After finishing this book in October of 2023, I wrote,

 

"Many of the books I read teach me something. But it's rare that a book will suggest an approach that strikes me an innovative compared to what I already know. This book did that."

 

My clippings below collapse a 212-page book into eight pages, measured by using 12-point type in Microsoft Word.

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See all my book recommendations.  

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Here are the selections I made: 

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You see, what I'll be sharing with you here is Existential Kink, a radical, somatic, hot, and eminently practical & quick method of coming to love the previously hidden and shamed parts of your own self, so that your old negative patterns dissolve.

 

As Jung emphasized: “Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.”

 

But Jung also pointed out: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

 

See if you can recognize any of these patterns from your own life or from the lives of your friends and family members: Only being able to earn a certain amount of money each month, no matter how hard or how much you work Only being attracted to partners who turn out to bear an uncanny resemblance to your asshole dad (or to your asshole mom, or to the first person who broke your heart, or whatever) Hearing the mean voice of your third-grade teacher in your head whenever you sit down to create, so you avoid creating Overeating (or overindulging in drugs, alcohol, etc.) to cover up feelings of guilt, shame, loneliness, frustration that seem endless Disliking yourself/your body no matter what your shape Perpetually feeling victimized and like your life would be good if only rude other people (your family, your boss, your spouse, your employees, the government, the blacks, the gays, the straights, the whites, the Jews, the Christians, the capitalists, the hippies, etc., etc.) would stop messing with you

 

Having grand plans for the future, but never getting around to taking the first concrete steps to realizing those plans Being very sensitive and taking everything personally Habitually seeking approval, doing things to get people to like you even when you don't really want to do those things Picking a fight with your partner just when everything starts getting really good

 

As long as we insist that we absolutely don't want dark, freaky, unpleasant things, a major part of our full-spectrum human curiosity gets cut off, repressed, denied, and made unconscious.

 

You are, however, as an individual, the only person capable of altering your unconscious conditioning and identity, and restoring it to its divine reality. You are capable; you are not “at fault” or “to blame.”

 

An axiom is a proposition that's assumed without proof for the sake of studying the consequences that follow. In other words, the seven axioms I'll present are working propositions that I can't “prove” to you are true, but I can say that if you experiment with accepting them as true and see what consequences result from that acceptance, you will find those results to be fascinating and rewarding. 1) Having is evidence of wanting

 

2) We have a choice as to whether we experience sensation as pleasure or as pain

 

3) It's possible to get off on every stroke—and every happening in life is a “stroke”

 

Sadly, most of us turn ourselves off. We have a quite narrow range of “strokes” that we're willing to get off on in our day. Someone is super nice to us? Turn-on. We get a big unexpected gift of money? Turn-on. The sun is shining? Turn-on. Someone is rude to us? Turn-off. Grey, cold, drizzly day? Turn-off. Low bank account? Turn-off. The game and the invitation of Existential Kink are to practice letting ourselves be madly, irrationally turned on and playfully excited by “strokes” in life that we would usually use to turn ourselves off.

 

Our degree of being “turned on” or “turned off” is a matter of how much we're willing to totally approve in our life

 

As Oscar Wilde once observed in a letter to a magazine in response to criticisms of The Picture of Dorian Gray, “If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.” Our trembling little human lives and emotions are exactly this—works of art that are “rich and vital and complete”—they're neither good nor bad, but deeply amazing to those of us willing to appreciate great and aching beauty.

 

5) Desire evolves through fulfillment, not denial and repression

 

6) Shame is the magic-killer

 

7) The truth is sensational

 

Now, for the sake of present simplicity, here's “the gist” of Existential Kink practice: 1) Get yourself into a relaxed state.

 

Create a container for yourself by lighting a candle and some incense, and setting a timer for 15 minutes.

 

3) Identify a situation in your life that your conscious mind, your ego, does not like.

 

4) Identify exactly what feelings and emotions you associate with this situation.

 

This reminded me of psychotherapist Fritz Perls' famous observation: “Fear is just excitement without breath.” In other words, fear is just excitement without embrace and approval for the sensations.

 

5) Gently allow yourself to get in touch with the part of yourself that actually, passionately enjoys the feelings and emotions associated with your “don't like” situation.

 

6) Get on the side of your shadow (your previously unconscious sense of desire/curiosity/enjoyment) and deliberately, consciously, humbly allow yourself to receive, feel big gratitude for, and get off on the situation your unconscious so brilliantly created.

 

Note: While getting off in Existential Kink does result in a synchronous change of outward circumstances, it's very important that you let kinky enjoyment, pure and simple, be far, far more important to you than the “change” that you consciously want to bring about.

 

Remember, it's very possible to “have everything” and still be miserable. That's why enjoyment, pure and simple, is always what truly matters.

 

No one is “to blame” for anything—everything just is for some unfathomable reason . . . and we have the option of divinely enjoying it, divinely grieving it, or humanly resenting it.

 

Does this feeling of guilt come from a sense of wanting to control the situation? By feeling guilty, do I think I'll somehow change the situation, or at least get the approval of others? Am I willing to stop trying to use this feeling of guilt to get a sense of control? Am I willing to stop trying to use this feeling of guilt to manipulate others into approving of me? Would it be okay if the ability to use guilt to get approval or control just left me? What would it be like to live my life without ever using the feeling of guilt?

 

The Game of an All-Powerful Being Write in your journal in response to this prompt: Notice that the making of drama, of theater, of fiction, is one of the great pleasures of human life. From the pettiest gossip to the most refined tragedy, all dramas come from the same exquisite impulse to feel the fun of tension, conflict, uncertainty. Imagine that an all-powerful being has freely decided to be you, in your life, exactly as it currently is. Writing from the perspective of this all-powerful being, explain what dramas and games and fictions are being played out in your life. What motivates the game? What are the pay-offs? Who are “the evil-doers,” in the drama, the adversaries in the game?

 

To fully, consciously embrace your sadistic “operating instructions” is to stop shaming your villainous sadistic aggression and instead to celebrate it. This is how you can free up the psychic energy that's currently bound up in your “operating instructions” and make room to choose new values to live by. Here's example “operating instructions” to get you started: I will guilt myself for at least three hours if I offend or disappoint anyone for any reason. Feeling supported and safe is utterly forbidden, no matter what. I must always find flaws with the people stupid enough to love me.

 

Some folks, for example, are willing to feel highly valued with money but are totally unwilling to be highly valued with love, or vice versa. Other folks are massively uncomfortable with all kinds of “being valued” sensations.

 

I was no longer able to regard my tiny bank account as a horrible sign of my personal failure mixed with how much the world hated me. Instead, it was quite obvious to me that my low funds were a deliberate, entertaining, adorable choice of my own inmost soul—the inner divine wholeness that Jung called the Self with a capital “S.” A few months into this, I started bringing in $10,000 a month rather than $2000. As within, so without. My whole world and horizon of possibility changed.

 

As it happens, the way to have profound success in altering your inner state and thereby altering your outer experience isn't through endless “positive thinking”—it's by being willing to look at the darkest, most twisted stuff in your experience and in your own heart and to feel great gratitude for it.

 

Imagine that you're a kind of cosmic masochistic slut (and I mean that in the nicest possible way—yay sluts!) who just beamed down into your life and body. She feels the heart-pounding panic of impending doom too, and she loves it. She feels the pressure of having to find a way to make ends meet again this month, and it turns her on. She feels the stretch and strain of having to prove herself worthy of support in this hard, cold world, and she trembles and moans and asks for more. Plus, let's not forget—she feels the righteous resentment of the evil rich corporatists and politicians who made this world so unbalanced—and well, there are few things more luscious in this sublunar realm than a big stinging heap of righteousness.

 

The essence of growth is to put more attention on context rather than on content.

 

We turn ourselves off because we actually just really like it in a secret, freaky way. The good news is that it's possible to get turned on about being turned off. I know that sounds weird—but you can be: Angry and turned on about it Sad and turned on about it Tired and turned on about it Defeated and turned on about it Grieving and turned on about it Disgusted and turned on about it Scared and turned on about it Self-pitying and turned on about it . . . you can be “the turned-on version” of anything. To be “turned on” about any feeling state, including feeling any variation of “turned off,” just means to be in total, unreserved approval of that state.

 

When you're in total, turned-on approval of your state, you're deciding to see that state as a way that you are “good for yourself” rather than as a way that you are “bad for yourself.”

 

I'm saying: Adopt an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude to your feeling states. In doing this, you practice being the artist of your life rather than the judge of it.

 

Practice liking that you're feeling what you're feeling. Practice liking that you like what you like to feel. I know that sounds a bit silly, but most of us habitually practice not liking that we like what we like to feel. Why not try it the other way around?

 

The thing about reaction formations is that they are reactions, and not responses to life. Genuine responsive emotions have an open, connecting, “moving” quality to them. They feel fresh and spontaneous including “dark” genuine emotions like anger and grief. Reacting, covering-something-up emotions have a hard, closed, robotic, repetitive quality to them.

 

The thing about the ego is that it needs a sense of opposition, of refusal, of rejection in order to maintain itself. It has to say: “No! That is awful! I don't like that! No, that's not me!” to something in order to define itself as separate from the undulating whole of the weird fractal hologram of life.

 

Pain becomes suffering when we take it personally, as if it reflects something uniquely meaningful (and bad) about us. And of course it does—it reflects that we're willing to take pain personally. Haha!

 

So yes, in a roundabout way, it does. The more you practice Tonglen, the more you come to experience pain and suffering as “the pain and suffering” rather than “my pain and suffering which proves that I am uniquely wrong, bad, and unworthy.”

 

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious,” our old friend Jung liked to say.

 

Your blood flows while you're asleep, doesn't it? The tides roll in and out without asking you about their timing, yes? To “make the unconscious, conscious” involves becoming personally aware of just how nonpersonal and interdependent all experience is.

 

The desire to make others wait is a desire for power. Similarly (to mention some other common patterns you may have), the desire to pick fights with your partner to get attention, the desire to troll people on social media, the desire to bad-mouth colleagues as a way of gaining leverage at work, are all sideways manifestations of a desire for power. This desire for power, this desire to have an impact on the world around you and to be significant, is an immensely normal, lovely, garden-variety human desire. The fact that you have it doesn't make you uniquely evil; it makes you just like the rest of us. 

 

If you boldly claim and revel in your previously suppressed desire for power, allowing yourself to savor the intense secret pleasure of all the times you've “accidentally” inconvenienced or upset others, you will find this doesn't morph you into a murderous fascist. Instead it gives you the opportunity to compassionately feel your connection to all us other “awful” humans out there who have the exact same desire for power, and it liberates your awareness and energy so that you can start finding energizing, gorgeous ways to make your power felt in the world rather than acting it out in sideways, resentful, passive-aggressive fashions.

 

two people being attracted to each other

 

Two of the most popular TV series in the world at the time of me writing this book, for example, are Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. Both shows feature big piles of violence, grief, pain, and horror. There are also heroines and heroes striving epically against all odds to survive and help others to survive as well. These shows are terrifying and people love them.

 

But if you're bringing a “don't like” situation to mind in order to practice giving yourself deep permission to feel hot, nasty, electric joy about it, well then, that's quite a bit different, isn't it? Because in this later scenario, you aren't wallowing in negativity; you're wallowing in hot electric bliss.

 

When I've been depressed, The Work of Byron Katie inquiry practice has helped me immensely. We humans tend to make ourselves depressed by believing bleak narratives about ourselves and other people. When you question these, often the heavy feelings tend to lift. So, definitely do that. See the Appendix for more information on The Work.

 

Also, if you're depressed I suggest that you check out EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), which involves tapping on acupressure points while saying helpful statements. You can also easily find demonstrations of this process on YouTube.

 

Finally, I suggest that you read The Mood Cure by Julia Ross and follow the protocol she recommends for your particular condition, as depression issues are often hormonal and Ross has well-researched supplement suggestions for most forms of mood problems. I've greatly benefitted from following her protocols myself.

 

Reminder: I am not a psychologist or a medical professional. That said, as another human being who has suffered trauma, I suggest plenty of regular ole' therapy, exploring bodywork and acupuncture, gathering tons of support from friends, and moving heaven and earth to get thyself to many ayahuasca ceremonies and to legal MDMA therapy sessions if you can find them. Ayahuasca is the most useful, beautiful, and rapid means I know of for addressing deep trauma (it has helped me immensely), and studies have shown that MDMA in a therapeutic context is also quite powerful for resolving trauma. I am proposing that you consider using these kinds of intense entheogenic substances only in well-held spaces with experienced healers, not just because I'm a giant hippie, but because they work.

 

The Option Method Similar to the Work but less well-known, the Option Method also involves investigating one's habitual perceptions. You can find instructions on the Option Method at www.optionmethodnetwork.com.