In this video, I explain how you don’t need to be deliberate with self-improvement…
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The most common error is when you aren’t truly improving yourself, but doing what someone else is telling you to do.
You should be doing it for YOU (see dark triad), not to please some red-pilled friend no more than if a SJW demanded it.
Some things can be achieved for their own sake because you desire it. Some things because they are the bridge to other things (e.g. a lifestyle change that makes you healthier). But you will find no end of people saying “Do this, and everything will be better and it will be great”, but if their goal, even if noble and not merely to sell or manipulate is not yours, achieving it will be a Pyrrhic victory.
Improving yourself means climbing your personal mountain to get to your personal apex. Not someone else’s.
Like most things, it takes balance.
Can’t agree more.
This red-pilled friend can encourage you to better your life and you will be glad you followed his advice. Bottom line here is that you’re not doing it to please your friend but because you are convinced that his advice is useful – you’re merely grateful to him. That means that if he would die, you would still continue on your journey of self-improvement since you truly want it for yourself.
I only add to that excellent comment only the fact that most people sefl-improve only for their want of attaining the object of their desire. The momment that is attained the regress fast. One should improve oneself only for his own sake. Only then one may truly self-improve.
It’s a matter of balance. Roosh is talking about guys who focus so hard on improvement that they miss out on life. I agree on that but you can’t just let yourself go and be a fat uneducated loser. Get rid of the tv and spend an hour or two on self improvement. Working out or learning is much more fulfilling than reruns of happy days
An hour at the gym and an hour reading, per day, are still 6 hours less than the average time an American spends in front of the tube. Add in another hour for prepping wholesome food for consumption instead of eating fast food and you’re ahead of 90% of the population, and still have ample free time to fart around, I dunno, throwing rocks into a stream or whatever.
Dropping television from your life adds so much spare time that *not* doing something to fill the void would seem really strange.
Being without a tv for nearly two decades I realize how much time I wasted in my youth. Now I really don’t know how I could find the time to watch a fraction of what I did
Dang hoss, you have me beat, I thought I had the record here (2003). Well done.
Something I’ve found is that I have so much spare time that I get new hobbies to try all the time, or get really, really focused on one particular hobby and get really geeky knowledgeable about it, and then am intolerable to talk to at social gatherings. Plus nights like tonight where I’m tired, worn out from the gym, hit several stores for Christmas presents, had a few drinks with friends and now just have nothing to do but surf a bit. All this free time is liberating.
1999 was the year I moved off to college an left it at my parents
The problem with self improvement is mentally you are always doing it for “someone else”. I mean, okay,you say-I want to work out to feel better.. okay.. but in the end …your still thinking about how it potentially gets more or better pussy… .or I want to go to school to make more money…so I can attract more pussy. After all, their is no crime living on skid row……. Everytime you talk to a girl…its saying..hey girl- want some dick.
There real question is what drives you and anyone telling you its for “you”; is likely lying. You improve because your a man and thats about it.
Why did Santa’s helper not make the annual sled run with his boss? Because he avoided elf-improvement.
But seriously, success is based on self-improvement. Or maybe better put, self-induced change. If you want something, you have to change your habits, and you have to work hard to get it. It might turn out to be something other than what you’d hoped (and it probably will be), but everything’s a trade-off. You have to give up something to get something.
So self-improve away, I say. Dance, dance, for tomorrow we die. In the end, we’re all making shadow puppets in front of a mirror. We have no time, and yet we have an eternity. It’s a mysterious world, to be sure. And nobody has it all figured out. (At least nobody who is still in this world.)
I’ve a thought that due to quantum tunneling, every single atomic switch in our brain is mirrored somewhere in the universe, such that our thoughts are contained withing the whole universe AND within one central location (the brain), meaning, that if we die, we continue to exist on a continuum of space/time, making the universe ultimately a sentient being composed of all of the self-aware life in it acting simultaneously. Throw in quantum threading of a still frame reality and it gets really, really messy and yet beautifully elegant.
What’s worse, is that there’s more, that makes processing information impossible. Yet, here I can see it a bit, in part. It’s worrisome.
And then I drink a bit of tea, and relax a bit into a book.
I’m right in line with that way of thinking. I might use different words, but words limit us anyway – so there you go. Energy doesn’t evaporate. It transforms. So it makes sense that we do, too.
Your analogy is really interesting. I’m into Carlos Castaneda (not all of what he wrote, just some of his ideas), and his mentor put it in much the same way you did. He said something like, we’re all advance scouts for infinity (for god). And infinity is constantly expanding (god is constantly expanding). And infinity absorbs the experiences of its minions (its sentient beings) after they die, which would be us. I like that idea myself. It’s very comforting.
I’m reminded of the end of the movie, “No Country for Old Men”, when Tommy Lee Jones’s character explains two dreams he’d had the night before, to his wife. It was a very powerful scene for me, and I think it’s very powerful for all men who might have seen it. It resonates. His character says –
“All right, then. Two of ’em, both had my father in ’em. It’s peculiar. I’m older now than he ever was by 20 years. So, in a sense, he’s the younger man.
Anyway, the first one I don’t remember too well…but it was about meeting him in town…somewheres, and he give me some money. I think I lost it. Second one, It was like we was both back in older times. And I was a-horseback, going through the mountains of a night. Going through this pass in the mountains. It was cold, and there was snow on the ground. And he rode past me and kept on going…never said nothing going by, just rode on past. He had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down. When he rode past, I seen he was carrying fire in a horn…the way people used to do, and I…I could see the horn from the light inside of it…’bout the color of the moon. And, in the dream, I knew that he was…going on ahead. He was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and cold. And I knew that whenever I got there, he’d be there. And then I woke up.”
Guess we’ll have to wait and see if any of that is true, but I don’t believe any of us will die, as in, just cease to exist, in one form or another.
What’s worrisome to me Bob is that it doesn’t stop there. I posted this on Telegram concerning this thought just a few minutes ago. You really need to get on our channel man.
Isn’t that crazy – and yet it isn’t crazy at all.
Back to Castaneda; I’m just throwing out some things based on what you wrote, sometimes this back-and-forth will lead to bigger and better things. I forget which book of his that it is, but Castaneda’s mentor talks about how the old sorcerers in Ancient Mexico (who aren’t sorcerers, as in, they sit around hatching schemes and casting spells; these guys were all about achieving total freedom of mind, body and spirit) believed that if you thought something, and thought about it hard enough, it would happen – if not in this world, then in a different part of the universe, and it would happen exactly as you thought it. In fact, it would start happening, right as you were thinking it.
Now the freaky thing is, from my personal experience, I know there is some truth to that. At one point in my life, I worked single-mindedly at producing some music, to the exclusion of everything else. Locked myself in my townhouse and worked away for months on end. What happened next was extremely curious. About two months into it, I started seeing how my music would be received, when it was finished and the time came to take it out in public. I kept “seeing” (for lack of a better word) exactly what would happen, at three different venues in town. And I found that really odd to say the least, because it was so vivid, and so nuanced (I saw it in great detail). But I believe what I “saw” turned out to be a by-product of focusing so intently on one thing, that I didn’t have those normal, self-defeating, negative thoughts that many of us have, in the background of our day-to-day experiences. Those are typically born of self-pity – “He said this, and he did that, and how dare he,” etc. Most people use self-pity as an advisor, which according to these sorcerers, is deadly. In my case, since I ceased hearing or thinking those thoughts, my personal energy was deployed elsewhere. In this case, it was deployed into “seeing”…
Anyway, when the time came for me to take the music out, I had it played in three clubs, just as I’d planned. And in all three cases, the people at the clubs responded exactly as I had seen it in my mind. This was a life-changing experience for me. Now a person might say it was a coincidence, or they might say I created that reality – but in my opinion, infinity (god) created it, and I just latched on to the thread. In any event, trying to rationalize it is like a dog chasing its tail. It just is. And either you embrace it, or you retreat out of fear. I have embraced it, and I utilize it in every aspect of my life. If I want something, I work unceasingly, and then the magic happens.
This is a fundamental component of every man’s makeup, it exists within every single man. He has just neglected it for so long, since birth, basically. He has had it beaten out of him, via his education, via his religious leanings, via his parents, via his entire upbringing.
Now here’s the interesting part. I read Castaneda’s books well after I had these experiences (about three years later). So it was really, really comforting, because at the time, I thought what was happening to me was crazy. I was afraid of it. Castaneda explained it to me in his own words, after the fact.
It isn’t crazy at all. It’s just part of our untapped potential. We have enormous power inside of us that typically remains untapped. I have a feeling that all of those cultures that “disappeared” over the centuries (Mayans, Incas, Easter Islanders, Anasazi, etc.), might have just dreamed themselves into another world. En masse. Makes more sense than the notion that they died of a disease, or starved (when, in most cases, there are no skeletons to be found).
Maybe we’re all asleep in somebody else’s dream, and we all know this, and it nags at us constantly, typically within our subconscious; we know we are so much more…and yet, we are either in the process of waking up, or we simply remain asleep, mostly out of fear of the unknown.
I checked Telegram out a couple weeks back. Looks simple enough. I’ll try and get hooked up with it by this weekend.
Focus on a goal to the exclusion of everything else may just be tapping into the thread work of an infinite frame reality to move towards one frame over the other. I have no answers, just questions.
You are on to something there. Seriously on to it. No doubt in my mind. I have no answers, just questions, and lots of potential. Infinite potential – just like you.
To bring this “back down to earth” what I like about ROK and most manosphere sites, is that I can go full bonkers with mindful extrapolation on reality, and it’s a thought exercise that isn’t met with “what?”. My real life even basic conversation is too much for most (“So hey, how about the new System.IO file subroutines in the latest .NET framework?!?”), and my biker talk, while refreshing in honesty, is about as intellectual as discussing the making of pasta.
I’ve a lot to think about tonight, I couldn’t sleep because of this, and now, thankfully, it’s written down. It’s probably fully fucked up, but it’s something to work with from here forward.
Bob, man, I appreciate you being my sounding board and helping me work through this. I believe that there’s so much more and that this is a scratch on the dusty surface.
Hey I will never think you are crazy for anything you might think; demented? Fuck yes, I’m demented, too, we’re all fucking fools and we’re trying to quit, but it’s hard. I’ve caught too much of that type of shit (being labeled by others) my entire life, while being immersed in the mundane venues similar to the ones you described.
If we ever get together I will show you this interesting little trick. It will blow your mind. It’s something every person can do, but they don’t realize it. It proves (if such a thing is possible) that everything is connected. Kinda like string theory meets New Age woo-woo. Talk is cheap. After I show this to you, down the road, it will really help you size all of this up, mentally. It helped me when somebody showed it to me.
Sounding boards, that’s what it’s all about, I think. Most people live their lives afraid of what others will think of them, and their thoughts. Which is odd, because most people think other people’s thoughts and don’t even know it. Heh. Always glad to read your ideas and thoughts, they are very interesting and in this case, I mean, what in the fuck else is really worth talking about? We’re all trapped in a prison of mind/body/spirit. Any ideas a person might have about how we might break free of this state (go to “heaven”?), I am all about it. Absolutely all about it, my friend.
I don’t know if you’ve read Carlos Castaneda’s books. Probably not all of them, but I don’t know for sure. One thing that really has helped me to realize that we are far more than 50 cents’ worth of elements from the Period Table, housed in a sac of skin, is his advice on dreaming.
He explains how we can take advantage of our sleeping state, while we dream, and experience some of its full potential. According to these dudes, our dreaming state is very much as real as our waking state – we’re just in another world, or in other worlds, while we do it. It’s based on the notion that we live in duality. There’s a counterpart to every physical being and object. Such as, stars have a “twin” (which, according to scientists, is true). Matter versus anti-matter, or dark matter, whatever they actually call it. The sorcerer dudes explain it as everything has a physical body, and an ethereal (energy) body. Everything and everybody has a twin, that is invisible to the human eye. In our case, we use our ethereal body (our invisible twin, our energy body) when we dream. And it is weak, usually. Because we don’t exercise it. And we don’t exercise it because we don’t know it’s there.
I’ll just lay some titles out at the end here, if anybody is interested. Better still, I’ll give you links to the books themselves, which are readable online. These are only parts of his books, but they are the best parts.
Dreaming is interesting (practicing it) because hell, face it, being asleep is pretty fucking boring. One-third of our lives, wasted, basically. There are different stages to it, as you practice dreaming. The first one, is holding on to the content of a dream, keeping the dreamscape in place, so it doesn’t morph. You know how dreams go – you’re looking at Dolly Parton’s face and she’s smiling, and then it morphs into Edgar Allan Poe (or whomever), and then a guy comes out of nowhere and asks if somebody ordered a pizza, and the next thing you know, you’re watching CNN with your girlfriend from the eighth grade and your dog is playing handball with a rubber dog biscuit, etc. They make no sense.
Anyway, a person can train themselves, to be aware that they are dreaming, while they are asleep. That is the first major breakthrough. Once you are aware that you are dreaming, just by shifting your eyes, in your dream, to a few of the objects that are visible in the dream, every couple of seconds, in a series – like, you look at the door handle, and then a picture on the wall, and then the face of a person in the dream, and then the bed post of your bed, and you keep doing that, in series, holding each image in your field of vision for a couple of seconds, as you switch your gaze from one “reference point” to the next, a funny thing will happen – you will hold that entire dreamscape in place, just like it is. There will be no morphing. Another side-effect will be that you will clearly remember the entire dream, meaning the parts that you held in place, just as you would do while you were awake, and experiencing waking life. Then there are more stages to this, more things to learn and experience along the way – just like it is in waking life.
Anyway, I find it all as interesting as hell, and I practice dreaming periodically.
Here’s a link to those online books of Castaneda’s. They’re all really good, but “The Art of Dreaming”, “The Active Side of Infinity”, “The Power of Silence”, and “Journey to Ixtlan” are my favorites, and delve into some of the things we were discussing tonight. Anybody who is interested, just scroll down about halfway on the following page, to get at the direct links to the books themselves –
http://www.prismagems.com/castaneda/
I have to look this guy up. I have lucid dreams a whole lot, most of my life. Sometimes it’s frightening, like when I’m trying to wake up from a dream that I know is a dream and can’t. Or when I know I’m flying over a building with wings on my back and the voice of my wife is asking me if I want coffee and I answer as if everything is normal and she’s really there, but I’m still flying yet seeing her face asking me. My whole life.
Dreaming, if it is the movement of atoms, has to be a part of metareality, by definition. How it puzzles together, I don’t know.
My friend, I have those very same dreams – lucid dreams and flying dreams. All the time. For my entire life. So do a lot of people. You are not alone there, not by a longshot.
Now here’s Castaneda’s take on it (I think this is true, it might be somebody else’s take, I can’t call it all up from memory at the moment, the particulars there), but when we dream that we are flying, we are using our energy body – we are piloting it, as it were. We are in another world when that happens, and it’s just as real as the waking world – it’s just different. And it’s every bit as real as you and I sitting here typing to each other, right now.
Let me tell you about just one of the many perks of dreaming that I have experienced. The manosphere is all about sex with hot babes, right? Heh. I’ve had some incredible experiences in that regard, with hot babes, while dreaming. To be totally candid here (full disclosure) the sex I’ve had in a dreaming state, is way better than any sex I’ve had in a waking state. It’s incomparable.
Now, there are dangers to all of this. So it isn’t for everybody. Some of those dangers are allegedly final, and irreversible. There are worlds all around us, according to these sorcerer dudes. Too many to count. And when we dream, we enter some of them. And inside those worlds, are sentient beings of another sort – they feed on energy. And some of them are tricksters, they don’t have our best interests at heart. And some of them can appear to us as loved ones – but they are anything but “loving”. They are after our energy. Supposedly, we can get trapped inside those worlds. And as we get adept at dreaming, we can actually go into those worlds with not only our energy bodies (our “twin”), but we can go there with our physical bodies as well. I don’t know about all of that, it seems plausible. But the point is, there are dangers.
However, we are going to dream anyway, are we not. We are going to go to those other worlds, when we dream, whether we like it or not. Better to have a strong body (energy body/dreaming body), when we go there – since we have to go there anyway. We have to exercise that body, to gain strength – otherwise we’ll be at somebody else’s mercy, somebody stronger.
Carlos Castaneda, just put the Wheel of Time as book that changed life the other day.
Whatever happens, that eagle isn’t gonna get me.
Intent. The exact reason said willpower is useless the other day here.
I’m hoping for the same result. Dart around the eagle. You betcha. Good luck…
Sounds like something Roger Penrose postulated some years ago in one of his books. I don’t remember which, but the discussion involved microtubules enabling quantum computation in the brain
Quantum tunneling is (or should be) one of the most embarrassing and transparent fudges in the history of science. It is strictly non-physical, and is simply a form of magic. In a nutshell, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is mis-interpreted for the millionth time to allow a statistical fudge.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5230a4da57fdb0330381b84a9eea774aeed6141090b6a98879d5a5dfac2b0644.jpg
Heh. Fuckin’ funny…
If you didn’t work on yourself, you wouldn’t become a man and still be a beta that’s votes for people like Hillary.
Self improvement is masturbation.
Only when it has no conscious goal.
And masturbation is self-rape, therefore …
Self-destruction then?
After a certain age, you should just pursue your interests and you will be fine. The self improvement lectures are good for motivating young people to achieve certain standards, but there comes a point in life where thinking in those terms is generally moot
In your forties, you really start to see how little time you have left in life, and that you should pursue what you enjoy with full vigor. You start to realize that many areas in which you could theoretically improve yourself aren’t worth the ROI, given the limited time that you have.
And I can say from experience that being the best, most accomplished, most alpha man in the room doesn’t always get you the woman you have your eye on or the job promotion or whatever—so just pursue whatever makes you happy, and you will naturally continue to learn and grow.
I believe that self-improvement should focus more on un-cluttering your life, (micro) rather the nebulous idea of a whole-person (macro). For example, I have completely been rid of all consumer debt, including old student loans and credit cards. Student loans are a goddamn dead albatross.
Re: debt, the only legit debt is a fixed mortgage, IMO. Three years ago, I sold my car (I can use my company car for personal mileage), and used the proceeds to pay off credit cards and student loans. As of last summer, I am debt-free. Using a CC in lieu of cash is OK, so long as you pay it off ASAFP.
Debt sucks!!! Get out if you can. If you want to but something, go w/cash or sell something you dont use on Craigslist to get the scratch, THEN buy it. That’s self-improvement!
Yeah if can’t buy something with cash, how can you afford it with a interest rate tacked on. Most of the stuff would swipe a card for…you wouldn’t give a damn about in the time saved the money.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-1j0XDGIsUg
These two things combined will shift anyone’s perception and or be a huge relief to those that just know something isn’t right.
If you watch fight club, you’ll understand. Self-improvement only serves one in the context of a single dimension. You see yourself in the context society sees you as a man, thus you strive to ‘improve’ within that singular context.
What happens when you reach that peak? When you reach the apex of your self being. You look out upon the world and ask why hasn’t the world improved too? You put in all this work, what was the point? You’re still dealing with the same shit.
It’s not about money, women, sex, status or any of that nonsense. Men no longer have genuine rights of passage of which we found manhood and our own masculinity. Rather masculinity is denoted by buying shit we don’t need to please people we dont like. Has buying a truck ever made you big, bold and brave? Some men who buy into that think so of themselves. But really, all they at the end of the day is an asshole with a truck.
Roosh is right. It is never enough. Consumerism operates on this basis. You need to buy more and more, more than the next guy. You need to be more bold, more brave. you need more money, more travels etc. That was the central premise of fight club.
I would say certain you should try to improve your life to the point where you can survive and you have material comfort, but there is a point where one has to say ‘let the chips fall where they may. ‘
Beyond this point Roosh, we need our project fucking mayhem.
Agree on all points. I am a little older and had my share of climbing the peak. – and over it. I think at a certain point in life; you get a certain amount of $ etc…and you look for different improvements but your only as good as your talent in most cases.
…. The reason you self improve is because if your not getting what you want; you have to change or you will keep getting what you are getting. The point of learning from others is to eliminate the price/time of trial and error. Roosh may have spent years learning to game; but the obsession was never asked- are you getting what you want? If you are; then the point is to do something else to grow again. In the end, you have a “life”. If you failed in business, in marriage, in a career. You do it again, until you say- I did it my way and its the best I could do. that’s it… Its when we look for others-specifically woman- for the question is when it gets hard. The problem is this other person – is a needy obsession in itself and not subject to what we believe should work.