Had a nice conversation with the hairdresser. They recommended Asperen or Leerdam as places to live. They don't want to live in the city anymore.

We have to up the bar

When I was young, my memory was very good, I had laser focus, and I was very creative.

Then, after years of neglecting my own body and pushing the boundaries here and there, I basically got stupid. There is no other way to say it. I also did it for so long that I developed psychosis. I thought the whole world could see my thoughts and that a helicopter was chasing me. I thought our family Labradoodle was a robot dog and that we were in a simulation.

I was fortunate enough to have seen the other side of things. But if I hadn't seen that, my reality would have been like that the whole time. I would think it was normal to feel like trash all the time. I would think it was normal to feel sick or regularly have a cold.

Now, if I feel sick for a few minutes a month, that's a reason to lock in and change my routines, diet, sleep schedule, everything. If I cough three times, I'm reconsidering everything I do. I'm probably a bit of a wuss too, but mostly because I don't find it acceptable not to feel well. A few years ago, I was so tired all the time that I had to take naps in the afternoon. Now — well, I don't.

If you grew up in a less fortunate position and think it's normal to take care of yourself a certain way, or to neglect your own emotional needs, that's disturbing. Because you don't know the other side of things.

How to get out of psychosis

1) Make your body as strong as possible.

The relationships we have with our bodies are based on trust and faith. If you mess with that for too long, you lose faith that things will get better. That's a very bad feeling. You lose faith in your body, that basic trust.

This is by no means easy: you have to rebuild your relationship with your body based on rhythm and trust. On balance, intensity, rest, and rhythm. Make your muscles strong. You can build on strong muscles. It's more important than you think.

2) Eat as cleanly as possible.

This is a levels game. I started off by just working out, and then slowly started fixing my diet too. In the beginning, I was still downing a bag of M&M's every evening. Then, a bar of chocolate. Then, no candy. It's amazing what this does, since the fuel you put in the car doesn't stop the car anymore.

3) Do something creative, and write about or draw your experiences.

I have no clue why this works. What I do know is that every second I live right now is about 1,000% better than a few years ago. It's like driving a Ferrari versus a broken car. I mean, it's fun driving a broken car around, but there were moments when I lost all self-worth and self-esteem.

The supermarket security guard thought I had stolen something, and I hadn't, but I was so far gone that I didn't defend myself, partly because I didn't really know what was happening. When the police came, I just let it go. You constantly get into these weird situations where you don't know what is true and what isn't.

Now, I own two apartments worth a combined €800k. Not to brag, but to show you how flexible a body and mind can be. And versatile.

4) Learn to fight.

Learning to fight is probably the single best thing that happened to me. Moving from psychosis to a martial art (I started with jiu-jitsu and then switched to kickboxing — yes, I know that's technically not a martial art) is a mentally unbelievably hard bridge to cross.

I remember sparring on a Sunday with zero fight experience, shaking beforehand, and having a black eye afterwards. But it helped me so much in a domain I can't even explain. It's like conquering yourself. You really don't want to do it, and then you do it anyway. And it makes you proud.

5) Surround yourself with 'normal' people.

If you're in a psychiatric ward and you're surrounded by people who are all messed up, you get messed up in a way too. It's also just a scene, like all other scenes, with normal people and crazy people. It's not scary at all. But it's also not an environment to stay in for too long.

So, if you're in a position to get out, get out and gamble on normal life.

We all get knocked the bleep out. The only thing that matters is whether you get up or not. Get up, be proud, own it. I lost it. So what?

6) Never avoid a thought or a feeling. Never.

Whatever you think, whatever you feel. No matter how dark the thought is. You stay seated and let the tape play.

Negative thinking doesn't exist. Being afraid of negative thoughts does.

Are we going to spend the whole evening thinking about the most horrible things imaginable? Bring it on. Let's do it. We'll play back the memories, one by one, endlessly. Let's go.

Are we going to have a panic attack? I want a panic attack. I want more panic attacks. I want my heart rate to go even higher than it already is. I want to faint from panic — this isn't enough.

I'm not going to try to control anything with my breathing. I'm going to breathe faster. I want more panic. Come on, show me how much panic a human being can handle.

That's the mentality you have to understand.

Fear? Yes, I'm absolutely terrified. And now what?

Let me feel that feeling. I want to feel as scared as possible, all evening, forever.

I want to experience life in a way nobody has ever experienced it before, in every single fiber of my being.

Count your thoughts, find the rhythm, find the wave

1# Make the feelings ten times worse.

2# Never get in the way of a thought. If we have to live in darkness all evening, we do that. Whatever the thought may be.

3# Consciousness is thinking about thinking and feeling about feeling.

4# Sometimes give zero energy with your whole body. Everything is still. Shift into the lowest gear.

5# You could have thought about anything right now. But you are thinking about this. What does that say about you?

6# I love to drift away with nice, long thoughts.

Every perspective matters

If you defend evolution from a standpoint of “we should value other animals on our planet”, I completely agree with you.

If you defend evolution because it’s a smart and coherent theory, I disagree with you.

Classifying species in different categories is imaginary. Just like numbers are imaginary. That species produce a new generation is not hard to spot, since I have a mom and a dad too.

I like to see this as one-dimensional relationships. A one-dimensional relationship means that you set up a relationship with something that pushes all other relationships away.

For example: you suppress an emotion. By suppressing an emotion, you push away other relationships too, like your feeling for appetite and thirst. We call this an eating disorder.

Or: you only look at misery through the lens of psychiatric disease like depression, without seeing that there is a human behind it. We call this a psychiatrist.

Or: you only look at reality through the lens of science. By doing that, you don’t see all the other relationships you can have with reality. It’s like you already said: it’s this and that, and then it becomes this and that.

I think we should form more bridges between different scenes in reality. When you are in an intellectual and progressive scene, you think you know better than the rest. When you are in certain religious scenes, you feel the same. You experience reality in a way the others can’t see. You push the other side away.

I went to university. I like science. I am not religious. But the wisdom in religion on a lot of subjects is unparalleled and at a way higher level than what we find in science. The problem is that we’re comparing two things that are so different, it’s hard to form that bridge.

If I am too deep in science, I push religion away automatically, and vice versa. Therefore, the professionals always look from the eyes of other people. This is also what religion traditionally used to be: a voice between different strata of people, people from different classes, who all possess very specific knowledge. Again: thinking that you actually know things is important. Before you know it, you have lost your mind and become a Buddhist (ego, anyone?). No, I am half joking – I think Buddhism is probably one of the most dangerous religions there is, but it still holds some value. The fact that we can see reality through the eyes of someone who lived thousands of years ago is amazing.

In my opinion, if you have to narrow it down to one person, Jesus is still the GOAT, and probably one of the most misinterpreted people in the universe. But the best of the best are unknown. They like to live anonymously.

How to solve consciousness

We all know it’s in the air: a lot of people are working on consciousness, because you intuitively know that most progress will be there. It’s true. Therefore, this step-by-step guide so you can solve it yourself.

Yes. It’s solvable. You either believe that or you don’t. It’s fine either way.

Let’s say you grow up in a Western, scientifically oriented society. The way you think your body works is probably based on your textbook knowledge of biology. You know what organs do, you kind of know how a brain works, and you obviously know a little bit about your own body, which is the material you work with.

What you don’t realize is how unbelievably much that shaped your view of reality. You are already looking at things very pragmatically. I am a white Western man, and the way most white Western men treat and talk about their bodies is very “clinical” – cold, almost. It’s all very functional. This does that and that does that. It’s almost as if we see our bodies more as a supporting machine than the core of what we are. When we have things going on in our bodies, it’s more of an inconvenience (my body is not working as it should be). I have pain in my knee. As if your knee is a different thing from you, as if it’s not a part of you. Or what happens a lot in Eastern traditions – constantly trying to disidentify from your thoughts. As if they are not yours. As if they don’t say everything about who you are.

Consciousness means that you figure out your body from the inside out. And it’s your body explaining to you how it works. It’s very interesting, since you are explaining it to yourself, but on the other hand, you are not only yourself. You are also the bread you eat (and the energy that comes from that), the things your parents told you, the animals that were killed so you could feed yourself, the opinions of others, how you form your own opinion within yourself, all your past experiences, the motor gestures you make now, the fact that I am typing this, etcetera, etcetera.

So you are you and all other things. In traditional religions, that “all other things” is the higher power (I am not naming anything, since I don’t want to insult anyone). It’s a balance between you and you being all other things. It’s a dance you have with yourself in the living room. And with all other things, all things you have been through, conquered, and whatnot. So what a “you” is is already debatable. In Buddhism, they tackle this by saying there is no you, which, in my opinion, is just a simplified and lazy way to look at it (yes, I really get it). It’s true, but why would you look at something that way? That’s not where the fun is.

Because do you know where the fun is? By figuring it out completely yourself.

The problem is that for a lot of people, this is simply too hard. You don’t believe it’s possible. You don’t think you can just ask your brain, “How do you work, brain?” and you start getting answers? But you can.

Time is what you see when you stop running, look in the mirror, and see how much you’ve changed. Beautiful — you give it your own spin.