truth

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About The Truth but Were Afraid to Ask

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The Biggest Problem Most People Have is that People Believe What They Want to Believe

One of the biggest problems in the world is the pervasive myth that we can believe whatever we want to believe because there are multiple ‘realities’.

According to this myth, reality is – ultimately – whatever the hell you want it to be and so everybody can live in their own ‘reality’, defined only by the limits of their own imaginations and beliefs.

By this definition all beliefs are equally valid, my ‘reality’ and your ‘reality’ are worthy of equal respect and are equally true – even if I decide to believe that I’m a unicorn and you should give me all your attention and energy – and we all need to tolerate each other’s beliefs without question because questioning such personal things as ‘reality’ is offensive and can upset people’s feelings.

This article concerns itself why this myth isn’t just BULLSHIT but also why it’s causing all kinds of unnecessary confusion and conflict in the world.

We will also explore exactly what it is to cause people to want to ‘believe’ in their ‘own reality’ in the first place and how you can IMPROVE YOUR LIFE by learning to step back from this instinctual, ego-driven tendency to run away from your own emotions – especially shame – instead of running towards reality in truth.

In short, we’re going to open up a can of worms that will help you to separate belief from actual TRUTH (or, more accurately, a truthful way of living) so you can stop holding yourself and others back with attachments to mental constructs, belief systems, and points of view that may help you in the short-term but which can only ever hinder you in the long-run.

If you feel like the world is going ‘mad’ or that people are putting more and more clown makeup on each day as the world becomes more absurd then there’s a good chance what you’re about to read will help you make ‘sense’ of things.

Here we go:

The Thing that People Usually Call ‘Reality’ or ‘Truth’ is Actually Just ‘Interpretation’.

When people say that this is “My truth” or this is “My reality” what they actually mean is that this “My interpretation”.

Actually, even in most cases of people simply talking about reality or truth, they’re also talking about the same thing: their interpretations of these things.

This is a subtle distinction but it’s important because truth and reality are actually OBJECTIVE (factual, basically) and interpretations are SUBJECTIVE (clouded by a person’s own experience and sense of themselves).

A story that I always use to demonstrate this when I’m coaching people or whatever is the story of ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant’ which is from the Upanishads or somewhere (which goes to show just how long the distinction between reality and interpretations has been causing problems in the human experience).

The story itself is pretty simple:

As the name suggests, it involves a bunch of blind men and an elephant.

Because they can’t see what they’re looking at – a metaphor for how we all naturally perceive and interpret reality incorrectly because of our limited human capacities – they all start to argue about their INTERPRETATIONS of the reality of what stands before them (the elephant).

For example, the guy who is standing near the trunk and gets hold of it, starts to argue that what they’re dealing with is a snake; the guy that’s holding one of the elephants legs starts to argue that they’re dealing with a tree trunk; the guy who has hold of the tusks begins to argue that they’re dealing with some kind of strange weapon (or whatever).

The point of the story is that all of them are dealing with the same underlying REALITY but because of their own individual vantage points – like our own life experience etc. and literal positions in time and space – they all come up with different INTERPRETATIONS about the same fundamental thing.

These interpretations have NO EFFECT whatsoever on the FACT that there is only ONE REALITY (the Elephant) but because they all come up with their own interpretations by focusing on the fragments instead of the whole they end up causing CONFLICT.

An interesting thing here is that it’s not the reality itself that caused this conflict and confusion – it’s the attachment that the blind men have to their INTERPRETATIONS and their conviction that these interpretations are the ONLY CORRECT interpretations.

This is interesting because it helps us to understand that the truth itself is beyond conflict because IT JUST IS WHAT IT IS.

The only thing that causes problems in our lives is our INABILITY or UNWILLINGNESS to accept this truth by stepping away from our own beliefs and interpretations.

In life itself, things work in the same way:

There is only the TRUTH (or reality in my view) as a WHOLE and it’s the same truth for all of us.

The thing that causes problems in our lives is that we all see this truth to differing degrees based on how willing we are to face it (which may be difficult sometimes as the truth is the truth regardless of what we ‘like or ‘dislike’ about it).

The question now becomes if the truth is the truth then why do we WANT to BELIEVE in something else?

Understanding this can help you to GROW REAL and live a life that’s aligned with who you really are and truly want to be.

To understand it you need to understand a common law of the human experience:

People Believe What They Want To Believe

There is an important difference – as we’ve hopefully just seen – between our interpretations of the TRUTH and the actual truth.

Our interpretations aren’t the ‘thing-in-itself’ (i.e. the TRUTH) – they’re just the CONCLUSIONS we come up with after perceiving whatever’s out there in reality and then interpreting these perceptions in the light of whatever STORIES and NARRATIVES we want to believe about life.

I often call  this set of fragments and confusions between ourselves and the truth ‘The Veiled Veil’ – that sounds fancy but all it means is that there is a twofold veil between us and the truth because of the way human beings ‘work’:

First, there is the veil of perception – i.e. what we literally perceive because of our bodies and the way they let information in (which is always limited because our bodies are fragmented and reality/truth is WHOLE).

Second, there is the veil of CONCEPTUAL interpretation – where we try to make ‘sense’ of the things we perceived in relation to the beliefs we already have and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the world, and reality (which are conclusions that have already been fed through the VEILED VEIL).

Anyway, maybe that seems a little complicated but all it means is that the interpretations we have are made up of BELIEFS that are almost always informed by UNREAL information: unreal perceptions (i.e. not aligned with the actual TRUTH) and unreal interpretations (that we CREATE because of whatever we have going on inside ourselves and the stories we tell ourselves and want to believe in).

The long and short of all this is that there is an important distinction between our BELIEFS and the TRUTH.

Some beliefs might be more ‘real’ than others – in the sense that they may ‘point’ more closely to the truth than others – but in general NO belief is completely true because they are just FRAGMENTS of the truth as a WHOLE.

Now, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with this – it’s just how things work: We need beliefs to make sense of the world and to interact with others (and ourselves to some extent).

The problems start to arise when we treat our beliefs as being the TRUTH and act like we’ve got everything figured out. When we do that we just end up causing unnecessary friction for ourselves and remove ourselves from the flow of life that is necessary for us to keep growing real and moving into life more deeply.

The other problem is that by acting like our beliefs are the actual truth we also invite unnecessary CONFLICT with others into our lives… For example, in cases when our interpretations of the elephant are different to somebody else’s but we both need to be ‘right’.

If beliefs cause all these problems – when treated as the truth – then why do we become so attached to them?

That brings us on to the fundamental law of human nature that we talked about: PEOPLE BELIEVE WHAT THEY WANT TO BELIEVE.

If beliefs are not reality or truth – which can’t be chosen because they just ‘are’  – then they are something that we have CHOSEN.

We didn’t just wake up one day and find these beliefs magically embedded in our heads – they’re something that we have decided to CHOOSE as a response to whatever it is that we’ve been through in life and what we want from life further down the line.

When you understand this you can ask yourself why ‘You’ or the people in your life believe the things that they do – if they’re just running on ‘autopilot’ you can bet your bottom dollar that they’re CHOOSING the beliefs that they have for one of two main reasons:

1:- To avoid some emotional ‘stuff’ within themselves (shame, guilt, and/or trauma).

2:- TO try and run towards some illusion they need to be true about life so they can keep telling themselves some STORY they want to believe about themselves, the world, and reality as a whole.

In many ways these  two motivating factors are interrelated (and go back to the unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ like shame) but the bottom line is that PEOPLE BELIEVE WHAT THEY WANT TO BELIEVE to avoid the truth about life (because when you’ve been ‘away’ from the truth for a while – not that it ever goes anywhere – then the truth will set you free but first it will piss you off and make you miserable).

Let’s explore these two aspects of ‘People believe what they want to believe’ in a little more detail:

We Choose Our Beliefs Because of Our Emotional Relationship With Ourselves

The best thing we can do for our long-term self-interest is to accept the TRUTH and to work with it. If we can do that then we have a better awareness of ourselves, the world, and reality and will be able to act on this awareness to get better RESULTS.

Those ‘results’ will be different in the context of everybody’s life, depending on what it is they’re trying to achieve with their lives.

No matter what, though – no matter who you are or what you’re trying to do – the one thing that we all have in common is that the only place where we can get results in the first place is the same for all of us: REALITY.

Or as I say all the time, “REAL ALWAYS WORKS”.

That being said, it makes RATIONAL sense to try and ensure that our beliefs are as closely aligned with reality in truth as possible.

The problem is that – for a lot of us – this may involve going through the short-term pain of giving up some of our illusions and aligning ourselves with the truth again.

Because most of us don’t want to feel ANY pain and would rather stay in our comfort zones this means that we defend the familiar beliefs and patterns we’re used to against the truth(even in cases where they’re making us miserable because we don’t get any results).

This is where the emotional ‘stuff’ comes in:

The MAIN reason that people choose to keep believing things that go against the truth is because choosing to believe the truth instead will cause them SHORT-TERM emotional pain.

Actually, it’s not ‘the truth’ that causes this problem for them – because being aligned with truth feels ‘good’ (as you’re flowing with life and living in a creative and authentic way).

No, the thing that causes this pain is the LOSS of illusions that have been ‘protecting’ us from our unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ like shame, guilt, and trauma.

It goes like this:

-We have difficult emotions that we don’t want to face so we create a version of ourselves and a BELIEF SYSTEM to go with this version that explains these feelings away.

-Because this belief system is designed to explain away something that actually exists (the feelings) it is UNREAL from the outset.

-When the truth comes along (however that might be) it threatens the foundation of the unreal belief system by letting reality back in.

-Once reality is back in the picture, we can either FIGHT against it (a battle we can never win) – which will just cause anxiety and unnecessary tension – or we can start to face it.

-If we ‘face’ the reality/truth then we end up removing the unreal belief system and the EMOTIONS we were trying to hide resurface.

It’s not ‘The Truth’ that caused the emotional turmoil – it’s the shattering of the beliefs that were trying to hide unresolved ‘turmoil’ that was already there (and probably got worse by being avoided for a period of time).

As a general rule – general because we can become REAL and wake ourselves up from sleepwalking through life – most of the beliefs that people have are a product of their emotional relationship with themselves.

If they feel ‘bad’ about themselves – consciously or unconsciously – they will become more RIGID with their beliefs because they need to believe that certain things are true so they can keep avoiding their emotional ‘stuff’ (which will be DISSOLVED if shared with others or simply embraced anyway).

People who are RIGID like this are not open to any disagreement because they’re not willing to learn (because that threatens the belief system they created).

If you look at the world around you – especially online – you’ll see that there are all kinds of people rigidly attached to certain belief systems and defending them like their lives depend on it.

Like we already said, the TRUTH is beyond any conflict – it’s only the interpretations that cause problems. These people arguing rigidly online aren’t defending the truth but their interpretations… Hopefully, you now understand why – because they need it to be true so they can keep avoiding their feelings about themselves (as shame-driven people).

If people have a HEALTHY relationship with themselves and their emotional ‘stuff’ then they aren’t DRIVEN by shame (etc.) but instead live in a way that lets them keep going more deeply into the TRUTH about themselves, the world, and reality and DISSOLVING their shame.

These people are easy to spot because they are not RIGID about their belief systems and are ready to grow and keep evolving (though they may still have CONVICTION about their values, intentions, and principles).

Ultimately, this is the difference between being OPEN or being CLOSED – if you’re open, then you’re willing to let the truth in and change your opinions so you can grow and evolve; if you’re closed, then you’re unwilling to let the truth in and simply want to stay the ‘same’ (for the reasons we talked about).

People Need Stories to Give Themselves Hope.

When it comes to certain situations or expectations about the future, people – especially shame-driven ones – will believe what they want to see, not the actual truth about life.

Again, this comes back to their relationship with themselves because their underlying ‘stuff’ affects the things that they think they want or need from life.

If somebody feels ‘bad’ about themselves, for example, they might think that what they need is a relationship with somebody (just an example). This will affect both their PERCEPTIONS and INTERPRTATIONS of what’s in front of them.

A simple example of this is unrequited or one-sided ‘love’:

Sometimes, if somebody is particularly lonely, desperate, or feels that they can’t love themselves they will perceive themselves as being ‘in love’ with somebody and also perceive that somebody else as being in love with them too (even when they’re not).

A similar example is when somebody is horny and they have a crush on somebody (who in this example isn’t interested in them in return) and so they start to look for ‘signs’ that the other person is interested too.

In both of these cases, the person in question has a NEED that’s driven by their emotional or physical relationship with themselves and they WANT the truth to be a certain way.

When they fall into this cycle they start telling themselves a story about how the other person (in this hypothetical example) feels the exact same way… It’s not because the other person actually does feel the same way but because the person telling themselves the story wants reality to be that way.

Other examples of people WANTING to believe bullshit stories like this often revolve around avoiding reality in the form of HARD WORK:

The short version of this is that when people set themselves ‘difficult’ goals they often start to become disillusioned by all of the hard work involved and so they start to believe in ‘MAGIC BULLETS’ that can take them out of the law of cause and effect and get them IMMEDIATE RESULTS (i.e. results that don’t involve work).

If you look around you’ll see this stuff everywhere:

-Business gurus online selling people a SHORTCUT to getting million dollar clients overnight.

-Weight loss products that will help you lose weight FAST with minimum EFFORT.

-Astrology reports (or whatever) that will give you all the answers you need RIGHT NOW.

There are a million different variations of these kinds of thing but the reason there’s so many isn’t because they actually get results or have anything to do with the TRUTH but because people WANT TO BELIEVE in these products to tell themselves the story that they don’t have to do the work required to get actual results (and so they buy these products and send themselves on a wild goose chase that just makes things worse in the long-run).

Finally, another example of where this ‘story’ thing shows up is when people are giving you advice:

Almost always – especially with unwarranted advice, at least – they aren’t telling you anything about the actual TRUTH but they’re telling you how they want to see the world.

If you’re trying to do something ambitious, for example, and somebody gives you the ‘advice’ that it can’t be done they’re not advising you but telling you how they WANT it to be. Probably if you dig into their past it’ll be because they already gave up on their ambitions and have some shame around it.

I could write about this all day but what I want you to get from this is that most of the stated beliefs out in the world aren’t the truth but a RESPONSE to it. That response is always motivated by some emotional ‘stuff’ and if you want to stay TRUE TO YOURSELF you need to know this so you can check yourself and others.

What To Do: Stay TRUE.

The only way not to fall into the BELIEF TRAP is to remember that beliefs are just beliefs but the truth is the truth.

There’s a quote by the physicist David Bohm that I’ve been throwing around for years:

“Your opinions are something that you have, not something that you are.”

We need to become familiar with this idea if we want to keep growing and evolving beyond  the limitations of our identities and the belief systems that we have CHOSEN because of them.

This starts by learning to understand how beliefs are formed in the first place, how they’re distinct from THE TRUTH, and how we identify with things because of our own emotional ‘stuff’ in order to keep telling ourselves certain stories.

If you want to move forward with some of this stuff then keep TESTING your beliefs.

Ask yourself questions; make sure you know how you reached certain conclusions. More importantly, be open to CHANGING YOUR BELIEFS because if you’re so convinced that they don’t need to change then you’re just keeping yourself from the thing that you actually want: THE TRUTH.


If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂

Sign up for my mailing list if you want to stay in touch (you’ll get access to the 7-Day Personality Transplant for uncovering your life purpose):

If you want to find your own real life, start moving towards unconditional acceptance, and finding a sense of purpose then check out this 7-Day Course that you can start right now:

Goal Setting for Creative People

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How To Get Results and Stay Creative

This is a relatively short but post but it will make a BIG difference to your life if you act on it.

It’s going to walk you through a simple but effective process of goal setting that will help you to get a big picture overview of your life or creative project, start to refine a VISION that keeps your passion ignited, and to make sure that the things you’re doing are actually REAL to you.

A lot of creative people hate setting goals because it makes them feel like they’re restricted in some way.  That can be true if we CHOOSE goals that are unreal to us or that we have to force ourselves to do but the bottom line is that – if you want to get RESULTS – then you need to find a way to FOCUS on the things that will take you where you need to be whilst also supporting and nurturing your creativity with DISCIPLINE and CONSISTENCY.

At the end of the day, the only thing standing between you and the life that you want to be living is the CHOICES that you make about how you spend your time right now in the present.  These choices will affect the ACTIONS that you take and the actions that you take (or don’t take) will close the gap between where you are now and where you want to be in the future.

Here’s a process for setting goals without feeling like you’re killing your creativity – you’ll start to see almost immediate results if you start making changes to your life based on what you learn here about the actions you need to take.

You’ll probably benefit from grabbing a piece of paper and a pen to help you make the most of this.

Here we go:

Stage 1: Open Up the Vision

The first step in this process is getting a big picture overview of all the things you want from your life/creative project/whatever you’re working on.

In other words, you can use this process to look at your life as a whole or you can use it in relation to something more specific (like writing a book or creating a new work of art etc.).

Either way, the first step is to OPEN UP THE VISION by coming up with as many ideas as possible for whatever it is that you’re trying to set goals around.

This means pushing your creativity to the LIMITS and seeing how many different ideas you can come up with.

Here’s what you need to do at this stage:

-If it’s something general like your life, then you can use Be/Do/Have. This is a pretty famous idea used in the coaching world but it simply means writing down three columns and listing as many things as possible that you want from life in each area.

For example:

Be: “I want to BE rich/famous/stronger/healthy/whatever”

Do: “I want play the piano/write a novel/start a business/whatever”

Have: “I want to have a new car/a partner/a killer body/a dog/whatever”

In this first stage, the idea is to not hold yourself back with your thoughts about what’s possible or not – you need to be AUDACIOUS and to just be honest with yourself about the things you INTEND to bring into your life if there’s nothing stopping you(including yourself).

-If it’s a specific creative project that you’re working on then you need to figure out as much as you can about what this project MEANS to you and what EFFECT you want it to eventually have on people.

For example, if you’re writing a novel or something then you need to figure out exactly what it means to you and how you might translate this meaning into the right story. You need to write down as many ideas as possible for using this creative project to become a vessel for the kind of meaning you want to put into it.

You also need to think about the EFFECT or IMPACT you want it to have on people – for example, maybe you want them to feel inspired,  connected to you, sad, happy, or whatever else.

Use your creativity to flesh out the VISION for your creative project but – either way – by the time you’re done you should have an understanding of what the project means to you and how this meaning can be translated into something that IMPACTS people in the way that you want it to.

In short, the first step to setting goals as a creative person at this stage is to let your imagination run wild and to create a BROAD VISION for yourself.

Don’t stop writing until you’ve run out of ideas.

Stage 2: Refine the Vision

You started with a BROAD vision for the things that you’re interested in doing. The next step is to start reducing the items on your list by finding out what’s actually aligned with your REAL values, beliefs, and intentions versus what’s just something that seems ‘nice’ but isn’t necessarily that real for you right now.

For each of the things you put on your Open Vision List from Stage 1 you need to answer the following questions:

-1: What are my reasons for wanting to DO this?

-2: Would the REAL ME do this?

If your reasons for wanting to do whatever you’ve listed are unreal then you need to either remove that ‘goal’ from your list or to try and find a way to make it more real.

‘Unreal’ in this context means that the goals are either there because you think they’re going to fill some kind of void inside yourself, because they came from ‘other’ people and aren’t actually your goals, or anything else that’s going to stop you from growing in a way that’s aligned with your highest values and intentions.

The second question is a little ‘intuitive’ but all it really means is that you ask yourself whether the most real or authentic version of you would do the thing in question – if you feel like it’s a ‘No’ then there’s no point doing it because the whole point of setting goals is so that you can move towards a more REAL version of yourself in the long-term.

By the end of this stage you should have list of goals that are DEFINITELY something that will benefit your life and make you more real because you know that you have GENUINE reasons for wanting to do them and that they’ll make you more REAL yourself as you move forward and take action.

Stage 3: Categorise Your Goals

At this stage, your list of goals should be a lot shorter than it was but you’ve still been able to go through a CREATIVE PROCESS of making sure that the goals you’ve chosen are something that will make a big difference in your life.

The next stage is to get some clarity about how you’ll start to carry out these goals.  What this means is that you need to CATEGORISE them so that you can start to make a strategy for dealing with them (and actually getting RESULTS).

There are four different categories that we’ll be working with: Ongoing Goals, Short-Term Goals, Medium-Term Goals, and Long-Term Goals. In each of these categories, you need to give yourself a goal that’s SPECIFIC and has a DEADLINE.

It works like this:

Ongoing Goals – things you will do every day (or most days). If you have something vague on your list like ‘get fit’ then you’ll need to probably create a SPECIFIC ongoing goal here (e.g. workout for 30 minutes every day).

Short-Term Goals – things that will take a week to a month. E.g sort out your website, reach out to a specific person on social media, etc.

Medium-Term Goals – things that will take between a month and a year. For example, reaching a target weight or making a certain amount of money etc.

Long-term Goals – things that take more than a year to complete. For example, moving to another country, writing a book (maybe – some people might take less than a year), etc.

If you’re working with a creative project, then you’ll need to look at how the overarching vision fits into these categories. For example, maybe your goal is to “write a book” it might look like:

Ongoing Goals: Write every day, edit, research.

Short-Term Goals: Finish the next chapter by next week, have three chapters written by the end of the month.

Medium-Term Goals: Finish the first-draft six months from now, find some beta readers, etc.

Long-Term Goal: Publish the book and become a bestseller, etc.

Whether it’s your life or your creative project, you’ll benefit from being aware of what goals you have at each of these levels and what you need to DO and WHEN in order to make your vision actually a reality.

Stage 4: Motivation Check

At this stage, it’s probably going to look like you have a LOT of stuff to do.

To stay motivated you might want to make sure to remind yourself of why these goals are important to you. All this means is that you do a final check-in about your overall vision and make sure that it SELLS ITSELF to you.

The main question to answer for each of your goals is “What does achieving this goal mean to me?”

By answering that question, you’ll be giving yourself a reminder of WHY you want to do this in the first place as well as all of the benefits, etc. that you’re going to get from moving towards and then achieving these goals overall.

Stage 5: Create a To-Do List

The final step is to get into the HABIT of keeping a To-Do List and then making sure you actually DO the things that are on it. How rigid you are about this depends on you, but I would personally recommend sitting down every morning (or whenever you start work) and writing down a list of tasks that you need to achieve each day.

Because you’ve already categorised your goals in Step 3 you’ll know what you need to be doing EVERY DAY but you’ll also know what you’re working towards as well.

Of course, as you move forward and start taking action you might uncover some new goals that are important to you and you might learn about yourself and realise that some of the things you’re chasing aren’t as important as you thought.

This is totally fine and healthy and just proves that your goals are there to SERVE YOU and your growth, not an end-in-themselves that you just chase blindly for the sake of it.

Either way, the To-Do List reminds you that the only way to get where you want to be – your REAL LIFE or to see that CREATIVE PROJECT become a real thing in the world – is to take ACTION.

Go get it.

 


If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂

Sign up for my mailing list if you want to stay in touch (you’ll get access to the 7-Day Personality Transplant for uncovering your life purpose):

If you want to find your own real life, start moving towards unconditional acceptance, and finding a sense of purpose then check out this 7-Day Course that you can start right now:

 

The Veiled Veil: How to Escape the Matrix

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Escape the Matrix

One of the most important things that you can embrace about life if you value your freedom is the idea that:

“THE WORLD IS NOT REALITY” (quoting my own books, Personal Revolutions and Shadow Life).

If you don’t step back to acknowledge this then two things can happen, both of which hold you back and limit your capacity for FREEDOM and its expression:

  1. You start to limit yourself INTERNALLY because you take a sense of identity on board that is given to you as a conceptual set of ideas from ‘The World’ (which isn’t real).
  2. You start to limit yourself EXTERNALLY because you start to see external barriers to your own growth and progress towards your goals (that also aren’t real because they’re rooted in your perceptions of ‘The World’).

This isn’t to say that ‘The World’ isn’t a thing that doesn’t exist (in the sense of at least being ‘there’) but it’s something that only really exists as a consequence of human ideas about life and what it ‘should’ be.

It’s a kind of MATRIX that exists as the sum total of all our collective doubts and fears about life that we project over whatever is really ‘out there’ in reality.

Nothing ‘wrong’ with that and it’s just something that human beings do in order to ‘survive’ whatever they’ve already been through (just like we do at an individual level by creating an ego for ourselves in order to keep surviving life based on what we’ve already seen of it).

The problem, however, is that a lot of the IDEAS we come up with about life and what it is are actually limited and unreal because the thinking that caused them in the first place is actually DISTORTED and untrue because of the natural limitations of being a human being.

That might sound a bit much but all it means is that the DEFAULT way of thinking and being in the world for a human being is often more about SURVIVING LIFE rather than THRIVING in life (something that you’ve probably heard before).

This being the case, we create a collective MATRIX for ourselves to live in that allows us to go through the motions of living but never to actually live in the REALEST possible way.

Perhaps that’s fine because not everybody is ready to pay the cost of living a real life and many people are ‘happy’ to just go through the motions and to take things at face value.

If you’re one of the Real Ones that feels like there might be more to life than just ‘the Matrix’ of the World, then keep reading because this article is going to simplify your relationship to it and give you a few simple techniques and strategies to start breaking out and finding freedom again.

You only get one life so there’s no point holding yourself back and being INDIMIDATED by a world that doesn’t even exist and living a life that never truly makes you feel alive.

Here we go:

Human beings need to be WHOLE if they want to be real but – unfortunately – we’re ‘made’ of FRAGMENTS.

Before we get into this, you need to understand an important difference between WHOLENESS and FRAGMENTATION.  If you’ve read some of my ‘stuff’ before then you’ll know what this means but if you haven’t here’s a super quick overview:

Essentially, human life becomes more ‘complicated’ than we often want it to be because we are torn (as a result of our bodies and our social programming) between two states of being.

The first state, is what I would call a REAL state which is a state where we’re constantly moving towards WHOLENESS in ourselves by connecting to our true values and intentions, uncovering and ACCEPTING hidden ‘parts’ of ourselves that may have been disowned in childhood (like certain emotions etc.), and generally putting ourselves on a path to be more authentic.

This real state will also see us moving towards more WHOLENESS in relation to the world around us: for example, by having less barriers erected between ourselves and others so we can have more authentic relationships, finding people that share our values, and understanding the similarities between ourselves and every other human being on the planet rather than just being obsessed with and motivated by the differences.

Finally, the real state will allow us to keep going into a deeper relationship with REALITY. All this really means in simple terms is that we embrace our inherent CONNECTION to life as a whole and to the systems within systems (ad infinitum) of the universe as a whole.  This doesn’t necessarily need to mean anything ‘mystical’ – it just means that we all play a role in the universal unfolding of the universe as ONE relationship.

When we are able to live in this REAL STATE then we’re able to keep flowing and growing with life and to generally avoid a great deal of friction, frustration, and  misery in our lives. This is because we’re not holding ourselves back with illusory mental blocks or ideas that cause us to act as something that we’re not.

This is where FRAGMENTATION comes in – fragmentation is just anything that causes us to think, feel, and act like we’re DISCONNECTED from ourselves, the world, and reality.  This is almost always because we have PERCEIVED these things incorrectly and because we have INTERPRETED these perceptions incorrectly on top of that (this is the VEILED VEIL which we’ll discuss in more detail in a second).

If you tend to CHOOSE fragmentation over wholeness then you will end up removing yourself from reality (because reality is ultimately about working with what’s WHOLE) and you will end up causing yourself to live in a state of FRICTION that will eventually turn to frustration and misery.

The most common form of fragmentation that the majority of us have to contend with is our own SELF-IMAGE (aka ‘Ego’ in the language I use) and the way that we separate and DISCONNECT ourselves from the whole of ourselves, the world, and reality in order to protect it (because we think protecting it will help us – which it might in the short-term but only causes more problems in the long-term).

For example:

At the level of ourselves, being ATTACHED to a certain fragmented image of ourselves cause us to DISCONNECT from all of the emotional ‘stuff’, values, or intentions that are real about us but which go against that self-image (usually because we want to hide from those things for whatever reason – usually social conditioning and self-hypnosis).

At the level of the world, being attached to this fragmented self-image (that we’re separate and not the ‘same’ as others) causes us to create unreal NARRATIVES about our place in the world and to start playing ROLES that are disconnected from reality (usually either acting as ‘more than’ or ‘less than’ human and playing either a ‘hero’ or a ‘victim’, respectively).

At the level of reality, being attached to this image causes EGO RESISTANCE that causes us to resist things about reality that cause us to grow more WHOLE – for example, we may resist change, we may resist facing our weaknesses, we may resist the fact that time is precious because we’re going to be dead one day.

These are all examples but the basic principle we all need to follow is that – to be a ‘happy’ human being – then we need to consciously make a CHOICE to move towards wholeness and connection despite there being a natural drive towards FRAGMENTATION inside all of us.

When the will to fragmentation starts to win, we just end up being ENSLAVED to the Matrix of the world because we believe that the world is reality and the identity we’ve created to survive in it is the truth about us.

‘Escaping’ and living our REAL lives means that we understand the unreality of fragmentation and make a shift into a REAL STATE that allows the world to slip away from our experience of our fragmented ideas about ourselves so that we can move towards wholeness (without expecting to be fully whole, just embracing wholeness as a direction to keep MOVING in).

This means battling our own biological and cultural limitations and making sure we step into what’s whole rather than just acting according to the fragments of ourselves that we picked up from our fragmented perception and interpretation of ‘The World’.

The Veiled Veil: Limited Perception and Interpretation

This is where we come to an inescapable problem of FRAGMENTATION that every human being on the planet has to contend with: the VEILED VEIL.

The Veiled Veil is what emerges when you’re in a fragmented body on a fragmented planet and when you have a machine in your head that uses fragmented concepts to try and make sense of everything it perceives (that ‘machine’ is your brain, btw).

Even though the ‘truth’ about reality is that everything is WHOLE and just one system relating to itself in different ways, human beings have TWO different levels of fragmentation that can block them from experiencing this wholeness to the greatest extent possible.

  1. Limited perception.
  2. Limited interpretation.

When these two things come together you have what this article is referring to as the Veiled Veil.

It’s called a ‘veil’ because it places a layer of fragmentation between ourselves and our experience of life as a whole. It’s called a ‘veiled’ veil because it doesn’t just do this once but two times.

At the first level of PERCEPTION, we experience the wholeness of life as being divided and fragmented because of our BODIES.

The fact that we’re in bodies in the first place means that our perception is limited.

My body is positioned in a different place in time and space to yours and so will have a slightly different perception of the WHOLE to you. Furthermore, all bodies are incapable of perceiving everything around them – for example, unless you have eyes in the back of your head you can’t see what’s behind you as you read this.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, it’s just the way it is but what it means in terms of wholeness versus fragmentation is that the primary information you bring in through your senses is completely FRAGMENTED from the very outset. To think that you’re perceiving the truth is a mistake…you’re just perceiving (like the rest of us).

The second level of fragmentation of the Veiled Veil is our INTERPRETATIONS of what we perceive. Because what we perceive is already fragmented, we’re already disconnected from the reality of the whole – but we complicate and fragment things even more by also being BIASED (consciously and unconsciously) in the way that we interpret things we’ve perceived.

This usually comes back to our own relationship to ourselves and our own emotional ‘stuff’ – for example, if we had a ‘bad’ relationship with somebody in the past then we’ll be more likely to interpret what they’re doing in the present as being ‘bad’ too. Another example might be that we CHOOSE to believe something about somebody because it fits in with the way that we want to see ourselves (the ‘ego’ stuff mentioned above).

Either way, what this all boils down to is that the NATURE OF REALITY is wholeness but the way that we perceive and interpret life as a default – from behind the Veiled Veil – is FRAGMENTED.

‘The Matrix’ is just what happens when we choose to continue believing in fragments in our own lives and when we choose to believe that the collective fragmentation of ‘The World’ is real also.

To free yourself, you need to condition yourself to step back from the influence of the Veiled Veil as much as possible.

Survival Value and the MATRIX

Just to be clear, we need the Veiled Veil so that we can survive life on earth but it isn’t the TRUTH about life – it’s the MATRIX that keeps us plugged into an unreal world that holds us back from REAL LIFE.

If you want to start freeing yourself then you need to improve your relationship at the two levels that the Veiled Veil causes you to buy into unnecessary fragmentation: the level of perception and the level of interpretation.

What we can do: Limited Perception

You  need to find  the EDGE and taste WHOLENESS

It’s probably impossible for a human being to live in a complete state of wholeness for their whole lives – this is because we’re in fragmented bodies in a fragmented world and because we will always have emotional ‘stuff’ to work through that distorts our perceptions and interpretations from time-to-time.

Even so, it’s more than possible to have a TASTE of wholeness that will permeate into the rest of your life and give you a direction to move in and return to if the ‘matrix’ starts to suck you back into ‘the world’ (and the unreal version of yourself that ‘lives’ there to keep the illusion going).

This is something I’ve talked about a ton in my books and in the 7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness and Life Purpose but the short-version is that you need to put yourself in situations that get you out of your head and allow you to feel completely CONNECTED to your surroundings.

Some examples:

-Riding a motorbike fast.

-Making love to somebody.

-Climbing a mountain.

-Getting in a flow state with a creative project.

-Etc. (the list is endless).

In these kind of cases, you will experience being completely whole and as one with life itself.  This means that you managed to find your EDGE and to get out of your ideas of yourself – in other words, there is no separation between you and life. It’s just life experiencing itself.

The more of these kind of experiences you have (Abraham Maslow called them Peak Experiences) the more you will understand your REAL IDENTITY beyond the Veiled Veil.

You need to think in terms of systems

Thinking in terms of systems can also help you to perceive things in a way that is more ‘reality-aligned’ and not limited quite as much by the Veiled Veil.

A ‘system’ in this context is just a series of interrelated parts sharing a connection.

Seeing things in this way, allows you to make a shift towards wholeness instead of just being caught up in the ‘default’ way of the body to limit everything to separate parts.

As a simple example – right now, as you’re reading this, we are not just too ‘separate’ entities but have created a new system that exists between writer and reader. That means that in this moment, we are ‘One’ and the exchange between us is a system. From that system, something ‘real’ might emerge.

That might sound simple but seeing things in this way – and making a conscious choice to remind ourselves to do so – allows us to see things in a way that’s more aligned with the natural WHOLENESS of reality.

Other examples:

-If you’re in a group of people, then you’re not just all separate individuals; you’re all ‘part’ of the ‘group’ system. Seeing it as ‘one’ thing allows things to flow better between the ‘parts’ (people involved) and to allow something bigger to emerge.

-If you’re walking through a forest (or whatever), then you’re part of that system whilst you’re in it (and even when you’re not, tbh). This helps you to see how connected you are to it – even if you’re only playing a small part, you’re still ONE with the system (and it’s only your perception that makes you disconnected if you get caught up in the default way of being).

-If you have a pet, then you and the pet form a new system and this connects you to each other on a deep REAL level. You might not see this if you’re in the ‘default’ way of perceiving but seeing it as a mutually beneficial system allows you to go deeper into it.

These are simple examples and it might seem almost trivial to make this shift but seeing things as systems allows you to step out of the fragmented view of life and to start moving more towards WHOLENESS (which is always more real and allows you to feel more ALIVE).

Train yourself to look for WHOLENESS instead of FRAGMENTATION and to act on what’s whole.

In short, you need to train yourself to overcome the limited perception of your body (which of course you can’t do completely because you’re in your body) and to start looking for the real connections between things.

How far you choose to take this is of course up to you but it might just be about asking yourself from time to time:

“Am I CHOOSING wholeness or fragmentation right now?”

You don’t have to be perfectionistic about it but it will usually be clear which direction you’re moving in.

Act in a way that moves you towards wholeness and your life will usually reflect what you want to a deeper degree.

Learn to BREATHE

Focusing on your breath from time-to-time is another great way to bring yourself back to wholeness.

Again, this doesn’t have to be anything complicated and you don’t need to meditate for hours at a time (unless you want to). Your breath is a great metaphor for some of the things we’re talking about here, though, because it’s connected to the WHOLE.

Your breath is connected to the whole of your body as it carries oxygen throughout the whole SYSTEM. More than that, the breath also connects the inner and outer world and so can show you that you’re not just an independent entity but interdependent with reality as a whole (the breath you breathe is shared with all the other living things around you, etc.).

There’s loads of good stuff out there about breathing but a simple technique is just to do 7-11 breathing when you want to remind yourself to get out of your head: you breathe in for 7 seconds and out for 11.

What we can do:  Limited Interpretation

You need to stop treating opinions as facts.

At the Veiled Veil level of interpretations one of the easiest things you can do is to learn to tell the difference between opinions and facts.

A lot of the time, we interpret things as meaning whatever we want them to mean because a general rule of life is that MOST PEOPLE BELIEVE WHAT THEY WANT TO BELIEVE (see below).

This could be about anything but the short-version is that whatever is going on with their relationships with themselves and their emotional ‘stuff’ causes people to act irrationally and to believe whatever will support their egos, justify their fears, give them hope, etc. etc.

When people slip into this unreal way of being they come up with all kinds of skewed distortions about life in the form of narratives and conceptual ideas that they treat as FACTS.

This gives them short-term comfort but in the long-term it just causes them to become more FRAGMENTED and to live lives that they don’t really want to be living.

If you have the emotional resilience, then a way to get around this is to be HONEST with yourself about whether or not what you think is just an OPINION or if it’s an actual fact (true for all about REALITY).

If it’s just an opinion then all you have on your hands is an INTERPRETATION of reality. That’s fine just as long as you are open to changing this interpretation if need be as you keep moving forward and growing more REAL.

You need to realise that MOST PEOPLE BELIEVE WHAT THEY WANT TO BELIEVE (and try to kill this tendency in yourself).

Most people don’t believe in the TRUTH, they believe in what they want to believe in order to feel good about themselves and life.  If you’re not careful then you might also fall into this trap (as the old saying goes “ignorance is bliss” but if you want to live a REAL life then you need to be truth-facing, not truth-avoiding).

People believe what they want to believe because it’s easier than facing difficult truths about life and the people that share it with us. It also gives us a kind of false ‘hope’ that we’ll get whatever it is that we want and need in the way that we want.

Here are some examples:

-Somebody might believe that they can grow their business by simply ‘manifesting’ clients or by finding a quick fix (like posting on social media once a week and watching the clients come crawling). Both of those go against reality but people WANT to believe it works like that because they WANT to believe they can do it without doing any WORK (people hate that).

-A guy might go to a coffee shop every day and he develops a crush on the girl that works there. He WANTS to believe that she feels the same way so he starts to tell himself a story in his head that she’s madly in love with him and he starts looking for evidence that this is the case (when really she’s just being nice because she wants the tips).

-Somebody wants to believe that she can lose weight fast in only 5 minutes a day by buying some MAGIC BULLET from the shopping channel on TV (do people still use those?). Of course, in reality there is no magic bullet but people WANT to believe in them because they don’t wanna do the WORK.

-Somebody is in a relationship with an irrational emotional retard but wants to believe “they’ll change” because they don’t want to do the difficult emotional work of breaking up, finding a new partner, accepting that the love wasn’t as deep as they thought, etc. etc.

-Etc.

These are just examples but the POINT is that people interpret life to fit into what they WANT from life. That’s fine if you wanna live in Cloud-cuckoo Land but if you wanna get actual RESULTS then you need to understand that this is just a case of you skewing things from behind the VEILED VEIL in order to justify your own BS.

You need to give up CONTROL FREAKERY

Another thing you can do to manage your life in a more real way at the level of interpretation is to stop trying to CONTROL everything.

If you lapse into CONTROL FREAKERY it’s always because you need life to be a certain way to justify your own interpretations of life. That would be fine if interpretations were the truth but because they’re not, it just causes all kinds of tension in your life, ruins your relationships, and stops you growing.

In the very best case, control freakery will just lead to you managing to create a bubble for yourself to live in but this bubble will always burst when reality creeps back in.

Instead of trying to control everything – which is always EGO – you need to switch to an approach where you can handle UNCERTAINTY and keep growing with it.

The TRUTH about life is that “the only certainty is uncertainty” but this means having to also face uncertainty in yourself (which control freaks hate which is why they’re control freaks in the first place).

When people have a lot of shame, guilt, or trauma that they don’t want to face, they create INTERPRETATIONS of life and try to hide from it behind a false certainty. If you’re a control freak, you need to accept that facing this stuff is just the way back to WHOLENESS and will give you the real experience of life you want.

You need to ensure you have an attitude that keeps you LEARNING

In short, your way out of the Matrix (which is really your relationship with yourself) is to stop acting like you know everything and to put yourself on a path of LEARNING.

Acting like you know everything is the same as acting like your perceptions and interpretations are completely true. Because reality constantly changes and evolves around us this is an UNREAL STATE to be in that just causes problems (including anxiety and depression in many cases).

The REAL approach is to accept and even VALUE uncertainty without letting it affect our own levels of self-acceptance so we can keep growing real and become more WHOLE.

Learning to learn means we can let go of our attachment to interpretations and:

-Not have to worry about being seen as ‘right’ all the time (a form of Control Freakery)

-Not needing to be perfect

-Not being afraid to change our minds

-Etc.

In other words, we won’t have to live our lives defending the fragmentation that makes us miserable in the first place!

You need to stop getting involved in unnecessary conflict.

Finally, developing a REAL relationship with your own interpretations of yourself, the world, and reality allows you to step back from engaging in unnecessary conflict (aka DRAMA & BS).

When you know that the TRUTH is whole and that people can only argue about their INTERPRETATIONS of it, then you don’t need to argue about your own opinions and you don’t need to be bothered about other people’s (whether they’re positive or negative).

Somebody calls you an asshole? Just their interpretation (which might be accurate).

Somebody doesn’t like your political opinions? Cool, they’re just your opinions and they’re entitled to theirs.

Somebody thinks their method of doing [whatever] is better even though it gets the same results? No problem, carry on.

All that really matters is what’s either gonna move you to more wholeness or bring more fragmentation into your life.

If somebody shares something – positive or negative –that helps you on that journey then take it on board. Otherwise, just smile, nod, and move on because the TRUTH can handle itself.

Bring it all together by growing real

The long and short of all this is that you can keep pushing through and EXPERIENCE life deeply by growing REAL:

Choose a purpose that keeps you moving towards wholeness and shattering your interpretations of yourself, the world, and reality (so you can remove layers of fragmentation and become more REAL) on the way there.

As you become more real, you become more whole, and the rest will fall into place. Get in touch if you need some help figuring out how to do it.

Conclusion

You can either live life in an unreal state and be miserable or you can get REAL by pushing through your limits and shattering the VEILED VEIL and leaving the Matrix.

 

The Loop: What You Have Now Is What You Once Wanted (Whether You Know It Or Not)

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You Always Get What You Want

More often than not, the things that you have in your life now are the things that you once wanted for yourself.*

Though you might not realise it – or may even be trying to hide from it – the current state of your life and the situations that your life is comprised of are the CONSEQUENCE of all the CHOICES you made in the past.

These choices will be affected by all kinds of different factors:

-Your underlying emotional ‘stuff’.

-What you’ve been conditioned to believe is possible.

-What you’re trying to hide from about yourself, the world, or reality.

-The relationships in your life (which you’ve also CHOSEN to stick around in or not).

-Your general way of thinking (‘negative’, ‘positive’, or REAL, etc.).

-Etc. Etc.

Either way, however you may have happened to end up thinking about life, these thoughts will always affect the way that you go about making CHOICES in life, and the end result will always be the same:

If you made REAL CHOICES – i.e. choices that are based on your authentic values and intentions rather than just your instinctual programming or social conditioning – then your life will predominantly be REAL too and reflect this.

If you made UNREAL CHOICES – i.e. choices that were rooted in your EGO or your fears about yourself, the world, and reality that caused you to HIDE your true values and intentions from yourself – then you’re life will predominantly be UNREAL too and reflect this.

A simple PRINCIPLE of life that applies to us all (and that we’ve mentioned before on this site and in my course the 7-Day Personality Transplant):

If you put real in, you get real out; if you put unreal in, you get unreal out.

It’s pretty simple, but a lot of the time we forget this or we think we are being real (even though we’re not getting the results that we want – the only sure sign that we’re actually acting in a real way: we’re either at peace because we ACCEPT life or we’re at peace because we’re getting the RESULTS we want).

This article is about how it sometimes takes current reality a little time to catch up with the beliefs we’re putting into the world but how almost ALWAYS, the things we have in our lives now are simply a reflection of how we used to THINK about life and how those thoughts affected the actions we took.

You need to know this and to ACCEPT it so that you can start making better choices RIGHT NOW so that you stand a better chance of living a life you want to be living further down the line.

Here we go.

*Obviously, this doesn’t apply to everything in your life as some things are completely out of our control (‘acts of God’ like natural disasters, people dying, illness, etc.) and so this isn’t one of those solipsistic posts about how we completely create our own reality like some kind of omnipotent being (if you’ve read my books you know I think that’s BS and a lot of the ‘spiritual’ philosophies out there that that say that ‘stuff’ are just selling people what they want to believe, not the truth).

Emotional ‘stuff’ leads to assumptions leads to belief systems leads to thoughts leads to actions leads to emotional ‘stuff’.

You need to understand that the way you feel, think, and do things when you’re running on autopilot is circular and builds on itself.

If you don’t step back and take control of this process (by growing REAL, the whole point of everything discussed on this site), then you just end up getting caught in the THE LOOP and feeling that you’re powerless and have no control over your life because you forget that: 1) you have a CHOICE, and 2) what you currently have is the CONSEQUENCES of those choice.

Here’s how things unfold for most of us when we don’t step up and take control:

 

Here’s an example of how this might show up in your life if you’re not aware of your ability to make a CHOICE to change something at ANY of these different levels (a good thing because you can CHOOSE to change the area that’s easiest for you personally and still break the cycle of ‘The Loop’):

You have some underlying emotional ‘stuff’ like shame.

This shame causes you to make the fundamental assumption that you’re just not ‘good enough’.

This fundamental assumption causes you to create a kind of ‘people pleaser’ belief system where you survive by putting the needs of others before your own (so it doesn’t trigger the shame you’re trying to avoid).

This ‘people pleaser’ belief system cause you to have unreal thoughts about yourself – for example, that you can’t do the things that you’re really interested in doing in life because it might upset people or they’d disagree with your choices (for example).

That causes you to take actions that keep you in your comfort zone and to avoid your edge for fear of upsetting others or stepping up and pushing through your own emotional ‘stuff’.

The fact that you’re being passive and not taking the real actions you want to be taking (i.e. because you’re not aligned with your true values and intentions) causes you to feel more shame and so your CHOSEN actions (or lack of action) just causes you to PERPETUATE your emotional ‘stuff’ instead of healing it.

The cycle continues.

The interesting thing here (imo) is that 1) most of us aren’t AWARE that we’re involved in this cycle of ‘The Loop’ and so it just keeps repeating and we get more deeply entrenched in our lives as a CONSEQUENCE of being on the hamster wheel, and 2) because we’re not AWARE of it we don’t realise how much CHOICE we have to change our lives for the better.

We can change our lives by changing the cycle (or, more accurately, starting to change the cycle so we can get different RESULTS from life – as the old quote says “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results).

For example:

We can CHOOSE to change the level of our emotional ‘stuff’ by doing some introspective work and figuring out what’s going inside of ourselves, meditating, talking to others about our ‘feelings’ (often just talking will dissolve shame, etc.), working out emotions through our creative art, etc.

We can CHOOSE to change our fundamental ASSUMPTIONS about ourselves, the world, and reality, by doing exploratory work, digging deeper into the way that we see things through introspection or journaling, etc. and seeing what PATTERNS emerge.

We can CHOOSE to change our BELIEF SYSTEMS by actively continuing to learn new things, putting ourselves in difficult situations, chasing new experiences that push us through our EDGE, testing the validity of our beliefs and the conclusions we’ve made about ourselves, the world, and reality by philosophical enquiry, etc. etc.

We can CHOOSE to change our THOUGHTS by learning to see when our thoughts are too negative, understanding when we’re held back by LIMITING beliefs, paying attention to our inner monologue and the language we use (maybe it’s passive and unreal – for example, always about how we will “try”, “always” or “never” do certain things, etc.).

We can CHOOSE to change our ACTIONS by learning what our REAL VALUES are and translating them into goals, we can act on our REAL INTENTIONS by making sure that we know what they are (by digging beneath the surface or our social conditioning, etc.), we can create a VISION for ourselves based on the real version of ourselves we want to become (instead of who we think we are right now because of false beliefs and BS), etc. etc. etc.

In short, there’s absolutely LOADS we can choose to do if we want to change our lives for the better and get out of the passive cycle of just UNCONSCIOUSLY CHOOSING to have each of these levels feed into each other as part of a cycle of negatively based on how we might ‘feel’ about ourselves.

Whatever life you’re living right now is a CONSEQUENCE of how you’ve engaged with this cycle in the past.

To paraphrase what we said above:

If you’ve been real at all or some of these levels your life will now be more real than if you’d be unreal.

Unreal in, unreal out; real in, real out.

If you start WORKING to change your relationship with yourself at these levels then you will eventually see that your life becomes more real down the line (it won’t change overnight because you need to wait for reality to catch up – this is called the REALITY LAG).

The Payoff of ‘Negative’ Consequences

Because we make a CHOICE about how we interact with ourselves at each of the levels on this cycle – even if we just choose to let things unfold on their own terms by doing NOTHING – then we can say that the life we have right now is whatever we actually WANTED for ourselves.

This applies just as much to the ‘positive’ things we have in our lives at present as well as the ‘negative’.

For example:

Maybe we have a crappy job that we hate right now and we’re stuck in the WAGE CAGE – we might have CHOSEN this because it reinforces the negative assumptions we have about ourselves as not being good enough (in the example given above) and so we don’t have to change or can prove ourselves ‘right’ on an unconscious level.

Maybe we can’t find a relationship despite telling ourselves we want one – we might have CHOSEN this because unconsciously we fear that a relationship will cause us to change our THOUGHTS about ourselves and that would mean having to face our emotional ‘stuff’ (that those thoughts only exist to keep us avoiding in the first place).

Maybe we have our own business and we’re constantly busy taking action but never get RESULTS (no sales or whatever in this context) – this might be because we have decided to only focus on the EASY actions (like doing spread sheets all day or whatever) so that we don’t have to do the stuff that would actually push us through the EDGE to the next level (like networking or making sales calls or whatever).

You could come up with all kinds of examples but the basic point is that we choose to keep acting in ways that keep the cycle of THE LOOP going so that we can avoid growing through our comfort zone and facing the fundamental emotional ‘stuff’ that has been shaping our life since day one.

What You Can Do: How to Break the Cycle and Escape the Loop.

To start breaking this cycle and to start getting different CONSEQUENCES then you need to change your patterns at each level (though because they’re all connected then just changing in one area will make a difference in all the others).

I’ve already given some examples above but the abridged version at each level:

Emotional ‘Stuff’: You need to start DISSOLVING your shame (etc) instead of being DRIVEN by it.

Assumptions: You need to actively work to replace unreal assumptions (“I’m not good enough”, for example which is never real because it involves a judgement) with REAL assumptions (which are designed to promote self-acceptance which is REAL – for example, “I am capable of succeeding just as much as anybody else”, “I can handle whatever happens”, “Nothing can stop me being real”, etc.).

Belief Systems: You need to replace belief systems that hold you back or make the world seem like a place where good things can’t happen to you with a belief system that supports your GROWTH.

Thoughts: You need to learn to step back from your thoughts, realise that they’re not ‘You’, and to condition yourself to never give into negative thoughts that stop you from acting on your true values and intentions (such as inner criticism etc.).

Actions: You need to make sure that you actually do ACT (because action is the only thing that will get you where you want to be), but you also need to make sure that you increase AWARENESS of what’s real (about yourself, the world, and reality), that you ACCEPT your true goals, and that the ACTION you take is not just a distraction from your emotional ‘stuff’ that keeps this unreal cycle going.

In your own life, you’ll know which one makes the most sense for you to experiment with and make the most progress but I think that the ‘easiest’ way to start making changes is to change our approach to taking ACTION.

This is because if we CHOOSE to act on a vision for the highest, most real version of ourselves then the rest will kind of fall into place as the RESULTS we get from taking real action shows the futility of feeling ‘bad’ about ourselves, negative thinking that stems from this, and so on.

I’ve actually seen it quite a lot in the coaching relationships I have with people: once clients start taking real action and ACTING in a way that’s congruent with who they want to BECOME (not just who they fear they are right now) then they start to build momentum and collect EVIDENCE that goes against the foundation of feelings and thoughts that are rooted on an unreal relationship with any emotional ‘stuff’.

The short-version of what this looks like is that you need to start running towards something REAL instead of just trying to run away from the unreal stuff (that comes from your emotional ‘stuff’ and the emotions it gives you about yourself).

The steps that will put you on this path are quite simple:

  1. Figure out your true values and intentions for your life by digging into how your life would be different if you weren’t HOLDING BACK.
  2. Turn this into a VISION for the future version of yourself and what your life would look like if you could realise this vision.
  3. Ask yourself who you need to BECOME to make that vision a reality (i.e. what skills and qualities would you have).
  4. Figure out what GOALS you need to dedicate yourself to in order to close the GAP between where you are now and that highest vision.
  5. Go out there every day and start DOING what needs to be done to close that gap.

Like I said, that’s a very simple process but it will be harder to actually do in real life (instead of just on the screen or wherever you’re reading this).

Coaching can help you with this (*cough*) but so can just being DISCIPLINED and realising that if you do have a struggle along the way then it will be a struggle at one of the levels shown on the cycle above.

If you can figure out which and start attacking it then you can unblock yourself and get going again.

Either way, once you start making a shift, your life will make a shift too and eventually the life you’re living will be a CHOSEN consequence of being REAL, not just a passive consequence of being UNREAL and getting lost on the hamster wheel of THE LOOP.

Go get it.

 


If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂

Sign up for my mailing list if you want to stay in touch (you’ll get access to the 7-Day Personality Transplant for uncovering your life purpose):

If you want to find your own real life, start moving towards unconditional acceptance, and finding a sense of purpose then check out this 7-Day Course that you can start right now:

 

The Faces of Humanity:  How We’re All Made Up of Different Versions of the Same Person

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Live Without Your Mask

There’s a (pretty) famous Japanese proverb that talks about how we all have 3 faces.  It goes like this:

“The first face, you show to the world. The second face, you show to your close friends, and your family. The third face, you never show anyone.”

I think it’s true, but – actually – we can take it a little deeper by exploring how there are more than three faces that the average person ‘has’ and also where they  come from and why.

Perhaps even more importantly than raising our AWARENESS of this ‘stuff’, we can also ask ourselves what we need to ACCEPT, in the face of these faces, as well as what ACTION we can take to improve our lives and grow more real accordingly.

(Awareness -> Acceptance -> Action – it works every time: see ‘Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World’ if you wanna apply this to your life as a whole).

If you read this article, it will help you to make sense of the MECHANICS of your relationships with yourself and the world and to start unblocking yourself and moving forward towards the only thing that really matters: an experience of WHOLENESS (or ‘connection’) to yourself, the world, and reality.

The ‘problem’ with all of these faces we each have is that we either think they don’t ‘exist’ or we think that only one of them ‘exists’ and try to ignore other parts of ourselves.

Actually, it’s completely normal and healthy to have multiple versions of ourselves in different contexts and situations because different contexts and situations allow us to express certain REAL qualities about ourselves that we might not otherwise be able to express.

Everything real about us is always within us – sometimes, it just needs a little bit of help to express itself.

The ‘FACES’ we show the world aren’t necessarily the same as masks (which mean that we’re ‘hiding’) – although, of course, they sometimes can be if we have an unreal relationship with our own emotional ‘stuff’ (shame, guilt, and trauma in the shadow or fear, pride, and desire of the ego, etc.).

All of us are FLUID because reality is in FLUX – sometimes, we just forget that and this can cause confusion if we think that we’re supposed to be ‘static’ (which is just UNREAL).

These are the most common faces of the ‘average’ human being (if such a thing exists). As usual, they fit into the only three levels that anything can fit into: The Self, the World, and Reality.

How many do you recognise in yourself?

Self-Facing Faces

At the level of our relationship with our ‘Self’ we have four faces (at least). Whatever it is that we really are is what EMERGES in the interplay between the four of them.

 

Face 1: Who You Wanna Be (To Yourself)

The first face we all have is the ‘Future Facing Face’ (or whatever you wanna call it). This is basically the face we carry of the person we want to BECOME.

This is comprised of all kinds of things that are related to the desired future we have for ourselves and we have to constantly SHOW ourselves this face in order to remind ourselves of where we want or even INTEND to be going.

It is comprised of things like:

-Our standards

-Our goals

-Our ambitions

-Our vision

-Etc.

Some people show themselves this face more than others and – indeed – you have to keep showing yourself this face in order to BECOME this face.

The reason that a lot of people become stuck or stagnate in life is because they haven’t cultivated this ‘face’ and given themselves a direction to move in.

That’s when other less ‘positive’ (or – at least – future facing faces) faces tend to get a hold of them and weigh their sense of identity down in an unreal direction.

The only ‘problem’ with this ‘Future Facing Face’ is that if we have an unhealthy relationship with our own emotional ‘stuff’ (shame, guilt, and trauma etc.) then the future becomes a projection of our EGO, rather than anything REAL (because we are creating goals and a vision of ourselves based on the fundamental assumptions of denying who we really are as a way of avoiding facing our shadow ‘stuff’ etc.)

Face 2: Who You Think You  Are Now (To Yourself)

The second ‘face’ that most of us have is the face of who we think we are NOW (i.e. in current reality). The keyword there is ‘think’ because it’s a product of our thoughts and mindset, not who we necessarily are in TRUTH.

Some of our thoughts might be ‘real’ or accurate (i.e. aligned with actual, valid truth) but often they aren’t because we get caught up in our INTERPRETATIONS of life, rather than life itself.

Anyway, this is the ‘Now Face’ and it’s a product of all of our self-assessments and conclusions about ourselves based on where we’ve been, where we think we’re going (based on the Future Facing Face), and the ways in which we JUDGE ourselves in the present to varying degrees of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (which is what all judgements deal with).

It’s ultimately, a product of the STORY we tell ourselves about who we happen to be right now.

The interesting thing (imo) – and the thing that makes the biggest difference to the quality of our lives – is not necessarily the STORY itself, but the WAY IN WHICH WE TELL THIS STORY.

If we tell the story in a way that is fixed as a FINAL DRAFT then we will stop ourselves moving and take ourselves out of reality (and be less likely to show ourselves a real Future Facing Face because we have conditioned ourselves to be PASSIVE).

If we tell ourselves the story in way where it is constantly being written and updated then we will be more likely to keep learning and move into real life (whatever that is in the context of our own lives).

Face 3: Who You Fear You Might Be

The third face is the ‘Fear Face’ – this is the face of who you FEAR you might be. This is usually shown to us when our emotional ‘stuff’ gets a hold of us and distorts our view of ourselves by our SHAME, GUILT, or TRAUMA (or a combination of the three).

When shame distorts our vision of yourself, it will affect your view of both your ‘Future Facing Face’ and your ‘Now Face’ because it will take unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ from the PAST and cause you to stop trusting and believing in yourself (so these three faces are ultimately about the Future, the Present, and the Past and your real or unreal relationship with each).

This SHAME will tell you that you aren’t the type of person to be able to get the future that you want.

It will tell you that who you are right NOW is no good.

This is just your FEAR talking and the unresolved emotions you carry within yourself that make you feel like you’re not good enough. The FEAR FACE is the one that you show yourself when you start to believe that this shame is the truth about you (because you haven’t started to DISSOLVE the shame by facing REALITY and have instead become driven by it).

It’s the same with GUILT and TRAUMA:

When guilt distorts your vision, you convince yourself that you’re a ‘bad’ person in the present and that you ‘don’t deserve’ the future that you want. This is just your emotional ‘stuff’ showing you your FEAR FACE.

Trauma – which makes us feel powerless – will  distort your ability to tap into your own power and will make you feel that you can’t CREATE the real future that your (real) ‘Future Facing Face’ wants to you to move towards (because it will distort your view and tell you that you’re passive).

There is more variation and complexity here but  – ultimately – you have a face you show yourself in your weaker moments that is purely comprised of your FEARS about yourself.

This is ‘normal’ and part of the human experience but the more overpowering your emotions are the more you will show yourself this face and start to believe that it’s who ‘you’ really are.

If you listen enough and believe it, that’s when you stop moving and stop growing REAL and hide behind ego instead (which is just a mental box you put yourself in to keep all your emotions and ‘shadow’ stuff at bay).

Face 4:  Your Shadow Face / The Unknown

Beneath the surface of all of the faces we do show ourselves from time to time, there is another UNKNOWN FACE that bubbles away beneath the conscious experience of ourselves and that drives the course of our lives without us even knowing (not consciously at least).

This is our SHADOW FACE and it’s comprised of all the different things about ourselves (qualities, goals, ideas, ‘parts’, etc.) that we have at some stage in our lives cast aside and disowned as being ‘unacceptable’.

This usually happens because the World CONDITIONED us to believe that certain things shouldn’t exist and then we hypnotised ourselves to live as though they don’t – this being the case, over the course of our lives we try and act like these things don’t exist or suppress them (with socially unacceptable emotions like ‘rage’, for example).

The TRUTH of the matter, however, is that these ‘hidden’ parts of ourselves are just as REAL as the parts that we do face and – as what’s real is always real – these parts never go anywhere.

In fact, they’re not even ‘parts’, they’re just certain EXPRESSIONS of what we are as a WHOLE. We just conditioned ourselves not to EXPRESS them.

Even though we try and hide this ‘Unknown Face’ from ourselves, the ‘parts’ that comprise it never go anywhere and continue to call for our attention (so we can integrate them) from beneath the surface of ourselves.

One of the most common ways that these parts ‘call out’ to us is through PROJECTION.

All that means – at the simplest level – is that we try and hide these parts behind the CONSCIOUS FACES we show ourselves but UNCONSCIOUSLY we project them onto the world outside of us.

A classic way of determining this kind of thing is to look at what annoys us in other people.  For example, if somebody’s RAGE annoys you – it’s probably because you haven’t ACCEPTED your own rage that’s bubbling beneath the surface of your conscious faces.

What this means in the context of this article is that we all have a FOURTH FACE: the Shadow Face that is shown to us as a reflection of ourselves in the world or as a projection reflected back from others (if we can decode the matrix).

Facing this ‘Unknown’ face is the best chance we have at growing more WHOLE (instead of just being fragmented by only facing the fragmented, surface level faces created as a response to keep the shadow ‘stuff’ at bay).

World-Facing Faces

There are two main types of World-Facing Faces that we show the world (and which are affected by our relationships with ourselves and our ‘Self-Facing Faces’):

Face 1: The Character You  Play In MOST Social Situations To Survive Them (Who You  Show To Strangers/People You Just Met or Want to Keep at A Distance).

The first face that we have for the WORLD is the default face that we want to show other people. This is influenced by all of the SELF-FACING FACES and how we ‘feel’ about ourselves but it’s also inspired by two other things:

  1. How we need others to see us (because of our emotional ‘stuff’).
  2. How we have LEARNED to survive social situations in the past

This ‘DEFAULT’ FACE is just the one that we use to make sure we can get through life on a daily basis and to interact with people we might come across like strangers we have to talk to (people that work in coffee shops, taxi drivers, people we meet for the first time at networking events, etc. etc.).

We will try and COME ACROSS in a certain light in order to reinforce the stories we tell ourselves because of our Self-Facing Faces and the ‘Shadow Stuff’ we want to keep at bay but we will also put on a strategic way of being based on how we survived social situations in the past.

This might involve using strategies like ‘being polite’ or maybe even something like trying to be ‘humorous’ and making jokes. Whatever strategy you use, it’s ultimately about gaining CONTROL of the interaction so that you show the face you want to show.

Everybody does the same thing and it’s something we have to do to keep ‘society’ going.  Depending on how REAL you are with yourself will affect how much of your real self can shine through(the most whole version of yourself possible in a given moment).

Even if you’re relatively REAL, there will still be a slight warming up period around new people whilst you figure them out – whatever strategy you use to ‘warm up’ is just your DEFAULT FACE for the world. It’s not ‘You’ – it’s something that you CHOSE based on your conditioning and expectations of yourself and others.

Face 2: The Face You Show The World In Different Partnerships or Groups (E.G. Might Be Different Among Friends That Parents).

This is where things get (more) complicated.  There are multiple versions of this face which is the face that you show different PARTNERSHIPS or GROUPS that you’re involved in based on your own relationship with yourself (and your ‘Self-Facing Faces’) and the EXPECTATIONS that whatever group you’re in has for you (and what you think about these expectations and whether or not you care about modifying the way you come across because of them).

Here are some simple examples of your CONTEXTUAL FACES:

You might have a face that you show your parents that you wouldn’t show your friends.

You might have a face that you show your friends that you wouldn’t show your parents.

You might have a face that you show your boss that you wouldn’t show your wife/husband.

You might have a face that you show your wife/husband that you wouldn’t show your friends.

You might have a face that you show yourself (one of your Self-Facing Faces) that you wouldn’t show any of these people (not a group, just here to demonstrate the point).

The short-version of all this is that each one of these partnerships or groups forms a new SYSTEM and you need different faces to SURVIVE them because of the roles you’re asked to play and the EXPECTATIONS that come with that role.

You can still be REAL in each of these context but how much realness is able to creep out depends on the DEPTH OF INTIMACY in each of these relationships and whether or not you’re allowing expectations to be more main motivation or realness.

The number of these CONTEXTUAL FACES changes and varies over the course of our lifetimes depending on how many different groups we’re engaged in or how big our network is (or isn’t) etc.

Reality-Facing Faces

Even though in reality we are ultimately WHOLE (i.e. not divided into all of the different categories and labels that we use to make sense of the world – which we’re doing in this article too because it’s just how we make ‘sense’ of the world), we have at least two faces that show us a reflection of REALITY.

Face 1: The OBSERVER making sense of all this .

The first of our Reality-Facing Faces is the OBSERVING FACE.  This is just the version of ourselves that occasionally (for most) is able to STEP BACK from the complexity and confusion of the interplay between all of the Self-Facing and World-Facing faces and to watch things unfold.

This Observing Face is important because it is a version of ourselves  that we are able to show ourselves BEYOND JUDGEMENT.

All of the other faces mentioned so far – apart from the SHADOW FACE (which contains who we would be if we stopped judging ourselves)- are ultimately unreal because they involve JUDGEMENT at some level (which is always unreal because all you can do with reality is ACCEPT it – the opposite of judgement).

The OBSERVING FACE is an AWARENESS of what we have observed or are observing and allows us to hold space so that we can start to respond instead of just reacting to the promptings and conditionings of the other faces.

This comes from the place of WHOLENESS that is within us at all times (in fact, is what we are) and allows us to come from a place that’s REAL instead of being a fragmented consequence of our outdated biological wiring, emotional ‘stuff’, or social conditioning and programming (like the other faces mentioned at the levels of self-and world).

The FACT that you can OBSERVE all of the other faces is proof that they are not ‘You’. They are just survival tools that form the foundation of the EGO (which is fragmented, not the bigger which is an EXPERIENCE of being alive which always comes back to AWARENESS).

Face 2: The REAL self (who knows what to do with all this Awareness and to ACCEPT it and to take Action)

The final Reality-Facing Face that’s relevant here is the one (which is really part of the same process) that you show yourself when you ACCEPT what the OBSERVING FACE has become AWARE of and decide to take ACTION based on this (Awareness -> Acceptance -> Action, it works every time).

When you take this kind of REAL ACTION it allows you to stop holding yourself back based on the limitations of your Self-Facing and World-Facing Faces and to put yourself back on track towards a natural DRIVE towards wholeness that we all have.

By taking action you always learn more about reality and you always  become more whole because you  will eventually end up having to bring your SHADOW ‘stuff’ to the surface (as you find the EDGE – i.e. where all your ideas about yourself meet reality and you can grow more REAL).

In short, the realest faces you can show yourself are the ones that EMERGE when you are able to step back from the ‘other’ faces (Self-Facing and World-Facing) and to put yourself on the path of growing real.

When you do this, you realise that you have NO faces – you’re just FACING THE TRUTH and constantly moving forward and experiencing life as a WHOLE.

 


 

If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂

Sign up for my mailing list if you want to stay in touch (you’ll get access to the 7-Day Personality Transplant for uncovering your life purpose):

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The Label Trap: Is Attaching to Labels Holding You Back from Real Life and Your True Potential?

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Stop Holding Back

One of the biggest barriers to getting the life we want and becoming the person we need to be to get there is labelling ourselves.

This is for two simple reasons:

  1. In order to make the most of our own REAL lives, we need to step up and be the real version of ourselves.
  2. Labels cause us to identify as PART of a group instead of being the WHOLE of whoever it is that we really are.

Being part of a group is obviously an important part of being a human being – “no man is an island”, after all –  but if being part of a group effaces who we really are because the group is based around static limitations rather than GROWING REAL then it can do more harm than ‘good’.

In the way that we’re using it here, ‘labels’ are catch-all terms that we use to describe ourselves to others that just end up erasing our own individuality (and the strengths and weaknesses that come with that which is totally normal when we’re being REAL).

Examples of labels might be:

-Mental and physical health conditions that we’ve been labelled with.

For example in my own experience: I have some health problems and could easily use these as a reason to focus on what I can’t do instead of what I can (and, thus, never do anything) because I’ve labelled myself as an “X Patient”.

-Stuff to do with our cultural background that we think we need to adhere to rigidly.

For example in my own experience: I might decide to fall into the stereotype of a typical reserved ‘Englishman’ and never really express what I truly think, feel, or want to do in order to keep a “stiff upper lip” (not that there’s anything ‘wrong’ with that if it’s what you want to do).

-Political or subcultural labels like identifying with a certain political party (and feeling cognitive dissonance when you go outside of the boundaries of what they say you’re ‘allowed’ to believe in) or even something as simple as overly-identifying with a certain subculture and being a ‘rocker’ or a ‘hippy’ (or whatever) and never experiencing life outside of what those kinds of people are ‘supposed’ to do.

For example, from my own experience: I really love rocking out and listening to rock and metal. If I needed a sense of identity then I could easily pluck an identify off  the shelf and start growing my hair out even more, wearing more black than I already do, and hating any sell-outs that listen to deep house (which I also love) or doing anything ‘mainstream’ (in order to strengthen my own sense of identity and the LABELS I’ve arbitrarily decided to attach to).

-Ideas about what it means to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ and how these things might limit us or mean we need to behave in certain ways.

For example from my own experience: I might decide that I’ll define myself by certain outcomes that are supposed to make life ‘meaningful’ for guys like how many women I sleep with every week, how many steaks I eat on the weekend, and how often I get in a fight when I go to the pub (not that there’s anything ‘wrong’ with that if it’s what you want to do).

-Being obsessed with certain superficial qualities of our physical bodies like the colour of our skin or how much we might weigh etc.

For example from my own experience: I might think that being a ‘white’ guy instead of being a human being actually means anything or think that because I work out and can do however many push-ups means anything in the scheme of things as a whole (when it just ‘means’ I like working out and have enough energy to do the things I need to do from one-day-to-the-next).

Sometimes, these labels might help us feel a sense of belonging – which is part of their appeal – but they can also cause us to be distanced from ourselves and to take ourselves out of reality.

Taking ourselves out of reality might feel good in the short-term – especially if we have a lot of emotional ‘stuff’ or unanswered questions and confusion we want to avoid – but in the long-term it only screws our lives up and causes unnecessary problems.

This is why you need to be aware of how the labels you’re applying to yourself might be screwing your life up and why you should maybe think about flipping the script on some of them if you want to feel better about yourself and your life.

When we’re REAL, we keep growing and we’re always works in progress; giving ourselves labels can stop us growing by making us feel like we’ve reached the end of the line (even if we don’t even LIKE where that end of the line might be).

This is something that we’re not really ‘supposed’ to talk about because – even though the labels we attach our identities to can hold us back – labels are something that we become EMOTIONALLY INVESTED in and often need to be true (to protect our own insanity).

When people have an emotional need for something to be true about themselves, the world and reality – i.e. WANTING for something to be true, rather than actually figuring out if it’s true or not – then it just increases the odds of conflict and disagreement when we question these things or try to think outside of the box that such labelling has put us in.

If you look at much of the insanity around you in the world today, it can be attributed to the WARS people are fighting over the labels they’ve CHOSEN to give themselves (and others) and a battle with reality and the rest of the  world to try and prove to themselves and others that certain labels are true.

Actually, in reality, if something is TRUE, then you don’t need to fight or lapse into CONTROL FREAKERY to try and defend it – it will just speak for itself because that’s what the truth does: exist in self-evident way (it doesn’t need people to argue about it because it’s beyond conflict and just THE TRUTH regardless of any arguments).

If you find that you have a lot of UNNECESSARY conflict and dramatic BS in your life, then there’s a good chance that you’ve labelled yourself in some way and it’s causing you more harm than good.

This article will help you determine if that’s the case.

Labels are a map, not the territory (reality).

Like with many things at the level of our thoughts and beliefs about our lives, the labels we use to make ‘sense’ of ourselves, the world, and reality are not the TRUTH about any of these things themselves but our interpretations and points of view based on how ready we are to face the actual truth.

Because these labels are ultimately about trying to make sense of a chaotic and indifferent universe – where human beings are incapable of knowing and understanding everything because of our limited perception and then limited interpretations about what we perceive – then a good analogy is to see these ‘labels’ as maps that we’ve DECIDED to try and use to NAVIGATE life.

Like any tool, however, these ‘maps’ (labels) are always only ever a way of working with (or against, depending how much BS we’ve picked up) reality, not reality itself.

If you treat the map itself as the reality – which is what many of us do with the labels we’ve become attracted to – then we’ll never really get anywhere and we’ll never learn anything in our EXPERIENCE that can help us grow real in the way that we want to.

Treating the labels you’ve picked up as being the end of the line – instead of going out and EXPERIENCING LIFE and seeing what you’re capable of – is the same as looking at the Disney Land brochure online, familiarising yourself with the map of the theme park, and telling yourself that you now know everything there is to know about Disney Land.

Yes, maybe CONCEPTUALLY, you can tell yourself and others where certain things are in relation to other things at Disney Land – you might even have a loose understanding of what each ride is like because of the blurbs you read in that same brochure.

Here’s the rub, though: if you only have the MAP in your head, then you just have a BELIEF SYSTEM comprised of conceptual knowledge and information.  Unless you actually go to Disney Land and USE the map to get from one place to another and enjoy the rides (etc.) then you don’t actually KNOW anything real – you just have ideas that you picked up and CONDITIONED yourself with.

When you LABEL yourself without GOING OUT and actually finding out the truth about yourself for real – by taking action – then you’re just living in the COMFORT ZONE of your mind and stopping yourself from experiencing something that’s actually REAL.

This applies even if the ‘map’ you have does point to something that exists out there in ‘reality’ (like in the Disney Land example): if you don’t go out there and EXPERIENCE life for yourself then you’re just living in your own head and telling yourself it’s all life has to offer.

Labels help you to make sense of something difficult you’ve been through.

Essentially, the main attraction of labels is that they give us something to HOLD ONTO that gives us a feeling of certainty. Unfortunately, life itself is UNCERTAIN which means that clinging to labels just creates a sense of unnecessary friction between the way that we see ourselves and interact with the world and REALITY itself.

The appeal of labels, especially if we’ve been through a difficult period in our lives – or if we have a lot of unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ like shame, guilt, or even trauma – is that the sense of ‘certainty’ they provide can give us a stepping stone towards finding a sense of direction or purpose again (in an uncertain reality they give us a taste of something certain).

In this sense, as a short-term solution to the problem of dealing with ‘life’, then it’s understandable why people find labelling themselves to be a useful COPING DEVICE for dealing with things.

In my opinion, this is why a lot of people who have a lot of emotional turbulence or who have been through difficult periods in their lives are more likely to attach to labels than people whose lives may have been a little ‘easier’ or where they have had less intense emotional ‘stuff’ to deal with.

When we have a lot of emotional ‘stuff’ to deal with, our natural tendency can be to try and hide from the uncertainty that comes with it by finding something to be certain about that can explain why we’ve found ourselves in whatever situation we’ve found ourselves in and explain away a lot of the associated negative emotions we have from being in a difficult situation.

A harsh fact about life that a lot of us try to avoid is that the current state of our lives is often a CONSEQUENCE of our relationship with ourselves and how much responsibility we’re willing to take for our own lives.

Even in situations that weren’t necessarily our ‘fault’, once things are done and dusted, it’s up to US and us alone to deal with the emotional fallout and to learn to forgive ourselves for whatever choices we might have made and  to learn to REGULATE our own emotional ‘stuff’ so we can MOTIVATE OURSELVES to move in the REAL direction we want to move towards here in the present moment.

Because facing this ‘stuff’ can be painful and may lead to us reconfiguring the way that we live our lives, it’s often easier to find a label that explains a lot of our own responsibility for our lives away and gives us a convenient excuse to keep wallowing in self-pity or to – at the very least – set us up for justifying the failure that will come from not acting to change our lives in the way that we really want.

When we have this kind of ‘stuff’ going on then labels can help us to make ‘sense’ of a past we can’t let go of, a present we don’t want to face, and a future we don’t want to take any ownership over.

The problem with making ‘sense’ is that a lot of things that aren’t REAL or even TRUE still ‘make sense’ to us if we want them to. That’s fine as a short-term way of avoiding some of our pain but – in the long-term – it’s only going to bring friction, frustration, and misery to our lives as we distance ourselves more and more from reality.

 

Labels are like armbands – eventually you need to swim without them.

All this is to say that labels are like armbands (stick with me here) – when we’re first learning to ‘swim’ in life’s great ocean of chaos and uncertainty then they can keep us afloat and stop us from drowning.

Maybe you get diagnosed with a physical or mental health condition, for example:

In those early stages of your relationship with your ‘illness’, then you probably don’t know that much about it or what to expect; your skills at dealing with the condition won’t have been refined yet, your conceptual and experiential knowledge of the condition will both be at low levels, and your confidence in your ability to ‘deal’ with it will be almost non-existent too because you’re probably scared (because you haven’t accepted things yet as you haven’t had a chance to learn) and you don’t know what you’re capable of.

A label in these early stages can actually help you learn to ‘swim’ within the context of whatever you’ve got going on because it will give you a frame of reference for how to deal with things and a direction to move in.

There’s nothing stopping you from living according to the label for the rest of your life – in this analogy we’ve got going though that would just be the same as never taking your armbands off.

If you’re afraid of drowning without them then maybe that’s a good idea; if you really want to know who you ARE and what you’re capable of then – when you’re ready – you need to learn to swim without the armbands so that your life is really yours, not just some idea that you picked up about it so that you could SURVIVE whatever you’re dealing with and not actually THRIVE in life.

People are scared they’ll drown without the label (because they only have the label to deal with shame, guilt, and/or trauma).

This fear of ‘drowning’ helps us to understand why some of us become so attached to the labels that have helped us stay afloat: we do it because we’re actually afraid of life and by fighting for our labels we’re actually fighting for the devices that have helped us to survive whatever we’ve been through.

Obviously, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with that – if something is helping us to stay afloat in life then it’s not up to anybody else to tell us whether or not what we’re doing makes sense or not.

The ironic thing, though, in my view, is that these labels may help us to survive in the short-term but the longer we cling to them and stop facing actual reality – i.e. looking at the ‘truth’ we may be blocking from view because of these labels – then the more harmful these labels become because they just cause us to be disconnected from ourselves, the world, and reality.

This is true of not just labels but our sense of identity as a whole: it’s a short-term survival mechanism that screws our lives up the more we keep trying to keep it in place without learning or growing through it.

In general, it seems as  though people are scared of drowning without their labels, comfortable points of view, ‘ego’, etc. etc., but actually what’s happening when they cling to these things is that they’re just scared of letting these things go because they’re attempting to keep their shame, guilt, and trauma at bay (which made them create a box for themselves to live in in the first place).

The actual fact is that when you let go of these COPING MECHANISMS then you realise that a lot of the emotional ‘stuff’ you’re trying to hide from is actually unreal and that when you hit the ocean of reality you can’t drown – you can only RIDE the reality waves to wherever it is that you want to be (as long as you choose a real vision for yourself and dedicate yourself to action with consistency, discipline, and focus).

Labels just erase our individuality which is actually what will ‘save’ us.

No real human being ever saved themselves or created a REAL life by trying to be just like everybody else.  Sure, we can learn from other people and see what’s worked for them in certain contexts, but – at the end of the day – no other human being has ever lived the life that we’re living and gone through the same things in the same way.

Sometimes, we might think that other people have the answers or can ‘save’ us but actually – even in the very best cases – all anybody else can really do is help us to better understand ourselves so that we can start listening to our OWN VOICE and then doing something with it as our ‘own’ man or woman.

This is because – no matter who you are – the only thing that will really help you to get where you want to be in life is your own INDIVIUALITY.

This doesn’t mean that you fall into the trap of trying to “THINK DIFFERENT” just for the sake of it (that’s EGO).

It just means that you walk your own path based on what you’ve learned for yourself by using your own CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE to weigh up all of the options and make a decision about what you need to do to be the real version of yourself.

Whenever you become overly-invested in a group (something you can only become overly-invested in as an attempt to hide from  yourself and reality) then you just end up erasing your true identity and all of the amazing things about you that will allow you to actually thrive in the way that will make you feel truly alive.

In my opinion (again), this is why so many people in the world get carried away with groups, causes, and movements without really caring what they stand for or are trying to change in the world – it’s not because they necessarily believe in the ‘cause’ but because it gives them a sense of identity that they don’t have to worry about choosing or creating for themselves (through the hard work of action and experience).

In other words, they might not know who they really are because they’re not willing to face their own emotional ‘stuff’ and so by getting carried away with a ‘movement’ it does two things for them: 1) it gives them a distraction from having to face anything real, 2) it gives them something to believe in that fills the void of not knowing themselves.

You’ll know if this makes sense to you or not when you think about the world and the various movements people are getting carried away over.

To get back to the main point, though, when people give themselves to ‘groups’ either directly or by applying labels to themselves, they just end up limiting their own options for growth and erasing their own individuality to become one of the faceless members of the group or label in question.

This might offer psychological comfort if you have a screwed up relationship with yourself but in the long-term it just prevents you from facing your ‘Shadow’ stuff and growing real.

By choosing a ‘label’ to give yourself you’re just lumping yourself with all of the other people that have that same label.  You’ll know how this applies in your own life or in the lives of people that you know but ask yourself this: “How am I different from everybody else with the label of [X]?”  – somewhere in the answer to that question is your way to true salvation (or whatever word you wanna use).

Labels give you a convenient excuse by telling you what you CAN’T do which stops you focusing on what you CAN do.

By labelling yourself in a certain way, you only end up holding yourself back because you just give yourself a bunch of reasons to focus on what you CAN’T do rather than what you CAN.

This gives you a sense of certainty (as we saw above) but the PRICE you pay for this feeling of certainty is that you can no longer express yourself because you’re locked behind a bunch of limitations and unhealthy beliefs at the same time.

Normally, when we focus on the “CAN’T DO” because of the label we either forget about or minimise the “CAN DO”. This is just the EGO’s way of stopping us from taking action and growing real.

For example:

You CAN’T climb a mountain because you’re a X PATIENT(but maybe you CAN still walk around the park and – actually – maybe you CAN climb that mountain but you don’t know unless you go find out).

You CAN’T listen to rock music you like because you’re a DEEP HOUSE HEAD (when actually you CAN listen to whatever you want).

You CAN’T wear a pink shirt because you’re a MANLY MAN (when actually you CAN).

You CAN’T express your true opinion because you don’t want to rock the boat as a RESERVED ENGLISH MAN (when actually you CAN say whatever you want if you’re willing to live with the consequences).

Etc.

The point is that most labels only focus your attention on the actions you “shouldn’t” take rather than the ones that you actually CAN and want to take to be authentic.

Labels keep you in the past when actually you can only find solutions in the present by moving towards the future.

Because labels are really just MENTAL CONCEPTS that you’ve picked up on your life journey, they’re just a summation of whatever STORY you’re telling yourself about where you think you’ve been.

This is fine as we all need to make ‘sense’ of our lives (understanding the limitations of ‘sense’ pointed out above) but the point needs to be made that every time you try and ACT OUT according to a label you’ve identified with then you’re just repeating the past.

In this sense, then, labels just reinforce the story you’re telling yourself about how you got where you currently happen to be.

If you’re HAPPY with where you are and you don’t have any desire to change or improve anything then that’s fine: keep telling yourself the same old story because it’s obviously working.

If you do have a desire to change or improve your life then that means you need to REWRITE the story and that means assessing your relationship with whatever ‘labels’ you’re giving yourself and identifying with.

Here’s something that can help you as you try to change and improve your life:

You can only find solutions in the PRESENT and they’re only really ‘solutions’ if they move you towards a FUTURE that you want to be living in.

In this context, the past isn’t really as impactful as you might have been led to believe. That doesn’t mean that you forget about the past or that you brush it aside – it just means that you need to work on ACCEPTING it so that you can focus on wherever you are now in a realistic way and then make a CHOICE about what you want to do with it.

If you’re too attached to labels that aren’t serving you and that are just reinforcing a story that’s holding you back, then you’re just DISTORTING your vision of what’s available to you here and now in the present; you’re also limiting your capacity to achieve something real and to ACT on the story of WHO YOU WANT TO BECOME IN THE FUTURE, not who your labels tell you that you’ve ‘been’ and still happen to ‘be’.

That might sound like an oversimplification but all it means is this: as long as you have a REAL VISION for the life you want to be living and the person you need to become to make that happen then the labels and stories you’ve told yourself about the past aren’t really that important.

Instead of labels you’re better off focusing on the skills and qualities you’re trying to develop to live the life you want to live.

A lot of people won’t like to read what I just said about the past not mattering that much in the scheme of things. It really doesn’t, though: what’s done is done and you either accept it and decide what you’re gonna do about it based on where you’ve currently found yourself or you just keep dwelling on it and don’t get anywhere.

When we ‘dwell’ on things it doesn’t mean that we’re actually growing, learning, or moving forward – it just means that we’re repeating the same old thoughts in our heads again and again like a hamster running around on a wheel.  Nothing ever changes and we never make ourselves any happier by doing this.

The main thing that keeps us on this ‘hamster wheel’ is the story we keep telling ourselves about who we are based on where we think we’ve been and the labels that we’ve attached to ourselves because of this. Every time we identify with those labels we’re just feeding into that BS story and greasing that hamster wheel so it can keep going.

To break free of the labels you need to ACCEPT where you’ve been and learn what you can from it and then follow this three-step process:

  1. Create a vision for where you want to be in the FUTURE.
  2. Be REAL with yourself about where you are in relation to that vision in the PRESENT.
  3. Start to become the person who can make that vision a reality by cultivating the SKILLS and QUALITIES you need to make it happen.

This process allows you to become the person you want to become whilst also embracing who you currently happen to be (based on the CHOICES you’ve made and what you’ve been through).

More importantly, it helps you to LEARN from the past without putting yourself in a box and limiting yourself because of the labels you’ve given yourself.

In this context, ‘Skills’ are just practical things you’ll need to be able to do to make your vision a reality (so let’s say you want to start a production company – you might need to learn videography, editing, marketing, etc.).

‘Qualities’ are just the personal traits you’ll need to tap into like ‘assertiveness’, ‘creativity’, ‘acceptance’, or whatever else.

In relation to your own life and vision these things will be unique to you alone and the experience you already have – what’s for sure though is that if you label yourself as just being whatever it is that you are right now then you won’t take the actions needed to grow REAL and you’ll just keep getting the same old story you already have.

Stop letting ‘labels’ hold you back and go and live the life you really want.

 


If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂

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How to know if you need a Personality Transplant (if you suffer these symptoms then here’s a guaranteed solution):

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Is it time for a Personality Transplant? Read on to find out!

The most important relationship in your life is your relationship with YOURSELF.

To some people reading this that sounds ‘selfish’ but, really, it’s just a matter of being REAL.

If your relationship with yourself is as good as it can possibly be then it has a number of incredible benefits that cascade into the rest of your life:

-You have better relationships with other people because accepting yourself makes it easier to accept them.

-You know what your true INTENTIONS and VALUES are and so you’re able to build a life with purpose that allows you to better SERVE other people.

-You’re happier because you’re getting authentic results from life and so you have less DRAMA with other people.

-You’re getting more DONE because when you improve your relationships with yourself you know what you really think and feel and know what to DO with this information.

-You’re more likely to take calculated RISKS that will allow you to get out of your comfort zone and actually reward yourself with experiences that you want (because you no longer allow a fear of failure to hold you back because you know that even if you do ‘fail’ your self-worth doesn’t need to be affected).

Etc.

Unfortunately, for a lot of people in the world – and you may be one of them – we get CONDITIONED to stop trusting and believing in ourselves and to try and conform to standards, values, and intentions that have nothing to do with who we really are.

When this happens, we end up convincing ourselves that we need to change something that can never really be changed – the REAL version of ourselves – and this just ends up causing our lives to go into a state of disarray and for us to feel the chronic call of the VOID as we disown important parts of ourselves.

We disown these life-enhancing parts because society/the world/matrix/whatever makes us self-hypnotise ourselves into thinking that these ‘parts’ (really part of the WHOLE) are “unacceptable” and so we try to hide them in the Shadows of ourselves – see the book Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World which you can get for free elsewhere on this site.

These collective, “unacceptable” parts are actually our key to salvation because they contain the TRUTH about us and will allow us to rise again and to live a REAL life instead of the life we’ve created as an extension of the cage we’ve caused ourselves to live in because of the denial of all this Shadow ‘stuff’ and who we really are and can become.

If what you’re reading here, makes sense to you, then don’t worry because there is something you can do – no matter what your situation – you have to ACT, though, and the price of inaction will just be the consequences of staying on whatever path you’re currently on and to keep building on whatever results you’re currently getting (you know what that means in the context of your own life – just ask yourself: “IF I don’t do anything now where will I be in five or ten years from now?”).

What you need to do is to start looking at how your relationship with yourself at present is HOLDING YOU BACK from the life you really want and how the way you IDENTIFY with yourself is keeping some of the real parts of you at bay (or attempting to – these ‘parts’ are always showing up in our lives but that’s a story for another day).

What you probably need to do is give yourself what I have recently been calling a PERSONALITY TRANSPLANT.

That might sound painful or difficult but it’s actually a relatively pain free procedure that can allow you to make a lot of ‘internal’ progress in a relatively short amount of time (usually 7-Days if you’re ready to commit and actually start changing your own life).

What a Personality Transplant involves is just looking at the personality (aka Ego in the language we use here) that you’ve CHOSEN and CREATED for yourself and seeing where it’s holding you back from taking the kind of ACTION that you need and want to be taking to get where you need to be in life.

Here’s a list of some of the most common symptoms that people suffer unnecessarily from (‘unnecessary’ because it’s quite ‘easy’ to do something about it) when they might be ready to go through the ‘Personality Transplant’ procedure for themselves:

You need a Personality Transplant because you never get anything real DONE.

The clearest sign that you might be ready for a Personality Transplant is that you never get anything REAL done.

Yeah, you might spend your days ‘doing’ things but this doesn’t necessarily mean that these activities are fulfilling or that they help you build any momentum or move forward in life in the way that you want to (like the REAL stuff you could be doing).

Normally, when this happens it’s because you have developed an unreal personality that is out-of-sync with both the nature of life and reality themselves but also the nature of who you are in your REALNESS.

This happens for a number of reasons:

  1. You don’t appreciate life as what it really is and you think that you have all of the time in the world (hint: you don’t because you’re going to die one day).This leads to a problem where you don’t value your time, energy, and attention and so you give them to DISTRACTIONS that don’t deserve them.These distractions can be ANYTHING – depending on your underlying intention – but the most common distractions are things like:

    Meaningless activities like video games, Netflix, dramatic relationships, pointless jobs, trying to escape from boredom (you’re only bored because you haven’t figured out your purpose), etc. etc.

     

  2. You have been conditioned to become DETACHED from your true values and intentions and you are listening to EXTERNAL SOURCES of ‘authority’ about how you should live your life and what you should do with it.This external conditioning eventually turns into an internal monologue that we hypnotise ourselves with that causes us to feel shame or guilt around the actions we really want to be taking.Eventually, this shame and guilt turns into NEGATIVE THINKING or SELF-JUDGEMENT that causes us to start making excuses about why we can’t act in the way we want to act.

This way of RELATING TO OURSELVES just ends up turning into an unreal PASSIVE mindset that prevents us from acting in the world.

When we are operating and attempting to design our lives with these two driving forces in our lives – 1) giving into distraction because we don’t value our time, energy, and attention, and 2) hynotising ourselves to be passive – then we just end up ensuring that everything we do is motivated by something UNREAL.

A simple truth about life is this:

Unreal in, unreal out; real in, real out.

All that means is that if you are motivated to act (or not) from an unreal place (because of your conditioning, etc.) then then end result will also be unreal (and vice versa: a real intention leads to real actions and therefore real results).

If you’re not getting anything real ‘done’ then it means that you’re starting off from an unreal place and so you need to switch things up and change your relationship with yourself (with a ‘Personality Transplant’).

You need a Personality Transplant because you keep getting frustrated and that frustration will eventually turn into misery if you don’t do anything.

Naturally, if you keep failing to get the RESULTS that you want from life then you will eventually become frustrated. This is normal.

The problem for a lot of frustrated people is that they try and convince themselves that the source of their frustration is outside of themselves.

Instead of changing their approach to life – by changing the way they relate to themselves first and foremost – they will say things to themselves that attempt to deny reality and to keep their (unreal) personality in place.

Examples of what they might say:

“Life is so unfair.”

“I’m just not supposed to succeed.”

“I’m so unlucky.”

Or maybe – instead of changing themselves and their approach to life – they will start to try and  trick themselves into thinking they have control over the uncontrollable (reality) with all kinds of magical devices or philosophies:

-Hororscopes and astrology

-Crystals or other things that can explain away PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY for our lives.

-Trying to ‘manifest’ things instead of taking action and REALISING things.

The point is that when we have unreal beliefs or use unreal systems to try and control life (instead of working with it) then we just end up distancing ourselves more and more from reality and prevent ourselves from getting RESULTS.*

This just leads to more frustration because of the friction between what we want and what we get from life.

If we don’t change our approach at a FUNDAMENTAL level (the most fundamental being our relationship with ourselves) then we just fall into the INSANE trap of “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

Unless we WAKE UP and see the truth – which means changing something – then we become more and more frustrated and then this frustration just turns to MISERY.

The SOLUTION is to start looking at where your relationship with yourself is BLOCKING your view and stopping you from ACCEPTING the reality of yourself – when you can do that you will start moving with reality again (instead of against it) and your levels of frustration (and potential misery) will dissipate.

*This is why so many ‘spiritual’ people (etc.) are actually quite miserable – because they’re not using their spirituality to face reality (which might mean changing) but to keep hiding and to try and force reality to their will (which is impossible and thus brings friction, frustration, and misery).

You have problems with yourself, the world, and reality that you just can’t seem to solve. You need a Personality Transplant.

When we have (unconsciously) CHOSEN a personality for ourselves that is designed to keep the truth about ourselves and the world at bay then we constantly find ourselves with ‘problems’ that can never be solved.

The variation and complexity of such problems is myriad but the thing that they all have in common is that they linger and NO SOLUTION can ever be found.

The reason for this is that these problems only exist in your head because you’re unconsciously trying to hide the TRUTH about reality and life behind your personality (which you don’t want to change).

If you could let the TRUTH in then one of two things would happen:

  1. You’d realise that you didn’t have a problem – you just had something you needed to accept about life or were thinking in a way that caused you to DISTORT reality.
  2. You’d find a solution to the problem and then you’d DO something about it (and so no longer have a problem).

The point here is that if you find yourself having a lot of existential or other problems that never go away  then the actual ‘problem’ is with how you’re relating to yourself and how this is BLOCKING YOUR VIEW of things.

Normally, the only reason we want to block our view in this way is because we have some unresolved ‘emotional’ stuff (shame, guilt, trauma) that the view will involve looking at.

The ‘cure’ is to learn to look in such a way that it doesn’t hurt and you can grow through it and find a stronger foundation to stand on. This is the end result of the Personality Transplant.

You have a restless feeling that there’s ‘more’  to life.

When you’re being unreal with yourself you’ll constantly feel like there’s ‘more’ to life and that you can express more of your potential or do more with your life.

Some people feel like this for years and years (sometimes even their whole lives) because they never wake up and smell the coffee.

The reason you feel like there’s ‘more’ to life is because there is more to life – you’re just not experiencing it because you’re holding yourself back with an unreal personality and the cage of beliefs it’s locked you within.

When you have these unreal beliefs that make you PASSIVE, then you don’t go out and get the things that you want from life. This manifests as a feeling that there’s ‘more’.

Sometimes, we’ll try and trick ourselves into not GROWING REAL by saying that we should just be grateful for what we already have (which is often not very much if you have these mindset issues).

This is an example of ‘toxic gratitude’ and is just your ego’s way of ensuring you continue not to take action (and therefore grow in the process).

The other reason you might feel like there’s ‘more’ is because as well as denying yourself external experiences (etc.) you’re also hiding all those internal ‘parts’ of yourself in the ‘Shadow Territory.  Your craving for ‘more’ is a craving to be RECONNECTED to your REAL SELF and to become whole again.

You need a Personality Transplant because you constantly judge or criticise yourself which stops you moving forward.

When you take onboard all of the external conditioning of the world that we talked about and start hypnotising yourself into believing it then you pick up a  metric-f-ton of unreal standards according to which you can judge yourself by.

This shows up as:

-Negative self-talk

-Imposter syndrome

-Hypercritciality

-Outcome-dependence

-Etc.

This stops you from taking action and makes you feel ASHAMED to be/feel/think/do the things that you really want to be doing.

What you need to do in these kind of cases is realise that when you’re being REAL you can never judge yourself because reality is beyond the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ of judgements.

You need to learn to stop listening to this unreal internalised voice and to start acting on a foundation of acceptance instead.

You can TRAIN yourself to do this and to start moving forward again.

You need a Personality Transplant because you feel like you’re stuck in a rut, just wasting your life doing the same old same old.

A clear symptom of having an unreal personality (that needs to be ‘transplanted’) is that you feel stuck in a rut, nothing ever changes, and you just keep going through the motions of doing the same old, same old.

You feel like you’re WASTING your life then the reason for this is that you are wasting your life because you don’t understand what life is (like we said above) and so you’re wasting your time, energy, and attention on distractions instead of DIRECTION.

Luckily, when you start getting back in touch with the real version of yourself by going through the Personality Transplant procedure then you will have a better understanding of your DIRECTION in the form of purpose and so things will start moving again.

Being stuck in a ‘rut’ just means that you have no VISION for the future or who you’re becoming on the way there.

Once you’ve started to look at what’s real about you, you will understand your true values and intentions, how you can create a vision around these things, and what skills and qualities you need to develop to MAKE IT HAPPEN.

When you’re armed with this information, it’s a lot easier to move – even if only a little every day – and to stop wasting your life on the same old, same old of the comfortable but familiar.

You need a Personality Transplant because you suffer from anxiety and depression that you can’t quite explain.

In many many cases, anxiety and depression are not fundamental problems but SYMPTOMS of the deeper issue of having an UNREAL relationship with yourself and allowing this relationship to remove you from reality.

Before you smash the REALITY RESET BUTTON and give yourself a Personality Transplant, you can just end up causing problems for yourself that lead to mental health issues:

Anxiety is often caused by engaging with yourself in an unreal way because you have created a false image of yourself based on false assumptions about who you are, what the world is, and how reality works.

When you interact with the world from the vantage point of this false image then you are constantly getting NEGATIVE FEEDBACK from reality in the form of unmet expectations and a lack of results.  This constant friction would cause anybody to be anxious.

Depression is often caused by not listening to the FEEDBACK you get from your anxiety and so clinging to our false self-image instead of changing it: this just causes frustration that turns to misery (depression).

The other fundamental problem that causes depression is that you have lost touch with your PURPOSE because you have picked up a PASSIVE BELIEF SYSTEM that caused you to stop moving.  All human beings need to keep moving to be fulfilled – if we lack purpose our emotional life reflects this.

If you suffer from anxiety and depression then it’s probably a result of the lifestyle choices you are making based on your relationship with yourself.

Medication (etc.) may mask these symptoms in the short-term but to solve the fundamental problem you might just need to give yourself a Personality Transplant and start moving again.

You need a Personality Transplant because you don’t trust and believe in yourself enough to build the relationships you want and get the results you need.

Our unreal personalities are always caused by underlying SHAME, GUILT, and/or TRAUMA that we are not prepared to face.

When you don’t face these emotions you end up blocking them behind an unreal version of yourself and spend your whole life engaged in CONTROL FREAKERY in order to support this false version.

Living in this manner stops you from building real relationship and getting real results.

This is because – at some level – you end up doubting yourself and failing to trust and believe in your CAPACITY to do the things you need to do and to relate to people in a way where you recognise your own VALUE and serve people in an appropriate way.

If you don’t have the kind of relationships in your life that you want to have then you need to learn to push through the underlying emotional ‘stuff’ and to learn to accept yourself UNCONDITIONALLY (which can be done).

When you can do that you’ll have a better relationship with the world and will get the results you want from life as an extension of that.

You want your life to change for the better but it never does.

In short, if you’ve been trying to change your life for a while but never get anywhere then you need to try and change your personality from an unreal one to a real one.

This means getting out of your comfort zone – which is an extension of your current identity, not reality – and to find your EDGE.

This means stepping up and giving yourself a Personality Transplant – if you don’t then things are going to continue to never change and before you know it your life will nearly be over and you’ll be battling regrets.

Giving yourself a Personality Transplant isn’t that ‘hard’ but takes a little commitment (to yourself and the life that you want).

It involves things like:

-Creating a REAL vision for yourself.

-Deconditioning yourself from all of the external things that have made you hide from yourself.

-Looking at your self-limiting beliefs.

-Seeing where you’re being too PASSIVE or NEGATIVE in your thinking.

-Exploring what parts of yourself you’re denying and what GIFTS they have to offer you.

-Looking at how you can STRETCH yourself and find your EDGE.

-Learning to understand how you might be causing yourself to be FRAGMENTED.

-What you’re not accepting about yourself and life.

-How you can use your time, energy, and attention more effectively.

-Plus a load more.

If you’ve already waited long enough to start making changes then you can get started right NOW by signing up below– this will give you access to a 7-Day course that will allow you to figure this stuff out in the context of your own life and to start getting results and moving again FAST (if you don’t want to leave this site, check out the Personality Transplant intro video below).

This is a donation-based course so anybody who is in the small group of people that are ACTUALLY ready to work on themselves can have access to these life changing ideas and be rewarded for their commitment to life itself (‘donation-based’ means pay what you want even nothing – this is an incredibly valuable course though so if this article resonates and you don’t take it then you need to ask yourself what’s blocking you).

Real life is just around the corner but you gotta step up and TAKE IT.

Many thanks for reading and I hope you get where you need to be,

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How to be real no matter what.

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“Real always works” – that’s what I’m always telling my clients and how I live my own life (really, “Real always works” is just a shortcut to circumventing all of the mind chatter that stops us taking action).

There’s only one problem: even though we may intend to be real, we’ve found ourselves in an unreal world where there’s more disinformation, BS, and confusion than probably any other time in history (really, not hyperbole or exaggeration: thanks to Internet algorithms and social media echo bubbles there’s more misinformation than ever before – we can all live in our own alternate (un)reality if we CHOOSE).

Here are ten things to keep in mind that can help us avoid the vortex of an unreal world and keep moving towards real life so we can be real no matter what.

1. Remember the times when you’ve felt most real.

I’m always reminding my clients (or readers of my books) to remember the times when they felt most real in the past. Almost always,  these will be times when they have stepped outside of themselves (or more accurately, their IDEAS about themselves) and they are fully present and spontaneous in the moment.

In my own life, the examples I always tend to give are:

  • Bounding down Mt Fuji one morning with the clouds beneath me.
  • Making love with somebody I truly care about.
  • Riding a motorbike.
  • Being outside in storms.
  • Really good yoga sessions.
  • Etc.

All of these experiences were times were my mind-body connection was heightened, I felt ‘one’ with my surroundings because I wasn’t only perceiving or interpreting everything conceptually, and where I got into a flow state of some kind and moved towards WHOLENESS instead of just mere fragments of living.

The lesson here is that you can’t always feel like this because these moments need you to take yourself out of the day-to-day world and to put yourself in the realest place possible.

Once you’ve tasted these moments, however, they do show you what real life is and show you the direction you need to start aiming back towards once the world begins to creep in again (really this is just the process of returning from the fragmentation of the world to the wholeness of reality: see Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness if you want to build on these ideas).

2. Always keep the real vision in mind.

If your life feels unreal then there’s a good chance that it’s because you don’t have a vision for where you’re going or – if you do have one – it’s not compelling enough.

In my experience of coaching people, a ‘compelling’ vision just means that we choose something REAL to run towards instead of only trying to hide from the unreal stuff (for example, running towards something that is an expression of our true values – creativity, freedom, whatever – instead of trying to hide from our shame or guilt, etc.).

A lot of people set goals for themselves that are actually unreal and become outcome-dependent because they think they can fill the void inside themselves with external validation or other things that can never really save us.  My view of why this happens is because they set goals from a foundation of not knowing themselves (because they haven’t gone through the process of raising Awareness and Accepting themselves before taking Action).

Chasing an unreal vision will only serve to make your life increasingly more unreal as you push yourself further away from yourself; chasing a real vision will eventually bring real results that compound on themselves and make life more real overall.

You can remember it by remembering this simple formula (from the Personality Transplant):

Unreal in, unreal out; Real in, real out.

Make sure you’re aiming for something real before you get there.

3. Set goals and habits that structure your day.

You don’t need so much structure that your life becomes a prison but – once you have that real vision – you need enough structure to support its forward momentum and to carry you where you need to be.

For most of us, this just involves breaking the vision down into goals and also dedicating ourselves to the (almost) daily habits that will take us there.

The reason that this works is because real life is about working with time and that the only way to get RESULTS is to use cause and effect to manipulate time.

For example, if you have a vision of being a creative consultant of some kind then a goal you might have to support that might be to write a book. The habit that will support that is writing every day.

You need to break down your vision into the necessary goals and then be disciplined, consistent, and focused with your actions as you get there.

If you don’t have this basic structure then you will likely just fall into the trap of being distracted with activities, relationships, and thoughts that just make your life more unreal.

4. Value the truth more than anything else.

I’ve said it loads of times before but – in order to live a real life- you only really need to commit to doing two things:

  1.  Uncovering the truth (cultivating Awareness and Acceptance)
  2. Living the truth (Acting on it).

The only caveat here is that we often think we have the truth but all we really have is an interpretation of it. This is why you need to work on being constantly curious, constantly learning, and shifting yourself into having a growth mindset.

Sometimes, we think we’re doing this but actually we’re just tricking ourselves because of our EGO RESISTANCE and a desire to remain the same because of our unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ like shame, guilt, and/or trauma.

The ultimate barometer is how much FRICTION we feel in our lives – if we’re constantly coming up against obstacles or have problems that we just can’t find solutions to then these obstacles and problems are usually only lingering because we’re trying to hide  the truth from ourselves at some level.

The cure is to look inside yourself and see what you’re not yet willing to accept – only if you uncover that can you find a solid foundation to build on and move forward. Without valuing the TRUTH above all else, though, you’ll never be able to do that work as you’ll always be judging what you find.

5. Remember that your time, energy, and attention are the most important things you have.

You’re going to be dead one day. That’s a real FACT that we can all agree upon.

This being the case, it means that the most precious and valuable things you have are your time, energy, and attention.

A lot of us end up being unreal because we forget this and we give our time, energy, and attention to distractions and BS that don’t deserve it (the short version of what these distractions and BS are is that it’s anything that causes us to deviate from that real vision and growing into who we need to be (with our goals and habits) to make the vision a reality).

To stay real, you need to condition yourself to keep checking in with yourself to make sure that you’re CHOOSING to give your life to the things that are real to you and will allow you to be more real.

All being real means, ultimately, is that you know WHY you’re doing what you do (because you have a real vision), you know HOW you’ll do it, and you choose to do WHAT you need to do to get there (the ‘What’ may sometimes be to do nothing so you don’t burn out).

6. Remember that the world isn’t real, it’s just other people and their ideas.

One of the biggest causes of unreality is that we IDENTIFY with the world and think it’s real – in other words, we allow ourselves to be conditioned from the outside-in thanks to the media, our parents, other people, the system, etc. etc. etc.

Really, the world is not real at all – it’s just a bunch of conceptual ideas and the end-result of our collective thoughts and interpretations about life and reality based on our collective emotional ‘stuff’ and how much light we’ll let it.

As we said above: unreal in, unreal out – if most people in the world are distanced from themselves then the world we build will be an unreal extension of that.

If you’re not aware of this,  then you might try and FORCE yourself to fit into the world, but all you’ll be doing in that case is trying to deny all the real parts of yourself that can make the biggest difference to your life.

Flip the script and start with reality before the world.

7. Don’t be discouraged when things don’t go to plan – that’s just how life goes.

Even with the greatest vision and all of the consistency, discipline, and focus in the universe, you’re still just a human being in an imperfect reality and things can and will go wrong.

Being real just means that you don’t let this turn you off – you know that the map is not the territory and so you will have to adjust and adapt to get where you need to me.

The more unreal you are, the harder this will be because being unreal means that you try to control everything in an attempt to hide from your own unresolved emotional ‘stuff’.

If you find yourself lapsing into control freakery and being emotionally wounded every time you fail or get rejected or whatever then you need to work on accepting yourself and reality so you can see things clearly.

Being real means if you fall down 7 times, then you get back up 8.

8. Learn to listen to yourself and to act accordingly.

Your body and your mind will give you clear signals if you’re being unreal – learn to listen to yourself and to make changes as necessary.

When it comes to your body, it’s kinda obvious: if you feel burned out, depleted, or in pain then you need to rest.

If you feel lethargic, then you may need to exercise more as the more energy you use, the more energy you get (only you will know what you need to do but you need to DO something).

Anxiety and depression are often also signs that you need to listen to yourself:

In the case of anxiety, it often means that you’re living according to a FAKE/unreal version of yourself and so you’re constantly getting feedback from reality in the form of friction. This constant friction would make anybody anxious and will turn to frustration and misery if you don’t listen to yourself and make changes.

In the case of depression, it often means that you’ve developed a passive mindset and have lost touch with your purpose. When this happens you stop moving, have no vision for the future, and become miserable.

In all these cases – and others like them – listening to yourself at a real level and acting on it is the solution.

9. Make sure you’re living your real life and not somebody else’s unreal one.

A lot of the time, you might think your living ‘your’ life but if you feel restless or even miserable then there’s a 99% chance that you’re actually living somebody else’s life in the form of goals that aren’t yours.

Only you will know whose goals they really are? Maybe it’s your parents? Maybe it’s some Hollywood movie? Maybe it’s just ‘society’ as a whole?

If you want to be real, you need to learn to decondition yourself and make sure that what you invest your time, energy, and attention on actually comes from deep within yourself.

10. Embrace your weirdness.

When we’re being real, we might be judged by the world for being unconventional or deviating from standard paths and ways of doing things.

If you resist embracing this weirdness at some level, then it means that you’re still JUDGING yourself. All judgement is unreal because it brings in value judgements of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (whereas what is real is beyond duality).

If there’s something weird about you and you’re not hurting anybody then don’t hide from it, embrace it.

Your weirdness is one of your greatest gifts to the world as it allows you to express the truth and the truth allows others to learn and embrace themselves too.

Don’t give into the pressure to hide from yourself because of your unreal ideas about the world. Life is for the living and real life is always a bit weird.

 


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The Real Ones Will Say the ‘Bad’ Stuff to Your Face and the ‘Good’ Stuff Behind Your Back.

The real ones won’t chat ? behind your back.

Instead, they’ll bring that ? to your door and help you figure out how to turn it into a ?(by helping you look at the truth about things together).

One of the main problems with living in an UNREAL WORLD is that it can be populated with so many unreal people.

The REAL ONES are out there and if you find them then you better do what you can to keep them close and keep growing even MORE REAL together – that’s what it’s all about after all: going deeper.

When you’re caught up in your own EGO ‘stuff’, you might fall into the trap of thinking that the REAL ONES are just the ones who only come to you with smiles on their faces and sycophantic words about how brilliant you are (or whatever).

Though they might have ‘good’ stuff to say, the odds are that anybody who only ever blows smoke up your ass is FAKE and either wants something from you or wants to hide something about themselves.

The TRUTH is that you need the REAL ONES to call you out on your own BS:

-We all have our own blindspots and can’t always see where we’re screwing up or holding ourselves back.

-We all have the ability to fool ourselves because of our cherished illusions and our emotional ‘stuff’ (see my latest vid on YT).

-We all need a little help or motivation to push through our EDGE and grow more real and sometimes we need a real one to give us a kick in the pants.

To somebody who doesn’t have a growth mindset – because they’re stuck in the ego stuff and its illusion of STASIS – that all sounds pretty ‘bad’.

As long as the REAL ONE is giving you the straight talk from a place of LOVE and actually wanting you to grow then it’s one of the biggest favours anybody could ever do you.

Some people will sing your praises every time they see you and then go stab you in the back as soon as your back is turned.

The REAL ONES won’t be saying anything ‘bad’ about you unless you’re right in front of them and they’re trying to help you grow.

The UNREAL ONES will smile and ask you questions to get information from you so they can compare themselves or whatever then they’ll use that to moan about you behind your back.

Find the REAL ONES and keep it real.

 

Find your blindspots and grow real with my coaching.

 


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Unicorns (from Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World)

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This is a sample chapter from the book Shadow Life: Freedom From BS in an Unreal World:

When we send our soul into hiding because of our fears about ourselves, the world, and reality and the perceived threat (to the Ego) of facing the Shadow Territory then our soul will keep screaming to us from beneath the surface of our unreal faces in an attempt to get our attention and wake us up again.

That’s all fine and dandy but we need to discuss another element of this unwholesome process of hiding ourselves from ourselves:

This element is the Unicorn.

In the terms of what we’ve been talking about in this book, a ‘unicorn’ is really just a vessel for all of the hidden qualities in ourselves – ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ – that allows us to gain a sort of unconscious control over the externalisation of our Shadow and its hidden messages.

It’s a way of experiencing our hidden qualities but without having to face the Shadow Territory and all of the uncomfortable work and the ego-reconfiguration that comes with it.

In short, a unicorn is a kind of ego protection device that allows you to deflect the whispers from the Shadow Territory so that you can remain the same. It’s another, more subtle, form of Control Freakery.

Our consumerist society is basically fuelled by unicorns and, with the rise of social media and the ability it gives us to fine-tune and tailor our image of ourselves and the way that we share with the world, we can even make unicorns of ourselves.

It’s all bullshit, though.

You need to be aware of unicorns and how they have a hold over you if you want to free yourself and forget about the hopelessness of being a fragmented version of who you are in your wholeness.

The most terrifying part of all this is that a unicorn can be literally anything: another person, an object, an intangible concept or idea, or even something that doesn’t even exist.

To make a unicorn of something, all we have to do is project a bunch of heightened symbolic meaning onto it and convince ourselves that it has certain qualities and attributes that we feel we lack in ourselves because of our conditioning and the BULLSHIT we believe about who we are.

In a sense, these unicorns are just an external manifestation of some image that our ego carries. They’re the bullshit belief that the conceptual or interpretational can be real but – as we’ve said in earlier sections of this book – no concept can ever be real and no interpretation is the truth.  Maybe some point more closely towards ‘the truth’ than others but the concept or interpretation itself is simply a signpost or tool.

Worshipping the concept instead of the reality is always going to leave you being removed or disconnected from the whole and that is the main problem with unicorns.

The short version, then, is that unicorns are a substitute for reality that are given heightened meaning because of our hidden emotional ‘stuff’. Because we’re not ready to own that ‘stuff’, because doing so will threaten our ego, we end up projecting it out into the world so that we can still feel it without realising that it’s coming from within ourselves.

It sounds a bit convoluted maybe but it’s pretty simple if you get some examples:

Perhaps the most common place where this unicornisation shows up to protect our egos is in romantic relationships.

We’ve already agreed that romantic relationships that are based on realness can threaten our masks because we can’t really avoid being vulnerable in those contexts.

If we resist this vulnerability, however, we can end up in a co-dependent or dysfunctional relationship where instead of real meeting real we find ego meeting ego.

Most of us have had these kinds of relationships at some stage in our short, miserable lives: they’re defined by a certain sense that something isn’t quite ‘right’ and by a push-pull dynamic as everybody’s conflicting attachment styles lead to a kind of ego dance where nobody really wants to stay and nobody really wants to leave.

This kind of ego dance is what we commonly call ‘drama’, kids.

For whatever reason, we stay in these relationships because they’ve ‘activated’ something within us that we don’t believe we can get outside of the relationship (or we just wanna get laid on the regular, whatever).

This ‘activation’ is part of the Unicorn Trap (aka ‘Unicornitis’).

Even though the relationship is distinctly unhealthy overall, we stick around because we believe we ‘love’ the other person (which we might, but that doesn’t mean we have to have a relationship with them – ‘love’ and ‘compatibility’ aren’t necessarily the same thing).

We probably even have moments of tenderness or intimacy with them – though they are few and far between in comparison to all the push-pull ego drama that unfolds the rest of the time.

Really, what’s happening in this context is that two people who don’t accept themselves are turning the other into a vessel for the feelings of unconditional self-acceptance that they’ve been hiding from themselves.

Read that last paragraph again because it might save years of your life.

It’s a kind of unspoken ‘deal’ that nobody even knows they’re taking part in: “we don’t accept ourselves but we can pretend to accept each other” – something like that, anyway.

The only reason you’d stay in an unhealthy relationship is because you don’t accept yourself in the first place but the feeling you get of being whole or understood in those rare moments of tenderness and intimacy are enough to keep you ‘hooked’.

What you don’t realise, though, is that those feelings aren’t coming from the other person – they’re already inside you and always have been.

You’ve just used the other person as a unicorn which means they serve as a vessel for you to be able to feel a degree of acceptance (or whatever else you’ve been ‘lacking’ because of your disconnection from yourself) without having to actually accept yourself and destroy your current version of the ego.

This is usually because – for whatever reason – you’ve been conditioned somewhere along the line not to give yourself permission to accept yourself and so you have to go about it in these strange and sophisticated ways.

Like I said, I used to be an emotional retard so I’ve been in this situation once or twice myself. I’m not gonna beat myself up over it or anything because I’ve seen a whole bunch of my friends in similar situations so I guess it’s just part of the ‘growth’ process.

A real, healthy relationship is when we use the context of the relationship to shave away layers of fragmentation and grow more real together by finding the Edge (see a later chapter).

The Relationship of Unicorns is what happens when you want the ‘relationship’ part but not the growth – once again because real growth would mean facing the Shadow Territory and seeing the emptiness of the ego.

Even with the ‘real’ relationships there’s a period where things start to settle down and we realise that we’ve created an idea or unicorn of the person we’ve been ‘seeing’.

Normally, we call this the ‘Honeymoon Period’ – all that’s really happened is we’ve projected all of the qualities we lack in ourselves on to this creature we’re now infatuated with and think that they have the answer to the question of our missing soul (which, don’t forget, we’re always on the quest to rediscover).

Over time, once we realise that we’re dealing with a real human being and not a fantasy, we have a rocky return to reality, and then we either stick around in the relationship and commit to trying to see what’s really there – or we move onto our next fix because we need to keep that ego in place and avoid the Shadow Territory.

Humans, eh? We’re all screwed.

Really, this idea of our “missing soul” sums it all up – if the soul is the whole within us, then we will naturally be attracted or repelled by the missing parts of ourselves in the objects of our worship or disgust (unicorns).

Not all examples are as dramatic as the romantic relationships we find ourselves in; there are plenty more mundane examples that we see around us day after day but they’re all based on the same principle of somebody subconsciously trying to fill the void inside themselves instead of simply becoming the void and closing the gap between themselves and the rest of the world and reality.

An obsession that many people have had over the last few years is ‘superheroes’ – obviously, Batman and Superman and whoever else have been around for almost a century so it’s not brand new or anything, but thanks to the popularisation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (which is basically just an expensive soap opera) people have gone next level in their fanaticism and their fervour for vicarious heroics.

We sometimes forget that the word ‘fan’ is short for ‘fanatic’ which means “Marked by excessive enthusiasm for and intense devotion to a cause or idea”.

Where does this ‘excessiveness’ or ‘intensity’ come from?

From BULLSHIT, of course.

Being excessively enthusiastic or intensely devoted to anything is probably never a good idea but feeling that way about made-up characters in tights suggests that there’s something extra missing in one’s soul that needs to be remedied if one is to ever sort the problem of one’s life out.

We already spoke about ‘heroes’ in an earlier chapter and you don’t really have to be a genius or anything to put the pieces in place and make the connections here, but all of this ‘Hero Worship’ doesn’t really have anything to do with the tights that these guys are wearing – or the adventures that they get in – as much as it does the QUALITIES that they embody and the qualities that have been denied in the people that are unicornising them.

Look, I’ll be totally honest and admit that I watched more than a few of those Iron Man movies – they’re great entertainment and Robert Downey Junior is the man.  I get it.

When I found myself watching these movies, though, it was at a bit of a low point in my life: I’d lost touch with my purpose, I wasn’t working on a book or anything like that, I’d probably just come out of some dysfunctional relationship after unicornising some chick and trying to solve all my mummy and daddy issues, and I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing with myself.

I always end up quoting Henry David Thoreau who said that “Most men live lives of quiet desperation” – look around you and tell me this isn’t true.

Why do most people find themselves in this state?

Because they don’t trust and believe in themselves, they have no vision for their real growth, have lost touch with their purpose, and are waiting for things to make complete ‘sense’ instead of taking the little bits of sense that they do have and making something more with it.

More than this, many – if not most – end up beaten into submission and living as the mask so that they can fit in with the rest of society and live comfortable but miserable lives in the safety of their socially, emotionally, and spiritually ‘acceptable’ personalities.

They’ve shrivelled away and gone into hiding but – as we’ve pointed out – the drive for wholeness and the quest for the soul never stops.

You’re looking for your soul right now. That’s probably why you’re still reading this shit.

Listen, here’s something you need to know and embrace about human beings, if you don’t already:

Every single one of us is fucking awesome.

Really.

We have been designed as goal-seeking, purpose-chasing forces of nature that constantly grow towards wholeness.

We’re not supposed to be shrivelled up and living in a “quiet” or “desperate” manner. That’s something we have to learn because of shame or guilt or trauma.

When people are becoming fanatical about Tony Stark – or any other superhero or unicorn – what they’re really becoming obsessed with is the qualities that they’ve denied within themselves for whatever reason.

Tony Stark doesn’t need permission to do whatever the frick he wants; he doesn’t live meekly; he doesn’t sit around wasting his potential and living a miserable life working in an office cubicle and then going home to his bored wife and snotty kids.

All of the things this guy embodies are exactly what the people who become obsessed with him are lacking in themselves.

But here’s the kicker: They don’t really ‘lack’ it; they’ve just been taught to deny it.

Their obsession is a sign that they need to reawaken these qualities in themselves to grow whole – the mere fact that they even recognise these qualities in whichever hero they end up worshipping means that the quality is definitely somewhere inside them already.

If it wasn’t, they couldn’t recognise it.

All these comic book nerds and other Hero Worshippers have suppressed their heroism (not the unhealthy kind, discussed earlier, but the need for real purpose) and so they’ve turned to unicorns. They don’t wanna face themselves so they experience these qualities through the vessel of [some super hero / rock star / product / whatever].

The tendency to worship unicorns is also used against us all the time for marketing purposes. It’s done by having companies spend millions of pounds on ‘audience research’ which is really just about helping them to understand the masks we wear, our aspirations, and the pain points that led to us being frustrated and unreal with ourselves in the first place.

When we’re queuing for hours through the night to get our hands on the latest [iPhone], or whatever, it’s not the actual object that we’re queuing for but an opportunity to be returned to our own souls for a little while.

Really, in the case of an iPhone, we’re literally just queuing for a bunch of minerals and plastics.

Yes, the coming together of these materials has great functional value in allowing us to better interact with the world and communicate with the people we love and care about or whatever, but, really, any phone on the market can do that these days and we don’t see the hipsters getting in line to buy those with such fanaticism.

Nope, for these unsavoury characters, the iPhone has been heightened to the level of a unicorn (though, to be honest, way less people give a crap about iPhones than they used to – thanks, Universe!).

Instead of it just being plastic and whatever else, it has become a vessel for storing all the missing parts of the human soul and connection to reality that makes life actually worth living.

Because these people don’t wanna get directly in touch with their souls because that would mean denying the ego and having to face the reality of flux and change and all of the complicated things that come with it (DEATH), they decide to outsource these qualities instead and get in touch indirectly.

I’m making assumptions because I’ve never queued for anything in my life unless totally necessary, but I guess the people who act in this strange manner get to feel a sense of superiority because they have some high-status (to other lonely people) technology, they feel a sense of belonging because the Apple Store Monkeys are all clapping for them, they’re getting attention because they might get their picture in the paper, and they get to see themselves as people who “think different” and are unique because of the advertising campaigns – just like everybody else!

It’s all BULLSHIT though (as you probably guessed).

If we take the ‘reverse engineering’ approach, we can make the assumption that a lot of these people really feel inferior, that they don’t really belong anywhere, that they never get any attention and are unworthy, and that they’re just sheep who have to make a concentrated effort to stand out from the crowd.

Those poor bastards.

Honestly, the human ego can make a unicorn out of just about anything in order to protect itself and stop us facing the Shadow Territory and grow through things.

‘Pretentiousness’ is another interesting example, because in this case people make a unicorn out of other people’s work and their ‘understanding’ of it or of abstract ideas and theories that they attach their identities to for ego-augmentation.

It might be something simple like ‘music’ – many of us have probably all been through the ‘edgy teenage music fan’ stage where we think that listening to obscure bands and avoiding things that are mainstream makes us ‘better’ in some way. I even know adults in their 30s and 40s that are still doing that crap – how insecure can you get?

It can happen with whole fields of thought too, though.

For the last few years, I’ve worked with a lot of designers and I must admit that some of them have been the most pretentious people I’ve ever met in my entire life.

In this case, they turned the whole concept of ‘Design’ into a unicorn, allowing it to become imbued with all of the qualities that they want to embody themselves but secretly fear that they never can: a sense of control over the world and the shaping of it, a sense of style and sophistication, a need to be creative and cool, etc.

I’m not saying that design isn’t amazing (look at what we’ve done for the world with it); I’m just saying that a lot of insecure people become attracted to it because of the way that it can be used as a unicorn that helps strengthen their desired image of themselves.

‘Philosophy’ is another unicorn so is ‘Mental health’ or ‘Writing’ – there are billions of them.

The point is that we take mere things or actions and then put all of our ‘stuff’ into them so that we can avoid our own souls.

If you look around you, you’ll see that the world is built of unicorns.

Which means it’s all bullshit.


If this inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂

Sign up for my mailing list if you want to stay in touch (you’ll get access to the 7-Day Personality Transplant for uncovering your life purpose):

If you want to find your own real life, start moving towards unconditional acceptance, and finding a sense of purpose then check out this 7-Day Course that you can start right now:

 

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