It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the F-word here: Freedom. We'll share, straight from the trenches, what we have learned from leaving our own addictions behind, and coaching hundreds of others to do the same—and since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it. [00:27.6]
Bob: All right, welcome back to the Alive and Free Podcast today guys. It's time to geek out on some science. We've had some bigger, kind of a slightly heavier topics in the last couple of weeks, and I want to make it a little bit lighter because there's so much cool stuff in the world to learn, to think about, to reflect on, to not reflect on, to not think about. And often what happens is we wander through life exploring, like, or thinking that the way that we're just used to thinking about the world is the way it's happening on the outside when it's not, it's not at all. And so what I want to do today is kind of break your brains a little bit, and we're going to talk about sound. We've talked about sight in the past, if you wanted to go check out the episode on dog vision. We're going to talk about sound in a very, very unique way today and give you some things that might possibly free you of feeling like your just bound by the rest of the world, right. [01:26.3]
And so the first thing we want to do is look at, you know, in the Zen tradition, there are a couple of koans now a Zen koan, you know, nowadays they tend to come from these old Mundos or discussions between the Roshi and his disciple or something like that and they were riddles. Zen is an interesting tradition because it's not really focused so much on meditation. One branch, I think the Soto branch is a little bit more, the Rinzai branch of Zen, you know, focuses a little bit on the koan, but it's basically a riddle that has no answer, right? So they would like, what is the sound of one hand clapping? And you've probably heard a number of these, if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? There are and there are a number of levels of these koans and riddles that are meant to help a person kind of just suddenly come to a stark realization of what's there in front of them, beyond all of their concepts about it. [02:15.8]
See, that's the real, really the rub. We have an idea about the world and those actually act, if you pay attention to your experience, those actually act as layers or films over what you're capable of perceiving. So I've had this happen a few times in my life where like I passed out and as I came back and one time kind of recently, as I came back to what I noticed was an incredibly strange phenomenon. So I was having these experiences. I was doing some breathing and I kind of passed out for like a half, a second or something, you know, like it wasn't that long. But when I came to, I felt my vision kind of swimming and I felt the first question start to arise in my brain. Who, what, why, where, when and how, where am I? Who am I? what's going on? Whatnot. What's happening? Colors would swim. An image kind of came into focus and I didn't have any answers to that. And as the answers started to come, Oh, this is where I am suddenly my vision changed of the room that I was in. [03:13.7]
And then again came the next one, Oh, this is what I'm doing. And then my vision changed again and my emotions changed. And then the next one in my vision changed. And then suddenly I had this like kind of warm, fuzzy, almost like hallmark video kind of feeling through my vision that I didn't have when I first came to. When I first came to, it was just pure perception. It was just pure, like there's light coming into my eyes. I don't know what any of it is. I'm just here in the middle of perceiving. And then every concept that I had about what that was changed, how I saw things, just like we've talked about Cortez showing up in the new world and the, the natives, not being able to see the big boats for a number of weeks because they looked like islands and clouds. They were so big and they couldn't actually see that it was a boat for a while. Same thing here, your concepts actually change what you can and can't see. So I remember we were sitting there at one of our events and I was just breathing and I kind of like passed out for just a second. And as I came to, I just, I looked around the room and I just saw a bunch of bodies breathing and it was the most hilarious thing to me. Cause I was like, man, we have through a lot of effort to try and get people to a place where they can finally just be themselves in the world and quit trying to be anything else. [04:25.1]
Because the truth is you can only ever be yourself, only ever be yourself. You'll never ever be able to be anything, but who you are. Then the problem with that is if you don't nourish that then it'll die. And most of the world is bent. Wow, I'm getting kind of emotional about this. Most of the world is bent on teaching you that who you are, the bottom is not good enough is not okay that you're supposed to be this way in society. You're supposed to believe this way. You're supposed to act this way. And while that helps to build a society, there's nothing wrong with it. The feeling underneath it, that you are not okay, as you are leads to so much pain, midlife crises, all of this turmoil and entire industry around personal development, another industry for mental illness and stuff like there's so much trouble in the world that has come from this feeling like you have to be something different than what you are. So I came out of this momentary pass out and I'm looking around the room, just seeing a bunch of bodies, just beautiful human beings that never needed to be anything other than what they are. [05:28.3]
And then slowly, I started to, like my mindset I'd be like, Oh, this is where we are. We're at an event. I'm running some things. This is what the people are here for. Oh yeah, and I felt my vision cloud up a little bit to where now I wasn't seeing just them. I was seeing them through the lens of everything I thought about them and what they needed and who they were and all this other stuff. And that experience was so powerful for me because it was such a, a tremendous reminder of how much, even though it seems like you're seeing the world, clearly, you really aren't. Even though it seems like you're hearing the world, clearly. You really aren't. So let's talk about sound to try and give you a way to consider that right. [06:11.9]
Now this is the same with all the five senses. So we're gonna, I’ll touch on vision briefly, but this is the same for all the five senses. Okay. With sound, what happens? Well, we'd say if I were to ask my dad, for instance, who’s an engineer, really, you know, really incredibly intelligent fellow. And I had, I had a conversation about this kind of like, kind of like this on the subject of touch at one point in time. And it came to no fruition because he wouldn't, he was like, no, I'm touching it. This is what's going on. That's fine. For practical uses, yes you heard a sound, okay. But let's look at what sound is. Okay. This is a beautiful thought experience, experiment. If you look at what sound is, what happens, there are vibrations in the air. Every single one of your five senses is in a sense, a finger, right? It's just the sense of touch. The most delicate of your senses of touch is your eyes because it's picking up light very, very, very refined matter. So your eyes are tuned to pick up all kinds of really, really refined matter. Okay. [07:11.1]
And your ears pick up vibrations that we eventually call sound, we'll get to that. And of course your nose picks up certain things. And so they're all a sense of touch. They're just differentiation in touch. Am I touching light? Am I touching vibrational sound? Am I touching smell and odor and particulates in the air? Am I touching literally things with my taste buds? And we may talk about that for a second. You know, am I just touching it with my fingers and my skin is there, is there a physical contact with it? So they're all different degrees of touch. Sound is picking up certain vibrations in the air, right? So you're driving right now, if you're driving and you're hearing the car on the road and you're hearing, or the radio or the sound of my voice, which isn't actually the sound of my voice, right? It's just vibrations running through whatever's your speakers in the car or whatnot. You're hearing other car, you're hearing the blinker go. When you got a blink, you're hearing the gas bubbles in your tummy, or the kids in the back kind of make a noise or words dripping or whatever it is. [08:10.0]
If you're not driving, obviously wherever you're listening to this, you're hearing your footsteps on the ground, if you're walking or whatever it is. And what those are tiny vibrations, and those vibrations are picked up by the ears, they're also picked up in other areas of the body. In fact, there's some interesting research to indicate that your body actually communicates through sound waves. And that's how like your immune system is being, being able to deploy white blood cells. So fast, the areas that are hurt, even the white blood cells are stored in one areas of the body, how does it get into these other areas so quickly? And one postulation is that it's because it's through sound waves through the connective tissues in the body, cause sound travels really well through water and other types of stuff. So there you have it. If that's true, we don't know, but there's vibrations, right? So those vibrations come up and that data is picked up inside the brain and then it's put together with all the rest of the sense data in a certain way, in order for you to have an experience of it and the experience you're having, you're just feeling the vibrations and then what's happening is the inside of your mind, your body is translating those vibrations as sound and it's projecting it inside of your body and in your, your experience as sound. [09:18.1]
So the sound is actually something created by you, the vibration is out in the world. And for example, a rock doesn't have ears, so does it experience sound? No, it experiences simple vibration. If an animal doesn't have ears, would it ever experience sound? No, it would experience vibration. Now we may call it sound cause we're used to experiencing it as sound, but it's for them just a different type of vibration or they might not experience it at all. So for them it doesn't exist if it's not inside their experience. So sound is not something that exists in the world. So if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? No. If it hits the ground, then it will definitely make a vibration, some kind of contact release, but only beings with ears wi'll turn that into sound. [10:05.3]
So if there is no one around to see it, then sound will not be experienced, but the tree doesn't make a sound at all, whether you see it or not. We make the sound. Now the question is, why is this relevant? Well, just consider it for a second. If we're projecting this out into the world, the sound is our own creation, it's inside your own head, so whether you like the sound or don't like the sound, your experience of it, then changes. That makes sense? In the same way, you're creating the sound in the world, just like in the same way, just like light is that way. Your eyes are not like night, they don't, they're not like you're not seeing what's coming in your eyes. There's sensations that are coming in and your brain is projecting that on the inside. So in a very real sense, you are the projector projecting onto the movie screen. You are the light of your world. And the pineal gland is bioluminescent to a certain extent. I don't know what that has to do with our experience of light per se. [11:12.0]
But what's going on is you are the light of the world is what Jesus said, I'm the light of the world, You're the light of rule the world. One way to take that, one way to take that because there are multiple layers of, of ways that you could take any number of books and scripture and whatnot. One way to take that is literally, it's true. You really are the light of the world. If you didn't have eyes and photosensitive cells, your world would be darkness. And oh how great that darkness, you wouldn't be lighting up the world at all. You really are the light of the world and your choice to engage with it, lights it up in a certain way, right? [11:46.7]
If you or someone you know is looking to drop the F-bomb of “Freedom” in their life, whether that's from past trauma, depression, anxiety, addiction, or any other host of emotional and personal struggles, but they just don't know how or wants some help doing it. Head on over to thefreedomspecialist.com/feelbetternow and check out some of the things we've got in store for you or book a call so we can look at your unique situation and get you the help that you're looking for. [12:14.7]
So this becomes this really powerful, profound awareness that really the creator of the world, your co-creating the world with whatever made it, right? God, whatever the word is that you use to describe the source of all this magnificent creation, your creating your experience of it. You're creating that world. And when you cease to create that world, you go unconscious, that's called sleep. And now you don't have any experience of it. So you really are the light of the world from the moment you wake up, right? If you look at the creation story in Genesis, right? You have it in Hebrew, the way that it's set up, [speaking in Hebrew] So that the land was like trackless and void, like a, this formless dysfunctional waste, [speaking in Hebrew]. And there was darkness over the face of the primordial deep. Right? [13:18.0]
And so there's just darkness there. And then yeah, the [speaking in Hebrew] right. So what it says is like his breath started to hover, or sometimes you can look at it like a hovering chicken nourishing her kids, but it was there hovering over the face of the water. When you start to come out of sleep in the morning, what happens is your breath starts to change a little bit. And then the first thing that God says is what? [speaking in Hebrew] let there be light. And there was light. He opens his eyes and starts to produce light. Now God saw the light that it was good. And he divided the light from the darkness. Does that mean he blinked? I don't know. We don't need to take this a lot further, but the interesting thing here is that you really are the creator of your world. Why is this important on a podcast called Alive and Free? [14:12.7]
You may not have some say in whatever the external inputs are, but when you are unconscious, you don't have any experience good or bad from the world, when you are. There's not a person alive on the planet that enjoys sleeping, unless they happen to be conscious during sleep, which there are a few people who have tried that who have, who have trained in that kind of environment, so there may be some people who enjoy sleeping. But for the vast majority, billions and billions and billions and billions of people, you don't enjoy sleep. You enjoy the feeling you have when falling asleep and you enjoy the feeling you have when you come out of asleep, assuming it was a good sleep. You enjoy the feeling of rest that you've associated and given credit sleep for, but you'd not, you didn't actually enjoy sleeping. And if you are dreaming, you are conscious for that bit of it, and some of you enjoy your dreams and some of you don't. But you didn't enjoy sleep. The more conscious you become in your life, the more you can actually have a say in how you enjoy it. So it doesn't matter what's happening, if you're unconscious, you're not enjoying it. You're not able to enjoy it. You're not able to experience life and freedom or anything else, even though your body is in stasis, your heart's beating, your lungs are breathing. Your experience is gone. [15:20.7]
You don't remember what sleep was like, unless you woke up in the middle of it. So the question of whether or not you enjoy sleep is an interesting one, because you haven't actually enjoyed sleep. And so learning that you're the creator of your world, the same with taste buds, right? And taste, and smell and all of this stuff. When you start to recognize that your experience of life comes from you and your ability to be conscious in life, then when you see, Oh, I want to experience life more fully, I want to be more free, it becomes very, very clear that the answer is a greater degree of consciousness, a greater degree of awareness of all the things happening so that you can navigate them with ease. Imagine if you will being on a river, going down the river, you're in whether you're in a boat or not. Right. And let's say you're in a canoe or kayak or whatever. So you're set up and there's parts of the river that are nice and placid and calm. And there's parts of the river that are, you know, rapids and rocks in the way and stuff like that. [16:21.0]
Let's say you're going down the river and you're blindfolded. Will you be able to experience that trip? Well, if you're unconscious in the boat, well, no, you're not going to experience; you're not going to be able to enjoy that experience. If you're blindfolded, you will be able to enjoy some of it, right? Maybe you enjoy the feeling, the rush of adrenaline, of not knowing what's there. You'll be able to experience the bumps and the bounces and all that other stuff. But you don't really have much say in which direction you're going, or what's going on, you have a little bit of perception of sound, right? You can smell some things and so you can enjoy it to that extent. But all of the beauty of going down, those, the river, all the visual cues and everything else, you're not able to experience. You're not able to really be free to enjoy. Let's say you go down the same river, but this time, instead of being bumped and bounced around, because you have a blindfold on enjoying what you can, but the rest of it's accidental. Let's say we take the blindfold off. Ooh. [17:15.1]
Now you can really enjoy it. Maybe you don't have all the skills that a great kayaker or canoeist would have, but you can see what's happening down the bend and you can navigate your ship accordingly, your bow accordingly. And at the same time, soak in the beauty of the other areas. And when it's really placid and not going well, you can lie down and look up at the sky and there's so much more that you can enjoy. Now, let's say that you now we've trained you how to canoe and find, now you're a really expert canoeist. So now you can go down the river and you can enjoy it on a number of different levels. You can enjoy the sights, the sounds, the smells and everything that you could before, but now you can enjoy it in terms of personal challenges and different types of tricks you want to do and different you want to steer the boat and different types of rivers that you can go down. And your capacity to do it with ease with much less fear in your heart and all the other stuff increases because we've increased your perception, your consciousness, including your consciousness of how to work with the river. The same thing in your life. [18:12.5]
If you're stuck with depression, if you're stuck with anxiety, if you're stuck with addiction, if you're stuck in all of these other places, if you're stuck with OCD or bipolar or anything else, if you're stuck in business, if you're stuck in relationships, if you're stuck anywhere else, if you want to be able to enjoy them more fully, the answer, the only answer is to become more conscious. If you want to be able to navigate them better, the only answer is to become more conscious. If you want to be able to make a drastic change, the only answer is to become more conscious so that it's not some accidental thing that you're just guessing and hoping it works out right. And to become more conscious means that all of the good things get heightened. Also all the things that you weren't aware you are feeling start to come to the surface. So sometimes we have clients who are like, man, I'm starting to feel more anger or more frustration or stuff than I felt in a long time, because they deadend that sense. They shut it down because they didn't know how to do it. So when we turn it back on, they're like, Oh my gosh, that's there. It's been there for a long time, but now I'm feeling it. Yes. And now we can clear it out. So even becoming more conscious sometimes can surprise you with things that are there. [19:16.9]
You might notice that there are rocks in the river. If you were blindfolded, you'd be like, I don't know if there's are rocks in the river, you're only dealing with, what's hitting the boat. Take the blindfold off, you see a bunch of rocks. You might start having a freak out. None of them are hitting the boat. You actually have more opportunity to do something amazing, but you might start having a freak out just because you're a little bit more conscious of it. Same thing here. I wish for you, dear listener, to have more life and more freedom and more joy in your life. And for me, that means helping you become more conscious of all the things, whether it's how you make sound and how you make light. And the fact that you are the light of your world and that you are the creator of your experience, maybe not the outside world, but definitely your experience of life. And becoming conscious of the way that you did that, that you've created all of the stuff that you hate. And you've created all this stuff that you like and being able to take full responsibility of that, is a way to finally become conscious enough to start to navigate it differently. [20:18.4]
And if I can increase the level of joy in the world, just one notch, even for a bunch of families here and there, it doesn't even have to be everyone for me that is a worthwhile endeavor. Because I, in my mind, joy, joy is the answer to almost all the problems are having on the planet. A person truly joyful domestic violence starts to disappear. All these political hate speech and all this other stuff that's happening starts to disappear. You know, we'll, we'll solve world problems because we're not angry about it at the same time. And so I just want to increase your joy and just recognize that that has, that has to do with becoming more conscious, conscious of even little things like how sound is made. You made that sound and maybe just maybe one day you can start to learn to make it differently. You made that vision, maybe just maybe one day, you can start to see differently, to hear differently, to feel differently, to taste differently, to think differently. [21:12.9]
I'm a personal witness that taste buds change over time. I'll maybe I'll talk about that in another episode, but they can change depending on how you treat them. Your entire experience of life is one open grab bag of pure possibility. And the more conscious you become, the more truly conscious and aware of what's happening, the more possibilities you have, to do things and plumb the depth of what it means to be human in ways that maybe people around you don't even dream possible. Because we've all been handed a certain perception of what life is and what if it's not that at all. If you really look, life is so much more beautiful. [21:49.1]
And that's it for todays “Alive and Free Podcast.” If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your ear buds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcasts from. And, while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you. Plus, it's just nice to be nice. [22:07.2]
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