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I read one or two threads on Reddit every morning.
This is how I stay in touch with what people think, what people say, what people find funny, what grieves them.
Today the discussion was what could convince an atheist to become a believer. What could change their mind?
This is right up my alley… That is all I have ever wanted to know: what would change your mind?
Because everything you’ve ever wanted is impossible with the mindset you have.
But changing your mind is not only about mindset stuff. You can change your mind about loving or not loving someone… for example. But changing your mindset is another ball of wax…
And counter to my former teaching: changing your mindset IS more like a ball of wax than a ball of yarn.
I am going through a ‘changing my mindset’ episode, and it is a lot like finding myself in the infamous ‘going through hell’ phase.
It feels like hell. I am coming apart at the seams… at least that is how it feels.
And Churchill’s advice: when you are going through hell, keep going.
They say that religious people have faith… I say they don’t… at least they don’t behave like they do.
What makes me say that?
Going through hell
Yesterday in our Sunday session of the Intention to Self program this whole ‘going through hell’ came up.
It is not an event. It is, for most people, a daily occurrence.
When you commit to something, and the commitment disappears and you find yourself nothing to drive you… It feels like hell… What do you do? Do you keep on walking or do you quit?
When you find something out about yourself, and it feels like hell… do you continue exploring and expose yourself to deeper hell, or do you look for a remedy, an escape, a pressure valve? Weed? Sex? TV?
When I tell you something about yourself and it feels like hell… But instead of taking it on, you say that I caused your hell, and you talk yourself out of it?
Life is hell for you and continues to be hell, if you choose to stop and look for an escape chute.
Your behavior, your attitude will depend on three factors:
1. your mindset. Meaning: your willingness to be THE cause in your life, about the things that belong to you, your attitude, your words, and your actions.
2. your level of intelligence. If it is true that intelligence is the ability to deal with uncertainty without loss of power.
3. your TLB… your ability to control the urge to change the channel, to quit, to run, to hide, to outsmart, to positive thinking, to avoid responsibility… To stay the course, even though it is hell.
People who go far trained their TLB through thousands of tasks to stay the course.
To stay awake and finish a job. To stay awake and guard others. And to stay present and think… even though thinking is the hardest work a man can undertake. To stay in the game, even though it suddenly looks hopeless.
Not doggedly, as a rule. No. Keep staying aware and evaluate, and evaluate, and evaluate.
The slogan of the Marine Corps: Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome is a high TLB way to behave.
Of course most of those dead marines didn’t… When the shit hit the fan they didn’t stay aware to improvise, adapt and overcome… they waited for someone to tell them what to do… or they reacted…
All three are important, but mindset is the most important.
And, of course, a sense of humor. If it is not funny, you are running a racket.
Religious mindset is: someone will do it for me.
Powerful mindset is: if it is to be it is up to me.
Your level of intelligence is the third most important factor. Intelligence without mindset and high TLB is not going to help.
The world, people, have been trained in the opposite of all three. Through everything that comes at them through parents, teachers, media… to seek the easy way out, to be intolerable to uncertainty, to believe that it is someone’s job to do the thinking. That life, people owe them a life.
Life is not a right, it is a privilege.
Privilege is the wrong word… it is enough to say: life and all its accouterments are not a right: you have to buy them, earn them, or someone has to give it to you.
Fuuuuuuck… right?
Education is not a right. Health care is not a right. Not to be judged is not a right. Not to be discriminated against is not a right.
And although last time I voted, I voted for ‘human rights’, human rights is made up. There are no rights in reality. Only what you can negotiate for yourself and yours.
So Social Justice Warriors are faith warriors…
It is what you can secure for yourself and yours that will keep you a human… whatever is given to you that you didn’t personally earned keeps you below human level.
Hate me as much as you want, I can take it. Your hate only damages you…
This is true on every level…
It is the nature of Life…
Our current social systems are against Life.
On every single level of society.
Even being loved by your parents is not a right… No one can make that a right…
If you were loved: good for you. If you were not loved… so what?
I wasn’t loved and it made me stronger, made me more like a Marine.
I prepared myself for a life without a safety net… where it is not only true, but it is visceral that ‘if it is to be it is up to me’.
There are not many characters I can point at who manifest that kind of mindset.
Maximus is Gladiator comes to mind.
He treated nothing as a right. He treated everything as something he worked for… needed to work for.
And this, a mindset that is in line with Life is something that is not a right.
It will not be given to you. It will not be something that ‘descends on you’. No. you need to work for it.
And everything you need to work for leads through hell. HELL. Some more hellish than others.
And that is how Life is.
Uncertainty is hell.
Needing to work for anything is hell.
Not having rights is hell.
Things taking a long time to come to fruition is hell.
Having to communicate to turn people to do what you want them to do is hell.
You see that it is a worldview. Worldview and mindset are synonyms.
The dominant mindset on Planet Earth is ‘someone or something will give me what I want’
The effect mindset. It can be called the religious mindset, even if that someone or something isn’t called a god.
Atheists are 10 times more likely to have the mindset that it is up to them, than religious people.
So ultimately the dividing line is around people’s relationship to causing. Causing what they can cause. What belongs to them.
The stupid ‘manifesting’ people want to cause what they have no business causing, because what they want to cause is in the dominion of ‘having’, or results.
You can do everything in your power and you may not produce the result because it is outside of your power to cause it.
So stupid ‘manifesting’ people assign power to attitudes, like gratitude, god status… that god will give them what they want. Stupid. Ugh.
Positive thinkers lower their TLB even lower because they hope that they will repel bad stuff… another stupid religious movement.
The only mindset that is not stupid is to take on everything that you can influence and declare ownership over them.
Not power… ownership.
Here is an example:
You speak and people listen.
You want to be heard as a winner.
They hear you as a wannabe… trying too hard.
Ownership means: you notice it and you improvise, adapt your attitude, your words, and your behavior, and thus, potentially overcome.
And you may produce the result you wanted: people hear you as a winner… and you may not.
Improvise suggests that no rules of conduct, no hard and fast rules will get you what you want. If you are a rule-abiding, rule-making person, this is the worst news you got today. Until you are willing to fly without a safety net, you’ll be an utter failure: guaranteed.
This is true in every area of life, health, wealth, love and fulfillment. No rules.
Now… with all that said: do you think that when you want to turn that worldview of yours around, like an oceanliner in a tight bay, it is going to
take many iterations?
pain
uncertainty
and hell?
Why hell?
When you change the floor on which you walk you’ll need to be suspended for a while. For a human that is the ultimate of hell… I say. Short periods of hell, and occasionally a long period of hell.
I am in the middle of a period of hell.
It’s been going on for more than a week now.
So what is the ‘keep going’ part of the Churchill quote when you are going through the hell of having lost your floor?
I don’t have a rule. So I can only share what I’ve been doing since my first ‘hell visit’.
I stay in the game. Grit my teeth and stay the course.
- The first time I went through hell started in 1968. I was in the hospital for a tonsillectomy that wasn’t going well… My brother was drafted. My father came to visit me. We had our first conversation ever. I couldn’t talk, so he somehow felt safe to talk himself. He talked about his trust eroding in the Communist system. The Hungarian army, instructed by the USSR, was invading Czechoslovakia to beat down the Prague Spring.
Hungary, I see, was always on the losing side of every altercation… at least since the Turks invading Hungary and ruling it for 150 years. Then came the Habsburgs for more than years, then the Soviets, who I feel still rule it…
The hell, this first ‘foray’ to hell took two years to complete.
- The second time was in 1977… I have written about that extensively. The seed of that worldview change came as a result of reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
This ‘visit’ to hell took me to interesting places… countries, and even took me to Israel of all places.
- The third hell started on the last Saturday of August 1985…
- Then the fourth in 1996
- The fifth in 2003
- The sixth in 2007
- And finally the seventh just a week ago.
All these ‘visits’ prepared me, groomed me to become an expanding human being.
Huh?
Yeah, unless your worldview matches the worldview of an expanding human being, you can’t even pretend to be one.
According to muscletesting there have been 19 humans that made enough turns in worldview to qualify as an expanding human being.
My work is to make these periods not random… but to cause them.
And because they are hell, I only have a handful of students.
That is how it works… When I ask Source if I should get, if I should want to get more visibility, the answer is ‘no’…
I should work with who finds me, or who wants to work with me.
The crucial components of the worldview of an expanding human being are:
What is real? What is reality?
Taking on being cause
Becoming the wielder of Word – integrity and communication.
In the Freedom Courses I taught all of this…
In the Integrity course I teach nearly all of this…
And in the upcoming Communication Workshop I’ll put the finishing touches on the work.
Unless you get the foundation, reality, you have no business to take higher classes. Without that you’ll listen from an incompatible worldview… and all you hear will feel, will prove to be useless.
Your current worldview is seeing everything from one fixed point…
And even the idea that things would look different from a different vantage point seems ludicrous to you.
Therefore loosening up that conviction is the first job… to do before anything else.
I lovingly call this the ITCH method… and it is not I.T.C.H… it is actually about an itch that doesn’t want to go away… The linchpin, the seed level of your life. If you can loosen the seed level, you can change your life. Can’t loosen it? You are stuck with the same old life.
Let’s look at the linchpin of your life- Pulling the linchpin, we tried, didn’t produce the result we wanted: freedom.
- Changing the linchpin… neither… sorry to say.
- What can work is Robert Fritz’s methodology of change. It is also what Confucius taught. That instead of trying to fix what is… create a new one and empower it. It is also the two wolves principle: the wolf you feed grows.
This is what I used, this parallel method and it worked.
But unless you identify, precisely, the linchpin, the itch, the seed level, you’ll be ineffective. This, the identifying is what we do in the ITCH workshop.
We may follow up, only for those who did the whole course, with two live sessions: 1. how to provide yourself what the ITCH says you should have gotten from others. 2. How to build the parallel universe… the White Wolf.
Fascinating work… And, of course to succeed it needs you to go through hell. No way you can avoid it AND grow.
