audio | mastery.fm

What is the next right move?

The way through the challenge is to get still and ask yourself:

What is the next right move?

Not think about “Ohhh, I had all of this…!” —

What is the next right move?

And then from that space, make the next right move. And the next right move.

And not to be overwhelmed by it, because you know your life is bigger than that one moment. You know you’re not defined by what somebody says is a failure for you, because failure is just there to point you in a different direction.

Loading Likes...

Your Relationship with Time

Jesse Itzler:

I became very aware of my relationship with time. When we think of relationships, we think of our relationships with our mom or our dad or our kids, or this and that, but no one thinks of a relationship with time.

Now, I’m turning 50. The average American lives to be 78 years old. So, if I’m average, I hope I’m not, but that means I got 28 years of life left. If you reverse engineer that… Like, I just climbed Mount Washington. There were no 70-year-olds climbing Mount Washington. The actual years that you have left to be active and do the shit that we want to do, they shrink significantly as a percentage as you get older.

So once you get aware of your relationship with time, everything shifts. I had a fundamental shift when I came home, as it relates to my relationship with time. Who I want to spend it with and what I want to do. And I want to put more on my plate of the stuff that I love to do, with the people I love to do it with.

And I started getting a lot of clarity around that when I wasn’t getting bombarded with everything else. Like, I don’t spend any time alone. The only I spent alone is if I go for a run. Everything else is… I’m getting influenced by everybody else and everything else. So I’m losing my main superpower, my instinct.

I survive on instinct and gut, and I was losing that, because I was so distracted. So once I started to get that alone time… You don’t have to go to a monastery to do it, you just gotta, you know… Carving out a little bit of time for myself, every day. I started to think a lot clearer on how do I want to live, how do I want to reverse engineer the rest of my life.

Loading Likes...

One Desire

Naval Ravikant:

So just don’t focus on more than one desire at a time. The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing and you focus on that, you’ll get it. But everything else, you got to let go.

Loading Likes...

How You Interpret Your Reality

Naval Ravikant:

At the end of the day, I do think, even despite what I said earlier: life is really a single player game. It’s all going on in your head. You know, whatever you think, you believe, will very much shape your reality, both from what risks you take and what actions you perform, but also just your everyday experience of reality.

If you’re walking down the street and you’re judging everyone, you’re like, “I don’t like that person because their skin color, I don’t like that — Oh, she’s not attractive. That guy is fat. This person is a loser. Oh, who put this in my way.” You know, the more you judge, the more you’re going to separate yourself. And you’ll feel good for an instant because you’ll feel good about yourself. “I’m better than that.” But then you’re going to feel lonely. And then you’re just going to see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.

Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there’s no concept of right or wrong or good or bad, right? You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations and lights and colors and sounds, and then you die. And how you choose to interpret, that is up to you. You do have that choice.

So this is what I meant, that happiness is a choice. If you believe it’s a choice, then you can start working on it. And I can’t tell you how to find it, because it’s your own conditionings that are making you unhappy. So you have to uncondition yourself. It’s just like, I can’t fix your eating habits for you. I can give you some general guidelines, but you got to go through the hard habit forming of how to eat right. But you have to believe it’s possible, and it is absolutely possible.

Loading Likes...

Little Onion

Alan Watts:

When you can really allow yourself to be afraid and you don’t resist the experience of fear, you are truly beginning to master fear. But when you refuse to be afraid, you are resisting fear, and that simply sets up a vicious circle of being afraid of fear, and being afraid of being afraid of fear, and so on.

And that’s what we call worry. Worry is simply a chronic condition, and people who worry are going to worry no matter what happens.

Because when one possible threat is exterminated, they will immediately discover another… because worry is an infinitely skinned onion. And you can go on and on and on, because the moment, you see, you reduce the size of the onion and you get your worry down to about this, suddenly your whole sense of distance and size changes.

And because you’re looking so intently at this little onion, it fills your whole field of vision and is once again a big onion. You start peeling that down. But as you get another one about this size, then it enlarges itself in your judgment and your sense of values. And once more, it’s colossal.

So if you are disposed to worry, there is always plenty to worry about.

Loading Likes...

You Are the Big Bang

Alan Watts:

Astronomers say there was a primordial explosion, an enormous bang billions of years ago which flung all the galaxies into space. Well, let’s take that just for the sake of argument and say that was the way it happened.

It’s like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it’s dense, isn’t it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see?

So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting.

But so we define ourselves as being only that.

If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time.

Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you’re a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don’t feel that we’re still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself.

You are actually — if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning — you’re not something that is a result of the big bang, on the end of the process. You are still the process! You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.

(…)

But we’ve learned to define ourselves as separate from it.

We have been hypnotized, literally hypnotized by social convention into feeling and sensing that we exist only inside our skins. That we are not the original bang, but just something out on the end of it.

(…)

And so what I would call a basic problem we’ve got to go through first, is to understand that there are no such things as things — that is to say separate things, or separate events.

So the world doesn’t come thinged; it doesn’t come evented. You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean. The ocean waves, and the universe peoples. And as the wave, I wave at you and say ‘Yoo-hoo!’ — the world is waving at me with you and saying ‘Hi! I’m here!’

Loading Likes...

The Precipice

Tilda Swinton:

I wouldn’t go on performing were it not for this interest in unpicking or examining how it is that we lumber ourselves with the idea that we have one identity, and we have to carry it, and we cannot change it or modify it in any way until we die.

And that both moves me and saddens me; that society has somehow hoodwinked us into thinking that this is the case. Because as far as I’m concerned, identity is a sort of … I’m not sure I believe identity exists. I think the only thing we can really rely on is change, and our sense of ourselves is completely amorphous.

And so, when, if I’m talking about a narrative, and I look back at my work, very often I’m looking at the story of someone who reaches what I call a precipice in their life. When they have to encounter their sense of identity, and they have to shift. Or, they have a choice about whether to shift or whether to perish in some way.

Loading Likes...

Manifest the Emotion

Abraham-Hicks:

The point of creation is the launching and the alignment for the exhilaration that it brings. It’s all about the feeling. It’s 100%, that’s all creation, is about the feeling that it brings to you. The manifestation that matters most is the manifestation of emotion. And you have the ability to manifest the emotion before you manifest any of the actuality that you are all so eager about manifesting.

And:

“I like knowing that essentially we are all the same. We are all love looking for a place to happen. We are all clarity looking for a place to happen. That’s who we naturally innately are.”

Loading Likes...

The Journey

Abraham-Hicks:

You can never have an unhappy journey to a happy destination. If you’re having a miserable time along the way, when you get to wherever you’re going, it’s going to be miserable when you get there. That’s a sign, you see.

But when you’re feeling good, when it’s fun, when you’re clear-minded, when you’re feeling frisky, when you want to go, when you’re just full of yourself — tuned in, tapped in, turned on! — when you feel like that, that’s when you know, you’ve managed to find that frequency, and now that Broader Perspective is helping you out.

Loading Likes...

Creating Abundance

Creating Abundance / Steve Pavlina

Steve Pavlina on creating the vibe of abundance:

What I do is I’ll sit down or lie down on my couch, and I’ll close my eyes and I’ll simply imagine the new reality I want to experience. If I want to have money flowing through my life, then I’ll imagine that. I’ll imagine it as real and feeling good to me — I’m already there and I’m seeing it fully associated, so I’m imagining whatever scene I’m seeing, I’m seeing it through my own eyes.

It’s not the visualization that’s so important; the visualization is merely a tool to create the vibration, to create that feeling. I have to get in that mindset of asking myself, okay, if I was already there, how would I really feel about reality? If I already had massive financial abundance, how would I feel? What is the feeling that would come up in me?

And:

The first time you do this you may only be able to lock into that emotional signature for maybe thirty seconds or a minute. It might take you awhile to visualize the right way of thinking about it, such that you’re creating those feelings.

Just keep doing it again, do it twenty minutes a day, every day. The goal here is to get good at doing it during those twenty minutes, so you really get good at locking on to that emotional feeling. Eventually you will figure something out, you will picture some scene that will make you feel just so abundant.

Loading Likes...