There are two mountain in life that every person has to climb. The career mountain and the spiritual mountain.
Most people climb the career mountain first. To later find their life lacking any meaning and depth. This turns them inward and makes them seek meaning, or become alcoholics or buy a cabriolet car.
For a long time I’ve been struggling with finding the balance between two worlds.
A world of being online, working on your career. Here you use technology, conform to societies standards and play the puppet game.
And a world of being offline, crafting, painting, living simple and authentic.
You don’t have to be a poor hippie, or a soulless businessman. You can be both. A poor soulless businessman. Uh.. I mean, An entrepreneur who feels life deeply 😉
There is a concept that solves this struggle.
It’s the hybrid life.
This is a life where career and spiritual growth go together. Nature and technology merge, the old and the new come together. The two mountains in life become one.
I’ve always loved the combination of nature and tech.
As you can see from my logo, I’m a Jurassic park fan. This is where High tech and Primal forces meet.
Like the scene from the game portal with all the strange science experiments. Talking robot potatoes and what not.
I’ve designed smart plant walls, merging nature and tech.
I’ve been a sustainability consultant, applying biomimicry, again merging nature and tech.
I stared living in a Yurt. And you might think that means I walk barefoot all day and eat from the land. Well, yes. But it doesn’t mean I can’t have any technology.
Although that’s what my girlfriend thought before I moved in.
So we made a deal.
I could bring amazon Alexa if I changed the language to Spanish. We could have tech, with an exotic twist. I agreed.
The most influential ideas come from applying known principles to a new unknown field. Thomas Edison had knowledge of electromagnetic fields from working on the telegraph. He applied this to phones, light and rails.
I envision a life where:
- You can live in a cob house in the middle of nature and still meet your friend over an augmented reality dinner.
- You sit by the campfire with you tesla cybertruck and use your online business as a vehicle for spiritual growth.
- You learn to understand your shadow side by using virtual reality. The goggles show you a spatial representation of your internal family system.
- Your AI assistant feels jealous because you and your partner are having a romantic camping trip in the wilderness.
- Your therapist is a cyber shaman guiding you through a psychedelic journey, but you are not wearing a facemask, but a virtual reality headset.
- A world where we let go of dogma, of how things “Should be” and create a renaissance. Not a digital renaissance, not a “going back to the roots-renaissance”. But a true merging of opposites.
let’s face it.
Internet, like fire – or any other tool – can be good and bad.
It’s up to us.
Do you want to look at eggplants and peaches all day, or build more than a tower of used tissue boxes?
We love the internet. And we love to be in nature as well.
We love working hard on our (digital) career, and we should also take the time to step back and reflect on life at large.
Why am I creating this vision? Because the chance of anything becoming reality is bigger if you know the direction.
And it’s even bigger when the vision is something you WANT, when it’s something that’s optimistic. That’s why it doesn’t work to tell people that they shouldn’t eat meat anymore.
You need to give a better alternative, otherwise people don’t change.
Change costs energy.
That is what these letters are about.
You don’t have to lose your soul when starting a business.
You can use it as a vehicle for spiritual growth. It’s also why I do focus tutoring. Click here for a free call.
In essence learning to focus is the spiritual practice of controlling your own consciousness.
Are you living or being lived?
So how do you use business as a vehicle for spiritual growth?
I remember when I started YouTube I thought that all my ideas were interesting.
Boy was I wrong.
Reality slapped me in the face with 0 views for a while. And this harsh truth made me more humble and taught me how to communicate better.
Reality rewards those who understand it, and punished those who don’t understand it. I was ignorant. And still am. Just a little less every day.
We can keep on “Healing” – ad infinitum – and it can be a great way to avoid doing the most important work.
I believe life is inherently spiritual. Whatever you do, even the mundane, repetitive jobs that you don’t like, are necessary to evolve your soul.
Your problems will keep coming back to you until you acknowledge them and work on them. Instead of using meditation as spiritual bypassing.
Here’s a list of problems that might come up when working on your personal business. They require you to look inwards as well as tackle them in the real world:
- Having a scarcity mindset. Maybe you grew up in a working class household where everything should be as cheap as possible. There’s truth to it, and it can block you from buying high quality durable, good products or services. Find balance.
- Being scared of calling people. You might stumble over your words. But the only way to get better at this is by doing it a lot. and failing a lot.
- The belief that you’re not worthy of good things coming to you. Deep down inside you believe that you should always sacrifice yourself fully. Even when you do, that’s not enough. This can hold you back in your business because you never allow yourself to relax. Learn to celebrate small wins.
- The belief that you are not creative. You feel like you never come up with the right solution. Your mind goes blanc when you need it the most. There are plenty of creativity techniques. And it’s all about allowing yourself to be silly, to make the weird new connections and not judging.
- The believe that you need coffee to survive. Okay that might actually be true.
- The believe that work should be fun, passionate and blissful. OR the believe that work isn’t supposed to be fun. These opposites can both hold you back in business.
- Learning that what YOU want is also important. This is something I also find difficult.
- The believe that you are stupid.
- The believe that you know it all.
- The believe that you should never show weakness.
- The believe that you are weak.
- The believe that you should only do good, that you have no bad parts. Very dangerous.
These can all hold you back in work and business. And they require inner exploration as well as outer action. And it will be painful and difficult.
An outer blockage is an inner blockage.
Learning about this through shadow work is the first of the 6 steps method I take during my focus tutoring call. If you have a scattered mind and want to learn to focus better, click here.
I’ve been going to a “spiritual meetup group” for a few years now. And a topic that showed up many times was “How do you integrate experiences?”.
This question applies to:
- Therapy
- Spiritual experiences
- That one time you made the rookie mistake of quadrupling your psychedelic dose
- Journaling
- A good conversation with a friend
Way to often we have a realization about something we want to change in life. We feel full of enthusiasm and optimism. The first few days we manage to stick with our behaviour change. Quickly we find that our old patterns took over again.
How do we integrate our insights?
During one of these meetups a Japanese woman shared her perspective. She talked about “integration” in our western culture and changed my mind.
She told us that in western culture we are used to buying something and than having it permanently.
We think that we can do something once and than keep the result forever. As if behaviour change is a tell-sell turbo hurricane blender. Buy one, get 5 for free, including triple life-time guarantee. No.
In many cultures you will find that people devote their whole life to one practice. They understand that there is no quick and permanent fix. Many things are a constant practice, but we don’t want to hear that.
We live in a quick fix society.
I think that most of our healing and growth doesn’t happen by turning inwards.
Growth happens by DOING things.
By learning through experience.
Yes you can turn inwards to learn what is blocking you. But to overcome it, you need to face the blockage in real life.
That’s how you are going to get the visceral experience.
That’s also why psychedelics can be useful for certain treatments. They get the person to think that their experiences are real.
You get the visceral experience by going through 4 steps:
- unconscious incompetence
- conscious incompetence
- conscious competence
- unconscious competence
Like driving a car.
First you sit next to your parents driving a car.
You haven’t even tried it and you don’t know what you don’t know.
When you practice for your driving license you step in the a car for the first time. You become conscious of the fact that you are incompetent.
This is all system 2 thinking.
It takes a lot of effort and mental energy. Slowly you become more competent and you become aware of what you’re capable of.
You notice that pushing the clutch and shifting the gears takes effort but you can do it.
After hours of repetition you don’t have to think about it.
You can have a chat with your friends about simulation theory, while effortlessly shifting the gears. You became unconsciously competent. Driving a car is now in your system 1 thinking.
If building a website and writing content is in your system 2 thinking, I have good news. It is in my system 1 thinking. Click here if you need a website or content writer.
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