Dreamscapes Podcasts - Dreamscapes Episode 122: Catharsis by Combat

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

“Catharsis is about cleansing and healing at one and the same time - healing memories and attitudes, healing the spirit and the heart.” ― Desmond Tutu https://www.instagram.com/timdinhbui

Greetings friends, welcome to another episode of Dreamscapes. Today we have our friend Tim Bowie from Los Angeles, California. He is a life mastery coach. You can find him at Tim Dinbuoy.com slash high performance humans. Also on Instagram.com at Tim Dinbuoy spelling and links in the description below. We're going to get right back to him in two seconds. Would you kindly like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers, viewers for my game streams, etc.

also 16 currently available works of historical dream literature the most recent dreams and their meanings by horace g hutchinson fantastic work from 1901 i hope the definitive edition heavily footnoted beautifully recreated by yours truly your friendly neighborhood dream wizard uh all this and more at benjamin the dream wizard dot com complete list of all 16 available works um encyclopedia of dream figures historical stuff uh terminology etc and uh audio mp3 download versions of these interviews. And that's enough about me. Back to Tim, thank you for being here. I appreciate your time. Hey, Benjamin. Thank you so much for having me. Nice to meet you officially. Yeah, good deal. I know we chat, you know, briefly beforehand to set up a meeting, but it's not like talking to a person actually interacting, you know, even though we're not in in person. It's,

this is very much different than text. Yeah. Yeah. You can't see when someone says something that is, you lose nuance in text and sarcasm and stuff like that. If I said something insulting with a smirk and a wink, you know, you're like, ah, this guy, you know, but if I said it in text, it's like, are you an asshole? What's going on here? I get that missing. I can see you're a cat person, you know, and it tells me a little about you. Yeah.

Your cat's a good. Yeah. Although most of them sleep and then they try to walk on the goal. Speaking of the keyboard, I had one episode eaten by a now deceased, uh, feline my boy prince, uh, has left us. but he destroyed episode number eight, did the whole recording, hour and a half long, wonderful thing. Guy was really impressed,

and I think I nailed it. No one will ever hear it. That one disappeared into the ether. Prince took it with him to the grave. It's a doozy. Ah, it is. It happens. Well, you know, it's one of those life lessons

you live and learn of these things happening. Like, I should pay attention that the recording is still functional and the cats have not destroyed it. But let's talk about you. That's a guy ramble about myself enough. Life Mastery Coach, how'd you get into that?

What is that? What's the service you provide? Just general broad strokes, elevator pitch, whatever you want to say. Yeah. So I think that basically, like, the goal for me in life has been to, like, get into flow state as much as possible. So I think that once you get mastery in one area of life, you can actually transfer that mastery to other areas of life because when you have mastery, you can get into flow very easily. So whether that's writing, whether that's dancing or for me, it was martial arts. I can use my experience of what that feels like, of what that's like. I can apply that to meditation. I can apply it to speaking. I can apply it to writing.

I just need to be able to sequence it, chunk it, and then transfer that experience over. So I've been able to do that with various different types of martial arts and other fields too. So there's basically a formula that I use. And it's just, it's based on elemental. velocity so there's just basically four elements and so each of these elements are sequence so you have like air which is like technical mental timing and they have water which is like flow um and whatever the aspects of water are we can we can talk about it for a while earth which is like structure and grounding and um rigidity and boundaries and then you have fire which is like this emotional aspect the impact aspect and then you have the

spirit, which is, it could be a lot of other things. Oh, yeah. We call it the void as well, the container of all of them. And so I think once you, once you have a, like a system to experience pretty much everything on a, in an elemental language, then really you have a way to work with things. So I would say like my first Iowoc experience like seven or eight years ago, like you don't really have the language to describe what happens in that type of experience. it is like a dreamlike state. Oh, yeah. Except if you have, like, I had the elemental language.

I was able to, like, in my mind, distill these experiences in an energetic way that I can make sense of the whole experience. Whereas a lot of people, they just, they were just lost and they just got like chewed up and spit out, basically, and didn't know which way it was up and they were done. So, I mean, it's been really beneficial. Wow. That is very cool. You've hit on some things that, like, I've spent.

time in my life contemplating. And one of them, I mean, if we kind of start, work backwards, start with the most recent, the idea of the elemental thing, that is always, but I've actually got sitting in my file here, an idea of a book. I probably have nowhere near your depth of thought in this concept. But it felt to me like a book needed to be written on this idea of applying the, you know, the five, I consider it like the five elemental strengths of human beings. And I don't know if we have a similar conception, specifically or not, but I think broadly it's the same thing. The idea that these things do describe, okay, so there's a, I went to a spiral rhythms music fest, probably 15 years ago,

up at a hippie commune in Washington. And there were people around a camp, fire playing drums as they do and there was chanting and then it was earth my body water my blood air my breath and fire my spirit and that just chanting over and i got uh you know if i wasn't stoned already i would have gotten into a hypnotic you know state just the the the the chanting of it and the message of it in in those ways now you and i may not or i may not even both of us may not agree with that specific formulation but that works as well but the idea that there are qualities of like Bruce Lee, said, be like water in your motions, in your responses, in your adaptability. There's things about the physical qualities of water.

And this relates to dreams as well, the idea that those collective unconscious understandings of how humans interact with physical objects informs how those objects appear in our dream. So there's almost a dream book style of understanding that can be applied. going to fit certain categories, but then it's always going to be personal. And there's some tweaking and adjusting and refining to get it specifically relevant to you. Um, it's so anyway, long story short on the whole book idea is that, you know, it's nowhere near development. And actually, I'm thinking of putting together a book series that I want to have other people author. I want to be like the editor, producer of it. And it's a wizard's guide to X, Y, Z, anything. So it could be a wizard's guide to

the five elemental powers of mankind or something, and you write it, and we put it out under my publication on the editorial thing, we share the profits and whatnot. Anyway, just planting that seed. Like, if you ever thought of writing a book, now you can do it on your own, you can publish on Amazon,

and you don't need me. So go ahead and write your own book. But if you wanted to be part of the Wizards Guide series, that might, the offers at least out there for discussion. Have you thought of? My mentors would definitely be interested in. One of them actually lives not too far.

He lives in Oregon as well, so if he guys ever met, I think you guys would have, I'm sure the two of you would just vibe out. You guys have very similar energy. Thank you very much. I hope I have that, you know, inquisitive desire to understand and explain correctly. I think both of you guys would really hit it off. So we'll talk about offline or something.

Sure, sure. Yeah, no, no problem. Well, I love the idea that you've connected this also to martial arts. Now, I've always been fascinated with that. And this goes back to my, you know, late to mid-80s fascination with the, Shaw brothers, Kung Fu movies coming out of China at the time. And that, you know, that started a lifelong passion, which, you know, inspired the Wu-Tang Klan.

So we're in good company there. But, you know, and then that, that broader category of understanding that if you can physically instantiate that flow state, as you were saying, like, when we think basketball players, we call being in the zone, they're just, they're just doing things that seem superhuman because they've found a channel and they're riding it. And one of the things we struggle with. with is the idea of how to trigger that, how to do it on purpose. You know, I don't know that I have the answer to that. I think there's a lot of answers suggested by a lot of different people, but

one way is definitely to find it in the physical and recreate it in the mental or vice versa. You were talking about combining these things are transferable mastery. So is there a way you conceive of that being transferable and how that works? You might, you might not, I don't know, just asking. Yeah, no, it's like meditation. So meditation is like the cleanest way. It's like kind of learning how to spell, right? And so it's a very fundamental experience meditation.

Like you nobody can really tell you what you're experiencing. And so when you have a sense of a certain level of focus, for instance, like they call them genres or like different differentiating degrees of mental states. And then, you know, we can use science and we could say like, oh, this is like a. alpha theta state or this is a gamma state. And so there's some correlation between these genres, these levels of concentration and what kind of brainwave states we're in. And so once you have a certain level of mastery and anything and urine flow, then it can be correlated to a certain brainwave state or it can be correlated to a genre. I'll stop using that. But basically, once you have mastery, then you know what it feels like. And so once you know what it feels like,

If you can start to take the qualitative aspects and find, basically the next step is to find a somatic or internal reference point to recreate that. So through breathwork, you could do it as well. So, like, if you basically, there's a couple of ways to ground it. So if I'm working with somebody and then it's just like, okay, so like when you're in flow state, what does it feel like? And then we'll talk about it. And then I'll like, okay, so the next time you're in it, like, where do you feel in your body? And then we can talk about grounding it through the breath. And then once you ground it through the breath, then you can activate it in other contexts.

So that's how we do it. What's considering that too is like when I've had those low states. I mean, one of them goes back to as far back as elementary school playing dodge ball. And I just could not be hit. And I am, I am, right? Dodgeball's the best. That was amazing to me because I, I'm, I've always been a chubby, chubby bunny, and I've never been physically talented in that way.

I can, I can play drums and, you know, but I can't dance. I mean, my body doesn't move, like, I can't do sports. It's just not my thing. It's a struggle with it. Even martial arts, I struggled with it. I very much have to understand something intellectually and then try to translate it into the physical. Like, I can't think physically like some people can't, one of my limits. Yeah.

But I was in this dodgeball court. And, man, I was the first one out in so many games throughout my life. And this one, I had to stop myself and realize everyone is out. And there's like half a dozen people still on the other team. And they're all looking at me like, dude, just end the game so we can start over. And I'm like, okay. So I just, well, eventually I got it. And that, you know, my autism, like I'm not always aware of social cues and whatnot.

And I had to stop and say, I'm keeping, you know, intellectually I had to process. And I'm keeping everybody waiting. Everyone's just out. And I'm the only one here enjoying this game still. So I just, I said, all right, hit me and I let him throw it. And he threw a nice guy. He threw it gently. and it bounced off me and hit the ground.

I'm like game over. But I just played dodgeball like, I think two weeks ago. So this is really relevant because I hadn't played it since I was a kid. And I just played it two weeks ago. So I think it was super relevant. But yeah, there was a moment like that where my partner, she was the last person in. But everybody was like chanting her name like, Jonah, Jonah. And then she was going.

It was too much pressure for her. But she thought the same way you did. And I was like, no, but we're all cheering for you because like you're representing our entire team right now. So yeah, that's that's that's. Super interesting that you brought that up, but I love dodgeball. I haven't played it in forever, but it's just such a kid game, you know. Here's a weird coincidence, and this happens all the time. This is why I'm about to give an example of why I lean into the mysticism stuff, too,

as scientific as my mind is and as skeptical as I am, crazy shit happens. So about two weeks ago, you're in a dodge ball game in real life. About two weeks ago, I'm watching an anime called Hunter X Hunter, and one of the challenges, one of the challenges they had to overcome was a dodgeball game. and using their, using their supernatural abilities to win this game physically. I'm like that,

so there was something happening at that moment prior to you and I ever meeting right now where we were both in the same space of having a dodge ball experience. What the fuck is that? How does that even happen? And then we meet here and we very well could have never met, but we did and share that link.

I don't know what it is, but I get that bodily, whole body feeling of, wow. You know, as soon as you had me introduce myself, and then I saw like something, you know, a couple of things click in your head and like I just got the chills. So I mean, yeah, definitely feeling this, our meeting. Very, very cool. And that, trusting those feelings too and leaning into them in terms of, of,

what am I trying to say, not just letting them happen, but feeling their significance, even if you don't understand it. Like, just let it be what it is. and enjoy it, number one, because those, yeah, some of those chills are like, wow, something just happened there. I love that. One thing I wanted to ask before I forgot, but I've started taking more notes while I'm talking to people because it's so hard for me to remember stuff. You describe something called Jahnel. Is that from a specific tradition?

Jannas. Jannas are from, like, Eastern, like, it could be Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism. They have it too. So they're just, yeah, they're just. levels. So like, I think there's like seven and it's just like there are different descriptions of what we would just call brainwave states, I guess. Okay, gotcha. Do they relate to or are they distinct from the kind of chakra type of thing or completely different traditions? They're different. I mean, they're the same, they're part of the same tradition, but they're, they're a meditative state.

So, okay. One is like, let's just say like one. feels like just complete bliss. And then one feels like a non-centered bliss. And then like another one that feels like a non-dual bliss. And so like it's just like very minor distinctions. But they're major because they take maybe more than one lifetime or 20, 30, 40 years to accomplish. So there might be things that pieces of experience, states of experience that are more or less accomplishable based on practice, focus, effort. And maybe. even biologically limited in some ways. If we think of reincarnation as like,

well, if you come back as a cockroach, you can't aspire to human understanding. And even humans, I think, have different instantiations of their biological. We were talking about this off the air, you know,

biological limits. I conceive it as, um, there are, there are two broad camps. Everything is biology. Everything is socially constructed. I think there,

I think it is a necessary yin-yang overlap that there's, it's always, nature and nurture. Okay, well, how do we know the difference? And what do we do about that? Those are a lot of political and religious, philosophical questions. The way I describe it, to try and help people understand that, you know, humans are not born tabular rasa, but biology is not destiny, is that biology draws the boundaries around

the possible. And then, that's nature. And then nurture determines the expression of what is possible within those boundaries. physical representation would be a person born blind will never see but then they can live in other ways they one thing they will never do is just visually perceive the world fair enough nature draws the boundaries but then what they can do within that is amazing I mean it doesn't need to hold you back from too many things other than you know um playing dodgeball I guess literally yeah definitely playing dodgeball blind could be pretty difficult in this you have

like some sonar, you know, like just yeah, faster, right? Like we were talking about Hunter Hunter, I think there's a guy who has sonar power. Yeah. But yeah, every, every world record, every Olympian has experienced, needs to experience flow state in order for them to break those records. And so like you're when we're accomplishing superhuman feats, like breaking five minute mile or whatever, like surfing like 40 foot waves,

it's like there's a part of you that has to let go of the sense of self in order for you to fully tap into all the resources that are available to you because your conscious mind is only like this big. It can like get in like so many bits of data, but your subconscious mind is just like vast. And so like when you blank that out, the conscious mind, that's when you have access to a lot more resources. Yeah, definitely. And that's, uh, that that comports, you know, completely with the Western, say, psychological idea of the subconscious and all the ways we've tried to describe it. I've got a theory of dreams that I'm working on. And it struck me recently after, you know, almost after two years of doing this and now for several months I've been thinking

about this idea that it seems to me like dreams are the unfiltered thought process that goes on underneath our conscious attention to it and the world and translating those thoughts into communication. So what you're getting is the, the conscious attention to the external world, even in some ways to yourself, in terms of directing

your thoughts, which will leave lucid dreams aside. But it's, it's that state of saying, just being aware, it's almost, dreamy is almost exactly like such a deep meditation that you see your thoughts passing as if they were separate from your,

from you. Like you are watching your thoughts happen rather than living your thoughts. I don't know if that's something that's occurred to you in terms of like the Eastern conceptions of dreams and meditation where they where they overlap. Yeah, there's something called dream yoga and one of my masters, my teachers in meditation and Buddhism talks to us a lot, tells us, shares with us about dreams as well. And, you know, I've been able to lucid dreams since a really young age,

probably five or six. I really wanted to be like the green range. Oh, yeah. Power Rangers. So every time I had a dream about Power Rangers, I was like, I want to be the, I want to go back, I want to be the Green Ranger. And so like eventually it happened and then it consistently happened. And then I started having the experiences of like, I spend, you know, we spend so much

time in the dream world that like I have all these memories from the dream world and then have all these memories from the waking world. And it was just like, it's lightweight becoming schizophrenic. I was like, what's real? What's not real? Like, I have the whole life here. Like, just like there, because like my dreams are constructed of like similar houses, similar buildings, similar types of people.

Like, even, like, I can see people's faces and stuff. People that I don't know recognize it. Sometimes, like, I might see them in real life. Like, I feel like I've seen you before. It's like, oh, like, so it's really strange growing up that, like, I have, like, this repository of all these lucid dreams and then, like, my waking life. And it was, they were completely different. And, uh, yeah, it's, I've had, I've had dreams where I've died before.

Like, I was murdered. I was like the Batman. I got murdered and came back as a ghost. Yeah, all kinds of crazy lucid dreams that were not awesome, but also awesome. Yeah. Some of the, well, we watch movies that are adventures and horror films. We like to explore the full range of what's possible. And even sometimes in our subconscious running thought experiments, what if I was the bad guy?

What would happen to me if I did this thing in this circumstance? You know, what would, what do I, sometimes it's even not, could I get away with it because I want to? But what would I think was a reasonable consequence? for me if I lived that way, if I did that bad thing. So making yourself in the bad guy in a dream is almost never a desire to be the bad guy as much as to understand that perspective, to see it through those eyes. And in some ways to see how you, as a member of broader humanity, knowing you could go wrong, what would it be like to do so?

And whether you could live with that or we're comfortable with it or how do you understand that. I love those, I love those experiences. I think we are the bad guy in somebody's story. I mean, we have. You're not the hero in every story. It's true. Yeah, definitely I have, we're not to talk about it, but I've had a pretty crazy

pass where I used to like sell drugs and guns and, you know, all kinds of stuff when I was younger, like 10 years ago or 10 plus years ago. And so I'm always definitely the bad guy. And I would say in some parts of my life, maybe I'm still a bad guy, you know, like I'm not always, I mean, I try to act with compassion. I try to act with kindness. Those are very high values for me. Yeah.

Harmony is a great value for me. But sometimes I got to lay down what I got to lay down. And so I make me a bad guy and I'm, but I have to be okay with that. Yeah. Well, there's also kind of the lovable rascal side of things or the lovable asshole in some ways like a Han Solo type character where he's done some shady things in his past. But, you know, when it came time, he stepped up and did the right thing.

and his conscience guided and he found something to believe in after after a while and decided to commit to that path, you know. That's a great, I am a sucker for the redemption arc. I love that. I want to believe it's possible for everybody. And I want to see even what's, there's some movies that are like that where, you know, someone starts out as the bad guy and you see them go through this transformation and they end up the hero that performs a self-sacrifice. And it's like, I'll cry. I will. No shame.

that's that's beautiful but um go ahead but uh but i do love those those and ever since i was like young i was wanted like again back to power rangers i'm not young but i always wanted the bad guy to win sometimes like why does he always have to lose like it's so like i feel bad for him like god just like one time just let him just give it to him yeah they just never do so that was a story arc in another anime i saw i can't remember which one but it was a guy that wanted to uh you know was it was I think it might have been one punch man. The second season, they bring in that guy who was a student of the older, older guy,

Gray Fox, Silver Fox, or whatever his name was. And the student went bad because he felt bad for the villains. Like, I want the villain to win sometime. So I'm going to become the villain. That's a great idea to explore, too. Yeah, I like that. When we were talking about the subconscious and tapping into those powers, I go all over the place now.

I try and come back. I even wrote down some notes on that. Yeah, the idea that. So, the idea that. subconscious is, okay, separate it from the conscious. It's not just attention. It's that limited attentional bandwidth in a way. There's only so many things we can consciously process, but everything we ever experience exists in our subconscious. Every taste, touch, and smell, every passing thought, every, you know, perceptual distortion impulse. It's all literally hardwired into our

brain by neuronal connections and by the sensitivity of specific pathways. That's why we get into habits and we get into, you know, and habits are hard to break because those pathways fire so easily. We have to actually build a new pathway that goes a different direction to get off that wrong track, like physically, uh, in real life and it maps. So what's in your subconscious is vastly more aware of the world. It's like the repository, as you were saying, of everything you've ever experienced physically, mentally, tapping into that, making. making functional use of it is the trick because we can only get this. You know, if you have like a giant map and you're zoomed in and you can only see that

little bit, but you can move it anywhere, move it anywhere, but how do you even know where you can't tell? Is that a tree? Is that a forest? You can't zoom out of what's connected to here and there. So, yeah, tapping into that becomes a difficult part. And then it's these very often the flow states that give us this weirdly zoomed out view of something.

We're like, I see everything all of all. a sudden and and I can do something with it. I don't know if I'm describing that well from your from your perspective. That's 100%. I would also say that in my real personal belief is that a lot of things are mapped within our body to like, you know, all this, basically the five senses and maybe the mind could be a six sense, but like, you know, it's all within the body. So every, all the senses map to our brain, right? So, you know, different deseratory, all factory, everything has a different part to map of the brain but also within our body we have mappings as well and you know so there are some eastern and also like a massage therapy as well but like

just certain i guess bodies of knowledge say that you know we store say like emotions in our hips or things like that so i mean i think within our body we have muscle memory and things like that so when we go into flow states or when we go into like more um when we lose the perspective of the consciousness. To act more frequently in the ways that it's trained to. We don't have to consciously about it. But we just to like absorb information on our body to do for work. Yeah, for sure.

There's no higher levels of like, if you, if you like in Buddhism, if you go to like the higher levels of or in any type of meditation school, really, if you go to the higher levels of, of meditation. And it's all about like, yes, we can get to these peak. states where we call it like I said like meditative states but it's really about how do you map that so that your entire conscious living is now like that not just sometimes when I'm sitting here on this cushion but like all the time and so these genres actually represent like attainments that you can't come back down from so once you're there you know what it's like and then you map that you map that all backwards and then your daily living life is like that and so you get to a certain point where at the highest point is you have no center of conscious.

Like you just walked around and everything is happening around you, like kind of like a 360 camera. And like all the senses, everything that you're hearing, you're smelling. It's happening all at once and you're aware of all that, but it's not like it's going to a central locus. So I think like that's just basically an extension of what you're saying.

Just like, but the more, I call them open loops, but like the more open loops we have, like we call them triggers or we can call them memories, that like kind of make a stay dream or you know this or that it's like it takes our processing power and it goes through this loop and so like I could be talking about a point and then I go a tangential or I can remember something traumatic from when I was a kid or something like that and more process things

that we have it takes us away from like our central processing power and our ability to like openly receive as much as possible and it just takes a little bit away it takes a little bit away until it's fully resolved and then when it's fully resolved it doesn't have the open loops and we're completely grounded system. And yeah, I believe like we're, you know, bio-energetic beings. And so we have only so much energy, but the more of it that's grounded, the more of it that's contained, the more effective we are at what we do. Absolutely. Yeah. And so, wow, I'm trying to remember all the things I was thinking while you were saying that. It's so hard to listen and think at the same time. Like, oh, that made me think of this, wait a minute,

but I'm still listening. Okay, and that's number two. Shit. And that's why I write it down. I forgot to write it down. It is. Oh, it's tough. And I can't. I'm so scatterbrain anyway. I was talking to another guy. God, I can't remember his name either. Jay, J. Bouchard, Joel. Joel. He's talking to Joel, well, now, a few weeks back by the time anyone watches this. And he was talking about how, you know, in his PhD studies, he's a grad student, he's, you know, learning things about how, say, the stomach produces more serotonin than the brain. Well, that's a neurotransmitter in the brain that really, we've only been able to determine. We've only been able to determine functions in the brain. But we've got the gut sending messages to the brain,

which actually it has to because, hey, there's food now kick up the digestion process and churn more. And there's a mutual communication where the guts at least telling the brain what it's doing. And then we talked about muscle memory and the idea that movements become automatic. Well, they did some experiments and I can't remember exactly how they were composed exactly, but the idea of responses to certain stimuli, the response happened in the hand, in the movement of the arm away, say, from a hot thing, like the, before it registered in the brain. So it wasn't, oh, that's hot.

Brain says, we know what to do with hot and it goes back to the hand. It is that automatic jerk away from a hot stove, say. That happens in at the site of contact. And then you get into the ideas of muscle memory. So if we conceive the brain neuronal pathways, certain pathways being stronger or having a lower threshold to trigger, the same thing happens in the body and other points, points once you've nailed a certain ability to hit a free throw from, you know, a three-point or from not a free throw, but a three-pointer from beyond that, your body learns how to do that.

And it can do that automatically. It's not even happening in the brain anymore. It's that it is that. And people think of, you know, muscle memory as an analogy. I think it's kind of literal. You don't have brain cells in your muscles, but your muscles, the cells also have a memory. They're very similar to brain cells, dendrites. Yeah, they're constructed very similarly.

Yeah. And they have a communication with each other. And if there's a certain, say, a wave pattern that goes through a muscle and into the next muscle, that's what we think of as, you know, it's you're positioning your shot here, not as an arc. I mean, there's a specific connection to all these muscles and that triggers in a specific wave form. Once we've nailed that down, it's so much easier to find it over and over again. It's a kinetic chain. So you have, you know, different kinetic chains within your body. There's a few. But basically it's firing and sequencing. So like, yeah, you know, firing a three point shot is

different from firing a free throw shot because of the amount of power is needed to generate. So it's like, your body naturally learns how to produce more or less power based on what you want. In the beginning, you have to think about it. But later on, your body just knows, like, this is how much force is required. And if you change the ball, the weight of the ball, then actually your body has to relearn it. So back in the day, they were talking about, like, they used to train quarterbacks in the NFL with, like, heavier football. So they can try to go further. But then actually, they messed them up because their body automatically had to learn how to sling a heavier football.

but when they, you know, transferred back to a normal size football, normal weight football, it wouldn't go further because their body already compensated for that weight. And so you can't throw further with the heavier football. You just got to throw further and further with the same. Like you can't like, I can't like do more like bench presses to like punch harder. Like I just need to punch more to punch harder. So I mean, yeah, there's some direct correlation between like kinetic chain development and, you know, muscle memory. And I definitely think that, you know, we, I think we're still in the beginning,

phases of really understanding, like, I think, exercise science or kinesiology. One of the things I think about, and this is probably not true, but it is, I don't know, like you look like evolution to change biologically. You know, one of the earlier animals is like a worm, for instance, but a worm doesn't really have a brain, which just has like a stomach and then has a nervous system. And so, like, if you, like, poke a worm, like, it kind of just does this thing, right? But it doesn't actually have a brain. So, like, it's nervous system functions to feed the stomach.

So it's like, when the stomach is hungry, it's like, okay, let's get some food or whatever, right? And so, like, it's driven to find food through basically this nervous system. And so, you know, I think about us in the way that we develop. It's like we have a stomach or what we call it, like, the second brain or the gut. But there's, like, so many nerves. I don't know if you've ever eaten intestines, but it's, like, most. fat. Why? Because like, well, that is how we, fat carries electricity. And so, like, if, like, if we're having, like, nerve tissue, like, that's pretty much what the gut is, like, tons of nerve

tissue. It's like, again, second brain. So how I think it is, like, possibly, you know, origins of evolution is we develop with a brain, I mean, our brain here, so that we can feed everything, the whole entire system and all the organs. And then we developed a higher conscious brain. But then we, if we, I think, more fully associate with, like, the higher conscious brain, brain, then we lose connection to our body. And so, like, when we can balance both of them is basically when we can become our full function of, like, how we are evolved to become. But I think because we live in a society and there's so much data, there's so much knowledge, there's so much information. Yeah.

We get overly emphasized on the brain, the head part. And we lose connection to the body part. It's like the body, like, the instinctual, like, well, what I want to eat? Or, like, what's good for me to eat? Like, what do it? You know, so it's like, but we get hijacked by, like, so much, like, double-mean and so much. much like knowledge, much information, so much trash. That sounds good.

That feels good, but isn't good. And so it's hard to connect. Yeah. Connect, reconnect. But it's very important. We did, oh, that brings up so many.

I mean, just the, just the concept of human nature, say, and the results of advancement, change over time. It's hard to say it's progress or advancement. But, you know, there's a,

there's a, certain amount of advancement or progress or change over time that accelerated because we started living in cities with agriculture. And it's hard to say return to monkey. Some people do. You know, go back to hunter-gatherer because that's the ideal state of mankind. Well, that doesn't really let us produce, you know, heart surgery and antibiotics and different things that maybe we want. Yeah, you can't go back. You can't really go back. Great book. It's called the Hunter and Gatherers Guide to the 21st century. Nice. That does sound familiar. Who's the author?

Brett Weinstein. Oh, yes, that's why I'm familiar with it. Very nice. Very nice. I should read that. I've got so many books on my list. Everything about this. Yeah, that's great. Well, that's what I'm looking at with the whole city and technology thing is that I've been having arguments lately. I argue with people online. This format, my show, is collaborative and we just discuss and it's not debates and there's no confrontation. But I need to explore ideas in other context. So I do that. Discord servers and Twitter and whatnot.

I speak my mind and challenge opinions and try and learn. So it's been an ongoing debate about the idea that, you know, we've produced more technology than we are capable of adapting to. Like there's been too much of the pace of change, not change itself. In this case, it's just the pace of change, especially with social media. You were talking about dopamine hits and whatnot. And, you know, possibly ever since the radio, specifically. the television, we've been able to see a representation of the Joneses that in our mind we're

trying to keep up with it. It used to be you live in a village, you're not competing socially or trying to keep up with anyone more than just the people around you, and you're all pretty similar. You know, maybe a guy has a great idea and he's like, you can do this too, and then you learn from them. Now everybody's got it. But the pace of change and the rapidity of ideas and all and it's social media, so it's hard to say this isn't a good thing. The same thing that makes social media possible allows me to talk to you right now and and produce my own social media or content in a way um but you know it's i don't know that's it's a it's a huge problem that i don't think we've solved discussions in the book is where they talk about the rate of which adaptation happens or like the

context which you grew up in is completely different from the context of your adult life and that's never been the case before so yeah like a hundred years ago like if you grew up um you know I don't know, say like 100 years ago, the technology would not change so dramatically that when you were an adult, like, that would just be completely different. Like when I grew up, you know, we didn't have social media. And when you grew up, we didn't have social media. But now we have social media. So like our learning, like, phase did not prepare us for what's happening right now in our

lives. And so, like, we're inadequately prepared for what's happening. And, you know, there's also this argument about, like, we inherit. This is one of my arguments, really. It's just like, we inherit, like, all this technology, like, how to drive. like just being able to drive a car or like nuclear power whatever but we didn't really earn any of it and so we don't really have quality that comes with that the morality that binds like a lot of power you know this is like the the spider man line right like the great power comes to great responsibility

and like we have so much great power but we have zero responsibility we have zero accountability to it because we just don't like i just need to have money and that i could buy a car i just need to be 16 and i could drive it so I don't need to have any sense of responsibility really and so I think a lot of times we I think there's this spectrum between like entitlement and and having earned something and I think like by earning something it takes us away from the entitlement and I think like we live in a society without rights of passages really and so yeah we're not really forced to earn our way through different technological achievement or power like in a video game for instance It's like you've got to earn every step of the way.

That's what makes it enjoyable. That's how we're wired. But, you know, the way that things are right now, it's not set up like that. Well, and then there's so there's pluses and minuses too with that. So in,

in the past before video games, we had no choice but to physically excel. And I don't mean sports wise, you know, like physical accomplishments, but physically in the world, excel at whatever we choose to do and to get our dopamine

hits that way from literal physical accomplishment doing something now since we seem to have lost a lot of that have we that's maybe I'm begging the question now a lot of people are seeking that through say video games or other means likes on social media and I don't know and maybe it's hard to say because it's available and easier maybe we choose that over the more difficult maybe more rewarding way or there was a second point I was going to make with that I don't know if you see that differently or you can expand on my if you see where I was going maybe like I just don't feel like discernment is rewarded and I think discernment is a very important attribute of of being a human being but I think in this modern time when we're just inundated by options we're inundated

with information we have to be able to discern like what it is that we're here to do And that's a big part of my work. It's like I want to, I think that we're all here to do something. I think we're all here to do great and amazing things. And I think the way that society is constructed right now isn't necessarily conducive for that, but that's okay. We just need to know what it is we want to do so we can get there. And so like if you jump in your car and you don't know where you're going, then it's going to be hard to like basically leave the driveway.

And so like when we have like a top down level of discernment, then we can rank order, like what it is that we need to do, what is important for us. And I think a lot of times for people it's just work or it's kind of these, these things that are like, you know, downloaded or passed down through us. And, you know, they're just cultural ideas that, that we don't really own.

And so, like, a lot of these arguments that people are having, whether that's hot button topics like transgender or whatever. It's like, these are just ideas that have been passed down and not really wholly examined. There's a lot of ideas, I guess, that people are debating about,

you know, nuclear power or this or that. But it's like, they haven't been wholly examined for their merits. And so, like, maybe nuclear power isn't that bad. Like, maybe there's a safe way to do it. You know, there's just, you know, all of these types of arguments, but you have to have a level of discernment.

So, like, we pass these ideas to Congress, but like, you know, these people, they're not trained in this matters, you know, and, like, they don't spend their time, like, really, like, they might not even be qualified to really understand these ideas. And so it's really hard. Their specialty seems to be how to get votes. Well, they do that very well. They got elected.

Now what? Now they have to actually govern. What you were saying there brought me back to the point I was aiming towards, which I'm trying to formulate, right? Thank you for that. I'm trying to formulate an idea, and it had to do with narrative. It's like when things don't change quickly, we have an older narrative and understanding that can be communicated to the next generation, and it's going to function because the circumstances are similar. If something changes, it takes a little bit of time to negotiate a new. narrative. What is the tradition we pass down to the next generation? If you have like in my case,

so you, a few years older than you, I was born and lived a good, you know, into my teens before the internet ever existed, before cell phones. Really a very, I've experienced in my lifetime a tremendous amount of rapid change. You used to have to find a pay phone. Couldn't just call someone. There was no online communities. Like way back when I think I was 11, 12 years old, when I first, a friend of mine had a modem, a cradle modem. You have to take your phone out of the kitchen, put it down on a physical cradle that would then talk and listen through the computer to this was the very first instantiation of the internet la DARPA, you know, created by the government type of thing. And it was just government agencies that were working on in the tech, tech sector. And it was connected to

schools. And that was where the first multi-user dungeons and online bulletin board system BBS has started. You used to be able to download or at least access asky images that were not naughty for, you know, for a 12 year old to be looking at. But it was just a just a pictorial representation of something that wasn't like a full color magazine spread, you know, that kind of thing. So that's, you know, what are you going to do when your kid?

Like, look at this place I found. It's got a drawing. It's got a naughty pictures. Yeah. It's still representation, you know. True. The emotions are still triggered. The stimulus is still there, so it worked.

It does. Well, that was all nested in the same stories going off on it. I just hit my memories there. So let's say someone was like me and you're born before all these things exist. And now I'm of, I'm of the age that I could have a child with a child of their own. I don't have any kids. But if I'd had a kid, they could be 20, 25 years old by now and have, and I could be a grandfather. Physically, it's possible.

What do I tell that kid who's going to now grow up? up for the next 20 years about the world I came from and how to understand the world we're in right now. I don't have. And I think that's where we're in this culture war. So it's almost necessary. It's almost an unavoidable consequence of the rapidity of change because we haven't settled on a broadly accepted cultural narrative that lets us put things in a in a framework that we can understand and function within. It's as clear as I can make it. That's what those are were my thoughts at that points to for me the importance of first principle thinking and with through first principle thinking is what what breaks what takes us to the elements right so yeah

the element is something in which I mean definitionally can no longer be broken down this is the most base and that is essentially the first principle idea is also so when you can basically like I can, like with the elements or, like, say like I have this, like I have a, I have a, I have a, I have a weapon here, right? So say this is a knife. I'm not going to unsheave it. But, you know, so we have like this in this weapon, we have like first principally, we have like a tip. We have the blade edge. We have the backside. We have the side. And then we have the back of it, right? Yeah. So like every weapon, like first principle is like this actually. Like a gun is like this as well. A staff is like this as well. A staff is like this as well. So, like, once I boil the first principles of that down, anything that I touch is actually can become a weapon because of the first principle of thinking, all I need to know is the balance point. That's all we need to know. From that balance point, then I can understand how to use that weapon, how to, you know,

like, whip it or, you know, use it. And so, like, I don't need to understand, like, okay, like in 50 years, there's going to be this crazy weapon. Like, it all has to boil down into just force principles. And then, so, like, I have the driver's manual for every weapon in first principle. But I can apply that to snowboarding as well. I can apply that to like tennis as well. So I think what we really need is like a clean operating system that's robust enough to handle whatever comes its way.

And it doesn't need to be complex. It actually needs to be really simple. And so I think we take that example from first principles. And then we just apply it to nature. And I think that's what the elements, the elemental system is. So I think it's been really helpful for me and the people that have worked with. Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the benefits of tradition is reducing, not reducing, not reductionist, reducing in a way, because down to first principles, the idea of here's, here's a recurring pattern that you will experience,

and here's a variety of ways to interact with that pattern. And I think that's kind of getting to the core of the utility of first principles. So I go down to say philosophical first principles of, what was the guy who said that? I think it was Emmanuel Kant or I always get him confused with some of the arguments with John Locke. So those Enlightenment era philosophers, that humans are ends in and of themselves and are never to be used as means to your end or to anyone else's end. So I get down to that.

That's a very guide, you know, what is it? Guidestone is what I'm trying. It's like a moral compass for me. Is this respecting a person for their individuality and treating them as an end in and of themselves? Or am I trying to use a person as an instrumental tool? People cannot be tools. People are not tools. You can interact with them for reasons, but they can't be used as tools.

It's a fundamental moral wrong at a level of reducing a person to an object. And that's, so when you talk about first principles, that resonates with me so strongly. And then you get into psychology and broader areas of like that. And, you know, the purposes I've said in an episode recently, the purpose of, say, therapy, a therapeutic interaction with a person is not to have them leave that interaction behaving as you prefer them to. Even if I think something is good for them, even if I think they're making a mistake, I will tell them that.

But I cannot use them as a tool to accomplish my end. You know, they're not just a means to an end of here's another person. in the world the way I want them to be, even if that is what I want. And even if they're going to get to where they want through other means, you know, yes, I want someone happy, healthy, functional, and not hurting anyone. Let's see if we can get there in a way that doesn't use you, treat you like an object to be manipulated towards that end. I probably just said the same thing three different ways.

Go ahead. That's good. I think that helps try home the point. You know, I think the base for me personally of all healthy, successful inner human. in interpersonal interaction is what you just shared. It's just we don't like we come with the best interests and we can give only what can be received and we're not attached to how it's received, you know. So like you know, I look at I always have like money in my cash in my, my, my wallet for

just whenever I meet a homeless person, which there is another topic, but it seems to be so much more now. There's a few. That's another recent change that seems to be getting worse. And the points of the mental health issues that we have, I think. Yeah. You know, I just, I give it to people, right? And people always ask me, like, oh, you know, like they're just some spend on drugs.

Like, what does it matter with these things on? Like, I'm just, you know, I just feel like helping them. I want to help them. It's like, it's not because I want them to, like, have a burger or, like, try to get a job with this money. It's like, it's just, you know, I think we should be unattached ideally. But it's hard because we have this very rigid center of perspective, you know. that I am me and you are you. And I think with social media, it actually makes a little bit worse.

I think there's a correlation between narcissism and social media, unfortunately. And so, like, the more we tend to use social media, the tendency on the narcissistic index, it tends higher from what I've seen at least. And so it doesn't make it difficult to live in the way that you're saying. saying, you know, with, with, uh, respecting people as, as individual human beings and not as a means to our ends. And I think that's something we had to grapple with that society and as social media, you know, gets bigger. Hopefully, uh, they don't ban TikTok, but if they do that, that could change things quite a bit. That's its own interesting conundrum. It's like, I'm, let's for the sake of arguments say it is a net negative. So,

still should it be banned? Does that violate some first principles that maybe we shouldn't cross, some lines we shouldn't cross? And then there is the basic question of, is it really bad necessarily? I don't know. I look at it like there is no tool of mankind that is inherently good or bad. It's all about how you use it. 100%.

Then again, you know, there's people who talk about the addiction model and there's controversy and psychology with this too, is like, should we allow someone? to go ahead and be an addict because it's their right to do so, even if we think the drug itself is influencing the decision-making process that would allow them to stop if they wanted to. What do they really want and how much free will do they have? So we get these things like social media on the same side. It's not a chemical in your body.

It's inducing natural chemicals. Is someone say so addicted that they are hurting themselves by excessive obsession or usage of this medium such that they're no longer fully in control of themselves and it's harming them and how do we respond to that? Hell if I know. That's way above my pain grade. I'm trying to figure it out. But yeah, so I can't say that I would endorse.

I can say that I do not endorse banning TikTok or other reasons way outside of exactly how it functions and its effects. I think first principal side, I would say, Maybe we shouldn't do that. Yeah, I think it's a difficult issue. I think, you know, a lot of it points to the trade war issues we're having economically and also China rising as a dual power. There, you know, obviously there are more people, countries, I should say, entering brick,

which is, you know, Saudi Arabia's, I think they're, I don't know. I don't want to talk about too much like current affairs. But, yeah, I mean, I could, we could. But it's like it seems like they're entering as well as some other key countries are entering. If they do, then, you know, that could potentially threaten our hegemony. And if that does, then, you know, going deeper into this trade war with China, you know, this chip war that we have and then now, like, technology war that we have with them. And it would probably make it worse harder for us to come back if we did lose number one. Or if we lose, you know, dollar as being the global currency.

Yeah. I could make things, we could be very, you know, find ourselves very alone on the global stage. So I think it's true probably it's not diplomatically the best decision. But I'm not there. I just thought just occurred to me in that whole thing is like, if, I mean, the accusation is being leveled. And maybe it's true. How hell if I know that the TikTok software itself is spyware of a kind. So I think a lot of at least whether that's true or not, that isn't a reason being asserted for the necessity of a ban.

I wonder if there's just other ways to account for that of like we say, well, of course it is. Why wouldn't it be? And here's what we can do about it. Let's write a code that acts as an antivirus specifically for TikTok. So it functions, but it can't access your data in other ways. Now, if it does, if that isn't the case, which again, hell if I know, I'm not deep enough into this stuff to figure it, I'm just kind of hearing it like you are. If it's not actually spyware and they're just talking about, well, they're collecting your data, your patterns of behavior, that's a different story. That's what me. Facebook does that. Twitter does that.

Is it for the good or bad? What algorithms are they using? I have heard the argument that TikTok in China has a very different algorithm built into it than for America, which is not necessarily nefarious. But the difference seems to be TikTok is programmed to show people more pro-social things in China, educational and whatnot. And in America, it's more excitement, drama-oriented. which may just be a difference in our cultures. Maybe that's what people click on in America. We like our little illicit thrill and they like their science and education. Maybe so.

Or there's something more nefarious going on there with like it's being programmed to culture jam America on purpose. I don't know. I don't know either. But that is an ongoing debate currently. I don't know how to resolve it. It's a difficult. I don't think there's enough people that are well first on that to make the right decision.

Probably. That's a better problem. You know, because there's a financial. interest in and you know going to the whole issue with the algorithm it's you know we have a huge difference in our culture and it's also like where is the data stored and supposedly the data stored here and it doesn't go to China and then they found out oh it does go to China and so it's like well then like what are they doing with all the data and like well all our Zoom calls are going through China too so what's happening there and so it's like yeah there's all these there's all these things that like

all these things to consider that nobody is really no one purpose. person is really knowledgeable or wise enough to make the decision on. And when you include more people, then you include more separate motivations. You include more, you know, separate incenses to make certain types of motivated reasoning, yeah. Yeah, so it's difficult. That's a difficult issue. It is for sure.

Well, this is far afield from the, you know, body mechanics and mat translatable. What'd you call it transferable mastery? I wondered, you know, since we touched lightly. And I think philosophically on the nature of some current event stuff, setting aside everything recent that may have happened with this particular person. But Scott Adams was talked was always big on and wrote a book about it, the idea of a talent stack. He says, the more things you can get mastered, the more things that then become transferable to other areas and other masteries. So I think he was expressing a very similar concept. it's great that um it's it's uh what am i say it's great and it's not great that we get into

these cycles of rediscovery like uh there was a huge trend in eastern mysticism in the late 1800s and then we fell out of that and we've gone into the very highly rigorously scientific and we're above all that superstition and now it's kind of coming back we're like wait a minute they had they had a point and people have been deeply thinking about these things for two three, five, 10,000 years. Who knows? And I was just saying this in another episode recently that we want to be very careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater in terms of traditions. Maybe something needs to change a little bit here, a little bit there, but it survived this long because it worked. It did. It doesn't mean it can't be better, but it means we don't want to scrap it all

and start over. We don't want to reinvent the wheel. And a lot of people do. Like we forget these tremendously important and I think very true philosophical concepts and then they get rediscovered later as if no one had ever thought of that before. And that's, I think, to our detriment that we, but then again, how do we educate every single human being in the full breadth of thought that millions of people have ever thought throughout the entirety of human history? That seems impossible as well. We're almost doomed to this forgetting and rediscovering cycle. I don't know. if you have a thought on that. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I had this idea that, you know,

the standard of life has changed, you know, socioeconomically, but like the amount of luxury that we have, maybe is not that, it's not that crazy different, like, from, in terms of just the wealthiest. Like, maybe we have AC. Yeah. We do have AC. But, um, I have a lot of you.

idea that the lifestyle that we have, we, we cherish so much, it's not really that different. So like, what really has changed? I'm not really sure. Like, I mean, I studied a lot of history and technology. And so we can say, you know, specific innovations in medicine and things like that have changed. But the purpose seems to be the same. You know, we want people to be happy and healthy, good relationships, you know, community that you can, you can function in and stay alive and accomplish your personal goals. No, a lot of these things don't change. Like what it means to live a good life.

We've been arguing that for a long time. It is material things. It's kind of what those material things afford you in terms of experience. Yeah, I think it goes back to also this topic that we're talking about with like, you know, like all this kind of out there, all political things. It's like, I think at the end of the day, you know, these types of just, decisions are made politically, you know, so, like, geopolitically, speaking. So, I mean, that's probably, like, outside of the algorithm, outside of, like, whether,

you know, what's being saved or served to us, it's really just about, like, power positioning. And, I mean, everything for the time that we live in, it's about that. So it's, like, I guess it's just, like, at what level do we need to make the decisions at? Yeah. And that is, like, relevant to our, lives, right? So it's like for you, for me personally, like I can't make any decision really. Like for me personally, I can't make any decision about the global stage. So I generally don't concern myself with with things that are outside of my locus of power. But my locus of power is continually

increasing as I develop more influences. My community gets stronger or I'm tapping into more communities. So like that is kind of like in a way like my video game life of like earning more influence and change in my own way. And like that like that. Like that's, that's the proof of the pudding. It's like the better you are at what you do, like life will reflect that in so many ways. And so like, you know, that's just one of my things. Like, whatever your experience of life is, like, that's exactly exactly what you wanted. And there's a time delay between like when you decide that you want something and when you actually get it. But the results are always there, the result of your life, like how you live and what you eat or, you know, like what your relationships are like is that that is the resultant factor of your decisions. Oh, yeah. Well, that inspired me of some other recent conversations I've been hearing the idea of simulation theory and the broad concept that we are, I think that maps on to the idea that we are luminous beings, as as Yoda would say, we are not this crude flesh. And what that really means is that, you know, and there's a perfect analogy, we create, we're in a game, we're in a simulation, but it is reality. So we're not being, we're not a break. in a vat being tricked to think we're in a physical world. The physical world is the simulation, but it is a subcategory

of the larger reality in a sense. And the analogy is to massive, you know, life in my estimation is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. We are all here in this same thing. We are embodied in these physical forms, but we are at the same time something else that is operating this avatar.

Yeah, this avatar in the world. And we're, we need to partner with teammates to go on quests We need to level up our experience and expand our skill trees to get game new special. That's such a brilliant analogy. If someone hadn't already written the book, everything I needed to know in life I learned from D&D, I would say I would do the same book about online role playing games. You can do the same book just in a different niche.

Right? You do it in business. That's true. There's so many. I mean, just, yeah, it's multi-segmental marketing. but yeah I definitely agree with you actually you know what's funny is one of the the products that we developed um is is basically uh we call it the hyperbolic time chamber and it's just like a group of friends and we we have this like Excel sheet and it has like all the skills and uh this you know the the

experience points that are associated with each like habit that we have so and you know like if you stack habits they call like on twitter they call them two first but like you know like i can like five stack of habits. I give me an example. When I wake up, one of the first things I do is I spend some time outside looking at the sun. That's good for my hormones. It's good for my circadian's rhythm. And so that's one thing. But at the same time, I'm also doing a, like, it's called a coconut pole. So I'm like swishing coconut oil in my mouth for 30 minutes. And at the same time, I'm reading for 30 minutes. At the same time, I'm topless and wearing boxers and getting vitamin D. So that's four things in a row. And then I could be doing. So like, I could be on the

treadmill as well I'm getting some some exercise in while I'm you know doing the reading so like I'm getting five things in at once but I only developed this through the hyperbolic time chamber because I'm trying to rack at these points because everybody's trying to rack up these points and so we're all in a game like but we're all we kind of like predetermined like what does our ideal day look like what are the things that we need to do like where that like you know what is the level of intentionality and the level like intention that we put into the things that we do and so we're all you know there's like five of us and then we have like this VA who's like like tallying all the points on the, you know, referencing them to the Excel sheet.

And so it's a pretty fun game. But we're literally playing a video game collaboratively with each other in the same way we're talking about. For sure. Well, that just sparked something with me too. And so a video game analogy that we have the idea of min maxing, minimum maximum. So how do you get these, say, maximum result for minimum effort? Or what is the, and it's all about refining efficiencies in different ways. I try to do that myself.

There's some things, once upon time we might have called it multitasking, but it isn't really that way because we actually can't do to say mental tasks at the same time. I don't believe anyone, and maybe I'm wrong, but I certainly can't read. If you don't have your corpus callosum, you can. Well, maybe so. No, fair enough, yeah. And maybe that's an advantage. Maybe we should all have them cut.

And this is not medical advice. Please consult your doctor. It's for me. to read and truly comprehend a paragraph and listen to a conversation at the same time and understand them both. My attention is very narrow on that, but you can do non, you can do things from different categories at the same time. And as you were saying, you know, and that's the idea of this maximum efficiency. I used to try to do, well, I'm still experimenting with that in a lot of different ways, but I will do things like, what's a good example? You know, it's,

go, go way back in the day in the 1800s, they had a grand tradition of the morning constitutional. They would get up and take a walk and they were getting sunshine and exercise and looking at nature around them to learn things from the visual display. And at the same time, thinking about, you know, these philosophical things, they'd come back from their walk and they'd write part of an essay of their book and that's how you get, you know, Emmanuel Kant and John Locke. And it was a big deal.

And they were, they were multitasking in a way, these things from, from, from, different categories of tasks that you can get done all at the same time. And if you're doing that kind of maximum efficiency is better than doing each one separately or consecutively. You want to do them concurrently, if possible, in a way that doesn't conflict, where none of the things impairs the other because they are on different levels. That's my rant on that idea. I think it's genius. You can totally train your brain to do that. I mean, because I had ADHD, there there was a way that I had to learn how to focus but it's it's transferable actually but it's basically a rank ordered priority stack switching so if I needed to say like read and listen

at the same time I would listen it's kind of like speed reading as well but like speed reading is like you're looking you're basically like looking at structure and like based on the structure you're looking for like the meat of things right and so like language has a structure and so when I'm listening and I'm reading at the same time I can I can shut off the I can just listen for the structure but while still reading and then absorb the using the structure of the writing like absorb those parts and then waiting for while I'm still waiting for the the juice of what I'm listening to yeah and I can switch over and then so like I can't do both at once but I kind of like leave a monitor on each on each one so I know when to switch over so that you can actually apply that to a lot of things you can

apply that to martial arts it's like the reason I love martial arts and the reason why I love business is because it's really like the pragmatic most practical sense of application of anything that's theoretical anything that's mental then you can't do that like a philosophical idea if you can't do that like with your body if you can't apply that to the world through business then like why does it exist right it's just so abstract that's like what's the point And so, like, that's why I am so huge in, and on business. Like, I've built many businesses and sold them and spent 25 years plus just doing martial arts because, like, I really, I want to find, like, the core essence of embodiment of philosophy, of a thought, of theory, and be able to express that in physical form. Yeah, I've been obsessed with that.

That's very cool. Yeah, I think there should be, I was having this discussion the other day, too. Okay, number one, before I forget it, as you were describing that, I'm like, you know what I actually do is I listen and think my own thoughts at the same time. So there is something that going on. And it's, I'm trying not to let my own thoughts take me away from listening, but I also want to have something to have something to respond. I want to understand what you're saying and carry on the conversations. So I have to plan ahead, strategize in a way that is natural. It's like it has to be relevant. So I do do that. It's very difficult for me. I'm not, that's not natural. So once again, the biological boundaries and the nurturing expression of them, I do the best they can. We all. I'll do. So, um, oh, don't forget that thought. Where was I going with that? Oh, the physical instantiation. I, I've recently had a concept that like the, the most real things are the, are where the abstract and the concrete intersect. I don't know how to explain that much better, but like, I think abstract things are as real as physical things, but not in the same way. I mean, when you say real, people think physically tangible. I can touch it. It's a, it's a desk.

But what we have here is the instantiation, and that's why I use that word, like the physical manifestation of the idea desk. What is it? It's a platform upon which one may do a particular kind of work. It's a surface for work, basically. And then there's the concrete example. This is a particular kind of desk. This is one form of desk.

There are many. So that's what I consider that intersection of the abstract and the concrete. And that neither one is less real than the other. one is just less physical than the other. And I get into arguments with people are like, well, how do you prove the abstract is real? And you're not just fooling yourself or it's not just an idea that has no substance. Like, well, if you can physicalize it, if you can make a desk, you know, the concept of a desk is real because it is what it does. And that goes back to, I think it's Plato.

I can never remember. I think it's Plato's forms, the world of forms. This is what he was trying to get across with that idea that anything physically possible already exists as an idea that may or may not be currently thought by a person, but does not disappear when we stop thinking it. You know, the nature of what is a desk or a chair specifically. I love that idea is, you know, a chair is what a chair does. It's a place for sitting and it has a particular shape. It will not stand up with it without at least three legs.

Maybe it has a back on it and that makes it a chair and not a stool. And anything that does not perform the function of a chair is not a chair. It does if it does and it doesn't, if it doesn't. Then you get into the other philosophical ideas of, well, what if it, you know, how many pieces of the, how many grains of sandy you have to remove until it is no longer a heap? How many parts of the ship of Theseus do you have to swap out until it's not the same ship anymore? I don't know, I don't know that I have answers to those either, but that's kind of where I go with some of those ideas. This was all built on your, you triggered all these thoughts on your idea of trying to instantiate these ideas, physically in the world. And I think you're exactly right. That's how you know you're on to something.

If you can put it to some practical use and it works, that's the true essence of genius or Archimedes-type Eureka moment. And I think it goes back to just like our life being a reflection of the results of our decisions. So it's like whatever philosophy you have, whether how abstract it is, it doesn't really matter. But what matters is the life. that you are living, are you happy? Like, because you could be successful, but if you're not happy,

and then I don't know how you're defining success that might suck to be successful and not happy. Yeah. Or fulfilled, you know? So like how do you define that? And like whether how pie in the sky that theory is for fulfillment or the philosophical idea behind it,

if you're not living, because I felt, you know, when I was studying philosophy that many philosophers, they had these like really high aspirations, but their life seemed like really suck, you know, like, yeah. So I was just like, why? Why did you spend all this time, like, thinking about all this stuff? And then, like, you can, you just, like, maybe just live a little bit better, you know? So it's, I think there has to be that connection between, like, what kind of life do you live?

And, like, how, how fulfilling is that? And what are your relationships like? Because if you don't, if you don't have, like, even like your relationship with your cat, you know, like, if your cat doesn't like you and you like, but you like, it's just like this one-sided relationship that it's like, it sucks right and like if you have guiding beliefs that lead you to to behave that way then that that that's kind of like just you know shooting yourself in the foot and I think a lot of um the value in life is just getting what you want um so that you can be happy to fill and show it with other people for sure yeah I think I think a lot of um the the practice say of psychology

is asking people how's that working out for you I mean you just just ask them and it isn't even like, I'm not condemning you. Maybe you're, maybe you are ecstatic, but I look at that and I see the potential for problems. So are there any? How is that working out for you? You know, and not in a, in a gotcha kind of way and not in a persuasive kind of way, but just honestly tell me, is this working? Is this the way you want to live? And I don't know that, I don't know how many people do or do not actively engage in that kind of thing. I'm like, how is this working for me? Is this doing what I want it to accomplish. The flip side of that in some ways is there is the tortured artist phenomenon where someone is just driven by who knows what to produce something and that other

people go, whoa, that's really cool. The mad scientist in a way sometimes too. There's two sides of that. The, you know, nutty professor, he's not, you know, then there's the evil genius, you know, mad scientist style, um, both driven in different ways, uh, towards different ends. But yeah, so there's balancing that. I want to live a good life. I would like to be happy. I also want to live a meaningful life that might involve a little bit of suffering. How do I know this is too much suffering or I'm suffering for no purpose that is not actually getting me closer to my goal? Big, big questions. I wish I had answers. We'll solve it on the next episode. I think that's a beautiful question because we suffering is a given. It's like like you just

breathe. You're going to suffer. Yeah, I'm being alive. There's a moment that you can't breathe. So that's the first, I think, fundamental first principle problem that we have. And so it's like, well, if that's a given, then how do I make that worth it? And then it's like, okay, well, what do you want? Is that worth it? And then that's pretty much the juxtaposition, the dance that you go and you scale all the way up to what it is that you want. And is it worth the trouble and the suffering that it's going to come with. And then there's like the strategies that you use to get there.

And some strategies that we have are better strategies are just. ways of getting what we want, right? And so some strategies we'll find out, you know, are not that great and some strategies are great. So is having, say, like, 50 cats better than five is there a diminishing return, right? So what's the strategy for that happiness, right? And so you just, it's, you know, just, I think for me, with the suffering problem and the suffering question, it's just like, well, like, what's worth it to you? Yeah. What are you really trying to accomplish out of this? And is it working? Yeah. You pick that. Like you were saying, you're sitting in the driveway, you don't have a destination.

What are you doing? You literally could drive in circles until you figure it out. Or you could think about it first. Get a map. Do some research and, you know, pick a destination before you even get in the car. There's a lot of best practice type of things that I, that's why I lean towards. Like my moral, the sphere of what I consider moral absolutes is very small, very specific. and it's usually interpersonal, asking people for consent before I record. Never releasing video that I've not had permission to believe. To me, moral absolutes, like, I just don't get to choose why, fuck, I'm not doing that today. No, to me, you know, that's just wrong. And then a lot of everything else is just aesthetics.

It's like, well, what do you, what do you like? Do you know, I was complimenting your room there and you're like, it's got white walls and a wave. I think that's the very famous Japanese painting of the wave, but put in a triptych. maybe you don't like ocean maybe you don't like Japanese art maybe whatever and put a different painting on the wall that's not a moral question you know this and there's no there's a lot of things in life that are like that it's like if it's working for you so be it that's what you want like are in relationships where they like uh they're significant other to be just a little mean and a or

bordering on abusive to them they enjoy they enjoy that not for me but i'm not here to tell them they're doing something wrong you know unless it's unless they wake up one morning they're like I don't like this. How did this happen? I don't, I want to change it. I'm like, now we, now we got something to talk about. Now you got a goal. And it's like you can't, usually people go to, you know, I'm going to quit rambling here in a minute, but people go to a psychologist. I doc something right. I don't feel good. You know, something's wrong. This isn't working for me. Now, and that's the whole purpose. Like a psychologist has no goal in, in therapy other than find out what you are negative experiences and trying to alleviate it if possible. That goes back.

ancient, ancient tradition, you know, but certainly at least to Freud's instantiation, I'm going to stop using that word, his invention of the practice of talk therapy in that sense of like popularizing. People were doing that before and you might say priests have been doing that for 2,000 years. But the idea that you can go to a doctor and just talk it out. And by talking it out, you're going to hopefully discover something that is not working the way you wish it would. And then you can figure out what to do about it. So I think a lot of what you're doing with the life mastery thing is that let's be proactive in teaching some frameworks of how to look at best accomplishing goals.

You still got to have goals, but there's going to be best practice methods that are going to get you lay a foundation in some ways to raise you up towards those goals faster, more effectively, more efficiently. Definitely stack of it as like yours. I love that example. If you can do five things, once and you do them all completely without infringing on each other, do it. That's brilliant. Those are the wins. Yeah, I think a lot of times when we're talking about goals,

but the difficulty is there are like hidden measures of sabotage that are embedded within goals sometimes. So if we have emotional baggage around a goal, or the goal is not really a goal that we really wanted, you know, so for my parents, they wanted me to become a lawyer. And so a lot of my life. I was like, well, I'm going to be a lawyer. I'm just going to be good at, you know, going to debates and learning philosophy and all this. And that was my goal for a lot of time, but I was hitting my head against the wall because honestly, like in my heart, I didn't really care for it to be a lawyer. Like, what is that you're going to do? And so, you know, there's all those emotional baggage. So like, well, if I let that go, my parents aren't going to love me.

And, like, they're not going to respect all this stuff. So I think, like, part of the, one of the first things I do when I work with somebody is, like, we're just figuring out, like, where the emotional baggage is. they use like neurolinguistic techniques to or like hypnosis or you know various techniques and tools to do like timeline therapy or something to like release and living beliefs or emotional baggage negative emotions that are associated with with the worldview that could become problems later on because like from the very outset of the journey if you can have like like I don't know if you got backpacking but like you don't want to carry like 200 pounds of stuff with you like

your whole life. Especially things you don't need. Yeah. It's something that's not going to facilitate your journey. Yeah. Yeah. We're just eliminating all the clutter, you know, emotionally, mentally, physically, whatever. Just to make sure that you have what you need to be successful in the strip so that you can see success, so you can taste success. And then once you have a habit of tasting success, we're going to just keep doing that. And we're going to build that across, like, multiple quests, you know, and everything just becomes a side quest. And your life is the quest. And so, like, that's one of the biggest things is just a moment. Like just we have so much baggage, like so many open loops. And we just, as you clear that, like, you can have, like, your full presence,

like your full level of intentionality. It's just a whole different ball game that we play in. Oh, yeah. And those, I like those open loops and the idea of mental bandwidth, too, because let's say you've got, just to put it in raw numbers, you've got 100% mental bandwidth. And it is a percentage. It's different for everybody.

Their absolute raw number, perhaps. But we all have 100% that we could tap into. if you've got 10 open loops and they each eat 2% of your mental bandwidth, you're operating at 80%. If you can close those loops, figure it. That's why I love discussing with people their reoccurring dreams, because that helps, I think, to close a loop that, because why is their brain going back to this thing, processing the same scenario over and over again? They need a resolution. They need to close that loop, as you were saying. That's a great. I might steal there from me. I might too. A lot of relationships like that, too. Like, if you have like an abusive parent

or maybe like growing up, say for myself, like growing up, my father is very emotionally, physically abusive. And so we could say that like, if I have a sister, which I do, that she's attracted to people who are like that. So she can close that loop. And I think it's a very, I forget the term for it, but it's a psychological phenomenon where we want to close loops. We want to change the narrative. We want to change the story around it. But we often don't have the tools to do it. So we'll attract, we'll create these circumstances, these dynamics.

so that we can re-experience it and choose different options. And, but if we don't have the tool set, if we don't have a higher level of insight or wisdom, to get us through that and around that and to safely mitigate any, you know, damage or harm, and we're just going to recreate those problems. Yeah. I think, like, if you have somebody helping you,

like a therapist, relationship coach, or, you know, psychologists who's kind of walking, and you kind of have to say it to somebody, and they hear it. And then when you say to them, then you see, oh, this is pretty ridiculous, isn't it? And they may say nothing. And they don't have to say anything, really. It's just like, yeah, it's ridiculous.

I think that's what I do with the dream thing, too, is that sometimes people are too close to get the proper level of focus on their own experience in that regard. These raw thoughts are just, too close, you know. So I kind of stand behind your shoulder and look over it and shine a flashlight in there going, is that what, is that what I see there? And then sometimes... You just implanted a seed now in my dreams, I'm going to have you over my shoulder, probably. With a flashlight. I got your back, man. Yeah.

I think that's going to happen. I seriously think you just planted a seed. That's totally possible. Well, that's how I conceive of my process. Because, like, there's some people who poop poo dream interpretation as a scam as some people being manipulative or, you know, like you go to a psychic and like, oh, the spirits are talking to me and really you're just using psychology. No, I'm really just using psychology, period. There are no spirits. There's no talking to God. Not directly anyway. I hope I am a channel through which the spirit of goodness flows to help other people. Sure.

It's a decision. Yeah. It is. It is. You have to open yourself to that energy versus the alternative. I was going somewhere with that. No, but the idea of none of the answers are in me. I'm not getting anything other than what you give. And all we're doing is looking at it together. And I'm trying to suggest different ways of seeing it. And some of those ways are going to, going to feel right and some of those ways you're going to feel nothing. And that's fine. That's what we do. So that feedback, um, active feedback process. Speaking of the dream thing, though, I know you had a, eh, hard out, uh, that's coming up in about an hour. Um, so did you want to take a quick break? I'll let the dog out and, um, we'll come back in like 10 minutes and then we'll, we'll start the dream stuff. Good deal. I'm going to go, uh, Benjamin the dream wizard

wants to help you pierce the veil of night and shine the light of understanding upon the mystery of dreams. Every episode of his dreamscapes program features real dreamers, gifted with rare insight into their nocturnal visions. New Dreamscape's episodes appear every week on YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey, and other video hosting platforms, as well as free audiobooks, highlighting the psychological principles which inform our dream experience and much, much more. To join the Wizard as a guest, reach out across more than a dozen social media platforms and through the contact page at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com, where you will also find the wizard's growing catalog of historical dream literature available on Amazon, featuring the wisdom and wonder of exploration into the world

of dreams over the past 2,000 years. That's Benjamin the Dream Wizard on YouTube and at Benjamin the Dream Wizard.com. Okay, so, yeah, once again, the basic process is, I shut up and listen. You tell me the dream as a narrative beginning to end, whatever you remember. Don't worry about being comprehensive with the details and whatnot. Just whatever it is. And then we'll go back through it again and we'll see if we can figure it out together.

I'm ready when you are. Okay. Well, there's a couple. So how do I pick? There's a, there's like, there's one that was like, it was a really big moment for me. And then there's one that, like, there's two. from last night.

But the one that was a really big moment for me, I think that was like two years ago. And so I don't remember all the details. Yeah. But I do remember the thing that happened. And so we could always discuss that briefly if you want to, if it's something you don't want to omit. The more recent dreams are usually the best because they're fresh. And they speak to something that is a current topic of consideration.

in a way where it might be it's very often more beneficial to focus on those because it's it's something you're going through now as opposed to the old dream being something you've probably resolved for the most part whatever it was not always but okay so maybe just hear your take on the short one since this can be short sure yeah oh do not walk on the on my mouse jesus they're going to they're going to erase another episode no okay you Yeah, yeah. Let's go ahead and we'll go ahead and talk about that real quick. That's fine. Okay, so this dream happened about two years ago. So I was doing something called HRB, a resonance breathing, which is like you're just breathing for a certain type of interval so that you can get your brain and your heart to basically resonate at the same frequency or like operate at the same frequency. And I didn't know at the time, but during week three is generally you're supposed to have some type of emotional release.

and I didn't read. I just, because they had like this program that you just follow. And so like I didn't read through like the whole book at the time because I was camping and whatever. So in this dream, okay, so backstory real quickly. When I was about 12 or so, I held my baby niece. And that was my first time holding like a, you know, she was like a week or something old or something. And they had these like four posts wrought iron bed. And I basically, when I was holding her, like, I knocked her head into the wrought iron post.

And I felt, and she was crying, of course. And I just felt so bad. Yeah. Until now, like, until pretty much two years ago, I was like, I'm never holding another baby again. Like, just don't trust myself. Yeah. And so in this dream, this is before I had met my, my new nephew. But he was just born at this time, like, you know,

a few weeks old or whatever, but I meet him in this dream. My sister hands into me and I have no reluctance to hold him or anything. I was just like, okay, hand. But usually I'm like, no. And so she hands on to me. And as soon as I take him into my hand, I look into his eye. And then my heart, it just burst open. And like all this, I just, I feel like all the tears that I haven't cried

because I haven't cried in a very long time, really, like, real crying. So, like, it just, like, came out. And like, and I felt like, I was crying in real life. Like, I felt like after I woke up was like, I had to check myself. Like, did I really cry? But it felt so real. And so since that experience happened, a lot of things shifted in my life.

And I did finally hold it at him and everything. Wasn't as magical as a dream, but it was so great. Yeah. Things are always a little more intense in dreams or not, vice versa. Not exactly aligned with reality one to one. So, yeah, that was the experience. but my, my therapist, she was like, I have an interpretation if you want to hear. I'm like, I don't really care for it.

So, but I didn't, I didn't care for her interpretation. I mean, I love her, but she's, I don't know. She's not a dream, you know, person. Gotcha. So a little different specialty, I suppose. You know, I don't have a license. I'm not a licensed psychologist, so to speak. So this is not counseling in therapy.

But I think by limited focus, I got a, I got something dialed in that actually works. So, and not everyone has that same skill. set um you know she's more like the bernays sure and sorry not bernays what i think bernays right yeah no could be i think that's an actual name or close to one i think that's that's the godfather of uh propaganda i think i would bernase so not him oh could be yeah what's that lady she's like she's like known for emotional intelligence uh what's her name day oh it's yeah it's on the tip my tongue, I think I know who you're talking about. Ornees or Brown or something.

Could be Brown. Yeah. Could be. Yeah. So she's more on like that side of things. And so like I'm like, yeah. Yeah. So anyways, what is your interpretation of this?

You know, this is not my process. But I have thoughts while these things are happening. And there's the theme that stood out to me is the idea of trusting yourself to, to, to, the any of you trusting yourself to handle responsibility well? And you've had a, you had a traumatic experience. And it isn't, you know, earthquake survival, you know, childhood abuse levels of trauma. But it is traumatic enough that you had a intensely negative, memorable experience where, you know, there was nobody to blame but yourself and you, and you internalized that. And you were like, I screwed up so badly that I'm not even

going to take the chance of allowing myself to screw up that badly in the future. because of how it hurts someone I care about. So this dream was, I think the catharsis of the emotional explosion was, I've changed enough that I can trust I will handle this responsibility better in the future. I can do this. What, what do you got? I love that. It's a very powerful interpretation.

I love it. Thank you so much. Yeah. Well, and that is that I would say, and the thing that got me really was that heart bursting, wide open emotional catharsis because it's things that are that important to us. The things that really matter and, you know, letting go of our self-doubt and self-criticism, that is intensely moving. Yeah. So that's what really clinched it for me is, you know, that idea of needing to get past that blockage and that, that euphoric feeling. So I think that's, that's, that's

And then you proved it to yourself. You know, you've held your nephew. You've not made the same mistake twice. Now you're more aware of it. Some people are a little too hard on ourselves and learning to let go of that unfair self-criticism. It's such a relief. I think that's probably where you were coming from. Thank you.

Yeah. That aligns like that a lot. It feels right. Yeah, no, it feels right, but it also feels very helpful. And just kind of noticing the trends that have happened since. I think there has been a lot of ownership of my role in life and what I'm here to do and stuff. So, yeah. That's a good thing, too.

It's like getting stuck halfway through the process. First, you have to see there's a problem. Then you've got to do something about it. And sometimes we get stuck on that. This is a problem. And that's all we can think of is the problem. And we're not. There's a great sci-fi fantasy series of books,

Kumur Borders, called the first book is called Wizards First Rule. I love the sci-fi and fantasy. especially genre. And one of the things he, you know, advises that the elder wizard character advises his, nephew, I think, in this sense,

or grand nephew, something like that, or grandson, possible. I can't remember their relationship. Anyway, he advises him, you're thinking of the problem, not the solution, and puts that in his mind of, you know, quit dwelling here.

Where do we go? What's the next step? We've got to figure this out. And that always stuck with me. That too. I read that, you know, some 15, 20 years ago. I'm like, yeah, if I'm stuck on something, I'm maybe I'm thinking to the problem, I'm dwelling on the problem and I'm not looking at what can I do about it.

And some people are scared to try things, especially if that, the problem is self-doubt. Oh, God, how do I make a decision about how to fix my own self-doubt? I'm so doubtful. Oh, no. And that's what it can help to go to, you know, go to a therapist or talk to a friend, anyone who can help you talk, kind of talk through that and be that mirror for you. Yeah. But work, I'm eating more of your time with my random ramblings.

To the, so you said there were two dreams you had last night. Does either one of them feel like, does it shine brighter in your mind of like this was more important? This felt like I needed an answer. I think I only wrote down one. Oh, fair enough. That makes it easier too. No need to flip a coin. Let me put this here.

Okay. Go, go for it. A lot of my dreams happen in class for some reasons. So, like, middle school, could be high school, could be, not really college, but a lot of them happen in class. And this person, he was chasing me, I guess, we were having, like, an outdoors type of class. And so then we'd fight. I'd fight a lot in my dreams. And then I'd take them out and not kill him, but I just, you know, I guess defeat him.

And then he'd keep finding me at different places and throughout the school or different, even, like, outside. of the context of school. And then one time he found me and he started flinging forks. I mean, this is also a common theme where people fling forks at each other, but they're like throwing knives. And so they'll stick in you. And so like I was able to like dodge and block them so they wouldn't stick. Like kind of just deflect them.

And then I'd do some back and stuck them. But yeah, it's kind of a weird. Every time I have that part of my dream, like, oh, white forks. But it's just, it's so cruel. I'm necessarily cruel. Then we had like an ultimate fight, I guess. And then that's when I, I guess, I really took him out. And then I had to call 911 to help him.

And after he woke up on the street, he tried to fight me again. And then this time I had to, I was just basically using a lot of misdirection instead of hitting him because he was in a, you know, fighting shape really um then then after after like he got tired then we just like walked up the stairwell and they started telling me his life story that's how the dream ended okay very interesting and i went to about uh where is it one 38 getting better at doing this time stamp thing because i'm going to go back through these videos and fine i chop out the um you describing the dream that becomes its own video i put it on my

what dreams may come playlist so people can go let me find a dream i'm interested in what is a mystery i want to hear solved and then they can they can listen to that three minute 90 second description of a dream and go i don't know what that one means and then corresponding episode uh it's also i turn one interview into a week's worth of of social media notifications keep my keep my presence out there it's all multitasking thing nice right there you go it's like the jo rogan clip style um and i just started making youtube shorts recently too and those are actually getting several hundred several hundred views yeah lots of exposure i don't think i'm ever going to get one that goes you know a million views viral but yeah i'm not complained if it does we have an interesting enough

story i'm sure or a dream i'm sure it could right anything's possible oh for sure i'm not gonna i'm not going to uh discount it or or work to ensure it never happens thank you i appreciate that i think that'll help i do um okay so we got the basic story uh and this i think is key to the uh psychological process in general. I mean, what, what is my process? Hell if I know, I just fell into this. I intuited this whole thing. And that's what I run with. I'm like, I'm not even going to try and figure it out until in retrospect, it starts to make sense to me. But I'm starting to get some explanations for it. Step one, you got to listen. You got to really just listen and get as many of the details as you can really hear with the other person saying, now, now is

the time to go back through it again and look at it. Okay, now I can ask my questions. You don't interrupt the process of just listening. Just get it, just get it to see it. See it for what it is. So you actually, this is in the style of some other reoccurring dreams where you tend to fight people or fight in general. Or did I have that wrong in terms of a lot of dreams just take place in school, but they're not all about fights. This one just happened to be about fights. A lot of them have in schools and oftentimes I'm fighting, but not, but they don't usually, I'm not usually fighting at school, I don't think. Usually just fighting in general and just random places. Gotcha. But the first thing is that it takes place adjacent to a school,

near a school. It is like an outdoor stuff. Like, you know, like how in Oregon, it's a lot of indoor or like, you know, you are saved by the bell. It's all indoor school. Yeah. But, you know, there's an outdoor schools. And so it's like an outdoor school, but it was outside of a classroom, say, for instance, but on campus. Yeah. So in this one specifically, you were near a classroom, you were in a quad area. You're out more towards the field where people would play kick, ball um kickball right dodge ball kickball um so say just and did it feel like any particular level you know um elementary school middle school college uh middle school but i think we're all adults which is pretty common too i'll be in a different like i'll be an elementary or middle

and not often high school, not often college, but I'll always be an adult and there will always be, they're all, everybody's an adult, but there's not something right there. Fair enough. Yeah. No, no, it's definitely, so a lot of, a lot of times the setting that it's in, well, almost always the setting that it's in means something. Like you didn't set yourself at a medieval castle. You weren't on a space station. I mean, this is, so it's telling you there's something about your experience at the time when you were actually in that environment. that is now also relevant to when you're an adult. But you're not in the classroom, but it's something, say, education adjacent or something to do with the way you conceive of school in general. It seems to have been a very, if it's going to come back as a common theme in multiple dreams, there's experiences from that time and the way you conceptualize it that stay with you. And I think that's true for a lot of people in terms of we look back at our growing up in general. I mean, if you grew up in the country and you had a little ramshackle one room schoolhouse in the 1800s or whatever, that's going to be your representation of school.

So if you have strong connections with that, you learned important lessons, things that you believe are still relevant to your life. That's what you're going to see. But what you see is more like your actual experience. You know, it's a different kind of outdoor school type of thing where the buildings are maybe in L shapes. And in between them is not a cover because it rains all the time. but, you know, for sunshine and trees and whatnot. I had the same kind of school, actually, when I was in elementary schools in kind of the broader Sacramento, California area. Oh, I'm from Sacramento.

Oh, my goodness. That's pretty cool. You might have actually, let's see, I'm 46. Is it okay to say how old you are? Yeah, I'm 34. So we actually lived within the same area at an overlapping period in our life. I mean, probably never would have met and not within miles. I was still living there when you were born and then moved to,

move to Southern Oregon, etc. I was born in Hawaii, but I lived there since I was like one pretty much. Fair enough. Yeah, our time in that area overlap. We were in greater proximity than we are now at one point, which is weird. That's another great synchronicity. Is it weird people?

Well, it's weird and like, of course we did type of way, which is weirder. Yeah. So anyway, this is where I start with things. And sometimes I need to ramble on that stuff saying, okay, there's something about this context that they, informs the rest of the story. We don't have to get that right now, but, but we start letting it percolate, as I say, like a brew and coffee. It's just drops, drops through the, through the grains. So you're in a fight with a person. Do you know how it started or who started it in,

in that regard? No, I think he was pursuing me and then I had to basically confront him and then that's how it started. Not 100% clear in the details, but my intuition is saying that. And that's okay. In dreams, you don't have to have a, I saw him come up to me and say insulting things, and then he threw the first punch. That's one type of experience. The other type is he was chasing me and I couldn't get away from this confrontation. It was going to happen. And I just know that. Exactly the same thing as seeing it. So this is definitely a confrontation not of your choosing. This is something, or maybe even someone, but I think less likely a specific person. I think the guy represents more an idea of something that is pursuing you and that you have to confront.

You're going to have to battle this thing. It's going to keep chasing you and forcing you into combat whether you like it or not. And despite your efforts to, say, run away from it. We're getting something that feels really, I don't know, is that? Yeah. Okay. That sometimes I get zings and I'm like, whoa, that's got to be it. there's got to be something there.

But again, just a flashlight. So what if we look at it this way? You're like, okay, okay, I'm with you. So you do, you have multiple instances of defeating this opponent that will not stay down. And it goes from different place to different place. So the first one is say outside these school rooms. And then you defeat them, you win. and you leave, you disengage, and where does the next confrontation happen?

What environment? I think the kitchen, the cafeteria. Interesting. And that is where the fork incident happened? Yeah. Okay. Well, it's a natural place for forks to be. I mean, you would say what kind of weapons would be available?

Forks, he's throwing forks at me. But you've had forks thrown at you in other dreams? Yeah. And I've had forks in the eyeball. I've forked other people in the eyeball. It's been pretty crazy. Do you have any strong association with forks in general? Here's a thing.

Well, here's the thing. Culturally, were you raised in a household where you used chopsticks? And actually, Forks is very much a Western thing that you had to kind of learn later. You had to learn to use both? I think we learned to use both simultaneously, probably. Yeah, because that's the first thing that came to my mind. in terms of why this specific utensil. Okay, it's common, say, in Western kitchens.

That's the very Western European thing. Not entirely common around the world. Say, if we went down to Mexico and a lot of their meals are going to be, you have a stack of tortillas and you've got a bowl of beans, and they don't even use utensils. They just take it and kind of scoop with the stuff and then sprinkle it in and make a hand taco. That's more like a spread. So there's always cultural differences in this thing, too.

And I thought at least I would ask if there was a resonance in that cultural angle of fork versus chops. And now there's no chopsticks in the dream, but forks being very different culturally. I don't know. There's anything there that comes to mind or I'm on the wrong track completely. No, I think just forks are sharp and, I mean, they're not really sharp, but I... They're very stabby. Yeah, they're just stabby. So I think, I mean, I don't know.

It's often that people are just kind of just like flinging up forks and not super often, but more often than knives or other implements for some reason. So it would just trigger me in this dream. I was like, why forks again? Yeah, definitely. So there's probably, I mean, I would say definitely because it recurs and it is always forks, there's something strongly related to forks. Do you remember having been stabbed with a fork or stabbing something with the fork as a kid?

I mean, in a fight or, you know, dispute with a sibling and you just, you know, frustratedly lashed out and, you know, poked them with a fork and they cried or anything strong like that from your, from your history. Like something with force. I don't think there's any history of violence with forks. I don't think. Gotcha. Okay.

In my conscious recollection at this moment. Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. So we're ruling. We're ruling things out. It's not necessarily say a cultural. angle. It's not necessarily a literal connection angle. We might not figure out forks. That might be deep,

whatever that is. Yeah. And that's okay. You know, there's no pressure on you and I can only do what I can do. I'm going to think back on this and wonder why didn't I suggest something better or different. But we can actually, you know, let it slide for a minute and see if we can come back around to it. Circle back, as some people would say. Yeah. But there was a, it is in some sense also in escalation. There was pistichuffs, and now there's weapons involved. And they're being thrown. And the purpose is to, it's not just to bruise you, but like to pierce your skin.

It's, you know, that's the nature of the object. And you are successfully dodging and deflecting. I mean, none of them actually make contact and stick. None of them stick, yeah. Okay. So if we conceptualize this as some kind of a recurrent, conflict that you can't avoid for whatever reason. And it's escalated now to weapons.

But you're still, you know, you defeated him the first time. You know, you successfully resolve that. Now, even though there's an adapted attack method, there's a new variation of attack thrown in. You're also successfully using your skills to dodge, deflect, and you're not being injured in that way. Um, so it's another, uh, maybe like, um, as I was saying, the idea of a, adaptive means of also achieving success. You didn't show yourself, you failing. Like, oh, no, this new vector of attack actually broke through my defenses. No, my defenses are good against this, too. Um, um, impervious to forks. Right. That's, but you get a plus three bonus versus forks. Exactly. It coming from your dexterity. how did that situation resolve was was this person where were you at physically in relation to them as that was happening you know had you sat down to eat or did you walk in and they were waiting for you what do you remember of the kind of physical layout of that encounter i think i had had some

food and then i turned around and they were there and we were uh maybe five or six feet away from each other and that's why they had to throw those forks but they had like a bunch of forks something that they're just kind of just flinging in on me. Okay. It's interesting, too. So you moved from outside a place of education in a way, you know, a low level of, but a fundamental necessary, but necessarily low level of rising through it. And now you've moved to the cafeteria, which is it's still in the school.

So in the context of the school, but it's a different experience of school. This is where you're actually taking a break from the education part. This is now the social environment. It's a place where you meet basic biological needs. Everybody got to eat. It's also a place where you'd hope you can just relax and be like, I'm not under pressure to do anything but meet my own needs here. I'm just here to eat and take a break before I'm maybe heading back to whatever else I'm doing.

So there's maybe some different contexts for how this thing is following you to different areas of your life and impacting you there too, something like that. Yeah, yeah, definitely. like something unavoidable, I guess, regardless of the schema. Yeah, yeah, something like that. And it may be something specific to the cafeteria experience, too. But again, you know, but we move up levels of broad generalization. What's a place to eat food?

No, what's a kind of larger building and a lot of different layers to look at it there. But that may not be as relevant as just showing different environments that the problem crosses over into. Yeah, the way of putting it. Thank you. Where did you experience the next ultimate fight? I think this one was on the street. If I can remember in front of somebody's house or something, in a neighborhood setting.

Okay. Or maybe just not a neighborhood setting, but her houses around. Yeah. And did this map onto your, what am I trying to say? The neighborhood you lived in when you're in middle school? Is it more like suburban, urban,

or something different than you experienced? I think it was similar. Okay. Not exactly, it was similar. Yeah, it doesn't have to be identical. But definitely if it was, you know, you grew up like I say, you grew up in the country in a one-room schoolhouse, but suddenly you're imagining you're in a dense city schoolhouse

and a very urban street, tall buildings everywhere, completely different experience. That would be drawn from representations that you might have seen in media rather than personal experience and conceptualizing it differently in that way. I see. Yeah, it's cool that you have all this. different ways to slice the onion. Yeah, that's what we're trying to do is like,

what if we look at it from this angle? That's why I say, I'm shining the light around in the dark. What if we, what is this thing? What if we turn it this way? Rubik's Cube. Okay, I don't want to lose, you know, make stuff, these in my notes. Were you walking alone?

Were you walking? Were you just suddenly in the fight and there's no context for how it started for this kind of? I think it would just end the fight, yeah. I just, it just, there wasn't a lot of transition before from my call. Is there anything you remember seeing around you? You're on the sidewalk. You're in the street.

You're on someone's front lawn. I think we're in the street. And there might have been people around, but I don't remember. Yeah, I think when I called 911, there were people around. So. But you don't remember that. explicitly during the fight. No.

Okay. That might be relevant. Might not. It might be relevant. It might not. I did have a thing that, you know, afterward, being relevant afterwards is, I think, but we'll see. It also brought immediately to my mind is street fighting. I mean, you're in the street fighting.

So it's in what is the street fight? It's a very speaking to you, I think you feel something there. It's a very specific kind of fight. It's not like, this is not just kids messing around. This is maybe life or death. And that's, you kind of characterize it as an ultimate fight in terms of, um, how knock down drag out brutal it was like like cage, you know, UFC cage fighting and someone's going down.

Yeah. And it felt that way, it felt more brutal than the first brawl and it wasn't as easy to deflect as the forks. This was, you were trading blows. You were getting hit and giving and taking. Yeah, I mean, more more. Yeah, I mean, I wasn't like taking a lot, I think. But, I mean, I was thinking some.

But, yeah, it was, it was more of a in-your-face, more dramatic, more intense than the first two. Yeah. And it is, it is interesting that this is, say, the, well, that isn't the final. There was another one after that as well. So you're putting in more effort. You're having to, you're having to put in more effort. The intensity of it in general escalated, the intensity of the

attack therefore the necessity of the defense to be equal, equal to the task, or, you know, if you're going to win, superior to the task. Do you remember any specific method of ending the fight? Some particular maneuver was, you know, a wild haymaker catches him on the chin. You, you sweep the leg and you're able to get them in a headlock, you know, things like that. I can't say that I remember. There's probably something, but there's, but I don't remember. Well, also there might have been nothing. It might be like what you needed to experience was the intensity of it and how serious it was and the idea that this is a different kind of challenge to meet.

And you still succeeded. I think they were bleeding and unconscious when I had a call 911. So yeah, that was going to break any lens. But they were bleeding. So there was some bludgeoning and they're unconscious. So either they're knocked unconscious or they were, you know, choked and took. unconsciousness. And that's probably the more important element of it is the level, the level of intensity

demanded a certain amount of response. And to win a fight like that, the other person is going to be in bad shape. And so you need it to show yourself, here's the consequences. If you win, whatever you're winning against is going to be defeated in this type of tangible way. That's not what I'm trying to say. There's going to be an escalated level. of damage that's just necessary to win.

Something about that. Sometimes I just need to say things. And rather than, rather than, you know, curb stomping, rather than walking around to the crowd with your arms up, roaring your victory, you have a concern for this person, this thing that has been brutally defeated. You don't want them to die. You don't want them to have to suffer the ultimate. cost of losing their life because they made the mistake of messing with you.

You're going to, and I wrote down just, um, kind, no desire to harm. That was my first thing. And that's the impression I was getting from that. So you know, you have a, you still have enough compassion for this person that, that started the fight that you don't really want to see them suffer too badly for their mistake. Yeah. Totally.

And that's what it felt like in the dream to you that this kind of this natural tendency the compassion? Yeah, and also a duty, I think. So, I mean, there is compassion that I, you know, I don't want it to be worse than what it is. But I think also, I guess on the other end of what I had done, just the responsibility to make sure that the responsibility and duty to make sure that he was, at least cared in some way. Yeah. And that's a good, that's a good distinction because there are some people who they lead.

into the emotional side, I felt bad for him. And that was my motivation. You corrected me a little bit to say, no, it was more like an obligation. And obligations are more intellectual, moral, than emotional. They might get us to the same place, but they are two different ways of approaching that problem. So there was an acknowledgement of responsibility. I did this. So I'm going to be responsible in how I respond to what I have done, even if it was justified. And I think a lot of us do, do look from that angle. Like, you know, do I have to let it be as bad as it could be? Or can I mitigate it?

Should I? Should I? What does it mean to be responsible? And certainly in this discrete instance, what it means to be responsible is, call them an ambulance. You don't let them die. Did the, when you realize there were other people around, what was their response? What were they doing?

Were they near, close? Were they horrifying? I think they were there to just witness. There wasn't really a lot of response or interaction with them. I think part of why I felt like I need to call this because there were people around and that was the right thing to do. Oh, yeah. Not because I wanted to get ahead of the narrative.

Yeah. I think just in general to do the right thing, especially if there's other people around, I guess. No, for sure. And that's not, that is no small potatoes in terms of motivation. there are people who, okay, what do they say? Character is what you do when no one's looking or when people can't do anything for you. That's how you treat people that, when no one's looking and people that, how you treat people who can't do anything for you. But that doesn't mean that public perception will not happen one way or another.

So if there are people present acting through the enacting responsibility will be, hopefully positively received by people who, yeah, they would expect that. Even if that wasn't your motivation. There's, it's like your motivations are separate from the perception, but the perception is going to happen anyway, no matter what your motivation is. There's two separate things that are both related to the same subject. So there is that idea of not, you know, I'm not suggesting, and I don't think it is the case, that you only did that because of the public perception, but you did the right thing

in there were people there to witness it. is more like it. Did you watch the remake of Mad Max? Witness me! People want to be seen doing things that are heroic. And I love the hero moment in Spider-Man 2, I think it was. The old Toby McGuire one, where he stops the train by shooting out all the webs, and he's about to collapse, exhausted, and they catch him.

And they bring him in, and they pass him hand over hand, and they lay him down. And one guy says, I got a kid his age. And then the little boy brings in the mask and says, here, Spider-Man, and I lose it every time. I'm getting chills right now describing that scene. That's, I want that kind of public approval, not for the narcissistic sake of, give-me, give me, I want to feel good. But like, I really did something important and somebody saw it and they appreciate it. So I think that's what you're leaning into here is.

No, definitely. I think that's right along the same vein. You're right on the money. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, so that's what I'm, I feel that resonance with you on that level. But did the ambulance ever arrive? Did he get treatment?

No. No, he got it before that. Okay. What were you doing when he came back after you again? Were you interacting with the people at all? Or did he come at you from behind or did you watch him get off the ground and like, oh, here we go again? Yeah, it was more like I saw him get off the ground.

Like, here we go again. I don't know why there was distance between us. But, yeah, I just, I think he, he gets up and he just tries to come out of me some more. And you, again, adjust your response to the needs of the situation. You say, look, I don't have to decapitate this guy. I can just kind of, he can't really hurt me, so I'm going to go easy on him. It's kind of the idea. Yeah, just like, yeah, just misdirecting and dodging and just letting him burn himself out, basically.

Um, any, any specifics of that scenario that stand out to you in terms of describing how it played out or was it just extremely brief? Yeah, it was somewhat brief before he pretty much ran out of energy and collapsed. Okay. And then was it a sudden scene change again to after he collapsed, now you're walking up a set of stairs with him? Yeah, scene change. and there's a

we're in an internal stairwell we're just going up together what kind of building it's it's almost like an inside of an apartment complex or something maybe and this would be one of the

outdoor stairwells for an apartment complex in terms of internal it no well you know that's right you did say interior so almost like a multi-story building where the staircase is on the inside. Any idea of where you were, you know, ground floor higher up?

Well, we're probably at least about the first level because there was a continuation from lower and then to the next loop around. Okay. So your impression was generally at a lower level of the building with multiple levels, perhaps, remaining to climb if you were to go to the top?

Yeah. Okay. That very much suggests the beginning of a process in a way. You didn't put yourself at the ninth story of a 10-story building, which would more represent the end of a process. I'm pretty close to the goal. You're very much showing yourself, I'm just starting to climb with this person. I think the fact that they are with you and telling you their life story is the purpose of putting yourself at a low rung on a set of stairs that there's a long way to go in terms of that.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. Where were you guys in relation to each other, shoulder by shoulder? Were they slightly behind into the left? No, shoulder or shoulder. I think I might have been holding him up or something or something like that. Assisting the climb, got you. Like with his arm around me or something.

And he's still out of sorts and not in good shape? Yeah, I mean, there's still like blood and stuff, but he can, can tell me the story in a very coherent way. Gotcha. And is there anything you remember about the story? Or just that that is what he was saying? There were definitely details that I don't remember. Okay. Do you remember how it came to be? I mean, did you ask him or did you volunteer? I don't remember how it came to be. Gotcha. I think it's probably more important that you are with this person, with this concept and what it represents at the beginning of a journey of understanding because what you are learning from him is his life story. How did he get where he's at? And that's almost the same as explaining the nature of a

thing. And when you're beginning to understand the nature of a thing, you're at the beginning of a journey, perhaps many steps to take you up to the top of peak of understanding in a way. That's an interesting story arc from the beginning of fighting this thing. You can't get away from that keeps coming back in different forms, follows you, you know, to the point of, you know, in the neighborhood, perhaps, where you live, it's close to home. It's not in your house. You never got into your house. But it's at least as close as the street in front of your house and you have to street fight, engage with it brutally.

And even though you win, you don't want to destroy it utterly. So you care take it. And then the next thing is, you know, and it comes back again. Okay. Now I need to understand this thing. What is it? Tell me your story. Why are you here?

If I tell it like that and something going on in your current situation, your current life experience, relationships, business projects, I don't know if anything comes to mind, a recurrent struggle of that kind. Well, I think along the arc of what we were talking about on the first dream,

of just like acceptance of responsibility and then where, right now, I guess where I'm at right now in my, his career is you know i've you know i've been a serial entrepreneur just for the sake of making money and now um for the first time ever in a service-oriented business that i've created so it's just a completely different oh set up you know like i am it's not about i mean i need money. It's not about the baby.

It's not about just mid-magging that whole deal. Yeah. So it's more about, like, hey, this is one of my gifts now. I'm not a dream that I had about the baby crying. It's like, after that dream, I realized that I had been repressing my emotional side,

my emotionally sensitive side. And because one of my best friends growing up who was autistic. And so he would always be like, why are you so affected by what's happening around us? Well, obviously, he has Asperger, so it's like he has zero effect. Me too. I feel that. And so I was like, oh, maybe I shouldn't be, you know.

But I think there was always a part of myself that I grew up very stoic. So very military very stoic. So I didn't really want to allow things to affect me. And I think I had always been repressing this emotional aspect of myself. Yeah. like I think one of my, like the second sign I have to say a moon or something so it's like very emotional. So it's like I just have this highly repressed emotional aspect and then I think two years ago I came to witness and acknowledge that in the dream but also in a series of dreams that happened after that. And I was like, why am I getting in the way of this thing?

It's such a gift to understand people emotionally, you know, and to understand myself emotionally. And so that's what led me to this path around now. It's like, why don't I use all the IQ that I have, all the business knowledge, all the wisdom, plus all the EQ that I have to, like, help people. Because I think, like, on a first sensible basis for us to innovate, so for us to, like, evolve technologically and to outgrow the problems that we have, we face. that we've sort of created, there needs to be the conditions for that. And part of those conditions are safety, trust, and compassion, connection. So one of my mission is to create, foster the mindsets, the ideals, the principles behind that so that we can have that space, that necessary foundation, so that we can have innovation

where creativity can excel. And so that's been a big part of my life right now. And so I, although I've done business before, I've never done business like this before. Yeah. It's been, I think always, you know, like this theme of like avoiding or repressing that emotional aspect. Maybe that thing is like,

would be something continually confronting me, but I'm always just like, I don't want to deal with emotions. I'm very much. I'm super logical. Me too. There's so much logic in here. It's crazy.

It's like understanding that there's both sides. You know, there's just two sides of the same coin. For sure. I think I'm left-handed. So I had to learn a lot of the ways of how to live in a right-handed person's world. Yeah. And so I think the mirror side of this is like I've also been, you know, since I was young, like just touted for being very logical, very smart.

like that allowed me to lean on that, but ignore my emotional parts. No, I have to learn how to be an emotional being now have a logical world. Something we cannot ignore. It's going to happen. We're going to have feelings. We're going to figure out what to do with them, which actually was leaning me towards some of what you were saying. So you're shifting your focus from a widget oriented, very physical, you know, numbers on paper type of thing. And there's people involved in production and whatnot.

but it isn't about that to something where it is about that. It's very much about the success of your business is, and it isn't just the business. It's the success of you yourself, the success of your chosen enterprise now relies more heavily on people. That keyed something in to me on this where it is unavoidable with some people that there will be conflict. And now this doesn't mean you're going to butt heads with people, but there is an unavoidable element of dealing with people where there will be differences of opinion,

perspective. And what you're trying to do is confront those challenges to communication to successfully implementing your business. You're trying to negotiate those where you defeat the challenge without destroying the person. You're not there to kill anybody. You're not, you know, you could defeat them physically. You can beat the hell out of them probably, you know, but that's not the point.

And that's not a win either. Yeah. So what you're going through is I'm going to keep running. up against conflict of different kinds. And it's healthy and natural and unavoidable in a lot of ways. But it's going to happen. You've got to navigate it gently to get to a point. And then probably you're like, how do I figure this out? Okay, let me start learning your story. How do I negotiate with you to get what we both want out of this? And that leans a little more heavily on that out of your element emotional side, like taking people's emotions seriously because you can't help it. You can't tell

someone, you're being irrational, stop it. They're going to go, fuck you, I'll talk to somebody else. Right? This is a challenge you're going to get. So that's, I mean, I don't know if that makes sense to you, but that seems to make sense to me. I don't know. You got to feel it. I like it. I like it a lot. It's very helpful because I think that that theme is actually happening a lot of different areas of my life from my relationship with my, you know, partner to, I don't relationship with my parents. So, yeah, it's happening throughout a lot of different relationships in my life. I think this is one of the few dreams I have come across, and there's been others, but

where the answer is explicit. It's like part of the dream. Tell me your life story. Let me understand you, how you got here from wherever. That, how you got here is going to let us, let me know where we can go together. and maybe what other challenges you have to overcome for us to move forward or how I need to adapt my fighting style to accomplish the mission in a way yet. Like I said, it doesn't destroy the person because that's not a win either.

You can't just kill them and walk away with the money. That's a different kind of business. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right? And so, wow, I mean, I'm just blown away by this idea that you suggested the answer to yourself in the dream. and I think it's spot on. Not a lot of dreams have that explicit message. Very,

very much they leave you with open questions. But if you're willing to listen to someone's life story, you're at the beginning of helping them up the stairs from their damaged position. Whoa, I'm going to stop. Mike drop. No, I felt it too. I'm like, wow, I can't believe I just said that. I think, I think that's it.

I mean, I'm rarely this absolutely certain, but, and don't take my word for it. It's got to make sense to you. it's got to be something you can implement. But I hope that's what it means and that that moves you closer to your goals. That's, yeah. I think so. I think so. It's really lovely, actually, because I am just, the only other thing I can describe myself

as a student of life, very, very serious. Yeah. And I'm always wanting to learn, always wanting to open up to what life is sharing with me, what life is showing me, what life is reflecting to me. I think it's represented in this train and you really. And I think to know that, I guess, in alignment with my subconscious in that way where it's being reflected at that level. Yeah.

Of awareness is, it feels right. And it's also feels right and nice. Yeah. I think, well, I don't always aim towards giving people a happy story. I aim towards giving them the truth. But a lot of these things, I think, are, the truth is in a way neutral. decide what you want to do with it. But this is definitely a case where you asked yourself a question, am I doing the right thing? Am I doing this the right way? And your answer was, I can see a

right way to do it. And that aligns with me personally. And it takes you back to, you know, so if you say you're someone who enjoys learning, our earliest representations of learning are often, you know, bound up with the concept of school. This is where I learn things. And so it's not at all out of alignment for people to say, anytime I need to learn something new, it's going to remind me of being in school again, because that's the place where learning happens. And being such an icon,

that's one reason anime does so many stories set in schools. It's like, well, everyone had this experience. We had classrooms and people and teachers and relationships and, you know, speaking to that commonality of that area of life. That's a good point. I never thought about that. That's a really good point. Yep. I mean, my personal opinion, I think that's what they're doing. But, you know, opinions vary on that. I love, I love the analysis of stories. And so I'm not always very good at it, but some key elements, just in passing, just the idea of the harem anime. I think that's greatly misunderstood. I don't think that's a male power fantasy. I think it's a male responsibility fantasy. It is. I agree with you.

It satisfies both. My thing is like, why do all these girls fall in love with you? Well, if it's done right, if it's not just constructed, well, you know, plot arm... The artist deduction. Yeah, well, if it's done right, why do all these girls fall in love with the guy? Because he's a good guy. And that makes me... I don't if you ever watched Bakemono Gattari, that series?

I would recommend... Okay, you want an emotional roller coaster. Watch that one. You got to find the right order to watch it in. You got to watch the movie before you watch the final season. Long story short. Like a movie before final season. Right.

You'll find the chronological, and it's pretty much the way you should watch the series. He, it's a bit, there's a bit of etchy fan service in there, you know, some cute girls, not entirely as dressed as they would be modestly. That said, he's a good guy. And what he does is he finds these, or these damaged women or young girls are drawn to his goodness. and he treats them respectfully and kindly and caringly and helps them solve their emotional damage. And of course, they all fall in love with him.

And he doesn't take... And he doesn't take advantage of any of them except... That's what I do in real life. He does fall in love with one and commits to her. Brilliant, beautiful series. I mean, so... I couldn't even... I could go on and on about it.

No wonder it's tremendously popular. You have to write that out to me. Yeah. So I can find it. But... Bake Monogatari. that's that's how my i mean before i decided to actually have a partner like that's that's pretty much what my life was i had lots of female friends and there were i was just always and yeah i don't

really try to uh cross boundaries i just wasn't like yeah i just didn't want to do that but yeah yeah it's very interesting it's nice we don't have to hold back but it's just like no you really are just a friend i'm not pretending that to get in your pants uh and i and and that also means i don't want anything else from you, but your health and happiness. And I can focus on that without a conflicting interest. That's a tremendous. Yeah, it's a conflict of interest. Tremendous position of strength to be coming from, to do the most good. Yeah. Well, I think we're going to get you out of here just about on time. I think it's three o'clock our mutual Pacific time zone. So if you feel like we got a good enough answer, you don't have more questions. We'll wrap it up. Sounds good. Yeah,

let's wrap it up. All right. Good deal. And well then, then for everyone out there listening, Thanks for watching. This has been our friend Tim Bowie from L.A., California. He is a life mastery coach. You can find him at Tim Dinbuoy.com slash high-performance humans, Instagram.com slash Tim Dinbuoy. All of these spelled out in the description below

because I wouldn't be able to do it without writing it down myself. And for my part, please like, share, subscribe, tell your friends, always need more volunteer dreamers. You can see I'll talk to anybody. We have a great conversation. 16, currently available works of historical dream literature book 16 dreams in their meanings by horace g hutchinson from 1901 great uh conversations by correspondence with his readership um all this and more at benjamin the dream wizard dot com

all 16 works of historical dream literature encyclopedia mp3 downloads of these dream interpretation interviews and uh that's my shilling i'll just say tim it's been good talking to you no it's really been a pleasure right we're is this actually my first podcast i'm really glad we connected Oh, wow. I'm glad I could have set the tone for what I hope comes for you. That is people this will be this engaging and interesting. Then again, I'm probably special. I choose to believe that. You're very special.

He says, don't applaud. Just throw money. Okay. And I'll say everybody out there, thanks for watching.