Creative Status is a podcast about using creativity as a vehicle for improving your life by deconstructing ego, integrating the shadow self, and designing and manifesting a real life.
Every episode explores how the creative process can help you GROW REAL by moving towards wholeness in yourself by making the unconscious conscious.
In this episode of Creative Status, I go down the rabbit hole with with Carl Serapian, a man with a life story marked by resilience and transformation.
Born into the chaos of war, Carl’s early memories involve seeking refuge in bunkers as his family faced the harsh realities of conflict.
At just 12 years old, heartbreak forced him to leave his homeland, setting in motion a journey of self-discovery that has lasted a lifetime.
His pursuit led him through religion, psychotherapy, yoga, meditation, literature, seminars, and encounters with spiritual gurus. What he found was that these paths offered insights but there was still something missing – undeterred, Carl determinded to challenge the foundations of these approaches.
In a powerful revelation, Carl discovered a simplicity at the core of transformation that had eluded him for years. In this episode, he shares the essence of this transformative approach with fellow explorers of the human condition.
Tune in to this episode and learn how Carl applied this newfound wisdom, transcending confusion to find clarity, liberating himself from medication, and transforming depression into enduring enthusiasm for REAL LIFE.
Stay true,
Oli Anderson
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Leave a voice message to share your thoughts and to be (maybe) featured on future episodes of the podcast: anchor.fm/creativestatus
Episode Links:
Carl’s website: https://innerpathwithcarl.com/
Carl on Instagram: https://instagram.com/inner_path_with_carl
Creative Status Links:
The Creative Performance Transformation Lab: olianderson.co.uk/creativeperformance
Follow me on Instagram: instagram.com/olijanderson
My YouTube channel: youtube.com/olianderson
Get my books on Amazon: amazon.com/author/oli
7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose: olianderson.co.uk/systemshock
Free one hour creative workshop to take your creative brand or project to the next level: olianderson.co.uk/creativeworkshop
Free 90-Day Journal Challenge: olianderson.co.uk/journal
The Law of Attraction for Realness (mini-course): olianderson.co.uk/lawofattraction
Show Transcript: From Trauma to Trust & From Victim to REALNESS
Intro
Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there. Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status. If you’ve ever wondered how you can transcend your ideas about yourself in the past, the things that you might have been through that are holding you back, trauma victim mindset, limiting beliefs, the feeling that nothing really means anything, then this particular episode of the show may be for you.
It’s an interview with Carl Serapian, who is a spiritual life coach. He helps people to deal with their trauma, brings in a lot of his own experience. This is a really powerful conversation about his journey, the lessons learned, and ultimately how it all boils down to trust and allowing life to do what it needs to do so we can become who we need to become. Carl, thanks for your time. Everyone else, thanks for listening.
If this helps you in any way, then leave a review somewhere. But other than that, here’s the interview. Thanks a bunch. Boom.
Interview
Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Carl. Thank you for joining me on today’s episode of Creative Status. You are a, uh, spiritual Transformation coach, which is a wonderful title, and I think that is going to crack open some things for this conversation that are very relevant to the kind of things we talk about on this podcast. I’m going to stop rambling and ask you to introduce yourself. Can you let people know who you are, what you do and what you want to get out of this conversation that we’re about to?
Carl Serapian: Sure. Thank you, um, for the introduction, Oli. Um, I’m very happy to be here. I kind of looked up the subject that you cover and all that, and it’s very interesting. It resonates a lot with what I want to share with the world. Uh, yeah, so I’m a spiritual transformation coach.
Um, basically I’m just sharing my experience of life, of how I went from being in a very, um, victim personality going through war. I was born in a country of war. I had to flee my country at the age of twelve. Um, uh, I was victim of physical violence, emotional violence, very strict education, not necessarily at home, but just the school system and all that. And I could say we could, you know, if you want to put words, I’m more of an open energy, a sensitive, um, you know, there’s many words, they give in these today.
So I was absorbing everything and I thought that was me, that was it, and that’s about it. There’s nothing to do, um, and that’s what creates, right, mental illnesses and all depression and all that. So I went through a lot of that. Um, but something that, I don’t know how it came to me is that I knew there was something better available. I did not accept that this is what life is.
You grow up in this beautiful planet Earth, sensational, but you have to suffer. It didn’t make any sense. It was too much of a disconnect. So I took it upon me to search, to take seminars, to do yoga, meditation, follow, uh, gurus, uh, uh, try everything. Uh, um, try having big projects. So I get excited about it. Or running after money or women. I tried everything, like, everything, right. And then after a while, with, um, a lot of ups and downs that, if it’s, uh, appropriate, we could get into, I kind of started seeing the big picture and committing myself to getting going step by step, following that picture, that feeling that I had, which was the path of transformation.
Oli: You just said so many amazing things that we can just crack open. We could go in a million different directions. Uh, I think a good way into this is what you said about being a victim and, like, getting over the victim mindset. Because, actually, the story that you just shared, you’ve also shared, within the context of the story, the paradox of transcending victimhood. Because if you look at your story as an objective observer, you can say, okay, this poor guy, he had to literally flee from his country.
And sounds like the education system was really strict. And you went through all of these different things. Uh, if you did decide to call yourself a victim, in a way, it’s probably justified, but at the same time, if you did do that, it would just hold you back from that bigger, uh, picture that you’re talking about and alluding to where really nobody is a victim, even though we do go through things.
And so I think a good starting point to kind of open all this up is that, so what is the difference between seeing yourself as a victim and being held back by the mentality that comes with it and just seeing instead that, okay, sometimes bad shit just happens. And it doesn’t have to define us, because in the context of the bigger picture of wholeness, as I like to call it, it’s not really a problem. It’s just part of the process of returning to who we really are. Something like that.
Carl: Yes. Awesome. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there’s a lot of traps. Right? There are a lot of traps when we go through difficult things. And it could be individual traps or collective agreements of how we should react to certain things. Right. So, I mean, we have an agreement today that if I don’t agree with you, then I could eventually go to the point where we could go in a fight and it could go very bad.
Well, that’s okay, right? I mean, we watch it on TV, in movies. It’s actually very, um, Hollywood puts it as wow. So there’s a lot of, uh, traps, I think. And mainly it’s because biologically, they’re chemicals that actually get hooked on, I really think. And I’m saying, with all due respect, we’re all druggies. We’re all addicted to feeling something. Whatever it is, just give it to me. I want it now. That’s why we go on Netflix. That’s why we go on YouTube the whole time. It’s because, uh, it’s much easier to just get a cheap drug right away. The next moment, I don’t care.
We’ll manage the next moment, where my life is going, I don’t care. As long as I don’t face the stuff. That’s literally what happens. Um, so the victim identity is. And it’s so powerful is because we actually protect it. Because what happens as a kid, you don’t know better. You’re like, okay, well, uh, for Mo, I think most kids, when I see them, they’re all open energies. Some of them, I believe, have genetically more sensitivity to, uh, loud noises, fear.
I could see it in my friend’s child. One of them is very Tarzan. He doesn’t care. He’s just walking and he doesn’t care. But the other one is always. And nothing happened to the other one. He just has these very sensitive, um, cords in him. But he is much more subtle about life. And he could be an artist, maybe. But when you go through trauma and you have that, then you’re absorbing it. And I think it’s been scientifically proved that until the age of seven, you’re just a sponge. You have a recording mechanism in you saying, okay, what is this thing called life?
Let me record. Let me see what it is. Okay, there’s war. Okay, fine. Oh, there’s a lot of fear. Okay, um, fine. There’s a lot of violent. Okay, fine. There’s also some good things. Okay, good. So I think the victim identity comes when certain events are very intense. And they actually leave impressions in us, in emotional, mental impressions. Something that really overwhelms our system. Uh, and the way I see it is our system says, okay, well, this seems to be the most important thing in your life. This happened to you. And because the level of intensity is so high, then this is it. This is you. Even though it’s not true, your attention starts going there because your attention goes where there’s most intensity happening. If during our conversation. Now there’s, God forbid a bomb explode somewhere. This conversation is over. We’re like, what the hell happened? It’s about the bomb, right?
Oli: Yeah.
Carl: So that’s where I think the victim mentality comes, where these events of people actually doing things. Sometimes it’s maybe exaggerated in our mind if we’re sensitive or maybe even invented, who knows?
That could go into mental illnesses. But the impression is so strong that we cannot, even if we try to hide it with drugs, we try to do things and have party all the time and be outgoing and react the opposite of what we feel. It’s there. It’s not going anywhere until you don’t face it. And so it’s a victim mentality, because, uh, that’s who you think you are eventually. So you fall in the trap as a kid, you identify with these things. I’m scared. I’m anxious, I’m weak. I don’t know how to handle people. Uh, people scare me.
And all these come whether just naturally because you’re introvert or because you had trauma, whatever it is. And then as an adult, you don’t even realize that you think you are these things, and then you protect it like it’s this very precious thing in you. And then we get insulted if someone tells, well, come out of your comfort zone or all these things, because we’re like, no, that’s me. So that’s in a nutshell. What I think is this whole, um, mentality of being a victim, acting like a victim.
Oli: Yeah. So there’s two interesting things there. The first thing is, it’s exactly what you said a lot of the time. Victimhood and the victim mentality, it’s a trauma response. So something terrible happens, we freeze up. And by freezing up, we end up creating a kind of fake version of ourselves so that we can stay frozen.
Ultimately, it’s an ego problem, I would say. Uh, the other interesting thing is exactly what you said as well. We end up protecting that false identity that we create. Uh, and it originates because at some level, we’re not ready to face life head on again because we don’t want to have to go through some traumatic thing in the future that similar to what we’ve already been through. But actually, in many, many cases, the odds of something terrible happening again, especially in adulthoods, when we have more autonomy and more control over our lives and all that kind of stuff, is very low probability.
So I guess the next question for you is, what are the benefits of being a victim? Because I think when we get into that state, where we’re trying to protect the ego and, uh, the victim incarnation that is taken on ball, we protect it because it offers us certain benefits. And, um, those benefits, they’re always only short term things.
In the long term, they keep us away from that bigger picture that you were talking about and then we’ll get on to you. But why do you think people fight to protect the victim mentality, the victim identity that they picked up, when at some level they probably are aware that it’s holding them back from being as real as they possibly could be?
Carl: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. So I think it’s because it has to do, and I’m not anybody, but it’s what it is. I think education lacks tremendous amount of awareness about the inner dimension of life. We are stuffed with information that is, to a certain point, very necessary. I mean, you have to know how to count, you have to know how to, um, uh, learn about countries, your country, all that. But I think it’s way over, like, way too many things that are not necessarily as important.
Actually, to me, they’re not at all close to being as important as learning how to be well, inside of you. We’re learning how to have inner peace no matter what happened. But because nobody, it’s a catch 22. How many teachers experience inner peace? And with all my respect, I love the whole idea of teaching and all that, but it’s our message and you and all of us that kind of bring a wakeup call saying, hold on, somebody’s got to start the wave and break the momentum the other way, saying, hold on, this is not it.
Um, the reason why I think we get stuck is because right away when the trauma happens, you’re alone. There’s nobody teaching you what to do with it. So when you do that, well, you’re a living being. Even if you look at an ant, if you try to try to kill the ant, it’s going to run away. So we’re programmed, anything that’s living is programmed to try to live as long as possible. So if there’s this thing here that’s very threatening to me and nobody’s teaching me how to, let’s say, tame the ego and kind of go into it and see what happened and all that talk about it, which, that’s just the first level, then the next thing is to run away from it because we don’t know it’s too painful. And that’s where dissociation happens.
That’s where a lot of mental illnesses where you’re completely cut off from the present moment and you just want to create a reality of yourself that is more acceptable, uh, more okay, to you to live. So the reason why I think we get stuck is because something major happens that leaves a very strong impression on us. Our whole system gets shocked. Uh, it’s like any alarm system. It says, okay, well, from here on, like you’re saying from here on, we’re going to watch out for this thing. Because look what happened to us, right?
So instead of having support or somebody helping us to kind of, um, melt that away and find that. And I’m not blaming anybody, it’s just our job as a collective to have the responsibility to do it. Um, so then we don’t have that help. So then we say, okay, well, the next solution. We don’t think about it this way, but the next unconscious solution, okay, well, let’s run away from it. Let’s suppress it. Let’s keep it as far as possible from us. And then once we do that, we are adding so many layers of, okay, well, you know what? I’ll work on looking better. I’ll work on, um, getting more girls. I’ll work on making more money.
All these things to replace the simple fact of having joy, of just living, of just existing, just vibrating for no reason. Because we’re a vibrational being. So I think that’s what happens, um, with the whole victim identity. So that’s why we get stuck in it. We don’t have anybody helping us to see through it. And then we go to our reflex. Our default system is let’s run away from it. Let’s suppress it. Let’s not ever talk about it. And then let’s build a whole other life on top of this one to pretend that nothing ever happened and that we’re actually maybe even the opposite of that.
So I think that’s, uh, how it develops. And then there’s something about what we call the ego, which the way I see now is the ego is like this identification, this attention that we give, this, uh, consent, this, uh, conviction that we convince ourselves, coming also from the collective convictions that I am this thing. I am this. That, for me, is what the ego is.
Now, I am anxious. I am. It’s not like I have anxiety. I am depressed. It’s me, right? And life tells you, fine. Life is just an energy. Fine. Okay, you want to play that role? Okay, fine. Uh, you could do it in a movie, or you could do it in life, all your life. Fine. And I think that’s where there’s a benefit, to answer your question. A benefit which is this entity called go, which actually is no entity. It’s just the way we describe it, because it’s all one. We are just putting our attention to the lowest part of our energy being. That’s how I look at it. And we’re saying, well, you know what? I’m choosing these things about who I am. I’m choosing that I’m anxious and that I’m depressed and nobody likes me.
Fine, okay, let’s go with that. That’s my life. So that’s what we do. And then every time we could reinforce this thing, we feel stronger about it. So the benefit, one of the benefits that the ego feels invaded. It’s like I am the most victim about, uh, among all the victims. Wow. Or the other way, somebody could say, well, I’ll prove it wrong, and I’ll be accumulating as many things as possible. So I have the finest car, the most beautiful wife.
Um, I know a lot about some stuff, either finance or I have a lot of knowledge. Um, so all these things, we start adding them and it becomes a truly living being. I mean, it’s not true, but to understand it, we have to actually exaggerate it to see it. It becomes an operating system, which is just basic energy. There’s nothing there. But every day we are supporting it. The moment we don’t support it, it’s going to go away. But we’re attached to it because it gives us that high.
If I could say, Oli, I’m better than you. Wow, I feel so good moment. Uh, uh. I play soccer on Sundays and I used to be, uh, um. I’m sorry, let’s say football. So I used to be a goaltender when I was a kid, and I did it through adulthood. We play a bit more, uh, whoever wants to go in nets and we switch. So I made two very nice saves. And my ego just was so big. It’s not only ego, it’s just a great sensation. But I was watching and I was saying it.
Wow. If I would fall in the trap of thinking that I’m somebody all of a sudden because I did something great. People are applauding. And then, um, I was looking at documentary about, with Robin, uh, um, what’s his name? Um, not the actor. Um, the singer. Yes.
Oli: Robbie Williams.
Carl: Robbie, amazing documentary. Because I love learning from these people. It’s a gift that they do these things and they’re vulnerable enough to let us go in their life. That’s what is going. I mean, how could you not have issues when at 23 you have 80,000 people screaming your name. So that’s what it is. We could go in other directions, but I think that’s what happens. The benefit is you feel inflated for a moment. Um, and also you could get attention from others. Poor little you, ah, work so hard, but things don’t work for you. Um, but you have that, okay, then you say, okay, well, I mean, that’s good enough, I’ll play small and that’s enough for me, and I’ll just take it.
Oli: Yeah, you’re right. Ultimately, if we’re filtering everything through ego, and that is, uh, our predominant way of identifying and interacting with life, we have become disconnected within ourselves. We become disconnected from our realness, disconnected from our truth. And if you become disconnected from your realness and the truth, you always feel like there’s something missing. And the thing that is missing is the feeling of love, of joy, of bliss, whatever word you want to use, the default state when we have been real and we’re aligned with truth. And so the benefit is exactly what you said.
The ego ends up being a device that we use to get attention, basically, or, uh, to do things that will get us attention. And we use that attention as a substitute for the love that we’ve been disconnected from. And so it can be positive things like in the example you gave, like you get a goal, that’s a good thing, right? It’s not bad. And you get attention from that which makes you feel like you’re lovable, let’s say with the victim mindset. It’s the same structure, the same principle, but instead of chasing positive attention, it’s negative attention.
And so you go around and you tell everyone how hard your life is and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, people give you attention or sympathy and you experience that as love ultimately. But actually you can have a more real version of love anytime you like. By realizing that that structure of the ego is completely unreal.
You can dismantle it, actually, and then you can step into your, uh, real life and put yourself on a path of moving towards things that actually matter to you and that are going to bring you a deeper, uh, connection to yourself, other people and life itself in a more authentic way. And that’s when you’re going to bring actual love into your life because you’re going to have found the foundation of love or realness, whatever word you want to use within yourself. And then that is going to be something you put out into the world. Instead of using the ego as a device to get little grasps of attention in any way that you can.
Carl: And also, I don’t want to disregard at all what happens to us and whoever’s listening. Uh, not at all, because it actually has nothing to do with that. It’s just, um, what happened is just then after that, I was calculating, um, let’s say somebody lives until they’re 80. I mean, maybe I’m being optimistic, but I like to be optimistic. Right. So, um, I calculated that’s, um, 2,524,800,000 seconds.
Uh, that’s how much you live if you’re living till you’re 80. So that’s 2 billion. That’s one thing. Then you add 524,000,000. And then you add, uh, 800,000 seconds. That’s our life. So how many bad things happen in our life? Uh, if you have these 5 billion, uh, more or less seconds, how many moments were really bad, traumatizing events?
Oli: Very few.
Carl: Let’s say somebody had, like, ten amazingly hardship life. Uh, um, some people might have worse in these days. I know some places are in tremendous, uh, trauma, uh, and difficult times, of course. But I’m just saying that what’s happening. So you have ten. So let’s take, uh, 2,000,000,500 minus ten M seconds. Or let’s say it took two minutes each. Whatever. So then you have all the rest of your life. What is happening is that we are repeating.
Oli: Yeah, exactly that.
Carl: We are repeating it every. We are recreating that reality every moment for the rest of the 5 billion second.
Oli: Yeah, that’s it. We take ourselves out of the present moment.
Carl: Mhm.
Oli: Because our bodies ultimately are just replaying the moment over and over again. And actually, that is a natural response in a way, because it’s helping you to process it. But the problem is, if we think we have no control over that and, uh, we don’t take responsibility for it because we’re scared, then those two minutes, whatever it is, end up defining our whole lives. And you’re right.
Like talking about victimhood and stuff, you do have to walk the tightrope of being real, but also been sensitive because, of course, some of the stuff that does happen is awful. There are awful, awful things going on out there in the world. And it is hard to get over some things. But the message, I think, is that we can get over them ultimately always. And there’s another element as well. You can take it to the extremes, but it seems to me, at least if I look back at my life, all of the bad shit that’s happened has been a blessing in retrospect. It’s shit when you’re going through it, obviously, and it’s shit when you kind of come into terms with it. But then when you are able to alchemize, if you want to use that word, or transmute the experience into lessons that give you a solid foundation to stand upon your own realness, that shit becomes a diamond.
And actually the only thing that stops you from getting to that place where you’re holding the diamond in your hand and you can use that to shine more light in the world. I’m, uh, laughing because that sounds so dramatically poetic. But anyway, the only way you can get that diamond, and it’s always there, is to kind of get the strength or the trust to wade through the shit. And as long as you can trust, you will find that diamond because there’s always a lesson and there’s always an opportunity. And I know that is offensive to some people. Like, if you’ve been through extreme, extreme abuse or trauma or whatever, then obviously it’s going to be harder to wade through all that shit. But there’s always something there that is going to allow you to be more real in the long run.
Carl: I think the trap that could come, that I observe in myself as well, is that the moment you want to do that, we forgot about the little ego that we gave so much energy and care and we’re protecting it. That’s going to come up. It’s going to say, uncomfortable stop it right now. Yeah, uncomfortable stop.
So that’s what if we look at it moment by moment, let’s say someone says, okay, well, Oli and Carl, very nice. It’s very nice what you’re saying. Let me try it. Let me try just, uh, using it. What the hell? No. Who’s saying no now? It’s the ego. Because, and what I mean by ego is that us giving attention to these events that happen and saying, no, I am these things. This is not what I want. I want to keep these things.
So, no, I don’t want to. You’re wrong. It’s not true. Um, and then there’s a whole mind that could, anything you want to give the mind to wrap around and protect itself, explain itself, it’s a genius to do it. It’ll find amazing arguments as to what we’re saying is not good and it’s crap and doesn’t make sense and just go back to whatever is comfortable for you, which is fine. You’re missing out. That’s all, what it is.
Oli: Yeah. And I think there’s another level as well, where stepping into truth, stepping into realness, you actually end up stepping beyond judgment and duality and any ideas of good and bad. And actually, that’s part of the process. Because if you can step beyond the judgments of the bad scare quote things that did happen to us, we realize that, uh, okay.
Even though it was really hard and it was painful in the short term, in the context of our lives overall, because in the big picture, we can get those diamonds. It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad. It just was something that happened. And now that that’s over and we’re stepping into taking responsibility for our lives and our own growth and expansion and all that kind of stuff, it’s just fuel for the journey. That’s literally all it is. It’s not good, it’s not bad.
There’s like a saying, I can’t remember it exactly. It’s like the same rain falls on some seeds and they turn into a rose bush or whatever. The same rain falls on other seeds and it turns into weeds. In the context of what we’re talking about, the rain is our attention and what we decide to do with what we’ve been through. And as long as you have a vision for where you’re going and the trust that’s going to get you there, then the judgment of the past can be let go of, basically, and you just keep moving. Do you know what I mean?
Carl: Oh, yeah. It absolutely is fuel. And the way I experience it is that. Wow.
Oli: Uh.
Carl: Anything that bothers me.
Oli: Mhm.
Carl: If I allow it.
Oli: Exactly. If you allow it.
Carl: If I allow it fully. It sounds too simple, but that’s the only place where we get caught. But it’s such a big trap because right away we say, this shouldn’t be like this. That’s our first reflex. And that could take a lifetime to even realize. This shouldn’t be like this moment shouldn’t be like, no, I’ll go on Netflix. I’ll convince myself it’s not there. I’ll get high. I’ll call a friend. And even if I say it, we all fall for it. I do fall for it as well.
But even if I said a million times when it happens, it’s so real. It’s such a seductive movie. It’s such a seductive, uh, fully, uh, uh, five M dimensional, um, with all the feelings and the biology going your way and saying, you’re right, don’t. It’s such a good movie, don’t come out of it. But it’s just. Nothing is happening. Nothing’s happening. You’re just in a movie telling you that this is awful. And the only practice that is really needed is the practice of allowing.
Oli: Yes.
Carl: And that’s how you become one with everything. And that’s what yoga means. It means one, uh, like you’re saying, right? There’s no bad, there’s no good. And if you look at, um, the reason why people do things, and that’s really, really hard to get your mind around, even, uh, I mean, for anybody, and I even dare say it’s never about you. It was never about you. In any case, that original trauma was never about you. You were there. It happened to you. But that person, if they did something to you that is so awful, imagine what’s going on in their mind. That’s how they see life.
Oli: Uh, yeah, that’s it.
Carl: Now, why are you convincing yourself that it’s about you? That’s on you. That’s your responsibility, like you’re saying, right? Yeah. Uh, that’s on you.
Oli: Yeah. It’s ego again.
Carl: Exactly.
Oli: That’s exactly it. When bad things happen to us, for most of us, our initial reaction is exactly that. Why me? What have I done wrong? Why am I being punished by the universe or God or ever? Like, why it shouldn’t be this way. It’s not fair. Exactly like you said.
But the key point is, it doesn’t matter how you think it should be or what you think is fair or isn’t fair. It is what it is. And this is why I’m always saying, the final lesson is acceptance. That is the key thing. And actually, it’s funny you mentioned yoga. Like, yoga has helped me probably more than anything else, with all this stuff, because it is what it is.
If you fall over in a yoga class, for example, there’s no point judging yourself. You get back up and then you keep trying till you can do the pose. And if you can’t do the pose, well, so be it. You do your best, you forget the rest. And that is the key thing, and that is the skill, ultimately, that we’re talking about. To accept that it is what it is, to take ourselves out of the equation, but not to use it, is what it is, filtered through the ego. That’s another level of this, because a lot of the time, people say it is what it is as a way of avoiding what actually is.
Do you know what I mean?
Carl: They disconnect from it. It is what it is. And you see it in their face that they’re just not happy about it, they’re a victim about it, but they’re mentally trying it out and saying, well, it is what it is.
Oli: Another example of that people say “I don’t give a f*ck”, but you can tell by m the way they’re saying.
Carl: Oh, yeah, you do, that they give.
Oli: More f*cks than anybody else.
Carl: Exactly.
Oli: At that moment. And so m it’s just acceptance. All you need to do is, uh, that accept where you’re standing. Because only if you accept where you’re standing can you decide where the next step is going to take you or what direction it’s going to be in.
Carl: Awesome.
Oli: And so without that acceptance, you’re always going to be an ego. Like, ultimately, that’s it. That’s basically all I ever talk about, really. If you boil it down to the basics, the ego is stopping you from accepting yourself, the world and reality. And without that acceptance, you’re always living in that movie that you’re talking about, that dream world that you’re projecting over what actually is.
Carl: Yeah. And, um, if you look at it, um, in a way that maybe we’re not used to look at, it is when something happens, if we really try to be as meditative as possible and as calm and in relaxed mood as possible. And just look at it objectively. Like you said, initially something happens. Is it the event? I mean, some events are painful. Somebody hits you, you’re not going to say, well, I’m imagining it. Somebody’s hitting you, fine. Or even if somebody screams at you, there’s an initial energy. The energy is coming is an aggressive one. Uh, it’s only normal for your heart to fluctuate a bit. You feel something. Of course it’s normal. We’re not made of steel. Right. But beyond that, most of the time, I would say 99% of the time, what we are traumatized about is what we are saying about it.
Oli: Yes, exactly.
Carl: So something happens. So, uh, the question is, are we bothered by what is happening or are we bothered by the violent reaction we have? Which is the ego again, exactly. Saying something like, am, ah, I, over my dead body, answering somebody. Or, how dare you say this to me? Or you are talking about this subject, all these things.
So what is bothering more? The words, which are just sounds coming from someone or you having your set of data sitting in the data room. Right. Let’s say you’re an it guy. You have all this data and you’re okay. Well, I’m going to reinforce this data and that data because I’m a victim and nobody talks to me like that. Because if they do, I feel bad again. That’s what’s screaming inside of you and saying, this shouldn’t be?
Oli: Yeah. It’s all about our relationship with the truth. So the only thing we can do with the truth, really, it’s two options. We either accept it and feel good in general, or we don’t accept it. And then we bring friction and frustration and misery into our lives because we’re adding extra levels of complication. And so, uh, a lot of the time when bad things happen again, it’s exactly what you said, right?
Bad shit, of course, does happen in life. Someone might punch us, we feel pain. Someone might shout in our face, and it’s annoying or whatever it is. But if we’re aligned with the truth, our experience of those bad things won’t be as bad as it would be if we were trying to resist it or we were filtering it through the ego. And so I guess what I’m saying is acceptance is about understanding, uh, that, okay, bad things are going to happen.
We’re not going to feel amazing all of the time. But if you’re living in this real way and you’re not filtering everything through ego, the bad things or the effects of the bad things kind of dissipate and dissolve more quickly. Because once it’s done, it’s done, and it’s easier to move on. If you’re filtering it through your ego because you need the truth to be something other than what it actually is, you’re avoiding that is what it isn’t us, then the ramifications of whatever it is are going to echo for way longer than they need to. And that is the distinction.
So you can either have a life where bad stuff happens every so often, because that’s just life for all of us, or you have a life where bad stuff happens, but you make it shit because you’re filtering it through your identity rather than seeing it as just part of the process and the bigger picture.
Carl: Yeah. And you did bring the word skill, uh, earlier in the conversation, and I want to bring this to our listeners as well. Is that it is a skill. It’s okay if it doesn’t work out right away. Years ago, when I was in therapy, my therapist gave me an image which is basically like, uh, uh, stairs. Just how you draw stairs. Just rectangular, up and up and up. This is it.
We want to make it one large step and reach the goal. It doesn’t work like, in anything. Why would it work in the spiritual path? It doesn’t work to ride a bike. It doesn’t work to, I mean, just to utter words. Uh, it’s so many things, complex things happening. It took so much training to just talk and speak and all these things. So we got to be able to say, okay, well, if I’m at level, not that there are levels of how good you are, but it’s a skill.
So if I’m starting off and I apply it and it felt uncomfortable, and I say, well, never again. Well, you’re putting yourself out of the game. It’s supposed to take some time. It’s supposed to be a step by step thing. There’s a skill level, unless you’re someone lucky, that gets enlightened all of a sudden. That could happen also very rarely, but it could happen where it’s so painful that you just make a switch and you’re enlightened.
But for most of us, it’s going to be a skill. How long can I hold? Can I stay with what it is? It doesn’t have to be the whole day. Can I start with 5 seconds? Can I do 10 seconds? Uh, when somebody says something and I don’t like it, can I at least wait 5 seconds before I reply and then, like you’re saying, don’t judge it, just let it be, and then say, okay, well, next time I’ll do this.
Well, next time I’ll do better. Well, next time. Well, when he said this thing, I think it brought me back to my past because I’m very sensitive about this and this that happened to me. So you start learning, and it becomes a journey. It becomes like you almost become impatient for the next thing because you want to learn.
You’re like, okay, um, I want to learn what else is in me that I forgot about because I suppressed it for so many years. And life is actually exactly giving us the opportunity every day to process this once and for all. And most of the time, we say, no, I don’t want.
Oli: Yeah, that is an amazing way to say it. Life is constantly helping us to return to life. The ego, um, is the opposite of life. It’s the illusion of death. Ultimately, that’s what I think. It’s the only true death. Because anytime you’re identifying through ego, you have taken yourself into just the realm of illusion and status and fragmentation and disconnection and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Life is always calling you back, and that’s how you have to see it.
Like, everything that happens to you is ultimately helping you to return from a place of fragmentation and bullshit, basically to wholeness and connection. That’s it. And if you know that, that’s why it’s easier to learn to do all this stuff we’re talking about, to train yourself to do it, because you can trust life. You can’t go through this path that we’re talking about. You can’t return to the bigger picture without trusting life.
You just can’t do it because otherwise, you think it’s all up to you. You think it’s all about your perceived strength, your perceived power. That’s all ego stuff. It’s like you were saying about the victim thing, right? The other side of the victim coin is the hero. You try and be a big hero, and you’re trying to do everything by yourself. It’s just as unreal. And it’s because you’re trying to take everything into your own hands instead of realizing that from moment to moment, day to day, life is showing you which direction to go in. And it’s always the same wholeness. And if you know that actually things aren’t bad because you’re just living in that place beyond.
Carl: Yeah. And more and more, what’s opening up to me is because you like to keep it real, and I’m actually sharing what’s going on with me every day. Is that what I’m seeing is that, um. I don’t want to say, theoretically, you got to start experiencing that we were in life energy. So if you’re not experiencing, fine, just go, run, jog. You’re going to see. Sit down.
After you jog, um, or whatever. After you make love, whatever it is, just sit down and experience. If you feel something vibrating in you, do you feel something which is not the body, not the mind, something different that is just making you feel so good. Right.
If you don’t see it, like, I guess, run, do, uh, push ups, play, uh, music, whatever it is, whatever makes you feel good. So, um, that feeling is there. So, um, then you want to do is what I’m seeing is that we learned to live through our mind. So the roadmap that we learned, again, I go back to education, is that we learn to stuff things in our mind and then go back and use that information to navigate the world, which is okay. If you want to learn math, geography, history, that’s fine.
You want to drive a car, you have to remember how you drove last time. What this is, that’s a pedal for the gas steering wheel. Fine. But there’s another part where, like, you’re saying where the trust comes in is if you experience. So, step one, experience that. Your energy being step two, what really is happening, from what I’m seeing, how we could live. The ultimate, uh, highest level of life is if we realize that this energy being has its own intelligence. But moment by moment, not by sitting down and saying, my life will be this way, because that secures how I feel right now.
It’s more, okay, this moment, my body, I feel energy in me, and this energy is drawn to take this next action that’s not just, uh, uh, not a benign thing that happened, is that the way I see it, is that we’re energy beings with antennas, and you’re picking up the information you need in that exact moment. And I’m sure it happened to all of us. We meet somebody that we fall in love with just by pure luck, or we’re inspired to say something and we don’t know where it came from, or, uh, we do so well, when we play piano or whatever it is, or even when we’re talking with someone, the conversation just carries because we’re picking up.
We forgot about our ego for a moment, and we’re recognizing. Maybe we’re not realizing it, but we’re recognizing that we are an energy being picking up data from the universe telling us what to do here and now. So that becomes the other way of operating. So one way of operating is, I’ll, uh, worry about everything. I’ll try to plan everything in my head, and I’ll just try to figure all the million things that could go wrong. I’ll try to figure now.
Or the other one is to just test it out like you’re m talking about the notion of trust, saying, okay, well, I might be an energy being. I feel this energy when I do sports or when I listen to music. Okay, so what is that telling me to do next? Now what’s the next thing? So now we’re trusting life itself. I’m not saying it’s easy.
It’s for anybody. I’m saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it’s the hardest thing, because, again, we go back to how we gave so much attention or how we cherished our ego, telling us, screw all this stuff. Stay where you are, complain, cry about it. At least we get high right here, right now, and it’s okay.
Next moment, we don’t care about our miserable life. We don’t care about just fine. That’s it. So that’s how I’m starting to see it as we are an energy being when we have antennas and we are just downloading. But to do that, we got to allow the stuff that’s blocking it to go away first. And gradually, we’ll start more and more, able to download what we’re supposed to download in that moment as information, like me and you, how we connected. In a million years, nobody would have said me and you are going to connect.
Why? Because nobody knows. But it’s just I was following something, you were following something, and our path crossed. So, um, that’s an example of it.
Oli: That’s a perfect example. That’s what I mean by trusting life and saying that it’s not all up to you. If you look at your life, if most of us look at our lives, if any of us look at our lives, all of the amazing things that we have done as individuals, we didn’t do it by our own power. The example I use when I talk about this is writing my book. So I could say if I was coming through ego, okay, yes, I wrote a book, and blah, blah, blah, I’m so clever. Look at me.
Uh, if, uh, I’m honest with myself, when I wrote that book, I was just open to allowing my unconscious to do what I needed to do based on all the other things I’ve been through in life. And it came pouring m out of me, and it’s not me. If my ego was going through that writing process saying, right, I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that, I’ve become a control freak. I would not get results, but it’s anything in life.
The best friendships I’ve got, the best things I’ve been, the experience I’ve had, it all just kind of fell into place because I was doing what you’re talking about, listening out for the promptings of which direction to go in. The power we have over our lives is training ourselves to be able to distinguish fragmentary bullshit information from the ego and all that kind of stuff and from things that are sourced in the whole. In wholeness.
That’s a big shift for me this year. I used to be one of these people. I was always doing things. I was always going to do this and do that and do this and do that. I wasn’t getting the results I wanted, so I was like, okay, I need to change something here. Uh, so I stopped just forcing things like that, and I would do what you were saying. So if I didn’t really know the next step, I’d meditate, I’d go for a walk, I’d take a day off instead of just doing things for the sake of it, which is always ego.
Uh, and by making space like that, these kind of promptings, my antenna would pick up the things that I actually needed to do. But you have to trust that those next steps are going to become clear. And they will never become clear if you’re filtering things through ego. But Otherwise, they’re just always there.
That’s the whole point. That’s why you can trust life. So this has been awesome, but I’m going to wrap things up. How would you sum up this whole conversation? Like, no pressure, because we covered a lot. What’s the main lesson? And also, can you tell people where they can find you if they want to work with you or whatever?
Carl: Sure. Um, let me just let it sink in.
Oli: Get the, uh, antenna up.
Carl: Yeah. So I really would go back to the initial opening or somewhere in, uh.
Oli: The middle of it.
Carl: We spoke about the allowing because eventually, um, if you train yourself to know when the ego is telling you, and I know it can be hard at first, but if you train yourself, and usually it’s a negative feeling, the moment you have a negative feeling about something, there is the ego awakening again and trying to, uh, control and tell you what to do. So I could only go back to the allowing. And if you tell me, yeah, but Carl, I could allow all this, but not this. Nope.
Allowing, yeah, but you don’t. Allowing, yeah, but nope. Then we’ll talk. Because once you allow something, then you’re able to find creative solutions. So I’ll have to go back to, um, the one answer, which is the allowance of everything. And to me, an enlightened being is one that feels one with everything around them. Um, yeah, so that’s what I would say.
Um, and I really, uh, want to thank you, Oli, for this conversation because for me, it’s the best job in the world. Comedians could think that cracking jokes is, and I love cracking jokes and I would love to try it out once to be a stand up comedian just for a night. But I think when I look at this, I say to me, it’s the most beautiful job and I hope some people, people get something out of it.
Um, if some people are listening, are interested in connecting with me. Um, I’ll send you the links. Uh, my website is, uh, innerpathwithCarl.com. Um, I’ll be adding a page with some bonuses and stuff like that. Um, my Instagram is also inner path. Carl. Carl.
With the, um, mean, I’m willing to offer a free session where we could just talk on and I’m all about value. And if you think that you need more guidance and more close guidance, and you have a lot of questions, then we could work together, but if not, uh, my job will be done by sharing something with you that could hopefully impact. So, yeah, um, amazing.
Oli: Carl, thank you so much. This has been really awesome. Like, I really appreciate everything that you’ve shared your whole life. So thank you so much.
Carl: Thank you. Oli, thank you so much.
