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What is missing is always in your blind spot.
Distinctions shed light on your blind spot. They point to what you didn’t know that you didn’t know.
You may have a thousand things you have and you know. But what points out the what’s missing is what is not there but should be.
And it’s not there because you probably don’t know it should be…
The other day in a workshop I brought up the concept that being entitled makes you dish out what you say you have received.
For example, for decades, I dished out abuse to everyone, because that is what I said I received. I felt entitled. I felt that I earned the right to abuse… because I was an abuse victim.
So I asked one of my students if she can recognize herself in me. In my behavior.
She could not.
I said: but you were abused by your husband, no? Him cheating on you for years. Him taking money away from you to give it to the other. That’s abuse…
She had never thought of seeing that as abuse. but had she looked at how she is now abusing her husband. that would have clued her in.
Of course even that she sees as ‘I am just telling his that I am good and he is not. That I am superior to him.‘ Even though it does land as abuse for the husband.
But alas, distinctions elude her…
And she is not alone. 70% of humanity uses nice words instead of astute words. Words have power… and they don’t.
Another 20% were taught that unless you have something nice to say, stay quiet. Words have power… and they don’t.
The source of power comes calling the spade a spade, and see what that digs up. No pun intended.
The source of all power gets dug up,always, from what you didn’t know that you didn’t know.
Even if you saw it, but didn’t give it any significance. Or called it another name.
Distinctions are like dots in a photo… the more dots you have the clearer the picture gets.
Most of you have a lot of dots in where you already know… and whole empty fields in the picture… and you don’t even consider to go there, to look there.
To examine the background, the context, the intention, the barriers, the attitudes. The more you would see the clearer it would become how you trip yourself up so your life is less than fulfilling.
Learning to look at things through newer and newer distinctions never stops. And it shouldn’t.
I am now listening to the talks of a clinical psychologist, in Hungarian, talking about stuff I have been foggy about.
I learned about the many different ways one can be afraid.
Fear, anxiety, anguish, terror, fright, fearfulness, horror, alarm, panic, agitation, trepidation, dread, consternation, dismay, distress, worry, concern, apprehension, apprehensiveness, consternation, uneasiness, unease, fearfulness, fear, disquiet, disquietude, perturbation, fretfulness, agitation, angst, nervousness, nerves, edginess, tension, tenseness, stress, misgiving, trepidation, foreboding, suspense, etc. OMG. And they ARE different.
Each word is a distinction… and yet, when I talk to people, they call everything fear or anxiety.
When you manage to pinpoint what you are feeling
When you manage to pinpoint what you are feeling, you can, so to say, take the feeling in your hand and look at it, like children look at bugs, and be love it. ‘Ooh, gross…‘ lol.
But if you call it another name, nothing happens, because the feeling won’t respond to the wrong name. If someone said: Suzy, listen up… I would not think they are talking to me. My name is Sophie… and I don’t respond to Suzy..
So yeah, precision. Accuracy. Vocabulary. Astuteness.
One of my students emailed me yesterday to report on her feeling. something in her chest/sternum, and identified it as the Star of Bethlehem PTSD symptom. I muscletested it for her, and found that the feeling she felt was Sweet Chestnut, anguish, not what she thought.
Bach Energies
When describing the Bach Flower Essences, Dr. Bach said that Sweet Chestnut ‘Is the (remedy) for that terrible, that appalling mental despair when it seems the very soul itself is suffering destruction. It is the hopeless despair of those who feel they have reached the limit of their endurance.’
Once you know that, you may start to break out the champagne. Why? Because that anguish is the ego’s… not the soul’s. The ego is afraid that you’ll become something bigger, and ego will lose its hold on you.
Yeah…
Good news.
PS: I think the reason so few people like math and physics is because it requires this capacity: mental representation. Mathematics and physics helps open it up and develop it, but if you have shied away from it… then you are screwed nowadays, decades later.
