Joshe

Kinda. I wouldn't think of it as "approach", because the very idea triggers your nervous system, then you automatically start fighting yourself, searching for calm and confidence, trying your best to pretend your nervous system doesn't exist whilst you conjure up your top inner-game wisdom and affirmations. I think women are more receptive to you when you're not performing anything and you don't want them one way or the other. I think just being in your own presence - authentically - with nothing to prove and nothing to gain is all most men need to have a fair amount of prospects. This might sound like bullshit but I don't know how else to put it. If you don't have looks, as long as you have some kind of redeeming quality, whether it be confidence, charisma, humor, demeanor, sexy, interesting character, style, or whatever, all you have to do is be around women and some will bite. If you don't have a hook at all, you will just be a nice guy (which is still better than coming off like pickup weirdo). Just a couple of recent examples of how things start and potentially escalate with no effort: I recently took my dog to the dog park and saw this chick there who invited me over to let our dogs play together. Had normal human conversation. At the end, without trying or wanting anything, we exchanged phone numbers and now she texts me every time she goes to the park. And out of the blue she's telling me her bf isn't actually her bf and that it's complicated, and she's texting almost on a daily basis. I didn't do anything - there was no approach or stress. Time before that, I met a super sexy, clean hippy with armpit hair who told me what time she usually comes so I can meet her there again. Again, no approach, no thoughts about how I wanted to have sex with her - just being normal and friendly. It's almost like showing them basic respect as a person and not trying to get anything from them makes them receptive enough so that you don't have to neurotically pummel your nervous system to create a window for escalation. 🤔 You don't have to practice tactics when all you have to do is learn to be calm, cool, normal, nice, good-faith, and seeing them as a fellow human instead of your game. This method might not be for the high-standard trophy collector because it's not as targeted as pickup, but high standards = less sex. You're handicapping yourself for a pristine story. 1/3 the girls I've had sex with, you might call me disgusting for having sex with them, but some of the best sex I've had was with a girl most guys wouldn't be caught dead with in public. Multiple pieces - but really too deep to dive into here. It's mostly about listening to, respecting, and retraining your nervous system for calm, which necessitates learning to identify and letting go of thoughts that induce fear and anxiety. First step is learn to listen to and accept what your nervous system is telling you. If you ignore it, you'll always just be masking and won't have true confidence and will wonder why you can't quite get it handled. The reason you can do 1000 approaches and still experience intense emotion is because you're trying to do exposure therapy wrong. True exposure therapy pairs exposure with safety and nervous system regulation, but when you approach 1000 women, there's no safety and regulation - in fact, the opposite - which is why it doesn't work, hence the idea of building calm from the bottom-up, incrementally, with safety built-in (i.e. outside the domain of pickup). There's probably not a one-size fits all strategy. It's kind of a long game and a lot of work tbh, but so is pickup. It's healthier in the long run but maybe pickup is better if you're hard up. You could check out the book called "Befriending Your Nervous System" to get some basic ideas, but the main work would be consciousness and somatic work, which you would have to figure out on your own for the most part. FYI, I'm no expert or master on this stuff. I'm still in the learning phase of cultivating calm. Also, since I'm not looking for sex, I'm likely biased towards methods that don't produce it. It just seems to make more sense to cultivate calm incrementally in safe, low-pressure environments where the nervous system can actually learn what calm feels like and rewire itself.

You can still get tall girls as a short guy. I'm a little over 5'7 and I dated a girl that was about 4-5 inches taller. It is pretty funny though. She was weirded out the first time I kissed her without shoes on, but she got over it and we just joked about it. Another time, I tried to pull a smooth one and lift her off the ground mid-kiss - she told me to never do that again. lol.

lol, ya think? I onced mixed LSD with red wine and volunteered to take a bus load of Christian children to Cracker Barrel for breakfast, and I offered to pay for it all. 😂 I'm glad that didn't pan out. Ahhh, the ideas we have on drugs...

Maybe hunger will be enough to move them in 2028, or maybe Fox and Musk will put the word out that the hunger was actually caused by Obama and Biden. Hard to say.

There are prerequisites for producing good thoughts. Quality thoughts emerge from quality processes. But to bring it down a level, what makes thoughts better in the truth-seeking domain? Self-correction and calibration. It's how willing, honestly, and flexible a mind can update itself. Iterative self-correction. A good thinker tests their knowledge and intuitions through internal trial and error and they are very sensitive to previous errors they've made. They loop between intuition, reasoning, and reality-testing and update as needed. This pays compounding interest. This is how I produce my amazing thoughts. 😆 Also, this would not be applicable to all thought, which is what I was trying to explain in my previous post. Maybe you've answered already, but what are your top contenders?

Choose the opposite of whichever one your ego gets the most juice from.

What even is a good-quality thought? It would depend on your goals and the context in which the thought arises. If you're an artist, "good thoughts" would be different from good thoughts of a philosopher. So, what is meant by "good"? If my goal is to rest, the thought that I shouldn't have any thoughts is a good thought. "Good thought" is not static because context is not static. If you specifically mean what is a good thought in the context of intellectual pursuits, insights, etc., then the quality of thought depends on the system producing them. Maybe a better question would be: what most affects the quality of the thinking process that leads to good thoughts in situation X with the goal of Y. Given this, maybe the answer would be something like the ability to select and apply the thinking process most pertinent to a specific goal. Strategic metacognition.

@EternalForest Your strategy would highly depend on what you want to sell. You'd need an entirely different strategy for selling something like art than you would for selling a service. You could just take cookie-cutter advice, and some of it is necessary, but many others are doing the same thing. You need an original, intelligent strategy. Most likey, you need a mix of partnerships, advertising, and self-promotion. Set yourself apart with high-quality branding and a high-quality website. A good list of foundational tech skills to acquire: Visual design HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Advertising tools like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, etc. Marketing psychology and copywriting Realistically, it would take 2 years to learn these so that you can produce more polished creatives than normies can with something like Canva or ChatGPT, but it would be worth it. I just finished a website for a new residential HVAC business. Currently, the business is ranked 33 in Google local map pack. I'm going to get it in the top 6 within 6-12 months. I wouldn't have a shot at this without tech skills. It all starts with good branding and design. This site I built is possibly the best looking, most polished HVAC website on the entire internet. That's just one way to set yourself apart, but I think it's foundational. I couldn't have produced it with cookie-cutter templates.

Pony up and it's yours!

Neurosyphilis. Brothels are fun until you wind up like Fred.

The key thing to understand is we’re all living for something. We need something to live for. If that something gets weak or disappears, we look for something else. Importantly, we want that thing to give us positive energy or the prospect of it. That explains the drive. The other side of the coin is the various entities exploiting this drive. Most people are on this forum because spirituality is the thing they’ve chosen to live for. Without it, they would need something else to replace it. Sounds simple but if you can truly see this, it’s one of those cold-chills insights. It explains a ton about human behavior.

lol. @Ramasta9 sorry for contributing to the clutter. This is has just been a fallacy I've been seeing for a while and I think it needs correcting. People get a whiff of AI and lose their shit.

@Dodo I've never been a stickler for rules, so I don't care much what the rules say. You're acting as if you can't assess the arguments on their own, void of style. Get to and assess the essence of the message and discard style. That's ideally what you should evaluate and not get hung up on style. Of course we want to keep the human element, but we also need to accommodate technological evolution as well. Imagine if this was a math forum and calculators didn't exist but a few members figured out how to make them. Would you berate them for showing you accurate math? Below, I gave my AI your AI's response and told it my position and it came up with the content below. Forget about whether or not these arguments come from AI. Which argument has more punch? Which seems more wise, logical, coherent, etc? Can you assess and weight the strengths of each response and see what's worth taking from each, or if there's a clear winner in the realm of ideas? Of course doing this all the time would be monotonous and the human element would be lost, which is not good, and I'm not advocating for that, but IMO, it's perfectly fine to use AI to help you articulate and flesh out your position and lead you to new ones. AI's response: " I get the distinction you’re making, but I think you’re overestimating the purity of “unaided writing” and underestimating how much mediation already exists in any act of communication. If someone uses AI to express an idea they already understand, that’s not deception — it’s translation. The tool doesn’t magically import comprehension any more than a thesaurus imports intelligence. It only shapes how thought takes form in language. You say it’s “dishonest” because it doesn’t reflect the person’s “actual skill level,” but that assumes the purpose of discussion here is to test people’s natural eloquence, not to explore ideas. If this were a writing competition, I’d agree. But in philosophy or nonduality discussion, the only meaningful question is whether what’s being said points to something real and true. If someone’s pretending to have depth they don’t, time will expose that. But conflating the means of expression with the authenticity of insight is like blaming the typewriter for the writer’s pretense. " See, AI just articulated my position far better than I could have, and it makes perfect sense. It's a very strong argument., formed from MY position. Could you yourself argue against it without resorting to the tactics you're accusing OP of? If you went to your AI to help you find flaws in my argument and presented them to me, if they were solid, I would gladly accept them. It's ultimately on YOU to openly and honestly assess the validity of ideas, regardless if they were augmented by AI or not.

Like everything else, the novelty wears off, you get tired of it, question its purpose, realize it's shit, and leave it behind you.

Yes, I acknowledge that is a thing. I don't know OP but I gave them the benefit of the doubt that they aren't using AI like that. Maybe they are, and if so, I'm with you. But there's some nuance here. People have been using Google for a couple decades to augment and improve their intellectual positions. What if you were on a forum that said "you can't use answers from Google in your debates" because that would unfairly raise your intellectual level? That would be absurd and that's the line you're flirting with. We all use technology to boost our intellects. Over time, chess cheaters get a bad reputation. Same thing here. If someone is constantly conversing/debating in bad-faith, it will eventually be known. I guess time will tell with OP. Using AI to assist in articulation of orignal thought does blur the line, but if you evaluate the ideas themselves, that's what should count, in my book. If someone delivers some next level ideas, I don't care if they ran it through AI because I only care about how the ideas are useful/interesting for me. Someone can use AI to refine how they express complex thoughts they already had. That doesn’t mean the thoughts were fake.

@Dodo I'm good at spotting AI. I know it was used and still praised the work because it included original insights I've had myself. With all the context, I don't think they just used AI to construct arbitrary arguments against non-duality. I think they used it to articulate their own perception of very specific errors they've noticed from this forum. I've been wrong before, but my read is that they just used AI to help them articulate what they saw. Maybe AI added a few extra things that wasn't theirs, but the bulk of the work - the main ideas - seems to have formed from original thought IMO, even if polished and stylized with AI.

I don't know that they didn't but I lean towards they didn't because he was discussing the topic elsewhere, trying to explain in his own words, then figured the whole topic would be better off in a post. Also, he honed in on very specific examples that represent a lot of what you see here, which makes me think they were his own ideas, unless AI was asked to scan this entire forum to find all the common non-dual fallacies, one of which he was just arguing against prior to his post.

well yeah, you could make it do that, but why the hell would you? If someone is having AI construct arguments or positions that aren't their own, then yeah, that would be annoying, but I'm not so sure that's the case here. Just because I detect AI, I don't automatically dismiss the ideas. The ideas here were solid IMO.

OP clearly used AI - but the main ideas were clearly formed by OP. The main ideas are what matters.

Pride + hatred is exactly right.

He's a con artist. A full-blown opportunist with no morals. Willing to claim he found Jesus because it helps his numbers. He once stood on a stage in his high school and taunted all the teachers to come up and argue against him and that you could give him any topic, and he could beat any member of the staff in debate. Something like that. In other words, since he was young, he was obsessed with the ability to persuade and change people's perceptions of a thing. And the thing itself wasn't important, it was the power he liked. Basically, he had a knack for manipulation and he knew it and stepped all the way into it without a moral compass. He's not ideological the way that most people think. Ideology doesn't mean much to him. Basically, he's a wolf herding sheep.

For a time, learn to not need or even want anything from women and learn to not be in opposition to them. When you relate to women in this way - when your nervous system is at ease - you can flow with them much easier and they can tell. It's a breath of fresh air when they come across this. They sense safety, which I would argue is far more powerful than any verbal/behavioral tactics. Pickup is not pickup without devising, calculating, and scheming how to get what YOU want. This automatically creates a posture of competition, opposition, and protection. This posture is toxic to your nervous system, which manifests outwardly. Pickup creates this dysregulation and then constantly tries to suppress it. "Optimal flow state" is actually "optimal suppression (successful repression)" - neurotic in nature - trying to manufacture calm over a foundation of chaos, which is what "inner game" is about - managing arousal. It's a nervous system suppression strategy that continually adds nervous system irritants. It makes sense that if you want to crack pickup, the first thing you should do is befriend your nervous system - honor it. And as a result, you will learn to honor others. If you befriend your nervous system - get to know it - it would tell you that modern pickup creates a sense of "protection" rather than "connection" and that you're handicapping yourself by actively feeding dysregulation. There's power in true ease and magnetism in safety. That's how you spread legs. lol. The only downside is they attach harder. You want deep connection with a woman? Drop pickup altogether, uproot neediness, and regulate yourself.

You know yourself - that’s the biggest data point for spotting Ni. IRL, me neither, but I have spotted it in others in books and on the internet. I can’t articulate how I spot them without spending 20 mins, but I saw it in a few people here - you and Emerald for example. Key hallmark is the ease with which they generate original insight with non-linear reasoning. More to it than that but I think that’s the broad pattern. It’s not just intelligence. There’s intelligence with something else. Something that can see without linear reason.

Introverted intuition. Tryna tell ya! The top spiritual people all have it. I think it’s more nurture than nature, but not sure. You could have the potential and never develop it depending on circumstances. Trauma seems to be a catalyst.

I did psychedelics every weekend for 2 years. They didn’t raise my consciousness. My consciousness has always been expanding (which I assume is natural for those interested in the riddle of reality), and it still expands, even without psychedelics for 5 years. What makes it expand is seeing that which was previously not seen, and understanding the mechanics of the vail - how it was hidden and how it came to not be hidden. That’s what expands consciousness, IME. And the “what” behind the vail is always my own mind. Psychedelics showed me some things about my mind but after a while, it’s a one-trick pony. One trap I can see clearly is some people will think they’re expanding their consciousness with psychedelics when in reality, all they’re doing is using the data from previous trips to construct even grander trips in the future, creating a feedback loop where trips become more pronounced and profound over time, which feels like conscious ascension, but in reality, your fleshing shit out sideways. 100% this is super common, and I wouldn’t rule out it being universal. You experience reality differently for a while because you’re discombobulated or traumatized or intensely perplexed. This does not = expanded consciousness. It’s easy to accumulate and stack these feelings and use them to trick yourself that they represent expanded consciousness.