Why do I read my (and your) Rob Brezsny horoscope every Tuesday? Do I believe that they foretell the future?
I don’t.
But every horoscope, yours or mine, gives me a different vantage point to life, a filter, a frame, through which I can see what is not visible (for me) through my day-to-day frame…
The exact same thing was true about listening to the 67 steps by Tai Lopez.
On average I took a redirection of my vantage point five times a week for three years by the 67 steps. Plus 52 times a year by Rob Brezsny.
To change from where you look, you need to step back, tear away your eyes from how you are looking at things now, and consciously move your attention to a new place, a new frame, a new vantage point.
Most people are stuck with one way to look, in every area of life… like the 35 year old man who still whines that his daddy is mean to him.
Saying “mean” is a fixed way of looking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySvAs5ppkRw
It is not that most people cannot change their vantage point: no. Most people are unwilling to do it.
Here is an example: I have a script to use (in the Playground course) to look at incidents in your life. Incidents that are unpleasant. Incidents that are accompanied with an unpleasant emotion. Resistance, fear, grief, anger… you have many of those unpleasant emotions.
This script takes you on a journey. Looking at the present, looking at different things in your past. It’s a journey that takes time, because you need to shift your attention many times during the journey… instead of getting stuck in a predictable view, like you have been, however old you are.
The script tells you what question to ask, where to look, what you should focus on in each vantage point, in a certain order. Exactly.
Most people try to do the script from memory, and, or course, get in stuck in their favorite and most ineffective view of life…
They use that view to justify how they are… lazy, self-righteous, stupid, abusive, exploitative, 1 naive, demanding, dominating, angry, intolerant, using others, duping others, hapless, incompetent, cowardly, boastful, shifty.
Now, you need to remember that there is nothing wrong with being that way… yes, they are ugly, yes, but not wrong. Ugly is ugly, not wrong. These students cannot allow themselves to be that way, the the way they are, so they are stuck.
Anything that you allow to be, will allow you to be. 2
You cannot move out of a behavior that you cannot allow, that you cannot own. Why? I am not sure why… just like I am not sure about a lot of why’s in reality, I am only sure that it is that way.
And while they are not able or not willing to allow, to own that thing about themselves, they also hate that about themselves.
Complicated? Hell yeah… You and everyone has layers upon layers of contradictory behaviors that if you can own, each, one at a time, you can really peel them away to find yourself.
Every psychological test addresses these layers, not the self. You are none of those layers, even if your behavior would suggest that you are.
Your Self, surprisingly, is an empty space… a space for everything. When nothing is fixed, when nothing fills that space, then everything is possible.
The layers, masquerading as self, are fixed, feel fixed, feel real… but they keep you stuck in behaviors you don’t like, behaviors that don’t get you what you want, don’t get you where you want to get to.
Like my student whose top layers of behavior is to be overly enthusiastic, overly dramatic, overly sweet… ugh. But what is underneath is hiding there… a second layer of forceful, wanting to win… And who knows how many layers below that is the Self… sigh… It takes work. It takes a process. done again and again.
In the process, especially the “script” addressing the incidents in the Playground, is an excellent way to highlight the layers, own them, and peel them away… Loving them, hating them, let them go. None of it is you.
If you are willing to let go, if you are willing to look, if you are willing to identify them accurately without explanation, without justification.
This process, on average, takes hours of looking before you can actually see. It is hard to do it in a call, in a conversation with someone. If you don’t do any of the work on your own, you’ll be only able to see what you have always seen… because that is the surface, the easy to see.
One of my students has asked me the favor of doing the process, daily and document them emails to me.
It’s a tad more than a normal email coaching… it buys her an hour of my time for about 5 cents on the dollar. But as an experiment it has shown me that it can be done… Yay.
She is one of the students who had been unwilling to follow the script, and therefore were stuck. She was stuck with fixing something that was never wrong. And then fixing it again, and again, and again, unsuccessfully.
You cannot fix what is not wrong… you can cover it up, explain it away, lie about it, hate it, pretend to laugh about it (that is her method, the laughter), but not fix it. Because only what is wrong can be fixed. And as usual, the fix is the next “wrong”… bigger, fatter, harder, more complicated that the thing that you tried to fix.
She has looked, so far, at two recent and two past incidents, but her “about-me” score has dropped from 99% to 50%. That is what I am talking about… lol.
Many, maybe most parents are always unhappy with their children.
The children don’t do what they are expected to do, make the parent proud, make the parent happy, make the parent feel good about themselves. Or prove to the parent that they, the parents, are smart, that they are good, that they are right, that they are powerful. Or prove to the parents that their genes are special… or that it was worth hanging in their with their spouses… the fruit is good.
So unhappy parents do all kinds of things to their children to express their dissatisfaction, or to assert their power, or to change them into something they can be happy about.
You can call these actions cruelty, violence, abuse. They are. No excuse.
The child isn’t allowed to be themselves. They don’t feel loved. They wait for the next abusive incident. They grow up to be like the parent: wretched, and they pass on the abuse.
You can’t fix the children, because there has never been anything wrong with them. There was never anything wrong with what they did. And, surprise, there was never anything wrong with what YOU did either, the parent.
It is not wrong to be stupid, violent, angry, unforgiving, intolerant, or any of the ugly things you do, any of the ugly things your parents did. There is nothing wrong with not loving or not liking your offspring. You can’t fix it. You have no control over what you feel.
You have control over what belongs to you: what you say and what you do and where you look from.
In the Playground we assert that what we see is what gives us what we say, what we see is what gives us our actions.
So we don’t try to work with what we say. Not even with what we do. We only look at what we see and attempt to influence it. Direct our attention. Take it through frames. If we are willing to look from those frames, what we see will change. Little by little. Slowly.
I have a real hard time identifying with you if you consider that keeping what you see as wrong is a benefit to you.
The “benefits” (we call them payoffs) are all ego-benefits, benefits to the dark wolf only, not to you, the person.
- Being right about what is wrong? A benefit? Really?
- Look good while you are cheating, stealing, duping, or lazing about? Are you kidding?
- Avoiding domination of your own word, of your soul, or anything you ever wanted… it it really worth it? A benefit?
- Immediately justifying, explaining your behavior… instead of owning it. Seeing that you did that. Seeing that it didn’t work… is that a real benefit to you to justify it so you can keep it? Long term?
- And forever declaring yourself as someone who can never cause anything, because you can’t… no matter what you do… because you are a victim of yourself, a victim of your “bad” character, a victim of your feelings, a victim of the world… even though by owning what you did you could be free to soar?
So I have a real hard time identifying with you. So much that if anything, this gives me the unpleasant times I need to deal with.
In yesterday’s article I said that I am a 70% TLB… Twitchy Little Bastard, who cannot leave things alone, cannot allow things to be the way they are.
Guilty as charged.
When I look at it, it makes me feel powerless that I can’t make a difference for you.
It takes me back to incidents (quite a few!) where I was accused with things I didn’t do, wasn’t guilty of, and the label was stuck on me… and obviously I am still fighting it.
There is no end to doing the peeling away the false selves, the labels you or other people put on you…
I’ll do this exercise now that I noticed something in the different vantage point I was looking from to write this article, strictly following the script, with the intention to see that there was never anything wrong in reality, even when I was accused of things i didn’t do.
Doctor heal thyself…
- exploitative: making use of a situation or treating others unfairly in order to gain an advantage or benefit.
- Notice that the law of attraction people say the opposite… If nothing else, this should tell you what they are up to: enslave you forever. Not that it is wrong… :-( by the way
