E129 - Know Your True Nature & Unlock Your Purpose in 2025 (Know Thyself Best Moments)

Here's the link for my 2024/25' journal prompts, I hope you enjoy them! https://www.knowthyself.one/journal-prompts To celebrate the ending of 2024 and welcome in a new year, we’ve put together a special episode with our favorite Know Thyself moments over the past 12 months. Each one is aimed at supporting you to actualize your purpose and become the truest version of yourself in 2025. We’ve split the episode up into 3 sections: to Know, to Thrive, to Create. For deep spiritual wisdom and answers about this reality we live in, listen to the “Know” section, where Dr Joe Dispenza, Bruce Lipton, Michael Beckwith and more share beautiful reflections. To find harmony in your mind, body, and spirit and actualize your unique purpose this year, listen to the “Thrive” section for reflections from Rich Roll, Kute Blackson, Kimberly Snyder and more. And lastly, to turn your unique gift into creations that can support the world, tune into the “Create” section, where 6lack, Steven Pressfield, Omarion and more share profound insights into the creative process. Thanks for a great year and for being on this journey with us, we’re so excited for all that this next year will bring. SURVEY: Share Feedback with us about the show: https://www.knowthyself.one/survey ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro 1:42 Dr Joe Dispenza - Your Personality Creates Your Reality 8:08 Bruce Lipton - 3 Steps to Reprogram Your Subconscious 18:08 Gregg Braden - 3 Powerful Steps to Awaken Heart/ Brain Connection 33:24 Dr. Lisa Miller - Is Spirituality Limited to the Brain? Awakening To The Schumann’s Resonance 42:26 Federico Faggin - The Awakening Consciousness Experience that Transformed me 48:37 Donald Hoffman - Waking up Beyond the Simulation 54:47 Annaka Harris - The Illusion of the Self 1:02:59 Rupert Spira - The True Nature of Our Being & Our Longing for Happiness 1:14:26 John Vervaeke - 4 Aspects that Define Meaning In Our Lives 1:22:14 Michael Beckwith - Becoming a Conscious Creator & What Law of Attraction is Missing 1:36:10 Rich Roll - Facing the Inner Critic & Cultivating Self Love 1:39:34 Kimberly Snyder ⁃ Becoming Magnetic to Your Dreams 1:47:14 Kute Blackson ⁃ Surrender and Allow Something Greater to Unfold 1:56:50 Paul Chek ⁃ Awakening Your Genius & Creating From Soul 2:05:52 Steven Pressfield ⁃ Facing Off With Resistance & Fear To Powerfully Create 2:11:15 6lack ⁃ Overcoming Creative Blocks & Rediscovering Inspiration 2:15:33 Omarion ⁃ Navigating Self Worth in Success 2:20:51 Conclusion ___________ Watch the Full Length Episodes: Dr Joe Dispenza - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQIwZ41Ro1w&t=1273s Bruce Lipton - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WKjO78zDUI Gregg Braden - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zw-fAVO2Q4&t=66s Dr. Lisa Miller - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUe0oaH7GtQ&t=3155s Federico Faggin - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6NHRB5V1eE&t=63s Donald Hoffman - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffgzkHCGZGE&t=40s Annaka Harris - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kabwgbq9Fhg&t=4945s Rupert Spira - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Smqgkab8HZI&t=1991s John Vervaeke - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOwnb6CkFlQ&t=5607s Michael Beckwith - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwxSB0-dfKg&t=1485s Rich Roll - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8vMjFGLmoA&t=1740s Kimberly Snyder ⁃ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIH2kGolxgk&t=3988s Kute Blackson ⁃ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEfBfw-Wy74&t=8s Paul Chek ⁃ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic4d21EeyKc&t=7789s Steven Pressfield ⁃ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H8kHnReaVk&t=2061s 6lack ⁃ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZkdi8OC3A4&t=35s Omarion ⁃ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvDlrVmGrKw&t=43s ___________ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00André Duqum?

  Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast. This past year has been amazing, beautiful, growth-filled, also challenges and pretty weird and wild, I'm sure, full spectrum for many of you. This episode is actually going to be different. It's going to be a compilation, snippets from this whole past year's worth of conversation, 15 selected best moments, hard to choose because there are so many great ones. But if you haven't seen some of the episodes from this past year, today's episode will be a good touch point, a little portal into that whole conversation with that guest that I think you might find interesting, as well as maybe reminders from previously loved episodes from 2024. One tool that I also want to share with you guys is that I'm going to link down in the

• 0:44André Duqum?

  description my Year of End Review Journal prompts for 2024 reflections and 2025 intentions. These questions can help guide you into extracting the lessons from this past year and then also get really intentional with the change that you wish to see both internally and outside of yourself in the world in 2025. So the link for that will be down in the description alongside a five to 10 minute questionnaire for those who feel called to check out and give feedback for us here at Know thyself. We're expanding a lot this next year and yeah, I just want to stay connected with you guys. And so any feedback, constructive criticism, things that you've loved that we've been

• 1:26André Duqum?

  doing to do more of, we'd love to hear and get that feedback from you. That's it for me. I hope you enjoy these 2024 15 selected moments for the podcast.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  So let's start with a very simple understanding. Your personality is made up of how you think, how you act and how you feel. So the present personality who's listening to this podcast has created the present personal reality called their life, not their mother, not their ex, you know, they're responsible for creating their life. And if they think the same way, they act the same way and they feel the same way, they're the same personality and of course they'll have the same personal reality. And I think most people try to create a new personal reality as the same personality. And it doesn't work. We literally have to become someone else. So then, if the majority of our thoughts are the same thoughts based on memories we have

• 2:22Speaker 01

  of experiences in our life, the moment we start remembering our problems, we're thinking in the past, right? So those memories have a feeling or an emotion associated with them. So the moment you think about your problems and you feel unhappy, not only is your brain in the past, now the body's in the past. So it's that thought and that feeling, it's the image or memory and the emotion, it's the stimulus and response that's immediately conditioning the body to memorize that emotion. Now the body is literally living in the past because it's so objective, it doesn't know the difference between a real-life experience that's creating that emotion and the emotion that person is fabricating by thought alone.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  So to the body, it's in the past experience 24 hours a day, okay? So now the body physiologically is now in the past. So then, the hormones of stress create the emotions of anger and aggression and frustration and impatience and competition and hatefulness and fear, anxiety, worry, insecurity, envy, jealousy, guilt, unworthiness, shame, suffering, those are all derived from the hormones of stress. Turns out, when that response switches on, when we perceive a threat or a danger in our outer world, the response from whatever condition in the outer world gives the body

• 3:50Speaker 01

  an arousal. And so then, if you keep doing that and you keep giving the body a rush of energy, the body becomes dependent on its external world to feel something. So the arousal from your coworker, from your ex, from traffic, from the news, something in your outer environment is producing that kind of addictive rush of energy. Then people begin to use the problems and conditions in their life to reaffirm their addiction to that emotion. They need the bad job, they need the bad relationship, and they become addicted to the life that they don't even like. And so, an addiction is something you think you can't stop,

• 4:34Speaker 01

  or an addiction is something you know that is not good for you, and you do it anyway. So people are unconscious to the fact that the arousal from the stress hormones is knocking their brain and body out of homeostasis, it's knocking it out of balance the majority of the time. So, we can actually think about our problems and create the same physiological responses if we were being chased by a predator. So what was once very adaptive becomes very maladaptive. So you turn on that response, you can't turn it off, now you're headed for a disease because stress is when the body's knocked out of balance and there's no opportunity for the body to return back to balance and order.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  That imbalance becomes the new balance, and that's when we head for some type of disease or imbalance in our bodies. So then, those emotions that we feel tend to drive our behaviors and we behave as if we're in the past. And if those emotions are just really chemical records from past experiences, then we probably more than likely remember the past instead of remember the future. So, 95% of who we are becomes, you know, an automatic set of programs in our personalities. So,

• 5:47Speaker 01

  if we really teach a person how to think differently, how to act differently, and how to feel differently, give them new information, have them learn that information, have them teach that information back to somebody so it's wired in their brain, have them understand exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it so the howl gets easier, remind themselves enough time to install the circuitry, so that they have neurons and circuits in place to make a different choice, to do a different thing, create a different experience and feel a different emotion. If you change your personality, would your biology change? The answer is 100% absolutely, yes. And we can do it in seven days. Now, a person with a dissociative disorder or multiple personality disorder had traumas in their life, as most of them, from childhood, and the way they coped with the constant abuse

• 6:31Speaker 01

  was that they would just dissociate from this world and go to another world. And they would live in that world and create a different character than the character that's being abused or molested or whatever.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  And so each one of those different personalities, just like creating a new person in reality takes seven days, they've been doing that for so long that the myriad of personalities of thinking differently, behaving differently, and feeling differently, produces immediate biological changes where the person is allergic to peanuts in one personality and not in the other. So in a sense, that speaks to human potential. Because that's exactly what we're doing. When we see people heal from chronic health conditions, I ask them, "Where is the disease? Where did the disease go?" And 100% of the time, they say, "It's in the old person.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  It's in the old... I'm no longer that person. I'm somebody else." So of course, the disease would exist in a different person. I ask a different physiology. So teaching a person, after years of years of thinking, acting, and feeling the same way, running those programs, teaching a person how to become so conscious of their unconscious thoughts, so aware of the defaulting habits and behaviors, and to notice when they start feeling different emotions, that you've got to catch yourself from going unconscious and returning back to that person, for them to unlearn and relearn, to break the habit of being themselves and reinvent a new self.

• 8:08André Duqum?

  So now, if you take the, let's say, the average American, what is the ultimate red pill that would change their perception? If they take that red pill, that they wake up to the illusion of how they've been living, what would that red pill be?

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Well, right now, the easiest one is just falling in love. And science has recognized why... Let's give a reason as to why we play programs, okay? Let's start off with a simple, basic fact. The human brain is a computer. It's not like a computer. It's actually a far better computer than humans have ever created. But it is a computer and still has the same functions and basic operation procedures to it. When, the old days, when we would buy a computer, you'd go home and you'd push "Start," and it boots up. And then I'd say, "Okay, let's do something." You go, "Oh, no, I can't do anything." I go, "Well, you've got a brand-new computer." The point is, no, first you have to put programs in the computer, and then you can access the computer via the keyboard, which is the creative part of the computer.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  The brain of a human has two parts to it. There's, we say the mind, everybody goes, "The mind." Like, there's one mind. I go, "Well, that's the problem right away." There are two minds. They're interdependent, and they have totally different functions. The latest evolution of the mind is right behind your forehead. It's called the conscious mind. It's the prefrontal cortex, part of the brain's lobe, right back here. That's the seat of consciousness. That's the seat of your spirituality, in fact. And I say, "Well, ninety percent of the brain back here is called the subconscious mind." I go, "Okay, so what's the difference? The conscious mind is creative. The subconscious mind is programs.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Just habits, hard drive, okay? Now, the issue about this is that with the conscious mind, we can be creative and do everything we want. But the conscious mind does two things, and one of them is, look out your eyes like the windshield of a vehicle, and with wishes and desires, the conscious mind will take us on the road to where we want to go. But the conscious mind can think." And I go, "So what's the problem?" I go, "Well, thinking is not looking out. Thinking is looking in. So the moment you start thinking, your conscious mind's not paying attention to the world outside here." I go, "Yeah, but what if you're driving the car and you start thinking?" I go, "Well, almost everybody does it anyway."

• 10:31Speaker 02

  I go, "That's kind of interesting, because at some point, you get so caught up in your head thinking, and then you look out the windshield and realize you haven't paid attention to the road for the last number of minutes, but hey, you're still on the road, everything seems to be running okay." And I go, "No problem, because the subconscious is autopilot." In other words, when the conscious mind is busy, the subconscious programs take over. You know how to drive a car, it's a program. Things that you know how to do, walk, talk, drive the car, do your job, these become habits. Habits are no thinking. Habits are just push the button, play the program. So the idea about that is, well, that's really cool, because that makes our life a lot easier

• 11:13Speaker 02

  than trying to focus on everything in the world, when you can just push the button. You can walk without thinking about walking, okay? So there's a great benefit to the subconscious. Well, the problem that comes up with the subconscious is if you're thinking, you're not looking out the window, you're not paying attention to what's going on, and the subconscious steps in and takes over. And I go, "Well, what's the point?" I go, "Well, we don't see our subconscious programs. We don't see them because they're playing while we're thinking." And I go, "Well, what's the problem?" I go, "Well, 60% or more of the programs are disempowering, self-sabotaging, or limiting beliefs." So I go, "Well, what does that mean?"

• 11:58Speaker 02

  I go, "The moment you start thinking, you start playing the program. But if you have a dysfunctional program, do you see it?" And I go, "No, because it's automatic. The problem is, everybody else sees it, and they're going to respond to your program. They're not responding to your conscious mind. They're responding to the habits you acquired." So the problem about that is, we're unaware, and here's the number, 95% of the day is the average amount of thinking a person is involved with, which then translates simply to 95% of the day, you're running your life with programs that you don't even see. But it becomes problematic, because when things aren't working,

• 12:41Speaker 02

  the tendency of an individual is, "Well, I have great wishes to be happy, successful, loving, endeavor, all these things, and if it's not working, there's a tendency then to consider yourself the victim, and then blame everything around you as why your life's not running right." And the fact was, no, you were the one that was running the program. They were just responding. So it takes us to this way. We are responsible for the life we are living. And the issue about that is, well, what are your programs? Because they're running your life. I go, "Ah, you don't know what your basic programs are." I go, "Why?" Because the programming of the subconscious started,

• 13:24Speaker 02

  well, three months before you were born, and it's continuous for seven years. Your brain, in that seven-year period, is running at a lower vibration when you put wires on a person's head, EEG. The vibration is called theta, which is just below consciousness. Consciousness is a higher vibe, alpha, and then even higher, beta and gamma. You're running at theta, and I go, well, theta is imagination. I go, yeah, that's what characterizes kids. They live in the real world, the imaginary world, the same time. I always talk about, oh, that great tea party. You pour nothing into the cup. You drink nothing, and that was the best tea you ever had in your life. Or a child riding on a broom, because in the child's mind, theta is imagination.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  The broom is a horse. I mean, to the kid, it really is. So if the mother says, give me the broom, the child's like, not understanding what she's talking about, because it's no longer a broom in that state of a child. It's now really a horse in their imagination. The problem? Theta is hypnosis. And I go, oh, so you're in a state of hypnosis for almost seven years? I go, why? Well, the answer is simple, and he goes, how many rules does it take to be a member of a family? How many rules does it take to be a member of a community? Thousands! I said, well, how are you gonna teach an infant? They can't read a book, they can't sit in a classroom. So, nature took care of it.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Nature said, first seven years, hypnosis, download, observe those around you. Your mother, your father, your siblings, your community. In observing them, you're actually downloading behavior. But other people's behavior. So, it becomes interesting, it's because we get the foundation of the rules by observing others. Now, problem is, if the people you're observing are not living in harmony, but then by definition, you've downloaded disharmony as well. And so, all of a sudden, it says, well, these are the programs. I go, yeah, it's 95% of the day, that's where your life is coming from. Do you know these programs? So, I ask people, well, tell me what program you got before you were born?

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Well, obviously, I don't know. Well, wait, wait, wait, you were programmed the whole year from zero to one. What programs did you get? Nah, nah, from one to two, another whole year? I don't know those programs. I go, the biggest problem is, most of the fundamental programs that operate our life were downloaded before we were conscious, and we have no awareness of what those programs are. But, we're running them 95% of the day. So, I stand back and go, wait a minute. Your life is a printout of your programs. So, the idea is this. All you have to do is, right now, is just look at your life and go, The things you like that come into your life,

• 16:18Speaker 02

  well, they come in because you have programs to acknowledge those things. But this is the one. The things that you desire and you want, but you struggle, you work hard, you put a lot of effort into it. I'm sweating over it. I'm gonna make this happen. I'm working really hard to make it happen. I go, "Why are you working so hard?" And the answer is inevitably that destination you're seeking, that destination is not supported by your program. And then you're trying to override the program. Very, very difficult to do. And so basically it says, "Well, wait. We are programmed." I go, "Yep, that's the foundation of the matrix. All of us are programmed. We're running these programs 95% of the time. We do not see these programs. We only see the consequence of these programs."

• 17:03Speaker 02

  So if you don't mind, I'll use an example that I've been using since 1980 because there's not a better one yet. And that is you have a friend and you know your friend's behavior and you happen to know your friend's parent. And then one day you see your friend has the same behavior as their parent, which gets you, "Hey, Bill, you're just like your dad." Back away from Bill. Because I know exactly what Bill's gonna say and you know it if you've ever said it. And Bill's gonna say, "How can you compare me to my dad? I'm nothing like my dad." But everybody else sees that Bill's like his dad. Who's the one that doesn't see it? Bill. I go, "Why not?" Because when he's playing the programs he downloaded from his dad, he's the one that doesn't see it. Everybody else sees it.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  So all of a sudden it says, "Your life is not being controlled by your wishes and desires while you're running the program. And you run the program 95% of the day because that's the amount of time you're thinking. So are you creating the life you want?" I go, "Not necessarily at all. As a matter of fact, you're creating the life you've been programmed to create."

• 18:08Speaker 03

  1991, scientists made a discovery that shocked the medical community for sure and the scientific community in general. What they found was a neural network inside the human heart. They found about 40,000 specialized cells. They're called sensory neurites. They're like neurons in the brain, but they're not in the brain, they're in the heart. They think independently of the human brain. They feel independently of the human brain. They sense, they remember independently of the human brain. So, right there, I've just said a big piece of information that affects all of us, and here's why. We all have had trauma in our lives, every one of us.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  But our trauma is perceived differently through the filters of our life experience. So, your trauma might have devastated you when you were three years old. And then you tell me about it, and I'll say, huh, what's the big deal? You know, or my trauma, my father left our home when I was 10. And it traumatized me because it said something about safety in the world and not feeling safe. And I still deal with that. I'm still healing that. And I might say it to you, and you would say, what's the big deal? Yeah, my dad left and, hey, you know, a piece of cake. The point is, our trauma is individualized. It's personalized, it's unique. But every one of us has it.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  When we have trauma, it's registered in multiple places. And if you attempt to heal that trauma only through thinking and talking about it, from the mind, it can help. And I think it's a good thing to do. But many people say, wow, I've done that and I feel incomplete. Now we know why. Because the talking or the therapies may not have addressed the thinking and the memory independent in the heart. The heart has a very different language. It doesn't always work with words. So, this is one of the amazing things that we're finding out about the human heart.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  When I was in school, back in the 50s, 1950s and 60s, it's a mind blower to me to say that. But when I was in school in the 50s and 60s, I was taught... But the, um, the heart is the master organ in the body, number one, and it's a pump. And we all know it pumps really well, but you can build a machine to do that. Here's what the new discoveries are showing now, is that the heart, the brain's important. I'm sorry, did I say heart? The brain's the master organ in the body. The brain is the master organ. That's what we were taught. But the brain receives the instructions that tell it what to do from the heart. The heart sends those instructions based on the way we feel about the world around us.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  And those perceptions are all through the filters of our experience. So all of a sudden, the heart becomes front and center because we now know the heart is telling the brain how to regulate the body, number one. Number two, the heart, this neural network, is key in what we call heart intelligence. The last episode of this podcast, we talked about how memory, information, our divinity, our imagination, our creativity, our innovation, our intuition, are all information in the

• 21:40Speaker 03

  field that we tune to, rather than that information actually residing in these cells, in these neurons. You know, scientists have, they've looked at the neurons and they're saying, where's the memory? Where's the memory? Well, the memory's not in the neurons. The neurons are the antenna. They are a soft antenna, a biological antenna that is in resonance. They tune based upon our feelings and our demands. When we say, I'm going to learn Spanish, that's a demand to the body, to build the antenna, to tune to the place in the field where Spanish as a language lives, where millions of other people tune in as well.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  So all of a sudden, the heart takes on a whole new significance in the scientific world. It parallels our most ancient and cherished spiritual traditions, who've always said that the, the heart is, is the seat of the soul, as my, my brother Gary Zukav wrote a book called that, my spiritual brother Gary, uh, that the heart is the seat of the soul. The heart is, is probably one of the least understood organs in this respect, and one of the biggest mysteries. Is that on a particular day in the womb of our mother, in one moment in time, there's a clump of cells that are there.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  And in the next instant, something happens. And the first heartbeat begins.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  And scientists do not know what triggers that first heartbeat. There are theories. Talk about ion potentials across cell walls and, you know, things like that. If you ask our indigenous ancestors, when I was with the monks and the nuns in Tibet, when I'm with my Native American friends, I'm with my Kechua friends, or my Aymara friends, and Lake Tadicaca in Peru, they all, my Yucatan friends, the shamans in the Yucatan and the Maya traditions, you all say the same thing. The first beat of the heart is the moment that our soul comes into our bodies. Our soul is part of, but it's separate from. It's a part of us that is ageless, timeless, it is the divine

• 24:02Speaker 03

  that is in that field. It's when when the resonance between the cells and the heart in that neural network come into phase, if you want to think of it that way, with this part of the field. So, the ability to self-regulate our own biology is a stunning, stunning ability. We're trying to build AI and smart computer systems that can diagnose and repair and heal themselves, and we can't do that with software right now. But if you think of us as an engineered biology, we have the programs, the soft, we are literally a soft technology.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  So, we're not a hard technology of silicon chips and wires and, you know, software running through printed circuits. We're neurons. We're more than that. We are neurons, we're cell membranes. We are ion potentials moving across cell walls with the ability to self-regulate ourselves. We are so good at it that we take it for granted. And that is a stunning capability, and it is where our highest levels of mastery come from.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  Now, the next level of this is, once we embrace the neural network in the heart, now you say, "Okay, we've got two neural networks. We have a neural network in the brain we all know about, and now we have one in the heart." One of the highest forms of mastery and one of the deepest places for our healing, we're the only form of life that we know of today with the ability to do what I'm going to describe. We can harmonize the neural network in the brain and the neural network in the heart. Two separate organs become one powerful, potent system in what is called heart-brain coherence.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  And the ability to do it, it's very, very simple. There's an organization here in Northern California, well, there in Northern California, the Institute of Heart Math. They are a pioneering research organization in the power of the human heart in unconventional ways beyond just being a pump. I've known them almost since their inception. I'm not their employee. I've worked with them. We tour together. We fundraise together. We do webinars together. They're dear, dear brothers and sisters, and they're really good people. And they've given me permission, as an independent researcher, to share and talk about their work. So I just want to acknowledge that. They've developed three very, very simple steps

• 26:48Speaker 03

  that allow us to harmonize the heart and the brain very easily based on the ancient and the indigenous traditions. It's a shift in focus, a shift in breath, and a shift in feeling. A shift in focus from the world out there into the heart, number one. Number two, slower breathing. And when we slow our breathing, and there's, um, there is a little bit of science to this. When we exhale for a period of time longer than we inhale, we trigger the parasympathetic nervous system. It's the relaxation response. So it doesn't make any difference what the times are. It's just that the release needs to be longer than inhale.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  So if you're inhaling for a count of four, and then you release for a count of six.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  Something that simple, that's step number two. And then step number three is while the focus is in the heart, while we're breathing slower from our heart, to focus a feeling. And this is something no other form of life can do. We're invited to have a feeling because we choose to have the feeling, rather than relying on the world around us to give us a reason for the feeling. Now you think about that. Most people, if you say, okay, a positive feeling. So let's say the feeling is a feeling of gratitude. Many people will say, well, I'm waiting for something to be grateful for. We're the only form of life that can initiate that. It takes practice, but we can initiate it at will, on demand.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  When we change the way we feel, we're actually shifting the chemistry in our bodies many, many ways. Over 1,300 positive biochemical responses in the body from shifting from our mind into our heart, number one, breathing slower, number two, and feeling a positive feeling such as gratitude that works pretty much for everyone. Once we accomplish that coherence, that can be an end unto itself, or it can be the launchpad for deeper states of spiritual awakening and development and healing and health, physiological healing and health.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  Just from three minutes of that process, the immune system is strengthened and scientific evidence shows this. The SIGA, first level immune response in the lining of the mouth, is strengthened more than many antibiotics can do. This is what the researchers found. We awaken the longevity enzymes, we trigger the healing of the telomeres. There's an enzyme called telomerase that is awakened from this process. We actually relieve stress, Andre.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  On a molecular level, so many people are stressed in ways they don't even know. So we all know about emotional stress, bad relationship, traffic on the 405 freeway, you know, we know about that. When we eat foods that are cooked in oils that have been exposed to high heat, for example, that is a stress to the body and the body has to work to compensate for that. We drink water that has impurities or the wrong pH. Our body has to work to compensate for that. Pollutants in the air, we're exposed to this stuff all the time. So those are levels of stress we may not even be aware of. And this coherence actually relieves that stress. It heals all the way down to the molecular level.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  And what the research has shown is three minutes, a minimum of three minutes will increase the DHEA levels over 100%, which is the precursor to every other hormone in the body, male and female both. Increase that DHEA without taking any supplements or changing a diet or anything. And you decrease the cortisol levels, the stress hormones by about 23% after only three minutes. And those effects will last up to six hours if, you know, barring some black swan event that comes into your life, the effects will linger for up to six hours after only three minutes of doing this. This is how powerful we are.

• 31:13Speaker 03

  So the implications of the ability to self-regulate our own biology, they run deep in terms of divinity. Those are the ability to heal our own bodies. That is a god-like ability that the ancients talked about in the literature. We have it at our fingertips. We've been conditioned away from it, led to feel helpless and powerless, that we need intervention. And sometimes we do, and we have technology for that. And I'm happy. But that technology is there when it reaches that point. The point is to honor the gift of this body, this temple, as we talked about in the last podcast, to the point where you don't need that kind of intervention

• 31:56Speaker 03

  because you are maintaining through the ability to self-regulate all of these things. So this has really put science into place. There's a beautiful place where science and spirituality come together, even though a lot of scientists don't like it. And a lot of spirituality or people that follow spirituality, they don't like it either. They like to think that the spirituality somehow supersedes the science. And the scientists like to think that they're more modern. But here's what happens when we drop those judgments and we allow the two great ways of knowing, the science of 300 years and spirituality of 5,000 years.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  Those are two forms of knowledge. When we allow that knowledge to honor and serve us, we then create a wisdom that's greater than any piece of knowledge can be. And I think this is what gives us the evolutionary edge right now that many of our ancestors didn't have. They didn't have the science. So that we can successfully navigate and triumph and transcend the challenges that we see in our lives now that other generations haven't had. We now have this at our fingertips, the ability to self-regulate our biology through the changes.

• 33:24André Duqum?

  How do you discern, I suppose, what materials would say you could boil down to biochemical kind of reactions? When you're using the word spiritual, do you ever refer to metaphysical, non-material realities? Because I know so much of your work has been bringing forth what feel like metaphysical experiences into understandable brain chemistry and kind of bridging the gap between the two.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  Oh, that's such a magnificent point. So. We certainly can track the neural correlates in our brains of transcendent relationship. We can certainly point on the MRI machine and say, okay, whether I live in China, the US, or Brazil, the same neural correlates run when I am in a deep transcendent connection to the force of life. There's one force of life, and there's one human porthole. That does not mean that all spirituality can be boiled down to the brain. I am by no means a biological reductionist. That merely means body, mind, and soul. In the monoist view of the human, we are soul, we are mind, we are body, there is at once

• 34:33Speaker 04

  a neurotrace, as there is a phenomenological experience. As I would say, there is ontologically in the structure of being, the stuff of consciousness or spirit, all at once, all at once. Now, in The Awakened Brain, in my book, I spend the first two-thirds pointing out our natural, spiritual nature, the capacity through which we can perceive and receive transcendent awareness. But the final third is dedicated to this very exciting emerging science done by generally extremely rigorous scientists on the foundational nature of consciousness, running in us, through us, and among us, where suddenly we can stop

• 35:17Speaker 04

  borrowing the 20th century somewhat reductionist view of the brain as a maker of thoughts, right? Like a Ford Motor Factory, the brain somehow produces thoughts, or toasters, or something like that. Instead, to the brain being an antenna or a conduit of consciousness, that opens up the possibility that we are both emanations of consciousness.

• 35:44Speaker 04

  Like Raised from the Sun, we are in relationship to consciousness, receiving, perceiving, contributing back. There's a dialectic going on. That's very, very far, to your point, from radical materialism or biological reductionism. I think it's important to point out that the best clinical science can say is that spirituality is not a belief, it is an inborn human seed of perception. We are born to perceive into the spiritual reality. And that's where clinical science stops. And then we can pivot and say, how does the brain, what is our evidence that the brain is connected beyond the brain in the box, beyond the atomistic limits of the skull?

• 36:29Speaker 04

  And there, there's a cascade of magnificent research going on. May I share one of my favorite studies?

• 36:35André Duqum?

  Please, yeah.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  Perhaps my favorite study is really a foundational, founding study of what we now call post-material psychology. Post-material meaning a consciousness-based psychology. And it's done by Akterhoff. Akterhoff invited a traditional indigenous healer to be in one MRI machine. The patient was down the hall, and in some cases, across the street, in a second MRI machine. As the traditional healer started to do his or her work, a consistent pattern came up on the FMRI machine, tracking blood flow.

• 37:14Speaker 04

  Within an instant, the same pattern came up on the MRI screen of the patient, implying one thing, consciousness, in two places. The material footprint is what shows up on the MRI. How do we understand that one thing, consciousness, healing consciousness, I would say, spirit, in two places? Well,

• 37:41Speaker 04

  There's several explanations, but one of them is that there's a send and receive between the healer and the patient at a distance, that the brain is a form of an antenna or a conduit. But I think that it's very dangerous for the new consciousness-based science to make the same mistake as the material science of the 20th century, which is really to claim radical anthropocentrism, that we are in the center, sending consciousness back and forth. From whence this consciousness come? Well, no one really answers that, but it's kind of suggested that we make consciousness, or we're the king and the queen.

• 38:24Speaker 04

  It seems to me that if we're really on a search, that we shouldn't feel nervous or somehow out of fashion to step out of the outdated vogue of radical anthropocentrism. And let's build a science built around source, that there's a source of consciousness. I say God, you use your word.

• 38:45André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 38:46Speaker 04

  The most breathtaking finding that I've seen in 30 years as a scientist is this. When we look at people who, through suffering, difficulty, have awakened. So, you know, there's a lovely body of science that shows that very often, struggle, suffering, depression is the early phase of an awakening.

• 39:09André Duqum?

  It's two sides of one door, as you have so eloquently shared.

• 39:13Speaker 04

  Yes, that the yearning and the struggle and the existential emptiness actually reveals that our vessel and capacity has become more capacious, and now feels like a half-empty vessel. We are on a quest. So, the yearning, the existential frustration, doesn't mean we're off the path, it means we're on the path, a knock at the door, a bang at the door, for a more deepened connection with God, spirit, consciousness. That is, I think, the majority of forms of human suffering. There are some, where there's a biological depression, there's a piece broken and we fix it with medication, but most of the time, and I'm not against medication, but medication

• 39:58Speaker 04

  alone is insufficient, most of the time, there is an emergence that first presents itself, the ignition, is struggle, it's developmental depression.

• 40:09Speaker 04

  When we take this journey and we awaken, what we find is that we've cultivated a path, a spiritual response to suffering that is forevermore there for us. We can always get back. If we invite people to come in, this time not to the MRI machine, but the EEG machine that captures energy given off the back of the head, how we're using the brain, brainwaves. What we find is that people to recover, people to move through despair through an awakening, give off high amplitude alpha, specific wavelength. High amplitude alpha goes by another name in another field. It's Schumann's resonance, the constituent wavelength of nature

• 40:53Speaker 04

  from the earth's crust up one mile, all the way around the earth, which means the spiritually engaged brain vibrates at the wavelength of all life, of nature, creation. So the kingdom, Eden was not long ago and far away. It's here now, and it is a choice to enter through our seed of being. And we readily then have available to the felt oneness is mirrored by the oneness of wavelength. That, to me, is the most beautiful finding in science.

• 41:27André Duqum?

  So powerful. And there is a, there's a part in this book, The Awakened Brain, that I really love. So this was advice Howard Thurman that you quoted, gave to someone who is struggling to make a decision and desperate for guidance. And Thurman wrote a letter, his handwritten response, said, "You're like a little boy under the Christmas tree who has so many gifts, he doesn't know which one to open first. The main thing is, you must wait and listen for the sound of the genuine, which is within you. When you hear it, that will be your voice, and that will be the voice of God." And it feels like when you're in those moments of depression, despair, where you're speaking to awakening is the other side of the door.

• 42:12André Duqum?

  And making space for silence to discover that which is genuine within you to emerge is it's our primary task is to make space and see what's trying to emerge from within us. I would actually love to just jump straight to your kind of awakening experience that you had that really was the pivot, the shift from being a materialist scientist into exploring consciousness in a much more fundamental way. So could you walk us through your experience at that moment?

• 42:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, I need to give you perhaps a little bit of background because I'm a physicist and therefore I study how physical reality works and with a sense that that that's all there is and that's really much, pretty much what

• 43:05Speaker 05

  science today is telling us about the reality and I had

• 43:11Speaker 05

  I had accepted that that must be true. And I was also expecting that if I did everything right, quote unquote, whatever that means, I should be happy. And

• 43:28Speaker 05

  that did not turn out that way. In fact, I did everything right, you know, according to the book, but I was not happy and I was pretending to be happy. And it was only because I realized that I was pretending to be happy. And I have learned, being an entrepreneur, I had learned to take responsibility for what happened in my life. That I put my foot down and said, no, I must understand.

• 43:55Speaker 05

  Why I'm not happy? In those days, I was studying consciousness, but I was working on neural networks. I was studying books in neuroscience. And I wanted to understand how come they were conscious. You know, neuroscientists don't tell us how we're conscious. They explain, you know, they explain how we work by electrical signals and biochemical signals in the brain. And I didn't see how I could possibly get sensations and feelings, what philosophers call qualia, out of electrical signals. And so I was really curious.

• 44:39Speaker 05

  Being a scientist and being also a technologist, I wanted to understand how I could program a computer to be conscious. And the more I thought, the more impossible it was. Because there was, there is nothing in physics that tells you how to convert electrical signals or bits in a computer into sensations and feelings. So the core was what are sensations and feelings? Which is how we experience life. And so it was in this climate where I was unhappy, which is also a problem of consciousness. I wanted to understand what consciousness is. And it happened one night, 1990, it was Christmas holidays. I was skiing up in the Sierras, you know, Tahoe, with my family.

• 45:24Speaker 05

  And one night, I wake up, midnight, was thirsty, went to get a glass of water. Then I went back to bed, and I'm just waiting to fall asleep again. And all of a sudden, out of my chest, this beam of energy, you know, white scintillating light is love. But it's a love that was 10,000 times, 50,000 times, who knows? Stronger than anything that I've ever experienced is coming from me. And my consciousness is in this rush of energy. And it's love, joy, and peace. Peace, I've never had felt that peace.

• 46:09Speaker 05

  I was always trying to get somewhere. I was never happy where I was. But this was... This is me, that's home. This is me, I am that. I am this, instead of that. This that comes out of me. And then this energy, all of a sudden is everywhere. And this white scintillating light, my consciousness is in that light. And so now, I am observing myself. So I'm the observer of myself. This energy, because this love was there. This joy and this peace was there as well. And then a thought forms.

• 46:54Speaker 05

  Wow, a thought. But I already got what the thought was trying to say. The thought was, oh, this stuff is what everything is made of. But these are symbols. What before that thought, there was the understanding that the thought expressed. And then, that was the end of it.

• 47:18Speaker 05

  My body was vibrating, you know, like the cells of my body were, you know, were resonating with what was going on. So body, mind, emotions, and the connection with everything was all in this holistic experience. So I was one, observing itself with my point of view. That's what I'm saying now. But at that time, I had exactly this sense, without the words, to say what I just said. At that point, I wanted then to connect what I knew about physics

• 47:58Speaker 05

  into a theory that would connect the interiority and the exteriority. Physics only describes what you can measure in the space and time. But what you can feel, is that in space and time? Cannot possibly be in space and time. So where is it? And so that was the journey where I dedicated myself 100%. I decided to, that's it. That's what I want to do for the rest of my life. Unite physics and spirituality into a seamless whole, where you can no longer tell the boundaries between one and the other.

• 48:36André Duqum?

  I'm curious, do you think that there are levels of fundamental reality that are simply inconceivable to the human mind in understanding? Like, we wouldn't expect a monkey to understand quantum mechanics, or enfoldment, or have even the baseline ingredients to be able to have any semblance of anything regarding quantum mechanics. Are there things that you think that are simply beyond the capacity of the human mind to understand and deeper levels of reality?

• 49:06Speaker 05

  That's, I do. I think that the human mind has great capacities and fundamental limitations. And when spiritual traditions tell us to set aside the human mind now and then, spend time on meditation and put the human mind apart, you, of course, then when you try to reconceptualize what you experienced, you can only reconceptualize it inside the human mind. That's, that's the tool you've got. But in fact, you infinitely transcend the human mind. So, so you aren't the human mind. You, when you talk to me through these avatars, we're having to use the human mind and therefore, all of a sudden,

• 49:49Speaker 05

  the bandwidth goes down to a straw, a little tiny straw of information that goes back and forth. But you and I are in fact, the infinite intelligence looking at itself through this particular little straw. So, yeah, the human mind has this incredibly-

• 50:02André Duqum?

  Write that down.

• 50:03Speaker 05

  But, but, but you are not the human mind. You transcend infinitely the human mind. But as long you're in this avatar, you can only have a human mind appreciation of that transcendence.

• 50:15André Duqum?

  There seems to be various enlightened beings, masters of meditation, that have emotionally embraced it, what they would say is close to 100%. Where they have literally no fear of the body because they clearly have the perception that it is not them.

• 50:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 50:34André Duqum?

  Where if somebody comes up to you, God forbid, on the street and puts a gun to your head.

• 50:37Speaker 06

  I'd be scared.

• 50:38André Duqum?

  Scared to death.

• 50:39Speaker 06

  Right.

• 50:39André Duqum?

  It seems like in the metaphysical practices and the contemplative sciences, you can arrive at the place experientially, emotionally, where you truly perceive the source of that which you are, and therefore, that which you are not does not have the grip over you. Which is interesting, because it requires both the rigorous science and logic to be able to explore these things and explain it with the limited capacity we have for language, with language. And then the contemplative practices that allow us to arrive there experientially, to become closer and intimate, and become one with that which we truthfully are.

• 51:18Speaker 06

  I completely agree, and I think that there are spiritual masters who are there. Eckhart Tolle, for example, I suspect truly doesn't fear death. And so, and I intellectually think that, well, this is interesting to think about it this way. Think about a video game, in which you jump into the video game, and you could be in the game identified with the avatar. That's me. So if it's a shoot 'em up game, and you think you are your avatar, you're going to be scared

• 52:03Speaker 06

  to death, and you're going to be really alert, and suppose that, I mean, I'm Navy SEAL or something, I'm trying to get you ready. So I'm putting you in this game, so I want to somehow drug you so that when you get in the simulation, you think it's real. Because I want you to be scared to death, and I want you to learn how to fight in that thing. So I'm going to make you identified. So here's a drug that makes you identified with your avatar in this VR game. And, boy, you really, you, and then, I'll slowly let you disidentify from that avatar.

• 52:40Speaker 06

  And that's what I think is going on here is we're in this emotionally, I'm still identified with the avatar, but part of me is recognize, oh, Don, that's just an avatar, it's not you. But the emotional part of me is still plugged into you are an avatar. The meditation process is slowly waking me up to the truth that an avatar is just an avatar. Relax.

• 53:04André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 53:05Speaker 06

  Just relax, it's just your avatar. You're the infinite intelligence of which this whole simulation is a trivial little game that you is it's no effort for you, whatever. It's literally nothing and all the wealth and all the possessions you could possibly have, you could be the richest man on earth, nonsense, it's nothing, it's absolutely nothing. It's just a little game in you and you could make a billion other much better games than that. So that's but see mostly I'm still it's very, very interesting to know that I am the infinite intelligence. I've woken up a little bit, but not completely. So I'm still halfway between identifying with the avatar and halfway disidentifying

• 53:50Speaker 06

  with the avatar. And I agree that there are spiritual masters who have completely disidentified and I would love to disidentify because it's no fun to be afraid.

• 53:58André Duqum?

  Yeah. I find it so interesting how I think largely like around the time of the Vienna Circle and the like 19th, 20th century, there was kind of this big divorce between the simultaneous contemplative practices and metaphysical practices alongside the scientific explorations. And like most people don't understand to the degree in which Newton himself had just as much exploration into alchemy than than the sciences. And it makes sense that they're kind of they're one in the same in the source and then there's the experiential side and then there's the logical side, there's the particle, there's the wave, you know, there's two ways to come at something from the top down, from the bottom

• 54:43André Duqum?

  up, you know, and the way that it's processed. If the possibility of consciousness being fundamental is real, it really does line up with a lot of Eastern wisdom traditions

• 54:53Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 54:54André Duqum?

  around the illusion of free will, the self, and that there is a more fundamental aspect of being that is the witness and awareness of any arising and passing away of phenomena and contents in our experience.

• 55:08Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 55:08André Duqum?

  That gives rise to a true sense of freedom.

• 55:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 55:12André Duqum?

  And so, as the show is the Know thyself Podcast, we really like to explore how this is a...

• 55:18André Duqum?

  What is the most fundamental aspect in nature of ourselves?

• 55:20Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 55:21André Duqum?

  Which feels as, you know, I have many experiences and I'd love to hear some of yours, where you experience and taste such a depth of stillness, whereas there is the absence of experience, but there is still consciousness floating in a void, it seems.

• 55:36Speaker 07

  Well, and what's interesting is, if consciousness is fundamental, it actually makes sense that spending more time investigating that first-person experience would give you, would enable you to have some insights or give you some direct understanding or knowledge in a way that our current way of understanding the world through science has not been able to. And I'm very interested in that crossover as well.

• 56:05André Duqum?

  Yeah. So, when you say like sense of self, what are you referring to as most people kind of operate with that notion? And then we can kind of start to see the illusory nature of it and come back and tell what's more fundamental?

• 56:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, I do always, when I talk about the illusion of self, I do like to start with what I'm not calling an illusion.

• 56:23André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 56:23Speaker 07

  Because I think it's less confusing that way. In terms of a self, there are human beings, there are animals, there are, you know, all of the things that we see in the world and we can call them the things we call them, and that's very useful. There, you know, we can point to a wave and know exactly what we're talking about. And actually, a wave is a much better analogy for the experience of self than something like a chair or a rock. And that's because a wave is a phenomenon in nature that is ever-changing, and it's very clear to us, and we can see it. That doesn't stop us from labeling waves, waves. We know a wave when we see it, and we can say a lot of things about how waves behave and what they do, and... It's a clear phenomenon in nature.

• 57:08Speaker 07

  And the same is true of the human mind and the way the brain works is it is an ever-evolving, ever-changing

• 57:18Speaker 07

  series of phenomena. And so that obviously exists. We can talk about it. We can talk about our biographical selves and how we went from babies to our current states. You know, all of these things are phenomena in nature that we can talk about. We can talk about decision-making. Also, when I talk about free will being an illusion, there's an element of it being an illusion, but in terms of decision-making in nature, that is absolutely a process that takes place and our brains are very good at executing that process. The illusion comes in the experience we all have and myself included. You know, I have had the experience of dropping this illusion, but most of the time I walk

• 58:00Speaker 07

  around with this sense that there's a solid self that's not changing. There's part of me that's not changing. That's the same me when I was two than I am now. And I talk, we talk about things that way. And you can see that it's an illusion when you start to investigate it a little more closely and think, okay, where, where is this unchanging, solid self that's moving through time? And you realize that you, you think of it as kind of being inside your body somewhere. It's not the same as your brain. It's in your brain or maybe near your brain. There's no real way to describe it because it's inaccurate. It's an inaccurate way of viewing things.

• 58:40Speaker 07

  But it's this very persistent intuition and sense of being an unchanging, solid entity that moves through time, when in fact, what the experience of self is, is a new, a new experience in every moment. We're constantly changing. Who I was and my experience as a two-year-old are extraordinary. I mean, so, so different from the experiences I have now that you and I are, are experiences right now are probably more similar than mine were with my two-year-old self. And that there are a lot of processes in the brain that make us blind to these changes and to the fact that

• 59:24Speaker 07

  I'm not in my body, I'm not in my brain. I, you know, and we even use the language, my brain, my body, as if I stand outside of those things. And so it creates this feeling that we are separate from the physical world somehow, that I'm, that it's not that I am my brain and these experiences are arising as a result of the physical structure that I am, but that there's some entity in there that takes ownership of, of my body and my brain and everything else. And this is where the illusion of free will comes in. It's, it feels that this self can make decisions that are somehow separate from the physical world and separate from the laws of cause and effect.

• 1:00:09Speaker 07

  And when in actuality, our brains are these, these waves and the processes keep moving and there's no stopping, there's no stopping the river. It's, it's an unfolding through time that consciousness likely is, in some sense, the canvas on which it all plays out, rather than the thing driving it or the subject of it.

• 1:00:39André Duqum?

  I really love that analogy of the sense of self being like waves in the ocean, because we can see that they're still connected and yet there is a more essential nature of one's being, which would be like the ocean.

• 1:00:51Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:00:52André Duqum?

  And we can see under FMRI machines, through psychedelic use and advanced meditators, the reduction in activity in the default mode network, which goes hand in hand with this loss of an experience of a solid self.

• 1:01:04Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:01:05André Duqum?

  So any thoughts you want to share there as well?

• 1:01:06Speaker 07

  Yeah. So you're right. I mean, we're still at the infancy of our, our understanding of what's going on in the brain, but clearly many, many people throughout history have had the experience, can train through meditation to have the experience or through psychedelics. It's a very common experience of this illusion of self dropping away and, and no longer experiencing it for a period of time. And as someone who has this experience regularly and knows many people who, who do, it, it in no way affects your conscious awareness. You are just as conscious as you were before. And so this, this sense that... That our consciousness is the self, is the intuition that we come in with.

• 1:01:51Speaker 07

  It is clearly not the case. And so the thing that's interesting about correlating this with something that the brain is doing is, one, we can see that the brain, in most circumstances, is generating this experience of self, and it doesn't necessarily need to be generated. We can have a full experience of being human beings and not have that experience generated. But also that when people have this experience, it's in extremely positive terms, for the most part. Feeling a sense of oneness, feeling a visceral sense of the interconnected nature of things, as we were talking about before. That even though there's not a visual representation of it, there's actually a way to be in the

• 1:02:35Speaker 07

  world where you feel intimately connected to the air and the water and other human beings and sound waves and everything else that we're immersed in. I mean, there's almost an experience of feeling like a flexible web, rather than being a self moving around inside something other.

• 1:02:59André Duqum?

  And the deeper examination of our fundamental longing for happiness, which you pick a person randomly off the street and you ask them, do they want to be happy? Everyone's gonna say yes, right? Yeah. And the I that wants to be happy, many of us have different perceptions on, but we tend to feel it is this locus of thoughts and emotions localized in our head, and we have this identity, personality structure, in which we engage the world with. And it's through the perception of that separate self that happiness is perceived to be gained through the possessions and gain of exterior material possessions. Yes. And an arrangement of relationships, something happening a certain way outside

• 1:03:44André Duqum?

  of us. Yes. And you're inviting the perspective to realize the source of who you are, which is happiness. And I often think of this metaphor of a lighthouse illuminating a beach. In many ways, it has been said that what we are looking for is the place we are looking from. And a lighthouse that's illuminating is almost like looking for its own light, failing to recognize that it is the source of its own illumination. And so as we start to peel back the layers of our preconceived notions of self, to see who we are more fundamentally, that field of awareness that we can tap into. I would love for you to reflect on that and start to guide us with the direct experience of that.

• 1:04:28André Duqum?

  Because I think non-duality can be seen as a philosophically dense topic of exploration, but it's also very simple and the immediacy of direct experience, one can come into contact with it. So what say you?

• 1:04:45Speaker 05

  Yes, okay. So there's one physical space in the universe. There are not numerous physical spaces. There's just one vast, boundless, physical space in the universe that seems to be contained within numerous buildings or within numerous rooms. And each of those rooms, like the room we're sitting in now, lends a quality to the space. The space seems to, as soon as the building is put up, the building seems to limit, put a boundary around a certain portion of space. And the space then seems to share the qualities of the building.

• 1:05:30Speaker 05

  Large, small, dark, light, and so on. The space never actually becomes limited. The space in this room is not actually limited by the four walls of this room. If we were to take a sample of the space inside the room and investigate it, and we were to take a sample of the vast space outside the room, they would be identical. Now imagine that the space were aware.

• 1:05:58Speaker 05

  And if we asked the space in this room, describe yourself,

• 1:06:06Speaker 05

  it would look around and it would say, "I'm small, I'm dark, I'm cozy, I'm full of objects." And it's not describing itself, it's describing the the walls within which it seems to be contained. But if we said to it, "No, don't tell us about the walls and the objects and the people.

• 1:06:26Speaker 05

  Look, tell us about yourself. We want to know about the nature of yourself." The space would, so to speak, look at itself, taste itself, become aware of itself. And if it were then to describe its quality, it would never say, "I'm small, I'm dark, I'm limited." It would just say, "I am vast, I am without limits, I am boundless." The space hasn't become boundless as a result of doing this. It was always that. It just mistakenly identified itself with the four walls within which it seems to be contained. And just one clear look at itself liberated, not from its limitations. It was never limited in the first place. It liberated it from the belief that it was limited.

• 1:07:13Speaker 05

  So instead of this space now feeling, "I am confined, I'm limited, I'm a fragment, I need something, I'm incomplete," and so on, the space now feels, "I'm whole, I'm perfect, I'm complete, I need nothing." Okay, that's the analogy. So let's go back to our experience, try to make contact with this in our experience. Leave the analogy of this vast boundless space, go to the analogy of being. Consider one being whole, without borders, unlimited, infinite, a single being like the single space. And now consider the single being temporarily enclosed

• 1:07:58Speaker 05

  within the body-mind and mixed with the...

• 1:08:05Speaker 06

  The content of our experience, by content of our experience, I mean thoughts and feelings, sensations on the inside and perceptions of the world on the outside. So our sense of our self is a mixture of the fundamental being or being aware or awareness itself, plus the contents of experience. So I would suggest that our being is like the space. It's fundamentally unlimited. And this is easy to check in one's experience. We could perhaps go there later. It's easy to check in one's experience that one's being is without limits.

• 1:08:46Speaker 06

  It has no, it has no shape, no size, no gender, no color, no age and so on.

• 1:08:54Speaker 06

  But in each of us, our being, our essential self is mixed with our experience, with our thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions. So we don't experience ourself as this complete, inherently peaceful, whole

• 1:09:13Speaker 06

  being. We experience ourself as a being that is limited, temporary, finite, and therefore lacking. Because we're a fragment, we feel incomplete. This mixture of infinite being plus the contents of experience makes for a finite being, like the space in this room seems to be a finite space. So although

• 1:09:36Speaker 06

  infinite being is whole, it lacks nothing. So the common name for the absence of the sense of lack is happiness. It's complete, it seeks nothing, it needs nothing. It's in a state of equilibrium, sufficiency, plenitude.

• 1:09:58Speaker 06

  But when our sense of ourself, the fact of being or awareness itself is mixed with the content of experience, mixed with our thoughts and feelings, it seems to acquire limits. I no longer feel that I am this inherently free, inherently peaceful, unconditionally, unconditionally fulfilled being or awareness. I feel that I am

• 1:10:21Speaker 05

  A temporary finite self that is made partly of of being or awareness and partly of the content of experience that the body and the mind. And so we feel we're a fragment. And as a fragment, we feel I'm missing something. So this sense of missing something and the attendant longing to find something is is the core feeling of the separate self that we seem to be. It's the it's the one feeling that defines the apparently separate self, this feeling I'm incomplete, I lack something. And therefore, in response to that feeling of lack, all separate selves, all apparently

• 1:11:03Speaker 05

  temporary finite selves are motivated by one thing, to be completed, to be whole again. Because because in the memory, deep in the memory, deep in the hearts of all temporary finite selves, that there is this memory of of our of our essential nature, this memory of our eternity, this memory of our innate happiness. But but it's been it's been veiled. Our innate happiness has been veiled by the content of experience and therefore everyone is longing. Now, to begin with in life, we we try to relieve this longing through the acquisition of objects, substances, activities, relationships, and and so on.

• 1:11:48Speaker 05

  And for what for many people, I suspect for many of your listeners, when most people, or at least many people, they they they've been failed often enough by the world, the world has has failed to produce the happiness they seek often enough, they begin to suspect that happiness can't be found in the conventional world. And then we start on a great spiritual search. We rebrand the search for happiness in the world, the search for enlightenment. But it's just the same thing. It's just it's just a rebranding of the same longing for for something, only now what we're longing for is a little bit more refined. And the objects or activities in which we seek it are a little bit more refined than

• 1:12:32Speaker 05

  the objects and activities that we used to seek it in the world. It's no longer substances and and so on. It's meditation practices and and teachers and and teachings and traditions. And disciplines and so on, but they're all in effect activities of the mind that we engage in for us one sole purpose, bringing to an end this longing, this existential longing that lives in each of our hearts. We now call it the longing for enlightenment. For in a religious tradition, we call it the longing for God, but it's all the longing for for something, something that's going to put an end to this unbearable longing.

• 1:13:12André Duqum?

  The dissolution of a separate self.

• 1:13:14Speaker 05

  Yes, so the

• 1:13:18Speaker 05

  most, if not all the, I would say, all the great spiritual and religious traditions in one way or another say that what we really, what we're really seeking is not an object, however refined and noble that object may be, it's it's within ourself. And for this reason, all the religious and spiritual traditions have elaborated numerous different pathways, basically to come back to the recognition of the nature of our being. Because when we recognize the the nature of our being, we like the space in this room, recognizing it's essential nature, it it recognized that it is already free, it is already whole, it is already perfect, it is already complete.

• 1:14:02Speaker 05

  And it is that recognition that brings to an end this unbearable longing. So that is why, in one way or another, all the religious, spiritual traditions say know thyself. It's only that self-knowledge that will put an end to this, to this longing.

• 1:14:25André Duqum?

  For people that don't know, what is the meaning crisis? And can you share some stats and some context for just how bad it currently is on the planet right now? So when people talk about

• 1:14:35Speaker 03

  Whether or not their lives are meaningful, they're using meaning as a metaphor. It's like the meaning of a sentence. Sentences are meaningful. You know, like if I say, "Guru, Kula, Shkabikla," that doesn't mean anything to you, right? But if I say, "There's a cat on the mat," that means something, though. What goes into that? If we slowly unpack the metaphor, we can get a sense of what people are gesturing to with the metaphor. So, think about how all the words cohere together. They cohere together, right? They make sense together. And what they do is they connect you to the world with the possibility of truth. It could be true that the cat is on the mat, and then you're connected to reality. So there's this coherence, there's connectedness, and the sentence signifies the world to you in a certain way,

• 1:15:19Speaker 03

  makes the world significant to you in a certain way. Now, if you look at all the work in, and I do, because in the psychology of meaning in life, not the meaning of life, the meaning of life is some metaphysical proposal. We're talking about a cognitive, psychological phenomenon, the meaning in life. This is what people are talking about when they say, "Even though my life has been filled with frustration, and failure, and betrayal, and guilt, and shame, I still want to keep going because my life is meaningful." Okay? And we can maybe talk a little bit later about how it's not the same thing as subjective well-being or mastery of one's environment.

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  So, if you take a look at the four, there's four features of meaning in life. One is coherence. What people mean is there's something like the structure of their experience that's like the coherence of a sentence. Well, what does that mean? Well, coherence is the opposite of absurdity. Absurdity is when you have two perspectives that are clashing so that one undermines the other. So, here we are, you and I, we're in this little perspective. We're here. And we're doing all this stuff and it's also meaningful. And then I get you to zoom out to the entire universe, the cosmic perspective. And from that perspective, our little lives could seem insignificant, right?

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  They could seem absurd. There's a clash. Now, before that gets too dark, realize that we have a way of dealing with potential absurdity between perspectives and reconciling it with an insight. So we already have a sense of humor. That's what humor is. Humor is when there's a clash between perspectives and then you get an insight that reconciles it. So just to hold that out so people don't meet, because when I sometimes say that, that's kind of a dark thing to say. Okay, so you want that. The next is, right? When I said the cat is on the mat, it oriented you. It made you look in a particular direction, gave you a focus. So the next factor is called purpose.

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  But the problem, I don't like that term because our culture is all about purpose. And we think of purpose as some end goal state of something we have to have, some status, some power. I gotta get to, gotta fulfill my purpose. The problem with that is if you, and I realized this in high school and I went around writing, there is no purpose. Because I realized even then, before I saw any of this research, that doesn't work because if you never get it, your life was meaningless. And once you get it, and once you've got your thing, your purpose, then your life becomes meaningless. So don't think about purpose that way. Think about it as orientation. You need a north star, something that orients you, helps you consistently focus, helps you navigate and track through reality

• 1:18:12Speaker 03

  and narrate and keep track of how you're tracking through reality. It's an orientation that allows you to narrate and navigate. That's what you need. The next is significance, like the sentence, that's just, right? Things have to be, you have to have a lot of significance. Things have, you have to have things that seem very real, deep, not ephemeral, superficial to you. Okay? And then finally, and turns out most importantly, is mattering. Mattering matters the most. Mattering is a sense of being.

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  Connected to something, and I'm gonna put in scare quotes because it's another metaphor we have to unpack, something bigger than yourself. But this goes back to what I pointed out about Plato. We want to be connected to something that's really real. So, these are the three questions to ask yourself to see if you have mattering. What do you want to exist even if you don't?

• 1:19:08André Duqum?

  What do you want to exist even if you don't?

• 1:19:10Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:19:11André Duqum?

  Got it?

• 1:19:13Speaker 03

  How really real is it? Is it not virtual, not ephemeral, not superficial?

• 1:19:22Speaker 03

  How much of it, how connected are you? How much do you matter to it? And how much of a difference does it make to you? How significant? So, mattering and significant are turning out to be actually be two sides of the same, the same connectedness. I use the ancient word religio for that sense of connectedness. So, I'm basically asking you, do you have religio? Is it connected to something that's really real? And so much so that you care about it beyond your egocentric concerns? Those are the three questions. Now, a prototypical answer that people give, and it's a right one, is, well, my kids.

• 1:20:04Speaker 03

  And you know, Elizabeth Olfield, like, the kids are sacred in that sense. Sacred is something you wouldn't exchange no matter how much money somebody was willing to give you for it. Okay? So, do you want your kids to exist when you don't? Well, yeah, that's the whole project. Of course, I want them to exist when I, and I'm trying to make the world a better place for them. So, when I'm not here, they will flourish, right? Are they really real? Well, if you aspire to being a good parent, they're way more important than you, and they're really real. I mean, having a child is one of the best ways to turn the arrow of egocentrism out to something other than yourself. You come to this stark realization as, wow, that being is more important than me. And if I, and if I don't live that, that child will die. Right?

• 1:20:49Speaker 03

  Like, I remember that, having those moments, and they're almost terrifying, right? And then, do I matter to my kids? I long to matter to my kids. I long to make a difference in their life. And they're super significant to me. And so...

• 1:21:05Speaker 03

  Right? Kids are a typical answer of that. Um, now, here's one thing, and then I'll shut up so you can reply. Right? When you have a kid, all the measures of subjective well-being, that sort of "I feel really good about myself", the thing that shows up in beer commercials, "I feel really good, I'm good, I'm happy, I'm good, yeah, yeah, yeah", that? All of that goes away when you have a kid. You're sleep deprived. You're not eating. It's like being in a shipwreck. Uh, you're wet all the time for some reason. Right? Uh, there's alarms going off, that's the kid crying. The person you thought loved you most in the world, your partner, doesn't like you anymore. Right? And you're getting sick all the time.

• 1:21:46Speaker 03

  Why do people do it? The subjective well-being is collapsing. Their finances are going down. Kids are wickedly expensive. So those are the two things we're supposed to be, wealth and subjective well-being. They collapse. What goes up? That more than compensates for the collapse in wealth and subjective well-being? Meaning in life.

• 1:22:10Speaker 03

  And that's what's at risk in the meaning crisis.

• 1:22:13André Duqum?

  So many people on the planet are like bystanders to their life, and they basically live as a reaction to circumstances or situations, people, places, and events, to consciously, uh, uh, we're at the stage of our unfoldment where we must consciously participate in our own unfolding. We have, what I, you know, we're made in the image and likeness of God. What that means to me, I mean, God is formless, it's a presence, it's a love, it's beauty, it's not like a man somewhere. But what that means to be made in the image and likeness, it means you have the capacity to think independent of circumstances. So you actually can pull your attention away from circumstances and have a new thought, an inspiration.

• 1:22:57André Duqum?

  So to consciously participate in your own unfolding means that you can actually, um, participate in this evolutionary urge that's within you and set it free and become better versions of yourself. You don't have to wait for a circumstance to change or another person to change, or you don't have to wait for a government to change. You can actually participate in your own unfolding, and that's where we are. As a species to participate at that level rather than to wait to see what's going to happen. It feels like more now than ever, society pulls us into a slumber because we have so much more comfort and convenience than ever before, which is beautiful. Would you say that there's more things you have to guard yourself now to be able to really be in the

• 1:23:41André Duqum?

  participation of paying attention to how your life wants to unfold in that way? It's a combination. One, there's a lot of distractions. You know, the world is full of distractions. And also, I believe we're on the verge of more awakening that's happening now. So on one level, it's more difficult because of distractions. But on another level, it's easier because you have more and more people that are articulating some way, shape, form, or another that you can participate in your own growth. I mean, you go back 30, 40 years ago, you talk, some of the things I was teaching was woo woo. Now it's science, you know? So, so because of that vibrational footprint of so many people participating,

• 1:24:26André Duqum?

  meditation, life visioning, yoga, qigong, you know, so many different things, that that's creating a vibrational footprint for more people to come into that frequency. So on one level, it's difficult because of the crisis we're facing. On another level, it's easier because there's so many more people involved now. How do you see the process then of us habituating into our smallness? If there's this infinite light within us that wants to express creatively in service to the world, but we have these ideologies, dogmas, beliefs that shrink us down into a mold that is conforming to society or fits the economic machine. Right. But that, you know, holds that light in. How do you see that happening? And how do we guard ourselves from, from that continuing to happen?

• 1:25:12André Duqum?

  I think when you look at the propaganda, you look at the media, which is like nefarious hypnotism, the whole media, and this is with all governments pretty much, is to shrink people into being consumers, pretty much, into fit into a mold that can be controlled. So once you know it and you see it, you see it operating, then it has less power over you. But people unconsciously like to conform. They, they don't, they don't want to be outliers, you see? So they'll conform into a kind of a group think about a particular thing. You know, nations will think alike, you know, for. To a degree, and now we're in great polarization, which I think is kind of good for the evolution of the species.

• 1:25:55André Duqum?

  But so we have nefarious hypnotism that's trying to get to habituate us into those smaller versions of ourself. But once an individual establishes an intention and their main intention, intention is to become, I want to grow. I want to be a greater version of myself. I want to contribute to the planet. When an individual establishes that kind of intention, they become available to inspiration. They become available to guidance. They become available to wisdom from their soul that comes in in a language and in a way that they can understand and begin to act upon. Now, interestingly enough, most people come through that door through a crisis of some kind. You know, many people come through it like inside they'll have an aha moment, a sator

• 1:26:39André Duqum?

  oh my god, you know. But many people come through it because they're sick and tired of their life, you know, and then they become available. But you are correct. People become habituated to their limited self. Habits are good if in fact it's a habit for transformation, but just run-of-the-mill habits keep people small. Yeah. I remember one of the first impactful audios that I listened to was by Earl Nightingale, just The Strangest Secret, that talks about how the opposite of courage is not cowardice, but conformity. And living in a society where it's so easy to conform and it's painful to stand out in many different ways.

• 1:27:22André Duqum?

  It's upon us more now than ever to have an intention and vision for our life. And I really love how you speak to that intention deficit disorder that we have. Absolutely. Well, that's where many people live. People will wake up in the morning and they really don't have an intention, you know, they're just going to react to whatever's going on at the office, whatever's going on with traffic, whatever's going on. But without an intention, you know, you're just kind of being buffeted around by the world. So most people, I don't like to use the word most, but in this case, so many people walking asleep that have an intention deficit disorder. And until a crisis happens, then they say, well, I should have had a V8.

• 1:28:07André Duqum?

  I should have been doing something else.

• 1:28:10Speaker 02

  But yeah, we want to establish an intentional life. You know, you want to, you want to wake up with intention. You want to be specific about your intention. You know, whether it's the healing of your body, whether it's what gift you're going to give to the planet. How can I activate the gifts that are within me and share them? You have to have an intention above and beyond consumerism and, and just buying stuff that's going to be in the landfill in 10, 20 years now. Anyway, it has to be, the, the, the soul has such infinite capacities. And we want to set that free. And it's the only way to fly for bliss and joy and ecstasy, actually.

• 1:28:47André Duqum?

  Hmm.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:48André Duqum?

  It's kind of interesting to flip it on its head when so much of us, and I fall prey to this at times, to like live in a future-based proposition, thinking that when I get something.

• 1:28:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:58André Duqum?

  Or if I get something, then I'll be happy one day, you know? Or it'll, it, there's going to be some sort of experience or sensation or feeling of joy that is going to be lasting once something happens.

• 1:29:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:29:09André Duqum?

  And it's just so, so much so the opposite, right? So can you speak about flipping it on its head that if you can embody the, the energy and emotion and vibration and feel attuned to that? That is the, that is the pole, that is the magnet that is going to draw it to you.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  And that, that is the inner work. You're not going to be happy when you establish the joy and the happiness now is the frequency. You live in that and then two things happen. That which you're holding for can manifest, but generally speaking, it's generally bigger than what you're holding in, in the field. Because it's beyond your present paradigm. So it's beyond your, the imaginal realm you're, you're, you're holding. Because there's more good that we can't even see. Cause we can only see from the paradigm we're living in. So if I, if I hold a state of gratitude and thanksgiving now, I agree of happiness, agree of joy.

• 1:30:02Speaker 02

  Then outside where all the blessings are, all the good is outside of my paradigm, I get to be shocked and surprised. About the opportunities that show up for me. So, but you're right, so many people live, you know, when I get this, when I get that, I'll be happy. You're happy for a minute, you know. You get a new car, you're happy until the smell changes. You know what I'm saying? It's all counterfeit temporary happiness. But you can actually sit and actually strike the mystery chord of memory or imagination and feel a degree of happiness, a degree of joy. You can feel that frequency and then train yourself to hang in there.

• 1:30:45Speaker 02

  You know, while you're doing what you're called to do in the world. And then that vibration will reveal itself as doors opening. It will reveal itself as blessings and gifts and things of that particular nature. It's all vibration, you see? So it's not, you're not just attracting something to you. You're actually in resonance with it. And then that field of resonance allows for radiation to take place. You're radiant, and then there's emergence. So it goes attraction, resonance, radiation, emergence. The law of attraction is a linguistic convenience for resonance.

• 1:31:27Speaker 02

  And so if you hold the resonant tone, you start to radiate. So you're not attracting, you're actually radiating the answer vibrationally. And then after, then something emerges. You become a condition for the emergence of good. The same way that if you plant a seed in the ground and the conditions are right, the seed doesn't attract a rosebush. That rosebush emerges from the seed. So in the same way, we have infinite potential, infinite possibilities within us. And as the right condition happens, then the next level of us emerges from that. It's already here, it's not out there. It's here, it's right here, emerges from us. And people will say, oh, you attracted some good stuff.

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it was in here, it just became visible. You see, it's me. Becoming more me. And then, because I'm living in this dimension of time and space, it condenses itself and shows up as form. You see, slowed down vibration.

• 1:32:27André Duqum?

  It feels like there's so much power in the detachment from that preference, because I think the Western mind can really love to latch on to what we're talking about here as a tactic to get things. Instead of, if I source and realize that I am, you know, the source of my own joy and happiness and kindness and grace, and invite these virtues, then I've become successful in that way, because it doesn't really matter, I guess, what the external circumstances are as much, because you've anchored that within your own being. Yeah, it's just easy to view it as a tactic to get things, versus like, no, you got what you want, which is the feeling behind the thing in the first place.

• 1:33:05Speaker 02

  Right. And then the things will show up.

• 1:33:07André Duqum?

  Right.

• 1:33:08Speaker 02

  But they may be better than what you even imagine.

• 1:33:10André Duqum?

  That's what I've always...

• 1:33:11Speaker 02

  Or it'll be legitimate. Like, there's legitimate needs, and they're just things that we want.

• 1:33:16André Duqum?

  Right.

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  And there's nothing wrong with that. It's not, you know, it's not, I can go to hell because you want things. You know, but, but you don't get cluttered with illegitimate needs. It's not necessary, you know? Have the best of whatever you can get. And, and, but your happiness, as you said, is already here. You see? And this has been proven by many people who've been in dire situations. And they had an attitude of joy, even though they were in horrific situations. And then when they got out of that horrific situation, they realized they determined their own attitude. And then that carried them further in life.

• 1:33:55André Duqum?

  It feels like the desires or dreams that we have can only be a recombination of our past memories. So like, you know, if I had a certain car, I want a really nice car. If I had an experience of certain, you know, circumstances happen, it's always informing what our dreams possibly are. And I just really love the understanding of, if you're going to live in the surprise and mystery of life, and the beauty and joy of how it's going to unfold, then it has to unfold greater than you could imagine.

• 1:34:22Speaker 02

  Absolutely. You reenchant the imagination so it doesn't get in your way. But the really great stuff is beyond your imagination. When I look at a lot of things I've had the privilege of being a part of for the last number of years, none of those things were on my vision board. All the stuff, some of the great things I've had an opportunity, that great people have had an opportunity to work with, I didn't imagine that. But it came as an outpicturing of who I was and the gift I wanted to share and how I wanted to be in the world. I look back on it and says, wow, that was really beautiful, that was fantastic. But I didn't even know that existed. You know, I didn't even know I could hang out with the Dalai Lama or something, you know what I mean? And we kick it and work with them three or four or five times, you know.

• 1:35:07Speaker 02

  Calls me and say, I need you to be an aspen. Can you come today? Okay, sure. You know, I mean, that was never a part of, you know, a vision board. But it was a part of my life, you know. Yeah, it's some good stuff here. So you were saying something about the being affected by your past experience, you know. And we want to live in a place where we're catching ideas from the ideasphere, but it's also within us. This is why I teach people to ask, what is it that's trying to emerge through us in the vision process? Just ask. And then your spiritual faculty will get ignited

• 1:35:52Speaker 02

  and the universe answers every question you ask. And you'll start to get parts of yourself that want to be set free. You'll hear it differently. You'll hear it with your awareness, you know. And you can trust it. You can trust your soul.

• 1:36:10Speaker 06

  Hardwired into me is this idea, this false idea that...

• 1:36:19Speaker 06

  That my value and my deservedness to be loved is inextricably linked to my ability to produce or achieve, right? And I will be my own harshest critic. Like, I have a drive to do better and do more and all of these things, but what's behind that? What is the wound that lives underneath that, that's creating that propulsion? And I think it's a lack of self-acceptance and this false idol, which is that the opinions of strangers and the external validations get mistaken for love.

• 1:37:00Speaker 06

  And there's a sense of inherent unlovableity for who I am just as a human being that is overcome only through achievement and accomplishment. And that delusion can be a powerful motor that can get you to achieve things in the world, but ultimately, at some point, you realize like, that that is separating you not only from other people, but from a compassionate relationship with yourself. So, I'm very active in trying to cultivate self-love, and it feels indulgent. It feels undeserved.

• 1:37:44Speaker 06

  You know, it's like, the only way that you overcome that is through actions on behalf of yourself to honor that, right? So, as uncomfortable as it is to say, like, I'm really proud of the fact that I have amazing relationships with my kids, and that I've been in a loving marriage for, we've been together for, coming up on like, 24 years at this point. Like, I'm really proud of that. It was a lot of work.

• 1:38:11Speaker 06

  But I deserve it because I worked hard for it and I am deserving of receiving their love as well, which I probably couldn't say out loud like not that long ago because it felt indulgent or unearned, you know?

• 1:38:31André Duqum?

  Yeah, and you sharing that it both feels like an acknowledgement and also reminder to yourself.

• 1:38:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a practice because you have to overcome that default setting or that wiring through contrary action.

• 1:38:45André Duqum?

  Especially in a society and culture that often celebrates the most high achievers being fueled by that not enoughness that we were talking to and so it's like...

• 1:38:54Speaker 06

  And anything and the self-love is an antagonist to that, like what would happen if I love myself and I muted that motor, then my whole life would collapse. So it's very threatening and confronting because it's our wounds that we misinterpret as superpowers and a distrust of the greater superpower that resides on the other side of overcoming those character defects or those wounds or those traumas.

• 1:39:34André Duqum?

  I feel like as you start to awaken to more of your true nature and you start to tap into the intelligence of your heart, you start to find regulation in your nervous system at a baseline level, like you start to find more ease in your system, there is a whole different place from which you're manifesting your reality in terms of your career, success, your finances, your relationship, everything. And I would just love for you to speak to that, how the more we tap into the heart and as we go kind of up through these stages of, you know, stages of consciousness essentially, the place in which we attract things, people, places and opportunities radically changes. So it's funny, like when you go on a hike, right, Andrea, just imagine any of us going on a hike or a walk, you can only see what you can see, right? So at the bottom

• 1:40:16André Duqum?

  of the hike, you see the parking lot or you see kind of like the little shrubs, I'm thinking about in California where we live. And then as you start to go along the walk, the view changes, right? This is sort of like, I think about the awakening of the heart and the five heart stages.

• 1:40:33Speaker 06

  Your perceptions of life radically change. So it's like you're living in a different reality. And so because you're in a different reality, because you are different, you also start to change your life. So I'll give you a more concrete example. When I think about the periods when I was in the dark heart, I think about how hard life seemed. And the only little lift I could get would be, you know, I used to drink quite heavily and have these partying times. I also think about the relationships that I was in. Because there was so much fear, I chose really nice, but really safe guys that loved me a lot more than I loved them. Because there was this fear of abandonment from my childhood. So I didn't want to be abandoned.

• 1:41:17Speaker 06

  So the fear predominated. So that's what I was creating in my life. And it was also just, you could just see there was limitations in my work and what I was creating. And then when a lot of my life, to be honest, was in the propelled heart, you know, perfectionism, always needing to be number one in the class and always needing to get more and more and the planning and everything. And then it's like, there's so little peace at this stage for most of us. It's like these little ups and downs, the dopamine rush. It's like, oh, look how many people loved this post or this thing did really well. But then there's the big downs. We let the ups in, we let the downs in, like, oh, like, this didn't do as well as I wanted, or, you know, this person didn't ask me out a second date on,

• 1:42:01Speaker 06

  you know, whatever, Bumble or whatever dating app you're on. And so the relationships I chose in that stage were fitting into the plan. Like my ex, right? We knew the same people, we went to the same events. It was like, also, you know, fun and fancy, it just kind of fit in. But there wasn't that deep connection. There was this still trying to fill, there wasn't that fulfillment, right? And so we see it in our lives play out. And so as we start to go into the steady heart and beyond, your life really does radically change in a way that you can't see yet from the earlier fields. Another thing I think maybe we might mention before we go into the Their heart fields is the um, the heart field.

• 1:42:46Speaker 06

  Can I show you here in the book under? Thank you. We still have the um, the galley here. So this was one of the first ways I started to learn about the power of the heart. And um, you know, for anyone struggling, I start to realize.

• 1:43:02André Duqum?

  Put it on screen.

• 1:43:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, there is, um, even right now when we're sitting, there's a Taurus field coming out of the heart. And it's going beyond our skin where we think we end, eight to 10 feet. And it's going out and around and it's a hundred times stronger than the brain. So what's really amazing about this heart awakening work, and we talk about coherence. It means your personal field becomes more harmonious and strong. This literally means, Andre, from a scientific perspective, that you become more magnetic. So it means people start to come to you like, hey, you know, what are you up to? You're just, I don't know, how can I help you? I want to be part of what you're doing. You know, just things naturally start to come.

• 1:43:44André Duqum?

  More coincidence, synchronicities.

• 1:43:46Speaker 06

  Synchronicities, I talk about the, you know, when I was in a clear heart moment in the book. I talk about how I ran into Deepak Chopra on the street after he reviewed one of my books, but I had never met him in person. And from that one meeting, we met for coffee. We decided to write a book together, which later became a New York Times bestseller. These are things that the mind can't plan. Energy doesn't lie. So when you're in the dark heart and the propelled heart, and you're just feeling like you're hustling all the time and that you can't quite get to that success that you want. You're not meeting the right partner. You really want a family. You really want love. You start to work on this incredible heart resonance, this intelligence inside of you. And then all of a sudden, things start to shift and change on the outside. And this has been my personal experience.

• 1:44:29Speaker 06

  This has been the experience of all the people I've been bringing this to. It's so amazing, Andre, because again, the perception from the dark and the propelled heart is like, gotta work harder, more, you know, self-help books. More motivational talks, like just more stuff versus, oh, there's this energy that I can start to work with inside of me.

• 1:44:50André Duqum?

  I love the Tao saying, "The master does nothing yet leaves nothing undone." And it's

• 1:44:55Speaker 06

  One of my favorite texts.

• 1:44:56André Duqum?

  Yeah, and it's it's really arriving at that place as you start to raise through through these different stages, you do experience more coincidence synchronicity, bumping into people on the street, and you go from the logical intellectual planning of your whole life to

• 1:45:12André Duqum?

  really allowing yourself to be surprised by something greater than you could dream of. And that's a really beautiful place to be.

• 1:45:18Speaker 06

  Because your perceptions change as your heart awakens, your thoughts change, and that also means incredible creativity and incredible this creative power awakens, which leads you to inspired action. So it's not that you sit back and you're like, oh, my heart's awakened, everything's going to come to me. What it does mean is that you start to do things in a very different way. You don't have to go about the same arduous uphill, like the mind is very step by step. I have to do this, then I'm going to be promoted to this stage, or I have to go on 50 dates. Statistically, before I meet my partner, whatever it is. The heart is nonlinear and dynamic. There is a force that comes through. So the other thing, Andre, in our culture, in the Western world in general,

• 1:46:03Speaker 06

  there's this idea of like, you know, this is where a lot of the, you know, motivational thinking talks and programs comes from, which can be helpful for some people. But it's often like, I have to awaken, you know, me, like, you know, the movies, like the Die Hard movies, it's like, I have the power, I woke up, like, I can save the planet, or like, I could save the building. It's like, me, my power. Whereas the awakening heart starts to realize more and more, the clear heart, that there's a power moving through me, right? The Tao is like allowing this force to move through you. So it's non-specific, and it's not personal. There's more ego in it, like, oh, I'm so awakened, I'm so enlightened, me, me, me.

• 1:46:47Speaker 06

  Versus, we're all in this, this is moving through me, that heart Field I showed you, it's like, oh, I'm tapping into a different energy field. So it's not like, oh, I'm the source of these miracles and synchronicities. It's that we're operating at a different frequency where things like that tend to happen for anyone who chooses to operate at that frequency. So we can all tap in and that's what's really exciting about this work as well.

• 1:47:13André Duqum?

  We all at different points in our life and we surely know people that set out to become an actor and it's not working out. Or they're looking for this relationship and they're really striving and it's not working out. And whatever the thing is we're trying to go after that we want, right?

• 1:47:30André Duqum?

  And it's not working out. I want to reflect on that just a little bit more because it's tough when things aren't working out the way we want it. We want things to work out how we want them to. That's part of the problem.

• 1:47:42André Duqum?

  And the trust in the unknown and the uncertainty is a beautiful place to arrive to, often difficult to work our way through. And I think in the face of that uncertainty, it can be tough to navigate. When is it time to double down? Or when is it time to let go in the process of going after what I want to go after? And I think the place we're coming from, when we ask those questions and form that decision a lot. And when we're actually in a place of surrender and we've let go our ego imperative of what we say we want from life.

• 1:48:20André Duqum?

  And then we're like, okay, but then there's still a part of us that kind of expects it. I feel like in the death of the expectation of what's going to come in, can something new be born out of that experience, right? But when we say we've surrendered and let go and then you're like, okay, but like now that I've surrendered, like where is that thing?

• 1:48:36Speaker 06

  See, it's like there's fake surrender and there's real surrender, right? Fake surrender is like, and we've all done this, right? There's just bust, I've done it, we've all done it, we all do it in some ways. But this can just bust yourself forever, right? Fake surrender is like when you say, okay, I know I need to let this relationship go as an example. I know I need to let this thing go and, you know, let it go so that it comes back to you. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna let this go, but I really like so that they come back to me. So there still is this part of you that is attached to some version of an outcome that is still based on your identity.

• 1:49:15Speaker 02

  Whatever you manifest and create from your sense of ego identity will be limited because the ego is conditioned from past experience, so it it doesn't see the totality of life. So fake surrender is when you say, okay, I'll surrender so in order that so that I can get the gold, so that X, Y, Z happens. So there still is a kind of attachment or limited expectation in the surrender. Fake surrender. Real surrender is different. Real surrender is when you know, you know that something needs to shift.

• 1:49:56Speaker 02

  You know that if you're honest, yes, it's terrifying, yes, it's scary, but I need to let this go. Like if I'm honest, if I put money concerns aside, if I put what people will say aside, if I put everything aside in my soul, yes, I need to let go. If you feel that, real surrender is the willingness to follow that impulse, to follow that directive without any future projection, analysis of what might or what may not happen when you surrender. Well, if I surrender maybe this way, if I surrender maybe, it's like, I know I need to let go.

• 1:50:40Speaker 02

  This is the guidance I'm given, and if I'm honest and don't BS myself, yes, let go. True and real surrender is the willingness to follow that without any projection into the future of any possibility. Because what I have found is whatever you project into the future will likely be a projection of your ego mind. And that creates a certain limitation on the on the on the flow of the infinite intelligence.

• 1:51:18Speaker 02

  And many of us, we are, because we can only see so much with the ego perception, and now we set our goals and then we get attached to the goals based on our limited ego perception, I'm gonna manifest this, it's gonna be that, it's gonna be that, oh, if I surrender that. But many of us don't realize that we are trying to manifest.

• 1:51:39Speaker 06

  Peanuts. I really want this peanut, Andre. I want this peanut. This peanut's amazing. I'm gonna visualize this peanut. Give me this peanut. You open my pineal gland and see this peanut. The pea, it's gonna be the peanut. But we don't realize it's still a frickin peanut. And maybe like we're so attached to what we think should be and how we think things should be. This little peanut, the peanut could be a relationship. The peanut could be a career. The peanut could be a business partner. The peanut could be, you know, the way you think your career is gonna go. When life is actually trying to bless you with so much grace.

• 1:52:15André Duqum?

  Give you a peanut factory.

• 1:52:16Speaker 06

  And buff, a buffet, right? Of a peanut factory, a buffet, but we're not open to the buffet because we're so attached to the frickin peanut, because the peanut is all that we know and all that we believe. So, look, I'm not saying it's not helpful to set a goal. Set the goal. All I'm saying is move from goal setting to soul setting. Have a shift, open to the deeper impulse, align with that deeper impulse. Set the goal that feels most authentic. Go one hundred percent, go all in with the vision. Go all in. Surrender isn't just, well, I just sit back,

• 1:53:00Speaker 06

  lay on the beach, meditate all day, and it's just gonna show up on my doorstep. That's not how it happens, right? You go all in with what you feel is most true. This is what's most true. This is what lights me up. This is what sets me on fire. And it's not because my parents wanted or my, my friends wanted or the religion wanted. It's just, this is what is my truth in my soul. Go all in on that. But don't attach to the outcome. And don't attach to the pathway and don't attach to how you think it's going to manifest and how you think it's going to look.

• 1:53:39Speaker 06

  Because sometimes the goal that we have, which is based on our current level of consciousness in a given moment. The goal that we have is sometimes really the cosmic carrot that takes us on a journey. The real purpose of a goal is not simply for the manifestation of the goal. The real purpose of a goal and the process of manifestation is not simply for the man. Manifestation itself. The real purpose of a goal and manifestation is for the process and the journey that the pursuit of the goal takes you on.

• 1:54:16André Duqum?

  Who you're becoming in that.

• 1:54:17Speaker 06

  Who you're going to be forced to evolve into, the lessons that you're going to be forced to learn, and who you're going to become in the process of the journey of that goal. That is the real purpose, the evolutionary purpose of the goal. So you could say any real, real goal, any, I don't say good goal, but any real goal

• 1:54:39Speaker 06

  will take you on a journey and force you to evolve beyond your current level of consciousness. And any real goal that you are guided to do when you're following your soul, most of the time, you will have no idea how the hell you're going to manifest it. Because it will be beyond your current ego's capacity of manifestation. And so many times, here's what I found, we, we, we, we ask ourselves this bigger question, okay, what is life seeking to express through me? And then maybe we're giving the guidance.

• 1:55:12Speaker 06

  And many times the intuition that we're given,

• 1:55:16Speaker 06

  intuition, which is the unconditioned energy of our beingness that flows through us into conscious awareness, right?

• 1:55:26Speaker 06

  This intuitive energy, the energy of intelligence, often does not make sense to your conscious mind.

• 1:55:35Speaker 06

  It is like, what? Do that? Go here? Go to Brazil? Do that? Launch a podcast? Why that? Why? I'm not qualified. What? And so what happens is the mind, the ego kicks in and starts to like question like, what do you mean? And how is this going to happen? And, and, and when and how? And so the ego starts kicking in, trying to understand this intuitive guidance with logic. And that, that over an analysis to try to understand it, which is really a strategy to try to have some control, ends up blocking the true flow from happening fully. And so what I would really encourage is that when you feel

• 1:56:16Speaker 06

  this flow, when you feel this intuitive nudging, you don't have to know where you're going. You don't have to know anything. But if you simply say yes to.

• 1:56:30Speaker 02

  The most authentic impulse and you take a step and you follow it and then you go all in as I've been saying without attachment to the outcome. You will find that life will guide you and life will reveal to you exactly what you need for your highest souls growth and evolution in the process of living life.

• 1:56:50André Duqum?

  As Young says, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

• 1:56:56Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, exactly. He says until, until you meet the, the unconscious will meet you on the outside in the events of your life until you meet it on the inside. And you will call it fate. It'll meet you on the outside in the events of your life and you will call it fate. In other words, you'll always think shit's happening to you. Instead of realizing you're actually generating this by being unconscious. And so that's when I say the pain teacher comes to wake you up, right?

• 1:57:24André Duqum?

  And that it's really important to examine where our neuroses are because those are the kind of the doorways into perceiving what our behavioral compensations are because of the psychic stress that we haven't fully dealt with.

• 1:57:35Speaker 02

  That's the pain teacher. So the, the, you know, the pain teacher is really the soul saying. You must take responsibility for what you're creating because ultimately you're God embodied and you have all that power in you. I mean, for a lot of people, that's hard to comprehend, but when you look at what we can create when we're really. Living to our potential, I mean, we have examples all around us, Mozart, Da Vinci, Michelangelo. All, you know, you know, we all know when we're watching an actor or a musician that's in soul.

• 1:58:14Speaker 02

  We feel it, we like, you know, because you cannot tell the difference between who the person is and who they're acting. You know, when you see a, a. Great singer on stage for which I, you know, can give many names, but some of the ones that come to me are people like Ray Charles, or Stevie Wonder, or Carole King, or, you know, I'm showing you how old I am now. You know, Michael Jackson, I mean, you know, there's no question that, that, that was a man who, who expressed himself from his soul, because it moves you so deeply, because you're seeing the potential that lives in you, not realizing that is in you, you projected

• 1:58:57Speaker 02

  onto somebody else. And when you think of all the great geniuses, you know, like, we got airplanes from human beings having these ideas, we've got everything around us, Steve Jobs and the cellphone, I mean, whoever you want to attribute that, Tesla, I mean, the list is so long. These are people that were in-sold, they were in their genius. And in my philosophy and in my experience, every single soul carries a piece of the grand puzzle that is important for helping us realize our potential and realize who and what we really are. And to the degree you transcend those structured stages of consciousness and do not include

• 1:59:38Speaker 02

  them, you limit the likelihood of ever finding the genius within yourself and coming to know thyself, because you are dropping aspects of perception that are absolutely necessary to perceive wholeness. And your genius is an expression of wholeness, it's an expression of the divine, it's expression of the entire cosmos. In fact, none of us could be here without the entire cosmos. When people tell me they're alone and they feel isolated, I'm like, you, you, you really need to spend some time asking yourself, what did it take to create you? And what does it take to sustain you? You breathe 25,900 breaths a day, it came from outside of you.

• 2:00:22Speaker 02

  You drink water, you have to, it came from outside of you. And that water is all over the universe and has probably been around for millions and millions of years. You're, you're made of about 100 trillion cells, depending on whose book you read, 50 to 100 trillion, and each one of them is made of- 100 trillion atoms and somehow it's all dancing and those atoms have been around for billions of years. You eat food that comes from outside you without which you wouldn't exist. Every cell in your body, based on science, turns over every year. So the Andre sitting here is a completely different Andre physically than he was a year ago. And you say, okay, where'd that come from? Well, it came from the periodic table, let's say. Where did that come from? Well, some of it came from the earth, some of it came from the sun. Most people believe that the earth came out of the sun.

• 2:01:06Speaker 02

  You say, where the, where the elements there come from? Well, they came from other stars. Where does that end? It goes through the whole universe. So when you track back what you are as a physical body, you, it takes the entire universe to create every one of us and we're constantly breathing each other. We're, we're, we're, we're breathing air, you know, there's scientific evaluations saying you probably have X number of molecules from the Buddha in you right now and atoms, I mean, like we're all each other and we're all the whole. The whole thing is playing this beautiful game of individuality. Because each one of us is carrying a piece of the puzzle that is absolutely essential.

• 2:01:48Speaker 02

  And if we don't engage that process of cultivating our genius, then we walk around feeling empty all the time. We walk around feeling hungry. We walk around feeling

• 2:02:01Speaker 02

  that we don't fit in or that we're unwanted or we're unneeded or we're not valued. And all of that is the pain teacher saying, hey, you're looking in the wrong place. Quit doing what everybody else wants you to do. Quit doing what you think you have to do for money because who cares about all your money? If it's not filling you with love, you're going to spend all that money trying to medicate the pain teacher. And so I think the pain teacher is the soul coming to say, you're moving in the wrong direction. It's kind of like a GPS. If you're with the wrong person in a relationship, the GPS starts buzzing. You're, you're going right when you should be going left. If you're doing. What you're doing for money, but it's not making you happy. The GPS says wrong direction. It's gonna cause pain.

• 2:02:47Speaker 02

  If you're drinking more coffee, you're doing more drugs than you can integrate and use effectively. The GPS goes off and the soul says, hey. And one of the realities of being who and what we are as an expression of the divine. We have to take responsibility for what we create. God's got nobody to blame. And so neither do we. And so the paradox of it all is that we have this built in guidance system. And unfortunately. Unfortunately, a lot of religious teachings. Knock, knock your awareness of that system out. And so you get caught in shame and guilt and sin and all this stuff and not realize. That a lot of what you're feeling is just the heart saying. You're going in the wrong direction.

• 2:03:32Speaker 02

  And so ultimately, I think. Back to your first question is we're all here. To create together as a family, as a human family. And we're here to create. Beauty, good, truth. And we're here to. Give. The genius of ourselves to each other, because every time I pass my genius on to you or your genius on to me. We each carry a little bit more genius. And when I get to experience Andre's genius or. Zach Bush's genius or Ken Wilber's genius or Houston Smith's genius. Or an amazing chemist genius or. You know.

• 2:04:14Speaker 02

  Bruce Lipton's genius of epigenetics every time, all of a sudden I see more and more and I see more of myself. And I feel more amazed by all these people and more connected to them. And I see the genius of. The animal kingdom and the genius of the birds and. And all of a sudden. I progressively go, oh, my God, this is a fricking miracle. This is, this is absolutely mind bogglingly beautiful and stunning. But to the degree that we transcend without including. We cannot see the genius in ourselves and we can't see the genius in each other. And so we keep creating more and more of what we don't want, which ultimately just leads to, you know, as Rumi says,

• 2:04:57Speaker 02

  "The function of a broken heart is to let your love pour out." So the question is, how broken do we have to get to get the love to pour out? When legitimate spiritual teachings is a path to making love every day? And to the degree that you live a life, like obviously you love what you're doing, your whole environment is saturated with, "This is me and this is who I am and this is why I'm here." I mean, it's pouring through the walls, right? If I put you in someone else's studio and said, "Now, do your thing", you would feel like you're wearing the wrong underwear, the wrong shoes. You're like, "I can't, this is not a reflection of my being," right?

• 2:05:41Speaker 02

  Your environment is the physical manifestation of your mind. I am sitting inside of your mind. And it's beautiful. And that's what we give to each other.

• 2:05:52André Duqum?

  This balance between talent and work ethic, what's the balance between the two in finding success in your creative expression?

• 2:05:59Speaker 03

  I'm a great believer that work is everything, you know? Particularly for a writer, because a writer has a long career, you know? You can be 70 years old, 80 years old, still working, you know? And, you know, I've said this before, that like for 30 years, well, now people tell me that I have talent. But for 30 years, they told me I was a bum, you know? And I was a bum because I hadn't learned how to do it. You know, I didn't have the confidence, I hadn't found a voice or anything like that. So, work, I think, is... You have to have, obviously you have to have some talent. But, work is 90% of it, I think.

• 2:06:44Speaker 03

  You can get better. That's the good news, you know? No matter how bad a first draft is, the ninth draft can be really good. Or no matter how bad you were when you're 26, when you're 46, you could be really good. You know, where you look back at what you wrote at 26, you're like, "This is dog shit," you know? But I'm not doing that anymore, I've learned. I can do better. So the good news for anybody that's struggling, I think, is that work does pay off. You can get better. You can learn more. You can improve.

• 2:07:18André Duqum?

  Yeah. To me, it feels very sad of, you know, there's that one quote of like the richest place on earth is the graveyard. All the people's die dreams, you know, that that weren't expressed that go there. And I want to speak a little bit more into resistance with the capital R and its manifestations, because part of that creative expression unlocking and, you know, being surprised by yourself. One of the struggles I find, you know, personally, sometimes and often, you know, with a lot of people in the creative process is because we live in a world of infinite distractions, procrastination is very easy. And so I'd just love for you to share as, you know, how to overcome procrastination as, you know, resistance to just

• 2:08:03André Duqum?

  putting your butt in the seat in writing or whatever people's creative expressions are. Cause I don't know how many people listening to the show right now are writers, but we all use our creative energy in some capacity, right?

• 2:08:13Speaker 03

  Well, you know, the like, the whole subject matter of the war of art, my book, The War of Art, is about what I call resistance with a capital R, which is that

• 2:08:24Speaker 03

  that voice in our head that tells us, you know, we're not good enough. Our idea isn't good enough. We're too old. We're too young. We're too fat. We're too thin. We went to school to blah, blah, blah. And the other aspect of that is procrastination, the susceptibility to distraction, going down rabbit holes and, you know, clickbait and stuff like that, and other things like perfectionism, where we'll spend all day working on one paragraph instead of moving forward. And there's a million ways that our, our, our, our ego will sabotage us, you know? And to me,

• 2:09:03Speaker 05

  Job one of any creative person is to, is to acknowledge that that is, you know, there is an enemy and the enemy is you, you know, the enemy is me. It's in, it's in us, it's there the minute we wake up in the morning. It's a dragon we have to slay every morning before we even sit down to work. Work is, that's easy compared with, uh, like in The War of Art, it says something like, there's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't know. And the secret is this, it's the writing is not the hard part. What's hard is sitting down to write. And I believe that completely. If you, and what we all have to do in our own way, and everybody does it differently,

• 2:09:45Speaker 05

  is find some way to slay this dragon every morning to, to be able to work. Obviously, if you can't work, you can't do anything. But, um, the first step to that, in my opinion, is recognizing that there is this negative force. You know, you sit down at the blank page and it radiates off that blank page, right? You know, let's go to the beach, you know, let's smoke a joint, let's whatever, right? Something that, that the resistance is always trying to stop us from doing our work. So if we can believe that, accept it, feel it inside us, then we can overcome it. We can dismiss it and just say, well, bullshit, I'm just gonna sit down, do my work.

• 2:10:27Speaker 05

  And it's, to me, it's like jumping into a cold pool. It's hard when you're standing on the edge, but once you're in the water, in other words, once you start writing or dancing or doing whatever it is you're gonna do, then, you know, that fear goes away. And fear is a huge part of it too, Andre, right? It's like fear of success, fear of failure, fear of destitution, fear of embarrassing yourself, fear of looking like an idiot. And somehow, we all have to get past that.

• 2:10:57Speaker 05

  You know, that I don't give a shit, I'm gonna do it anyway. The pain, when the pain of not doing the work becomes worse than the pain of doing the work, then we'll actually sit down and do it. But the good news is, once we start to do it, immediately, everything is okay.

• 2:11:14André Duqum?

  What really separates creatives that are able to find success, which you can define in any which way, you know, for you. But if you want to make a career out of it and be able to sustain yourself through your art, I feel like the difference between creatives that make it there and don't is that devotion to the whatever it takes mentality and like working through all those feelings of self doubt. And I just have seen with my artist friends who like maybe take a break, have not had, have made music for a little bit. They're doing their own thing and then they come back and like, do I still got it? You know, all like all these things that, and so looking back on those times where you've had those emotions. I guess what wisdom, any other thoughts you have when those stuff, when that stuff comes up now of,

• 2:11:58André Duqum?

  yeah, imposter syndrome and all these things?

• 2:12:00Speaker 06

  I would say honestly, just do everything else besides whatever it is that you're like tripping about. So for me, it was, am I taking care of my body? You know, let's start there, like what are you eating? What time are you waking up? What routines do you have? Is it gonna be yoga today? Is it gonna be kickboxing? Like, put something on your schedule. Wake up every single day with some kind of purpose to do something healthy for your body. Food, workout, stretching, meditation, whatever it is. Do something for your body every single day. And once I started to get a routine back going with that, it was like, oh duh, how could I forget? That like, I do better when I feel better. It's just such a simple concept, but um, yeah. If you focus on every single thing else, then whatever you're worried about starts to figure itself out. So it started with making sure my body was good.

• 2:12:45Speaker 06

  And then once I like had those check ins, then it was, all right, now when it comes to writing like, don't put the pressure on it being like a song all the time. Like, what are your thoughts today? How do you feel today?

• 2:12:57Speaker 02

  What are you grateful for? What are your goals? Where do you want to be in the next however many years? Like, get back to writing, just in general, like being in a creative writing class. Like, give yourself a prompt. Do something that isn't just like, I need to make a song because I need to turn in this album. Leave that over there, come back to it later. Uh, so, taking care of my body for sure. Um, giving myself writing exercises for sure. And just being in student mode overall just helped me like, get rid of whatever that stress was during that time. So if I needed to find a masterclass, a documentary,

• 2:13:32Speaker 02

  uh, somebody else's album, a music video, it was just like, get back into being a fan because you've been in the field for so long that it seems like you forgot what it's like to like, find something new that has nothing to do with you and to just appreciate it and feel excited about that. So, um, those are like a couple of things for sure. And I'm still in fam mode right now. Like, the last three years, I feel like my curiosity, just as far as other people, has like gone back up, which was really what got me going in the first place. Like, I, I remember doing my own thing and then discovering some of my favorite artists. Like, I remember Frank Ocean in the beginning. I remember The Weeknd in the beginning and Janae Aiko and, um, James Fauntleroy.

• 2:14:13Speaker 02

  And it was like all of these things that just excited me so much that I ran to work on my things. It was like, ooh, that gives me such a good feeling. I want to give that feeling to somebody else. So, being back in fam mode the last few years has been like, the upside to like everything that I've been doing creatively. Like, I've just been going to concerts and, uh, what was it? Day before yesterday, I went to a Claro concert. And I didn't hit anybody on the management side. I didn't want to bother anybody. I bought me a ticket on Ticketmaster. I put a scarf over my head, shades on my face, hat down low. I stood in a G A line outside, scanned my ticket to get in, and I just enjoyed the show by myself. Took myself there and just enjoyed myself in the crowd and watched the show from beginning to end.

• 2:14:57Speaker 02

  And like moments like those just remind me of how I felt in the very beginning. It was like, don't you ever like lose that feeling or let that feeling get away from you? Because it's nothing more pure than just like being in a space that's safe and everybody's like. Feeling the same thing and the music is beautiful and it's about someone else, but you can relate to it. And um, yeah, like I, I need that, you know, in order to feel inspired. And I think I forgot it for a bit, but I'm back at the place where it's just like, no, I need to, I need to be out here and I need to be outside, but not in that type of way. Like I wanna go outside and like do something that just makes me feel good.

• 2:15:34André Duqum?

  How have you come to change what you see, like how you value yourself as a human being? And also in relation to self-worth, when the externalities of success, you know, fluctuate with your career, when you have a number one and then, you know, there's downtime or like, um, how, how do you see yourself as a, how do you value yourself and like, how do you come into relation with self-worth?

• 2:15:55Speaker 05

  Well, I definitely keep a daily practice. That is something that, you know, um, I would advise to all the men out there and young men, you know, um, keep a daily practice, you know, that allows you to tap in into the mental, the physical and the spiritual, you know, um, I do that with working out every day or dancing and moving my body or, you know, I'll do some breath work. I think having a schedule has allowed me to, um, stay grounded and then also maturing. Maturing have really helped me, uh, understand that going slow is going fast, you know,

• 2:16:35Speaker 05

  and being able to really be present in all of the moments because, you know, um, I, I was just telling my boy this, when I got nominated for a Grammy, you know, it didn't even mean anything to me, you know, that's how much, you know, I was not present, you know, and I didn't like that, I didn't like that, I wanted to, even though it was a nomination and, you know, it wasn't that I won one, but it just was that like, I had so much on my mind at the time that I wasn't even able to be present, I didn't like that, you know what I mean? So life has definitely showed me the importance of, you know, taking time for yourself, you

• 2:17:17Speaker 05

  know, enjoying your own company, showing up and giving people, you know, what it is that you want within yourself.

• 2:17:26Speaker 05

  The importance of that in the workplace and everywhere you go, you know, even the grocery store. You know, I mean, um, just living in a way that's purposeful. Uh, those ups and downs has gave me a great sense of value. And I understand even with, you know, um, my music, um, all of the art that I share and, and make myself available to, that even in that, you know, I have purpose and it's not just about, you know, now we want number ones, don't get me wrong, you know what I'm saying? But this season that I'm in, eh, in my, you know, entertainment experience,

• 2:18:10Speaker 05

  I've arrived to the point to where, you know, now fans are coming up to me and people that have appreciated my music are telling me how my music has helped them, you know, through certain situations and, you know, if I'm gonna do anything, then it's like, that's the effect that I want, you know? That could be one person, it could be a hundred thousand people to arrive to that point to where it's like, okay, yeah, the work is working, you know, um, I'm doing exactly what I need to do. Being able to look at that, being able to appreciate those down moments, uh, as, as we would call them down, maybe we should call them plateau, you know what I'm saying? Because, uh, people think that it's an up and down thing,

• 2:18:52Speaker 05

  but it's really a, it's a rising thing, you know what I mean? And we just arrived at different plateaus, you know? Maybe sometimes we have to go back, you know, to realize and recognize some lessons we may have like, you know, forgot. Because that's definitely what the Millennium Tour was for me, you know, um, sidebar, you know, when I went on the Millennium Tour, and I, I speak about that in the book as well, you know, it wasn't something that I wanted to do, you know? But the universe propped this opportunity up for me to be able to. Go back and remember, you know, and um that's what life is and I'm realizing it more and more. A lot of the things that we are already innately in contact with,

• 2:19:35Speaker 05

  we've always been in contact with, you know, we we just had to remember. You know what I mean? So life is a grand remembrance. And I'm so, you know, happy to be in this position because I remember people would be like, why is he so happy? You know, why, why, you know, why is he dancing all of the time? You know, I mean, and I just realized now like yo, joy was just inside of me, you know, and I it had to, it had to move around. It had to let loose, you know, I had to find out things. It had to go through, you know, being disappointed. It had to go through being feeling, you know, um betrayed and and

• 2:20:18Speaker 05

  you know, that's what my journey was, you know what I'm saying? And I'm happy to to be able to go through this experience because, you know, without that experience, there's really, there's no information, there's no testimony, as they say, there's no realizations, you know, you don't come to nothing, you gotta go through some things. And life is just powerful like that. And that's why it's important for platforms like, you know, yourself, to know thyself, to get to know who you are so you know who you want to be.