Years ago, my wife, Kristen was having dinner with a group of people she met at a personal development seminar. At the end of the meal, someone offered to pick up the check and treat everyone to dinner. One woman said, “Thank you so much. I have a track record for getting things for free!” Kristen’s eye turned the size of quarters. “Wow,” she thought, “Now there’s an awesome context to live inside.” Yep, that’s some effective dogma in action.
Look, I know you were born predisposed to unique perspectives and behaviors. But you may not know how you got this way:
• You aren’t like your brothers and sisters
• You see things differently than your parents
• You were born with irrational fears, and you know it
• You like chocolate, others like vanilla
• You have no idea where these propensities and preferences come from
To illustrate my point, let me give you some examples of cultural conditioning, limiting dogma, and unexamined beliefs to consider. To keep it short, I’ll refer to it all as dogma.
Cultural dogma:
• Men work and women raise the babies
• Get a job, start a family, and save for retirement
• You have to put the kid's needs above your own
• Find a good man who can take care of you
• You need to marry to validate you are a good man
Religious dogma:
• Follow the rules in the books
• God is judging you
• God will be offended if you say the wrong thing
• I have to tithe
• I have to recite incantations
• Heaven and hell exist
Sexual dogma:
• Sex is dirty
• Sex is sacred
• Sex is private
• Sex is only for married people
Atheist dogma:
• There is no God
• There is no purpose to life
• Birth, life, and death are completely random
• My actions have no impact on the greater whole
Success dogma:
• I have to get a college degree
• When I accomplish X, I can stop working
• The more I achieve, the happier I will be
• Successful people compromise their values to get ahead
• My family is successful, so I have to be
• I don’t have the same advantages as other people
Money dogma:
• Money is bad
• Money is good
• I have to save money
• I have to give to charity
• Rich people are unethical
• Poor people are lazy
• My value is determined by my bank account
• I have to make a certain amount of income each year in order to feel accomplished
Physical body dogma:
• I have to work out in order to stay healthy
• Pampering yourself is a luxury
• Others thrive on little sleep
• I have to get up early to be successful
Over time, each of us accidentally adopts a set of dogma (or beliefs) about the world. Then, we’ll fill in the gaps with guesses about what’s going on. Some of it is cultural, some gender-based, and some are familial. The origin doesn’t matter.
In the end, you can’t answer life’s fundamental questions but that doesn’t stop you from making up a story and defending it like you know the answers.
As human beings, we seem to be hard-wired to develop stories about the meaning of life, how to live, what happens when we die, what it means to be a good person, and so on.
Whatever version we adopt isn’t the “truth,” it’s dogma.
Limiting dogma is what blocks you from experiencing a quiet mind.
The Rapid Enlightenment Process is a series of contextual shifts that destroy cultural conditioning, limiting dogma and unexamined beliefs and replaces them with new enlightened dogma (Enlightened Perspectives).
In a nutshell, it moves you from survival mind to quiet mind.
There are four components of The Rapid Enlightenment Process:
1. Seeing the mind as a survival mechanism: The Drunk Monkey (Chapter 5)
2. Understanding what causes The Drunk Monkey to talk: The Hidden Motives To Survive (Chapter 6)
3. Transcending the mind’s limiting dogma: Recontextualization (Chapter 7)
4. Piercing through the veil of the denial mechanism: Muscle testing (Chapter 8)
When you recontextualize the fundamental questions about the meaning of life and your role in it, you naturally begin to create an empowering context. When you are living in an empowering context, you move out of a survival context, and the mind begins to quiet.
This is why no amount of self-help, or personal development aimed to master the mind, overcome the mind, change it, transform it, alter it, or train your mind, will ever produce a quiet mind state.
You must transcend the mind. To do that, you must eliminate its purpose for talking in the first place.
That’s what we are about to do.
In the coming chapters, I am going to take you step-by-step through each component of the Rapid Enlightenment Process, and then share proven Enlightened Perspectives that will cause your mind to go quiet.
Let’s begin.