Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Loving is like being pregnant. You can’t be more pregnant than pregnant. Even pregnant with two babies is just that, pregnant.
And, by the same token, you can’t love someone more. You either love them or you don’t.
Pregnant, love, respect, are intrinsic in nature. They also have no opposites, like values on the systemic level of value. An they don’t have a scale…
Life is easiest to navigate, easiest to understand, and easiest to ‘dance with’ if you know that values have three tiers. Each tier with its own rules of engagement.
The lowest tier is the systemic value level. It is all opinion. Culturally defined, constrained, proscribed.
The values on this tier have no gradation, no scale. They have only their opposite.
Religion entirely lives on this level, you believe, or you are a heretic.
You are a sinner or a saint.
There is no path to get better: better doesn’t exist on this level of value. Until you are absolutely blameless, you are as good as s.h.i.t. and that is that.
Also, unless other people consider you king, you are a pauper. Unless you are treated as special, you are relegated to nothing. Unless someone, preferably your father if you are a man, or mother if you are a woman, unless they say your contribution is extremely valuable, you feel gypped, robbed, and vow to force them to comply, so help you your systemic level god… who either is or not.
You either understand or you don’t… know or not. If not, you need to lie… because how are you going to impress everyone that you are valuable?
The more you live out your life on the level of systemic, the more wretched you are.
You see systemically, you hear systemically, you think systemically… You become this big switch yourself. On if you think you can be proud of yourself, and off if someone tells you that you are not quite as great as you think you are.
But all you hear is that you are not… and fall into despair and hang out there for days.
No matter what anyone says you only hear yes or no. The two colors of wretchedness.
—-
The next level is the level of the world… as opposed to the systemic that is the level of religion.
This level’s hallmark is that it has degrees, hundreds, to every value.
It also has currency, the mighty dollar for much of the world.
It is still highly cultural, but not as wretched as the systemic level.
Here, on the extrinsic (outside) level, you can do well, and you can do better. You can also do poorer.
You can like and like more. Also, you can want and you can want more. You can value more or value less… you can have a scale.
Most of daily life happens or should happen on this level of value.
You have wants, you have needs, and you have desires. They all have a value attached to them. If you match their value with your own production of value, and decide to TRADE your production value with one of those, you can do it.
On this level the biggest mistakes people make, mistakes that make them miserable or conceited is to consider that people pay for YOUR value, not for the value that you trade. Money, time, work, skills, results, stuff.
And therefore what you have, you believe, actually makes YOU more valuable… or alternatively less valuable.
Your value as a person isn’t measured on the extrinsic level, only the value of your production.
Some people’s time is more valuable than others because what they can produce is something very few people can or are willing to produce.
This is where skills are the big thing. You have the kind of skills that are difficult to learn and are in demand: your time will be more valuable on the marketplace, but you, as a person are still only as valuable as if you had no skills.
—-
This takes us to the intrinsic (inner and innate) level.
Like everyone, I had to climb the Tree of Life… meaning: I was born at the bottom, on the systemic level. Because of my curiosity and competitiveness I ‘graduated’ to the extrinsic level quite fast… But then I was stuck there for decades.
I was looking at women who were happy, married. And I saw, on the extrinsic level, they were not much value. Their time didn’t amount to much in the marketplace. So I pondered how come they got married, they were loved, and I wasn’t. Even though I had skills up the wazoo (is that a word? look it up!) and I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t loved, I wasn’t married.
I was 51 years old when I first heard about the tiers of value. The first time I heard that people have intrinsic value. That intrinsic value has no dimension, no scale, it just is. Like the sky.
I had to learn every intrinsic value word individually… so I can actually SEE IT!
It was like I landed on a different planet! Unfamiliar! Didn’t feel friendly. It had words I didn’t understand.
I had to learn what words meant… I started with generosity. Then compassion, authenticity, powerful… lots of new words.
I had to learn that every person is infinitely valuable, whether they can produce value or not. Whether they are likable or not. Whether they like me or not… lol.
That that value, the intrinsic value is innate, and it is constant. And that all the things I like or don’t like about people are just clouds. And I can either interact with the sky and have room, tolerance, patience for the clouds and have a good life, or tolerate the sky and interact with the clouds and continue being wretched, feel like a puppet on a string.
Same with Life. Life is like the sky, and what is happening are the clouds, leaving Life unchanged, untouched.
Things misbehave. It’s too hot. And then it’s too cold. A bat wreaks havoc in my apartment. There is a flea infestation. The internet is slow. My students don’t get it. The world’s vibration is dropping, and I have to manually energize my water. My stomach hurts and I can’t fall asleep.
All clouds against a glorious unchanging sky.
I can deal with the clouds if there is a sky! If I forgot about the sky, every cloud would pull me out of my inner peace… like they used to… and I would be wretched… again.
I was thinking yesterday about my brother. I love my brother.
Then I asked myself: do I love him more than I love my students? And I had to realize that I love them exactly the way I love my students. Wholeheartedly…
Systemic and intrinsic are like book ends… you either love or you don’t… You either see a person as a person or you see them as an object. You either see them as the sky or you see them as a cloud.
Now, you should be asking: why should I care? Why climb the Tree of Life? After all you only want to make more money. You only want to have a life where you have a choice when to work and what to do. Right?
In the Moneyroots workshops we deal with your two main relationships:
…your relationship to yourself and your relationship with money: the symbol of worldly value.
It is nearly impossible to make money and have peace of mind unless you have your values right.
Yeah, you can be filthy rich and wretched. And you can have little and live a delightful life.
It all depends whether you have your values right… Whether you can tell the difference which tier of value you judge on… and if you notice your mistake, move yourself to the level of value where your judgment is accurate.
If you live entirely on the level of the systemic, 70% of all humanity lives there, then you may want to climb up to the extrinsic value, where your judgment will matter… because on the systemic level it is just hot air. You are a windbag on the systemic level, like a Sunday sermon. Words and more words.
The higher you climb on the Tree of Life the easier it becomes to see things rightly.
Yesterday I got an email from a student of mine. Here is the email… It’s a great illustration:
Hi Sophie, I realize that something must give if I am to become a producer. I am at war inside myself. All of those years of starts and stops have done nothing but build a wall bigger and bigger between who I want to become and I am being.
I’ve been thinking about yesterday’s article regarding my ‘instant and effortless’ delusion. There must be something I can do. Then I thought: well, what if looked for a hypnotist?
What the email illustrates is how one is on the systemic level of thinking… never considering that there is a higher level and one could climb.
That how you think about one thing is how you think about everything. On the systemic level of thinking everything is either is or isn’t. Binary. So results are either are or not. And they can go from nothing to all in an instant, and effortlessly.
On the systemic level… the level of a little kid with magical thinking.
And although hypnosis could liberate me 45 years ago, it only could do that, because it suggested that I have what it takes to do my job. Because the only thing that prevented me from doing it was fear. Fear of public speaking… not being incompetent in my job. I thought that fear meant I couldn’t do it… And I found out that fear is just fear, and I can include it, like the clouds in the sky. It just means that I need to look at the sky and not that pesky cloud.
This student never ever considered that the way the world works is mainly on the extrinsic level, where work, effort are what produce value. Work and effort.
Nothing happens instantly and effortlessly other than in the fantasy.
But you can only learn it if you actually climb up to that level, and start doing work, start expending effort, the tools of creating value… Thinking about any of it means: you didn’t climb. You are still on the systemic level… thinking about another place with the thinking you have…
I remember as a child spending hours upon hours trying to figure out how to slap someone’s face. But until I actually did it, it was just fantasizing. And then one day I did. I didn’t like it.
I could not tell that I wouldn’t, through the fantasy. I never slapped another person again. Slapping someone’s face was like extinguishing their light. Horrible. Weep weep.
So if and when I needed… I kicked people in the balls… I am kidding… maybe.
Anyway, if your value, if your money, if your life is not as you would like it to, buy the Moneyroots workshop.
I am now, hereby committing to one session per month, until I decide that we chewed all the meat off those bones.
The next Moneyroots live will be on Saturday, September 24, at 11 am New York time. And thereafter probably on the third Saturday of the month, to avoid scheduling on holidays.
The recorded sessions are included and are mandatory. You need to learn to learn from other people’s mistakes, or you’ll be condemned to make every mistake in the book yourself. That is a very expensive way to learn… only stupid people would choose that…
Is it what you have been doing? It is time to change, my stupid friend. High time.
Here is the buy button:
Start climbing the Tree of Life
PS: Transformation simply means: you see something new that presents a new reality.
In that new reality I see myself different, I see others different, and I see opportunities I hadn’t seen before. And what I see is at the root of my actions… so my actions are new…
I have been trying to cause transformation… and with rare exceptions, I have failed.
There are entire companies in the same predicament. Like my Alma Mater, Landmark Education. They failed at it…
Why? I am still looking. It could be because you don’t see what is in front of you? Because you use your eyes to be projectors instead of perception organs? This is, so far the only cause that tested yes with Source.
I have one student who has spent the past two years activating her Sight capacity. And she is the only person who has, at least in one area, experienced transformation.
Yeah, if you don’t see, if you can’t see, then transformation is not available to you… however beautiful the phenomenon is.
