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Alienation… not feeling yourself… rigidity
One of my students sent me her collage.
A collage is an artwork where the hidden surfaces. We think one things but what is the truth, what is underneath it come out in a well-done collage.
We all feel disconnected, isolated, not quite belonging, lacking intimacy, and we think that it is from circumstances, like COVID or the other person, or maybe even you.
What I saw in the collage is that alienation, that separateness, that loneliness comes from an alienation from our self… that we don’t feel our self, because physically we don’t feel our self.
So we go to the other… to get hugged, and it doesn’t do it. Get sex… and that doesn’t do it either. We eat until we burst… and that does it for a little bit.
I used to experience that loneliness, and I have noticed that hugging myself, or stretching, or doing certain moves removes the distance between me and my self… and then I experience myself. I feel myself.
One of the things I measure in the Starting Point Measurements is rigidity.
Rigidity’s opposite – in the context of ‘loving life’ – is dancing. Dancing with life.
In dancing you and life are in flow, and you feel yourself. Not Life, not the dance, yourself.
I think that is one of the biggest missings for humanity now: feeling yourself. Maybe it was always missing… Source says it was always missing. Or looked more closely: it was only there sporadically.
In my humble opinion, and this time it is really humble, lol, people crave other people, people crave lots of things because they want to feel themselves.
Dance is like that. Hugs, whether someone hugs you, you hug someone, you hug yourself… that is like that. Lifting weight is like that.
Feeling yourself is needed for sanity, feeling yourself is needed for confidence. Feeling that you are still there.
The biggest enemies of feeling yourself are
- living in the mind
- laziness, idleness, slouching
All feelings are in the body, and when you are in the mind you don’t feel anything. The mind is a small part of the brain, like a broom closet. It stores stuff, but it cannot feel, cannot think.
When signals come in from the body and the perception organs, they go through the mind first. And the mind decides to let the signal through, distort it, or block it.
When you live in the mind most of the time, you truly live in the Matrix… the outside, the reality cannot reach you. You see what the mind tells you to see, hear what the mind tells you to see, and most of what is said, most of what is taught doesn’t go through, isn’t allowed through to YOU.
There is a you, and there is a YOU.
The YOU is starved to death… It needs to be touched to thrive.
But the challenges, the tasks, Life is outside of the mind… and to be a match to them you need to, at least some of the time, live outside of the mind.
90% of the brain is not in the mind. All thinking functions are outside of the mind. All of them you miss.
When I talk to someone who lives in the mind, I, an alive EEG machine, feel activity ONLY in the mind, no activity outside of it.
This tells me that they are not using, they are not building synapses, connections in the brain… in essence they can’t think, can’t solve problems.
It is not that there is something wrong with their brain… it is a non-use issue.
This is the area where nature vs nurture is most obvious.
In cultures, in religions, in societies where there are answers and learning the answers is prized, people can’t think. You don’t need thinking to learn and recite the answers.
In cultures, like mine, I am an Ashkenazi Jew, there are no answers, only thinking. Trying to interpret the seemingly senseless world.
When I emigrated to Israel, I studied at a Yeshiva, a religious school. I worked during the day, went to school at night.
The very first evening we spent four hours on one paragraph of the Old Testament, where Sara overhears the conversation between Avram and the guest… about them having children.
It was exactly the opposite of what happens in most schools… memorizing the answers.
There are no answers. It is all guessing. And to guess well you need a well-wired brain… lots of connections, lots of possible links.
Ultimately the first 20 or so years’ job would be to build a good brain so the person, you, can navigate life well.
The job of school would be to take you to many areas of life where you can use your brain. Algebra, geometry, history, grammar, literature, chemistry, physics… these are areas of life…
For someone like me, it was adventure, fun, joy, and I dreamed about living in the school so I can have it 24/7. I hated school breaks and weekends. I substituted school with reading voraciously.
Now, neither of my brothers shared my enthusiasm. Both live 70% in their minds. I do there occasionally, my number is 3%.
I confess, I have no idea, no inkling why I turned out different. All three of us were good in math. I was good in everything except geography. I am dyslexic, and cannot tell left from right, up from down… and am still wrong in my guess about 50% of the time. My brothers weren’t good in anything other than math.
IQ measures actual abilities. And the biggest difference between high IQ and lower IQ is the number of connections.
The human baby is born with a certain number of connections that make survival possible. Some babies’ brains build more connections, most babies’ brains prune.
The most important job of the brain is to make sure the body survives. And only a little bit important is that the individual can succeed.
And for that the individual needs a lot of exposure to challenges, stuff to understand, stuff to respond to, stuff to build, physical, intellectual alike.
Exposure to other people, exposure to other cultures, exposure to challenges.
Notice that the word ‘challenges’ pops up repeatedly.
What makes one high IQ and the other one low IQ is the number diverse challenges one is exposed and encouraged overcome.
Protecting a child is to the child’s brain’s detriment.
Another element is who you surround yourself with… Curious explorers, or answer repeaters.
I remember when the class leader in Landmark Education said: think this.
That ‘this’ was not something the students could already think. So they could not think it. They could only think what they had already thought.
I could… all because of the really diverse challenges I had set up for myself all my life. I did it myself.
And this is the challenge of someone who wants to change what people think… the fact that they only want to think what they already thought (mind stuff) and unable or unwilling to think something different.
But if you continue thinking what you have been thinking, then the chances that you will DO DIFFERENT are between zero and slim.
In the years I have observed a lot of people. The ones that managed to do different… that fact could be tracked to sometimes only one new and different thinking… even just thinking on thing different can change your life.
In my current group who are participating in the Intention to Self program, the ones that COULD think something different have a much higher IQ when I measure.
The rest: they suffer from not able to ‘get’, not able to ‘grok’ what I teach, because it is different. They are trying to think in their minds… and the mind is not a thinking organ, it is a storage device, like a computer disk… In computers the ‘processor’ is what thinks, everything else is just an appendage.
The original computers didn’t have any storage devices… only processors. The data was fed into the computer on cards with holes punched in them. That is the kind of computer that calculated the daily code of the Enigma machine the Nazi’s used to encode their messages.
No memory would have saved the world from Nazi victory had there been no ‘processor’…
There was nothing to remember. And if you were a ‘mind person’, you got creamed… Dead dead dead.
It wasn’t the army that won that war… it was the computer and its creator, Alan Turing. And of course the incredibly observant and clear thinking women of Bletchley Park.
Now, if your ‘in the mind’ score is too high: meaning that your brain is almost barren of connections, what can you do to remedy that, and at least allow you to do SOME thinking?
The biggest issue is this: the mind and its stored stuff doesn’t want you to do anything outside of the mind. Especially not thinking.
It uses ready sentences to discourage you from exploring life outside of the Matrix: ‘it’s not worth it‘, ‘it won’t work‘, or the famous ‘I can’t‘. It uses fear to stop you from doing anything that would help you become more, help you become a person.
Or occasionally I see another way it does it: It will take you to overwhelm through trying to do too many things. You can hear the chuckle of the racket as you throw your hands up and quit.
If you just had a question: so what is the connection between all the invisibles and the mind? then just send me an email and I’ll write an article… I haven’t much worried about that… because it is wanting an answer and I don’t think answers help you: instead they keep you in the mind… ugh.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t ask it. You can ask anything. Your questions tell me where you are between the mind and using your thinking brain… If you ask questions that want answers, not more thinking, then you are still more in the mind than outside of it.
None of the answers can help you be more, to be more a match to life, to dance with life, to experience yourself.
The kinds of questions that help you open yourself up more are the questions that don’t have answers, just more questions, inquiry, looking, thinking, and dancing. Delicious.
If this last sentence made no sense to you, then just forget it… In the mind it makes no sense.
What anchors you in the mind, what anchors you so you can’t change is the seed level of your whole self. It is a sentence or two that you made up when something happened when you were little.
And unfortunately it is not easy to get to it in one go… It is really at the very bottom of the iceberg and often you have to dig and dig and dig several times to get to it.
Mine is ‘I am not worth to keep‘. It won’t go away, but you can set up competing sentences, like in the two wolves parable… and feed the new sentence, not the old.
In the Intention to Self program we went through several rounds to get to it…
And we are at the stage where people have the competing sentence, and now they need to feed the new sentence and it’s not going well.
So we are working on ways to create the brain that can do that. Create methods that can help us. So eventually we can become that new Self, and not the miserable, slighted, abandoned, not wanted, not belonging self, we have been.
The program has already 22 videos on the website.
It is nearly everything I can teach… So it is an ‘all you can eat buffet’.
I have lowered the price. My goal is to train more people, not to make more money. So if you have been thinking but didn’t think you could afford it… look again.
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