Deliberate Receiving Page 3

  Over time, you’d have sorted out all the icky buttons by marking them, leaving only those buttons that yielded the tasty stuff when pushed. This would be a pretty good system unless…

  There were more than a few buttons. What if there were millions of buttons, instead of just a few hundred? It would take a LONG time to try and mark them all. And if the number of buttons was infinite, you’d never be able to get it done.

  People weren’t inclined to try ALL the buttons. It’s likely that after a sufficient number of buttons had been marked, people would seek to avoid getting any stinky foot mush by sticking to the part of Vending Machine World that’s mapped and not venturing into uncharted territory.

  Not everyone had the same sense of taste. What if what some people considered red-dot worthy wasn’t to others? What if some people actually liked stinky foot mush? If newbies were simply taught not to push the red buttons, they would never have a chance to find out.

  The content behind the buttons changed. If the buttons were marked and never pushed again, how would one ever know?

  The system was not as simple as it was presumed to be. What if buttons could be pushed in combination, yielding different results, while society assumed that only one button could be pushed at a time?

  And finally, this would be a good system if your goal were simply to avoid the icky stuff. If you actually wanted to find the best of the best, however, this system of elimination of what is unwanted would be highly inefficient, especially when coupled with the idea that there are more than a few buttons.

  We’ve been living in a society that’s based on eliminating what’s unwanted: one that assumes that we all want the same things (same sense of taste); one that teaches new generations what to avoid (never pushing those buttons again to see if anything different squirts out); one that is based on the assumption that someone else’s observation about how the system works, made years ago, is how it actually is now; a system that’s geared towards avoiding stuff we don’t want, instead of towards finding the tastiest morsels possible.

  Now, imagine that one of the designers of Vending Machine World came along and gave you a User Manual – a technical guide to how the vending machines work and how to find what you’re actually looking for. A handbook full of hidden buttons, hacks and descriptions of delicious foodstuffs you hadn’t even heard of. Would you read the book? Would you actually apply it? Of course, if asked this question, just about everyone would say yes. And yet, in the ‘real’ world, most people, when faced with this exact same scenario – the chance to apply a totally different method to getting what they actually want – will scoff at it, run away from it and possibly even forbid others from reading it.

  I refer to people like that as living in the ‘Old World’ paradigm or thinking ‘Old World Thoughts’. This isn’t a judgement, just a differentiation. There’s actually great value in that paradigm (more on that later), but we are now living in a time when more and more people are opening themselves up to the ‘New World’ paradigm, where they can access ‘New World Thoughts’.

  The Old World is all about avoiding pain (avoiding the red buttons), staying safe (don’t stray from the mapped areas, you might encounter stinky feet mush!), limitation (avoid the red buttons and teach others to do the same) and conformity (we all have the same taste).

  The main theme of the Old World is pain minimization.

  The New World is all about seeking pleasure (finding the buttons that yield the really tasty stuff), adventure (push all the buttons! See what happens! Charge into unchartered territory!), expansion (question observations, gather new data, draw your own conclusions) and individuality (you have the right to like stinky foot mush even if I don’t).

  The main theme of the New World is pleasure maximization.

  Of course, this New World isn’t really new. It’s the world we could’ve been living in all along. So, why haven’t we? Why did we forget how it really works? Who took all the labels off the vending machines and hid the user manual?

  There’s value in the fog

  Consider that reality is like a game: the best, most awesome, most advanced, most kick-ass, full-immersion virtual reality game EVER. Go ahead and geek out a little, if you need to. I won’t judge. When you play this game, you create an avatar (a wee human, for example) that can experience this video game reality as ‘real’, with feelings and stress and love and pain.

  Now consider that, while playing this game, you have the chance to explore different aspects of your personality, of who you are, by placing yourself in different scenarios. We’ve all done this; we’ve all imagined how we’d react in hypothetical situations. How many times have you seen a report on the news and declared confidently, ‘Well, if that happened to me, I would’ve been way cooler about it than that idiot was.’ But how can anyone ever really know how they’d react unless they’ve actually lived that experience? How can you know how it would feel if your boyfriend (or girlfriend) cheated on you unless you’ve gone through that? You might like to think that you’d automatically leave or forgive him (depending on which one of those appeals more to you), but because nothing is ever black and white, your decisions would depend on a whole host of factors. How long you have been together, for example? Was it a fling or an affair? Do you love him? Do you want to make the relationship work or were you actually ready to leave anyway? Does the fact that he cheated make you feel insecure about yourself? And, most importantly, does he have a six-pack? (If yes, send pics please.)

  You can pretend that you know exactly how you’d react, if something like that happened to you. But the truth is, you don’t. You can’t even imagine all the different combinations of parameters involved, or how you’d feel about any given one. In order to truly know how you’d feel about it, you’d have to live it.

  Enter the game. By placing yourself in different scenarios, in a way that feels real to you (because how can you fully experience something if you don’t think it’s real? There’s a difference between watching a movie of someone being kissed and actually being kissed), you can truly know how you’d react in any given situation. You can know yourself more fully.

  Now, imagine that you’re able to create more than one avatar, giving you the ability to experience yourself from any angle, as a serf in 14th-century England, as a Viking warrior(ess?), as Cleopatra or Antony, as a surfer dude in California, as a stockbroker on Wall Street in the 1980s, etc. How would YOU react in any one of these situations? Well, live it in the game and wonder no more!

  Of course, this is a game that never ends. Every experience you have gives birth to a new desire. What if the scenario had been only slightly different? What if this time round, you played the game as a man instead of a woman? What if you lived it in a different country? What if this time you were rich?

  This is, essentially, what we are doing – WE are creating lots and lots of avatars, all with their own perspective, their own consciousness, at many different levels of the game, who enter the illusion of reality in order for US to experience OURSELVES fully from every angle.

  The ‘fog’ we enter, the one that causes us to forget who we really are, as well as the fact that we are playing a game, is what creates this illusion. Without it, we couldn’t experience any situation as real. It’s not the same if you know it’s a game. An actor in a play may feel some of the drama he’s experiencing, but nowhere near as fully as if he doesn’t realize that it’s just a play.

  Waking up

  Knowing it’s a game, however, doesn’t end the game. It merely changes it. While there’s great value in the fog, there’s also great value in waking up from that fog: it offers up a whole new set of experiences. When you know who you really are, when you know your power to control your virtual reality world, it’s like playing a whole new game. It’s a whole New World.

  I like to describe the process of waking up like this:

  Imagine that you’re a world-class tennis player, only you have amnesia, and you don’t remember that you know
how to play or even what tennis is. You find yourself on a tennis court and suddenly yellow, fuzzy balls come shooting out at you. Some of them even hit you. You feel fear and panic, wondering what the hell is going on. You might stomp your feet and demand that whoever is lobbing those balls at you should stop. And maybe be sent to prison. Hell, let’s just outlaw tennis balls while we’re at it. That’ll fix it. Only, that doesn’t work. The balls keep coming, keep hitting you, making you angrier and angrier.

  Finally, in a rage, unable to take another second of this crap, you pick up a nearby tennis racket and wildly swing it about. At some point, you connect with an incoming tennis ball and it flies off into the distance. ‘Huh,’ you wonder. ‘What just happened?’ You swing some more and hit another tennis ball. You suddenly realize that you’re not powerless, that you have the ability to defend yourself. As your pent-up rage comes flying out, you really let those tennis balls have it, whacking them into the distance as hard as you can. This feels good!

  After a while, you get a bit tired of angrily smacking at the incoming obstacles, so you begin to play a little. Can you control which direction a ball goes when you hit it? Why, yes, you can! Can you control the distance? Can you put a spin on it and make it fly off in a curve? How accurate is your aim? As your muscle memory takes over, you begin to feel the power and skill you have – that of a world-class tennis player. Your mastery becomes apparent. You no longer mind having tennis balls lobbed at you, in fact, you welcome them. And you don’t want the easy ones, either! ‘Bring it on,’ you yell, happily, enjoying the challenge. The game that used to terrify you now thrills you.

  That’s what it’s like to wake up from the fog. A world that once seemed random begins to make sense. An environment that once seemed mean and unfair now becomes a joyful challenge. Obstacles that once seemed painful are now a welcome part of the game.

  You are like that world-class tennis player. You are a master creator; you just don’t know it yet – or any more. You’re not here to be taught a lesson or to pay your dues or to prove yourself worthy. If you weren’t worthy, you wouldn’t even be in the game (because it’s YOUR game! It’s all for YOU!). You’re here to experience and to play. And while the obstacles coming at you in the fog can be scary, they don’t have to be. They can actually be part of the joy. It’s all a matter of remembering who you really are.

  There is value in forgetting, but there’s even more value (and more fun) in remembering. And while that wasn’t possible for most of humanity until now, at this point in our human history, we are experiencing a mass awakening. And yes, that includes you.

  If you’re reading this book, you’re coming out of the fog. You’re starting to remember. You’re ready to cross the threshold, where you go from the Old World with its focus on pain minimization into the New World, with its focus on pleasure maximization.

  Playing the game consciously

  You see, when I mentioned earlier that each experience spawned a new desire (‘What if I lived that life as a woman this time?’), it may have seemed as though I was saying that each experience spawns a whole new life, a new avatar. And while this is certainly true, this spawning process also takes place from moment to moment.

  Each experience you have creates a new desire, which you can then choose to experience, right here, right now. If you eat some chocolate ice cream, you’re going to have a reaction to that experience: you’ll either like it or not. This will cause you either to want more chocolate ice cream, possibly with sprinkles this time, to try a different flavour, maybe strawberry, or never to eat ice cream again. Even if you hated the ice cream, the experience will give you information about what you don’t like and what you want instead (something less sweet, less cold, less chocolaty, etc.).

  Even an unwanted experience gives you more information about what you want or, in other words, spawns a new desire.

  In fact, this is how new desires are created – you have an experience, and by its very nature, it causes you to want something. Even when you like something and just want more of it, it leads to an evolution of that thing. For example, if you love driving fast, you’re not going to drive at the same fast speed down the same stretch of highway. You’re going to push that speed (which changes or evolves the experience), and find new and different roads to drive on (which also changes or evolves the experience). You’re going to be driven (see what I did there?) to keep making the experience of driving fast bigger, better or more intense.

  This is the real-time version of ‘What if I did it differently this time?’ You don’t have to die first and come back as a new avatar (this isn’t actually how it happens, but that subject is way beyond the scope of this book). You can live that new experience right now.

  This is also why nothing is predetermined (don’t think I didn’t know that you were wondering about that). Your birth, the situation that you’re born into, is just a starting point. From then on, you get to make new decisions on where to take your life in each and every moment. In fact, the game depends on your ability to experience any desire you create. Each experience begets a new desire which, when lived, is a new experience, which begets a new desire and so on.

  When we wake up and begin to play the game consciously, we can choose to live those new desires at will, instead of just hoping they’ll someday come true.

  The problem arises when we choose not to live our desire, but instead, choose to live the experience that creates that desire over and over again. A new desire is created each time we do, but if we don’t move towards it, if we don’t go with it, it’s like hitting the replay button on an old experience. You drive that same stretch of road at the exact same speed every freaking day. Oh joy (sarcasm alert!).

  That’s when the game sends us a message because this sitting in idle isn’t at all what the game is about. We don’t want to just sit there treading water. It’s no fun to run on a hamster wheel and never get anywhere. If you were truly playing a video game and your character was just running in place, it would get pretty boring pretty fast.

  The game’s built-in feedback system

  And this is exactly how the game gets our attention. Boredom is the feeling we get when we sit idle, when we live the same experience over and over again, without making a change. New desires have been spawned, even if it’s just ‘I don’t want this any more’, but aren’t being chosen. Boredom is both the antithesis and mother of evolution and innovation. It’s the antithesis because when you’re on repeat mode, you’re not innovating or evolving. It’s the mother because when you get bored enough, you’ll find it so excruciating that you won’t be able to help but make a change.

  Haven’t you ever had the experience of being some place you didn’t want to be? Maybe it wasn’t even bad, but just some place, well, boring, like a class or a job. Didn’t the boredom get bigger and bigger until you just wanted to rip your hair out? Didn’t you look for any way to distract or entertain yourself so you wouldn’t have to experience the boredom any more? Didn’t you get to the point where you just couldn’t wait to get out of there?

  When you’re sitting idle in the game, you get bored. If you continue to sit idle, you’ll get even more bored. In fact, the boredom will build until it turns into frustration and anger. The time will come when you won’t be able to take it any more and you’ll do something about it. You’ll make some kind of change. You cannot sit idle forever, because that’s not what you came here to do.

  Think of it this way: imagine that your avatar is bouncing around in their own little reality. They run around having experiences, creating new desires and then living them, which creates new desires and so on. Let’s say that for every experience they have, they get an ‘experience point’. The more experience points they accumulate, the more ‘life’ they have and the better they feel. Think of it as a bar at the bottom of the screen that grows with each experience.

  Now imagine that when your character sits idle for a time, the experience points start to decrease. When an experience
creates a new desire, that desire floats in front of your avatar like a little coin, ready to be plucked out of the air. If your avatar plucks the coin, one experience point is gained and the character goes on to experience that new desire. If the coin goes to waste, if it’s just left there to rot, an experience point is lost. You gain points if you pick up the coin and lose points when you don’t.

  When your character’s ‘life’ starts to go down, they start to not feel so good. Instead of the vitality they experience when the experience bar is at full force, they start to feel kind of weak and sickly. The lower the point score, the worse the character feels.

  Let’s say that your avatar falls into a deep pit, where she just runs back and forth. This experience causes her to want out of the pit. A new desire coin is created and floats in front of her. If, however, she doesn’t pick up the desire coin, but instead just keeps running back and forth, her experience points will decrease. Each time she has the experience of running back and forth, a new desire coin is released. Each time she doesn’t pick that one up, letting it rot, her score goes down and she starts to feel worse.