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It’s a symptom. You have no reason to wake up. Moreover, you have no reason, no purpose to be alive.
The eight billion lives like that 90% of the time. For someone who has the Sight capacity open, it is quite obvious. It has a hollow feeling to it that the speaker tries to fill it with phony cheerfulness, or phony sweetness, or phony eagerness.
Trying.
Trying is a clear sign of that hollowness.
Life wants more life. Moreover the spirit wants you to use your life for something bigger than your life. Bigger than just surviving.
So why don’t you?
The answer even surprised me: you are committed to something else.
And commitment is a singularity.
The way culture uses the word is designed to mislead you. To take on stuff that doesn’t belong to you, and call it commitment.
But what are you when you take on stuff that doesn’t belong to you? You are a load bearing animal, that is what you are. Not a person. Dutiful.
And you wake up in the morning only because you didn’t die the night before. You live your life as a burden, even if you cling to it as if it were the prize.
But, I say, you cling to life only because deep inside you know you could life with purpose… except that you can’t.
The commitment that you made almost as long ago as you are alive won’t let you.
Commitment is a singularity.
And unless you divorce your commitment, the commitment that actually owns your life, you cannot make a commitment to something that would animate the spirit and fulfill your life.
Every single one of us, every single human is somewhere on the spectrum with this.
The one thousand occasionally goes through this valley, but is free enough to re-commit.
The eight billion thinks that they are committed, or thinks that they are afraid to commit.
But because commitment comes from the inside, the inside that is invisible to the naked eye, the eight billion doesn’t know that they are already committed to something, that feels like death reheated.
So the only thing that is common among all humans is that… that they feel like death re-heated. Death warmed over.
And they come to me to be rescued from that… hoping my energies, my challenges, my workshops, my remedies will do it for them. Breathe life into their lives.
But only you can do it.
But not on the top of your already commitment.
I listened to that old (ten years old) workshop about turning your life around on a dime. I myself sounded life death warmed over. And so did my participants.
And although I touched on the commitment that is in the way, I did not elaborate. Why? I didn’t know it needed to be taken out of commission before any of the things I taught could be really useful on the long term.
In that workshop I set a challenge for the participants to increase by 1% in a week, and find a new way to increase, in addition to the previous one, so they can really turn their lives around.
The name of the workshop was ‘Turn around on a dime‘.
That turning around can only be fast if the context, the backdrop changes. Changed by you.
When the backdrop changes, what you see in the foreground looks different, even if nothing changes there.
Purpose, commitment, are background elements.
At present your commitment is undeclared, undistinguished, and reigns supreme.
It is a commitment you made in your originating incident, which was around age 3.
That incident had a failure. A failure to be liked, heard, paid attention to, appreciated, wanted, etc.
You DECIDED something about that failure. And it became a commitment to fix it. And that commitment has been ruling your life.
What you’ll notice today, decades after that failure, is that ‘no matter what you do’, it doesn’t fix how you feel.
Here are a few examples, let’s see if you can see what’s wrong with them.
1/ Me: I was raped when I was barely three years old. My mother said I was a whore. I have been trying to be smart ever since, but it doesn’t fix that I feel no compassion and no support for me and my plight.
2/ Ju: she took a steep slope in her pedal car. At the bottom of the slope her pedal car crashed. I assume her parents either fussed, or laughed, or maybe hit her on top of the hurt. That part she never shared.
Today she works diligently, efforts, takes on challenges to prove that she is right… but that doesn’t fix that nobody cared how she felt.
3/ Jo: she ran in a race. Her father, instead of celebrating her win, said she didn’t run as fast as she could have.
She has been scrambling to show to the world that she is running as fast as she can… But it doesn’t fix that she feels unappreciated for what she does, for who she is. And no matter how much scrambling she does, it doesn’t make her feel good about herself.
4/ Ba: he had asthma as a toddler. His mother didn’t want him to go and play with the other boys in the street. All he wanted is be like other boys and play. When he was a little older and got a bicycle, an older kid stole it from him. He failed to be able to do what other boys could do with such natural ease.
Today he starts many things, but as soon as he reaches the stage where he could be at risk, he quits. He never accomplishes anything, because he quits before it he is even near where he could.
No matter how hard he tries to fix that he can’t be like other people.
5/ Ka: he asked his father to let him play ‘I am driving the car’ on a hot summer day in the Middle East. His father had to pee, or was thirsty, or tired… whatever was the reason his father went into the house and forgot about his son. He was in the hot car and could not get out. Eventually he fainted. His neighbor alerted his mother, who eventually rescued him.
His decision was similar to mine. He decided that he wasn’t smart enough to know how to get out of the car. So today he tries to be smart. To know better than others. But it doesn’t seem to fix how feels. Uncared for. Unimportant. Someone who nobody cares if he died.
6/ Tr: she suffered nightmares. When she woke up in the middle of a nightmare she padded on into her parents bed. They didn’t like that. She failed to be wanted.
She decided that the reason she got no sympathy is because she was weak. So today she tries to be strong, tries to force, coerce, strong arm people to prove that she is strong. But none of that makes her feel that anyone wants her around, wants her for herself.
And no matter what she does, she doesn’t feel wanted and appreciated.
7/ Wi: He was the prince, until her mother gave birth to more children who needed her attention. One night he heard noises through the window, so he yelled for his father. His father dismissed the idea that there is something by the window but brought in his guard dog to be in his boy’s room.
When the dog alerted him to something outside the window he finally relented and investigated. Turns out a stray horse was chomping on the grass right by the window.
He decided that he failed to be believed. That no one appreciated him.
Since then he has been busy doing things that others don’t appreciate. None of the things he has done make anyone appreciate him…
So let’s see if you can see the commonality in these seven examples.
Did you?
.
.
.
There are a few commonalities.
But the most important commonality is that something happened. The ‘victim’ in the story decided to fix how they felt by some action, or behavior, that hasn’t been working.
They actually committed to do that, or behave that way… even though it never worked. But it should… they thought if they ever thought about it.
But the cause of the feeling was misidentified, and therefore the behavior will never fix it.
But the commitment is there… so what is there to do?
I say that the first thing to do is recognize the mismatch between that commitment to behave in a certain way, and the bad feeling.
And with that recognition begin the separation all the way to divorcing that commitment.
That commitment, that behavior always ends you up at the same place. Like a train.
So in essence, you need to get of the train if you want to end up somewhere else.
Unfortunately it is neither simple nor easy to get off the train. Thousands of little pulls keep you there, or maybe a big fear is doing it?
In essence, stop doing what you have been doing to prove that you are smart, or that you know, or that you are valuable.
There is no proof needed. Instead start putting your energy, little by little on something that has a result without fixing anything. Because there is nothing wrong and nothing to fix.
In fact there has never been anything wrong that needed to be fixed, or even could be fixed.
The problem with the separation between reality and what you consider reality is that no matter how sure you are you got reality right, your fixes don’t actually fix what is real. Because there is nothing wrong in reality. So nothing can be fixed in reality.
All my instances when I feel smart, or maybe when I am smart won’t fix that I was and still am feeling that nobody cares about me. And to prove that it is not wrong that nobody cares about me, even the supposed fixes when people express how much they care don’t fix it.
People don’t care. People can’t care. There is nothing wrong with that. It is what it is.
Until you can actually look at that incident and see that what you decided was there was something wrong and that it needs to be fixed has been the issue, not what happened.
So you didn’t get what you wanted. Didn’t get what you ‘should have gotten’. The attention, the appreciation, the permission, the sympathy, to support, the love… OK. you didn’t.
Infantile will to power
This is what I think it was whoever coined that phrase meant: crying for the bottle, infantile will to power. Feeling oneself omnipotent like when a baby (or a dog) cries, eventually the bottle appears.
When I look at my undeclared commitment to cry for the bottle, what I am actually crying for is to be rescued. But what do you need to be rescued? Of course you need to get into trouble. So ultimately I have an undeclared commitment to get into trouble. Shiiiiiit!
I could tell you the story of my life through that commitment… And the two dominant emotional reactions: panic and devastated.
What was I expecting when I got myself into trouble? Obviously I am still stupid in a way, because I react with panic, as if the situation weren’t 100% my creation. It is. Always. So the panic is a pretense! And the devastation is real. With all that effort I could use for something useful, instead I diligently create situations where I can conveniently feel panic.
So obviously I haven’t completely divorced my undeclared commitment to getting into trouble where I need to be rescued… The rescue that never comes, so I can feel devastated. Again.
For Ju feeling not wanted (I think). For Jo it’s feeling not enough. And for Ba feeling that he can’t. For Ka not feeling included? (I am not sure what it is). For Tr never feeling wanted. Wi never feeling appreciated.
I might be imprecise with the ‘outcome’ or home page feeling…
Because the in between issue, like my needing to be rescued is not quite distinguished for my students, yet.
So until that is clearly distinguished, we cannot see what the feverish commitment really is going for.
We are geared to dig into it next Wednesday…
What will come after that session is the ‘Turn your life around on a dime’ challenge… still only with my trusty core group. If and when I clearly see that the steps we set out work, and work famously, I’ll make the challenge public. Public as in inviting people who have not participated in my courses and workshops before.
Let’s see if I can commit to that… I would laugh if it were funny.
That undeclared commitment is what psychologists call ego.
Let’s get deep in with your ego
