## a wise dude once told me, professionally, "you have to find your crowd"...and part of that is seeking and courting a boss or company or institution that has a high enough QoC behavioral bell curve to tolerate your "weirdness", or they are weird like you are...or you have to be so frigging productive, they are willing to overlook your weirdness - best to have both

money, office allocation, parking spot, pecking order, task type, tone of voice - there is a vast array of tools they employ as carrots and sticks to get control of you, and you are doing the same back to them, and this can be unfriendly either way, or it can be cooperative, win win (Stephen Covey anyone?)

all this PMR ego-material stuff though is secondary to the NPMR QoC feedback, where a serious material setback might coincide with positive QoC feedback...but this rare, and I believe it is not an either or thing



## so I am saying, figure out how to pay the rent in a practical reasonable way, that is relatively harmless, the usual free exchange of useful products or services, without going overboard into miserliness or love of money, so that you free up your attention for the higher things, which is difficult if you are worried about how to pay for your kids dental bill. The higher things also include using your worklife as a canvas of the higher arts, the how rather than the what.

Tom talks about first order, second order and third order drives. First order is food and water and sex. AUM built you with these drives, and I recommend a matter of fact, harm-less approach to these things, to avoid them taking up too much energy.

Second order is everything beyond the 5 minute planning horizon. Short term pain for long term gain. Education, saving, biting your lip, diet, exercise, ...all the selfish smart behaviors required of pragmatic life.

Third order is everything beyond the infinite PMR planning horizon. Some families have multigenerational planning, and will sacrifice their lives so that their children will have a better life. This is still kinda in the realm of ego..."for even the wicked do such things". Third order is the so called mystical love stuff, that really defies logic....Tom's higher ruleset, and then folding in the concept of balance, which Tom also talks about, but does not directly link to first, second and third order drives.

My interpretation of this is that the algorithm of our life is find that sweet spot that balances our first, second and third order hungers, at each moment of our decision tree, and that a commitment to this is a sort of fourth order of efficiency, as most people are dominated by one of the lower orders.

A monk is someone who chooses the third order, and makes war with the first and second. The teaching and example of Tom, (and Judaism) is that we can have it all, it is all about pleasure, but this is not hedonism, it is about sustainable pleasure maximized across your lifetime, and the lifetime of your higher apparently eternal self.



this is outside my understanding, but after a brief wiki review, it brings to mind what Tom says about fearlessness and how dieing is just not that big a deal. Its like that crazy teen chick who sailed around the planet...what a powerful example of fearlessness...or these bible thumpers I know who tromp into the jungle routinely to save child slaves....they are having such a great time (while racking up pension credits in safe jobs)





I was reaching into other thinking in this regard...Tom's guidance is more about dropping in than dropping out. Part of being ordinary, in things superficial and visible, is to stick a silver spike through ego, and defeat spiritual materialism....to borrow from Chogyam.

It was Chogyam's membership in the Boulder Chamber of Commerce that startled me out of the counter culture...like that other guy here that can't wrap his head around the quality of Tom's teachings, and the fact that he worked on missal defense.

the real challenge is figuring out just exactly what is bothering you...where is the itch - in your twenties, there are normally about five or six to sort out...its very confusing, and difficult to isolate and dispense with each one.

I suggest examining and testing each one of these separately
- boredom
- loneliness
- taking egolessness too far, mental egolessness beyond core being egolessness
- inefficiently narrow financial decision space (Rich Dad, poor Dad)
- anthropological incorrectness (disconnect from R-complex and nature - paleolithicism)
- aesthetic stress (living in an ugly messy environment)
- social stress...are my buddies/family bringing me down, holding me back (Antony Robbins)

sometimes, what we think might demand a great spiritual quest, can be solved by going camping or joining a poker club, and our spirituality itself can become the disease.

what a great discussion!

_________________
Does this PMR make my butt look big?

Thank you very much for your detailed reply, Randy.



I have been thinking about this before for a while. The problem within the German economic rule-set is [I wouldn't call it a 'system' - because basically it's just a bunch of 'rules' that people arbitrarily came up with and that go unquestioned ever since...] you need a certain degree to work at a job that matches your QoC - even if you are talented and know everything you need to know. There has to be a degree. This is how it works. I know that in the Anglo-American economies things are a little different. That is, if you have the skill to do the job - you can do the job. But here in Germany it is not that way. You can not even show that you would have the skills - since you will not be invited to a job interview if you cannot show your degree upfront.

Now that leads us back to the degree-question: Where to get that? At university... So, basically in order to find that 'sweet spot' - and not just any spot to go with - one would have to go through the mills just to be able to get a job interview and then show some staff-manager that you have the skills you had before you threw five or six years of your valuable life-time away to memorize crap you will not need at your future job anyway. I mean, let me study by myself on one subject for five years and you will have an expert... without degree. ;)

I gave that whole university thing yet another go - in terms of thinking about it - and the only possibility I could imagine to accept to wrap my head around just to get another job later on would be economics because it offers the most practical and less belief-system ridden content - although it holds a lot of highly questionable paradigms... But without getting a degree there is not the slightest possibility for me to get a job that offers a QoC that even remotely resembles mine - at least here in Germany.

All that lead me to the consideration of a Hagakure-style work ethos - which I actually didn't primarily see in fearlessness but surrender to one's 'liege lord'. ;)

'If one were to say in a word what the condition of being a samurai is,
its basis lies first in seriously devoting one's body and soul to his master.'



The whole thing really turns into a relatively delicate balancing act. Even more if we take questions about QoC at a workplace into consideration. ;) I guess, I have always been looking for straight forward answers - so that I get to do stuff. Hence the decision of becoming a monk which reflects pretty much what you wrote here:





Trungpa's writings are a great help in developing a sober view on spiritual life and freeing oneself of spiritual materialism. [Have you read 'Work, Sex, Money'? Would you recommend it?] Either way you drop has to be sustainable over a long period of time. Dropping out isn't really possible at the moment for lack of quality [QoC] options to do so. I don't know if there ever will be a viable opportunity for larger numbers of people to successfully create a society that deals differently with the issues that make life so exertive at times. Also the perspective about 'dropping out' isn't really clear - what are you dropping out of - and where is the idea coming from that you are not that...? In my experience 'dropping out' often involves some ego-issues [feeling of superiority, inability to accept certain practical constraints etc.] Dropping in, in my view, pretty much means sobering up and becoming a more mature person.



Stuff like that can blow your mind. The problem is that you can only understand the meaning behind it as soon as you reached an equivalent QoC... ;) So long you just have to accept it as uncertainty. Or run away to still that apparent cognitive dissonance.



I can very well relate to that. Since I am 17 [now I am 25] I have actively attempted to find out 'what exactly is bothering me'. ;) That lead me from dropping out of school, to going to Africa to do development aid, to going back to an economics school, to drop out again, to join a Vedantic Order and travel with the 'Master' through South-America, to going back to Germany to work in a bookstore, to go to university to study psychology, to drop out of university and prepare to becoming a monk - to chatting on some weird internet forum about the weirdness of professional life in PMR... ;) I learned a lot through all this - but I feel I am still not there yet. Still haven't found out what exactly is the issue. That's why I thought it be beneficial to develop an attitude of a samurai and simply work. No matter what. Rather than blinding myself with this never ending search for resolving an issue that might simply dissolve itself once the right attitude toward practical life issues has been developed.



-> no

-> no

-> probably

-> No actual financial decision space [worthy of the name] at all...

-> I have my suspicions concerning what you mean by that - but could give me a short note an that? ;)

-> Big time!

Familiy used to do that - until I got rid of them. ;) I told them not to contact me again if they were not willing to stop 'bringing me down/ holding me back'. Haven't heard of them since. ;) My friends are very supportive.

Thank you very much!

_________________
"Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way,
Which is ever greater and more subtle than the world."

- Dao de jing, 1.

Nemo,

Have you considered a technical career? No one ever asks an engineer to believe anything in particular, other than in doing accurate work. It is not difficult to believe in personal integrity in your work ethic, that machines not fail in their design or buildings fall down. Believe in and study anything else that you want after hours. The same goes for physicists and other technicians. Hierarchies then tend to be team based, organized to do a job, not to play games with subordinates although that can still occur. Get into the other sciences as I was once interested in oceanography and took a course, but found there was a belief system problem. That professor would hear nothing about continental drift and plate tectonics although it seemed perfectly reasonable an idea to me, considering how much work is done in engineering based upon dimensional analysis. If you can use the same data for steam flow as for the flow of liquid mercury, why not have rocks 'flow' as well when they ride on a base of magma down below. Get into a field that does not have such limiting belief systems. Have you not heard economics referred to as the 'dismal science' although the origins of this were not such good reasons? On the other hand, perhaps economics needs someone to yet work out a system that does not so tend to enslave the many in the behalf of the few.

Ted

There is a hint of prejudice here.

Secondly, the "you must pay your dues by getting a degree"-paradigm you mention is not a marker of high QoC. It is a world of petty jealousies, passing of judgment, obsessing over what school, what degree, and how much money someone "is worth".

In certain environments, people sometimes hinge their self-worth on their formal backgrounds. Judging others based on their degrees then is a form of ego-defense: "why should she get to do XYZ when I have all these years of ABC ...". In other fields where there is constant need to solve problems and achieve measurable results, there is less room for this.

England and london, which may be a bit more permissive, is close to germany.

_________________
Johan

Some people can be mavericks. But it is difficult.


There is no escape from productivity and hard work. That is why everything worthwhile is so difficult.


- Feeling that almost everything is a wasted effort, as a machinist on the Titanic with water to his knees would. No matter what individual goal succeeds, the ship will still sink.


I'm reading this as a euphemism for "not enough sex". But who doesn't think that?

_________________
Johan

Let me explain this so that it will not go misunderstood: If I were to find a work environment that would resemble my QoC - then I would need a degree - as long as I expect to find it in Germany. I see no prejudice there - only a realistic attempt to evaluate the average QoC I know of being prevalent in work environments. This evaluation is not solely my own but has been addressed also by other people who got to know me closer. ['What? You want to work there? You will go nuts after two days!' - Type of stuff...] I do consider to work in an environment of low QoC though for the rest of my life - due to it being more accessible and probably more of a lesson for me to increase my QoC. So I hope the matter of 'prejudice' has been sufficiently addressed. ;)



The "you must pay your dues by getting a degree"-paradigm is not a marker of high QoC. I did not mentioned it were. I have not established a causal relationship between degrees and QoC-jobs. So far it has been an assessment based on observation. There is, however, a causal relationship involved: people with higher than average QoC tend to accept the torture of institutionalized education in order to pass the "you must pay your dues by getting a degree"-paradigm because it exists and would otherwise lock them in the position I am in at the moment. Therefore there is a relation between the occurrence of certain degrees and high QoC jobs. There will be quite a few exceptions to this: High QoC in a less respected work environment - but because things like that are the exception rather then the rule I can not count on finding them.

If I were a defendant of university degrees I would have one, wouldn't you think? ;) In an article about authority I wrote a few weeks back I expressed a similar idea as follows: "Of course there is a rather high amount of scientists that meets the criteria of being ‘intelligent people’. But: Cum hoc non est propter hoc. Just because there are intelligent people practicing something doesn’t mean, that this practice is the necessary condition for being intelligent or developing intelligence or that this practice can only be done by intelligent people."



Thank you for the advice. I will take that into my considerations. In Ireland people seem to have a more liberal policy toward formal education as well.

_________________
"Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way,
Which is ever greater and more subtle than the world."

- Dao de jing, 1.

Viewed that way it might actually apply. In terms of achieving anything like material 'success' or 'climbing the social ladder' I have no real motivation - since 'everything is a wasted effort' and 'I should increase my QoC rather than earn lots of money for whatever reasons people do such stuff otherwise'... ;)



Oh, I didn't consider that. I thought of it in more general ways of neglecting bodily needs and synchronization with mother nature.

_________________
"Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way,
Which is ever greater and more subtle than the world."

- Dao de jing, 1.

Randy, just a side-note:

regarding 'Fair-Trade' you wrote earlier:

I did some research about this and I guess I arrived where you pointed at... ;) Apart from all the other stuff I found the most drastic stories regarding 'Fair Trade' are so far:

'In order to join Fairtrade, cooperatives must meet quality and political standards which means their farmers must be relatively skilful, educated and well capitalized, and therefore far from the poorest farmers.'

and

'As the demand for coffee is highly inelastic, a small increase in supply means a large fall in market price, so perhaps a million Fairtrade farmers get a higher price and 24 million others get a substantially lower price.' Source

_________________
"Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way,
Which is ever greater and more subtle than the world."

- Dao de jing, 1.

Thanks, Ted, for your answer.

Yes, I actually have considered that. The problem with that is that I actually don't bring the skills that are necessary for such things. I totally suck at math - due to being the ever-stoned teenage rebel who rather read Sartre and listened to the Grateful Dead than did his math-homework... ;) I tried to get some of that lost mathematical education back at later years. I succeeded with that partly and later on got better marks. But the level of training I received in technical subjects is far from sufficient when it comes to studying any of that. I was really good at biology, though. So the most practical, technical thing for me would be economics, basically. For a technoid person this must sound horrible, I confess. But what to do - I just don't care enough about details. I guess. ;)

_________________
"Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way,
Which is ever greater and more subtle than the world."

- Dao de jing, 1.

If you actually need a degree, this is the way to get it. Just hold your nose and swallow. Think of it as walking across the desert for water. Don't be so sensitive to the environment.

Is it a matter of just finding the right course?

Higher education is the low-risk, high cost version of accumulating "credits" for a future goal. Outside of education, one must continue accumulating, but now there is high-risk/payoff trade attached to every decision. It was probably wise not to become a monk. Aid-work in Africa was probably wise, though the real payoff remains somewhere in the future, as with many things.

Is "healer" really a wise use of the leverage you get with your accumulated "credits", and the ones you have yet to get?

What if you would channel the dissatisfaction to cause a wider impact instead? Teaching? Maybe journalist or broadcaster? Working with individual businesses and institutions, there are various titles such as "xyz consultant", which are not necessarily attached to specific degrees, though economics/management studies will help.

"Kommunikationsberater" is a word that I imagine comes with some "baggage", but maybe that is how you get yourself in a position where people will listen to you and take heed. It sounds like you have many strange and interesting stories to tell. It will probably not pay next month's rent, but make sure that whatever steps you take, they lead somewhere you want to be.

The thing with countries such as germany, and sweden which is marginally better, is that people find it difficult and dream of escaping, usually to warmer latitudes. Many eventually return with lessons learned. I think the fantasy is "always summer, the fruit always ripe ..." but it seems our climate (social, seasonal) is part of the schooling we are meant to get from nature (there is a corresponding quote about winter that I can't find). Summer is so sweet because winter is so harsh. A tree is in bloom for one week in june, the fruit ripens in time before the frost, and then it endures winter for six months. There is a lesson there about patience, perseverance, etc.

_________________
Johan

Nemo,

If you did well in biological subjects, then that is a technical field that you could enter on the same basis as engineering or others. If that does not directly appeal, there is nursing as I suspect you don't have patience for the medical doctor path. In the US, that is a very good field at present. Nurses here are becoming more managers of care than direct caregivers. I of course do not know how well it goes in Europe.

Ted

You guys are discussing utilizing our QoC consciously here like it is something that we utilize consciously when I am pretty sure Tom would say it isn't like that. Our QoC isn't something we knowingly can use like that, it is something our IUOC or Higher Self or Cluster I :), takes care of. Really any talk of us getting the best job in the VR for our QoC is sort of silly even though I know what you are probably really saying it you need to find a way to survive that doesn't make you barf after wards because it feels so wrong be it getting someone else to support us or doing the job our self if it doesn't make you happy it isn't what you should be doing. Just doing it because society says this is what we do is no reason to keep doing it because obviously it ain't working because it goes against what is correct (can't say "right" without barfing in my mouth a little). Correct?
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

There is a lot of great stuff here, and it causes me to reflect upon my own path.

Nemo wrote:



This is something that Tom has touched on. He said something to the effect that dropping out may not be the best way to lower entropy and grow. Dropping IN has much more value in terms of entropy reduction and growth potential. We do not evolve as individuals (per se) but in relation to others. There may be value in throwing off the trappings of the material world and travel the world with nothing but a "begging bowl" (if one is so inclined) but it is still in the interaction with others that real GROWTH occurs




This statement seems to infer that QoC is somehow reflected in the academic levels achieved. I must interject, and remind you that the halls of academia (and even mainstream science) can be just as full of belief traps and dogma as are the halls of religious institution. And in my own observations, I have noticed that some of the people with the highest levels of (formal) education, SOMETIMES, also exhibit the highest levels of ENTROPY.




This is the position that I have decided to take. To focus on the present moment and take care of the task at hand. (If life gives me lemons, I make lemonade) Every situation that you encounter is another opportunity to make some situation a little better. Every step you take just leads to the next step. The job for me to do is the one in front of me, here and now. It is the journey that really matters, NOT the destination. You may be able to arrange your schedule so that you can work towards a degree, if you like. And you have the power to shape your life into anything you choose. But sometimes, as Joseph Campbell said, "We have to let go of the life we planned for ourselves, in order to get the life that's waiting for us". Sometimes we can make a wrong turn, yet end up in the right place. And there is also the possibility that we can make all the "RIGHT" turns (according to "the map") and end up in the wrong place.

_________________
LOVE is the answer

peace
patrick

Yes, Bette. I have thought about this today as well. This discussion is pointing that way. This is why I am more and more trying to accept my samurai-style work ethos and lay all of these other considerations aside. At least for now. I can come up with so many different ideas of how to generate money and go through all sorts of educations - and I have over the years. But what it boils down to over and over again is that I won't be able to escape the downsides of all of it: mixing with people that I normally would avoid and doing stuff I wouldn't normally do. ['Normally' means 'If I were a truly free man - i.e. economically - and wouldn't need to sell my valuable life-time to do nonsense which probably some computer could to better.] So I assume my horror associated with that is reason enough to delve into it. Not that I didn't have any experience with that. Having it is exactly the source of the horror. ;) I've been to school, have worked, went to university: I know what's going on with people. And I actually don't want to witness it or take part in it. So in there surely lies a lesson.

'There is something to be learned from a rainstorm.
When meeting with a sudden shower,
you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road.
But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses,
you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning,
you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking.
This understanding extends to everything.' Hagakure

I think, maybe finding the super sweet job might even hold you back from evolving toward lower entropy the same way as living in a monastery would - as in both challenges will be minimized drastically...

_________________
"Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way,
Which is ever greater and more subtle than the world."

- Dao de jing, 1.

Nemo do you trust the LCS?


Edit(After approximately 20 seconds)/ When i wrote the above text i had opened a tab with my email on it but hadn't looked at it yet. After writing my reply above I looked and i found inside an email from TMI(The Monroe Institute). Inside the email had a poem. I paste it here, i believe it might make some sense to you:


Wild Geese



You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

from Dream Work by Mary Oliver


Does it resonate?