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It was my birthday yesterday. It was also Labor Day.
There are lots of theories about what’s the purpose of life. But ultimately, it seems to me, that without working and working in a way that you feel useful, and used rightly, you don’t feel that you are here for some purpose.
And yet, in this declining epoch people don’t work, or don’t work in a way where it causes satisfaction and fulfillment for themselves.
People want to work less and want to make more… and the secret to a fulfilled life eludes most if not all.
This article is, ultimately, about awareness, and curiosity… all the stuff that is about as unfamiliar as the Dark Side of The Moon is for most people.
Unknown, and who cares…
Except, if you cared, you’d become a human with higher consciousness.
A human not jerked around by changeable thing… always looking for the next more, better, and different… through as little effort as possible.
If you look to find out the answer to what you don’t know… that is not curiosity. That is trying to move something from what you know that you don’t know segment into the slice of all knowledge that contains all the suff that you know (or think you know) that you know. A fix. You are a fixing machine.
And it is the mind that wants to fix everything. So you are moved, jerked, animated by the mind.
Curiosity is where you want to just to know it. Want to see. Want to hear. For no reason.
Curiosity shouldn’t be confused with wanting to know, the focus. Curiosity is the result of alertness. Also curiosity is outside of the mind… The mind is the storehouse of what you think you know. So curiosity isn’t even related to that.
When you search for ‘X famous person’s wife’ you have idle curiosity… mind stuff.
When in the mind, you are never alert.
This is why The Sight capacity doesn’t produce the kind of seeing you could have… you are looking from the mind, and The Sight is only activated by alertness, by curiosity.
When you are alert, it is the Observer who is looking, not the mind-driven, scarcity-driven self. Notice the lower case s in self.
There is no Ego, there is no Mind, there is no ‘you’ in how the Observer is looking.
The Observer is the prime example of looking from the side… The Driftwood capacity… one of the eight capacities included in The Sight activation.
Consider that virtually all the questions you ever have come from the mind, and not from curiosity.
Yesterday, in my birthday call, I asked people where they are stuck if they are stuck.
I muscletested who to do the work with… I didn’t want to do a full-blown workshop then and there.
I worked with a person I know well. We have been through together a lot in the past ten years.
He has no skills. He has no energy. And he doesn’t invest himself in anything.
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Sidenote question: why do I have clients, students, who don’t follow instructions, who can’t follow instructions?
The issue is the issue of the butterknife… Butterknife is a perfect instrument if and when you use it with butter. But if you want to slice bread, or meat… it is as good as trying to use a stick to cut bread or meat.
My job is to use the Anna Karenina principle to see all the ways humans can’t and won’t be happy, so I can change it for them.
Remember the quote: Happy families are all alike. Unhappy families are unhappy their own way.
If my goal is to facilitate happiness, a sense of well-being, contentment, productivity, fulfillment, where people can love themselves and live their lives consciously, then knowing what they do instead is the most important thing for me to know… and knowing what they do, be able to, learn to turn around. If possible. If they let me.
So this is why I have clients, students who are bad at doing what would work… I haven’t yet found the way to turn them around.
This question also brings to mind a story from Osho, from the collection of talks called ‘Mustard Seed’.
In it he says, I paraphrase: when you manage to bring the ‘sinner’, the slacker, the never-do-well to happiness, there is rejoicing.
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So this student has been stuck, forever, never doing anything for himself, never learning any skills, never taking care of himself.
And what it would take for him to become anything other than a ‘never-do-well’, he would need to start a percentage of ‘doing all he can do’.
Even 1% would be noticeable, 10% would make him achieve some level of contentment, 30% would make him a somewhat-producer.
In certain periods of my life my percentage of doing all I can do was 91%. My ‘everyday’ percentage is 70%.
His approach, his attitude, his mentality in life is ‘I shouldn’t have to do what it takes to get what I want.‘
While my attitude is ‘Life has given me a lot. My students have given me a lot. There is no way I am going to let this gift go to waste.’ and I don’t.
I think it may be reciprocity. Giving life a fair deal. Valuing life I have not earned by giving all I’ve got. Honoring Life. Honoring the gift. In essence, honoring the giver.
Now, changing a little of what I’ll talk about. but we’ll remain still within The Sight capacities.
One of the included capacities in The Sight activation is foresight… that is also seeing the consequences of certain actions, including yours.
This inability is caused by time.
Kabbalah’s interpretation of time is this: time is inserted between two things, between cause and effect, so people cannot see that the bad things they do, the stupid things they do, the evil things they do have a detrimental consequence to them. To them… pain, loss of health, death, suffering.
If there were no time between cause and effect, people would not do good because it is good, but because they’d want to avoid the unpleasant, often detrimental consequences of doing the bad they were about to do.
This is where foresight, seeing the cause and the effect, seeing the consequences of your actions can come in.
You see and you choose. Choose between the evil inclination, the desire to receive for the self alone, ego, etc. and not doing what you were going to do or doing something else. Choice. Free will to choose.
If you don’t pull your weight, someone or someones have to give up what they earned, so you can eat.
So here is the absolute kicker: you live not pulling your weight and you are miserable, you feel bad. But you don’t know why. Because the connection, because you lack the capacity to see the connection, is not visible for you. You can’t connect the dots.
And until you start seeing the connection, no matter what anyone says, including myself, you won’t SEE that you are miserable because of what you do and what you don’t do.
You paint yourself as the victim, but you are the perpetrator.
Really.
So now: what should you do?
I don’t know what you should do…
But listening to the audio of yesterday’s birthday call may be a good way to get more dots into this fuzzy picture
Get yesterday’s call for a song
