Podcast: Play in new window | Download
One of the genius moves of Kabbalah is to call the little voice, the evil inclination, The Opponent.
That is to say anything that takes you out of your natural state of goodness, expanding, being in harmony with all of it, Kabbalah calls it the Opponent.
Compare that with how YOU think: I am, I did, I was…
The little voice, all the shoulds, and all the labels, and all that totally paralyzing stuff isn’t said by you. It is the Opponent.
All the wants. All the needs. And all the fears… It is the Opponent that is doing it.
Now watch the dynamic: there is you and there is the Opponent. You’ll fight for your right to be free, won’t you? Because that is what YOU want. you want to do good, be good, be expanding, and the darn Opponent is forcing you to do whatever you don’t want.
Of course, if you don’t fight for anything… Kabbalah is not for you.
It is not an accident that for thousands of years Kabbalah, the studying of Kabbalah was restricted to men over 40, who have already proved that they will fight for their right to be themselves.
Not a putz, not a pushover.
Another way to deal with the pesky Opponent is to pay him no heed. It is not a he, it is not a she, it is an IT. And the more you allow it to do its own thing without considering it binding to you, binding for you to obey, to fight, to oppose, to get upset, angry, sad, or any of the things you now get, the less the Opponent bothers with you. It will seek greener pastures.
Humanity as a species, is very reactive. We react not to facts they react to meanings.
Meanings are not the same as a fact. Meanings are an interpretation of a fact. So more often than not, the reaction is disproportionate to a fact, or aggravating of the fact. not a good move.
Considering the Opponent at work. considering that the Opponent is giving the meaning. It effectively separates the fact from the meaning, and your actions can be more astute, more shrewd, more accurate. and your life a lot less like a drama.
You could argue that all the religions that used Judaism as the template had a character they call Satan, Devil, or whatever they call the character that is on the side of bad. But that character is not personal. That character is larger than life, and opposes not YOU, it opposes your deity, god, or whatever name you give your deity.
So on the personal level it doesn’t help you soft yourself out, doesn’t help you know what you are about, doesn’t help you to have a Self. So it doesn’t allow you to become a person. Without a Self you are not a person, you are an object in the world of objects, and you are doing object things. like want to dominate, or want to be right, or conquer nations, kill entire races, etc.
People with a Self wouldn’t.
In the Allowing Challenge one of my clients is winning and winning big.
His originating incident was allowing us to get a glimpse of how the Opponent has been driving him and his life for many decades.
His story is the ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’, and Aesop fable.
The tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly fools villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his town’s flock. When an actual wolf appears and the boy calls for help, the villagers believe that it is another false alarm, and the sheep are eaten by the wolf.
He has been trying to get attention by ‘crying wolf’… complaining about everything and everyone.
So the Allowing Challenge was the perfect ‘playground’ for him to learn to allow the Opponent to do whatever it likes to do, and eventually learn not to react. Not to react with anger, not to react with complaining to the many many many wrongs he sees.
Now that he has freed up his time and energy, he may even start redirecting that energy and do something useful, beneficial, enriching with it.
He likes guided meditation. He may want to create a business with it for all I know. And finally get paid for his seemingly self-sacrificial actions that never got him what he hoped they would: notoriety. Being valued and appreciated.
By the way: we have looked and our originating stories, if we look from the side, can be seen as one of the fairy tales, Aesop stories, Grimm tales…
Of course the original meaning distorted the facts and replaced them with meanings. And of course you have been suffering ever since, because the meanings were not giving you any power. So looking at those incidents from the side, and seeing them as one of these teaching stories can often do the trick: separate you from the original meaning, and give you power with the Opponent. The tireless Opponent… that will never quit.
Your mettle gets measured in every ‘interaction’ with the Opponent.
Your mettle, your ability to cope well with difficulties or to face a demanding situation in a spirited and resilient way, is what we call TLB here… your twitchy little bastard score.
What is a twitchy little bastard, you ask? The twitchiness is the issue. And maybe the little?
A twitchy little bastard is reactive. He (or she) misinterpret everything according to their inner code book, and react to the meaning, react to the interpretation. That is what makes him (or her) twitchy…
An intelligent person with some mettle deals with reality. Can stand still until the situation is clearly visible. And then act, according to what’s happening, not some made up story about what’s happening.
A twitchy little bastard most of the time has already ‘twitched’ and never realized their misunderstanding.
Also, I say, a twitchy little bastard has given themselves over to some mirages, that things are instant. That all you have to do is want something really hard… and it will manifest.
Even if you could manifest with your thoughts, it would take a long time…
I heard in an Kabbalah lecture that god considered creating the world hard work. And a lot of holding that thought for a really really long time.
If you learned anything ever, you probably know that since the Tsimtsum, the moment the world STARTED to be manifest, the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. Earth’s age is 4.5 billion years. So if god needed to hold the thought that long, do you think you can just think something and it manifests?
So you see, humanity’s combined TLB is very consistent with humanity’s combined attention span. At this point it is probably too short even to remember what you were looking for when you went from one room to another, let alone ‘manifesting’ anything.
One of the main difference between people who get things done. People who amount to much. Who are worth a dime is not that their attention span is necessarily much longer than yours. The Opponent is hellbent on bringing disruption, distractions to everyone.
People who achieve and therefore I much happier than the rest know the meaning of ‘keeping things in existence’.
The famous last words of most people is ‘I’ll remember.’
People who ‘remember’, remember because they kept things, what they said, what they intended in existence. Wrote in down in words that retained the intention, retained the inspiration, retained the possibility.
People often take a note of something they don’t want to forget, but when they read the note later, they cannot revive the thought, the emotion, the why of the action… so they won’t do it. It is lost. The Opponent won a battle again.
So it is an art to word things in a way that when you re-read it the inspiration is still there. The context.
Looking at life as Kabbalah suggests that you do, that there is this Opponent who delights in you being miserable, useless, and live a meaningless life is one of the GIFTS that you can take away from this article.
Most people live very close, very connected to the inner voice that suggest that they do all the things they don’t want to do… They think the voice is theirs.
And when you consider it yourself, it is hard to allow, it is hard to create a distance, it is hard to step back from it and not react. Not obey. Not be a puppet on a string.
My last four challenges were all intended to create this distance between you, the conscious you, and the voices.
I now realize that had I introduced the concept of The Opponent, it would have been a whole lot easier to get the results I intended for the participants.
If you are still in the Allowing Challenge, now you can do it with this piece added. Bring it home, please.
Which course of mine do we create a foundation for a life where there is a YOU and then there is the Opponent?
In the Integrity Workshop.
Why integrity?
Integrity measures the degree to which you live according to your values, according to your standards, according to your Word.
In that course we remove the idea that every word you hear in your head is YOUR WORD. That everything you do is your self.
We create that separation… a separation that is mandatory if you want to have integrity.
It is hard to say what single activity, what single capacity is the key to moving from the paradigm of powerlessness to the paradigm of powerful.
I say that the way I have done it, do it through distinguishing, is probably the hardest. Why? Even though your vibration can be low… I know it because mine was low. But I had what most people don’t have today, because they never saw the need to learn it, is the capacity for structured thinking.
The job, as I teach it in my integrity course, is to distinguish things for yourself.
Everyone can LEARN distinctions, because it requires no thinking. But only someone with the capacity of real thinking AND the burning desire to move away from the syrupy world we are taught to live in. Syrup on a French toast is wonderful. Swimming is syrup with no shore in sight is death. The death of life, the death of thinking.
I taught this course once, and in spite of it being the best thing I have ever done, it was completely ineffective… I think. But if you HATE being powerless, it can at least show you the direction and the actions that lead to a powerful life.
Knowing about it won’t get it done, but can direct you. And that is, sometimes, all that is missing.
Distinguishing for yourself… access to the new paradigm
