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Where do you listen from? An important distinction
According to many awareness is the most missing when you are poor, sick, and miserable.
But what IS awareness? Aware of what? And with what organ? What sense? What equipment?
I call the awareness, really the same thing SEEING.
Why? just a personal preference… even though I probably would do better if I called it what smart people call it.
Awareness, the word, includes a certain level of conscious seeing…
It, somehow says that you know that you are seeing it, and you named it.
- What neither words say is what is probably the key to your power: what you didn’t name you don’t see. You are not aware of.
- And the other thing neither of the words say is: if you mislabel a thing, then you are aware and it won’t help you.
- And the third thing neither of the words say is: if you name something with your mind and then relate only to the words thereon… whatever you are supposedly aware of won’t influence your actions. Your behavior. Your attitude. Only the words you gave, FROM THE MIND.
I know, this probably went right over your head… and rightly so… It was how a philosopher, or a thinker gets to a conclusion… only one in 10,000 people ever THINKS…
Thinking uses facts to work with, not mind-stuff.
The kind of awareness that imports everything into the mind leads to thinking ABOUT… pondering, but no thinking.
So while Warren Buffet says: awareness is the most important and telling characteristic of a winner, I definitely prefer to say, instead:
- The person who sees more facts inside and outside accurately is the one who will be able to act accurately on what they see. Thus they can become a winner.
- And the loser, to the degree they practice it, are the ponderers, the rule makers, the right/wrong makers.
The difference between the two groups I measure in the Starting Point Measurements, Measure 23. the percentage of time you spend looking in the mind.
The more you keep on looking in reality, the more chance you have to be a winner.
Some of my most faithful students have this number around 0%. And they think they are thinkers. And they think nothing of changing this number…
But how do you do that? How do you get out of your mind? And how do you listen not from the mind?
Very good questions. I am going to attempt to answer… albeit I am not sure I’ll succeed.
First I’ll tell you a little story.
Back in 1966 I was on vacation with my family on the Adriatic coast. I met a Dutch family there. Parents, three kids, two girls and a guy. About my age.
I fell in lust with the dude…
Some six month later I got a letter from him. His English wasn’t very good… He wrote: Here is a sign of live from me.
I read ‘love’. Sign of love. And for quite a while I lived in lala land… where we were married and happy, blah blah blah.
At some point I re-read the letter I realized my mistake. He meant: a sign of life.
I came out of my mind where I KNEW what he meant… to reality, where I saw what he meant.
Now, if that is all that happened, it would not be worth writing about it. But as long as this was going on, about eight months altogether, I wasn’t living in reality, I was living in my head. I was going to university. But I did that only until this knight in shining armor would take me away. I hated school. I hated homework. And I hated every single thing because they weren’t what I wanted.
Typical of the mind-dwellers.
Once I came-to, once I came out of my cave, I snapped to life…
and life started to be what life was… not ‘what I didn’t want‘.
I still lived in ‘I am not loved‘, ‘I don’t matter‘, and other mind-places much of the time, but at least not all the time.
But my ‘ascension’ from mind-dweller to awareness began with re-reading that letter and seeing what was there, instead of what should have been… LOVE.
In English there is a saying: wake up and smell the coffee…
Yeah, that is exactly how it begins. You start smelling what is… in reality.
Now, what happens if you read this from the mind taking it into the mind directly?
You will ponder about it. You’ll wonder what you haven’t been smelling. And you’ll maybe write really ‘astute’ and ‘insightful’ emails to me about what you saw.
But you saw it in your mind Bubele! Not in reality!
For mind-dwellers seeing the facts is the hardest.
Why? Because all the facts come together with the interpretation, and a mind dweller has a hard time to separate those two.
And don’t be mistaken: if you saw it, you already said something.
To the degree you are a mind-dweller, to the degree you’ll have an idee fixe. A firm knowing that what you said is the only thing that can be said. Whatever you said…
And then you act, behave, feel accordingly.
Like my student whose interpretation was that I was wasting his time the other day. No doubt on his mind.
I managed to change what he said, but he would have never thought of doing that himself… because in the mind there is only one thing it could have meant… I. was. wasting. his. time.
The more things you know and know for sure the more you live in the mind.
Someone who lives in reality is never quite sure… the meanings one can make up about what is happening, or what happened are in the thousands.
The purpose of the Reframing Challenge is to bring people out of their minds. Their minds where the meaning is already decided, where the meaning is and idee fixe.
The ability to do that, the DNA capacity is rare. I named it Driftwood, because I liked the name… But in essence it enables you to step out of your mind, and move to the left or move to the right, and look again.
And to your utter surprise, things look different from different angles.
That is the essence of transformation…
Unless you can move out of your mind and move to a different place to look from, you have no access to transformation.
Here is another of my little stories… you probably heard me tell it before.
Back in 1992, I worked from a store-space. It had huge plate windows to the street… So I installed vertical blinds, the fabric kind… so it wasn’t dark in the office, but people could not see in. And I could not see out.
When you can’t see out, but things are happening there, like dogs, and cars, and people, you feel like a shut-in. And I felt like a shut-in.
It became intolerable.
One day I had an idea to look not in my feelings but in reality.
So I got up from my computer, and moved to the left. About a yard.
And lo and behold: I saw the street, I saw the people, I saw the passing cars, I even saw a dog…
The blades of the vertical blind were at a 30 degree… not quite closed.
I got transformation: what I was feeling was based on one fixed point in the universe, my head. The reality was that I could look out any time, and see what’s happening, by standing up and moving just a yard to the left… Any time.
So the ‘I am a shut-in‘ wasn’t true, it was just one interpretation, looking from my fixed place… not the truth.
And so is with any interpretation. Because there are thousands, the likelihood that the interpretation you came up with is true is next to nothing.
I promised to teach you how to come out of your cave…
Maybe you need to practice ‘looking again’. Like I did in both stories.
Instead of thinking about it, really LOOK again. And see what is there… black and white…
I can activate and re-activate the Driftwood capacity for you till I get blue in the face. If you don’t do the ACTION that I ask you to do, if you don’t look again from a different angle, the activation won’t matter. You’ll continue seeing what you have always seen.
Because you don’t look in reality: you are so darned sure that what you think you saw is what was there. That is the definition of idee fixe.
So I cannot help you.
Until you DO different, nothing will change. Looking differently is doing different.
Thinking about it is more of the same.
OK, but what about the people who allow me to show them different, but themselves won’t look different?
They need to do exactly what the 100% cave dwellers need to do: set out to look again. Look. In reality. So they can actually start to distinguish facts from their interpretation.
Don’t forget to step out of your mind…
PS: How can you gauge to what degree you live in your mind?
Any and all emotions come from words. And all of them come form the past or the future.
So if you are fearful, anxious, hopeful, feel angry, resentful, vengeful, or really any emotion, you are IN YOUR MIND…
Cautious? in your mind.
Orderly, organized, obedient, dutiful, even ambitions… in your mind.
Lazy? unmotivated? joyless? grumpy? ditto. in your mind.
You are only not in your mind when you are in the flow, interacting with some aspect of reality, like making music, watching a movie and not thinking about it, reading a book and not thinking about it, in a conversation and not wanting anything, just conversing…
Dancing, and not thinking about it. Not thinking about anything…
Rare. Moments only,
You are only aware when you are not in the mind.
It’s a degrees issue. You want that ‘in your mind‘ state less than 70%.
Here is just another story:
I wanted to make humus, because although chickpeas tested as OK for me, all the hums products I could have ordered tested ‘no’.
So I tested all the Tahini (sesame seed paste) on the market and only one product tested as yes.*** So I ordered it.
The oil and the ‘meat’ of the sesame seeds were completely separated. I guess that tin sat on those shelves for many years before I bought it.
It is like your mind. Reality and mind have separated… and there is no connected between them, except that both sit in the same ‘tin’…
Can you ‘homogenize’ them, again? That is the question, isn’t it?
Is there a capacity, a DNA capacity that would make it possible? What do you think? Please comment below.
In the meantime consider activating your Self-control capacity… so in the future you will be able to not go automatically to the same place, but look… again.
Self-control to the rescueIf I make you fresh salad with leaves that were sprayed with preservatives… if I make you fresh Tahini from seeds that were irradiated or sprayed, will the end result be better? I don’t think so.
Humans, humanity, isn’t looking at facts any more.
Same with supplements.
One 100% mind dweller client of mine ‘knew better’. I asked her to order Lithium Orotate for herself on Amazon. She didn’t ask: what brand? She didn’t ask: can’t I buy it locally? And what she actually bought tests no. Why? Its formulation is off… and therefore it’s harmful.
Elemental Lithium is toxic. Lithium Orotate’s formulation by Lithium Orotate from Advanced Research™ is the only one that tests yes. I bought Lithium Orotate powder for a no-name chemical factory in Bulgaria… the home of the correct formulation. The rest, 99% of what is on the market, is different, and harmful.
No wonder the Canadian Government put the supplement on blacklist.
