How to beat the ‘human condition’ successfully and become a happy person at no one’s expense?
I spent a few hours this week reading really old emails from two of my clients. I was especially interested in their early emails… maybe so I can see what changed?
When you talk to someone nearly every day, it is hard to notice the changes…
So periodically going back and seeing some of the things they said six years ago is really useful in this regard.
I have my customer/client emails saved, all of them, grouped by client, so I didn’t even have to search… Just pick a client, and read…
One of these guys went on and on and on how much he doesn’t want to be human. How much he doesn’t want to be part of the human condition. Live in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
I almost think that every person who is aware, who is present to what is really going on, wishes they could live in a life where it is not as random, not as cruel, not as hard as it is on Planet Earth in the society of humans.
Even if you have money, a faithful partner, good kids, if and when you look around, you see the disharmony… Even if you don’t follow politics, don’t watch the news, don’t read the newspaper… you can’t escape it.
Even among friends, among families, disharmony dominates human life. If you are a subscriber to my Sunday Rants you can here that my friend and I don’t agree on anything… Not by far.
The human condition is not a walk in the park. Not a beautiful, heavenly experience…
Definitely not like the memes try to tell you. It is more like an occasional joyful moment followed by 90 not so joyful moments. More like an occasional generous actions followed by 90 selfish actions. Humanity’s average about-me score is 70% The average.
Where is the problematic, disharmony causing element of being a human? Inside or outside? That is the crucial question that correctly answered, one may glean insight and guidance to change their experience for themselves.
Not change the human condition. Change your life experience. I have… because… Why? Let’s see.
If the disharmony causing element is outside… good luck changing that. People, systems, location, weather, even health… TV, books, videos, conspiracy theorists, Covid 19… these are all outside elements.
It seems that every outside change makes things worse. Despite the hope, and the rhetoric, the world is moving, inexorably, in a way that is impossible to stop or prevent to more conflict, to more chaos, to lower levels of well-being experience, lower and lower levels of contentment, and rarer occurring sense of “all is well”.
So my old-time client is right: being part of the human condition is the pits.
It’s taken me till just a few minutes ago to see something, that I have been seeing for quite some time, but didn’t occur to me as the culprit in all of this, the culprit that has poisoned the life of humans for who knows how long.
Let me explain: Margoczi in his Feelings book talks about feelings… but, unfortunately, he cannot quite tell if a feeling is natural, meaning it is part and parcel of an organism, its DNA, its “design”… or if it is imposed on the organism.
Imposed? WTF are you talking about, Sophie?
This is what I mean: all animals NEED all kinds of stuff, resources, conditions, food, shelter, safety, reproduction, a group (most animals) so you don’t have to fight your own kind for all the resources, Here is part of the book’s table of content. I’ll mark in bold a ‘need’ that is cultural, that has been imposed on humanity, and not natural: meeting other people’s expectations of you. For example ‘morals’.
1The core issue of humans is that they have two selves.
A self that they really are, and self for public display… including, often, for the narcissistic self.
- You can see that in order to be happy with yourself, you need to meet your own expectations of yourself. We call that integrity.
- You can, maybe, see that in order to be unhappy, you want to strive to meet other people’s expectations of you… i.e. give a hoot about what others think of you.
I have no idea when the idea that there IS a set good and set bad, set right and set wrong… when the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Good and Evil was made up… muscletest says about five thousand years ago.
But when I look, it was Christianity and its copycat, Islam, that made an oppressive religion of it.
The Greeks didn’t have good or evil. The Egyptians didn’t have good and evil. The Chinese didn’t have good and evil. The Mongols didn’t have good and evil.
It was introduced by Christianity, about 1800 years ago…
…and it was taken one step further by Islam, and then it took many centuries of proselytizing to convert almost all of humanity to a religion that keeps humans in slavery, that
- keeps humans unwilling and unable to think for themselves,
- trust in themselves, and their desire to take care of themselves,
- to love themselves,
- to be on their own side, instead of hoping that if they obey then others will take care of them.
Nearly every human who is alive (98%), defers making decisions to other people… to what they think others expect of them, commandments, rules, etc… and never actually experience and thus learn from making their own decisions.
The most important characteristic of the human condition that it teaches you to expect something different from what is happening. And therefore not be able to learn from the lesson. To never actually learn anything.
To never learn the difference between “desire to receive for the self alone” and taking care of yourself.
Hillel the Elder famously said: If I am not for me: who is for me?
Hillel’s saying, Hillel’s question, 2400 years ago, today flies in the face of your expectations that others will take care of you, in return for all the sacrifices you make for their benefit: you denie yourself, we you try to conform to the expectations you think others have for you.
Conformation is a denial of Self.
He also said: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah.” Jesus said: “Do unto to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets (Tree of Knowledge).”
From the doctrine of man’s likeness to God, Hillel deduced man’s duty to care for his own body. … he said “As in a theater and circus the statues of the king must be kept clean by him to whom they have been entrusted, so the bathing of the body is a duty of man, who was created in the image of the almighty King of the world.” In this work, Hillel calls his soul a guest upon earth, toward which he must fulfill the duties of charity.
Hillel’s three questions force you to think:
- If I am not for myself, who is for me?
- And being for my own self, what am ‘I’?
- And if not now, when?
The third part contains the admonition to postpone no duty, the same admonition he gave with reference to study: “Say not, ‘When I have free time I shall study’; for you may perhaps never have any free time.”
I am learning more from listening to the Partner calls of the Playground than I have learned, ever, from anything else.
The participants alternate between expecting to be accepted, liked, maybe admired(?) and being hurt that they are not. And then they flip to the other side: and they condescend, and judge, and dominate, and pretend to like… so they don’t have to be themselves… ever.
The more distinctions you learn and be able to see, live from, catch in real life, the less the human condition will have its hold on you, its claws in you.
It is a long process, and occasionally painful.
But when you come out on the other end, you’ll trust yourself. You’ll ask for your own counsel… You’ll be well on your path of being able to live a life that comes from the desire to receive for the sake of sharing: abundance, instead of scarcity and fear.
I am thinking of giving people a taste of the process… the first important bits of it… So they can see that even a little bit of the truth begins to set you free.
It is true that the whole truth and none of the untruth will take you all the way, but if you think you have to wait till then… you will be pleasantly surprised.
Let me look at just one thing… One thing that shows up in every Partner call and is not getting any better… so I can see that people are stuck… and can’t see what they are doing.
In this article I say that you don’t have to fulfill other people’s expectations of you. Lovely, you say… right?
But the flip side is also true. Other people don’t have to fulfill YOUR expectations of them…
But this doesn’t sound so lovely, does it?
After all you have your standards. You are the special one, you ‘need’ to be treated as that…
- Anyone who expresses an opinion that you don’t agree with, is an enemy… they are attacking you… damn them… right?
- Everyone who asks you to do anything is the enemy.
- Everyone who doesn’t do what you expect them to do is the enemy.
And they should know that, honor that without you ever having to say anything… of they are subjected to your wreath. How dare you?!
You see, that as long as you have a different measure for yourself than for others, life cannot be happy, neither for you nor people around you, nor on the planet.
In the What’s The Truth About You workshop we’ll look at you, and peel of the layers of conformity, pretense, and all the layers that prevent you from being happy, joyful, productive, no matter what is going on in the world.
Not in one session, though, but in many. One layer at a time.
If you are in the Playground, your layer to remove, most likely, is the applying a different standard to yourself and others…
Here is the link to register. The first workshop will be held in two days’ time, this coming Saturday at 4 pm EDT, New York time.
Each session is a separate workshop, and each time you’ll see different things to remove for you. It is an iterative process… like most things in life.
You’ll have an option to buy three sessions at a time with 30% discount in the ‘upsell’ process.
What’s the truth about you?- 9. ONCE MORE ABOUT NEEDS
9.1 Need for energy supply
9.2 Need for information
9.3 Need for safety
9.4 The need to reproduce
The indicating feelings of the need to reproduce and the related orienting feelings
The asymmetric nature of male-female relationships
Dominance
Love
The child
9.5 The need for a group
9.6 The need to meet others’ expectations
9.7 The need to meet our own expectations
9.8 The need for self-realisation
10. THE VALUE
11. THE WAY TO HAPPINESS
11.1 The need-based control
The need for energy supply
The need for information
The need for safety
The need to reproduce
The need for a group
The need to meet others’ expectations
The need to meet our own expectations
The need for self-realisation
