Spinning endlessly

You feel bad.

Now, you say to your body, “I don't want to feel bad.”

Your body accepts your command.

The problem is this: your body now understands how you don't want to feel, but it doesn't understand how you do want to feel.

Do you want to feel love going through your whole body? Do you want to feel relaxed? Do you want to tingle with excitement?

Without giving it the end state you actually want, your body keeps spinning in cycles.

It did the first part: avoiding this feeling. But it still needs you to pick something from all those different ways you can feel.

There are different ways to fix this:

For example:

  1. Buddhism: You accept the bad state first.

  2. Creation: You pick the desired end state first.

There are more ways that lead to Rome, but these both work. The optimal strategy is a little bit of both.

  • Only picking Buddhism is boring and imprisons you in states you already know.

  • When only picking creation, it's tempting to avoid the negative things.

Creation is a bit more of a gamble. You can clearly see this in the types of personalities of people who are attracted to certain religions. Buddhism attracts completely different people than other religions.

I am more of a fan of creation because it's higher-stakes.

Step 1

Do this: imagine that you feel the most love anybody has ever felt. It goes through your whole body. You are one hundred percent love right now. You already feel it (even if you don't). You feel it going all the way to your hands and feet.

Step 2

Your body is now actually going to rearrange everything in your body until you feel that way. If it's been a long time, this takes a few minutes. If you have never felt love, try to imagine what it would look like to look at something you love.

What Is Something?

I am typing right now.

I could also have been somebody who does triathlons. But I am not.

Instead of typing, I could have been training right now. But I am not.

I was in psychosis a few years ago.

It took me years to ‘shake that off’, to see it as something that is no longer me.

It was me back then, but it isn’t me now.

What is psychosis?

A state your whole body is in. It’s hard to explain. It’s a combination of so many things that it’s no longer possible to verbalize what is actually going on.

For example:

  • You suppress your own voice.

  • You suppress your own emotions.

  • You suppress your own sexuality.

  • You make yourself smaller in your own body.

  • You make yourself smaller when you are in a room with others.

  • You walk away from responsibility.

  • But also, as you can see from what I am typing now, you are too critical of yourself. Maybe you are constantly focusing on what you are not.

  • You abuse substances because you feel bad anyway.

  • You take poor care of your own body and health.

  • You don’t clean your house.

  • You live in isolation.

You could say that the common themes here are 1) avoidance and 2) being too critical of yourself.

But those are still only negative things.

You may also be much smarter than people think you are. You have a lot of untapped potential. There are specific tasks you excel at.

My whole body is in a state of...

Only You Know You Know

Let's say you are somebody who avoids certain situations. And you do that for 20 years in a row.

Maybe you have a good reason for that: maybe you got hurt very badly during childhood.

Now, you play life in defensive mode.

The problem with this is that nobody can see this except you. Even if I followed you with a camera 24/7, and I saw you grocery shopping, going to the movies, and going to work, I still wouldn't see the situations you were avoiding. Because only you know that.

So the most important thing, the self-taught behaviour, is not visible from the outside. Frankly, it's even hard to see from the inside. That's how hard this game of life is.

I grew up in a household where my voice and my opinion weren't appreciated. So what did I do? I silenced myself. If you silence yourself 30 times a day, then over 20 years, that's around 219,000 times you don't speak out. That's 219,000 times of extra tension in your body, extra bites of air you take, and untapped potential.

After 20 years, do you know where that gets you? Into psychosis. But the psychosis wasn't the problem. The problem was that I wasn't speaking out when I had to. I didn't realise that. I kind of forgot I was doing it, and things progressively got worse over time.

What you can measure in the visible world isn't the only thing there is. Because there are things only the specific individual knows (all the things you don't do). Some things that aren't happening are only visible from that person's perspective.

Another example: I used to avoid emotions a lot. So every time I had a certain emotion, I would basically: 1) distract myself, 2) use substances, or 3) work out. Those are the same mechanisms. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with those things, but sometimes you avoid things you shouldn't avoid. Only you know you know.

Do you know what the best example of avoidance is? Buddhism. If you're going to sit in nature wearing your orange jumpsuit, that is literally what avoidance looks like. You're so desperately looking for a way out of suffering that you've actually made up an extra layer on top of it (insert "You don't really understand Buddhism" — trust me, I do, better than you).

Stop Focusing on What It’s Not

Especially in modern life, I think we all have the feeling that we’re avoiding a lot of things because of what we see all day on social media.

I mean, I could train for a triathlon right now, yet I’m sitting behind a computer.

In my reality, virtually nothing is going to change. I’m typing a little bit and moving my foot a few centimeters here and there, but not much more than that. How easy is that? The rest is purely projection, mostly because of what we see all day.

And here, I actually agree with Buddhism.

If you only look at the potential of what something could be, this generates an unbelievable amount of stress in my body.

Think of what I’m not doing right now:

  • I’m not training for a triathlon.

  • Or, the opposite stance: “Today is my rest day!” (which has the same problem). That’s also something you force on yourself.

  • I’m also not changing the world and saving the environment.

  • I’m not saving animals.

All the things I could do, but I’m typing this right now.

See how critical I am of myself?

I’m only focusing on everything I’m not doing.

I’m not focusing on the fact that I’m actually a smart guy, a nice guy (most of the time). I mean, I’m restless, but I’m also curious.

Right now, I’m looking at every inch of my body like this:

“I don’t have a six-pack.”

“I’m not the greatest thinker in the world.”

“I’m not the best writer in the world.”

Instead of:

“I like how I look. I’m in good shape.”

“I’m a sharp guy.”

Or, better:

“Look at the unique way my foot is shaped. Nobody has a foot like this. I think it’s beautiful.”

“Look how original and creative my thoughts are.”

“I’m very good at feeling emotions and sadness.”

That’s what it actually is.

(Or: I have very cheeky tendencies to overstep some boundaries and do a little bit too much of that stuff from time to time.)

You can figure out how your body works from the inside out.

A lot of what we know about the body is based on outside-in information.

Somebody says: the brain does A and B. This region is responsible for A, and that one for B.

Fantastic. But that is not how to use a body in practical terms, in day-to-day life. It's way more fun, and way harder, to figure it out from the inside out.

All religious stories (Adam's apple, for instance) are about this game people play. This game is called consciousness.

Consciousness is a game that has unlimited depth, in the sense that it's a never-ending puzzle. You get progressively better, but the more you know, the more you understand what you don't know.

Example 1

I used to avoid a lot of situations. If you followed me with a camera 24/7, you wouldn't see everything I was avoiding. So, the visible, measurable world is only a hint of everything that is out there. You don't see the things that didn't happen, so to speak.

Example 2

Let's say we know everything about depression. We know every molecule, every little thing. That is not the same as fixing it in real life. It's not the same as working with the actual material: the woven material that is your body. Creation is about taking control of your own body and brain. It's doing it.

If you are a person who does this:

  • Takes left

  • Takes left

  • Takes left

Then doing right is actually surprisingly hard.

Especially when you're doing things like being extremely critical of yourself, which is something you have to unlearn.