I have been holding off on delivering the promised READING class… Why?
There are so many factors that control how much you can do with the instructions I give you, that it is hard to know what I can teach to make a difference…
When you read my articles, when you listen to me (or to anyone else, by the way!) you think that you got 100%, and you maybe even think that you are smarter than me… OK, it’s not a maybe. You think you are smarter than me. And that you know everything. 1
How do I know you think you are smarter than me?
From your questions, from your requests.
Here is what you do that gives it away:
You ask me to muscletest things… but never ask me a question that would bring some clarity into your thinking. What got you where you are is the quality of your knowledge, the quality of your thinking. All within your power… but you accept and ask for no input from me… because, you know, she is just an empath, a tool.
So what makes one smarter than another?
The answer is simple: how much they see of reality accurately.
The measures in the Starting Point Measurements tell me all I need to know… but not to you, because you already know that you see everything, and you see it accurately.
Sigh…
- your relationship to feedback and instruction:
- The level of discomfort you are willing to allow w/o trying to fix it. This is your TLB score…
- The size of your vocabulary: the number of words you can use accurately:
- To what degree you think of yourself:
- how enslaved are you to memes? (what percentage of your life is run by memes?)
- do you have a bridge between your precious I and your actual I? What is your level of delusion
- How teachable/how coachable are you?
- The level of your awareness?
- the percentage of time you spend in the mind:
- the percentage of input that gets through to you.
These measures are all about how much you can see and how accurately.
But your delusional self, the one that fancies itself smarter than me… maybe not smart, but definitely smarter than me, will not allow you to hear that you and your results are below acceptable, and unless you increase how much you see and how accurately, you are stuck with where you are… no matter how much you argue with me.
One of the elements of getting those numbers better is what I intend to teach in the READING course. Maybe it is the linchpin element, that unless you get that under control, nothing will happen…
It’s been hard for me to see what it is I have done that allowed me to see more and to see all that more clearly than before.
The linchpin capacity is this:
Being able to hold your attention without narrowing your cone of vision
When you hear “focus” you narrow your cone of vision and block out everything that is outside.
It sounds like a good thing but it is really very bad for you, because it causes the fragmentation where you can’t see the context of what you see, and therefore it either doesn’t make sense, or it seems to mean something entirely different than what it actually means.
- Let’s say your focus is to make sure no one says anything bad about you, that you can maintain your delusion that you are smart… When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail… you’ll hear everything as a personal affront, a judgment, a slight, an attack.Your hammer will then activate and you cannot learn anything new, neither about yourself, nor about anything else.
When you can keep your cone of vision wide enough and deep enough, it is like having a tool box with all the tools a tool box can hold, and you can look and pick the tool that is a good match to the “issue”… learn from it, dance with it, try it out, experiment, take correction, and a lot more.
- Same with having the focus on understanding… narrow cone of vision, context is missing… and surprise, understanding will not happen.
- Same with “What’s in it for me?”… you won’t hear anything else, and you’ll even miss what’s in it for you.
- Same with the Desire Trap… you’ll hear that I am your enemy, or you’ll hear how you can jump and skip to a windfall without any process, any knowledge, any skills, any consideration, any plan, any work.
- Same with when you want me to be kind, nice, or whatever
- Same with when you want things to be so… and nothing less will satisfy you… it’s not fun? It’s not just so… Not easy? it is not just so… Doesn’t agree with what you believe? it is not just so…
With a penlight of attention you need someone else to direct your attention so you can now flash it on another tiny fragment of reality.
But something remarkable happens: when you have a narrow cone of vision, you never build a framework of knowledge that the new learning can be hung from.
You remain ignorant, fancying yourself smart.
And your life is a proof of it:
- you don’t tapdance to work,
- you don’t tapdance to the people in your life, and definitely
- don’t tapdance to looking in the mirror… because nothing is really magnificent, nothing is really up to your expectations.
Working with one of my students who volunteered to work with me, I managed to recall my many attempts to increase my reading speed AND retention.
Now… I never increased my reading speed. But I learned to control my cone of vision… the width…
I am still working on increasing the depth… the chesslike thinking part. Especially the willingness to do it.
My base nature is to jump without looking. Not pretty, is it? My patience is in short supply… but I am getting better, even dramatically better. It is deliberate practice: I do it every day, and the only purpose is to force myself to look before I leap, then look a little longer a little wider a little less impatiently.
I still have to do it with conscious competency: the unconscious competence, where I don’t have to think about it, is probably still far away. 2
So I am still getting smarter.
It’s all about how much of reality you see, the reality that is in front of you, and how accurately.
Your results will depend on that. And the quality of life as well.
Ignorance is bliss? Not in this day and age. It is bliss not for the ignorant, but for the puppeteers. Because ignorant people can be swayed this way and that… Because they can’t tell what they see…
Yet they think they are smarter than me, smarter than everyone.
No respect, no regard, no honor, no reverence, no appreciation.
You are the person who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
How is it working for you?
I posted this puzzle for you in a previous post, the difference between make do, or make it work.
The biggest difference is the mood it creates, the attitude it creates.
Your approach to life (attitude) is that you will make do… with less than what you deserve, less than what you should get. Settle for less, resigned, depressed, yearning, but inactive. You are the effect, not the cause. You are not getting enough, you are not loved enough, you are not happy enough, you don’t enjoy your work enough… not enough…
The second, make it work, is an active relationship to reality.
I live as if I lived in the woods with electricity, water, fast internet, and sewage. I don’t spend a lot of time making my environment just so… I leave it alone. I only care about taking care of what takes care of me.
Energizing my water, eating good quality food that matches perfectly what my body needs. Having enough opportunities to access the all-knowledge and also to teach it new things. And to practice the fundamental linchpin capacity that allows me to do a good job at it.
I also attend to exercising my body a little bit each day. To fill the birdbaths with fresh water so I can lift my eyes from my computer to watch the 40 different bird species that visit every day.
And I play the different activators around the house… so I can remain high vibration.
That’s it. I make my life work for me. I make my environment work for me: meaning: serve my needs. Fill me up so I never run on empty.
- I listened to step 67 in the 67 steps where Tai talks about a kid who has a toy business that nets 10 million dollars a year. He says: the kid may be smart, and maybe I am not as smart as he is… So maybe I am half as smart… so I’ll make five million dollars a year… Tai is not exempt from this phenomenon: he thinks he is smarter than everyone, because he doesn’t know what makes someone smart, so he cannot do deliberate practice to make himself smarter.
- the stages of learning are: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence. My job is to take you to conscious incompetence, or you’ll never learn anything: you believe you don’t have to. Once you are in conscious incompetence, I may be able to teach you something. But your “ego”, your Precious I will not want to let go of the delusion that you already know everything you need, that you are smart enough.
