In yesterday’s Playground ((new groups are starting continuously… )) we expanded what can be considered reality by a lot.
So far we have excluded emotions, words, memes, opinions, commentary, meaning… because they are totally personal, and isn’t shared by another, they cannot be part of reality, even if you consider it your personal reality… at your own detriment.
What do I mean, your own detriment?
Your personal opinions are not reality makers… no matter how highly you think of them or how real they feel.
Here are a few examples that will drive this home for you (hopefully):
- You are not the best… even though you think of you as the best… but better, best are comparison terms, and unless there is a clear competition and everyone can agree on the criteria, your opinion won’t matter…
- Your boss is not the worst, your daughter is not the laziest, your life is not the worst of all lives… same explanation as the one before
- Your child wanting to change her sex isn’t the worst thing of all… having a daughter/son is not the best, no matter what your emotions say about it.
- You can’t do everything, you can’t become a billionaire without knowing what the heck you are doing, no matter how justified it feels
- Being fat/skinny is not the worst thing in the world… and neither is being pretty the best…
- Your friend isn’t nasty when they tell you that you have spinach in your teeth… no matter how offending it feels.
Your commentary/meaning isn’t what’s happening:
You don’t really listen, you don’t really read. Your brain/mind instantly exchanges words before they reach your conscious mind, and you hear something totally different than what is being said. And then you treat it as reality… not even knowing that you are like Don Quixote… the delusional hero of Cervantes.
Memes
You considering witticisms, truisms in memes, including religion, reality doesn’t make real what you say, what the memes say… Oops, I have strayed into dangerous area of religion and politics… let me get out of here…
So until yesterday we considered reality only things that a newly arrived Martian without any familiarity with human “culture” could see… not having any meaning.
Cultural meaning is not a reality maker… smiling is not happy, and pain is not bad… and someone talking loud is not high drama… for a Martian… and in reality.
When you strip away the meaning, you can see that all drama is added by the words, and the word-created emotions in your precious “I”.
So, as I said above, yesterday we expanded reality, by adding the invisible layer of patterns: behavioral and thinking patterns. The common elements of all invisible patterns, just like anywhere else in nature, are repeating in different sizes, and different proportions… in nature we call the fractals.
Once you look at people’s behavior through the common repeating elements, the “fractals” of human nature, things become clear, and don’t carry the usual high drama… it is just a darn pattern running away with them.
There are many different ways to approach these patterns, by the way, the Landmark Education style, calling them distinctions. The psychology style, calling them “games people play”, the high-brow style, calling them cognitive biases, the archetype conversation, the hero’s journey pattern… etc.
Our job as humans aspiring for self-actualization, is to recognize the patterns, so the drama can disappear from our lives.
What’s wrong with drama?
Just watch (or read) any Shakespeare drama, and see that when emotions are high, intelligence is low… and that is what is wrong with drama.
What is wrong with low intelligence? Well, it cost you. It cost you affinity, the ability to love, to appreciate, to enjoy, to even utilize, to wonder, to be inspired… all what is beautiful about being human… but rare for those who love and keep drama around in their lives.
Drama is noise… it is often also a smoke screen: it hides that you are pretty much worthless, or evil, or unappreciative, that you are all about yourself… and none about granting people the right to want what they want.
There is a very simple test to see to what degree you are all rotten… and that is to see how shaken up you become when you find out that your drama kills affinity, the chance of love and caring of both yourself and others.
When affinity goes: the color, the life is drained out of life. It becomes dead, and formulaic… no life.
It is the highest price you pay for your drama… that deadness.
You don’t care? I gotcha!
So, what do you need to be able to reliably recognize the patterns in reality, so you don’t have to go to the drama and the loss of affinity?
Thus far I see three things that can stop you from that:
1. Your split selves… you protecting the lower self so even yourself won’t be able to see it.
When you create smoke screen, everything is covered with it… so you can’t see clearly.
Seeing and embracing your Dark Side, your lower self, is the price you pay.
* The best it is expressed, the horror of it, in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall –
Take One’s Life in One’s Arms
I tried to die near the end of the war. The same dream returned each night until I dared not to go to sleep and grew quite ill. I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept onto my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it was my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible… but I kissed it.
I think one must finally take one’s life in one’s arms.
More about this… that stops you from being able to live in reality: https://yourvibration.com/45628/self-actualization/
2. Lack of training.
We all have more or less brain cells, more or less brain synapses going for us. It starts out genetic, “nature”, and it quickly becomes “nurture”… what you are willing to train your brain for… in spite of your parents, in spite of your environment, in spite of your innate abilities.
If you don’t train your eyes and your brain, if you don’t train yourself in patterns, you will be like 99% of humanity: functionally blind.
You are here, I hope, to be cured of your blindness. ((Sidenote: I have been pondering, for decades, why certain people are more savage (as in uncultured, untrained, undifferentiated brain) than others.
As I am watching the Oxford, England themed detective stories, I am starting to see the pattern: when the educational gap between higher class and lower class (class as in money!) the lower class’s hatred of its “superiors” fuels more hatred, and more savagery.
There seems to be no sense to get educated, to read, or to learn, because the gap is so wide, and also because it is not visible that the difference is ONLY in the level of training a brain has received.
It’s no use… says the poor, and they are, by virtue of saying so, make themselves right.
It’s no use… says the “second class citizen” of a rich country… I have brown skin… I’ll never be treated as equal…
This is another example of seeing the patterns of reality… It is real… not a personal reality, but real reality…))
The more different things you attempt to learn, the more your brain adjust to this new requirement of seeing. This is the proper use of the 20-day skill learning challenge, by the way.
No matter what skill you choose, the context should be that it is training your brain to see… Unless that is the context, you can learn a hundred skills and still not see… I have seen examples of that with students.
Context is decisive. It actually directs your attention, and where attention goes, energy flows.
You need energy flowing to the pattern recognition function of the brain… so you can see reality.
Mark Twain said best: Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
– Mark Twain
Your brain is a cabbage… without training…
3. Your Dark Side may create lack of humility
Humility is when you say: “I know, I already know.” of you say “I don’t need it, I already have it!” or when you say “Don’t tell me what to do!”
Obviously, if you have already embraced and integrated your Dark Side… humility will be available to you.
Without humility you’ll refuse to learn anything new, train any part of yourself, make up your own sh*t…
You’ll call it independence, or you’ll call it creative freedom, or you’ll call it avoid domination… but in essence you insist on not learning, not training, you insist on remaining the same.
I have a small but very effective measuring tool… the water energizer. It is simple, it should be easy to duplicate… but… of course, you need to do it your way, you need to make sure it doesn’t happen, you need to express your own brilliance instead of making it work.
My Starting Point Measurement is a brilliant collection of measures… very predictive of your attitudes, your behavior and your results.
And inespensive… but you’ll argue: most do.
But the Water Energizer… it is not that cheap, it’s $90, and you have to buy your equipment, and set it up, and remember to refill the container, and remember to check that the audio is playing, and remember to drink the darn water… lol.
You can track your personal evolution in that simple activity: raising your cell hydration.
It is, incidentally, a self-perpetuating system: if you don’t get it right, you get stupider and stupider as the time goes.
Or smarter and smarter, clearer and more coherent if you make it work…
Brilliant, if I may say so myself.
Read the original article: The Nature of Reality: the expanded view