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 the podcast, I have a pretty esoteric (at times!) conversation with Israel Bouseman – author of the book ‘Only Human: An Operating Manual for Seekers and Sensitives’.
Israel is a really interesting guy who has taken a multidisciplinary approach to breaking down the human condition and exploring the systems and structures that can allow us to live better lives at the levels of our emotions, intellet, spirit, and pretty much anything else. He shares what he’s learned in this conversation and gives some really practical tips about how we can implement these truths in our lives to find joy, truth, and flow.
The abridged version of what we discussed is that to live a REAL life is to live in a way where we can act as a conduit for truth; if we can do this then we can merge what is NATURAL about us with what is TRANSCENDENT.
This is a powerful conversation for anybody who is curious, creative, and ready to embrace the greatest power they have: bein a REAL HUMAN BEING.
Thanks a bunch,
Oli
(Scroll down for show transcript)
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Episode Links:
Israel’s website: https://onlyhumanwisdom.com/
Israel’s book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Only-Human-Operating-Seekers-Sensitives-ebook/dp/B0C673LTQL
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
It’s Only Human (Show Transcript)
Intro
Oli Anderson: Oh hi there, Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status. This is a place where we talk about how the creative process is actually a journey of growing real. Growing real means that we’re moving towards realness or wholeness, which is a connection to ourselves, connection to life, connection to other people. And basically every episode I interview people about themes related to that. If you don’t know, I’m a creative performance coach and author. I wrote a book about this stuff called Personal Revolutions, Short Codes in Realness.
And in my coaching practice, I basically help people to bring realness into their lives and businesses. Every episode of the podcast, Creative Status, I interview people about themes related to all of this stuff, which is basically the human condition. What does it mean to be a human being?
How do we be a real human being instead of just an idea of what that means based on our social conditioning, our fears, our doubts, all those kind of things. Today’s episode is an interview with somebody who knows a lot about this stuff: Israel Bouseman. He’s the author of a book called Only Human: An Operating Manual for Seekers and Sensitives. And basically, he’s a great person to talk to on this podcast because he has dived into what it means to be human from all kinds of different perspectives.
He has a really great understanding of our emotional lives, of our intellectual lives, of our spiritual lives, how we can bring it all together, how we can do what this podcast is advocating that we should do, which is live a real life. So here’s the interview coming up. Israel, thank you for your time. Everyone else, hope you get some stuff out of this.
I’m sure you will. Thanks a bunch. Here we go. Boom.
Interview
Oli Anderson: Oh, hi there, Israel. Thank you so much for joining me on today’s episode of Creative Status. We’ve had some deep conversation previously, and it seems like we have a ton in common when it comes to studying and kind of breaking down the human condition.
So I’m assuming that’s the rabbit hole that we’re going to go down today. Before we get into it, do you feel like introducing yourself, letting people know what you’re all about and also telling us what you want to get out of this conversation specifically?
Israel Bouseman: Sure, brother. So first, let me say thank you so much for having me here, man. It’s an honor and a pleasure. And so my name is Israel Bouseman. I just recently published a book called Only Human: An Operating Manual for Sensitives and Seekers. And as you might tell from the title right there, I’m a lifelong student of the mysteries of human potential, of the different spiritual perspectives. And I love to look at all these perspectives and find the links, find like the deeply human core truths that I can then share in like personal and lived terms. So that’s really what I’m all about, man. And it’s like I said, it’s a delight to be here to be able to share that with you today.
Oli Anderson: That’s awesome. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to start to you, because ultimately, my approach to all this stuff, being a human and living a real life is very similar. So basically, I’ve kind of cherry picked a lot of different themes and insights from all kinds of different texts, like, you know, religious texts, spiritual texts, philosophical texts, psychological texts, and looked for those core themes and patterns when it comes to growing and getting the most out of the human experience.
So just to dive right into it, your book, Only Human, why did you decide to call it that? Because obviously, like only human, people could say, you know, I’m only human, therefore, I’m flawed and I’m broken and blah, blah, blah. But if I understand you right, only human isn’t just an excuse, it’s something much bigger, something much deeper.
Israel Bouseman: Oh, yeah, absolutely. So what I really wanted to share with my book was how incredible and amazing human beings are, and like how magical the human experience is. And there are so many things that people have studied over the course of history that key us into that. But so often, I find that the way that we describe them, the form of the message can kind of get in the way of us being able to access that magic of our experience in lived terms.
So we get so full of stories and concepts, and people who understand one story, they hear another story and they’re like, no, it’s not that, it’s this. And so we kind of end up losing the human wisdoms in the mix of all of these words and concepts. So what I wanted to do was take all those beautiful ideas and put them in human terms again, and offer something that was only human. And yet at the same time, incredibly powerful, empowering, liberating, you know,
Oli Anderson: Yeah, that’s really interesting that you’ve mentioned kind of concepts and stories. Because actually what I found is concepts and stories are the main problem for most of us. They show up as fragments that we attach to. And those fragments cause us to become disconnected from the flow of wholeness ultimately, which is our natural drive to more expansion, more growth, more connection.
And when we pick up all of these stories and concepts in the form of unreal beliefs, that ultimately just causes us to put blocks in our own path that prevents us from seeing reality. And the reason it stops us from seeing reality, and therefore been aligned with our natural state, is that we think that the interpretations we’ve picked up at the end of the line.
And once we attach to those interpretations, that’s when all kinds of problems start to happen in our lives. So is there anything there to do with the interpretation versus reality thing that is aligned with your view or your understanding of all this?
Israel Bouseman: So, let me give you a little bit of background here. The way that I arranged my book, I set it up in seven modules, seven simple steps, and they’re loosely correlated with the scope of perception of each chakra. So once we come up to the sixth module, then we’re looking at the third eye.
We’re looking at vision, which means we’re looking at stories. And my whole approach in the sixth module is one of deconstruction. Like, I have spent my life learning these amazing, beautiful, and powerful stories, but I’ve found in working with people, before we can get benefit from any story, we have to learn to unbelieve the things that we’ve picked up and just taken on unintegrated. So, you’ll notice a theme here and a lot of what I share. In the sixth module, I talk about three levels of certainty.
And this is a really hard line approach, but it’s good for precision and thought. So my three levels of certainty, the first level of certainty, the only thing about which I am truly certain is I am. Now, I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what I is. I don’t know what it means to am to exist, but that is the one thing that anytime I look around, that’s true. So that’s my first level of certainty.
The only thing that I know. Second level of certainty is this bubble of things that I am seeing and feeling. And again, I don’t know that what I am seeing and feeling, the way that I perceive it, has any connection to the outer world. But since it seems somewhat consistent, it behooves me to act as if this is what’s going on. That’s my second level of certainty, as what I see, feel, touch, here, and smell. Now, there’s a third level of certainty, and that refers to how I interpret what I experience.
So when I look at something and I offer this collection of color and line and form and texture, when I give it a name and I say, this is a cup, this is a guitar, and when I think about my history with that or what it means to me, how I might use it, this is a collection of stories, fixed concepts that we attach to and overlay our direct stimuli. So here’s my hard line with that. Stories aren’t true. Stories aren’t about truth.
I look at truth as something that is, like I describe truth in absolute terms, something that is true for all people in all ways. So I am, I am works on that level. But any story that I have about what I am or about what that is, or about how the two are related, all of that comes from a specific vantage point. So what I say is a story is a conceptual model.
It’s a map, not the territory. And if we know that, then we can get incredible value out of the use of story. If we don’t know that, any story that we learn becomes a trap. It blinds us to things that do not line up with that story. Hmm.
Oli Anderson: There’s so much good stuff there that aligns with the way that I’ve learned to understand all this. I always describe it as the veiled veil. So at core, we’re just pure consciousness. I am, like you said, that’s all we can truly, truly know. But then because we’re in bodies, fragmented bodies, there’s two levels to the veil, which you’ve kind of just alluded to. There’s the level of perception, which is always going to be fragmented because our bodies are fragmented.
So we can’t see, you know, in the back of our head, for example. But then what we perceive in this fragmented way, we then interpret that stuff through all of our emotional stuff, through the through our capacity to be able to face the truth based on, again, our emotional stuff. And so there’s this constant dance between what’s going on inside us, what we’re perceiving, how we interpret that, and it kind of turns into this big loop where we just end up going round and round on autopilot, believing the things that we have unconsciously chosen to believe, so we can remain in that cycle because we become addicted to the cycle because it basically pacifies us from riding deeper into the truth, which is always going to cause us to let go of our illusions.
And, ultimately, if we can accept that, then we can start to take a more active approach to writing stories in the way that you’ve said. If we’re not aware of this cycle that we’re all kind of caught up in automatically because it helps us to survive and stuff, then we just end up passively writing stories and then living out the scripts that those stories are ultimately telling us we need to follow. And so I guess the question becomes, how do we step out of just that cycle of being on autopilot, living according to these passively written stories and then take a more active approach to writing a story that’s based in truth, but it’s going to allow us to go deeper into that truth, if that makes sense.
Israel Bouseman: This is a beautiful, beautiful question. So, okay, it’s one thing to say, all right, so we have all of these stories and it’d be nice to get out of these stories and like get the freedom that might come in our perception and our life experience that comes from that. But then asking the practical question, then it becomes really hard because the thing about this is that when we are identified with our stories, when we believe our maps, then that’s what we see.
So it’s invisible to us that we’re seeing the map instead of what we’re actually experiencing. So one of my favorite descriptions, like a breakdown of this, is from the Toltec traditions. And this is actually drawn from the work of Don Miguel Ruiz. He’s got a book called The Fifth Agreement that he co-authored with his son. And they tell about the dream of the three attentions. Have you ever heard this one before, brother?
Oli Anderson: No, I’ve heard of the Four Agreements and that author, but no, I haven’t heard the three attentions.
Israel Bouseman: The forest is a forest, a jungle, and each of the trees in this forest is a different vantage point. It’s a different story or way of standing in relation to the world. But at first, we’re in the dream of the first attention, which this is the dream of the snake, or sometimes it’s known as the dream of the victim. And we only see that one tree that we’re in. We can’t see far enough to see the next tree. This one view of the world looks to us like the whole world. And while we’re in this place, if someone were to say, no, there’s this other way to look at it, man, this is what it is.
Why would I change my perspective when this is clearly what’s happening? So the dream of the first attention is one where it’s like the nose pressed to the glass, taking everything at face value. And we learn a lot of habits when we’re younger than we take on into our early adult life and do without even thinking about it. And that’s just how the world works. But eventually, some of these early conditionings, some of these early habits play out in ways that don’t actually work for us. So eventually we hit a crisis. This is like an opportunity to awaken.
It’s an opportunity to look again at our stories and ask, is this actually working for me? Or not. Right? So the key in shifting from the first attention to the second is accountability. So the first attention is the dream of the victim. This is the world.
It’s too big. I didn’t have any part in creating this situation for myself. It just happened to me.
So I just got to deal with it. Right? That’s the dream of the victim.
But then eventually we say, hang on, hang on. There’s something that I did that led to this situation. And I can kind of remember doing something similar and it leading to a similar situation.
Maybe I can try to change that up. Right? So we start to see where we’ve put our power, where we’ve made our decisions unconsciously, where we’ve attuned to a particular type of interaction with the world. And it’s just a glimpse. But that little glimpse is like two tree limbs crossing. And it gives the snake passage to climb slowly into that other tree and slowly take on a different perspective.
So this is the beginning of the movement from the dream of the victim, nose pressed to the glass, seeing that their perspective is the whole world into the dream of the warrior. And this is connected to the animal image of the jaguar. Like the jaguar. Jaguar will go around in the forest looking for different perches that will be good places to hunt, places to hang up and jump down on something.
So the jaguar is better than the snake at jumping out of a tree and walking along on the ground a little bit. So in human terms, this means hang on. OK, maybe I’ve had this story that life is hard and you just got to settle for what’s on offer. And while I’ve had this story, this is the kind of experience I’ve been having.
Maybe I can try to let this story go and say, hey, it’s possible for me to do something I really care about, something that matters to me. You know, and then we’re being like the jaguar at that point. We’re dropping out of our old story and we’re stalking, stalking a new perspective and trying to try out a new way of relating to the world.
So this I’m going to actually break this down in a different way in a minute. We’re going to bring some Jung into it with the middle world and the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. But I’ll finish the dream of the three attentions first. So eventually, as we’re on this second attention, the dream of the warrior, the dream of the jaguar, we go through and we reclaim our personal power that’s been lost to this story, lost to this perception of self, lost to this limiting belief.
And it’s this whole journey of looking, going through life, looking at the outer world as a mirror for ways that we’re hanging out in a tree that isn’t a very good perch for us. And then learning that it’s not about what the outer world did to us just then. It’s about how we are meeting it, how we are standing in relation to the outer world. And that is within our power.
Oli Anderson: Yeah, I think the key thing there is that we have a lot of misconceptions about where stories come from and how they impact our lives. And I think for most people, if they kind of wandering through life on autopilot because they they’re not aware yet of like how all this stuff plays out, they think that their story is a response to the things that they’ve experienced. But actually, when you kind of become aware of how reality works and how we can take control of our lives, you realize that actually our experience is a response to the story that we’re telling.
So it’s not the it’s not that the story comes after the experience. Our inner experience affects our experience of the world and the stories that we tell ourselves about it. And so if you can understand that, you realize the story is just a kind of a concept, like you said, it’s not real. It has literally no connections to the truth. And so actually, you can reconfigure it and unlearn all of the untruth that are kind of embedded in that story.
So you can start to live the life that you’re supposed to live by being aligned with your natural state. And so do you think this is a bit of a tangent, I guess. But do you think our culture in general encourages us to buy into stories and ideas about stories that are just not even true? And if so, why has that kind of become the norm?
Israel Bouseman: You know, I mean, yes, in a way, but I’m wondering if that’s just part of the human condition. You know, like we want stories that make us feel safe. We want stories that make us feel important. We want stories that give our lives meaning, you know, and if we are not able to find these in true ways, then we will make them will will will create will make artificial meaning and value just so that we can have something that we can rest in. And I think that’s actually it’s just part of human development.
But I will say that our culture is not one that encourages human development for a number of reasons. One of my big things, and this is actually a bit far afield, but one of my big things is the the perception of an objective world. Like science has looked at the whole human experience in objective terms and there’s a lot of value that’s come from that. But at the same time, it leaves us ignorant about who we are, what we need. We look for the meaning of life, the meaning of the world in some terms like we would find in a microscope when that’s all about subjective relation with the world. It’s all about stepping in and saying, this is my experience right now.
What am I going to do with it? You know, yeah. So I would say that in a way, it’s part of the human condition to connect with stories that keep us small. And that’s part of our growth, too, is to have the opportunity by being connected with these stories that don’t serve us to actually be springboarded forward into that next bit of growth, that next opening. Yeah.
Oli Anderson: Like the way that I always think about it is that we’re constantly on a journey from fragmentation to wholeness. And I must have, you know, broken this down like a million times now on this podcast, but it’s always the same structure for all human beings, because in a way you’re right, it’s part of the human experience. And ultimately what it looks like is we’re born, we’re in a state of wholeness.
Then, you know, we go through this process of coming into the world, we develop language, we develop our own sense of self and identity. We start to think that we’re fragmented and disconnected from everything else that we’re an individual. Then usually something happens that causes us to feel shame or guilt or in the worst cases trauma. When that happens, we end up disowning parts of ourselves and sending them into the shadow self, the shadow territory.
We create an ego version of who we think we are to fit into the world and also to keep those parts that we’ve now disowned at bay. And then we go through life, putting our fragmentation out into the world and a fragmented story about who we are.
And because like we said, the story dictates the experience that comes to us, we end up experiencing life in a fragmented way. And if we’re lucky, either one of two things will happen. Something really bad will happen, which you know, it sounds a bit kind of paradoxical, but something bad will happen that ultimately causes us to hit rock bottom. And when we hit rock bottom, we’ll ultimately see that the story we’re telling ourselves is not true because down there rock bottom, we get reunited with all these different parts of ourselves that we were hiding from.
So that’s a good thing because then when we start rebuilding our lives, we integrate the parts that we fit in, we become more whole. And then one, thank you, man, we can live the rest of our lives kind of flowing in a way that’s ultimately founded on acceptance rather than denial. The other thing that can happen is we can, you know, we can avoid hitting rock bottom because we basically put ourselves through some kind of spiritual experience or some process of aligning ourselves with the truth.
Either way, the result is the same. You know, there’s a million and three different ways to do that, probably more is different people take different paths. But the end result is that we end up tasting wholeness and that allows us to transcend the unreal stories that we’ve been telling ourselves, which, you know, maybe our illusions or lies, whatever we’re doing to use. And then we can start writing a real story because we then thereafter have a vision of where we want to go, what our real life looks like. And instead of holding back because the stories we’ve attached to, we can keep writing a new chapter basically every day or a new page as we learn more about ourselves by changing our relationship with life.
So there becomes life enhancing instead of life denied. So I love that man. That process is ultimately the theme of this whole podcast. So I know that you you share some similarities in your work, but just to break it down, I always say it’s awareness, acceptance and action. Awareness is basically deconstructing the ego. So you start to, you know, you start to become aware of how you’re holding yourself back, the limiting beliefs, how you fragmented what the truth of life actually is, you know, blah, blah, blah, you become aware of all these different things.
The natural laws that apply to us all. Then you accept it. And when you accept yourself, you have to start accepting, you know, certain things about life, which you may have been hiding from. And then finally, when you’ve gone through the process of awareness and acceptance, then you can start building or even manifesting a real life, because you don’t have the blocks and you’re aligned with the flow state.
So for me, that is a transformational process that applies to every single human being that’s ever lived, that’s gone through any kind of transformation. And but how does that align with your stuff? And is there anything that you want to add or subtract?
Israel Bouseman: Oh, yeah, no, this is absolutely perfect, brother. So okay, the the awareness bit with the story that I was just telling you that first bit, the dream of the victim, the dream of the snake.
This is what you laid out about. Basically, it’s like we’re born into a sea of chaos, and we start to erect a palace, an armor of different stories that we call an ego and a view of the world, you know, and it protects us from the uncertainty for a little while. But it’s just a fragment. It’s just a part of our whole being.
So when we start to grow and become conscious of more of ourselves than is contained within that little structure, that’s when we’re pushed to crisis. And it might be an existential crisis that leads to spiritual awakening. It might be a physical crisis, but either way, we’re pushed to reassess. Now, the way that I break this journey down, I describe it as freedom, power and purpose. What does that come from?
From inside? What feeling or what story do I have that is helping me to attune to this kind of experience in life? So it’s this whole process of self-stalking to reclaim the power that we’ve invested into these ideas and stories and memories. And then slowly, slowly, we shift from reclaiming our power to actually deciding how do we want to use it. So this is a whole other journey, right? So after we have taken back our freedom from our conditioned perspective, after we had reclaimed our power from these stories, slowly, slowly, then we have to decide what we want to do with it.
And if at this point we don’t have any purpose that extends beyond ourselves in some way, we will tend to become a petty tyrant and we’ll tend to use our words, use our will, use our power in ways that are self-serving, but don’t really, they’re not really in balance with the larger framework. So in the Toltec perspective, in the dream of the three attentions, this is when you come into the third dream. The dream of the third attention is the dream of the eagle or of the master of the artist. And this is the point where you say, okay, all right, I can roost in any one of those trees that I might like.
And I can also be at home just floating in the thermals, seeing the whole layout of the forest, how all of these perspectives relate with one another, and where I might use one of those perspectives fruitfully for what I’m doing right now in the world. So I wanted to add Jung’s stuff to this because it would kind of expand it a little bit, right?
So Jung was an early psychologist and one of the things that he gave us was a way to understand Eastern and tribal and more spiritual perspectives within a framework that’s more acceptable to the conventional Western mind. So he discussed archetypes and he discussed Jung, the three shamanic worlds, which is what we’ve been discussing right now, like you got the middle world, which is the world of our waking consciousness. And that’s where we start off in that dream of the third attention.
That’s where we start off in our fragmented state, seeing the middle world and believing it as the whole world. And then when we have crisis, when we have something come up, it actually starts to, like the hero’s journey style, it launches us into the underworld of the personal unconscious. So all of our memories, all of our unintegrated emotions and stories, all that stuff that we’re carrying inside that’s reflecting out to our experience of the world.
So in the process of moving through that personal subconscious, we, this is shadow work, we get to know these different voices, we get to integrate these old stories, so they’re no longer calling the shots from behind the curtains. And slowly, slowly as we have more time, more will to actually do with as we intentionally choose, then we move into the upper world, as Jung would describe it, the collective unconscious. And this is the place, like the collective unconscious is the repository of the archetypes. So like the strong passions and the holy ideas with universal appeal.
So things like peace and mercy, right? These are, these are denizens, like ideas that live in the collective unconscious. And when we speak and act in alignment with these things, they have power, we become aligned with something that speaks universally to people. This is in that dream of that, that master, it’s coming right back to the middle world, taking this freedom and this power that we’ve reclaimed for ourselves, taking this clarity, these values that we have identified in this upper world and dedicating ourselves to serving them down here in the middle world, where we’re actually experiencing.
We’re going to go down there because we put ourselves on some spiritual path. And by going down there, initially it seems like we’re just trying to serve ourselves. Because at that point, we’re obviously still telling ourselves all these ego based stories and all that kind of stuff. We think that healing is what we need to do for our own sake. But when we get down there and we start digging into our stuff, shame, guilt, trauma, all the disowned parts that we’ve already talked about.
Then the end result of that is exactly what you said. We’re going to find the greatest treasure, which is some universal truth. And then we come back to the normal world, to the village, you know, if we’ve been out in the hero’s journey, like hunting and striving and all that stuff. And ultimately what we learn to do by facing ourselves to this deep, deep level that you’re talking about is we learn to transcend ourselves.
Oli Anderson: Ultimately, the end result of this process, which is a creative process is always the same thing. It’s that we realize all of the stories we’re telling ourselves are untrue, all the concepts, all the ideas are unnecessary. And actually, we have all of this universal power, ultimately, which is going to show up as certain gifts or whatever it is, certain qualities and, you know, depending on who we are. And then we get into the final stage of your model, which is the purpose stage where we realize, okay, I have this value to offer to the world.
And the only way that I’m going to be able to give this gift is to step away from who I thought I was ultimately. And in that process, that’s where we find true freedom, I would say, true connection. And we’re just back to our natural state, because ultimately that’s where we were supposed to be all along or where we actually were all along. But we didn’t realize it because the way these stories have been kind of blocking our view, our perceptions and interpretations of what was real.
Israel Bouseman: Yeah, man. Yeah. You know, the story, though, have I mentioned to you before the pen through four sheets?
Oli Anderson: No, I don’t think so.
Israel Bouseman: Okay, so this is like an oversimplified description of the human condition, you know, and I often think of humans as like, you know, a pen, like a needle, stuck through four different layers of density. So you got in the bottom sheet, the earth, the layer of the physical body and the situations that surround the body, the next layer, the emotions, you know, all of our feelings, all of our, you know, the emotional cores that we attach to other situations. As well. On top of that, you’ve got our ideas, our stories.
And on top of that, you’ve got the energetic, which kind of reflects all of the three previous densities. And whenever we got something going on on one of these things, let’s say we got like a serious distortion in our story. Well, it’s going to play out in the way that we feel in response to what we perceive.
It’s going to play out in the actions that we take and how we hold the physical body with different tension. So the story bit is amazed. It’s not necessarily the easiest or most direct path to work with chronic life issues or deep unresolved traumas or things that require healing or shifting. The emotions are the story will run you around it all day. But if you are able to actually allow yourself to sit and feel what’s coming up and let it process in the body, it will offer you clarity, like 100 times what you would get by studying this thing in terms of concepts. Yeah, yeah, everything can happen in the body, man. So I love stories to support that. But I try to get out of them as soon as possible so the work can happen.
Oli Anderson: Yeah, so that’s ultimately the end result of this process is you transcend all stories ultimately. I think right at the start of the conversation when we’re talking about interpretations versus reality, you said ultimately, I might be wrong, but I think you said like stories ultimately are not true, because they’re just little fragments, like we said, and different perspectives of the same universal truth, which is, you know, I believe, like you do, absolute. The truth is the truth for all of us. But our interpretations either bring us towards it or away from it.
And the stories just feed into that. And if we can understand that, then we realize exactly like you just said as well. The concepts are totally irrelevant. Like all concepts are ultimately unreal. But we often fall into the trap of thinking that, you know, some are more real than others, which isn’t necessarily true, although some of us can point us more closely to reality than others can.
But ultimately, there’s no real difference between, you know, an illusion that seems like a really big lie and illusion that just seems like a little lie. And actually, the process of stepping away from all of them is the same. It’s exactly what you said, facing what is going on inside of us, feeling our way through it and then dissolving all of the conceptual bullshit that has arisen because of that. And if you live in a kind of real way where you’re basically raising awareness, learning to accept and then taking inspired action, or going through your process, then ultimately, what is going to happen is you realize that there’s nothing holding you back, and that there is no reason not to just kind of be with your nature.
I was reading a book about yoga the other day, and it said, ultimately, the purpose of yoga is to put you in a situation where you’re merging nature with the transcendent. And I think ultimately that’s what we’re talking about, because the only way you can go from awareness to acceptance to true action is to face your nature and to look at the way that you’ve, you know, you fragmented body and all that stuff is holding you back. But to realize that there’s more than that.
And if you’re living in this way where you’re basically merging the past, present and future by putting yourself in the process of growing real, as I call it, then what happens is your nature is a foundation for transcending itself, something like that. And so that’s the whole thing about that stuff that comes from the body, thinking that’s the truth. And if you can accept that it’s, it’s just the way you’re perceiving, but that you can change your perceptions because we have power, like you said, then everything kind of opens up. So that was a huge rumble. But what do you think?
Israel Bouseman: Well, I totally agree with you. I do. And I’ve also found that in working with people, it can be really, really tricky to get to the point where we realize that that’s what’s going on.
Because when we’re triggered, when we’re spiraling, you know, our thoughts can have so much vividness to us that we can’t see that it’s just a thought, you know. So I totally agree with you. At the same time, I try to bring it back to just lived terms as much as possible.
Like this idea of transcending it and, you know, getting getting to our true nature. I love it. I’m 100% with it. And at the same time, if I describe this to someone, that sounds like poetry. Or it sounds like scripture. And, you know, if they don’t already know how to do it, they’re like, well, that sounds great. You know, I’d love to be that monk in a cave somewhere, but you know, I got work to do.
Oli Anderson: No, I was just going to say this is why really, yeah, all this philosophizing and everything is, is important in a way because it’s part of raising awareness. But ultimately, if people don’t take action, then nothing is going to change is it. But what I found like working with people is once you help them to figure out a real way forward, which just means they’re taking action that is aligned with their current best understanding of what wholeness looks like to them, then ultimately they’ll start getting results.
They’ll start getting evidence that all of the unreal stories they’ve been telling themselves are not true anyway. And then it all just kind of slips away. Like this is kind of what I was digging out a few minutes ago when I was saying that, you know, concepts are just concepts. So if you think you have a big problem, you think you have a small problem, ultimately it’s the same thing.
Like really, if you think you have a problem and it’s lingering, the thing that’s causing that problem to linger is your identity. And so when you step away from that story by taking new actions, actions that are aligned with who you’re trying to become, it all kind of slips away. And so this is a roundabout way of saying that the only way you can learn all this stuff that we’re talking about ultimately is by doing it. And you’re right, like you can’t just go to a random person in the street and start, start a rhapsodizing about like, you know, transcendence and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You have to help them if you are going to help them to help themselves take the action that is going to allow those stories to slip away. And yeah, you, there’s yeah, there’s stuff you can do to strategize that, you know, what does, you know, who do you want to be? What does it look like? What qualities do you need to develop? You know, the person who’s trying to reach the vision you’ve set for yourself, the real one, what is, you know, who do you need to become basically to make that happen? And it’s only by becoming that we can let go of it, if that makes sense.
So you’re 100%, right? Like you can’t, it’s not a conceptual thing in any way, shape or form. But like, obviously, we sometimes have to use the concepts to, to talk about it. That’s the catch 22, I guess. But ultimately, no, no action, no result.
Israel Bouseman: That’s true, man. It’s such a big topic that we’re talking about here, that it’s really hard to find a good access point or a reasonable way to pass it across. That’s actually one of the things that I am most pleased with about this book that I’ve recently published. And I mentioned it in the beginning, only human and operating manual for seekers and sensitives. So what I do is this has been my study throughout my whole life. It’s the big stuff. It’s liberation, it’s empowerment. If you want to use a term that’s got a bunch of charge and very little understanding around it, it’s enlightenment, right? I don’t like to use terms like this because people have ideas on what they mean. And it gets in the way of actually experiencing stuff.
So I like to start with the breath, man. Everything in the world has a rhythm to it. Yeah. And the body itself goes on this three, three-part drum, right? We got the bellows of the breath and the heartbeat and the brainwave activity.
And they’re all linked. So as soon as we can slow the breath, we can actually like tune the mind and do a slight meditative state into a slower state than our normal waking consciousness. And from that perspective, everything looks different. But there’s another benefit to that. Because if you pay an attention to your breath, man, then you’re breathing all the time. Breath is something we can always return to.
It’s something we always have going on. So when we start cultivating awareness around breath, we start cultivating awareness around what we’re doing right now, which is awesome. And then you move into a place where, you know, okay, all right, I’m paying attention to my breath. And then something happens and I get triggered and I launch into a reaction without even realizing it, right?
So then it moves us into the emotions. How do we handle triggers when they come up? How do we process our emotions in a healthy way? How can we navigate these waters so that we can understand the wise messages that are coming to us from our emotions?
And we can use them access our emotions to make us even stronger and to support us in the task at hand. So I’ve broken it down into these little steps that can incrementally build. And in the process, we’re working up towards ego. We’re working up towards ideas. We’re working up towards a person’s relationship with their self, their self acceptance. But all of that is seeded by just starting being here right now and dealing with the really human stuff in a really human way.
Oli Anderson: 100%. Yeah, it’s so important. Because obviously, I have a tendency to do this as well, like we can complicate these ideas. But ultimately, it’s all very simple. It’s about getting out of the fragments in your mind and getting into an experience of something real. And so actually, you know, it’s like there’s been loads of studies done showing that if you’re depressed, and you’ve got anxiety and stuff, you can take antidepressants, okay, or you can start exercising, you can start sleeping better, you can learn to meditate, you can look after yourself, blah, blah, blah.
There are foundational things that just make all of this stuff we’re talking about so much easier. And breathing, learning to breathe, learning to get in your body is a super important one. Because obviously, when you’re meditating and you’re breathing, doing Pranayama or any other stuff, you’re not in your mind, you’re like in your body, you’re in the present moment, you’re in the flow, the breath as well is interdependent. It’s about the inner and the outer kind of flowing together.
So it shows you the exact connection. It’s super, super important. So just to kind of wrap this up, because I basically run out of time, what other kind of practical things for kind of moving in this direction we’re talking about, along with the breath stuff that you just mentioned, what other practical stuff is in your book, if anyone’s kind of interested in going down that path with you?
Israel Bouseman: Oh, there’s loads. So like I said, I set it up in seven steps. So the first step is about our breath and rhythm. Second is about emotions, healthy processing triggers, learning the language of the emotions. Third bit is about presence and attention. Attention is the key to inner freedom.
Anything that demands your attention in that way is taken away your freedom. So we learn to actually workshop that in our daily lives, moment to moment. Then I look at acceptance and accountability. If you have a moment of complete radical acceptance, this is your life right now and it is enough. That is something that stays with you through the rest of your life. It is a depth of peace and grace that provides a foundation that can never be taken from you regardless of what happens in life.
That is incredibly powerful. Then I look at our habits and loops. If you step back and look at where your energy is going through the course of the day, through the course of the week, this is when we can start to consider that upper world stuff, the collective unconscious, the holy ideas. What do you serve?
What do you want your life to support and help to create, cultivate in this day, in this week, in this month? It’s a blessing. It’s like some clay that we’ve got here to work with and we can either just chuck the clay at the wall or do something with it, man. Yeah.
hen I mentioned earlier in our conversation, there’s the sixth module on stories and discernment, breaking that down to bring in precision in the mental space. Finally, man, my seventh module is all about consciousness. It’s all about the holy I am presence at the core of our being and what it is that makes these little functional eyes, like this little eye that says I am Israel.
I am sitting here speaking with you on this podcast. There’s that little eye and there’s the big eye that doesn’t just fit in one body and doesn’t fit in labels very well. So I start to look at the relationship between those two in a way that we can work with it. It’s just like I mentioned that rhythm of the world, man. If you match rhythm with anyone or anything, then in that little space, in a little way, you become a one thing, a functional unity. You can use this for therapy. You can use this to connect deeply with the beings around you.
You can use it to actually awaken to this whole experience of life in a really powerful way. So there’s loads, man. There’s way more I could share than that. This was just an introduction so that I could start some deeper conversations with people.
Oli Anderson: That was awesome. And ultimately, your book, it sounds like it’s structured in a way from fragmentation to wholeness. Like it’s leading people down this path that we’ve ultimately been talking about.
If you’re going to sum up this conversation and give some final words of wisdom for people that have been listening, what would they be? And also, can you tell people where they can find your website and where they can buy your book and all that stuff? And you’ve got some courses as well, I think.
Israel Bouseman: Yes, sir. Yeah, I have just recently launched a couple of courses. I’ve got my four week Alpha State Calibration, where I teach people how to reliably and consistently enter a meditative state and how they can use it in many different ways to improve their quality of life. I’ve got a 16 week Only Human Foundations course, where I offer a guided journey through the material that I share in this book and work with one-on-one coaching to help address things that come up and really tailor it to each person’s situation.
But my courses are available on my website, OnlyHumanWisdom.com. And my book right now is available on Amazon. So I’ll leave the link for you in the chats. And I don’t know, were you asking about words of wisdom to leave it with or other details?
What have I missed?
Oli Anderson: Yeah, that was it. So just if you’ve got some kind of… If you’re going to sum this all up, how would you do it? Because we covered a metric fuck ton of things. So just how would you sum it up?
Israel Bouseman: You know, I would sum it up by saying that every single person is way more amazing, way more powerful than they think they are. And that we all, regardless of your situation, regardless of what it looks like on the outside, every single one of us can live a life of such overflowing joy and deep meaning that it just, you know, that life can feel like the blessing that it actually is.
And part of that comes from slowing down and connecting with who we really are and what we’re really doing. And on a very deep level, I’ll share this, this gets a bit esoteric, but I think it’s a good place for it. Every single being is suspended on a thread of inexhaustible energy from source to the core of the earth.
We often try to get our energy, you know, our acceptance or acclaim or, you know, we try to get energy from the middle world, but really we’re this channel of energy from the upper to the lower worlds. And the more that we can breathe and slow down and feel that connection above and that grounded connection below, the more that we can be centered, full of vitality and in the best condition to respond to whatever step of the journey that we find ourselves on. I couldn’t agree more.
Oli Anderson: Like, ultimately, that’s what this is all about. It’s kind of like the yoga quote that I shared. Like we’re merging nature with the transcendent. And the way that we do that is by choosing a process right here, right now, like you said, and making the unconscious conscious and just going with it where we need to go. And the only place it can ever leave is back to our natural state of wholeness. And when we get there, it’s exactly like you said, we have so much more power, so much more grace, we have so much more trust. We basically become unshakable because what’s real is always real. And that’s just it.
And when we understand that we’re real, everything else gets more real and life is just amazing. So Israel, thank you so much for coming on here and sharing all your wisdom. I’ll share your links and everything in the show notes. But I really appreciate your time today and like everything that you’ve shared has been amazing. So thanks again.
Israel Bouseman: Thank you, brother, for having me. This has been a great conversation. And yeah, I’d love to go further at some point. If you’d like.
Oli Anderson: Yeah, I feel like we could like at least another 48 hours. But let’s see how that goes. But yeah, thanks again, man.
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