Another one of the consequences of not seeing reality from unreality is a life that doesn’t amount to much

Let’s clarify a few things before I start:

Scam… every time you really expect to get something… and therefore you believe unreality…

Reality is reality, consistent, and congruent. A is A, as Ayn Rand and his famous character, John Galt (In Atlas Shrugged) say. Continue reading →

This article was inspired by an Aeon.co article against cheerfulness as a virtue [note]cheerfulness: noticeably happy and optimistic.
causing happiness by its nature or appearance.[/note]

I am taking that concept to its conclusion… So here we go…

The mantra of the world-class thinker is: “I am responsible.”

That quote is from Mentally Tough leader, Steve Siebold…

I get his one-sentence emails, and I read them. They are all wakeup calls, and they are all telling me the many ways your TLB, Twitchy Little Bastard score manifests.

I teach that the most valuable ability, capacity, aspiration, maybe even virtue is to interact with reality.

Continue reading →

I just had an email conversation with a client. She wanted my review on a marketed healing program, and I reviewed it for her. The person doing it: personal vibration 100, truth value of that program: 3%

The things you are attracted to cater to where you are in your evolution as a human… They talk to your “identity”, to your world-view, to who you are.

If you are attracted to a 3% truth value program it is because your world-views truth value is about 3%, 97% not reality, not truth, 97% b.s. These programs sell like hotcakes… Because this is the level that most humans live on. Continue reading →

The art of being heard, being known the right way

On one of the webinars the topic was “Not being heard… Being misunderstood”

Every person on the call had at least one painful childhood incident where their speaking wasn’t getting for them what they intended to get, instead their speaking was earning them grief and heart ache.

They wanted appreciation, understanding, equality, or love, validation, significance, or at least agreement.

When something doesn’t work, one would expect, next time you’ll try something different. But no… in real life it seems that the more something doesn’t work, the more you, humans are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

When we looked, each and every one of us were repeating and repeating and repeating the incident in our lives, the same way, expecting a different result. Insanity, right? Continue reading →

Things were falling apart on me. Both my computers misbehaved, and threatened me with a situation of no computer… not good, not good.

Two partner calls I listened to showed me that half of my students didn’t, don’t get what is supposed to be done in the Playground.

You can only imagine how it felt…

My home page, using the terminology from Transactional Analysis, is devastated… So I felt devastated… as if my life were destroyed.

I have seen this enough time to know that it’s the machine… so I chuckled…

This kept me in the game… I didn’t fall apart… I just kept on looking what caused both computers to misbehave all of a sudden… a gremlin in both computers? Weird. I found both this morning, by the way.

I wrote articles, I wrote emails, but from the response I saw that I am shooting blanks. I was puzzled.

Then on the Day of Power download webinar I had three of the five students who weren’t getting it and we had a conversation. And finally I got what I didn’t teach well, what didn’t go through, what has sounded to my students exactly as important or exactly as casual as the rest of the course.

So I am going to teach that part, the part that is 90% of the course, the part Landmark Forum gives only 30 minutes, even though it is the most important element of a life you live powerfully: telling reality apart from unreality.

And even though the entire Advanced Course deals with it, it never actually goes back to the basics, so graduates of the Advanced Course still don’t consider it, don’t do it, to the tune of 99%.

The circles.

So here is what I haven’t been teaching effectively to 50% of my students:

You don’t see the world, things the way things are, you see them the way YOU are.

What does this mean? This means that you add your personal flavor, meaning, agenda, past grievances to what you see.

But because you can only be powerful if you interact, interface with how the world is… i.e. reality, 99.99% of the time you aren’t powerful, you cannot be powerful, because of all that “personal reality” stuff, the meanings, the agenda, the emotions. All words, even if they are largely unconscious. All words that color and distort reality, and make life hell on earth.

So in the circles part we dig out, separate out reality, and put it in the left circle, with regards to everything that we see. In the partner calls we largely deal with incidents that cause us grief… but you can do that with anything, like myself with the computer troubles, or student troubles… lol.

Why do we go to the left circle, the reality circle?

This is the crucial question. Why not just deal with the sexy, seductive invisible dynamics, that are, by the way, also in the reality circle… part of the yet invisible reality?

Because unless you start from reality, you’ll end up in unreality and in hell.

Yeah, so what?

If all the suffering, all that’s wrong with you, wrong with the other, wrong with the world is in the right circle, you are choosing suffering, a life of fixing what is wrong, and that is not a powerful way to interact with the world… because in reality there is nothing wrong.

What?

Yeah, in reality there is nothing EVER wrong. In reality things are as they are, blue, dead, wounded, talking, walking, sleeping… and none of it is wrong… so there is no need to fix anything.

In my personal reality the computers are wrong and they need to be fixed. They are wrong because them not working MEANS that I won’t be able to run my business, and I’ll starve, become homeless, destitute. In my personal reality there is so much meaning, so much future, so much fear… if I stayed in my personal reality that push to fix it will surely put me in the poorhouse.

But in the reality circle, the left circle, I can see what the computer is doing instead of what is expected, and there are no emotions. I can look, soberly, what it is that I have done recently that can cause the trouble, and one by one, undo what I did.

And lo and behold, that is exactly what I did, and found that an audio component I installed cause the rest of the computer to stop working. I uninstalled that part, and voilà the computer is working.

So what am I saying?

What I am saying is this: whatever is going on, if you can and do separate out reality, what even an unemotional Martian can see of hear, your power can increase as much as 99%… because you leave the meaning where it belongs: the right circle.

How do you know if you did the separation right, and put yourself in the left circle? You look at things without any emotions. You still have your preferences. You still have your intentions. You still see that maybe there were things you didn’t say. Or that you had expectations that remained unfulfilled.

But in the left circle you can be 100% responsible, maybe even 100% accountable for what is happening.

And responsibility is your access to your personal power to do what you need to do to have a great life.
You can look at Hillel’s little poem that asks the questions you can’t answer in the right circle:

If I am not for myself, who is for me?
If not now, when?
If I am only for myself, who am I?

And use it to advise yourself.

In the left circle you can see clearly what it is that you are not providing for yourself, even though you could.
You can see what stands in the way to provide it… and do it now.
And you can take responsibility for your about-me score that wants everything for yourself and nothing for others, your attitude towards the world.

Without any emotions. In the left circle it is not good to give yourself what you need. It is not bad to not give yourself what you need.
It is not bad to procrastinate.
And it is not bad to be selfish, self centered, self-destructive, or anything that you do.
None of your attitudes are bad in the left circle.

They are just what they are.

Why? Because we don’t drag the good and the bad and the evil, all fruits from the poisonous tree of the Tree of Knowledge that destroyed humanity… and keep destroying it, mercilessly.

In the left circle there are no having to, needing to, wanting to and should either.

Those belong also to the right circle.

Instead in the left circle you can see what would work. What is needed. What could be there, what you could do, so life works powerfully for you.

In the left circle you are also not wrong. You can let go of your tendency to avoid domination: there is no domination there, unless you say so, and the moment you say so, guess where you are: in the right circle.

Domination doesn’t exist without words… it is not part of reality. Just like freedom, and dignity, and smart and stupid, and confused, and clumsy, and meek, and the rest of the words you habitually use: they all belong to the right circle.

What makes you angry, uncomfortable, meek, etc. is all in the right circle, not in reality.

Even love is in the right circle. There is no love in reality. There is behavior that looks smooth and productive to the Martian, but not love. Not kindness. Not niceness.

The Martian can see that you tighten up, that you react to something, but the Martian doesn’t see it as wrong, neither sees it as justified… it just sees it as it is, tightening up, or reacting, and there is nothing wrong with that.

I remember when I first experienced the Martian’s view (I could tell you that it is the same as the Witness view, but I don’t think it would make sense to you).

I was in the 6-day course, October 1987, the week of the Stock Market Crash…

Between the zip line course and the vertical rappel my group had to wait for the previous group to finish the exercise. So we sat down, and were instructed to close our eyes and think of nothing.

I did what I always do: what I wanted to do. So I decided to go back to one of the defining incidents of my life, when I was six years old, or maybe five, and my father made me perform oral sex on him.

I normally remembered that incident as myself, but this time I looked at it as a third person, the sounds turned off… And I saw what I saw, and it was funny. Much like a silent film where they throw the cream cakes into each other face… funny.

And what I got is this: looking at anything from a sideway view, the Martian’s frees me from the suffering, the interpretation, the drama.

And you can too.

I tested it: after seeing it from the side, I went back to how it felt to the little girl, and the drama was gone from there too. There were feelings, but they were words… not the drama. Not the “horrible” thing that happened to me.

Later, over the years, I went over all the hurts and “bad” things that happened to me, and took them through the circles… and today I am sober, I am effective, and I am happy.

And when new things happen, which are rare, then I immediately take them to the circles, and in a few minutes I am free, back to being a person instead of the wretch I was heading towards.

I am present, I am curious, I am alert, alive, and I have fun. Fun was not even in my vocabulary until I brought most the incidents into the left circle. But today I have fun, and maybe I can even say: I am fun.

Most people like me. Which is nice… It used to be the opposite: most people didn’t like me… lol.

So this is what the circles do.

And in the Playground you have a chance to bring all the current incidents to the partner calls, and run them through the circles, and the invisible dynamics that reach back to the past incidents, and clean them up. Bring sanity, sobriety, clear eyes, fun and happiness back to your life… where nothing is wrong, and nothing needs to be fixed.

If you only do the invisible dynamics and don’t bring everything to the left circle, you may indulge in telling the story, but you remain wretched.

The circles is the magic wand that fulfills on the promise of the course: Playground: it is never too late to have a happy childhood.

Hell yeah… a happy childhood and a happy life. That is something, isn’t it?

PS: I just noticed that I didn’t say why yesterday was one of the best days of my life… In the conversation with my students I discovered that I didn’t make sure they got that the goal is to live life in the left circle where there is nothing wrong.

Now that I know, I can make sure I do make sure… whatever it takes.

When you take responsibility for what you did or didn’t do, you can correct it. So yesterday put me back to power… and that makes yesterday the best day.

Read the original article: Yesterday was one of my worst days and one of my best days.

Most people who read my articles, or new people in my courses are puzzled by the term: learning about the invisible reality. How can you learn about, how can you learn about something that is invisible?

But, just like you can write with invisible ink, that can be made visible by another chemical process, you can make the invisible visible, for yourself, by recognizing certain characteristics, or by asking astute questions I teach you.

Of course unless you are somewhat astute, all the astute questions won’t matter… or worse than that: you’ll ask them without first seeing, astutely (again) what is in the visible.

One of the biggest missing is the ability to connect the dots, to see the connection or similarity between seemingly unrelated incidents, seemingly unrelated occurrences, either in space, or in time, or in circumstances. Continue reading →

When you blame other people… When bad things always happen to you… When you won’t be happy unless… When winning is the goal…

Why is it that some people consistently choose being right… when the question is being right or being happy?

The underlying dynamic is invisible to the naked eye. It is like an iceberg: only tiny bit of it is showing, and the bulk of the iceberg is under the water level, waiting for your life to kill it… like an iceberg sunk the mighty Titanic.

The visible part is almost always presenting you as the good guy. Nice guy. Hurt, angry, taken advantage of, innocent like a freshly born lamb. Harmless. Continue reading →

Arrogance, appreciation, Sherlock, myself and your pebble

If you have attended one of my Pebble webinars, you know that your pebble is your dominant desire that the world at large frowns at.

I have seen, on the calls, the desire to be significant, the desire to be different, the desire to belong, to be accepted, the desire to be untied, unburdened, allowed to be yourself, the desire to live on Easy Street, and the desire to do something that really matters.

There are more, but these are the desires that have been represented on the calls already. We have a lot more calls scheduled, so there is a chance that we’ll see a lot more.

The desire, when you look at it, is legitimate. You may have the same desire. Unfortunately to you, your dominant desire was not honored as valid, not honored as legitimate by your parents, your siblings, your teachers, your church, your peers.
Continue reading →

I am an insomniac. I was born this way.

My father was also an insomniac.

Occasionally I find ways to get more restful sleep and the longest streak of a sleep solution lasts for a few months, and then I have a new longer streak where I don’t sleep well, don’t sleep enough, even though I spend the night in bed, with the light turned off.

This morning, while I was researching something else, my attention was guided to a TED talk… on sleep. This was the second hint this morning to go and watch some videos… on sleep. But I have gotten, this past month, some hints every day… so it is time. Not my favorite topic. Continue reading →