"All a woman really wants in a relationship is a man who is willing to endure her past for a chance at being a part of her future."
 -Anon FB woman

'nuff said.

Riposte

"You have become awfully full of yourself lately"


-Several other people are full of me too.

Crash her frame

So a friend of mine is now dating this chick...

We'll call her Karma...

Because it is close enough to her name and still has that aire of plausible deniability.

Karma is young, short, thin and blonde. She also comes equipped with enough personality to fill up her space and can fill in the gaps where there is a vacuum. In the classic 1-10 HB scale I would rate her about a 6 and on the soon-to-be infamous 4-10 crazy scale she might be a 4-6. All in all she seems like a sweet girl.

So this friend of mine who is a Man of God is now dating Karma and they are attending church together. In fact, they have attended her church twice to date. Mind you, this is not a valid sample or indicative of a long term trend. They have been dating 3 weeks or so.

But I had this nagging feeling. This feeling like she was setting the frame. On the first week they attended her church. No big deal. The morning of the 2nd week I text my friend to confirm which church he was attending that morning. Lo and behold. Independently both I and his brother decided that we were going to join him for service at her church. This served many purposes for either of us, but most importantly it served my friend, that is to say, it was in service of him. A man being thrust into the heart of a woman's sphere of influence with only his wits and grit is at a severe disadvantage for creating personal status and setting the frame. This is one of the greatest responsibilities that Men within your Gens is tasked with. Helping you set and control your frame with "them". The men in your Gens are your "us" in the classic "Us vs. Them". As men we ought to only allow others to come into our "us", we should never allow ourselves to come into their "them" Think of this like the movie 300.

Long story short. If you think one of your own is in danger of falling into someone else's frame, give them a rock to stand on.

Even if it means you have to come in hot and steal the thunder.

The Beta-Whip-Saw

The Whip-Saw

A good EAP I know came to the club to dance dressed far more provocatively than I have ever seen her. I am not even sure where she got the clothes to be honest. She looked good without being slutty.
I could tell she was very uncomfortable so  I immediately dragged her on the dance floor where everyone could see her. I then performed what I will call the Beta-Whip-Saw.

The set up:

I began to soothe her fears a little while doing my best not to indicate personal approval(after all, she is fun to look at). She explained that there was no one home to check out her outfit and offer approval (she lives with her parents).

Beta-Whip:

I calmly explained how I live very close and the next time she found herself in this situation she should call me. I would be happy to come over...

Alpha-Whip:

... and Judge her.

It was like watching the hamster try to step onto a wheel already spinning 900 rpm.

Spinning plates

In my mission statement I declared that my purpose was to share what I've learned, my experiences and how I came to learn them.

Enter Rollo Tomassi with Plate Theory.

This act, which ought to be an art, has had a very dramatic effect on me recently. The idea took a little while to make its way past my old programing residuals left from before my awakening. This was actually very helpful as it forced me to examine other processes, or "Rules" that I had in place that were left over from the last administration.

Things I cleared up for myself:
It is ok to romantically pursue more than 1 woman at a time.
It is ok to romantically pursue a woman a friend has dated with the proper disclosure/allowance.
It is ok to remove the woman from the pedestal and place her in the bond pits of Chicago.
It is ok to directly compete, head to head, with other men... unless that man is the bints husband.
It is ok for a woman to not live up to your expectations, they just don't get to continue riding.
It is ok to steal the frame and force women to compete over you.

You may notice a lot of these things are naturally occurring withing the red-pill awakening process.
My problem was that I Auto-Updated my OS and just trusted it to work without further examination. Shame on me for lacking sufficient observing ego.

Recently I have started the plates-a-spinning by starting with one what is almost a sure thing. Next I started spinning a pair of sisters, though I am really only interested in one (the younger, of course).
Next I have started treating every woman who might possibly qualify as a plate. I'll examine them, give them a once-spin on my finger to see if they balance and finish by checking to see how worn they are. And I have begun doing this without pretense.

All this and I didn't realize I had made this shift until my brother made the comment that I chase women more than he changes his underwear. If I am going to err, I will do so on the side that pegs him as a man of good hygiene.

Go lift.

I should just leave this post at its title.

But then what would the purpose of blogging be?

It's is almost cliche to claim that lifting has changed my life. It may also sound a little melodramatic. Reality is, everything you do changes your life to a varying degree. So put your preconceived notions of what you think I am going to talk about away.

 How much can you know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?  A multidimensional question. Fear is one of the greatest killers of men. Men fear what they do not understand because they don't know how it may threaten them. Men also fear what they lack the potency to combat.

Consider fear to be a flaw in the iron. If you make a sword without properly tempering it, it will be brittle and fail under the slightest amount of stress. If you use poor quality stock, you can temper it all day long, but it will only hold a certain edge.

Consider learning about the things you fear to be improving the quality of your stock.
Consider also action in direct opposition to your fear to be the tempering.

Through preparation you increase the chances of success, through execution you gain victory.

One of the first things you learn when you begin your journey is failure. Yes, you learn failure. Failure in this context is not the opposite of success, bur rather the earning of it. Failure is the process. Embrace the Suck. You will never be able to lift all the weight and you will never be able to lift it all of the time. The purpose is the journey; perfection is an ideal. When you begin your life of lifting you will grieve. You have made a decision to kill yourself in favor of creating a new and improved self. Most people never get past the first stage:

 Denial and Isolation. you are too skinny/fat to go to the gym, you don't have time, your dog ate your car keys, Obama is president... Unless Socialism has caused your gym to close (/hint**find another one**) or you are deployed to a F.O.B., you really have no valid excuse. That voice in your head isn't really you. What voice? THAT VOICE! THE ONE THAT JUST ASKED YOU THAT VERY QUESTION IN YOUR OWN HEAD.
It is not there to help you and if you haven't noticed, it is the one thing that has always held you back or talked you out of things.

Anger. This is too hard. I can't lift compared to the guy next to me. I want to be lean/built/huge already. I am not seeing results after the first week, etc. Relax, step back and evaluate your expectations. If you can't form proper realistic expectations, then go get a personal trainer to help you, or make friends with a lifter and apprentice. Chanel all that energy into your lifts.

Bargaining. This was my favorite part of my process. The iron will never lie to you, nor love you, nor hate you. It will always be fair and unyielding in equal proportions. It cannot be bargained with which leads us to:

Depression. This is the distance between your first rep and the first positive sign you see in your progression. It may be hitting a milestone PR, dropping a certain amount of weight or getting a positive response from the opposite sex. This is the void where your efforts are unrealized and achieving your goals is uncertain. Persist, it wont be like this for long.

Acceptance. Boom! you look in the mirror and you give yourself a chubby. You catch a woman staring or adjusting her body language to accommodate yours based merely on your physical fitness indicators. You leg press 1,100 lbs. People start acting more accommodating based merely on the fact that they now lack the potency to defeat you. The greater you is arrived. The old you has perished, never to return.

In the process you have learned your physical limits, tested them and increased. You have honed your body into an edifice worthy of respect. To take either from you would require someone to kill you. It bears repeating: "Strong people are harder to kill"

These are a few of the secrets the iron keeps. It will share them with you if you are willing to persist to earn them.

What the hell do I want?

I seem to have developed a sense of detachment from the things I think I should want. At first I thought this was listless apathy. Perhaps it is. It does not pervade my entire life; my job, lifting weights, building and maintaining my Gens, nor does it keep me from being social. What it does do is turn down the volume on things that I think I ought to enjoy or be concerned with. It is as if my If-Then formal logic register decided to go to Bali for the weekend and turned off its cell.

On Country Music.

Country music is where I started, left for awhile, and now have returned to. I have a fascination with it now, as I have been made wise to the real ways of the world. On one hand, you have these big ole country boys, big trucks, fighting, beer and chasing women. Country girls love it, and given what we observe, that figures. On the other hand we have these country music stars who sing about the most depressingly blue pill, delta male topics: Oneitis, Supplication and Willingly participating in being friend-zoned. I could go on, but wont.

Women eat this stuff up.

 All of it.

Now, I am not a shrink, behavioral scientist or mental health practitioner, nor have I ever played one on TV(/hat tip Scalp). Given what we have collectively worked out as men of the Sphere, the fact that women love the pining-away sappy side of country serves to reinforce what we have come to know. Women have no ability, no observing ego that allows them to see their own disconnect between what they value in men and what they say they value. I think I will leave this idea around for greater thinkers than I to evaluate and find how this benefits us.

Some definitions.

Axe and I have been having a discussion about the will, agency, authority and power.

He and I disagree, and use these words differently. But I define the will as that part of a person that makes decisions. To choose to sit, or not sit is an exercise of the will; it is an act of the will. Agency is the ability to make a choice. If you can exercise your will, then you have agency. If you can exercise your will to make moral choices, you have moral agency. It is about mental capability, the ability to choose one result in preference to all others. If you have agency, your will works.

Willpower is a finite resource. Some people have more willpower than other, and everybody has more at sometimes, but not at others. But having more willpower doesn't make one more or less of an agent. Either you have the ability to make choices, or you don’t. Children and incompetents lack agency. But the kinds of choices that children can make change over time and a 12 year old has agency over more things than a six year old.

Potency, as Axe describes, it is the ability to make your choices occur in the real world. So, if I decide that I want to sit, I have exercised my will, when I actually sit I have used my potency. Or to use a less silly example, when I decide to ask a woman out, I have exercised my will. To actually step up and do so requires a certain level of potency. If you make a decision, and are unable to affect it in the real world, it is fair to call you impotent.

Both agency and potency are amoral. One can use either for good or ill. It is simply about ability. Authority is a moral condition. To have authority is to have the right to exercise the will in a certain area. And one can have authority, and lack potency. And vis versa. So, I have authority over my house. I have the right to make decisions about it. But if I lack money, I may make a decision that I don’t have the ability to carry out, and in that lack the potency to make reality conform to my will. Or I can be physically capable of taking another man’s life. But without some condition that would grant me the right to do so, I lack the authority.

You are at war.

I have always seen life as a long war.

From the beginning, each of us began our journey as 2 parts. You and I were one of untold millions of sperm that fought like hell to make it to the egg. We survived the greatest war we will ever fight, the biological war to be present (to paraphrase George Zaluki). Birth was the biggest shocks we have endured, barring possibly catastrophic injury suffered in combat (/Salute). We managed to make it through the first 5 years being almost completely helpless, solely by the discretion of the members of our tribe who raised us. As young boys...We didn't die, or most of us didn't at least. We fought our way through our childhood, the social pecking order of our schools. We learned to fight together though sports and as members of our perspective gangs. We got older. We fought through higher education, through trade skills and the job markets. We fight each other for resources and women and honor.

We all have one thing in common. Everyone of our ancestors won. In a world where plagues, wars and famine kill millions, you and I are a testament to our fathers and their fathers before them.

 Perhaps you read this and think: hell, I am not a violent person, I haven't murdered my way up the corporate ladder or put anyone into the poorhouse.

Maybe you have in some way done just that.

For everyone who got "that" job, many others didn't. The law of unintended consequences. Someone loses out on that job, they are forced to take a lesser job or no job at all. they do or don't get X,Y or Z as a result. Perhaps they can't afford  the absolute best lifesaving treatment for their child, or feed them or any number of possible scenarios that ends their bloodline. You get the woman with the quality genetics, they are forced to settle for one without. Your children grow up and attend private school. theirs gets stabbed in public school. The possibilities are as dark as they are endless. Everything you do in life matters and echos down your bloodline.

 Lift some weights, eat cleaner, talk to women, ask for a raise, read a book, fight like hell for everything you can so you can choose how the story ends. You are entitled to what you earn, so go get it! Your bloodline depends on everything YOU do.

With that said, morality isn't subjective. Don't murder, literally or figuratively, your way up the ladder. Take care of the people who take care of you. "Give something back", as Arnold says. Bring others up with you. Be resolute as Iron.

On Pagan Tradition and the Hope of the Resurrection.

This morning at church, we hid Easter Eggs. I have never done that before. In  my family we didn't really follow the Church calendar or engage in the traditions of the Church because my parents believed that Christmas and Easter were pagan holidays that were appropriated, and because of that, they were inseparable from their pagan roots, and oughtn't to be celebrated.

This morning, one of the women objected to our Easter Egg hunt for much the same reasons. That got me thinking. Because in the past couple years I have begun to be involved in the Church calendar and to care deeply about the seasons of the Church and how we live life together celebrating the life of Christ, and what he has done for us.

Cruxifiction is the worst possible punishment one could be sentenced to. It is a horrific form of torturous death. But the power of Christ is such that He can redeem even that. That the cross, that emblem of the wickedness of the artifice of man, should become a symbol of hope and salvation, is one of the many evidences of the power, greatness, and glory of God.

If Christ can redeem the cross, surely He can redeem Easter Eggs and the Easter Bunny too. If Christ can redeem me, what is a bunny rabbit?

The empty eggs serve as a symbol of the empty tomb, and also as a symbol of the whitewashed tombs that we are. We decorate ourselves, and pretend to be righteous, but  without Christ we are as empty and worthless as those eggshells.

Today we celebrate the greatest thing to ever occur in the entire history of the human race. I mean that as literally as possible. There has never been, nor shall there ever be, as long as time itself endures, a greater event than Christ raising Himself from the grave. Three days ago, the worst catastrophe to ever be committed by the sinful mind of man occurred. We, humanity, murdered the only innocent man to ever live. In fact, we murdered God Himself. But the power and grace of God is so big, so magnificent and merciful is He, that He intended that we should, that He would become Agnus Dei, and swallow all our sin, that we might live forever with Him. Glory be to God.

He is Risen!

Scalpellum; an introduction.

I always find it hard to describe myself to others, particularly strangers. I am never quite sure when I have provided enough information to be honest, while also not crossing the line into oversharing. But as a general rule for myself, I prefer to be overly honest than underly honest. I would rather make errors of boldness, than errors of timidity.

I first discovered the “Manosphere” about a year ago. In fact, Athol Kay is at least partially responsible for the fact that I am not married; for which I am incredibly grateful. At the time, I was engaged, and as I learned more, and as I kept asking questions, and as we went through our pre-marital counseling, it became clear to me that marrying her was not a good idea. So I ended it. And frankly that was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. It wrecked me. And it made me re-evaluate everything.

My entire philosophical system had to be re-evaluated. Because my conclusions weren’t corresponding to the real world, I knew that either my premises, or my logic was faulty. So I had to start back at the beginning and work my way forward. One of the hard truths I had to confront was the fact that I was a loser. So the past year has been me working to stop being a loser.

 I have been doing that for the last year, and my role in Ferrous Gens is to talk about some of the conclusions I have had, and some of the questions I have been wrestling with. I am not going to write about pick up strategies, or how to get same day lays, or anything along those lines. I don’t have any experience with that, nor do I have any interest in it. I am not going to write about how to be happily married. Having never been married, it would be inappropriate.

What I am going to write about is philosophy, specifically metaphysics, and epistemology, theology, my self-improvement journey, and what I am looking for in a woman, and how I am going about trying to find her. In short, I am going to write about how to become a good man, and what I am doing to become better at being a man.

The story of the Axe and the Scalpel

An order of introductions:

There are 2 of us (so far) that came about the idea to take what we have learned from other parts of the Manosphere, recapitulate, aggregate or otherwise share what we know now as well as how it relates to our worldviews and experiences.

We are the Axe and the Scalpel.

The Axe: an introduction

   There have always been very apparent glitches in the Matrix, and when the red pill came for me I embraced it with enthusiasm and nearly choked on it. I had been a White Knight of the highest order and knew that things weren't working as "intended". It was my strongly held belief that it was within my power to exert enough will to change the world around me back to the way it was "supposed" to be. My discovery of the Manosphere and the red pill was unintentional. I was very much committed to my blue pill world that I had invested time, resources and an inordinate amount of brain and willpower to succeed in. I was looking for that last missing piece...

What I found was that I merely possessed the bottom right corner piece of the puzzle.

 For years I had a best friend who got every single girl I was interested in. A natural Alpha, the guy didn't even graduate high school, worked as a nobody in a non profit, had no car, no money...and yet women loved him. I spent the 8 years of our friendship having a perfect example of how to be an Alpha, and hating every minute of it. And when I was no longer useful I was turned on and my sphere of influence broke apart.

Then the Lord spoke to me. Yep. I was driving through construction at 3am, doing slaloms between the pylons. Thus began the 5 year reconciliation of the way the world is and the way God intended it as it was known to me.

3 years later and a failed 2 year relationship with "the one"(no such thing) I discover the red pill.

And I grieved. The whole world I built on the solid foundation of the female imperative came crashing down on my soul. In much the same way I grieved the 2 year relationship that I chose to end, I said the same goodbyes to my life long investment in the world in front of the real world.

*****************************************************************************

I have always felt the desire to improve the world around me as I have taken much that was offered freely to me. Through this blog I hope to increase, as well as increase the world around me through the free exchange of experience. Much of what I plan to write will be of what I have learned and how I came to such knowledge and Truth, as well as truth. I am very much still a work in process. On my quest from low level Beta to Apex Alpha, I have found friends and allies, brothers all, to blaze this path with. I am a man of modest education with a knack for stating the elusive obvious. I try to think useful thoughts, form practical opinions and enjoy cracking the code of humanity. Let us reason, together, as Men.

It begins.

I would call this the beginning, but it began well before.