How Your Soul Fraile Unlocks The Subconscious Mind
There was an American man who failed business at age 21.
He decided to try his luck at politics but was defeated in a legislative race at age 22.
After the failure, he ping-ponged back to business, only to fail yet again at age 24.
At age 26, this man became depressed after the tragic loss of his sweetheart.
The melancholy took a toll on him, and he collapsed from a nervous breakdown at 27.
After some time, he decided to get back into politics at age 34 and lost a congressional race.
Two years later, he lost another congressional race.
At age 45, he lost a senatorial race.
Would you consider this man a failure?
It seems like failure followed him everywhere throughout his political career.
At age 52, this man became the 16th president of the United States.
This is the story of Abraham Lincoln.
Signal vs Noise
One of the most important things you must consider when analyzing information is the discerning of signal from noise.
Noise is information which doesn’t help you.
The signal tells a story.
The problem is the signal is often hidden within the noise.
This is the case for success and failure.
Life is riddled with thousands of events.
Some you consider encouraging successes, others terrible failures.
The reality is you can’t discern what is a failure and what is a success from where you currently are.
There is too much noise from your field of reference to make sense of what’s happening.
You are also limited by your current timeframe.
Failures and successes have a tendency to change over different time horizons.
What was initially a success (your marriage to a high school sweetheart),
Can transform into a failure in 20 years, with a divorce and your children hating you.
Things once considered failure/noise can transform into success/signal.
Often, it’s only when looking back that you are able to connect the dots.
Steve Jobs shared this wisdom during one of his last speeches.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
Jobs explained how his dropping out of college was a blessing in disguise as it allowed him to pursue his interests.
He joined a calligraphy class which taught him to draw elegant fonts.
The same class would later inspire the font selection on Apple devices.
Another seemingly strange piece of noise was Jobs’ fear of buttons.
This strange phobia is called koumpounophobia.
Most of the clothes Steve Jobs wore did not have buttons due to this phobia.
This odd quirk also influenced the buttonless design of the iPhone, which helped make it a huge success.
Looking at the lives of Jobs and Lincoln, it’s easy to mistake the noise from the signal.
It’s hard to see the bridge of incidents.
It’s easy to mistake failure for success.
Transmuting failure into success
There is a common saying:
“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
This is a flawed statement.
Many people have indeed become weaker from traumatic events.
The death of loved ones has caused depression in millions.
Breakups have led to suicide.
Injuries became the catalyst for weight gain.
Look into the history of humanity, and you will see a wide range of people devastated by failures.
But you will also see many cases of people who benefited immensely from their adversities.
We have all heard of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).
It’s often stereotypically depicted in movies of crazed Vietnam veterans who still hear bullets during their sleep.
A condition which affects people who have gone through severe trauma.
They often relive the traumatic events in their minds.
This disturbs their mental health and affects them in many areas of life.
You likely haven’t heard of PTG (Post-Traumatic Growth) coined by psychologists Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun.
This is the opposite phenomenon in which people find hidden benefits from their adversities.
They use these events to fuel future success.
Emerson's Law of Compensation Explained
Every adversity creates an opportunity due to the cause-effect nature of our universe.
The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson explained this beautifully through his ‘Law of Compensation’.
“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something else.”
This same law was first uncovered in a different form by physicist Sir. Isaac Newton.
His third law of motion states:
“For every action in nature, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
We understand this logically, but logic doesn’t matter to emotional creatures.
What transforms logic into understanding is a change of emotions.
This only happens through wisdom, the coveted ‘aha’ moment.
Wisdom is what allows the smoker of 20 years to finally quit and start taking care of his health.
For 20 years he knew smoking was bad, but he needed an emotional shift to really make a change.
Wisdom is what gives the entrepreneur the groundbreaking insight which grows his business well past 8 figures.
The information was always there in front of him, but he couldn’t see it.
What stopped him from seeing the truth was his subconscious mind, which resonated with failure.
The Soul Fraile Inspires Wisdom
The movie ‘Mr. Nobody’ beautifully shows the effect our choices have on our life.
In the film, a 118-year-old man called Mr. Nemo Nobody is the last mortal on Earth.
Humans have achieved immortality and are curious to learn more about Nemo, whose life is somewhat of a mystery.
A journalist investigating the issue asks Nemo a series of questions regarding his life.
Nemo, whose memory is fading, tells him several different contradicting stories.
Each story focuses on various times in his life and the decisions he made leading to different outcomes.
In one story, he marries Elise, in another he marries Anna.
In another story, it’s not Elise or Anna, but Jenny.
As a kid, Nemo stays with his dad after his parents’ divorce, while in another story he stays with his mother.
The truth eludes the viewer because Nemo’s stories explain a fractured timeline.
Each decision draws a new reality from the multiverse.
This idea of us having multiple potential life paths has been considered in physics, philosophy and mysticism.
Vadim Zeland, the author of the esoteric book ‘Reality Transurfing’ calls this dimension of possibilities
‘the alternatives space’.
Every human has millions of potential life paths.
In one lifeline, you are president like Abraham Lincoln, in another you are a janitor.
Some lifelines your soul loves, while others it hates.
The barometer for discerning whether a path is right for you is your emotional state.
If your baseline emotions are happiness, joy, fulfilment and excitement then you know you’re on the right path.
If your baseline emotions are stress, depression, meaninglessness, despair and boredom you’re on the wrong one.
By following your life purpose, what Zeland calls the ‘Soul’s Frail’, you open the gates of your subconscious mind to aid you in attaining wisdom.
This is how Steve Jobs was able to use his button phobia to help with the iPhone’s success.
This is how Abraham Lincoln could leverage the lessons from his ‘failures’ to ultimately achieve phenomenal victory.
When the subconscious mind has a goal, the wisdom needed to transform failure into success will be supplied.
The discernment of uncovering the signal from noise will be given.
The ability to change traumatic events into fuel for transformation will be granted.
This is why William James, who was regarded as the father of psychology, said,
“The power to move the world is in your subconscious mind.”
Let’s zoom out
There is a difference between noise and signal.
The noise often hides the signal.
Failure and success are subjective.
Both can transmute into each other.
Some people are stunted by failure, others use it as fuel for growth.
What separates PTSD from PTG is your alignment with the right life purpose.
When you follow your Soul’s Frail, the subconscious will open doors for you.
Do this and I promise you will be one step closer to living and dying well.