You may now unfasten your seatbelt.
Stretch a bit.
Today’s contemplation is about cultivation. You might say, "Hey David, what’s with this cultivation thing you keep talking about that can take a lifetime?"
Think of cultivation as a record creation system. The term "cultivation" stems from our history as farmers, where action leads to reaction: Plant a seed, nurture it, and it grows into something else. Cultivation takes time, work, focus, and many other elements.
Basic Level
- Body: You cultivate your body when you work out, ensuring strong health later in life.
- Health: You cultivate health by sleeping well, eating healthily, drinking enough water, and letting your body's ecosystem thrive.
- Intellect: You cultivate your intellect to achieve more with less, enhancing your value and results.
- Relationships: You cultivate your relationships by spending quality time with your loved ones.
- Inner Self: You cultivate your inner self by pondering the what, how, and why—starting with yourself.
You can also cultivate yourself in specific categories, for example:
- Emotional Intelligence: Practice empathy and self-awareness.
- Professions: This is self-explanatory. The hustle and all it takes to become great—hopefully as unique as possible—in the niche you are playing with so many man-made coins. This is a very important cultivation.
- Creativity: Engage in activities that challenge your mind, such as painting, writing, or brainstorming new ideas with family and friends. Narrating stories and having fun is a great way to be creative and do pure, perfect science.
- Money: Simply earn more than you spend. Learn about budgeting, investing, and saving. That way, you will make some money. However, I wouldn't focus too much on money—just enough. It's easy to get lost in the pursuit of wealth.
- Compassion: Cultivate compassion by truly seeing everyone—seeing their lives, dreams, and challenges—and acting upon them. If you can do something, great. If you can't, don't let it hurt you. Compassion can be painful, but also incredibly rewarding.
- Resilience: Just like working out, challenging yourself and facing problems head-on will make you strong.
- Gratitude: Cultivate gratitude by focusing on it. There are techniques for it, but I often experience these "moments" in fractions of a second. Sometimes it takes effort to maintain that state for long. A shortcut for gratitude is doing something small that you can feel proud of, then feeling thankful for that experience. Build on it, do it again, and soon you'll enter a state of constant, natural, glowing gratitude. This is a topic on it's own.
Proficient Level
- Power: Power can be cultivated, just as you cultivate your body to be strong or your gut bacteria to be powerful against anything. You can cultivate power itself, either through presence, authority, or influence. These are combinations of many types of cultivation and can be physical, psychological, vibrational, or event-driven (exercising your power of will).
- Luck: To me, luck does not exist as an independent entity but rather as a byproduct of multiple elements such as persistence, diligence, and synchronization. It's an art, albeit a complex one to develop, because, in the end, it's not luck at all—it's an incredible sense of timing and precision. This precision is achieved through a strong pulsar and fast-spinning vortices and vertices within you. It's a fascinating topic to explore, and I will probably dive deeper into it another time. What we call luck is an attracted and event-driven type of force.
- Control: This is a good one. Self-control is the foundation of any type of true control. It's an art that can be cultivated extensively thus requires a lot of effort. There's a saying that controlling the tongue is a big deal, much like how a horse is controlled with a bridle. But it goes beyond that—self-control starts with your own motivations and delves deeper, even touching upon your purpose of being in the first place. Self-control is as complex as exploring outer space. In fact, it's more complex and challenging, but the rewards are eternal. Try controlling your thoughts and emotions—what a ride.
- Influence: Influence is a fascinating concept, as it combines many elements yet can lack others. Some people with great influence achieve a lot without much power, while others may contribute far less despite having greater resources and power. Influence should be cultivated responsibly, as it can generate negative karma if not used wisely. Influence can easily hurt if not handled with care. It's a powerful force that, when wielded with integrity and purpose, can create a profound impact on many. Always remember, true influence is not just about what you achieve, but how you uplift and inspire yourself along the way, thereby influencing everything and everyone around you. It's important to monitor your influence closely to avoid missing the mark and inadvertently steering towards negative polarities of life. True influence—just like control, begins from within.
Advanced Level
- Cultivating is an awesome act in the realm of doing; it's something we naturally engage in all the time. Yet, in the realm of cultivating, we obtain something in return. Any cultivation needs to be grounded, used, put to work, and transformed into something else quickly; otherwise, it can burn you from within. Just like an electrical current needs grounding, so does anyone with a certain amount of cultivation. If it’s too heavy, it can consume you. Cultivating too much knowledge can generate unnecessary stress that impacts your health. Do more, always.
- Accumulating anything generates extra weight, and you need just enough baggage to fly high—no more. Otherwise, the extra weight and its karma will find a way to express itself, potentially bringing you down, especially when you are accelerating upward.
- Daily cultivation is inevitable. Monitor your thoughts and emotions, but mostly your emotions. Pay extra attention to your thoughts to see what type of emotions you are cultivating. This piece of information is vital to understanding cultivation.
Master Level
Through this book, "The Joy of Doing," I aim to inspire myself on a daily basis and hopefully others to cultivate and pursue divinity, specifically through the pursuit of divine virtues. The power we were given through the act of "doing" is one of the most cherished gifts of any conscious being. I mean, I could be doing whatever I want, yet I choose to be here, devoting my whole self to crafting and feeling every single word I write.
Being focused and present in this task, even if it's just for 30 minutes or 2 hours a day, is a victory the very moment I begin. Every moment I manage to stay in this state of mind is a win.
I'm far from mastering any of these virtues, yet, that does not stop me from focusing on them and doing my best to cultivate them. Even if all I can attain are their breadcrumbs, it's a polarity of life I voluntarily chose.
These virtues—such as love, compassion, wisdom, integrity, humility, courage, patience, gratitude, generosity, and resilience—are not just fleeting qualities but are the very essence of what elevates humanity. They are timeless principles that, when consistently practiced, transform our lives and the lives of those around us.
- We can't pursue divinity while in a body without "doing" something to express it.
- We must go beyond words and cultivate our virtues with a clear goal, a purpose, and through actionable efforts.
Checkpoints
Now, before carrying on the rest of the day let me share a few recommendations.
- Devote yourself to only keep positive, constructive, and rightful habits.
- Devote yourself to host and harvest positive and constructive feelings about everyone and everything around you.
- Devote yourself to create good thoughts about everything in your life. Monitor every thought.
- Devote yourself to say positive, constructive things about everything and everyone you talk about. This can be mastered.
- Devote yourself to transform any negative feeling, thought, or word into its positive counterpart. Polarize everything to the light.
- Devote yourself to drop what is not convenient to accumulate after considering the previous commitments.
The more you try, the more you like it and the easier it gets. Take it from someone who knows the abyss pretty well.
There is so much I want to share about this topic, but will leave it for the final edit.
Rest
At this level, without turbulence, we can enjoy some champagne now and watch some soccer.
