Something More Esoteric

In today's episode, I want to get a little more woo-woo and talk about Reality Transurfing.

Key topics:

✔️ Be careful of pendulums and energy vampires. Constantly thinking about negative outcomes will suck any positivity out of you. And that's not the goal!
✔️ Are you giving excessive attention or importance to certain things in your life?
✔️ Preparing for difficult economic times does not mean that you have to assume the entire world is going to hell in a handbasket. There is a balance between toxic positivity and Chicken Little. 


Links I discuss in this episode:

https://www.youtube.com/c/BrianScott1111

https://chengeer.medium.com/transurfing-of-reality-in-a-nutshell-a73b162fff85


Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/

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Transcript

0:15

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. And now, here's your host, Sara Causey. Hello, Hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I'm going to get a little bit more esoteric and philosophical than I usually do. That being said, if that's not your bag, I don't want you thinking that I'm not going to discuss anything tactical or practical. And so you should just turn this episode off, if you don't want to go down the rabbit hole a little bit. That's certainly not the case. I've spoken before about my decision to employ strategic quitting and radical acceptance. In regards to my real estate expansion quest. All of the markets seem to be in such a weird state of flux, the stock market, the housing market, the job market, etc. So I do feel like it was a matter of an unanswered prayer. And I definitely feel that I'm going to achieve my goal. It's just not going to happen in the immediate short term, I need to ride out this wave and try to figure out exactly where things are going and be strategic and insightful. Now, it's one thing to do something in theory, but in practice, it can feel really different, right. So it's one thing to verbally say, I'm going to strategically quit and put this quest on the shelf for now, as I wait for better conditions to appear as I wait for a bargain to show up as I wait for the right place at the right time. So it'd be a great fit for the humans and the animals in my life to show up. I'll just wait. And I will radically accept the set of circumstances. It's one thing to say that verbally it's another thing to actually feel it and embrace it emotionally. So I was a bit worried about what my emotional state might turn into, after I had this reality check of okay, this goal is not happening. Interest rates are only continuing to climb. settlers in this part of the Midwest still have their heads up their rear ends about what they think they should charge for these junk houses like, yeah, I might go into a depressive episode. I might feel really sad for quite a while about this, like, how is this going to hit me emotionally. I really like Brian Scott's YouTube channel. If you have never checked it out or never heard of it, I will drop a link to it so that you can find it for yourself. And he has a number of videos like explanatory videos as well as guided meditations that center around this concept of reality Tran surfing, so I had heard the notion before, but I didn't really understand it. So anytime that I would be on Brian's channel, if something popped up about reality, Tran surfing, I was like, I don't really understand it. So I kind of always kept it at arm's length. But after I made the decision to do the strategic quitting, and the radical acceptance, these videos kept popping up in my YouTube suggestions. And it was almost like the universe was poking me in the ribs like, Hey, we're giving you a hint, this is something that might help you. Maybe you should check it out. And I thought one night I thought okay, I'll take the bait. I will go down this rabbit hole, I will explore this possibility and just learn more about this concept. The reason why I wanted to bring all of this up in today's episode is because we are living in a time of uncertainty, particularly economic uncertainty and political uncertainty. As I sit here recording this episode, there are a whole host of possibilities brewing up in the world right now. Some of them good, although it seems like not many, most of them seem to be ranging from bad to worse. And it's important to keep your mind right, whether you are spiritual and you have a belief in a higher power that you pray to and you get guidance from or whether you don't, you have to try to keep your mind, body and spirit in good shape. And in good health Come what may, whether we have a mild recession and all of us who've been bearish and kind of about it all or proven wrong, which I hope that we are. Or if we go into a more significant economic downturn, we have another great recession where for two or three years things are just tough. And you have to catch as catch can and do what you need to survive whatever the case may be. You need to remain as healthy as you possibly can. And when we from a mindset perspective, when we hinge our happiness on outside factors that we don't control, we really set up a recipe for disaster. That's one of The things that I have learned time and again, in therapeutic settings. If you view things with an internal locus of control, and you say, You know what, I'm I cannot control the world, I can't control geopolitics, I can't control the power brokers. I can't control what the weather is going to do tomorrow, but I can do the best that I can. For myself and my family, I can control myself and my own reactions. That is something that I can manage, the more that you break things down into, here's what I can control, and what I can manage and what I can't, the easier your reality becomes not to say that life itself becomes easy. But you're less likely to go down a slippery slope towards anxiety and depression Been there done that my hand is in the air. It's not a fun experience. And in times like these when we're feeling the pinch, and we don't know what the future holds, it can be really easy to go down into the abyss, I decided to go down this rabbit hole of reality Tran surfing, and at least keep an open mind about it. Take a chance learn learn something new, maybe I agree with it, maybe I don't know harm and learning some new concepts and new ideas. But it was attractive to me because I had this lingering question of what next? Or what now, I've tabled my real estate expansion search. And I'm trying to get my feet underneath me about how can I better manage the property that I have now to accommodate my animals? What does the next step look like when you've been? You've been like Don Quixote, you've been out fighting the windmills and you've been on this quest? And then reality has slapped you down and said, No, not today. It's not happening. Where do you go from there? How do you pick up the pieces and move forward? And for myself, specifically, I really wanted to answer this question of how do I move forward without sliding down into the abyss without having a full blown depression, without feeling so much disappointment that it spirals out of control? I don't really want to go through an existential depression or a dark night of the soul right now, I want to be able to figure out how to lick my wounds and say, All right, not right now is not a permanent rejection from the universe. It's just temporary. So what do I do now. And I went down this rabbit hole of reality, Tran surfing, and it has helped me a lot, not only with kind of being a bomb around my real estate quest, and radical acceptance, but also in helping me to cope with what all is going on in all of these markets right now. And I'll pull the curtain back further than I usually do. And tell you last year 2021, I was incredibly busy. Things were rocking and rolling, I turned down way more opportunities than I said yes to. And frankly, it was not difficult. Now, I still do that. I want to be really clear here. I practice what I preach, I'm not gonna get on the airwaves and say, You need to be really thoughtful about who you take on as a client with what goals for what length of time, et cetera. And then I don't do that. Or, Oh, well, I'm willing to fire a client if they're absolutely terrible and abusive. But then I don't do that. No, I still turned down more opportunities than I say yes to that being said in here in 2022, the amount of RFIs RFQs. And people that want to bring on a project manager or that want to hire a freelancer, it seems like even that market has slowed down and has clamped down in comparison to what it was like in 2021. So business owners and freelancers, also, in their own ways, benefited from the great resignation. People needed help, and they were willing to pay almost whatever price that you put on it. And whatever rules of engagement that you set forth. If you said ABCD, and for this amount of money or I walk, they will either say yes or no. And it was pretty cut and dry. Things have gotten hairier here in 2022 is we're in this recession as people are trying to figure out what in the world is going on with the economy. It's a different set of circumstances. Now, I'm not on Pandora. I'm not gonna get on social media and be like, everything's great. Everyone's in wonderful shape. Sunshine, roses and lollipops. No, I'm going to be real with you guys. And I'm telling you that the script has flipped and we're not in 2021 anymore. Going all the way back to January, the early part of January of this year. It was like something shifted. Now I don't know how to sit here and explain it to you logically, chapter and verse. I'm just telling you, it was a shift that was palpable. You could feel it. To use a phrase from the youngsters, the vibes were off. Again. I don't know exactly how to explain it to you rationally. I could just feel it in my gut instinct. And in my spirit, it was like something has changed. So last year, q4 was crazy. I mean, even during the weeks that are typically Did Thanksgiving Christmas, that kind of dead week that typically happens between Christmas and New Year's I was busy. I had work to do. We were shaking and bacon and it was just nuts. January 1, it was like a door slam shut. I don't know how to explain it. I'm just telling you that it happened. Now, of course, you do have decision makers that use up their PTO in January, you have some executives that leave during the month of December, and they don't show back up until the middle part of January or the early part of February, because they're the power brokers and they get to do that. But it was like, Okay, I understand that there's a holiday slowdown, typically. But this feels different. I don't know how to explain it. It just felt different. It did not feel like the typical holiday slowdown, or the typical January doldrums after people realize home, dammit, Christmas is over, we're back in the long haul. There's not a lot of public holidays. It just felt different. And so because of the combination of things moving about as slow as molasses, combined with the fact that to me, it felt like the vibes were off. And I didn't really know why I started to slow things down in both the economy of my business and personal finances because I thought, Okay, well, this could just be a temporary slowdown, or it could be a bad omen of things yet to come. And I personally want to be prepared either way. And I think that that is I'm going to opine a little bit here. I guess. I think that is a skill from yesterday here. It shouldn't be. But it seems to be a skill from yesteryear, that people don't want to do anymore. They don't want to read the tea leaves and say, Oh, things could get slow or things could get difficult. I need to clamp down and make sacrifices. And the minute that you get on the airwaves, and you do anything other than pandering to people and saying it's all going to be okay, keep doing what you want. FOMO YOLO don't save anything. Just keep going keep spending that money keep racking up that credit card debt, the algorithms punish you and it's like how dare you give somebody a truth bomb? What on earth are you thinking? So for me in looking at circumstances, I'm like, No, something. Something's weird here. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark and I, I want to plan and prepare accordingly. So for me, this entire year has been slower for sure than last year, not dead. It hasn't been a graveyard. It hasn't been like sound the alarm? Everything's terrible. No, it's just been slower. And based on what I'm seeing out in the job market with the layoffs and the hiring freezes, and the rescinded offers, then we have all of this information about zombie companies, all these places that have never made a profit. They're being propped up on debt and VC money. It's like things could get rotten are in the state of Denmark. And I just think it's wise to plan ahead and to have some kind of means of coping. And for me, reality, Tran surfing is something that I think we can find helpful. Again, it's not it's not the same messaging is like save up all your money, start hoarding food, go to the cave and assume we're about to have World War Z. I don't think that that's a healthy strategy either. I mean, if you're constantly looking over your shoulder expecting that everyone and everything around you is evil. That's a pretty sad and disappointing way to live. And on that note, there is a concept in reality Tran surfing that Vadim Zealand refers to as pendulums. And you can think of a pendulum as being like an energy vampire, a psychic vampire, anything that siphons your energy, so that it can give itself strength and power. It can be beliefs, it can be actual people, it can be groups of people, some pendulums operate on the thesis of we're good and very bad. Or we we know the truth about the world, the whole world is evil, the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket. And the more that you focus on that, and you give attention to it, the more it starts to show up in your world. I'm sure you've heard the phrase before what you focus on expands, your thoughts become things live, you sit around, and you say the world is hell. We're all going to hell, World War Z zombies, really your brains, you're going to find more and more reasons to feel terrible, you're going to find more and more reasons to get paranoid and hyper vigilant. The zombies are coming to eat your brain. And so according to Zeeland, one of the things that you can do to get rid of a pendulum in your life if it's controlling you with fear, guilt, false importance, etc. One of the ways that you get rid of it is you stop giving it your attention. Because the more that you're giving it, anger, fear, rage, whatever emotion it is, the more that you are giving it that the more you're feeding it. So then just like a pendulum, imagine like a metronome More a pendulum and o'clock, the more energy that you give it, the harder it's going to swing, the more momentum you're giving it. And so the the more difficult it's going to be to purge that pendulum out of your life, that negative way of thinking, the more energy that you're giving it over and over and day after day after day, month, after month after month. So it's important to identify that it's there and then stop giving it your focus. To me, this is not about saying sunshine, lollipops and roses, there is no recession, there is no problem in the stock market, nobody's getting laid off. It's not about denialism. It's about saying, I'm not going to make the entire focus of my life, what's going on in these markets, I'm not going to make the entire focus of my life paranoia. And assuming that zombies or marauders are going to show up and try to murder me in the night. There's another reality Tran surfing concept that I want to highlight here. And that is called excessive potential. When I read about that, it was just like those old VA commercials here with the person bonks himself on the headset, could have had a VA, I was like, Okay, well, things are suddenly becoming really clear that had been murky for me before. Excessive potential could also be defined as you giving too much attention to something, or you making something way too important, creating this life or death dichotomy around something. If this doesn't happen, the world is going to explode. If this doesn't show up for me in the next six months, I'm just going to jump off a bridge. I mean, it's like you taking something that's not that important in the long run and trying to make it important. It's like you telling the universe this is life or death, when really it's not. And then in an effort to create equilibrium, the universe responds back to you by saying, I'm not going to engage with this, you're telling me that if you don't do this real estate expansion within the next X amount of time, the entire world is going to explode. I know that's complete BS. So I'm not going to play this game with you. Once I started to realize how much excess potential that I had put into my real estate class, I was like, no wonder, no wonder everything felt like an uphill battle. No wonder I felt like Don Quixote fighting the windmills, I had created all of this excessive attention and excessive importance, and the universe was slapping me back down to reality, and putting some equilibrium back into the situation. Now we can do the same thing in our life, we can do the same thing with over attention and hyper vigilance, I'm going to watch the stock ticker. Every second, I'm going to go to websites about layoffs and read every layoff that's ever happened in the whole world all the time. I'm going to listen to gloom and doom News, I'm going to listen to people that are telling me that society is going to collapse within the next few days. And I need to be prepared to live in the woods and kill deer and eat moss and tree bark and stuff. You can put excessive potential on just about anything, and create a scenario where either the thing that you fear comes upon you or the universe slaps you back down to get you into a place of reality and says no, we need to restore some balance, we need to restore some equilibrium and you need to quit focusing on this so much. There is a really helpful article on medium.com I will drop a link to it so that you can find it for yourself. And it's titled Tran surfing of reality in a nutshell. And it is a great summary. The books are dense, and they can be overwhelming at times. So if you just want to get a bird's eye view of what reality Tran surfing is, this article is very helpful. Now, I'm not going to sit here and blow smoke, I'm not telling you that this is like going to a supermarket and putting things into your shopping cart, and then going to the checkout and getting everything that you want out of life exactly when and how you want it. That is not what I'm telling you. What I am telling you is this can be potentially helpful to you as you're trying to navigate weird uncertain times. I don't want to see anybody go down a rabbit hole of extreme sadness, high anxiety, depression, dark night of the soul. Being overly worried about everything all the time, being like Chicken Little we're all gonna die. Zombies are coming for me. Living in a spirit of fear sucks. And it seems to invite more spirits of fear to join it. You know, I had a philosophical conversation one day with a friend of mine. And he was telling me about how he had temporarily just kind of going through some stuff in his life and he needed to bunk up temporarily with a couple of friends. And he only lived with them for about a month. And then he was able to get back on his feet financially given the apartment and all that and he said you know unbeknownst to me when I moved in with them, and they took me in for this period of time. If they were not in a good place in their marriage at all, and they were fighting all the time, but they would try to hide it from me, they didn't want to have marital arguments in front of me. But whenever I would walk into the room, you could cut the tension with a knife. So even though I never heard any of their arguments, they were always very careful not to say anything in front of me or whenever I was within earshot, I could feel it. And he described it as a spirit of contention. It was like a spirit of contention had descended upon their house. And it was everywhere, whenever he would go be out, you know, like looking for a job looking for apartments, all that whenever he would get back to their place. It was like, as soon as you open the door, you walked in, and the tension would hit you right across the face. He didn't even like being in the environment, because of all of the angst and anxiety and tension that he felt in that household. So those spirits can descend upon us now, whether you want to believe they're literal spirits, or you don't you get what I'm saying. We're living in a household of constant fear, paranoia, anxiety, the world is ending. That's not a great state to be in. And I don't think it's healthy either. I disagree with some of the predictions that Dave Ramsey has been making lately. But I do agree with his thesis that if you panic by if you are making decisions, from a place of panic and abject terror, they're typically not good decisions, you are typically going to wind up doing something that you regret later, if you do it from a spirit of fear that I 100% agree with. Now, I'm getting my boilerplate here. I'm not an economist, financial planner, advisor, lawyer, genius, billionaire, philanthropist, Playboy, I'm none of that. And this is not meant to be advice of any kind. I'm just giving you some opinions for your entertainment only. That's all that I'm doing here. In my opinion, living in a spirit of fear, not a great way to live making decisions from a place of fear, and panic and paranoia. Also not great. And I think that if we get to a place economically where people are panic buying and they're just throwing things in the cart, I mean, it's like Black Friday, you if you've ever seen those videos of people all fighting over like Tickle Me Elmo dolls or TVs that are on sale. It's like Lord of the Flies, people revert back to the law of the jungle, and it's just crazy. And there's people fighting like lions and tigers taking down the antelope. I don't want to be in the middle of that. I don't want you to be in the middle of it. And I don't want you to turn your household into Lord of the Flies, dog eat dog. Everyone hates everyone and we're going to live out in the woods. I don't I don't want that spirit of fear to come upon you. So check, reality Tran surfing out for yourself. It might help. You might say, You know what, I have some pendulums in my life that I would like to extinguish. I've gotten into some us versus them the whole world's going to hell thinking that I could probably do without who knows it might be helpful. Again, not advice, just my opinion. And you can check it out if you would like to. I'll drop some links and hopefully this will help be well stay safe. And I'll see you in the next episode. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you haven't already, please take a quick second to subscribe to this podcast and share it with your friends. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.