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OK, Sophie, but what is the bottle you are in? And what is the label?
Most everything that is about you is the bottle and most everything that would clue you in why you are stuck, why you don’t feel well, why your life works the way it works is the label.
To read the label, you need get outside of the bottle… while you are also in it.
I call it bilocation… but not in the physical or esoteric sense…
I mean it in the intellectual sense.
Sentience means you can bilocate.
The word sentience is derived from the Latin word sentientem, which means feeling. The adjective form is sentient. You are aware, you FEEL yourself.
You can get out of your head and actually see, observe what the body is doing there. See things about it, its attitude, maybe you can even see or figure out its worldview, mindset, errors, fallacies, delusions… while from the inside you can’t.
Almost everything you say about yourself from the inside of the bottle is inaccurate.
Muscletest says: about 1% truth value.
What you ‘think’ about yourself, what you ‘feel’ about yourself… inside the bottle.
Depending on your level of trust…
…you can use an outside person’s view as a guide, as guidance, if getting out of the bottle is beyond your current capabilities.
The average level of trust, in this regard, in humans is 3%.
The biggest gift you can give to yourself and to me is your trust.
How do I know that you trust me? You at least consider taking what I say to you to heart. Attempt to see what I see, from the outside of the bottle.
One of the aspects of being an empath, a true and trained empath, is to be able to bilocate… Be in your body, aka inside your bottle with you, and of course outside of the bottle… my natural view of you.
I can hear, feel, and go through your inner motions when I say something to you that doesn’t agree with your inner view of yourself.
I can feel as you take it straight to your mind… and compare it with what you see, and I can see the moment when you discard it. And I can feel the ‘ugh’ feeling you do it with.
That was the case with nearly every client for tens of years, for me as a coach. Very unpleasant… unrewarding…
I stumbled on challenges by chance.
A challenge is a training tool… where you do 100% of the work, and you get some feedback, some guidance, but not much.
It is a self-teaching tool.
In the normal course of events you’d try to do something, and give up after three days, some even less. But in a challenge, at least my challenges, you are visible, you get my undivided attention, and if you value it (not all do!) then you don’t want to lose it, so you actually do the work.
If you are one of the people who have dropped out of my challenges: what the label on the bottle says to me that you don’t value my attention. You know who you are. And if you don’t value my attention, you probably don’t value much about my programs either. You probably consider yourself higher and mightier than me, and at best you pick and choose what you accept. Because you know. And you don’t get guided… you are on your own.
One of the things about trust, that everybody knows but is wrong…
….is that you need to deserve trust. That you give someone your trust after they proved to you that they can trust you.
The same concept reigns in the public, in the culture, about love. You love someone if and only if they earn your love.
And did you notice what a shitty life that gives you?
It gives all the power to a circumstance, to the other… and leaves you as an effect, a beach ball on open ocean, lost… waiting for something you call ‘your life’. Your ship to arrive.
No. Both trust and love are an action… an action that creates itself as a context inside which you can live with another. You create it, you cause it, you are the boss. And inside that context you cause trust to be there, and love to be there. Trust and love give you YOUR speaking, your attitude, your actions…
But not blind… Not blind love, not blind trust.
Of course, if your whole game is that of a victim…
…cheated out of what is due to you, then you’ll do the exact opposite. And like with everything, what you expect you get… You make sure… can’t leave it to chance! Nothing can be your fault… It is them… and you are a victim, and you are absolutely positive about it.
So let me say it again: trust is something you give. As a context. As a space for the other. A space for yourself.
And like I said before: if and when they do something that doesn’t match the space… doubt the space YOU provided, not the other.
That is the only way to drive your own life, and not be the beach ball.
I have an example for that. And if you have one example for this, you probably have a thousand…
I hired a guy to do work for me. In the first few days I trained him, watched over his shoulder, and then got busy with my own stuff, although in the periphery of my view I saw that he was doing the wrong thing, that he wasn’t earning his keep.
I waited and waited and waited, got really angry, I blasted him and fired him.
If I want to be responsible for my own machine here, which is the key to happiness, by the way, I would tell the truth.
- I hired someone who needed training.
- I hired someone who needed management.
- And I refused to manage.
- I refused to be the boss. So he, predictably, slacked off. I knew he would… and I didn’t know…
The space I provided for him wasn’t trust. It was ‘you are on your own, buddy. Let’s see when you’ll rip me off!‘ I set him up… ugh.
So back to the challenges:
the space a challenge is for is to provide trust to the participants that they can and will do the work. And then do what any sane person would do: manage them, and not let them stray…
You, anyone, cannot be trustworthy in a space that isn’t. When trust isn’t there as a context, then what is there is a free-for-all… So if you say you trust but your awareness isn’t there… then you set the other up to do what you, in a way, you trust them to do, so you can remain a victim.
You, me, everyone.
Obviously I have a trust issue. Everyone with a victim racket does.
What’s a racket? It is an invisible dynamic that is as universal as anything: it is part and parcel with the human condition.
So if you are a human, you have a racket. Or more precisely, a racket has you.
To the degree that you can get outside of the bottle, or to the degree that you can adopt a guide’s view of your racket, you can be happy and successful, and productive, even though you have a killer racket.
Your racket has a trigger…
My racket’s trigger is that I want other people, all people, to just do what they have to do, so I can do what I want to do. So I take my awareness away, and I don’t manage them.
People, the services, everything.
Vigilance is not my favorite activity, because I just want to do what I want to do, and vigilance is not part of it.
Vigilance includes making virtually air tight agreements. And management. Awareness. Even vigilance the beingness.
I think what I just saw, reading a Reddit thread deserves an article on its own, but just to do a ‘bookmark’ here… the idea is that there are two conflicting desires, with a mutually exclusive (what does that mean?) outcome…
- In my case: get something done by another… and be left alone.
- In my fired helper’s case: I want the money but I don’t want to do the work
- My student whose email I just read: I don’t want to be good but I want to enjoy the results of seeming good?
This wording is new to me, so I am probably clumsy.
In the Reddit thread
…the case was of the landscaper who spoke out against immigrants, but enjoyed the benefit of the lower wages they are willing to work for. Conflict. Inner conflict. Two mutually exclusive outcomes driven by two different desires.
I am going to look at this: is this always the case? I don’t know yet. Muscletest says ‘yes’. but for me it is Tree of Knowledge… I need to see it to make it mine.
Anyway, when it comes to trust, when it comes to anything that needs trust: being guided, buying something, getting healing…
…blind trust is stupid.
The trust where you call the shot: I trust you but I make sure I am aware, maybe even vigilant is what is going to work.
I would have had a very different life, had I mastered this kind of trust, but I still haven’t. I am still learning to get the hang of it.
It’s a skill… not just an ability. I think I am completely able, but I am still a bumbling idiot.
Often it is an issue of self-trust… by the way. My hunch is that the path to mastery is the same… You create a context, and then muddle your way, consistently, until you actually get good at it… as opposed to what you are doing today: drop whatever you said you trusted yourself with within three days. Ugh.
One of my students, at my prompting in the last article to pick some way of being to say no to… decided that being a putz is his… ‘I am unwilling to be‘
He said: ‘I am unwilling to be a putz’
Of course the racket will want you to end up being a putz, or whatever your ‘unwilling to be’ is.
Unless you consider this a master course… a course to mastering… a skill builder course… you’ll forget all about it, and the racket will be able to chew up your life unimpeded.
Trust yourself that you will
1. forget about it
2. won’t want to do it
3. would rather forget about it and wallow in your victimhood
4. and trust yourself that you CAN learn to say no to all of them, at least some of the time.
But what is missing? You don’t trust that your self-control will do it. What self-control?
Self-control is the absolute bottom ability that everything is built on. And humanity’s overall self-control, in practice, is one quarter of a percent.
The student who is unwilling to be a putz: his self-control is 1%… To be able to have a life where he doesn’t end up being a putz in the majority of circumstances needs his self-control to grow. And he has no idea how to do it, because most things can only be learned by doing it. He hasn’t been a doer, he has been a ponderer.
Every time he’ll choose the hard not the easy way, every time he’ll say ‘no’ to the easy way will train him…
In action all this boils down to choice.
Choosing is when it is you who chooses, when there is no ‘because’. If there is a because, then what comes after that word is what chose, not you.
If you trust because… then you didn’t choose to trust. Also if you love because… then you didn’t choose to love.
Trust, love, do, grow, accomplish, for no reason.
That is when life is allowed to be beautiful and joyful. Where you are awesome, complete, full, joyous, satisfied, and whole.
You have reasons? All that great stuff will elude you.
So what should you do if you were interested in becoming that awesome, complete, full, joyous, satisfied, and whole person?
First you probably need to learn what is actually choosing… the invisible dynamics.
You can learn them all, or you can learn just one: the Racket.
Judging from the many people who have bought all the invisible dynamics before you… I recommend that you get The Racket… and start becoming first conversant, then start recognizing the moves both on yourself and others.
Just learning about it will give you encyclopedial knowledge… which is useless.
If enough people start being interested in becoming awesome, complete, full, joyous, satisfied, and whole through mastering The Racket, I’ll do a Racket Challenge… that could be fun…
But first you need to learn how it really works… so you can recognize it. It is not easy… so if you are expecting easy because you are smart: you won’t do well with it. The smarter you think yourself, the less you’ll see it.
With that warning, here is The Racket for you to buy.
Learn the Racket…
