Mindset

These four words will stop you from living up to your full potential. What are they? Find out in the latest Cernovich Podcast.

Several high consciousness people I’ve spoken to independently told me they felt a shift in energy. Something is going on. This feeling happened 2-3 weeks ago, and it wasn’t about politics or elections. The feeling is much bigger. There has been an energy shift.

Whenever you talk about Energy, haters appear. “It’s woo-woo,” but this only shows they are morons. You see Energy measured every day, though it’s wrapped up in terms like consumer confidence, inflation, and bubbles.

Keynes called this Energy the “animal spirits,” or animating force of human behavior. We all know Energy when we see it.

On a personal level, we all know the experience of having a person suck out the energy of a room. There are people who seem to suck away energy with every interaction, and we call them emotional vampires.

Mass movements don’t come from out of nowhere. They only seem that way, as most people don’t notice the Energy propelling human behavior until some event has happened. (November 8, 2016 was one example.)

There’s always some force behind mass movements, and these forces are largely invisible. My work and study is devoted to finding and channelling this Energy.

The Act in the movie we are living in is changing.

“The movie is getting dark,” is how one friend described what we’re feeling. Dark doesn’t mean evil or bad. It mean a transition to something new.

Scott Adams, when asked about the change in Energy said, “I feel it too.”

Adams explained that,

You have a country that is off-balance because we moved from a place where facts rule the world to where facts do not rule our world. We live in a non-factual, mostly-subjective world…

Once you start realizing how much of an illusion we are all living in, you can start to deal with your reality with a better understanding of it.

We’re entering a period where our biggest problems are simply psychology, simply the way we recognize our reality and the way we deal with it.

If we can just figure out how to be friends and how to work together in a positive way, we have an opportunity within the next 100 years to be something so special that it’s almost indescribable….We’re on the cusp of this, but we’re not there.

Why do we feel something “all at once.”

Although we must think of ourselves as individuals in order to survive, it’s more accurate to describe ourselves as being part of a “hive mind” or what Howard Bloom calls the global brain. We are nodes in a social brain:

A complex adaptive system is a learning machine, one made up of semi-independent modules which work together to solve a problem. Some complex adaptive systems, like rain forests, are biological. Others, like human economies, are social.

We are constantly learning and adapting, and social media is accelerating humanity’s shift.

Have you felt the energy shift?

What do you feel is going on?

P.S. If you like this article, read Gorilla Mindset.

Shauna and I agreed that a traditional hospital birth with drugs wasn’t right for us. It wasn’t about doctors, who are great, and it wasn’t about judging pain killers, which some need. We tend to live an unconventional life, and a natural child birth without pain killers fit with our lifestyle. Shauna also wanted to have an active role in her pregnancy and natural birth with a midwife allowed that.

We weren’t ready for a home birth and thus decided to have our daughter in a midwifery. We started our research by watching The Business of Being Born, a documentary about child birth.

We formulated a game plan. Rather than have a traditional child birth, Shauna would give birth:

• Using self-hypnosis (she took a Hynobabies course) rather than pain killers,
• Have a doula (a natural birth mindset coach),
• With me in the room the entire time.

Now when you tell people you’re going to have a natural child birth, the first reaction from others is concern or hate. AREN’T YOU WORRIED YOUR BABY IS GOING TO DIE?! People tend to get angry when you make choices they didn’t make, it’s as if they view your choices are somehow being a judgment on theirs.

Midwifery is far different from the stereotypes:

Midwifery, as known as obstetrics, is a health science and health profession that deals with pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period (including care of the newborn), besides sexual and reproductive health of women throughout their lives. In many countries, midwifery is a medical profession. A professional in midwifery is known as a midwife.

Everyone has a “horror story” about a midwife, and most of those are fake. What about hospital horror stories? Confirmation bias for the dominant narrative (hospitals are good and midwives and doulas are for hippies) means you’ll only hear about problems during birth that happen at midwiferies rather than at hospitals.

The midwifery has a full staff of nurses and mid-wives. They all have education and experience. There is also a hospital nearby for emergencies. According to our midwifery, fewer than 3% of women need to leave for a doctor’s office. Also, midwives and the nurses are experts in delivering babies. They are present the whole time unlike many OBGYN’s who come in right when the mom is ready to push the baby out.

Our midwifery only selects women with low-risk pregnancies. You’re required to undergo extensive childhood education.

Doulas.

A doula is a birthing coach, and the right doula is a game-changer.

A doula (/ˈduːlə/), also known as a birth companion and post-birth supporter, is a nonmedical person who assists a person before, during, and/or after childbirth, as well as her spouse and/or family, by providing physical assistance and emotional support. The provision of continuous support during labour is associated with improved maternal and fetal health and a variety of other benefits, including lower risk of induction and interventions and less need for pain relief.

Shauna’s contractions began increasing in intensity around 2:30 p.m.

Our doula arrived to our home at 3:30p.m., she began coaching Shauna through the process.

Shauna’s doula was also her self-hypnosis coach, as Shauna and I went through the Hypnobabies course together.  

We arrived at the midwifery at 6:02 p.m. There wasn’t any drama or freak-outs, which is unusual if you’ve ever seen a movie depicting birth. Americans tend to make child birth, a highly natural process, like a medical emergency.

We got settled in. It was low-key at first. When the midwife did her cervical check Shauna was 7cm dilated.

Once it was go-time, I stayed in the delivery room (which as you can see above is a bedroom) with Shauna and used mindset coaching during the delivery. We had developed some mantras and Gorilla Mindset framing techniques to guide her through the pain.

One technique we developed together was to imagine what she’d say to Cyra when she was born. When in “discomfort” (Hynobabies teaches you to change language patterns, so rather than saying “pain” we use “discomfort”), we’d change Shauna’s focus. “Imagine Cyra is on your chest. What are you going to say to Cyra when you see her?” During the transition phase of her labor when her contractions were really strong and intense I kept saying “You can do anything for 1 minute.”

Shauna rocked it.

Our first child, Crya, was born at 8:38 p.m., weighing in at 6 pounds and 11 ounces. It was a smooth delivery process at a midwifery assisted by a doula. Shauna did not take any pain medication. Cyra arrived with eyes wide open, looking alert.

While I am not here to sell anyone on midwifery, my experience with the process of delivery was another reminder that most of what we know (or think we know) is a lie.

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Gorilla Mindset: Epilogue.

Mindset is Status: Freeing Yourself from the Status Slavery

If you understand social status and status signaling, you understand everything about humans and the human condition. Understanding social status will help you make more money, save more money, and live a life of freedom.

Status is everywhere. It’s inescapable.

Even if you don’t care about social status (you most certainly do), social status cares about you.

Your social status is your position on the hierarchy of humans.

Your social status is constantly in flux and changes based on social circumstances. There are many CEOs who are alpha males at work who go home to a life of being a beta.

• Gorilla Mindset shift: Most of the powerful men you admire live in fear of their wives. When you feel intimidated by a powerful man, smile to yourself knowing his life is one of quiet desperation.

Status signals are behaviors you engage in, consciously or unconsciously, that shows others your social status. When you walk upright with good posture, you’re signaling to the world you have status. When you shuffle your feet and look down, you’re also signaling your status.

Status signals can be useful. If you are a lawyer, wearing a Rolex shows you are a successful lawyer. If people perceive you to be successful, they are more likely to hire you.

Yet our innate need for status can be hijacked, causing us to live lives of servitude to the system.

What is status? Status is a social construct. Status is what everyone else says is status.

Status varies by culture. In the U.S. youth is prized above all else. In hunter-gatherer cultures old age was valued, as age symbolized the possession of the will and wiles needed to survive our precarious and dangerous ancestral environment.

In the West, the following behaviors and attributes are associated with status:

• Youth
• Physical attractiveness
• High intelligence
• Proper manners
• A large vocabulary
• Winning
• Exclusivity
• Home ownership
• Cool cars
• Hot girlfriend or wife
• Successful husband
• Dominant body language
• Money
• Home ownership
• A large group of friends
• Name-brand logos
• Designer jeans
• American Express Black Card
• Business class travel
• Private jets
• College education

The pursuit of status is the root of all unhappiness

Do you feel insecure for lacking a college education? Why? Most college graduates are idiots. Finishing a new Great Course from the Teaching Company once a month would give you a better education after 4 years than possessed by even a Harvard graduate. (See what I did there? Harvard is status.)

Arguing is status.

Why do you care if people believe you? I see people scream at each other, and that was even how I used to behave. Who cares?

We care because winning an argument increases our status. But what is our prize for winning? Usually nothing.

Expecting people to prove something to you is a status play. You seek to impose your ego on others and have others validate your intelligence.

Who are you to demand anyone prove anything to do?

Spending money is status.

Logos are status.

Because I am not “plugged in” to the status associated with logos, I feel nothing. Yet someone who is still plugged into the status game feels weird.

Do you see how status is slavery?

Not all status is bad, and there’s a human need for status.

Friends are nice to have. If you have high status, you’ll have more friends. (Yet many of those “friends” only associate with you to boost their own status. Status is a double-edged sword.)

Status gives you access. Access opens doors. The rich really do get richer. Making a million dollars is harder than making 10 million dollars from one million.

Most Venture Capital funds are wrong 99% of the time. You can be wrong 99% of the time and look like a genius if you 1000x your investment. Only rich people can afford to play this game.

Status hijacks your brain.

Status makes you a slave to the opinions of others. You see this in journalism. So-called conservative journalists claim to have principles, but ultimately they want to be accepted within the dominant social hierarchies, which are controlled by the left.

Cocktail parties are status. Read Bonfire of the Vanities or talk to some New Yorkers. These people are obsessed by being known by the “right people,” even when knowing the right people will not lead to a direct life benefit – and in some cases impressing the right people makes you broke keeping up with the Jones.

I’m reading a book about Americans in Paris. Being accepted by Parisians is a huge deal to these Americans – who largely come from New York. Why? Because Paris and Parisians are status.

Why are they high status? Because everyone else has taught you to believe that.

Do you see the dangers of status?
Status is slavery.

Most anger results from a feeling others have not respected your status.

When you say you are not being treated like you deserve to be treated, this is due to your unconscious belief you are high status. Often this belief is delusional and based on imaginary unearned status.

Moreover, status is contextual. If you’re seen as being low status, it’s likely because – in that situation – you are.

Who cares?

• Gorilla Mindset shift: No one owes you respect.

When you stop caring about social status, you are truly free.

Again, status is neither good nor evil. Yet for most of us the pursuit of status leads to unhappiness, insecurity, and even financial ruin.

Be conscious of your desire for status. Perform the Gorilla Focus exercise: Ask yourself in the present moment whether your drive for status is brining you closer to your vision.

Make status work for you.

Gorilla Mindset Status Habits

Never buy status (unless your purchase will have a positive ROI).

Beats by Dre are inferior headphones and are a status purchase. Name-brand clothing (especially with visible logos) are status purchases.

Surrender your lust for status. When you are upset with how you are being treated, ask why. You likely are upset that your status (real or imagined) was not recognized.

Remind yourself in the present moment that a desire for respect is a desire for social status, and that no one has to recognize your status.

The Status Worksheet
Answer These Questions to Become Free from Shame and Status

Am I sending off status signals? If so, to whom?

(You are sending off status signals every day. If you can’t list these behaviors, then you live a completely unconscious life of slavery.)

Write down three people you have recently tried to impress: ____________, ______________, _______________.

Why do I want these people to like me? Is it because they are virtuous men or women, or is it because I’ve been conned into believing their opinions matter?

List three positive results that will occur if you impress the people you want to impress: _____________, _____________________, ______________________.

• Gorilla Mindset shift: You may need to kiss ass or hobnob with the right people to get what you want. Status is neither good nor evil. We must instead consciously understand why we are seeking status by asking ourselves whether attaining status will truly meet our deep human needs.

Will this purchase lead to a direct and measurable increase in my desired outcome? What do I desire out of life?

• Gorilla Mindset shift: Never pay for status unless you will have a positive return on investment.

Do I want to impress women who are impressed by status? What does her obsession with status do to our ability to live a nice life while saving and making money? Will she pressure me to work high-stress jobs to fund her desire for status?

Live life on your terms. Gorilla Mindset shows you how.

“I focus my intent on my fear,” I said repeatedly while preparing for my ayahuasca journey. Uncertainty and the loss of control are two of the biggest human fears. Whatever you think you know about reality will be upended.

“Why do this,” is a question I asked all week, and the rationalizations came readily. “So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature,” Benjamin Franklin observed, “since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” Or in our case, a mind not to do.

My self-talk became more apprehensive. “Your life is great, your book is great, every metric is up, your life can only get worse from here, don’t take any chances!”

And that’s why I had to travel to a remote farm in South Africa to meditate on fear. To focus my intent on my fear.

Because I could not surrender to my fear.

The fear of the thing is greater than the thing.

Great horror authors have observed that the fear of the thing is almost always greater than the thing.

The most terrifying moment in any horror story is when a noise is heard—a noise behind a closet door; a noise heard in an attic, or the basement; a noise heard in a thicket of bushes; a noise heard deep in a cave—and a person pursues the sound. We always want to yell out: Don’t go there. It’s that moment of suspense, the second before the bogeyman is revealed, that is the most gripping. After the door opens, after we shine a flashlight on whatever awaits, the audience might laugh or scream but ultimately they feel relief. Because whatever is provided by the author or filmmaker is never as bad as what we imagine ourselves.

Start with a small fear – the fear of a cold shower.

You step it. It’s not fun. It doesn’t feel good. Your breathing is shallow. Maybe you feel a small spike of adrenaline. You’re annoyed.

And then what happens?

You get your breathing under control, and it’s all fine. Whatever.

A terrifying experience transforms into – at worst – an annoying or unpleasant one.

Most of our fears are banal.

Pick up the telephone to make a sales call. Horrifying.

Salespeople earn the highest salaries of any worker because they face their fears.

Fear keeps you alive, and keeps you from living.

To fear is to be human. Without fear, we’d all be dead. Fear keeps us alive. That’s why it’s useful.

If you had to choose between boldness and timidity, the smart bet is on fear. Hide out. Do just enough to get by. That’s what most of your ancestors did. They laid low, kept their heads down, did enough to not be noticed too much, but noticed enough to breed.

You’ve been bred to fear.

Fear is embedded in our DNA. Every instinct tells us to give into our fears, to surrender to our fears.

No one needs to read a book about How to Be Afraid. That comes naturally.

Courage is a virtue.

Have you ever thought about what virtue means? We don’t talk much about virtue in modern society. We talk about how to have it all, how to indulge, how to get our way. We don’t talk much about how to live a life of virtue or moral excellence.

Virtue is human excellence, and virtue must be trained. 

A world full of cowards would implode. Most of us live the lives we do because others took tremendous risk.

A world full of cowards will be overtaken by the audacious and courageous. I’m not going to get political, other than say that if you look around, and ask the question, “Who wants it more,” it’s not hard to see where the geopolitical trends are.

Shame and Fear.

Have you ever asked yourself, “Why does shame work?” Think about that for a while. Why does shame alter your behavior?

The shame of being found out.

The shame of being judged.

The shame of not being enough.

Do you doubt that shame is powerful? Why do billionaires and A-list celebrities care what bloggers say about them? They do care.

Some of the most powerful people you’ve ever met – or read about – are terrified of shame.

Shame hurts.

Shame, Fear, and Laughter.

The next time you watch a group of powerful men or women in a film, think about how the scene was set.

How do you change the group dynamic?

Laughter.

Are people laughing at you, or with you?

Tony Soprano knew he had to kill Feech La Manna because of the absence of laughter.

https://youtu.be/PJq3mjARUgg

 

Shame is the ultimate slave emotion.

Shameless has a derogatory connotation. Why?

Shameless is freedom from the masters, freedom from the angry mobs, freedom from slavery.

Modern mind control is a form of slavery, and do you know who enforces this slavery?

It’s not the masters, it’s our fellow slaves. The media tells us what to think, they tell us who is evil, they tell us who to attack.

And we do it. Like good little slaves, we do what our media masters tell us. We fight each other.

And we are sanctimonious about it. We enjoy it.

When you start to live a shameless life, the anger won’t come from the masters – for they are not living under the Rules they’ve set for others. The anger will come from your fellow slaves.

Live Not By Fear (Lies).

“Live Not By Lies,” a powerful essay by gulag survivor and Nobel-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, could have been titled, Live Not By Fear:

Things have almost reached rock bottom. A universal spiritual death has already touched us all, and physical death will soon flare up and consume us both and our children—but as before we still smile in a cowardly way and mumble without tounges tied. But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength?

We have been so hopelessly dehumanized that for today’s modest ration of food we are willing to abandon all our principles, our souls, and all the efforts of our predecessors and all opportunities for our descendants—but just don’t disturb our fragile existence. We lack staunchness, pride and enthusiasm. We don’t even fear universal nuclear death, and we don’t fear a third world war. We have already taken refuge in the crevices. We just fear acts of civil courage.

Solzhenitsyn wrote his essay at the time people were being enslaved for their words, they were being enslaved for political speech.

In the West, most of our fears are personal.

The fear of sharing your art, because people might make fun of you.

The fear of trying a new skill, because people might say you look stupid.

The fear of sharing who you really are, because people might reject you.

The fear of the thing is greater than the thing.

When you try a new skill, you will be laughed at. Because they are afraid to admit that watching you face your fear reflects their own cowardice on them.

When you make a sales call, people will reject you. Because they are afraid of being ripped off or being sold a bad product.

When you’re an artist who evolves, people will call you a sellout. Because they will fear losing the connection they felt with you and your art.

When you’re a person who changes his life, friends will mock you for “getting into self-help.” Because they are afraid they won’t be enough for your new and improved self.

If is fear, When is facing the fear.

Read the above paragraph. Did you see the trick?

In my first draft, I wrote “If you try a new skill,” before realizing fear had crept into my own writing.

If is a fear word.

If I take this chance….

Eliminate if from your self-talk.

When I will….

An easy life (fear) or a good life (courage).

You can live an easy life, or you can live a good life.

And the universe, being a dirty prankster, has a nasty surprise for you.

Those who seek an easy life will lead a harder life than those who seek a good life.

The easy life is one of fear.

The good life is one of purpose and meaning, with views from the top.

Life is heavy, and you can either prepare now for what’s coming, or be crushed when it happens.

The time for change it today, the time to crush it is today, the time to face your fears is today.