160 The Virtue Of Openness: Attracting What You Want

Every so often one meets a person who changes our view of life,

Changes our model of reality.

And for me one of these people,

A key person in my life,

Is my friend Daniel.

It's not his real name.

I don't think he wants me to use his real name.

Give him what I'm about to share with him.

He's one of the most inspiring people ever met.

I met him when I was 24 and at this point in my life I had basically just started my all-in journey of trying to essentially fix my character defaults.

It was my personal development,

Spiritual journey starting because at this point I realized I just I couldn't go along with the way that everyone else I knew was living.

You know,

Couldn't do a normal working job.

I had things that I thought were more important.

You could call them spiritual values or whatever,

Right?

And things I was trying to correct in myself,

My perceived problems,

Came down to anxiety.

I had a lot of social anxiety,

But also anxiety about the world.

I didn't really know what to do and the only models of fixing my problem,

The only schools of thought that I was exposed to up until then were kind of mechanical personal developments.

You know,

And whether it's like productivity hacking in the,

You know,

Career space or what we now would call the pickup artist world and the relationship space.

These are two areas of my life I cared about.

I think what most people,

Most young men care about and this is all I had to work off of.

Now with my love life I was entering or I was at this point kind of steeped in what at the time was called the seduction community,

But we would now more derogatorily call the pickup artist community and even though that kind of framework of relating to women didn't really feel good to me,

Again it was the only model I had of guys who had successfully overcome the problems that I had and had things to show for it.

These were guys who and as described all of their sales pages and marketing information,

Guys who used to be huge losers and now they had tons of beautiful women in their lives and you know had made lots of money mostly through charging exorbitant prices to teach other men how to meet women.

And even though this didn't feel great to me,

It was the only model I had,

Right?

It was all about learning psychology and human behavior and approaching and playing the numbers game and you know at the time I didn't have a way of describing why it didn't feel good to me.

But looking back now one of the reasons why I didn't feel good is that this model of human relating came from a purely materialistic,

We could say superficial,

But also fear-based and contracted view of human interaction.

It viewed dating as a zero-sum game where you had to out compete all the other males for the affection of females,

You know all backed by science which I liked and still think is useful,

But it's a very cold way of looking at things and a lot based on kind of survival of the fittest,

You know viewpoints.

Like if you don't,

You know,

Conquer,

If you don't conquer women,

If you don't out compete men,

Your genes get weeded out of existence.

Which is true on a level,

But it's only one way of looking at things,

Which I would learn from my friend Daniel because I met Daniel maybe a year and a half or two years after I started dabbling or hanging out with pickup artist guys and Daniel was totally different because similar to the pickup artist guys I'd met,

He had a very dynamic love life.

Just like them,

He had many beautiful lovers and many things to impress other men,

But the thing that was way more impressive about him is that his way about going things is totally different because whereas other guys would brag about the numbers they slept with or the difficulty,

You know,

A pickup artist guy would brag about,

Oh I picked up the 10 at the bar who had already rejected 20 other guys so look at how awesome I am.

Daniel's stories were totally different.

Daniel's were so impressive not because of how well he went against the grain or overcome adversity,

It was that every romance of his,

It's not even fair to call them seductions because he wasn't really the act of party seemingly,

All of his romances what was so impressive is that they were so unlikely.

There was something incredibly serendipitous about every time he essentially fell in love with a woman which happened almost every couple weeks.

Daniel never went out to approach women or meet women or try to make anything happen,

But he would just go out into,

I lived in New York City at the time,

He would just go out into the city and go about his day and somehow would always end up in these adventures.

He would randomly meet a woman on the train or end up sitting next to someone in a cafe or you know randomly being magnetized to a woman in the park and they would have these epic adventures and every time it was just so impressive and he was an amazing storyteller.

One of the most magnetic people ever met,

But what was so cool about his stories was that it seemed like everything was happening to him as opposed to the pickup artist guys who would frame it as they were doing things to the world.

So of course as a young man who was working on this part of his life,

I very often asked Daniel,

How did you do this?

Like how can I be like you essentially?

How can I like other techniques?

Like what do you think about?

What do you say?

How do you look at people?

And many times Daniel did try to give me an answer.

I think they're all kind of kind of bullshit answers,

Not that he was trying to bullshit me,

But I think he himself didn't really know.

Like he would try to explain it one way or another,

But it was almost like he was being guided by something that wasn't anything conscious or voluntary.

But there was a clue that he offered in his stories and he had many.

Was that every time he connected with a woman,

And sometimes even beforehand,

He would often use this line or this phrase,

You know,

In explaining what he was doing of like,

Yeah,

I was just like I was just drinking her in or I was just drinking in the situation.

Like he'd often say I was just drinking it in.

It's like he was like,

It's like he was like fully taking in reality,

Fully taking in the person he was talking to.

Like he was just guzzling it down,

Consuming reality,

And somehow that just drew the things he wanted to him.

At least when he was on.

Because when Daniel was on,

He was so on.

Like he was so magnetic,

He was so charismatic,

Like I wanted to listen to everything he had to say.

But he wasn't always on.

Sometimes he was off.

And he was also one of the most volatile people I've gotten to know in that when he was on,

Everything went right for him.

But when he was off,

Everything seemed to go wrong with him.

Right?

Just like his amazing stories were like,

He would attract incredible romantic situations or career opportunities or interesting people or lucky breaks.

He also,

When he was off,

Seemed to repel everything from himself.

Right?

Like he would get fired inexplicably or unfairly from what was his dream job.

He would,

You know,

For as many times that he had an incredible romance story,

He also had a kind of crazily dramatic and unfortunate breakup story.

Like things that are so unusual,

Like an ex-boyfriend of his lover would show up and threaten his life,

Or the woman would randomly turn on him and become super cruel out of nowhere.

Like he seemed to be plagued with an equal amount of bad luck canceling out his good luck.

And as I got to know him over the years,

It seemed like at times it seemed randomly bad luck,

But at other times I've actually been frustrated with him throughout our friendship because there have been times where things actually aren't that bad,

But he like he puts this super negative filter on reality and somehow sabotages everything good in his life.

And the difference between these two situations,

As far as I can observe from being his friend,

Comes down to this thing that we can call openness.

When he was on,

He was super open.

Like he would drink in reality,

He would drink in the world.

And when he was off,

It seemed to be like he would not take anything in.

He would like push everything away and something about him became equally repulsive.

And I've been thinking about him these last couple days.

I think about this virtue of openness because the family and I just finally made it to Mexico.

It was a fairly stressful journey,

As you would imagine,

30 hours flying,

Whatever,

Etc.

What you would expect.

But here I am in a new environment,

Totally different culture,

Totally different reality than the one I've gotten used to in Thailand.

Meeting new people,

New opportunities,

A kind of an opportunity to recreate my lifestyle and life and identity.

And I noticed that I kind of have a choice every moment because there's so many things that are outside of my control right now.

Like what house we're going to live in,

The housing market here is pretty terrible,

At least as far as we can see.

And other things like what I'm going to do,

The friends I'm going to meet,

Things that I can't really like just do a certain thing and expect an immediate result.

But I can affect my attitude.

And I've been thinking about him on how in these moments where you don't have direct control over your circumstances,

But there's a little bit of luck involved or you play the odds,

But there's things that are going to be outside of your control.

The only thing you really can do is choose whether or not to be open,

Whether to contract against your experience,

As is very tempting,

Especially when you've gone through some inconveniences,

As I have through this intercontinental family move.

Or you can choose to be open.

You can choose to blindly trust that things are going to work out or semi blindly choose that things are going to work out and take in reality and take in the opportunities that exist.

And what reminded me of Daniel specifically is actually my daughter because she's seven months old and experiencing what myself and my wife are experiencing,

Stressful move,

New environments,

All that stuff,

Stress,

But also newness and excitement.

But without the verbal narrative,

Without the conscious thought.

She's just purely emotion.

And I can see in her that she's either open or closed essentially.

And when she's open,

She's also super magnetic,

Right?

As babies are,

They smile,

Everyone wants to cuddle them.

That's their evolutionary survival strategy.

And when she's closed and she's crying and uncomfortable about something or rejecting her experience,

Everything seems to be wrong.

And this also kind of reminded me of Daniel because when he was on,

He was almost like childish in his worldview.

He was like trusting to a naive level,

But things would work out for him.

Whereas when he was off,

He was like resentful about everything and nothing could be right.

He was almost like he was,

You know,

Almost like a kid crying.

As made me think,

You know,

As a conscious adult,

We can at least choose what we think about to some degree.

And in this environment,

I could choose to be a happy,

Open,

Smiling person who attracts or accepts everything that he's experiencing,

Perhaps creates opportunities through that.

Or I can reject things.

By rejecting things and being resentful,

I would almost certainly confirm a negative worldview.

So in this episode,

I'm speaking about the virtue of openness.

This is another one of these topics that can be taken to a magical or mystical esoteric level if you want as far as manifesting your reality.

Or it can be taken from a more grounded lens of creating opportunities and having the experience of enjoying what you want.

We can say that's gratitude versus rejecting what's there,

Which we can call resentment.

This is episode 160,

The virtue of openness.

So one thing about my friend Daniel is that he is a recovered addict.

And at the time that I met him around age 24,

I seem to have a lot of addicts in my life.

One could say that maybe I was attracting them into my life.

And first,

I want to be sensitive to the topic because,

You know,

Obviously addiction comes with a lot of pain.

And as a non-addict,

You know,

I know that there are things that I cannot quite understand,

At least not to the magnitude.

But I do think I was drawn to this type of person at this point in my life because they seem to have had a trait that I was very much lacking in.

Just before meeting Daniel,

I was in a relationship with a non-recovered addict.

She was offered doing drugs when we were together and I was a little bit too naive to really understand what was going on or the seriousness of it.

But at the time,

I was a dumb 23-year-old,

A naive kid,

And she and I would travel around and do things.

And somehow,

She always found drugs.

And I found this so fascinating about her.

We would go on a trip and stay in some place,

A place we'd never been before.

But somehow,

She knew who to talk to and how to navigate the conversation to somehow find drugs that night,

Always.

It seemed so magical.

And at that point,

With my hyper-rationalistic worldview,

It just defied my sense of logic.

And it wasn't just with drugs,

Although those were the ones that were the thing that was always the most astounding.

It could be anything.

She wanted something and she was essentially on,

In quotes.

She was in her magnetic mode.

She could find some way to get the thing that she wanted,

Even when it seemed super unlikely.

Later on in life,

I became acquainted with a number of love addicts,

Which of course is something we refer to women as when they have love addiction.

Because when a man is a love addict,

We call him a stalker.

But the women I've known who are love addicts also had a similar thing.

I knew this broken up couple where the guy just wanted to get away from the woman,

But she was super addicted to him to a delusional level,

To a stalker level.

And I remember there was a couple of times where he would hide.

And they lived in a big city.

He would hide from her.

He would go to a neighborhood that she wouldn't think of,

Basically try to get lost from her.

But somehow,

With no clues,

She just found him.

And I remember hearing her say this once,

Like,

Yeah,

I didn't know why,

But I just went to this neighborhood and I just had a sense that he'd be on the street and I found him.

And somehow she always found him.

And it always seemed so uncanny,

Still,

To hear these stories of how someone in this almost delusional level of desire can somehow find the thing that they want.

And the unfortunate other side of the coin with such type of person is that they also seem to have a repulsive counterbalance to them.

Where they might be able to find the person they like,

In a love addict's situation,

But they also repel them at the same time.

Or obviously there's many negatives and pain that comes with substance addiction,

Any kind of addiction.

Like there's this drop,

There's also this pushing away.

Both of which can sometimes seem uncanny and so unlikely to the point that it seems magical.

And my basic understanding,

My theory of understanding this,

Because I've tried to wrap my head around this a lot,

Is that when someone's survival circuit,

Like primal survival circuit,

Is triggered,

They can somehow pull off things that seem very unlikely for the sake of survival,

But then there's a counterbalance,

Or there's like a correction to make up for it.

Which is like the great highs followed by the great lows.

The extreme like ultra magnetism to the extreme repulsion.

The other type of person that I've met who seems to have a way of like magically getting what they want,

And often overlaps with addiction,

Are people who are abused when they're young.

It's like they're in a situation where they didn't have control over material circumstances,

But they developed like this kind of like extreme intuition.

Like I've seen this a lot in my friends who had an alcoholic parent where,

You know,

In order to protect themselves or maybe their siblings,

They developed this like survival instinct that defies logic sometimes.

Almost like a Jason Bourne level of like knowing exactly where the gun is headed.

Like they know how to find the thing that they need in order to make it in the world.

And the way I've been looking at it is it's kind of like all of this experience is on the most primal survival circuit,

What we would call circuit one,

According to Timothy Leary's model,

Which I like.

If you haven't caught my episodes on that,

Simply circuit one is the bio survival circuit.

It's our most primal circuit that we have in common with much more primitive life forms.

And it comes down to basically lasting,

Surviving in a world where there's things that want to eat you,

But you also have to eat things.

The survival circuit comes down to consumption.

It's all about putting things that are good into your mouth or into your body,

Depending on what kind of organism you are,

And getting away from things that might consume you.

And I think this is in line with people who've had survival fears triggered,

Say due to unfortunate circumstances or dangerous circumstances where they're young,

Where they may overcome their survival fear,

Their anxiety through consuming something.

Because according to the survival circuit,

It's a unidirectional experience or unidirectional form of consciousness where you're either consuming what's good or you're getting away from what's bad.

It's a parasympathetic nervous system of feed and breed,

Or the sympathetic nervous system of fight or flight.

So very often you see people who have these ongoing survival fears triggered,

Called anxiety or some sort of discomfort,

Some sort of malady,

They won't go away.

That type of person is more drawn to unhealthy consumption,

Be it substance abuse or overeating or even sex addiction.

You can metaphorically say love addiction is very similar to addicted to smoking,

Things like that.

Because this is a kind of way to trick this circuit into the open version.

If you're caught up in this prey experience,

We're trying to run away from something metaphorically that's trying to consume you,

If you eat something,

You can't be in both at the same time.

Smoking a cigarette or pounding some junk food or whatever the addiction,

The comforting addiction can be,

Flips the person back into an open version rather than contracted,

Into consuming rather than avoiding being consumed.

I can actually see this in my daughter.

She doesn't think in words,

She's not sapient in that sense yet,

But when she's upset again,

When she has some sort of survival,

We could call it a survival fear triggered by being hungry or tired or cold,

She cries.

That's her essential version of like,

That's the best she can do.

She can barely crawl.

The best thing she can do is cry and hope that something takes care of her survival need.

Whereas actually,

One of the things that has been flipping her out of that is when we give her food.

When she eats something tasty,

She just started eating solids.

When she eats something,

She can't possibly cry at the same time or if she's really like dug in on crying,

Then she's not interested in food.

Like those two things can't coexist.

You can't be the predator and the prey at the same time.

So by consuming something,

You disable the fear of being eaten.

So us as conscious adults,

We of course don't want to be in the experience of having our survival fears triggered and basically pushing things away,

Literally or metaphorically,

Repelling things that we want or repelling life.

But we also don't want to rely on consuming things to make ourselves feel better.

That's what a lot of people do,

Even people who don't consider themselves to be addicts or maybe wouldn't be called addicts.

We don't want to rely on consuming things because that's not really the solution.

That's really just a band-aid.

It's really just avoidance of the discomfort and comes with a lot of pain.

Even just simply binging Netflix all the time and eating junk food,

You're going to end up in a body that you don't like and you're going to end up letting life pass you by.

On the flip side,

It would be nice to have that kind of magnetism and we would have to entertain a bit of a spiritual view on this,

That kind of magnetism where things just kind of work out for you or things are drawn into you.

Like my magical friend Daniel or even like I look at my daughter's worldview as best as I can see,

I look at the world through her eyes and it's like when she's on and magnetic and open and smiling,

Everything she wants seems to come to her.

It's obviously from an outside adult's perspective.

We can see there's other forces at play that she doesn't understand.

But in her reality,

When she smiles at a stranger,

They almost always smile back.

They almost always pick her up,

Which is what she wants.

Her parents give her something that she wants.

She gets cuddles,

She gets love,

She gets attention,

She gets food.

I can see how from her worldview,

It can seem seemingly magical too.

When she turns on her magnetism,

Everything works out.

So similar to an animal or a baby or some non-sapient life form where you can't be eating something and avoid being eaten at the same time,

We as more rational adults who do engage in the world with more conscious thoughts,

We also kind of have a binary choice or binary experience where we can't be relentlessly desiring and trusting that we're going to get what we want and resentful and blaming circumstance at the same time.

That's kind of our version.

That's the adult human version of parasympathetic versus sympathetic nervous system.

Either we expect to get what we want and we are open to the experience or we are not open to the experience.

We are resentful,

We're blaming,

We have reasons why we can't have what we have and enter what we would call slave morality.

When it comes to abstract words like trust versus resentment,

It's abstract so it's kind of hard to do that.

But it does come down to this very simple thing of openness and if we simplify and simplify and try to connect to our more primal experience of are we open or are we contracting,

Are we moving towards things or are we going away,

It does come down to this very simple thing of openness.

Are we willing to take in reality and trust that things work out?

I mean,

If you just even make it simpler,

It's like are we willing to take in reality?

Are we willing to be open to the experience versus rejecting things and having reasons why we can't have it or trying to get away from things?

This applies to social experiences,

This applies to being in a new environment as I am right now or really anything.

And in other episodes where I've spoken more about the circuits of consciousness,

Specifically circuit one,

The survival circuit,

Physiologically it does come down to openness or closeness.

To eat something,

You have to open your mouth and have various sphincters in your digestive tract be open versus what I often say is the simple hack for promoting relaxation in your body is to relax your butthole.

People laugh but it is a primal thing that I think men do more than women,

Although not that I'm checking people's butts.

It seems that when someone is in some way not happy with the experience or rejecting things or in any way a slightly bit anxious,

They clench this most primal part of their body,

Their most primal sphincter in their butt.

And even in my friend Daniel,

Before he would speak I would always know whether he was on or not because when he was on and in magnetic mode and just super fun to be around and drawing in the things that he wanted,

His pupils would actually get huge.

I know that he wasn't taking drugs or anything,

He would just be so excited about life that his pupils would get big and it would just be fun to look at him and talk to him and listen to what he had to say.

Whereas when he would get into resentment mode and blaming circumstances and how the world was against him,

His pupils would actually contract.

And you can notice this when you speak to people,

Obviously if you're looking at someone and their pupils are tiny,

They're probably either afraid or angry at you or maybe they're looking into the sun which also makes pupils contract as other things.

But this is something that we know intuitively.

When we look at someone who has pupils dilated,

They just seem more attractive and they seem more trustworthy.

This is one of the reasons why bar environments and places where people mingle and date,

They almost always have mood lighting like low ambient light because it makes pupils dilate which in some way triggers the parasympathetic nervous system,

Makes people more social and trusting and happy to be around each other.

So the very simple single takeaway here,

The thing that I've been trying to meditate on this week has been just focused on being open.

To make things maybe a little bit less abstract or to give something more concrete to focus on,

It is a bit of a spiritual way of looking at things.

I've been imagining my heart center,

My heart chakra if you will,

This energy wheel in your chest that we can imagine if only metaphorically.

I've been trying to go through the days imagining it being really open.

Because even if this is just a mind trick,

I don't know if there's such a thing as a chakra in my chest,

Even if it's just a mind trick,

By meditating on having the circle be really wide and open,

I notice I immediately become more calm.

You can't imagine this thing and maintain the feeling of fear and distrust at the same time.

I mean this is the best trick or hack that I can attempt at dilating my pupils on purpose,

Which of course I wouldn't even know if it was happening.

But it does feel like it,

Right?

When I meditate on having an openness in my chest,

It does seem like I am taking in more of reality.

I am taking more light in.

Perhaps my pupils are dilating,

But at least I'm more open to the experiences I've been having.

And it does seem,

It could be confirmation bias,

But it does seem when I really have this awareness on some level,

At least my social interactions are a lot more friendly as opposed to when I'm not paying attention to this and I seem to be a lot more awkward and not having the best interactions.

But also,

Life seems to be a little more pleasant,

Right?

Because you could be standing in the same exact place with the same exact weather and the same exact people around you or not around you.

And we all know that you can be really enjoying that moment.

If you've ever taken something like MDMA,

This kind of forces you into that experience.

Or you could be in the opposite,

Right?

If you drink too much coffee or do something else physiological that makes you contract and constrict and perhaps cortisol,

High cortisol levels make your pupils constrict.

You're just a little more wound up.

You're in that more sympathetic fight or flight experience.

So I would offer this to you as something to try in your waking moments when you have free attention where you can just remember is to meditate on openness.

As opposed to what most people do when they have free attention,

Which is to let it get spent on say scrolling their phone.

That's the consumptive,

Is consumptive a word?

I'm not sure.

The consumption-based semi-addiction that most people have of just filling the void by consuming their phone.

Instead use something a little bit more wholesome or perhaps useful,

Which is to meditate on openness.

Pay attention to yourself.

Are you clenching anything in your body versus if you like this trick to imagine your heart opening?

Just see what happens.

I'm not saying that this is an absolute truth.

This is just something I'm trying.

Again,

Might be confirmation bias.

I might just be tricking myself and wrongly attributing the good things that seem to be happening.

But at least at the very least,

I've noticed it makes me feel good.

I'd be curious.

If you try this,

What happens next?

If you want to hit me up on Instagram after trying this,

I would love to hear from you.

And those of us who decide to do this,

Perhaps we can treat it as a collective experiment because that's what I'm going to be doing anyway for the foreseeable future,

Which is meditate on openness and seeing what the results are.

Because so far it seems to be working out pretty well.

So if you decide to try this and you want to get in touch,

You can hit me up on Instagram at Ruwondo.

I'm literally only using Instagram for messaging,

So it's still up there.

And of course,

If you know anyone who would enjoy this episode and maybe you want to try this openness experiment as well,

Please share it with them.

Thanks for listening.

Goodbye.

I give it away to think like a white even.

Right,

Right.

There's no.