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've 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.
(00:36): And I'll write folks today, it's story time. I'm gonna share with you a passage from one of my favorite books and we get to talk about it. This is rare that I do this. Maybe I'll do it more often. Just take a passage and kind of talk about some of the things that are involved or that it brings up. We've done it with some scripture, which were some of my favorite books for a long period of time. And they have, they had some potent passages that radically altered my life. I do think it's important to recognize definitions here. How you define something really defines your relationship with the thing. So if we took scripture and we say we define it as a bunch of inks, ink smears on a page, then you may treat it just as much like toilet paper as you treat it.
(01:18): Like some, anything else. If we say, Oh, this is the word of God and it's something that must be kept pristine and pure and and and whatnot, then you're gonna interact with it in a certain way. You may treat it as reverent, you may treat it as holy and whatnot. You may kind of even get emotional around people that are trying to say things that are different that aren't there. You might memorize it a lot, you might all that stuff. If you then define it as, No, no, this is a guidebook for like, then your interaction with it will be different. If it's just the word of God, that must be kept clean and, and clear and pristine and pure. That's different than saying, Hey, this is a guidebook, cuz then you're gonna search the guidebook for answers to questions. If you think no, no, scripture is, is nothing more than words by maybe inspired people.
(02:03): But the whole point of those words is to get me in my own experience, to be in touch with whatever the divine is for you. Then your engagement with it will be different instead of memorizing the words necessarily or which may happen. But instead of that approach or even seeking in those words for answers, you will engage with those words in a way that it gets you into a state of communion with the divine. And then you don't need the words anymore cuz they've done their job. If you think of scripture as utterly worthless entirely, then you may treat it the same as any piece of page. Or you may burn it because like the Germans did and like others have done because you think it's evil and devilish and all this other stuff. So your definition of a thing creates your thoughts and your feelings and your behaviors all around it.
(02:47): And so when you look at books, if you think one book is more important than another or something is more spiritual than another, then your judgment process comes in. It's gonna be very hard to obey whatever commandment to judge, not less you be just that you be not judged, right? It's gonna be very hard to do that because you are very descriptions of things or categorizing of things is a judgment. And that judgment creates in you automatically without your say so, without your ability to choose it. That categorization automatically creates an aversion or a like or a dislike to something and those likes and dislikes, well if you have likes and dislikes for life, it's really hard to be one with all of life cuz at least part of it you don't wanna be one with. And that all comes with categorizations and the way we look at things.
(03:33): And what I found was that many times there were extremely profound, um, experiences that I could have with literature that wasn't, that sometimes wasn't even literature, you know, it was just like a one off, uh, statement. Somebody said, or it was a quote here or didn't have anything to do with scriptural traditions or anything like that. There's a client I had a while back, she is absolutely brilliant when it comes to looking at movies, analyzing them, whatnot. She's really into the entertainment industry. I think she has her own podcast on doing movie reviews and, and major themes and, you know, pitfalls and plot holes and, and all these other things. I mean, she's really in there and she's had some profoundly what she would call very spiritual experiences in movies that were more potent to her than anything that she had got inside of a church building.
(04:18): And that's just because her definition of what's there allows for that possibility. If you think about it, how many people in history actually had or could read scripture? Very, very few literacy rates. And ancient Israel at the time Jesus was around was basically around 1% or less of the population. They didn't go and learn to, if they did, it would be like they would learn to read the tour, but there wasn't, they weren't sending populations of people to all these schools to learn to read and write and all this other stuff. A synagogue could be in a town as long as there was one person that could read the tour scroll doesn't mean these people didn't know language or couldn't talk, but in terms of reading or writing, wow, literacy was not there. And on top of that, the way reading was not like a read in your head and interpret stuff.
(05:03): The word in Hebrew for read means to call out loud, right? They say the same thing like when they say, what's your name? People read me as or call me this. And so you call out the stuff, you don't read the stuff, it's the same thing. And so, in that time, reading was an out loud activity and the meaning of scripture was something that happened kind of on the spot as things were happening. Some, some kind of combination of what was being read plus the, the way in which it was read plus the what you brought to it and that the meaning was some personal kind of experience. And if there was a, you know, some preaching on the topic or some talking on the topic, each synagogue, it wasn't like there was some regimented, every synagogue taught the same thing for a long time.
(05:47): No, the marets, even the pronunciation of the Torah scroll was something they weren't around until like 1000 ad or something like that. Uh, like the, they were, that's they're the ones that put all the little vowel pointings on the Hebrew text to try and regularize and regiment exactly how everything was meant to be read. They put in little marks to talk about cancellation marks. So how you could sing this thing out loud and it was meant to be heard in a sort of sing songy way. People at their bar mitzvahs are meant to read, like they spend a good while training themselves in and memorizing a very particular passage of scripture to know all the correct pronunciations and canal marks and all that other stuff cuz they have to get up and perform that as part of their bar mitzvah, at least in some congregation.
(06:31): So there's a lot there in terms of reading. And all of the interpretation of this could have been different from one synagogue to the next synagogue because there wasn't some, you know, tradition of, oh, we all have to read this and it has to mean the same thing. Rabbis argued about the meaning of scripture from time all over the place from time and memorial. You know, come let us reason together. That's in Isaiah. You know, like that's the Jewish tradition is really anal tradition. One of like taking a book and pulling it apart and looking at it. And boy, you guys didn't expect this when I told you it was story time. Did you I promise to read you a little bit of this story. The point is this, the happiness, the joy, the freedom that you're looking for, the life that you're, you are experiencing.
(07:10): Have you considered the possibility that it's everywhere? And that the reasons you don't find it in many places is because you have a limitation on where you can find it. You can find divine inspiration in so many different places. Um, you can find some sort of contact with life with the deep core of life everywhere in everything. It's a little bit like Mr. Miyagi and karate, Karate kid, right? You know, pick up the jacket, put it, that's the new Karate kid, you know, wax the floor, paint the house, you paint the fence, you know, all of the wax, the floor, sand the floor, wax the car, right? All of these different things were like mundane stuff. And he found karate inside the mundane once it was shown to him what he was doing. You can find life in all kinds of places and your definitions, the limitations that you have simply assumed into place.
(08:02): This has been a theme for a while, right? Question them because as the writer, it was, I don't know how long ago it was, but he was a, he was a, a Buddhist writer and a sage, a long time young ch I think fourth century. Uh, and he said, we, too often, we live life in like this deep rut and we end up passing by the joys of life without knowing what we've missed. We live with blinders on and there's so much happening that is absolutely extraordinary. And I mean, extraordinary in the sense of amazing and in the sense that it's not just ordinary, it's extra ordinary. It's so there in front of you that you miss it. But it's, it's absolutely fantastic. All right, so we're gonna look at the book Illusions Now this is written by Richard Bach, the guy who wrote Jonathan Livingston Siegel, which book I didn't like when I was in ninth grade and I later came back to absolutely love.
(08:53): It's another one of my favorites at the time being and illusions is the Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, Some guy, um, who became a kind of messiah and then quit because he didn't like the job out in Indiana. And so he's teaching Richard, the protagonist of the book, How to Become a Messiah and their Messiah. And they're like flying their by planes and giving by plane rides all over the place. And they're talking back and forth here. They, in this particular passage, they're coming back and you know, he's been shown some amazing crazy, amazing things by going on. And, uh, the Messiah character just walked through a wall and, uh, Richard had to go the long way back to the airplane. And so then he's coming back to the airplane at this point in time. And right here, what he says is, Donald, I said, Donald, I said, when I got to the field, I have come to the conclusion that you just don't live in this world.
(09:47): He looked at me startled from the top of his wing where he was learning to pour gas in the tank. Of course not. Can you tell me one person who does? Oh, what do you mean? Can I tell you one person who does me? I live in this world. Excellent. He said, as though through independent study I had uncovered a hidden mystery. Remind me to buy you lunch today. I marvel at the way you never stopped learning. I puzzled over that. He wasn't being sarcastic or ironic. He had meant just what he said. What do you mean? Of course I live in this world, me and about 4 billion other people. It's you who, oh God, Richard, you're serious. Cancel the lunch. No hamburger, no malt, no nothing at all. Here I had thought you had reached this major knowing he broke off and looked down on me in angry pity.
(10:36): You're sure of that You live in the same world. Do you as uh, a stock broker, shall we say, your life has just been tumbled and changed, I presume by the new SEC policy, mandatory review of portfolios with shareholder investment loss more than 50%. You live in the same world as a tournament chess player. Do you with a New York open going on this week, Petrossian and Fisher and Brown and Manhattan for a half million dollar purse. What are you doing in a hayfield in Maitland, Ohio? You, with your 1929 fleet by plane landed on a farm field with your major life priorities, farmers permission, people who want 10 minute airplane rides, Kenner aircraft engine maintenance and mortal fear of hail storms. How many people do you think live in your world? You say 4 billion people live in your world. Are you standing way down there on the ground telling me that 4 billion people do not live in 4 billion separate worlds?
(11:28): Are you gonna put that across on me? He panted from his fast talking, I could almost taste that hamburger with the cheese melting. I said, I'm sorry, I would've been so happy to buy. But ah, that's over and done. Now, best forgotten here. He's bringing up a point guys, and I hope you enjoyed that here he's bringing up a point. And the whole point is that we tend to think that there is some reality that everybody agrees on is the case. If I were to take it in the religion, I grew up in the Mormon faith, you know, the thought was we all believe the same thing. We all go to the same church, we all, and so we talk about it as the church, but if you were to independently interview all the millions of members of that church, you would find variations in their own theology.
(12:13): They don't all believe the same thing. They read the same text, but they don't read it the same way. They don't understand it the same way. They don't engage with it the same way. They don't believe some of the things are as important as other things, just like every other religion on the planet. And so what you end up with is, you know, millions of different religions all claiming to be the same religion. Now that happens inside of politics, everybody thinking they have the same political leanings. Everybody thinking they have the same economic interests, everybody thinking they have the same, even, even just borders. I'm American. You are American. I mean, if you think about American history, for instance, we claim the story of our history as if it's something that is ours, but my family history doesn't have anything to do with the founding of the United States.
(12:55): There may be some tendril of a line somewhere along the way, but the garden, the Gordon clan that became the gardeners that clan Gordon was up in Scotland, which I do happen to own some land there. So technically you can call me Lord Bob , uh, I'm just saying not Lord Vader, Lord Bob. Anyway, so they own land there up near Huntley ca castle, I think in Aberdeenshire. And they came over to Canada in the 18 hundreds, early 18 hundreds, I think 1805. And it was there that they met some missionaries from the Mormon faith and then they converted and they went down to nav and then they became a part of the whole Mormon leaving the United States and then settling in Utah and then eventually becoming part of the United States again, again, once that became a thing. And so Mormon pioneer heritage and all that other stuff.
(13:40): And when it comes to like, we are Americans and we fought in the Revolutionary War, what am I talking about? I'm talking about some inherited sense of things that doesn't really have anything to do with my way of looking at life or anything else like that. So we tend to have all these stories about who we are, what we believe in, what everybody else thinks, and we think that there's some agreed upon reality. But if you have any conversation with anybody, like how much agreement is there, how hard is it to have a conversation with your spouse who has lived with you for that long or your family and they still don't understand what it is that you're trying to say? So imagine somehow we are living, we still believe that we're living the same reality when we're not. Because your reality is a construction of your brain.
(14:22): Basically how it works is this, right? Imagine a rock, good job, way to go . You get brownie points for that. Okay? So you've imagined a rock that's basically raw materials, right? It is minerals of certain sorts all sticking together and your body is the same. It's a different sort of accumulation of minerals, but it's minerals, a tree no different. But then there's a nervous system and, and trees don't have a nervous system, but you know, every cell in the body, every cell can learn. There's a tremendous in inte intelligence with each cell. So learning happens in more ways than just with the nervous system, but with the human system basically there's a bunch of minerals, a bunch of molecules of things hanging out and without the nervous system to kind of power it, there's nothing that is doing right, It's not having any experiences at all.
(15:09): It does, it's not having a reality, it's just a corpse, right? Once a person dies, there's still life there happening, but there's no experience of that person. It simply vanishes their reality. Van vanishes all that. They were vanishes, evaporates. And life continues on in a different form. So when you consider that, and then you consider, okay, cool, so what is the difference between a corpse and me? And the difference is that there is some power. I mean, many, many traditions equate it with the breath, but others equate it with chi or para or some kind of energy. But there's some something we can say. There's something that is powering this whole affair. And if you sever the nerves, then that seems to cut the power in some way, shape or form. But also if you cut off the breath, that kind of cuts the power. But the breath is also powered by the nerves. The phrenic nerves interate the diaphragm and they get the diaphragm to move. They, there's other nerves that move the intercostal muscles and the scaling muscles so that they're sucking in oxygen that way. And so there is some nervous system power.
(16:13): If you or someone you know is looking to drop the fbo 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 want some help doing it, head on over to the freedom specialist.com/feel better now 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.
(16:44): So your nervous system is taking information, and I mentioned this a few weeks ago, it's taking in information and the information that it sends to the brain is just in bits and pieces. It's firing at a certain amount, a certain intensity and a certain frequency, you know, because there's a buildup of electricity in it and then it releases and a buildup and it releases. So how intense that is or how frequently that goes. And then the location of it, the particular intersection of nerve fibers and stuff that it's coming from, those are the two bits of information that somehow get passed along in some amazing way all the way up to the brain. And then the brain is getting that from all the different corners of the body. I mean, if you think just 11 million bits per second from the eyeballs, imagine how many billions of bits of information are coming from every corner of the body, every second of that.
(17:31): Some say around 2000 bits are made conscious and they've said, suggested around 4 billion bits. I'm sure that the number is different or has changed over time or been adapted, but that's like less than a half of a millionth of a percent that you are even remotely conscious of. So there's a lot of information that's going on. And out of that information, your brain is building a three dimensional reality. So space and spatial orientation is created because both eyes are picking up stuff and then the brain puts those together, those two eyes together to create some sense of depth of field. Um, if you only had one eye, you wouldn't have the same level of perception. That doesn't mean that you are right and the dog is wrong or the the cyclops is wrong. Uh, what if you have like eyes, like a flies, all that information is coming into its nervous system and then it's presenting a reality to the fly.
(18:24): Who's to say that our reality or the way we perceive it is more accurate than that of a fly? We all we know is the way we perceive it. So we have this information coming up and it's being built, the space, the amount of time and the sense of time things take, which which you know, shortens depending on how fun, how much fun you're having. And, and it grows really, really long if you're on the wrong side of the bathroom door and you need to get in . So, so there's a sense of time, there's a sense of self that is created, a sense of identity that's based in memory. There's a sense of the boundary of your body that it's created based on, uh, information from the sense of touch and into reception and stuff. There's all kinds of stuff that's all built together into what it seems like is one seamless experience.
(19:09): Now, how did your brain learn to do that from the time you were a baby? Uh, a fetus inside of your mama's womb, Your nerves and your cells have been interacting with their environment. So at first, for the first number of years of life, but especially in the womb, it's just involuntary. There's no volition involved, there's no self involved. You haven't learned to build or create a sense of self yet. So the baby's experience of reality is not like as a person, it's just a bunch of neurons firing. There is life there, but their neurons, they're firing in response to other neurons firing and to amniotic fluid and to stuff happening. And the legs are moving and all that stuff is involuntary. So why babies scratch their faces, it's not just that they lack coordination, it's a completely involuntary movement. And in some cases they might not even be able to feel that they're, that there's some part of them that is scratched, you know, just an experience that happened, uh, uh, a certain kind of neurological activity that they haven't been able to make sense of yet.
(20:08): And so as that's happening, think about all of the neurological patterns that your mama has. So all of the stuff she's learned, all the cultural conditioning that's happened, all the stuff she learned from the time she was a kid, some people talk about how we're dealing with millions and millions of years of human time that we're having to overcome all this conditioning. And that's, that's b kiss. There's nothing, there's no evidence to support that. That is a theory. You're not dealing with me. Millions of human years of, of cultural conditioning. You're dealing with the cultural conditioning of your parents, you're dealing with, that was the environment that your nerves first interacted with. And yes, the ideas that are there came over eons of human existence. Sure, but in general, all you've done is gone through an evolutionary process. Process where you started as basically a single sale organism and became a human, uh, baby in nine months.
(20:59): Good job. You went through evolution very quickly, , and you even had gill at one point way to go, and a tale. And, um, and so then you went through that and your nerves went through a process of interacting with all the other nerves. Now they didn't interact with information per se. They interacted with a particular pattern that those nerves had and chemical stuff that got, uh, moved in with based on the emotions of your mom and, uh, thought processes and sounds and tones of voice and all that other stuff. So initial training of the nervous system began there just training your nervous system how to fire. And then you grew up in an environment with certain economic status and the way your parents talked and the religion that you were in and the way your friends talked and the way that the way the gender that you were and the, the education that you had and all those things played a role until your brain learned to take little bits of, hey, nerve fired here, uh, at this frequency and turn them into that is a cabinet over there.
(22:03): And that's a tree. I mean vision I told you took about a year, but all the concepts you have envisioned took a lot longer. So over the period of time, your nervous system in response to the unique environment that you grew up in learned whether it responded in a positive way or a negative way to whatever was going on. But it learned to create a view of itself and the world. That's the stuff that we're dealing with, with core issues of people and their limiting beliefs of self. It's not a limiting belief, it is literally just a habit of neurological firing. And it's been reinforced over time because nobody thought to go back in and double check it and question it, especially cuz you know, your parents really want you to believe and think the way that they think and do the things they want you to do and clean up your room at the right time, and all of those things.
(22:53): And so as a result, these patterns don't get challenged, which means there's a limitation of all the possible ways that human nerves could fire. They've grown into a series of patterns that are more and more limited as time goes on. As we talked about creativity a few weeks ago and, and how in the beginning nature gives us tremendous possibility and nurture is what takes it out of us. This is the conditioning kind of that we are dealing with as we go through it. Well this is what creates our other world. So somewhere along the way, and I think it's fairly young, I think I remember it being two or three years old, there's this theory of other minds basically that kids realize, you know what, there's more going on behind the face of that person than meets the eye. And so they start doing things, not like they start knocking over the same thing and we think, oh, they're having a good time with it and we're getting frustrated, but they're actually not doing it anymore because they're really interested in the sound of the thing falling or, or your initial reaction.
(23:48): They're actually kind of doing it to mess with you so they can figure out what you might be thinking so that they can develop a worldview that allows them to predict better. Because these nerve connections are reinforced by this sort of cinnamon sprinkling of dopamine that happens when you predict something about the world. The nerves seem to fire in advance. And when they, when what happens on the outside matches that in some way, then that becomes, there's a reward that happens and then those nerve nerve processes fire even stronger together because that would be a survival thing. You know, being able to identify patterns and stuff would enable you to survive. So somehow the biology strengthens our ability to make predictions and predictions come from the way that we have modeled the world and explained it in our head. So when something doesn't make sense to you, it's not because it doesn't make sense in reality it doesn't, not because it doesn't fit, it's because your world model can't contain it and it starts to break your brain and it feels very, it feels like it hurts almost.
(24:44): And so the process of being free from this stuff is a process of really being able to get down to the perception and challenge some of these things, not just mentally but biologically, physically, you know, in breath and movement and all of these different things starting to break up habitual patterns of nerve firings so that they become open to other possibilities. So what we end up with though you and I, is this idea that we've built to the world that is accurate. And then we think everybody sees the world the same way, but it is possible that there could be a million different ways to describe reality. And all of them could be equally, equally viable at predicting what's going on. And all of them could be equally wrong because we're only picking up a small tiny fragment of what's really happening out there. We're only conscious of a tiny bit.
(25:29): So how is it that your brain knows which bits of, of all this data to focus on that came from your environment, your conditioning? So you were given a series of options by your parents. You didn't even know your nerves, didn't know that there was another way to fire because they weren't given that chance. When they are given that chance, it can feel like, Oh my gosh, I I, you know, I got gypped or no, but you did the best you could with the options that were in front of you. Everybody does. It's beautiful. So we wanna give you more options. So this notion that everybody sees reality, the same that Richard and Donald are talking about is by its very nature one of the problems of relationship and communication. Uh, we assume that there is a right way. We assume that I'm right and you are wrong or you are right and I'm wrong.
(26:17): But there is only one right way to look at things. Only one right way to look at the world. Only one right way to think, right way to feel, right way to be. We've created the myth of a perfect man or a perfect woman. We've created the myth of a perfect reality. But there isn't such a thing when you consider that every species of animal on the planet experiences this very same reality in a very different way. What evidence do we have that humans are seeing it correctly at all or accurately or more or better than anybody else? There are animals that smell better than we do. They have far more neurons in their olfactory bulb than we do. Are we saying that our representation of reality is correct? There are an like dogs, have we talked about dog vision in one episode? You know, they have blue and yellow, um, rods or cones in their eyes and we have like red, green and blue.
(27:08): That's gonna change how the spectrum of what things happen and change what you can and cannot see All of these things a bat. You know, they're hearing things in a very different way. Is their way of seeing reality accurate or more than us? You know, some animals guide themselves by electromagnetic fields, humans can do this, you know, but you know, it's, it's a dormant ability. But all of this stuff is there. So who's to say that my representation of reality is accurate? One, accurate to some the ultimate reality. There's, we will never have any evidence that that's the case. Even the machines we build are machines we build out of the biases we have about the reality we're trying to measure. We do our best to try and eliminate that, but we're humans making machines. We're not dogs making machines. So there's no evidence that we have that we are seeing anything correctly at all.
(27:59): And yet we tend to walk around cock shore of that being the fact. And that's the very thing that gets in the way. We tend to judge people, we tell them that they're wrong, we tell them, Did you know this when you, you don't actually, you read that somewhere but you don't actually know it. So I bring this up here because there is tremendous freedom in being willing to admit that. One, you don't actually know that reality is the way that you think it is. You just believe that. And two, that you don't actually know what the other person is thinking. Cuz then that gives you the freedom to ask questions instead of trying to argue about who's right. And that has saved so many marriages and my own in particular where, you know, Jasmine rolls her eyes. I assume, oh, that means that she's like ticked off at me.
(28:40): And then I've later found out, no, she was agreeing with me about the noise that the kids were making. I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't asked about the reality that she'd constructed in her head. There is no one in your life that lives in the same world that you live, that believes in the same wo in the same way that you believe. And for all of your attempts to find common ground, what you're missing is the beautiful diversity of life. And when I realized that and I stopped trying to be on the same page with my wife and I just started witnessing with front row tickets and popcorn in a hand, oh my gosh, here is another being that is unfathomable in many ways. I'll never know all that they are, but I get to watch them engage with life, watch them make stories out of what's happening.
(29:20): Watch them have emotional experiences and be there. And if they want some support from me, great. And if not, there's, it doesn't mean anything about me because everything that a person says is only a reflection of the reality that they've built. Let me say that again. Everything a person says is only a reflection of the reality they have built. It's not the reality you've built. So it doesn't mean anything about you, it just means something about them. And when you start seeing that, you get to start to see the things people are holding the kinds of things that are holding them back. And it's not your job to fix them cuz how do you know that you're accurate, but you get to experience people at a deeper level without it having to mean something about you being wrong or you being a, a failure or a success or anything else like that.
(30:03): So go this week and as you're watching and listening to people and you're noticing their interactions, get curious. Look at this. There's billions of people on the planets all experiencing this planet in ways that you cannot even imagine. It is that profound and their experience completely negates all of yours because both of them are equally valid and that beautiful. You both get to have whatever experience you wanna make out of life. And then if you want tools to learn how to use your biology to enhance the energy that you have or to get rid of negative experiences and stuff, obviously we, I have retreats and programs and all that other stuff. Do you want tools to help you have more like control over how that experience goes? I'm happy to share it with you, but it's gotta start from recognizing that the very reality you've built is just the reality you've built. It isn't like anyone else's and it isn't right either. It's neither wrong nor right. It's simply the experience you're having.
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