Smash Your Conditioning with a Cosmic Perspective!

One of my personal favorite awareness-raising exercises is that of consciously (intentionally) shifting my focus away from my ego-level experience (Jason), and into a more expansive and cosmic one.

Let me explain this a little more clearly:

One of the most common things about the human experience is our ability to blow completely trivial things out of proportion, and this is almost always due to our social conditioning.

A conditioned expectation will yield a conditioned response, which yields to conditioned actions, and thus conditioned results.

All the things we’re conditioned to believe to be important – our job, social status, relationship status, your environmentally-healthy diet, etc. – are absolutely insignificant from the larger perspective.

We are flying through deep space, at hundreds of thousands of miles an hour, orbiting a nuclear reactor (with several other planets orbiting it), all moving through space like a chaotic cosmic kaleidoscope.

There aren’t just one, two, or a dozen of these systems similar to ours happenings out there, however; there are countless! And we’re discovering more each year.

While it may sound semi-depressing to “realize your life is more or less pointless”; this is in truth your greatest point of personal power, and it’s the perspective that allowed me to change my life, goals, and behavior patterns permanently.

By the end of this exercise, it will be self-evident (to you) how you’re unnecessarily adopting a narrow, limited view of both yourself and your personal potential, due in part to your ego-level social conditioning.

Your Ego vs Your True Self

Social conditioning caters almost entirely to the ego.

Consequently, most social goals – career, relationship, status, etc. – are all the result of this external conditioning.

By default, most will center their lives (and experiences) around the goals which cater to ego reinforcement, rather than correctly placing their ego in service to their higher potentials.

One of the greatest missteps of the New Age movement is the belief that the ego must be done away with completely. I don’t ascribe to this notion, and I’ve noticed that those who do seem to have trouble navigating the waters of life consistently.

The key is developing the wisdom and temperance to understand how your ego works, and then use it to your advantage instead of your detriment.

Most will not do this, and will simply default to socially pre-programmed responses/defense mechanisms when questioned about uncomfortable topics – such as those that lie beyond and/or test said conditioning.

This is where most have a problem. The ego getting highly (especially on the emotional level) invested in these trappings, and then identifying them as itself. An attack on these things is an attack on you (it)!

Your ego is based on boundaries. It doesn’t like when you try to move, expand, or remove any boundaries in your current thinking paradigm (your current world view).

People who restrict their worldview to the level of ego-awareness will naturally live very reactive, uncertain lives. These are the types who wait for the media to tell them who/what to get mad at/about, and what to buy and when. The more ego there is present, the less original thought and choice there will be. Fear is sold without question to most.

As a result, most never even stumble across this type of exercise, even by accidental intuitive curiosity.

Intuition may give such an individual a glimpse of higher truths, but the undisciplined individual will succumb and favor the inertia of their ego-level social programming.

It’s the old binary fallacy in action: “If it’s not 1, then it’s 0. Since 2, 3, 5, and 7 aren’t 1; 2, 3, 5, and 7= 0!”.

Social conditioning is all about keeping your perspective, logic, and reasoning as narrow as possible.

The less options you genuinely believe you have in this life, the easier you are to control and guide toward fulfilling someone else’s expanded perspective of things.

Everything you’ve been conditioned to value (especially here in the West) is pure ego survival.

Yes, we require things like clothing, food, and shelter – but these things are not exclusive to being narrow minded and unquestioningly obedient to arbitrary social protocol.

You can achieve the same goals by adopting a higher state of conscious awareness of yourself and your relationship to the infinite universe around you.

Plenty of people have, plenty of people are, and plenty of people will continue to do so – just as surely as the Earth keeps spinning and careening through deep space.

Your True Self

The real you is the part of you reading this, and nodding along with all of the above.

The real you is the one who knows that you should be doing something more fulfilling with your time, and that fear is just a distraction that most never overcome (due to social conditioning!).

The real you wants more, because the real you intuitively knows that there is more than what you’re being told about/allowing yourself to experience.

The real you knows that your finite existence in an infinite physical universe is its real point of power. Overcoming the trappings of the ego – especially in an environment as convoluted as 21st century Earth – is a valuable playground/gymnasium for consciousness!

When you neutralize your social conditioning, realize how big the universe truly is in relation to you, and adopt a genuine sense of humility and gratitude, your perspective is naturally going to shift.

Suddenly, your “biggest problems” here on planet Earth don’t seem so big anymore. The things you scraped tooth and nail for (usually money for most) become less and less important and powerful in your reality.

Politics will also become a blatant, hilarious charade (if it already hasn’t). Why are humans – the same species of being – fighting over resources instead of working together to protect them…?

If you said “because the ego is out of control!”, come to the front of the class for your prize! :P

You start to realize that none of that material stuff matters, because you’re not taking anything you trade your precious time for with you once your time is up.

You stop panicking, kicking, and grasping for the life raft of material security you’ve been conditioned to value, and you realize that as long as you’re conscious, in control, and connected – you’re secure.

True security arises out of you consciously and calmly navigating the waters of life, with discernment for what’s truly worth investing your time and energy into.

Those on the ego-level have no idea what discernment is, because their consciousness takes a backseat to the “app” that is ego – and it’s always open and running.

The second someone stuck in ego is forced to make a decision (think for themselves and choose), they will default to whatever they perceive will move them closer to pleasure and further from pain.

This is just another manifestation of the ego defense mechanism (fight or flight) – no conscious intention required!

The Shift

I went through this exact “perspective smashing” exercise experience when I was 19 years old, attending community college.

This was right around the time that I began seriously questioning what my intuition was screaming at me about for my entire life: what the hell was I doing, how did I end up here, and why the hell do I believe that this is what I need to be doing right now?

…And that’s why I left college prematurely. The learning style and speed just wasn’t for me. Despite what parents, friends, and counselors attempted to do to convince me that this was a “mistake”, I had to learn to trust myself, and know that just because college works for most doesn’t mean it will work for me.

Knowing this for myself, and sticking to what was true for me, was huge.

I was already ahead of what my teacher was explaining – yet it was costing me thousands of dollars per semester. I’d rather spend that money and educate myself in my own time…and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the last 9 years.

This website, my writings, all the work I’ve contributed to Expanded Consciousness, My Empowered World, SelfGrowth.com, The Mind Unleashed, my ebooks, my premium subscriber content, etc. – is all a result of me trusting myself, following my passion, and expressing it to the highest of my current ability, while expanding and growing myself and that ability in the process.

I’ve learned more through trial and error than I ever learned in a classroom. A lot of people feel the same way.

Most will argue that leaving college is a mistake, and will only tarnish your track record or resume value.

I’d argue that knowing your limits – rather than assuming them – is infinitely wiser and more profitable in the long run.

Most people have no idea how to manage their passive aggressiveness; why should I take to heart something so many people foolishly assume to be the apex of truth, simply because other people tell them so?

Rule #1: never take advice from people who clearly don’t ask questions about the nature of things for themselves.

I’d rather be out learning, setting, and achieving goals. Results > assumptions. You win every single time.

It was at that same time where I was heavily invested in music, and would play with several different bands. One (my band) won a huge battle of the bands, a couple grand, and recording time at a prestigious studio in Boston.

We out out an awesome 3-song EP, and played lots of shows for a year or two afterward.

Another project I was in got signed to a european record label (for a full-length album), and my face was published in a popular metal music magazine.

The reason I gave you the above example is because the more I trusted my intuition and genuine internal compass, the more my life has worked out despite what social conditioning claims should happen to people who deviate.

Yes, I held odd (and often times inconsistent) day jobs during these times, and that was no doubt challenging in its own right (balancing a 6 day work week, and driving back and forth to Boston (90 mins one way) for rehearsals and recording each weekend).

However, I noticed how my goals were always on indefinite delay when I focused on “gathering money and resources FIRST”.

We’re all already aware that a lot of famous, wealthy, and successful people didn’t finish college.

That’s because they understand that there’s no time to waste sitting in class, learning at a socially-mandated, highly-filtered, snail’s pace of a ciriculum; they were out testing, refining, failing, and succeeding.

They were DOING instead of “endlessly preparing to DO” (with an astronomical price tag).

Please note I’m not bashing college here. I’m using it as an example from my own life to illustrate how you can still achieve your goals without pandering to the low-hanging ego-level distractions that society runs on.

I’m also not condoning reckless behavior.

What I am saying is that I challenge you to expand your perception and beliefs, so that what you currently see as being “reckless and irresponsible” is only so because you’ve been conditioned to view it as such.

Reality is that which actually happens, occurs, and unfolds; NOT what large masses of people ignorantly assume to be true for all participants, with no exception, due to entirely outdated and untested social dogma.

Those still trapped in ego-level conditioning probably stopped reading after the second paragraph.

The rest will be experiencing a self-test/epiphany/nodding their heads in complete agreement.

So, with all of that said; what’s the rest of your day looking like? :P