by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
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 through the power of TRUST.
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 solo episode, we delve into the critical distinction between the REAL and the unreal, a concept that comes up frequently and passionately in these podcast episodes and in my (Oli Anderson) coaching and writing.
Wholeness vs. Fragmentation: Ultimately, the journey towards realness involves embracing wholeness and moving away from fragmentation. We explore how this boils down to the importance of understanding our deep connection to ourselves, others, and life itself.
Understanding Viveka: We explore how this aligns with the ancient yogic concept of Viveka, which is the discernment between the real and the unreal. This helps us to understand some of the universal principles that guide human experience and that we can align ourselves with to live a REAL life.
Life as a Lesson: With the right perspective, every experience in life is an opportunity to learn and discern the real from the unreal. By focusing on the real, we can grow, flow, and ultimately lead a more authentic life. Seeing things in this way makes us more resilient and allows us to TRUST in the deepest possible way.
Creative Status: Real vs. Unreal
Join me as we explore the fundamental principles of realness and how to apply them to your life. This episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking to move from fragmentation to wholeness and live a more authentic existence by tapping into their realness.
Stay real out there,
Oli Anderson (www.olianderson.co.uk)
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Creative Status Links:
Book a call with Oli and grow more REAL (coaching): olianderson.co.uk/talk
Yoga flow I made (Vinyasa to Yin flow): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNVsITXyy9c
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
The Creative Performance Transformation Lab: olianderson.co.uk/creativeperformance
Show Transcript: Discerning Real from Unreal & Finding Wholeness
This is a podcast about understanding how to be more real
Oh, hi there. Oli Anderson here. You’re listening to Creative Status, a podcast about understanding how to be more real, more human, and how to cultivate a sense of unconditional self-acceptance. This will allow you to have better relationships with other people and with life itself. Ultimately, it’s about accepting things as they are and removing resistance from your life. When you do that, you experience less friction, frustration, and misery.
This is a solo episode, which means it’s just going to be me rambling about some kind of philosophical, psychological, or maybe even spiritual topic. Before we get into that, if you don’t know, my name is Oli Anderson. I’m a transformational coach focused on realness. Realness is an idea I’ve been discussing for quite a long time—maybe even ten years.
The main source of my thoughts on this topic is my book Personal Revolutions: Shortcuts to Realness and Shadow Freedom from Bullshit in an Unreal World. I also have a new book coming out in the next few months about trust—learning to trust life and trust ourselves.
Real versus Unreal is one of the most important things to be able to distinguish
Today’s episode, as I mentioned, is a solo one, and I’m not planning to make it long—I’ll try not to, anyway. I want to talk a bit about how we can distinguish the real from the unreal. This is something I discuss nearly every day, whether I’m recording content for this podcast or for YouTube, or when I’m working with clients in my coaching practice. Understanding the difference between the real and the unreal is one of the most important skills for living a good life—a life where we’re emotionally healthy, have goals that inspire us, and keep us moving forward, growing, and evolving. It’s about having a mindset that doesn’t attack us or hold us back, and it all comes down to real versus unreal.
In our postmodern society, many people believe there isn’t anything truly real, thinking everything is just a matter of interpretation. This can cause confusion, especially when someone like me is on the internet saying, “This is real, that’s not real—figure out the real stuff and everything will be fine.” So, I want to dive into some fundamental but simple principles that you can apply in your own life to make sense of this. I’m also going to touch on some ancient ways of understanding this concept.
I’ve been doing my yoga teacher training recently, and I came across a concept called Viveka, which is all about discerning the real from the unreal. The word Viveka literally means discernment of the real versus unreal. For me, that was a “wow” moment when I read it, because it’s something I’ve been talking about for ages. But, like with many things, the yogis figured this out thousands of years ago. I find it really interesting because it’s a reminder that there are universal principles that apply to all human beings, regardless of when or where we were born. These universal truths aren’t going anywhere, and if we can understand them, work with them, and build our lives around them, life becomes amazing.
In this episode, I want to give you three key points—three takeaways that you can start using as a kind of barometer to measure whether you’re being real or not. If you find yourself getting caught up in the unreal, these points will help you shift your focus so that you can direct your time, energy, and attention to the real things that matter and watch them grow. Ultimately, that’s what this is all about. If you focus on the unreal aspects of your life, your life will continue to be unreal. But if you make some simple shifts and focus on the real, then things will start to get much more real. What we give our time, energy, and attention to grows, so you might as well focus on the real stuff to live a real life.
Everything comes down to wholeness versus fragmentation.
Let’s dive right into these three points so we’re not here all day. The first point I want to make is something you’ve probably heard me say a billion times before, whether you’ve been listening to this podcast, or you’ve read or watched my content. Ultimately, everything comes down to wholeness versus fragmentation.
When I talk about being real, I’m talking about being on the path toward embracing and going deeper into our own wholeness. Wholeness means being deeply connected to who we really are, beyond the ego and our conceptual understanding of ourselves. It’s about embracing ourselves at a fundamental level, as living beings. It also means understanding our connection to other people and recognizing the universal experiences we all share—whether it’s facing mortality, dealing with cause and effect, aging, working through emotional issues, dissolving shame, or coming to terms with trauma. These shared experiences connect us to everyone else. We often focus on differences, but it’s our similarities that make us real and human. This is because we’re all on this path toward wholeness.
Understanding ourselves, understanding others, and ultimately understanding our connection to life itself are key. We tend to filter everything through our perception and interpretations of what we perceive, which I refer to as “the veiled.” It’s like a double-barrelled barrier between ourselves and life. First, we perceive things in a limited way because we’re in these fragmented bodies—an example I often give is that you can’t see behind you because you don’t have eyes in the back of your head. Once we perceive things in a fragmented way, we then interpret them in a fragmented way as well, due to our emotional baggage, our need to avoid or resist certain aspects of life, and the things we want to believe to protect ourselves from reality. This creates two levels of fragmentation between us and life.
Most of us run around thinking that we are these fragments, and this is where problems arise. We go out into the world treating unreal things as though they are real. And once again, it comes back to the concept of Viveka, which is about discerning when we’re truly in the flow of life—when we’re experiencing life, growing, evolving, and moving with wholeness—versus when we’re holding back due to our attachment to the way we perceive and interpret life. This is ultimately the difference between wholeness and fragmentation.
Life behind the Veiled Veil
There are three key sub-points I want to make that can help you understand and discern the real from the unreal in the way we’ve been discussing. I’ll go over these quickly.
The first point is about the nature of concepts. When we’re caught up in the “veiled” state—the unreal way of perceiving and interpreting life—we experience everything conceptually. We often mistake concepts for the truth, but in reality, concepts are merely signposts either pointing toward or away from the truth. Some concepts are more real than others, but none of them are completely real. For example, consider the concepts of a unicorn versus a chair. Both are concepts, but the concept of a unicorn points away from reality, while the concept of a chair points toward it, since objects we label as chairs exist in the world. If you perceive and interpret everything at a purely conceptual level, you’re living in the unreal because real life is an experience. That doesn’t mean that everything we experience is real, as we often filter experiences through the ego, coloring them with interpretations that serve our attachment to fragmentation. But to keep it simple, if you’re living at a conceptual level, you’re likely being unreal. By discerning the difference between the conceptual and the experiential, you can better identify the unreal and start focusing on what’s real.
The second point is the illusion of stasis. When we’re caught up in the ego—essentially buying into fragmentation and the “veiled” state—we imagine that we are static and unchanging. The ego needs us to remain static so we don’t have to grow or embrace new experiences that could bring us closer to the truth, exposing the futility of the ego and our attachment to it. The illusion of stasis is what prevents us from having a growth mindset. In reality, life is constantly changing because we experience it through time, space, and causality, always moving forward. However, if we cling to static concepts—whether about ourselves, the world, or reality—we resist change because we want life to conform to these fixed ideas. This resistance keeps us in a state of opposition rather than acceptance, which is about flow. Understanding that the illusion of stasis is unreal helps you become more discerning between the real and unreal. Once again, it comes down to fragmentation versus wholeness. Wholeness keeps moving and evolving, while the ego tries to keep things static.
The final point is what I call the illusion of separation. This, too, stems from how we interpret life through the “veiled” state, causing us to fragment what is inherently whole. Real life is interconnected—everything is part of an unfolding wholeness. As life evolves, we are drawn into more wholeness, letting go of unreal things that obscure our vision of this truth. However, when we identify ourselves as isolated entities within time, space, and causality, disconnected from everything else to maintain the illusion of the ego, we fall into the illusion of separation. In truth, nothing is separate; it’s all one vast system within systems, all interacting with itself. Our perspective from behind the “veiled” state makes us feel separate and static, leading us to believe we are just physical entities moving through life in isolation.
All of these points—concepts, stasis, and separation—are manifestations of fragmentation versus wholeness. By understanding this, and recognizing how it shows up in your life, you’ll see that discerning the real from the unreal ultimately comes back to the same idea: it’s all about wholeness versus fragmentation.
Wholeness and fragmentation in yogic philosophy
So, that’s the first point I want you to take away from this episode: everything ultimately boils down to wholeness versus fragmentation. Wholeness is real, and fragmentation is unreal. We often cling to fragmentation because of our ego and our desire to stay in our comfort zone, resisting growth and change.
The second takeaway is the concept of Viveka that I’ve already shared. In yogic philosophy, Viveka refers to the discernment between the real and the unreal. If you want to be liberated from the things that hold you down and lock you into the illusion of duality, the “veiled” state, and all the challenges that come with it, you need to cultivate this discernment.
In yogic philosophy, this discernment shows up in two ways. First, it’s about distinguishing between ultimate reality, known as Brahman, and illusion, known as Maya. If you can learn to discern what’s truly real—recognizing that everything is interconnected in wholeness—and separate that from the illusion of duality, you can step into your own power. You’ll understand that even though you experience life in a personal, singular way, you can go through a process of letting go of fragmentation and align your consciousness with universal consciousness, or Brahman.
This concept ties back to the idea that everything boils down to wholeness versus fragmentation. Maya, or the illusion of duality, is the idea that things are disconnected and that everything has an opposite—good and bad, up and down, good and evil, and so on. When we perceive life through this veil of Maya, we create an identity to fit into that dualistic world. I like to describe it as being asleep, dreaming, and your ego or identity is the character you play in that dream. It’s not the real you; it’s just a role you’re playing because of the dualistic world you find yourself in.
The main problem with buying into this illusion is that it disconnects you from the truth. When you’re disconnected from the truth, you start to feel things like shame, emptiness, restlessness, and the sense that there’s something more. These feelings are valid, but we often misinterpret them, thinking we need more things within the dream or to be a different version of ourselves—essentially, an extension of the character we’re playing—instead of tapping into who we truly are. This adds layers of complexity to our ego.
The feelings of emptiness and restlessness are signals that there are parts of yourself that need to be reawakened so you can escape from the dream. This aligns with what the yogis and I have been saying about wholeness and fragmentation: you need to wake up to the fact that you’re often perceiving unreal things because you’re treating fragments as the whole, and the illusion as the real thing. Once you understand this, you can start waking up and bringing your true self to the surface, rather than just creating a version of yourself to fit into the dualistic world.
Another way the yogis explain this is through the Yoga Sutras by Patanjali, where Viveka is described as the ability to distinguish between pure consciousness, known as Purusha, and nature or the material world, known as Prakriti. These two—nature and consciousness—can work together, and it’s not that nature is evil or anything like that. In fact, I believe we should attune to our nature as much as possible. But, again, it comes down to wholeness versus fragmentation. Nature is composed of fragments, but behind it lies pure consciousness, which is wholeness, truth, or God—whatever term you prefer.
If you can understand this and discern between nature and pure consciousness, you can free yourself from being dragged into the illusions of the material world. On a practical level, this involves managing our instincts, mastering our senses, and understanding the limitations of our perceptions. You can experience pure consciousness through practices like meditation or engaging in creative processes that strip away layers of fragmentation, such as limiting beliefs, old patterns, and the stories we tell ourselves.
This process often requires effort and pushing yourself to the edge, where your ego meets reality. But if you can do this, you’ll free yourself from taking everything at face value and start to realize that there’s much more to life than what we see on the physical level. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to believe in a conscious universe or anything like that, but it does mean you should recognize that there are forces greater than yourself, even if those forces are just chaos bringing unexpected challenges into your life.
The key takeaway is that meditation is one of the best ways to begin this journey. That’s what the Yoga Sutras recommend, and Patanjali certainly knew more than I do, so I’d suggest following his advice and start meditating.
Everything in life is a lesson in discerning the real from the unreal
The final takeaway I want to leave you with in this episode is that everything—literally everything that happens to us or that we make happen—is a lesson in discerning the real from the unreal. As we grow older and accumulate life experiences, the ultimate lesson we learn is to distinguish what is true from what is untrue, what is real from what is unreal.
Every experience, no matter how small, teaches us to discern whether we are moving towards wholeness or clinging to fragments. When you go through a bad experience, it’s like a baptism by fire. You can’t lose anything real, so these difficult moments are life’s way of helping you shed the unreal, fragmented things you were holding onto that prevented you from seeing the real, valuable parts of your life that were already there.
This is the final lesson for me: it all comes down to accepting the truth about life, which includes the truth about ourselves, the truth about others, and the truth about life itself—that everything is ultimately connected. As we navigate life and become better at discerning the real from the unreal, it does get a little easier. That doesn’t mean we won’t face challenges or be pushed into deeper understanding, but it does mean that we’ll have a stronger foundation because we’re no longer filtering everything through that veiled perception of limited understanding and the identity we’ve created in the dream world of illusions and duality.
Ultimately, learning to discern the real from the unreal is about embracing the truth of wholeness and letting go of the concepts we cling to in order to maintain the illusion that we can control life with the fragmented bits of understanding we’ve gathered. Often, these very fragments are what keep us from fully experiencing life.
This podcast was about learning to discern the real from the unreal
So, that wraps up this podcast on learning to discern the real from the unreal. We covered three main points. First, we talked about the concept of wholeness versus fragmentation. This involves discerning the conceptual from the experiential, recognizing the illusion of stasis, and catching yourself when you’re resisting growth, because life is always urging you to evolve. We also discussed the illusion of separation, the mistaken belief that you’re an isolated entity disconnected from the rest of life.
Second, we delved into the concept of Viveka, which is about understanding whether you’re aligned with universal truth or simply clinging to the fragmented, physical world. When you buy into the illusion of duality, you end up playing a character in a dream rather than living in your true self.
The third takeaway is that, no matter what happens in life, we’re always learning to discern the real from the unreal. When you understand this as a constant life lesson, it becomes easier to navigate challenges. You can remind yourself that every experience is just another lesson in learning to separate truth from illusion. The more you practice this discernment, the more you can focus on what truly matters, continue growing, and move forward in life.
If you’re looking for a practical exercise to apply these ideas, start with a simple journal prompt. Reflect on areas in your life where you feel stuck or where you might be holding yourself back. Consider how these might be tied to the unreal concepts we’ve discussed—whether it’s the illusion of separation, a static self-image, or being caught up in abstract concepts instead of truly experiencing life and relationships.
Also, consider starting a meditation practice or trying yoga if you haven’t already. Yoga, in particular, has different asanas (poses) that are accessible to everyone and can help deepen your presence. I recently uploaded a 75-minute yoga flow to YouTube—a Vinyasa to Yin practice that’s designed to help you connect deeply with yourself. I’ll put a link in the episode description.
Ultimately, the key is to identify where you might be living in unreality and shift your focus to what’s real. This change in focus can transform your life. If you want to explore this further and work on applying these principles in your own life, feel free to book a call through my website at olianderson.co.uk. I’ve seen people make amazing progress when they start focusing on the real and taking authentic action.
I hope this episode has given you some clarity and inspiration. Go out there, stay real, and I’ll see you next time. Thanks for listening. Peace to you!
Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.
It contains practical exercises and dedicated meditations (Transformational Bridges) to take you DEEP in knowing yourself and life.
This book will answer many of the questions you have growing REAL and flowing towards wholeness. It covers everything from shame to addiction to the unconscious mind and synchronicity (and way more).
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is a book designed to help you look at your life from the inside-out so that you can stop holding yourself back and go get what you really want.
It contains 166 practical ‘Revolutions’ for awareness and over 8,000 Self-Guidance Questions for you to uncover new insight about yourself, the world, and reality that you can translate into action and start building your real life on the realest possible foundation.
Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.
The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.
The Flow Builder Journal has everything you need to make the next 21-weeks of your life a turning point.
It has monthly, weekly, and daily (morning and evening) check-ins, tools and reflections to keep you in the zone and keep you flowing with zest and momentum.
If you want to get unstuck and grow REAL then check it out.
Download EGO/SHADOW/TRUST - a free guide to transformation that will walk you through the vital stages of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action with practical strategies to implement right away.
