The Glorious Return

Yes, that’s a real rock.

As in found in nature. It’s called the “Phallic Rock” and it’s found on the remote Hawaiian island of Molokai.

I flew there in a small Cesena a few weeks ago through a tropical storm. Apparently I made it.

After being blessed with the newfound potency that the ancient Hawaiians believed this rock contains, I flew to Los Angeles for the final recording of The Blueprint Decoded.

Four days, all me.

I’d prepared for this for... well, it seems like my entire life.

There’s something that’s different about doing a four day program all on your own.

You become a family with the people you’re speaking to. The hours pass up on stage and time seems to come to a stop. Eventually it’s like the only reality that exists.

The only reality that ever existed, and the only one that ever could.

It’s like you find yourself thinking “I could just be here forever... What difference would it make?? What difference could anything possibly make??”

The Blueprint was hard to let go of. It's what kept me going when I felt like all the certainties of my life were falling apart. For a long time it felt like it was all I really had.

I had no idea how I was going to get myself out of the circumstances I found myself in, but in the process of creation I could forget about all my problems and think about offering value to other people.

It was a way of sort of “outframing” all the uncertainty, so to speak.

I could say “I’m working on The Blueprint... My personal situation is just petty nonsense... This is bigger than that...”

Maybe that’s why they say that offering value is ultimately more rewarding than receiving it.

It sounds cheesy and contrived but I think it's true. The outward movement of value, for some reason or other, is the more profound human experience.

We seem to be wired that way, maybe because we’ve evolved as social creatures, I don’t know.

It’s so often forgotten... So easily and naturally forgotten in the progressive society in which we live.

The endless stimulation and prodding towards gratification... the constant conditioning to look to the surface of things and miss out on the depth.

On the surface you make a bunch of money or get some new toy ... and it’s fun for about five minutes and then you take it for granted and it's off to the next thing.

Like how the advent of the grocery store and central-air would have been like an infinite paradise for a caveman -- but for us to say we really care about it is more of a hypothetical thought experiment than an actual reality.

So it’s always more... more... more surface level gratification.

You wonder “How could all the people who came before me live without all the comforts I take for granted?? How could they have lived with all the uncertainty?? They must have just been ignorant... Their lives must have just been spent in the distraction of satisfying their most basic needs...”

That’s the obviousness of progress...

We’ve come so far, culturally, socially, just to look around isn’t it dogmatic at this point??

I don’t know... I’m not so sure anymore.

It’s all about certainty, isn’t it??

We all want certainty. Maybe it's that lust that causes us to spread ourselves like a cancerous tumour.

Look at the cities we live in, really look at how they swell and expand.

Fly over Los Angeles. Fly over Sao Paulo. Open your eyes and look, because most of the cities that are now considered small will someday become just like them.

Our children and all of their children for thousands of generations will be likely left with the legacy of a mangled planet, a smoking wrangled carcass of the vibrant and living entity that it once was.

This same drama is played out on a micro level in our own lives, as we seek a temporary fix of certainty in our status and beliefs and personal relationships.

And for what??

THERE IS NO CERTAINTY.

That’s the absurdity of it all. It’s nothing more than a mind-perpetuated veil of distraction that’s only purpose is to distance you from who you really are.

All the status and validation you get from people... It’s gone as fast as it came.

Your beliefs??

A set of labels, judgements, and interpretations of previous events that’s more often than not creating an opaque wall between yourself and an authentic experience of present reality.

Even relationships...

How many do you still have from childhood?? How many will you still have if you make it to be old and gray?? If you're lucky there's a few that are important and THAT'S IT.

What do we cling to all this for?? Is it the promise of nice memories??

So we can sit in a diaper blabbing incoherently to the disinterested youth about all the cool stuff we used to have??

Fuck certainty.

I’m disgusted by it. I can’t stand it.

The more certainty you get, the more temptation there is to root yourself in it. To delude yourself. To root yourself in the fleeting and the false.

As far as I can tell, and I’m speaking as a naive kid in his twenties who’s probably read too many off-the-wall books for his own good, the only real certainty in this world is being WHO YOU ARE and the only real joy is OFFERING VALUE.

That’s it.

There’s nothing to want from anybody. Nothing to be needy for, nothing to be insecure about.

Everything that you need you’ve already got.

All the girls, all the props, all the food and luxury... the only way it can be really enjoyed is when it’s a natural consequence of who you are and the value you’ve offered.

The individual who gets this “stuff” by any other means, be it “easier” or “more clever” –- the depth of their experience is diluted by the neediness of attachment, the taste soured by the permeating filth of their petty existence.

Like the girl who’s number you got and you’re too nervous to call, or the relationship you destroy by clasping to it too tightly ... you can’t really enjoy it because your mind can’t process the deservedness, so you just cling to it until it’s gone.

The only pleasure is when it’s a natural consequence...

When those good, positive, healthy emotions are rooted in who you are and the value you offer -- and the external circumstances are attracted into your life as “experiential bonus rounds” so to speak.

Like sitting at a cafe by yourself after a day where you gave everything you had, and you just feel... awesome.

Or walking down the street in Manhatten, and you’re listening to your boots clacking against the pavement and you’ve got a smile in your eyes for everyone you pass because you’ve come into alignment with the world.

Have you ever been basking in the afterglow of sex with a girl who you just fucked the brains out of... and you know... YOU JUST KNOW that you’ve been the dude that you’re meant to be and she’s so thrilled to be with you and it MAKES SENSE??

That’s the real glory in all this... The depth that's found beyond the surface.

A girl who’s genuinely attractive, not just on the surface but with real depth, she has the ability to intoxicate and have you buzzed out of your head on a level that's in a lot of ways better than sex. Just talking her, just being around her, totally natural. But that only comes when you let go out of the petty neediness for her validation, allowing yourself to be in the moment without “thinking ahead” and REALLY experiencing her.

Funny how in doing so you offer so much value to her that “getting laid” is practically inevitable, and yet, the swarms of needy chodes of the world will NEVER land themselves that quality of girl.

The petty desires you came into this with... Kill them... Evolve past them.

Fuck the need for certainty. Enjoy it where you've got it but overall just let it go.

I want to be in the outdoors. Hiking up in the mountains. Hitting stupidly big waves out in the ocean.

I want to visit new cultures, to travel in the third world away from the power structures that give us all this bullshit sense of security.

I'm serious, that's what I want and that's how I spend all my free time. Just put me ANYWHERE that I can let loose and experience my faculties to the fullest.

You want to know where you go when you die??

It’s easy. You go into the unknown. Just like now. You’re in the midst of it and you don’t even realize it.

There’s no difference.

Think about that... how by a way of looking at it there’s fundamentally no difference between your life and death.

When you feel uncertainty, all you have to remember is that you’re ALREADY in the midst of the unknown. You’ve lived your entire life in it, it’s your only home.

This isn’t even abstract. You don’t have to be intelligent or have any major epiphany to understand it.

It’s not toying with semantics like “You can never really know anything for sure...” when in fact you DO have the ability to take right action based what you know.

This is even simpler than that. It’s just a dilation of awareness where it would normally exist in a state of contraction.

You’re born in uncertainty, you live in uncertainty, and you die in it.

It's your home. It's where you live, and no matter how hard you try to deny it to yourself it's where you're SUPPOSED to be.

You exert a level of control over yourself and your environment, but at the end of the day you can’t find your sense of self in that because like it or not the world will only revolve around you and operate on your agenda for so long before you get a kick in the face.

The real experience of life found in the depth, and this experience is as profound as it is timeless.

How long you lived... The number of hours... The number of days and years...

All surface stuff... All petty and somewhat funny if you think about it, even if at times it seems very much to the contrary.

That’s where you find freedom... Liberation from this insane epidemic of the need for certainty.

It’s the core difference between the people who play at life and the people who sit it out as dazed spectators on the sidelines.

And if you think about it, the whole system is really pretty darned elegant.

There is no surface solution to life... You always have to go deeper, and in the process find a new depth in YOURSELF.

Just like how you can’t make a ton of money or memorize the perfect set of pickup lines to get the girl without having to become a better dude...

Just like how you can’t kill all the bad guy terrorists to end the violence without recognizing all the geopolitical causes of which we are a central part...

And just like how you can’t produce and expand and consume endlessly to make for a better world...

It’s all about embracing the complexities, and finding the depth and the balance that the experiences are trying to communicate and move us towards.

As cool as it would be to find that sense of centeredness we crave in a lifetime of surrounding ourselves with layer upon layer temporary security, the only durable solution is to peel back all the false, superfluous distractions and get to our core selves.

That’s not to glorify the past, which would be a massive oversimplification.

Rather, it's living the uncertainty and unknown as the basis of freedom which allows us to connect to the depth of our experiences on the most profound level that we could ever want or desire.

Alright, that’s it for now. Very good to be back!!


Tyler