There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
This story is how the legendary writer David Foster Wallace started his 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College.
In my opinion, it is one of the classics in a long tradition of great American speeches.
Wallace continues: The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
He is absolutely right.
But why is it so hard to see the most obvious realities?
It has everything to do with ego-based thinking.
During our lives, everyone around you basically brainwashes you with ideas about what you are and what you should be. The people that are brainwashing you include your parents, teachers, friends, as well as Disney movies, Hollywood filmmakers, your books, your music albums, and all newspaper articles.
Common ego-based ideas are “I should have great career success and keep climbing the job ladder”, or “I have to get married”, or “I must make a lot of money because that will give me safety in an unsafe world”.
“My friends should always like me. I have to make sure my colleagues accept me. I need to go to the gym to get beach body ready for the summer.” And so on.
Such thoughts are very common. They lead to a lot of suffering, but they are hard to get rid of.
The reason they’re so hard to get rid of is that we’re so used to thinking them that we are not even aware they are thoughts in the first place.
When I feel stress about earning enough money, I automatically assume that financial stress is simply a part of life. An inevitable part of this world.
So, when you have stressful thoughts about money, it feels like you are directly perceiving an inherently stressful world. It feels like your thoughts are a rational response to reality.
But that is not the case.
The whole feeling of anxiety about money is actually created by your mind. It is created by the fact that you believe the thought “I have to make sure I earn a lot of money”. If you didn’t believe that thought, you wouldn’t experience stress. Even though you would still live in the same world.
Many years ago, I discovered the solution to this problem.
It is called the OUT technique, which you probably have already learned in the Freedom Practice course. But I am going to start a brand new course where we are going to go waaaay deeper with this:Perfection & True Awakening course.
For the coming 8 months, I will host a group call every single Saturday. I will teach you how to destroy your ego-based thoughts and how to resolve your suppressed emotional pain.
I am creating this course because some ego-based thoughts are very difficult to spot on your own. When you begin your freedom practice and start using the Pure Awareness techniques, you will usually find a lot of obvious ego-based thoughts.
But as you go further on your journey of awakening, the ego-based thoughts in your mind become increasingly harder to spot. Ego is extremely intelligent. It is very good at hiding itself.
Some ego-based thoughts are such a fundamental part of your worldview that you are not even aware anymore that they are thoughts at all. An example is the idea that you are different from the world around you. Or that you need to improve yourself. Or that some actions are good and others evil.
Because these ideas are so hard to spot, they are fundamental barriers to full spiritual awakening. As long as you don’t know you are caught in a false belief system, you can’t free yourself from it.
Like Dostoyevsky said: The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.
Most spiritual seekers need someone to point out to them that they are caught in their ego-based thinking patterns. Ideally, a mentor who has gone through a deep awakening himself and knows all the pitfalls and subtleties of the ego.
Having such a guide can help you to make the unconscious conscious.
That’s what we are going to do in the Perfection & True Awakening course.
The awakening process that you will go through in this course can be incredibly liberating. But it also requires courage and vulnerability.
That is why you only have one chance to join this course – by signing up before this coming Saturday, July 29th.
I will NOT sell this course as a series of recorded videos later on. You cannot get the course afterwards if you were not a part of the group. In this way, every participant has the maximum security in sharing themselves. This means that the only way to follow this course is to be there live.
That’s why this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Let’s get back to the fish I started this e-mail with. They show us the importance of awakening. And that is also how David Foster Wallace ended his commencement speech:
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
“This is water.”
“This is water.”
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
But we do have a way of speeding up this process. It is a systematic protocol for finding and resolving the ENERGY Patterns that are the deeply suppressed invisible energies that generate your ego-based thoughts and decisions. You learn that in the Freedom Practice.
The Perfection & True Awakening Course commences: this Saturday.
To find out more about the course and to sign up, check out the link –
Sincerely,
Tom
P.S.: If you’re still in doubt after reading the web page about this course, I have a unique chance for you. I offer the opportunity to join the first group session for free. No strings attached. I have created this option of getting a free demo group session so that you can find out for yourself what the course will be like.
However, this option is ONLY available for the first group call on Saturday, the 29th of July. You can join the free session by clicking the following Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/8189381616
The meeting starts this very Saturday at 8 AM Pacific Time – which is 5 PM in most of Western Europe. Make sure you join the call on time!
P.P.S.: The first 5 people to sign up get a FREE one-on-one session with me. Normally, I charge 500 dollars for that, but if you are one of the first people to join the course, you get it for free. There are still a few spots left, so check out the web page before it is too late!
The web page with the details of the Perfection & True Awakening program is here –
You can read the whole speech here: https://fs.blog/david-foster-
Or watch it on youtube.
Got to the landing page for all of the details –