Category: Conscious Experience Described

This version for living in the present comes out of my weekend at the LandMark Forum in Toronto.

It comes down to accepting that we are the designer, creator and actor in a play that is our life – we influence almost everything in it and are responsible for almost everything that happens to us and EVERYTHING we perceive.

Once we accept the truth of the above statement, we uncover our strong traits, our trump card, work on a list of possible things that we don’t know we don’t know, our list of rackets and then spend time talking to people who will tell us the truth and not what they think we want to here.

It’s easy and just requires hard work. There’s no paradox there, it’s just mindless effort once we have the instructions.

Imagine if you were able to see yourself from the outside, see your actions in an unemotional way that doesn’t impact you. This view would help you make strategic or tactical decisions that move you closer to what you consciously want. That is what this process will do for you.

If you disassociate from your body / life and realize that the mental processes are just programs running, you gain the ability to see the input and output without judgment / bias and this opens up the present moment into something that is as long as you want it to be. It’s a skill, you need to develop the muscle, but each of us have this ability within them. It’s the willingness to put in the work that may be in short supply.

I make something to eat and get a few fragments of sleep. My dreams are in overdrive yet am not more than just about asleep.

I wake-up laughing and can’t stop. Life is a big joke. Everything is a big joke. We’re $7 worth of carbon, big meats sacks blobbing our way around the earth as it spins around the sun, one of billions of stars in an enormous universe. Each of us is utterly worthless, existing only because we were born and life has a strong need to continue. I, like the walking dead guy, have manufactured the existence that I have been conditioned and then choose to believe I deserve. I can be anything and given my ability to manipulate I have been doing the jobs, participating the relationships and living the life that I am best suited for. Knowing that I created all of this closed the door on the past and opened the door to the possibilities of almost anything.

I’m 39 years old, unmarried, no children, limited dept, limited obligations, I ache when I am inauthentic, cruel or mean, I can read minds, strip people naked and control them, I am the most powerful person in the universe, one of a small group that float through time and space being of service to others while fearlessly acquiring little. I will die friendless and alone, and when I do, I will return to the earth to be broken down and reconstituted into something else. I am a general in the battle for human potential and I no longer ache when others do not achieve the freedom that is their possibility. I no longer seek to make people feel better and accept that in my wake will either be enlightened progressives or those highly committed to remaining stuck as they are blaming me instead of taking responsibility and walking through the door to a different future.

I float into Toronto, the weather is perfect, the roads are perfect, this is the first day of my life and I am younger than I have ever been, older than I ever thought possible and the same person as many of the people I have admired, read about and fantasized about being. There is nothing going through my mind but a feeling of contentment, satisfaction and safety. Everything that I have thought about the world is true, and false. It is as meaningful and meaningless as I want to make it. My memories can be fun, joyful reflective things or they can be oppressive punishing stories that milk the joy from my very being. I select the life I want to live, starting last night when Des laughed and I realized that I wasn’t going to die from the knowledge I got that I am a compassionate, manipulative, analyzer. The wisdom is out there, the choice has been made and my possibilities are endless because it’s all meaningless anyway. My body is made-up of the same particles that have existed since the beginning of time, in this form they exist for an instant. It doesn’t matter at all. I can make whatever purpose I like and have been doing this all of my life.

The room is filled with the same people, a few are different, a few are broken very badly, I can see their past, some have been raped, others molested, beaten, abandoned, rejected, taught negative love, or are simply young and insecure. All of them are beautiful and I love each of them. I approach and smile at a few, they smile back, taking something from the softness and twinkle in my eyes, almost basking in the safety of my energy. Touching their arms as we speak, I’m trying to given them some of what I’ve tapped into – the energy of the universe that flows freely when the AAT and rackets disappear. Some receive the gift, others seem taken back, I glide to a seat and the session begins.

There is value at this point, but less and less for me and more for the other people. I am present, alive, vibrant and of service to everyone and anyone. There are move conversations about language, stories we tell and chatter about what is coming-up before dinner this evening. I know it doesn’t matter, my transformation has begun, and it actually began when my mom asked me to not change anything until after my dad died and I didn’t change anything. I realized that because of who I am and what my strong traits are, I COULDN’T change anything until after he was gone. It simply would have been selfish and unfair to the entire family and that is not how I operate.

As we break for lunch I notice someone new. Standing there, tall, alive, clean shaven, hat-less and wearing really nice clothes is the greatest person I have ever met. The walking dead guy has clearly started act two.

“Wow, you look amazing, you look alive.”

There’s a huge smile on his face as he says “I feel amazing, I am alive!” We hug and he tells me the following:

“I went home and told my wife that I loved her for the first time ever. She asked me what it meant and I told her that it didn’t matter, all that was important was that I did and that I finally realize it. We chatted, we had breakfast, we were a family for a few short moments before I had to come here.”

I can leave now, I’m certain that my Landmark Forum weekend has begun and will never end until I return to the earth. But I’m going to stay. I’m having a fun like I used to when I was training clients and completely focused on them, like when I was working on a project with Ranger with a clear mind, like I was playing the last spring in Ireland before we moved to Canada, like I was talking with Rachel or Leigh or my family or one of my mentor friends. The present moment is a peaceful place to be, free of depression about the past, free from anxiety for the future and filled with energy like I’m in love and on fire!

Right before dinner, the big reveal and I’m laughing because it is obvious that the entire weekend has been building towards it. Des and I have been talking about it for years, I have always tried to get my clients, friends, romantic partners, any and everyone to see and accept it. Some accept it easily, others fight back trying to convince me of how wrong it is. But the science is solid and there is no refuting it. So I laugh, and laugh and laugh, and my laughing is starting to get to people. Much like my happiness, smiling and compassion towards people, my being makes some other people feel insecure, scared or fearful. I get up and walk to the back of the room, laughing. I catch eyes with someone else who feels the humor, he too is at the back of the room. We share a moment, it doesn’t matter, we’re the same person for that second in time, we ARE the moment.

The arguing beings and I’m captivated by watching human beings acting like human beings. The leader owns each and every people who tries to convince the group that the reveal is not accurate. I keep laughing. It’s like wack a mole watching peoples body language change as the reveal opens them up to the possibilities. They get taller, brighter and start smiling and laughing. I laugh, we leave for dinner, return, and I head home early. The graduation isn’t for me. I will never graduate. I am not the same as most people. My purpose in life is service to the universe, so service to myself. This was the start of my life, not just a weekend course.

As the session begins, we’re asked to consider what we are thinking about, how we feel and what our impressions are of the first few hours. I’m feeling very impressed with the day so far. I’m well fed, have drank a few coffees and I’m feeling good about the exchange at lunch. People give different answers, most are what you would expect – running from satisfaction to confusion. The member of the walking dead in front of me raises his hand and when call upon says that he’s “not getting it.” “That doesn’t surprise me” is my thought and the leaders comment is “good, keep trying it on.”

It doesn’t surprise me because the walking dead doesn’t look like anyone I’ve ever seen before other than one of those fellows from the Thriller video. His frustrated response is silent body language that screams WTF?!?!?!?

The next session covers something called Rackets which are persistent complaints or fixed ways of being, the notion of “already always listening” (AAL) which is the internal self talk that seems to narrate everything and the notion that human beings existence is in language. These are lumped together because they are the foundation for reflective human experience.

I consider the scripts that we run to be the same sort of thing as AAL in that we enter into every interaction with a lot of knowledge about the world and a strong desire to predict / win every interaction. Given that we have notions in our heads already, we perceive everything from the stand point of what we know. When all you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail covers this. The rackets are related in that they are the outcome of the AAL. For example, every relationship I have had ends and it is usually the girl who ends them so my AAL would tend to direct me to perceive anything that isn’t positive about an interaction with a GF to mean it is about to fall apart. The racket is that I’m unlovable, not worthy of the love of a female, etc…. It’s some BS I’ve made-up based on my small sample size of maybe 15-25 relationships.

These rackets are noisy in our heads and they taint the perception of anything we believe is related to what what we’re presently experiencing. The language component is critical because without language we don’t really have a way to keep things going – experiences become memories which we can recall but tend to engage linguistically to created useful / accessible lessons.

It was pretty heavy, but my psychology degree, conversations with Des, experience with therapists / life coaches and independent learning had created most of the understanding I needed to accept the lessons quickly.

There was some sharing with the people beside us, I asked a bunch of questions to my partner and kept them talking because it was both interesting and what I like doing. It was fun to push the rackets back onto my partner as my observation of what they had told me. Their awareness of themselves was improved and it was good practice for the performance coaching I planned on doing.

My mind got completely blown again about 45 minutes before dinner when we covered actual impact of and cause of rackets; the stories we tell ourselves about what happened. For a while I had been holding considerable anger towards one of my best friends for something that she did. What happened was she made the decision to spend more time with her children and less time with me. The meaning I applied to it was that she had abandoned me. It’s silly to look at now because I really respect her decision to focus on her children but since our experiences linger on in language (the stories we tell) I had scripted a meaning that was great at maintaining the racket.

It was at this point that a lot of my past just disappeared. First off, I stopped feeling really crappy about my dad dying. My dad got cancer, he died, I was sad and grieved. That is what happened. The story I was telling myself that I had lost the 33% of my support structure, my primary male roll model etc… just ended. It’s fine to be sad, but he was content with his life and our family had lived our hearts out for the time between his diagnosis and death. It was actually the best 6 weeks of my life to date; or at least 6 of the best weeks spent living. The same applied to my friend. I loved her, she couldn’t continue the intensity of our connection, I was sad. I still love her, I always will, not because of anything to do with her, but because of how I feel. It’s fine and actually only appropriate for my love to be unconditional.

Dinner break.

The final thing we covered was context, and it seemed to be the icing on the cake made of icing about language. Change the context, change the meaning. This went hand in hand with the Cognitive behavioral therapy that I have been doing – change the thought, change the feeling, change the action. My friend is building adults with her children, not taking time away from me. My father returned to the earth, the very earth he had been eating for his entire life. The same earth we are all a part of, have all been eating and will all eventually return to. I was floating in a strange sense of contentment. No, I was drowning in the bliss of freedom.

The leader gave us our homework and sent us on our way. As I flowed down the stairs, across the road to my car something the leader said before dinner was thumping almost orgasmically in my awareness in a way that committed me to the possibility of a new purpose in my life – “I don’t want to make you feel better, I want to set you free.”

NOTE – what is covered in these blogs is based on my experience and is available on the Wikipedia Landmark Eduction page or available publicly with a Google search.