I have some students who are not keeping up with the other students. These students don’t learn. So much so, that after a whole year, they are still at page 1 or page 2 of a class… that is 100 pages… Of course there are no pages… but pages express more what I want to say than percentages.
It is the middle of the night: I got up to write this article, because I got the insight that has been missing.
Before you can learn something, you need to see the end result in your mind’s eye. Then when you actually get there you can recognize it.
If you can’t see it ahead of time, in your mind’s eye, you won’t recognize it even when you get there, because you have never seen it before. So you don’t know what you are seeing.
This is a very important distinction.
When you drop something on the floor, you won’t find it unless you know exactly what it looks like. So mechanics, seamstresses, etc. use the trick to drop a second same item… but this time intentionally, and see what it looks like in the environment of the floor. And a minute later they can find the original dropped item.
Why, because now they can recognize it.
In certain courses you are asked to make collages of what you want. Use pictures from magazine advertising.
This serves the same purpose. You see it, commit it to memory, track the feelings the pictures awaken, and when they come, you’ll recognize them.
When you plan a trip, you get a map, a guide book. It is essential for you to recognize that you are where you planned to go, because you recognize what you are seeing.
The people who don’t learn, can’t learn, even though they take all my classes, miss this step.
And they missed them all their lives. They never visualized what they were learning in school, what marriage will be like, what this will be like and what that will be like.
In my Playground the fully accomplished purpose of the course is to become a fully equipped adult, unflappable, impervious, productive, and worth a damn. To that effect we work towards being able to be in reality where nothing is wrong.
- Where you can continue loving your children when they do what children do… even teenagers.
- Where we can continue loving ourselves when we make mistakes, when we find out that we don’t know everything, when we are fat, etc.
- Where we can be happy even if not everything others have is attainable on our salary.
- Happy, even when other people don’t like us.
- Happy even when we don’t get what we want,
- Even if and when we don’t win arguments.
Because we have the ability and the practice to know what we are aiming at.
Without this practice and ability, students, you, are a bumbling idiot, a boat without a rudder, and you never learn.
If you cannot imagine it: it is not going to happen.
For two reasons:
- 1. you won’t even go for it
- . you won’t do the thing that would create it… because you are just going through the motions.
It is like
- arriving to Paris, but not looking to see the Tour Eiffel… thinking: is this all there is?
- Or arriving to Las Vegas, and staying at an airport hotel and not going to the strip. And telling everyone: I was in Las Vegas. Just like any other town! What is the big deal?
Imagine what would happen when you get a box of jigsaw pieces, but not the picture of the assembled picture. You’d be just spinning your wheels, because you wouldn’t know what it was supposed to look like… you don’t know how the pieces should fit together.
This is what a person’s ‘learning’ looks like when they haven’t done the work of designing what they are learning for.
A mortifying 40% of humanity does not do the work of seeing the finished product, the destination before they begin the learning process, and the result is no learning.
And even if in one area you’ve learned to do it, for example in repairing engines for a living. You think it belongs to work… and the rest of your life is a mess.
I watch people do ‘landscape design’ and even though they spent a lot of money on buying this and that, their garden looks like a junkyard.
There is a saying by Helen Keller: The only thing that is worse than being blind is to have sight but no vision.
This is the situation of my non-learners. They have the capacity but not the practice. They have the brain cells… but without doing this work, they cannot, will not have the results.
So what can an exasperated spiritual teacher do? lol.
My suggestion is, probably, two steps:
- 1. find out if they have any area of life where they do have the practice… and suggest that they build on that, that they bring that capacity in all of life.
- 2. start building collages… pictures from magazines. What should be the topic? The life that doing the work in the Playground can get for them.
Focus on the being and not on the having.
I have a collage I made a number of years ago. Every picture talks about a certain life experience, that I wanted at the time, and maybe still want.
It was before I found my niche… so it has little to do with my work. But as a life experience. It says: World’s Best. It has me stand on the top of a high peak. It has me have a lot of physical experiences, the waterfall, the sun on the deck of a ship, the living on the precipice, just above the water, the unflappable ‘grace’ of the camel, the touch of a massage therapist. and the exotic far east… discovery. The silliness of putting mud mask on my face… laughing, laughing, laughing.
Oh, and having the cheetah’s speed and agility… let us not forget that.
I am keeping it on my refrigerator door. It is faded, and wrinkled, but it is context…
Life is NOT purposeless, life has a context, and for me having a context for my everyday life is mandatory: without that I’d only pay attention to work. And All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. So I play. I am the class clown in my exercise classes: people miss me when I am not there… and are all smiles, eager for me to take them to FUN. And I do.
But it is all inside this context. I am getting well, so I can pursue some of those visions, like the Far East… you need to be in shape to enjoy that.
Yes. Having a context for everything is a must for a life that works.
Context is the jigsaw puzzle box: what does the finished picture look like, feel like… And…
…WHO YOU NEED TO BE…
…to have that.
So you create that context with a collage. Why not just words?
You don’t know the words yet. Another common characteristic of people who can’t learn is their poor vocabulary.
They know words and their meanings approximately.
But words create worlds, and approximate words create a mess.
One of these people, no longer a student, read the book ‘Feelings’ by Hungarian engineer, Margoczi. I asked him to do a presentation on it to the other students, as a practice, given that this dude planned to write his dissertation on this book.
His grasp of the book was 10%. 10%! Ugh.
It’s a vocabulary issue.
Someone with that low level grasp of someone else’s world-creating prose… will never create worlds with his or her own words that can stand as context, and breathe life into an otherwise hodge podge existence.
He is, not surprisingly, no longer a student.
I am doing this month-long course in December, Inner Authority. Of course ALL the students that cannot learn have signed up.
Why? Because they want something… but it is a vague yearning… and not a defined, expressed, doable future… just a vague nagging feeling that something is available.
You cannot create ‘something’. You can only create a thing: METICULOUSLY defined.
So these students have their job cut out for them if they want the Inner Authority course to make a difference for them. Or else it will be one of the courses they signed up for that left them in the dirt… again.
Shall I do a workshop where you come and do your collage?
It is mighty difficult to do it through a webinar… but if you are not willing, or don’t have the discipline to sit down and do it until you are done, maybe that is what we’ll need to do.
- Step 1: Find out if you have the capacity to create context and live through it… (ask me in email)
- Step 2: tell me if you’d come to a workshop like that… bringing a lot of magazines with pictures, mostly ads have the right pictures. Make sure you can take a picture of your collage and send it to me while on the webinar or I really cannot guide you, give you feedback, teach you… If you can’t grok it… you should find a class in your neck of the woods… there are always classes for collaging, vision quest or whatever they call them. I made mine at one of those.
- Step 3: start gathering the magazines… borrow, steal from waiting rooms, or buy some. If this is not important enough for you to throw 10-10 bucks on… then might as well give it up now…
By the way, the measure that corresponds with this in your Starting Point Measurements is measure #25. How inspired can you become? And what level are you now
If your numbers are under 10, you are in trouble… you’ll have to work to bring your ‘inspirable’ score higher.
Yesterday I measured, and although 40% of the population don’t live, don’t create context, don’t create a vision for their activities, only 3% won’t, don’t want to… because they consider it limiting. These are the committedly evil ones… Remember, evil means: lives out of the desire to receive for the self alone.
If I already know you, you have already had your Starting Point Measurements done: just ask away.
If I don’t already know you: please get your starting point measurements… and then you’ll know.
If your inspiration measure is too low, you may want to come to the collage-ing class… I’ll schedule it when I know how many people want to come, and where they are from, so I can find a time that can work for anyone.
Get your Starting Point Measurements
