DIG: A Manifesto — More like a note to self…

“It is in the ‘staring off over the cliff, into the abyss that is yourself’ that you will find the key to everything you want.”

The treasure, the present, & the prize.
The game of games…

“The Game Of Self.”

You are constantly talking yourself into and out of everything you want.

You do this on autopilot because you’ve rehearsed it to perfection.

All your little quirks are but coping mechanisms developed in order to deal with your experience. They keep you safe; they’re how you survive.

From this, you’ve created stories about who you are, what the world is like, and how life works or doesn’t.

By doing this, you’ve established a hierarchy of being, call it an operating system…

These stories are instructions and act like programs, all working together to carry out a level of experience in line or aligned with your expectation.

Any deviation from this results in inner conflict, which then plays out in your experience… through your behavior.

Some call it self-sabotage. Others verbalize it as getting or being in your own way.

We call it “fate; not in the cards. Maybe next time. That’s not for me… I don’t deserve that, I didn’t earn it, I don’t have permission, I’m not allowed, this is my punishment for…” and a truckload of other nonsense.

It all works the same.

And, it’s not just the negative “I can’t have that” story. The positive stories you’re telling yourself also work the same way — just like the stuff that goes well or even great, you’ve got narratives about that too.

And guess what? They tend to play out exactly as you keep telling yourself. Good or bad, we recreate what we keep reinforcing ⚡︎.

Each time we do this, we add layers to the original story, the base code… each time providing yourself more proof that you can or cannot have something a particular way.

Accordingly, this forms reinforcement stories that allow the inner conflict to persist, in some cases, to thrive, turning that struggle with self into a game all its own…

That game plays out alongside the other game you are/were playing… the game of “trying” to accomplish, achieve, or acquire some perceived prize. Pretty soon, these two games become associated with each other and make your story even more “true.”

As fucked up as it seems, this is a form of self-preservation, a type of self-trust baked into your base code… put there by you at some point in time.

A knowing, so to speak, that although you want or need something to be different, on a deeper level, you have a setting in place that acts like a rule that “knows better,” and despite your best effort to cause or have the change, the rule that’s in place won’t allow for it.

Creating a self-fulfilling and usually personally tormenting game of keep away.

You want something to be different somehow and never seem to get it… let alone see that you’re the one keeping it from yourself… or, more importantly, how.

You’re so good at being who you’ve become that you think that’s who you are. The fact of the matter is it’s simply a perspective. A perspective that works well enough to survive…

And then you’ve rehearsed that to perfection in order to keep you safe, accepted, and loved… or so you think.

There’s:

• Who you are…
• Who you are being…
• Who you think other humans think you’re supposed to be…
• &, who you wish you were.

That’s still not who you really are.

If you only knew what you were doing and how it worked…

This is “the what” and “the how” of getting what you actually want… what that even is, and the how to actually do it… Get what you want.

Said another way: what you’re already doing and how it works.

One more time in yet another way? Sure. What you gotta do in order to get what you want. And stop getting what you don’t want.

Relationship with self is our core game.
(More accurately represented by: Relationship between “SELF, Self, and self.”)

It’s the first-tier or First Order game… the main game.
All the other games are either 2nd or 3rd order games at best…
The rest of the games we play merely keep us occupied, perpetuating the game of hide & seek…

Dude. It is a Game.
Tag. You’re “It.”

Which, like every game, is determined by its rules… the ground rules that establish the game. We’ll circle back to this shortly…

That “thing” you’ve been seeking… what it is, and the “how to do it”…

• The point.
• The quest.
• The journey.
• The center of it.
• The answer to it…

The key to it all… (the instructions, if you will.)

Including, The Antidote.

The antidote for what’s wrong, what’s missing, what feels “off” – the essence of what you’re really after…

This is “That Game.”

The Game of Self.

The “what” this thing is and is for, this experience you’re having…
What you call your life…

Is literally to be and to have experience. If that’s confusing, it should unravel itself over the next few pages.

It’s a game, Dude… a game of hide and seek, a game of keep away, a game of all kinds of weird shit you play with yourself.

Even though it may not feel like play or like fun, it is, in fact, a game you are playing.

The point?
The point is “It’s” you, and you’re doing “It.”

And you’re flawless at it… You simply haven’t figured out what you’re actually doing and how it exactly works…

…how we turn chaos into order and order into chaos…

“One more time for those in the back!… the nose bleed section!”

If you knew what you were doing and how that worked and then learned how to do that at will? (With intention, fully consciously aware of your doing it.)
You could recraft your entire experience into anything you wanted, whenever you wanted.

(No, you likely can’t turn yourself into a Giraffe… and you probably shouldn’t turn that frog into a Prince… but hey, you do you.)

Anywho…
You might as well sort out what exactly you’re doing and how it works…

If that is, you would rather get more of what you do want and stop getting yourself what you don’t want.

I could be wrong… but I’d bet that’s what you’re seeking… and that, on some level, you know it.

All the other games you play are designed to keep you occupied and distracted… that’s built into the fabric of the game, hard-coded, so to speak, so the game goes on perpetually without needing you to steer it consciously.

A rabbit hole for another day, perhaps.

Which “circles” us back to where we began… or close enough.

That this is a Game, and if you knew how it actually worked, you’d be an even better player than you’ve become. Hell, even in baseball, something like hitting the ball thirty percent of the time is fabulous…

I don’t know about you, but getting what I want thirty percent of the time just won’t cut it.

Fortunately, unlike in baseball, batting a hundred in life every day doesn’t require cheating… only understanding the ground rules so we can make our own.

The real game to play is the game of self. The way it’s played and won is through a relationship with self.

SELF.
Self.
self.

Those three, on the same team, playing for the same ends… get you exactly what you want. That’s “The Magic.”

You just gotta know the rules so you can rewrite them.

The rub? Your “self” doesn’t trust you with them…

The way to address that?

Through a relationship with “self”… and establish a different type of “self-trust” than what keeps the original rules in place. And that’s “The Trick.”

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The Gist of “It.”

We are pattern-seeking, meaning-making machines… and then we automate that in order to be as effective and efficient as possible…

…because the operation of “being” requires an enormous amount of energy to maintain homeostasis.

It doesn’t matter what you believe, except that what you believe works for you and against you according to how you believe it.

While we’re here… let’s address this “belief” thing.

You don’t have “negative” beliefs, nor do you have “false” beliefs.

Though, many a guru would like you to “believe” that…

You have “conclusions” – a small but meaningful distinction at the definition level of the two words. (The importance of that is more significant than many realize. We’ll come back to that shortly.)

The point is your “beliefs” are conclusions, and those “conclusions” work perfectly to achieve exactly what they are designed for…

To keep you “safe” and progressing forward.

As the only thing that actually matters in order for the game to continue… is your continuation… to “be” and “have experience,” which sets the two foundational rules of eating and screwing firmly in place… a lovely way to put it, me thinks.

Moving on…

You are the culmination of everything you’ve concluded about yourself, the world and how it works, and what it’s like to be you in that world…

(…that forms your perspective. And to the extent that your perspective holds true, meaning you don’t encounter information to the contrary strong enough to change your mind, you act like your perspective is the truth…)

…and then behave accordingly.

Our brains are wired to take in information and process that information into recognized patterns as quickly as possible in order to progress from one moment to the next.

Even at our age (everyone north of their late twenties), our current patterns are simply extensions of the most basic patterns we “picked up” early in life… which are:

• This is good
• That is bad
• This is right
• That is wrong
• We’re like this
• They’re like that
• This is allowed
• That is not
• I can… or,
• I cannot

If you’re reading between the lines, these are all slight variations on the first two, “Good” or “Bad.”

And for good reason. When we encounter information, the first process (Program) that occurs is a reaction, a full-being reaction (almost so subtle we’re not even aware of it, in fact, many of us have lost touch with ourselves enough to notice it at all)…

Followed immediately by a second process (Program), one of judgment… “Is this Good or Bad?”

As we get older and practice this process, it becomes nuanced, and while the nuances are subtle, they are critically important to the strength of the rules we have put in place.

(Notice that? “We… put in place” … That’s important. Park it in your brain somewhere safe. We’ll return for it later.)

We’ve added those nuances by giving meaning to events and circumstances and what they meant to us, for us, and about us.

Neuroscience has learned that our thoughts, feelings, and actions cause or create AND/OR are a response to a sequence of “firing” in the brain at a cellular level.

You’ve undoubtedly heard the “neurons that fire together wire together…” and while that’s accurate, it doesn’t tell the full story, at least not yet.

(Talk about a rabbit hole… neuroscience…)

And, there are other as-of-yet unknown aspects to this puzzle we “extremely intelligent monkeys” have yet to deduce… we do, however, have enough information to support the idea that the more your brain does a thing, the better, stronger, faster, and more automatic it becomes.

Use chopsticks often? How about a fork?
Needed any help taking a drink from a glass lately?
How about telling off a solicitor (politely, of course, what are we animals?) when they’ve interrupted dinner and won’t take the hint and ‘fuck off!’?

Right.
Autopilot.

What we’re talking about here is the easier-to-prove, easier-to-become-aware-of, and for some of us, the seemingly difficult task of changing “what gets fired” and, most importantly, the “what happens next” when we become (dare I even use the term???) ‘triggered’ by something.

It’s simple.

You are/were designed to, or have evolved to, learn that some things in your environment are dangerous, and along with that, you now have systems in place to notify you of those things and how to deal with them if and when they occur.

Simple.

We’re not talking about rocket science here, and certainly not brain surgery… in that sense, anyway.

We’re talking about a complex organism that has the ability to cope with the right-here, right-now, real-time nature of existence.

The problem?

That tool is the proverbial “hammer” … not everything is a nail, though; we essentially treat every “problem” as though it were… whether that problem is real or merely perceived as real.

The gist?

For better and for worse, you are programmable, have become programmed to operate (behave) in certain and specific-to-you ways that shape your experience and your encounter with it… even your thoughts and feelings and opinions about it—it being your life and what it’s like to be you.

As I’ve said… if you only knew what you were doing and how it worked.

Yep, I will repeat that a total of 42 times before we’re done… how many was that thus far???

Anyhoo…

Burn it into your brain so that when you know the answer, you never forget it or how to do it.

I’ve also said we’re always seeking the “How,” and that’s part of the problem… you already know how, silly.

What you need to understand is “The What.” When you understand “The What,” the how becomes obvious.