In the beginning I was almost like an automaton, thoughtlessly performing the actions that would keep me alive. 

~ Patrick Rothfuss, Name of the Wind

At this foundational level, individuals operate purely from instinct, driven by survival needs alone. There is no awareness of Free Will; life is simply a series of reactions to environmental stimuli. This is the domain of Maslow’s physiological needs, the Root Chakra, and the earliest stages of human cognitive and psychosocial development.

The practice for this stage is the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique. Only taking a few seconds, this technique is designed to gracefully disengage from high energy states—to leave the Peaking energy of the Archetypal Wavelength without grasping at it and making the inevitable pendulum backswing more painful. 

The technique will anchor attention in sensory experience, helping to manage anxiety and cravings by focusing on what is immediately present. It becomes the first step of every meditation: to turn focus inward.

An example of an ongoing habit to cultivate during this stage is taking work seriously, fostering the stability in the basic structures of life that is a necessary foundation for pursuing and exercising agency.

I'll make believe you are who you think you are if you make believe I am who I think I am. 

~ Ram Dass

As we evolve, our personalities take shape through the influence of cultural and mythical archetypes. We model ourselves after figures in our families, communities, media, and even spiritual traditions. Identity begins to form as a composite of these role models, and at best, our “will” is experienced as aligning ourself with the right influences.

The practice for this stage is divination, such as a daily tarot draw and five minute meditation on your card, used as a tool for healthfully engaging with the archetypal forces of the world. 

Just as the Active Yes-And-Ness process focused on the Peak, the Receptive Stage focuses on the Bottoming Out experience. It turns out that opening  yourself receptively to the advice of the tarot during your darkest, lowest energy states, invites in delicious oomf that can begin the shift toward Restoration sooner.

The ongoing habit is to nourish the body with water, vitamins, and probiotics, becoming receptive to that which enriches the physical form.

If we truly loved ourselves, we would never harm another because we are all interconnected. 

~ Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness

Here, behavior is driven by an often unconscious urge to alleviate emotional pain. Without self-love, the tendency is to exert dominance—over others, over situations, or even over the self. Power dynamics become central, and Free Will is often misinterpreted as forceful control.

The meditative practice for this stage is confidence-building through belly breathing, placing a hand on the stomach to activate the solar plexus and remain present in personal power. We’re up to ten minutes of meditative practice by week seven, and research has shown that to be plenty to start creating positive changes in emotional regulation, stress management, and self-image.

The recommended belly breathing practice is a perfect, gentle introduction to meditation, but we’ll go over other options that take around the same amount of time and that also focus on building this Third Chakra energy up in the Solar Plexus.

The ongoing habit in this phase might best involve reckoning with intoxicants, whether that means moderating, eliminating, or understanding their role in one’s life. 

While sobriety isn’t required for APTITUDE, it is strongly recommended. The ways in which chemicals that lead to heedlessness manipulate our minds toward Wavelengths of craving, use, remorse, and more craving only serves the chemical. 

For too many of us in our addicted culture, the bliss of substance use stands in as an unsatisfactory substitute for the rapture of true belonging, connection, and self-love, and yet they often preclude our experience of exactly those qualities. The irony. 

 They’re  like clouds passing in front of the Sun of our own True Will. 

Like residue on the antenna that picks up the signal of Source. 

Why not experiment with letting them go?

I wanna heal, I wanna feel
Like I'm close to something real
I wanna find something I've wanted all along:
Somewhere I belong

~ Linkin Park, Somewhere I Belong

This stage is defined by external expectations. People behave according to their roles in relationships and society, seeing themselves as defined by how they fit into larger systems. Free Will, at this point, feels like a constrained choice within predefined lanes.

But like all the others, the Community Love stage has both a light and shadow side. While the default temptation is often to become a Conformist or a Victim of others’ wills, Belonging within groups of genuine connection—in person—is essential to go from Liminal Creep to Whole Adept.

The meditative practice is fifteen minutes of Metta meditation, or loving-kindness practice, cultivating compassion for oneself and others. Cultivating the ability to draw on the infinite wellspring of love always available to each of us becomes a beautiful antidote to shame and self-doubt that arises during daily life and even the longer sitting practice of later stages.

The ongoing habit, often revealing subconscious struggles with conformity and distraction, is scrolling awareness—noticing and interrupting compulsive engagement with digital media. 

Again we are letting go of that which does not serve. That which introduces other Wavelengths into the ecosystem of our soul and makes our own true voice difficult to hear. Scrolling mindfully—or not at all—reveals that the artificial belonging that social media promises is like salt water to a thirsty person: it only makes the underlying problem worse.

Do you want a song of glory?
Well I'm fucking screaming… at you 

~ The Used, A Box Full of Sharp Objects

Here, individuals chase external validation: achievement, money, status, and recognition. Free Will is still largely unexamined, as behavior is dictated by culturally sanctified success metrics.

The practice for this phase is the Wim Hof Method, which leans into this drive toward achievement and activating energy, rather than resisting it. We’ll be doing what my wife calls 20 minutes of “breathing a whole lot and then not breathing at all.” 

You’ll be striving. Yes. Contrary to what you’ll often hear in “spiritual” circles, healthy striving is a part of the whole human experience. Be sure to reflect on that as you dive deeper into the rapturous bliss of just the right balance of carbon dioxide in your blood.

Just as you learn to stir up prana—life energy—and hold your breath for longer and longer periods, your ongoing habit is physical exercise, where you can express the achievement oriented mindset that is a part of your Whole self by setting your own Personal Records.

Light and darkness are a pair, like the foot before
And the foot behind, in walking.
Each thing has its own intrinsic value
And is related to everything else in function and position.

~ Eihei Dogen, The Song of the Precious Mirror Samadhi (via Deborah Eden Tull, quoted in Luminous Darkness)

Pluralistic thinking emerges here, where fairness, inclusivity, and moral virtue become priorities. This is a stage when the venerable bell hooks’ rightly decried hegemony, “Colonialist, White-Supremacist, Capitalist Patriarchy,” is the villain oppressing the edges that we now wish to center. It seems that single-mindedly opposing that dominator power structure is the only moral path. 

This self-reflective analysis is getting pretty advanced, but demands to perfectly adhere to any dogma, even a righteous one, can not be Free Will.

The primary practice for this period is thirty-minute shadow work sessions, engaging in reflective rituals to integrate repressed emotions, past experiences, and the lingering identities that they engender. This is a stage for welcoming back the exiled parts of ourselves so that we can feel safe to project out the healthy vibration we’ve been building through the previous stages through some authentic self-expression. 

If it hasn’t yet, this is where our building energy demands to make contact with real people out in the world. It’s time to start testing what happens when the vibrational frequency that you’ve carefully cultivated bounces up against the frequencies of others. 

Do you harmonize? Do you feel resonance? 

Can you find alignment and appreciation for the authentic self that is emerging as you shed layer after layer of programming and unintegrated baggage?

The ongoing habit involves finding and regularly attending an in-person sangha. Although the Digital Sangha on the Creekmason Discord that will support you throughout the program is a vibey dance party of a massively supportive place, it is primarily meant to support APTITUDE participants as a launch pad into re-integration with their physical communities. 

We’ll talk about finding a sangha that is right for you, looking at examples like Circling, Alcoholics Anonymous, Codependents Anonymous, Buddhist communities, Meet ups, and M. Scott Peck’s Community Building. I’ll be providing a ton of resources so you can find what fits for you.

If  you focus on any single field like these—neuroscience, endocrinology, behavioral economics, genetics, criminology, ecology, child development, or evolutionary biology—you are left with plenty of wiggle room for deciding that biology and free will can coexist… But—and this is the incredibly important point—put all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will.  

~ Robert Sapolsky, Determined

At this Integrative stage, individuals begin to see the totality of their conditioning—biological, cultural, psychological. The totality, in other words, of the impediments to Free Will that arise through the categories of experience represented by the previous seven Stages. 

The realization dawns that Free Will may be largely illusory, a construct emerging from countless prior influences. An ability to decenter yourself, and look at your behavior objectively. 

To look at everything that makes you a you and to notice how little You there is directing it. That’s “You” with a capital letter, representing your inherent True Self rather than your acquired personality self.

If effort is applied correctly, the despair generated by this analysis doesn’t need to last long. But the only way out is through.

The practice here is central to the objectives of APTITUDE. Blissy meditation is a deep concentration method that evokes a felt sense of loving rapture—or “blissy-ness”—by deliberately incorporating techniques from the practices we’ve worked on in previous Stages. We’ll be working and enhancing a baseline practice of Samatha Vipassana meditation, similar to what is often called mindful breathing. 

This represents an important shift in the path of APTITUDE, a focus on the true core practice.

 As such, full focus on daily meditation of at least 45 minutes will be the habit for the Stage as well.

The Great Way is not difficult
for those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clear and undisguised.
Make the smallest distinction, however,
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

~ The Third Chinese Patriarch of Zen, Hsin Hsin Ming by Seng-T'san

With enough continued perseverance, the next stage can help gnosis—direct experience—arise of the Nondual nature of reality. 

Having reflected on each Stage prior and incorporated their healthiest expression into your ongoing Blissy Meditation practice, the impossible begins to happen. The individual begins shedding conditioned patterns, releasing karmic attachments, and disentangling from the illusory of personal control by the small “y” you so that the True You can step up and take command.

Finally, Free Will becomes possible, but it is recognized as not belonging to the level of the small self.

But with your increased balance, a strange intuition begins to form: there is a soul—called the Atman/Brahmin in Hinduism—more basic and essential than the personality. Outside of time. Outside of dualism. Beyond, transcendent, of the vessel. The You, with a big “Y.”

That is where Free Will can be located. In the soul itself that has chosen to incarnate here as you. The soul that is simultaneously an aspect of the All and also identical with the All itself. 

You are everything. Your will expresses through all of causality because it’s all you.

To get in touch with it, we’ll be practicing something called the MacGyver Method, using distraction as a gateway to spontaneous insight. The ongoing habit shifts to caffeine consumption awareness, recognizing that even the most socially condoned chemicals cloud the whispers of your True Self with their own agenda.

We are as gods. We might as well become good at it. 

~ Stuart Brand

That whole Free Will experience didn’t really last long, did it? 

If everything goes according to plan, you won’t care. At the Ultraviolet Stage, Will stops looking like a struggle and starts to feel more like attunement to flow states. To a sort of yogic “yoking” to Source. To the samadhi—a relaxed but blissful state created by deep concentration—that creates opportunities for  intuitively behaving in alignment with the needs of every situation.

Of course, the school of “Crazy Wisdom”—the idea that an Awakened Person can do no wrong or create no negative karma even if it appears to us normies that they are behaving inappropriately—has lent legitimacy to the abuse of countless unwell individuals. APTITUDE must never be used to justify the sorts of behavior that create scandal after scandal in spiritual communities.

Being Whole does not make you special in a way that sets you above conventional morality. 

At the same time, many of us may experience an improved ability to respond appropriately, effectively, morally, virtuously, and healthfully to challenging circumstances. This improved efficacy is the natural result of engaging with the world exactly as it truly is. 

This wisdom arises from concentration. From looking without distraction and engaging from a place of clear-headed focus, unhindered by the layers of gunk that through the other Stages, you’ve already gently peeled off the antenna that lets you tune in to the language of Source. 

Although it may be too early to see results, hey maybe it's not! At this stage we’ll learn about cultivating Samatha Jhanas, refining meditative absorption into relaxed but blissful states of consciousness. It’s a joy and rapture known as Samadhi to the Yogis in the audience. 

If you’re following along with the recommended habits, Stage Nine is where we tackle mindful food choices, embracing every calorie and nutrient as a vector for the sacred. We’ve just about tackled the entire gamut of messed up habits that are the societal default. Just as much as the spiritual practices that APTITUDE encourages you to charge after, these prerequisites are fundamental to the benefits that the Course will yield. 

In many cultures, you don’t start meditating until you’ve proven an ability to stick to the ethical standards of that tradition. The Energy Scaffolding aspect of APTITUDE is a kind of sacred scouring—an ablution that prepares you for seeking.

Enlightenment does exist. It is possible to awaken. Unbounded freedom and joy, oneness with the Divine, awakening into a state of timeless grace - these experiences are more common than you know, and not far away. There is one further truth, however; They don't last.

In fact, in the awakening of the heart there is no such thing as enlightened retirement. That is not how it happens to us.

We all know that after the honeymoon comes the marriage... In spiritual life it is the same: After the ecstasy comes the laundry.

~ Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy the Laundry

At the culmination of APTITUDE, we explore how the illusion of an individual separate from the cosmos might disappear. 

We’ll be utilizing practices that, when stuck to diligently for long enough, will uncover the fundamental truth that there simply is no "one" left to have Free Will. These are the practices that make an incarnation an instrument of the Dharma. A vessel that can’t help but assist in the arising of the conditions for Awakening in everyone they encounter.

The final practice is a twist on Vipassana meditation inspired by the Archetypal Wavelength. We’ll be learning to recognize Annatta, Annica and Dukha—no-self, impermanence, and unsatisfactoriness—in every moment by watching the way reality is constantly rubberbanding back and forth between Peaks and Bottoms, regardless of which fractal zoom level you’re looking at. 

As Daniel Ingram puts it, you’ll recognize the truth that all phenomena “doesn’t last, doesn’t satisfy, and ain’t you.” 

The ongoing habit is to set aside a significant chunk of time weekly to engage in high-flow activities, even if that activity is only a longer meditation sit. You’ll delight in—and see benefits in unexpected places from—allowing existence to express itself through the body without resistance.