The Thirteen Thieves blog is about life, exploration of thoughts, glimpses into the lifestyle, motivation, grooming recommendations, and sometimes men's style and style staples.
Happy Holi enjoy the end of winter and the beginning of spring with me today. Today is also a great day to forgive your enemies and let go of those grudges. Holi is a Hindu festival that marks the arrival of spring. Known widely as the Festival of Colour, it takes place over two days, and is a celebration of fertility, color, and love, as well as the triumph of good versus evil.
Read MoreWe are SUPER excited to share the latest addition to our product lineup. Now in stock is our Shampoo Bar Beard Kit. This Beard Kit comes with Beard Oil, Beard Balm, a Beard Brush and our Homemade Tea Tree Mint Soap and Solid Shampoo Bar. Completely Organic and Natural. This Bar follows a 35 day "Cold Process" which ensures a super creamy, extra mild and long lasting bar.
Read MoreYour Primal Inclinations and the Concept of Mastery. "Now the moral of the story, as I told the people who had come to me for advice and as I’m telling you now is the following. We, humans, tend to fixate on what we can see with our eyes. It is the most animal part of our nature. When we look at the changes and transformations in other people’s lives, we see the good luck that someone had in meeting a person like Joost, with all of the right connections and the funding. We see the book or the project that brings the money and the attention. In other words, we see the visible signs of opportunity and success in our own lives, but we are grasping at an illusion. What really allows for such dramatic changes are the things that occur on the inside of a person and are completely invisible. The slow accumulation of knowledge and skills, the incremental improvements in work habits and the ability to withstand criticism. Any change in people’s fortune is merely the visible manifestation of all of that deep preparation over time."
Read MoreI would always suggest purchasing organic when possible, but I sometimes still wonder about those purchases. However, I have the same issues with nonorganic fruits and vegetables as well. I just don't know what any of these companies or farmers are doing as standard practices. So I would recommend finding the cleanest fruits and vegetable that you can.
Read MoreWe are excited to share the latest addition to our shop: Homemade Beard Soap and Solid Shampoo Bars. They can be purchased by themselves or in a Beard Kit at Thirteen Thieves
Read MoreThroughout much of human history, Sages have spoken about the mystical experience perhaps the most meaningful experience that human beings are capable of having. A mystical experience is an encounter with the transcendent; It's an encounter with the numinous. Otto Rank described this as the Mysterium tremendum et fascinoso of reality when the doors of perception are cleansed, and the mystical experience has some characteristics, some persisted hallmarks that always show up, no matter the culture or worldview and belief system of whoever is having it. So there are these common attributes that show up with mystical experiences. They are the following...
Read MoreOn a clear, dark night, the sky lights up with millions of stars, the brightest of which form a glowing band from one horizon to the other. That band is the tiny slice of our galaxy, the Milky Way, that can be seen from Earth. Unfortunately, a 2016 study found that in a whopping 80 percent of North America and 60 percent of Europe, you can't see the Milky Way at all because of the light pollution. This isn't just a shame for stargazers; it's a real hazard for the natural world. Artificial light can disrupt bird migration, alter the behavior of insects, and mess with plants' seasonal cycles.
Read MoreHuman beings are hungry for an ultimate understanding, some kind of cosmic communion, a treasure at the end of the rainbow, a pot of gold. We all dive through the looking-glass, we all tumble down the rabbit hole with this idea that there will be some final answer, some ultimate meaning, some noetic quality that is rendered more real than everyday literal reality. Carl Sagan the astronomer, he used to say that "understanding is a kind of ecstasy.
Read MoreWe live in an increasingly cynical age where romantic love has been distilled into algorithms of data. Where love is reduced to nothing more than the neurotransmitter, dopamine. Biochemically, no different than an addiction to cocaine. Imagine that, right? The romantic passion of the lover, reduced to a coke head on a coke binge. There's something kind of cynical about this resignation, about letting go of that ecstasy of love that inspired the Romeo and Juliet story. The archetype of finding "The One," that is as God.
Read MoreThere's a lyric from a Radiohead song that perfectly captures the wistfulness of lost love, the wistfulness of what could have been and might have been and should have been, if only. The lyric goes like this "I wish I could be who wanted, I wish I could who wanted." It so perfectly captures that bittersweetness, that aching sadness, that anguish of longing for what might have been, if you or I could have been what we hoped each other would be for one another.
Read More"Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: sat-chit-ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.” I think it worked."
Read MoreWe are always looking for ways to get our products into more hands, especially in the local shop's Barbershops, Salon, local retail stores that you shop in every day and support your community. We offer our products for purchase through wholesale. Please contact us so that we may provide that information to you or tag a business you actively support that you would like to have our luxury grooming products available.
Read MoreAs opposed to extroverts who turn to other people to recharge and renew themselves, too much interaction saps our energy. Introverts turn inward and need quiet spaces to recharge. This is why we turn to nature, to prayer, to solitary hobbies.
We already know this from our own experience. What we often struggle with is the validity of this preference for time alone. I’ve wrestled with this too, thinking that there is something wrong with me if I am not excited about going to a party or socializing at the end of a hectic day.
Read MoreNow I have already mentioned that there was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it got even stronger. It only said one thing, I want, I want!
And I would ask, “What do you want?”
But this was all it would ever tell me. It never said a thing except I want, I want, I want!
Read MoreOne of the classic definitions of mindfulness is that it helps us not cling to what's pleasant and not condemn what is unpleasant. An example would be if you're driving in New York City and someone cuts you off; that's unpleasant and one would instinctively have an angry response. But that's happening all the time and if you have an angry response too often, then you become a nightmare yourself. So what mindfulness is teaching is that the stimulus, which is someone cutting you off, is different; it's distinct from your emotional reaction to that thing. So someone could cut you off; you could feel the anger, but you don't have to act on the anger. So instead of being driven by your reactions, there's a little bit of room where you can choose to be a different kind of person. So mindfulness basically helps us tolerate the aspects of the external world and the internal world that otherwise are hard to face.
Read More“Every moment of your life is either a test or a celebration. The same is true about every moment with your woman, only doubly so. Not only is her simple existence a test for you, but one of her deepest pleasures in intimacy is testing you, and then feeling you are not moved off course by her challenge.” – David Deida
Read MoreIt's preposterous that we can entertain in our popular journalism the titillation of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and prop up all reductionist personalities, and trot them out to give the statistics on the distribution of G-type stars, and this sort of thing. Because the fact is, what blinds us to the presence of alien intelligence is linguistic and cultural bias operating on ourselves. The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world, you see.
Read MoreI'm not with the term ‘New Year New You.’ I feel it’s a part of the cultural lexicon that suggests you aren’t good enough and that you should keep trading your money for corporate products and your attention for social influence all based on the vampiric illusion of macro-tribal inclusion. It also makes us second guess our intuition. That keeps us feeling incomplete, which keeps us yearning, which keeps us stuck.
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