Landmark Education was born in 1991. With its name change it also, appropriately, introduced a “new technology”.
The new technology was based on an earlier statement or assertion: that who you are in the present is given by the future you are living into.
It was also said like this: What gives you who you are in the present moment is the future you are living into.
But, although they were illustrating this assertion with a story 1 , what they meant was this: what gives your being and consequently your actions in the present moment is who you invented yourself to be.
Let’s say you invent yourself to be a winner… what give your being and consequently your actions in the present, that no matter what you do, you’ll at least end up landing on your feet… and that makes you, automatically, a winner. And some of the time you’ll win more than just your safety or your life… you may win some stuff, some arguments, etc.
When you invent yourself to be a winner in life
When you invent yourself to be a winner in life, you won’t resist much, because you won’t feel like you have to win every battle, every argument, every small advantage for you to win. You are a winner by default.
So what we see when we watch a winner is an economy of actions, and a lack of fretting, anxiety, and trying, forcing, efforting, and all the other stuff that we see with “normal” people.
The technology worked for some people, not a lot, and didn’t work for most people. And even for those that it worked for, it mostly worked for a little bit… like a flash in the pan.
Why, you would wonder, after all, Landmark Education has trained millions of people in this new technology at the tune of 500-1000 dollars a pop…
Did it work for me? Yes, it always worked for me… spectacularly.
If it worked for me, and it worked for a few, why didn’t it work for everybody?
My hunch has been, that most people make three mistakes in life and when they want to become bigger, better, happier:
- Unbeknownst to them, they have a bend that is focusing on what’s wrong, on what needs to be fixed. And even when they are asked to invent something inspiring, they invent something that would fix what they see as wrong, wrong with them, wrong with others, wrong with life.
A future that stands on unreality (wrong is not real. there is no such thing real in life as wrong. Everything in life is just is… and the wrong is added by a human. Therefore it is not from reality, it is from the human…) cannot stand, and cannot inspire… it has no power, no standing power, no effect other than make it even deeper that life is wrong.
- Our concepts of possible ways of being are very impoverished. Just ask people what they mean by loving, caring, freedom, and other inspiring sounding words that mean next to nothing to the speaker. Facebook is a hot-house of nonsense… the bigger you bluff, the more people will share your bluff.
Before you can get guidance with regards to your being and doing from a future, like freedom, or caring… you need to spend time distinguishing what the heck you are talking about.
I did that with about 20 of these words, qualities, and I still struggle with the rest of them… there are at least 100!
It is not easy to do this work, most people have no idea, and our concepts are impoverished.
- Once you have a quasi grounded picture of what that “possibility” looks like in real life, and what actions are consistent with it, you need to take that possibility and look what guidance it gives you in different aspects of your life.
What does, for example, being a winner, look like in an intimate relationship? With regards to your health, vitality and stamina? or your work, your recreation? Do you know? Of course you don’t.
The Instant Coherence Workshop puts in all these missing elements into the creation of Organizing Principles… and has a lot more chance to be giving you the amazing life that you desire and deserve.
At the moment the Instant Coherence Workshop is winding down… and I’ll restart it again, with new participants, in a week or two.
- this is a story of a vacation in Hawaii… Seattle, I’ve told you in this article.
