Life is an experiment. Unless you only have good and bad, successful or failure in your vocabulary
An experiment is always successful. It is successful at showing what it shows. Whether you interpret accurately what it shows or not… it is up to you. And then what you do with what it suggests is also up to you…
‘Do not be timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.‘ (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Considering my life, life is an experiment has been probably the best thing I’ve ever invented for myself. Why? Because it killed 90% of the voices inside that said that I was stupid, that I was a loser, that nobody will ever love me.
I hate learning new things… Why?
Yeah, why would anyone hate learning new things?
What does learning new things means? REALLY REALLY MEAN? About you…
It means that you didn’t know it. That you didn’t know everything. That you weren’t already perfect.
Why is that a problem and for whom?
Because humans have many aspects, much like a workplace with a few people, who all have jobs and people who almost never agree what is the job, who is the boss, what is the purpose of the enterprise, individuals pushing their own needs, lying, cheating, hiding, concealing, conniving, manipulating the system and each other, you are an internal mess, and some parts of you say that learning something new means you are stupid, ignorant, a cheater, a freeloader, or whatever your loudest parts claim.
No matter who you are, you have this workplace inside you, with noise, disagreement, all parts pulling in different direction.
Managing that workplace, your different aspects, is a lot like herding cats.
or
That is, in a nutshell, the human condition of homo sapiens… where we now live.
Now, like every workplace, this workplace has a single person who ultimately calls the shot, but is unaware of this infighting among his staff. He is unaware that he doesn’t receive much of the relevant information he needs to make decisions.
I am using the pronoun ‘he’, even though the gender of this part is the same as your gender… just translate it to she, if you are a woman.
What are the parts, what are that work at this workplace… you, Inc?
You don’t need to know all your parts, but it helps to know what direction they are pulling you, and what they use to dupe you, to cajole you into doing things that don’t serve the ‘company’, you, Inc.
And it is also very useful to know what are the strings that can be and are pulled… so you can disable them or just simply get aware.
In the Playground program this is the work you do, or are should do, but sometimes a part of you, Inc. takes the freaking microphone and doesn’t allow anyone else talk… and you are left with more confusion that you had before.
I paired people in the course to do Partner calls… like a confessional… where you self-examine with the intention to get some clarity, to satisfy some parts that have been vying for your attention, that have been undermining your life for decades… and all they needed is being heard, being seen, and not made wrong.
I paired people by feel… and it is turning out that they have their most hidden, most pushy parts can come out because of the pairing…
How does a partner call go?
The partners get on the phone or on skype when they agree to meet. They record the call, so from that aspect skype is good: it’s free and it records the call if you ask it to.
One starts with part one: by telling an incident that is bothering them, something that left them with some emotional turmoil. Recent.
The purpose of the call is not to chat, not to get sympathy, agreement. the purpose of the call is to do the work on the incident itself, to see what the ‘workplace’ and its workers did in it…
It is done by following a script as it introduces new aspects, new ‘workers’, new invisible dynamicsed.
I designed the questions in the script to dig up the invisible… the hidden… the concealed… the ugly or the beautiful: both can be hidden.
In part two the speaker finds an earlier similar incident where the emotions were the same or similar… all to dig for the source of the emotion.
Emotions are 91% created by something from the past…
and not from the present, not from the incident the participant brought to the call. They were born and still running the ‘show’ in the past from the past incident.
Slowly but surely, from the many incidents, a clear picture of the unhealthy working environment of the ‘office’ emerges, with each worker’s individual and unhealthy, unproductive needs.
Clarity is power. The head of the office, hearing all the voices, can now get a clearer picture of why he has been making decisions from falsified data, why he has had a life of a puppet on a string…
When the parts can voice their needs, wants, having to’s, should’s, they calm down, and start to pull in the same direction…
The mantra is: there is nothing wrong in reality.
The reality of that noisy office is real and, in spite of it having been a total mess, and in spite of it resulting an unhappy, unproductive life, bad habits, stagnating, no success, that reality is not wrong.
You don’t need to fix it… you need to know it, see it, with compassion, and you also need to learn to lead… instead of allowing them to lead you, the ‘leader’…
That happens much later in the course… like with any iceberg, 99% of what is is below the water line, and is running the show.
Until and unless you reveal most of what is there, and restore or create a relationship with the parts that is not based on wrong, and blame, and domination, and manipulation, you cannot create a future that your office workers will agree to work towards.
So is with this course: 99% of it is spent with revealing, and making peace.
And at the very end, we’ll spend some time to create a future the whole office can agree upon. The whole office can see that they can and will work towards.
Of course the culture of homo sapiens if the culture of fixing and immediate gratification.
This is why only a tiny fragment of my readers and followers will undertake this intense work we do in the Playground.
I am OK with that… after all it is a lot of work for me too… I have found that unless you know I listen to all your partner calls, you actually don’t do the work… just like your office workers when they thing consciousness doesn’t pay attention.
Back to the title of this article: life is an experiment.
In this context, doing the same things over and over, expecting different results… is pretty much the only thing that creates an unsuccessful life.
Each person has a crucial event in their lives, most at or before age 3. They come to a conclusion with the faculties of a 3 year old, and then that’s the rule, that’s the conclusion their life is now testing… forcing, trying to work,… and not surprisingly it doesn’t quite work, or doesn’t produce the results it seems to produce when you were 3 years old.
Looking at life as an experiment, and yourself as the person who runs the experiment, an adult, can cut that unproductive sequence of doing the same thing over and over again… but you don’t become an adult until you do the work of the Playground.
In my Starting Point Measurements, one of the measures I have is to what degree you have access to your Adult… the numbers range from 1% to 10%…
The Playground is designed to raise that number to about 30%. Why not 100%?
A course I did twice, the Wisdom Course, uses collages to get the work done. It got me up to 10%… I started at the bottom.
Instead of collages, I use the more time consuming partner calls. I pair up participants, and listen and give audio feedback on every weekly call. It uses 10-15 hours a week of my time… But it keeps people adhering to what there is to do…
The current ‘advanced level’ course participants are at it for about a year. A full half of them are still at ‘no adult’ level. The other half ranges from 3% to 30%.
What is missing for the people who have refused to grow up? That is what I need to learn new things for…
I am reading AND listening to a book I found last week, The Art of hunting humans. Hard to read, but goes deeper and wider than my current knowledge, so I am struggling my way through it.
My learning style doesn’t match the author’s writing style… yet it is worth chewing my way through the book: I want to be able to teach my participants what I haven’t… what might make them change their minds and actually do the work of the course.
Because don’t be mistaken: the course’s methodology works, but it only produces the result if you adhere to the methodology.
If you do it your way, the way you do everything… you get a surprise, just like your life, the course won’t yield its fruits for you…
Doing things your way is what you repeat, expecting a different result.
Life is an experiment… want to try a different way?
.
PS: I have a secret weapon. I stumbled on it by accident. It is an energy that is like sounding the alarm for consciousness to pay attention.
To pay attention and start behaving as if it were the owner of the company You, inc. Take responsibility, take ownership, and act as the owner… not just in name.
The results are dramatic. Instead of being limited to the second-hand notices of your aspects, it starts taking a first hand view of things and instruct the crew to repair, change, or simply pay attention to things.
This results who up in health, behavior, intelligence… not short of a miracle. Elsewhere I call it the Big Bundle, but it is really my secret weapon.
Does it work for people who are not in the Playground? The answer is yes. Of course the more distinctions you have, the more you can look the more results it produces… But at the minimum, it can start to repair your physical you… your body. So you can age backwards, so you can regain what is not irreparable damage in your body.
That is not all it can do, but that is all it does… Whatever your body can do for you, it will tell it to do.
