I have this friend who swears that for a whole year of his life he was haunted by dark entities from the spirit world.
He says this happened to him because he spent that year taking a lot of ayahuasca.
He was trying to heal from some past traumas and did a lot of ceremonies.
I think he did a ceremony every weekend for the entire year.
And taking this much of the plant medicine in his perception opened a portal between him and the spirit world.
And all these demonic entities rushed through.
So I of course asked him,
How do you know?
What was that like?
And he said,
Well for one they kept poking me in the side.
He pointed to his right side.
And I'm not a doctor but I did have to point out or at least pose the question.
I mean dude that's where your liver is,
How do you know that he didn't just develop some liver damage from taking that much of an entheogen taken orally.
He said no no no,
That's not the biggest thing.
That's not the real thing.
The serious thing was that throughout the day I could hear them.
He said that they would call him names,
They would mess with him,
They would rub his face in hurtful memories and painful ideas and they're constantly fucking with him like this throughout the day.
Now my friend,
He's a smart guy,
He's actually not particularly spiritual other than this one thing.
He's quite a normal dude.
And I myself have had experiences with ayahuasca where it definitely felt and seemed like I was communicating with a consciousness that was not mine.
So I can't discount anything he said for sure.
In fact,
I've had some experts on the podcast to discuss this idea of entities and are they a thing and all that stuff.
But even after speaking to experts and having friends like this and even having my own experiences,
What I always end up concluding is well what's the difference between a quote unquote real demon and something happening in your head.
It's actually the same thing.
It's not even that you can prove it one way or another.
Actually experientially it's exactly the same thing.
If there is such a thing as a demon there and you're only experiencing it,
It is no different than something being in your head.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately because recently I myself have been haunted.
Now my demons I perceive a lot more metaphorically than my friend.
So my experience has actually been very similar to him.
You're not with the poking in the side but my demons have come in the form of embarrassing shameful memories mostly.
Moments of weakness in my life or times I was arrogant to cover up weakness or something that just makes me feel bad when I think about it.
And the weird thing is not only are these things that I'm surprised that I would feel bad about them so many years later,
It's the fact that they were popping up over the last couple months and peaking a few weeks ago.
Just popping up in my head over and over and over again.
I couldn't explain why.
I don't know what Tourette's Syndrome is like but I kind of felt like I had what I think it is like.
Every so often it would just pop up and I would kind of spaz out in reaction to it.
It's like,
Ah not again.
Like ah fuck.
Like shit.
It just popped.
I mean it was getting a little ridiculous.
There was even a moment where I was cuddling on the couch with Aliyah.
It was a very normal happy moment but one of these random embarrassing memories popped up and I couldn't help blurting out,
Oh no.
So she of course asked me what was wrong and I told her and she was like,
Really?
That's it?
It was some seemingly insignificant moment from like 15 years ago that was making me feel bad.
And she was like,
Really?
That's it?
And you know with these kinds of things,
And this is kind of a property of shame in itself,
It's like there's a double layer of it because there is the shame of the memory and then there's a shame that something like this would still affect me so many years later.
So I was like,
Okay.
I don't know why this is happening but I need to like excavate this.
Like whatever this is,
It's not cool.
So I spent some time.
I came across a process actually that helped me believe myself of these demons,
At least as far as I can tell.
In a sense I exercised myself using a process that I learned from one of my favorite subjects,
General semantics.
If you caught my nerdy episodes on how language creates reality a few months ago but you wondered how to use it in practice,
We're actually going to use a process from general semantics.
I'm going to talk about it here in this episode.
But I'm also going to go into why demons exist.
For our purposes,
When I say demon,
I'm talking about a patterned emotion,
Maybe an emotional reaction to something that does not exist now in material objective reality.
So it's something that maybe is a fiction but it's a fiction that's real enough to you.
It might be memories from your past that are holding you back.
It might be fears of an imagined future,
Basically something in your head.
It's not immediately observable.
It's not observable to anyone else.
These are your personal emotional patterns that don't exist now but they are limiting your ability to enjoy the present.
They are limiting your ability to experience your life.
In this episode,
I'm going to speak about a few different types of common demons people have.
I mean ones that prevent one from achieving career success or limiting career success.
I mean we commonly call this self-sabotage and in the pop psychology self-help world,
Many guys I work with have demons around relations,
Relationships,
Connecting with the opposite sex.
Like basically demons around receiving love and for some reason they block themselves from it or throw it away when it's available even though they want it or filter it out.
Those are actually some of the worst kinds of demons where they prevent you from seeing the thing that you want is readily available.
So today,
We're going to slay some demons.
Right now,
You're listening to Bruando Podcast Episode 154,
Slaying Your Demons.
So my starting point with attacking my demons was to first understand why.
Try to understand the enemy like why,
Why do they exist?
Why would these random memories pop up in my head?
Why do I have these emotional patterns?
Why do so many people sabotage themselves from the things that they want inexplicably?
I was actually speaking to my friend Dalton who I hope comes on the podcast soon.
We're speaking about how he and I have been working together for a few months and I have been witnessing him grow a lot and take some massive actions in his life and make some bold changes.
All of a sudden,
It seemed like all of his demons had showed up all at once.
He ended up in this strange negative spiral which didn't make sense given all of the progress he'd made in his life.
He didn't understand why.
It didn't make any sense to him.
But from my perspective,
Outside of my life,
At least my perception was that,
Oh,
These are your demons last stand.
Life was getting much better for him and things were changing.
All of this negativity was kind of like a psychic subconscious move towards homeostasis.
That dawned on me.
I posed the idea that maybe his demons were getting super loud right now because he was just about to have a breakthrough and they were trying to protect him from the unknown.
That clicked in my head for like,
Oh,
This is why one would have a demon.
This is not the spiritual view that these are just disincarnate evil entities but more of a psychological based view that,
Yeah,
These patterns didn't come out of nowhere.
All patterns in your psyche,
Even the unpleasant ones,
Are there because there's some function.
It might be vestigial.
The function might not need them anymore but they're there for some purpose.
It's actually no different than the idea of archetypes.
Jung's idea of archetypes are essentially a set of character traits that have persisted in human consciousness because they've been useful.
Humans have needed a hero archetype in there or like a magician archetype or the lover or however you want to put it,
You know,
Whatever.
However you want to slice the archetypes,
They exist because they've at some point in human history found themselves to be useful character traits just like your genes.
All the genes you have exist because they've proven themselves useful for survival and replication.
Therefore,
They've persisted in the human genome.
Same exact thing.
So viewed this way,
I have to think,
Okay,
What could be the function of a demon?
Why would someone have an inexplicable fear towards something?
It makes a lot of sense that demons are there to protect you from worse harm.
Like if you really don't want a kid to go out the back door where it's potentially super dangerous,
Maybe you put a barking dog in front of there which will scare him or her off,
Right?
That kind of idea.
And I like this perspective because it removes the antagonism,
Right?
When someone is metaphorically battling their demons,
Right?
It feels like internal conflict,
Like you're fighting some part of yourself and of course that just adds to the stress and doesn't feel good and doesn't make sense.
But look at it this way,
Right?
Like that your demons are patterns that you developed to protect you in some way and they're just not protecting you in a pleasant way.
But they actually feel like they're doing something good for you.
Your demons are protecting you from the unknown probably because at some point in your life you were hurt when you ventured out into the unknown.
In my case,
I think a lot of my demons when it comes to stuff come from social pains,
Some of which when I was really young,
Like being laughed at by a group or in some way looking stupid in front of a group and that has caused some contraction,
Some pattern in me that has lasted.
And I don't even remember the root memories but the feeling is still there and the behavior is somehow still affected.
And from here the analogy to physical trauma is a good one in that like one of the reasons why our bodies harden,
Why our joints stiffen maybe prematurely is it's usually to prevent injury,
Right?
Like there's this false idea that strength training makes you inflexible or getting strong or having big muscles makes you inflexible.
That's not true.
It's not that muscles or strength make you inflexible.
It's that the way that most people strengthen their muscles puts a lot of stress on your joints and your body can't adapt quickly enough so to prevent it from tearing something,
It hardens everything.
It reduces your range of motion.
And actually in physical therapy and exercise science,
It's a new concept.
There's a newish concept,
Relatively new concept of active stretching where instead of just stretching out the way people have for a very long time,
You try to strengthen your joints at the edge of their range of motion.
And the whole idea is that you're teaching your body,
Hey,
We are actually strong enough to remain,
To be safe even at a greater,
Even beyond what we're used to,
Right?
We don't have to be afraid of stretching beyond what we normally do.
And it reminds me of my friend Joseph who,
Joseph Teske,
He's been on the podcast,
Psychotherapist.
We spoke about attachment theory some years ago.
He's actually the one who introduced me to hot yoga many years ago and he was telling me that in hot yoga,
And this is probably true for all yoga,
Your flexibility doesn't increase gradually,
Right?
It's not like you go every day and then each time you can reach a millimeter further.
Actually even if you do yoga every day or hot yoga every day as many people do,
You keep doing the pose over and over and over again and nothing moves for a while.
And then one day,
Maybe after 20 times or maybe months,
You have this huge like four-inch expansion,
Right?
He was telling me with back bends like he couldn't even come close to doing a back bend for the longest time.
And then one day he could just do back bends,
Right?
Something just opened.
And it was because it's not that his body couldn't go that far,
It's that his body didn't trust itself to remain safe at that range.
So it had to learn that it was going to be okay if it stretched that far.
It had to actually strengthen around the joints to know it's not going to break.
And then it was like,
Okay,
Yeah,
We could totally reach that far.
And I like this concept.
If we think of your demons are patterns that in a sense you hired,
Right?
You summoned these demons probably at a young age because some part of you,
Some subconscious part of you is like,
Okay,
If we go too far in that direction,
We get hurt.
So let's make sure we don't go that far ever again.
And that's essentially what a demon is,
Right?
Every guy,
Every person I've ever met who has demons blocking themselves from receiving love,
They were heartbroken once,
Right?
I mean,
Most people have some,
At least a little demon when it comes to love.
Like we've all been hurt in some way,
Right?
Same thing with people who have demons around career success,
Demons around you name it,
Right?
There's probably some pain.
So taking this physical analogy,
The first thing would be to convince your subconscious,
Convince this part of you,
This seemingly demonic part of your psyche that you can actually go further than you've gone before and remain safe.
Like I have a client right now who's a professional athlete and according to him,
Many people have told him,
Many professionals in his sport who are more successful than him and many coaches have told him,
Man,
You're really good.
You should be playing in the big leagues.
But for some reason,
Every time in the past that he's had opportunities to basically bump up his career,
There's been something,
Basically whenever he's been ahead,
He's somehow choked or sabotaged himself and then he hasn't gotten that shot.
And we're exploring what could this possibly be because his competence levels are far beyond his performance levels.
And there could be a lot of things,
Right?
Obviously,
Fear of success can have many layers.
But one thing that he feared is that if he was really playing the big time,
He wouldn't have so much time for his family.
And there's more to it than that,
But that was one fear.
And it's like,
Okay,
Well,
That kind of makes sense.
If this is a real fear of yours,
Of something bad that might happen if you enter this new unknown where you don't know exactly what's going to happen,
Even though it's stuff that you think you want,
Well,
That might be a reason that your subconscious would sabotage you from it.
Something that would take away pleasure or comfort or enjoyment or something else that's also very important to you.
It makes sense that you might have some internal conflict when you get the opportunity.
So with him,
I've been working through scenarios on how he can really prove to himself that all the things he cares about,
The other things in his personal life that is really important to him,
All of that will be okay,
Even if he's actually in the career he wants to be in.
So in addressing my own demons,
I started to explore,
What is my greatest fear of what might happen if I were to break out of this?
What are my demons trying to protect me from,
Is another way to put it.
And to share a little bit more about mine,
These particular demons,
They were all socially painful moments.
Growing up extremely shy,
I've had quite a few experiences where I have been,
What I felt judged or looked at negatively by a group of my peers who didn't really know me.
In some way,
Something came out wrong or I presented myself in a weird way and somehow I was made fun of or something like that.
That's the childhood stuff.
The way it's been affecting me and one of the reasons why I think this has been coming up for me is that my career has been progressing and I've maybe hit a thing where I'm afraid of too much exposure because I'm afraid of the same dynamic,
The same psychodrama playing out of a group of people that don't know me making fun of me.
Of course,
I speak about controversial things time to time and it's funny,
Perhaps,
Perfectly synchronistically,
Something very close to my biggest fear related to this particular wound actually happened.
Some years ago,
I used to make these guest post videos for this brand that promoted dating skills.
They taught dating skills to men and to be fair,
It was a little bit of a sleazy brand.
They would give me very clickable headlines and I had to make a video with that title.
I always felt like I was – even though it was click-baity titles and appealing to more base things,
I always tried to insert something a little more holistic and empathy-driven skills even though it was basically a pickup channel.
But funny enough,
I was searching online to show a friend these videos that I've made for this channel and what came up is essentially a hate video made by some vloggers ragging on this channel but actually ragging on me.
They thought that it was my channel and it's this whole – it's like very feminist.
I didn't watch the whole thing because it was clear that they didn't actually watch any of my videos.
They didn't hear me talk about empathy,
For instance.
They just picked on maybe the title.
But it was actually my greatest fear.
This was actually my greatest fear,
To have someone who doesn't actually know me tell everyone,
Basically tell the whole school,
The metaphoric school of the internet that I'm a loser.
It was like,
Wow,
I can't believe this is happening because this is what I've been afraid of,
I think,
Of having too much exposure.
Actually,
Well,
For one,
It turned out to not be that bad,
Although it did make me feel particularly bad.
Not particularly for that long though because it became very apparent that these people actually didn't know me,
Right?
Like there's no way they actually listened to my podcast and knew anything about me.
They just saw a thumbnail of my face on it and some sleazy title and they decided to rag on this whole idea.
That took away some of the pain,
Although to be honest,
This hitting my exact fear did cause a gut wrenching in my stomach.
It did make me realize,
Oh yeah,
Actually I have a fear of being famous.
I have a fear that more of these kinds of videos would pop up given that I talk about edgy things sometimes.
But then I tried to rationalize it at first.
I tried to think of other people I look up to who have been wrongly accused of things or have been criticized of things that aren't true.
I was like,
Okay,
That's that.
But even that was like,
I felt like that was kind of an intellectual and not concrete way to attack my demons.
It's almost like I was creating another demon to make my greatest fear seem like not that bad.
Essentially,
That's what rationalization is.
So instead,
I started this process related to things that I've shared before on this podcast because it's actually probably the most simple mindfulness thing that's important,
Which is I tried to reduce it down to the sensation.
It was just like this whole idea of like,
Okay,
Here are these vloggers who've never met me.
There's all these ideas maybe they're telling people.
Now people are thinking I'm an asshole that I'll never meet in my life.
There's all of those ideas and your thoughts could just go spinning and spinning and spinning in a situation like that.
And I actually think that's one of the causes or the reasons why things like social media lead to so much depression,
Especially young people.
It's like,
Yeah,
It's just like the thoughts keep spinning.
But if you reduce the experience down to the sensation,
Which I tried to do,
It's like,
Okay,
There's this gnawing in my stomach and I just focus on that.
And I think,
Okay,
This gnawing in my stomach are my demons trying to get me to avoid something uncomfortable,
Avoid something potentially painful by making it uncomfortable.
What if I just feel the sensation and as a way to try to convince my demons like,
Hey,
We're actually safe here,
Right?
Like nothing bad is actually going to happen.
Okay,
A couple of vloggers think I'm a jerk.
Not really a big deal.
And just in that,
I felt like something in me chilled the fuck out.
Because that's exactly how demons operate.
They cause discomfort to try to get you to avoid something that they or some subconscious part of you thinks is going to be damaging to you.
Maybe it was really painful when you're a kid or teenager or some years ago,
But it's actually not something or maybe even as an adult,
Right?
You might have experienced some pain as an adult and like there's something that you want to do,
But this previous pain is preventing you from stretching that far.
But it's something that you consciously do want to address to prove to yourself or somehow communicate to yourself,
Hey,
We're actually safe if we proceed.
Because one big way that your demons prevent you from doing something that it doesn't want you to do,
Perhaps to protect you,
Is by creating bad filtration.
And this is where we have to look at things through the circuits of consciousness model.
You can't possibly take in everything from reality.
There's just too much sensory data to process.
So your mind,
One of the great features of the sapient human mind is that our minds abstract things,
Simplify them based on their utility to us,
And create a mental model for going through the world.
That's why we label anything,
Just so we have expectations of what it is and we don't have to take in every single detail about it.
Now,
If you have these demons floating around in your psyche,
You know,
These mechanisms that are trying to prevent you from doing something that might hurt you,
Well,
It might filter out this thing,
This opportunity to get hurt.
I've seen this a lot with guys with love demons who maybe disqualify themselves from opportunities for connection that are there,
Right?
They disqualify themselves from women who actually seem interested.
I bet you've been coaching this one guy around this subject,
He was telling me some experience he had where some woman,
Attractive woman,
Started a conversation with him in a certain setting and asked him for his contact info.
And I was like,
Oh,
Awesome,
Great.
Did you message her?
Anything happened?
He's like,
Oh,
No,
No,
No.
There's no way she actually liked me.
She was just being polite.
And I was like,
Oh,
You know,
That is possible.
But usually when a woman asks you for your contact info,
It means she's in some way interested in communicating with you,
Right?
And you just couldn't see it for some reason.
And actually,
We ended up,
At least in that moment,
It just didn't seem real to him,
Right?
He was totally disqualifying what probably to anyone on the outside,
It seemed obvious,
But he just couldn't deal with it.
And actually,
We explored this whole thing with him.
And he revealed that when he was a kid,
He had this fortune teller reading that told him he would be very successful in every area of life,
Except with women.
Women would just not like him.
And he was young and must have like incepted something into him.
It was basically a bad spell that was cast on him because he went on to fulfill that prophecy,
Right?
He's got a really cool life,
But women,
For some reason,
Elude him.
But then he has these experiences that he tells me about where he finds some way to filter out what seems to be real,
A real opportunity for exactly the thing he wants,
And he just can't see it.
And,
You know,
I spoke about this a bit,
I think,
In the Boyhood Wounds episode of my own experience of,
You know,
After many,
Many experiences of unrequited love,
I finally had a situation in high school where someone I really liked actually liked me back,
And it was obvious,
Obvious to everyone.
In fact,
People were telling me,
But for some reason,
Something in me,
You know,
This demon,
You know,
This demon of like,
Wanting to avoid rejection,
I guess,
Was so deeply ingrained that even when it was obvious,
I couldn't bring myself to do this thing that I wanted and was readily available.
So if you have these negative filters on,
You know,
It's great if someone can point it out to you,
Right?
Some friends can objectively point out to you how you're seeing things wrong.
But that doesn't always work or help,
Right?
Like the athlete that I mentioned earlier,
You know,
Many people have told him he should be more successful than he is.
But for some reason,
You know,
It just doesn't stick.
He has all of these comments,
These positive comments in his head,
All this positive evidence,
But it doesn't seem to stick.
There's another guy I'm close with who has a love demon type thing where,
You know,
I've told him this and many people have told him this,
That he's actually very attractive.
In many ways,
He's actually got most of the things that women would find attractive in men.
But for some reason,
He doesn't believe it.
And therefore,
He always finds a way to mess things up,
Even when the things he wants seem to be available.
Because just to layer on positive affirmations on top of a true negative belief,
It doesn't really work in most situations.
And if you're not lucky enough to have someone point out to you where you have some incorrect perception,
You know,
Because maybe it just doesn't come up,
Maybe it's not something you share with other people.
And if you don't have someone else pointing out to you,
How could you know what you might be filtering out that's in front of you?
Like how could you know what you're not seeing?
Which brings us to this process that I found in the book Radical General Semantics by Gad Horowitz that basically breaks down or puts into a step-by-step format some ideas from Korzybski,
Father of general semantics,
As a way to basically detach yourself from these negative patterns or unwanted patterns.
Now of course,
They don't talk about demons in general semantics.
What I'm calling a demon,
Gad Horowitz would call an intense evaluation reaction.
So a reaction,
A response to not an event,
Not a concrete event,
But your evaluation of an event.
The meaning that you've made from a concrete event or a meaning that you made off of another meaning that is intense,
Something that makes you feel not well,
Right?
So an intense evaluational reaction.
Semantics is an IER.
And Horowitz would go further to say that the ones that need to be addressed,
Of course,
Are the ones that are leading to unnecessary suffering or what in semantics they would call unsanity.
So incorrect modeling of reality.
And this was actually the overarching goal of Korzybski when he created general semantics,
His inquiry in how people abstract and categorize and label reality and therefore perceive reality.
His perhaps rosy view of the future was that if everyone could learn semantics and how we make meaning off of events,
Then everybody will,
For one,
They wouldn't have perceptions that unnecessarily cause themselves or others harm.
And everybody would be on the same page.
Everybody would be perceiving things very closely to objective or understanding the probabilistic nature of news,
For instance.
I do I wish he was alive now because I'm very curious to I would be very curious to hear his comments on things like fake news and the culture wars,
Which are basically disagreements about how how people are making sense of reality.
But anyways,
In our in our own personal demon slaying,
Horowitz puts together a process where if you can identify these intense evaluation,
Evaluational reactions,
These these perhaps in no longer useful or maybe they were never useful reactions to ideas.
If you can separate the connection between your felt experience and the idea that's made,
The idea that's in your head,
Then you basically free yourself of the demon.
And he actually breaks it down into a six step process,
Which is something Korszewski never did.
He shared a lot of brilliance concepts,
But he he almost never laid it out in a way you could actually use it.
And that's actually one of the reasons why I cared so much to make those episodes on semantics.
And here I am another episode kind about semantics.
So here are Horowitz's six steps.
Step one is to recall what he would call an IER,
An intense evaluation reaction,
Which I am referring to metaphorically as a demon.
Any thoughts in your head that has you feel unpleasant feelings,
And specifically it's something that you're not experiencing in actuality,
Right?
It's in your head,
Either from your imagination,
From some imagery you've gotten somewhere from your own past,
But it's not a reaction to something in your literal reality,
Which would make total sense,
Right?
If there's a dangerous threat to make sense,
You would feel bad to somehow get away from the threat.
These IERs are things that occur in your head.
These demons occur in your subjective reality.
So the step two is reducing it down to the sensation,
Which is the only thing that is actually real about our experience.
And actually something that Horowitz doesn't describe in his book,
And I haven't seen any semanticists refer to this because it's more about the mindfulness side of things or the healing side of things if you want,
A more esoteric lens,
Is that just paying attention to the sensation has a therapeutic effect,
Right?
This is no different than any grounding practice or releasing practice.
Almost every mindfulness practice guides one towards this kind of experience,
Whether it's vipassana where you focus on your breath and then scan the sensations in your body,
Again for essentially the same purpose of releasing demons of the mind.
This is something I often guide clients through,
Especially when they're hitting on some intense emotion in a session,
Because simply there's a lot of benefit when you attend to your sensations,
Focus all your attention on your sensations.
It does allow,
In many cases,
It allows the negative sensation to ease up,
Almost like pressing into a sore muscle.
And you know you've done this,
You've actually done this,
If the words in your mind disappear,
Right?
Because you have a limited amount of attention at a given moment.
You can't fully,
Well I should say,
If 100% of your attention is on your felt sensation,
You don't also have free attention to generate words.
So if you're able to still run commentary in your mind while trying to pay attention to a sensation,
100% of your attention hasn't hit the sensation,
Right?
Because you have free RAM space to come up with words and you haven't done it fully.
Because the goal of this is to achieve a state of what in spiritual lenses they would call no-mindedness or you know,
Western Esoterics would call Gnosis with a G.
But Korzybski and Semanticists would essentially call this silent practice.
It's where you are directly experiencing reality,
Three or five senses,
Without an abstract commentary on top of it.
Step three is then to do the opposite.
Is to shift all of your attention to the storyline,
To the thought,
To the images,
To the idea,
Which includes the meaning and the relationship that you've developed between some image in your mind and the felt sensation,
Right?
So in my case,
It's perhaps thinking about the worst case scenario and also thinking about how it means I'm somehow a bad person or I'll be ostracized for society or a bunch of people will hate me or whatever the thing is,
You know,
And going,
Korzybski and Horowitz don't say this specifically,
But I think on a practical level,
It is helpful and useful to go as far into your fear fantasies as possible for this stage.
Just like flush out all the possibilities.
Like what really is the worst that can happen and imagine it for a moment.
And if you're unsure on how to figure out what meanings you strung together,
Because maybe you haven't put it to words before,
Horowitz offers the question,
What must I believe about the given situation in order to feel the sensations?
What was I believe in order to feel this way?
Meaning the feelings that we attended to in step two.
If you can answer that question,
Whether it's with words or not,
You can find the relationship that has formed in your mind between either real or perceived events and the feeling that you are now having.
Now step four is to notice how in order to produce the sensations that you felt that you are feeling and paid attention to in step two,
This story had to be rehearsed in your mind,
Right?
If this connection to form so that it's persisting,
Again,
Independent of any real events,
You must have rehearsed it.
Obviously not on purpose.
Maybe it was rehearsed because of some childhood experiences where it was reinforced by a teacher or a friend group or the society you lived in.
However,
This relationship between unpleasant feelings in your body and a thought in your mind developed,
It had to be rehearsed.
Because just in the same way that we essentially practice our physical movements,
Like the way we walk,
Our facial expressions,
Whatever signals of our culture that we've adopted as unconscious behavior,
We also in a sense practice our feelings.
As we can see when we look at large groups of people,
Anybody can see,
There are many ways to react to the same event.
If you have pets,
I mean specifically dogs,
Or if you have children as I am now observing with my daughter,
It's like there are some reactions,
I mean especially most of our emotional reactions we kind of assume are just like the only way to react to a thing.
But if you look at,
This is something I've noticed with a friend's child who's a little bit older than mine,
That in some cases,
Like if a kid falls,
Like I say a one-year-old falls on his knee,
Obviously there's a little bit of pain there.
But you can almost see,
Actually not almost,
You can observe if you really pay attention that he looks to his parents or whoever his authority is to see whether it was a crisis or not.
He doesn't even decide for himself whether he's going to wail or if he's just going to like,
You know,
Actually kids are quite durable,
Like falling on her knee isn't necessarily going to cause immense pain.
But if the parent reacts in a way,
Like,
Oh my God,
You fell on your knee,
The kid is more likely to cry.
And then that reaction gets rehearsed and then flash forward into adulthood,
Obviously that memory isn't going to be remembered,
But that just becomes a default reaction.
Which brings us to step five,
Which is to move your attention back and forth between your internal experience and the mental projection that you've created,
The storyline,
The abstract set of meanings that somehow were created throughout the course of your life to believe this thing and,
You know,
Cause this feeling in you.
And you just keep going back and forth,
Right?
There's the feeling,
There's the idea.
There's the feeling and there's the idea because you're proving to yourself that these two things are not actually related.
There's the idea can still exist.
The idea can be true even,
Right?
But it doesn't have to make you feel bad,
Right?
There's no reason why it has to make you feel bad.
And then it makes it easier to look at the actual events.
It looked at it that way,
Separating the feeling from the events and the belief because the belief is what ties the events to the feeling,
Going back and forth and back and forth.
The meaning created,
The connection kind of dissipates.
Now step six that Horowitz offers is to then choose a better story,
Choose a greater meaning.
But actually,
I don't know if it's necessary,
Right?
Kind of like I said earlier,
It's like you can rationalize things or I mean you can attack them back,
Come up with some new story of why they're wrong,
Come up with some new explanation.
But I actually feel like that's in itself kind of a way to,
You're again abstracting unnecessarily,
Right?
Because if you really get over this thing that has been bothering you,
There actually would be no meaning,
Right?
Like these memories of my childhood have been lodged in me because of some pain of mine and made them significant.
But if the pain is gone and the beliefs causing the pain is gone,
A lot of these memories I don't even need to remember anymore.
So I actually have my own version of step six,
A different version,
Which is to accept that no story needs to be needed.
It's actually in a sense ending at step five,
But again going back and forth and back and forth and recognizing that you don't actually need to make any meaning.
I mean you certainly don't need to make meaning of every situation.
In fact,
If you stick to only making meanings that are directly useful to you,
You actually save a lot of RAM in your mental hard disk,
Right?
There's no reason to think about all that stuff,
Right?
When a person says like spinning in their head with resentments or whatever or these demons like I had,
It's actually draining your CPU.
And what's actually more useful is the idea of gnosis.
I mean that's the western occult term for it,
But the idea of no mindedness,
The idea of original perception,
All different words for the same thing where you're actually to put in Korzybski in terms,
You're living at the unspeakable level where you actually don't need to assign meaning to things.
And this is something that as someone who is very connected to expressing himself with words,
In fact,
Basically all the time when I'm not podcasting,
I'm saying things similar to what I say on this podcast,
But in my head,
That's just what I do.
I do need to remind myself that I don't need to string words to label everything,
Right?
And actually being the father of a young infant,
I have found this that she actually helps me with this,
Right?
Like when I spend time with her,
If I just try to get on her level,
There's no words at that level,
Right?
Because she doesn't know any words and I could just try to perceive things through her eyes.
I mean it's easier when she's not crying.
But there's something so calming about that and so enlivening about that is the experience that many of us have when we're on something like LSD or MDMA or whatever upper you're into.
And I'll just say these particular demons,
I do believe that they started to come up over the last couple of months because I'm moving into a new unknown in my life,
In my career.
Hopefully,
Positive things are coming.
But I do feel like especially what was happening a few weeks ago,
It was my demons last stand of trying to really prevent me from changing because they've been hired essentially to prevent change,
To keep me in the safe zone.
And I'm going to end with this one idea.
Actually when I first had the idea for this episode,
I was calling them ghosts instead of demons.
I was haunted by ghosts from my past.
So I'm actually – I mean demons just fit better.
But I'm going to end with this idea of ghosts,
Right?
Ghosts are a little bit more neutral than demons.
And it reminds me of the sixth sense and how in that movie,
Haley Jo Osman can see dead people and these dead people,
These ghosts,
They exist as ghosts instead of resting in peace because they died with some unfinished mission.
And if we think of our demons this way,
Think of these things from our past,
These patterns from our past in this way,
Right?
They still exist.
They're still holding us back because they were hired for a specific mission.
And they can only rest in peace and stop bothering you,
Stop scaring you and haunting you if you help them complete their mission.
And this can be done through proving to them that you're safe but also essentially,
I mean this whole radical general semantics process of detaching the experience from the idea is kind of like retiring the demon.
It's like,
Okay,
We hired you to tie these two things together,
This idea and this experience,
But now we're cutting the cord and you're retired.
You're off to bed.
And from this perspective,
I feel that just thinking of it this way takes away a lot of the internal antagonism.
And I'll say in my own experience these last couple of weeks,
They did dissipate quite quickly.
It didn't take a huge amount of introspection.
Actually I did reach out to a coach about it because I did want a second consciousness on it,
A second perspective,
But it dissipated really fast by doing this kind of simple process.
I hope this episode has been useful and fun.
If you know anybody who you think may benefit from it too,
Please share it with them.
I appreciate you listening.
I'll see you in the next episode.
Goodbye.
