The Direction of Intention

153.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

True power is an expression of vision. At the center of true power is a value: to empower.

Power for power’s sake becomes a drug. Power without vision can only serve to oppress. Power for power’s sake intoxicates the mind and erodes the body – this is as true for nations as it is for individuals. The goal of power for power’s sake is to feed the habit. Like all addicts power will destroy itself to feed its addiction so in the purest sense it is self-destructive.

Power over others serves nothing and confuses its lack of service for conservatism – for holding on to what it has. Like all addicts, it will cheat, steal, and lie to get what it needs (more power). It confuses ethics and morality with the maintenance of power – it needs to justify its abuses as necessary and principled. You will hear stories about how “the ends justified the means.” You will hear phrases like, “we have to weigh our interests against our values.” You will hear, “business is business.”

Power for power’s sake will necessarily express in cultures of control. Education becomes dangerous because educated people ask questions and are capable of complex thinking: educated people will inevitably ask the question, “Why are we doing this?” People who ask, “why?” are more difficult to control – within this question “why?” is the seed of empowerment. Power for power’s sake fears this question because it always has something to hide – namely, that there is no answer other than, “to feed the power addiction.” A standardized test is a great way of providing a standardized answer and is necessary to keep a population from asking itself the question, “why?”

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152.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Truly powerful people are dedicated to inspiring true power in others because they recognize that power is a not something that exists within a single person. No one is powerful alone.

True power is never power over others. It is a signature of weakness to diminish others in order to elevate your self. A drowning person will climb atop the heads of others. In the end, both die.

True power is a relationship dynamic; power finds increase in the space between people. True power is not found in the person looking for what they can get from life. True power is found in the person who brings power to life.

Power is brought to life in the giving, not in the taking.

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151.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Today I began cataloguing these posts and revisited post #1. It starts with these two phrases:

Truly powerful people are dedicated to inspiring true power in others.

It goes like this: empowered people empower others.

The other day when I was visiting Judy on Bainbridge Island we had a conversation about perception. I told Judy that I’ve recently been thinking that notions like “survival of the fittest” are concepts that only make sense to a culture devoted to the individual. Survival of the fittest is a construct of a human mind, like time, and not a “reality” describing how nature works. From another set of eyes I could describe nature as collaboration or cooperation, an exercise in balance. We see everything as a competition because our mythologies are filled with warriors, heroes and angry gods fighting for power and control over this pie that has a limited number of slices.

In her book, Wild, Jay Griffiths wrote that most indigenous cultures have no word for or concept of “wild.” When nature is not seen as something to be tamed, everything is collaboration. Nothing is wild; there is no separation between nature and not nature (civilization?). No fences needed. This applies particularly and most importantly to inner nature. Your inner nature is just fine without all the control you impose; it needs no compartmentalization. You require no taming if you believe you are part of nature and not the master of it.

Empowered people have no use for power over others. Empowered people have no use for taming their inner nature; they desire to know themselves not control themselves. Empowered people empower others because they are collaborating, participating, and not so dreadfully invested in putting up fences.

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149.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

It’s an odd image but go with me. Lately I’ve been looking at people as if they were empty cups that fill themselves according to the story that they tell. For instance, yesterday I watched a man fill himself with angst and frustration. He stood in front of a photograph muttering, “I could never do that,” and I watched as his body began filling with frustrations; it began to rise from his toes, filling his legs and his belly, seeping up into his heart, clogging his voice and drowning his brain in a thick liquid, “I can’t.” His story thwarted completely his desire to be a photographer. What liquid story might have filled his cup had his story been, “Cool! I’m going to learn how to do that?”

According to the research 90% of what runs through your mind is the same stuff that ran through it yesterday. The story you tell yourself is on a loop. The story you tell yourself comes from a specific point of view. I don’t need the research to know that I tell myself the same story loop each day from the same point of view. Consider, for instance, if you assume the universe is against you, your cup will fill with a story of resistance, hard luck, and victimization; no matter what you do, the universe is against you. Every traffic jam, every paper cut will reinforce your story and keep your cup filled with liquid negativity. And, you will fill every relationship, every choice and opportunity, with the negative liquid in your cup because that is what you bring to the party.

I don’t know about you but if 90% of what runs through my mind is the same stuff then I might as well make that 90% a story of opportunity, choice, and support. I’m seeing others as story-cups because I feel within myself how easily I can fill up with anger or blame. “Look how I just filled myself,” has become an awareness tool, a mantra as I literally fill myself with a story of poison or a story of pleasure. Either way, it is my choice and that is the point. I have choice about the story I tell. I have choice about the point of view from which I tell the story. I have choice about where I place my focus (what I choose to see, to emphasize, how I choose to interpret every experience).

How are you filling your cup?

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145.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Apples are not oranges.

Government is not business. It has fiscal responsibilities, yes, but the intention of government is fundamentally different than the intention of a business. Government is how a state (state = a group of people who share a common identity) manages itself. A group of people, even with a common story, has multiple points of view and has to have some mechanism for maintaining a healthy commons. Government concerns itself with what a community values. It is the functional layer of the question, “who are we?” Business is not in the least concerned with values. Business would have you believe that is provides something of value. This is sometimes true and sometimes not.

Education is not business. While it also has fiscal realities the purpose of education is not to make money. The purpose of education is to support a new generation of citizens, expansive, curious, dynamic, human beings capable of critical thought, constructive debate, capable of sharing and perpetuating a common narrative. Education is not about answers. It is about this question: Who are we (and the individual variation, “who am I?”)? If education is not about self-knowledge, then it is about nothing. The era of education-as-factory is collapsing on itself.

The arts will never make money; art is not business. The purpose of art is to hold, maintain and renew the identity of the culture. Artist’s hold the necessary sacred space for exploring the question, “who are we?” When the purpose of art in a culture becomes the making of money, the culture is already dead: despite its appearance the core of the apple is rotten.

News is not entertainment. The purpose of news is to report without bias the events of the world. Hopefully, news informs the community, it provides the necessary information for good decision-making. When the purpose of news becomes to attract the most viewers (make money), to influence opinion or to promote a point of view (make money), it is no longer news. It is something else.

In the collision between old world ideas and the reality of the world in which we live it is increasingly more difficult to discern between apples and oranges and it is more and more imperative that we remember how to do so. Confusing the intention of government, education, art, news,…, with the intention of business is to forget the essential in pursuit of the superficial. It becomes the default answer to the question, “who are we?”

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