Activism, reforms, revolution… a timely inquiry

Did you know that every revolution has been, historically, just a re-shuffling of who is going to have power over who?

When I first read Osho’s book, Rebellion, Revolution and Religiousness, I actively worked on understanding.

In Hungary we learned a lot more history than American students do, and I personally have seen revolution, and reform and all that never changed anything on the long run.

It’s like making a dish, turning it on a plate… and thinking that now it’s different. No. it is the same dish… just what was on the bottom is now on the top. Continue reading “Activism, reforms, revolution… a timely inquiry”

Only failures, only mistakes teach you anything useful

I have been leading a webinar for quite a while, and it has always been brilliant, both to participate in and to lead.

It has always delivered on the promise:

  1. show you what’s missing in an area of life, something that you can do something about so you can get unstuck and have that area of life be a lot better… and consequently all of your life.
  2. Effect you so strong that it would get you, or a lot of you, finally get off your ass, and into action.

It’s worked for years… and this past weekend it didn’t.

I have now spent hours looking, and finally I see it. I see what happened. I see what I did differently. I missed the most important job of the workshop… Continue reading “Only failures, only mistakes teach you anything useful”

One step of the what’s missing workshop is sobering. As in a horrible wake up call…

probable-almost-certain-future

While writing this article, unexpectedly, I managed to break through a self-imposed barrier I have had… It’s unexpected… Bear with me till the end, please…

In this step of the What’s Missing workshop, the participants’ task is to look at an area of life that isn’t working as well as it could… and look how it will look in 5-10 years if nothing changes.

Rule is: You won’t change your actions… or how you do your actions. You won’t change your attitude…

Result 5-10 years later: homeless, fired, alone, dead, in jail…

These are just examples. Some results are worse than this. Unfulfilled is the worst…

Turns out that the saying, the observation that ‘how you do anything is how you do everything’ finds its roots in this exercise.
Continue reading “One step of the what’s missing workshop is sobering. As in a horrible wake up call…”

What is the spiritual work I did to raise my vibration? You can do it too…

building-resiliency-raise-your-vibrationPeople ask: what is the spiritual practice, the spiritual work that allowed me to climb up to the skinny branches of the Tree of Life, and allowed so many spiritual capacities to turn on? To raise my vibration…

All these years I’ve been asked, and all these years I didn’t know what to answer. I didn’t know what to suggest that you do, that I did, until this morning.

This morning, while and after I was leading the workshop “What’s missing” I realized something profound:

Life is not set up to challenge you to turn on new capacities. The box you live in has no room for new capacities, and offers no challenges.

So how are you going to grow?

You can learn to swim by being thrown to the deep end of the pool, and it’s life or death… sink or swim. Not a pleasant experience, and will probably scare you away from swimming again, for life.

This is when the need for a new capacity is thrown at you. You are unprepared, and you are not at your best… because of fear. Incoherent, and reactive.

It is too late to dig a well when you are thirsty… and it is too late to summon empathy, or courage, or resiliency, or other capacities when you need it, unless you already have it.

This is how it works with capacities.
Continue reading “What is the spiritual work I did to raise my vibration? You can do it too…”

Empathy… Life’s most important capacity to master

empathy-lifes-most-essential-skillIn my inquiries, I find that more and more capacities that I’ve assumed we all have, it turns out, we don’t.

The question that has been puzzling me is why certain ethnic groups that were persecuted at any one time don’t recognize a similarly persecuted other ethnic group as comrades in suffering. Why one victim can’t and won’t give you a hoot about another victim’s misery.

I mostly see this in movies nowadays, but I used to participate in groups and in big seminars, so I have been seeing this forever.

But this was the first time I asked the question: why is this?

Are these bad people? And I guess that is what I have been stuck with until yesterday.

Yesterday I asked the question: is it a capacity to see the same fate in another?

The answer was yes. Hm… but then what is the capacity? Is it the seeing or is it the appreciating of it?
Continue reading “Empathy… Life’s most important capacity to master”

Tangerine Technique, Tangerine Method: can you hack it? Can you do it? Will it work for you?

photoreadingWhy is it that the tangerine technique works for some and doesn’t for others?
Why is it that PhotoReading works for some people and not to others?

The culture says that we are all the same, and therefore, THEREFORE! we should get the same results form what we learn to do.

Hogwash.

If that were the case, we would all be Einsteins.

You are like a dull knife, a sharp knife or a surgical knife… do you think the three knives will cut the same?

No.

But even people with the same measured IQ will fare differently.

Why? Because there is more to life than the measurable IQ.
Continue reading “Tangerine Technique, Tangerine Method: can you hack it? Can you do it? Will it work for you?”

Hijacking the conversation… inside and outside

cool-loserWhen I owned the magazine I published for 10 years, I was looking to hire an assistant.

One of the test assignments I gave to the applicant is to sort the stuff in a junk drawer. I gave them no pointers… it was a big drawer, a lot of things to sort.

Every single applicant failed to find something relevant to sort by. I finally hired a girl who was nice, but useless…

Sorting is a life skill. Deciding on a relevant criteria to sort by is a life skill.

I learned life-skills in Landmark Education.

Previously I was like a nerd, an idiot savant.

One of the life-skill I learned is to be able to keep to what is relevant, to what belongs to the conversation.

In meetings at Landmark Education, they choose a “conversation manager”.

The two jobs of the conversation manager is to

  1. keep people to say only what belongs to the conversation
  2. to make sure that everything said forwards the conversation towards resolution.

I am always dumbfounded by people’s inability to see what belongs to a conversation.

Continue reading “Hijacking the conversation… inside and outside”

Could you be crying and be unphased at the same time?

the white lotus, the symbol of being unphasedCan you listen to insults to your family, your god, your country and be unphased?

Can you watch death and grieving and be unphased?

I am unphased 91% of the time. Very few things pull me out of the equilibrium. Times when I need to recover so I can return to being well and being unphased. All of these situations are self-created. none of them are real.

I cry a lot. Why? I feel people’s grief, I feel centuries old sadness, I feel people’s pain of not being allowed to grow, or even to live. Continue reading “Could you be crying and be unphased at the same time?”

Do you have a keyhole size view of the world?

chess helps you get more ram for your brainHow many pieces of information can you play with in your brain? Do you have a keyhole view of the world?

What is real thinking, as opposed to having thoughts, or recalling what someone said someplace?

I have been pondering.

My method for pondering is this: I play Freecell, so I am tied to my computer, so I must be sitting. My hands are busy, my eyes are busy, even my mind is busy.

The part of me that does thinking, on the other hand, is free. Free to do, what I call thinking or pondering.

I read a lot, and oftentimes I muscletest if it is true, but some things, moral, ethical, real spiritual things I like to see for myself.

Osho says somewhere that the understanding man doesn’t think, because the understanding man sees.

It is easy to see that if the thing to see is outside, you don’t have to think, you see. Red is red, and blue is blue. You see it.

But when the thing is inside, you need to set it up to see. So the understanding man can set up structures in their brain to look at. You need to use your random access memory (RAM), the instant memory function of the brain, to set up what you want to see.
Continue reading “Do you have a keyhole size view of the world?”