Uncomfortable Conversations with Gregory

 Perception is never a passive process to take in the objective truth of the reality around you. In every moment, you are making educated guesses to construct an internal, conceptual understanding of the world. You frequently mistake this conception for the genuine article. You take this for granted.

Isaac Lidsky went from being a successful teenage actor on TV to losing his sight and learning to reassess every unconscious assumption he had about life as a result. Isaac contends that going blind the way that he did is one of the best things that ever could have happened to him, as he learned to see his life beyond the illusions of his mind that would have kept him a prisoner of bad luck and circumstance.

As Isaac began to lose his sight gradually over the course of more than a decade, he gained uncommon insight into the layers of meaning his mind automatically added to his perception. As micro blind spots formed in his vision, his brain would do everything it could to immediately compensate for them, often with wildly inaccurate guesses (such as perceiving a urinal as a sink in a bathroom).

The mind is always attempting to sort incoming stimuli into the categories it knows. When the old categories we carry are not adequate for new types of information, we run into conflict with reality. We cease to be able to communicate with each other. We make terrible choices about what to do with our lives because we cannot align our actions with what is real. As Isaac had to learn how to reinterpret his most fundamental perceptions of the world, he took less and less for granted about the way his mind worked. For that reason, he is thankful for the new outlook being blind gave him.

Even in communicating with other people, there are so many signals we take for granted in the subtle realm. We may completely overlook body language, tone, etc., or rely on them too much and form faulty assumptions from what we think we perceive in the many nuances of how someone presents themselves. The easiest way to clarify the true meaning of communication is to break concepts down to their simplest possible terms (“explain like I’m five), or clearly outline the premises behind an evaluation.

If a blind person were to enter a building having been told an inaccurate layout of its structure, his false impressions would conflict with his experience and make it impossible for him to get where he was trying to go. Instead, if he went in knowing nothing, he would be able to derive the truth of the situation through his own unbiased observation. The same is true with everything we ever do in life, as we are all blind and, yet, mostly unaware of our disability. We refuse to draw new categories when our blindness creates obstacles, and so we suffer without end.

Isaac Lidsky:

www.lidsky.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Lidsky

Eyes Wide Open by Isaac Lidsky:

https://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Wide-Open-Recognizing-Opportunities-ebook/dp/B01HCGYXZW/

Isaac Lidsky “What reality are you creating for yourself?” TED talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/isaac_lidsky_what_reality_are_you_creating_for_yourself

Travel As Transformation by Gregory Diehl:

http://amzn.to/2fDzgkM

Man’s Search For Meaning by Victor Frankl:

https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-Viktor-Frankl-ebook/dp/B009U9S6FI/

Isaac Lidsky on The Doctors explaining his blindness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kezluf7I_5M

Isaac Lidsky playing Weasel Weasel on Saved By The Bell: The New Class:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xM13axKEkDY

 Alexander, a young man struggling to express himself fully after reading Gregory’s book (Travel As Transformation), returns to Uncomfortable Conversations With Gregory after his appearance in UCWG 006: Does Knowledge Without Power Lead to Idle Suffering? to carry the dialogue on from their first conversation about being bold enough to pursue the interests of great intellect. The conversation this time around gets much more personal to both Gregory and Alexander’s unique perspectives on themselves and interaction with the people of the world, eventually coming to a head for the purpose of meditation and enlightenment.

The world is composed of only two things: experiences you are prepared to handle and experiences you are not prepared to handle. When an event that is outside your unconscious expectations comes into your life, you shift your conscious attention toward it so that you can figure it out and learn how to apply it in your life. This necessarily slows down your thought processes, however.

Whenever two people communicate, they have to be able to fit their thoughts into a structure that will make sense in the internal model of the one they are talking to. No communication is ever perfect. There is always information lost. There is always imperfect representation. Communication only needs to be good enough to be functional, so that two separate entities can come together in pursuit of a common, conscious goal.

All people rely on narrative structures to layer cognitive categories to filter the information that drives their lives. We all tell stories to explain or to justify who we think we are and what we think we are pursuing. Our conscious cognitive structures give justification for our unconscious wants, and this grows only more complex as we evolve out of childhood. This is why is so important to question every thought and value in our minds as our lives grow more mature and complex.

Regardless of the specific complexities within a person’s mind, everyone bridges the gap through the use of language. Language forces us to meet somewhere in the middle of our unique subjective worlds and share, for a time, an understanding of how things are. To improve our communication, we need to be able to reach into our subconscious assumptions and processes about other people. We all operate from flawed axioms about how human beings are supposed to work, and this prevents us from seeing things clearly and really connecting with others.

Alexander describes his conception of enlightenment as the pulling apart of the layers of the conceptual mind, the personal identity someone has of themselves. The enlightened mind is more easily able to address each layer of itself without harmfully tying them all together into conflicted states that do not serve the goals of the individual. The enlightened person has a greater perspective on why he perceives things the way he does and wants what he wants. The quality of enlightenment means the difference between a fulfilled life and a life of constant suffering, regardless of the activities a person pursues.

Meditation is supposed to give a person the perspective of enlightenment, yet most meditators limit its effect to highly specific practices. The effects of meditation can and should be brought into regular active life, to the point where times set aside for meditation are no longer required. The goal is to become aware of your mind in everything you do, not just when you’ve decided it’s time to engage in spiritual practice. Meditation in a controlled setting does not prepare you for your mind’s interaction with the real, chaotic world. It creates addiction and dependence.

If you don’t think you have an ego anymore, you are more subject to the delusions of the ego. This is a state of spiritual pride: to delude yourself into thinking you are immune to delusion. A crazy person doesn’t know they are crazy. The devil tricks the world into thinking he no longer exists so that he has greater manipulative power over it. He who says he is enlightened has just revealed himself not to be so.

The goal of enlightenment is not to acquire any specific piece of knowledge or physical skill. Enlightenment is disentangling yourself from whatever arbitrary narratives and cognitive structures determine how your mind processes information. The enlightened man can adapt to new circumstances without a prior structure by simply coming into them from neutral conditions and building a new structure from the ground up. In any moment, he can reset himself to the present and act as though he knew nothing before.

People come into conflict when they use terms in a categorical way that conflicts with other commonly held categories. Being transgender or homosexual rises out of a set of conditional qualities, and instead becomes an identity and a sociological concept. If everyone were able to just own the desires and apparent qualities that apply to them, these group identity clashes would never happen. Being precise with our language enables us to root out the cause of our deepest psychological misunderstandings and social problems.

Know what you want, and know how your mind works. If you knew nothing but those two things with certainty, you would live a very satisfied life.

Things mentioned:

UCWG 006: Does Knowledge without Power Lead to Idle Suffering? Matching Intellect with Boldness of Action -

https://gregorydiehl.net/ucwg-006-knowledge-power-lead-idle-suffering-matching-intellect-boldness-action/

Gregory’s book, Travel As Transformation: http://amzn.to/2fDzgkM

UCWG 031: Do You Dare To Follow Your Hero’s Journey to Find Self-Actualization? Life Purpose As The Highest Priority With Leo Gura of Actualized.org -

https://gregorydiehl.net/ucwg-031-heros-journey-self-actualization-life-purpose-highest-priority-leo-gura-actualized-org/

Actualized.org by Leo Gura:

https://actualized.org/

UCWG 001: How Many Dicks Would You Have to Suck to Know You Weren’t Gay? The Practical Limits of Exploration –

https://gregorydiehl.net/ucwg-001-many-dicks-suck-know-werent-gay-practical-limits-exploration/

E-Prime:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (linguistic relativity):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Andrew Galambos, Jay Snelson, and the V-50 Lectures:

https://youtu.be/Whx4QA3tGCo?list=PL2902B51D3386B77C

http://www.volitionalscience.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Joseph_Galambos

https://www.galambos-fei.com/

Our culture loves telling the story of one man taking on the world, working hard to do everything for himself. We build our movies and our myths around this archetype, and then unconsciously model it in our own lives. Useful as this type of path is, and even a necessary starting step, what comes next in the heroic journey?

The lone warrior must eventually learn how to deal with other people. He must form a tribe of ideas and perspectives that complement his own. He must be humble enough to know that however capable he is on his own, he will be more capable with the help of others. This humility only comes after he has earned healthy pride.

Parker Harris runs Junto Global, a networking organization for high-performing, high-ambition entrepreneurs dedicated to creating massive change in their lives and the world. Inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s meetings about 12 of his most respected and intelligent peers, Junto aims to enable individuals to act beyond their solo potential. This is a step that many capable individuals never reach in their development.

Education was once about helping people figure who they are, what they care about, and how to think about life. Today, it primarily serves to get the members of a society to act in a way that is considered in line with cultural and social values. We no longer need centralized schooling models to learn basic survival skills, as survival is now more nuanced and varied than any single path could ever adequately cover.

Foremost, children need to learn how to communicate harmoniously and interact with one another.

When young people first realize that they have never made their own choices, they move into an individualist, “me vs. the world”, state of mind to find themselves in solitude on their own personal journey. They perceive collective thinking as the enemy.

Mental traumas are often the result of thinking we are something other than what we are. Accurate thinking is the solution to this needless suffering. Exceptional people are prone to numbing themselves to the problems of society because they are hypersensitive to chaos and suffering. If they don’t learn to focus on the problems and passions that are most important to them, they might waste their lives and suffer needlessly until they die.

Our lives are determined by the quality of the questions we ask and the problems we attempts to solve.

You cannot know yourself completely if you come from either end of the suffering spectrum: abundance of everything or lack of anything. You need to see how you act under both conditions to see what you are capable of, and then comfortably navigate throughout the middle.

Your ability to experience deep suffering directly affects your ability to experience deep joy and fulfillment. You are more grounded in your pursuits when you have suffered, more dedicated, and more focused. You appreciate every win.

Delayed gratification is a product of maturity. Mature, well-tested people can look far into the future with their actions and go through tough trials that eventually lead to greater reward. Immature people have no tolerance for such trials.

The ability to accomplish what you want is dependent on first having the right experiences, acquiring the right tools, and meeting the right people.

“It’s not what you don’t know that’s going to hurt you. It’s what you know that isn’t so.”

Mark Twain

Things mentioned:

Junto Global: http://getstarted.juntoglobal.com/

UCWG 031: Do You Dare To Follow Your Hero’s Journey to Find Self-Actualization? Life Purpose As The Highest Priority With Leo Gura of Actualized.org - https://gregorydiehl.net/ucwg-031-heros-journey-self-actualization-life-purpose-highest-priority-leo-gura-actualized-org/

UCWG 029: How do Neuroatypicals Function in an Ordinary Society? Low Latent Inhibition, Divergent Thinking, and the Problem of Social Integration. - https://gregorydiehl.net/ucwg-029-natalie-marsh-neuroatypicals-society-low-latent-inhibition-lli-divergent-thinking-social-integration/

There comes a narrative turning point in the life of the person who makes their development their highest priority. When you find your internal motivation, your actions become immune to circumstance. But you can only reach this point through painful self-discovery.

Veronica Kirin is an entrepreneurial success coach for women, an anthropologist, and the creator of an upcoming book featuring the life lessons of the “greatest generation” who grew up before our present technological abundance. Veronica and Gregory embark on a journey of understanding why we act the way we do, and how we use the tools of our world to get what we want.

The new Wonder Woman movie tells the story of an idealistic hero whose motivations are faulty because she has no real world experience to test them against. By the end of the movie, after suffering great misery and having her motivations tested through trials, she realizes she now acts for a different reason. She isn’t acting to save other people for their sake or because they deserve it. She is acting because she has confidence in her beliefs that her standards for action are better, and she will uphold those standards no matter what changes around her. Nothing can destroy her now. She is internally invincible. She is a hero.

Emergency situations test us because they suddenly remove the external conditions we have grown dependent on for maintaining the illusion of our comfortable motivations. When we are uncomfortable, only our internal conditions remain. Your internal motivation must be rock solid to operate under any possible circumstances.

Self-doubt and humility keep you human. People have to know their weaknesses just as much as they know their strengths.

Boredom is the opposite of fear and curiosity. It is the indifference to the stimuli in your environment. Fear is the rejection, and curiosity is the desire for more.

Your weaknesses only matter if they stand in the way of your goals. They create struggle on the journey toward what you care about. Abilities only matter when you decide they do. When you are lacking a natural faculty, you can compensate with analysis and adaptation.

We all rely on mental strategies and physical tools to accomplish what we want and make up for our weaknesses. You must adapt to the toolset that makes you category of actions comfortable. We are spoiled by our physical tools because we grow with it, so we take it for granted. Are you always using the best possible tool in any situation.

People would rather never try something new than risk the discomfort of being bad at it for a time, and that shame is there greatest weakness of all. Shame can only exist when we compare ourselves to a standard someone else has given us. This is why children have so much less shame and so much more enthusiasm for trying new things. They have no other standards. Curiosity is gradually replaced by habit and routine as we age.

You need passion to break out of the normality of your routines. Passion can look like many things besides curiosity and enthusiasm. Passion can be deeply negative, a righteous kind of anger. When conditions are comfortable, rely on your curiosity and enthusiasm to drive your actions. When conditions are uncomfortable, when things have started to go wrong, rely on anger and other negative emotions to drive you forward.

The purpose of acting on a negative emotion is to reconcile the emotion as quickly as possible. You want to change the conditions which urgently created these bad feelings. The goal of positive emotions is to prolong them as long as possible by continually feeding them with new experiences.

Every work of art, regardless of the medium, exists to foster a new emotion in the viewer. It is to make people think or feel differently than they did before.

If you lack the emotional capacity to use your entire toolkit of emotions, you will also be unable to perceive of the world in a specific way when certain emotions are necessary to be accurate. Practice your ability to act in emergency settings to develop your emotions and hone your tools.

Things mentioned:

Veronica Kirin: https://veronicakirin.com/

Untold Stories book by Veronica Kirin: http://untoldstories.life   

@storiesofelders

Natalie Marsh joins Uncomfortable Conversations to discuss the problems of unconventional, exceptional thinkers trying to thrive in a conventional world. Neuro atypicals, including those with Low Latent Inhibition (LLI), Autism, ADHD, and so on, must learn to construct their own societies in a world not made for how they naturally are, in spite of their great gifts.  

From the episode of Prison Break where Michael Scofield is diagnosed with Low Latent Inhibition:

"People who suffer from low latent inhibition see everyday things like your or I do…but where we just process the image…they process everything. Their brains are more open to incoming stimuli and the surrounding environment. Other people’s brains, yours and mine, shut out the same information. We have to do it in order to keep our sanity. If someone with a low IQ has low latent inhibition, it almost always results in mental illness. But, if someone has a high IQ, it almost always results in creative genius."

A genius is someone who is able to push the limits of normal conceptions of intellectual ability. Intelligence is the ability to categorize information. They are the next step in the evolution of the human psyche, in at least one specific domain. However, everyone symbolizes information differently, accounting for the various traits we associate with different “types” of genius. A person can be extremely capable in one domain of thinking (such as mathematics or language), but weak in others because of how they conceptualize the necessary factors.

A great painter understands the symbolic concepts of color and proportion. A musician’s ears are equipped to pick up sound better, and his mind to rearrange it meaningfully.

Geniuses and divergent thinkers are often socially isolated from average minds because they do not have a way to communicate effectively. The way they perceive the world is just too different. It often leads to a life of quiet desperation or rapid revolutionary innovation. Societies change over time as minority subgroups rapidly become more successful than the majority norms which randomly bred them. This is how humanity becomes more intelligent over time. Neuroatypicals today are analogous to the random genetic mutations that ultimately change the entire DNA of a species.

In the modern world, we are arbitrarily born into and conditioned to be part of social groups we never chose for ourselves. We are limited by trying to understand the world through the group we were born into. Social outliers question these rules and branch off on their own to form new groups with new rules. If you can live as an outlier but still meaningfully participate in society as it is, you can have the best of both worlds and still push the world in a positive direction. All you have to do is be able to adapt.

Society has prepared many conventional paths that are designed to give the average person an averagely successful life. For extreme outliers, these established paths are ideological death sentences. They must be willing to explore and design their own lifestyles, brick by brick, to find their own highest happiness. They need an indomitable will to match their powerful intellect.

Confidence is often mistaken for arrogance or narcissism. This is ironic in comparison to the fact that our culture glorifies specific types of acceptable exceptionalism, so long as they do not threaten the average mind too far. It is okay for someone to claim to be superior in a very specific way, so long as you have other ways to bolster your own ego. We don’t mind if someone is taller, faster, better at playing the piano, and so on, because we know we have other qualities. The moment a claim of superiority is generalized enough to apply to everyone and threaten their ego, a dominance dispute is created. The world resists.  

People of average intelligence can feel very threatened when faced with intelligence as an objective concept that can be measured and compared on an equal playing field. No one wants to consider the possibility that their brain does not work as well as someone else’s.

It was not until recently that outlying behaviors, such as nerdy and geeky pastimes, became socially celebrated. Nowadays, it seems that nearly every big budget movie has its roots in books, video games, and comics, which were once shunned and specialty pursuits to be ashamed of. The story of outlying behaviors is already changing.

Focus on your own evolution. The only person you can be responsible for is yourself. Do not be limited by your attachment to society. Build your own society so that you can be yourself to the maximum possible degree.

Pain is what tells us that something in our lives need to change. When you feel friction in your social life, question what is wrong and what you can alter to create the life that is best suited for you.

People will fight you because you are different. Your existence challenges them, forcing them to consider that reality might be different than they are comfortable dealing with. You disrupt the foundations of their identity, so they lash out. This is why they hate you on an existential level. Until they are ready, you cannot co-exist in the same space as they do.

If you just a little bit different than the norms of your environment, you may be celebrated for what makes you superior. If you are extremely different, you will be demonized and disadvantaged. People of IQ 120-140 find themselves as leaders among averagely intelligent people. People of IQ 150 or higher may find it impossible to interact at all.

If two normal people give birth to an exceptional person, they will struggle to raise and guide them effectively because the offspring will outgrow them much sooner than they or society are prepared to accept. A young child might quickly become smarter and more mature than his parents before he even becomes a teenager. These are the children who will suffer the most, resenting their own gifts and failing to apply them productively. They need guides and role models who can meet them where they are.

As normal society progresses in its acceptance of outliers, it will become easier for unconventional young people to follow their path and find their place in the world.  

Things mentioned:

Low Latent Inhibition group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/151833815112

Prison Break: Michael Scofield's Low Latent Inhibition (LLI) diagnosis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDliPQAJIsY 

UCWG 006: Does Knowledge without Power Lead to Idle Suffering? Matching Intellect with Boldness of Action: https://gregorydiehl.net/ucwg-006-knowledge-power-lead-idle-suffering-matching-intellect-boldness-action/

UCWG 027 - Are You Self-Aware Enough to Parent Your Own Offspring? Unschooling and Unconventional Child Rearing in Vilcabamba, Ecuador: https://gregorydiehl.net/ucwg-027-self-aware-parent-offspring-unschooling-unconventional-child-rearing-vilcabamba-ecuador/

Travel As Transformation by Gregory V. Diehl: http://amzn.to/2fDzgkM

IQ and the Problem of Social Adjustment by Grady Towers: http://www.triplenine.org/Portals/0/Docs/download/IQ_and_the_Problem_of_Social_Adjustment.pdf

The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris: http://amzn.to/2rQVque

At 17, Katharina Knoll experienced the brutal murder of her boyfriend - a traumatic experience that has lasted with her the last 11 years, coming back into her psyche periodically as various events remind her of the event. Painful memories continue to haunt her without resolution because she has not learned to fulfill the expectations which had been cut short by his untimely death.

The great struggle Katharina must go through now is to examine the arbitrary associations she has adopt with her past trauma. Specific people, dates, and symbols only serve to bring back the negative emotions that keep her trapped in pain. She must learn to see things as they are and replace harmful associations with useful ones.

It is necessary for every truth-seeking person to become highly aware of the meaning they add to their observations in the realm of their minds. No matter what you do, you are adding meaning to experience. You need to figure out how to optimize your meanings and make them work for you instead of against you.

Of all the countless experiences we accumulate over every waking moment, only a tiny fraction end up repeating themselves in our unconscious over and over. The mind has ways of deciding what is important to store. One way to mediate the symptoms of unfulfilled expectations is to participate in similar activities which produce similar results.

People resist letting go of their emotional associations because it feels like giving up a part of themselves, or lessening the importance of an event. They must learn to leave the past in the past and cut off their negative associations, or find a way to replace them with positive ones. There is something good you can learn from any situation, if only you know how to process pain. Perspective can always be gained.

Forgiveness is accepting that a negative memory no longer has to negatively affect you. It is a funeral for emotional baggage. Funerals and other ceremonies are supposed to help us find closure, giving us a chance to close the recurring mental loop.

What are you missing in order to let go of what troubles you from the past?

Must you amputate the infected emotions? Or can you turn them around into something positive?

At age 33, Antonio Pondichi had gone from growing up poor in communist Romania, to move a comfortably luxurious life in New York City as an adult where everything he ever needed was planned for him. One day, as his daughter reached age 5, he began to realize that many of the things he had been taught about how to live and raise her weren’t true. He moved his family and his life to the valley of Vilcabamba, Ecuador to explore unconventional ways of living that would allow all of them to find their happiness.

Many parents don’t realize that they are giving away the majority of their children’s upbringing to strangers who run the arbitrary schooling institutions of their culture. Schooling trains people in what to think, whereas a true education teaches people how thinking works. We can either acquire knowledge through inheritance from other sources or observing and reasoning it ourselves.

The social environment of schooling is frequently destructive to self-esteem and normal bonding habits. Segregating children into groups based on age is arbitrarily limiting to their understanding of their place in the world. Forcing children to learn kills their desire to learn. They can no longer effectively follow their intuition about what interests them. Parents and teachers are often threatened by a child’s natural learning capacity. They unconsciously feel compelled to control it.

If you see that the values of your culture are no longer serving you, you are obligated to question them. There is a natural separation now between upcoming generations and their parents who are stuck in old paradigms of growth. What was once considered the role of being parent is no longer true, and will continue to change into the future.

Do you feel equipped to give your children everything they need to discover who they are and pursue their own highest education?

Are you passing your inherited limitations onto the young people in your life?

Antonio’s family on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/FamilyOfLight2010

Trivium education: https://tragedyandhope.com/trivium/

Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto: https://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling-ebook/dp/B072F9VRZP/

The necessary first step to personal development is removing yourself from comfort, but very few so-called personal development leaders acknowledge this in their methodology. They keep their devotees steeped in comfort and enthusiasm. What many people miss is that the willingness to be unhappy is what increases your overall capacity for happiness.

Stacy Cross is a personal and entrepreneurial development coach who founded The Comfort killers. Stacy received an email one day from a stranger deriding her for all the lifestyle mistakes she was making. That email became the seed for rapid personal transformation. She has embraced discomfort as a lifestyle and used it as a tool to overcome gambling addiction and change her entire lifestyle. Now she helps other people do the same with their own lives.

Social cohesion can be the enemy to personal development if you allow other people’s stories about you to replace your own self-awareness. Social sacrifices must be made to embrace one’s own development as their highest priority. Be willing to lose the relationships which once defined you.

True transformation is when you change your unconscious way of acting in the world. New ideas must pass through the barriers of conscious acknowledgment to become a part of you.

Addiction is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a powerful form of passion and enthusiasm. You only need to monitor how you apply for beneficial things throughout your life. It’s not the action that matters. It’s your mindset about what you’re doing in the end.

The fastest way to the truth is to cut off exits and remove all distractions. When we look back on our old selves, we can often find the seeds of the person we were going to eventually become. There is some consistency to who we really are.

At a certain point in development, there are very few mentors and gurus to guide you to the next step in the path. No one else has taken your step. At this point, you must become your own guru and find your own path, or else you are just wallowing in distraction. When the book you need to read next doesn’t exist, it’s time for you to write that book.

What can you uniquely contribute that a specific type of person will find to be just the thing they needed to progress to their next level?

Websites mentioned:

The Comfort Killers: http://thecomfortkillers.com/

Comfort Killers Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thecomfortkillers/

Stacy Cross’ email: [email protected]

Tal Gur is an author and personal development professional who recently completed a transformational journey of spending 10 years accomplishing 100 specific goals around the world. He started at 31, and is now ready to share what he learned in his upcoming autobiographical book, The Art of Fully Living: One Man, Ten Years, a Hundred Life Goals.

Tal devoted each year of his decade-long journey to a different aspect of his personal transformation. He learned that going to uncomfortable extremes could teach him more than staying in the comfortable middle of any domain.

Transformation is not random or spontaneous. It is cumulative and logical. We move in sequence from one change to another according to patterns and rules. Most people are not in tune with their own minds, bodies, and emotions, so they do not know the right path for themselves. Tal had to learn through his many trials how to get in tune with himself to find his authentic core.

Not everyone has to spend 10 years pursuing 100 goals to find themselves. The journey is different for everyone. You have to be curious. You have to be willing to go on your journey, whatever it is. Not everyone needs to know themselves deeply to be happy. But for others, it is the only option.

We all create our lifestyle and our goals based on the timescale through which we evaluate our lives. What would you do if you only had one day left to live? A decade? Forever? Your actions can be defined by processes or objectives, journeys or destinations.

Websites mentioned:

Tal Gur’s website, Fully Lived: http://fullylived.com/

Gregory Diehl’s book, Travel As Transformation: http://amzn.to/2fDzgkM

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Sisyphus comic strip: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3259

The guest today is a self-professed sociopath who believes that the more self-aware you are, the less you emotions you feel. He claims that almost everyone with an IQ over 140 will have symptoms of an antisocial disorder like sociopathy. Sociopaths are superior because they have greater awareness of their emotions. Psychopaths are inferior because they are slaves to their emotions. A psychopath’s emotions are defined by violence and destruction. That is how they achieve ecstasy.

There is a difference between being unable to feel something and simply not finding it useful. Generals in wartime have somehow recalibrated their emotions to justify the killing of soldiers. People who think they rely entirely on reason to dictate their actions fail to see the reason behind their most powerful emotions. Reason only matters when you’ve defined a goal. Change your goal and the validity of your actions changes too.

Emotions are not social constructs. They are not imaginary, counterproductive, or unimportant. What matters is how we calibrate them to external events. Just because we can be conditioned to believe something does not necessarily mean that thing is wrong. Just because something is a social construct, doesn’t mean it isn’t effective or important. Morality is just how well you understand the rules of engagement of the society you happen to be participating in.

Maturity requires us to understand the larger, long-term impact of our actions, like a toddler learns object permanence as it develops. It requires admitting that your life is more than how easy it is for you to experience pleasure. It is the impact you have on your environment and the people around you.

The logical outcome of empathy is intertwining your concept of happiness with that of another person. Sometimes only great trauma can bring us to the point of breakthrough to rapid personal evolution.

What would have to happen for you to bring empathy into your life as a valuable tool?

Do you feel genuinely happy for other people in any context?

Are you afraid to adopt all possible emotional tools into your toolbox?