the timboucher experience

A Guide For The Newly Uplifted

Let’s say, hypothetically, that you have suddenly become enlightened somehow or other. Now what?

First of all, cool! What a struggle to get to this place, am I right? To get here, you very likely had to pass through some serious fires on a personal level. And I commend you for getting this far in the game. I know, from personal experience, that the boss characters protecting this treasure can be extremely nasty.

But the worst is over. Or is it?

It is, I promise. The struggle to become a “superhero” (the neutral term I’ve chosen to describe this state) is first of all the struggle to get over yourself and to get out of your own way. Once you can get over yourself, that’s where the real fun begins. Because once you’ve gotten over yourself, you can now become whatever you want. You have the ability to perfect yourself and to maximize your experience of life.

While I won’t go so far as to claim personal enlightenment, I can say that I first noticed that *something* was happening to me when I spontaneously stopped suffering. At first I was just like, “Huh, cool. But no way this will last.” And then days passed, and then weeks. And now months. And somehow or other, not suffering anymore became a habit and became a way of life.

From my own experience, the road to get here and “what to do now” are actually one in the same. I’d like to offer my own outline of how I find that superheroic state to be like, as well as how to achieve it.

Clarity

The first and most difficult step of all is becoming honest with yourself. This type of honesty stretches from being emotionally and intellectually honest with yourself to re-opening habitually closed pathways of perception. Put another way, our habits tend to control us. Instead of having an authentic *new* response every time a novel situation arises in our perceptual field, some part of our brain tries to shield us from it. It does this by automatically associating all new stimuli to existing stimuli. It’s neither a good or bad thing: it’s almost like your brain knows better than to bother you with every little thing that comes up, like a good secretary or personal assistant.

The only problem with this system is that most of the imprints and associations currently running your life were not consciously chosen. They were rules which were abstracted from past experiences in an effort to make “sense” out of them and to shield you from emotionally distressing situations. As such, these existing associations and habits are not optimal because their imprinting stretches back to when you were a child in many cases.

What must be done is to open up these associations, imprints and habits. The phrase I’ve been using to describe this process is “conscious pain” - which needn’t be as masochistic as it sounds. All I’m saying is that you consciously face your fears and your frustrations, and you learn to *watch* as your perceptual mechanism responds to them. When you get scared you want to stop or run away. Same thing when you get frustrated. Developing clarity means you become able to see and recognize your emotional and intellectual reactions to perceptual states as they occur.

Tranquility

Buddhists talk a lot about detachment. I never grasped what they meant until I read the Bhagavad Gita and began having some of my early superheroic experiences. I once though that by detachment they meant only that you didn’t concern yourself with things of the world, that you just floated by unaffected. That didn’t sound positive to me because what it felt like I was lacking was a sense of direct engagement in and with the world. How could removing myself from it benefit me whatsoever?

What I began to realize though through consciously facing frustration and undoing habitual responses, was that the thing you’re supposed to detach yourself from may not be the world at all. Instead, it has more to do with your reactions to the world and to experience. When something seems difficult or scary and you want to stop, you simply recognize that feeling (as opposed to trying to suppress it - which doesn’t work *at all*…), and then allow it to move on. Detachment comes from recognizing that every moment is unique, and in some sense perfect.

Epictetus talked about the sphere of the moral purpose: how the only thing which a man can truly control are his reactions to sense impressions. He can’t necessarily control the impressions themselves, depending on the situation. He may not even be governor of his body - if he were injured or put in jail, etc. But he can always - as a free man with Free Will - control how he reacts to things.

Again, this doesn’t mean that you empty yourself of emotion, that you become some kind of cold unfeeling isolated individual. For me, the complete opposite has occurred. By gaining mastery of my responses to my perceptions, I have become infinitely more connected to the real world, to situations occurring around me, to others, and to my emotional responses to things. Most of my emotions, I realized at one point, were mitigated by suffering; everything was seen through the filter or lens of painful resistance to things as they were. I wanted them to be another way and when reality rudely intruded, I would explode. Consciously becoming aware of my habitual responses to things, and actively re-engineering them is what allowed me to overcome that childish mode of behavior and become a full-fledged superhero.

Intent/Action Harmony

First I had to become clear with myself about who and what I really was and what I really wanted out of life. When you’re faced with the truth about yourself - especially ones which you’ve been denying - the reaction most people have is, of course, not one of tranquility. Tranquility doesn’t automatically follow clarity. The bridge that links the two is something I have taken to calling intent/action harmony. It’s a deceptively simple name for something which is rather difficult to attain.

When I talk about intent/action harmony, what I am really talking about is the ability to (1) recognize what your intentions are. How would you like things to be? Many of us never quite answer that question satisfactorily (advice on answering it here), and more of us never really ask it in the first place. We just allow circumstances to buffet us from one place to another, and wonder why we are so lost and miserable. Then, when we begin to be clear with ourselves about what our intentions are, we begin to see that our various intentions do not add up together. We harbor hidden intentions which act at cross-purposes with one another, crippling our effectiveness before we even begin. This is where tranquility comes in: the ability to dispassionately observe your emotional responses to things and make conscious decisions about whether you want to continue having those kinds of reactions or change them. You won’t know if you’re hitting the target if you’ve never chosen which one to shoot at.

I remember going through an intense two month period earlier this year where with every action I took, I asked myself: does this action serve my intention? Am I hindering or helping whatever it is that I really set out to do? I asked this question so often that I began annoying myself with it. Part of me would constantly interject with things like, “Lay off just this once, man!” and so on. The point is not that I was successful in perfectly yoking every single tiny action with my overarching intentions. Far from it. But I got better at it. And all it required was consciously introducing a code correction: the formation of a new habit of self-assessment. It got me in the mindset of always seeking out the most economical way of acting. If my intention was x and actions a, b, & c did not lead to outcome x then it would become a simple logical matter of not taking actions a, b, & c, and of replacing them with a much shorter and more direct route to the desired outcome. (PS. A concrete desired outcome for a given situation is often much easier to articulate to oneself than an intention… Many small outcomes tend to constellate around a big intention)

Intent/action harmony demands an intensive period of self-discipline. Changing your habits is hard work. But first you have to be able to see your habits (clarity) and then learn how to disengage from them (tranquility) before you will be able to create the mental and emotional space to actively change them (intent/action harmony).

DIY Self-Mastery

Self-mastery is the over-arching term I have begun using to describe the state of the superhero. This state tends to be characterized by certain attributes of self: clarity, tranquility and harmony. (1) You can see things as they are. (2) How they are does not control you or your reactions to them. You alone are in control. (3) You have the ability to change how things are and how you are, through taking actions harmonious with your intentions. Together, those are the basic building blocks of self-mastery. If you haven’t achieved those, then you may have mastered *something* but it certainly isn’t the self.

If other people can needle you and set you off-balance, then you haven’t mastered yourself. If a change of circumstance or scenery can spin you suddenly into a depressive or angry state, then you haven’t mastered yourself. But you can’t expect it all to happen at once; it’s an on-going process which you must maintain and guard, trust me. (Jefferson said the price of liberty is eternal vigilance - was describing the life of a superhero). The important thing to remember during self-mastery training is: don’t beat yourself up over your failures. By holding onto failures, you create and encourage holding onto negative feelings. Negative feelings directed at the self just so happen to be the worst, most damaging and most limiting kind. They are also the most difficult to see and to root out.

Responsibility

This is one of many reasons why healthy human relationships with others are so beautiful and important. If there are things which we can’t see about ourselves, it can help us (even if it hurts like hell) to be shown those things through the mirror of our interactions with other people. One of the most difficult things to disentangle in relationships - especially the deeper they get emotionally - is where I end and you begin.

For me, this ultimately boiled down to the question: who is responsible for my internal states, my thoughts and emotions? In the past, if you did something to “make me upset” then it was you who was making me upset. It was your fault and your responsibility and you were the one with the problem which you were unfairly pushing onto me. But somewhere along the line I realized: each of us is responsible for our own feelings. No one can *make* us feel anything. No one can reach inside of the sphere of your moral purpose. They can certainly take actions which put us into positions where in all likelihood we will feel a certain way. But it is us who takes the last and ultimate step of allowing ourselves to actually feel a certain way. It is each one of us who is responsible. This realization is essential for the care and feeding of the superheroic state of being.

Humility

Self-mastery allows one to take ownership of one’s actions and internal state. With that ownership comes great authority: you become the author of your own destiny. You exert the God-given power of Free Will. And what power it is that you gain when you free up all of your internal processes from needlessly holding onto useless outdated patterns. Suddenly that psychic energy which was being used to keep the world at bay now becomes devoted to actively sensing the world, and the mind becomes bent on finding the most economical and efficient ways to actualize intentions.

In short you become extraordinarily powerful. The ancient Greeks had a danger word for this state, hubris. The type of pride for which the Gods always unequivocally punished mortal heros who achieved it. Characters in Greek dramas, whatever their flaws, were always self-mastered. They were nobles and heros and sons of divinities who launched epic quests and engaged in tremendous battles and conquered kingdoms. This is the kind of power which self-mastery unleashes in the heart of the superhero who achieves it.

This flush of power combined with the dawning realization that an individual is responsible for their own internal state creates also the feeling, “If I did this, then anyone can do it.” I maintain that self-mastery and the cessation of suffering is the true and authentic state of every human being. Heaven is a place on earth, as the song says. Anyone can get there. But not everyone knows that this is the case, and if they do know of the possibility, they may not know how to get there. And if they do know how to get there, they may not be ready to. They may need help or support. A superhero who acts without humility basically says “Fuck you!” to those people, because they have not achieved the state he has achieved. But as we all know, the point of a superhero is to help people. When you become that powerful, there’s really nothing else you can do - because simply taking over the world would be far too easy of a challenge!

Self-Sufficiency & Abundance

A superhero is someone who has transcended lack, scarcity and insecurity because a superhero has a well within from which he may draw. He may have material needs: food, clothing, a house. But they tend to be scant and easily met. Moreover, a superhero must be able to attain those things for himself: self-mastery demands it. If you can’t enable the continued survival of the self, then you have not mastered it. Dr. Bronner wrote, “A great teacher, must first, a self-supporting hard-worker be… or he’ll turn our greatest teachings into spades, to bury our people!”

Merely becoming self-sufficient, however, is not enough. The superhero hasn’t just mastered himself; he has moved beyond that into mastering existence itself. He strives to perfect the experiences of others, and to initiate cause/effect chains which will naturally enable other people to master themselves. A superhero does not simply scrape by, but a superhero has an abundance. His needs are simple and easily met, and as a result what little he has goes much farther than the vast sums most men strive after fruitlessly. He shares what he has which is extra, and his example inspires others to do the same. He fosters mutually inspired abundance. Where he walks, things grow in his footsteps. And they often seem to do so of their own accord, because he has mastered intent/action harmony, and all actions he takes - regardless of their outcome - initiate positive cause/effect sequences for the improvement of events and experiences.

Community

Abundance, humility and responsibility, coupled with self-mastery form the cornerstone not just of the healthy high-functioning individual, but provide a base level for a community to exist upon. A community of would-be superheros who have not mastered clarity will be filled with rumors, backstabbing, passive-agressive actions and confusion. A community which has not mastered tranquility will be battered this way and that by every little thing which happens. They will have no rest, and no ground from which to grow. A community whose members are not acting in intent/action harmony will be filled with strife, with people acting at cross-purposes with one another, etc. A lack of responsibility creates finger-pointing, blaming and name-calling. A lack of self-sufficiency and abundance (Note: abundance is an attitude towards life, and not a state of material success) leads to insecurity, to theft, to holding back, to holding on, to taking that which does not belong to you and making up excuses why its okay.

Simply put, a true community can not exist where people have not mastered themselves. Remember also, that other people are a fundamental requirement of self-mastery. Without others, you can not see yourself in all the ways you need to to master yourself. There will always be things which you are blind to, which you lie to yourself about, and which others are required to assist and correct.

So a health community can’t exist until people have mastered themselves. And people can’t master themselves without the help of a community. We could put that more simply and say: we need each other. But we need each other to help ourselves be honest; we don’t need other people to complete us. No other person can, in fact, ever complete us. If someone else is required to complete one’s self, then you’re neither being self-sufficient or self-mastered. It must - in all cases, with absolutely NO EXCEPTIONS - come from you.

Personal Sovereignty

Once it *does* come from you though is where the fun starts. When you can tap that well within, when you can master yourself and harvest abundance in your life, and remove old unnecessary habits and behaviors, then you can begin really experiencing other people. They stop being just a mirror for your own problems and confusion, and they start being REAL PEOPLE unto themselves. Parents are often the easiest way to guage progress in this kind of thing: are your parents still just the same mom and dad you had growing up, or have they become for you real people in and of themselves, with their own lives, motivations, experiences and so on?

This kind of maturity, in the realm of the superhero, extends to everyone. No longer are others seen as vessels for or obstacles to the actualization of your desire. Other people become sovereign beings, entities complete unto themselves just like you, the realized superhero (whether or not they realize it themselves yet!).

Agreements & Negotiations

Even if other people don’t see themselves as superheros, the defining mark of a true superhero is that he sees everyone else as the superhero they really are. He is not fooled by people who feign weakness or ignorance. He is not tricked by put-ons, emotional cons, manipulative games, or other types of bullshit and nonsense. He sees and knows from experience that everyone is secretly a superhero. Most people just tend to continue identifying with their mild-mannered alter ego because they are afraid of putting on the superhero tights and costume because they think everyone will laugh at them. They are not self-mastered, but they are still sovereign beings who have the potential, innate nature, and God-given right to become superheros.

As such, they need to be treated like superheros. And even if they couldn’t ever become one themselves for some reason, the superhero would still treat them that way anyway: because the superhero’s bearing is one of dignity and respect for all things. As a sovereign being, complete and mastered unto himself, he has the ability to instantaneously transmit that state of awareness to other beings. That is the at the root of his superheroic powers: the ability to spread, share, deputize and otherwise disseminate his state of mastery through simply exercising his abilities and acting as an example.

He does this through direct and clear communication with others. He expresses his needs, desires, fears and expectations up front and in so doing gives others the opportunity to react through choice, through the exercise of their own respective Free Will, instead of through coercion and manipulation. When these types of things can be communicated clearly, awareness and choice are created. People are free to agree or to disengage with an interaction because they know where it is going and if participating would agree with their intent/action harmony.

This state of awareness and choice allows for parties in an interaction to negotiate terms which would be mutually fulfilling, and then to engage in an agreement which will guide the execution of an interaction towards a particular objective. There was a point in my life when I would have thought all of this type of talk was stupid; how could you ever govern human interactions that way? It seemed unnatural, and yet I suffered constantly adhering to what to me seemed a much more natural course of action: “just letting things happen”, etc. It landed me into all kinds of (useful) turmoil though, because I wasn’t being clear with myself and with others in what I was trying to do and why, and what role each of us could or should play in one another’s interactions. But now that I try to be clear and up front about things, those kinds of turmoil have receded into the distance; they no longer haunt my every waking moment.

Self-Government

The self-mastered superhero is a sovereign being who has become power-fully realized through clarity of perception, tranquility of mind, and harmony between intentions and actions. Harmony creates first self-sufficiency and second abundance. Abundance communicated humbly to others by directness and by example leads to happy, healthy and harmonious community. A community of superheroes governs itself not from without, but by clear agreements based around stated terms and expectations. A single individual living this way inspires others to live this way, because it is simply better. Don’t believe me? Try it for six months, and if you don’t like it you can switch back to your way of doing things. You won’t want to though because one individual living like this becomes like a reverse virus, correcting and curing others. The symptoms of the sickness aren’t reduced or masked like with conventional medicine, but health and love spread out in radiating waves in every direction.

That is light and life of the superhero.

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