ATTN: The two guides of IDEAL ME and REAL ME

What i am to say next is my personal experience / view. It definitely needs translation for any other person, because of the uniqueness of each individual person and her or his own experiences.

Inside each person there are two guides.

One guide is an outer guide, internalized, and yet it represents the voices from the outer world. Parents tell the child "you must do this or that, you must be such and so". These directions are both conscious and unconscious. The feed, the link, is where the child needs attention (= food) and the parents decide about the ideal child, the state and shape of the child that they approve of before it gets the attention it needs. After internalization - called a script in TA - the "you must" is changed into "i must". And then you think this ideal you, is really you, as if you were the one who owns this voice of "you must". This is the bully guide, the one that overrules the other, more timid, guide. Some people call this guide "my mind" or "my will" as if it were something outside themselves. Well they are right and they are wrong. "Letting go" is not about fight, about being strong. "Letting go" is not about being weak, about surrender. Neither one helps to get rid of the bully guide. What helps is to take ownership of the internalization ; to really stop wanting to escape whatever reality you're in. Picture you being in a prison, and the bully guide says : you may not leave the dungeon, not until your wish to be out has ceased to exist.

The other guide is the inner guide. Let's for now call this the body, or the inner child, the one that is the real you. This is the guide that says "I want" and "I do". This is the guide that IS action. This guide is like a shy child. It is not afraid of the bully guide, but it has no voice like the mind.

Then there is you. You are not your guides, but your guides are part of you. With your attention on either guide, you hear different stories. "I must" or "I want". The guides both talk to you, and you get confused, mixed up, the doubting process begins and procrastination is the result. Attention is psychic energy, and when you have used all of your energy to listen to the guides, there is no more attention left for yourself. You feel trapped. You feel an emptiness inside. You feel bored, want to escape this situation by finding something new ; only to enter another cycle where you feel the loneliness and all these things you wanted to run away from are still there, because you carried them with you all along.

The ideal me is a fake. It is what the environment wants from you. They are your helpers, not your friends.

A friend is someone who enjoys the real you. They want you in no other way than the way you are right now, including all of the potential that you have. They want to find out more about you because the more there is of you the more there is for them to enjoy.

A helper is someone who enjoys the ideal you. They don't pay attention to the real you, they pay attention to the ideal you, their own idea of who you are. And they look in the sky where the ideal you is, and they invite you in by saying "look !" and then they point at the ideal you. And you look away from the real you, and your attention goes to their ideal you, and you start to believe that that is you. And then you're in the expectation, the need to belong, the drama replay of the bully guide who says "you must".

For me, that is a sense of what I set out to achieve in life, where I'd like to see myself and the lessons I'm hoping to undertake along the way, for better or for worse.

My 5 cents: it is a mix of 2/3rd real me and 1/3rd the ideal me. This is the person saying "'i'd like to'" which is a mix of "i want" and "you may not" . This person says "i'm hoping" which is a mix of "i want" and "you may not".

Ask yourself this: what if you were to fully acknowledge the ideal me, who says "you must ask permission"? what if you no longer run away from this "voice" inside your head? what if this parent, this bully guide, what if it were acknowledged : "yes i hear you". What if you inserted 10 seconds between listening and reacting? What if there was a difference between what this guide wants you to do, and what you are going to do? What if you alternate between two states : one in which you would listen only and do nothing ; the other where you only do and never listen?

Isn't confusion about getting mixed up in these two states?

My quest for becoming an honest person is about taking responsibility for both guides. That i am their creator and their host, and that both need my attention in a nurturing way. Both want to help me, and wanting them dead (kill the ego, then you're ok) is not the treatment of an honest person.

Ouch, heavy stuff. I'd better post something funny. Oh well, lets post this first.

EU: what is a servant leader?

The essence of servant leadership i find in a quote by Arthur Koestler :

The egotism of the social holon feeds on the altruism of its members.

For me, servant leadership is the application of the mechanism described above. The servant leader is at the border of the social holon.

She (he) is not an altruistic member, because she does not "give away" in the sense of a zero sum game. Nor is the servant leader the holon itself, because it is not her (his) egotism that is being fed. The servant leader is the point of least resistance between the holon and its members.

The servant leader pays no attention to the members. She (he) pays 100% attention to the social holon. The servant leader "feels" the total of the members' altruism / energizing life force / that brings the social holon into existence. And she (he) gives direction to this energy.

The holon can not live without its members. But the servant leader is "lifted" by the total energy of the group, and into the position that is like a crossroads ; it is the speed and the volume of the energy that keeps the servant leader going. This in effect is a state of "doing nothing", or "wu wei". For a better understanding please consult Joseph Jaworski's book "Synchronicity : the inner path ofleadership"..

The servant leader never "looks" at the members, because the members "look" at her (him) ; after all, she IS the leader. If she were to look at the members, it would confuse the members because then their attention would reflect back onto themselves, and their altruism ("giving") would necessarily cease to flow.

Unfortunately, there is no substitute for experience.
Nevertheless i hope that my writings have shed some light on my personal beliefs.

Hope this helps,
Best regards, Ron
Senator at Europe United
Author of "Bilocality and the inner world of attention"

EU: the statement on LinkedIN

I have a dream that communities become the servant leader of communities.

I believe there is a place for each one of us. This place i call home, a place you can not earn, a place no one can show you. When at this place, we experience flow. When we're outside this place, our attention can not flow and we need to get rid of the superfluous attention by solving problems; or if we run low on problems, by creating problems first and then continue solving them.

We need to acknowledge the fact that there is a place for each and every one of us. That being different is natural, because each of our places is at different locations. The state of abundance is the natural state of every human being.

Servant leaders are women and men who are able to receive the superfluous attention; not to keep, but to forward onto the essence of the community, the very reason why these people are together.

It is my place to be one of those servant leaders. That's where i feel at home.