Persistence vs. Forcing

This is a valuable distinction. It’s about learning something new – how to distinguish between persistence and forcing so that your decisions lead to success rather than frustration and disappointment. It is also about learning how to make the unconscious – conscious.

Sometimes it is important to keep working on something and not give up. Other times it is important to stop trying to make something happen and just let it go. How can you tell which approach will be more successful for a given situation?

What are the basic differences between persistence and forcing?

Persistence is appropriate when your inner knowing intuitively senses that what you are pursuing just needs more time, energy and attention. To persist and have it be the right action is when you can sense that this is correct from your inner knowing. This is when your intuitive thoughts are influencing your decision.

Forcing occurs when your decision is coming from an ego or emotional pain based thought. The tricky part is that the ego makes you think that you must keep trying if you are going to bring about the result that you want. This can’t ultimately lead to success because the thought to keep going is coming from a story that you made up in your mind. It’s not coming from a perception of some new reality that you can step into. So it can’t happen.

There is a major shift needed in the way that you see the world and this shift involves having a way to make the distinction between persistence and forcing that is accurate and therefore effective.

How can you do that?

The Problem

First of all you can’t do it with your mind. You can’t do it by figuring it out. The ego is too clever and makes you think that your thoughts are real.

Here’s a 2 minute video of experts in psychology and personal development talking about how difficult it is to even recognize when your thoughts are ego based.

These experts know how insidious the ego is. But they don’t offer anything for making it more conscious.

There is, however, a way to come out of this kind of illusion and it involves learning how to consistently know something with you intuition rather than your mind.

In order to understand how to do this let’s take a look at the distinction between “thinking” and “knowing.”

Both thinking and knowing come to us as thoughts that we experience in our mind. And the problem is that because they are all thoughts, people don’t sense the difference between a “thinking” thought and a “knowing” thought. But there is a way to tell the difference. Here it is –

There are 4 kinds of thoughts that influence our decisions.

Useful thoughts –
1. Practical thoughts
2. Intuitive/creative thoughts

Not-useful thoughts
3. Ego based thoughts
4. Emotional pain based thoughts

Practical thoughts and intuitive/creative thoughts are the useful ones that lead to success.

Ego based and emotional pain based thoughts are the not-useful ones that lead to poor decisions, disappointment, frustration and failure.

Your mind can’t tell them apart. But your body can!!! That’s because the experiences that you have with your body and senses are experiential, not intellectual.

For example, if you had never before tasted a strawberry and someone tried to describe what a strawberry tastes like to you, even if they talked all day about it you wouldn’t know what a strawberry tastes like. But the moment you take a bite of a strawberry then you know what a strawberry tastes like.

This is an important distinction. Descriptions and intellectual understanding happen with the mind and don’t provide experiential knowing. They compare, measure, name, quantify and categorize your experiences but they don’t provide knowing through direct experience of the senses via the body.

When you have a practical or intuitive/creative thought there is a subtle sensing that occurs in the body. There is a naturalness to such thoughts. One way I like to describe it when you have this kind of thought is that you are “remembering the future.” There’s no emotional charge to them. They are quiet and effortless.

When you have an ego based or emotional pain based thought you body can sense the subtle feeling of forcing and unnaturalness. However, this subtle feeling isn’t obvious to you.

The source of energy that is creating all of your thoughts is coming from your awareness. Your awareness is the reservoir of energy that gives life to every thought, feeling and perception that you have.

But the “causes” of your thoughts are different. All four kinds of thoughts are patterns of vibrating awareness. You’ve been having all four kinds of thoughts all of your life. You are so used to them that even the ego and emotional pain based ones “seem” natural to you so you haven’t learned to how to sense this subtle difference in the energy of the four different kinds of thoughts. This is the problem.

A Solution

But there is a very clever solution. It turns out that there is a simple technique for amplifying the subtle energy pattern in the body that allows you to more clearly sense and know the difference between useful and not-useful thoughts. It is called intuition testing or muscle testing. Once you learn how to do this, the difference between the causes of the different kinds of thoughts becomes very obvious.

Intuition/muscle testing has to be learned properly. Many people who learn or teach it don’t do that thoroughly. So some people who have attempted to learn it haven’t been able to do it reliably. Then they say that it doesn’t work. But this isn’t because it doesn’t work. It’s because they are missing some of the finer details about it that are essential to having it be reliable. When they have this kind of thought about muscle testing, that’s actually another ego based thought!

I have been teaching how to do muscle/intuition testing for 25 years and have taught thousands of people how to do it so that it is reliable and accurate. Once you know it, it becomes possible to use it to tell which of the four kinds of thoughts a particular thought is.

This is an incredibly useful tool. It finally provides a way to make conscious something that has been unconscious. It finally makes it possible to know which kind of thought you are having.

Certainly once you know which kind of thought you are having you have a much better possibility of making your decisions and resulting actions be based on your practical and intuitive/creative thoughts and not making decisions and taking action based on the ego and emotional pain based thoughts.

But there’s more good news. I have also been very fortunate to discover new techniques for transforming the patterns of energy of the ego and emotional pain based thoughts so that the energy patterns dissolve. This permanently removes the cause of such thoughts. This is also incredibly valuable because then the energetic cause of that particular thought no longer exists in your body.

Eckhart Tolle, the author of The Power of Now and A New Earth says that the two things that you have to get rid of to gain enlightenment are the ego and the pain-body. But many people have told me that his explanations of how to do that aren’t sufficient for them to be able to do it successfully. Perhaps that is because Tolle had a spontaneous awakening and it didn’t come with a road map or owner’s manual of how to get there.

But I’ve been blessed with discovering exactly how to resolve the energy patterns of both the ego and the pain-body. Here’s a chart of the two different kinds of emotional energy patterns. The ego based thoughts (Reactive/External) are primarily resolved with the OUT Technique. The emotional pain based thoughts (Painful/Internal) are primarily resolved with the IN Technique.

These techniques that I’ve been so fortunate to develop also make the unconscious – conscious. Each time you resolve one of the energy patterns of the not-useful emotions you have more access to your awareness. It’s cleaning up your inner emotional landscape. What I’ve discovered is that the energy patterns that make up the ego and the pain-body are the only real barriers to having Pure Awareness be present all the time.

 

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