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There is no suffering, there is never anything wrong in reality. All suffering, all wrong is brought on by words…
We live in an imaginary reality… with literally no capacity, no ability to tell fact from fiction.
Humans can’t see much of anything without labeling it… so humans live in the world tainted with words…
For the purposes of this conversation we will define reality as something even a just landed Martian can see, a Martian who isn’t complicit in all the meanings and narrative.
The fiction we have been honoring as reality isn’t reality. If it were, everyone would see the same’
A Martian can see what is actually happening, but cannot see anything that is a cultural interpretation, the modification of the happening, the things you say about what you see inside your head.
So, for example, a Martian can see your mother talking. A Martian can hear the voice coming out of your mother’s mouth. But he won’t see yelling. Screaming. Because yelling is a cultural, emotional for speaking loudly. And a newly minted visitor on Earth, a Martian will not consider the meaning of the words, because the meaning isn’t happening… it is added by you.
So if your mother said: ‘unless you say what I told you to do, you won’t belong to this family!‘ the Martian isn’t going to say: ‘Oh my god, how cruel…‘ lol.
To fully appreciate what a Martian can see, I’ll introduce here a new way to look at language:
Language #1: Descriptive language. Talking about…
This is what you use 99.99% of the time, the misery maker…
We use it to interpret, color, dramatize, to make sense of life… Imprecise, and personal… I measure the accuracy of your language in the Starting Point Measurements.
One of the most reliable indicators of your chances of success is this number: the higher it is the less suffering you have…
This, the descriptive language tries to approximate reality, and is doing a poor job at it. It is highly political, and the gap between successful and clueless is getting wider by the day.
Language #2: active language:
speaking this can be considered an action. This category includes
- declarations,
- requests and
- promises…
I won’t go into detail, but mastering this language is very important and it takes character to do so.
Language #3: Immediate Language
This is new to you, but is highly visible for the world to see, including our Martian. This language is called Immediate Language… it is the visible and obvious reaction something happening…
- Surprise shows on the face.
- Fear often shows on the face.
- Hesitation, resistance, joy, amusement, excitement have a way to express themselves physically, in Immediate Language
Language #4: Structural Language…
the position of objects to each other, their interplay, whether those objects are alive or inanimate.
Hugging, beating, hitting, pushing, leaning on, dropping, scratching, kissing…
Laughing, for example, is both an immediate language example, and a structural language example. Highly visible.
It is surprisingly mostly unconscious.
My memory of my childhood, actually my life was that I was serious, unhappy, moody, etc. When I first encountered the structural language as something to pay attention to.
Then I searched pictures of myself at different ages, and to my surprise (and dismay, because it poked holes into my story) most of the pictures showed me laughing recklessly, raucously, like a crazy person… And I probably still do…
Once I started to track how I really express myself in structural language, I realized that I was a lot more animated and expressive in that language… no wonder I loved dance, pantomime, and loved being on stage.
I discarded my imaginary moody persona, and took on being me, myself, the way I really am. A coherent whole, inside and outside.
Calls with me are often a blast, I use my voice to express all that would be visible on a video, laugh like there is no tomorrow, and even use curse words to emphasize my offbeat, off the beaten path personality. Very freeing.
OK, now that we have the four languages…
…we can see more of what a Martian can see, and we can see that the words are not meaningful for the Martian… that the words are designed to replace reality, to describe reality.
And however close the words get… most words describe reality that doesn’t exist.
There is a whole big area of reality, in fact about 90% of reality, that only exists in language, only exists in the words.
But…
Here comes the mischief: let’s go back to the Bible, to the Garden of Eden, to the naming of the plants and the animals, and god’s rule of not eating from the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Good and Evil.
You should hear, that that whole episode was about language. Naming the animals was active language, declaration: you will be called elephant… and it was done… that animal, from that point on was called elephant. All the words had a phenomenon counterpart in reality… elephant, mouse, deer…
But it all became a whole new thing with the introduction of descriptive language in the Tree of Knowledge: judgment was introduced…
Judgment is talking about stuff that doesn’t exist in reality, only in talking, only in words.
And therefore it is fair game to twist and change it according to the person’s fancy when it so served them to do.
And just like I wasn’t aware of my affect, of my real nature until I examined it with the help of a new angle to look from, most people have no clue that they twist and turn words to serve themselves, their hidden agenda.
You have a hidden agenda. You hid it and forgot that YOU hid it.
It is that you made an executive decision at a certain point, most likely around age 3~4, and then made it your hidden agenda.
1. You said, for example, the world should go my way…
…that is how it should be… and then could spend a whole lifetime suffering that it isn’t, it doesn’t, because your executive decision was against nature, against reality, and it was powerless.
The only power it had is to make you miserable, and clueless that it is you who is causing the misery.
2. Here is another example from a student:
it’s winter, your father is in jail, your mother sends you to steal wood, so she can cook and heat the house. You don’t want to go. So she says: unless you do as I say, you are not part of this family.
You decide that you are worthless. And unless you X, you will be regarded as worthless by everyone.
Then you forget that YOU said that. Your mother just wanted to cook… but that is forgotten.
But, of course, you are a kid, and you have very little chance to do worthy things, so what do you do? You withdraw into your mind, and make up stories there, on how you are a worthy hero.
We call that Desire Trap… It is mighty difficult to do much in the world, in reality, if you live in your imagination.
So the gap between fantasy and reality is getting wider and deeper. And you are alternating between being truly worthless and truly heroic. And that is your life… until and unless you discover that in fact you made this whole thing up, and the premise that you are worthless was never real.
3. Here is a third example, Matt:
you decided that only supermen are respected, so you decide to become superman. Your area of super performance is fixing stuff…
You tell everyone that you are superman. But after a while they expect immediate and magical results from you, and you feel sucked dry… and you are.
You trained the world to use your superpowers, and ignore you, the man. You see that they have no value for you the man, they only want what you can do…
The moment you realize, if you do, that YOU trained them to treat you as your fake persona, you could start training them to see you as a man, to hear you say: it takes time to get things done, and to claim your humanness… to be someone they can relate to, someone they can see as they see themselves…
4. This one is going to be painful. So if you are squeamish, skip this example. Bee
You decided that you are not enough. You can’t win, things are bigger than you, others are bigger than you, and the best way to get them to do your bidding is to alternately show that you are trying, and that you are failing.
Your agenda is to be taken care of… and that you pretty much only have to keep up this charade for the rest of life. You suck people in with the occasional smarts, and the more frequent ‘I need help‘…
You are a master manipulator, a user of people.
You are not allowed to amount to anything in this game you set up… you have to be an ‘almost success‘ by being a failure.
OK… these were the stories, we call them cases of the four people who were in the Men’s Playground… All potentially tragic, all potentially a hero’s journey… depending on how they will OWN the case. Own it as their own creation that has gone rogue.
The goal, the purpose of life is to live… and to become all you can become while you live.
You can see that any of these cases work against you becoming all you can become… in fact the goal of the case is to keep you the same… to destroy your chances to be a person. Its goal is to reduce you to a puppet.
Much like government, by the way. You elect your officials to take care of business, but once they are elected, they become the puppet-master… See the similarity? Of the people, for the people? Bah humbug. For themselves.
Now, if you look at the cases, what you should be able to see, that without words none of that mechanism would exist.
You can see that the mischief comes from the Tree of Knowledge, where non-physical stuff got named…
Everything that the Martian cannot see is non-physical. Everything that the Martian cannot see is the consequence of words…
90% of your personal reality is made up of stuff that isn’t real… using the definition of reality we set out to use: if the Martian cannot see it, it is not real.
90% of your personal reality is made up of stuff that can be manipulated, easily, by others, or by your case.
All of your misery comes from that 90%.
The interesting thing is: the more interesting and rewarding your life, the less affinity you have to the words, to the story, to the misery.
Some of my students’ entire life plays out in the words. And the most dramatic thing that is in the reality, meaning visible by the Martian, is a walk in the park, where the dog is on the leash and off the leash.
Nothing is happening, so life is filled with the words.
You won’t and don’t have a life worth writing about until you get into the habit of looking, every moment, at the 10%: what is real. What is actually happening. And leave the words to other underachievers who don’t know what you are talking about.
You can see that the quotes in my previous article, by George Bernard Shaw, and by Shakespeare applies to you to a T… you live in the world of words… and nothing is happening.
The Martian, when he looks at your life, is bored to tears…
Really, depending on the percentage you live in the imaginary world given by the words, (in the Starting Point Measurements I call it, for now, To what degree you honor your feelings as reality? and to what degree you live in the mind) you have intelligent, purposeful actions available to yourself.
The other day I watched a 4-hour long marathon presentation on how to get clients on Linkedin. The two dudes on the call where the exact opposite of each other in this regard.
I measured one with a 91% To what degree you honor your feelings as reality? number. And he kept on interrupting, drawing diagrams, explaining, making the whole issue muddy as hell.
The other, with a 20% To what degree you honor your feelings as reality? number was clear, concise, entertaining. And he was incredibly effective at presenting, doing what he was teaching, and getting through to me. I wanted to be him… funny, whimsical, and bold.
I measured the numbers for my students before and after that Playground session.
They started with a lot of words, words that doesn’t exist outside of language, to tell their story. The starting numbers were 60%/30%/91%/70%
After the training they realized what they were doing it to themselves, that they set themselves up to be jerked by the words. Thus the numbers went down: 10%/10%/20%/50%
The numbers went down consistent with the degree of ownership the student can or willing to have, that they MADE UP the words. That 90% of what they said never happened.
And the new numbers, the degree of ownership, is also consistent with their current level of vibration.
It is all connected. In order to raise your vibration, you need to work on different aspects of unreality and disappear them, sculpt them away… that is the essence of the Michelangelo Method.
In the new course or program or whatever it is, we are spending a lot of time with the words… and see how they influence your emotions.
Once you can see that what happened is what happened and what you made up is ridiculous… you are on your way to become a person.
To have a Self. To allow the spirit to fly.
Grow into a person by changing your story
The new methodology is that you do the work on the hour-long (hopefully) sessions… And get the results.