@I_Am_The_ICT The Optimal person would be a manifestation of a proper World view, displaying behavior that's anchored in undeniable universal truths & metaphysical story, from which flows all structured understanfing of the intricate puzzle pieces of the world, and one of them would be trading
I noticed early that the brightest ones were often the most cold, and i didn't understand that for a long time. i thought intelligence was supposed to make you good, but it doesn't. it just makes you capable, and capable without something to kneel to is scarier than stupid ever was. the serpent was the cleverest animal in the garden, not the strongest, not the largest, the cleverest, and that is where the fall came from, not through ignorance, through the cold precision of a mind that could see through everything except its own hunger
@I_Am_The_ICT Throughout my years in this industry, I have come to the following conclusion: To make it in trading, you have make it outside of trading. I have never seen anyone who ever succeeded in trading without having their life outside it in check first. Ever. Its paradoxical but true..
Your 20s feel like a storm because your individuality is being born.
At 21, the Ego fully descends into earthly life.
Not the ego of vanity, pride -
but the true "I," the spiritual center that can say, "I am."
Before 21, this Ego is present but not yet anchored.
It is sheltered by parents, education, culture, and larger spiritual forces.
The human being is carried.
At 21, the carrying stops.
For the first time, the Ego stands on its own feet.
A person becomes capable of bearing their own destiny.
This is why the years after 21 feel turbulent.
The questions deepen:
Who am I?
What am I here to do?
What direction is truly mine?
Until 21, life is mostly inherited.
After 21, life becomes authored.
Steiner calls this the awakening of individuality -
not because freedom is achieved,
but because freedom becomes possible.
The passions of adolescence no longer need to rule the soul.
The Ego can take the reins.
Desire can be directed.
Impulse transformed into conscious action.
This is the beginning of self-mastery.
And for Steiner, this work is not just psychological.
It imprints itself into the whole human being; posture, gesture, expression, even the physical body.
The soul begins to write its biography into the flesh.
This is why 21-28 are so important.
The Ego has arrived, but it must learn its instrument:
How to think independently.
How to form relationships freely.
How to recognize destiny rather than drift through circumstances.
21 is not the completion of development.
It is the deepest point of incarnation.
Everything before prepares it.
Everything after depends on it.
Your 20s are for waking up your thinking so at 28 you can build the life you want.
The saddest people i know are not the ones who took a risk and failed. they at least have something to tell you about on a thursday night. the saddest people i know are the ones who got the safe version of everything. and there is this specific thing they all do. they ask you about your life with too much interest. they ask too many questions. they lean in when you tell them about something stupid you did. and you can see it in their eyes, they wanted to be in that sentence, but they chose to watch
Somewhere there is a man who quit his tax job to open a bakery, and everybody around him talked about it like someone died. his wife was terrified. the bakery is probably failing, the lights are on late and he looks tired. but he was different before. he used to stand like he was waiting for permission to be in a room. now he just stands there. the bakery is going under, probably, but whatever was missing from that man for fifteen years came back. and everybody is so busy feeling sorry for him that nobody noticed he is the only person who actually likes mornings now. for whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will find it.
"What uplifts one soul can crush another. The same principle fire warms or burns depending on the vessel."
Truth is not passive.
It is not just “information.” It is a force.
The same idea, the same experience, the same piece of knowledge; can elevate one person into clarity and strength,
while throwing another into confusion, arrogance, or imbalance.
Why?
Because it doesn’t act in a vacuum. It acts through you.
If your inner life is ordered:
disciplined thinking, steady will, clean intention -
then higher truths become fuel.
They strengthen you.
But if your inner life is chaotic; driven by impulse, ego, or instability —
those same truths become destructive.
They don’t build; they distort.
This is why real spiritual traditions never begin with “secrets of the universe.”
They begin with:
Self-mastery
Moral discipline
Inner structure
Because without that, you’re not being “opened”… you’re being overwhelmed.
People think more knowledge = more power.
But the reality is:
More knowledge = more intensity.
And intensity amplifies whatever you already are.
When truth arrives, will it refine you… or expose you?
Things that expose what you actually worship
-what you fantasize about on the walk home alone.
-what you pretend to hate but check on constantly.
-what you read when you cannot sleep.
-what you would steal if nobody would ever find out.
-what you would lie about under oath.
-what you do for free that others do for money.
-what makes you feel chosen.
-what makes you feel erased.
-what you cannot watch without crying.
-what you can watch without blinking.
-what you do for money that you would never do for love
-what you reach for first in the morning, before your eyes open fully
-what your mind returns to when pain enters the room.
-what you will not give up, even when it is destroying you
-what you defend instinctively, even when you know it was wrong
-what you sacrifice for silently, without announcement or record.
-who you imagine watching you when nobody is.
-whose approval would make you finally rest.
-whose opinion of you would ruin you, if it was spoken aloud
-what you hide from the person you sleep next to tonight.
-what you hide from yourself.
-what you would trade years for, if God offered you the exchange.
-what you would refuse, even if the price of refusal was your life.
-what name you whisper when the fear comes, and there is no other witness.
That name is your God
Some men rise so high that God has to break their legs to bring them back. and it only shows at the end, when they're crawling, and everybody thinks they fell but they didn't fall. they were cut down. and there is a difference between falling and being felled. God does not warn you. he does not send an angel with a message. he takes the knee first and then you spend the rest of your life on the ground wondering what happened. but he knew all along, because the hunger that made you climb was never yours. it was the serpent's voice telling you higher, higher, and God let you climb because free will is his test and every rung higher was a rung further from him. the men who rise that high don't rise out of pride. they rise out of a void, a void so deep it never fills, and God sees that void and he mourns for you because he knows the fall is coming and he knows you won't understand it when it comes. and it will only show at the end, not in the middle when you still had time to kneel, but at the end when you're finally still, in the quiet room where all your works, all your empire, all your conquests mean nothing. and you look down at your hands and realize they've been holding dust this whole time
“Our juvenile pride in rejecting any attempt to understand evil is potentially catastrophic. For obviously we cannot manage or control a process we do not understand. This is so self-evident it hurts. We must understand evil, not only abstractly, but intimately. We must grasp what makes an evildoer tick, their outlook, motivations, the psychological rewards they reap from doing evil. We must be able to visit the rooms in the palace of mind that motivate evil acts, without losing ourselves in the process. And yes, I do see the obvious danger this entails—empathizing with evil may tickle dangerous, dormant potentials within us—but it is a risk we must take. For the alternative is to be at the mercy of evil while giving expression to the unfathomable, Promethean forces underlying the primordial lack that drives us.”
BERNARDO KASTRUP
The Daimon and the Soul of the West (2025). Art: Michele Melcher, 'Withered Pride' (after 'The Genius of Evil' by Guillaume Geefs), 2023
The most hopelessly romantic women are the least capable of being sluts.
When a woman like this falls in love with a man whom she respects and looks up to, the experience becomes physiological, and it reorganizes her body.
Something in her softens and tilts towards him, her attention begins to orbit him, she starts breathing him in without noticing, and his presence regulates her nervous system in strange ways. When he walks into a room, her spine straightens slightly, voice lowers, eyes widen, and her body becomes aware of itself in relation to his.
Once she has submitted to the idea of him, she begins to become hungry for him in ways that embarrass her own dignity. She wants proximity and leaning into him, watching the rise and fall of his chest, memorizing the cadence of his breathing, breathing in more of his scent, his gestures, the careless way he moves through the day begins to imprint itself into her nervous system. She just studies him.
This is unconscious at first, her eyes begin to linger, she notices how he drinks a glass of juice, how his shoulders shift when he laughs, the small pauses in his speech, the way his hands move when he explains something...these details become strange data points that her mind starts collecting and reuminating over.
While this all happens, she starts wanting to belong to him in ways that sound degrading if you say them out loud; she wants to be claimed, absorbed, consumed, rearranged by the gravity of his existence. Her ego loosens its grip and lets his presence take over.
Part of her watches him and imagines the future where she starts seeing him as the man who could hold her children, whose bloodline would move through her body, while another part imagines something more animalistic about how, on a random Tuesday evening, he pulls her close without warning and presses his lips and himself against her.
She starts being more devoted to him physically when her gaze lingers too long, her body leans towards him even when she is trying not to, her attention stays fixed on him, and there is something indecent about the degree to which she wants him.
And the society's language finds ways to make this sound crude by using words like possession and belonging, which just gesture towards a psychological truth that rarely holds any weight in these cases.
She just wants to be everything for him.
Every morning of your life should start with a deep meditation and then a walk in nature.
Be with yourself until that religious feeling arises where you look forward towards eternity.
Once your thought forms are pure and your self remembering begins, you can now reward yourself with computer and iphone.
Go make money in an ethical way and return to the religious feeling before your bedtime prayer. This keeps the nervous system only stressed in the middle of your day, your intentional suffering.
This keeps you young and healthy.
Always knowing who to meet and where to go.
Every man who reads too many books before he has lived goes mad in a specific way. first he is gentle because books are gentle. then he is arrogant because books make him feel superior to the unlettered. then he is desperate because he knows everything and can do nothing. then he is finally dangerous because he takes his first real beating from life and realizes all his knowledge did not protect him and now he must rebuild everything from the ground
The reason this feels so good is because your brain was taxing you for a week straight and you didn’t even notice.
Every time that undone task crossed your mind, your anterior cingulate cortex fired a conflict signal. Small. Subtle. But metabolically expensive. Your brain was running a background process on that 5-minute task 24/7 for 7 days, burning glucose and generating low-grade cortisol each time it surfaced.
Neuroscientists call this the Zeigarnik Effect. Incomplete tasks occupy more mental RAM than completed ones. Your brain literally cannot let go of open loops. So that “5 minute task” was never 5 minutes. It was 5 minutes of execution plus 168 hours of ambient cognitive load.
That relief you feel when you finally do it? That’s a dopamine spike from closing the loop combined with a cortisol drop from removing the threat signal. Your body just stopped paying a week-long neurochemical tax on a debt of 300 seconds.
This tells you everything about how procrastination actually works. The loop runs like this: task feels slightly aversive → amygdala flags it → you avoid it → avoidance provides immediate relief → brain learns avoidance = reward → task stays open → background stress accumulates → task feels MORE aversive than it originally was.
The fix is stupidly simple and Huberman talks about this constantly. You don’t need motivation. You need a forcing function that bypasses the amygdala’s threat assessment. Set a timer for 90 seconds. Tell yourself you’ll stop after 90 seconds. Your prefrontal cortex can override 90 seconds of discomfort. Once you start, the dopamine system switches from avoidance to pursuit, and the task completes itself.
The 5-minute task was never hard. The starting was hard. And every hour you waited made starting harder.
Reincarnation isn’t a decorative spiritual belief or a myth meant to comfort people about death; it’s presented as the structural law behind human evolution itself.
The “I,” the enduring center of identity, is not finished in one lifetime because one lifetime is far too narrow to exhaust the possibilities of growth.
A single biography gives you one culture, one temperament, one historical moment, one set of challenges.
That’s not enough to shape a being capable of genuine freedom and wisdom.
If humanity evolves across ages; intellectually, morally, culturally — then the individual must evolve with it.
The same Ego re-enters the stream of history again and again, not randomly, but to absorb the new conditions each epoch offers.
In one life it encounters a more instinctive world; in another, a world of sharpened logic; in another, a world of technological abstraction.
Each period imprints something different.
The soul becomes layered; not just psychologically, but historically.
From this perspective, talents, inclinations, even moral struggles are not isolated accidents of genetics or upbringing.
They are the continuation of unfinished work.
What appears as “natural ability” may be the ripened fruit of effort carried across centuries.
What appears as irrational fear or resistance may be the shadow of past imbalances still seeking resolution.
Reincarnation, then, explains why growth feels cumulative.
Why certain ideas feel instantly familiar. Why moral development often feels like remembering rather than learning.
The Ego is not built from scratch each time; it gathers, integrates, refines. Life becomes less a one-time test and more a long-form education in becoming fully human.
And most importantly: evolution is not just biological. It is spiritual and conscious. Humanity as a whole moves upward through epochs, and the individual participates in that ascent through repeated earthly lives.
Without reincarnation, history would educate the species but not the person. With reincarnation, history becomes the classroom of the soul.
The people who make it to the top of anything are running from something or toward something with a force that normal people do not have access to. and you can call it drive but drive is what normal people have. this is different. this is a hole that cannot be filled and they discovered that achievement numbs it temporarily so they achieve and achieve and achieve and the hole is still there
the grind content is a joke. you cannot learn this. you cannot motivate your way into this. the people posting about discipline have a manageable relationship with rest. the real ones cannot rest. rest is where the thing that is wrong with them lives. so they keep moving
this is a warning. do not envy them. they are in a prison that looks like a palace and most of them know it
“The devil is the sum of the darkness of human nature. He who lives in the light strives toward being the image of God; he who lives in the dark strives toward being the image of the devil. Because I wanted to live in the light, the sun went out for me when I touched the depths. It was dark and serpentlike. I united myself with it and did not overpower it. I took my part of the humiliation and subjugation upon myself, in that I took on the nature of the serpent. If I had not become like the serpent, the devil, the quintessence of everything serpentlike, would have held this bit of power over me. This would have given the devil a grip and he would have forced me to make a pact with him just as he also cunningly deceived Faust. But I forestalled him by uniting myself with the serpent, just as a man unites with a woman.”
CARL JUNG
The Red Book
Art: Jose Gabriel Alegria Sabogal