The Inner Intent Meeting External Opportunity

Today I am giving a workshop on the mastery of life by participating, actively, in the cycles of life.

I am well prepared, but this morning I realised something important: my focus is not on me. It is on the people in the room and the experience I can create for them.

For four hours, I want to invite them to operate consciously from their own identity.

That may sound simple, but perhaps it is more unusual than we realise.

We always operate from identities. They shape how we interpret situations, how we respond to others, what we believe is possible and what actions we take. Yet much of the time identity remains like an operating system running quietly in the background.

What happens when we bring it into the foreground?

When I become conscious of who I am, something changes in how I engage with the circumstances around me.

And then another dimension appears: the cycles of life.

There are times for beginning, times for building, times for consolidating, and times for letting go. Becoming aware of these rhythms matters because how can we purposefully engage with the cycles of life if we are not first conscious of the identity that is engaging with them?

This brought me to what may be my noblest thought this morning:

I unite thought, identity and cycle.

It is the inner intent meeting external opportunity.

Perhaps mastery of life is not about controlling life at all. It is about becoming conscious enough to participate in it.

We step back. We observe the conditions. We recognise what is needed. We become conscious of who we are in relation to that need. And then we act.

For me, that is increasingly what self-mastery means: mindful participation in life with certainty of identity.

And perhaps it offers something more.

When we constantly fight circumstances, life becomes friction. But when identity, intention, action and circumstance begin to meet, friction can become flow.

Then life becomes less something to conquer and more something to dance with—

a dance with life in its natural rhythm of being and becoming.

Writing noble thoughts

Here I am, sitting in the morning hours, putting my most noble thoughts into writing.

There is something almost defiant about writing by hand in an age of technology. We type, dictate, prompt, copy and paste. Everything becomes faster. Yet somewhere in all this speed, the art and secret of writing is being lost.
We are built for contemplation and reflection.
Technology makes us look ancient, like a horse compared to a car. But a car can never be a horse, and a horse will never be a car. Perhaps that is the point. We should not measure the value of being human by how well we compete with our technology.
Our inner consistency, our integrity, our capacity to love — these are things that express our uniqueness as human beings.
I have written before. I have abandoned the practice and returned to it again. I have never regretted returning.
I have, however, regretted the times of abandonment, because something of value was lost during those periods. It was not always by choice. Often work pressure simply crowded out those quiet morning hours of contemplation.
But I am here now.
I am back to sit, to engage with the slow flow of writing, and to enter more deeply into virtue.
Time is not on my side, and because of that my choices matter more than ever. I must choose the things that matter.
Age is not my enemy. It comes in equal measure for all of us.
Perhaps age is more like a pencil sharpener.
It slowly takes something away, but in doing so it asks us to become sharper. It asks us to discern what is important and what is not. What deserves our remaining time? What deserves our attention? What deserves expression?
And so, this morning, I sit with my pen.
Writing my noblest thoughts is important to me today.

The short walk to a revelation of self

Which relationship has taught you the most about yourself?

Sometimes we step into a relationship that is short, but its effect is enduring.

In 2024, Grand Rune Master Jesse Pryor stepped into my life. He reached out to me as one Grand Rune Master to another. We came from the same lineage, both having studied the runes under Grand Rune Master Karl Hans Welz.

Jesse had started his journey about ten years before me. There was even a period when we were both working closely with Karl, yet somehow our paths never crossed.

Until much later.

Recently, my fellow rune practitioner—and by then, my friend—passed away. I found myself going back through our conversations over the last two years. Reading them again revealed much about Jesse, but unexpectedly, they also revealed much about me.

I learned that two people can hold very different views and still have a constructive conversation. We don’t always need to accept or reject the other person’s viewpoint. Sometimes the value lies simply in allowing the discussion to throw light on something so that both of us can see more clearly.

I learned that we don’t need to judge another person when they falter or fail. There is enormous value in finding a relationship that provides a safe space to simply be human—with our weaknesses, struggles and doubts. These things do not necessarily make us less. They make us real.

And I learned the value of humour.

Jesse had a wonderful ability to use humour to soften the harsh edges of life. There is something elegant about dismantling an overwhelmingly serious issue with a little humour. Suddenly the monster in the room looks more like a cuddly kitten.

Through Jesse, I discovered that I have the capacity to hold another person’s view with respect without becoming attached to it. I learned that I have weaknesses, but they do not have to define me. And although I have never thought of myself as “the funny guy,” I discovered that there is almost always room for humour to smooth the edges of friction.

But perhaps the most important lesson was this:

The runes never leave us.

Jesse once said that the runes can “take a nap.” He also described them as armour that we never really need to put down.

I have come to appreciate the wisdom in that.

There can be cycles of intense rune work and other cycles when the practice seems almost to slow to a halt. But the magic of the runes does not stop. What we have genuinely put into practice continues to carry us. What we have transformed within ourselves continues to serve us.

Perhaps that is true of relationships too.

A person may walk beside us only for a short distance, yet something of that relationship continues travelling with us long after they are gone.

Through knowing Jesse, I discovered that I am more capable than I sometimes think, more resilient than I imagine, and more human than the person I sometimes expect myself to be.

And perhaps that is one of the greatest gifts a relationship can give us:

not merely another person to know, but a clearer view of ourselves.

Apply today! Travel in an instant!

If you could start a new business right now, what would it be?

My Next Business? Teleportation, Obviously.

If you could start a new business right now, what would it be?

That is a difficult question.

Robotics? China is already running ahead.

Artificial intelligence? No thanks. Let Meta AI, Grok, ChatGPT and Claude fight that one out.

A colony on the Moon? Elon Musk is already looking in that direction.

Neuro-electronics?

Noooo!

That damn Elon got there first too.

So I sat down and carefully considered the remaining opportunities in the global innovation landscape.

Whisper…

Teleportation.

As far as I can tell, nobody has successfully commercialised it yet.

Think about the business model.

People already pay enormous amounts of money to travel. Airlines need aircraft, pilots, airports, fuel, maintenance, baggage handlers and those little packets of peanuts.

We need none of that.

You step into our Teleportation Booth™ in Cape Town and—ZAP!—three seconds later you are standing in Paris.

No luggage restrictions.

No jet lag.

No middle seat.

No child kicking the back of your chair for eleven hours.

And absolutely no carbon emissions.*

*Apart from the unfortunate amount of electricity required to disassemble a human being.

The technology itself is surprisingly straightforward.

We scan your complete energetic and molecular pattern, cut you into approximately seven billion billion billion atoms, transmit the information to your destination and reassemble you there.

Some people have raised the rather negative question:

“But won’t I die?”

We prefer the term temporary molecular inconvenience.

Others have asked what happens to the soul.

Excellent question.

Our research division is working on the hypothesis that the soul travels faster than light. In fact, by the time your atoms arrive, your soul may already be waiting impatiently on the other side.

Obviously, the etheric and astral bodies will have to travel as hand luggage.

There remain a few minor technical challenges.

Our first experimental teleportation, with monkeys, was partially successful.

All travellers survived and are in excellent health.

One can now hear through its nose.

We consider this a breakthrough.

Admittedly, we still cannot explain where the second nose came from, but our engineers assure us that this will be corrected in Version 2.1.

Which brings me to the investment opportunity.

Teleportation Inc. is looking for adventurous early adopters.

We need investors.

We need scientists.

Most importantly, we need volunteers.

The compensation package is unusual: instead of payment, successful volunteers receive shares in the company.

Should anything unexpected happen during teleportation, those shares will become a valuable legacy for your children.

We call that intergenerational wealth creation.

Imagine where this business could go.

Cape Town to London in three seconds.

Johannesburg to Tokyo before your coffee gets cold.

Earth to the Moon without a rocket.

Eventually, we could even offer a premium service:

Teleportation Plus™ — Guaranteed Reassembly of All Original Body Parts.

Naturally, that package will cost a little extra.

And once Teleportation Inc. becomes profitable, I have already identified our next frontier.

Time travel.

Although I had better move quickly.

Knowing my luck, Elon probably started that company tomorrow.

So, if you are ready for humanity’s next great adventure, hit the subscribe button, like, comment and apply for our first public teleportation trial.

Teleportation Inc.

Why travel when you can simply arrive?

Terms and conditions apply. Number of noses not guaranteed.

What If World Leaders Disagree Less Than We Think?

I have been doing something slightly unusual this week.
Instead of watching the news coverage of the United Nations General Assembly, I started reading the actual speeches of world leaders.
Then I analyzed them using my Nine Principles of System Viability.

I wasn’t asking who was right or wrong.
I asked a much simpler question:
What does this leader believe their country needs in order to remain viable?
And something unexpected happened.
The leaders started sounding less different.
Not because they agree on politics. They clearly don’t.

But beneath the politics, the same concern kept appearing:
How does my country retain enough agency to determine its own future in a world where we increasingly depend upon one another?
The answers were very different.
A small country may depend upon international rules because it cannot compete through raw power.
A developing country may emphasize economic capability because political independence means little if you remain dependent upon others for everything you need.

A country that feels excluded from important decisions may demand representation.
A threatened country may emphasize the ability to defend itself.
A highly interconnected country may diversify its relationships so that no single partner can determine its choices.
And a powerful country may emphasize autonomy precisely because it has the resources to exercise it.
Suddenly these don’t look like completely incompatible ideas.
They look like different answers produced by different circumstances.

That changed the question for me.

Perhaps one of the great challenges facing the world isn’t:
How do we get everyone to agree?

Perhaps it is:
How do we build a world in which countries with very different circumstances can cooperate without requiring them to become alike?
Because we have a strange problem.
We need one another more than ever.
Technology, trade, climate, security, migration, energy, finance and artificial intelligence don’t politely stop at national borders.

Yet the more dependent I become upon you, the more your decisions can affect my ability to choose my own future.
So perhaps the challenge isn’t independence versus interdependence.
It is something much more interesting:
How do we remain interdependent without surrendering our agency?
After reading these speeches, I am beginning to wonder whether that question sits quietly beneath much of the noise we call geopolitics.

And if it does, perhaps the world disagrees a little less about what it needs than about how to get there.