- Zero built-in meaning,
that's what the meaning of things in our reality has.
It has no built-in meaning
other than the meaning we give it.
And think about it like this.
The other day, I was doing a live stream
and I was talking about a rainy day.
How we feel about a rainy day
depends upon the meaning that we give
to what a rainy day means to us.
And when I asked that, there weren't thousands of,
there was a lot of comments,
there were a lot of people on the live
that were going through and you saw,
amazing, I love rainy days, awesome, phenomenal,
depressed, horrible, not so great,
this huge bandwidth of what people felt
when it's a rainy day based on the meaning they give it.
Why?
Because a rainy day has no built-in meaning
other than the meaning we give it.
Now, the challenge that we get
is there's many things in our own life that we can agree
has a certain meaning.
We can mainly agree
that people going through abuse is wrong.
People should not be abused.
People shouldn't be treated a certain way.
However, what I found in my own level of transformation
is that some of the most traumatic things
that I've been through have been the things
that have actually reaped the most amount of reward for me.
Now, does that make it right?
Does that mean that I'm like,
I hope, I just can't wait
til I go through some type of physical abuse or anything.
But what it did make me aware of is how neutral things are
in the sense that once I changed the meaning
to a past experience, everything changed.
Now, if you think about this
in the form of the traditional story
that you guys have heard
if you've been watching my videos for a long time,
and it sounds like a broken record now,
but when I used to have the nine to five job
selling women's shoes, and I had a manager
that was the same personality structure as my ex step-mom,
she was controlling, she was manipulative,
she was protected by upper management.
And she was in my life.
I was feeling very stuck.
I had the pain of my past kind of waning over me.
And what happened is I then went through
a spiritual awakening.
All that happened with the spiritual awakening
is I looked at my past
and I changed the meaning I gave to my past.
Instead of my past being this thing
that meant I'm not worthy.
I also had a belief and a meaning there
that women are trying to control me.
So there was always a woman in my life
that was trying to control me because that was my belief.
I had the belief that I wasn't worthy.
I didn't have much of a childhood.
And it was a level of also shame, not feeling,
like feeling there's something broken with me.
And that was my reality.
But then once I changed the meaning to that,
I looked at it from a new point of view.
And I saw that it actually led me to a spiritual awakening,
to me helping and being able to gift
and share my story with other people
in hopes that it can also inspire them to change.
When I made that change of meaning, everything changed.
My buddy, my best friend Victor Odo,
he went through crazy amounts of trauma as a kid
because he had a firework that literally blew up on him.
He was at 4th of July.
It's actually 4th of July tomorrow
here where I'm at right now.
I'm in Austin, Texas.
Side note.
And he had, it was at a family thing
and it was a whole community there,
a whole neighborhood thing.
A firework fell, launched at him, exploded on him.
He was burnt, almost died,
had to wear like some type of skin suit
for like weeks at school.
Got made fun of at school.
Had to wear like this brace thing
so he wouldn't touch his skin.
And it was an extreme amount of pain.
But you want to know what's funny?
Even though, then from there, Victor eventually went into,
went through a level of addiction.
Also, can appear very negative.
Victor though, now helps people,
does what I do for a living.
That's why we're at BFFs.
We're best friends forever.
Yay.
But both of us agree that our trauma,
the most horrible thing
that's probably happened in our lives
are both the most grateful things,
things we're grateful for
because it led us to do what we're doing now,
to be able to help other people.
You ever notice that a lot of people
that go through addiction,
or I guess a lot of people
that run addiction recovery centers
are people that used to be addicted?
Think about, even though they may have torn apart
their whole entire lives, they are then able to help people
and they have a new meaning, a tie to what they are,
who they are and what they do.
Your ability to shape meaning
is your ability to change and transform your life.
Meaning everything in life is fundamentally neutral.
Yes, we can all get together and say,
hey, 9/11 was a bad thing.
All of this meaning.
But in actuality, in the whole cyclic part of life,
we don't know what the true implications of things are
because we don't have a greater picture.
So what I mean by that
is whatever the hell you want it to mean.
What I mean by it though,
is that things are inherently neutral
except for the meaning we give it.
I was working a nine to five job selling woman's shoes.
I was thinking, feeling and acting equal to that reality.
I then gave things a new meaning.
Once I was told by a,
I got in trouble for saying the word belly button.
Can you believe that?
I literally got told, Aaron,
if you say the word belly button one more time,
you are fired on the spot.
And everyone else in my department in women's shoes
was told the same thing.
Why?
'Cause we had this word that has no-built in meaning.
It's the word belly button.
But people at the job thought it was some sexual term
or something like that.
That was their meaning they were steering upon it.
It had no built-in meaning.
I just thought it was funny.
We were helping customers that were really rich
with like thousand dollar, a pair of $1,200 shoes.
And to slip in the word belly button
in between conversation without them knowing,
it was just a funny thing.
We weren't trying to be like horribly rude or anything.
We did it 'cause it lightened up the mood.
So eventually, everybody in the department
was saying belly button under the surface
until one person decided to go into the email of somebody
and change their footer
and their email to say the word belly button.
So eventually, the store manager found out about that
'cause that person emailed the manager
and it became this whole thing,
saying the word belly button
and we were told to never say the word belly button again.
It has no built-in meaning.
I was told that if you ever say the word belly button again,
you're fired, like that.
Like Trump, you're fired.
But you wanna know what happened?
I also got in trouble for being on my phone
because working at Barney's New York in women's shoes,
we'd stand around for like eight hours a day,
sometimes not having a customer for four hours.
So one of us would stay on the floor.
One of us would go in the back.
I went into the back and be on my phone
and we'd be taking turns on our phone
and I was on Instagram.
It was boring.
Wasn't much else to do it.
And I agree, I have a business now
and I understand that it is somebody
getting paid to do that, whatever.
But what happened is I had the store manager
and the department manager bring me up to the office
and make me watch a five-minute video of me on my phone,
on Instagram, watching myself scroll.
And they really wanted to wire it in.
So they're like, no.
I'm like, okay, I get the point.
I won't be on my phone or whatever.
And they said, no,
we want you to watch this whole five-minute video.
They wanted to really rub it in.
So here I am watching a five-minute video
of me scrolling on my phone on Instagram.
It was so humiliating.
It made me feel so small.
Actually, I was choosing,
I was giving it the meaning that I was small, first of all.
Let me acknowledge that right out of the gate.
But what I did is in that moment,
I gave things a new meaning.
The new meaning I gave life
is that I'm going to figure out
how to go full-time doing what I love.
I will never be told what to do like this
and demeaned like this again.
I want to work for myself.
The ability that I had to shape a new meaning
is what transformed my life.
Meaning is what gift we have.
It's a gift from the creator, whatever you want to call it.
We have the ability to give things meaning based on things.
If I say a word right now, like, (speaking jibberish).
(saying jibberish)
How does that make you feel?
You probably don't feel anything.
Or maybe it reminds you of some language
that gives you a certain feeling.
So that's the meaning you choose to give it.
Like, it kinda sounds German or something like that.
But what if I told you that that word,
I don't even remember what it was because I made it up.
What if I told you that word meant kombucha kitten,
lovable stuffed animal.
You'd be like, I like it.
Or maybe you don't.
Maybe you're like, I hate stuffed animal.
I want to shoot it with a machine gun.
The meaning is that.
What if I said, you know what?
I'm kidding.
It doesn't actually mean that.
You want to know what it really means?
It means strangled kitten,
I dunno, something horrible, right?
And you're like, ah, no, I don't like it anymore.
I don't like it anymore.
The meaning of the word has no built-in meaning.
We give shit meaning.
We just agree, we use language patterns
so that we can agree to what things mean.
That's it.
So we have these agreed things.
We can all agree abuse is bad.
We can all agree this, but,
but we givin' that shit meaning.
So let's get back to the source.
Let's get back to the source of the meaning of your life.
You wanna transform your life,
look at the things that have happened to you
and look at the meaning you gave them.
Maybe they're meanings that your parents gave things
and you took on that meaning.
Whatever it is, meaning is like belief.
Your beliefs create your reality.
You're walking around with these shades right now.
And you're only seeing reality
that is equal to the lens through which you wear.
When you change your beliefs about who you are
and you change your stories about reality,
beliefs and stories, same thing,
that's when you change your life.
And you start to become empowered
when you realize you right now
are deciding the meanings of things.
You.
You and only you.
But when you let other people give you meaning,
that's when you feel disempowered,
when you let the government
or you let other people tell you what and how to feel,
that's when you're giving away your power.
Two people lose a job.
One person could give it the idea of a negative meaning.
Say, oh, I'm not worthy.
I really like this job.
How am I gonna make money?
Blah, blah, blah.
This is horrible.
Somebody else says, you know what?
This job kinda sucked.
I trust the universe.
I'm gonna go for this job.
And then they get a job within two weeks.
And this person stays there for awhile.
The meaning they gave it was different.
My brother and I went through very similar
childhood trauma growing up.
We both responded to it in a very different way.
Same thing kinda happened, a little bit different,
but same thing kinda happened, different response.
Meaning your ability to transform your life
is dependent on the meaning you give things.
You could give things zero meaning, neutral meaning,
zero or neutral.
You give it a positive meaning.
You give it a negative meaning.
What you give it is what you get out of it.
At any moment you could decide,
I'm gonna figure this out.
Until you take ownership of the meaning,
you'll continue to give it away.
You'll give it away to a boss that can tell you what to do.
You'll give it away to other people
that can tell you how to feel.
You'll give it away to other governments
or other people that tell you
what's going on in the world right now.
Can you just watch the news so we can program you?
All of that is built-in, is meaning that they're trying.
And honestly, we have a collective consciousness
that we're all connected to.
Things have zero built-in meaning,
but what government is, not just the government,
people behind the government, whatever we wanna call it.
What they've realized
is they can control the media companies.
They can control the belief structures
that have us thinking, feeling and acting a certain way.
And if you can keep enough people
believing they're not powerful, then guess what?
You can control the energy dynamics in our reality.
They know that.
But now what we're doing is we're waking up.
We have the ability to shape our own meaning
and to come together to shape a new meaning.
Things are neutral.
We do not have to believe what we're told on the media.
We do not have to believe
what we're told by different things
that have their own agenda.
There is our own agenda and they have their agenda
based on, a lot of times, moolah.
What can make the most money
and have the most power and control?
That's what they want.
But even that's a story in and of itself.
That's the meaning,
the meaning I guess I'm choosing to give it,
but I choose to give,
or I don't watch the news for that reason.
I don't choose to be programmed.
Maybe some people can watch the news and not be programmed.
That's the meaning they give it.
I don't know.
But just in general, that's the key.
The meaning shapes your life.
When you change the meaning, you change your life.
Everything has built-in meaning.
Go back to your past.
Look at things that have happened to you.
You can give it a positive meaning
and see how you can use it for transformation.
And everything will change.
Now, there is something
that I really want to share with you.
It's a very powerful, free meditation
that you can download right meow.
All you gotta do is go to www.highviber.com.
There's a new app.
This app is that of a free app that you can go
and there's meditations in there.
But there's a meditation specifically
to help you become aware of your beliefs
and to let go of negative beliefs that aren't serving you.
Completely free.
You go to highviber.com
or you can download the High Viber app on iTunes,
on Apple, just anywhere, Android.
It is an app and it's a community of high vibe people.
And we do lots of cool things in there.
And we do live meditations.
We do live activations, live workshops.
We come together.
There's a book of the month.
We do challenges.
And it's completely free.
And all you got to do is go to highviber.com,
but there's also some meditations in there.
One of those meditations is on understanding
this ability to shape meaning.
Other than that, talk to you guys in the next video.
If you liked this video, if you liked it,
if you want more like it, it kind of rocked the point,
all that stuff, and that.
As always, peace, much love and namaste.