Tag Archives: Busting Loose

Busting Loose, Spirituality

The Paradox of Change

Leave a comment

Nothing changes, until it does.

I’m about to rock your world…

Things change, but you never change things. What I mean is that it is not you doing the changing of anything. So I want to stress to you that you are not changing anything, but I also want to stress to you that you will never believe my words. Now that we’ve established a relationship of mutual distrust, let me continue.

You may believe it intellectually, but deep down in your soul you will continue to believe that you have sway over your reality. This is the fundamental paradox of our time here. If you’re reading this blog, you probably think you are an open minded person. Well I have news for you: you are human – subject to flaws, prejudices, and other kinds of limitations. If you say, “you’re wrong about me!” you might go to great lengths to prove that you are in fact open-minded and furthermore, that you don’t need to change anything.

But here is where the trap happens. The fact that you need to prove to me (or yourself, or god, or whoever) that you don’t need to change, is you trying to change something. I’ll say it again. Wanting to not change (or detach, or surrender, or whatever) is wanting to change that you want change. In fact, wanting things to stay the same, is wanting them to change underneath. Go as far as you can underneath your own internal drives and see if you don’t want some little aspect of your life to be different.

Ok, let’s stop with the torture. The only thing you can do with this paradox is embrace it.

You cannot solve a paradox – just as you cannot change anything in your life. You cannot get out of a paradox, for that is not what a paradox is for. I do not mean to instill helplessness in you. I do not mean to tell you to stop trying. I mean only to tell you the truth as I know it.

It is your role to make things better, but doing so is fundamentally futile. I know it doesn’t seem so. If you could, why wouldn’t you make more money, attract better relationships, travel more, and do more more more? If you were to boil down exactly what the human game is at its root it is the fundamental relationship between you and the world. Specifically, that you try to change the world. And  the tricky thing is that sometimes it looks like the world has changed, but that’s all part of the game. That’s what keeps you emotionally invested in your life.

Do you understand? You may understand intellectually and you may never get it a gut level . There is nothing particularly to get here anyway. The irony is that as I’m writing I’m living the game right now, banging my head against a computer screen trying to get you to understand. But not long ago I realized that I can’t change that I want to change my life. So I’m doing the only thing I can do – embracing it.

I recommend that you too do this. But it doesn’t matter what you should or should not do, you are going to do what you’re going to do anyway regardless of what I say. If what I say compels you to do something different, that was the story you wrote out for yourself. I did not change it for you. Change happens to you and within you – nothing more. Nothing less.

Are you having trouble dealing with it emotionally? That is because you hold on the idea that you are in control of your life. You may have read Busting Loose from the Money Game and thought “wow this is my ticket to happiness.” Indeed the book lays out step by step what you can expect in your brand new life. But this is the genius of your experience here. Hidden within that book is the message that awareness has no path and the change you burn for is unnecessary. Yet the form of the book offers you progress and results: The same kind of progress and results that you’ve been chasing your entire life in spiritual and non-spiritual ways.

So what is different? Some would say awareness is the only thing that changes. Others would say everything changes. I would say both are true. If my words sound hollow it’s because at a certain point, that’s what words do. You have to take it from there.

Robert Scheinfeld previously said that, on your journey, you will eventually let go of trying to change, fix, or improve your life. Yet recently Robert said that he no longer believes you shouldn’t try to change the hologram. He is tapping into a fundamental truth. Like the ocean, your world is forever changing. And the rules themselves are forever changing. But for now the rules seem set.

It is as simple as this:

  1. There’s you and there’s your reality.
  2. You will forever try to change your reality to fit what seems to be in your mind. What you want will change, but you will not change that you want.
  3. Reality will push and pull against you.
  4. If you change that you want, the game will end.

Such a simple game but infinitely complex in its variations. Do you see? You are so amazed by this game that you would never want to stop playing.

Play on!

Busting Loose

Phase 2 Players Retreat: Your Story Separates You

9 Comments

There is much to say about the Phase 2 players retreat that took place in March 2010 at the Chaminade in Santa Cruz. This is first of several posts I will be making about the topic.

So let’s talk about separation.

Separation is very good. It allows for the structure of day and night, sound and silence, and you and me. The idea of “you and me” allows for us to have roles wherein you know something I don’t, or vice versa.

I began the weekend by recreating a very familiar Phase 1 role for myself: the student. As, the me who “doesn’t know,” I enter a room set up with round tables and office chairs, business stationary and bottles of water. Everything about the environment screams for me “lets workshop this!”, whatever this is. But I roll with it (especially cause there are rolly chairs!) And it feels comfortable. Most of the time if a Phase 1 pattern is comfortable, it means it’s time to get real uncomfortable.

I meet Robert in the very first moments of being at the retreat. Instead of feeling like an equal, like we actually are, I feel like a very special student allowed to be in the presence of a guru. The student/teacher paradigm is wonderfully intact. He gives me a hug. Ok, so maybe he’s a new agey guru, but a guru nonetheless. My perception of him before this was as an anal-retentive, logic-minded, straight shooting businessman. Yet in this moment, confronted with his unique separate entity, I see cracks in that perception already beginning to emerge.

For one thing, he’s incredibly laid back. For another he has almost no plan for this entire three day retreat.

The Introductions

“We’re going to start with introductions,” he says. Seems right. I should get to know all these strange people who all separately felt compelled to be here this weekend.

(I’m paraphrasing here) “Tell us as little (ha) or as much about yourself. Your name, where you’re from, and how you discovered the busting loose work.”

Simple right? Of a 3 day retreat, the introductions took almost 2 full days.

Each day lasted about 10 hours (9am-7pm) with maybe 2 hours of breaks each day (give or take.) The “introductions” were then 8 hours the first day, and about 6 hours the second. Or 14 hours, or watching the extended versions of Lord of the Rings with ample snack and bathroom breaks. What I’m trying to say is that they were epic.

And not just epic in length, they were epic in emotion, in intimacy, in meaning, in transformation.

One by one people laid bare their souls in the form of their storylines about money, rejection, their search for meaning in life, and imagined octopus’ clinging to their heads.

That last one wasn’t a joke.

The Truth

While I listened to stories about visions quests, law of attraction, and losing everything, I started to really get something.

Firstly, I started to get that the introductions were not really introductions, but one of the main points of the entire retreat. As I said before Robert hadn’t planned this, but If these were introductions, your entire life is a prologue.

Having my expectations for this retreat completely dashed, I started to let the truth of it seep in – that listening to these sometimes completely irrelevant and rambling personal biographies held many nuggets of direct experience.

Furthermore, that every one of these people were me, and everyone was telling the same story. You who are reading this, are living the same story. You can’t not, because you came here to do exactly that.

Sure, the details are different, but slowly distinct patterns begin to emerge.

  1. You comes across the book in an inconsequential manner – a friend recommends it to you, or you idly picked it up from a bookstore one day.
  2. If it is meaningful, you most likely learn the wrong thing from it first, especially if you’re steeped in the more more more, bigger bigger bigger, mindset (which you can’t not be in Phase 1)
  3. The book in many of your stories sits on a desk for months, unread.
  4. You eventually read it, and sure enough, your life as you know it falls apart.

Some were telling this from the perspective of the initial “falling apart” and some were telling it from the new expanded perspective that inevitably comes like a rebirth from the ashes of their old life. But as the hours passed equal parts boring and riveting, mundane and completely fantastical, I realized I was watching my story in a hundred different permutations.

Like a prism of truth with colors in infinite varieties.

During “break times” I had the privelege of talking to myself dressed up as old wise women, fit and ambitious men, gorgeous younger women, clueless and depressed older men, and every other kind of person you can imagine. I met myself as a porn star, an energy healer, a lawyer, a disillusioned wanderer, and as a guru.

The Retreat

If you’ve been playing in Phase 2 for a while, you know (or atleast you try to understand intellectually) that everyone is you. Yet, most of the time this fact does not stay in my awareness. An absolute gift of this retreat was that I allowed my persona to see the truth more easily in everyone else. As it went on the truth felt more and more obvious.

That is one of the reasons I highly recommend a retreat like this – if nothing else than to be in a room with a hundred other people who hold a significant piece of truth. The feeling of expansion happens tenfold in this environment.

For the first time ever, I felt home. Not the home in the story where my parents raised me and I lived (though ironically Santa Cruz where the retreat took place is that.) The home outside the story, where nothing is seperate, and where we each play dress up for the fun of it.

Though I met many people for the first time, I felt like I’d known them all my life. And Robert too, played a role for me to support the cast and crew of the story I want to play. He was obviously in on that understanding, since when someone asked if they would sign his book, he replied “you should sign it too.”

The Feeling of Separation

Yet this was all the details of my particular story.

Not everyone in my hologram had this same feeling. Some were frustrated, some pained. Some were absolutely delighted, and some were quietly contemplative. Many left the meeting room because they didn’t see the point if Robert wasn’t going to do Q&A (which he eventually did quite a bit of.) This was not a bad thing by the way, as it was established we could come and go as we pleased.

Separation is necessary so that coming back to your natural state of infinite abundance feels like a journey. In reality there is nowhere to go, no one else to be, and no knowledge to gain. You just pretend you aren’t there, you aren’t them, and you don’t have “it.” Many people at the retreat did wonderful jobs of pretending these exact things.

So a curious thing happened. It became obvious in my story that there were those who saw the separation for the game it was and those who didn’t – both as beautiful as those who watch the movie and those who made the movie. Both ideas must exist for this human game to be played.

And though I’m the only thing that is real, as I sat amongst a myriad of other beautiful stories, I couldn’t imagine playing this game in an empty room.

If you came to the retreat I would love to hear your story. What did you think of the “introductions”? What “new knowledge” did you “gain”?

If you didn’t go, what is your story now? Are you “in the know”? Do you want to be?

Next Post

I realized during a Q&A session that though I’d been waiting for years to be in the presence of a spiritual leader or someone “in the know” (where the know is the answer to life the universe and everything) that now that I was here, I had no questions left that I couldn’t answer myself. I was witnessing the breakdown of the teacher-student paradigm.

Busting Loose, Creativity, Fun

“Funny People”: Why the Hologram Feels so Real

3 Comments
How can something feel so real and so fake at the same time?
How can something feel so real and so fake at the same time?

You may be asking – what does a shallow comedy have to do with spirituality?

Funny People is about as shallow as the continental shelf and for me the experience of watching it was like a guided tour of the creation of the hologram. For you non-busters, this means that the attention to detail in both its fictional world and it’s honesty of emotion is staggering.

Both groups will enjoy Anthony DellaFlora’s article on the intersection of comedy and spirituality The Zen of Seinfeld.

You should know that I have a bias. I have a B.A. in Film and Digital theory the majority of which was earned by analyzing films. The upside of this is now when I watch movies it becomes a four-dimensional experience. No I don’t go back in time, but I watch much more than the movie itself. Even while I’m engrossed in the story, I think about and analyze the cinematography, the direction, the locations, the script process, the sound design, the editing, the 2nd unit work (stunts and location-only shots). It’s like having a making-of documentary simultaneously piped into my brain at the same time as watching the movie.

You may think that this kind of critical thinking would detract from my pure enjoyment, but on the contrary, it greatly enhances it. Having made a film, I’m in awe of how much work must have gone into every little piece. How difficult it was for them to find that perfect extra to walk by the background of the shot at just the right moment. Or how much work went in to planning a piece of dialogue that reveals a nuance of a character. So when a film is good or great, it becomes a truly transcendental experience.

Are you seeing the corollary to busting loose yet? No?

Ok, so maybe you’re not me. Maybe you watch films for the pure escapism of it or maybe you don’t even think about all of the rigorously planned elements that go into a movie that make it feel like it was meant to be that way. The funny thing about Funny People is that it makes you have that kind of experience no matter what kind of person you are.

Putting busting loose aside for a second, what is the difference between the narrative of “movies” and “real life.”?

1. Movies have characters you can root for and neatly wrapped endings whereas life is full of ambivalence and non resolution.

These characters are credibly unsympathetic and they experience very little personal transformation.

2. Movies take place in a fictional universe with fictional characters.

This takes place in L.A. with characters who are only fictional because their name is different than in real life. E.G.

Adam Sandler plays a rich comedian turned movie star who makes shallow family movies.

Seth Rogen plays a young comedian taken under the wing of Sandler (in real life just the same happened with him and director Judd Apatow)

Leslie Mann (Apatow’s wife) plays the mother of two who are actually her kids in real life. At multiple times during the movie, we watch old real clips of all of these actors in the context of their characters’ stories.

Not to mention all these actors (featured on the poster) are or could be considered “funny people.” At this point the line between fiction and reality really begins to blur.

3. Comedies especially have contrived situations with formulaic structures.

Most of the time you’re watching brutally honest performances in normal life situations while the movie merely threatens to have a plot:

Is it about a young comedian starting his career?

Is it about an old comedian dealing with impending death?

Is it about a couple trying to rekindle an old flame?

Is this not starting to seem like real life?

I dare you to watch this movie and not think of the elaborately constructed world inside the movie or the elaborately constructed world outside the movie theater. This movie continues to capture real human experience to a frightening degree while also calling attention to the fact that it’s not real.

So what’s the point?

If you’ve ever believed that life was an illusion, most likely your brain or one of your five senses brought you back into believing it was real. Maybe you felt fear that you wouldn’t have enough money to live or joy from getting promoted. Maybe you stubbed your toe. Maybe you got rejected by that person you really wanted to know more about.

Like swing dancing, dating, and tug of war, awakening from your state of living dreaming is a push-pull process.

If you were to pose the question of “why make the movie feel so real?” to Judd Apatow, he would probably answer “to make the illusion better.” And then ask him “why make the illusion better?” he would answer “to make the emotional experience of the movie more real.” This could go on forever…

Modern day Hollywood  is one of the greatest manifestations of an illusion making machine that we have in our experience. It is one of the greatest “clues” to what’s really going on. So much money, time, effort, and energy is put into such complex illusions to make them feel “real.” Robert Scheinfeld even equates living to being in a “full-immersion movie.”

And that requires being fully immersed. Which means coming up for air only so often to see the truth. So now that you can’t see which way is up, is the awakening that you experience when you do the process another, deeper illusion?

Is it the honesty and truth poking through the artifice? Or is the honesty and truth you feel right now just an illusion itself? For the record, I believe that it is real truth poking through the cloud cover. I believe the hologram pulls you further towards immersion in order to further convince you of the truth. Every time I experience transcendence or the truth, it’s not long for the hologram to do its darndest to convince me that it’s real again. In one moment I see the Matrix and in the next I’m paying taxes. Then I realize the taxes are an illusion, but then I have a flat tire.  How far can this rabbit hole go?

Like watching Funny People, I think busting loose includes a happy coexistence of the illusion and the truth – one where each illuminates the other.

What do you “think”?

Busting Loose

Bust Loose with The Power of Now

2 Comments
Time is an illusion.
Time is an illusion.

One of the main differences between Phase 1 and Phase 2 is that in Phase 1 it doesn’t matter what you learn or how much you “try” to “achieve” higher consciousness. By it’s very nature, every solution in Phase 1 must fail, because we haven’t recognized the illusory nature of our reality yet. And, taken from a Phase 1 perspective – that everything that is happening is real and apart from you – using “The Power of Now” will ultimately not give you the results you want. However, in Phase 2, it gives a powerful example of how to use the process effectively.

Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” concisely points out the fact that we only ever live in the present. It’s overriding thesis is that our true power is in our present experience – and by focusing our power into the past by dwelling or into the future by speculating ultimately diminishes our effectiveness.

There are some amazing exercises similar to Buddhist meditation wherein you simply feel experience moving through you. To demonstrate how to know you’re in the now, he says just think to yourself:

“What am I thinking now?”

We don’t talk about it much in “real life” where we are often dominated by calendars, time, events, troubling pasts, regrets, and so forth. Yet the the fact remains true that the only real thing is right now. If I am preoccupied with the past, it is my choice to bring feelings and thoughts of the past into the present. If I am concerned or excited about the future, those feelings can still only exist in the present.

Is the Power Really in the Now?

So essentially the past and the future are an illusion. No matter how real they are to you, they are no more real than a highly impressionable book or movie. Furthermore, your memory is not so different than your imagination as it’s widely understood that your memory tends to be selective and can be changed through methods such as suggestion.

I once had a past-life regression and the whole time while under hypnosis I wondered if I was just making the whole thing up. Then I wondered what would be the difference? As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

So if we can assume that the past and future are merely constructs of our mind – ideas that make our living in reality much smoother – is it that hard to extend this idea to now? What if now is just as imaginary as then, or when? What if, by focusing all our power into now, with slogans such as “live in the moment”, we are fiercely reinforcing the idea that now exists? This can’t help but strengthen the illusion – that everything is real and separate. “Now” is a wonderful aspect of the Phase 1 game.

Reclaiming the Power of Now

Robert Scheinfeld also believes that many of the Phase 1 “tricks” include pieces of the truth. So it goes with “The Power of Now” It is true that our power to progress in Phase 2 exists now, but it’s not our ill-focused mind on the past or the future that disempowers us – it’s the logical progression of Phase 1.

Here’s what’s really happening – this entire world is your consciousness. Before playing the game, you decided to have a focal point of your consciousness as a persona. This you commonly refer to as yourself. I’m Chris the limited human being, for example. Along with your limited playground universe that is an extension of your consciousness (even this writing is your consciousness) is your persona’s experience of the passage of time. Thus the key here is the only “time” to experience your infinite nature is “now”

What I’m trying to say is that the belief that “someday” you’ll “achieve” enlightenment or whatever the Power of Now seeks to give with enough “effort” or “knowledge”  is an illusion. And thus what the Power of Now claims – life is freeing when lived in the present unburdened by the past and future is correct. Through this lens, does it make sense to worry about the future?

If you’re having trouble, think of time not so much as passing in a linear fashion. Think of it as an unfolding. Did you know that our tectonic plates are actually like large conveyor belts? That means that every second another piece of new Earth (Eckhart Tolle pun) rises from its center. No piece of Earth is ever in the same place. It’s all subtly moving.

Your consciousness too slowly unfolds as you realize more and more. Time seems to pass because no matter how limited you are – you’re still infinite underneath and new experience will continue to be manifested in consciousness. Nothing is ever the same. Now is simply the leading edge of your consciousness.

Your Opportunity

The opportunity  you – the persona – have is to embrace the call to connect with your infinite nature. By doing this you are telling your consciousness to expand more. And as the unfolding continues while playing the human game, your infinite nature will become more and more fully realized. You will have revelations. You may find your relationships with yourself and others changing. You may become clear.

And eventually, you will begin to know at a very deep level – not just accept – the experience of now as perfect no matter how imperfect it may seem to your persona. Good or bad, angry, sad, ecstatic, bored, hurt, hopeful, distraught – all just unfoldings of your consciousness – only the finest pure experience for the life connousieur that you are. You will understand that “now” – how you feel, what you think, even what you do – has no bearing on the past or the future. And time is just a story your expanded self chooses to live in the unfolding.

Imagine a piece of paper. Crumple that paper up. Though it may seem to be smaller and insignificant now that it is crumpled, if you unfold it, it becomes just the same as it ever was though it seemed when crumpled to be different.

The paper is the Human Game. In Phase 1 your life can easily seem like a crumpled piece of paper. It’s got obvious limitations. It doesn’t seem to change. But the process of awakening and shifting into Phase 2 is the process of unfolding that paper. Once you bust loose, the paper can be made through origami into a crane, a heart, a plane, or a treasure box.

Feeling the Game in “The Human Game”

What I invite you to do is to feel the present through the lens of your expanded self. Just imagine if you were a creator that lived in constant bliss (what Scheinfeld calls joyfulness) and you decided to live in this limited reality. Can you see that you feel two levels of consciousness here? On one level there is your current emotion – guilt for example. One another level there is an absolute non-judgmental feeling of incredible joy that you are feeling just for the fun of playing the game.

Have you ever played a video game where your character is in extreme circumstances? Most games have these kinds of situations. If you were really fighting hundreds of enemies you’d probably be feeling intense forms of fear, rage, shock, pain, and who knows what else. But instead you who is playing the game, are having fun because you just got the game, it’s got the newest best graphics, and it’s not real.

If you die, it’s no big deal. But maybe you’re at the end of the level and you just have to defeat the boss. You’ve played this level many times before and now it’s personal. You experience many similar emotions of distress to your in game avatar. “I almost beat him!” you think. Maybe you throw the controller across the room. This is what happens when we forget we’re playing the game. We take it personally. But that’s the point.

If anything should charge you with purpose it’s this: you came here to experience right now. All the “failings”, “mistakes”, “should-haves”, and “could haves.” Now is not always “happy” and it’s not supposed to be. Just like you’re not supposed to eat your favorite food all the time. The emotions and experiences that many believe you should avoid – as though focusing on the “now” was an instant morphine drip – are exactly what you came to experience. And experiencing limitation (or Phase 1) is part of the unfolding.

In the beginning you can only experience now on one level – the face value of the illusion. The limited world. All of your thoughts, emotions and, actions. All of your attempts to “fix” the illusion. All the conviction you can muster to believe this is all there is. But now you know there’s more than that.

Now you can begin to experience the second level of now. The level of the player, playing you. That is the real and eternal present. That is the “real” now. You’re not a puppet. The player is you as well. Every spiritual experience you’ve had up until this point has been placed there by your expanded self to support you in moving into Phase 2 – to bust loose. And for the sheer joy of experiencing it.

Ever given up something you love? I love Cinnabons and I intentionally don’t eat them often. I do this so every time I will rejoice and remember how delicious they are. In Phase 1, your expanded self does the same with the feeling of bliss or spiritual connection in order to deepen your palette of experience in the illusion.

But now you have the opportunity to move into Phase 2. To see “The Matrix” for the code. To see the illusion for the unimaginable power that created it. This power is you and always has been. If you have made the decision, I urge you to reclaim your power from now. To see it as your expanded self sees it. And as you say “Marco” your expanded self says “Polo.” Only now, you can begin to open your eyes.


Busting Loose, Happiness, Spirituality

What’s Missing? Playing the Happiness Game

Leave a comment

I was journaling today starting with the question, “If I know the truth, then why doesn’t the illusion collapse immediately?” Robert Scheinfeld’s answer to this is simple – it’s not part of the Human Game to win it easily. The fun is in playing a game with challenges and discoveries. Fair enough, but I’m now in the part of the game where I must discover what has held me back – what pieces have been missing.

And after writing about what was missing, the now obvious realization came swiftly after. Ironically, the idea that something is missing, that there is something more to know, something more to be and I have only to find that thing – is one of the greatest Phase 1 illusions there is and one one of my largest eggs to process.

Step By Step

I began with the question “Why must I play Phase 1 games when I already know the mindset of Phase 2?”

After a bit of clarifying, I boiled my question down to “what’s missing?”

I had the direct experience of “A Ha, the thing I’m trying to do is the very thing that’s giving me the opportunity to progress in Phase 2.”

I felt deeply the emotion of missing something, like a part of my body or soul had vanished, and I could never have it back. I sat with this feeling for a couple of minutes, really exploring the terrible existential crisis that I’ve felt a lot throughout my life.

Then I told the truth about it. That it wasn’t real. I didn’t try to change my feeling, merely add a layer of understanding to it. This lessened the intensity a bit, but in no way suppressed it.

I began reclaiming my power. Right now it seems the major shift happens when I tell the truth and open to my infinite nature, not reclaim my power. Nevertheless I felt the judgment draining out of “this feeling is bad.” And as I did, I felt more joyful emotion beginning to come in, and I saw the emotion – this great emptiness – for the pure experience it was.

I opened up to my infinite nature, and while many times this step causes me to expand my brain beyond my personal experience to encompass oceans of cosmic light, this time the focus extended inwards and backwards along my personal timeline. Appreciation of this Phase 1 illusion came along with the expansive perspective.

The immediate understanding that came to me was that this feeling of emptiness, of a missing piece, what Lynn Grabhorn calls, “separation” is the prime driving force of my life, and what I now believe to be the engine of the Phase 1 game. It’s a negative driving force, in that many of my actions have been taken to get away from this feeling.

The Origin of a Feeling

Can you think back to a time before a feeling existed? For instance, back to before you had crushes on the opposite gender? Isn’t it weird to think that something you may be obsessed with now used to never matter? I did this to investigate the beginnings of this gaping hole in my soul.

Beginning in the present, I feel that my direct understanding of the truth and Phase 2 is missing. In one way or another, this search for the “answer” has permeated my life for the last couple of years.

Before that it was the sensation that my connection to abundance was missing – whether it be knowledge of how to make money, ability to acquire money, or straight up luck to find money.

Another huge one before that was in the dating world. I felt that a true part of myself was missing without another person. I still feel this way and must work with the process on this feeling.

It wasn’t until I got back to about third grade that the feeling ceased to be in my experience. When I was a child any negativity was temporary, and everything in life seemed to be in a state of flow. There wasn’t this feeling of hollowness.

Without going into the day-by-day of my childhood one experience after another (created by my expanded self) slowly created the illusion of this incredible lack inside me and also manifested that outside of me in ways like jealousy, inferiority, disillusionment, and poverty. At every point in the timeline it seemed like a cruel force. I was diagnosed with depression. I wondered why others didn’t understand this all encompassing feeling. I watched my friends settle for less when I would settle for nothing but the unequivocal achievement of my dreams – dreams that still have gone unrealized. But today looking back I understand the reason of the pattern. And I’m just now seeing the wide ranging implications of this feeling.

Examples

Money

“I don’t have enough money for the things I want” Boils down to: Something’s missing. In this case resources.

“I don’t have what it takes to earn enough money.” Boils down to: Something’s missing. In this case the knowledge to “earn” money.

Relationships

“I need a relationship to feel complete.” What’s missing? A relationship.

“I need to be more attractive/outgoing/skilled or have more money/status/fame or have better friends/opportunities/job/hobbies in order to have the relationship I want.” Something’s missing. This person feels they aren’t complete enough to “get” a relationship.

“He/she is better than me. I’ll never be as rich/beautiful/successful/charismatic/smart as them.” Translation: Something’s wrong with me. I.E. Something is missing. In this example, it’s an inherent or learned characteristic.

Body

“I really should exercise more. I’d probably feel better and feel better about myself.” Boils down to: I’m not good enough as I am – something’s missing. Is it discipline? Motivation? Respect?

Creativity

“I wish I could draw.” Translation: there is something other people have that I don’t have that allows them to draw and I can’t. A.K.A. Something is missing.

“I can’t figure out how to end this story/get past my creative block/design this house/get this chicken recipe right.” Is something missing? Yes.

“If only I could make money doing what I love.” Something’s missing. It could be many things – drive, enterprenurial skills, a valuable product, etc etc.

Lifestyle

“Maybe I should move to a different town. I could start all over there.” Something is missing.

Spirituality

“If we’re supposed to be infinite, then why don’t I feel infinite? Why do the things I truly desire keep eluding me?” Conclusion: something is missing. Otherwise by spritual law I’d have the life that I want.

“Why don’t I feel fulfilled?” Something major is missing here.

The Happiness Game

That’s probably enough examples. What I’d like to point out is that the missing piece to every one of these confounding problems is an illusion.

Ergo, the process by which we seek to “obtain” these “missing pieces” is also an illusion.

And that means also that the very notion of not being complete just as you are, just as this moment is, is too an illusion. Sit with that a moment. Ok, even if you just had a profound paradigm shift, money is most likely not raining from the sky just yet. Of course not. If you identify with any of these examples or extrapolated some of your own, then you know that this is a huge huge huge egg. What is an egg? Belief + Power + Judgement + Consequences. Think of the consequences of any of these beliefs. For me I’ve always been searching for the “one” and I’ve moved over twenty times just to avoid that feeling of lack, as well as taking drugs, watching TV,  and graduating college as quickly as possible in order to feel “special.” I’m fully convinced that most of my greatest life decisions – where to go to school, who to date, what area to study, what jobs to take – were predicated on avoiding the feeling of cosmic emptiness.

So the power can be reclaimed not just from the feeling itself,(though I invite you to really dive into it once you have a handle on the process) but every choice you’ve made that was informed by the feeling. Every “consequence” And every time you judged each consequence as “good” or “bad” This is a motherload of an egg stash.

What I invite you to contemplate along with this information is that this was an incredible Phase 1 trick, similar to the Money Game. But this is a bigger game in scope than that. It’s the Happiness Game. The Happiness game holds all the power of your hopes, dreams, fears, and nightmares. In your own time, explore each one and realize its truth. They are all illusions, and you came here to experience them first as real, then as the truth.

This feeling, the “splinter in your mind” as Morpheus says in The Matrix, began in perfect time with your process of moving deeply into Phase 1 so that you could begin to move into Phase 2. The sensation that there is something more to life than what you see is the beginning of your journey home. It’s the call to action in your hero’s journey. And this is not to belittle the depths of sadness you may have felt that may have led you to look for “the answer”. But whatever path led you here was perfect for you, and if you’ve had an inkling or an ocean of this feeling – count yourself lucky. There is vast power there.