| Information about Tao of Dating |
| Dr. Alex Benzer is a Harvard graduate and former consultant turned dating advice guru. Dr. Alex offers some of the most intelligent and interesting ideas you will read, both based in practical experience and ancient Tao philosophy. You may have heard of the Tao of Physics, but don't miss the equivalent of the Tao of picking up women in the exellent newsletters by Dr. Alex. To find out more about Tao of Dating, visit them at www.thetaoofdating.com. |
<< main archive home < Tao of Dating archive home
No-Self & the Astounding Power of Your Mind
by Dr. Alex Benzer
of Tao of Dating
April 10th, 2008
I have a little confession to make here.
I don't really care about dating all that much.
Before I tell you more about that, I want to tell you about something utterly fascinating I read about the other day.
It was the story of a Dutch man who broke the world record for being submerged in ice.
Basically, he filled up a big ol' vat with ice, stripped down to his underwear, and stepped into it. Only his head was sticking outside the vat.
Now I don't know about you guys, but on my recent skiing trip, just taking the few steps outside in the cold to get to the hot tub was pretty uncomfortable. And that was only 5 seconds.
Most people experience excruciating pain from putting their hand in ice water for just a minute or so.
So how long do you thing this naked man lasted in a vat of ice surrounding his whole body? Ten minutes? Twenty? Maybe a full half-hour?
A half hour would be physiologically implausible, since by then someone submerged in water colder than 45 F (about 7 C) would die of hypothermia.
But our man stayed in the ice for 72 minutes. That's right -- OVER A FULL HOUR.
And he suffered absolutely no adverse physiologic effects. No frostbite. Nothin'.
His core temperature was monitored throughout the event, and it remained a normal 37 C/ 98.6 F.
I am not making this up. This was fully filmed, monitored and documented. No gimmicks involved. You can even check out YouTube videos on him, which are unreal. His name is Wim Hof.
What the hell is going on here?
Well, our man here is practicing a meditation technique derived from Tibetan Tantric Buddhism called 'tumo', or 'inner fire.'
It's actually a meditation on deep compassion, which has as its side effect the generation of serious body heat.
How serious?
American scientists heard about this practice of tumo, and traveled to Tibet to examine it firsthand.
They found some Buddhist monks who were willing to volunteer for their project. The monks demonstrated their enthusiasm by sitting outside in the dead of Tibetan winter with no shirt.
Then the scientists draped them with cold wet sheets, just to make things more interesting.
After about an hour, the sheets were DRY. The monks had generated enough extra body heat not only to keep themselves warm while sitting outside half-naked in the Tibetan winter, but also to DRY frozen wet sheets.
Dr Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School studied some of these monks and found that they were capable of raising their external body temperature by 7 C (about 13 F). Other scientists observed rises of over 17 C.
They were also able to drop their metabolic rate by 64%. Note that sleep drops your metabolism by about 15%, deep meditation about 17%.
So how were these monks and Wim Hof able to achieve these superhuman results?
Simple: through the application of the power of the mind.
One of the principles of NLP is that if someone else can do something, so can you. You just have to learn their strategies -- and APPLY them.
And you can do amazing things if you were to apply the power of YOUR mind.
So as far as dating goes, sure, I find it interesting and all. And I did write a book called 'The Tao of Dating'. And there's a lot more to life than dating.
See, I was trained as a neuroscientist and physicist in college. Ended up in medical school and where I developed an interest in Eastern wisdom and hypnosis.
I was also raised with the old Persian mystic poets like Rumi and Sa'di and Hafez.
So what I'm really REALLY interested in is the power of the mind in all its creative capacity. I firmly believe that every one of you reading this article has infinite potential -- including you.
And I'm deeply interested in helping you use that mind power for your continued growth and fulfillment. To become the best possible version of you in this lifetime.
Now, it so turns out that dating is a great platform to start with. Because to be truly successful with women in the long run, you have to sort through a lot of stuff. Take a hard, honest look at your life. And decide to put in the effort to be an awesome guy.
And lord knows that pretty women are a damn good impetus for taking action: "Improve this part of your life and I promise you'll score more babes!" Some evolutionary psychologists would even argue that all of our achievements as men have scoring babes as their ultimate end, whether we're conscious of it or not. And that's fine, too.
Everything that I teach you can be applied to dating. And everything that I teach you can be applied to every other part of your life as well.
Once again, the key word here is 'apply'. And that's why I created the Metamorphosis Mentorship Program -- to give you a full month of disciplined, regimented practice to put into practice everything you already know.
There's a saying by the great poet Sa'di which says, "He who knows but does not act is like the bee that has no honey."
True learning means doing, pure and simple. And one of the things we've been doing with the guys from the Metamorphosis Program is a simple daily meditation.
It's a meditation on the concept of 'no-self', or 'anatta' as they call it in Buddhist tradition.
The idea is this: if you were to look at a river, close your eyes, open them again and look at the same river, it wouldn't be the same river. Every molecule of water in that river moved, so it's effectively a brand-new river. The Greek Heraclitus put it thus: "You can't bathe in the same river twice."
Similarly, right now you just took a breath. And you read this last sentence, which made some neurons fire that weren't firing before. Trillions of molecules of air joined your body, and billions of neurons secreted neurotransmitters and activated.
Voila, a new you. Every moment of existence.
As such, the concept of a static self makes no sense. If there is no self, and there is only no-self, now what? How is this useful to dating, the ostensible subject of this article?
Turns out this can be a pretty useful concept, especially in dating. Let's break it down according to the 7 steps of successful dating that I enumerated before:
1) Find:
If there is no self, then you're not bound by some notion of who you are and where you can or cannot go. You would be willing to go more places and try more things that are 'out of character'. This would mean meeting a lot more women and expanding the numbers at the top of your pipeline.
2) Meet
This is the biggie. No self means no ego means no fear. You can't get dinged because there's nothing to ding, which means you're pretty much bulletproof. This means you can approach women anywhere -- in the market, on the street, at the gas station, wherever.
3) Get contact information
Again, no self means you're much more willing to get it done. You're less afraid of rejection, more interested in getting the task done.
4) Follow-up
No self means less fear and less uncertainty, less adherence to protocol, and more flow with how you feel about something. This will help you take the right action (Te) when it comes time to follow up with her.
5) Second encounter:
No self means no ego, means you're more interested in her, since there's no self to worry about. This means you'll focus your attention on her, which is powerfully attractive. You'll also be less afraid of screwing up -- what's there to screw up?
You're also less likely to take anything she says or does personally, which is the right thing to do, especially if she's testing you. Basically you're imperturbable, which is very attractive.
6) Progression to intimacy
Similar to 5 -- you will progress because you're flowing with your feeling and desire, vs being afraid of doing too much or not enough. Sex becomes a lot less about performance and more about togetherness and having a shared experience, which paradoxically makes your performance better.
7) Third encounter and beyond
From the outside, No-self looks like incredible self-sufficiency, backbone and imperturbability. Not only is this attractive, but it also allows you to be a conduit for love without lapsing into possessiveness or other counterproductive modes.
We covered this in the second session of the Metamorphosis Mentorship Program. That audio is not available to the public, but the first session in which we do the Galactic Consciousness meditation -- which some of the students called 'mind-blowing' -- is up and available to you right here. Just scroll to the bottom of the page:
http://www.thetaoofdating.com/metamorphosis.php
Wow! One tiny little concept can have such vast ramifications? Yes -- if you APPLY it and make it a part of your life. A part of your actual BEHAVIOR.
Everyone wants some kind of change -- the trick is to make it happen. As a behavioral change specialist, I've found that certain elements help make the change happen.
Leverage is one. Accountability is another. Repetition is essential. And hypnotic trance work does wonders, too. The 60-min audio above gives you a dose of all of those. The Galactic Consciousness meditation is about 10 min long, around the 35min mark of the audio.
It's yours to download, hear and implement -- and to observe its positive effects on your life, especially when it comes to dating.
The power is within you,
Dr Alex
PS: Can you think of two friends who would also ind this article useful? Then feel free to do them a favor and forward the article to them.
PPS: I'm interested in your questions and comments regarding dating, persuasion and
networking, so please do send them to me. I can be reached at dra***x@th***.com[ ? ]
INFORMATION ABOUT THIS ARCHIVE:
This is an article which has been archived from a
contribution from Tao of Dating,
republished here with explicit permission. Your accessing this article and
any contents within it do not denote any transfer or permission of further
reproduction. Your access of the contents of this article is for private
and personal use only.
By accessing this article, you understand that the information contained in within is an expression of opinions, and it should be used for personal entertainment purposes only. You are responsible for your own behavior, and none of anything you read herein is to be considered legal or personal advice. You also understand and agree that any products you may order as a result of your reading about them in this article are produced and sold independently from us and that any complaints, disputes or other issues which you may have with the sponsors of these products are to be dealt with directly with said sponsors and we are not responsible in any way whatsoever for any issues which you may have with them. If you are not in agreement with any of this, please leave this site now.
DISCLAIMERS:
This contents of this article are reproduced here with the
explicit permission of Tao of Dating and is
Copyright© by Tao of Dating.
Visual enhancements and search features have been added by the fastseduction.com
webmaster to facilitate the reading and researching of the content. Products,
services, or external web sites mentioned or linked to in this article does not denote
endorsement of those items. The contents reprinted here are the opinion of the
original writer(s) and are not necessarily the opinion of, nor endorsed by, the owner(s)
or operator(s) of fastseduction.com. The article enhancements are generated
automatically and there may be occasions where the visual cues don't correlate exactly
with the textual context; most of the time, though, the enhancements are pretty
accurate.
