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Everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.
Why? because love, real love has nothing to do with worthiness. Or deserving.
You either love or you don’t love.
Of course if you are talking about the kind of love that people say when they say ‘I love ice cream!’ then yeah… tasty is a good feature to have.
Or when they say: I love this country. I love America!
Whenever I hear that the Hungarian joke comes to mind where the kid says: ‘I love grandma!’ and the father answers: ‘OK. you can have another helping.’
This is the way people love this country, and 70% of all people who live here are lining up for a second and third helping.
Love is a commitment. A commitment to love.
Love is when you want for your beloved what they want for themselves…
The kind of love most people speak about is loving what they get… not loving the other. Loving what they feel, loving how it tastes. No mention of the other in that.
And then comes along society, and they codify love… They call it marriage. You are now bound to eat ice cream for the rest of your life… Ice cream and only ice cream.
Love doesn’t even depend on the value someone does or can provide.
Value recognizing is not part of homo sapiens…
it is a capacity, a DNA capacity, an epigenetic gene, that is not on for more than a thousand people worldwide. In fact that is one of the hallmarks of a 1000. That they can see and recognize value.
Do the 1000 know that they have it and other people don’t? No, they don’t… It doesn’t seem to be part of the ‘job description’.
It doesn’t reduce the ‘value’ of the 1000, it just points to the fact that the distinction: value, the distinction: ‘good’ is not part of the culture of homo sapiens.
There are 160 epigenetic genes. I made that number up. It is easier to work when you have a number, even if that number is made up. Had I said in the beginning 10, I would have limited myself… and that doesn’t look like a good idea.
Having said 160, I can keep on keeping on, without ever getting smug and say ‘I am done’.
The idea of being worthy of anything is ludicrous, because it presupposes deserving, and deserving presupposes a reality where reality entitles you to anything.
When you look at anything you say reality entitles you to, the attitude is flat. No chance for gratitude. Zero chance for appreciation. No chance that you are GETTING something. Your chances for joy and happiness are minuscule if any.
The moment you can consider life, living, the sunshine, the rain, the changing of seasons, the running water and the toilet a gift, you’ve set yourself up for a life where you can be joyful, maybe even happy.
And this applies to things you think you earned, you think you were promised, you think they are your due.
Take the example: you are married. You now take being loved, for granted. And when the dude strays… that is a huge violation of your ‘rights’. After all you have signed away your own rights to keep on looking for someone who would be, who could be better, more juicy, kinder, or a better provider.
Or the job. Or the clients.
You have earned nothing, you have deserved nothing, you are entitled to nothing.
In a world with no commitment, with no commitment to love, to appreciate, to see value, you are only ‘worth’ as much as your last contribution.
And what keeps people around is not what you are worth, but what they hope to get from you. For themselves.
And if you are aware that that is how the homo sapiens’ world is, you can do what you need to do to get what you want.
Wanting to be loved, wanting to be liked is a self-concern, and is not attractive, because it keep your attention on not what you are providing, but what you want to get. So it works against you.
Wanting to prove that you are smart: ditto. Your attention is on yourself, and not on what you are providing. But if the other is in the ‘relationship’ for what they are getting, they want the attention to be on that… what you provide.
No matter what you do in life, no matter what relationships you have, the more your attention is on yourself, on what you are getting, what you are concerned with, the less people will be interested in the relationship. Even if you are a good ‘faker’ of being interested in them, appreciating them.
Eventually the truth will come out, by accident, and your real interest will be shown to the other. And all that good faking, favors, gifts will be for naught.
What you don’t know eats your lunch.
When T. Harv Eker says: ‘When things are not working, there is something you don’t know’ he talks about think kind of thing, the things you don’t know that are an inner game.
You don’t know that you can only give attention to one thing… even if you are multitasking.
And if you have an agenda, a self-concern, you are always multitasking… meaning: whatever you do can’t be done well, because most of your attention is on what you really want… want to be liked, want to not make mistakes, want to do well, want to dupe, want to get the darn thing over so you can do what YOU want to do.
So your attention, your energy is only sporadically on what you are doing… and your effort, your companionship, your participation is less than stellar, no matter what it is that you are doing.
It can be as simple as reading. If your reading has an agenda… it is a self-concern and you won’t accomplish what you said you wanted to accomplish with reading.
Your number one enemy is the self-concern. It robs you of results, it robs you of joy, it robs you of what you are most concerned for. It leaves you empty.
What keeps self-concern in place is your worldview. The pesky and ever present ‘is’.
The most visible element of ‘is’ is the worldview that things are right or they are wrong. That is The Tree of Knowledge the Bible warns against. The worldview that had Adam and Eve being banished from the Garden of Eden.
And, of course, if you are an untrained homo sapiens, that is all you see. You see the world through the filter of right and wrong. Through ‘is’.
The difference between the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge is really that pesky ‘is’.
Before the apple, everything wasn’t an ‘is’, they were named… and it was clear. They were what they were, and then they were named. They weren’t their names.
Adam and Eve knew that they had the power to name, but that power didn’t change what they named.
So when you, the descendent of Adam and Eve say: this is wrong, you forgot that YOU are the one who names it wrong, it isn’t wrong by itself.
And unless you can SEE that it’s you and not the thing, you won’t get access to the power of WORD… no matter how many of my courses you attend. No matter how many videos you watch, no matter how many books you read.
It’s not that you are stupid. It is that you are unwilling to leave the safe and fully undeserved position where you call things wrong, therefore you are good. And right. And better.
In the ‘Intention to Self’, the program I simply call growth course, I turn on seven epigenetic capacities. They allow you to see, but they can’t and won’t effect what you’ll actually do. It is your Free Will to do self-harm. It is your Free will that allows you to refuse to accept what you see. To argue, to reject, to take yourself away.
It is fascinating to watch. Fascinating as in watching it with morbid fascination.
To the degree you can SEE that everything in reality is nothing until you call it, until you name it, you can become powerful, effective, and joyful in life.
Understanding won’t help. You need to SEE it… The mind will argue, the mind will sweep your understanding aside, and will say: ok, that wasn’t wrong, but this is really really wrong… whatever that thing is.
Or alternatively you try the ‘positive thinking’ bullsh!t where you SEE wrong, but call it something nice, that excuses it. Or you see wrong and look away and engage with what is nice.
Positive Thinking is simply a self-concern. Protecting yourself from anything ‘negative’…
So if you are a positive thinking adherent, you are like the live-in maid we had in the 50’s: you’ll put sugar in the oversalted stew… Ugh.
When you have the what it takes, the mental/intellectual fortitude to see no wrong, that doesn’t mean that things are OK. No things are the way they are! OK is again a positive thinking move.
No. You see how things are, and now you can say what is actually true: you don’t like it. It scares you. And it offends you. It makes you feel irate… or whatever it makes you feel. And then you can choose how to respond. It’s not wrong. It can’t be fixed. So now what are you going to do?
And then, the moment you let go of that something is wrong, the ball is in your court… and you have lots of actions available to you.
If and when you call something wrong, you only have three options: fix it, kill it, or avoid it. And because it can’t be fixed, it can’t be killed, you have now handed over all your power to that thing that you called wrong. You have none. You are a puppet on a string… plain and simple.
So let’s look at the third option: avoidance.
I think that most people choose to avoid what they call wrong. Avoid the whole issue altogether… This is what Freud called the substitutive satisfactions. Here is the full quote:
‘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.‘
If you read it now, fully knowing that what makes life so hard for us is that we call things a name and think that becomes them. We call things wrong and now they are wrong. We call things we deserve or entitled to and don’t get it and we are disappointed. And we think we can do something and we find out that doing that thing well needs skills, effort, and capacities, and we feel gypped.
And almost naturally humans start to move away from life and do what I see most people doing: deflect, get busy, self medicate, so they can become insensible to life.
I have been watching my neighbors across the street for a few months now. Until this very moment I haven’t puzzled out why would I give a hoot what they are doing…
They spend half of their time away from home, in their New York City apartment. It is goddamn 275 miles each way! I watched the man yesterday mowing the grass. He is now starting to stoop over. Because 275 miles is far, but the road to there is tricky, mountainous, and you need to pay attention… exhausting.
I know because back in 2003 I drove back and forth every week for eight months. In the winter! I was in a training program. Half of my training was the commuting… it made a whole lot more invested than anyone else in the program, so I got more than anyone else…
The more you invest the more you get…
But it almost killed me. Physically.
So yeah, most people find a way to deflect, avoid, and fill their lives with meaningless substitutive satisfactions.
Playing computer games. Enrolling in courses. Being the judge of everything. Being a Mother Theresa saintly figure. Workaholic. Drink. Smoke weed. Millions of ways to avoid life.
Depending on the degree that you make what is wrong, you are available to live life constructively, being present, and be joyful.
I am left with 1% of everything that I make wrong, the darn mites… I am still trying to kill them… Luckily I have nearly succeeded, so it occupies less of my attention, less of my time than before. They used to dominate my life at least 30% of my time…
I haven’t been able to see that they are not wrong, albeit very unpleasant.
And I noticed the other day that I was making Socrates wrong for being a pederast… And I still hate it… But hating it is not the same as calling it wrong.
If you have ever wanted to reclaim freedom from wrongs and your self-concern, which comes from the same place, your number one job would be to start looking what you call wrong square in the face, and start seeing that things are not wrong unless you say so.
We may call that Facing the Tiger…
A few years ago I had a two session course I called Face The Tiger.
It is very worth listening to it, because it may add distinctions to your world that you can replace wrong with.
As long as you call something wrong, that is all you can see, and that relegates you to the home of moronic, the systemic judgment world. No distinctions. Just something and its opposite.
The basement of your being.
To climb out your number one tool is to see more of what you can see, to see facets of what you see, to see it from more vantage points.
To have a richer universe you need to have more words. Words for feelings, emotions, facial expressions, attitudes, colors, temperatures, etc.
While you are in the basement of your being, all you can see is wrong… no details.
When you tell your stories, you use no words that talk about details, only the skeleton…
In the Face the Tiger workshop you face that skeleton worldview, and start filling it with details…
So you are not stuck with positive/negative, good/bad, right/wrong… and with their help you can climb up to the next level of extrinsic value… so you can have a richer, more satisfying life. Seeing the world in color.
Until you have more words, a richer active vocabulary, none of my work will be useful for you.
Get access to seeing the world in colorI priced the recordings at a rock bottom price. If you haven’t bought any of my courses before, I offer a bribe to you: you can get a 50% off coupon, if you try this course. Just email me and I’ll send you the coupon code. But only if you haven’t bought any of my courses before…
I’d like to see how it works for someone who is a ‘virgin’…
