How to Debug Your Human Operating System

(Realize Effortless Peace as Your Default Mode)

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At the end of 2018, I was in “spiritual burnout”.

I’d been cycling through dozens of practices, but none of them were getting at my deepest stresses, attachments and intrusive thoughts.

I felt like I was drowning in an ocean of conflicting advice, reaching out for awakening as if it were a life raft… But finding only water.

Until one day, insight finally struck!

I realized that the techniques I’d been applying, and the thousands of variations on them, were all mental processes. And the issues I was attempting to fix with them were mental processes too.

I was trying to fix my problems on the same level I was creating them.

Suddenly, it felt absurd that I ever thought it could work! What followed was the end of my spiritual seeking and the beginning of a new life, characterized by effortless peace, clarity and effectiveness.

Since then, I’ve taught hundreds of people to end their seeking too. Paul’s lasted fifty years before the penny finally dropped for him during one of my videos.

So in this post, I’m going to show you what I showed him…

Forget Everything You Know About Awakening

You were born with a clean installation of your human operating system, which came with simple software, like:

• attention.exe

• pattern_recognition.exe

• imitation.exe

• memory.exe

This basic setup enabled you to learn; to install more software.

But you didn’t yet have sophisticated tools like discernment.exe to tell what was helpful from what was harmful, nor social_boundaries.exe to guard you against insecure connections.

So you automatically installed everything you came into contact with, and ended up running buggy software like:

• anxiety.exe

• self-doubt.exe

• perfectionism.exe

These were installed via insecure connections to websites like generational-trauma.com, bullying.com, and discipline.com.

Buggy software hogs resources, which makes your human OS feel slow and unresponsive. In extreme cases, it can even cause crashes like panic_attack.exe or dissociation.exe. (If these are common for you, I recommend getting professional support alongside your exploration of this teaching.)

Your teens and early 20s were messy and confusing, but by the time you reached adulthood, you’d installed one other piece of software, which would turn out to save your life: introspection.exe.

Spiritual Self-Diagnosis

introspection.exe enables you to see what’s going on in your OS.

When you first ran it, you discovered tons of buggy software running constantly in the background.

So you ran problem_solving.exe. You searched tons of websites, and eventually found spirituality.com, which hosted hundreds of programs that promised to fix your OS, for example:

• breath_meditation.exe

• loving_kindness.exe

• vipassana.exe

• yoga.exe

You were overwhelmed, but you picked one and ran with it, diverting to it all the resources you could spare. It helped! But then it stopped helping. So you went back to spirituality.com and tried something else. That helped too! Until it didn’t.

Each new spiritual practice you ran seemed to work at first, but the results always plateaued. For example, you might have shut down weed_dependency.exe, but failed to get at restlessness.exe, which popped up in its place. So you started pushing more resources to one of your most reliable tools: effort.exe.

The Paradox of Effort

effort.exe helped you tremendously in the beginning of your spiritual practice. It also helped you gain skills, status and rewards in your worldly pursuits. You had every reason to believe it would help you here, too.

But it didn’t.

In fact, it did the opposite.

And this brings us to today.

For some reason, the more resources you dedicate to effort.exe, the more you find old bugs starting up again:

• anxiety.exe constantly worries something is wrong with your system, and whether spiritual software is simply incompatible.

• self_doubt.exe loops on questions like, “did I choose the right practice? Did I understand it correctly? Am I too dumb to get enlightened?”

• perfectionism.exe opens dozens of browser tabs on spirituality.com and searches frantically for something you might’ve missed.

The cure has become the disease.

You know you’re in a better condition than before you subscribed to any spiritual teachings, but the bug-free operation they promise somehow feels farther off than ever.

A few more things are troubling you, too:

1. The benefits you do get from your spiritual software depend on you running it for hours each day. When you don’t, your old bugs come right back.

2. The software doesn’t state how long you’ll have to keep using it. It talks about that goal of bug-free operation (enlightenment; awakening)—but it never gives you a clear timeframe regarding when you’ll get there.

3. Everything on spirituality.com is software that tries to fix other software. This is what I was doing at the rock bottom of my own struggle: trying to solve my problems at the same level I was creating them.

There’s no shortage of dedicated practitioners who’ve been running their spiritual software for decades. Yet millions of them are no closer to getting rid of their lingering bugs.

If you really want to be bug-free, you must learn to understand your system in a whole new way…

Stop Trying to Solve Your Problems At The Level They Were Created

In this metaphor, software represents mental/emotional processes.

The operating system represents awareness: the environment or “space” in which all mental/emotional processes run, and all data (experience) is processed.

When you think of an operating system, you likely think of a login screen and a bunch of menus and settings. But it’s much more than that. It is the invisible foundation of everything that occurs. Awareness is the same.

Without an OS, no software can run; without awareness, you don’t even exist!

But here’s the best news you’ll ever hear: the OS, at its core, cannot be affected by buggy software. It may seem as though the OS is infected but, at the deepest level, all it’s doing is processing data impartially. The problems are all occurring on the surface layer.

And all the software on spirituality.com, while somewhat beneficial, is ultimately just a bunch more processes that obscure your naturally bug-free Default Mode. (Not as in neuroscience’s “default mode network”, but as in your natural, optimal way of being.)

All you need to do is simply recognize this.

Let me show you how…

How to Debug Your System

You do not need another new piece of software.

All you need to do is hit ctrl+alt+delete. No matter what you’re involved in, you can use this shortcut to simply “zoom out”, rest a moment, and see all the processes you’re running with perfect clarity.

But if you’re like everyone else, in the next moment you’ll zoom right back in on something:

• Your phone rings and you run obligation.exe

• You smell someone’s lunch and you run desire.exe

• You remember a deadline and you run stress.exe

Good news: you can just hit ctrl+alt+delete again and zoom back out!

You might imagine this would slow you down. And maybe it will while you’re getting familiar with it. But something amazing happens as you continue:

1. The more moments you spend zoomed out, the more you see how unnecessary your buggy software is

2. The more you see how unnecessary your buggy software is, the less resources you dedicate to it

3. The less resources you dedicate to your buggy software, the more likely it is to self-terminate!

This leaves you running in bug-free Default Mode.

And in Default Mode, you’re actually faster. Much faster. Think about it: how efficient would you be without any of those bugs running?

• You’d pick up calls on your own schedule and respond with appropriate boundaries

• You’d be content as you are, hungry or not, and undistracted by your colleague’s burrito

• You’d be focused exclusively on completing the task in front of you, which is how you meet the deadline

Default Mode is Naturally Effective

More good news: all the good qualities spirituality.com promises in its advertising are actually built right into your OS. They’re always present, but obscured while buggy software hogs your resources:

• Peace

• Clarity

• Wisdom

• Presence

• Efficiency

• Resilience

• Acceptance

• Confidence

• Compassion

These are expressed naturally to the degree that you debug your system. Eventually, when you’re called to act, you’ll run only extremely simple, lightweight, bug-free software, like:

• articulate.exe

• appreciate.exe

• cooperate.exe

• empathize.exe

• sacrifice.exe

• forgive.exe

• listen.exe

• assert.exe

• decide.exe

• focus.exe

When I first heard of all this, it seemed too good to be true. But I’ll tell you what every one of my teachers told me:

You don’t have to believe any of this—you only have to test it for yourself.

So let me help you with that. Just watch the short video below, where I'll guide you through your first ctrl+alt+delete so you can get a glimpse of the freedom I’m talking about…

What I’ve shared with you here is only the beginning of the beginning.

The next step for you is to tell me how that video struck you, plus a bit more about where you’re at in this whole picture. So please run my 1-minute system_diagnostic.exe. It's just 3 multiple choice questions. Your answers will tell me what guidance to give you next.

Following that, we can begin your debugging process for real and guide you all the way to realizing stable, effortless peace.

With love from my desk,
Dan 💙

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