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The difference between a wild animal and the ‘modern man‘ and his domesticated animals is how they see their role in what they have.
Modern man is more like his domesticated partners: they feel they depend on something or other to have sustenance, roof over their head, and someone to take care of them.
So from this vantage point wild animals are higher in consciousness than ‘modern man‘. They know that unless they seek out sustenance, roof, etc. it won’t happen.
Some books, like Jack London‘s White Fang are very educational… and may bring you out of your mental position of waiting for things to happen for you. The common behavior of the downtrodden.
A saying I have been suggesting to people of ‘modern man‘ persuasion is: If it is to be it is up to me.
The economy won’t turn magically around. People won’t magically discover your business. Bosses/people won’t magically start favoring you. Ideas won’t magically come to you, skills won’t magically be available to you, you won’t magically know things you need to know.
In the real world you have to work for everything.
One of my teachers has been writing a book about talent for about ten years, I think… I am sure the reason he wants to write it is the same reason I am writing this article: to tell people that work always trumps talent.
Moreover talent by itself is worthless… talent without work to sharpen it will not take you where you want to get to.
And neither does raw intelligence.
Clay won’t magically transform itself into a brick and then to a house…
At every step of a process there is a need for work.
I still have students who won’t do anything, and are still waiting for the right time, the right opportunity.
An author I am currently reading spent two years working on several different projects to develop some skills, some knowledge, some new vistas for himself before he got himself into the position to start something worth doing… He started a new search engine, duckduckgo.com
Aren’t you fascinated? I bet you are. But I bet you are not fascinated with the work that goes into being able to see an opportunity that one can win with. And he is winning. Today I get a lot of visitors from duckduckgo, and the number is growing.
Compare that with a ‘modern man‘ I used to have as a client. He had an idea for a search engine. He had done no relevant work before he had the idea. Then he had to hire a programming team for a lot of money because he had none of the relevant skills.
Moreover he wasn’t doing anything to get those skills. Did’t think he needed them. He was sure that he was going to win, except he could not code a simple page, let alone a search engine. And he knew how to do a little bit of marketing, but not enough to make his search engine gain traction.
He was a true ‘modern man‘… unhappy, and resentful.
And, of course, how you do anything is how you do everything. And that means that you’ll be passive in your growth, in your evolution, in changing your worldview… You’ll wait for it to come to you, and if it doesn’t, you’ll be offended, and even stop dreaming about it.
Trimtabbing
I am now having a chance to see how an oceanliner-like ‘modern man‘ turns herself around in a tight bay.
Buckminster Fuller said it right: it is faster and relatively easier to get to big results through tiny steps. He calls them trimtabbing.
His geodesic dome is like that too… short and narrow components, but a lot of them, can cover a huge span of space… as opposed to the other way: huge, river-spanning monstrosities in building, and huge moves in life or in business.
For creating ‘river spanning’ lives, you need to have a huge amount of raw material, skills, money, knowledge, people.
I created my business like the geodesic dome… I can do everything. I already had half of the skills I need today BEFORE I opened the doors. And I got the other half while the doors to the business were already open…
The third half…
And because times have changed, I am now buckling up and will learn the ‘third’ half… lol…
I myself have been resisting adding tools to my toolbox and actually doing the work.
It is clear to me that ‘modern man‘ is in everyone. On every level of vibration.
And yet, ultimately what we’ll choose does depend on what level of vibration, what level of consciousness our worldview is.
Buckminster Fuller said that we need to do away with work… ugh.
But… ‘Modern man‘, when left to his own devices, doesn’t think about what he thinks. ‘Modern man‘ doesn’t think at all.
And if it took no work to acquire the necessities for living, ‘modern man‘ would prefer to do nothing.
So no, Buckminster Fuller, in my opinion, was a moron. Moron simply means ‘stuck at a child’s level of development‘. Mental development. Intellectual, emotional, spiritual development.
Humans need work because only through purposeful work you can become all you can become.
In my coaching practice I have seen clearly that unless a person had a project, a biggish project to work on, they won’t grow.
If they trust enough and accept a project I give them, they won’t even have what it takes to pick a project.
Only through a project can one see that their worldview has been the worldview of the ‘modern man‘… passivity and ‘positive thinking’…
If they remain a ‘modern man‘ they won’t be able to even SEE what it is that they NEED to do, learn, master to get further on the project.
The issue with ‘modern man‘ is not that they are lazy, or dumb, or bad. The issue is the worldview.
You cannot see your worldview as a worldview. You need an outsider to point it out to you.
Worldview is like a sorting device: it won’t allow anything to be seen unless it matches the worldview.
Even when an outsider guides you, you are sh!t out of luck, unless you muster trust in that outsider and what they tell you.
And trust, for many soul corrections, is not forthcoming…
Trust
In my practice, when trust first shows up, it is dramatic. And it is always the product of a process of letting go of self-righteousness, letting go of resistance, of avoiding domination, of wanting to be right.
Trust, like anything in reality, is not a right/wrong issue. It is not like pregnancy, where you are either pregnant or not.
Trust can be measured on a 1-100 scale.
Students whose trust measure is at or above 70% are doing SOMETHING, consistent with what I ask them to do… what would take them to the Promised Land of self-love, fulfillment, prosperity, and power.
When the trust measure is 100, a rare occurrence, they start doing exactly what actually has the potential to take them there.
If their trust measure is under 70, they won’t do anything, because their worldview will not allow them to do so. They are locked into their worldview. And that worldview of no trust IS like a prison with no obvious path or method to break out of.
Do I have a magic wand that can change your level of trust?
Muscletest (Source) says ‘no’.
So what can I do, if anything?
Sadly, the answer is: nothing I do can change your level of trust. Only YOU can change it.
How? I discovered that by accident, or maybe by guidance this past Saturday.
Unconsciously, unaware of the significance of the ‘move’, I had been attempting to do it, but never had a whole workshop to cause it and to succeed with it.
I should have known better.
After all Landmark Education and its previous incarnation, Werner Erhard and Associates, spend an entire course on it.
If you have a chance to visit the evening session of a Landmark Education Forum, you’ll be impressed that the graduates share only one thing: they’d made peace with their parents.
And that is the secret move I didn’t realize is so potent that can restore trust, the ability to trust guidance.
In nature the first people who you trust are your parents. If, for whatever reason, you don’t, can’t trust them, your ability to accept guidance is diminished.
As an adult you can restore that trust by seeing that regardless of what horrible things they did, your parents wanted one thing and one thing only for you: to become a healthy, happy person who can stand on their two feet and prosper.
The horrible things they did to you didn’t mean they didn’t love you, or didn’t want the best for you.
So your job is to consider that you have a debt to repay.
They, ultimately, gave you life, and brought you where you are, where you can read this. They forewent a lot of things in life to give you a chance to be here. Comfort, leisure, money.
So you have a debt that you haven’t paid. You haven’t even been grateful.
My turnaround came when I could see that the way to pay MY debt to my parents is by letting them know that my life turned out.
My life wasn’t all I wanted. It wasn’t even good. But I was alive, I earned a living, I had roof over my head and food on my table.
So I decided to be grateful. It was hard, I admit. But I did it.
I had to give up all the ways I was right about them, and about all the ways they were wrong, wrong, wrong.
It wasn’t an event… It took me years, but the abuse I’d experienced was big.
It probably won’t take you as long as it took me…
To the degree you ‘get complete’ with your parents, to the same degree you can accept guidance from me, from Source, from any teacher.
You need trust to accept guidance.
You need someone who can look at what was done to you, and help you see it differently.
As long as you see it the same way, you cannot let go of making it or making them wrong. And as long as you don’t start seeing it differently… you remain in your prison cell… with no means to get out.
Landmark Education takes 60 hours to get you there. In my experience I can take you there in two-three hours… But whether you do the Landmark Education Forum, do my workshop, or do a one-on-one with me, the work is still yours… You need to do what you need to do to get out of the prison.
- In my experience, the first step is to see that you have been an ungrateful brat.
- The second step is to grieve. It will take as long as it does… but it has to be real grieving, not public, not flashy, not for effect… No. real grieving.
- The third step is to formulate a communication to your parents, teachers, siblings, to express your gratitude that they allowed to live in spite of your ingratitude. Really. You didn’t deserve it. I know I didn’t.
Let it simmer… eventually like muddy water, the mud settles on the bottom, and you’ll be crystal clear and ready to trust.
- The fourth step: You’ll need a declaration to yourself… ‘I am ready to trust‘ if you are ready to trust.
The only thing I provide is the different view of what happened, so the wrong can disappear. And that is why it only takes two-three hours.
It takes courage to do the workshop. It is a public view at you and your life, and many people don’t have courage to be seen.
If you are one of those but still want the results, then you can book a private session with me. The call takes as long as it takes, so schedule enough uninterrupted time…
And if you want to get a sneak peak into a workshop session, you can just buy the recording of one session that actually was the first session of the new Integrity Workshop, where we look at what Source wants you to do, and be and from there we get to the trust issue.
I am calling this the Prisonbreak. Until and unless you have trust, you are a child and have the worldview of an adolescent. The anger and the haplessness of an adolescent… And only fun suitable for an adolescent. Ugh.
It is time to become an adult.
PS: Some results students/clients share:
This client has had no trust, no permission, no freedom to be. She did everything dutifully… so there was no fun in her life.
She sent me this today:I was looking at being dutiful and I saw that it’s like having to pay some kind of tax for just breathing.
It’s something that can suffocate me somehow since I’ve been living like I ‘have to’ do something, like it’s my obligation to do stuff I don’t choose to do. hmm…
This client has started a new business a year or two ago… and it wasn’t doing as well as she expected it would.
- When it comes to facing my financial troubles – I had always switched the thoughts to ‘it will be better soon – I will make more money in the future’. And just choose to believe that it would be so.
- I believe this was me running from the Tiger. Not facing it.
- Lately I have been looking hard at my finances. I have been seeing that I need to work on the business; take action to make money. I had been doing this for a few weeks. But the positive thoughts just kept coming. And meager results with it.
- Yesterday I turned to face the Tiger.
- Yesterday, when I caught myself thinking ‘I will make more money this week’ – I saw and then said to myself – ‘I need to take action to make the money – it won’t just happen by itself.’ This shocked me.
- I was able to arrest the positive thought and let it die. I finally realized that I needed to make the money. What a wake up call.
- I saw that all I had done in the past was just enough to get by – just enough to keep the positive thoughts coming. And I could complain when the results weren’t great.
- Now I can see the amount of work that will be needed to get this new business profitable. And for the first time – I am not afraid.