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FULFILLING LIFE
This is the conversation you've been waiting for your whole adult life. We will address and resolve what has made living a fulfilling life unnecessarily difficult and spotty. An early central insight in the conversation will be to see that what it is to be a person isn't going to work out in a fulfilling way. Not because you have been doing it badly. But because it isn't designed to work out as fulfillment. Personhood has a lousy track record, even when good people diligently try to take it as far as it can go. (It's a trap. Get out!) It is actually even more insidious than that. The more personal, close-in, deeply-identified-with version of being a person lives as the self we know we are. The bad news that is really good news is that the kind of self we have is the wrong kind for being fulfilled. Bad news because it ends the hope that improvement will provide fulfillment. Good news because we can stop the struggle of trying to have a construct not designed for fulfillment take us to fulfillment. (When you stop beating your head against the wall, it feels good.) This isn't a personal problem. We become people and selves in a widespread relational, social, historical and cultural environment. It's fully over by the time we know what kind of a "you" we are. Then the environment of daily conversation reinforces that in every conversation. There is a hidden and unannounced background grammar to being a self these days that isn't organized for what would make fulfillment natural. That grammar determines the relationship between you and yourself, you and others, you and life itself, you and whatever could fulfill life. It happens to do so in a way that is good for certain things (enculturation for example, practical negotiation of everyday activities) and not good for others (providing qualitative contributions from your strengths, real relating, being whole and fulfilled, being connected to life's deepest meaning and beauty.) Once the background grammar is in place, all roads lead to the wrong Rome. They lead to altered versions of the kind of self that will never be fulfilled. Maybe there will be a lucky accident and moments of deep satisfaction will occur, but they will occur as a lucky exception, which exception won't provide a sufficient basis for overturning the hidden grammar. Hence, the exception will prove the rule that true fulfillment isn't available rather than alter the self to a kind in which it is. It shall be thus unless the background grammar of a self is altered along with the experience, and not only altered but established as the new basis of relating to life that is sufficiently robust to hold its own in a world of conversation that doesn't recognize it properly. That is why good people, even when being disciplined, working hard to improve one's life and character, communicating, serving, being religious, don't quite have those activities work out to deliver fully on the promise these areas of life seemed to show. It is also why these areas consistently take more effort than it seems that they should. What kind of a "self" (if that word is appropriate at all, which it isn't) would be naturally fulfilled? And what would it take to trade in that old, used self you have been living as for the kind that is already fulfilled and does fulfill life-one more true to your essential nature than you have ever had? That is the trade up to be made in October. And it is a radical big deal. We aren't talking about just the self you think you are. We are also talking about the silent lines of force in the background that shape each new development and alteration and transformation you ever have experienced into the next kind of a self to be....and winds up undermining the power and breakthrough of each new development and co-opting it back into something more mundane, something partially happy, partially disgruntled. Something lackluster. It doesn't have to go that way. But it will. It will, barring a lucky, life-altering conversion, until the hidden presumptions about selfhood are altered permanently to the kind of background orientation that calls for fulfillment naturally. Come do that. The most important thing you can do for your "self" is to end that one by seeing that it won't scale to where you really intend to live, and to uncover the kind of a self for whom fulfilling life is natural. That is "you" more deeply, more truly, more connectedly, more fittingly, and the chances for being that are slim to none without a fundamental shift in the deep structure and presumptions about what it is to be "you" as a human being. Let's do that.
The time has come to be fulfilled in life, and to be free to fulfill life.
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