Are you busy building pedestals? This is episode 68 of 101 things I wish my Dad taught me bought to you by the universal law of abundance, law number 3.

this is going to be one of the more difficult podcast you will listen to because it’s going to be one of the most difficult podcasts I have to do. It is full of so many contradictions. Usually, with a universal law there are no contradictions it’s clear but the subtlety of putting things up pedestals and the frailty of pumping things are bigger than they need to be is a fine line. This is a line I wish my dad could’ve taught me because it certainly cause me unnecessary diversions in my life.

let me try to break it down.

firstly, putting other people on pedestals is a crime against yourself. It is some form of religious dogma that has woven itself into your psychology. People are human. When you think somebody is not human you put them on a pedestal. Putting somebody on a pedestal means that they are better as a human being than you. The person who is excepting the gold medal, the person who is achieving an award, the person who gets more sales than you, they are all human and therefore for every achievement they have they also have suffering and pain. It is just too easy to compare ourselves to others and think that their world is immune from being human. So it is an wise to put people on pedestals. If we think on the one hand they are better than us or have life better than us we will also want to be superior to someone else and think they are worse than us. So this complicated mess of putting people up on pedestals has a downside which means we develop a superiority objective. That superiority objective makes it impossible to relax and rest in our own skin. So in the first instance do not put people upon pedestals. They are human, and everything they achieve has a cost that we possibly would not be willing to suffer. Better to witness their suffering, the cost of the victory, before we start wishing we had what they had.

That was pretty easy wasn’t it?

no outcomes for the topic of putting yourself on a pedestal. There are benefits to putting yourself up on a pedestal. If you can’t see your success, your happiness, your life joy right in front of you in your visualisation, it will never manifest. So it could be said that putting yourself up on some sort of victory pedestal is a very critical part of achievement. So there is the benefit. The drawback is if we start expecting ourselves to be not human. A human being is a two sided animal. We have upsides on down. We are good and bad. But if the pedestal we put ourselves on is an airless vacuum in which we behave according to some new-age book we have found then it could be that our expectation of ourselves becomes poison.

and this is where vision quest needs to be incredibly well supervised.

pumping yourself up to feel that you are going to feel fantastic when something happens slides the concept of putting yourself on a pedestal into dangerous territory. For example if you see yourself standing on top of your Mount Everest, that is a really great visualisation if that is what you want to achieve. However seeing yourself jumping up and down with joy and running around happy as a pig in poo, this expectation is a pedestal that is unrealistic. It is just going to sabotage the journey.

my domestic upbringing was pretty rough. There was a lot of domestic violence. One of the ways I managed to stay immune from it all and keep my chin up the whole time was to have heroes. So I put pictures of certain footballers up on my wall and managed to get a football jumper with their number on it. I think this is absolutely putting people on pedestals. The good news was that I saw light at the end of the tunnel when everything in the real world around me was chaotic. When I went to school I played football emulating these football heroes that I had. I transformed that hero worship into all the sports that I played and it motivated me strongly to be way better than I was. In eastern culture the concept of having a Guru in your life is very normal. I guess you could say that is putting somebody on a pedestal to. The idea of this pedestal, Guru, is to give people, very much like my football heroes, something to look up to and aspire to be. Again the pedestal rules. Similarly now I believe that this sort of hero worship can really help a person as long as they are aspiring to emulate that person.

In a perfect world our hero would be our parents. Bit by bit as we grew up past the age of nine or 10 we would come to realise that this hero is not the hero we thought they were, we would start to observe them being human, and bit by bit by the age of 12 we would take the parent down off the pedestal, and start to build one for ourselves. But parents are really stupid. They try to shove the children up on their own pedestal and create unrealistic expectations for the children to be perfect. While the parent themselves makes no effort. The process of putting a parent up on a pedestal and the transference of that pedestal to self requires that the parent behaves in a certain way in which they don’t live vicariously through the child but live in away the child would love to emulate. But most parents are so stressed, so serious about mopping the floor or cleaning up the lounge room floor that they become the antichrist. In this paradox schoolmates start to become the ambition of the pedestal for children. They start to look around for other people who look more like what they would like to be like then their own parents. Parents who fight and parents who are unhappy and parents who are anal retentive about trivia drive children to start to infatuated, put their schoolmates up on pedestals, and then we find that the child is not functioning well at school because they are being bullied, in particular by those they have put on pedestals.

you can see this topic is getting more complicated!

now we return to the topic which is really going to twist your hair in a knot if you have any. Through either parental projection or our own education we start to develop an expectation of ourselves emotionally. We expect ourselves to be always happy, comfortable, nice, kind, friendly, smart, good at sport, fast and running, good looking, a good friend, friends with many friends, passive or aggressive, smart or dumb. And these expectations places on pedestals. We create a me and a fictional me, something I often referred to as a cardboard cut out version of ourselves. The cardboard cut out is in fact a pedestal version of ourselves. These are called our expectations. These expectations are either caused by parental misalignment, school education or religion of some sort. The dysfunction we have in our own life is 100% to do with the fit between who we are and that cardboard cut out. Some people take themselves to the grave trying to fit through a cardboard cut out that is a pedestal, and a fiction.

and what makes things worse is when we can’t sit through our own cardboard cut out, we create them for others. And this is where pedestals really turn dark. When a parent fails to meet their own expectations and therefore cannot fit through their own idealistic cardboard cut out pedestal, they create them for their kids, and then tried to shove the kid, no matter what resistance they get, to shove their kids through that cardboard cut out they have created. This only happens when the parent fails to get through their own cardboard cut out version of themselves. These cardboard cut outs are pedestals. And this is why there is a “to say don’t put yourself or others on pedestals. This vulnerability creates the process of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

my dad would often say don’t get too big for your Boots. He was sort of saying the same thing. My dad had very low expectations of all of us. He just sort of wanted us not to have the struggles he had in his life. He had a very strong moral compass but even that he had a very big hole through which we could fit in his cardboard cut out expectation. After my mother’s death he concreted up that cardboard cut out for a partner in his life. For him that cardboard cut out became filled up. And for other people, sometimes they make the cardboard cut out so huge that anybody can fit through it. Then they have no self-respect.

the universal law provides us with an opportunity to create cardboard cut outs that are realistic. It acknowledges that we do create cardboard cut outs of ourselves and others and tries to present you with an opportunity to make those as adaptable as possible. It starts with the universal law number three which basically says every human has every trait. With this the boundaries of the cardboard cut out did not become human qualities such as goodness or badness. And this is a big shift. I don’t know if those of you who have studied this first part of the universal laws realise how important it is when finally your expectations of people, and yourself for that matter, no longer are framed by behaviour we acknowledge that every human thing has every human quality and therefore we can see the difference between fake cardboard cut outs that are unrealistic, pedestals, and the truth of being real. This differentiation between what makes the boundaries of a cardboard cut out and the one that most people have which is the difference in human qualities between people, call this judgement, is enormous.

The second universal law makes our cardboard cut outs symmetrical. It means that if we see somebody being super nice we also cut out the other side of the centreline and give space for that person to be super not nice. And this is how we learn how to love. Half the cardboard cut out is our expectation that we have carried forward from our dirty laundry of the past, and the other half is presented to us by the universal laws, that there are two sides to everyone, and therefore what we see is only half of what we get.

the second universal law also teaches us that what we see in other people is only a fraction of who they are. There are seven areas of life and therefore we may only be experiencing that person in one of the seven. When we meet them we might say I don’t like you you don’t fit through my cardboard cut out of good people. But when we meet them we know we are only meeting them in one or two of the seven areas of life. A nasty mean person has two sides and therefore we know there is another aspect of them, and it may not be presented to us in the area of life in which we are interacting with them. A great example of this is my stepmother who was alcoholic from time to time and very angry. I saw her as a witch. She even look like a witch with her black curly hair and violent rage and long fingers. But my stepmother had a daughter who is my stepsister of which I have no memory but lived with us for 16 years. I have no memory of her. Guilt blocks memory you know that. Anyway, my stepmother in relation to her daughter, was an angel. My stepmother in relation to her daughter was the most loving kind caring mum. It was an unbelievable contradiction to see the difference in the way she treated me and the way she treated my sister, stepsister. And as much as I tried to dislike my stepmother in order to make my relation with her combative and successful, it was impossible to create half a cardboard cut out of a person you saw be so kind.

one day, I was at dinner in Byron Bay with my then partner, and her very wealthy girlfriend with her new boyfriend. We were at the house of the girlfriends father and it was a multi million dollar home right on the beach sand. We had a few predinner drinks, not many and were enjoying banter just before the dinner was to be served. At this point in time completely out of my I range the boyfriend launched at me and flatten me to the floor out of my chair and took me into some sort of super karate kung fu submissive lockdown in which my jaw and the floor and his knee formed a new bond. He was screaming at the top of his lungs that I should apologise for something that I said. Which I remember was, I don’t agree that people who eat meat pigs. I thought it was quite an honest opinion. But he had a Guru, he was about to at a bar as his full-time occupation, and knew no other way to force me through the cardboard cut out of his gurus ridiculous teachings. Suffice to say that this was the end of the dinner party and I had a choice as to whether to call the police, go to a hospital or just simply lick my wounds and leave. We did the latter.

the incredible thing about this story is not what happened to me but the fact is my partners girlfriend stayed with him for another five years. This ugly violent man had a soft sign and she was experiencing that soft side obviously sexually. The girlfriend of my friend, the daughter of the multimillionaire, was wealthy beyond measure, a supermodel in her own right, famous for her work, and under dad’s wing absolutely wealthy. She had the choice of so many men in the world including mini movie stars that she dated. But she chose this Thunder Bus of a human being. It was only too easy for me to react to his behaviour and create a cardboard cut out that he couldn’t fit through and assume that he was half a human because of his behaviour towards me. But I didn’t. At one point I was so angry I wanted to go back and catch him blindside and give him a dose of his own medicine. But I didn’t, instead I sat down with sheets of paper and tried to work out where I was him, in what form took, the benefit of it, and I relaxed.

the story concludes that five years later, when they broke up, they were in court. He was after a chunk of cash, she was after custody of the child that produced, and she wanted me to testify to witnessing the violence that she believed was the causation of the marriage break up and her defence as to why she should have the child custody and why he should get nothing financial from her abundant supply. If I was carrying any resentment about that evening this would’ve been my golden opportunity to shove it up his bum, but I felt nothing. I had created a cardboard cut out in which I didn’t take people’s behaviour to be the pedestal on which I put them up or down. Whenever I felt superior to somebody I process that. Whenever I felt inferior to somebody I process that. And I think in unravelling this story it has help me to explain to you the difference between a good pedestal and bad one.

good pedestal is you seeing you do something well, a bad pedestal is you seeing you do something better than somebody else, and therefore being superior. The person who creates a superior pedestal also creates an inferior one, the universal law number one again. So be careful of comparing yourself to others. Except the fact that gurus are an opportunity to create better versions of ourselves. That every human has every trait. That a pedestal built for others with human traits is there for a block on yourself and your life emotionally. Finally, except the fact that these pedestals, cardboard cut outs exist. That a cardboard cut out that is made with the philosophy of excepting everything and loving it all will lead to low self-respect. But a cardboard cut out built from the knowledge of the universal laws can adapt to situations and grow as you grow. But the best place to put your cardboard cut out is with yourself. And the best cardboard cut out to be with yourself is unconditionally excepting and loving who you are.

So these cardboard cut outs are explain a lot about life. When that cardboard cut out becomes rigid and the world becomes flexible, we find ourselves in a combative place with everything that goes on around us. When we project cardboard cut outs onto our children or partner or friends or family it’s basically saying that I will like you if you do what I want, the cardboard cut out, and I will dislike you if you don’t fit through my cardboard cut out. This modelling confronts every aspect of human nature and can turn a good life into a bad one.

The worst cardboard cut out is an idealistic one. And not wanting to have on and on about the same old story but to give a great example of this from my own reality is the death of my mother when I was three years old. Everybody described her as this most perfect being, I developed an angelic image of her, and therefore expected people, especially the women in my life, to be able to fit into that cardboard cut out. I was attracted to people who looked like they would fit through this cardboard cut out. And for my Young years this ended up in a marriage with someone who looked like they fitted through the cardboard cut out of my expectations. But after a very short period of time, six weeks, to be exact, cracks started to appear and this chosen person started to rub against the sides of my cardboard cut out. Now I have no idea any of this was going on all I did was felt attracted to somebody and had no idea why. But then some of the attraction started to wear thin. Suddenly they displayed qualities that were not allowed for in my cardboard half person, idealistic cut out, built out of the impression of my mother who wasn’t with us. When a person dies we infatuated them very often, or, the opposite, and resent them. They are gone and therefore our idealism is allowed to persist. This whole process of creating an idealistic view all the opposite a resentful view of people compare to our cardboard cut out leads us to get in gauged and involved with many people we would otherwise be wiser not to. But the purpose of these relationships that we get involved in, is to smash the edges of the cardboard cut out rather than to smash ourselves up. We tried to change people only so they fit through these cardboard cut outs. When we realise the problem is the cardboard cut out itself is wrong, we can approach relationships with a completely different viewpoint. If there’s something we don’t like in somebody it’s just because we didn’t leave room for it in our idealistic cardboard cut out which may in fact be holding us back from our fullest potential.

in the 30 day challenge we introduce the discard form. This is a hacked process. The ancients understood this process. If there is ever was built a process that smashes through cardboard cut out idealisms and breaks down all the barriers in relationship, that allows us to not be trying to change other people but rather to see where we have a block in our own awareness, this is the one. I have used this process in my own life through many a challenging relationship situation and I continue to use it daily. If you’re going to take just one thing away from the 30 day challenge the ability to do a discard form on any human being on earth is the most miraculous take away and it is worth it’s weight in gold, because it is a life extending, life improving, loving and growing, process for achievement. I encourage you, like I do, to employ it at every opportunity to grind down the edges of cardboard cut outs built out of false expectations and idealisms that we have accumulated.

that is the end of this episode.

with spirit,

Chris