Category: Plato’s cave

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I started the day with reading…  Yesterday’s Growth course sucked all creativity out of me…

I stumbled onto an article about a funny English born Buddhist Monk… Funny? English? Monk? lol…

I like funny… so I went and looked up a video to hear funny.

Yeah, he is funny for a monk, but that is not what struck me most.

The dude, no disrespect meant by calling him a dude, is 69 yeas old, has a Wikipedia entry, is the abbot of some Western Australia Buddhist monastery, with meditation retreats, blah blah blah. The spiritual head of, the advisor or… more blah blah blah. Look it up if interested… I wasn’t.

I measured his vibration. 200. I listened to half of the long talk, about 50 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2aZo38WeXw

He did say profound things I practice, I live by, I somehow attempt to teach..

He says that the noise doesn’t disturb you, you disturb the noise. The [disturbing thing] doesn’t disturb you, you disturb it.

Smart, maybe even obvious, and yet, not even the abbot is living like that… At 200 vibration you can’t… not yet.

What is missing? Because to have that attitude, natively, automatically, you need to clean house… your inner house, of all the ways you have labeled everything and its opposite, wrong, good, bad, right.

And that is a long process, it is all verbal, you cannot do it in a wordless meditation.

Verbal, because all the wrongs exist only in language.

Outside of language nothing is ever wrong. Everything is just is. Mosquito bite, not being able to sleep, noise, assholish people… they just are… no label. Outside of language what you have you have, what you don’t doesn’t even occur, because the only place for it to occur is in language.

What you produce is what you produced, what you didn’t doesn’t exist, because the only place for it to exist is in language.

Really.

If you are agile enough to turn around and catch your shadow, i.e. to hear the voice saying something like ‘you didn’t do X’, then you’ll know what I am talking about. Because if you look around, what is is, what isn’t doesn’t exist…

• Can you find ‘no love’ if you are looking? It isn’t there… unless you say so.
• Can you find ‘not enough money’ if you are looking? It isn’t there… the amount of money is, but not the ‘not enough’.

Because homo sapiens live their lives entirely in the speaking, the job is to clear up that world, the speaking world… and then, only then, will you be able to have peace, joy, and then, only then will you know that if you are complaining, you are complaining about something that only bothers you if you are speaking.

It is not easy.

I have seven students in my Growth course. Five of the seven continued from the Playground. One is a newbie to this work of ‘transformation’. One has been around quite some time, but she wasn’t in the Playground…

This work of transformation? What does it mean?

Transformation is simply a flexibility in language that gives you new and new ways to look at reality, so you lose the suffering, escape the rigid confines of the words you have been using.

The way you get a new perspective, in the world of homo sapiens, is through words… Because, as I said above, homo sapiens lives their entire existence in the world of words.

Anyway, one of the new students is so entrenched in the world of words, that she has no access to her feelings… even though this morning she sent me an email regaling unusual physical sensations she had between last night and today…

The moment you label the feeling, you are again back in the world of words… cut off from the current feeling, firmly in the past. The exact situation Plato’s Cave is best to explain… You don’t feel the feeling, you feel its shadow… The feeling may have changed, may have stopped, but you are still feeling it. Phantom feeling.

Just in…

I just got off a zoom webinar. the webinar was full of opportunities to practice no words… no mind…

• there was noise, jarring noise in the background of the speaker
• the presenter talked too fast and too theoretic, and I didn’t understand a word, my attention was wondering
• I felt stupid
• he kind of helped me with an issue (this is a technology call) but not really.

OK, so for a person with 200 vibration, this would have been an unpleasant call, and the noise in their heads would have prevented them from benefiting from the call, that is part of an expensive course. I even caught myself saying: maybe I signed up for the wrong course… I even had to do some work, some magic to not judge, to not suffer, to not hate.

So what did I do?

• I said to myself: You are disturbing the noise.
• Then I said: he is talking as fast as he is talking… you don’t have to understand. And then
• I said to myself: ok, feeling stupid is just feeling stupid…
• And with the fourth ‘issue’ I just thanked him. I didn’t even have to do anything. He gave me what he gave me, and now I have that… and have a chance to look how it can benefit me… how it can be a starting point for me.

The monk on the video spoke in terms of a meditation retreat, I spoke in terms of participating in a zoom call…

The Universe is always there to answer, so I got an email from a client. He hasn’t done any of my courses, so he is a good representation of most people in the world.
—
he writes:

Hi Sophie

I wanted to know how one should deal with discrimination, racism and oppression.

Yesterday I watched a short video clip of a police officer using excessive force with no regard for another life. After watching the short 3 minute clip I became angry.

My solution to the above issues are to not be ignorant of what is going on in society and in America but to just not watch it or read about it.

In terms of employment: although I feel that less qualified people are favored and that I normally receive the short end of the stick. I also must increase my value and what I am able to bring to the table so that I can get paid more.

Lastly I feel that I need to focus on my spiritual development as that is one of the things in life that can’t be taken from you because no one can give it to you but yourself.

I read your articles daily and I pick up things like taking responsibility, integrity and authenticity in which I have to work on all of them. Reading your daily post is a constant reminder of taking responsibility for my life.

Thank You

—

As you see, life is full of triggers. Triggers to label, labels to make you upset, resigned, angry, sad, hopeful, etc.

Things, people, attitudes, behaviors offend your sensibilities… but it’s not a good way to just control yourself.

Those sensibilities are just the tip of the iceberg of a long chain of ‘offenses’ with something at the bottom, that until it gets disengaged, defused, it gets triggered, and then you need to use your expensive ‘will power’ energy that you now don’t have available for important things, like getting things done, doing something that is difficult, or keeping healthy.

A number of years ago I volunteered to be a ‘leader’s assistant’ in Landmark Education. The job entails picking the leader up at the hotel, driving them to the seminar site, running errands for them, making lunch for them, tea, coffee, and being there for them for the duration of the course, which is normally a 16-hour day, each day.

I was dumbfounded how reactive my leader client was. He is still active, so when I measure his vibration, today, it is 200… just on the cusp of low vibration and high vibration.

Could he become higher vibration? hell yeah… but it is a process, and unfortunately I know that Landmark Education doesn’t have the time and the personnel to develop people to that degree… they didn’t when I was being trained to be a Forum Leader, and they don’t today.

Dianetics trains a horde of auditors, an audition cost an arm and a leg. I know two people who did it, and they are as reactive as ever… so the methodology and the theory of the audition isn’t effective… even though it is a one-on-one process and can take days.

So what I am saying is this: you have to go deep deep deep and find, not just the incident, not just the moment, but the words, and then the whole ‘tree’ of words, ‘tree’ of attitudes what come from that seed.

Unless you manage to change the seed level, the tree that grows out of it is going to be the same… reactive, like a machine, when a suitable trigger happens.

Obviously I can’t coach someone through an article. But what I’d suggest to the writer of that email is to look at this whole idea of inequality as the trigger… Considering that it is personal. That in his fateful early incident what he discovered seemed to be that he wasn’t equal to something or someone, and suffered a real or imaginary loss. And then the whole family, society pushes for that, because it is a favorite trigger and a favorite mindset to a lot of social groups.

So you can see that unless the first incident and what you said there gets de-fused… i.e. the explosive material removed, and thus collapse the entire tree, limb by limb, you’ll never have time, energy, and attention to develop yourself spiritually, professionally, emotionally… EVER.

We could say that it is the chip on your shoulder… and we all have one. Some of us have, at least seemingly, have more than one.

Myself not exempted… But because I have done the work I teach myself, on myself, I now get triggered once or twice a week, while I used to be triggered several times an hour.

The triggers won’t disappear, but you’ll have a weapon to manage yourself, a weapon that requires less will-power than it requires now.

I won’t be starting a new Growth Course in the foreseeable future, so your only option is to do the recorded course… the recording of the webinars.

Get the Growth Course recordingAfter you pay, you have the option to sign up to a one-on-one call with me, or to sign up for email coaching. Outside of a live course, they are the only ways to get personal attention from me.