Soulful Inception

“The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes, judgments and interpretations, which is to say the less present you are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not.

I've come to realize that negative criticism often arrives from the lips of someone incapable of accomplishing the things you can.

\- Unknown

Our eyes see 0.05% of the entire electromagnetic wave... *We*'*re blind cosmically*, but we judge everything by what we see.

Architecture drawings come alive with glowing windows

Things get more refined as you make mistakes. I’ve had a chance to make a lot of mistakes. Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes. But the real big thing is: if you’re going to make something, it doesn’t take any more energy—and rarely does it take more money—to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to persevere until it’s really great.

– Steve Jobs

## Energy is motion. Motion is time. Time is life. Life is energy.

Cycles are the answer to everything. If the universe were static, meaning all mass was suspended in position, there would be no life, time, or stars. Just dead rocks stuck indefinitely.

The heat from the stars created time. It set the planets in motion creating life and death as we know it. A planet dies much like we do: when its orbital trajectory flies too close to the sun. As cycles pass the planet ages and its orbital track becomes less viable until it gets eaten by its creator; becoming fertilizer. The same happens to us on the micro-scale. Our molecules eventually stop orbiting efficiently and the earth reclaims us.

What is this strange almost goo-like muck of a force we call gravity that gives us a window of healthy cycles before the system reaches its limit? And where did all the initial energy come from?

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” —Teilhard de Chagrin

The desire to exclusively engage with media and art made by “unproblematic” artists is a direct result of Americans viewing media consumption as an inherently political act because that is the supreme promise of Western prosperity and the religion of consumerism, and because it’s seemingly all that’s left. We’ve been stripped and socialized out of any real political energy and agency. Our ability to consume is the only thing remaining that’s “ours” in late capitalism, and as a result it’s become a stand-in for (or perhaps the sole defining quality of) every aspect of being alive today — consuming is activism, it’s love, it’s thinking, it’s sex, it’s fill in the blank. When the act of consuming is all you have left and indeed the only thing society tells you is valuable and meaningful, the act must necessarily be a moral one, which is why people send themselves down manic spirals deciding what, who is “problematic” or not, because for us the stakes are that high now.

So plant your own gardens, and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

\- Jorge Luis Borges

"The more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place."

— Alan Watts

We allow things in our outer environment to control the way we think and feel.



Why are you so upset? This person or this circumstance. Some person or condition is controlling the way I think and feel. The stronger the emotion we feel, the more we pay attention. And where we place our attention, we place our energy. We’re giving up our life force to that circumstance.



Our thoughts can make us sick. Every time we have a thought, we make a chemical. Thoughts are the language of the brain. Feelings are the language of the body.



— Joe Dispenza

You're a ghost driving a meat-coated skeleton made from stardust, riding a rock, hurtling through space.

Fear Nothing.

People only hate what they see in themselves.

\- Unknown

“Surfing is like music. It's infinite. You will never assess it or encompass it because the movement of water and waveform is so infinite and so nuanced and so beautiful and so changeable that, just like a musician, all you're trying to do is get yourself inside the pocket of that flow and have the ephemeral moment of getting in sync with that energy. And it doesn't matter how many times you do it; there's no guarantee you're going to get it right the next time.”

\- Edward Norton on Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Add through subtraction.

Burnout often manifests itself as stagnancy. When you do too much you kneecap your mental and creative capacity.

Audit your commitments and aggressively cut out the things from your life that are siphoning your energy.

Against living in the moment

My new mini-essay:

"New goals don't deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is a process, not an outcome. For this reason, all of your energy should go into building better habits, not chasing better results."