Turning things around… creating a turning point
I have a potential turning point for how I teach and what I teach… I saw it yesterday.

It’s a potential turning point, because I am not sure I can do it. After all I would be teaching something I did not learn myself. So I don’t even know if it is teachable. But at least now I understand what is going on. Why the results are sporadic.

I’ll explain later, after the story… but let’s start with a story, OK?

I’ve been cooking regularly since I was eight or nine years old. Don’t remember the age, I only remember what I screwed up then. So I am a veteran when it comes to cooking.

Something happened a few weeks ago.
I learned a new word.
Aromatics. I knew this word from Organic Chemistry… Yes, I went to school, and yes I learned what they taught. Didn’t you?

Onion, garlic, celery, even carrots… spices, herbs. All aromatics.
Aromatics refer to vegetables and herbs that add flavor and aroma to a dish. When cooked together, these ingredients help create layers of flavor in your food.
Just like with everything, food can be looked at from many different aspects. These aspects are called, at least in this work, DISTINCTIONS.

Aromatics is a distinction. The common denominator, what they all share, is that they release an AROMA when they are cooked.
Aroma is a distinctive, typically but not necessarily a pleasant smell, while in combination it is heavenly

You can look at cuisines through their use of aromatics. You can estimate the sophistication of the country and its culture through that.
Today, instead of learning to cook, learning to use aromatics, people go to a different country’s restaurant… Almost every country’s ‘cuisine’ is boring, flat, hard to enjoy more often than once a week.

Chinese, Tai, Indian… all dishes taste the same after a while.

My cooking, on the other hand, just because of that one distinction, has become explosively more enjoyable over the past few weeks.

Aromatics are like musical notes. You can create pentatone (boring) music with it, or you can create symphonies, musicals, rousing songs of love and loss…

Same with words…

Same with facial expressions…

Or the alphabet… 26 letters, millions of words and combinations.
Information… all the raw material you can work with.
The difference between a five star chef and you is simply the chef has distinctions. At best you can smell and taste the difference between something well prepared or not… But most of you can’t even have that much distinction, let alone doing what the chef does.

Same in every area. Music, literature, acting. No distinctions.

You may have a kitchen without ingredients. You may have access to many ingredients, but don’t have any distinctions of cooking, you’ll put ketchup on everything, or follow a recipe. Repeat the words…

This is what has been happening in my classes: you repeat the words. but there is no substance behind the words.

Read the original article: When you give a new name, it changes your relationship to it

People complain of stress.

I am normally not experiencing stress, but the last few days I have been.

My response to them was tightening up, playing freecell, working more, or not working at all.

Today, at a connection call, stress came up and I asked: what causes stress? People said all kinds of things, circumstances, disease, etc…

I said: None of that. What causes stress is your resistance to life, to how it is.

Whatever you resist or ignore, like a little kid, will get your attention, whatever it takes. And it is going to cost you. Your freedom, your perspective, your peace of mind.

The best way I can illustrate this is with three pictures:

Picture one: you are attending (lovingly) the “issue” and you are able to do anything, while you never ignore the “issue”, lovingly whisper to it “I am not going anywhere…”

Read the original article: What is Stress? How Do You Deal With It? A Tree Of Life look at Stress… quite enlightening

Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis handing out a sentence to an old bank robber
’30 years’
‘Your honor, I’m 75 years old, I don’t have 30 years to serve’
‘Then do the best you can’
This joke pretty accurately summarizes our lives.

The odds are not on our sides to live out our lives fully.

I could say ‘by design’, but that would not be accurate.

What the heck am I talking about? About the conflict between you and commerce…

Read the original article: Commerce is king… and you are a peon, or maybe a rook.

Learning is humbling. Especially humbling is learning about yourself, and learning about your need to change.

You have a Precious ‘I’. Whether you believe it or not, whether you know it or not, the precious ‘I’ is in every single person.

And your precious I wants to have and retain the self-image unchanged, the self-image that says you know everything. That you are the center of the Universe. You are special. And it wants to keep the self-image where it is superior. Where you are, therefore, OK.

It considers anything and everything less that that ‘not OK’, and it fights it.
It is easier to see it on others than on yourself.
Every learning means, logically, that you didn’t know something.

For example, you don’t know and therefore you can’t tell if your cells are dehydrated or not. You can’t tell if you have DNA capacities on or off… Or that you think yourself smarter than you are.

You didn’t know you had narrow cone of vision.
You didn’t know that you were all about yourself…

You don’t know, who cares? You have never made any moves to learn it, find out, research… you really don’t care that you don’t know. But when someone else says that you don’t know something, it is bruising, offensive, and insulting to your Precious ‘I’.

You may call yourself names. You may call some family member names. But when someone else says that same thing… you are ready to kill them. That is the Precious ‘I’ that wants to kill them, not you.

You are not your Precious ‘I’. You HAVE the Precious ‘I’. But if you think you are that Precious ‘I’, then you’ll react.

Depending on the personality of the individual, depending on your your personality, on your soul correction, depending on the number of predatory genes you have active in your DNA, your Precious ‘I’ will react and the reaction will be highly predictable.
Large variations in reaction

My personality is to retreat. Retreat and lick my wounds. To examine what happened. To write an article about it, and get over it. Get over it as fast as I possibly can. And to glean as many insights from it as I can get. That is my Jewish personality. Learn from mistakes. Nor by making rules… no. By REALLY seeing what happened. Bringing awareness to it. And taking responsibility for it. Fully.

I am not here to fight.

I don’t want, don’t like animosity. I am more on the sheep-side. My before adjustment predatory genes count showed: 0. So I had none of those genes active.

Another person with a high predatory genes count may argue, bite, mock, and want to reduce you to nothing… Whether they do it publicly or not will be also part of their nature.

There are probably countless variations.
Learning is humbling, because learning says: you didn’t know. And for many people the idea that they don’t know something is offensive.
The Precious ‘I’ prides itself in knowing everything it needs to know. And if and when it finds out that you didn’t know something, it says: Ooooh,

Read the original article: Why do you need humility to learn anything? Skills, habits

In the movie, Stranger Than Fiction, our hero is doing what he is doing, unconsciously.

When Harold Crick, the hero of the movie, starts hearing the narrating voice in his head…
…what the voice says takes him out of his unconsciousness and makes him conscious
…his usual way of doing things, going through life like a drone, and this changes his life.

Read the original article: Respect: look again… but this time differently

I, and some of my students, are experiencing, what you could call the Global Negativity Transmission.

Although it is not pleasant, it is not harmful, unless…

Imagine yourself at a research lab. Medical or psychological research.

you have wires attached to different parts of your body.

You are not told exactly what they are experimenting with, actually they don’t even want you to find out, because it forfeits the accuracy of the results of the research. Just like placebos: you won’t have a placebo effect if you know you took a placebo, will you?

So you are sitting there and a sense of gloom and doom comes over you. Your mind jumps in and starts looking for the reason. It will look in the past, it has no access to the present.

Depending on your personal history and personality, it will come up with a reasonable explanation why you are feeling that gloom and doom.

For the rest of the day you can’t shake it off… actually you are going deep into the old memory, the old grievance, pain, wound, disappointment.

Next day you go to your daily hour-long experiment “job” and finding that breathing is becoming exceedingly difficult. The mind, again, jumps in and explains it with some knowledge the mind has… and now, in addition of gloom and doom, you are dissatisfied, or angry, or irritated.

The third day brings on doubt. Doubt in yourself, doubt in the research, doubt if you are spending your time wisely, so you quit.

In about the week you feel better and go back… but the cycle of doom starts again.

What’s going on?

Those wires and electrodes are just an excuse, just a smokescreen, to make you think that you will know when you are getting some input, but the input comes through thin air, through energy waves, from an unidentified source, giving you the flavor of the day negativity…

Read the original article: Why You Feel What You Feel? Sadness, Anguish, Fear, Anger, Or Whatever You Feel? The Thus Unidentified Role Of The Mind…

Like saying it is missing. Like need. Like want. Like missing.

All those only exist in language.

The crucial distinction I teach is reality. Reality as opposed to the mind, the imagination, the meaning making machine.

Today I realized that inversion, the different thinking methodology is needed. because often what is there is what is the problem. I’ll explain.

Humanity is a piling upon piles hoarding type of species. A lot like squirrels.

Read the original article: There’s no ‘no’ in reality. ‘No’ can be masked.