Pretense Flashcards
THE PRETENSE OF JEALOUSY
Jealousy is being consumed by wanting what someone else has that you don’t; putting your attention on wanting what someone else has that you don’t, all the while believing, or, more accurately, pretending that that gives them some advantage over you. This is a great way to avoid putting your attention on what you DO have. As soon as you’ve granted them the advantage, you’ve just destroyed your own self-worth .Jealousy is a pretense(lie) because you’ve taken your attention off your own talents and abilities. You’re putting your attention in the wrong place.
Guess what? You are a star on your own stage! Did your mind just go into total resistance to that fact? Tell the truth! If you are jealous, the truth is you’re being too lazy to look around and take note of your own talents. You are also pretending that you have no stage of your own with an audience just waiting to applaud you. With your attention riveted on jealousy ,you can be sure you will never turn on your own footlights.
Everyone has expertise in something. One type of expertise is not any better than another—just as one ingredient in a cake is no better than another. Is an egg, flour? Is flour, sugar? Is milk, water? Can you create a cake without all the ingredients? We, humans, make long lists of better than ingredients and attribute them all to other people. The truth is their abilities are not better than, only different. If someone else has a skill, ability, or great relationship that makes them shine, it is far easier to put your attention on jealousy than to notice your own abilities. There is always a positive quality under all that jealousy, but you won’t see it until you quit pretending and start looking for it Jealousy will never clear up by looking outside yourself. You can’t make jealousy disappear by trying to change the other person or by adopting martyrdom or remaking yourself for someone else. These things simply keep your attention further away from telling the truth about your qualities.
They keep your mind busily engaged in pretending.
TELLING THE TRUTH IS RECOGNIZING THAT YOUR ATTENTION IS IN THE WRONG PLACE. It is also recognizing that you have just given up your relationship in favor of an attitude called
jealousy. You’ve disappeared into the fog of pretense in your mind. You have stated that your mind’s chattering pretense is far more important to you than your relationship. You have CHOSEN to create a condition called jealousy, RATHER than create an ecstatic relationship.
You can’t be jealous and
be in a relationship
that is whole, complete and sound.
THE PRETENSE OF FEAR
There is not a person I know who is not afraid of something, and most peo ple are afraid of a lot Fears are lies when you allow them to keep you from having love, health, happiness and full self-expression in your life. Notice I said YOU ALLOW. The only place fear exists is between your two ears. The startling truth is that fear has never stopped you from doing anything. You USED fear to stop yourself. Fear has never barricaded your door and prevented you from leaving your house to look for that job. Fear never made your phone receiver weigh four hundred pounds so you couldn’t lift it to make that date. Fear never stopped you from meeting someone new at a party. Fear is a fantasy creature you made up inside your head to take the blame when you don’t have the courage to do something or the willingness to admit that you can’t
Left to your own devices, you will gravitate towards fear and her twin sister, worry. It’s inconceivable for most of us that life could be without something to worry about or to fear. Here, you never go into a relationship telling the truth because you have so much to protect The only Point ofView you can have, when you are coming from fear and worry, is that everything in life is a threat. The only reaction you can have to threat is to seek protection. Here, you will do anything to get away from, or be protected from, that threat There is no way you can tell the truth under these circumstances. It certainly isn’t possible to have an ecstatic relationship if you are afraid of it threatened by it and want to be protected from it while trying to make the relationship work.
Pretense of failure
Failure means not producing an expected result. THAT IS ALL IT MEANS! Yet most of you react to failure as if your life were at stake. If failure killed, no one would make it past diapers!
Not producing an expected result is JUST THAT. Failure is ajudgment you make about yourself that you funereally drape around the simple fact (truth) that a result you expected to produce didn’t get produced. Failure, bydefinition,isabouttheRESULTnothappeningandyouareredefiningit to mean YOU are not happening.
You cannot BE a failure. Yes, you can NOT produce an expected result, but that is ONLY what you did not DO. It is not a statement of who you ARE. Or, ARE NOT. When you insist that you ARE what you DO (or don’t do), you’re pretending. You are not telling the truth. As soon as you create this pretense, it automatically puts you in a condition of feeling worthless. To tell the simple truth, “I did not produce that result,” enhan ces your sense ofworth and creates the freedom to choose the next result to produce, or NOT produce.
THE PRETENSE OF BLAME
Humans are never at a loss for thinking up new and different ways for temporary relief from being responsible. Blame is a favorite temporary
reliever.
Blame goes like this:According to you, things are as they are because someone else made them that way. You had nothing to do with it You don’t like it. It’s being done TO you and, what’s more, you want someone or something else to stop it!
Blame only occurs in the first Universe of Experience, the one of your personal and private world. When you experience blame, it exists only in your mind. You are holding a viewpoint so narrow that it conveniently blinds you to your responsibility in the matter. When you blame, you’ve taken reality and then dressed it up with your judgment of it This judgment is a lie you tell yourself about reality. Your attention is focused on blaming, not on what is fact You are seeing your judgment not reality.
Your mate leaves dirty dishes in the sink and you don’t like it You’re in the blame pretense and think those dishes have been left there just to get you. After all, it isn’t the first time. You aren’t the least bit willing to wash them yourself. Furthermore, you want them washed immediately AND by your mate. You waggle your accusing finger at the other person and milk the blame pretense for all it’s worth.
The truth is your mate left dirty dishes in the sink. That is ail that happened. The blame pretense is all that YOU added, in your mind, to the fact that the dishes didn’t get washed. If dirty dishes irritate you, wash them and eliminate your irritation. When you won’t be responsible for eliminating things you say irritate you, look again. Are the dirty dishes in the sink an irritation in and of themselves or are you in your blame pretense creating a betrayal that demands revenge? If you are at blame you’11see the dishes as a betrayal that you feel must be avenged—AND it all happened in your head; not in the sink. Blame is futile for two reasons: one, the irritation remains, Le., the dishes aren’t done; two, you experience the dishes not being done as a betrayal. Your mate may very well be out doing your laundry, buying your food or even on the way home to surprise you with a gift
BLAME IS USED TO EXCUSE AND JUSTIFY IRRESPONSIBILITY. In our society there is the implication that if we are responsible for something AND that something^ces wrong, we are to blame. The truth is that blame has absolutely nothing to do with responsibility.
Werner Erhard once explained responsibility to me as follows:
Responsibility starts with the willingness to acknowledge that we are cause in a matter. It starts with the willingness to deal with a situation from and with, the point of view, whether at the moment realized or not, that we are the source of what we are, what we do and what we have.Nowhere in that definition does the word blame get mentioned. A responsible person is simply one who recognizes their part in bringing about all the circumstances that surround them as well as their reactions to those circumstances. In fact, blame is the opposite end of the pole. Blame is a pre tense used by those who are not willing to be responsible.
If the dirty dishes in the sink are really THE irritation, wash them and produce the result of no more irritation. If your viewpoint is that the dirty dishes are a betrayal, turn to the Integrity Tone Scale; find blame. Put the Commendment to expand column to use; and make a giant step forward to that perfect relationship. We will explain later in this chapter how to use the formula.
THE PRETENSE OF LONELINESS
When you are lonely, you are pretending you’re the only one in the world and very few people are good enough to be included in your life, OR you’re not good enough to be included in your own life or in another’s life.
How many times have you been in a room full of people with your best friend, mate or lover and felt lonely?
Loneliness is the result of putting all your attention on yourself and closing out everyone else because you believe they’re not good enough or you’re not good enough. The only way you can be with others and still feel lonely is to hold the point of view that none of those people (or yourself) can be let into your life. You are refusing to open up your heart Loneliness is a pre tense (lie) because you are not better or worse than anyone else.
Loneliness is a very aggressive sport You have to work really hard, all the time, to keep all those people out of your experience. Lonely people aggressively pursue trapping a prospective good enough prey simply in the vain hope that this person will rescue them from all of life’s hardships.
If you’re at a party and you’ve made a choice to not talk, you feel very much a part of the group while knowing you simply don’t feel like talking at the moment When you’re at choice to not talk to anyone that night, everyone is in your world with you and they are part of your experience even though you’re not talking. Your feelings and experience have nothing to do with the other people. What you feel, your experience, comes out of YOUR DECISIONS ABOUT HOW YOU ARE GOING TO SEE THINGS.
THE PRETENSE OF VICTIM
This pretense is all about what the whole world is doing to you. All of your attention goes to proving they have tied your hands. Because of them you don’t have anything you want It’s all such a burden. Victims seek partners who are good at giving consolation. At victim, people aren’t seen to love you except when they are consoling you, so for heaven’s sake, you can’t give up playing the victim or you’ll never experience love again!
Victim is one of the most popular and most loved pretenses. Here you are blaming yourself. It is, at the least, a step closer to the truth to blame your self rather than others, but it will still block your having ecstatic relationships.
Are you a victim to the world or is that the lie you tell to secure the only form of love (consolation) you currently choose to say exists?
