A bull just goes
What if we went through the streets like a bull, barbarically pounding our way through each photograph we make? With a strong gait, strong legs, and strong feet, you can walk on the street endlessly, on repeat.
Conquer yourself
Perhaps the ultimate goal of man is to conquer oneself. While we have the ability to conquer land and the open terrain surrounding us through conquest, warfare, farming, building, and creating the infrastructure that holds our world together, we can also turn inward for the ultimate battle, the spiritual war.
In our modern world, we are bombarded with distractions and things that are ultimately artificial. Think of the sounds of cars, honking horns, planes buzzing by, and the mindless chatter of people, fueling the air with pollution, celebrity gossip, drama, and bad news. While people smoke toxic cigarettes, fueling the sidewalks with pollutants and cancerous gases, so can the thoughts of others, through the words that they speak.
Man is body, not mind.
When it comes to conquering yourself, consider your physical body first and foremost. Think of somebody who cannot pull up their body weight above a bar, and the effect this will have on their mind. Weakness of the body is weakness of the mind. A strong body is inevitably going to possess a strong mind. Because of this, I believe we should take some simple precautions and measures to notice the way in which our body feels, becoming in tune with nature, and ultimately, what is real.
Flesh is real.
Interacting with humans in the physical flesh is a real embodied experience that can never be replaced through artificial means such as social media, text messaging, or even FaceTime and Zoom calls. Body language is lost through the digital spaces, and there are no pheromones in the air. Think of the ants and the role they play within our ecosystem, and the pheromone trails they leave behind for other ants to follow toward the colony. Like ants, each human has a role to play within the colony. In our modern world, we face artificial separation that atomizes man through bureaucratic systems, whether the FDA, the DMV, or even the corporate office that you work within. With the separation of man from physical flesh, division will be the inevitable outcome. When men are domesticated and put into a cage, they become like a bull, ready to destroy anything in their path.
Desire? Tame it
You often hear this notion, to follow your desire. What if our desires are something to also tame, to conquer, or to overcome? When you think of desire, maybe you think of licentiousness, greed, or the other laundry list of sins that Christianity discusses.
To be disciplined is to overcome desire
The other day, while walking down the street, some homeless man asked me for some money, and I simply continued walking, without acknowledging the man. As I walked away, he exclaimed to me, calling me a “faggot.” A bull would respond immediately, with aggression, knocking the man into the ground, beating him to a bloody pulp, because of the noise and vibration echoed from this man’s lips. However, I continued walking, without batting an eye, responding with words, or turning my head, as I know this man is in the depths of hell. Perhaps like a bull, who cannot tame his aggression, we should be more like an elephant, strong, large, capable of harm, but gentle, intelligent, and empathetic.
Energy flows from the weak to the strong in nature
There’s something strange about the feeling I had within me after this interaction. I almost felt stronger, larger, and more grand than this weak, homeless man, in a seemingly unorthodox or unethical way. However, as I walked away, I also felt deep empathy for this man. I had deep concern for his well-being, his state of mind, and the degradation of his weak and feeble body.
No matter if it’s a homeless man, some random stranger, etc., when the words or actions of a weak person are attempting to hurt you, you will inevitably just feel bad for them when you are filled with strength.
Ultimately, those that hate are weak and feed the strong with their energy.
When I was in high school and would play League of Legends, I always played as the tangiest character, Blitzcrank. Blitzcrank, this super tank indestructible robot, had the ability to produce a shield when his health was low by absorbing all of the hit points from the weak minions that would attack him. In life, perhaps it’s wise to be like this tank, that reflects all of the bullets shot at him, indestructible, unmovable, yet filled with love and empathy.
Focus your energy
If you take your two hands, your palms, and squeeze them together with all of your energy, while moving them outward from your chest and back towards your heart, you will feel an immense sensation of energy flowing through your pectoral muscles. The hormonal response of your physical body, through concentrated energy flow of your muscles contracting, releasing dopamine, is pure bliss.
In this brave new world, we have a new drug that releases these chemicals instantaneously, which sits in your front right pocket, the iPhone. Mind-numbing entertainment, media, whether consumed through video, or even playing video games, allows the individual user to experience this euphoric high of dopamine without putting in any muscular effort. Let’s become in tune with nature, with our bodies, and the environment around us more. By focusing your energy through physical exertion, you will feel good and powerful, even more so than your favorite champion or tank from League of Legends, or some superhero movie you watch on TV. Going forward, let’s focus all of our energy on becoming the real-life embodied superhero, the Ubermensch.
Upgrade the world. Upgrade your soul.
In video games, you often have downloadable content enabled after a few months of the release, which sometimes expands the world, opens up new locations, and missions for you to conquer. What if in real life, we saw the world this way, as an endless expanse for us to conquer? When I travel to new locations, I find myself lost in the unknown, uncomfortable, in a situation that ultimately results in the upgrade of my soul. When you put yourself into an uncomfortable position, by traveling somewhere new or doing something different, you increase your curiosity and courage, which I believe are the ultimate traits that influence the quality of our soul. Whether you go far away from home or simply walk down a new street that you haven’t been to recently in your hometown, these novel experiences upgrade the way in which you perceive yourself and the world around you.
Guard your time
In a 40-hour work week, we only have so much time. We are all slaves in this modern world, to our salary, our boss, and time itself. What you spend your time doing, or focus your attention towards, is the ultimate currency in this world.
“Spending time”
Simply think of this notion of spending time, and the correlation it has towards spending money. Money is economic energy that flows through the time that we spend doing things. Perhaps the ultimate currency then is time itself. If the thing that you are spending your time doing is generating money, yet giving you displeasure in life, unhappiness, and anxiety, is it truly worth it? If the time you’re spending is enslaved to a computer, emails, text messages, and communication, consistently for 40 hours a week, do you really think this is a healthy way of life? There is so much anxiety in the air, that it is almost palpable through watching the way people in suits move so quickly down the steeet, always on the phone, always on call, slaves to time itself. I believe this way of life causes the majority of people in modernity to have unbalanced hormones, with high cortisol levels, in need of medication. This is the reason why so many people become consumers and slaves to hedonism during their free time.
I see a future where our time is sacred, and spent innovating, producing, with friends, family, creativity, and spirituality. We’ve replaced these fundamental needs of humanity, such as community, or God, and replaced it with productivity. We’ve all voluntarily enslaved ourselves to technology and comfort.
I believe because we spend too much of our time focusing our attention on things that are trivial and monotonous, in a 40-hour work week, sacrificing our physical bodies and our health for material things and wealth. By spending time always working, laboring, and slaving away, we have no time for true leisure, or to even ask deeper questions about life and meaning itself. I think this is a serious crisis and problem because it inevitably leads to the decline of the human population, as we spend more time working than producing, whether the production of innovative ideas, thoughts, products, art, or even children.
We are here to create something beautiful.