This won’t be another meditation guide. This won’t be me telling you to add more material things to your life. This won’t be a “quick trick or hack.”
This is a series of concepts that you must understand.
This newsletter could have been titled:
“How to be happy.”
“The only thing you need to live a good life.”
“How to live.”
This concept is crucial for navigating the modern world. Take your time as you read through this. Take notes and practice.
This takes time. It took your entire life to be culturally conditioned into an unhappy state. It could take years — or a moment of surrender — to deprogram the negativity that’s been planted in your head.
We will start with a quote from Alan Watts:
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions. By thoughts I mean specifically “chatter in the skull”… perpetual and compulsive repetition of words… of reckoning and calculating.
I’m not saying thinking is bad. Like everything else, it’s useful in moderation. A good servant, but a bad master – and all so-called civilized peoples have increasingly become crazy and self-destructive. Through excessive thinking, they have lost touch with reality.
Most of us would have rather money than tangible wealth… and a great occasion is somehow spoiled for us unless photographed… and to read about it the next day in the newspaper is oddly more fun for us than the original event. This is a disaster.
To get in touch with reality there is an art of meditation… It is the art of temporarily silencing the mind… of stopping the “chatter in the skull”. Of course you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flat iron. Water become cool and clear only when left alone.
Alan Watts
You’ve Been Conditioned Into Mediocrity
What is “conditioning?” Think of the gym. You condition yourself through repetition of a specific exercise. As a result, you build muscle or cardiovascular capacity. If you don’t go to the gym, you are performing repetitive actions that result in the opposite. There is no middle ground. You are either growing or decaying. Small increases in muscle, small increases in fat, small decreases in muscle, small decreases in fat. Repetition often goes unnoticed.
Cultural conditioning of the mind is the enemy here. This is the cause of your excess “chatter in the skull.” The thing that keeps you unhappy. Thoughts, beliefs, biases, reactions, ideologies, political stances, and everything else that blurs your perception. External projections that have been hammered into your head through repetition.
Your perception — for the sake of this email — is your worldview. How you interpret things. Your “lens” that you see things through. Cultural conditioning has “blurred” this “lens.” As a child, you existed in your natural state without this conditioning. You were playful, loving, and curious. As you aged, these traits were suppressed. They were blurred through conditioning. This conditioning prevents you from “seeing” things as they are.
There is perception, based on the lens of the character you are playing. Your personality, beliefs, and biases. And there is reality, based on who you are. Truth. God. Consciousness. What Is. The All. The Universe. Whatever you want to call it. Different belief systems call it different things. These are lenses of perception that some adopt to lead lives that are closer to Truth.
Separating Being From Becoming
Who you think you are is not who you are. Who you are is what you are doing. Not what you have done. Who you are is the being that is moving with life. As you walk down the road you see buildings, trees, streets, and other things that will be there with you even when you are miles away. They aren’t left in the past. They don’t have beliefs and emotions that are temporal. The building will be here in 2 years unless destroyed. You will be here in 2 years unless destroyed. Your thoughts, emotions, and feelings will not be. Negativity cannot exist in reality.
Who you think you are is a character that you are playing. Who you are becoming. A disguise you are putting on to fit in. A fabrication of the mind. The result of rampant — or controlled — thinking. Thoughts, given life through focus. Turned into negative emotions and feelings through perception. Automatic and unconscious reactions to the external stimuli you are exposed to. Accuracy of focus will determine how much you suffer in life.
We all have the desire to transcend the self. To fully serve The All, Universe, God, etc. Before we do this, we must self-actualize. Some may be familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Meaning, before self-transcendence, we must self-actualize. Hit the gym, start a business, gain independence, and nurture our mind. In order to self-actualize, we must play the game of life. In order to play the game of life, we must first create our character. Consciously. Not through cultural conditioning. Through Conscious Conditioning.
Our goal is to become aware of this separation and bridge the gap. The gap between reality and concepts. God and the word “God.” Nature and fabrication. Immaterial and material. Light and dark. Love and hate. Truth and false. Stripping away the perceptions that do not serve you so your actions are intrinsically driven (closer to Truth) — not extrinsically assigned (obstruction of Truth).
Remove the obstruction from your mind and you have wisdom. Remove the obstruction from your heart and you have love.
You must realize that your character (who you are becoming) is there to serve you. That your beliefs are malleable. That your negative thoughts can be turned positive — closer to Truth, at any point in time. We must create the character through repetition of positive thoughts, beliefs, and actions to move us towards positive outcomes in our life.
This will allow you to attract and build the things that result in money, meaning, health, and other things that have been masked by faulty perception. Allowing you to eventually transcend and pass on your lessons (which is the distilled meaning of life per ancient and modern teachers.)
The Conscious Conditioning Process
Through conscious conditioning, you create your own “lens” to view the world from. You perceive things more accurately. You upgrade your mental programming. You can either be culturally conditioned into failure and mediocrity — or you can consciously condition your character into favorable outcomes. Program or be programmed.
Before you go through this process, you may want to read up on The Creation Pyramid and download The Power Planner. This will give you extra guidance and something to refine along the way. Structure is king, but distractions will still come our way. They are impossible to avoid. This process will help you navigate them and transmute negative energy into positive.
You will be conditioning your focus onto something positive so this process becomes habit. It took years for your current thought processes to be solidified. This is a lifelong journey and practice.
This is a 6 step process:
1) Pause
When a thought pops into your head, pause before that thought becomes emotion, belief, trait, or reaction. This takes practice.
If the thought goes rancid immediately, bring your focus to what I call “anchors.” Anchors are places to bring your focus to neutralize and transmute negative feelings and emotions.
The breath is the most readily available to you. Some schedule this via mindfulness meditation. You can bring your focus to your breath at any time.
Other’s include music, nature bathing, physical activity, journaling (as we will discuss), and any other activities that imply potential flow-state or stress regulation.
2) Question
Ask yourself questions that will reveal the thought’s true nature.
“Why am I thinking this?”
“Is this a thought I’ve had before? Where did it lead?”
“Is this rational? Should it be given energy?”
Let questions trigger more questions. This shines awareness and may dissolve potential problems outright.
The next best way of doing this is through CC (conscious conditioning) journaling. Getting your thoughts out on paper. Writing out the questions, and answering them right there. This is a crucial habit to develop. Having your thoughts on paper provides immediate relief. It is an incredible self-awareness practice.
Questioning. Is. Crucial.
This is the most important step. Why? Understanding. This is where you uncover where the root of your faulty perception lies.
Habit formation and other self-help advice is worthless if you are not aware of your attachments and negative aspects of your identity. You must attack the root. Question your thoughts until they strike a chord. Until you feel that negative energy building up. From that energy, you have shined awareness on the issue. Now you can work in the opposite direction.
You cannot understand a potential positive future. You can only understand a negative familiar past. Now you have a point to work away from. Towards the potential positive future.
As an example, “I am lazy” won’t cut it as a place to work away from. What are you attached to that is making you lazy? No productivity advice will help as much as uncovering and understanding this blockage.
3) Objectify
Understand that this thought — or negative reaction that you uncovered — is not a part of you. It is an object. A separate entity. Only given life when given focus. A tool that can be used for the destruction or creation of your character.
Write this down along with your thoughts.
4) Reframe
Now you want to turn the self-destructive negative into a self-creative positive. Implying consciousness. Something that will push you towards an optimal outcome. Your vision, goals, and priorities.
Here are a few reframes:
Guilt to gratitude — Jocko Willink felt guilty for leaving his team while in the military. He had to consciously condition this negative belief into gratitude for being able to go home.
Failure to success — Understanding that one failure is feedback. It is a rung in the ladder of success.
Cope to curiosity — Instead of being closed-minded to an opportunity that presents itself (most online business opportunities, this conscious conditioning process, etc), be open-minded and ask “what would happen if I tried this out?”
If you want to understand this more, study polarity. Fear opposes — and can transmute to — love. Similar to all negatives.
5) Characterize
How can you use this reframe to move you in a positive direction? What actions can you take? Is there anything you can do?
Consult with aspirational archetypes such as Jesus, spiritual teachers, and positive role models that you “vibe” with. What would they do in your situation?
6) Align
Remind yourself of your vision, goals, and priorities per The Creation Hierarchy and how this positive trait can help you move along the path.
Alignment = having your character act in accordance with who you are. Positive, truthful, God-like actions that result in self-actualization (enlightened selfishness), self-transcendence (enlightened selflessness), and heaven on Earth. Advancing the collective human consciousness. Playing your part and spreading the positive message.
This. Takes. Time.
While listening to an Actualized lecture (I listen to philosophy lectures each night to “think big picture” and fall asleep), he mentioned the importance of studying philosophy. We all get wrapped up in the technical details of life when in reality they mean nothing. Technical details solve technical problems. You are not tech. You are consciousness blobbed together that may never be fully understood.
Studying philosophy and spirituality put’s your brain in “big picture thinking” mode. I can’t explain the phenomena, but through studying daily — my days are stress and worry-free. I “care less.” Things just fall into place as I act through my intuition that is not obstructed by technical thought.
It was also mentioned that it took years to start to understand these philosophical concepts — then it hits you all at once. All of this spiritual stuff is hitting me all at once. It makes sense that it doesn’t make sense and the root of all of our problems is trying to make sense.
By not making sense, you be and become in alignment with Truth.
Dan Koe
