The experience always comes first. Make sure there are no experiences blocked!

The experience comes first, so that’s more important than what you think about it. It’s more like a taste/feeling bad thing.

Consciousness crash course

Consciousness is the most fun game there is. We always play it backstage. You wouldn't believe what is possible in a million years.

Step 1) You focus on one thing only. Let's say a baseball cap. When another thought comes in the way between you and the baseball cap, you push (physically but in your mind) that thought away.

Step 2) You sit back and relax. I just did it on the couch. I sit on the couch as if me sitting on the couch has always been perfect, exactly what it is. As if that was all that was ever needed: this man sitting on the couch. I let all thoughts and feelings ‘pop’ like you notice but you don't notice. You just sit there as if everything will forever be perfect.

Step 3) Now, if you relax long enough, something very interesting happens. You can end up in the midst of a new conviction about what something is. For me, they always look like squares around me, with my current conviction in the middle. Those convictions can be very scary things.

You have now done 3 things

1. You went cross-dimensional by crossing the physical barrier between thoughts and you pushing.

2. You have located where beliefs are.

3. You have altered the pace of your thinking. Some people play life with fast thoughts (ADD, for example). Some people with longer waves. By pushing and then sitting back longer, you have changed the rhythm to:

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thought

.. (sitting on couch)

.. (sitting on couch)

.. (sitting on couch)

.. (sitting on couch)

.. (sitting on couch)

.. (sitting on couch)

.. (sitting on couch)

a new believe

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This is also why people are fans of religion. Religion, no matter which one, does a lot with rhythm and pacing. It's like finding the gas and the brake in yourself.

Be careful with Buddhism

Buddhism is unintentionally one of the most rigid beliefs there is. Reality is not only as it is; it's extremely layered. It's way more interesting than you would think.

The Man on the Couch

The man sits on the couch. It had always been perfect. It was exactly as it was supposed to be.

“I’ve been a bit tense lately,” the man thought. “But when I remind myself that it has always been the way it was supposed to be, and that everything happening now is part of it, my body naturally relaxes.

And then I’m left only with the thoughts that fit with that.”

It makes sense: thoughts and bodies always operate at a certain level of tension, and they communicate with each other.

ADHD’ers spend a little energy on a lot of things, and then spend everything on the things they like (hyperfocus).

From the outside, it looks like boredom most of the time. Which it’s not. It’s a different distribution of energy.

Like a car that is driving slowly at the boulevard or is at full speed. Or like a kickboxer, who is either dancing around or spending a lot of energy when actually kicking.

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The thing with a lot of social media is that it mimics the ADHD brain a little. Scrolling through videos is spending a little energy on a lot of things. Maybe we do that a little bit in real life now too.

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How to find the gas and the brake in your brain

1. Focus on one thing you want to think about for as long as you can. For instance, visualize a banana. When there is a thought that blocks your banana, you physically (!) smack that thought away.
2. Now, you let everything go and let all thoughts and feelings ‘pop’. You don’t think about anything.

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You have now done two things. You have operated your brain manually, you have physically controlled it (yes, this is possible), and have unloaded your nervous system by letting everything pop.

You can actually use consciousness to check the health of your brain.

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If you are good at this, you have a gas pedal and a brake pedal. Now you can learn to drive. You can also move from the right side of your body to the left side.

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Right now, I feel that some parts of my brain are overworked.

I sometimes find it difficult to put a feeling into words. But I don’t feel good. And I can’t really explain why. I don’t feel free. I feel restricted. I don’t like it, but there is nothing tangible going on. Of course, there are things like loneliness and so on, but I don’t think that’s it. I just don’t feel good. And that’s frustrating.

I also don’t think it’s fair. I feel like I’ve already done everything. I’m fit, and I have contact with other people.

Some things are my own responsibility. But I actually find life too heavy for what I get in return. And now I sound like I’m being dramatic, or burned out. But I’m not. I’ve also lost some of the magic. As if I can’t quite be fully myself.

Sometimes it’s a feeling of despair. The feeling that things will never get better. And then I start doing all kinds of things to try to make it better.

I also don’t find movements such as Buddhism sufficient. If that’s all there is, then I don’t want it. I’m not going to spend the whole day doing breathing exercises just to get through the day. If it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work.

The problem with these kinds of things is that it’s not bad all the time. There is an underlying current that makes my life feel a little unpleasant, and then it suddenly rises to the surface. And when things are bad, they are really bad, but it was always there in the background, just a little bit.

I think depression works like that too. There is an underlying current. That current keeps getting stronger. And suddenly everything is pitch-black. But that current was there all along; it just got a little worse every day.

I really miss that young, carefree boyish swagger in myself.

Everything has become so heavy. With everything, it feels like there is so much going on. I used to be more relaxed, and in a good way, I just didn’t care about everything so much.

Suppose you feel bad all the time.

You push your emotions away, but you have no idea that you are doing it.

You turn to substances.

From someone else’s perspective, this is an unwise decision.

But anyone who has been in those situations understands it. At that moment, it doesn’t feel like a strange decision at all. You feel horrible, so at least this way, you get to feel good every now and then. Is that smart in the long term? No. But it is logical.

Learning new habits and no longer pushing those emotions away is difficult. It takes energy. But you get freedom in return.

You have become so used to spending your energy in a certain way, to push that emotion away, that it takes effort to unlearn it. That’s how energy works. There are billions of things you have learned, just like walking. Some things you have to unlearn. That feels unfamiliar.

If you are somebody who internalizes emotions, then you have to learn to make a way bigger deal out of it within yourself when you suddenly have a feeling you don’t like. You make a big fuss about it. You don’t pretend like you don’t care. You complain about it for days straight. Even if nothing happens, you don’t stop complaining.

The hard part is that this feels unnatural in the beginning, because you are doing it differently than normal.

What is hard about understanding the brain from the inside out is that you have to learn to be extremely comfortable with feeling that you don’t get it.

The moment you understand a certain thing, you feel it. You don’t necessarily verbalize it, but there is a “boom” in time, like an apple falling on your head. Your whole system knows it.

It’s a very fun and addictive game to play. And the moment you know is also immediately the moment you realize you don’t know a lot, like with a martial art.

It’s the most fantastic rhythm there is. The rhythm of learning.

You just go ahead and do things, and afterwards we’ll see how much you’ve learned and whether you’ve gotten better. But I can assure you: don’t worry about that.

This does mean that you will constantly have the feeling that you don’t understand anything.

I used to internalize my emotions a lot. The result was, I was a ticking time bomb.

The problem in these situations is that you don’t realize it at first. The tension in your body grows. You become frustrated by the slightest things. In a way, you also become afraid of your own emotions. In fact, when you block emotions for so long, you don’t even feel anything anymore. It’s bizarre.

We, especially in the Western world, often view emotions as a sign of weakness. Somebody explodes in traffic? Weak. A man crying? Soft.

What we don’t see is that behind that, there are people constantly readjusting everything they are every second of the day. It’s a drop every day. Those drops of sadness and frustration become a depression, and that loneliness becomes an extremist view. Meanwhile, you feel like absolute garbage because you carry an immense amount of tension in your body.

I fixed it like this:

I started practicing to:

• become as angry as possible
• cry
• allow myself to be frustrated for hours
• get in a state of panic

I literally had to relearn these things since my default reaction was internalizing, pushing it away. So I basically had to make it worse first. It felt better from the start. The depression faded.

Another very common thing people do is this:

You make the emotion something else. Having a panic attack, and then doing breathing exercises. If I have a panic attack, I am going to make it ten times worse. Bring it, show me what happens.

Don’t make things that you don’t like things you do like. It’s like fake smiling. If it’s not funny, it’s not funny. If I am by myself and I am scared, I am scared.

Lots of emotions are layered

You can see anger as one very direct example of an emotion. But a lot of emotions are extremely layered. You don’t really know what you think about certain things. But you have to shy away from them, especially if you are by yourself. Who are you hiding from? Your own past?

Right now, I am slightly amazed, but I am also slightly annoyed, and slightly on edge, and slightly shy. You can always pin down emotions you don’t like within yourself.

The cheetah is right

If I look at a cheetah, I don’t look at how it can hunt, how fast it is, but how it cycles its energy.

How many runs does it have? How does it decide whether to take the shot or not? Because running and missing is spending energy.

These decisions, you call intuition. Intuition means that sometimes you do something, and sometimes you don’t.

We often see spending more energy on something as good. I once read a book by somebody — who actually won a Nobel Prize with this — who managed to put words like this on paper:

‘’A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?’’

This is a very good example of where this goes wrong.

The right answer is 5 cents. But the right answer was not the question.

First of all, you could argue the answer is 10 cents, because if you calculate the amount of times you have seen a question like this, the answer is always 10 cents.

1 dollar bat + 10 cent ball = 1.10

The reason why that answer is wrong is because the question is framed in a cheap-shot way, so you have to overspend in figuring out what the question is. Everybody understands that 1.05 plus 5 cents is 1.10.

So, you have to spend extra energy because the other party couldn’t frame the question properly.

The real choice is: do I want to solve it or not? The leopard says no and immediately says, ‘’the ball costs 10 cents.’’ Which objectively is not true, but is still the 100% correct answer.

AI is a little bit like this. You can spend all the energy in the world on figuring out all the exact answers, but you still don’t understand what the original game was.

* By the way, there is no System 1 or 2 thinking. It’s a conscious spectrum, a decision on how much you spend in any given situation. It’s a choice.

** Have you ever wondered how amazing it is how your body distributes energy within a body? It cycles perfectly to the amount of energy that is necessary per organ.

*** Social media gives you a lot of decisions where you want to spend energy on. Be careful with that a little bit, because there are a lot of decisions.

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In the cheetah example, the answer is sometimes 10 cents, and sometimes 5 cents. Therefore, things never have a defined answer. But that doesn’t mean it’s probabilistic.

A rigid thinker will say the answer is always 5 cents. And that’s why you only see a fraction of reality: one dimension, focused too much on correctness.

Some thoughts are shorter and faster than others.

A way to look at this is by counting:

Somebody with ADHD probably has a shorter time in between two thoughts (or feelings).

This is very useful, since you can use this to differentiate during a day and see what is best to do.

What belief originally was

Looking at something from multiple angles. Your own perspective in the middle. That is very healthy for a universe.

A universe is not one thing. That is why it is important that you make it into whatever you want it to be.

If that is scientific, fine.

I live in a magical universe.

Again: you can make the universe into whatever you want it to be. From the perspective of a universe, it is also important that you look at it the way you want to look at it.

We actually know absolutely nothing. It is impossible for you to imagine what my world looks like.

You decide for yourself.

If you want to live in a world that nobody else sees, then that is perfectly fine. Fantasy worlds do not exist. If it happens inside someone’s head and that person decides that is what it is, then that is what it is.