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Pardon for mixing my metaphors… but…
I am downloading five movies that people on Reddit reported watching more than seven times.
These movies are part of the culture, and I have missed it.
I am seeing, again and again, that I came to this party late… It was already going on.
When I first noticed it in earnest was in the exercise class for old people. The singalong… Everyone singing along with songs I had never heard before.
All those people knew the words flawlessly… I still sing Hungarian pop songs, or Hungarian ‘celebrate that the Russians liberated our country’ songs, or the Marseillaise… I don’t have to remember the words, they are muscle memory, I think.
Sometimes I pay attention to the words, and am surprised at what words have shaped my worldview… ugh.
Maybe you should try it sometimes…
If you do, you’ll get, maybe, some clarity why some things are as important to you as air… you can’t live without them… Brainwashing for sure.
Maybe it is time to re-think.
When someone comes ‘late’ to YOUR party… they can actually see all the weird things that you consider normal. They see that you are swimming naked.
For example take me, or take Amy. We both came from an Eastern European country, and we often laugh or commiserate about the weird and self-limiting beliefs of Americans that conflict with our own.
She lives in the South… and that must be quite forbidding, more than living in New York for me.
Living in a make-believe reality, where literally nothing is real, nothing is meaningless, is actually normal.
What unreality is normal in Eastern Europe is different from what is normal in the South, or in New York.
Your normal is invisible to you. Just like what you eat is what you eat. Normal. For you.
There are only a very few things that you have thought through as a good idea to live by.
Most of what is normal came to you, unexamined, undigested, swallowed whole.
In my work, in my programs some of these not beneficial normals come out loud and clear.
You may not agree, but comparing you with the 1000 is instructive. The 1000, the people who managed to live on a higher level of beingness than you, and therefore be happier, calmer, more successful than you, more self-directed than you, have more power than you.
For the 1000, the first thing that had to be, is questioning the normal.
The normal, for any society, is to drink the Kool Aid… For those of you who won’t understand the reference: The phrase ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’ means: don’t believe everything you are told…
Back in 1978, I was still in Hungary, read about it in French, Weird, isn’t it?
A large group of Americans moved to Guyana with their pastor, Jim Jones, in search of an egalitarian, just life. Jim Jones appointed himself the Messiah in a world of sin… My words… very simplified…
He tuned into what people wanted, a simple useful life, no abominations, clarity.
And in November of 1978 he ordered his congregation to drink the Kool-Aid, grape flavored beverage laced with cyanide. 918 died, adults and children. Many survived, this is how we know the story.
You would think that those people were crazy. But no.
Those people wanted what they wanted, and never questioned, never re-thought the solution they got.
Trump and others are a lot like Jim Jones.
Cults, cultish leaders… some of them do it for sport, for business… Rabid followers.
We could screen and filter everything that you were ever told, everything you have ever believed, and we would see something really interesting:
Every single thing fits into the filter ‘cultish’ on some level. Everything has a harmful level of unreality.
What are the measures that I can measure?
- It comes from the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Good and Evil
- Does it serve one person, or one group only?
- Does it create a craving, shoulds, have tos, need tos, want tos that don’t serve you?
Given that reality is empty of meaning, all meaning is added by humans.
The meaning is manipulated to serve a narrow interest, not the individual. An individual is most effective in life when and if there is no ‘already always’ meaning.
Already always is what you get from culture, your peers, from your parents, from books, from movies. They are not yours.
You never sat down and thought it through, that, for example, the best thing would be to believe in the pursuit of happiness… and then chase the blue bird of happiness, while nothing gets done, no value gets generated, and you are unhappy.
Or you never sat down on a rainy Sunday afternoon and decided that the way to have a good life is to create rules, rules that need to be followed, without thinking. That the secret to a good life is to never do anything that violates any of your rules.
And you even have a rule: don’t have rules!
With rules your chances for a life that works are between zero and none. You’ll hear everything through this one filter… and 90% of what is said stays outside… they don’t get through this filter.
The experience when one of your fundamental beliefs is challenged is that you experience that there is no floor to stand on. That is the meaning of a fundamental belief: they give you your floor that is never looked at, is never questioned.
I have gone through this process of ‘losing the floor’ a few times in my life.
The secret to going through that upheaval is to not get frantic. To do nothing. To wait for the floor, whatever it will be, to emerge.
There has never been that there was no floor.
If you need one firm belief that supports life, believe this: the floor will always rise to meet your foot. You won’t fall into the abyss… There is no abyss.
It is just that the new floor isn’t visible to you… yet. Or you still see the old floor, the one that you created, thoughtlessly, and perpetuated by mindlessly believing in it.
If you are unsuccessful in life, if you feel stuck, if you behave stuck, if you never actually do anything to make you be worth a damn, you are actively insisting that the floor doesn’t change.
But if the floor doesn’t change, you cannot change.
What gives you your actions or your inaction is the floor.
Back in 1977 I got a glimpse of something I had never seen, never thought: that the society I lived in made it impossible to anyone who lived there to experience full self-expression.
I didn’t even know that self-expression was important to me until that point.
Obviously that realization pulled the floor from under my feet, it killed the floor, and made me feel that there is nothing I stand on.
I patiently waited until the floor came up to meet my foot.
The new floor was dominated by the belief that self-expression is a right not a privilege. and I wanted it.
I have gone through several ‘the floor is gone, here is the new floor’ experiences, unscathed.
When you fret, when you scramble, when you flail, you re-create the same floor that you had before… so nothing changes.
Nothing changes? Nothing changes.
Then what was all that effort for, in my classes, and everywhere?
Yeah. If the floor doesn’t change… than nothing can change. And YOU didn’t allow the floor to change. You.
Now, you should ask the question that is on your tongue:
What is my floor, Sophie? What is the floor that is keeping me the same?
The floor is a context.
It takes several rounds to get to it… it is hidden from your view. It actually protects itself. It uses floor coverings…
We do that work in every one of my courses, peeling the floor coverings, until we get what we see as the floor.
Over the years I got better and better at peeling the layers and actually getting to the bottom-most context, that we can safely call the floor.
It is different for everyone, despite similarities.
All layers are ugly unreality.
We call what we find the default context… because you always default to it, until you create a new context, a new floor and empower it.
It comes down to the two wolves teaching of the Native Americans: the wolf that you feed is the wolf who becomes your dominant wolf… or your dominant context.
The other wolf, the default context won’t go away… it just gets weaker because you don’t feed it.
As long as you immerse yourself in the same culture that created it, with the same people who know you as that, you are still feeding it.
We could tell the whole story of my life through the environments I left, I stopped being immersed in, all the way to living a whole new life where I love my life and live it powerfully.
I dare say that all the people of the 1000 had to go through several instances where they left a whole life behind.
One is not born a 1000, one becomes one, through these ‘I choose to leave this comfortable environment where people know me‘.
Sometimes this is geographical, and sometimes this is a circle of friends/family.
The most important environment is your ‘social circle’ that Landmark Education calls your ‘originating circle’, the people you talk to, interact with at least once a week.
And the path to the 1000, the state, leads through being willing to have NO originating circle.
What am I saying?
- You are born into a party that has been already going for a while.
- You are indoctrinated into the game without actually telling you the rules.
- Those you make up… you make up a hodge podge rules.
- At some point you experience no freedom. No freedom to be yourself. No freedom of choice. You feel constricted by the game.
- If you are lucky, you encounter a game that you feel will give you more freedom…
- Depending on the nature of the new game, it can be a cult, it can be something higher, better, that can put you on the path to becoming really free, if that is what you aim for.
- Each new game is a new context… that is given to you.
- The best new game is the one you invent. Consciously.
The Create a new context for your life can take you there, if the stage where you find yourself is stage 3 or above.
The course can take you to a context where you’ll experience more freedom.
If you don’t want more freedom, if you just want to have ‘more, better, different’ then this course is not for you. It offers none of that.
You need to be willing to give up where you are at so you can have what is beyond it. You must be willing to give up what you are to become what you want to be. And ultimately you must be willing to give up who you are, who you consider yourself to be, to become who you want to be
Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be. ~ John Wooden
The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking. ~ Albert Einstein
Even if you cannot change all the people around you, you can change the people you choose to be around. ~ Roy T. Bennett
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ~ Buckminster Fuller
Resistance is never the agent of change. You have to embrace the actions that are going to get you closer to your goal. ~ Ali Vincent
If you think you are ready, if you just want to test if you are ready, the Create a context for your life workshop is a good place.
- You may find that it is too hard. Possibly you’ll find that you can’t take the heat…
- You may find that I am insulting you, laughing at you, mocking you… and that is WRONG!
You just got some of the layers above your floor…
Only if you manage to go beyond that this class is for you.
If you are willing and able, I promise to take you all the way… if you want to go all the way. I also promise to let you go if you don’t. I call that an act of love to let you go when you are ready to go.
Take this opportunity for a live you loveIn my experience the more limiting your current paradigm feels the further you can go.
Because the real motive power comes from that.
Oh, before I forget: All sessions are on a Saturday. All times are EST… New York time. Noon in New York is 4 pm in London, 6 pm in Paris, 7 pm in Bucharest.
This coming Saturday, December 11, 2021, 12:00 PM – 03:00 PM EST
Dec 18, 2021, 12:00 PM – 03:00 PM EST
Jan 8, 2022, 12:00 PM – 03:00 PM EST
Jan 15, 2022, 12:00 PM – 03:00 PM EST
I will schedule more sessions when I see how many more we’ll need to take you to your new ‘floor’ and trust that it will stay.
