The most fundamental aspect of consciousness, and of a person, is their opinion. Being vocal about what you feel. This encompasses your whole body and really is the core of what people are. It should be like that.

The problem is that when you are not vocal about your opinion, this can actually lead to psychiatric conditions, internalized. It’s like blowing yourself up with air on the inside because you swallow all your opinions. This is disastrous.

How to give your opinion

My upstairs neighbour is calling again. “Go f yourself. You’re always calling your Eastern European family. Shut the f up.”

That’s a real opinion. That doesn’t mean I go upstairs and tell it to her face, but it’s also not the same as pushing down the emotion behind it. I really find it annoying. But am I also a little overworked myself, a little bit? Sure.

People who are good with consciousness literally label every thought, every feeling in themselves as “I like” or “I don’t like” and work from that.

There is nothing egocentric about that: that’s how it should work.

Let's say you are a man and you grow up in a society where there are very rigid ideas of what being a man is.

So what happens?

Internally, you are going to judge everything that happens within you—every feeling and thought—based on the criteria of what you think a man should be. You often see things like this: “I am not scared.” “I would never have a same-sex fantasy.” Because you have invented the person first, and then you filter out what is appropriate. You take pride and physical fitness, but you won't take weakness.

Funny enough, this is exactly what science does the whole time. You invent this idea of what something is first, and then you test it. But you don't realize that you have already made it kind of that way beforehand. You have already made it causal, energy-based, or quantum.

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In the other team, there is religion. Traditional religion has absolutely nothing to do with the religion we have now. What religion traditionally was, is that you have zero ideas, you have a completely open mind about what something is, and then you let it unfold. It's the equivalent of living “on feel.” It's the equivalent of feeling within yourself what you want to eat, instead of forcing the idea (today I am eating 2,000 calories) into the day.

So you let the thing reveal itself first, in a way, and then you are amazed by it.

If you want to solve consciousness, the latter strategy is more fun. Stop forcing what you think it is, and it will reveal itself to you if the timing is right.

No, that feeling is exactly right as it is. We’re not going to keep changing everything about ourselves all the time just to work around that feeling.

It is exactly as it is.

Stay put. I’ll stay sitting exactly like this, because that feeling is already right. Or I’ll run around, whatever. But the feeling is exactly what it is. I’m not going to run away from it.

Me, that feeling, is exactly how it should be. I don’t bow to anything.

I am not on auto-change, I’ll just sit here

Think of the brain as something that detects changes.

 

So sometimes when there are changes in your body, you feel worse.

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Your automatic response is to fix that, for example through calorie restriction or working out.

 

You want to counter the change in your body with another change.

But first, try this:

I am exactly as I should be. Every feeling is exactly as it should be. First, I am staying put. Afterwards, I decide. I refuse to dance around my own feelings.

There is something very powerful in that. You no longer let those changes boss you around. Does something in my body change, and do I feel worse? Sure. I’ll sit here first.

I am not on “auto-change.”

Where the Bible is about

I don’t know what the whole Bible is about. But there are a few things I am a hundred percent sure of.

• I vividly remember the time I became conscious that I had a brain → paradise.
• I vividly remember the first time I became aware of my sexuality → bitten by the snake.
• I vividly remember becoming aware of what I was thinking → knowledge of good and evil.

They are descriptions of processes in our body. These are landmarks you hit when you grow up, like binary points.

It’s so elegant, so well explained, that these explanations survive the test of time.

Did Jesus turn water into wine? Or is that about a specific place in your body too?

Did Moses split the ocean? With a little imagination, he did.

Level 1 consciousness

Stay put and feel very slowly how the inside of your body changes. Now you know what a brain does.

A lot of people take a very passive stance when it comes to health.

Health, both mental and physical, is meant to be a 24/7 job. The thing that does that job is consciousness, so you, within yourself.

1# Feel that part of your body. This is the coping line feelings move on.

Now, you have formed a connection, like a train station.

2# Check where emotions break off within your body. Emotions come in waves within yourself. Sometimes the wave breaks and splashes over to other parts of your body. Check those areas.

3# Access your nervous system. For instance, via reverse pressure pointing through your voice or breath. You can feel the individual states of your body parts.

This is very important, because if you suppress your voice for a long time, for example, that part of your body literally gets overworked. You can get a lot of tension in your neck, for instance. It feels like too many trains going on one rail.

4# Pull feelings towards you, as arrows pointing toward your middle section or stomach. You can push them outwards, but only for so long.

General rule of thumb: if you are not feeling well (in your whole body), something is off. There is nothing “it’s only in your brain” about it.

Skipping beats

A lot of people, including myself, have taught themselves from a young age to “cut their breath off” because you were shushed too many times. If you see the inside of your body as a symphony, this gives pauses in the music.

You can only help someone if you show them the difference.

I was extremely strict with myself for years. I wouldn’t even allow myself to sit still: if I did, I had to be doing something. Otherwise, I wasn’t making progress, I wasn’t working. I always had to be doing something, moving forward, making progress, keeping up with everything else.

It took me 37 years to realize that that voice was the problem: the idea of how life was supposed to be lived. Only when I saw other people and realized that it wasn’t necessary at all—that you can simply be kind to yourself and love all of your thoughts—did it finally click.

The line between being healthy and fit and being far too hard on yourself is razor-thin. You can drive people completely crazy with a certain idea. The culture of achievement is probably the best example of this.

So now I divide my day like this: first, I am strict with myself and focus on achievement. But from the afternoon onward, I am only kind to myself, and I love myself. Otherwise, it just doesn’t work.

Again: if you have strict ideas about what life is supposed to be, then every second you spend doing nothing is a wasted second. You’re lazy, you’re not making progress. And that’s nonsense. You can also look at it this way: everything is always okay, and I’ll see what happens.

There is nothing that I love to do more than thinking. Exploring different thoughts within myself. Seeing them pass by. Getting obsessed by them. It's really one of the biggest wonders in this universe, how thoughts work. I enjoy it every day.

You can't fathom how precious life is. Your life. That you are alive. It's not communicable in words.

Religion is about changes in the energy state of a system.

That is on a parallel axis. Hence the cross.

Why? Because if there was only the thing that changed, you wouldn’t be able to see yourself.

You need two axes:

1. The thing that changes
2. The thing that observes that. It needs to stand still; otherwise, you see the movement on the other side.

The brain detects those changes. It’s on the second axis. But when you are doing things, the brain moves to the first axis. They rotate.

If they wouldn’t switch positions, we would be able to observe everything, and there would be no observing the inside of our own bodies, since both parts would be moving simultaneously.

Another, more linguistic way of saying this: if the thing that wants to see changes in a whole system also changes itself at that moment, we wouldn’t be able to see. One point has to stand still and take a photograph of the moving part.

Consciousness is the thing that rotates and starts with a different part of your body. It always starts somewhere else.