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

Weird is the necessary ingredient to getting a cult following

I spend some of my “entertainment credits” to shore up my cultural understanding of the country I live in, the United States. It is still study… it is still doing my work.

I read books you had to read in high school, and I find that they are really good books.
I watch shows that you watched, read nursery rhymes.

I am watching Twin Peaks.

It’s a cult classic, and I am learning a lot from it.

I learn that to be a cult movie, it has to be consistently weird. Like The Big Lebowski or really many of the Coen Brothers movies. The movie, Being John Malkovich.

But Twin Peaks takes it to a whole new level of weird. I am not talking of the surreal elements, those are just silly props. I am talking about people being themselves. Stupid, naive, self-centered, living in their made up universe… illustrations to “you live in a world of your own design”, having very little of your map of reality and reality have in common… all very funny and all very commonplace… but here made weird, so you can see it.

Through adding weirdness it is now clearly visible, that most things we watch have a soothing, unreal corrective lens on them, because I have a hunch that Twin Peaks’ representation of reality, the reality of human behavior, is closer to how it is.
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The Integrated Good Life & The Four Pillars Of Eudaimonia

Eudamonia: the fulfilled life. The satisfying life. It’s a how… It’s about how much life you have in your years. Fulfilling the potential that you are.

It’s impossible to have “the Good Life” without Integration… but… ¹

One of the hardest steps for students to complete in the 67 step coaching is the step about creating an integrated life.

Why? Because on the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, there is no such a thing as integration.

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Are you disappointed with yourself for not being higher minded, and achieving more in life?

For years I’ve seen that humans, humanity, are stuck in a place where happiness is impossible, accomplishment is not predictable, and health is touch and go.

I’ve had big hopes, selfish hopes, that I will be the one to unstuck you.

Lots of other people have this hope… and the hopes remain hopes, because you have a vested interest to keep what keeps you stuck in place? If we knew what keeps you stuck, maybe we could unstuck you.

This article is an attempt to identify that one thing. The linchpin issue.
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When you don’t hurry, time doesn’t hurry either

When you don’t hurry, time doesn’t hurry either. When you are prepared you can afford to not hurry

An article I wrote about IQ and your inability to see higher than 1 degree above your level, and about 5 degrees below your level fell on dead silence. Hm, interesting. It seems to have violated something unsaid, and got caught in the filter the mind mounts to stop disturbing news to enter your consciousness.

I shared this with the woman who drives me to do my errands on every Tuesday, and watched her emotions (remember, I am a True Empath!)… the emotions were “holding your breath, playing possum: I am not even here… Nobody home, I didn’t hear you…”

I pondered it until I saw it: we don’t like our bubble burst. We want our self-image to stay the way it is, so all of life can stay the same.

This, in spite of all the wants to be more, live more, do more, have more. In spite of the desire to raise your vibration. Why? Because it’s scary. It is scary to hear that our worst fears are true. Or maybe even worse than we feared them to be.
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You see only what the mind allows you to see

This is a four years old article. I am rewriting it to include fixed mindset, the distinction from Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset.

When the mind takes over your perception you see what your mind wants to see.

We have all experienced how the mind tricks us into believing that something other than what’s happening is happening.

When you are dizzy, sea-sick or drunk: the room seems to be spinning. When someone tells you skinny is good, you start liking skinny. When someone tells you you are ugly, you start seeing ugly.

Here are some examples:

1. You are not allowed to see what your mind doesn’t allow you to see…

…this is why Japanese soldiers could not see, till the end, that they were beaten.

More than that: Japanese soldiers enlisted into the Japanese navy, but never considered that they should learn to swim: the option that their vessel would sink never occurred to them: after all their emperor was invincible. They would not even make any moves to get a life preserver when they were under attack: their mind told them that nothing can, nothing could happen to them… and they died by drowning… victims of the mind hiding reality from them.

You are that Japanese soldier, you just don’t know it.
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Smart people don’t have to look… Creativity is genetic… and other bullcrap from the Tree of Knowledge

I have started to put my old videos on my video site

I also listened to one… how you lose your creativity, how to get it back…

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Want to see me? Instead of just reading my words…

The counter-intuitive path. Teaching pigs to fly

Today I am tired. I am in and out of bed, I need my rest.

Why am I so tired? I lead a session of the From Upset To Communication course/workshop, an experimental course with no curriculum, except my commitment to take you to a place of living in the flow.

It is possible. I did it. But not with what you already have.

People, maybe you, my students, hope that we can have a life like that, without some pain, maybe a lot of pain.

What is the pain about? Well, it is the pain of loss.
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It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so”.
~ from the movie “The Big Short”

Why is it that people don’t like this quote? Can you guess?

I see it all the time. People are quite certain that what they know is true, and are puzzled by the fact that they don’t feel good about themselves, about their place in the world, about their lives.

This includes smart people, and this includes people who are not that sophisticated.

We, as a species, are full of knowledge that just isn’t so. And when we build theories, actions, futures, arguments on those untruths, then things don’t work. Continue reading “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so”

How a collage is a diagnostic tool

“What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?” French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posed that question. I invite you to put it at the top of your list of hot topics to meditate on. In doing so, I trust you won’t use it as an excuse to disparage your companions for their inadequacies. Rather, I hope it will mobilize you to supercharge your intimate alliances; to deepen your awareness of the synergistic beauty you could create together; to heighten your ability to be given the universe by those whose fates are interwoven with yours.

In the current live course, from Upset to Communication we have come to the last of the four non-elevated fields of communication, Admirer-admired. My horoscope, above, for the coming week reflects that.

One of my students has already sent me her collage. It has given me a glimpse into her internal conversations that is deeper than I have ever seen… and I have known her for almost six years now.

Collages, where you go through pictures in magazines, or memes on the internet, are the best way to reveal to yourself your relationship, opinion, attitude about the world, about others, about yourself, about effort, ambition, etc.

Making collages has two parts:
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