If you find yourself on the wrong road… trace your way back to where you went astray… and choose a different road.
Why? Because trying to go across to where you really wanted to go, without going back, is fraught with death traps.
Humanity, some seven thousand years ago, took a wrong turn. In just a few words: they started to replace reality with word pictures in the mind. Concepts.
This took us to where we are now: not a pretty place. Any and every human is afflicted: no one is exempt.
An “avatar’s” job is to take you backwards so you can find your way from there… They have to have earned the right… by going back personally, backtracking themselves.
Colin Wilson is one of my favorite writers. I started my course of study with him with The Mind Parasites, a science fiction novel, back in 1987.
In the books I have read, Colin Wilson is only interested (really) in a few questions: What does it mean to be a Human Being, and how to accomplish that? What is the purpose of life, and how to fulfill on that purpose?
The view is different from the foot of the mountain than from the top
One of the weird thing about humans that they are stuck in their limited view of reality.
They don’t even suspect that there is a different view from different points.
This is why almost every otherwise worthless therapist or coach can cause temporary results… because all they need to learn is to ask you to look a different way, through a different perspective, and voilà… magic happens.
The problem is that when you are left to your own devices, you rarely if ever think to activate the magic. The magic that is magical, but isn’t magic.
Things look different from different perspectives, because that is what perspective mean
It’s New Year’s day. Billions of people give and get strokes… ((A stroke (in Transactional Analysis) is a unit of social transaction. A hug. A nod. A smile. A hello, a thank you, a “how are you?”, or an f… you…. these are all social transactions. The more you get the less your spine shrivels up on you…
Experiments show that babies stop thriving if they have insufficient social transactions… Other experiments how that rats are the same way. But the most surprising thing is: for a rat (and I guess for a human) an electric shock, a slap on the face, and insult also count as a stroke… preventing their spine from shriveling up.
My personal interpretation is: as long as life tells you you exist, you want
In my weekly coaching call with my only business/marketing student last night, I went deep into the causes of why someone with a degree, why someone who is making a living, cannot move further up the life-satisfaction, life effectiveness scale.
I have found two blatant holes in him, that my guess is shared by all of you, or most of you.
1. a total blindness of what gives meaning and therefore the mood for life.
2. a total inability to see what is cause and what is effect.
So how do you fix that? You don’t.
When you find something that isn’t working or isn’t working as well as you’d like it to, your knee jerk reaction is to fix it. Or change it. Or stop doing it.
We live as if things never changed. Even though we hear, read, that the only thing that is constant in life is change.
And yet, our minds, the machine-like part of us that cannot learn, won’t learn, and fancies itself YOU… our minds tell us, moment to moment, that life will remain the way it is in that moment.
Is that crazy or what?
When something bad happens, the reaction is not to the bad thing, but to the idea that the results of the bad thing are life-long.
When something good happens, the reaction is not to the good thing. It is to the idea, to the notion, to the ce
I am getting a lot of requests to teach people how to become people who live a life worth living, who excel in all four areas, all four pillars of the good life.
My answer is almost always: Sorry I can’t help you.
But why?
Today I got lucky and got my answer in a pristine form.
My University classmate, Panni called me. We talk once a month. She is, of course an architect: we were classmates in architecture school, a five year study.
I am sitting here at my computer, playing freecell. Somehow I find myself pondering the flowershop scene of the movie… and am taken visually and viscerally to the movie, City Lights with Charlie Chaplin. To the scene where he passes the flower shop where the girl whose eye operation he paid for works.
I saw that movie back in Hungary. I was young. And I didn’t understand the movie.
Today I realized: I didn’t understand the movie because I didn’t understand that the Chaplin character was poor.
I lived in a country, in a household where poor wasn’t a meme. We had what we had. And we were alive.
You could argue that poor isn’t a meme, that it’s a fact, but it isn’t.
You have what you have, and that is not a meme. But wha