This is the very definition and beauty of true art

This is the very definition and beauty of true art. (Re-blogged from One Thousand Single Days.)

These people had a real connection. This is what you are looking for when you are searching for a soulmate. Forever, or for a moment.

 

What makes you think you need to go to Russia?

“You who seek out the object of a lasting love, learn the places which the fair ones most haunt,” writes the poet Ovid in his 2,000-year-old poem, The Art of Love.

I have given a few tips about where to find your soulmate before.

If spam emails are anything to go by, there must be a fair number of men out there who fall for Russian woman who are very romantic and are looking for an honest man in the West for love and marriage. Now there is of course nothing at all wrong with Russian women. But if you can’t attract a woman in your own home town, why do you imagine you’ll have more luck with a woman from hundreds or thousands of miles away?

If the relationship is based on money (which it may be) then is that what you really want? Wouldn’t you rather learn the arts of attraction and find a woman much nearer home and who wants you because of what you really are? (Ok, you really like Russian women. There are probably thousands in London. You still don’t need to find the air fare.)

Ovid says, “You won’t have to put to sea or undertake any distant journeys … Rome alone will give you a choice of such lovely women, and so many of them, that you will be forced to confess that she gathers within her own bosom all the treasures that the world can show. As numerous as the ears of corn on Gargarus, grapes in Methymna, fish in the ocean, birds in the thickets, stars in the heavens, so numerous are the beautiful girls you’ll find in Rome. Venus has made her seat of empire the city of her beloved Aeneas.”

And for the benefit of us in England, note that our own Henry Purcell made a song called ‘Fairest Isle’ from John Dryden’s words, in which the poet explains that Venus has made her dwelling here, too.

Here are the words:
Fairest isle, all isles excelling,
Seat of pleasure and of love
Venus here will choose her dwelling,
And forsake her Cyprian grove.
Cupid from his fav’rite nation
Care and envy will remove;
Jealousy, that poisons passion,
And despair, that dies for love.

Gentle murmurs, sweet complaining,
Sighs that blow the fire of love
Soft repulses, kind disdaining,
Shall be all the pains you prove.
Ev’ry swain shall pay his duty,
Grateful ev’ry nymph shall prove;
And as these excel in beauty,
Those shall be renown’d for love.

Happy Christmas!

There will be a short break until the New Year!

Suggested New Year’s resolution for all you single love-lorn men out there, looking for your soul-mate and yearning for the love and passion that could be yours: treat yourself to my book, Dating – the missing manual, and start applying the advice little by little to your life.

It comes from personal experience. It works.

How do I find my soulmate?

Strategy. Finding your soulmate can be difficult. Finding someone for a quick fling is easier if you know how – the rules of attraction are the same. But how to find the one?

You can be great at chat-up and attraction (of which I have much more to say some other time) and still this part can be very difficult. You can go on date after date and nothing works out for the long term. You can even have dates that pall after the first ten minutes.

Why not start working on strategy now?

Let’s cut to the chase. Yards of verbiage are not needed to explain this. Go to places where the kind of woman who might be your soulmate would hang out. Sure, if you just want a quick fling, go to a bar or club (comedy clubs are fun too), and apply the techniques. But if you are (for example) into art, go to a gallery or join an art evening class (if there are no hot women there, join another one – join several – simple).

If you don’t like noisy nightclubs, why would you expect that your soulmate would? It’s possible, but you are lengthening the odds unnecessarily. Go to the places she might go to.

Your criteria for a soulmate are, or should be, pretty strict. Don’t compromise. Learning confidence will give you plenty of choice, so you don’t need to compromise. It then becomes a numbers game. Don’t waste time looking in the wrong places.

Don’t buy my book!

I’m very excited now because my book “Dating – the missing manual – you can attract and keep the woman of your dreams (if they had taught this in school alongside algebra and French irregular verbs, my whole life would have been different)” now has the Look Inside feature working!

Link to Amazon.com for Dating – the missing manual

Link to Amazon.co.uk for Dating – the missing manual

I am also excited because I have the first review of my dating book on Amazon.com.

I’m going to come completely clean here. The reviewer is a friend. But before you discount his opinion, I have a few things to say.

You all know that many writers get their friends to write 5-star reviews of their books. Probably some authors even review their own books under false names. That’s why many people, myself included, often prefer to read the 3-star reviews to get the real low-down. I know this and you know this, and that’s why I want all the reviews of my books to be genuine. (You will note that so far I have not got any reviews for my other book, despite my giving away free copies no strings attached – the offer still stands, by the way.) So what’s all this about my friend reviewing my book?

First of all, I gave him a draft copy to read and comment on, before publication. I did this because at that time he was in the same situation I had been in, looking for a soulmate in vain and doubting his own ability to attract women. So I thought he would be an ideal person to test my book on. Why not pass on to a friend what had worked so well for me?

Some months passed, and as yet he hasn’t told me the full story of what happened. But suffice it to say, a short while ago I saw him with a very attractive woman, and the other day I saw them still together and she could hardly keep her hands off him. He also had a very big smile.

So I asked him, no pressure, but if you would please post an honest review of my book on Amazon.com I should be grateful. I emailed him, ‘If you are happy to do this it should be an honest review. Some new authors get their chums to write 5-star reviews but I suspect that if all the early reviews are 5-star people don’t believe them.’

Well, he gave the book 5 stars anyway.

So, why am I telling you not to buy my book? Because I am working on the Kindle edition and I am going to publish the Kindle edition free for a limited period, as Amazon allows. This is because I want the book to get known and I’m hoping for as many honest reviews as possible. So I don’t want any loyal followers of this blog to buy the paperback and then feel cross because they spent £5.50 (US$9.50) when they didn’t have to.

If you want to know about it as soon as the free promotion starts, all you have to do is follow this blog. The ‘follow’ button is at the top right of the page (or just below the posts if you are reading this on a mobile).

But if you can’t wait, £5.50 (US$9.50) is hardly going to blow a huge hole in your finances, is it?

Dating – the missing manual

As promised I shall post on the topic of sex tomorrow, and usually once a week on a Thursday. But I am quite excited that my book on dating is finally finished and the digital files are now at the printer. The projected publication date is 1st October, but it may be available a little before or after that date. Watch this space!

The full title is:

Dating – the missing manual:

you can attract and keep the woman of your dreams

(if they had taught this in school alongside algebra and French irregular verbs, my whole life would have been different)

This is from the introduction:

Cornelius Agrippa used to have big problems with dating.

As a teenager he suffered agonies not knowing how to approach girls and not understanding how was it that other boys succeeded where he did not.

Later in life he would admire beautiful women from afar and their smiles destroyed him. He regularly fell in love with women but he had no idea how even to approach them. He wanted a woman with whom he could share both serious moments and fun. Ultimately he wanted a female companion he could share his life with on every level.

Unfortunately he had entirely the wrong approach to solving this problem. This led him to end up with more than one woman who was not suited to him, because he did not know what he knows now.

‘Surely,’ he thought, ‘if I have the good qualities I think I have, the right woman will see this and be attracted to me.’ But this didn’t happen.

Part of him also didn’t really believe that he had what it takes to attract the woman of his dreams.

Eventually he began to believe that the woman of his dreams did not exist.

Now there’s no doubt that a lot of luck is involved in finding your perfect partner, the woman you could happily spend the rest of your life with. Nevertheless there is a great deal that can be done to shorten the odds.

In particular it is vital to know what to do when the right woman does come along, and not to mess up your chances. Indeed you need to know how to have chances in the first place. If you let her walk by and say nothing, what chances do you have? (This book tells you what to say and how to overcome the fear of saying it.)

Eventually a friend saw the author’s predicament and gave him some good advice.

Putting this advice into practice, trying this and that, your author came up with the insights in this book. Insights that got him some fun dates, some very interesting times, some amusing escapades (amusing with the wisdom of hindsight anyway), and some mistakes.

It also got him the woman of his dreams.

This book is the distillation of his experience, and if you take it to heart and put it into practice it will seriously increase your chances of finding the woman who is right for you.

To teenagers: this book will help you, too. When you have the power to attract girls you will learn to be picky, knowing that you don’t have to promise more than you intend to fulfil to get a girl and you don’t have to settle down until you find a real keeper.

As to the mistakes, suffice it to say for now: be wary of your own desire to believe. And if you are not sure of a woman, don’t leave her alone in the same room as your credit card.

Learn from your mistakes. It is fine to make mistakes. Just don’t repeat them.

Don’t settle for the first woman that comes along (unless of course she is actually your dream incarnate and at the same time very real – see my warning to romantics). You are more attractive than you think (this book shows you how) and therefore you have choices. This is very important.

Be clear about what you really want, and don’t think about settling for less. Then do the work.

Do you want to achieve your desires?

Unless you are a monk I recommend making the effort to achieve your desires.

The main and consistent focus of my life is looking for and finding ways of living in the present moment as much as possible. Along the way I came up against a number of very strong obsessions that were not connected with this effort, and that were occupying most of my waking thoughts. These were (1) the need for love and a life partner and (2) sex.

If you believe yourself to be on some kind of spiritual path, it is easy to convince yourself that you are working with transforming a lack – but this may be the coward’s way out.

Ask yourself whether the truth is that you have not yet found the courage to tackle these problems. Ask yourself whether you believe achieving what you want is too difficult, therefore you never start. Ask yourself whether the effort to achieve what you want might not be more challenging, more liberating than trying to live with frustration.

At some point I realised that, as Mr Gurdjieff put it, a roast chicken was not going to fly into my mouth. Just as anything I have ever achieved required effort, this was going to be no different. Then a friend pointed me towards some good advice, and another passed on his own techniques in the field of dating. I soaked up many ideas, some good, some that didn’t suit me, and I started applying the ones I thought were good. It was a steep learning curve, but I got there. Luckily for me, when I had it pretty well sorted, I met the love of my life.

One thing you learn along the way is that you are not who you think you are. This in itself is worth the price of the journey.

Later on I understood how to overcome unsatisfactory sexual performance too, and I have already provided some pointers to this in previous blog entries. Remarkably, the answer to this is being in the moment – and so we arrive back where we started.

Frequently I meet others who so obviously need to know what I have learned. What better time to write down what I know when the steps are still fresh in my mind? Hence two books: one on dating which I intend to publish soon, and one on sex which is already available.

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To be first to know when my book on dating is published, please click on the ‘follow’ button top right on this page.

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Please check out my free book offer. This is for the book on sex. I am hoping for a few honest reviews on Amazon, although if you accept the free offer you are under no obligation to write a review. Alternatively you can download the section on female sexual anatomy called ‘10 hot tips for lasting longer in bed and giving your woman more pleasure‘ (US link) for a mere 99¢ (about 75p – UK link here).

Sex and the spiritual quest – 2

When other bloggers like my posts I usually pop over to their blogs to see what they are up to. If it’s relevant I like to comment here or post a link.

Here is what struck me as significant in NewHeavenOnEarth’s blog post on Spiritual Marriage:

Physical marriage is meant to be the training wheels for the real spiritual marriage of the soul to the Beloved. Spiritual marriage is the crucible of transformative love that is able to transform each partner into the divine complete self or anthropos, and reunite each completed self with God.

After that she lost me a bit in the discussion of different levels of inner and outer marriage. I don’t like to write about what I haven’t personally experienced, at least in some degree, so I’ll pass over what I don’t understand.

My comments:

I think of sex as fuel. It’s high-octane. As such it is neither good nor bad. It’s up to us to use it wisely. Used correctly it can be the door to more presence and more real love, but only if we make the effort to be present to it.

I think that is why there is a connection between sex and the striving for clearer states of consciousness in many religions. Sometimes sex is integrated with religion, as in Tantra and as shown in some Hindu temple carvings. At other times the two are deliberately separated, as in some Western ascetic traditions where monks try to be celibate, perhaps in an effort to transmute sexual energy into a spiritual state.

(Note: I should have liked to avoid terms like ‘spiritual’ because such terms are often poorly used and the use of them closes more doors than it opens. But try as I might, I cannot avoid association-laden terms altogether. We need a new vocabulary.)

I also think it is essential, if a long-term relationship is to be happy, that the couple have some third point that completes the triangle. That third point should be a common aim and it should look beyond the couple’s own personal happiness to the happiness of others, whether it be some great cause or simply considering the needs of the people they come in contact with every day.

In this way a couple can assist each other on each one’s journey to the inner marriage of that which strives to that which is.