Ep#96 Direct Experience Pt.1

We are going to go deep on these next 2 episodes!  Today we are going to break down meditation as a tool, understanding it’s effectiveness and potential downsides.  We are going to be challenged by these next 2 episodes to think a little more outside of the box.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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What You’ll Learn From this Episode:

  • Tools to use if you feel that meditation ‘doesn’t work’ for you
  • What to do instead of trying to forcefully replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

  • Learn how you can enter to win one of five FREE coaching sessions here!
  • Sign up for Unleash Your Alpha, your guide to shifting to the Alpha

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Alpha Male Coach podcast. The only podcast that teaches men the cognitive mastery and alpha mindset that it takes to become an influential and irresistible man of confidence. Here’s your host, certified life coach and international man of mystery, Kevin Aillaud.

Kevin Aillaud :

What’s up my brothers. Welcome back to the Alpha Male Coach podcast. I am your host, Kevin Aillaud, and I am really excited about this episode. We are going to get wild in this episode. This is a two part episode. Guys on direct experience, on circumstance, that I’m going to tell you, if you haven’t listened to any episodes before this one, it might get a little out there for you, right? So just so you all know, I am out there. I am counterculture and I am counterintuitive, not in the way where I reject everything around me, right? Not in that like nihilist way, but in a way where I question everything around me. I am a human, just like you, and many of my philosophies, my methodologies, and my training concepts are beyond the ideas of conventional cognition. And that is good. I like it like that. I like being on the forefront of what’s possible for all humans, all of humanity. I’m a futurist who lives in the present moment.

Kevin Aillaud :

Now hear me on this, I am not an idealist. I am not a realist. I don’t subscribe to most of the conventional concepts that drive humanity. I observe them, and I’m curious about them, and I use my alpha state to determine if they work for me, if they serve me. I don’t just go along anymore. Right? I don’t just people please. I don’t just go along with the group. I believe strongly in my ability to create my human experience. And I can only do that when I question everything and I choose deliberately and intentionally what I want to believe. Now with that being said, I have a feeling this episode is going to confuse you a bit. I want you to let your brain struggle a little bit in this episode to explain this to yourself, because this is going to challenge a lot of the concepts that you’ve had before on the framework of the world and the fabric of reality. And so your brain is just not going to want to do it. It will be confused and it may even get a little agitated, a little irritated. So something to look forward to, but I want to warn you that this is going to happen.

Kevin Aillaud :

Over the next two episodes, we’re going to talk about some concepts that can be life altering. One of the reasons why I’ve struggled a little bit with some of the like spiritual mindful meditative concepts is that I feel like sometimes it just leaves with no growth, with no progress. A lot of the spiritual work, a lot of the meditation work is about getting to what I call peace, right? That neutral place of steady energy. So when I imagine being able to meditate, right? When I imagine sitting, a picture of like Eckhart Tolle or Jiddu Krishnamurti, some of these great mindful people being in that moment of pure presence in the moment.

Kevin Aillaud :

I don’t see any momentum. I don’t see any movement. I don’t see any results. And for me, that just doesn’t feel right with who I am. And so a lot of the work that I’ve done in terms of meditative practice and mind work that’s been kind of an unintellectual in the sense that we’re not cognitively finding our way there, but more letting go of everything, and being in the present moment, hasn’t felt like any progress for me in my life. It hasn’t felt truly satisfying, and I know that many of you feel the same way. You’ll use meditation as a tool, or you’ll use relaxation techniques as a tool, right? But it’s not something

where you want to land there and stay there in that kind of lifestyle. I have done that before. I’ve lived in the woods. I lived in the woods in a tent for a year, and I actually lived in a Buddhist temple for a few months when I was in Asia.

Kevin Aillaud :

And I can tell you that for me, there is very little to be gained from living in that place of neutral. Now I want to start there and recognize that I think a lot of you who follow me probably feel the same way. Otherwise you’d already be turned off by me and what I teach with getting results, being like what? Stay in the moment. How can you just be happy with that existence? Right? It’s all about the future-focused thinking. And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and studying as it applies to this, and really trying to find for myself, what the common ground is, because I’m going to tell you, I love them both. I love being in the present moment, and I love feeling the feelings that come in the present moment, and I love meditating and all of that stuff, but I also love business, and I also love creation, and I also love making money, and I also like enjoying relationships, and people, and all of those things that go along with that. And it’s gotten me thinking about how to merge these two. How to be in the present moment, how do we exist right here, and right now, while maintaining future focus thinking.

Kevin Aillaud :

Now, one of the things that I want to tell you before getting into that, is that for the rest of my life, before getting into how to reconcile with the present and the future, I want to tell you guys that for the rest of my life, I will always be studying. I will always be a student. Yes, I am a teacher, but I will always be a student and I will always be searching and researching for the next best tool. What is the next best way to live? I researched and studied for the best fitness protocol and I found constantly varied functional movements executed at a high intensity. I researched for the best life philosophy, and I found the Universal Truth and the model to serve me the best. Now, a lot of the ways that I do that is by creating my own tools, and creating my own way, and researching other people and other ideas and incorporating it with what I already know.

Kevin Aillaud :

Most of my students will tell you, I’m always open to anyone’s teaching that is better than mine of course. I want to teach the best of the best and I will teach whatever is best, but what I have found to be most effective so far is to take pieces of everyone’s work and to create a tool that works for me. I’m an innovator and a broker. So if you think about the Universal Truth, and if you think about the terms of the letters that are in the model, those five components that make up the Universal Truth, there are circumstances which we define as neutral facts in the world that are out of our control.

Kevin Aillaud :

And then there’s the thoughts brothers, which are your sentences, your beliefs, your thoughts about those circumstances, what you make them mean to you. Basically your interpretation of the facts of the world. And my teaching is all based on thought work and recognizing that those sentences, those interpretations of the world, create your feelings. This is neuroscience, this is cellular biology, and that would all be fine, and that would all be great if those feelings were amazing all the time, and similarly, it would all be fine and good if all of our thoughts were accurate and authentic all the time. But what I’ve taught you, and what you all know is that those sentences, those thoughts that we may not even be aware of are optional, and many times programmed or inadvertently believed in a way that doesn’t serve us.

Kevin Aillaud :

So my work is about, first and foremost, recognizing that and becoming aware that you have those thoughts, that you are not those thoughts, and then recognizing the effect of those thoughts, and then knowing that you can change them if you want to. I think the most evolved piece of my methodology as I’ve become more authentic within myself has been the ability to feel my emotions, has been the ability to stay with my emotions long enough to not be in a hurry to change my thinking, and to recognize my thinking, and recognize the effect of it, and then just as gently, let it go and let it be replaced with a thought that serves me better instead of rejecting negative emotion, rejecting negative thoughts as something bad, and then going and buffering all of my time. It’s just something for us to be curious about.

Kevin Aillaud :

So as I teach this work, and as I share it with you in the podcast, I talk a lot about sure, your circumstances, the facts of the world are really boiled down to the most basic. What do you put in the C line? I had words with a woman instead of my girlfriend yelled at me, right? Or there was a conversation instead of had, I had a fight with my wife, right? Keeping that circumstance very, very neutral and very, very factual, and that practice is life altering. But brothers, there is more, there’s much more, because here’s what we’re going to get into, and this is going to drive you crazy. This is just going to be amazing for you, even the facts in the circumstance aren’t really facts, right? When you think about circumstance and you think about putting facts in that C line of the model, like there was a person, I ate dinner, right? I had a conversation with my brother. Those are all acceptable circumstances that we put in the C line of the model, but the truth is when you free yourself from the matrix and really think about it. Every one of those circumstances, even though it’s a neutral set of words, is still a thought because it’s made up of language, and all language begins in our brain. It’s made up cognitively before we say it out loud, it’s still a neutral thought about a direct experience.

Kevin Aillaud :

If you have an experience with something, a direct sensation, one of the five senses, you touch someone, you hear something, that experience is a direct experience. It’s not a thought about an experience. So whenever we’re talking about the past, which of course we would put in the circumstance line. Once we write it down, once it’s coming from our brain, written in language, written in words, it’s still technically a thought.

Kevin Aillaud :

I enlisted in the Navy, right? It’s a statement of fact, but it’s still also a thought about my past. So what I’m suggesting is that we can still use the C line as a direct experience. We can think about the matrix as a direct experience, that doesn’t include language. And when we do this, we’re sort of released from those words in our head that have to become the language before it can become the circumstance.

Kevin Aillaud :

So what is the neutral circumstance without language? What is happening in the world? What is happening in the matrix when we remove our language, or our ability to communicate with our cognition? Essentially with our relationship with ourself. Now, here’s what I want you to imagine. I want you to imagine all the animals on the planet that don’t have language, right? Their experience is direct because there’s no words, there’s no letters, there’s no sentences in addition to the actual experience. Let’s say I find myself standing here and I’m watering my plants. If I say to myself, I’m watering my

plants. I have two things going on. Guys, stay with me. I have two things. I have the experience, the direct experience of my motor control and my vision of spraying and giving water to my orchids, and also seeing that occur, watching that. But then I also have a thought about that experience, which is I’m watering my orchids. One is a direct experience, a pure circumstance with no language, and the other one has language involved in it.

Kevin Aillaud :

Now, is there a benefit to differentiating between a stated circumstance, a stated event, and the direct experience without the language? I think it can be a complete game changer if we can experience and then actually re-experience things without language. And here’s why, language is the only thing that can create psychological emotion. Direct experience causes sensation. It comes from one of the five senses, which is a direct experience of your body. Not caused by a thought, and language is what creates emotion. And I think sometimes we think that we are experiencing an emotion because of something that happened in the world, or something that is happening, even though we’re the ones creating it with our thoughts, with the sentences, with the language. You see, it’s not the experience that creates the emotion. It’s not coming from the sense. It’s our thoughts, which are being manifested in our head, in the form of language, the relationship we have with ourself.

Kevin Aillaud :

And so I’ve been asking myself, what would life be like without any language? And is that even possible where I can’t even think, I’m in the world, right? I’m a human, I’m a person, right? I’m having a conversation, like this event is happening. Like there’s no language. There’s no words. There are no thoughts. There are no sentences in my head. There’s no relationship with myself. There’s just simply a relationship with the matrix. There’s just the relationship with my body. There’s just that direct experience in this present moment, without the commentary, without the sound on, without the subtitles. You know, guys, when I watch movies, I like to have the subtitles on. I think it has to do with my hearing and how I may be losing it over time, but I love subtitles. I love to read my movies, but think about you’re watching a movie and it doesn’t have the subtitles. In fact, the sound’s not even on. You’re just having a direct experience of that without the attempt to interpret what’s happening.

Kevin Aillaud :

How do you let go of language? How do you let go of words to be present in an experience? Now I’ve studied meditation. I’ve studied meditation from several different teachers. From the Zen school, from the Buddhist school, from the Christian school, from the Transcendental school, I’ve even done the Joe Dispenza stuff. I love it. I love it all. And when you study meditation or you learn from the masters of meditation, one of the things that they will have you do is release thinking, try not to think. Release your thoughts and allow them to be. And I was taught this in the Transcendental school, it’s like the bubbles in the pot of boiling water. Your thoughts they begin as bubbles at the bottom of the pot and they rise from the bottom to the top, and then they pop in, and they’re gone. And you just kind of allow them to come and go, just let them release.

Kevin Aillaud :

Of course, if you try not to think it’s very difficult. You just keep thinking these bubbles just keep appearing at the bottom of this pot, and they come up and then there’s more appear. And one of the things that you can do when you’re meditating is you can try to be aware of your thinking. Not engaging with your thinking, you just become the observer of your thinking. And if you can just watch yourself

think without judgment, then you, as the alpha, are watching yourself think, and you’re not actually thinking.

Kevin Aillaud :

And when you are there, those of you who experienced this, a lot of you, when you’re doing your thought downloads, when you’re doing your thought uploads, you have a kind of out of body experience. It’s meditative because basically what you’re doing is you’re observing yourself thinking without judging yourself thinking, which means you’re in truly in that meditative state. You are in that relationship with yourself, watching yourself be in relationship with yourself. You are in the alpha state. That is that awareness. And when you’re able to step out of your life and into that alpha state, without words, with just observation, with just experiencing yourself thinking, you can find a level of peace that many people have never known. And that’s, what’s crazy and so fascinating about it, right? You could be in the middle of a crazy round of anxiety, or fear, or stress, or anger, and for a minute, as you observe yourself in that experience, you were in a place of neutral peace. You’ve separated yourself from it. You’re in a place of peace where there is no direct language creating that emotion.

Kevin Aillaud :

So when you think about being in your body without language, in this present moment of being, just being, you may be saying, “Okay coach, you’ve explained this to me in words, in sentences, in thoughts, I’m thinking about your words. So I’m having these thoughts. How am I supposed to execute this if I am listening to these words and creating thoughts in my mind about how to accomplish this?” What’s it like to be in your body? As a human, a living organism without language? Imagine being a tree experiencing a flower. And I know it sounds bananas. I know it sounds crazy, but let’s say that you are a living, breathing tree. You can’t talk. Trees don’t talk. How do you experience the flower? Right? It’s completely neutral. There’s no judgment about the flower. It’s there. Now, when I say there’s no judgment, let me tell you this. There’s no judgment in a good way, right? But there’s also no judgment in a bad way. There’s just no judgment at all. The way we think of a flower is, oh, it smells good. Or it’s a beautiful flower, but the tree doesn’t think a flower’s beautiful. It’s just, it’s there. A tree just experiences. How does a tree experience itself or does it? Is there an experience that happens without language?

Kevin Aillaud :

Now, considering this concept in terms of your past, I want you to imagine that you’re the flower, and a heavy gust of wind comes up and knocks a branch off the tree and it lands near or on you. How do you experience that? What do you call that? Is that abuse? Is that neglect? Is that abandonment? Is that harmful? Is that hurtful? Are you going to blame that tree? Are you going to hold that tree responsible for the rest as you grow and you go through the seasons and so on? I was trying to imagine what it is because you can’t describe it. Can you describe it is as like this thing? Like this is life or this is being, or this is awake, or this is consciousness. This is the momentous leap my brothers, because all of those are just words.

Kevin Aillaud :

I think one of the ways that this is so powerful is it can give us a space to kind of pass through and not a place to stay. The point and purpose of cognitive mastery is not to be neutral. It’s not to get to a point where you’re just always saying to yourself, or to other people, like it is what it is, or whatever. And so I’m not recommending that you learn how to live without language, or that you go and meditate without language all the time, because here’s the thing, you don’t have negative emotion without

language, but you don’t have any positive emotion either. You’re not creating anything. You’re not getting any results. You’re not moving forward in your life. You’re not growing. You can just be in that meditative state, but the reason it’s so powerful as a way of passing through, is it gives you a place to land in between suffering and success. It gives you a place to land in between where you are and where you want to be.

Kevin Aillaud :

Now it’s neutral to get out of pain, which can become a loop that you’re creating with yourself if you try to talk your way out of it, which so many of my students do. They try to talk themselves down, or try to find a new thought that makes all those bad feelings go away. Like in that moment, how do I get out of this? This is an alternative to talking your way out of it. This is a way for you to simply release all words, all sentences, all opinions, all judgments, all perceptions. You basically are recalibrating your emotions to zero temporarily. You’re clearing out your words. You are going to that void in the mind, the empty mind.

Kevin Aillaud :

Now, have you ever had an experience that was so mind blowing that you can’t even describe it? This happens to people when they’ve had those a-ha moments, right? Have you ever had an a-ha moment where it was a total paradigm shift in your perception. Now I call this the Delta surge, right? There is a massive, almost an evolution in consciousness that people go through when their worldview changes. Now I’m talking about a worldview, not a change in like, I used to wear Nike’s and now I wear Reeboks, right? Now I’m talking about a massive paradigm shift that is so startling to the nuclei of your cells, where you might say, I can’t even explain it to you. I can’t even put it into words because it was such a direct experience of sensation, such a direct experience in the body.

Kevin Aillaud :

Now, remember, even when you have a direct experience like that, it’s not positive, or negative until you label it so, until you get back to the words. That’s when the words come to it, that’s when the word starts to begin to add to it. That’s your judgment about it? And what I’m recommending is that you learn how to just be in yourself temporarily to pass through for a moment without that language. It’s the doorway. It’s the way that you don’t just take something that you are labeling as negative and try to brush some positivity on top. You’ve got to pass through the place of direct experience. Without the experience of language, without those words, you have that pure presence. It’s a place of pure being. So if you don’t put words to it and you don’t describe it, you don’t even feel it. It’s a zeroing out. It’s like cleansing your palate. You’re only have your present sensations, that’s it. That’s all that’s happening, and that’s so neutral. That’s true circumstance. That is a blank C line. That is the direct experience when we haven’t put words to it.

Kevin Aillaud :

Now here’s why this is so amazing. When most students learn the Universal Truth, they get so caught up in wanting to change the thought from negative to positive that we don’t learn how to just let go of the original thought first. You have to let go of that negative belief by passing through the direct experience before deciding deliberately your thought that you want to have, creating more of a desired emotion. But you can’t get there by slamming positivity on top of negativity. I see brand new students do this all the time. They just push against or resist the negative thought and replace it with a positive thought, but when that happens, when you do that, the positive thought becomes heavy. It becomes the fighter of

the negative thought. It becomes tension, and the negative thought is still there. It’s just the positive thought is trying to push it away. And I see this happen a lot where the old thinking keeps coming up and being present because we haven’t truly learned how to release the old thought, the negative thought, by recognizing that you can feel that emotion you don’t need to fight it at all.

Kevin Aillaud :

And one of the ways that I’ve found that’s really interesting to do that is to drop the negative thought and a positive thought into that neutral circumstance. That direct experience that has no words. Drop into that space between words where there’s no language, there is only the experience of being. There is no sentence. There’s no thought.

Kevin Aillaud :

Now many people will tell you that this is where you should live. I have worked with several teachers who have said you should live in the place of non-judgment. Just be positive, just be neutral all the time, positive or negative. Just none of it. You should live in that space of being always in that peaceful energy. Just serene energy. You know, like part of the Jedi code, there is no emotion, there is peace. There is no passion, there is serenity. It doesn’t get too excited, it doesn’t get too upset. It just stays neutral.

Kevin Aillaud :

And I do not personally want to do that. I do not want to be in a pure neutral circumstance all the time. I do not want to be without words and without judgments, I want to choose my beliefs intentionally. I want to choose my beliefs deliberately, so that I can get the results that I’m after. But I do want to know that I can go to the place of non-judgment, that I can go to the place of pure direct experience. I do want to know the difference between my interpretation of the world, and my direct experience of it, without any words.

Kevin Aillaud :

And the reason why I want to be able to do that is because I want to be able to go to a place where I’m not creating any emotion and I can clean that emotional palette. I can clean my brain, wash my sentences out of my head. I want to be able to take a respite from emotion when I’m having a lot of negative emotion. When I’m having a lot of emotion that doesn’t serve me. And what I’ve found is that if I can release the language, if I can release all thoughts about something, meaning all words about something, if I can just watch the words come in and let them go as if they don’t exist, I can find a presence and a place that makes me feel indomitable. That makes me feel the most powerful I’ve ever felt in my life, and that where no one can hurt me. And even if I die, no one can hurt me. It’s the craziest thing.

Kevin Aillaud :

And so I feel like sometimes these people that are really trying to be meditative all the time, like I get it, it feels so awesome to be in a place without language. It’s even more awesome to be in that space powerfully than even to be fantasizing about possibility. And I think it’s such an amazing present place to be.

Kevin Aillaud :

Now, understand, my brothers. This is all 201 material. In the Spartan Academy we have cognitive mastery 101. That’s what most of these podcasts are usually about, the basics, level one, freshman year material. This is all level two stuff. Cognitive mastery 201, the second year, sophomore year, junior and senior year, we get into some really cool specialized work, but that is something I’m not going to touch on the podcast.

Kevin Aillaud :

So I’m excited to be able to introduce this concept as we near the 100th episode, because I know it’s going to take you to the next level, but it’s really important that you understand this concept before you listen to the next podcast, which is on the power of why I’m recommending you do this, and then how to get through it, how to get from this bad, negative emotion to this neutral, direct non-language circumstance to then going to positive possibility, love and compassion. Because if you can fully release the negative by passing through the objective neutral direct experience, then the positive is going to be so much more powerful. It’s not going to be using the positive against the negative. It’s not just trying to slam positivity on a whole heap of negative things that you are feeling, which is what so many of you do, but we’re going to be using all of that positive energy towards the positive creation. We’re going to lay it on a blank slate. We’re not going to slam it on top of negativity.

Kevin Aillaud :

Now I know I may have lost some of you on this. If I did, no worries. That’s why it’s a podcast. You can listen to it again, and again, and again, and again, especially if you’re enrolled in the Academy. I want to make sure that you get these concepts deep within you. So listen to it over and over again. If you’re Spartan, of course, ask me questions about it. We’re going to be studying it deeper. So don’t worry. I’m going to be talking about this a lot, especially in July, because when you recognize that everything that ever hurt you in your life, in your past, was caused by language, was caused by a word, and you have the ability to disconnect from that long enough to pass to and to pass through the neutral direct experience. Think of how powerful that is. Think of how amazing that is.

Kevin Aillaud :

So if you feel like this is too challenging, if you feel like you’re bored, right? Or frustrated, or irritated, or agitated, or whatever, I want you to bookmark this episode and come back to it. Especially if you haven’t listened to all the previous podcasts. Sometimes when I introduce some of these concepts, I’ll have students say, “Look, coach, like that’s not advanced. We’ve been doing this for years,” and that’s okay, because some of us are just in a different place in our journey. And then sometimes I introduce this stuff and people don’t get it at all. It’s like mind blowing and they want to listen to the episode several, several times.

Kevin Aillaud :

So wherever you are, hopefully this is helpful to some of you. I want you to start practicing it. What is it like to be in the middle of an argument? Imagine this, in the middle of an argument with someone and say, “What would this experience, what would this event be like without language, without words, without sentences, without thoughts in my mind?” You just be a person. You wouldn’t even be able to get mad, right? You wouldn’t even have that emotion. There’d be nothing. There’d be no language about it. Have you ever walked up to a stranger? Have you ever walked up to a beautiful woman you see passing you on the street, or in a store, or in a lobby of a building and just allowed yourself to be with her? With no language, with just your eyes, your body, your presence, to say nothing to her, but hold

her in your power of being. It would just be two people. Even if the other person had language, even if they started speaking and you didn’t, what would you be like? How would you hold the presence of love, and compassion, and desire, and attraction? Can you drop into that pure being of neutral circumstance?

Kevin Aillaud :

Okay. So once you get this episode, we’ll go into part two of this concept. This is going to be a part one, part two is next week. We’ll go way deeper into this in the Academy if you have any questions. So go to the alphamalecoach.com and enroll in the Academy by clicking on the link at the top that says work with Kevin. And so I will show you how this concept helps you create all the results you want at twice the speed, because you’re not pulling any negative thoughts that are just dragging you down. You have these negative thoughts. You’re trying to slam positive thoughts on them. I will show you how to pass through direct experience so that you can create, on a clean palette, your positive thoughts. I’m telling you guys, not only do I have all these people in my life, all these students in my life that are having the most extraordinary success that is mind blowing for all of them, but it’s happening for me and it’s happening faster and faster and faster. And I think these concepts, these ideas, these practices are the reason why. So I look forward to teaching you as well as I possibly can these concepts, so that you can start apply them to your life. Until next week my brothers, elevate your alpha.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Alpha Male Coach podcast. If you enjoyed what you’ve heard and want even more, sign up for unleash your alpha, your guide to shifting to the alpha mindset the alphamalecoach.com/unleash.

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