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You can get inspiration wherever you find it… if you have a strong enough knowledge base to attach it to.
Actually, curiosity, the strength of curiosity is proportionate to the amount of knowledge you have.
I have no knowledge of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals because when I was a kid that wasn’t a topic for us at all. So to get curious about anything, you need to have some pre-existing KNOWLEDGE about them… that leads you.
Most people nowadays have no KNOWLEDGE to lead them to curiosity. What they think they know is flimsy, and mostly not true. And what they actually know was force fed to them…
Curiosity dies when you force it. It is like love… fragile. Stendahl the great French novelist likened it to a twig in the salt mine… the salt crystals make it beautiful. But you handle, shake it, the salt falls off and you are left with a twig… no beauty, no poetry in that.
Because curiosity is like poetry… in your mother tongue. I don’t enjoy poetry in English, and savor poetry in Hungarian… Such is poetry and such is curiosity.
Without curiosity life is dull. Tasteless. Colorless. Duty. Drudgery.
Today’s human has an interesting approach to everything. An approach that they never abandoned. The idea that everything is due to them, and therefore it is either coming or should already be there.
Like dinner. Like television. Or clean clothes. Appearing as a matter of fact, not the result of labor, effort, but ready.
Of course I have no actual knowledge that this has been a downward trend… But Source backs me up on this.
In my family, me being Jewish, education was the most important thing. Education doesn’t mean going to school. Education is always self-education. No one can educate you, they can, at best, light a match of curiosity in you… and then you go and educate yourself.
When you think you know something because you went to a class, or because you read about it, or because you watched a video, you don’t think you need to do the actual learning yourself. You think you know. And you end up knowing nothing. You end up not curious. You end up like a puddle. no depth.
You crave titillation, you crave intriguing, but you leave it like a dog leaves its poop. all done.
You have no latticework to attach anything to. and then you are surprised that you are neither happy, nor a producer.
You desire the result, but you don’t desire, in fact detest the process. The process that takes you, or better said CAN TAKE YOU to the result you desire.
In yesterday’s class we looked at the curious phenomenon that what you said in a crucial moment in your life is now providing you with the floor that seems to be completely unchangeable.
What holds the floor in place is that sentence… or the core of it.
As I said in yesterday’s article, there are three versions of that sentence: 1. it’s not fair 2. I was wronged 3. this will never happen to me because I am good/right
—The first one
…is based on a worldview where equality means everyone gets the same results, regardless of what they do. My little brother belongs to that group… His most frequently used words, when we grew up, were ‘it’s due to me’. When I lived in Israel, I heard that a lot too… I am going to have to think about that… just not now.
I never thought anything was due to me. Somehow I have always known that you EARN what you want. I wonder what’s different about me? Have also never envied anyone…
So one of the hallmark of this group is envy. Wanting what someone else has, without even considering working for it. Except maybe relationships: I didn’t know one can work for a relationship… and I didn’t learn that until I was in my 50’s.
—The second one
…is based on the worldview of entitlement. ‘I am entitled to do whatever I want to do, and get praise for it. And they will never punished me. Ignore me. Not celebrate me… It is my due because I am me.‘
This is the hardest, I think, to influence. Why? Because it the gene working. A child is born with two entitlement genes… so it allows the adults to give them, and not try to get for themselves. It is largely societal… It allows the adult to feel in power, and feel accomplishment. And the child is like an object… easy to handle.
But those genes are supposed to turn off at crucial development ages, age 3 and age 6~7, so the child can start doing for themselves. Ultimately human happiness is the result of doing… Producing, accomplishing, overcoming… all the things the entitlement genes don’t allow you to do.
—The third one
…is interesting. The child sees someone punished. And they say: ‘I am good. This will never happen to me.‘
My older brother was hanging me on the cord of the Venetian blind in our room, while my parents were in the basement to bring up coal for the stoves. I told my mother and she beat him with the same cord. Bad.
My thought wasn’t about me being good. My thought was that ‘I was NEVER going to cause someone to be beaten, EVER.‘ It was horrible to be the cause of beating. So how you react to something bad happening to another is different, person to person.
And that thought will give you your floor, for the rest of you life… unless you realize that what you decided is not in your best interest, and have the courage to change it.
And whether you figured it out on your own, what is underneath all three is the entitlement genes.
M entitlement genes turned off when they were supposed to turn off… So I don’t have either of these as my floor.
My floor, I could say, is that in life you often get what you earned, but not always. I think I have earned a lot more than I am getting, that is how life works.
If you could predict everything, life would be boring. Predictable means boring…
So some of the things I do earn me some results, and many of the things I do earn me nothing. Other than the satisfaction of doing and having done it.
And having that as the floor, I live an interesting life, that looks utterly boring for anyone who looks at me.
In fact I have been called destitute by some people… because they measured with their own yardstick… I measure with my own, and I am happy.
In another article I’ll write about the other thing we saw in yesterday’s class: the seven boulders issue…
The issue that gives you the fallacy that you are working…While you are working on what won’t matter, what can’t make a difference, until and unless… But I’ll elaborate on this in another article.
For now, I’d like to do an encore of this class… if there are enough people who are think of coming out of the utter predictability of their lives. Predictably miserable, lying about it.
Before I schedule, I’d like those of you who feel you would like to come to a class… Just send me an email… [email protected]
It’s not a commitment yet, it is an expression of interest.
I’d love to promise that I can de-activate your entitlement genes
I’d love to promise that I can de-activate your entitlement genes, but it is like learning… Unless you do your work, it is worthless. It may be so for a few minutes, until you need to make a decision, or need to do something… and the floor re-asserts itself, because it is kept in place by what you said, not just the entitlement genes.
I think I said that I was worthless… and for a while I lived the life of a worthless person. A long while…
Worthless is a past, present, and future thing… so why bother? It is already so!
The hallmark of fixed mindset. I think my fixed mindset I dislodged back in 1985… first a little bit, and then completely.
Humans were designed that way… but something went wrong along the way.
We are different
But, in addition to a fixed mindset, unfortunately we are different: our soul correction makes us entitled in different ways.
Some are stingy, some are ‘smart’, some are envious, jealous, rigid… talk too much… so we all have our personal ‘flavor’… and that is why it’s so hard to coach.
Cowardly, glib, engaging, entertaining, cooperative, helpful… yeah… many different flavors.
So finding what is exactly that you need to handle, what is the first of YOUR seven boulders is not easy to assess…
You may want to get to know your soul correction intimately, or you’ll shoot blanks at a target instead of the boulder that is in your way.
For example, if your Soul Correction is 34, Forget Thyself, then removing yourself from the top of the pyramid, considering yourself important, smart and better than others is your most important job… You see it is ALL entitlement… because you never earned that position, and between you and me, you don’t think you need to.
If your Soul Correction is 23, Sharing the Flame, then your boulder is stinginess…