I don’t think I have ever really distinguished the difference between these two similar sounding activities… so it’s time.
As usual, I had to distinguish the difference for myself… the hard way.
I almost didn’t make it…
My strength deteriorated to the degree that I was having heart pain and exhaustion from just going from one end of the apartment to the other… So I started to mentally prepare myself to meet my maker, so to say.
The weird stuff was, that Source answered all my “diagnostic” questions with no… not my heart, not my lungs, not this and not that… yet it agreed that I was dying… Weird, right?
Then by accident I watched the Mustard Seed video I hadn’t seen since I made it years ago. And it made me see that I had no faith, that I was resigned, and I took it for a fact that I was dying…
OK… so if I am not dying, then I must have made some mistake along the road… and if I made the mistake, I can correct it.
It took me about a week to trace my way back to when I started to get weak…
I don’t want to tell the whole story here, but what I didn’t realize that I’ve made my body really acidic, and the body cannot generate enough energy for life if it is not within a very narrow range of acidity…
My acidity wasn’t the consequence of eating processed foods, or drinking coffee, or acid creating foods… it was from a “fix” I was using to get rid of the invisible mites I have written about before.
And as it is always the case, the fix creates the next, bigger problem… almost killed me in the process.
Wow. Whew…
So, fixing:
Fixing is saying: something is wrong, and must be fixed.
The moment you say “something is wrong”, you stop looking. Your wrong substitutes looking. Now you have an enemy, faceless, featureless, pathless… and by god you are going to kill it, force it, fix it… wrestle it into submission.
The issue is the not-looking. Your fix completely ignores the steps that caused the trouble you call wrong. You don’t care.
You are full of rage and pull out the big gun. I did exactly that…
Correction is saying: somewhere along the line I must have made a step that took me away from where I wanted to go.
I am really good at detecting mistakes, and yet it still took me a week to get to the bottom of it…
Finding the real issue is like picking a lock… takes patience. Takes skillful questioning, skillful looking.
And it takes to have been aware…
For most people awareness is missing.
You need to be aware inward and outward. Pay attention. Notice… and remember.
And, of course, most people aren’t aware.
I measure awareness in the Starting Point Measurements, and most people’s awareness number is on average 3%. That number means that 97% of the time you are unaware. Nobody home. You are in your head, in Plato’s Cave, and you aren’t paying attention to anything inside or outside.
My best students’ awareness number is 10%. Mine is 70%…
In addition to awareness you also need to know what you are observing… accurately.
It takes distinctions, it takes vocabulary… or you’ll file what you see with a false meaning: I see a lot of examples to that, when students assume that what they are seeing means whatever sinister meaning they give it.
For most people everything is the same as everything else… except not always.
And another capacity is also crucial: being able to keep several plates in the air.
We are at a place in the Playground where only keeping one plate spinning will keep the participant from ever really getting the results of the course.
The 10% awareness students are “juggling” several plates,
- what is real, what is meaning,
- the complaints process, and even
- choosing/embracing what seems to be wrong with them.
One of the reasons I added the 20-day skill learning challenge to the curriculum of the course, because unless you are challenged to spin more than one plate, you’ll remain a one-plate nobody, an underachiever, forever wretched.
If you plan to do the course, start thinking ahead what skill you’ll learn in YOUR 20 day challenge that will help you develop the dexterity to spin more than one plate.
So back to correction: you cannot correct when you cannot see the wrong step, if you cannot trace back to where you made a wrong turn.
There is nothing wrong… and you need to find the wrong step. A decision, a rule you made up, a meaning, a hasty move, an ignored step you decided you can skip…
How the invisible dynamic works in here…
Back to myself, my personal experience: yesterday I was cold so I went to bed to warm myself up, all clothed, under the covers. I didn’t have my kindle there… and I had the thought that without reading I would fall asleep, by I waved the thought away…
Of course, I fell asleep.
Then I didn’t want to work for the rest of the day… I didn’t want to do anything!
This morning, even though I woke up at my usual 4 am, I stayed in bed and slept another three hours… On my way to depression… unless…
When I finally got up, I saw that it was all an elaborate racket.
- Being sick, dying, provided me with the payoff that I could justify why I wasn’t generating enough income.
- And now, the oncoming predictable depression from oversleeping will continue creating the smokescreen, that it is not my fault that I am not doing better financially….
So I never have to confront that I am not as good, not as smart, not as heroic, or whatever I have been fancying myself to be.
The payoff is that i can justify why I don’t have to be responsible, why I don’t have to even consider the truth that I am not as great as I “should” be, if I were really truthful.
So there you have it. Everything you do hides a racket… and maybe many of the invisible dynamics…
If you could follow this whole topsy turvy path, you can see that now that I have retraced all the wicked mis-steps, all the invisible ugliness, I can now correct it… and get back to the strait and narrow… Of course, for me, owning it is second nature. You may have to work at it.
I am cut down a notch (baaah! weep weep) but I am alive, and a I am a person again… causing my life.
All tiredness, all illness is a racket… find the payoff… and you’ll be able to beat it at its own game.
Want to learn about the life-affirming, life-harmonious method of correction (also called Kaizen, or trim-tabbing) that leads straight to the happiness the Anna Karenina principle teaches “All happy families are alike… every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.
Ultimately, the fundamental difference between a human and a human being, the next level of human evolution, is that human beings live in harmony with life… without forcing, dominating, coercing… with honesty and integrity.
I have a small ebook, and a webinar where I teach this… if you feel that you are ready to graduate to correcting instead of fixing life… this is for you.
