How To Never Get Angry or Bothered By Anyone | Alan Watts

How To Never Get Angry or Bothered By Anyone | Alan Watts - YouTube

Transcripts:

There's something Jung discovered that terrified him. Certain individuals who cannot, and I mean literally, cannot be emotionally manipulated by anyone. Not because they're psychopaths, but because they've seen through something so fundamental about human nature that once you understand it, you can never go back to being a normal, reactive person again.

 And what terrified Jung most wasn't what these people could do. It was what they could no longer feel. I'm not talking about numbness. I'm not talking about dissociation or emotional death. I'm talking about something far more disturbing. The complete inability to be offended. The absolute impossibility of taking things personally.

 The total absence of emotional triggers that define what we call being human. [music] Have you ever met someone who simply cannot be provoked? I mean truly cannot. You could betray them publicly, humiliate them, attack everything they stand for, and they look at you with this peculiar expression, not of superiority, not of judgment, but of genuine fascination, as if you've just revealed something profound about yourself that has absolutely nothing to do with them.

 Jung called this the most dangerous state of consciousness a person could achieve. Dangerous not to themselves, but to the entire social order that depends on our predictable emotional reactions. Because when someone can't be emotionally manipulated, they can't be controlled. And a person who can't be controlled is a threat to every system built on emotional leverage.

 Let me tell you about Heinrich. A businessman Jung studied for years. This man had been brutally betrayed by his closest partner. Lost half his fortune overnight. His reputation destroyed. His family name dragged through the mud. When Yung asked him about his feelings toward this betrayer, Hinrich said something that haunted Yung for the rest of his life.

 Why would I be angry at my own reflection? You see, Hinrich had discovered what would later shake the foundations of Jung's understanding of human psychology. Every person who triggers us, who makes our blood boil, who gets under our skin, they're not actually affecting us at all. They're showing us something we've hidden from ourselves.

 Something we've buried so deep that we can only see it when someone else displays it. [music] And here's the part that will disturb you. The person who infuriates you most. [music] The one whose very existence seems designed to torment you. They're you. Not metaphorically, not poetically, literally. They're performing the parts of yourself you've rejected, denied, suppressed.

 Think about this for a moment. Really think about it. That person you despise, what exactly about them makes your skin crawl? Their arrogance, their weakness, their fakeness. Now, here's the knife that Hinrich understood. That trait doesn't just live in you. [music] It is you. The part of you that you've exiled so completely that you can only recognize it when it appears outside yourself.

 And once you see this, truly see it, not just intellectually, but in your bones, something breaks. The ability to be angry at others simply stops working. Like trying to be furious at a mirror for showing you your own face. I knew a woman, let's call her Maria, a brilliant teacher who spent three years being psychologically tortured by a colleague.

This colleague would undermine her in meetings, spread rumors about her competence, steal her ideas, and present them as her own. Maria would go home shaking with rage. She'd lie awake plotting revenge, imagining confrontations, feeling her heart race every time she saw this woman's car in the parking lot.

 [music] Then something happened that changed everything. Maria was venting to her therapist, describing in detail all the ways this colleague was a manipulative, insecure fraud who built herself up by tearing others down. And in the middle of her rant, she stopped. Her face went white because she heard it.

 She heard herself describing herself. Not the surface self she presented to the world, but the shadow self she'd buried. Every accusation she hurled at this colleague was a confession about her own hidden nature. The colleague who stole ideas. Maria realized she'd built her entire teaching philosophy on concepts she'd taken from others without attribution.

 The colleague who was insecure. Maria was terrified every day that someone would discover she was a fraud. The colleague who undermined others. Maria had subtle ways of diminishing anyone who threatened her position. And here's what nobody tells you about this recognition. It doesn't feel like enlightenment.

 It feels like dying. Because in that moment, Maria understood that she hadn't been fighting her colleague for 3 years. She'd been fighting herself. And every attack, every sleepless night, every stress symptom, she'd been doing it to herself. The colleague was just a projection screen for her own self-hatred.

 But then, and this is thecrucial part, something else emerged from this death. Once Maria saw the projection, once she recognized the mirror, she discovered something that most people never achieve. The gap. Let me explain what I mean by the gap. Because this is where Jung's terror really began. Most of us live our entire lives in what Jung called reaction slavery.

 Someone says something, we react. Someone does something, we respond. It's instant, automatic, as mechanical as a knee-jerking when tapped. We think we're choosing our responses, but we're not. We're running programs installed in us before we could even speak. But when you see through the projection, when you recognize that your triggers are just your own shadows being performed by others, something [music] extraordinary happen. Time slows down.

 A space opens up between what happens to you and what you do about it. And in that space, that fraction of a second that feels like eternity, you find something most people never experience. Freedom. [music] Real freedom. Not the freedom to control your anger, but the freedom to not generate it in the first place. Hinrich described it like this.

When someone would try to provoke him, he could see their words floating toward him in slow motion. He could watch them arrive, observe them hanging in the air, examine them like a scientist studying specimens. And in that examination, he could see exactly what the attacker was revealing about themselves.

 Their pain, their fear, their desperation. The attack would arrive, but it wouldn't land [music] because there was nowhere for it to land. The part of Hinrich that could be offended had died when he saw through the illusion of separation between himself and others. This is what most people don't understand about emotional immunity.

 It's not about being strong enough to handle your emotions. It's about reaching a state where certain emotions simply can't form. Like trying to make waves in solid ice, the mechanism that creates the disturbance no longer functions. But here's where it gets dark. Really dark. When you achieve this immunity, [music] when you can no longer be triggered, you start to see something that will haunt you forever.

You see that everyone around you is fighting ghosts. Everyone is shadow boxing with their own projections. Everyone is exhausting themselves in battles against enemies that exist only in their own minds. You watch your friends destroy their marriages, fighting traits in their partners that actually live in themselves.

 You watch your family members make themselves sick with anger at situations they themselves created. You watch entire groups of people torture each other. Each person attacking in others what they most fear in themselves. And you can't unsee it. >> [music] >> You can't go back to the comfortable unconsciousness where you believed the drama was real, where you could participate in the mutual emotional violence and feel justified.

 Hinrich told Jung that this was the worst part. I live among sleep walkers, he said. They're all dreaming they're in a war, dreaming they have enemies, dreaming they're victims, and I'm awake watching them fight air, watching them exhaust themselves against illusions, watching them create the very suffering they claim to hate.

 The loneliness of this position is unbearable because when you can no longer be triggered, when you can see that all attacks are just projections. When you understand that everyone's emotional reactions are just shadow material being activated, you lose something precious. You lose the ability to blame. And losing blame is like losing gravity.

 Suddenly, you're floating in a space where you're completely responsible for your own experience. No one can make you feel anything. No one can hurt you emotionally. No one can disturb your peace. Which means if you're disturbed, if you're hurt, if you're not at peace, it's your creation. This is why Jung was terrified.

 Not because these people were dangerous to others, but because they represented the end of psychology as he understood it. If people could reach a state where they literally couldn't be triggered, where emotional manipulation was impossible, where projection was seen through completely, then everything we understand about human behavior collapses.

 I want to tell you about David because his story shows just how deep this rabbit hole goes. David worked in the most toxic environment you can imagine. His boss was a sadist who enjoyed humiliating employees publicly. His colleagues were backstabbers who would sabotage each other for the smallest advantage. [music] The culture was pure psychological warfare, gaslighting, manipulation, emotional terrorism as standard practice.

 For years, David was dying, panic attacks, insomnia, his hair falling out from stress. He was on three different medications just to get through the day. His therapist told him to quit, but he couldn't afford to. [music] He was trapped in hell. Then one morning,something snapped. Or perhaps something finally clicked.

 David walked into the office and saw it all differently. Not metaphorically, literally saw it differently. Like someone had switched the channel from a horror movie to a nature documentary. His sadistic boss wasn't a monster. He was a traumatized child in a suit, reenacting his own childhood abuse on others. The backstabbing colleagues weren't evil.

They were terrified animals fighting for survival in a system that told them there wasn't enough to go around. The toxic culture wasn't a battlefield. It was a mental hospital where the patients were running the asylum. But here's the disturbing part. David didn't feel compassion. He didn't feel sympathy.

 He felt nothing. Complete emotional neutrality. Like watching ants in an ant farm. [music] Interesting, but not personally affecting. His boss would scream at him and David would observe the vein throbbing in his forehead, notice the tremor in his hands, catalog the specific words that revealed his deepest insecurities.

 His colleagues would try to sabotage him, and David would watch them like a scientist watching mice in a maze, noting their patterns, their triggers, their entirely predictable responses. Within 6 months, David was running the department. Not because he fought back or played the game better, but because he had stepped out of the game entirely.

 While everyone else exhausted themselves in emotional combat, David just did excellent work. While others formed alliances and betrayals, David simply produced results. His former boss ended up reporting to him. And in their first meeting, this former tormentor broke down crying, begging David to tell him his secret.

 How did you survive me? He asked. How did you not let me destroy you? David's answer reveals the final piece of this [music] puzzle. You weren't trying to destroy me. You were trying to destroy something in yourself that you saw in me. Once I understood that, there was nothing to survive. You were fighting your own reflection. I just happened to be the mirror.

 But here's what David didn't tell his former boss. Here's what he couldn't tell anyone who hadn't crossed this threshold. Once you see through the illusion, once you understand that all emotional violence is self violence projected outward, you become something that isn't quite human anymore, at least not human as we normally define it.

 You become what Jung privately called the awakened dead, alive, functioning, maybe even thriving, but dead to the emotional drama that defines human society. unable to participate in the mutual triggering that passes for relationships, incapable of the emotional fusion that most people call love.

 This is the price, and it's a price most people aren't willing to pay. Maria described it perfectly. After her immunity developed, her relationship started dying. Not because she was cold or cruel, but because she could no longer play the game. Friends would come to her with their dramas, expecting her to take sides, to validate their victimhood, to participate in their emotional reactions. But Maria couldn't.

[music] She would see through their stories to the projections underneath. She would recognize their complaints as confessions. She would understand their enemies as their own shadows. She'd try to help them see it, too, but they didn't want to see. They wanted to stay in the dream where they were victims, where their suffering was someone else's fault, where their emotional reactions were justified by external circumstances. One by one, they left.

They called her cold, unfeilling, inhuman. They said she'd changed, that she wasn't the same person anymore. And they were right. The Maria who could be triggered, who could take things personally, who could believe in the reality of emotional attacks that Maria was dead. What remained was something else.

 [snorts] Something that could witness human suffering without being pulled into it. Something that could see clearly without needing to fix or save or change anything. Something that could love without attachment, care without codependence, be present without fusion. But here's the paradox that Jung struggled with until his death.

 These awakened dead, these emotionally immune individuals, they weren't actually cold or disconnected. They had accessed something beyond normal human emotion. Something Jung called conscious compassion. Think about what this means. Most of us are either emotionally fused. We feel others emotions as our own. [music] We get triggered by their triggers.

 We suffer when they suffer or we're emotionally cut off. We build walls. We disconnect. [music] We protect ourselves through distance. But there's a third option that emerges from true immunity. The ability to remain completely open, completely present, completely [music] feeling without being destabilized, without being pulled into the other person's emotional weather, without losing your center.

 Heinrichdemonstrated this when his betrayer came to him years later, dying and alone. This man had stolen Hinrich's money, [music] destroyed his reputation, turned his friends against him. He came expecting anger or maybe forgiveness. What he got was neither. Hinrich sat with him for hours. Listened to his story. Held space for his regret and fear.

 Not from a place of superiority or spiritual bypassing, but from a place of recognition. This man's betrayal had been Heinrich's liberation. It had forced him to see his own shadows around money, reputation, [music] and approval. It had been the catalyst for his awakening. The dying man asked Hinrich, "How can you not hate me?" Hinrich's response cuts to the core of this immunity.

 How can I hate my teacher? You showed me where I was still asleep. Your betrayal revealed my attachments. Your attack showed me what I was still defending. Without you, I would have remained unconscious. You freed me from myself. This isn't forgiveness in any conventional sense. It's something more radical. It's the recognition that there was never anything to forgive because there was never really an attack.

 There was only unconsciousness meeting unconsciousness until one party woke up and stepped out of the dance. But I need to be brutally honest with you about something. This immunity isn't achieved through positive thinking or meditation or any technique you can learn from a book. It's achieved through dying while alive.

 through watching everything you thought you were dissolve. Through seeing every story you've told yourself about who you are and why you suffer revealed as fiction. Maria said there were nights when she couldn't breathe from the vertigo of seeing how much of her life had been reaction to illusion. How many years she'd wasted fighting projections.

 How much energy she'd spent defending against attacks that were really just her own self-hatred reflected back at her. The process isn't just psychologically difficult. It's existentially devastating because you're not just changing your responses. You're discovering that the entire framework within which you've understood yourself and others is false.

 The you that can be triggered isn't the real you. It's a collection of programs and patterns and projections. And when that false self dies, what remains is something that has no reference points in normal human experience. This is what Jung meant when he said these people terrified him. They proved that human consciousness could evolve beyond the emotional patterns that psychology assumes are fixed.

 They demonstrated that triggering was optional, that taking things personally was a choice, that emotional suffering was self-created and self-maintained. But here's the final twist that even Jung didn't fully grasp until near the end of his life. These immune individuals, these awakened dead, they become something else.

 They become what ancient traditions called the wounded healers or what we might call the conscious warriors. They can walk into any situation, no matter how toxic, and remain unaffected. Not because they're protected by walls, but because they have no surfaces for toxicity to stick to. They can witness the deepest human dysfunction without judgment, because they recognize it all as variations of their own shadow material.

 They can hold space for others emotional storms without being swept away because they found their own unshakable center. And paradoxically, this makes them incredibly dangerous to unconscious systems. When David became immune, his entire company started to transform. Not because he tried to change it, but because his presence revealed the insanity of the dysfunction.

 His non-reaction to attacks made the attackers look ridiculous. His calm in chaos made the chaos unnecessary. His refusal to participate in drama made the drama impossible to maintain. Within 2 years, the most toxic workplace in the industry became known for its exceptional culture. Not through any program or initiative, but through the presence of one person who couldn't be triggered.

 One person who saw through the projections. one person who had died to the false self and couldn't participate in the collective unconsciousness. The other employees didn't know what had changed. They just knew that the old games didn't work anymore. The emotional manipulation fell flat. The drama couldn't sustain itself.

 Slowly, without understanding why, they began to wake up, too. This is the ultimate irony of emotional immunity. The people who can't be bothered by anyone become the ones who transform everyone. Not through effort or intention, but through their mere presence. They become mirrors in which others see their own reactivity. Their non-triggering highlights others constant triggering.

 Their peace reveals others war. Some people will hate them for this. Will call them cold, inhuman, dangerous because their immunity threatens the very foundations of how most people understand relationships,society, and themselves. But others, the ones who are ready, the ones who are exhausted from fighting their own projections, will be drawn to them like moths to flame.

 They'll sense something different, something that promises freedom from the endless emotional warfare that most people call life. So, here we are at the heart of it. The possibility that you could become someone who literally cannot be emotionally manipulated. Not through force or control or spiritual bypassing, but through such a complete understanding of projection and shadow that triggering becomes impossible.

 The question isn't whether this state is achievable. Hinrich proved it is. Maria proved it is. David proved it is. The question is whether you're willing to die for it. To let the reactive you, the triggered you, the you that believes in enemies and attacks and emotional causation, to let that you die completely.

 Because make no mistake, this is a death. Everything you think you are, every story you tell about yourself, every belief about why you suffer and who's to blame, it all has to go. And from that death, something else emerges. Something that Jung could barely find words for. Something that operates under different laws of psychology altogether.

 The invitation is terrifying. The path is devastating. The price is everything you think you are. But on the other side is something extraordinary. the ability to walk through the world untouchable. Not because you're defended, but because there's nothing left to defend. Not because you're strong, but because the you that could be weak, has dissolved.

 A freedom so complete that you finally understand what the mystics meant when they said, "You are in the world, but not of it." The choice, as always, is yours. But now you know what's possible, and you can never unknow it. That's the real danger. What if this moment right now as you're listening to my voice isn't what you think it is? What if the solid, dependable reality you're so certain of is actually far more mysterious, far more fluid than you've been led to believe? I want to invite you on a journey not to some distant place, but

right into the heart of your own experience. Because the question isn't whether you might be dreaming someday or sometime. The real question, the question that might just change everything about how you see your life is whether you might be dreaming right now. You see, we've all been taught this marvelous fiction that there exists a clear, unmistakable boundary between dreaming and waking, that one state is real and the other merely illusion.

 But I want to suggest something rather revolutionary, that this boundary is not nearly as solid as we pretend it is. Consider how while dreaming, you rarely question the reality of your experience. The dream tiger chasing you feels absolutely real. The dream lover's touch feels absolutely real. It's only upon waking that we say, "Ah, that was just a dream.

" But what's fascinating is that during the dream itself, you were utterly convinced of its reality. Now, isn't it curious that we're equally convinced of the reality of this present moment? What makes you so certain you aren't dreaming now? Well, you might say, "Everything follows logical rules here. Things are consistent. I can touch this surface and feel it.

" But couldn't a sufficiently vivid dream provide all those sensations, too? The ancient Chinese philosopher Trang Tu once dreamt he was a butterfly fluttering about happy and content. When he awoke, he wondered, "Am I a man who dreamt he was a butterfly? Or am I a butterfly now dreaming I am a man?" This isn't mere word play.

 You see, it points to something extraordinary about consciousness itself. What we call reality and what we call dream might be far more similar than different both our experiences arising in consciousness. Both feel absolutely real when we're in them. The only difference is that one state seems to last longer and have more consistent rules.

But is duration and consistency really the definition of what's real? I rather think not. Now, how do you know really know that you're awake right now? What's your evidence? Perhaps you're thinking, "Well, I can read these words clearly, and reading is difficult in dreams." Or maybe, "I remember how I got here, and my memories are coherent.

" But aren't these just tests we've invented to reassure ourselves? You see, we create these little reality tests, these checks and balances to convince ourselves we're firmly planted in the real world. We pinch ourselves. We look for inconsistencies. We trust in the solidity of objects. But here's the fascinating thing.

 What if the dream itself provides all the confirmation you seek? In a particularly vivid dream, you can indeed read words. You can remember a perfectly logical sequence of events that led you to the present moment in the dream. You can touch objects that feel absolutely solid. The dream, you see, can manufacture all the evidence yourequire to believe in its reality.

What's more, the dream can even incorporate your doubts. You might ask yourself within a dream, "Is this a dream?" and then perform some test that convinces you that no, you're definitely awake. How marvelously recursive the dream creates both the doubt and the resolution of that doubt. So I put it to you.

 What if this present moment, this seemingly solid reality is equally capable of manufacturing all the evidence you need to believe in its absolute reality? What if the very confidence you feel about being awake is itself part of the dream? This isn't meant to frighten you or to suggest some kind of cosmic conspiracy. Rather, it's an invitation to hold more lightly this thing we call reality.

 To see it not as a fixed, immutable truth, but as a kind of magnificent play, a dance of consciousness that we're participating in. And perhaps in that lightness, in that willingness to question, lies a kind of freedom we hadn't imagined possible. Let's go deeper now. Who exactly is the dreamer? When you dream, you might say, "Well, I am, of course.

" But which eye is that? Is it the same eye that's listening to me right now? When you dream, you create entire worlds populated with characters that can surprise you, landscapes you've never seen, conversations you didn't consciously compose. All of this emerges from what we might call your deeper mind, a creative intelligence that seems to operate below the threshold of your everyday awareness.

And yet, and this is the extraordinary thing. You experience these dreams as if they're happening to you rather than being created by you. The dreamer and the dreamed appear to be separate when in fact they're one and the same. Now, what if the same principle applies to your waking life? What if the you that experiences this moment is also at a deeper level the creator of this moment? What if consciousness itself is playing this divine game of hideand seek, creating worlds and then experiencing them as if they exist independently?

The Hindu tradition calls this Maya, the great cosmic illusion, where the ultimate reality, which they call Brahman, pretends to be all the separate things and beings of the world. It's rather like an actor who becomes so absorbed in a role that he temporarily forgets his acting. Consider this possibility that the deepest nature of your consciousness, what you really are beneath all the layers of identity and personalities, not merely a witness to reality, but the very source from which reality springs.

And perhaps this waking life is not fundamentally different from the dream state, but simply another level of dreaming, collective dream we're all participating in together. If this seems strange or impossible, ask yourself, is it any more miraculous than the fact that each night you create entire worlds in your sleep? Worlds with their own physics, their own dramas, their own cast of characters.

The capacity for world creation is clearly within you. Perhaps it extends further than you realize. What if? And this is a delightful what if. What if the entire cosmos, this whole magnificent show, is fundamentally playful in nature? Not serious, not purposeful in the grim, determined way we often imagine, but playful like a dance, like music, like laughter.

You see, in the West, we've inherited this rather solemn view of existence. God is terribly serious. Life is terribly serious. Reality is a grave matter indeed. But in the east, particularly in Hindu cosmology, there's this marvelous concept called Laya, the play of God, the divine game. The idea is that consciousness at its most fundamental level engages in creation not from necessity, not from loneliness, not from any lack, but from an overflow of delight, from the sheer joy of play.

Just as children play without needing a reason beyond the play itself. And what is the nature of play? Well, play always involves a kind of willing selfdeception, doesn't it? When children play house or pirates or spacemen, they know at some level they're pretending and yet they also truly inhabit those roles, those imaginary scenarios.

They are simultaneously aware and unaware that it's just a game. Now, what if consciousness is playing a similar game with itself, through us, through all beings? What if it divides itself into seemingly separate entities into you and me, into humans and animals and plants and planets all for the sake of experience, for the adventure of it? And just as a dreamer can become completely absorbed in a dream, forgetting their dreaming, perhaps consciousness becomes so thoroughly absorbed in this cosmic play that it forgets its true nature. It

forgets that it is both the stage and the actors, both the dreamer and the dream. But here's the wonderful secret. The forgetting is never complete. There are always these little gaps, these moments of awakening where we sense something more, something beyond the apparent solidity of our everyday experience.

We catch glimpses of the play behind the play. These moments might come in meditation or in nature or in love or even in profound confusion, any experience that momentarily suspends our usual way of seeing things. And in these gaps, we might just remember what we truly are, not merely characters in the dream, but the dreaming consciousness itself. Not merely waves on the ocean, but the ocean in wave form.

Let's look at how some of the great wisdom traditions of the east have understood this dreamlike nature of reality. Because long before western philosophers began questioning the solidity of the world, Eastern sages had already mapped this territory with remarkable precision. In Buddhism, particularly in the yogakara or mindonly school, there's a teaching that all phenomena are projections of mind.

Not your personal individual mind, you understand, but mind with a capital me consciousness as the fundamental ground of being. The world we experience isn't out there independent of consciousness. It arises within consciousness itself. The Buddha often compared our ordinary perception to a dream, an illusion, a mirage, or a reflection of the moon in water.

Not to suggest that nothing exists, but to point out that things don't exist in the solid, separate, independent way we habitually imagine. In the Dowist tradition, there's the wonderful story I mentioned earlier about Chuang Su and the butterfly. But there's more to this tradition than just clever paradoxes.

The Dowists recognize that our categorical divisions of reality insistence on separating dreaming from waking, self from other, human from naturer, convenient fictions rather than ultimate truths. The Advita vdanta tradition of Hinduism goes perhaps furthest of all suggesting that the multiplicity of the world is ultimately maya cosmic illusion and that the only true reality is consciousness itself what they call Brahman not that the world doesn't exist but that its apparent separation from consciousness is the illusion.

What fascinates me about these eastern perspectives is that they weren't arrived at through abstract theorizing. They came from direct investigation of experience through meditation and contemplative inquiry. These weren't merely philosophical positions. They were maps drawn by explorers who had ventured deep into the territory of consciousness itself.

And what they discovered there what countless practitioners continue to discover is that when consciousness is turned back upon itself when awareness becomes aware of awareness the solid world begins to reveal its dreamlike nature not as some intellectual conclusion but as lived reality. Now there's something rather fascinating about the human mind.

 It absolutely craves certainty. We want solid ground beneath our feet. We want to know beyond any shadow of doubt what's real and what isn't. And this craving runs so deep that we'll often settle for a comforting illusion rather than face the vertigo of uncertainty. You see, most of us construct these marvelous systems of belief about the world, about ourselves, about what life is, and what it means.

And we cling to these systems as if our very existence depended on them. We say this is real, that is not. This is true, that is false. This is me, that is not me. And we feel safer for having made these distinctions. But what if this desperate search for certainty is actually obscuring a deeper truth? What if our insistence that we are definitely awake and not dreaming is itself the veil that prevents us from seeing the dreamlike nature of experience? I'm reminded of a Zen saying, "Great doubt, great awakening. Little doubt,

little awakening. No doubt, no awakening." There's profound wisdom here because it suggests that the path to seeing more clearly doesn't lie in eliminating doubt, but in diving straight into it. When we hold our certainties lightly, when we're willing to admit that perhaps, just perhaps, things aren't exactly as they seem, we create space for a different kind of knowing to emerge.

Not the rigid knowing of concepts and beliefs, but the fluid, direct knowing of immediate experience. And here's the paradox. It's only when we surrender our insistence on solidity that we discover something far more reliable beneath all our mental constructions. Call it awareness. Call it presence. Call it the witnessing consciousness.

It's that in you which knows experience but isn't limited by experience. It's that which remains constant through all the changing states of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. So I invite you to experiment with loosening your grip on certainty, to entertain, if only as a thought experiment, the possibility that this present moment might have more in common with dreaming than you've realized.

Not to reach a new conclusion, you understand, but to create space for a more direct recognition of what you already are. As the Zen masters would say, not knowing is most intimate. There's a kind of freedom in that, notknowing that all our certainties can never provide. Let's talk about time that most peculiar of human concepts.

We tend to think of time as this absolute reality, this unchangeable dimension that flows like a river from past to future with us carried along in its current. But I want to suggest something rather revolutionary about time that it might be the most convincing aspect of the dream we call waking life.

 You see, in your night dreams, time behaves very strangely indeed. A dream that seems to last hours or even days can occur in just minutes of what we call real time. Events in dreams don't necessarily follow a linear sequence. You might meet your elderly grandmother, then find she's suddenly a young woman without this seeming at all odd within the logic of the dream.

 Now, we dismiss these temporal peculiarities as simply the way dreams work. Of course, time is jumbled in dreams. we say. But in waking life, time is orderly and reliable. But is it really? Haven't you noticed how time seems to expand or contract depending on your state of mind? How an hour of boredom can feel like an eternity while an hour of delight passes in what seems like minutes? How your perception of time radically changes as you age with years seeming to accelerate their passage.

What if time as we experience it is not an objective fact of reality but a construct of consciousness away that mind organizes experience to make it comprehensible. What if as Einstein suggested the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion? There's a wonderful concept in Zen called the eternal now that points to something quite extraordinary that this present moment is all that ever exists.

The past exists only as memory in the present. The future exists only as imagination in the present. And both memory and imagination are activities happening now. If we really examine our experience closely, we find that we never actually experience any moment except this one. We've never left the now and we never will.

The sense of a continuous timeline is a mental construction, a story we tell ourselves to create the sense of a consistent identity moving through time. And if time itself is part of the dream, then perhaps awakening means recognizing the timeless nature of consciousness, that which witnesses the apparent flow of time but isn't itself subject to time.

 Perhaps it means discovering that beneath all the temporal drama of our lives lies an eternal presence, an unchanging awareness in which the dream of time unfolds. Let's use a metaphor. I'm rather fond of that of the theater. Imagine consciousness as a vast empty stage. Upon this stage appears the entire drama of your life.

 All the characters, all the settings, all the events. The stage itself doesn't change, doesn't move, doesn't get involved in the drama. It simply provides the space in which the play unfolds. Now, here's the curious thing. In your ordinary everyday experience, you're completely absorbed in the play. You identify exclusively with your character, with your body, your thoughts, your feelings, your story.

You've forgotten that you're also the stage. You've forgotten that you're the space in which the entire drama appears. This forgetting is what creates the sense of being a separate self, of being a fragment rather than the whole. It's what creates the sense of being in the world rather than being the awareness in which the world appears.

And this fundamental misidentification is at the root of so much of our suffering. You see, when you believe you're just the character, you're at the mercy of the plot. You're buffeted by the ups and downs of fortune. You're perpetually seeking happiness in the next scene, the next act, as if it's somewhere else, somewhere in the future.

But what if you remembered that you're not just the character, but also the stage? What if you recognize that you're both the drama and the empty space in which the drama unfolds? This recognition doesn't mean the play stops. It continues exactly as before, but your relationship to it transforms completely. Instead of being caught up in every twist and turn of the plot, you have a kind of spaciousness around experience.

You can enjoy the play without being entirely defined by it. You can allow each scene to unfold without desperate grasping or frantic resistance. And this is precisely the shift that occurs when we begin to recognize the dreamlike nature of what we call waking life. We don't stop participating in the world.

 We continue working, relating, creating, exploring. But we do so with a newfound freedom, a lightness of being that comes from knowing that we are not merely characters in the dream, but also the dreaming consciousness itself. This is what the great mystics and spiritual teachers have been pointing to throughout the ages. Not some alternative reality to escape into, but a more fundamental way of relating to this reality right here, right now.

 Nota rejection of experience, but a more inclusive embrace of all that arises. Now we come to a rather beautiful paradox that what we most deeply long for might come not through finding certainty but through embracing uncertainty. Not through solidifying our sense of reality but through recognizing its essential fluidity. You see most spiritual seekers are looking for answers for clarity for some final resolution that will put an end to all questions.

They want to know for certain what reality is, what they are, what life means. And there's nothing wrong with this impulse. It's entirely natural. But what if the freedom we seek isn't found in answers, but in questioning itself? What if liberation comes not from knowing with certainty, but from relaxing into the vast mystery of existence? When we look closely at our experience, we find that all of our suffering comes from resistance.

 From fighting against what is, from demanding that reality conform to our ideas about how things should be. And underlying all this resistance is a fundamental insistence on solidity, on fixity, on things being definitely this way and not that way. But if we can recognize the dreamlike nature of experience, if we can see that reality is more like a flowing river than a solid rock, then something remarkable happens.

We naturally relax our grip. We stop insisting that things be other than they are. We develop what the Buddhists call non-attachment. Not a cold attachment, but a warm, open embrace of life in all its transients and mystery. I'm reminded of a Zen story. A man hanging from a cliff by a vine is confronted with a tiger above and a tiger below.

As he hangs there, he notices a strawberry growing on the cliff face. He picks it and eats it. How delicious. This story points to something profound that when we stop insisting on security, when we stop demanding guarantees, we discover a capacity to fully meet this moment just as it is. We find we can savor the strawberry even in the midst of danger and uncertainty.

And perhaps this is the greatest liberation of all not an escape from the dream, but a full wholehearted participation in it with all its joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains. Not a transcendence of life, but an intimate embrace of life in all its dreamlike flux and flow. What would it mean really to awaken within the dream? Not to escape the dream, you understand, but to recognize its nature while still fully participating in it.

 You see, there's a common misconception about spiritual awakening. that it means somehow leaving behind the ordinary world, transcending physical existence for some purely spiritual realm. But I want to suggest something far more radical and I think far more beautiful. Awakening isn't about going somewhere else. It's about discovering the extraordinary within the ordinary.

It's about recognizing that this very world, this very life with all its mundane details, its dirty dishes and traffic jams, its heartaches and its ecstasies itself, the dream of consciousness. When the great Zen master Dogen was asked, "What is awakening?" he replied, "Awakening is intimacy with all things.

Not separation, not detachment, but intimacy, direct immediate relationship with life that isn't filtered through our concepts, our judgments, our endless commentary. And this intimacy becomes possible precisely when we recognize the dreamlike nature of experience. Because when we're no longer desperately trying to control the dream, to make it conform to our preferences, we can finally allow ourselves to be touched by it, to be moved by it, to be fully present with whatever arises.

The awakened person and the unawwakened person might perform exactly the same actions. They might work at the same job, live in the same house, have the same relationships. The difference isn't in what they do, but in how they relate to experience. One is caught in the grip of the dream, identified exclusively with their character in the play.

 The other recognizes the dream as a dream and in that recognition finds a profound freedom. This freedom doesn't mean that everything becomes perfect or that suffering disappears entirely. The dream continues with all its contrasts and conflicts. But our relationship to suffering transforms. Instead of being something that happens to me, suffering becomes something that happens within me, within the vast spacious awareness that I am.

 And in this shift of perspective lies the possibility of genuine peace or not, the peace of escaping conflict, but the peace of embracing all of life with an open heart and an open mind. the peace that comes from knowing yourself as both the wave and the ocean, both the character and the stage, both the dreamer and the dream.

So I leave you with this invitation not to reach some conclusion about whether you're dreaming or awake but to hold the question itself with curiosity and wonder to look at your experience with fresh eyes without the usual labels and categories.To notice the spacious awareness in which all experience arises and to consider the possibility that this awareness this knowing presence might be what you most fundamentally are.

You know there's a lovely story from the hassidic tradition about a rabbi who told his students in the world to come I shall not be asked why were you not Moses I shall be asked why were you not Zuzia and I think there's a parallel question for each of us in the grand scheme of things perhaps the question isn't whether you're dreaming or awake in some absolute sense perhaps the real question is are you fully being yourself fully expressing your unique nature within this marvelous cosmic dream.

Because whether this is a dream or not, it's your dream, your unique perspective, your singular experience of the universe becoming conscious of itself. And no one else can dream your particular dream. No one else can be the exact expression of consciousness that you are. So rather than trying to wake up from the dream, perhaps the invitation is to wake up within the dream to bring the light of awareness to every moment, every encounter, every experience.

To live with the recognition that beneath all the apparent separation and solidity lies an unbroken wholeness, a seamless fabric of consciousness that includes everything and excludes nothing. And in that recognition, perhaps we find what we've been seeking all along. Not an escape from life, but a more complete participation in it.

 Not an answer to all our questions, but a comfort with the essential mystery of existence. Not a final arrival at some distant destination, but a coming home to the wonder of this moment, just as it is. After all, if this is a dream, it's an astonishingly beautiful one. And we might as well enjoy it while it lasts.

There exists a peculiar paradox in the realm of spiritual awakening that few dare to acknowledge. The more conscious one becomes, the more elusive true love appears to be. It's as if the universe plays a cosmic prank on [music] those who glimpse beyond the veil, granting them profound insight into reality while simultaneously making their heart's deepest desire seem ever more unattainable.

 [music] I've observed this phenomenon repeatedly among those who walk the path of awakening. They develop extraordinary clarity in so many aspects of existence, yet remain utterly bewildered when it comes to finding that profound connection they so deeply yearn for. What makes this situation so fascinating and so ripe with potential for genuine understanding is that the very search itself creates the apparent absence.

It's rather like turning on all the lights in your house to look for darkness. The very means defeats the end. Today, I'd like to explore with you this delicious irony, this cosmic joke that has so many awakened souls feeling perpetually incomplete despite their profound realizations. And perhaps we might discover together that what we've been seeking has never been missing at all.

 That love, like consciousness itself, isn't something to find, but something to recognize as the very ground of our being. You know, it's the most fascinating thing about human beings. We have this extraordinary knack for searching high and low for our eyeglasses while they're sitting right on top of our heads.

 And we do precisely the same thing with love. The awakened soul has seen through many illusions. They've recognized that the separate self is something of a useful fiction. They've glimpsed the underlying unity of all things. And yet, isn't this curious? They still approach love as if it were something out there to be captured, achieved, or won.

 Now, I want you to consider something rather revolutionary. What if love isn't something you can find because it isn't something that can be lost in the first place? What if love is what you are rather than something you have or get? You see, in Zen there's this marvelous saying like a man riding an ox in search of an ox.

 The very act of seeking creates the illusion that what you're looking for is somewhere else. But how could it be elsewhere when it's the very fabric of your being? The awakened soul paradoxically can be blind to this. Having seen through so many veils, they create a new one, the veil of spiritual seeking.

 They imagine that the love they desire must be special, transcendent, perfect. And in doing so, they overlook the ordinary miracle of love that permeates every moment, every breath, every heartbeat. It's rather like a fish swimming frantically through the ocean, crying out, "Where is the water? I'm so terribly thirsty.

 The joke is, of course, that the fish is swimming in exactly what it's looking for. And so it is with us. We are swimming in an ocean of love. And yet we convince ourselves that love is scarce, that it must be found, captured, and held on to lest it escape. But how can you capture what isn't separate from you to begin with? So the first hurdle for the awakened soul is to recognize thatseeking love is precisely what makes it seem absent.

 The moment you stop looking for it as something outside yourself, you may suddenly realize with a burst of laughter perhaps that what you sought was never missing. It was merely playing hideand seek with itself through you. Have you ever noticed how we create these extraordinary images of the perfect lover in our minds? We craft them with such exquisite detail, how they should look, speak, think, and feel.

 We imagine how they'll understand us completely, fulfill our every need, and compliment us in all the right ways. It's a beautiful fantasy, isn't it? But that's precisely what it is, a fantasy. The awakened soul often falls into an even more elaborate version [music] of this trap. Having glimpsed the divine nature of reality, they now expect their partner to be nothing less than a perfect embodiment of this divinity.

They seek someone who is both human and transcendent, earthly and cosmic, individual and universal. In short, they've created an impossible standard that no actual living, breathing human being could possibly satisfy. You see, this is the peculiar thing about awakening. It can sometimes make us less tolerant of the messy, contradictory, and imperfect nature of human existence.

We become so enamored with the perfect clarity we've glimpsed [music] that we expect it to manifest in every aspect of our lives, including our relationships. But consider this. What if the perfect lover doesn't exist because perfection itself is a concept that misses the point entirely? What if the beauty of love lies precisely in its capacity to embrace imperfection? When we seek the perfect other, we're really seeking a mirror that will reflect back to us our idea of perfection. But mirrors can't love you

back, can they? They can only show you yourself. Real love, the kind that transforms and awakens, emerges in the space where two imperfect beings meet and recognize each other, not as idealized projections, but as they truly are. It's in the willingness to see and be seen, flaws and all. The mirage of the perfect other keeps the awakened soul forever chasing horizons.

But horizons, as we know, are not places you can ever reach. They move as you move. And so the awakened soul finds themselves in the curious position of constantly approaching but never arriving, always seeking but never finding. So perhaps the first step toward finding the love that has never been missing is to let go of this mirage.

 to allow others to be as they are gloriously imperfect, wonderfully inconsistent, and [music] beautifully human just like yourself. Now, let's consider something really quite marvelous about this universe of ours. What if, and this is rather startling when you think about it, what if the entire cosmos is playing an elaborate game of hideand seek with itself? You see, in the Hindu tradition, there's this wonderful concept called Leela, the divine play.

 The idea that God or the absolute or whatever you want to call it gets rather bored with being absolutely everything and knowing absolutely everything. So what does it do? It pretends to be you and me. It fragments itself into countless beings who forget their true nature simply for the joy of remembering again.

 And isn't that precisely what's happening in our search for love? We are the universe that has forgotten itself, searching for itself in the form of another. Each of us is a wave looking for the ocean in other waves, not realizing that we are all manifestations of the same sea. The awakened soul has caught a glimpse of this truth.

 They've had a moment, perhaps several moments, where the veil dropped and they recognized, "Aha, I am that." But then, curiously, they continue the game. They go on seeking now with a spiritual twist. They want a partner who has also seen behind the veil. Someone who understands the cosmic joke. But in doing so, they are still playing the same game of hideand seek.

They are still looking for themselves in another. I find it absolutely fascinating that we can know intellectually that we are all expressions of the same underlying reality and yet emotionally we can feel so desperately alone. So separate, so isolated. And this is the predicament of the awakened soul in love.

 Having glimpsed unity, they still experience separation. Having tasted the oceanic feeling of oneness, they still feel the boundaries of their individual wave. And so they search for someone who will bridge this gap, [music] not realizing that the gap itself is an illusion created by the very act of searching.

 You see, this game of hideand seek only works if the hiding is convincing. The universe has to really commit to the illusion of separateness for the game to be any fun. And it's done a marvelous job, hasn't it? So convincing that even those who have glimpsed behind the curtain keep forgetting and remembering, hiding and seeking, losing and finding themselves in the eyes of another. And perhapsthat's exactly as it should be.

 Perhaps the joy isn't in ending the game once and for all, but in playing it with full awareness that it is a game. Perhaps love isn't about finding the other who completes you, but about dancing with another expression of yourself, knowing full well that you are both already complete. Have you ever considered how peculiar our language about love is? We speak of having a relationship, getting a partner, winning someone's heart, keeping their interest.

 It's the language of possession, isn't it? as if people were objects to be acquired, maintained, and perhaps eventually discarded. And here's where the awakened soul encounters another fascinating paradox. Having recognized the illusory nature of ownership in the material realm, having seen that you can't truly possess anything in this flowing river of a universe, they still approach love with the mindset of acquisition.

 But what if love isn't something you have at all, is less than hash zero, five hash is greater than? What if it's something you recognize? You see, when you love someone as a possession, you're relating not to them, but to your idea of them. You're trying to fit a living, breathing, constantly changing being into the static image you've created in your mind.

 And naturally, they will never quite match up to this image. How could they? They're alive. And life by its very nature is unpredictable, uncontainable, ungraspable. But when you love someone as recognition, something marvelous happens. You see them not as what you want them to be, but as what they are, another expression of the same life that expresses itself through you.

 You recognize in them the same consciousness that looks out through your eyes. The Hindus have this beautiful greeting, namaste, which means the divine in me recognizes and honors the divine in you. Not the divine in me wants to possess the divine in you. Not the divine in me needs the divine in you to feel complete. But simply I see you.

 I recognize you. [music] I honor your existence as an expression of the same mystery that I am. The awakened soul understands this intellectually and yet emotionally they still fall into the trap of possession. They still feel that ache of wanting, that fear of losing, that anxiety of not having enough.

 And this is precisely why they never seem to find the love they seek. Because they're looking for something to have [music] when what they truly desire is something to recognize is less than hash zero. Five hash is greater than consider how different love becomes when we approach it this way. It transforms from a desperate grasping into a joyful celebration.

 from fear of loss into appreciation of presence, from conditional acceptance into unconditional recognition. And perhaps this is the key that the awakened soul has been missing all along. Not to find someone who fulfills all their criteria, but to recognize the sacred in whoever stands before them. Not to possess another soul, but to walk alongside them.

 Two expressions of the same life, exploring this magnificent world together. Now, here's something that might surprise you. Spiritual awakening, for all its profound beauty and liberation, often comes with an unexpected companion, fear. And not just any fear, but perhaps the most fundamental fear of all, the fear of ultimate aloneeness.

You see, when you glimpse the truth that you are not merely your personality, your history, [music] your likes and dislikes, but something far more vast and indefinable, when you touch, even momentarily the ground of being that underlies all existence, you also glimpse something rather terrifying.

 You glimpse that at the deepest level there is only one. And this realization can create a peculiar kind of loneliness. Not the ordinary loneliness of wanting company, but an existential loneliness. The sense that no one else could possibly understand this experience, this perspective, this way of seeing the world.

 The awakened soul thus finds themselves in a paradoxical position. Having tasted unity, they feel isolated. Having transcended the separate self, they feel more alone than ever. And so they seek with increasing desperation someone who shares this understanding. Someone who's also peaked behind the cosmic curtain. But here's the rub.

 This very seeking is driven by fear. Fear of being the only one. Fear of never being truly understood. Fear of having to carry this profound realization alone. And love that is driven by fear is not love at all. It's a form of escapism, a way of trying to soothe the existential terror of ultimate aloneeness. I'm reminded of a story from the Zen tradition.

 A monk asked his master, "What is the most terrible thing?" And the master replied, "That you will discover that the universe is perfect just as it is, [music] and there's nothing you can do to improve it." Isn't that fascinating? The most terrible thing is not that the universe is flawed, but that it's perfect.

Because if it's perfect, what role is there for you to play? If everything is exactly as it should be, including your own apparent separateness, then what's left to do but surrender to it completely? And this, I think, is the fear that haunts the awakened soul in their search for love. The fear that if they fully accept the perfection of everything as it is, including their aloneeness, they will have to relinquish the dream of finding that perfect other who will make them feel less alone.

 But what if, and this is quite a startling thought, what if the cure for this existential loneliness [music] is not to find someone who understands, but to understand that the loneliness itself is part of the perfection is less than hash zero. Five hash is greater than what if the very feeling of isolation is just another wave in the ocean of experience to be neither rejected nor clung to, but simply experienced fully as it arises and passes away.

 Perhaps then the awakened soul might find themselves falling in love not with some idealized spiritual partner but with existence itself with the play of form as it arises and dissolves with the dance of life in all its myriad expressions including the very human experiences of longing connection and yes even loneliness. Let's talk about a fundamental pattern in this universe of ours.

 Throughout nature, throughout human experience, [music] we find polarities. Light and dark, sound and silence, activity and rest, and perhaps the most fascinating polarity of all, masculine and feminine. Now, I'm not talking about men and women in the biological sense, though that's certainly one expression of this polarity.

 I'm talking about fundamental energies or principles that exist within each of us regardless of our physical form. The masculine principle [music] is directional, focused, penetrating. It's the capacity to set goals, to analyze, to act decisively. The feminine principle is receptive, encompassing, nurturing. It's the capacity to be open, to intuit it, to embrace.

 And here's the fascinating thing about awakening. It often creates an imbalance in these energies. The very act of seeking spiritual truth is predominantly a masculine activity. Its goal oriented is less than hash zero. [music] Five hash is greater than its analytical. It involves concentration and effort. But the experience of awakening itself is fundamentally feminine.

 It's receptive. It happens when you stop trying, when you open, when you allow. So the awakened soul often finds themselves in a curious position. Having used the masculine energy to reach a feminine state, they are now somewhat unbalanced, and they unconsciously seek to restore this balance through relationship.

If they've become overly identified with the masculine principle of consciousness, clear, detached, observing, they seek someone who embodies the feminine principle of life, flowing, emotional, embodied. If they've become overly identified with the feminine principle of openness, they seek someone who embodies the masculine principle of direction.

 But here's the problem. No external relationship can ever permanently resolve this internal imbalance. The dance of polarities is meant to happen within us, not just between us. It's rather like trying to find your missing arm by looking for someone else who has three arms. The very idea is absurd when you think about it.

 And yet, this is precisely what the awakened soul often does. They seek outside themselves for what can only be found within. So perhaps the path to finding love isn't to seek someone who compliments you, but to become more whole within yourself, to cultivate both the masculine and feminine aspects of your own being.

 To be both strong and tender, both focused and open, both assertive and yielding. And from this place of internal harmony, you might find yourself naturally drawn to someone who reflects your wholeness rather than compensates for [music] your perceived lack. Someone with whom you can dance as equals, neither needing nor being needed, but simply enjoying the play of energies between you.

 Isn't that a radical thought? That the most profound love might arise not from need, but from abundance, not from seeking completion, but from sharing fullness. Have you ever sat by the seashore and watched the waves? Each one distinct, rising and falling, appearing to be separate from the others.

 And yet when you look more closely you realize that every wave is simply the ocean expressing itself in a particular form at a particular moment. There are no separate waves. There is only the ocean waving. This is perhaps the most beautiful metaphor for understanding who and what we really are. We are not separate selves looking for other separate selves with whom to form relationships.

We are the ocean appearing as distinct waves temporarily taking on the appearance of separateness. The awakened soul has glimpsed this truth. They have had moments perhaps even extended periods of recognizingthemselves as the ocean rather than just the wave. And yet, curiously, when it comes to relationships, they often slip back into wave consciousness.

 They forget the ocean and become identified once again with the temporary form. And so they seek other waves that seem special, that seem to rise higher or shimmer more beautifully [music] in the sunlight. They want to merge with these special waves to somehow become more complete through this merger. But how can one part of the ocean become more complete by joining with another part? The very idea assumes a fragmentation that doesn't actually exist.

 You see the tragedy and also the comedy of the awakened soul's search for love is that they're looking for the ocean in particular waves when they themselves are already the entire ocean. They're seeking wholeness where there is only wholeness. They're trying to become what they already are. Now don't misunderstand me.

 I'm not suggesting that relationships aren't valuable or that the experience of connecting deeply with another human being isn't one of life's great joys. Of course, it is. But the question is, what are you seeking in that connection? If you're seeking to become more complete, more whole, more real through relationship, then you're setting yourself up for inevitable disappointment.

Because no wave, however magnificent, can give the ocean to another wave. The ocean is already what they both are. But if you recognize yourself as the ocean and you recognize the other as the ocean, then something quite extraordinary happens. The relationship becomes not a means to an end, but an end in itself.

 Not a path to wholeness, but an expression of the wholeness that already is. It becomes a play of the ocean with itself. A dance of forms, a celebration of the infinite variety that the one can express through the many. And perhaps this is the love that the awakened soul has been seeking all along without realizing it.

 Not a love that completes them, but a love that expresses the completeness that they already are. Not a love that fills some imagined emptiness, but a love that overflows from the fullness of being. So the next time you find yourself longing for that special someone, [music] remember the ocean and the waves. Remember that what you seek is not out there in another wave, but within yourself as the ocean that you truly are.

 And perhaps in that remembering, you'll discover a love far greater than anything you could have imagined. A love that encompasses all waves, all forms, all beings. A love that is the very nature of the ocean itself. There's a rather amusing phenomenon I've observed among those who have had spiritual awakenings. Having glimpsed a deeper reality, they often develop a subtle or sometimes not so subtle sense of superiority.

I've seen behind the veil, they think. I understand something that most people don't. I'm more evolved, more conscious, more awake. And this spiritual pride, this sense of being special or advanced creates a peculiar kind of barrier when it comes to love. The awakened soul begins to feel that they can only truly connect with someone who is equally awakened.

Someone who shares their level of consciousness, someone who gets it. They look around at the vast majority of humanity, still apparently caught in the dream of separation, still identified with their personalities and their stories, and they think, "How could I possibly have a deep relationship with someone who hasn't yet realized what I've realized is less than hash zero? Five hash is greater than.

" But here's the delicious irony. This very attitude reveals that their awakening is incomplete. Because a true awakening dissolves not only the boundary between self and other but also the hierarchy of more or less evolved, more or less conscious, more or less awake. You see, from the perspective of ultimate reality, no one is more or less awake than anyone else.

We are all exactly as awake as we need to be at this moment in our journey. The person who seems completely identified with their ego, their desires, their fears, they are precisely where they need to be in the great unfolding of consciousness. They are playing their role perfectly in the cosmic drama.

 To judge them as less evolved is to miss this fundamental truth. It's to create a new form of separation, a new kind of duality, the awakened versus the unawwakened. But any form of duality is ultimately an illusion, isn't it? The great Zen masters understood this. That's why they said things like, "Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

 After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. Nothing fundamentally changes. And yet everything changes. There's no special state to achieve, no elevated platform to stand on. There's just this reality as it is, neither special nor ordinary. So perhaps the awakened soul's difficulty in finding love stems not from the scarcity of sufficiently evolved partners, but from their own lingering sense of spiritualsuperiority.

Perhaps they're overlooking the profound depth and beauty that exists in every human being regardless of their apparent level of spiritual understanding. What if, and this is quite a revolutionary thought, what if the perfect partner for the awakened soul isn't necessarily someone who shares their spiritual perspective, but someone who compliments it? Someone who brings different gifts, different insights, different ways of experiencing and expressing life.

 After all, if we're all expressions of the same underlying reality, then each person offers a unique window into that reality. Each person reveals an aspect of the whole that no one else can reveal in quite the same way. So instead of seeking someone who mirrors your awakening, perhaps seek someone who expands it. Someone who challenges your assumptions, broadens your perspective, and reminds you that the mystery of existence is far too vast to be contained within any single framework of understanding, even a spiritual one. In this way, relationship

becomes not a confirmation of what you already know, but an exploration of what you have yet to discover. Not a comfortable echo chamber, but a dynamic dance of different energies, perspectives, and ways of being. And isn't that a far richer, more interesting, more alive kind of love? Let's consider our curious relationship with time, shall we? We're constantly oscillating between past and future, reminiscing about what was, anticipating what will be.

 Rarely do we fully inhabit the present moment, the only moment that's actually real. And nowhere is this more evident than in our approach to love. We carry the baggage of past relationships, past hurts, past disappointments. I'll never let myself be vulnerable like that again, we think. or no one will ever measure up to what I had before.

And simultaneously, we project into the future, creating elaborate fantasies of how things should unfold. When I find the right person, then I'll be happy. Then I'll feel complete. Then my life will really begin. The awakened soul is not immune to this pattern. In fact, they often have a particularly sophisticated version of it.

 Having experienced states of profound presence, of timeless awareness, they now expect their relationships to reflect and sustain these states. They want love to exist in that same spacious timeless now that they've touched in meditation or moments of grace. But here's the fascinating paradox. The very expectation that love should be a certain way, even a spiritual way, immediately pulls them out of the now, and into the realm of conceptual thinking of past and future.

 The moment they start measuring their actual experience against their idea of how it should be, they've left presence and entered judgment. And judgment is always based on the past and projected into the future. This isn't as good as what I've experienced before. this isn't leading where I want it to go.

 These thoughts take us away from the actual experience of the present moment, the only place where love can truly be found. I'm reminded of a lovely Zen saying, "When walking, just walk. When eating, [music] just eat." To which we might add, "When loving, just love." Not for what it was or what it might become, but for what it is in this moment.

You see, love doesn't exist in the past or the future. It only exists now. It's not something you achieve or arrive at. It's something you recognize and express in each moment freshly, newly, without reference to what came before or what might come after. The awakened soul, having tasted the freedom of the timeless now, often makes the mistake of trying to capture that now, to freeze it, to ensure that it continues.

 But that's like trying to hold on to a river. The very act of grasping destroys what you're trying to preserve. So perhaps the key to finding the love that's never been missing is to release all expectations of what love should look like, feel like, or lead to. To step fully into the present moment and simply be available to whatever arises.

To love not for any outcome [music] but for the sheer joy of loving. As the Zen masteran so beautifully put it, the present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it. Perhaps the same could be said of love. It's already here, abundant and available. If only we have the presence of mind to notice it.

 So I invite you to experiment with this. The next time you interact with another human being, whether it's a stranger, a friend, [music] a family member, or a lover, see if you can be fully present with them without expectations, without judgments, without trying to get anywhere or achieve anything. Just two expressions of life meeting in the eternal now.

 And notice [music] what happens. You might just discover that the love you've been seeking has been right here all along, hiding in plain sight in the simple, ordinary, extraordinary present moment. And so we come to what may be the most deliciousirony of all. The cosmic joke that sits at the heart of the awakened [music] soul's quest for love.

 Are you ready for it? Here it is. You cannot find what was never lost. All this searching, all this seeking, all this yearning for the perfect connection, the ideal partner, the ultimate relationship. It's been based on a fundamental misunderstanding. The assumption that love is something to be found, attained, achieved.

 But what if love isn't something you find? What if it's what you already are? Consider this. When you were born, did you need to be taught how to love? No, of course not. Love was your natural state. As a baby, you didn't judge or discriminate or set conditions. You simply were love expressing itself in human form.

 And then gradually you learned otherwise. You learned that love is scarce, that it must be earned, that it comes with conditions, that it can be lost. You learn to protect yourself, to guard your heart, to be cautious about giving too much or being too vulnerable. Even the spiritual path, for all its talk of opening the heart and cultivating compassion, often reinforces this basic misconception.

It suggests that love is something to be developed, something to grow into rather than your original nature that has merely been covered over by layers of conditioning and fear. The awakened soul, having glimpsed the truth of their being, still carries this unconscious belief. [music] They've recognized that they are not separate from the universe.

 And yet, they still seek love as if it was something outside themselves that needs to be found and secured. But here's the liberating truth. The love you seek is not out there. It's not in another person. It's not in a relationship. It's in you. It is you. It's the very substance of what you are. You are love looking for itself through the eyes of fear.

 You are love pretending to be a seeker of love. You are love playing the game of hideand seek with itself. And the moment you recognize this, truly recognize it, not just intellectually but with your whole being, something miraculous happens. The seeking stops. The desperation dissolves. The feeling of lack disappears. And from that space of fullness, [music] of completion, of love recognizing itself as the ground of your being, you naturally begin to express love rather than trying to get it.

 You become a fountain instead of a drain. You no longer approach relationships from need, but from abundance. And paradoxically, it's precisely when you no longer need a relationship to feel complete that you become capable of a truly fulfilling relationship. Because now you are not coming to take but to give, not to be filled but to overflow.

Not to find yourself in another, but to celebrate yourself with another. This, I think, is the resolution of the paradox we've been exploring. The awakened soul never finds the love they seek because they're looking in the wrong place. They're looking outside when the love they seek is their very essence. Once this is recognized, relationships take on an entirely different quality.

They become not a means to an end, but celebrations of what already is. Not attempts to become whole, but expressions of wholeness. Not efforts to find love, but opportunities to be love. And so, my dear friends, if you find yourself in this predicament, awakened, yet still searching for that elusive, perfect love, I invite you to consider this radical possibility.

 What if there's nothing to find because nothing has been lost? What if the love you seek is not somewhere else waiting to be discovered, but right here, right now, as the very awareness with which you're listening to these words? Turn your attention inward, not to your thoughts or your emotions, but to the awareness that's aware of thoughts and emotions.

That still silent, spacious presence. [music] Isn't there a quality of love there? A warmth, an openness, an acceptance? Isn't that the love you've been seeking all along? And if that's the case, then the search is over. You can rest at last in the recognition of what you've always been.

 And from that rest, that peace, that completeness, [music] you can begin to truly meet others. Not as potential sources of fulfillment, but as fellow expressions of the same love that you are. And who knows, in that meeting, you might just discover a kind of relationship you couldn't have imagined before. Not the fantasy partnership of two incomplete halves making a whole, but the reality of two holes recognizing themselves in each other and dancing together in the joy of that recognition.

 As we come to the end of our exploration, I'd like to leave you with a thought that has always fascinated me. Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived. And love perhaps is the greatest mystery of all. We've been examining why awakened souls seem never to find the love they seek. But perhaps the real question is what if they stopped seeking altogether? What if theysimply allowed themselves to be the love that they are without trying to find it, capture it, or secure it? Because you see, love is not something that happens

to you. It's something that happens through you. It's the universe experiencing itself through the unique form that you are. It's lifeloving life. It's the one recognizing itself in its many expressions. And in that recognition, there's no seeker and nothing to seek. No finder and nothing to find.

 There's just this this miraculous, mysterious, utterly ordinary unfolding of life moment by moment, breath by breath. So perhaps the answer to our question why awakened souls never find the love they seek is simply this because they're still seeking. Still caught in the idea that love is somewhere else, someone else, someone else.

 But the moment the seeking stops, the finder dissolves. And in that dissolution, love is revealed as what has always been here, hiding in plain sight. Not the love of fantasy or romance or spiritual idealism, but the love that is the very substance of reality itself. The love that you are, the love that we all are together in this grand adventure of being human.

 And isn't that the most wonderful joke of all? That what we've been searching for so desperately was never missing in the first place. that the treasure we thought was hidden at the end of a long and arduous journey was actually the ground we were standing on all along. So I invite you to join me in laughter at this cosmic joke.

 To release the search and fall back into the love that you already are, to stop trying to become and simply be. For in that being, in that presence, in that love, you'll find or rather you recognize everything you've ever truly wanted. And with that recognition comes a peace that passes understanding. A joy that needs no reason.

 A love that knows no bounds. Not because you finally found what you were looking for, but because you finally realized that you never lost it in the first place. And that, my friends, is the greatest awakening of all.

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How to DESTROY Anyone Who Shames You – Machiavellian Psychology - YouTube

Transcripts:

Shame is not an emotion. It is a social execution. [music] When someone tries to shame you in public, they are not just insulting you. They are trying to murder your identity. You know the feeling. The heat [music] rising up your neck. The sudden silence in the room. The feeling that you have suddenly become very small and everyone else has become giant.

 Your instinct screams at you to defend yourself, [music] to explain, to fight back or worse to apologize. But here is the brutal truth that most people will never understand. [music] The moment you react, you die. The moment you try to prove you aren't what they say you are, you have already accepted their frame.

[music] You are dancing to their music. But what if you didn't? What if there was a way [music] to take that burning heavy energy of shame and with a single psychological shift turn it back [music] on them? Not by shouting, not by arguing, but by doing something so counterintuitive, so [music] surgically precise that it leaves them exposed, terrified, and wishing they had never opened their mouth.

 There is a method to this, a dark art [music] of psychological reversal used by Machavevelian leaders for centuries. [music] And once you learn it, you will never feel the sting of shame again. You will only feel the rush of power. Most people think [music] the opposite of shame is pride. They are wrong. The opposite of shame is indifference.

 [music] But getting to true indifference, the kind that freezes a room, requires [music] you to kill a part of yourself that craves validation. In the next 30 minutes, we are going to perform surgery [music] on your social instincts. I am going to show you how to dismantle an attacker, not with insults, but with presence.

 We will [music] look at the gray rock inversion, the mirror of silence, and the dead [music] star technique. By the end of this video, you won't just know how to handle [music] disrespect. You will crave it because you will see it for what it really is, [music] an opportunity to display dominance. But be warned, this knowledge is not [music] for the kind-hearted.

 It is for the strategic. Once you see the strings, [music] you can never go back to being a puppet. Phase one, the anatomy of the [music] kill. You need to understand what is happening to you biologically before you can control it [music] socially. When someone shames you, why are you wearing that? Did you really just say that? [music] Everyone here knows you're lying.

 Your amygdala hijacks your [music] brain. It perceives a threat to your survival. In tribal times, shame meant exile and exile [music] meant death. So your body prepares to fight or flee. This is where you lose because in the modern social hierarchy the person who is reacting [music] is the person who is losing. The shamer knows this.

 They are banking on your biology. They want you to get angry. They want you to stutter. They want you to look at the floor. They are the director of a play and they have just cast you [music] as the fool. If you follow your instinct, you play the role perfectly. The Machavelian mind does not [music] follow instinct. It overrides it.

 The first step to destroying a shamer is to [music] realize that their attack has nothing to do with you. Nothing. Shame is a projection. [music] People only shame others when they feel a threat to their own hierarchy. A happy powerful person does not need [music] to make others feel small. Only a desperate person does.

 When they attack you, they are confessing their own insecurity. [music] They are revealing that they view you as a threat that needs to be neutralized. Take that in. [music] They are afraid of you or they are jealous of you or they are bored and empty [music] and need to use your pain as fuel to feel alive. Once you see their attack not as a judgment of your worth, but as a symptom [music] of their weakness, the heat on your neck vanishes.

 You stop being [music] the victim. You become the observer and the observer is the most dangerous person in the [music] room. Phase two, the void. Let's talk about the pause. The average [music] person cannot tolerate silence. When an insult lands, there is a vacuum created in the conversation. Human beings are social [music] creatures.

 We are programmed to fill that vacuum. We laugh nervously. We retort. We justify. [music] We rush to close the gap because the gap feels dangerous. But [music] for the dark triad mind, the Machavelian strategist, the gap is not a danger. The gap is [music] a weapon. The most devastating thing you can do when someone tries to humiliate you [music] is absolutely nothing.

 Not the nothing of a coward who is afraid to speak, [music] but the nothing of a predator who is deciding if the prey is even worth eating. [music] Here is the technique. They deliver the insult. You do not blink. You do not look away. You do not smile. You do [music] not frown. You go completely still. You look them directly in the [music] eyes, not withaggression.

 Aggression shows they hurt you. You look at them with dead eyes. [music] A flat, bored, almost clinical stare. You count to three in your head. 1 [music] 2 3. In those 3 seconds, the dynamic of the room shifts tectonically. The audience, [music] the people watching are waiting for your reaction. When it doesn't come, they [music] look back at the attacker.

 The attacker expects resistance. When they hit nothing but air, they stumble. They start to wonder, "Did he hear me? Does [music] he not care? Is he crazy?" The silence stretches. It becomes heavy. It becomes awkward. [music] But it is their awkwardness, not yours. You have refused to pick up the burden they threw at you, [music] so it falls at their feet.

 By doing nothing, you force them to sit in the ugliness of what they just did. You turn the volume up on their disrespect until it becomes deafening to everyone else. This is called the void. You become a black hole. You absorb their energy and give nothing back. And in that silence, their power evaporates. They might [music] try to fill it.

 They might say, "I'm just joking." Or, "Cat got [music] your tongue." This is the death rattle of their dominance. They are panicking. [music] They are trying to fix the frame because you broke it with silence. [music] Do not help them. Let them scramble. Phase three, psychological judo. Once you have held the silence long enough to make them [music] uncomfortable, you speak, but you do not defend.

 Defense is an admission of guilt. If I say you are a thief and you scream, I am not a thief. You have just associated yourself with thievery in the minds of the audience, you are debating your innocence. Kings do not debate their innocence with peasants. Instead, you use psychological judo.

 You take the energy they threw at you and you pull it further until they fall over. You treat their insult not as a fact, but as a behavior. You analyze them. You treat them like a patient in a mental asylum who just had [music] an outburst. You don't get angry at the patient. You get curious. They [music] say, "Wow, you really messed that up, didn't you?" The defense response, "No, I didn't.

 [music] I was just trying to weakness." The Machavelian response, you pause. You tilt your head slightly. [music] You look at them with mild detached curiosity. And you say, "Are you okay?" or you seem really upset about this or even colder that was a weird thing to say out loud. Notice what happened here. We are no longer talking about my mistake.

 We are talking about your reaction. [music] We are talking about why you are being so emotional. I have framed myself as the calm rational adult and I have framed you as the emotional [music] unstable child. This is frame inversion. You flip the microscope. Suddenly they are the one under the light. They [music] have to explain themselves. No, I'm not upset.

I'm just saying. Now they are defending. [music] And remember, the one who is defending is losing. You have stolen the higher ground without raising your voice. [music] There is a variation of this that is even more savage. It is called the amused agree. Sometimes [music] the shamer is right. Maybe you did make a mistake.

 Maybe you do have a [music] flaw. They are counting on you to be ashamed of it. So you deprive them of that satisfaction. You own it, but [music] you own it with arrogance. They say, "You're so arrogant." You smile, look [clears throat] them in the eye, [music] and say, "I know. It's my best quality.

" They say, "You have no idea what [music] you're doing." You laugh softly, and say, "I never do." But it always works out, doesn't it? [music] This is the agree and amplify technique. You take the bullets they shoot at you and [music] you eat them. When you agree with an insult, you disarm it. You take the weapon out of their hands.

 Yes, [music] I am weird. Yes, I am loud. Yes, I am late. [music] So what? When you are not ashamed of yourself, no one can shame you. You become teflon. The mud slides [music] right off and the person throwing the mud ends up with dirty hands. [music] Phase four, the audience. Shame is a performance.

 The attacker doesn't care about [music] you. They care about the crowd. They want the crowd to laugh. They want the crowd to agree that you are the lowest rung on [music] the ladder. Most people try to win over the attacker. They try to make the attacker stop. This is a waste of time. The attacker [music] is your enemy. You need to win the crowd.

 But you don't win the crowd by [music] pleading for their sympathy. People despise victims. It's a harsh evolutionary truth. When we see someone weak, our reptile [music] brain wants to distance ourselves from them so we don't catch their weakness. But people worship strength. People worship control. When you remain calm while someone is berating you, the crowd instinctively shifts to your [music] side.

 Not because they like you, but because you look like the leader. [music] You look stable. The attackerlooks volatile. You can use the crowd [music] to destroy the attacker. This brings us to the triangulation stare. They insult you. You don't look at them immediately. You [music] look at someone else in the group. You make brief eye contact with a third [music] party and you give a tiny subtle smirk.

 A look that says, "Can you believe this guy?" You share a secret joke with the audience at the attacker's expense. [music] You ostracize the attacker. You make them the outsider. By bonding with the crowd through non-verbal communication, [music] you isolate the shamer. Suddenly, they are not the ringleer.

 They are the court jester dancing for attention [music] and nobody is clapping. This is subtle. It requires nuance. If [music] you do it too much, you look petty. But if you do it right, just a glance, a raised eyebrow [music] to the person next to you, it destroys the attacker's social capital instantly. You have signaled to the tribe, he is not one [music] of us.

 He is trying too hard. And in the laws of power, trying too hard is the ultimate sin. The person with the most power [music] is the person who is trying the least. So slow down. Your movements should be languid. Your voice [music] should be deep and slow. Your breathing should be rhythmic. You are the rock in the [music] storm.

Let them be the wind. The wind screams and howls and eventually [music] tires itself out. The rock remains. Phase five, [music] the nuclear option. Sometimes the best way to destroy someone is to turn them into a ghost. [music] There are people who thrive on negative attention. If you fight them, they win.

 If you play psychological judo, they enjoy the game. They [music] are energy vampires. They want a reaction. Any reaction [music] for these people, you use the nuclear option. You delete them from reality. They speak [music] and you continue what you were doing as if a breeze just blew through the window. You don't look at them.

 You don't pause. You don't flinch. You turn your back to them and speak to someone else. [music] If they are standing right in front of you, you look through them at something behind their head. This is not the silent treatment. [music] The silent treatment is an emotional reaction.

 It says I am hurt so I am not talking to you. This [music] is active non-existence. It says you are so beneath my notice that my brain does not even register you [music] as a biological entity. This triggers a deep primal panic in [music] the attacker. Being ignored is biologically more painful than being attacked. Attack acknowledges existence.

 Indifference denies it. [music] They will escalate. They will get louder. They will say more hurtful things. Let them. The louder they get while you remain oblivious the crazier they look. [music] They will burn themselves alive in the fire of their own desperation. And [music] you? You are just sipping your coffee discussing the weather completely unbothered.

 [music] This is the ultimate dominance. It is the dominance of the mountain over the ant. [music] The ant can bite the mountain all day. the mountain does not care. But to do this, you must truly believe in your own value. [music] You must believe that their opinion is as irrelevant as the buzzing of a fly. This brings us to the philosophical core of this strategy.

Phase [music] six, the internal fortress techniques are useless if your soul is fragile. You can learn the stairs, the pauses, the witty [music] comebacks, but if you are trembling inside, they will smell it. Microexpressions never lie. To truly destroy anyone who shames you, you must destroy the part of you that feels shame.

 You must build an internal fortress. Why does shame hurt? Because you have given them the keys to your self-worth. You are letting an outsider, someone who doesn't know your history, your struggles, your potential, audit your value. [music] Why? Why do you trust their judgment more than your own? Machaveli wrote about virtu not virtue in the moral sense [music] but prowess, strength, capability.

 A man of virtu relies on himself. [music] He knows what he is. If you know you are strong and someone calls you weak, it is [music] not painful. It is funny. It is like someone calling a lion a mouse. [music] The lion does not get offended. The lion knows it is a lion. You need to reach a point of self-nowledge that [music] is so concrete, so solidified that external inputs bounce off.

 This requires shadow work. [music] You must face the things you are ashamed of. Are you ashamed of your past, [music] your body, your bank account, your loneliness, bring it into the light. Look at it. [music] Accept it. Yes, I failed. Yes, I am struggling. The moment you accept your own flaws, you become invincible because the shamer has no ammunition left.

 They can only hurt you with the truth you are hiding from. If you hide nothing, they [music] can hurt nothing. Become transparent to yourself and opaque to them. This is the paradox of power. The most vulnerableman is the one hiding behind armor. [music] The most powerful man is the one standing naked in the storm saying, "I have nothing to fear.

" [music] When you reach this state, you stop walking into rooms wondering if people will like you. You start walking into rooms wondering [music] if you will like them. The dynamic flips. You become the judge. Phase seven, the [music] counterattack. Sometimes silence isn't enough. Sometimes you need to cut. But you must cut [music] like a surgeon, not a butcher.

 A butcher hacks and makes a mess. A surgeon makes one precise [music] incision and removes the organ. When you decide to strike back verbally, [music] you must follow the rule of brevity. Less is more. A long speech [music] makes you look defensive. One sentence makes you look lethal. Here are three surgical strikes [music] to keep in your arsenal.

 Strike one, the who frame. They insult [music] you. You look at them and ask, "Who are you trying to impress right now?" This is devastating. It immediately exposes [music] their performance. It tells the room he is performing. I am watching. It breaks the fourth wall. Strike two. The repeat command.

 [music] They say something nasty. You put your hand to your ear and say, "I'm sorry. Say that again. I didn't catch that." Make them repeat the [music] insult. Insults are like jokes. They only work the first time. When you force someone to repeat an insult, it loses its rhythm. It sounds rehearsed. [music] It sounds petty.

 And usually they won't say it again. They will crumble. They will say, "Never mind." You have forced them to retreat. Strike three, [music] the validation trap. They attack you. You smile compassionately and say, "I know things are hard for you right now. You don't have to take it out on me." You act like a [music] therapist.

 You frame their attack as a cry for help. You pity them. And there is nothing [music] nothing more humiliating to a narcissist than being pied. They want to be feared. [music] When you pity them, you place yourself above them. You are the adult comforting the tantrumthrowing child. It drives them insane, but they [music] can't fight it because you are being nice.

 If they get angry, they prove your point that they are unstable. You have trapped [music] them in a double bind. Head, you win. tales they lose. Phase eight, the aftermath. [music] How you end the interaction is just as important as how you handle it. Do not linger. Once you have deployed the silence, the stare, or the surgical [music] strike, leave or turn your attention completely to someone else.

Machaveli knew that power [music] is about access. When you withdraw your attention, you are withdrawing the greatest resource in the room. You [music] punish them with your absence. Let them sit with the wreckage. Do not check to see if they are looking at you. Do not [music] look for validation from the crowd. Just move on.

 Show them that the interaction meant so little to you that it has already been deleted from [music] your cash. You are on to the next thing. This is the ultimate insult to be forgettable. Make them [music] forgettable. Phase nine. The philosophy of the shadow. Why are we talking about this? Is it just to win arguments? No, [music] it is because the world is becoming sharper, colder, and more vicious.

 We live in a digital [music] coliseum where everyone is judging everyone. Cancel culture, online shaming, social status [music] games. It is a war zone. If you do not have these defenses, you will be eaten. You will shrink. You will become afraid to speak your [music] truth. You will become a gray conformist ghost, terrified of stepping out of line.

Learning these dark psychological tactics [music] is not about becoming evil. It is about protecting your light. It is about building a perimeter around your mind so that the toxic waste of other people's insecurities cannot [music] touch you. When you know you can handle shame, you become fearless. You take risks. You speak [music] up.

 You lead. You walk differently. You stop asking for permission to exist. Shame is [music] a cage. These techniques are the key. But remember, with great power comes the temptation to abuse it. Do not become the shamer. Do not use these tools to destroy the weak. That [music] is cowardly.

 Use them to destroy the destroyers. Use them to protect the innocent. [music] Use them to hold your ground when the world tries to move you. Be the monster that keeps [music] the other monsters at bay. That is the outlier way. You now possess the tools, the silence, the stare, the judo, the void. You have the [music] blueprint to dismantle anyone who tries to lower your status.

 But knowing the path is not walking the [music] path. The next time you feel that heat rising in your neck. The next time someone tries to make you [music] small, don't panic. Smile. Because you have been waiting for this. You are no longer the prey. You are the trap.

 Let [music] them step in and watchwhat happens when they realize they are locked in with you, not the other way around. [music] Most people will watch this video and nod and then go back to being a victim tomorrow. They are addicted to their own weakness. [music] But you, you are still here. You are listening to the silence between these words. That tells me you are ready for something deeper.

 [music] This was just the defense. But what about the offense? What about the art of influence? How do you not just stop people from hurting you but make them desperately want to follow you? [music] That is a darker, deeper rabbit hole and we are going to go down it soon. If you are tired of the blue pill advice that tells you to just be nice and forgive everyone.

 If you are ready to understand the raw unfiltered dynamics of human power, then you are in the right place. Join the order, [music] subscribe, turn on the bell. We are building a sanctuary for the strong. Don't be left outside. I'll see you in the shadows.

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