Fear, Fortune and the Fog of War
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper”- W.B. Yeats
[This article has a 7/10 Woo Rating]
In some video games there’s a mechanism called “fog of war.” The map around you is shrouded in darkness, but as you explore it becomes more visible.
It turns out that this is sort of how our senses work. Donald Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception posits that what we perceive as reality is not “objective truth” but a useful summary optimised for our survival. What we experience is more like an icon on a desktop, rather than the inner workings of the computer. We evolved to perceive only what was necessary, not the full reality of existence. For example, we tend to think our vision is pretty good, but the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that’s visible to us is roughly a ten trillionth of it. If we were seeing everything there is, we’d presumably be on the most insanely disabling psychedelic trip the entire time.
Evolution did not shape us to perceive the whole truth. It shaped us to survive. “Part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know,” Hoffman says. “And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you." In a world full of tigers, speed is more important than accuracy.
In a world without tigers, our most pressing fears often concern material scarcity. They inhibit our movement and act as the outer limit on our sense of what’s possible in our lives. The majority of people I speak to are exploring the relationship between pursuing meaning and paying the mortgage. The fact that my simple tweet below went modestly viral last week anecdotally confirms my suspicions.
It’s pretty obvious that fears of scarcity cloud our judgement. Where this gets more interesting is the other side of the trade-off between fitness and accuracy. The implication being: the less anxious you are, the more of true reality you can perceive. As we move into one of the least dangerous environments in evolutionary history, a growing number of people will see reality increasingly accurately. We would expect a rise in mystical experiences, neurodivergence and interest in substances that expand the doors of perception.1
The forces that we can perceive in this richer reality are fundamentally subtle. My life’s work is to help more people understand that these emotional, energetic, non-logical, non-linear and non-verbal signals often come with a high degree of intelligence. They may come from the future.2 They may come from God. They may simply come from your own intuition. But there’s a force guiding you through life’s fog, and it feels like something.
The last piece I wrote was about magic and manifestation. In the couple of weeks since, five of the most tapped-in people I know have all written excellent articles along very similar lines.3 Their collective conclusion is that, what looks like magic is often just very close alignment to life’s subtle forces. These forces can feel like love, and loving action can have exponentially positive outcomes. This isn’t a cheesy sentiment: love is probably the most powerful unifying force in the universe.4 Taking the right path through the fog then becomes obvious and effortless. To those still trapped in the fog, it can look like magic because they can perceive, anticipate and do things most other people can’t.
This anecdote also supports my point: these five people are uniquely sensitive to shifts in the world right now and they are all feeling the same thing happening at the same time. What looks like mysterious prophecy is sometimes just deep attunement to what’s unfolding. One of the most obvious lessons I took from Wall Street is that scared people are very bad at predicting the future. Perma-bears make legendarily awful, linear forecasters. At a broader level, people who remain too scared, intellectually closed-minded or traumatized will still be stuck in the murk of the fog. Those who remain open to subtle forces will be guided to make better choices towards brighter futures.
The descent into scarcity is a downward spiral because the more afraid we become, the fewer exits we can perceive. In the depths of my most severe depression, my sister once asked me if I could envision any kind of positive future. I couldn’t, all I could see was a continuation of the same pitch darkness. In contrast, my life since that nadir has been a positive upward spiral: the more energetically connected to life I’ve become, the wider range of futures I can see.5
If you’ll allow a higher Woo Rating observation, I believe there is something in the air right now because we are being collectively drawn to learn a specific lesson. In fact, as I wrote recently, this seems like it might currently be the “main quest” for humanity. This is because we are moving away from the prevailing paradigm of materialism towards one where consciousness is foundational to reality.6 As we move towards wider acceptance of this “anomaly” that shatters scientific materialism, we might start to realise the extent to which economic materialism is another derivative of consciousness. Hoffman’s work implies that our relationship to scarcity might sometimes be more of a perceptual limitation than a material one. As George Lucas put it “we’re all living in cages with the doors wide open.”
Our overwhelming belief is first you need material security, then you can start to pursue your attractor. But one of the most heretical ideas I regularly challenge people with is: what if we have it backwards? If you resolve the fears of scarcity first, then cultivate your sensitivity, then the fog clears and the path forwards is revealed. It’s so triggering because it implies that we might be sacrificing our lives to unfulfilling careers and delaying our dreams for no reason.
To give a specific personal example, I have been cheerfully lecturing other people that they will never receive their fortune from the universe without putting an appropriate value on their unique gifts first. I know far too many world-class healers, coaches and intuitives living hand-to-mouth. And yet I myself have been irrationally unwilling to charge some people appropriate value for membership of The Leading Edge. I used
’s exceptional “Yes, Yes, Hell No!” framework to help make my decision. Yes: it was rational to charge them more (my own customers were regularly telling me to raise prices!). Yes: the intuitive tugs through the fog felt right. And “Hell No!” It was also terrifying. I feared rejection, isolation and ultimately scarcity.So one morning recently I reached out to the small handful of disengaged members. I asked them to either pay for the value they were receiving, or leave to make space for new members who could receive greater value from the network. The exact same minute I received an email with an unexpected financial windfall. Like all synchronicities, this story is deeply personal and anecdotal and likely changes few minds. But it’s also consistent with a pattern in my own life that the real flourishing follows steps on the correct path. This is because I suspect that one of life’s primary goals is to learn how to manifest from love rather than fear. If you already had material certainty, you wouldn’t learn the importance of acting from faith first. Although they get easier over time, those initial leaps into potential insecurity are some of the hardest decisions you will ever make. The path to fortune favours the brave.
Whatever the true nature of reality may be, one thing is clear: it’s always worth developing your sensitivity to the world around you. Last year I interviewed an array of experts on this topic and distilled their insights into a practical guide. I also have a powerful playbook from Brian Whetten on how to move away from fear into greater awareness. We even produced a manual to making a high-integrity living by helping others do the same.
If you’re looking for a single specific experiment to bring these themes into your life immediately, the simplest and most effective of all the practices I have spent the last few years researching is tracking your energy as it rises and falls throughout the day.7 Is there something you love doing that energises you and helps clear the fog for others? If it feels rationally right, intuitively right and charging money for it is absolutely terrifying, it might actually be the correct path. Transcending fear through the act of creation opens up an energetic connection to the world. It’s the icebreaker in a deeper conversation with your environment. At this pivotal moment in human history, learning to clear the fog, for yourself and those around you, may be one of the most meaningful things you can do. If it pays the mortgage too, well, that’s one recipe for a flourishing life.
As recently discussed in
, Neuroscientist Dr. has developed a “Hypercuriosity Theory of ADHD.” We are drawn to pursue unique niches appropriate to our gifts. But in an outdated system optimised for a small number of careers and low-level of neurodiversity, this can just look like distractibility and impulsivity.One of the ideas that changed my life was Jung’s belief that our future selves guide us by directing our interests in the present. My guest last year Dr. Ulisse Di Corpo on Syntropy also argues that attractors work from the future. And recent guest Dr. Julia Mossbridge’s peer-reviewed physics paper also challenges our view on non-linear time, explained well here by
.Devin Martin: Manifestation. “How do we know if manifesting is helping or hurting? Focus on LOVE. If your vision is win-win, you're getting in sync with the universe. If you need to diminish others in any way, if you're engaging in win-lose thinking, your ego is likely inflating. Love dissolves boundaries between self and other, between your desires and the greater good; boundaries that prove elusive if you meditate on them.”
: Applying the Mystical Powers of Water in Everyday Life. “Although one note is important: when I use the word magic I’m not referring to just manipulating reality for personal benefit. That practice certainly exists but I have no interest or desire in participating. The practice I’m referring to involves tapping into the Divine field to spread more love into the world. I’m speaking of the literal transmission of love and higher consciousness into humanity. Some people can change you just by their presence. That’s the magic we’re interested in cultivating.”: The Psychic Power of Imagination. “When emotion and intellect harmonize, they potentially give rise to a higher form of cognition—what Gurdjieff termed "reason" and we might call "super-reason." Perhaps extrasensory perception and psi abilities represent not supernatural powers but manifestations of this elevated, integrated understanding—a consciousness that transcends ordinary boundaries.” : Predictive Processing and The Sacred. “This isn't about imposing meaning on a meaningless world. It's about developing the perceptual capacities that allow us to recognize the meaning that's already there. Just as we can develop the ability to distinguish subtle variations in wine or music, we can cultivate the capacity to perceive dimensions of value and meaning that remain invisible to the mind caught in the prison of priors. The predictive self, in its defensive configurations, systematically filters out these dimensions of reality. Focused on survival and coherence, it reduces the rich complexity of existence to manageable patterns based on past experience. But as these defensive patterns relax, reality itself begins to shine through - not because we're adding something to it, but because we're removing the filters that previously obscured it.”Check out my interview with recent guest Dr. Julia Mossbridge.
You can go to some pretty high woo-rating places with this idea. Speculatively, we can see that the right hemisphere, presumably through its connection to the heart and body, might have a connection to energetic forces usually stripped out by the left hemisphere. As we become more right-hemispheric and aligned with the whole, we increasingly have access to non-local collective consciousness.
hosted an interesting podcast with Arnaud Saint-Paul this week on the energetic role of the heart and it’s role in the pursuit of abundance. Most assessments are a bit horoscopey, but I enjoyed this one from Saint-Paul that claims to indicate your level of heart leadership.My interest in psychic abilities stem from the fact that they are scientifically validated proof that consciousness is non-local. I really enjoyed this robust dissection of scientific materialism in relation to the paranormal from
.I recommend this Big Think interview with Eric Markowitz and Anne-Laure on Becoming the scientist of your own life.
Thanks for this, Tom. So much of this resonates, especially this bit at the end:
"If you’re looking for a single specific experiment to bring these themes into your life immediately, the simplest and most effective of all the practices I have spent the last few years researching is tracking your energy as it rises and falls throughout the day.”
I’ve been stress testing this concept lately, mostly out of a well-worn pattern of frustration of going to the mind for answers only the intuition can give. One morning I sat down at my computer and stared at it, trying to figure out how to solve a particular problem. The more I thought, the more frustrated I became. So I asked myself, “What would be energizing? What would be playful?”
I was planning to go for a 4 mile hike that afternoon for a workout. When I thought about that I got excited . . . so I was like “f*** it, let’s do that.” My energy came up so I followed that. Five miles into my hike, I texted my wife and told her I would probably do 7 (I ended up at 7.5) because the answers I needed, and several I never considered, were coming to me effortlessly.
Tapping into that free flow of energy burned the fog of war away, revealing the path. I stopped resisting the flow of life and it felt like magic. I agree with River, Bodhi, et al, magic is just another name for cooperating fully with Reality.
Great essay. Two thoughts:
1. I might pinpoint "relative materialism" > "absolute materialism" as our primary anxiety. Most people, today, could access materialist security quite easily, but what we REALLY want is to be relatively secure. That lens creates a never-ending fuel of anxiety for humans.
2. I've come to recognize that the "spectrum of meaning" available to us is quite abundant. We act like it's scarce (e.g. "only some of us can live out a calling"), but in reality, it's everywhere and quite renewable.