Let’s look at the role of discovery in growth… your growth… if there is no growth, there has been no discovery.
All the steps of the 67 steps program are nudges for you to discover something that you haven’t seen.
Of course, like with everything, your tendency is to go to your head for the answers, and not look at all outside of your head.
The step (Step 5) where the homework is to list what you see about poor people and rich people is a great step to show your relationship to growth.
If you think you are rich, you go and tell me how what you do, how you think, how you feel is the way to be rich. No looking, no discovery.
If you think you are poor, then you do the same thing… but you list what you do, think, feel… and you tell me how you think rich people feel, do… etc. No looking either.
This program is to upset your apple cart. This program is to take you out of your tiny box, where you are comfortable, and make you feel uncomfortable, confronted, upset, surprised…
Most of you, especially if you are trying to do it on your own, without someone forcing you to look.
Do you want to know what rich people have that poor people don’t?
They have intangible capacities.
Some of them are crucial.
Crucial capacities I have seen so far:
- humility
- being able to change the focus from narrow angle to wide angle
Humility: the capacity to empty yourself of interpretations, and certainty, and arrogance
I have already beaten to death on this blog: do your reading on your own.
But the aspect that you go to your mind, to your thoughts to get answers is something I haven’t said enough.
I can hear it. I am almost sure that you can’t. You think that just because you remembered something, you need to repeat what you thought about it, what your interpretation was, etc.
It’s like there is nothing you can take out of your closet, dust it off, and look at it anew.
You are using the exact words you have always used.
You are here, I hope, because you want your life to change, at least to include stuff you now lack.
Fat chance if you go to a memory and drag out what you have always said about it. You just fixed the future to be the same where it was headed.
To change the future, you need to look at your past differently, and look for different interpretations, explanations, etc.
This is what we did in the Playground… at least this is what you were supposed to do if you were in it. And yet… insisting on meanings you already had puts another nail in your coffin.
If you never had the capacity “humility” then pay me to turn it on for you. If you can’t keep it on: don’t bother to dream of any change: impossible. I cannot do it for you without you being willing to look differently than you have always looked.
If you have had the capacity “humility” but turned it off… see if you are willing to upset your apple cart.
Seeing that you have never been the victim, that you have always had the power to live a great life, to do great things, but you insisted on being a victim being a better payoff than a good life…
Seeing that is very upsetting. You may get sick. You may get depressed. Consider that a good sign. You have been nurturing cancer and toxins and when those come out: it is not pretty.
If nothing happens… then the instruction “don’t bother to dream of any change: impossible” applies to you.
The capacity of seeing the big picture: being able to change the focus from narrow angle to wide angle
Of course, how you do anything is how you do everything.
If you cannot change the context at will, if you always look at things from a certain angle, if you never see beyond the obstacle that is in front of you, then you probably lack both humility and the ability to change your focus. The depth of your focus. The width of your glance.
Almost everything looks different when looked at in different environments.
Cropping a picture does that by narrowing the focus. A cropped picture is always more dramatic. Because the environment tells the whole story: with a cropped picture you don’t have the whole story… and that lack pulls you in.
When it is your life, or when it is an assignment, or when it is another person: unless you have the capacity and the habit of changing the width of your cone of vision: 1 you are stuck in one view, and with you your life is stuck.
Of course, without humility this is just a mechanical “job”, you have to be willing to follow the meaning changes as you are changing the cone of vision.
If you are stuck in a certain angle, a certain size of a cone, your aspiration to get unstuck, to start doing things differently, a achieve what has eluded you are nil. As in zero.
And if you follow a teacher whose cone of vision hasn’t obviously changed… you are learning from a fool who is stuck themselves.
Your vibration is stuck in low, their, the teachers’ vibration is stuck in low.
If this is your issue: make sure you have both humility and the big picture capacity turned on.
Just practicing the big picture capacity correctly will also keep on the humility capacity.
What if that doesn’t work? Just quit dreaming… or better yet, keep on dreaming… lying to yourself.
- in photography terms, change how much of the environment you include in the picture by changing from telephoto to wide angle picture…
