SUFFERING Comes From "IGNORANCE"

Speaker 1: 0:01

Ladies and gentlemen, andy, here I went from depressed and suicidal to living a life of abundance and joy. If I can do it, you sure as hell can too. Let's talk about the concept that all suffering comes from confusion, and this isn't a concept that's new. This is from Buddhism, this is from Byron Katie, one of my favourite authors, and plenty of other people, and I'll give an example or an illustration that I think really typifies this. One of the coaches in my coaching program, ed, posted this in the coaching group recently. It was sort of a realisation or an understanding that he came to, and he said I had a realisation recently that makes me much more understanding and be more sympathetic to why women flake on me a lot, as I've been raising my own standards.

Speaker 1: 0:51

Over the past few months. I've been turning down a lot more women Over a dozen that I have had sex with or fought around with or just went on a date but didn't want to see again, and then even more that I just matched with online or talked with online and then unmatched. Years ago I used to feel very guilty anytime I said no to a woman, but now I'm basically desensitised to it. I unmatch and maybe I send a polite farewell message and that's it. I'll often even unmatch mid conversation if we've only barely just started talking. I still prefer to send a message and it feels a lot more polite to not just drop off without some sort of warning. But given my trend towards carrying less and less over the years, I could see myself being at some sort of point where I stop messaging and I just start quote ghosting. I don't believe that I'll do that, but I understand a little bit more the mindset behind it. I understand women who have tons more matches than I do and have had tons more sexual interest in them since basically their teenage years. Ghosting without warning. When you have that sort of insane abundance and you've done it so many times before, it's just less energy to ghost.

Speaker 1: 2:05

And then he shows off a couple of the messages that he usually sends to a woman that he's no longer interested in. And if you're interested, he just sends a polite message and he says you know, hey, I didn't want to leave things hanging or ghost you. I had a great time or I enjoyed our conversation, but I'm not sure that this is what I'm looking for right now. I hope you find what you're looking for and he sends a similar message. Even if all they've done is talk a little bit on a dating app, he'll just say, hey, I've decided I'm not really into dating anyone right now. I hope you find what you're looking for. He then shows a screenshot of some of the women that he's sent this message to, to show that he's sent this to quite a few, you know. In other words, is being quite a few women where they have a little bit of a conversation, maybe they even meet up for a date, help, maybe they even have sex. And he decides you know, I'm just not really feeling the chemistry.

Speaker 1: 2:52

So the point was he started realizing and embracing this understanding Of something that used to frustrate him a lot, because he used to be very frustrated anytime a woman would flake on him or ghost him or not want to keep talking or not want to meet up with him, and I think a lot of guys get frustrated by that. But it's a lack of understanding and it brings me back to the title of this podcast, which is all suffering is confusion, or I could also Phrase that, as all suffering is ignorance, and the word ignorance has strong connotations, but I basically mean a lack of knowledge, a lack of understanding, like you literally don't know something and then you suffer Again. This is not a concept that's new. This is very much from Buddhism and a lot of other places. But If you don't understand something like you don't, you literally don't understand and you don't have the knowledge as to why it's happening. It can be very frustrating and that's what Ed and plenty of other guys you know Ed was going through that and plenty of other guys go through the same thing with a wider women flake and plenty of women go through the similar stuff to that. Why are you guys doing this? Why do guys do this? The frustration comes from not understanding.

Speaker 1: 4:00

So it's been really beautiful to watch and you know support Ed On this journey of understanding, to watch him go from. You know, when I first met him, he was a 31 year old virgin who you know was completely feeling very hopeless about his situation. He had extreme erectile dysfunction and all sorts of stuff like that. To watch him in just two and a half years I think it might be about three years now Go through this beautiful journey of understanding and understanding himself, understanding women, understanding male female sexual dynamics, understanding relationships, understanding dating, understanding sex, understanding his own penis and All of that kind of stuff, and then to watch him to come to complete, basically blooming like a flower. He's now a coach in the coaching program, which is absolutely amazing. And so what I said to him after he had this realization, you know, and again the realization was basically oh man, I understand why women flake is because they have a lot of options. And now that I have a lot of options, yeah, sometimes I'm tempted to flake to. So what I said to him after that was man, what a beautiful realization, my friend.

Speaker 1: 5:10

When we can see that everybody else is just doing their best and when we can see the innocence in other people's actions, we no longer suffer. There's no more frustration. In other words, what I'm saying there is women. When they flake on you, they're not doing it because they're trying to piss you off or because they're bitches or anything like that. There's innocence there. Look beyond the frustration. If you're able to look beyond the frustration and understand why it's happening, and then you don't suffer anymore. It's happening because they have a billion matches.

Speaker 1: 5:40

I showed this in my tinder guide. I've shown screenshots of women's tinder profiles and how many matches they have, how many likes they get on tinder. You can do this yourself with any girls that you're dating or any girls that you have sex with, or even just girls that your friends with. Say, can you show me your tinder profile? Can I see how many matches you have, especially if you get them to pay for tinder gold so you can see how many likes they have, like how many guys like them? I've done this a couple of times now and they have like 5000 matches. When I checked image and when image and I first met, you know, when we were just casual, I did this with hers and yeah, it was like five and a half thousand or something. I had another girl that we were seeing, same thing, so several thousand likes.

Speaker 1: 6:26

And when you understand that, you can see why they struggle to reply to everybody, why they just get lost or your message just gets lost amongst literally hundreds of others and thousands of potential others. You just get lost. And they weren't trying to be mean, they weren't trying to be unkind and as someone who is a content creator, you know me. Obviously I'm talking about I understand, not replying to people's messages. I do my absolute best to reply to as many like YouTube comments as I can, as many emails as I can, but I regularly ignore emails and comments Because I'll see it and I'll go. Okay, I'm gonna reply to that, and then I just I don't, I don't have time, I don't remember, I forget about it.

Speaker 1: 7:09

In my mind it wasn't super important and that happens on a daily basis. Like at some point you're just getting way too many messages that to sit there and reply to everything would quite literally take you four or five hours a day. And I can't even imagine what it would be like to be someone with like a million YouTube subscribers or a celebrity you know. Oh my god, I can't imagine. It's like it's literally impossible. You would need a full time team of like a hundred people just reply and then that's not a reply, that's coming from you. So you know, sort of like lying, you're having your team pretend to be you.

Speaker 1: 7:43

So, when we can understand these things and look beyond the emotions and actually try and figure out okay, why are women flaking on me? Why is this happening, when you actually look behind that and understand you can't suffer anymore because you're like oh no, I understand it now and, yeah, I prefer that they message me, but at least I understand it now. So I went on to say to Ed there's a great quote from Socrates, which is everybody desires the good. And this quote from Socrates comes from a debate that he was having where he was basically saying nobody intentionally wants to do bad things. Everybody's doing what they believe to be the good in each moment, even if, to ask the outside, it seems bad, like on a very deep core level. I think we would say in our own lives we've never tried to do something bad, even when everybody else looked at our actions and they said what the fuck did you do that? That was bad, that's wrong. But to us we were like but this is what I thought was good in the moment. I was doing it because I thought that was the best thing to do in that moment. Maybe I was emotional, maybe I was scared, maybe I was a rational, whatever it might be, but I wasn't trying to fuck up. I was trying to do my best and you can kind of look at Anyone that might flake on you. You know if that's a woman, if they flake on you or they ghost you, they weren't trying to do something to bother you or to be bad or anything like that. They were trying to do their best.

Speaker 1: 9:05

And there's a similar quote from Plato that I really like, which is be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle, and just thinking about that brings me a lot of peace. And it's not so much. Maybe the word harder is like you know. I would reframe that to you know, be kind for everyone you meet is fighting their own battle. Maybe I'd phrase it like that. It's not about harder battle or easier battle or comparisons, but the point stands there, right, that, like everybody else is going through their own shit and most people are trying to. Everybody's trying to do the best they can. Everybody's trying to do good.

Speaker 1: 9:42

To bring it back to the title I went on to say to Ed, buddhism has a saying that all suffering is due to ignorance, or you could phrase it as you know, just not understanding, a lack of understanding, which is exactly what ignorance is, as in, when we don't understand why something is happening, we suffer. And Byron Katie has a similar saying all suffering is due to confusion. But as soon as we understand a situation, like we understand why it's happening or why the other person is doing what they're doing, or even ourselves, we understand why we're feeling a certain way, as soon as we figure out the why, or maybe why reality is the way that it is, it's no longer possible to suffer because you go I know where that's happening. It's like you have the answer, or a possible answer doesn't even need to be the answer, just can be a possible answer, and that can make you feel a lot better.

Speaker 1: 10:30

There's a really great story that Byron Katie tells quite a bit in her content that I really love, and I'll read it out, or I tell the story. So Byron Katie tells a story that she was on a hike in the desert and she came face to face with a rattlesnake which struck fear into her heart so deep that she did not look back at the snake as she started imagining all these scenes of, you know, a lonely death in the middle of this occluded desert with no one there to hear her cries for help, no one to come and help her. And then she somehow mustered up the courage to take another look at this snake, this terrifying snake, and at that point she realized that the snake was actually a rope. She started laughing to herself, you know, completely relieved, and she just looked at the rope and took it all in. And now she knew she was safe. She knew that she could stand there looking at that rope for the next thousand years and she would never fear it again. The entire world could come across that supposed snake and they could scream and scare themselves to death, but she would never again be able to fear that snake, no matter what happened. There's nothing that ever could make her fear that supposed snake again, because she knows it's a rope.

Speaker 1: 11:42

And this is what happens with all of our fears or our emotions. You know what I mean. They're often not even real, they're just an illusion. It's a framing, it's a worry, it's us being sort of caught up in the emotionality of it, and frustration with ghosting or flaking is like a snake. It's like we sit there and talk about what it might mean.

Speaker 1: 12:04

You know, the reason we get so frustrated by a flake is because we had an expectation that they were going to show up and we're angry about the fact that our expectation didn't come to fruition. We talk about what it might mean. You know what if this keeps happening? What if I keep getting disrespected? We have fears of. You know what if all of these flakes really get me down and I just can't keep going anymore and I never make it and I never have a sex life and I never get a girlfriend and I'm never happy. We tell all of these stories and we're getting ourselves all concerned over this snake. That's actually really a rope. And so when we can look beyond the snake and see the rope in other words, when we can look beyond the flake and not get too frustrated by it and look at it in terms of okay, this woman just had her own reasons for why she stopped responding. We don't suffer anymore and then we're free and calm to start taking action. And that action might be we improve ourselves so that more people say yes to us and we have less flakes over time. That action might be going and talking to more women so that you're not that bothered by the ones that flake on you.

Speaker 1: 13:07

Because if you're seeing multiple women or if you're just looking for one woman, if you have a girlfriend, it's really hard to give a shit about women that are flaking on you. Same thing as if you throw yourself into your own self-improvement as self-love and friends and all of that kind of stuff. It's kind of hard to give a shit about getting flaked on if your life is awesome. The only way that you would ever give a shit about it is if you're not happy with your life or if you're telling a story that you need this. You know you need this woman to respond. You need this woman to have sex with you, you need this person to go on a date with you, and so suffering really is ignorance or confusion. It's a lack of understanding.

Speaker 1: 13:46

I hope this podcast was helpful. If it wasn't helpful, hey, that's beautiful too. If you're interested in my new video course, play to Win, where I talk about these kind of concepts a lot more the link is down below. I also have coaching. Would love to have you sign up for the coaching program. We'll get in there. We'll change your life. We'll make beautiful things happen for you. Now's a beautiful time too. We're coming up towards the end of the year. Imagine how amazing it would feel to sign it right now, and then, by the time the new year kicks in and you make some new year's resolutions, it's like motherfucker. Everybody else is starting to think about getting there. 2024 together. I'm already freaking eight weeks into my 2024. I've already started getting myself improvement. I'm already kicking ass. So think about how amazing that'll be, the momentum that you can carry forward with you till the next year. Don't wait till next year to get started. Now's the most beautiful time. Link in the description below to the coaching program. As always, leaders and gentlemen go out there and crush those goals.