Every living thing must have fear or they would be dead already… meaning the species. Fear is a useful warning that life is dangerous, and every species is the food of another one.

So we have a reason to be afraid. In reality. Animals, cars, other people… all good reasons.

In reality fear is like a nudge.

It lasts for a few moments. If you don’t pay attention: it will nudge you again. If the danger continues and you ignore the signs, it now turns the nudging on high.

In the cave it is totally different. In the cave your fear is almost totally continuous.

Because in the cave reality and the idea of reality are not distinct, not separate, and you are insulated and separated from what is real.

In the cave your mind filters out most of the signals from reality, and replaces those signals with memory. Memory of things that were, maybe, never real. With what you said, consciously or not consciously, about what actually happened.

In the cave fear is not like a nudge, fear is like Tinnitus… continuous, nerve wrecking, and has no reason at all, or if it does: in the cave you can’t see the reason. So you make it up. Really.

You are a meaning making machine, and you cannot tolerate not knowing the meaning…

Most things have no meaning beyond being what they are.

In reality A is A. no translator, no meaning, no interpretation, no reason even. A is A.

In the mind, in Plato’s Cave, A is not A. A is wrong. Or A is right. Or A means that you are wrong/wright/smart/stupid.

A is not able to remain A in the cave.

You, if you spend your life in the cave, of course don’t know that A is not A is an interpretation made up by the mind. You really don’t know, you can’t tell.

I spent an hour drilling someone and teaching him distinctions in language to shed light how something can be recognized as A or not A. It was hard going, and I don’t think I was successful.

So what happens when A happens and you hear ‘not A’?

You react to ‘not A’ and you do something stupid.

So what do you do then? You make up even more meanings, rules, and withdraw even deeper into the cave…

Now, what happens if you are reading something, or hear something?

How do things land when you are in reality, and how do they land when you are in the cave?

I have been observing it, testing it with clients and students.

I have found that the awareness level, the most important measure predicting success in the world, is the exact same number that also predicts how much of what is read lands verbatim… as it was said, as what was written.

Said in another way:

How much of A remained A, after you heard it or read it.

I am going to look at three students/clients.

• Student A has an awareness level of 30%
• Student B has an awareness level of 5%
• While Student C has an awareness level of 3%

Let’s look at the behaviors that come from the awareness level

• Student A stands out among his peers. He is a graduate student. He is fun, he is curious, he is like a sponge… He cultivates his awareness with many different exercises throughout the day.He wasn’t always like this. His awareness level, about a year ago, was 7%. He has been working on increasing it through reading in a particular way, listening in a particular way, and quite recently, starting to recognize when he wants to talk instead of listening.
• Student B has some level of success in the world, but he is plagued with fears, and he likes to escape into fun and more fun. He hasn’t distinguished reality… yet. It is coming at him like a threat, or a surprise… only very occasionally.
• Student C, the level of most people, is perpetually afraid, makes rash decisions, fancies himself alternately smart or stupid… Nearly all his decisions, all his habits, all his concerns are made up… and they have nothing to do with reality. Chances for worldly success is very limited… pretty much limited to physical labor.

Most people with a low level of awareness do not put themselves in a position where it matters how aware they are, how much of reality can get through to them.

Or when they do, they lose everything.

They are the serial muck-ups of the world…

OK, here is a million dollar question: can they get more aware?

I would say yes and I would say no.

It depends on many factors… mostly on the other numbers in the starting point measurements and their soul correction.

What are the other numbers in the starting point measurements that are important predictors if the person can change… or not?

Here are the measure that indicate where you live:

• the level of your health (1-100): Hell yeah. If your health is low, you move into survival… and the cave seems like a good place to go to
• the level of your cell hydration (1-100): Hell yeah. This is the reason I start people with their cell hydration. If they can’t or won’t do it consistently, I won’t work with them because I can’t do anything for them..
• your relationship to feedback and instruction: This is a matter of attitude, but also a matter of being able to hear A as A, and not as criticism. So if you have a doubtful, angry, cynical, resistant relationship to feedback and instruction, chances are there is nothing I can do for you.
• The level of discomfort you are willing to allow w/o trying to fix it. This is your TLB score… The higher your TLB the more discomfort you are willing to take on, the more persistence you can demonstrate. Coming out of the cave needs you to be pain tolerant

 

• The size of your vocabulary:

the number of words you can use accurately: This is both a cause and an effect. If you have a low number, you will not like to read anything worth reading, because it won’t make sense to you.

This number is a very good indicator to what degree you live in the cave. Student A started a reading practice: not to read for comprehension. Comprehension is in the mind, in the cave, and is therefore the enemy. That was his first step. Then he also looked up every word in the dictionary that he didn’t know what it meant. Then he looked up words that he only approximately knew what the word meant.

Even if the sentence made sense without the exact meaning. His current accurate vocabulary is 1000, double of what it was a year ago.

• To what degree you think of yourself: You are the center of your thoughts in the cave. You are self-referential, self-centered, everything is related to you, or is about you. Obviously this is making you stay in the cave, and be stupid there… and afraid.
• % of fixed mindset: I don’t know… Changing your mind about anything is what this number is concerned with. If you can’t or if you won’t… it indicates that you are comfortable with living in the cave.

More…

• Ambition: No ambition is possible in the cave. Because ambition is the willingness to do what it takes to get what you aim at… You pretty much aim for survival and maintenance  in the cave.
• Desire: Desire is one of the most accurate indicators. Desire, the size of it, is a delusional imagining phenomenon, wholly separated from reality, from what is real, what you can get, what you are willing to work for. So we could say: the size of your desire is quite consistent with your time spent in the cave.Anything over 20% is bad news. But low desire also signals low energy, low dissatisfaction. So lately I am suspicious of low desire…
• Degree of inauthenticity overall: don’t know the connection, but the more you want to appear better than you are the more you probably love the cave.

• Level of integrity 1-100:

No chance for integrity in the cave. dutiful: yeah. integrity? no.

• how enslaved are you to memes? (what percentage of your life is run by memes?) Memes are all cave stuff
• do you have a bridge between your precious “I” and your actual I? What is your level of delusion the higher this number is the less you even know about reality. See authenticity above
• To what degree you have access to your adult capacities % no adult capacities in the cave… not possible. Why? Because adult capacities require you to see no wrong… and see A is A. Otherwise you are fighting windmills
• 17. How teachable/how coachable are you? Obviously if you can’t hear what is being taught, you cannot be coached, can you?
• 18. The level of your awareness? this is what we are talking about mainly in this article.

All in all, most people want to be, fancy themselves to be a butterfly… but have the awareness of a caterpillar. Narrow cone of vision, no clue, eating and more eating… that is their life.

If you want to know about yourself… the starting point measurements are a snapshot… but provide a good guidance what it is that you can work on.

Get your Starting Point Measurements

Read the original article: Fear in reality vs fear in the cave… Are they different?