Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
The one thing you never want to say to yourself is, “I’m probably doing this wrong.” Uh, and it goes to like, if you know, when we’re doing things that are very somatic, very bodily embodied, like Tai Chi and Qigong, the tendency is to mimic. Right?

So if I’m moving in a certain way, there’s a tendency to want to mimic. I look at you externally and I think, okay, how do I do that? It goes like, uh, no, no, no. Go into your body, try different things, see how each one feels, and don’t tell yourself anything is wrong, right or wrong. If there are such things, you will discover them. But go into your body, you have to feel your body from the inside out. That’s the whole point. The whole point is internal to the outside. It is not, let me mimic this. Okay, yeah, if you’re learning a Tai Chi form, you start off by kind of, uh, mimicking. Okay, it’s Yang style and this is, uh, the single whip goes like this, okay, um, very nice. Um, but that isn’t the movement. That’s an external of the movement. You have to, at a certain point, go into your own body and be willing to play and be willing to, you know, if somebody comes up to you and says, oh, it isn’t quite it. It’s a little bit more like this. Low-level teachers say that typically. You have to be able to go in and play and experiment and live inside your own body, and be somewhat immune to people’s criticisms, especially people who are less than masters. Uh, their criticisms of, oh, you’re doing this too fast, or you’re doing this too slow, or you’re doing this, or this arm is too high, or this arm is too low, or this is… Yeah. Ignore it.

Jamie Meyer: 
The format or the cookie-cutter or the template cannot be your… the height of your potential in that particular instance.

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You’ve caught the copy and it gets you an introduction, but that’s all it is, gets you in the door. The rest is an inside job. And it’s very liberating, and it’s very true.

Credits Begin to Roll

Jamie Meyer: 
Most people like do not try this at home. Symeon and I are like try all these things at home.
Final Credits Roll

Somatic refers to anything related to the body, particularly in terms of bodily sensations, movements, and experiences. It is often used in the context of practices or therapies that focus on the physical aspect of human experience and how the body holds and expresses emotions, trauma, and consciousness.
​
Embodied refers to the expression or manifestation of an experience, feeling, or concept through the body. It emphasises the connection between mind and body, suggesting that physical sensations and movements are integral to understanding and integrating emotional and psychological states.

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Jamie Meyer: 
We started this conversation talking about advancement and different avenues of development and understanding. Something that’s kind of come up from me throughout the evolution of that conversation is that really what we’re looking for is more layers. So whatever we’re doing needs to be more layered. Whether it’s we start with the thought process, we need to introduce the body, we need to introduce an energetic or spiritual understanding of that one thing. Instead of doing everything with one part of ourselves, we really need to do anything with all parts of ourselves. And that’s what creates the depth or the semblance of what you’re describing as available through the Tao, Tai Chi, and Qigong. Have I missed the mark, or am I kind of somewhere in the right realm?

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
I think there are a lot of different ways, Jamie, of describing this, and that’s one of them, for sure. Yeah, it’s more depth, more layers of ourselves. Yeah, we want to connect with more layers of ourselves. Certainly, things that are very somatic, like Tai Chi and Qigong, are examples, yoga to a certain extent, other things can help with that, for sure. One of the traps is that it can become, and I think you alluded to this earlier with personal development, it can become an endless litany of things to do. Okay, if I want to develop personally, I have to have time for meditation, Tai Chi, yoga, tapping, this, that… Pretty soon, you’re spending theoretically 24 hours of your day doing these things, and you don’t have time for sleep.

Jamie Meyer: 
Or a job. You don’t have time to make any money.

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
No, exactly. As you said, we like to complicate things. Part of that complication is looking at all these things and saying, “What? You have to do this. I have to do that.” You end up with a to-do list, and then you feel more stressed because of the to-do list. That seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Well, yes, it is. Maybe what might help is another story from this particular Tai Chi master I referenced—kind of a fun one—where he takes people down a peg. At one point, people were training with their partners, doing various things, and he stopped the whole class and said, “Look, I just had someone come up to me and ask if I could teach them this form or that form or this other Qigong set. I understand that in your culture, you’re all about complexity. You want to learn a whole lot of stuff. You want the whole thing. You want the slow form, the fast form, three versions of each, six different Qigong sets. But you’ve got to stop going broad. If you want actual progress, go deep.”

He continued, Traditionally, when this was originally being taught, there were people who would never be allowed to see the Tai Chi form for the first years they were training. They wouldn’t even be allowed to see it. All they did for the first six months was stand in a low horse stance for hours a day, which developed an enormously strong lower body. That’s foundation number one. After that, they might spend six months doing nothing but projecting power, issuing power, which is something you do in combat. He used one particular movement as an example. And he said, ‘There are some people who will do nothing but that for six months. You might know more about Tai Chi than that person, but that person can throw any of you through a wall. So who knows Tai Chi better—him or you?’” Because they’ve gone very, very deep into very specific principles.

Jamie Meyer: 
So it’s about simplicity?

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
Exactly. Principles can always be condensed into simplicity. There’s no end to complexity. Even something like Tibetan Buddhism falls victim to this. The number of meditation systems is blinding—absolutely crazy. And yet, you go back to the person who actually brought Vajrayana Buddhism from India to Tibet, Padmasambhava, who says, “Forget all that. Here’s one thing.”

Jamie Meyer: 
Take the concept that all of those differentials exist so that for every person, there is an idea—one thing—that works for them. They don’t exist so we learn them all, but so that one person can find the thing that suits their being, their way of being, the best.

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
Yes, ancient systems talk about it in that way. There are different things for different groups of people because they have different orientations. Find what works for you, what resonates with you. It’s about finding what works for you, and then always going back to the basic principles. Principles can always be reduced to simplicity.
​
Credits Roll

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Jamie Meyer: 
That idea of creativity can be applied to just about anything based on our perspective of the task in hand.

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
I think it’s absolutely true. I mean, in a sense, think about it like we’re what we’ve talked about, we’re creating our lives, right? So life itself is creation and if we choose to have that sort of open expectation, that positive expectation of reality, that’s being creative. That’s doing something with deliberate intentionality. And so everything we do has this sort of possibility to be creative. I mean, some people’s canvases, like Michael Jordan, the great basketball player, the basketball court was his canvas. You know, so everybody has a different canvas. There is almost no limit to what creativity can encompass. And again, you know, as you say, people think, well, creativity, oh, uh, painting, sculpture, uh, you know, no, but it’s so much more than that. It can be anything that puts you into that frame of mind, really.
​
Credits Roll

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Book, The 5 Pillars of Life: Reclaiming Ownership of Your Mind Body and Future.https://www.amazon.com.au/Pillars-Life-Reclaiming-Ownership-Traditions/dp/0973873418

Jamie Meyer: 
We talk about dissonance and resistance and our avoidance of complexity and things that we don’t understand. Do you think it’s our inability to create a label, bind words, distinguish language for this version, this true version of reality that separates us from it so strongly?

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
So you’re asking if there’s a language problem?

Jamie Meyer: 
Well, is it because we need language to be able to— we use language to understand something, right? And so if we don’t— if there— if words do not exist and it cannot be described, is it the fact that because we need language to really understand something and we can’t use it in this instance? Is that what creates such a division of us versus what this is?

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
Um, maybe not necessarily. I think the word there that’s a problem is the word “understand,” right? Because we, especially in the West, we want to understand things intellectually. We want an intellectual structure. We want concepts. We want to be able to put something in a box and put a label on it. And here we’re dealing with things we can’t label. There is no box, and these things go beyond language. So what do you do? Well, the ancient solution to that was always to admit that understanding has to be lived. It has to be lived out, right? It’s experiential. It’s not in the head, which is why living in the head is actually unhelpful, right? Because the more you get into your body, the more you will understand what is being talked about. And, you know, there is a school of thought— “school” is too much of a rigid word—but there is a school of thought that basically says your body actually is incredibly intelligent. It has access to all knowledge. You have access to all knowledge. You just don’t know how to access your access, right? You’ve lost your library card or, you know, whatever analogy you want to use. Yeah, lost your password.

But, you know, if you take something like muscle testing, applied kinesiology or muscle testing, you know that whole thing where to find out if something is true, you come out with someone gives you a proposition and then they will test how strong your muscle is, right? And yes, if you’re deliberately lying, you will go weak. You will not be able to hold your arm up. They will push down on it easily. But it’s not only about deliberately lying— if your body will tell you and is capable of telling you what, in a sense, what’s true and what’s false, at least this is what researchers have found. Dr. David Hawkins was famous for this.

So at that point, you realise, okay, the body has incredible knowledge. It seems to know all these things yet— well, how do you tap into the body’s knowledge? Well, you’re certainly not going to tap into it by living in your head all day, in other words, stuck in your own conceptual world. You do have a fighting chance to dip into that once you live more in your body and, you know, people always talk about intuition and gut feeling, and gut feeling is very real. It really is gut. It really is that neural network in the gut. And what allows people to tap into that is a number of things. One certainly is living in the present moment, which people don’t do because we’re always “what’s next, what’s next?” We’re frenetic, right? What’s next? But when we live in the present moment, or when we’re being very creative, there’s a really hot tip— when we are creative, we engage a different mode in the brain, and our thoughts slow down. We become very absorbed.

We also become very open. And so when we are creative, we also feel really good. That’s a clue, right? If we feel really good, then this is probably the way we’re meant to be in a lot of the time. Because we sure as hell know that the frenetic state we’re in is feeling really bad, so that’s dissonance. That’s clearly an indication, okay, we probably shouldn’t be living there.
But being creative is part of that. It will get rid of a lot of that dissonance, make a person feel really good. And when you are in that creative mode, you’re very receptive. To give you an example— so, let’s say you’re trying to write an article. If you say to yourself, “Okay, I’m going to sit down tomorrow morning between nine and ten o’clock, and I’m going to write a super amazing article.” And you sit there and you have total writer’s block, and you feel absolutely miserable, and nothing comes to you, and you’re just trying to force it. And, you know, people have had that experience.

And yet, you know, some other time, you could be just sitting back, looking at the sunset, and all kinds of super ideas for this article would come to you.

Jamie Meyer: 
I am so guilty of that, in the shower.

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
No, it’s— but that’s right. That’s a lot of history’s even great inventions have come— have come to the inventor when the inventor was in the shower or the bathtub or just on the cusp of waking up or just on the cusp of falling asleep, or sitting on the toilet, not thinking about anything or, you know, in all these sort of states where there’s no expectation, where the mind is just totally relaxed and maybe not thinking about anything particular, and then you start almost unconsciously to ruminate, think about this topic. And all kinds of stuff comes to you.

Right? So it’s— it’s being able— it is very much that that creativity is related to that state that we want to be in more and more.
​
Credits Roll

Simplicity refers to the quality of being clear, straightforward, and easy to understand or do. In the context of personal development or philosophy, it often suggests a focus on essential elements, avoiding unnecessary complexity.

Complexity involves intricate, multifaceted components that are often interrelated, requiring deeper understanding or analysis to navigate. It reflects the idea that many systems or ideas cannot be fully understood at surface level and require careful dissection.

Complicated refers to something that is made more difficult than it needs to be, often due to overthinking or excessive detail. While complex systems can be intricate and layered, complicated situations tend to be convoluted without added value.
Intellectual Understanding refers to grasping concepts or ideas through rational thought and logical reasoning. It involves processing information with the mind, often without engaging emotional or somatic awareness.

Kinesiology is the scientific study of body movement, exploring how muscles, bones, and joints work together to produce physical motion. It plays a key role in understanding human movement and improving performance and rehabilitation.

Dr. David Hawkins was a psychiatrist, physician, and spiritual teacher known for his work in consciousness research and the development of a “Map of Consciousness.” His books, such as Power vs. Force, examine the relationship between human consciousness and spiritual development, proposing a scale for measuring levels of consciousness. www.powervsforce.com and www.veritaspub.com

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Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
It’s often said we live in a post-truth world, which is a real problem. It may build on the idea that the West typically has thought of truth as a proposition, like truth is an intellectual proposition. Whereas other cultures typically treat truth as the way things are. So truth has an actual sort of physical basis. Truth is the way things are.

The way the universe functions is true. Your idea about it, you may say, is a truth, but it’s inevitably not because your idea is always in a construct that’s partial. There’s no way of putting that truth into words. It can’t be done. And anyone who knows how to… Yeah. And systems that have been devised to navigate people to that greater reality around the world have always been very reluctant to describe them. So that’s why you have expressions like, you know, Taoism saying, the Tao that could be described is not the Tao.

Jamie Meyer: 
Right, so if you describe it, because it’s not the way.

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
Yeah, it’s not the real thing, it’s your idea. That’s all it is. Or even, strangely enough, in early Christianity, in Eastern Christianity, there was an extreme reluctance to define things too carefully. So definitions, what were actually called dogmas, were not absolute statements of “this is the way it is.” They were statements of sort of “not this, not that.”

Okay, we just exclude alternatives that are off track, and the middle is where you want to be, but it is kind of amorphous, always leaving it open to experience. So the funny thing is, in that ancient Christian mystical tradition, the idea was if you haven’t had a direct experience of the absolute reality, you shouldn’t be talking about any of this stuff. You should just shut up and do the work to get yourself there and not pretend that you know. Not go off and teach at university or something like this.

Jamie Meyer: 
Hmm.

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
So it becomes a little bit like— I mean, even in Roman Catholicism, which unfortunately developed into this extremely rationalistic version of Christianity. And a lot of that rationalism was partly built by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. But there is, you know, the story that, you know, people don’t want to tell, which is that Aquinas, eventually before he died, had a direct experience of the supreme divine love. And then he said, “Everything I’ve written is straw.” Garbage.

Of course, the Church didn’t want to tell that story. They wanted people to read what he wrote. So there you go.
​
Credits Roll

Roman Catholicism is the largest branch of Christianity, characterised by its traditions, doctrines, and practices, with a focus on the authority of the Pope, the importance of the sacraments, and the teachings of the Church as central to faith and moral life.
​
Thomas Aquinas was a 13th-century Dominican friar and theologian whose writings, particularly in Summa Theologica, integrated Aristotelian philosophy with Christian doctrine, laying the foundation for much of Western Catholic theology and philosophy.

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Jamie Meyer: 
What is the difference between narrow self-interest and this understanding of self that we’ve been talking about for an hour and 34 minutes now?

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
I’m not sure there’s an easy answer for that. We’re constantly striving for total ease, total comfort, but we live in a three-dimensional reality where that doesn’t seem to be the default setting. There are people who would say this reality, Earth, is not the most comfortable place. A friend of mine, who treats people who’ve gone through all kinds of trauma, refers to this as “trauma school Earth.” It’s about working through the craziness.
So, will we ever be totally free of that in a world with birth and death? Probably
not. But a lot of it comes down to our perspective. Our perspective on what’s happening can cause us immense unnecessary pain if it’s the wrong one.

Jamie Meyer: 
And so that goes back to your point before about different cultures perceiving the same reality in different ways and then also the idea of truth. What is exactly the truth? Whose truth is the truth, the true truth?

Credits Roll

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Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
We all run on a certain combination of conditioning, where we’ve been heavily conditioned. We were heavily conditioned by our parents, by the school system, by the media. We’ve been conditioned literally since the day we were born. And so we have conditioning on the one hand. We also have trauma, which is a different, more specific kind of conditioning, and pretty much everybody’s been traumatised in some way or another.

So we have all of these things, and when we’re traumatised, we have this pent-up energy that can be triggered at any time, and we can go down that rabbit hole involuntarily. We don’t control it. Can you get past this? You can, but the worst thing you can do is fixate on whether you’re getting past it. That’s absolutely the worst thing you can do.

Sometimes you can have some pretty bizarre experiences. For example, I had a really bad trauma when I was growing up because my father’s attitude toward life was that life is really dangerous. My aunt, his sister-in-law, later said, when she was in her 90s, “Yeah, your father just didn’t trust life.” And I said, “No, he didn’t.” He communicated that to me at an age when I had no defense because, until you’re eight or nine, you don’t have cognitive defenses. You absorb everything as truth, and your subconscious assumes it’s true. There’s nothing you can do about it at that stage.

So, long story short, I disproved this particular trauma. I have a friend in the world of EFT, the Emotional Freedom Technique, tapping. About ten years ago, she emailed me and said, “I have this new trauma protocol for EFT. Can I try it on you? I’m looking for people to experiment with. It’s free; just hop on the phone with me.”

So, I did. We were tapping away, and she was doing the linguistic parts of it, for which she was very gifted. At the time, I wasn’t emotionally connecting with the trauma, but I thought, “Okay, that’s fine. This probably won’t do anything, but I volunteered the time, so I’ll stay for the session.” We were on the phone for about an hour and a half, and the next day, the trauma was gone. I didn’t think about it for seven years. I assumed I had finally found what everyone wants: not just temporary relief but real resolution. It was gone.

I was so wrong. It came back with a vengeance. The same old approach didn’t work the second time. Over time, I realised that what had happened was that I had been given a space out of the trauma, but I didn’t understand the purpose. When it returned, I needed to do more than just try to get rid of it; I had to work through it. I needed a deeper, more patient approach.

But even then, it wasn’t easy for quite a while. We have to be aware that sometimes we’re given challenges we just need to work through. It’s not necessarily bad. There may be reasons we don’t fully understand. But eventually, we have to trust that there’s a greater wisdom behind it all, even though it’s uncomfortable. It won’t always be smooth sailing.
​
Credits Roll

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Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
If you do this, you will overcome one of the biggest unseen hurdles in personal development—unseen, unrecognised, and unnoticed. It’s the idea that you are defective and need to fix yourself. The belief that you’re not enough, that you’re not good enough, that you’ve let yourself and others down, and that somehow, you’re a throwback or broken in some way. You think you need to work to fix yourself and struggle to fix yourself. Many people go into things like meditation, yoga, or other personal development practices thinking they’ll have to work really hard, be extremely disciplined, and constantly tell themselves, “I’m terrible at this. I’m doing it wrong.” They sit down to meditate, but their mind races everywhere, and they think, “I’m doing it wrong and I’m useless.”

The Dalai Lama says that if he can do it, you’re fine. Okay? We are incredibly hard on ourselves, unrealistically so. As one Tibetan lama put it: “Look, you can have this self-pity version of yourself that you run around with all day, but please don’t try to tell me it’s not just a made-up persona. It is. It’s the version you indulge. You could always indulge a different version, and whatever you focus on becomes your reality.” This is the fundamental core of all ancient systems: what you focus on becomes your reality. It becomes real. It becomes everything.

If you focus on how bad you are, you’ll continue to feel bad and miserable. “I’m bad and miserable. I have to work to fix myself so I won’t be bad and miserable,” but I’m still bad and miserable. It doesn’t make sense.

Jamie Meyer: 
With that said, I’d like to go back to the idea that thoughts aren’t the only way we create our reality. A lot of people might hear the phrase, “What I focus on becomes my reality,” and think that their thoughts need to be a particular way. Then, they over-rationalise and overthink about what their thoughts are doing—whether they’re positive or negative. There’s a big difference between constantly repeating a thought and actually embodying it. The difference is like isolation versus embodiment. The mind can only do so much with the thought, and the rest of your being needs to get on board.

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
That’s true. The conscious mind can only focus on one thing at a time, although, in a sense, you can keep a general orientation in the back of your mind while going about your day. We’re capable of doing that. But, yeah, it sounds like you were talking about affirmations. Just repeating something—affirmations and similar practices can be very powerful. They can reprogram the subconscious. However, they require consistent effort. Without a general openness and positive expectation, you’re essentially fighting an uphill battle. You’re still crippled by the fear that things aren’t going to work out. You might say, “I’ll use this affirmation and drill it into myself,” but that approach often puts you in a much harder position than you really need to be in.

Jamie Meyer: 
So, how do you take, let’s say, an affirmation as an isolated thought, and then transform it into a full embodiment of being? How do you create that ease you’re talking about?

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
That’s a great question. How do you take the content of an affirmation and embody it? Well, let’s look at affirmations since many people are using them. They can be effective when done properly and consistently. The issue is that most people dabble in them and don’t stick with it, then they claim, “It didn’t work for me.” But consistency is key, just like with anything else.
Take a health affirmation, for example. There’s a famous story from a book called The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel, published 120 years ago in the United States. Originally, it was a correspondence course. In the book, Haanel tells the story of a client who was crippled as a child. The doctors told the parents that nothing could be done and that the child wouldn’t survive. This child came across an affirmation that helped reverse his condition. The affirmation was a combination of all the things he wanted to be—seven attributes that, together, would heal him. He focused on the person he wanted to become. He wrote in saying that he completely recovered, and now as an adult, his body was fine. He woke up every day repeating the affirmation. So, we know these practices work when done consistently.

But the essence isn’t in the words themselves—it’s in the feeling state behind the words. The key is to feel the affirmation. You have to be in that state—the state of your wish having already been fulfilled. And the funny thing is, we can choose our feeling states. People don’t think they can choose their emotions. They believe circumstances dictate their feelings. Something “bad” happens, and they feel down. Then a friend brings them a birthday cake, and suddenly they feel happy. But our emotions don’t have to be so erratic. We can choose our feelings and our moods. It just takes practice and detachment from the noise around us, especially in our busy, chaotic world.
​
Credits Roll

Book by Charles F. Haanel, The Master Key System
Originally Published: April 4, 1912
https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Master+Key+System&client=safari&sca_esv=8af1621642e5e6e9&rls=en&sxsrf=ADLYWILPWSz-OUeSvqngi-FS_k2hTp9LMQ%3A1731905238491&ei=1sY6Z9XGHaCv4-EPlZyfwQU&ved=0ahUKEwjViZnkieWJAxWg1zgGHRXOJ1gQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=The+Master+Key+System&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiFVRoZSBNYXN0ZXIgS2V5IFN5c3RlbTIKECMYgAQYJxiKBTIFEC4YgAQyChAAGIAEGEMYigUyChAAGIAEGEMYigUyChAAGIAEGEMYigUyChAAGIAEGEMYigUyChAAGIAEGEMYigUyBRAAGIAEMgUQABiABDIFEAAYgAQyFBAuGIAEGJcFGNwEGN4EGOAE2AEBSNESUKsFWIwIcAF4AZABAJgBnQKgAZAEqgEDMi0yuAEDyAEA-AEBmAIDoAKnBMICChAAGLADGNYEGEfCAg0QABiABBiwAxhDGIoFwgIOEAAYsAMY5AIY1gTYAQHCAhMQLhiABBiwAxhDGMgDGIoF2AEBwgIHECMYsAIYJ8ICBxAuGIAEGA3CAgcQABiABBgNwgIWEC4YgAQYDRiXBRjcBBjeBBjgBNgBAZgDAIgGAZAGE7oGBggBEAEYCZIHBTEuMC4yoAe_Fg&sclient=gws-wiz-serp

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Book, The 5 Pillars of Life: Reclaiming Ownership of Your Mind Body and Future.https://www.amazon.com.au/Pillars-Life-Reclaiming-Ownership-Traditions/dp/0973873418

Jamie Meyer: 
If the world is a better place, why do we need any more development than we currently have? This whole conversation has been about moving from isolated development and superficial development to embodied development and broadening understanding and perspectives. If we’re already better, safer, stronger, and freer, why would we adopt any other form of development beyond what we already have?

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
I could say probably at least two reasons I can think of. One reason is that we’re miserable. Okay, just back up a little bit. The world is better, safer, and freer than it’s ever been, albeit not perfect, and it’s facing its own challenges at the present time. Despite that, the fact is, we’re miserable in this better society. What does this tell us? It should probably tell us at least one thing. Going back to the idea of a theoretical manual for living human life, which doesn’t exist, if we had that manual and we were able to compare how we are living to how that manual says we should live, we would realize we’re off. The fact that we’re off is proven by the fact that we’re experiencing symptoms.

If we’re experiencing considerable friction in our lives—often emotional or internal friction—then something’s not quite right. What could it be? When we look deeper, we realize there’s a divergence between our understanding of the universe and how we relate to the universe around us. There’s a difference between our understanding of reality and how we’re living it on the one hand, versus how the universe actually is. If we were really in the flow—let’s go back to the flow concept—if we were truly in the flow, we wouldn’t experience this dissonance.

The fact that we’re experiencing dissonance is a symptom. Instead of labeling that dissonance as bad or evil and trying to get rid of it with, I don’t know, drugs or whatever, we can look at it as feedback. If that’s feedback, then how do we actually get into the flow of reality? How do we do this?

Because, you know, looking at something like Taoism, for example, the whole idea of the Tao, the Way—this whole notion of the Way—is that the Way is the essence of everything. The Way is how things are. The Way is known not by intellectual understanding but by getting into the flow of it. And that’s the message every ancient tradition will tell you. You can’t actually know absolute reality intellectually, but you can experience it.

And you can only do that by following certain paths that will hopefully get you into that flow. If you do, it will reduce that dissonance, and you’ll experience something completely new and different. The question is, how do we do that?

And I think a lot of it has to do with, if people want it, honestly, Jamie, in my opinion, if people wanted to experience a lot less dissonance, I do have a recommendation that seems ridiculously simple. It seems silly, and it seems completely absurd. And, you know, I don’t think anyone should believe what I’m about to tell them. They should simply try it out.

Jamie Meyer: 
So definitely try this at home.

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
Yeah, so it’s really simple. The problem is, we often expect that bad things will happen, and we try to protect ourselves. What if we reversed that? What if we adopted the point of view that the universe is on our side and is going to deliver benefit?

What if we adopted that perspective wholesale? What if, every moment of every day, we expected good things? What if we became ridiculous, irrepressible, and uncontainable optimists? What if we just expected the best all the time? What if we became complete idiots? Because that’s how you’ll look to other people, by the way. What if you ignored all the evidence to the contrary?

I submit that if you try that, you will feel 3,000% better. And in a crazy, mysterious way, this will solve almost all of life’s problems. It will start solving your health problems—some of them, at least. You’ll be a lot less stressed and a lot less tense internally. Your metabolism will change. Your blood pressure will probably go down. It certainly won’t go up.

In addition to that, one of the really big problems—if you look at ancient systems of personal development—they will say the big problem is the “monkey mind.” The big problem is that your mental attention is scattered everywhere. It’s going in a thousand directions at once all day long. And of course, if they said that 2,000 years ago, that was nothing like what we have today. We’ve created a hyper-stimulated society.

We’ve created a society where we run on stimulation to such an extent that many people are totally uncomfortable without it. They can’t just sit and be.
Well, if you were to simply practice this open expectation—just be open and expect good things to happen—this has the effect of pinning your mental attention, holding it in one place. It solves that problem right away, and it opens you up. You no longer feel closed off because when you’re protecting yourself, you’re always closed off. Instead of being mentally and emotionally closed, you become open and available to what is.

You will stop labeling things as good or bad. Not necessarily in a moral sense, but we live by labels, and it becomes ridiculous. We feel the need to label everything good or bad, and we measure everything. Oh, we love to measure.
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Credits Roll

The Resilience Code: https://www.resilientlifecode.com/optin
Website: https://www.drsymeonrodger.com
YouTube:  @dr.symeonrodger9163 

Book, The 5 Pillars of Life: Reclaiming Ownership of Your Mind Body and Future.https://www.amazon.com.au/Pillars-Life-Reclaiming-Ownership-Traditions/dp/0973873418

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
Every culture tells people how to perceive reality. And this is something we don’t often realise, but our culture tells us to perceive reality in a very rigid, materialistic way. That’s why people with spiritual ideas have been told for centuries, “You’re just fantasising. This is all unreal. You’re making it up.” Yet, the people who go deep into those ideas will say, “Actually, no, we have data. You just don’t like our data. You prefer yours.” That’s another story altogether. The fact is, we tend to live in a very materialistic perception of reality, which is, frankly, foolish.

And yet, other cultures that have not been so heavily influenced by the Newtonian worldview have very different ideas about reality. You can be with someone, inhabiting the same physical space, talking to them, and yet realise that they don’t interpret the space in the same way you do at all. To them, all of physical reality is very provisional—it’s there, but it’s really not. There’s an entire existence beyond that. It’s like the relationship between life and death.

We’re terrified of death, but cultures like Tibetan culture, which has been exposed to over 1,300 years of Buddhism, have a very different view. For them, death isn’t the end—it’s just a part of the cycle. One Tibetan sage, for example, said to a disciple, “You know that big encyclopedia I’ve been working on? I don’t think I’ll finish it. I think death is closer than I originally thought. So when I die, come and find my reincarnation. When I get to be about ten years old, remind me where I left off and light a fire under me to get going again.”

Jamie Meyer: 
Right, leave a bookmark in the book.

Dr. Symeon Rodger: 
Exactly. It’s this whole idea that everything is continuous, and there’s nothing to fear. We’ve been here before, we’ve left here before, and we’ll do it again. It’s okay. For those who aren’t deeply into subatomic physics, Robert Lanza actually wrote a book called Biocentrism, which offers an easier way of understanding the physics I’m describing here.
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Credits Roll

Robert Lanza, M.D. – Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe
Originally Published: May 18, 2010
Google Search for Robert Lanza Biocentrism

The Resilience Code: https://www.resilientlifecode.com/optin
Website: https://www.drsymeonrodger.com
YouTube:  @dr.symeonrodger9163 

Book, The 5 Pillars of Life: Reclaiming Ownership of Your Mind Body and Future.https://www.amazon.com.au/Pillars-Life-Reclaiming-Ownership-Traditions/dp/0973873418