[Pre-amble: This is one in a series of posts which includes an alternative set of lyrics to a well known song.Each post will also contain a short introduction to the topic at hand, and a brief explanation of the song itself.A video of the original song will be included so that the reader can listen to the original song while reciting the alternative lyrics at the same time.]
The Song: Worst Friend (based on Best Friend by Queen)
Porn can be a real bitch if it controls you rather than you controlling it.It can turn you into an addict just like every other drug based substance if it gets too much for you.It can screw up both your mind and body up if you indulge it too frequently.The psychological damage is documented on websites like yourbrainonporn (though beware of the subtle mis-andric attitude of this website that attacks male sexuality but not female sexuality).Then there's the physical damage that 'can' occur if you masturbate.Excess masturbation can cause the muscles on either side of the penis to degrade and become mis-shapen (possibly in the same way that weight lifters report about 'muscle fatigue' if they spend too long weight lifting in the gym).It's what happens when a muscle is over worked, it suffers, just like any other part of your body.This psychological damage and physiological damage are both the result of porn, and both the result of giving into sexual desire whenever they felt aroused.
Now porn isn't really the cause of the problem, rather giving in to 'desires' is the problem.Just because you feel aroused or hungry or angry doesn't mean that you need to let those impulses run riot.You have the ability to 'Choose'.That, the element of exerting a Willful Choice, is the important point to remember.The Neo-Cortex is on top of the amydala for a reason: so that humans can 'Choose' what they want to do, rather than just 'following their instincts' like an animal.If a man follows his sexual impulses 'all of the time' then he is likely to suffer psychological and physiological damage because of it, damage like the man written about in this song.
This may lead some to think that being an ascetic is the only life to advocate, the life of self-denial, but this is not the case.Self-denial is a negative and reactionary way of looking at life, where someone allows their life to be dictated by something else (e.g. sex).The positive and actionary way of looking at life is a pro-active one, where a person 'affirms' a particular way of living instead of focussing on the negative/denial aspect all the time.In practical terms this means 'doing something' enjoyable rather than focussing on 'not doing something'.If you focus on not doing something for your whole life, it'll be less pleasant than choosing a life affirming and active one.
This is one in a series of very short posts containing snippets from the Havamal text (which can be found in full here - http://www.beyondweird.com/high-one.html).
Why post snippets of an old pagan text here, in a blog that's supposedly about the Androsphere? I’m posting them because they contain helpful everyday advice that is applicable in the modern world e.g. being aware of your surrounding environment, drinking alcohol responsibly, how to score with women. And for many of us, it is part of our heritage that goes back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE) beliefs that stretch back 4000 years or more.
Christianity offers the only dominant philosophical view points in the Androsphere, represented by bloggers like Free Northerner and Simon Grey. Christianity, and indeed the other monotheisms from the region draw, from the mythologies of the PIE culture. For instance Noah s flood is a replication of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the story of the Angels rebelling against God in the bible is just a copy of the Giants rebelling against the Gods, which is present in both the Greek and Norse religious traditions, as Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out in the eighteenth century.
The downfall of the Titans, whom Zeus hurls into the underworld, seems to be the same story as the downfall of the angels who rebelled against Jehovah.
The story of Idomeneus, who sacrificed his son ex voto, and that of Jephtha is essentially the same
Can it be that the root of the Gothic and the Greek language lies in Sanskrit, so there is an older mythology from whith the Greek and Jewish mythologies derive? If you cared to give scope to your imangination you could even adduce that the twofold-long long in which Zeus begot Heracles on Alcmene came about because further east Joshua at Jericho told the sun to stand stil. Zeus and Jehovah were thus assisting one another: for the gods of Heaven are, like those of earth, always secretly in alliance. But how innocent ws the pastime of Father Zeus compared with the bloodthirsty activities of Jehovah and his chosen brigands. {page 220}
Source: Schopenhauer A. (2004), 'Essays and Aphorisms' (Hollingdale translation), London, Penguin.
So, instead of offering you snippets of second-hand wisdom from the Bible, I will offer you snippets of first-hand wisdom from the (probably) older and much more concise Havamal text (roughly 5,000 words compared to the 190,000 words of the New Testament).
Harvest the corn when it's ripe, trust a man when he has matured. Everything reaches it's full level of development after a period of time. When a thing has matured, then it can be used, harvested or trusted.
This is another in a series of posts about men from history who have either achieved great things in one form or another by pushing boundaries: either in themselves or in society or science or exploration of some form. Boundary pushing and growth is what men do, it's their nature: to grow and push outwards. We, as men, are the frontiers men, the first to discover/uncover new territory, in a metaphysical sense (i.e. including both material and the immaterial) that is later colonised and 'civilised' by the rest of humanity.
Richard Francis Burton
Because Richard Francis Burton's life was so full of events, reposting them all would take up too much of mine and your time, so the bio is only the introductory section from the Wikipedia website, plus a paragraph on his early life at college, which shows his rambuctious nature and disdain for authority.
CaptainSir Richard Francis BurtonKCMGFRGS (19 March 1821 – 20 October 1890) was an English geographer, explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer and diplomat. He was known for his travels and explorations within Asia, Africa and the Americas, as well as his extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures. According to one count, he spoke 29 European, Asian and African languages.[1] Burton's best-known achievements include traveling in disguise to Mecca, an unexpurgated translation of One Thousand and One Nights (commonly called The Arabian Nights in English after early translations of Antoine Galland's French version), bringing the Kama Sutra to publication in English, and journeying with John Hanning Speke as the first Europeans to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile. Burton's works and letters extensively criticized colonial policies of the British Empire, to the detriment of his career. He was a prolific and erudite author and wrote numerous books and scholarly articles about subjects including human behaviour, travel, falconry, fencing, sexual practices and ethnography. A characteristic feature of his books is the copious footnotes and appendices containing remarkable observations and information. He was a captain in the army of the East India Company, serving in India (and later, briefly, in the Crimean War). Following this, he was engaged by the Royal Geographical Society to explore the east coast of Africa and led an expedition guided by the locals and was the first European to see Lake Tanganyika. In later life, he served as British consul in Fernando Po, Santos, Damascus and, finally, Trieste. He was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and was awarded a knighthood (KCMG) in 1886.
[..]
Despite his intelligence and ability, Burton soon antagonized his teachers and peers. During his first term, he is said to have challenged another student to a duel after the latter mocked Burton's mustache. Burton continued to gratify his love of languages by studying Arabic; he also spent his time learning falconry and fencing. In 1842, he attended a steeplechase in deliberate violation of college rules and subsequently dared to tell the college authorities that students should be allowed to attend such events. Hoping to be merely "rusticated" —that is, suspended with the possibility of reinstatement, the punishment received by some less provocative students who had also visited the steeplechase, he was instead permanently expelled from Trinity College. In a final jab at the environment he had come to despise, Burton reportedly trampled the college's flower beds with his horse and carriage while departing Oxford.
[..]
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton
Check out some of the other entries from the 'Men of Yore' series:
(The third part of the three-stanza series, see Stanzas 85 and 86 for the two preceding parts).Moving from 'A' to 'Not-A'.In this instance, from a state of vitality/liveliness to one of deathliness.
[Pre-amble: This is one in a series of posts which includes an alternative set of lyrics to a well known song.Each post will also contain a short introduction to the topic at hand, and a brief explanation of the song itself.A video of the original song will be included so that the reader can listen to the original song while reciting the alternative lyrics at the same time.]
Introduction:
Men are the Vanguard of planet Earth.They are the first ones who domesticated cattle, the first ones who domesticated wheat, the first ones who smelted iron, the first ones who developed steam power, the first ones who developed nuclear power, the first ones into space, the first ones who mapped the human genome.Men, individual men, achieved these things. Why?Because that's what they wanted to do.There's no other reason than that.It's really very simple.Very simple indeed.
Men who do their own will is nothing but good.I'm certain that we all like eating nutritous food and living in heated homes, and free from diseases like cholera and smallpox, all of those were the result of mens Will, mens Works.Men doing what they wanted, doing what they enjoy.Not out of duty, or 'doing the right thing' but Doing their Will.That they enjoyed doing it, and they enjoy doing it, is what is good.
'Everything that is good is good in itself and begets goodness.'
Goodness is both good now and in the future.It is both good to the person that does it and to other people.In contrast to this are the things that are only good to either one thing or the other thing.An example of this is 'Deferred gratification', which promises goodness in the future, but not in the present.Another one is 'buy now pay later', which promises goodness now but not in the future.Both of these are only 50% good, which really isn't very good at all!
It's this 100% goodness that comes from men doing what they want.Men do what they want by exerting themselves and pushing their own, personal, boundaries.And by penetrating those boundaries, by breaking through that shell (picture a chick breaking out of it's shell), does goodness come.Once they've penetrated this outer layer it means that new growth can happen, new contributions to humanity.Like the individual men whose efforts contributed to the growth of the medical world (Hippocrates, Galen, Pare, Jenner, Louis Pasteur, Lister etc), a world which we all benefit from.That's goodness that comes from mens Will, from being the Vanguard.
The Song: I'm the Vanguard (based on 'I'm a Dreamer' by Livin Joy)
# I'm the Vanguard #
I'm the-
I'm the-
I'm the-
I'm the-
I'm the-
I'm the-
I'm the Vanguard.
Brain and brawn power
is all that I need.
My dreams are to push on now
far beyond my own frontiers.
I never learned how to achieve,
when I was Liberal.
Now I'm Right I know that,
I can go beyond the far beyond.
Here I am pushing up toward the frontier.
Now the heat is building up and the pressure.
Is forcing me to rethink what I'm doing, what I'm doing.
But my mind will keep calm and endure it.
Here I am now at my limit.
And pushing on beyond the frontier
I'm the Vanguard.
Here I am pushing up toward the frontier.
Now the heat is building up and the pressure.
Is forcing me to rethink what I'm doing, what I'm doing.
But my mind will keep calm and endure it.
Here I am now at my limit
And pushing on beyond the frontier.
I'm the Vanguard.
I am the Vanguard.
I am the Vanguard Hel yeah.
Brain and brawn power
is all that I need.
My dreams are to push on now
far beyond my own frontiers.
I never learned how to achieve
when I was Liberal.
Now I'm Right I know that
I can go beyond the far beyond.
Here I am pushing up toward the frontier.
Now the heat is building up and the pressure.
Is forcing me to rethink what I'm doing, what I'm doing.
But my mind will keep calm and endure it.
Here I am now at my limit.
And pushing on beyond the frontier
I'm the Vanguard.
Here I am pushing up toward the frontier.
Now the heat is building up and the pressure.
Is forcing me to rethink what I'm doing, what I'm doing
This is one in a series of very short posts containing snippets from the Havamal text (which can be found in full here - http://www.beyondweird.com/high-one.html).
Why post snippets of an old pagan text here, in a blog that's supposedly about the Androsphere? I’m posting them because they contain helpful everyday advice that is applicable in the modern world e.g. being aware of your surrounding environment, drinking alcohol responsibly, how to score with women. And for many of us, it is part of our heritage that goes back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE) beliefs that stretch back 4000 years or more.
Christianity offers the only dominant philosophical view points in the Androsphere, represented by bloggers like Free Northerner and Simon Grey. Christianity, and indeed the other monotheisms from the region draw, from the mythologies of the PIE culture. For instance Noah s flood is a replication of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the story of the Angels rebelling against God in the bible is just a copy of the Giants rebelling against the Gods, which is present in both the Greek and Norse religious traditions, as Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out in the eighteenth century.
The downfall of the Titans, whom Zeus hurls into the underworld, seems to be the same story as the downfall of the angels who rebelled against Jehovah.
The story of Idomeneus, who sacrificed his son ex voto, and that of Jephtha is essentially the same
Can it be that the root of the Gothic and the Greek language lies in Sanskrit, so there is an older mythology from whith the Greek and Jewish mythologies derive? If you cared to give scope to your imangination you could even adduce that the twofold-long long in which Zeus begot Heracles on Alcmene came about because further east Joshua at Jericho told the sun to stand stil. Zeus and Jehovah were thus assisting one another: for the gods of Heaven are, like those of earth, always secretly in alliance. But how innocent ws the pastime of Father Zeus compared with the bloodthirsty activities of Jehovah and his chosen brigands. {page 220}
Source: Schopenhauer A. (2004), 'Essays and Aphorisms' (Hollingdale translation), London, Penguin.
So, instead of offering you snippets of second-hand wisdom from the Bible, I will offer you snippets of first-hand wisdom from the (probably) older and much more concise Havamal text (roughly 5,000 words compared to the 190,000 words of the New Testament).
Possibly it means: 'Quiet imminence'.The period immediately before moving from 'A' to 'Not-A'.
This is another in a series of posts about men from history who have either achieved great things in one form or another by pushing boundaries: either in themselves or in society or science or exploration of some form. Boundary pushing and growth is what men do, it's their nature: to grow and push outwards. We, as men, are the frontiers men, the first to discover/uncover new territory, in a metaphysical sense (i.e. including both material and the immaterial) that is later colonised and 'civilised' by the rest of humanity. It is also partly intended to show images, be they paintings, statues or photographs of the countenaces of men of yore. Because, quite frankly, many men wear the countenances of women these days: smiling, smirking, cooing, rolling their eyes, looking smug etc. It's a sign of the times, and by showing some images of men from the past, I hope to show some modern men why looking surly, frowning and giving hard-ball stares at people is something to do, something to practice.
Early life
Stevenson was born in Glasgow;[1] his father was Alan Stevenson, a partner in a West India trading house in the city. He died of an epidemic fever on the island of St. Christopher when Stevenson was an infant; at much the same time, Stevenson's uncle died of the same disease, leaving Alan's widow, Jane Lillie, in straitened financial circumstances. As a result, Stevenson was educated as an infant at a charity school.
His mother intended Robert for the ministry and to this end sent him to the school of a famous linguist of the day, Mr. Macintyre. However, in Stevenson's fifteenth year, Jane Lillie married Thomas Smith a tinsmith, lampmaker and ingenious mechanic who had in 1786 been appointed engineer to the newly formed Northern Lighthouse Board.
Professional career
Stevenson served as Smith's assistant, and was so successful that, at age 19, he was entrusted with the supervision of the erection of a lighthouse on the island of Little Cumbrae in the River Clyde. He devoted himself with determination to follow the profession of a civil engineer, and applied himself to the practice of surveying and architectural drawing and attended lectures in mathematics and physical sciences at the Andersonian Institute at Glasgow. Study was interleaved with work - his next project was lighthouses on Orkney. He made use of winter months to attend lectures in philosophy, mathematics, chemistry and natural history, as well as moral philosophy, logic and agriculture at the University of Edinburgh. He did not take a degree, however, having a poor (for the time) knowledge of Latin, and none of Greek.
In 1797 he was appointed engineer to the Lighthouse Board in succession to Smith; in 1799 he married Smith's eldest daughter Jean, who was also his stepsister, and in 1800 was adopted as Smith's business partner.
The most important work of Stevenson's life is the Bell Rock Lighthouse, a scheme long in the gestation and then long and extremely hazardous in the construction. This structure was based upon the design of the earlier Eddystone Lighthouse by John Smeaton but with several improvements. The involvement of John Rennie as a consulting engineer in the project led to some contention for the credit upon the successful completion of the project; particularly between Alan Stevenson, Robert's son, and Sir John Rennie, son of the consulting engineer. Samuel Smiles, the popular engineering author of the time, published an account taken from Rennie, which assisted in establishing his claim. History, and the Northern Lighthouse Board, give full credit to Stevenson.
Stevenson's work on the Bell Rock and elsewhere provided a fund of anecdotes of the danger in which he placed himself. Returning from the Orkney Islands in 1794 on the sloop Elizabeth of Stromness, he had the good fortune to be rowed ashore when the Elizabeth became becalmed off Kinnaird Head; the ship was later driven back by a gale to Orkney, and there foundered losing all hands. On Bell Rock, which was covered by all but the lowest tide, he tells of an occasion when one of the crew boats drifted away leaving insufficient carrying capacity for the crew in the remaining boats; the situation was saved by the timely arrival of the Bell Rock pilot boat, on an errand to deliver mail to Stevenson.
Stevenson served for nearly fifty years as engineer to the Northern Lighthouse Board, until 1842,[1] during which time he designed and oversaw the construction and later improvement of numerous lighthouses. He innovated in the choice of light sources, mountings, reflector design, the use of Fresnel lenses, and in rotation and shuttering systems providing lighthouses with individual signatures allowing them to be identified by seafarers. For this last innovation he was awarded a gold medal by the William I of the Netherlands.
The period after Waterloo and the end of the continental wars was a time of much improvement of the fabric of the country, and engineering skills were much in demand. Besides his work for the Northern Lighthouse Board, he acted as a consulting engineer on many occasions, and worked with Rennie, Alexander Nimmo, Thomas Telford, William Walker, Archibald Elliot[2] and William Cubitt. Projects included roads, bridges, harbours, canals and railways, and river navigations. He designed and oversaw the construction of the Hutcheson Bridge in Glasgow, and the Regent Bridge[2] and approaches from the East to Edinburgh. He projected a number of canals and railways which were not built; and new and improved designs for bridges, some later adopted and implemented by his successors. He invented the movable jib and balance cranes as necessary part of his lighthouse construction; and George Stephenson acknowledged his lead in the selection of malleable rather than cast-iron rails for railways.
He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1815. He published an Account of the Bell Rock Lighthouse in 1824; a paper on the North Sea, establishing by evidence that it was eroding the eastern coastline of the United Kingdom, and that the great sandbanks were the spoil taken by the sea. He devised and tested the hypothesis that freshwater and saltwater at river mouths exist as separate and distinct streams. He contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, and published in a number of the scientific journals of the day.
Three of Stevenson’s sons became engineers: David, Alan, and Thomas; he also had a daughter, who assisted in writing and illustrating an account of the Bell Rock Lighthouse construction. Robert Louis Stevenson was his grandson, via Thomas.
Stevenson died on 12 July 1850 in Edinburgh.
Robert Stevenson constructed lighthouses, functional, lifesaving structures that silently do their job out of the way of civilisation, far from the eyes of the people they help, like giant monolithic watchtowers on the edge of the city making sure that danger is kept at bay and it's inhabitants remain safe. While his accomplishments are not as famous nor as glamorous as those of his son (Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island) they are no less important. Like other civil engineers who design the structures that make our lives more pleasant (transport structures, communications, sewerage etc), his designs enabled us to live the lives that we currently do: we have the ability to order/purchase goods from overseas with an almost 100% guaratee that the ship carrying them will arrive at port safely. While ships may use GPS, sonar and other navigation systems to safely traverse the seas, lighthouses were used prior to the development of these technologies.
Check out some of the other entries from the 'Men of Yore' series:
This stanza is a series of synonyms. It's like at least one other religious text (the Nag Hammadi) and it's pretty much like a dictionary: it uses a number of different examples in order to convey a single phenomenon. Like a person might say "a lava flow; a cup of tea; scalding steam; a burning fire", which are all similar because they describe something hot.
The phenomenon that the stanza is trying to convey might be: Powerful, Wodh like (as in 'blazing' with energy), imminence. As in the period immediately after moving from 'A' to 'Not-A' (like getting off of a train onto a station platform after a long journey).
