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By Cathy Eck

As we practice letting go of the true mental cause of every problem in our life, our confusion slowly disappears.  Things do start to make sense. Then we realize that we’re not encountering so many problems anymore.  There is no bolt of lightning or angels in the sky moment.  It’s a gradual, organic change.  At this point, we often begin to feel incompetent when we try to explain what we feel to others.  We feel too different.  Others don’t get us.  We don’t want to be around our friends and family anymore.  Let me explain why.

We are born to be creators.  The purpose of our mind is to act as a bridge so that we can express what is within our mind in the outer world.  If our minds had remained dominated by our True Self, problems would not even be a topic of conversation.  We’d have no problems.  But that isn’t our reality.

We do have problems because we’ve accepted knowledge, beliefs, and ideas from others who were not thinking true thoughts. We’re creating things we don’t want because we are thinking the way others want us to think.  And that’s why people are depressed, drugged, angry as hell, and can’t stand life anymore.

Our minds are designed to look for causes when things go wrong.  It just makes sense.  And they are designed to let go (not put more beliefs or better thoughts into our mind to counteract the false cause).  The law of cause and effect means looking for an inner mental cause.  Few people practice cause and effect as designed; they mostly practice reasoning.

Reasoning looks for an outer physical reason for a problem.  For example, we have a headache; and the cause is that we’re stressed because we believe that we won’t be able to get everything done that we need to do.  Now stress isn’t the cause; the cause is the belief that’s causing the stress.  Many today blame the stress, which is a fatal flaw.  When you blame the feminine aspect of any situation, you can’t fix the situation.  Emotions (or stress or pain) are feminine in nature; the causal belief is masculine.  If we doggedly hold on to the causal belief, we aren’t going to fix anything ever.

At best, we can fix the effect; and that is exactly what everyone does.  They can’t let go of the belief, the stress won’t go away, so they take an aspirin.  But they still feel bad.  So they blame the stress on their boss (a completely outer reason) for giving them too much work.  In this way, they’ve got something to complain about.  Now they will try and fix the boss, if that is possible.  They will try to gain the masculine role by manipulation or whining.  If they do successfully manipulate the boss, they will consider the problem fixed.  Or maybe they’ll just quite the job; but they will have a new boss just like the old one in time.  This is the making of a control freak.  This person will now be fixing everyone and every situation so that they don’t have to feel the emotions caused by their own FALSE beliefs.

Reasoning (or intellectual domination or eating from the Tree of Knowledge) created a huge shift in the way we think that took us out of the Garden of Eden.  When we moved from cause and effect to reasoning, we were assured that problems would repeat again and again without any chance of resolution.  God’s curse actually makes sense because reasoning makes work hard; and the birth of a new idea becomes painful or impossible.

Reasoning created all religions; and it’s why they’re all so inherently flawed.  Reasoning is also behind science since most scientists just prove what they believe.  People are so used to thinking in this way, that they accept illogical reasons with ease; but they’re often suspicious of true wisdom.  When we point out the cause within their mind, they act like we’re hurting them.  We’re not; they just think they are their beliefs.  Consequently, when we finally move beyond reasoning and back into wisdom ourselves, we become unpopular with the intellectuals and the victims.  But we don’t have to lay down and die.  We can take back our OWN minds and no longer be affected by those who chose to worship the illusion.

Reasoning is mostly about shifting the blame.  Reasoning is about projection.  It’s reasoning that keeps us stuck in the illusion.  Here is how the typical mind works before the fall into knowledge.

The Wisdom of Cause and Effect

Joe has just arrived home from school.  He stops to talk to his mom.

Joe:  Mom, today at school, we had a pop quiz in math class.  I know I did terrible.  I’m so afraid that I’m going to flunk this class.  It will ruin my chances to get into Harvard.

Mom:  That’s strange; you love math.  You always get A’s.

Joe:  It’s not the math, mom; it’s the fear that comes up when Mr. Smith says, “Today we’re going to have a pop quiz.”

Mom:  Okay so go into that fear; witness it.  What thoughts arise?

Joe:  I just feel like I’ll fail.  I feel out of control.  I feel unprepared.  Oh so much emotion, mom; I hate it.

Mom:  I know, I know, but you won’t find the cause unless you go toward the fear.  Stay with it; don’t run away.  Do you see that all of those thoughts came out of that fear.  Get with it Joe.  Are they true?

Joe:  Shit mom, you’re so right.  As soon as he says, “pop quiz,” I start believing my mind.  It just lies and lies.  It takes me into his world.  It is like I don’t know anything in his world.

Mom: I get that, but you can’t change him.  He’s got the masculine role, you know.  So go back now to the class in your mind.

Joe:  It’s the way Mr. Smith looks at us when he announces the quiz.  That’s where the fear arises.  It’s a sinister look like he wants to trick us.  I mean he could give tests like other teachers, you know?

Mom:  Yes he could, but he doesn’t.  I won’t feel sorry for you, Joe, because I want you to find the cause.  The issue is about being tricked.  Am I right?

Joe:  Yes, yes, normally when I take a test, I feel like I get to prove my ability.  I feel confident.  I even kind of enjoy it.  In this case, I feel like he wants to trick me and pull me down.  I can see that believing that is the cause.  But I don’t want to let it go.  I want to make him wrong.

Mom:  And does that help you in any way?

Joe:  It gives me something to complain about.  No one likes Mr. Smith — I like having a common enemy with my friends.

Mom:  So do you want to gossip about Mr. Smith with your friends or go to Harvard?  You might all be reading him correctly.  But that doesn’t change anything.  What matters is that you let go of the belief that another can pull you down…trick you…cause you to fall out of the natural math genius that you are.

Joe:  You’re right.  Thanks mom.  I actually kind of hope he gives us a quiz tomorrow.  I feel like I’ll ace it.

Okay, you see the direction of this conversation.  No blame, no right or wrong, no good or evil, no victimhood allowed, and no fucking sympathy… just in, in, in until the cause is found within Joe and the relief comes.  This is what’s required because Joe is in the feminine role to Mr. Smith.  There’s no way in hell that Joe can go to Mr. Smith and say, “You look sinister when you give us those quizzes.  Do you intend to trick us?  You need to stop that.”  Joe must recognize that Mr. Smith will be Mr. Smith; but Joe can let go of what he’s believing about Mr. Smith.  Then Joe won’t be bothered by Mr. Smith because Joe won’t lose himself in his classroom.

Reasoning (makes the cause outer)

In the illusion, we don’t believe we can change the masculine role from the feminine, so here’s another example.  This one examines what most people tend to do.  What I want you to notice is that there’s a strange unhealthy satisfaction in finding a reason and making someone else bad.  That’s because reasons sooth the cognitive dissonance in our minds.  They answer the question, “Why is this happening to me?”  So we feel relief.  But we don’t fix the problem.  Also making another bad implies that we’re good; that also provides some relief in the fallen world of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  We might be suffering, but at least we’re good.  But goodness doesn’t get us to the calmness of the True Self.  Reasoning doesn’t help to ease Joe’s fear, nor does it get him to Harvard (which he says is his current desire).

Joe and Dave are walking out of Mr. Smith’s class after a pop quiz.

Joe: I think I did terrible on that pop quiz.  Shit, I’m afraid I’m going to flunk math class.

Dave: That’s strange, Joe, you love math.  You’re always the best kid in the class.

Joe:  Yea, you piss me off when you make fun of me for it.

Dave:  Just showing the love bro…it’s all good.

Joe: It’s not the math; it’s the fear that comes up when Mr. Smith says, “Today we’re going to have a pop quiz.”

Dave: Yea, I’m kind of afraid of him too.  It’s like he gives us the evil eye when he hands out the tests.  I think he wants us to fail.

Joe: The truth is that I hate the guy.  I feel like he’s taken over my mind.  No matter how much I study, I’m never prepared.

Dave: I guess I’m lucky.  I’m never good at math so he’s just like every other douche math teacher to me.

Joe: But Dave, what about college?  We have to take the SAT exam in a year.  There’s math on it.

Dave: I’m not going to college Joe.  I’m not smart like you.  I just want to get out of school and apprentice.  I love working with my hands.  I hate memorizing information.  I hate thinking like everyone else.

Joe: I have to go to college, or my dad will kill me.  I’ve got to pass this class.

Dave: Well I can’t help you Joe.  Wish I could.  Don’t take it personal, Mr. Smith is an ass.  It isn’t your fault.

Joe: I feel a little better.  At least it isn’t me.

Dave: Glad I could help.

Okay, Dave is a “nice” guy.  He’s a people pleaser.  He’s honest (not truthful), and he cares about Joe.  That’s obvious.  But is Joe in a better place or a worse place?  Much worse.  He’s more trapped in his situation with Mr. Smith than he was before the conversation.  That’s because they’re treating the situation with Mr. Smith as if it was the truth (rather than a falsely created reality).  It’s considered the starting point, when thoughts in Joe’s mind were the real starting point for Joe.  You see we link people together into roles.  If we pull Joe out of Mr. Smith’s world, we can see that Joe is the source of Joe’s problem.  If we include Joe in the group of students, now the cause is very hard to see.  This is why members of groups can’t see the group baggage.

Dave has behaved in a friendly way, according to social protocol, but now Joe has support for his problem making it even more real.  I want you to see this clearly.  Dave supported Joe’s problem, not JOE.  We all do this, and we call it friendship.  This is what keeps people stuck in problem after problem.  They are doing it to themselves, and they call other people good friends who support this nonsense.   In fact, if you don’t support their nonsense, you will probably be labeled a bad friend or rude.

I often tell the people I mentor to stop gossiping, stop looking for sympathy, and stop fucking whining.   I’m not being a mean mentor or judging them.  I just know that if they work really hard to let something go, and then they see their friend and go back into complaining about their situation, they erase all the good work they did.  Then they will say that letting go doesn’t work.  They have it backwards.  Gossiping, sympathy, and whining don’t work.  But the false self will never tell you that or allow you to see that.

The false mind likes to convince us that Joe and Dave’s conversation is cause and effect.  They believe they found the cause, which is Mr. Smith.  But Mr. Smith is outside of their control.  They are both in feminine roles to Mr. Smith.  Reasoning leads to death; as you reason, you solidify your feminine role within every situation until you have no power left.  This is why death was associated with the Tree of Knowledge.

Most people consider the problem fixed after this conversation because they’ve reasoned that they aren’t the problem so they’ve done their analysis.   In fact, the worst people at this are therapists and New Agers.  They add their “intuition” or “knowledge of people within the illusion” to it.  They will tell you a really good reason for your problem like “You had a past life in battle where you got tricked by one of your own,” or you have “school avoidance syndrome.”  Oh, whooped ti do.  Now you have an amazing reason why you will always get tricked and lose your Self in learning situations.   That’s really helpful.  Let me pay you a lot of money for that.  Like reasoning, intuition is what we use to navigate in the illusion.  Escape the illusion; and you will never, ever need either of them again.

We do this stupid shit because we live in a world where drama is king.  We think we’re social adepts if we can talk about worthless bullshit and give up our quality of life in a conversation.  We don’t fix loneliness when we do that; we create it.  We become increasingly lonely for our True Self.

We are even taught to think that people who don’t choose to do this have some psychological disorder like Asperger’s Syndrome.  If we don’t whine, complain, or gossip, we might feel that we won’t have anything to talk about.  In some circles, we don’t.

If you want to stay on the path of initiation, you MUST practice owning the true masculine role in any situation where there’s no wise ones around.  Start with easy people like friends.  Then work your way up to parents, teachers, Presidents, and even the Pope.  In the first situation, Joe could stay in the feminine role because his mom was wise enough to not agree with him.  She helped him to find the cause and effect relationship.  She helped him let go.  The roles didn’t have to change for Joe to break free, and their conversation was empowering.

In the second situation, Dave isn’t being a wise person.  Joe is sometimes wise; but in this situation, he’s completely sucked into his false self.  Any conversation with almost any person will solidify his false self’s position.  Having had a taste of wisdom, Joe might feel alone if his mom wasn’t around.  He might feel that none of his friends support him or understand him.  That isn’t true, they’re trying to understand him.  But asking a person, who has been trained to believe that the illusion is true, to understand letting go or true and false is like asking a first grader to explain calculus.  It can’t be done.

So let’s go back to Joe and Dave, and let’s see what Joe must do.  He might be stuck in his false self, but Joe knows something Dave doesn’t.  Joe knows that he can get out of his false self.  His mom taught him that.  And I realize you didn’t have Joe’s mom growing up, so don’t be hard on yourself for this.  You can learn how to do this now.  It’s never too late.  Dave will probably not help him discover the true cause and effect relationship; Dave would most likely offer reasoning.  So Joe must step into the masculine role and guide the conversation.

Using Roles to Regain Power in the Illusion

Joe: (looking perplexed as he walks out of class)  Hi Dave!

Dave: That quiz was tough, wish I was a math wiz like you.

Joe: Not sure I was a wiz today, but let’s not go there.  I heard you might be looking into an apprenticeship after school.  Tell me about it.

Dave: Yea, I realized that I’m really good with my hands.  I have a lot of things I like to do.  Quite frankly, I’d play video games forever if I could make money at it.

Joe: Hey don’t rule that out.  You know, professional gaming is catching on.  Some of those prizes are s-w-e-e-t!

Dave: I guess I’ve learned that I hate memorizing information. I hate thinking like everyone else.  Gaming sort of let’s my mind be quiet.  But I feel the same way when I work on my dad’s car, you know.  But not like fixing it.  I like making it work better.  I’ve also been doing some sculpting lately.  But don’t tell anyone that; they’ll think I’m gay or something.

Joe: I have to go to college or my dad will kill me.  Or… I guess I think that.  But I admire your courage to go for what you truly love.

Dave: Yea, I’ve been a little embarrassed to tell people, afraid that I’ll get judged for not doing the cool thing.

Joe: What?  Don’t be embarrassed.  Hell Dave, sculpting, pro gamer, improver of cars…is that what you call it?  Those are cool jobs, Dave.  Nothing at all to be embarrassed about.  Just let those thoughts go.  They don’t help you anyway, you know?

Dave: Man thanks Joe.  I feel so much better now.  I really didn’t like hiding my plans from everyone.  I was just worried about fitting in.

Joe:  I’ve got your back buddy.

Now I guarantee you two things.  Dave is no longer embarrassed.  Joe’s lack of judgment helped him to let go of his fear of coming out of the closet with his secret desire.  That’s the beauty of what we can offer when we stand in the true masculine role.  Second, now that Joe is in his own true masculine, he can fix his own feminine problem.  He can be his own God, just like his mom did in the situation above.  But I also want to point out, that Joe wasn’t being nice.  That would have kept Dave trapped.  Joe was being real and truthful.  Joe was setting the tone and allowing Dave’s True Self to join him.  He was allowing Dave’s passion to ignite his own passion.  He was only in the masculine role to make sure the conversation didn’t go into gossip, complaining, or victimhood  since it probably had many times before.  But Joe never dominated Dave because that would be a false masculine behavior.

This is what true conversations look like when one person in any group is in the true masculine role.  This is what being a leader is about.  In a business, the same is true.  It’s the difference between people meeting at the water cooler to discuss new ideas and get feedback vs. people whining about the boss.   It’s also true in government.  If Obama could move into the true masculine, America would be back on top again.  There would be no division in Congress.  But almost no one can do this because we’ve been trained to be false leaders since birth.  We’re so good at providing reasons; and we’re so painfully bad at fixing problems at their cause.

Back to Cause and Effect

Joe goes off by himself for a few minutes; he sits under a nice big, old tree.  He goes back to the fear at the time of the pop quiz, and he realizes that any thoughts that arise in his mind now are false because they’re connected to this fear.  He sees the thought that he’s powerless, the thought that Mr. Smith is out to get him, and the thought that he can’t succeed at this.  He lets those go because they aren’t true (they feel horrible).   Eventually, he realizes that he feels like he’s being tricked, and he notices that he associates being tricked with failing.  If someone tricks you, they have the upper hand.  If someone tricks you, they catch you off guard.  If someone false tricks you, they pull you into their world.  These are all beliefs we hold about being tricked — they aren’t true unless we believe we can be tricked.  Joe’s found the cause.  Now a memory might come up as an insight.  And it will be the true cause.  It’s not intuition; it’s inspiration.  Joe will have a little higher view of the world and his place in it because he will know that he can’t be pulled into any teacher’s illusion anymore.  And he’ll go to Harvard or become a great mathematician even if he never goes to school.  He’s back on his path.

Now if I was with Joe, I’d explain the archetype he has encountered.  In much of old mythology and religious stories, some Lord (who was a false God) posed as God and tricked people into following him.  The most popular of these stories is Adam and Eve.  Tricking is one of the most common ways that stories got people into the illusion.  Tricksters exists in every culture’s mythology.  But some say that tricking wasn’t meant to be a bad thing.  They say that people were boring.  They just hung out in the Garden of Eden watching the fruit grow.  They didn’t invent or create.  They simply followed God’s will all the time.  So they had to be tricked into the world where they could create and manifest their own ideas.  They were tricked into looking outside rather than inside.  And when they started looking out, they forgot that the cause was still within.  Reasoning was born.  Looking outside didn’t cause the fall.  The fall would have never occurred if judgment (good and evil) didn’t come into the picture.  But that’s another blog post.

Joe is a math genius.  He didn’t know how to fail at math before Mr. Smith.  Math is his gift.  He doesn’t memorize math; he knows math.  He’s living now and will live and work inside of the illusion for most of his life, but he will never be pulled unwillingly into the illusion regarding math again.  Mr. Smith is a false math god.  His room represents the math illusion where people pass or fail.  If you pass, you’re good.  If you fail, you’re evil.  Mr. Smith doesn’t even know he does this.  In fact, he has the highest test scores in the school.  He was teacher of the year because most of the children he teaches learn math by memory; and they do well in his fear-centered environment.  Memorization of things we won’t need in the future isn’t normal; but fear motivates us to do it.

By letting go, Joe moves back into his True Self where math is part of who he is.  Mr. Smith still has an illusory classroom, with illusory memorizing kids; but Joe is no longer part of the pass-fail mentality.  He now takes his quizzes with confidence and hasn’t missed a single question since.

When we let go from the feminine role, we step out of the illusion that the person in the masculine role has cast us in.  We’re beyond roles.  We’re our Selves; and our True Selves are always free.  We don’t listen to reasons anymore; they just don’t make sense.  And when we reach this place of wisdom, knowledge returns to its proper submissive position.  As long as knowledge submits to wisdom, we can learn all we want.  Knowledge is only a problem when it becomes more powerful than wisdom.  Likewise, reason is only bad for us when it replaces cause and effect.

With all of this being said, I’ve got a suggestion.  Try to shift your conversations in this way.  If you’re lucky enough to have others who want to move toward freedom, make a pact to support each other in freedom and never again disrespect your True Selves in the way that most friends and family do.  I live this way much of the time because I guide conversations with the people I mentor in this way.  I also did it in my business before I even knew what I was doing.  The beauty of what I share in this post is that you have unlimited moments in each day to practice moving from reasoning to cause and effect.  And each time you do, you get closer to the gates of freedom.