Appearance on Men Of Purpose Podcast

I have a new podcast appearance on the Men on Purpose Podcast that I’m excited to share with you.

Here’s how Emerald Peaceful GreenForest the host of the show describes it:

“Speaking of BURSTING – I’m bursting with excitement to bring the Magnificent Max Marmer to you today – listen CAREFULLY to this interview – you could review it maybe several times – pause, let the words really sink in and then go listen again!

Max is THAT kind of guy – who when he opens his mouth or more accurately directs his energy and intention – amazing things happen! There is so much juice in this interview I seriously want to make the time to listen again myself.

We covered a huge range of topics from Biohacking to Startups to stock trading to confidence to dancing to what it means to be a polymath. WHEW! Please, I’m asking SERIOUSLY, listen with focused attention to today’s episode.

How do you develop the courage to jump off a ledge and ‘assemble a plan on the way down’? Max Marmer believes that confidence comes from knowing who you are and developing that. So what tools are out there to help you achieve that kind of self-understanding and clarity of purpose? And how exactly do you practice stepping into your courage, developing confidence as part of your skill set?
Today, Max sits down with Emerald to explore his early awareness of multidimensionality and how he navigates between maps and territory to further his understanding of himself and the universe. He explains the concept of biohacking, sharing how he utilizes its principles to increase his energy and mental sharpness. Max walks us through the life cycle of a successful startup, discussing how self-awareness and clarity of purpose have contributed to his confidence as an entrepreneur and the dynamic tools for self-understanding offered by his new company TrueSelf. Listen in for Max’s insight around the power of integrating across disciplines and the opportunity for men to design a new model of masculinity in the current cultural moment.

What You Will Learn
Max’s early awareness of multidimensionality

How Max navigates between maps and territory to understand himself, the universe

How Max leverages biohacking to increase energy and mental clarity

Max’s take on the crossover between the inner and outer world

How Max uses applied kinesiology to identify his body’s needs

The life cycle of a successful startup

Discovery

Validation

Efficiency

Scale

The idea of confidence as a practice and a skill

How self-understanding and purpose informs confidence

How Max employs faith to endure the darkness of the ‘crash and burn’

How Max’s new company TrueSelf offers dynamic tools for self-understanding

The definition of a polymath

How power and innovation comes from integrating across disciplines

The opportunity to develop a new model of masculinity in this cultural moment”.

And I encourage you to check out episodes with other Purpose-Driven Brothers Michael Hrostoski and Satyen Raja

On Getting Back Up When I’ve Been Knocked Down

 

Life inevitably has ups and downs.

When I was knocked down hard in the past, I stayed down for longer than I needed, because in going all in and coming up short, I didn’t emotionally, mentally and spiritually prepare well enough for the losses and failures.

The pain, disappointment and devastation hit me harder than I was expecting.

Add to that, I was curious about the dark. A part of me wanted to know after efforting so much to chase after my mission and purpose since the ripe age of 13, swimming upstream stroke after stroke, overcoming obstacles and resistances day after day, what would happen if I just let all my pushing go and let the river of darkness pick me up off my feet and take me downstream?

Last year my cycles of initiation were completed. The curiosity satiated. The lies of depression understood. The psychological brush fires painfully burning away all false attachments, to reveal only the indestructible core of my essence.

Showing me there is literally nothing to fear. Allowing me to journey forth with boundless freedom, unshakeable confidence and inexhaustible enthusiasm.

An Absolute Truth containing all the energetic undulance of the universe’s inevitable pulsations of expansion and contraction.

What Einstein Had to Say About Alignment

Einstein is speaking to proper alignment within the Immanent Holarchy of the Spirit -> Soul -> Personality.

Your agency is your self. Your Body/Mind.

Your True Identity is All of Existence. 

Your Task is to over come the persistent illusory prison that you are your Body/Mind.

Your Process is recognizing all the energetic Self-contractions that manifest as limiting beliefs, unresolved traumas, and negative emotions like fear, uncertainty and doubt that stand between you and Identifying as All of Existence.

It is here where unending Liberation and Positive Flourishing is found.

A Beautiful Poem on Love, Self-Worth, and Solitude

 

Solitude

God, my alone feels so good, but lately I’ve craving something more, something deeper
I want love
But not just any kind of Love, no,
I want a love so deep it’d make the ocean jealous.
But I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude. You must love me for everything I’m worth and then some.
Start with my eyes, look into them like you want to know all the good, bad, and anything beyond. From my eyes go to my mind, love me for everything I know and love me just as much to teach me what I do not.
Hold me in your arms, and love me for everything I am, from my breasts to my thighs, and even the scars that others have left behind
But tell me if you’re not up for it…Not that you don’t want me but rather you can’t handle me.
And please don’t say, “I won’t be like those other dudes and break your heart.”
You see my solitude has always been sweet, and during that time I learned to love myself before I could learn to love anyone else.
Give me the love that I’ve been craving, make the ocean jealous. Fall for my eyes without knowing me just yet
And then kiss me like you want to be loved just as much
Remember that I want to be loved as deep as the ocean, but remember that I am like the ocean
I can slip through your fingers, but manage to hold up an army of ships
Kiss me, hold me, love me, but tell me if you’re not up for it
I’ll only have you if you’re sweeter than my solitude

What Kind of World would be Manifest if both Men and Women were Living at this Frequency?

 

For a woman to open up to her immense, natural sexual fullness she needs to trust a man with her heart, soul and sacred feminine core.~ 

She needs to feel that he recognises that she is goddess in incarnate form. He needs to recognise that the core of him – his masculinity – is deeply nourished by the spiritual feminine and that it is only through surrender to this sacred Shakti force that he can become the man he yearns to be (and the world most needs). The blunt – and quite harsh – truth is that most men do not yet realise that they are only experiencing a fraction of their woman’s sexual potential. Through a lack of teaching, role modelling, and example in how to deal with feminine energy, many men bypass the incredible sacred sensual riches that lay deep within a woman’s body.

Worshipping Goddess-energy has nothing to do with satisfying the ego or personality needs of women. It has nothing to do with unequal gender roles or subservience. It is based on this truth: a man who devotes himself to opening up his woman to the full power of her sexual Shakti energy will not only experience heights of erotic pleasure that are off the scale, but will also give himself the strength to step into his own full Divine Masculine purpose.

Devotion to the Feminine Essence is the torchlight for a man to realise his spiritual purpose on the earth. If he has embodied the energy of trust, commitment and dedication to being the best, most evolved man he can be, then she will instantly recognise it. He doesn’t have to be ‘perfect’, or even have it all figured out. He just needs to come to her with a resonance in his heart that says: “I know that it is only through dedicating myself to loving your feminine spirit that you will open your body up to me in the way that will transform me forever. I realise that if I am in any shade of denial in my own life and regarding my masculine purpose, that you will intuitively know it and withhold a portion of your sexual light from me. If I come to you with a willingness to grow, to honour your Light as a means of realising the spiritual and personal potential of both of us, I know that I will get to experience true Heaven when you accept me into your body.

As I come to you with a surrendered, open-hearted, devotional passion, so you respond to me with ever-increasing vulnerability, exquisite melting openness and the most exciting sacred sexual power I could ever experience. You begin to take off your layers of defences; the hardened shell of distrust, self-protection and emotional hurt that has set in from years of feeling that you have to shield your most sacred erotic nature from those men that are not ready to see it.

As the protective layers around your sexual core gradually fall away, I get to experience sex with you as the most transformative key to my own masculine progress and evolution. There is literally nothing else that can encourage me to build my masculine energy and work in the world as the blasting open of your sexual light-centres as the radiance fills my chakras and my heart.’ It is pure, sacred, erotic alchemy: the blending of the completely receptive, wide-opened, fully-trusting feminine body with the devotional and conscious active, directional masculine life force.

Men, when you love a woman in this way you will, as a natural consequence, be asked by the Universe to ‘step up’ to your Life Purpose in ways that require true masculine potency. You will be forced to come out of your hiding places and comfort zones. You will have to start putting yourself ‘on the edge’ of your fears about being out in the world as a warrior presence of masculine wisdom. Experiencing female sexuality in it’s full spectrum of transformational expression will not only send you into physical and spiritual orgasms of cosmic proportions, it will literally ejaculate you into your Masculine Life Purpose. She won’t tolerate anything less; so if you want to keep diving deeper and deeper into the eternally replenishing, profound wonders of the feminine sexual core, you will have to keep on worshipping at her altar so that you get to live as the exceptional man you were born to be.

– Sophie Bashford

Art: “Os Beduínos” by Bruno Steinbach Silvas

Do the Problems of the World Make Us Screwed as a Species?

 

Someone in a Private Facebook Group I follow asked me this Question, and I thought I would give my Answer:

“Are we as a Species Fucked ? For real ?

Not to sound gravely pessimistic yet how many dire local and World wide issues are there to even deal with ?

Really what do you think/feel about our overwhelming societal problems ?

If we get down real into the background feeling behind daily doings, does your Being feel we are doomed as a species ?

Candid truth please 🙏🏽

No solutions needed for this post and comments…just your real feeling please 🙏🏽”


Whatever your perspective is:

The world is doomed,

Or, we are living in the best time in human history.

You will find evidence to support your perspective.

My perspective is that we are at the best time in human history, but we are also facing more complex problems than ever before, which can feel overwhelming to many.

But this is how all complex adaptive evolutionary systems work — as they grow and complexify, so do the problems they are confronted with.

These are simply growing pains.

Sometimes complex systems advance to a new level of coherence and sometimes they fail and take a step back, stabilize and then accelerate from that base.

Some dimensions of the world are making the leap to the next level whereas others are self correcting by taking a step back.

There’s enough resiliency in the world system now that I don’t believe we are at risk of existential collapse, although the potential for things to get pretty ugly is there.

Scientific Study on the Neuroscience of Awakening

The Tibetan Buddhist Lineage I study in just published a study putting 40 of their top students in a controlled EEG experiment to map the Neuro-Correlates of Awakening.

This is a landmark milestone to spreading these incredibly potent teachings to a much wider audience.

To date, nearly all the neuroscience studies on meditation have looked at Beginner Meditative States like Basic Concentration and Mindfulness.

This study investigated the Neurocorrelates of Awakening which is probably the most important state of consciousness in all of Buddhism and all of Spiritual Practice.

For when Awakening is Stabilized the Magnetic Force of Suffering in life is replaced by a new Pole of Attraction — one of Liberation, Goodness, Truth and Beauty.

Stabilizing Awakening is the Point of Meditation.

Or said in more elaborated form:

The point of meditation is to move beyond the confines of the illusory separate self into a stabilized state of Awakened Awareness (and eventually Enlightenment) where you experience the cessation of all suffering, the flourishing of all positive states, tap into the boundless bliss, power and knowledge of Infinite Reality and live your life in such away that you bring as many people as possible with you into this State of Being, for you know everything and everyone is Indivisibly You.

Considering that in today’s culture, ideas and practices spread with much greater speed when they are backed by ‘evidence-based western scientific methods’, I am very pleased this study was conducted, as if there’s one thing this world needs more than anything else it may very well be more humans with stable access to Awakened Awareness.

Pithy Post Potpourri – Winter/Spring 2018

If you and your partner(s) can’t both reliably access a state of awakened awareness beyond the ordinary sense of self then any exploration of non-monogamy will inevitably lead to an increase in pain and suffering.

#PsychographicEntryCriteria

When you lose your cool, when you get triggered do you tell yourself to raise your game and live up to a higher standard?

Or do you justify why it was okay to lose your cool and ascribe fault to other people and external circumstances?

This is one of the key regular decisions that separates the extraordinary humans from the ordinary.

I love my morning meditation view so much.

There is a reason yogis go to the mountaintop.

The sparkling, harmonious, blissful, spacious, luminous nature of reality is unassailably clear.

People who don’t utilize the tool of debt and credit in their life have been afflicted by a false sense of lack.

They lack sufficient belief in themselves.

And they lack a willingness to invest in themselves for the long run and to bet on themselves.

The question for analyzing whether debt and credit is worth utilizing is very simple:

Can you create more value, faster with the money you are loaned than the interest rate you are given?

One of the worst decisions the masculine can make is to seek comfort.

The masculine grows through setting big goals, pushing to exhaustion and then savoring accomplishment in the recovery phase before setting a new bigger goal that lies beyond the new expanded comfort zone.

From the higher perspective there is no such thing as rejection.

There is just energy jostling around trying to find its way into proper alignment.

From the higher perspective there is no such thing as failure.

There is just feedback about what needs to be improved and recalibrated.

Black Panther was so much better than the Last Jedi.

Plot and Story Arc.

Character Development & Consistency.

Visual Effects.

Empowering portrayal of Cultural Minorities.

…the script for Luke Skywalker was particularly terrible…acting like someone who was never a Jedi

…so many of the Star Wars characters felt like forced affirmative action plays rather than authentic casting.

…One disappointing feature of the Wakandan’s was that for being so technologically and culturally advanced in many dimensions, they still had an Ethnocentric Worldview when looking to the outside world, opining about how to help downtrodden and oppressed blacks around the world rather than how to help downtrodden and oppressed humans with their technological prowess.

All for now. No time to be a detailed movie critic.

I am currently reading the Life Divine by Sri Aurobindo.

Who else has read it?

My personal website is titled In Quest of Super Humanity and I’m coming to see how my intuitive guidance has been (previously unbeknownst to me) plugged into the same source as Aurobindo’s, especially with respect to his articulation of the Supermind and its Divine Unfolding through Humanity’s Involutionary Process.

Your body is an instrument that the Consciousness of your Soul learns to play.

An Evolved Soul is therefore a masterful musician.

Back on my own again and restarting my cooking skills after 2 years of dormancy.

Immediately noticing a shift in my relationship to food preparation as I’ve deepened my relationship to the fundamentally universal nature of subtle energy in all things.

Succinct infographic of a lot of misguided class warfare and anti-wealth sentiment from the Liberal Left.

Always remember that how we react to every moment of our life will reinforce either our negative habits or positive habits. No matter how challenging life may be, each moment can be seen as either a problem or an opportunity. If we can understand this, we can start to bring our entire life to the path.

~ Chamtrul Rinpoche

You might ask, ‟If I have Buddha nature, why can’t I perceive it right now?”

It is because, like gold hidden in its matrix, that nature is hidden by our habits that we have accumulated since beginningless time. These habits have been created by our disturbing emotions and then reinforced by the actions that those disturbances have produced.

~ Shechen Gyaltsab

The ultimate nature of the mind is empty and without basis. It is intangible like empty space. But this is not a nihilistic view. Self-arisen, primordial consciousness is original, clear consciousness. Self-arisen and self-illuminating, it is like the essence of the sun.

~ Guru Rinpoche

 

Why You Should NOT do a Vipassana Retreat, Pt. 2

My Medium post, “What is the Point of Meditation and Why You Should Not Do A Vipassana Retreat” is gaining quite a bit of attention, especially on twitter, with hundreds of comments due some retweets by influential folks.

And I have to say I’m pretty happy with the effect of the post given the response I’m receiving.

It looks to me like perfect Psycho-Cultural Electrolysis.

I put Direct Current into the system with a strong opinion and people separate into component parts like an induced chemical reaction.

Three primary clear groups coalesced:

1) Advanced meditators who understand the arguments and perspectives.

2) Beginning meditators who’ve had their eyes opened to the wider perspective of the meditation landscape and see the limitations of Vipassana instruction.

3) Triggered, defensive and reactive Vipassana attendees who feel the need to justify their choice to attend.

What I find ironically amusing is how numerous people in group 3 validate the thesis of the post, that:

Vipassana is an ineffective methodology compared to alternative meditation paths.
See, if Vipassana were effective you wouldn’t see so many defensive, reactive, triggered posts from people studying in its lineage.

Being triggered and reactive defensiveness cannot arise in a state of Insight/Emptiness.

So by definition, if you are triggered or reactively defensive, in that moment, and for all moments in which that behavior persists, you are failing your meditation practice.

Relatedly, this is why I’ve written many posts about triggers pointing the way to your Awakening.

The people who read my whole post — which makes a lot of nuanced points, on a range of subjects, who then comment with just one or two lines about how I’m misunderstanding or mischaracterizing Vipassana are very likely in the Triggered/Reactive/Ineffective Meditator category.

ADDRESSING CRITICISM

Let’s take a brief sidebar to address some of the criticism of my first post.

1) “But I had a very beautiful and insightful experience at my Vipassana Retreat!”

Sure. I didn’t say good experiences weren’t possible. I said Vipassana is ineffective for many people and for those who it is effective, it is still a slower path down the path of Awakening compared to alternative meditative paths.

I said people were likely to get discouraged by the way it teaches meditation and develop bad meditation habits.

In many ways the Vipassana tradition is much better suited for the culture in the East than the culture in the West. The reason for this is the emphasis in Western culture on Rationality and Individualism.

A friend of mine who is a Buddhist scholar told me about a study she read that was done on Vipassana meditators in the West vs in Burma. In Burma, they stay focused on meditating and finish the 1st major path of Theravada within 3 months. In the West, they found almost no one completed the path and instead spent the majority of the time psychoanalyzing themselves.”

From an Integral perspective the reason for this differential performance is rather obvious if you understand the Wilber Combs Lattice which maps Stages of Psychological Development by States of Development.

Those in Burma are primarily at the Mythic/Subtle stage. Those in the west are primarily at the Rational/Subtle and Pluralistic/Subtle stages.

Different practices are needed in different spaces within the Field of Consciousness.

Lastly, many people’s ‘good experiences’ have nothing to do with making progress towards Awakening. They are silent insights and self-reflections at the ordinary level of self, rather than transcendent experiences beyond the ordinary conception of self and self-identity.

2) “Have you even taken a Vipassana retreat? You can’t comment on Vipassana if you haven’t taken it.”

Buddhism has gone through three major evolutions:

Theravada -> Mahayana -> Vajrayana.

These are called the Three Turnings of the Wheel of the Dharma. Each Turning, transcended and included, or improved upon the previous stages, through major philosophical re-conceptualizations and the introduction of new meditative practices and principles.

Theravada represents the original teachings of the Buddha. Mahayana, primarily introduced the central notion of the Boddhisattva —a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings— and improved the articulation of Emptiness. Vajrayana, the Tibetan version of Buddhism, accelerates the path towards Awakening and Enlightenment, through greater precision in its teachings and the use of Tantric Energy practices.

So you see I don’t need to take a Vipassana retreat to comment on it. I know it deals with the Concentration and Insight/Emptiness stages of the Invariant Path, and does it poorly relative to Vajrayana.

Each of these schools of Buddhism are like operating systems.

Theravada is like Windows MS-DOS.

Mahayana is like classic Mac OS.

Vajrayana is like Mac OS X.

In 2018, why would you want to run Windows MS-DOS?

RESULTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES

The results of different lineages speak for themselves.

I know hundreds if not thousands of people who meditate, and the people who are attracted to study in accelerated non-dual lineages like Tibetan Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta are unequivocally superior meditators to the people who study Vipassana and mindfulness based meditation.

I can’t tell you the number of people who I’ve conversed with who have been to multiple Vipassana retreats who do not have a solid grasp of Insight/Emptiness, much less Awakened Awareness.

One of the tech influencers who retweeted me, said along with the retweet that, “Of course, given the way identity and confirmation bias work, everyone who has done vipassana will feel compelled to fire back.”

To which I replied,

“Yes, very few people will admit they have wasted their time with anything they’ve engaged in. Of course, the type of people who can be both brutally & lovingly self-critical are the type of people who become the successful entrepreneurs & the awakened meditators.”

A DEEPER EXPLANATORY PATTERN AT PLAY

This all said, there is a deeper pattern at play here that must be discussed to explain the differential skills between meditators studying Vipassana & Mindfulness vs. meditators studying Vajrayana/Advaita Vedanta — as it is not only the inferior instruction that creates the performance differential.

In many Post-Modern and New Age communities there’s a concept of an Old Soul.

But what’s not talked about enough is its relative: the Young Soul.

And Soul Age is one of the main factors that determines what lineage one is attracted to and how natural meditation comes to a person.

Old Souls are attracted to the superior non-dual lineages like Vajrayana and Advaita Vedanta.

When they hear wisdom from these lineages, a feeling of Inner Knowing is triggered and they say, “That’s what’s up! I’m going to go deeper with that.”

The feeling of Inner Knowing does not come from the evaluating information in the mind or from the desires or aversions of the ego and spiritual materialsm.

Inner Knowing comes primarily from a mix of past life experience and Soul Guidance.

Old Souls have tried out many different spiritual lineages and have a felt sense of what works best.

Young Souls for the most part don’t have experience of different spiritual lineages and thus cannot discriminate amongst them.

The problem today is you’ve got all these Young Souls running around the Bay Area and other cultural hotbeds, discovering the existence and depth of the inner world, for the one of their first lifetimes, acting like they know something.

I’m not trying to reverse this trend, but I am sauntering into the conversation like Morpheus saying, which pill do you want to take?

“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.”
Unfortunately, no one can be…told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill [opens his left hand revealing red pill], you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.”

The Matrix is more apt an analogy than you may even realize.

1) The Matrix is the Prison of Samsara Buddha spoke about. Stabilizing Awakened Awareness midway down the Invariant Meditative Path is almost literally what ‘Escaping the Matrix’ is metaphorically pointing to.

2) The creators of the Matrix, Lana & Larry Wachowski are good friends with Ken Wilber and he influenced the writing of the script. Ken Wilber and Cornell West have 15 hours of dialogue on the director’s cut of the Ultimate Matrix Collection.

I’d like to at least give Young Souls and Asleep Old Souls the opportunity to take the Red Pill.

“The key advantage Vajrayana Buddhism claims to provide is an accelerated path to enlightenment. This is achieved through use of tantra techniques, which are practical aids to spiritual development, and esoteric transmission (explained below). Whereas earlier schools might provide ways to achieve nirvana over the course of many lifetimes, Vajrayana techniques make full enlightenment or Buddhahood possible in a much shorter timeframe, perhaps in a single lifetime. Vajrayana Buddhists do not claim that Theravada or Mahayana practices are in any way invalid, only that they represent slower paths. It should also be noted that the goal of the Mahayana and Vajrayana is the attainment of Buddhahood, whereas the goal for Theravada practice is liberation from the cycle of rebirth in Nirvana.”

So Vipassana isn’t quite the Blue pill. It’s more like the mix of the two: the Purple Pill.

But why do you want to take the Purple Pill if you can take the Red Pill?