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Does outer work can change your insides? Or is it the other way around? Inner work produces outer results?
Back in the year 2000 my then boy-friend told me (lol. He didn’t suggest, he didn’t ask… No. He told me that I have to get, buy, learn Transcendental Meditation. It cost me $1200, which was big money for me. I remember I paid in payments.
Transcendental Meditation, TM, is a very simple meditation technique.
The essence of TM is concentration…
I didn’t know it at the time. Had I known it I promise I would have practiced with more enthusiasm.
I learned this today when I was listening to an audiobook of Inner Path exercises by my favorite Hungarian, Dr. Peter Popper.
Concentration of your attention. Concentration of your will.
When your attention is ‘normal’… you are like the sun: lights everything up. But when its concentrated, like the sun, it sets its focus on fire.
My students, when they read, or when they talk to someone, including me, are able to give about 1-3% of their attention to what they read or listen to.
Therefore whatever they read or listen to will leave no traces… No footprints. No growth. No nothing. 90-97% of what is being said is not received and literally makes no difference… as if it never happened. Like smoke, it disappears
The leave your heart, soul, brain, and your life untouched. What continues dominating is what has always been: complaints, resistance, suffering, feeling like a victim.
A ‘casual’ TM practitioner’s power of concentration number is 10%.
For a serious practitioner of TM, this number is 40%.
This is why TM, the organization, can claim so many worldly successful people… because if at work, in relationships, in wealth, health, you can concentrate your energies on what you want to accomplish you’ll have success. If you can’t, you won’t.
My number is also 40%.
I developed this ability… through painstaking practice. TM is not the only game in town to develop concentrating ability…
Most people’s attention is not controlled and concentrated at all…
it is hijacked by everything, no matter what they want to pay attention to they simply cannot. So most people never amount to much. This is not coincidence, this is cause and effect.
I, occasionally, experience a profound sense of inadequacy. I don’t try to override it. I allow it to fully express itself. I ride the waves. And when it becomes bearable, I concentrate of what I wanted to do, what I felt inadequate to tackle.
I am mentioning this, because it just came up. It lasted exactly seven minutes. It is almost completely gone… although I can feel its remnants in my stomach.
I allowed it to occupy my whole world…
Your attention can be hijacked and held by a self-concern, like ‘I am less than others’. If you resist it, or if you indulge it, you’ll then produce sub-par performance… probably in everything.
Other self-concerns, that you should already know, or you should understand!, or you should get to the end of it already, and many others do the same thing: you can’t hear a thing that is being said, you can’t comprehend what you read… Sometimes a whole 90 minute long session: nobody home.
Bonnie, my Friday podcast partner had a breakthrough in that recently… she shares it in the latest podcast.
She managed to cause herself to concentrate more by shifting her context… More about context later.
Unfortunately how you do anything is how you do everything. Your work is not worth the money you get paid… You don’t get paid for YOUR value, you get paid for the work’s value. And you cannot concentrate on your work… can you?
You know that your work should be worth more… But without being able to concentrate more, it won’t.
You, yourself, are worth different in every of the three paradigms. Only the second paradigm is about your work, about your ability to concentrate. But it is an important paradigm: that is where you get paid.
- In the paradigm of judgment you are judged as useless, worthless, nothing… You judge others the same way… right/wrong. good/bad.
- In the paradigm of worldly value, your production is measured, not you. And your production depends on your ability to concentrate more than anything.
- In the paradigm of ‘god’, you are infinitely valuable, because you are unique. If you have no access to this paradigm, you are not considering yourself a person. And as a consequence, you consider everyone a thing too.
If you live your whole life in the judgment paradigm, you are miserable.
It’s not your fault, it is the paradigm’s fault. It has no room for joy, or happiness.
So it is very important that you do whatever is necessary to elevate yourself to the worldly values’ paradigm, where you can do good even if in the judgment paradigm you were yourself worthless… or not enough… or bad.
You know where you live by the way YOU judge.
You may ponder how absolutely horrible people can amass fame and fortune. Their personal ugliness is not part of the measure in the paradigm of production as value.
What keeps you in the judgment paradigm is your focus. You judging, and you overvaluing what others think about you or you think about you.
I have a secret for you: no one gives a flying fig of are. They don’t think about you. They think of themselves, or their work… not you.
Or they think about your work… but not you.
So all that time, all that effort, all that tightening of your muscles is all for you and you only and not for your work.
You are not all you could be for yourself.
No matter what the originating incident was where you decided how the world judged you, your ‘not enoughness’, your failure to be good enough happened in the lowest of the three paradigms.
One of my students won a running race but here time didn’t make her father proud. He said: you can do better…
She heard that she didn’t measure up. That she wasn’t good enough.
That is in the paradigm of judgment. In the next higher paradigm she would have heard: you can run faster. Faster is better, so run faster. In that paradigm there is no bad, there is no wrong, only faster, more precise, more inventive, etc.
The lowest paradigm, the paradigm of judgment is created by people… It is the paradigm of the Tree of Knowledge, The Tree of Good and Evil. The tree god asked us not to eat from. God foresaw what kind of misery it would mean to humanity.
Animals are not stuck in that paradigm, in fact that paradigm doesn’t exist for them.
That is why you can tell your dog or cat: bad, wrong, they will hear that you are not happy… and that maybe punishment is forthcoming. But not bad and not wrong.
There would be no life on Earth if all life, animals, plants were also stuck in that lowest of paradigms.
God was right to ask the original humans not to go there.
You see, to judge by that tree’s two-prong approach, you don’t have to see. You don’t have to look. You don’t have to be any better than what you judge to judge. Because you claim the right to pronounce life or death. In your mind you are the Roman Emperor deciding on life or death in the Coliseum.
You morally murder people and things. Moronic but addictive.
Moronic means that your intellectual age is that of a young child.
It is also low vibration, and makes you feel like you got you off the hook.
You never have to amount to anything. You never have to become intelligent, or kind, or helpful to judge. And you know what? Most judgmental people fully exploit this smokescreen… and remain a promise or maybe not even that.
But they never live a full human life, because they must pretend to be emperors to be so powerful while they are non-producers in life.
Unfortunately, life seems to be about work, about struggle, about producing… and the amount of Light you get, happiness, joy, self-love, depends on the quality of the work you produce.
Real producers, happy people, fulfilled people never judge. They don’t have time for that nonsense.
What can I do with or for judgmental students?
My difficulty is, when I want to ease these students out of the pit of judgment, that they don’t want to judge, it’s actually painful, but they also don’t want to do what it would take for them to become a full fledged human.
Becoming someone they could respect for their accomplishment would need energy… But pushing a button to execute people and things is work, and maybe even a lot of work. Uses up all their energies.
The fact that doing the kind of work that is the meaning of life. The fact that that work is satisfying, gratifying doesn’t weigh enough (yet) to help move the needle.
An interesting thing happened yesterday. I say interesting, but it was more the unexpected kind of interesting.
After listening to my Friday podcast with Bonnie, a student who in the ten years when she did most of my courses to no benefit, to no movement whatsoever, she decided to follow suit and like Bonnie, decide to trust me… again.
Trust is a big issue.
When you go from no trust to trust, it is a lot like you opened your whole house for the air and the sunshine to enter it again. You begin feeling the breeze on your skin, your breath is moving, and life is circulating in your veins.
You changed teams. Instead of Death you now play for Life.
You may not even know that you don’t trust… Some things only become obvious when they go away. When they aren’t there any more.
Same thing with breath: you don’t notice that you held your breath until you actually start breathing again.
As long as it is only judgment that gives you self-value, you cannot learn, you cannot grow. You cannot be yourself. And you cannot be happy.
You are locked into a role where your main job is self-protection. Self-image protection, but for humans their image and their self feels the same. A kind of idol worshipping, Moses’ Ten Commandments advise against.
Your life there is lonely. It is dry… like the desert. Cacti, some brushes, insect and burrowing mice. That is the extent of life in the desert.
Everything you want to learn threatens with disrupting, destroying that little life you have. So you resist it.
And you can’t really read. You can’t really pay attention. The alonness, the isolation grows. And the desire for being free to be yourself is becoming stronger and stronger…
But unfortunately you need to accept things and not resist them to belong. To enjoy life. To be WITH others. And feel like a person.
The enemy, as I see it, is the resistance. And resistance is physical. It is a habit. And you don’t feel you can survive if you let it go.
The ebook I talk about in the beginning, The Book of Inner Paths is a series of simple exercises that I’d love to re-publish as a book, so you can see each exercise, instead of having to find it on an audio. Where you can check each exercise off as you accomplish them. Take notes. And start growing.
I have ordered the printed book in Hungarian. I can’t seem to get a hold of the English translation, the translation the audiobook is based on.
The exercises, especially when explained by Dr. Popper, can take you to a place where you can change yourself little by little so you can grow. Where you can elevate yourself, because you have strengthened your ability to concentrate your energies. Your will, your ability to concentrate is stronger than the energy that hold you closed, hold you tight, keep you down.
I will create that workbook… in time.
In the meantime you can listen to the audiobook and if you want provide support me financially in creating this new exercise book… A book of exercises that can take you from the prison of your bad habits to freedom. To being free to be yourself. Grow. And become a Human Being.
Donate and get the audio
