What if everything you're doing right now is either accelerating your spiritual ascension or dragging you further from truth?
There's no neutral ground.
Woke up this morning extremely sore after some MMA training with a kickboxing world champion yesterday.
My lats and my shoulders are feeling the unique soreness of endless repeated elbow hooks to a punching bag.
And I have a mat burn tattoo’d on my tail bone from this very unusual crawling exercise we were doing throughout the class.
It's a beautiful sunny afternoon. And I just went on a beautiful walk throughout the meandering Hollywood Hills.
This morning I went to a lecture led by a monk from India at Yogananda's temple. Before that, I actually completed my Kriya Yoga initiation ceremony. So I am an official Kriyaban, which is pretty exciting.
I feel like I've progressed at a rapid rate over the last year on my spiritual journey and just my overall sense of peace and knowing of God and truth — so, I can only imagine how this Kriya technique (which is highly praised Yogananda and among disciples from Steve Jobs to Michael Singer to George Harrison) will influence what truth moves through me and what I create as I practice it.
My mom thinks I'm going to become a monk and renounce everything. Lol!
Of all the fears a mom could have, that one is pretty funny.
And what's funnier is that, as I look back on my life the past year and a half, in a way, I feel like I already am a monk.
Just not the traditional kind.
I'm not at a monastery or in some official organization of monastics.
I'm a rogue monk.
One on a mission in a different, more abstract temple in the vast world itself.
I write these daily posts. I imbue all of my creations and work with the fragrance of this peace and joyful energy that I've found.
That's monastic living to me.
As I said in a recent post, I think that basically all founders are prophets.
And that's, I suppose, how I feel about myself lately.
And when I look at what I'm working on right now, I realize this "rogue monk" description extends both forward into the future and backward into the past even further than when I started doing the Yogananda stuff.
Even my YouTube videos that I started making a decade ago were really my first informal sermons - rogue sermons of the Truth I discovered after my initial awakening when I was around 18.
And since then in the past decade, I've created a number of different things beyond the YouTube videos.
Whether it was:
A clothing brand and design language through my 8AM brand—which always pointed people to shift their focus from the finite number “8” of material abundance to seeing the infinity sign “∞”, which directly pointed to the concept of God and the infinite.
My other projects like Maxi (which is now the 8AM app), a place where you learn about consciousness and the mind and how to direct your energy and thoughts into a Master Vision in alignment to serving the most people possible. Very monastic.
And of course, most recently, my music with the 8AM album as an energetic portal to experience a spiritual creative breakthrough. That's how I felt creating it, and I know that's how people feel listening to it - carrying them through that journey through sound frequency, like how a monk would carry someone through a spiritual awakening.
So it's all the same.
The highest Truth is not dogmatic or ritualistic or wearing some outer form, it’s in the realm of spirit.
Dualities and trinities on something do hang,
Supportless they never appear;
That support searched for, they loosen and fall.
There is the Truth. Who sees that never wavers.
And then, of course, I suppose my most monastic-like thing that I'm working on lately is 8AM World.
Which essentially includes a virtual weekly monastery meeting with hand-selected members from various fields of creation and entrepreneurship.
My focus has been on allocating spots to people who are sincere in both their spiritual path, in supporting the messages I’ve been pushing, and in their desire to create things that make the world a better place—whether it's a business or product or music or whatever.
We meet weekly on Mondays, beginning with a prayer / meditation each time, and then communicate through the week in a daily group chat discussing the confluence of spiritual principles, new technology, and how to serve more people.
And we also have, of course, culmination - a week-long village on a 200-foot cliff.
I booked us 21 villas in Uluwatu in October of 2026.
You can read more here.
So it appears that everything I'm working on is a version of monastic living.
And I think that once you've had your awakening—once you've shifted from seeking worldly status, approval, security in the material… to seeking inner peace—everything you do becomes part of your spiritual journey.
Even the work that seems totally unrelated.
It's all connected.
So I think even you reading this are probably closer to a monk than you realize.
I guess some of us look into that or contemplate that or practice the monastic-like requirements more than others.
This is, of course, in no way an attempt to broaden or insult the definition of what a true monastic commits their life to.
And honestly, probably much to my mom's relief and my girlfriend's relief, I don't really plan to put on the orange robe anytime soon.
But I will continue meditating and sharing the truth as it comes through me in whatever medium that takes.
Talk soon.
-Arlin
PS - dm me how you think your work is actually a spiritual act…
