The Enlightened Way: Detachment

The Fallacy of Human Experience

We are an obscure planet in an obscure solar system on a distal arm of a massive yet obscure galaxy in an infinitely expanding universe.

Lets take a moment to reflect deeply on that fact. Your life is indeed a rat race of obligations, expectations, and interactions, some of which are more contentious than others, but in the grand scheme of things, you are absolutely miniscule. You are a piece of a larger cosmic production and whether you believe in a Divine being or not, this production is governed by rules and principles that supersede any day to day obligation you may feel.

In my opinion, people spend far too much time obsessing over themselves and over the human experience in general. Its seems that people are consumed with propinquity; things that are close must be of greater importance, however, its this mindset that constantly drives our world to brink of destruction. We are imbalanced in our understanding of existence and this causes us to become disoriented.

I cannot diminish the importance of human variation in expressing life. I cannot say that it is always prudent or plausible for people to disregard their natural proclivities and simply gaze at the stars. There are those among us that are susceptible to emotion variation, others who are susceptible to devices of the mind, and others, yet, who fall prey to the destructions of idle hands. The list goes on and on. We are all fundamentally different beings who place priorities on however we have come to develop.

But, this does not mean that the evident chaos of our world is necessary. It may be natural; since we are so varied as entities it only makes sense that impasses and divergence lead to complexity and persistent discord, however, that naturalness does not necessitate existence. We can, through cultivated thought and a stillness of spirit, begin to forge a prototype of a world at peace.

My proposition, to all of those developed enough to cast away pointless ego, is to realize that you are insignificant. Your opinions, your developments, your convictions are intrinsically worthless. Yes, you may, through the vehicle of reality, exert force on the natural world, but a compulsion to do so is resolutely futile. I am not promoting nihilism either! Man should be freed be this notion. You may choose to focus intensely on yourself and create an illusion of significance, but to do so really causes no greater benefit.

The anger that we feel when we are slighted, the frustrations we feel when things don’t go our way, the sadness we feel upon unrequited love are all examples of how our experiences can obfuscate an enduring peace that is possible.

This philosophy may seem radical, but it is the same equanimity of mind that is promoted by the Christian and Hindu faiths. Christianity says to cast your cares on The Lord for He is in control. He is big and you are small. Ecclesiastes even says to make your words unto God few because He exists so high above you. His supreme holiness renders your specifics obsolete. Hindu, especially that taught within Kriya Yoga, see that life is cosmic production and we can either choose to consume the delusion, MAYA, or we can choose to step away from it and enjoy the drama ourselves.

If you have no spiritual pathway to speak or you are an atheist, this changes nothing. The sheer immensity of the universe, the fact that there are stellar objects billions and billions of times larger and brighter than our sun whose light we can see now was produced several hundred million years ago should inspire the same humbling awe that an adherent to faith has for God.

When I am honest with myself, I don’t care about race relations, human rights, animal rights, politics, religion, business, or the economy. Although I am a black, Christian, business owner who votes independent, these are all negligible in my contemplations of being alive. I take very, very few things personal, I hold no grudges, I harbor no obsessive thoughts about this or that. I spend time marveling at the wonders of being alive and the intricate processes necessary to bring me to every nascent moment.

Up until recently, I needed people to think like me and I wanted synchronicity of thought. My conception of Objective Truth meant that deviations or interpretations from some ineluctable concepts were useless and eventualities of flawed beings. While this may be the case, I have learned to step outside of the tempestuous dimensions of human affairs and consider things of superior strata. I am no yogi or sage, but a young man who values things that endure.

Momentary human expression is micro and subject to wild variations per the dynamics of those involved, yet the massive universe, the creation of the Supreme Being Himself rages on in every direction until infinitude. I can never see my oscillations, as real and proximal as they are to me, as anything of consequence. I may feel fear, feel anger, feel depression, but these are passing fancies and I am quickly resolved.

The Secret: Accessing the Hyperreal

Cruising at about 30 miles per hour on a metal contraption high above Northwestern Long Beach, a highly theoretical and amorphous conversation ensues between two young philosophers. The subject, cognition and super-cognition in multivariable hyperspace, draws both speakers’ deepest thoughts about discrete creation of existence, how individuals become authors and coauthors of what we have come to term as life. The setting is unusual, both men draw curious stares from other passengers as the enthralling discourse weaves and tumbles through all manner of hypothetical thought. All the while, the young thinkers trek on, hoping to tap a mysterious power, known only to few humans throughout recorded history.

The last 3 months of my life have been absolutely surreal; no other word can really describe it. Surreality is not good or bad, it is indeed both, an admixture that feels like one is living in an extremely vivid dream. In this timeframe, my failures have led to threats of lawsuits, many an uneasy email/text message exchange, and other moments of unwavering discomfort. My successes have led to great nights on the town with friends, extraordinary progress as a business owner & consultant, and opportunities that are so tantalizing I sometimes forget that only months ago I was operating on a dollar and a dream (minus the dollar).

What changed? My prayer life.

I don’t pray like a traditional Christian; I am not a traditional Christian. I meditate on deep considerations of the Universe, I contemplate a Creator who could make that all possible. I ponder the true makeup of my religion’s interdimensional liaison, the man we have come to call Christ. When I open my lips to make praise or utter supplication, I do it from a place of extreme humility, and extreme non-humanity. My foundation is not to make utterance to Christ as a man, but as a spirit who has also has a physical emanation.

Extant expression is ubiquitous in this world, as all of us are alive. Being alive, being able to express life, is comprised of several factors that can be lumped into two arenas that I have spent many blog posts enumerating: linearity and nonlinearity. Linearity is an agreement between two or more people in an effort to produce predictable outcomes, whereas nonlinearity is the individualized state of man which produces no predictable or only partially predictable results. Most of the physical realm, what we have come to term as reality, are attempts at creating linearity. We as individuals in larger social structures must come to agree with one another in order to coexist harmoniously; yet, the components of those linear attempts are nonlinear bodies, humans, whose overly complex nature creates the ambiguous, ever-changing world that we are all doing our best to navigate.

As my business partner and I engaged each other in one of our philosophical discourses, the effects of my meditative practices became readily apparent. We, two nonlinear beings, began experiencing each other from a true platform of expression, a place where no agreement was necessary because it superseded the very consciousnesses that perceive and analyze information. Thus, our nonlinearity simply melted into this higher ordered thought and we became aligned with what I can only call energies that occurred in this exotic place.

Linearity is only as pure, strong, or capable as the nonlinear components that comprise it’s ability to construct.

Where my friend and I got to needed no construction, its pillars were more mathematically perfect than the greatest Palladian structures and its ground was fertile for true extant thought.

I had been entering — perhaps a better word would be foraying — into this world, what I call hyperreality, more and more as of recent. I can only describe it as being a place of intense focus, where the very world around you seems converge on a single point, a potent thought, that permeates one’s entire being. With a thought that potent, the conscious and subconscious, mind and spirit, become attuned and a single person can create a multo-entity agreement within themselves.

Fuck.

Thats some heavy stuff, no?

See, the world is consumed with figuring out the “secrets” and “shortcuts” to this and that. We want to know what is the “secret” to success, what is the “fastest way” to wealth, and what is the “secret” to happiness. We are looking to creating a linear system which has no flaws! That, unfortunately, is impossible; remember, a linear agreement is only as effective or good as the nonlinear components agreeing upon it and since no human is perfect in his physical or even conscious expression, any linearity we create will be inexorably flawed. The secondary reason that no “system” can be created, no secret uttered, no shortcut fabricated, is because as nonlinear beings interacting with one another, there are infinity plus infinity variables interacting at any given moment, which leads to more and more unpredictable outcomes, the very essence of nonlinearity. In other words, what works for you may not work for me, and vice versa. There can be no cohesive, universal, “secret” process or application.

THERE IS NO SECRET

So how, then, does one create the necessary traction to accomplish anything? How do we “win” at this game called life.

While there is no secret, there is a way that one can maximize their time here on this physical plane. Creating an agreement with one’s self. This was the lesson that was revealed to me by my friend during our conversation. Most of us are at war with ourselves; our mind wants on thing, our heart wants another, and our spirit is all but muted during a typical day. Reality, or at least our perception of what is occurring around us, poses the greatest threat to success. Reality is mundane and its prosaicness becomes rarely sensed as being important or of any particular value. Reality will drive you quickly into mediocrity as it is comprised as an average of linearities around you. Therefore, reality is blah. It comes and goes. Its unpredictable, yet you are taught from birth strategies to mitigate risk and capitalize on opportunity. Go to college, get a job, get married, pay your bills by working hard.

All of those taken become the very basis for losing at life.

Humans are unique. We are amalgams of spirit and flesh. How is it that we think we can create systems and all thrive within them? How is it that we think we can all agree and all will flourish? How is it that we make incongruous projections about the future without understanding what is currently going on or even worse, how humans tends to react to things?

College, marriage, working hard are not inherently wrong nor are they inherently right, is it up to the person to agree mentally, spiritually, and physically as to whether they are right for them!

How does one discern what is right or wrong? When one actively seeks out the supermundane, the ‘higher realm’, they are in fact setting themselves up for alignment. There is no systematic way to “getting there”, as every person will find themselves traversing a slightly different road to this manner of enlightenment. My tip is to meditate by sitting in absolute silence while thinking one thought. That thought can be anything from considering the magnitude of the universe to pondering that you yourself are a universe. The depth and complexity of your inner world is a wellspring of fuel for enlightenment.

As you ponder the implicit and explicit complexities of the universe(s), you will naturally begin to see yourself as a citizen of all known and unknown realities, infinitely large and infinitesimally small; you will be a formless, dimensionless being which has a subordinated expression in the physical world. You will see the unreality of the physical world and be drawn to the pervasive “real” framework of the invisible dimensions. This will create the beginnings of “inner linearity”.

Inner agreement.

Inner peace.

One might say, “bryce, are you not laying out a secret? What you’re proposing, is this not a system of thought that leads to predictable results?” I have no response to that because to validate or invalidate that statement would be to breathe life into that belief. Accessing the hyperreal has one frustrating aspect to it, the hyperreal has no concept of time. Some people will die before they experience a full immersion. Some will never make it. Some will try to make it work so that they can pay a bill on Tuesday and will cast it down as too imprecise, too ineffectual if that bill is not paid. Hyperreality is not about creating a system to win in a consciously perceived world, but instead having the consciously perceived world be subordinated to the hyperreal. Its about discovering true dimensionless thought, not turning that dimensionless thought into profit. The profits will come, but how those profits will manifest physically is not for me to say.

You will begin seeing this world with different eyes, my friend. Eyes that actually see, not passively view. No longer will it be “go to college to be successful”, but you will understand that college is a cultural agreement and with it comes rewards, but those rewards are not automatic as the extent of this agreement cannot accommodate supply and demand nor the intrinsic confusion of 18-22 year olds. College is set up as a catapult into professionalism, yet professionalism is a linear agreement with a series of components. These types of greater understandings increase the value of your time and efforts in college or in the work force; they increase your influence over your surroundings and the people in it.

It opens the universe to you and opens you to the universe.

Success vs Failure: Your Mind

The world is finally catching on to the fact that the mind is the new frontier for virtually all commerce. As ephemeral things such as brand loyalty, employee-employer dynamics, gender roles, and race constructs morph and bend, more and more managers & strategists have had to apply traditonally unconventional knowledge to solve new problems in the 21st century. VB ICON likes to believe that it is on the forefront of one of these new paradigms, but the fact remains that a new zeitgeist has descended upon us…

The mind is the new mine.

As some of you who follow my blog, you may remember that I break up the human existential condition into 5 parts: Mind, Body, Heart, Soul, and Spirit. This is an offshoot from the conventional Christian breakdown which has only the Flesh (body), Soul, and Spirit. I add in the Heart and Mind because they have qualities which I believe can be observed and dealt with separate from the other components and this expanded construct has also led to several of the cathartic realizations I’ve had over the last year and a half. Although each component complements and affects the others, they maintain what I believe to be very distinct differences which, once understood, can lead a person to greater enlightenment and a bump down the path of self actualization.

What is the mind? I am not going to venture into an ontological debate about where the mind exists because quite frankly my answer involves multiple dimensions and a whole slew of esoteric, theoretical components that aren’t my main focus tonight. So I will simply say this about the mind: it is the conscious. It is the place where all neutral information goes to be considered and meditated on. The brain, the physical component of the mind, is simply a computer which receives and sends out signals, whereas the mind interprets those signals for the purpose of creating perspectives and opinions. Using inductive reasoning, one can see how the mind is affected by the other components of existence… The spirit, which some may call the conscience, offers positive uplifting information. The body simply seeks maximum, short term pleasure. The heart offers undifferentiated emotion, skewing the interpretation off things this way and that. The soul though, for me, is rather neutral; its manifestation will be comprised of how the individual mixes the other components.

The mind is then an extremely interesting component. As the wellspring of conscious thought, the mind is the seat of practical intelligence. The mind is exceptionally malleable, prone to changes as one ages or gains more information. The mind is where we create our biases and our subjectivities, it is literally the site of our views on life. In our conscious we look at ourselves and assess such things as self worth or self efficacy. Our mind is generally the vehicle through we engage in introspection or an evaluation of the effectiveness of all our components working together. Therefore the mind is an extremely instrumental place. I mean it is the faculty through which we express our conditional free will; I say conditional because all of us are bound by something. Nevertheless, the mind is the progenitor of action and therefore something that we should all vigorously strive to understand.

As aforementioned, our mind is defined by an intricate latticework of predispositions and biases. These arise from experience, childhood development, parental relations, and natural personality propensities. However, most of us are unaware and will vehemently deny that we have success crippling biases. Why? Because many of these biases lurk deep within our subconscious and are very comfortable places where we tend to hide our insecurities or general ignorance. Thus the mind becomes bogged down by useless information that only serves to hinder us and never actually bring anyone forward. This is why so many women will make the conscious decision to stay with an abusive man or why a person who hates their job will be paralyzed with fear to pursue alternative careers. These same deeply embedded neuroses lead people to constantly blame others for their shortcomings or only accept limited responsibility. Under these hindered mental conditions you find those who complain, those who judge, those who lash out in insecurity, and a myriad of other observable symptoms.

Sound like anyone you know? Perhaps maybe yourself?

Those who are not currently doing what they’d like to be doing or passionately pursuing some goal are living in failure. This does not mean that they are failure, but instead are living in a state of failure. These people have allowed their circumstances to define them and have acquiesced to the torrential current of life and simply quit. They had kids, got married, got fired, had too many bills and just began surviving. They really stopped believing in the dream. I know you’ve heard shit like this before, but really its true. Those who achieve, those who truly accomplish in life are those who refuse to bow down to the relentless pressure of life; they instead fight back with a pressure that overpowers life’s obstacles. They are objective about their struggles, not blaming others or blaming the economy, but instead shouldering the blame then coming up with a practical solution. They sacrifice every goddamn drop of energy they have. Why? Why are these people so resilient? Because they believe in whatever it is they are trying to achieve.

Here’s how it all works. The mind is a remote control and the game is being alive. We are all nothing more than self fulfilling prophecies with chance, luck, some Providence and occasional misfortune peppered in. When the mind believes in a goal, obstacles become minor inconveniences, its simply shifts gears and maneuvers around them. Thus those who achieve seem to have some upper edge, some superior intellect or unfair assistance helping them, when in fact they are simply those that align with a goal. Now here’s the kicker, we are all believing in something, even those not achieving their aspirations. Most of us have programmed our minds to accept life as subpar, we think God is punishing us, or Jesus wants us to learn a lesson. We think that maybe it wasn’t our “destiny” or God’s will for us to be the lawyer, doctor, or CEO we once envisioned. That is all nonsense. Utter nonsense.

Your mind will act on the physical because your mind controls your actions. Your actions control your opportunities because the harder you work the more fertility for opportunity you generate. Mate that with wisdom, prayer, meditation, and an acute eye for analysis and you suddenly have people who are “successful”. They aren’t special or more talented; by thinking and acting they allowed their prophecies to be self fulfilled.

This is the most important lesson as we look towards a shaky future. Geopolitics are uneasy and the world is poised to go through a very uncomfortable transition, it is imperative that those who are ripe begin to get their minds right for success. This is not New Age thought, most of these principles can be found in virtually every culture, Judeo-Christian, Islamic, Asiatic, and Sub-Asiatic all have versions of this simple core principle. YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK.

If you think you are shit, you will commit actions which prove you are shit. If you think you are a 24 year old CEO, you will act in ways that prove and eventually realize you are a 24 year old CEO. The physical realm is an eventuality of all the intangible realms and right now the mental is one primed for investment.

bryce

Champion: Overcoming Fear

Lately life has thrown off the gloves and thrown some haymakers. With every punch, I have honestly considered giving up. I mean giving up in the most disparaging of ways. However, daily I wake up with the need to live and live abundantly. The problems I have faced this year are not the severest in the world, nor are they the lightest, but ask anyone who goes through something, pain is relative. I have often woken up this year in the middle of the night, covered in sweat, dreading to look at my phone or emails or just merely hoping that someone — anything — will work out the way its supposed to. Yet, like clockwork, I failed. Plans broke down. Investments in shambles.

Fear begins to set in. You can quote all the Rev Run mnemonic devices you can mentally conjure, but fear is a very real and persistent feeling. It is virtually crippling, rendering even the strongest of us a ball of tears. Yet, there is something peculiar about the way I experienced fear this year. It would descend on me like a thick fog and then immediately be pierced repeated by this urge, this obsession, inside of me to change the circumstances…

I cannot explain this feeling… Perhaps its integrity, perhaps it is pride, or character, or just a sharpened sense of survival, but I tell you that my spirit seemingly springs into action. I devise contingencies and alternate routes. I begin to look at my life objectively, see that my problems are trivial in terms of human life, and I begin to rediscover my faith. I begin to envision bigger, better procedures for my business, begin to probe my emotions to find a deeper capacity to love.

But most importantly, I find that in every single wound that circumstance afflicts me, there is wisdom. That wisdom is directly applicable each and every day. It causes my entire being to align with precepts of joy and shun any semblance of powerlessness. I stop being angry and become motivated. Anger is the most dangerous of emotions because it clouds a person’s genuine sensibilities; it prohibits one from ever working their way out. One needs all their innate faculties when life hurls beefy blows, so we must work to mitigate anger.

Everything you currently want in life is a decision away. You don’t need someone to hand you an opportunity, you don’t need a miracle from God. You don’t need a breakthrough, lifesaver, or vacation. You need only to make a conscious decision to ignore the fear, ignore the destructive emotions, and choose to make your life whatever you feel its not. God created us to be free moral agents , who consult Him on us becoming fulfilled individuals, its time for us to start acting like it. Out of fear we blame everything and everyone for our lack of success: government, race, family, friends, God himself, astrological sign, bosses, or cultural norms, when the common denominator is us.

Life does not owe you anything except your eventual passing from this earth. The vast majority of what you do between exiting your mother’s womb and expelling your last breath comes from how you respond to circumstances. You are defined by you perspectives, not your circumstances. Choose to be successful and all the fear, stress, unfortunate circumstances, lawsuits, failures, missed loan payments, evictions, repossessions, firings, rejections, and heartbreaks will merely fortify your resolve to emerge victorious. Be warned: this shit isn’t easy. You will be hit and hit hard, but as long as you choose to get up time and time again with more information, you will be a champion among champions.

bryce