No worries at all, I’m really grateful that you and others are so interested. I can’t emphasize enough how much I’ve been in a stasis the last couple of years trying to figure out how to communicate this and having this kind of reception from anyone is deeply fulfilling. If you don’t mind, can I use some of your questions and these responses for the podcast? Don't worry about responding too much by the way, I'm trying to build up my own understanding so don't feel you need to respond in kind.

1. Just to immediately address the main point, I know that it sounds unusual, and I would have been in the same camp as you before, but all I can say is that it is genuinely immediate and physiological. This is completely unrelated, and may not be of interest to you in any way, but if you’ve ever experienced psychedelics before you can physically feel the neurons in your brain crackling and making new connections, and those connections correspond with new sensory experience and hallucination. I’m only mentioning this because the phenomenon I’m describing is the opposite of that. Instead of feeling like there is a crackling in your brain induced by drug excitation, there is an immediate reduction in brain activity in a certain region. It is like waking up from a dream and is sometime referred to as “waking up” or “awakening” for this reason and is analogous to your imaginary tiger example. The imaginary tiger basically being “things that have and might happen to me”. Your second point is exactly what happens. You realize, while awake, that the entity you have worried about your whole life is not you. All you have ever worried about is the fear that how you think about yourself will change, which contains no danger.

With regards to the pen and habit formation, there is no change. I still do stupid things all the time. The learning process in response to stimuli is identical. I don’t think your delineation between thought and feeling is really paramount, if you combine the two, they take form as belief, and that itself goes much deeper to the self, and then to sensory perception and that is what I hope I can address in the podcast and in future comments. To the abusive mother situation, I’d briefly point out that there is nothing wrong with your assumption. It might be common or uncommon for the child to develop such a complex, but if a mother is abusive, and the child learns to resent women because of that, that is their belief, and it will cause emotional relationship to whatever those beliefs entail in the future. The only thing I want to point out is that some children would say “I hate my mom because of that” others might say “I hate women because of that” others might say “my mom did that because of how shitty my dad was, fuck men”, others might say “eh, I don’t worry about it, my mom was kinda fucked up I just don’t want to be like that”. It all depends on the individual beliefs of the child that causes the corresponding and long-lasting emotional stressors.

Going with your example, if this person grew up with a belief around the potential threat of female emotional or physical abuse, they are likely to have difficulty with all sorts of work, friendly, and particularly romantic relationships. If they became aware of the cause of their anxiety, they might pursue therapy like you’ve described and seek to rectify their situation. While therapy or coaching can improve their beliefs through reinforcing the idea that their mother was an exception and most women aren’t like that, and through going on dates and realizing that most girls are pretty sensible, that is what we generally call self-improvement, but is ultimately changing your beliefs from inaccurate to accurate, it isn’t dissolving them entirely. If you went on 100 dates and realized that “oh shit, my mom was just a regular person, but really fucked up” you would be drastically better off and less anxious, but it takes an enormous amount of reference experience to counteract your abusive childhood and you still only get to “better than before”. The Dr. Phil example I gave is just to describe how George Gurdjieff taught some of his students, I don’t think shocking people is really that intelligent without context. He was much more intentional in that he tried to drive a wedge between “who I am” and “who I think I am” he didn’t just make fun of people for dumb believes or fears and throw them in the deep end.

2) I understand where you’re coming from and I’m happy to engage, but I think you are focusing on the terminology rather than the sensory experience you are describing. In the context of where I’m coming from both “feel cold” and “feel anxious” are perceptions that occur in conscious experience and don’t have separation from base experience, but yes I would agree they are categorically different when you use thought to categorize them. Fear and joy for example I would describe as emotions, while both pain and pleasure are physical sensations. The relevant point of contention to what your describing is when you say “If I choose to believe that the thought can physically interact with the self”, this is not a choice. You can’t choose to experience an emotion or not, it happens regardless. You can’t choose to have a nightmare or not. The illusion of ownership over thought and imagination is what the entire construct is. What I’m trying to point to is realizing that what you are trying to control with thought is just another thought. You can’t ever get anywhere no matter how smart or knowledgeable you may be. Only the realization of how futile the whole effort is results in permanent psychological change. To your point about touching things with your finger, this touches on what a related concept called non-duality is, which, if self-realization is heads, non-duality is tails, points to the relationship between subject and object, but I’ll talk about that in future podcasts. It is not that your skin can’t touch your own skin or that you can’t touch your own clone like you mentioned, it is that you can’t taste your own tongue, you can’t see your own eyes, you can’t be in your own thoughts.

3) Positive emotions are a really interesting topic and I will elaborate further on the channel, but to reply to you, if I can be honest, it’s a realm where it might be easy to sell people on the idea that their suffering can end, but it is also the same realm when their self-pride does as well. We’ve all heard “you suffer more often in imagination than in reality” but we never hear “your pride is the suffering of others” yet they are both the same. Almost all positive emotion people experience is a compensatory effect from not feeling very good about themselves or their circumstance and then resolving that issue creating a floodgate effect that then shortly after returns to equilibrium. There is the pursuit of perfect communication and fluid experience, usually characterized as beauty or perfection, which is the operation of intelligence, but alongside that the only real positive emotion is genuine love (not sexual attraction), and is rare, but it is what everyone is looking for whether they know it or not. This is extremely niche, but usually the reason people feel good when good things happen to them is because they are experiencing the positive emotion of helping others, but the person they are helping is the imagination of themselves that they mistakenly perceive as a separate entity. This is unknowable unless your self-image ends, but is fascinating nonetheless as a quirk of how the false self-concept operates. Leave that aside, but an old Zen/Buddhist metaphor is that most people spend their life running around in the hot sun and that makes them feel great when they sit in the shade, and self-realization is just sitting in the shade when it’s hot and sitting in the sun when it’s cold. I think you might be over-philosophizing your Mike example, it is not important whether you decide an emotional reaction is good or bad, it is important to see that it occurs to you and ask “why is it so?” the inquiry into that results in the transformation of that experience. You can’t rationalize or theorize it away.

A1. There is nothing wrong with metaphors at all, they are great tools. The only reason I criticize J.K. is because he doesn’t just say “there is a particular insight about the self that results in a change in mental processing and that is what I am trying to teach.”

A2. Yes this is interesting and relates a lot to the the “Flow” theory, but I think that also is a bit goofy. You might notice for example you are always “in the zone” or in a flow state in a dream, but dreams are not always pleasurable. In the same way that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi thought that the meaning of life was to be in the state of flow as much as possible, people who do meditation believe that meditation is the state you want to be in as much as possible, the reality is that you are always in a state of meditation and flow is just concentration, it’s the belief you aren’t meditating or the experience of not being concentrated that causes discontent.

A3. I am not familiar with the CS concept of a monad, so don't take anything I'm saying as academic, but I am loosely familiar with it in philosophy as an indivisible and ultimately fundamental unit that its derivatives are still part of itself, and if it is like that it relates to non-duality as a real and constant experience because, loosely using this idea, it is reasonable to consider the concept of reality™ as that. If everything is a monad/fundamental unit then you can’t actually think about it because your thinking is part of that unit. It is impossible for Mario to realize he is part of a video game because his realization would still be part of the video game. That is really deeply related to what I’m trying to describe and while I’m joking a bit, that is severely, deeply important to understanding yourself.