Flow State
I’m someone who can only learn by experiencing things for myself.
If you explain something to me, I don’t understand it.
I think learning is the most important thing there is. I also think school is one of the places where you learn the least (except when it comes to interacting with other people), because someone else is telling you things. You’re not experiencing them yourself.
The same goes for psychiatry. I went pretty deep into life. I learned things in psychiatry that I wouldn’t have wanted to miss for the world, such as facing my fears, seeing that things always get better, and meeting kind people who work there. But I learned very little from psychiatry itself — I had to do it myself.
So the moment I decided, “I have every psychiatric diagnosis there is, but I’m going to live on my own anyway and learn how to take care of myself,” was the moment I really started learning. And I’m proud of that.
A few years ago, I was in psychosis and thought the whole world could see my thoughts live. Now I have two apartments worth a combined €800,000, a serious job, and kind people around me. I earned it myself. And I’m proud of that. Not out of vanity, but because I did it myself. The person typing this is the same person, but somehow also a different person.
Sometimes I wonder if we’ve gone too far in trying to help other people. Sometimes trying to help someone can be the worst thing you can do, because they don’t learn how to do it themselves. As if everyone needs to be led by the hand.
It’s a bit like building an AI that knows everything. Great, but then everyone else learns nothing. What matters is the journey, the struggle, the street, the jungle.
A few years ago, I thought, “Holy moly, if I can still make something of my life from this starting point, how incredible would that be?” Autism, ADHD, psychosis, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression — we have everything in the family. And yet, I made it.
Lately, I’ve reached several points that simply feel like paradise. Everything just clicks. It feels right. Wonderful.
Ego Death
With consciousness, it’s important to make yourself important first. Especially if you are somebody who tends to make yourself smaller.
Mother Nature takes care of this phenomenally.
In Buddhism, they say, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” They are missing the point. The point is the journey in between, where you actually make yourself, your thoughts and feelings as big as possible. Who you are. What your journey is.
You have to make that temporarily bigger than the world around you. After that, the world will return to ‘normal,’ and you can perceive everything as it is.
Another way to explain this is that if I have to sit here and breathe my thoughts away, Mother Nature can go *** ***. Then these bodies we have just don’t work, which is a possibility. But they do.
Do you know how you can experience ego death in one second? Well, you can, for instance, think about somebody else for one second. Remember: your own breathing is still only being occupied with yourself.