Brian Johnson (Philosopher's Notes TV) summarizes and reflects on Michael Beckwith's Spiritual Liberation. He highlights central themes: discipline that becomes 'blissipline' through persistent practice; freeing oneself from the 'tyranny of the trends' of pop culture; reframing challenges as 'positive negativity' and treating mistakes as 'miss takes'; the difference between rudimentary (theoretical) spirituality and advanced (practiced) spirituality; and the distinction between personality (persona) and character (the soul's imprint). Johnson weaves quotes from other teachers (Lao Tzu, Seneca, Howard Thurman, Joseph Campbell) and points listeners to the Philosopher's Note companion for deeper remarks.
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Hey, how are you? This is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to do one of my favorite books, Spiritual Liberation by Michael Beckwith. You might know Michael from the Secret. He was one of the main guys in the Secret. He's got a great church out here in Los Angeles called Agape and and Trans denominational church. Super energetic guy, one of the most plugged in guys I've ever seen. Amazing guy. So as always, we've got the book, we've got the Philosopher's Note where we will go off on some of my favorite big ideas. The book's packed with big ideas and the Note has a bunch of awesome big ideas as well. We're going to look at a few of my favorite ones. So to get right into it, first big idea here is an idea that discipline is leads to blissipline. And Beckwith talks about how important it is that if we want to transcend the merely and purely egoic relationship to life and live from our authentic self, our highest expression of ourselves, we've got to have discipline. Now, a lot of people, for whatever reason, have a negative experience in relationship to discipline. And he says, look, we have to have discipline if we want to create the spiritual freedom we want to see in our lives. And the fact is that as we practice discipline and do the things we love to do with diligence and patience and persistence and playfulness, it turns into blissipline. So discipline turns into blissipline. I love that idea. And I talk about how Lao Tzu talks about the importance of discipline as well as Seneca and a couple other teachers. All the teachers talk about how important discipline is, but I quote a couple other ones here that you might enjoy in the notebook. So discipline leads to blissipline, which leads to just freedom, the ability to freely express ourselves. But that takes an attention to rituals and the things that we need to do to really plug into our highest selves and live from our authentic selves. So we can talk about that for a weekend, but we'll buzz on to the next one. Beckwith talks about the fact that we need to get free from the tyranny or tyranny of the trends. So modern society and pop culture rewards all kinds of stuff that's constantly bombarding us, right, in all the magazines and TV shows and commercials and movies and stuff like that. Tyranny of the trends, he calls it. It's all the stuff that we really don't want to be doing a whole lot of. We want to plug into the highest selves we possibly can. So we talk about that more in the note. Another really cool idea is positive negativity. Positive negativity. Oftentimes we see all the challenges in our lives as purely negative. And Beckwith says, no, no, no. A lot of times we can look at them and see, actually always we can see the positive in the negative, right? How can we see that some of the most challenging times in our lives have been the most transformative? And then when we're going through a challenging time, we don't need to suffer quite as much, right? Or even really at all. We can see the positivity in the negativity. So in the note, I ask you to ponder what is an event that you're going through right now that you're seeing as exclusively negative? And can you pull back and see the positivity in that negativity? It's a really cool practice. And we know that when we look back on our lives, Whether it's over five years or 10 years or 15 years or 50 years, we can see that often at the time, the most challenging events have been the most transformative and the most beautiful, and we wouldn't remove them from our lives for anything. So how do we appreciate them now and really redefine our relationship to them? Positive negativity. Great idea. He has an awesome idea on the fact that enlightened beings, even enlightened beings, burn their bagels on occasion. I love that idea. And he says that anytime that we make a mistake, right? Or a mini failure, whatever, a mistake is only a miss take, right? So we miss the take. Big deal. You know, have fun with it, look at it, laugh and say, let's try it again. Let's do another take. Really cool idea. Ms. Take. I love that. And now I want to focus on a few of my really, really favorite big ideas. So Beckwith is all about practicing the things in which we believe, right? And he says that it takes practice. Practice, practice, practice, practice. Which is a theme we come back to deliberately, again and again in these notes. So he says, though, something that I love. A couple things, actually. One, he says, rudimentary spirituality is theory, right? So talking about these ideas, theoretically, having fun conversations, dialoguing about them, that's all nice. But that's rudimentary spirituality. When you're just talking about it. Theoretically, advanced spirituality is practicing this stuff. It's actually embodying it. It's living it, right? That is advanced spirituality. I love that. So rudimentary spirituality is thinking about it, talking about it theory. Advanced spirituality is Practicing it, embodying it, living the ideals, being in integrity. So what we believe in is what we do. That's advanced spirituality. Really, really cool. And he says that if you don't practice what you believe in and all you're doing is consuming. So you consume this and all, you know, hundred notes and all the books that you read and all the workshops you go to, and all the DVDs are CDs you watch and listen to. That's all great. But if all you do is kind of ingest it and you don't live it and practice it, it's like being spiritually constipated. Spiritual indigestion and constipation. He's got a great quote on that. I just love it. So in order to have good spiritual bowel movements, we need to practice this stuff. So there's indigestion, constipation that comes when all we're doing is being in our heads and just consuming, consuming, consuming. We've got to practice it. I love that idea. Apologies for that visual. So another idea that's really powerful is this idea of personality versus character. So personality versus character. And this is a theme we come back to again and again, too. But apparently the word character is grounded or is actually from word. Where's it from? The French word which means imprint on the soul. Isn't that amazing? So character comes from the word that means imprint on our soul. Isn't that cool? So characters are deepest sense of self, whereas personality is really like a mask that we wear. Persona. Right. Which is. Yeah, it comes from the word Persona, which was a mask worn by actors. So personality is the mask we wear to kind of impress other people. Right. Character is the imprint on our soul. It's our deepest sense of self. And we talk about this a fair amount in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Stephen Covey says in the intro quote I pulled out for that note, he says he's not interested in most of the modern self development literature because what it's doing is teaching us how to put on a better Persona. It's teaching us how to become better personalities. But he says that true growth only comes from character development. It only comes from embodying these ideas that we really believe in. That's character development versus personality development. So we really want to kind of quit looking for the get anything quick, whether it's rich or healthy or whatever personality fixes and work on our character, work on the deepest part of our souls. And as we do that, all the things we are chasing after come to us more effortlessly. Really cool ideas. We embrace diligence, patience, persistence and playfulness and build our character. Really cool idea. Beckwith also talks about the importance of being radically alive. And as we look at things and see the positivity and negativity and we actually practice these ideas, we get rid of and get free from the tyranny of the trends. We have the opportunity to be radically alive. And he says we're called to be radically alive. And he shares a great Howard Thurman quote who says, don't worry about what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and do that? Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. Really cool idea. Oftentimes we look from the outside in and we're like, what does the world need from me? Whether how can I make money? Or how can I serve? Even that's noble. How can I serve and how I can make money is often noble as well, in different ways. One other conversation. But the idea of what makes us come alive, when do we feel most vibrantly alive? Doing that is what the world needs. And as we do that, we naturally serve the world. Really cool idea. And I quote Joseph Campbell here as well, who talks about how important it is that more of us discover who we are, what we really, really want to do in this world. And we do it now. As we do that, we inspire those around us and do the same. Big idea. So there you go. Michael Beckwith. Awesome guy. Spiritual liberation. Hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more with.
