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When we work on distinguishing reality from the voices you add, we actually work on one of the most important aspects of life: your emotions.
The quality of your life, how you feel about yourself, about your life, about the people in your life is all emotions.
You, mistakenly think, that your emotions are an accurate expression, an accurate measure of what they seem to be around, but they aren’t.
The Starting Point Measurements has one measure that directly asks the questions: 26. To what degree you honor your emotions as reality? %
The higher that number is the more wretched you are inside…
Here is how it works, here is how you get to the high numbers most people who feel wretched have:
Something happens. You don’t quite know what happens, because it happens while you are busy doing other things. So it hits you when you are in the ‘wondering what happened’ phase.
Remember, there are three kinds of people:
- People who make things happen,
- people who watch things happen,
- and people who wonder WTF happened.
And especially when you don’t know what happened, you make up stories. Stories that have hardly any facts in it, because you were unaware… so you didn’t see facts.
You only felt/saw/heard some effects of what happened, aka facts.
Unhappy people have a weak relationship with reality… they live from their interpretation, not from facts.
This is what the positive thinking teachers try to change… but they are apple polishing…
The unhappiness, the negative thoughts are effects, not the cause. The cause is a severed relationship with reality. Actually, the words have no relationship whatsoever with what is a fact…
I never needed to learn to be positive, because I have a stronger than strong relationship with reality.
With reality. With the what’s so… And I may not like it, it may be painful, but it is what is so, so I deal with it like that.
When you remove yourself from reality, when you only interact with the meanings, the interpretation, the story, then you are ineffective first, and unhappy second.
The facts are always neutral… no negative, no positive facts are possible. Facts are neutral. What you feel about them is not part of the facts. What you say about them: neither.
The lower your emotional IQ the less you interact with reality and the more you ‘need’ positive thinking.
Need as in ‘I stabbed myself in the gut with a sharp pointy object and I am bleeding. Now I NEEEEEED to cover it up with some positivity‘
I would laugh if it were funny. It is tragicomic… Seinfeld-ish… All of Seinfeld is an illustration to what I am saying. Watch a few episodes and see if you can see it.
Probably not.
You and all the eight billion blockheads do that tragicomic thing.
One of my students’ Organizing Principle is to have, to develop Self-expression. More than his whiny, Eeyore-ish way… Because inside there is a great guy, loves humanity, wants freedom for all, including himself.
So in this latest part of the Reality Challenge, (he has been in it from the beginning) he decided to start reading.
His first book to read, he says, is The Old Man and The Sea… Hemingway.
Not a lot happens in that book… outside, inside… not a lot of facts.
Hemingway’s #26 measure was: 10%. Meaning: he saw the facts, and he saw them as neutral… That is what made him such a good writer.
The author dude I am reading all his books now, David Estes has it even lower: 7%. My three most active students’ are 70%, 91%, and 30%.
If you are an ex student, for whatever reason, your number is close to 100% and that is why we can’t work together.
You have insisted that you are right and I am wrong. You have clung to your interpretation of life… unwilling to let go.
If I needed to choose what capacity to focus on, on what capacity would dislodge you from your ineffective, powerless, unhappy place, I would say it’s The Sight… but the aspect of sight where you actually see reality as reality and what you say about it as what you say about it… distinct, and often unrelated.
H., one of my students has been focusing on The Sight… and has gone from having no facts support her claim at superiority to actually become superior and remarkable. She is on her way to become a Registered Nurse at the age 61… and a past that didn’t point this way. Her final exams are in a few days. Go Helen.
Her #26 went from 91% to 7%. That is the cause of her success. Her Sight capacity is 30% open… Her ability to tell fact from fiction is at 70%.
So if you are not happy, if your life isn’t a life you can love, if you are not someone you can love, that aspect of The Sight is what you want to work on…
If you do nothing else, it will be enough to turn your life (and your feelings about it) around.
One of my superpowers is that I go to bat for the nearly hopeless cases. Why? I think that is because I was myself one of them. Hopeless.
In my head I call myself the Distinction Queen… But what does that mean really? It means that I look and look and look until I can see something clearly distinct from everything else. Like fact from made up fiction.
I did that with the water, with the dark side, with the mites, and I am now doing it very actively with way to teach getting out of your emotional misery.
I’ve boiled it down to the simple measure: to what degree you consider your emotion reality.
All emotions come from words. All of them. Good emotion, bad emotion… And all come from words. Interpretations. Not from facts, not at all.
And most of those words are not even yours… they come from the voices.
And you have been engaged with the voices… and never actually LOOKED at the facts.
Your opinion, your interpretation comes with a fact, together, like the front of the hand and the back of the hand… inseparable. Seemingly.
The art is to see the fact and see the interpretation as two DISTINCT things…
And shift your attention to the fact, instead of the interpretation.
So if one of my students could do that, maybe her husband would have a chance…
But her voices will not care about the facts… about reality, only about the interpretation.
Shoulds:
I should point out what a big mistake he made
I should make him feel badly about what he did (I hate that but I did have it)
and I should point out why this is so Important
I want him to take his power back & stop being so helpless
Voices:
You should show him where he’s wrong
You have to get your point across- keep talking till you do
and You have to make sure he knows how hurt you were
You have to educate him on what really happened
What would that look like, you ask? I am glad you asked.
Here it is:
he did whatever he did. I considered it a mistake. It was my opinion. My interpretation, not a fact. The only thing that’s a fact is that he did what he did. And of course it is also a fact that I didn’t like it.
We all do things that other people don’t like. It’s normal. It is so normal it’s boring.
And that is that. Very different inner state… the wretched thing, the husband would not have to suffer abuse for years, and the wretched thing, the wife would not have to suffer emotional storms, deadly diseases, and no peace of mind, no love, no harmony, no happiness.
If it haven’t been obvious, her #26 is 91%.
She can’t love herself. She cannot love her life. And obviously she cannot love her husband. The perfect trifecta.
The only way I know to teach the SKILL of telling reality and fiction apart is through slow and gentle practices.
Knowing that they are not the same won’t help you. Only SEEING that they are not the same will.
You are blind and I am trying to teach you to see. See accurately. See astutely.
Astute is the degree you can tell different things apart.
But, of course the human condition is ‘for you everything is the same as everything else… except that not always’…
That is the condition of blindness… Maybe it is more accurate to say color-blindness.
Either way, it is curable… with a lot of practice.
In an upcoming Wednesday early afternoon workshop I’ll take a few people through the hoops.
It is not enough to take you from blind to seeing, but it will show the path, it will show what to practice and how to practice.
Skill building… not a door to walk through. Not a magic wand. Not ‘manifesting’… lol.
Get access to the workshopAt this point you can’t trust yourself, you can’t trust anyone. Your decisions are based on what you see… and you don’t see facts as facts and opinions as opinions. They are collapsed… So your level of astuteness is very low. Universally, for the eight billion, the astuteness number is 1%. Meaning: 99% wrong… oops.
The level of ‘even a blind chicken finds a seed occasionally.’ not hardly enough for the good life, for self-love, for feeling good about yourself.
PS: If you want to know what I measure in the Starting Point Measurements, here is the page that shows you with brief explanation of each measure.
PPS: Opportunistic diseases look for gaps.
Gap between your precious I and who you are in the world. Gap between reality and your story about it. The healing clients I have recently dealt with all had between 91% and 100% for measure #26. Not a coincidence. It is a diagnostic measure.
When H. above had a bout with a serious disease: her #26 was 91%. I have proof… So did T… from England. So does C who just ask for her health measurements yesterday.
So yeah, it is a valid diagnostic criterion, more precise than unnecessary biopsies ‘they’ make you subject yourself.
