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You learned rules… and they didn’t make life good.
All rules, moral or otherwise, serve one purpose and only one purpose: to kill your inner guidance. To kill your spirit.
Some exceptional people, most of them part of the 1000, live by their inner guidance… This means they must have, at some point, said no to rules, regulations, commandments, common wisdom, laws, and make up their own minds.
Make up their own minds about what to eat. About what to think. About what to read. And most important: about what’s important.
They hear what the rules say, they hear what they are expected to do, think, even see. But then look what their inner guidance says… and when the two, the inner and the outer don’t agree, they have the courage to follow their inner guidance.
I did.
Teachers called me amoral… someone without morals… but that was never true. I just never obeyed the outer morals, I obeyed my inner morals. Even as a child.
And, of course, I was beaten. But beating was their move, my move, in return, was to take the beating.
I was born a preemie… very premature. So I wasn’t fully developed. I was in pain and have been for 75 years. I do remember some hours when I didn’t hurt… those hours were rare, and therefore significant. No pain.
Looking at my life from the viewpoint of the rest of the world: that was a severe disadvantage. But looking back from nearing 75, pain, beatings was the biggest advantage anyone can have:
I developed a huge capacity to be with unpleasant, ugly, painful, disgusting, disturbing, while the rest of humanity is mostly comfortable and has a low capacity to be with the unpleasant.
I am sitting here and muscletesting some public figures about their relationship to unpleasant, hard or painful. And I am finding something really interesting:
- People with high tolerance to unpleasant, I call that tolerance TLB, are happy. Unpleasant can be there, pain can be there, loss can be there, and they don’t have to fix it.
- People with low TLB are not happy. Life is never how they want it to be, they are never how they want to be, other people are never how they want it to be, and they are reacting to it.
I think it’s like this: as you live, life, people, will give you grief. As a rule. Unavoidable.
- When your TLB is low, your reaction to it is: ‘this shouldn’t be!’
- When your TLB is high, your reaction to it is: ‘it’s all in a day’s work’ meaning: you don’t react.
Now, truth be told, the body does react…
the body does what the body does, cringes, your chest gets tight, you have tight throat, your stomach hurts…and when the body reacts is a time to choose to get upset about something. To try to fix something. To try to hide from something. And to put what’s happening into the center of my world and be about that.
Most things that happen have nothing to do with me, and I can deal with it. So I choose to let it go.
It’s work to choose. It needs you to look… and see if you need to react.
If it is a Mac truck coming at you at full speed, it is a good idea to react and jump out of the way… Most other things: reacting just makes things worse.
But the body doesn’t know that, and the body reacts. It’s a symptom of the fundamental motive power of everything alive: will to power…
When I am on a call with a group or with a single client, I don’t have much time to do this work. So by the end of the call my body is so tense you could break nuts on my back. And then, when I get off the call, I slowly release the tension… It is all in a day’s work… not a problem.
But it takes a toll.
When I read: it’s the same thing.
Much of what is happening in the books I read are not to my liking. So I tense up. And put down the Kindle and work on releasing the tension right away. This way I can read a book a day, and be well.
Sometimes it is the content of the book: the character is doing something stupid. Or there is talk about topics that are sacred to me… and the talk is casual or indifferent… It bothers me. Or sometimes the writing sucks big time…
Nowadays, it seems to me, successful best selling authors sell their name to rank amateurs who have money to pay big bucks for the readership. When fans of the author, people, like me, buy the book, it is obviously not written by the author. I’ve read tens of books from that guy. This new book was written by some third-grader… a rich third-grader, I think, who wanted to be an author.
We live in a world that is so full of fakery it is not funny.
At least I don’t find it funny, I find it horrible.
But what I find even more horrible is that these badly written books get just as many five star reviews as the good books. WTF? Are those reviews bought? Or the readers of those books cannot tell that what they are reading is poorly written with contorted sentences? ugh.
It seems to me that the virtue signaling culture puts women in most decision-making positions. 90% of the new books published on Amazon are written by women. And authors I am fond of, authors with good writing, don’t want to write any more. It’s not worth it, I guess.
It is becoming harder and harder to find something good to read…
To read something that keeps me on my toes. Something confronting… so I can keep my TLB high…
Having my nose out of joint, being bothered because something needs to be read twice, rearrange sentences to make sense of it is not the kind of reading I want to do.
Are you saying my own writing is like that too? Or is it that it is so counter-cultural, it is so original that you need to fasten your seat belt to keep up with it? That is not what I am talking about when I criticize writers.
I once asked a woman whose profession is ‘editor’ to critique one of my articles.
She pointed out parts of my article that, she said, didn’t make sense.
When you ‘hire’ an editor, you do best not to hire someone who is either not versed in your topic, and whose worldview is harmonious with what you are writing.
Talk about worldview…
The book that upset me right now is obviously written by a female.
How do I know? The writing emphasizes lips touching and kaka like that… Only a woman would write dreck like that… to please other women. Are women, are most women about titillation?
Freud’s quote about humanity applies here again:
‘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.’
Let me reword what Freud said without changing the meaning:
‘Life, as we find it‘ is life as it occurs to us. Life is in conflict with what we think it should be and shouldn’t be. But life is life… We have no idea what life is, what reality is: we only relate to what we said it should be… and then act surprised: it isn’t that way… So obviously that leaves us disappointed, seeking palliative measures to reduce the pain of disappointment. Deflection, substitutive satisfactions (romance novels!) and drugging ourselves insensible.
Life doesn’t behave as we say it should behave… no matter how many ‘spiritual gurus’ say that you create your own reality…
Yeah, what you’ve been creating is actually the source of your misery…
Your word has power, but not about life, not about reality. It has power only in areas of life where YOU have authority to change: your Free Will. Areas that are exclusively yours. That you own. And what you own has nothing to do with what you consider ‘life’… You own only your attitude, your actions, and your word.
Really.
So people who are above the miserable multitudes… people who are less miserable, don’t expect life to be different than it is… They know that that is silly. Instead they work on themselves, their attitude towards themselves and life, their actions toward life and what they want to accomplish, and what they say.
- Positive thinking, avoiding negativity try to change reality… in vain. They can’t and they won’t.
- Magical thinking? ditto.
- Incantations, affirmations, mind-movies, changing beliefs? ditto.
OK, long article, and I have to sum up what it is I wanted you to get…
Summary:
- Maybe I wanted you to get this: if you have the courage and the mental/intellectual capacity to sever your ties to morality… then you’ll start having a chance to live a life befitting a human. It is only possible if you go item by item, and say no to it. No blanket actions will work… You have to do inventory and say no to each item. Go and re-read my previous article.
- Or maybe this: if you want to live a life and be happy, effective, no matter what, you need to increase your mental toughness… the number of unpleasant things you can look at and not call them wrong. It’s OK if you don’t like them… but that doesn’t mean they are wrong… it only means that you don’t like them.
If you see them as wrong, then you are still attached to the morality of religion, the morality of society, the morality that has only purpose: to reduce you to sheep.
- Or maybe this third thing: your word has power… but only on or for things that belong to you. And unless you clean up your integrity, your word has NO POWER at all.
And then you need to learn how to use your word to create what you want. Your word as an action.
One of the word actions that people don’t understand is how to use requests and promises to create a life of integrity… a life of Personal Power.
On Tuesday afternoon, New York time, I’ll have a free office hours call. You may bring your questions and I’ll answer. And I’ll also spend some time to teach you a little bit about requests and promises… because without that knowledge you are sh!t out of luck, pardon my French.
Here is the link to register
Come and spend an hour or two with me
