The Ark of the Art
Welcome to Improve Our World’s Ark of the Art, leading to the seven fundamental cause-and-effect cycles that form the patterns of understanding all of life — enough for you to create a life of abundance everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Even the challenges you face that are difficult, you’ll actually appreciate, because you’ll know they’re there for a reason: for you to get stronger, for you to have a breakthrough.
What you won’t encounter is repeated struggles with your health, your body, or your confidence. You won’t experience the stress of finances you’re not taking care of. And you won’t walk around angry at someone, because you’ll understand that anger is a belief you hold — you not yet seeing the first cause-and-effect pattern clearly.
This is what lies ahead for you. So buckle your seat belt and get ready to change how you think about life — forever.
First, where understanding happens
Before we take the broad view of who we are as human beings, let’s zoom in on that first cause-and-effect cycle — where the understanding of life actually happens. It happens because you do what we all must do to understand life: you use your imagination to picture something carefully, over and over, until you’re certain that what you think is true and accurate. You’ve verified it, and you can go back and verify it again.
Consciousness
Biology
Pattern Recognition
People
The Modern Marketplace
Institutions
Human Civilization
This internal cause-and-effect pattern — your thoughts, your consciousness — is actually creating your very experience of life. Wherever you are, whatever’s happening, is not your life experience unless you’re thinking about it. You can be in the most wonderful place in the world, and if you’re thinking about something else, you’re missing out on that experience.
But it goes deeper. You can be somewhere that matters to you and still have a defense mechanism working inside you that prevents you from using your imagination to accurately recreate what you’re perceiving. This is what it’s all about, right here.
The Ark of the Art is the accurate, relevant knowledge about the accurate, relevant truth. And this is powerful because of a fundamental truth science has proven: because our brain is always thinking, and because of our early childhood experiences, many of the things we believe to be true are not. The key is this — when you understand that, you can begin to do the work. Not the work of questioning your most cherished beliefs, like whether you believe in God. The work of understanding why your body’s hurting, why you can’t get along with someone at work or home, or why you can’t seem to make money, save it, and invest it.
And each of those things — your body, your relationships, your finances — is one of the cause-and-effect patterns of life. They’re simple, and they’re easy to imagine. When you imagine them over and over, what you believed to be true about your life will change, because of what you’ve imagined and verified.
The second pattern is your biology, which is creating your psychology — and it runs both ways. Your biology sometimes causes your psychology to procrastinate, to feel negative emotions, to think negative thoughts. That’s the internal world that determines how you interact with the external world. Without biology, there is no psychology. Consciousness and biology oscillate, cause and effect, back and forth — and those first two patterns are what generate the third.
Want to find a limiting belief? Find an area of your life where you think you can’t, while somebody else is doing it.
The third pattern is your ability to perceive and accurately interpret the other six cause-and-effect patterns. It conditions the nervous system to empower you to adapt to life at a high level, everywhere relevant. When this works, you can identify a cause-and-effect pattern and then interact with it in a way that changes it — so you heal pain, release stress and negative thoughts, and create financial security and eventual freedom.
Let me spend a moment between the first and third patterns, because this is where your ability to adapt to life is generated — and limited or expanded. When the human brain imagines time and space, that’s what it does naturally; when you’re young you don’t even have to train it. But as an adult you have to retrain yourself to do it — to stop trying to figure out life with words.
This is critical. Life happens too fast to understand with words. Even in a single experience — you, talking to somebody, somewhere — there’s too much happening to figure out in words. By the time you’re halfway through explaining everything relevant, you’ll likely forget what you started with. But you can imagine it instantly, in less than a second, and the brain extracts what happened effortlessly.
Then comes the work. You pause, and you imagine what you just imagined, and you stop where the key parts of the cause-and-effect interaction happened, finding the moments where what happened is impacting your health, your finances, your relationships. That’s the part of the pattern you pause, rewind, and play forward, over and over again. I’ve said this more than once, and I may say it again, because this is what it all comes down to: to understand life, you must use your imagination to verify what you believe is true. Otherwise, you’ll keep struggling with your finances, your health, or your relationships.
Now let’s make it fun. There’s another important truth, this one from psychology — excellence. Anything one person can do, you and everybody else can do too, except in rare instances. And importantly, those rare instances never affect your ability to lose weight, heal pain, create love, or build financial security. Never. You can absolutely create a life of abundance — and if you think you can’t, you’re wrong.
There’s an example of inaccurate knowledge you’re carrying. Discovering it is one of the most important breakthroughs you’ll ever have — the moment you realize: I’m wrong, I can do this. I’m wrong, this person isn’t that way, it’s just how I’ve been talking to him. Money isn’t evil; money’s just a tool. On and on. (A list of the most common limiting beliefs will be available for free for you to scan.) Remember this: as soon as you find a limiting belief and replace it with an enabling one, you’ll be healing pain, releasing stress, and creating security.
Just as consciousness is created by biology, pattern recognition is created — or allowed to develop — by people. By caring for, and at times protecting, the safe environment that allows the young developing mind to process cause and effect. The fourth pattern is how you interact with people, and the cause-and-effect patterns that happen as you interact with another person. And here’s something hugely important — my heart feels love vibrate just sharing it: how we interact with other people often very closely mirrors how you interact with yourself. A huge amount of insight opens up when you make that connection.
When you first occupy that body, you’re experiencing your first moments of life and learning about it from your family. Then you begin to interact with people in your neighborhood as a child — those relationships either limited or empowered by how your relationship was with your parents and siblings. And here’s a relevant truth that touches all of us to some degree: when you don’t realize this — and most people don’t — you live a life handicapped by the relationship you had with one of your parents. These seven patterns are not yet common among most parents; most people lack the ability to process them, because one of their parents struggled in parenting them.
And it caused something interesting — something that will help you understand at a mechanical level, not just a psychological one. When you have a sore muscle — an ankle, a knee — you naturally avoid using it, with a limp or a movement that keeps you from feeling the pain. That’s what a defense mechanism is. Every defense mechanism in your life is preventing you from enjoying abundance, because it causes you to not access the part of your imagination that would accurately picture the cause-and-effect pattern you need to recognize. The brain skips over those cells because there’s pain stored there — and you misinterpret what happened.
So pause a moment. And don’t think about it being you — because then your own defense mechanism will protect it. Think about somebody else: imagine someone having a childhood experience that was painful, the way we all have. Whenever that person meets a life experience that touches that stored pain, the body quickly releases from it and thinks differently. To break through this common human experience is simple, and you’ll find it all over iow7.com. It only takes one breath — through your nose, with a clear intention to be present where you are and in search of your purpose, which is to be happy right now and productively take care of your life, so tomorrow is easier than today. That’s the first breath. Then you do it again. Learning to sustain it takes practice — just like learning to stand and walk, you’re learning to be coherent and flow it throughout your daily life. Then comes the fun part, which can be challenging: you look for the limiting beliefs, which are easy to find. Just find the area of your life where there’s stress, pain, fear, anger, or hate.
Powerful stuff. If these words are enough for you to begin questioning the pain and stress and negativity you believe — because you want to be happier, and you’re in a place where you can question what you believe and then verify it with your imagination — then you’re on your way. And there’s a conditioning program you can use to practice processing cause-and-effect cycles. It may be hard at first, because you’ve disconnected from it. But it’s what your brain does naturally, so you’ll pick it back up quickly — and when you do, here comes your life, more positive in all the ways that matter.
Now the fifth pattern — like the fifth finger that makes the hand fully functional — is the economic system you participate in to survive. To understand it simply, let’s jump for a moment to the seventh perspective. Picture yourself back in time, before knowledge had developed into a modern society where the resources that let you survive and thrive are purchased. Then look at the basic services that exist in any town, and realize that every one of those patterns is an opportunity — to create a business and contribute, or to get a job and contribute.
Remember the principle of excellence. When you use your imagination to scan what happens in your town, or other towns, you realize you could learn about any of it, develop the skill, and make it your source of income. And following the principle of capitalism — which seems to be the best economic option — you save your money, hire other people to provide the service, pay them for it, and now you have a business that functions even when you’re not there.
What matters is that as you consider this, you stay aware of your thoughts and keep them from blurting a negative — “I can’t,” “I don’t want to” — before you’ve given yourself time to see it accurately. This is one of the consistent things we all have to do to understand life: stop your brain from declaring what you believe is true without verifying it, while applying the truth that you can do anything someone else can, except in rare instances. That applies directly to choosing a career or a business to grow.
Here’s the exciting part. Let’s go around this pattern again, but a deeper, earlier layer — jumping back to the first pattern, consciousness, and the third, pattern recognition. Doing something difficult requires you to want to do it and believe you can. If what’s playing in your head is “I don’t want that much responsibility, I don’t think I can do it,” pause. Understand the biology — the synaptic pathways that let a person build desire, then practice into knowledge, then into skill. Open yourself up to let go of the limiting beliefs. If you invest enough time imagining yourself enjoying the outcome — more income — and imagining yourself wanting to go through the trial and error of figuring it out, that process is the pathway to increase your income to any level possible for you. Over years, maybe a decade, you could earn as much as anybody alive.
A powerful truth: past a certain point, more income won’t make you happier. But a high income — say over a million a year — is beneficial, and once you reach it you can pull back, cruise, and enjoy a better life. If a million isn’t your number, two, three, four hundred thousand is a number you can create by mastering a career or business, rather than settling for under a hundred thousand. (These numbers are based on America in 2026 — real, and doable.) The question is: do you want to breathe through your nose, be aware of your thoughts, and imagine yourself at that higher income — feeling the increased vibration in your chest, which is gratitude, the intrinsic pleasure of doing something difficult and doing it well? It can also just be love.
These are the steps of the journey — exploring and creating your full income potential, increasing your contribution to the economy you live in. Or today, it can be on the other side of the planet.
Pause and reread that, if you’re someone allowing yourself a low income — say under seventy thousand a year — and telling yourself that’s the best you can do for the rest of your career. That’s a limiting belief worth some time to question. There are conditioning programs where you sit, breathe through your nose, and think powerfully with your imagination — sensing, feeling, questioning slowly and carefully — taking care of what’s inside your skin: the beliefs that create the thoughts and emotions that determine your experience everywhere, including in the economy.
The dream I have as the founder of Improve Our World: that these seven patterns become fundamental knowledge for everyone on the planet. Understood as well as people understand gravity.
The sixth and seventh patterns aren’t necessary to enjoy health, happiness, and financial security — but they are necessary to understand society at large, and what’s happening around the world. The sixth is the observation of the institutions that have developed over time as humanity moved from living in nature to living in modern cities with technology: the economies, the governments, and religion.
When you look at the sixth pattern, shift back and forth to the seventh — the broadest view, all of us living together as human beings. Remember that the food chain out in nature still exists in modern society. It’s always present, and these institutions — the economy, the government, and yes, even religion — are being corrupted by people in power. That’s a sad but relevant truth to verify with your imagination. You have to be willing to look at it with consistent vigilance, and be willing to fight for your mental freedom by not continuing to accept what you assume is true without checking it.
Almost every community around the world is touched by this food chain. The people in power impact the economic health of your town — jobs and businesses affected. They impact your government. And they wield a powerful institution, the media, which makes us believe our neighbor is our enemy — rather than the people in power who are making us think so. Someone believing differently than you does not make them your enemy. This is propaganda, divide and conquer — a cause-and-effect pattern that has existed since the beginning, even at a lower level when we lived in nature. But today, with TV, the internet, and social media, the divide in America and around the world grows more intense.
With machine intelligence arriving, there’s a real possibility of a breakthrough. Nobody walks around dropping something valuable, because they know it’ll hit the ground and break. In the same way, people could interact with all seven patterns from a basis of awareness — and advance them to the point where the pain and suffering most people live with stops happening. This happens because almost everyone sees these patterns and effectively adapts.
That’s why the sixth and seventh patterns matter so much. The suffering that happens around the world — including yours, at some level, whatever it is for you — is caused because these seven cause-and-effect patterns, interpreted through the Ark of the Art, are, I believe, the solution to these primitive and painful realities. The antidote to the disease of hate and violence that exists around the world.
And something relevant: I believe everybody — including the people in power — is suffering just as much as the people being preyed upon. Go back to the truth from the first and third patterns: whenever you experience a negative thought of hate or judgment, that moment carries a reduced vibration. It’s unpleasant, and it makes the experience less healthy for everyone in it. So, in a real sense, the people in power are suffering too. And for the rest of us, understanding these primitive ways — and contributing to advancing human civilization by helping people discover these patterns, and by making friends with a neighbor even when they’re different from you — that’s the real meaning behind these seven perspectives. You don’t have to settle for hating, judging, and accepting things primitively, just as they are.
And now I’ll speak as carefully as I can about religion. There most likely is a God — I believe there is. But if someone wants me to believe in God in a way where I need them, and I have to give them money to have a good relationship with God, I think that’s corruption. If you don’t see it as corruption, that’s okay — just make sure you’re engaging all the other cause-and-effect patterns, so you can adapt to life and stay positive. Religion can be deeply important and meaningful. So I just ask you, as a businessman with positive intention: if you believe in God, keep believing in God. Just protect yourself from being manipulated into thinking negatively about yourself or other people.
And there’s a simple, skillful way to think about something negative in a positive way — detach from expressing the emotion, and think as accurately as you can, without judgment. You’ll end up sounding like a doctor or a scientist, and you won’t reach for words like “idiot” or “evil.”
Here’s the thing to realize: when you focus on the first five patterns — thinking positively, being kind, staying humble, and yet focusing and competing and being productive — you have access to all of it by developing one habit. Breathing through your nose so you create coherence, then conditioning yourself to keep it going all day.
As soon as you start doing that, and you engage these five patterns consistently — taking a peek at the sixth and seventh once in a while — you’ll start seeing the opportunity to be happy and thankful in the moment, focused, flowing through your day with effortless flow.
Yes, you’re going to realize you need to invest time thinking, and most likely writing down what you want and why. That speeds up the process. It’s available to you, but you don’t have to do it. Just know that with a breath, you start allowing your brain to think faster than words — directed by words, but well-thought-out words. Words that make you curious: what’s going to make me healthy, happy, and financially secure? Words that keep you from getting caught up in some bogus judgment that your neighbor is evil.
Can I do this? Can I enjoy wonderful abundance, more and more, throughout each day? The answer is yes, my friend.
And to accelerate the process — work with Mark on stabilizing your consciousness and causing it to function at higher and higher levels, every day of your life. From the busiest workday to the most pleasant day off, optimum flowing consciousness is always available to us in every situation. The key is to train ourselves to flow it.