Become all you can become with Sophie
He that won't be counselled, can't be helped
It’s been a weird couple of days.
Every time I stop doing something my mind goes to evil acts I have seen in movies or read about in books.
It started with the Marco Polo series on Netflix. I realized that I can’t watch betrayal… something about betrayal is too difficult for me to be with.
I wondered if it was that I saw myself in either the traitor or the betrayed, but I don’t think it’s that.
But it dislodged a veritable mound of buried memories of acts in books and other movies.
Yogananda… I have measured his vibration at different times, in different contexts, always having a different number come up. So today I spent some time in his space… to see what’s up.
Paramahansa Yogananda was a sad person. For two reasons, the two sides of the same coin: he had something that he wanted to share, and it wasn’t shareable.
His words are simply his idea what made him the way he was, and the words did not communicate. Did not do for others what they, he thought, did for him.
So, slowly but surely, his words became a lie. Now, he himself wasn’t the way he said people should be: he had sadness, grieving, devastation move into his heart.
And greed… wanting. Wanting it to be different. Wanting that burning go away from his throat and his upper chest.
And then it all fell apart… and what remained is pretense.
Continue reading “Why is the sad guru sad? … Paramahansa Yogananda”
I have been changing. Subtly.
The biggest problem with subtle changes is that they go unnoticed. And if you are like most people, you want encouragement, you want people to see that you are becoming something better.
But your environment is about as aware and as present as you are, which means: not very. And besides they are busy having their head up their ass… so until you are very very very different, they don’t notice it.
A good example is your weight: if you drop two dress sizes… then they notice it. But if you are doing it right, in a sustainable fashion, it’s taken you months… And for those months you had gotten no feedback.
Continue reading “I am changing… Why aren’t you? You can’t? You won’t?”
Reprinted from Forbes… 1
Recently some close friends visited, both of whom have worked in education with adolescents for over 40 years. We were talking about students in general and when I asked what has changed with regards to the character of kids, in unison they said “grit” – or more specifically, lack thereof. There seems to be growing concern among teachers that kids these days are growing soft.
When I took a deeper dive, I found that what my friends have been observing in-the-field, researchers have been measuring in the lab. The role grit plays in success has become a topic du jour, spearheaded by Angela Duckworth, who was catapulted to the forefront of the field after delivering a TED talk which has since been viewed well over a million times.
Continue reading “5 Characteristics Of Grit — How Many Do You Have?”
I am reading one of my all time favorite books. Again. I was guided to read it again. As I have been guided to watch everything I watch, read everything I read.
Sometimes the key to the insight is on page 800 of a book, or in episode 60 of a Netflix series.
Don’t expect the “key” to be a direct answer, and once you have what you were needing, acknowledge it.
This book is full of clues for me. Clues for why you are living a life of quiet desperation, why you don’t live an interesting life.
The book is about a little girl who gets an interactive smart book, to teach her life.
Neal Stephenson: The Diamond Age. Wikipedia says: The most important quality to achieving an “interesting life” is deemed to be a subversive attitude towards the status quo.
She is four years old when she gets the book.
Continue reading “Expanding human being aka living an interesting life”
How do you go about awakening compassion, caring and empathy?
The first step of transformation, and awakening a missing capacity is transformation!, is to tell the truth about how it is now.
Transformation is so rare, because people are unwilling to tell the truth. Why? Because truth, any truth about you, will first be painful, and it will piss you off.
The truth about you is that you, the way you are, are unable to feel for another person. You mistake your loin’s yearning, your heart’s yearning for connection to a feeling for the other, but they are not the same.
At this point only a handful of people are able to feel, feel deeply for another person.
Living in the three levels of value, the systemic, the extrinsic, and the intrinsic, lived fully, and balanced, is the secret to the good life.
The Indian sages, including the Buddha, skipped the extrinsic. They taught people not to live there. They had a disdain for it.
But work is on the extrinsic level, making money is on that level, so skipping it means living a life of charity. Living a life where you cannot value another person on all levels… because you don’t value the values of that level.
Continue reading “Back into light… The counter cultural way to”
When you are trying to use your mind to be well, healthy, vital, vibrant, and smart
Your mind is good for mind stuff… but being well, being healthy, being vital, being vibrant, and even being smart are intrinsic values, and the mind cannot wrap itself around it: they are above mind.
Mind is concerned with what mind is concerned with, and it is never the whole; it’s the pieces, it’s the spot cleaning.
Mind thinks that if it put together the parts it can see are needed, the parts would create health, vitality, etc… but the mind, the mechanistic systemic organ is sorely mistaken. In the paradigm of the mind two plus two makes four… same level where you started: parts. No life.
Life is an intrinsic value… impenetrable by the mind.
Continue reading “Are you trying to use what you know to be well, healthy, vital, vibrant, and intelligent?”
I am reading a book… 18% truth value, on evolutionary psychology.
What bothers me most is the air of authority these people that write books project… But, of course, real science doesn’t sell books…
Anyway, one of the things this book says that in the past 10,000 years we didn’t learn anything, because our brain was unable to…
And we haven’t been able to change our basic behavior… or our minds.
But recently I saw something that contradicts what the book says.
Continue reading “Why you have been unable to change: The Savanna Principle. Updated”
This article is politically incorrect, and somewhat philosophical…
Not up for it? Spare yourself frustration, and don’t read it.
OK… now that only the eleven or so readers that are up for it remain reading, I can be blunt, and use some six letter words… lol.
Of course, this is, at least partially tongue in cheek…
OK, I am going to, first talk about a new insight I have on religion, then about Jews, capacities, genetically smarter… and other politically incorrect subjects that are keeping me busy pondering today.
Continue reading “Religion, smart Jews, and being a good person… what do spiritual capacities have to do with it?”
