Awareness

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

Unachievable is what I call the process of re-wiring the brain so that it stops investing its energy in an endless loop of confusion that literally hides what is being searched for. Stress is often a sign that instead of dealing with reality, the mind is trying to secure what doesn’t exist, trying to control what cannot be controlled.

Locked into stress, unable to define what it wants, the mind circles endlessly trying to control the experience of being while al…

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

This book is called Unachievable because the attempt to secure a learned self-Identity will always lead to greater insecurity. Everything that serves as a proxy for this attempt will either be impossible to attain or will become futile. All wants that relate to controlling the experience of being are Unachievable.

Something magical happens when this is realised. Without the search, there is ONLY wholeness. Without thoughts fixated on being Someone, there is nothin…

Imagine we are an animal out in the wild. We hear a rustling in the long grasses that could be a predator. Ears prick up. Vision focuses and narrows. Sense of smell hones in. Our own movements get very very still. The whole physical, psychological and emotional system is focused on that danger. Everything is trained into discerning what it could be. The freeze itself is safety, minimising any disturbance that could lead to our detection. It is also a preparation for fight or flight, every sine…

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

Choices are happening all the time. Billions, trillions of them. At an organelle level within a cell there appear to be something like ‘choices’ about what micro-functions will be carried out, how and when. Then there are choices at a cellular level, for example, stem cells choosing what they will become.

Choices at tissue level dictate, for example, how the connective tissue in the skin reacts to a change in temperature. At organ level, there are choices which, for …

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

This is the saddest chapter of the book to write. Because Identity Wants are unrelated to current reality, because they are unfulfillable, because they look vital to survival they can result in a whole spectrum of harm to our own bodies, to other people, to animals, to nature.

There are no limits to the damage and devastation human behaviour can wreak in an attempt for the individual mind to find peace and wholeness. This is what we call having a lost mind: a mind th…

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

I recently watched the streaming series Love is Blind. For those who haven’t seen it, the participants interact with one another from individual pods in which they can hear their date’s voice but not see them.

Lines like those above were said at some point by pretty much everyone in the pods. They ‘fall in love’ with each other never having met, never having worked through any real-life situations. As long as they make each other feel special, then bingo! They get e…

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

It’s fashionable in coaching circles to focus on the ‘Why?’ inside the want. The ‘Why?’ relates to a personal, driving motivation. The motivation might be through the roof, but it is a survival motivation. The attention is not on the project. It is on trying to secure an individual Identity that doesn’t actually exist.

It’s a great idea to expose these personal ‘Whys’. It is not a good idea to take them seriously, as though they are something that can ever be achieve…

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

The other day a client said to me, “I just want to understand myself. I just want to be true to myself.” It led to an interesting conversation about what the self really is and what it means to be true to it. What are we? Are we the beliefs about what we are? Are we the behaviours, actions and words? Are we our habits? Our values? Our opinions? Are we the experience of being us? Our tendencies and preferences? Our personality?

It is amazing how through this work eve…

In their book, Stealing Fire, Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal calculate that the industry of ‘shutting off the self' is worth $4 trillion a year. They include all the activities, substances, experiences and practices that ultimately have the result of shutting down – even if only momentarily the burden of self-focus.

As they pointed out, many of these are ‘impulsive, destructive and unintentional’. They include activities such as legal and illegal drug taking, pornography and gambling which can, o…

The public speaking phobia continued through different jobs and roles. I scraped through the presentations I had to do feeling absolutely sick. 

At the same time, I continued exploring what the mind is, what reality is, what the idea of ourselves is. 

One day, I knew I was going to do a talk in my house for a small group of friends. The thought came in with dreadful inevitability. I felt sick at the idea of it and yet I knew it was going to happen. The same tensions aro…