The narrative ((narrative:
* 1.a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious.
* 2.a book, literary work, etc., containing such a story.
* 3.the art, technique, or process of narrating, or of telling a story: Somerset Maugham was a master of narrative.
* 4.a story that connects and explains a carefully selected set of supposedly true events, experiences, or the like, intended to support a particular viewpoint or thesis: to rewrite the prevailing narrative about masculinity; the narrative that our public schools are failing.))
A student of mine, after listening to my last Sunday call recording, asked why Jews turned to a different strategy than the slaves from Africa. Or Native Americans.
Your behavior is always consistent with what you see.
And what you see depends 100% of your available capacities.
You don’t even look… because you know what is there… you know there is nothing to see.
The difference between a blind person and you is that the blind person knows she cannot see.
Why can’t you see? For two reasons:
1. your prejudices and cognitive biases
2. no one demanded that you actually see. The school system, your family, even the places where you work expect you to be blind, stupid, waiting to be told… and you don’t disappoint.
The few of you that can see are called trouble makers, or simple “trouble”.
With regards to the title… I am not suggesting that you become like Jesus… but become like the Creator, who supposedly said: there shall be light… or whatever he said… This Creator created with his word. That is the god I mean…
The main difference between a human and a human being, the next level of human evolution, is an inner difference. Not biological, physical, physiological. Instead a difference in what tells the one and the other to do things, what attitude to have, how to do things.
Humans listen to memes, the voices. Voices that are not the human’s friends, voices that have no rhyme and reason, voices that make the human misbehave, and take actions that on the long run make him miserable.
During the summer of 1966 I ran into a girl I knew from elementary school. Turns out she applied and was accepted to the same school I was going to start in that September.
We were having a chat. I remember thinking to myself: Compared to her I know everything… why am I going to school?
We both graduated. I am sure she still thinks she knows everything. My experience is that I know less and less as time goes by.
Whether you can identify with my 19 year old person, or my 69 year old person, and to what degree will be important, so jot it down.
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.
Everything you ever wanted is available to you, if…
… if you are willing to look at see what is so about you and your life.
The truth. Naked. Ugly. Often shameful.
Here is a correspondence I had with a client today:
She said: “I’m interested in changing my context since it’s part of what keeps me stuck.”
“… answering the questions: what am I doing? Why am I doing it?
Unless you have done the work of identifying what you have been doing, and why you have been doing it, no way you can shift the context. You cannot catch what you can’t see. And you cannot change what you can’t catch.”
To the degree you are able and willing to do that, to the same degree you can change your life. ((
For decades one of my sore spots was that people refused to serve me, even though I paid them.
I remember saying to myself: my money is not good enough for you? and wept.
I had no idea how I “accomplished” that… in 20/20 hindsight it is still a little spotty.
What wasn’t clear to me, never even occurred to me, how my attitude effected the service provider. My “To what degree you think of yourself:” starting point measure was, at the time, 70%. From my behavior I would have guessed it was higher.
Mainly I overrode what they said. I argued, I knew better, I acted with contempt…
What I didn’t know then is that being a service provider needs to be a win, or no service.
Both are context words. Neither talks about the stuff that is inside the context… inside the wrapper. The wrapper tells you how to look at the content.
It has nothing to do with the stuff, or the quantity of it. It can be great, it can be plenty… the context, scarcity or abundance will tell you what to feel, what to think, what to do.
Why? Because context is decisive.
You can have plenty inside the context of scarcity, and feel that you don’t have enough. Enough time, enough stuff, enough happiness, enough whatever…
…or the opposite, you can have little, but inside the context of abundance, you have what you have, and what you have is enough.
One of the signs of the overwhelming inauthenticity ((My definition of authenticity is that there is nothing in the unsaid that isn’t consistent with what is visible… Authenticity is one of those big words that no one knows what it really means… so they go by feeling. The simplest way to define authenticity is that there is no pretense, no façade, no game playing. The person is the same through and through, whether he/she is seen or not.
Most people smile a lot in their pictures, but I can feel their anxiety, their fear, their inner trembling.
One more thing that I haven’t said before, but given that we are working with memes: if you obey memes, if you repeat memes, if you try to fit in with memes, y
Yesterday I used the free community van to get to two stores I cannot get to easily on my own.
Note: in the illustrations I am not taking sides. I am illustrating that there is confusion and disagreement in what is race, what is racist, what is racism, and what it does is it makes people rigid, lie about what they think, and vote for Trump… ugh.
The driver of the van, PhD in sociology, asked if it bothered me if he continued to listen to NPR radio ((National Public Radio)) . It was a public debate in Trump and if he was a racist.
I listened for at least half an hour, and observed that no one bothered to define what they meant by
The narrative ((narrative:
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