August 7, 2024

I want to see whether we can together in these weekly meetings through dialogue and conversation create the content of a book. And the idea for the book has this long title, The Unbelievable Joy of Not Needing to Be a Someone. I think many of you already have some feeling abound that because otherwise, you would not be here.

But what that means exactly, and what the topic will be, and the content will actually be in the end, that’s something we will create together. So nothing is set in stone, except for some agreements that I want to make with you about how we work together. Okay, so even the title, even though I love this, is not fixed.

The book is going to explore and our conversations are going to explore how we can end the need to be any different, even one micro unit different from how we are, what we are right now, the way we are in this moment. And the idea is to write a book tthat is accessible to everyone.

So this is not a nondual book. This is not a book about nondual theory or concepts. It’s not an inquiry book. It’s the the popular version but sticking to the principles that we believe are true or not, we’ll see, but the place I’m coming from is: this body and mind is what it is.

It doesn’t need to improve. It doesn’t need to change. We don’t have to judge anything. We don’t have to fear anything. So I think most of you seeing who’s on this call, I don’t have to explain any of that, where this is coming from. And if not feel free to say something. Feel free to just interrupt me at any time and to start a conversation and a dialogue. And please don’t use the chat to have a parallel conversation because I want everything to be in the record, in the audio recording so that the transcript picks it up and I don’t have to go align it with the chat.

There are seven themes. That came up just when I thought about this concept, but these themes as well are open to our discussion. So we may end up with, I don’t know, 500 themes or three.

But the ones I have now are about thinking thoughts that they are in essence, powerless, unless we put belief in them, into them, so that thoughts are not ours, they’re simply, clouds in the sky appearing. That there is no control, so that we’re not the doer, we’re not the one who, the circle of control is empty.

We don’t need to we’re not children who need self-parenting we don’t need this constant, judgmental finger trying to improve ourselves. Life isn’t personal. It’s impersonal. It’s not mine.

You can’t understand this life or what this is through thinking because the thinking is conditioning, there’s no security in an identity, you’d say in a fixed identity, but in any identity really, and there’s no need for purpose. meaning or goals for it to be about something relating to a separate self.

We’ll go into these again. So this is just to give you a quick overview of the things that came up for me that would support the idea, the overall idea of the book that you’re much freer and there’s much more joy in not needing to be a someone.

About the word joy, what I would like to do with this co-creation is to really focus on the joy of it. I hope that already the colors and the title managed to bring across the excitement and the beauty and the joy and the happiness of this understanding. And if any of this sounds like I’m completely crazy and this doesn’t make any sense, that is good too, because I’m hoping that in this dialogue, we come up with questions as well.

The questions that people who read this later would have. What do you mean life isn’t personal? How can that possibly be true? What about this or what about that? Those type of questions are exactly what we want to be discussing so that it ends up in the book. So it doesn’t mean that you have to agree with this.

But a little bit more first about the format, because what we’re trying to do is create a living augmented book. So this is not going to be mainly a book that you hold in your hands, a published book. It’s going to be an open source, not copyrighted, no IP, collective creation that lives on the internet.

So anybody can read it it’s open, and it’s free. It’s authored by us as a community, meaning there will not be, this is, this part, this paragraph was contributed by person x or y. It is simply our co-created text. However, I will edit it and create the final version of it.

At least a first version. Because we want to continue to develop it online. Maybe indefinitely. We’ll see how that works, but the document itself online can continue to create conversation and further questions. So it’s not fixed after publication and dead. It’s supposed to generate further discussion, and maybe new insights that we will then add or change.

Very important to me as well is that even though there will be one text that then I end up well, editing and writing with all of our contributions, but it won’t be authored by me, I won’t be put there as the author, the community is the author. It will be augmented by your contributions during, after, and before.

So these contributions can be ongoing commentary and discussion, but also spontaneous, maybe even a spontaneous workshop about the book or an online event or whatever comes up for us. We can do it. So that’s the whole experimenting aspect. We don’t know.

You don’t have to write anything if you don’t want to, your contribution can be just to have the discussion here and that’s fine, or you may be inspired to add your own stories. Your poetry, artwork, or whatever it is that you feel inspired to contribute.

And we will have for now, a Google Drive, where you can upload those things. The Google Drive will contain all the transcripts from the meetings. The text of the book will start to emerge there, slowly. And you can add your contributions in whatever form you feel inspired. This is the solution for now because at some point we will move to a platform that allows for all this to work in an easier way The platform is being built right now.

But for now Google Drive. And everyone has editing rights. So you have complete control of this Google drive and can do whatever you want, which is part of the experiment as well. Potentially the book may then end up as a published version on Amazon but priced at just the cost of printing or the cost of electronically transmitting the book. So it doesn’t make any losses. And as far as I know at the moment, if you publish on Amazon, there has to be someone in the back end as the author but there would be no author on the cover. It would just be a community. These are the ideas for now. All of this is just first thoughts.

So it may end up different but the development process can look something like this. We have these meetings. A conversation about one of the seven topics of the book. There’s a transcript. You add your contributions if you feel called to do so. We write a first draft of that particular content. For example, if we’re discussing the theme of thoughts, I may write a first draft. You add more contributions. We have another meeting. So it just keeps evolving in that sense. 

At a certain point, we end with a curation of all the content we’ve generated and the creation of the first book draft.

So that’s really where Kat reserves the right to say, okay, now I’m going to decide what goes into the book and what doesn’t. This is the only point where it stops being community.

The content is not owned by anyone. So if anyone at any point, wants to start a branch, a spinoff community using some of the content that’s perfectly fine, so this is all open source, free to use. 

So this is done already in coding. Anyone who has developed before there’s open source code and you can branch from the open source code and create your own fork. And that fork becomes its own thing. And it can contain a link back to the source or it doesn’t. So we’re just adapting this a little bit more to a book format. There will always be a main curator. It’s very important. Otherwise, it’s a bit of a mayhem. So if someone doesn’t like that direction, they can take that spin it off and do their own version of it, right?

So this is all experimental. We’re trying how this could work as well the licensing to be no license or similar familiar patterns, which already existing and coding for different languages. So even though this is new for book authoring, et cetera, it’s not necessarily new in context of having content, which is generated by a group and has the ability to be moved around.

This might not work. So part of experimenting is that it might fail. And that’s something we all need to be aware of. So if it  doesn’t work, Kat also reserves the right at any point to say, okay, I’m done. This is over. We’re not doing this anymore. But I would love for it to work.

So what you contribute is your gift to the community. If you upload something it becomes part of the community content IP. So typically in this context, there’s always versioning. So even if you delete, we have the history of the version. Google docs would allow us to maintain a certain level of history. Once we move, we’re moving this as well into repositories where full history will be maintained. So even if you delete the history of the deletion exists.

So if you introduce now in Google Drive, if you introduce something that is, we have history, but usually Google Drive gets a little bit wonky with the history at some point. Once we move that to be similar to code repositories and like GitHub or similar, it will become open and every single change or added information will be maintained.

So the best thing to do is not to remove anything you upload to the Drive. 

But this is great because this is the cool thing that we’re finding is that the whole understanding of there is oneness and there is no separation. And if we write a book, it is ours. It is shared. The knowledge is not personal. And now we have the technical support to realize this. So I’m quite excited about the technical way publishing of the book mirroring how we think about the content of the book.

But we do need some agreements and I don’t think you will be surprised by any of them. You are free to come and go, contribute or not, that is completely as you like. This is the first introductory meeting. I’m assuming that if you show up next week you’re in, you’re into this.

But if you then at some point disappear and don’t show up again, that’s all fine. There’s no commitment. Whatever you contribute in any form is a gift to the community. And that includes me everyone. Everyone is equal in this. But there will be no. It’s just creative commons. 

All meetings will be recorded, but it will only be the transcript and the transcript will be anonymous. So you can say whatever you like. So it might make it into the book, but nobody will know you said it. 

So the platform we were talking about that we will move to will also allow this toggling of I want to show my name or I want to be anonymous because we want to allow that to always be an option. 

Our goal here when we’re going to get to the juicy stuff of the actual content is to build a book and not to debate each other. In the sense of who is right, who is wrong, and what is the correct understanding but I’m assuming you’re not into that anyway.

As we said before, questions or challenging the content is totally desirable because that’s going to help us create better content. So it’s not that you can’t have any questions or you have to just agree. Absolutely not. Please disagree. 

Having said that, there is no right or wrong contribution. It may not make it into the book. It will be curated but in essence, there is no right or wrong. Kat reserves the right to manage the platform, what remains on the platform, and decide the final content of the book. We all realize and affirm that this is a complete experiment and therefore it can fail.

A question regarding the meetings. Maybe I’m not able to attend every meeting? That won’t be a problem, no. And even if you have to leave in the middle of a meeting or if you show up only for one meeting ever, it doesn’t matter.

You will have access to the Google Drive so you can read all the transcripts. So you can catch up what you missed if you want to and there’s no need to do so. At a certain point, if you miss a lot of meetings and you then start asking questions about things we’ve already discussed, we will refer you to the transcripts.

How long will it take more or less? Do you have any idea? No, I have no idea. But just thinking practically, if we end up with seven themes, those could be seven chapters. And if we say that a chapter is a mix of explaining the content, some case studies, maybe some stories, exercises, thinking about that type of book we should be able to write a chapter a month. 

I’m thinking February, March but because this is a live online thing we can start publishing online much earlier than a traditional book. So it is iterative. There can be bare-bones stuff and you don’t have to have the whole book finished before you publish.

Yeah, so if all of that works, the content is all on a GitHub repo, which is public and open source. So even if it’s published through the platform it’s just really masking some of the technology so it doesn’t get into the way. But behind the content will be an open-source repository. GitHub, if people are familiar, that is anyone has access to. So it’s already open and public from the get-go. It will be most likely in MD files or something like that. It’s easy, something to read through. It won’t be JSON or like any coding language. The platform itself might end up being open-source as well. And if it does, we’ll open it at that stage. But we’re still very early in the process. So we’re putting the pieces as we go even on the platform side, just to be clear. So they’re going in and parallel.

About using the content that we generate here on other media: For example, maybe you want to write a LinkedIn post about it, or you want to write an article somewhere that too is fine. So it’s not like what’s here has to remain here. It’s owned by the community so it can go wherever it wants to go. 

The video recordings of the meetings don’t get shared. Only the transcript is shared among the community without names. Your name won’t be mentioned, and I would ask that you don’t just publish the complete transcript somewhere else. That remains here. But if you want to use the content somewhere else you are free to do so as long as you don’t mention any names.

The recording of the meeting is deleted after I have genertaed the transcript.

So since we’re writing a book, are we limiting ourselves to the written word or can there also be audio or video?

The book itself online, maybe eventually a published version, is limited to text and visuals. But on the platform we’ll hopefully be able to host everything. So we can have audio, we can have video. That’s exactly why we want it to be a living augmented book in the sense of augmented with other media and richer content than just text and image. And I think I’ve mentioned case studies or conversations or things like that. 

Ideally, we will be able to enable those and tag them to specific sections, so it will be a continuation. So you get a section and think about it as blocks, and the book is a set of blocks. A block can have more attached data to it outside of just the text material. So it can have a video attached to it. If someone did a workshop around that idea, it could have a visual, it could have a Q and A, or it’s a small group chat between three or four people. Again, on the anonymous part that will be determined by how you set your platform preferences. But the idea is that it will be ongoing so you can add to it later. It doesn’t end when you publish.

This is important because I want everyone to have the sense of, yes, we want this, we understand where it’s going and I’m willing on that basis to contribute. 

But the idea is to create a book about this the joy of not needing to be any particular way. And to share that in a way that is as accessible and as universal as we can make it. So that’s why I think this is ideal for a community because the more voices meld into this, the more chance we have that it reaches more types of people. The hypothesis is that if we meld voices, we will be able to create something that reaches a broader audience. And that’s the goal behind the goal. Wouldn’t it be great if we can transmit and share the universality of this in a way that reaches more people.

That means the final text or the way it’s going to look might be a bit of a jumble. The goal is not to put one style onto it. But I’ve never done this before. So I don’t know how choppy that will be, we’ll see. We’ll see how this works and whether it works. But we’ll definitely come up with something.

Can people then also join the community at any point in time in this process? Yes, absolutely. This community is also living and breathing. People will leave, people will join. I’m assuming that some will say, no, this is not what I want and never show up again. If you bring your 20 friends, I’m happy. They’re all welcome.

Are we looking at illustrations and graphics also to complement the written word? Yes, I think so, especially if you have feeling, oh, this could use a visual. And again, here, if we’re going to create a final form, it may be that at some point I will say, okay, look, I’m going to make all of these visuals look similar because we don’t want different languages or different styles. But that will be up to us to decide. Maybe we want very different visuals and we don’t mind. But the final process of deciding, look, I want it all to look the same there, Kat reserves the right to do that because otherwise it’s going to get really chaotic.

It’s not a democracy in that sense, so it’s not that you get to decide on every single decision. At some point, Kat will take some of that decision. And that’s important to know what you’re getting into.

Since it’s online, would the AI be able to translate it to other languages? Assuming we do a good job of creating something that doesn’t require a previous understanding and that is accessible to all, then I’m assuming that it will be easy to translate into other languages. Yeah, why not? And people will do that anyway, they just take the text and then translate it.

So how do you feel about the the general idea of the book? The unbelievable joy of not needing to be a someone. Anyone want to say something about how that feels for them? 

Yeah. So this part about needing to be someone what I was thinking is this discovery is possible only when we I’m speaking for myself. I’m thinking in a certain way that I need to be someone. But sometimes it was not possible also. So I think that first part is to realize that here is where I’m trying to be someone or I’m trying to attach some expectations to myself in a certain way. And then first realizing that this is happening with me, and then realizing that I don’t have to wait. 

Yes, so just a comment: How we discuss the book can be chaotic. So we can start at the end, which ends up being the first chapter. So that’s the beauty of chopping things up and then gluing them back together. We don’t have to worry about structure and order until the very end.

Anyone else want to share their unbelievable joy concerning the unbelievable joy?

So I think, first of all, I really like the whole idea, the whole process of co-creating a book. That’s something that resonated with me to a great extent. So I think, first, thank you very much for taking this initiative and working on it.

And whatever you have, summed up and put here is really good. I really appreciate it. So that’s the first thought. And that’s it’s giving me joy because here I don’t feel like I have to be someone to be able to contribute. So that’s the feeling, right? That’s the fear, which is always there, how I would look like to be, some XYZ who’s trying to contribute here? So that part is gone. So that gives a joy in its own way, which is very difficult to explain. So that’s something, I found very different in all of the platforms so far, which I have been into. And I really felt suffocated to express because I was trying to be somebody to express my thoughts there. Here, I’m like freely expressing it. So I’m amazed how it is coming out through me. So that’s the first thing that, I would like to congratulate and say that this platform is wonderful.

So that’s good to hear because then we’re living what we’re going to be doing. 

I was so delighted when I saw your post about, and also about the joy because that’s also something that we can tap into. So that’s the delighted part that I would like to share. And also because we are multidimensional beings having a human experience. Yeah, you can tap in and out from different levels every time and also choose to just be us. But on the other side, I feel it’s also okay to see, how can I contribute? Because I’m also creating my own book. So I am really delighted, but also want see what I’m going to choose first.

This book as we are saying, it will be live, but at ome point in time it will be okay, version one closed, published. And then there is what they call the second edition. So there will at some point be the first edition it’s published. And then when there is extra information, there’s more discussion, there’s more augmentation we will publish a second version. Yes. We get to decide that because we are not dependent on publishing or a publisher. We can just decide there’s so much new stuff that has come up or we just feel like it. So let’s publish a new version. Or, we say, okay, let us close it for now. But that is also the part where Kat reserves the right to decide that and for it not to be an endless discussion in the group.

I’m excited about this. I love the idea of an experiment doing something different. I think it’s interesting that joy is showing up, it’s showing up in the politics of America. So the world may be hungry for joy. And so I’m excited about that being the main topic if it stays there for now. I know it may not say there. I love the idea of shaking things up in the world and to experiment with other ways of doing, being, and relating. It’s just so exciting for me.

The joy, I hope we’re already seeing it right now that it’s apparently carrying us. So we’ve hopefully framed this in a way that we will have joyful meetings and create joyful content. But if we don’t, that’s fine too, right? So if we all go depressed, that’s great. Don’t worry. Then we also know how to come to joy, right?

Have you thought about a subtitle already or not at all?

No. So there’s a general title, which hopefully expresses joy about the joy. And there are these seven themes.

If you don’t show up at the next meeting you can already put your ideas into the Google Drive. I don’t know how this will work yet. Whether somebody creates the document with questions that came up and others will add to that. I want to leave it open for now and see what emerges, but so you own the drive. You can edit everything. So feel free to just create a document and say, okay. Here are alternative themes, or these are the questions that came up since yesterday. 

We’ll have to see how much this produces because if we’re producing a hundred documents, we’ll go nuts. So then for the next time we’ll have to manage that. But I don’t want to start by managing it. I want to start by having it completely open and then we’ll put restrictions as needed. Instead of just starting with restrictions. 

What will happen is after this meeting, I will upload the transcript to the folder with meeting transcripts. You will all receive an email with the link to the drive. So if you decide after this meeting that you don’t want to continue, you just reply to that email and say goodbye or I’m out or whatever. You don’t need to explain.

So anything that comes up for you now, after this meeting, feel free to create something around it on Google Drive. If nothing happens, that’s also totally fine because next meeting we will start by diving into one of these topics and we will have the theme and we will develop the theme as an orchestra.

So at most, Kat is a conductor. I will do some light conducting if the trumpets go off in their own direction. But it will be a shared dialogue about the topic and we’ll riff off of that. We’ll just try to tease it apart and have a discussion.

We will also be blending levels, right? So we will be having content discussions and we will be having meta discussions about the structure and the format of the book. These I will try to then afterwards chop up, of course, but they will all be in the same transcript because that’s how it works.

The meetings are always at the same time. Same place, same link. And we’ll continue until they don’t. We’ll see what happens. The duration of those sessions is an hour maximum.

You don’t have to prepare for a meeting, but you of course may, if you want, it’s all open, right? So if you want to, for example, apart from Kat doing the conducting, if you say, look, I have a solo here I want to contribute that and I want to read something that I wrote or show some artwork that I created or a poem came up for me and I want to share that. That’s also fine. That can also be part of the meetings.

If you could please Give me one or two sentences about what it means for you not to need to be a someone. What is the first thing that comes up for you when you think, what does it mean to me that I don’t need to be a someone?

Now, for me, that’s mostly a question that comes up. Can you be complete joy without necessarily experiencing it? Can you be the joy without the experience of such? So you’re not experiencing joy and can you still be it?

So for me, I would say peace, that I don’t have to be someone or so the peace that I get from it is good. 

So to me, it is feeling light and liberated.

For me, just three words that emerged, happiness, freedom and spaciousness.

For me, the word freedom also immediately popped up and out of freedom joy, And for me, maybe there’s also a component of fearlessness. Yeah. Because you don’t have to defend anything anymore. It’s part of freedom, of course.

Yeah, I do go with the freedom because you’re not having any mask wearing to be able to say in a particular way. Just express the way things are just emerging at this moment.

So be in the moment, just show whatever is emerging. I think that’s what makes sense to me. 

Free. For me, it’s not believing thoughts point to anything that’s real. And in that it’s not taking anything that seriously. And I think there’s the joy in that. 

Yeah, the joy of playfulness.

The first thing that came to me was I don’t have to care, even though it sounds horrible, but I just don’t have to care. Yeah. Who cares? But that’s sometimes misinterpreted.

I like the playfulness. I had that in the beginning of the meeting. Yeah, playfulness, that would be cool. 

Maybe we can set up parts of chapters as a game, we can put little gaming elements into the book.

Carefree is a lovely way to express that. And that’s an interesting one, right? Can I have cares and still be free?

I don’t have to worry.

What comes to mind is a relief into full trust and not the need of a trust authority or like our authorship is a certain level of authority. We’re getting rid of that. We’re dismantling that. And I think there is so much power in it, that’s the trust element we keep searching for. I think that there is a lot of that in it. And I think that’s quite beautiful.

And I would like to add vulnerability. So you have to be vulnerable. You have to be someone to know that you’re not someone. That’s the paradox. So we’re somebody and we’re not somebody.

Liberation comes up for me. Liberation from the story.

My favorite word is the freedom of it. But it’s also, the image of Atlas with the world on his shoulders and just getting rid of that completely, the weight of the world, the weight of needing to be a certain way just evaporating, just completely disappearing.

And then, the joyful lightness of being because you don’t need to be a specific way. I’ve had a lot of that in my personal story, there was a lot of you need to be this, you need to be that, I think that’s something everyone resonates with no matter what it was.

Whether it’s other people telling us how to be or us then internalizing that and saying, this is how we need to be, that’s what we do to ourselves and to each other, and just getting rid of that is the relief of putting down that rock that we’re carrying.

Once you get rid of the need to be someone you feel unburdened. It’s like throwing off your baggage. Even if the purpose is to be very good, to be helpful, to be, even that also is a burden. Yes. So that also is a burden. So once you get rid of that, it’s like you regain your childhood. A child does a lot of things, but he’s not forced to do things and he doesn’t even internalize that. What I have to do, but he still does it and he does it with joy.

Then I would be happy to see if something shows up in the Google Drive that I will send soon. And if not, that’s also fine.

And I hope to see most or hopefully all of you next week. And if not then some other week. And if not, that’s no problem either.

So thank you for wanting to do this, for considering this.

And I hope we create something really cool.