I am reading a book, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. I am reading it because I want to be able to teach my students better, so they can leave behind the level of ordinary school learning, the pedestrian learning that always produces pedestrian result.
Amateurish performance, amateurish life. 1
The DNA, the blueprint that heralds the evolution of humans, the inactive 160 spiritual capacities, don’t become needed, and therefore won’t turn on, or won’t stay on, in a pedestrian, amateurish life where one doesn’t go consistently beyond their limits, intellectually, spiritually.
Like muscles don’t grow beyond a certain size without exposing the muscles, regularly, and mercilessly to loads that are just beyond the muscle’s current capacity, your spiritual capacities won’t be needed unless you expose yourself to requirements and demands that go beyond your current capacities.
Some people get lucky and life exposes them to such a requirement, but that is much like praying for rain: unpredictable.
So people who want to grow, need to do it for themselves.
Bummer, eh? Because you can get away with never growing, you can get away with living a pedestrian life, you don’t have to.
And you don’t… I can see that. The average person, just off the street, isn’t going to do it.
But you are miserable, and need help.
You come to me, and I am offering you the path to growth, because that is what I was born to do, but you are not interested. You hope for some remedy, some relief, while you are committed to living a pedestrian life.
The question I have, and the question you should have: can I help you?
When I muscletest is it is a weak yes, it is a weak no. It’s like an 80% yes.
But how, I ask.
So I sit here, playing freecell, well, unusually well. That is always an indicator that I am onto something, so I am patiently wait until Consciousness tells me what I am onto… lol.
And then, after half a dozen games, I see it.
Patterns.
The extraordinary expertise that Peak is about, is only possible if the “subject” is able to break up what they are doing to patterns. Recognizable chunks of information, where the information is data, not words.
And then it hits me: patterns are the same as distinctions. A set of data that always show up together.
In our case, human behavior, the nature of human beings, it’s dynamic, it’s behavior, it’s speaking, it’s attitude.
If you can look at human being and recognize the chunks, the patterns, you can navigate this life and be happy, fulfilled, and maybe even wealthy…
I haven’t been able to get through to my students about distinctions. Maybe it’s the word. Maybe they will be able to get patterns and chunks… maybe not.
It’s an intellectual capacity.
I can almost predict who will and who won’t.
It’s a different way to look at life.
Instead of life being an undifferentiated nothing and everything, confusing, random, and not very friendly, when one can see chunks and patterns, life becomes surprisingly manageable.
Cats have distinctions! They recognize patterns. They are alerted to every noise, but after they recognize it, the pattern of noise, they either go back to sleep or do what they need to do to hide or attack.
If you were as smart as a cat, you’d recognize all the patterns you need to be ok, in spite of the noise around you and in you. But alas you don’t think in patterns, and you are unhappy.
I wrote about one pattern yesterday, the one where you assume that what you see is what is, where what you understand is what was said… it’s a pattern.
If you consider it a pattern, then you’ll have the first piece of a power puzzle, and you are in the game of becoming powerful.
Powerful not over others, but powerful as in capable. Capable to accomplish stuff, capable to call the shots in your life, all the way to the good life.
Just like Helen Keller needed to grok one element of language for the whole world of seeing/hearing people to open up for her, you need to get just one pattern or distinction, and you are on your way.
For her it was water. Connecting the actuality of water, and the symbols drawn into her palm. Hah… that is what the symbols are for, to identify patterns in reality! she ran to test it, and lo and behold, a tree, herself, the house… all had a name.
I say, you need to get one pattern and the world of power can open up for you.
Conscious patterns.
Life, when looked at through patterns, work when looked at through patterns, people when looked at through patterns, becomes as easy to read as a book.
I have been failing.
I have learned this from Landmark Education. I took to it right away. It was like oxygen to me.
I was pretty much alone with that.
And Landmark Education’s track record is poor in this regard. One in 100,000.
I don’t know. Maybe it is laziness. Maybe it is part of the next evolutionary stage… muscletest says yes.
The book says that even people who recognize and use patterns in one area, like chess, memorizing, playing the guitar, don’t necessarily have the capacity to see patterns, to see reality in chunks of patterns.
It seems that recognizing patterns as patterns, chunks of patterns as chunks of patterns, is a higher capacity, a spiritual capacity, as I call it. Encoded in your DNA, but suppressed.
I can turn it on.
Forcefully… with energy. But unless you are burning for it, so much that you are willing to practice, with one pattern, it will turn off…
And then you’ll know that I most likely can’t help you. You lack the desire to access your power.
I am having a workshop this afternoon, where I am teaching one of the most important patterns you’ll ever want to recognize.
It’s called “context”, but it is the same pattern as attitude, approach, and reason.
I will turn on the capacity of recognizing patterns for the participants, no extra cost: it is my experiment.
I will do it at the beginning of the class, so what I say can be heard by the pattern recognition capacity.
We shall see what happens.
I’ll screen the applicants to the course. Meaning: I’ll muscletest you (if you want to come) to see if you’ll accept the capacity, and if the rest of your life shows enough desire for it to work.
- Your level of fulfillment is exponentially correlated to the amount of effort you invested. Easy: no fulfillment. Hard, lots of effort, hardship: lots of fulfillment.
