Leveling Up: Part IV — Introduction to The Value Pyramid & Leveling Up as a Human

In Part I we asked two questions; what is a leveled up human and whether or not there are optimal values in order to better understand if we can even provide an answer to the first one. In Part II, we questioned the importance of meaning to better understand what motivates our behavior. In Part III, we learned about the evolution of consciousness, about qualia and how they correspond to our mental state, and about valence which is the degree to which a certain qualia is desirable or not. Humans evolved to engage in certain behaviors that were motivated by their desire to feel good, to optimize for positive valence.

Introduction to the Value Pyramid

It is the idea that there are three values that everything in our leveling up journey can be reduced to; these are valence, knowledge, and health. As stated previously, all complex organisms on earth increased the probability of passing on their genes by optimizing these values. Positive valence mental states are the carrot on a stick that motivate us to keep moving forward, to evolve. Valence is the most important value and it sits at the top of the pyramid. This is because it doesn’t matter how knowledgeable you are or how healthy you are. If you feel unhappy then it seems like it’s all for nothing. Every other value you can think of ultimately reduces down to whether or not it is correlated with positive valence. As mentioned earlier, if you value meaning it is only important as a tool to alleviate suffering and increase happiness. Same thing if you value money or family. Does your relationship dynamic with those things bring you happiness? You get the picture — it all boils down to valence.

The relationship between knowledge and health

Knowledge and health act as guide rails to ensure that the organism can increase the probability of optimizing for positive valence. Knowledge is a requirement in order to have the skills necessary to engage in behaviours that create more positive mental states. Health is directly correlated with how we feel and is required in order to maximize the amount of time, energy and concentration that we can invest into the behaviours that optimize for positive valence. We can imagine a scenario where someone is addicted to methamphetamine. They choose to repeatedly dose with the drug in order to feel high, which at the time feels extremely pleasurable. Over time if the individual neglects their health they will start to feel increasingly worse as both their highs and lows will be lower. 

So while methamphetamine increases your valence, if it is at the cost of neglecting your health, over a span of time your valence will actually be lower on average than if you weren’t addicted to methamphetamine. Instead if you possess the knowledge to engage in behaviours that naturally increase your valence, it just happens to increase your health as those behaviours were selected for by evolution. These also just happen to be the behaviours that we intuitively know “in our gut” are good for us. Things like nutritious food, intimacy, leisure, community, art, understanding of the natural world etc. So it looks like we have answered the secondary question — that yes there are optimal values, and they are valence, knowledge, and health. In light of all of this, perhaps we have been guilty of thinking of what it means to be a human in some strange vacuum. Not realizing that what it means to be human is simply being an entity engaged in the process of evolution.

Leveling up

The reason we continue to live is because positive mental states make life worthwhile. No human being truly wants to feel worse, as that would be in direct contradiction to their very nature. A person does not commit suicide because they are happy. And it is not by accident that we reserve the right to a legally assisted death to only those who are greatly suffering. We can summarize this as follows, being happy and making others happy is what seems to give purpose to our lives. So if we are still playing the same game as our ancestors, why do so many people seem to be living their lives like the aliens — in states of ignorance, disease, and unhappiness? The answer is that the external environment is no longer challenging. The fact that we can satisfy our urges for sex, fatty food, and socialization at the click of a button — coupled with the reality of the modern rat race, means that we are often left feeling empty. We go on to search for meaning in our lives because without it we are lost. The meaning used to be survival, and although it was difficult, if we were doing a good job at it we generally felt good.

The brain needs a challenge. For countless millennia, we were preoccupied with meeting our basic survival needs. If the environment is no longer that challenging for a growing number of people around the world, how do we achieve a state of lasting happiness without feeling empty? Fortunately this is the perfect time to level up as a human in this game. While life may have gotten easier per se, our environment has allowed us the opportunity to shift from survival mode to overcome a new challenge, ourselves. In order to change our outer environment, we must first begin by changing our inner environment. No longer can we wait for the relatively slow process of natural selection via reproduction to save us. We are now at the crossroads in human history where we are more able to influence the direction of our individual and collective futures. Instead of satiating ourselves in the comfort zone we must seek discomfort by entering the unknown. Ironically, it is only by challenging ourselves that we can increase the values of valence, knowledge, and health, beyond what our DNA evolved for. 

“Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.” - Ralph Waldo Emmerson

What it means to be human (or perhaps any other lifeform for that matter), is simply maximizing the desirable characteristics of qualia for that organism, as that would increase the chances of reproduction. That is, you wake up in the game as a human, as such you play the game as a human and are motivated to engage in behaviours that feel good long term such that you can fulfill your instinctual drive to procreate. What it means to be a human does not mean maximizing ignorance, disease, and unhappiness, as behaviours that led to those outcomes would not lead to successful reproduction, and therefore the extinction of humans. 

To conclude, we have established our optimal values — valence, knowledge, and health as the variables to optimize. Which is in line with our intuition that being happy and making others happy is what seems to give purpose to our lives. It’s important to be happy, but if you are already happy, why not try to be happier? Why not try to be more knowledgeable? Why not try to be healthier? Now we can answer our primary question, what does it mean to level up as a human? Leveling up as a human means taking what it means to be a human to the next level, beyond reproduction of genetic code. 

A leveled up human is one that values positive growth in the dimension of valence, knowledge, and health.

This blog is about taking us on this journey together. Everyday you can simply ask yourself this question — am I smarter, happier, and healthier than I was yesterday? If the answer is yes, then congratulations... you've leveled up.

Leveling Up: Part III — Qualia & Valence

In Part II, we explored the arbitrariness of meaning, and how it is only relevant to the extent that it is able to provide value to one’s life.

In a role-playing game, we level up our character in order to become better at surviving the next challenge. We can see this process at work if we look to nature. Throughout the evolution of life on planet earth, many life forms popped in and out of existence. The ones that survived did so by successfully adapting to their environment. We are the descendants of a long relay race, with each of our ancestors having passed on the genetic baton to the next. As more complex multicellular life began to emerge around the globe such as animals, the development of a central nervous system became a significant advantage to their reproductive fitness. Starting with locomotion with the cerebellum, to emotions with the limbic system, all the way to the formation of complex notions with the frontal lobe. Along with this came an emergence of higher consciousness in which the richness of sensory experience expanded into a nearly infinite field of possibility. In the human animal, and likely many other animals, perhaps all things including electrons, this is known as the capacity to feel “what it is like”. A bat knows what it is like to be a bat — a dolphin, a dolphin — a cow, a cow — and you, yourself. In philosophy and psychology, the “what it is like” of subjective experience is referred to as qualia.

Qualia can be divided into varying degrees of “this mental state feels good” or “this mental state feels bad”. Positive mental states played key roles in motivating humans towards behavior that allowed them to successfully reproduce, that is, “nutritious food tastes good”, “social cooperation feels good”, and “sex feels good”. If we didn’t desire calorie dense foods like fatty meats and starches we would be too weak to perform the tasks necessary for daily survival. Without motivation to cooperate with one another, we wouldn’t be able to form larger cohesive social units. And if we weren’t motivated to have sex, you and I simply would not exist. Negative mental states played key roles in motivating humans to avoid things that were detrimental to reproduction, “this plant is bitter and smells bad, maybe it’s poison”, or “that person is ugly, maybe they are unhealthy”. Without the ability to detect off putting flavours and smells, there would be a lot of unnecessary deaths due to consumption of poisonous plants and fungi. A person’s attractiveness is a byproduct of healthy genes and access to adequate resources, and our desire to reproduce with the most attractive potential mate ensured that the highest quality genes were passed on successfully to the next generation. The evolving brain selected for states and behaviors that were beneficial for long term survival to feel good, and selected against states and behaviors that were detrimental for long term survival to feel bad.

Whether or not consciousness pervades all things, somewhere along the line, as evidenced above, evolution evolved in brains a sense of feeling in the dimension of what in psychology is called valence. Valence, otherwise known as hedonic tone, refers to the intrinsic attractiveness (positive valence) or aversiveness (negative valence) of a mental state — pleasure vs. pain respectively. Whether you are being chased by a lion, are having a migraine, or have been poisoned; these examples would generally refer to negative valence experiences in various degrees. And whether you are having an orgasm, have just eaten a good meal, or are experiencing a mystical state of ecstasy; these examples would generally refer to positive valence experiences in various degrees. In the past, before the internet, our desire to pursue pleasure would have been beneficial for survival. This is because our brains evolved valence to motivate us to either engage in behaviours that were conducive to reproduction or avoid behaviours that were not. It is this biological machinery that motivates us to continue playing the human game.

Our modern environment is radically different from the one we experienced as hunter gatherers hundreds of thousands of years ago. But we are more or less physically identical and thus the game itself has not changed, as we are still motivated by our desire to feel good. If there are optimal values, they are neatly situated within this context. Purely as a thought experiment, we can imagine that there are aliens out there in the universe with their own set of values. Perhaps these beings value ignorance, disease, and unhappiness. You may have experienced a gut feeling that these do not align with your values, and you are right. We have evolved to value their opposites — namely knowledge, health, and happiness. Our capacity for knowledge allowed us to survive and adapt to the often harsh and changing environments of the past. Being in good health was important in order for us to reach sexual maturity and pass on our knowledge to our children. And our desire to be in a positive mental state created the motivations to engage in the behaviours conducive to our survival. All complex organisms on earth increased the probability of passing on their genes by optimizing these values.

We can call this the value pyramid.

Leveling Up: Part II — Meaning

In Part I, I asked you to write down on a piece of paper what you value.

What did you come up with? It is common to have included things like money and human relationships in your list. However, if someone has a bank account balance of $0, are they less developed than a millionaire? What about someone who lacks social capital, like a hermit? The problem with things like money and human relationships is that they are measures of the external environment. You could have been born into wealth, or be a celebrated individual, but at the same time be deeply dissatisfied. If leveling up implies a sort of progress, each of us are unique, and our set of values may be too idiosyncratic to generalize across all humans. After all, we are trying to define what it means to level up as a human, not as Jamie in Western culture middle-class suburbia. Perhaps you included more values as well — things like meaning and purpose. But can we reduce what we value to be general enough so that it can apply to all areas of life? Did your list include knowledge, health, or happiness? If so you are on the right track. What if I told you that the basis of our self-development can be reduced to the pursuit of knowledge, health, happiness without including meaning or purpose. 

What about meaning though? What is life’s relevance, significance, and value? In the grand scheme of things, it does not appear to have any meaning other than what is attributed to it by the individual. It is up to us to fill the void. However, as a reflection of our changing attitudes and circumstances, the meaning or purpose we apply to our lives does not always seem to stay consistent. If we find a new purpose, it appears arbitrary and subjective whether it is better or worse than the one we had before insofar as it is contingent on the overall satisfaction it can provide us. So while it can still be argued that the search for meaning is important, whatever we find is deeply personal and only relevant as a tool to alleviate suffering and increase happiness. For example, fostering family relationships can bring meaning to one’s life insofar as it brings joy. But if it brings misery, then we often feel trapped and have wishes that those relationships would end. My goal here is to provide an alternative to this dilemma, a meta-meaning. Namely, if there was a meaning to life, what would it look like? We can start by looking towards someone accomplished to see if we can gather some information about what this meta-meaning looks like. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger once said “The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer”. To paraphrase, the whole point of life is to level up. 

We can look to evolution as an example.

Leveling Up: Part I — What is a Leveled Up Human?

All humans to varying degrees must bear the weight of their circumstances. While most people would love to have the ability to snap their fingers and magically improve them, life isn’t exactly fair and unfortunately no such magic exists. These circumstances may work to benefit some while proving truly burdensome to others. Although they may have been determined by some combination of good and bad luck, we must not fall victim to them. For example, if you are reading this, you are one of the lucky ones, as your circumstances have allowed you enough freedom to end up on this blog. It is with this “free will” that you have the choice to rise above the perceived limitations they present. We must choose to focus on the things in life we can control, because focusing on the things we can’t is a waste of our energy. So while there are times most of us may not be able to control our circumstances (outer environment), we may be surprised to learn how much control we have over how we perceive and react to them (inner environment). With practice, we can construct our inner environment like an athlete training to build strength, or a musician learning and mastering an instrument. Over time as we develop our inner environment, our outer environment naturally will follow suit. Classically, the development of our inner environment is called self-development. This is the environment we must learn to master in order to take our first steps towards leveling up.

Before we embark on our journey of self-development we must ask the question — what does it mean to level up as a human? Development means progress, as such there has to be some sort of measure by which we can gauge our development by. The athlete may measure their progress by gauging the amount of weight they can lift compared to the last workout. The musician may measure their progress by seeing how efficiently they can play common chord progressions in different keys. In both these examples it is imperative to keep some sort of practice log or diary if one wants to measure and thus maximize their progress. So before we can even begin to answer the initial question, we have to go deeper down the rabbit hole. We need to come up with the variables we are to measure in order to track our self-development. One question leads to another and we are left asking — are there optimal values? We don’t know where we are going until we determine what set of values are important to us, which will in turn determine our trajectory and thus help us answer the initial question.

Before reading further, write down on a piece of paper what you value.

Self Development: Coming Full Circle

Life can be more or less characterized by its cyclic nature. We orbit around the sun once every approximately 365 days. We have the seasons of spring, summer, fall, and winter. We are greeted by the sun every morning, which regulates our circadian rhythms, allowing us to repeat the cycle of sleep every night. We have the hydrologic cycle, where water circulates between the air, bodies of water, and living things. I posit that our conscious development is also composed of cycles akin to those found in nature. The question then becomes - where are we going when we are going? What is our destination? What if I was to say that the ultimate destination of life is independent of concepts, and dependent on our consciousness instead. This change of consciousness allows us to make a return home instead of running away from our problems.

I want to introduce the idea of coming full circle. That in our journey of raising our consciousness, our long winding paths eventually lead back to where we started, albeit with a new perception. We can start off first with the example of going for a long run, you look outside with anticipation, put on your running shoes, and step out the door. You may be running ten, twenty, or thirty kilometers, but after you finish, you end up back home. Along your run may encounter difficult emotions that percolate to the surface. Maybe you have to contend with a pain in your knee or foot, or you’re thirsty and regret not bringing extra water, or maybe you are feeling fresh and tap into a flow state. Regardless of what you experience, the person who enters the door all sweaty and ready to take a shower and eat a big meal, that is a changed person. This process is one of many, where once completed, we end up where we started.

Why does the journey of raising our consciousness bring us full circle? How can it be that after all our so called progress and hard work, we end up closer to where we started? It is because there is nowhere else to go but home, you are you, and will always be you. The only thing you can truly gain are new perspectives. Anything else is ideology, religion, and dogma. To traverse the path towards higher consciousness, we must abandon all of those things, and what we are left with is ourselves. What I mean by you will always be you, is that your existence is independent from concepts. The man who is a pilot is not a pilot, but is merely playing the role of one. We cannot really determine whether something is absolutely good or evil. And thus instead of unnecessarily limiting ourselves to paths away from certain behaviors as a way of leveling up, we must do things consciously. It is from the new perceptions that result from changes in our consciousness that we are able to be free to choose to do the things we truly want, which generally form from an evolutionary generated morality of good. We must become conscious of our choices to be free from our unconscious patterns. It is by becoming conscious of our participation in reality that we are truly able to level up.

The evolutionarily generated morality of good

Humans are operating under more complex and diverse cultural operating systems that constrain their consciousness to function at certain frequencies. In these narrow bandwidths the human brain cannot fully tap into its ancestral knowledge or instinct. It is with instinct, a type of post-stimuli calculation we can call a context-dependent value judgement system, that we are able to derive good. This is opposed to religious thinking, which relies on a type of pre-stimuli judgement we can call context-independent value judgments. There are religions all around the world that operate on vastly different value systems, however they all are similarly context-independent. A system which enforces a set of values allows for cohesion within a group, however it can create high-levels of xenophobia. If we could learn to tap into our instinct more often, we would feel more aligned with our choices without the need for a context-independent framework which alienates us from each other.

“Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”

All of these circular journeys can be characterized by three main stages; the beginning, the middle, and the end. The key here is to understand that the middle of the journey is characterized by a state of chaos, the radical and unpredictable opening of possibilities. It represents the lifting of the veil of ignorance, which is often accompanied by the pain of knowledge and awareness. It is the beginning and end of the journey that are characterized by a state of order. The beginning can be understood as a state of ignorance is bliss, and the end state as knowledge is power. But they actually occupy two sides of the same coin. You start at x, and you make the journey towards growth, plunging into chaos and exploring infinite possibilities, but as you grow more conscious you are pulled towards the end y, which inevitably is the other side of the same coin. For example, birth is opposite to death, and in your journey between the two states you are plunged into the unpredictable nature of reality where you are free to live your life as you choose, but you will inevitably reach the end state. It is in your death that you will have made the round trip back to where you started. In this example, if you were to remain alive forever, you would be stuck in limbo and would have never completed the journey, as death is a fundamental property of life. I want to highlight some more examples of going full circle which will hammer home this concept.

Within the dietary paradigm we have a lot of contention as to what is the right and the wrong diet. The modern diet culture is populated by two extremes, the vegan diet and the ketogenic/carnivore diet. While growing up, many of us do not receive any sort of dietary education. You could say most of us eat a “see-food” diet, i.e., we see food, and we eat it. This includes anything from candy bars at the convenience store to home cooked meals at our grandparents house, and everything in between. Like a dog with kitchen leftovers, we tend not to discriminate. However as we grow more conscious about the impact of our food choices on how our bodies feel, the state of the environment, and the lives of other creatures, we may decide to change our dietary habits. This is where our journey begins. Whether that is veganism, which is focused on ethics as it’s basis, or ketogenic based approach, which is focused on health as it’s basis. What usually starts off as self-education and experimentation quickly evolves into dogma and religion. There seem to be examples of people thriving in both camps. But by choosing to fall into one of these categories when we seek solutions for the health, environmental, or ethical reasons, we limit our possibilities. Our vision of what is possible narrows, and if we face struggles or feel dissonance down the road, we often resort to solutions within the paradigm we have trapped ourselves in. In truth, all other animals in nature follow their natural diet. It is the overabundance of processed foods that have perverted our intuition about our food choices, and thus we require education in order to get back on the right track. However in most cases this education only leads us further from the truth. As we become more conscious, we realize that the truth is not found in any of these paradigms exclusively, rather it is synthesized out of the partial truths that they each contain. In the pinnacle of this evolution we go from living to eat, to eating to live, and regardless of whether we stick to eating exclusively plants, exclusively animal products, or a healthy balance of both, we realize that it’s real food that matters more than macro-nutrient ratios or elimination of entire food groups. We know having a Snickers bar or a glass of wine won’t kill us, but we understand the benefit of eating real foods consistently. In a way we go back to a “see-food” diet, but instead what we see is now filtered through a higher consciousness, which influences our food choices to be healthier overall. You are not a vegan, you are playing the role of one. As soon as you make the journey of coming full circle, you realize you are a human being whose behavior does not fit into this context-independent value judgement framework.

This pattern of going full circle also exists within the religious paradigm. Similarly to diet, the contemporary spiritual climate is also populated by two extremes; the dogma of religion, and the rejection of that dogma, atheism. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and thus the atheist is steadfast in their skepticism. While the religious individual is unwavering in their faith.  These two camps actually share more similarities than one would believe at first glance. They both have limited what type of evidence they will accept, and fail to appreciate the constraints that the ego projects onto reality. In essence what we see is only a shadow, or a distortion of what exists like in Plato’s allegory of the cave. Like the diet example both camps will inevitably resort to the limited conclusions that their worldviews allow them to have. Children raised in a religious environment have the idea of God imposed on them by secondary sources, it is only as a result of experience that we may come to the conclusion that there is more to the nature of the universe than what meets the eye. Our spiritual evolution can be understood as going from indirect experience i.e. the meme of God or science, to the direct experience of God or awareness. The middle in this case can generally be characterized as either a rejection of the belief systems that you were indoctrinated with, or a doubling down of your faith. It is in the pinnacle of this evolution that both paradigms converge into the same realization regardless of whether you started as a believer or a skeptic. Ultimately there are altered states of consciousness that confirm the existence of God, whilst denying the meme of God, leading you back to where you started, albeit with a new perception on your atheism or spirituality.

DISCLAIMER: I understand that God can trigger the atheists bullshit meter. God can be interpreted as the ground of reality (consciousness) from which all information processing takes place to give rise to the physical phenomenon we take for granted. The direct experience of God or awareness is then understood as the realization of consciousness as the fundamental ground of reality.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s diet, religion, career, or your relationships with people. If we are to participate in our daily reality, we must do so consciously, otherwise our decisions carry a heavier burden. This is the burden of cognitive dissonance. If we commit to doing things consciously, we have completed our task in making the most out of life, thus reducing our dissonance and increasing our feeling of being in alignment with our choices. By choosing to grow towards higher consciousness, we can increase the likelihood that we act in accordance with behaviors in aligned with our evolutionarily generated morality of good, or instinct. The reality is simple, you must understand that you really have the freedom to do what you want, you just gotta be woke to accept it. It is by understanding that all conscious development leads us in a circle, that we can finally begin making our way back home.

Self Development: What is an Attractor?

The whole point of life is to level up. That is, everyday we must strive to be better than who we were yesterday, not only to increase our chances of survival - evolutionarily speaking, but to enrich the lives of ourselves and others right now. Nowadays many of us have grown accustomed to the luxuries of modern life, and thus we remain in our comfort zones, disconnected from our primal nature. And yet our potential for personal transformation has never been greater. How can we embrace our evolution and look at our successes and failures as equal opportunities to learn? How we can avoid setting goals only to feel a sense of fleeting accomplishment when we achieve them? We must become more conscious and reconnect with ourselves. And in doing so we equip ourselves with the tools to create the life of our dreams.

Many of us have an inner voice that we feel we could listen to more. And it is likely that the source of most of our problems is this reluctance to follow it. We often blame procrastination for leading us astray, destined to repeat the cycle of not following through with all the things that we want to do. In order to break the cycle, we must leverage the power of the most complex organ in the known universe, our brains. 

The brain is a world builder. And to begin our self development, we must first create an image of our future, or an attractor. The term is borrowed from within the mathematical field of dynamical systems. An attractor is defined as a set of numerical values toward which a system tends to evolve, for a wide variety of starting conditions. The value of the attractor in terms of your self development is self-evident, it attracts. It does this by reframing your perception from wanting or doing, to being. Before going into detail about the benefits of attractors, I want to review two approaches to self development that fall short and the reasons why.

Goals

While there is utility in writing down your goals, they can often be vacuous. With goals you have built a frame of I want, and thus you are inevitably reminded of what you don’t have, and while that may act as a motivation to go towards creating a reality for yourself where you have the things you want, it can be a false promise. Imagine the number of instances where you have said to yourself, if only I had x, then I would be happy. If only that were true. Instead, the achievement of your goals can be anticlimactic. Oh wow, you finished the marathon Peter, do you feel any different? Oh wow Peter, your birthday is today, do you feel any different? You realize that it’s not in the arbitrarily set milestone, it’s in the journey to get there that you feel more connected to something greater.

Systems

The systems based approach is better in some aspects compared to strictly setting goals. By focusing on what skills you can develop over time vs. what short term goals you can achieve, you build a perception of I do, and thus you are identifying with your action and the direct impact those actions have on your life. This allows you to make progress over time regardless of whether you encounter failures, because instead of the goal being the goal, you develop transferable skills that can be applied to overcome future challenges. However, the systems based approach is inextricably linked to goal setting. I simply have the goal of becoming a better runner, instead of setting an arbitrary goal of finishing a marathon, I will develop a system of trying to run each day whilst increasing my mileage slowly. Over time I will be equipped with the tools to finish the marathon. The best runners spend most of their time running if possible, thus their system becomes training as much as possible without injury. If you are just interested in completing the marathon, you may focus on becoming a better athlete overall, which will grant you the capability of running 42 km while potentially having a balanced repertoire of movement patterns at your disposal. In this circumstance it is clear that following a systems based approach will allow you to develop a broader range of skills. Ultimately, neither thinking what skills can I develop or what short or long term goals I can achieve is going to create the optimal conditions for you to tap into your highest potential. It is time to realize that it’s not in the milestone, it’s not in the journey... it’s in your self perception.

Attractors

The brain is a world builder. And we can use this feature to create a world that we are attracted to. In the creation of our subjective worlds we rely on others to build a sort of consensus reality which imposes limitations on our perception. The scope of the effects of these preconceptions can affect our outer and inner worlds, potentially imposing a self-limiting view of ourselves. Attractors represent the creation of your ultimate vision; whereas in some sense you can create goals and systems without having a vision. To have faith in your vision, is to build a perception of I am. Imagine two twins running a race and they are identical in every way, same nutrition, genetics, and training. The only difference is that while one followed goals, the other one has a vision, a faith. Which one will have the edge? The mind is a powerful thing, the one with faith will have an edge over the other twin because they are connected to something deeper, something pulling them forward. You have three choices, you can not believe in yourself, you can believe in yourself, or you can believe in the ideal of yourself. This latter kind of belief is a transrational self belief, in the sense that it is beyond rational thinking. That’s why they call it a leap of faith. 

"Nature rewards courage." - Terrence McKenna

You are that person; you are just doing what they did in the past to become who they were in the future. The attractor is your destiny; you must grow into your destiny, regardless of your failures. Failures are seen as an important part of the path to success. Everything is framed in light of the integrity of your future self having made it through all of this. It may be beneficial to establish a level of schizotypal thinking and dialogue with your future self to guide you on the path of being yourself. Goals and systems will not be able to motivate you the same way as creating a reality where you are fully aligned with your inner voice. That future self will act as an attractor. Think of how the zygote develops into an embryo, then a fetus, and then a child. During the process there may be a few mistakes, like the creation of a birthmark, yet the process will likely lead to the successful birth of a child, imperfections included. You can imagine that the cellular processes during the development of a newborn are not only successful insofar as they are in the right place at the right time but simultaneously the DNA acts as a holographic storage device of the finished result. This holographic projection is the attractor. 

Ultimately the power of attractors lie within moving the goalpost of success. When setting goals, you self-identify with success once having achieved the goal. When following systems, you self-identify with success based on your adherence. When in a state of attraction, you self-identify with success based on your emotional and intellectual congruence with who you are in comparison to your attractor. By shifting your perception from I want to I do to I am, you are essentially reducing the dissonance between where you are and where you want to be. In I want perceptions, you are only satisfied by some future state. In I do perceptions, you are only satisfied as evidenced by your commitment to certain behaviors. In I am perceptions, you are only satisfied as soon as you are congruent with your attractor. You can be whoever you want to be, but be that person, take responsibility, take action, evolve. The attractor is not a fixed state, it represents the embrace of the journey, a cycle of continual evolution.

We are able to achieve goals or utilize systems mainly by being in the right place at the right time, but attractors represent goal states through which multiple starting points at varying times can manifest and lead to the same conclusion - there are many paths to the top of a mountain. On a surface level, goals and attractors appear the same, however the difference is that the journey towards the attractor is part of your process, where a goal is something you achieve as a result of things separate from the goal. I am training for a marathon vs. I am a marathoner. An attractor is to the relationship between a black hole and a nearby star, as a goal is to the relationship between a lion and it’s prey. The lion must chase the prey down and has to make certain adjustments to achieve that goal state, whereas the planet is inevitably consumed by the black hole due to the fabric of the universe. That fabric is your faith. As time goes by, your vision crystallizes, you become more in tune with the reality of who you are, and more courageous to follow the earth’s heartbeat - to continue... to level up. 

10 Benefits of Barefoot Forest Bathing

Forest bathing or shinrin-yoku, is a practice that encompasses a multitude of movements in an outdoor environment. It is like meditating amongst the trees.

What better time to take your shoes off?

Acupuncture - Although Traditional Chinese Medicine is riddled with pseudoscience, acupuncture has been found to exert anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects. Being barefoot can stimulate the nervous system in the same way. When the entirety of your body weight is resting upon dozens of often sharp and pointy rocks, which often hurt just like tiny needles penetrating the skin, you can’t help but liken the experience to acupuncture.

Massage - At certain points during a massage, people often experience some form of discomfort and pain. This is due to the stimulation of tense muscles and tendons. The varying hardness and texture of earth’s surfaces allow for your feet to be massaged in a multitude of ways which allow for them to be softened up, just like the way your body feels after a massage. Think of running on grass versus running on gravel. If you are on a soft surface, your foot will tense up to compensate. If you are on a hard and varied surface your foot will relax to compensate.

Yoga - The biofeedback encourages you to connect your movement with your breath in order to relax into each step. You become more conscious of where you place your feet, and in return you will be more gentle on your body. This slowing down of your natural pace will allow you to re-calibrate with your body and your surroundings, often leading one to take on a new found gratitude and appreciation.

Posture - Your whole body is more easily able to move in harmony without elevated footwear, allowing for a more natural alignment of the spine.

Meditation - Barefoot forest bathing increases the need for you to pay attention and the elevated sensation allows for you to not 'be bored'. This is flow, being, oneness, failure, success, pain, pleasure, sadness, joy, fear, and love all wrapped into one activity.  

Memory - You need to watch your step =) Researchers found boosts to participants working memory after subjecting them to barefoot running experiments. This is hypothesized to be because of paying increased attention to the ground. 

Proprioception - Whilst being shod our feet are mostly out of the picture. We get a better sense of our movement and position in space when the proprioceptor neurons in the bottom of our feet are activated. This triggers a chain of conscious and unconscious neuromuscular adjustments; your body acting in harmony to achieve balance. An active individual will spend a large amount of their time standing, walking, or running. In these cases the feet are almost always the first chain of command. Shoe wearers effectively turn the most important part of human locomotion into their ‘weakest link’.

Earthing - Wearing shoes insulates us from the Earth’s supply of free electrons, which are hypothesized to influence our bio-electrical processes by decreasing markers of inflammation, improving sleep and recovery, and reducing stress levels.

I would not necessarily trust anecdotes, but I do feel better after being barefoot for a while, and have experienced the benefits above. However there is room for skepticism; the claims made by pro-grounding proponents have been heavily criticized. There is a possibility that we have formed positive mental associations with being barefoot, and that we generally tend to be in nature when we walk around without shoes, so all the benefits of being barefoot could just be confounded by all the things that come along with it (you’re probably not at work).

Connection - By taking off our shoes, we open up a whole new dimension of sensation and get to know the earth beneath our feet. In this new state we are inspired by the balance of order and chaos we see in nature. In this increasingly connected world, it is increasingly difficult to remain connected to nature and to our humanity.

Fun - This is the other side of meditation. In the end it doesn’t even matter. But the strength in overcoming that nihilism is that we do it anyway, for the shits and giggles. How do we know unless we try it? It is our duty to reconnect with our inner child.