The Anti-Guru: Why I Won't Set Myself Above You

There’s a posture that comes with this kind of work, and I’ve turned it down.

You know the one. The teacher who has the answer, who speaks in certainties, who becomes the thing you organize your life around. The crowd that needs him more each year. I understand the pull of it. It sells. I won’t do it. The method itself won’t let me.

Identity Shifting® rests on one move: holding the self you assume is just you at arm’s length, where you can examine it and rework it. Nothing in that practice gets stamped as final. Not your beliefs, not your limits, not the rules about what’s possible that you’ve been treating as fixed. You look at all of it as a thing that could be otherwise. Which means the discipline is to never grip any idea too tightly, and that has to include the ideas I give you.

So I can’t honestly speak in certainties. The day I do, I’ve quit the very thing I’m teaching you to do. A man who issues verdicts can’t credibly hand you a method whose first instruction is to stop issuing them. My restraint is how you know I mean it.

What I have is one experience and twenty years of taking it apart. The Fundamental Shift® happened to me, and I can report exactly what it felt like from the inside, because that part is mine to tell. But the moment I cross the line and announce what your life means, or what you’re required to believe, or that I’m the only way through, I’ve gone past what I know and started performing. I’d rather give you something you can test than sell you something you have to take on faith. This is, admittedly, a terrible business model.

Worship runs against the whole aim. The point of this work is for you to look at your own identity as an object you can handle, and find that it can move. That’s an inside event. It happens in you or it doesn’t happen at all. I can hand you the method and tell you what’s on the other side. I can’t carry you through it, and any teacher who pretends he can is selling dependence and calling it a gift.

Good work shrinks your need for me as the months pass. If a year from now you can run this without me anywhere in the picture, I did the job. A personality cult is engineered to run the opposite way.

There’s a reason underneath all of it, and it’s the main one. I would rather get the work into as many hands as possible than become a figure people line up behind. So I’m encoding it into technology, where it can reach anyone whether or not I’m in the room. A following can only get as big as one man’s attention allows. The method has no such limit. I’ll take the reach over the worship every time.

A teacher with the answer can carry you a stretch. The ability to read your own mind well enough that you stop needing one carries you the rest of the way. That’s the harder thing to sell and the better thing to own, and it’s the only thing I’m actually handing you. If you want the long version of how I arrived at any of this, it’s waiting on the about page.