Will you elaborate a little on your journey with Ascended Mogul so far?
How many hours have you listened? What have been your most noticeable change that you have accompanied by your listening time? How long will you continue to listen to AM?
What is your listening schedule?
What version of Ascended Mogul are you listening to?
Thank you for sharing your insights with the community, you’ve made a very inspiring journal so far.
That was a very enlightening video. Wow. That just hit on a whole bunch of themes that have been running through my head lately. It also made me realize this journey of mine with AM should be about becoming the best version of myself, not trying to become an entirely different person out of that shame. The funny part is that I know this on an intellectual level, self love, vulnerability, letting go of shame. But every time I tried to enforce it my mind said “no” and I listened. The closer I’ve always gotten to myself, the more fear it triggered and consequently caused me to put up the walls again. Self love is such a simple concept, but is by no means easy if you’ve spent a lifetime telling yourself you aren’t worthy of it. I know where I have to really focus now and I’ll use my discomfort as a barometer for how much closer I am to getting to where I really need to be. Thanks for sharing this.
I quite like this idea. I am always weighed down by the idea of making full songs, finishing, structure. It would be nice to create something more abstact, shorter, and didn’t need to be anything except pure expression.
Of course! Happy to do so
Amount of hours I really couldn’t say but it’s a lot. I’ve been on AM for about 6 months now. Most noticeable changes would be confidence and the drive to follow my own path instead of following what everyone else is doing. It’s very abstract and from the outside looking in from other people it probably doesn’t look like my life is all that different. But internally I feel stronger and I’m not as afraid of the world. I treat myself a lot better, I no longer tell myself I deserve crappy circumstances or it’s all I get in life. That was a massive change for me. I’m going to keep continuing to listen to AM until I can confidently say I’ve achieved the goals of the subliminal. Where I can do and be whatever I want without that restriction that’s always weighed me down in life. And I can fully be myself in this world without shame or fear.
My listening schedule isn’t always consistent. I listen during the day and depending on the demands of my job I get between 3-6 hours during my time at work. I’ll come home and either play masked on my phone or on the speakers in my room if I feel I didn’t get enough exposure. I don’t listen at night, I found listening at night disrupted my sleep too much. On the weekends I can get about 8+ hours per day depending if I’m staying in working on my music or not.
It’s v2. I’ve never tried the experimental version so I can’t comment on that one.
You’re welcome, I’m glad to share my journey here. It’s my hope that I can detail growth enough so other people who have been in similar circumstances as me can have hope for change and live a better life.
Thank you for those insights.
Did the experimental got good results from other users that you know of? Can’t seem to find much information of this around the forum. What is even the difference between the v2 and the New Dawn.
Keep moving forward. 
I may be out of line here, if so just ignore or tell me to f off.
But while your journal has a TON of deep introspective insights and enlightening realizations, I can’t help to notice they ALL slant toward the pessimistic/negative/problems to fix.
Would it be crazy to simply, at the end of everyday, look for just one POSITIVE behavior/action/change that occurred that could possibly be evidence of your subconscious accepting the subs suggestions?
RAS is a powerful thing, at some point we have to start consciously directing it.
You’re referring to the brain’s reticular activating system?
Unfortunately that’s because that’s all my life has been filled with. I used to be suicidal. I’m not anymore. To me that’s a positive, but to other people I can seem “still negative”. It’s just a consequence of how I grew up and the mental states I resided in. I’m still making that transition. I wish I could go faster or just jump there, but I’ve failed that many times and it only made me feel worse.
It’s a valid point you bring up and I don’t hate the idea. What I would be worried about is this becoming another “should” for me. And what I mean by that is an obligation I fail to fulfill and then feel worse about, whereas if I just left it out it wouldn’t burden me as much. Effectively doing the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do. Maybe once a week would be more doable, possibly once a month. But I know once a day would just be stressful. I might be in the minority here but I’ve often had positive thinking backfire on me hard, then it doesn’t work as intended, then it feels like I did something wrong vs realizing it’s a very one sided approach that doesn’t take into consideration the complexity of the human mind.
Notes for myself.
Being stronger and confident is a good goal, but don’t override the other positive traits like empathy and compassion. They can and should both exist at the same time. Right now I still have trouble with being assertive around people. But that’s assertiveness, not agression and being tough. The goal isn’t to be less empathetic, it’s to strengthen myself so nobody can take advantage of that.
Kicking myself right now for this mistake I’ve been making for a long time now when it comes to my music. I’ve always been careful about the instrument levels in my mix. Trying to get drums to punch through while not drowning them out. Basically being too worried about setting things at a bad level. But that led me to obsess over every small change and take way too long. So I’ve been working on this one track of mine and I swear I’ve done at least 20 different renders of the same mix with minor variations in levels. But I was never happy with any of them. And I’ve sunk at least 60 hours into it at this point, just sitting there all obsessive trying to get the “right” balance. Well after being utterly burned out tonight I just tried setting it as fast as I could and going with my gut. In less than 5 minutes I achieved what I was trying to do for the past week. Lesson learned, trust my own intuition and decisions and stop second guessing myself.
I don’t know why it’s so damn hard to do, I’ve always struggled with this. Even in high school, I’d study for tests for hours and hours and I just didn’t have faith I could recall that information. I think it goes deeper than just music. This must be a fear of making the wrong decisions or being wrong. So it’s not that I strive for some standard, but rather it’s an avoidance of perceived pain.
Consequently this probably reflects on my attitude towards subliminal usage. Being light on the taking action bit, always thinking there’s something more to heal or figure out before I can get going vs trusting myself. I guess that’s why action is so important, that’s the only time you’re not thinking about what you’re doing and you’re just doing it. You don’t have time to overthink or debate the best way. But ugh, when I think of living my life that way I get nausea. It just feels like flying blind and going right into danger. At the same time what I’ve been doing has created a ruminating hellscape where I don’t advance… Both suck, but one of them will improve my life.
Need all the courage I can muster to face all these fears and head on and just start doing things vs waiting until I’m ready to do them.
Yes, me too.
And what makes it even more ironic is that, 9 times out of 10, you’re probably not even competing with anything external, it’s just your own fear-driven standards.
It’s not that there won’t be any barriers once you actually take action, it’s that they’re just as likely to be in some area that you weren’t even thinking about. Like with putting out music, marketing and legal contract knowledge could sometimes end up being more of the issue than the actual perfection of your craft.
On the flip-side, when you get out there, you’re going to discover that you’re more confident than you ever realized. Actual people are puny compared to the monsters you’ve fought inside your own head.
Experimenting with less hours or rather broken up in the day more. I think gaps in the day are just as important as at night. Since I was sick the past week I didn’t listen at all. I knew if I did I’d just get sick again. So I took a break and I feel more clear. Best way to describe it, it feels like all the buzzing in my head has calmed down.
I think there is such a thing as oversaturation for me when it comes to subs. There’s a sweet spot where I have just enough to push me and take action without completely throwing me off.
It’s hard knowing when to pull back vs having it be reconciliation. But I think the fear of not getting enough exposure and overdoing it might be worse than getting less exposure. Wish there was a definitive answer for this stuff, I’m incredibly bad at listening to my body and giving myself needed rest. I plunge headfirst into stuff if I think it’ll release me from unideal circumstances but I’ll overdo it.
A spiritual bypass or spiritual bypassing is a “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks”.
Me for a lot of my life. I’m trying to undo it. I really dropped the ball as far as providing support and non-judgemental awareness for my own emotional needs. No book, subliminal, therapist, girlfriend, can do that for me. I have to.
I think with these subs I was stacking the hours in hopes I could escape from that part of my self. But if these subs are based on questions, are probing me to answer those questions, and I’m just digging my head in the sand and hoping just filling my head with questions will move me forward, then it makes sense why I got stuck.
Trying to get better at creating a space inside myself where there are no “wrong” emotions or thoughts or beliefs. They just are and they exist and the only thing I should be doing is providing understanding and work with those to improve upon my own well being. But holy shit is that hard after a lifetime of doing the complete opposite
I had a tendency at certain points in my life to be a bit extreme (probably everyone has such a tendency at some point, i don’t know). I hadn’t heard the exact term ‘spiritual bypass’ before, but, from about ages 19 or 20 to 24, I became a bit obsessed with the idea that I had done exactly this. My reaction at the time was to try to cut out any and all ‘spiritual practices’ from my life and to ‘face reality’ that I’d been ‘hiding from my whole life’. From your description, I think you’re approaching it in a more balanced and realistic way than I did at that time. For example, I decided to completely stop anything that seemed like spiritual practice. (At 24, I sort of re-entered the ‘mysticism/spiritual practice’ area. Started learning/practicing qigong and taijiquan, among other things, and expanded from there. Gradually returned to meditation.)
I have always been fairly hard on myself too. Always looking for ‘what went wrong’. Desperately trying to fix it and to be or feel better. This is somewhat less desperate now, but that might just be because it’s camouflaged under the activity and concerns of a (fairly) stable, if imperfect, home and family life.
Like it or not, so much of this stuff is triggered by interpersonal conditions and cues (and our subjective sensations of them). To be honest, the fact that it is so feeling-driven makes me a bit skeptical of it. (Though, again, that’s probably only because I have the luxury of skepticism since it’s not turning my life completely upside down at the moment.)
At certain points in the last 20 years, I found myself dealing with more direct interpersonal attacks than I’d ever dealt with previously (having avoided such due to my generally evasive, retiring, and withdrawing interpersonal style). That was highly unpleasant, but, interestingly, it also drove me to realize that I didn’t believe that I deserved that. I looked at myself and felt, ‘give me a fucking break, I’m not a bad guy.’ That may not be on par with the Buddha’s awakening, but it has represented a real shift for me.
What my meditation and spiritual practice has accomplished has been to (occasionally) give me a glimpse of vast UNKNOWINGNESS. When I contextualize my personality, my choices, and my experiences against the backdrop of THAT, everything is reframed. Against that backdrop, beating myself up or being beaten up by someone else, seems kind of weird. I still do it out of habit, but I think my heart’s just not in it as much. Just seems a bit small and unimportant. On the other hand, when I completely forget about that vastness, then the self-recrimination or desperate search does not seem small at all. So… that means whatever that means.
Either way, whether I’m currently experiencing myself at the scale of an ant in the Grand Canyon, or as a monstrous giant oaf trying not to damage delicate porcelain, either way, I am still living this life, and working on these life projects.
anyway, just some random sharing.
Always appreciate your posts man, thanks.
That skepticism can turn into full blown denial for me. I find it very easy to sweep things under the rug. That intellectual process that thinks it can just override emotions somehow if it was all reframed.
I guess that’s what got me into this mess. Having a false perspective of how much control I really have over my inner self.
The intellectualizing of emotions needs to stop for me. It puts them at arms length and not only do I not have control, they are never processed. So it’s one thing to understand on an intellectual level how I hold the belief “I’m not good enough”, but it’s another to sit with that and let that emotion go about it’s intended path so I can release it.
I’ve noticed when I do this my immediate thoughts were that I’m not being productive and I’m feeling sorry for myself. Did I learn emotional management as a child? I don’t think so. It’s kind of funny how for most of my life it seemed like I was knee deep in emotions, but the truth is a lot of it was incredibly numb and avoidant. I guess what I really internalized was “my emotions don’t matter”.
I’ve been wanting to “fix” everything. My behaviors, attitudes, bad habits ,etc. Mentally burning myself out, trying to figure out how. to push all this self growth along. But it’s obvious now where the roots are and I’ve basically been chopping away at the top layer and getting nowhere because I wasn’t going deep enough. And the level of depth I need is beyond words, it’s experiencing. It can’t be intellectualized. And I find myself wanting to “do something” or figure it out vs letting my mind do what it needs to do without interference.
Been having some small insights lately about introverted Feeling. While it was always a relief to read MBTI stuff and have such an accurate description of my process, I’ve always had trouble seeing the practical value and applications of introverted Feeling as a dominant function. A lot of the descriptions make it sound like you’re supposed to be some kind of knight or something, going around the world striving for your ideals. Inspiring but not practical or applicable enough for me.
Recently, I feel like I’m able to see it a little more clearly. I’m suspecting that, apart from the usual morality and ideals stuff that tends to be described with introverted Feeling, and viewing it more on a purely cognitive level, introverted Feeling is about an ability (and a willingness) to access the various parts of your own and others’ ‘internal process’. I think that it’s so much second nature that we may not even realize we’re doing anything particularly noteworthy.
I think that introverted Feeling orients you to grasp the internal processes and sensations that are contributing to your decisions and experiences. It also gives you a good foundation for accurately estimating the personal logic and subjective processes beneath someone else’s behaviors and decisions.
For better and for worse, it seems to add a whole lot of nuance to our answers to the question of ‘Who am I?’ (or of ‘Who are you?’ when we’re focused on others).
Introverted Feeling is indeed a head scratcher and I often feel it’s horribly represented online or within MBTI communities. If you’ve read any of Jung’s analysis on Introverted Feeling I think he definitely understands. What I like about his interpretation is he understands it from a human perspective, so none of that crazy idealist/crusader type stuff. Just a human being with flaws and gifts. God knows I’ve met my fair share of INFP’s online that base their worth on that archetype. It’s incredibly damaging.
But anyway, thanks for sharing. I’ve had similar insights myself on the nature of introverted feeling so it’s good to hear someone else had a similar perspective on how it all works.
I haven’t seen Jung’s descriptions of Introverted Feeling. I remember looking for it briefly once upon a time, but I did not find it. I did find extensive writings on Introverted Intuition (his own dominant function). I’m going to go back and look again. I remember that his book Psychological Types was quite big, and I didn’t read it cover to cover. Just scanned through it. That should be enlightening.
The way out is through. Didn’t want to accept that for the longest time and I was always trying to find a better way. The other day as I was falling asleep I just wanted the pain to stop. I wanted to run. But that’s not the way forward and actually makes everything worse.
I’m working on really tuning into my body and the parts of it that feel “stuck” so to speak. It seems like my go to escapism is to overthink to distract myself from the emotions. Shutting down the mind and tuning into the body seems to open up a lot more that I couldn’t consciously access.
Another thing you’ve got to give yourself props for.
It seems that you maintain your musical artistic life completely independently. There aren’t people pushing you to do it. It takes a lot of energy and will to focus on your art when the common narrative in society focuses so much on just work and career, and recovery from work and career. But you maintain this focus on your art and your personal journey. It’s pretty dope.