This article is about the inner workings of a human… that if you get it wrong, the price you pay for the error is your life.
Is a human like a assembled faucet? When it drips you have to replace the whole thing?
I energize my water in a 5 gallon (20 liter) plastic containers with a spigot.
The spigot is replaceable, but I am not strong enough to unscrew it. I have the replacement spigot… I bought it a year ago, but is still sitting on my kitchen counter. I still need to be mindful that the old spigot, which is just another word for water tap… still drips.
Good question, right? You were just about asking that… Gotcha!
OK, simple question, simple answer.
First I tell you what I am not:
I am not a Kabbalist. Kabbalists study, practice, and teach Kabbalah full time, for many many years. It could be even said that being a Kabbalist is like an insider… you need to be appointed.
I am not a teacher of Kabbalah
I am not a guru
I am not someone who knows a lot about Kabbalah but doesn’t live it.
OK, then what am I?
Well, I was first introduced to Kabbalah by a friend of mine (who is accidentally out of my life now… but more about it later.) My introduction happened by
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.
This is probably the most shocking sentence in the whole 67 step program.
I literally don’t know anyone who lives that way.
People try to succeed, try a diet, try this and try that… while their plane crashes in every area.
So what is the difference between who are like that, who are on their way to become that kind of person, and others who never ever land their plane on the landing strip?
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.
Oh no! This video software that used to work doesn’t work any more. I cried out… This can happen to anyone. Technology changes so rapidly, keeping pace with it is both expensive and time consuming.
Sometimes there is an upgrade. Nowadays upgrades cost money… or the software developer simply abandoned you… and you are stranded with a software that doesn’t work any more.
I have been teaching what I teach for seven years. Teach people a world view that has been tested and true, and includes the invisible. This world view is sharply different from the accepted norms… but it works, instead of just being a nice theory like what psychologists and philosophers teach. Or even Landmark Educati
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
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.
This article is about the inner workings of a human… that if you get it wrong, the price you pay for the error is your life.
Good question, right? You were just about asking that… Gotcha!
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.
Make your plane go where you want it to go…
Everything you ever wanted is available to you, if…
For decades one of my sore spots was that people refused to serve me, even though I paid them.
Oh no! This video software that used to work doesn’t work any more. I cried out… This can happen to anyone. Technology changes so rapidly, keeping pace with it is both expensive and time consuming.
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.
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.
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