1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

This classic book, a fictionalized autobiography, describes the journey on a motorcycle of a father and his son. It takes a while before the story picks up, but then the history of both is slowly revealed. The book is full of philosophic contemplation, such as “What is the definition of quality?” and the difference between rhetoric and dialectic. It has a beautiful ending that literally moved me to tears.

2. Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

Author Jaron Lanier does not have any social media account. That hasn’t impeded him at all, as he is one of the top 25 most influential people over the last 25 years of technological history. In his book he constructs ten very compelling and well supported arguments for removing yourself from social media. On top, he writes it in such a positive and uplifting manner that it is a joy to read.

3. Common Sense by Thomas Paine

With more and more totalitarian control being instigated by governments all over the world, Common Sense is a refreshing pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in the 18th century. In it, he advocates for independence from Great Britain. Written in a clear and persuasive way, Paine gives moral and political arguments to encourage people to fight for egalitarian government.

4. One Red Paperclip by Kyle Macdonald

I had heard the story, but never read the entire story. Kyle Macdonald started a barter experiment. He starts by a paperclip and finally ends up with an entire house. It is a lovely story, written in a light and honest way. Highly recommend for if you see more possibilities in life.

5. Bezmenov World Thought Police 1986 by Tomas Schuman

A candid account of the role that state media played in the KGB’s activities in the Soviet era. Far reaching tactics were used to change the perceived reality of the Soviet Union over an extended period of time. It contains very interesting ideas and concepts that we can find back in today’s world. When you demoralize a society, people will not know anymore what is right or wrong. Hence they become lethargic and subject to totalitarian control.

6. How to Hack Like a Porn Star by Sparc Flow

A fascinating technical story of a real hacker who takes the reader on a fictional journey of hacking a bank. A little bit of IT background will help in understanding the technicalities described in the book, but without one can still follow very well. It demonstrates the vulnerabilities in any complex system architecture. IT security should not be left to the experts alone.

7. The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Edith Eger

The author describes her heart breaking story from being deported to concentration camps in World War II, their liberation and subsequent escape to the United States. Edit Eger became a psychologist and draws wisdom from all her horrifying and her beautiful experiences in life. Deeply moving.

8. TranscEnding the Global Power Game by Armin Risi

A beautiful book which you can purchase directly from the author himself. It is a work that combines the spiritual, philosophy, esotericism, history of mankind, and proven conspiracies and projects it onto the current developments and near term future of this planet.

9. Mutual Aid by Pyotr Kropotkin

Highly thought provoking and fascinating book. Kropotkin reveres Darwin, but rightfully points out that life is more than the mutual struggle for survival. He gives a wealth of examples from the animal kingdom where mutual aid is the predominant drive. Then he investigates primitive tribes and subsequent civilizations and confirms that mutual aid is also prevalent there.

The book triggered me in pondering over the mutual struggle that we experience today, which is mainly caused by a flawed money system which creates artificial scarcity.

10. When Google Met WikiLeaks by Julian Assange

A shocking book that exposes Google’s close ties with the U.S. government, including the NSA and the State Department. It discloses the lies told by its former CEO, Eric Schmidt and the tech company’s dystopian vision for a “new world order”.

And that is why I like to experience of swimming in ice cold water. It offers me to possibility to travel away from this paradigm. It seems like a temporary escape, but I do come back differently afterwards.

Mental hurdles

Before taking the plunge, there are many mental hurdles to take. You know it is not going to be nice and a part of you is revolting. Your mind breaks down the entire effort into many smaller steps. Every step encompasses a decision. The decision to go for a swim, the decision to pack your gear, the decision to go to the water, the decision to get undressed, the decision to step to the edge.

And the biggest one of all is to actually jump in the cold water. You know what is going to happen when you jump, and you know it is not going to be nice. You are actively choosing for discomfort, or flat out spoken, pain.

This is the first benefit. Daring to choose for something that is uncomfortable. pushes your mental and physical limits. Not out of competition with others, just with yourself. This is a training that will pay itself back many times later.

When you submerge yourself, many things happen. First of all, as you can imagine, you put your body under tremendous physical stress. Your system gets in a shock. It screams to get out.

Calmness

The key here is to remain calm. Pace your breathing, one breathe at a time, in and out. I imagine myself being a captain on a ship, my body. I am only the captain, I am not the ship. I hear and feel the hull is suffering, but I also know the ship is very well capable of coping with these extreme conditions. My mind is safe in the boat cockpit.

Let your body do what it knows what to do: adjust. It takes around a minute before you notice. Your body is protecting the most vital organs which resides in your core. It therefore circulates less blood to the auxiliary organs. You start noticing that your body can handle these conditions a bit better.

Some people like to bathe, I prefer to swim. At a certain point I decide to return. When I turn around, I see the distance back to the shore. Somehow it is always much more than I thought it would be.

And this is where your personal leadership is trained. You are under extreme pressures, but you also realise it is of utmost important to remain calm. Panic is not an option. The only way out is to swim back, stroke by stroke, meter by meter. What keeps me going is the thought of being on the shore again.

As I focus on the next meter ahead of me, I have no time to think of anything. My pressing appointments, the depressive state of the world or the cashier that was not nice to me, they have all become irrelevant. What a bliss.

Euphoria

As I reach the shore, I climb out of the water. I feel a sense of euphoria, but I do not let myself indulge in it. It could lead me into taking unnecessary risks. I know it is important to dry yourself as soon as possible and immediately get warmly dressed. Your body will notice that the dangerous conditions have disappeared and your systems starts opening up again. It circulating the warm blood away from your core to your limbs. This can result in the after drop: your core temperature going down.

As I warm up, all the challenges of the rest of the day don’t seem so heavy any more. The body can handle it, I just need to remain calm.

Please note: if you feel inspired to do swim in cold water, please prepare carefully. Read thoroughly the information you can find on the internet and ask for experiences, advice and assistance from others.

I never dared to share this with others, as this is not socially accepted in the world we live in. Furthermore, I did not understand the emotion. I did not know what it was that “they” did not see; I certainly did not see it either. Hence, I repressed this feeling. Thanks to a strong intellect, I was able to adjust myself fairly well in society for the first three decades of my life.

But life taught me that things are not always as they seem. I started a quest to bring me closer in line with that which houses in me. Bit by bit, step by step, I slowly began to intellectually understand what we, me included, did not see.

The issues in the world are merely symptoms of the real issue: the current paradigm. No solution, how inventive it may be, will suffice to solve the challenges. However, when we embark on a mission to discover the fundamental mysteries of life: who we are, where we come from and why we are here, we can actively build and grow towards a new paradigm.

We can already start today. Each individual can start with their own inner revolution towards sovereignty. If you want to start that journey and build a radically better future, I invite you to read my book Path to Sovereignty.

History has shown the great dangers in blindly following one belief or the other.

Is there another way to approach this? Can there be a way where it is unnecessary to choose a side? Can both sides can be right AND be wrong? Can they both be relevant and irrelevant? That would require a new paradigm of thinking. Jiddu Krishnamurti spoke about this belief dynamic.

“To be a theist or an atheist, to me, are both absurd. If you knew what truth is, what God is, you would neither be a theist nor an atheist, because in that awareness belief is unnecessary. It is the man who is not aware, who only hopes and supposes, that looks to belief or to disbelief, to support him, and to lead him to act in a particular way.

Now, if you approach it quite differently, you will find out for yourselves, as individuals, something real which is beyond all the limitations of beliefs, beyond the illusion of words. But that—the discovery of truth, or God—demands great intelligence, which is not assertion of belief or disbelief, but the recognition of the hindrances created by lack of intelligence. So to discover God or truth—and I say such a thing does exist, I have realized it—to recognize that, to realize that, mind must be free of all the hindrances which have been created throughout the ages, based on self-protection and security. You cannot be free of security by merely saying that you are free. To penetrate the walls of these hindrances, you need to have a great deal of intelligence, not mere intellect. Intelligence, to me, is mind and heart in full harmony; and then you will find out for yourself, without asking anyone, what that reality is.”

from The Book of Life by J. Krishnamurti

What do you think?