What Makes A Meaningful Life With Arjuna Ardagh

Arjuna, thanks for being here.

Hey, it's great to be with you, Mike.

All right, well, I thought the way we'd begin this is I just want to ask you a question which is tell me a little bit about the big project and the quest you're on right now. What are you trying to do worldwide?

Boy, I could give you a sort of, you know, media ready answer. I could give you the honest answer from my heart. What would you like?

Well, the way I'll set this up is. Why don't you begin? You know, the whole concept behind Capability amplifier is our goal is for our listeners to listen to your brilliance and get like a cartridge style upgrade to their skills and capabilities.

That's the goal. But I want you to speak from the heart, obviously and tell me what's really going on.

Sure. I think there are two like massive contexts in which we could place that. Okay, so imagine like, imagine a little ant who's trying to make its way from A to B. And so it's, you know, and it's trying to carry bread from A to B, you know, a little piece of bread. And so it's working its way, doing that. But now imagine that ant is actually on a high speed train that's going from Frankfurt to Paris. It's the ants activities within its own world of moving the bread from its from one place to another is absolutely irrelevant relative to its actual movement through space from one place to another, because the high speed train makes its own efforts irrelevant. So if we can extrapolate that to what we can do with our lives, you know, how we can amplify our capabilities. There are two massive contexts that we overlook. Okay, One massive context is what is actually happening to humanity and to the planet at this time. That, you know, we can, we can express this in many ways, but essentially we are faced with various kinds of crises that are completely and utterly unprecedented both in their, in their global nature and in their severity. So you and I can do various things to become more capable in various ways. But if, if we're not actively addressing the predicament of the global crisis, then whatever we're doing, it's like making a little more money on the, on the card tables while the Titanic goes down. You know, the Titanic's going down anyway and your winnings will not mean very much once you're in the water. Right? So that's the first big context is unless our capabilities are aligned with the well being of generations not yet born with, they're somewhat irrelevant. Second big context is something that Actually, you and I have talked about personally and privately is you've talked to me about how slowing down and relaxing and doing less actually ushers miracles into your life. And that's actually the big. The big myth that we often overlook, in my opinion. As, you know, as doers, as entrepreneurs, as capable people, we think that everything is the fruit of our actions and our intentions and our doing. And we overlook the fact that a lot of the greatest miracles that come out of our lives come when we're still and when we connect with a source bigger than our own minds. Right. Yeah.

You know what? I liken that too. And I'm curious what your perspective is. I call it the compression cycle, which is the way a combustion engine works is four cylinder is it sucks in fuel and then it does a compression cycle and then the explosion and then another cycle and it spits out the exhaust.

Right.

Or when you compress a spring. And what I've been thinking of meditation as and still time is a compression cycle. And the longer you're willing to wait and the more you're willing to pull back and the more patient you are, you're generally rewarded with great things because you have time to make fewer mistakes and be more thoughtful.

Absolutely. And the brilliant cycle that I want to share with you today is exactly, exclusively, totally, exactly about that, about the very, very precise mechanics of that works. So it's great. You great. You brought that up.

All right, so let's. I think the other thing that would be interesting from a contextual perspective is who's Arjuna? First of all, where's that name come from? What? Where are you from?

How? I was born with the name Nicholas.

Okay.

In England.

All right.

Yeah.

I did not know that.

Yeah, not many people do. But, but there are things I tell you I don't tell anybody. Mike. There we go.

And.

I was in India in. What was it now? In 1991, and I had a. I wouldn't really call him a teacher. He wasn't a guru in the conventional sense. He was more like a really good friend. And after a particular sort of transition or growing up happened in consciousness, he suggested I took this name. And I've since then written many books with it. So, yeah, that's my name now, Arjuna.

Okay, I didn't know that. So the next question then is, tell us a little bit about your background just to contextualize some of the other questions I'm going to ask you.

Well, I went to Cambridge University in England, studied English literature. I had a deep, knowing sense of Something bigger, more meaningful, more liberating. Went at that time then to India right after university.

Really immersed myself in my 20s in kind of spirituality, in exploring the outer dimensions of consciousness. I then got interested in hypnotherapy and I trained a lot of people in hypnotherapy.

I became concerned. It was clear to me that when people can connect with the bigger mind, when people can actually transcend their fears, their prejudices, their immediate greed based desires, when someone can connect with the bigger mind, with something bigger than their immediate kind of preoccupation, they become way more influential, more powerful, they have more, Their life has more depth and meaning. But I was very concerned by the hierarchical and often kind of woo nature of, in which all of that is often disseminated. So in the mid-90s, I started a school, a coaching school, which was really the first sort of awakening based coaching was called awakening coaching. And I trained, I've trained 2, 000 coaches to be facilitators of awakening. And all of those coaches are doing their thing now and then to really fast forward. Three years ago I was, I was in a car accident where the car was like crumpled. I mean really if it was looked like a piece of paper that you really crumpled up. But miraculously I was not hurt. I was not physically hurt. But it did initiate a really deep. It initiated a kind of PTSD period of a few months where I just couldn't move. And during that time it wasn't really a choice logically. I just realized I couldn't, I couldn't actually run this coaching school anymore. It was just, it was, for whatever reason, it was complete time for reinvention.

Huh?

And out of that emerged an understanding which really emerged on its own. It happened while I was laying in a dark room trying to get over my ptsd, while I was lying in this darkened room for about three months. This, this, this model emerged of what is first of all what really creates a deep meaningful life which perhaps we can talk about for a moment. What really creates real, real deep meaning, Purpose, energy, connection. And then what are the components of that which can allow people to switch on brilliance? By brilliance I mean innovation, like innovating in a way that is evolutionary. What allows that to not become the shake of a dice, but actually can become predictable. Great.

So maybe the best place to go from here is let's talk about what makes for a great and a meaningful life. What's the definition of that? And then let's dive into your process because I think that's what's going to at least get the left brains and the greed glands going?

Well, it's going to give a lot of very, very powerful takeaways that are very, very practical. Okay, so in terms of meaning, okay, there's a lot of mythology that we share about what meaning. And a lot of the mythology is marketable. So for example, I mean, the most obvious one is back in the 80s, really leading up to the crash, you know, or 90s, actually. Leading up to the crash was the idea that if you just make more and more and more and more money, your life's going to get better and better and better and better and better. There's been a great deal of research now, particularly done by the center for Positive Psychology at Penn State, where they've, they've demonstrated this is completely false. If you actually take. They have 22 measurements of. Well, this is. Martin. Martin, My brain's not working.

I could find it.

No, it's okay. Martin Seligman. Yeah. Okay, so, so 22 measures of well being which include things like the likelihood of drug addiction, how close you feel to your children, or whether you have alienation, how, you know, how long marriages last. There are many measures of well being, stress indicators, 22 of them. They correlate with money. If you go from like 25 to 30,000, then you make more money, you make 5,000 more in the year. All your wellbeing indicators go up. That levels out in America, it levels out at about a hundred thousand. In Europe, a little less because of nationalized medicine. So when you've got nationalized medicine, you've got that cushion. Your well being levels out earlier. So when you get to about a hundred thousand, it doesn't make any difference anymore. You could make, you could go from 150,000 a year to 200. None of your wellbeing markers are changed anymore. But here's the shocker, right, that nobody expects. You get to a certain point, which is up about 250 or higher, actually starts to go down. In other words, you're making more money. This is just statistics. You make more money, the chances of drug addiction, of divorce, of stress related illness, et cetera, all increase. Right. So that's just a quick myth buster, right?

Oh, interesting. So maybe a way to look at it is if there's lots of drugs available for the rats, the rats will eat them.

It's like the abundance of money. I could see say that in Jeff. Yeah, I got it. Yeah, there's, there's actually another guy, Oliver James, one of the most Sort of prolific popular psychologists in England wrote a book called Affluenza which documents this very well. Right. So you can see money and well being go with a bell curve. So that's a quick myth busted. We could do, we could bust myths all over the place. There's the soulmate myth. The idea that if you just find that there's one person walking around in this sea of humanity who's got your happiness in their back pocket, and you better hope they don't sit down before you meet them because they've got the key to your well being. Well, that clearly is not true. Right. People find their soulmate and so you meet somebody, oh, I found my soulmate. And then, you know, a year later, well, didn't quite work out, you know, so clearly the soulmate myth is nonsense. Then there's like the.

Longevity wellness myth, you know, that if you can just be like perfectly healthy, you know, just, you know, that, you know, there's one absolutely predictable result to everybody's wellness story, that it all ends with a phenomenon called death. Right? So you're going to die whether you like it or not. We could keep going. We could keep going. There's, you know, getting your name on the New York Times bestseller and, and I think you and many of our colleagues have explored these myths to their, to their ultimate extreme. And gone. It was empty. Look at Marcia Weider, you know, she's like, it's just. It meant nothing. I put all my energy into. It meant nothing, right? So I did some reverse engineering during this time that I was laid up. I did some reverse engineering because I've done a lot of interviews. I'm a kind of bit of an interview junkie. I've done 470 interviews with amazing people. And I reviewed all of these interviews I'd done to think, who are the people who are unconditionally fulfilled? In other words, just. They get out of bed feeling life is meaningful, life is good, plenty of energy, relationships are flowing on their own, Money comes and goes, but it's not in their crosshairs, right? So people like Lynn Twist, people like John Gray, actually just people I knew who just feel good, feel fulfilled no matter what. And I thought, what do these people have in common now? I was looking for one element. I thought, what is the magic key? But then a couple of months into this inquiry, I had an aha. That I realized it's something like health, right? Something like physical health, that when you think about health, you know, what's important with health. Got to go to the Bathroom every day. You've got to have like good elimination habits. But you don't want to spend your whole life in the bathroom. Right? You also need to eat well. And those are opposites. Putting food in at one end of the chute, taking, taking stuff out at the other end, those are opposites, but you need them both. You see what I mean? Equally, you could say, well, in order to be healthy, you've got to get a good night's sleep. If you don't sleep for several days in a row, you're going to be wrecked, right? But that doesn't mean you want to spend your whole day in bed. You also want to go running, which is the opposite. Right? And we could think of lots of opposites. You need alone time, you need company, etc. So I, then I realized, and this took me a while for this to click, that incredibly, people whose lives are just overflowing with meaning and purpose, right? First thing is the key ingredient. The driver is not romantic love. It's not money, it's not fame. It's actually. Drumroll. Contribution, right? When somebody finds a way to make a significant contribution, whether it's local or state or national or global, their well being is a pretty direct byproduct of contribution, of changing things for as many people as possible for the better. Okay, so the question comes, how are you going to live a life of contribution? Many people say, oh, I want to lead a life contribution. I want to find my purpose in life, right? So this is where this cycle came in that I came to understand that a life of contribution, a life that I would call radical brilliance of being, of being, of having ideas no one's had before that make the world better for everybody, not just for you, is actually the product of several value sets which contradict each other.

All right, I know you've got a slide to show that'll probably get this thing rolling. So you want to dig in and.

Should we jump in?

Show us. Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so I'll bring up the screen here and you can just flip through.

So there it is. We'll just sit with this on for a while. Right, so this shows. Actually you could see it looks something like a clock. Okay. Okay, 12 is at the top, three on the right, six at the bottom, nine on the left.

Okay, so purple, orange, blue, brown.

Those are the movements. Yeah, so let's first of all just ident identify four stations and then we'll talk about. Actually, you're never really living at a station. You're always Moving. So let's identify four stations, then we'll talk about how they move. And this is all tied to brain chemistry and practice. It's, I mean it's, it actually fits the. Once it, once you, you get the point, it clicks very well.

Okay, so, so is it fair? So you've got science to back this up and research.

So there's a book called Radical brilliance which you, which you have, which has a chapter called your brilliant brain. And it's got all the brain science in there. Yeah.

So for our friends at home. And then I'll, I'll show this here, here's book. I'll make sure that we've got information in the show. Notes for. Beautiful. So, yeah, keep on going here and I'll alternate between you and the actual slides.

So let's go through these stations very, very briefly. So up at the top we've got 12 o'. Clock. And that's characterized by what we could call moments of awakening. Now that sounds a little woo woo, but it simply means moments when you transcend the usual constrictions of thinking and reactive emotion. Okay, so that could happen in some kind of spiritual thing like meditation, but it could equally happen skiing off a cliff. You know, that's why people do that. Right. It can happen through having a great orgasm and sex. It can happen through psychedelic substances. There's lots of ways to have moments that transcend the usual constrictions of your mind. But that's one component. Moments of awakening, when you recognize the nature of consciousness, when it's not constrained within worry and.

Kind of limited thinking. Right. Okay.

Okay. So cycle two.

Well, we're not going through cycles now, we're going through stations. So that was 12.

Right.

Then we'll come back through cycles. The next one is three. The next station is three. And those are moments of maximum creative flow when just stuff is just pouring through you. It's like the musician who just can't stop playing. Somebody who's automatically writing, they're writing all night. William Blake used to write all night. And in the morning there was a stack of perfectly rhyming, perfectly alliterated poetry that he just channeled it. So this is station 2. The 3 o', clock, which is the next station is moments of creative flow. These are moments. Now we go to the bottom, six o'. Clock. Moments of very high productivity. When you're getting a lot of things done. You're meeting deadlines, you're fulfilling agreements, fulfilling contracts. And the last station we're going to identify is at 9 o', clock, which is actually moments of deep humility where you're very much connected with and aware of your limitations as a human being. You no longer think you're the, you know, the bee's knees. You realize that there are significant debilitating limitations in your. Which you've described very beautifully, where, you know, you realize as a person, I'm kind of limited, but I'm capable of being of service. Okay, so now let's go back through it and talk about movements. Because in fact these are stations, but rather like a train that passes through a station and doesn't stop, right. You're actually moving through these stations all the time. So the first movement is, as you can see, is the orange arrow in the diagram. And that's the movement from awakening to flow.

Okay?

So that means that's how moments of transcendence, instead of becoming an end in themselves, become the basis of flow. And you can see in this diagram, you can see it's an arrow which is tiny at its origin and fully expressed at its destination. Right? So this is how in moments of expansion there are tiny impulses. You've described this in your own experience. Little intuitions, little impulses which so often get ignored if we're too busy. But if you pay attention to them, like, ah, there's a little something there. It's like a, like the faint whisper of a violin coming from across the valley.

I call them downloads. And what I, and how I've had them described by other people is if you wake up in the middle of the night and you don't write down your download, you forget it in the morning. And oftentimes these are where some of the biggest. Yeah, I know. For me, the foundation of a great marketing hook, a book idea, what have become great products and great speeches have actually come from my nighttime downloads.

Exactly.

Somewhere between my dream state and my awakened state.

Right. They come, they come very subtle, you know, very hard. You can easy to. It's not just in the middle of the night, but it could be, you could be, you're driving and there's just like a, like an intuition. Right. Okay, so the movement from 12 to 3, that orange arrow is the movement from that tiny whisper to giving it attention, feeding it with attention, giving it space so it can build into music or great. A great idea, a great book, a great, A great product, a great. In a technology innovation. So when we get to 3 o', clock, you're in full flow. One particular kind of flow, one particular kind of creativity is what we call intention. And that is a creative act. An intention is a creative act. Right? Okay. Okay. Just like music's a creative act. The. The impulse that comes I'm going to in the future. That is a kind of creativity. So that's born at 3 o'. Clock. So that's like creativity with future Velcro to it. So if you have the creative impulse now at 3 o', clock, let's make a CD. Like, you know, you've been jamming, you're moving from 12 to 3, you're jamming, the music's great. Like, whoa, guys, let's make a cd. Now you enter into a new phase, different brain chemistry from 3 to 6, which is getting stuff done. And it's all about operating within limits. If you want to get stuff done in the world, you've got to sign contracts. You're going to have budgets, you're going to have deadlines, you're going to have agreements. You've got to do.

That's really what they are. Right?

You've got to do what you said you would do on time or you mess up. Right. So that's the movement from 3 to 6. Now just. I'll do a quick retrack on the brain chemistry. The movement from 12 to 3 is the play between serotonin and dopamine. Okay. Up at 12, it's mostly serotonin with tiny releases of dopamine in the pre synaptic neurons. So tiny impulses, tiny releases of dopamine, but highly receptive.

Neurons that are receiving that. So tiny release of dopamine creates strong subjective experience. As you move around to three, you get much stronger releases of dopamine that don't produce such strong subjective experience because the receptor sites have become less attuned. Okay. So it's a little bit like the difference between hearing a tiny violin. One violin note. And feeling being moved to cheers and standing in front of the speakers at a rock concert and hardly feeling any emotion at all. Okay, all right, Got it. Now, the movement from 3 to 6 is. Starts actually run by hormones. So in a man, it's the movement of. Or in a more masculine style, it's run by testosterone. I got to get this done. Nothing's going to stop me. We're going to break through. I'll stay up all night. I don't need any help. Thank you. I got this. Right? That's testosterone style. Oxytocin and estrogen style is more about. We're a team. I got your back, you got mine. We're going to do this together. You can feel we're supporting each other, but either way, whichever way it goes, as you get closer to six o' clock on here, your brain starts to be taken over by the, the, the neurotransmitter neuroadrenaline, which is like the brain's equivalent of adrenaline released by the adrenal glands above the kidneys, right? So this is where you're feeling like, whoa, you know, we got a deadline, we got to do this. It's where you start to experience stress, okay? But all of that is about getting things done. And if you don't have that part of the cycle, you can have all the creativity you like, but no one's ever going to know about it because you've got to actually commit to producing things in time. Okay, the next. Now we move from. And this is a little. The one that's. At least. It's most difficult to understand because we don't talk about it much. But the movement from 6 to 9 is actually what happens after accomplishment. Okay? Now there's a guy in the late 20th century.

Who, Gregory Bateson, who wrote a book called towards an Ecology of Being. Right, was an ecology of mind, right? And Gregory Bateson recognized this phenomenon called double bind. Double bind means if you're going to operate within limits, which is what we're doing at six, you are going to be faced inevitably with impossible choices. So if you fulfill this.

Aspiration, you're going to, you're going to somehow fail at that. So if you really make tons of money and do your business really well, your family life may suffer, right? If you really take care of your body and really make sure you get plenty of rest, your commitments may suffer. If you really take care of the shareholders, your long term employees may not. You may have to sacrifice. If you really take care of your employees, the shareholders may not, et cetera, you're faced with double binds, right? And what it means is a confusing thing. However well you do, as you get a little bit past 6 o', clock, it is inevitable that you are going to feel some experience of regret, shame and failure, which are commonly regarded as negative feelings, right? But when we understand this cycle, you'll see that they are really actually essential feelings to have sometimes, right? Because you can't succeed at everything at the same time. So you have these feelings of, ah, I can't believe I did that, I kind of messed up. You feel bad about yourself, right? And that becomes visceral. If it's just mental, it doesn't do anything. But if it actually Goes in your body, you feel like ugh. You know, you feel like ugh, which you've described to me. That is how we learn and grow, okay? And if you don't have that part of the cycle, you. You end up just regurgitating the same old thing over and over. So from six to nine is how we go from feelings of regret and remorse, passing through learning into humility. Humility at 9 o' clock means wow. Now I realize I'm doing my best, I'm well intentioned, but I sometimes make mistakes. There are some things I know, there's a whole lot of things I don't know. And, and therefore I'm. I'm kind of available, but I'm not everything I thought I was when I was at 3 o'. Clock. Full of creative flow, right? So 9 is a state of humility. This is coming back to the brain chemistry. The movement from 6 to 9 starts with the rebalancing of parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system activity. Okay? So right after 6 o', clock, you see, you've been pushing through to get something done. At 6, you've been sympathetic nervous system dominant. So it means if you want to go to the bathroom, you've repressed it. Okay? If you're hungry, you've repressed. If your eyes get itchy because you need to go to sleep, you repress it. When you finish your deadline, you suddenly you get what's called parasympathetic flooding, right? It's like suddenly you feel way more tired than the new expected. Suddenly you really need to go to the bathroom. And if that builds up over months or years, you have a breakdown because you've pushed aside all those not only bodily but psychological impulses. Suddenly you feel terrible. Really terrible, right?

It seems like when people have thyroid issues, it's from blocking that. That's at least my. My guess.

Yeah. One of many. Yeah. There are many, many ways that we can get health and balance through too much sympathetic nervous system activity. It's stress, basically. Yeah, stress. So you get parasympathetic flooding. And if you allow that parasympathetic flooding to do its work, as you have very nobly in your own life, if you allow to actually inform you of what you should be doing, you start to take better care of yourself. And slowly, as we get to 9 o', clock, you build up the neurotransmitter GABA in the brain. Now, gaba, which is naturally produced by the body, you can take it externally as well, but it's naturally Produced by the body. It's the brain chemical associated with the feeling. I've done my best, right? I deserve to rest. I've made mistakes, but I forgive myself. And as an overflow of that forgiveness, I forgive other people too.

So is it a form of the way you experience it, A form of like internal compassion and empathy?

Yes, absolutely. Nine o' clock is where compassion and empathy happens. It's like, you know, I, I've done my best, but it allows you to, to relax. It also allows you to be carried by something bigger than yourself. So at nine o'clock now, it begins the next phase of the cycle. At 9 o', clock, you start to have the intuition of something bigger than your own mind. If you turn that, it's just an intuition at the beginning. If you turn that internally, you, you start to have a longing for peace, a longing for silence, a longing for kind of awakening. If you externalize it, it becomes devotional and you start to think about God and what is really running all this. Right. As we move from 9 to 12, it's the movement from humility back into awakening. And similarly, there are two. There are two styles of this. One more masculine, which is internal, which is more like meditation, inquiry, finding stillness in yourself. One is more externalized, which is more wondering. How did the wings on the butterfly get so beautiful? That didn't just happen through random, random. I mean, that's art. There's art in nature. Who's the artist? Yeah, and you also talked about when you relax, miracles start to happen that you didn't make happen. So we start to get an intuition of some benevolent, intelligent force bigger than the human mind. And that's the movement from humility to awakening. Now, if we can live that cycle, awakening, building into creative flow, creative flow becoming intentions, turning into practical results, which inevitably leads to learning. We have the humility to digest the learning and the learning leading to humility, which returns us back to awakening. If we can live that cycle on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on an annual basis, during the life of a project, in my opinion, that is the recipe to become a radically brilliant human being who is in service to the well being of humanity, not just today, but for future generations.

Okay, so my question then is, in your experience or your opinion.

You know anyone who's a biohacker, for example, someone who's looking to do optimization, they're going to be like, all right, how do I optimize this? Is there a way to stimulate it? Is there a way to control it? Is there a way Exactly. And how.

And I would imagine there's micro versions of this going on all the time, as well as a macro version, which, let's say, for example, my objective was to write a new book or create a new product or create a new presentation or maybe a preparation for a podcast or whatever it is.

But how. What is there an optimum time cycle for this that the body recovers from? It can rejuvenate with its chemicals. And you know, one thing I've noticed as a for example is like, I didn't drink coffee for 25 years and then I invested in bulletproof coffee and I started drinking it because one thing I, I learned about myself, I have a strange absorption. Caffeine in me are weird. And if I drink coffee, like, if I go to Starbucks specifically and I drink it like daily for a week, I get excruciating back pain.

Yeah, Kidneys.

Okay, that's, that's, that's, that lasts for about three weeks and, and I have enormous anxiety. I notice. I, I get pissy. You know, I'm just, I'm angry and, and, and I don't sleep well, etc. It's cumulative.

Can I drop in a quick, friendly, friendly tip? Okay. There's a product you can buy called Rasa R A S A and then it's coffee, but it's K O F F E E. Right. To distinguish it. All right. It's an adaptogenic drink. It has no coffee in it. It has adaptogens in it. So chugga, for example, and drinking this drink in the morning will actually completely 100% antidote everything you've just described.

Wow. Okay.

It's an adaptogen, so it supports your body to actually do the opposite of what you're describing.

Well, here I'm going to finish the story because I want to compare it to what you're talking about. Yeah, go ahead. That was super useful.

Yeah.

And it is. What I found is I started drinking bulletproof and I didn't have whatever this pain is. So Dave Asprey, the founder, says, well, it's because there aren't the mitotoxins and toxins and stuff like that. All right, well, here's what I do notice, though. If I drink.

Some coffee, I definitely experience euphoria. Definitely improves my ability to concentrate, focus, get stuff done. I'm happy and I'm definitely more creative. It is definitely a cup of happy. But I can only have it at most once a day, and probably every four days is my ideal cycle. So my question going back to is there a brilliant cycle that is optimal. So what might that be?

Great. So actually there are cycles within cycles, right? So I would say one thing is we do want to make sure that we touch every point in this cycle each day. And in the book, I give you actually a rat. I give you a sample daily routine. Like here's, you know, there's one chapter, it says, you know, here's the way you can organize your day to make sure you touch in all this during your day. Okay? So the best way to do that is during sleep. You are unconsciously going into 12 o' clock anyway. But it's unconscious because you go into dreamless sleep, right? So it's not that big a deal to go from unconscious to conscious. All you got to do is, is to combine the deep. Well comply combine the deep theta now with a little bit of Alpha 2. If you bring in the Alpha 2 along with the theta, you've got consciousness, right? Emptiness.

And so we can, we can hack that with a variety of devices and.

Supplements don't even need devices. You can use devices. I've got a chapter in the book called how to sit right. Makes it really simple. It's like forget meditation, just sit right. Anybody can sit, right. And it actually gives you a really simple guide for how, how you can get to stillness every morning that anybody can do. Okay. You just got to simplify it and not get too ambitious about it. Anyway, the point is we can. 12 o'. Clock, the ideal time to go into 12 o' clock is very early in the morning. The earlier you can wake up, the better. I get up about 4:30 in the morning, I wake up, I drink some lemon water because that actually gets the liver active, you know, so you, you're not so sleepy anymore.

Cleanses the liver. So 4:30 in the morning, I mean as early as you can, you want to, you want to try and do this before sunrise. You sit, I sit for about an hour, but half an hour will be fine, right? Just sit, just sit and observe. And there's, there's, there's instructions in the book. I've got a very simplified version of how to get, take all the ambition and complication out of meditation and just call it sitting, right? So the, the 12 to 3, you don't need very much of this, you know, if. So long as you touch into each part, you're good. So 12 to 3, you could just spend 10 minutes after sitting doing some automatic writing or, you know, or work walking with a voice recorder. But you want some time after the sitting to warm up. That spaciousness and turn it into some kind of not doing, but some kind of just allowing the perfume of that creative energy. Now if I'm writing a book, I'll spend my whole morning in 12 to 3. But you just want to touch into it for at least 10 minutes. Now three to six, you don't have to worry about that. Everybody's doing that all the time, right. So you know, basically from about nine o' clock in the morning till six in the evening, you're going to be in three to six getting stuff done. Unless like me, I'm a writer, so I spend a lot of time in 12 to 3, but I make sure in the afternoon there's at least some time for checking my email and checking off boxes. Right? Right. Three to the. At six o', clock, where you learn from mistakes. Very simple. It's all in the book. Very, very simple. Practice you can do super simple. You just need five minutes, right? Five minutes will do it. At the end of the day you stop and you just stop and reflect. And people do this anyway, as your energy is dropping a bit, as the sun goes down, what's something that I did today that I regret I might have been, that I hurt my own body? Maybe I was abrupt with somebody, maybe I didn't keep my word. What's something that I, that I, that I don't feel good about? And then you can ask yourself, you know, not just cognitively, but then you, you shift and notice how that feels in your body. Right? It's very important, the physical aspect of it. Do you actually feel that? No, we don't want to do shame all day, but five minutes of shame in the evening is kind of healthy. It's like where you want to get to that feeling of, oh, you know, that you really, you have that visceral feeling of regret, like, oh, I wish I could, I wish I could do that again. That's important because that makes it real learning, not just head learning. So then you can ask yourself, okay, how would I do that differently? You know, and what, how do I intend to do that differently tomorrow? Now of course we can spend longer. You know, if you go to a psychotherapist, you might spend an hour in that and you might have a whole day, you know, where you, where you really go into self reflection. But five minutes a day will make sure you pass through that part of the cycle. And finally towards the end of the day you can, as you enter into sleep, there are ways that you can get from 9 to 12, right? So we can Loop back into this later. But yes, the cycle happens on a daily basis now. Okay, you mentioned hacking. So let's move on then. Okay, let's move on because we've got the basic idea of the cycle and let's see if we can kind of make this very practical now. So I'm just going to move ahead and you can see that in reality, okay, what. What this really looks like is something like that. Okay, so the. In theory, we've got this cycle. In practice, what we've got is a bunch of obstacles. You know, I've illustrated it with road.

Signs, you see, so old clothes, squiggly, slippery, detoured, you know.

Oh, that's right. A lot of people are listening. Yeah, yeah, they're listening. Yeah, exactly. So in reality, what. What this cycle looks like is not just how life happens, it's actually how life gets blocked. This becomes a really accurate predictive tool that coaches can use to see how brilliance actually gets blocked. And it gets blocked in one of these segments. So it's not just random. We've identified four kinds of blockage and they all exist in all four quadrants. So four times four is 16 styles of royally screwing things up. Okay, 16 ways, 16 styles that we can be not brilliant. If we can understand that and realize it's not just that you're not brilliant, you're specifically having a blockage of brilliance in this cycle in this way. Once we can have a predictive tool for that, now this becomes a really beautiful, accurate map for hacking, as you said, for biohacking, for habit hacking, for. Because here's the thing.

When you apply any kind of practice, whether it's a substance that you take a supplement, whether it's exercise, whether it's keeping your word, whether it's forgiveness, apology, whatever, any practice is going to be really useful in one part of the cycle and super not useful in the other. And that's the whole problem with hacking is people will, you know, people will just. Oh, well, just experiment, you know, just try this out, everybody. But if you might end up hacking in something that you're already imbalanced in and making it even more imbalanced. So that's where this cycle becomes useful, if you understand it. And it becomes a really useful tool for coaches, because we can see that if somebody aspires to make a contribution, if somebody aspires to make the world a better place, then the motive to hack is not just, you know, to get more money or be more successful or push your book up. The motive is to become the very best version of yourself, which I know you've been through a very powerful process like that yourself, you know, a journey of becoming the best possible version of yourself so you can make the greatest contribution. If we aspire in these times where things are unstable, if we aspire to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem, this becomes a very, very useful way to see exactly where the brilliance is being blocked and to be able to remedy it very effectively, very efficiently and gracefully with the right hack applied in the right way.

Interesting. So I have one question that I think will kind of bring this thing home.

Yeah.

And that is in my own reinvention over the past, it really began about two years ago, but I know some of the big stuff happened in a compressed time period.

Very inspiring, your story. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Congratulations.

Thanks. Well, in the. In the quest and working on this, what I found.

Is what happened for me is I went through a period of time where chemically I felt off and my soul hurt. I explained that in an interview we did together. And anyone who's listened to this podcast knows a little bit of my story. But here's what I'm curious about is what made the biggest difference was deep self reflection and ego deconstruction, or ego death was. I realized that lots of. I didn't. This took a lot of work, but it ended up being old attachments, old traumas, old stories that didn't serve. They were like corpses and phantasms that were either dragging me or I was dragging them.

Got it.

And they're like landmines and roadblocks. And when I. After working with an enormous number of high performers. And again, I'm going to measure them in terms of dollars on one hand, but I'm talking about ultra high performers, multi New York Times bestsellers. They could be ye mega athletes, celebrities, also the extreme wealthy. And I'm talking the billionaire class. And I've worked with a fair number of them. What ends up blocking them is these layers of trauma and getting rid of the. And somehow creating a garden that is ripe for ego death. So it's sort of like the nourishment.

Can I give you my little.

I want to hear your perspective, what that is and maybe how to use your cycle to create.

A fertile ground for conscious ego death that allows true transformation to occur. So your next tier of contribution can actually occur.

Well, I want to just. If I may, first of all, I just want to give you a very quick little perspective on ego. Okay. Because I think it's important because there is a central misunderstanding that happens about ego that really makes things overcomplicated. So where, you know, a lot of people are listening to this. So I'm just going to. I'm going to take my pen now.

Now.

Okay, what do you see here?

You're drawing a circle over and over.

And you see a circle.

Okay, so circular movement with your pen, right?

Well, yeah, but most people, especially if it's in the dark and I take a. You know, sometimes I do that in the dark and I'll take a lighted pen. People say, oh, there's a circle. So then I stop moving. I say, well, where did the circle go? Right. And of course, the circle doesn't exist independently of the movement of the pen. Right, right. So that is an important insight to have about ego. Right. The e. The word ego is describing a pattern of thought and emotion, right?

Oh, yeah.

Okay. It doesn't. It's not a thing. Right. It's describing a kind of movement, a kind of behavior. So you could. You could be. You know, somebody could be. We could use the word ego relative to someone's behavior. And then in the moment their child gets sick and they go in and they're hugging their child and they're completely full of love and compassion. Where did the ego go? It's not like in now. In the closet. There is. So the ego is a kind of behavior. Right. And it's the byproduct of behavior and stories. So as soon as we stop selling the story, the ego is not there, you see? Okay, that's great.

That's great.

So we don't. You can't really kill something that doesn't exist. Something can't die if it doesn't first exist. The way to be free of ego is to see through its story, not to actually participate in its death. Because you can't kill something that's not there in the first place.

You stop identifying with a framework.

Right.

It's an identity. It's. I. I get it. That's a great, brilliant explanation.

So what that means is then it's not a thing that has to die. It's behavior that has to relax. You see? And that's where the 6 to 9 really kicks in. If we just. Basically, if you just hang out in six to nine and involve yourself in six to nine type activities, which you have, there's going to be parasympathetic nervous system activity increasing. You're going to relax, you're going to feel pain you haven't been willing to feel.

You'll Crack humility.

You're going to forgive yourself. You're going to get happy, you're going to love people, walk more. The people around you are going to feel more loved. You're going to become a good person. You're going to realize that you're fueled by something beyond your own mind. Problem solved. You see?

So it's also just a matter of just recognizing these patterns. And I don't know if you share the same love of it, but the book Letting Go had a huge impact on me. It's David Hawkins, I believe, also the power versus force. But that really comes down to recognizing emotion not as being part of you, but a guide and letting it pass through instead of becoming attached to the feeling, just recognizing and observing it. And that's when I say ego, death. It's more of a thing that controls you, that you don't understand. And a huge part of what I'm hearing here, what I love about your framework is it's a pattern that you can help usher and move along and recognize the pattern. Go, oh, I'm going through this right now. So the, you know, what is a lack of ignorance is just a knowing and a recognition and seeing the patterns. It's like, great. Being a historian is super useful to not making big dumb mistakes over and over again, if you're intellectualizing it.

So, you know, we all of us go through our different kinds of evolution. You know, we're all of us growing in different ways. Sometimes we stagnate for a while, but eventually we all grow. You've grown a lot in the last few years, you've told me. And, you know, we all of us grow. It seems to me that although we're all growing in our different ways and on parallel paths, you know, there is a kind of a. There is a kind of a realization that we all arrive at eventually. You know, there's a kind of a fruit to all human evolution, which I would say is the recognition that we are actually being danced more than we are dancers. We're being danced by a music that is. That is huge, that is universal, and that we are actually all of us, kind of. We're like waves of that ocean. And when you arrive more and more in that recognition, there's tremendous forgiveness because you realize the only problem really was thinking you were separate. And then all of this stuff and all of this, like, struggle and I've got to fix it. It's just the result of one simple misunderstanding of thinking you're separate. And when that relaxes and you realize that you're being danced. You become inevitably part of the solution. You become an instrument of love, an instrument of goodness, an instrument of making the world better, an instrument of caring for people you may not even have met yet.

Really, really good. And therefore contribution.

Contribution.

Bringing it all back for all.

Contribution.

Yes. So my final question is how can we as listeners, viewers, best serve you? Where do we go to learn more other than. I'll put the, the, the link to the book in the show notes.

Well, you can serve me by serving you.

Okay.

And serving life. Right. So if you, if you'd like to drop by radical brilliance.com there's all sorts of, of, of stuff I would be delighted to share with you as a guest. So there's a, there's a, you can, there's a, like a five day little introduction to Radical Brilliance. It's completely, there's no payment for it. It guides you through all this in more detail.

Detail.

There's stuff to read, there's some videos to see, there's a podcast with brilliant people and there's no money charged for any of that. So come to radical brilliance.com and there's, if this attracts you, there's lots of resources that can help you to explore this more deeply. And of course, the book is on Amazon. Right.

Rock and roll. Well, thank you, my friend. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much. All right.

Sam.