Reading · The Mystic's Playbook

photo by Gregory Kasunich

*But first, exciting news! I wrote a whole manual on The 7 Layers of Reality and created a tool that maps where you are in each layer: Reality Gameboard. Both just launched, check them out!

Neo, you are, The One.

There’s a version of you that you know exists. It feels like a memory of the future.

It’s a version that is your ultimate ideal, the one you’re striving to become.

The one.

Someday. Maybe. Soon.

“Definitely in this lifetime… I hope.”

Stop hoping and stop waiting and stop (no, don’t stop, just pause) dreaming and start doing. This article will show you how. Down the rabbit hole we go. 🐇

First of all, you need to know that you were right all along.

You always suspected there was more going on in reality than you were shown. More moving parts, more levers, something underneath the surface that the books and the courses kept circling and never quite got right. That suspicion wasn’t suspicion at all. It was knowing. Remembering.

It happens automatically, the knowledge returns, it morphs into wisdom.

Like right now, you are remembering that there are layers to reality. You’ve felt it, sometimes you may have even seen them. Today, we’ll dive deeper into the layers and tie them all together. The layers are the key to becoming the architect of your lived reality. They're how you play to win.

And what happens when you win? Ahh further down the rabbit hole we must go…

Now do one thing for me before we go further.

Name the thing. The one thing you’ve been working on the longest. The pattern or behavoir or subconscious belief that keeps looping back around, inevitably, no matter how much work you do on it. Perhaps it isn’t a pattern at all but a purpose or an ache to live your life at your fullest potential (because let’s be honest, this is not your fullest potential)

Got it?

Ok good.

Hold on to that thought. We’ll comeback to it and boy will you be surprised.

Oh, and one more thing. It has to do with the pattern, the purpose, the potential, the ache, the vision you just saw. How does timing, of the divine kind factor in? Have you been waiting for the right moment? Or have you ever said “it’s just not the time yet”

Hold on to that one too. It plays an important role in our rabbit hole adventure. 🕳️

I speak confidently on these things (some may say cocky in fact) because I speak from decades of experience. The sentences above could easily describe me in 2007 or 2010 or 2015. Throw a dart into the time space continuum and you’re likely to hit a version of me yearning for the life I live right now. And, more accurately for the level of understanding that I am about to share here.

See, I did all the work. I studied and meditated and learned the disciplines and took courses and went through seemingly countless books and participated in so many workshops and well you get the picture. It was all precious and sacred and powerful. It made me into a teacher and a student and a guide. Eventually I taught my own workshops and courses and led many student and clients to their next levels. Powerful work.

I was however perplexed by the fact that I, despite knowing what I knew, teaching, guiding, facilitating healing and huge breakthroughs, was personally still not in the place I yearned to be.

So of course, I did the thing that only irrational mystics do. I burned it all and went searching. That search is how I found The Layers…

There are so many methods, frameworks, systems, schools, disciplines. You could spend your entire life learning, healing. In fact, many do (in my reality code assessment, this patterns is called “The Loop” and it’s fascinating and oh so destructive) and they feel like they’re making progress but their life doesn’t really reflect it.

Here’s the problem: Every method is built for one layer of a seven-layer system.

Therapy deals with the emotional layer, and it believes that this is the ultimate key. It isn’t. Manifestation work floats between the mental and the energetic layers. Habit systems (btw, loved Atomic Habits, failed it, but loved it) work the material layer and achieve a surprising amount of success but it isn’t lasting success, as you may have noticed.

The monks and the holy men touch Source, the 7th layer but most often can’t bring it into the other six, can’t integrate, can't come down from the clouds, so to speak. Each one does its job, and each one leads you to believe you’ve not only made progress but have experienced true transformation. You believe it until the other layers make themselves known and it feels like all that work was wasted. Or at the very least you see that it wasn’t so much a transformation as it was a little progress in the right direction.

That’s why you can make the all the right moves and reality might still answer with the wrong result.

Or why something you never consciously chose keeps choosing you.

Every teacher I studied with found real depth at one or two layers and built an entire world there. It’s human nature. When we find something that works, something that changes our life, relieves the pain, gives us clarity, we see it as IT. And it is, for a while. But because the IT only works on one or two layers, the cracks start to show.

Those are usually ignored.

This was something that totally confounded me. Seeing people who’ve been on the spiritual path for decades, who understand the way reality works, who can manifest amazing things living nearly hand to mouth was so weird.

Seeing people in the community who were masters of wellness, had perfect, healthy bodies, had mastered living well but also had no mastery of their emotions was interesting and confounding.

Mindset coaches who had success in all areas except the one they wanted most.

Leaders whose life was a mess.

You get the picture.

Ok, now listen, before you say “judgy much?” understand two things.

1. I have probably been most if not all of these and more, and: 2. I have been collecting this as data and doing research for as decades now. That’s kind of the whole point.

I KNEW this wasn’t supposed to be happening. I knew that there has to be something to it. I felt in my entire being that we are all sort of close to the thing but haven’t quite grasped the thing…

Cut to the search and discovery era (I went over that in my first article on this substack) and…

Enter the map, the gameboard of life, of our lived reality, the 7 Layers: the discovery I made and have been working with. It’s been life changing not only for me but for those I've taught it to. It is the missing piece I’ve been searching decades for. This is how it all clicked.

And now, I am sharing it with you.

Reality, our lived experience of reality isn’t one thing. It’s a multi-layered system, seven layers, running at once, all of them shaping how you experience life.

Shaping what you get to do, see and become.

Shaping what you are able to create.

Shaping our collective experience, your individual experience and the experience for those to come.

It isn’t a hierarchy. These aren’t levels. They are layers, like in a cake. Mastery of each is necessary in order to fully embody who you came here to be. 🍰

The 7 Layers of reality framework brings together all of the parts and pieces of how we as humans experience and shape reality but also shows us how most place all their focus on one or two layers. Let me explain.

And another disclaimer here (this seems to be a running theme in this article, let’s just go with it) I am using stereotypes in the interest of quick visuals.

So, finance bros, hustle culture bros, ladies who spend their entire lives on getting the next coveted it bag etc. They’re really mastering layer 1, the physical layer. So are the biohackers, the wellness gurus, the fitness crowd.

Therapists and shadow work guides and many of the healers and the people on a healing journey and even the urban shamans and the retreat leaders and participants are deep into layer 2, the emotional layer.

I’ve started you off with a few examples but I want you to continue this thought exercise after you finish reading and see if you can categorize and see where different people are. And, of course where you are. And in case you want to truly understand the layer you excel in vs the ones you desperately need help in balancing, I’ve built a tool for this. It’s called The Reality Gameboard and it will not only help you understand the 7 layers framework but show you where you are individually and how to improve. More on that in a bit.

Your body.

Your money.

Your environment.

The physical realm.

The tangible parts of this reality.

This is the layer that most spiritual people try to “transcend” or choose to ignore or neglect assuming it’s beneath them. Although that is absolutely changing right now, this has been the trend for ages…to “refuse the body its earthly pleasures and not be tempted, instead turn your eye to heaven..” And that is how we got into this mess.

But I digress.

There is of course the polar opposite. Hustle culture and the like. The point is, this layer has been either rebuked or obsessed over, given little importance or all importance. Its the layer that we really have to balance out as a society.

The magic of this layer is that it is a direct reflection, a physical manifestation of all the other layers. It’s sort of a “real world render” of how you’re doing in the other layers and on a larger scale, an indication of the greater state of the society you are a part of. It’s fascinating and I for one am so thrilled to have finally understood its importance after rejecting it for so many years. Doing that has improved my life greatly.

This layer is a sort of antenna, a satellite, a broadcasting and receiving system. It’s the frequency you hold and send out into the universe. It also greatly influences how you experience life. This is the space where emotional loops live and it’s also the layer that determines how someone feels about you without you saying a word. Your frequency speaks before you do.

This is the realm of “doing the work” or at least the realm we default to when we begin doing the work. There’s a danger of getting stuck here because emotions are incredibly sticky. They’re also sort of drug like. They flood us and we therefore often give importance to this layer above the others without being conscious that we’re doing this.

The emotional layer holds the greatest potential for self-destruction. Mastery of this layer means you’ve genuinely unlocked one of your greatest superpowers. Delving into this layer will absolutely prove to be one of the greatest adventures with the highest payoff.

This is the code running your entire operating system. Like it or not, you run on programs. Layer 3 is where those programs live.

Every belief, every assumption, every story about who you are is here. Some of them new and update, others hanging around since before you stopped being a sponge (around age 7) and all running your lived reality.

This is where your conscious thoughts live and where the subconscious thoughts reign supreme. This is the realm of what happened and what it means and what can happen to me as a result. This is where the justification stories live, the explanations for the trauma we explore in layer 2.

This is the funnest layer because if you approach the programs with a neutral stance and a sense of curiosity, you’ll literally laugh out loud at some of the ludicrous things you find in there. Things you’d never say out loud or even think you’d think. Well no, that’s not why it’s the funnest. It’s fun for me because this is the layer that’s easiest to reprogram and get results pretty quickly. It’s a blast playing programmer and coder of your mind but the really fun part is what happens after.

Ooh this layer, the one we’ve all been obsessed with lately. Seriously, the “everything is energy” conversation of the past 10, maybe 15 years has certainly opened a lot of (third, haha!) eyes while confusing nearly everyone. 👁️

This layer can be described as your life force, your point of focused attention, the vibration you emit and work with. I see it as the way consciousness transmutes into a form capable of moving you and moving through you on the earth realm.

There’s also a “real world” component to this. The amount of energy you have in a day. The way you’re able to harness the energy available to you. The way you choose to direct that energy towards what you create. The way energy leaks out of holes you may or may not be aware of. There is so much there to explore. Definitely one of the most interesting layers and I’d say the most mysterious.

One of the coolest things to explore is how eastern thought has really worked intently with this layer giving rise to Tai Chi, Chi Gong and TCM like acupuncture reiki. In the west we have homeopathy and Bach Flower Essences that work on the energetic realm was well.

This one’s really cool and also the one that almost no one thinks about. Want to know why? Because as free thinking (are we?) individuals who get to decide who they are, we would never want to assume or accept that we are all simply playing a role.

But, we are. All of us. And we play different roles with different people.

If you look closely and do a little silent observer work, without judgment and without any expectation, you’ll start to see your roles. It’s even more fun (and a little less painful) to watch the roles others play. It isn’t so fun to see the cost and the toll that these roles take thought. That’s the biggest takeaway here. Every role comes at a price.

Well no, let me correct that, the biggest takeaway is that you, having realized this, can now actively choose the roles you play. You can recast yourself. You can recast others in your reality too.

Some of the biggest contributors to my understanding of archetypes have been Carl Jung and Caroline Myss. There are a lot of books out there to help you understand but a lot of them pull from these two sources. I like having a balanced male/female view from the two plus Myss is more modern, Jung is from a different era.

Does a fish know it’s swimming in water? Do you know you’re adrift in the collective?

This layer is perhaps the most underestimated and also the loudest, strongest and strangely easiest to master. Because once you understand just how much you’re influenced and learn to see it, you are able to detach. You are able to enter and exit at will. You are able to use the collective sea to your advantage rather than being dragged along the current. 🐡

The problem is, there isn’t just one aspect to it. There’s the familial and ancestral but also cultural, both the culture you come from and the culture you’re currently a part of. There are layers or rings to this layers. There are collective energetics at play in your industry, the company you work for, the city, country or people you’re a part of.

There’s the big one, religion. Which can be active long after you’ve left the faith.

The new ones…the algorithms, the online worlds. The virtual realms.

And the main one. The collective of the human race. Truth is we are still confined by the rules and boundaries that are held in the collective mind and direct how a human is able to experience this world. Physics, the laws of physics come to mind here.

And, we have arrived. This is the layer everyone strives for without quite knowing why. This is the one that is elevated above all the others. Dare I say, it’s almost fetishized.

Source layer.

Awareness.

The player behind the character.

Consciousness having a field day, playing to its limits that it continues to set and break through and laugh at and then go again.

You’ve undoubtedly experienced this if you’re here reading this and you got this far in. This is the layer that can easily influence and change and master all of the other layers.

Yes, a shift here shifts everything. But also, not. Because the source awareness that incarnated as you, the avatar, didn’t do that in order to push a few buttons and make it easy for you, for itself.

The entire point of you coming here to this realm, to this reality in this time space is so that you could experience it, fully. And perhaps change things too, if that’s your mission. You experience by doing, living. Not by begging sky daddy or mama universe to fix it for you. (should I insert another disclaimer here? this is a place for truth, it may offend the sensitive)

Look, you are already that. As in, you are that pure source awareness that is behind the I, the eyes of the character you’re playing. You don’t need to chase or strive for what you inherently already are.

You simply need to remember.

That’s where the problem is. When you forget, life becomes hard. The deeper you go into forgetting, the darker and bleaker this world becomes. As soon as you remember, it’s as if the clouds part. Light enters your body and your life again. Reality makes sense.

Layer 7 is always a part of you. You simply need to remember. That’s where spiritual practice comes in.

The layers aren’t separate. They’re intertwined. They run like mycelium networks through everything in our lives, our worlds, ourselves.

A move on one layer affects the other layers.

For example, doing mindset work or self-concept work that changes your identity is powerful, it shifts things. But then, it bumps up against layer 6, the collective. Are you allowed to be this identity in your family or will you bring shame to your entire extended family line? Layer 2, the emotional gets activated. The emotions that arise when the new identity is anchoring in has the power to make or break whether it stays to whether you return back to that old self.

And, when we zoom out and look at it from a broader view, we see just how the layers play out in the experience of every individual and Us as a whole. The emotional frequency of a place, you’ve undoubtedly felt this if you’ve traveled or explored outside your immediate vicinity. The emotional layer, the frequency influences how the denizens of that place experience life, what they believe they can have and do and be. This is compounded by layer 3 stories and programing and the reality of what layer 1, the physical experience is rendering.

I can keep going but wow, this has gotten long. See, you get me started on the layers, and I’ll never shut up. It truly feels like my seminal work, a discovery after decades on the journey that has the potential to help change how we understand and experience our lived reality. But ok, let’s start to wrap it up.

Remember those two things I asked you to think about, to keep in mind all those years ago when we started this article? Bring them up now, we’re finally getting to it.

So, the thing you named and the waiting for divine timing. Right, what is your thing and how does it look now that you’ve been given a crash course on the layers?

Think about the pattern you’ve been working on, the one that still hasn’t shifted despite the work you’ve put in, (ahem plug right here for The Breakthrough Protocol 2.0 if you want me to guide you and shift it in 30 days) think about it through the prism of the 7 layers. Which layer does it sit on? Have you been trying to go at it from the wrong layer? Very possible.

Think about the whole waiting for divine timing or when you’re ready or when everything aligns. Is it perhaps a collective cloud that sits above you that prevents you from finally leaping off that cliff and doing the thing? Or is it perhaps that a layer 5 archetype simply wouldn’t do such a thing so you can’t yet?

And your purpose, your true purpose, that thing you’ve always known you were here for but perhaps didn’t dare share with anyone lest they smirk at your audacity and delusions of grandeur. Can you see now that source, consciousness, the all that is which lives through you has put this desire in you in order to experience it, in order to actually do it in the physical realm?

Yeah, it’s that big and it’s also that simple. You’re welcome. ;)

Ah, glad you asked. So, the 7 layers framework is my discovery and it’s a work in progress. It came together last year and has been evolving ever since. I’ve had people ask a lot of questions and also had some confusion in the comments of my reels where I talk about the framework. So I started writing a manual on the layers that I was planning on selling. You can even see “manual coming soon” in my previous articles.

But! I realized that what I want to provide you with is the ability to facilitate your own transformation, not merely give you more information. I give plenty of information here and on my social media for free. So I decided that I’d give the manual away for free too. You can grab it here.

But, BUT! Will the manual give you the transformation? Yes, no, maybe, depends. I couldn't stop there, right? So I kept planing and strategizing and getting creative which led me to masterminding a tool that actually does exactly what you need to do once you become aware of the 7 layers framework. It’s called The Reality Gameboard and it maps where you are on the 7 layers, which layers you excel in, which layers you need to work on and most importantly it takes your problems, issues, stuck patterns and shows you were on the 7 layer map they live so you know EXACTLY which layer to work them on. Yup, it’s pretty phenomenal.

If this sounds like something you’d benefit from, check it out here.

First of all, if you’re a one of the patrons who supports this publication and my work with your financial gift, I sincerely thank you. You’re helping make this into a viable movement that will go on to each millions. Of this I am sure. Please know, I am deeply grateful.

As a token of my gratitude, I’m creating something special for you that drops later this week.

The Seven Layers: A Guided Journey is an audio experience where I'll take you through all the layers so you can explore within how the 7 layers look, feel and are structured in your psyche, in your inner world. It will be a magical experience and I’m so excited to create this for you. If you’re a paid member, it will hit your inbox this week. If you’d like to receive the audio journey and help support the work that will change millions of lives for the better, upgrade below.

We’ve spent some quality time together here today, you and I and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Did you learn anything new? Or perhaps did you remember things you knew but had forgotten? I think one of the beautiful things about these types of connections is how we’re able to help each other remember. If any of that happened for you while reading, I’d love to hear about it below.

Having comments pop up on my substack writing is a highlight of the day for me. This isn’t meant to be a monologue but a conversation.

The 7-Layer Method to Stop Waiting and Start Creating Reality

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