The inner view and the outer view of who you are are vastly different. Your chances for success, love, happiness depend on the accuracy of your self-image. ((self-im·age
noun
noun: self-image; plural noun: self-images
the idea one has of one’s abilities, appearance, and personality.
“sickness is an affront to one’s self-image and dignity”))
Do you know that people see you differently than you see yourself? And both you and other people see you differently than you actually are.
You may see yourself worse or better or just plain different than you really are… and so do others.
Your life would work better if the two views were closer. You’d have less surprises, less upsets, less fragmentation in your life…
Your actions depend on your self-image combined with your world-image. Altering either, will alter your actions. Bringing both closer to reality will make you a winner.
Want to stop procrastination? This is the work you need to do…
But why and how are the two pictures different, and what can you do about bringing them closer so you can start living the good life?
The two spiritual capacities that are active in people whose inner and outer pictures are close, are the capacity for self-awareness, and the capacity to see the big picture.
Seeing the big picture is a very high spiritual capacity. Very few people have it turned on. The experience of life, when you don’t have it on, is like being a visually impaired person, walking around with a white stick, bumping into stuff, walking to the edge and notice it just before they would fall off the cliff, literally and figuratively.
Let’s see how that looks at your job: You look at your work, and you “know” you are doing some of what you are paid to do. You “know” that you should be paid more, so you reduce the amount you do, to match the pay you are getting.Then the boss calls you in, and tells you that your work is insufficient and crappy.That is one cliff you walked onto, unawares.
You think everything is all right in your relationship. You go home, you go out to eat with your spouse, you sleep in the same bed. You even give out eating healthy, reading books, growing, just for the sake of the relationship.But there is no relationship. The other hates you. They imagine having a spouse with whom they can have fun, they can have interesting conversations, go and have adventures with.That person is not you. You are there for the status quo…This is one cliff… or more likely one desert that you wandered into unawares… no water, no oasis in sight.
You think everyone is watching you with critical eyes. You look different: an Asian face amid the round eyes people… and you know they think you are less than them.You want to go back to where everyone looks like you. You “know” it will be good, because then people won’t criticize you.They you do… and oh wonder, people seem to criticize you there too…What you don’t see is that you are so self-involved, that you are completely blind, deaf, to what is going on around you. You don’t know you are talkative, you don’t work much, you have no relationship to anything around you.If you stepped back, out from behind your eye balls, so the “big picture” includes you, you observing you and others, you would see how out of sync you are…
My story of coming out from behind my eye balls
I first stepped out from behind my eyeballs back in 1988, a few months after the big stock market crash on October 19, 1987, “The Stock Market Crash of 1987 or “Black Monday” was the largest one-day market crash in history. The Dow lost 22.6% of its value or $500 billion dollars on October 19th 1987.” Architects were out of jobs, and so was I.
I desperately needed a job. Someone suggested that I invent myself for the job market as a person they would want to hire regardless of the economy. I decided on a beingness: “brilliant and a contribution”.
Then the coach instructed me to spend as much time in front of a mirror to practice the beingness as I could.
I spent the whole night in front of the mirror, observing and talking to the person in the mirror.
The person in the mirror had the demeanor ((de·mean·or
d?’men?r/
noun
noun: demeanour; plural noun: demeanours; noun: demeanor; plural noun: demeanors
outward behavior or bearing.
“a quiet, somber demeanor”
synonyms: manner, air, attitude, appearance, look;)) of being condescending, arrogant, demeaning.
I saw it. I could not unsee it.
My life suddenly made sense in retrospect.
My mother beating me. My teachers wanting me to get expelled from school. Men leaving me. Friends being afraid of me. Colleagues not wanting me around.
It was terrible. Because that is not how I felt. That was an outside thing, as the definition says “outward behavior or bearing”, for the most part. Facial expression that did not match my inner being, my emotions, my thoughts. At least not all.
I worked on that all night. Next day I got a job.
But working on a behavior all night did not change anything: I still have that demeanor… and it is still hard for me to control my facial expression.
I watched some of my videos where I am having a phone conversation with someone… Ughh. Scary.
But now I know… And can do something about it.
In the 67 step coaching program, this is one of the goals to achieve, without actually having to work on it specifically. Some people take to it better than others.
It largely depends on another spiritual capacity: self-awareness. Self-awareness is the big enough distance between the self and the Observer, for the Observer to be able to see, not just feel…
For the Observer to step out of the mind, step out of the body, and hear it, see it, from there.
It is a capacity twice as frequently turned on (active) in the genome as the Big Picture capacity: one in one hundred.
For most people the idea doesn’t even come up.
The 67 step coaching is quite useless unless through doing the steps and the coaching, you can turn on both capacities, the self-awareness and the big picture capacity.
I give it a nudge if it is called for… meaning: I turn it on for you, but unless you were ready to turn it on yourself… you’ll turn it off.
Why? Because seeing yourself as others see you is very unpleasant… You don’t want to see that you have been living in an illusion about who you are and what you can do. So at the first glimpse, you turn it off… “Hell No… I don’t want to see that!”
Here is a quoted “conversation” between one of my students and myself:
He writes:
It’s a constant practice, to try and be present. And it takes constant vigilance on my part to not fall into automatic thinking, and automatic ways of being.
I just watched the second Matrix movie, “The Matrix Reloaded.” In it we see that even the Resistance is part of the plan to keep things going. That the people who are living outside of the Matrix are a kind of relief valve for the greater system. What it tells me is that I cannot consider myself safe and saved just because I am working with you, or connecting to Source, or anything. There is no free lunch and no free ride.
I keep trying to step further back to see the bigger picture, while at the same time attending to everyday matters.
My answer is to point out where he misunderstand “stepping back” aka the Big Picture…
your understanding of “stepping back” is different from what I mean.
You have been taking the “me” with you, I intend for you to step out from behind your eye balls so YOU are in the picture that you see.
One thing you obviously miss when you step back your way. Here is what you wrote:
I cannot consider myself safe and saved
You can only write such a thing from behind your eye ball… no matter where the eye ball is, how far or how close…
When you step back and out from behind your eye ball, you start to see humans, among them you, J, doing life the way people do life, unconcerned about life, and life is unconcerned about them.
You may see some humans who seem to walk to a different drummer, more alert, so they don’t bump into everything… don’t get hung up on rules, and don’t protest smoking, and don’t come from right and wrong, and get upset, and argue, and don’t want to get saved…
Their movements are smoother, more like a dance, more inner directed than the others that are like marionettes, being jerked roughly by those circumstances.
It’s eye opening to see oneself from the outside.
Next up: Werner Erhard said: “your actions are in a perfect dance with how the world occurs to you.” The more precise statement would be: Your actions are in a perfect dance (correlation, harmony) with how the world and you together… occur to you… I.e. your self-image inside your world image.
We’ll see how your self-image inside your image of the world influences your actions…
Read the original article: How do you see yourself? how accurate is your self-image?