167 On Havingness: How To Increase Self-Concept

Havingness (a.k.a. self-concept) is how much you subconsciously believe you deserve when it comes to different areas of life— money, love, respect, attention, ease, etc. We tend to revert to this "Having Level" when we deviate too far away from it. But you can increase your Having Level, and upgrade your sense of normal through certain practices.

Transcript

Today we're speaking about havingness.

So what is havingness?

Havingness goes by many terms,

But it is the subconscious belief or expectation that we have when it comes to different meaningful quantities in life.

So we have a havingness level when it comes to money,

When it comes to love,

When it comes to respect.

In practically every area in life we have an expectation of how much is comfortable to have and we tend to revert to this level because it's familiar.

Sure we all have anecdotal experiences where either in our own lives and other people's lives we drop down below an amount of money that's comfortable and then something comes up with us that we start hustling to get back up to a comfortable level.

On the other end,

And this is where it becomes very interesting,

Is that when we surpass what is within our realm of normal,

And this goes for anything but I'm using money because it's easily quantifiable,

There is a tendency to revert back down.

I'm sure we've all heard when someone wins the lottery who's not used to having a lot of money,

They find some way to get rid of all that money and bring themselves back down.

When I was a sales manager,

I saw this a lot in a lot of sales trainings.

When I worked for Verizon,

We were taught to look for this in our salespeople that when someone knocks it out of the park one week,

Maybe beats their monthly quote in a few days,

They're almost certainly going to slump the rest of the month because they've gone so far beyond their expected level of income that something makes them lose motivation to keep increasing so they could go back down to their expected level.

This is in other areas,

Not just money.

Respect,

Status,

Someone starts looking up to you.

We see this in relationships a lot where someone's in a relationship where maybe they're used to being talked down to and then all of a sudden they're with someone who really looks up to them.

It makes them feel this weird feeling and they almost sabotage their way out of the relationship.

We're going to look at this in this episode,

Why this happens.

I'm going to look at it from a non-spiritual lens,

I think,

When it comes to these kinds of ideas,

There's a tendency to,

Like law of attraction,

Spiritualize it.

I'm going to try to ground us in science as I try to do always.

Also looking at,

Obviously,

How to increase this level,

How to disrupt this tendency to revert to our more comfortable levels.

I do want to say the word havingness does come from L.

Ron Hubbard.

I do believe he was the one who coined it.

I'm obviously not promoting Scientology,

But from all the different words to use this,

In sales training we call it self-concept.

In personal development,

There's probably tons of other terms.

I like havingness because this is how I first learned it.

I also think it's kind of almost a kid-like term that really describes what it is.

The thing about havingness and my view on it is that one of the reasons why we tend to revert is that our havingness level,

When it comes to every meaningful area,

Be it love,

Respect,

Money,

Amounts of friendship,

Even though those things are harder to quantify,

It's because our havingness is directly tied to our identity.

A person has a certain identity,

Even though,

Obviously,

We don't want to think of ourselves as poor or low status or not getting love or not getting respect.

When something becomes ingrained as part of our identity,

It becomes very hard to shift it because there are certain mechanisms in our psyche,

If you will,

That want to keep things the same.

Cool.

So,

First part,

Why would this reversion exist?

It doesn't seem to make sense.

Everything that's evolved in our psychology is for our betterment,

For our survival,

For our ability to thrive,

For our ability to pass on life.

Why would we have some mechanism that causes us to contract and go backwards?

I think there's a lot of analogous points with attachment theory.

The idea that based on our parental imprinting,

Specifically with our opposite-sex parents,

If we're heterosexual,

There's a tendency to recreate the same patterns in our adult's love relationships,

Even though it doesn't make sense.

Why does the woman keep dating the abusive guy?

Well,

Very often,

You can tie it to an abusive father who imprinted that this kind of verbal abuse or whatever kind of abuse is equated with love,

So then she keeps recreating it.

The opposite end,

Maybe a little bit more common with men,

A man feels smothered by a woman,

He becomes avoidant to get away from it,

But then he keeps dating women that are,

He's for whatever reason,

Drawn to the stage five clinger,

And then he always has the same dynamic he had with his mom where he's running away.

Reason is that for our lower consciousness,

Our non-human pre-rational elements of our consciousness,

There's this assumption,

If you look at what we could call our more animal brains,

Our reptilian brain or paleomammalian brain,

There's an assumption that what's familiar is safe and the unknown is dangerous,

Because for anything not as advanced as a human,

This is usually the case.

In other episodes,

I've gone into the circuit theory of consciousness more deeply.

I'll do a quick refresher of it.

If you look at our circuit one consciousness,

Which is imprinted during infancy,

Its whole thing is about how can I get nourishment and not starve to death.

All of its mechanisms,

I have a daughter now,

I can see this in my kid,

Especially in her first few months,

All of her programming,

All of her emotions,

When she cried or when she was content,

Simply came down to this.

Any kind of imprinting in that level,

When it comes to something as simple as nourishment,

Has an imprinting on how much one expects to receive later.

If your mother,

Or you're part of a tribe,

Pre-civilization,

Where your mother did not have enough calories to produce a lot of milk for you,

It doesn't make sense for such a child to endlessly cry about not getting enough calories for him or herself.

It just wouldn't be serving to the infants,

It wouldn't be serving to the tribe.

If they really were all starving and had a caloric deficit,

They might just can the infant because it's not worth it,

They're all going to die otherwise.

So it made sense for the infants to expect less,

To expect,

Okay,

My general needs,

My primal needs don't get met.

This kind of imprint can pass on into adulthood where there's this just general expectation that I don't get what I actually want.

If we look at the next level of our imprinting during toddlerhood,

Our circuit two consciousness that we have in common with more advanced social mammals,

We see something similar with status.

If you are the third kid in the family,

You're obviously smaller than your siblings,

There's a new kind of imprinting which is not purely,

Do I get what I want?

Because for infants,

They haven't realized the separation yet.

So everything is about them because they are everything.

If they're not getting the amount of milk they desire,

That's their imprinting of how much should I expect to get for myself?

Whereas in toddlerhood,

We develop social emotions,

We realize we're separate from other beings and here status becomes something significant.

We start to get the imprint of how much do I get in relation to others?

My big brother gets more food than me,

My big brother gets more hugs than me because if I try to surpass him,

He'll beat me up or something like that.

So that imprints our status which is a little bit different than our pure level of do I get as much that I want from the universe,

Let's say,

Which is what an infant's view tends to be.

And then later on,

We develop more rational consciousness up to age seven where there's other kinds of imprints like how much do I expect to understand?

That's going a little bit outside of our topic of havingness.

The thing here is that those lower circuits,

Circuits one and two,

Associated with our reptilian nervous system and our palypomelian brain,

They are regressive evolutionary programs.

They work on a negative feedback loop.

When it comes to status,

Let's say,

When it comes to our limbic brain,

Our palypomelian brain,

Even though it's best for ourselves,

Especially for males,

To be as high status as possible,

One also gets imprinted on where do I belong in the hierarchy because if a certain,

Let's say,

The youngest boy in the family is constantly trying to fight his big brother,

At some point he's going to get beaten up.

If he keeps doing that into adulthood and his big brother becomes the alpha male or chief of the tribe,

He'll probably get kicked out of the tribe.

It's actually better to accept the imprint that,

Okay,

I'm lower status.

Now,

In our modern life,

We don't live in tribes.

This obviously doesn't serve us very much for a male especially to constantly be assuming,

Okay,

I'm less than other males.

With our rational consciousness,

We have a little more mobility.

However,

When it comes to certain tendencies that don't seem to make sense,

Especially if you're trying to improve your life as far as being higher status as a man,

Getting more respect,

Getting more love,

Making more money,

It doesn't make sense but it is driven by this pre-rational consciousness for which it does make sense.

It does make sense to accept lower status.

It does make sense to go hungry literally or metaphorically because otherwise you're going to get kicked out of the tribe.

Now,

The thing is,

These circuits are only plastic up to a certain,

You know,

Our brain is only plastic up to a certain level,

Right?

Even when it comes to our rational consciousness,

If a child doesn't learn how to speak a language by seven,

They actually,

You know,

At that point,

They can't learn anymore.

You know,

This is why we learn languages so quickly and learn certain ideas and ways of thinking so quickly up until about the age of seven and then afterwards,

It's really hard because part of our brain is actually lost its plasticity.

This is the time where we get our imprints of how much we deserve to have,

What our status is,

How much love we expect to get,

Etc.

So in order to change this about ourselves,

You know,

We have to look at it as if we're looking for ways to re-plasticize ourselves because even if you read all the self-help books,

You do all the workshops,

You tell affirmations to yourself,

You know,

It's like you're talking to something,

You're talking to an old dog that has a hard time learning new tricks,

Which is why,

Like,

Despite the best efforts,

Perhaps you always revert to the same behaviors around money where you contract back down to the same number in your bank accounts or respect or anything like that.

You take supplicating behaviors around other men or around women,

Even though you hyped yourself up to be confident,

It's very hard to fight against these lower mechanisms.

So and actually there's one more piece that is also important.

Circuit four,

Which comes after a rational consciousness,

This is imprinted during puberty.

This is where we get the imprints of how attractive we are,

How much we expect to receive attention from the opposite sex,

How much we expect our sexual desires or our desires for intimacy to be fulfilled.

And actually this is something I've heard Neil Strauss speak about,

Which is guys,

Men who lose their virginity before 15 have a very different kind of relationship to men who lose their virginity afterwards,

Right?

Which is for,

You know,

Puberty starts around 12,

13.

You have all these sexual desires.

You're suddenly craving the opposite sex if you're straight.

And if you go many years,

It doesn't seem like that much,

Right?

Because we don't expect anyone.

I mean,

It's not it's more common to lose your virginity later.

But when you think about,

You know,

You remember being a younger boy,

If you're a guy,

You go three,

Four,

Five,

Many,

Many years of having this strong primal,

Hormonally driven drive for intimacy with women and it goes unmet year after year after year,

That's some heavy imprinting,

Right?

Because that's a lot of emotion.

That's a,

You know,

Puberty is a very plastic time where we get certain imprints where,

You know,

A lot of us,

This is where our adult identity is formed,

Right?

A lot of people,

You know,

They were one way pre-puberty and then they get certain inputs when they're,

Let's say,

Late in middle school,

Early in high school,

Going through puberty,

And then afterwards,

They're kind of that way the rest of their lives for the most part,

Right?

At least for someone who maybe isn't taking an active role in developing themselves,

This is common.

Whereas for a guy who loses his virginity before 14 or before 15,

He doesn't have that period of lack where he has this drive that's being unmet.

So,

Those kinds of men,

Even if they don't grow up to be good looking or charismatic or confident in many ways,

According to Neil Strauss,

They have this kind of ease when it comes to being around women because they didn't go through that period of an unmet need,

Right?

They didn't go through a period of starvation that imprinted an expectation of lack.

And you know,

Neil was referring to,

You know,

Those guys who obviously learn to be very attractive but if they lost their virginity late,

There's always this kind of unease that comes where just basically when they're in the presence of an attractive woman,

This feeling of lack comes up again and it takes a lot of work to reduce that and it can't simply be done by simply having a lot of experiences,

Right?

That feeling of lack is still there.

And so,

The thing is,

When you have an experience of lack,

Whether it's,

You know,

Desiring more milk when you're an infant and it's not given to you,

You know,

Wanting more attention when you're a toddler and it's given to someone else,

You know,

Strongly desiring intimacy and you go through a period of horniness where that horniness is unsatisfied,

This imprint of lack kind of messes up our mechanisms for fulfillment.

So an example here would be with food.

You know,

I had a friend who owned a bakery.

She loved,

I mean,

She still loves baked goods.

She's upset.

She's always,

You know,

She's always,

You know,

She's always,

You know,

She's always going to taste every kind of donut and every kind of cake and she owned a bakery so she had access to all of this stuff.

She was creating it all day and then she's super skinny and people would always ask her like how the hell are you eating baked goods all day and you're not skinny and you're not fat and she simply was,

Well,

I love tasting it but I always stop way before I'm full.

Whereas someone who,

Let's say,

Has food addiction tendencies,

Maybe they had an imprint of lack early on when it comes to food fulfillment,

They don't recognize the signal that they're full.

They keep consuming and consuming and consuming because they never feel full.

In 12-step and addiction recovery,

They call this the hungry ghost,

Right?

Like you're constantly consuming whether it's a psychoactive substance or food or sex or attention.

You're constantly consuming,

Consuming,

Consuming and you never feel full.

And when it comes to another quantity,

The one that's more easily quantified,

Money,

Money is kind of built to not have,

You know,

No one is ever full of money.

No one's ever like,

Oh,

My bank account has enough and any more would feel uncomfortable.

No one thinks that way,

Rationally at least.

Money is like,

It's built in to experience scarcity with the way our monetary system works.

I'm not going to go into that but if you consider the way that,

You know,

The standard for wealth should be evolutionarily which is essentially food.

Every food at some point,

You know,

Even the tastiest food,

If you're only eating that one thing,

If you're only tasting that one thing,

With anything,

You're going to get full long before the point where you would overeat or eat yourself sick other than artificial things that kind of circumvent that.

When it comes to like natural foods,

No one can like stuff their face with steak or vegetables to the point where they get grossly overweight.

Unless you have a hunger-ghost mechanism where maybe you have the imprint that you don't get enough food and then you keep eating and eating and eating beyond the signal for fulfillment.

And I think this relates to other scalars too like,

I'll speak for myself,

Like I lost my virginity kind of late so I had this scarcity with women.

And it wasn't just about sex,

It was also about attention and respect and connection.

And I recognized the moment that I had moved out of scarcity when it came to women when it got to the point where,

You know,

There's a period in my life when I was in one taste,

A woman asked if I wanted to have a sexual experience that night and for the first time in my life I recognized,

No,

Actually I would rather do something else.

And the fact that I was able to say no for the first time in my life to basically like time spent with a woman was a signal to me that,

Okay,

For the first time I'm no longer constantly seeking the next thing because I actually feel full.

Whereas previous to that,

Any time an attractive woman would have given me any kind of attention or invited me to anything,

I probably would have dropped most everything to spend time because of that hunger-ghost experience.

So these are the roots and in changing our havingness,

Given that a lot of these imprints happened early on in life,

Before we can remember for most of these things,

It's kind of like if we really want to dig into this,

We want to find ways to return to plasticity.

So we're going to speak about a couple things here in the rest of this episode in that,

And I want to remind us that changing our havingness,

Changing our subconscious expectations requires a change of identity.

If you caught my episode on the myth of identity,

Where I speak about Chinese brainwashing camps and how they kind of demonstrate that our identity is a fiction.

However,

Identity is a very useful fiction.

It's a fiction that a lot of us rely on because once we have an idea of,

Hey,

This is how I am,

This is how smart I am,

This is how confident I am,

This is how social I am,

And we have all of these I am statements deeply rooted in our brain,

It saves us a lot of energy on how we relate to other people.

And that's the purpose of an ego,

That's the purpose of a persona,

Is that,

Okay,

I have these predetermined traits about myself,

So when I am in a new situation,

I don't have to spend a lot of energy figuring out my place,

Right?

This is why,

You know,

Evolutionarily we would stay usually in the same tribe our entire lives,

Unless,

You know,

You move to another tribe due to what's called exogamy,

You know,

Marrying into another tribe,

Which means that if,

You know,

It kind of makes sense that your status,

Which was maybe determined at birth,

Maybe because of the size you are,

Or your,

Where you are in your,

Amongst your siblings,

Or the status of your parents,

It's kind of a good idea to just stay where you are because to try to change that within an insulated tribe would mean a lot of energy spent and potentially being kicked out of the tribe.

Same thing with everything.

So,

This is the reason why identity is evolutionarily useful.

It's a very useful abstraction.

It saves us a lot of brain energy on changing,

On changing,

On trying to change our situation,

But it is an abstraction.

It's not real.

It's a bunch of ideas that we treat as real.

And given that,

You know,

Basically none of us,

No one listening to this lives in an insulated tribe where you only interact with the same 50 to 100 people all the time,

Of course we want to change.

We want the opportunity to increase.

You know,

We do deal with this other kind of abstraction,

Money,

Which didn't exist in the tribal environment,

Where of course we don't want to be trapped at a certain amount.

And I'll speak for myself on the money issue.

For the longest time,

I had basically like one month of rent in my checking account.

This is during my more bohemian broke phase.

Any time that I dropped below one month of rent,

I would find some way to hustle.

And like,

You know,

Especially in the years that I was in OneTaste,

I basically had no income,

But somehow every month I would find some hustle,

Some way to like make the,

Basically make my monthly nut.

Every month it was exciting.

Every month there was some way I pulled it off.

But any time,

And there were a few times where I made double that amount somehow,

I found some way to spend it.

Like I would almost immediately buy another workshop or spend,

Or like basically take the next month off.

And actually as a salesperson,

I experienced this too.

Whenever I had a really great month,

I would take,

Sometimes I'd take the next month off and work on my writing career,

Which I don't regret,

But in another way,

It does look like a way I was reverting to my having this level.

So how do we change this?

If we look at this,

Is this a part of our identity or,

You know,

More scientifically,

We have certain myelinated pathways in our brain.

You know,

You may have heard this before,

If you consume self-help,

That it is very difficult to remove a myelinated pathway.

It's very difficult to create a new,

You know,

A new pattern.

It's much easier to just create a new pattern and then the old pattern will eventually atrophy.

So the lowest hanging fruits when it comes to this,

The simplest thing,

You know,

I basically recommend this to any young single person who wants to really change their character is to change your environment.

If we can,

And it's not just this,

There's a caveat with this,

But if we consider that our identity,

Our expectations have been built around interacting with the outside world,

Specifically the social element of our outside world,

You know,

Our evolutionary tribe,

It makes sense to leave the tribe essentially,

Right?

And you know,

Anytime I'm speaking to a guy from a small town where,

You know,

His friends treat him a certain way and he finds it very hard to improve himself,

You know,

He'll do certain things to boost his confidence or change,

You know,

How he speaks or how well he tells the truth or his assertiveness,

But then he's around his friends and he tends to revert to the status level or his old way of communication,

I say very simply,

You know,

Just change your environment for a while.

It's very hard to essentially,

You know,

Empower a dormant archetype when you're around people who are used to interacting with your,

Let's say,

Weaker self or like more submissive archetypes,

Right?

But it's not just that,

Right?

Because if you go travel and a lot of guys I've spoken to have experienced this,

They go to a new place,

But they bring all of their habits with them,

They bring all their tendencies even though the outside world,

Like you show up to a new city,

A new community,

They don't know how to treat you.

They don't know if that,

You know,

Your old friends or your family treated you a certain way.

But if you're already expecting that because that's just how your being is,

You're communicating to them how to treat you,

Right?

You meet a new group of guys,

You become friends with them and you're kind of giving off these submissive vibes,

Eventually they're going to treat you as the beta male.

That's just how it is.

Like this is,

You know,

These are all subconscious processes,

You know?

Same thing in relationships,

Right?

You don't want to recreate your relationship.

You're drawn to a certain woman,

Subconsciously drawn to certain traits.

And actually,

Just yesterday,

I recorded a podcast with Patrick from Germany.

If you caught the episode,

Episode 140,

Slave to King,

He spoke about his journey from really transforming from super beta to super alpha.

And yesterday,

He was talking about how he was always subconsciously drawn to and would actually get physically turned on by the more,

We could say,

Masculine dominance and sometimes chaotic and dramatic and maybe,

You know,

Broken in quotes woman.

He was actually physically turned on by this type of person because he was being driven by what we might call a slave archetype,

Right?

He was looking for an opportunity to be the savior,

To be the white knight and be submissive to a woman,

Essentially.

And he noticed that he had truly changed and truly transformed himself when that kind of person was no longer interesting to him.

His body wouldn't even get turned on around such a woman,

Even if she seemed to make sense on paper and she was beautiful.

Whereas then,

For the first time,

He was actually really interested and attracted to a different kind of woman,

A woman who didn't have those traits and more complementarily fit his new way of being,

His more king archetype,

His more alpha self,

His confident self.

So it's not just changing your environment,

It's also changing your habits when you get to the environment,

Right?

Changing your physical environment,

Changing the people you spend time with is basically an opportunity to not have the pressure of your old self against you,

But that you have to hit the ground running with new habits,

Which simply can mean completely doing everything differently.

Like anytime I speak to a guy who's going through a divorce or about to go through a divorce and he's afraid of entering the new marketplace,

The dating marketplace,

He's concerned about having his old nice guy behaviors recreated,

I say,

Okay,

This sucks,

Right?

This sucks,

But it is an amazing opportunity since your outside world is being torn apart and totally changed,

You have this window,

You have this specific,

There's no way to say how many days or how many months or weeks this lasts,

But you have this window where since everything outside in your outside world is new,

Your life situation is new,

The conditions of your life is new,

You have an opportunity to change the way you interact with the outside world because it's reentering a plastic state where everything is new.

Which brings us to the next principle,

Which is we're very plastic when we're young,

Obviously,

Because we're finding a way to interact with our tribe,

With our environments,

But there are other ways even as adults that we enter plasticity and that is when emotions are very high.

When we have very high emotional arousal,

And I'm using arousal in the general sense,

Not sexual,

But sexual does include,

Like anytime we're feeling a lot,

Whether it's joy,

Grief,

Excitement,

Emotion,

Lust,

Anything that has us feel a lot,

Which forces our attention outside of our minds,

Right?

Like it's,

You know,

This is the whole thing of like,

By thinking of baseball statistics can make you last longer according to that,

You know,

That old wives idea.

It's because thinking about ideas and feeling a lot,

You know,

We don't have enough attention to have both processes run at a high level.

So anytime you're feeling a lot from anything,

It forces you into kind of a lower state where you also become more plastic,

You become more childlike,

Right?

Like little kids,

Toddlers are not thinking abstractions,

They don't think in words yet.

So their feet,

Like all they are is feeling at their highest level of,

You know,

Their highest brain functions are social emotions.

So they can absorb everything really fast.

And the more we start thinking,

Especially after age seven,

Where we're now basically always thinking in words,

We're no longer plastic.

So there are various ways to enter higher plasticity through higher emotions.

Number one is taking advantage of situations,

Right?

And actually,

I spoke about this yesterday.

Anytime I bring up Patrick,

I bring this up because a lot of people after listening to his first appearance in episode 140,

Have asked me,

How did he transform so quickly in and so greatly in a short amount of time.

And I,

You know,

And I said this a few times,

Like,

And from my perspective is because he used his pain,

Right?

He had a bad breakup where he was so,

So greatly humiliated.

And unlike what a lot of people do,

Where they try to avoid the pain,

They try to,

You know,

Comfort themselves,

They,

You know,

Look for consolations or ways to like,

Avoid the pain and feel more normal,

Which is less feeling.

He dove into the pain,

Like he made himself feel the humiliation and feel the pain,

Which,

You know,

One motivated him to really change,

Right?

He didn't try to drag it out for years.

He had to change immediately because he was causing himself so much pain.

And your body,

Your psyche doesn't want to keep you in pain.

And pain is a mechanism for getting back to a more comfortable,

Secure survival state.

He dove into the pain.

And not only that,

Did it inspire him to change,

It forced him into a more plastic state where he no longer had to fall back on his old ways of being.

And he could basically program new ideas or new ways of being.

That's one way.

But obviously,

You don't want to wait for a crisis necessarily.

You don't want to wait for the fight club moments where,

You know,

Your life,

Your apartment is blown up and now you can change.

Although we do see this in the movies a lot because it is the easiest way to change.

It is the easiest call to adventure for a new hero's journey of transformation when shit is,

Shit has gone down in your life.

You know,

Some crisis,

Some moments of all of your comforts being taken away.

But there are other ways.

You know,

I've spoken about this in a few episodes on how this is kind of the roots of what in the Western occult world they would call greater magic or ritual magic.

Organized religions do this also,

Like basically congregations of people where we have certain sensory experiences that essentially disable your higher order thinking and force you into a lower brain wave state where you're feeling more and thinking less can also do this.

Right.

And for a non-weird or a more normal example,

You look at any church congregation,

You know,

They do this through certain ritualistic actions,

You know,

Eating the Eucharist.

And the big thing is singing together,

Right?

When you sing together,

You're singing a hymn,

You're not thinking so much rationally when you're using your verbal center for song,

You're feeling something and you're feeling with a bunch of people.

It's essentially a light version of mob mentality where all of your emotions sync for the purpose of taking collective action.

If you follow the history of man substack,

I wrote an article about mob mentality and why this happens.

The short version is when we lose our individual rationality and enter this like collective feeling states as seen in mob mentality,

It is a lot easier to take collective action.

Mob mentality obviously usually has negative connotations because,

You know,

A group that of a group of normally passive or pacifistic people can become very violent in mob mentality.

The evolutionary reason is that,

You know,

If you're a peaceful group of gatherers or hunter gatherers,

Let's say,

Or early agrarians and none of you are violent,

But now you're faced with an individual who's threatening you somehow or a threat,

Something primal gets triggered,

You all go into a greater feeling state and not so thinking state,

And then you're capable of attacking the threat.

That's the purpose of mob mentality.

It's also how,

You know,

Church is,

I mean this in a neutral way,

Is an opportunity to brainwash you into hopefully positive characteristics.

Every Sunday you get together with a group of people,

You sing hymns,

You go through certain rituals,

Which in a way numb out your rationality,

You end up entering a more feeling,

Less thinking,

More plastic state.

And ideally on the positive end,

You know,

The preacher,

The priest reminds you to be compassionate and grateful and love your family and all of this stuff.

That gets in more than reading it in a book when you've just drank a bunch of coffee,

Which puts you in a different kind of state,

Right?

The priest can actually get those words into you,

Hopefully he's programming you with good things.

And this is also how on the more esoteric occult side ritual magic works.

It's basically a group hypnosis where you enter like an alpha brainwave state where you're way more receptive and,

You know,

Someone keeps telling you,

Again on a positive note,

Keeps convincing you that you're confident,

Keeps convincing you that you're great with money or that you're smart.

That gets into your subconscious better than just reading an affirmation or telling yourself those things in the mirror.

Another way,

And this is Mantak Chia's thing,

Is through sexual arousal,

Right?

You enter this state and,

You know,

We're seeing this in a less esoteric way with the nofap movement,

Semen retention.

Guys are noticing on the base level that when they don't ejaculate all the time,

They feel more in their bodies and there's various positive effects to that,

That,

You know,

Nofap and the semen retention guys talk about.

You know,

I talk about sometimes in my arousal control course.

But on this note,

And Mantak Chia says this kind of with the causality reversed,

He says that any emotion you have mixed with sexual energy,

Arousal,

Becomes heightened.

So if you're angry when you get turned on,

You become more angry.

But I would say the reverse is also true is that when you are sexually aroused,

You are more plastic because you're feeling more and thinking less.

And then any inputs,

Whether it's a feeling or emotion or an idea will tend to get in deeper.

And this is,

Again,

On the occult side with people who call sex magic,

Right?

You classically condition an idea or a belief or a desire or intention with a high,

With an experience of high arousal.

And then you start to feel,

It starts to feel more real than if you're just like numbly in a regular waking state or thinking,

You know,

I'm rich,

I'm confident,

Whatever.

So there's various ways and really any way of getting yourself emotional and feeling and then try to input an idea or belief or intention will be more effective than simply just telling yourself that or hoping or even doing some of these more,

You know,

Materialistic actions.

So the third thing,

And this is new,

I mean,

I haven't mentioned this before in any other podcast episode,

Which is having this on a primal subconscious level is related to the amount of sensation we're feeling.

It's kind of related to the arousal thing.

Whereas,

You know,

When we get into a new kind of state,

Whether it's having way more money than we,

Or less money,

Or people are treating us differently than we're used to,

You know,

Or we're dating someone and they're admiring us in a way that we're not used to.

It causes feelings of discomfort to our lower circuitry or circuit one or circuit two.

And this discomfort is what we could call tension,

Right?

My friend Brian Bajan would just simply call this tension or others would simply like Carol and Elliot,

Another friend of mine would call this since everything's just sensation,

Right?

And this is one of her ideas in her book,

Existential Kink,

Is that instead of contracting against this new sensation,

You try to get off on it.

You try to feel it because greater levels of stuff,

You know,

You know,

Grading levels of having this,

Having more respect,

Love,

Money,

Whatever does come with more feeling.

It's something my wife,

Delia,

Speaks about in her courses on intimacy.

She says that people tend to sabotage their opportunities for secure.

I mean,

This just doesn't use these words,

But secure,

Healthy love relationships,

When they have something really good,

A person who's not used to having a partner who really listens,

Really loves,

Really cares for them,

Really respects,

Really connects.

When they have this that's greater than their sense of normal,

The fear of loss becomes very high.

Whereas if you have someone who's treating you the way that every person has ever treated you,

The fear of loss isn't that great because that is your normal,

Right?

The amount of food you expect to have,

The amount of income you expect to have.

It doesn't trigger that fear of loss because that is what we are used to.

Whereas when you have more of it,

There is a tension that comes to the fear of loss.

It's like,

Oh crap,

I really would hate to go from this level of income down to this level of income.

I really hate to have this amazing experience.

And there's the feeling of too good to be true,

Which is again related to fear of loss.

So any diversion from our normal range causes this tension that is physical tension.

So I'm going to use money as an example because it's quantifiable.

Kind of coinciding with this,

This was unintentional,

But I've been playing a lot of online poker in the last couple of weeks,

Mainly because I've been spending a lot of time playing chess.

And when I'm winning,

I'm like,

Man,

It would be great if money was coming in.

What am I going to do if my chess rating goes up instead of just this kind of meaningless activity,

Meaningless in the sense of what matters in my life.

So I started playing poker and I've noticed that there's different feelings at the level of whatever stakes I'm playing.

So I'm playing online,

You can choose what stakes level you're playing.

And this is something that I've heard from a lot of gamblers.

Probably the one I'm remembering is Dan Bilzerian said this on Joe Rogan's podcast is anytime you're gambling or making a wager on something,

And I think this is true for all kinds of wagering,

Whether it's on the stock market or whatever.

If you're not playing with an amount that's high enough to you that is meaningful,

You can't really play.

Like you can't,

If you're a millionaire,

You can't play super low stakes poker and actually play because any amount of money is meaningless to you,

Whether it's winning or losing.

It doesn't trigger any feelings at all.

There's no sensation with playing the super low stakes when you're super rich.

On the flip side,

If you're buying in with all the money you have in the world and losing it would literally push you on the streets,

That's a level of tension that would probably cause most people to check out and make bad decisions also.

There's a sweet spot with stakes where there's tension,

It's meaningful enough that it feels good,

But it's not so high tension that you check out or it becomes so uncomfortable that you can't make a rational decision.

I think this applies to everything,

But sticking with poker,

I did notice because it's been a long time since I played poker,

I lost a bunch of money really fast.

I lost half of my bankroll really fast.

I noticed that the first bits,

Let's say the first 10%,

20% loss,

There was a lot of feeling there of like,

I got to get back up.

But at the 50% loss,

Because I lost about half,

It's like I lost so much that I actually stopped caring and I stopped being even more reckless.

I did some things that weren't smart that I almost lost everything because once I deviated so far outside of my havingness level,

My buy-in was around what I felt comfortable having,

Is what I had initially.

I started noticing myself making less rational decisions and going more into gambling and doing reckless things because maybe the loss was so much that I wasn't really able to feel the feeling comfortably.

I wasn't able to get off on it,

I wasn't able to expand.

I recognized this and I did what I could to snap myself out of it and really get grounded and be like,

Okay,

I lost this amount,

But losing the rest of it isn't smart.

I started playing a little smarter and I ended up winning back that money.

And I kept winning.

Part of it was I was being more grounded and rational,

But honestly,

I got a little bit lucky.

And then I ended up like,

That was the first week I lost.

The second week,

I doubled my bankroll in just a couple of days.

And I wasn't expecting that.

It was a greater amount of income that came in.

And I noticed myself,

Of course,

Going into some maybe diluted ideas of like,

Shit,

If I do this every day,

I'll be making way more than anything else.

I could become a professional poker player.

And I went into some of my old adolescent fantasies.

And then I also noticed,

I again started gambling.

I stopped making rational decisions.

And it was like,

I was willing to lose chunks with the hopes of these big wins,

But I was going all in or I was calling all ins in ways that didn't really make sense.

And I remember I was semi-conscious of this.

I was justifying it being like,

I'm so way up that I can handle a couple of losses,

Which was true.

But the result was I brought myself back down to my initial bankroll.

I ended up losing,

I doubled my buy-in and I basically lost it almost all,

Not completely.

But I got back down to maybe being 20% up instead of 100% up.

And looking at it now,

At the time,

I was at this point,

This is just last week,

I was preparing for this episode.

So I was kind of laughing at myself that I had forced myself back down to my previous,

My existing having this level when it came to my poker bankroll,

Because on some level,

I wasn't able to ground the sensations of having double the amounts.

I wasn't able to handle the tension of it.

So I found some way to literally sabotage myself back down by making dumb decisions.

So how does one get out of this?

And I'm using this poker analogy,

One,

Because it just happened a few weeks ago.

But also,

Given that it's quantifiable and the idea of stakes,

There are certain stakes,

Our having this can almost be defined by the level of stakes that we feel comfortable fluctuating it.

And to bring this outside of money,

Let's say it was respect or love,

There's a certain range of behavior that feels normal and acceptable with say,

How someone treats us on a date,

Or how a peer treats us when we meet them,

Or how our group of guy friends,

How they see,

There's a certain range,

Right?

A certain level of disrespect or uncool behavior towards us.

Most of us,

If it's too low,

We would have some reaction of,

Everyone deals with that kind of thing differently,

But we'd have some kind of corrective behavior of like,

Oh,

Yeah,

This is not cool with me.

I'm going to bring us back up to here.

Whereas again,

When the stakes,

It was like when we've bumped up to the big boys table in the poker casino,

That also can feel this discomfort of like,

I kind of want to go back.

In fact,

You see this in sports,

In combat sports specifically,

Where someone who wasn't expecting to be champ,

Maybe wins this upset,

Some huge underdog wins the upset,

They become champion at the division,

And they don't keep it very long.

And if you've watched UFC,

You've heard this from many champions who lose it,

Where they're almost relieved to not be champ anymore.

It's like,

I'll use one example of a fighter I really like,

Rosana Muniz.

She's probably the best female fighter at 115 pounds,

But she hasn't kept her belt very long.

Like,

She'll win it,

She'll win it like in an impressive fashion,

And then she'll lose it.

Like,

She lost it in a really weird way where it seems like she didn't try.

And then she actually said she felt relieved to not be champ.

It's like,

Okay,

Well,

These things kind of click from this lens.

So how does one increase their ability to handle the tension of higher stakes?

And it is gradually.

And I'll look back again at my friends,

Carolyn Elliott,

Through her existential kink model,

And Brian Bejan through his tension increasing grounding model,

Which is through the body.

If we're trying to change these very primal mechanisms where we were imprinted pre-rational consciousness,

We want to give ourselves exposure to feeling this new level of feeling until it feels normal.

So for myself,

I'm still a little bit up in poker,

And I'm trying to build it up and not enter self-sabotaging mode.

What I will do this next time is to try to spend more time accepting a certain level of winning before I up my stakes,

Before I think of trying to double it again.

Because I think that's where I kind of detached from reality.

It was like,

Oh,

Wow,

I doubled my bankroll in three days.

Let me do it again in the next three days.

And that wasn't really.

.

.

It caused me to make some dumb decisions.

I'll use an example with dating.

I have a friend who got divorced and back on the dating marketplace,

And he was very out of touch.

And he was going out with his single buddies,

And he couldn't even talk to a woman at a bar.

And he felt.

.

.

He basically.

.

.

He didn't put it this way,

But he told me about his experience.

I think he just kind of went unconscious.

The level of tension,

The level of feeling was beyond his normal because he literally hadn't been out talking to single women for years.

So I actually shared with him stuff that I learned when I used to help out at Fearless Man Workshops,

Brian Vision's company,

Where I was able to talk to women.

When that is too far,

When even talking to an attractive woman confidently is beyond a certain guy's happiness,

They don't use this term,

But beyond his ability to handle tension,

What they'll do is they'll bring him to the club or the bar or whatever and simply get used to feeling comfortable standing there.

Which if you compare this to the pickup artists,

Dating workshops,

The typical ones,

This seems kind of ridiculous.

They would kind of laugh at this idea,

But actually this is how one gradually develops the confidence to sustain this new level of confidence later.

To switch to a fitness analogy,

Papo Salstulin says progressive overload,

Almost always the idea of constantly increasing your weight,

Like how much weight you're lifting,

It leads to injuries,

It leads to problems actually athletically versus solidifying your gains.

If you bump up to the next heaviest kettlebell or the next level of weight for a certain exercise,

The best thing to do is spend a while,

It could even be months,

Solidifying the gain to where that no longer feels like a new stimulus to your nervous system,

To your muscles.

It becomes normal to swing the bigger kettlebell and then the next level becomes handleable.

Your body doesn't go into emergency mode thinking there's a brand new stimulus.

Same thing with social situations,

Same thing with expectations of respect,

Same thing with expectations of love,

Allowing yourself to be exposed over an amount of time where that can become your new normal as opposed to throwing yourself into the fire.

And as far as how to,

You know,

You're not just throwing,

How to experience it,

How to actually solidify the gain,

I'll turn to Carolyn Elliott's idea of getting off on sensation,

Right?

Did an episode,

I mean,

I don't remember how long ago,

On the idea of getting off in every stroke and what that means.

The quick refresher is the whole idea,

Even though it's,

You know,

A sexual analogy,

Is simply can you find a way to enjoy the discomfort that comes with a certain thing,

Whether it's an amount of money in either direction,

Right?

You know,

And being broke or making more than you expected,

Can you find a way to enjoy,

You know,

The idea is get off on everything.

Can you enjoy the sensations that come with everything?

Can you essentially,

Instead of contracting and resisting against a certain sensation,

You find a way to feel it intentionally,

Which allows you to relax,

Which in the more evolutionary lens that I'm using here,

It signals to those primal parts of your nervous system that you're safe.

You don't have to go into survival mode where you try to bring yourself back.

You don't try to use negative feedback to bring yourself back to the familiar.

Instead,

You're feeling it intentionally,

You're approaching it with,

You know,

Conscious choice of like,

This is going to be my new normal.

And then finally,

You know,

You know,

I spoke about a few points here,

The changing environments,

While changing habits,

The lowest hanging fruits,

You know,

Increasing your plasticity by either using heightened emotions from,

You know,

A crisis in your life is the easiest thing,

Or finding ways to actively heighten your emotions by,

Say,

Digging into your dissatisfaction of an okay,

But mediocre life,

Digging into,

You know,

Let's say,

You feel lonely,

But you find ways to numb that out.

But actually,

Instead of doing that,

Really digging into your feeling of loneliness,

Because not only will it inspire you to change and change that part of your life,

But also improve the plasticity.

The next thing related third point would be in like gradually increasing your sensation levels gradually,

You're increasing your ability to handle new levels of tension so that it feels normal.

And you know,

Again,

This is something I'm intending to do when I get back into poker,

I gave myself a break because I took some big losses last week.

But like getting used to winning a certain amount getting used to having a certain fluctuation of a certain amounts,

As opposed to going into,

Oh,

This is too much in either direction,

Too much loss,

Too much win,

Through grounding through getting off on the stroke.

And then finally,

I have to put this in,

You know,

So stuff you've heard before,

Anytime people talk about abundance and having this or exceed increasing expectation from a more spiritual lens,

But it's true,

Which is gratitude.

And I'll go beyond that,

Because of course,

We've all heard,

Okay,

Gratitude is important.

We all know this,

Right?

Not all of us put it into action.

So I hope I'm just gonna say a couple things that maybe will make it easier to put this kind of cliche idea into action,

Because the reason why gratitude is a cliche self-help idea,

Because it's universally a useful thing,

Right?

Is recognizing that,

I actually flip it to the negative side,

Which is gratitude and resentment cannot occur at the same time.

They're impossible.

Like these are mutually exclusive emotions.

And personally,

It's hard for me to remember to feel gratitude,

Right?

Like I journal every day and I can,

You know,

And I have done this before where I write out my gratitudes,

Kind of feels like LARPing a little bit where like,

You know,

Especially if I'm in like a higher brainwave,

More focused state,

Like,

Okay,

Yes,

I'm grateful for all these things.

It doesn't feel real.

It doesn't really feel like it's going in anywhere or personally,

You're like changing anything about myself.

Whereas it's much easier to recognize when I'm being resentful.

Anytime I'm complaining,

Anytime,

You know,

And the way I would functionally define resentment is anytime that you are blaming something outside of yourself,

Whether it's a person or a thing,

Specific or general abstract,

Like somehow you're framing your situation of this is why things aren't the way I want,

Right?

It's something outside of myself,

Right?

And this is maybe a slightly spiritual way of looking at it.

And I talk about this in the more spiritual episodes,

Such as the magician archetype episode,

Which is anytime you are allowing resentment in your mind,

You are also telling yourself that you don't have agency.

Obviously,

There's situations where you maybe you don't have agency.

I'm not saying that I necessarily believe that we are all literally masters of our universe,

Although I like to think that.

I think that is at times a useful perspective,

Although that can also become ungrounded and unhealthy.

But it's easy to recognize,

Like it's much easier to recognize when you're being resentful,

Anytime you're blaming,

Anytime you're like,

You know,

Like the situation or like this sucks versus recognizing that most of the time you do have agency,

Right?

And this is something I remind guys when it comes to relationship stuff and when guys reach out about their dating issues or relationship issues is that in any relationship,

You always have the opportunity to leave,

Right?

It might not always be pleasurable.

There might be things that are unpleasant when it comes to that,

Especially let's say you're married and you have kids like,

Okay,

There's a lot of negative,

There's a lot of pain and discomfort that would come with that.

But you always have the option,

Right?

So if you're sitting here resentful at your wife,

That,

Oh,

She's doing this to me,

She's this way,

She won't be such and such and like my life sucks because of it,

You are denying reality.

That's actually a delusion because if things are so bad,

You can leave,

Which I think,

You know,

Not to say that one should do that or threaten that or anything,

But to recognize that in yourself,

It makes you realize,

Okay,

If I can leave at any moment,

Then I can also do a lot more here or take a little bit more responsibility or recognize that I have a lot more agency here than my resentful thoughts are telling me,

Which to me is maybe a strange and roundabout way to getting into the feeling of gratitude of like,

Oh yeah,

I do have a lot going on for me.

Even when things suck,

You know,

You can feed the resentment idea or you can feed the fact that you do have agency,

Which is for me,

Maybe a more masculine or more like active,

Assertive way of looking at gratitude,

Which brings me to my last point for the episode,

And I think we're right hitting exactly an hour,

Which is when you're in that state of like,

Wow,

I have a lot of agency to do things in the world,

You can go in,

This is magician archetype stuff,

If you will.

You can exercise what Matt Cohen,

When he was on the podcast,

He calls the abundance model.

If you caught that episode,

I also did another episode explaining it called the abundance model on how when you're really in an abundance mindset,

You can give away the thing that you feel abundant about while feeling good.

When you're in scarcity,

Anytime giving away anything of that thing that you feel scarcity about,

It feels bad.

Whether if you feel scarcity around money to donate to somebody's GoFundMe or to give a homeless person in amounts that's significant or to lose a certain amounts in some playing poker or trading on a stock market or something like that,

That it hurts.

When you're really in the abundance mindset,

You can give it away,

You can say no to it,

You can encourage someone else to have the such and such thing because you feel full.

And what Matt Cohen talked about,

And you can listen to that episode if you want for the whole process,

He recommends kind of flipping the causality there where you create an abundance mindset in yourself by pre-tithing,

If you like,

With money was his example.

You allocate a certain amount of your income to always go to other things.

To maybe even making magic in the world,

Anonymously paying for a random person's dinner or something like that.

And I'll speak for myself,

Is when I do this,

Regardless of my financial situation,

It's almost impossible to not feel grateful and abundant.

It's like,

Because if I was,

It's like it violates your previous havingness,

Let's say,

Around scarcity about money,

Let's say.

You can't possibly,

The two actions,

To actively,

Randomly pay for someone's dinner and to feel scarcity about whatever amount is in your bank account,

Those two things can't exist.

So that actually kind of disrupts the scarcity side.

And I do believe that on maybe a more mystical level,

This does inspire perhaps the universe to give more to you,

But maybe on a more psychological grounded level,

You stop getting out of your own way and you're less likely to self-sabotage yourself down when you think that I always have so much that I'm able to give some percentage to making other people happy without even recognition for myself.

So that's what I got on having this.

Just one little announcement.

I did announce this live stream last minute.

So yeah,

We'll see.

I do plan on doing another one next week,

Maybe at a different time.

And I do want to say also the big thing coming up is that I'm planning on doing the Mask and Archetype Challenge,

Which I plug in most episodes,

Live again with a live cohort.

This is what I did in 2018 when I first launched it.

We did a group call in the beginning.

We went through the 21 days together.

We did a group call at the end.

And I was thinking I'd like to do that again.

So also for anyone who has already done it,

An alumnus,

If you signed up for the course,

Whether you did it or not,

You're welcome to join that for free.

Probably start last week of January or first week of February.

And one announcement,

Planning on doing the Mask and Archetype Challenge with a live cohort.

So when I first did it in 2018,

This is how we launched the test group.

We did a call in the beginning of the 21 days.

We did the 21 days together with group interaction.

And then we did a call at the end.

I haven't done it since,

But I feel called to do it again.

So one,

If you've already signed up for the Mask and Archetype Challenge at any point in the last couple of years,

And you want to do it again,

Or maybe you bought the program,

You didn't complete the lessons,

But you want to do it with a group,

This is a great opportunity.

We're going to start probably last week of January.

I'll announce it to anyone who's purchased.

And if you want to sign up for it now,

This is a great time to do it because it comes with everything as before.

Still comes with the free one-on-one coaching call with me.

But this time you can also do it with a cohort,

With a group.

We're going to do a group call the day we start and then a group call at the end.

It'd be great for interaction.

I think it's a lot more fun to do a program like that with everybody else.

So you can still sign up at maskandarchetypechallenge.

Com or ruwando.

Com slash archetype,

Or just email me if you have questions about it.

Hello at ruwando.

Com.

Thanks for listening guys.

And as always,

If you know anyone who would enjoy or benefit from this episode,

Please share it.

I'll see you next one.

Peace.