by the effort to see what you cannot see.
Guaranteed.
And only you can do it for yourself.
I can give you exercises, but I can’t make you see something… but YOU can.
It is hard to conceive the notion that there is something right in front of you that you cannot see. And yet it is true.
When you are willing to take my word for it, and put in the effort, the capacities awaken, one by one.
One such capacity is to be able to read, listen, and speak NOT from the mind.
One exercise doesn’t fit all, one practice doesn’t fit all… that is why some people pay me for personal coaching, in-person coaching.
Often it takes me quite some time before I can get clear enough myself where the inability to distinguish is anchored in a client. It is more an art than a science. I experiment and the client pays.
But eventually I figure it out and then they start growing like a weed.
Nothing I have ever read written for coaches is useful in this… actually most of the methodology anyone suggests is harmful and leads to no fundamental change in a client’s clarity, in a client’s ability to bring distinguishing to life.
Can I produce good results with ANYONE? I have no idea. Even if I can see where the sticky part is, ultimately it is the level of courage and the level of ambition of the client that is the motive power that will get them unstuck. I can’t do it for them.
But no matter what’s the issue, it seems that the first sticky point that needs to be unstuck is this collapsing the self with all the things that it seems to be. And causing the person to see distinction.
The path to it can be many.
Some clients think that if they can fake me out, it is as good as having done the job… It must be innate to some soul corrections.
One famous exercise is the color exercise.
In the color exercise one learns, or more precisely, one CAN learn to tell apart different shades of the same base color.
Distinguishing is a skill, it is also a spiritual capacity. It can only happen outside of the mind. In the mind, Plato’s Cave, everything is collapsed. There are no shades, there are not aspects. You are the same as your actions, your looks, your history, your everything.
Only outside of the cave are there distinctions.
If you can see “YOUR” color in the color exercise as distinct and separate from the base color, you must be outside of the mind… But if secretly you consider it a shade of “red”, or whatever the base color would be, you are in the mind, pretending to do the exercise.
It’s grueling because your tendency to collapse everything to become the same as everything else is very forceful.
You need to grow “balls” to be in the game with the powerful forces you are up against.
You can. The question is: will you?
I have asked hundreds of people to do this exercise, and thus far NONE of them that I know of has done it truly outside of the mind.
So, you see, some exercises are wicked difficult. Is it worth it? You tell me! It all depends on the size of your ambition.
- Ambition is the energy you are willing to invest into getting what you want.
- Desire is the energy you invest in imagining what you want.
The job is to reduce the desire to less than 10%, and raise the ambition to more than 10%.
Desire is from the mind. Ambition is from the Self.
For the Self to get anything done, it needs more or equal energy to even be in the “fight” or the game.
Another exercise is the process of becoming an idea machine…
One of the hardest exercises is to read/listen not for understanding.
Understanding is from the mind. Acts as a filter, a limitation to what you can consider as reality, what you can consider as knowledge.
Wicked difficult, but glorious when becomes operational behavior.
Distinguishing what you don’t like, what you don’t want, what you stand against is yet another practice… the challenge is again: do you take everything personally? Is everything about you?
There are many ways to skin a cat, and my job as your guide is to invent new ways. That is 90% of my work.
I am working as fast as I can.
Nisargadatta Maharaj: personal vibration: 200. Truth value: 10%I have encountered and measured many Indian gurus. Although Nisargadatta Maharaj is not flashy, and seemingly nothing special, he has a unique position among all these gurus: he isn’t fake.
You cannot teach much of anything if you haven’t truly distinguished that you are not any of the things you may think you are… you are simply the Self.
Most gurus give diligent lip-service to this… I know Osho best, and he says it all the time. But saying it and being it are two different things. When you say it but you don’t be it, you talk Tree of Knowledge: it is not your experience. So you are a liar, a fake guru: because you cannot teach what you don’t have.Nisargadatta Maharaj got one thing right… ok, maybe more, I don’t know all he did. But he got the crux of the matter right: he got that he is none of those things…
And that is what makes him a real guru.
Now, can he teach it? OK, he is dead. Could he teach it? No way. Knowing and teaching are two different capacities.
My own trouble is that I have to be able to do both… But it is getting possible… I am getting better at it.
When someone with Tree of Knowledge tries to teach it, no one learns it… because fake invites fake… ugh. Same is true for Landmark Education and Werner Erhard.
Thanks