The Flower of Life

The Cycle of Life

May 15th, 2015

The fundamental energy that’s responsible for all life in the universe, including the universe itself, is consciousness. Consciousness is what animates everything in the universe down to even the smallest particle. Analogous to our computer technology, if we see the matter in our universe as the hardware, then consciousness is the software that drives the hardware. But in the case of consciousness the relationship goes much deeper than that — the software actually also creates the hardware. A better analogy would therefore be a computer simulation — for example, a videogame set in a virtual 3D world — where the software not only creates the objects inside the virtual environment, but also drives the behavior of those objects. Every object, and indeed every particle, in the simulation has a piece of the software attached to it that drives its behavior, also known as Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Similarly, in our universe even the smallest particle is in possession of consciousness that determines its behavior and how it interacts with its environment. ¹ In fact every point anywhere in space-time is in possession of consciousness — including what we perceive as ’empty’ space. ² This means, for example, that all the laws of nature are a direct result of consciousness. Like I discussed before, consciousness is to the universe what AI is to a virtual reality simulation. This is no doubt one of the reasons why many people — including scientists — are coming to the conclusion that we might be living in an elaborate virtual reality simulation; the universe might be a holographic simulation on a grand scale running inside a cosmic computer. ³

Because of the fractal nature of the universe, consciousness not only creates our reality, but our reality can also modify and reprogram consciousness. This is the built-in feedback loop that is so characteristic of fractals. What happens is that consciousness creates this virtual reality hologram, and through experiencing that virtual reality can learn and then reprogram and hopefully improve itself (become more intelligent, wiser or enlightened).

Indeed it would appear that this is the ultimate goal and purpose of consciousness: to create, to experience, to learn and to improve (modify or re-create), all of this in a continuous cycle, ultimately evolving to a state of lower entropy ⁴ (creating order out of chaos).

If our universe is really a virtual reality hologram — a computational simulation — then you would expect to find evidence for that everywhere. And indeed there’s evidence in nature that suggests that we do in fact live in a hologram. One important piece of evidence is the fact that we can find fractals everywhere in nature. Not only that, but the computational nature of these fractals is evidenced by the fact that we can find the number phi (φ), also known as the golden ratio, everywhere throughout nature. This is evidence for the fact that there’s a fundamental geometric and computational principle behind our reality. This fact is further backed by Vortex Based Mathematics which was discovered by Marko Rodin, and which can be used to mathematically model everything in nature. According to Rodin, everything in our reality is made up of numbers and the basic geometry that’s associated with those numbers. ⁵ Think of the code in the movie “The Matrix,” but in this case it’s all numbers.

Numbers are the highest degree of knowledge. It is knowledge itself. Geometry is knowledge of the eternally existent. Plato

Before I get to the really interesting things I want to discuss regarding the cycle of life that governs the entire universe, I want to first take a look at an important part of the underlying basic geometry. Because It’s important to understand that what I’m going to show about the cycle of life isn’t just based on random drawings.

As I mentioned in my post about the All Seeing Eye, a lot of what we’re discovering today isn’t new; for reasons which I won’t get into in this post, ⁶ humankind has ‘forgotten’ a lot of what we knew in the past, and we’re now on a path of rediscovery. There’s lots of evidence suggesting that ancient civilizations knew a lot about the underlying energy that drives our entire universe and that this knowledge was encoded in simple symbolic visual representations. An example of this is the All Seeing Eye, and other examples are the flower of life, the swastika, the yin and yang and sacred geometry. Even numerology and astrology probably come from the same basic understanding. They all appear to stem from the same basic principles that define our reality; principles which themselves stem from the fundamental energy responsible for our reality, which is consciousness.

If we start with the famous pyramid with the All Seeing Eye on top, it’s important to note that in the correct depictions the pyramid is an equilateral triangle. This is a special triangle where the lengths of all the sides are equal (x=y=z), and all three internal angles are congruent to each other and are each 60°.

If we take the centroid p of this triangle and draw a circle around it where the circumference C of the circle is equal to the lengths of all three sides of the triangle (C = x+y+z), then the relationship between the triangle and the circle is such that we get the golden ratio (φ) as shown below.

The length a from point p to the side of the triangle and the length b from the side of the triangle to the edge of the circle are such that the below is true:

If all of our reality is really based on this basic geometry, then this begins to explain why the golden ratio can be found everywhere in nature. This also explains why the symbol of the All Seeing Eye is often also shown with a circle, for example as seen in the depiction on the Church of St. Magdalene in Venice.

The All Seeing Eye on the Church of St. Magdalene in Venice (Photo by gnuckx)

We can even find the golden ratio in the relationship between the equilateral triangle and its circumscribed circle.

And if we take a look at the relationship between the equilateral triangle and its inscribed circle, we can see where the seed of life motif comes from. The ancient flower of life motif is made out of the seed of life.

In the above figure the inscribed circle is in orange, and its circumference C is half the circumference of the circumscribed circle. This is a very important mathematical relationship between these two circles, because as I’ll discuss later below, there is a constant doubling process happening as we grow outwards from the centroid p of the equilateral triangle.

As you can see there are 6 blue points where the inscribed circle intersects with the median lines of the equilateral triangle. Notice that if we would connect the 6 intersection points, we get a hexagon, which is also one of the basic geometric patterns that we see everywhere in nature (snowflakes, beehives etc.).

If we draw circles around each of those 6 intersection points with the same diameter as the inscribed circle, we get the seed of life pattern as you can see in the above figure. In total, the seed of life is composed of 7 circles, also an important number in sacred geometry and in the enneagram discussed later below.

Looking at the figure above, can you see the yin and yang symbol? Let me help you out. 🙂

As I will explain later, this geometric system is in constant motion (rotating and spiraling out from the center). Rotate the yin and yang symbol by 90° and you get the swastika. (Click here for a more details on this, including how to arrive at the version used by Hitler in Germany).

Just like the yin and yang symbol, the swastika is a simplified representation of the seed of life in motion. If we take a copy of the seed of life motif and rotate it by 30°, and place it back onto the original copy, we get the figure below.

If you look carefully at the above figure, you can see that it looks like there’s a vortex rotating out of the center point. And it turns out that this is exactly how the motion of energy is throughout the universe. This was discovered by Marko Rodin along with Vortex Based Mathematics (VBM). When you read up on VBM, you’ll notice that, at least so far, they’ve modeled the flow of this energy in the form of a torus (a donut shape) ⁷ but I think that the actual flow of life energy in reality is more like the above figure with a very small hole at the center — perhaps infinitely small; a singularity where all matter is compressed. This would also make sense in the context of the big bang theory, which I also discussed before. ⁸

Not coincidentally, the equilateral triangle and its circumscribed circle are also part of Vortex Based Mathematics (VBM) as can be seen in the diagram below.

The equilateral triangle is formed by the numbers 3, 6 and 9 which are very special numbers in VBM, said to describe things in the higher planes of reality. The numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8 are numbers that describe our physical reality — the 3D world that we live in — and describe a bounded infinity through a process of doubling. ⁹ If you look at the blue lines connecting the numbers, you can see that they also visually form an infinity symbol ( $\infty$ ), and this is probably where that symbol originates from. The infinity symbol is also related to the ouroboros and they both describe the same thing. ¹⁰ As explained on Wikipedia:

The ouroboros symbolizes self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return, and other things such as the phoenix which operate in cycles that begin anew as soon as they end.

That’s exactly what we see in the VBM diagram above. Starting at the number 1, if we apply a doubling process we will eventually return back to the number 1 and start the cycle all over again. ¹¹

But even in the higher planes of reality, the numbers 3, 6 and 9 are also connected. Not only are they connected, but they also form an infinite cycle, although this is not depicted in the VBM diagram — and I think that this is an omission in VBM theory (at least in its current state). The reason why I think this is because the numbers 3, 6 and 9 are connected in the enneagram ¹² — an old symbol that looks a lot like the VBM diagram and very likely describes the same process.

If we overlay the pyramid with the All Seeing Eye on top of the VBM diagram, the correlation becomes clear.

We then see that the number 3 is connected to creation (our physical 3D reality), the number 9 to experience (awareness, consciousness), and the number 6 to learning (knowledge). Take note of the fact that to go from the number 3 to 6, we first have to go through 9, as can also be seen in the VBM diagram (the dashed orange line). This reminds me of the famous quote by Einstein:

The only source of knowledge is experience. Albert Einstein

From the moment when I first came across that quote by Einstein around 2001, it has always fascinated me and I’ve even included it as my email signature ever since. Now I know where it comes from. We can only get to number 6 (knowledge) after we went through number 9 (experience). It’s also important to mention that the number 9 is associated with spirit or consciousness in VBM theory, so this matches perfectly. Not only that, but the number 6 has also consistently been associated with (gaining) knowledge, especially in the bible (666 the mark of the beast — the dragon and serpent who wants to share knowledge and wisdom with humankind etc.).

From the above image it’s also clear that the number 9 is the most important number, especially since it becomes associated with the All Seeing Eye, also known as the Eye of Providence which has been explained as “god watching over humankind” and “god’s intervention in the world.” Mathematically it’s also the most important number because it is present everywhere throughout the system; all the other numbers on each side of the number 9 eventually add up to nine (8+1, 7+2, 6+3 and 5+4), while the numbers connected in the doubling loop describing our physical reality (the blue line) also add up to nine (1+2+4+8+7+5=27 and 2+7=9).

Based on this, it’s very important to note that there is no central point of authority in our physical reality; the number 9 is distributed throughout the whole system. This is a very important mathematical fact that shows that nature is fundamentally a distributed system, a peer-to-peer (P2P) system with no central point of authority. The number 9, which is the source and authority of this whole system, is distributed everywhere throughout the system, in the parts and in the sum of all parts. If we want to create a truly prosperous and healthy human society on Earth for the long term, we’ll have to model it after this important fundamental understanding (so no governments and no central authorities whatsoever, but anarchy). ¹³

In our physical reality the only thing we know of that is present everywhere throughout all matter — even though we can’t see it ¹⁴ — is the energy known as consciousness. So again, it’s no coincidence that the number 9 is associated with experience, awareness or consciousness (spirit).

This may also be the origins of the concept of the holy trinity in Christianity, and may also be why the Eye of Providence is used as a symbol for the holy trinity (the father, the son and the holy spirit):

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity (from Latin trinitas “triad”, from trinus “threefold”) defines God as three consubstantial persons, expressions, or hypostases: the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit; “one God in three persons”. The three persons are distinct, yet are one “substance, essence or nature”.

According to this central mystery of most Christian faiths, there is only one God in three persons: while distinct from one another in their relations of origin (as the Fourth Lateran Council declared, “it is the Father who generates, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds”) and in their relations with one another, they are stated to be one in all else, co-equal, co-eternal and consubstantial, and “each is God, whole and entire”.

As mentioned earlier, the numbers 3, 6 and 9 do form a trinity (the equilateral triangle) in the higher planes of reality. The number 3 might be associated with the father (the creator). The number 6 might then be associated with the son (in the bible man was created on the 6^th day (Exodus 31:15), and the number 666 is also said to be the number of a man (Revelation 13:18)). The number 9 is then associated with the holy spirit. And just like in Christianity, the holy trinity are all one, and this is mathematically so, because 3+6+9=18 and 1+8=9. All 3 numbers are unified into the number 9, which is spirit or consciousness (or God, if you want). They are also co-equal, as follows from the 3 sides of the equilateral triangle that are equal in length, and the three internal angles which are also equal. And you’ve probably heard that you can only get to the father through the son (John 14:6)? Well, if you look at the diagram above, you can see that you can indeed only get to the father (number 3) through the son (number 6).

The Eye of Providence used as a symbol for the Holy Trinity

If you’re a Christian and a bit surprised by all of this, you have to realize that Christianity — and indeed all religions — are disinformation created by the elite to fool the masses in order to control, manipulate and enslave them. The true knowledge has been withheld from the masses and made occult by the elite, while they spread disinformation (sprinkled with some truth) for the masses to consume. We have all been fooled for thousands of years. For more details, read my post “Why ancient symbols are demonized.”

The relationship between the numbers 3, 6 and 9 is what I call the cycle of life. George Gurdjieff calls it the Law of Three in his explanation of the enneagram. ¹² Everything else in the system is controlled by, and adheres to, this cycle. It keeps the whole system in constant motion — continuously experiencing, learning and re-creating in order to evolve to higher states of awareness. Remember that this is what the ouroboros symbolizes as well; a constant cycle that keeps re-creating itself.

The ouroboros (blue) on top of the pyramid

All of life (all of creation) follows these three stages of development in a constant loop and in a fractal manner. What I mean by the fractal manner is that the same process is being followed at all scales of creation (macro and micro, as above so below). Take a human being, for example: a human being as a single entity follows the three stages of the cycle of life from birth to death, but while that is happening, on a much shorter timescale each individual cell that the human being is made out of also follows the same three stages from the moment it is created to the moment it dies. Similarly, our planet Earth as a single entity is also a living organism, and it too follows the same cycle of life on a much longer timescale. But while it is doing that, all organisms that are part of the planet are also following the cycle of life on their own shorter timescales.

Bacterial Growth: Growth is shown as Log(numbers) where numbers is the number of colony forming units per ml, versus Time. (Source)

The three stages of the cycle of life can clearly be seen in the bacterial growth ¹⁵ chart, where they are labeled B (the Exponential phase), C (the Stationary phase) and D (the Death phase). Again, keep in mind that these stages are the same for all organisms in the universe, including the universe itself. So if we understand these stages for bacteria, we can get a pretty good idea of the universal process (remember, as above so below).

The following is a shortened explanation from Wikipedia for these phases in bacterial growth:

During the lag phase (A), bacteria adapt themselves to growth conditions. It is the period where the individual bacteria are maturing and not yet able to divide.
The log phase (B) (sometimes called the logarithmic phase or the exponential phase) is a period characterized by cell doubling. If growth is not limited, doubling will continue at a constant rate so both the number of cells and the rate of population increase doubles with each consecutive time period. Exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely, however, because the medium is soon depleted of nutrients and enriched with wastes.
The stationary phase (C) is often due to a growth-limiting factor such as the depletion of an essential nutrient, and/or the formation of an inhibitory product such as an organic acid. Stationary phase results from a situation in which growth rate and death rate are equal. The result is a “smooth,” horizontal linear part of the curve during the stationary phase.
At death phase (D), (Decline phase) bacteria die. This could be due to lack of nutrients, a temperature which is too high or low, or the wrong living conditions.

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, when it comes to consciousness, its goal is to experience and to learn in order to grow and evolve to higher states of awareness. So for consciousness, the ‘resources’ that determine the progress of the cycle of life are new experiences and learning. The correlation for consciousness with the bacterial growth stages is as follows:

During the lag phase (A) consciousness seeks out new opportunities for experiencing and learning.
Once a new opportunity is created, the cycle of life for that opportunity begins with the exponential phase (B) where consciousness starts to experience it at an exponential rate (first slow, but increasingly faster). In this phase there’s more experiencing than learning.
At some point the stationary phase (C) is reached where the amount of new experiences reaches a plateau and there’s a balance between experiences and the knowledge extracted from them (learning).
Then the death phase (D) sets in; the amount of new experiences begins to decline rapidly, and a phase of reflection sets in, until there’s nothing new left to experience and learn anymore. Consciousness eventually then moves on to new opportunities.

In the below diagram I’ve mapped these stages onto the symbol of the All Seeing Eye, which is a symbol for consciousness as I explained in a previous post, and, as I’ve shown above, is a mathematical representation of the cycle of life.

If you look at the diagram (click on it for a larger view), you can see that the three stages in the cycle of life (B, C and D) are shown in grayscale lines. The first stage, B, starts at the number 3 of the triangle where creation begins, and goes all the way to the number 9. From the number 3 to 9, it’s all about creating and having new experiences. Then starting at number 9 we have the second stage C, where there’s more or less a balance between experiencing and learning. Stage C ends at the number 6 of the triangle, where the death phase D sets in, which is mostly about reflection and determining the lessons learned from all the experiences had during the previous phases in life. The knowledge gained will be essential for use when creation starts again at the end with the number 3; by applying that knowledge during the next creation, we get evolution and growth (under the right conditions) which is the ultimate goal of this system.

God and the life process, which is nowhere so clearly expressed as in the orgastic discharge, are identical. Wilhelm Reich in Ether, God and Devil

As we go around the circle starting at the number 3, the point of creation, the thickness of the orange line shows the amount of experiencing and learning, while the thickness of the blue line shows the desire for new experiences. So if we start at point E1 at the time of creation, we can see that the line becomes thicker all the way to point E2. From E1 to E2 there’s an exponential increase in experiencing and learning. From point E2 to E4 the thickness of the line stays roughly the same, meaning that a plateau has been reached and the amount of new experiences and learning stays roughly the same during that period. Then from point E4 back to E1, there’s a rapid decline of the amount of new experiences and learning until it becomes very small at point E1.

Notice that the opposite happens for the blue line, which shows the desire for new experiences. At the point N1 at the moment of creation, this desire is at its peak and the line is the thickest it will ever be. Going from point N1 to N2, the desire for new experiences drops rapidly and becomes very small. From point N2 to N4 it stays roughly the same, and starts increasing rapidly again from point N4 to N1.

To understand what’s going on, let’s take human beings as an example. First we will take a look at the overall life of human beings. From the moment the zygote forms in the mother’s womb, we begin at point 3 of the triangle, which is creation. The desire to experience (N1) is at its peak, while the amount of experiencing and learning (E1) is at its lowest. Then experiencing and learning starts to increase at an exponential rate — first slowly, but after the baby is born increasingly faster, as it continues to build on top of past experiences and learning. The amount of experiencing and learning then reaches point E2 where it reaches a plateau (adulthood, where growth stops and stabilizes). Meanwhile the desire for new experiences drops rapidly as well from point N1 to N2, and this makes sense, since the more the human being is experiencing and learning in life, the less the need is for new experiences. At point E3 they reach the peak of experiencing and learning, and likewise at that point the desire for new experiences is at its lowest at N3. When the third and last phase of their life begins, experiencing and learning starts to decline at an exponential rate from point E4 to E1. Meanwhile the desire for new experiences increases at an exponential rate from N4 to N1. During this phase old age sets in eventually, there’s increasingly less to experience and all that’s left to do basically is to reflect on past experiences and filtering the lessons that have been learned and the knowledge gathered. The desire for new experiences grows, and this continues until the cycle of life starts all over again. Of course, this can only happen after death.

Evidence that the life of a human being is indeed divided into three phases can be found in female fertility. The average lifespan for women is 73.5 years according to the United Nations World Population Prospects 2012 Revision. This means that each phase of a woman’s life takes 24.5 years on average. So the death phase sets in at around 49 years on average. Is it mere coincidence that this is also the age at which female fertility has completely declined? I think not. 😉

The curve describes the percentage of ovarian reserve remaining at ages from birth to 55 years, based on the ADC model. 100% is taken to be the maximum ovarian reserve, occurring at 18–22 weeks post-conception. It is estimated that for 95% of women by the age of 30 years only 12% of their maximum pre-birth NGF population is present and by the age of 40 years only 3% remains. (Source)

As you can see from the chart above, by the time the death phase (D) sets in for women, most of their ovarian reserves are gone. As far as I’m concerned, this timing is nature telling them it’s time to wrap up and begin the process of death. ¹⁶

One last example that I want to discuss in order to illustrate how the cycle of life works concerns the relationships (romantic, friendships, business, jobs etc.) that we have in our lives. Remember, again, that the cycle of life is a fractal process; it doesn’t only hold true for an organism’s life seen as a whole, but also for all the individual processes and experiences that their life consists of. The same cycle of life also applies individually to the many relationships we can have with other people during the course of our lives.

So let’s take two people, for example, John and Mary. The moment when John meets Mary we’re at the number 3 — the point of creation; this is when the new relationship is created. John and Marry are attracted to each other, so the exponential phase (B) begins where they start to spend time with each other and experience each other more and more. Their desire for new experiences at point N1 during creation is the highest it will ever be. This is the stage at which they “are in love,” which is really being in lust. From that point on it starts to decline until we get to point N2. There we see that the amount of new experiences they can have with each other reaches a plateau at point E2, where it will remain more or less stable for a while until point E4 is reached. During that time, from point N2 to N4, their desire for new experiences is very low, because they’re pretty satisfied with each other. But we know that this cannot go on forever, just like we’ve seen with bacterial growth. At some point resources begin to deplete — in this case the amount of new experiences that can be had with each other starts to decline. In other words, things start to get boring. And from point E4 it starts to get boring at an exponential rate; we see that the thickness of the orange line starts to decline rapidly, which means there’s an increasing lack of new experiences in the relationship. This is when the death phase (D) begins, and the desire for new experiences starts to become much stronger in both John and Mary from point N4 to N1.

Now, if John and Mary are wise and know about the cycle of life, they will recognize what’s happening and acknowledge the fact that they can no longer satisfy each other’s desire for new experiences, and will take appropriate actions to prevent things from going wrong. This would mean, for example, spending less time together and allowing each other the freedom to also pursue other experiences with different people. However, if they force each other to stay exclusive, which is what society still brainwashes most people to do, then things can get out of hand, get violent and potentially become very dangerous. They will start to develop a (subconscious) tendency towards rebellion and hate for each other. And due to the fact that the desire for new experiences keeps growing rapidly from N4 to N1, John and Mary might even begin cheating on each other.

If John and Mary know about the cycle of life, they will understand that the death phase for their relationship with each other is inevitable, and that as a result, they cannot promise each other to be together for eternity, and certainly not exclusively. If they want to enjoy each other for as long as possible (really stretch out the cycle of life for their interaction with each other), they will let the flame of lust for each other burn for as long as possible. This can only be done if they allow each other the freedom to also pursue other experiences with different people right from the start, which keeps experiences between them fresh and new for a much longer period of time. It’ll take longer to get bored of each other in such a case, i.e. it’ll take longer to reach the death phase.

From the few examples I’ve discussed above, I hope that you can start to see that when we truly start understanding the cycle of life, we’ll be able to explain a lot of our reality, begin to see why things are behaving the way they are, be able to solve many of the problems we’re currently dealing with around the world, develop better and more natural ways of living together, reach a much higher standard of living, and a much higher quality of awareness and collective consciousness. It’s better to work with nature than against nature. This is especially true when it comes to our technology; most of it works against the fundamental principles of nature and as a result requires a lot of wasted effort and energy. Like Marko Rodin often mentions, once we truly understand and apply the math behind the cycle of life, we’ll be able to revolutionize our technology and energy sources.

Finally, I also hope that you begin to realize how this information can be used against us, because this is very important to understand. Once you truly start to understand this information, it’s easy to use it for unethical and evil purposes. Indeed there has been an elite who have used this knowledge against humanity for thousands of years. Because they understand this knowledge, they know exactly what buttons to press, can easily predict behavior and other processes in life, and can easily manipulate the masses to forward their agenda. The only chance humanity has for fighting back against this, is to bring this information out again in the public domain and spread it far and wide, so that everyone can have it and understand it. Once most people possess this knowledge it will be a lot more difficult for the few to abuse it against the many. And thanks to the Global Brain, the timing for this is now perfect.

Footnotes

See my post “Thoughts on Karma and Consciousness” for references concerning the fact that every particle in the universe is in possession of consciousness. There I mention the thoughts of physicists such as Max Planck, Freeman Dyson and Eugene Wigner on this subject. ↩︎
The reality is that there’s a lot of matter even in what we think of as empty space, but we’re just not capable of seeing or detecting it. Consider that humans are only capable of seeing a fraction (3.5 × 10^-26 %) of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Imagine how much exists around us that our senses and our technology simply cannot detect (not unless it enters our range of observable reality). ↩︎
I recommend reading my post “The Holographic and Fractal Universe” for more detailed information about this. The thought that our universe might be a holographic projection isn’t something new, and you’ll find that even prominent physicists such as David Bohm and neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, have come to such a conclusion in the past. In the notes you’ll also find links to recent research on this topic. ↩︎
Lower entropy in the sense that consciousness is aligning more with the natural order of the universe which is based on true love. For example, a lot of what I write on my blog would lead me to be burned at the stake hundreds of years ago. Today things are different. A clear indication of the progress we’ve made in the evolution of our consciousness. ↩︎
For an introduction to Vortex Based Mathematics (VBM), I recommend watching the below presentation by Randy Powell (part 1 and part 2), one of Marko Rodin’s students. All the important details of the VBM diagram are discussed including the doubling process that underlies all of our reality. More can be found on YouTube.

For more information, check out this article on Rense.com or visit Marko Rodin’s website. ↩︎
This knowledge was hidden from much of humankind in order to dumb us down so that we could easily be controlled, manipulated and enslaved by the few who were in the know and who abused this knowledge to forward their own agenda. For thousands of years, secret societies were among the few who possessed (some of) this knowledge. But we’re now heading into a new era for humankind, where all of this knowledge will become available again, and will remain in the public domain. It will truly empower each and every human being on this planet and allow us to finally break free from thousands of years of enslavement. ↩︎
The flow of energy throughout the universe in the shape of a torus is also discussed in the documentary Thrive. ↩︎
Note that matter being compressed into a very small singularity doesn’t have to mean that it physically gets squashed into a tiny space. I think that matter in the universe grows bigger and multiplies starting from a singularity through a doubling process as discussed above. Compare this with the human body. Our bodies also come from a very small microscopic singularity called the zygote. But through a process of cell doubling, it grows bigger and expands at an exponential rate until we get to adulthood. The same can be said about a giant sequoia tree that once existed inside a small seed. This is how the universe works; everything grows from a small seed or singularity. I discuss this in more details in my post “Exponential Growth in the Fractal Universe”. ↩︎
This constant doubling is where the exponential growth in the universe comes from. I discussed exponential growth in details in my post “Exponential Growth in the Fractal Universe”. ↩︎
According to Wikipedia:

In modern mysticism, the infinity symbol has become identified with a variation of the ouroboros, an ancient image of a snake eating its own tail that has also come to symbolize the infinite, and the ouroboros is sometimes drawn in figure-eight form to reflect this identification, rather than in its more traditional circular form.

From the book “Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities” (page 242):

The ouroboros, the snake with his tail in his mouth, is the prototype of the vicious circle. […] The “Endless Snake” depicts an ouroboros who has become one with himself. It has fallen into the mathematical sign for infinity.

↩︎
If we begin at the number 1 in the VBM diagram, and double it, we get the number 2. Then, 2 doubled is 4. 4 doubled is 8. 8 doubled is 16, but 1+6=7, so we arrive at the number 7. If we double 16, we get 32, but 3+2=5 so we arrive at the number 5. And finally, if we double 32, we get 64, but 6+4=10 and 1+0=1, so we’re back at the number 1. Notice that as soon as the doubling sequence reaches 64 we’re back where we started at the number 1, and have completed one cycle. This is why the number 64 is also important and can be found everywhere, for example in the Mayan calendar, the Chinese I Ching (64 hexagrams), and the 64 codons that form our DNA.
It’s also important to note that the binary code in our computer technology is also based on a doubling sequence. So when you’re playing a 3D computer game, the whole virtual environment is actually constructed from data that is fundamentally based on a doubling sequence — just like the reality we all currently live in. This is more evidence supporting the fact that we might actually be living in a holographic simulation. ↩︎
The enneagram encodes very ancient knowledge which has been repressed for thousands of years — knowledge about the exact nature and workings of the reality we live in. It seems that when Marko Rodin developed his own VBM theory, he had just rediscovered the same basic principles of our reality that are also encoded in the enneagram.
The Enneagram

From Wikipedia:

The enneagram is a nine-pointed figure usually inscribed within a circle. Within the circle is a triangle connecting points 9, 3 and 6. The inscribed figure resembling a web connects the other six points in a cyclic figure 1-4-2-8-5-7. This number is derived from or corresponds to the recurring decimal .142857 = 1/7. These six points together with the point numbered 9 are said to represent the main stages of any complete process, and can be related to the notes of a musical octave, 9 being equivalent to “Do” and 1 to “Re” etc. The points numbered 3 and 6 are said to represent “shock points” which affect the way a process develops. The internal lines between the points; that is, the three-point figure and the six-point figure, are said to show certain non-obvious connections, although here very little elucidation is offered.

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As reported by Ouspensky the enneagram was introduced by George Gurdjieff to his study groups in St Petersburg and Moscow in 1916. Ouspensky records this original explication in his book of Gurdjieff’s teaching In Search of the Miraculous where the enneagram appears as Figure 44 and in further diagrams. It was presented as an ancient secret being released for the first time, the truth behind for example the Philosopher’s Stone. Ouspensky quotes Gurdjieff as saying; “The knowledge of the enneagram has for a very long time been preserved in secret and if it now is, so to speak, made available to all, it is only in an incomplete and theoretical form without instruction from a man who knows”. Gurdjieff also remarked “In order to understand the enneagram it must be thought of as in motion, as moving. A motionless enneagram is a dead symbol, the living symbol is in motion”

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The enneagram according to Gurdjieff shows the “Law of Seven” and the “Law of Three” united and so some explanation of these laws is necessary here.

The Law of Seven or law of octaves, according to which phenomena evolves in seven steps; and the Law of Three, according to which phenomena are produced by three forces, are presented by Gurdjieff as global laws appearing on all scales and essential to his cosmology. This cosmology offers a view of how the world operates said to derive from alchemy and more ancient sources, and to complement or complete modern experimental science rather than to contradict it. According to this cosmology everything is material, including consciousness and spirit, and all matter can be assigned a “density”; consciousness and spirit for example having lower “densities” (and therefore higher “vibrations”) than for example water while for example rock has a higher “density” and lower “vibration” than water and so on.

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The Law of Three holds that three forces act on any event, which can be called Active, Passive, and Neutralizing forces, or simply First, Second, and Third forces respectively. Humanity is said to be “third force blind”, to have difficulty recognizing the third force, which may appear to us in the guise of a result or of a background environment.

↩︎
Anarchy is the condition of a society, entity, group of persons or single person which does not recognize authority. The word anarchy comes from the ancient Greek ἀναρχία (anarchia), which combines ἀν (an), “not, without” and ἀρχός (arkhos), “ruler, leader.” Thus, the term refers to a person or society “without rulers” or “without leaders.” It does not mean chaos. ↩︎
Regarding the fact that we cannot ‘see’ consciousness, George Gurdjieff’s explanation of the enneagram mentioned above, says the following:

The Law of Three holds that three forces act on any event, which can be called Active, Passive, and Neutralizing forces, or simply First, Second, and Third forces respectively. Humanity is said to be “third force blind”, to have difficulty recognizing the third force, which may appear to us in the guise of a result or of a background environment.

I contend that the third Neutralizing force which humankind can’t ‘see’, is consciousness, which is connected to the number 9 and is present throughout the whole system (throughout all of creation — hence the concept of ‘god’ being omnipresent, seeing and knowing everything). The Active force is creation, which is connected to the number 3, and the Passive force is learning (knowledge), which is connected to the number 6. I explain why in my article above. ↩︎
In my post “Exponential Growth in the Fractal Universe” I discuss the bacterial growth chart and how it relates to the process of growth in the universe. ↩︎
It’s interesting to note that Dr. Sigmund Freud had speculated about what he called a “death drive” in humans, which was often also mistranslated as a “death instinct.” This idea never really caught on because it contradicted the pleasure principle and the desire of an organism to live. But I think that Freud was definitely on to something important. Based on what I discussed above, we can see that there is indeed a “death drive” which is part of the cycle of life and which is working more as a background constraint that guides the overall progress of life. The death phase is all about closure, where reflection and learning are central. This is why, for example, Freud would notice a repetition of (war) trauma in his patients. Any experience gained in life, which hasn’t properly been reflected upon and brought to closure, will keep demanding for closure in order to complete the cycle. As a result, his patients kept re-enacting traumatic events and kept having dreams about them. If this is true for individual experiences in life, might it also be true for the complete process of life? In other words, if we fail to properly reflect upon and learn the lessons we’re supposed to learn in life, might we feel compelled to return in another life in an attempt to achieve proper closure? ↩︎

Additional Notes

In an interesting interview with Daniel Bergner (author of the book “What do women want?”) on Trouw.nl (“Monogamy is killing the female libido”, June 12^th 2014), much of what I wrote above is confirmed. The interview is in Dutch, but below I’ve translated some of the relevant quotes from Bergner:

But there are monkeys where the females are the stalkers, and abandon their offspring when they desire sex. When rhesus monkeys were removed from their tiny cages where the males were going up against the females, it revealed that the females began taking the initiative. New males had to be bought, because the females were bored of the ‘old’ males.
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But as attachment grows in a relationship, and “the other” becomes a trusted person, the desire women have for their partner decreases at blazing speeds. One third of American women say they feel a serious lack of lust. Boredom and a long relationship or monogamy, is a cultural cage for the female libido, and kills it. A psychologist Marta Meana concludes that monogamy is not serving the natural sexuality of women. She gave numerous couples therapy, but only for a third “something” returns, such as “fuck-night”. Like going to the gym, a woman told me. “You do not want to go, but afterwards you’re satisfied.”
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Indeed, it is mostly women in long relationships that crave a lust pill. It is especially they who can be sad and bewildered about their disappeared lust. A free woman who’s doing exciting things, doesn’t need a pill. In all these years I’ve met only one couple with three children, who have managed to keep their erotic life exciting.
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Often hormones and menopause are blamed for decreased desire. But it is much more complex than that. A large-scale, long-term Australian study shows that a new partner makes short shrift of the supposed hormonal factors. I just received a nice letter from a 62 year old. She writes that it was only after her divorce that she came to understand her own desire. And that she’s now faring much better than during her marriage.

If you’ve read my article on the cycle of life above, then you know why the desire in women for their partners (lust) decreases very fast in all relationships. And, it’s the same for men. It’s the same even for rhesus monkeys, as Bergner mentions in the interview. And like I explain in my article above, it’s the same for every organism in the universe.

Added on June 18th, 2015 at 10:27 pm

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Benjamin von Cramon May 16th, 2015 at 10:56 am

Though sweeping, I’m not only good with that, it’s pretty awesome to see such disparate avenues of thought about physical and metaphysical reality described in a dynamic system, your Cycle of Life essay. With due respect, and even admiration, for your many talents, keen intellect, and your curiosity generally, I’d like to feedback on one element that from my personal perspective is sadly given short shrift, if not entirely distorted. That’s admittedly a judgmental way of phrasing it, but depending on which of us can see it more clearly, please, know it’s not my intent to be puffed up about being a right person here, rather, can we agree that truth seekers owe it to one another and to themselves (and possibly to those reading along) to be open to comparing notes, challenging one another, and hopefully learning things that help resolve misperceptions. It’s important not just to perceive the world clearly, to the extent our actions flow from perceptions to conscious ideation about what action to take in response, those actions feed back into the cycle of life and reality generally.

As I read your post, I happened to be listening to an old Joni Mitchell song, “Love”, which draws heavily from Paul’s Corinthian 13. I’m no Christian, but Paul’s text on love is a keeper, no wiser words IMHO have ever been spoken. It appears to me you’re wise beyond your years in many ways, in light of your many wonderful insights strewn throughout these posts to your blog, keep it coming. At the same time, it appears you’re either quite young, in fact too young to know much about love, or sadly embittered from the inevitable heartbreak that follows life and struggling attempts at love.

It’s your life, your choice how to live (express) your finite life. The direction you’re choosing and prescribing to your readers, serial monogamy (or perhaps some variation, multiple partners, etc) will lead you, I predict, in a circle that ultimately proves no different from the one you seek to escape, the plateau you describe that, as you claim, describes the beginning of the end of the love cycle, and can only regenerate with a new partner. I guess that’s why it’s called “recreational sex”, that which gets you into the love cycle, which is fine, but question to me being, is that truly how deep you take that story?

When Bill Moyers interviewed the great Joseph Campbell and asked about love, Campbell called love “a great ordeal”. The number of words you afford this complex topic, relative to your many other words and diagrams, is a very small percentage indeed. And though you kind of place love at the top, it coming last in your close, the phenomenon of love in the universe, if you believe in the conscious universe at all, renders the relative importance of love conspicuous by (near) omission. I’m 57, very happily married now 20+ years, graced that neither of us is dying of cancer or dodging bullets. And yet, I’m clear, one day I’ll either die and know my wife will struggle without me, or really “us”, or the other way around. We both go into that as best we can, no regrets, but it’s better than that. As serving something and someone greater than yourself, this process of self-actualization seems much more in line with all you describe about the behavior of the cosmos, at least in terms of the highest realm of potentialities, love being the highest.

Returning to your story, that you don’t become that (shallow) story, a guy who’s concept of love is largely geared around satisfying his sexual instincts, and only expressing your “love” of that person conditional to how it suits YOU, or what you think is best for you, I urge you to rerun the math here. It’s only natural and good that humans begin with self-serving interests, be it to satisfy instinctual urges, filter for basic compatibility, or whatever basis you wish to use. Eros Love provides the starter fuel, but if every time that plateaus our answer to that entropy is to find a new partner, how might one ever experience Agape Love? I see no acknowledgment in this post that such a thing even exists. From an anthropological perspective, we know that the whole stable pair bond thing defining most cultures across time is supported biologically. Humans have a really long gestation period in producing offspring, and usually just one baby, not a litter. That baby takes forever to grow up relative to other animals, many years invested by both parents in raising that child to the age where it can provide for itself and procreate in turn. Agape love surely evolved out of these conditions, or maybe not. Is it possible, that the conscious universe predicts love as a phenomenon seeding down at every scale, such that humans in response to life, with curiosity about pleasure, pain, birth, death, etc. evolved their conscious ideas about sex and love, leading to actions which predicate longer relationships, that also contribute as a driver to longer gestation periods, lower fecundity rates relative to other species, etc. I contend that just as nature and nurture work together, that also our hearts and conscious minds work as a force of nature, both being molded by and contributing to whatever sociobiological mechanisms describe our physiology and our cultural mores and behaviors.

However that all works, we know empirically it has worked more or less that way for eons and will continue to do so. Yes, there’s always the shadow side of things, there’s the male dominance thing, rape, sociobiological arguments supporting all kinds of ideas about why it ain’t all lovey dove out here. Yet, very precisely because it’s so easy to get it wrong, how destructive our behavior is until we figure out how to love, I say it’s important to get beyond the kid in the candy story level of sex and love, and possibly understand (experience) sex as an expression of love and mainly in support of it, and not the other way around. It’s what we consciously chose that represents our only freedom, so I’m all about choosing and becoming responsible to the ordeal that is love.

Reply
- Karel Donk May 16th, 2015 at 9:30 pm
  
  Thanks for your comment Benjamin. The above post was getting very long and I tried illustrating the cycle of life with just a few examples, that I hoped would be enough to get people to think about how they might be able to apply this knowledge to their lives. If I had to also go in depth about love here, then it would become a very long post.
  
  However, I have written a lot about love in the past, and still have posts to do on it in the future. The main problem is that love and lust are very misunderstood. And this is a result of thousands of years of sexual repression, which had the purpose to frustrate every individual in society so that they would be easier to manipulate and enslave.
  
  Consciousness, which I discussed above, is actually a very sexual energy, it is the creative force of the universe. Our whole cycle of life is actually sexual energy being expressed. That’s why if you look at the cycle of life diagram above, you’ll note at the bottom that I labeled the desire for new experiences as “lust”. Lust — the desire to experience and to learn — is what drives our entire universe. I discuss the difference between Love and Lust in my post The difference between Love and Lust.
  
  Sexual repression in society brainwashes people to suppress and repress their sexual drives, which has a severely negative impact on their sexual energy, which is the life force energy, which is consciousness (check out my post Thoughts on Karma and Consciousness for more on this, especially the quotes by Wilhelm Reich and Carl Jung mentioned there).
  
  When the expression of this energy is being blocked in an individual, the elite then harness this energy to manipulate the individual into doing the things they want. I discuss this in the second part of my Understanding Women series. This is one of the reasons why I mention that if you truly understand the cycle of life and the information I discussed above, it is easy to abuse it for evil purposes.
  
  If you understand this, you’ll easily realize why tyrants, gods and the church and religion in general, suppress and repress sexuality, and demonize lust — it hijacks the cycle of life of the individual, who can then be manipulated and basically, enslaved. For the elite, sex is about power.
  
  I don’t pretend to know everything there is to know about love, but I think I have a pretty good understanding of it at this point (see The difference between Love and Lust). I’m ashamed to have to admit that I, too, was very much brainwashed by society when I grew up, and had the same wrong ideas about love and sexuality that most people have these days. If you grow up in our current societies around the world, there’s really no escaping that brainwash.
  
  Fortunately I was able to deprogram myself very early in life from that kind of thinking, and was able to see from experience, observation and research what the truth is. I also had the good fortune of getting to know someone when I was around 19 years old, who taught me what true love actually is. Very much like what you mentioned about 1 Corinthians 13, but also that true love means letting people be free and independent.
  
  And that means that the artificial social constructs like marriage and exclusive relationships have nothing to do with love; they only exist to repress our sexuality, limit our freedoms and make us dependent. Read my post Why getting married is a very bad idea for details on this.
  
  The things you mention, like male dominance, rape, and why it’s not all lovy dovy out there, are precisely because of this sexual repression in society. You’ll come across this when you read my post about marriage which I linked above. I also mention some reasons for this kind of behavior in my post on Human Nature and Morality.
  
  Like I mention in my post about love and lust, true love lasts forever; lust, however, plateaus and declines in each situation, as shown in the cycle of life diagram above. True love means respecting the right to life of an individual. This means allowing them the freedom to go out and explore and experience the world, and have as many (sexual) experiences with whomever they want, whenever they want, as much as they want, and hopefully learn and grow as they go along. You cannot learn and grow in a balanced way by experiencing a single situation, or a single person, all your life. Variety is therefore essential. Love is allowing people the freedom to have the variety they need in their life so they can learn and grow. After all, according to the cycle of life described above, that is why we’re here. 🙂
  
  Reply
  - Benjamin von Cramon May 20th, 2015 at 4:48 pm
    
    Thanks, Karel, for your reply. That you gave short shrift to the topic of true love is merely symptomatic, what’s more problematic in my opinion is that your argument omits a key aspect of human existence, without which your frame is rendered dangerously close to hedonism. I’d like to explain, but firstly, to your point about sexual repression and what forces at play account for it.
    
    My choices in love and sex are just that, choices, highly deliberate and not arrived at casually. I’ve not only entertained and been tempted to open relationships, in my 20s I enjoyed promiscuity, loving the one(s) your with :^) I was raised by parents who lived WWII on the German side, that is, I was raised by folks who cautioned against authoritarianism, much self-reliance instilled in me, which explains why I’ve been self-employed all my adult life, fiercely independent, and arguably eccentric. All this to say, When you think sexually repressed and casualty of some conspiracy brainwashing the masses into accepting their repressed state, one is hard-pressed to convince me that could possibly apply in my case.
    
    Choice is freedom, perhaps our only freedom. We can’t chose to live forever, and we can’t even chose if life throws us painful curveballs, e.g. disease, war, economic malaise, etc. we can only chose how we respond. Your argument does somewhat account for the shadow side of creation, vis a vis the plateau, the bits on entropy, what we in nature see happening every fall and winter. In terms of love and sex, what I hear you essentially saying is that when winter comes, find a new lover, that if everyone would accept this as agreeable, if not inevitable, that we’d all be much better off. We’ll likely not convince one another, but it’s worth thinking about and putting into action (writing), as I find meaning in doing so.
    
    Victor Frankl, the author of a branch of psychology called logotherapy, suggests human existence falls into three categories in terms of what propels us in various directions. The person of action is driven by a creative urge, derives satisfaction from that output, which also might return money, fame, etc., but the expression itself remains the main driver. When the creative work is impeded, that person becomes frustrated, and if you completely take away a person’s ability to generate creative output (not narrowly defined to the arts, but including all endeavors), that person finds him or herself in an existential vacuum, losing all hope, in the most extreme cases ending in suicide (which can be acute or chronic in execution).
    
    The person of inaction awaits passively for various forms of satisfaction, could be anything, e.g. sexual pleasure, aesthetics, money, fame, whatever, this being pure hedonism. Some individuals are blessed (or cursed, depending how you view it) with a charmed existence, born into great wealth, or just luck of the draw coming into a highly effortless existence in which many pleasurable aspects of life seem to pour in all on their own, with no real input required. Take away such “good luck”, that person is hardly prepared to stomach having to do something to return a passive, pleasurable state.
    
    Of course, many people fall somewhere in between, these belonging to the work-hard-play-hard combo group. Here the creative urge propels the individual into taking action, material and non-material rewards flow back, are passively enjoyed for spells of time. The cycle renews when equilibrium is disturbed too far in one direction, working too hard or playing too hard. Take away both ends of one’s ability to create and ability to passively enjoy, you’re back to the same problem, to be or not to be?
    
    I enjoy exploring caves. Enjoy is a big word. Some caves are like a walk in the park, others are fantastically deep and wet, so why would humans chose to push the far reaches of harsh environments, when that experience in the moment can be so very punishing physically? As a vehicle to introducing Frankl’s third type of human drive, here’s three more concepts — categories of fun. Type 1 fun = an awesome meal, great movie, can of beer on a hot day, hot monkey sex. Each of these types of fun are fun in the moment, so by the same token, the moment you finish the meal, the movie, the sex, the fun soon fades back to some other state. In type 2 fun, which now includes a variety of outdoor activities, but arguably could include “hard work” as associated with action and creative endeavors, there’s an element of suffering or sacrifice that sweetens the success to come down the road. Such is the principle behind delayed gratification, which we know to sustain us longer than instant gratification.
    
    In type 3 fun, which now I’ll limit to outdoor experiences, but might even apply elsewhere, it’s at the extreme end of existence under challenging conditions, a life and death situation, but the kind where something suddenly happens and it’s quickly over, which would simply be a close call. When you’re in a situation, as I’ve been in several times, where you have time to contemplate your imminent demise, where your survival depends on your every thought and every action, that type 3 fun is clearly no longer any fun at all. Who are we then when those wheels come off? I was once in a wet pit, thick waterfall pounding on me relentlessly, so loud you can’t hear yourself think, and I can’t rappel down or climb back up, my rope being ensnared on sharp pinnacles above me and the force of the falls being too intense to climb against. While trapped, I faced perfectly simple questions about life itself. It wasn’t about to be or not to be, for I’d pretty much deduced that this was it, could not think my way out of it, the question turning to how best to die. I could hang there and wait for it to come. But, then I thought about my friends finding me, one of them being the editor of the national cave accidents report published by the National Speleological Society. These guys come in after a fatality and do basic forensics, what happened accounting for the death. If I did nothing, they’d examine the rope at the point of ensnarement and see no wear marks on the mantle of the rope, logically deduce that there was no struggle whatsoever, or perhaps suspiciously minor signs of struggle. That couldn’t and wouldn’t be my legacy, I decided. If I’m going to die, let them know I fought valiantly, a statement, however lame, that I believed in that struggle, that a slow death is difficult enough to endure, but that lacking any shred of dignity, which is ultimately solely defined and actually willed by the individual, this bit here is what Frankl points to as the third and most important type of our needs, that being the need for a meaningful existence.
    
    While man’s search for meaning doesn’t necessitate suffering, it is invariably tested whenever we’re made to suffer. As Friedrich Nietzche says, if we can only figure out the why, we most always figure out the how. Frankl wrote some 20 volumes about this subject in his early 20s, had intellectually mapped out how creative energy relates to pleasure, relates to the need for meaning, but then found himself challenged by life to experience the world as a subjective thing next to his objective ideas. Should he leverage his visas to escape Nazi persecution, allow his wife and he to flee to the U.S., where he could publish his books and move on with his life? Or should he stay and stand by his parents? Take a look at “Man’s Search For Meaning” to see how he willed meaning into his choice to stay, to endure and survive Auschwitz. Most importantly, this wasn’t for Frankl just about enduring and surviving, for he figured himself dead numerous times. It was about finding meaning and dying with dignity.
    
    To bring the discussion back to love, humans find great meaning in love, will even die for it. People who are tapped into their need for meaning are willing to sacrifice pleasure and life itself, if they believe there’s greater dignity in doing something for a loved one as an expression of love. The way use the phrase “true love” leaves open to question what you personally are prepared to sacrifice in support of an expression of your love for others. You may readily agree to step up in saving your mother’s life, say in a house fire or under threat from a violent predator, but how does that play out in the context of romantic love? Never mind dramatic choices; If at the first sign of the creative cycle coming 360 you sense the relationship plateauing, a more instantly gratifying romantic opportunity appearing on the horizon, you’ve then expended what “true love” you have for that person, I couldn’t possibly imagine how you’d ever be up for something more than recreational sex, any talk of true love being rendered kind of silly by comparison to what’s in those vows, “in sickness and in health, ’til death do us part”. Again, it could be a function of age. That or embitterment, or perhaps a bit of both. In any event, it’s not for me to win this debate. We’re neither one another’s daddy, boss, or therapist, just people in the world comparing notes, right? So, let’s agree to disagree for now and go create something, enjoy something (or someone ;^), and hope we find the meaning to sustain this journey.
    
    Benjy
    
    Reply
    - Karel Donk May 20th, 2015 at 7:00 pm
      
      Here’s the definition for hedonism that Google just gave me:
      
      he·don·ism: the pursuit of pleasure; sensual self-indulgence. the ethical theory that pleasure (in the sense of the satisfaction of desires) is the highest good and proper aim of human life.
      
      There’s really nothing wrong with that. But the fact that you mention that my argument is brought “dangerously close to hedonism” reveals the nature of your personal opinion on this subject. It seems to me that you’re probably still too influenced by the negative (religious) propaganda we all had to endure starting from early childhood, which was targeted against things like giving into your sexuality, lust etc. And in my previous reply, I’ve shown why lust has been so demonized in the past thousands of years.
      
      Based on the above definition, hedonism is a very positive thing, and agrees perfectly with the cycle of life that I described above. The cycle of life is fundamentally all about the pursuit of pleasure, of new positive experiences. This is exactly what Dr. Sigmund Freud’s research also showed (the pleasure principle). Freud’s research (and Wilhelm Reich’s as well) also showed that society makes it very difficult for an individual to satisfy their desires — and this for reasons which I already mentioned in my previous reply.
      
      I don’t believe in “romantic love.” What most people in society refer to as “romantic love” is really just lust. And that is exactly the root of most of the problems related to love in society: people confuse love with lust. I explain this in more details in my post on The difference between Love and Lust. There you will also see what true love actually is.
      
      And again, true love (explained here) lasts forever. Lust plateaus. So when the relationship is plateauing, it means you’ve expended what lust there was for that person, and the time comes to move on. If it was true love, you will still love the person (love as explained here), while moving on to other experiences. 🙂
    - Benjamin von Cramon May 21st, 2015 at 1:26 am
      
      To note, I’ve never attended church, my parents were very le sais faire with us, and again, I did what I wanted sex-wise from the time I learned about it, shame never came into the picture, so your impression that I’ve been negatively steered somehow, by the church or otherwise, is unfounded. I emphasize, I’ve come to my values by choice, by being highly deliberate in thinking these matters through. In your scenario, is it not thinkable or possible that an individual would behave so, much less fully own that decision? I see my behavior as typical of many who through the normal maturation process grow from instant to delayed gratification behavior in childhood along similar lines.
      
      In light of the many weighty realities I’ve plopped on the table, I note that your response isn’t to account for any of these, that instead you point the question back at me, postulating if I’m not falling victim to religion, guilt, etc. instead of answering my questions to you. The question in my lengthy reply is admittedly implicit, intended to urge a thoughtful response. It’s not necessary, I have my answer, you obviously are in agreement with hedonism, let’s say you’re an avowed hedonist.
      
      And as Wikipedia is both our friend, might you consider reviewing this bit on the paradox of hedonism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_hedonism, which not ironically quotes Victor Frankl, Nietsche, and other classics.
      
      I recognize that intellectually, one can – and people do – argue their ideas about what’s real, what should be, what’s what… until the cows come home, which isn’t a bad thing, it’s an awesome thing communication is, never to lose sight of that. And while I reject your assertions about my supposed control by religion or more subtly through social forces, I suspect our differences go deeper yet. Brain activity is only a part of human activity, I note a major problem today and especially with modern society is a retreat from physical reality, our bodies, the environment, us spending way too much time thinking about the world and not physically engaged with what’s happening internally or externally. We’ve come so far technologically adapting the environment to meet our wants/needs, it’s tempting to believe our power is limitless.
      
      I surely don’t stand here looking to limit human potential, quite to the contrary. At the same time, history shows what’s risked with collective, unbridled hedonism, which is by default what happens when everyone is more concerned with pleasure than taking care of problems. By your reckoning, historically we’ve never seen something neat like pure hedonism. but I submit we see it all the time, people living for the moment, instant gratification, optimizing their pleasure, wealth, sexual gratification, etc. in large-scale social movements that explain bubble economies, popular culture, sugar consumption, ubiquitous McMansions springing up watering their lawns in the desert, in a word, conspicuous consumption. That behavior bit Easter Island and the ancient Maya in the ass, whereby drought and deforestation precipitated revolutions ending in cannibalism. Japan experienced near collapse three centuries ago, but luckily woke up. These aren’t exactly subtle examples of what can happen when we only live to increase our pleasure. There really is too much of a good thing when it’s not sustainable. You express hedonism as an ideal with no physical basis to support it, that being my main reason for describing it as dangerous, as it can and has accounted for highly problematic conditions and desperate behavior.
      
      I agree what may be well-intended efforts to moderate pleasure in the spirit of avoiding problems associated with “too much of a good thing” are problematic in their own right, much along the lines you suggest, with religions rubberstamping so many dos and don’t dos into silly, if not destructive, dogmas. That’s no reason to throw the baby out with the bath water, and anybody who values that bathwater shouldn’t be pigeon holed with those who soil the water either. Just because I hear the Buddhists, Life is Suffering, doesn’t make me a Buddhist, just like tipping my hat to Corinthians 13 doesn’t make me a Christian.
      
      Any ideas I’ve pointed to geared at the value of suffering, as it stands in tension against pleasure, is self-limiting as an idea, that truth being something also physically experienced, learned, understood, practiced, and respected. 35 years of yoga, 23 years of caving, 14 years of running — and daily efforts to consciously bring it down into my body, I’m not seeing we can get there from here sharing the subtler aspects of embracing suffering as a noble act in life when coming at this over a keyboard. I know one thing, if for some horrible reason I were thrown back into the dark ages of 1942 Nazi Germany and into the confined spaces of Auschwitz next to Victor Frankl, to say I’d feel more comfortable next to him than around the hedonistic Capos (Jewish opportunist that threw fellow Jews under the bus in order to gain favor with those running the camp, e.g. booze, avoidance of punishments). And even under far less dramatic circumstances, though such extreme and realistic examples stress an important point, I’d also rather live next to, be business partner with, endure a trying cave adventure with, share the planet with a true mensch like Frankl than fair-weather friend, who when weather turns bad reveals true colors.
      
      It’s really not my intent to say things to make you feel bad, which might backfire by only confirming for you I’m working for those conspiring to promote guilt and minimize pleasure. I love pleasure, really. I just don’t agree it’s the most important thing in life. Meaning is. I do hope I give you cause for pause, maybe not today, but hopefully as the years go by. Some day, hopefully not for a very long time, you’ll be in a situation where the choice of how to respond to a really tough reality will force the question of your own why. If you can figure that out then, with pleasure far from view, that will indeed be an awesome thing.
      
      Best,
      Benjy
    - Karel Donk May 21st, 2015 at 1:25 pm
      
      I emphasize, I’ve come to my values by choice, by being highly deliberate in thinking these matters through. In your scenario, is it not thinkable or possible that an individual would behave so, much less fully own that decision?
      
      Why is it not thinkable? Everything I’ve said does not rule out thinking matters through.
      
      It’s not necessary, I have my answer, you obviously are in agreement with hedonism, let’s say you’re an avowed hedonist.
      
      Yes I am; as the cycle of life shows, life is all about seeking new experiences so you can continue to learn and grow.
      
      And as Wikipedia is both our friend, might you consider reviewing this bit on the paradox of hedonism
      
      I am aware of the paradox of hedonism, also from many personal experiences. And for many cases, the paradox exists because, like I mentioned before, society makes it especially difficult for people to satisfy their desires. Many unnecessary and artificial barriers exist to limit people satisfying their desires. The reasons for this I’ve mentioned in my first response to you above. For example, I’m sure you can imagine that me not being into exclusive relationships and marriage does not make it very easy for me to find girlfriends, especially not since I also like to be very honest and upfront about it. So there you have the paradox of hedonism playing out for me. And this is the case in many other areas of life. But as you can imagine, this paradox would not exist, if society didn’t brainwash women to repress their sexuality starting from early childhood.
      You might ask yourself why I would insist on still being so honest and still holding onto my views on staying free and not tied to a single partner when it means difficulty in finding a mate? The answer is that I know the truth now, and I’d rather live by the truth as much as possible. This again shows that being for hedonism, does not mean that you stop thinking.
      
      At the same time, history shows what’s risked with collective, unbridled hedonism, which is by default what happens when everyone is more concerned with pleasure than taking care of problems.
      
      Actually history shows what happens when a small elite hijack the cycle of life of most individuals in society in order to enslave them, thereby demonstrating that they are incapable of loving and respecting the right to life of those individuals. If they were capable of loving others and respecting their right to life, then all the things you mention like bubble economies, consumerism etc. would not exist. In fact, the whole system of enslavement which they have set up would not exist.
      
      You express hedonism as an ideal with no physical basis to support it, that being my main reason for describing it as dangerous, as it can and has accounted for highly problematic conditions and desperate behavior.
      
      All the physical basis you need supporting hedonism comes from within yourself, provided it is not repressed by society’s brainwash. Dr. Sigmund Freud’s research shows this (the pleasure principle). Hedonism in and of itself does not account for problematic conditions and desperate behavior. It is when hedonism is suppressed and repressed, when the problems start to arise because then you attack the right to life (you frustrate the cycle of life) of those affected by it.
      
      I love pleasure, really. I just don’t agree it’s the most important thing in life.
      
      Actually it is the most important thing in life. That’s why the founding fathers of America included “the pursuit of happiness” in their declaration of independence. That’s how important they thought it was. It’s all most people want in life. And you can only be happy and have a pleasurable life when your desires (your basic needs) are being fulfilled. This can’t always be the case, certainly not in our current societies that are designed to make it extremely difficult for individuals to satisfy their desires. But when that’s difficult, then it’s our duty to try to change that and make it easier, maybe not for ourselves, but for future generations. And here you have the paradox of hedonism again: not being able to satisfy your desires, and because of that, deciding to tackle the problems that prevent you from doing so – thus deciding to get involved in negative and unpleasurable activities in order to be able to more easily experience pleasurable activities in the future. That is one example of where I find meaning in life.
    - Benjamin von Cramon May 22nd, 2015 at 12:32 pm
      
      Interestingly, I was seeing what’s new on TED Talks, found this presentation right at the top, which drives to the core of our discussion. I think we can agree this topic is super-charged with physical and metaphysical drives and beliefs, fully accept why you and I would go round and round on such a topic, there has to be room for that. Take a look, share your thoughts.
      
      https://www.ted.com/talks/esther_perel_rethinking_infidelity_a_talk_for_anyone_who_has_ever_loved
      
      Benjy
    - Karel Donk May 22nd, 2015 at 9:34 pm
      
      Thanks for sharing, it was interesting indeed. Especially since she confirms what I have discussed above in my article about the desire for new experiences (lust) and the cycle of life for relationships. She confirms that it eventually gets boring because desire becomes less and less and that people then begin to cheat in an attempt to create a new cycle of life where they can get new experiences again and enjoy life again — exactly what I said in my last example in the post above.
      One of the problems with her talk is that her definition of love is wrong — she basically confuses love with lust, like most people today. Another problem is that at the end she encourages people to stick together and keep trying again with the same partner they cheated on, in the hope to renew desire. This is a futile undertaking and a potentially dangerous one as well. It’s not a good idea to keep forcing what isn’t happening naturally between two people anymore. The best approach is to acknowledge the death phase of the relationship and move on.
    - Benjamin von Cramon May 22nd, 2015 at 12:55 pm
      
      Well, I then see this dame is featured in another TEDx, this one longer and even more intense, extremely sophisticated description of the human psyche and how sex and love exist in tension, simply amazing woman Esther Perel is. Do view.
      
      https://www.ted.com/talks/esther_perel_the_secret_to_desire_in_a_long_term_relationship
    - Karel Donk May 22nd, 2015 at 9:47 pm
      
      In her second presentation that you linked, she confirms much of what I wrote before as well, such as that monogamy is not for humans, and that it’s very unrealistic to want a single partner to fulfill your every desire in life; that’s why we have variety in nature and why we should have as many partners as we need and like. She also confirms that our natural desire to want to be free causes a lot of trouble in exclusive relationships.
      She also confirms something I mentioned in the last example of my post above: she mentions that desire for a partner gets renewed when they were away for a while and come back again; this is why I mentioned in my example above that if John and Mary were to see other people right from the start, they can keep the desire for each other burning for a longer period because having experiences with others in between keeps experiences between them fresh and new longer.
      And basically she confirms the many problems people will encounter when they try to keep the relationship going well into the death phase when it naturally wants to die (problems such as lack of desire, lack of sex, lack of interest in general etc. etc.).
    - Benjamin von Cramon May 22nd, 2015 at 11:01 pm
      
      You contend Ms Perel confuses love with lust. If you’ve never invested in one person for any length of time, nor they in you, one has to question how you qualify to speak to a subjective reality like long term love when you’ve never experienced it. You’ll surely know platonic love from your friends, but the love between a couple who truly believes in love and works hard to protect tenderness, respect, AND intimacy, true intimacy, this kind of love I haven’t heard reflected in anything you describe, so it must not exist in your world, or maybe you think it’s a myth.
      
      I suppose one person’s truth is another’s cognitive distortion, and since we’re all entitled to an opinion, we could play intellectual ping pong forever sorting that one out. At the end of the day, we each must live with our choices. Just as many devoted singles run with the script that all married people feel enslaved to the old ball and chain, enduring largely sexless marriages, I also have many married friends who talk about how overrated single life is, not missing it one bit. There’s truth in both stereotypes and yet lots of ignorance too. Fact is, many singles show great depth in their capacity to love, are just gun-shy or commitment phobic to take the chance taking the plunge in building something of lasting value. At the same time, many married people have easy access to reliable sex, and if they get lazy, take one another for granted, err on being too close, clingy, as Perel points out kills desire, then that’s where listening to a Perel makes good sense. I found her presentations incredibly valuable, mainly because what she says affirms what I’ve been living all these years, but also to make those choices conscious once more, which brings yet greater meaning all around.
      
      Karel, you say you have a hard time finding girlfriends who’ll play ball with you when they learn you don’t want to get involved. Of those girls who do want to get involved, how involved? After the type 1 fun is up, how involved? Are they soon gone? Do you count them in your experiences of true love? What does that look like? Do you honestly believe this uphill battle of yours to enjoy free love is the result of a conspiracy by the church? I grant you the church and really anybody coming at this complex topic with dogmatic daggers isn’t helping, but a woman like Perel approaches this topic much more along the lines I suggested were appropriate, from an anthropological perspective, psychological, and with greater insight, empathy, and humility in glimpsing and describing the human condition.
    - Karel Donk May 22nd, 2015 at 11:28 pm
      
      If you’ve never invested in one person for any length of time, nor they in you, one has to question how you qualify to speak to a subjective reality like long term love when you’ve never experienced it.
      
      I have actually, that’s why I mentioned before that I speak from personal experience, observation (experiences from others) and research.
      
      but the love between a couple who truly believes in love and works hard to protect tenderness, respect, AND intimacy, true intimacy, this kind of love I haven’t heard reflected in anything you describe, so it must not exist in your world, or maybe you think it’s a myth.
      
      Have you read my post on The Difference between Love and Lust? There you’ll find what you mention in my definition of love.
      
      Just as many devoted singles run with the script that all married people feel enslaved to the old ball and chain, enduring largely sexless marriages, I also have many married friends who talk about how overrated single life is, not missing it one bit.
      
      Like I mention in my post on why you shouldn’t get married:
      
      From my own observations I’ve seen that in many cases married couples pretend to be happy to the outside world, but struggle with all kinds of problems in their marriage. They may even be having regular arguments, may be sleeping in separate beds, may be cheating on their partners, etc. But for social reasons they give everyone else the impression that all is well and that they are very happy together — right up to the moment when you suddenly hear that they’re getting a divorce. This often comes as a shock to their friends and acquaintances, since everything seemed to be going so well. But people then realize that it was all a big show, and find out that things weren’t going well for a long time already.
      
      I lost count of how many times I’ve seen this play out around me.
      
      Karel, you say you have a hard time finding girlfriends who’ll play ball with you when they learn you don’t want to get involved. Of those girls who do want to get involved, how involved? After the type 1 fun is up, how involved? Are they soon gone? Do you count them in your experiences of true love?
      
      Actually I have yet to find any person, male or female, who knows what true love really is; true love as described here. Our societies around the world brainwash everyone with the wrong ideas about love, for reasons I mentioned in my first reply to you, so it’s no surprise.
      
      but a woman like Perel approaches this topic much more along the lines I suggested were appropriate, from an anthropological perspective, psychological, and with greater insight, empathy, and humility in glimpsing and describing the human condition.
      
      Perel approaches the subject in a politically correct way, and one that appeals to the brainwashed masses. This might not be intentional; she seems to have the same flawed ideas about love and lust as most people. She admits to, and perfectly highlights all the big problems with our current way of living together, but then essentially advises more of the same. Like Einstein said, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. And he also said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
      
      I think in my post above, and every other post I’ve linked to in my replies to you, I have a much better approach — a more honest and objective one — and offer much better solutions that are consistent with the way things work in nature.
lala May 26th, 2015 at 1:31 pm

Wtf is that ? Trying to explain life with numbers, maths, and so on, seriously ? Ahah…

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- Karel Donk May 26th, 2015 at 7:37 pm
  
  The entire universe is all about numbers and math.
  
  Reply
Anca Mihaela Bruma May 30th, 2015 at 9:28 am

There is an assumption that boredom sets in because neither grow and therefore offer nothing new. This may be true in today’s mundane arrangement but was never intended to be.
What causes relationships to fail is the failure of growth in both individuals. It is not emphatic to maintain stability, since instability is the basis for falling in love. Stability of each, meaning stagnation, kills the very thing that drew them together — which is the challenge of getting to know someone of uniqueness.
This uniqueness requires a controlled instability. Not so unstable that it drives them apart but requires each to constantly learn new things about the other.
New things are the result of new learning. New learning the result of rejecting stability and stagnation. Each must trust the other that individual growth is for the sake of the whole. What is good for the one is for the good of the all.

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- Karel Donk May 30th, 2015 at 2:47 pm
  
  You cannot learn and grow in a balanced way by exclusively tying yourself to a single person for most of your life. It’s only natural that at some point you reach a plateau with regard to the new experiences you can have with a single person. And when that happens, you need to acknowledge the death phase and move on. It’s the same for all experiences in life, including examples such as jobs, food (try eating the same food every day of your life and see how that works out), music (try listening to the same song every day and let me know how fast you get bored of hearing it), etc. We need and desire variety, and this includes relationships.
  
  Reply
Anca Mihaela Bruma May 30th, 2015 at 9:34 am

Indeed the universe is about sacred Math and Geometry, but emotions are NOT! You make a statistical projection on the human brain with its emotions, which is incorrect!

Your logic does not imply the truth! Now that you talked so much about Consciousness, have you ever thought that a highly elevated individual has the capacity to find an infinity of possibilities inside the other individual? TRUE love does create this, opens gates to infinite other places. The way how u presented the whole story, U basically talk about the reptilian brains, in this case we are no different than the animals.

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- Karel Donk May 30th, 2015 at 2:53 pm
  
  Emotions and behavior can be predicted as well. In fact, the elite know this and have been abusing this knowledge to influence behavior for thousands of years. Everything in this universe follows the cycle of life as explained above. And there is no infinity of experiences to have with another individual exclusively. New experiences decline rapidly at some point.
  Since the cycle of life applies to the entire universe, it’s really no surprise that we have things in common with the animals. We have things in common with everything in the entire universe. This is a fractal reality, which is characterized by self-similarity at every scale.
  
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Anca Mihaela Bruma May 30th, 2015 at 4:01 pm

I am sure u talk from your experience not being able or having the chance to experience the infinitude in a person. Your approach is very earthy, in this case you shall not put it in high conscious level perspective. Have you heard of the Sufi expression “die before you die?” You choose to reveal part of the truth and that makes it not being a “truth”. Where is “death” there is also beginning, in the same point. But humans prefer to find extravagant type of excuses. As per psychology of the emotions, let us be very realistic, every day science comes with different stuff, human soul and its manifestations including the emotions is still an enigma. The reason is that we try always to put something in patterns. Trust me, where there is revamping it is always a new mystery created, therefore novelty. Mind believes what wants to believe, if you think there is “death” in a relationship, that you will create all the logical explanations in the world to prove your point. As per boredom yes it is inevitable but not impossible to be removed, what about co-creating and re-creating yourself as human. The sustainability stands when we have very clear morals about us, as humans who create the society and out own power to recreate ourselves. With the rest that we shall give freedom and respect to the person I agree, but not the point of moving to LUST and confuse that with experience. Where all of us as relationships will head if you preach this?

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- Karel Donk May 30th, 2015 at 4:45 pm
  
  Yes, where there’s death, there’s beginning, that is true, and that is also shown by the cycle of life diagram above. But realize that the beginning after death is often in a completely new situation. In the context of relationships, it would be with another person. Forcing it with the same person will lead to adverse consequences.
  There is nothing wrong with lust. You should take the time and ask yourself why you have such a negative reaction towards lust and hedonism. You will find that it’s mostly because of the way you were brought up by society. The beliefs against lust were all programmed into your consciousness starting from early childhood. And as I explained in previous comments above, this was on purpose in order to hijack your cycle of life so you could be frustrated, and would be open to easy manipulation and enslavement.
  When we let go of that brainwash against lust, we will experience relationships the way they were meant to be experienced naturally. We’ll all have an abundance of experiences to choose from and there will be an abundance of true love in society — not the scarcity we have today. We’ll experience relationships that will truly empower every individual, respect their right to life, and will help them to reach their highest potentials in life. As far as moral codes go, the only guideline we need is respect for each other’s right to life, as explained here.
  
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  - Anca Mihaela Bruma May 30th, 2015 at 5:50 pm
    
    I have red Benjamin’s answers, there were so CLEAR, full of wisdom based on experience. I can see, you did not get it, because yourself are in a specific mind loop. In fact, you try to convince others of your own “truths”. Saying as an opinion is something, but preaching about it as being the ultimate truth you might through the enlightenment of your readings, it is not fair for the audience. Now, as I stated if Benjamin’s answer were not thought provoking to you, I can simply understand, at this stage of your life, you are simply not prepared to listen to others. Maybe one shiny day will happen maybe never. We simply assign different definitions to various concepts, therefore the “misunderstandings”. As per stereotypes of society impact on me, I passed that long back, so you can not use that stamp on everyone. Like you, other also read a lot, and experience a lot. You said what U said because U simply did NOT succeed it. You have here Benjamin, myself two people who tried to tell you two successful stories, but you are too much into your own version of the truth. Which is fine, no blame, but do not “sell” as ultimate truth, for sure it is not!
    
    Reply
    - Karel Donk May 30th, 2015 at 9:18 pm
      
      I don’t think this is the ultimate truth. I’ve mentioned before that very often in life it’s difficult to know the truth, but we can continuously try to get closer to the truth. And based on the information I’ve seen so far, the cycle of life as described above has to be closer to the truth, simply because it is much more consistent with reality.
      
      I sense in both your answers a clear bias towards negativity surrounding lust and hedonism. And I know where that comes from. There was a time when I too thought like you do, but I’ve been able to let go of those thoughts which were really forced upon me by the society I grew up in (which on this subject is similar to other societies worldwide). You guys are not the only ones who have difficulty with seeing things differently when it comes to the subject of lust; I encounter this very often with many people. Like I wrote before, this is one of the most important mind shifts humanity needs to make for us to get to the golden age we’ve all been waiting for. And it’s no coincidence that this is very difficult, because lust was the main attack vector the elite used in their divide and conquer strategy to enslave us all. It’s their most powerful weapon. I briefly discuss this in my post “The prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor”.
- Benjamin von Cramon May 30th, 2015 at 5:19 pm
  
  Clearly, there’s simple disagreement here what is meant by true love, who is confusing love and lust, and whether or not Eros love can (and should?) evolve to Agape love. Anybody can state something as immovable fact, and this being Karel’s blog, he enjoys that freedom. To the extent the blog features a Comments section, we can argue differently, doesn’t make it fact what we say (individually) any more than it does when Karel states what he writes as fact. The defensive response to overly self-assured people is often to become overly self-assured in turn. I like to say, all my convictions are up for grabs, show me a better way, I remain open to being convinced. Since I’ve enjoyed a stable relationship for a couple decades now, and it does resonate with me to hear how an element of instability keeps it interesting, individuals who can say the same are right to claim from personal experience this as a truth. At the same time, when challenged if Karel is either too you (inexperienced) or possibly embittered (experienced, but unable to grow, gets bored, is overwhelmed by the boredom), his experience leads him to embrace a very different truth, i.e. don’t fight boredom, move on. From the outside, this clearly points to our choice in which reality we trust will better serve our needs. I submit, long term thinking is for mature adults who aren’t consumed with just satisfying their (immediate) needs, rather serving those of a partner, the investment in such relationships paying off way beyond the transitory pleasure brought by Eros love, or even it’s somewhat deeper, yet relatively shallow, variations.
  
  I spoke earlier about the role of our need for meaning in life, not just in matters of love, but especially there, challenged Karel to consider how difficult a proposition he puts on potential girlfriends with his philosophy (especially delivered as dogmatic truth). What woman would dream of investing time in him? He admits it is indeed hard to find girlfriends, plural, who are interested in anything beyond expressing lust, but that he finds meaning in his life, answering to that part, by sticking to his tune. This would appear to satisfy the textbook definition of “drinking one’s own koolaid”.
  
  It’s unimportant for anyone here to win an argument. I only care because, we all know there’s not enough love in this world – there’s an amazing amount of love, just not enough. Karel believes the world will be a better place if we all go his direction, free love, everybody sleeps with whomever their heart desires, the children will figure it out, and we’ll figure it out whenever it comes to buying a house together (not), specifying beneficiaries on life insurance policies, who moves where when a job opportunity comes up. And I believe the world will be a better place when people like Karel outgrow commitment phobia or heartache or rationalizations, whatever the case may be. At the same time, it’s also for Karel personally, that his personal world become a better, more loving place, that I care to weigh in. You’re missing out, dude, try opening up a little. You’re moving against the grain, the best thinking in anthropology, philosophy, and really plain common sense is not on your side. You’re too young to claim absolute knowledge on things you’ve never fully explored. Your graveyard of failed attempts at relationship is too small, these things take time, but the struggle is more than worth it, and what may seem impossibly complicated and, to your thinking impossible, as actually quite simple and very possible, if not broadly realized by many awesome people. It just takes some defocussing so much on me me.
  
  Reply
  - Karel Donk May 30th, 2015 at 10:04 pm
    
    What woman would dream of investing time in him?
    
    This is one of the main problems with society: people view love as an investment. Explains the need to control and own your partner. After all, if he/she is an investment, you want to hold on to your prized investment. And this corrupted view of love is what drives many of the problems we see everywhere in relationships. I don’t want any woman to invest in me, and neither do I want to invest in any woman. I just want to spend time together and enjoy each other’s company. Nothing more.
    
    He admits it is indeed hard to find girlfriends, plural, who are interested in anything beyond expressing lust, but that he finds meaning in his life, answering to that part, by sticking to his tune. This would appear to satisfy the textbook definition of “drinking one’s own koolaid”.
    
    I’ve found that it’s wiser to stick to the truth. For example, just because the majority of the people in the USA believed it was a good idea to invade Iraq in 2003 because Saddam had WMDs, doesn’t mean it was justified. Today we know it was all a big lie (he didn’t have WMDs, and I knew that even before the war). So just because most people still subscribe to the brainwash against lust, doesn’t mean it’s the best way to live your life. I’d rather stick to what’s closer to the truth, which is what I wrote above and in the many posts I linked to. If your way of living was better, Esther Perel (in the TED talks you linked above) would not be summing up all the many problems people are experiencing around the world in their relationships. It’s really a disaster.
    
    we all know there’s not enough love in this world – there’s an amazing amount of love, just not enough.
    
    There’s a situation of artificial scarcity, because people are being restricted to love by all kinds of rules in society. We could have been living in an abundance of love if people were allowed to be free to love.
    
    Karel believes […] the children will figure it out, and we’ll figure it out whenever it comes to buying a house together […]
    
    No I never said not to be responsible and not take care of children.
    
    You’re missing out, dude, try opening up a little.
    
    I know what I’m missing out on. I see it everywhere around me in society. And Esther Perel mentioned all of it in the TED talks that you linked to. I’m glad I’m missing out on all that misery.
    
    You’re moving against the grain, the best thinking in anthropology, philosophy, and really plain common sense is not on your side.
    
    The best thinking in science is actually on my side. I often quote them in my blog posts.
    
    You’re too young to claim absolute knowledge on things you’ve never fully explored.
    
    Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravity and motion and the laws of optics before he turned 26. I’m not saying I’m as smart as Newton, but this shows that age has very little to do with knowledge.
    
    Your graveyard of failed attempts at relationship is too small
    
    My graveyard? What about the graveyards of the many people in societies around the world? What about the graveyards of all the people Esther Perel talks about, who are suffering? How much more suffering do you need to see to admit that there’s a serious problem with our way of living together?
    
    Reply
    - Caue Custodio October 18th, 2015 at 10:40 pm
      
      Karel I find your perspective refreshing and amazing.Real high vibrational wisdow. This guys trying to put you down are very weak and they show very well the sad state that most of humanity are: denial. Thanks a lot for your enlightened words fellow human brother. Keep on. You rock. To Anca and Benjamin, guys you are in the wrong Blog. Go read another text that does not confront your model of reality ok?
Anca Mihaela Bruma May 31st, 2015 at 10:31 am

What Benjamin was trying to tell you, myself as well, it is the fact you chose to remain in the EROS stage rather than pursuing the AGAPE stage of LOVE. It is true this cannot be attainable if you look at every relationship as a candy, rather than something which helps you to grow. Every relationship by its nature shall help the other to enhance more, grow individually. It is ONLY the human mind which creates this limitation. As I previously stated, if you know truly to dive into someone’s infinity of aspects you will be pleasantly surprised what you can experience. But you chose the snorkeling part, and because of this choice you made, consciously you try to justify your own choice. Among many things I do, I am also a writer, and one of the main focus I have it is EXACTLY the power of Love, what can create and co-create. Funny enough, one of my writing is even called Agape. The limitations are in us! If you truly LOVE someone, boredom can never settle, maybe mundane but not really boredom. Unless someone on the way chose to stop believing in the relationship, and just go for skimming. I have noticed of the years that the maintenance” of a relationship is directly proportional with the intensity of a soul, the depth. Your preach the BREATH, I preach the DEPTH, very different perspectives.

Reply
- Karel Donk May 31st, 2015 at 5:40 pm
  
  I don’t subscribe to the eros/agape views of love. I steer clear of what society thinks of love because most of it is a very corrupted view of love, and one that confuses lust with love. In fact lust and love are completely different things as I describe here, and true love is not at all like what we have been led to believe.
  
  Every relationship by its nature shall help the other to enhance more, grow individually. It is ONLY the human mind which creates this limitation.
  
  I agree and it’s also what I say in my writings including the post above.
  
  As I previously stated, if you know truly to dive into someone’s infinity of aspects you will be pleasantly surprised what you can experience.
  
  There is no infinity of experiences to be had with a single person in this reality in traditional (romantic) relationships. My post above says why, and all the evidence around us in societies around the world (the many problems in relationships between men and women) supports my view on this.
  
  But you chose the snorkeling part, and because of this choice you made, consciously you try to justify your own choice.
  
  As stated in previous comments above, it’s not a matter of trying to justify my own choice. I began with the same wrong ideas about love and relationships that most people have today because I too was brainwashed by society while growing up. Through experience, observation and research, I came to see that my thinking and that of most of society was very wrong. It was then necessary to change my thinking to be more consistent with reality.
  
  The limitations are in us! If you truly LOVE someone, boredom can never settle, maybe mundane but not really boredom.
  
  You are confusing love with lust. True love lasts forever yes, but lust doesn’t. What you mean by love in the above quote is lust. When it’s about lust, then boredom is inevitable.
  
  Reply
Benjamin von Cramon May 31st, 2015 at 6:12 pm

Hello Karel,

I’ll say you are a tenacious debater, and I respect your counter arguments as rational, that is I trust your intent. You believe what you believe because you’re simply not convinced, not because you claim to be the authority. It does appear you tend to state things as categorical truths, which is triggering for most people. But I get it, it’s no argument to simply claim more number of people agreeing with you on your side. When among those people you can count truly credible voices, such developed intellects can’t readily be dismissed. I’m not suggesting you’re guilty of that. Your replies reflect the fact that you honestly believe what you claim as truth. Can we agree on the value of this debate at the highest level, that we’re not here for any other reason than to test our ideas and see what they’re made of. It’s an example of what Frankl calls “will to meaning”, that is an action aimed at finding meaning. Philosophy, isn’t a static set of numeric principles, like Anca suggests in different words applies to love, we will ourselves to think, and insofar we consciously choose to go deeper with someone, even if lust provides the starter fuel automating that process, our choices aimed at reflecting what we believe about love, that is our philosophy, and our choice to move beyond lust and into all other aspects of companionship, that too is something willed.

I can see a possible point of departure being what meaning we attribute to whatever is meant by experience of the plateau and death phases. When Anca speaks of tapping into the infinitude of another being, that resonates with me and I’m guessing with anyone who’s experienced the rhythms in a long-term relationship. When my wife and I get out of sync, it’s no worry, we give each other plenty of space, the sun shines again and again. You can’t say you like rainbows if you’re not good with the rain. This is a true weakness with hedonism, in that it flies in the face of simple physical reality. I have no problem you saying that we shouldn’t put a cap on feeling good, great, greater still. But, to suggest that any behavior not geared at optimizing pleasure is against our nature and the result of some collective super ego shaming humanity, I find that argument very hard to defend.

It simplifies my argument if I ask you how far we’d have to turn the clock back looking at human behavior to predate the advent of so much social oppression you point to as separating our “true nature” as hedonists from the messed up situation today, people enslaved to the institution of marriage, etc. So, how far, 100,000 years? That’s long before organized religion or organized much of anything, we were nomadic and semi-nomadic hunter gatherers. Now that I think about it, there actually is value going back even further, a million years and more, a time when the significance of our biological evolution even more outstripped our emerging cultural evolution.

When I hear you say “our true nature”, I think of how we behaved and functioned (biologically) as animals (among other animals). Picture all these hedonistic proto-humans up in the trees awakening to a new day, looking around, where am I? Still safe? Where are my fellow social units? Everyone good? We band together because there’s safety in numbers, there’s competition over limited resources. The law of the jungle, eat or be eaten, has two sides to that equation, and therein lies the crux of the matter defining our meaning-making over pleasure and pain. We’re aware of the studies done on human sperm where they identified these murderous sperms whose job wasn’t to fertilize, rather to hunt foreign sperm and kill them. Sociobiologists point to these as evidencing our hedonist nature, proto-woman having multiple partners. Were these encounters necessarily consensual? I doubt it, but even if they were, consider what was really going on here and how human sexual interaction and social behavior changed.

You argue that my languaging of love with a word like “investment” makes transparent some inherent flaw in my mental construct of true love, which should be unconditional, divorced from destructive possessiveness. I say possessiveness isn’t implied by true love, is but a potential danger and only realized to varying degrees and accompanied by varying amounts of backlash. At the extreme end, it’s all too common to hear about murder cases resulting from runaway possessiveness. It’s what happens in the middle that applies to most people and is problematic, and that we want to discuss, but not to digress. Back to the idea of “our true nature” and whether “investing” in another person is categorically anti-thema to our true nature as hedonists.

To suggest that proto-humans and early humans lived in some Garden of Eden by which amorous relationships weren’t plagued by possessiveness and the idea of “investing” in those relationships wasn’t appropriate, that strikes me as romanticizing to the extreme. Humans didn’t invent the ecosystem we were born into in which competition over watering holes, whole territories, fertile females, healthy-gene males, and so many other purely biological components supporting survival and procreation all had to be answered to in our unconscious and THEN conscious adaptations. It’s the fact that both from a purely biological perspective AND anthropological perspective we see a two-fold progression a) toward longer gestation periods, leading to 9 months, the longest of any animal on the planet, b) in parallel to that the emergence of the stable pair-bond thing we more recently call marriage, but that’s been around many tens or even hundreds of thousands of years.

It is absolutely fair to speak in terms of investment, biologically and otherwise, in describing the forces at play in early human development. Likewise, possessiveness has its roots there too, and it surely manifested in as horrific ways then as it continues today, as well as in far more benign ways, to the point of highly rightfully being viewed as highly appropriate. While my wife does kind of own me, it’s not because I’m enslaved to her or to society. We’ve invested in one another, and to claim this reflects some perversion of true love as conditional misconstrues what’s searched for and to a degree most satisfying to me personally also found. Like so often said, you get out of it what you put into it, and MORE.

You can say it’s our true nature to desire and to enjoy pleasure and that would be correct. But, it’s just as true to state that what literally makes us human, both biologically and culturally, is that we haven’t become who we are, for better and for worse, without learning to sacrifice pleasure for something greater. Such would include many things, both biological and otherwise. From a gaming theory perspective, there had to be a driver(s) explaining why we ended up producing one baby at a time, elongating the gestation period to 9 months, taking care of that baby for at least 7 years, and now much longer. Regardless if you want to believe this paid off as a biologic adaption or a conscious choice, that is a cultural form based on a belief system about love and such, or a hybrid co-evolution by which cultural forms support biologic function, the result is the same. And insofar there is a cultural component, that to the extent we do consciously choose what to believe and how to behave, we surely see many examples of our knowing we’re better off, individually and collectively, when we learn to sacrifice pleasure, freedom, etc. in favor of other values, e.g. security, painting our lives on a larger canvass, going for something bigger than the ephemeral returns from instant gratification, especially sexually speaking.

Karel, you claim to be an avowed hedonist, but I have to question it, as it doesn’t appear possible you apply this philosophy with consistency. Maybe, in the isolated realm of personal relationships, if it’s even fair to call what you’re up for with girlfriends anything beyond Eros love, there’s consistent rejection of sacrifice as a good thing, and seen more as succumbing to some perceived effort on behalf of society to control you through guilt. But, what about elsewhere in your life? Your work, and fine handiwork it is, implies much sacrifice. What is your response whenever you encounter a challenge solving a technical issue, either directly in finessing the nuances of software capabilities to bring shape to awesomeness in software design, graphics, photography, writing, etc.? You work the problem until sameness kicks in, you see the plateau phase at your door, then what? Do you apply your fractal charts, see the death phase impeding progress to such challenges and, according to your solution as applied to the problem of a stagnant romantic relationship, abandon the challenge in favor of finding something else to do, something that speaks consistently to your devotion to hedonistic principle? You’d never get anything done. We both know what great work looks like, and surely you can relate to how it is that great work is predicated on the embrace of tedium. I don’t care how creative a job one chooses or lands in, nobody gets out of this one. We often hear people expressing a desire to work in a creative field, which is to say they see work as potentially a source of pain, and so the hedonist might say, follow your passion. Yes, follow your passion, but we both know what sacrifice great work entails, so it’s easy to say you’d rather be doing something creative, but we can agree not everyone is prepared to make sacrifices and to deal with an inevitable measure of accompanying pain whenever the work gets monotonous, and at the other extreme, overly challenging. When one learns to deal Zen-like with tedium, carry water make firewood, this state can be immensely rewarding in the process of challenging work.

If you can count just one example in your life of appreciating what I’m saying about the value of delayed gratification, sacrifice, no pain no gain, character through adversity, we speak to this powerful concept too many ways to mention, then you dear sir are no hedonist. And if you’re selectively applying hedonistic principle to this particular corner of your personal life when it comes to women, then how do you answer to the charge of inconsistency?

As to my examples of simple impracticalities predicted by open relationships, how one’s children are to deal with that, I didn’t mean to imply you ever said anything about intending to harm children. Nonetheless, you haven’t answered to my challenge. I’m trying to picture what this looks like in your hypothetical household growing up, you at say 4 or 5 enjoying life as any kid, exploring your world and relying on somebody for everything else. You need food, shelter and all of that, but you also want to keep the I’m-the-center-of-the-universe party going for as long as possible, meaning that everything should come to you, including whatever love and attention you can get from at least a mother, a father, if not both. If not three?, or more? In an open relationship, we can imagine you mother sleeping with three or more various guys in a week’s time, depending on her libido, and your dad maybe less, maybe way more. Because they’re open to as much of that as their appetite affords, there’ll be any number of people coming and going in your house. Never mind that you hear or see what goes on behind closed doors, a fair amount of traffic is predicted. Since the plateau and death phases by your thinking predict an end to every relationship that one begins, such that the only solution is to move on to a new person, you the boy will likewise not be seeing your mother and father in the same house for long. Maybe, you’ll travel between two houses. Predictably, whoever your mom and your dad goes on to hook up with will also, statistically speaking, have children from a prior relationship, you’ll now be sharing your space with new siblings. That can be fun, but we also know it more often comes with a lot of stress on families when children have to adapt to new relationships, step-parents, step-siblings. By your thinking, no problem, your mom and all these men and your dad and all these women coming and going, they’ve taught you that you’re not losing anything, you can love freely. Is there any space here for you, this kid, to enjoy something just for yourself when you’re asked to share everything with everyone all the time? That would seem to defeat the whole purpose of hedonism, to enjoy limitlessly. I don’t care what philosophy you adopt, nobody gets out of basic realities. In this Golden Era you hypothesize is worthy and possible, we’ll have learned to love and to share space (a bedroom) and time (personalized attention talking at dinner, e.g. what you want for your birthday), you’ll be so free of that, it’s like this utopian society I think was featured in a Star Trek episode, a swell-sounding philosophy propped up on the front end and exposed as a flimsy facade to a highly problematic social structure underneath. In a word, Karel, you’re risking the achilles heel of the idealist. It’s good to have ideals, but unless your feet touch the ground, you’ll fly away like Icarus and scorch your wings by the sun.

Pain and pleasure are held in tension, stress is as important to relaxation as the other way around. The phrase, “like a kid in a candy store” reflects what we know about our true nature, both our lust for life, which isn’t a bad thing and we must work to never lose sight of that childlike appetite for all the good things in life, but just as importantly, we have no choice but to come to terms with the fact that it’s not just about what a child asks of life, it’s about what life asks of us. Our survival, both our biological evolution and cultural heritage is all about both sides of the coin, what we ask of life and what life asks of us.

That you claim Perel’s observations of the dismal state of affairs in matters of love and infidelity as evidence that we’re screwing things up because we’re somehow fighting our true nature as hedonistic, I don’t buy that for the following reason. As a professional therapist, of course she’s going to focus on what’s problematic, it’s implied. That she accurately exposes how big a problem this is in the world doesn’t imply, however, that every married couple is guilty of infidelity, is thinking about it, is controlled by guilt, is unhappily married, etc. Just as you argue, being alone in your beliefs doesn’t make you wrong, if the whole world is plagued by half-ass marriages undermined by indifference, contempt, and cheating — that or open relationships going nowhere (and in my 57 years I’ve never seen one work, show me the money) — then I’m fine enjoying a marriage I’m truly proud of, and I’m confident that not throwing out the baby with the bathwater on matters of love and sex was the smartest thing I’ve ever done. Most cool that Ms Perel, though bravely plowing through deconstructing failed or failing relationships, does so because she too believes in love as being the most important thing in life.

One last thought. To your argument about the importance of not giving in to being marginalized by society, it’s interesting you point to the broad American support of regime change in Iraq, this based on trumped up intelligence on WMDs and the whole Yellowcake debacle. I clearly remember on 9/12/2001, just one day after watching the World Trade Center buildings crumble, when George W Bush, among the worst, most destructive presidents in our history announced the intent for regime change in Iraq. WTF! Social historians suggest we saw the biggest protest in human history as this hair-brained plan took root, and not a small amount of representation happened here in the U.S., the only real place where it stood a chance to count, but came nowhere close to counting. I had several friends who were so disheartened, no sickened, no angry, that they picked up and moved overseas. You may recall, Johnny Depp moved to France and disavowed any relationship to his former home country.

At the time, I was feeling much anger too, but I wasn’t a U.S. citizen. Having been raised, as you know, in a highly anti-authoritarian household, I was encouraged to keep my options open, had U.K., German, and Austrian passports, and I never questioned changing my status for some 38 years. I paid my taxes, justified earning my keep by abiding the laws and rationalized making my vote felt in other ways than voting in elections. I know what you’ll say, or surely you’ll just link me to your blog on why we shouldn’t vote, but these two issues actually relate, and I vehemently disagree with you on both counts. I watched during the first election where W. Bush won by the slightest margin because of a questionable Supreme Court decision over hanging chads and such in Broward County, Florida. Don’t tell me votes don’t count. The system is severely flawed, but it’s all we got, the alternative only looks worse. I was left to question if the script I’d been operating under all these years living here in the U.S. as an alien still served me. And when it took forever to get my U.S. passport and I missed being able to vote when W ran for his second term, I’m there seeing guys like Johnny Depp cut bait and leave, and I can’t leave because I never got in the game to begin with. (Likewise, it’s said people struggling in a marriage shouldn’t bolt to divorce court until they’ve first earned their way out. If you haven’t gotten in there and tried your best, then how can you expect anything better than the default, that being the dissonance following a certain level of conflict natural in life). By not voting, you implicitly lose your bitching rights. And if everybody listened to you about not voting, and I include in that not showing up generally at the table that society understands as a type collective marriage, the “social contract” generally speaking, then we’d still be kissing the feet of kings and either owning slaves or being one. We should consciously chose to be worthy citizens, world citizens, citizens of countries, and citizens in the smallest unit of human relations, in marriage.

I’d love to ask of life many things to satisfy my personal desires and my transpersonal desire for Mankind generally to coexist peacefully, to be responsible stewards of the environment, and explore the stars, but I also realize that what life asks of me is to accept that life isn’t exactly a bed of roses, that our personal relationships and our global relationships exist in a constant state of tension between a bewildering array of conflicting forces, and that any attempt to socially engineer “progress”, while arguably a dubious proposition, is nonetheless all we’ve got. If you’re not part of the solution (in your intent), you’re part of the problem. Sitting at the sidelines and throwing rocks is but so useful.

Reply
- Karel Donk May 31st, 2015 at 11:53 pm
  
  Can we agree on the value of this debate at the highest level, that we’re not here for any other reason than to test our ideas and see what they’re made of.
  
  Of course, this is one of the reasons why I write on my blog, not just to share knowledge but also to see what people think and especially to receive any feedback that might help to further refine my ideas.
  
  But, to suggest that any behavior not geared at optimizing pleasure is against our nature and the result of some collective super ego shaming humanity, I find that argument very hard to defend.
  
  I never suggested that being for hedonism means that one always avoids behavior that’s not pleasurable. You yourself mentioned the paradox of hedonism above, and I replied to that by giving a personal example, showing how being for hedonism can actually cause you to not get the pleasure you’re looking for. You might even temporarily take on activities that are not pleasurable, in order to improve life such that you can look forward to more pleasure in the future.
  
  However, with regard to the traditional (romantic) relationships in societies today, these are artificial social constructs which are completely unnecessary, go against our true nature, and work against us. There’s no point keeping such constructs in place when we have the option to live more in sync with nature and as a result lead more enjoyable lives.
  
  When I hear you say “our true nature”, I think of how we behaved and functioned (biologically) as animals (among other animals).
  
  When I mention “our true nature” I mean the way human beings would naturally behave if they were allowed to live by moral standards that come from within, and not forced upon them by society. Wilhelm Reich referred to this as “self-regulation.” Everything in nature regulates itself, and that is also true for human beings. Reich discusses, with examples of the past, how human societies and interaction would look like in such a case. I highly recommend reading his book “The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality”. You’ll find that living according to our true nature does not mean that we become “animals” or barbarians; on the contrary, people living according to their true nature are actually more civilized than most people living on Earth today.
  
  To suggest that proto-humans and early humans lived in some Garden of Eden by which amorous relationships weren’t plagued by possessiveness and the idea of “investing” in those relationships wasn’t appropriate, that strikes me as romanticizing to the extreme.
  
  It seems like that if you’re not aware of certain knowledge, and I hope you read the book by Reich mentioned above. He discusses examples of humans who did live in such conditions.
  
  Likewise, possessiveness has its roots there too, and it surely manifested in as horrific ways then as it continues today, as well as in far more benign ways, to the point of highly rightfully being viewed as highly appropriate.
  
  No possessiveness is a result of the social system that we live in, which goes against the natural order of the universe. A human being cannot own another human being. Every human being owns himself.
  
  You work the problem until sameness kicks in, you see the plateau phase at your door, then what? Do you apply your fractal charts, see the death phase impeding progress to such challenges and, according to your solution as applied to the problem of a stagnant romantic relationship, abandon the challenge in favor of finding something else to do, something that speaks consistently to your devotion to hedonistic principle? You’d never get anything done.
  
  In the case of working a problem, the plateau only kicks in once you’ve actually solved the problem. In that case you’ve already gotten something done. So you move on to the next challenge, if that is what you get pleasure from.
  
  We often hear people expressing a desire to work in a creative field, which is to say they see work as potentially a source of pain, and so the hedonist might say, follow your passion. Yes, follow your passion, but we both know what sacrifice great work entails, so it’s easy to say you’d rather be doing something creative, but we can agree not everyone is prepared to make sacrifices and to deal with an inevitable measure of accompanying pain whenever the work gets monotonous, and at the other extreme, overly challenging.
  
  If the work gets monotonous and overly challenging for a person, then that work is not their passion. It’s as simple as that. When you’re doing something that you’re actually very passionate about, it doesn’t seem like work at all. And while the activity might seem very difficult and mundane to other people, the person doing it with passion doesn’t notice any of that. In fact, that person might even lose track of time while he’s busy doing what he’s so passionate about. This is also my personal experience. What comes naturally requires very little effort, if any at all, to keep going.
  
  By your thinking, no problem, your mom and all these men and your dad and all these women coming and going, they’ve taught you that you’re not losing anything, you can love freely. Is there any space here for you, this kid, to enjoy something just for yourself when you’re asked to share everything with everyone all the time?
  
  You won’t be asked to share everything with everyone all the time, since there will be abundance. There will be plenty for everyone at any given time. Jacque Fresco discusses this in his book “The Best that Money Can’t Buy”. And this would certainly be true with regard to love and intimate relationships. Like I mentioned before, we could have been living in a society with an abundance of love already, if it weren’t for the artificial social constructs that limit us. It would cost us absolutely nothing at all. We could have it today. It just requires a mind shift.
  
  we have no choice but to come to terms with the fact that it’s not just about what a child asks of life, it’s about what life asks of us.
  
  What life asks of us is described in the cycle of life above and that appears to be: to go out and experience the world, learn and grow. We shouldn’t limit ourselves in that regard with artificial barriers, especially not those that work against our true nature.
  
  Just as you argue, being alone in your beliefs doesn’t make you wrong,
  
  No but your beliefs should be consistent with reality and not be the cause of problems in reality, as Perel clearly shows that our current way of living is.
  
  And if everybody listened to you about not voting, and I include in that not showing up generally at the table that society understands as a type collective marriage, the “social contract” generally speaking, then we’d still be kissing the feet of kings and either owning slaves or being one. We should consciously chose to be worthy citizens, world citizens, citizens of countries, and citizens in the smallest unit of human relations, in marriage.
  
  You fail to realize that we are in fact still slaves in this anti-social system that we live in. I discuss this in details in my post “Statism: A System for your Enslavement”. The elite have basically just changed the way in which we are enslaved, giving people the illusion of freedom while they are actually still slaves. If you realize this, you will automatically stop participating as much as you can, and certainly stop voting to keep a system in place that enslaves you and everyone else.
  
  Reply
Benjamin von Cramon June 2nd, 2015 at 12:14 am

The Best that Money Can Buy, looked into this but five minutes, came to the part on Jacque’s Fresco’s plans for energy. I’m not an energy expert, several of my friends are, so I’ve learned a bit. Talk about Utopian dream worlds, I can’t even begin to take any of this seriously. Maybe, there’s much value beyond the first impression, but those do count, smacks of lunatic fringe.

Reply
- Karel Donk June 2nd, 2015 at 12:25 am
  
  Lol. Fresco is one of the smartest men alive today. Take the time to research before you call it a utopian dream world.
  
  Reply
Benjamin von Cramon June 2nd, 2015 at 1:31 am

He may be smart about many things, he seems like a saint in his messaging, but proposing an energy system requiring billions of degrees Kelvin on the input, that is cold fusion, which has been marginalized for years now as a pipedream by most everyone, especially those experience with nuclear, that’s kind of a credibility buster out of the gate. I don’t know enough, could research, but not inclined. That he alligned himself or let himself get aligned with that Zeitgeist Movement dude, 911 conspiracy world, which is even more triggering as lunatic fringe, also doesn’t help. I can get along to a big degree the basic premise that politics and religion don’t belong in how to run a planet, or a city, but just like libertarian philosophy makes great points, they lose me and most people when it gets down to it. He proposes this system where we all live in abundance and treat each other as equals, free love too I suppose by your model, and yet not two beats into getting things moving with this activist arm, there’s dissension to the point of “I quit”. I’m not blaming him for disassociating from Zeitgeist Movement, but then what was he thinking? Again, it’s idealism hitting the fan.

There are no easy answers, no grand system solutions, no utopias, and it’s dangerous to design a system that doesn’t take into account how challenging these problems really are. I invite good ideas all day, but sweeping and oversimplified utopian dreams quickly run out of steam because the foundation is weak. This also applies to human relationships. If those foundations are weak, just based on optimizing pleasure, this too is not enough to provide a foundation to carry responsible adults through life’s good and bad times.

Pure Idealism is no more productive than pure realism. Only tempered optimism, leaning toward hope and giving tough realities a chance to slowly ripen, that’s how tough mountains are climbed.

Reply
- Karel Donk June 2nd, 2015 at 1:02 pm
  
  You’re mostly right about utopias and idealism, except for the fact that Fresco’s ideas are not a utopia. Fresco actually thinks very similar to what you described. But you won’t know if you draw conclusions so quickly. For example, Fresco himself doesn’t like it when people call The Venus Project a utopia, and he himself doesn’t believe in utopias either. This will always remain a work in progress; there is no final perfect system. We’ll continuously be working on it and adjusting and improving it. So take the time to study The Venus Project before you draw conclusions.
  
  Reply
- Karel Donk June 2nd, 2015 at 1:05 pm
  
  Here’s one more:
  
  Reply
Zina October 21st, 2015 at 12:12 pm

This is a real interesting debate. You guys are so knowledgeable at this issues, I almost didn’t leave a comment for fear that my ideas/position wouldn’t hold a candle light to this discussion. I must say that i enjoyed the debate so much that i believe both of you and would find my own middle ground.

I would like to give a scenario and ask advice from both of you though based on your wealth of knowledge.

X and Y fell in love and got married, ofcourse, expected to live happily ever after. Somewhere along the line, X sees evidences that convinced her Y is cheating on her. She confronts him but he denies everything. She seeks comfort with Z, who restores her confidence and makes her really happy. She falls in love with Z but doesn’t know it at the time. She realizes it, when Y eventually retraces his steps and warms up to her and she is unable to warm up back to him.

X is busy playing the good family but her heart is faraway. She cant tell Y because she is still working on loving him and suppression the emotions she has for Z. Y is a good man who seemed to loose his way at some point but has definitely retraced his steps. As for X, every day is torture of having to suppress her emotions that hasn’t gone even after four years of trying every recovery method in the book. Bear in mind that X is the one who has made her decision to stay and make the marriage work but for the love forces that torments her each day. What do you think is happening?

Reply
- Karel Donk October 21st, 2015 at 12:55 pm
  
  What I think is happening is what I described above regarding the cycle of life. The feeling of lust isn’t there anymore for X towards Y; things simply got boring after so much time together in marriage. There are no new experiences to be had with Y. Keep in mind that this has nothing to do with love. Love is a separate subject (explained here). X may still love Y and want the best for Y. It’s just the feeling of lust that’s mostly gone for X (the desire to want to spend time with Y and experience him). This is completely natural and expected, as I explained in my post above. It’s also one of the reasons why I wrote that getting married is a bad idea. The feeling of lust plateaus and declines in all relationships eventually, so it’s never a good idea to tie yourself to one person. Always remain free and independent, with the ability to spend time with whomever you want, whenever you want, however you want.
  
  The best approach now would be for X to be honest and have a talk about this with Y, and try to come up with a solution. This may lead to:
  
  1. Divorce. Each goes their separate ways and can still remain good friends and keep seeing and caring for each other (depending on how they handle it).
  
  2. Stay married, but allow each other the freedom to go out and experience other people as well.
  
  And I would try to do this as soon as possible.
  
  Reply
Stef July 17th, 2019 at 1:53 pm

What about the LGBT movement and the Cycle of Life?

If, as you say, the ultimate goal and purpose of consciousness is ”to create, to experience, to learn and to improve (modify or re-create), all of this in a continuous cycle, ultimately evolving to a state of lower entropy (creating order out of chaos)…”, so the LGBT movement (and the World’s Leaders agenda,), are a natural expression of this same consciousness.

So? and you Karel? what kind of consciousness expression are you in this reality?

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- Karel Donk July 17th, 2019 at 4:46 pm
  
  You can probably imagine that if you can’t think rationally/logically, and if you can’t see reality as it truly is, there won’t be a lot of learning and improving going on in your life. On the contrary things might get progressively worse, and the reality you will be creating won’t be a very pleasant one. Like I said in my related post “The All Seeing Eye: A Symbol of Consciousness”:
  
  If we want to refer to consciousness as God, then it’s true that God is experiencing (watching) and intervening in (shaping) the world, and indeed the entire universe. In that sense it’s also true that God is within us; all of us have a piece of the universal consciousness within us, and consequently, all of us have the power to reshape reality for the better if we want to. But we can only do this if we make absolutely sure that we see our reality as it truly is. We have to scrutinize every bit of information before it enters our consciousness and we have to start facing the truth in life. We’re only going to be able to reach enlightenment if we keep our consciousness pure and free from any kind of deception. Consciousness that’s built on a foundation of deception can only come crashing down in the end.
  
  Is thinking/pretending that you’re a woman, while you’re a man, rational? Is it healthy? Will it bring you to enlightenment? What about society in general? If you pretend to go along with someone pretending to be something they’re not, do you think this will be beneficial to your consciousness in the long term?
  
  Reply
line February 5th, 2020 at 3:46 am

I agree to what you are saying but I also believe that the primary objective of a person is to attain moksha. If a person indulges in sensory pleasure without any limitation then it might get in the way of achieving the ultimate liberation.
About the marriage yes it is a social construct and I believe that it is for our own benefit. If there were no marriages, then it is possible that it will bring more problems than solution. And what about the kids that are born with disabilities in a society where there are no fixed caretaker. Who will look after them. Maybe this system is humane but it’s frustrating. We must understand that there will be trade-offs in everything. And maybe this system is the best course we have as of now because in the long run physical pleasure is not going to be enough. And a society where everyone is having sex with everyone will not be possible either as there will be some which will be left out and it will bring another set of problems and we as a modern society have now the highest life expectancy. I understand that there are these elites that are in control but they are in control of someone too. There will never be full autonomy as I have found out. Maybe the system does want something from us and there is a transaction. Sexual pleasure is not the primary goal and there is more to life. It can be seen in Maslow’s need hierarchy. You might have shrewd view of things around. We will never know who is wrong who is right. We are supposed to be smarter than all the other creature. Maybe marriage is the way we self-regulate and is the absolute way. Who knows it might be for the safeguard of us as we have come a long way since civilisation started and we must have been living life like you stated and it only benefited a select individuals. So I think after a whole lot of research including your blog that it is through marriage by which everyone will have a fair and equal chance of procreation.
On a different topic it is not correct to say that homosexuality is a mental illness because it will be hypocrisy. Anyone is free to do what he wants to provided it does not harm others or himself.

And you say marriage is not natural, well, so is driving a car or sitting in an air conditioned room. I take this as anything we do is natural. I think it is in the best interest to take conservative approach in order for us to survive and progress.
In the end I will suggest we adapt and learn to live our lives in a given environment and try to free our self from all the material attachments.
I definitely believe that there is something wrong in us or/and the system. We should never blame it on one sex for any problems.
If we go looking for dirt we will find it. We must look at the world without any expectation. It does not take a lifetime to get wisdom.
Maybe the education system and capitalism in its current form is the root cause of all the misery. We must strive to increase our consciousness.
All that you are speaking of can be considered as an ideal world which this is not.

Reply
- Karel Donk February 5th, 2020 at 5:34 pm
  
  If you know where ‘marriage’ comes from you’ll see why it’s not for our own benefit. Far from it in fact. It started as slavery. I have all the details on that in my post “Why getting married is a very bad idea”. In the comments below that post I also get into how kids would be raised in a situation without marriage. Then you might also want to read about where the concept of ‘family’ comes from in “The true meaning of Family”.
  
  On the topic of homosexuality, it is indeed a mental illness. Everyone is free to do as they please as long as they don’t interfere with the right to life of another person. But being free do to as you please doesn’t mean that logic stops existing. Some people believe that they are a woman, when clearly they are a man according to biology. Believing something contrary to reality is simply ‘crazy’. A penis and a vagina are made for each other and fit together for a specific purpose. A penis and an anus don’t. This is simple observable logic. Going against that logic, while in this case people are free to do so, is crazy. Especially so when you know that under natural and optimal conditions such behavior doesn’t exist. There is a reason for that kind of behavior relating to mental damage caused by sexual suppression. In societies where there is no sexual suppression, there’s also no (need for) homosexuality as everyone can satisfy themselves with the opposite sex and doesn’t develop perverted desires as a consequence.
  
  Reply
  - line February 9th, 2020 at 3:28 pm
    
    I agree. But it is what it is. We have no say in any of these. If you have any spare time kindly read this.
    https://vedkabhed.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/women-in-hinduism-2/
    
    And of course there are these things in other religion too.
    Thankyou
    
    Reply
    - Karel Donk February 10th, 2020 at 8:52 am
      
      We do have a say actually, if we are courageous enough to actually say it. Share what you know and speak the truth when there’s an opportunity. And of course try to live according to the truth as much as possible. The status quo only stays in place because people are afraid to go against the system.
      
      That website has some interesting information, and confirms what I wrote in “Why getting married is a very bad idea”. And yes, all religions are anti-women. But there’s a specific reason for that: it was to make sure that men could more easily be manipulated and enslaved. So they are anti-humanity to be more precise. I discuss that in my post “Sexual Suppression and Repression I: Definition and Origin” and “The Manipulated Man”.
line March 7th, 2020 at 4:50 am

I took the blackpill..Its a lifesaver..
And read Sex and Character by OTTO WEININGER.

Reply

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