Spell Breaking Language-Keys to Unlock Language Locks
Unseen, We Live Bully Stockholm Syndrome And Other Oddities of Being Alive in a Miss-Spelled See of Words
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Introduction: Words are Spells! Where Was The ‘Proper’ Spell Checker™ When I Needed One?
Now that I have, in four parts, really questioned the value of words and language in the series
what is it that I have left to do or to write?! Of course, I am to write more words! ‘Good’ words, though, words that help bring order to the word chaos of Babel within which we find ourselves embroiled and entangled. So I changed my mind-direction from the simple dichotomy of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ towards simply ‘bad’ words. Hence the discontinuation of the series from Good-Evil as a unity to the question, ‘How can we use words in our daily language to transform that seemingly intractable dichotomy?’
‘Words are spells’, or so I have recently heard spoken to me twice in the span of a few days from completely disparate sources.
And I agree completely that words are spells and that our empowered use of them is important. For example, history for as long as humans have had language, to the best of our understanding, began to use words as the magic connection to the ineffable with rituals of song, prayer, and mantra. And even in today’s world, that has largely officially dismissed these powers as religious or superstitious nonsense, the entire ‘critical-construct’ theories that are post-modern marxism are destroying our society using a Babel-spell debasement of language that empowers their critiques of society. They use their specialised language as spells for which they are the authorities and demand of us to defer to that authority. Even that use of authority from expertise or speciality is a form of black spell magic. It is to use their arcana as a shibboleth to separate the deserving from the undeserving and to create blindness within the deserving. From these effects of their word spell magic arise the incompetency and weakness and infatuation with the power of word and social destruction we are seeing highly activated at this time.
Their words are to imperil us, to paralyse with confusion and misunderstanding. So strong is the power of words that despite the real differences between men and women, for example, we now argue about it and have people willing to die for the right of men to be impregnated and to breast feed while men pretending to be women have been given by governments the right to demolish women’s sports and rape female prisoners. And despite the mostly superficial differences between people across the globe — even between men and women who do have some significant and important biological and personality differences — the current critical language police experts want everything to be categorised perpetually as unbalanced power structures based on the superficial: skin or genitalia being the two most elevated markers, although not the only ones, of victimised deservedness or undeserving oppressor. And it is the gradations of oppression and power within that imbalanced power structure that require the grifting authoritative language police and their policing. And since this is the deepest language arcana, an increasingly confused Babel, to know or understand what is the ‘true’ meaning of words as agents of categorising power needs to be deferred to language police experts, our magicians of critical language theories, who profit monetarily and prestigiously. They create confusion and we pay them to make it more confusing.
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And this is also well displayed in the socio-economic-political language demands of our time that insist that nuance is such a perverse offence against yes-no, good-evil, right-wrong, deserving-undeserving that the offenders can be cancelled, caned, and killed. For example Maajid Nawaz, in his interview with Jordan Peterson, in ‘In Response to Netanyahu | Maajid Nawaz | EP 337’ gently albeit precisely castigated Peterson for Peterson’s failure to respect the magic of group identity words by having unintentionally ‘othered’ (having made undeserving) the Palestinians in his interview with Benjamin Netanyahu about the Abraham Accords. Ostensibly those accords are designed to heal the bloody Israeli (Jew) / Palestinian (Arab-Moslem) rift and to stop the ‘political’ and/or military grift as the narrative is being simplistically and controversially told to be of Israel’s illegal genocidal war against the innocent Palestinians, especially Palestinian children. Nawaz astutely argued that Peterson’s words by their exclusion of anything Palestine had energetically and/or psychologically put them in the ‘other’ camp, those of the undeserving. The strength of that encampment as undeserving included not having even the semblance of equality by lacking an official presence of Palestine in the Accord’s formulation and associated discussions
This telling by Nawaz downplays, by completely disregarding, the broad, horrific and brutal presence of Hamas in Palestine and the ostensible support given to Hamas by a significant percentage of the Palestinians themselves as Arab-Moslems who voted them into power many years ago. And so Nawaz has used his own magical word spells to remove from the dialogue Hamas’s extremism towards their own Palestinian people let alone Hamas’s open and public avowal that until every Jew and Christian is dead they will continue the jihad against the non-believers. They are brutal, and not just to Israelis. Side picking is to pre-define our spell casting of words. (For more context on the nature and extent of the one-sided and shrill spelling language that is propagandised in order for us to pick correctly the good side and vilify the bad side, see ‘“Do You Hold ALL Palestinians Culpable?" Douglas Murray on Israel-Hamas, Riots & More’ on Piers Morgan Uncensored. Or ‘Piers Morgan: Israel/Palestine, Farage & Who Gets My Vote’ on Triggernomety with Konstatin Kisin and Francis Foster.)
As noted, I saw that Nawaz displayed his own failure to see his use (misuse?) of word magic in his precise and detailed delineation of ‘othering’ words and language. He is not alone in this mostly unconscious action / hypocrisy nor in the complete blindness (avidyà — to not see true) to it: the blindness arises in large part because it is ubiquitous in our bully culture and can remain ‘comfortably’ unconscious. I’ve discussed how we are barely alive and mostly unwell in our psychological state of being bullied, and being the bullies, in my series ‘Obedience to Authority’. In particular see
Mass Formation, Woke and Corporatist News: On Deservedness and Death in a Post Modernist Bully Culture.
And that brings to mind how we have empowered the words of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, for example, with the force and frequency of our energetic intensity. This ‘principle’ of the power of words being made more powerful with mantra, repetition, prayer and intensity has moved from ‘just’ the superstition of prayer and witchcraft to an interesting scientific elaboration with Rupert Sheldrake’s proposed principle of morphic resonance. Some have seen ‘morphic resonance’ to be so threatening to the world’s scientific™ order that, in 1981, the much acclaimed Nature magazine published an article denouncing Sheldrake’s book, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance, as a threat so grave to people’s mental and/or psychological well being that it needed to be burnt as dangerous anti-scientific™ delusion. (Nature 24 September 1981, p.245; I couldn’t find that article in Nature’s online archive. Although I found several letters to the editor in later archived editions that were critical of the article’s suggestion that it was best to burn the book. For example: ‘Incendiary Subject’.)
And I find that this confirms that the suppression of truth by the authority of science™, for example, that pounced on the world in the time of the convid is not new. (The ‘real’ history of vaccinations as slow death by toxification is making that especially clear, although few are yet willing or even able to consider that to be a possibility at this time!) What that Nature article wanted to do was to keep control of the spell words within a specific set of science™ language gatekeepers. What is new is that the convid as a global tyrannical control grab by the oligarchs triggered the great apocalypse, the great reveal. A key part of that unveiling is, for those who are seeing more clearly, that our trusted social contracts are lies. Seeing the lies becomes the desire to reclaim from those ‘trusted’ authorities our own personal agency and responsibility: we are taking back from them the power of our words as agents that abet our freedom from those outsourced authorities. ’Trust me, I am the science™’ is now understood as bullshit dark magic disempowering spell language.
Furthermore, are not the ‘woke’ and the ‘counter-woke’ married by a nearly identical dichotomous split as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are? Each side knows what is true and good and demands compliance to their own good, of one sort or another, from the ‘bad’ guys over there. And at the same time each have their own spell-languages that differ in complexity and to what extent they are grounded in reality or not. Here I will rhetorically ask, ‘What have been the consequences of that battle of Babel-words?’ I ask rhetorically because I’m not directly exploring that question here, and consider the answer to be obvious in how effectively Babel spell-words have filled our communication spaces. Those spaces are now full enough of the debased idioms that discourse is close to being crippled by the created enclosed encampments of policed and impenetrable tribal languages. What does LGBTQIA+ even mean? Why is the question ‘What is woman?’ even necessary and asking it a ‘micro-aggression’ demanding censure and cancellation by culture marxist language police who deny that their actions are tyrannical.
Here I suggest a way that we can step out of that good-bad language paradigm into a verbal tertium quid that empowers us is with a simple change in how we cast our spells — I mean cast our word-spells — on ourselves and between each other. In my experience it almost magically and nearly effortlessly dismantles the arcana language encampments. In a kind of trojan horse, sort of way, it uses our inherent trust in words to free us from the authoritarian word-prisons within which we have naïvely entrusted our lives and misplaced our personal power.
The Seven Spell (s)Words of the Apocalypse — Well, Six and a Trump Card to Make Seven.
I look at the following words. The first two are foundational keystones. The rest are important.
Deserve† (top dog)
Have to (a big one)
Should (a bigger one)
Need (to make scarcity plentiful)
Try (impotency)
Thank you (really?)
Never (the trump card)
†Deserve was actually covered in my introduction above and is more deeply examined in the obedience to authority essay that I’ve linked. It is the most subtle and extremely important. In its deepest expression of our unconscious psychology it might be the foundation and weaponry of all the others — except maybe ‘never’. And I elaborate on ‘deserve’ as the spouse of ‘thank you’, below.
And it is important that this is not just the words as fixed in meaning. Language police have unsuccessfully over the centuries used bully tactics and disconnected reason to pin down language, to confirm its conformity to moral proprieties of controller wannabes. (C.G. Jung indirectly explores this idea in his book Man and His Symbols where he clarifies between dead signs and living symbols.) Words are energy spells that carry the energy associated with their meaning and beyond that, to wordless symbols. And their use extends and expands that energy into the zeitgeist, or into the extended aura of the collective unconscious, or the field that houses morphic resonance and thus affects all aspects near and far in our lives. Is the energy we are extending with our words supporting a joyful life rich with opportunity and freedom? Or are we extending word-energy into the energy field that is supporting the convidian oligarchy and those global imperialists who seek to create a forced conformity to their singularity of an idealisation of the unity of uniformity that removes freedom and the eccentricity that naturally arises with the joy of life? And it seems that that the deep joy of life is the annoying impediment to their morbid anti-life ideology. To the extent that we can stop co-creating with them the morphic resonance of a necrosis of language by debasing or removing nuance and symbol, both of which express tangible reality, we energise shared experience and intimacy and align ourselves with the intangible and yet the felt omnipresent energy of life.
Bully Stockholm Syndrome. What Is It And Why Don’t We See It?
As I discussed in Obedience to Authority Part VI, we have adapted to being (partially) alive in our bully culture in the manner of Stockholm Syndrome, what I see as Bully Stockholm Syndrome. Our survival-mode as subjects to and co-creators of external authority and force is expressed in an uncompromising, ie tyrannical, authoritarian social requirement. To survive we have taken into ourselves, without seeing it, the language and the ‘magic’ words of those global religious and social empire bullies and have re-birthed ourselves, for survival, into bully-survivalists in our words, languages and actions.
This essay is a look at six key words, plus a funny one, that weave the bully-spell and keep it alive and well in our words, minds, actions and relationships. In their magic these words subtly and effectively promote lack of internal integration and integrity, which in turn pretty much eliminates the possibility of true intimate relations with the people around us. Period. And I argue that eliminating their use in our day-to-day speech and writing is a huge step towards peace within and without our Selves because it removes the distancing and isolating ‘bully’ language. Bully language, I argue, creates separation schisms between people and groups in almost exactly the same that Maajid Nawaz suggested would happen without proper inclusionary language for the Arab-Non-Arab world. Nawaz simply hasn’t taken that idea far enough and doesn’t understand that most ‘inclusionary’ language is inherently schismogenetic. He, like most of us in the west, are like fish unable to see the water they are in: we are in Bully Stockholm Syndrome. It abounds and binds us, blinds us with the invisibility of its ubiquity.
This essay is one of the tools that empowers our eyes and ears, once we have chosen to change, when we choose to ask ourselves ‘Am I seeing and hearing what is true? How to know?’
The Greater Spell Words, After ‘Deserving / Undeserving’: Have To in Five Parts.
Have to part 1)
Because Authority Tells Us What we Have to Do We are Surrounded by Bullies Kind and Cruel Who Simply Have To Infringe Against Our Sovereignty.§
§I’m following Tereza Coraggio’s contemporaneous (and slightly synchronous with my essay) discussion on the separation between Empire as bully-dictator and Sovereign as referring to an individual’s agency independent of outside bullying (my slight paraphrase). And I’ve substituted ‘authority’ for her use of ‘empire’. See her challenging and important essay regarding the Empire-Victim situation loosely described as the trouble with the Middle East,
‘**Should** We Be Taking Sides On Palestine And Israel? (My emphasis in the subtitle.)
“Have to” is at its core and without equivocation a word-spell of the bully. It is an expression of force with the tacit or overt threat of violence behind it. We have become totally unconscious to it. If you are ‘lucky’ enough to meet me in person I will, depending on my intuitive sense of who you are and after asking you if it would be okay with you, for me to point out that you have said ‘have to’ perhaps ten or fifteen times since we met an hour ago. Invariably you would be surprised and even incredulous. And then you might kind of ask ‘So?’ or ‘So what?’ I would explain to you the ‘So what’ (elaboration below) and every time, within two or three sentences, you are likely to have said ‘Have to’ again. I would then politely, albeit firmly, interrupt you and ask if you even heard your use of ‘have to’. I’ve extremely rarely heard the answer ‘Yes’ to that question. Although that has changed much to the better in the last few years in comparison to twenty years ago. This seems to be evidence of what some spiritual leaders have described as a change or acceleration of consciousness. A few years ago my ‘have to word’ lecture was a twenty minute discourse of ‘have-to’ as malevolent. Now it is often done in less than five minutes and is far more effective and quickly understood. Recently I have been profusely thanked for the ‘have to lecture’ when a chance encounter with strangers turned to the ‘have to’ as Bully Stockholm Syndrome. That was something that did not happen a few years ago.
How do we use ‘Have to’? Let me count the ways! Ubiquitously, of course! Eg: You have to buy a ticket; I have to exercise more; You have to leave soon; I have to learn more Spanish; You have to remember your mother’s birthday; I have to go on a diet; They have to …. Endless.
And here I suggest an exercise: count the times you say ‘have to’ in a day. If that number is ‘zero’, record your conversations for ten or fifteen minutes and, with very few exceptions, you will be able to hear several times to many times that invisible word vocally expressed. Or ask someone to listen to you, although that is not fool proof either because most people do not actually hear it. I’ve tested this many many times. NB: I’ll write about ‘have to self-talk’ in a moment.
When I say to somebody ‘You have to…’ I have bullied that person. For example, if I were to say to you something like ‘you have to cut your hair’ or ‘you have to change your shirt’ what might your reaction be? Usually it is something like ‘No, I don’t,’ or ‘Who are you to tell me what I have to do? It’s none of your business’. (Occasionally I get someone who simply wonders what’s wrong with them that I would say that.) These two questions are very personal and outside of our social norms of what is comfortable to demand and usually consciously triggers something like ‘No I don’t, who are you to tell me what I have to wear or do with my hair?’ The inherent sovereign within us instinctively rejects the bully’s demands, and we feel it either consciously or unconsciously.
We have completely normalised ‘have to’ and so our rejection of being bullied typically rests in our unconscious. And yet we are born sovereign even though that was as dependent babies. We instinctively or intuitively reject or push back against the ‘have to’ language, even if we aren’t aware of doing that. The deeper consequence of that is we have rejected intimacy because we inherently do not trust the bully. The bully has overruled personal sovereignty of the other and therefore the tendency by the bullied is not to trust him/her, even if unconsciously and/or subtly. And the bully, in being a bully, has unconsciously separated him/herself from the other person. There can be no real intimacy between the bully and the bullied, even when that is unconsciously done.
Often this type of bullying is done with the ‘good intentions’ of the kindly helper-bully knowing how to fix the other person! Yikes, is that a recipe for disaster and again, the damnable path of good intentions, a big barrier to intimacy because it includes an abuse of power between the morally / psychologically stronger and the weaker with that oh so soft threat of violence. [Synchronicity: Tonight I heard Konstantin Kisin in an interview say:
23:28 … [the woke] are incredibly well-meaning… which is what makes them so dangerous. … [There is]… a wonderful quote about this, which is that a tyranny exercised for your own good is much worse than a tyranny that's exercised out of pure evil because at least the evil person knows [that] they're being evil. But when someone is trying to help you by being tyrannical towards you [ie bullying you in the guise of helping you] they are not held back by their conscience at all so they will do whatever the hell they think is the right thing in order to help you’ (The Anti-Woke Expert: “We Are Witnessing The Fall Of The UK & The USA!” - Konstantin Kisin’ with host Steven Bartlett).
What if the Bully is Right?
Now even when the bullied person recognises, cognitively, that the bully was right about whatever directive has been pronounced, that bully-push creates, consciously or unconsciously, the energy and attitude of ‘No I don’t have to!’ And that ‘No I don’t have to’ is an actual hard core truth, amongst the deepest and unshakable truths of being alive and human. It is a strong energy to overcome! That ‘energy’ is also known as free will. When that truth is violated, when we allow it to be violated by choice, unconsciously or not, it creates much of the stress and anger and resentment of people who have abdicated their agency, their sovereignty at their own expense in order to become the ‘good’ victim of the good-intentioned bully.
’Good intentioned’ bullying creates a particularly enervating state of being that at the same time creates forceful energetic barriers between both people. And it creates energetic and undermining resistance within the bullied against ‘fixing’ whatever has been bullied as ’wrong’ in the eyes of the bully and the bullied.Thus the person ‘successfully’ bullied to lose weight, for example, will struggle incalculably and unsuccessfully, oftentimes. And if the bullied’s goal is achieved the feeling of success by the bullied is at best muted and often disappointing because the success also, and more powerfully, has concomitantly created a victim: him or herself. That victim will fight back, in someway and perhaps once the diet is done, for example, will give the bully — him or herself — the finger by putting on more weight than was lost. The successful bully has in turn been victimised with his/her ‘success’. And the ‘successful’ victim has debased the truth of ‘No I don’t have to’ to the bully and further strengthened their lack of agency in a pretty nasty spiral.
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Have to part 2)
We Bully Ourselves in Order to Be Aligned with the Bullying Authority We Trust and Thus Forsake Our Own Sovereignty: Bully Stockholm Syndrome 2.
When our wonderfully strong internally directed critical self-righteous bully-voice kicks in with all those ‘have tos’ it is an even more troublesome bully. That bully knows intimately our most vulnerable spots and will often be relentless in grinding into them. And like with the external bully, especially the so-called good intentioned ones, any ‘have to’ success will be difficult to achieve because the resisting energy is aligned with the truth that we don’t actually have to do anything. And in the end, a ‘success’ means we have victimised our self.
It is a very tough fight to overcome our body’s innate alignment with what is true. So tough that it often leads to rather poor outcomes, either in health or even in things like accidents or critical life changes such as job losses. I mentioned about the rebound of bullied dieting. The well known psychologist and addiction expert Gabor Maté has explored this extensively, from a slightly different perspective, in his books. Such as The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Alice Miller has also explored the toll on the body of misalignment from truth, especially in her book The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting. However I am not aware that either of them connected the toxicity of our culture to that of being in ubiquitous Bully Stockholm Syndrome. And they didn’t explore language in the way I am here. At least in what I’ve read or heard by them, nor have I seen them having made that connection.
We have been indoctrinated with the delusion that our minds are powerfully able to create our good, even though we don’t really know how to tame our minds. And that lack of mind-skill has been augmented negatively by the aggressively promoted maliciously distractive practices of school and social media, whether intentionally developed or not. We have come to substitute bullying ourselves as a kind of coarse and ineffective way of abusing our minds to cudgel ourselves into shape! And yet for thousands of years yogis have recognised that the mind is so easily bamboozled by lies and other gibberish when it is untamed that it is a relatively easy ‘victim’ of bully language, especially in our days of ‘experts’ and the need for seemingly endless fear for some kind of safety net that an authority figure or science™ expert will heroically provide us.
Only when we transcend thought, can we begin to witness our conditioning and all of the old patterns we’re stuck in. In witnessing these patterns, by definition, they are no longer unconscious. Through a consistent meditation practice, the mind begins to clear, letting go of these once unconscious patterns that no longer serve us.
I’m not saying don’t use the mind. Absolutely not! The mind is completely essential if we’re to successfully navigate our lives in space and time. What I’m suggesting is rather than existing with the false notion that you are your mind, learn to meet yourself before the mind. Don’t exist as the mind; use the mind… for the mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master (‘The Mind – A Wonderful Servant But A Terrible Master’).
And the easiness of human (mind) bamboozlement is delightfully explored in Edward de Vere’s (aka Shakespeare’s) play Twelfth Night, where tricks are played on the minds of several of the characters, perhaps most powerfully with the gulling of Malvolio that is both extremely funny and creates extreme sympathy at the same time.
Have to part 3)
What a Pile of Wasted Energy
Our true nature is born into a body that knows it has been given both innate sovereignty and the power to express its agency. Indoctrination of the mind, including the splitting effects of trauma, at all levels suppresses or hides that. The separation of the ego-mind complex from our somatic sovereignty-awareness sets us up for one of those bizarre truth-traps whose truth keeps us stuck somewhat like the hamster spinning its wheel. We have adapted to being in a bully culture and we use that adaptation to keep us from claiming the responsibility for our sovereignty. One of the cleverest ways in which we do that is what I call the ‘have to’ pile.
Something somewhere inside us, beyond just our body that we disregard most of the time, knows the truth that we don’t have to do anything. And so when we encounter a something that ‘has to be done’ — such as join this, start that, leave that, buy that — we will most often simply half-heartedly agree to whatever thing it was being bullied simply to shut up our external or internal bully voices. And we add it to the ‘have to pile’ either half consciously aware that we have no real intention to do the thing, or in a less optimal manner, we keep ourselves in complete denial that our real intention is to not do it while pretending that the ‘have to’ nature of it will see it done magically sometime before death. In both cases we have created an energy drain to maintain. And one that we continue to grow with each ‘have to’ straw that we continuously pile on our psychological back while rarely removing anything from it.
As well as being an energy drain, this also takes us further from alignment with integrity because we are actively lying to ourselves about our intentions. Our body and spirit are not equipped to support an increasingly demanding set of lies, and the results of that are easily seen in the poor health statistics everywhere, and the endless studies linking that poor health to a lack of integrity brought on by stress — well, stress brought on by a lack of integrity. The have to pile is a huge stressor, in my opinion, that isn’t talked about because it is hidden within Bully Stockholm Syndrome.
You may find it an interesting exercise to write your ‘half-to’ pile out on a piece of paper or with a computer keyboard. And then look at it with a clear honest eye. Will anything on that pile be strong enough to engage your sovereign power to choose to do it? Would a multiple of lifetimes be enough to complete that list? This provides a wonderful opportunity to practice the fifth of the Yamas of yoga, aparigraha, the letting go of those things that do not serve you at this time. Often translated as non-attachment or perhaps non-coveting. Why continue to attach ourselves to a pile of have tos we don’t really want to do enough to actually choose to do them?
Have to part 4)
A Lie is a Lie and Doesn’t Just Lie Dormant in the Unconscious
We have through some weird social pressure decided that it is better to lie as a kind of politeness to the people around us rather than to be truthful. Well, all the lying in the previous three ‘have to’ failures doesn’t help that, of course. This last one I have come to find very funny because we lie to be polite. Or rather give an impression of politeness when, after meeting someone we haven’t seen for a while unexpectedly, for example, we say ‘We have to get together sometime.’ That is almost 100% of the time a lie, and an unnecessary one. Instead of lying, say something like ‘I enjoyed seeing you again. All the best.’ Or ’It was great to see you. Who knows when next we’ll get a chance to catch up?’ Or a dozen other ways of politely recognising the event without faking a desire to repeat it from a false sense of politeness when you don’t really want to repeat it. And if you choose to get together, be straight and set a time. ‘Wow. It was great to see you. I’d love to have lunch or supper. What about on [date].’ Do something concrete, without lying about it.
Now it would be wonderful if every delicate situation could be addressed without lying. It is possible that life is too complicated for that to be realistic. So, when a lie seems like the best option, do it in a way that does not make ourselves a victim. When we use a ‘have to’ as a polite lie, that action is in reality saying to the other that ‘I am too weak to avoid this, so I will say ‘have to’ in order to show the other person that I’m too victimised by another circumstance to do whatever it is that is not to be done here and now with you.’ Very likely all of us have ‘have to’ excused ourselves with some weird lie and in doing so we have literally and clearly displayed our lack of sovereignty, power and authenticity. We have made ourselves weak internally with the energy of lying and externally by not simply saying I choose x without lying about the choice. Energetically the other people will distrust us and intuit that we are weak, that we are not sovereign unto ourselves and that that weakness itself is untrustworthy.
In my almost twenty years of ‘no have to’ practice I have found that removing ‘have to’ from my vocabulary / language has reduced my lying to basically zero. As I was thinking about this, it came to me that with this change I have rarely found myself in circumstances where I have felt that lying was the optimal choice. Interesting. Has creating agency with my language created an alignment with life in such way that lying falls away?
When Yoshiko joined me in 2018 I shared the ‘have to’ argument with her. She thought, I was to learn much later, paraphrased ‘Oh yeah. Another talking head full of his own bull shit.’ She spent the next six months carefully listening to me in anticipation of my using ‘have to’. She was surprised that she didn’t hear me utter those words even once. She commented to people in front of me, four years later, that she had not heard me say ‘have to.’
In my personal experience this is perhaps one of the most powerful mindfulness and empowerment exercises you can do: it stops you from giving away your sovereignty and it stops creating the energy of isolation by perpetuating dishonesty inwardly and outwardly and it significantly reduces unnecessary leaching away of your energy. It aligns your mind body spirit with an absolute truth, a rare thing in this physical existence: you do not have do anything unless you have chosen to do it. There are exceptions that people cite to prove the rule: typically breathing and eating. Once in a while someone remembers dying. So far no one has said to me that peeing is necessary! And I just laugh at that because of those four, peeing is the most pressing. (And for the first time, sneezing came to mind! Now, that might be a real ‘have to’, even if suppressed.) Yogis have been known to train themselves to suspend breathing for extended periods, and their life spans too. Eating has well documented cases of people not eating for many years — and I’m not referring to the so-called ‘breatharians per se. And, of course, there are yogic practices that reduce or suspend the pressing need to pee. I’ve not heard what they do sneezing, though.
Have to part 5)
What to Say Instead of Giving Your Life Away
I choose to. I want to. I desire to. I don’t want to. I’m not interested … and the like. Each of these options reclaim our sovereignty. At the beginning this may seem selfish, to actually claim what you are born into life to do, which is to live your life. And so by removing ‘have to’ you will begin to see where you have been giving your life away, which is in reality the truest form of selfishness possible. And where you are giving away your sovereignty will become very evident because it will be comprised of the resistance you experience when you claim your sovereignty, with choosing to act or choosing to decline an action. Each time you see yourself reaching for ‘have to’ as an excuse or as a motivator you will know that that action is grounded in giving away your power. And with that awareness you have the opportunity to stop it and opt to embody your life as the powerful human that you are.
Don’t You Should On Me! Nor On Me, Myself And I.
Very likely people reading this who have been on a spiritual journey to recover their Self in some way will be familiar with the trials and tribulations of ‘shoulding’ themselves and others to death. This may be a review for some, although I’ll do my best to add my own expansion of the ‘should shit shill spell show’.
On the surface it has a very similar function as ‘have to’ in that its spell creates disempowerment, separation, and dis-integrity with self and others. The difference, and I think it is a significant and more pernicious one than the overt bully nature of ‘have to’ with its mostly unconscious threat of violence, is that ’should’ is bully language that has weaponised guilt. It is a kind of pervasive stench comprised of an ostensible ethical integrity being used to ‘force’ a behaviour with or through initiating or expanding feelings of guilt.
The external ‘should’ bully is coming almost purely from the position of moral superiority. This othering, as Maajid Nawaz described it in the context of war and peace, has become almost as invisible as the ‘have to’ threatening bully-spell, but not quite. That pinch of guilt has been felt by the self-help gurus who have pretty well exposed it as unhealthy to anyone beginning inner work.
I would like to elaborate on that because I have expanded my understanding of the pernicious nature of ‘should’ beyond what my early exploration of it revealed in association with guilt as an almost knee-jerk ‘New Agism bad’ kind of argument. I’m not sure that all guilt is all bad when it is seen as a clear expression of an important complex-aspect of our Selves that is forcefully asking us to look at something that has made us uncomfortable. I was wrong! I did something badly. I made an important error of judgment! And the like. So, to feel guilt is a feedback mechanism that creates within ourselves the opportunity to see something we may not have seen or that we have been blinding ourselves to.
That discomfort is our opportunity to look at it and expand our experience-based wisdom. However, instead of turning towards the discomfort, we humans have collectively practiced the infatuating embrace of distraction. That often or even usually becomes some kind of addictive behaviour that stops our emotional and spiritual growth and becomes malignant in some way either overtly or, more often, covertly. And even that malignancy is asking to be seen as a doorway towards the truth of our discomfort. And it is when the distraction no longer works at all and the will to live exceeds the desire to be distracted to death, that groups like AA help people pick up the pieces of their unseen and unlived lives. And AA and other therapies understand that seeing what is true is the beginning of healing. Healing is the return to a fully embodied integrity, which does not happen until the truth is seen and spoken!
Back to the ’shoulding’. ’Shoulding’ gives us an opportunity to be an unproductive guilt collector, whether that source is coming from others or coming from ourselves. And with some kind of puerile hope and/or allopathic medicine, or shopping, sex, illicit or licit drugs and the like we do our best to calm the guilt and its associated anxiety enough to live productive lives without really looking at it or the source of it.
The most harmful spell of ‘shoulding’ comes when we zap ourselves with it because it is another of those delectably lazy-person’s truth-traps. And Jung and others have argued that laziness to the point of torpidity is the humans’ strongest and most widespread characteristic. What’s the truth-trap? We have been given the spell-making tool that allows us to avoid uncomfortable things at the tiny cost of a twinge of guilt. ‘I should go and see my mother in the hospital.’ Zapped with guilt we find ways to not go because we have paid the guilt price that allows us to avoid the conflict or despair or frustration or anger or whatever has displaced us from wanting to see our mother to not-wanting to see her. When the not-wanting is strong enough that dose of guilt may be the preferred action instead of the visit. Or, if we do visit, the guilt is the drug that distracts us from seeing the why we feel what we feel.
And thus ‘should’ keeps us blind to our real experiences of life while filling us with guilt. Each time we use ‘should’ we have a clue that we are hiding something about ourselves, about our lives and/or about the other people on whom we are casting the should spell or from whom we get should spelled.
Stop using should. There is no requirement under any circumstances to use it. I’ve not used it for almost twenty years and there is no need. At the beginning it will call at you often. We are a bully culture steeped in guilt for many generations. In time I felt an easing in my heart and found the courage to really live life.
What to use instead? At the beginning this can be a challenge, and even now I find that removing should may demand some creativity. Not from my own writing or speaking anymore! I find that ‘should’ jumps out at me in the words of others and so in the last couple years I have been editing out ‘should’ from their writings. Here are three examples from the Buddhist Ten Oxherding Pictures, parts of which I have included later in this essay.
The boy is not to separate himself with his whip and tether, Lest the animal should wander away into a world of defilements;
becomes
The boy is not to separate himself with his whip and tether, Lest the animal wanders away into a world of defilements;
And:
“There seems to be a lot of thank you and I am much obliged to you and you shouldn't do that for my sake on every occasion.”
becomes
“There seems to be a lot of thank you and I am much obliged to you and you are not to do that for my sake on every occasion.”
And lastly:
“But that does not mean that you should join the half-wits always hanging around the railway station.”
becomes
“But that does not mean that you are to join the half-wits always hanging around the railway station.”
Do you see and/or feel the energetic difference between the before and after?
‘Should’ and ‘have to’ are simple spells of personal and extra-personal disempowerment and separation that with practice are relatively easily stopped and create huge returns of energy, agency, peace and intimacy with ourselves and others. And when we do hear it call, that is an ‘aha’ moment, a chance to see the truth of who we are, warts and all. From that place true-seeing, integrity, is possible and with that arises the healing from the rifts between and within mind, body, spirit and action and each other.
Lesser Spells
On the Trail of the Try on Trial
The English word ‘try’ has several definitions. One of them is to run some kind of test. Another is to take someone to court. And yet another one, the interesting one for this effort, is the one about ’trying your best’. In the woke world that concept has become especially meaningless as everyone finishes first and last together, regardless of effort or even starting. Woke is try on steroids.
Do not use ‘try’ as an attempt to begin, do or finish something. The self-so, built-in meaning of try is failure because the effort is focused on the trying more than on the completing. For example, if I ask you to try to pick up the pen from the table, it literally has no meaning because you either pick up the pen. Or not. Try may exist in some kind of word ghost-land, one of the hungry ghosts, that causes serious grief in the expressing of language and, more importantly, in the emotional and psychological commitment that gives language its power.
And because of that we love to use try as an excuse not to put our heart into something or committing to something. How do these sound: ‘We’ll try to get there on time’ or ‘We’ll get there on time.’ The latter has commitment and intention, the former waffling and the wiggle room to slack off and fail. Do the best you can. Or: try the best you can. The latter is again flaccid.
What I discovered when I removed ‘try’ from my vocabulary was that I became much more careful about making commitments. Before that change I could roll a try off my tongue for anything. And the commitment wasn’t there because all I had to do was ‘try’ and that would be good enough. Now I am more careful with taking on tasks and I see that for me the psychological and emotional benefits of commitment have changed my ability to complete the challenges of life that genuinely belong to me, and by clarifying my ability to see when something does not belong to me.
We are finite creatures in an infinite world. It is important to have the tools of vision that enables us to discern what is ours in this world to complete, and what is not. Removing ‘try,’ oddly enough, quietly and yet firmly assists with that, and so, although it is only comprised of three tiny letters it is not trivial.
When the Need Hits the Road Gimme All Your Lovin’
The need to know. The need to love and be loved. The need for food, water, shelter. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Good enough parenting. The need to be touched. The need to grow up or throw up. The need to leave. The need to pee. The need to return. The need to shit and for our remains to decompose back into the soil.
‘Need’ is funny word, a bit slippery. At its core it is grounded in the feeling of lack, of scarcity, even the threat of deprivation. It being connected to scarcity puts it as one the hidden assumptions that direct the religion of economics, which is ostensibly a method to analyse how societies manage scarce resources / needs. The religious nature of economics comes from economists’ hubristic belief that they have the wisdom to prescribe economic solutions despite more than two hundred years of being wrong. In my opinion capitalism likely works despite economics and economists, certainly not because of them. It seems to me that, following from my last essay,
the sense of scarcity comes from the (false) subject-object split of classical philosophy that Robert Pirsig deconstructed so well in his books, Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values and Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals. With the objective world having become the totality of the perceivable, under classic philosophy, the objective world is automatically bound by the limits of that (arbitrary) definition. Pirsig argued very clearly and persuasively that the subject / object philosophical split under ‘reality’ was arbitrary and that it wasn’t necessarily the ‘correct’ one, meaning it wasn’t consistent with experience. Pirsig argued for an alternative philosophical world-view that put the subjective and objective perceptions as a subset of the unknowable reality he called ‘quality’.
How is that related to ‘need’? ‘Need’ is mostly a false perception of reality. For example, we are alive in the time of a global genocidal ‘health’ program which is being walked lockstep with the climate fear-mongering. The reality is that climate change fear-mongerers haven’t even been on the same planet of correctness with their sixty plus years of hot/cold/water predictions. And yet the ideology of need, resting as it is on their perceived conception of the scarcity of the earth’s resources and resilience, is alive and well within the oligarch. As a consequence they have determined that they need to reduce the population, end farming and lock everyone into fifteen minute cities to save the world from a scarcity need that doesn’t actually exist as advertised. Oil might be an issue of course, and will provide challenges that human ingenuity will likely find interesting solutions for. And despite the brouhaha, oil is not a need as we have consumed it. It has been transformative and challenging and distracting and yet hasn’t existed for even a smidgen of time in human existence.
There are the young, infants and children, who clearly need to be attended to well up to a certain age. And the agéd will in time ask of us to meet their needs. And we may become one of those too, in our movement through life. Those are pretty unequivocal.
And yet, what about the adults? What else is a genuine need? Peeing seems to be one. And perhaps breath, food and water although yogis bring that into question as an absolute. And we see that this has become much more nuanced. In most cases we artificially jack up something we want as if it is a need to give it added importance in our hierarchy of wants. If I need it then I’m more likely to get it? Right? And that extra-push of energetic wanting quickly slips into scarcity and having to have it. Paraphrased, Gautama directed his monks to give relief from those physically suffering, be they old or sick: relieve their needs. And for the rest, the individuals within the sangha, they were expected to provide what ever is required / needed for themselves and the group. So… Buddhist practice of fulfilling needs is to relax and the universe will provide and so their needs do not come from the energy of scarcity. Rather from the energy of being open enough to actually receive abundance.
And scarcity was a designed tactic of the dissemination of the convid injection programme in the early days. Do you remember how the media pumped the scarcity of injections early in the roll out? The psychologists of effective marketing manipulation know full well that creating the impression of scarcity increases demand for that much needed precious life-saving thing. Need feeds the feeling of scarcity, and scarcity the feeling of need and the spiral very effectively destabilises the mind.
I suggest that we stop using ‘need’ completely. It fosters thoughts and feelings of scarcity and that creates stress and that sufficent stress deranges our ability to think and see properly. Removing ‘need’ from our vocabulary easily reduces stress from our stressful lives.
I recognise that for some or many of you reading this that may seem like an impossibility attached to a triviality. I assure you it is very possible and that it is not trivial. I have felt much lighter and more alive for the practice. I have dropped need out of my vocabulary even when I am jiggling and dancing around when I’ve held my pee too long. And now it has become, in a very strange way, a form of choice that came into existence when I did. Pee is no longer a ’need’ in conventional terms, it is simply a part of what is the choice of being alive in this moment. What is more properly defined by Gautama Buddha as karma as distinct from how most Buddhist practices or Hindus define or act on karma as an extension of a sequence of undesired physical lives, where each is affected by and affects the quality of the one to the next until reincarnation stops. Gautama rejected that conception of karma. He linked karma to living in the moment of what he called ‘conditioned arising’ or ‘dependent co-arising’. See ‘Buddha for Buddhism 7: Karma’ by Michael Stone.
And breath? Yes, breath is what keeps me alive at this time in my existence. And yet it is slowing and easing and, with those changes, a more stable calmness has arisen. Breath has become, at a fundamental level, an awareness that life is a choice within the infinitude of conditioned arising, of the interconnectedness, the interdependency of all things. ‘The opportunity is choice’ to misquote the Architect in the Matrix.
Thank You? Why? You Are No More Deserving Than Me! Right?
A tricky one-two. The ever popular ’thank you’ as good mantra is somehow married to the ostensible greatness of deservedness. I’ve stuck these two together because they have a subtle energetic connection. As noted above, deservedness is perhaps the source of bullying and guilting in its various guises. And that source arises from states of deservedness versus undeservedness.
To begin with I start my day, each morning, with an extended gratitude ritual. So I’m not an anti-thanks conspiracy theorist, although I have recently stopped using the words ‘thank you.’ And I’m moving away from using even the word ‘gratitude.’ As for ‘deserving’ it is a word I have removed from my vocabulary. So what is the connection and why are they here?
In
I went into detail about the energetic ‘problem’ I see with the words ‘deserve’ or ‘deserving.’ They are very popular in our culture especially as a tool of advertising propaganda. Everyone wants to be one of the deserving and most every product under the sun has likely been sold to us as something we deserve to greater or lesser extents. And why is this such a strong advertising pitch that has lasted for millenia? Because historically the undeserving are treated abominably and more often than not are killed in variety of moralistically rationalised ways. I have extirpated ‘deserving for the simple reason that the only way the deserving exist in our world is to have an undeserving. I have chosen to reduce the energy we put into creating groups of people who deserve anything because that action by energetic necessity creates the undeserving who are being abused and killed even now. Hamas has labelled all infidels as undeserving of life. And many Jews think the same of Palestinians. For example: a Jewish friend asked a friend who is a Rabbi who lives in Israel what he thought about what was happening in Palestine. The Rabbi answered ‘Palestine? Why are you asking about that? They are only animals.’ My friend was horrified and feels incredibly shamed that he was born Jewish. A clear and succinct definition and consequence of, in this case, Jewish deservedness creating Palestinian undeservedness. And of course, my earlier reference to Hamas seeing everyone who does’t worship Allah as deserving death as an undeserving.
And I had come to that realisation long before the convid. And so with the convid it was a fascinating process for me to watch my fellow and sister citizens basically go crazy and easily assign me and my wonderful partner into the undeserving class. It was actually, in the end, frightening, with Trudeau initiating friendly concentration camps and the increasing vigour of the convid police harassing and even arresting maskless people. I knew which class we’d been assigned to and that that was dangerous. We left Canada shortly before the truckers stopped what looked to be getting close to the tipping into mass for-your-own-good corralling like they did in Australia. And then who knows what might have happened? The government did shut down protestors’ bank accounts and stole the money that had been raised for them.
What about thank you? Another funny word that, as I said, has an odd connection energetically to ‘deserving’. And if you guessed ‘the thankless’ I would laugh because that is likely true. It is not what I’m pursuing though. David Graeber in Debt: The First 5,000 Years does a great job of describing an anthropologist’s experience at the turn of the last century in an Inuit camp. The hunters had been unsuccessful in their hunts and the people were hungry. Eventually a seal was killed and the flesh distributed to every person in the camp. The anthropologist expressed gratitude to the hunter for sharing the food. The hunter became angry and scolded the visitor for having thanked him. ‘I am no better than you and you no better than me. We are human and to thank me is to create a barrier of difference between us.’ (Paraphrased from memory.)
This had an interesting echo a few years later from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the head of the multi-national Art of Living Foundation. In a book of his published sangha talks I heard someone read out loud Shankar’s reply to a question on the importance of ’Thank you.’ Again, a paraphrase as I no longer have the book. ‘Yes, to be thankful is important, to appreciate that which is good. However it is important to not thank too much, because that builds a barrier of more than and less than between the person doing the thanking and the person being thanked. It creates inequality. So be careful and very light with your thanks.’
Deservedness and excess gratitude both create separation. And so I thank with a light heart and a sense of fun each morning. I no longer say ‘thank you’ out loud. And as the days progress, I find myself thanking less and less.
And by synchronicity, a few weeks ago, I listened to an audio presentation of The Ten Ox Herding Pictures of Zen Buddhism. And I heard a commentary that cautioned that the Buddhists who were thankful had failed to ‘return home to the parents of their parents’, ie, were not centred into Buddhas and were still practicing the teachings as guests in the house of Buddha. They were, in other words, still trying to be Buddhists when to be one is beyond the spell of words.
7:59 It is best to not loiter around any place where the Buddha is or where there is Satori these days. There seems to be a lot of thank you and I am much obliged to you and please don’t do that for my sake on every occasion. There is nothing wrong in all this. There is a lot of religious feeling here but so long as there is any feeling of gratitude left it is not genuine. People who say such things have not yet returned to their original home, they are still [only] guests in the house of Buddha. That is why they go around being so polite.
There was once a devout follower named Sha Mat-Su who one day was taking an afternoon nap in front of the image of the Buddha. One of his companions came upon him and scolded him. ‘Hey Sha Mat-Su, you fool you're displaying improper behaviour in front of the Buddha! No one lies down and takes a nap in front of the Buddha.’ At this Sha Mat-Su drowsily propped himself up and said ‘It's just because this is right in front of our parent that I was taking my nap here. You think that you mustn't take a nap in front of our parent? But that shows you are only a stepchild of the Buddha.’
So long as you are still going around saying thank you and excuse me you still have not gone home to your mother and father to your parents. You were just visiting as a guest.
The preface says not to remain in any place where the border is. Not to stay in any place so restricted and confined. If so, does that mean we are to stay in some place where the Buddha is not? Where there is no truth?
Not at all. The preface continues. You do not linger where the Buddha is. You dash right past where the Buddha is not. Where there is no Buddha run smartly past without a backward glance. Do not associate with the thank you thank you group. But that does not mean that you are to join the half-wits always hanging around the railway station.
Making a display of being considerate towards your parents is bad. But being inconsiderate towards your parents is even worse.
Things that smell of Buddhism are disagreeable. But things that have absolutely no whiff of Buddhism are even worse.
What, then, is one to do? Be complete. Be round. Not thinking is best (‘Ten Ox Herding Pictures (Picture Eight - Forget Both Self and Ox) - Zen Buddhism’, my emphasis and slight edit).
Back to The Gift of Gratitude
I’ve included Margaret Visser’s book on gratitude above. I read most of it many years ago, although I found my self distracted away from it before finishing it, despite Visser being a remarkably good writer who I have previously enjoyed. And I don’t remember too many details, except that it is extremely difficult to teach children before a certain age the importance of gratitude. She suggests that young children have no ability to understand the concept of gratitude. In contrast we adults are exhorted to return to childlike purity and that gratitude is critically important! Hmmmm. Is the teaching of gratitude an early lesson that, to use the Buddhist idea expressed in The Ox Herding Pictures, that which helps the parent remove the child from the home of his parents’ parents and assists the child to embrace scarcity to create the need for ‘thank you’?
What is with all that, I wonder? Who’s right? Does a ‘right’ even exist? And where my thoughts have turned to is that the expression of gratitude is, as the Inuit hunter and Shankar said, a form of creating inequality between people. What does it mean to thank god, then? The reinforcement of our inequality, of our ‘debased’ human state relative to god’s?
This brings to me this question: is gratitude important as an equaliser with people who have previously inflated themselves? To say, with sincerity, thank you and to be genuinely grateful is to help remove narcissistic inflation by lowering our own ego-delusions with recognising that there is something in life that is greater than us? This is a key part of the twelve step programs. And within the progressive liberal humanists who put themselves into our faces, one of the common refrains that comes from the traditional conservatives as argument against them is to suggest to the deluded to be grateful for what is, for what has given them the freedom to be resentful and to use it to tear down society. Is not that the same idea, that the ego of the humanists is ungrounded and inflated enough for them to know what everyone on the planet ‘has to do’ to save it or the group they have elevated themselves above?
So ‘thank you’ and ‘gratitude’ are likely spiritual homeopathic treatments that help the inflated ego-maniacs to come back to earth, back to being a human and not just a yelling ideologue or the self-destructive addict in denial, deluded by their own inflation. And like any medicine, at some point it comes time to set it aside and to know the power of being healthy in this moment, this moment of dependent co-arising, of karma without the creation of a deserving that we are to be grateful for.
Were You Thinking That I would Never Get to Never? Here It Is: To Ensure You Will Do Something, Swear That You Will Never Do It
And for a bit of fun. I noticed as my life moved into my thirties and forties, that just about every single ‘I never would do’ thing became something that I did in fact do. And often that do I’d never do turned out to be a great thing, even if at the time it was embarrassing or painful. I loved the VW Jetta I bought because by ‘chance’ in a strange time in my life, it was the only car under $10000 on the lot. I loved that car after swearing I would never buy a VW because they were dishonest with the rusting gas tanks twenty years earlier. I swore I wouldn’t live in a small town again and here I am living in a tiny village in Mexico. I swore I wouldn’t be like my father, and my fat cheeks turned red the day I realised that I had become almost exactly like him. Those are three standouts of many that were personal to me. And I saw many more happen to my ex and to the people around me. (Phew! A big sigh because I’d not ever thought that I would never be like my mother!)
So, use ‘never’ with caution. I’ve concluded that God, or whatever the creative energy of life is, has a wicked sense humour and takes particular delight with anyone so bold as to dare that energy with a futile ‘never.’ I hear a kind of roaring laughter from the heavens, saying, ‘I see you, I see you, you bold neverer, you! Just you wait. When you least expect it - ‘pow, right in the kisser.’ So funny.
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Two Cautionary Tales: Cast Not Your Pearls Before Swine Lest they Turn and Rend You
Earlier this year my friend turned and rended me because of my cast pearls. Why?
Early last year, shortly after we met, I asked him if it would be okay if I suggested some changes in his language that, in my experience, I’ve found to be very powerful. Do not be a progressive liberal humanist woke language activist and blast them with how they have to stop using have to! Ask, in your own words, the have to addicts if you can share something with them about the spell magic power of words and how certain ones have the power to keep us small. Do not proceed without permission. Although even doing that is not a guarantee of not being rended.
A problem, of which this is an example, is that the permission given comes from a place without the capacity to understand what is being offered and my failure to see/hear that the recipient lacks that capacity. We are all created equal, and yet none of us are the same.
My friend has been on a spiritual path for many years, far longer than me. And he has spent many months in ashrams in India and other asian ‘spiritual’ countries, unlike me. He claimed to be open to my language discourse and so I shared this ‘have to lecture’, as others have called it, with him. At the time I could tell it hadn’t landed well, despite his fifteen or so years of spiritual exercise and his claim to have understood what I had cast before him. I could tell, from his unconscious push back and rationalisations, that he was not actually in a place to have received those pearls. I had mistaken his extensive yogic practices as having created enough wisdom to understand my pearls. It is possible that, because of all his spiritual effort, that he felt that he should be in place to be able to ‘properly’ understand it and so was blind to his state of being.
So, about a year later, with politeness yet clearly expressed deep frustration and anger, he lashed out in an extensive direct message that I had no right to tell him how to speak. That he hadn’t asked for my advice about that. And hadn’t asked to be reminded of when he spoke the ‘bad’ words. I replied that I have no problem stopping myself from commenting when he had unconsciously used the smallifying words. And I reminded him that in fact before I told him about these words that I had asked his permission. I do not remember the last time I pounced on anyone with the ‘have to lecture’ without first having asked for permission.
After talking with my friend a few days later about his reaction, I realised with more confidence that my original perception of his rejection of the concept was correct: the nature of it hadn’t landed and became a thorn and burden instead of a path towards freedom and personal empowerment. He had taken my arguments and added them to his ‘should’ and ‘have to’ piles. It took a year for the weight and discomfort of them to become so intolerable that he was willing to end our friendship to remove them. He thought that his anger would turn me away. It did not. Although I honoured the discomfort he felt and no longer overtly helped him to see how he was giving away his life.
Second one. With synchronicity and intuitive muscle testing I found myself accepting an invitation to an alternative medical freedom group. I didn’t know anyone in it, and the invitation came via an interaction of comments in a thread. There were about seven or eight people in total. I noticed the frequent use of ‘have to’ and asked if I could tell them why using that is going to hurt their objective of helping people wake up to a particular aspect of the convid. I was given the go ahead. And generally it was well received by the people and, from the questions they had, I could see that it had landed with them well. Except for one person.
The one argued that all he heard from my talk was how I was telling him how he should talk without using the word should! I kind of laughed inside at that response. It was the first time I’d heard that particular critique. I told him I wasn’t, although I din’t think of why it was I wasn’t until after the meeting. As I was walking towards home I realised that he was in fact projecting onto me his own shoulding language habit. The group has an activist element to it. They go out and tell people, gently, about one of the important scams of the convid, likely one of the most difficult ones to share. My feeling is that he is at heart an ideological activist and took my discourse as telling him what he should do. That is what he said! Yet, I wasn’t telling him or anyone there what to do: I shared my understanding of how we can more powerfully communicate by not bullying or guilting people. Very much like my friend, although in a humorous to me way, he also piled onto himself my idea as a should. And with hearing me ‘shoulding’ him, he did exactly what I argued the words ‘have to’ and ‘should’ do: that is to create push back, resistance and schism. All of which happened between the two of us. Amazing. Learning doesn’t stop!
Epilogue: What Is The Difference Between Walking And ‘Wording’? Nothing?
I’ve included, below, a fun and perhaps funny, play on words. The gambol came when, by synchronicity as I was writing this, a verse I read by the much esteemed early Buddhist Nagarjuna (b 150— d c. 250CE) who was pivotal in the foundation of Mahayana Buddhism. His writing is fun and inspirational. So, his words on the left, my edit on the right. Enjoy. (Maybe.)
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Song of the essay: Feist — 1234.
I appreciate that you shared with me today your precious time. I am honoured.
All the best with what is changing. Everything changes! With peace, respect, love and exuberant joy.
🙏❤️🧘♂️☯️🧘♂️❤️🙏
What a beautiful essay. So much awareness and wisdom weaved with intentional experience, producing a mix of authority and lightness. I appreciate it, and will revisit. (I was reminded of Gurdjeff's practice of 'remembering' oneself, as you go through the day. It has an effect of not just becoming aware of how often we 'forget' ourself, but by recognizing in the in-and-out quality of 'self' how a deeper presence is always present and does not require 'self' at all. A hint, I think.
Maybe "We are finite creatures in an infinite world." is a a deep assumption? Maybe we are infinite creatures who sometimes experience the world as finite. Sometimes 'I' show up as a body, sometimes by body shows up in the larger space of me.
A conscious, 'thank you' for the reflection.
My sister told me a story years back. She told gramp she "has to" do something. In his playful, joking way, he said no, you "get to" do it.
I think "get to" fits in well with your deserving list. If it is said about something a person does not want to do, its almost a bullying positive affirmation, akin to you should be grateful you get to do this! Many kids/people arent so blessed as you!
Another word "need to" hmmmmm. Lol
Maybe it depends on the context. Some people use words passive-aggressively to manipulate others. You "need to" do this.
I'm rather attached to the word thank you. I use it mostly as an expression of gratefulness, valuing people who I admire and love.
*thank you*!! 🙏🤣