 Today is the final day that you are able to join my six-week live online meditation course, which is the martial meditation method. This is the culmination of over 15 years of my own personal meditation practice and nearly 10 years of coaching men in my live workshops around the world in techniques and strategies that allow you to have more presence, have more flow, get out of your head, into your body, into the present moment and, very importantly, gives you very practical tools to be able to dissolve and resolve the dreaded approach anxiety, right? So social fears, social anxieties that come up when you're in high-pressurized social situations. These are the techniques that I personally use in order to be able to stay smooth, calm, relaxed and collected under high-pressure situations, especially when I am personally interacting with new girls. And it's the same techniques which I've taught hundreds of men in my live courses. Now, finally it's available to you guys out there, but this is literally the last day that it's going to be available. That's because tomorrow the course starts and I will be there in real time helping the guys to apply the different techniques and also to have an accountability system and an interface with me day by day for the next six weeks to integrate this practice into their life and make it something that is a lifetime practice which brings joy, flow and relaxation. So if you're interested, click the link below or in the description. It will take you to a page which explains in a huge amount of detail what the course is and how it's going to benefit you and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow on the first day of class. James Marshall, signing out. So here I am in the jungles of Costa Rica in the amazing cloud forest and it's just starting to rain lightly which is nice and today I wanted to talk about the little voice that's going on inside your head right now and pretty much every waking moment of your life because if you want to get a handle on internal change true personal development in the sense that you want to alter things you want to improve your mindsets, your belief systems the way that you self-talk, your moods, all of these things this is all dependent on one key understanding not just this key understanding but this is foundational and without it it's really hard to make any real change and that simple understanding or key understanding is this your thoughts are not you so let that ruminate for a moment the narrative that's happening in your mind is not synonymous is not exactly the same and is not definitive of you as a person and this is something that all of us forget all the time because for whatever evolutionary reason we develop the ability to have an ongoing narrative with our self in our own brain so right now as I'm speaking to you there's also a little voice inside my head which sounds pretty much exactly the same as me saying stuff to me like it's raining and is my girlfriend holding the gimbal correctly and do I know what I'm even talking about and I wonder what I'm going to eat for lunch and there's all these other little bits and pieces going on in my mind especially when I'm not talking and I'm just going about my business during the day walking and thinking there's this constant narrative thread going on inside my head and of course there's reasons for this this is not a negative thing in its essence just because we're talking to ourselves doesn't mean we're crazy and it's not a negative function of our brain of course it has really positive processes and effects in the sense that we can future project we can start thinking about what's going to happen in the future we can problem solve, we can daydream, we can fantasize and really in terms of anything that's helping somebody who achieves things in life if you can't imagine it, if you can't have a vivid picture of it in your mind if you can't think about it then you can't make it real which is why the rest of the animal kingdom doesn't go around building things it just follows its instincts and it's fairly unlikely that they've got a narrative going on in their mind maybe they do just squeaking to themselves but for the most part they're just responding and reacting in pure presence and in the moment which must be nice and zen or make America great again or anything like that so the fact that we have a narrative in our mind is not negative per se but the problem comes when and this is what happens most commonly with people we associate our complete core intrinsic human being self with that voice so whatever it is that's going on in my mind whatever I'm thinking I perceive that to be the representation of me and the interesting thing about our thoughts is that this narrative that we have in our mind is always always right so whatever it is that we're thinking we always assume that it's correct 100% correct even when it's negative so we can have this narrative in our mind that's ranting at us about how amazing and awesome we are and that might be completely delusional and we may need to take some feedback from the world and change things or on the other hand it may be completely self-destructive and full of self-loathing where I'm talking to myself and I'm saying that I'm a loser I'm never going to succeed and I'm never going to get girls and all of this negative self-talk which wouldn't have any power if I perceived it to be incorrect or even partially incorrect the reason why some people are really effective in the world is that their self-talk is really positive and then their actions follow that up as well as them being able to take feedback and responses from the rest of the world and being able to adjust and often the reason why people are not successful or very unhappy or negative is because they're following a negative narrative either way they perceive it to be 100% true and this is where things like positive affirmations become problematic because if we're trying to tell ourselves that we are amazing or we're trying to tell ourselves that if we move in a certain direction or do a certain thing that it's going to have success and we keep repeating this over and over again what we're doing is we're creating a solipsistic view of the world and we're all doing that whether we're doing positive affirmations negative affirmations or we're just randomly thinking stuff we're allowing our mind to take control and to define reality for us the thought processes that we have become definitive of what we perceive reality to be and it becomes an impermeable barrier this can be really powerful and this can be really negative depending on the types of self-talk and the types of belief but in my opinion whether or not it's effective in the world or ineffective in the world it's all a trap because the thing is that some of the people who are the most successful in life are the ones who are the most self-delusional they are the most fanatical they believe what they think to such a high degree that they block out everything else and then they just move like a bulldozer forward and you see that extremists are often very effective people if someone holds on to an ideology or a thought process and commits to it 100% and it is something that also can have a real effect in the world then they can be very successful of course if I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'm a next generation alien incarnation that's come down to the world to turn us all into purple power people and I believe that stronger than anything else that may not lead me to success because the apparent reality that I live in doesn't seem to support that narrative however if I believe that hard work and focusing in on a single task to perfection and not listening to anyone who is doubting or who is a hater and I'm not going to associate with anyone that doesn't have these positive beliefs then yeah that kind of mindset can be really effective in the sense that I can get shit done but I still feel like it's problematic because what it is is a self-encapsulated viewpoint it does not allow for new information to come in and it all stems back to this problem which is perceiving that what I think is real what I think is true and only that and this of course can manifest in negative and positive incarnations but it's still very limiting if you want to grow, change and become more flexible, spontaneous and become a different kind of person then you have to be able to recognize that the voice that's talking to me right now is not me it's just a manifestation of all of the thoughts and experiences processes, genetics learning, socialization, media all sorts of things have gone into create this narrative that's going on inside my mind and it serves me in the sense that it keeps me company and I think that's probably one of the biological reasons that we have this narrative is that it's just a way to keep ourselves company to talk constantly through the process of being a human being alive on the planet because it's a mystery what it is that we're supposed to be doing here why we're here the question of what is the self is something that mystics and philosophers have grappled with since the dawn of time and no one's come up with a definitive answer yet but having this narrative in our voice allows us to talk through and try and make sense of the world around us and just like early tribes people were trying to make sense of the world around them so when they looked up at the sun they perceived that that was the golden balls of a god and that when the sun disappeared that he was angry because they were trying to work out correlations with things that are going on in the natural world this created a story and created some comfort and some sense of identity but of course it locks you into a reality which is not objectively true in the sense that unless that's the real truth is that the golden sun god's ball was like blazing in the sky and when he gets angry his ball sucks up inside him I mean maybe that's the true reality but probably not but for some tribe at some point that was something that kept them company some psychologists out there were going which tribe are you referring to James not really sure if there was a tribe but they believed all sorts of weird shit just the way that religious people of today believe all sorts of weird shit like that some guy died and then came back to life and healed people and told you not to masturbate and that was the source of truth and happiness throughout the world or any other extreme belief or any other belief the problem with all beliefs when I have them in my mind and what's true is that they do not allow for anything else to come in and intersect with that it's only when we actually have cognitive dissonance that we can grow so cognitive dissonance is when reality or some piece of evidence comes into our field of view and upsets the way that we think upsets the way that we believe and people don't like cognitive dissonance at all so that's why when you present you can present a Scientologist or a Greenpeace of Knowledge or a Creationist with the dinosaur bone and instead of taking this evidence and going hmm ok so that's carbon dated to 65 million years ago that probably means that the world wasn't created in 6000 years ago I can't need to update my beliefs how can a creator fit into this and start to adjust it what do they do they delete, distort and change the evidence and go ok the dinosaur bones will put there by God to test our faith why would he do that why would he create dinosaur bones and bury them in the ground to dig them up later so that Christians could go nope don't believe in it ah good enter the realms of heaven I mean it's absurd until it's not absurd it's not absurd to somebody who believes it many things that I believe other people would look at and go that's fucking ridiculous you're a retard so it's only when we have cognitive dissonance and we allow the dissonance to happen right when we actually accept that the voice inside a head is not correct it's a lie it's a lie that keeps us comfortable or it's a lie that keeps us downtrodden, talks down to ourselves or talks up to ourselves is positively delusional or negatively delusional in all different aspects we're all guilty of it that voice is running all the time for most people but it's only when we allow some space in between the words in between the internal narrative it's only when we start to question every single thing that we think that we step into the realm of possibility for change my very good friend John Keegan said to me recently you know my daddy always used to say beware the true believer and I think this is an important thing for you to internalize beware of the true believer inside you that wants to hold on to its way of thinking its world view and we all want to do that because to constantly have to question your world view to have to rethink everything over and over again is painful because if you do that then you're going to have to let go of assumptions you're going to have to let go of long held beliefs you're going to have to let go of your comfort zone but in my opinion that's the only choice you have if you actually want to grow and change and evolve we all see the result of what happens when people don't do this as people get much older they tend to get more and more calcified in their beliefs so during their youth they experiment with some different ideologies or ways of thinking or behaving and then over time they settle in many ways but they settle on a set of beliefs a set of thinking processes and these may be effective ones they may create wealth or they may get you laid but they won't they will create excuses they will create bitterness they will create prejudices and regardless of what the outcome is in the real world the internal result is that you're old in my opinion you become old when your body is not supple anymore and when your mind is not supple anymore the best thing about youth being young is that you are supple in mind and this is something that you can of course carry through for much longer than most people do most people become very stiff in their bodies and very stiff in their world views and mindsets as they get older they calcify in their opinions and this means that they are simply not able to change you guys if you're here on this self-development and seduction channel then obviously you want to change because you're not satisfied with the results that you're getting in your dating life the way that you're feeling about yourself your confidence, your self-esteem and therefore you're going to need to accept that you are not your thoughts especially the negative ones especially the ones that are telling you you can't do it only these types of guys can do it it requires XYZ that I don't have all that kind of stuff it's just you lying to yourself with your beliefs or you can have growth and change they do not coexist together alright so this is all well and good for me to say what do I do about this because regardless of what I tell you in this video that narrative is going to continue to roll inside your brain and tell you all sorts of things in Buddhism this is called the monkey mind the untrained mind which has essentially had free license to do whatever it wants for a long long time it has basically the idea of the monkey mind is it's a monkey going from thought to thought to thought through the jungle right and as soon as something takes its interest it jumps to the next jumps to the next and each time it perceives that this is real, this is true this is me, this is who I am with every single thought and if we took a little gif of this of James doing this then people would think I was a fucking madman which I am so if you want to be able to adjust and change the first step is to acknowledge and accept ok the narrative is not me but then what do we do what do you do, well this is where the technologies of internal change come into place things like meditation or NLP or tapping hypnosis all these different technologies which you can use to adjust yourself internally must be built on a foundation of understanding that what I am trying to shift is I am not trying to make that narrative more perfect, yes that narrative will change over time like when I think about the way I used to think about myself in the world the narrative I used to run it was very nasty, it was cynical, it was negative it was self-loathing and now mostly it's pretty cool it's like I'm thinking yeah I'm enjoying my life things are pretty good and now I've got that Stevie Wonder song stuck in my head happy birthday to you whatever is going on in my mind but still all those things are not me just more positive ways that I talk to myself and think which are yes definitely far more useful I'm not saying the way that you talk to yourself doesn't make a difference, of course it does the fact that I speak more positively to myself than I did when I was a teenager has definite correlations to the effects that I have in the world but the big shift for me came when I started to look at what was the spaces between the words the space between or underlying the narrative that's going on in my head and starting to disassociate myself from the narrative I'm not suggesting that you try to crush it destroy it, repress it in any way and trying to just clear your mind is very challenging if I say to you alright think nothing now you're thinking about not thinking yeah if I say clear your mind you're thinking about clearing your mind it's not as something you can think your way out of that's the problem so how do we get to a space where the narrative that's going on doesn't affect us so much that's where utilizing meditation is the most powerful effective and simple tool that you can use to do this because a good awareness type of a meditation insight power of now meditation what it does is it gets you to step back to an observer platform and then to step beyond the observer and beyond the observer of the observer so what that means is first we start with following my linear thought processes I'm going along on my journey come with me we'll go on the journey as I talk you can go there and it'll follow me modern technology awesome so initially we're following this linear train of thought negative positive wherever it takes us then what you start to do is you can step back in your mind's eye firstly with that intellectual understanding of okay that thought process is not me it's just something that passes through me it's a function of my brain has its purposes but for now I'm going to step back and observe what space is there around it what silence is there what vibration is there what all knowing encompassing truths that are beyond my opinions are there what possibilities are there and it's not that I would want you to be thinking all those questions it's more a sense of like going okay I see thoughts passing through my mind like clouds instead of getting on the train and following them allow them to move through they do their thing they're always going to if you learn to meditate and you do lots of it you will have these blissful moments where there is fucking silence for the first time in your life where there is not I got the moves like Jagger or I wonder if I'm going to ever be rich or all this shit going on constantly constantly inside your brain you will have blissful moments of silence which is very nice but for the most part it will continue to keep churning thoughts but using meditation awareness allows you to step back from that and to start to see the greater whole the greater possibilities of things that are out there so I'm going to wrap it up there but the main takeaway I wanted you to take from this video is not an instructional video on meditation that's coming out very soon with the release of martial meditation method coming out on the 2nd of December where I reveal all of my secrets that I learned in the ashrams of India, Shaolin temple all sorts of amazing teachers around the world where I give you the how-to exactly the processes for meditation embodiment, true awareness true power of now so that you can have a much more enjoyable life and so that you can not be so locked up in the way that you think but the main takeaway is to start to question every single fucking thing so when you have the thoughts in your mind that say things of this way negative or positive you look at the way that you're talking to yourself and you can say okay this may be true but what other possibilities are out there and this is the way that anyone who is faced up to the cognitive dissonance of seeing that okay the thing that I've held onto for so long is core belief does not serve me or only serves me in a small small area and it is the person that constantly takes on new forms of thinking new ideas questions their old intrinsic beliefs at their core on an intellectual level to put them through rigorous scientific study to check them against evidences to check them against the mindsets and the thoughts of all sorts of other people but that's not in order to just eventually come to the conclusion that yeah I was right or actually no I was wrong so I need to somehow shift and now believe 100% in this thing because beware the true believer and beware the true believer who goes from guru to guru from ideology to ideology because at the end of the day he's going to be locked inside a box that's why I'm so anti every fucking ideology that's on the planet that's why I warn men against getting involved in the MRAs because it means that you're going to hold ideologies that hate women I warn people against getting involved in ideologies that are too loving and spiritual and hippie trippy because that means that you don't get to interface with raw or powerful masculinity so all of these ideologies that people want to attach to because they give them comfort because they give them an understanding of the world, sure go ahead and do that if you want and it may make you comfortable but it won't allow you to grow almost every single ideology out there is a self-inclosed and encapsulated thinking mechanism that's very existent depends on you not questioning it because the moment that you question it then it doesn't work anymore and you have to go and pick up another ideology so the important thing is question or believe nothing certainly not me, but not right now but learn to experience the internal present actual now behind what you're saying to yourself over and over and over again and to do that use meditation, more on that coming soon James Marshall from the amazing cloud forest of Costa Rica, signing out