XYZ

I find it easy to hack my brain into feeling as happy as I want whenever I want. But when I try to explain this process to help depressed people stop feeling depressed, they can't grasp it, because they see their emotional reactions to their environment as deep, meaningful, and real. Denying the validity of their emotions seems like destroying their sense of self altogether, and perhaps this kind of ego death is the very means by which you stop being a victim of emotional reactiveness, and start being the author of your own reality. If you want to be happy, then be happy for the sake of being happy. But one trap that is easy to fall into, and I have myself many times, is that when you feel happy all the time, you can fall into neglecting and self-sabotaging behavior patterns, since you could be just as happy regardless. This is why I feel it is important to feel happiness from a place of genuine unconditional self-love. Writing out this thought now, I realize this may be the key if I want to be successful in such endeavors. Teach people to become self-loving, and only then will they have a healthy psychological foundation form which to develop emotional mastery.

@Robert Thank you for your reply My sense of purpose has become a lot more clear over the past several weeks, including things learned about myself in this thread. If I were to try to describe a summary of my life purpose, bring it to the surface using words in the simplest terms, stated in the positive-affirmative, it would be: "keep pushing the limits of human potential." This goes back to what I said before about how this life purpose is a further evolution of feeling at one with the human community and wanting to heal the planet, and that this sense of purpose is shared with many others who've ultimately reached the same conclusion. There is lots more for me to contemplate about this purpose, and work on deriving actionable personal goals from it. There are some books I have but didn't read yet, videos bookmarked, and people in my life I can talk to about this now that it is more clear than ever. Right now a personal goal I am recently making good progress on is spending less and less time sitting at the computer, so later on, when that is even more minimized and I am more disciplined with technology use, would definitely consider the life purpose course. Ideally I would find these 3 things. An actionable plan that is aligned with my highest purpose, the agency to overcome external limitations to make it happen, and making a comfortable income while engaged with it. Does that sound like what the life purpose course is all about?

Time seems like an objective measurement as it passes automatically, but knowing that 2 objects can experience time differently in different places in the universe, I feel that I can never full understand what this 4th dimension called time actually is. What I am interested in is how we perceive the passing of time, and what some tricks are to s l o w i t d o w n. Time seems like it is moving faster the older you get. Because when you were 5 years old, a year was a fifth of your life, and it seemed so long. At age 10 it's only half that much, a tenth of your life, at 20 a year passed is only 5% of your life and so on. Even the most memorable action-packed days seem to pass in the blink of an eye now. And the uneventful ones just the same. In certain moments of mindfulness though I can just slow down whatever I am doing. Slow my breathing, slow my eating, slow my walking, slow my talking, slow my thinking... and feel like I'm pushing back upon the hands of time ever so slightly...

@MarkusSweden *resists the urge to post memes and link more PJW videos about Sverige*

@PartumCreed Yes, but anecdotal evidence and hearing about others' experiences would be helpful in my approach to the issue. @Spiral It also occurs to me that if I find myself in that situation, we can have tantric sex, without the sex part. @LiakosN What is "the right way?" There are all sorts of books and videos about how to have sex the best ways, but not cuddling. I have learned by experience how to share the best standing embraces with women, but it would be different lying down. Don't want to overthink this too much as it's something that would just happen naturally, but hearing about "cuddle buddy" experiences would be useful. @Feel Good "Just be yourself" lol

To clarify, my assumption was that if, say 5000 years ago, some females engaged in homosexual behavior, it wouldn't prevent the males from coming in and mating with them. However, if some males decided it was better to just be homosexual with each other rather than compete against each other to mate with the females, less reproduction would occur. So male homosexuality was selected against in our evolution, and mechanisms to prevent it were selected for. These are just broad generalizations though, as certainly some groups of males have engaged in regular homosexual behavior yet still procreate with women, as is the case in certain ape species as well as modern humans.

@Robert Okay, let's talk about pathological altruism, just for the sake of exploring the issue further. Don't get hung up on the semantics of defining it, how I'd best explain it using my own words is engaging in action that feels like being compassionate, selfless and helping people, but is actually harmful to both the altruist and the people they mean to help. Should have done this originally instead of just appealing to authority. Recently came across this video which reminded me of the term. Don't mean to keep picking on Sweden (or that I believe everything Paul Joseph Watson says), but it is a very good example: Now that I think about it, this is actually very relevant to religious celibacy. Requiring Catholic priests to commit to a life of celibacy is intended to be dedication to selflessness, to purity, to serving God. The news of just how prevalent the sexual abuse has been really suggests that all these abusers were doing is sexual repression. Now I'm a big fan of voluntary celibacy for men, if it is done by choice and they know how to transmute their sexual energy from base urges, or just deal with it using the conventional age old way by masturbating. Problem is if that sexual urges are there and just kept repressed, they will keep festering, and maybe manifest as paedophilia and rape. They were more concerned with keeping up the illusion of celibacy, for if they admitted to themselves they had sexual feelings they would feel un-holy, and if anyone found out it would be disgraceful to the church, and they would be removed. The antidote to pathological altruism is to always look at the big picture, and re-evaluate old paradigms and procedures that may be doing more harm than good. My assumption would be that the Catholic Church and other religious and spiritual organizations will more away from mandatory celibacy more and more. European countries overrun with violent refugees, and West Coast urban centers overrun with homeless people are already experiencing popular backlash for the pathological altruism which created these problems. Can actually credit Donald Trump for increasing global awareness of this harmful altruism bias, even if it's between a slew of other inane shitpostings on Twitter. Yes, I do feel that the world is waking up, realizing that you can't help everyone, and very few people even know how to be genuinely altruistic. Often the best policy is live and let live, and I don't have any magic bullets to address the harm already caused. "Live and let live," there it is! No need to feel anger and disgust, even if the world's problems creep into my everyday life more and more, it's no big deal, life goes on, live and let live. Life purpose is something I feel much deeper, really beyond words, never reduced to a clear-cut "do X accomplish Y" credo. That's all I have to say about that and hopefully refined my perspective and made more sense this time.

One theory I have based on my own observations, and the perspectives of gay men I've read about, is that homosexuality is a result of abnormal olfaction. After all, the sense of smell is the most powerful, the most vivid memories you have probably involved some sort of scent, and the scent of a woman you are intimate with colors your entire experience of her. Straight men are naturally repelled by the scent of other males, and I believe this is by evolutionary design, specifically to prevent homosexual behavior. See, men could easily get their needs for sexual release, emotional intimacy and skin contact, with each other. The olfactory repulsion mechanism is there to prevent this from happening, and it works perfectly for heterosexual men. Gay men often describe being deeply aroused by "man musk" smells, the same aromas which make straight men want to gag. Whether this was the case form birth or something in their diet or environment damaged their sense of smell, I can't say. I would say that the real gay test would be to go into a smelly locker room and see how you react. If it smells completely disgusting to you, you're probably straight as a laser. Can't say if it would work the other way around, since male scent is much stronger and noticeable than female scent, and women don't seem to have the same mechanism since female to female intimacy wasn't a threat to procreation in ancient times. Men doing homosexual behavior instead of mating with women was a threat to the survival of the human species, so nature had to find clever ways to prevent it form happening.

http://chiefpua.com/street-harassment/

@Robert It's an actual term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_Altruism I don't want to make that issue specifically my life purpose. What I mean is that in a broad sense, all of the grand ideas people have about how they could optimize they way society and humanity in general operates are actually rooted in desire to alleviate suffering in the world. Otherwise, why bother even thinking about it, there would be no motivation to do so. I don't want to hijack this thread anymore, let it digress back to the original discussion topics.

I'm starting to explore the idea that selfishness and selflessness may be the same thing, that they both come full circle: fully embodying one necessarily implies the other, they're essentially both sides of the same coin! Being completely selfish, one realizes that the well being of others and reduction of human suffering, both individually and collectively, is actually to their benefit. And being completely selfless, one realizes that caring for their own well being, and focusing on their own self-actualization is of benefit to everyone you come in contact with, and humanity in general. What do y'all think about this?

The idea of enlightenment is not enlightened.

@Robert use systems thinking to solve the problem of homelessness even make that your life purpose The over-arching life purpose of much of my thinking would be under the umbrella of "reducing human suffering, inside and out" which I have observed is a very common realization many of us share. I can come up with the most brilliant practical solutions to many of the world's problems, some of I am sure taking small action, or sharing the ideas with certain people can have profound butterfly effects. But with the urban street homeless issue, it's all just theoretical musings. I can clearly see how things like immigration enforcement, safety nets of basic living provisions, forced detox programs, prefabricated mini-houses, Gulags, assisted suicide, public nuisance ordinances, funding mental health services, privatizing public spaces, and many other changes could prevent the issue on one end and solve it on the other. Lot of these are obvious, and most others are brought up in political discussion. But politics itself is the limiting factor here, the pigeonholing of social issues into left and right leaning agendas, and the arbitrary lines between countries, states, counties and cities. I don't want to obsess over this issue, I accept it exists and there is no escaping it. It's actually beneficial to myself and to the world if I don't focus on the negative manifestations of things, better to think positive thoughts and live in a world of shiny happy people than live in fear and disgust towards homeless migration. Why not think bigger instead, addressing the root issue: Fostering awareness of how attitudes like pathological altruism and feel-good-ism, which are responsible for so many band-aid solutions which appear on the surface to be acting from a place of compassion, only lead to more human suffering. Or more broadly, helping the world at large advance into the next stages of consciousness, leading by example.

Actually, it's starting to occur to me that selfishness and selflessness both come full circle, fully embodying one necessarily implies the other, they're essentially both sides of the same coin! Being completely selfish, one realizes that the well being of others and reduction of human suffering, both individually and collectively, is actually to their benefit. And being completely selfless, one realizes that caring for their own well being, becoming the strongest version of themselves as Elliot Hulse would put it, is of benefit to everyone you come in contact with, and humanity in general. This could be the key to getting past my retained stage Red thinking. I don't doubt that I'm mostly in stage Yellow, but just as Leo claims President Trump has retained many Red tendencies despite being overwhelmingly in Orange, it seems quite plausible that I've carried similar things, but they remained latent during my mid 20s, eclipsed by the environmentalist, community oriented, egalitarian hippie beliefs I used to aspire to. That's all about this for now, but I'll definitely want to start another thread about the selfishness<>selflessness realization. I'm still finishing the very long video on sameness vs. difference, and for all I know this exact topic had come up. Through I responded to the subject line, it appears this thread was supposed to be more about the relationship of spirituality and sexual repression.

@kingroboto I can't stare at people in the eyes Yes you can! If you really wanted to, you could power through whatever anxiety you have and just force yourself to do it! If I gave you $100 to look deep into the eyes on an angry looking big macho man, or exotically beautiful woman, you'd probably overcome your fears and just do it! My two points are that letting people see into your eyes is nothing to be afraid of. At the same time though, it's really pointless to just lock eyes with people for no reason, it can be distracting or agitating when people stare at you, and just as you shouldn't fear making eye contact with people, you shouldn't fear choosing not to if you really don't want to. does anyone else have this? I've had it from my earliest memories along with my general fear towards people by default. When I look at people I get lost and paralyzed and basically cannot think or function as a rational human being. It's like they can see all of my flaws, all of my secrets, my darkest thoughts and desires. As a young child I learned to shy away from making eye contact, because I got exactly that sense, that people could "read me" know what I was feeling or thinking about, even before I was consciously aware of it myself. This scared me, and I trained myself to repress emotions by poker-facing constantly whenever in the presence of others, this would happen automatically: I have a vivid memory of strolling through a park in spring 2005, lost in my thoughts and smiling. Suddenly noticed a woman making eye contact with me and smiling, then my face fell flat, I felt very sub conscious and began to "walk manually" and stumble awkwardly away. Looking back though, I knew exactly what I was doing, far more than I realized at the time. I was refusing to be emotionally impulsive, not making myself vulnerable to emotional input and feedback from others. I saw the way other people's eyes and faces seemed to react instinctively to other people, and felt that this is not what I wanted to be. I wanted emotional privacy for myself, but they only way I know how to do that was repress my own emotions. This caused immense psychological trauma that remained until my late 20s, I was able to work through it and cut out all the emotional baggage only by essentially going through a second childhood phase, discarding everything from my past and rebuilding my reality from the ground up. Also, deep tissue release, breathing exercises and mantra/sound mediation have been instrumental in breaking free of emotional tension. What happened though is I've gone to the other extreme- delved so deeply into emotional self-mastery that I've essentially commandeered my own emotional feedback loops into an enclosed ecosystem. I can just feel as happy as I want whenever I want, but at the same time, completely detached from empathy, since I live in my own emotional bubble. I used to think I could help depressed people by detailing this process I've went through, but beyond the challenge of trying to accurately convey the experiences so that others may understand and embody them, less introverted people could easily use them to become narcissistic sociopaths that inflict real harm on people, rather than just use them for personal development. Integrating back with your original topic, the big picture is not being reactive, staying grounded, not carrying emotional baggage. When you live your life so free and lightly, don't take yourself so seriously, realize that there is no self, you are not your thoughts and feelings, and on and on... there is absolutely nothing to be afraid of when eye contact occurs. The prettier the girl or the more important the person the worse the effect gets. This little thing has crippled my life for too long. This is indicative of low self-esteem. You instinctively assume that if a woman looks at you it must be in a condescending, dismissive manner. I advise you to work on your self esteem, sense of independent self-worth, so you are not seeking approval and validation from women, you have no emotional investment on whether women in general, or any particular woman finds you attractive or not. Be forewarned though that once you do have solid self-esteem, self-consideration, or self-love, the opposite challenge occurs. You find it easy and effortless, even fun and enjoyable to look at women, but making eye contact with men feels incredibly distracting and puts your body into flight-or-flight mode. I think this is because you naturally become more masculine, no longer at all submissive. Whereas when you were a shy boy and a man smiled and nodded at you you might have automatically complied in submission or benevolence, when you are a confident man and you see an unfamiliar male face staring at you, your testosterone surges and your body reacts as if you're about to fight to the death. The trick is to not react to it, breathe deeply, and dismiss the sensations, NOT repressing them, just breathing deeply, staying present and letting them pass. In the past you might have felt that breaking eye contact or looking away first is shy and submissive, makes you look like a pussy. But once you realize that your own internal reality is all that matters, you literally don't care, since you are only concerned with the sensations you feel, not what you think it means socially. If men are mad-dogging me I ignore it, tune it out, don't even engage at all, totally unreactive. It can be a very pleasurable experience if I meet eyes with a pretty woman, she smiles at me and I'm in a perfectly relaxed state to reciprocate- in fact, what I described here is one of the only times I'll engage in affective empathy with people in passing. But it's still distracting, and I'll totally ignore beautiful women if not tripping over obstacles or bumping into other people takes precedence. I wat to conquer it but I don't know how to go about it in a sustainable way that would not creep people out or get me arrested. Any tips or suggestions? What sort of class I can sign up would be optimal for this kind of issue? Just let go, just be. I don't advise going out and staring at people, and staring at a video, or your own eyes in the mirror I don't think would help much. Remember that it's not a matter of making facial expressions at people, but coming from a place of emotional stability, fearlessness, non-neediness. If anything, next time you happen to look at a pretty woman, feel like "I am perfectly happy and content, I enjoy looking at you and that is perfectly okay." Be careful to state your affirmations only in the positive, not in terms of "I AT NOT ," since that would create cognitive dissonance, or resentment, which would show up on your face. Bottom line is it takes genuine presence, and experience to get to the point where you can calmly look a woman in the eyes and share a warm smile together. Don't be afraid to accidentally be creepy, and then learn from your mistakes, your will probably end up staring too long, looking too serious, or breaking eye contact before you want to. I know there are rare instances of this reported in the media, but we really don't live in such a feminazi gynocracy that women will call the police if you looked at them too long. According to some PUAs, if you're talking to a woman and reach a lull, and you maintain direct eye contact in an intense, yet blissfully zen state, it creates powerful sexual tension like nothing else. That's the extent of it for me though, I don't actually try and pick them up, that experience of deep connection is enough for me. I'll leave you with this. Think back to times when you were inadvertently checking out a woman, she noticed you, and then you got very shy and immediately looked away. Imagine if, instead, you met her gaze, and amused grin came over your face, and then you shared an intimate moment together, smiling sweetly into each others' eyes, not trying to hide anything. Cause she knows exactly what you doing, might as well own it and be genuine, unapologetic, natural, human.

@kingroboto It's not just you, something really shifts during the third week where your libido kicks into hyperdrive trying to get you to seek an outlet for sexual energy. But if you stick with it, there is an amazing feeling where brain fog you didn't even realize you were carrying before seems to dissipate right before you, the world literally looks brighter, and you feel infinitely creative, open to the limitless possibilities of life. Long term semen retention changes every aspect of your personality. Even if you have a nocturnal emission, you can retain this state because it's more of a gentle effortless release of excess when your cup runneth over, not this intense burst and loss of subtle body energy that happens when you make yourself ejaculate from sex and masturbating.

I understand why you'd think otherwise given my extreme self-centeredness, and as I acknowledged, that actually seems a retained aspect of Red based on the model. But as for all other qualities of stage yellow, they seem to accurately describe my experience, and evolution in development. http://spiraldynamicsintegral.nl/en/yellow/

Indeed so, I fully recognize I'm more physically sensitive to things, some things that don't even register for most. Take human body odor for example. I used to think maybe my revulsion to the way certain people smell was just some conceited, holier-than-thou attitude, and if I humbled myself I won't see people so negatively just because of how they smell. But what I found is that it's purely visceral aversion. Yesterday I tried walking past a homeless person normally instead of leaving the sidewalk to avoid their path, and I automatically grimaced and scowled in discomfort/disgust at the way they smelled and looked. Many times I've had to just get off buses because it was difficult to breathe due to all the homeless stench. More general example is that even at community oriented comfortable places like the yoga classes I go to, some people seem to not wear deoderant (or enough of it, or shower, wash their clothes, etc), so I have to move away from them so the smell doesn't distract from the experience. The most uncomfortable thing that could happen is if I hug someone (as is common after spiritual yoga events) and the strong odor of their armpit sweat and stale body musk rubs off on me and now I smell like that, their foul odour transferred onto me, and now I feel uncomfortable and need to take another shower, the day is somewhat ruined until I do. Generally I enjoy hugging women, but I encounter plenty of bad smelling women too, there and many other places, so in my mind I sort of tag certain people as "smells-avoid all physical contact" to stay comfortable. This is one of the many ways in which I'm overly sensitive to people and prefer to be alone, avoid the phsycial discomfort of being around other people, and the emotional discomfort of allowing myself to be vulnerable to directly experiencing other people's emotions. I'd defnitely rather "cleanse myself" from existence than live like the street-dwelling homeless bums. Actually did some research into why such people continue to deolately scrape along in their slow and painful deaths intead of killing themselves, and it's basically drugs and alcohol for the most part. And this is mostly why they live on the street instead of using the available services to help them, which would require them to stop substance abusing. "Treating the wound" would be changing laws so that people who make such messes of themselves while being a public nuisance can be simply rounded up by civil security forces, and put in containment facilities to be evaluated for rehabilitation. But cities aren't allowed to just kick out homeles migrants because 'they're people too and have a right to exist freely' even if they negatively impact public safety & quality of life for everyone else who has to deal with their presence. I also lament how being constantly harassed by beggars has made me far more antisocial, to the point where I ignore anyone who tries to talk to me in public, assuming they are just begging for money or trying to sell somehting (99% of the time I'm right though). Really eroded any sense of community I might have with the plave I live. You just know that as the scourge gets worse and nothing is done about it, people who have the means will self-segregate more and more into gated cities, shielded from the masses of poor and hungry surging in from all corners of the Earth, where everything is clean and beautiful, and people can trust each other. If I lived in such a place I think I'd feel a lot more positively of my fellow humankind again. And presently, by tuning out all the poverty and suffering in the world, as well as physically avoiding undesirable people more and more, I can maintain a positive perspective on life, ignoring the harsh reality of things and living in my own serene bubble, reality is mostly subjective. City limits, county lines and international borders are just arbitrary boundaries. The issue is that migrants will cross over these regardless, they place wherever they end up has to deal with the blight of the problem, and when they try to "help" these people, it just keeps attracting more.

Compassionate social cleansing, in a theoretical sense. And case in point how merely thinking about such thinks creates a dark mood. The real issue here though, both personally and globally, is what do you do when you feel that humanity and the world is completely fucked and nothing can be done about it? This is how, after previously embodying the Green virtues of the typical hippie environmentalist passionate about "healing the Earth" I seemed to move into extreme self-centeredness and apathy, living in the present, filling my life with pleasant sensations, tuning out other people's feelings people rather than empathizing, and ignoring human suffering to instead focus on my own deep inner world, no longer giving any fucks about the world's problems, as long as I can dodge them myself.

Also an important thing to mention is that euthanizing most of the urban homeless, those who are experiencing constant suffering and realistically have no chance of being anything else but a street bum, actually feels like the most compassionate thing to do in terms of alleviating human suffering. When I walk under a freeway, often choosing to walk out into the street and risk getting hit by cars than go near the homeless encampments, I see all those wretched miserable people there barely even living, rotting away in their own waste, painfully waiting around to die. They would probably kill themselves if they had an opportunity to do it quick and painlessly, assisted suicide programs would be a humane option I suppose. Been talking about this stuff too much and it's getting depressing, got to go clear my mind by looking at pictures of mountians and trees and flowers.

I'm not talking about it as a social issue, but as personal experience. Imagine being constantly accosted by beggars, threatened randomly by homless people, encountering their urine and feces all over the place, and most of the voilent crime in your city being homeless related. The cancer is spreading into the nice parts of town too, where you see more of them sleeping on the sidewalk and breaking into houses. Not to mention the rancid smell of those people, makes public transit, libraries and many other places unusable, I'd even go as far to describe it as olfactory assault. Can't find pictures of these signs online, but I once went to a park where there were signs warning not to feed the squirrels, because then they will overpopulate, spread disease and destroy the landscape. This is exactly what is happening when homeless pour into a city, tourists and yuppies give them money, churches hold public feedings, and the city applies for grant money for homeless services instead of speical security forces to kick them out. This pathological altruism results in more and more homeless pouring into the city all the time, until it looks like a third world hobo village. People who've never been to places like LA and SF really can't imagine what utterly disgusting shitholes certain parts have turned into because of homeless migration. The most efficient solution woud be to enact the toughest public nuisance laws possible to allow regular patrols to sweep up the street homeless into containment camps, then determine who gets rehabilitated, deported, incarcerated, institutionalized or euthanized. Because most of these people really can't take care of themselves, never could even if everything was handed to them, otherwise they would actually use the services available instead of just sleeping in a doorway, shitting in their pants and begging for money. But even if this could happen, who would even pay for it? Certainly the city under seige by the homeless plague wouldn't want to bear the cost of it. The country, the state, the federal government? Realistically this would never happen, and what I do now is go very out of my way to avoid them. Can't move any time soon, and I've learned to avoid the areas most infested by the plague. There are still lots of beautiful things, I don't dwell on all these negative thoughts expressed here, but can't help but to feel angry and disgusted when I encounter parts of an otherwise nice city completely ruined by homeless invasion. But referring back to my longer post on the climate refugee problem, when things in North America get as bad as Malmö, Sweden, the best I can hope for is to live in a utopian walled society like Bregna in AeonFlux, where the atmosphere and people are all clean and safe and aesthetically pleasing. Don't get me wrong, I can totally empathize with those people as individuals and see things from their perspective. That doesn't change the fact that each one of them is part of a major problem, and thus I don't care about them as people, there are just parasites, blights on the environment that I would like to see eliminated. I guess this is what I'd call the post-empathy aspects of yellow. I'm no expert on spiral dynamics but I did watch the video series on this site, and identified with everything in yellow, and even many parts of turquoise. One glaring excpetion though is retaining a pervasive self-centerdness regardless of my development in all other areas. It feels like I grew out of stage Green empathy and taken on an attitude of hyper-individualism which allows me substantial control over my thoughts and emotions compared to seeing myself and others as part of a human collective. Though I do realize stage Turquoise would be a much more wholistic perspective on things, and the pendulum swings back the other way. For many reasons it seems doubtful I would ever get to full Turquoise, and I readily acknoledge that the self-centeredness my even be some retained Red.

No-fap is incredibly useful for people who actually have a severe addiction to wanking, since like any other hard addition, moderation isn't possible, and quitting it altogether is the only alternative to fapping like several times a day. I know this from experience, ever since I first did that at age 14, my life was either a nonstop wankfest or a period of total abstinence. And on the positive side, the chenges you go through from semen rentention are too nuanced ot even begin to describe, and as I've learnt by now, it's pointless trying to convince other people to try no-fap, or that it's a valid endeavour, since any guy (assuming they're healhty with normal T levels, not on SSRIs) who'se experienced a month without ejaculation knows full well how their life changes profoundly. But there is plenty of information across many acient systems of spiritualiuty which echo the same sentiments, which concurr with my own experiences of semen retention. But I completely understand your precautions about sexual repression. Nowadays I do breath and sound meditation which helps transmute the energy, but back in the day semen retention would turn me into a ferociously horny animal, acting aggressive picking fights with people, crudely hitting on women, even discarding my antinantalist beliefs and feeling overwhemling urges to impregnate someone and actually feeling excitied about having babies. If priests force themselves to be celibate but don't transmute that sexual energy away from primal levels, it just gets repressed, and then inevitably rears it's ugly head in some disturbed perversion. I actually don't endorse no porn though. Seems so pointless for me personally since I could walk out my door tomorrow and see things outside one might find in a softcore photoshoot. That's one reason I justify causally browsing adult content even while not fapping. Though porn and masturbation addictions are obviously highly correlated, I always felt that it was the constantly ejaculating multiple times a day that was detrimental to my life, and from my experiences with semen retention while watching porn and/or edging, found that not ejacualting is the key factor that gives me those no-fap superpowers. Having a wet dream, though rare at my age, feels different though, like it's the body gently cleaning itself out, I don't feel that same sense of depleted energy as when I masturbate to completion.

World is utterly fucked as far as the future of humanity is concerned. I'm not intending to say this through a lens of gloom and doom pessimism, and my tone is emotionaly neutral, analytical. But just realizing the extent of the damage people have caused to our environment, as well as the snowballing effects of everything like climate change, contamination and biosphere loss. I was hardly even aware of the situation until I took a colelge course on environmental biology, and by now it seems every week I learn of a new kind of ecological disaster we're only seeing barely the tip of so far. Trying to "save the earth is futile" and trying to effect consumer choices is basically just feel-goodismand naïve virtue signaling, it won't change anything. But even things that do help ease the destruction like regulating industry, increasing fuel efficiency, and banning throwaway plastics will not be enough to slow down the cascade of suffering humanity inflicted upon itself. I've seen some very promising technology that can do things like reduce waste and sequester greenhouse gases, but it would never be viable on a scale large enough to reverse where we're headed, only enough to get businesses tax breaks for "going greener." Notice I didn't even mention human behavior, because with all the temperature extremes, increasingly deadly natural disasters, loss or arable land, lack of drinkable water, collapse of entire biomes, you can expect wars over the remaining resources, millions and millions of refugees like never seen before, and the inevitable deaths of large swathes of humanity who can't escape in time, or have nowhere to run to. And this will all just be a natural correction, what happens when any population of a species overshoots the carrying capacity of it's environment. In light of all this, my intention would be to never have children and strongly discourage others from procreating also, because while many of us not so young people may get to live out our lives spared fromt he worst of what's to come, those born today and hereafter are most liekly on a course for immense physical suffering and horrible deaths. Seriosuly, climate change really eclipses the whole natalism-antinatalism debate, from this context reproducing is a selfish and reckless endeavour. Well think about it this way. Consider the postuation that if we took all the wealth in the world and divided it equally amongst all human beings alive at any given moment, then everyone's standard of living would drop through the floor, except if they were already that poor or worse to begin with. And the rhethorical question: Why should it be your problem if other people, or governments make poor choices, like carelessly having kids they can't afford to feed, or make living conditions in their country so oppressive that they give up everything and risk gruesome death to illegally immigrate to the civilised world? One black pill I had to swallow as I moved from stage Green to Yellow in the spiral dynamics is that it is imposible to care about everyone, because there are just so many people on this planet, several billion, it's inconceivable, you couldn't ever even draw that many dots on a never-ending roll of paper. Stage green in its extremes take on a pathologal altruism, obsessed with wanting to help people or alleviate suffering, often blind to they ways in which this backfires upon themselves- most glaring example being places like Sweden obviously, having basically destroyed itself by letting an endless flood of migrants come in and take over the country. So what I'm trying to illustrate here is the realization that there is, and always will be unimaginable and utterly devastating human suffering. And it feels like desensitizing yourself to the suffering of others is of practical necessity for maintaining your own inner zen while the world crumbles around you. Why help any specific person, what makes any individual(s) more important, or worth saving/protecting than theother 7 billion? I'm forced to think of this every time I see a homeless person begging for money, how they're 99.9% likely not from my locale, don't care about me or any other passers by, but expect them to care just because they came here and put on a display of poverty porn for us to witness. They are a nuisance, threat to safety and sanitation, and it often occurs to me the most efficient way to purge the plague of domestic homeless migrants infesting urban centers would be to round them up and throw them in gas chanbers. I recognize though that this is part of the unrealistic stage Yellow thinking Leo warned about in the corresponding video, and I'm careful not to mention such opinions publicly. So I how I deal with the issue of human suffering is to ignore it, avoid and tune out people who pester and disgust me, and make it my goal to avoid the encroachment of ever-growing masses of starving poor people. I used to feel that maybe helping others master their inner worlds, learn to control their emotional states to overcome internal blocks was my calling. But that has been a fruitless and futile endeavor, since the process by which I internalized these things was though highly subjective experiences which can't be welle xplained using words. I can't teach people to become zen, because the journey is the destination. But maybe I'm just a zen devil really, and transitioning from Yellow to Turquoise manifest as an attitude shift from self-exceptionalism to self-transcendence. Regardless I don't take myself too seriously, constantly mindful of my humility, I may feel extremely powerful within my own mind and body, but who am I to think I am in any position to help others overcome their sufferings even if I really wanted to. I had often tried talking to depressed people about developing a sense of unconditional self-love, but they tend to escew my advice in favor of wallowing and commiserating in their sadness. And if I'm being honest about it, my method of emotional mastery is realy just hijacking the emotional feedback loop normally used for empathy, and using it to feel whatever you want to, shaping your reality fromt he indide out. It's both incredibly empowering and incredibly antisocial. And less introverted people could use these methods to become full blown narcissistic sociopaths.

I'll indulge you one last time. I really don't care what you believe about me or yourself. But if you go back and re-read my comments without viewing them as egocentric, nor emotionally reacting to them, maybe the filters will come off more and you will have better understanding. One thing that did occur to me recently is that extroverts may view any kind of detailed analysis as an emotional reaction, since they themselves would only delve so deeply into a subject if they were emotionally invested, agitated and worked up about it. For me as an introvert I am always in contemplative thought, mindful of the difference between critical thinking and emotional reaction, so this kind of writing flows naturally and effortlessly. Perhaps this is why people ascribe all sorts of non-existent emotional frustration to my forum posts, emails and youtube comments. It's just puzzling how I can express myself from a place that feels so calm and detatched from my perspective, but others will read it and get angry angry angry, or assume that's the way I feel. Well this has veered way off the original thread topic...

I write in an emotionally neutral analytical style. What you seem to be doing is filtering plain text and concept emphasis through your own emotional projections and cocksure attitude. Dissecting your reasoning was intended to humble your ego, so you can be objective, take a step back and think like a rational problem-solver. But as I thought might happen in the worst-case-scenario, you take everything as a personal attack and reply with even more arrogant shitposting. I thought this was a self-actualization forum, not 4chan... Done.