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Life is like a rusty screw: resists your efforts to be smooth… Full of frustration… isn’t it?
Introducing The rusty screw method… Removing the frustration without anything other than a screwdriver…
Your life, the quality of your life is the direct consequence of what you see.
Not everyone sees the same thing… even though what happens, what is in reality is the exact same thing… the only thing different is the observer.
People who are effective, happy, healthy, productive see reality differently.
So, for example, where I see a challenge, YAY! others, you, maybe, see a should, a shouldn’t, a wrong, a ‘f… that!’ Or something to lie about, something to hide, something shameful, funny, or disastrous.
There are only three major ways to see what you see:
- 1. Call it right
- 2. or call it wrong
- 3. or call it a seeming
The difference between intelligent people and not intelligent people is right there.
Remember the Charles Bukowski quote? The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
Yeah…
Even though on the surface the second one looks better than the first… it isn’t. Unless you actually know that reality is collective hunch, you are still considering that what you say about reality is true.
Unless you actually know, unless you are aware, conscious and RESPONSIBLE for what you say as your own creation, you are still one of the stupid ones…
So let’s look at the word SEEMING and see what the heck it may mean to us.
I learned that word in a Landmark Education course, called The Wisdom Course.
It’s a year long course… and supposedly it leads to wisdom. Except unless you GET clearly that the pivoting point, the whole difference between stupid AND a victim of life and others is that SEEMING distinction, you got a lot of fun in that course… and yeah, it was expensive and it was fun. I did it twice for good measure.
So the moment you can look at ANYTHING as a seeming, you own that you have already said something.
Yeah. At the instant level, the instinctual level, at the base, we all say something… and it is not that what we see is a seeming.
We already KNOW what it is and it is either right or wrong.
So if you have been trying not to see that… stop.
First you need to own that the chassis humans are built on is a meaning making machine… a right/wrong machine… a reaction machine.
Unless you OWN that, you’ll be stuck forever in stupid.
So the moment you can own that you already said something, you can calm down and see that you have the power to say anything… and look what to say.
In the Reality, Reframe, Completion series of challenges, that is what you are supposed to learn.
If you learn it, you go from always stupid to rarely stupid… which is as close to wisdom as a human can get.
If you don’t learn it… you remain stupid AND ineffective, and in inner turmoil… because you are playing with your kaka, hoping that it’s chocolate.
In that Wisdom Course the means to get to realization and maybe to clarity is collages, and the autobiography…
Both are intense, labor intensive, and both are to show you that what you say is not the only thing you could say.
I.HATED.IT!
After all who likes to be told that they have been wrong their entire life?! Not me, thank you very much.
Except even just one instance of ‘having been wrong’ can be a godsend…
…because around that untruth you can unravel the whole ‘conspiracy’ of your life.
Like Archimedes said: give me a place to stand, a long enough lever, and I’ll move the world… or however that quote is verbatim.
- So the solid place to stand was: I have been telling myself stories about my life that are not true. Grrr.
- The lever was, in the Wisdom Course, the collages. Specifically the Seeming collages, where you make a collage with many pictures to show that in fact THAT.IS.HOW.IT.IS!
We have many seemings… One of mine that I have shared about before, is that I am alone.
It’s the collage where I am that black bear on the top of the pine tree, and everyone is crowding in groups… penguins, and all kinds of other animals.
While you do the collage you weep, you drip grief and self-pity… I did.
But once the collage is done, you write on the back: It seems that I am alone… and then you look at the picture, the collage as a whole and you see what you see.
If you see that you said ‘right’ or you said ‘wrong’ and in fact neither is true, that you saying that doesn’t make it so…
If you can bring some doubt into your seeing, then you just took a tiny step in the direction of wisdom.
They, Landmark Education, don’t tell you that. Why? Maybe because they don’t want you to pretend. Maybe because the work the ‘worm’ does to break the cocoon open is what makes it a butterfly, maybe they, the leaders haven’t seen that either…
I don’t know. And I don’t care much.
I saw it, and that is what I paid the big bucks for.
And because I saw it, it is mine, no one can take it away from me.
If you pretended because you care what I’ll say about you, they you are still stupid, but now doubly stupid, because you are even fooling yourself.
The Reality Challenge is a lot like the Wisdom Course with a few differences and only one similarity.
The similarity is that it is designed to take you to wisdom… Wisdom translates to grace and ease and power in life. That is the ultimate goal: that you live a life you love, and you live it powerfully.
The difference is the price and the form.
In the Reality Challenge you jot down and at the end of the day send me all the instances where you said: ‘I should, shouldn’t, should have, shouldn’t have’
What I don’t say because I hope you realize, is that by the time you say should… etc. you have already said ‘right/wrong’ so the shoulds are a reaction to that.
Now, I have said above that saying right/wrong is normal, comes with the hardware. Even the shoulds come with the hardware. What you do with those, on the other hand, comes from you.
Even if you don’t write it down, your typical ‘therefore’ shines through.
You go where you normally go when you have said something is wrong.
You go to pretending, lying, explaining, justifying, grieving, feeling powerless, trying to change it… There are other moves I just can’t think of them right now.
Instead of seeing that you have reacted… or more precisely the animal machine reacted… and go and see if you have a seeming, go and see if you need to do something about it.
- One of my clients has a new boyfriend. She doesn’t like him. Her feelings have told her so… aversion.
Yet he is playing in a lot of her shoulds.
Almost instantly the seeming can be seen from the side: ‘I am a martyr, I am supposed to do things I don’t like‘
- Another client has a should about forgiving her cheating husband. She says she should… But keeping that should in place is a great justification for being miserable, feeling bad about herself, feeling that the world is giving her challenges that she is not a match to. Another seeming: ‘I am superwoman, but the world is against me.’
We are all the same in this regard.
- The more seemings you have the more rackets you have.
- The more seemings you recognize AS SEEMINGS the more power you have to stop the racket from running a full cycle.
We all have a tendency to own and be proud of every good thing that happens, and deflect responsibility when things don’t go well.
The job is to see that your seemings are your creation and without them life could be smoother, better, nicer, richer, more abundant.
So learning to not do your usual song and dance reaction to it is the JOB.
But not pretending that you are now better than it, more, there, and all the happy horseshit that you would make you shout: Victory!
All victories are momentary.
If you think any of them stay, you are delusional.
The world, reality, is changing every minute of every hour of every day!
So you need to stay aware and alert… leave one eye out in reality, so you can catch yourself. YOURSELF…
And have only one thing solid and unchanging, until YOU change it: where you intend to go.
where you intend to go.
The where you intend to go will be most important in the Skill Building Challenge.
If you only have goals for the immediate, you’ll never get anywhere.
I had a private call yesterday that ended in massive disappointment for me.
After carefully and I must say generously advised my client what to go for, he blurted out that his goal is to make some money…
So here is the really bad news: unless you are up to something greater than your immediate ‘need’, you need to get yourself out of the ‘right/wrong’ paradigm that is all about you… and there is no room there, no space there, no chance for the eternal to enter.
The divine I call it.
I go as far as to say ‘I bring the divine to everything‘ as may favorite activity.
And when I do I do, and when I don’t, I look how I could.
Desire and the divine
I have noticed that the higher my desire, the less the divine matters to me. I want a gadget so I can make food that is not good for me? No chance for the divine to be there.
And no chance for my life to work either… No chance to get healthy enough so I could actually move house… either down the street or another state, or another country. No chance. So I take a deep breath and purge that desire… it hurts while I am purging it… If one time purging is not enough, I’ll do it until it goes.
Just like wiggling the rusted in screw:
you wiggle it until it can be unscrewed. However long it takes. Without forcing, without hurry, without a doubt that you’ll do it.
Bringing the divine to it…
What is the divine?
The eternal. The lasting. The forever… as opposed to desire, which is always for the temporary, the fleeting, for the meh…
What else is not divine? Tree of Knowledge… What you read on the internet, what even your doctor tells you, what even ‘science’, your clergyman, or your mother tells you. What your Bible, Quran, Baghavad Gitta says… it is all Tree of Knowledge, lacking the divine.
So now, what should you do?
In my humble opinion, you should do the Reality Challenge. You can add to it doing collages… but one thing is: the Reality Challenge, treated as a campaign, however long you are willing to wiggle that rusted in screw, will not do anything for you or for you life.
So if nothing else, you’ll get, on the first level, some increase of awareness, some increase in consistency, and get to ‘talk to me’ every day.
That should be enough to keep you wanting it… I hope.
Get on the path to Wisdom
