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, folks, welcome back to the Alive and Free podcast. Today, I wanna start with a question and I wanna explore it and all, I'll explore it in a sort of simple, funny way, and then we'll explore it a little bit deeper, but the question is really how much do you actually know that you think, you know, or have told other people that, you know. The reason I bring this up is that most of us wander around throughout the day, just tossing around things that we say we know, but they actually don't. And often it's our blind spots, the things that we think we know the things that we assume to be true, but we don't actually know to be true that trip us up. They're like stage props, you know, from the outside, they seem like, okay, cool. That's a rock, that's the background, that's the, you know, all that other stuff. And only when you go up and touch it, do you realize, oh, they, it's not actually made of rock, that's just a bit of paper mache over an armature. It's not gonna actually support any weight. You have to test it. You have to look at it. [01:30.8]
Now, I want to bring us back to this idea here of knowledge. What are we talking about knowledge of? And I would say that generally speaking, we're talking about this idea of truth. Why am I bringing this up in the podcast? Because if you want to be free, if you really want to live a, a life all out, totally out full out, really have the, the greatest possible experience as a human being and not being bodage to things that are not helping you, or are downright hurting you or are not real and whatnot, or are blinding you to what's possible in life, well, then it's best that you actually understand what you do and you don't know. Cause a lot of the assumptions that we've made end up being root issues later on. The, the root issues we deal with, with people who are dealing with trauma and depression and anxiety and addiction and all kinds of other stuff, lot of it boils down to things that have felt true for them that aren't actually true. So, we back up to this question asking ourselves, how much do you actually know? [02:35.3]
So, what do I mean by know? I mean that you are in direct perception of you have witnessed it with your own set of senses, that much, you know, anything that you have not witnessed, you don't know, you might believe it's true. It might be true. For instance, I don't know, from my own perception that Saturn has X number of moons. I don't know that. I don't actually know Oh, I have seen Saturn’s rings in a telescope at one point in time, so I have had an experience of seeing that. I don't know what more there is to it. I don't know the constituents of that. I have read information about it, but I don't actually know. So, when I say knowing, it doesn't mean that it's bad to not know. All it means is there's a difference between what you and I have actually witnessed. And it doesn't happen to be concrete. You felt an emotion for instance. Well, nobody saw that, but you felt it, that was a real experience too. So, what you and I have actually experienced versus what we have assumed into that experience that isn't actually there. And this goes as much for a are individual day to day experiences as it does to when we read scriptures or when we're listening and talking to people. And when we're reading the news and when we're making up stories about the future and all that other stuff, when our memories change all, there's a lot of assumptions that go into things. [03:53.7]
And even firsthand witnesses are not super reliable. I think I've mentioned this before, but often when there's a shooting in an area where there's a lot of people, almost invariably the reports come back initially that there were multiple shooters. There was more than one. And almost invariably it turns out that when the investigation is done all the way, it turns out there was only one shooter most of the time. And it was coming from ex place in the, in the vicinity. Why does it feel like there are more shooters? Well, because there's a lot of people in there running around in total chaos. They experienced the sound of a gunshot, when their head was turned, one way. They experienced the sound of a gunshot when their head was turned another way. They're disoriented, they're running for the exits. They're not sure what's happening. There are echoes. There are people screaming. Others think that there are multiple, there's a lot of data that goes into this. And so, people commonly feel like there are more than one shooter when often it's not the case. [04:48.6]
So, we wanna get rid of all the Phantom shooters in our life so that we know exactly what we're dealing with, because that is your ticket to living a life where you are not burdened by all the weight of stuff that's not actually true. Are you down with that? Cool. I mean, I'm assuming you are because you're not talking back to me. You can talk back it's okay. I may not hear you, but at least you'll have a good time doing it. You'll be participating and there are, I'll give you brownie points for participation. okay. So how much do you actually know that you think, you know. I watched a movie a while back called Evan Almighty. Have you seen it? This was, I didn't like Bruce Almighty as much. Evan Almighty, I thought was great. We used to watch it a lot with the family. This is Steve Carrell playing the character of Evan who has a job in the he's some sort of lawmaker, Senate or representative or something like that. And he's out there and he gets Morgan Freeman as God shows up to him, tells him he wants to build an, a, wants to build an a there's all kinds of miraculous stuff going on. [05:52.3]
He's having a hard time with it, yada, yada, yada, the movie goes on. In the beginning, when they're moving to Washington DC, his son is full of factoids. Do you have children like this? Hey dad, did you know, Hey mom, did you know? You have your neighbor tell you, did you know, this is how gossip starts, right? And they say this word, no, as if it is an indicator that they actually know the thing instead of have read about it. Well, in this movie, he's like, Hey, did you know that an Argentine like duck has a penis as long as it's body. Yes, I did just say that on a podcast. nyway, did you know that? And obviously Steve Carell’s like, wow, he must have been very proud. Either way, the idea here is that the son, what I'm pulling out is that the son has read some information in a book somewhere. He doesn't actually know from his own experience what's real. You may think I'm splitting it hairs here, but this is very, very important. If you don't know it's true, then that means you are making stuff up. [06:55.0]
You're you are natural going to be fantasizing about it. You, you can only make sense of other people's words based on your history, based on your experience. This is why babies don't have coherent thoughts, coherent thoughts. They don't have any information. They just sit there when they're first born, they don't, they can't even see straight, their eyes are blurry. And they're just like looking around, just open up information. Only once they have, their nervous system has information to go on. Can they start looking for patterns and start matching things up and finding, figuring out how things work at a deeper and deeper level. Then thoughts can arise, but in the beginning, no thoughts. So, if you don't have any actual direct experience of the, a thing you're talking about, it means that what you've done is taken information from your past and you've used it and reformulated it, taken it apart like Legos and made it into this other thing that you're calling what the other person was talking about. But you don't actually know what they're talking about. You weren't there, you didn't see it. You didn't witness it. You might have seen pictures and read stuff in the book and it may, may be that your fantasy about it, isn't that far off. [08:04.3]
It may be that you're pretty close, but there's always gonna be something that's a little bit off. And then on top of it. Okay, cool. You, you know, it may still be true. We're not saying it's not true. What we're saying is you can only interact with and do things with that at what you know, and the degree to which you are unwilling to admit your ignorance, just like me, the degree to which I'm unwilling to admit my ignorance is the degree to which I run around tripping over stage props that aren't there. We get into arguments about things that aren't actually real things. We get theories running around, fear and emotion runs rampant. Emotion isn't a big thing when, when you're dealing with what's real. emotion only starts showing up when you've got stories in your head that you don't know are true. And so, you're afraid they're true or afraid they're not true. And all that stuff starts to boil up onto the surface. So, it's important to get back to what, you know, even with things as mundane as the size of an Argentine Lake Ducks apparatus, okay. There, I won't say the word twice. Cool. [09:11.9]
Well, so how does this play out in normal life? Well, here's some places where this shows up really well. It's very common when you're wanting some help with something for you to go look for a professional, isn't it? You're looking for someone who has a certification who has been through a lot of schooling or training or something like that. Now, when this comes to coding in the world, a degree in and software engineering and stuff, isn't always, sometimes it is very, very useful, but isn't always the best, the, the thing that companies are looking for. They're looking with, for people who can do the job, because doing is understanding. If you can do it, that's what they want. They don't wanna know if you've read about it. They don't wanna know if you've got the theory behind it. They wanna know if you can do it. So, they're looking for people with wrecked, hands-on experience, but there are other fields that are very, very theoretical for a long period of time. [10:01.5]
As of, for instance, doctors are commonly seen as authorities on a whole host of things. You go to the doctor whenever your health is bad. Doctors, typically don't even today many doctors don't ever take a single course of nutrition or if they do, they take one or two and sometimes it's an elective. And these, this, I have heard from people who have interviewed doctors from other, other doctors that I've listened to talk about this stuff. And so, I haven't, I'm not, I've verified this with every doctor on the planet, but the general trend from what I've heard and from what I've heard from a bunch of different people is that doctors don't study nutrition, not by any stretch of the imagination. Can you imagine taking just one course of nutrition that is rooted in science that came out of the 1860s based on steam engines and how steam engines work. And they're supposed to know everything about nutrition. How many of those doctors are actually the best health? How many of them are in great shape? How many of them treat their body well? Do they actually know what they're talking about with regard to nutrition? They may know with some other things, but when nutrition, they get scanned information, yet we often go to them to ask for nutrition advice, or they might even offer nutritional advice. Wouldn't they, they don't actually know that that's the case. All they know is what they've heard. [11:21.1]
Likewise, they haven't tested out all the drugs that they prescribe on themselves. They might know that in certain cases that they've operated with, but people they've observed that it seems to have helped. They might also have read certain indications from the studies and the cases that are there. So, we're not saying that the information is necessarily not worth looking at. But there is a big difference between someone in a lab coat who has a certificate on the wall coming to you and telling you, they know that this will work and this is how it's gonna play out. Between some random stranger on the street saying the same thing, because they have this fancy certificate, we just assume they know when they don't actually know. Do you know how much your doctor truly understands about things with regard to health? Do you know? They might say, no, this is the only thing we recommend. This is the only thing that's gonna help you. Do they know that that's the only thing that's gonna help you? How many people have been healed in a bunch of alternative ways? [12:18.1]
Western medicine is one approach. It has helped many people, there's no doubts about that. And there are other approaches that have also helped many people for thousands of years longer, even. So, for a Western medical practitioner, doc practitioner, which anyone worked their salt, wouldn't sit here and freak out about stuff like this, but for them to sit there and say, they know, and that the other person is wrong when they've never tried stuff is a little bit too much, don't you think? And it's only because there's this assumption that in that profession, they know things that they don't have actually know. Can you see how that would be problematic for your health? Taking advice from somebody who says, I know this because I've read this, this, that, and the other. How many people online have you heard say that they've researched it? Well, what did they research? What were the studies that they looked up? And this was way back in the episode on science with a grain of salt about this, where like, what studies did they, what studies did they look up? Who was in those studies? What data was thrown out of the studies, because either the people running the experiment couldn't make sense of it, or it was an outlier. And so, they just tossed it away and gave you only the median, the median data, or the mean data and what information did they select for? How did they set up the experiment? What biases were involved in setting up the experiment? Where were, where were possible implications out there? Was there actual causation or was it just correlation which in most scientific studies, that's all that you can point out. [13:51.3]
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. [14:21.5]
So, there's a lot of problems inside of this research, but then someone comes along and they say, I've read this book. And so, I know just today I had somebody a on Facebook, sit there and try to tell me that the number one reason Hitler was able to do what he did was because church goers were busy treating church like a social club, instead of being the kind of people that Jesus demanded that they be. I just responded. And I said, that's, that's a pretty large claim. I don't think anybody is in a position to really tell you the, the number one reason why Hitler was able to do that. Maybe that was a contributing factor, maybe not. I don't know. And that was the end of it. Well, then the man comes back and he says, I have read this book by Bon Hoffer who was involved with Hitler's people and so on, in some way, shape or form, I don't know all the history of Bon Hoffer. I know that there's a documentary out on the fellow and so on and so forth. And he's like, you should read this book, it clearly states it, that this is the reason. And he proves that I'm and there's lots of ministries that did this, that and the other. [15:33.6]
And like, this is one person I simply asked him the question, well, how did Bon Hoffer determine one that these Christians weren't busy trying to live their lives that way. And two, that, that was the number one factor. Did he go in and interview every single church goer and determine by some magical analysis where their heart was and the, the level of sincerity of their practice, how did he get this information? It's impossible for him to make such an assessment. He's just possibly putting forth an idea in that book, which may have merit, no doubt. It may not have merit, I don't know, but the point is we don't know. And so, all I was doing with this fellow was trying to step back and say, look, that's not something we actually know that doesn't negate the things that, the information that is there, but we don't, there's stuff that we don't know. And it extrapolating from, it may be useful from time to time, but it's important to recognize how much we do and don't know. [16:29.8]
Well, all of a sudden, this man got super inflammed and left paragraphs upon paragraphs telling me all the things about myself that are actually opposite of the way that I feel about stuff. Claiming that I'm a guy who's busy running around, giving people prescription drugs, and that I'm like taking 'em away from this spirit and claiming that I'm like super mega pro religion as the one true of things and telling people this, that I'm like a big hypo hypocrite. I'm the reason that the world is so screwed up and all of these different things, all kinds of names, cussing left and right. Calling me McFly until I finally told him look, you don't, it's clear that you don't know anything about me. The person called McFly that you're talking about is the figment of your imagination. Guess what folks, the people that you're off at right now, the people that you're irritated by, you're not actually irritated by them. What you've done is cherry picked information from your limited interactions with them. And you've made a picture in your mind about them. [17:29.2]
And that's that picture is the person you're upset at. And as long as you're substituting the pictures in your mind for the people that are actually in your life, your relationships are gonna suffer in a big way because you're taking first impressions and you're never looking twice. To revere someone, the word revere literally means to look again. It's from a Latin deponent verb, meaning to look [inaudible] and then ‘re’ meaning again or thoroughly. Well, if you've looked once or if you've only looked twice, or if you've looked 10 times and you've made an impression of someone, what about 70 times seven even? And you've made an impression in your mind, well, as long as you're carrying that, then you're not actually talking to the person in front of you. You're talking to a figment in your mind and you're hanging that figment on them. And that's a disservice to everybody. And I have done it all over the place. I can't tell you how many times I've had an idea about my wife. And then later she's done something that didn't match. And I was like, wait a second. You maybe, I don't know this woman at all. [18:30.5]
And boy, what a fun discovery process it’s been to be willing, to be honest about my ignorance. Very, very much so. Now this gets, that leads us into a discussion about religion. And this is not meant to tear our apart religion by any stretch of the imagination, religion that is one way that people have found to find comfort and hope and joy and meaning in life. It is not something that I don't think can be taken away from people. I mean, I don't think that's the, that's a necessary project. I mean, people have really happy lives because of their religion. People have had healing stuff happen because of their faith and their beliefs. And so, this isn't about taking it away. But notice I grew up in an environment where I was trained as a kid to declare that I knew things that I didn't actually know, but that I only believed. No, I didn't see a problem with this as a kid. I didn't see a problem with this when I was a missionary at one point, I didn't see a problem. I would say I know I about things when the reality was, I believed those things. I hadn't witnessed them. I had no direct evidence other than that, when I thought about them, I had really positive feelings or some good experiences. [19:42.6]
And there were some experiences that I did have, and there's no denying of any of that. But all of the extrapolations beyond the experience were of my own making. I didn't actually know those things. Why this became important is because I ran into faith crises precisely because of all of the places where I had claimed to know something that I didn't actually know. And so, then I would slam into a wall because there was something in reality that challenged the thing that I had made up. And I thought it was challenging faith when it was really only challenging my own claim to know something that I didn't actually know. For instance, I have not died, gone to some afterlife and come back to tell the tale. I don't know what happens after death. I don't know whether there is a heaven. I don't know whether there is a hell. I don't know whether there are degrees in heaven or glory in heaven. I don't know if families, if all human relations disintegrate to death, or if they continue on in family structures, that's none of that stuff is stuff I know. [20:47.9]
It's stuff that I have talked about, read about, believed from time to time growing up and all kinds of other stuff, but it's not anything I actually know. Not by any stretch of the imagination. I simply haven't gone there. And I don't know anyone who has, because a near death experience is not the same thing as a death experience. Maybe medically you're dead, but clearly, you're back. So, you didn't die, die, meaning ceased to exist in this mortal plane, the way we talk about it. And so that too is like, okay, cool. So, you had an inner death experience. You saw some lights through these. These are things other people have had similar experiences. I myself have had visions, but I don't pretend that those visions were anything more than the experience that I had and some of them were incredible experiences. And I don't pretend to know more than that I had those experiences. They, they were meaningful for me. They shifted my mind in a few different ways, or they shifted my life in some good directions. And that's that I don't pretend that that means that I'm some sort of favor from God individual or anything of the sort I had those experiences. [21:51.8]
And I don't know what precipitated them all actually. But having learned the things that I've learned by watching how my mind pieces together, vision, how it pieces together, sound, how it pieces together, understanding in very, very minute observation of myself, it has become very, very apparent that the, these things are, and they are necessarily experiences that have come through my body in some way. How do I know that I've been tempted? Well, it's a feeling I have in my body. If I didn't feel tempted, I wouldn't be being tempted. How do I know that I'm excited? Well, that's a feeling in the body too. How do I, these are direct experiences. How do I know that I have a hand? I simply am feeling it. I don't have to deduce I have a hand. The minute my hand goes to sleep, then worry creeps in and I've got problems. So, the point of this is to draw us back to a certain level of honesty about our ignorance. [22:48.4]
The, the field of biology purportedly, the name means the study of life, right? But it, they don't actually study life. They study things that have expressed or been expressions of, or have had life, but the phenomenon of life itself, that which seems to be powering this entire planet, your body, my body, that that is not really being studied in the field of biology. We've got classifications for all the things that life has done, but life itself, we still know scanned information about. Likewise, when we come down to a simple elements like water for, from what I've read from what I've heard and I say this clearly, from what I've read from what I've heard, we still don't understand what water is exactly as a scientific community. There's plenty that we've learned that has been obvious both to you. And to me about what we can do with water in a number of different ways, including heavy water and ionized water and, and drinking water. And then like culinary, like what we do in terms of irrigation, how we flavor water, we're talking rain and cycles of, of the rain, like the irrigation, not the irrigation cycle, but the water cycle and how clouds are seated and all kinds of other, there's all kinds of information we've got around how water behaves, what it does, but still, we don't know what it is. And if we can admit that, guess what you and I get to become like a little child. We get to show up in the world with wonder and curiosity about the things we have assumed we knew. [24:34.0]
One of the most amazing things I did for my relationship with my wife was I decided sometime back and I did this for months on end. Was that every day I was just gonna sit down and stare at my wife. Now she, at first, she was like, what are you doing? Like, I'm just staring at you don't mind me. But I would sit there going, I don't really know who or what you are. I mean, I see skin, I see eyes and hair. And if I look into the eyes, there's a dark area and if I were to go in there, I would be inside of a nerve. And if we were to cut you open, there would be like intestines and fatty tissue and muscles and connective tissue and blood and, but where would you be? Who are you? It's a question to this day that I say, I look at all my kids and look at my wife in just absolute wonder and awe in total mystery. I don't know who or what they are. And it leaves me wrapped and wonder, I don't know the trees and the grass and the sun. I sit there and I look at it. And only in the times when I think that I know that I have this problem, when I say, I know I am telling my eyes, no, I'm telling them to stop looking to stop seeing what's really there. [25:53.1]
And so, I miss the glory of what life really is chasing around all of these extraneous things, looking for happiness, looking for meaning, missing everything. That's right in front of my own eyes, my own ears, my nose, my hands, even my taste. I'm missing all of it because I think that I know. How much in your life are you missing because you're pretending to know, because you're saying things like, no, I got it when you don't got it. There's no it to God. How much in your life and in your relationships are you missing, because you think, you know, the other person. How many mistakes have you made, because you thought you knew and stopped paying attention? Knowledge is the enemy of real knowing information is what comes from “knowledge.” All of this stuff that we gather. And we say, we know, no, you read it somewhere, true knowledge. Do you want to really know what it's like to be alive? Do you want to really know life itself? [27:00.6]
The first step mean you have to admit that you don't actually know because as soon as you see your ignorance, there is the possibility of seeking. As long as you think, you know, you have come to a conclusion and a conclusion is an ending my friend. Do you really want to end your life? Every belief you have, it's just a, it's a conclusion, a decision to hold something is true that you don't know. What if you just admitted, you don't know, and that you believe it's that way, but you just admitted. It might not be, I don't know. And so, I'm willing to seek instead of no, I believe. And so, I've already found it when you haven't yet, you've only believed it. Would you like to know it by firsthand experience that requires seeking only seeking what you find and the truth will set you free of all the pain, all the misery, everything else. Most of the stuff I built, everything that I learned around was this notion that the truth would set you free. [28:03.5]
And that level of percent requires some training for sure, but it will lead you to experiences that will blow your mind will not fit in any of your rational ways of making sense of life, but are so absolutely magnificent that you will wonder how you could have thought you knew all of, of what life was. It's right here in front of you. How much have you filtered out through the lens of your “knowing,” and when will you be willing to give it all away? Be honest about your ignorance, and finally give yourself a chance to know for real. [28:46.4]
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. [29:04.6]
This is ThePodcastFactory.com
