201. Andreas Phelps | The Sacred Practice of Integration

Hello, Book Thinkers family, and welcome to our personal development podcast, Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books. During each episode, we interview one of the world's top authors, and as a listener, you can expect to discover new books, new mentors, and new resources that you can use to achieve more and live better.

Hello, Book Thinkers family, and welcome to our personal development podcast, Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books.

In today's episode, we have the pleasure to interview Andreas Phelps, author of The Sacred Practice of Integration. Andreas is the principal and founder of The Collective Potential, a catalyst for change at the organizational, project team, and individual level. He has worn many hats throughout his life, being a structural engineer, forensic scientist, sustainable systems designer, researcher, human systems developer, general contractor, trainer, facilitator, sociotechnical integrated systems thinker, listener, provocateur, Storyteller, work therapist, scalability consultant, systems optimizer, learner, annoying question asker, and when the pressure is right, sometimes a maker of diamonds. Through his work, he strives to understand as much as he can about nature, inner and outer, the relationships between elements and creative ways to manifest our collective potential. In this episode, you'll learn about how Andreas got into spirituality and what it has to do with the day-to-day life, how in paradox we progress, How to lead change, how you already know what you need to, the importance of transcending the limits of who you thought you were and becoming something greater, why you should have gratitude for everything, even the bad stuff, and why ego may not be the enemy. This episode is packed with value and we learned so much. I cannot wait for you to listen. We had a great time talking with Andreas and he is an absolute wealth of knowledge for progressing every part of your life. Now get ready to learn and enjoy this incredible conversation with Andreas Phelps.

Andreas, welcome to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books Podcast. I'd like to do a little bit of a different intro today. I want to read from pages 25, 26, and 27 of your book to give everybody a little highlight as to who you are. You have this fun exercise that you take people through called True Original Nature, where you sit down and you ask them to think of a few characters from stories that resonate with them and You make a cool point that 5 different people could choose the same character for 5 different reasons. So be it. But it's a cool exercise, and you highlight some of the people that you resonate with. And once you do that, you take a composite of all the characters, and you kind of mash them together. And for you, there are 3 things that you found. One is liminal. You like to operate in the space between worlds and move freely between them, which I think gives a really cool insight as to who you are. 2 is knowledgeable, unconventional yet meaningful insights, which we're going to have a lot of today. And the 3rd one, which is what I want to continue to talk about after I read it here, is paradoxical. You say you want to transcend the world of opposites, and in some cases we can even distill the composite characteristics down to a single image. You highlight a man who lives at the edge of town. He goes into the wilderness and learns about the mysteries of nature while also going into town and learning about the mysteries of human nature. And that captures Luke really well. I think that captures me really well as well. So let's start there. How do you describe yourself and what do you want to riff on related to these 3 subjects?

Yeah, that's great. Thanks, Nick. And I'm happy to be here. Yeah, that exercise, there's a couple of things about that exercise that are really interesting. As I said, you know, different people could pick the same character, but What's important is why they picked the character. And for them, it could be totally different reasons. Like, that's the resonance of, like, they saw this character on the screen or in the book or whatever it is, and something resonated with their, you know, authentic, original nature. And that's what the important thing is to distill out. So, yeah, the— that image of the man that lives at the edge of town, that's something that has been really helpful for me, you know, throughout my entire life, especially when it comes to difficult decisions or— areas of ambiguity where it's not really clear, like what the right direction is. Right. And so, um, that idea of paradox, I think it was like Niels Bohr, the particle physicist, I think on the door of his lab, it said where there's paradox, there's potential for progress, right? Like when we get to something that we can't reconcile, then there's an opportunity to actually, you got to take a step back and try to figure out what's a paradigm that actually includes both of those, not an either or. And even like, you know, in the times that we are now, it's really easy. People wanna polarize. It's, it's like cognitively simple for them just to say that one's wrong, this one's right, right? And I can double down on that. But to actually take a step back and say, okay, how do, how do I find some sort of notion that reconciles both of these things, that allows both of these things to exist at the exact same time? And it's still true, right? So I don't know. I mean, that didn't really give you much more insight on me, but maybe a little bit about what goes on in this brain of mine and how I see the world.

Oh, I think it does, you know, and we have the next 30 to 40 minutes to kind of explore you and your brain a little bit more anyway. I think one of the reasons that it resonated with me is one of my favorite characters who I thought of instantly when I was doing the exercise myself is Maximus from Gladiator, Russell Crowe's character. And the movie kind of kicks off. He's like a retired military guy living on the edge of town, focusing now on his family. He's gone through this transition, but he gets pulled back into it, and he needs to exact revenge. And in my head, like, I always think of that on the edge of town type person. I also resonate with that message because in the world of personal development and reading as a way to improve yourself, I'm always balancing the need for progress and validation with the need to be in the present moment and enjoy the passage of time. And it's fun to balance the desire to do more, to serve more, to be more with also sitting in the present moment. So anyway, it's that paradox thing that just fascinates me so much. I'm sitting here today with Ken Rusk, who has done hundreds of millions of dollars in business. He's also sold tens of thousands of books and changed countless lives. We're sitting here today because he is sponsoring today's episode. So Ken, tell everybody about your course.

Well, thank you. I built a course called The Path to a Successful Life. It's designed around trying to get somebody unstuck. You know, sometimes you're feeling like you're kind of stuck in where you are. You're not really sure what you want your life to look like or how to go about getting it. Well, for the cost of about dinner and a movie and maybe the time you spend on a weekend, you can know exactly what you want your future to look like and how to go about getting it.

You know the power of vision. That's why you watch podcasts like this. So click the link below, get signed up, and let me know what you Yeah.

Well, and I mean, even just your example with Maximus there in Gladiator, I mean, who's the character that comes up in a lot of people's 3, right? But for different reasons. I mean, you look at what happened to him, and we talk about this in the book. He was happy. He was totally content. He had this amazing military career, and now he was just wanting to focus on his family. But then, at least in that story, Life happened, and it forced him to go in this whole different direction. And it can be uncomfortable. I mean, there's someone that I've listened to talks of hers, and she's like, yeah, everyone wants life to be easy. Life's not supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be meaningful, you know? And sometimes it's unlikely ways that kind of pull us out of our, you know, nice comfortable little zone and force us into something where we have to actually take a much bigger manifestation of what our purpose is, right? So that's sort of an interesting thing when you look at some of these challenges and stuff. that come up in life. It's like you didn't— you never would have wished them on yourself or anybody else, but when they come up and you have to deal with them, can you see them as an opportunity to transcend the limits of who you thought you were and actually become something much greater, right?

Yeah, you're totally right. Life happens. Who are some of the characters that resonate with you today?

Well, they're in the book. I mean, you know, they probably hold true. So yeah, there was the first one was Doc Holliday from Tombstone. If any of you were watching movies back in the early '90s, that was a favorite of mine. And, you know, again, there's this thing of like, he's sort of like, he's not playing both sides. He genuinely has like friends and relationships on both sides of that, you know, of that conflict that's there. But he's, he's his own person, you know? And then the other thing was the unlikely knowledge. Like, you know, he's like a drunk cowboy playing classical music and reciting Latin, like, at the bar, right? And it's like, who would have thought those 2 things could come together in, like, a single human being? But that, that's, you know, and neither of those things play well with one group or the other. So it's something that's kind of, like, authentically him. So that was one. I mean, Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings was the other one. And then William Wallace's character from Braveheart. And, you know, again, it's all like, there's a nice little section in the book that kind of unpacks all those. But yeah, so if you mash them all together, I think they look like this. I don't know.

I love it. I'm working on the beard as far as Gandalf goes. The Gandalf.

There you go.

Andres, I love that you, you know, every great story has struggle. It's something that I just recently like came to the realization of because I was looking at my life and I'm like, oh man, it would be nice if it was easy. It'd be nice if it didn't have this problem. It'd be nice if I didn't have that problem. But then I think it was a tweet or something, just somebody just said that. And like, I feel like your life and what you're talking about is kind of a similar thing, right? It's like you need to have that struggle in order to get to the next level of you, to push yourself to the next level. Now, you're quite the paradoxical character yourself because you're a structural engineer, but you're also this very spiritual guy that's a very deep thinker. So I'm so curious, how does somebody who's in construction and in this whole world of, you know, hard guys, like, get into this spirituality stuff?

That's a really good question. I mean, like everybody, you know, our, our life has this trajectory, and we don't know what it is like on the front end, right? We think we know what it is. But then there's all these turns that make us go way to the left or big correction that has to happen or whatever, right? And so You know, so when I look back, it's like, you know, I started as a structural engineer doing mostly building forensics. So it's like we're trying to understand how buildings work, trying to understand how to reflect that into design, how that design then gets built by people that actually have to like do things with their hands. Like it looks good on paper, but how do you get your hand back there to like make the attachment or whatever it is? And then when something goes wrong, you can learn from it. So that was like Let's just call that like version, I don't know, 3.0 of where I was in my life. So it was that holistic thinking, that like looking at the whole picture of needing to understand the science, how science comes together in design, how design comes together in means and methods. And then when something's wrong, what do we learn about all of those things? And I was in all these meetings with people, a bunch of brilliant people sitting at a table trying to solve problems. And I realized that sometimes when I say something, it seems to resonate and add value, and we have a really good creative synergistic conversation. And in other times, it's just noise. Like, it just— like, it was like it was never said. And I'm like, this is happening for me. It must be happening for other people as well. So I went back to grad school and I just studied what are the dynamics that happen in diverse teams, like where people are coming together, they all have different perspectives and experiences and values. And what allows 1+ 1 to equal 3 instead of like 1.5, which is what it usually adds up when we're working together. So I studied that. That was mostly with healthcare teams. Healthcare project teams. And, you know, so it was the— and what came out of that was actually the importance of behaviors, right? So holistic thinking was something that I really learned in the first part. The importance of behaviors rather than just tools and strategies was this— it was the second part. Then I had to do that in practice. So I worked for a large general contractor, one of the biggest in the country, after they had acquired a bunch of companies, and I was trying to help integrate them from a cultural standpoint, but also like a best practices standpoint. And then the lesson was really like, this is a great idea. Like, we figured it out, but how do we implement this at scale? Like, how do we get people to, like, the whole company to be understanding and doing these things? And that was a really big challenge. And then I started working on my own, and I was helping other organizations go through these big cultural shifts. And, you know, like, I had all the tools and the tricks and the facilitation techniques and all that. And what I really realized is that if you're going to ask people to go through a change, especially a transformational change organizationally, they can't really do that with integrity until they've transformed as an individual, like they've gone through some internal transformational shift, because then they know firsthand what it takes, right? They know all the resistances, all the excuses, all the things that come up that keep you from really wanting to lean into what who you want to be and who you, you know, are destined to be and keep you small. Right? So, so the last couple years I've really focused, it's been mostly with like executive teams or even thought leaders within companies of like really understanding what that's like to go through a transformation yourself, a meaningful transformation yourself. And then it becomes a lot easier to try to drive that externally. Right? And this is something that I, I say a couple times in the book of like, All the knowledge in the world is already within each of us. You know, we just have to uncover it. We have to like study our own experience, learn from it, try to figure out like how that's relatable or scalable to others. But like the more curious you are and the more, you know, seriously you kind of take that study, you can almost do anything. You know, I mean, physical limitations aside, right? But like you can understand and you can own with integrity. Those things if you care to spend enough time and it's important enough to us, right?

Yeah. This is such a fascinating topic. I have like 100 questions that I want to ask to follow up with that, but I guess I'll start here. So, you know, BookThinkers is actually, we're going through some change right now and I'm really curious how, okay, we want to change, right? Ourselves. But how do you get others on board as that change goes? I mean, do you like try to coach them through their own transformational change? Like how do you, go about that? Or is it just all about your own individual self? Like, how does that work when you have a large team that you're trying to make changes for?

Yeah. And I mean, in the first 2, like, major sections of the book, I kind of touch on this, right? Which is the only place where you have complete control and complete agency is in your own experience, right? Like, that's the only place we like to think we have control over others and over external factors. We don't, we might be able to influence, But we don't have control there. So the place where you have 100% agency and control is with, with studying, changing, and transforming your own experience, your own relationship to yourself, to others, to the context around us, to the world around us. So that's the place where you can, where you certainly need to work. From there, you actually, I mean, I know it's a, it's a Kind of a common thing to say, lead by example. But that's where you're genuinely leading by example. Not like, hey guys, look at me, look what I'm doing, you should do the same. You're just doing it and you just radiate integrity, right? And people are like, I actually want whatever he's doing. Like, I need to figure that out and I want to be doing more of that, right? So that's one thing. The other side is, as you go through that process yourself, you become much more aware of your own humanity and your own divinity. By divinity, I mean inspiration, what's possible, things like that. Humanity, I mean, you're just— your human limitations, like you can only do so much, right? And by becoming more aware of both of those things, we have a lot more compassion for others. So when they're not where we expect them to be, we can just be like, all right, like for whatever reasons, they're further down on this gradient than I am. They didn't have, you know, they weren't born with certain natural skills, they weren't given certain opportunities in life to kind of develop Or understand the importance of it. And I need to not be complacent and just say it's okay, but I have understanding that, okay, for them it's a different path to get to where we're trying to get to. And I need to be aware of that, right? It also helps us when we're working with others. It helps us also be more compassionate to our own limitations of like, okay, this one thing is not where I want it to be. Can I be kind? Can I pay attention? to where I actually am. I don't know if any of you do yoga, right? Yeah. Well, anyway, there's this thing, just something as simple as touching your toes, right? And I'll just— my dad, he always used to say, if God meant for us to touch our toes, he would put them on our knees, right? And so that sort of gives you your frame of what a lot of people think about, you know, that.

Mm-hmm.

But in a yoga— in sort of the philosophy of yoga, the idea is if you just go for it and try to get there, Every muscle in your legs and your back is just gonna seize up. It's gonna keep you from actually like being able to do it, because your idea of where you should be and your idea of where— and, and the reality of where you are are totally different. There's too much difference between that. There's too much stress. If you go to right where you can go, and then just take a breath and go a little bit further, and then take another breath and go a little bit further. Then you actually get there much more fast, much, much quicker, and, and in a much healthier way than if you're just like pushing to go for it, right? So there's this idea of like, you know, any, anything that comes up, any emotions, those are cueing us into the fact that our expectations of reality and actual reality are different, and that we just need to pay attention and be a little more skillful about that, right? So working Working with others, like you said, you know, you can drive the change internally for yourself. But when you're working with others, there's a lot more stuff that we have to pay attention to, right? It's not just, here's the strategy, here's the goal, let's go. Why aren't you guys going? You know, it's, you know, there's, they've got their own process and they've got, and there's also a lot of correction that we have to make in terms of our ability to see things clearly.

So much wisdom. So much wisdom. I'm— I'd love to know, what are your practices that you're doing? You mentioned yoga. What are other things that you're doing to cultivate? I don't know, that just the change in yourself, like, what are you doing to do that on a daily basis?

Oh, yeah. Okay, so many different things at different times. I mean, I'll go with the consistent ones, right? So, and I allude to some of these in sections in the book as well. But like, just something as simple as like sitting and counting breaths, like the only thing that you're doing is trying to count a breath. You might get like 2 breaths in and all of a sudden your mind is thinking about something, right? And so that's, you put a pin in it and you're just like, okay, something about that is unresolved for me. Like I'll need to, I'll need to study that a little bit more, right? And then you try to go back to the breath again and then something else comes up and it's like, okay, let me note that. I do this, I mean, actually I do this with my 9-year-old. Like he just takes a couple breaths, 20 breaths before he goes to bed. And then I ask him, I'm like, What's up? What came up? I'm like, you know, all like everything we do gets filtered through this body and this mind, and we take almost zero time to try to understand how either of them work, right? And so he'll just tell me and we'll talk a little bit about, you know, like school just started and he's a little bit like, I don't know, unsettled because things aren't falling into a routine yet. So I'm like, okay, let's just talk a little bit about it. It's like defragging the computer. Before you go to bed and get all your rest. So the, the programs aren't just playing in the background, and you wake up and you got 8 hours of sleep, but you're exhausted still because all this unresolved stuff is still there. So that's one, is just like a simple breathing practice, not to solve the problems, but just to become aware of like what's taking up more space than it deserves. The other one, I mean, you know, you can— yoga is, is a practice, but I'll give you even a— there's a— where we live, we live in a small town, and there's a little skate park there. And during the pandemic, like, the kids weren't in school, and I would take them to the skate park, and I'd just be like counting the clock and waiting for them to be done so we could go back home. And I'm like, you know what, forget this. Like, I'm gonna get a skateboard, and I'm gonna be that 40-year-old guy with like all the pads because I never did it when I was little, and I'm gonna go in there with them. I mean, first of all, they can see what like trying and failing looks like, but second of all, like, I can at least have a little bit of fun while I'm sitting here and waiting for them, right? And so I did that. And then, you know, then eventually like they started going back to school. And the interesting thing was I would still go for like 10, 15 minutes to the skate park and like skate around. Because I actually noticed something. I noticed that some days I was leaning too much, like I was too eager. And then later on, when I was on my calls with like clients and stuff, I'd realize that I was pushing them too much. Like I wasn't paying attention to like where they were and what was comfortable. And, you know, so at the skate park, you lean too much, you bite it, you know, it's, you know, you're gonna fall. The same is true for the opposite. If you sit back too much and you're a little too cautious, you bite it the other way, right? And I would notice also days like that when I was engaging with people, I might be a little disengaged, you know, a little like sitting back too much, not seizing on certain things that they're saying and going in that direction. Like, you know, so I was a little bit checked out. So even something as simple as like skateboarding, I mean, yoga is the same thing. Anything, anything kinesthetic that you can do pretty much the same thing every day. And notice like subtle differences in your energetic, subtle differences in your like perspective. Those are really helpful to like go through the rest of your day a little more skillfully. Like just be like, oh, okay, like today for whatever reason, that's the energy that I'm bringing into this, right? So those are 2 simple practices. I think I'll just add one more, which goes into sort of more the transcendental integration part of the book. which is like that connection with something greater, right? There, you know, I note this a couple of times in the book. It's like a lot of times we're like, we feel like we're just having this human life. And every once in a while, we get glimpses of like divinity, you know, glimpses of something bigger. And that's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it, so is that you're actually like this divine being having an experience of humanity. There was, there was, I forget who it was, one of the mystics said something like, This guy was having a dream about being a butterfly, and he's like, but isn't it true you could be a butterfly having a dream of being a human? You know, and it's like either one of them could be true. You don't know, right? And so if we can put ourselves in this perspective, like maybe like first thing in the morning and last thing at night, that like actually we're part of something much bigger. And some people do it by, you know, going for a hike and being surrounded by, you know, a beautiful environment. Or they read something that's really uplifting or something like that. But like, I'm talking like bigger, bigger perspective, not like, how do I run my business better? It's like, how do I actually begin? I mean, you guys are lucky that you get to do this, you know, for a job where you're encountering all kinds of things that are like, you know, uplifting and inspirational and things like that. But if somebody can have just a daily practice, it could even be something as simple as a gratitude practice at the end of the day of like, All the stuff that I went through today, what am I thankful for? And sometimes it's even the hard stuff. You're like, you know what, that gave me— that difficult conversation gave me an opportunity to tell that person, like, how much I cared about them, or gave me an opportunity to apologize for something that I did. And, you know, and kind of show that, you know, embody that humility, right? So I don't know, those are the 3, like, check in with your mind, check in with your body and your energetics, and then connect somehow to something greater.

Mic drop after mic drop after mic drop. No, I, I, we love actionable value on this podcast. So thank you for sharing those 3. And there's a couple things I'd like to unpack. First is just a comment. Thank you, uh, for highlighting, uh, this podcast and our jobs. I mean, we are so grateful to be able to have these conversations and read this type of material constantly. And I sometimes take for granted, I'll admit, that most people they don't touch the world of personal development or philosophy very often. And when they do, it's like that quick hit, the transcendence, the connection to the divine that, that goes away quickly. And it's our entire world, which is so amazing. Um, I have a question for you. Have you ever done a sensory deprivation float tank?

I have, yeah.

When you were talking about counting your son's breaths, uh, or having him count his breaths and see what comes up for him, I'll never forget, I was like 4 or 5 years into meditating consistently and focusing on my breath, but the first time I ever got in the float tank, I was trying to recite a prayer to myself, and I never got more than a couple words in, and I realized how little control I actually had over my own brain. It was a very humbling experience. Did you find the same thing?

I'm trying to remember. It's been years since I did that. You know, I'm— what I, what I remember about it is that certain people have— I mean, because I've talked to people about it since, but like, certain people have claustrophobic, you know, reactions to it, and other people actually feel like they're in like an infinite expanse, even though they're in this like little pod, right? And, and so it's this like feeling of complete spaciousness, which can also be terrifying.

Right?

And, you know, so for me, the interesting thing about that is when there's nothing else to pay attention to, like, do you start focusing internally and that starts to freak you out? Like, things get smaller and smaller and smaller, or do things get bigger and bigger and bigger, right? Like, my recollection, and I mean, again, it's probably 15 years since I was in a float tank. was that it was, it was just interesting to see like what kind of things come up when you don't have to process any information. You know, like I remember being curious at first and then being bored and like I had no idea how much time was passing by and then being like curious about the boredom and, you know, so it was just, I think it's just again, like when you have no external stimuli to like pay attention to, you're only stuck with whatever you brought in there, you know, like whatever, whatever things that you brought in there, you're, you know, just your mind and your ability to pay attention to your senses and stuff like that. So I don't know, it's, I mean, it's, it's great in that, that you don't have any external stimulus, anything external that's like forcing you to pay attention to different things. So I don't know, it's been a while. Maybe I'll have to do it again.

Yeah, you'll have to check back in. Maybe we'll have another conversation just about our float tank experiences. I went, uh, I went almost 20 weeks in a row every weekend, and I had like intense claustrophobic— is that the right word?

Yeah, it's claustrophobia.

Yeah, claustrophobic experiences. And then I also had very intense, like, expansive experiences where I thought I had floated away or had been abducted by aliens. Like, your brain goes to some weird spots. Um, but kind of circling back to your book a little bit, I wanted to bring up a subject which you didn't talk about that much, but there was a line that I'd like to read. You said, Sure. this ego, in example, the will and driving force for action. Now, ego is something that I've loved exploring. I know Luke loves to explore the term ego and what it means to different people. So You talking about ego as the will and driving force for action is really interesting. Do you know where that philosophy stems from and what work maybe you've read about it?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the influence— a lot of the influences on me are either from Carl Jung and all the work that he did in depth psychology, or Vedanta philosophy, which is like a non-dualist philosophy that Turn of the last century, Swami Vivekananda was like the first one to kind of come to the United States and give a whole bunch of talks on that. And I'm not sure where it comes from, but, you know, in, in today's society, like, ego gets this bad rap of like, ego means like, I, you know, I'm trying to make myself bigger or whatever than I really am. The way that I'm referring to it is that let's— if you think about it as like you've got this soul, or like something that's bigger than you, right? You're part of something bigger. And then you've got this ego, which is your individual, like, manifestation, like me, you know, this body, this mind, all this sort of stuff. And you can't do anything in the world if you don't have an ego. Like, if you— there's no sense of, like, me, right? That's what motivates us to kind of do things. Where we get into trouble is when we make that ego more important than the bigger thing, right? Now we're forcing ourselves into a smaller notion of who we are, like we're just this body and this mind, right? So ego is good from the standpoint of like, that's how I actually do things in the world. That's how I engage with people. That's how I relate to people. That's how I learn and accumulate my learnings and share those learnings. But if we, if we forget about that bigger part of who we also are, That's where ego becomes limiting. So I don't know if that's where you were going with it, Nick, but that's, that's kind of what comes up. Yeah.

It is. And I'll comment on one thing and then kick it over to Luke because I know he loves this subject too, in case he has a question. But we've interviewed a couple of people like Ryan Holiday, for instance, who wrote a book called Ego Is the Enemy. And I'm a big fan of Stoic philosophy, but it is— ego is always viewed as this negative thing. It's And, and because you view it as this positive driving force in life, it needs to be balanced, and we need to connect to the divine and remember that we're part of something bigger, but that it has its usefulness. Like, from an objective perspective, it can be viewed as, as a positive thing, as a positive force in our lives. And so I just thought that was interesting, and I felt that our, our listeners and followers would enjoy that. So thank you.

Yeah, and just one quick thing, like, a lot of times in dreams Hello, Book Thinkers family.

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Like, if you do like dream analysis and stuff, ego shows up as like a car or like it's a means of moving around, like moving through the dream world, right? And, you know, so that's a useful tool because it gets you places and it allows you to like you know, interact and go. But you don't want that to be the main thing. Like, the reason the car exists is to get us around, you know, like our, our, ourself with a big S, right? Like, allows ourself to get around, not just to be a car in and of itself, right? Like, so it's, you know, like a car is a great thing, but you want it to serve your, your bigger notion of who you are rather than you. I mean, I had some friends in high school who spent a lot of time, like, really taking care of their car. And I'm like, Dude, like, just use the thing, you know, like, you're spending more time— maybe one of you were like that, I don't know— but like, detailing it, cleaning it. I'm like, it was already clean, and you're cleaning it again. And so it's like, you just want to make sure that these tools, like our ego, are in service of our higher self rather than us being slaves to them, right? So that's, that's the distinction that I would make.

It's interesting, my wife and I actually just this morning, we were talking about this whole egoic concept. And it's something that I have had a lot of back and forth and struggle with. And I love how you just— I don't know, you just like— I feel like you just split me open as far as like what ego is. I'm like, oh yeah, it's just this important thing. Yeah. Anyway, um, I've had a lot of like different breakthroughs over the last couple of years with ego because I used to be like, oh man, I don't have that much of an ego. I don't have that much of an ego, right? And it's kind of ironic when you, when you think about it. But I always saw ego as this puffed up, very like, oh, I'm the best thing in the world. And I had a different type of ego, which was almost like kept me down, like, oh, I'm nothing. And that's still ego because I had this attachment to that thing. So I love— man, I just love how you just broke all that down. I want to, I want to talk about a line in your book that just jumped out at me. And it's like, it's really early on in your book, but you— it's the phrase of becoming Our highest truth. Can you break down what that means? And what, when you said that, like, what does that, what does it mean? What are you talking about when you're saying becoming our highest truth?

Yeah, I mean, this is, there's a lot of places there where I talk about higher or lesser truths, right? And I think maybe just an easy frame to kind of think about it is, A lesser truth is something that's true for a very small— I don't know, let's call it demographic— for a very short period of time. Like, if there's cookies sitting on the counter, like, my part that would really enjoy eating that, those sugary cookies, like, that's a lesser truth. Like, it's good for that. That's true for that part of me. Now, the part of me that wants to you know, feel good in half an hour, like, you know, after the sugar crash and all that sort of stuff, or like be fit or, you know, manage my blood sugar or something like that. That's a little bit of a higher truth, right? So that's just like within one person. There can be many, you know, like I think I mentioned this in the book, in my— I have a 5— well, he's now 6, but I have a 5-year-old and he often says like, there's 2 parts of me that want to do different things. And I always ask him, I'm like, which one's the wiser part, right? Like, that's So if you scale that up, though, there can be something that's true for you as an— it's better for you as an individual, but it's not good for a bunch of other people. Or there could be something that's good for a bunch of people, and maybe it's not convenient for you in the moment, but it's actually good for you in the longer run, right? So that's sort of like the spectrum is, as things become true for longer and for more people at the same time, that's what I would call a higher truth. Right? And the lesser truths are the things that are true for me or a part of me and are more focused on like instantaneous gratification, right? And not thinking long term. So another way to kind of think about higher truth and lesser truth is if something's true at one level, if it's also true at another level, like I, there's a number of analogies that I have in the book where you can observe like processes in nature, but they mimic like processes that go on in our own psyche, right? And it's like, oh, okay. There's something, there's something real here, right? If we're watching, like, I think I give the example of like a seed germinating. Like, there's a period of time that seed is just sitting there. It doesn't look like it's doing anything, but there's a tremendous amount going on internally. And then all of a sudden it just like, it just grows really fast and it's, it's able to become this whole plant. Without that period of internal transformation, that external would never have been possible, right? So I see that with people as well. Like, they feel like they're not being productive for a period of time, but what's happening there is that germination. Like, you know, their, their psyche and everything is just getting ready for like a really big growth spurt, let's call it, right? Psychologically, or, you know, or experientially or whatever. So I don't know, that notion of, of higher truth is something that I guess to just define it, it would be something that's true for the, the most beings for the longest period of time. Right? Like, I saw this bumper sticker, it said like, end speciesism. And I'm like, that's interesting because like, we, we like to think that humans are the top, right? Like, we're gonna do what's best for us and maybe not care so much about what's good for the, I don't know, worms or whatever, right? So that's, yeah, that's that notion of higher truth and lesser truth.

Yeah, you know, what's interesting about that subject is I was I've gotten into endurance sports a little bit, and some of the events like triathlons, they require a lot of cycling. And I have this new bike, and I was looking down at the bike, like really pushing it the other day, and there's this big open space on the stem of the bike where I could put some text. And I was thinking of putting something like, you know, in this moment, what will the version of you tomorrow be more proud of? Like cycling farther or stopping shorter. Just that idea of what will Nick tomorrow be proud of when he wakes up? Is it the extra push? Is it the extra mile? Is it enduring a little bit more physical resistance and pain, or is it giving up quick? And that's what does it for me. So do you oftentimes— I'm curious, do you often think of your future self, not from delaying gratification, but like, how will future Andreas think about this situation?

Yeah. I mean, I just got done working with a group of executives over the weekend for this company, and there's actually an exercise that I have people go through, which I'm like, forget about tomorrow. There's going to be, you know, we all think that we're going to live forever, but there is, there's going to be an end to this ride, right? And when that day comes and you think about how you want to meet that day, if you're going to eavesdrop on your memorial service and hear what all the people are saying about you, What do you hope that they're saying about you? And what do you need to start doing today so that those things are actually true, right? Like, that's sort of like the ultimate, you know, I mean, again, what's Nick tomorrow gonna care about? Like, that's a good, that's great. That's better than most, right? But that's just the start. It's like in the final reflection, what is Nick really gonna be really gonna care about, right? Is it gonna be that he knew the He did as much as he, like, he pushed himself to the limits of what was possible, right? Or, you know, or that he had a good time. Like, maybe it doesn't matter about going fast. It's just like, this is something that I want to spend time with other people doing, right? Like, everyone has their own different value proposition. But that's, I mean, my, you know, my wife sometimes, I don't, I wouldn't, I won't say she makes fun of me, but like, she's always like, you know, in, in a certain situation, she might be like, You know, do you think you should have handled that a little differently? And I'm like, if I died tomorrow, that's, that's exactly how I would have handled that situation, right? Like, that's sort of my metric, is if I don't get to repair it, am I proud of like how that was handled? Doesn't mean that went smoothly. It meant that I, I said what I think needed to be said. I represented what I thought needed to be represented. And maybe I pushed somebody in a way that I thought was their best. I could be wrong, of course, but like— In that moment. Like, so it's, it's, it's in our society, we don't like to think about our own mortality, but it's actually a really useful frame to cut through all the bullshit of like what's really important and what's not really important, right? So yeah.

I think you're 100% right. I think so enough. I tattooed memento mori, remember your own mortality, on my chest. I'd see it every day. But here's a little bit of a different— this will be my final question for today, and I've really enjoyed the conversation. Luke might have a few more. Um, we've gotten a really cool insight into your mind so far. Why do you think that the average person, or that our society as a whole, struggles with this idea of, uh, living up to their potential or being the best version of themselves? And the reason I'm asking that is because the way that you're explaining it, like, okay, I'm at— I'm on my deathbed, I'm at my memorial, I want people to talk about these things, so I should act that way today. Logically, it makes perfect sense, but nobody lives that way. I mean, at least 99.9% of people, you can't get them out of the day-to-day chaos to serve their future self. So why do we as a society have such a tough time with this?

Gee, if, I mean, if I knew the answer to that, I'd be, I don't know, I'd be doing a lot of, I got more sense than to be president. But anyway, fair enough.

Yeah.

You know, I, and even in the book, I try to like explore that a little bit. I think a lot of it has to do with, I mean, what we'll call like euphemistically socialization. Like you come up in a society, certain things are deemed important and, you know, like, nope, like you want to aspire to them. Right. And, and so we start this process of cutting off or, you know, amputating certain parts of us that don't align with that. And then eventually you get to the point where like you're so embedded in like chasing this thing that it's really hard to look back and be like, what was the sacrifice that it took me to meet this external notion of success, this external validation, right? And I think especially in our society that has been a big thing. I mean, I think maybe now like in some of the younger generations, you're seeing this trend towards wanting to be connected to purpose instead of like financial material success. But for, you know, for a couple generations, that was always the trajectory. Like more, more, you know, you, you always, I mean, you watch like documentaries and stuff and everybody wants the next generation to be better off than the previous one. But what they don't say is better off means like higher paying jobs, more comfortable circumstances, You know, just all that sort of stuff. And we don't take as much of a focus. I mean, you look at some of the Eastern, you know, societies and cultures, there's much more of a focus on cultivating the internal and I mean, I'll just call it like spiritual aspects of humanity rather than the material side of it, right? So I think that's part of the challenge. But again, I think as I engage with younger people, I start seeing that they see the limits of that. They see the trap of that, and they're actually starting to make different decisions. They're starting to value different things. There's even with their, like, you know, friends of mine that have younger kids or young kids like mine, they're starting to value different things even with their kids of like, yes, you can be on technology and have access access to all these great things, or you can go get dirty in the mud and just like have that experience. And, and that one of them is not better than the other, you know, like one might be more convenient and easier to control, but the other one maybe has just as much value, right? So I think that's, you know, it has to be important enough. I mean, I say this in the book too, there has to be enough, enough discomfort that a change is needed for a person. So I don't know, you know, different people are at different points with that. Like some of them are just fed up with chasing, you know, being on the hamster wheel and just running, running, running and don't feel like they're getting anywhere and they need to find, they need to just step off the wheel, right? And go in a different direction. So yeah.

Such good stuff. I, I wanna stay on with, this has been such a fun conversation. I'm like, man, I have so many more questions I wrote down. Like, 20 more on here, but I know there's a little bit of a time limit. So I'll try to save it maybe for another time. I'm really, I guess maybe we can just start wrapping this up. I'll just stop us here. For people who want to, and I'll just ask 2 more questions. For people who want to learn more about you, where can they go and what can they do? Yeah.

So I have a very simple A website for the book. It's called www.sacredpracticeofintegration.com. They can— the book's available, I think, through Amazon. Yeah, it's definitely available through Amazon. It might be available through other means as well. There, you know, I've got another page which is more my work, which is thecollectivepotential.com. So www.thecollectivepotential.com. And, you know, for people that are interested in these things, like, just reach out to me. It's not a big deal, right? Like, shoot me an email. My email's on both of those sites. And just let's get a conversation going. And, you know, I mean, my aspiration is to really have a community of people that are interested in these things and that we can make it a little more part of the day-to-day influences on our life and to counter all the other stuff, the socializing forces, right, that are, that are pushing us maybe in, in other direction, right? So yeah, don't, you don't have to have anything profound. You can just shoot me a note and say, hey, I got your book. I'm enjoying it. I'm looking forward to it. You know, ask me a question, whatever. So that's, that's what I would say.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Yeah, we'll definitely, we'll link all that stuff in the, in the show notes below or above, wherever it shows up on whatever platform. All right. This is my final question that I like to ask all of our guests. And it's this, you pass away and all the information that you put out, the books, blogs, all courses, whatever you put out disappears, but you can leave the world with a single piece of advice, what would it be?

That's a great question. Yeah. So I think this is something I tell other people and I try to remind myself all the time. So I would say, don't shit on yourself. You're enough. Just be yourself. That's what I would tell them. And that's okay, man. Yeah.

Beautiful. There's been mic drop moment after mic drop moment this whole conversation. I've enjoyed listening to you so much, Andreas. Thank you so much for your time today. This has been awesome. I'm sure it's not gonna be the last time that we're gonna, we're gonna talk. Appreciate you. All right.

I really appreciate it, guys. Thanks.

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