Some days I get a ton of offers for new marketing tools, and I get desirous… I want to buy, but then I ask Source: I muscletest if I should buy, and the answer is always “NO”. 1
So I have been pondering what guides Source… 2
What investment is useful and for what? Is getting more visitors to my site useful? Not really, the return on investment is fragile… Having more visitors to my site won’t forward my work, more visitors may put some pocket change in my pocket, but are they really interested in what I teach? Not that I can see…
Every minute of every day, every choice, ask the same question: is this for a temporary gain, or is this for a permanent gain. Is it for me, or is it for some circumstance I’d like?
Like me, you are always investing, but unlike me, you probably don’t ask the questions I ask.
You are always investing… Investing in things, investing in feelings, or investing in yourself.
Everything you choose to do can be considered an investment. All your habits. Some investments have high returns on the very short term, like feeling superior, or the glee over having avoided domination. Other investments have steady returns over a lifetime, grow you and your life.
Investing in you, in you becoming all you can become is what we do in my programs.
I call it “raising your vibration”. Is that an accurate expression to what you are doing? Who is to argue? Is there such a thing in reality as vibration? Not at all. It is an agreement:
We’ll call the level you are at in becoming all you can be “vibration”… and the process, we’ll call “raising your vibration.”
Raising your vibration, going from miserable to powerful is a process. A long process.
I experienced one of the most dramatic turnarounds when I learned about the three levels of values: systemic value, extrinsic value, and intrinsic value.
I learned that your intrinsic value, the value that is innate, is the same whether you are good or bad, whether you are useful or useless, whether you can speak one language, ten, or none at all.
It was the most horrible news to me. Sometimes the best news are the worst news, because of their connotations, their meaning about you.
Having intrinsic value and not ever seeing it, made me treat other people as if they had no intrinsic value.
I was treated that way, I think, all my life, so I didn’t even know there was such a thing. I was appreciated for what I did, not who I was, and no amount of doing compensates for not being valuable…
I was already over 50. And I never considered myself having any value, other than what I produced.
And therefore taking care of me wasn’t one of the things I did… In fact I never considered taking care of myself.
Or more precisely, I was never on my side, I was never FOR myself. In fact, had anyone asked, I would not have been able to say what that meant. How it would look. What I would do.
We all KNOW how to care for a baby… but do we really? We all take care of things more than we take care of people.
You take care of the bills: You pay them on time. You take care of your clothes… your car… your dog… but do you take care of yourself?
Well, you take the medication the doctor prescribed. But do YOU take care of yourself… or maybe even written this way: your Self? Or do you expect others to take care of you?
In the Playground, you learn how to take care of yourself… something you never learned, something wasn’t even suggested that you do by the “world”.
And because everything needs someone to take care of it, you thought your parents, other people, the government will take care of you.
I am not sure if you are lucky if you never found out that they won’t take care of you.
They have their hands full of worrying about themselves. They don’t even see that you need being taken care of… Or they don’t care.
Recently I had… I must have had a breakthrough. Why do I say it this way?
Because breakthrough is not what you do, breakthrough is how reality responds.
My journey from hell to here had mileposts.
- Finding the Hillel poem, the three questions, in a prayer book in a Jerusalem synagogue was the first. I didn’t understand, yet I knew that it was very significant… so I cried, and pondered.
- Then finding out that everyone has intrinsic value, including myself was the second milepost… I started to see person in people… little by little.
- And then my brother saying: “Take care of yourself”. Maybe because it was about a certain, specific complaint, I could see, for the first time, what it is something I COULD do, even though I didn’t see it possible, and I even saw it distasteful… but I did it.
- And then, the sudden insight in the Playground.
Everyone, just like I did, froze into a self/world attitude where they expected someone else to consider them, their feelings, their desires, their aspiration, them important and relevant.
I have written articles about caring, and I said: caring feels dangerous, because it feels that it is either not caring, or giving up about yourself and giving everything to another.
Said in another way: it awakens the age old dilemma: it is either you or me…
In the context of taking CARE, or care about you… it feels, it really feels that you cannot care about another person, without giving up caring about yourself.
So people don’t care. They give lip service to caring, they say they are very caring, but it is a lie.
- Mother Theresa didn’t care
- Bill Gates doesn’t care
- your mother didn’t care.
Caring is somewhat counter to, against life as we know it… life that is based on the selfish gene that cares about keeping you alive and urging you to procreate. It, the selfish gene, only cares about its own survival, its own immortality.
But as Hillel said, 2500 or so years ago: you can CARE about and for yourself, and the selfish gene will even love it. LOVE IT!
So you can give yourself what you need, whether it is attention, love, tender loving care, encouragement, forgiveness, compassion, courage, support, knowledge, whatever you need.
It will “kill” the racket you have been running since you were a wee lad or a wee gal.
The racket that uses this “nobody cares” as a justification for being nasty, sad, depressed, lazy, an underachiever, a domineering know it all… etc.
In the Playground we look at stories from your life. Past stories, present stories.
They all stem from the fact that you don’t take care of your needs. All.
Nobody ever does anything to you… or only in unreality. In reality people do things, but the part where they are doing it to you is an interpretation.
They did it to me… they are doing it to me… is only a seeming. It seems that way, listen up! if your entire cone of vision, if your entire personal reality centers around you.
I measure the “about-me” score in the Starting Point Measurements, because it will tell ME to what degree you play the victim, to what degree you’ll conduct your life to make people do to you, for you, and then blame them for it.
This is also the same degree that people run rackets, and not take care of life, of themselves, the same degree they point at this or that circumstance that did it to them.
If you are someone, for example, who is very interested in personality tests, or numerology, like the big book by Dan Millman, “the life you were meant to live”, then I don’t even have to do the measurements.
Why? Because I can be sure that you’ll blame your character flaws, your personality for your failings.
The number one capacity that is needed for a life that has power in it, is the capacity to take responsibility for what belongs to you.
The moment you do, truly, life turns around. If it doesn’t… then you just gave lip service to responsibility.
Because the Hillel verse, “If I am not for me, who is for me? If not now, when? If I am only for me, who am I?” calls for responsibility.
Your about-me score doesn’t allow you to see that you are causing. Your about-me score make you appear as a hapless victim.
And you can’t see that you could be responsible, and that life could start becoming your life, a life you can mold and shape and direct… instead of the life that is happening to you.
What a difference…
So the question to ask: how do you lower your about-me score?
I don’t have a simple, do it yourself method for you.
My flagship course, the Playground, is perfect for that. Because it confronts your narrow cone of vision that only sees one aspect of life, what is about you. Your superiority, mainly. And forces you to notice that there is beauty, heroism, humanity, etc. outside of that narrow concern… and it could be yours.
I confess, I had to go through that same thing.
It took me long decades, because I didn’t have the Playground and all the confrontations available to me.
In the Playground, you are confronted at least once a week, for a whole year… And come out on the other end a person. Free and powerful.
It’s gradual. It’s a process. Almost unnoticeable, so slow.
I pair people up (partner calls) to bring out the worst in you, so you can confront it. And then I give you feedback every week.
Some people even opt for more than one partner call a week. Because it is where you find out to what degree you give away your power, to what degree you insist to be an effect. (Martyr Syndrome) Or be superior… the kind of superior that is unearned and that is your prison.
PS: If you read my last article about the cultures people hail from, who can’t, who won’t be willing for transformation… The main question is: how can I change that for an individual.
After I finished writing this article, the answer to that question, or at least one answer to that question surfaced: unless the future the person lives into changes, no change in behavior is possible or forthcoming.
The future is not fixed. It is not prescribed. It is not written in some book. You write the future with your actions every minute of every day.
That meme, that the future is set in stone, is part of some cultures, some religions, and if you were brought up that way: you can change your mindset any minute… and that is the most heroic and fundamental change you’ll need to make.
Some circumstances won’t change. If you have three children, then even after changing your mindset, you’ll have three children. But you can change how you look at the life you have, you can change what you see possible for yourself, and with that everything changes… even though you’ll still have three children.
If you can only think of changing where you live, what house you live in, for example, you probably have that nothing can change really… and transformation will be difficult for you.
That fixed future will come, inexorably, the future impossible to stop or prevent will loom darkly… even though there is no such thing as future… it is hypothetical… it is created every minute of every day… by YOU.
What future are you creating?
So far you’ve had two ways to be: to be Trump or the shoe shiner in this picture
- The same thing is happening in food, in books to read, movies, videos to watch… by the way.
- I call all-knowledge Source. But I could also say that my higher power, the one I am willing to obey and listen to: “whatever works” is what i am asking questions of.
I am not very concerned with truth… I am concerned with what works… In life, in reality, for most people.
