Tikkun is a Hebrew word, means correction.
I am yet to hear a Westerner, or an Easterner use the word: correction. The world, nowadays, is into “fixing”. 1
Fixing is an ugly world, immediately signaling what the speaker sees, that there is something wrong and it urgently needs to be fixed, because it is wrong that it is. Reactive.
But when emotions run high, the cone of vision narrows, your intelligence plummets, and stupid as the stupid does, your fixing creates new problems, that are the next thing to fix.
Compare that with the approach of correction… course correction… returning to the path of true north.
The history of humanity can be told through the history of fixes that turned out to be no fixes at all, or created bigger problems than what they meant to fix.
One good and repeating example for this behavior is the history of toppling leaders, regimes, systems.
People who are the leaders, the instigators, the campaigners of the “fix” cannot and won’t even look how to create a new and better ess, evolutionary stable strategy… they are only interested in the fixing what they deem as wrong.
And the winners of such changes have not concept, no idea, no experience, no real interest in moving countries towards true north… only in winging it and winging it.
Like Trump, like thousands of puppets before him.
So, if you are a campaigner, if you are a hater, if you get fired up by hating war, abuse, slavery, animal cruelty, and a billion of other causes, your best action is to turn around, and look at what would true north be… and how YOU can bring it about.
One of the best advice I got from Thoreau
Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.
Looking back includes:
- Don’t look at what you see as wrong… unless you want your life to be about it, unless you want it to occupy your whole world.
- This includes what happened to you or to your people.
- This even includes what’s happening now… you may be a woman, a second class citizen. Or Black or a Kurd, or a Moslem.
I am Jewish. My parents’ families were wiped out in the Holocaust. I grew up without relatives.
- My mother didn’t give up hating. She was an unhappy person till her last breath.
- My father chose the Thoreau saying and he climbed near the top of his chosen profession. He chose to adjust his steps to true north. He was a happy person to his last breath.
But the true Jewish way has always been: keep on moving yourself towards true north. Educate yourself. Do what only you can do and do it to the best of your abilities.
In the Jewish tradition, the concept of tikkun Olam, or “repairing the world” is very simple. Any activity that leads to a more harmonious state is valid and valuable. The Chabad organization website, which illuminates Jewish mysticism, explains, “All human activities are opportunities to fulfill this mission, and every human being can be involved in Tikkun Olam, child or adult, student or entrepreneur, industrialist or artist, caregiver or salesperson, political activist or environmentalist, or just another one of us struggling to keep afloat.”
Each act of repair fine-tunes the instrument that is the universe, and you don’t have to be religious or artistic or political to participate. You just have to be a human. As Chabad puts it, “With each [fix], we are creating meaning out of confusion, harmony from noise, revealing the unique part each creation plays in a universal symphony.”
Or how the Japanese celebrity novelist says:
Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami said Saturday writing good stories is the best he can do for victims of terrorist attacks and natural disasters such as the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami.
“I was wondering what could I do for the people who have suffered. But I thought, ‘What I can do is to write good fiction,’ ” he said during an event in New York, referring to a number of tragedies, including the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States and the disaster that devastated parts of Japan’s Tohoku region.
Murakami, 69, said that after the 1995 earthquake that destroyed much of his hometown of Kobe, he “just wanted to write something” and penned a collection of short stories.
or you can heed Albert Einstein’s advice,
where you simply honor nature and flow with it… instead of trying to get quick answers, or force nature to go your way.
“Nature hides her secrets because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse,” the physicist Albert Einstein said. What he meant is that elusiveness is a truth. Nature speaks a coded language. And you can too.
People read about their soul correction on my site, and immediately translate the word “correction” to fixing. And say to themselves:
Oh, this is what’s wrong with me! And write to me with the question: how do I fix it?
The number in your Starting Point Measurements, that most correlates to this fixing-it attitude and narrow cone of vision is the “about you” number, measure #8 To what degree you think of yourself.
When you look at something from that fixed point: it has something to do with me, you reduce the world and your cone of vision with that move. Your eyes and your feelings are consistent with that limited view of reality.
The truth is that nearly nothing is about you… things happen and the “perpetrators” didn’t even consider that you exist.
So, in my programs we do what’s necessary to reduce that “about you” number and widen your cone of vision.
How? It’s a lot of work, and the number of tools we use are many.
One of them is the Idea Machine. The ideas should be about a topic, or another person’s issues.
If you do the Idea Machine about your own issues, questions, you are still in that limiting fixed view of the world, and your about you number may even grow… so beware.
And you may have noticed: your level of stinginess and the “about you” number are also a team…
Conspiring against your happiness.
- In your vocabulary, each word should mean what it actually mean… If you use words that are close, but mean something different, you can see that in your Starting Point Measurements, in the vocabulary measure… your number will be low… signifying that for you everything is the same as everything else, except that not always… a low ability to differentiate between things. You’ll misinterpret what you hear/read, you’ll misunderstand things, follow things poorly, you’ll have a lot of pain and little happiness.
