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This article is not about the squirrels, it is about you. What you can see, what you can notice. Or don’t.
This article is about looking. (Or listening, or any looking you can do with a perception organ, perceive incoming signals: light, sound, gravity, acceleration, chemical substance, position, motion, temperature, pressure, aka incoming… Not from memory, not from the mind.)
Looking is the act of intentionally focusing perception on someone or something, for the purpose of obtaining information ~ Wikipedia
Whether it is looking at, or looking for, the words you use tell me that 99% of the time you are looking in the Tree of Knowledge, in the mind, not in reality, not into the signals that come from your perception organs.
You are in a workshop that you paid for. Something is said. Instead of listening to it, you go to your mind. The conversation in your head, conscious of not conscious, must be: what I have already heard is more important than what is being said now.
Arrogant? Hell yeah. Stupid? Hell yeah.
Everyone has Tree of Knowledge knowledge… it contains what they learned from someone else, what they bought into, made up something about what they actually saw. Or heard. Or felt, experienced.
Something is said and you expect to see that same thing, something that you know about, that you know must be somewhere, so you are looking for it. In your mind. On the Internet. Because when you live in your mind, nothing, I repeat, nothing can or be allowed to be new.
Things only exist for you in comparison. It is the same as X. Or conversely, it is different from X. It is more, better or different, but never new.
New cannot exist in the mind. And unfortunately to you, everything worth having is new… Not some puny option, more, better or different.
Looking in the mind leaves out the 99% of reality that has all the magic, and all the power.
If what you know were enough for what you want to accomplish, you would be successful.
But T. Harv Eker wasn’t kidding when he said that his serial loser status didn’t change until he learned from his father’s millionaire friend (millionaire 40 years ago!) this little ditty:
When things are not working the way you expect them to work, there is something you don’t know.
I would suggest a change in the wording, not in the meaning: When things don’t work as well as you’d expect them to work, there is something you don’t SEE… i.e. it is from the ‘I didn’t know that I didn’t know‘ variety of knowledge, something you don’t learn from a book.
Why? Because when you read, if you read from the mind, you read for what you recognize… But what you don’t know that you don’t know you can’t recognize. It is ‘unrecognizable’.
You need to step out of the mind, and do some serious brain work to DISTINGUISH.
If you use the mind to distinguish, you’ll fail. The mind can’t do it.
Distinguishing is an inversion type of brain activity: you look at what you want to distinguish and strive to be as complete as you can in listing everything the item isn’t…
That is the only way to get to what you don’t know that you don’t know.
The missing knowledge for success is the part that you don’t know that you don’t know. The part that you can’t look for because you don’t know that it exists. You can’t look for it because it cannot be in the mind. That NEW KNOWLEDGE is what could bring finally success to you.
Looking for what you know prevents you from ever finding what you need for success. In any area, health, money, relationships, happiness.
Looking in the mind is really like looking for the keys where the light is… not where it is.
Unless you learn to look and not know what you are looking at but keep looking at it. Unless you look and see what’s there, you can’t, you won’t have access to what you don’t know that you don’t know.
Your box is made real by what you know, or think you know.
The box is not real. What makes it real is that you consider it real… even though it has no walls. Its floor is even imaginary…
When I ask you to give up something that you are sure of, you get scared. But there is a floor right under your floor, so there has never been any danger of falling.
The danger is imaginary.
Overvaluing what you ‘know’ and undervaluing everything else.
Overvaluing ‘learning’, specifically learning of ‘knowledge’ and undervaluing seeing, being taken to see, experience things.
What you think you know limits where you look, how you look, and what you see. And creates your box.
People who are more successful than you have had one thing over you: they were willing to look and see something they didn’t expect to be there.
Many of them were lead there in a ‘hitting bottom’ phase of their journey.
Hitting bottom is when you don’t know how to continue what you have been doing without losing your life as you know it.
And that is what causes the magic: what you know isn’t enough to get out of it alive. So you need to trust… you need to risk. And you are rewarded.
As long as you can be rescued, you are not there. Yet.
And unless you are there, unless you are willing to risk your life for what you want you won’t listen to others, not even to people who you paid to guide you. You’ll listen the way you’ve always listened: you’ll listen for confirmation or disconfirmation…
You don’t listen to, you don’t hear what they say, only the part that is inside your Tree of Knowledge, inside your box.
But when you really hit bottom, you hear what anything an anyone says, and you’ll hear what you need to hear to go up…
- When Alex Hormozi hit bottom, he spent his last dollar to get coaching from Russell Brunson and allowed it take him in a direction he’d never known about.
- When Robert Greene hit bottom, he tuned into the 99% and came up with his most successful book idea yet, something about human power… that everyone wanted to read. (47 Laws of Power)
But… and here we go again, everyone who read it read that book inside their Tree of Knowledge… the box that allowed only a little bit of what was written to go through their filter.
When I first started my journey…
…I really just wanted to feel better about myself and my life. I wanted to feel good about being alive… and I didn’t.
It was 1985 and I was 38 years old. And I was miserable. I hit bottom. So I went to that first course back then to help me decide if I should kill myself…
I saw something in that first course that I didn’t know that I didn’t know about myself… and it gave me a taste of what’s possible through courses of that kind.
Not knowledge but seeing. Seeing NEW.
I still had that question to decide for the next 30 years… even thought I was putting all my tenacity and curiosity and tirelessness in making my ‘box’ bigger… and yet the question was still there. Less nagging than before, but there…
As a real choice… Choosing between a life I didn’t love, and not living at all.
And that is, maybe, why I’ve never stopped looking in the 99%.
Honestly, answers inside the 1% are uninteresting, and don’t excite me.
- Good food, meh. But eating as much as I want and not gaining an ounce… yeah, that is exciting.
- Making more money, meh for me. Making more money with something no one expects, and no one really believes… yeah, that’s exciting.
- Stretching, pushing, poking the boundaries of what is possible… and occasionally having something to write home about. Yeah.
I spoke with my older brother on the phone the other day. I was sharing one of those reality-defying results I produced… and his wife asked him to put the phone on speaker phone, and me to repeat what I shared.
I’ve known that woman since 1968… This was the first time she was interested in anything I had to say.
In my workshops, in my articles, I offer to take you to your 99%… What is beyond where you would look, beyond your box. Where you wouldn’t even consider one can look.
And to my disappointment and despair most people still only hear what they have always heard.
When I started my journey, that first course, I did it in Hebrew, not my mother tongue Then I continued doing courses in English… also not my mother tongue. That gave me an advantage over others.
Everything I heard was alien to me.
When I want to explain anything to people back in Hungary, I don’t have the words. And the words my friends offer don’t resonate with me. Had I done these courses in Hungary, I would not be where I am… I would probably still be in my box…
My younger self doesn’t hear those words the same as my older self hears the English words. Not even close.
There are also words that Hungarian helped me see clearer than my American students, like the word ‘attitude’.
The Hungarian word spells it out: ‘how your body is in relation to what you are dealing with‘. So one can see, instead of words, a picture: you and that thing. The relationship.
Of course to me most things translate to body… what your body does, what your body feels, what your body is ready to or refusing to do.
Meaning: I don’t live in my head and choose words, I look at my body, or your body when I connect to you, and see its position, its relationship to the conversation, it’s relationship to what you are saying, and see a whole lot about you through it. This is how I know when you are lying… from that relationship.
I see the things that you are unaware of, because your attention is somewhere else…
I like to say that your head and attention are firmly lodged in your rear end… and that is why you are so clueless. That is why you have no idea about anything…
Because where your eyes are, up your arse: there is nothing much to see.
Unless you become aware that you don’t use your body as it is designed, you don’t use your body as if you were the boss… there is nothing I can help you with… or not much.
In my workshops I ask you to look where you don’t want to look.
And what you don’t want to see is what you use to justify that you are not where you’d like to be. Your dark side, your shadow, that you willfully ignore. That you don’t consider relevant. That you are lying about or hide.
Instead of getting clean about it, instead of chipping away at it, you want good ideas. You want to add some good stuff to your already crowded life.
And, of course, I am not willing to indulge you. Why? Because of the Anna Karenina Principle.
The Anna Karenina Principle says that a deficiency in any one of a number of factors dooms an endeavor to failure. Consequently, a successful endeavor is one for which every possible deficiency has been avoided.
Deficiency cannot be fixed by piling in the ‘good’ stuff.
Here is a little bit of that ‘you don’t know that you don’t know’ stuff:
How come you are not successful… just three of the invisible Dark Side:
- If you are only interested in what you get, but not interested in what others get, no amount of do-gooding will take you to success.
- If you are only interested in being considered slighted, no amount of work will make you feel good, because you’ll need to remain slighted.
- Or if you measure your value in how much people agree with you, or take your advice, then no work that is not about that will interest you.
So what do you do with your Dark Side?
- The first step is to see it in all its glory.
- The second step is to not make it wrong and not make it right. It is what it is.
- Then see it in action, own it. Own it like you’d own a misalignment of your vehicle’ wheels… you compensate for it.
Your dark side is not correctable… It is part of the design that it isn’t. You can only compensate for it.
But when you manage to own it, you can do things that the Dark Side would, normally, stop you from doing.
- If your dark side is that you want to be scaffolded… so you can remain floppy… you can build that scaffold yourself… and get things done.
Your dark side would prefer that you remain floppy, needing someone else to spend their whole life to hold you up.
- If your dark side says: I only want to do what I want to do when I want to do it, and I don’t want to do what I don’t want to do when I don’t want to do it… Then you can increase, slowly and gently, what you want to do… so your life doesn’t remain empty, meaningless, and you insignificant.
And so on… with every and any dark side. Compensation…
My dark side is to devalue what others say, without even looking. A knee jerk reaction. To be impulsive about everything. To not even look before I act.
So you see, the compensation for my Dark Side is all about looking for me, and maybe that is why I teach looking so much. Because I need to remind myself to look.
I am still impulsive about 10% of my actions. If I could bring deliberateness, look and think first, to more of my actions, it would make the most difference.
Deliberate, deliberation is a thinking process. Its essence is to look. To look at the situation, in reality, before I take an action.
Many people I know think about things, but the data they mull over is not from reality, it is from opinion, belief, fear, and hope. From the mind.
I don’t call that deliberation.
Reality is stuff you can see, you can measure. It is in time and in place. It has no word components.
An empty pool. A sudden drop in sales numbers. A sudden drop in people’s vibration. You feeling sluggish. Something that is out there, in reality… not in the mind.
And, most importantly, it is not right and it is not wrong, it is what it is… You may have a preference, but it is just your preference, doesn’t make what is right or wrong.
In our conversations, You need to confront reality every time you talk to me.
You need to increase your ‘tolerance’ to reality. Your TLB… Your mental toughness. Or you’ll never be able to be deliberate and make good choices about anything in life.
I live in an old house. Two apartments and a basement.
For many years all the pipes were exposed in the basement, and some of them froze in especially cold winters. and burst. A mess.
So the landlord would call or email ME to ask me to keep the water faucets dripping through the night when the temperature dropped too low.
A few years ago he put on foam sleeves on the pipes. But he still emails me to ask me to drip the water.
He is not looking in reality: the pipes froze because they were naked. He looks in his memory…
At the beginning of the pandemic people gave him a lot of business. he is in home improvement. He spent the windfall on luxury cars. Not surprisingly he can never see that his actions have any effect on the future…
OK, this article is getting too long.
One of the areas where your dark side shows its ugly face is your health. And without health you are nothing.
Your body is your foundation. Unless you keep it in good enough shape, everything else is unimportant.
If you have health insurance, you are probably counting on doctors to keep you healthy.
But medicine’s truth value is only 10%, and your doctor may be below that. 10% is the average.
Even famed natural doctors, Dr. Joel Wallach 30%, or Dr. Richard Schulze 30% say things, offer things that are bad for you, or useless for you, but makes them money. 70% of what they say. It made Dr. Schulze a billionaire.
My muscletesting is 96% accurate.
Partially because I don’t like to sell you something that you don’t need. I find what I find… and then I’ll tell you.
- I can accurately muscletest your health… as it is right now. It’s a snapshot.
- I can accurately muscletest the foods that don’t harm you… There are no ‘beneficial’ foods: if your body can use it, it is beneficial.
You get a list of foods that tested ‘not harmful’ to your body. Inside that you often have a choice to be vegan, vegetarian, or carnivore.
I am, at the present time, feeling better being a vegetarian with an occasional piece of fish…
Before I was a 90% carnivore… and the occasional plant food I consumed added to my already ballooning weight. Huh?
Now I am never hungry. I am shedding weight. I am eating vegetables. And I make sure that I don’t violate my eating style: one vegetable at a time, with maybe one spice-like vegetable added. My current favorite is garlic.
I saute the vegetables in animal fat… not oil.
If you want to see where your, health is at, you can use my muscletesting service to find out.
If you already know, then you are probably wrong. Your body likes to change it up…
Or if you are not as well as you’d hope to be, probably what you know about health, about your body just isn’t so.
If the two most famous doctors are only 30% correct, what do you think you are? 100% right?
Human arrogance covering up ignorance is the reason 10% health is considered good in this day and age.
Get your health in shapeIf you look at everything through your eyes behind your eyeballs, you’ll keep on seeing what you have always seen. Nothing new, and therefore nothing will change.
Nothing changes? Then nothing will change.
