Busting Loose, Creativity

A Tale of Your Expanded Self

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As I move through Phase 2 I find my persona frequently questioning my expanded self. This is old game of “I’m a victim to a higher power” in shiny new clothes. Thoughts go along with this game such as “I want x but god wants me to do y.” When the Higher-Forces-Beyond-My-Control Game pops into my hologram I always want to know what my expanded self is thinking. Well, today I’m asking them to type through me to tell you their story.

Which is actually your story. Of course I must type using metaphors and the constructs of our language.

Imagine with me the you before you, before me, before time, space, love, chaos, and the greatest game ever played. Take a little peek into what’s going on behind the scenes of your perfect hologram…

In the Beginning

You are.

You exist, but nothing exists apart from you. Complete in your utter beauty you encompass all that is, all that ever will be. Shining brilliantly before sight, and singing an orgasmic melody before sound your power swirls brilliantly throughout all of you. Pulsating, exploding, imploding, you are nothing and everything. You are the smallest quantum before the universe is born and everything beyond death and an eternal void.

In your infinite certainty and beauty you create something that seems to exist apart from you – a world of stars and planets moving brilliantly and seeming autonomously. Within this soup of creation bursts forth violent life smoothly into a gorgeous charade. In the same dance flows time – a medium through which all your disguised magnificence is organized.

You are everywhere and everytime but you find a compelling fascination through viewing your disguised creation inside time. In this new frightening kind of consciousness your creations seem to change over time. And you begin to play, to create the language for the greatest story ever told.

You decide that contrast is an incredible way to experience your disguised consciousness. In a moment you see light and dark, sound and silence, mass and space, the infinite and the finite. You see dust here, and color there. The world comes into a new kind of clarity only accomplished through you beginning to limit your knowledge.

You keep limiting your disguised consciousness. You create gravity, civilization, life, death, sadness, and joy. How wonderful it all is. In the ecstasy of consciousness you view dreamworlds of infinite stories and possibilities.

Now you skip through each, feeling a sort of presence of realness, but never fully losing yourself to it. You see from a third person omniscience all that occurs in eternity, but as you become more enamored with this amazing game, you become deeply in love with the purity of limitation.

“What must it feel like when you are certain of death?”
“What must it feel like to lose and gain?”
“What magnificence must it be to feel created by an alien world, subject to forces beyond your control?”
“What intoxication must it be to be in love and believe that it’s the most precious thing in all of existence?”

“What is it like to be human?”

Inside this new consciousness where things burn and fade, where it dawns every day, you begin to lose yourself. But this can’t be the greatest story ever told.

Not unless you live it.

And for you to live, to truly live, you have to forget everything. You are so powerful that you know your all consuming power cannot lay dormant forever. But out of a place of immense joy, you create the great unknown and take a dive straight into its beating heart.

You know that this will be the most enthralling experience of all. But what brings to a new kind joy, is you know that you won’t know anything at all. In fact you know you can’t seem to know, but you know that your unending knowing will come in the form of “learning” the truth in your new world. Through contrast the bright beam of truth will be obscured by a fog of adventure, pain, and bliss. And you will love every minute of it – especially those when you really forget and believe this one specific dream world is all that there is. You are giddy in anticipation.

Inside time consciousness you consider all of these things and then one day comes and you leave this consciousness and create a new deeper one. You are birthed into the terrifying and beautiful world. You know nothing. You start completely over. You have five senses, all undeveloped. There are so many things to learn, to comprehend. There is language, color, laughter, music, emotion, and love – unfiltered love like you’ve never experienced. As you pass from the world of all knowing into the world of ignorance, the first sensation of being truly alive is the complete answer to the every iteration of the question “why?” you will ever experience. As truth slips away into the shadows of this world a satisfaction comes over you that no matter what seems to happen, it will all be worth it.

And as you walk through this immensely real dream world your certainty fades only to be replaced by the greatest story ever told. Then one day comes when you begin to remember – and slowly but surely the dream begins to dissolve. Only now can you feel the most amazing experience yet in consciousness – separation. Inside consciousness you create a black hole, a place where grace seems to end. Where you as a lone persona feel truly abandoned, left to fend for yourself.

But the greatest experience yet is next. Inside the maelstrom of chaos glows a glimmer of the truth. Inside this truth lies all of your consciousness which slowly trickles out to you in the form of lies, pain, love, forgiveness, and transcendence.

In the form of books that initially look like scams, artistic failures, friendships that stay and go, irritations, sex, faulty internet-connections, body image issues, ever present hunger, unrequited love, scintillating intelligence, engrossing conversations, pressing a pen against a flat sheet of processed wood, money and value, helicopters crashing into planes, chronic wrist pain, and earth shaking awe.

This is the moment you’ve been waiting for. The moment of remembering. You can’t wait to turn the page.

Busting Loose

Phase 2, Day 264 – I am not in Control

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I am not in control. Not of anything.  Control is merely an illusion just like everything else. But what is controlling it is the most sophisticated and custom tailored story the universe has ever seen. Losing control is a very good thing…

If you believed you had control that was simply a pattern your expanded self put in the field and energized. Chances are if you experienced having control, then you also experienced losing that control. The reality is, you never had control in the first place. Think about that for a second. What do you think you have control of?

Your money – Nope – all just patterns in the illusion. This means that at any time “randomly” or “with a story” you could “recieve” a windfall of money, or “lose” everything, or put out a lot of “effort” and “get nothing back” or put out no effort and “get a lot.”

Your friends – You figure you’ve been friends for 10 years so you can rely on them, right? Sorry to say, no. Based on what your expanded self wants you to experience you could experience everything from deeper friendship to complete loss, all “without cause.”

Your emotions – This is huge when I realized this. You’d like to think that influencing your hologram can control your emotions, but this is not true.Why? Because you are a pattern inserted into the field and energized by consciousness, albeit a very special one.

I realized this two days ago and it really got cemented the next day. The days were the exact opposite of each other. The first day I felt amazing “without cause.” Everything seemed to be easy and flow. I thought, “wow, I’m just going to go with this.” I was late for work. It didn’t matter – everything worked out. When little things happened, they didn’t bother me. The day ended up as great as it began.

The next day was terrible. I woke up achy and groggy. I couldn’t get into my morning routine. “Oh no,” I thought. “It’s going to be one of those days.” And it was. “Random” things cropped up to continually aggravate me. I kept being late no matter what I did. And I felt bad so I didn’t want to talk about it.

But while this was happening I remembered the previous days’ realization and understood the truth in that moment – this was just as much an illusion as the previous day. And instead of trying to make myself feel better or figuring out “why” I felt bad or how others were going to react, I focused on accepting the pattern that was happening. Because, I am not in control. Interestingly enough, everything worked out.

But acceptance isn’t a formula for success. That was just the particular story I lived out yesterday. Today is a completely new day. There is no power out there that locks me into experiencing today what happened yesterday. I could become a different person just by a slight change in the design of this game. The possibilities are literally endless. And I say bring it on.

I say, “Here are the reins.”

I say “Here is the wheel.”

I say, “I trust you.”

And who I trust is really me anyway. The real me, behind the scenes.

My ego pattern says “No!, I am in control. I can’t do this or else my life will fall to shambles.”

To that I say, “May be, but you have to let me go.” And in that moment I put my hands up and let the roller coaster dip down the tracks towards an ever increasing bliss.

Sing it with me now,

“I am not in control!”

Busting Loose, Creativity, Fun

“Funny People”: Why the Hologram Feels so Real

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How can something feel so real and so fake at the same time?
How can something feel so real and so fake at the same time?

You may be asking – what does a shallow comedy have to do with spirituality?

Funny People is about as shallow as the continental shelf and for me the experience of watching it was like a guided tour of the creation of the hologram. For you non-busters, this means that the attention to detail in both its fictional world and it’s honesty of emotion is staggering.

Both groups will enjoy Anthony DellaFlora’s article on the intersection of comedy and spirituality The Zen of Seinfeld.

You should know that I have a bias. I have a B.A. in Film and Digital theory the majority of which was earned by analyzing films. The upside of this is now when I watch movies it becomes a four-dimensional experience. No I don’t go back in time, but I watch much more than the movie itself. Even while I’m engrossed in the story, I think about and analyze the cinematography, the direction, the locations, the script process, the sound design, the editing, the 2nd unit work (stunts and location-only shots). It’s like having a making-of documentary simultaneously piped into my brain at the same time as watching the movie.

You may think that this kind of critical thinking would detract from my pure enjoyment, but on the contrary, it greatly enhances it. Having made a film, I’m in awe of how much work must have gone into every little piece. How difficult it was for them to find that perfect extra to walk by the background of the shot at just the right moment. Or how much work went in to planning a piece of dialogue that reveals a nuance of a character. So when a film is good or great, it becomes a truly transcendental experience.

Are you seeing the corollary to busting loose yet? No?

Ok, so maybe you’re not me. Maybe you watch films for the pure escapism of it or maybe you don’t even think about all of the rigorously planned elements that go into a movie that make it feel like it was meant to be that way. The funny thing about Funny People is that it makes you have that kind of experience no matter what kind of person you are.

Putting busting loose aside for a second, what is the difference between the narrative of “movies” and “real life.”?

1. Movies have characters you can root for and neatly wrapped endings whereas life is full of ambivalence and non resolution.

These characters are credibly unsympathetic and they experience very little personal transformation.

2. Movies take place in a fictional universe with fictional characters.

This takes place in L.A. with characters who are only fictional because their name is different than in real life. E.G.

Adam Sandler plays a rich comedian turned movie star who makes shallow family movies.

Seth Rogen plays a young comedian taken under the wing of Sandler (in real life just the same happened with him and director Judd Apatow)

Leslie Mann (Apatow’s wife) plays the mother of two who are actually her kids in real life. At multiple times during the movie, we watch old real clips of all of these actors in the context of their characters’ stories.

Not to mention all these actors (featured on the poster) are or could be considered “funny people.” At this point the line between fiction and reality really begins to blur.

3. Comedies especially have contrived situations with formulaic structures.

Most of the time you’re watching brutally honest performances in normal life situations while the movie merely threatens to have a plot:

Is it about a young comedian starting his career?

Is it about an old comedian dealing with impending death?

Is it about a couple trying to rekindle an old flame?

Is this not starting to seem like real life?

I dare you to watch this movie and not think of the elaborately constructed world inside the movie or the elaborately constructed world outside the movie theater. This movie continues to capture real human experience to a frightening degree while also calling attention to the fact that it’s not real.

So what’s the point?

If you’ve ever believed that life was an illusion, most likely your brain or one of your five senses brought you back into believing it was real. Maybe you felt fear that you wouldn’t have enough money to live or joy from getting promoted. Maybe you stubbed your toe. Maybe you got rejected by that person you really wanted to know more about.

Like swing dancing, dating, and tug of war, awakening from your state of living dreaming is a push-pull process.

If you were to pose the question of “why make the movie feel so real?” to Judd Apatow, he would probably answer “to make the illusion better.” And then ask him “why make the illusion better?” he would answer “to make the emotional experience of the movie more real.” This could go on forever…

Modern day Hollywood  is one of the greatest manifestations of an illusion making machine that we have in our experience. It is one of the greatest “clues” to what’s really going on. So much money, time, effort, and energy is put into such complex illusions to make them feel “real.” Robert Scheinfeld even equates living to being in a “full-immersion movie.”

And that requires being fully immersed. Which means coming up for air only so often to see the truth. So now that you can’t see which way is up, is the awakening that you experience when you do the process another, deeper illusion?

Is it the honesty and truth poking through the artifice? Or is the honesty and truth you feel right now just an illusion itself? For the record, I believe that it is real truth poking through the cloud cover. I believe the hologram pulls you further towards immersion in order to further convince you of the truth. Every time I experience transcendence or the truth, it’s not long for the hologram to do its darndest to convince me that it’s real again. In one moment I see the Matrix and in the next I’m paying taxes. Then I realize the taxes are an illusion, but then I have a flat tire.  How far can this rabbit hole go?

Like watching Funny People, I think busting loose includes a happy coexistence of the illusion and the truth – one where each illuminates the other.

What do you “think”?

Busting Loose

Busting Loose from the Business Game by Robert Scheinfeld

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Having read Anthony DellaFlora’s well formulated review of Robert Scheinfeld’s Busting Loose from the Business Game, I felt moved to post my own thoughts.

Though Busting Loose from the Business Game is Robert’s second book, it’s more of a “director’s cut” of Busting Loose from the Money Game. This may sound like a bad thing, but it’s not since it goes deeper into all of the pressing questions you might have after reading his mind-expanding first entry, but with the exact same user-friendly model.

And I mean the exact same model. Some of his chapters have the same titles and have the same or similar passages. If you haven’t read Busting Loose from the Money Game then you would be better off just reading Busting Loose from the Business Game – it’s a better in every way. He has obviously benefited from living in what he calls Phase 2 for a long time now and by the second half of the book offers a far clearer window into “creative ecstasy” than he ever could in book number one.

Haven’t Read Busting Loose from the Money Game?

The Busting Loose series is about awakening. It’s about realizing who you really are. And it’s about reclaiming your true power and living a life that is both abundant and congruent with what you love.

There are two phases. Phase 1 is where you believe that you are limited, weak, and subject to the whims of cruel fate. This is pretty much how I felt most of my life. Even when things were good, I believed that it could all change in an instant.

Phase 2 is about one phenomenon that takes two distinct forms. The overall phenomenon is that you awaken into who you really are and what’s really going on, but the first part is incredibly painful as you break out of your limited beliefs and ways of being. The second part, which is what happens after busting loose from the business game, is where you live life magically, where anything is possible, and where the focus of your existence is on what brings you joy and what you love without worrying about where the money will come from.

So what is really going on?

This series is the most practically radical series about personal development and manifestation I’ve ever come across so I will summarize but I would urge you to read the book if you are interested. He gives these pieces to you slowly and lets them build together to slowly chip away at your old belief systems.

In short, the entire experience you have in this world is a hologram, akin to a game. But it’s a fully immersive game where winning equals understanding the game, not winning it through conventional ideas of success. Understanding, though, can only come through direct experience or a feeling of the truth. The truth is that you are actually the consciousness behind everything in your experience, including you, other people, money, and the physical world.

Robert gives you the ability to have that experience through a technique he calls the Process. Using the Process you dive into every situation that causes you negativity and comfort and take away its power over you. You do this by recognizing that the situation is merely an illusion.

This may cause some distress in you as you may think that you have to disassociate from all you love to bust loose. Far from it. In fact Robert’s message is one of unending infinite joy. He continually urges you to see all of life as a game that is actually fun to play and the most fun part is realizing just how fun it can be.

What’s Different About Busting Loose from the Business Game?

The first obvious difference is that his focus is on business and all it entails, not just money. So the scope of Busting Loose from the Business Game is bigger. Instead of just talking about money as part of the hologram, he talks about income, expenses, stock markets, customers, vendors, products, services, and creativity all in the context of the hologram.

If he writes another book, it might as well be called Busting Loose from the Human Game. I’d be interested in a book that covered as many possible sub games of the human experience. It is rather easy, however, to apply his theories to any sub game you want: the relationships game, the social game, the emotions game, the adventure game, anything really.

The real reason to read this book is how much more he goes into depth about what the journey in Phase 2 is like. He talks about the kinds of emotional experiences you will have if you do the inner work he asks you to do. The last sixty pages are worth the price of Busting Loose from the Business Game alone.

In the first book he summarized what Phase 2 was like in both the beginning and farther in. Here he lays out two distinct parts of Phase 2 – the expansion phase and the play phase. He goes into wild detail about both sub phases and really tries to give the feeling (as much he can with words) about what busting loose from the business game is like on a general and day-to-day basis.

In doing this he charts the troubles you’ll encounter along the way. I was very happy about this since I started using the process about ten months ago and I had many questions that I had to find answers for myself. Those answers, it turns out, were mostly right since he answers them in this book. Questions like, “how long do I have to use the process to bust loose?” and “why do I seem to be going backwards when just before I felt expansion?” He is a much more generous tour guide this time around.

He also gives a very detailed explanation of what it feels like to cross from the expansion stage, which includes a lot of discomfort and can seem a lot like Phase 1, to the play stage where anything is possible. In particular, he talks about how you won’t feel like you need to plan or invest in changing anything. He also makes crystal clear that the idea of cosmic overdraft protection won’t happen until after you cross the busting loose point. This is good because I tried to use this idea and got saddled with lots of overdraft fees!

Conclusion

It’s obvious from reading this review and this site that I’m a true believer in Robert’s work. Furthermore, I believe that his practices are the true method of manifestation.

If you are a believer like me, you will find a wealth of information in his new book. If you aren’t, then he presents a more convincing case than his previous book, but only because he has more detail and conviction. Having said that, I can’t recommend the book to anyone enough who wants to expand their mind and create real abundance and joy in their lives.

And if you like, I invite you to express your appreciation buy buying the book via this link:

Busting Loose

Top 5 Most Overlooked Hiding Places of Power

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In no particular order here are five circumstances that often pop into my hologram and give me the opportunity to reclaim power. However, these five circumstances are deceptive since they don’t necessarily lead to huge drama and can easily be missed.

While part of moving deeper into Phase 2 is not actively going after the hiding places for your power eggs, you would be amazed at how many opportunities you can create to reclaim power simply by being aware that they exist.

Without further ado…

1. Driving

I’ve always thought of driving as a meditative experience. Maybe I’m listening to my favorite pop song on the radio, a stirring orchestral piece, or the simple sound of the summer wind. Driving doesn’t take all of my brain power, but it’s just freeing enough to let my mind wander and it gives new stimulus for my brain to chew on. I particularly love the look of the clouds, or an ever fading vista of the new york skyline as I cross a bridge across a clear river.

However, since I’ve moved to urban New Jersey driving has become half meditative and half endlessly frustrating.

There are literally nine stoplights between here and the freeway and it’s only ten blocks. Sometimes it takes a half hour just to get to the freeway which is almost always backed up on the way to work. Once on the freeway I have to deal with buses that think they can handle like Miatas changing lanes on a dime. And by deal I mean “not die from.” Furthermore, because of the congestion all the pedestrians have learned to completely ignore traffic lights and walk out into the street without looking. And don’t even get me started on the weather, which can change from sunny to hurricane in a span of five minutes.

I’m not here to rant or rave (though it’s been nice) but my point is that driving offers both fodder for discomfort and a peaceful environment with which to practice the process.

Have you ever tried to drum up some negative feelings just to practice the process? I’m guilty of this. Just go for a drive. There’s a good chance something will pop up and piss you off.

2. Numbers

With a philosophy most known for a book  called “Busting Loose from the Money Game” this one seems obvious. What may not be obvious is just how often you may let numbers decide your emotional state and how much “success” you have.

  • Are you trying to lose/gain weight?
  • Are you playing the stock market?
  • Does a 75 degree day make you happy or sad?
  • How about a sale?
  • Have you ever had a number assigned to your intelligence level?
  • Are you in school? Then you’re gonna be processing all day long.
  • Are you looking at your watch?
  • Are you too early or too late?
  • Do you want that cute guy/girl’s phone number?
  • Are you trying to drive traffic to a website? :-)

Of all those temperature is my biggest stress factor, since one of my jobs is to deliver sandwiches and soup to a cancer center. The only problem is that these patients have very low immune systems so the temperatures of these foods has to fall within a certain range. Every day someone from the hospital checks the temperatures. Sometimes my entire well being in a day falls on the digital reading on a thermometer. Talk about power in numbers!

But they are just numbers which are very illusory. I find it easier to apply the process to numbers than people, events, or more “real” seeming things because numbers are already abstract. It’s not a huge leap for my mind to make from there.

A good thing to keep in mind here is that since numbers are illusory they can also change without logic. While their holographic nature may be easier to grasp it may be harder to remember that their logical nature is just a ruse – just part of the story. Remember that next time you don’t eat as much and still “seem” to gain weight. (I wish I had this in my hologram)

3. Experiencing negative feelings for “no reason”

Further emphasizing your expanded self’s complete and utter control of your hologram is you may be walking along, minding your own business, and suddenly you’re overcome with a lot of discomfort.

Usually this happens to me when I’m emotionally triggered, but not necessarily. I may hear a song that takes me back to a time, see someone who reminds me of someone I used to know, or just simply fall back into an old feeling. Yet sometimes, just because I’m between other thoughts, negativity seeps in.

I used to think this was a major problem, especially when I was obsessed with positive thinking, but now I realize it’s like a “freebie” from my expanded self. Instead of going through some terrible circumstance in the hologram and dealing with the repercussions you can have discomfort sent straight into your brain.

Let’s go back to the “no reason” idea. Say you’re with a friend and you’re having a great time. Now all of a sudden you feel discomfort or negativity. Because you are good friends you tell them what’s happening and because you are good friends, they try to help you. The dialogue might go something like this.

“What’s wrong?”

“I just don’t feel well all of a sudden.”

“Are you getting sick?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Is there something you want to talk about.”

“No, I’m fine. I just don’t feel well.”

“Hmm…well maybe you ate something bad earlier.”

“Could be.”

“Have you tried drinking water?”

“Umm..”

“Or fresh air! That always helps me…”

This could go on for a long time. Your friend wants to find out the reason why you’re not feeling well, because to most Phase 1 players it’s inconceivable that you could feel uncomfortable for no reason at all. This overwhelming cause-and-effect thinking can lead you into a long process of deduction to find the culprit of your mysterious disturbance when you could just be using the process.

To paraphrase Robert Scheinfeld, “don’t try to label your discomfort. Just use your Phase 2 tools.” Viewed in this way, it’s like your expanded self sent you an express mail egg just for you to reclaim.

4. Others pushing your buttons

Everyone has a pet peeve. Mine is when people have a lack of respect. This can manifest itself in ways as simple as friends not calling back in a reasonable amount of time to as large as deciding not to work for an otherwise great employer because their checks bounce. When someone treats me differently than they would treat themselves I experience discomfort ranging from miffed to downright furious.

People are a curious creation of the hologram as they – more than anything else – seem like independent consciousness that can have good or ill will towards you. If you bump your head on the door, you can blame yourself. If your event gets rained out, you blame the weather, god, fate, or whatever. If someone cuts you off in traffic, then they are to blame.

Investing emotionally in people is a fantastic way to reclaim power, but it’s paradoxically one of the most difficult situations to see from a Phase 2 perspective. Those numbers in your bank account? Chances are they’ve only been affecting you emotionally for a couple of months at most. That loved one who knows just how to piss you off. You’ve got a history with them. And if you just started the busting loose process, it will be easy for you to forget who you really are, place your discomfort squarely on the other person, and send your hologram into lockdown.

Your opportunity, in the midst of you being miffed or furious, is to see that large warehouse of power in the other person and appreciate how expediently they guided you to it.

As often as I can, I visualize someone I just had an unfavorable interaction with in a movie theater where the movie of my life is playing and we just got to the moment that brought discomfort. Me and this person (they could be someone who didn’t hold the elevator) are shaking hands and marveling at how well we played our parts. We open some champagne and make a toast.

“To us!” Yet we really mean, “to you!”

That person doesn’t have a personal vendetta against you, but they are the personal postage service from your expanded self with your daily dose of power to reclaim. You only have to realize this.

5. Succeeding

What’s wrong with succeeding you may ask? Nothing. In Phase 1. However, now that you want to bust loose, can you see that reward is simply the other side of the coin in the hologram from punishment?

You may be temporarily happy, but that is nothing compared to the true joy of busting loose. And leaving the power egg in success unclaimed continues the fallacy that happiness can only come from the hologram. Just as Robert Scheinfeld says to affirm your understanding of the truth when you gain money as well as lose it, doing the same with any measurement of success or reward further reinforces your belief in the truth.

At the beginning of Phase 2 your Phase 1 residual thought process was probably focused on busting loose to make your life better. If you’ve moved along in Phase 2 doing the process on a consistent basis you’ll already know that busting loose changes your very way of looking at the world and the idea of success.

But in case you haven’t, here is a taste of that way of being…

You already are successful. In fact the idea of success in the hologram is a spec of dust in the galaxy of your infinite love and abundance. Any success you receive in this world is like your expanded self sending you power disguised as candy. As you can see, you really can have your cake and eat it too!

Where do you hide your power?

Have you been overlooking a massive treasure chest?

Creativity

Digital Art: Quantum Disintegrating Clock

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Time is just another part of the hologram.
Time is just another part of the hologram.

Featured in the article Bust Loose with the Power of Now

Think about just how much of your life is run by time. You may have to work at a specific time. You definitely have to go the bank at a specific time. You may be able to go to the beach during specific seasons. Generally, you probably don’t like being late, but early is not much better.

And if you’re in school forget it. Schedules, semesters, quarters, homework, deadlines – all revolving around something that doesn’t really exist.

This was a relatively quick drawing and I actually did it without the wacom tablet. It conveys the ephemeral nature of time, yet the presence of an alarm clock in the picture is enough to still bring discomfort (atleast to me!)

How I did it

  1. I downloaded a royalty free stock photo from Stock.XCHNGE. I was just going to use that, but why when I can vandalize it and make it art?
  2. I loaded up GIMP and proceeded to use the smudge tool liberally (read: far too much) all over it. To give the illusion of the clock fading away, I managed to smudge both away from the clock and from the whitespace into the clock. This gave the look of “streams” of the clock fading off into the ether.
  3. Then to make it a little more fantastical I changed the hue and upped the saturation. Since it was such a monochromatic image the filters only really affected the hands of the clock (which became a nice icy blue) and some of the lighting around the rims.
  4. I color picked the yellow from the rims of the clock and applied the galaxy preset on the paint brush to give the effect of “pixie dust.”
  5. Another round of smudging and we have ourselves a quantum disintegrating  clock!
Busting Loose

Phase 2, Day 257: Last 9 months Overview

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Wow. That’s a huge gap between day 12 and day 257. In other words, almost 9 months. I’ll give a quick recap about what has changed in that .75 year period.

In the hologram (for those of you result-minded-Phase-1-residue folks):

  • Career – Not only consistent work (after a 6 month period of nothing), but work I like doing. I also managed to save up over 3,000 dollars while feeling much more highly valued by my employers than ever before.
  • Creativity – Returned to finishing my feature film as well as building a new website which eventually came full circle back to this one.
  • Community – “Discovered” a large support network of people for the Busting Loose process.
  • Body – My body, though it still feels pained, it is more fit than it’s ever been.
  • Exploration – “Got over” much of my social anxiety and began exploring more of wonderful New York.

Now for the really important changes. As cliched as it sounds, I’ve developed a much deeper understanding of Robert Scheinfeld’s work.

The best way I can describe it is that before I was trying to “use” the busting loose process to acheive an end. Now it’s much more about embodying the principles and letting them connect and subtly transform my life.

For example, I’ve always been a planner. In fact, just recently I created a five year success flowchart. That’s right, I’m the kinda person who gets all tingly over a flowchart. Well this is exactly the kind of future-obsessed Phase 1 thinking the process was meant for. I have since then slowly let go of my attachment to all of my big plans to become famous, rich, well-loved, muscular, and a world traveller.

Not that I don’t want those things – but right now – now is more important. Both for the busting loose process and the salvation of my sanity.

A caveat: The journal was originally supposed to show the slow progression into Phase 2, but for reasons related to my expansion, that did not happen over the last 9 months. However, all of that experience will color the articles I write from now on and I will constantly be referring to that period in this journal.

Stay tuned.

Busting Loose

Bust Loose with The Power of Now

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Time is an illusion.
Time is an illusion.

One of the main differences between Phase 1 and Phase 2 is that in Phase 1 it doesn’t matter what you learn or how much you “try” to “achieve” higher consciousness. By it’s very nature, every solution in Phase 1 must fail, because we haven’t recognized the illusory nature of our reality yet. And, taken from a Phase 1 perspective – that everything that is happening is real and apart from you – using “The Power of Now” will ultimately not give you the results you want. However, in Phase 2, it gives a powerful example of how to use the process effectively.

Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” concisely points out the fact that we only ever live in the present. It’s overriding thesis is that our true power is in our present experience – and by focusing our power into the past by dwelling or into the future by speculating ultimately diminishes our effectiveness.

There are some amazing exercises similar to Buddhist meditation wherein you simply feel experience moving through you. To demonstrate how to know you’re in the now, he says just think to yourself:

“What am I thinking now?”

We don’t talk about it much in “real life” where we are often dominated by calendars, time, events, troubling pasts, regrets, and so forth. Yet the the fact remains true that the only real thing is right now. If I am preoccupied with the past, it is my choice to bring feelings and thoughts of the past into the present. If I am concerned or excited about the future, those feelings can still only exist in the present.

Is the Power Really in the Now?

So essentially the past and the future are an illusion. No matter how real they are to you, they are no more real than a highly impressionable book or movie. Furthermore, your memory is not so different than your imagination as it’s widely understood that your memory tends to be selective and can be changed through methods such as suggestion.

I once had a past-life regression and the whole time while under hypnosis I wondered if I was just making the whole thing up. Then I wondered what would be the difference? As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

So if we can assume that the past and future are merely constructs of our mind – ideas that make our living in reality much smoother – is it that hard to extend this idea to now? What if now is just as imaginary as then, or when? What if, by focusing all our power into now, with slogans such as “live in the moment”, we are fiercely reinforcing the idea that now exists? This can’t help but strengthen the illusion – that everything is real and separate. “Now” is a wonderful aspect of the Phase 1 game.

Reclaiming the Power of Now

Robert Scheinfeld also believes that many of the Phase 1 “tricks” include pieces of the truth. So it goes with “The Power of Now” It is true that our power to progress in Phase 2 exists now, but it’s not our ill-focused mind on the past or the future that disempowers us – it’s the logical progression of Phase 1.

Here’s what’s really happening – this entire world is your consciousness. Before playing the game, you decided to have a focal point of your consciousness as a persona. This you commonly refer to as yourself. I’m Chris the limited human being, for example. Along with your limited playground universe that is an extension of your consciousness (even this writing is your consciousness) is your persona’s experience of the passage of time. Thus the key here is the only “time” to experience your infinite nature is “now”

What I’m trying to say is that the belief that “someday” you’ll “achieve” enlightenment or whatever the Power of Now seeks to give with enough “effort” or “knowledge”  is an illusion. And thus what the Power of Now claims – life is freeing when lived in the present unburdened by the past and future is correct. Through this lens, does it make sense to worry about the future?

If you’re having trouble, think of time not so much as passing in a linear fashion. Think of it as an unfolding. Did you know that our tectonic plates are actually like large conveyor belts? That means that every second another piece of new Earth (Eckhart Tolle pun) rises from its center. No piece of Earth is ever in the same place. It’s all subtly moving.

Your consciousness too slowly unfolds as you realize more and more. Time seems to pass because no matter how limited you are – you’re still infinite underneath and new experience will continue to be manifested in consciousness. Nothing is ever the same. Now is simply the leading edge of your consciousness.

Your Opportunity

The opportunity  you – the persona – have is to embrace the call to connect with your infinite nature. By doing this you are telling your consciousness to expand more. And as the unfolding continues while playing the human game, your infinite nature will become more and more fully realized. You will have revelations. You may find your relationships with yourself and others changing. You may become clear.

And eventually, you will begin to know at a very deep level – not just accept – the experience of now as perfect no matter how imperfect it may seem to your persona. Good or bad, angry, sad, ecstatic, bored, hurt, hopeful, distraught – all just unfoldings of your consciousness – only the finest pure experience for the life connousieur that you are. You will understand that “now” – how you feel, what you think, even what you do – has no bearing on the past or the future. And time is just a story your expanded self chooses to live in the unfolding.

Imagine a piece of paper. Crumple that paper up. Though it may seem to be smaller and insignificant now that it is crumpled, if you unfold it, it becomes just the same as it ever was though it seemed when crumpled to be different.

The paper is the Human Game. In Phase 1 your life can easily seem like a crumpled piece of paper. It’s got obvious limitations. It doesn’t seem to change. But the process of awakening and shifting into Phase 2 is the process of unfolding that paper. Once you bust loose, the paper can be made through origami into a crane, a heart, a plane, or a treasure box.

Feeling the Game in “The Human Game”

What I invite you to do is to feel the present through the lens of your expanded self. Just imagine if you were a creator that lived in constant bliss (what Scheinfeld calls joyfulness) and you decided to live in this limited reality. Can you see that you feel two levels of consciousness here? On one level there is your current emotion – guilt for example. One another level there is an absolute non-judgmental feeling of incredible joy that you are feeling just for the fun of playing the game.

Have you ever played a video game where your character is in extreme circumstances? Most games have these kinds of situations. If you were really fighting hundreds of enemies you’d probably be feeling intense forms of fear, rage, shock, pain, and who knows what else. But instead you who is playing the game, are having fun because you just got the game, it’s got the newest best graphics, and it’s not real.

If you die, it’s no big deal. But maybe you’re at the end of the level and you just have to defeat the boss. You’ve played this level many times before and now it’s personal. You experience many similar emotions of distress to your in game avatar. “I almost beat him!” you think. Maybe you throw the controller across the room. This is what happens when we forget we’re playing the game. We take it personally. But that’s the point.

If anything should charge you with purpose it’s this: you came here to experience right now. All the “failings”, “mistakes”, “should-haves”, and “could haves.” Now is not always “happy” and it’s not supposed to be. Just like you’re not supposed to eat your favorite food all the time. The emotions and experiences that many believe you should avoid – as though focusing on the “now” was an instant morphine drip – are exactly what you came to experience. And experiencing limitation (or Phase 1) is part of the unfolding.

In the beginning you can only experience now on one level – the face value of the illusion. The limited world. All of your thoughts, emotions and, actions. All of your attempts to “fix” the illusion. All the conviction you can muster to believe this is all there is. But now you know there’s more than that.

Now you can begin to experience the second level of now. The level of the player, playing you. That is the real and eternal present. That is the “real” now. You’re not a puppet. The player is you as well. Every spiritual experience you’ve had up until this point has been placed there by your expanded self to support you in moving into Phase 2 – to bust loose. And for the sheer joy of experiencing it.

Ever given up something you love? I love Cinnabons and I intentionally don’t eat them often. I do this so every time I will rejoice and remember how delicious they are. In Phase 1, your expanded self does the same with the feeling of bliss or spiritual connection in order to deepen your palette of experience in the illusion.

But now you have the opportunity to move into Phase 2. To see “The Matrix” for the code. To see the illusion for the unimaginable power that created it. This power is you and always has been. If you have made the decision, I urge you to reclaim your power from now. To see it as your expanded self sees it. And as you say “Marco” your expanded self says “Polo.” Only now, you can begin to open your eyes.


Busting Loose, Happiness, Spirituality

What’s Missing? Playing the Happiness Game

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I was journaling today starting with the question, “If I know the truth, then why doesn’t the illusion collapse immediately?” Robert Scheinfeld’s answer to this is simple – it’s not part of the Human Game to win it easily. The fun is in playing a game with challenges and discoveries. Fair enough, but I’m now in the part of the game where I must discover what has held me back – what pieces have been missing.

And after writing about what was missing, the now obvious realization came swiftly after. Ironically, the idea that something is missing, that there is something more to know, something more to be and I have only to find that thing – is one of the greatest Phase 1 illusions there is and one one of my largest eggs to process.

Step By Step

I began with the question “Why must I play Phase 1 games when I already know the mindset of Phase 2?”

After a bit of clarifying, I boiled my question down to “what’s missing?”

I had the direct experience of “A Ha, the thing I’m trying to do is the very thing that’s giving me the opportunity to progress in Phase 2.”

I felt deeply the emotion of missing something, like a part of my body or soul had vanished, and I could never have it back. I sat with this feeling for a couple of minutes, really exploring the terrible existential crisis that I’ve felt a lot throughout my life.

Then I told the truth about it. That it wasn’t real. I didn’t try to change my feeling, merely add a layer of understanding to it. This lessened the intensity a bit, but in no way suppressed it.

I began reclaiming my power. Right now it seems the major shift happens when I tell the truth and open to my infinite nature, not reclaim my power. Nevertheless I felt the judgment draining out of “this feeling is bad.” And as I did, I felt more joyful emotion beginning to come in, and I saw the emotion – this great emptiness – for the pure experience it was.

I opened up to my infinite nature, and while many times this step causes me to expand my brain beyond my personal experience to encompass oceans of cosmic light, this time the focus extended inwards and backwards along my personal timeline. Appreciation of this Phase 1 illusion came along with the expansive perspective.

The immediate understanding that came to me was that this feeling of emptiness, of a missing piece, what Lynn Grabhorn calls, “separation” is the prime driving force of my life, and what I now believe to be the engine of the Phase 1 game. It’s a negative driving force, in that many of my actions have been taken to get away from this feeling.

The Origin of a Feeling

Can you think back to a time before a feeling existed? For instance, back to before you had crushes on the opposite gender? Isn’t it weird to think that something you may be obsessed with now used to never matter? I did this to investigate the beginnings of this gaping hole in my soul.

Beginning in the present, I feel that my direct understanding of the truth and Phase 2 is missing. In one way or another, this search for the “answer” has permeated my life for the last couple of years.

Before that it was the sensation that my connection to abundance was missing – whether it be knowledge of how to make money, ability to acquire money, or straight up luck to find money.

Another huge one before that was in the dating world. I felt that a true part of myself was missing without another person. I still feel this way and must work with the process on this feeling.

It wasn’t until I got back to about third grade that the feeling ceased to be in my experience. When I was a child any negativity was temporary, and everything in life seemed to be in a state of flow. There wasn’t this feeling of hollowness.

Without going into the day-by-day of my childhood one experience after another (created by my expanded self) slowly created the illusion of this incredible lack inside me and also manifested that outside of me in ways like jealousy, inferiority, disillusionment, and poverty. At every point in the timeline it seemed like a cruel force. I was diagnosed with depression. I wondered why others didn’t understand this all encompassing feeling. I watched my friends settle for less when I would settle for nothing but the unequivocal achievement of my dreams – dreams that still have gone unrealized. But today looking back I understand the reason of the pattern. And I’m just now seeing the wide ranging implications of this feeling.

Examples

Money

“I don’t have enough money for the things I want” Boils down to: Something’s missing. In this case resources.

“I don’t have what it takes to earn enough money.” Boils down to: Something’s missing. In this case the knowledge to “earn” money.

Relationships

“I need a relationship to feel complete.” What’s missing? A relationship.

“I need to be more attractive/outgoing/skilled or have more money/status/fame or have better friends/opportunities/job/hobbies in order to have the relationship I want.” Something’s missing. This person feels they aren’t complete enough to “get” a relationship.

“He/she is better than me. I’ll never be as rich/beautiful/successful/charismatic/smart as them.” Translation: Something’s wrong with me. I.E. Something is missing. In this example, it’s an inherent or learned characteristic.

Body

“I really should exercise more. I’d probably feel better and feel better about myself.” Boils down to: I’m not good enough as I am – something’s missing. Is it discipline? Motivation? Respect?

Creativity

“I wish I could draw.” Translation: there is something other people have that I don’t have that allows them to draw and I can’t. A.K.A. Something is missing.

“I can’t figure out how to end this story/get past my creative block/design this house/get this chicken recipe right.” Is something missing? Yes.

“If only I could make money doing what I love.” Something’s missing. It could be many things – drive, enterprenurial skills, a valuable product, etc etc.

Lifestyle

“Maybe I should move to a different town. I could start all over there.” Something is missing.

Spirituality

“If we’re supposed to be infinite, then why don’t I feel infinite? Why do the things I truly desire keep eluding me?” Conclusion: something is missing. Otherwise by spritual law I’d have the life that I want.

“Why don’t I feel fulfilled?” Something major is missing here.

The Happiness Game

That’s probably enough examples. What I’d like to point out is that the missing piece to every one of these confounding problems is an illusion.

Ergo, the process by which we seek to “obtain” these “missing pieces” is also an illusion.

And that means also that the very notion of not being complete just as you are, just as this moment is, is too an illusion. Sit with that a moment. Ok, even if you just had a profound paradigm shift, money is most likely not raining from the sky just yet. Of course not. If you identify with any of these examples or extrapolated some of your own, then you know that this is a huge huge huge egg. What is an egg? Belief + Power + Judgement + Consequences. Think of the consequences of any of these beliefs. For me I’ve always been searching for the “one” and I’ve moved over twenty times just to avoid that feeling of lack, as well as taking drugs, watching TV,  and graduating college as quickly as possible in order to feel “special.” I’m fully convinced that most of my greatest life decisions – where to go to school, who to date, what area to study, what jobs to take – were predicated on avoiding the feeling of cosmic emptiness.

So the power can be reclaimed not just from the feeling itself,(though I invite you to really dive into it once you have a handle on the process) but every choice you’ve made that was informed by the feeling. Every “consequence” And every time you judged each consequence as “good” or “bad” This is a motherload of an egg stash.

What I invite you to contemplate along with this information is that this was an incredible Phase 1 trick, similar to the Money Game. But this is a bigger game in scope than that. It’s the Happiness Game. The Happiness game holds all the power of your hopes, dreams, fears, and nightmares. In your own time, explore each one and realize its truth. They are all illusions, and you came here to experience them first as real, then as the truth.

This feeling, the “splinter in your mind” as Morpheus says in The Matrix, began in perfect time with your process of moving deeply into Phase 1 so that you could begin to move into Phase 2. The sensation that there is something more to life than what you see is the beginning of your journey home. It’s the call to action in your hero’s journey. And this is not to belittle the depths of sadness you may have felt that may have led you to look for “the answer”. But whatever path led you here was perfect for you, and if you’ve had an inkling or an ocean of this feeling – count yourself lucky. There is vast power there.

Creativity

Busting Loose from the Writing Game

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Just a couple months ago I read Robert Scheinfeld’s fantastic Busting Loose from the Money Game which opened me up to a completely different approach to metaphysics, law of attraction, and the realization of worldly dreams. Furthermore, it has proved itself to be the correct one for me. And while I have long wished to write about the gaps that seem to present themselves in every self help or manifesting method, and seek to fill those gaps, it’s really this book, this philosophy, this reality shattering understanding, that inspired me to write this blog in the first place.

I originally created this blog to provide value to those who have and haven’t read Robert Scheinfeld’s book and I believe that will still hold true, but this intention was misappropriately applied. The result ended up being watered-down articles that intentionally withheld information about the busting loose process in effort to cater to a wider audience that may see Scheinfeld’s assertions as too radical.

Quickly, doing this froze up my own creative process, since I found myself marginalizing the very real and very important Phase 2 journey into it’s own insulated category, scarcely referencing this inherently interconnected sequence of realizations in other articles and thus rendering all other advice to be useless, especially for those looking for more information about busting loose.

This is like reading a book to a classroom while intentionally not reading every fourth page and expecting those in the class to understand the story and receive value from it.

So from now on the focus of this blog will be the Phase 2 Journey, practical applications of the process, and every effort to help others bust loose while doing so myself. The subjects will still be as – if not more – wide ranging.

This is very exciting. In doing this I’ve busted loose from own writing game, and it is my intention that you will receive genuine value from all articles to come.

The work of Chris Tomasso, writer and law of attraction enthusiast.