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Water becomes vapor. A species becomes sentient. A person becomes a Man.
But the ‘gurus’ say: you are already god. You are already perfect.
Why? To stop you from becoming. To stop you from putting in the effort to actually become someone you can love.
The language is to blame… And, of course, the crab bucket.
One of the ‘obscene’ beauties of life is that we are layers away from seeing what works and what doesn’t.
And, of course, we don’t learn unless we manage to have something that most humans don’t… manage to have something that shows what’s beyond.
I know I am talking in riddles, but it is unavoidable.
I read the Chop Wood Carry Water book in 2016 and loved it.
And I read it again this week. It has a lot of teaching, but it doesn’t give a conclusion… A conclusion that I guess every reader needs to draw for themselves… mistakenly. Because they can’t.
The protagonist, or our hero of the story is teenager John. He wants to become a samurai archer.
So he travels to Japan and trains for 10 years and he graduates.
He has a sensei, Akira, who himself had gone through his own ten years of training.
On one hand this book is the story of building a skill. On the other hand it is the story of becoming. Of abandoning the urges, the mind bugs that would render all that work worthless.
Whaaat? Worthless? Yeah.
The famous ten dark years is sold wholesale, but an important aspect isn’t told… My guess is because so few actually ATTAINS it.
A skill is a skill is a skill. Valuable, but still WHOLESALE. A dime a dozen.
What the ten dark years are about is what Jim Rohn says: ‘Become a millionaire not for the million dollars, but for what it will make of you to achieve it.‘ And what T. Harv Eker echoed: It is not the millions of dollars, it is who I’ve become that matters.
If someone hands you a million dollars, best you become a millionaire, or you won’t get to keep the money. — Jim Rohn
By the way, this is the issue with talent, this is the issue with overnight millionaires…
They don’t have to go through the process of abandoning all the traits that wouldn’t help them become a millionaire, or whatever winning position we are talking about.
Most people are human doings… but the aim is to become a human being.
And the difference is the beingness… Another word for beingness is attitude.
- As long as your attention is on winning, the goal… you won’t attain beingness.
- As long as you do what you do because you have to…
- And as long as you are competing, comparing, etc…
These are just four attitudes that prevent you from attaining the beingness of a master, attaining the beingness of a human being.
Why become a human being? Isn’t winning enough? I am sure you ask that in your head.
The horizontal plane
Here is the answer: all that winning, have to, competing, comparing happens on the horizontal plane… the Valley of The Shadow of Death.
It all can be taken away at a moment’s notice. You can get sick. You can lose everything… and retain nothing. This is the plane of the WHAT…
The vertical plane
Human being lives on the vertical plane. And beingness cannot be taken away. The WHO you are cannot be taken away.
What I realized this morning is that it almost doesn’t matter what skill you are building. It seems that I built the skill of playing Freecell.
It is almost laughable… but no. I used building that puny and unimportant skill as the vehicle to build myself a human being. To abandon all ways of thinking, all attitudes that are not useful, not helpful and would keep me on the horizontal plane, the plane of The Valley of The Shadow of Death.
It’s like a purifying fire you walk through… for however long it takes.
And, as you see, the skill didn’t have to make me money. The skill didn’t have to make me famous. And it doesn’t. It’s building, the process, the sharpening has made me become a human being.
Would I have been better of spending my time building a worldly skill? The skill of selling? The skill of programming? The skill of being a leader?
I don’t know.
I don’t think so. And I have a sneaking hunch that that probably would have kept me in the Valley… like that little dog on this picture. Trembling.
You see, to build a skill to mastery
You see, to build a skill to mastery, you need to be able to do it, and do it, and do it, 3-4 hours a day. But not just doing… like the way people drive for 20-30 years and never get better. No. doing it with the intention to get better, for ten years.
But it is mighty difficult if not impossible to have the intention to get better when you are doing it for real
But it is mighty difficult to have the intention to get better when you are doing it for real… like teaching, leading, selling. Because in the real world results matter more than your beingness.
So I used an activity that I can do even when I am doing other things.
So I’ve been playing while watching movies, listening to audios, leading workshops. I’ve probably played over 20 thousand hours in the past ten years. And only some of it was to get better… Probably about 40%.
- I learned being present.
- I learned keeping my attention on playing instead of looking at the goal.
- And I learned widening my cone of vision.
- I learned connecting the dots.
- I learned recognizing patterns.
- And I learned thinking ahead… ten steps ahead.
- I learned to allow Consciousness to look before I made any moves. This last one was the hardest…
And when you learn these things, they are who you are…
We are running the 5-day challenge, Drink your Food.
You are a beginner at it, and you have hardly any grasp over your WHO.
Eating this way is a skill… a skill that can take you to The Promised Land.
It has the power to do it… if and when you use it to learn to be present, to keep your attention on eating instead of the goal. Learn to widen your cone of vision, to connect the dots, to recognize pattern. To think ten steps ahead. And to allow Consciousness to look before you make your move.
Is it worth it?
I had never known
I had never known that I am not the only person on the planet who has discomfort immediately after eating. Most people have now shared the same thing in the Challenges forum. I didn’t know.
But when I do people’s health measurements, I can see the havoc their eating breaks… Eating in a hurry, living in a hurry.
When I still drove I could see people driving like maniacs, to get home, and put up their feet.
Their eyes were on the goal, not on what they were doing, not on where they were.
Never present. Never effective. Killing themselves, killing life.
And, before I forget, the most important idea, notion to abandon is that there is right and there is wrong. Wrong thing to do. Wrong way to do it. Anything.
That ‘wrong’ will anchor you to the horizontal plane, to the Valley of the Shadow of Death more securely than anything.
One of the huge benefits of doing a challenge publicly… meaning that others can see and hear what is your attitude, who you are being, is that you can get correction. Because, between you and me, it is not easy. It won’t be easy for a long long time, maybe ever.
The things that keep you on the horizontal plane are the things everyone considers good, right, healthy, and normal.
That is the reason not more people become human beings, not become a 1000. Because it is so NORMAL to not be one.
The more time you spend with people on the horizontal plane, the harder it is to achieve liftoff. Because humans behave like crabs… they want to prevent you from climbing out of the crab bucket.
Your undeclared commitment to remain the same
And your ‘undeclared commitment’ to remain the same, remain a victim, will be doing the same ‘for you’.
You’ll get sick. You’ll get headaches, emergencies, or a sudden ‘opportunity’… so you can stay in the crab bucket.
And to be sure, even after you largely moved onto the vertical plane, the ‘human condition’ will, with its long arm, reach out to you and try to grab you and move you back into the crab bucket. These are the occasions where you prove your mettle… (mettle: your ability to cope well with difficulties or to face a demanding situation in a spirited and resilient way.)
I hope that some of you will choose the Drink your Food process as your skill to master… and use it to attain to the vertical plane.
Some of you, with your health history, wouldn’t be able to find a better ‘vehicle’ to keep death away from your door.
And just one more thing: If you have the Big Bundle… The energy that does double duty: it heals directly, and it connects Consciousness with your brain…
If you have the Big Bundle, it can significantly shorten the time it takes to abandon the harmful mind-bugs, the not useful attitudes, the urge to hurry.
PS: Why is the horizontal plane called the Valley of the SHADOW of Death?
Because in that valley the shadow of death takes everything away or threatens to take it away. Love, riches, attention, health, success…
It is the place of scarcity, of division, of fear. Of property, of having. And there is no BEINGNESS in the valley… Beingness drives the shadow of death away… And you only need to deal with death when it actually comes.
At the end of a life. A life where you loved yourself and loved your life.
PPS: I am sitting here still pondering.
I bet the distinction ‘becoming’ doesn’t exist for you. You can’t see it. It is in the invisible.
This is one of the reasons you are not inspired, and you are not inspirable much.
The Korean movie, Castaway on the Moon is a becoming movie.
Wikipedia calls it a love story… but it is a becoming movie. That becoming could be you. Just by dealing with the challenges of the Drink your Food process.
In the movie the good-for-nothing serial-loser, and the schizophrenic girl become through the real, physical and emotional challenges. The challenges of being stranded on an uninhabited island. Beautiful. Makes me tear up just thinking about it.
PPPS: Just one last thing: In Judaism you earn a letter H in your name when you BECOME… Avram became Abraham. Sara became Sarah. So becoming is not new… It is as old as humanity… but it is becoming rarer… as the emphasis moves from being, the WHO to the WHAT…
PPPPS: and a great cartoon to illustrate how the gurus dupe you…
