Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power (A method for getting what you want by getting off on what you don't)

Consider: the unconscious rules not only our night-time dreams, but to a great extent (a far, far greater extent than is comfortable for us to acknowledge)—it also rules the patterns, desires, and curiosities that shape our waking experience. Our day-to-day waking experience is also a kind of dream—more dense and more slow-moving than our nighttime

Hell yeah, I generated this! Hell yeah, a part of me fucking loves it and that part of me deserves to enjoy itself too, because every part of me is worthy and awesome, including the perverse shadowy parts!

So to emphasize: focus on allowing yourself to take sadomasochistic pleasure in the sensations and emotions stirred up by your “don't like” situation. Don't put your energy into trying to get yourself to like the bare facts of what you “don't like.”

Gradually, you can link your expansive sense of choice to your awareness of the “don't like” situation in such a way that you become less and less prone to experiencing it as something that's “being done” to you, and more and more as a funny game you play, until one day it just dissolves.

And if you're curious as to what you unconsciously want, you don't need thirty years of psychoanalysis to figure it out: you can just take a look at what you currently have in your life and know that that's exactly what your unconscious wants, because what your unconscious wants, it gets.

“I don't like this,” “I don't want this to be this way,” “I want this to end,” “this sucks” and instead you're going to savor and get off on your unconscious creation. You can experiment with more EK statements like: “This unconscious enjoyment matters just as much as any other enjoyment in my life.” “My enjoyment of this fucked-up stuff is just as

The Picture of Dorian Gray, “If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.” Our trembling little human lives and emo

We start to perceive our lives from the perspective of the divine curiosity within us, instead of from our grasping egos.

Grab your journal and write out “the rules” of your day-to-day feelings and behavior in no uncertain terms, as if you were programming an android to have the same hang-ups and neuroses as you.