I am always looking for guidance from whatever is giving guidance.
I am also looking for confirmation. My mind is a meaning making machine, like yours, and I catch myself looking for meaning in everything.
I am like a GPS… in order for the GPS give you accurate actions, it needs to know where you are at.
I am looking for the GPS function, the locating function part of the guidance. I am an experimenter, and I am aware, what can be easier, right?
Children’s Games
You may have played the game as a child where a group of kids hides something while you are out of the room. And then you come in and try to find it… warm, cold, hot are the only words the group can use to guide you.
Some of you were good at that game, because you weren’t entrapped by the right/wrong bias. You were light on your feet, and didn’t start to despair the moment you went away from the target.
It was a great training. Every game is training. Training for life. Playing is the children learn the most important things in life.
Parents who didn’t play games as kids are lousy parents in that their kids don’t know how to learn. And the children end up where their parents were…
Some curses turn out to be blessings.
I have a next door neighbor who teaches me stuff I would not be exposed to if she didn’t live here.
She runs the gauntlet, 1
What do I mean? You know the distinction “strait and narrow” the narrow path to what you want… Every step outside of the strait and narrow is a step that does not take you to what you want.
My next door neighbor has no room for a misstep. Therefore she frets all the time. Every moment life is as if she ran the gauntlet: the punishment is coming down.
I have ex students like that, by the way. Ex, because I could not move them away from the rigid state of being where they are either right and OK, or wrong and not OK.
In that game you are wrong 90% of the time. And you find your way, you find out the direction of the strait and narrow from the feedback warm, cold, hot, and prepare for a life where knowing the “right” way is hard, and near impossible, you need to experiment, and need to be wrong 90% of the time.
Now, if you are someone who thinks of yourself all the time, about 50% of the population, then you have a hard time with that. so you are going to create yourself as an ideal person, and then you’ll be miserable, violated, invalidated 90% of the time.
What a life, eh?
Now, here is a second part to this article…
A year or two ago I read a fascinating book about people. The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane
I don’t think there is anything out there that actually provides guidance. But having the magical thinking is useful to me. It keeps me happy, healthy and sane.
It is hard to live a life without some magical thinking…
Religion is, at least on the surface, is magical thinking, but because it is a comprehensive whole, a religious person will think rationally occasionally… too rarely to matter much.
Read that book if you can. Ask me if you could borrow it from me…
And here is the third part to this article…
Happiness is accepting things the way they are and the way they aren’t…
Weird sentence… what does it mean?
I have attempted to translate it to normal English with no success.
I have a new way to say it: A is A.
A mistake is a mistake. A bad feeling is a bad feeling. Someone saying something is someone saying something.
The balance in your checking account is the balance in your checking account.
That is the accepting things the way they are.
And the second part, which is trickier to get if you are prone to unhappiness:
Things are what they are. But if they are not the way they should be, if you are not the way you should be, if you do not what you should be doing, if you feel not the way you should feel, then you are not accepting them being the way they are, and you are unhappy. Many times a day, like my next door neighbor. I call it wretched. Call it what you want.
In a formula, this behavior is A is not B, even though it should be.
The moment a student gets this, they start moving towards happiness.
The amount of exposure to this differs on your soul correction, on your ancestry, and on how much vested interest you have in being unhappy, and right about it.
I could say it simpler: it depends on how much rigidity you have to disable to get there.
I could measure rigidity in the starting point measurements, but I am afraid that people would consider it judgment.
Rigidity means, to me, that you are not light on your feet. That you cannot turn around on a dime. Or on a quarter. Or on a buck.
The more sweeping movements you make with your life, the more rigid you are.
Trimtabbing is the methodology of people who want to turn around on a dime.
- To run the gauntlet is to take part in a form of corporal punishment in which the party judged guilty is forced to run between two rows of soldiers who strike out and attack them.
