These are some ideas that I’ve had due to a recent discussion with @rpeck90 that I feel may be lifechanging to some people here.
Our discussion was mainly about business and how to invest in your business vs externals.
But I realized that it applies equally, if not more so, psychologically.
And this line of thought should clarify and bring order to a lot of other teaching you may have heard over the years.
I feel most people, myself included, fail to reach their potential because we squander most of our psychic energy by paying attention to what is essentially bullshit.
Some may have bigger potential than others, that doesn’t matter here. You can’t change your potential, the same way you can’t change your height or many other things about yourself.
And we squander our psychic energy because we invest it in goals that are external to ourselves.
You can lift weights in two different ways:
(1) You lift in order to be an Andrew Tate like gigachad that attracts women
Or
(2) You lift to develop your form, your skill, your strength, your discipline.
In the former case, the goal is external to yourself: women. Its achievement doesn’t depend upon the self nor does it develop the self by itself.
So why does this matter if in the end you achieve the same outcome (ie you get more girls) using both ways?
It matters infinitely. The former depletes your energy and will make you feel weaker and more depressed at the end of it… because you may have achieved the external goal, but you have failed to take notice and appreciate your own development.
As such, you exchanged your own self for something that is external — you sold out who you are, your essence, to get some tits and a$$, in plain English. And so you’re left with the tits and a$$, but without your self.
As Jesus asked, what good is gaining the whole world, if you will lose your own soul?
Therefore you’ll feel miserable. And it’s obvious why you’ll feel miserable when I put it like that.
Not that I care about feeling miserable. I’m personally concerned only with power, but the feeling of misery you experience is the subjective correlative of the loss of power that occurs objectively.
I see many people here set external goals. Make $1 million dollars is perhaps the most frequent LOL.
That’s what our culture teaches. It teaches you that money matters, fame matters, women matter — in other words everything matters but your own self.
This idea has led you to invest and give away all your psychic energy to the achievement of external goals which are imposed on you by society, and forget yourself.
It has caused you to move everything good outside of the self, and therefore deplete your self in the service of externals.
And that is how you are kept controlled — powering the matrix by giving away your energy to others, instead of investing it back into your own self.
The Stoics touched on this idea, by trying to identify externals, things outside of your control, vs internals, things within your control. But as you know, I’m not a fan of the Stoics and I think their philosophy is broken — because it misses out the key detail… it’s not about things you can control vs not control, nor about being virtuous or a good person morally. It’s about building your own power, vs squandering it.
Everything you can achieve externally is determined by your own power. The more power you have, the more you can do. The better you are able to control your future and to create what you wish to create.
And this power is morally indifferent — you can use it for good (say to build a business that makes millions) or for bad (say become a ruthless corrupt politician that takes over other people’s resources).
The key to building such a strong, robust, “antifragile” (I dislike the word, since Nassim Taleb considers the Stoics antifragile, big mistake imo) self lies in three activities:
1) Set internal goals that are relevant to your own self and its development
2) Focus attention on the internal goals vs the external ones. If anything the external ones should be TOOLS for the internal goals. For example, the internal goal is to play better tennis, and the external goal to win the match is merely a tool in the service of the internal goal. In this way other people, and the external environment become TOOLS in the service of your self, rather than your self becoming a tool in the service of the environment.
3) Pay attention to the process, and the development of the self that ensues as a result of the process as you are executing. Look for developing your own skills in other words.
This latter one is a KEY point — the investment of attention must be towards the development and exercise of SKILL.
This will shift your motivation from being externally driven, to being internally driven. It will shift the center of power from outside the self, back into the self, and it will give you power.
Happiness and joy will come, as a result of increasing personal power. Achievement will also come, as a result of increasing personal power.
The yogis likewise talk about preserving your energy and making it rise inside your chakras instead of spilling your seed all over the place. Well… I think that’s bullshit, but it’s driven by the right impulse.
That’s why they ask you to meditate. And although I do meditate and have in the past too, I think meditation is also bullshit. Because its purpose usually is losing the self.
I think the mistake here is in directing the goal towards the dissolution of the self, rather than towards the positive, which is your attention being so engrossed in the process of developing the self that the self is momentarily forgotten.
When you are engrossed in the process of developing the self, you lose consciousness of your self. And that is what actually allows your self to grow — you lose consciousness of it, and once you gain it back after your performance, your self is now bigger.
But this also is a far cry from the goal being the deconstruction of the self. That’s why India is a poor nation. They’ve destroyed their self, by taking part of the process of increasing power and perverting it... essentially making a correlative part, (losing consciousness of the self) into an end-in-itself. They control their minds, but, as a result, have 0 control over their environment. In essence, the yogi yields control of his environment in favor of extreme mental control and is therefore rendered powerless.
This happens when the goal becomes perfect integration into the environment (ie. Dissolution of the ego), rather that differentiation AND integration, which leads to better creative powers to bring about in the environment what you wish to create.
This is why both Eastern practices (yoga, meditation) and Western ones (Stoicism) are imo psychologically damaging to the development of the self imo.
The hope is that some of these ideas will provide you with better guidance.
Our discussion was mainly about business and how to invest in your business vs externals.
But I realized that it applies equally, if not more so, psychologically.
And this line of thought should clarify and bring order to a lot of other teaching you may have heard over the years.
I feel most people, myself included, fail to reach their potential because we squander most of our psychic energy by paying attention to what is essentially bullshit.
Some may have bigger potential than others, that doesn’t matter here. You can’t change your potential, the same way you can’t change your height or many other things about yourself.
And we squander our psychic energy because we invest it in goals that are external to ourselves.
You can lift weights in two different ways:
(1) You lift in order to be an Andrew Tate like gigachad that attracts women
Or
(2) You lift to develop your form, your skill, your strength, your discipline.
In the former case, the goal is external to yourself: women. Its achievement doesn’t depend upon the self nor does it develop the self by itself.
So why does this matter if in the end you achieve the same outcome (ie you get more girls) using both ways?
It matters infinitely. The former depletes your energy and will make you feel weaker and more depressed at the end of it… because you may have achieved the external goal, but you have failed to take notice and appreciate your own development.
As such, you exchanged your own self for something that is external — you sold out who you are, your essence, to get some tits and a$$, in plain English. And so you’re left with the tits and a$$, but without your self.
As Jesus asked, what good is gaining the whole world, if you will lose your own soul?
Therefore you’ll feel miserable. And it’s obvious why you’ll feel miserable when I put it like that.
Not that I care about feeling miserable. I’m personally concerned only with power, but the feeling of misery you experience is the subjective correlative of the loss of power that occurs objectively.
I see many people here set external goals. Make $1 million dollars is perhaps the most frequent LOL.
That’s what our culture teaches. It teaches you that money matters, fame matters, women matter — in other words everything matters but your own self.
This idea has led you to invest and give away all your psychic energy to the achievement of external goals which are imposed on you by society, and forget yourself.
It has caused you to move everything good outside of the self, and therefore deplete your self in the service of externals.
And that is how you are kept controlled — powering the matrix by giving away your energy to others, instead of investing it back into your own self.
The Stoics touched on this idea, by trying to identify externals, things outside of your control, vs internals, things within your control. But as you know, I’m not a fan of the Stoics and I think their philosophy is broken — because it misses out the key detail… it’s not about things you can control vs not control, nor about being virtuous or a good person morally. It’s about building your own power, vs squandering it.
Everything you can achieve externally is determined by your own power. The more power you have, the more you can do. The better you are able to control your future and to create what you wish to create.
And this power is morally indifferent — you can use it for good (say to build a business that makes millions) or for bad (say become a ruthless corrupt politician that takes over other people’s resources).
The key to building such a strong, robust, “antifragile” (I dislike the word, since Nassim Taleb considers the Stoics antifragile, big mistake imo) self lies in three activities:
1) Set internal goals that are relevant to your own self and its development
2) Focus attention on the internal goals vs the external ones. If anything the external ones should be TOOLS for the internal goals. For example, the internal goal is to play better tennis, and the external goal to win the match is merely a tool in the service of the internal goal. In this way other people, and the external environment become TOOLS in the service of your self, rather than your self becoming a tool in the service of the environment.
3) Pay attention to the process, and the development of the self that ensues as a result of the process as you are executing. Look for developing your own skills in other words.
This latter one is a KEY point — the investment of attention must be towards the development and exercise of SKILL.
This will shift your motivation from being externally driven, to being internally driven. It will shift the center of power from outside the self, back into the self, and it will give you power.
Happiness and joy will come, as a result of increasing personal power. Achievement will also come, as a result of increasing personal power.
The yogis likewise talk about preserving your energy and making it rise inside your chakras instead of spilling your seed all over the place. Well… I think that’s bullshit, but it’s driven by the right impulse.
That’s why they ask you to meditate. And although I do meditate and have in the past too, I think meditation is also bullshit. Because its purpose usually is losing the self.
I think the mistake here is in directing the goal towards the dissolution of the self, rather than towards the positive, which is your attention being so engrossed in the process of developing the self that the self is momentarily forgotten.
When you are engrossed in the process of developing the self, you lose consciousness of your self. And that is what actually allows your self to grow — you lose consciousness of it, and once you gain it back after your performance, your self is now bigger.
But this also is a far cry from the goal being the deconstruction of the self. That’s why India is a poor nation. They’ve destroyed their self, by taking part of the process of increasing power and perverting it... essentially making a correlative part, (losing consciousness of the self) into an end-in-itself. They control their minds, but, as a result, have 0 control over their environment. In essence, the yogi yields control of his environment in favor of extreme mental control and is therefore rendered powerless.
This happens when the goal becomes perfect integration into the environment (ie. Dissolution of the ego), rather that differentiation AND integration, which leads to better creative powers to bring about in the environment what you wish to create.
This is why both Eastern practices (yoga, meditation) and Western ones (Stoicism) are imo psychologically damaging to the development of the self imo.
The hope is that some of these ideas will provide you with better guidance.
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