Become all you can become with Sophie
He that won't be counselled, can't be helped
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I am re-reading Atlas Shrugged.
When the first two times I read it, I knew it was very important. but an essential aspect was missing for me. An aspect I just got a week or so ago.
This aspect, the difference between ambition and desire, that goes, hand in hand, with the word pairs, producer vs second hander, vertical plane vs horizontal plane. Continue reading “Beyond the horizontal, beyond ambition, beyond desire…”
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What are you building with that?This question was my absolute favorite in Landmark Education’s Communication Course…
I have tried to ask it of people outside of Landmark Education, and the answers I got was always puzzled silence.
So, what am I asking here?
Well, you are always building something. A more popular but less precise way of saying the same thing: you are always creating something… creating yourself, creating your life, every moment. Continue reading “Exercise to create context: What are you building with that?”
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I have written about it, I have even quoted Lao Tsu: Because of great love one is courageous. Lao Tsu taught effortless action, which is in line with Life, he calls Tao.
But if the fundamental understanding of life is missing, if life is fundamentally misunderstood, then that quote is misunderstood.
We, humans, have that ‘love is something you feel for another person’. Or for ice cream, or a puppy… more often, lol.
But what if the love Lao Tsu is talking about is something entirely different?
Continue reading “Because of great love one is courageous.”
The art of being heard, being known the right wayOn one of the webinars the topic was “Not being heard… Being misunderstood”
Every person on the call had at least one painful childhood incident where their speaking wasn’t getting for them what they intended to get, instead their speaking was earning them grief and heart ache.
They wanted appreciation, understanding, equality, or love, validation, significance, or at least agreement.
When something doesn’t work, one would expect, next time you’ll try something different. But no… in real life it seems that the more something doesn’t work, the more you, humans are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
When we looked, each and every one of us were repeating and repeating and repeating the incident in our lives, the same way, expecting a different result. Insanity, right? Continue reading “Always misjudged, misunderstood? No one sees your genius?”
We tend to look at the world in black and white terms. This or the opposite…
You and me… 1
But often what you think is the opposite is not…
My current favorite book, 46 rules of Genius, says:
“Rule 24 (of Genius)
“SIMPLIFY
“People tend to view simplicity and complexity as opposites. But this isn’t strictly true. The enemy of simplicity isn’t complexity, but disorder. And the enemy of complexity is also disorder.
Continue reading “Simplicity, Elegance, Coherence, Ask a different question”
The world is mundane. Ordinary. At least through ordinary eyes. It is just the way it is.
Some people see beauty, some people see truth, some people see goodness, but for the most part you see reasons to justify why you only trudge through life, never really seeing any poetry, any romance, anything really uplifting.
You cry, you laugh, you shut up… words don’t come close to express it.
When I work with people on their life’s purpose, on the meaning of their lives, especially when I do it in a private call, I need to work a lot.
When I speak your purpose, as I see it, I hear you being hooked, being moved. Then you get off the call, and turn it into mundane… money, sex, or such other stuff, that makes life and you stuck in the mud. Continue reading “A life worth living: What does poetry have to do with it?”
The opposite of Life is a conversation is you living in a world of objects, being an object. An object. Ugh. I don’t want to be an object. But if you look, you ARE treated as an object, by nearly everyone nearly all the time.
People don’t look at YOU, they look at your body, your clothes, your hair… but not YOU. Continue reading “Heaven or hell… same place, same people… the difference:”
Landmark Education was born in 1991. With its name change it also, appropriately, introduced a “new technology”.
The new technology was based on an earlier statement or assertion: that who you are in the present is given by the future you are living into.
It was also said like this: What gives you who you are in the present moment is the future you are living into.
But, although they were illustrating this assertion with a story 1 , what they meant was this: what gives your being and consequently your actions in the present moment is who you invented yourself to be.
Let’s say you invent yourself to be a winner… what give your being and consequently your actions in the present, that no matter what you do, you’ll at least end up landing on your feet… and that makes you, automatically, a winner. And some of the time you’ll win more than just your safety or your life… you may win some stuff, some arguments, etc.
Continue reading “Stepping up to the plate”
Pick your battles… have an organizing principle
A good 20 years ago I had lunch with a famous seminar leader from Landmark Education. We had a long history, and she shared with me how unhappy she was, and how ready she was to quit leading seminars for Landmark Education.
I was quite dumbfounded… she was the best in the country, the most effective…
She said: “We teach people to be more effective, and many use the technology to be more effectively dupe people, abuse people, exploit people, make the world a worse place than it would be if they were not equipped with what we teach them.”
I didn’t have an answer for her… but I was pondering that myself for the past 20 years.
And this morning I am as close to having an answer as ever…
Continue reading “Pick your battles…”
If you didn’t ask… “Know Enough For what?!” then you can consider that you are trapped, at the moment, by the question in the title.
That was the purpose of the title, by the way. To trap you.
While you read your article, to get the most out of it, allow yourself to find yourself in my experience, instead of agree or not agree… OK?
Every person with a mind (that is every person alive!) moves back and forth on a continuum (scale) of knowing enough or not knowing enough… Some days you feel you know everything, on others you feel you know nothing.
Continue reading “Do you know enough?”
