The After Hours Alternative

Asad Mustafa takes us out, into the never-ending totality.

Series finale: we talked to Dr. Ashok Rajput - Pakistan's only certified teacher of Transcendental Meditation - and found out that there's nothing more left to say.

A new theory: the root cause of all suffering is a state of desperation. Know this and literally change everything in a single masterstroke.

'When you feed your brain a fantasy, unreality, it takes it as the basis. With this seed, it takes whatever it can get, the strongest of all the sources (be it bullshit, if your bullshit is stronger than your conception of truth, reality, and yourself) and it grows these huge, huge trees that can then block out the very sunlight you needed all along.'

 'Agar koi karnay waala kaam aap kar saktay hou, tou karna aapki zimmeh daari hai. If it needs to be done, and you can - then do it.'

"I don't want borrowed happiness. I don't want to live with the fear of it being stolen."

"When you help, you get help. When you get help, you help. A circuit is complete and the switch is closed."

'There is no true self-sustaining sustenance.'

'Not found, but manifested.'

A season finale, and a new year, new meme.  May this year bring irreversible good into your life. Take away one thing from this episode, just from reading this: you have to move into the next period of your life, gracefully, and timely. You have to be aware of it, and you have to comply, because if you make friends with time, time will make friends with you. Time is on your side.

There is a movement, to stop the improvement of you; and the short end of that shtick is being used to hold up womankind the world over. Women who will be marketed (and sold) anger and empowerment - the end product being a cycle of just replicating the same mistakes men have been making in your place for thousands of years.  There is no big war; just battles sizable enough to keep you sidetracked. It is not 'your turn' at trying your hand at fucking it up; you are not meant to be 'the same' as them. You never were, and you never could be, because what they are is nothing remarkable and nothing to aspire to be, but to dismantle and to make obsolete. But your rage will continue to be manipulated in a certain direction that will render all your energy useless. Shady 40-year-old white males will write the women-empowering break-up pop songs for you and for your queens, to trick you into ideas that were never your own. Women in countries you'll never hear of will be enslaved to manufacture graphic tees with slogans of female freedom and queenery. You will be made scared, hopeless, and as far removed from the center of your peace and power as you can be (preferably a YAS QUEN throne to keep you distracted); to make the wave of the future break before it even threatens to topple any of their sandcastles. Unchain and recenter; journeys can truly only be made inwards.

We share this space that each of us creates. Someone out there feels the exact, exactly specific way you do; this has been shown to us, time and time again, but the signal keeps getting hijacked and the message distorted. We're not the only ones who are going through what we go through; you're not the only one. There is a you in us, and help will always be found. Help will always be given; to you, or by you.

(alternate title: The One In Which Jalal Convinces You That Failure Is Something To Actively Pursue, Let Alone Actively Avoid.) This is perhaps the most alternativiest episode I've ever had the courage to do - but I hope it rings true for you, because I truly believe that to be differently than we've been being, we need to do differently than we've been doing. "Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force." - Alan Watts.

"Stop trying to prove that you are who you think you are, and you'll get to be whoever you want to be." Presenting: the input-output theory of thought. You are a universe unto yourself, and as such, have your own laws of nature and science. Know this, and you can achieve whatever you'll see to.

Let's talk about love; love is natural. Love is good. Based on Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

The search for the will to meaning, based on the works of Viktor Frankl.

Within you, there are two. Everything comes from here; even everything that is the opposite of within. I'm vulnerable, so I can show you how to be, too; so we can see what's inside behind the rubber suit, because that suit that we're wearing is wearing us down and it's clear that it doesn't serve a service anymore. We want to be happy. We want to be better. We want to understand the darkness, we want to understand what we can't. And in this hour, we do it.

Look, let's just both calm down, yes? This episode is designed to be the optimal 15-minute break for regular listeners of the show (I know you're out there, sneaky bastards). We look at the roadmap of the show and recap things in a way that reinforces ideas and concepts worth explaining. We will then settle down and listen to the introductory episode of a fun little unreleased podcast that I recorded last year. It's fun stuff. It's fun stuff. We try to go as fast as we can here to catch up to ourselves listening to next week's episode, in which I talk about my favourite thing; you.

In this episode, we talk about inconvenient things, by way of a poem. Inconvenient is everything you can't slow down for, because you know it might call into question why you're racing on in the first place. Russell Brand says that if you don't work through a conscious system, you will be worked by your unconscious system. And so, we talk about sigils, the nature of addiction, and poetry written by yours truly that deals with such and more arduous concepts - which you can find at facebook.com/inconvenientthings. I bid you transformative powers.

"A drunken man walks in a way that is quite impossible for a sober man to imitate, and vice versa. An evil man has a way, no matter how clever. To the trained eye, his way will show itself. Am I being too secretive? No. One can never answer questions at the wrong moment." - David Lynch