Thursday, February 24, 2011

Sexual Revolution?

Some stuff on my mind:

1. Thanks for Coming: One Young Woman's Quest for an Orgasm by Mara Altman.

2. Caroline Myss: Revolution, Involution, Narcissism, and Evolution

3. The current roco triple feature:

No Strings Attached

Just Go with It

Hall Pass

4. The hype over Ashley Madison.

5. Affair: How to Have Your Cake and Eat It by H. Cameron. Barnes

6. Lust in Translation: Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee by Pamela Druckerman

7. I didn't realize David Barash has written so many books...

8. A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s by Stephanie Coontz

9. Thy Neighbor's Wife by Gay Talese

10. Erotic Wars: What Happened to the Sexual Revolution? by Lillian B. Rubin

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Choice vs Compulsion

There is a certain flavor to a codependent relationship that might be described as 'driven' or 'intense.' There is a compulsive nature to it. The members are tied to each other almost as with an invisible rope. The slightest move in one causes a reaction in the other. The positions are rigid. Every word or thought is guarded, weighed against the other's imagined response.

How different is the chosenness of an interdependent relationship! The desire is there but not the intense need. Love, whether for a spouse, a child, a parent, or a friend, is a matter of choice. Should the choreography require, the skaters can more about with beauty and originality. Each can stretch and grow without tilting or damaging the relationship.

Robert Hemfelt, Love is a Choice

Savage postscript:

Pick-up is dominated by the compulsion of the lower three chakras, seduction involves the choice associated with the 4th through 6th chakras. I assert that all relationships (even one-night stands) that result from the intention of pick-up are codependent. Like attracts like.

Here are some traits of codependents:

1. A codependent has low self-esteem. (PUAs are notorious for lacking self-esteem and attempt to develop self-confidence -- the shadow to 3rd chakra self-esteem.)

2. A codependent is certain that his happiness depends on others. (Look at the PUA's incessant pursuit of social/sexual value.)

3. A codependent worries about things he can't change and may well try to change them. (Look at the PUA's obsession with image, identity, personality, value, and status.)

4. A codependent's life is punctuated by extremes (Look at how PUAs cycle from sexual addiction to sexual anorexia and/or social addiction to social anorexia).

5. A codependent is constantly looking for the something that is missing or lacking in life. (A PUA is defined by his sense of lack, limitation, frustration, separation, scarcity, fear, worry, doubt, anger, and attachment.)

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Intention vs Desire

There is a distinct difference between your desire and your intention. If you desire to return home to Kansas, you are attached to the outcome. Intention, on the other hand, is desire without any attachment to the outcome. You intend to return to Kansas, but you are no longer obsessed with the idea. Every twist and turn of your journey through Oz is no longer critical to your ultimate goal. You no longer feel the need to force solutions. By letting go of your desire and by participating with detached involvement, you open yourself up to infinite possibilities...

Joey Green, The Zen of Oz

Friday, February 18, 2011

Character vs Personality

The word character is from the Old French caractere and means "imprint on the soul." The etymology of personality suggests veneer and is connected with the Latin word persona, which was a mask worn by actors. Character is revealed when our masks are removed.

It's easy to tell if you are living from character or personality: If things aren't going your way, personality pouts while character remains unruffled and learns from the experience. When you are not in psychologically or emotionally safe territory, personality panics. Character, on the other hand, rides the vicissitudes of life with even-mindedness. Personality endeavors to extract happiness from its experiences, whereas character realizes that happiness is an inherent quality of being.

Your personality has been forged by the values of the external world beginning with parental fantasies about who you are and who you were raised to become, your education, your religions, your companions, all to assure your ego's survival and protection from getting hurt. Ego is an artifact that is used to fit in, to hang out in the status quo, an agreement with mediocrity that allows you to move and groove in the world without causing too much disturbance or being too much of an irritation.

Eventually, such an existence become sterile, claustrophobic, painful. The way out is to learn how to ultimately tell the difference between your ego personality that is seeking to survive and avoid being hurt and your character that seeks to confidently deliver your talents, gifts, and skills. Remember, the ego seeks to protect the temporary personality by projecting unresolved issues such as a sense of separation from the whole, lack, and scarcity.

Michael Bernard Beckwith, Spiritual Liberation

Thursday, February 10, 2011

"I'm with Cupid" Event

This page is the easiest way for me to get this information to the interested guys. Also, if you have questions, email me rather than leaving a blog comment: gonesavage@yahoo.com

So, here's the deal. I'm putting together a Valentine's Weekend outing. Here are the details:

1. This is an event of camaraderie through both spirit and visual unity. We are going out as a group. We will dress as if Valentine's Day is the most amazing holiday ever. Like we invented it. We love women, we love the idea of expressing that love, and what better time to do it? Wear a red blazer, a red shirt with a black blazer, a heart necklace, etc. Have fun with your attire. This is not "peacocking" -- this is dressing the part of someone excited to be sharing a good time. This is not "dress to impress" but "dress to express."

2. The spirit of the event can be summed up in this sentence: "To have a good time, be a good time." We should look like a group of guys having a good time and sharing it. This is about giving rather than getting. You have so much fun, excitement, and pleasure to give -- it is just overflowing. Think either fun-loving trickster type or super-suave seducer type. Exaggerate it. Think Eros, Cupid, Dionysus, Casanova, Don Juan, rakes, dandies, and horny devils. Then we will go out and give fun and pleasure.

3. Bring something to give. Something simple like those 2nd grade type Valentine's cards, candy, stickers, etc. PLUS, I will also bring a box full of ideas. Things like naughty trivia cards, dirty dice, sensual lottery tickets, etc. Fun stuff. Again, the idea is to share a good time. It's up to you how much you want to give and if you want to create a playful dynamic where there is an exchange required. :)

4. The commitment fee gets you on board BOTH Friday and Saturday. We will expect to meet at 7pm sharp at Ox Social Headquarters to share ideas and do some warm-ups. We will hit the town by 10 and expect to go until 2am both nights.

5. We should end up as a group of 6-10 guys and will stick together entourage-style. We can go to 6th or 4th streets. Doesn't matter to me. If you know a particular V-Day event that we should check out, let me know.

6. The most important decisions we will ever make in life is that of our attitudes and intentions. I talk a lot about the difference between pick-up and seduction, but the number one distinction comes down to intention. Do you meet women with the primary intention of getting something or giving something? It's as simple as that. Examine your motive. Obviously there is return in it for you. No one gives ONLY to please others. You can't hold a torch to light someone's path without also lighting your own. But what I insist is this: The best way to get is to give. Add value to her life. To have a good time, be a good time. Give with no string attached. Put her first. Use your talents, resources, perspectives, and ideas to show her a good time. To me, this is the intention of true seduction. Keep this in mind.

7. Bring a camera. :)

Jason Savage

7 Lively Sins

1. LUST

Lust is an expression of wanting to connect. Lust is about being curious, fearless, present, and aware. Lust is liberating. If you don’t act on a feeling of strong lust, you will actually kill your spirit.

2. GREED

Greed is an expression of hopefulness and abundance. Greed is about having drive and persistence. Greed keeps you pursuing life with an outlook of opulence and a belief that there is plenty to go around.

3. ANGER

Anger is a force that awakens your spirit into action. Anger creates a ferocious energy that can be channeled into the ability to follow truth and create a path to positive change. Anger stimulates productivity and growth.

4. PRIDE

Pride is about fully appreciating the rewards of your inspiration, aspiration, and perspiration. Pride is about self-respect, self-love, and self-reward. Focus on your talents and flaunt them.

5. SLOTH

Sloth is the pursuit of peace, relaxation, and rejuvenation. You have to slow down and let loose to gain clarity and make the best choices. If you work hard to achieve success, but don’t take time to enjoy it, then what’s the point?

6. ENVY

Envy allows you to find your true desires. Envy awakens you from your programming and creates a drive for improvement. Surround yourself with people that have what you crave to inspire you to get what you want.

7. GLUTTONY

Gluttony is about having a passion for all of what life has to offer. Gluttony gives you the positive energy to try new experiences. Laughter, learning, love, food, sex and travel -- you want to taste it all.

Karen Salmansohn, The 7 Lively Sins

7 Sins for a Life Worth Living

1. The Pleasure of All Five Senses

"Not just our eyes, but all of our senses are losing the original savor of first-hand experience. We live in an ocean of smell but smother it in detergents, disinfectants, and artificial perfumes. Millions wear little white earphones and hear only faintly the sounds of the living world they are passing through. We are becoming out of touch with the earth we live on, and fast. We need to come to our senses before we lose them."

2. The Pleasure of Being Foolish

"Being the fool is not the same as acting the fool; you can't decide to be playful, or foolish, for an hour a day, as if it were yet another task to add to your campaign of self-improvement. It's rather the result of a relaxation of the rules and goals that you normally run your life by. A softening of the beliefs that hold up your world and your idea of who you think you are. The pleasure of foolishness lies in large part in the absence of self-consciousness; in the self-forgetting that comes in a moment of abandon."

3. The Pleasure of Not Knowing

"The fact that we can never see the whole picture doesn't mean we don't bother to form any personal intention -- it acknowledges that our intention is best served by an open, attentive mind, one that is receptive and cooperative with the larger forces of life around it, whatever they may be. Then life can be what it is, a mystery, and not just an agenda; a mystery that is constantly revealing itself, and of which we are a part, instead of an agenda we have to laboriously work through. Life as revelation is a pleasure indeed."

4. The Pleasure of Not Being Perfect

"Not being perfect allows us to feel empathy and compassion, not just for ourselves but also, and especially, for others. We see our own frailties and shortcomings in our friends and lovers, or we see that they stumble in their own way just as we do in ours. Not being perfect together joins us in our humanity. That's a good feeling, that we're all in this impossible, crazy life together, and that in large measure it will take us where it wants to go."

5. The Pleasure of Doing Nothing Useful

"We each in our own ways have an agenda. We are all lobbyist for our own cause, our own opinions, aspirations, status, or career. While there's nothing wrong with getting ahead, whatever that may mean, it can also be an enormous relief now and then to lay down our own cause and enjoy wherever we find ourselves on its own terms."

6. The Pleasure of Being Ordinary

"Whether you look at an object or a person, the beauty is in the looking, not in the value or in the cheekbones. It is almost impossible to look upon any human face and feel a dislike for the person. The sheer looking reveals the individual instead of the stereotype. It replaces liking or not liking with an affinity for another living being, and that is always a pleasure."

7. The Pleasure of Coming Home

"When you have spent much of your life wanting to be other than where you are, or wanting conditions to be somehow different from what they are, it comes as a relief to begin to know the pleasure of feeling at home, both in yourself and in the world."

Roger Housden, Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living

Joy vs Happiness

Happiness is defined as 'a happening of chance, luck, fortune.'

Joy is defined as 'an exultation of the spirit, gladness, delight, the beatitude of heaven or paradise.'

That's quite a difference! Happiness is always short-lived. We are constantly chasing after this experience; we think that we should be happy -- after all, isn't the pursuit of happiness guaranteed to us in the Bill of Rights? But happiness comes at the whim of fortune. No happiness can be kept permanently.

So ask yourself this question: Do you want happiness, which is luck or fortune? Or do you want joy, which is the beatitude of paradise?

Robert A. Johnson, Ecstasy: Understanding the Psychology of Joy

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Egotism vs Narcissism

In common parlance, narcissism is often used as a synonym for egomania or excessive self-regard. In psychological terms, however, egotism and narcissism can be very different things. Egotists are preoccupied with themselves to an extreme degree. Their self-importance is unshakable, so much that it generally allows them to disregard reality.

Narcissism, on the other hand, springs from an opposite relationship to the self: Not self-involvement, but a disconnection with oneself. The key to understanding the Narcissus myth is not that he fell in love with himself, but that he failed to recognize himself in his own reflection. In other words, true narcissists are not self-aware. A real narcissist is dissociated from his or her true self; he feels haunted by chronic feelings of loneliness, emptiness, and self-loathing and seeks to replace that disconnection with a sense of worth and importance fueled by others. Narcissism is also marked by a profound lack of empathy, a fundamental inability to understand and connect with the feelings of others.

Furthermore:

1. Narcissists often develop attractive or persuasive social skills to help them maintain the personality they have constructed to get what they want from the world.

2. Because their sense of true self is so flimsy, narcissists are masters at creating ways of getting what the do need to exist: Positive feedback and stroking from others.

3. To protect his flimsy self-esteem, and avoid the pain of the inadequacies he constantly feels, the narcissist creates a pseudo-self, an idealized version of himself, and consciously or unconsciously projects it out to others to prime that continual stream of admiration and desire.

4. Instead of pursuing real intimacy, however, narcissists tend to seek out high-arousal situations that allow them to bask in the love and attention of the people around them.

5. Narcissism is not a byproduct of celebrity, but a primary motivating force that drives people to become celebrities.

Drew Pinsky, The Mirror Effect

Savage's postscript:

Pick-up is the self-centered pursuit of attraction, attention, and validation. It involves vanity, entitlement, and exploitativeness. Often the attention of other men is more validating than actually connecting with women.

Seduction is the self-empowered gifting of intimacy, passion, and pleasure. It involves empathy, positive regard for oneself, and positive intention for others. High self-esteem is required to find the key to a woman's fantasies and seek to make them come true. It is about generosity, giving unselfishly, and helping women realize their sensual and sexual potential.

Seducers don't think less of themselves, they just think of themselves less. They (quietly and without fanfare) put the interests and pleasure of women first. PUAs do not.

Hero vs Celebrity

Fame does not equal greatness.

1. The hero was a human figure who had shown greatness in some achievement. He was a man or a woman of great deeds. The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness. He is the human pseudo-event.

2. Heroes were men and women of great purpose. Celebrities are receptacles into which we pour our own purposelessness. They are nothing but ourselves seen in a magnifying mirror.

3. Heroes were made from virtue and value. Celebrities are made by simple familiarity, induced and re-enforced by public means. Their chief claim to fame is their fame itself. They are notorious for their notoriety.

4. The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark.

5. The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media.

6. The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name.

7. The hero was born of time: His gestation required at least a generation. The celebrity, on the contrary, is always a contemporary.

8. The hero was made by folklore, sacred texts, and history books; but the celebrity is the creature of gossip, of public opinion, of magazines, newspapers, and the ephemeral images of movie and television screens.

9. The dead hero becomes immortal. He becomes more vital with the passage of time. The celebrity even in his lifetime become passé: he passes out of the picture.

10. Heroes standing for greatness in the traditional mold tend to become colorless and cliché. The greatest heroes have the least distinctiveness of face or figure. Celebrities, however, suffer from idiosyncrasy. They are too vivid, too individual, to be polished into a symmetrical Greek statue.

11. While heroes are assimilated to one another by the great simple virtues of their character, celebrities are differentiated mainly by trivia of personality. To be known for your personality actually proves you a celebrity. Thus a synonym for 'a celebrity' is 'a personality.'

12. If someone does a heroic deed in our time, all the machinery of public information -- press, pulpit, radio, and television -- soon transform him into a celebrity. If they cannot succeed in this, the would-be hero disappears from public view.

13. In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person with solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs. Their virtues are not the product of our efforts to fill our void. Their very anonymity protects them from the flashy ephemeral celebrity life.

Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image (1961)

Monday, February 07, 2011

Presence vs Charisma

Someone with presence imparts a feeling of substance, a confidence that is reassuring, at home with itself. That's a nourishing feeling for those in the vicinity, whereas charisma can feed off people. Presence extends energy outward, but charisma draws energy toward itself from others.

When we are present, we have a natural grace, however large or small we may be, just as the elephant has grace in its way and the gazelle in another. All animals have presence, and from them we can assume that this is the usual property of a body whose occupant is home.

Roger Housden, Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living

Sunday, February 06, 2011

Sensation vs Materialism

When society chose to follow the erratic footsteps of the degraded Bacchus instead of the joyful dance of Dionysus, it began to confuse materialism with sensation.

At first glance, I suppose, our society looks terrible sensation oriented -- the flashing neon signs of Broadway, the almost naked bodies on billboards, our obsession with food and exercise. Originally, perhaps, we want these things for the pleasurable sensations they give us. But after a while we develop a craving for sheer quantity and lose sight of quality all together. So it seems that we are materially oriented, and that is a fine distinction to make. We want more things -- more cars, more money, more clothes, more drugs, more fun -- but we're frightened of touch, of making real contact with another person.

Craving spiritual ecstasy, we mistakenly seek material fulfillment. We chase after a phantom, and when we catch it -- in the form of more money, more food, more sex, more drugs, more drinks, more oblivion -- we find that we have been chasing ephemeral happiness when we should have invited lasting joy.

Robert A. Johnson, Ecstasy: Understanding the Psychology of Joy

Saturday, February 05, 2011

Bouncers vs Splatters

Not everyone responds to discouragement in the same way. In regard to discouragement, there are two kinds of people in the world: splatters and bouncers.

When splatters hit rock bottom, they fall apart and stick to the bottom. Bouncers hit rock bottom, pull themselves back together and bounce back up.

The question is: Are you going to give up or get up? It’s a choice.

John Maxwell, The Difference Maker