There is not much in common. It is not talent. It is not ethnicity. Not personality. Not schooling. Not religious affiliation.
The one common characteristic I have found is books. People who become worth a damn are readers.
Even more importantly than being a reader: the most important commonality is when they started to read.
I just read in Wikipedia about Howard Zinn:
Both parents were factory workers with limited education when they met and married, and there were no books or magazines in the series of apartments where they raised their children. Zinn’s parents introduced him to literature by sending ten cents plus a coupon to the New York Post for each of the 20 volumes of Charles Dickens’ collect
Creativity comes from the “other than conscious” activity of the brain. The part that is neither linear nor word based.
I spend a large chunk of the day allowing it to do what it does…
It is allowing whatever is going on in the brain and in the body to go on… The best way is to make yourself busy.
Washing the dishes, vacuuming, doing the laundry, walking, or playing Freecell…
One of the useless things Tai teach is what he calls armchair meditation. He wants you to do serious linear thinking… which is proven to be a lot less accurate than your other than conscious brain doing the work unattended.
Why? Because the other than conscious mind is not corrupted. It doesn’t think one thing is good becau
It’s been remarkable because I didn’t mean to do it.
It’s been remarkable because what I’ve seen.
A week ago I got a “message” from Source, whatever that is, to stop doing the 67 steps. It suggested that something else should be started, but no indication of what that “something else” was going to be.
It’s just one week after.
Nothing has replaced the practice of doing the 67 steps.
I am sitting by my computer, and suddenly the thought floats up with the all too familiar feeling: “I should die. It’s not worth living.”
People who can’t tolerate negative, unpleasant, ambivalent feelings try to resist them, which is the surest way to make them permanent, or at least last.
What you resist persist… Carl Jung (1875-1961) says, and it is true. ((Psychologically speaking, resistance and resolution are at opposite poles. For resistance has fundamentally to do with not being able, or willing, to deal with the negative experiences in your life. And ultimately your happiness depends a lot more on handling—then letting go of—such adversities than it does, self-protectively, denying them, or fighting against them. In addition, so does (unwittingly) holding onto their associated feelings of hurt, sorrow, anxiety, or anger.
Jung was talking about his research into what he ca
I just had a “conversation” with a student, where I suggested that she uses ego to support her growth.
From her answers it has become clear that “using ego” is not a commonplace conversation, and that it needs instruction.
So let’s see what ego is, and what it isn’t.
Ego is a lot like a kitchen knife: you can use it for good, for useful, or for harm… kill with it. You can also use it to clean it under your nails… somewhat useful, but not the right tool…
You can also call it bad, and ban it from your house. ((It is also a lot like a nail. It concentrates the energy so it can go through thick planks
Putz: putz
noun
1. a stupid or worthless person.
2. vulgar slang: a limp dick.
verb: putz; engage in inconsequential or unproductive activity.
origin: 1960s: Yiddish, literally ‘penis.’
I meant to share student essays on how self-created rules keep them alienated from themselves, keep them playing safe and dead… not joyful, not accomplished, not living a life worth living.
Then I changed my mind.
I had two calls, where I was training, each, a person to take on a practice to activate the capacity to be with unpleasant, bothersome, disturbing feelings and actions. To be a MAN…
This capacity used to be active in humans… but because of the widespread positive thinki
I completed the third round of the 67 steps, and my intrinsic Self told me: it is time for another kind of practice.
So I have been curiously waiting for the “thing” to show up, and today it did.
Actually it started two days ago, but I noticed it today.
I need to get on the chiropractic table periodically to adjust my hip, or it goes out of shape to the degree that my thigh bone jumps out of its socket. That is very painful.
So I got on the table today… and it’s a long process… and somehow I was looking into what started my hip pain, whe
I read a lot of books. About 100 books a year. Cover to cover. I don’t subscribe to Tai’s reading method…
I left a 2000 book library when I left Hungary. that was 34 years ago.
Every book is an opportunity to shatter my view of the world. And many do. Sometimes not directly… sometimes through the effect the book has on other people.
There is not much in common. It is not talent. It is not ethnicity. Not personality. Not schooling. Not religious affiliation.
