This article was inspired by an Aeon.co article against cheerfulness as a virtue
cheerfulness: noticeably happy and optimistic.
causing happiness by its nature or appearance.
I am taking that concept to its conclusion… So here we go…
The mantra of the world-class thinker is: “I am responsible.”
That quote is from Mentally Tough leader, Steve Siebold…
I get his one-sentence emails, and I read them. They are all wakeup calls, and they are all telling me the many ways your TLB, Twitchy Little Bastard score manifests.
I teach that the most valuable ability, capacity, aspiration, maybe even virtue is to interact with reality.
To be able to tell what is not real, and let it be, let it die if that is the direction it is going.
When you live in reality, by virtue of being able to tell what is real and then CHOOSE to live on reality’s side 1, you can hear your wisdom, your inner guidance, your body, and can make wise, useful, life-affirming decisions.
All the misery is on the unreality’s side. All should’s. All have-to’s. All want to’s. All need to’s. All wrongs. All bad’s. All goods as well.
Life began to suck for humans when the right hands side, unreality, started to tell them what to do and what not to do, and they listened.
The Bible calls that the Original Sin, the Tree of Knowledge, and it is.
In reality there is no good and there is no evil. In reality things are only what they are, nothing added, nothing taken away.
The Original Sin introduced the interpretation, and set it up for the unsuspecting human as valid as reality… and this situation has gotten gradually worse from there.
With the printing press, then electronics, radio, phone, television, and now the internet, the process has been accelerating… at the same rate as the speed of dissemination of interpretations, opinions, what somebody, nearly anybody can say. Anybody… with any intention. People cannot tell what is real, what is true, what is good, what is bad… they are like puppets on a string.
Unreality, the words side, the Tree of Knowledge, is endlessly manipulable… you can manipulate anyone’s interpretation by telling them a different one they are used to, and say it authoritatively.
Psychologists test this with experiments. In their famous experiments where the subjects learn that they have to punish people when they lie or when they are ignorant… even if the punishment kills them… Not what they would do without suggestions. 2
In a person’s lifetime, through suggestions from other people, present through media, you can track how humans start learn the “right” behaviors, the behaviors that introduce someone’s good idea as the standard.
For me this is illustrated even more what happens when the new suggestion shows something counter to the now “social” norm.
Two instances in my recent experience:
- I have give access to an audio program that teaches how to have personal authority. This is a 50% truth value audio recording. The true parts teaches you to act counter to what society teaches you.
What society teaches you is to
- act like sheep.
- Be nice.
- Listen to your fear… Be cowardly.
- Be wishy washy, and allow others to do the same.
- Do things approximately.
- Good enough is good enough.
- Do something only when you feel like it.
- Do only what you love to do or be unhappy about it.
- Be forgiving, allow others to trample on you.
- Lie well, have excuses, win at all cost.
- Those who get away with murder win.
- Talk much, especially if you have no idea what you are talking about.
- Waste your life and others’. etc.
That is what society teaches.
What personal authority demands is what works in life, for everyone involved, what would take you, and humanity to a more natural, healthy place… and it sounds like a foreign language to people.
2. The second was the mother dog video.
The mother dog has natural personal authority. What all humans had before the introduction of right and wrong, good and evil.
The mother dog doesn’t think she should be nice. Neither do her puppies. She does what makes her and the puppies life work: demands order, and gets it.
She has established personal authority: and the world responds in kind.
Her behavior is not a results of “desire to receive for the self alone”. It is a “desire to receive for the sake of sharing”, everyone will be able to share the mother’s milk, if they settle down and behave orderly.
If the dog mother behaved like a human mother
If she behaved like a human, some puppies would hang on her tits, others would not be able to get to food. She would be abused, and hate her life. And she, as a human, would complain, be frustrated, angry, or scream and still would get no compliance. 3
She would complain to everyone who is willing to listen, consider herself a saint, and post smiley pictures of herself and her “happy” family on social media.
She would come to my classes to learn how to get well, how to feel and be treated like a person, how to be able to do, at least some of the time, what she wants to do, to pursue what is important to her, to have peace, peace of mind, etc.
She would come to my classes to learn to take care of herself, to give herself what she expects from the world. To stop procrastinating, hoping, wishing, living in a desire trap. To live a life suitable for a human.
The mother dog doesn’t need my classes. The mother dog will do what works: discipline the puppies, take her time to find a comfortable spot to lie down, to be able to provide what nurtures Life.
In the Playground, my year long program, I promise to change your childhood… so you can have a future unencumbered by the past.
The disciplined puppies won’t be encumbered and won’t need a year long program to recover from their puppyhood. They will, without humans interfering, develop into healthy, well-adjusted adults, who will have personal authority just like their mother.
Poorly behaving dogs are the product of their humans not having ANY personal authority.
The dog who jumped on me last September was an example to that. I fell, broke my wrist, and still have to exercise several times a day, or else the pain is prohibitive to live my life well.
That was an aside… but if we look, all childhood unhappiness was the result of a parent not having, not exercising personal authority… letting you have your way, letting you believe that you are special, that you are entitled, that the rules don’t apply to you, that you can do whatever you wanted and not what would work for everyone involved.
And impose on you rules and behavioral norms that are all “desire to receive for the self alone”, smile, be cheerful, be happy, be this and be that.
And then, decades later, you come to my Playground asking to be taken back to natural, normal, so you can be more in alignment with Life, with reality, with what works, with what you could have learned as that mother dog’s puppy… but didn’t learn with the parents you had.
When you are taught what the mother dog would teach you: your innate and inner desires motivate you to do your absolute best, to enjoy learning, to enjoy doing, to become your best… because that is what your insides, and that is what Life wants from you.
You would know that your moods are momentary. That only humans give a hoot about cheerfulness, smiling, and all that crap.
You would know that only integrity will work… as Buckminster Fuller famously said.
In the program I am now concentrating on, the Instant Coherence workshop, we deal with the dysfunctional behavior, dysfunctional attitude, the dysfunctional results you get due to the parent having no personal authority, and thus allowing you to have some false ideas, false concepts, false expectations about how life works.
Should’s. Having-to’s. Needing-to’s, wanting-to’s.
Our job in this workshop to straiten you out like the mother dog straightens out her puppies, disabusing them from their “desire to receive for the self alone” that makes them undisciplined, demanding, complaining that the world doesn’t turn their way.
I am going to quote Bernard Shaw again:
“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”~George Bernard Shaw
And when you manage to straighten out your childhood, you will suddenly have access to Hillel’s suggestions and suddenly know what you can do for yourself, right now.
If I am not for me, who is for me?
If not now, when?
If I am only for myself, who am I?
And you will know that “desire to receive for the self alone” is what makes the world not go well, what makes and creates the misery we all are immersed in, as if it were natural, as if we had no part in creating it.
One of the interesting things I have experienced is exactly this:
It is possible to live in a world where everyone all the time is animated by the “desire to receive for the self alone” and not even be bothered by that.
Not feel that I am getting less because of it. Not feel slighted. Not feel offended. Not feel frustrated. Not feel angry about it. Or sad. Or depressed. Or anything.
See it for what it is, and not be bothered.
Not be distracted… instead do what works… and keep on desiring to receive for the sake of sharing.
That is heaven on earth… It’s taken me too long… I’ll help you to get there faster.
You need to be in the Playground to be really be able to get all you can get in the Instant Coherence workshop. It is an advanced concept, and I am merciless in its delivery.
It is not something I can squeeze into the Playground, even though it belongs there.
If you are a beginner: it will make your work in the Playground easier. If you are advanced: it will finally get you to see clearly where you have been causing your current misery.
And the system is such, that you can do and redo and redo the workshop, as many times as you need to. And you may need to bring different childhood incidents to the call… and I want you to get “clear” from the decisions you made, disabuse you of your mistaken concepts your parents didn’t.
You can get the recordings of previous workshops, and upgrade to the webinars at the same time, or later.
But you MUST be in the Playground to be in the webinar workshops.
In the workshops I work with each participants, one-on-one, until I can take them where I can take them. Depending on your clarity and willingness, I can take you to “clear”… or not. It is not up to me… It depends how stuck you are in your “desire to receive for the self alone”.
- The left circle in the model of the three circles
- the two most famous experiments were the Milgram experiment, and the Stanford prison experiment. Here is a link to the The 25 most influential experiments in pdf format
- I just finished to read Mary Poppins, who is like a dog-mother… Of course, not the syrupy Walt Disney movie… no, not that. It is enjoyable, but doesn’t teach you anything worth learning. Bromide… soba from the Brave New World…
