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For you everything is the same as everything else…
Or said in a different way: you can’t tell the forest from the trees.
You can’t tell your ass from a hole in the ground
You can’t see the big picture
All mean the same: you can’t see distinction.
When you are a student, you use the jargon, but you don’t see what it means. You use it thinking that saying the word means you can see it, you can be guided by it…
I took to distinctions like fish takes to water.
Because of that it never made sense to me what’s the problem.
Many teachers are like me: you can’t teach what you didn’t have to learn. But learning to see it is mandatory if you want to become a person who can become new in any way.
Underneath any real change there is a distinction or two.
Why do people have such a hard time with distinctions?
Humans have a weakness, in spite of their advanced DNA. But DNA is like a multiple choice exam. It is also like a Swedish Buffet: you can pick and choose your dinner. but you cannot choose everything.
And people choose what brings instant benefits… thus miss the eternal, the long term, the big picture benefits. And, unbeknownst to them they do this at their own demise…
I’ll make up a silly analogy so you can understand: when you walk on a rocky surface at night it brings immediate benefit to have the flashlight and your eyes on your feet, so you don’t step into a hole, or god forbid turn an ankle on a pebble.
But the same behavior, putting the light on your feet doesn’t serve you eternally. On the long term. You need to be able to look where you are going, not just where your feet are.
That is a DISTINCTION that most people miss. their eyes are glued to their feet. and they treat the direction as unimportant.
Looking at both, the feet and the direction, is missing for most people.
Looking at the direction, at the ‘where are you going with that?‘ or ‘to what end?‘ is the same capacity as what I am teaching in the Driftwood video… Seeing both needs the same capacity: bilocation.
So if you want to get from A to B, you need to be able to see both the immediate and the long term… aka the consequences.
This ‘feet stuck in the mud’ way of looking is everywhere. It is not just you, it is everyone. Even the 1000 spends some time just looking at their feet.
All my challenges thus far have been designed to add the second view to your ‘arsenal’, to your tool-kit. To open up the Driftwood DNA… and use it.
So far no one has taken advantage of it.
So how does it look when you do, and when you don’t take advantage of it?
It is easy… it is how the world occurs to you now!
When you don’t have and utilize the driftwood, the whole world OCCURS to you as if you were in the center of it.
All your sentences begin with I, or alternatively what they, or it did to YOU. How you see the world from your own eyes, and that’s it. No seeing beyond it.
One participant in the current challenge ‘managed’ to put herself into another person’s body, and look from there. but the eyes were still strictly focused on the mud around the feet.
None of them widened their cone of vision, or looked onto the path away from the feet.
So how do you do it, if you, at this point, can’t do it?
I am still working on finding the way to teach it, to force your eyes away from your feet…
My very first attempt at teaching distinguishing or distinction was the color exercise.
In the color exercise the challenge was, to no one’s surprise, to see the immediate and the distant at the same time. You have a swatch of the color your chose, and you compare it with the colors in the world… It needs the capacity. it can breathe life to it…
To my utter despair, everyone came back after a day and declared victory. They thought the challenge was finding the same color… not to practice to see sameness.
Remember that the starting point is ‘for you everything is the same as everything else… except that not always‘
So when the participants managed to see same or similarity once, or ten times, they were done. no distinction, no self-awareness, no learning.
Their attitude for the challenge was ‘get this done so we get it out of the way‘… the same attitude you have in everything. No one asked: what is the goal? No one asked: what is the gain? Asked: To what end? Just like with everything else in life. Sigh…
And the exact same thing has happened in the three challenges after the color exercise. We could even consider the five questions a challenge, the fourth.
All were failures, as far as the real purpose of the challenges was.
So my current ‘little idea’ (M. Hercules Poirot anyone?) is…
…that if you look at what you are looking at, your feet, but through the FILTER or FRAME of a distinction, then that should automatically widen your cone of vision, so you are be able to see the context.
Will it work? We shall see…
You see, your way of looking applies to everyone, including 99% detectives, 99% of scientists, 99% of ‘thinkers’, 99% of entrepreneurs. But master detectives, like M. Poirot, look through distinctions… and that is why they succeed in unconcealing the crime, its motives, and its perpetrators, when the police can’t see a thing.
The Driftwood way of looking is the key to their method.
I’ll demonstrate this way of looking here: I’ll use a comment on Friday’s article.
In that article I talk about the pull. I attribute the pull to your soul correction, your shadow… and that it is always towards the temporary and not the permanent.
So even in the question I am talking about the immediate. I am saying that you focus on the temporary, the immediate, and not on the bigger picture.
Here is what the commenter said:
What’s my pull? The pull to quit… to not give a f*ck. the pull to escape into fantasy. the pull to should have done this and that.
Obviously all that behavior is from looking at your feet.
All from feelings… Feelings are in the narrow cone, obviously, so when you look at your feeling to describe something you are thinking in that ‘feet stuck in the mud’ way.
But that same pull looked at through a filter, through a larger frame, that same pull placed inside a larger context, by placing a filter, a distinction called ‘the machine’ can be seen differently. each pull you feel is the pull of the machine, we call racket. And because the moment you look at what’s happening through the racket, you can see that each pull is the pull of a payoff. The payoff is the fuel of the racket.
And even wider view at your pulls would include the consequences, we call the costs.
So when you look at the pulls and the behaviors of the commenter, you see two more distinctions:
1. avoiding
2. regret
the pull to quit, the pull to not give a fig, the pull to escape are the trees. Avoiding is the forest… the distinction.
the ‘should have done this and that’ is the tree. Regret is the forest.
So you see, without seeing the forest, without seeing the distinction, he is stuck with his pulls… and won’t be able to do anything different. Because he cannot see really what is the energy, the irresistible pull.
So let’s look further… through the main distinction of ‘racket’
So what is he avoiding? Four of the payoffs are avoidance based: avoid looking bad, avoid domination, avoid losing, avoid responsibility.
He seems to be avoiding all four.
If he never does anything, he avoids being a beginner, a bumbling idiot. Avoids making mistakes. Avoid being seen for what he is: an ordinary human.
If he never does anything, he manages to avoid the domination of life, the domination of his own word, the domination of reality that only action produces anything. He can remain in his fantasy world where his mind can create anything shiny… Because his soul correction is ‘Memories’, my guess that this, avoid the domination of reality is the main driver.
And if he never does anything, he avoids losing, but by necessity he also avoids winning…
And with all three above he manages to avoid being the driver of his life… and manages to be the effect, the victim, because he never accomplishes anything.
Now, if you look at what he wrote, you can see no way for him to behave differently, because unless you can go below the surface, all the way to the REAL pull, you cannot change anything.
Quitting is the result of something. Saying ‘I don’t give a f…’ is the result of something. Escaping into fantasy is the result of something…
Of what? Of being afraid to be cause. Of anything.
And this is when his defining incident, his break in belonging incident is so helpful:
He had asthma as a little kid. His mother told him that he can drop dead if he does what the other kids do… His mother told him that his doing will kill him.
So he didn’t. He doesn’t want to die. He doesn’t want to cause his own death.
But that is now his whole world… he cannot, he doesn’t dare to do ANYTHING… and he doesn’t…
So if we go back there and attempt to change the SCRIPT, we would need to clarify that his mother meant only the rough physical playing his ‘friends’ did, not everything.
With the same warning his mother gave him he could have become a nerd who does nerdy things, like write books and plays…
But his understanding as a kid was that he is not supposed to, not allowed to do anything other than fantasize…
Death is what he is trying to avoid… But trust me I know, death is not that easy to accomplish… lol.
But you see, going through the distinction: racket/payoff we got to a place where he can change his mind. Will he? I don’t know. But he can.
OK, that was an example of the process.
Let’s see if we can get below the surface of this other one?
It’s spring and it is the season of the stink bug. I know it has a proper name. But this bug’s most significant characteristic is that it stinks when squashed.
I am deadly afraid of this bug. I have always been. Why?
It’s a racket. Every fear is a racket… Every emotion is a racket.
And if it is a racket then there is a payoff, even if it is invisible to me.
I am avoiding something… When there is a fear, it is always avoidance. Here, again, we have four kinds of avoidance based payoffs: avoid looking bad, avoid domination, avoid losing, avoid responsibility.
I don’t see that it is avoiding looking bad… Neither it is avoiding domination or losing. Then it must be avoiding responsibility.
I have never looked at this before. I am as curious as you SHOULD BE.
Avoid being responsible for what?
Again, we’ll go back to the first incident, which in my case was being raped at a country fair or whatever it was.
I have never truly taken responsibility for not even questioning the guy before I went with him… just like all the little girls in the movie ‘M’ (The Fritz Lang movie I have written a lot about).
I so wanted to be rescued, that I threw all caution to the wind…
I was nearly four years old. Since then I have countless examples of repeating that same script… over and over, with the same exact result: I got hurt.
Wow, so I just need to come to terms with the fact that there is no such thing as rescue… my life is entirely up to me. Ffff… lol.
So finding the way to get rid of, of trapping the stink bugs is my immediate solution… But to rid myself of the script, I need to accept, once and for all, that no one is coming to rescue me.
I try, I attempt to teach what came to me naturally and easily.
But Source says, it is possible. And I will either succeed or die trying.
We’ll start this work in this coming Thursday’s workshop.
I’ll either continue doing digging webinars, or I’ll create a new Challenge… It depends on what I’ll see in the workshop.
This coming workshop will attempt to create what we call ‘completion’, a state of whole and complete, nothing missing, nothing to fix.
We’ll use distinctions… because without distinctions it can’t be done. Without distinctions you’ll never feel complete.
Being complete is a beingness and a feeling. As rare as snow in July on the Northern hemisphere.
