A fascinating thing about being human is that, if you want to create any kind of change (e.g. become happier, uplevel in a skill, drastically improve your external conditions), there are a series of “awareness gates” you must first pass through—either consciously or unconsciously.

“Hold up”, I hear you say: “What are awareness gates?”

It’s when the thing you desire to move towards feels blocked. Like it’s outside the realm of what you have access to.

It may even feel like some parts of your present condition are a permanent thing that will stop you from ever accessing it.

For example: I vividly remember thinking “This is just how it is for me. I don’t like the world I live in. My mind seems to be broken or unfit for this society. I do like myself, but I hate how the world is and how people are…I can have a lot of fun here, but it seems to be a fact of life that on many days I’ll be heavily depressed”.

This felt like a fact for many years, but it was false.

It’s not that I didn’t want that to go away, it’s just that I saw the wall, the wall was huge, and I didn’t see a gate.

Why?

Because awareness gates are invisible.

That’s the interesting thing. They are not guarded by big bad dudes with weapons.

They’re guarded by their own invisibility.

Awareness gates are open. You can walk through at any time. But when you look for them, all you see is a wall.

And the most fascinating thing is that once you find one and manage to pass through, you find out it wasn’t a gate at all:

There was no wall. There was no opening to pass through. It was all an illusion.

And what was keeping you from moving in the direction you wanted to go, was the fact that you were confusing the edges of your own awareness for the edges of the world you live in. In the same way that early civilizations used to stare at the edge of the ocean and believe it was the edge of the world.

Nothing was stopping them from sailing past it, except for an awareness gate.

It always goes this way. I’m about to turn 35 and it still continues to go this way:

Moving to a next stage requires walking through an awareness gate.

And you won’t know where it is, because it will always look like a wall, or like the furthest edge of what is possible in this world.

That said, there’s one gate that rules them all.

A first gate you must find and walk through, before you can change anything that’s meaningful to you:

The awareness that your reality is malleable.

And when I say that, I don’t mean that the world doesn’t contain any sort of objective truth—I don’t mean “the first gate is to go woo woo“.

What I mean is, the first gate is fully grokking that the reality you experience can be sculpted like play-doh, both by yourself and those you interact with.

Not that the higher truth of things will change — but that the way you experience them changes.

Because reality is profoundly relational:

You don’t experience the truth in front of you, you experience your relationship to it.

Your worldview, your self-view, your life-view, your God-view (yes, even atheists have one!) and your relationship to the sensations you are exposed to, these are the things that determine the reality you experience.

And since you can change the way you relate, you can change nearly every aspect of the reality you live in.

That is the first gate.

Realizing that your reality is how you relate.