Leave the country or stay? There was a time period where my friends and I were getting invited to these new exciting community projects in the Central America and Asia and Europe. Crypto millionaires and retired billionaires trying to bootstrap whole new civilizations and villages and large retreat centers.
Yet, all of us felt a certain affinity and even responsibility to stay in the States.
Which is a little strange considering probably all of our families also have immigrated here at some point.
How does one assess whether to establish a new home abroad and call it quits on the homeland? Or stick it out and try to make it work?
It reminds me of the dilemma that's often posed around do you try to reform an institute as a player within or do you go off and establish a brand new thing? Does staying in the current system doomed to be corrupted and compromised? Or is going off naive and doomed to failure as a retreat from life?
As I'm writing this, I could see the same dilemma in deciding whether to stay working for a corp or start your own business. Or stay in a currently challenging relationship or call it quits to find a new partner. Or even try to be a lay person in the world or go off to be a monk in the mountains.
I suppose the answer is ultimately context is what matters most.
And I've yet to see a really compelling abroad experiment that seemed actually integrated or likely to deliver on the promises.
I, myself, have been increasingly interested in building out more of the physical and social infrastructure locally to create the new type of village community in AVL. But, those billionaire communities or even rural Portugal tiny communities do tempt me at times.
"You know, there are 13 ways of doing anything. 11 of them will work. Just pick one and do it.”. Dennis Hightower, who at the time was head of Disney International.
https://www.nfx.com/post/9-habits-world-class-startupsHe asked me why I wasn’t doing something, and I responded by explaining the pros and cons of two different ways of doing it. Thoughtfully, he replied “You know, there are 13 ways of doing anything. 11 of them will work. Just pick one and do it.”
The best Founders avoid over-analyzing. At a startup, you don’t have time — and the result will most likely be marginal. Pick a way and do it. Be consistently decisive.
On Aspiration. In a recent Relateful Flow session, I said that I was aspiring toward something and that, to me, aspiration is an active principle. My comment was met with strong disagreement from a person who said that aspiration is passive and only concrete action of a physical kind, actually "doing" something, is active. I was a bit shocked and then realized that I might be in the minority on this subject. To me, "aspiring" is actively signaling Life/God that I am now ready and willing to receive the thing I have been saying I wanted. It is an energetic "yes"! Other more physically tangible actions may follow, but aspiration is first , especially in things which have always seemed to be beyond my grasp.
However, I understand what the person was pointing to. There is a world where action is physical; aspiring may be useful in some way, but it is a passive practice.
Would love others' thoughts and experience with this.
"Why did our friends stop posting on social media? | BBC Global". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN4MNdCAnWA <-- the first 30 seconds speaks directly to why we think UpTrust is desirable for individuals.
#whyUpTrust
Musings: The World Is Overstilumated. I'm reflecting on my experience this summer spending 3 days in the dark. I was in Tangier, Morocco, in an apartment, and I had those garage door window shutters that would keep the entire apartment completely pitch black even in the middle of the day. I chose to spend 3 days in the darkness. Mostly sitting on the couch staring into darkness.
I wasn't aware of this experience having much impact until I started having phone calls with people from the darkness. I could hear everything in the silence. Beyond someone's voice, I could hear the Soul speaking. I'm pretty convinced we can communicate in Silence, and I love words.
I've been wondering about how overstimulated the world is. In this moment I'm watching the woman across the table from me scroll through her phone, going from Instagram to Spotify to texting to checking out concert tickets this weekend. Starting sentences and starting new ones mid sentence. I'm in love with how incongruent and disoriented we can appear as humans.
I wonder what it would be like for the world to take a day off from stimulus: food, cell phone, entertainment devices, etc. What if we had a collective pause? Sunlight, water, fresh air. Our collective nervous system could use a Parasympathetic Pause. I like this as an Emerging Probability and Planetary Potential. Feels like part of the emerging meta-model and protocol for The Wellbeing of Humanity.
American aristocracy could learn some things from the old world. A big American founding myth is that we eliminated the aristocracy from our government, but the real American innovation is making it much easier to join the aristocracy starting as an outsider.
Sure, great. A little closer to meritocracy, one hopes.
But governance is complex enough that you’d ideally want to be trained from birth to do it. Programs of similar intensity to olympic training, for example.
That was a potential upside of the previous method. You had a limited set of preselected kids who were almost certainly going to rule one day, so you could put them through the training to do so. It often worked pretty well.
Now anyone who is good at twitter can ostensibly rule without knowing anything about how to do it.
Remember Boaty McBoatface? Our current timeline is the spiritual equivalent of running an internet poll to determine who is in charge of a nuclear reactor. Except orders of magnitudes more reckless and dangerous than that.
We need a better synthesis.
#DeepTakes
Anyone drinking molecular hydrogen rich water? A friend of mine bought a water bottle that turns regular water into hydrogen rich water. She’s been drinking this water for several months and swears by it. She says she has more energy, recovers easily from physical exercise, and her senses are heightened.
The water bottle is distributed by a MLM. I thought it was a new thing. But I researched and was surprised to see how popular molecular hydrogen rich water is.
I’ll usually an early adopter of stuff like this but I’m hesitant because the long-term effects are not known.
Is there anyone drinking this stuff? What has your experience been?