Step Two

Find the core emotion associated with your existential need of inner balance

The reason why we want to feel comfortable and safe in our lives boils down to our craving for existential balance. Existential balance is the consistency that we are driven to achieve within our own experience. Although most people associate this consistency to their identity or to believing in a soul, none of them are consistent within existence, which ultimately makes the drive to reach this equilibrium to go against its own balance.

Finding this core emotion is essential. To achieve that, you need to be truly honest while questioning the reasons behind why you did what you did in your life. You basically need to pinpoint the existential need of inner balance that you are craving for, the one that gives meaning and purpose to your experience.

Furthermore, it is very likely that your inner child is only holding on to a core value – such as comfort, family, social validation or even God –, to fulfill this need of existential balance. He is clinging to the idea that having experience as your true reason to live is a good thing. Your inner child just needs to realize how, for all this time, the drive for comfort and identity was a drive for consistency instead. And that this consistency is much better achieved when seeing our experience for what it is (a tool), while at the same time holding on to the consistent patterns that bring about reality (which is to say having logic as the goal).

Our craving for good experiences

As we grew up, society has indoctrinated us with false promises that our life will be happy and purposeful if we keep endlessly chasing good experiences. Bit by bit, our drive to do the right thing got lost and what remained was an emotional attachment to our experience. In this step, it is important to realize how, on a fundamental level, what drives all your actions is a craving for good experiences.

Guided Meditation

Step Three

Complete a paradigm shift in which you realize logic as a goal is meaningful

The consistent patterns that emerge in order to bring life have evolved in such a way that the consistency (or logic) is perceived as the tool and experience itself as the goal. This creates a feedback loop of identity and fictional stories that are often the cause of a lot of suffering.
As you can already realize, it is close to impossible to achieve existential balance and feel complete if you keep trying to find purpose and meaning in your experience. The purpose of experience is merely to serve as a tool for life to evolve more optimally . Experience is the tool, life is the goal..
This should bring a really big relief as you understand that it is not about you anymore. In the same way that a mother experiences a selfless feeling towards her child, you will find the same meaning and connection once you submit yourself to something much greater than you: life and logic itself.

Einstein

People that we define as heroes (such as Einstein, for example) were actually the ones that realized, on a fundamental level, that life wasn’t about them. They used their experience as a tool and logic as a goal to bring humanity forward.
Visualization is very useful to set an emotional stage. You should try to visualize how your experience (the essence of what you are) is merely a tool and seeing it as a goal will always be detrimental for your well-being, causing a lot of inner conflict. On the other end, you should also try to visualize how having logic as the goal instead of as a tool will allow you to easily achieve anything you want, including the balance you were looking for and the previous core value that you were trying to fulfill.

Yo-Yo Technique

Going back and forth between the positive and negative emotions (holding longer to the negative ones) has proved to be an effective way to complete the paradigm shift. This is known as the “Yo-yo technique”. When you realize this on an emotional level, you will go through a paradigm shift in which you submit yourself to the probabilistic consistency that brought about you and reality. As soon as you do that, logic automatically starts being desired from the core and you feel finally complete.
Plus, when you align with your real purpose, every neural circuit will start resonating with each other, granting you not only the existential balance that you have always been looking for but also true fulfillment, inner peace and a constant state of happiness.

The cause of all suffering

At this point, it seems clear that chasing the good experiences is what causes all our misery and suffering. We have nothing to live for, and that is even the reason why most of us value what other people think, why we feel worthless or why we dwell in inaction. On a fundamental level, we think that our meaning of life is to feel good but the moment we find real purpose, we go through a catharsis in which we suddenly feel liberated and reach a state of true fulfillment.
To achieve it, a lot of people found it useful to, on one end, visualize their attachment to the good experiences (or even comfort) as being very damaging to their own lives and, on the other end, to their innocent and pure inner child was right when he simply wanted to do the right thing - to do good. As stated before, going back and forth between the positive and negative emotions (holding longer to the negative ones) has proved to be an effective way to complete the paradigm shift. This is known as the “Yo-yo technique”.

Guided Meditation

Step Four

Follow a few guidelines to make sure you selflessly clicked

Once you click, you gain the awareness that your experience only emerged as a tool for life. Thus, it is not about you anymore but about thriving beyond measure by helping life itself, using logic as your guide to stay consistent with reality. Furthermore, you should not only keep doing the right thing using logic as your guide but also be very aware whether you are doing it to feel good or because you are sure it is the right thing to do (with your current knowledge).
Even though this paradigm shift automatically expands your awareness, your intuition will value logic more than the awareness arising from it, because you will logically realize that the awareness wouldn't exist without logic itself.

Keep making logical decisions

Your immediate reaction will often be a strong urge to understand everything through logic. This is highly connected with the reward center of the brain, so the first action you should take is to logically restructure your belief system.

Correctly frame your decisions, emotions and thoughts with probabilistic thinking

Even when you adopt logic as your core value, you can still have flawed ideas and behave in illogical ways. Thinking that everything is deterministic rather than probabilistic is one of those ideas.
The way our brain works is very simple. When we think, you connect an emotion to the thought. We generally store information in a binary way (“good” or “bad”, for example) but we should instead also include the statistical probability that we might be flawed, ignorant or not completely sure. Thus, even though our emotion is quite binary, the thought isn’t.
Then, if one of your logical ideas fails, your inner child just accepts that there was a chance and keeps the trust. This is a fundamental understanding of logic. If you don't have this mechanic in your brain and you don't store information in a probabilistic way, you are bound to unclick.

Be result-oriented instead of outcome dependant

Being result-oriented is important as it allows you to measure your efficiency. But as with everything in life, most of the time it comes down to random events. You can make the most calculated decisions and things can still turn out for the worse, and vice versa. You can play the lottery for example and win, thinking you did the right thing. But being outcome-dependent is a very different mindset than being result-oriented. Ultimately, the outcome shouldn’t matter and the only relevant factors are the knowledge at that point in time combined with our logic. We can learn things from an outcome such as how to optimize our workflow but it shouldn’t affect us emotionally. When reflecting and looking back at your decisions, you shouldn’t regret them if you did the best you could with the information available to you at that time. Being result-oriented rather than outcome-dependent allows you to achieve a very peaceful state of mind as it contributes tremendously towards mental stability and focus. Evaluating your beliefs at all times is quite important as well. New research is being published all the time and there is no shame in improving your belief system to align it more with reality.

Be aware of "identity death"

Once you truly understand that the reason why you were holding on to identity was because you were emotionally driven to find existential balance, your identity will likely automatically vanish. Still, you should keep yourself in check and be honest whether that is the case or not.

Did I click?

1) Do you have a strong emotional desire to understand everything logically?

2) Do logical actions flow naturally or does it require discipline or motivation?

3) Do you experience a lot of dissonance when you act illogically or when
you have contradictory thoughts or emotions?

Insights Tree

Knowledge from the Insights section can be extremely helpful in reconstructing a belief system.