Identity as Software: My Journey from Unconscious Programming to Reality Creation

How I Broke Free from Addiction, Found Inner Silence, and Learned to Engineer My Mind

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Most people on this planet live as if their identity is fixed - a permanent structure handed down by childhood, culture, and chance. They mistake the voice in their head for truth. They confuse their conditioning with their nature, accepting the mental programs installed by others as if they were laws of physics.

I was no different.

For decades, I operated as a collection of inherited programs. My past self went through all the consequences of human ignorance: substance addiction, smoking, alcoholism, suicidal depression - unconscious patterns that felt like permanent features of who I was. I believed these behaviours defined me.

But identity is not fixed. Identity is software. It can be rewritten, upgraded, or eliminated entirely.

Today, through this exploration, I want to show a different perspective on that entity within which you call “My Self”.

The Physical Body is the Gate to Understanding

For me, the breakthrough came about 15 years ago through a revelation that would reshape everything I understood about the human mind.

It all started when I stepped on the path of physical transformation. I started building strength and physical discipline. With time, I realized that as my body was changing, my identity was changing with it. Two different bodies, two completely different people. Same consciousness, entirely different operating system. This is how I learned. The body is the key to the mind.

We talk a lot about it in my coaching conversations with my clients. Physical transformation is so important for inner awakening.

I've experienced this firsthand when my body started to transform and I really felt the change in the way I see myself and the world. In Russian, we say: "In a strong body there is a strong spirit." The ancient wisdom is encoded in the language for a reason. The spirit is changing and reconfiguring itself following the body's metamorphosis.

As you become physically stronger, multiple systems activate:

• Your life energy is increasing - that energy unlocks everything else, you can use energy to do more with your life.

• When you go clean, the biochemistry of your body stabilizes - so your mind states become more stable too.

• Your self-perception, self-concept, is changing because you get used to looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing a different "you".

• Your environment is changing, your surroundings are changing, so the people you hang out with feed you with different information and that kind of programming is also changing your identity - you become like them.

• The desire to progress pushes you to new content, so the content of your mind is changing with time as well.

New thoughts lead to new actions. New actions lead to new experiences. The experience shapes your beliefs about yourself and the world. The cycle continues.

That physical transformation gave me the identity shift I was at that time unconsciously seeking.

Now, in retrospect, I am looking at my past self, who was an addict, smoker, and alcoholic, and I can’t recognize that person. It was still me, but the memory of that version of "me" is so vague now that it feels like that story of my life happened to someone else. And it did. In a way… It happened to that “person” I believed myself to be. That person is no more.

Of course, this transformation didn't happen overnight - it was a lot of failed attempts, a lot of relapses, a lot of suffering and insights on the way. It is a process. And that process of building the physical discipline is what gives you the firsthand experience of understanding the fluidity of your identity. The process is the goal.

The simplest way to confirm for yourself experientially that identity is nothing but a construct lies through the gates of physical pain. One way to change the content is to transform the vessel.

There is no single point of realization when you start to suspect that the identity is flexible; with time, you just learn how to observe, and the more you observe, the more you recognize your changed patterns of thinking. You might not be aware fully, but you notice that something is happening inside your mind.

You will notice that:

• Your physical strength increased.

• Your sleep improves and so does your mood.

• With it, your confidence grows - it is way easier to feel confident when you feel good, look good, and know that you can absolutely physically dominate any person in a room (if it comes to it - no aggression :)).

• Your circle changes because your perception will get attuned to like-minded people - people who hate mediocrity - those who want to make something out of themselves - in the gym, in life, in work, in business.

And yes, you will go through that phase of maturity in which you will be comparing yourself to others. This is natural.

They say that comparison is a thief of joy, and indeed so, but just like anger, if channelled right, comparison can become a life-changing fuel. It can push you to strive and seek how to improve yourself, how to become better. And that's where it all begins. A healthy body is the foundation for what is coming next - the beginning of healing the spirit - healing the mind.

The Quantum Transition: When the Mind Stops Talking

Physical transformation was just the prep work. Laying the bricks for the actual game-changing epiphany that happened to me years later.

My search for inner strength and discipline brought me on the path of seeking people who were tougher than me, mentally and physically stronger than me. And I found them.

Back in August 2013, I moved to South Korea, but just before my move, I managed to secure a place in a training program for men called Sparta. The program lasts 3 days, and they beat the shit out of you (quite literally), both physically, mentally, and emotionally.

All the lies, all the BS you were telling yourself for years, flushed out from your system with the powerful mix of physical pain and the pain of unfiltered truth about yourself you have to face.

Day 2 is the day they break you - the "you" that believes that there is a limit to what you can do. This is where you find out - there isn't. Day 2 is a physical challenge that goes on for a good 10-12 hours, and during this time, you really get to understand what "out of your comfort zone" tastes like.

Your mind is fighting itself all this time - one part of your mind screams that you can go no more, another tells you to "nut up and shut up", but somewhere inside there is a part of you is just observing and getting progressively more surprised that no matter the pain, no matter the suffering, you just keep going. Like a machine. Un-fucking-stoppable.

At a certain point, you start to realize that whatever limiting self-deprecating bullshit you were taught to believe about yourself has never been true. There's almost no limit to how far you can go. The body moves. The mind is blank. Mind over matter.

Every time you reach a point of utter exhaustion, when that “bitch” inside of you is ready to cave in, there is another side of you that has awakened - an animal, a primal part of your nature, that knows that if and when it is pushed to the edge of survival it can go like this for several days non-stop… Long story short - we survived :)

After the program, I started digging. All head coaches of Sparta were meditation practitioners, so I started meditating. I had zero idea of what I was doing, but the discipline of doing shit consistently was already there. I knew how to execute like a robot. And so I did.

For 2 years, I was meditating very mechanically, just sitting my ass down, trying to push my personal record - can I sit still for 10 minutes, 20, 30, 50? I meditated without knowing what was supposed to happen. It was not a spiritual practice. I was just doing it. It was almost like an instinct was pushing me to be in that space. I wanted to discipline my mind.

Eventually, after 2 years, I pushed myself to sit still for 90 minutes. Nothing sophisticated, just sitting there with my eyes closed, noticing when my mind starts to wander, gently returning attention to the focal point - to the place of breath.

And one day it happened.

I had a spiritual experience.

Basically, my mind stopped, and for the first moment in my life, there was Silence…

I don't know how long it lasted - maybe it was just a glimpse, just a couple of seconds of absolute quiet. And of course, seconds later, I thought: "Oh my god! I'm not thinking!" Naturally, the very moment I had that thought, I was thinking again but that short moment was enough. I knew there was something else there. The first glimpse of Awareness.

I finished my meditation, and my day went as usual. I went back to doing things, thinking, functioning. But the next day, something beautiful happened to me.

I stepped outside the dorm. It was a beautiful, fresh, spring day, the sun was shining upon me, I closed my eyes, felt the sunshine gliding on my skin, and funny thought occured to me: “This is God watching me,” I thought, and then right after - my mind went completely silent.

No thought.

Quiet.

All I was, my whole being was - pure Direct Experience - a mix of sensations, perceptions, feelings and emotions - no chatter, no dialogue, no memories, no plans for the day - quiet, effortless being and an absolute, overwhelming sense of beauty. I was standing there, filled to the brim with that sense of beauty, feeling whole and complete, maybe for the first time in my life, tears running down my face. The only word that comes to mind as I am remembering this is - bliss.

I don't know how long it lasted, maybe 10-15 minutes. The feeling started to subside. I opened my eyes.

I walked through the campus, and it felt like I was seeing everything for the first time. I touched the water in a fountain, I noticed how light was playing in the ripples, I smelled flowers, fascinated by their shape and form, I looked at the sky and clouds passing by - everything looked new and brighter, like someone suddenly increased the focus on the camera and splashed some colours.

I was walking, and I felt it - something cracked within me, something changed, and even though I couldn’t tell what, I knew that nothing would be the same anymore.

Since that day, I started my “spiritual search” - I was looking to return to that state - the state of inner silence, gratitude, and bliss. This is something I figured out with time.

Some people are doing an intellectual search first, and then have the spiritual experience. Some people have the spiritual experience first, and then they start intellectualizing it, building knowledge that supports the experience.

I was the latter.

Since that day, and now for 10+ years, I have spent on the integration path, absorbing and consuming as much content as possible - esoteric teachings, spiritual teachings, studying religion, and studying all sorts of things until I had assembled the body of philosophical knowledge that helped me to synthesize my own philosophy of life and internalize the spiritual knowledge that the sages of the past have been talking about. I discovered Advaita. The teaching of non-duality.

The more I studied it, the more everything made sense. I realized that there were a few humans in history who had had similar realizations. Awakened beings existed, and they left their teachings. This knowledge has always been there - you just need to know where to look. Funny enough, there is almost zero probability that you will start to look if you are in the dream-state phase.

Papaji, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Rupert Spira, Eckhart Tolle, U.G. Krishnamurti, Michael A. Singer, Nissargadatta Maharaj, Ramana Maharshi, ancient sufis like Rumi, Buddha himself (potentially Mooji and Kapil Gupta) - these are all enlightened teachers - humans who were studying the nature of the mind, until they cracked the code. They have seen (and some have transcended) the omnipresent, all-tenacious illusion of Ego.

All these teachers are talking about the same stuff. Read them and you will see that they speak as one. Because the source is One. They all come and speak from the same place - same Nothingness, same Isness, same Awareness, that stands behind the thinking mind. And that’s good news.

Even with such a seemingly sophisticated thing as Spiritual Awakening, you don’t need to invent a bicycle. There are true teachers out there. There are people who have gone into the places you haven’t yet and they can take you there.

The answers are here, the guidance is here, and you can go into the place of self-discovery, self-understanding, and ultimately self-destruction - the destruction of Self.

I am here to contribute to this work.

I am no teacher, but my mission is to catalyze the consciousness evolution of humans on this planet. My work lies at the convergence point of blending the philosophies of the East, Russian philosophical schools, esoteric and shamanic teachings, my personal experiences, and then translating them into practical application within the operational reality and value systems of Western civilization.

I can see that people of the West are so desperately hungry and seeking spiritual knowledge, but my goal is not to just raise consciousness; I want to show how inner work can enable your manifestation ability - through awareness, mastery and metacognition, you can become exceptional in your capacity to create your material reality, not just attaining peace of mind. Lastly, there is such a great opportunity to leverage AI for consciousness work - I believe this is knowledge worth spreading. So thank you for joining the ride.

The Death of Fixed Identity

Here's what is interesting about this (dis)integration process: eventually, you lose the ability to fully identify with any identity at all.

I don't have any visceral memories of being trapped in the old identity. I barely have memories of it. Maybe I am getting older and my memory is getting worse :) Maybe my mind rewired itself in a way that most old memories just get discarded as irrelevant, as the mind is growing in its ability to be in what is real - the present moment - here and now.

The identity itself feels very weak every time I use something next to the word "I". I still use the word “I” because this is how people communicate but I am noticing that there is a process of constant observation of that fact of using “I”, there is pure seeing - understanding that, yes, I'm playing the role, I'm accepting to act as identity but now it is a deliberate, free play. I rest as awareness, while the mind is doing its thing - talking, interacting, working, eating, playing.

Here is the analogy I often use.

Remember the movie “Matrix”? So, look. Keanu Reeves, the actor, needs to forget that he's Keanu in order to play the role of Neo. Neo needs to forget completely that he is Neo to dream the dream and execute the role of Mr. Thomas Anderson. Who needs to forget what in order to play the role of Keanu Reeves?

Who needs to forget what to dream the dream of that character called Chengeer Lee?

Who needs to forget what to play the role and dream the dream of "You"?

You see, everyone experiences confusion, seeking, the sense that something is missing. A rare human arrives at the point of understanding that what they're seeking is the recognition of what they already are.

If you want a map, I like to think about it in simple 4 stages of awakening:

Stage 1: The Sleep Mode (a.k.a. “The Dream State”)

You live as if your thoughts equal you. You are fully immersed in the dream of thought. Life feels mechanical: school, job, money, reputation. You're basically an automaton - a set of programs running automatically on default settings installed by parents, culture, society. It feels normal... but it also feels, at some level, like you're trapped in a loop that you didn't design.

It feels like you are the NPC in someone else's video game, yet you can’t understand the rules. Life is reactive, not responsive. External stimuli determine your internal states. Victim mentality dominates. Life is spent not in reality but in mental constructs.

Stage 2: The Glitch (First Crack in the Matrix)

Something breaks the illusion: a breakup that hurts like hell, a health scare, a death of a loved one - a life event that creates an existential crisis. You realize: "Wait... maybe life isn't what I thought. Maybe I'm not who I have always believed myself to be."

This is the red pill moment. You start reading strange books, listening to weird podcasts, meditating for the first time. You start grasping glimpses of quick awareness of your thinking patterns when they appear. You start to take responsibility for your thoughts, the content of your mind, and, by extension, your life.

The mind begins to question its own programming for the first time. You start testing your reality against mental constructs. The introspection practice begins.

Stage 3: The Burn (Identity Meltdown)

This is the intense part. A process I call disintegration. Old beliefs, identities, and ego structures start to collapse. You might feel lost, anxious, like you're "dying" - and you are in a way- the old you is.

Spiritual teachers call this the dark night of the soul. Everything you believed about yourself gets pressure-tested and questioned. The ability to choose a response instead of an automatic reaction grows by the day. Your life, in accordance with a consciously designed thinking systems, begins.

If you stay with it, you discover what you really are: the Awareness itself - the silent space behind all thoughts in which all thoughts unfold and all your human experience takes place. The character in the game gets destroyed, and you realize... You have never been the character, the avatar - you can be the player.

Stage 4: Free Play (Awakened While Still Human)

You're no longer fully trapped by thoughts or roles. You still do all the things that “normal” humans do - you work, eat, love, live in society - but tension is no longer there - you do so lightly, playfully. The Integrated state is a state in which everything moves as one: body, mind, spirit - all fully aligned.

You see that you can still create identities, but you're not owned by them. Life shifts from a countless chain of battles for survival to creation. From fear to freedom. Absence of self-conflict. Complete alignment with values feels natural, not effortful.

You're playing the game of life in God Mode. You are not invincible by all means. You can’t stop bullets with the palm of your hand. Shit can still happen. But you become increasingly more untouchable by that shit because you understand that all of it is mental in nature - no matter what is happening in your world, you remain still. You understand that the game is an illusion, but you learned how to enjoy it. You focus on long-term purpose with absolute clarity of your goals and meaning.

Here is the truth.

Most people never leave Stage 1. They never will. They are destined to spend the entirety of their life in the Illusion of Personhood. This is my definition of life wasted. Some humans touch Stage 2 but then retreat back to the comfort of familiar illusions. Few persist through Stage 3. A rare human will stabilize in Stage 4.

But those who do...

They become dangerously capable of reality creation. Because an awakened mind is the mind that is set free. It can be used as a tool of reality creation with a full range of motion, uninhibited, unhindered - and it can create any reality it deems worth creating. This is the mind in free play.

The Language as Consciousness Architecture

On this path of inner work, it is helpful to observe and investigate your cultural programming.

I got lucky.

I’ve had the blind luck of being born and having Russian as my native programming language. I am convinced that those who lucked out like me and call Russian their mother tongue have an unfair advantage in their pursuit of awakening the mind. The concentration of deep, philosophical, and sage-like minds coming from Russian culture is high for a reason - it is rightfully considered to be one of the most sophisticated languages in the world.

Language is a tool.

The complexity of language enables the complexity of inner reality. It's not a coincidence that the phenomenon of Russian classics exists in the world - Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin - they have all been masters of thought because they got to explore the flexibility and degrees of freedom of the language in all its power and potential. Language is a tool of thought; thought is a tool of reality creation. I write and teach my clients writing as practice for that reason - writing is one of the few forms of thinking that I can call true. If you master writing, you have the tool to reprogram your mind.

But first, one must learn how to detect programming.

For example, in our post-Soviet education, we had that common program about money, e.g. it was not the culture in the family to talk about money. It was true for me, it is true for so many people. As a result, we grew up with very low financial intelligence and a set of very immature programs about money, like: “Money is evil”, “Be humble”, “What people would say?”, “Rich people made their fortune in dishonest way”, “Don’t do anything to stand out from the crowd,” etc.

Communism. That was a very strong post-Soviet ideology - the meta-program that was passed on through generations. Collectivism overrules the power of an individual.

You can understand where all these limitations are coming from - my parents, and my parents’ parents have been through so much - second world war, famine, revolution, the breakage of USSR, the wild 90s associated with the rise of the organized crime - the echoes of all these events still live in millennials manifested as the scarcity mentality, hoarding, always preparing for a bad day to come.

There is an inherent risk encoded in this program - you can forever get stuck in this thinking that dark times will come, locking your mind in a state of scarcity.

There is a more dangerous program hidden here.

The history has a tendency to repeat itself (especially when we learn nothing from it). Today we live in times of so many wars unfolding before our eyes - Gaza, Ukraine, God knows how many wars and military conflicts on this planet that we don’t see - are happening in the world right now that are not within the space of our awareness. But this is exactly what I am bringing your attention to.

People who believe they are Ukrainians are immersed in the war of Ukraine. People who believe that they are Jews are immersed in the war in war of Israel. Black vs White. Democrats vs Republicans.

We fight because we are asleep. We are still stuck in that Stage 1, fully associating our Identity with our Nationality, Country, Culture, Religion, Tradition… We are stuck in the illusion that we are all different. Me vs Them. Us vs the Other.

Duality.

Humans are imprisoned in the illusion of separateness. Separateness creates division. Division breeds conflict. The only path to peace is the path of awakening - the path of higher consciousness. And it starts with you.

Inner work is individual work. If you can awaken the whole of yourself, you can elevate others. By raising frequency in our own space, we can build conscious communities. How you shape your worldview will shape the world.

I don’t write for humanity. I write for an individual. I write for the one who is right now persevering through Stage 3 - fighting, struggling, going through the process of identity meltdown - but refusing to go back to sleep.

Explore your language. The one you use to describe yourself and the world. The key is in the code.

Explore your culture, your tradition, your religion. How do you know that what you know is true and valid?

Maybe you don’t speak Russian. Maybe you are not coming from a largely atheistic society. It matters not. Language or ideology is not a predictor of one’s awakening.

To be honest, I have no idea what it is. What makes someone seek truth is a complete mystery to me.

It is a particular composition of DNA - and I don’t mean DNA as in genetic material - by DNA I mean some specific configuration of the mind and spirit. Some of it is nature, some of it is nurture, some of it is a self-driven quest that is calling you to the Source.

If I am to observe myself, there were absolutely no prerequisites for my realization. I was born in the USSR - the most atheistic country in the world. God is dead. There is no God. That was the notion.

The ideology of post-Soviet people has always been very pragmatic, very conservative, grounded in hard science, and maybe even materialistic, and hence the very way of living was, in a way, denying anything spiritual in nature.

We can observe a similar pattern in the West - Corporate America / Canada may still frown at the word “spirituality” - they will call it woo-woo and look away, and that’s ok. The old people with old ignorant ways are dying away opening space for new generation with higher consciousness.

I am not here to talk to the dead. I can’t help them. I am writing for the one who seeks truth.

You see, everyone wants to be happy. If a human matures to a certain level of sophistication, their mental models around the concept of happiness evolve.

Mature humans don’t chase happiness. They don’t want to be happy; they want to be peaceful.

When we start optimizing for peace, we start looking deep into the things that take away our peace. That inevitably leads us to investigating the nature of our own mind.

Going into the mind solo may take you only so far. You can do all the inner work alone - but the impatient mind you have wants to “get there” faster. And so people seek other humans who have “progressed on the path”. This is what essentially coaching is about.

A coach is a tool. A source of external awareness. A guide to your mental architecture. My job as a non-duality coach is to help you, my reader, to dissect that beast you call your mind, and help you start destroying and reconfiguring the parts of it that no longer serve you. And as you suspect (and as you may eventually discover), there is a lot in there that serves you no more.

So how do you rewire Your Self?

The Principles of Mind Reprogramming

The way I explain it to my clients is the way I would have explained it to my younger self:

Your brain is hardware.

You don't choose your hardware. Unlike with computers, you can't really upgrade it - so you're locked with your natural potential that’s been given to you at birth. If you won the genetic lottery, you have a high-functioning brain. I'm assuming you do since you're reading this. Not everyone got so lucky.

This is already a huge reason to live your life in a constant state of gratitude if you have a brain that works, if you have a body that works, if your body isn't flawed from the get-go.

Your mind is an operating system.

Everything you believe to be true about yourself and the world is a set of programs - beliefs.

Every belief is just a thought that's been repeated countless times and integrated into the Mind OS.

The thoughts can be changed. Their integration is a matter of focus and experiential proof. Life is funny that way - whatever you believe, you will find confirmation for everything you believe to be true.

So you can go two ways here:

1. Change the confirmation. Go get different experiences that would challenge your beliefs.

2. Challenge your beliefs (e.g. via coaching). Your beliefs will help you seek out and change your experience.

The system works in both directions.

Most people let their experiences create their beliefs. They remain unconscious software operated by others.

Awakened beings use their beliefs to create their experiences. They become conscious engineers of their own reality.

The difference between victim and creator is simple: who is programming whom?

Either you program your mind, or your mind programs you.

Either you are aware of the mind and its play, or you live as a puppet hung up on the invisible strings.

Use the mind to engineer your beliefs, or your beliefs will engineer your life.

The choice is always yours. The power was always yours.

You just forgot.

Where do we start?

The Core Practice: Dumping the Mind

Clear space means less junk in the space. So clean up. This is what journaling is for. You don’t need any prompts. With AI tools, all you need to do is capture your stream of consciousness. Daily.

This article is written like this: I'm just sitting here dumping my mind using Wispr Flow, and then I'm using the machine to introduce 1-3% AI to introduce structure and cohesion for a smoother reader experience.

This article IS human-written - everything you are reading here is the content of my mind. But I'm using Claude AI and GPT as my writing assistants, as AI augmentation - to become a better writer, and ultimately, a sharper thinker.

Install this daily ritual.

Just write and capture your thoughts.

It's like a cleaning routine for the mind, where you would sit down and you would dump everything into a container. The benefit of using LLM as a container is that it can also organize your thinking, feed it back to you, mirror it back to you, make you hyper-aware about what's going on inside your head, but then also challenge you and pressure-test your mental models - be a sparring partner in your thinking process.

This one simple exercise will change your relationship with the mind. And with time, it will change the mind itself.

A few words about Meditation

People overthink meditation. They start intellectualizing it. They start obsessing about the artifacts, apps, teachers, attributes, and all that nonsense. They never get the point.

It's not about meditation. It is about meditativeness.

What is the point of sitting on your sofa for 20 minutes and being aware, but then giving in to the thinking noise, letting your mind dominate your awareness, spinning you in the internal chaos all day?

Meditation is not about certain positions, pillows, angles, mantras, or breathing techniques.

The purpose of meditation is simple.

The purpose of meditation is to stay still until you eventually learn how to rest as Awareness.

That’s it.

The purpose is to grow in awareness. The goal is to live increasingly more as awareness vs the usual default state of living as the thinking mind.

That’s the point.

The point is to learn how to be by being.

The point is to understand yourself to your core, so well, to such immense depth, so that the whole world couldn’t shake you and who you are.

The point is to stabilize in Stage 4 or maybe even go beyond it? Live in free play. Life without Ego. No more silly identification with non-sensical stuff. Life without noise.

Remaining constantly in that state of equanimity, always at zero, accepting the randomness of life in its whole totality through the state of stillness - being without resistance, without limitations, without distortions that the mind is creating.

Imagine this, what kind of life would you have if you were this?

The Readiness Filter: Why Most People Reject Truth

The transformation is not about the modelling, copying, or replicating others. There are enough people who can inspire you, but in order to fully transform, the seed of transformation needs to be in you.

Most people, if they are to read my articles, listen to my podcasts, would just bounce back. They might think something like, "Oh, that sounds interesting. Maybe one day I will revisit this." But there will be no one day. They will hit the snooze button and go back to being their usual selves.

But…

There will be one person who will immerse deeply, who will truly go and digest everything. They consume content. They research. They marinate in it. And then when the critical mass of information is accumulated, they can no longer ignore what they now know. And so they reach out for more.

"I have been following you for a very long time, and I feel like now I am ready to work with you. Can we connect?"

When we hop on the call, I don't need to “preach”, convince or explain myself. They are ready.

We have resonance - largely because we have a shared understanding. They feel that there is no way back for them - being their usual selves is no longer an option.

All coaching conversations from there are just a breeze because the person went 99% of the way solo in order for me to just add that 1% of guidance. They are ready because they have done the work.

All the people who are at 98% and below are not my people. They are not ready to hear what I have to say. My words will not penetrate them.

And it is not good or bad. This is just a phase of evolution.

The Ongoing Reality: Awakening Doesn't Make You Perfect

Being awakened does not make you some perfect, enlightened being.

I am not perfect. I am human.

There are moments when the mind comes and takes me. I lose myself as Awareness and get lost in the mind. There are moments when I discover yet another blind spot in my thinking systems. The path of mastery never ends. You never stop asking: What else is there that I don’t understand?

A strong mind is a problem in itself.

The more intelligent you are, the more sophisticated you are, the more high-functioning you are - the more you are prone to being stuck in your self-limiting self-imposed mental constructs. Your inner prisons have high sophistication by design - the design of your powerful mind.

The mind is tenacious.

There will be moments during the day when I'm being pulled by my mind, and I'll have to snap out of it - especially considering the nature of our work (reality for a lot of people), where most of us are zombified, staring into screens for 10-12 hours a day, over-stimulated, over-caffeinated, underslept, underexercised, underexposed to sun and fresh air.

Modern life is a lot, and it's a lot for the mind to take in. The hungry mind wants to learn; it wants to become even more high-functioning, even smarter, even more sophisticated in order to understand the world of men better, navigate it better, be more effective, be more productive, be in control.

But the awareness wants nothing.

All it does is stay vigilant. It is in itself a constant reminder that you can be awakened only in the present moment. Enlightenment is a sham.

You are awakened in the present moment, or there is no awakening at all.

Awakening or enlightenment doesn't exist somewhere out there in the future because if you are thinking of it existing somewhere in the future, you are living in expectation. Expectation is nothing but a mental construct of some kind of beautiful spiritual event awaiting you somewhere, sometime. There is no sometime. The only time is Now.

Same story with happiness. Same story with inner peace.

Either you're happy and peaceful right here, right now, in this very moment. Or you are not in the moment, lost wandering somewhere inside the labyrinths of your mind, possessed by illusions.

Remember - it is ok to fail on the path. Failure is natural; failure is how we learn.

The way I explain it to my clients is that you're building all these different systems and guiding rails for the mind so that the mind can stay in awareness longer. But you won’t need these systems and guiding rails forever. Resting as awareness will become more and more natural to you - because it is indeed your true nature.

In the beginning, it feels like practice; it may feel like effort, work, or struggle. But with time, as disintegration continues, you become less and less the mind, and more and more of what you truly are - the awareness in which everything is.

Your presence will sharpen until all that is left is the presence itself - even when you are being pulled by deeply worrying, troubling thoughts, the awareness will not leave. A part of the energy of your attention will be channelled into the process of observing the mind.

Right now, looking back at my past self, I have an interesting mix of emotions. A mix of awe, curiosity, and compassion. I'm studying my old identity as a subject. Past me was a person deeply confused. With an extremely noisy mind - awareness completely lost in noise of thought - conflicting programs and beliefs, projections, hopes, fears, expectations.

A lot of time was wasted in that noise, but at the same time, I understand that this is exactly how humans spiritually mature.

Call it a Law of Growth.

If you want to develop patience, you'll have to go through the trials in which you will have no choice but to be patient. If you want discipline, you'll have to go through the training, where you will have to push yourself to a new level of discipline.

Every quality, every virtue you want to nurture within your mind, or on the other side, any kind of malfunctioning program that you want to destroy within yourself, will only be eliminated through work - deep work, physical work, inner work.

Transformation does not happen by accident; it only comes as a result of commitment and intentional energy investment. It is important to set the right vector because if there is no clear direction, then energy will be wasted and splashed around. If the energy is focused, you can create transformation efficiently, and arguably, faster.

The Method: Collecting Wisdom as Code

I’ll share something that helped me on the path - Quotes.

My instinct has always been to go out there and collect quotes - accumulate them in my mind - build a library of human wisdom. What I like about quotes so much is that they are the intelligence of the whole book condensed into one sentence.

You see, the process of collecting quotes is basically mind reprogramming.

Every quote is a line of code. And you can rewire the whole code within you if you increase the concentration of smart thoughts in your head. Of course, collection alone won’t help; you have to reflect on them deeply yourself, but the heavy lifting is done for you - someone intelligent thought very deeply about stuff in their life to then distill the essence into its purest form - a line of code that you can use as a wisdom anchor.

If you absorb the quote, if you wire it into your programming, and you do this consistently for a very long time, it will serve the purpose of re-configuration of the mind machine.

This is the purpose of studying philosophers. This is the purpose of the dual practice of reading and writing.

Reading gives you the bits and pieces of useful code. Writing is the implementation process.

The Core Recognition: You Are Not Your Mind

All limiting beliefs are the function of one core limiting meta-belief:

That belief is that you are some kind of person.
That you are the Mind, and “I” and the Mind are the same.

That's the work that I'm doing in non-duality coaching. I invite my clients into the space where they get to investigate and pressure-test the reality of their "I".

The most limiting belief is the belief in the reality of your thoughts.

This is the mind trap people are stuck in. It's the belief in the validity of their own thinking, that blind conviction that everything they think is unshakeably true. That's how all humans are designed. We all believe that our way of thinking is the only right way of thinking, we believe that we are surrounded by idiots 24/7. There is no intellectual humility in this, and obviously, it's a fallacy by definition.

That's the difference between a human who is in Stage 1 and a human fully stabilized in Stage 4. The former believes the mind. The latter knows that everything that the mind produces is a lie. The former fully believes in everything that the mind says. The latter knows that what the mind says can be chosen.

A daydreamer operates as the mind. An awakened being has a productive, synergistic relationship with the mind because they are no longer bound by the illusion that they are the mind.

And this is it - that’s the holy grail of personal transformation.

Because once you understand that you are not the mind, your relationship with the mind changes forever, and the way you work with the mind will change, giving you the opportunity to reprogram yourself in a very deliberate way.

You do not give in to knee-jerk reactions. You can observe the mind. You can see what it's doing, you can study it, you can understand it. And what you understand, you can tame and control. Well, even the way I am describing this to you is not the right way to put it.

There is no "you" who is controlling anything.

It's just that the very fact of awareness that is there, the very fact of observation, is changing the way the mind is functioning.

An aware mind is a still mind, a calm mind, a centred mind, a disciplined mind. That is the mind that becomes dangerously capable of reality creation.

The power to create lies in noticing that everything in life is about focus and attention. Wherever your attention goes, energy flows, and through the power of your attention, you create both your experience and material reality.

What you focus on expands.

Focus on nonsensical stuff that you were conditioned to focus on, and that's what you will be multiplying and creating in your life, stuck in a cycle of ignorance perpetuating itself.

Learn how to see through your conditioning, and you will be able to disillusion yourself from the false programs and paradigms that serve you no more. This is the place where life by design begins.

The Practical Foundation: Principles, Not Prescriptions

I don't give you prescriptions.
I invite you to observe principles.

The body is a biochemical, biomechanical machine. As such a machine, it has to move, and it responds a certain way to movement.

Study science, look into human nature, and you can observe and understand how living beings need to live. Look at the way humans evolved and study it. Ask AI to teach you. Observe those patterns in order to build your own routines.

There is nothing new under the moon.

Move daily, get sunlight, walk a lot, fresh air, clean food, clean water, less stimulants, less screen, less sugar, more nature, more movement, more sleep, write a lot, think deeply, consume the content of people who are smarter than you (i.e. have the life results that you want for yourself), organize the content of your mind through writing, meditation, coaching. Get to know your inner reality.

The more you know yourself, the higher shall be your mastery of the world. The higher your mastery of the world, the more you will know yourself.

These are all just bare-bones, simple principles that can be shaped into your own individual routines. The specific implementation does not matter.

People are looking for prescriptions - they're always looking for some kind of tricks, tips, and hacks, something they can implement that would change the game for them. The real game changer is not a hack.

The game changer is the transcendence of the player.

You won’t get there through a prescription. Only through sincere desire.

The Modern Tools: AI as Intelligence Amplifier

The beauty of the modern age is that there's plenty of information - there are AI tools, there are books, mentors, communities, articles, newsletters, pods.

Bells and whistles.

All of this is not necessary; all you need is your own mind. If you have a serious desire to understand, pen and paper and your mind - that would be sufficient.

Sit down, write, get the stuff that bothers you out of your system, look at what you have written critically, and think deeply about whether there could be an alternative way of thinking.

A lot of the tooling that can help you can be found on my Substack, and again, AI is that helper we've all been waiting for. If you understand the tool and learn how to use it masterfully, it will change your life.

But if you don't know how to use it, if you delegate or outsource your own thinking, it will shrink you, it will make you small and dull and decrease your intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence (at least in the shape and form it exists right now) is not intelligence per se, and so beware of using it as such. LLMs are tools that can be used to sharpen your own intelligence, and you will be sharper if you train yourself on the tools.

Last Words

Your mind is not a mirror of reality. It is a machine that creates reality.

If the machine runs corrupted code, your life will reflect the errors in the code.

If the machine runs clean, sovereign code, your life will reflect clarity, power, and freedom.

The difference between those two different variations of your life is simple: whether you remain unconscious software operated by others, or become the conscious engineer of your own experience.

Identity is not fixed. It is engineered.

Most people will read this and do nothing. They will find it interesting, maybe save it, then return to their default programming. They will hit snooze button on their own awakening.

A few will recognize something here. They will feel that gravitational pull - the same pull that made you read this far. They will know that going back to sleep is no longer an option.

If you are one of the few, understand this:

The path is not comfortable. But it is necessary.

You will lose friends who cannot follow where you are going. You will question everything you once believed about yourself. You will face the terrifying freedom of taking full, ruthless, unapologetic responsibility for your reality.

But on the other side of that dissolution is something the sleeping mind cannot imagine: the end of psychological suffering.

Not the end of challenges. Not the end of pain. The end of the stories that transform pain into suffering. The end of the mental prison your current self mistakes for home.

This is the only work that matters.

Everything else - your career, your relationships, your achievements - they are all downstream from this fundamental recognition: you are not the mind.

You are the awareness in which the mind appears.

You are the space in which all experience unfolds.

You are the consciousness that reads these words.

And that consciousness is free.

Free to create any reality it deems worthy of creation.

Free to engineer any identity that serves its highest expression.

Free to transcend every limitation that once seemed permanent.

The one who learns to engineer identity consciously cannot be stopped.

Not by circumstances. Not by conditioning. Not by the opinions of those who are still sleeping.

This is your invitation to wake up.

This is your permission to be free.

The door is open.

Come in.

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