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Reality and fiction, reality and fantasy, reality and dreaming are occasionally hard to tell apart.
I may dream that I am getting up and even getting to my office… only to discover that I am still in bed, under the covers… It felt so real
I am lucky it is only on cold mornings… Some people spend their lives on the border of dreaming and living.
Some books are intentionally written in a way that the reader can’t tell if it is fantasy or a skillful telling what happened.
Two books come to mind most: Anastasia, The Ringing Cedars of Russia that sold tens of millions of copies. I have them, and read them. I enjoyed them. Well written fiction, although some of it is bad as far as fiction goes.
Humanity, especially women, took every word of the book for a fact, and there are groups, quasi religious, the Anastasiasts…
The other book is Dan Millman’s book, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior.
It’s of the same genre… fantasy is mixed with reality… skillfully, I admit.
I enjoyed that book too… but I am going to rain on some parades…
Fantasy believed is not good for you.
The followup book to The Peaceful Warrior, The Journeys of Socrates. The white haired gas station attendant in the first book is called Socrates. This book is one of my favorite books I read once a year. It could be true, except it is 99% fiction. Beautiful, moving fiction, but fiction. A likely story.
The original book is 40% fiction. The interesting part is fiction… Almost believable…
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Humanity wants to, desperately wants to live a life that is NOT reality bound. Jump to spirituality, fantasy…
…because, as Freud so astutely said:
‘Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures… There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensible to it.’
Freud doesn’t say it here, but all religion, all religious ideas, belong to what he calls ‘palliative measures’. I would say they are substitutive satisfactions, as a category.
So there are more than enough writers are willing to jump on the bandwagon, and create fiction that tread the netherworld between reality and fiction, providing the much needed ‘opium of the masses’, the crutches for the weak and weak willed, the flimsy, the ragdoll.
Yes. Reality is hard.
And no one can realistically promise that life will be easy. Instead the job of a self-respecting human, maybe you? is to get strong so they can meet life as equals.
Jim Rohn, famed coach said: ‘Don’t wish it was easier wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems wish for more skills. And don’t wish for less challenge wish for more wisdom‘.
Wishing won’t change anything, fantasizing won’t change anything.
I was taught early in my life that fantasizing will culminate waking up with your hand in the chamberpot, kneading the poop as if it were chocolate…
A strong visual, not mentioning the aroma… lol.
So I was lucky, I was taught not to fantasize… But the bulk of humanity wasn’t… And life is, admittedly, hard.
I get it, working, struggling, is, or feels pedestrian.
But humans are physical beings with the capacity to become more.
But the more is ground, firmly, in their physical.
A full half of humans on earth believe that god sent his son and then killed it and that now allows humans to get off scot free. Not happening.
Large groups believe that if you practice gratefulness, then the ‘Universe’ will send you gold bullions, or a million dollar mansion.
I am attracting a lot of the wishful thinkers… the quasi spiritual, the hopeful ones
It so happens, that what I do is misunderstood, and people hope that what I teach, what I do, can turn them into ‘spiritual beings having a physical experience.’
But judging from what I see… people have no concept that life is physical… and therefore needs to obey physical laws.
The only things they ‘know’ from biology and physics is what the pseudo-spiritual sites, gurus say… I got a dose of that yesterday in a consulting call I did with a woman… No actual biology, no actual physics.
I think my biggest advantage is, be surprised if you wish, is that my basic education comes from Carl Marx… that emphasizes the physical as primary.
After being fully educated in reality I went to architecture school, where all your fantasies could only be built if you were aware, if you honored, if you were skillful with physics.
A building may seem to fly like a bird… but it is anchored to the ground… Always… or it’s not a building.
All the woowoo so-called spiritual teachers start with the flying… And what they teach is not valid, it’s not doable, it is a sham, and it is a money-maker for them because YOU WANT TO BE DUPED.
YOU WANT TO BE DUPED
I build a lot of ‘tolerance’ and ‘redundancy’ into my schedule. So if occasionally I don’t get up when I planned to get up, nothing bad will happen to me.
But if you have ambitions that need you to get things done, if you have desires for more, better, or different, you might come out to reality to play… and tighten the reins on yourself.
The only thing that gets anything happen in reality is action.
Admittedly some words are also action… but before your word has power, you’d better know how to get to power… where your word can have power.
In the novel, The Journeys of Socrates, it takes him 16 years to get to where he can get out of the way of his power.
His mind.
Your mind, your resistance, your reaction to every freaking word, every freaking idea, your self-concern prevents you from having ANY power.
You are like a walnut shell thrown about on the stormy sea… No motive power, no direction, no amount of saying to yourself: I am grateful will get you where you want to go. Some buy a Gratitude Journal… that will do it! But you want to be grateful for the good things while you call everything else wrong?
In my ‘system’ of building from the ground up, clearing the ground first, digging deep for getting to what is already there. building a strong foundation, and then building a future. Brick by brick.
The flying mobile homes, and the collapsing homes in tornado areas should illustrate famously the illiteracy and ignorance of physics… Ignore it at your own peril.
Most people learning from me are in the ‘clearing the deck’ phase.
I have been doing this work for a long time, but I am back digging for what’s already there, that doesn’t allow me to become all I can become.
If you think you are better, if you think you can start on the second floor, or maybe even the penthouse of your being… I am fine with it, just do it away from me.
I wish you luck.
As we are working on the anchors that hold you back, hold you down, hold you tight, we also look at the repeating script caused by those pesky early decisions.
I work 2-3 times a week with a man who, like a puppet on a string, repeating the same devastating script.
It is not enough to know the script, it is important to see what EXACTLY the words are that trigger it.
Yesterday, in a marathon two and a half hour long coaching session with Kristof, I think we’ve hit paydirt… the exact words that need to be cleared…
When you have the exact words, you can start building a habit, a practice, that makes it possible for you to pull the sting from the words… and start having some power.
The energetic surgeries are both constructive and exploratory.
As I pull your anchors, I can feel the invisible dynamic rather accurately. And then conversations can have some power… and design to take actions to restore power.
I guess 99% of humanity, and even about 90% of my readers don’t have enough confidence in themselves or in the methodology to actually do any work.
But it works if you work it… as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous.
And just to be sure, some of my clients hold back and resist doing the work…
Only consistency will matter. Or as Buckminster Fuller said ‘Only integrity will count‘ meaning: when things aren’t working it is always that we have violated integrity.
We ignored it.
The mind cannot have integrity… it can jump, it can fly, it can do anything… because there is no reality in the mind. It is all fiction.
But your life only works for you if and when there is integrity.
Most people’s integrity is so low, that it hovers around zero.
The average integrity on the planet is 1%… about as sturdy as a mobile home.
I have been teaching an Integrity Course that is all based on people… But I can see that unless I bring a new aspect, your integrity with reality, there is more to teach.
When you base your life, your beliefs, your whole worldview on the word of a baby, your life cannot have integrity… Because none of what you said as a baby, none of your beliefs hold any water.
And as long as you insist that it is so… your life won’t work.
I have recently gone back and re-examined my own beliefs about myself and my family’s relationship to me. And I have found that I have a lot more access now to what they said and why they said it, and this new, more in reality based view has a chance to set me free.
And of course, when you are close, you get guidance.
I stumbled on the story of a misfit aka runt lion cub… and its journey, how it got a second chance, and made it to adulthood.
I cried. And I saw that that is another interpretation of what happened to me… having been born so little, and so weak. But like the injured lion cub I marched bravely, and never gave up…
And here I am, 74 years old, still holding my own… still weak, still little, but doing the best I can… and still striving to do even better, at my age.
The new Integrity Course will include the recorded course from 2021 and add the new part: your relationship to reality. You can be on time, keep all your agreements, but if the foundation of your world isn’t based in reality, you have no integrity… your life is flimsy, and your results in life will be flimsy too.
I have not created the new course yet. It probably won’t be read for a few more weeks… I am experimenting with methods of teaching it.
So if you are lucky, and you jump on it, you’ll pay much less than I’ll charge when the course is ready.
If you already have the recorded course… don’t jump… Wait until I have a better idea how much to charge.
Should you buy the recorded course now? Yes.
The sad truth is that integrity is such an obscure concept for most people, that they have really no idea how to strengthen it, and how to gain more life for themselves.
So yeah, buy it. It is priced very low, because I want you to have it. It will provide a much needed clarity.
Quite a few people have built a successful life on that one course… Even surprising me… lol.
Get the integrity course
