🏍️Creating Life Alchemy🏍️
🔥Welcome to volume #00054!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey.
🏍️Creating Life Alchemy 🏍️
Hopping up onto my 50cc yellow Yamaha motorcycle with my yellow helmet, I felt ready. There was anticipation flowing through my veins. The lights of the track made me feel as if I was in the center of the action. The butterflies pulsed in my stomach as the excitement coupled with pre-race jitters built. It tasted like the oh-so-good yet bitter smoothy.
As a 6-year-old, I experienced the world blending into oneness when racing motorcycles. When the checkered flag dropped, the me I knew fell into the background. I became my bike, the dirt on the course, and the rider, all at the same time. As I hammered the throttle of my bike, the bike's noise became my noise. My bike, the crowd, the lights, and the dirt jumps all flowed together.
Life Alchemy takes one thing and mergers into everything. It weaves us together into the fabric of the universe, creating an all-encompassing quilt. We become the moment, and the moment becomes us. The merging creates fireworks going off inside and outside of us.
We create oneness with Life Alchemy. We find our peak states and merge with the universe.
The borders and boundaries between us, things, and the others get ripped apart. We are no longer on the map; we become the map. We don't see the sun; we become the sun.
We get caught in the slipstream of the activity, becoming the water in a lake. We transcend beyond ourselves. We experience this when we lose ourselves in our work or a conversation with friends. We get pulled into the flow, merging into the waterfall of the now. Like reading a great book, and becoming the book.
When we engage with life by letting ourselves flow, we create Life Alchemy.
📓Articles to Read📓
The End of the Industrial Society by Samo Burja
Samo writes about when the marketers took over and first principles got left in the dust along with what might happen next.
By the early 20th century, the United States had perfected an advanced social technology that ultimately gave it a second important advantage over the Soviets: marketing. Originally developed to help missionary efforts, it can quickly adapt and train consumers in how to use new products, technologies, and lifestyles. The great 20th-century architects of life and desire built a whole replacement culture and provided just-in-time replacements for gaps that the typical institutionalized factory worker experienced throughout the course of their life. For a time, life was good, as shown by the post-war baby boom. Optimistic American thinkers believed they had found a way to make an industrial society technologically dynamic, yet politically stable and socially sustainable.
The marketers were eventually replaced by people who grew up on marketing. Beware, social engineer, of obsoleting your own origins! Yet, they did so in field after field. Not only marketers, but scientists, statesmen, industrialists, politicians, philosophers, and writers shaped ersatz social technology to fill the gaps, but completely failed to guarantee knowledge succession of the generative core of knowledge. The strange spiritual practices, scientific exploration of human psychology, and at times outright ideological cults of the founding cohort gave way to a more shallow type of knowledge. This was a knowledge of levers and buttons, rather than the first principles which built those levers and buttons.
Anne Helen Peterson breaks down how she puts together a 5,000 word rough draft
The draft I eventually turned in, 4500 words later, was an unruly octopus. I admitted as much to my editor, Julia Rubin, who helped turn it into something far more ruly and coherent. But I also think the state of that first draft speaks to just how conceptually layered the problem is, and how much we should admire the people who’ve made it their work to understand it and try to advocate for the change in the field, even when the most common response to this sort of work is still “but where does the money go??” I spent a month trying to wrap my head around all of this, and I am still learning so much — and I was only able to synthesize what I did because of the patience and deep knowledge of the various people who agreed to teach me, in some way, what they understood.
And a lot of that knowledge didn’t make its way into the final piece. I probably spent 30+ hours interviewing people; each interview comes in between 1000 and 3000 words; would you like to read 90,000 words with your morning coffee? This is how writing and reporting works: you ask questions and more questions and repeat previous questions, and then you try to braid all the answers to those questions together in a way that makes sense. The braiding process is not and can never be “neutral,” because lives are not neutral, and interviews are not neutral, and the questions you ask during them aren’t neutral, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is telling themselves and you a lie. But it’s also not just me deciding on a narrative ahead of time and trying to find people and quotes and stats to support it.
Interesting Standford study on parenting and parental involvement by Dr. Jelena Obradovic
Retiterarting that parents need to let kids lead and know when to step in. When the kids are focused, leave them alone. When they lose focus or start wonder off, we can step in and help provide ideas and focus.
For their analysis, Obradović and her collaborators created a measure of what they call “parental over-engagement.” They noted the moments when a child was working independently or leading an activity, and they calculated the ratio between times when parents intervened in ways that were meant to be helpful (not harsh or manipulative) and times when parents followed the child’s lead.
The researchers found a correlation between high levels of parent involvement when a child is focused on a task and children’s difficulties with self-regulation and other behaviors. This was most apparent for children’s “hot” executive functions.
When a child was passively engaged, the researchers didn’t find any link between parental over-engagement and children’s self-regulation. According to Obradović, this suggests that there is no harm in parents stepping in when children are not actively on task.
Obradović said the point of the study is not to criticize parents. “When we talk about parental over-engagement, we’re not saying it’s bad or obviously intrusive engagement,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with suggesting ideas or giving tips to children.”
How Delusion Can Be Helpful by Steve Inskeep interviewing Shankar Vedantam (host of the wonderful Hidden Brain podcast)
On deluding oneself when faced with serious illness
There are lots of examples in the realm of health that suggest that accurately perceiving our limitations, disabilities and shortcomings might not actually be functional for us. In fact, there has been a body of research over the last 20 or 30 years that has made the argument that mental health involves seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses, that when we see the world accurately, completely for what it is, we might in some ways be less functional than when we look at the world optimistically. This is absolutely the case when it comes to people who have serious illnesses when it comes to diseases. But it's also the case for all of us right now, even when we don't have diseases. When you think about the pandemic ... a lot of us have indulged in fantasies and daydreams that have allowed us to get through the horror of the past year.
🎙️ Ideas from Podcasts/Videos 📺
Ryan Hall: Soliving Martial Arts from First Principles on the Lex Fridman Podcast (Spotify)
How to White Belt - Skill is showing you are compassionate, curious and passionate person vs. just being an annoying dick. Ask why is it done this way and then ask why again while walking that fine line
Ryan asks why do I need to master that? How does it work with my body type? Digging into the fundamental basics and feeling if they work for you. What does your body tell you?
Say yes sir and be gracious
You can’t teach someone anything, they only can find it within themselves. For Ryan that involves a lot of thinking and knowing he can’t control anyone but himself
Know what’s in your control… controlling the breath, your posture, your emotions (you can always be calm), when you are concerned or unconcerned , and giving it your all. Always master those
All the things you can control you can do better and practice them
Ask, why does this work? Then ask what else can we do here?
Have a system and a process
The Darkside of the Movement Profession featuring Zac Cupples and Tim Richardt
Tight rope balance between not like how things are and enjoying what you have…holding those opposing ideas
Thinks in energy mangement and time management - you need to do both and learning as much as you can in the right moments
Know when people are around you and sucking up your energy - time for a new environment
Trainer and PT takes complex things and makes them simple for people that might not have time to get to that level of understanding
Cross fit gyms get people who haven’t been intense, to do intense things that are good for you like deadlifts and snatchs
Getting fired from the NBA (Grizziles) was the biggest learning moment for Zac which lead to a lot of soul searching and growth
Movement variety is key and we are always in anterior pelvic tilt b/c we are fighting gravity
Put people in positions the nervous systems like and the nervous system will remember that position
Communication is key. Always work on improving your communication to relate and connection with people
Widening our view of what is possible
Drawing pictures and stories of what is possible
Look back farther and forward farther
The Future of Storytelling by Asmara Marek (Youtube)
Story Telling needs to be inclusive, high tech, and empathetic
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow (Goodreads)
A great fiction read perfect for any spring break or summer trips. Her writing pulls you in and keeps you enthralled throughout.
I've always hated it in books when a character freezes in fear. Wake up! I want to shout at them. Do something! Remembering myself standing there with my canvas bag hanging stu-pidly over my shoulder, my fingers gone slack on Bad's collar, want to shout at myself: Do something!
Words and their meanings have weight in the world of matter, shaping and reshaping realities through a most ancient alchemy
I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.
The Ultimate Colin Wilson by Colin Wilson and Colin Stanley (Goodreads)
This includes a compilation of works by Colin Wilson. It introduces many of his concepts like Facility X (when we can focus so intently to)
that human beings experience a range of mental states which is as narrow as the middle three notes of a piano keyboard. I believe that the possible range of mental states is as wide as the whole piano keyboard, and that man’s sole aim and business is to extend his range from the usual three
Boredom, I knew, meant not having enough to do with one’s life energies. The answer to it, quite simply, lies in extending the range of the consciousness: setting emotions circulating, and setting the intellect working, until new areas of consciousness are brought to life in the way that the blood starts flowing again through a leg which has gone numb.
Boredom cripples the will. Meaning stimulates it. The peak experience is a sudden surge of meaning. The question that arises now is: how can I choose meaning?
Peak experiences are in direct proportion to the intensity of the will.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
What Great Storytellers Know - Bernadette Jiwa
They want to develop the untapped skills they can use every day to influence and inspire the people they love or lead, parent or serve.
The Lost Art of Good Conversations - Sakyong Mipham
Often we are so wrapped up in our own emotions that we’re unable to feel others’ state of being
Meaningful - Bernadette Jiwa
It’s easy to believe that ‘meaningful’ applies only to the businesses in what some people might call the ‘do-good’ sector of non-profits, sustainability and so on. But every one of us, from a software designer to a cab driver, is in the meaning business. Without meaning, products and services are just commodities and nobody wants to be in the commodities business.
Tempo - Venkatesh Rao
Whatever your self-archetype, it is the construct through which your sense of self inexorably gathers momentum through life.
Born Standing Up - Steve Martin
Another rule was to make the audience believe that I thought I was fantastic, that my confidence could not be shattered. They had to believe that I didn’t care if they laughed at all, and that this act was going on with or without them.
Edge Master Class on Superforecasting - Danny Hillis
Hillis: But it's also presumably true that making correct predictions is only part of what the intelligence community is there for. It's also there for coming up with stories that support whatever the decision is. Tetlock: Yes, storytelling is indeed arguably the basis on which analysts are ultimately promoted or stay stagnant.
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big - Scott Adams
My first inkling that conversation was a learnable skill, and that the benefits of conversation were larger than I imagined, happened while I was taking the Dale Carnegie course I mentioned earlier. The focus of the class was on public speaking, but we also learned techniques for making conversation with strangers, such as one might in a party or business situation. The technique is laughably simple and 100 percent effective. All you do is introduce yourself and ask questions until you find a point of mutual interest.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
How can you create more Life Alchemy?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
