cept.

Suppose I said to you I would like you to take this potato, just a regular uncooked potato, and could you walk it a half a mile that way and give it to somebody. Now forget about why you need to deliver this potato. That's not important. But if I say could you take this potato and deliver it over there and you've got the time and the inclination to do that, would that give you any anxiety? Probably not. Because what's the worst that could happen? You drop the potato. Well it's just a potato. You lose the potato. It's just a potato. You get busy and you don't make it with your potato. What's the difference? It's just a potato. That person can get a new potato. Potato has no value.

Now let's say instead of a potato, could you take this priceless painting by Picasso and just walk it down the street to where it needs to go, to the museum. Could you do that for me? Now let's imagine it's a world where there's no crime so you're not worried about crime. You're only worried about the safety of the painting. And all you're doing is just carrying it a half a mile that way. I'm giving it to the museum.

How much anxiety would you have if you were holding a priceless, irreplaceable painting and you're just walking down the sidewalk with it? You'd be plenty worried because of the value of the painting. You'd worry that a bird would do something, that the wind would come up and put some dirt on it. You'd worry that you'd trip. You'd worry that somebody would come along. You'd worry that a car would splash water on it. It would be your fault. You'd have to pay for it. You'd have all kinds of things to worry about. And it's only because the painting is so valuable. The potato was not.

So what you need to learn is to be the potato. Don't be the painting. Be the potato.

Now why is it that a psychedelic experience would give you ego death and would turn you from somebody who's trying to deliver a priceless painting into somebody who says no care in the world, it's just a potato? And here's my hypothesis.

The hypothesis is that when you have the ego death you have nothing to worry about because there's nothing to protect. And I think that the way that you come about that is indirectly. The way that you get to that is by being in the hallucinogenic experience you see your environment completely differently for the first time. And yet, and here's the important part, you understand it. You see your world as if it's brand new but you still understand it. And by the way other people experience it, explain it the same way.

Now once you've experienced that you could have a completely different set of subjective interpretations of your environment. What does that tell you about your old view of the world? It was subjective. It wasn't right. More importantly it wasn't important. The way you always saw the world before that first time you saw it differently was never real and it was never important.

And if the way you see the entire reality is unimportant and you just feel that you're part of that larger reality and that it is subjective, you suddenly start to feel that you are not that important. But here's the important part. You never lose the sense that you need to take care of your life and your health and all that. There's no danger. You simply take your unreasonable fear of protecting yourself and it comes down to a normal, well I have to eat today, I've got to sleep, God you know if I cross the road still got to look both ways. There's no downside. You still would be fully protective of yourself but you'll just learn that you're more like a potato than like a priceless painting.

Once you get that feeling that your ego is not important, what would you ever be afraid of? Would you be afraid of the future? No. There's nothing to be afraid of because there's nothing at risk but a potato.

So I'm going to walk you through something, a set of thoughts that will reproduce what a hallucinogenic trip would do. So I'm going to give you without the hallucinogens and therefore without the risk of a bad trip or any illusion. There's a small risk but you won't have any of that. I'm going to give it to you without that.

All right, and bear with me. It's going to take a little bit of setup and then we're going to do it.

The first thing you need to know, and this will be helpful, is that there are different filters in the world and you have probably experienced them. For example, did you know that in quantum physics a particle that exists on the other part of the universe that has never been seen and never been measured in any way doesn't actually exist? Did you know that? This is actual scientific truth. Matter, the actual building blocks of our reality, we know don't actually exist except as probability until a human or a machine or an animal or something that can see something and detect something, until something is seen and detected it doesn't actually exist.

Now all the things in your room around you exist in a sense because you're looking at them, somebody has measured it, touched it, looked at it. But scientifically we know, and by the way this is not anything controversial, this would be something every scientist would agree, matter doesn't exist until it's witnessed by a machine or a person. What's that mean? Well it probably means that there's some subjectivity to your perceptions.

Let me give you some other examples. Religion. How many people are walking around, they have different religions. If somebody is let's say a Hindu and they believe that they have reincarnated and are going to reincarnate and they're standing in the same room with somebody who's a Muslim or a Christian, are they experiencing the same reality? I would say no.

I would say now if you believe that everything that's happening to you is God's will that's not really the same reality as a person who thinks it's their own doing or the person who thinks they're in a simulation. These are completely different subjective realities.

You also know because you've been following me for a while, you know that in politics we can look at the same set of facts and see a different movie. I call it the two movies on one screen. You've seen it a hundred times. You see it every time anybody looks at a document. I see this, a crime. I obviously see a crime. I'm looking at the same document. So you can see in real time on the news every single day that people who are sincere and they're not lying, in every case there are liars in the news but they're not lying about their perception. They are looking at the same stuff you are but they're seeing a different reality. Normal. Completely common.

Once you understand that you can start to release on your preferred version of the world. Yeah you've seen it with the optical illusions like Laurel and Yanny that you could hear the Laurel or the Yanny. You've seen the ones where you can think a different word and then the word you're hearing starts to sound like that word but then you can think of a different word and the sound you're hearing that's the same sound sounds like the other word. You see lots of tests like that and again it's showing you that your impression of reality is subjective.

Now here's another framing that will change your frame. Instead of seeing the world as there's you and then there's this reality that's sort of fixed and you're just looking at it, think of yourself as almost like the person in the robot's head. Think of your body as a big old robot. In this case it's a moist robot or biological robot. But imagine yourself as a person in the control room inside your head. You're looking at your eyes and you're controlling this big robot that is your body. Just think about that.

And then think about the fact that there are different filters, as I call them, on your perceptions. And so sometimes your big robot body is hungry. You know that you see the world differently when you're hungry. Things bother you that wouldn't bother you. You're angry about things you didn't need to be angry about. But you're not really seeing those things. You're seeing it through a filter of your own hunger and it makes you angry sometimes. Likewise if you're tired that's a different filter. Likewise if you're an optimist you're seeing the world through a different filter. If you believe you live in a simulation you're seeing the world through a different filter. If you have a different religion it's a different filter.

Once you start to understand that your filters are interchangeable and it has nothing to do with you, whoever is you, whatever is this thing called you, your preferences, your experiences, your memories, whatever it is, it can be all kinds of different things in terms of how it sees the world but you don't really change. Not that much anyway. What changes is your filter. Take your filter down. Hey this president is a big old monster. Change the filter. Oh he just operates differently. Now I see it through a different filter.

This mental exercise of being able to see the world as a filter will depersonalize things and give you very close to your escape route. But we're going to take you all the way there in a moment. And it goes like this. Are you ready? Here's the payoff in the next few moments. Some of you, not all of you because everybody's going to have their own experience, some of you are going to have a deep experience in the next minute or two. Watch this.

All right, I want you to relax. I'm not going to hypnotize you but I'm going to take you through some guided imagery. You don't have to close your eyes. In fact keep them open. Keep your eyes open. Take a deep breath. Loosen your shoulders.

And now I want you to imagine, not as if it's true but just imagine, that everything you see in your environment, your room, the device you're looking at, the table, the objects, whatever you were using to drink, imagine them as if they're a virtual reality. Imagine that you're not in a real reality but rather you're in a virtual one. Now it's a special one because if you touch something you can feel it but imagine that's just an illusion.

And imagine without touching anything you just look around and you look at an object. Pick an object in your room and just look at it and imagine instead of it being real that it's a perfectly rendered virtual reality simulation.

Now watch how that makes you feel. Just feel yourself in the moment. Just looking at your environment. Don't think of anything else. Don't think of anything outside of your direct immediate experience. Look at them and imagine them as a virtual reality construct and see what happens. Do you feel it? Yeah, some of you are already feeling it. Keep doing it. Stay in the moment. Stay in the moment. The future doesn't matter. Just look at your objects. Look around you and imagine that they're not real. They're subjective. They're just like a virtual reality.

Now do that and then repeat. The first time you do it some of you will have a profound experience. You see in the comments somebody says goosebumps. Somebody else, no experience whatsoever.

For those of you who have had a lifetime of anxiety issues keep these thoughts in mind because it's the setup as much as the exercise. Think about life as filters. Think about your ego as unimportant, worth protecting but it's not the be-all end-all. Just see yourself in a simulated subjective reality and know that you can change the subjective reality if you need to. You have control.

You can see in the comments somebody is crying. Some of you, not all of you, some of you were just released from a lifetime of pain, a lifetime of anxiety. Some of you just got released. Some of you will be released later. You'll think about this and you won't be able to get it out of your mind and you'll repeat the exercise on your own. You'll look around wherever you are. You'll imagine it as a virtual reality and it will give you the same sensation that people have when they experience ego death and it will free you.

And that's all you need and I'll end it right there. And you have a great life.