I am both a child of God, and a child of the simulacrum generation of American culture; a 90s baby. I lived on fake food, primetime television, pop radio, the full vaccine schedule, and a Prozac commercial every 8 minutes repeating the chemical imbalance lie.

I was told I didn't have a soul, and that there wasn't microplastics collecting in my testes.

Both were lies.

Not many people talk about what it means to have a soul during the collapse of an empire.

When I say soul, I mean the the same thing in a seed that drives it to become a tree. In this way, spirit and soul are different. Spirit is the soil the seed is planted in. Soul is the force that shatters the acorn and expels us from our mothers womb.

Spirit is what is left after the body and identity die.
Soul is the temporal crescendo of body and identity.

Spirit is the unborn, undying, imperturbable, infinite ground of being.
Soul drips with blood and contracts the tunnels that push new births.

My work, my obsession, is what ought a people do with the seeming fact that we both have souls, yet live in a culture that chronically denies soul.

What does soul ask of us during the collapse?

I'll give the answer I've found; our souls are asking for a renaissance.

Your soul is asking you to figure out how to navigate time and space so that you can spend the majority of your waking life living in your zone of genius and using that genius to help others.

And because we live in 2025, this means learning how to do this in a way that you generate enough wealth to be able to design how you fill your time.

There are three objectives:

1. commit to cultivating your genius
2. start helping people
3. let the people you help pay you

This article is about how I'm managing that.

a brief history of the soil i came from

Both my parents where enlisted soldiers in the US Army when they conceived me. I arrived January 1st, 1991.

They divorced when I was 10 and my mother raised 4 kids by herself on an enlisted solider's paycheck and work schedule.

Thank you for everything mom.

We didn't get an internet connection until I was in middle school, but by that point, I spent most of my time playing basketball and chasing girls until I tore my rotator cuff my junior year of high school.

I got surgery my senior year, got addicted to oxycontin, and graduated high school 40 pounds overweight.

I was dead inside.

At that time, I was the first person in my immediate family to graduate high school. I only got into college because my mom was a war vet and had the G.I. bill. A local private university emailed me saying I had been accepted.

I still don't know how this happened, but it worked, I made it to college.

Thanks again mom.

After failing all my classes my first year, I had my first significant spiritual experience and woke up from my opiate-fueled depression. I 180’d my lifestyle and ended up graduating with a 3.7 GPA.

Because I was the first in my family to graduate college, I thought that I'd magically get a nice job after graduation.

Nope.

I got a job at Chipotle making $8.00.

It would take me 4 months at Chipotle, and 3 readings of The Four Hour Work Week to understand what an entrepreneur was, and that I was going to have to learn how to be one.

15 years later:

• I write these words from a live event I’m hosting called the ‘Dharma Artist Intensive,’ where 30 artists have gathered for 5 days to create and share their dharma with each other.
• I’ve made more than $600k in the last 2 years teaching a class I created called Mentally Fit, which is showing clinically significant reductions in depression and anxiety.
• I’ve cofounded a company with one of my best friends called the Dharma Artist Collective that helps artists train their focus. We give a 3rd of our monthly revenue away to members in the community for creating art for the public.
• I do what I love, what I love helps people, and helping people generates enough wealth that, god willing, when we have children, I will be able to give my best hours of each day to my children’s becoming.

But most importantly, I feel aligned with my soul.

I have found that the best measure of being in right relationship with my soul is:

1. i sleep well without sleep aids
2. i have good dream recall
3. i don't have recurring nightmares
4. what feels like art making to me feels like service to my community

And the fact we have souls might be why our culture is so sick.

A denied soul feels like a demon.

Because we're living through the fall of the empire, all of us are going to have to learn how to create DEVAs for our souls (a DEVA is a corporation designed to allow it's creator to renegotiate reality so they can live their calling).

Because our world needs a renaissance, and the renaissance is going to need as many of us as possible living our calling.

I'm sorry your life isn't meant to be easy, where you get to live a simple life without your soul gnawing at you for turning away from the call of our time.

But, when you forgive life enough to answer the call, you'll find there are others. People you'll come to love and respect. A new circle of friends, people who are out here, piloting DEVAs, trying to help build the future.

Let's get into how to start creating a DEVA.

A Quick Refresher

This is the the 4th article in the Egregore Series.

The 1st article shows you how to compost your personal entities.
The 2nd article reveals to you the real collective entities.
The 3rd article invites you to create your own.

Now that you can see the Egregore War, and you know you’re smuggling a piece of the renaissance, lets get into how to birth your DEVA (your dharmically oriented business).

Remember, egregores are the entities that dominate our world. Every egregore comes from a human artist. Each of us has the capacity to raise egregores. A DEVA is a corporation designed to allow it's creator to renegotiate reality so they can live their dharma. A DEVA is a piece of our dharma incorporated and given legal armor.

If you’re going to contribute to the Renaissance, become a DEVA pilot.

When I look back on my life, I notice that there are 3 distinct phases of my DEVA building:

Phase 1: Triage
​Phase 2: Freedom
​Phase 3: Dreamwalking

Triage Phase: stoke the spark

The goal of the triage phase is to renegotiate reality so what you do for money generates minimal resentment so you can begin cultivating your dharma project.

You’ll know the Triage phase is complete when you begin using your free time to cultivate an egregore that could one day be your DEVA.

(this is the phase I will breakdown in this article)

Freedom Phase: create a vehicle

The goal of the Freedom phase is to figure out how to make enough money so that you can do what you want with your time. No one can tell you when you have to be where.

The Freedom Phase begins when you make your first dollar doing something you want to do, and the money goes directly to you.

The key move during the Freedom Phase is learning to create compounding dharma artifacts that put money into your DEVA when it helps people.

(i'll break this down more in the next article).

You’ll know your Freedom phase is complete when you are the maker of your calendar. No employer or client can tell you when you have to be somewhere.

This is important to note: this phase isn't complete until you feel you are the captain of your time.

You can run a 100 million dollar business and be stuck in the triage phase if you hate how you spend you days.

You can make 40k a year roofing homes and be in the Freedom Phase if you love the flow of the physical labor and you enjoy spending your evenings on the beach drinking with your friends.

Because this is not about money.

This is about creating room for your soul.

Remember, our soul is the same force in the acorn that shatters the shell and drives it to grow into an oak.

Our DEVAs are new, larger pots we are setting our soul into.

Until you recognize that business competence is a part of your call to be an artist, you are going to suffer unnecessarily. The inability to see how business competence is a part of your call as an artist is to reveal a blindspot.

Forgive your dad, forgive the coaches and teachers who hurt you. Forgive whoever you have not forgiven, and embrace the brutal fact that a part of being an artist in 2025 is learning the game of money.

Dreamwalking: become a leader of the renaissance

Something happens once we achieve the Freedom phase.

Soul stirs.

It eventually becomes harder to sleep. What use to be pleasurable starts to diminish. Long-term relationships begin to crack, we may even find we’re battling a significant health condition. Some will be blindsided by the death of a loved one.

The Freedom phase seems to awaken soul that it is time to shatter the ego. We live in a culture designed to quell the shattering, but when you know you’re meant to be an Oak, you can trust the shattering.

Any personal dreams for your life that don't include contributing to a cultural renaissance is acorn thinking.

If you didn’t realize it before, by the time you achieve your Freedom number, the shell shattering force will come for you, to wake you up.

This sets the stage for Phase 3: Dreamwalking.

This phase begins when you commit to use the freedom you’ve earned to start creating a DEVA that puts your dharma into culture and generates enough wealth so you can be present with your family, nourish your community, and notice the rising and setting sun.

Dreamwalking is nothing less than you piloting your egregore towards raising the renaissance.

In this article, I'll share in detail my journey through the Triage Phase.

My Triage Phase: 2014 - 2018

On the left is a picture my girlfriend at the time took of me working at Chipotle, circa 2014. The picture on the right is me sitting at a table with Jordan Peterson as he did a podcast with Aubrey Marcus, circa 2018.

It took 4 years for me to massively change the direction of my life. I've spent a few weeks distilling the most important moves I made during this time.

1st Triage Move: FIWDIL moment

Have you seen this clip of Bill O'Reilly losing his shit? This is the 'Fuck it, we'll do it live,' moment.

For me, this happened during a shift at Chipotle where a group of teenagers came in for lunch. These were kids that had looked up to me because I was one of the two main guys in the varsity basketball team when they were on the freshmen team.

They were all out of high school now, 18 and 19 year olds, and it was the way they looked at me that woke up something in me. The transition from recognition to joy to confusion to judgement was the just right cocktail to trigger an aggression in myself that I had forgotten back in my opiate addiction.

It was that day that I decided with a smoldering clarity that no one was coming to deliver me from my situation, and that if I was going to have a life I respected I was going to have to make it happen.

Executive coach Joe Hudson says his first response to someone struggling with depression is to help them find and express their repressed anger.

Anger woke me up.

The first triage move is to accept the total responsibility for creating the life your soul is calling you to create.

2nd Triage Move: Learn to dharma sprint

The day after my O'Reilly moment, I started spending the evenings in Barns and Noble. I'd read and take notes for a few hours and then put the books back when I was done.

It took a few weeks but eventually I found the book.

It was Tim Ferriss's 'Four Hour Work Week." I cannot overstate how much this book changed my life. For our story, the main idea it introduced me to was the idea that if I took the time to read 5 high quality books on any subject, I'd be in the top 5% in the world of experts on that topic.

He recommended picking something you are interested in, then spend a few months reading and really absorbing the leading ideas in that field.

Once you do that, you can then experiment with creating information products teaching some essential piece of that field.

I chose behavior change. I bought the 10 highest rated books on amazon on the topic and started reading.

What made this possible was my ability to deeply focus for multiple hours without task-switching. This is what I refer to as 'dharma sprinting.'

Social media wasn't the furiously addictive monster that it is today, and thankfully I didn't have a nice laptop or phone, so it was easier to not be distracted.

But if you are anything like I was, the fundamental skill to develop after you realize you're going to have to create a life you respect, is the ability to focus deeply for multiple hours every day.

Check out my podcast 'Dharma Sprint and Death Cookies,' to learn more about how I study. And if you want to join a community of artists and entrepreneurs dedicated to dharma sprinting, check out the Dharma Artist Collective.

Important Note:

If your life is such that you believe the story that you cannot commit 90 minutes a day to learning a new skill (mine was habit change), then the goal for this triage move is to use the information in Tim's book to renegotiate reality so that you liberate those 90 minutes to commit to learning your new skill.

However, the truth for 99.99% of you is -- if you believe you don't have 90 minutes a day to commit to this, you're bullshitting yourself.

The truth is that you haven't faced your addictions and the lies you're telling yourself that are keeping you from taking full responsibility for creating a life your soul can flourish in.

​If this is you, take my journaling course. It's a 30 day protocol that will help you start telling yourself the truth.

If you don't have a daily practice where you practice telling yourself the truth, you're likely bullshitting yourself. Life begins to change quickly once we stop bullshitting ourselves.

3rd Triage Move: Commit To A Dharma Project

Pay close attention here, because if you get this right, you can't lose, and if you miss one of the steps here, you may get stuck here a lot longer than you need to be.

1. pick a skill you're interested in learning that you know people pay for (I chose behavior change).
2. get 5 to 10 of the most respected books in the field.
3. commit to read them all like you're studying for a college class.
4. commit to share what you've learned in your own words on some social platform (X, Instagram, Substack, Wordpress, etc).
5. commit to a weekly or twice a week publishing cadence.

This project will cultivate many key skills at the same time.

The most effective way to learn something is to do what is called 'active recall.' Committing to creating content in your own words over what you're learning will force active recall and you convert a greater percentage of the information into long-term memory than you would otherwise.

By reading the best books in the field, you will massively reduce your 'imposter syndrome' bullshit many people get crippled by.

You will also dissolve the internal flinch most people have when sharing their perspective online. Just share the most interesting thing you learned that week. Consider this 'learning in public.' Getting past this flinch will put you in a position most people will never reach because they will never face the fear of 'being seen.'

This project will also familiarize yourself with a platform and a medium of expression (video, audio, written, photo).

I suggest you pick 1 platform (whichever one you use most), and pick one medium. I chose wordpress as the platform (if I was starting from scratch today I'd choose substack). And I chose the medium of writing.

Writer's block is a conspiracy perpetuated by amateur writers. Find any professional staff writer, journalist, or editor of a magazine, and all of them will tell you that writer's block doesn't exist when your livelihood depends on the article you have to writer.

Committing to this project will show you that that is possible.

This project also gives you the chance at a lottery hit. A post could go viral or you may find you strike a vein and start gathering a following. However, this is not the purpose of the project. If it happens, cool. If it doesn't, don't worry.

The purpose of this project is to stoke your dharma, cultivate your skill, and center you in the middle of a field your unique genius is drawn too.

What you will find is that this project will fortify you regardless of what job you have. It will give you meaning. Every day, you will look forward to getting back to this project, whether it is before or after work.

I used this project technique at every job I had. I still do a version of it today.

Expect to work on this for at least a year.

4th Triage Move: Play The Free Gift Game

As you're working on your project, look for the leaders in the field you're learning. Start to follow them on the platform you're using. Search for forums and groups online that center around the skill you're developing.

Seek to contribute to those spaces. Be additive in the comment sections of your favorite creators. If a paid course or community calls to you, join it and give as much value as you can.

You'll be surprised how effective this is because so few people do this.

Giving free value is how I got my dream job at onnit. I joined an online course Aubrey Marcus hosted, and I showed up every day asking and answering questions without expecting anything in return.

As someone who hosts courses and communities, lemme tell you, it is still rare for someone to show up looking to add value without expecting a return.

As you make progress on your project, find the people and spaces where your budding knowledge can be of value, and give it freely.

This is lead to new opportunities.

Triage Sumary

The point of the triage phase is to convert the growing resentment at life into a spark of dharma you begin to feed everyday. The triage phase is complete when you no longer hate the moment you wake up in the morning.

1. take responsibility
2. begin training your focus
3. commit to a project
4. start giving free gifts

This will set you up for the big phase, the one that took me 10 years.

Phase 2 of birthing your DEVA will be the focus of the next article.

Good luck.

Song I'm Listening on Repeat

​Always - RL Grime​

Incredible podcast I listened to this week:

​Joe Hudson is one of the few people I've seen in a long time that feels like the kind of man I wanna be when I'm 50. Peep this pod to see what I mean, esp the rapid fire questions at the end lol.

Great job on the pod Jonney!

Quote I'm Enjoying

"Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives."
-Joseph Beuys

"We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction
police and threaten us."
-Robert Hayden, Collected Poems