…Or will you complain that “they” don’t allow you to be free? That you can’t…
Most mornings I get up when I wake up. But today, I got up to pee, weighed myself, and went back to bed. Something told me I have some thinking to do that would be impossible if I went about my day as usual.
So I went back to bed and allowed myself to see what wanted to be seen… I chose to surrender and see what Life wants. The trick is to feel the difference between the forceful “I want this” and the gentle “Life wants this” tugs. The most significant difference is the force… the second: I don’t remember wanting this… lol. So what Life wants is different from all the things I want. In a way, what Life wants doesn’t make sense.
What makes sense isn’t from Life. What makes sense isn’t true. What makes sense is not from the here and now: it is from the Tree of Knowledge.
Today’s article comes from a memory that surfaced in a dream earlier last night: Back in Hungary, back in 1977. I just won my first architectural competition and a sizeable cash prize. Winning happened in “violation” to my self-image as loser. The story I kept on telling myself and others.
Somehow I didn’t communicate it to the jury… In the competition I teamed up with a man who was and had been a winner… That was also a violation… Before this winning I always teamed up with the weak, so I could feel bigger, stronger, smarter… in comparison… the one eyed king in the land of the blind.
We won and my share of the winnings was enough money to buy my first car (used) and pay cash for it.
As soon as the results were announced, it was a national competition, I fell deadly ill. I remember the moment… the dread instead of elation.
Of course. Makes no sense, does it? Why would you feel dread instead of elation when you win?
Whenever you do something that can change your self-image profoundly, your dark wolf, the one that works feverishly to keep you the same, makes you sick.
Or sends you back to who you’d always been for yourself, by making you do a misstep, a blunder to return you to square one in the game of life. 1
This time the dark wolf made me bedridden with high fever. I don’t watch TV, so to pass the time and to avoid being with myself, I was reading a book in bed.
I read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In English. I was already on shaky ground… I won something with my efforts.
In that somewhat altered state, while reading, I could see something new. I’d caught a second glimpse of something I saw nine years earlier in 1968.
I was sick at that time too… Not accidentally… I was laid up in the hospital with tonsil surgery that didn’t go well.
My father, whom I still love, came to visit me. He told me about the event of the day, the Prague Spring, an uprising, that the Hungarian army was sent to break down in neighbor country, Czechoslovakia. My brother was serving in that army at the time. My beloved older brother. I was mortified. I was 21, he was 23 at the time. I felt a stirring, and I felt a crack in my worldview… a worldview that until that point was unscathed. (socialistic, communistic worldview… of course. I lived in Soviet occupied Hungary, no sovereignty, the bigger dog gets the bone.)
Back to 1977 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: I suddenly saw the world differently. (This is what is called worldview: how you see the world.) I saw that all freedom was denied to us, citizens of the socialist republic… that we were are all hoodwinked… that whatever that society claimed was for everyone wasn’t for anyone but for maybe a mighty few who were winning in that game.
I am not the hater type. I am not able to stay on my feet and be well when I see the ugly underbelly of the world of humans… So I fell depressed… every time the ugly showed itself through some crack of the fabric of the solid worldview: the Pollyanna. 2
Depression, in my personal experience, is a sideways move.
A move away from equilibrium. Where you can deal with what you see. When you can’t, when you, your brain, your psyche cannot accept what it sees, what it experiences, when your brain deems that reality is impossible to live in… it moves you to an altered state where you can’t see, can’t hear, only vegetate.
A vacation of sorts. A time out. Waiting out the brain to be able to catch up with reality or give birth to a new worldview… a worldview that you can handle, your brain can handle, whether the worldview is accurate or not.
If you are furious, then you are not depressed… 3
I came out of the depression in 1977. From thereon I saw, more clearly, that I was on my own, that “if it is to be, it is up to me” whatever that “it” was… result, feeling, nurturing, support, action…
I stopped expecting from the world to give me, support me, love me, acknowledge me… “if it is to be, it is up to me” became my mantra.
That marked the beginning of the journey to where I am today.
Why am I sharing this with you?
What I am attempting to do in my work with you, is causing you to gradually move out of the collective hypnosis of civilization. The collective hypnosis of right and wrong, where anyone, parent, politician, guru, has the right to tell you how to be, where you are treated like a thing, where telling the truth gets you punished, where you should or shouldn’t… anything.
The collective hypnosis where your personal power is squashed, and everything you do or think comes from somewhere outside of you… Where nothing of you is yours. Where you don’t own anything, including your actions, your decisions, it is always because… never “I caused it”. Where you make decisions, not a choice. Where you don’t have a Self… only a psychological self, the dark wolf masquerading as you.
I listen to the partner calls in my Playground, and see you struggle to get to the first glimpse, the one I got in 1968.
The partner calls are getting longer, because you are tiptoeing around telling the truth… It is a sign that the dark wolf feels threatened. It could be a sign for an approaching crack in your worldview.
You experienced parental abuse… and you dare not name it abuse. I hear: he was nasty to me… she didn’t love me. But what was really going on is abuse. Physical, psychological abuse. Enslavement.
Some rebelled, others succumbed. Most turned around and are dishing it out to others the treatment they suffered: making yourself win by making others feel like losers. Some make a part of them feel like a loser by encouraging the two wolves to fight… sick, I say.
You hear the words I say: there is nothing wrong in reality, ever, but it doesn’t match what you see, your worldview. The way things SEEM to you.
You translate it to the language of the collective hypnosis: I am OK. You are OK. but OK is just another word for “right”… still inside that hypnosis. There could be nothing wrong, and still no “right”… No OK.
That “I am OK” still blocks you from seeing reality, blocks you from seeing the ugly, the unproductive, the stupid, the evil in you or in the world.
Seeing what is, reality, is NOT making it right, it is being able to see that it is that way. And allowing it to be the way it is. Not as in resignation, powerlessness, but as in powerful. It is not wrong. It is merely what is.
Worldview is the sum total of what you see. There is nothing wrong in reality is a worldview… Two polar opposite worldviews won’t mesh, the parts don’t work together.
In the prevalent worldview things are either right or they are wrong… you should or should not… and everything is the same as everything else, except that not always. You stay on the surface and do the best you can with what you are dealt.
Your emotions come directly from the worldview: from what you see. Your mind names what you see, and the words create the emotions.
All emotions are marker feelings… but all words come from what you see. This is why incantations, affirmations don’t work: what you say in those comes from the mind, not from what you see. First you see, then you interpret what you see (words) and then you feel. If that is not what you learned, you were taught a lie.
If you want to change what you feel, you need to change what you see. You need to see, almost as many examples of things as it’s taken to create the “there is something wrong” worldview…
This is the work we do in the Partner calls. Or, in some cases, this is the work you should be doing… but don’t.
Worldview is created…
…you are born, without a worldview, into a world where everyone sees the world the same way: there is something wrong with me, there is something wrong with you, there is something wrong with the world.
This morning I received a “Starting Point Measurements” request from a person whose Facebook profile is full of memes that say all the things that are true about freedom, personal or societal, but say them by saying that something is wrong with how it is… as opposed to how it should be.
As long as you exchange (fix) one thing for something else that should be or shouldn’t be, you have the exact same worldview… the worldview of “something is wrong here, and it needs to be fixed.” The worldview of humanity.
The French have a witty way to say that: The more things change the more they remain the same… The seed level, the worldview doesn’t change.
Your worldview. The worldview that doesn’t easily allow you to get a glimpse of reality. You can only see what’s happening through the filter that something wrong here… and its words and resulting bad feelings. You are miserable. By necessity. If you always should and shouldn’t, your life is miserable, and so are you. You only have one action available to you: fixing.
I listened to a sermon by Joel Osteen, celebrity pastor of the largest flock… oops, church in history… I am told.
What do you think he preaches? He tells you what you should and shouldn’t do… BECAUSE god needs you to do one thing and not another to be able to do the work only god can do…
Frank Kern, one of my mentors, suggests that I can learn from Joel Osteen who is really good at taking his large flock of sheep to where he wants them to be: miserable.
I wondered if I could use his techniques to take you to freedom? To reality where there is nothing wrong. Where you have power, personal power over yourself and your actions. Where you can hear what Life wants you to do, be, or have. Where you can fall in step with Life… that’s what heaven is, if you ask me.
I wonder if with Joel Osteen’s method I could make you want to hear the call for freedom… (shaking off the shackles… ) Or you would continue hearing what you have always heard: this is wrong and that is right. Or this should and that shouldn’t…
I wonder.
I had the my cataract of seeing wrong removed through lots of shorter or longer bouts of depression.
Is that the way it works by necessity? Muscletest (Source) says yes. At every stage you adjust through shorter or longer time-outs… we call depression.
Depression is not melancholy… Depression is not anger… Depression is not confusion…
Depression is a sign that the brain is considering getting stronger to handle the shock of being different from others, from all others… and the shock of connecting to something larger than yourself.
You may not go into depression… or you may. Either way, your brain may decide that you are not able, not willing to stand alone. That you want to remain angry, hurt, frustrated, an effect, instead of a cause.
Some of you will.
I am the happiest person I know. I find everything funny, even this… You will do what you will do… not what I’d prefer that you do. Remain the same or rise above it all, and start YOUR journey to freedom.
I know what allows me to grow, what I can use to grow.
I use ugly. I see ugly and I move away from it. I don’t deny it. I don’t whitewash it. I don’t call it OK. I move away from it.
I don’t say it’s wrong. I don’t want to fix it. I am grateful for ugly. Because ugly shows me which way to go. Away from it.
Happiness is accepting what is as what is… without wanting to change it, without saying no to it, without denying it. Accepting that ugly is ugly. Whether it is your behavior or someone else’s… Ugly is ugly. So what?
In the carrot and the stick analogy, it is the stick.
Ugly doesn’t have an opposite… Ugly is the guidance you get on the strait and narrow. The more willing you are to see ugly, the further you can go towards what you call happiness.
In the world of right and wrong, should and shouldn’t you cannot be happy. Why? Because life is full of “wrong” in the worldview that is all about right and wrong. How could you be happy any longer than for a few seconds?
You can do some useful looking at your machine… how carrot and stick makes you do what would work for you… or make you do what the machine, the dark wolf wants you to do. Self awareness… and some clarity, in my Carrot and Stick Course
buy now- Some of my students do this daily… Others occasionally.
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A friend of mine, decided to apply for a job that would require of him to learn something and pass an exam. His dark wolf convinced him to study only three hours a day… so that is what he did. He failed his exam, three times, and is now out of the running. Back to square one.
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His self-image is back where it had been… “I can’t learn anything”
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What he cannot see is that he was duped. Just one hour more studying a day would have gotten him to pass the exam… But no, he is back to being a loser… like he has always been.
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Loser is an interpretation… by the way. There are no losers in reality. In reality you may be measured by Life and found light… but it doesn’t make you a loser. There is always the next time. - I still to into mini depressions… they last anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours… A worldview always updates itself… I get to be able to deal with more and more, without being pulled out of equilibrium or homeostasis.
- People join cults… leave cults… become alcoholic, workaholic, make drastic changes in order to avoid seeing the world that for them is impossible to live in.
