White lotus grows out of mud… and creates beauty out of it. Peacocks eat poisonous berries and create beautiful plumage out of it… This article is about how to be like the white lotus, how to be like a peacock where life, and the circumstances don’t beat you down.
So, how to be like that, unbreakable
the song, Unbreakable, is exactly the opposite of what I am teaching in this article. That whole song is imagining a perfect world with a perfect “another” where they do all the things they are supposed to do so you can feel good, so you can feel loved…
The perfect prescription for unhappiness, fear, anxiety, disappointment, frustration… because people are the way they are. Because people aren’t even willing to be the perfect person for you, because it feels like a straight jacket. If you look in your own heart: you aren’t willing… and yet you expect others to abide by your standards… ugh… ugly.
Unflappable… loving life the way it is?
There is a long long answer, and there is a short answer.
I will give you the short answer first:
- learn that there is nothing wrong and nothing to fix.
- learn that the horizontal way of living where everything depends on people and their opinion of you, you become like them… and you are vulnerable and a slave to their opinion, to their beck and call, and you’ll be, with tiny breaks, miserable, till you die.
There is a movie by the Indian film maker, M Night Shyamalan, starred Bruce Willis. In that movie there are two characters:
- no matter what happens, he comes out of it unscathed – The Unbreakable
- no matter what happens, he is broken to pieces, shatters.
If you pay attention to the unbreakable character of Bruce Willis…
…what you’ll see is a certain flowing with his environment, a conscious awareness. He feels his way through life… and that obviously gives him an edge. It is as if he walked in a bubble, and the bubble would walk with him.
Is that a story, or is that actually possible for a mere mortal? Don’t try to remember all the stuff others have told you: I want you to empty your mind of preconceived notions, and have no prejudice, either way.
Cultures where the “floor” isn’t that things should be different, that there are things right and there are things wrong, where making a mistake is just making a mistake, are much more intelligent. Far East culture is that, a certain acceptance and allowing of what is to be what is.
People’s average IQ as measured by the IQ tests is noticeably higher than in cultures like America, regardless of color or race… it is the culture of wrong, should and shouldn’t that makes people less intelligent.
The other aspect is significant in Western culture and much less present in the Far East culture is taking things personally.
I am addressing cultures where the difference in base attitude, the attitude to life, is most different.
In the Western culture, where I live, people want the world and the circumstances to change as a condition of their happiness, productivity, actions.
When people think what they want, and I have asked, no one said: I would like to be happy, fulfilled, productive, and well, regardless what life metes out to me.
The idea that you can choose your attitude and that will, in turn empower you or disempower you, is alien to the Western culture: the dominant emotions are fear, trepidation, anxiety, and frustration.
This is not true, or not yet true (things are changing!) in Far East cultures.
The emotions that are dominant, determine your experience of life. Fear, trepidation, anxiety, and frustration will reduce your coherence, your intelligence, your accuracy, your results by far. And it is double “whammy”: both your experience and your results effect your circumstances… which means those emotions are unhappiness makers.
But it is possible to create a personal bubble of “there is nothing wrong here” and remove the triggers that create the emotions, and live, largely, in a Western society as if it were a Far Eastern, and be happy, fulfilled, content, effective, productive, kind, available, and become untouchable, unbreakable, impervious to the negative influences of the culture.
How do you become unbreakable?
You need to realize that wrong is a comparison: you arbitrarily determined what should be, and you call that right. But it is your personal take, and arrogant.
It is also a pedestrian way of relating to the world: where everything and everyone seem to be in the way, blocking YOU from getting what you want, getting where you want to go, and it feels entirely personal.
A person who needs life to be easy for them to feel well is a weakling, and his or her kind will be eliminated in the evolutionary near future.
The person who is able and willing to be strong and empowered in the face that life is: random, and impersonal, is the specimen whose seed will be the basis of the next evolutionary step.
The future depends on the individual, not on the masses. The number of people that can master their nature and their attitudes are few… and the future (and the present) is theirs.
Because they can be well, present, happy, productive, intelligent, and kind in the face of whatever life throws at them.
Does it take work? Does it take diligence?
You bet it does. But the truth is: the willingness activates the capacity to work on what’s important… and the unwillingness makes you quit.
What you say won’t matter… what you’ll do is all that matters.
Talk is cheap.
