Introduction

Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. This is Chris Walker with his new sexy voice. Yes, it’s gone deeper, it’s dropped an octave, and it’s got nothing to do with my testicles. It’s due to a cold. And while you all may be out there on a Saturday, thriving in the misty warmth of a May Saturday, I sit here inside the house, trying to keep myself amused and stay positive. I missed out on my Saturday bike ride out there on the streets.

Audio is at the end of this Summary Article.

Missing My Routine

As my partner got up and went running at 5.30 a.m. with her normal group, I would normally be heading out the door with my trusty bike, heading to the hills of the eastern suburbs to enjoy some real-time bike riding rather than on the turbo, but not to be today. So there’s an opportunity to have a chat. You may have noticed over the last week’s Inner Wealth, the brand has morphed into Inner Wealth Real.

Overexaggeration of Mental Health Problems

The reason that I’ve done that is because I think there is an overexaggeration in the world of the problem of mental health. Every single piece of human mismanagement is being labelled as a mental health problem. Let me just go through a few minor examples.

The “Pig Poo Boots” Scenario

A husband comes home from work. His family, wife, husband, and kids are at home. He’s tired. He’s exhausted from his day at work. And the first thing he does when he walks through the front door after he kisses his partner and the kids is to sit down and start talking about what happened at work today. And that’s what I call pig poo boots. He’s decided that the crap he dealt with at work should be the crap that everyone hears about at home.

A few years down the track, his wife has an affair or his husband has an affair. And as a consequence of that, they break up and the kids end up having two homes to live in, one of which is the home of a distraught person who caused the breakup. The other one is the home of the other person, the victim, who quickly finds another partner and lives happily ever after. They will say that their husband, who came home from work tirelessly working to engage in his work and came home exhausted each day, was doing everything he could to build a family. That will be the Disneyland Americanised version of a Hollywood scenario.

The Reality of Mismanagement

But what really went on was an incompetent bumbling idiot went to work and let the work that he did come home and invade the sanctity of his sacred loving home and forgot that the person that was there in the home was deserving of inquiry as to how their day and their life and their joy and their romance and their love and their hard work being put in the home deserved to be acknowledged. It was all one-sided. This is not a mental health problem. This is ignorance.

The Creation of Inner Wealth

What I set out to do 40 years ago in creating the Inner Wealth model was not to inspire everyone to live on mountaintops and walk around in white robes or with thongs on their feet and tell the world how bad it is for being an industrial environment or a commercial environment or a technological environment. It was to stamp out ignorance, of which, until I started Inner Wealth, I had been one of the prime advocates of in my own life.

So I have a good track record of being ignorant, therefore, and learning what that ignorance caused, and therefore, I’m probably a great teacher of the paradigm, “don’t be ignorant.”

The Dinner Problem

The next story I’ll tell you is about a person who eats flamboyantly large meals at night. They come home, traditional as it is, and cook the largest meal of the day for dinner. They cook a really big roasted dinner with potatoes and vegetables and carrots and peas and lots and lots of accoutrements on the side and place that on the table and say, today, we have the celebration of life. We have dinner.

Sometime later, this individual develops Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or depression or something else, and we say, this person, this clever person, has a mental health problem. No, this person has a case of prime ignorance. Things have changed since the 50s when a big meal sitting on the table was pride of place for a family during the weeknight. Things have changed remarkably.

The Modern Challenges of Sleep

There’s TV screens, there’s all sorts of getting up early and all sorts of demands on a human being, which means sleep has become far, far, far harder to achieve than it ever was before. Our brains are running fast, our lives are running fast, the mobile phone is running fast, and we’re being expected to drive fast in our electric cars, and therefore, getting to sleep at night has become more of a challenge than it’s ever been before, not because it’s hard, but because we’re ignorant. We don’t turn off our mobile phones in time.

We don’t turn off the TV a couple of hours before bed. We still eat big meals at night, and it is categorically proven that a big meal at night is still digesting when most people want to try and get to sleep. Now, if you talk about getting to sleep, well, there’s lots of ways of doing it. Alcohol, pills, or you can take magnesium, or you can rasp your arse to death on a treadmill or at the gym to try and force your body into exhaustion so you sleep. But if you measure the quality of that sleep, how much REM, how much deep sleep, how much mild sleep, you’ll know for a fact that the hours of sleep are not the most important criteria in sleep. It’s how much deep sleep, how much REM you get.

The Impact of Late-Night Eating

And so, a body that’s digesting a big meal at night is being given energy to run a marathon. About three hours after the meal is eaten, the body is at its absolute prime place of readiness to zoom out there and put the foot on the carpet of the electric car and zoom through the traffic while talking about work on a mobile phone, while watching a screen of a video, while thinking about what is going to happen next month. And all of that can happen middle of the night. And people go, well, he’s got a mental or she’s got a mental health problem. No, she’s got ignorance. Ignorance is eating a big meal at night.

The Importance of Timing Your Meals

That’s ignorance. That’s ignorance to go to bed within three hours or four hours of a big meal because the big meal is what a triathlete does four hours before the triathlon. A big meal is what we do before we go to work so that we last all day. A big meal is what you do in the Himalayas before you go trekking, not while you’re trekking. A big meal is not something you do before you go to bed, but it’s been done forever. And so we do it again and again and again, and then say, we’ve got a mental health problem, which is sleep deprivation.

The Morning Exercise Myth

Let me give you another little example. A guy gets up, he gets on the turbo on his bike exercise machine, and he starts grinding away because it’s 6 a.m. And he’s got to really get some fitness into his body because fitness is first. And fitness is fantastic to have.

And then he goes to the gym and does some pushups and some weight training, and boom, the training’s done for the day. And then it’s have a shower, get dressed, get on the bus, go to work, work for eight hours or six hours or five hours, whatever convenience has been enabled for this individual, and then come home and then deal with the kids, or then deal with nightlife, then watch TV, because why? They’re too puffed out to do anything else. And the only way to struggle through that puffed out period in the evening is with alcohol, is with sugar, is with grumpiness, is with tiredness.

Mismanagement of Energy and Ambition

And somebody said to that person, are you sure burning all your metabolism and metabolising all your energy in the morning is the wisest way to deal with your ambition to have a great career? And they go, oh, no, it’s the best thing because I get it done, it’s all finished, and it’s completely out of the way, and then I can get on with the day. Well, it’s out of the way because it lasts for about three hours before the metabolism drops to the depth of sleep time. So how are you going to keep the metabolism up? Well, coffee or a cream bun.

The Impact of Poor Dietary Choices

And because I’ve exercised in the morning, I can have two Mars bars, or I can have a sandwich for lunch, two pieces of junk, either side of something hopefully nutritious. Bread is junk. We know bread is junk. You don’t, if you think you’re going to Sonoma to buy good bread, that’s good junk. And that good junk is full of sugar, starches, carbohydrates, and boom, it’s like doing an exercise programme. Well, we’re ready for the afternoon.

And after a period of time, this person starts to exhibit symptoms of stress. Their heart rate goes up. Their face starts to age, start to put on a bit of weight. They get a bit grumpy at work. They can’t cope with meetings that are put on at three o’clock in the afternoon. And they start, the people start to say, Freddy has a mental health problem.

Ignorance Versus Mental Health

Rubbish. Freddy has an ignorance problem. A problem with ignorance. This goes on until you go, oh, there’s a person who’s got depression. No, no, no. That’s a label.

It’s a brown paper bag into which we put 90% of people who are ignorant go in the brown paper bag that we call depression. 10% in there are real. They have really got it. They have really got depression. Depression, when the mind loses its ability to inflate itself, to inflate itself, to get up from the ground, that’s depression. It is outside the cone of consciousness. It is a serious problem and it will lead to serious consequences.

Ignorance in Physical Exercise

And we see them down in Bondi all the time. These overweight men and women running along the beach doing their once-a-week exercise routine. And then they have a physical problem. They end up at the physio because something got pulled or something hurts or something doesn’t work properly or they’ve got a murmur in their heart. And what happened? Ignorance is what happened.

Twenty minutes a day walking in nature is what most people can live with as an exercise programme. Twice a week, maybe three, we need to do 30 seconds of high cardio. 30 seconds with a break. 30 seconds again with a break. 30 seconds again with a break. Six times, which adds up to three minutes twice a week. Three minutes, three times a week. Add up, nine minutes of exercise at a high cardio will keep a person in a supreme level of fitness. The only problem with this model is it doesn’t consume calories.

Caloric Intake and Exercise

And so we eat way more calories than we need because we gravitate towards things that spike us during the day when we’re feeling lethargic and down in the dumps because we’re working on thin ice. So then, therefore, we need an exercise programme to compensate for it. We start eating too much and then we need an exercise programme to compensate for it. We try to burn the calories. But here’s a fact, and I love this fact. You can run two marathons on the calories in two Mars bars. You can run two marathons on what most people would think is a snack.

The True Purpose of Exercise

So the idea that exercise is gonna burn off the excess calories from excess eating, that the excess eating is to spike our energy so that we can fulfil our duties as a parent or as a person, that is completely ignorant. The idea of exercise is to enjoy nature. The idea of exercise is go for a walk and experience the spirituality of being outdoors, to smile, to look up at the sun, to feel the water, to touch your feet in the water and maybe go for a dip and a swim. But there’s enjoyment involved in that. At any other level, it’s nine minutes a week. Any other level, if you want to be super healthy, cardiovascular, biologically healthy, nine minutes a week. It’s called HIT training. The rest is ignorant.

Enjoying Your Exercise Programme

So if you’re not enjoying your exercise programme, if you’re doing it to burn calories, maybe you can look at ignorant here and think maybe I need to stop eating so many things that have so many calories and then I won’t need that ignorant exercise programme that I’m not enjoying. I’m paying a fortune to do it indoors in a gym when I could be just going for a walk and letting my fingers immerse in the sand. Ignorance needs to be addressed and then that person who’s going through these diet fluctuations and body weight fluctuations and energy spikes at work will be labelled ignorant rather than depressed, rather than a mental health problem.

The Importance of Spiritual Connection

There’s another one and this is my last one. There are people who have cast away the concept of religion. They’ve gone to hell with organised religion. There are priests who sex little boys. They’re disgusting, disgraceful, abysmal abuse of power. And therefore the hierarchy, the whole concept of a God that is put between a God that is above me and an intermediary, the priest who goes between me and that God and me, I don’t want the middle man. I want the so-called middle woman. I want direct connection. And therefore I’m throwing away the book, throwing away the textbooks.

The Role of Religion and Spirituality

I don’t want to be part of a religion that endorses terrorism. I don’t want to be a part of a religion that endorses separatism or is against same-sex marriage. I don’t want to be part of that. And that’s a great piece of wisdom for an individual to get off the bottom of the thin ice and start making their own connection to a higher power more real. But then they forget that there is benefit in religion because it gives structure. There’s benefit in religion because it gives gratitude. There’s benefit in religion because it gives people a sense of purpose. There’s benefit in religion because it gives people a sense of community.

The Consequences of Losing Faith

And when we cast away something that’s most important, very important, to replace it with something. But what we end up with is narcissism where people say, I discard religion and the only thing important is how I feel. How I feel and what I’ve got and what I’m doing and where I’m at. And you hear it all the time. I, I, I, I, I, I. I pad, I pod, I, I, I, me, I do, I am, I is, I want, I got, I need. And that person has become a narcissist. And we will say at the end of the day, because a narcissist always ends up confused.

Finding a Sense of Order

A narcissist always ends up emotionally twisted with bipolar, with extremes of duality and always ends up alienating and polarizing the community. That person we’ll say has a mental health problem. But no, they’re godless. They haven’t found a replacement for what they discarded which is a sense of connection to something greater than themselves. Excuse me. Something greater connection.

The Magnitude of Existence

If you go in the Himalayas and you look up at the mountaintop, you look at Ama Dablam or Mount Everest or Lhotse, you look up these mountains and you see these beautiful, beautiful things that stand so high above you. You go, my goodness me, I’m so small. My goodness me, I’m so small. And you realize the magnitude. If that’s the magnitude of existence in a Himalayan environment, what’s the magnitude of existence in an earthly comparative to the sun or the stars or the moons or the universe or the galaxies? If we’re so small compared to Mount Everest, how infinitesimal are we in this giant picture? And there has to be order in that chaos because otherwise all the planets and all the galaxies and all the universes would collide. And suddenly we go, oh my gosh, I don’t have to call it God.

Embracing a Higher Power

I can call it a power greater than myself, the creation. And that person who becomes the narcissist, who threw away religion, it’s easy to do. We can all do that. We can all find the problem with religion, but we can’t live without it. We can’t live without some higher sense of order. And even if that higher order is, the belief there is no God, that’s still a higher order because it’s fatalistic.

The Necessity of Faith

But we need to spend time every day considering the higher order of things. Some people call it good luck. Other people call it karma. Other people call it the universe. Other people call it energy, vitality, whatever it is. There is a higher order. You wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t a higher order. The evolution of the human condition, higher order. The development of AI, higher order. Something’s going on bigger than a human. And it’s very important to have some sort of belief about that, that you can integrate in your life so that you don’t become a narcissist because a narcissist is skating on thin ice. And a narcissist, they will say, has a mental health problem.

Addressing Mental Health Misconceptions

Emotion, emotion, emotion, emotion. You hear 13-year-old kids being, parents are saying, oh, they’ve got a mental health problem. They’ve got this problem. They’re suicidal. They’ve got this problem. No, they’ve just lost the belief in authority. They’ve lost the belief in a higher power. They’ve lost the belief in something bigger than themselves. And so the only thing they can think of is I am what I feel. And when I feel shitty, I am shit. And when I feel good, I am good. They ups and downs.

The Importance of Faith and Reason

And that’s not a mental health problem. That’s ignorance. And it’s ignorance because the development of a faith in something bigger than ourselves transcends our feelings and gives us reason. So there are mental health problems on the planet. They are not as big as what we think. And the reason we have such a broad spectrum of calling stress at work, people’s behaviour in the home, people’s life outside in the street with knives and guns and things. The reason there is always going to be a percentage of the population is nuts, is completely mentally unhealthy, is completely devoid of any sense of reality, is skating on thin ice. There’s going to be a group of people out there who are nuts. But the other 90% who we say have a mental health problem, don’t.

The True Cause of Mismanagement

They’re ignorant. And because we call it a mental health problem, we don’t give them the solution, which is, hey, don’t live on thin ice. Don’t have your finances so close to the bone that if something goes wrong, you feel you wanna kill yourself. Don’t live so close to the bone in a relationship that you depend on this other person for all of your joy because you’re a narcissist, that you realise that the person you’re with in a relationship is a person who shares your joy. These teachings are, I don’t know, simple. They’re very powerful. They’re real. And I think the more we go towards AI, the more real we have to become in managing our lives.

Conclusion

Anyway, that’s Saturday morning. And I hope you’ve thoroughly been consumed by this chat today. And if there’s any questions about it, if you have any arguments about it, please don’t hesitate to talk to someone else except me.