I’ve spent, so far, 20 years in Landmark. (the date of this article is 2008!)
The most important thing I learned there was that all the power for you lies in the part of reality that you don’t know that you don’t know.
Said in another way, the power to alter what is so you can have what you want comes from the part of all-knowledge that you didn’t know that you didn’t know.
They demonstrate the proportions with a pie chart: the whole pie is all that could be known. A thin slice is what you know. Another thin slice is what you don’t know and you know that you don’t know. For example I know I don’t know how to fly. These things you can learn if you have the time, money, etc. But what about the
I am sitting here, working… but my mind wanders to the movie August Rush. I hear the Catholic church’s call for whatever they do at 6 pm… and today I hum with it, I hear it as music. And I remember that I used to hear it as noise. This brings me to August Rush. […]
If you want to enslave a man, the best and fastest way to go about it is to rob the man of his common sense, his guidance system.
Train him to not trust his feelings. In anything. Train him that he can’t trust his feelings. Train him that all decisions should be made by men smarter than him. Train him that he can’t be trusted to made decisions about the education, the health about his children.
Train him by printing on plastic bags that they should not be put in the cradle… because a child may suffocate playing with it… Do this so the man will stop thinking for himself and start relying entirely on thing being given to him chewed and digested.
This is paraphrasing the famous Leo Tolstoy quote: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This is the Anna Karenina principle… As all principles do, it applies to many, maybe even all areas of life. A principle is the same as a distinction… I say.
But truth is, if you know distinctions, if you know patterns, there are only about 50 different ways to get stuck… and your way is just one or two of those.
The story. Your story. It is either inspiring or it is depressing… either way it’s the context of your life
Your story can be your personal story. Telling what happened from your personal point of view. No creativity is required: it’s already applied generously.
Why? How? Anything that happened is turned into words… and words, whenever applied, create a story, a story line, an interpretation. Filters added creatively… Skewed.
Your story can be the story of your heritage. No matter how you tell this story: it is filtered through opinions, beliefs, and other filters.
What are you carrying on that weighs you so down that you can never ascend? Or climb the Tree of Life, until you put it down?
Have you noticed that making changes, doing new things, going to places unfamiliar is difficult, near impossible?
Consider that you are dragging a persona with you, that is what makes the going so encumbered…
A coaching client of mine began to build her persona in an incident that happened when she was four years old. There was an escaped serial killer on the loose in her neck of the woods, and her mother left her in charge of her little sister who was in a cast. There was a knock on the front door, and she tried to drag
Living in the three levels of value, the systemic, the extrinsic, and the intrinsic, lived fully, and balanced, is the secret to the good life.
The Indian sages, including the Buddha, skipped the extrinsic. They taught people not to live there. They had a disdain for it.
But work is on the extrinsic level, making money is on that level, so skipping it means living a life of charity. Living a life where you cannot value another person on all levels… because you don’t value the values of that level.