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.
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 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
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.
How to Get Your Mind to Read ((article by Daniel T. Willingham (@DTWillingham) is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of “The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads.” Republished from the New York Times
Photo: Credit Lilli Carré))
Americans are not good readers. Many blame the ubiquity of digital media. We’re too busy on Snapchat to read, or perhaps internet skimming has made us incapable of reading serious prose. But Americans’ trouble with reading predates digital technologies. The problem is not bad reading habits engendered by smartphones, but bad education habits engendered by a misunderstanding of how the mind reads.
I have 2-3 conversations a day with my students, conversations that should be made public.
Here is one from today:
Him: Wow. I realized on yesterday’s call that there are memes and voices when I am on the call and they are disturbing me to get things more than I am doing. Or disturbing me t
This week has been a success for Life, and a disaster financially. Everyone was spending their money on turkey, I guess.
So I am going to announce some sales for this coming week. I’ll make them good… so you’ll buy.
Now, about the successes that lead me to a huge insight.
All that people do is guided by memes, and they think they decided to do it. And you think they decided to do it from the goodness of their heart, from the badness of their heart, whatever seem to be the case. But in fact they never decided anything… It is the memes that are doing the deciding.
This is a totally different way to look at people, at life, and at what’s happening.
The narrative ((narrative:
Him: Wow. I realized on yesterday’s call that there are memes and voices when I am on the call and they are disturbing me to get things more than I am doing. Or disturbing me t
