Reclaim Your Mind, Body, and Spirit

I’m starting to think that anything that promotes fear, guilt, and shame is works of the devil, or something to at least just be skeptical about. I don’t necessarily believe that people are inherently evil and purposely try to make you feel guilty, but it’s almost a subconscious programming, where people become so wrapped up with an identity, then anyone that comes from outside of their bubble is someone that they instantly begin to shame.

Beware of Nature Worshipers

So I started attending a church in Philadelphia, and after a few months, I realized that maybe church just isn’t for me after all. What I realized is, real community is very difficult to find. Maybe community in general is dead?

Anyways, after disclosing my lifestyle, my diet, of only eating meat on a carnivore diet, I started getting strange looks and judgments from others. Particularly, on one day, I was told that I would be a better Catholic, that I would be a better man, if I would stop eating meat. That was the last straw, and since then I stopped going to this church. I realized that pretty much 75% of the church were vegans, promoting vegan diets to people in the church, and they are also very active in combating climate change and promoting healthy practices with the environment.

The thing is, I have absolutely no problem with somebody deciding to be a vegan, or working to combat climate change, etc. However, once I realized that they had a problem with me, for my lifestyle and my decisions—bro, I wanna live my life—because apparently, cows farting causes the climate to change, as they said, and that my “carbon footprint is probably so high” that I’m a bad person, a bad Catholic. I think that there’s a strange trend towards this vegan, nature-worshiping, sort of death cult. It’s like they think they’re doing good and virtuous things, but in actuality, it’s the complete opposite. Now I know to beware of fake spiritual people, as they fear Truthseekers.

God Is Dead and We Replaced Him With Bureaucracy

So I think with the death of God comes the replacement of God, in strange groups, whether God is replaced with nature, veganism, sexual identity, racial identity, political ideology, or bureaucracy. When I think of 75% of the work that is done in a modern city, it’s all done behind a desk, behind a computer screen, inside, surrounded by a cubicle system that completely controls society. Just think of places like the DMV, and a long line, waiting for a number to be called, interacting with the person at the desk. It all just feels so dehumanizing in my opinion.

It’s almost like you’re just a number, which is also something I experienced when working for a union. When you work for a union, you’re basically just a number on a list. Yes, your name is on the list, but the number is what really matters. It’s easier for the system to decide who to send texts to, who to email, and what rank they fall in order. I feel bad for people who have to constantly be on their email, in a call, or behind a desk. It seems like we’re almost just voluntarily enslaving ourselves to a system that society created for control. This control is our new God, our new religion—the system itself.

Church Is the Center of Community

Whether during my time living in Jericho or Zambia, Africa, as a Peace Corps volunteer, I learned very quickly that the church is at the center of the community. Every morning in Jericho, you hear the sound from the mosque and a beautiful prayer, gathering people to come together at the center of their village. In Zambia, Africa, the church and the teachings within the church guide the individual, the family, the tribe, to strive for the highest virtuous good for their neighbors.

I think when spiritual communities are replaced with bureaucratic systems, we stray further and further away from God, by dividing ourselves into particular identity groups. After all of my years of traveling, despite visiting so many different countries and experiencing so many different cultures, we are more similar than different. I think it’s important for us to recognize this. It seems that we try so hard to differentiate ourselves, from what makes us different from one another, when we’re all the same: human, with a brain, a heart, two lungs, and two legs. Yes, we’re a product of our environment, our upbringing, religion, and cultural values, etc. But that doesn’t make us any different on the biological front, as we all suffer, feel pain, joy, sorrow, cut, and bleed.

Bleeding to Death

One extremely tragic thing I witnessed in the village while in Zambia was the practice of bloodletting. This very young 12-year-old girl was in dire health, with bloodshot eyes, and sick for weeks with a fever, vomiting, and unable to get out of bed. In the village, they lack proper surgical instruments, medicine, and clinics. Because of this, dire circumstances lead to drastic situations, where parents will take it into their own hands to do whatever they can to make their daughters feel better. Unfortunately, this young girl underwent bloodletting for weeks, having her skin cut, all down her legs, her arms, even on her face, to remove bad blood—or supposedly bad blood—from her body, in hopes to heal her and to make the suffering stop. Unfortunately, this practice sped up her suffering and led to her ultimate death just a few weeks later.

There are still places in the world, centuries later, that utilize this practice of bloodletting. These places rely on water from wells, requiring individuals within their family to carry buckets on their heads for miles, just to have clean water to drink and survive. The things that I witnessed in the village, and the way of life generally, reminds me to simply be grateful for the small things, like running clean water, our medicine, and high-quality clothing. For instance, the boys only have one pair of shoes for school, so when they go to play sports, they have to remove their shoes and play soccer barefoot. One day, I decided to join the boys, removing my shoes to play. Needless to say, my feet were blistered and battered for a week.

Nowadays, I enjoy walking barefoot in the city, to keep me grounded, to strengthen my feet, providing calluses on both my hands and my feet through weightlifting. What’s amazing is, when you shake hands with a man that works on the farms in Zambia, their hands are fully calloused, like a glove. However, our hands from weightlifting only have calluses in those little spots where you’re holding the barbell.

Heat Tech

I wonder what kind of clothes Washington and his troops were wearing when they crossed the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War? I’m pretty sure a lot of the men had very poorly fitted shoes for the icy, sleet, and winter conditions. It’s amazing how despite the cold climate, they still pushed through and wound up winning the Revolutionary War. Unfortunately, though, we led George Washington to death through the practice of bloodletting. He had a throat condition or an infection, and because the technology at the time was not advanced, in the 18th century, they cut him up and bled him to death.

This reminds me of the importance of technology and why we’re living in the greatest time to be alive, considering all the advancements we’ve made over the years and centuries. I’m currently wearing the heat tech tights from Uniqlo on my legs, with wool socks, gloves, and a down jacket. I feel nothing from the external world around me, despite the cold climate of winter. When your body is properly insulated, you retain the heat and your blood is warm.

I saw some old man yesterday, who went out into the cold for just a few minutes and came back with his hands all black and blue, unable to withstand the conditions in his old age. As we get older, maybe our blood runs cold, and our health, of course, becomes poorer. With this in mind, I recognize the importance of heat, insulation, and keeping my body as warm as possible in these winter months. The luxury of having a bath in the morning, cranked to the max, or even taking icy cold showers, conditions my body to withstand the various temperatures from summer to winter. I think this is a great way to train your nervous system through hot and cold therapy, which may actually boost our immunity.

Working in the greenhouse during the winter is proving to be a bit challenging. For instance, we recently received some plants that were put into the soil just last week, and a few of them went into shock. Because the windows aren’t perfectly sealed, and there are some cracks in the walls, the cool air from winter is entering the greenhouse, affecting some of the plants and locations, causing them to go into shock and die quickly. Indoor plants are very particular and require the temperature to be just right to keep them alive.

When the Titanic sank, some women and children were safe on the lifeboats, but the majority of the men had to stay behind and die, freezing to death in the cold ocean. Most of the people didn’t die because of drowning; they died because the water was so cold, causing them to become unconscious in around 10 to 15 minutes of swimming in the freezing Atlantic Ocean.

Get on the Lifeboat

I remember in Zambia, one of the most common health concerns was cholera. Without treatment, people with cholera have about a 50% fatality rate. The main causes of this disease are contaminated water and food. This is why when I was in the village as a volunteer, I always made sure when I drew water from the well, I boiled it, put it through a gravity filter, and added iodine before consuming it. I would never take any chances of drinking water without the proper filtration, and always made sure to take my malaria medication every single day.

What if our economy in the United States is a slowly sinking ship, like the Titanic, and the vitality of our United States dollar is like contaminated water, slowly bleeding us to death? Personally, I’d like to get on the lifeboat before I freeze to death. As the Federal Reserve continuously prints money, inflating the money supply, the value of the dollar depreciates over time. Just look at the prices of simple things like homes. It’s quite obvious that the system is broken and in need of repair. Thankfully, we have a solution for where to park our money and where to gain autonomy over our capital—Bitcoin. I feel like this is something that George Washington would’ve definitely been a fan of, as the ethos and principles of Bitcoin are all about self-autonomy, freedom, and truth.

Cattle Is Capital

I recently visited the Amish in Lancaster to purchase a half cow. What’s interesting about the word “capital” is its root being caput, meaning “head of cattle.” In ancient times, cattle was one of the first forms of capital, and people would trade their animals and exchange them for land or various goods. When I visited the Amish, I’m always so intrigued by the way they use horses and buggies to this day. Now we have self-driving Cybertrucks, artificial intelligence, and robots. With all these technological advancements comes the ability for us to cryptographically engineer perfect money.

However, the bartering system is still used in those villages I was living in, in Zambia. Some people would trade his ducks in return for rice and vice versa. My funny idea is, trading United States dollars, paper fiat currency, for cattle or meat is the best trade possible in terms of acquiring physical goods from the exchange of money.

From the bartering system, we transitioned to having physical materials like gold and silver forged into coins that kingdoms used to circulate throughout their kingdoms. However, if the king diluted their gold coins with copper to enrich himself, the rest of the people in the kingdom became slaves within an inflated money supply, and the value of the coin depreciated and diluted from the mixing of copper with gold. It’s so obvious to me that this is occurring in the current system we have in place in the United States, where the rich become richer and the poor become poorer due to the broken nature of our money. Once I realized how broken the system is, I became more skeptical of why I’m spending money, and frankly, just basically stopped spending money altogether.

Why Spend Money?

Of course, you need a home, a place to live, but let’s say that you have one or rent somewhere, and you don’t have to worry about the simple need for shelter. Once you have shelter, food is the next thing to secure, as that’s the base level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—food and shelter. Personally, I find that food and shelter are the only things worth spending money on. Once you have your clothes, camera, computer, iPhone, some coffee, meat, and salt, nothing else is really desirable to spend your money on.

It seems like a lot of people spend money on very foolish things like going to concerts, festivals, beer, alcohol, drugs, and all this hedonistic stuff. To me, this is a product of a weak currency, where fiat promotes immediate spending without a care for the future. I mean, honestly, if the dollar is just depreciating in value over time, you might as well spend it now while you can? We voluntarily poison ourselves with drugs and alcohol and cigarettes and very poor food that is essentially poison, to please ourselves now, instead of increasing our energy and storing it for the future.

So then, what do you do with your money? If I want to save money, I can, of course, have a 401(k), Roth IRA, invest in stocks, or even real estate, but I personally believe that these are all subpar forms of investments once you learn the power of Bitcoin. I feel like if you want to start to play the stock market, it becomes this full-time job, or you have to do extra work, just to store the work that you put in for physical labor. It honestly makes no sense, and it shouldn’t be this way, but Bitcoin solves this very fundamental issue of where to store your time and energy. To me, that’s what Bitcoin is—a place to store your time and energy, so that you can access it in the future and not have a diluted value.

It seems like the best use of money, once you have everything else that you need, is on home gym equipment and a deep freezer. This way, you can continue to build muscle and strength, increasing your vitality each and every day, while storing energy, real capital—or cattle—meat, in a war chest, or a deep freezer.

Fat Is Energy

Since adopting a 100% carnivore diet, eating red meat is satiating my body to the point where I don’t need to eat breakfast or lunch and can go throughout the day with only one meal at night. The fat and the protein that I consume fuel me with vitality and energy to carry out each day. I feel like our body is a battery, and the fat on our bodies is what stores this energy. What’s interesting is, if you actually have a lot of fat on your body, you can fast for an extended period of time because your body will eat itself, shedding the fat from your body. The lower your body fat percentage, the more difficult it is to fast for extended periods of time, and so by eating red meat, we consume the amount of fat and protein that our body truly needs.

Every BODY Is Different?

Maybe everybody is different after all? When I consider certain diseases, like thalassemia, which affects the blood with high iron levels, these people cannot consume too much red meat, as it may kill them. I think it’s important that we align with ourselves, from within, and align with our nature.

Grip Strength

The other day, I decided to hang from my pull-up bar as a test for my grip strength. I decompressed my spine and stretched my body out, holding on for dear life for as long as humanly possible on the pull-up bar. I didn’t really think much of it—just a simple hang—but the next day, I realized that my index finger was strained, and my lower back was in pain. I feel like I accidentally put myself out of alignment. When I think about it, when in nature are humans hanging from anything? Monkeys are the animals that are swinging from trees and hanging on things, not humans. Maybe it was foolish for me to hang from the bar like this for so long, as it ultimately caused me pain, and now I feel my lower back, the bottom of my spine, and the way it affects both my body and my mind.

For instance, when your body is out of tune, not only does it affect you physically through pain, but it can also affect your sleep, because of the way it feels when you lay on your back. It can even give you more anxiety, or a higher temper, or make you more easily frustrated and angry. When I consider the nervous system and its connection to the spine, this makes total sense to me, and it’s why I love to do yoga every morning and evening. I find that when I do yoga—just some simple stretches—I set my body, my temple, in order before I start the day. Through the little movements and stretches, you can fine-tune your body and bring it back into alignment.

Be Hot and Cold

I recently finished reading The Iliad, and I’m currently reading The Odyssey. I enjoy the story of Achilles at the battle of Troy. I find that he’s a good legend, with a great myth, to be inspired by as a man. His rage was something that ultimately led to his downfall, due to the death of his best friend, Patroclus. This rage inside him caused him to go without eating and drinking anything until he killed Hector, who was responsible for the death of his best friend. Maybe we should live like this every single day—fasted until we kill our prey (accomplish our goals) and feast on meat in the evening, similar to the hecatomb they sacrificed to the gods during the funeral rites of Hector.

Achilles was a very paradoxical character. He lived from his passion, with feelings of pain, anger, and grief. But he was also cold. For instance, when he withdrew from battle, he did so without a care for the suffering the Greeks endured without him on the field. He was merciless with the way he treated Hector’s body after he killed him, tying him to the back of his carriage and riding his corpse around on horseback in front of the walls of Troy. He knew that his inevitable fate was death, and he accepted this as a part of life, as he wanted to do anything in his power to avenge the life of his best friend.

Optimistic for the Future

While it may seem a bit nihilistic to have that perspective of Achilles and accepting death and whatnot, I think we should still remain joyful and optimistic about the future, despite the current state of things. Ultimately, a lot of life is out of our control, but what we do have control over is our minds and our bodies. Don’t let anybody tell you what to eat, what to think, or how to live your life. Reclaiming autonomy over your thoughts and over your body itself provides freedom. This feeling of freedom is ultimately my aim and why I believe Bitcoin, by separating money from the state, will provide this for our future.

Disconnect From Worldly Success

For me, success looks like a very simple thing. Success is walking all day, standing upright, getting good sleep, and being eager for the next day. Success is having a relationship with direct relationship God, a free schedule, working on my art, fitness, and focusing on vitality and health. For me, success has nothing to do with this material world but has everything to do with the mind, body, and spirit. I’d rather be poor and wise than rich and a fool. Going forward, success looks like owning less but experiencing more. My goal is to continue traveling, to continue producing photos, and to simply enjoy my everyday life.