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I woke up at 3 am today. Shall I get up? I asked myself. Yes…. said something…
And then I asked, what part of me that wants me to get up.
My body, my intellect,
My psychology…
What is Psychology? Feeling science… right?
I want to be proud of myself.
I want to love myself. Happy to be me.
And that… that is what we call integrity.
We are very involved, very concerned about the particulars, but it is really our feelings. We want to feel good about who we are.
And when we don’t feel good about who we are: we are not happy.
Quora has become a trash can… titillating stories. The goal is titillation.
But today a gem came up, and I want you to have it.
I am quoting:
Our six-year-old handed us a note…
Our six-year-old handed us a note. His teacher had called my wife and I in for an emergency meeting. We asked our son if he had any idea why
and he said, ‘She didn’t like a drawing I did.’
We went in the next day.
His teacher pulled the drawing below out and said, ‘I asked him to draw his family and he drew this. Would you mind explaining?’
‘Not at all.’ my wife said. ‘Family vacation. Snorkeling off the Bahamas.’
Quora is full of ‘feel-good’ stories.
What’s the purpose?
On the surface the story gives you hope about human goodness. But every feel-good story reminds you that you are not good. That you don’t like people, that you don’t care about anyone other than yourself. And instead of causing good feelings, these stories cause self-hate.
I have a new word I learned from my favorite Hungarian engineer, Margoczi, whose new book is quite unreadable, but my correspondence with him has lit up a fire under my arse.
He calls this setup a word-cage.
Religion is a word-cage. In the center is the attractor: an undefinable, vague concept. For today’s humans nearly any word, any concept is vague, and undefinable. Because definition does not actually define these words… the method to gain clarity is distinguishing… But I digress…
In religion’s case the vague, undefinable concept is a deity. Serving that deity. Blah blah blah.
I am not religious, so you’ll forgive me if I am insensitive…
And like any self-respecting cage the outside boundary, the bars of the cage, in the case of the Christianity, are the commandment. The ten commandments. They are fear-inducing, because we all violate them, one or more of them, habitually. Because they are MADE UP!
And then, if you are religious, you fear your god’s punishment. If you are an atheist, you just hate yourself. Because doing any of those things is WRONG. You hate yourself, you hate others, you hate life.
Our whole world is a set of word-cages… all constructed, consciously, intentionally, and maliciously to rob us of our power, of our self-love, of feeling like a person worthy of being a person.
If you want to be happy, successful, and you want to love yourself…
…what can you do? What can you do about these word-cages?
Ultimately, if you looked you would be able to see that everything I teach is designed to give YOU the power to call.
To call bs, to call complete, to call what’s important.
To become a person who can call it…
The difficulty is that as long as your foundation, your seed level, remains in place, everything we do is apple-polishing.
For most people that foundation is believing in some entity who sets right and wrong. The moral code setter…
That moral code setter, the one who can call something right or wrong is the central piece of that word-cage.
Moral code…
I am amoral. That doesn’t mean I don’t have right and wrong, but no one gave them to me. I decided what is right and what is wrong.
So I’ve escaped the word-cage to the degree I have.
Of course my mother’s daily beatings, and my father’s occasional beating me seemed to indicate some boundaries, but they weren’t defined as wrong… And I never knew why I was beaten. You would have, but I didn’t know. Maybe I am not very smart.
I have been allowing my distaste to be the guide. I have been allowing my distaste to guide me away from ‘wrong’. So I allow MY distaste to tell me what’s wrong, not some authority’s, not my parents’, not even my students’. It irks you doesn’t it? You want me to be different and I ignore your wishes.
The rights and the wrongs of the world
When I was in the six-month training program to lead introductory seminars, in essence sales presentations for Landmark Education, one of the rules I had to agree was to not violate traffic rules of the world.
Traffic rules act a lot like a word-cage. The roads would be safe up to a hundred miles an hour if you were a good driver. The cars are built for that same speed. But the speed limit is half of that or less.
So unless you are eighty years old or older, you will drive faster than the speed limit.
Your only concern is to not get caught.
So how much attention can you give to being good, caring, loving your neighbor? None.
If nothing else, that speed limit hoax has trained you to never do the right thing… and to hate yourself.
And when you hate yourself, when all your self-concern is to not get caught, not be found out. So how effective are you AT life?
Not very… or not at all.
Now, question. Was Landmark Education right about that the solution is to keep the speed limit? Not at all. In fact Landmark was part of the problem, in a way. They accepted the ‘deity’ in the middle, undisputed.
In my programs the job is to dispute the middle. The deity of the word cage.
So that you can be free. So that you can love yourself.
And when you love yourself you love your life. And when you love your life, you take care of it.
And ultimately that is what life is about.
We go back to the beginningI haven’t spoken of ‘my’ raccoons for a while.
Now they seem to come back at daybreak only every few days. And they do make noise trying to enlarge the gap between the layers of the outside wall.
When I hear it over the loud drone of the fan I talk to ‘her’, the mother, and warn her that I can hear her. She listens, and most of the time stops the activity.
She already knows that I am powerless about evicting her, or would have done it already. So now it is RESPECT that stays her activity. A kind of ‘I know I am a bother. I am trying to be as little bother as I can. Thank you for telling me what level of noise bothers you.‘ says the raccoon mother.
Raccoons don’t live in a word-cage.
And they are happy (I say).
Your job is to destroy the ‘deities’ of your word-cages, so you can be free. So you can be happy.
The path to that is responsibility.
Responsibility is simple. It says: ‘I did that. or I did a part of it. or I accepted that as the truth.’
And mean it.
It’s a MOVE to take your power back.
Now, some of my students in the ALLOWING Challenge are still in a word-cage. This word-cage is also some morality crap: it says something like ‘be nice’. ‘Don’t rattle the cage!’ Maybe ‘Don’t upset anyone, look at everything through rose colored glasses‘.
I call that positive thinking…
Positive thinking is one of those pesky deities that entrap you in a word-cage.
It says if you are positive, the word will respond in like. Which is about as much crap as anyone can give you. A true deity… ugh. Up there with the ‘attraction’ deity…
All made up, all create a word-cage. All manufactured to suck you dry.
We slew deities here.
If you don’t have the stomach for it, then you probably shouldn’t be here.
