Before I write the meat of the article, I am sure you have a question: what the heck is a worldview… and how do you know what YOUR worldview is, if any.
The Three Umpires
A little anecdote comes to the rescue, about a radio interview of three umpires on how they call ball or strike (in baseball, for those who don’t know).
The three umpires are different ages.
Umpire number one asked first. He is a rookie umpire. He is asked, as will be his colleagues: How do you call ball or strike?
The rookie umpire answers: It’s obvious. I call it the way it is. A ball is a ball, a strike is a strike.
The journeyman umpire, has a few years of judging the game, answers: I do it differently. I call it the way I see it. I see it’s a ball, I call it a ball.
The old, wrinkled seasoned umpire, when asked the same question, grumbles… You are both rookies. Because I know that it ain’t nothing till I call it.
The three umpires represent three worldviews… A worldview is your relationship to what is happening in the world… 1
And now: onto the article…
I am at a loss about how to say things that standing firmly in the worldview of right and wrong you can hear what I say the way I mean it, not the way of the right and wrong… your filter.
The more your parents lived, entrenched in right and wrong, the more they gave you rules.
Rules are all from the right and wrong world. Mind stuff.
I live in the “does it work?” world, which is a more effective way to live in reality. I don’t have to go back to remember what “they” said about it, what it is supposed to be, and why… I can just look and judge it for myself. Does it work? Does it do what I wanted it to do? Does it do it well? Can I do it again and get the same result? What if I change one thing… does it stop working?
My method, my living in reality is called: experimentation.
I don’t believe anything. I hear it. I don’t argue it. I don’t not believe it. I don’t know. I’ll test it out. either with logic, or with action.
Of course experimenting requires intelligence… believing or disbelieving don’t.
All psychologists do is set up experiments that are supposed to prove or disprove a theory…
The more intelligent psychologists become famous… because setting up an experiment well, so it actually does prove something is not easy. Same with double bind medical/pharmacologic experiments…
In an intelligent test there is only one component is changed, or you don’t know what caused the different result.
The most important time to test something is when it seems to work… but you cannot be sure what makes it work. You have to change what you think cause it to work… and intentionally fail.
And this is where we are going: wanting to fail.
In the theory of the strait and narrow the path to anything is narrow… you need only a few simple ingredients to live a happy, healthy, harmonious, enjoyable, productive life.
But, of course, there is no money in that, so peddlers or goods, whether those goods are physical or philosophical, intellectual, experiential, what makes money is confusing you with plenty. Confusing you with truth-sounding rules… that you can remember.
Remembering puts you squarely into the mind… and squarely into the worldview of right and wrong… the land of misery, hell on earth.
Heaven on earth is outside of the mind. There are no decisions, no rules, no right and no wrong. The question is: does this work?
There are principles… but even principles, if you are intelligent, you’ll test for yourself… intellectually or in the field. You believe nothing. Not a thing.
Belief, believing is a mind thing. As is desire…
Every once in a while, a few times a month, I pick a “rabbit hole to follow” from my email spam folder. Something that promises a result I’d like, or that promises a result I have some experience with.
My desire number is 7%, so I don’t easily get hooked.
This week I indulged in three rabbit holes, one about selling, one about youtube video selling, and one about improving your vision.
I set through three presentations, formed no opinion, just took what was being said all in, no emotional reaction, just getting it.
Did not involve my mind. Nothing to learn, nothing to unlearn, nothing to argue about… I know nothing. No Tree of Knowledge… none.
And once the presentation was done, I looked, an intellectual looking, if what I heard was going to work FOR ME. Then, at the end of the presentation, I allowed what I already knew, proven, or unproven, to come up and argue for or against the veracity of the new information. I also looked at what I wanted, what I was already doing, what I could be doing if I bought the darn thing… and from that I made a decision.
I didn’t buy the business info… but I was tempted to buy the vision improvement issue: I use my eyes for a living, and although what I am doing work, my eyes haven’t gotten worse in the past 40 years, I occasionally have a hard time seeing, and occasionally have blurred vision… so yeah, I was interested.
The truth value of sales presentation of the vision product tested 3%. I asked a question I have never asked: that 3% include the strait and narrow solution? the answer was: 30% of the strait and narrow.
Meaning: if you follow what they say in the product to the letter, you get 70% busy stuff that doesn’t work, and 30% good stuff… stuff that works, but doesn’t give you all you need to get the result.
I found the product for free through google search… and have downloaded it. I WILL read it… so I can maybe report on what I find.
According to Dr. Richard Schulze, whose products have saved my life a few times before, the main issue in vision loss is toxins getting into the eyes, but not being cleared, not coming out.
I have been using his vision formula for two decades now, and it works. I don’t even see my floaters any more… even though I only use it four months out of a year…
Now, what am I trying to say? What am I trying to sell you? lol
I am not sure yet…
But: the purpose of everything I do is simple: to return people who engage with me to the age of innocence, where there are no rules, there are no right moves and no wrong moves. Where the decision is left to the individual after they consider.
Just like Landmark Education’s famous chocolate or vanilla exercise, the demonstration of choice shows for all who is able and willing to see: 1% of the participants. 🙁
In that exercise one person is called to the podium and asked to choose. They are told: choice is selecting, freely, after consideration.
Of course, if you are anyone I know, you have never chosen anything. Freely? Bah humbug. After consideration? give me a break.
No, what you do is allow something to select FOR YOU. Your desire, your greed, your taste, your need, your want, your should, the rules, the mood, the thought that it is right, or it is wrong… You don’t select… EVER.
In the worldview, in the paradigm of right and wrong there is no choice. You can decide, but you cannot choose.
When you look, the leader of this demonstration takes the person through all the ways they make decisions, more, better, different. How the reasons choose, not them.
Until they get to the inevitable outcome: I chose what I chose because that is what I chose…
But, of course, doing it once doesn’t change the paradigm. Not for that one person, not for the hundreds of people watching it.
In the Playground we are dealing with the same thing, even though it LOOKS different.
In the Playground we look at incidents in our lives and switch back and forth between the old paradigm where everything is wrong, attacking us, hurting us, violating us, threatening us with annihilation to reality where nothing and no one is wrong, and they do what they do for their own reason… not to hurt us.
Even though I don’t ask people to choose: i.e. select freely after consideration, some do. They choose reality. Do they really choose, or are they deciding, or because it feels better… we shall see. It will become obvious at some point.
I measure how far they have been willing to go from “wrong” in a percentage number.
Some more faster than others. Some don’t move at all.
My hunch is that the ones that don’t move have a vested interest in not moving. The perceived benefits of remaining planted in wrong outweigh the benefits of living freely. I have heard of prisoners choosing to stay or return to prison for the three square meals, the roof over their heads, and the certainty… instead of living at large and risking not even being able to eat or have a roof over their heads.
These same people also stay in relationships that don’t work, whether it is with their birth families or their spouses, or their children.
Another common characteristic: they don’t want to have to “put out”… either because they have no abilities, no skills, or because their self-image would suffer if suddenly they could produce results, in spite of all the “wrongs” that have happened to them.
Eleven students, seven non-movers, at this stage. 37% movers, 63% non-movers. It may change… this is a snapshot.
There is a relatively easy and painless test you can do, right now, that will tell you if you would be part of the 37% or the 63%.
What would you do if suddenly you lost your job, your family, your house, everything? Think it over… Now look, would you be willing to initiate even just one of those things? job, family, house?
If yes, you belong to the 37%… probably. If not, most likely you are the 63%-er.
But there is an even more interesting thing you may want to look at: I have 300 people visiting my site every day. 4000 people have been coming regularly… And yet, I only have 11 people in my Playground.
4000 people read my articles with some regularity… their life experience is, on the scale of 1-100 is a 7. They know it. They feel it. They may even see that the solution I offer may just work… but they are unwilling to leave the safety of their worldview.
I remember some 30 years ago I likened it to the shipwrecked person who is now stuck on an uninhabited island. The question I asked: how far are you willing to swim from your island to see if there is something better?
You see, you can always return to your safe island… but most of you would never risk swimming far enough so it would become a question.
One of the measures I use in the Starting Point Measurements is #25. How inspired can you become? And what level are you now? The lower that number the less inspired you are to make a move… and the more hold on you the status quo has. Very predictive of how far you are willing to move into the new paradigm: i.e. how much choice you will have about suffering indignities in the future.
Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional, says the principle.
Things will happen. People will say and do things. People will call you names, withhold acknowledgment and appreciation, take what belongs to you, leave you, not reciprocate your kindness…
Things happen to you, me, everyone. Unavoidable.
The pain can be a stinging pain… or can fester and become suffering.
What keeps it alive is you… you calling it wrong. You seeing it as wrong. You considering it wrong… something that needs to be fixed. Something that shouldn’t be.
In The Playground you get to practice to feel pain and not go into suffering.
It is not that you can change life… it is really how much power you can demonstrate in the face that life is.
Everyone has troubles, billionaires may even have more than you. Just look at Zuckerberg or Elon Musk…
So it is not about not having troubles, it is about how you deal with them. Really.
On Wednesday both my computers decided to have audio. I had partner calls to listen to and give feedback on. I had a webinar scheduled in the afternoon. And I had no idea why the computers would refuse to have audio.
So, one by one, I turned them off, and started to clean them inside…
I still don’t know what I did… but both audios are back, working. Could have been dust in the works…
I probably will never know. But if my life depended on it, i would start experimenting until I can duplicate the trouble… lol.
People who “buy into” the strait and narrow principle of the good life, are more interested in failures than successes.
People who are more interested in successes than failures, are tethered to hell… those are the failures… being failures instead of having failures.
Fail at life… instead of have a failed experiment… and keep moving.
And this is the heart wrenching truth about most of you. Hurts… but I am not going to suffer about it.
PS: The Self-Knowledge Course
One aspect of The Playground I don’t talk much, because I take it as obvious, is in the Playground you learn about yourself more than about anything… ultimately, we could say that you have a chance to find out who you are, have a self-knowledge that is accurate, so you can live with Emotional Intelligence, and work with what you have, instead of trying to work with what you should have, hope to have, but don’t.
So when we look at the people who are doing well in the Playground: they have embraced what they learned about themselves, while the ones that don’t do well in the Playground: well, they are having a hard time seeing themselves, or alternatively accepting themselves the way they are.
So, if I were allowed to start over, I would call the Playground the Self-Knowledge course… because, ultimately that is what it is.
Would you be more likely to buy a course that teaches you about yourself? Please comment below…
- another iteration of the same story:
.
Three umpires are sitting in a bar, sharing a beer together. They begin talking about their job and the difficulties they face in calling balls and strikes. The first umpire states quite confidently, “There’s balls and there’s strikes, and I call them as they are!” The second umpire, with a slight look of disapproval, says, “No, no, no, there’s balls and there’s strikes, and I call them as I seem ’em.” The third umpire says, “You know, you’re both wrong. There’s balls and there’s strikes, and they ain’t nothin’ till I call ’em.”
.
And like that, nothing exists until we perceive, label, and interpret it.
.
Or, put differently: The first umpire claims we perceive the world as it actually exists. The second umpire claims we interpret the world that exists. The third claims we create the world through our perception of it.
