LastThursday

What do you need? A man, a relationship, the love from a relationship, not to be alone, something else?

Coincidence only happens if you are aware of it. It's the active process of awareness that is weaving together reality. That awareness is intelligence itself. Everything is just luck and coincidence.

A value is like a thought story compressed into one word. To see it just ask yourself for example: "Why do I value authenticity?" and out comes the story. All values are like this, there are many aspects to them. In a sense the word used for the value has no absolute meaning, something like "love" is just a placeholder for a whole story about love. You could replace "love" with "excitement" and some of the elements of both those values would overlap. Because they are just stories, your "authenticity" would be slightly different from someone else's "authenticity" - it's all relative. Meaning comes from emotion and identification with something. We say something is meaningful if it contains some truth or has some sort of emotional charge behind it. When you have a value of "being kind" for example, it's not because it's innate but because you have an emotional response to the story of "being kind". And, because you have the positive emotional response you identify with it. Maybe you imagine being kind to a person and it makes them happy, and you get a good vibe from this thought story, and then that makes it meaningful to you.

Knowing how to get results is really about asking what is the source of the seeking. In my case it's curiosity, I'm just itching to know all the time and that causes me to seek. But once I know a thing, the curiosity stops. So to improve my seeking I have to ferret out novelty or at least follow a chain of curiosity. But I realised that there are other sources of seeking, say through repetition (a.k.a. mastery), or quietude, or journalling. I think what I'm saying is to broaden the ways of seeking, it will give you greater/better/deeper results.

Would you say that is done through character assasination? Or is it more commonly just shunning someone?

@UDT sorry miscommunication - I meant I'm the fan boy not you. I was just proving your point about fan boys and bloody corpses. Anyway, moving on...

I think you forget that his audience is not scientific. The only reason a scientific presenter can speak so concisely is because s/he uses a lot of scientific words and is speaking to a scientific audience. Leo also uses some jargon (god, ego, enlightenment and so on), but mostly it's plain English, so it takes a lot longer to explain. Also, unlike a scientific seminar Leo uses lots and lots of examples to make his stuff easier to understand, and this takes extra time. I'm sure Leo prepares plenty. There's no way he could talk about what he does without solid preparation. [Leo fanboy, I'm looking at you @UDT]

Truth is unchanging.

Why not press pause and watch the rest another day?

What are you? It seems like if you strip away all the things that are not you, you aren't left with much. For example, if you lose a limb are you still you? It would seem so. So you are not that limb, or that limb isn't needed to define you. It quickly gets metaphysical. It appears that you could be a kind of disembodied (i.e. limbless) entity that observes or senses the world. In this view your body and the rest of the world is observed and is in some way separate from the actual you. I like to think of it like a bar magnet: You can see the lines going from North to South. You are the observer in the South pole sucking in everything from the world in the North pole. If you cut the magnet in half width-ways you get two magnets each with their own North and South; hence there are many observers in the world, each observing their own version of the world. Looking at this analogy the world (North pole) emanates activity and the observer (South pole) passively sits there taking it all in. But it's worth noting that without the South pole, the lines have nowhere to go, and without the North pole, there are no lines to observe. The whole is a system one part co-dependent on the other. Can we do better than this analogy? Notice how the field lines seem to circulate out and then back in. If you were to remove the magnet, but keep the lines it would form kind of circuit perpetually going round and round. Also notice that the field lines have no edges, it fills all of space in all directions. You could imagine how these circuits of field lines are self-sustaining, once they get going. There's also a sort of centre to the circuits where all the field lines squash tightly together into nothingness. So maybe, you're a self-perpetuating field of something? You are everywhere and are neither observer or observed, but both simultaneously. You have an ill-defined centre from which everything springs and is subsumed. This centre is the thin slice of the present moment, and all the lines are awareness or consciousness. That is what you are.

Five is too small a sample size to make any firm conclusions from. Take a deep breath and try 100 (not in a day!). If 100 flake then you have to change something. On the other hand, if you try anything 100 times you'll get much better at it. Practice, practice, practice and patience.

Yeah, biology still counts. It's like there's a little computer whirring away in the background adding up all the pros and cons for every man or woman you meet. It's just the computer runs different programs for men and women. The program doesn't really care about what you think consciously, most of it is subconscious. It doesn't care if it's a one night stand or something longer term, or fun, or FWB or pickup or anything really. Regardless if it's sex or not, you still need a relationship to bring up a child. The path is: attraction > relationship/sex > pregnancy > child > adult >more babies. That's the evolutionary program.

Long live this thread! Bump.

You put it better than I did. @Gabith it takes practice to be able to lead and you should always be ready for it. If the women wants to talk, of course let her. Good, own it, display the hair for all the world to see. Being confident and self assured is more important than appearance every time. Appearance is just the icing on the cake.

@Preety_India compliment gratefully received

Play the high value game. Some women are visual, so dress well, dress like you have money, impeccably, everything fits properly, no stains or dirt. Get a haircut, the style is irrelevant, the more quirky the better. No bad smells, get rid of them. You need some sort of hook in your appearance, something that can be a talking point: hats are good, or unusual colours, maybe a bright yellow shirt, whatever. A lot of women are attracted to novelty, make yourself stand out from the crowd. I like to call it peacocking. Carry yourself as if it's the most normal thing in the world to wear green trousers and a daffodil in your back pocket, it doesn't matter. It's all about novelty and confidence. Talk like you know what you're doing at all times (you should). You are in complete control: if X happens you do Y, if A happens you do B. Everything is planned. Any hesitation or being flustered will hurt the attraction. Most adults are just grown up children, given the chance they like to be led and told what to do (mostly). The women shouldn't have to think too hard at all in your presence. Make and maintain direct eye contact only looking away occasionally. There should be intent in your gaze: you are signalling your attraction. This can be threatening, so smile and laugh plenty. Talk plenty. You should be able to carry the conversation. Practise by talking to yourself in the mirror for ten minutes, whatever. Tell stories, tell jokes, talk about their appearance, just keep going. You need a certain momentum and energy to appear attractive. You need to be completely present and aware of your surroundings. All your attention is outward, none of it inward, or on your mobile phone. Any self-talk ideally should be completely absent. Meditate regularly to calm the mind. Learn to kill the monkey mind. Any negative thoughts are immediately betrayed in your facial expressions and body language. With practise this will make you appear calm and confident and focused. Attraction is not about you, it's about them and their impression of you. If a women is not attracted to you, and she is not receptive, then say "thank you" and graciously move on.

Maybe the OP can elaborate? Get what?

@Gesundheit2 absolutely. As I say, women are also interested in men having good genes (a.k.a. high value). If you know your man is just going to pump and dump, then at the very least you want to make sure he's a good investment. In practicality good genetics are expressed in a number of ways: ability to show physical fitness and strength; ability to handle themselves in any situation; intelligence; compassion and caring and so on. In fact any trait that increases the likelihood that your potential child will survive to adulthood and that will confer genetic advantage to that child. In actuality, traits like intelligence and good looks, are only secondary indicators of underlying good genetics. So being handsome in itself is useless for helping your child, but it is definitely a sign of good genetics. The "market" just rides on the back of these markers of good genetics: the dapper dresser; the strong caring type; the asshole etc.

Guys are desperate because there is actual scarcity. The scarcity is set up because women won't just sleep with every man that approaches them. Biologically this makes complete sense. Women are the ones who get pregnant and carry children. Biologically, the endgame of sex is reproduction; creating a child and then looking after it until it's self sufficient is a huge challenge which the mother takes on. For a man, he's free to wander off after sex and not give a damn. So a woman has to be really really sure the man will stick around long enough to help out or at least that he has very good genes. Also pregnancy and child rearing is a hugely risky process and can even be life threatening (even nowadays). I would say all of that biology is mostly unconsciously programmed into men and women. Men want to sleep around as much as possible, because there is scarcity created by the huge burden on women by having children. Effectively, men and women have completely different strategies for reproduction.

@Eph75 paradigm lock is a real problem as you say. It takes luck - epiphany or suffering or external influence - or something else that breaks the paradigm to escape it. No paradigm is wholly consistent, there are always holes that can be noticed:

Unknown unknowns. We're all deeply ignorant all the time. Except on occasion we get lucky. Even then we usually forget like goldfish.

@Valach you're focusing on the wrong thing. Why did you want to do pickup in the first place? Whatever your answer is to that, is what you should be focusing on.

Forget that. If you have a gf you've already won. On the other hand, if you want a new gf, then that's different: work out as if your life depended on it. Or at least have some other high-value metric.

With these sorts of contemplations there is an underlying need that doesn't get questioned. That is, will "I" continue after death? The answer is, of course not. Awareness may well continue after death, but it's a kind of anticlimax because @Adamq8 won't be around to appreciate it. Then again the "I" continues to die and be reborn constantly even when living. When I was around 13 I used to sit on the bus home from school and contemplate what I would be like when I was 27 (the year 2000 seemed good and futuristic to contemplate). I had no idea except I thought I would be married with kids. When I hit 27, it was nothing like I thought it was, and sadly I was no longer 13 to appreciate it as that was a distant memory. Now I'm 48 both of those ages seem like a haze on the horizon of my past. Three different ages, three different "I"s, three different deaths and rebirths.

The one thing that rubs me up the wrong way about owning a house is being in (large) debt to a bank. Once you're mortgaged, you are effectively enslaved to paying off the mortgage, plus interest. That translates into having to have a steady income to cover it (wage slavery). If your income is patchy (because you run your own startup business say), then you will have the constant worry of defaulting on your mortage and repossesion of the property. However, for most this is all moot - you still need money to pay for rent. The ideal (for me) would be to build my own home and own it outright - no rent/mortgage - no wage slavery. But in the UK no chance, I'd need to be a millionaire.