Internet Marketing

Life in a Nutshell

Being Told Repeatedly By Doctors You're Gonna Die Young
You Heal Yourself and Survive, People Tell You You're Crazy for Thinking and Acting Differently
Living Life By Your Own Standards

Self-Overcoming

We can’t remove every external barrier to our success, because we have little control over the world around us.

Yet we do have immense power over ourselves, power over how we react to this environment – the path of self-overcoming.

Life Experience

At my core I’m an erudite hermit who studies the world, seeking to understand it better.

I read a lot of books when I was young. My reading focus shifted from reading encyclopedias and the Bible to books on evolutionary theory and history, as I was deeply confused about the mismatch between ‘how the world was supposed to be’ and the stupefied and relentlessly cruel reality I encountered every day.

My life growing up was terrible, I lived in an alcohol and cocaine fueled chaotic home. A series of live-in boyfriends meant experiencing all sorts of violence, the worst aspects of human nature.

After dropping out of high school, I went on to be successful in college. I taught successfully as a schoolteacher at the alternative high school I graduated from, then I started entrepreneuring.

Among other projects I worked on, I helped an isolated and conservative Amish community to market their furniture online and maintain their way of life in the face of modernity.

I also worked in politics and ancestral health & fitness, managing conventions and political campaigns intended to help uplift and improve people's lives.

I love learning, understanding the world around me better. It's been my prime goal throughout my life -- to answer the question of 'Why is the world so cruel and dumb? Why do most people behave like children?'

Proving the Experts Wrong

The biggest barrier I’ve overcome is related to personal health. I started becoming very sensitive to low level toxins, which led to me nearly dying several times and becoming highly isolated out of necessity.

I was sent to the Mayo Clinic for weeks of testing, they couldn’t find anything so I got sat down at a conference table full of doctors who argued that I’d be dead by age 30 unless I took a bunch of drugs and subjected myself to endless psychotherapy. I challenged their assessment and asked for proof in the form of research and journal articles, I asked them to look at relevant MSDS (material safety data handling sheets) printouts and show me where my symptoms were not listed.

The doctors couldn’t provide any proof or peer-reviewed studies. Their argument was that if the prestigious Mayo Clinic couldn’t find a physical cause then the chemical burns and brain fog and 20 other awful symptoms must be mental in origin, because it’s not normal for a person to respond that way to toxins and poison.

So I left the Mayo Clinic and learned how to heal myself. I’m still alive today, 25 years later.

I studied nutrition, exercise, brain chemistry and wiring, detoxification pathways and epigenetics, meditation, lightwork … anything that might work I tried it via a natural science approach. Does it work or doesn’t it work was my only ideology. Through this intense practice I’ve become an expert at the art of self-healing and self-recoding.

In developing and testing Meliora Meditation over 10 years, I’ve been mocked and ridiculed by friends and family. The disconnect between ‘super rational Erik’ and ‘guy teaching woo stuff’ is too large a gap for their brains to bridge, and my challenging their favored myths in the form of scientism and psychology and stoicism and soyboy masculinity hasn’t helped.

I don’t grok that attitude. I’d be dead many times over if I listened to ‘expert advice’ versus doing my own research and doing my own independent testing. I’m a simple dude, I go with what works.

Fear

“You know what everyone’s greatest fear is?

It is that all the dreams we have, all the crazy ideas and aspirations, all the impossible romantic longings and utopian visions can come true, that the world can grant our wishes.

People spend their lives doing everything in their power to fend off that possibility: they beat themselves up with every kind of insecurity, sabotage their own efforts, undermine love affairs and cry sour grapes before the world even has a chance to defeat them.

Because no weight could be heavier to bear than the possibility that everything we want is possible.”

― Crimethinc Ex-Workers Collective’s ‘Days of War, Nights of Love’

Predicting our Modern Malaise

When I was a teenager, I wrote a lot about the future in the form of poetry, essays and fiction.

Mostly what I saw was awfulness, as technology was being used to control and manage dissent. For every PGP encryption tool and Phrack article on how to hack the phone system, there were 200 new ways to use technology to turn us into heavily monitored and overstimulated gelded cattle.

What I saw is that at some point in the near future these technological and psychological mechanisms of control would come to eliminate human free will and choice.

I started a BBS, a pre-internet method of communicating with like-minded people in your geographic area. I called it Dissent, this was the opening screen.

The opening poem sounds a lot like what we’re experiencing in the world today:

“Mobs of once proud men rage

Frustration, fear and hopelessness have become their daily bread

Hearts ablaze with hatred, fear and intolerance

The light of hope subdued, blood red

All hail the glorious revolution of lowered expectations

Children search the streets for haven

Caged wolves are freed to cull the weak and powerless

The dark embrace of terror

Battle lines drawn in the shifting sands

Men and women who once toiled side by side

Building a better world for their children’s children

Attrition through division

Darwinism as public policy

Easier to blame others than ourselves

I Dissent"

I also wrote about communism taking over our schools, ‘for the greater good’ biopharmaceutical science, and the consequences of expertise and hubris.

So I’m not surprised at how the world has turned out. I expected it, I predicted it. I’ve been studying my entire life trying to figure out the how and why.

Mostly it comes down to people. We’ve accepted our role as small, terrified, happily gelded cattle who treat other people like shit because that’s what the people at the top are all doing.

And also because our phones and social media augmented reality have become far more titillating than the degraded reality we live in.

Fixing things, healing ourselves, acting like adults ... far too difficult. Pass the brain-numbing drugs and TikTok.

Self-Overcoming

Through over 3 decades of intensive work on self-healing and self-improvement, I’ve learned that self-overcoming is not a linear curve. It is a slow and erratic climb.

Change is difficult. It requires strength, bravery and hope.

Change requires doing difficult new things, and sometimes (or often) failing.

Sometimes it feels like the hardest thing you can do is pick yourself up off the floor and crawl an inch, after the world has kicked you down and thrown sand in your face for the fifteenth time in a row.

But the hardest and most powerful thing that you can do is open your heart up to the hope and belief that you can overcome all internal barriers to create a life of limitless beauty, joy and meaning.

We can’t remove every external barrier to our success, because we have little control over the world around us.

Yet we do have immense power over ourselves, power over how we react to this environment – the path of self-overcoming.

Business and Life Strategy

Study and Analyze
The first step is to understand the current environment, with eyes unclouded by ego or attachment. A clear analysis is essential to making real progress.
Analysis at the heart of strategy as defined by Miyamoto Musashi in The Book of Five Rings. Study and analyze, master all forms, and then strike with one decisive blow.
Adapt and Overcome: Do
Getting too focused on a tactic that's worked for you in the past, or a strategy that is sub-optimal, are two common ways that people fail to succeed with their goals.
Fluidity is an essential component in most successful outcomes; do not bend your ethics, but do bend your tactics and strategies.
Study, Learn then Do.
Laughter and Joy
Laugh at the clownshow that is the modern world, seek and create and reify joy where you can.