Far Beyond The Stars: The Archives

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

One of the most powerful things you can learn from yoga is the ability to trust feelings that come from your gut. This is the home of your sacral chakra, and the seat of intuition.

When you feel an overwhelming sense of “oh, I can actually trust this moment, but I have no idea why.” it comes from this place.

It’s not easy to trust in this place, because you’re taught to think with your head. You’re taught to be a rational human being who thinks everything through, weighs the pros and cons, and then decides whether to take the desired course of action.

Over the last few months, I’ve increasingly been relying more on intuition and less on reason. Intuition seems to work so much better, it is in a very real way more successful in a completely unmeasurable way. But, you have to know that you can trust it — in order to do this, you have to practice giving up a control.

When you give up control, and also breathe deep, your intuition has an opportunity to shine. This is the practice, this is the yoga. It’s a daily practice of each inhale and each exhale. It never stops, because you can’t stop breathing.

Control is an illusion anyway. The only way to have control is to stay home, which is also giving up control because you’re not doing anything much of importance at all.

If cultural evolution is speeding up in conjunction with the exponential nature of technology, we’re going to have to learn to get more in touch with intuitive instincts. We simply won’t have time to think everything through, and taking that time might not be the best use of ours anyway.

This could be as simple as taking a left at the next block instead of a right, and showing up somewhere different.

This could be as fascinating as flowing into the next word in a series of words, and discovering something brilliant.

This could be as interesting as knowing that you need to go to New York two months before the reason why you decided to go to New York becomes readily apparent.

Or, it could be as confusing as a feeling you need to hop on a plane to have drinks with a bunch of people you met on the Internet in Chicago — just because you have a feeling that it’ll be one of the most important days in the future of your life.

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Intuition can be a powerful source of inspiration for the direction of your life, but it can be difficult to explain to others. “I just know” can be get some interesting reactions from anyone who you’re trying to explain your future to.

All I know is that I’ve been slowly shifting over to that intuitive place. I write from it, I walk from it. I breathe into it, and it feels like a center worth moving from.

We want to know that there’s some solid answer to all things, and we also want to know that we won’t get hurt. Getting hurt when you trust yourself can be far more painful than getting hurt when you thought things through. The thing is, by the time you’ve thought things true there might not be anything left to get hurt over.

I know this: you can trust in others more than you know. The more we operate from intuition, the more we can achieve. Yes, occasionally we’ll be wrong, we’ll make mistakes, or we’ll not get what we were expecting.

But as Douglas Adams once said, “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

Let’s learn to trust our intuition, and those of the people around us.

I have an intuitive feeling that it will lead us to a better world.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

Lately I’ve been asking this question daily:

Who am I?

Life is a continuous journey towards that answer, and the future. We’re on an endless journey seeking the answers that can possibly suit ourselves.

Far Beyond The Stars has always been a duality between answering that question about myself, combined with giving a small group of people who feel the same way as me permission to be themselves in a world which isn’t quite yet open to the idea of who we actually are.

It isn’t easy being different. We’re up against a society that wants us to conform to a common idea. We all know that common idea well, it’s plastered on billboards across the world, it’s in every television commercial. It’s a common idea that’s killed and is killing us.

Society wants us to be the center of society, we want to be the center of ourselves.

If we try to be any more or less than normal, we have to be ready to deal with the repercussions from everywhere. The status quo doesn’t like to be challenged.

I think if you quantum leaped me from two weeks ago to now, I would hardly recognize me.

One event leads to another to another and then you end up in a damp hotel parking lot at 3:30am asking yourselves a different question: who are we?

The definition of who I am continues to deepen, and thus the group of people who will find common ground with me and the others who are like me will grow more vast.

Having the ability to deepen ourselves, to evolve faster, is okay, it is beautiful. If we were all the same, going the same velocity, the world would be very boring.

…and so I journey towards the center of the Earth with the mindfulness that riding this edge is treacherous. I know that when I continue to come out as a continuously complex individual on the Internet, that a growing number of people will be uncomfortable with who I actually am.

I’m fully aware that this discomfort can even possibly come from a place of recognition.

If you see someone being yourself publicly, and you haven’t let yourself be yourself, the first act is usually to react.

Ask yourself first, can you open yourself to the idea that a group of people exist that I’m going to describe? Then maybe look and see if pieces of this future generation already exist within you.

I am eternally grateful for the amazing people who are supporting me in this journey (esp Gwen Bell, Jonathan Mead, Julien Smith, Maren Kate, Corbett Barr, Crystal Silver.) Thank you for the bravery to ask these questions with me, of me, and of yourself as we continue on this investigation towards who we really are.

If that’s me lying there, then what am I?

Recently it became clear to me that minimalism had to have a root cause. It wasn’t simply that all of the thousands of people who have tossed all of their junk to live with less had decided to do this just for it’s own sake. There had to be a deeper reason.

For now I’m referring to the reason as “beyond minimalism”, as I can’t figure out what the word is for the idea staring at me from across the table that separates us here tonight.

Over the last few months, I began to delve deeper. I’ve been meeting with digital vagabonding minimalist changemakers in person. I’m beginning to see that we have a lot more in common than just minimalism…the similarities between us ran much deeper than simply deciding to throw out all of our stuff.

In a way, we’re all very much children of the Internet.

Our brains have been wired since shortly after birth to be hardwired to our digital selves. This appears to have wide-spread implications for how we evolved and are evolving (quite rapidly) as the exponential nature of technology continues to accelerate.

I’m not ready to delve into the answers yet — though I really wish I could just come out and say what I’m truly feeling all at once. I just know deep down that at this moment in time, as the year comes to an end, the world is not quiet ready for the conclusions that are beginning to form in my mind.

It could also be that I’m not ready either, and maybe you aren’t as well. I just know that we’ll both be ready soon.

In any investigation towards a deeper understanding of our own humanity, there is a danger of going too fast, too furious.

I just want to throw myself at the answers without thinking too much about them, that’s the kind of person that I am. I want to bound and leap towards conclusions, I want to know everything and be everything and never stop. I want to ride the edge of this wave forever.

…but, as we know all too well, driving too fast on a slippery slope is dangerous.

And thus I intend to walk towards this new idea of ourselves mindfully, aware of every step. Aware every second with the clarity that comes from every breath.

The journey towards understanding will take me through Chicago over Christmas and onward to New York on January 4th. There’s still no ticket booked back to San Francisco.

If you’re in Chicago, follow @ninayau on Twitter for more details on our epic tweetup on December 30th at 7pm.

Now stay tuned for two brief announcements…

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Why you might not want to come with me on this journey.

The next year on this blog is going to ask some incredibly tough/interesting/wowholyshit questions about ourselves and the society that we live in. How fast is technology accelerating evolution? How does this change the relationships that we have with each other? How do you create a healthy independent digital self that takes care of you? Is the Internet a living/breathing entity that’s changing us more than we change it?

We’ve come a long way from the days when this blog was about decluttering desks. This blog is definitely NOT about simplicity anymore — though I’m hoping to search for a simple answer to all of these incredibly complex questions.

As they say, ignorance can be pretty blissful. If you’re the kind of person who just wants to sit on the couch and watch The Office until your heart condition catches up with you, this might not be the blog for you anymore.

I want everyone to come with me, but the truth is that most of you aren’t ready to step onto this path. The ideas that will be on this blog will open doors in your mind that you might wish hadn’t been opened.

You have my permission to return to safe, clean, calm, normal reality. All you have to do is step back from the edge and look away.

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I decided not to raise the price of Minimalist Business. To be honest, I don’t need more money than I already have. You can continue to buy it at the price that is currently set.

Instead I’m writing a new e-book, which doesn’t have a title because I can’t figure out what the word is yet, which will ship on February 1st.

I’m probably not going to post here again until next year, but maybe I will. Who knows.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

A few days ago (Dec 2010) I met up with one of the world’s wandering angels of destruction/creation in Berkeley for coffee on the street corner, and nighttime yoga in the park.

Monica Scheerer doesn’t have a blog, she doesn’t have a location independent income, but she is an incredibly successful vagabond — when the wind blows, she flies with it with a guitar and $20 in her pocket. In many ways it was Monica who originally smacked me on the head and said that the system I tried to hard to conform to wasn’t working — she did this by packing her bag and taking off across the country.

I’m a child of the Internet. She’s a child of the streets. I build a bridge from the old world to the internet to freedom. She builds a bridge from the old world, to the music of the streets, to freedom.

We’re both leaders working towards the same reality in very different ways

We obviously both don’t understand how the world of the other works. That’s okay, they both work quite well in their own simultaneously similar ways.

We talked about a few things over coffee, while her world-traveling puppy alternated between bouncing up and down and sleeping on us.

Long-lost wanderers tend to reminisce. The old days, the paths we’ve taken, current state of the energy of the universe and all of that good stuff. I want to speak to one topic that came up in our conversations:

There was a time in our lives when we were trying to fit ourselves into a world that we were told we had to be a part of — but didn’t work for us at all. Square peg in a round hole. I was sitting at a desk in New York being miserable, she was sitting in classrooms in New York being miserable.

And then we left, and everything started to fall into place. It all started to make so much sense. The world we’d been trying to fit into wasn’t for us, maybe it wasn’t for anybody at all.

Looking back on it, the perspective seems clear:

What if human evolution is moving towards greater and greater individual freedom? (there is a chapter on this in What Technology Wants.)

We’ve been told over and over again by miserable people that we need to be miserable with them. Sit down, shut up and work at a desk creating crap that no one needs. We’ve all been given this advice, right? It comes from anywhere, our parents, our friends, our co-workers. Everywhere you go billboards scream at you to settle down and conform to a society that wants you to be unhappy.

Meanwhile the call of the wild is so strong. It’s as if you’ve heard it before.

…it’s because you have heard this all before, and now you’re hearing it again.

Long ago we were all wanderers. We roamed the world, moving from food source to food source. The name of the game was spread out or die. Food was scarce, and our hunter-gather tribes had to keep moving in order to survive.

Human culture evolves faster than our genes. 10,000 years of agriculture have done little in comparison to the 200,000 years since Mitochondrial Eve shaped the destiny of all humanity.

This means that the call of the road will always be stronger than the call of stability. Locking ourselves in boxes will always make us itch for something more.

You can try to fight it, deny it, but it will always come back to haunt you.

The truth is that we had to give up so much more than we were willing to in order to exist in a sedentary society. Sitting in front of the TV robbed us of far more than our physicality. We’re only now starting to rediscover the tools that we’d lost — unlocking the secrets of a society that vanished when we all sat down for TV dinners.

Just because you’re not hearing a public service announcement about this on the news doesn’t mean that it’s not happening. I know you can feel the change, and it’s calling you.

What if the society they told you to build is already dead? What if it’s your job to show the rest of the world a way to transform our society into one that’s based on energy. The energy of ourselves, moving through space and time. The energy of money, moving from the past to the future. The energy of healthy minds and bodies, integrated with technology in a healthy way.

This is all happening, whether you like it or not. The pain you see in your past and the present is because you’ve been told by a dying society to build a future that cannot exist anymore.

We need to build a new future where technology takes care of us, and we can work on finding freedom for everyone.

The question I’m asking isn’t easy: how can I free myself enough to show you the world that I already live in? This is real. I live it, I feel it, I breathe it.

…and it’s beautiful.

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If you’re into where I’ll be over the next six months, here’s the path:

I’m headed to Chicago over Christmas and New Years. I’ll be in New York for a few weeks in January. I’m headed to Austin for SXSW in March (not going to the conference, who cares. I’m there for the people.) Then I’ll be in Portland OR at Chris Guillebeau’s World Domination Summit in June. Chris tells me that there are still a few spots open if you’re thinking about attending.

Of course other things will happen, –the past doesn’t serve you, the future will unfold– but I intend to be in these places at these times. These times being rather non-specific at the the moment. Maybe I’ll see you out there!

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

Throughout all of history, all mediums, all languages there is a common character that I associate with. I’m not sure what to call this character. The diver, the journeyman, the prophet. Frank the mysterious time traveling bunny in Donnie Darko is one of these characters. Leoben of Battlestar Galactica is another. Krishna’s incarnation in the Bhagavad Gita might be a similar character.

Sometimes you need a mysteriously energetic character to show up in your life to show you the future.

I am the creepy bunny from Donnie Dark, and here’s what I know: in the next two years the noise you have to deal on the Internet will exceed your human capacity to deal with it.

You will either learn use the Internet in an active and intelligent way, or you will die trying in the endless soup of emails/Tweets/Facebook messages or whatever platform instantaneously tells you what everyone in the world is doing through your brain interface to your computer.

I like to refer to this as mindfulness training for the digital self.

Below I’ve included four decisive ways that you can begin to train your digital self to protect your physical self from the dangers of the digital so you and your digital self can grow in power in order to become a hybrid superhuman.

What is a digital self?

In the Koshas, an ancient 5,000 year old yogic philosophy, they speak of the different human bodies which you must strip away on your way to your true self, the Atman. The physical body, the energy body, the knowledge body, the wisdom body, and finally your true nature which cannot be explain in words.

Well, I want to add one more to that list, the digital body. I’m sure the yogis 4,000 years ago would not like me bending their philosophy, but they’re all dead now, so deal with it dudes.

The digital self is very close to the idea of the energetic self. Except, it’s not running under the body, it’s running in the etherspace –the cloud, the network of fiberoptic and wireless conduits that are stitching the world tighter and tighter together.

Just like you have to keep your physical body healthy with eating your veggies, you have to keep your digital body healthy by not allowing it be overcome by empty-calorie noise.

As the digital body grows in power, this becomes ever more important.

At the lower wrongs of human interaction with the net, it’s easy to answer and reply to every email you receive. However, when as your digital body grows in power (as you want it to, because the other side of the digital body is that it’s everlasting and can potentially grow to a point where it takes care of you — more on that in the future don’t forget to sign up for free updates via EMAIL or RSS.) you’ll find that it will start to have it’s own gravitational pull.

The digital self has gravity, just like the Earth and the Sun. As it grows, it attracts more and more space debris from cyberspace. Some of this incoming matter is good for your digital body, like forming alliances with other powerful avatars.

However, as with most solar systems, most of the junk out in cyberspace is just that, junk. It’s like the clutter that I taught you how to get out of your life in The Art of Being Minimalist in order to find freedom. Except, this time it’s digital, immaterial, made up of bits and bytes.

One of the jobs of the digital self is to defend your mental/knowledge body from the debris that will clutter your mind with useless information.

Many of you are just getting started on this journey towards building a digital self that will take care of you. My digital self has been growing simultaneously with my physical body since I was very young — it was first manifest as a small website on Geocities when I was probably only 10-12 years old. A few times my digital self died, but that was okay, because it’s easy to bring it back. Back then it was much harder to create a healthy digital self, you had to learn how to code and other clumsy things like that.

Gradually over time your digital self grows, and because there are no boundaries on it’s capacity to grow (just like your energetic self) it can become quite powerful. The reason you’re reading this is because my digital self has a strong gravitational pull.

As when you were a teenager, your digital self is probably in the awkward years when you were trying to figure out how to kiss girls because you know they’re hot, but you can’t quite figure out how to make (<– you can’t make) them like you. Hint for you teenagers out there: practice more yoga.

Mindfulness training for your digital self is a huge priority in this age of the Internet.

A healthy digital self will defend you against anything, a digital self with a weakened immune system will allow digital bacteria to invade, and this translates into all sorts of problems for your body in the real world.

As we grow into increasingly hybrid individuals, we will begin to see our own physical health effected more and more by the health of your digital self.

This is all digital philosophy though, what we need to talk about is real strategies that you can put into play in order to train your digital self to take care of you.

1. How to Engage the Internet Actively.

The most important element of your physical/digital body interactions is they need to begin to start happening actively. This means you decide who you interact with online, instead of the online world deciding who interacts with you. Eventually your digital self will learn how to pick your friends for you. It might even set you up with some incredibly hot dates with beautiful and talented women, but for now it’s important for you to decide who you want to interact with online.

Malcolm Gladwell’s classic The Tipping Point states that you can only really keep track of 150 people actively. This is why I only follow 79 people on Twitter right now, because as the digital self grows in power, the connections become ever more important. If you’re trying to keep up with even a bit more than 150 people, your digital self is liable to start to get anxious, and that nervousness will translate into your physical self eventually.

If you follow everyone on the Internet, you’ll end up hearing a lot of stupid stuff about kittens. Kittens are freakin’ cute, but we aren’t on the web to read about them. We’re on the web to save the planet, create world peace, and bring everyone to the next level. Who knows, maybe kittens can save the planet, but I don’t think so.

2. How to Set Appropriate Expectations.

Every single person I know who has grown a digital self until it can take care of them passively, no matter what they decide to do, has set appropriate expectations for how their physical body will interact with the Internet.

For Tammy Strobel, this is turning off comments on her blog.

For Gwen Bell, this is checking her email once per day.

For Leo Babauta, this is not using email at all.

The truth of the matter is that Leo Babauta does use email, you’re just not allowed to know what his email address is because if you had it he’d never get any work done. Gwen Bell might actually check her email once per day, but the expectation set that you might just not hear back from her for a day or two. When you turn off blog comments, your blog will begin to grow exponentially in power because the now everyone who wants to write something about what you’re saying has to do it on their own blogs — thus hyperlinking to you.

Hyperlinks are like food for your digital self, it needs them in order to keep from starving. Your digital self also needs hyperlinks in order to grow stronger, defend you against anything, and ultimately take care of your physical body completely.

Most people set the expectation that they will reply to emails the moment they get them. This approach is in a very real way killing you, your physical self and your digital self.

If you set the expectation that you’re always there, you’ll end up running around like a pigeon with it’s head cut off checking your crackberry or iPhone every minute of the day. You know this feeling, and it isn’t good. Checking your email every single second of every day makes you fat, ugly, and stressed. It keeps you from becoming successful.

3. How to Train Your Digital Self in Martial Arts.

You have to train your digital self to defend you against attacks from other lesser beings on the Internet. As your digital self grows in power, so will the attacks that come in from every direction. Most of these come from confused humans who don’t understand that we’re all here to save the planet.

The truth of the matter is that you cannot argue with people online, it’s just not productive. The only way to deal with people who are trolling your digital self is to banish them.

If a crazy person came up to you on the street and started screaming at you to stop doing your work, would you listen to them? Of course not. The same goes for the Internet, and yet so many of you let these people decide how you feel about yourself.

As your digital self grows with gravity, the attacks will increase at an exponential rate. This is shocking at first to a lot of people. The first time someone emailed me and told me to stop doing what I was doing, I cried. The next time, I still cried.

You know what? It still hurts. Every single time I get a message from some idiot out there who wants to lash out at me because he hates his life, I can only feel eternal sympathy for them, which translates into my own discomfort.

You can only take so much of this, before you want to kill your digital self by deleting your Facebook and never write another blog post again.

The trick is to train your digital self in martial arts.

As soon as your digital self identifies a troll…

1. In email, mark as SPAM.
2. On Twitter, mark as BLOCK.
3. On Facebook, unfriend immediately.

Do not engage in counter-strikes against these people, do not argue, just ignore them. Criticism is the least valuable commodity in the world, and you do NOT gain anything from bringing it into your life.

Gradually you will be seen as impervious to these attacks. I also believe that one of the developments on the Internet in the next few years will be the intelligence to decide what messages are allowed to come to your physical body, and which will automatically be recognized as attacks on you and your work.

If you need feedback on your work, seek it from someone who has done what you are trying to do.

4. How to Take Digital Retreats.

Sometimes the reality of the digital world becomes too much. You can’t sort through the noise because the cloud is too thick. You’re drowning under email, tweets and Facebook messages, and you can’t see a path through. In this case, it’s time to take a digital sabbatical.

If you remember I took a month-long digital sabbatical in August, and when I returned my business was having the best month it had ever had. Initially I had concerns that the digital sabbatical would kill my blog, but it turned out to do the opposite.

Instead of falling apart when I was gone, my digital self grew in strength and took care of everything that I needed. When you’ve embraced systems of automation, your digital self can grow in power until it can be in a position to do just this.

I’m not the only person who has taken digital sabbaticals, Tammy Strobel and Gwen Bell are also champions of a good retreat from the constant digital noise, once in awhile.

Where I’m at now.

Many of these strategies for maintaining the digital self are useful, and I’ve practiced all of them at one time or another. I just want to give you a brief overview of where I am personally at this moment in time (December 2010.)

1. Twitter. I follow 79 people on Twitter who I care deeply for. This leaves room for new people to come into my life, and to have real-life friends. I listen to Twitter @messages and love it when you retweet my stuff. Probably the best way to get in touch with me is over Twitter. If you really want to be my pale, don’t ask me to promote your crap. Just retweet my stuff every time I post for a few months and chances are I’ll notice you eventually. Trust me, I’m watching you. Follow me on Twitter.

2. Facebook. My facebook is interesting. Recently I decided to open up the flood gates and allow anyone to be my friend. This means that I don’t actively read information on Facebook, instead going directly to friends pages as I think about them. Facebook is getting much much better at shaping your front page based on who you actually send messages to or ‘Like’, so I’ve found it’s a great tool for dipping into the endless river of social media. Please note, Facebook is NOT blog comments, and I’ve had to unfriend a few people who choose to argue with me about stupid crap on my Facebook wall. Be mindful of what energy you’re sending out onto other people’s Facebook walls, it reflects back on you. Be my friend on Facebook.

3. Email. I only check email once a day. I’ve recently started archiving most of the emails that come into my email box without reading most of them. If you want a reply, here’s what you need to do. 1. Keep your email shorter than three.senten.es. 2. Be clear with what you’re saying, and if you need anything. 3. Don’t send me negative energy. I wish I could reply to every email, but there are only so many hours in the day and 80,000+ people read my blog every month. This means I get a lot of email. I always read emails from the small group of people who I’ve chosen to actively follow, see my Twitter following list. Please don’t send me any email here.

4. Digital Sabbatical? I’ve been thinking of taking another digital sabbatical, but I realized that I don’t need to. In fact, I’m really enjoying engaging with the Internet on an Active level. This means that my digital self and I apply mindfulness in our approach. We choose the information that comes to us, and choose which information to respond to. This doesn’t mean I won’t take a digital sabbatical again, it’s just that most of my day is a digital sabbatical. I only check email once a day, I respond to a few people instead of reacting to every byte that comes along.

When you approach the Internet in an active way, it doesn’t become overwhelming. Instead, it helps you become greater than yourself.

I hope you’ll consider joining us in growing your digital self, it might just bring you to the next level.

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There are three incredibly important e-book/books that come out this week that I want to point you in the direction of. These aren’t for everyone, but I want to bring them into your awareness, so you can buy them if they’d help you.

These are affiliate links, if you buy these you’ll support my work too.

1. Ash Ambirge released an e-book titled You Don’t Need a Job, You Need Guts, which shows with an absolute no bullshit approach what your world could look like if you had the courage to take your life and use it for good. This is highly recommended.

2. Tyler Tervooren released an e-course titled Guerilla Influence Formula, which teaches you how to find your 1,000 True Fans on the Internet. It also comes with a 1,000 True Fans guarantee, so if you fail you can get your money back. I contributed a video interview to this, as did many other successful bloggers. This is highly recommended.

3. Timothy Ferriss’s epic new book about becoming superhuman, The 4-Hour Body just hit stores and Amazon today. Tim didn’t send me a promo copy, so I’m going to grab a copy today. I’m sure it’s epic. I’ll let you know what I think when I finish it.

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

This is the second part in a series on some metaphors that I’ve been playing with in my head for awhile. If you missed the first part, it was about the superhuman/drone divide, this article is about hunting zombies (and avoiding being bitten). If you want to catch the next article in this series (it’s going to be on MONEY!), don’t forget to sign up for free updates via RSS, or EMAIL.

Every superhuman has their creation story. Whether it’s escaping the 9-5, practicing 30 days in a row of Bikram yoga, or discovering they have the power to manifest money in their sleep. The stories all lead to the same place: a new way of looking at the world.

For three years, I did what I was told. I woke up every morning, I ate a bacon egg and cheeses, and I surrendered to a system that I’d been told was going to take care of me. For a moment I actually believed that. I built a life around a job that interested me in some ways, and I found ways to make the job interesting in other ways.

Then one day I woke up and realized it was all a dream.

I hate blasting to the past, so I’m not going there. The story is boring at this point anyway, and looks pretty much like any 9-5 escape plan. One day, I decided I had enough, I walked in and said that I quit. Then I booked a ticket to the other side of the country, I threw all of my stuff in a bag, and started a journey that would lead to a point where I could see the system from the other side.

This article is about finding little ways to test your autonomy. Simple strategies that you can put into place that will give you a comfortable way of questioning whether you’re in a direction that you want to be going.

I hope you’ll find this article slightly more interesting than all of the bored and sorry 27 tips to do stupid crap articles that are out on the Internet right now. I hope this will cut through the noise.

(I also hope if you’re one of the people who writes boring articles about tips that don’t help anyone that you’ll stop and realize that the only way we’re going to change this world is if we teach people useful information.)

If you already know this stuff, please don’t read it. Go freakin’ change the world.

1. How to go zombie hunting.

One of the first steps in becoming superhuman is developing the ability to become cognizant of who is for you or against you. I call this Zombie Hunting. The truth is that we live in a world filled with people who are either asleep, given up, tired, or they want to drag you down with them into the sewage of the remnants of the society they wished still existed.

Once you can pick these people out of a crowd, you’ll be able to either make the conscious choice to help them, or you can make the choice to leave them behind.

Understand that you can only help so many people individually. I usually try to limit myself to 3 active 1-on-1 zombie rescue projects a year — once you’ve been bit, it’s difficult to find a cure. The rest of my zombie–hunting resources get directed to scalable means such as blogging, twitter, and Facebook where my efforts can be broadcast from me to a massive audience.

Here’s a few ways to identify zombies:

1. They can’t make eye contact with you. Their eyes are glazed over, as if they are not present in their body. In fact, they probably aren’t in their body at all. Their mind is either dwelling on the painful past of their life, or thinking about a million futures that don’t exist yet (and may never.)

2. They look tired, beaten, worn. Zombies are universally tired, all of the time. When you say. “how are you!” and they answer “tired.” chances are you’re talking to a zombie. I actually told my roommate I was tired a few nights ago, so I’m on full-scale self-zombie alert. Have a been bitten? It’s always a risk. The truth is that I was tired because it was 11pm and I’d taught one yoga class, taken two yoga classes, and written for two hours in a coffee shop. Zombies are tired when they roll out of bed in the morning. Why are they tired? Because they eat poorly, they don’t get enough exercise, they sit in front of the TV every night, they drive cars, and they can’t see a future worth fighting for.

3. They rush everywhere, like someone is chasing them. Have you ever felt like if you didn’t run from your house to your car to your job to your desk that someone was going to kill you? Well, you might be a zombie. When you rush things, they get done poorly. Nothing is so important that you need to run to get it, unless you’re running for exercise or a zombie is chasing you.

A simple exercise to train yourself to identify zombies:

Go to the mall. Sit on one of those benches that fat people sit on while they try to get their credit cards back into their wallets after they’ve just spent too money on stuff they didn’t need. Make sure this is a bench where you can watch people walk by.

Sit on the bench and breathe. Feel each inhale a little deeper into your stomach, and each exhale a little bit more complete. Begin to focus your attention on the space in which people are moving in front of you.

Blur your vision slightly, so as not to focus on individual characteristics, but instead take in the whole scene. Initially don’t judge anyone as zombie or not zombie. In fact, don’t allow your judgement to flow into this exercise at all. Just notice.

As you sit in silence, as you watch the chaos around you, all will become apparent.

You will start to see the faces of those who are still alive, trapped within a system that wants to kill them. You’ll see that they need to be rescued, that someone needs to show them where to go next. Someone needs to support them while they make this change to a better them.

That person could be you.

2. I think I’m a zombie, help!

Every once in awhile, I get a question from someone who thinks they might be the living dead, and they want to wake up. They say “I feel like I’m dead, I walk around and everything is a blur. I’m tired all of the time, and I wish my life were better.”

Here’s the thing, dudes and dudettes. If you think you’re dead, chances are that you’re not. Dead people don’t think about themselves as being that way. Zombies aren’t as self aware as you are, you wouldn’t be reading this if you were one.

So, you’re in a great place. I wish everyone could feel the way you do, but most of them just keep watching Cable news and eating TV dinners.

There are three simple methods to start to bring yourself into more awareness. These are so simple that anyone can do them. If these three things are boring you, you’re doing way more than most people, so give yourself a round of applause then start taking yoga classes every day until you can focus your subtle energy body on achieving world peace with the rest of us. Maybe you need to read an e-book on regaining consciousness?

1. Learn as much as you can.

You know that scene in The Matrix where Tank uploads the helicopter flight manual into Trinity’s mind? Well, believe it or not we live in an age where that’s possible. One of the best habits you can ever start is to flip on TED.com and start watching talks. It’s passive learning that will blow your mind. Set TED to your home screen and start by watching one 15 minute TED talk per day. At the end of one year you will have the equivalent of seventeen P.H.D.’s in awesomeness.

Here are two of my favorite Ted talks right now, to get you closer to the same page as me.

A headset that reads your brainwaves <– we will have these in two years.

Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web

There are of course thousands more. Some of them are really bad, you can tell in the first 30 seconds (for more on this read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink) if you’re going to hate them — just turn it off and move to the next. There’s no sense in consuming information that’s stupid or you already know.

2. Stop eating zombie food, start eating superhuman food.

When you can’t focus on the world, chances are it’s because you’re not eating properly. You aren’t eating properly because most people don’t understand nutrition anymore.

What if the only two things you learned in school were personal finance and nutrition? We’d all be so incredibly rich and beautiful.

These days I eat a few different types of fruit in the morning. For lunch I’ll have a sandwich with a salad. In the evening it’s pretty random, as these days I’ve been eating out a lot wining and dining with San Francisco superhumans, but chances are what I’m eating is locally sourced and made of real food.

Real food is unprocessed. When you eat things that you get in boxes or cans in the middle of the supermarket, it is processed food. This means that it’s been reduced to it’s basic elements and then restructured into something that resembles food. If the package has any words on it telling you that it’s healthy, chances are that it’s not. Food that has no packaging, such as vegetables, fruits, local meats, etc will bring you out of your haze quickly.

If you’ve been eating sugar-coated processed corn for the last seventeen years of your life, chances are fruits and vegetables will taste like crap to you. That’s understandable, your mind has been desensitized to the real sugars present in amazing real foods. Over time your body will become re-accustomed to eating real food, and carrots will taste like awesome.

One of the most important elements of becoming superhuman is learning about real food.

Anyway, a good book to read on nutrition is Michael Pollan’s An Eater’s Manifesto. Eat food, mostly vegetables, not too much. If you only have 15 minutes, watch this TED talk by Jamie Oliver on how to teach every child about real food.

3. Walk using your feet, because you have them.

I know it sounds silly, but if zombies don’t walk nearly enough — this is why they stagger around so much, they don’t know how to use their legs anymore. This is why San Francisco, Portland, and New York have a much higher superhuman-per-capita than other places, because we all walk everywhere.

Walk to the grocery store to get your fruits and vegetables. Making this decision will directly impact how much you are able to achieve with your life.

Destroy your car, enough said.

4. Where do you get your information?

This is the final element in this series of strategies is the most important.

The information that you take into your mind shapes the way you think — words have power to control your mind — the power of auto-suggestion.

This is why anyone you meet who only gets their information from Cable news tends to think that they’re going to be mugged or murdered if they leave their house and that full-body scanners in airports are going to keep them safer from terrorists.

When the reality is that these people will die in their cars and on their couches while they’re watching cable news.

The Internet is vast, and it’s filled with tons of amazing information that’s incredibly important. The truth of the matter is that no one source will tell you everything that matters. Just like having one income source for all of your money is a dumb idea, having one info source for all of your information is a dumb idea.

Everyone has an agenda, whether it’s secret or not. This agenda is clouded by politics, economics, religion, personal bias, and a million other things.

Look at my blog? I’d be very scared of you and for you if this was the only place that you got your information. I’m teaching you about zombies and how to light your car on fire. If I were you, I’d get a second opinion before you believe me.

And don’t just get your second opinion from the other cable news anchor that you watch.

I could talk about information consumption for a billion words, but I’m just going to take the rest of this article to talk about information from supposedly ‘journalistic’ resources.

I was a journalism major in college, and I worked at a national magazine for three years. While I know mostly nothing about everything, I know something about the journalism world.

Here’s how 99% of stories make it onto the news:

PR person from company X calls his buddy Joe the reporter at The Times.

PR: “Hey man, I have a good story for you. Did you know that our new pharmaceutical can give you everlasting life and make you happy forever? It’s awesome and only costs $124 a month but is covered by “medical” insurance!, let me send five boxes and also I’ll buy your wife a new TV for Christmas.”

Joe: “Oh, PR man, I guess so? I know I’m supposed to have journalistic ethics, but bullcrap, I want to be happy and I don’t make more than $35,000 a year at my job here, so I guess I’ll take the new TV too.”

PR: “Oh good, I’ll send over that case. I’m going to send you a bottle of Jack Daniels too, so you can drink away the fact that you make 5% of how much I make selling people poison.”

Joe: “Oh, thanks! I just ran out of my last bottle of Jack.”

PR: “It’s a good thing too, because company X is also your main advertising sponsor. If you hadn’t run the story I would have pulled the ads and you’d be out of a job! Cool huh? It’s like a giant corporation controls your life and everyone else’s. This must be what power feels like. Muahhahahaha!”

Joe: “I hate my job.”

This is not an exaggeration. The mainstream journalism world really does work like this. Every single story you see on the news is a collaboration between a company that wants to make money, a political organization that wants to stay in power, or a religious organization with enough money to throw at a good marketing team and a journalist.

This isn’t to say that this is wrong, it’s just reality.

This wasn’t always the case, but because journalism is tied to two of the most expensive mediums to maintain on the planet — printing on newspaper and broadcasting on TV costs so much that it’s a delicate system to maintain.

When the budget is low, the first element to go out the door is the truth. Most of the good writers you knew from your magazines and newspapers a few years ago have quit and moved on to more profitable ventures. I know, because I didn’t stay in the journalism industry and most of my friends didn’t either. The people left in journalism are sad lifers and people who aren’t smart enough to find better ways of helping to save the planet.

Now that you know that, here’s what I want you to do:

1. Double check facts on the Internet before you assume that what you’re seeing on the TV is true.

2. Realize that all information can also be manipulation.

3. Consider cutting TV news and the newspaper out of your life entirely. There are better ways to get information, most of what you read in the newspaper doesn’t apply to your own life. You can do without it.

4. Use your time to concentrate on what you can control in your life and others.

When you’re conscious of the fact that you’re being manipulated, you’re able to defend yourself against it. This is true with advertising, this is true with television, it’s also true of the blogs you read.

Sometimes the difference between being asleep and awake is simply the ability to ask a simple question: “what is the truth?”

Sometimes the truth will surprise you.

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Was any of that hard to hear? Do you feel the urge to email me and tell me that you hate my blog and the ideas that it’s putting in your head? Maybe consider unsubscribing to my blog and then go subscribe to Darren Rowse’s new blog Feel Gooder, it’s guaranteed to give you one tip a day that will make you feel good about yourself no matter how much your life sucks.

Or you can stick around and we can figure out how to bend reality to our will, become superhuman, and take over the world. In my opinion, life is too awesome to waste doing stupid shit.

Red pill, blue pill. It’s your choice. Swallow it whole –> sign up for free updates via EMAIL or RSS. Follow me on Twitter or become my friend on Facebook (don’t friend me if you’re a zombie please.)

Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.

When people meet me, they instantly observe that I have achieved an interesting social position within society — one that most people don’t have. I have no schedule, I am required to be nowhere, no one tells me to do anything. I simply am what I am on any given day.

I like to refer to this as complete autonomy.

In order to do this though, I had to learn a few incredibly important skills that allowed me the use of systems which grant me this freedom, autonomy, the ability to do whatever I want.

Some people look at me and assume that someone else must be paying my bills for me. I used to look at people who live this way and assume the same thing: “He must be a trust fund baby.” I assure you, this is not the case.

My parents both work very hard for their money, and while they’ve given me more than they ever needed to, they certainly didn’t give me a trust fund that pays out every month. As most of you know from Minimalist Business, I was able achieve complete autonomy by learning about systems inherent to the Internet etherspace which allowed me to automate my business.

In a sense, the internet takes care of me in exchange for the value that I added to it.

This is how Chris Guillebeau makes his living. This is how Tammy Strobel makes her living. This is how Colin Wright and Miles Fitzgerald are designing their startup Ebookling, and how Maren Kate is designing her startup Zirtual.

Value added to the Internet = Internet takes care of you.

I want you all to figure out how to do this, but it will take a leap of faith in order to for you to cross over. The systems that you were told about before are broken, and you’ve got to suspend your belief in them long enough to realize that there is another system.

For some of you it won’t be hard to suspend belief in a broken system, just look down at your unemployment check, or glance up from your cubicle. It’s not working very much at all.

Some of the most successful newcomers to this scene are ahead of you because they had the courage to burn bridges behind them and embrace the idea that we’ve entered an age where the Internet will care for your well-being.

Defining a new way of thinking about freedom.

To make my next point, I want to put some metaphors into play that I may use for the next few blog posts if they work well.

You’re free to either use these metaphors as imaginary ideas, or you can actually view the world in this way. The difference between metaphor and reality is slim, language is simply a technological construction and can be used in any way that you please. Your perception of reality is also largely an illusion, and can be changed at will.

If you want to see zombies, you will see them.

Ask anyone what they think the most dangerous thing in the world right now is, and they’ll probably still tell you terrorists — when in fact the most dangerous things you can do is drive a car, or sit on a couch too long. Your reality is what you’ve been told or told yourself. I’d rather tell myself than be a servant to someone’s mind control.

Some definitions for a new reality:

Drones. Have you ever walked down the street in the financial district of any major city and look around you? Hordes of people that we call worker drones for a reason. Running back and forth from their desks to get a sandwich. I know about the drone hive cluster, because for a moment I bought into that illusion and I was one of them. Once you’re in, it’s difficult and/or impossible to un-assimilate yourself.

Many people have been convinced by mega-corporations that they need to slave away for 10 hours a day in order to make a little bit to afford their cable bill, where they can then sit down and watch cable news which convinces them that they need to hold onto their job desperately because everyone else is looking for one.

It’s a culture of fear, and some pretty powerful people are pulling the strings. Most drones don’t even know they’re drones, instead they think that this is all there is to life.

Get up, drive to work, sit at a desk, eat a donut, get up from desk, drive home sit in front of TV and eat products made out of corn from the middle of the supermarket, and wonder why they’re so goddamn fat.

You’re fat because you’re being used as a human battery in someone else’s system.

If this is you, I feel bad, but there’s another option.

Superhumans. This metaphor that I’m going to start using for people who’ve escaped the system, who live on their own terms. There are many paths to becoming a superhuman, minimalism is one of the easiest ones. Yoga is another shortcut to becoming a superhuman.

I recently started to realize that over the last year I’ve unintentionally began to draw superhumans towards me, as this blog and its influence grew in power. These are people who’ve found shortcuts around the drone system in order to bend reality to their will. They’re all charismatic, attractive, and incredibly talented.

It really does happen like it does in the movies. You wake up down day and realize that you’ve developed sophisticated control over one of your superpowers — such as passive income, minimalism, yoga, charisma, avatars or veganism, (I don’t actually do all of these things, just some) and slowly over time you realize that your power draws other people to you. You’re a magnet for a certain group of incredible people — and they’ll follow you anywhere — as long as you maintain your superhuman strength.

I’m starting to view minimalism as just one superpower in a network of other powers that I’ve been able to employ over the last few months in order to achieve more with my life.

I realize this is all metaphors (maybe you forgot? I hope you did.) None of us are really from Krypton or anything like that. But look around you, you are starting to realize that you’re surrounded by the living dead, haven’t you? When you drive down the street and glance into other cars you see the scowling faces of other drones.

Maybe they’re scowling back at your dead-eyes, if they could see past their windshield.

This is a cultural split. Those people aren’t alive anymore, they’re simply doing what they’re told. They can’t see freedom if you smacked them in the face with it.

There’s a very real battle going on here, but it’s not being fought with weapons or in the real world. This is a war between the darkness of a society that wants us to be zombies in their artificially constructed cages, and a future that wants us to live free lives supported by a digital world that gives us infinite options.

We’re living in the future… of what?

Over the last few months I’ve been investigating something… a deeper reason for minimalism.

Minimalism is a huge part of my life, and it’s a very real shortcut to becoming Superhuman. The fact is that minimalism is easy for me, and it’s also easy for a lot of other people too. It’s no longer a few people talking about decluttering closets — minimalism is a very real movement that thousands of people have embraced. Hundreds of blogs have sprouted up written by people who are living this lifestyle.

I know this because minimalism didn’t just allow me to stop worrying about money and stuff, it also allowed me to become location-independent, to grow passive income, and freed time in order to practice yoga once or twice a day for the last four months, this allowed me to drop my waist size down from a 32″ to a 29″ improve my overall health and charisma in general.

All of these systems are connected in some way.

This isn’t just minimalism at work, it’s something more, and I’m dedicated to figuring out the answer. Why? Because I know it will help you escape the reality that you’re trapped within to become superhuman and join us on the other side.

A generation of us are now living out of backpacks searching the world for the next great adventure.

The question is:

What is this deeper reason for minimalism?

Why has it become so easy to part with our stuff?

What are the implications of this change?

How can we harness this mysterious force of nature in order to become better than ourselves?

Anyway, I don’t have all of the answers at the moment. I’ve decided to delve headfirst into full-time research mode in order to investigate the implications of this change in the fabric of our very own society.

This mission is not without dangers. I’ve already uncovered some material that has challenged my own thinking, and will definitely challenge yours. I’m even a little worried that there are powers out there who’d rather this information not be made available to you.

There are people who’d rather keep you sitting at your desk. They want you there, because they need you to power their languishing empires.

I’m a little scared, and I know you are too. However, if we’re going to make any changes in our own lives and the lives of others, we have to take risks. Freedom does not come without challenging the status-quo.

I just worry that some of the people in power don’t want to be challenged.

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In the next article, I’m going to go over some very real actionable strategies that you can put into play in order to increase your superhuman powers using this mysterious secret force of nature that I’m investigating.

One of the most important superpowers you can command is the power of automation.

Did you know that you can automatically have my blog come to you? Well you can. Simply sign up for free updates via email or RSS.

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Oh, and don’t forget! The incredible business e-book sale is still going on until Thursday morning at 10 am EST. 1000+ people have already picked up the package (it’s no wonder.) If you’ve been thinking about buying $1052 worth of business education for only $97, don’t wait until 9:59…