The bumbling idiot’s guide to a life worth writing about

“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself” said William Faulkner. I agree, even though the language, the vocabulary is imprecise.

The “heart” is one self, and the other self is the precious I, the delusional I, the lower self.

The conflict, the struggle to make those two selves align, as William Faulkner says, is worth writing about… because it is like a hero’s journey.

I call it “soul correction” because I am firmly rooted in Kabbalah’s view of life. But it is the same thing: bringing the two selves in harmony so they cause synergy that allows living a life worth writing about.

This pretty much the context for the next quote: “Either write something worth reading (about) or do something worth writing (about).” – Benjamin Franklin. I added the word “about” in brackets for clarity. Continue reading “The bumbling idiot’s guide to a life worth writing about”

You live inside a machine… now… Respect the machine… Don’t fight it.

respect the machineRespect the machine… 1

Many of you will get unstuck reading, understanding, and making what I teach in this post instinctual.

Many topics give themselves better and easier to make an advice, a guidance, a new method of doing things instinctual.

I envy the teachers of those “things”… My favorite teacher, ever, is Robert Plank because of his “how”. I make a point of taking all the classes he teaches, because I can see the path: how what he teaches will be made instinctual.

And try I might, I haven’t been able to duplicate it in my courses.

Worldview, attitudes, how to read, creating context, etc. seem to be not quite demonstrable, and not that easy to tell people what to do exactly to make them instinctual.

Instinctual means you can do it like you can breathe…

I have managed with a few things myself, but quite a few things: I still have to see, suffer, and do…

Everything in what I teach has to go past the hearing and the understanding level. Because the distance between those levels and actually applying them, instinctually, is like crossing the Grand Canyon… not very likely.

Even a little practice can go a long way… maybe half-way? Continue reading “You live inside a machine… now… Respect the machine… Don’t fight it.”

Musings. Thoughts that an unplanned ‘vacation’ gave me

I just spent almost four whole days and whole nights in bed, in and out of sleep.

It was new to me to think of myself first, and of ‘duty’ second.

But I have learned, the hard way, that if I don’t take care of myself, I may be dead sooner than I’d like.

Actually it wasn’t hard to stay in bed. This was for me like a vacation. I vacated my mind. Trial death. Nice.

Until last night… that is. when my mind kicked in and instead of letting me sleep, I was writing articles in my head. Continue reading “Musings. Thoughts that an unplanned ‘vacation’ gave me”

What is the number that most predicts how effective you are

What is the number that most predicts how effective you are

Theory induced blindness

I like to call the phenomenon of not being able to see what doesn’t agree with your theory of life: theory induced blindness. A more popular and better known label for it is “confirmation bias”.

You only hear what you agree with. Or more precisely, you only see what you recognize. And you only consider what you recognize as agreeing with your worldview. Continue reading “What is the number that most predicts how effective you are”

You are a racketeer. Small time bit player. Smoke, mirrors

You are a racketeer. Small time bit player. Smoke, mirrors
Why is drama a racket? Why is it never real…
Life is never dramatic. The drama is added by the onlookers or the participants.

Things happen. And you do what you do. You may get mauled, killed, or laughed at. But drama only happens in your head… it is never out there.

You look in the mirror and you see what you see.

I look in the mirror and I see loser. Why? I don’t care. I know there is no loser there… in fact there is no loser anywhere. so I have a choice: make drama or not make drama.

Most of my life, like everyone, I was making drama.

I found clever or not so clever ways to make people say that I was a loser or something like it. Other ways to prove I was or I wasn’t.

Life was a drama around being a loser. Continue reading “You are a racketeer. Small time bit player. Smoke, mirrors”

Do your spiritual practices make you higher vibration?

Do your spiritual practices make you higher vibration?

What is the common error in many of the spiritual practices, an error that result in not what someone wanted from the practice, but instead forcing, or self-righteousness… neither of which are very spiritual? 2

I am learning a lot by observing Gurjieff at different stages of his journey, and through the different students he had.

If I am not mistaken, the mistake is made early on… in the intention.

I have learned different meditation techniques. What was in common with them is the desire to be free from the thoughts, and the harmful emotions.

It is the wrong start. Continue reading “Do your spiritual practices make you higher vibration?”

The connection between how you listen and how alive you are…

You listen… approximately. And your life can be no better… you are at best approximately alive.

Your powers of distinguishing the relevant from the irrelevant, the worth listening to or the noise, the worth reading or the noise, the worth knowing or the noise are not even on a kindergartner level.

Why? Because you have all these amazing human abilities, but you don’t use them.

When I tell you to practice the Amish Horse Training Method, and I explain that the way it goes is that the Amish farmer ties the young horse in training to a pole next to a busy highway, and leaves it to deal with the noise of the highway for 30-60 days. Continue reading “The connection between how you listen and how alive you are…”

How is the relationship between you and you? wretched?

How is the relationship between you and you? wretched?

What is the “feat”, what is the accomplishment that will come from doing the Amish Horse Training Method faithfully and as it is meant to be done?

As it is meant to be done… this sentence has a rhythm, a music… and it is rare to see it happening. Continue reading “How is the relationship between you and you? wretched?”

Blind chicken syndrome part two. Serious teaching here

Blind chicken syndrome part two. Serious teaching here

In some way I was born to be one of these blind chickens. It used to take me conscious and deliberate thought not to close down a looking process, not to jump into a conclusion. It did not happen without deliberate thought.

And when I forgot, or I was too tired, or when I was on a roll… god save me from the consequences. My life, my business, my relationships could have been twice, three times as good had I had the presence of mind of remembering not to jump into conclusions all the time.

But there is another aspect, or maybe two?

And that is agenda.

I just watched on youtube the impassioned speech of the whistle blower in Larry Nassar sexual abuse trial.

The person, since her abuse, became a lawyer, has her own children.

The interesting thing about the speech was that its words were powerful, but she had an agenda… and that killed it for me, made me cringe: she wanted to impress.

Now, that is one of the agendas that you want to notice.

Are you speaking to impress? To be considered smart, knowledgeable, fast, or whatever the hell you are pretending? Are you pretending to others, or are you pretending for your own sake?

In the invisible 53, I speak about the invisible moves and games people play.

We could say that there is only one game … a racket. It is recognized by seeing that you have a payoff: making yourself look better than you are, smarter, etc… and a cost; giving up being all you can be.

Obviously, speaking for effect is a racket. And the real cost is that after saying what you said, now you cannot do what there is to do… because now it would negate the talking… and make you look bad.

And all the talk about becoming all you can be, having this and having that becomes impossible for you… because now you can’t do what you need to do.

And that is a horrible price to pay.

The other day someone posted a question that triggered a way of looking that is important:

Here is the question: Sophie, I’ve been teaching these steps to my children too. Hoping maybe they can catch it earlier on and start practicing hearing the voices and memes.

How do you make it a spiritual practice where you consciously do it 24/7 without forgetting it? Do you have a certain method you apply for each practice? I am thinking maybe putting few reminders in my phone to start with until it becomes a habit.

Some soul corrections are very delusional. The person fancies themselves other than they are. It is the voices… The voices that tell you you are better than you are. So what is asking the questions is the voices of the delusional self.

This particular person is a good example: when I muscletest how much of the time she is unconscious, asleep, living in the bull’s ear, safely tucked away in an imaginary world created by the voices… the muscletest says: 99%.

Gurjieff was a 20th Century philosopher and “guru”. His school is still operational, and his school still produces people who believe they are better, more awake, etc.

Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.

Looking at Gurjieff I realized something really important: your eventual success, your personal success, depends on your starting point: what you call things.

And I just found another reason his teaching wasn’t effective. He taught:

It is impossible to recognize a wrong way without knowing the right way. This means that it is no use troubling oneself how to recognize a wrong way. One must think of how to find the right way.

The exact opposite is true. The strait and narrow of the “right” can only be found by finding the “wrong” way. This is a huge and important difference between his ineffective methods, and my 80% effective methods.

I am still searching for the missing 20%. But between you and me, happy 80% of the time is almost good enough for me. Personally. But for humanity’s sake, for human evolution’s sake, I am diligently searching for the missing 20%. It is there, by design. Muscletest says: I am holding it, just can’t see it for what it is… weird. lol

He called all the voices that you hear, all the voices that demand that you do, that you don’t, that you eat, that you don’t… etc. he calls them all I… a multitude of i’s.

I call them the voices. The voices that you train yourself not hearing as yourself. They are not you… they are noise. Train yourself Like you would train a horse… like the amish train their horses to hear they noises of vehicles as irrelevant.

Without that training both you and the Amish horse are clueless as to what to listen to, and what not to listen to.

As some of my students have been astutely stating: most of the voices come from the Delusional Self… the not-you. The “entity” that masquerades as you… And you fall for it.

And without training you will.

There is a huge difference between a spiritual practice and a training.

In a spiritual practice you practice what you have trained to recognize, what you have trained to do accurately.

Truth be told, meditation is not a spiritual practice, because no one knows what the heck they are doing, and the teacher doesn’t know either.

So it is not a practice, it is a passtime…

Unless you are drilled, trained, corrected, and drilled, until you make NO MISTAKES, there is no spiritual practice, there cannot be.

Most people I know refuse to be trained. The Delusional Self fancies itself too good to be needing training.

These are the people I tell “Sorry, I can’t help you.”

And when the trainer himself uses their own method that is using the terminology that is misleading, like Gurjieff, then the trainer himself will only have moments of awakeness… Gurjieff was only awake 10% of the time. The rest of the time he was battling or he was in a trance with the voices that he fancied were him.

I am awake 80% of the time. Not because I am better. But because I am working with a different model of organization of what is going on in a human.

My awake time is not 100% because of some inaccuracy in the model I use.

I have been nudged about that for a few weeks now… and I am having a hard time seeing what would be a more productive model… that would allow you to see and hear reality, to see and hear the order that Life has, to see that Life is pretty simple if you take away all that isn’t Life… the voices, the memes, the desire traps…

That when you live Life at Life’s terms with Life’s tools, then you can be happy.

But not until then. All that smiling, all that success seeking, all that pleasure is not happiness making…

And because what is NOT Life needs to be relegated to the unimportant…  your eyes, your ears, your feelings need to be trained to recognize and relegate them to ‘unimportant’, so you can be left with Life and what is important. What is intrinsically valuable, and what makes you happy.

Here is an insight I have been attempting to give birth to:

There is a Ukrainian series on Netflix, The Sniffer. He is a guy who can smell like an empath can feel. He walks around with a smell-blocker in his nose. He only takes it out when he needs to identify a smell. He works with law-enforcement.

And he is good. He is amazing.

There are a lot of people with a good “sniffer” for a nose, but he is unique in that he has the discipline to direct his sniffer to what is relevant. And he has a huge body of smells that he recognizes accurately.

Like I direct my “feeler” to what is important.

Unless you train yourself, with the Amish Horse Training Method to be able to tell what is relevant and what isn’t, you are worthless as an empath, worthless as a sniffer, and pretty worthless as a human.

Worthless to yourself! I see your value, but you don’t. Because you listen to everything as if it were relevant!

I have some generous students who give me daily detailed glimpses into their personal hell. In that hell you can’t do good, you can’t amount to anything, you are tortured.

Happiness? An obscenity inside that hell.

The only thing that can get you out of that hell is training. Training or hell… these are the options for humans.

And in the meantime I am working on the missing 20%.

The next training I am offering grew out of the ‘Growth’ course where it became evident, that you connect to everything through words. Everything including yourself.

And that produces surface connections, where no love, no fulfillment, no satisfaction is possible.

Unfortunately unless the participants do what they are supposed to do, the mallet exercises, the attempts to feel and connect on the feeling level, no course, no training can be successful.

I want people in the Feelings course who are willing to do what it takes to move from distant, unhappy, meaning making machine to feeling, breathing, loving, fully alive productive person.

Are you that way? are you willing?

I can only help you if your level of integrity is higher than 10%.

I just visited the website of a spiritual advisor, who gives skype/zoom consulting calls.

She has a ton of testimonials.

She just has a simple conversation with people and points out what they can do differently.

And as the testimonials attest, they do, At least once. And then get the results that have eluded them.

I could, like her, do the ‘I give you advice’ like I give you a fish.

I have decided that I want to teach you to fish so you’ll never need me.

My diagnosis of humanity is: they don’t believe in becoming someone who can fish, they prefer to be fed… one fish at a time.

But if you are one of the rare people who want to be trained so you can become all you can become, in business, in relationships, in health, then the Feelings course is for you.


Go to step 2

12 behaviors to weed out to become worth a damn

12 behaviors to weed out to become worth a damn

Becoming worth a damn is what people in my 67 step coaching program are working on. But here is an aspect that is not touched on by Tai Lopez and his 67 steps program.

Being worth a damn is a tricky distinction: there are no guidelines to follow. If you want to be worth a damn, where you want to look is what value other people assign to you, how much respect, support, love, etc. you get from other people.

This is also my first time looking at life through this question, and myself have found two behaviors I haven’t eliminated completely, and all the negative social feedback is caused by those. Continue reading “12 behaviors to weed out to become worth a damn”