Are you dead or mostly dead, slightly alive?

The attitude of submission, dutifulness, and the death of individual and the death of joy

Part of the enslavement process that has been going on for thousands of years, you are robbed of your sense of free will, and your joy.

The chicken coop ((from the White Tiger)) doesn"t want you to enjoy anything... or more precisely, it separates enjoyment as a special thing on special occasions, not your natural state. Same with happiness.

But the truth is: your natural state is joy. Enjoying the body, the movement, breathing, eating, working: everything.

One of my challenges is to re-awaken, to liberate that capacity that society is hellbent to suppress.

Observe a dog, and you"ll see that a dog is happiest when it learns, when if is challenged, when if is allowed to more fully use his abilities.

Tai talks about the zoo animals, monkeys, that cannot "self-realize" when they are given the food: their self-realization includes the joy of finding food, hunting for food, and even running from hiding from, duping a predator.

Your life is boring, you get serve slop and don"t have to hunt for it, most of you don"t get to make edible food from the ingredients, you are told what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and you are unhappy, depressed, and self-realization is totally impossible for you.

You are dull, dutiful, and dying inside. Caged.

Whether you"ll stay that way or not will depend on several factors.

Circumstantial factors: who you live with, and to what degree you live under their thumb.
Inner factors: how much courage you have to effect change, how much responsibility you are able to take for your own life.
To what degree you are trapped... in one of those traps, like desire trap or fear trap. ((See the Feelings book. If you haven"t read it... you must if you want to understand your inner dynamics. Popular psychology books are largely trash: less than 7% truth value, whereas the Feelings book by Margoczi has a 50% truth value, that is why my whole teaching got wings when I first read it. And I re-read it as often as I can"t remember something. ))

I am working with people... and I can clearly separate the three groups:

• one group has found a way to enjoy the process without killing the "endgame" optimism


• the second group is finding inner and circumstantial barriers (mostly wives who would rather have you dead than joyful)


• the third group is solidly trapped in a fantasy, and nothing seems to bridge the fantasy with the now-moment.


• and then there is the potential fourth group who has a vague sense of something better, that they have to do something now if they ever want to have that "something better" but there is no energy in the "wish"... so they dabble in the present, and never put enough energy in it for the "plate" to keep spinning.

I have likened you to a plate-spinner, and this fourth group, in that context, can be called "the plate of self-realization is not spinning" group.

Humans do things for two reason: because they have to, or because they get to do them.

You want to get to a place where you get to do things that contribute to your full self-realization.

Self-realization is the process of becoming all you can be: joyful, creative, present, and where you love yourself and love your life.

The biggest contribution to humans in all the past we know about was made by Victor Frankl, who showed that you can love yourself and love your life even in a concentration camp.

If you look at animals in captivity, some can do it and some can"t or won"t.

Consider a dog an animal in captivity... some dogs are joyful and others are depressed.

The difference, I feel, is what Seligman coins "learned helplessness".

It is the result of a decision an animal makes, that says: it is hopeless. It is over. It is not worth doing anything.

That animal can be you, that animal can be your dog, the lion in the circus, any animal in captivity...

The moment you say: it"s hopeless, you stop striving.

As a human you lose sight of what is possible, you lose sight of your own power. You give in, you give up.

And then you come to me, or go to a medical doctor and they give you chemicals to sleep and other chemicals to be awake.

You become a puppet... and you expect me to save you.

I am a lot like the character Miracle Max, Billy Crystal plays in Princess Bride, one of my all time favorite movie. I watch it not for its wittiness, and it is very witty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4ftmOI5NnI

I watch it for the "archetypes" it shows.

Most characters in the movie wake up in the morning because they didn"t die the night before.

Except the young men, Westley and Inigo Montoya.

They have a purpose, they have a meaning to their life, the way Victor Frankl did in the concentration camp.

Miracle Max says when they bring the lifeless body of Westley to him: "he is only mostly dead...". The difference between dead and mostly dead is the meaning Westley invented: True Love.

or the meaning that animates Inigo Montoya: to kill the six-fingered man.

Once he kills him, the meaning is killed as well. And Westley gives him a new one: to become the Dread Pirate Roberts...

My job, when you come to me, is to consider you only "mostly dead" and find the meaning that you have, that brought you to me, even though you don"t know what it is. Or you know, but you are looking at the hopelessness of it.

My job is to bring it back to life, so you can be joyful in the present.

Some disciplines call that meaning your North Star, and it is. As long as you follow it, you are always on your way. And when you don"t... you are back where you were, mostly dead.

In my "what"s missing" workshops that I have been centering around money this issue is coming up: you try to make money your North Star. Money is not suitable for that. It is not a meaning that enlivens you.

It is a minor circumstance.

The woman who wants to sell her art really wants to feel like a person on her own right, not a "kept woman".
The woman who wants to sell more of her product really wants love to flourish in all her relationships, voluntarily and not because you are supposed to.

As long as worldly success seems to be the "meaning", you are like Inigo Montoya, you have to be drunk all the time.

Not enough meaning.

And you"ll only wake up in the morning because you didn"t die the night before.

And then, after the morning, comes the dutiful day, the drudgery, and slavery, the non-life.

Learned helplessness.