Lesson 2

Make sure to complete your four everyday exercises along with today's class where we will look more at your thoughts on being the ideal person and also examine stereotypes.


When you look at your belief around what it takes to be the ideal person it is probably not much different than the impression that all of society envisions. You did not start to believe in this by mistake. It is an impression that grew over time as you watched how the world reacts to certain types of people both favorably and dismissively. 

Most of us either try our whole life to attain the ideal existence while others just give up and settle for what we think we deserve, falling well short of the picture of ideal.  We settle because we went ahead and just gave up rather than strive for something we aren't sure we could ever attain. 

Imagine a pyramid and sitting on top of that pyramid is the throne for the world's most ideal human being. We look up at that person hoping one day to be good enough that we might sit on that throne. We believe that we will ascend a little at a time until we will one day be worthy to sit atop of the pyramid. We try and we try and try and then some folks just give up right out of the gate believing from the beginning that they will never be worthy. Most people believe in some version of the fallacy that striving for the throne is the main goal of our earthly agenda. If you fail to want these things then your worth will be in question and you will be dismissed.

What we don't understand is how much a myth this really is. The ideal person does not exist. A day will not come for anyone where everything in the world will finally work out and your life will suddenly be perfect. You'll never master the universe. No one ever has, that is part of being human. What you can master is your internal beliefs. First you have to give up on this idea that there is an ideal way to be. 

If being ideal was not a myth then we'd all be the same. There'd be no need for humans to be born different. There'd be a copy/clone of you somewhere in the universe but there is not. That is a phenomenon that does not exist in nature. There is a reason there is only one you. That reason is that you were born into this world to be exactly who/what you are. You weren't meant to strive to meet the world's expectations. If we all meet those expectations and somehow managed to be the perfect person, the need for human existence would cease. The project would be over. The project is rather this, you are born to the earth to learn to be exactly you in spite of the pressures of society to conform. We have had it all wrong. We should not want to be part of the army of perfect soldiers. We should seek to be a unique universe, wrapped in a body, that will never be duplicated.

Today's exercise is to think about all the ways society categorizes humans by both list and definition. So list all the different stereotypes you can think of and define them all. Now list people who have defied each stereotype. Think about the people who seem idyllic who have fallen or turned out not to be what they presented themselves to be. Think of all the people who have stunned the world with their acts of courage who might have seemed very common, meek and mild. 

Now go out into your yard and pick up one stick for every one of these stereotypes you listed. Count them and as you do assign each one a type from your list. Start a fire in a safe area if you have the space and ability to do so. Now, one by one, burn every last stick. While you burn them allow yourself to let go of all these ideas that have been projected on society about what makes one acceptable or dismissed. An alternate exercise might be to read back over your list one last time and either burn the whole list or tear off each stereotype and burn them one by one. The idea is just to take those ideas we have about certain types of humans and ways of being and clear them away to a blank slate.

Go forth in your day and shine

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