Your Game: the mental, physical, domestic scenarios of your life.
Just remember that the reason that you must sort out your Game immediately is to propel yourself that much further, and faster, toward your own authentic Livelihood.
Strategically, claim all free advantages available for your progress toward your own Livelihood – including proper sleep, diet, exercise, grooming, etc.
Nailing these aspects of your Game either gives you free superpowers, or, their absence holds you back.
The overall attitude we’re offering right now toward what we’ve called your ‘Game’ of personal maintenance is meant to be more cut-and-dried and blunt than other treatments of this topic you may have seen. That’s part of why we call it a game.
The reason being: there is danger here of getting too caught up in your personal needs and physical constitution – whereas our goal (that is, what’s necessary) is just to ‘sort out’ this dimension of life quickly and without much fuss.
Why? – in order to focus that much more on Livelihood. When your Game is on point, so to speak, you’re less distracted generally and benefit from more advantages for attaining Livelihood. In other words, a warning: beware not to procrastinate by obsessing over these personal issues in avoidance of confronting the necessity of attaining Livelihood.
Please just keep that in mind as you touch upon the following aspects of your Game.
About Sleep
To be moving, thinking, and alive, a human being is obliged to sleep, which is being fully unconscious, still, nonthinking, and yet still alive. This is one of those hardwired play of opposites that exist within the human condition, but it’s a weird paradox that all creatures experience to some extent.
Understanding that, you can’t really think that it’s somehow okay to cheat or skimp on your sleep – that would be like a delusion that you’ll be able to keep using your phone normally with a low battery. Requiring sleep on a daily basis is, if you like, an artistic constraint inherent in our lives. Accept it, and, understand that as a hardwired, existential constraint, sleep provides a useful and orienting backstop, and traction, for everything we find ourselves doing.
‘If I don’t sleep 11 to 12 hours per day, it’s not right. If I don’t have that amount of sleep, I hurt myself’ – Roger Federer explained.
tennisworldusa.org
Exercise & Sport
Getting golden sleep every night is the real linchpin for the other aspects of your Game we’re covering here. Interestingly, sport and sleep dovetail together: once you start playing a sport (something athletic, difficult) then you crave proper rest and you will sleep better; once you start sleeping deeply and enough hours, then you have so much energy that you will need a sport.
That synergy between sleep and exercise really ensures functionality, in the most visceral sense, for the rest of the aspects of your Game that we’re covering. In fact, without starting to sleep with gratitude for your existence, and exercise enough, you cannot absorb the Escape Velocity Training as deeply as if you had done.
Diet
Here’s another one of those weird necessities of mortality as well as much of our culture: eating stuff. That includes shopping, then preparing and cooking foods. And, today there is a myriad of diet strategies people are following. Diet is one of the trickiest aspects of our Game to get right – and often this is a long process of trial and error. So, we’re going to make this extremely simple.
For the present, then, let’s just say this:
If your diet is atrocious, then find the fastest way to improve it without causing extra health problems from the shock of sudden change.
If you’ve already done the diet quest and what you eat now is fine, then good, there’s no need to focus on the diet aspect of your Game too much – although you can always buy better quality foods and improve diet without much fuss.
In truth, what we eat (along with our entire conception of the act of eating, and food’s symbology in other areas of life) does matter in the most fundamental ways. So we don’t want to underestimate it.
However, for the same reasons, our diet is often a site of much neurosis and distraction – especially when taking socio-cultural conditioning into account. So rather than harboring the aim of perfecting your diet right now, it’s better to think in terms of improving it, certainly, but mainly stabilizing in that degree of improvement.
As you reach escape velocity from the stress of survival mode (itself a trigger for most food troubles), you can focus more easily and more effectively upon your diet. Once you are experiencing Livelihood, then you can focus on what and how you eat as much as you want!
Grooming
This is a fun one. Grooming mainly includes your clothing, and ironing it, as well cleaning and trimming your body parts, basically. Yet the essence and importance of this aspect of your Game should not be underestimated: excellent grooming is being kind to oneself, and so it naturally shows the world your standard of personal excellence and self-respect – not to mention, you’ll just smell better.
Again, get free advantages for reaching Livelihood by grooming, period. Clothing as a technological medium (not fashion) in particular is worthy of special focus, which is why it has its own segment about half-way through this Training. You could start reflecting beforehand upon your attitudes towards your own attire (which of course represents the self-image you project, whether consciously or not). How could you use clothing as a tool bringing more advantages in your Game?
Anyway, if you have not been on point about grooming hitherto, then – well, you’re just going to enjoy how you feel after you adopt better ‘health and beauty’ tactics. You will appreciate the unexpected self-love, guaranteed. And you will be less cranky, to boot.
Best of all, your own well-groomed state should be a constant symbol and reminder of the sheer excellence of your plan to reach escape velocity.
So, guess what! You’ve reached the end of your first day of the Training. Well done. If any of this material has stuck, or, it has made you rethink your personal, domestic Game (including how you think about the importance of things like sleep, exercise, and food), then changes will start to appear in your behaviors organically. From the inside-out, if you like.
Always remember: understanding = action. We also can say it this way: authentic action starts with deep understanding.
Download your morning micro-podcast (its under 5 min), to hear tomorrow shortly after rising – or, you can just listen from the webpage player. Then, answer the question below, in order to cue up tomorrow’s lesson page.
(to download this file, click the options dots on the player)
PLAY Micro-podcast for EVT Day 02
The Philosophical Intelligence Agency 