When you get the message, hang up the phone.

Apr 22

This week I sat in a one hour and thirty-minute meeting, the topic of which was "un-thinking." The facilitator explained the topic, and then the participants proceeded to tell one another what they "thought" about un-thinking... For ninety minutes.

Ninety minutes. Of thought. About unthinking. 😒

Ohhhh and of course, I got to hear all the same old shit stories about the evidence people have that kids have all the secrets to life. And someone always has a story about "what someone's kid said" that makes us know we as souls have been here before. And then someone has to theorize about the universe and God, and how shit works. And then someone has to bring up The Body Keeps the Score or one of the other fucking personal development reads that--- yeah, you might wanna read, but LIKE WE HAVE NOT HEARD THIS BEFORE?! A THOUSAND TIMES?! And blah blah. Blah blah. Blah blah.

Finally, in the last ten minutes of the call, I spoke, and I said that I typically leave calls like that one angry. Angry because we're talking about unthinking but all we did was exchange yet more information. YET MORE! YET MORE!

I used to have this same trigger on the Wisdom social audio app-- just these people talking for hours and hours every day about esoteric concepts they're completely theorizing about from the same books we've all read. Hours, just saying the same shit, over and over.

I quoted this in an email earlier this year, which is from Phil Stutz about the consumer versus the creator. It's all about how what we want is to just cram in more information, so that it becomes our addiction, rather than focusing inward.

"Consumers try to make up for their laziness by gorging on new information- TV, podcasts, web searches, texts, emails, etc. But like a meal eaten too quickly, nothing is really digested. I once met a woman at a seminar who told me she'd read seventy-five books on spirituality in the past month. How could she find meaning in one book when she was already consuming the next? Trying to consume spirituality is like buying multiple GPS systems for your car and not learning to use any of them."

Alan Watts said (and it was about psychedelics, but this is the ultimate application for consumerism):

"When you get the message, hang up the phone."

When you get the message, stop chasing the high of yet more, and do your work.

If you "got the message" that your soul is infinite, you don't need thirty more books to tell you. Receive the message.

If you "got the message" that you are a creature of divine light, you don't need to continue to invest in hallucinations that will never get you closer to enlightenment. Receive the message and hang up.

If you got the message that you have an unworthiness story, you don't need to keep seeking to see that it exists.

When you get the message, hang up. You know what to do now.

The curriculum of your life *is* your life.

I agree, you need to read a few books. But once you see it, there's nothing more to see that is out there. It's all *in* here.

I'm writing this going into a weekend, living in a very busy neighborhood in Manhattan. I live here because my rent is cheap.

In New York, you get a place to live and unless you’re a billionaire, you usually just die there. (Or you move at 48 when you can’t stand the stairs anymore… to New Jersey.)

I once consumed the fuck out of everything-- all the food, all the beer, all the wine, whatever new fancy dessert they could invent, the fanciest coffee, the coolest experiences. ALLLLLL THE INFORMATION.

I was the hungriest ghost.

And what I realized through eating and drinking and fucking and smoking and having every conversation with absolutely nothing unturned and no topic too taboo to touch was...