For me, consciousness always has been that part of your imagination you use to describe how your inner world works.

Always start with the state your whole body is in right now. If you are feeling like the gutter, then you feel like the gutter.

Consciousness works in practice like a consent machine, or a norms and values machine.

Religion provides a set of rules, and everything you do—all your actions and thoughts—gets measured based on those norms and values.

This is a super solid way of living, because in the end, you’re probably going to be very happy, since it’s a good framework to filter out things you don’t want.

On the other side, there is me and my brother. We take all thoughts and let them live inside ourselves. And then afterwards, we decide our norms and values: what stays and what doesn’t.

But initially, everything is welcome in my consciousness. Good and bad.

Do you see the difference?

We judge afterwards, not beforehand.

While somebody who is religious and has a religious upbringing starts with “judgmental” labels.

Our solution is cleaner, but also more tricky, since you basically let everything live within yourself. It’s lawless.

Therefore, I alter it a little bit and mix in religion from time to time. That makes it a little bit safer. This actually helped me get out of terrible times in my life: these presets of norms and values.

First, we have to take a step back and see what learning actually is.

Learning is making mistakes.

You do things, you mess up terribly, then you do other things.

And then you judge all your actions.

If you're like me, you still make the same mistakes here and there again. Now, you recognize the pattern. If you see the pattern, you are safe, because now you know what to do.

I have used this to spiral into psychosis, out of psychosis, and into psychosis again. The latter I did on purpose. If you know the patterns, you can get back in again, and back out.

Patterns that are automatic and underlying, and that are extremely hard to see, are, for example, being too strict with yourself and being too performance-based. This leads to a very fast, automatic shift from “I am sitting, so I am lazy” to running around 24/7.

Or the hardest one to spot: you want to speak out, but you automatically don't. This one is very hard, because it happens very fast. Speech is at the base of everything, so the damage is already done by then. That's not a problem when it happens once, but when it happens a lot of times, it is. If you don't speak out 30 times a day, over 20 years, this adds up to 219,000 times.

What is the similarity between depression and being hungry?

They are both feelings.

Being hungry is a feeling that starts every few hours.

Being depressed is a feeling that starts over years. So you don’t get depressed fast; it only looks like that because it has grown with one drip every day.

A psychosis is like that too. It’s a feeling that built up over 10–20 years. You don’t really notice that; it comes downhill a bit, step by step. And then, boom, you are in it completely.

The reverse is also true. When you are hungry, you can eat and the feeling is gone. But when you are in a depression or psychosis, it takes way longer to climb out. It takes years. You'll see progress very fast when you change your life, but the real healing is after years.

People who are good with thinking can separate thoughts from your “subconscious” (it’s really not) and from the “thought you have right now.”

“Subconsciousness” is a bad name. What it really means is that you have a lot of automatic patterns in your thinking from where you were growing up. Your body can show these to you, especially when you feel there are mistakes you make in day-to-day life.

So you communicate with your “automatic thinking.”

For me, the automatic patterns feel as if they are located in the back of my mind, while other thoughts are more to the front. It’s like a half-circle going back and forwards, as you will.

A very common example is moving from a bad feeling immediately to a thought/action about “being strict,” like restricting your calorie intake.

This goes blazingly fast in real-life situations. It’s only when you reflect backwards that you can talk with your automatic patterns about what you do in those spots.

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Buddhists confuse this subconscious/automatic thinking with leaving the here and now, which is not how the mind works.

Your brain is not going to throw you out of this moment for fun.

What is possible, though, is that you have taught yourself that when something bad happens, you push away your body and go into a fantasy, which can be harmful. But that’s not the same as “leaving the here and now.”

No matter how bad the thought is in your automatic thinking, or subconsciousness if it feels like a subconscious to you, never run away.

Let your body explain it to you. It’s super useful to learn from past events.

But be wary: the back of your mind can be so scary that people built complete religions around it in order to not get to the gutter.

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You can do that in that area of your mind via “monkey jumps.” It’s like jumping between plateaus in your thoughts.

Always start by looking at which thought you are in right now.

Thoughts go around in circles. Not nice? Then you just switch, or you make a little detour.

I usually sit in the thought for a little while, completely in it. And then I switch if I feel like it.

A body is a very simple, elegant machine.

Ask, “How do you work, brain?” and you will start getting answers.

Input → [Black Box] → Output

It will mirror things back based on what you find interesting. Those are going to be the things that you will see in certain moments.

For me, that’s the “inspiration stack” within myself. That’s on the right side of my overlay.

In the right corner, there is blocked emotion. Too much liquid circling around my brain.

My attention gets drawn to the right the whole time.

What is there? Show me, body.

Ah, those are my past energy states. Or past energy states of the things I saw.

It’s a vibe thing

Think of your body as something that is in a certain vibe, a certain mood.

There are things that will forever be high vibe: drawing, working out, cooking, etc.

There are things that will forever be low vibe: suppressing your own voice and emotion, scrolling on social media endlessly, etc.

If you are in doubt, always go for strategies around “making things.” That always works.

If something keeps getting you into a low vibe, then you stop doing that.

Since things like “vibe” always have these “energy spirituality 101” feelings, let me elaborate with an example of what it isn’t.

The furthest thing away from “vibe” is something like calorie counting. Calorie counting is a preset set of rules that you are going to live your day by. Calorie counting doesn’t take into account the vibe of that day.

How do I know what I am going to eat tomorrow? It’s today. I don’t know what I will be doing tomorrow.

Rule number 1:

Always start with the lowest vibes within yourself. Start with the worst feelings.

After a few years of trying, the first time I really did this within myself, my right knee started shaking endlessly. There were so many emotions stuck there that couldn’t get out before that.

I was completely disconnected from certain parts of my body. I had pushed down so many emotional states that they kind of had stacked together in that area.

Why You Can’t Blame the Junkie

I used to be not comfortable in my own body. When you don’t feel comfortable in your body, you never feel good. There is no foundation for you to ground on. You become extremely vulnerable to certain ideas and ideologies.

The relationship I had with my body was based on punishment. If I was not performing, I started punishing myself until I collapsed. I punished myself by suppressing all my feelings via my brain.

When you have a relationship that is solely based on performing, it’s the equivalent of basing your relationship with food on calories. It’s very one-dimensional. You don’t see all the things that you are. You only judge yourself, binary: yes or no, good or not good.

What I found hardest is that this is virtually impossible to communicate to somebody else that you do this. You don’t see yourself doing this. For you, it’s normal that you are constantly extremely critical of yourself within yourself.

Now, I speak to myself with soft words mostly. Not the whole day, but at least a portion of the day.

It’s such a bizarre idea that a lot of people are trapped in things they learned wrong from a young age. You think all these other things are the problem, but it’s just something you taught yourself wrong, for whatever reason.

Therefore, your world becomes smaller and smaller.

When medical professionals talk to me about bodies, this doesn’t really resonate with how the inside of my body feels.

For me, life is more an emotional thing. The first time I hit an emotion that had been stuck for years, my whole right knee started shaking endlessly.

That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in doctors—but in day-to-day life, it doesn’t work for me in a practical sense.

Thoughts, for instance. We can talk about all the functions of the brain, but that’s not how thoughts feel on the inside of my head. They don’t feel like that in a mechanical sense. My thoughts don’t make those sounds.

We can talk about suppressed emotions, but it’s hard to put into words that the inside of my stomach is completely tense the whole time.

Therefore, I started to wonder whether we don’t need a new language to bridge the gap between doctors and patients.

A language that is simpler.

We can, for instance, start with how the inside of somebody’s body feels. Where is it tense, and where not? Where are things blocked? Which parts hurt?

This takes the attention away from the part that is perfectly fine, which most of the time is the brain.

People who are good in life are extremely body-oriented and feel-based. If something in my body doesn’t feel right, I spend 24/7 investigating it. Especially the things that are hard to verbalize, like body tension, overworked organs, a stiff jaw.

Always go where the pain is.

You are the sting on the couch, and you have a feeling.

What is a feeling?

A feeling signals a change in your body — it is, in essence, an electrical signal that goes up.

Feelings are, in themselves, non-judgmental. The original feeling of you being hungry was something like “stomach more empty,” without any label of whether you should act or not. It only marks an instability in your body.

So the signal goes up to your brain.

If you are very busy, and you haven’t had time to process everything, these signals get stored in a stack.

Then they go down again, where you judge them. You can choose to act on a feeling or not. It’s not mandatory. This is your body’s way of explaining to you that you are fully responsible. If you don’t want to eat, you don’t. A lot of people counter one feeling with another feeling, like countering emotional instability with calorie restriction.

So feelings are both:

a small electrical signal

as well as containing information about the whole state of your body

at the same time.

Over the years, you get progressively better at detecting which feelings are important or not.

Now, stack a million of these feelings together and you understand why your mind is chaos, and it should be. It’s supposed to work like that. If your mind is not chaos, then you are in the beginner levels of consciousness.