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Why are all the measures in the Starting Point Measurements important?
Why would, for example, someone with more words have an advantage over someone who has fewer words?
I am going to explain it here… But judging from my core group’s response, I am warning you, it will sound Greek to you. Unless, of course, you are Greek… lol.
Incomprehensible.
Why? I am going to say it, in different ways, until I find out what about the concept is conflicting with your worldview now, what about it that the ego or the mind or whatever it is that is blocking it, finds so intolerable that it won’t allow you to wrap your brain around it.
My first hunch for the why is this: you are not willing to cause.
Why would that be? Isn’t what you have always wanted, to have a life where you have some role, maybe a major role in how it turns out?
To my surprise most people will pretend that that is what they want, but what they really want is being GIVEN a great life.
Why? Maybe they don’t trust that they can cause a great life? Or maybe it is the backwards aspect of responsibility: they don’t want to consider that they caused their own misfortune, mishaps, misery. That they chose the life they have through the daily choices and through the bigger life choices.
Maybe you are one in a million and you have accepted that you caused your own misery. But still, likely, you don’t know how you did it. And without knowing how to cause your happiness, that is not really a useful knowledge… in fact it makes you more miserable, because it adds guilt to the misfortune.
Even though humans CAN cause, are designed to cause, they don’t know how.
Why?
The 1000s to the rescue… again.
Unless as a child you were encouraged to do projects of your own then as an adult you won’t have any sense of you causing anything. And most children never have projects. They never created. They have never pursued projects of their own making.
The ones that do become billionaires.
So what happens if you are one of the eight billion who has never really learned to create, pursue, accomplish projects of your own? Can you start as an adult?
Yes. You can start. But you’ll only succeed if you manage to see and handle a project as a process… not something that should happen fast.
The more your worldview is the McDonald’s type, where you don’t do every part of the project, you really just consume, the less you’ll develop the sense that you can cause.
Also: if you forget that the context, the purpose of doing projects is to awaken your sense that you are a cause not an effect, you’ll abandon the project, or do it shabbily.
Here is an example… an example that shows where you end up unless you have learned that you can cause and how.
In the Core Group I showed pictures of faces. I asked to talk about the faces. It didn’t go well.
First they called them good or bad… and then, maybe, they called them an actual attitude or emotion… and then they stopped. They had nothing more to say. I, or any of the 1000 would have talked about each face for hours…
I saw that your misery is 90% due to you living on the surface, being only a consumer, never seeing deeper than the first impression. That your lack of depth reflects itself in what you call things, especially emotions, emotional states. You are shallow. Probably in everything.
Unless you learn to express, recognize, appreciate different emotional states that are around your base discontent, around your base ‘the wrong that was done to you’, you’ll be stuck in the right/wrong paradigm.
And no surprise, in the right/wrong paradigm you cannot cause anything. Why? Because there are no dimensions.
Positive thinking is a right/wrong paradigm move… where you attempt to paint something you don’t like in nice clothes to cover up that you think they are wrong… just because you don’t like them, or don’t agree with them.
But that is still inside the right/wrong paradigm, still rigid, still a misery maker.
In this right/wrong paradigm you cannot cause anything. Things already are right or wrong… so that makes you a person who can only be a hapless victim of things already wrong… This is the paradigm where things happen to you. Where things are also supposedly instantaneous. If something is already what it is, then there was no process to become that. So nothing is caused, just like in the Bible… god said and it is done. No process, no in-between states, no causing. So if god didn’t cause how could you?
So you hope it works out. You move about in a world of objects like an object… Either fancying yourself as special, better, already done, or a loser, a nothing, worthless. But there is no chance to grow, or to change… Because in that paradigm, in that world you don’t cause anything. In that paradigm it is not possible, because that is not the nature of the paradigm.
The right/wrong paradigm where your job is to be thrown about by every wind, every whim, every circumstance, like a leaf, like a beach ball.
The eight billion live lives of quiet desperation, their entire lives in that paradigm.
But with some work, some conscious work you can move to the next higher paradigm where everything is a process, and you can become anything. Where the nature of the paradigm is that nothing is fixed, and you cause anything and everything. Including what you say.
- You are not limited to say what someone already said.
- Things are not fixed, nothing about them.
- And it is up to you how much of your speaking you cause.
Speaking CAUSES in that next paradigm.
Cause them to be the way they are… Cause is not the same as creating, by the way. So you won’t ’cause’ money, a car, a love by speaking it… that is some unwholesome b.s. that you can only believe if you live in the right/wrong paradigm…
But you CAN cause your words. And with your words you can cause your attitude, you can cause your actions, you can cause yourself.
So if you ever want more out of life, if you ever want to feel powerful.
If you ever want to be a match to life, you need to move and start inhabiting the next higher paradigm where what you say, you, actually matter. Where what you do matters. What you think, what you say, how you are matters.
You don’t matter in your current paradigm, even if you people judge you. The currency of the right/wrong paradigm is judging. And of course you are: judged.
As you attempt to climb higher, the invisible ceiling holds you back.
The invisible ceiling is words.
Why? Because You can only see things that you have words for. And the words also tell you how to see. The attitude. The words are like a projector in your eyes. If you call everything anger and yelling and forceful, for example, then you are justified to be afraid. Always.
But if you learn to have words that are shades of emotions, shades of how someone talks, behaves, then you can let go of the fear and actually become a person.
You can learn recognizing the facial muscles and the moves they have. Contract, expand, pull up, pull down, go sideways, etc.
And the moment you do that, observe and see, you are starting causing… You are causing yourself to see beyond the shallow ‘IS’ world, beyond the black and white world where things already are.
With that move you are starting to climb out of your misery and into the paradigm of process.
Your fear signals that you don’t consider yourself a person
Fear and person can’t appear together. A fearful specimen isn’t present to their personness, isn’t acting as if they were a person. they are 100% in the grip of object-ness. ‘I am an object in a world of objects‘. That is why they are afraid.
Your vocabulary
So unless you get out of calling every feeling ‘fear’ and have words to say: concerned, alarmed, uncertain, cautious, weary, holding back, etc. on one side, and petrified, terrified, frightened on the other… you have an impoverished vocabulary and therefore an impoverished ‘object-like’ life. Therefore you cannot even consider causing. Causing anything.
To cause you will need lots of words, and to cause you’ll need to look deeper, look beyond the skin. Beyond the ‘IS’ world. Into the dynamics. Much of those are invisible to the naked eye.
Consider that even if you manage to climb out of the lowest paradigm, the ‘IS’ paradigm, the paradigm of ‘I am an object in a world of objects’, the people you interact with still live there.
I have a student who does an awful lot for others. Services, gifts, etc.
What he intends to ’cause’ is validation of himself. He fails to get any of that.
Why? Because causing doesn’t work that way. Causing is also a process, like everything in life. In addition to that: the recipient is also a part of the eight billion.
So unless you give them words to let them know what they are getting, they won’t even notice it, or what will register is that they got what they expected… without any thoughts, any regard that YOU gave them the service… They can’t see it. Just like you can’t see 99% of what is there, neither can they.
The job of the specimen who wants to become a person is to start having more words, start with that project, so they can cause with their words. Cause their own mood, their own emotional state, their own personness. And cause others’ relationship to him or to things.
So how do you actually do it? What’s the process?
Here is what I recommend: get a bunch of pictures of certain emotional states. Graphics are maybe better start with, because they are easier to see what parts of the face moves and how. The artist already saw that.
Re-arrange your features to match the graphic. Don’t use photos. Don’t use videos. And don’t rush through it.
It’s OK to spend a whole day with just one new emotion. Maybe even a whole week! A month!
Doing this as a project for however long it takes will do many things for you.
- It will increase your self-awareness. You’ll know about your face… how it feels when you move a part.
- When I ask you how you are, instead of saying fine, or I am anxious, you’ll say something that is actually outside of your fear-based impoverished vocabulary. You’ll look and speak.
- And if you do it long enough, life will start to follow suit. Your life will, imperceptibly become bigger, and you’ll become more at home in it.
Seemingly you are causing your vocabulary to get richer. But you are causing much much more. You are causing yourself, what you see, your own internal state. And causing yourself to see, feel, how you are causing it.
Now, judging from what my core students have been doing, this is going to be a complete flop.
Why? Because my core students, the ones that actually took this on back in September, did it for a few minutes, maybe a minute a day… and then stopped.
Maybe they said: ‘it is not worth it‘… maybe they said: I don’t know what I am doing.
But, between you and me, if you EVER want to change yourself, if you ever want to move up in the world, if you ever want to be more than you are, this is the crucial place to start.
If you look at a lot of pictures, you’ll notice that people have two modes: they either control their face to produce a rehearsed smile, or a rehearsed serious look, or they have no idea what their face is saying…
You can see the eight billion that is stuck in the right/wrong paradigm, where growing is impossible. Where changing is impossible.
So if you have ANY ambition, don’t be stupid and take on this project. Place, stick the picture of the day where you can see it many times during the day. and every time you see it, rearrange your face to match it, and make up the name of the emotional state… by feeling what your face makes you feel.
You’ll start noticing a shift after seven days, but don’t stop. The richer your vocabulary the higher you can climb on the Tree of Life.
I have been doing this for 50 years…
Warning. Don’t forget the context. Don’t forget the why!
And most importantly, don’t forget that you are doing this to cause yourself. To cause your freedom, your happiness, your personness. Your Self, and your self-expression.
If I measured your Bach profile, the dominant bad-feeling emotions that you are stuck with, would show me how you limit your freedom, how you limit yourself. Then if I measured you let’s say a month into this ‘becoming a person’ project, you’d be surprised that you get controlled by much less, maybe no emotion… that you are free to be. You are free to be yourself. That you feel whole and complete. After just one month.
Could you become all you can become and not have a rich ACTIVE AND ACCURATE vocabulary for emotions? Not possible. Sorry.
I hate to be the one to break it to you.
In the Feel your Face workshop we’ll endeavor to move parts of the face, the brows, the lips, the nose, in particular ways and feel what emotions they create… and see that you can actually cause you to feel in a certain way.
Causing is the key to personal power.
Without the ability and the willingness to cause you are stuck at the lowest level of being an object in a world of objects.
What is dynamics? It’s a physics, it is an engineering term… and is invisible to the eight billion.
Dynamics is the study of forces and motion. Dynamics is distinguished from kinematics, which describes motion, without regard to its causes.
In dynamics the forces cause internal or external changes in an object. External are movement, speed, position, direction. Internal are tension, stretching, pushing, distortion, expanding, shrinking, lifting, etc.
We are interested in dynamics because we are interested in becoming a person, a person who causes, instead of being an object in a world of object, where we are caused, but know not how, know not why.
Society isn’t interested in you becoming sentient.
Ultimately, until you learn to cause you are not, you cannot be considered sentient.
So this article and the process it asks you to perform for a long time is to cause yourself to become sentient… a Self…
One of my students has been doing tiktok videos for a little while. It is worth going there. The first thing you’ll notice is that he is not conscious of his face. The second thing you’ll notice is that he is trying to impress the watcher. If you are good, the third thing you’ll notice is that he has control, he uses only a few dynamics that he looks at instead of feel… The fourth thing you’ll notice, maybe, that his vocabulary isn’t growing… he has no words, just clownish moves. What moves his face and facial muscles in the desire to impress, not himself.
So don’t do what he is doing… Start with a stationery expression… and stay with it for months.
Feel your Face: become a person
I had a Feel your Face: become a person workshop in September.
It made no difference.
So like a perfect Nudnik (Yiddish: a persistent person, maybe even pestering) I’ll do it again. If it doesn’t take, I’ll try a different way… because maybe there are more than one way to skin this particular cat… encouraging you, teaching you to become a person.
Feel your face: Become a Person
I intend for this workshop to be a lot like a guided meditation… Priceless.
PS: You may not believe me, but unless you FEEL your face, you will be like American actors: inauthentic, phony, and shallow.
Shallow? Yes.
In this context shallow means: you have a limited range of expression. like a thing. Like an object.
A person has unlimited range of expression… that is what makes a person a person. Unfortunately causing and personhood rise at the same time, like seeing and meaning… The front of the hand and the back of the hand.
Question: can you benefit equally from the recording? Source says: no. Fuuuuuuuck… right?