emoticons

The pressure to be thoughtful. It’s an interesting thing - this feeling that I need to post something thoughtful here. I’m feeling tension emerge in my abdomen. There’s a belief that there’s a right and a wrong way to engage in this community with no clarity on what is right or wrong. Noticing that and letting that be.

Mars feels like a really important backup plan. If there’s even a small chance that Earth is fucked from global warming, we need to be able to go to Mars. I heard a cool concept that we can basically artificially create global warming on Mars by putting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Unless it’s life or death, I personally wouldn’t move to a planet with less than a million people on it (imagine Austin is the entire world, that feels like the bare minimum for me).

How much money and time would it take to get a million people to Mars?

... No belief is true, no matter how popular or plausible

COVID Vaccines: is the cure is worse than the disease (these days)? I don’t get COVID vaccines anymore. I did the first round while we were still in lockdown.

I stand by the choice to get vaccinated then. We didn’t know what was happening, lots of people were dying, good statistics were hard to come by (good interpretations even harder), and the virus hadn’t mutated yet.

It wasn’t great for me: two shots separated by a month; 5.5 days after the first I got shingles (apparently thousands of other people also got at that exact time) and then after the 2nd I was sicker than I’ve almost ever been. It lasted about 2.5 days and then was VOOM instantly cleared up. It was weird and felt unnatural. But perhaps when I later got COVID, it would have been WAY worse, without having gotten the vaccine.

Now, I don’t believe it’s worth it. The experience of having COVID is way less. It’s less deadly. There’s not a chance of herd immunity. And I’ve got friends who have awful long COVID from the vaccine. I haven’t done all the research, and anyone who’s tried to tell me about the research has seemed stilted to one side or another that had me take their interpretations with a huge grain of salt.

Some Thoughts on Boundaries. Boundaries are mine. My portals to connection. They’re statements of fact: “whoops, I’m sorry, it turns out I can’t love from here anymore.”

The purest form doesn’t require anyone else to uphold. I can say “no” to a party I don’t want to go to. I can turn off my phone at bedtime. Asking someone not to interrupt me or not answering emails after work can feel a little trickier to uphold, because I have to be willing to walk away.

There are a bunch of socially agreed upon boundaries that are upheld by law enforcement, like cease and desists or restraining orders. It’s often not simple—in Texas I have a right to refuse anyone setting foot on my property (but what about racism, when my property is a business?).

There are some thoughts for now...

What do you think are the biggest planetary potentials? I want to think of it in a bunch of ways, but one is through the lens of things we want to improve, eg:

1) What are the biggest problems/threats/embarrassments? and another is

2) What are the greatest potentials? I'll post some examples in the comments

Premature Ejaculator? Try edging! I’ve gotten into some conversations lately with heterosexuals and How do I not prematurely ejaculate? has come up a lot.

I never really thought about this how because from a young age I used the when you get close to cumming and it’s too early, use the grandma visualization. Grandma meaning: someone/something I don’t want to have sex with. Pick a different word if you want to boink your nana.

This kinda got me over the hump and I never had problems but recently I filmed a scene with a tantra teacher who gave me a crash course in edging. Edging is a masturbation practice where a scale of 1-10 is used. 10 means I’m going to blow no matter what. 9 is I’m going to blow if the status quo remains. 8 is I can sense myself getting close. 1 is I’m not really horny.

This tantra teacher ejaculated multiple times in the span of 90 minutes (5 or so?). He also had a few orgasms where he didn’t ejaculate. He said it was the result of edging training. Those further heights stimulated my interest.

Key points:
1. Jerk off as much as you want.
2. Decide whether you’re going to shoot before you start.
3. Imagine the possibility that all the energy generated somehow stores in your sexiness when you don’t cum (the teacher edges to get ready for things like social events or even sex.)
4. Get as close to 9.5 as you can get without shooting.
5. The practice of building it up is equally important to the practice of not hitting 10.

I spent about a week on it and it was really clicking and enjoyable, porn or no porn.

Then I had the idea of trying it during sex instead of masturbation.

Key point:

I told my boyfriend.

I told him because he REALLY likes when I cum inside of him and our healthy codependency on that was it was a sign of connection for me to nut in him.

I said, I’m practicing this thing. I hope you like it. You can support me in it by staying completely still when I say, hold still.

If he wiggles or flexes his anal muscles it can take my 9 to 10.

The first time we did it, as I got to 9, my cock was kinda dry heaving but not shooting, maybe just a drop or two came out AND he actually thought the sensation of my cock pulsating inside him was hotter. Now I probably hit 9.5 a few times each session. We still always finish with a 10 but because of all the cardio that last build up is crazy vigorous so he gets a really intense ride out of it.

I think straight guys who tell their ladies they’re trying this are in for a treat. Sex has co-vulnerabilities. For the receiver, at least when I’m receiving, I want to be simultaneously objectified and subjectified. I want to be a hot person who’s loved. For the penetrator, at least for me, if I’m not high enough on the scale, say 5 or 6, I’ll lose my erection. If I go too high too fast I’ll blow my load too soon.

It seems REALLY hard to hold these vulnerabilities in consciousness. I think edging while fucking addresses all these issues in a very collaborative and fun way.

The first time I described it to a couple and asked the woman if she was ok if he tried it, she responded with a sly joy and said, Sounds fun to me. <3

Happy fucking!

Are We Ever Awake/Free/Thriving Enough To Not Practice? Through the years, I’ve had periods in my life where I feel so overwhelmingly good that all my daily spiritual practices (yoga, meditation, prayer, Big Mind process, relatefulness, spiritual study, etc) fall to the wayside.

When I feel super awake, connected to everyone and everything, able to flow with whatever is happening, in an unshakeable trust that Basic Goodness is all there is, it’s really easy for me to go: Well, this is it. I’m done. No point in doing any practice of any kind anymore. And that’s not to say that I abandon practice entirely. I still lead my sessions online a few times a week or whatever, but the underlying attitude in me is this is all optional.

And yet, the feedback that I keep getting from Life is that I do, in fact, need practice.

There’s something about making the daily commitment to presence, to myself, to Spirit, and dedicating one or several periods of my day to some form of spiritual practice that is just so nourishing.

And when I stop doing it, it’s like if I stop doing physical exercise. After a while things start feeling kinda stagnant, and my way of being in my life gets wonky. I’m more likely to make choices that could hurt me and the people close to me.

I’m grateful that I can always come back to the routine of one or more daily practices. It feels healthy. : )

Learn about Bitcoin. Your future self will very likely be grateful you did. I think understanding Bitcoin is in everyone’s best interest.

Although everyone’s heard about Bitcoin at this point, I think it’s still mostly misunderstood (and misrepresented).

I also think it’s here to stay, and will become increasingly significant and enmeshed in all our lives in the coming years and decades.

Also, learning about Bitcoin necessarily involves learning about money, and I think the subject of money is also widely misunderstood (to everyone’s detriment).

My experience engaging with the subject of Bitcoin has been extremely enriching. Yes, my net worth has grown because of it, but that doesn’t even seem like the most valuable thing I’ve received. Here are a few things I’ve gotten out of it:

-Holding bitcoin through the euphoria of its highs (in dollar terms) and the despair of its lows, has helped me develop levels of equanimity and resolve that I frankly didn’t know I had in me.

-Learning about things like Austrian economics, sound money, fiscal responsibility and libertarian principles has, I think, made me a more genuinely integral/integrative thinker. It has tempered my natural left-leaning idealism with what feels like a more grounded, common sense simplicity.

-Understanding the story of Bitcoin (and of its pseudonymous creator) has shaken me out of a cynical malaise that I didn’t know I was in, where I was assuming that it was almost impossible to have any significant positive impact on the world.

-Thinking of my savings in bitcoin terms instead of dollars/pesos has made me view my life on a much larger time scale, thinking in years and decades instead of days or months (while still living in the immediacy of the moment).

So, I want to invite you all to learn about Bitcoin. I’ll share a few great places to start below, and I’m down to converse about it anytime (it’s one of my favorite subjects).

I don’t think links work in these posts yet (just sent that feedback) so I’ll just name the resources, you can easily find them by googling:

*The Legendary Treasure of Satoshi Nakamoto by Tomer Strolight. This is a fantastic blog post on Bitcoin’s origin story. It’s philosophical, it’s spiritual, it’s awesome. And it’s now also been adapted into a great short film on YouTube, so just search for it there, it’s on Swan Bitcoin’s channel.

*How Money and Banking Work (and Why They’re Broken Today). Another fantastic short film on YouTube, by financial analyst and author Lyn Alden (who, by the way, I’m pretty sure is operating from integral awareness, though she’s probably never heard of Ken Wilber or integral theory). The short film is a summary of her excellent book Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make It Better.

A couple of awesome introductory books are:

*The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous (if you lean more conservative or libertarian)

*A Progressive’s Case for Bitcoin by Jason Maier (if you’re more left-leaning).

*And finally, if you’re ready for the deep dive, there’s a free online college-level course at Saylor Academy that’s called PRDV151: Bitcoin for Everybody. That was the course that REALLY helped me grok this vast subject.

When you do decide to dive in, let me know how it goes!