With the start of the new Playground group two weeks ago I am beginning to learn yet another wrinkle in human culture? psyche? that I hadn’t encountered before.
Not accidentally, I think, the people with that different worldview, different thinking, are from different cultures…
- Wrinkle #1: If my behavior makes me unhappy towards unpleasant or disagreeable things, what I need to do is change my behavior
- Wrinkle #2: If what I am saying and how I am saying it is not reality, not real, then I must change what I am saying, while is still say the same thing, but differently.
- Wrinkle #3: If reality changed then what would also change is what is true! Oh no! Truth must remain truth! Baah!
These have been the emerging thought forms from new and some older students… All working against transformation.
An interesting aside: the less you are able or willing to cause transformation for yourself, the more you tend to act as a coach or teacher on the partner calls, because you don’t understand what the other person is trying to do: transform reality for themselves.
This may be, perhaps, generalized: the more stuck you are in your view of life the more you insist on its truth, its inconvertible truth, and the more you are going to try to teach from it. Ugh.
In a way, it makes sense…
I am in the business of teaching and causing transformation
Transformation is a threat to the current political, societal structure, so every effort is made to corrupt the word, and relegate it to something mundane, and insignificant.
When you do a search for the word “transformation” in image search, you get millions of images of weight loss, as if weight loss were a transformation… Weight loss is a change… not a transformation.
Impeaching the president is also a change. And catching his aids and convicting them is also a change…
The more things change the more they remain the same…
Transformation is surprising… and sudden.
In change, what is in common is the hidden perspective: something is wrong with me with how I am behaving, how I am speaking, and it needs to be fixed…
What I teach, transformation, says that there is nothing ever wrong in reality: all wrong is created by words.
So what we do, when we want to cause transformation for ourselves, is go to reality where there is nothing wrong, nothing wrong with us, nothing wrong with the other, nothing wrong with the world.
But… there has been, for billions of years, a certainty about what is real. And for the past 60 or so years, since the Wigner’s friend theory, came about in 1961.
It seems that it is scientifically possible for two people to experience reality in completely different ways. But what separates the two is not reality itself, but what one knows about it. Knowing is the key here (and the point of this post). What this means is that the mind (the organ that generates knowing) has a relationship with what can be known that is not at all intuitive. The reality is, only the reality you know exists. And this has been proven by a new experiment that verified an old thought experiment know as “Wigner’s Friend.”
Transformation is based on this theory, that if you change what you know by looking at things from a different knowledge base, things readily change without you having to change them.
And this is both cultural and personal.
My first transformation was back in 1985. I was in a course. I have told this story many times before… so I’ll be short and cryptic here:
When I was a child, my father did sexual stuff with me.
In the course we were asked to find a sentence that set our relationship with a person straight. I chose my father.
I said things I knew… you did this, and you did that… but then something was said with my voice: You never married me!
I suddenly saw that I saw the world from the point of view of the scorned woman… you never married me… and my life changed… my relationship with my father changed, forever.
You change what you know through new distinctions and new questions. And voila, reality that seemed to be fixed changes in front of your very eyes.
On the other hand, if you try to change your behavior or your words, you are still inside the same knowledge, no you are not causing transformation, so the misery, the wrongness just hides waiting for the next time.
The foundation, the reality, didn’t change.
This has been a theory, for scientists, but it has been very real for transformation’s practitioners…
But recently even scientists have been able to prove that reality depends on the observer, and maybe there isn’t even an absolute universal unquestionable reality… meaning: reality is malleable.
And this is really the foundation of the work we do here. That reality is malleable, and depending on how you look at it, it changes.
The purpose of transformation is to empower you, so you can become all you can become, you can be powerful in the world, live a life that is worth living and live it powerfully.
Where the only thing that YOU change is where you are looking from.
The more places you can look from, the faster you can see reality change to an empowering reality where there is nothing wrong.
We call these places distinctions. The Playground is a transformational course where we learn to look from about 20 different places, but only if the participants are willing. Why is willingness important?
Because what changes reality is what you know. But know, intimately, with your eyes closed. Not rules, that you have to…
- Homework attitude, avoiding to learn to see through the distinctions will produce no change in reality.
- Philosophizing, explaining, trying to change results in no transformation… it is only reshuffling what you know. The one reality from your particular knowledge’s point of view.
Totally missing the point.
Transformation transforms… what? reality. The reality of you, the reality of the past, the reality of the present, the reality of what is possible.
It is actually simple and straightforward.
What is in the way is the current knowledge. You can call it worldview, self-view, it really is knowledge.
Certain words give away that fixed, inflexible attitude. The words I, “is”, “am”, “seems”, for example.
When I look at the students that are unable or unwilling for their view to change, are, so far, are from Eastern Europe, Near Asia, still living there, or hailing from there.
Is this a useful insight? Well, maybe. Maybe there is some undoing that is needed with these people… because their fundamental worldview is that things ARE the way they are, and they need to be changed, either the things, or themselves, or both, for things to be OK.
It probably is a religion issue… religion that emphasizes “is”. Of course I am a stranger looking in: Judaism is not like that. Mainstream Christianity, I think, is not like that. Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy seems to be the culprit.
I don’t thing the issue is in what they teach, but in the how. In the rigid, fixed, carved in stone way?
One of the students, of course, is not of either of those religions, he is Catholic… and yet he is not able to look differently, and between you and me, doesn’t even try.
Why am I sharing my trials and tribulations with you?
If you are able to look through different eyes, you may be able to free yourself up to be part of the flexible people of the earth, and benefit from transformation, regardless of your cultural indoctrination.
What is the experience of transformation?
It feels like magic. It is seeing things, suddenly, that weren’t there before, and other things simply disappear.
While change is forced. Change leaves things, basically unchanged. The more things change the more they remain the same. Change is like putting makeup on pimples… they cover up. The misery remains waiting underneath.
If and when you change things, the results are temporary, and surface. Deep inside, because the reality you know never changed, nothing has changed.
You remained the same. Society, your chances, opportunities, politics, nature, remained the same.
If you felt like second class citizen before, no matter what you change, that will not change.
With transformation, even the hint of second class citizenry disappears as if it never existed.
If you felt like your feelings don’t matter to anyone… with transformation, you don’t even expect them to matter… who cares.
If you were a good for nothing, never do well, non-producer, with transformation you remember how you were, but find yourself getting things done, and having a ball doing that.
If you look at the above examples, there is a fixed view of things that keep you in bondage, keep you being the same way, doing the same things.
Until the view of things can change, you’ll remain in bondage.
And that is the sad news.
The distinctions in the Playground gradually and magically change your view of things. And with the things, you change, what you do change, because in different reality YOU change to match reality.
And that is the good news. Very good, indeed.
PS: Every article I write is transformational. Each and every one offers a different view of reality. The fact that you look through your already always, fixed knowledge, shows you that you need to become willing to change your mind about reality, and allow it to become malleable. Now, that is hard… and inconvenient… And there you are… trapped.
