Sometimes friendly people, friendly fans, and friends in general will compliment me about the many ways I "give back" or "pay it forward". My attitude and response is de nada and con gusto. It's of nothing and with pleasure. I am thankful to them for the compliment about my alleged generosity.
Nonetheless, on a more philosophical side, there is something to explore there that I want both my mentees and other readers to deeply consider and understand and keep in mind throughout all sorts of very different life contexts.
And that's this: I typically don't like to think in terms of "giving back" or "paying it forward", because then it seems to mean I'm just a slavish cog in an ongoing karmic cycle out of my control, meaning I'd be merely mirroring/copying other people's energy, only treating the world as good or bad as it allegedly treats me, frowning at those who frown at me and smiling at those who smile at me, getting into road rage fights with fight-seeking road-ragers, and probably buying a car every single time I test drove one because those salespeople are experts in getting you to match their energy, which of course always happens to be buy now energy and this car is amazing energy and cars will make you happy energy.
Instead, I prefer to see myself as a rebellious free-spirit that breaks cycles including karmic cycles.
Instead of slapping the slapper, I might turn my other check to them.
I might smile at the frowner.
I will always love the hater.
And, when it seems everyone else is most hating someone, I will go out of my way to bend over backwards to love that person even harder and to make my love for them most visible to all. There is a reason I wrote and heavily publicized a short booklet called "I Love Brock Turner" (a spoiled rich rapist) and earned myself countless extremely triggered haters who among other things ultimately got the book banned from Amazon. Getting a bunch of haters triggered and hating me wasn't an inadvertent mistake; it was mission accomplished. I hadn't even considered that I would succeed so well at that project that the book would get banned by Amazon. But even better. I am so proud to be the author of a banned book.
When everyone is throwing stones at someone, I'd love to do what nobody is doing and maybe nobody else did for me ever, and stand in front of those thrown stones.
I don't want to give back merely what was given to me, but give more than was ever given to me, which also requires creation and thus often free-spirited creativity. I can create wealth among other things. I don't need to be given wealth or such to give it away. Perhaps that's one key fallacy had by those spirits still trapped in a body trapped in karmic cycles or the cycles of addiction and misery and the addictive hellish comfort zone: Perhaps they falsely think they physically can only give away what was given to them. Perhaps they falsely think that wealth and such is a zero-sum game. Perhaps they falsely think, "To give it away, I need to have it, and, to have it, I need to have been given it." No! Wealth is not a zero-sum game. It can be created.
And there's a lot more to life and creativity than merely wealth.
You can give away so many things that were never given to you.
A philosophical zombie (i.e. a hypothetical human who literally has no spirit or true consciousness at all) would not be capable of free-spirited creativity. But neither you nor I are philosophical zombies. The humans we see in the mirror are conscious human beings, meaning they have spirits that can be free or not. In one sense we have consciousness, meaning we have spirits. In a deeper and truer sense, we are the consciousness, meaning we are the spirits. We are that which the body has that makes it not be a zombie body. As my book says, you don't have a spirit; You are the spirit. You have a body.
Both you and (thanks to you) the human body you see in the mirror are capable of free-spirited creativity. Unlike a philosophical zombie that has no spirit to free or cage, you and your body together as a human being have the potential to have self-discipline (a.k.a. spiritual freedom). You can break cycles. You can be more and do differently than the genes would have a philosophical zombie do. You can break memetic cycles too. People tend to mimic their ancestors both genetically and memetically. But as someone capable of being a free spirit rather than a slavish cog in an ongoing cycle predating you by billions of years, if your great-grandfather abused and bullied your grandfather, who abused and bullied your father who abused and bullied you and seemed to do his absolute best to train you through his role modeling example to be an abusive bully, well you can choose to not pay that forward. You can choose to break that cycle. You can choose to be a rebellious free-spirit and not do what the genes and memes and cancer-like self-perpetuating patterns and cycles and feedback loops would otherwise have you do. You can become revealed to yourself as a co-creator of this timeless and seemingly infinite 4D spacetime. If this material world of eternal spacetime is the painting, you can be revealed as a free-spirited painter with a paintbrush in your hand. It can feel like you are changing the future, which (if we accept causal determinism) would require changing the past, but in reality there is no "the future" and no "the past", and, in reality, you are creating not changing, but even the word creating, while still more accurate than changing, can still be misleading and understate your power insofar as it implies a form of real time or temporal objectivity or objective simultaneity that simply does not and cannot exist. To say you already painted it, or are currently painting it, or will paint it is all to say the same thing when we really understand the eternal unchanging timelessness of true reality and the nature of who and what you really are, but if you don't get that yet, just let it go for now. Just know, that it's really no more sensible or true to say that "the past" causes "the future" than that that "the future" causes "the past" or that your now causes it all; to disagree with any of that requires disproving Einstein. Objectively, the painting is eternal, timeless, tenseless, and self-consistent.
"We always did it that way," others may say. "It's tradition", others may say. "It's what's proper and in good propriety, and we shall shame with our wagging fingers anyone who dares violate our would-be enslaving moral laws," others may say. To all of that I would rebelliously say, "Good, all the more reason I'll do it this new different way!"
Real universal laws can't be violated. Reality is always right. Truth is never wrong. Reality is never wrong. It's always funny to me when someone says I can't do what I am doing, or can't do what I am going to do and then do do. And it's not just funny because do do sounds like I'm talking about poop. I can't do it? Then explain how I am doing it. Typically, the easiest way to disprove an alleged law is to break it, and typically the easiest way to overthrow or dethrone a pseudo or would-be master is to disobey them and break their impotent commandments. By definition, I can do what I do do, and that applies to everything not just poo poo.
Even if I was deprived of something, I often won't give back that deprivation nor pay it forward.
I am in touch with that which makes this body not be a philosophical zombie and that which makes this body behave differently than it would if it was a philosophical zombie. And that thing is me, the real me. And when this human being who writes to you now is most free-spirited (a.k.a. self-disciplined), then the real me and the unreal me--meaning this spirit and this body--become one, become coherent, and act together. It is then that we can truly say in all the seemingly opposite senses of the equivocal words we use to describe the self that then I am most myself.
Rather than to merely give back or pay forward, I shall create and give away that which I created, with love and rebelliously free-spirited creativity. I shall be a free artist in the world, in touch with the transcendental essence of who and what I really am, not merely a slavish cog in a machine.
Instead of a cog, I shall be me, the real me.
With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott
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In addition to having authored his book, In It Together, Eckhart Aurelius Hughes (a.k.a. Scott) runs a mentoring program, with a free option, that guarantees success. Success is guaranteed for anyone who follows the program.
