I call this section Paradigm Shift because you must begin to make that kind of change, or there won’t be any change. And that is what you want. To be a better version of yourself means that you will be different. Right now that doesn’t make sense, or is repellant, but regard the following material and you will see. Let’s begin with a thought experiment
Consider...
How could your iPhone have value or meaning? It is brilliant computationally, with its use of logic, AI, and all things linguistic. But it can't feel. Nowhere deep inside it, is their Meaning or Value. Your iPhone is a brilliant Nihilism Machine. If it lasted a thousand years, used by a hundred people, all their joys, suffering, lives, and death, would have no effect on it, if it had a decent cover. In our modern Cyberpunk world our thought-language is as inappropriate as AI or your cell phone for comprehending life. The proof of this is in how many kill themselves.The suicides don’t know who they are or why they are here. They live in a world of nihilism. They look about themselves for cues on how to behave, what to think, and find others looking back at them with the same question in their eyes.
This is from the NY Times:
“There is some kind of hard to define spiritual crisis across the land, which shows up in rising depression rates, rising mental health problems. A survey the Pew Research Center released last year captures the mood. Pew asked people to describe the things that bring meaning to their lives. A shocking number of respondents described lives of quiet despair.
“I no longer find much of anything meaning, fulfilling or satisfying. Whatever used to keep me going has gone.”
From an old Wall Street Journal;
Science, technology, the free market and the liberal democratic state have enabled us to reach unprecedented achievements in knowledge, freedom, life expectancy and affluence.
But they do not answer the three questions that every reflective individual will ask at some time in his or her life: Who am I? Why am I here? How then shall I live? The result is that the 21st century has left us with a maximum of choice and a minimum of meaning.
And so we have the 1eye Life System. It will make you autonomous. You will craft your own identity that will be rock solid and shaft deep. You will know who you are, where you are going, and how to get there -always. You will be proof against the braying of the mob, and will have the guts and strength to stand alone when that is needed in contrast to the large number of healthy people, who have accomplished all that society esteems and the self-help gurus promise, who commit suicide. Go ahead and check this out. There are those who are handsome, drop-dead gorgeous, and with plenty of money. And yet they hang themselves. I believe that had they all been practicing the 1eye Life System, fewer of them would have done so.
We will start with Value and Identity:
Value:
It's not what you have, but what you are that counts.I want you to feel the power of this value now. It frees you from the opinion of others, and relieves you of striving for trinkets and promotions. It releases all that wasted energy to use for change and growth. By itself this value, once made a deep part of you, will take you far toward your ideal version.
But for now you are trapped in a movie you didn’t write, and chained by a role you didn’t choose. It is part of the 1eye Life-System to realize this, and create your own character to be the hero of the narrative you create.
identity
You are trapped by a story you didn't write, and chained by an identity you didn't choose. It is part of the 1eye Life-System to realize this, and create your own character to be the hero of the narrative you create. And the first thing we will do is give you an identity to begin with.
Consider actors, they are not the part they play, but that is how you know them. If the camera pulled back to show the entire set, it would be a shock, and would ruin the movie. The pain or joy you were feeling moments before would be gone, perhaps replaced with a clinical interest in the creation of a movie. And that actor would never be the same for you either. I want you to do that with your movie. And if your script called for suicide, when you pulled back, that would be gone, and you would be just your new Identity.
ronin
We will call this new identity Ronin. Originally a rōnin was an unemployed samurai "drifter" or "wanderer" without a lord or master in feudal Japan. They lived in poverty without status, like bums. Their dream was to be offered vassalage to some lord. But not the Ronin of the 1eye Life-System. Since our Ronin cares for what he is, and not what he has, low status is meaningless to him. Our Ronin has purposely chosen to live a pilgrimage of excellence. My hero for Ronin is Miyamoto Musashi. When offered vassalage he turned it down.He is most famous for being a great swordsman, and writing the renown Book of Five Rings. But in his time, as he walked his Musha Shugyō, he was a sculptor, poet, fine artist, as well as a landscaper and construction supervisor, but never a vassal. So while he played many parts, he was always his own man.
This is the type of identity you must choose for yourself. Not as a weapons master, but as someone who cares little or nothing for extrinsic rewards. They might be matters of strategy, but never identity and self-worth. Thus you become autonomous. You might play many roles, but inside you are Ronin, and your “wealth,” is what you are, not what you have.
It is a paradigm shift to value what you are over what you have, and to consider yourself a free agent. These are basic to the system, but so far it’s all just words. Before we really get into it, let’s consider some of the basics.