September 25, 2024

More and more features are being added to this platform as we go along. So we’re creating a platform for living augmented books as we do these conversations.  You are part of a new movement of creating living augmented books that will create a platform that then may be used maybe even for your book in the future.

 So this week’s chat room will open directly after this conversation and is our space for the week to put in comments. So anything we figure out after this meeting, we didn’t get to say, or we come up with later. The advantage of these chats is they’re completely anonymous. We have no idea who posts what. And it will soon also be editable.

 We will show slowly start using AI to summarize the transcripts, to figure out what the recurring themes are. We will have highlight opportunities so that when you go back to earlier transcripts, you can highlight what you liked or what is useful. And then at some point, I can’t say when that will be, we will start creating drafts for a book.  So we will collate these different things that you like, that you put in the chats, that we had in the dialogues, and start co-writing.

 These drafts will also be written in a way that we don’t know who is writing what. We may work with questions, a bit like wikipedia pages, where you can then write whatever comes up for you. You can also copy paste from earlier transcripts. And we will have a set amount of space. And we’re thinking about actually overwriting so that when someone new comes in and rewrites what you’ve written that will be the new version.  But these are all experiments going forward. All of them will require the lack of ego and the lack of attachment.

I invite you today to again try to see each other, see these different images on this screen as different versions of yourself. So different thoughts that we are having emerge out of different minds and mouths, but they are the same us.

Someone wrote that the sharing was helpful from personal experience and that it helps to start from personal experience. On the other hand, I have no interest in limiting this in any way. Although that was a nice experience, and I’m very happy that we shared these things, that’s not how we have to always do this.

But maybe it helps to just keep going back to the main question, which is, the unbelievable joy of not needing to be someone, by which we mean not needing to be a specific set of characteristics, a specific individual, to have a specific identity, to have certain strengths or weaknesses. We could also say no need to become someone, the better version.

But also, the joy of not needing to be A someone. So not needing to be a self at all. There is a self, apparently. But do we need to be one?

What does that mean for you right now? And with the explicit invitation to share any experiences that you may have around that?

I have been reflecting on that a lot after the one session that I attended. And I feel like I don’t see the need for myself to be someone. And yet, I don’t know yet how to function in the society that requires you to be someone or to become someone or to strive to become someone all the time.

And even though my online presence shows that I am someone or somebody I’m detached from that because I feel like this is just a part of me that’s there because for whatever reason it seems to be required for me to function in society. But not necessarily something that I would long term choose for myself if I had a choice.

How do you notice that society wants you to be someone?

Ah, one of the signs that very often people try to put me into a box, but it’s very difficult for them to put me into a box because I’m many boxes, or maybe I’m not a box at all. Maybe there are no boxes at all in general.

And I’ve observed that many discussions and conversations with people who maybe want to work with me, but they just don’t know how to … they feel the need for having this clear path or having this clear flow of for example, of expertise and services that I might offer, but this is not how I present myself to the world. And this is not how I would love to be present in the world because I don’t believe that there are boxes.

I’d been experimenting with LinkedIn and using phrases like true flow is beyond ego and things like that. And I got some quite critical feedback from people, from my business partner and my life coach about speaking in a way that a lot of people won’t relate to. So I moved that bit further down in the introduction and started talking about true results and typical business things.

So it feels like there’s this pressure from society to be a certain way, if you’re a coach, like I am an executive coach, you got to be in a certain business where you, even though when I work with clients, when I get the near the end of the work, we go really deep into this things like presence and true flow. I think talking about that at the beginning raw with people who aren’t interested in this subject is challenging for people.

It’s a very personal journey, but in the essence of it, it’s actually not, but it is difficult to explain. And it’s something that you almost feel like you don’t want to force on other people or explain it too much. And that is something that they have to realize for themselves in a way.

I think from that perspective it partly depends on, whether you’re working with people who are interested in this, T H I S, and other people who are just put in front of me, managers, directors, who don’t even know about THIS. So it’s been interesting being more open about where my own Direction is, if that’s the right word, and it all feels quite interesting to observe at the moment

The question comes to me. Do we think that defining ourselves as a someone is the same thing as communicating ourselves as a someone? So that what I put on LinkedIn, does that necessarily mean that I’m defining myself or is it just a bunch of words on LinkedIn?

So I’m thinking the way we present ourselves, which is the way I experience it, different in every moment, different in every situation, tt’s never the same. It’s different with different people. So I’m a different person here than I am 15 minutes ago before this started. So if we’re describing ourselves in a certain way or people are labeling us, does that define us? Does it have to mean we’re being a someone or can we be no one in the midst of labels we give ourselves publicly and labels others give us?

Isn’t being no one another label?

Yes. Of course, if you want to put it that way, but I don’t mean the label of no one. I don’t mean it literally with those words,  but just taking the time to think about it.

So even the label “no one” is a label, we can’t escape that.

But I think there’s a difference between the play and believing in the play. So the play is labels. The play is boxes. The play is multiple identities. So can there be the joy of not being a someone while being seen as a somebody?

Totally. Maybe what I’m searching for here, but this would be a label as well, maybe to live authentically and present yourself authentically everywhere where you go, without putting much attachment towards, however, someone else is going to react to that. So I don’t have that attachment. I’m free of that attachment of being charged. Nevertheless, in the more like down to earth business context, many people need that. Many people need to relate to us in a way that they want to, for example, work with us, which is also interesting.

And that also might be an assumption. Because maybe people like to work with us who are completely different.

Maybe there’s just space for everything, right?

And maybe the goal would be here just to find within yourself the non-existence. and then the joy of not existing in whatever dimension, whatever scale.

So maybe from experience what comes up for me is I grew up in Thailand as an expat kid in an international community. And when I came back to my supposed home country, which was Belgium, I was supposed to be Belgian. And all the labels were in place because that’s what the culture expected.

And I wasn’t. In an international community everybody’s different and it’s difficult with the labels. Then I moved to the Netherlands and I was expected to be from the Netherlands. Then I moved to Germany and I was expected to be German. I’m just plugging general labels on this. It had lots of different aspects to it.

Then you show up online and you have a Dutch name and you do stuff in English and more labels are put onto you. So all these different perceptions.

And right now, we’re labeling each other, continually.I guess that’s part of our wiring, part of the system. Probably also biological survival, if we want to think in those terms.

But, do you have any experience of being labeled or labeling yourself? And at the same time, the deep knowing or the deep experience of not being a someone, maybe in a specific situation or generally?

I believe it happened in the transition time some time ago when someone said you have an amazing artist name, how did you come up with this? And I look at this person and said that’s actually my real name. And that was a great labeling actually, because then I also started to live my life a little bit more creatively, allowing myself to live it a bit more creatively some time ago already.

But I feel like in the times of maybe struggles or challenges, that’s probably the most when I don’t feel anyone, or nobody. Where I feel like I’m nobody and everything what is happening around is just a play and, it doesn’t belong to me. I’m detached maybe from the 3D world in a way.

This is a question that I struggle with because, there’s no sense of ownership whatsoever, these questions put me in a spot. So when these questions are asked or discussed, what I normally tell people, you can ask me very specific questions and I’ll be able to answer them. And though I say there is no sense of having to be a somebody that’s including wanting to be a nobody. I tend to agree on a philosophical level, that, yeah, it is a label and society has boxes and other people have expectations. That’s going to be there.

And why not? Why can’t anything arise? I think the need to fit in or not to fit in, et cetera, is also, on some level, this slight ego grasp that’s what has happened for me in the past. There was this detachment of, so I have to be a certain person, I have to play a certain role, I have to use a certain words Authenticity seemed to appear, the word authenticity seemed to make an appearance often.

And what has happened over time, as it were, is that all those things fell away in that one of the reasons of why I didn’t talk last time was it seems like an accomplishment, but it really is not. It’s seemed to just happen organically and there is no need to be a certain person anywhere. Like I am here talking to you guys and I might be saying or doing something else elsewhere and it’s really okay. There’s no struggle at all with being, being anything or anybody because you’re not anything as we’ve at least conceptually established, then you can be anything.

That’s the thing when I’m speaking to people I don’t know if I make sense at all. And I say, when I talk about these things, because I really don’t have the right language to talk about it. It’s very difficult.

So I was born in England. I grew up in America and I’ve lived in eight countries but my mother’s Swedish and my father’s Finnish. And I had a Finnish passport my whole life. But I never lived in Finland and anyway moving around, I was just noticing when you talked about you had to be a someone there and there. That’s the same with me. I tell my story, they want me to just say one thing, where are you from? And it was never the right answer. I would just say Sweden, because that would just stop the conversation and it’s all good.

But I was reflecting that before and after, when I was 36, when my whole world fell apart and started to see new things. Before, that never felt like a someone. I really didn’t. I was trying to be a someone, definitely trying always to be a someone. I didn’t know what a someone would be. And then, like now, especially since non duality came into my life, I really feel like a someone but it’s not anyone. Just when you were saying that, it just clicked it was really interesting. I don’t have to be someone, but I definitely am so much more of a someone now when I don’t have to be anyone.

Another paradox.

Do we need to be someone or do we need to be a someone? We can play around with this.

So that’s the kicker for me. It is the separate someone because when you fall back into that feeling of I, it feels like ocean size. It’s not that you are not nothing, it’s you’re everything. So yeah, it feels contradictory to say I’m nothing, it’s a strange feeling.

Yes, and that’s why the statement is “the unbelievable joy of not needing to be a someone.” It doesn’t say “the unbelievable joy of being no one.” That’s the trick of dealing with the non dual. You just put everything in the negative so you don’t have to name what is unnameable. Of course, it doesn’t work either.

I think the via negativa works. Is more was more effective for me because the mind has an incredible time visualizing nothing like when we have these like with joy like it’s my mind wants to find that whereas when you do it negative and you’re trying to visualize nothing like nothing really comes.

Do we have to be someone? And the question the way someone is normally understood through convention whether we like it or not, to the extent, we exist. You are a someone whether you tend to think about it or not, and the someone, whoever you seem to be at any given moment, seems to make an appearance in relation to the other person or circumstances.

I think in Buddhism, there’s a dependent origination concept. So you appear with everything else, like here, I don’t know who I am, but I seem to be having a function. But when I’m in a in a company meeting, I probably will be talking about business goals and so on and so forth. But does there have to be a sense that I am someone now going into a business meeting now, I’m a chief operating officer. Or I’m a co founder, and those are the titles that seem to be firmly associated with me. I don’t even know what those things are, but that used to be my titles.

And whether we like to say whether we should go with the flow or not, we are flowing. Only when we seem to think about it, then we get trapped. Oh, are we someone? Are we no one? And there are no thoughts. Everything just is.

So my experience is that I can be that one and not believe in being separate. And then that’s when other people then start putting labels on you and certain expectations.

So for me specifically, I will have a wedding ring on and someone that I meet will assume I’m married to a man, which I’m not. And then they will ask me, do you have children? And then if I say, no, I don’t have children, then they will ask, but why do you not have children? Because they will bring you and your husband so much joy. And so that, so all of those assumptions from other people then pull you out of that oneness into being a separate I again, because then you have to explain your I and who you are as a someone to that person. Yes, I am married, but to a woman, not a man, and I don’t want children. That’s why I don’t have children. So that’s where that labels and all of that comes in and where it becomes a bit more tricky.

So the question is, can we be in the middle of that? Can we still not be a someone when I am being labeled as whatever I’m being labeled as, whatever is triggering for me. Even the positive labels, especially the positive ones. And then the internal labeling is going, yes, give me more of those labels. That’s someone I want to be. That’s it.

That’s interesting because of my specific, my experience is that I don’t walk around expecting that people are going to mislabel me. So it always actually catches me off guard when someone asks those questions because I just live my life and I don’t feel that is labels that I own, so it’s an interesting angle.

And what comes up for me now is very interesting. The whole discussion about in the business context or the work context, of giving people feedback, right? Which I mean, immediately everyone goes into some sort of cramp either about how you’re supposed to get feedback where you’re supposed to love it, or you’re supposed … whatever the current philosophy is or the model for that.  May I give you some feedback? And we’re like, no. Again, we’re labeling ourselves and identifying with the label and that’s what makes it so difficult, right? If I am not a someone, it literally does not matter what feedback you give. You can tell me whatever you like, you can tell me I’m the biggest, nonsense spewing organism on the planet of all time, but if I don’t need to be a someone it doesn’t matter.

Maybe that’s exactly the thing. Maybe we are exactly all of the things and all of the stories and all of the, whatever someone wants to label us with, and yet we don’t identify with those. Maybe the detachment here is just important.

And I love the ring story. It happens to me all the time, but this is because I love rings. And in many cultures, I can be married or I can have a spouse or a fiance, and I’m actually not on that, and I get always the questions around having children and being married.

So it is interesting. I’ve actually never really sat down and thought about this, but it has just transitioned from fear of labels to almost appreciating them, because if they are affecting me, it is showing me that there’s an unawareness and something lurking within me because why is it bothering me, if someone labeled me, because I’m clearly identifying as the opposite of what they may think. I feel like for a very long time what has been getting in the way there are all these beliefs that have cropped up, like the belief in being no one or the belief in this that or the other thing that are involved in non duality. And those beliefs I found to be just as detrimental as the belief that I’m American etc. Any of these beliefs are really indicators of deep insecurity, maybe a lack of trust in my authentic being through the ego.

And then, words like ego and authentic … The words I keep using at the moment after some interesting conversations over the last two weeks are “this, aware, here, now.” I keep coming back to those words, but they’re all still labels.

So we’re going to have to work with the labels. Which is why it’s interesting whether we can hold them, we can use the labels and not believe them at the same time. They’re both true and untrue at the same time. So there’s a self and there’s a person and a body. And at the same time know that it’s not the essence or, can it be both and simultaneously? So can there be labeling? Can there be being a someone and at the same time not needing to be someone?

I think for me the confusion comes when we mistake the existential plane for the functional plane. So in the functional plane, why not have labels or mislabels? It’s all right, but an existential plane sense of security as it were, but there’s no one to have a sense of security, but that’s the bane of using language.

Then it really doesn’t matter what labels are used because it’s purely in a functional way and that doesn’t have to have a bearing on the existential plane where they just exist. I think the joy of just simply existing doesn’t have to be initiated by any of the labels because labels can come and go, like phenomena can come and go, labels can come and go, all kinds of things can come and go, but in the distant plane, there are simply, it’s the vast emptiness.

This is where the wisdom of impermanence comes in, right? Straightening the hooks of all these labels so they don’t hook into you is because this is all fleeting and non existential.

We’re very disorientated, really. Normally I don’t speak about any of this because I’m clearly mental. I’m seen as a person who’s completely gone mad when I talk about this.

I don’t care as well, but then out of compassion, I don’t talk because why if people love the dream as it were, why not? There’s no need to interrupt them and tell them about this great non duality stuff. I love it. Let them be. There’s really no difference whatsoever between the alternate and whatever term they use.

I think that labels are needed to express ourselves, right? The way, now that we are talking and sharing about even non dual experiences without the use of language we could not have shared that with among all of us. And another part is of experience. So when we experience and we go deep down then all labels naturally go away and then we have the pure experience of non duality.

And so that’s a paradox that both of these kinds of label and non label both exist at the same time. And that has been, as you mentioned, existential and functional, and that’s a very good way to put it.

In some sense, there is really no paradox seen from the perspective of this body. Paradox is another concept I’ve come up with. And Get trapped in it, but I agree with you can use all kinds of concepts, ideas, labels, and see them for what they are simply pointing to something. And we don’t know what knowing is an illusion.

We can only, like when I talk to people about this, anyone who is patient enough to listen, I normally tell them about the infancy of a species as it were, when everything was simply a mystery and then language came along and then we slapped a label called thunder or rain or whatnot. That doesn’t mean that we have understood what that is or we know what it is. All that we have now is a word to refer to the phenomenon. That’s it. That is not new. So why not? Why not just play the game as it were?

And I often give this metaphor to explain the three ideas. This is, if I may just label it and say that we are three, that is spirit, mind, and body. And I could take this example of let’s say an iceberg, right? And so iceberg is ice, which is coming up from the sea, which is water. And then the water ultimately is a gaseous form, let’s say H and O. So H2O is a gaseous form, we can call that as a spirit, and the mind is water, we can call it the mind, and the eye that is coming up as body. And these three are all interlinked, without the gaseous form, you won’t have water. Without water, you can’t have icebergs. And all these three forms exist at the same time.

So I sometimes give that examples that we can see ourselves as there’s three parts. And we all exist at the same time and all are needed for each other to exist, coexist together. So they bind it all together and we become one at the level of spirit that is a non duality. And at the level of iceberg we are all separate as something, depending upon where this iceberg is popping up. It could be in India, could be in the US or somewhere else, but it is the same iceberg in a different form, maybe in different color or whatever.

So that is the first thing that came up when she was discussing being at work and working with people and them having labels. I deeply related to that, but I have also noticed that as I’ve let go of having to be whatever I think they might think I need to be in these places, I realized that I was projecting a lot of that, and nobody was really expecting a lot or these specific things, or not to the level that I was.

And it’s all the same. It’s all the same. This is something that I find so fascinating. That here in this, what we’re doing is we’re talking to ourselves. So I keep saying that because I find it so fascinating that I never saw that before. So the label I give you is the label I give me. What I’m saying to you I’m saying to myself. What we’re saying to each other is the same thing. And if we would really know that, imagine how that would change interaction.

So the question is, what do we need to do to make this happen?

Uh oh, now we’re doers again, we’re going to make things happen.

Yeah, that would be a fascinating world to live in where exactly what you mentioned would be true, this kind of inner knowing.

What if it is true already? Yes, and not everyone is aware of that.

Does that matter?

I do believe it matters because if everyone would be aware of that and also aware of the consequences, then maybe people will be more effective and conscious about how they actually show up in the world.

But we feel like we know better, and then we’re back to the whole ego issue.

Oh, I didn’t believe that I know better. I believe I don’t know anything. But my experience is that when I talk to people that are aware of, for example, non duality, it’s an amazing thing, actually. Then I have completely different discussions.

And if we’re all talking to ourselves, then everyone, whether they know about this or not, or can express it or not, it’s the same.

You can sometimes, explain a certain thing, like you can explain somebody that okay, the apple looks like this, this is the color and all that. But unless somebody eats the apple, he’ll not come to know how it tastes. You know how it is. So it’s something like that, we can talk about non duality, it may feel like this, like that, but unless we experience ourselves, we will not have the experience of that.

But doesn’t that assume that there is a separate self who needs to experience something?

Yeah, because if you look at that metaphor, so if I’m looking at outside, because if I’m interacting with you, so I become someone to be able to use my sense organs to get the input and say whatever. So I have to be someone in order to get it. That’s the way it is designed, I think. So then we get the input, insight and then we experience it subjectively. Right now it is more objective experience, which gets converted into subjective experience data. Let’s say when I meditate, when I get into that state, so I realize that, okay, it’s there. It’s not about simply that I’m talking about it, but it’s there, which I’ve experienced, and experiencing it as I speak, it’s already there inside me.

So what if we just assume that no experience is required, but that this is all already being experienced?

Yeah, that’s the truth actually. If you see that way, it’s the truth. No one can deny that. Again, you need to be able to experience it to be believing it, right? Not hearing it to be believing or seeing it, seeing is believing. It is like experiencing is believing.

What if we could skip the experiencing part?

Then you’ll keep imagining, but I’ll be already imagining like when we talk about design and purpose and things ought to be a certain way we are assigning purpose and destination to this. I think that’s the one level of reality, which is inclusive. I think it’s all inclusive and gross to settle. It varies.

And that’s a problem for the ego or whatever. Absolutely. It’s just unconditional love that loves everything. Absolutely. The problem is to the ego only,

Ego is another fiction as well. I think next time we should talk about the ego.

Ego that doesn’t exist.

Yes. It’s always fun to talk about things that don’t exist.

I think what you said about having a conversation with yourself, I love that it’s because of the lack of ego, the ego has been bothering me for a while and not sure if it’s bigger than it is. If I am having a conversation with myself, it feels that I could open up a little bit more and the ego, if there is an ego, and if I can label the ego, it became a little bit softer and I could open more to the conversation and really take it on board and even just in this short amount of time could reflect on what I said to myself about the labels that’s put on me and maybe that is based on previous experiences or previous outcomes of labels. And that I’m attached to that. So yeah, it allowed me to reflect quickly.

So if things come up later the chat will be open soon. Please feel invited to share whatever comes up for you.