SelfAdoration.com

Life is a benedy, y’all, and the only newspaper-news worth attending to is good news. The best news in the week just past? Poker pro and currency trader Alex Jacob brought us a brand new Jeopardy strategy. Why is that such good news? Because he is showing you the power of new and better strategic thinking for achieving your own objectives.

Two posts are cited in the video, these being them:

How do you live happily among people at war with all joy? Cultivate indifference.

The perfect date night for the man with a plan? Take your baby to the shootin’ range.

We’re talking about the Alex Jacob Jeopardy strategy (winning big by putting everyone – the contestants, host Alex Trebek, even the attendant Twitterati – on tilt), but what we’re really talking about is thinking strategically to identify and pursue your actual goals by actually-attainable means.

And thus to church:

The pitch…

That’s a sweet offer in the headline, don’t you think? It’s like Batman meets Ironman, but it’s all real — achievable now, no super-human powers required.

Not enough? You want more?

How’s this?

I can show you how to all-but-eliminate every sort of street crime.

I can show you how to protect any real estate or personal property you own from theft, mayhem, mishap or from simple maintenance oversights.

I can show you how to resolve almost every kind of civil dispute — without courts, without attorneys — and usually without rancor.

I can show you how to perfect your sales praxis to an amazing state of efficiency.

Hell, I can even increase your chance of successfully hooking-up at the singles bar.

I can cut your commute time, maximize your work-day productivity and save you from getting Aunt Whatshername’s name wrong when you see her.

Watch me: I can show you how to create a brand new trillion-dollar industry that will spin off dozens of start-ups as it is aborning and hundreds more later on.

I can show you how to mine an incredible new source of vast, uncountable wealth, a source no one has ever thought of before. I can put you there, at the dawn of a new age of human productivity — a pioneer, a prospector, and ultimately a tycoon in a brand new way of making money.

As you gaze upon that incredible motherlode of riches — knowing that there are unfathomable trillions more buried within it — I have one simple question to ask you:

To gain access to those riches — no fear of crime, no more petty lawsuits, better closing skills on and off the job, plus hundreds of new businesses, each one throwing off astounding new opportunities — would you be willing to correct one simple error in your thinking?

Are you willing to consider the proposition? Stay tuned…

 
The moth, the cat and the ontological nature of error…

Oh, good grief! Was there a fifty-cent word in that (more…)

Celebrating three years of Man Alive and the first year of The Church of Splendor with a recounting of the rules I live my intellectual life by.

These are the five (so far) rules of The Church of Splendor:

1. I don’t go to your church.

2. I am not arguing with you.

3. Don’t be an asshole.

4. Butthurt is not contagious.

5. Never play the other man’s game.

Find out how they can make your life better, too:

Why an egoist, atheist church? Because human beings don’t need gods, but they do need worship. I don’t go to your church, but I will repay your effort if you come to mine.

Man Alive is three years old today, Easter Sunday 2015. Here I am rehabilitating the idea of reverence as an essential experience in the fully-human life. Why is there a Church of Splendor, an egoist, atheist church? Because we don’t need gods, but we do need worship.

 
Chapter 12. The love of Splendor is the life divine.

We see the world we’re looking for. I see a world full of children.

I see the adults around me, of course, and the houses and cars and trees and birds and animals. I love everything in existence, natural and man-made, and I take in everything the world brings to me. But I focus on the children. I love babies when they’re barely old enough to smile at the world. And I love toddlers, just learning to speak in verbal semaphore but already well able to laugh in delight at absolutely everything. And I love children, newly awakened in Fathertongue, newly awake to the life of the mind.

I start to lose interest in kids at about age eight or nine – when they begin to get good at inventing and repeating lies. And, to say the awful truth, I don’t give much attention at all to adults – and they tend not to like me much, either. If you’re still awake, and – man alive! – I can tell in a glance if you’re still awake, you will be as delightful to me as any five-year-old. But if your mind is dead, if you have locked it away in a mental dungeon to make sure you don’t inadvertently think or say something that contradicts some insipid dogma you swallowed whole, I don’t have much room for you in my thoughts or in my heart.

But that can’t be you I’m talking about. How do I know? Because you made it to the end of this book. You can be assured that anyone who cannot abide letting me live my life as I choose – who can’t suffer to let me say these things – fled the scene in revulsion a long time ago. To me, it is absurd (more…)

Man Alive will be three years old Easter Sunday. When I wrote the book, I thought this argument would incite riots. That it has not is good, I suppose: People might mouth anegoistic arguments, but few are willing to fight for them. But it’s tragic, too, since your self and its interests are the very definition of what is worth fighting for. This is a very good time to resurrect your values.

 
Chapter 5. The greatest love of all.

When the subject of love and sex come up, our friends in the lab coats have a field day. For one thing, gibbons and other critters pair-bond for life, so they’re “just like us.” And for another, when you’re in the thrall of your best-beloved, your brain is all but drowning in pheromones and oxytocin and a mad obsession to rut yourself raw, so you’re no different from a house-cat in heat. Everything they have to say about you omits the inconvenient fact of Fathertongue, which makes their comparisons specious and invalid. However, as a consolation to deluded butterfly collectors everywhere, a genetic Homo sapiens without Fathertongue really is just like a poorly-adapted animal.

But since no mere animal can think in Fathertongue, no members of the animal kingdom bother to study the dating and mating habits of professors and graduate students – a fact that might raise a question in the minds of those assiduous researchers, if they were of a mind to question their contra-factual prejudices. A plausible meta-goal of reductionist science, arguably unknown to the scientists but presumably very well understood by modern philosophers, is to reduce everything to nothing – to trivialize everything in order to trivialize the human mind.

It can be useful to judge intellectual causes by their observed effects, and it is certainly the case that the study of humanity in the modern epoch has robbed you of the desire to learn more about your own nature. You (more…)

It would be hard to find better evidence of mindlessness than this week’s news – until next week, at least. Man Alive will be three years old Easter Sunday. My thinking is that the book has never been more needed than it is now – until next week, at least.

 
Chapter 9. The high cost of mindlessness.

When you are not thinking carefully, you are not not-thinking. If you are not asleep and not unconscious, you are always thinking – always sustaining an uninterruptible mental “dialogue” with yourself in Fathertongue. But if you are not thinking carefully – thinking mindfully – then you are thinking carelessly – mindlessly. Most of the academic nonsense I have mocked in this book consists of a scrupulous cataloging of the processes and consequences of human mindlessness – which is misrepresented by the professoriat as being the normal state of human consciousness.

The existence and substance of mindlessness are not what the researchers intend to document. Their work is simply a reflection of the fact that, for each one of us, the world we see outside the mind is the one we are looking for from inside the mind. If you want to be excluded entirely from any academic “study,” all you have to do is question the premises – the prejudices – undergirding the “research.” It suits the professorial temperament to insist that your purposive behavior must be the end-consequence of some type of mindlessness – genetics or physical-, psychological- or behavioral-determinism or brain chemistry or vestigial animality or social dynamics or anything except rationally-conceptual volitionality – free will. Accordingly, if you should dare to peek behind the curtain it will turn out that you are not an appropriate test-subject. If the territory does not correspond to the map, by all means dispose of the territory.

Even (more…)

Man Alive will be three years old Easter Sunday. Fun for me to reflect that this is where I first connected the Sam Cooke chord progression with the predations of government ‘science’. As the West creeps ever closer to complete capitulation to unreason, putting your life, your family and all of your values everyday more at risk – perhaps this is the day you should read this book. The lifeboat you save could be your own.

 
Chapter 8. The integrity of art.

The universe is internally self-consistent. This is what we mean when we say it “makes sense” – the laws of nature are comprehensible to us because they are all consistent with each other, all superficially differentiated manifestations of the law of identity. This is actually a matter of controversy right now in theoretical physics, where the self-consistency of the universe and humanity’s seemingly uncanny adaptation to it are held to be evidence – in the mother of all We-Now-Know-We-Know-Nothing theories – that there is not merely one universe, but, the physicists claim, as many as ten to the five-hundredth power universes.

I am not making this up. I’m inclined to think that there can be only one everything-that-exists, and that, where the math does not conform to the observed evidence – where the map does not correspond to the territory – it is probably not the evidence that is incorrect. And doubt you nothing, the theologians are dancing in the streets: No (more…)

How does a ‘natural’ salesman – a natural-born carney with the harsh edges burred down – how does a ‘natural’ sell?

Bad news. He can’t tell you. He thinks he can, but most people don’t get it. Accordingly, most people fail at selling.

Here’s better news: I can tell you how to sell like a ‘natural’ – like a carney. I can show you how to get remarkably better at persuasion – and at everything else you do.

How? Stop blaming everything but the one factor under your control: Your self.

Improving your persuasive praxis is as simple as acknowledging that your results are caused by your performance – which can be progressively perfected.

In the video, I’m sending affectionate regards out to @DreamExec Michael McNally for the comprehensive interview he did with me, to man-champion Socrates for pushing me to be more Sociable, to ‘natural’ salesman Brian Brady for his pitch-perfect affectionate persuasion and to the very-hard-charging George Kellas for showing the world what a Driven man with a big idea looks like.

This is The Church of Splendor, so of course we’re talking about a lot of serious stuff – including, incredibly enough, the empathy of persuasion and the epistemology of sales-training – but I can make you more of a ‘natural’ salesperson right away, with two simple carney tricks: Enthusiasm and eye-contact. You’re failing because you are surrendering needlessly. Your lack of self-confidence is soiling your value-proposition. Pushing the value harder with real eye-to-eye conviction will increase your closing rate more than you’ve ever dared to dream.

And think what you could do if you taught yourself to think my way?

It’s raining soup, Bunkie. I am raining soup. How long will it take you to click play and learn what I know? Where will you be fifty years from now if you don’t…?

I think I must have cabin fever. Whenever I get a chance to talk about my ideas, I rain, I geyser, I gusher, I seed and flower and summer and harvest all in one world-sized breath. And mind you, I’m pushing out a half-hour or more of The Church of Splendor every week – and I present for a living!

And I am deeply indebted to BlogCaster Michael McNally of The Dream Executive and LondonReal.TV for letting me demonstrate the idea of living life with the commitment of a continuous orgasm by having a fully-committed verbal orgasm in response to each one of his very-well-considered questions.

I like what Mike is doing: His #DreamReal hashtag speaks to me in detail. I had a marvelous time talking to him, and his questions took us all over the vast terrain I am mapping. I always feel bad for the interviewer when I do these things, but I love, love, love the soaring feeling that comes from living my values from the inside out.

The Big Picture focus was Shyly’s delight, and Mike is offering five free copies of the Kindle edition for clever viewers of the podcast. Meanwhile, for the Driven, I’ve cut the price at Amazon.com to 99¢. I want to change the way you think, and I’ll meet you more than halfway to getting started.

And the man is a much better blogger than I am, so I am happy to share the links he put together:

Links:

• Greg Swann – Twitter | YouTube
• The Church Of Splendor – YouTube
• Self Adoration
• The High-D Diet: How To Lose Weight Without Even Trying
• Briggs Myers
• DISC

Books Mentioned:

• Man Alive [FREE]
• Father’s Day, by Greg Swann
• Nine Empathies, by Greg Swann
• Shyly’s Delight, By Greg Swann
• The ONE Thing, By Gary Keller

And now: The Movie: How to live a (more…)

Once you accept that a government ‘scientist’ will say what he is told to say – what then?

This week at The Church of Splendor: How to focus your mind on the values that actually matter in your life and stop wasting your time on trivia that wouldn’t matter even if it were true.

The #BlurredLines judgment erases all creativity.

American popular music is built on a very spare music theory. Virtually all of it can be reduced to just four very simple songs, with one – the 12 Bar Blues, originally attributed to WC Handy – easily accounting for 80% of everything.

This week at The Church of Splendor, why the #BlurredLines judgement is disastrous for pop composers – and for anyone who loves music.

Oh, yes, it’s music theory in church. Plus: Me culpa. I’m speaking without notes and I mangled the structure of Pachelebel’s Canon. Should be: I, V, vi, iii, IV, I, IV, V. Learn to listen for it and you’ll hear it everywhere.

Got a taste for a mouthful of big words? My favorites are these: Ontologically-consonant teleology. What that means is conforming your moral philosophy to the true facts of reality.

In this week’s Church of Splendor video, reprised from June of 2012, we take up the idea of ontologically-consonant teleology by contrasting it, first, with the teleologically useless idea of determinism, then by exploring an article about pandemic cheating.

I mention in passing my post about the performances people enact in preference to living as authentic selves.

And all of this harkens back to my discussion about how you can make the changes you long for in your life.

This is how reality works: If you act upon your self, upon your life and your surroundings and upon the people you love as those things really are, you can attain your values. And if instead you insist that everything “must be” as you already know it is not, you will frustrate your goals now, and you will render yourself progressively less competent to achieve your values going forward.

This is the way your world really works, regardless of what you say about it, and whether you like it or not. It’s Splendor or Squalor – and everybody’s gotta take a side…

Zero Hedge, killingly conveying how all of human destiny is being laid to waste. Your prize for your complicity in the cultivation of the über-state is to explain to your grandchildren why they have been enslaved and imprisoned. Their prize is never to have grandchildren at all…

Month to month, year to year, it’s hard to notice the subtle changes in costs of living and standards of living, but after a long period of time it’s easy to look back and remember how things used to be.

You used to be able to support a family on a single income. You used to be able to afford medical care and higher education.

It’s often said that the greatest expense that someone will have in their life is his or her home. That’s total nonsense.

Now, I’m not saying it’s not worth it, but the biggest expense most people will have is family, and particularly children.

And after years and years of suffering through pitiful, destructive policies that have chronically made people less prosperous, it’s no surprise that they’re coming to the conclusion—you know, we can’t really afford to have a child right now.

There are consequences to conjuring money out of thin air. There are consequences to destructive policies.

So destructive in fact that central bankers and politicians even have the power to make a population disappear.