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Zen: Chop wood, carry water. An outcome independent series of actions. Outcome independence .
Western Culture: What is your why? Create big audacious goals, take bold actions…
One is outcome independent with an overarching goal of inner peace. Not now, not at this moment, but for life.
The other is outcome dependent, judging every step for the result it produced or not, resulting in misery.
What does outcome independence really mean?
Obviously as many people as many interpretations… ultimately one hidden goal of language is to create confusion… ugh…
But here is what I mean: your self-image is independent from your outcome, in the moment you perform actions.
You don’t suddenly feel like a moron, and you don’t suddenly feel like a genius. You are you, neither a moron nor a genius. You are able to move, steadily, towards a future you have defined, previously.
Your actions will not jump around for the cheapest immediately achievable self-gratification, because you don’t need it.
You can be even, purposeful, steady, and producing results.
Why does the idea of outcome independence work?
because when you look at the outcome instead of what you are doing, you are driven by want… and not by anything else… and being driven by want is a key to
- no success
- misery (from the area of dating: Outcome independence doesn’t mean you don’t care about achieving a specific outcome, nor does it mean you have no goals or objectives for what it is you’re doing.)
Rather, it means this: that you can do something, not get what you want, and be OK with that for now.
In his book The Practice, Seth Godin emphasizes the word ‘yet’.
If the action you are doing is designed to take you to a certain outcome, then you always live inside ‘yet’. You put all your efforts into each action, knowing that eventually it will get you where you are going… like putting one foot in front of the other will take you where you are going. There are no jumps in reality, only in your childish fantasies.
As I have shared with you before, the most potent self-training tool I have is the solitaire, called Freecell.
I can distinguish almost everything while playing it… I mean principles, not moves or tricks.
A principle is a true statement, in every and all areas of life… not just the one it is currently applied.
I saw a principle this morning: If you want to see, you have to look. What you see may be unconscious, but without looking you won’t see.
This is the biggest missing in all the work I teach. People expect to see without looking, myself included. The difference is: I do look often…
While others, you: never… or hardly ever.
Where you look is another part of this: you need to look in reality, in facts, not in the meanings, not in the mind!
In the Validation Challenge the reason the numbers were not getting better is that people were not even looking… they expected to see something to validate, to see value, to get the result of the challenge without the work. Because looking is work… Not kidding either.
If you see what you have always seen… it means that you didn’t look. The only thing that is constant in the universe is change… so when you see the same, you see not the thing but the memory of it. The shadow of it in the Cave of the Mind.
If you want to see, you have to look. What you see may not get all conscious. Often the brain saw… and if allowed, can act on what it saw.
So the experience of having seen something is not the point. The point is to allow the brain to see. This is, again, an example of the importance of outcome independence.
If you invalidate everything you didn’t consciously see, then you’ll stop looking, and retreat to Plato’s Cave, where you seem to see all the shadows.
And will continue taking steps, or feeling how you feel, guided by the shadows.
Outcome independence is a universal principle, so it is worth our time to look at it deeply.
Here is one way outcome independence can take you to the top of your game… Jerry Seinfeld’s method.
Jerry Seinfeld used outcome independence to get to the top of his game… it worked for him. Consistency.
Some people, even more arrogant than myself, call principles laws… are they laws? Laws? I haven’t gotten that far in my inquiry, so I don’t know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Source says no.
I look for the pattern everywhere… that is because of another principle. Fractals are repeatable and repeated patterns in nature. The underlying idea is that everything is built from the same minuscule elements, following a certain building rule… Why? I don’t know, but it seems that nature does… and it builds structures that are the same when in micro, and macro.
The small elements build the larger elements, and the larger elements build the whole. Like creates like.
It is called nature’s geometric code.
What does this have to do with outcome independence?
Everything.
Every result, every accomplishment has their root pattern, that when repeated results in the accomplishment.
Playing Freecell too. Producing a book, a course. Learning a new way of being. Raising your vibration. Happiness.
Ultimately what Leo Tolstoy said is built: (The Anna Karenina principle) a happy family. A happy family is built by repeating small acts that ultimately result in a happy family. What are the small acts? I am not an expert on family: I have never seen a happy family, but if I live long enough, I’ll put it on my agenda to figure it out.
But I am almost certain: the secret is Outcome independence.
Instead of what the culture suggests you need to do: do this and do that, and buy this and buy that.
- Our culture is built on the imperative of consumption, not on the imperative of nature. Of Life.
- On want presented as a need.
How does it look in the invisible reality? What is the invisible dynamic?
Every person ends up, from an early age, harboring some resentment for some unfulfilled ‘need’ that is really a want. A desire to receive for the self alone.
Their base attitude towards life is resentment, vengeance, or hate. It is hidden. Hidden well. Covered up with pretense.
And then the person lives out their whole life punishing the world for the wrong of not giving them what they wanted.
Result: a humanity without soul. A humanity where the spirit cannot fly.
No spiritual growth can happen, the spirit cannot find room inside to soar as long as this default attitude dominates the person.
Don’t forget, we want to prove that a happy life is like all of nature, built on fractals, small action patterns.
So the first step to do when someone wants to grow is to identify the fact that they had this want as a child, that was ignored, violated, or unfulfilled and the attitude they now have for the world to punish it for not giving it to them.
Ultimately the person is eating the poison they mean for the world, because the world is… eh big? lol.
So the first building block of a happy person that can grow is taking responsibility.
Responsibility is seeing and owning that it is you who is doing it to yourself. It is you who said you needed that. And it is you who is blocking the spirit from soaring with your hate, your resentment, your wanting vengeance for the wrongs done to you.
And it is you who is unwilling to do what needs to be done, because others might benefit… instead of eating the poison you meant for them.
This is every person who is at the beginning of their growth journey.
Without the capacity and action of taking responsibility, taking ownership, and without the crystal clarity of seeing how YOU are responsible for your own misery, non-productiveness, non-loving, non-caring actions.
Integrity
And the second element is integrity… same thing. Without the capacity, without the seeing how it is up to you and not others, not circumstances, not how you feel, but you… No growth is going to happen.
This first phase can take as long as years… building takes time. Brick by brick… step by tiny step. Day by day using the ‘don’t break the chain’ rule of the Seinfeld method.
The second phase is also built on a capacity… as you can see, the core element of the pattern:
- distinguish,
- activate capacity,
- take responsibility for how it has been, and
- integrity, especially in the context
The capacity that can take a person to the next level is the ability, the capacity of astuteness, and power with word.
I am not going to teach here the whole huge Tree of Life structure, but if you are sharp enough, you can see that this pattern builds, the pattern you have been employing doesn’t.
So back to outcome independence?
The only way to build anything is to know the direction, but allow the end result to EMERGE as a result of small consistent steps.
Why? Because you only have power in doing anything when you don’t keep your eyes on the result of your action, but keep your attention on doing the action as well as you can. Meaning: When the outcome dominates your view when you take an action, it takes the power out of the action, and makes it dutiful.
A dutiful action has no power. No integrity. No joy. No fulfillment.
Without integrity nothing works… and this is why.
The most salient, the most important element of integrity is that you do what you do inside an empowering context. Context creates the attitude.
Empowering means: you feel more powerful, you act more powerful as a result. Disempowering means the opposite… you feel wooden, flat, empty, dutiful, joyless, blah. Or maybe even angry and resentful.
If and when your context talks about the result, the goal, what you want, there is no integrity because there is no attention, inspiration and joy in what you do.
Looking at the results suggests that you are only going to have joy when the result is achieved…
disempowering? You betcha!
In any life, in any work, there are tasks that are not inherently joyful, pleasant, interesting, etc. But they are part of life, they are part of work.
The default context people bring to it is ‘I have to get it done’ and that gives them mundane, dutiful, let’s get this over with attitude.
No joy, no power, no growth.
One of my all time favorite movies is ‘Dangerous Beauty’. It is about a Venetian (Venice, Italy) courtesan, in the 16th Century. She is able to look at every client as the only man existing for her, and gives all her love and care to that person. She experiences joy by giving herself fully to the ‘task’ and therefore she experiences the joy of the action as well.
Contrast this with the wives who want to be a good wife, bear healthy male children to their husbands, and dutifully submit to the act, the same act the courtesan loves and enjoys.
The only difference between the two is the context. No, not the marriage. No, not that. The difference is to what degree the female gives herself over to the act…
The same thing is true with every action.
Do it for its own sake… do it with all you’ve got.
Animals eat because eating is good. Some humans are told to ‘eat for life, not live to eat’… or eat for health. Or whatever garbage we are told.
Animals do things because doing is good. Living is good.
Humans don’t like to live, but don’t like to die either. They don’t do either with intensity…
But the difference between animals and humans is in the invisible: humans always have their eyes on the prize, not on what they are doing.
The prize of ‘showing it to them’, the poison, or the prize, like a goal.
Both make you miserable and a puppet on a string.
So outcome independence is simply letting go of having your eyes on the prize, either kind, and put it on what you are doing. Whatever it is.
Putting all power in all actions is what I call the capacity. To date I haven’t had any student who was willing to do that.
- Why? Because the world is a lot louder than I can ever be.
- Because the world wants you to be outcome dependent, and not do the things you can do… instead buy buy buy.
- Because you expect to get it from another, something for nothing
That is why.
Christmas is a season when everyone’s vibration drops, and everyone forgets what they learned from me.
In my series of workshops, The Freedom Courses I teach everything from the ground up.
This article is more complicated than my courses. My courses are simple. But I wanted you to see what it takes to grow… because no one else teaches it.
The course is called The Freedom Courses. Freedom from the culture that had distorted your view of life and yourself, and made you a miserable wretch, whether you agree with that statement or not.
With what the culture teaches, you will be and remain a miserable wretch.
I have two teachers who are very successful in business… yet they are miserable wretches…
And you can look at almost any person and see it… if you have eyes to see.
The Freedom course starts on the kindergarten level. Why there? Because most mischief happened on that level or maybe even before, in the cradle… We need to start there, and attempt to undo the distortion we have. We need to alter the seed level of your life.
In the first session we deal with the most basic, the most fundamental seed level elements of the human condition.
- listening
- story
- racket
Unless you get to the level of conscious competence with these, everything else will be piled on thin air, and won’t make a difference.
Build a foundation for freedom
