I just recently got the following email from an ally I call, Ronin, after the masterless samurai of feudal Japan. The ronin were those who’d been trained in the Samurai warrior life of honor, self-mastery, fearlessness, etc. as loyal protectors and servants to a master, and were then set free. Ronin literally means cast upon the waves.
Ronin authored a book after his Vision Force Boot Camp experience and is frustrated that the world does not yet know the power of the Vision Force technology. After he saw our recent promo page for Visionary Mind he was even more frustrated. Here’s part of his email to me:

I am more convinced than ever that the next level for you must be showing, rather than telling.

People need to see your technology in action. Even testimonials from bootcamp attendees are still telling rather than showing.

I am convinced that you need to test yourself, throw yourself into situations where the conflict, emotions
or stakes are high. Film it all and keep what works, and improve the format each time.

You, trying to describe your technology in terms of what it is not and in metaphors is like the great Musashi trying to describe his sword technique (without a sword in his hand) to people who don’t understand anything about swordmanship.

How far could he really get with words? But film him with a sword, and better yet, show him in action with others, and even if they no nothing about technique, the power and mastery of Musashi will be captured and demonstrated. They will feel it in their gut.

It also ties into your desire for being transparent. Get used to being recorded. Bring the bootcamp into every interaction.

Look for opportunities to film a couple of bootcamp challenges for yourself each week. Expect that it won’t
be perfect. But get the raw footage and figure out how you can edit it together to show something about the process and interaction itself.

All for now.

Jim

Well, Ronin, I feel ya brother! And, we have started with video–today. I’m exhausted after a day in the film studio, where we filmed footage for DVDs that we intend to include with future Visionary Mind packages. After that it’s video blogging, and raw video footage of Vision Force in action as we travel to do work with change agents, visionaries, organizations and people in conflict!

(We’re going to include the DVDs retroactively to all who’ve paid the $197 price, and there are only 13 left at that price as of today.)

I shared my feelings in an email to several of our lists yesterday. Funny, the only negative responses I got were from men. This one was typical:

“Yes! You are a Sap!! Now don’t send me your crying a** s**t anymore!!!” (asterisks added)

Of course, we only email people who subscribe themselves to our lists. And this fella was subscribed to one of our “Warrior” lists, so he was probably wanting to get emails that made him feel more… well… manly! LOL

Ok, this leads me to a great point. There is, especially in the West, a blind spot for many of us guys… and it’s not just guys as many women share this.

It’s a relationship to emotions, specifically tearful emotions as weakness. To make this association (even if just subconsciously) is to deny yourself access to one of mankind’s greatest powers.

There are, to be certain, many displays of emotion that are evidence of weakness. The child throwing a tempertantrum, because he can’t get his way, for example, is a prime example. The child, exaggerating his situation, as if he is a helpless victim who deserves our pity is… well, pitiful.

When adults display tears and emotions in this way, it is by our cultural standards, quite pitiful even shameful.

We usually learn that such displays of tears are seen as weak, so we learn to convert our feelings of inferiority, victimization and weakness to anger and agression–without the tears.

You can see this in non-tearful tempertantrums of the teenager… as well as in the adult teenagers, as often displayed by the angry macho male type.

Now, of course, anger can be a useful emotion. But it’s interesting how displays of such non-tearful tempertantrums are often viewed as acceptable responses to circumstance, while tearful, poor-me responses are not.

In many cultures, rallying in the streets in fits of rage, is not only acceptable but something to be proud of. I can’t help but wonder, what our world would be like, if such displays of anger were viewed by the majority of “alpha males” as pathetic, weak reactions. Yet, many of our most visible “alpha male” types in sports, politics, Hollywood, religion, etc. commonly display such pitiful, weak responses in life… which elicit the respect (or fear) from many of their peers and those who emulate them.

(I believe there will come a day when we come to see any such “positionary” reactions to circumstance as weak and shameful… and we’ll see humanity elevate ourselves to
much higher standards of behavior and interaction. To what I’d call visionary standards.)

Personally, I’d be very embarrassed if I reacted to life’s situations the way many macho male types do. For most of them, there simply is no visible third alternative. It’s either be a wuss or take control and force your view, your will, your position on others.

I’d feel like a reactionary wuss if I wrote someone the kind of tempertantrum-type email I got from the fella who sent the email quoted above.

From the world of the positionary, there just don’t seem to be many real ways to access power other than forcing your position on others.

Let’s look specifically at how the macho male type can access more genuine power.

At intense levels, feelings such as sadness, love, joy and honor all produce tears in humans. What these three emotions share is a deep connection to values–to what things mean to you. Your son is born and you feel such immense joy that tears come to your eyes. Your son dies and you feel such immense sadness that tears come to your eyes. Any time you get present enough to how much your son means to you–how much you love him–there will be tears.

The more we cut off access to our feelings (for example, to avoid a display of tears), the more we cut off access to our power.

Think for example of the person at the funeral who is weeping at the loss of his son , who has never really gotten present to how much his son means to him,… until he was gone forever. What a tragedy. Had he gotten present to his intense love for his son, while his son was alive, he would have done and said many things differently. This power to make different choices and take different actions was unavailable though, because the man did not want to feel his feelings.

A man may love his wife, yet the less present he gets to the feeling of love, the less he will act and speak in a way that honors the value of that relationship.

Here’s where honor, the feeling, comes in.

Love and honor are almost indistinguishable, and often felt at the same time. Love arises from being present to what someone (or something) means to you–feeling deeply connected to and valuing someone (or something).
Honor is a deeper cut at love. It has to do with not just getting very present to a value and it’s worth to you; but getting present with your choice to honor that value in the face of challenge. Honor can also be felt as you see others in this light.

Honor is an incredibly powerful emotion. It’s a uniquely human phenomena, because it requires a level of self-consciousness not possible to animals. It’s what’s at the root of the range of heroic actions we see in the world that we refer to as the “human spirit.” What inspires a person to face incredible criticism and even risk to his/her own life? Most often, it’s a feeling that is born from getting present to what is worth standing for. It’s a uniquely human emotion called honor. And it’s far different than pride or happiness.

The feeling of honor is literally a “force” of consciousness that can be accessed at will. In our new product called, Visionary Mind, honor is one of the two natural forces of consciousness that are practically cut off from us as we grow up. The other is vision.

Visionary Mind explains both of these forces in some detail and shows how these natural forces of self-guidance are short-circuited through our relationships with authority growing up. It also shows how that conditioning still guides us today in our moment to moment choices through VisionForce’s proprietary Inner Conflict Diagrams and models. Then, Visionary Mind gives you simple exercises that give you the powerful experience of both honor and vision. You come to experience these as guiding forces in your day to day life, and watch the new actions you take. You simply show up in a heroic way in relation to what is most important to you in life. (If you haven’t gotten that program, get it shipped to your door today.)

Love can have you do great things. Add honor to the equation and you’ll do much greater things–naturally.

Mr. macho is cut off from these heroic dynamics and is guided much more by positionary dynamics such as fear and pseudo-pride. He can, for example, feel good about himself by making himself look somehow superior to another. Pseudo-pride is a poor substitute for genuine honor.

It’s an honor-yielding vision that drives a Gandhi or MLK to make the impossible happen. It’s an honor-yielding vision that drives many great inventors, entrepreneurs, and social innovators. It’s the feeling of honor that often has parents make incredible sacrifices for their children–without experiencing it as a compromise.

The shift from a positionary mind to a visionary mind is what I see is next (and Now!) for human beings. It’s a fundamental shift in the way we relate to ourselves, our values, our responsibility and each other. And it’s what we’re all about here at VisionForce.com.
The “alpha male” of the future will be an inspired visionary, not a macho positionary.

Women, are more likely, as I see it, to be making this shift first, as they tend to have more access to feeling their emotions and thus feeling the powerful emotion of honor.

Here’s a video from one woman’s experience of vision and honor.

Who will lead the way? Women? Men? Does it matter? What about you? Who will lead your family, your community? Post comments below.

To get the complete Visionary Mind home study program shipped to your door, go here.

Yes, we’re building a robust on-line member area for visionaries… and, yes, it’s free.  However, our home away from home is a place in cyberspace called… shhhhh…. Zaadz.  It’s a social networking site for people like you who are up to changing the world.  Brian, the man behind the curtain at zaadz (actually, there is no curtain at zaadz), is pioneering some amazing things over there.  Go see for yourself and play with us.

You can blog, network, learn, evolve, play and live inside of a world of conscious people there.  And if you don’t immediately find “your kind of people there,” create them!  Invite your conscious friends, family, coworkers and playmates.  After you check it out, leave a comment about your experience below.

We laugh at different times and for different reasons. Why do you laugh? Consider that laughter is a release. When we laugh, it’s often an involuntary response to a paradigm shift.

Suppose you live a life of frustration, anger and despair because “the man” has got you down. In your world, life is hard and it’s all the fault of “the man.” So, someone tells a story about “the man,” and it engages your paradigm and all the weight you place on your paradigm. Suddenly, there is a paradigm shift, as the story teller makes a turn in his story that has you see things from a whole new perspective–with “the man” as the butt of the joke. And you laugh. Of course there’s an art to this, and if you’re really good at shifting paradigms in a way that elicits laughter, you can hit the road and make a lot of money from the stage.

This begs the question, what do you laugh at? What you laugh at and why you laugh says a lot about the paradigm you operate from.

Since I was a kid I laughed when I could elicit a dramatic emotional reaction from someone. Looking back, I can see a number of dynamics in play. For one, it allowed me to see myself as “superior,” because they were reacting emotionally for no sound reason. They were in my eyes less mature. (how arrogant!) Indeed, it was an easy shortcut to feel good about myself as an adolescent. In time, it evolved me such that I was freer from the shame and guilt pressures of authority and the majority than the average bear. I did come to pride myself in being “wise” and mature, and in many ways this led me down the path of learning more and more about psychology, philosophy, the mind, etc.

Generally, anyone who placed what I deemed to be unnecessary weight on a certain issue (especially the issue of their image in others’ eyes) was fair game for teasing.

There were (and are) not many limits to this. I would quite often (and still do) make a fool of myself to have someone look at me weird or have them think I’m someone I’m not. For example, I may intentionally respond in an exaggerated childish way around a friend who places a lot of weight in appearing mature. I elicit a certain look from them and then I laugh and we laugh (if they can laugh about it). Or, I’ll pretend to morally judge someone for an action they are trying not to be judged for. I elicit a defensive response, and I laugh and we laugh (if they can laugh about it). There is no seeming end to this. If someone is very uptight about any aspect of life or themselves, I’ll play the role that has us both be able to laugh about the extra weight they’re giving it. If someone is extra concerned about ego and people who have an extra large one, I’ll make comments that have them seeing me this way. And often, people don’t find such things funny. And it irks them that I laugh it off.

There are many things I do not find funny, however. When someone laughs at or judges the awkward person who is risking the esteem of others to follow her own mind and heart, I don’t. Not only do I not find it funny, it bothers me. A lot of people also laugh at the heroes, the successful people, because it makes them uncomfortable to either be seen as less than or to be reminded how they themselves are not making the effort required to be as successful. There was a video on the internet I saw of a many spitting in Bill Gates face. A lot of people found this funny. To me, nothing could be less funny.

Both of these things make people uncomfortable. Both of these things remind a person how they could also be risking the esteem of others to follow their mind and heart. We want to look good all the way to the top, but we fear stepping out and looking foolish. So we’re uncomfortable around the awkward person who is stretching themselves beyond their given social position/identity. We’re uncomfortable around the people who have risked what we don’t dare to risk. It’s easy to laugh at them.  (And it’s interesting how Hollywood generally only dares to inspire us to a certain extent before poking fun at the hero… thereby diminishing the power of a movie that could have been incredibly powerful.  Armageddon is a great example.)
Of course those who stay “inside the box” laugh at those who flounder outside of the box–the rebels, the radicals, the visionaries. Those who can’t take this social pressure jump back inside the box sooner or later, or live some kind of compromised existence on the edge of the box or close to the box (and they suffer on the edge of true freedom).
And, it’s important for these who stray from the box of the majority’s and authority’s norms to have the freedom to laugh at the pressure exerted by the masses to return to the box. You, the visionary, make them very uncomfortable. They seek a reason to laugh at you. Yet you are the one who is risking your social position and your very psychological identity to “be the change,” and come hell or high water, you WILL make this world a better place for all of us–them included. So, your freedom to laugh at the pressure they place upon you to fit in or be normal is invaluable to you–and thus to them.

Now, what’s interesting is that your laughter can help them shift their own paradigm and free themselves from their box. Your laughter can help free them to stand for their own values and vision, in the face of the world’s judgments and criticism.

Just think about why you laugh and when you laugh. Are you liberating yourself and others?

Laughter can free you from the external pressure to conform, or it can free you from the internal pressure to follow your values and dreams in the face of external pressure to conform.

So laugh your ass off today as you step free from what the critics and doubters might think. Free yourself to be yourself.

Post your comments below.

Over here at VisionForce we’ve been asking some radical questions that are evolving our entire idea of how we can best facilitate the coming waves of evolution. From the Stone Age to the Information Age, civilization has been defined largely by the tools of the times. New tools give us more power to do and to be. And as we realize there is more we can do and be, the more we elevate our ideas about what should be. And as we elevate our ideas about what should be, we change our ideas of what we should do and be. And as those change, we change the behaviors that we shame and honor.

The more one sees the extent to which shame and honor dynamics shape human behavior, the more one can begin to grasp the size of the waves of change that are headed our way. The tools that we as humans are just beginning to build give us access to power in a whole new realm–the realm of consciousness. (Before you assume that I am referring to the common tools you’ll find in the domains of religion, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, sociology, human development, self-help or New Age; I’ll tell you I’m talking about a Next level of tools that will arise in those domains. That Next level of tools is emerging as we develop more valid models of consciousness.)

These tools will give us a greater ability to create the kind of world that really works for all of us, and with that greater power, our standards, values and expectations will rise. Then, so too will the behaviors that we shame and honor shift. And with that shift will come the kind of mass behavioral change that will define the coming age, which may very well come to be know as the Age of Consciousness (or the Age of Vision, if I had my druthers). So sudden, so deep and so widespread will the changes be that the word revolution may apply better than evolution.

And the world that will emerge will be, I believe, brighter and more glorious than many of us dare to imagine. For most of our existence the power of our tools in the physical world have surpassed the power of our tools in our inner world. When MLK said, we have guided missles and misguided men, he was pointing to a dangerous dynamic that has only grown worse in the centuries since his death. Will we evolve the technology to be ethical enough and live together in peace and prosperity before we annihilate ourselves and each other? For the last two centuries the light of hope at the end of that tunnel seemed to grow smaller and smaller.

All that, I see, is about to change.

Here at VisionForce, we think we have some truly cutting edge ideas and tools in this new domain, created from our emerging model of consciousness. And the questions we’re asking now are having us look at how we can facilitate the coming revolution the best, rather than how we can best sell the ideas or the tools to people. These questions are changing everything.

This is just a heads up! Watch for ongoing evolution here at VisionForce over the coming months.

What do you see?  Add your voice below.

A message I made for you at 3:45am this morning, because there was something I had to say. I welcome your reply in Comments below.
MP3 File

preBeta… that’s the mode we’re in here at VisionForce.com. Nearly 4 years ago we held our first-ever event, a boot camp. It was the first public introduction of the VisionForce methodologies, after 6 years of research and development. Since then, we’ve been testing all sorts of ways to deliver these concepts and methods, from face to face boot camps (intensive small group trainings), to weekend workshops (less formal), to on-line automated interactive programs, to tele-workshops, to 2-month tele-programs (delivered via conference call and on-line), to internet membership areas, to on-line ebooks, etc. And we’ve also been “finding our niche,” and how to best communicate what we offer.

Bottom line is, we’re still in the inquiry. We’re still testing new approaches and models (as you’ve noticed if you’ve been following us long). Well, rather than try to present a polished image that gives people the illusion that we are a more established company or institution, let’s say exactly what phase of the business we’re in and tell people what they can expect.

We’re still in start-up mode, and you can expect changes–lots of them. A great way of identifying a web site or project that is still in early testing stages is to call it a beta version. But what about a web site or project that is not even ready for wide public testing, and is still in the early development stage? “pre-Beta” is the term we’ll be using.

Yes, many of the programs and events we offer produce incredible results (and as you’ve probably noticed get incredible reviews), so the “technology” that we offer is quite well developed. What is as yet quite undeveloped is our organizational model, including our on-line structures.
So, if we simply say we’re in the preBeta phase, then you will know to expect rapid evolution (change) here at VisionForce.com.

What we want to do is build the kind of structure that will allow people who are ready (you) to join with us in creating the kind of change the world needs now. There are a lot of things in the works, so stay tuned. In the mean time, expect change–lots of it–here at VisionForce.com. And please sound in with your feedback and comments to the blog (below).