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Poetry, poetic, poetic mind… not part of the fabric of culture in our times.
JFK was inspiring. Trump, Biden? coarse or boring.
At the same time there is a quirk to human nature: A result that is not poetic, a result that is not uplifting, a result that is not inspiring doesn’t register as a result. So people are left with a sense of nothing important got done. No happiness, no fulfillment. Nothing to be proud of, nothing to be inspired by.
And then the second quirk: that the skill people have for poetic language is completely undeveloped.
Humans are a marriage of earthly: drab, common, selfish, and near-sighted. And the heavenly: the magical, the powerful, the beautiful and inspiring.
An artist’s job is to show that heavenly to people who have no eyes to see, no ears to hear, and no tongues to speak the beautiful and inspiring.
Most societies that have lived on Earth have been 99.99% drab and self-serving. But man’s path was designed for this marriage of the drab and the etherial.
But the etherial, the inspirable part is neglected like a towheaded stepchild. Drab recognizes itself only in drab… grabby in grabby, taker in taker. The spirit self is denied.
The work of soaring, the work of becoming really who we were meant to be: created to the image of god leads through awakening the poetry in our eyes, in our ears and in our tongues.
Inspiration is a funny thing… One would expect it means that there is something out there with an extreme pulling power. But that expectation comes from a complete misunderstanding of the inner dynamics of creation.
What created the physical universe is hate. Defiance and not some desire or even love.
The more that people believe that looking at their desires, whipping them into a frenzy can take them to soaring, the less the poetic, the spirit part of them is alive and operational.
Motive power = power that moves
There are two possible power sources to anything that wants to move: one like a propeller that pulls, or a jet engine that pushes.
Desire is a propeller. Weak, and gets weakened as you approach the object of desire. It fizzles out, like passion or hunger when satisfied.
Fear, defiance, hate, are jet engines. They don’t fizzle out, they keep pushing the person all the way to heaven.
Love, interestingly, is neither. Love is a stabilizing force… allows and encourages one to remain put. No movement.
I bet that every producer that ever was lacked love in their childhood. Why? Because love tends to kill the fear, the defiance, the hate that is needed to soar. To strive. To move.
That missing love can be rocket fuel, or can be the roasting fire that uses the life as fodder.
You can get wings from it, or you can get complaining and wretchedness to spend your life with.
The ordinariness is like a planet with strong gravity force. Some people break gravity fast, some people take decades, most people don’t even go for it.
I was complaining and wretched until I found a way to redirect that self-burning energy to rocket fuel. And it still took me 30 years to break out of the ‘atmosphere’ of this planet wretchedness fully.
I was 38 when I started… I am 75 now…
In a way all the years not lived like a Man: created to the image of god, doesn’t seem to matter. I do now. And I’ll die as one.
Grief, regret, remorse, self-hate are not suitable rocket fuels. In our session yesterday where I asked people to tell me what they hated, the ones that don’t seem to have any energy to move hated how they have been.
You want to hate how being earth-bound limits you. You want to hate gravity. Huh? Yeah.
Birds… only an empath can feel it, hate gravity and that allows them to fly. That fuels them to fly. They fly away… a true jet-engine movement.
When you imagine yourself to fly, if you have imagination at all, you’ll feel that the ‘enemy’ of flying is gravity. Same in swimming.
Those of you that are directed by desire, the ‘propeller’ engine people are more like bombs… or bullets… no motive power of your own. Not a person.
Most everyone can experience at one point in their lives that they had been traveling through life not driving their own life.
Driving a car is also a jet-engine type movement… propelling each wheel to defy the forces that want it not to roll.
But for little kids asking ‘Are we there yet?’ and for people who never became adults, it feels that the nature of the vehicle is to go towards what they want… And they never experience the pushing away force… they are passengers in their own life.
I often watch in movies how people walk… Watched Mads Mikkelsen. He is completely unaware that walking is pushing, walking is pushing away…
I don’t know the man, but I promise, he never became an adult, never started to drive his own life. Wretched… High cheekbones and all.
My two favorite actresses, Ruth Wilson and Emma Thompson… They drive their own lives… How do I know? I see how they walk.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I bought the kinds of shoes that have rocker-bottom soles… like Skechers’ Shape-ups… that are impossible to walk in if you don’t push away…
Lucky for me, I can buy all my shoes on ebay… after just trying to walk in them, people sell them off… because they are unsuited to the propeller engine types, the eight billion. Skechers stopped manufacturing these shoes… The world of pedestrians don’t want them.
Back to poetry…
In my programs, in any programs, you didn’t learn unless you can teach it.
In addition to that: if you stop at the insights and revel in them, celebrate them, or hate them… you get no results.
Insights are a dime a dozen. A dime is the tenth of a dollar, for you foreigners. Which means you can get ten insights for a dollar… But a result, an action, a breakthrough type of action is worth hundreds of dollars… Because only actions count.
If you sit here, reading this article, and get the insight that birds push air to get to flying… did that insight got you to flying?
Occasionally, not too frequently, my students DO something that could be a result… But due to the propeller engine nature of the action, they only see that they did something that was avoiding something, a bad thing, or a harmful thing, or a despicable thing… but they cannot see the sky… They pushed through the earth’s crust… but cannot see the sky.
The sky is the poetry.
When you create an action from an insight and succeed, you created a future, an open sky, a possibility for yourself and the world. ALWAYS.
But if you don’t have eyes to see, ears to hear, tongue to speak, then it didn’t happen for you…
And you can do it a hundred times, a thousand times, unless and until you see and sing the praises of the possible future you created, you are earth-bound, and won’t fly.
The spirit is still dying inside… until and unless you see and sing.
You share your action with me… and you are happy with yourself…
You don’t see but I can… because I am not earth-bound.
- When Adriana, instead of giving her father her wisdom, just listens and allows her father to talks… she created intimacy that has been missing from all her interactions everywhere… missing for everyone… missing in the world. Intimacy.
- When William, instead of staying and working in the sun, goes inside and gets a sun hat and a shirt thus avoiding sun-stroke, created a world where he doesn’t drive his life to the ditch to be sick and unavailable for weeks… So he can continue his journey and stay in the game to being the hero who breaks through gravity… Inspiring.
- When Jodie says to all the people who want her to move and drop everything right now, when she says to them: I’ll come when it’s scheduled, she creates a world where people won’t be indulged like little children crying for the bottle. A world of adults that can take care of themselves, and do. Amazing.
More examples
- When Baheej, who normally gets stopped even by a pebble on the road pushes through a sticky point in learning a software, angels sing. Trumpets sound, because pushing through is a major victory… and all the people who get stopped by everything now see how it’s done. Heart-stopping.
- And a movie reference from Departures: When people are shown their dead mother, child the kind of care they themselves can’t show, when they can see them the way they were when they could love them, real grief can be felt, real love can be felt, and life becomes beautiful again… and people can become whole again.
Yeah, if you are not inspirable, and you are not inspired, that means you don’t hear the poetry… and you are wretched.
Don’t wait for someone to inspire you… it is really your own life… start driving it.
I had a workshop once called ‘Learn to Drive Your Life’.
Now that I have a ton more elements what it takes to actually drive your life, I am going to do another workshop… most likely a series of workshops, attending to the jet-engine, and to the methodology to see the possibility you create… And whatever new may arise between now and then.
I know you expect of me to point to a staircase that is already built and tell you to start climbing it.
There is no staircase. I am still building it. And make it easier to climb for those who have enough energy to do the work, and the will do the work.
The workshop I ran 4 years ago is still good… and you need to have it, consume it, and learn it enough to teach it to be eligible to participate in the new course.
That is the condition. If no one does it, there won’t be a new course…
OK, here is the old course, Learn to Drive Your Life
It is four hours of intense drilling… and I act as the drill sergeant…
Learn to Drive Your Own LifePS:
I have people who sign up to programs, coaching programs, and wait for me to wipe their behind.
And until you learn to drive your life, you’ll do this everywhere… you’ll wait for something or someone to do it for you. Do everything… But life is not set up this way… it is the child carried over to adulthood… but no one will volunteer to wipe an adult’s behind.
You want someone to teach you, as if learning were like feeding… Learning is self-generated or it’s not learning. Unless you start teaching to learn, anything, your plants, your dog, your cat, your spouse, your friends… you won’t learn anything. And unless you learn you need someone else to drive your life, because you can’t…
- Driving is like taking charge. You set your schedule and then you obey your schedule… or change it. But you won’t allow other people to dictate it for you.
- You dress appropriately, so you don’t get a sun-stroke… you won’t allow the nagging ‘itch’ to seduce you.
- And you stick to hard, maybe even impossibly hard tasks, because you said so.
You won’t? Then you are still allowing something other than you to drive your life.
PPS: Rob Brezsny calls what I call ‘poetic’ lyrical, fanciful, marvels and curiosities
