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This morning was one of those mornings.
I stepped on the scale, like I do every morning, and it showed a number .8 pound less than yesterday, that is like 400 grams, and my thought, my commentary, my meaning was: I’ll be a svelte thin corpse. Yaay for me!
My work is hopeless, I think.
I look, still sitting naked in my 51 degree bedroom, slowly putting on socks and panties. I look why I’ve defied the seeming rule: people want to remain the same while they get more from life… as if it were attainable, or worth it…
You carry your misery to riches… dufus!
So I decide to write today’s article about the White Tiger which was a book for those of you non-readers, an amazing, confronting, thought provoking, take your stand dude! type of book I loved.
Blame society, your loved ones, your attachment to being with people…
Then I have this thought: I could take a prison population and work with them! They have no attachments!
Just look and see that a number of prisoners work on getting a GHD, or is that GED… thank you Google. And some of them even gets a law school degree…
Something they would not, I repeat WOULD NOT do in the real world…
…shaming their environment… leaving them behind… that is what I am talking about.
In Israel I knew a woman, Mikki, who was in Buchenwald as a child, and was liberated. She was suffering intense guilt: survivors’ guilt they call it.
She is the one who introduced me to Landmark Education, although that wasn’t the name then… Moreover she really needed it to be able to leave that guilt behind.
I needed it too… maybe I felt guilty that I was born to my mother’s dismay… No abortions were legal at the time of my conception.
Anyway… My theory is that the reason students of transformation drop the ball, slide back, lose interest and desire, is because of survivor’s guilt.
People who are happy to be wretched, ordinary, pedestrian manage to convince the students that they are better staying wretched… like them. At least they will be wretched together.
I remember when it happened to me… But I was awake and aware enough to see that they don’t mean ‘together’… as soon as I gave up my personal ambition to become extraordinary, their job or ‘rescuing me’ they left.
The author of the White Tiger calls this the chicken coop phenomenon, others call it the crab bucket… where the one who is poised to escape is pulled back by the others.
It is not an accident that this always happens around holidays, or when someone gets married, gets a new relationship, or they finally get a job…
Life doesn’t look wretched enough, and the seduction of ‘forever! together!’ wins out.
This is why there are only 1,000 escapees on the planet and eight billion puppets.
For the responsibility to stay on, for the responsibility to work, a person needs to be able to direct their attention and keep it on what they INTEND to keep it on… intention, purpose, context, goal, whatever… all continuously and diligently caused by the person.
You can see that being continually seduced by others interrupts the person who WANTS TO BE responsible, wants to be causing, but can’t even cause themselves to say NO… and say: go away. NOT NOW.
The more needy of companionship, validation, togetherness someone needs the less likely they will be able to stick to their guns and learn to cause, learn to intend, learn to live purposefully.
Needy is probably the counter-crux to responsibility.
Both are a gene…
Needy is natural in children under the age of three. Then it is even useful.
But past age 3 it is harmful… and becomes a hindrance to life, independence, and to becoming a person.
You can’t be needy and causing at the same time…
The moment you allow yourself to be needy, the same moment your responsibility gene turns off…
And the more often it turns of the more reluctant it is going to stay on. And then, eventually it will refuse.
Just like in the Defending Your Life movie, the people can try to overcome fear a number of time, but eventually they are discarded…
It is real… every time you give up, you strengthen the giving up muscle, and your ‘going for it’ muscle dies.
At this point all my active clients still have some mileage in them…
One of them, a serial giver-uper, sent me a video of attention training.
Whenever you avoid doing what I ask you to do, as your coach, I know that you are building your giver-uper muscle.
Even though the video is good, sound, and maybe even effective for what it was made for: people with PTSD, anxiety disorder, etc.
But it is an exercise to escape a condition, while my practices are designed to become part of your life forever… not something you need to take time out for.
You can do them while you are doing other things.
This practice is to strengthen or for most create the attention that is at the root of everything… that is the missing in everything… that is, it seems at the crux of the matter: are you the boss, or are you the puppet?
No metacognignition exercise will train you to be the boss… Even though I can safely say that I am training you to step out of the mind, where most of you do your ‘cognition’ although cognition is really not done in the mind.
I am not knocking metacognitive therapy… And maybe for that rag doll student he needs to start there…
It is crucial to settle down and observe how you escape, how you avoid your own success: the life you can love and live it powerfully.
Some gets busy. Others get bombastic. Some gets to pretending to be puny, or sick…
UTI? A woman’s best friend… After all you can’t expect me to do it while I am in pain, right?
What’s next? Getting pregnant? Yeah, I can see that coming.
In diet, just one instance of eating food that wants more of itself… like bread for me, will destroy months of hard work with just one bite.
I am craving a bagel with cream cheese and lox. If I had a car I would be on my way to Bruegher’s Bagels and would give up my diet.
Thank god I don’t have a car any more. Thank god I can’t walk that far either.
Because I would be worse than back to square one… I wouldn’t be able to restore my self-respect for many months enough to start all over again.
It is attention firmly held on your purpose, your intention, that prevents me from falling of the wagon this time. And tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow.
Thinking that the devil will stop trying to get me off my ball is a fools thinking.
The devil does one thing really well and that is his secret of success: convincing you that it doesn’t exist… and being a shape shifter… of course.
I know the devil and recognize it in many of the disguises it wears… But even I am not safe from it. So I keep my attention on what matters to me…
How are YOU doing with that?
The devil speaks through your best friends, your mother, your lover, your boss… and you are still falling for it.
But just to clarify: you can’t be half inside hell and half outside of hell. You cannot make hell nicer… hell is hell.
Everyone out there is working inside hell… not on getting you out of there… but to make hell more manageable, more bearable.
Everyone I know, everyone I have ever heard of.
So if you are here for tricks and moves to make hell less hellish, I am not the guy for you. You are on the wrong website… looking for something that you won’t find here.
I once had a colleague who used this Xacto knife and the big paper cutting scissors to clean his nails…
He was using the wrong tools for the job. A simple sixty cent rasp would have done a better job.
If you would like to get your feet wet, see if you can stand the temperature of the water, test if you have enough to go for, I recommend the Freedom Courses.
It’s a live course. It is designed to give you all the foundation you need to break out of the chicken coop, or climb out of the crab bucket.
I am thinking of doing it on Sundays… but will endeavor to find a time when everyone can attend.
If you’d rather have a recorded version, your price is the same… but I’ll provide you with email coaching… The live participants will have to pay for that extra.
If you have done the Freedom Courses a year ago and want to do it again, email me for a 50% off ‘reviewer’ coupon.
Another possible time slot is morning-ish… 10 or 11 am my time… I am in New York.
The more loops you need to jump through to register and do the course, the more you’ll get out of it.
Why? Because you invest more than just your money.
Many of you are cheap with your time: you treat it the way you treat yourself: worthless. And you are wondering why you are not amounting to much…
OK. Here is the link to the course
Sign up to the Freedom CourseI guarantee to give you everything you need to get to freedom. What you’ll do with it is a whole other question.
Will you succumb to societal pressure, the chicken coop? Will you soar?
It is all up to you. If I could, I’d rescue you. But then you’ll count on me to do your work.
Your work is your work. Do what belongs to you, do what is yours to do.
In this course you’ll get crystal clear what is yours to do.
PS: If you have the DNA adjustment but it keeps turning off: this is the most organized way that set you on the right path… Everywhere else you are really on your own, even if you are in one of my advanced programs.
PPS: You and your ‘advisors’ overvalue self-talk and belief. My self-talk is nothing pretty. I woke up with hopelessness and I still look to you and the world with the same exact words: it is hopeless.
But my actions are not connected to my ‘self-talk’, or my beliefs.
This is one of the things you can learn in the Freedom course, to hear your ‘beliefs’ as noise, irrelevant. Not where you look to see what you should do.
My self-talk has been saying for 72 years to kill myself. I hear you, I hear you. I don’t have to do what you tell me to do.
