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: Welcome back. All right, last week we destroyed an obliterated work from your life. So you should have had a great week. It's not, well, maybe we can play around with that a little bit more, but today I want to talk about something different. This is in a different vein, and this is very, very much related to being free of a lot of the woes and problems that you may struggle with. Whether those are small ones, like little day-to-day frustrations or whether those are huge ones. What I want you to really focus in on is that a lot of people, when they're looking at problems like this, the tendency is to see it as a problem and to try and go and fix it. And so, they spend a lot of their time trying to fix outward circumstances or inward circumstances and beliefs. We talked about this in the five kinds of freedom episode. There's a lot of people that spend a lot of time doing that. And what I want you to consider the possibility of is that the number one solution to any problem is to stop creating the problem in the first place. [01:41.6]
Now that's one way to talk about it and it sounds kind of flippant and sort of in your face, like, well, quit seeing it as a problem, and it's not a problem, but I really do mean that. I mean, wake up from the nightmare that you have problems. This is a very significant thing. Many, many, 2500 years ago, Buddha's walking around now. He had been a teacher for a long time, some 40+ years in his life. But early on, after he had really achieved what was enlightenment for him and for him, it wasn't a religion. He was came out of a Brahman society and so the religion of the day was a Brahman kind of religion and the rituals around that time were that. And he wasn't really seeking to create a new religion. He was literally struggling with things that he had encountered. Whether you want to take the legends of him having encountered in one day where he saw a sick man and an old man and a dead man or something like that, or whether as some scholars would put it that this was something that distilled on him over time, that he had seen enough sickness and enough death and enough other things, either way, he was really troubled by this. [02:52.2]
He felt in some way, shape or form suffering on the inside of himself and a struggle, you know, a desire to live and not suffer. And yet there was still suffering there despite his, you know, really incredible upbringing, despite having access to all of these incredible wealth and riches. Here was a man who still suffered, Hey, point one, good news, the Buddha started in his life as a suffering person. He was not just born as the Buddha. He struggled, he suffered. And I think that's in a really important point to make, too many times somebody has achieved something great and immediately we want to put them on a pedestal like they were born, you know, out of some divine manifestation of mercy or something. And that that's really what is the reason why they were that the way. We want to ascribe some supernatural reason for their success and for their capacity, but with the Buddha that wasn't the case. [03:54.6]
With him, he struggled, he suffered, he had a rough time. And once he finally decided he needed to get to the bottom of it, he went searching and spent six years in intense practices and rituals and meditations and finding teachers and trying everything he could until nothing was working. And he finally was just kind of off on his own. Then after he had finally woken up from that nightmare, he was walking down the road and there was a man, just a farmer, a local peasant or something who saw him and saw something radiant about him. Now this doesn't mean he was glowing or that he had a halo, but there was something in his presence that just exuded peace, joy, love, calmness, whatever you want to call it. And the man went up to him and started bowing down and started speaking to them as if he were the divine, as if he were God who had come to earth to bless other people. And Gautama looked at him and said, I'm not a God. And he says, well then surely the peasant said, surely you're an emperor then or some kind of ruler of some kind. Nope, I'm not an emperor. Well then maybe you're an attendant or a high official, there's an air of authority about you. Nope. I'm not that well then what is it? What is it that I see, what are you? [05:17.6]
And Gautama, the Buddha said, I'm awake. I want you to look at that for a period of time. Just really look at it. That's his only claim the Buddha, he did not claim to be anything other than awake. What would he be awake from? We'll talk about that. But he wasn't claiming mastery. He wasn't claiming godhood. He wasn't claiming anything other than to be awake. Now I want you to think back around a time that you had a really vivid dream or a nightmare or something like that. And let's look at the process of waking up, just look at it. See what it brings into, into mind. Because a lot of waking up waking up is the key to you finally eliminating suffering just like it was with the Buddha, right. It's a realization and we'll explain this. So, when you're asleep, there are stages of sleep. Now they've measured this in brainwaves, whether you're in theta, gamma, Delta, beta, all these other things. You're in different brain activity levels, depending on different areas of sleep. At your deepest levels of sleep, we could say that you're unconscious in the sense that you and I don't have any experience of sleep. [06:32.1]
Now, a lot of people say, oh man, I really love sleep. But if you really look at it, you don't love sleep, cause you don't even experience sleep. You're not aware of it. What you are aware of is waking up from sleep or going to sleep in both of those might be pleasurable experiences. So, you enjoy waking up after sleep and you enjoy going to sleep, but you it's really hard to enjoy something that you weren't present for, isn't it? There are people who have trained themselves to be awake while sleeping, but that's not in my level of capacity. If that's you, that's absolutely incredible and I laud you for it. You are a person that then can say you enjoy sleep. The rest of us, you can't say that because you're unconscious. Yes, there are levels of consciousness, it's not just unconscious and conscious, but you're unconscious. At a certain point, when you start waking up or you're in a, a more semi-conscious state, you start dreaming. This may happen during rem sleep, I'm not quite sure exactly the process or where it fits inside, but you start dreaming. [07:30.8]
Now dreams themselves, dreams themselves are, they are not real. Are we, are you with me on this one? They are just fantasies being concocted and created by the brain. They are visions and sounds and sights and smells even sometimes that feels so real to the body that the body is actually chemically responding. It'll respond in physiological ways many times. Teenage boys know this because their body produces certain secretion sometimes in response to a dream state and sometimes not in response to a dream state, okay. And so, during this dreaming state, what's happening something that your mind is making up is affecting your physiology, but it's not actually happening. Now, as you start waking up further out of these dreams, there's a certain point that many people have experienced where you realize you're dreaming, but you're not really fully aware of the fact that you don't have to dream anymore. So, you're kind of conscious in the dream and you can start to consciously affect the dream. Have any of you had this experience where you're deliberately changing the dreams that you're having now, because you're enjoying it, but you want it to go a different way. [08:42.0]
Then at that point in time, when you finally start to wake up, there's a certain confusion that's there. Meaning the dream ends, you open your eyes and your body has to assess where am I what's going on? How much is in the room? What day is it? All the other stuff. So, there's a certain amount of confusion that happens. Then after that, there's the process of waking up fully. Now people do all kinds of things. They shower, they do exercise, they stretch, they do breathing stuff. They do all kinds of different things in order to wake themselves fully up. And then at that point in time, they're awake and there's clarity. So, six basic steps, unconscious, dreaming, conscious, dreaming, confusion, waking up activities, and then clarity or being awake. In this process, everything that you had as a nightmare, when you wake up, is it a problem anymore? Maybe it was a rough one. Maybe it was a really bad dream. When you wake up as the bad dream, you might have the residual effect of the dream for a second. But is there any part of you that actually believes it's still happening? No, there's not. The entire problem has vanished because you woke up from the illusion that it was real. You woke up from the dream that it was happening, the entire problem vanished. Can you see how fantastic that is? [10:07.9]
So, when in the beginning I'm telling you the number one solution to any problem is to wake up or to stop creating the problem, meaning stop dreaming, all the things that are not making it a problem that are making it a problem. When I say that I'm not blowing smoke and I'm not trying to be flippant, I'm actually pointing to the number one process that will help you cease having problems in your life. Wouldn't that be nice. Cool. So, the same thing happens with waking life. To my kids when they were growing up, they used to have night frights not all of them, but many of them did where they would just have this dream and it was freaking them out. So, on the outside we could see they're freaking out about something that isn't happening. And so, we're going in and we're trying to sooth them and we're trying to help them out, we're talking to them. But the only thing that really clears it up is that they wake up. And as soon as they wake up, then they're oh, okay, that happened, no big deal. [11:06.0]
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. [11:33.7]
The Buddha talked about it this way. He said, he spoke about it as an awakening, but then he spoke about it as like a realization too, which is, he said, just like, when you walk out the front door and you step on a snake, you have a reaction. Well, the minute realize it's a rope instead of a snake, all of the worry and the panic and the fear go away. He said in the same way, when I realized that the person, I was calling myself, wasn't real, or we could say when he woke up from the dream, that what he, what he thought was happening and who he thought he was, was just a dream. Then he said, all of his depression worries, anxieties and all of his sadness just evaporated because he woke up. He didn't have to fix it. He didn't have to go into his past and change who he was. He didn't have to do years of shadow work or trauma work or belief work or any of that stuff. He simply had to wake up from his night fright. [12:35.1]
Now in waking life, the same thing happens some time ago, I was running an actual, a retreat and we were doing a little bit of intense breathing and I actually passed out. And when I came to, I passed out for just a second. And when I came to, I watched my mind put reality back together. It was the most fascinating thing it's happened to me a couple of times. And I just watched it happen because the first thing that happened was there was a mess of chaotic noise and sound and lights and no forms or shapes and no specific sounds that were identifiable. It was just a whole bunch of noise and a whole bunch of light and that's it. And then all of a sudden, all of these forms started to coalesce and I could see specific individual shapes and I could start to hear sounds. And then I started to recognize, oh, I'm just hearing the room breathing. And I remember looking around the room at that point, going, wow, all of these people in one place doing all of this work, just to feel happy, like what's the problem. Life is beautiful. And I felt so clear. It was like waking up on a Saturday morning as a kid, there was nothing there. [13:38.3]
And then what happened was I started feeling my mind going, wait, where am I? What am I supposed to be doing? What day is it? What part of the retreat is it? What's the next process? And then I felt worried show up. And then I, what I saw was that the colors dimmed and the sounds started to become less [inaudible] and less vibrant. And every part of my sensory experience started to vanish into the background a little bit because my thought process had kicked up and I've seen that happen over and over again. Every thought that you and I have literally functions like a screen through which we see life. It is some separation, some barrier between you and a direct experience of life. Every thought you have every emotion, you feel every judgment, you harbor, everything is a barrier between you and fully experiencing the depth and breadth of the joy of life. [14:35.5]
So, when Buddha woke up, he woke up from the thoughts and he was just left with reality. Guess what? All of your problems, where do they come from? If you're just dealing with this moment, all you're dealing with is this moment. Your problems come from, oh, what's going to happen in the next moment, that's you thinking your problems come from? Oh, so-and-so did this 10 minutes ago, you're thinking. All of it's coming from some sense of memory, some sense of not being totally immersed in what's happening here and now. And as a result, you start to experience your body, your brain has to present this to you in some way. So, you have sensory experiences, but then you're having thoughts and your brain is trying to present it to you in living reality. So, it'll dim your perceptions and it'll create emotions in you and other sensations in your body like these Phantom things in your brain are actually happening. Literally tension patterns will show up, you'll breathe different, you'll have chemical changes and all of this stuff because your body is literally, they're presenting to you what is going on. It's showing you what your experience of reality is and on top of that, it's imposing on that all of your extra thoughts, all of your extra feelings, all of your fears, all of your worries, all of your judgments. [15:50.2]
So, when we're talking about waking up, we're talking about waking up from all of that extra mental activity. It is only your psychological process that creates suffering. Pain is in the body. Pain is something that is created by the mind, but it's useful. It's helpful for survival purposes. And if you didn't have pain in certain places, imagine the things that you would be doing to yourself. I mean, already people have implanted all kinds of interesting ornaments into their bones to create different shapes in their head. They've, they've pierced all kinds of things. They've added surgical additions to their like tails and all kinds of other things to their body. And there is pain. Imagine what would happen and what ways we would have contorted our bodies if there wasn't any pain at all. Imagine just how much, what to, what length we would have distorted the human system if there weren't any pain. So, pain is useful. But most of the suffering that we have is I have this pain and that's not good. And I don't like it and I shouldn't be there and all of that other stuff. [16:52.3]
And so, as a result, the suffering that we experience is entirely a psychological process and waking up means transcending the psychological process. The word Buddha literally means one who has gone beyond the intellect. Now think about that for a second. Buddhu, would be one maybe who was below the intellect. Ignorant people are very happy. They haven't developed their mind enough to really think through a lot of things. And they tend to be really happy. Really equanimous really, they have ups and downs for sure, but once you've entered the area of the mind, the Buddhi, the intellect, the intellect is, is a cutting device. It divides things up into concepts and ideas and, and thoughts and plans and nouns and verbs and all kinds of different things so that it can move them around to try and understand. Well, cutting is not a way to really enjoy yourself. If you keep cutting yourself and cutting your life up into bits, you can't enjoy it as a whole. [17:47.3]
We could put you on a surgical, we could cut you to pieces. We could find out all kinds of information about your liver or your large intestine, or what you had for lunch before you died, or the shape of your nose and what genetic structure you had. But would we find anything out about you? Would we really find anything out about the nature of life? I've always thought that the word biology is a hilarious word, because it means the study of life, right? But it's not actually studying life, it's studying things that has life. It's killing them and cutting them down and cutting them apart so that we can look at them and pretend we know something about the life that was in them. We don't know anything about life. All we know, all we've learned are what we've studied from things that have had an experienced life. And while that's beautiful and has led to all kinds of cool discoveries and technologies, we still haven't learned one iota about life. In order to do that, the mind has to be still, the intellect has to stop cutting things up, so you can experience it as a whole. These are aesthetic experiences. An anesthetic is something that dead ends you, that removes life from you and an aesthetic experience meaning often that's something that's driven for an art is something that wakes you up, enlivens you, puts more life into you. [19:04.4]
These types of experiences happen when you're overwhelmed by something. It's something so beautiful that you're just left in awe about it. That is an aesthetic experience and that has to happen, that can only happen when your mind shuts up. If you think about all the times in your life, when you've really just felt truly alive, truly free of all problems. Were you thinking, no. You were living, your mind had calmed down. You had woken up for a moment from your nightmare. See, the cool thing is recognizing this as you've woken up many times in your life, it's not like it's out of your reach. It's not like some distant attainment. But to be able to be awake in all moments of your life, that might take a little bit of work, that might take a little bit of practice. It's something that you'll really have to look into and hone your ability to wake up. Well, how do you wake up? I would submit to you that it's in a very similar fashion, that you would wake up from a normal sleep or a normal dream. [20:02.0]
How does a person wake up from a dream? How does a person wake up? Well, they rubbed their eyes and they do some things to kind of stimulate the body, they put cold water on their hair, on their face or something. They take a shower; they do some exercise. They stretch, you know, they do some breathing or something like that. They get some food in them. These are all things that have been in spiritual traditions all over the place. If you look across the course of human history, you'll see all kinds of spiritual traditions doing dances and breathing and movement, and like stimulating the body in different ways and putting the hands in different areas and moving them around and whether slow or fast or chanting or making noises or any number of other things as a way of waking the system to life. So there are many, many methods to do it. I've hit upon a few that have been exceptionally powerful and we do them at our retreats. And we take people through these processes that are so good. And people end up at the end of them waking up from the sense that there's a problem with them. That there's a problem with their life. That there's something that they have to go overcome and they get a glimpse of what it's like to live without feeling like anything needs to be fixed. [21:12.7]
And what happens. It's not like they go well, all right, well, I guess there's no point in being alive. No, they go back into their life with more joy, more exuberance, more desire to be involved. Waking up, just allows you to set down the burden of the problems that you made up in your mind. And it gives you the opportunity to really go live. If you want help with that, please come to one of our retreats. I've never found anything on the planet like those. They are exceptional. They really build your mind and your body and your emotions in a certain way to finally let you be free if only for a moment, but totally free of all the problems that have been there. And for many people, it's a massive shift that doesn't ever turn back around. Just because we're working with a body in a certain way to help it finally wake up from the problems it created in the first place. So, if you're looking around your life today or this week, and you see problems, I just want you to consider the possibility that what you're seeing is a dream that every negative emotion you have, it just means that you're still dreaming, that you're not seeing reality as it is. [22:27.6]
And that all those emotions are now lights on the dashboard telling you, Hey buddy, you're falling asleep at the wheel. Wake up, wake up. Life is happening. It's so beautiful. Wake up, don't miss it. And you can take all those negative emotions and all those feelings as just a gentle nudge to remind you that you're not getting this life back. It's beautiful. It's there to be had and you might just have fallen asleep for a bit. Once you wake up, that's the end of suffering. To live that way all the time, that is a beautiful life. But even to live that way, once a day will change so many things about the way that you live, about how much stress you have and about whether or not you start having problems at all, because it's intoxicating. And it doesn't make you a God that doesn't make you an emperor, it doesn't make you some kind of divine being it doesn't make you better than anyone else. All it does is this, waking up finally gives you a chance to live life as it's meant to be lived. [23:36.4]
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. [23:55.0]
This is ThePodcastFactory.com
