When you tell someone something, depending on many factors, you are going to get answers that belie their relationship to what you told them.
I once had a driver: she took me to do my weekly errands, I didn’t have any transportation. I talked a lot when I am in her car. Her response to most of it was “I hear you…” That is a non-committal answer, the politest way to say that they consider you noise. That they put up with you speaking.
I have students that say: “I understand.” They took what you said and fitted it into what they already had in their mind, and found a fit. Unless what they understand are the instructions, I know that what I said was wasted, and nothing will happen.
The answer I most appreciate is: “I see it.”
In order to say “I see it” one must track the dynamic, the interaction, the forces, the whole picture. I see it potentially comes from the Observer aka the Witness.
Our goal in this work is to live out of the Witness, or at least spend most of our time there. In the unfrazzled peace of the Witness. In reality
March 4, 2011 I’ve been talking about paradigm jumping as a major tool to improve your life. I have been talking about all kinds of stuff regarding paradigms, but what is it, and why should you care?
Evolution of a species is not linear.
There are evolutionary shifts, we could say paradigm shifts. The fish climbing out to dry land was a paradigm shift. A lot more freedom, a lot more stimuli, a lot more fun… but also a lot more danger… And evolutionary jump.
A big winter storm is moving across America (I hear Europe isn’t doing better) and people are holding their breaths… Waiting for Godot A French nihilist play where people are talking waiting for some imaginary character, called Godot, someone who never comes, and yet you can spend your life waiting for him… Recognize yourself?
One of my favorite short movies is called Godzilla and Bambi… Bambi is grazing, Godzilla stomps him… the end.
or waiting for death… hoping…
How you do anything is how you do everything. If a snow storm makes you hold your breath, how do you think you are when you are trying to face yourself? Hold your breath… of course. You cannot face the tiger… because you don’t like to feel bad… anything bad.
The-powers-that-be teach you to keep your face to the light and avoid the darkness surrounding it. It eventually evolved to a slogan: Think Positive.
Result: a sissy humanity that is drowning in misery.
There are two kinds of lights: one light is like the Sun, life-giving and one light is like a fluorescent light or a candle… lets you see around you, but that’s it. It won’t give you satisfaction, it won’t give you anything… it’s small.
We are told to follow the small still voice within, but no one can check what we hear, no one can check if we are listening to the “right voice” out of the many voices within, and people I watch follow the voice within that tells them to withdraw, to shrink, to shrink away from what is hard, ugly, painful, or fearful.
One of the disciplines I immersed myself on my path to here is Kabbalah, the Kabbalah Centre version of it. Kabbalah is quite open to interpretation.
One of the most important things I learned in my five years immersion is that the Light, the life giving light is behind the darkness. The darker it seems the more Light it reveals when you have the courage and the know-how to go beyond it.
Another way it was said that the Light conceals itself with layers of buffer, as if you put layers and layers of bed-sheets on the window. First it filters the light, but put up enough bed-sheets, and you live in darkness.
Humanity lives in that darkness, and satisfies itself with inventing better and better light sources, like the newest I know, the led light fixtures. Ingenious.
The Dark Side, a group of people that revel in keeping people in darkness, in smallness, in quiet desperation, in slavery, just like the TV production kept Truman in the movie, The Truman Show.
When you look at your own life, don’t you experience asking yourself; “Is this all there is?”. Or don’t you ever wonder why your life seems repetitious, your money, success, happiness so limited and so small?
The Truman Show
This is a very interesting short video putting religious references over the movie: worth watching, even if you are an atheist, like myself.
Here is the trailer of the movie.
is one of the most, accidentally, truth-telling movies. Of course some parts of it are not how it is… but the fact that we live in a world that is isolated from all-of-it, that has none of the grandeur of Life, that our choices are limited, and our misery, longing, sense of lack is permanent, like an undercurrent, underscoring everything.
And of course there is no door on our personal wall… the access to something bigger and better is through the dark spots, the darkness that we don’t want to approach. The unknown, the bigger scares us and we choose, time and again, to live in the little limited world where we know (and hate) every nook and cranny, but it’s comfortable.
If you are like that, you don’t belong with me, because you are, to me, the enemy. The ballast that keeps humanity down.
You see, the Dark Side people could continue doing what they are doing, but it’s not personal, and it’s not a physical prison bar they managed to erect, and who keeps the rest of humanity from evolving into the beautiful Expanding Human Being society is you… with your voyeuristic fascination of what you are not doing, what you are not willing to do, but are titillated watching it.
I don’t kid myself that you will ever take that step. I don’t. Your entire life, your cowardice, your finding satisfaction in meaningless stupid things tells me the whole story, the ending: you are not someone who should even be given a glimpse at heaven: because you are the enemy. You’ll weaken it, and spoil it for the ones that have a big enough desire to move them past the fear.
I want to attract the Jim Carreys of the world, (Jim Carrey played Truman in The Truman Show.) not the do-it-yourself pretenders.
Not the 99% but the 1% that can make the world what it really is, for everyone. An exciting and dangerous place, but alive. Alive with pleasure and with grief. The whole enchilada, not just the “tasty” parts.
Here is a quote from Rob Brezsny’s weekly newsletter to illustrate that “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong”.
Answers that sound like solutions… but aren’t… they just hide the problem deeper… so we get further away from the truth.
Our ability to pursue our dreams can be inhibited by four addictions:
1. an addiction to what other people think of us;
2. an addiction to creating melodrama in a misguided quest for excitement;
3. an addiction to believing we’re imprisoned by what happened in the past;
4. an addiction to negative thoughts that fill us with anxiety.
(Thanks to success coach Tom Ferry for these ideas.)
The good news is that it is your birthright to beat all four of those addictions. The work won’t come fast or early, and it may never be perfect. But it’s quite possible
The above is an example of how coaches teach us. It’s all surface. Simple, easy, and not true. 99% of what you find in books on the internet, in articles, is simple, easy, and not true.
Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong. H.L. Mencken
I had an interesting insight yesterday: you don’t know what it feels like to have courage available to you.
When you apply courage, it just feels like you are doing what you are doing, what you were afraid of. Normal.
Which indicates to me, that courage is a paradigm-shifter.
Paradigm is like a glass ceiling. A one-side mirror. When you are in a higher paradigm, you can see what is below you, but if you are still in a lower paradigm, you cannot see what’s above. In fact you don’t know there is something, anything.
In The Truman Show, Truman didn’t know there is a whole world outside of what he knew… He had to get to a point where he suspected, and then where he walked through that door. So it is a process in a way… not a moment.
If you read one of my previous articles, your answer (most of it) is there: our upbringing is based on the interest of the “powers that be” and not on the interest of the individual, or the interest of the human race: the Original Design, evolution, being an expanding personality.
Our lives, what we are allowed to do, see and know, is not that much different from what you see in the movies “The Truman Show” or “The Matrix” and we are policed, rigorously, and incessantly.
And the policing forces are also “sheep” and have no idea about the truth, about their own status…
So, humanity, in lack of real information, to understand and make what they see easier to handle, easier to be with, invented an imaginary world of explanations, gods, spirits, angels… just to be able to make sense of what they needed to deal with.
When you tell someone something, depending on many factors, you are going to get answers that belie their relationship to what you told them.
