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

The dynamics of your suffering, and misery explained

Feedback is a 13th floor (Tree of Life) phenomenon…

If someone mocks you, laugh with them. It is obvious that humans, on the current level of evolution, live in comparison. I am better, smarter, richer, etc. than you/others.

So they mock you, judge you, try to change you. Normal.

You allow your ego to resist: you suffer. You allow your ego to fight back: you suffer.

The best way to deal with it is to laugh with them, agree with them. It takes the wind out of their sail.

All pain, all suffering comes from from your resistance, is the feeling of your own resistance. Continue reading “The dynamics of your suffering, and misery explained”

From time to time I get incoherent. What do I do then?

Coherence is when all your energies, all your fibers share the same direction and the same rhythm.

Much like having a six-horse carriage, and the horses pull in the same direction.

Incoherence is like herding cats… hopeless.

I am rarely incoherent. And when I am: I am acutely aware of it. Very unpleasant.

The truth is: I used to be incoherent most of the time.

What is the cause of incoherence? I think, for me, too many choices. And an inability or unwillingness to narrow them down, and maybe choose. Continue reading “From time to time I get incoherent. What do I do then?”

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.
Continue reading “Weird is the necessary ingredient to getting a cult following”

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.
Continue reading “You see only what the mind allows you to see”

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 your health number, the number of spiritual capacities, and your earning power are connected?

Warning: read the footnotes!

One of my students in my coaching program taught me something today that I could not see before.

Every student of mine has had one or more health consultations with me, where I muscletested their supplementation, their eating style and the foods that work best for their body. ¹

They also had to set up their water energizer system.

This particular student had her session a long time ago (in October of last year), but she didn’t make the changes I suggested. She kept emailing me with her doubts: can I trust that these are the foods I can eat? Continue reading “How your health number, the number of spiritual capacities, and your earning power are connected?”

Teaching you to climb the Tree of Life… how I do it nowadays

Yesterday I downloaded the Days of Power energy. The “skies” open up at precise times and the energy that is available can be channeled if someone is able to go close enough, and if someone is brave enough to use themselves as a pipe to concentrate the energy for someone else’s benefit.

That is what I do in the Days of Power energy downloads.

There is a part of this though, that I want to talk about, because there is something to learn from it.

Humans, on the Tree of Knowledge, see change as a series of instant changes, like the cuts in a movie. Now I am here, now I am there.

But in reality, things don’t just jump from here to there… even the brain cannot switch as fast as the movie.

Continue reading “Teaching you to climb the Tree of Life… how I do it nowadays”

What should be your first step in becoming astute:?

About the title: an astute person is a person who can see things for what they are

On the Tree of Knowledge we are taught to listen to words instead of looking at reality.

In essence we are cut off from our direct experience of life. ²

In my classes the biggest challenge is to cause the students to see. Unless the seeing comes with words, explanation, they can’t see.

See patterns, see the story behind a picture, see cause and effect, see similarity, see differences, see what they need to see to maneuver life.

Astute is a person who can see things for what they are without having to ask for help, explanation, etc.
Continue reading “What should be your first step in becoming astute:?”

Change vs. Becoming. Fixing vs. Becoming. The dead end paths

The Mindset book is the perfect accompaniment to the Reclaim coaching program, and the From Upset To Communication course where we learn the fields inside which all of life plays out.

I have questions coming at me that shed light to misunderstanding of what this work is about. What the course is about. What the program is about.

I have asked for this type of questions. I have asked my student to share with me what they are getting, so I can see where they are off… where I was off… what it is that is misconstrued, misunderstood, or not understood in what I teach… It was a great idea, because unless I know what you got, I can’t help you.

It won’t be easy to share it, so please advance to me some compassion: I am walking on some uncharted territories.

1. You may feel, together with some of my students, that it is all about removing the upset, removing the disagreements, removing all confrontation, including how hard, how difficult it is to do something.

Hi Sophie,
I’ve re-listened the call and here’s what I got up to now about fields (if I got it 🙂 :
Fields are an energetic, dynamic space where you (need to) move/go intentionally-consciously so that you can communicate with someone who is already there so that communication flows/leads to a win-win outcome.
In other words, you adjust yourself and ‘switch’ fields according to ‘needs’/situation/circumstance no matter what your usual/’default’ field is (does something like default field exist)
And all that you can do when and if you develop such skills first? And these skills is what we learn in the course?

English is her second language, but here is my translation:

She is asking if the course is to teach you to manipulate yourself, until you can get to a place where your can have no strife… where you please the other person, so they don’t kill you… lol.

No. None of my work is about manipulating, or even changing yourself.

That is the forceful approach to life… the approach that cause wars, fracking, and presidents like Trump.

Strong-arming things, people, yourself.

What is underneath is this: There is something wrong. Something wrong with you, something wrong with me, something wrong with it.

So it is a fixing modality.

Whenever you fix something, the wrongness doesn’t go away, it is there, because it is the core of your being.

The action that takes you to Expanding Human Being is becoming.

The reason we use the worm to butterfly analogy, because no traces of the worm can be found in the butterfly, not physically, not emotionally, not spiritually.

Arrogance cannot be fixed: it will remain in every fixed form.
Forcefulness cannot be fixed: it will remain the core of every fixed form.

Becoming is like the seed needs to die to become a plant.

You cannot wrap your mind around it. It is beyond the mind.

I know people with a ton of knowledge but no distinctions.

Distinction is a new way of seeing the world. A becoming.

My job is to cause becoming through seeing the world differently. Through distinctions.

It is like balance: once you get it no one can take it away from you. But if you haven’t gotten it, you can’t get it through explanation, through reading; you have to go through the process of falling and stumbling until you get it.

This is the main reason that humility is the human capacity to all becoming. Humility means: willing to go through what it takes. And experience what there is to experience while going through it.

No jumps in becoming. The mind doesn’t help. Reading doesn’t help. Only going through does it.

2. The second way to miss this work is, I would call, coloring within the lines.

Here is a post inside our Reclaim program, that may help you to see if you belong to this second group:

I am really in an unfamiliar place. A place where the majority of my conscious time is going towards my plans. I honestly feel like I’m in school again. I’m saying this because I hope that my behavior is a reflection of a greater degree of humility.
Where Tai refers to some guy who says we have about 50,000 hours to get it all done, I pause. Now, I realize the number is relative, but it highlights the importance of staying with the pursuit. I surely don’t know how much time I have.
On another note, there’s something that is bugging me. Forgive me if I mess this up, but if humility is about the seeking of knowledge and not the getting of it, could it be that I and others are lacking the foundation for seeking? It occurred to me that I may not possess something necessary to be a great student. When you said to those of us in the Upset webinar that ‘you are not in the class,’ I was dumbfounded.
Then later, I got more of what you meant, but giving myself to something is mostly a foreign approach. Even as I am taking on about as much as I can, at this moment, I feel scarcity saying: hey, there’s only so much you can do in a day so…. I guess what I’m getting at is: maybe there are levels in the depth of humility that I can take on as I learn to manage my life better.
I even realized that sometimes I ask you questions that you refuse to answer, and rightfully so. However, I didn’t know that I was avoiding doing my own work. I’m not sure I know what questions are appropriate to ask you. Is there a guideline I can use so that I don’t ask you questions that are not for you to answer?

This second way of being off… is fear based.

Actually, even the first way is fear based, but the reaction to fear was different there: it was aggression. Here is hiding, cowering, trying, whimpering, backing away from what feels threatening, unpleasant, or a waste of time.

What you want to get is that intellect is not useful in becoming.

Intellect can be actually in the way.

I had the moment clearly when I got my first distinction. It was taught by Werner Erhard himself, and you could hear that he was struggling, intellectually, himself. You could hear that intellect was trying to take him off.

He was attempting to distinguish two. The number two.

The first distinction that alters the rest of life…

For Helen Keller, it was “Water” that created the birth of the paradigm: words. That words are a symbol, a stand-in, for a thing real, a piece of reality.

The moment she got that, she wanted to know the word that was saying: tree, house, me, you.

The movie “The Miracle Worker” (1962) does a great job at capturing the process, capturing the moment.

For me, the distinction “Two” became my “Water” when Werner held up one hand and said “Two”.

It was one hand. One hand. One hand and no second. One hand and in all around there was no hand… no second…

And when I got, hand and no hand make two. hand and everything else make two… I got distinction.

My “evolution”, my becoming became an unbroken path from there.

Now, was it easy to “get it”?

I don’t think so. I had to be there to have my mind blown. There was one other guy and myself who got it.

But that doesn’t mean YOU can’t get it. But you have to let your mind be blown.

That is humility in action. That is growth mindset in action. Becoming. Growing a set of new eyes.

Everything else is hoarding, fixing, explaining.

Change.

The more things change the more they stay the same…

PS: Becoming is rare. If you read the Mindset book, she documents the opposite… very generously.

Humans’ imagination in inventing false, fake becoming is inexhaustible.

And because people really would like to become, the fake becoming paths sell like hotcake. This is the secret the gurus, spiritual teachers, more money teachers, more love teachers, more time teachers capitalize on.

None of them teach you how to become, in fact they haven’t done the work themselves, they use the tone of voice, the right words that sound like they have become, but they are fooling you, fooling themselves.

And that’s why you feel like you should get a magic potion to turn your beggar into a prince or a princess. With no work.

If enlightenment is the way they describe, then it should descend on you…

But, between you and me, the “water” experience or my “two” experience could be called the real enlightenment… the starting point of an arduous and long journey, climbing up on the Tree of Life.

The Buddha didn’t do it. Osho didn’t do it. “Jesus” didn’t do it.

Enlightenment not considered the starting point is false gold. An insight.

And insights are worth a dime a dozen.

Gurus who offer instant enlightenment thrive… why?

Every offer for something instant is a fraud. In every area of life… spirituality, health, weight, tinnitus, hair loss, erectile dysfunction, business, marketing, traffic, success, everything. But…

You flock to them. The main reason you come to my site is to find the ‘right guru’ for you… The right instant solution.

story

17 years ago I met a guy and we started dating. He was weird, he did hands-on energies, spoke with a breathy voice, and had a guru. He told me that you don’t choose your guru, your guru chooses you. He talked about shaktipat… where the guru touches you with a peacock feather and your kundalini rises and you have an instant enlightenment. He drank, took drugs, meditated, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on energy attunements… I told you he was weird.

But he was influential to my evolution.

Through him I found out that I was an empath. He said clairsensar, but when I told that to people they didn’t understand… but empath, it seems most people know what it is… so be it, I’ll call myself an empath…

He told everyone how smart I was… I was a trophy girl friend, raised his standing in the world. Of course he was sure he was smarter.

He had… ok, let me not get ahead of myself. This article is what I found out about him.

Yesterday I learned that the answer was actually in my hands three years ago…

I had it in my hands but I could not hear it. I republished the article with that answer… even though it makes me look really bad that I could not see it. 🙁

Yet, publishing, republishing is the right action.

The article was about the two mindsets, the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.

Fixed mindset, a mind-bug, is what is predominant in society with parents calling their children alternatively smart or stupid… pretty or ugly.

Fixed mindset people raising fixed mindset people.

My mother had the fixed mindset, my father had the growth mindset. My mother called me stupid, and other names that don’t bear to be seen in a respectable publication… lol. She was an underachiever with two masters degrees. She was unhappy.

Parents often say to their children: you can become anything you want, but never say how, and why. Why don’t they? Because they don’t know, but more importantly, they don’t believe. My mother was mighty surprised at my success in life…

Society likes certainty, people like certainty, and knowing your place, and knowing other people’s place in the important areas of life is part of certainty.

You know how smart you are. You know what your talents are. And you now that you are good/not good at math.

My brothers know that ‘we are blunt and rude’… That is how we are… lol.

What you don’t know is that knowing all that is the death of you. The source of your misery. Because now you have to remain that way.

Why? How?

If you think that there is a fixed you… a self-image, self-concept, you’ll protect it at all cost. Justify it. You’ll also refuse to do anything that the fixed you can’t do, shouldn’t do.

You’ll do every personality test to find out how you are, who you are. Get more and more certainty. You’ll send for my Starting Point Measurements, and hate me forever for it. lol. I am not supposed to rain on your parade!

You are a fixed thing with fixed qualities… and every feedback rattles your cage. Every time someone tells you something about yourself: you feel that they overvalued you or undervalued you, so you hide yourself from any opportunity or any chance to be evaluated. You are shrinking… and you are miserable.

You think that if more people found you charming, smart, brilliant, irresistible, pretty, a winner… then you would be happier. But you are mistaken… You would be even more miserable… after the momentary drug-like high of the flattery.

I shared what I learned about the fixed mindset and the growth mindset yesterday with some people, and they attacked me.

The guys fought me tooth and nail… that their IQ is set. That no one can raise their IQ. For most people IQ stands for smartness, for their chances for success, but these guys, over 70 years of age, like myself, have had a life to prove that they weren’t smart… Finding out that they could have become smarter is invalidating their whole life.

And you may feel the same way. You prefer to continue the way you have been, with fixed IQ and a fixed mindset, to avoid having been wrong.

Being wrong is the worst nightmare of a fixed mindset person. Unconfrontable. Feels like dethroning… It’s like public humiliation. It’s like pulling your pants off in front of others…

For a growth mindset person there is no such thing as humiliation. And there is no such thing as enlightenment.

There is only the challenge, there is only the growth, the essence of life. Really, that is life for a growth mindset person. All good, all great.

Returning to the gurus and their reason to offer instant enlightenment…

Because nearly only fixed mindset people go to gurus, the gurus know what someone with a fixed mindset wants, craves, hopes for… and they oblige. They promise it to him or her.

Instant this or that.

You offer a process where you have to work, effort, experiment to produce the result you crave… a fixed mindset person is turned off by that and won’t pay you a dime.

My work, on the surface, looks similar. Activators, remedies, meditations, energies…

But those are only helpers. Ultimately you do the work… Only someone who is doing the work can be helped.

Even the bible says, I think: Help yourself and god will help you.

You need no god, but you do need help, I say.

I needed help. One of the things that helped me on my journey is exposing myself to different and diverse views of life, diverse views of the world. Different vocabularies.

For many years I was stuck in one world, architecture, and I grew more and more unhappy. I changed countries, but inside: nothing changed.

Inside that limited world there was no happiness for me, because inside that world nothing that was happening to me made any sense… or the sense it made, that I was insane, sick, wasn’t to my liking.

Then came my 26 years of Landmark Education participation, then Kabbalah, then energy systems, then Pam Ragland’s quantum mind sweeping, or whatever it’s called, Bach Flower energies, numerology, Peak Potentials, then my own work…

Words that set me free

The first word that I added to my vocabulary made me less ‘insane’ was dyslexia. Suddenly it made sense how I saw the world…
The second word that I added to my vocabulary made me a lot less miserable, and made sense of my past was ‘empath‘… Suddenly the misery I felt was either mine or not… wow. Most of it wasn’t mine at all.
And the third word happened two-three days ago: fixed mindset/growth mindset is now making it possible to take myself, take people, spiritually, and all ways to where they wanted to go.

The fact that three years ago I could not hear it… is very interesting. I think what helped me to be able to hear it this time was my practice to listen to the 67 steps, and observe my own letting go of the fixed mindset in many areas, especially about being smart and stupid as the most important thing in life…

And the 67 steps helped me observe many of my students resisting doing anything that would make them look bad, or find out about themselves anything.

Without this new vocabulary word (distinction) I wasn’t able to diagnose what was holding them back, and wasn’t able to help them overcome whatever that was.

One of the symptoms I saw was them feeling ‘it isn’t worth it‘ or ‘it won’t matter‘ if they do anything or not.

The fixed mindset students are either sloppy or casual about energizing their water or eating only foods compatible with their body. Their health isn’t getting better.

But symptoms, fixing symptoms, won’t help… only finding the cause… and it frustrated me to no end, I was tearing my hair out.

The second symptom was: will they take steps towards what they want or not… And none of them did. They may have taken many steps, but none in the direction of their chosen goal. Taking steps towards what really mattered to them: that they avoided it at all cost.

I used to be like that… I was afraid to find out that I can’t have it, because I didn’t have what it took. Fixed mindset. So I didn’t do anything… and kept the dream as a dream.

Having a growth mindset is very different from a fixed mindset.

In the fixed mindset you believe that there is a straight and obvious path to what you want. If you have what it takes, then it will come to you. (Manifesting?) If you don’t… well… you know, you’ll never get there. Or better yet, don’t even try.

I am certain that all the positive thinkers, all the law of attraction enthusiasts, all the manifesting wannabes are of the fixed mindset.

The growth mindset considers the journey, the discovery, the challenges life, and the results, the destination only secondary.

I still have a fixed mindset in many areas of life. Money is one of them. How to make money, what to do to make money, how to make more than I need…

Also my view of some people is quite fixed… sigh… To me changing this is more important than money.

I have read about, watched movies about extraordinary teachers.

They were inspiring, but none of those offered access to being like those teachers. There was NO vocabulary word. Instead: I saw that they were special. They had it. And I didn’t.

None of them said: ‘I have a growth mindset about my students, and you have a fixed mindset… That is the only difference between us.‘

And they could have said: just knowing those words will alter your worldview. And then you can practice and grow towards the growth mindset, and allow everyone you teach to grow in your care.

They didn’t say it, and i didn’t know it.

Wittgenstein, a German philosopher said: ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’

Whatever you can name accurately becomes part of your world, part of your worldview. No word? No vocabulary? That part of the world is outside of what is available to you.

In the Starting Point Measurements I offer, one of the measures is: ‘How many words are in your vocabulary that you can use correctly, where the word accurately reflects reality’.

This is one of the non-fixed aspects of a human. Of you. Of me. The number of words. The size of your world.

You learn a new word and the world opens up. The smaller your number the smaller your world.

Let’s say the world is 100… and your vocabulary is 30… 70% of what would allow you to navigate the world towards the good life, a life worth living, is missing from your vocabulary… and unless you learn new words that open up new worlds, you are stuck in your miserable existence.

No one who is already happy is ever reading my blog. Everyone reads it because something is missing.

Nothing wrong with that… I am writing my blog to people who are like me: something is missing and I can lead you to it.

Of course, if you have the fixed mindset dominating in your worldview, the gossipy stuff will interest you more, the vibrational reviews.

Before you can really benefit from what I have to say, you should make it your priority to move your mindset towards the growth mindset.

I have been, and I am still doing it.

And as I am increasing my willingness, as I am growing my capacity to be OK with uncertainty (HARD!), my intelligence grows, including my IQ, my effectiveness, and my enjoyment of life, of people, of my days.

Who would have thought that! lol.

PS: I used to call people who fell for anything instant ‘stupid’.

It didn’t help me helping them at all. In my fixed mindset view I could not help them.

With this new word ‘fixed mindset’ I can see that inside that fixed mindset only heavenly interference will every be able to change that is fixed to something new that is also fixed.

It is a horrible affliction, and not in alignment with Life, the Tree of Life… it was taught to you. Why? because in the growth mindset you will become too smart for people to dupe you, to hold you down, to enslave you. That’s why.

PPS: In Landmark Education there was a seminar talking about the myths of I and is… Had Landmark Education known these distinctions, fixed mindset, growth mindset, there would be, potentially, millions of people more with the growth mindset. And humanity would be heading towards living in freedom. Personal freedom.

PPPS: Do the gurus know that they are taking advantage of your fixed mindset? My guess is that they know they are taking advantage of you. My guess is that they have contempt for you. But my guess is that they don’t know that they have a fixed mindset… that keeps them from ever growing, and keeps their vibration low.