Become all you can become by raising yourself higher on the Tree of Life

Frustration… or pushing on a string

My dominant emotion is frustration.

Of course frustration lacks humility… frustration is when you are trying to force your will on reality.

things take as long as they do, people do whatever they do, and you’ll screw up, like everybody else.

But, of course, my soul correction is Forget Thyself… meaning allow life to unfold.

That, allowing anything, is the hardest thing for a human… And allowing and yet feeling powerful is even rarer.

We want to make things happen, rush things along, push, pull… and yell in frustration.
Continue reading “Frustration… or pushing on a string”

You get back what you put in… unfortunately for most.

Did you notice that I said what, and not how much?

Did you also notice, that you heard: how much?

Do you notice that people seem to say the things you already know?

But you never noticed that they say what they say, but you hear what you have already heard!

When I said: you get back what you put in, I meant: you plant a corn seed, you get a corn plant.

The things you plant are mostly your attitudes. The attitudes that hide just under your conscious level, the attitudes that you lie to yourself and anyone who questions you.

You hope they stay hidden… but they come out in the result.
Continue reading “You get back what you put in… unfortunately for most.”

The many ways to be unhappy, the only way to be happy…

I mean this article to be the first installment in a series.

The underlying principle is the Anna Karenina principle

The Anna Karenina principle
The Anna Karenina principle is: good systems must meet simultaneously a number of requirements. All good systems are alike, bad systems are bad in their own way
Tolstoy said: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
Aristotle said: success/failure: …it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited, as the Pythagoreans conjectured, and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult — to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue;
good/bad: …For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.

But under the Anna Karenina principle there is an even deeper layer, the cause of the principle, and that is what we are interested in here. Continue reading “The many ways to be unhappy, the only way to be happy…”

Do you have free will? What is the ego’s role in that?

Genetic determinism and the ego’s role in it.

Genetic determinism is the mechanism by which genes, along with environmental conditions, determine looks and behavior.

I could also have made the title: your horoscope and your ego’s role in it, or
your soul correction and your ego’s role in it.

Continue reading “Do you have free will? What is the ego’s role in that?”

The dangers of having empathy…

I saw something really important this morning.

One of my students is planning to build a business that he can do while working for a big corporation full time.

He knows what he wants to do. He knows why he wants to do it. He has the skills: he is good at it. If he gets a client: the client will be happy.

But… having a product, a service, is one thing. Selling it is another thing.

To sell anything doesn’t need you to be good at doing the service, or creating a good product.

Selling is a whole other business.

You either need a partner who can sell anything, or you need to become good at sales. Not easy.

Why? Because to sell anything, an idea, a relationship, intimacy, sex, going on vacation… anything, you need to be able to be in the other person’s head and speak from there.
Continue reading “The dangers of having empathy…”

What do I know that you don’t, that I don’t often get upset? In spite of my peppery constitution…

One of the things I learned in Landmark Education, ¹ is that there is physical development, and there is emotional, ethical, moral development each person needs to go through to become a fully functioning adult.

It was brand new information to me and it blew my mind.

It was new to me in spite of the fact that I was educated, having read thousands of books… even about child psychiatry, and yet, it was an earth shattering revelation to me.

I, like other people, thought that children were born with the capacity to understand why certain things are harmful, etc.

I’d thought that the inability to comprehend and appreciate responsibility for your own actions, for example, was not inability, instead it was unwillingness. Ability as programmed by the genes wasn’t becoming clear to me until about 13 years later. Continue reading “What do I know that you don’t, that I don’t often get upset? In spite of my peppery constitution…”

Learned helplessness versus innovate yourself out of your box

Learned helplessness is a technical term coined by Dr. Martin Seligman.

I don’t want to spend time with what he means by that, and how he came to discover this phenomenon… you can google it if you want to know.

If you are in the 67 steps, it’s step 7…

What I want to focus on here is the place where you won’t look: today… Where you locked yourself into a small box.

How come you are the way you are, how come you live in such a tiny box, no fulfillment, no energy, no love, no success…

So, how do you find the areas where you have learned helplessness limiting your life, the dance floor, the ability to accomplish?
Continue reading “Learned helplessness versus innovate yourself out of your box”

Charlie Munger… quotes

Charlie Munger was a college dropout who served as a meteorologist in the US Army Air Corps before graduating from Harvard Law.

And then he met Warren Buffett.

The rest is history.

As vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Munger is Buffett’s right-hand man. He has an estimated net worth of $1.19 billion.

Like Buffett, Munger is incredibly sharp in his wit and investing wisdom. You might even argue that his words are more blunt and unfiltered than Buffett’s.

We compiled a list of Munger’s most insightful quotes about investing, business, and life.

Check them out below:

———-

Overestimating your intelligence could be a major pitfall.

If you think your IQ is 160 but it’s 150, you’re a disaster. It’s much better to have a 130 IQ and think it’s 120. Continue reading “Charlie Munger… quotes”

Empaths, psychics, healers: could you become one? Can it be handed to you?

It’s very uncomfortable being an empath who “evaluates” others.

Any psychic, or seer, or empath, or whatever… even doctor, who isn’t uncomfortable is a shyster. After all you don’t know.

Knowing anything is arrogant. You see or feel what you see or feel, and you are ready to question it.
Continue reading “Empaths, psychics, healers: could you become one? Can it be handed to you?”

Sometimes it’s hard to see past the trouble in front of you

I heard this sentence in a Netflix film… and wrote it down quickly. ²

Anything that threatens your well-being, anything that threatens your reputation, anything that threatens your self-image shows up as trouble, and fixates your view, in an ever narrowing way on the threat. And you stare at it, and see it with the exclusion of everything else.

The challenge is to just look, and allow the urge to do something, to run, to say something, to explain, justify, fix, to just be there…

When you can do that, when you can just look, you are able to bring conscious awareness to what you see.
Continue reading “Sometimes it’s hard to see past the trouble in front of you”