If you play to win, you’ll always play a small game.
Play to win in anything.
- Win friends, and influence people.
- Win an argument
- Win a competition
- Win at cards
- Win at computer games
- Win a reward, a salary, a compliment, a free examination from a vet
- to look smart, respectable, well-thought-of, generous, holy, spiritual, humble… whatever will make you look, so you can live another day.
They are all about winning zero sum games… Zero sum game: when you win, someone has to lose.
Winning is a survival game. It always has the flip side coming… The flip side of winning is losing… or being a loser.
An oscillating structure. A binary switch. Systemic values.
A life of looking good and making it. No room for anything else. Having your foot nailed to the floor…
Small person life. Survival. The dog chasing its tail. Never a moment to settle down, never a moment to just be…
Having to, needing to, wanting to, should… no rest for the weary… The alternative in unconfrontable.
So what’s the alternative?
Stop. Make friends with yourself. Make friends with losing. Make friends with looking bad. They are ok… Life is life, ups and downs, so what?
Once you settle into yourself, eyes open, nothing rejected, nothing to run from, nothing resisted… you’ll be able to start living.
Maybe even return to innocence, where you played for playing’s sake: that is how you learned life.
Play to expand. Play for mastery. Play to learn something. Experientially. Heavenly…
And by “play” I mean every action in life. Walking, peeing, eating, picking up, or sitting by your computer. Present, alert, alive. A person. Bigger than what’s happening out there… bigger than what is pulling your attention, bigger than what is not you. Coming from your power… not like a dry leaf being blown about by every breeze.
When you go to school: if your goal is to get a good grade, or to know the answer, you are setting up the small game or uninteresting, boring life… a life of despair. Homework attitude…
When you work… the job of getting things done is too small… set it out to expand from everything you do.
When you are with your family… being accepted, or alternatively being obeyed… Just be there. And let them be there. Nothing to prove, nothing to win, nothing to lose.
Every person has an agenda.
Having an agenda reduces you to a machine, a thing among other things, win/lose games.
Distinguish your agenda, and let it go. Or if you can’t, for whatever reason, then make it an overt agenda: say it out loud. To the people you are dealing with.
I have been doing that and it’s given me back to me.
Imagine the mother telling their children: my agenda in this argument is to prove how much better parent I am than your stupid father…
Or at work you’d tell people: my agenda is to prove that I am working, that I care, while I really just want to survive this day.
Or when you come to a call with me: my agenda is to survive this call without finding out anything unpleasant about myself…
You’ll hear yourself and you’ll laugh.
But when the agenda is hidden, you think you are OK.
You think it’s OK to be that way.
It’s not OK, and therefore you are not OK. You are not OK with yourself… I don’t care what other people say, you don’t like yourself.
And a life where you don’t like yourself is not worth living.
When you can tell the truth, in the moment, about your agenda, to yourself, your higher self kicks in, and life shifts, subtly on the outside, but dramatically on the inside.
You come to me first to look good, but ultimately you come to me to get help to see the agendas that run you, that ultimately make you hate yourself.
What you can see, what you can articulate, what you can name returns you to power.
Name it and claim it.
I did that with stupidity. I did that with dyslexia. I did that with arrogance. I did that with contempt. I did that with superiority.
Named it and claimed it.
It took time. It’s not an instant panacea… you have to keep at it.
But underneath, you’ll see, there is a magnificent person, who can.
Keep on naming it and claiming it. Keep on seeing your agenda, get mortified, and become a human being.
Note: I had no idea that this there is a religion of prosperity… called name it and claim it.
Name it and claim it is a “theology” taught by some televangelists, faith healers, megachurches, and Pentecostal preachers. Some of them think the “name it and claim it” label is derogatory and prefer it be called “Word of Faith” or the “prosperity gospel“. Word of Faith theology is also called “blab it and grab it” by less kind detractors.
The movement was popularized by Kenneth Hagin (1917–2003), a Pentecostal preacher from Texas and later based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He taught faith healing and founded the Rhema Bible Church and Rhema Bible Training College.[2] His church was moderately famous around the state for the insanely large and expensive Christmas light display but not really notable for anything else. Hagin authored scores of booklets teaching how the Holy Spirit could make you rich, healthy, and “anointed” with spiritual gifts if you would just have enough faith to “name it and claim it.”
I am not religious, I don’t watch mega churches on television: I expect to work for my money… For me, naming and claiming my ineffectual, evil inclination has proven to be one of the most effective techniques I have ever used.
When you name it and claim it, you own it without any resistance. I call that embracing. You remember the three stages of embracing: level 1: it is the alien on your face, you can’t see. level 2: you are always out of balance by it, but can see around the edges. level 3: you truly embrace it and can do anything with it: you can work, you can sleep, you can run, you can even make love. It is something you can take with you. You let it be, and in return it lets you be.
- So when they say it: name it and claim it, they are teaching religion.
- When I say it: I teach you power over what wants to claim power over you: your laziness, your greed, your evil inclinations.
Name it and claim it is essentially the same as believing in the “law” of attraction, manifestation, vision boards, mind movies. In all of those religions you don’t have to earn what you want, you can just want it, really want it, “claim it” in your imagination, on the vision board, in declarations, and “god” will give it to you. Or the “universe”. Or Archangel so and so.
Covering up your laziness with theories why it is a good thing…
Read the original article: The invisible dynamic: Wanting to win