To give you an example, I’m pretty old now, but when I do this, even now, there are a lot of repeating mental-pictures about my schooldays. Sometimes it’s in the form of memories, but other times it’s kind of “based on” this period of my life, i.e. something triggers a certain feeling in me now and I keep getting these mental sequences but it involves people I knew in the past in either altered situations of the past.
For example, if I come across something on YouTube, say a video of a kid being told off for whatever, and for some reason it triggers anger in me, so that manifests as a sensation in my body, like a slight rising energy around my chest which feels light a slight wave of static electricity. Also, while this happens, there are mental-pictures, which are vague, ghostly imaginings which seem to exist around my eyes somewhere is space (visualising/the visual field) and the pictures could be, say, me being told off as a schoolchild and me defending myself, but the scene is changed in some way. Perhaps it’s an actual school teacher I had in the past who is now triggering this reaction in me as a memory, but in this scene now, the child in the YouTube video that triggered the emotion, is also there. So perhaps it is her getting told off and I am a supply teacher in the daydream, and I am defending them and I am so eloquent and intelligent (in the fantasy, alas, not in real life) that I can reduce the aggressive teacher to a gibbering mess.
So in a way, there are three things happening here. There is this mental-picture, there are the inner-voices as the characters speak, and there is this sensation in my chest. Some people are very body aware and some people are not, but you need to be, because these sensations are actually emotion. You don’t want them rising and existing under the radar of mindful consciousness for the simple reason that you can reign them, but also they are emotions. So in this situation, I would label this rising sensation of vague static in my chest as ‘anger’ or ‘indignation’. In a way it is completely separate from the mental-pictures and inner voices as those seem to be located (if they have any existence at all in relation to the physical world) around my eyes somewhere in a ghostly way that no one else can perceive. I perceive them someway but not with my physical eyes and physical ears but with my… “spiritual senses”.
I’ll give another actual example. I usually live in a city, but moved to a small beach place to write this (and other things). So I’m sitting in a shack overlooking the ocean while I type these words (living the dream!). I wake up, come straight here, and write 2000 words touch-typing, looking at the ocean every morning. Then I go back to the room, clean up, exercise and stuff, and I have YouTube playing in the background. I have the “suggested videos” and ‘autoplay’ turned on. You know how that works. Google spies on me, watches everything I do and knows everything about me, and then it’s algorithm suggests videos. Well I’ve been hanging out in the manosphere a bit, not usually my thing (although maybe it should be?), it’s mainly to market my writing.
It started playing these videos; I guess you’d call them commentary videos. Some guy looks at a channel, picks a video, plays it and comments on it in real time. The theme of the videos was female dating requirements. One batch of videos is from the channels of various women, listing the things they want in a partner, and they have (unrealistically) high expectations. The narrator explained it as the three sixes, at least six foot, earning six figures and six out of ten in looks (I can think of a better criteria for that last one). Well the videos are partly humorous, because some of the women are… a bit rough. Nothing wrong with not looking perfect, hey, I don’t look too great myself nowadays. The joke is really about the disconnect from reality. There’s some average looking female “in the hood” standing dressed in cheap clothes, using a cheap camera speaking to potential suitors saying not to even approach her unless you have this much money, all your teeth, this much height. It is actually quite funny (not sure if this is gender specific, you could perhaps find similar men and third gender jackasses).
Well then it cuts to these other women in their forties, posting about trying to date online in middle age and they are being ghosted or not clicked. One guy turned up in sweat pants, and when she asked why, he said “I don’t care”. And she kept shouting into the camera ‘I don’t’ care, I don’t care , I don’t care!’. There was another one from China called “Am I ugly?”. In this one a middle aged women had parents who arranged a blind date with a guy as a potential marriage partner, and she turned up and they ate and all went well,. He had all the requirements, lots of money (she had money but didn’t want to share it with a partner, the requirement is for the man to be richer), tall, car, paid house etc. Half way through the dinner he was sweating and he still had a hat on. She asked him to take it off and he was bald.
Now this is a little bit funny when I just explain it like this, maybe I should add I’m bald at this point, and currently smirking in a shack in the tropics overlooking the ocean on a perfect day; this is my context. Bald as a coot though, fair dinkum.
Anyway, this woman isn’t laughing or mocking him or anything. She’s telling the story as a kind of tragedy. She gets to the climax of the story, him taking his hat off, and explains how his head looked, long and thin, and there was sweat on it (bastard) and she’s looking so sad and broken and trembles with emotion as she speaks, and then repeats in Chinese “Am I ugly? Am I ugly?” before breaking down and crying.
Well no, for a middle aged Asian woman, apart from not smiling she looked OK. But I think this was her point. The understanding that she gets from that, is that her parents fixed her (an older, moderately successful woman) with a rich, good guy with a house and car, but he was bald. And they did this because they think she’s ugly, that she couldn’t be matched with a man that checks all the boxes, has a house, car, money and perfect looks (with hair), but found someone with no hair and a long skull.
I mean, I don’t know how you feel when you read this. I thought it was hilarious. I was on the floor doing my sit ups laughing. Well to do my routine, it takes a couple of hours (I washed clothes yesterday also, Oh, they’re still on the roof, I must remember to take them in, thanks for reminding me). So there was a succession of these videos playing, kind of similar stuff.
Well later in the day, I noticed this repeating daydream. This is again going to sound crazy when I write it down, but when you start this practice then you’ll see the fact, that WE’RE ALL CRAZY. In this daydream, a South African woman invites me to hang out and I decline. That’s it. Politely, no drama. Just, a nothing, under-the-radar daydream. There is an occasional slight variation. In this one, she has a daughter, who is concerned she is lonely, and she suggests her mother invite me out, so this is kind of a prelude, but then the daydream plays out in the same way, she does so and I politely decline.
Full context: she exists. Where I sit and write, in the morning I come alone, if I come in the afternoon (I rarely do as the sun sets shining in my face) then there’s a guy I chat to at the table next to, and this woman is an acquaintance of him. She’s older than me. I know nothing about her and she’s not significant; I’m not attracted to her (this is how random this s*** can be). The only contact is, we both like the same table, and if she get’s there first I sit elsewhere (no big deal) but although we don’t know each other, we look at each other and pull a face (joking) sometimes. If she’s in my table first she kind of apologises by looking guilty and I pout. That’s it. No flirting. It’s nothing.
So what the f*** is going on there? I mean, what is this daydream about? When you start this practice yourself, then you’ll notice that your mind, the stream of consciousness (and thus you) is full of this s***.
So the first way to understand this is, if it came true, how would I react? I’m by myself in this little town or village or whatever it is. I have a lot of friends in the city, but I came here to be alone to get the writing done. I chitchat with expats and locals a bit but really don’t want company. On a different level, I’m also single and not looking for a partner. It’s ironic really, but when I was young, I was desperate to be in a relationship but couldn’t be, and over the decades that changed to being at peace with being alone but open to a relationship should it arise. Then this kind of morphed to now where I’d essentially be single, even if someone suitable begged me. This might be partly due to my sexual awakening, becoming sexually active and having no trouble finding short-term partners nowadays; I also am a loner at heart. I like the solitude and the quiet. Actually, a large part is also a disciplined mind, it’s the result of what I’m trying to teach people now. It’s not that I don’t need a romantic partner, but I don’t need anything really, I create the inner, and so outer, world I want as a matter of course. It’s ironic because, nowadays, if I did want to be in a full relationship, I could go back to the city and know numerous women who, I’m confident, would be living with me within the week.
So, if this lady did ask me for a coffee or something, did ask me out, I’d politely decline. That’s a simple fact. Now it’s partly that I came here to write and get work done. Sometimes when I’m sitting here writing and this guy comes and sits next to me and he’s a great guy, but to be honest my heart sinks a bit because he wants to chit chat, and I want to write. There was this one time (at band camp :P) when I was on a roll writing. I touch-type and I picked up a thread and was hammering the words away on the keyboard and this guy just would not shut up about the new broadband connection he was getting installed in his apartment. It was surreal because I was hammering the keyboard looking at him and nodding politely and my mind somewhere else and this went on for a full ten minutes.
It’s perhaps a little deeper than this though. I think when you’re younger you’re thinking is based much more on what you SHOULD do, be, want etc., and then you get to a certain age and it’s more about what you ACTUALLY want. That is if you’re living life well, spiritually, then the world the senses report matters less and less. There is ‘norm’ in society, about most things, and it’s always BS. The norm concerning companionship, friends, lovers etc. is that we all want them to some degree and hanker after them and feel bad when we don’t have them — and if a person spends too much time alone then they are a catlady or similar.
Of course, the truth is that we’re all different. Now, possibly you will hate it (or me) when I say this because it is contrary to all the societal brainwashing, that men are desperate for women and female company, and it was true for me at one point. But as I got older, aged and became sane (i.e. introduced logic into my life) and also became mindful, then I realised that I don’t really like female company, to be frank. Now, there is a fallacy there, hasty generalisation. The logical truth is that everyone is different and you need to take each different individual as they come.
But there is a different context for me as I’m dark-skinned. Whether you like it or not, or want to be in denial, my colour makes it different for me. In the past, when I’ve been speaking to white women it’s been misinterpreted. Once I was pulled aside and searched by the police for sitting too close to a woman (she was a friend I was with), the close proximity was taken as me trying to steal (the possibility of us being together wasn’t considered). Another time I was fooling around, actually with an Asian friend. We were out and the bill came and for a joke she grabbed my credit card to use it to pay and I caught her. So we were both laughing about it while I tried to pry it from her hand. Totally light-hearted, totally a joke, but someone ran up and dragged me out into the street thinking it was a fight. Another few times, talking to white females, random people will come up mid-conversation and ask, “Is he bothering you? “. This is in the middle of perfectly friendly conversations where we are just talking, and the irritating thing is that white women will never register this as racism. They’ll just say it’s a random stranger guy checking that she “feels safe”. (No one ever cares when I feel unsafe).
Now if I ever openly admit to anyone I avoid white women, I’m instantly wrong, a misandrist and racist, and in a way my behaviour is illogical (such avoidance). The thing is, as far as I’m concerned, the (perfectly legal) police search, frightening and humiliating in public, gives me the right to avoid that happening again. Period. This is logical, I can write it as an argument with a premise and conclusion and it has good structure and no fallacies.
Now, I’ve made that decision. It is a part of who I am. Who am I? I am the stream of my consciousness, all the thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations and mental-pictures. And all these scenarios in my mind are actually rehearsals, of how I might behave, how I should have behaved, how I might behave in the future. Do you see? I’m telling you I’ve made this decision, and it now affects the way I behave because it is “who I am”.
I could change it. I could look into my mind, and see this little fantasy, of declining her invite, and choose to change it. I could construct a new one where we are best buddies and love hanging out. I could choose to think it every day five times a day, then watch my mind for any negative variants. I could vow to never allow a daydream based on avoidance to ever be on my mental screen. I never allow my inner-voice to suggest that I want to avoid contact. I choose all my thoughts and all my feelings and my stream of consciousness (and thus my very being) to be about having crowds of friends and us all hanging out and having such fun. If I could make those mental-pictures believable and maintain moment-to-moment discipline, then this is pretty much what it is all about.
But my thought process (and so who I am) is no longer under the radar, and I like to think I choose who I am, the stream of consciousness and so my behaviours, based on logic and reasoned arguments and not unconscious insanity and unwatched reactions. I, deep down in my heart, love solitude, and the joy that my mental discipline brings me. You might be completely different, which is fantastic, and if you want to create a relationship, friends or a lot of promiscuous sex, then you can do that and be happy, and I’m happy to help you with this, as long as you stay sane, conscious, aware and base all of your choices on reason. That’s all I’m saying. DON’T BE CRAZY.