Podcast: Play in new window | Download
If you ever tried to meditate. If you are a ‘meditator’. And if the idea of meditation brings up bile to your throat… like for me.
OK who else? Oh, those who couldn’t give a shriveled nut for the idea of mediation… so all people…
The only thing meditation wants you to do is to look within. You spend almost all your life looking outward, and have no idea about what is inside.
Please don’t argue. What you think is your inside is also outside.
The thoughts, the feelings, the emotions, are still outside.
Outside of what? you ask… Outside of the inside…
When you manage to stay awake, stay aware, and wade through all the stuff, that is outside of the inside, even though they are within your skin… you get to a place where what you see is nothing.
No thing. Nothing to see. And you get scared.
You wanted to see what is at your core, and you saw an empty space. No thing. No beauty. Courage? Not a shred of courage. Or a special person like you hoped. Or brilliance.
So you go back into the world and double up your pretending… but you shouldn’t.
The self, the core of a human, every human is no thing.
It’s energy. It is pure energy. The energy of goodness, and beauty, and courage, and brilliance, and all the virtues you have ever heard of, and all the virtues that you haven’t.
And if you are willing to consider THAT as yourself, because that is you, then life can change, because suddenly you can be the boss.
Or using the imagery and the words of the ‘The Art of Hunting Humans‘, you can finally become the captain of the ship that you are.
In the Art of Hunting Humans, you are likened to a ship. Crew and captain. It is a good image to work with… you’ll see why. For now just see the ship, the crew, the ocean, and the captain in your imagination. That ship, kit and caboodle, is you. And every member of that crew has a good idea where to go, what to do, how to do it, and they are extremely vocal about it.
The captain of that ship sits in the middle of it.
I like that book’s analogy because it is easy to see that warships have a crew. And it is easy to see that on the warship that is you it is the crew that is making the decisions, not you.
The crew ignores that there is a captain… Because the captain doesn’t assert his or her captain role…
And that is the case with the eight billion people today on Earth. The crew is making the decisions, not the captain.
Except for the ‘Superiors‘ as the book calls them. I call them the 1000.
Each and every 1000 (Superior) learned the nature of the ship, and the role of the captain from someone who knew.
Knew, as in Tree of Knowledge. Knew, not as an experience. Not necessarily lived accordingly. Or even have ever owned being the captain.
So knowing how to be the captain, how to not be a ship directed by the crew isn’t enough.
So how come I could.
My example can guide you
By the time I got to the point of someone teaching me to connect happened after 18 years of me diligently chipping away at and robbing the crew of the warship-me of their say-so… Just like people in the Reality Challenge are asked to do… First you hear what the crew says. Then you recognize it as the crew’s doing. And then learn to ignore it. Or if you find it valuable, schedule it in your calendar.
Undistinguished, the crew gets between you and your core. Between you and the captain.
Between you, who you think you are, and who you really are.
So what does it mean chipping away in terms of real life?
Every member of the crew has a say an opinion about what is right and what is wrong. What you should do or shouldn’t do. What you have to do, need to do, maybe even what you WANT to do… in everything. And they are loud about it. IN YOUR HEAD.
It is like a democracy. They can’t see the big picture. They can’t see much, after all from their level of view those things are not visible. It’s a democracy of fools… should be very familiar, except that in the democracy you live in, you are the fool.
Fools have no care, no concern about the whole. No care about the direction of the ship, no care about any other crew member… every goddamn crew member has a say, and it is a cacophony of voices.
The language of the crew is the shoulds, the sholdn’t, the have tos, the need tos, and even the coulds we learn to hear and distinguish in the reality challenge.
Obviously, when I attempt to teach you something, in your democracy of fools I become just one of the fools, one of those voices. I have a vote like all the other crew members…
I am not considered higher than one of the fools… That is why I have been able to have no results with you. When I speak to you I hear other voices in you speak over me. Argue… or try to interpret… So I am relegated to be just one voice among the many. I am relegated to be one of the crew.
If you want to have a say in the direction of your life, your job is to take the power away from the crew, one by one.
To own that you are the captain and where the ship goes, what battles it goes into is your decision and yours only.
And then you can also hear me as a trusted advisor, a guide, a partner, and benefit from your conversations with me, from my articles, from my courses. Until then… no chance.
Those voices running the ship are the human condition.
I teach about 50% of how those voices do it, how they seize the reins and run the ship aground in my Invisible Dynamics course…
It is easier to ‘dethrone’, invalidate the voices if you know how the dynamics work, if you know how they came about, how they are the way they are, what their concerns are.
But it is not mandatory.
If you learn to recognize the shoulds as the crew shouting, you are well on your way to become the captain.
The captain who doesn’t look to the crew to tell him how to run his ship.
The job is to take away the crew’s power over you, one should at a time. Until you are clear to be the captain… And till the rest of your days.
The crew won’t shut up. But you’ll hear it as background noise… and you’ll make your own captain-decisions from what you see in reality, not based on what the crew yells.
Of course it is useful to know what all those shoulds want you to do, but I don’t think it is crucial.
Just know that the shoulds are as varied as the invisible dynamics. They come from The identity, the racket, the self-concern, the ITCH, the pebble in your shoes, the perpetration/withhold, the scarcity, the neediness, the wantiness, the having to/needing to/wanting to/should.
Neutralizing the voices gives you access to the Self.
So why would you be willing to do so much work to get access to the Self?
That is what you are thinking. Am I right?
The answer is simple:
Your Self is the source of everything that makes life worth living.
- The source of the energy that makes work cause fulfillment.
- The energy what transforms sex to love making.
- That transform marriage into a partnership, a companionship.
- That transforms a house into a home.
- An on again off again relationship with your life into unconditionally loving.
One more thing:
As long as you listen to the crew’s voices as if it were you speaking, every single voice, every single should says: YOU HAVE NO INTEGRITY.
Why? If you were the whole ship and all those shoulds were valid, then in fact every should you don’t DELIVER on, becomes an out of integrity.
The moment you start assuming the role of captain, you have two choices:
- You can choose to ignore the crew. It is going to take some time… but you can do it. Likely this point you only hear the crew in your head, so you are safe to ignore all the voices.
And do what you said you would do… preferably your one thing… The one thing you decided to put all your power into. The one thing that will make the most difference in your life… down the line. Not instantly… but eventually.
- The other choice is to listen and evaluate. And after evaluation, after consideration, decide to do what the voice says, or not.
And if you decide that you’ll do it, put the task in your calendar, or do the thing it suggests right away.
Instead of letting it hang there as an out-of-integrity.
By the way, deciding on the One Thing is a difficult thing to do. It can be a context. It can be a spiritual practice. Or it can be a project.
It is the Organizing Principle for your life… And most people have a real difficulty seeing the big picture inside the Organizing Principle is obvious.
If you think you would use my guidance… and if the crew is still very vocal you won’t… Then I will make myself available for individual coaching.
Get guidancePS: If you have subscribed to my weekly Podcast…
…you’ve seen that no matter what I say in that podcast, it has no power, because it is just one of the voices in my partner’s head. So she will never really entertain it as guidance, or anything of value.
Until she can become the captain of her ship instead of being a puppet of her democracy, she is not coachable. Big learning there.
She will, at most, ask me to muscletest something for her… but ignore even that.
