A Midwest Journal

Has to do with wanting to be slaves – which comes from sitting at “have” instead of “do” or “be”.

Now this is really metaphysical ethereal stuff, so if you are here for more practical stuff, like how to raise grass fed beef cattle, there’s lots of links to the right to follow.

For the rest of us, this comes from a Lester Levenson recording I was listening to, called “The Steps to Being What You Are”, which is from his Ultimate Goal Volume II CD’s, available at Larry Crane’s releasetechnique.com store. (Follow this link and then go to SHOP, then AUDIO AND VIDEO, then LESTER, and you’re there. Volume I is also great listening, but you alone can decide how much enlightenment you want…)

Lester describes on that tape that 95% of humanity is sitting on the Be-Do-Have scale at Have. Meaning they are just there to receive stuff given to them. They are on a constant inflow, like bumps on a log out in the weather – just taking what comes.

People who are in action, whether it’s in the government, business, or similar scams like Internet Coaching, are in Do. They are always out there doing things. And so they are the  ones likely to accomplish any “scamming” that goes on.

Now the scam, as I’ve defined it for years, is nothing but “I didn’t get what I expected.”  And the reason that this occurs is that people at Have don’t really put a lot out. Self help in general only works to the degree you really put something into it. Healing, in particular, only works with both practitioner and patient are both actively working at having the healing occur. (Like placebo studies.)

So not only are people at Have easily scammed, they are often scammers themselves.

Of that 5 percent of people who are in Do, about 5% or less of those are actually at Be – and so can simply get things without virtually no effort at all.

And this is the core of Levenson’s teachings. Why Larry Crane tells people to sit on their BUTT and get everything they want. It’s just too simple.

Until you do it, you’ll think it’s just hocus-pocus nonsense. And until you do use his techniques, it will be. Sitting and listening to tapes, or CD’s, or DVD’s won’t get you anywhere. Like going to a “feel good” movie. Sure, it makes you happy temporarily, but the effect fades after 3 days or so. And if you are addicted to others making you feel good, then you’ll be off to the movies again, or renting a video to watch at home.

This is of course, the description of people who “work” for someone else for a living. Too often, they spend their lives working and coming home to watch TV. Weekends are spent either working (on overtime, where Uncle Sam takes most of that extra pay) or taking their boat to the lake or hunting, or some other high-adrenaline activity. Mostly passive, mostly based on feelings.

Traps, all of them.

Who gets taxed the most? People in the middle who “work” for a living and haven’t studied the tax codes to see that Uncle Sam actually wants you to be an independent contractor (as these pay the least taxes) and reinvest all your income so that you have nothing to show for your work. (Self-employment FICA starts at $400 and has no exemptions. Worse than Income tax… But government is one big scam, isn’t it?)

When they raise taxes on the “rich”, they are actually only catching a few stupid ones – who are at Have on the scale. The smart ones don’t work for anyone, everything is covered for them by some trust or corporate entity. They may not even own the clothes on their back. All on expense accounts, not taxable as income.

Sure, not paying your taxes is as much a scam as paying them and seeing it all wasted on silly items like telling manufacturers they can only put this much salt or sugar in their food. (Ketchup has to have sugar in it by law – fascinating these scams, aren’t they?)

And while marketing has to involve people at Have to get them to Buy (a Do), the point which Jack Canfield, Napoleon Hill, and so many others tell you is to get into action. Decide goals, plan them out, work that plan, revise it as needed. While I rail against Internet Marketers scamming people – you can see that (depending on the intention) it’s mostly for their own good.

Levenson says that when you go on up into Be as a regular operation, you’ll still be doing – but what you should be doing will come to you as an inspiration. It will be intuitive. And effortless results will abound.

So why sit around waiting to “attract” something into your life?  Get out there and go for it. Or better yet, simply release the reasons you don’t have it and Be your Self.

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That inspirational tape again: “The Steps to Being What You Are”, from Larry Crane’s ReleaseTechnique.com – Follow this link and then go to SHOP, then AUDIO AND VIDEO, then LESTER, and you’re there. You want the Ultimate Goal Volume II CD.

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Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”

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“…Of course it took years to discover that I was just a homespun mystic from Missouri, just trying to make sense of the world around me.”

I’ve traveled a great deal of this country and it’s neighbors, talked with and worked beside to a great deal of people from all over this planet. And all this has taught me is that to be your self is the highest attainment possible – at least in this realm.

Raised on a farm, I’ve seen and taken a very pragmatic and practical approach to life, living, and survival. While I initially studied to become an engineer (as farmers and artists were usually “broke”), I quickly learned that our school systems were themselves bankrupt of knowledge. While they pretended to control vast amounts of learning and provided research facilities, they were mostly telling you how to think, if not exactly what.

So, for many years (a few decades) I eschewed formal training in deference to informal education – this is the “school of hard knocks”, a rather hard-scrabble educational process. You learn, in the oldest philosophical traditions, by simply looking, listening, and deciding for yourself.

Philosophy, in its roots (which give us truncated meaning, actually) means love+truth – and if you then take the Huna principle, “Effectiveness is the measure of truth”, you have philosophy meaning “Appreciation of things that work.” Very engineering-oriented. But a statement like that also has use on a farm or in a city-based life.

So my very practical/pragmatic view of philosophy extends to real workability, not just metaphysical, mystic, occult-type stuff.

Speaking of which, when you check out mysticism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysticism) you’ll see that work in metaphysics isn’t that far from it, particularly when you state the goal is some version of self-actualization like “enlightenment” or the various descriptions of that linked article. Essentially, you are talking about a higher or greater spiritual state or beingness.

Taking the derivation of mystic further shows that in its base meaning, it encompasses both being “an initiate” (or student) and also a teacher – one who instructs. Of course that fits just fine, since every teacher is a student and every student a teacher. (And I’ve stumped my teachers more often than not, from their own texts and syllabus, by giving them a new point of view for the same data – a new combination they hadn’t heard before.)

While only a metaphor, an argument can be made that we are here to learn and attain understanding, and to teach what we understand.

My studies in the mystic are simply to resolve questions about how things work. To this end, I committed myself to a multi-year study of classic self-help bestseller authors to derive, if possible, a common and underlying system of self-help and personal development. This was successful and wound up with “Go Thunk Yourself!” A follow-up study involved analysis of analysis to see what actually worked in this area, and the thesis for this became “Go Thunk Yourself, Again!” As these gave a logical study sequence, they were combined into a prescriptive study system in “Go Thunk Yourself, S’more!” and I ended those studies for a time while continuing other research.

But by the 10th anniversary of these studies, I had found what I considered to be the “bottom line” of these studies – the additional authors and their principles which explained all I had encountered after that point, and which also showed the gaps in any school of thought or modern “guru” which came along. I had reached the end of my research, since I had essentially found the “universal solvent” and needed no studies.

So this was compiled into a book (from my various blog entries) and entitled “Go Thunk Yourself, Revisited.”  As well, it was later updated with additional essays and published as “Freedom Is – (period.)”

My job, then – in this area at least – is done. My current “Farewell Book Tour” is the only promotion I am working on, although it has me more than busy scoping out and creating the content to explain this series to the unknowing world.

I don’t consider that I know best, am any guru, or even a teacher. In fact, I tell you in these books that your own “path” (if you decide you need one) is and can only be decided upon by yourself. Consequently, what I have covered is only what I’ve found to work for me, personally. Your mileage may vary – there are no “typical results.”

I also consider that all the freedom, peace, and happiness you could ever seek are already present in you. All you have to do is to figure out how to let them out. While I tell you my own path in my books, I don’t expect you to find that these work for you completely.

And that is how it has always been, and what has given us such diversity in these humankind cultures of ours.

I then wish you the greatest possible joy, peace, and freedom in your own quest.

“May your road rise up to meet you” and, “may the times you live in be interesting ones.”

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Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”

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This  may be best discussed as a complete theoretical concept – figuring that the people who read this will find it intuitively, all buried in some stretched mathematics. They’ll skip down to the best part – and others who aren’t ready won’t see it at all, but just think I’m over the edge… Which I am, after all.

And this essay is also kept overlong on purpose – just to show the point that most people won’t actually use the data. The vast bulk of Internet users live on instant gratification and won’t bother. Those who are willing to suspend disbelief and do the hard work of research to follow their heart – those are the ones who have that very tiny chance of making it.

It’s not any government who is going to help you find your freedom. Nor any particular belief-system. Just you…

Natural Distribution, the Bell Curve, and Life

This is a natural distribution which you see in nearly everything around you. It tends to pull order from chaos if you can line up the data with the right comparative. (Told you this would get thick real quick…)

Now, any of these distributions has the 20/80 Pareto Principle in it, which then breaks down again around 2-4% on each extreme edge (20% of 20%).

The problem with philosophy and enlightenment is actually their continually reducing results, as these 2% limits continue to interact all the way along. These chain-react all the way up the line. Naturally.

Consider this natural distribution as showing how each level toward attainment works – only a very small handful in every “level” will actually achieve what they are seeking.

Levels of Enlightenment based on natural distribution

What is easily observable is that only a handful of people actually are successful in life. Earl Nightingale laid this out in his Strangest Secret – only 5% in that study were actually able to make a success out of life. Everyone else wound up either just “scratching by” or on the Welfare dole. Of course, these statistics were out of the 1050′s, but these have been examined later and found to be the same percentages.

Between 2-5% actually make a successful life.  (.02 chance)

Now, taking this on up, you’ll then see that the really, extremely and outrageously successful people are just 2% (or so ) of those. The very rich are just about 1 in 10,000 – or close to 2% of 2%. (.0004 chance)

On up from that are the very, very successful, or the uber-rich. These are about 1 in 100,000 or so.  (.000008 chance)

And if you want to wind up on the richest person on the planet list, you are going to have to apply another 2% to that – about 1 in 10 million. (Giving you a .00000016 chance.)

This is what drives scams along. I was just talking with a former scam-coach (he found out he was working for scammers after he had been there for awhile and discovered their actual statistics.) He pointed out their business model actually consisted of finding and selling dupes a bill of goods which had them build their own ecommerce site. Only about 2-3% of these finished building their site. Another 2-3% of those actually made their original investment back. And out of that tiny amount, only about 2-3$ of those then made a real “killing” from whatever they chose. This last bunch are then interviewed in the infomercials (long with scantily-dressed, buxom “hostesses”.

This is also then the same control and approval methods which various companies use to get you buying their products and continuing to support their services. This is the phenomenon which makes “consumers” – which are literally “people who use it up” and customers, which are “creatures of habit”.  (But that is all covered in my lesson series on how to scam proof your life.)

The deal is that they hype these “actual examples” to get you sold on the idea that you could do it. However, the FTC had to crack down on these, which would then tell you that the average results are in fact that you just lose money with these deals. Some to the tune of over $30,000…

Natural distribution and spiritual enlightenment

Same goes for making “saints” out of “sinners.” While both of those terms are inaccurate, they really give us the same points of digression people follow who are going to make their way out of this mess we call humankind existence.

The vast bulk of the people have no clue what’s really going on. They live average lives going to work most of the week and paying out their income to support an average lifestyle, buying and paying off stuff that makes them feel secure. The government takes a huge chunk, as does their union (if they are in that shrinking minority), and more than half of what is left of what they make are sent to the black holes of insurance and finance companies. The average hard-working American, due to credit cards, usually has nearly nothing left to show for their life’s work – which is the exact design of advertisers, finance companies, and any government.

Now, about 2-4% figure out that they can actually improve their lives. These are the people who buy self-help, spiritual, and personal development books/tapes/seminars. The bulk of everyone else gets by with going to church on a regular basis. (The reverse minority are nihilists, who just consider life’s all a loss and that it is basically pain.)

Out of those 2-4% who know there’s a way out, only 2% of those will actually work out what their path needs to be in order to “go free” and “make it”.

And only about 2% of those will then stick to it and follow that path.

But of those finalists, only 2% will actually get enlightened in a given lifetime. Or about 1 in 10 million. Most of these keep it quiet, so you don’t hear much about them. (Follow the Christ’s works and you’ll see the problems he had with charismatic popularity and word-of-mouth advertising.)

That gives us a scale of:

• The mundane “Muggles”
• The Perceptive
• The Genius
• The Skywalkers

Now, the scale doesn’t really quit there, but the levels above enlightenment can’t be described in our words – they can only be intuited or imagined.

Churches, Self-Help Guru’s, and Money

Now, this also explains why there isn’t any money in philosophy and why real spiritual extremists (the guys who made it all the way out like Lao Tse (wrote Tao Te Ching), Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), Jesus of Nazareth (the Christ) – none of these cared a hoot about money or even civilized society as it existed.

They were at or above that 4th level.

So in order to “do” anything with this metaphysical/spiritual stuff on a wide model – society wide – you have to have a lot of people working at the lower levels to keep people involved in it. Not that this either makes or prevents people from achieving actual enlightenment – but it’s a key point of having support groups for those who are between the 1st and 4th levels.

Any government, loosely defined, is a support group. Mostly devoted to the darker side of survival – but still, it supports those contributing to it (particularly those in power).

In all these, people pay their dues and follow along as best they can. They all know that if they keep to what they are seeking, they will find it.

Now, additionally, you won’t find the uber-rich being the enlightened, either. They are still looking for themselves (or looking out for themselves.)

You see, once you get into the third level (Genius), money doesn’t matter. You’ve got all you really need. And most of the reasons people have for keeping this fiction called Money going no longer apply to living – at least Genius’ see it that way. If they need it, it’s there. Otherwise, skip it – not worth investing the energy into it. Look up the lives of Sun Tzu, the Christ, and Siddhartha and you’ll see they just skipped the whole idea of money and what it “can buy”.

Genius live in the intuitional – everything gets provided at that level. But there’s a curious caveat as well. Levenson pointed this out in the beginning of his “Fireside Chat” series, which Larry Crane published. When a person is getting everything handed to them, they have to keep going and move above that level. Or catastrophe happens. We saw this recently in one famed self-help guru who was in the middle of a process where he was pulling in around $400,000 – and some people died. Now he’s charged with manslaughter.

You have to move beyond money or anything it buys, or any identification with a body – and that puts you into that next level, of real enlightenment (Skywalkers).

But there are people around these Geniuses who can “make money” off their existence and actions. And many who know that they have to keep this going in order for them to finish finding their own route to salvation, so they have to build churches and maintain followings in order to support their lifestyle. This doesn’t say anything is bad about this, it’s just a fact of life that “things” cost money. Especially if you don’t get that you actually do make things show up around you – the money aspect is just a frivolous additional exercise. Like Wallace Wattles – what you need will show up for you along the existing lines of trade and manufacturing.

The trick to beating the natural distribution and achieving Enlightenment

The trick is that while there is a small minority of truly brilliant, there is also a minority of the equally-brilliant-but-criminally-destructive.  And these two balance each other out. It’s that old yin-yang thing. The middle route (quite Zen) is the way which actually wins out.  The criminal are those who are really keeping this planet down. It’s their offset which makes this distribution model the way it ends up.  If there were no offset, we’d simply all go free in short order. And it’s the fact that criminals simply can’t get it, so are always lop-sided and off-balance. Their base is destruction; they are always self-destructive to themselves and everyone around them.

But for all those people who are working as scammers and ignorant dicto-crats (North Korea, Uganda, anywhere people are being starved into submission) – mafia types which infiltrate (and run) governments – these are all equalized in the society as a whole, very effectively and at great expense, by honestly for-good-only organizations (Red Cross, among others) and everyone-wins, top-manager networks like CEO Space.

That’s the real reason for support groups like churches, social networks, and clubs like the Optimists. They need your help to keep the balance.

It’s our top minority (extremists) who are able to make it out in spite of. But you also see that the noise the lower end makes is what keeps the whole thing a mess – and so keeps this distribution pattern in place. So only the very few can make it out. (Now, eventually, it’s possible for everyone to make it out – but that’s a complete other story…)

[An interesting sidebar is that the "Middle Ground" is where the enlightened "skywalkers" find themselves. To these, there is no "evil" and "good", but just the whole Zen experience. From that viewpoint, this whole essay is completely an excess. Listening to Alan Watts explains why and how this is.]

How to get yourself enlightened is by NOT going after it

Essentially, you can’t get there from here.

Practically, the leap from Muggle to perceiving your own path out is as wide as perceiving there are geniuses and then becoming one.  And the gap between an operating genius and becoming an enlightened skywalker is even broader.

Again, there is a trick to this. This middle road can’t be described in any of our languages. It can’t be taught; it can’t be studied. It has to be experienced, which is the way of all truth. You can’t “work” at this, you can’t pay anyone to help you achieve it. You can’t stumble on this by accident (although there are plenty of synchronous serendipities to take advantage of — or not.) And when you know you’re there, you are.  Meanwhile, you simply know that something isn’t complete, and so you are still looking…

So don’t think I’m anything above being a genius. If I were, I wouldn’t be writing this – it would just be obvious and not needing the telling. I can only tell you the obvious steps you might or might not take to get up to the level you can then make your own “leap of faith”.

Route to a top end?

Intuition and your own Imagination are apparently the only effective skills you can develop in order to get up to that point.  At least the most effective known at this writing. You can derive such a path from studying as close as you can to what true Masters have said.  But you have to listen to these with your heart.

The trick is to get beyond having to “know” what is going on. You have to get beyond knowing, and find your own intuitional sense.

Of course, this goes beyond printed matter – but you won’t need it by this time, according to sources found to date. The Tao itself is a bit of a comic book, since it says that what can be spoken or written isn’t the Tao – and then continues on to tell all about it…

This starts to explain some of what we are running into in trying to discover this path – and why it’s so “hard” to do. Because you have to give up all the effort you’re expending to find everything you’ve been looking for. (This is as it’s really been there all along…)

Practically, you have to use whatever you are using to get enlightened to un-do their very fact and effectiveness of those exact tools. You won’t need them after that point, anyway. The impossible first becomes possible, and then they both become the same.

Again, words fail here as a description. But the reason for this is because you don’t need them any more. (And because this essay is of course supposed to be motivational, and get you to do something.)

You go to, and then beyond, the level of a Christ, a Buddha, a Master. There are obviously levels beyond just achieving the level of an enlightened being coexisting on this planet. Obvious.

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And we’re going to have to leave you with that. Nothing else needs to be said – or effectively could be.

Cheers.

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Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”

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