Spirituality, finding your way, finding your self, the path to living a life worth living use different tools from science, schools, the mind, and ordinary thinking.
Not just different tools, but tools used differently.
If you haven’t found what you are seeking… if your seeking has taken you on a wild goose chase only to find nothing of value for yourself… then you owe it to yourself to learn to use the tools and to use them in new ways.
My very first exposure to this was 31 years ago, in Hebrew, and I was shamed right after I got the exposure… so I don’t even know if anything came out of it, because I cried for two hours.
Tai Lopez’s reading method… and what he can’t see he cannot teach you, because for him it is like water for the fish… invisible.
Tai Lopez started to read when he was barely potty trained. And has read, ever since.
His grandfather gave him the kinds of books that train circular reading… the history of the world, encyclopedia…
Thus he build a body of knowledge, a fertile soil, that almost any new information can sprout roots into.
In this regard, he is unique, and as different from most people, as he can be.
He has a reading method, the book-a-day method, that he teaches to people who have no body of knowledge, no fertile soil… and the question is: can the m
Animals are not forceful. Plants are not forceful. Why? Because, while the selfish gene is quite forceful, the animals surrender to the selfish gene… and go “with” it.
Humans are animals with a mind… and the mind is forceful. More forceful than the selfish gene…
The selfish gene is clear on what it wants: it wants to increase itself in the gene pool. That is all it is interested in. It negotiates with nature, with other species, with toxins, with members of the same species continually to lead to evolutionary stable strategies…. ess in short. It adapts or it dies. The more adaptable, the more aware the gene and the vehicle, the more successful the gene is in propagating itself, and it thrives. It cannot
I am a Kiva lender. I circulate about 400-500 dollars, lend it, and lend it again. $25 a clip.
Kiva has been looking for find an angle to have more people be inspired to lend money.
After I lent another $25 from my seed money (I haven’t added any new money to Kiva for years now!) a video popped up.
In it an Indian woman shares that her fields were mortgaged and it was near impossible for her to make a living. Then she got a Kiva loan, got herself cows.
The cows give her five liters of milk a day she can sell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MDPl3ZeNtk
This allows her to make a good living, and she has paid off the mortgage on her lands.
I started to cry.
Why? When I cry I rarely can tell why I am crying, the squeezing painful emotions don’t tell me what is going on…
So I watched it again… and no, I am not masochistic, I wanted to know.
I used to lead introductions to the Landmark Forum.
There is a part in the introduction where you attempt to distinguish for people that most of what’s knowable for a human: you don’t know. Moreover: you don’t know what you don’t know.
Then you ask a simple question: Can you give me an example of what you don’t know that you don’t know?
In most groups there is at least one person who tries… Everybody laughs… because the answer to that question can only be: I don’t have an example… You can give an example of what you used to not know but now know… but that is an answer to a different question.
Now, one of the beauties of reading is finding stuff that you didn’t know that you didn’t kn
I almost snubbed this link a reader sent me… She is quite talkative, so I thought it was b.s… but integrity didn’t allow me to skip it.
And I watched it, and wept, and laughed, and felt that those of you who read my articles, and especially those of you who have been working with me one-on-one, in my Reclaim program, should recognize at least three parts where he said it better than I ever could…
So here is your challenge: Watch the video. It is arguably one of the best commencement addresses… and because it has elements of attitude and beingness that actually work…
OK, here is the youtube video… don’t just watch it. Find the parts with the teaching… It will make a difference for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikAb-NYkseI
The way to comment is to say the distinction/principle he mentions.
If you catch all three, I have a big gift for you. If you catch one… I still have a gift for you.
Sounds simple, right? self-image means: how you see yourself… but nothing internal is as simple and as straight as that?
The way scientists, medical practitioners, diet-cults, pharmaceutical companies work is called linear reductionism… ((
reductionism
[ri-duhk-shuh-niz-uh m]
noun
1.
the theory that every complex phenomenon, especially in biology or psychology, can be explained by analyzing the simplest, most basic physical mechanisms that are in operation during the phenomenon.
2.
the practice of simplifying a complex idea, issue, condition, or the like, especially to the point of minimizing, obscuring, or distorting it.
)) and it is a cognitive bias.
Motto: Mentor: Someone whose hindsight can become your foresight
Remember who you are
In 1981 I got a letter from a man from Israel. He claimed to be a second cousin on my father’s side to me. He was coming to an educational conference in Hungary. He came with his wife.
We spent time together, they were staying with me, in my one-bedroom high-rise apartment in Budapest. He visited with every member of my family, and witnessed their contempt for me first hand.
He promised to be family to me if I decided to go to Israel.
One year later I packed a suitcase and left Hungary. illegally. It was winter in Hungary when I left, in fact it w
Update August 2016: I think this article goes really well with my “giants” article, so I am republishing it, yet again. It is germane, apropos, relevant to the new discovery I am sharing in that article today.
Update: This article was written two years ago, and a lot has happened, but we never again addressed these life-suckers… Since we are working on anchor-to-doom and the actions necessary to live a life not determined by the doom… we probably will need to talk about these minor anchors… the topic of this article. These keep us stuck, suck our aliveness, curtail our successes, and make us inauthentic and pretending. So they are important.
People want to become the person they are in their dreams…
They are not that way… obviously.
Becoming that person is like being a Michelangelo at the stone quarry looking at a block of marble and seeing if the sculpture they see with their mind’s eye fits it.
If it doesn’t fit, you need a bigger block of marble.
But no matter how big a block you choose, it will take two kinds of work to get to the David of your imagination: the work of awareness and the work of chiseling.
Chiseling is the easy part… honestly. I bet you thought that was the hard part.