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Recently I went through a bit of a low point in my life, mostly unrelated to women (though women of course are a litmus test of the quality of one’s inner world, so it is always affected). During this time I started meditating a little more than usual, and paying more attention to my ability to manage my internal state. I had the opportunity to learn a bit more about meditation, in particular why it sometimes works against you.
For anyone who has tried meditation on a regular basis, you will probably find that it can have the side effect of leaving you with low energy. This makes sense when you think about it: the problem that meditation solves (or tries to solve) is the problem of having uncontrolled emotional energy sloshing around inside your psyche. Regardless of whether this energy is positive or negative, the fact that it is uncontrolled means that it produces unpredictable results in terms of everything associated with action, including drive, motivation, satisfaction, etc. It makes it very difficult to maintain this energy and consistently and efficiently direct it toward anything useful. If the energy is negative, it goes without saying that it damages and inhibits everything useful.
What meditation does is use the body to control the mind – by becoming immobile, and bringing the muscles and posture to a state of rest, and breathing deeply and regularly, the mind gradually quiets down, leaving you with a sense of tranquility and stability even if the emotion is not fully transformed. The emotional energy loses its ability to express and rebirth itself in the movements of the body, and so gradually dissipates. This leaves you calm and able to reassess your perspective in a much more positive and constructive manner.
But does it always do this, or does it sometimes inhibit you by tranquilizing your capability to respond to the requirements of your situation and life in general? Let's look at some problems with it, and some of the essential things that it does not cooperate with.
It’s very hard to be persuasive with low affect
When it comes to influencing and persuading other people, emotions are king. This is because emotions are contagious. If you do not feel them, chances are the other person won’t either, and when you do feel them, the other person subconsciously and powerfully reacts – positively in the case of positive emotions, and negatively in the case of negative emotions.
In seduction, lack of emotion is probably the quickest way to kill an interaction. It makes every word and action crude and awkward. For those guys with significant inhibitions, they will often find themselves unable to maintain emotional control when approaching women – either they become highly emotional, which makes the woman feel overwhelmed and anxious and repels them, or they become suddenly wooden and dead, unable to express anything, which leaves a woman cold. It is actually better to be the former – sometimes girls will throw you a line if you are nervous and make a mess of things, and you may be able to bring things under control over time, and though it's ultimately unlikely to pan out, it can end in a positive experience. But for the latter there is no chance of anything good – at best she will simply disengage, at worst she will panic and run. Because without emotion there is nothing there for her, nothing for her to vibe with, nothing for her to stimulate herself with, nothing for her to trust. There is simply the shadow of someone there, but nothing of the reality of their spirit. Is it absent or merely hidden? Neither answer is good for her.
When meditating excessively, or when meditating in a situation where the mind is primarily filled with negative emotional energy, the net result is that most of the energy leaves the body before the session is complete or the mind is brought into a state of equilibrium. This results in a state of low affect, where the mind is tranquil but rather numb to everything, and only with difficulty mounts some kind of engagement with its environment. If you try to approach in this state, you may get some of the worst kind of rejections – not because girls are mean, but because you have left them with no clear indication of your state of mind or intentions while putting them on the spot. Girls, who are emotional creatures, trust and engage with emotion more than anything, and the absence of it is something alien and deeply unsettling to them.
Action vindicates itself
Life does not always provide clear directions, indeed it is very difficult to tell even over the span of one’s life which actions were good or bad, useful or not, necessary or superfluous. Some people profess to know the answers, but they have merely chosen a narrative, and the more certain they are the less experienced they are likely to be with the reality of living that narrative out against any level of opposition.
Nietzche said that “Happiness is the feeling that power increases, that resistance is overcome”. Resistance is overcome through action. If action is taken that overcomes resistance to that which one desires, what else could be more satisfying? I have found this to be one of the most important truths of life. Action consolidates everything – the emotions, the body, the spirit – rendering many unanswered questions irrelevant, providing deep and lasting satisfaction without requiring certainty of anything.
Sex is one of the most dominant and powerful actions, both physically and psychologically, that you can take. Its entire nature is primordial – the drive to conquer, to penetrate, to dominate, and ultimately, to expand oneself through reproduction. Do any of these drives have clear and unarguable rationalizations? As I like to say, there are two things that can never be explained to a man: why he should fuck women, and why he should fight his enemies. He either simply wants to do it or he doesn’t. Life does not provide any clear explanation for the relative benefit of either choice, nor does it guarantee him any future knowledge of whether he was right or wrong. It is simply a drive that preexists reality itself – and perhaps because of this is what gave birth to it.
Nowhere does a man’s actions vindicate themselves more than in the female mind. In terms of the psychic components of sex (at least, if not throughout the rest of life), men fundamentally act upon reality, and women are acted upon. This is why women do not approach men, nor do they precipitate any action or escalation of the seduction, physical or psychological. First comes the action by the man, and this resolves itself one way or the other in the mind of the woman, such that she chooses to accept or reject it. Thus the man acts first. But does he know if his action has any certainty of being accepted or not? Does he know whether this woman belongs sexually to him, or to someone else? How does he know if it is acceptable for him to go up to a woman he does not know and presume to end up having her for himself? No, he does not know. Nor can he know beforehand. Because his action spawns its own vindication, its own kingdom in which it rules according to its own truth. A truth to which the woman submits on faith, if she so desires.
The problem with meditation in this regard is that it can dull the primitive drives and motivations and prime the mind to become too much of an observer of itself. This is useful to an extent – to be able to observe yourself gives you power to understand and optimize your internal and external reality. But it cannot go all the way – the observer who cannot determine what it is seeing becomes stuck and paralyzed, unable to come to a conclusion, and loses the sense of primacy of action. And because the most fundamental drives – which are far closer to the surface of reality than we usually are aware – are not determinable, not evaluable, if we become too absorbed in trying to observe them, we unwittingly frustrate ourselves and become separated from them to the point where we lose our connection with the sap of life, and end up listless and disoriented.
Loss of self
It is one of the fundamental truths of life that a person knows themselves partly or mostly through their own actions. This is because the conscious mind is not the real person, it is merely a layer that is more or less useful for the quality of the outcome of the expressions of the entirety of the self. I believe that the role of the conscious mind is that of the teacher and manager, to manage and optimize the training and output of the rest of the self. But the teacher who tries to replace its subject with itself is the worst and most destructive of all teachers, it kills the independent spirit, creativity, and raw potential of its subject. Unfortunately, this is what the consciousness egoistically is compelled to do if left to its own devices.
What does this result in? A loss of the true self, and a full identification with the persona – that is, the mask that the person wears as the ideal self, which is typically one of static elegance but completely and utterly incapable of operating effectively in reality.
You can see this at work in those people who identify fully with their conscious mind and strive to deny the instincts and impulses of the deeper psyche. They fortify themselves with and pleasure themselves in ‘self-evident’ logical truths, immersing themselves in the realm of thinking and observing (which is the domain of the conscious) to uncover more of the same, while completely disregarding their effectiveness and power at actually influencing the world around them. Other people tend to enjoy having them around, enjoying the music of their words of ‘truth’, but are rarely moved or compelled by them in any way. Because fundamentally, they know that the person is outside the reality of action and consequence, and therefore inconsequential themselves.
Meditation puts the conscious mind on the throne and disconnects the power to everything else. When things are out of control, this is all well and good – the manager or teacher must be able to regain control at necessary moments. But its job is not then to leave the rest of the mind subdued permanently, but instead to rearrange it and stimulate it in order to ensure that its expression is efficient and useful again, and that it is doing the right actions, and receiving the right level of feedback to its actions, in order to learn, grow, and adapt optimally.
This is why meditation is to the emotions what sleep is to the body – it is very necessary, but should not go for any more than necessary, and once over, the emotions should be immediately lifted up and exercised in order to be strong and useful.
Loss of momentum and lack of intent
Life contains substantial opposition in a variety of forms, overcoming which will absorb some amount of energy. As much as we would like to be able to act spontaneously according to some conscious choice, the psyche requires momentum in order to fully realize its capabilities. This goes back to the fundamental drives – the more these are given expression through decisive and effective action, the more momentum they acquire, becoming able to overcome greater and greater opposition that may appear.
This is true throughout all aspects of life, and is a fundamental part of seduction. Unrealized action – action that has not occurred yet, but shown itself to be potential or likely – is particularly at risk of being inhibited in some way, whether by the man’s own mind, people around him, or a woman he is seducing. This is because all action of any significance results in change, and change comes with all kinds of uncertainties and risks. It also captures attention, and creates excitement. But all this attention and excitement veers toward opposition if the energy behind the potential action is weak. Because what basis does this action have for exercising itself upon reality if it can be so easily opposed? Whatever opposing action can be brought to bear against it, in this case, vindicates itself by its relative strength.
This is why men who approach without conviction are denied, why men who cannot bring themselves to express their desires are shut down, why women shit-test when a man shows brittleness or weakness. Women cannot submit to a reality that appears easy to oppose, because that means that it is likely to be overwhelmed by some other reality which she did not submit to in the first place, putting her at risk.
One of the characteristics of a seduction that a woman submits most readily to is one with intent on the part of the man. Because with the strength of his intent he provides something for her to rely on in her submissive uncertainty, and in showing that he will not easily be obstructed from carrying it out, she can trust that if she submits to it, it will happen, regardless of any interference which could produce unpredictable outcomes.
But what is intent, how does one have it, or show it? The easiest way to have intent in a certain direction is to have momentum in it, to have strung together decisive actions over a long period of time which move you toward it, building up a store of emotional energy connected to those actions which spawn further ones with a minimum of hesitation or inhibition. Because the mind does not fully believe that which it has not experienced, regardless of how strongly you try to delude yourself, and if you try to show intent without any momentum, the expressions reek of uncertainty and confusion.
The problem with meditation is that it can dump all the emotional energy of positive momentum along with any negative elements, leaving the mind wide open for fear, anxiety, and disorientation to fill it. Thus, though a man may move to approach a woman, he does so lacking real intent, and because of this, being easily deflected by any obstacle he encounters.
In this case, I believe that instead of meditating, it is better to immerse oneself in the reality of the moment you are in, guiding your mind toward the drives and emotions that spring from your positive momentum and expanding them, moving your body to their rhythm to make them grow. Otherwise, like a ball of foam, you will bounce off any obstacle, real or imagined, before it has even done anything to stop you.
So when is meditation good for you?
Meditation is like a drug, it subdues an emotional mind that is out of control and which, left to its own devices, is likely to end up damaging its own effectiveness and potential. But once this happens, the drug is of no further use in rebuilding the mind, in fact it keeps it in a state of passivity. Therefore it must be stopped after the mind is brought under control, and attention directed toward simple strategy, action, and the expansion of positive emotion.
A small amount of meditation can be useful during action to bring things under control, but only enough to reengage the attention with reality and refocus on the positive emotions again. Any more than that risks disengaging the mind from its own drives, dumping excessive energy, and stalling momentum to the point where everything has to start from scratch.
I also believe meditation, like sleep, fasting, or any other 'reset', is good to do regularly whenever the mind and body is not required for immediate and decisive action. Back when I did kickboxing, I did a fight in ketosis (my coach did not know) and I experienced the feeling of being incredibly calm and incredibly ineffective at the same time. This is the same feeling I get when I meditate too much or at the wrong time. Sometimes your mind and body need to be like a runaway train - powerful, unstoppable, focused intently, and moving with overwhelming force - to have the effect and impact you wish to have upon the world. You can subdue it and tinker with it later on.
After meditating, one should spend at least as much time stimulating and exercising the primitive emotions through some kind of physical action, bringing the mind and body to a state of calm but intentful readiness.
For anyone who has tried meditation on a regular basis, you will probably find that it can have the side effect of leaving you with low energy. This makes sense when you think about it: the problem that meditation solves (or tries to solve) is the problem of having uncontrolled emotional energy sloshing around inside your psyche. Regardless of whether this energy is positive or negative, the fact that it is uncontrolled means that it produces unpredictable results in terms of everything associated with action, including drive, motivation, satisfaction, etc. It makes it very difficult to maintain this energy and consistently and efficiently direct it toward anything useful. If the energy is negative, it goes without saying that it damages and inhibits everything useful.
What meditation does is use the body to control the mind – by becoming immobile, and bringing the muscles and posture to a state of rest, and breathing deeply and regularly, the mind gradually quiets down, leaving you with a sense of tranquility and stability even if the emotion is not fully transformed. The emotional energy loses its ability to express and rebirth itself in the movements of the body, and so gradually dissipates. This leaves you calm and able to reassess your perspective in a much more positive and constructive manner.
But does it always do this, or does it sometimes inhibit you by tranquilizing your capability to respond to the requirements of your situation and life in general? Let's look at some problems with it, and some of the essential things that it does not cooperate with.
It’s very hard to be persuasive with low affect
When it comes to influencing and persuading other people, emotions are king. This is because emotions are contagious. If you do not feel them, chances are the other person won’t either, and when you do feel them, the other person subconsciously and powerfully reacts – positively in the case of positive emotions, and negatively in the case of negative emotions.
In seduction, lack of emotion is probably the quickest way to kill an interaction. It makes every word and action crude and awkward. For those guys with significant inhibitions, they will often find themselves unable to maintain emotional control when approaching women – either they become highly emotional, which makes the woman feel overwhelmed and anxious and repels them, or they become suddenly wooden and dead, unable to express anything, which leaves a woman cold. It is actually better to be the former – sometimes girls will throw you a line if you are nervous and make a mess of things, and you may be able to bring things under control over time, and though it's ultimately unlikely to pan out, it can end in a positive experience. But for the latter there is no chance of anything good – at best she will simply disengage, at worst she will panic and run. Because without emotion there is nothing there for her, nothing for her to vibe with, nothing for her to stimulate herself with, nothing for her to trust. There is simply the shadow of someone there, but nothing of the reality of their spirit. Is it absent or merely hidden? Neither answer is good for her.
When meditating excessively, or when meditating in a situation where the mind is primarily filled with negative emotional energy, the net result is that most of the energy leaves the body before the session is complete or the mind is brought into a state of equilibrium. This results in a state of low affect, where the mind is tranquil but rather numb to everything, and only with difficulty mounts some kind of engagement with its environment. If you try to approach in this state, you may get some of the worst kind of rejections – not because girls are mean, but because you have left them with no clear indication of your state of mind or intentions while putting them on the spot. Girls, who are emotional creatures, trust and engage with emotion more than anything, and the absence of it is something alien and deeply unsettling to them.
Action vindicates itself
Life does not always provide clear directions, indeed it is very difficult to tell even over the span of one’s life which actions were good or bad, useful or not, necessary or superfluous. Some people profess to know the answers, but they have merely chosen a narrative, and the more certain they are the less experienced they are likely to be with the reality of living that narrative out against any level of opposition.
Nietzche said that “Happiness is the feeling that power increases, that resistance is overcome”. Resistance is overcome through action. If action is taken that overcomes resistance to that which one desires, what else could be more satisfying? I have found this to be one of the most important truths of life. Action consolidates everything – the emotions, the body, the spirit – rendering many unanswered questions irrelevant, providing deep and lasting satisfaction without requiring certainty of anything.
Sex is one of the most dominant and powerful actions, both physically and psychologically, that you can take. Its entire nature is primordial – the drive to conquer, to penetrate, to dominate, and ultimately, to expand oneself through reproduction. Do any of these drives have clear and unarguable rationalizations? As I like to say, there are two things that can never be explained to a man: why he should fuck women, and why he should fight his enemies. He either simply wants to do it or he doesn’t. Life does not provide any clear explanation for the relative benefit of either choice, nor does it guarantee him any future knowledge of whether he was right or wrong. It is simply a drive that preexists reality itself – and perhaps because of this is what gave birth to it.
Nowhere does a man’s actions vindicate themselves more than in the female mind. In terms of the psychic components of sex (at least, if not throughout the rest of life), men fundamentally act upon reality, and women are acted upon. This is why women do not approach men, nor do they precipitate any action or escalation of the seduction, physical or psychological. First comes the action by the man, and this resolves itself one way or the other in the mind of the woman, such that she chooses to accept or reject it. Thus the man acts first. But does he know if his action has any certainty of being accepted or not? Does he know whether this woman belongs sexually to him, or to someone else? How does he know if it is acceptable for him to go up to a woman he does not know and presume to end up having her for himself? No, he does not know. Nor can he know beforehand. Because his action spawns its own vindication, its own kingdom in which it rules according to its own truth. A truth to which the woman submits on faith, if she so desires.
The problem with meditation in this regard is that it can dull the primitive drives and motivations and prime the mind to become too much of an observer of itself. This is useful to an extent – to be able to observe yourself gives you power to understand and optimize your internal and external reality. But it cannot go all the way – the observer who cannot determine what it is seeing becomes stuck and paralyzed, unable to come to a conclusion, and loses the sense of primacy of action. And because the most fundamental drives – which are far closer to the surface of reality than we usually are aware – are not determinable, not evaluable, if we become too absorbed in trying to observe them, we unwittingly frustrate ourselves and become separated from them to the point where we lose our connection with the sap of life, and end up listless and disoriented.
Loss of self
It is one of the fundamental truths of life that a person knows themselves partly or mostly through their own actions. This is because the conscious mind is not the real person, it is merely a layer that is more or less useful for the quality of the outcome of the expressions of the entirety of the self. I believe that the role of the conscious mind is that of the teacher and manager, to manage and optimize the training and output of the rest of the self. But the teacher who tries to replace its subject with itself is the worst and most destructive of all teachers, it kills the independent spirit, creativity, and raw potential of its subject. Unfortunately, this is what the consciousness egoistically is compelled to do if left to its own devices.
What does this result in? A loss of the true self, and a full identification with the persona – that is, the mask that the person wears as the ideal self, which is typically one of static elegance but completely and utterly incapable of operating effectively in reality.
You can see this at work in those people who identify fully with their conscious mind and strive to deny the instincts and impulses of the deeper psyche. They fortify themselves with and pleasure themselves in ‘self-evident’ logical truths, immersing themselves in the realm of thinking and observing (which is the domain of the conscious) to uncover more of the same, while completely disregarding their effectiveness and power at actually influencing the world around them. Other people tend to enjoy having them around, enjoying the music of their words of ‘truth’, but are rarely moved or compelled by them in any way. Because fundamentally, they know that the person is outside the reality of action and consequence, and therefore inconsequential themselves.
Meditation puts the conscious mind on the throne and disconnects the power to everything else. When things are out of control, this is all well and good – the manager or teacher must be able to regain control at necessary moments. But its job is not then to leave the rest of the mind subdued permanently, but instead to rearrange it and stimulate it in order to ensure that its expression is efficient and useful again, and that it is doing the right actions, and receiving the right level of feedback to its actions, in order to learn, grow, and adapt optimally.
This is why meditation is to the emotions what sleep is to the body – it is very necessary, but should not go for any more than necessary, and once over, the emotions should be immediately lifted up and exercised in order to be strong and useful.
Loss of momentum and lack of intent
Life contains substantial opposition in a variety of forms, overcoming which will absorb some amount of energy. As much as we would like to be able to act spontaneously according to some conscious choice, the psyche requires momentum in order to fully realize its capabilities. This goes back to the fundamental drives – the more these are given expression through decisive and effective action, the more momentum they acquire, becoming able to overcome greater and greater opposition that may appear.
This is true throughout all aspects of life, and is a fundamental part of seduction. Unrealized action – action that has not occurred yet, but shown itself to be potential or likely – is particularly at risk of being inhibited in some way, whether by the man’s own mind, people around him, or a woman he is seducing. This is because all action of any significance results in change, and change comes with all kinds of uncertainties and risks. It also captures attention, and creates excitement. But all this attention and excitement veers toward opposition if the energy behind the potential action is weak. Because what basis does this action have for exercising itself upon reality if it can be so easily opposed? Whatever opposing action can be brought to bear against it, in this case, vindicates itself by its relative strength.
This is why men who approach without conviction are denied, why men who cannot bring themselves to express their desires are shut down, why women shit-test when a man shows brittleness or weakness. Women cannot submit to a reality that appears easy to oppose, because that means that it is likely to be overwhelmed by some other reality which she did not submit to in the first place, putting her at risk.
One of the characteristics of a seduction that a woman submits most readily to is one with intent on the part of the man. Because with the strength of his intent he provides something for her to rely on in her submissive uncertainty, and in showing that he will not easily be obstructed from carrying it out, she can trust that if she submits to it, it will happen, regardless of any interference which could produce unpredictable outcomes.
But what is intent, how does one have it, or show it? The easiest way to have intent in a certain direction is to have momentum in it, to have strung together decisive actions over a long period of time which move you toward it, building up a store of emotional energy connected to those actions which spawn further ones with a minimum of hesitation or inhibition. Because the mind does not fully believe that which it has not experienced, regardless of how strongly you try to delude yourself, and if you try to show intent without any momentum, the expressions reek of uncertainty and confusion.
The problem with meditation is that it can dump all the emotional energy of positive momentum along with any negative elements, leaving the mind wide open for fear, anxiety, and disorientation to fill it. Thus, though a man may move to approach a woman, he does so lacking real intent, and because of this, being easily deflected by any obstacle he encounters.
In this case, I believe that instead of meditating, it is better to immerse oneself in the reality of the moment you are in, guiding your mind toward the drives and emotions that spring from your positive momentum and expanding them, moving your body to their rhythm to make them grow. Otherwise, like a ball of foam, you will bounce off any obstacle, real or imagined, before it has even done anything to stop you.
So when is meditation good for you?
Meditation is like a drug, it subdues an emotional mind that is out of control and which, left to its own devices, is likely to end up damaging its own effectiveness and potential. But once this happens, the drug is of no further use in rebuilding the mind, in fact it keeps it in a state of passivity. Therefore it must be stopped after the mind is brought under control, and attention directed toward simple strategy, action, and the expansion of positive emotion.
A small amount of meditation can be useful during action to bring things under control, but only enough to reengage the attention with reality and refocus on the positive emotions again. Any more than that risks disengaging the mind from its own drives, dumping excessive energy, and stalling momentum to the point where everything has to start from scratch.
I also believe meditation, like sleep, fasting, or any other 'reset', is good to do regularly whenever the mind and body is not required for immediate and decisive action. Back when I did kickboxing, I did a fight in ketosis (my coach did not know) and I experienced the feeling of being incredibly calm and incredibly ineffective at the same time. This is the same feeling I get when I meditate too much or at the wrong time. Sometimes your mind and body need to be like a runaway train - powerful, unstoppable, focused intently, and moving with overwhelming force - to have the effect and impact you wish to have upon the world. You can subdue it and tinker with it later on.
After meditating, one should spend at least as much time stimulating and exercising the primitive emotions through some kind of physical action, bringing the mind and body to a state of calm but intentful readiness.
