“Our culture denies the nature of reality. It holds out a promise that you can live in an ideal world where things come easily, a world in which unpleasant experiences can be avoided, where there is never a lack of immediate gratification. Worse, it suggests that if you do not live in this world, something is wrong with you. This ideal world is a realm of illusion. No matter how promising this world seems, it does not exist.” – Lessons for Living, 2023
Raise your hand if you’ve hung out in the Realm of Illusion. Anyone?
The truth is…life is painful, the future is uncertain and accomplishment of any kind requires discipline. Precisely what human beings love to avoid. This is one reason we stay in the Safety Zone, and also why the Reversal of Desire Tool works so well, both of which we talked about in last week’s article.
The Reversal of Desire Tool activates a force more powerful than the desire to avoid pain – the Force of Forward Motion. You can learn more about these forces in True and False Magic, which comes out in less than two weeks.
God – or whatever you call the creator of the universe – loves forward motion because it places us into one infinite act of co-creation. The universe is designed to keep us here, pushing us through the things we want to avoid, by engaging with what we call the three unavoidables: pain, uncertainty and the need for constant work.
The purpose of these domains isn’t to break you down. They exist to offer life events that ensure you’re consistently and systematically attacking your tendency to avoid.
I once worked with an actor who was considered successful, but he hadn’t ‘made it big’. It wasn’t because he didn’t think he deserved to…he just hated to audition. So as a result, this client would only take jobs where he didn’t have to step out of his Safety Zone. And that kept him precisely where he remained, working steadily, but feeling that he wasn’t living his full potential. The thing is, if he wanted to get bigger roles, he had to audition for them. Meaning, the very thing he needed to do to advance his career was the exact thing he was avoiding doing.
His big breakthrough came when he finally admitted, “I’m afraid of auditioning and it’s the reason I’m not progressing in my career.” What happened after that is irrelevant. Recognizing what he was avoiding and accepting it was the important part. Here’s a tip: if you want to really understand a person, find out what they’re avoiding.
There is also a force in the universe that wants to keep us standing still, to never realize our potential. I call it Part X. “This force wants to take the free part of the human being— the part that’s resourceful, and can recover well, and has a broader consciousness— for its own uses.” – True and False Magic, 2025.
Part X is destructive, it wants to ‘X’ us out. It’s that inner voice that tells us we aren’t and we can’t.
