#41 - Michael Stroe | Solving Happiness, Oneshotting Procrastination & Speed Running Stream Entry

Michael Stroe (@Plus3Happiness) is a phenomenologist and “happiness concierge.” Through a combination of the Buddhist Fetters & somatic practices, he’s allegedly reduced his suffering by ~90%. He claims to consistently live at 9/10 life satisfaction and has skillfully guided others into similar transformations.

Today we demystify his journey and discuss concrete practices for oneshotting procrastination, reducing reactivity and permanently raising the floor of your happiness (seriously).

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Transcript — Michael Stroe

​[00:00:00] Daniel Kazandjian: Michael Stroe, welcome to the Metagame.

Michael Stroe: Well, thank you for having me. How you doing?

Daniel Kazandjian: I’m doing great. I’m really excited for this conversation. You famously, through a combination of Buddhist practices and somatic practices reduced your suffering by around 90%, which

Michael Stroe: Even more these days.

Daniel Kazandjian: And now you’re teaching other people how to do that, which is fantastic. How did you figure that out? Like what, what’s the story there?

Michael Stroe: As many great things happened by mistake, it’s a total mistake. I was on a more or less sabbatical in like 2023 in Barcelona. Uh, not in a great place in life, honestly.

Daniel Kazandjian: Hmm.

Michael Stroe: and towards the end of the trip, someone actually, someone that, someone being Frank Yang, which you might be familiar with,

Daniel Kazandjian: Mm-hmm.

[00:01:00] Michael Stroe: Shared, Kevin Schanilec’s website, which I’ve messaged, and he was very succinct as like, “try Liberation Unleashed” being a Liberation Unleashed being this forum for, for these practices

Daniel Kazandjian: Can you say that again? Liberation

Michael Stroe: unleashed. Yes,

Daniel Kazandjian: Unleashed. Yeah.

Michael Stroe: Yes. And very quickly realize that the way they’re doing it is one practice at a time and it’s months of work. My ADHD Mind, uh, was like, yeah, but what if we do everything all at once? Um, instead of doing one practice at a time, I basically did eight of them daily for a couple of hours.’cause that’s how you do it. Uh, in a bunch of days I had a perceptual shift, which was very interesting, and a bit of a honeymoon for like two days. Uh, that was something that I found funny that um, some people speak of these, uh, awakenings or whatever in terms of like, oh, months of bliss. And I just had two days and on the second day I was in an airport delayed for like five hours, which I was chill about.

[00:02:00] But that wasn’t necessarily like, whoa, I’m so alive. They’re like, yeah, that’s not happening. It was a bit better than usual. That perception shift coincided with a bit of a, what should I put it? Less? Uh, stress, let’s call it initially. ‘cause I didn’t know what was happening. Just less stress, less, uh, overthinking, less, chatter.

And actually one of the, one of the few things that I found really interesting somehow coincided with great sleep. I don’t know how to explain it seconds to sleep.

Daniel Kazandjian: Wow.

Michael Stroe: I found it very interesting because I used to get like one hour, two hours, three hours to get to sleep. And I just have ideas and sit in bed for just 30 seconds. I was out and I’m like, okay, this is an interesting benefit. Not gonna lie. Uh, I don’t even care about all these benefits, I’m sleeping. Like that’s, that’s enough. And from then on I sort of returned to simply the scene, the, the initial website where I was guided, uh, to Liberation Unleashed.

And I’ve done the practices on attachment and version. Okay.

[00:03:00] And I should mention that immediately after stream entry, which would be the first shift that I had where it kind of, you notice that there’s just the body mind, there’s no little guy driving this, uh, body around. Um, you start to be aware of the fact that you kind of don’t like a lot of the things that are happening.

You’re trying to pull out experience to such an extent. And, I had 10, 15 years of anxiety and other things on and off. Um, when I started looking at them, uh, I sort of noticed that I had a sort of a version towards so many things even after the first shift in like two more weeks had another one where, oh, like I, my, my, like that was the point where anxiety got reduced both in size and intensity and that was a big deal, even more of a big deal than the first one. ‘cause the first one is, like I said, it was nice, I was sleeping better, but also realizing how much you hate your experience,

[00:04:00] let’s call it, put it into a certain perspective and realize that from whatever anxiety I used to have or whatever intensity, it went down by like 60, 70%, at least in duration.

Michael Stroe: One of the things I’ve noticed is actually, I used to have anxiety for days and weeks at a time about some stupid thing, or in general, like a generalized anxiety. And I realized that I couldn’t. Get anxiety going for more than 30 minutes. As in, if someone distracted me, I forgot I had anxiety, and I’m like, huh, don’t understand what’s happening.

Why do you mean like, I forgot I had anxiety. What do you mean? Like that makes no sense. And sort of like this continued, uh, after a bunch, uh, more time, a few other shifts, but this one especially, were like, oh, there’s a dare there. Which for me, there were years of trying self-development, failing at meditation, um, or is nothing working actually.

You sort of like, you do all these self-development things.

[00:05:00] You, you’re gonna do your finances and orders, like you’re not happy. You’re gonna get a great job, not happily encouraged to do these things. It’s like, okay, but like what works? Um, and I had a notion that there’s a debt there, but I didn’t have a notion about what’s possible.

It’s sort of like more of a faith, even though I’m not religious, more of a fate that it’s possible. I didn’t

Daniel Kazandjian: Yeah.

Michael Stroe: I feel like maybe some of the people that I was following were somewhat trustworthy in this sense.

Daniel Kazandjian: So, you just, so to recap, you had 10, 15 years of suffering with like, maybe above average levels of anxiety, is that what you’re saying?

Michael Stroe: Yeah.

Daniel Kazandjian: Yeah.

Michael Stroe: Were months at a time where I was to be okay. And the, the moments where I was okay were just the moments where I wasn’t doing anything. As you know, I was mostly taking sabbaticals, which is not necessarily a great thing in the sense of like, if you’re not active in society, you’re feeling great.

It’s like saying, oh, I’m feeling great on vacation, but I hate my job.

Daniel Kazandjian: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So from that, the practices at On Liberation Unleash, the first thing,

[00:06:00] Daniel Kazandjian: the thing that allowed you to sleep fast and stuff was, was that stream entry.

Michael Stroe: Yes. That would be stream entry. Yeah. And

Daniel Kazandjian: So just,

Michael Stroe: Obvious. Yeah.

Daniel Kazandjian: Just to bring people on board with that, what is stream entry?

Michael Stroe: Stream Entry, if I am to take away from the woo stuff, it’s like realizing there’s no self, but the problem with realizing there’s no self, it’s so, uh, abstract, but we, no one, no one know what it means, but it’s provocative.

But if I’m to be a very mundane phenomenologist, it’s just the sense that I’m no longer the little guy in the behind the eyes. I used to call it behind the eyes or behind the, an experience that sort of looks like a watches experience from afar a bit.

Daniel Kazandjian: Mm-hmm.

Michael Stroe: So realizing that, oh, I guess there’s nothing separate from the body, mind world. There’s just the body and mind. And my identity is more so that of a witness, uh, not of the tour, let’s call it. And it’s very simple. Like it’s mundane. One of my, uh, most treasured experiences, right? When someone says, uh.

[00:07:00] Is it almost disappointing that there is not more there? Because that’s what you kind of know. Like, okay, like yeah, they got it. And it’s like, of course, like after enlightenment, it’s just, just ordinary experience. Um, and yeah, basically just the sense of no longer identifying as the doer. It’s

Daniel Kazandjian: Mm-hmm.

Michael Stroe: There’s no one moving the body mind, just the body mind moving itself. Uh, it doesn’t need a do or it’s all conditioning. And so,

Daniel Kazandjian: Yeah.

Michael Stroe: freeing.

Daniel Kazandjian: So, so, uh, we might get into more details on this, but what’s interesting to me is what you said after that was when you realized that you had a lot of aversion to things.

Michael Stroe: Yes.

Daniel Kazandjian: So is it that stream entry kind of brought awareness to the suffering that was already, like, you weren’t feeling your suffering fully, and then something shifted in terms of

Michael Stroe: Yeah. Um, what happens prior to stream entry? You take all these things as identity. This is mine. Then through stream entry,

[00:08:00] You start seeing them as more of an objective, uh, phenomenon or objective processes. Basically what I used to call, uh, um, what I was seeing afterwards as, oh, you know, like some contractions and so on, it used to be like my anxiety, my social, whatever. And it was, it was getting, uh, caught up as identity. And once I was able to see these processes, just those objective processes that I’m able to watch, uh, there is, uh, a subtle detachment. I don’t mean detachment in, uh, sort of like going away, but they’re actually going towards them.

What I’m able to see them for whatever, which is a bunch of thoughts and sensations and that has a very interesting side effect of actually realizing that these are happening, these are conditions and they’ve been happening for so long. And if beforehand they used to be like, oh, uh, it’s me, it’s, I’m, I’m bad like this. I’m bad like that. I’m not good enough for whatever. It’s like, oh, there’s this process. Of these sensations appearing and this story about not being like this or not being like that?

[00:09:00] Daniel Kazandjian: Do you have a personal anecdote about that? really illustrates this point?

Michael Stroe: Uh, yes, actually, I can tell you how, uh, we, the weakening of a version happened.

Daniel Kazandjian: Hmm.

Michael Stroe: Uh, there was this particular day I was in my parents’ house in the countryside and for some reason, some of my friends, not just one, were not answering my messages. And I used to have anxiety about this thing for, uh, both relationships and of both kinds of friends and, and anyway, about people not responding.

And I used to have three friends and it’s like they were not answering my messages and I was kind of going in a loop. What did I do? What did I say? Did I say something? And I was just, I had the moment of watching. I was like, okay, there’s this weird process. There are some sensations that are kind of like, not pleasant, but I’m going through all these thoughts.

And what happens is that I’m making it worse, but what is this? I was like, there are some sensations I had the moment. The sensations are not that bad. And also, I don’t know how I’m making this. Like they’re just here.

[00:10:00] And that was the moment, like, oh yeah. It’s like, why, why am I, what, why am I doing this to myself? And I was moments like, ah, yeah, it’s okay. Oh, it’s like, I best I’m gonna like if, if this is how bad it feels not to, uh, receive, uh, attention or whatever it was at the time. Like, I don’t even remember fully what I was like, it’s not that bad. was like, huh. A bit of like, oh, this is no big deal.

Yeah. I can just go about my day. Like, I thought it was gonna be worse. The anticipation of this being so bad was what I was amplifying but the sensation themselves was like some amount of contraction in the stomach area. Like, uh, one out of 10. Not a big deal.

Daniel Kazandjian: Yeah, so it’s almost that there, the raw sensation itself is relatively benign, but then there’s some sort of mental content, some story at adding to it.

Michael Stroe: Yeah. The mental tension. Like a rat, like basically a rat in a cage.

[00:11:00] Michael Stroe: Um, and going through all these stories, going through all these machinations in order to, and this is very important in order to seemingly try to change the sensation, like what should I say for this person to respond to me?

Michael Stroe: And then it dawned on me that actually I was not trying to have them respond. I didn’t think it was gonna sound bad, but also I didn’t necessarily care about them responding. I actually cared about me not having the sensations. And this is one thing that I usually show to people, which is like, if this sensation would be the same, but you were happy, you wouldn’t care about the sensation.

If you were content with how things are. Whatever happens, happens, you can still be pretty, pretty okay with it. But the problem for me was not the situation, which is like all these people not responding to my messages, like the, the, the anxiety or the amplification was just happening. It’s like, I just don’t like how I feel right now.

I hate this and probably this is the reason why. It’s like, is this the reason why it’s like, not just some conditioning there. But Yeah.

[00:12:00] Daniel Kazandjian: And so what were the practices that allowed you to create a little bit of distance with those sensations and stories?

Michael Stroe: I think at, at, at the time I didn’t necessarily like I had the materials, right, but the materials were something like, oh, notice in this moment that what you’re trying is to look for some other reality than the one you have. Basically that moment I had these people that were not responding to my messages, and the thing that I was was like, oh, I don’t have a reality where they’re responding to my messages.

In current practice, I would frame it like, oh, I didn’t get a response from my friends. It’s like, oh, I’m looking for this reality somehow. It feels differently and things are different. So it’s like, not necessarily that I wanted things to be different, I wanted to feel differently. Oh, I don’t have friends that respond to my message quickly.

So like, sure. I guess.But when, when, when we were seeing that actually the practice was just seeing things and just feeling a bit to it, it’s not a big deal.

[00:13:00] And definitely, my practice was a bit different from the one I, uh, show to people right now. Uh, at the time I was doing more inside Heavy, which would be staying that mental tension and seeing that it’s just a sensation that we can do something about it.Right now. I ask people to do both that, but also like just sitting with a so-called pain and letting it dissipate.

For me it was just sitting in that tension. It’s like, okay, I’m sitting in that tension. So what? And it’s like, okay, it’s not that pleasant, but also. There’s no other reality available.

There’s no other Michael. Sometimes I, I, when I see people being stuck in, it’s like, what is your quantum duplicate that somehow has some other sensation? They’re not. It’s like, okay, so I guess this is what you have right now. Is it that bad? And sometimes I make these weird analogies, which is like, imagine you’ve hit your leg very badly in the furniture.

Would you trade these sensations for those sensations? Like, no, you go. Then sit with these ones. Maybe you appreciate them more,

[00:14:00] Daniel Kazandjian: Hmm. Um, I wanna get back to your story, but one thing I’ll, I’ll, highlight is what your practice wasn’t. It wasn’t trying to understand why you happen to be so sensitive to people texting you and it, and like going into the deeper reasoning for your emotions. It wasn’t that at all. It was focusing on the sensations themselves.

Michael Stroe: Yeah. And what I found is there are cases where the, let’s say the story unbundling, which I would call it, is helpful.For the sake of reducing suffering, there is minimal need for that. You need to see that the story is a story, which is a bunch of thoughts, and the sensations are conditioned, arising and the like.

The impression is that, oh, this anxiety, for example, right now for me, it’s happening because of what’s happening. But the reality, no, it’s happening because all the baggage from the back, all my priors that are being, uh, involved in this particular situations, out of which, let’s call it this gate out, which, the anxiety comes up is through this situation,

[00:15:00] it’s actually the baggage that’s to blame, let’s say for this. One of the things I usually do, um, lately is, uh, to ask people to, okay, has some meaning, whatever story, right? My story, I was like, there’s meaning, and my friends are not pointing my messages. Okay, why is there more meaning to that particular thought compared to my body? 70% water?

It’s like. Uh, somehow one is more meaningful than the other, but they’re both, let’s say language markers.

They’re both tokens and somehow one has more meaning than the other. It’s like, is it the meaning or they’re just both neutral, but the charge is just because of the conditioning and it helps a bit putting on the per circuit. Like you have two stories or you have two sentences. is charged, one is not charged.

It’s like, how exactly is the story charged experience wise? What exactly is the charge? Oh, some sensations. Yes. So it’s not the story. And through just sitting with them, they eventually were like, oh, I guess the story.

[00:16:00] It was the sensations that I was resisting.

Daniel Kazandjian: Yeah. maybe it’d be worth spelling this out a little bit more. It’s like there’s a story

Michael Stroe: Yes.

Daniel Kazandjian: And then there’s a sensory experience in the body, like some, some knot in your gut or something like that, or like a buzzing sensation somewhere. And then those two things are very tightly coupled or correlated. And so the story itself feels charged.

What’s the process of disentangling those two things?

Michael Stroe: Well, the first step is usually to take away from the story as in, oh, this thing happened, this thing happened, this thing happens. It’s like, okay, all those things happen, but what’s happening right now? It’s like me, I’m looking for some other reality in the one available. It’s like, okay, um, I don’t have this reality that I’m looking for where this other thing happened.

So it’s like, okay, in this moment, right now, what you have, uh, this sensory reality and some thoughts, it’s like, okay, that brings you a bit further, into the present, right? So it’s like, okay, you make a sentence,

[00:17:00] and that sentence is almost like a summary of what happened, but in a very factual way.

Right. Like very factual. It’s like they didn’t say this, okay, so I don’t have this experience where I’m looking, I’m looking for them to be different. The next step would be putting the sensations into perspective. And actually that’s a very big one.

of the things that I notice is if I ask someone, which I have a lot of track questions during my inquiries, I, I need to mention that, uh, I usually ask them, it’s like, okay, on a scale of one to 10, how bad are these sensations?

And I’ve gotten some weird responses for some very meaningless situations. Like this email being an eight out of 10, right? Um, it’s like, okay, that like an eight out of 10, an email, like he, that torture, that torture level pain, right? So if you ask people, uh, in, in that way, they’re gonna, um, compare it with the ideal, how they would prefer to feel in this moment.

So it’s like, okay, okay, put it in a bit of a perspective, like compared to some actual pain, which is a breaking leg, I think breaking leg is the one I use most often.

It’s painful enough. And if you try to imagine it’s like.

[00:18:00] That would be a bad one. It’s like compared to breaking a leg, how bad is this pain?

It’s like, okay, it’s one or two. It’s like, oh, now we got some perspective. Now we got a foothold to just sit with the sensations. Right? And, and going through these a few steps, uh, you’ve basically taken away from the story. You’ve reduced it to something, you are looking for some other reality, and then you have the intensity dropping a bit.

Quite a bit actually. And then the last thing is like, okay, I want you to see with the sensation, it’s called being called staying in the gap. And what I mean by staying in the gap, it’s you tone descendants. I didn’t get the response from my friends, right? Some sensations are appearing and being in the gap.

It means seeing with those sensations until the thoughts that are happening, the thoughts that are happening somehow it seems. They can, uh, act upon these sensations somehow seem to be about these sensations. And the more you stay in the gap with a sensation, with thoughts,

[00:19:00] eventually it’s such a, uh, a long time between the sensations appearing and the thoughts that it’s like this couldn’t be connected.

Michael Stroe: It’s there’s no way that these, there’s a way for, for these sensations to be changed by this thought that happened a minute later. Like there’s no way of causality in such a way. So it’s like,

Daniel Kazandjian: Yeah.

Michael Stroe: There’s two channels. You have the channel of the thoughts, you have the channel of sensation, and it might seem initially that they’re glued somehow, but then it becomes, uh, obvious that no, the sensations are conditioned in a certain way.

The thoughts are conditioned a certain way, but there is no, uh, uh, glue in between. There is almost one of the metaphors I use lately actually, the, the channel of sensation is the basketball game the channel of, uh, thoughts or stories is the sports commentary. No amount of sports commentary will change the basketball game.

Whoever is your favorite basketball player, whether it’s LeBron or whatever, it doesn’t even matter. It’s like he’s not gonna suddenly start shooting trees just because the sports come. It’s like, oh, you’re shooting wrong. It’s like, yeah, that’s not gonna happen.

[00:20:00] And it’s a bit of a, of a more immediate, um, metaphor that it’s helped is like, oh, I’m trying to change the game by just commenting on it.

Daniel Kazandjian: Yeah, yeah, I love that image. Um, you used the word, uh, conditioning a few times, so like, because of conditioning, there’s the glue between the sensations and the thoughts and the stories. How, what do you mean by conditioning here? How does that process work?

Michael Stroe: Yeah. By conditioning, I mean all the situations and experiences that have left an imprint on the body mind, they’ve made a, they made a dent, whether it’s in personality, whether it’s even in the body. We have a discussion sometimes about VA computation, like.

The body does keep the score right. and that conditioning is basically everything you would, uh, actually both, uh, uh, positive and negative. You can have positive conditioning, right? Uh, both, uh, pleasant and negative experiences that make a mark in that condition.

[00:21:00] Future experiences based on prior experiences. If you wanna use priors, because we’re more in rational spaces, we can use priors, but I’m mostly speaking about the priors at the level of, uh, memories oftentimes and bodily, uh, contractions.

Michael Stroe: That’s what we use mostly for this.

Daniel Kazandjian: So is that like, let’s say when I’m younger and I have less awareness,

Michael Stroe: Yeah.

Daniel Kazandjian: Something happens to me, you know, maybe I feel a sense of social rejection, um, because I don’t know, the girl I like didn’t text me back or something like that. And then it prompts a really big physiological response that I know.

Michael Stroe: Yes.

Daniel Kazandjian: Correlate with the story of like, girls not texting me back, and then that’s conditioning. That’s like the prior.

Michael Stroe: Yes. That’s basically the pairing of some sensations with some stories.

Daniel Kazandjian: Mm-hmm.

Michael Stroe: Often, whether the stories can be like a visual memory. Like myself in that situation where I used to feel this way, and it’s like, oh, when that happens,

[00:22:00] this is, uh, this is the thing. And, and also like when I have that, those pairings, those pairings actually create a certain amount of one unidimensional response.

When I feel the sensations, I need to double text them or I need to say, I need to say, I need to say something. I need to say something to them. Right. Um, there is a sense where the degree of freedom is being traded for, uh. A sense of apparent control, right. In that case, uh, the one we mentioned for like, uh, not receiving a message.

When I, when this happens, then I do this. But by having, just when a then BI have a degree of conditioning or a degree of conditional, uh, response that actually prevents me from seeing there are maybe 10 other options. And that tends to shrink our personal freedom to such an extent that we often don’t realize that we’re doing it.

[00:23:00] Daniel Kazandjian: Yeah. So let’s come back to your story. You got, you got the stream entry. Then you start to recognize the conditioning and all the ways in which you had aversion to your experience. What happened after that?

Michael Stroe: Um, I found a guide, a lovely lady in Italy that was recommended to me by some other guide in fairs. She had some availability and we started working together and I started working on the big issues. Right now, when I work with people, I think I work a bit differently.

We used to work, we used to work directly with big stuff. One of the big things I had the most directly, which was something like some past relationship thing, and then I started working with a bunch of them. But the reality is, looking back, like I had a certain degree of buy into the process

When I used to guide the same way with folks that weren’t necessarily as bought in or

[00:24:00] believing in the process, I can say I had like 25 to 30 people quit after the first month because, um, instead of having more of an upstream, slowly gliding your way to more wellbeing, it’s more abrupt. It’s like you, you have reactivity that happens in two stages, weakening and breaking.

With two big issues, you’re gonna have the weakening and then the breaking. But if you don’t go with the biggest ones and you just go with. You, you can, you can have more of a smoother path.

Okay, what’s the biggest thing I can think of? Like, oh, there’s this, uh, memory from a relationship. And because I have this memory, I won’t have happy relationships in the future. Right.

And to work with this, and I can definitely tell you that between getting a weakening of reactivity or a version by myself and dropping, it’s been like a month and a half where I cannot necessarily say that was progress.

And I, uh, at the level of pedagogy,

[00:25:00] I found that actually to be a big issue because I was crazy enough to believe because I got the benefits fast, let’s say, and I was on my own. So it’s always easy to believe in the process, but I can definitely understand someone being like, I wanna stop.

So, and then in another month and a half, um, I kept working with bigger and bigger things. Right now, I, sorry, I separate things and things. Keeping you up at night, which is like immediate short term things that are causing suffering at the moment. And then the next one would be, uh, big goals and desires.

The second category. And by starting to work with Maria, I was already working on the big stuff, which is not necessarily ideal if I’m gonna be honest. I don’t have the emotional capacity right now. I feel that I end up in a point where I actually help people build the emotional capacity as we’re dropping a version.

Otherwise it can feel very jarring and that can make people not want to keep the process until finished. Right.

[00:26:00] I’d say like a month and a half, beginning of December, 2023, I started noticing that things were kind of like, uh, water of a duck spec. That’s what I would call it. Things were smoother. That was kind of where I started noticing. I kinda cannot say, and this is so like a bigger discussion, but. I cannot say I have bad days. A version basically is this mental chaining, uh, of some pain that happened and, and keeping it with you during the entirety of your day, even though it was like two minutes or five minutes of unpleasant sensation.

So when that no longer happens, a version by the way, dropping a version is called dropping into non-conceptual. That’s basically when you drop the associated between, uh, stories and sensations. And once that, that was dropped, it’s like, yeah, you can still feel pain, you can still feel unpleasant sensation, but you’re no longer chained as your day goes on into a big feeling that basically colors the entirety of your 24 hours.

[00:27:00] And that was the last, so like the, the last days where I’ve noticed, uh, bad days. So I cannot say that I have had bad days since then. Okay. I had

Daniel Kazandjian: Wow.

Michael Stroe: unpleasant situations for a few hours or whatever, but the amount of pain was actually low and there was no suffering. Even once, like, I had someone, like almost lost a friend a bunch of months ago, and there was crying, there was pain. There was no way of me imagining that there are some other sensations available and I fell through it. I cry. Uh, just what seemed natural there was necessarily suffering or resistance and it’s, it’s also a very point to be, it’s not relatable.

I cannot explain it for it to make sense. If someone doesn’t have it almost seems like I’m trying to sell someone on these. Grant benefit, uh, uh, by now, uh, where it’s like, oh, it’s so amazing. It’s like drugs.

[00:28:00] It’s like, it is amazing, but also it makes no sense how this could, uh, be experienced. Right?

And then when that happened in a few more weeks, I dropped into non duality again. It is a very fast process. I think there is a certain extent to which all these shifts are happening fast when someone really wants it. And I know that the Buddhist say desire is the root of all suffering, but that’s a mistranslation.

Was the root of suffering. And that’s a different, more moment to moment, uh, thing. being open, it’s like, yeah, I really want, this has led to very fast progress. And I think actually, um, suffering wise, actually this one actually made the most, uh, difference just dropping a version. I used to have so much of it.

It’s to color my days to such an extent, days, months, years, whatever you wanna call it, that once it drop, it’s like, okay, yeah, I did not expect this was possible.

[00:29:00] It’s easy to say that it’s not possible or there could not be something like this. Okay. It’s not perfect, but it’s amazing. It’s sort of like, that’s how I would call it. No, it’s amazing. And, and luckily right now, I, I, I feel like I’m not speaking from a standpoint of just me at, with her, there are a bunch of friends, some of them that you already know that have gotten the same experience and they have the same experience or like, no, it’s pretty great.

Michael Stroe: No,

Daniel Kazandjian: Yeah,

Michael Stroe: great. Yeah.

Daniel Kazandjian: I know you, you also tried to make this a little more legible for people by like mapping it on to commonplace positive experiences.

Michael Stroe: Yes.

Daniel Kazandjian: You know, and I know it’s a totally imperfect process or whatever, but it gives people a sense.

Michael Stroe: Yeah.

Daniel Kazandjian: maybe you can tell the listeners that, like how different stages mapped onto like the, these commonplace positive experiences.

Michael Stroe: I was trying to do this with a friend a bunch of times ago because I was thinking,

[00:30:00] what’s the marginal value of the next dollar? But actually it was more so what’s the marginal value of the next million dollars? It’s like, what do you even buy with a bunch of money that gives you happiness? I put my own happiness into, okay, what would I trade this for?

And it’s for, for as much as it’s gonna sound, it’s farfetched, I would say, like, I don’t know, tens of millions to be like, you have no physical worries for the rest of your life. You would still end up in the place where you’re pursuing this.

It’s already that good. Like there’s no convincing. Like I would rather take my pain from years ago just to have it. Yes. So the first, the first steps, treatment three, first one to three. I’ve humorously, uh, called it getting a free sandwich daily. Um, which is okay. It’s nice. Like there are some days when, when a sandwich can, can make you feel a bit better.

Uh, it’s, it’s nice. Um, you got a sandwich, you have a bit of a brighter day, right? There are days where a sandwich does not do anything.

[00:31:00] I’m gonna throw that off, right? Uh, and I’ll be experimenting, weakening. Um, it’s a bit of a, a bit, uh, higher and I would call it almost like having a very relaxing massage daily, right?

And it’s great. Like you go to have a massage, it’s great. You, you are relaxed now, you enjoy your day more. Maybe you are smiling more. It can make most days a bit, uh, sunny, right? also like when, some really bad things are happening and massage probably won’t be enough. And there are certain categories of things where.

A massage won’t do anything like, you know, loss and so on. Um, but the real, the real, uh, thing happens with the dropping of reactivity. And the reason why I call that, um, basically, um, being in a, a, a pretty good vacation all the time is because you no longer want or expect to always feel good.

[00:32:00] But that has the interesting side effect of making most days pretty amazing. Dropping reactivity or no longer, like I know, don’t want to feel good all the time. And because I don’t necessarily want or try to feel good all the time, I’m actually feeling good most of the time.

It was the suffering or other, the resistance to those few moments. We were feeling some pain that was coloring all these other moments negatively, let’s call it.

But when you no longer want that, it does feel pretty, uh, vacay vibes, uh, it’s okay. I’m on vacation most days. I don’t necessarily need to be somewhere, I don’t necessarily need to have a fancy dinner. A lot, a lot of what humans imagine they would feel during a vacation where they’re away from work.

You can have here and now with work, with life, with all these, uh, trappings of daily life, and it’s pretty amazing. And that would be what we spoke so far, which is the trapping already. [00:33:00] And there’s a bit of a, there’s technically two more steps, but I usually, I only, uh, speak about the first, uh, uh, one, uh, in this, in this, uh, next, uh, in next year row, which is like the fourth, uh, range, I would call it, uh, dropping form and formlessness.

And for those that are familiar with Buddhist, uh, terminology, that would be non-duality. And “I-ness”. I-ness probably it’s a bit less, uh, common, but no is very obvious. uh, or getting into no. Minus the stories that, uh, were all one and so on. it’s a, it’s a small, actually a small gain in, in pleasure.

You have more of a sense of connection with everything or everyone. You no longer have the sense of things or people being distant from you. You have the sense that you’re in one world simulation, which is interesting, but I found it compared to not having a version not as consequential.

[00:34:00] I have expected, based on how all the spiritual people are selling nonduality to feel amazing, connected. It’s like you do feel connected or actually it’s more correctly framed, disconnected. Like, I’m not, we are not all one necessarily, which is like, uh, further inside it’s like, okay, we’re all in one.

It’s like we’re close by distance is an illusion. Pretty great. Pretty great, right? But in terms of suffering reduction, I would’ve expected it to be more, but it was like 5%. A cool 5%, right? But not what I expected and this would

Daniel Kazandjian: You’re like, disappointed.

Michael Stroe: I’m gonna be honest a bit, a bit.

Daniel Kazandjian: Yeah.

Michael Stroe: I would’ve expected more people to have sold it to me as this grant thing where everything is amazing. It wasn’t necessarily, and this would correspond with the third six, right?

And I actually feel that third seven is more impactful, which would be “I-am-ness” consciousness and so on. Uh, the reason why this one actually was, um, profound, I would start with the sense of time.

[00:35:00] Sense of time kind of goes away and you realize there were a bunch of sensations and thoughts. When that happens, you have to be a bit more clumsy with your appointments. I’m gonna give people that warning.

That’s gonna happen, but you no longer have the time pressure. I need you to do this, I need to do that. If you heard people speak about timelessness or the experience of timelessness, this is basically what they were speaking of just now. Just now, just now. And it’s pretty amazing. That’s just one aspect.

The second aspect that I’ve seen, um, this actually has to do with, um, almost, um, dropping the notion that somehow things are existing in opposites. Where it’s like, in this case, it’s ugly and beautiful you’re dropping the opposites as real categories when, when the opposites seem to be integrated as neither this nor that, neither ugly nor beautiful.

I found that everything is more beautiful.

[00:36:00] Very few people will be able to relate to this, but there was a joke going around on Twitter a bunch of time ago, which is like, Would you rather get plus three to your own, uh, beauty, or would you give plus three to everyone?

And this is in a way giving plus three to everyone’s beauty. course, beauty being in the eye of the beholder, uh, but everything from a wall to a flower to whatever you want to tends to become way more, uh, beautiful by, um, via negative, which is no longer saying, saying it’s mundane or, uh, boring or whatever you would project upon it.

That cancellation of the extremes makes it way more likely that everything is like, has a certain beauty, has a certain vividness to it, that I. I actually wasn’t told that it’s gonna happen. Uh, but I found it very, very obvious and I’m sometimes, uh, I’m, I’m being caught in, in the metro and

[00:37:00] I’m just looking at people with a certain fascination regardless of how they’re looking or whatever their gender is, because there is a sense of, wow, look at all these ways that the reality is happening.

All these ways that, uh, things have manifested, right.

Daniel Kazandjian: Yeah.

Michael Stroe: And I guess, uh, the last one, which is very interesting and some might relate it, um, is no longer making things out of images. Here’s what I mean. You’re looking around the room or you’re looking around something. You’re noticing, let’s say, uh, a basket.

The mind or the brain is like, oh, that’s a basket. It makes a thing almost like the image that you would see it and gives it a thinness, uh, substantiality. When you just take things as they are, it’s an image or if you want to interact with it you can go touch it and so on. But when you compulsively make it a thing, the mental chatter drops a lot.

[00:38:00] Michael Stroe: I used to have problems where I used to work in advertising, like outdoor advertisements and I was like Coca-Cola, and it’s like, oh, I like, like all these, uh, ads I used to see in the brain were automatically naming them. That goes down because okay, I’m seeing an image, but I don’t necessarily need to make it a substantial thing.

That drops a lot of the mental chat and also like the compulsiveness of interacting with the world. Um, the benefit of this mostly is that life tends to become very movie-like at this point. When you no longer imagine that things have very distinct boundaries and everything becomes more fluid in that sense, you no longer have the image, the, the, the image that somehow you are outside of the world somehow.

You, you, it’s one big singularity, if you wanna call it. Um, that tends to make things very easy to move around. If you ever heard, and this is a bit of a, I’m not sure I would give it a trigger or warning,

[00:39:00] but I would be mindful that sometimes when in Buddhist, a lot of people know this, know that they’re actually very dumb ways of giving insight. For example, if you heard that there is no body, that’s one of the dumbest ways of framing it.

The actual framing would be the body arises together with everything else. And that wouldn’t necessarily give people any type of, uh. Scaries. It’s like, oh, okay. So the body is just part of the Raja. And the sense of the body as a thing, as a monolith was just the brain taking a bunch of this junk, uh, sensation and constructing a mental model of what the body would look like.

With the seven photos, you no longer need to construct a body as a monolith. You just take sensations as different pings. I used to call it the same way that rain drops. That’s how you feel. You no need to hold the frame of there is a body in, in a very, um, uh, experiential way or like one big block of stone.

[00:40:00] Have this, the sensations, the body’s still there, the organ is still there. You no longer hold the concept of it being a monolith and that I’ve actually found very relaxing and super easy to do, uh, hard things, physical hard things, or go without sleep for a long time because the body seems to be way, uh, way easier.

To process. It’s like, oh, there is some unpleasant sensation from tiredness. Okay. Like, it’s not that the whole body is tired, it’s like tiredness, uh, expresses itself as just this one muscle in the back that it’s a

Daniel Kazandjian: Yeah, yeah.

Michael Stroe: You’re no longer like, oh, the body is tired. It’s like, no, it’s just some sensation. It’s not pleasant. That’s it. So it’s easy to bounce back.

Daniel Kazandjian: Um, so this reminds me of a meditation prompt. Uh, it’s like a direct pointing prompt of just experiencing the body. Just see, see if you can experience the body as a cloud of sensations as opposed to. The, the mental map or like, maybe a simple one that, that I noticed was if someone says, pay attention to your hand, the sensations in your hand,

[00:41:00] you might think you’re doing that, but then you’ll notice that often there’s also an image of the hand and like a sense that you’re up here and you’re looking down at your hand and like there’s a bunch of other stuff happening quite habitually that isn’t just the raw sensations of the hand and the raw sensations of the hand are something like, like texture and, and heat and tension and like these more, uh, simple constituent elements.

And then the same applies for pain. Or I’ve noticed when I’ve had issues with chronic pain, if I just do this type of exercise, it just gets deconstructed into a bunch of neutral sensations.

Michael Stroe: Yeah. Direct pointers of this nature are very useful because we tend to interact with the word via abstraction or via fabrication.

[00:42:00] But once you see, like into the, let’s call it, you realize that, oh, it’s actually easier to bear. And as you mentioned, there are a lot of these small pointers that you can give someone that make actually a big dent in your experience, uh, especially are of suffering and pain they finally see experience as is not through the conceptual map.

And one of the, because you mentioned the one with the conceptual map, one of the things I actually ask people during the stream entry conversation is, uh, can they imagine an actual tactile sensation? Like, okay, let me try to imagine my feet standing on the floor. So it’s like, are you really imagining a sensation or are you imagining the mental body map and where it would happen, is like, oh yeah, no, I’m, I’m imagining the mental body map.

There’s no way for me to. Imagine a sensation the same way. It’s like Exactly. So that helps put things into perspective between what’s direct sense experience and what’s abstract experience. And you can use abstraction.

[00:43:00] It’s just though you never confuse abstraction, if you want to call it, the abstraction would be context, right? And enlightenment is just untangling more and more of the context of identity or of concepts into the components of, um, what we would call experience, like context and content. Like that’s, that’s like the more you take, uh, context and make it content, that’s the more enlightened you are, if you want.

Michael Stroe: Call it like that.

Daniel Kazandjian: I wanna see if we can help people on this a little bit. Obviously, you know, reducing your happiness by 90 or reducing your suffering by 90% or

Michael Stroe: Yeah.

Daniel Kazandjian: Nine outta 10 happiness is like a pretty good sell. But one of the things you’ve mentioned, and it’s also implicit in the stories that you shared, is this idea of freedom. How there’s actually just more degrees of freedom around different areas of life.

[00:44:00] And so I wonder if you can speak a little bit more about freedom and then some of the other kind of tangible benefits that you’ve discovered through this journey.

Michael Stroe: Yeah. Um, the biggest degree of freedom, I would say, does come from aversion attachment.

I used to have this notion that I should make this amount of money by this age, and I would say that’s very common for type A. Uh, once I was no longer held by that attachment, I could actually work toward that direction.

Well, in the past I used to be very contracted around not having, that would actually mean and turn, uh, into procrastination. And that’s a very common experience where it’s imagined that procrastination is somehow. An issue of the situation. I don’t have this, I don’t have that, but most often with the people at work, we end up seeing that procrastination is just an emotional issue.

Procrastination being just the resistance to how I’m feeling and most often how I’m feeling is not that bad.

Freedom, it turns out, is a very common conversation for me. It’s like, if meditation takes away my ambition?

[00:45:00] It’s like, wouldn’t that be bad? It’s like, well, let me frame it differently.

Uh, if you were to lose some of these things probably you weren’t interested in, but you’re gonna do way more of the things that you actually want to do. And none of the people that I know have gotten, uh, this far have somehow lost their ambition. They will have families, they’re still doing things, they’re doing more things.

They’re no longer ima