Everyone has a good firm suggestion what is the most important spiritual capacity of a person who"ll go far... very far, or at least as far as experiencing the good life goes...
Because the good life is not very far... no matter what anyone says.
The main difference between someone who is living the good, the excellent life, and someone who is struggling, trying to get to the good life is not on the outside.
I could say meme-like nothings, inane b.s. like most people... but I won"t. Instead I"ll try to be clear: getting what you want from life is important.
Settling for less is not good for you.
But what you want from life needs to be really what you want from life... rarely the stuff you are going for nowadays.
You are going for possessions, toys, bigger, better, but judging from how happy they make you: they weren"t that important to you, or your overall happiness, overall satisfaction would have grown from it.
So my hunch is: you are not going for what is important to you, because... because of what?
It takes guts, courage, a high level of resistance to pain to go for what is truly important to you.
I remember, when I looked at a potential project, making calculations in my head like this: "this is really important to me. This is my main hope, my salvation. If I fail at this, I will have nothing left, no hope, nothing to look forward to."
And then... quite predictably, I didn"t go for it.
Life has an annoying way to bring up the most important "thing" again and again, until you say yes.
Sometimes Life doesn"t allow you to say yes: it makes you sick, or lose everything, or lose someone important to you.
In my case, this same exact pattern has been going on for a long time. Every 20 years or so Life brings out the BIG hammer, and hammers me down. And every seven or so years a smaller hammer...
This experience has been one of the reasons I have likened myself to the magical bird of Phoenix... burns to ashes, rises from the ashes, naked, weak... to become stronger and more beautiful than before.
My hunch is that this is not my personal story... that we all have a story like that...
Whether the story is an upward movement, or a "more of the same" will depend on my latest guess of what is the most important characteristic of a person who"ll go far towards living the excellent life.
And that characteristic is your TLB score. To what degree you are reactive and to what degree you are responsive.
If you need to fix everything without first truly getting, observing, witnessing, what the heck is going on, you have a low TLB score, maybe as low as 1.
You take everything personally. You have a knee-jerk reaction to everything. You go to the doctor often. You take medication, get angry, yell, go away, drink, eat, as a reaction to some perceived wrong.
One of the Starting Point Measurements looks at your attitude about feedback. After having done hundreds of these, I haven"t found one, not even one, where that attitude was curiosity, gratitude, or appreciation... instead I get hiding from, resenting out of hand, hating it, rejecting it, not wanting it, etc.
You don"t know yourself as well as you think you do... because you are unaware of your own behavior.
Awareness is allowing consciousness to form a clear picture of what"s going on, and allow the response come from consciousness.
But, of course, if your tolerance level, your TLB (Twitchy Little Bastard) score is low, your access to awareness is very very very low... and of course your actions will not come from consciousness, they will come from reaction... mostly pride... ego... your Precious "I" you"ll defend with your last breath.
Or fear... all your wires cross, your intelligence is gone, and you are reacting reacting reacting... killing yourself instead of watching, witnessing, and allowing consciousness to tell you what to do.
Well, that is your life in a nutshell.
Now you see why you are not growing. And you also see that the crucial linchpin capacity that can be grown is your TLB... growing the number of seconds before you react.
PS: After I wrote the above, I saw that the capacity that most depends on your TLB is the capacity to be responsible, to be at cause of everything.
As a low TLB you consider responsibility as blame, and you can"t deal with it. Guilt threatens you... so you blame circumstances, or others, society, or your past... and you miss your access to personal power.
Without the capacity of responsibility you have to sleepwalk through life. Without the capacity of responsibility you"ll have a nice dream about yourself and will protect that dream (delusion) with all you have.
While life, undisturbed by your "magnificence" leaves you behind.
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