Vision, Values, Mission... are there any pre-requisites?

If you have lived a lifestyle that left you with no foundation for self-growth is answering the question... what comes first: the chicken or the egg.

You, people in this predicament have one characteristic in common: you don"t want to do anything that you cannot see the immediate usefulness of it.

Usefulness can also be enjoyment... enjoyment is useful. ((Enjoyment is an extrinsic value))

This common characteristic has rendered you to either rely on your quick intelligence in school, and you had reasonable to good grades, or you had bad grades... the result in common: no knowledge of the world, no foundation for self-growth, because no real learning took place.

The percentage of humanity that would like to grow, but has nothing going for them, other than that vague desire, is a staggering 70%. 70%!

When some of you, who accidentally came to my site and found out that you have to study what you missed in high school... you don"t know what to do with that.

And even if you do, some rare people actually do, start watching video courses on biology, or history, or whatever, your brain needs more intense pressure to be willing to use its capacity for brain plasticity, and start receiving and retaining the new knowledge.

And unless you are willing to give up the need for immediate usefulness of the activity, you will do the new studying exactly the way they did it in high school... relying on your brilliance, or not building any long term memory knowledge.

Many of you also fancy yourself smart, and the thought that comes with being smart is that the new information will stick... but it doesn"t.

It doesn"t stick if you are brilliant, and it doesn"t stick if you are less than brilliant.

The brain is a lot like wood... you need to carve into it. And it is painful to get new knowledge.

If and as long as your TLB is only 1, you won"t go for anything painful, and you are kidding yourself.

Learning, no matter how much you already know, no matter how smart you are, is allowing a carving knife to touch your brain... it hurts.

And that is why humanity is so divided to the haves and the have nots... if you can"t take the pain... you"ll have nothing... or not much.

So your number one job is to decide that pain is your friend and that many things you are asked to do has usefulness, if it is painful: pain is the indicator that it is useful.

Doesn"t sound very appetizing: in a world where people don"t cook, where you get everything put in front of you, ready, you don"t have any familiarity with working for what you want.

By the way: usefulness is a value. It is a systemic value, an on/off type of value, but it is a value nevertheless.

It is the base value that you live by... so, in essence, you live by systemic values...

You judge the world from there, the level of right/wrong, useful/useless, worth it/isn"t worth it, and even art, a diamond, a lover are judged by you according to the on/off nature of systemic values.

You have a hard time seeing value anywhere, in any activity, in any person, including in yourself...

Let"s connect the dots between Maslow"s hierarchy of needs, and your value system: systemic, extrinsic and intrinsic values...

Self-growth is the highest level of the hierarchy of needs, and you are stuck on the "deficiency needs" level...

Here are the human needs according to Maslow"s Hierarchy of needs...

• 1. Physiological needs - these are biological requirements for human survival, e.g. air, food, drink, shelter, clothing, warmth, sex, sleep.If these needs are not satisfied the human body cannot function optimally. Maslow considered physiological needs the most important as all the other needs become secondary until these needs are met.


• 2. Safety needs - protection from elements, security, order, law, stability, freedom from fear.


• 3. Love and belongingness needs - after physiological and safety needs have been fulfilled, the third level of human needs is social and involves feelings of belongingness. The need for interpersonal relationships motivates behaviorExamples include friendship, intimacy, trust, and acceptance, receiving and giving affection and love. Affiliating, being part of a group (family, friends, work).


• 4. Esteem needs - which Maslow classified into two categories: (i) esteem for oneself (dignity, achievement, mastery, independence) and (ii) the desire for reputation or respect from others (e.g., status, prestige).Maslow indicated that the need for respect or reputation is most important for children and adolescents and precedes real self-esteem or dignity.


• 5. Self-actualization needs - realizing personal potential, self-fulfillment, seeking personal growth and peak experiences. A desire “to become everything one is capable of becoming”(Maslow, 1987, p. 64).

If you live by the requirement to do anything is that it needs to be immediately, and obviously useful, given that your main requirement of anything you consider of value is for it to be useful, you are stuck on the lowest levels. Even belonging needs are pretty much out of things to be useful need... real friendship, intimacy, trust, giving affection and love is guided by usefulness.

You can see, maybe, that the need for self-actualization is far off in the sky...

Without higher level values, extrinsic and intrinsic values, you remain the center of your world, and there will be no chance to develop a vision and missions that bring the vision to bear. ((

It"s all about seeing... and seeing is the result of looking...

Back in April (it"s December now) I assigned to four students to become value recognizers. To recognize value you have to see value. You cannot see value unless you are on the level on Maslow"s hierarcy of needs that matches that kind of, that level of value.

So what I assigned to them is to raise themselves, by their bootstraps, to a higher level.

One person managed to do that. Three didn"t.

The issue is this: when you are asked to see something that you can"t see, the first thing you need to internalize: there is something to see, that other people can see... Unless you make this mental leap, you"ll abandon the assignment as "there is nothing to see here".

The exercise of staring on the ceiling as soon as you turn the light off at night, is to activate the "muscle" that allows you to look: if "she" said there is something to see, by god I"ll see it... If not today, then tomorrow. But I will stare until I see it.

There was one course, one seminar in Landmark Education, that was supposed to activate this "muscle" and it failed. It failed to activate the muscle... But it did activate that muscle for three people... I was one of them. Worldwide. Three people. And not surprisingly, all three of us were Jewish.

What does Jewishness have to do with it? A whole lot.

In Judaism you are taught that you live and see only the tenth emanation of the Creator"s creation, and the 99% is shrouded in mystery. So you don"t expect to see everything, and you don"t think that you do.

You endeavor, you strive for seeing more and more of the mystery... so you LOOK!

What is missing for most people is the effort to look. They don"t. It doesn"t seem immediately useful... so they get stuck on the lowest levels of the hierarchy of needs, on the lowest level of values.))

Now, with that said: every company, every leader and their brother claim that they have a vision, and mission, and all that dance.

They are lying.

I am going to quote what I just wrote to my students on the Accountability Forum:

The context is, one of my students fell face first into the desire trap. In the desire trap you forget that what produces results is your doing, and you start to concentrate on having, the money, the glory, the success... And that traps you.

Pay attention: I am distinguishing a principle that if you learn it, your life will never be the same: your astuteness level will go through the roof. Astuteness is the accuracy with which you see the world... the current level of astuteness in the world is 1%. PhD"s astuteness is around 4%. Low. This is why most books" truth value is under 10%... the lack of the big picture, the lack of the whole truth...

OK, here is the principle

Good work Kawa.

The more dots you have in a picture... like the picture of a desire trap, or the picture of what is a high about-me number, what is master plan and what is desire trap, what is having and what is doing/giving/providing, the more dots you have the faster you can resolve wrong steps like that, and the faster you can return to wholeness and high vibration.

The same principle applies to what you are practicing with all the spiritual practices you are doing.

It is all about seeing an ever more complete and accurate picture of reality, so your actions can be astute, precise, and effective.

Interestingly, I learned this principle from an artist/teacher of mine in university. As an architecture student we had a lot of freehand drawing classes, six hours a week.

He taught us students to go back and forth between looking through squinted eyes where you don’t see the details (the big picture) and open eyes: focusing on the details… alternating between the two states, rhythmically and regularly.

Those of us who did it got our drawing always at some level of completeness, with correct details and correct proportions. Works of art.

Those of us, the “normal” ones, behavior worked only on details, and the drawing was never correct and never complete. Too much in one area, none in others.

The same exact behavior you can notice on yourself or on your peers: they get lost in the detail and forget about the big picture.

Having, stuff, money, power, experiences, is a detail. A side effect. The vision, the kinds of doings you enjoy doing, the difference your doing makes is the big picture.

And you can project this technique to Michelangelo, the sculptor. To the Playground. To the Second Phase Activators Course. To my health coaching... To politics. To the theory of happiness... everywhere... because it is a principle.

A true principle is true everywhere...

Unfortunately, scanning my articles, or reading an article here and there, or dabbling in things will keep you on the surface, on the level of the visible, on the level of the mundane... and it will keep you in the neat, the plausible and the wrong.

One of my favorite sentences, by H.L. Mencken: "Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong."

And the way to get to that neat, plausible, and wrong explanation of reality is to look through a narrow cone of vision, ignore the big picture, ignore anything that you may know that conflicts with your explanation... basically what we call science nowadays.

Here are a few more H.L. Mencken quotes: "School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers."

"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."

Go, read more... but I warn you, you"ll find nothing soothing, nothing complimentary, nothing kind to your own ignorance. If you can connect the dots... few of you can, you"ll find his writing delightful, expressing what you have been thinking, just a lot better, clearer, and more viciously. I love it.

The truth could set you free... but not until you can bare its sting... not until you can get through the pain, and actually look... that is not a quote, that is me speaking.

In my search to find a way to turn ignorant adults into people who can be trained and who can raise themselves by building a foundation of knowledge, a plasticity of brain, I look at methods that scare me...

If they don"t scare me, they probably don"t work. No pain, no gain. This is also a principle... true in every single area of reality.

I am looking at learning to do math with the abacus. I used to be a math wiz... but that part of my brain got injured in my second brain damaging accident, especially the simplest move, addition is damaged. I find myself perplexed at looking at digits I need to add when I calculate your soul correction, so I have been practicing it on my projection clock... a clock that projects the time on the ceiling. Every minute the picture changes, and I have a new challenge... and I am really trying to return to my former math wiz state... hardest thing I have ever tried...

The familiar picture of a date, or a time stamp doesn"t immediately invite the math-instinct...



So I am looking if learning the even more unfamiliar abacus would be a good way to activate your otherwise blank brain, and start triggering the brain to an alert, awake state where it knows that it is supposed to come out of its stupor.

What"s the vision?

Taking a few people to Human Being... the next evolutionary stage of the human race... working out the methodology, so it is ready when humanity is about completely destroy itself...

The values:

the main value: Life. it seems that our planet and our race is the only intelligent life in the Universe... and I say that value is above all... and deserves to be saved.

The mission...

ferret out the many different ways the current humanity is tethered to the wrong path, and invent ways to liberate people from it, and test those ways with actual students.

I"ll close this article on a personal note.

There are a handful of good thinkers, good writers, that I have been reading and envying. They get read, they are liked, and they seemingly make more difference than myself.

But then, after I stated my mission, I can see that they talk... that is what they do. Talk... and people get whatever they get, and no difference is made.

Only concerted, intense, purposeful actions can make a difference. The practices i take people though in my various programs are that... concerted, intense, purposeful actions. Not much talking...

No popularity, no clapping, no adoring words. No. instead I get results. For the people I train.

I wonder what the mission those writers have... if any.

Do you recognize caring?

Selfish, selfless, wanting, forcing, pushing on a string... What is missing?

When you are a value recognizer, you see value, for you, everywhere.

Seeing value, recognizing value, is a very high vibration capacity, and I literally don"t know anyone who has it fully open... meaning the DNA capacity.

It"s Tuesday, and I had no idea what to write about today. The way it was looking, life was going to be mundane, maybe even boring today...

But I opened my horoscope from Rob Brezsny, and it all changed when I read it. It brought back yesterday, and the whole past month.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): How sexy is it possible for you to be? I"m referring to authentic soul-stirring sexiness, not the contrived, glitzy, counterfeit version. I"m alluding to the irresistible magnetism that wells up in you when you tap in to your core self and summon a reverent devotion to your life"s mission. However sexy it is possible for you to be, Virgo, I suggest you unleash that magic in the coming weeks. It"s the most reliable strategy for attracting the spiritual experiences and material resources and psychological support you need.

In the 30 dry days... that seemed to pass through the land of commerce, I learned a lot about scarcity, about abundance, about being Selfish and being selfless, wanting, forcing, and pushing on a string.

I am not sure I"d be able to live through a whole year like the past month, but if I could, maybe my vibration would go up all the way to to 1000...

Life is, normally, normal... You survive and you know it.

But some time periods are not normal. There is a solar storm. Then there is February/March... The water doesn"t want to fully energize... No new money is coming in... This is a time when small businesses pray that they can stay in business. I have been observing this for 30 years... And maybe, occasionally, there is A February/March when there is also a solar storm. That is what happened this year.

I am going to share my observations, and I am going to share my insights.

I spent 20 years serving, advising, helping service providers, individuals who made a living, trading their time for money. When they know about every penny, and every penny has its place.

In the first of those years, 30 years ago, one of my clients said: If you survive March, you"ll live another year. That is what made me first look at the cyclical nature of business.

In order to see the bigger picture, you need to step back. You need to see more dots in the picture than just those in front of your nose. In fact, a whole lot more dots.

If you don"t, or you can"t, your actions will be reacting to what you can see, the partial picture, and everything you"ll do will be a mistake. Often fatal.

Unless you see, clearly, what causes what, you are going to try to fix something that can"t be, shouldn"t be fixed, because there is nothing wrong with it.

Each one of those service providers called me on slow weeks to ask me if I saw anything in the big picture. And I looked and saw.

And I always saw.

Waiting to when you need to see something may be a little too late.

When Lao Tzu said: do what is difficult when it is easy, he meant all kinds of doing, including thinking, including looking.

In the 30 years that I have been observing, I have mapped out cycles, regularities, etc... that make people buy or not buy.

And yet, when the dry spell hit this past month, my first thought went to: I am through. People suddenly don"t want what I have. I have to change!

Change what?

This is where the proverbial stuff hit the fan... I reacted. I became a beggar. Luckily it didn"t do a thing, and luckily I started to query Source for a better course of action... and thus I didn"t dig myself six feet deep... the depth of a grave.

Source said it"s temporary... the dry spell. So I stopped digging, and I decided to employ end-game optimism: if I do the right things things will work out.

Just the way it started, suddenly, the same way it ended... at least let up for a few days. It"s not over yet... not quite.

The book, Acres of Diamonds talks about the dangers of abandoning your efforts when you are close to the gold or diamonds, because of your small minded, small picture view of the world.

I have a ton of visitors who, like zombies chasing mirages, hope for a windfall, but never achieve it.

Why? Because the mirages prevent them from seeing. The mirage gets into their eyes.

It does take thousands of hours of intentional learning, growing, self-developing, and there is no shortcut.

Talented people, smart people, they have to work as hard as everyone else.

You can get mediocre results with less work, less intentionality, less consistency... and the world is full of mediocre people. In every country.

And mediocre will not be fulfilling, especially if you believe that you deserve more than you are getting. And of course if you believe that you deserve more, you won"t apply yourself, you won"t put in the time.

Catch 22... the snake bites its own tail. Self-perpetuating attitude.

What is preventing you from applying yourself, is an attitude.

Attitude is a big word that can mean about a thousand different approaches to life.

My fundamental approach to life is: if something is not working, there is something I am not seeing.

And if there is something I am not seeing, fixing stuff is not a good solution.

The question to ask, instead of rushing to fix, is "What am I not seeing?"

That is probably the most intelligent question you can ask. In my 70 years no one asked me this question.

People come to me telling me what they want me to tell them. They tell me what they want me to teach them.

And when they do ask questions, they ask them from what they know.

But no one thinks to give me the facts and help them move around so that they can see what they need to see for life to start working for them.

I could be offended. It would be justified. I could say: you have to pay for that... it would be justified.

But, I can see, that is not a productive attitude.

For the past week or so I have reversed the order of things, I have been giving the strategy session (a 20 minute conversation) BEFORE I give people their starting point measurements.

I have found that people are actually quite delightful. Once they tell me all the things they know, they start to hear what may be missing. (Me keeping my mouth shut has been the secret ingredient.)

They still don"t know to ask the question: Things are not working. What am I not seeing? and they may NEVER think to ask that question.

Not even my paying clients and students think to ask that question...

I wonder what it is about humans that they think they see everything that they need to see to find their ways out of the maze.

I am reading a book written by a guy who played competitive chess for a long time.

He played well... but he didn"t have questions, until one day he did.

Asking the type of question that probes into the invisible (to you), is an adult capacity. And you cannot even consider asking those questions from inside the cave of your mind. The mind likes only clarifying questions that prove it was right, prove that it knows everything.

When this dude suddenly saw that to win consistently, you needed to ask different questions, he became a person who spent 99% of their time widening their cone of vision so more things are recognized and more things are seen in a single glance.

Patterns, for example, take a billion hours to identify to such a high degree, that you can see them even from the corner of your eyes... like I see money spending habits of people. Or signs of weather changes.

Or the way I can see your attitude... the soil from which your behavior grows.

The "thing" you don"t see, the missing piece, is always an attitude.

When things are not working, or a thing isn"t working, there is always something you don"t see. And what you don"t see is your attitude. Your approach. You don"t see that the soil from which your actions grow out of is toxic.

In yesterday"s money attitude workshop (see sidebar) almost every participant adopted my attitude: Being a value recognizer.

Being a value recognizer is a big deal. I literally don"t know anyone who is a value recognizer, who has that capacity fully open. I have it open to 30%. A major part of the value isn"t recognized... mostly in themselves. But what you cannot see you cannot grow.

If you depend on others to tell you your value, life won"t work well for you.

It takes work to see the value of what you are providing, to grow it to have monetary value, and speak it effectively so others can see the value too.

If you don"t see it... or if you are just giving it lip-service... or if you hope that others will see it without you telling them... life will remain as dark and miserable as it is now.

Of course, if you want to be honest to yourself, at this point you have no idea what value is, whether they eat it or drink it.

Until you start to get glimpses of it, this will just be a good idea... and that is mostly what will happen to people... because words don"t change attitudes, only effort to see something different. Much like in chess... you look until you see. Thousands of hours? Hundreds if you have a teacher.

But you are, nevertheless, going to be the average of the five people you spend the most time with, who have the most air time in your life.

And if they are the way you have been, no amount of work you do with a teacher will make a difference. Guaranteed. You cannot change reality.

There are no jumps, even if you feel that a conversation you had with a coach was life altering. As soon as you go back to your life and your people... you are back to where you were.

So what can you do... given that before the capacity opens up, it is as good as non-existent?

There are a few practices you can employ.

--One practice is putting a question mark at the end of every statement you think, or you say.

What this does is enters the element of "it ain"t necessarily so", and the element of "it ain"t nothing till I say so" you could have learned from the Umpire story.

The more diligent you are in adding the question mark, the faster the capacity will open up.

Every sentence, remember?

The goal is to become cause. Cause of what you see. Cause of becoming a value-recognizer. In yourself and in others.

Here is how I sound being a value recognizer. You may sound different. Or you may emulate me... But remember, it is not the words that matter, it is the attitude:

I am fully and totally responsible for the value I receive, while I give more than what people expect of me.

No one can take advantage of me, because I make sure that I receive and end up with more value than I have given. How? by pulling the value towards myself.

I give everything I know away for free. And I get more value for myself than what it takes... and thousand times more than you are able to receive. Unfortunately.

The value is not necessarily enjoyment value, or extrinsic value. Often it is intrinsic value. An experience of gratitude, an experience of awe. And experience of self-love spilling over.

Everything I ever wanted is available to me through being a value recognizer and in providing value... to you.