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Life is best when it is lived where what you want for yourself is a side effect.
For half of humanity that sounds like liberal nonsense… but this is how life becomes the most enjoyable, and maybe the most ‘life-earning’ as well, in spite of it being counter intuitive.
And this is true in every area of life…
I can’t write a better article on this than Zat Rana on Medium.
What I can write best about is the wretchedness of going straight for what you want, and quitting when anyone else benefits… And I can share how this… getting what I need as a side effect, consciously, has been one of the secrets of my inner peace, fulfillment, and happiness.
Some 15 years ago I started studying Kabbalah, an ancient body of thought. The truth value of Kabbalah is about 30%, while most other “ancient” teachings are less than 10% truth value, so if you have a large body of knowledge yourself, if you have read hundreds or thousands of books, if you have degrees, etc. you are somewhat safe in studying Kabbalah.
People I have observed only cared to learn what they already knew from other disciplines, the religious crap…
…and that part, the religious part is NOT true in Kabbalah either.
What is it I call ‘religious part’?
That it’s a two-way street with a deity. The the ‘deity’ cares how you are doing, that it cares about you, that it will help you in any way. The essence of prayer. The ‘help me’, ‘bless me’ part.
The most useful distinction of Kabbalah has something to do with getting Light… Light is everything you want to get… energy, health, help, happiness, fulfillment, success… and if it is governed by some “rule” or “law”, it is useful to look at.
Kabbalah says your desire is very important… 1. You have to have desire, because it is like the pilot light for receiving. (The meaning of the world “Kabbalah” is, in Hebrew: receiving, the act of receiving.)
One could say the Kabbalah is the sum total of Jewish thought on how to understand the Universe, so you can receive the most of what you want to receive, and the least of what you’d rather not receive.
The linchpin distinction is this: are you desiring to receive for yourself alone? or are you desiring to receive for the sake of sharing?
If you are a human living in this world, you probably desire to receive for yourself a whole lot more than you desire to receive for the sake of sharing.
The proportion between the two desires will decide your level of fulfillment and happiness. And maybe will decide your level of activity to become all you can be, your ambition.
There is a strong correlation between your about-me score and the level of desire to receive for the self alone.
The most visible signs of a high desire to receive for the self alone is in NOT acknowledging source…
Some clients/students of mine feel a physical pain when I “force them” to give credit where credit is due. They mumble something incomprehensible, and then say something eloquent about how they deserve all the credit. Very funny, albeit tragic.
To cover it up, they may be very good at saying thank you, praising… but praising is not the same as giving credit where credit is due.
In extreme cases, desire to receive for the self alone spreads desire for annihilate others… not just usurping their right to receive.
I hope that you can see that when the desire to receive for the self alone is really strong, the result is extreme wretchedness.
But why? Because the more you want something only for yourself, the less it is forthcoming.
It took me years to sort this out for myself. Why so long? Because even my Kabbalah teachers could only repeat the sentence, but could not explain, could not coach me. So there words were words, not heartfelt, not authentic.
Luckily to me, this ‘desire to receive for the sake of sharing’ is actually easy for me than for most. Except for food, I have always lived this way.
With food… not so much. As a child, I hated some of the dishes my mother loved, so I would sneak into the kitchen, and eat the parts that made the dish… And even though I was beaten each time, this beating felt good: my eating style, separator, was happy, even though everyone was deprived from fruit-cake, green beans with sour cream, and other supposedly yummy dishes my mother was going to make.
But in other areas I seemed selfless, even though while I channeled Light to other people, I also got what I needed.
Music, languages, sports, and especially learning anything…
I am dyslexic, on the autistic spectrum, in a way, learning disabled. I can’t make the knowledge usable for myself, unless I teach it.
So all my life I taught everything I needed to learn. And that activity, teaching to learn was the secret that got me enough Light to live… in spite of my hard circumstances, in spite of my weak constitution, in spite of my broken brain.
When you look at people who amounted to much, in science, literature, music, education, except politics, all those people lived and acted the same way.
Politicians may pretend that they desire to receive for their constituents, but it’s mostly a fat lie… they desire to receive for the self alone, not even for their spouses, or families. Just for themselves.
It is impossible to see the invisible unless you know it’s there… and then you can wait until you can see it… stare and wait.
It’s easier if you have The Sight capacity activated, but even when it is, it takes a ton of looking before you see. Looking with your right brain, not with questions, not with words. Looking.
I teach my students to train their eyes after they turn off the light at night… by staring at the ceiling, and wait for the invisible to appear… The invisible appears when your eyes adjust, when they get used to the darkness… It happens without fail.
How many followed this? Probably none… judging from the dismal numbers I test in The Sight tracking… 1-10% with one outlier: an artist.
Seeing, looking is out there… if you are thinking, you are not looking. Looking is wordless.
The invisible, that you can learn from me is there, appears just as reliably… but 1. you never learn… 2. you never wait… 3. because you are not really looking.
Ayn Rand has taken a lot of flak with her theory, the virtue of selfishness.
Why? Was she right? I don’t know, I haven’t read that book… The truth value of the book, The Virtue of Selfishness, is very high: 30%. Why not higher? She never quite penetrated the invisible… and could not see behind the veil.
But if you look at her two novels, which I’ve read several times, (The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) all her heroes were examples of desire to receive for the sake of sharing… while all the second-handers, moochers, looters, the selfless crowd, were examples of desire to receive for the self alone.
She was talking (I guess) about the producers’ selfishness: the desire to receive for the sake of sharing…
Because I am motivated, controlled, driven by the desire to receive for the sake of sharing, and the Light showers its blessings on me. I am VERY SELF-ISH.
The principle applies, “you don’t see the world as it is, you see the world as YOU are”, you see in other people how YOU are… not how THEY are.
If you are motivated, dominated, controlled, enslaved by the desire to receive for the self alone, then you won’t see, can’t see any desire to receive for the sake of sharing…
And, of course, an unevolved human can’t even fathom the idea that the benefits will come as a side-effect… that if you go for them directly, they will make you wretched, whether you get the benefits or not.
The measure, to the degree you are dominated by desire to receive for the self alone (I call it the only evil there is, by the way) will show you clearly why you are not getting what you think is your due, what you think you earned, and get instead wretchedness.
I will organize one Talk to me webinar around this issue… because it is so important and so little understood.
If you want to enjoy the topic and maybe start “correcting” your ways so you can get more benevolence from the Light… Get your Starting Point Measurements, and I promise I’ll start to make sense to you.
I have a grand total of one student whose “desire to receive for the self alone” number is under 20%…
So if you are a student…
Where, in our relationship, can you see that you are run by “desire to receive for the self alone?”
Interestingly you can see that in the things you cannot do…
- You cannot readily see value
- You may be stingy
- You may feel you are in competition with me
- You may habitually think that you are going to get your money’s worth
- may keep me on a call longer than what you paid for… you want to squeeze another drop out of me…
- You may only see the value you provide… none of what I provide, or what a partner of yours provide
- You may never ask: what in what I want is there a contribution to what Sophie wants?
- and many more…
PS: If my article is too highfalutin for you, here is an article that spells out the principle… in a more accessible way, translating it to 14 or so principles. The truth value of that article is 10%. My article’s truth value is 70%. But truth is hard to penetrate, if your habitual environment and thinking is around those 10% truth value articles. So be nice to yourself, and read that article.
OK, what shall I sell you that will help you to be more Self-ish and less selfless?
Judged from my conversations with Amy, who looks at everything as good or bad, being able to hear the internal conversation but neither fix it nor abdicate it, just letting be, is the skill horses are taught in the Amish Horse training method… just as useful for people.
You’ll learn the inevitable internal conversation, the little voice and be able to consider it just noise. Noise you don’t need to heed… don’t need to resist… don’t need to change.
I listened to a phone recording of two of my favorite guys from a decade or so ago. One of them had a 2-year old and a 4 year old making loud shrieking noises in the background.
The father continued the conversation as if nothing were happening, undisturbed, impervious…
that is the skill you learn in the Amish Horse Training method
Go to step 2
yes. but if your seed level is desire to receive for the sake of sharing, it is almost automatic that the following action will also be desire to receive for the sake of sharing.
but, for example, if your business/job is about making you money and that is the essence of it, then also every action will be desire to receive for the self alone.
Hi Sophie! Thank you for this article. To put it in practice, do I have to, on a regular basis, ask myself if the intention of what I’m doing or will do is for the desire to receive for the act of sharing or not? Thank you!