Episode 70. Who’s running your life

Who’s running your life? This is episode 70. Brought to you by the fifth universal law of nature. The law of hierarchy, the one and the many.

First up, the answer to this question would seem conspicuous to most people. However let me introduce you to a number of variables involved in sorting through the fog.

firstly, and enormous number of people believe that some sort of God is running their life, who is represented by somebody here on earth, who therefore is running their life. They believe in fate or, or God or something outside of them that is in control.

then there’s another group of people who don’t care. They would much rather have no question about who is running their life because their life doesn’t seem all that important to know the answer. They just live.

then there’s another group who would say categorically me. Now this individual or these individuals are typically emotionally wired to the hilt. They are like one of those angry dogs on a leash and when you walk past you think to yourself thank God it’s a strong leash. Otherwise you’d be bitten. This individual is living in a state of narcissism.

then, lastly there is a group of people, who think the answer is they are running their life but they’re not. And it’s his last group of people who might be open to the following conversation.

There are seven areas of life. If you bang your hand with a hammer that area of life will take command of the ship, a mutiny will take place and all the other areas of life will be thrown overboard while there is extreme pain in the hand and the hospital stitches at all up. I then, another area of life like banking, which may be running extremely low relative to the costs of living in that area becomes commander and throws out the existing government and forms a dictatorship. Once this government settles in to run the country, the boss at work becomes agitated that things aren’t going well enough and next thing you know there is again and overthrow of the government and a new dictator takes over the country. This is how the majority of people define who runs their life. The squeaky wheel always gets the most oil. And governments overthrowing other governments is how the country called you is run.

holidays start to run people’s lives as well. Holidays are like a temptress. There she/he stands on a beautiful warm beach waving her hands to you saying come to me and all else seems less important than harking to the call. Come to me I will give you extreme happiness and pleasure. Come to me nothing else is important. I’ll get your work done. Stress is not important because when you get here it will be fantastic and beautiful and wonderful. Come to me. And in this way people live week to week looking forward to the weekend and week to week looking forward to their holidays and through quality of life aside in the interests of making it all up on a holiday.

another group of people are aware that they are not running their own life. These people love to blame the children, the job, any family member, for how they feel and why they are not living that magnificent life they could be living if it only wasn’t for someone so. When they get past the influence of one person they just find another to allocate responsibility to for not being themselves. Now this group of people, remind me of the days when we used to have schoolyard fights and you would say to your school friends “hold me back” and you would hope like hell they would do so because you knew you would lose the fight. They really do not know how they would live if they were no obstacles and so they create them.

then, there are the group of people who believe if they support somebody into achieving their greatness that they can jump on the back of that achievement and feel like they are living the fullness of their life. Traditionally, not so long ago, women were encouraged to play this game of be the background support team for someone who would achieve something and then ride on the glory. That mystical ignorance has evaporated. However, I knew more sinister way of operating has been introduced in its place. And that is a clumsy form of balance. Partners are comparing themselves to each other in both time availability and work performance and if one gets ahead a little bit, the other person feels that they have been done and injustice. There are so many emotional games that go on inside relationships now under the auspices of the concept of equality. I have witnessed some relationships where one partner would rather sabotage their partners success then celebrate it because they feel like the relationship will disintegrate if their partner becomes too successful. Weird hey?

But to try to bring this to a simple centralise distillation of what really goes on when people think they run their lives when they really don’t we must go back to the universal laws and look at where the guiding principle of running your own life would begin.

in the fifth universal law there are seven levels of all things. The pyramid hierarchy of the one and the many is seven levels high. Whether this is a business or a society or the stars or the human mind it is the same seven levels. Remembering the definition of a universal law that whether you are examining the construction of the smallest energy particle gnome called a quasar, all looking at the construction of the universe and suns and planets, or looking to understand tigers in a forest or the human mind, the same law governs. And so, in the human mind there are seven levels of thought. The lowest is got to, the highest is love to. So if you ask a person are they in love, they will answer that question from the level of the mind that is in control of their life. I met one man who had beaten up his wife with a belt. I had done a coaching session with her just hours after the beating where the marks of the buckle and bleeding on her face was still unattended. I asked him why he had done such a brutal act to another human being and his answer was, because I love her. No you are listening to this and say holy crap that is not what we think love years but he did. He was operating from the lowest level of the human mind, the bipolar level, the primal animal level, and had in his mind only two ways to define love at that level which was extreme. No doubt they had experienced extreme pleasure as well as this extreme version of control. I said so if I had ask this guy who runs your life he would have said she did.

imagine that this pyramid of seven levels of thinking is actually not two-dimensional but three-dimensional. It becomes a cone. The base of that cone has seven areas of life. And so each separate area of life has its own hierarchy of thought. So for example a person might be operating from a got to space in their finances, I love to space in their career, a need to space in their house and they want to space in their relationship. So you can see from this that people very often compartmentalise who is running their life depending on what they are doing at any point in the day. And this is it great insight. At work they may be in a should headspace trying to get the approval of their boss so that they get a pay rise. At home they might be in a choose two or love to headspace. So there is no single answer for this person because, like a bear in a forest there in protective mode in a danger environment and cuddly mode hibernating in another environment. And this is where people start to become angry and abusive at themselves.

if we experience and get used to the love to environment mind space, we know how good and how powerful we can be in that state of mind. Zen, if something draws us down into a lower state of thinking such as a demanding boss or a critical partner, we know that we are being compromised and that there is mutiny taking place, our government of good thinking is being overthrown by a military coup. This state of continual comparison between the seven areas of life and the state of mind we are in causes what is best described as suffering. The Buddha said all of life is suffering. He blamed desire. And if you think passed the rhetoric of cornflakes packet Buddhism you will see that what the Buddha was talking about was this conflict of values and the state of mind we are able to apply. Of course the Buddha didn’t have to pay rent or had a mortgage and five kids to look after. His solutions were therefore very simple. Give up desire. Something that, a hippy up in Byron Bay might be able to achieve if they are on government subsidised unemployment benefits and live in a tree. But for most people, giving up desire would mean giving up the vision, inspiration and purpose in life. So that does not become an option for a healthy thriving individual.

I call this complex competition between all these levels of mind and the areas of life spaghetti mind. People get all tangled up in the spaghetti. Thinking becomes conflicted. Achievement becomes an obsession, feelings become an obsession, other people’s feelings get tangled up in the spaghetti, and it’s all welded together in a very generous attempt to get it all right. It’s fuelled by a source, not tomato sauce, it’s fuelled by sauce called our values.

if you go around the seven areas of life each and every person on earth has their own hierarchy of which of those areas is the most and which is the least important. That is not to saying that any of the areas are unimportant. But, in the course of living a good day of life, we are continually negotiating with ourselves and others regarding how much time and energy we spend each area of life. We eventually learn that time and importance are disconnected. Even if money and wealth which represents security, where our highest value by a long way, we may only need to spend 30 minutes a day worrying about it. So time and value hierarchy have finally been separated. And most people are aware that you don’t have to spend all day every day with your children for them to grow up healthy and well, but the time you do spend with them needs to be 110% turned up. Time and priority have been disconnected even if, sometimes, expectations have not evolved.

but the most challenging thing about organising this spaghetti and making it makes sense in accordance with a universal law, is honesty. Guilt blocks memory. Fear blocks imagination. And so this combination of guilt and fear, make it extremely hard to break down this whole spaghetti into a clear understanding of one’s own true value set. Ask any parent what their highest value is and they will no doubt say the children. But if you follow them around with a camera for a week you will see that, in about 80% of cases where people have said their highest priority is their children, it isn’t. If you follow somebody around with a camera who has said my highest priority is my work, in 80% of cases you will see that other things are far more important to that person. However, they have been conditioned to think and say what should be important to them rather than what really is.

when I wrote my favourite book, sacred love, the last of the five chapters is titled, love is a lifestyle. I wrote this because I think a healthy relationship cannot exist in a bubble. I had one couple come to me for coaching who were so in love and created a bubble for each other like two peas in a pod. They both hated their work. They both hated the world. They both hated exercise equally. They hated everything else except two peas in a pod. And truly, you can’t hate one person and love another. Every human has every trait. So the book was trying to say that if love is your number one value than it is love in all seven areas of life. That means, operating in the love to zone of the cone in all seven areas of life. That’s a little bit difficult however, if love becomes a lifestyle then, you treat yourself and you treat others as you wish to become and the spaghetti begins to unravel. But, if the only place that love becomes important is inside the family home or in the bedroom, and everything else is about discipline and making money and doing sport and all these other things then, love is an escape, love is not a value and if it is there is going to be a battle within that will cause enormous suffering.

self honesty is really hard. I recently spoke to someone about time that I spent in Zen retreats. In these retreats you go in, leaving your phone and everything else behind, including conversation and I contact, and live for a period of time without any escape from yourself. This sounds really easy and I thought it would be too but after about 48 hours half the people who were attending the retreat had abandoned the program. Truth is really hard to bear. We create so many ways to avoid it in those ways to avoid it are so welded into our daily life we have no idea that they are even there. Until we spend time doing nothing. No escape.

one of the exercises in the 30 day challenge is learning to do the corpse pose. You lie down on the floor with a pillow under your head, a blanket over your body and freeze. It is probably one of the most important things to do in human development. It just lasts 10 minutes every day. But if you ask anybody six months after the 30 day challenge finished which of the exercises they ditched first and forgot to do and don’t do any more it is always the corpse pose. Is it because we don’t have time to lie down on the floor and do nothing for 10 minutes a day or is it because it’s such a confronting experience to do nothing and be with ourselves? If the latter is true imagine what it feels like to do it for 10 or 20 days. That’s pretty serious stuff.

so we create conscious attempt to put structure to this spaghetti. I hope you find your purpose, let the seven visions drop out of that, build goals around those visions and use your value set to create a sense of priority, not time allocation, to allow some internal peace. We then create daily habits so that you can live very much inspired by what’s going on right now. All of this is organic and natural to a person who grows up outside the influence of other people who are not being authentic and living to their true nature. But there are no people left on this planet to grow up in such an environment. Parents bring their baggage, grandparents bring their baggage, teachers bring their baggage and I suspect somehow children bring their baggage from there unspoken hereditary existence, and next thing you know spaghetti becomes the norm and an internal conflict becomes the life of a youth.

people are blaming iPads and Internet time for the disrupted existence of their young teenage children but I think that is just blame. I think the biggest cause of disrupted existence for a young teenage person is the spaghetti in their mind that has come from the projection of their parents who don’t know themselves very well and dump that shit on the kids thinking that it’s love. I think parents are accountable for the complete disruption and growing mental health problems in the young teenagers of our day. Not the Internet. The Internet is a sane environment but parents are insane they carry their baggage home they dump it on the kids and say that’s love just like that guy I mentioned earlier who beat the shit out of his partner saying I did it because I love them. And parents collaborate on this. Even though they may witness their partner dumping their spaghetti on top of the child in truckloads they remain passive. They remain passive because they are cowards. And we are all at some point a coward because the spaghetti in our own mind, if it’s not clear, makes us uncertain about are here for and who runs our life.

That’s it for the episode

With Spirit

Chris