Yeah, it is very interesting. It turns out that I keep a list of these.

I could be wrong though, because they say that there's something about the antioxidant nature of melatonin. So I didn't think about I missed that one. That was anyways.

This is super interesting though. But yeah, no, thanks for talking about that.

Yeah, no, I mean, I love talking about, I mean, I like medicine. Medicine is great. A lot of fun. Just circling back. So I feel like there was one other thing that I wanted to share with you. I know we're kind of off track, but just to kind of TLDR for people. So earlier we were talking about like drive and burnout. And we were also talking about this kind of like this third space where your drives come from.

So a

couple of things, Durya, self, Atman, whatever. So I think that like the part of the reason that this stuff is easily accessible for you. So one of the explanation from the Eastern system, I'm not saying this is correct. But the way that they would explain that is that you've done some amount of spiritual practice in a past life. That being said, we don't know if that's real or not. There's also some really interesting biological mechanisms of that, which have to do with like epigenetic memory and things like that, that like we can basically inherit memories from our ancestors. So the concept of memory or learnings that come from beyond your life, that's scientifically fact. Instinct is a really great example of that. Like that's like learning that comes from before you were born. So there are sources of transmission of information and competence that can happen before you were born. Yeah, it's really interesting.

But I also have to be interesting too, because it's like you you can't just have an animal always act, you know, similar to the other animals like itself, even in isolation where they've never had any type of environmental factors where they've they've learned from others or their kind and they're still acting, you know, in the same way.

I'm sorry. You can't have any. So are you saying that some animals?

So like as funny as this, take a ferret, you never show it to another ferret. They're still going to do war dances. They're still going to do all their behaviors, they're digging behaviors, all these types of things, an instinctual drive to do those. And yeah, the

idea of where does that

come from? Didn't come from socialization. They didn't learn it from humans. There has to be something to

carry. So yeah. So that's a pretty well known scientific fact. So the couple of things that, you know, I want people to kind of like take away is first is that I think if we look at your thought process, we see that there are very few egotistical oriented statements. We also see that the inflection point that you describe is actually very consistent with this idea of abandonment of the ego. Now, I think inflection point is a really good word because the other really important thing to understand is that the more that you think in an egotistical way, literally the number of thoughts that you have that are ego related will strengthen your ego. And the number of the less you think in an egotistical, I am bad, I am good, I am a badass, I am grandiose, I am this, I am bad. The fewer thoughts you have like that, the less egoistical you will become. So we know that like literally if you take like a thousand thoughts that you have, the percentage of them that are ego oriented with an I involved will correlate with like a stronger ego in a bad way. And that's just because neurons that your neurons will habituate. So like you will have patterns of thinking, which you could absolutely. And if you notice this, if you like know people who are like very habitual thinkers, like you can trigger people who will, you know, go on their tirade. Like, you know, I have family members that will go on their tirade about like, so I have a family member who thinks that the younger generation is losing touch with whatever the hell. And so that like all you have to do is like you it's like you activate like boomerant.exe. And then like the you'll notice is that the what they say is like it's like it can be scripted literally. They can repeat it over and over and over again. And it's not that it's right or wrong, it's just that once the script activates, it'll continue to activate. It's never gonna stop. Yeah. And the script of the ego is something you have to be very careful about. And so literally, I think the really cool thing that you're doing, which I think correlates a lot with the success of your community, Thor is that you are training people to think in a non-eotistical way. Right, setbacks are setbacks, there are opportunities to learn. There's some stuff about growth mindset and Carol Dweck's work in there. The last thing that I want to talk to you about is so a lot of people may be wondering, okay, how do I get rid of ego? How do I get access to that third space? So a couple of weird things about that third space. The first is that some people believe that all knowledge comes from there. I happen to be one of those people. So it's kind of weird, but like, because we noticed that the conclusion happens first and logic and emotion happens afterward. There's this kind of belief that all knowledge exists in that third space that you have access to. So this is not part of you. This is why we use the word transcendental. And now we've left science completely behind, okay? Or I mean, there's some scientific arguments that can be made, but they're not, I don't think they're anywhere near convincing enough. It's like, you can kind of, you can MacGyver it together and it may be correct, but we're far from any kind of scientific proof of what we're talking

about now. So

all knowledge exists in this kind of divine collective consciousness weird thing. And when we tap into that is when we get these right answers. So the less ego we have, the easier it is to tap into that. And the really interesting thing is that the text that I happened to read the night that our stream got flubbed was talking about particular techniques to directly tap into that. So this text is specifically about there's many complicated ways to tap into it. You can do yoga, you can do pranayam, you can do different kinds of meditation practices, but there are direct ways to get on like tap into it just directly without all of these steps. And the essence of that is, it's going to sound weird, is in the in between spaces. So if you pay attention to your experience of life, what you will probably discover, what I've discovered, what a lot of people I've worked with discovered, is that you know, you have a thought, and then you have a thought, and you have a thought. And then you can also have an emotion, you can have an emotion, you can have an emotion. But if you pay attention to your mind, there is a quiet space in between thoughts. There is a quiet space in between emotions. And that third space, I would venture, I would hypothesize for you Thor is accessed in those quiet spaces. It is not the result of logic. It is between logic and it is between emotion.

Yep. I could see that. No, that makes complete sense to me, actually.

So can you explain that to us? Because

I don't ever feel like I'm pushing down my logic and emotion. I'm not raining it in or telling it to step aside for a moment. It's like, there's a breathe in and a breathe out. There's a moment where it's like, okay, it's this now logic and emotion. Now it's this logic and emotion, whatever it's good, it's taking turns. But there's never any type of a, I need to force myself to do this. It just happens.

So it's funny the language that you used because that is actually the technique, is to catch this the, yeah, it's

cool. It's weird. So

if you're trying to look for the in-between space, there are a couple things you can do. First is when we meditate, generally speaking, our goal is to stop, create a cessation of thoughts. And so if you're, if you have no thoughts and no emotions and you're just present, if you're in that durya state of consciousness without mental activity, you're just focused. This is kind of like flow. Flow is on the, on the track do this place. But

flow still

has mental activity. So at, so what we try to do in meditation is we widen the in-between space, right? So if we say thought, nothing, thought, nothing, thought, nothing. And if we look at our suffering, our suffering correlates with a very, very tiny gap. So if you look at something like a panic attack, the subjective experience of a panic attack is one thought leads to another leads to another leads to another leads to another, there's no space in between them. There's no relief. A thought loop is also we're going to cycle through these 15 thoughts and we're going to cycle again, we're going to cycle again. There's no gap. Meditation is the exact opposite. We are trying to increase the gap between our thoughts and our emotions. The really interesting thing about what you described is that the other formal way to practice this is to find the gap between inhalation and exhalation. So breathing in and breathing out is a very natural thing where there's directionality in one place, there's directionality in another place. So you have to move through an inflection point every time you breathe. There is an inflection point between thought and thought number one and thought number two. There's an inflection point between happiness and Sadness. There's an inflection point between breathing in and breathing out. There is an inflection point between being awake and falling sleep. So in all of these inflection points, it is in the inflection point that the magic happens. And if anyone wants to free themselves from thought, emotion, ego, and they want to follow your path, or they need to sit in the in-between spaces.

I think that's really hard for most people to conceptualize.

If that makes sense. Yes, it is very hard for them. So the tradition that I'm drawing from is Shambhava Yoga, which is a very, very rigorous and difficult technique. So it is like straight onto the highway, so it's hard to do, but it is absolutely possible. They also describe it as a choiceless awareness. So choice, and this is where like, I don't know, I think this will resonate to you as well. Like you don't really make a choice. So the choice sort of gets made and you follow it. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. And like this is where I don't think many people will understand that. But the more that you do this, the more that it just becomes what it is. There's no choice to be made. There's no choice about the ferret rescue. It's just it is to be done. It's happening. It is happening. It is right. It is. It is.

It is. It's funny because people will be like, how do you choose things? How do you choose to do things so fast? I always have to wait on it. It's already chosen. Yes.

Yes. I can tell. So that's happening. So I think that's happened. Yeah. Shamba of a yoga is what you're doing. So I don't even know. I don't even do anything for you. You're doing it. All right. You know, if you want more detail, we can go into more detail at some point about practices and stuff like that. Like we're actually doing something on the membership side this month about developing a meditation practice. But. Yeah. So I think that like this choiceless awareness, I'm not surprised. I think it's very confusing for a lot of people. Like what do you mean? I don't choose. No, the choice. Yeah.

I mean, it's been confusing for anybody that I've talked to. Yeah. Pretty much my whole life over. Like people I mean, we're live. People I know online, like it doesn't make any sense. And they're just like, what? Like, what do you mean? You just do things. And it's like, I just do things, you know? Yeah.

I get you. So, so the, you know, my experience of it is that I oscillate. Between. Choosing things and choiceless awareness. The more my ego activates, the more emotional I get, the more that state of mind. Happens. Then I feel paralyzed. I don't know what the right choice is. The whole point is like, what's really cool about this is like once you operate from Thuria, there is no choice. It just happens. Yeah.

I mean, it's not even, I guess it's even the thing. It's like, I'm not even. It's not even that I do things. It's that. Things are happening. Yes. That's a weird

way to describe it, but that makes the most sense. And I know it's hard for people to understand. At the same time, I think that every person who is listening to this has experienced what we are talking about. They had a moment in their life where things became clear and then it was a, how do we make this happen as opposed to right choice, wrong choice? Or it wasn't, it wasn't about it being the right choice or the wrong choice. You abandon the concept of right or wrong and you just do the thing. You kind of know like deep within you that this is like, this is to be done. You kind of know what it feels right. It kind of

reminds me of what sometimes crisis situations when there's a crisis situation you just do without thinking. You just do. Your brain goes, it's not even your brain. It's this needs to happen. I'm doing this. That crisis situation feels, it's not the same, but it feels similar in that way, where it's this is happening. We're doing this. And the other parts of your brain go, how do we do it? And then they figure out how to do it.

And then you do it. It's a beautiful analogy. The challenge is that when some people enter crisis, there's two kinds of modes in crisis, that with ego and without ego. So when you are in a crisis and your ego is active, then it's the very opposite. It is absolute torture. Because you're like, what will happen? This will mean this and then this will happen to me and then this will happen to me and this will happen to me. And then you spiral out of control, you feel overwhelmed and the crisis crushes you. The flip side is you're in a situation like what, what, um, Thor is describing where you remove the ego from the equation, right? In the absence of ego, then suddenly you go into like, you know, Chad mode. Where you're just like, you're crushing it and it needs to be done and you don't think, you don't worry about the fact that it may not work out. Like it may not work out. You just accept that and you have to act. And this is so an

interesting thing about that too, actually that one. I've had that many, many times in crisis situations, especially when, you know, there's like an emergency with the rescue or something like that. And it doesn't mean you don't have emotions. You just have them afterwards. A lot of the times. I've found where it's like, I need to put this one to the side because it's going to cause a problem right now. And it's like, I've decided, you know, this, this is what needs to happen. We figured out how to do this. And if I break down right now, none of this is going to work. So it's like in this instance, I need to wait, right? This needs to wait, whatever that is. And I've had that happen a number of times. Yeah.

So that's very common in medicine too. So when we're dealing with crisis situations, you know, we have a specific process. We tell everyone, set your emotions aside from now, for now. And then we'll do debriefs. So we'll do post-mortem debriefs and things like that. Like, like we have like, we have time and space to let that emotion come back into your life, which by the way is a very useful technique to apply for normal people, which I don't think we do enough. We don't set aside space for our emotions in a particular formalized way. Which means that they have to like, you know, it's like, if I'm inviting my neighbors over for a Christmas party once a year, they don't have to show up randomly to see me. Like, you can set aside a time and space for something to happen. And when you give that space for that thing to happen, it's beautiful what your brain does. So another great example of this is sometimes like when I'm working with patients, right, is a psychiatrist doing psychotherapy and stuff like that. I'll ask them like, you know, sometimes they'll notice something really interesting, which is that their life is getting better, but every time they come to therapy, they feel worse. And they're like, I don't understand. Like, I feel so bad. Like we're fucking here crying, but like my life is fine. And I'm like, yeah, that's exactly how it works. What you've learned how to do is you used to cry every single day. And now you've learned how to push it all aside, come here, take out the trash, and then like your trash can is empty for the rest of the week. And you pile up that, you come here and then you feel bad. And they're like, oh, and I was like, we can continue like if this is, and then the cool thing is even that stops eventually. Like that, like once they figure that out, I don't teach them that.

They have to figure it out. Human garbage collection. Yeah. That's

what we are. We're trash compacters, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, so I found it to be useful sometimes. Like it's definitely a tool kind of in that belt where understanding when it is healthy to move that to the side, to handle a crisis situation, but not to keep that permanently aside. There's no, that's not good for you at all. And I've had a number of situations like that. We had one, um, uh, Vinny, one of the ferrets that came in, uh, owner was like, oh yeah, he hasn't eaten in two days. Get there. He's half the weight that a fair his age should be. Uh, the owner is very clearly on meth. So house reeks of it horrible. Um, had to file a police report to all that kind of stuff. And it was just grim, man. Like it just really messed me up. But it was like, in this moment, these are the things that need to happen. Animal has like I put on the happy face be like, Oh, everything's okay. Get the animal from the person. Make sure that everything feels good. Call the police file the police report. Put all the evidence in front of that. Get the animal home. Like figure out what we're going to do. Start finding a way to make him so that you can, uh, if you have a person, even any mammal, actually that is, uh, not eaten in a certain amount of time and you try to give them a full meal, they actually go to shock and they die. Yeah, it's a horrible thing. And so. Yeah, refitting syndrome. But that's exactly what it is. So we had to figure out exactly what levels of food can he eat over that amount of time to prevent refitting syndrome because he would just like his vital subcrash. And he'd die. So try to figure all that stuff out and then. Okay. Everything is handled. Let's go sit the car and need a pot. You know, I mean, I think it's, it's a huge problem that I think people, you know, we,

we push the emotion

to the side, which

I agree with you as healthy, but then you've got to pay that price. You have to. You have to. Yeah. But you can't, you can't dodge your gutter. Like that, that needs to be paid and you need to feel that negative emotion. Yeah. And I, I've gotten very good. I think that's a good idea. And you need to feel that negative emotion. Yeah.

And I, I've gotten very good, I think at knowing when it's okay to push that, you know, it's like this is, it's only in a very critical situation. Like a really critical, like something could die. There's no coming back from the failure on this one. You could fail. Sure. You might learn something from it. But there's something that will break that cannot be unbroken in those situations. That's like, okay, now it's time to push this aside for a moment. Handle it, you know, and like you said, medicine, it's the same.

I would, I would say I would add one thing to that. So I think that that's perfect. And I think that you can't discredit your ability to deal with it later. So the ability to set something aside is way easier when your brain knows that we can deal with this later and it won't be catastrophic. A lot of problems that I see with people are that they keep setting it aside, keep setting it aside, keep setting it aside. And then they don't know that they don't have confidence that they can deal with it when they open that basement door that's full of negativity, right? It can feel so incredibly overwhelming. And that can also become kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy because the more that you let things pile up, the more objectively overwhelming they are when you try to tackle them. So then you feel overwhelmed. And so then you let things pile up more because you can't deal with it. And the reason you keep on letting it pile up is because you can't deal with it. And then the more you let it pile up, the more impossible it becomes to deal with. And so that's where like oftentimes professional health, like with a medical professional can really go a long way. Like so we're really helping people deal with unsolvable things.

Yeah, I remember when I was younger, that kind of felt like a pressure cover. You know, it's like it just keeps building up, building up, building up. And you're like, I don't even want to let steam off that. It could explode. And I'm just going to leave it over there. Right. And then you get another pressure cooker and another one. Then you're just what I didn't realize at the time is like, it's not just like you're putting something in a cabinet somewhere and walking away. You're maintaining that thing. There's energy that goes into keeping that pressure cooker pressurized, right? Every day you're like, I'm just going to spend maybe I'm only spending 5%. I mean, it's only 10%. Maybe it's 15% until you're just buried with this spinning plate maintenance that you have going on. And then you don't know what to do with the damn thing, right? And that's I felt that before in my life. And I basically got to a point where it was like, you have to let the pressure off and just sometimes that's awful. Sometimes it's horrible going through that. But if you don't, then you're going

to be maintaining that and paying taxes on it all the time. Absolutely. It's debilitating. One of the three biggest willpower drains is emotional suppression. So the more emotions that you're constantly constantly, constantly suppressing, like it's amazing how people don't realize. So people will like look for motivation. They'll look for drive. They'll look for passion. They'll look for like discipline. And literally like all you need to do is unburden yourself of all of your emotional suppression because just just the maintenance. It's like your inventory is full and then you can't loot anything. Like you can't, you're like, how do I pick up this nice, epic piece of loot? You can't because everything is full. So maybe that's not the best analogy, but like there's a man. There's a man. There's a man at maintenance cost. Huh?