13. On Becoming Conscious (or) The Pylon and the Pier

It was the Friday after Thanksgiving in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, so instead of treating it like a regular workday, I decided to take off on a long run. My intention was to begin running into a new future, to run my way out of the subterranean hole I had fallen into, the likes of which I had not known since my mother passed away and my house burned down.

As I ran along the narrow sidewalks of Ancha de San Antonio, I turned left towards Parque Jaurez, ran up the north side of the park, and began running the stairs near the Paseo del Chorro. While ascending the stairs, a peculiar, unexpected thought popped into my mind: “Good things are about to happen to me.”

Now before I proceed, Dear Reader, if you are going to trust me as your narrator, I feel I have to admit something to you. Before I had time to fully register the thought, “Good things are about to happen to me,” meaning before the thought had time to register, assimilate, and/or entrain with my body—before the thought had the time to create a corresponding neural network for its existence, and ultimately it’s manifestation—like a bartender at closing, I threw that thought out on its ass and shut it down as quickly as possible.

The extermination of such a thought was an all too familiar act of fear, contraction, and limitedness, albeit an unconscious one. Nonetheless, in the same way malware affects the function and effectiveness of a computer, for a large portion of my life these unconscious programs have been running in the background of my awareness. There is a silver lining, however. I am happy to report that as soon as I shut that thought down, a moment of self-awareness occurred. I simply observed my thought. By observing the thought, I was able to bring forth from the darkness of the unconscious the light of a new awareness. What does that mean?

New awareness is expanded consciousness, so to combat the negative voice that so rudely interrupted my future, I consciously began repeating in my mind over and over, “Good things are about to happen. Good things are about to happen.” In repeating this mantra only a few times, like the moment when grinding gears on a bike finally shift into gear, the energy of the consciousness that produced the thought, “Good things are about to happen to me,” clicked into my being. In that moment, I allowed myself to feel the energy of my future—and I can tell you it was as refreshing as it was titillating.

In that elevated, expansive state, I transcended an old form, an old pattern of the person who fell into darkness. Like any training or practice, while I would need to continue working on embodying this energy every day, every time I made the effort to embody it, I was pushing tinfoil. This self-awareness (or awakening) was a tear in the seam of an old form and pattern I have clung to for most of my life. Why? Because to a certain degree it’s safer to live in the known—a somewhat linear, predictable path that doesn’t require me to stretch outside of my comfort zone.  

To bring the light of consciousness to the dark corners of the unconscious was a moment of triumph for mind over matter, because it was not actually my consciousness that shut down the thought of “Good things are about to happen me.” It was the old habits, old forms, old patterns, and old wounds—unconscious programs that exist in the body as feelings, reactions, and emotional triggers. The summation of these repeated patterns causes the body to function as the unconscious mind. Perhaps at this moment you are thinking, If I stepped out of the paradigm of the known and stepped into the paradigm of the unknown, what could happen? The answer is infinite possibilities of rich, abundant, experiences in love, career, family, connectedness, and so on. Perhaps you would agree we could call this the fruition of our dreams.

According to the quantum model, if I step out of my resting or baseline state of being (the known) to embody and/or become the energy of my future (the unknown), then I am casting an electromagnetic signature into the quantum field, an infinite field of information that exists outside of time and space where all possibilities exist as energy and frequency. Therefore, when you become the frequency of your future self, a self which already exists in the field, as you connect with the energy of your future self, you pull possibilities towards you. This is, as Dr. Joe Dispenza says, how you become a vortex to your future. It’s also the truth of who and what we really are; consciousness animating matter.

And so as I embodied the thought of my future (that is to say, who I was becoming and who I could become), because thought is energy, that thought expanded the energy and frequency of my future into my body. This is the process whereby we heal. It’s also the process whereby we create, but are they not one in the same?

What all of this adds up to is that if we are to evolve as human beings, we need to surrender the old, limited ideas and aspects of ourselves that no longer serve us. This is the power of consciousness becoming awakened. It is what enables us to be energetic snakes and butterflies in human flesh. To not become aware of the unconscious programs that run our life is to live as a diminished potential of our highest self-expression.

The unique aspect of humanity that gives us domain over all other animals on the Earth is the power to become awakened. This power is our divinity—that greater aspect of humanity that calls us to be something more, that calls us as consciousness to evolve through the physical experiences of our senses. To say this more simply, the mind can train the body to be its servant. This servitude arises through heart and brain coherence, the unification of which turns the body into an instrument of higher consciousness. Like the snake, it’s this ascension into higher states of consciousness that allows us to molt old parts of ourselves, and like the butterfly, what allows us to transform from one state to another. As we do this over and over, it is not the physical that is ultimately molting and transforming, it is the internal—it is the individual aspect of consciousness in service to the transformation of the universal consciousness. Let’s look at this in a slightly more down-to-Earth way.

For a moment, let’s think of the old self as the remaining pieces of a decrepit pier whose utility has passed. Piece by piece, while time has dismantled the pattern of what was once a pier, a single pylon stands obstinate, clinging to what it understands to be its nature and form. Rather than surrender to the tides, it becomes an immovable force by which nature, in this case water, must circumvent it. This remaining pylon of the pier clings to the idea of itself as a pier because it is a safer, more known way to exist in the world. But if we want to evolve as individuals, or even continue existing as a species, it’s time to let go of the limited constructs that no longer serve us.

We only need to turn on the television to see that the outdated constructs of the old world are falling away around us. It’s important to remember, however, that our global external reality is nothing more than a reflection of our individual internal reality. The old is falling away so something new can be born, but birth is not an easy process.

What is being born is the awakening of a new planetary consciousness, but global awakening begins within each individual. In this moment of history, all of us are being called to surrender old ways, old patterns, and antiquated concepts of being so as to step into the new consciousness that is being birthed. I not only see this happening in my own life, but I feel it…and still the internal battle rages within as I cling to old ideas of self. I cling to the last standing structures, the last patterns, the last remaining vestiges that represent my old, limited ways of being. It is not an easy process, but a necessary one.

If we are to let go of these old forms, we must first ask of ourselves: If I am not the pylon and no longer the pier, then who am I? Who will I be if I step out of the patterns and prison of my own making and thinking?

The answer is I will become freedom itself, and within the limitless energy of freedom, I am free to create any life or reality I desire.

Like to read? Check out this list of some of my my favorite books.

Like to listen? Check out this narrated excerpt from Chapter 9 of my book. It features music from my book’s soundtrack. This song, People Zoo, also from the soundtrack, is why I named my blog People Zoo.

12. A List of My Favorite Books (that come to mind)

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

I carried this 900-page novel with me throughout India for three months, which added quite a bit of unnecessary weight to my pack. (Pro Travel Tip: Bring a Kindle or eReader.) Every time I picked up this book, after reading the first paragraph I had to put it down. Why? Because I was so busy volunteering, writing, and creating, that I knew if I started reading the book, it would overtake my life. This book has one of the best opening paragraphs I’ve ever read. I love the language Roberts uses, the scenes he creates, and the sentiments he expresses throughout the book.

This extraordinary tale is based on Gregory David Roberts’ life, which included escaping from a maximum security prison in Australia and hiding out in the slums of Mumbai, India. That’s when the story really gets good. I’ve never read a 900-page novel, and I can’t imagine there’s one more engaging. There are so many lines in this book I wish I wrote. You won’t want to put this one down. Here’s the first paragraph: 

"It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life."

Narcissus and Goldman by Hermann Hesse

When I was younger, people used to ask me, “Well, what do you want to write about?” At the time, I would just say, “You know, life,” as if they understood what that meant to me. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was trying to express an ever-growing, ever-expanding feeling within me—and that if I didn’t express it, it would destroy me. It was that feeling that called me into the world to search for my own expression of it. This is at the heart of my own book, a book which required me to go out into the world to live and discover in order to express it. For me as a writer, my 15-month odyssey was a journey into heart of my self in the hopes of discovering something about the heart of the universal self. That’s why beyond Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce, and On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, Narcissus and Goldmund is probably one of my life’s most influential works of art.

Published in 1930 and written by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse, it’s the story of a thinker (Narcissus, a young, brilliant scholar at a cloister school) and Goldmund (an artist and one of his prize students). Goldmund wants to be like Narcissus and live a cloistered life of the mind, but Narcissus shows Goldmund his life is about discovering his own heart, a heart that is meant for the world, not meant the cloister. Goldmund leaves the monastery and has many loves and adventures as he searches for the meaning of life, or rather, his own meaning of life. Along the journey, Goldmund awakens to his own artistic talent.

The Tender Bar by JR Moehringer

This is a touching, beautifully written, masterly crafted coming-of-age story that I’ve probably read three times. As a young boy, J.R.’s father abandoned him and his mother. His father was still in his life at a distance, however. His father was a New York radio, so as a boy J.R. would sit on the front steps of his Long Island, New York house and listen to his father’s voice on the radio. In his absence, the main male figure, his uncle, was a bartender at a bar on Long Island. This is the story of a boy who’s trying to become a man, his romance with the bar in which he was raised, the characters who inhabited it, his acceptance to Yale, and ultimately his journey towards becoming a New York Times journalist. This is one of my favorite books.

Becoming Supernatural: How Common People Are Doing the Uncommon by Dr. Joe Dispenza

According to the quantum model, all disease is a lowering of frequency. That’s why Dr. Joe, a friend and mentor, teaches meditation all over the world through the lenses of neuroscience and quantum physics. As his students learn to tap into the energy of the quantum field, the results are magnificent transformations and healings of biblical proportions. His cutting edge research is uncovering what was formerly known as truths by ancient cultures and what today could be labeled as “woo-woo.” At his workshops all over the world, as his students learn to tap into the field, and individually and collectively create more coherent energy, his students are healing themselves of Stage IV cancer, past traumas, anxiety, genetic disorders, MS, lupus, and much, much more. “Science is the new language of mysticism,” says Dr. Joe Dispenza.         

Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) by Jeff Tweedy

I am a sucker for rock autobiographies, especially ones where we can learn about an artist’s successes, struggles, and what they had to do in order to overcome themselves. Honest, vulnerable, raw, funny, and authentically Jeff Tweedy, this book catalogs his humble mid-west upbringing, the birth and destruction of his first band Uncle Tupelo, and the rise of his band Wilco. Along his life’s journey, he intimately comes to know tragedy, loss, and addiction, which he works hard to uncover its root causes. He writes with humor, humility, insight, and aplomb, and the audio book is especially enjoyable. In fact, I finished the audio version in three days and then listened to it again. What is great about the audiobooks is hearing conversations between Tweedy and his wife and Tweedy and one of his sons. I especially like this quote from the book:

 “I think artists create in spite of suffering, not because of suffering. I just don’t buy it. Everyone suffers by degrees and I believe everyone has the capacity to create. But I think you’re one of the lucky ones if you’ve found an outlet for your discomfort or a way to cope through art.”

My entire reading list could be autobiographies by musicians , artists, and writers, but alas—in the name of diversity, I had to make some choices. I chose this book because it is the most recent one I have consumed. Other notables include: Life, by Keith Richards, Scar Tissue, by Anthony Keidas, Just Kids by Patti Smith, The Universal Tone, by Carlos Santana, Beastie Boys Book, by Adam Horowitz and Michael Diamond.

Lit by Mary Karr

Author of The Liar’s Club and The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr is a master of the insightful memoir. In this memoir, we follow her decent into alcoholism, the many ways in which it destroyed her life, the surprising course of her resurrection from its grip, and how it affected her career as a writing professor. This is another book where I wish I had written some of the lines she wrote. Someday I would love to sit across from Mary and discuss the craft of writing and the writing life with her over tea.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

Published in October, 2000, when I first read this book I was disappointed in the second half. The first half is a memoir of his life, which included not remembering writing Cujo because he had a plethora of booze, pills, and cocaine in his writing desk. I wanted to know more about the writing life. We know the rest—he overcame his addictions to become one of the most successful commercial fiction writers ever.

When I read this book again years later as professional writer, I realized just how important the second half of this books is for both wannabe and experienced authors, which is why this is a book I recommend to my writing coaching clients. It is a meditation on both writing, the writing life, the publishing world, and the nuts and bolts of writing.

The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff

Three pivotal events at age 17 defined who I would become in the future.

1. On September 29th, 1991, I first laid pen to paper when I began keeping a journal.

2. An incredibly powerful mushroom trip at a Grateful Dead concert awakened me to a greater level of consciousness, awareness, and the connectedness of the human experience.

3. This book.  
   
   After years of Catholic schooling, at age 17 this book was my first introduction to eastern philosophy, which I would later major in during my days at university. While I haven’t read this book in decades, I do remember that it’s profundity is its utter simplicity. It awakened me to the notion that there’s a much more simpler way to exist and flow through life, and this way is to be like water—to take the path of least resistance. This is the way of the Tao.

The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis by Annie Jacobsen

There was another war besides the Cold War between the United States and Russia. For more than 50 years, the United States government has been performing experiments in ESP and psychokinesis, the purported ability to move or deform inanimate objects, such as metal spoons, through mental processes. These experiments were performed throughout all branches of the U.S. intelligence agencies and military services, including the CIA, DIA, NSA, DEA, the navy, air force, and army—and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The players these government programs hired were involved in locating fugitives, freeing hostages in high profile, international cases, and even discovering the infamous Russian submarine that the movie The Hunt For the Red October was based upon. It’s a fascinating read and a look at some of history’s biggest events through new lenses and unlikely ways.

The Book of Knowing and Worth by Paul Selig

In 1987, a spiritual experience left Paul Selig with the ability to be a clairvoyant, making him one of the foremost spiritual channels working today. Whoever or whatever is speaking through Paul, it is a wisdom beyond religion and beyond the ages. As one of seven channeled works, this book will be powerful for whoever chooses to internalize the empowering message found within. It’s also worth noting that this book was a winner of the 2014 Nautilus Award, which represents "Better Books for a Better World" and the Silver Award in the category of Religion /Spirituality: Other Traditions.

11. Big Love, Big Wounds, Big Change, and Big Gratitude

“The good news is you love very deeply,” said my friend Linda over a glass of Brunello. “The bad news is, you love very deeply.”

It certainly wasn’t how I imagined my life in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico would turn out. Then again, life rarely does. After 15 months of a long distance relationship, I moved south of the border for love. While I was still three hours away from where she lived in Mexico City, at least it was better than 2,300 miles away from my home in Seattle, Washington. Before the first month was out, however, the relationship imploded, leaving me exiled in a foreign country and grieving over an imagined future that would never be.  “Big love reveals big wounds,” my friend Beth Bell says.

The thing with relationships is that they are about a shared frequency, time, and place during the evolution of our soul’s journey. Very often we begin in the same frequency as our lover, but sometimes the soul’s journey moves one or both into a different frequency; not necessarily higher or lower, just different. I had to accept that the greater aspect of our soul’s intersection was to put each of us on a new soul path and journey. As Dr. Joe Dispenza says, “When you remove the emotional charge from a painful experience, it becomes wisdom.”

When the relationship ended I fell into a deep hole, a hole from which it was hard to see the light. As a result, I stopped doing the things that were loving to me; writing, exercising, creating, meditating, being social, and so on. The thing is, when you fall into these holes, from your subterranean vantage point, you can’t see what’s around you—and if you can’t see what’s around you, then you forget how much there is to be grateful for.   

One recent evening on a walk through my beautiful, adopted Mexican town, I experienced a vivid moment of clarity. I realized that long before the relationship ended, my life had been shifting—and all along I had been desperately resisting it. Whether I liked it or not, the tectonic plates of my life were recalibrating beneath my feet, rearranging and restructuring the intersection of my internal and external world. As a result, I was desperately holding my life in a vice grip, and it was desperately struggling to breath. It finally took the dismantling of this relationship to realize I was in one of my life’s greatest initiations. When you’re in these spaces of initiation, what I am learning is that it’s not so much about embracing change as it is allowing it.

I am a work in progress.

I have been in this space of the unknown countless times in my life, in fact, I even wrote a book about being in the unknown. Theoretically you’d think I would feel comfortable in this space, but I’d be lying if I said I did. To jump into the unknown, to do the deep work of the soul is to find yourself in an endless labyrinth where you are not only called upon to make decisions, but to trust that those decisions are in alignment with your highest self.

Our external life is always going to shake us up, this is after all what life is all about—to rattle us out of our slumber. But it’s how we meet these external shakeups from an internal perspective that determines the duration and degree of our disorientation and discomfort. Personally speaking, I am in one of the greatest unknowns in my life, and I am so wide open and so far out in the unknown that there’s nothing left to shelter me—not a tree nor a toadstool. I’m on a lifeboat in the center of a vast ocean of the unknown, and the only thing I have to protect myself is a LifeVest made of surrender and trust.

When you’re in these spaces, it seems like a time of action—to start rowing, planning, plotting, or reading the stars for direction—but instead I believe it’s a time to go inward and be still. It is a time to take the remaining disparate pieces of what you knew as your former life and begin to shape matter and our external experience through consciousness and intention. It’s also a time to look closely at why these shakeups happened, because when we’re paying attention, shakeups lead to awakenings.

Part of what I have awakened to is the fact that for most of my life I’ve been holding on to dormant pains from the past. Like an old t-shirt you can’t throw away, for reasons you can’t name, this pain had become incredibly familiar and comfortable, and yet I know I have outgrown it and that it’s not really who I am. I’ve been so wrapped up in this pain—what I call in my book a soul ache—that I haven’t actually been able to see what I have before me, who I have become, and how I’m living the dream of my 17-year-old self. That dream was a dream dedicated to the pursuit of art and the freedom of my soul’s expression. It was a dream where I was free to roam the world, meet fascinating people, have experiences that caused my soul to grow, expand, and evolve, and to be able to express those experiences so that hopefully others would be able to see their own lives in the reflection of my own.

While by no means is my life perfect, in most regards I have managed to create the life I’ve always wanted to live. I’ve managed to express in a book what I’ve been trying to articulate since I was 17 years old, a journey that took more than 20 years. It was only through the experiences provided by time and space that I would have enough life experience to paint a picture in words of the intangible thoughts, feelings, and emotions of my soul’s journey.

***

Surrounded by a rim of mountains, the spires of grandiose gothic churches, calles lined with colorful facades, and rickety cobblestone streets, I live a life of freedom in one of the most beautiful cities in Mexico. I am constantly surrounded by and meeting interesting artists, creatives, and masters of energy and consciousness from all over the world. But most importantly, I am free to create the life I want to live, and this is one of the most important things I’ve forgotten during my current iteration and initiation of self.

Know that I don’t say this to be braggadocios, dear reader. In fact, the truth is I am giving myself a pep talk, and in doing so, I hope to be giving you one as well (if you are in a similar space). If you are going through an initiation in your life—and if some days you find yourself wondering how much longer you can last in this initiation, as well as dreaming of how much easier it would be to go back to the old, familiar self—I want to encourage you to look around you with awakened eyes at the abundance of blessings that surround you. Know that the pain and discomfort you are experiencing now will in fact become one of your greatest teachers and gifts in the future.

I also want to say that if you too are suspended in the anxiety of the unknown and living in a state of resistance, identify what you are resisting, release the resistance, and allow for the new to come forth. We are, after all, energy organized as matter, and we exist in an infinite field of energy, energy that calls us to become more coherent energy, for it’s that coherence that brings us closer to the truth of who we are as wholeness and oneness. It is the nature of energy to flow, so be the conduit for whatever this new thing is within you that is trying to be born. And remember, this is the time and space when we are called on the most to create, surrender, and trust. When you experience a great loss in your life, no matter what it is, our natural inclination is to lament the loss and close our hearts, but instead, as the poet Dylan Thomas said, “Do not go gently into that good night…Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

I think the best way to do that is through gratitude, so I am going to call on you to do the same. For the next 21 days I am going to practice gratitude. Why? Because gratitude is one of the highest frequencies, frequency alters matter, and our physical existence is made of matter. You can practice gratitude however you feel fit, but one of the structural elements of my book, and a practice I have used since 2010, is to write down five things you are grateful for and five things you want to create.  

If you too are carrying around pain from the past, I will also ask you to leave it by the side of the road. It may be comfortable, and you may have some nostalgic feelings towards it, but it’s no longer you. It is only in surrendering this part of yourself that you can allow a new aspect or dimension within you to be birthed.

Finally, I want to leave you with one of my favorite poems by the mystic, poet, paleontologist, geologist, philosopher, and French Jesuit priests, Teilhard de Chardin. It’s about being suspended in the unknown and the value of patience and trust.

Should you decide to take up this practice, feel free to comment below or drop me a line throughout your journey of gratitude. Thank you for reading and grace, love, and blessings to you.

Have you check out the book trailer to A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment?

10. Creativity, Flow, and a Book Deal in 21 Days

It’s hard sometimes to shut off the analytical mind—the mind that wants to control, predict, and forecast outcomes. This mind certainly has its time and place, but not when you want to be in a creative space, for creativity is about flow, openness, expansion, and trusting the information and ideas that arrive in our minds. When we are in this state, it’s like our minds are radio antennas, picking up frequencies and information that exist behind the visible light spectrum. This is the state of being from which creativity arises and unfolds.

For nearly eight months last year I was in that flow space. If you read my earlier blogs, you know it culminated by living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico for two-and-a-half months to finish my book. Then I came back to Seattle and contracted…and contracted some more…and even more until the point where when I was alone in my own company, I was almost unbearable to myself. I was in such a state of contraction and discontent, I was blind to my future.

 At the beginning of 2018, I made a decision to get clear, which included quitting alcohol, coffee, and sugar for a minimum of 21 days. I remembered doing another 21-day cleanse about seven years prior, and I remembered how clear and creative I felt at the end of the second week. The Being Experiment was born out of the clarity of these 21 days in January, and the idea downloaded to me right at the end of that second week. What also occurred at the same time was that although I knew not what it was, I could finally feel my future moving towards me—so much so in fact that I wrote on my desk calendar on January 31st, “Finalize book deal.” While I didn’t know what that meant, I wrote it on there anyway.

Today, January 31st, marks the 21st day of the cleanse. When I woke up this morning and performed my morning meditation practice, which in turn changed my state of being towards the day into one of excitement, I said to myself before leaving the house: Anything can happen today. Today is going to be a great day. Even though I said this, I was unattached to any outcome, and since I picked the word “peaceful” that morning in The Being Experiment, I knew even if nothing else happened, I would be at peace at the end of the day.

Like any normal morning, I made my way to a coffee shop to write. On this day, I happened to choose KEXP, Seattle’s independent radio station. (If you are a music fan and don’t know about KEXP, this is one of the best independent radio stations in the United States and it streams all over the world.)

At first it seemed like any other day, however, when I opened my laptop I received a message from an internationally renowned New York Times bestselling author and lecturer. He told me he had received my name from a publishing house and asked if I would be interested in working with him. I was in complete shock. This great unknown showed up, or materialized, completely out of nowhere.

Of course I thought it was a joke, because it was so absurd that not only had I said something great would happen today, but I had also written on my desk calendar, “Finalize book deal.” While this communication with this author was the opening salvo of a negotiation, none the less it was a start towards finalizing a book deal. Not only was this occurrence seemingly preposterous, it was exactly what I had been focusing on creating during my 21 days of cleansing and meditation; a client from whom I can learn, a client to whom I can offer value, someone who has a big message for the world, someone who values me, and the freedom to work from anywhere I want.

As I said in the previous blog, in getting quiet, focused, and still, I have changed my internal state from fear and worry to joy and trust. Nothing changed in my external world, but I managed to change my internal state of being. It’s my belief that what we see and experience is just a sliver of a greater mystery that revolves around our consciousness and who we are being—and that our external reality is simply a projection of our internal reality.

In A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment, this is one of Thomas’s main discoveries—that the universe is not cold and lifeless, but loving and interactive, and that it responds to who we are being.

 This was originally written on January 31st, 2017 and edited on September 26, 2018

9. The Being Experiment

At turn of the new year, I was not feeling my best self. After a month of holiday parties and gluttony, I decided I needed to completely change my internal world, and so I cut sugar (for 21 days), alcohol (28 days), and caffeine (34 days) out of my diet. Harder than cutting out wine, whiskey, and/or the occasional beer was removing sugar from my diet. With the removal of these elements from my diet, however, towards the end of the second week I began to think and feel remarkably clear. Like a clear channel or frequency, it was as if information and creative ideas were flowing into my mind unobstructed.  

In addition to changing my diet, I also began meditating twice a day. One night in meditation during the end of the second week, the idea came to me to write down a bunch of words on a piece of paper that had highly elevated emotional quotients, throw them into a bowl, choose one every day, and try to embody that energy. The idea seemed to complement my attempt to create a new baseline of feeling good within my internal environment.  

When I told my 20-year-old nephew Jack, who is a musician and scored the soundtrack of my book trailer (not to mention has created an incredible unreleased soundtrack to my book) expressed an interest in the exercise, I decided I needed to think it through so I could more properly formalize it. And so that Saturday I went to a coffee shop and created The Being Experiment.

The next day I found myself thinking, what the hell—I’m gonna send this out to friends and see if anyone is into it. Comprised of 13 – 70 years olds, I wrote an email to about 50 friends. This ‘beta’ group of people resided in eight countries on four continents, and in the email, I included the following message:

What Is The Being Experiment?

In short, it’s a social experiment and an exercise in mindfulness. If you participate, however, I think you’re going to find it’s a lot more than both.

How It Works

• Formatted in the attached Word Doc are 72 words that represent elevated emotions or expansive states of being.

• Print out these three sheets and cut the words into squares. Next fold the squares in half and throw them in a bowl or a bag (like you would do for charades).

• Put this bowl somewhere where you will see it in the morning.

• Before you leave the house, pick a word from the bowl.

• Your job then is to contemplate, interpret, act, and/or be the embodiment of that word, either for the whole day or at least in one instance.

I went on to say that I suspected participants would find it to be a creative process, because at times it will require a change in their being, habits, and/or energy—and when you change your energy, you change your reality. It’s my belief that like attracts like, so as a result of you embodying the energy of these elevated emotions and states of being, you’re going to pull interesting people, experiences, opportunities, synchronicities, and/or serendipities into your life that are a vibrational match to those elevated emotions.

After I sent out my email, I created a Closed Group on Facebook and invited the 25 or so people who answered the email. I figured it would be interesting for people to share their experiences and be inspired by others. Much to my surprise, by the end of the day there were 160 members, and as of publishing this, there are 680+ members. Today I made the group open to the public. You can join the Facebook group if you like or connect here on Instagram.

I’m also happy to report that The Being Experiment is now trademarked and is being developed with a partner into an app and a physical product. If you’re an app developer and/or a digital designer and would be interested in being involved, drop me a line. Let’s work something out.

Please drop me a line or add a comment below if you've had any interesting experiences as result of The Being Experiment.

Happy creating!

Have you watched my book trailer or explored the excerpts?

8. Architects, Ayahuasca, and Tinfoil

How are architects, ayahuasca, and tinfoil related?

Architects
In my previous blog, Love and the Construction of the Universe, I talked about how I imagine the universe to be constructed. The way I theoretically see it, for every construct there must be a context, for instance, if you were an architect and were tasked to build a structure, you would need to know whether that structure’s purpose was to house a family, businesses, airplanes, assembly lines, and so on. So for the construction of the universe, it must exist in a greater context.

What I proposed (and what many other quantum physicists, leading thinkers, and scientists such as Dr. Joe Dispenza, Dr. Bruce Lipton, and Gregg Braden, among others) would agree upon, was that the construction of this physical world is for conscious to experience physicality. Why? Because consciousness in its purest state is just energy and awareness contained within an infinite field of frequencies. These infinite frequencies are creation itself.

The context of all creation is the unified field, which—according to where we’re at in the infancy and limited understanding of the human experience—is the supreme governing law and structure of all that is...and when I say all that is, I don’t just mean our universe. I mean the multiverse, which are infinite realities that exist beyond space and time.

Ayahuasca
I am going to step out of this space and time (which is to say the flow of the above three paragraphs) for a moment to share something that I think is relevant to this discourse. Last summer, I attended an ayahuasca plant medicine ceremony in a remote, wooded area about 1.5 hours from Mexico City. Before I tell you about it, I feel like I should make a public service announcement (PSA), and that is this:

PSA: My advice to those who haven’t done Ayahuasca and/or are thinking of doing Ayahuasca is this: Do as I say, not as I do. Unless you’re really prepared to go dimensional and explore the most outer/inner reaches of your mind, only drink one cup. (When will I learn this lesson?)

To make a long story short, when the ceremony was ending at 4am, I was just taking off. Another way to say this would be that around 4am, a tear in the seam of my being was just beginning. This tear was separating "Tim Shields" and my ego from my physical existence. In the process I fell into something much greater, much more infinitely expansive, and much more encompassing. And so began one of the most intense and humbling experience of my life. 

During the course of the next ten hours I received a lot of information, in fact it felt as if I was being waterboarded underneath Niagara Falls—only instead of being tortured by water, I was being tortured by an endless stream of information that was more than my mind could handle or process as matter in a physical body. (This included an entire download for my third book. Although I can’t recall all the particulars, I know the story lives in my biology, and under the right conditions, in the right state of what Steven Kotler talks about as flow in this video, I am confident I will be able to access it.*)

Download after download the information flattened me, leaving my quantumly expanded and physically depleted. And when I say depleted, the depletion I speak of is like nothing I have ever experienced. It did not even come close to my Division I college soccer days of double-session, pre-season training at Loyola University in Baltimore’s late-August, 110 degree heat. It could not even begin to compare to the highest fever I’ve ever had. It could not begin to touch my longest stretch of sleeplessness, which included nearly 40 hours of travel to the other side of the world. 

To use a plant medicine such as ayahuasca is to be a spiritual miner, journeying into the deepest recesses of one's inner world. In a sense it is the hero's journey into the darkest caverns of the soul in search of precious, metaphysical jewels to bring back to the physical world. This journey is not always a beautiful one, in fact, I can remember calling out in the void for my deceased parents or someone—anyone—to help me. 

Despite this rigorous odyssey into self, I received many jewels on this journey in the form of downloads. For me, the three most important ones I discovered I will share with you now: 

1. Dimensional experiences, while mystical, are not something far off, removed, and inaccessible to the majority. Instead, they are simply a subtle sidestep to the left or right, and they are born out of choice and awareness.

2. Because the greater aspect of our human existence is consciousness, be careful what you wish for, because you can have anything you want.

3. As previously stated, whatever “It” is that gave rise to the universe, “It” is so much bigger than we can handle as physical matter.

Tinfoil
And now back to our regularly paid programming…I want you to imagine for a moment a flat piece of regularly-sized tinfoil floating freely in space. That piece of tinfoil is the quantum field, the very fabric of reality that exists beyond our senses but is impressionable, pliable, and malleable through the energy of our thoughts, intentions, and awareness—the summation of which is our consciousness.

Now I want you to imagine a wooden block in the shape of a star, but instead of it being a star, I want you to assign meaning to it. That meaning can be whatever you want to do, be, or create while you inhabit your body in this physical reality we call the human experience.

Each time you press this star (which represents your energy and awareness) into this piece of tinfoil, you are creating an impression in the very fabric of reality. The more times you push into this piece of tinfoil with your energy and awareness (which we call intention), the more the tinfoil takes on the form of your intention. Eventually, your thoughts actually take form. We could call this the creative process, and this is a truth many ancient cultures knew. Somehow along the way, however, modernity lost this truth under the dirt, dust, and ash of time, a result of the physical world reorganizing itself. Fortunately, we’re once again beginning to awaken to this unifying law.

So what is my point? The point is this: like tinfoil, the very fabric of reality is malleable and impressionable by our thoughts. What we think and feel over and over—if we keep thinking that thought enough times—eventually that thought begins to take shape in this reality.

Whether you are conscious of it or not, at all times you are creating, therefore the questions you need to ask yourself are this:

• Are you going to be conscious of the impression you are making into the fabric of realty?

• Are you going to be conscious and push into this fabric the impressions of love, compassion, and unity?

• Or you are going to be unconscious and push into this fabric the unconscious program of fear, hate, and division?

Remember, this fabric of reality responds to who you are being.

***

(Have you watched my book trailer or explored the excerpts? If you like this blog, you'll certainly like my book.)

*'Flow' when used to describe an altered state of consciousness is attributed to the researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his seminal book, "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience".

7. Love and the Construction of the Physical World

On a walk last Friday night I was thinking about the construction and nature of the physical world. The way I theoretically understand it is that there is an energetic reality that exists beyond our physical form (beyond our senses, which are what plug us into this physical dimension). This energetic reality, which is comprised of energy, light, and information, exists beyond the visible light spectrum and is comprised of infinite frequencies.

As far as we know, this energetic reality is endless—without beginning, without end, has always been, and always will be. Science calls this reality the quantum field, the zero point field, or source energy. Religion calls it God. The sweet spot, and perhaps the greatest hope for the future of humanity, is the melding of the two, which is why Dr. Joe Dispenza often says, "Science is the new language of mysticism." 

Of this field, Einstein said, “The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.” This means that the field governs all other laws of both the physical and nonphysical worlds. All information within this field is transmitted through the wave function, including our thoughts. Just as you would see a ripple in a pond when you drop a rock in it, that wave is the way the physical world transfers energy. 

As individual people, we are all a part of, and connected to, this greater field of consciousness. This field is consciousness itself—far bigger and greater than what we can comprehend in the human form or with our limited mind.

If you were to continue to move upward into this field of frequencies—which is to say, into greater levels of consciousness and awareness—there would be no separation, only oneness. It’s only when light moves beneath the speed of light that oneness, separation, and division begin to occur. 

If this model of reality is indeed true, then this is how I see the construction of the physical world:

1. The Field (infinite consciousness/potentials/possibilities)

2. The Question (consciousness becoming self-aware)

3. Language (consciousness giving ideas form, structure, composure)

4. Action (consciousness turning ideas into matter)

5. Result (consciousness constructing the physical world)

So why the construction of the physical world? What’s our purpose here? I believe it is for consciousness to experience itself in the physical form. This requires us to truly live our life—to take risks, to love, to suffer, to experience loss, to transcend our suffering and loss, to get bruised and battered all while experiencing family, joy, unity, transcendence, wholeness, and all there is to experience in this physical form. (I talk more about this in my book.)

Mostly though, I think it’s about learning to love. Learning to love is a surrendering of our stories, because it’s our stories that create distance—I am this and you are that. When the distance created by our stories disappear, there is only oneness, wholeness, and the energy, consciousness, and awareness that unites us.

When will the human species get this lesson?

Seattle, WA 8/17/18

6. Surrender and Trust

Only publishing this on July 16th, 2018 did I realize there is a mustard seed in the middle.

Last year was truly a transformative year that began with me quitting my day job to help a NY Times bestselling author edit his book. When I finished, I took off to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico for two-and-half months to finish my own book. There, thanks to my friend Linda, I fell into an opportunity to help a Fortune 500 executive develop a book proposal. For the first eight months of the year, every day I was living my truth, and by living in that energy, every day I was excited about my life. I was in a constant state of awe and wonder at the opportunities that were flowing to me.

In August, I came back from Mexico to my life in Seattle and fell into a ‘WTF am I doing with my life’ moment, and those moments turned into more than a season. I began a very subtle slide in the opposite direction of the energy of my truth because I was living in fear and lack. Sitting here writing this on January 8, 2018, I can see how lack, fear, and the correlating contraction affected my holiday with my family, as well as my relationship.

My analytical mind wants to deconstruct what changed, but the reality of the situation is that my energy changed. Our energy is our internal state of being, and that state of being affects our external reality. It’s a very simple equation when you break it down: who we are internally is reflected back to us in the external world.

What I know about the state of being I’ve been living in is that it is ruled by fear, and when you live in fear, you desperately try to control and predict outcomes. For months I've had my life in a vice grip, which has not allowed it to breath and expand. Instead, my metaphorical life has been choking and grasping for air. And so I decided this past Sunday that I have to let go, surrender, and trust. Change only happens in the present moment, so I had to find a way to be who I want to be in the future in this present moment.

But what does it mean to surrender and trust? In the most simplistic terms, I believe it means to allow—to cease controlling and predicting so that the unknown can appear, after all, if you don’t allow room for the unknown, then you are living each day as the previous.

You would think I would have this down by now since it’s such a large part of what my book is about, but the truth is I don’t. Life is a series of expansion and contractions, and there’s learnings in each of these movements if we are living in awareness.

Found January 7th, 2018

Yesterday was the first day of living in this new space of surrender and trust. I meditated twice for more than an hour each time on the energy of who I want to be in the future. Despite occasionally feeling the anxiety of fear move up from my stomach into my heart, I managed it by telling myself that what I am seeking is seeking me. I believe if you are living in your truth, then synchronicities and serendipities appear. This is feedback from the universe that you are in the right place at the right time.

It just so happened that yesterday I decided to roll a bunch of loose change. I was on the phone and sorting through the coins when I found one that was an odd size, and so I picked it up with curiosity to observe it more closely. On one side of the coin read, “With faith, all things are possible.” On the other side, with a mustard seed in the center, it read, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, nothing shall be impossible for you.” With awe and wonder I held the coin in my hand, then brought it to my heart.

I had never seen this coin before and I have no idea where it came from...but now I keep it next to my bed as a reminder.

Written January 8, 2018