Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctor's week show where I show you how bad States of mind, difficult life issues, aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it. Greetings fellow travelers. I hope you're traveling along paths of peace, wisdom, and tranquility. And if not, it's all right, because everything
Speaker 1 00:00:37 It's trying to point you toward the promised land. It doesn't matter if it's a dance or a fight. It's all the same. It's all just information trying to wake you up to be the most awesome aware human you can be today. I want to chat with you about how no matter what's happening in your life. There's always this more awakened, conscious, liberated awareness sitting there, right under your nose, just waiting for you to tap into it in episode 12, exercise for how to use a joyous experience to transform a problem. I shared a simple method for doing this and for using it to change a problem. It involved, reacts assessing a high positive state of mind you've experienced in the past and applying it to a problem in the present. It's fascinating that not only do we experience extreme variation in our highs and lows in life, but that we can reaccess them.
Speaker 1 00:01:44 Re-experience them as if they already exist somewhere within us. It's a radical thought to consider that while you're sitting there in the depths of depression, there's an ecstatic, free, happy version of you just at the fringe of your awareness. And it's possible to tap into it. Of course, it works the other way around too. I've had experiences where I felt awesome and then heard a sound or smelled something or saw a picture and a bad memory flooded in and instantly made me feel bad. It's crazy how our States of mind are so fluid, intangible and transitory, but this is our very nature. We think we're solid beings with set identities. We assume that reality exists in a fixed state. We strive to attain a certain state of happiness, an ideal condition in our lives. But the fact is everything in the universe, including us is in process.
Speaker 1 00:02:55 We are processes the notion that we have a bunch of different potential States of being within us at all times, isn't only a basic element of psychological reality. It's also a central feature of physical reality. One of the main theories in quantum physics is called the many worlds paradigm. I want to dive into it a bit and then show you how it reveals something profound about ourselves. The many worlds paradigm States that whenever an observer makes an observation at the subatomic level, she collapses many potential results into just one, which manifests by virtue of how she observes. In other words, the lens through which she looks, which in a quantum physics experiment means the specific type of experimental setup she uses determines which version of reality she perceives. There are many other versions right there in front of her, but they don't get perceived because her chosen lens only measures certain kinds of information.
Speaker 1 00:04:13 Now by versions of reality, I don't mean different interpretations of the same thing. I mean that what gets observed actually changes depending on how you look at it in physics, they say this in a fancy way. What is observed has no properties independent of the observer. The very act of observation determines what gets observed. It's similar to the basic problem in psychological research, which is that people behave differently when they're being observed before quantum physics was developed, nature was thought to be something you can study without influencing it by the act of observing. And this is still true in the everyday visible world, but quantum physics studies, the invisible world of atoms. And when you get down to this core level of the universe, nature exists only as a relationship process with an observer. There's no set of pre-existing facts that can be detected. There's only nature exposed to one's method of questioning.
Speaker 1 00:05:26 For example, one of the central questions in physics has always been what is light. It's an important question because without light, we don't see the world and the early 19 hundreds, quantum physicists made a shocking discovery. If they set up their experiments in one way, light behaved as if it's made of tiny particles called photons. But if they changed their setup, light behaved as if it's made of waves, like ocean waves, but made of light. The problem with this is that a particle is a defined object that occupies a specific region of space. Whereas a wave is a fluid pattern that spreads out how can light be these two totally opposite things? How can something be a definite object located in indefinite position and simultaneously be spread out all over the place? It makes no sense, right? Well, that's only if your paradigm is one in which the observer and the observed are independent of each other.
Speaker 1 00:06:37 Once you understand that the observer and the observed are entangled in an interdependent system, you begin to see how different ways of perceiving create different results in the old physics that predated quantum physics, something, couldn't be two different things at once. And couldn't be explained by two different mathematical formulas. But quantum physics discovered that at the subatomic level nature, doesn't manifest according to these old established rules. Instead, it only answers the questions you ask. If you set up your experiment to find light particles, that's what you'll find. If you set it up to find light waves, that's what will appear. This discovery showed us that nature is a totally interactive phenomenon apply to you and me. This means that we have within us many different realities, different ways of perceiving life, different ways of being different selves. And the one that manifests in a given moment is determined by how we observe, meaning how we perceive ourselves, others in life.
Speaker 1 00:07:57 Our perceptions are governed by how we use, and don't use our awareness, your moods and problems. Aren't fixed things that exist independent from the way your consciousness is oriented. You're always in a fluid process that can go in many potential directions, ranging from ecstatic to depressed, relaxed, to anxious, creative, to bored and so on. It's all there in you all the time. If you feel a lack of meaning in your life, there's another part of you. That's in touch with a deep meaning. If you're lonely, there's another part of you that isn't lonely. In fact, thrives on being alone. Your opposites are alive and well, of course, the obvious question arises as to where all your other realities, ways of being inner selves and perceptions go. When you, as the perceiver collapse, all the options into just one in the many worlds paradigm, the other reality still exists, but in parallel universes, yup. It sounds like science fiction, but it's actually hardcore science.
Speaker 0 00:09:18 And guess what? Our
Speaker 1 00:09:19 Psyches also have parallel universes. Every moment your awareness focuses in a certain way. You unconsciously choose one of your many selves with its specific way of perceiving things and repress the others. But where do they go into a parallel universe in your psyche? In other words, into your subconscious, they're still there, but you aren't aware they exist in the moment in physics. You can't travel into a parallel universe because to do so, you'd have to travel through. What's called a wormhole and its physical conditions would instantly kill you,
Speaker 0 00:10:01 But you
Speaker 1 00:10:03 Can travel into a parallel universe in your psyche and you won't die. You can do this by exploring an amplifying. The signals you receive from these parallel worlds, meaning your subconscious and processing them. The signals range from everyday problems like pain accidents, conflict and bad States of mind to awesomely, uplifting, creative, liberating experiences that feel like they come from who knows where the gods, the sun, the moon. Well, they come from these parallel worlds in your psyche. In fact, this is what your subconscious is. It's where all your unconscious parallel perceptions reside. It contains the whole
Speaker 0 00:10:56 Unrealized big wide world of you all
Speaker 1 00:11:02 Unknown potential in its awesome. And sometimes ugly glory in the exercise. We focused on a problem. You're having an access to one of your inner parallel worlds where your past positive state of mind was still alive. And well,
Speaker 0 00:11:23 When I show
Speaker 1 00:11:23 You how to process your problems from scratch, you'll see that these other worlds, other ways of perceiving and being and other identities are there for you to discover. They're not given to you by me or anyone else re accessing a joyous state of mind is a pretty general direction, but it's still a direction I gave you. That's because it's a beginner's exercise. When you learn to actually process a problem, a new way of being will show itself to you organically. This is very different from most other approaches to healing and growth, which actually tell you what state of mind to get into they're prescriptive. My approach is descriptive. Instead of prescribing a way of thinking, feeling and behaving. I focus on your unique experience of an issue and use your description of that experience as the starting point and guidance system within your problem lies its own solution, but to train your processing skills, it's helpful at the start to be given some ideas of where to go.
Speaker 1 00:12:39 So that's what we did in the exercise later. You'll find that the answers directions and changes are within you and you won't need someone else to tell you what state of mind to get into now, why did I have you focus on a joyous experience? Why not an experience of feeling powerful or creative or at peace? These would have worked too, but joy is at the core of all of them. It's a fundamental feeling you get when you're in conscious sync with your process. Notice I said, conscious sync, not just sync that's because there's also an unconscious version of joy. Sometimes it's hard to choose the right words because everyone interprets them differently. But what I'm referring to here is more aptly called pleasure. Now don't get me wrong. Pleasure, rocks co for it, totally, but it tends to work at a basic physical level.
Speaker 1 00:13:41 So you have to be careful because if you overdo it, it can take you under and wreck your life. You know, like if you eat too much or shoot too much heroin or gamble, all your money away, pleasure has an addictive quality to it. That's because it's really only the seed for something else. Something more evolved in conscious, namely joy. I used the word joy for what happens when you process basic pleasure and transform it into a conscious experience that informs your life with meaning and purpose. It expands your process from its animal instinct experience into a conscious, psychological and spiritual awareness of yourself and others. Joy is an unfolding process and doesn't get tiring. Whereas pleasure can eventually get old. And as I said, mess you up, of course, in practice, most things we like to do contain a combination of the two. The trick is to be aware of what feels good and use it for the growth of your awareness, knowledge and appreciation of life, as opposed to just grinding the good feelings into the ground.
Speaker 1 00:15:01 Like too much beer, although that could be enlightening too. A great example is sex pleasure, but even the most pleasurable sex can become mundane over time. If it doesn't lead to exquisite joy to connection or love or spirituality or something that awakens you and the other person in some way, okay? So we got pleasure and joy kissing cousins, but why do they even exist? If you're a biologist, you'd say they exist for the continuation of the species, but why should the species continue? Who says it has to keep going? And why are there so many other forms of pleasure and joy besides having sex, you can have the most awesomely ecstatic experiences through having fun, working, chilling, playing music, dancing, reading, writing, traveling, relating to someone. There are tons of ways. And even the idea that sex is for procreation is kind of lame since almost all the sex we have is not for procreation.
Speaker 1 00:16:20 I mean, you have sex hundreds or thousands of times, but you only have a few or maybe no children just because something can have a certain result. Doesn't mean that's the only reason it exists. I remember once a client who accidentally got his girlfriend pregnant, said it happened because of biology. Meaning his sexual impulses were hard wired for procreation. I challenged him pointing out that my gay friends have the same turned on hot attractions and impulses, but they don't all procreate sex is so much more than making babies. We got into a fascinating discussion that led to the realization that there are aspects of reproduction science that are contaminated with homophobic beliefs. The reason pleasure and joy exist is to act as the fuel for our most important drive, which isn't procreation the impulse to breathe, eat, fight, or flee, and have sex. Our basic instincts that preserve life so that we can pursue evolution's real goal, which is wait a second. I got to get to my drums.
Speaker 2 00:17:48 <inaudible>
Speaker 1 00:18:03 Enlightenment. We're all driven toward it. Whether we know it or not call it what you want. Consciousness awareness, freedom, liberation, knowledge, love, power transcendence, or rock and roll. Whatever you're driven to do has an explicit or implicit goal of growth, expansion and creation. This is why striving after happiness is a losing battle. True happiness happens when you connect with your drive to evolve, unhappiness happens when you feel disconnected from this drive, the way to connect with it is through joy. It acts as your guidance system in life. It's fuel is desire and like joy. There are two kinds conscious and unconscious, your unconscious desires can get you going toward joy, but they won't get you there. If you're stuck at the level of pleasure, making your desires conscious, meaning discovering what you actually need versus what your impulses just grab. That is the route to finding joy, which is the road to enlightenment.
Speaker 1 00:19:27 But before getting into how to cultivate your conscious drive toward enlightenment, by processing your desires, I should say something about the concept of enlightenment itself. When Westerners used the term enlightenment, they might mean the age of enlightenment, which was the Renaissance period between the 14th and 17th centuries. When all the mindblowing classical philosophers and scientists brought the world out of its medieval on consciousness. But if your interpersonal growth and are familiar with Eastern spiritual traditions, you know, that enlightenment refers to awakened consciousness. It's a translation of several Buddhist terms like bode, hee Nirvana, Ken show, and Satori in Hinduism. The term is Moksha. These are intuitive terms that denote things like wisdom, detachment, freedom from suffering knowledge consciousness, and so on. The problem with these definitions is that they make it sound like enlightenment is a state of mind. It's not, it's not a fixed condition.
Speaker 1 00:20:42 One reaches one day. It's a process, a never ending journey of awakening to the mysteries of life. I always cringe when I see a subculture with a guru type figure who has quote reached enlightenment, like he's finally arrived in New York. It's absurd. Life just doesn't work that way. And it especially doesn't work by someone suddenly becoming enlightened, like the old classic tales. You can have a sun enlightenment experience, but you're in process. So it ain't going to stay there long. The minute you get enlightened, your process and the processes around you evolve. And not only that and light mint is contextual enlightenment in one place in time. Isn't enlightenment in another. Staying on your path of growth means continuing to evolve in relationship to yourself, to others, to the world and to your location and era. So if you ever encounter a therapist or a so-called spiritual teacher that puts himself or herself out there as some sort of finished product of human perfection run, it's not real.
Speaker 1 00:22:07 He's going to go home and try to take a shit, realize he's constipated, get cranky and snap his wife. I've seen it many times. I've worked with literally thousands of people all over the world, and I've even worked with some girls and I've never come across the picture in our minds of a completed human being. In fact, being completed really means yes, stuck the river of life, always flow it on an enlightenment means. Following the stream of it's never ending changes and light mint is a human process, not a godlike state of mind in the nether reaches of universal consciousness. And don't forget that the image of the guru we very often have in the West is very culture and context specific. It comes from an Indian tradition in which the guru doesn't work, but travels from town to town depending on other folks to feed him.
Speaker 1 00:23:17 That's cool, but we wouldn't want the whole world to be like that. Would we? I mean, who would do the feeding? All that stuff had a powerful contribution from the far East. And one of the main tools for working on yourself is mindful awareness, which is the process of observing yourself in the present moment without judging or interpreting. It helps you free of addiction to unconscious automatic, harmful ways of being mindfulness. Isn't a sense, a form of science akin to empiricism in scientific research, scientific knowledge, accumulates through observation measurement and prediction things you can actually experience in real life. It rejects all forms of conjecture opinion and belief, at least good science does. There's always the potential for subject of agendas to contaminate science. But the goal is to stick to objective observation, similarly, observing yourself and describing what you observe with as little interpretation and judgment as possible is the beginning to being objective about yourself.
Speaker 1 00:24:39 So how does mindfulness help us navigate conscious versus unconscious desire and joy so he can move forward in the process of enlightenment? Well, if you use mindfulness as your sole method of working on yourself, you won't get too far. I mean, you'll feel somewhat better. You'll attain a more quantum state of mind and feel less entangled in your problems, but you won't transform unconscious processes into conscious ones. Why? Because simply observing yourself, detaches you from your desires and sort of pathologizes them. The old Eastern idea is that desire is a lower form of consciousness and detachment from this is a higher form of consciousness, but this is incorrect. It's based on a pre psychology understanding of the psyche. And doesn't differentiate our human drives into conscious and unconscious ones. It conceptualizes desire as a drive that imprisons you, and that you should work to free yourself from.
Speaker 1 00:25:51 This is why enlightenment is often defined as having no desires. There's some truth to this in terms of the fact that the more you grow, the more centered you feel and the less you feel in the grip of overwhelming impulses and addictions, but it's also a false understanding of desire. In fact, it's an internally self refuting concept because if you have no desire, then why bother working on yourself or practicing mindfulness or considering enlightenment or self-improvement. Why not just sit there like a bump on a log? Why help other people? Why do anything? Why meditate, why live clearly desire, pleasure, and joy are our fuel for growth. So how do you cultivate your drive toward an enlightened joyous? It's the way of living first? You have to, you acknowledge that most everything you do can be done either consciously or unconsciously relating, working, thinking, feeling, behaving, eating, drinking, sex, yes.
Speaker 1 00:27:09 And even music to something on automatic or compulsively or out of your control, or just without full awareness of yourself means it's unconscious. Mindfulness makes it quasi conscious. Like at least you see what you're doing processing makes it fully conscious by transforming it from an automatic behavior into a new conscious way of being second. You have to use your desires as seeds for your personal development, whether your desire is to experience pleasure or to get free of a problem, or to reach a goal, view it as happening in order to wake you up to a more enlightened version of yourself, desires are vehicles for self-actualization. And so our problems and goals. There's an interesting quote from Swiss psychologist, Carl Young, where he says the most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm, that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and they're conflagration, which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.
Speaker 1 00:28:36 In other words, without your problem or goal, you won't get to the valuable and lasting changes you need to make. It's like your problem is a boat that wants to take you across the river, but you have to get into the boat, meaning the process. If you stay on the shore, pathetic your problem, and trying to just get rid of it without understanding its message, or if you're convinced the boat will sink because you think problems are only bad. You miss the whole point. Your problem is the doorway to your enlightenment. It's your unconscious process asking to be made conscious. Now, one of the things I mentioned that can be done either consciously or unconsciously music, think about rock and roll. The originated in the drive for freedom. First in the African-American expression of freedom through the blues, and then in the cultural crossover arts known as rock and roll.
Speaker 1 00:29:42 The first step in attaining freedom is to follow your pleasures, to be free, to do what you want when you want, where you want and with who you want. But some rock and roll stopped there. It's kind of the dumb version, which don't get me wrong. Totally rocks. We need. It is often a process where we have to first be unconscious, especially in the beginning of a revolutionary endeavor. For example, rock and roll began by fighting the stiff white status quo of America. And to begin that process, folks just had a go for broke sex, drugs, and rock and roll freedom. Pleasure. If you get too conscious of what you're doing at the start, you lose the spirit of it. It'll progress to a more informed, conscious joy if you process it. But if you just try to go straight, there, you skip important steps.
Speaker 1 00:30:45 It's similar to when people try to detach from their problems without processing them, you do feel more detached after processing something. But first you have to dive into it, explore it, amplify it, wrestle with it, get to know it, live it for a while, grow from it. Then you can get a sense of freedom from it, controlling you. If you just try to live in some kind of great blissful state of mind right away, you skip the real process and you won't be able to really transform things. The rule is you have to first occupy and experience a process before getting free of it. Otherwise you don't even know what it really is processed. This is often first manifest in you as bothersome signs and symptoms. If you automatically reject them, you throw out the baby with the bath water and you miss their transformative power.
Speaker 1 00:31:49 You've assumed that because they feel bad and wrong. They must be bad and wrong, but they're not, not. They're meaningful irritate. It's designed to wake you up and catalyze change. Just getting rid of them or trying to detach from them is unhealthy because you throw away an important piece of your process and growth. A great example of this is relationships falling in love. Often involves falling into an unconscious dreaming with the other person. You sort of lose your mind. And this is how you enter into the process. It's the doorway into your own story. And that of the other person, as time goes on, you can wake up to the story and help it evolve, or you can remain unconscious and allow it to stifle. But if you're too conscious right at the start, it makes it hard to fall in love. Unless you're like really conscious, like you've worked on yourself a lot, which means, you know how to fall into dreaming without losing awareness.
Speaker 1 00:32:58 But that takes years of study and practice today's relationship environment with its online focus is really difficult because it's too detached and consciously analytical from the start. People stand back with their checklists and never allow themselves to fall into and explore the process. Our relationship is a process. It's not like buying a finished product at the store, but unfortunately that's what online dating is like our modern focus on the individual is awesome, but it also has the bad effect of making people too removed from each other. The feeling of not wanting to settle for the wrong relationship can become an inability to actually have a relationship because you can't have one. If you can't let go and let things happen for a while, a relationship is a process you have to dive into, you can pussy foot, as much as you want dance around the outside, convince yourself you have high standards and all that, but you can't skip the groundwork where you jump in and roll around in the mud and see what happens.
Speaker 1 00:34:17 There's another great quote from Carl Young, where he says the meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there's any reaction, both are transferred. In other words, don't approach a relationship only in terms of finding someone who fits perfectly with who you think you are. Sure compatibility is important, but the whole point of a relationship is that it's meant to transform you in some way. And you can't predict what this will look like. It's the same as processing a problem. You can't predict what you're going to learn. In both cases, you have to take the leap at some point and see where it goes. I like how rock and roll while some of it follow this process of diving into something and following its evolution, instead of stopping at sex, drugs and rock and roll, the art evolved into joy and awareness through spiritual exploration and social activism.
Speaker 1 00:35:28 It became what art is truly meant to be, which is a challenge to the status quo of the individual and of society. Of course, more recently, a lot of it got watered down, analyzed, sanitized, marketized, like the original spirit got killed and replaced with a formulaic entertainment. But Hey, everything's a process. It'll change again. The point is that everything happening in your life contains a higher calling and your joy can lead you there. If you use it to grow, enlightenment means continually making your desires conscious and connecting them with the big picture of your life, the world, and the universe desire often starts at the lowest level of pure pleasure, but you can process it to discover conscious joy and healing. When you feel like everything's gone to shit and you have no joy in your life, remember that your joy is still there in a parallel world in your psyche, often disguised as a problem.
Speaker 1 00:36:45 And it's just waiting for you to connect with it. One of Joy's basic expressions is love. And I wrote a song and made a few videos, a music video, and a live concert video called everybody love. It's about embracing diversity, not only in the world, but in yourself too. When you form your identity, you tend to marginalize certain parts of yourself. And in the process you become one sided. These marginalized parts don't just disappear. They express themselves as problems calling out for your attention. In fact, every problem you experience is an expression of a marginalized part of yourself. Everybody love applies this idea to the marginalized and oppressed peoples of the world. And also to each of us having the courage to explore and process the foreign unfamiliar little known parts of ourselves. The videos are already on my YouTube page, but I recently came across the demo for the song and made a lyric video for it. Tune in this Friday, November 13th for the release, the lyric video will be on my YouTube channel and you can stream the demo version of the song on Spotify or wherever you listen to music. Here's sneak preview.
Speaker 3 00:38:15 <inaudible>
Speaker 0 00:40:04 See you next time. Stay aware. You can follow me on social media at doctors awake, and you can sign up on the mailing list at doctor's wake.com where you'll receive discounts on private coaching events and merchandise starting 20, 21 weekly personal growth tips, and lots more be well.
