So Im late to the game I know...
I will reply nevertheless since I this has been quite big topic for my self...

Ive also been addicted to a cat, and it was the most irrational emotional roller coaster of my life so far. Without going into details, this completely turned around how I relate to the outside world. I truly believe that everything we experience outside is a reflection of the inside, and in this case this has been true in the way that I understand that the intense feelings that this situation has brought upon me have a lot to do with some internal lack of wholeness, or trauma if you want to call it like that.

I believe such moments happen with the sole purpose of directing our attention to the inside and really look at those feelings and use them to go deeper. For me the behavior of getting stuck with a particular moment in time, rerunning that scenario in the head over and over again has to do with us not allowing our selves to fully feel and accept the pain that was caused in us in that moment. So a part of us literally freezes in this moment, while life goes on, a part of us stays back in trauma.
I cannot say that I fully understand why those feelings towards one single person are that intense and that rare, and feel that unique like a once in a lifetime thing, but what I truly feel is that it is merely a mirror of something inside of us. A mirror that is there to teach us about our selves, and invites us to go deeper and look at all our deepest fears and wishes and examine them very well. In my case I mostly had to look at the relationship to and between my parents in the very first years of my life.

What is love there for, if not to teach us something? I now feel like I should thank this person for showing me all this insane attachment issues and lack of self love that I have been carrying around with me for so long. I am only talking about my own situation here, but for me I can now see that if the lose of one persons affection affects me so deeply, how should that relation or any other relationship on that level of intensity ever work out and be balanced in any way?

Why do we need a partner in the first place? I look at all the people that settle for mediocre relationships and I feel I never want to be in that place. Why not learn to be happy on your own, if you manage to get there I can guarantee you will attract a person of the gender of interest that will feel the same way. Would you like to be in a relationship with some one who feels he or she cannot live without you?

No one needs to deny his biological urges, but one might as well decide that the "quality" of sexual and intimate relationship that is generally being shown and experienced in our society is not worth the trouble.

Maybe non of this relates to your situation and maybe it does. Maybe your also experiencing some completely different kind of "love". I dont know.

Just let go man. It didn't work out, it happens, in fact the odds are staggeringly stacked against it working.

But is it something you want? That intense love and connection?

Then grow a shell (edit: in the sense of not being fragile and letting such things destroy you, rather than building an impenetrable wall that doesn't let anyone close), learn to accept the pain of when it does not work out, rather than shying away from it and shrinking rather than growing.

Suffering is part of life, if you fundamentally deny that, you're ignoring reality, and when people ignore reality, suffering inevitably follows.


tldr

Open up, embrace the pain, transcend it, go on to become closer and closer to who YOU are meant to be, what you truly desire (and I reckon it's not being celibate) will come.

But you gotta do your part. Become who you are.

Good post, agreed nex

I just saw this in my Youtube subscriptions today. I think it's a sign.

Hello everybody!

I tend to disagree with you. I think that a person is incomplete as is. There are two main routes one can take in order to attain the fullness of being. The first route is through the forming of a deep, romantic relationship with an another human being. This is the most common way, which is employed by the vast majority of people. The second route is through the devotion of your life to God (e.g. becoming a monk). Without going into the detail about the definition of God, I would like to say a few words about the technical aspect of being a monk and why it might not be the preferred route for you.

I see that you want to move a lot, do something and then “be on your way” and “disappearing with the wind”, while the life of a monk is all about staying at one place. It implies daily interactions with your follow monks and total obedience to the leadership of the monastery. And it is not a small feat! I myself spend 2-3 weeks every year at an Eastern Orthodox monastery and talk to the monks there. And I have learned that it is a heavy life, definitely not suitable for everybody. It is refreshing and relaxing to stay at a monastery for a limited period of time, but to stay there for your entire life asks lots of devotion. If your primary motivation to become a monk is a broken heart, the bitterness of unrequited love, a way of permanently dealing with the love matters, you will not be able to stay there for long I am afraid. Of course, you can become a wandering monk, but it is even a harder route. You might think that you can handle it, but can you really? Won’t you get bored after some time, become burdened by a constant lack of such basic things like food and a shower?

My point here is: deal with your unrequited love addiction first and then see whether the calling to become a monk still persists. It might happen that the calling will disappear as soon as you deal with your addiction.

This sounds familiar. In the beginning of my stalking “adventures”, it was about smiling at my love object (Melissa), joyfully greeting and hoping in this way to show my love for her and win her love. However, at some point I realized that it was pointless. She would not fall for me no matter what I do. But addicted as I was, I kept stalking here. But now, it was all about looking at her as contemptuously as I could. I spent many hours walking and looking out for her, and constantly playing a simulation in my mind of how I would give her a cold stare, telling her with my eyes “you hurt me sooooo bad, but I am OK without you” and keep walking without even stopping for one second. At this period in my life, I felt that the most important thing I could do was to stalk Melissa and give her this really awkward look, and then walk away from her as fast as I could. And then to repeat this same action on a daily basis: stalking – giving this awkward look – walking away.

People often say that from love to hate is just one step, and Thomas Fuller elaborated it into a saying that “The greatest hate springs from the greatest love”. This is exactly how I felt then. At first, in my imagination, I turned my crush into a beautiful angel and then into an evil bitch. Both images were equally incorrect. But that realization came much later, when my unrequited love addiction moved away and I regained the ability to look clearly and objectively at this matter.

So, returning to your personal situation, I would say that it was not her who caused your hurt (how could she? she barely knew you!), but it was your silly, unfounded fantasy about her that caused your hurt. Once you realize this, the pain will subside, you will become amazed how you got fooled by your own fantasy, basically living in an illusion all this time. “It is an easy task to build castles in the air, but hard to pull down” applies to unrequited love matters very well.

Don’t get me wrong, unconditional love for everybody is indeed the ideal you should try to achieve, no doubts about that. But what I am warning for is the illusion of unconditional love, which might look like the real unconditional love, but in reality is an egoistic, self-centered, conditional love-like feeling: “I love everybody, but only if they don’t command me, don’t irritate me, don’t talk trash behind my back, don’t say unkind words towards me, don’t smell like rotten eggs, don’t cheat on me, don’t punch me in the face, don’t steal from me, don’t rob me, don’t rape me etc”. The list of conditions people need to have in order to have your “unconditional” love is pretty much endless. It basically boils down to “if people behave nice towards me, I will love them back”.

You can spend your entire life meditating, doing psychedelic drugs and following a hippie lifestyle, truly believing that you reached the blissful unconditional love status towards everything and everybody. But what will happen, if you would be walking down the street and some thugs would beat the crap out of you, breaking your spinal cord with a leaden pipe, making you an invalid for your entire life, never be able to walk or move your arms again, completely ruining your life? Wouldn’t your unconditional love feeling be completely gone, leaving you lying in bed all day long, crying from hatred, sorrow and unfairness that happened to you?

The point I want to make here is that if you really want to cultivate the unconditional love towards all, you should start small. Your romantic partner is the ideal candidate for such a practice: you have to interact a lot with your partner and you will stumble upon thousands of things that irritate you about your partner. You have to break your ego, dampen your pride and become very humble in order to form a deep and lasting relationship with a person, who causes so much quarrels, troubles and discomfort. This is the true breaking of your ego, which takes many tears, sweat and time to accomplish, and not the illusory dissolution of the ego that you can experience on drugs or meditation, that goes away as soon as you return back to your everyday reality.

What you are doing here is changing the polarity of the feelings from ‘+’ to ‘-‘, while you need to lower the frequency (how often you think about her) and the amplitude (how much distress they cause) of the feelings. Every time you think about her, tell yourself: “this is not real, she is not real, this is a silly fantasy, I refuse to attach myself to this silly fantasy and fantasize about it”. This is hard work, you have to become an ever-vigilant gatekeeper of your own thoughts, filtering out the thoughts about Cat as soon as they enter your mind, refusing to play with them in any way. Remember: it is not your goal to realize that she is not the One for you (you already know this for a long time), but to see her for what she really is – a silly fantasy, an addiction, from which you want to get de-attached.

You changed the polarity, but your attention is still bound by your addictive thought patterns about Cat.


And if somebody told you that he has a pain in the arm, would you suggest to just cut the arm off, because no arm = no pain? Isn’t it much wiser to find the root of the pain and fix it, instead of simply cutting it off? Additionally, the problem with unrequited love the topic starter experiences can effectuate an enormous spiritual growth, if he deals with it correctly. Don’t deny him such an outstanding opportunity to grow.

Agree. “Transcend sexuality” is a fancy term for running away from your problems with love partner(s). One should not be running away or deny the problems, but face them and work to the best of your ability to solve the problems. In this way, there are no problems, but only opportunities to grow. Masturbation is definitely not a solution, but a quick fix, akin to getting drunk in order to forget your problems. It works as long as you are drunk, but the hangover is inevitable.

Your romantic partner is the best opportunity in your life to humble your pride and break your ego, stepping away from a self-centered lifestyle and starting to live your life to serve others instead of yourself.

Couldn’t agree more. However, the topic starter has no feelings for a real person, but for a silly fantasy about that person. And having feelings for a silly fantasy is…silly

I think this is a thing some people need to experience in order to grow. If there is one thing that such experiences can teach us, it is how little control we have over our own imagination and how easily we can get tricked by our own fantasies. The growth here is to learn to control your thought process, filtering out unwanted thought forms.

With kind regards,
A.

I recommended castration as an option as the topic of the thread is "Eliminating sexual desire and romantic love. Permanently." and Psilo wrote:



I assumed that he did not want to hear the same "Don't worry, you'll be fine and find what you're looking for" advice that he said was not helping. And if you truly want to escape being a slave of biologically-embedded hormones, getting rid of them (chemically or otherwise) might be a good solution.

I agree that castration is an extreme and likely unrealistic option and one that does not address the true, underlying problem. However, simply thinking about it and exploring the also-likely scary feelings that may arise with such thoughts could spur one to salvage their sexuality and find that it is not totally repulsive or worthless, but something to be nurtured and cared for. I should have made that explicit.

Quite indeed. Hardware solutions for software problems?

Suppose one does castration a few times, physical, chemical, make a tie in the penis, poor some asphalt over it, burn the whole intimate place down few times, bulldozers over it, etc etc, and then ending up with still having those feelings.
Duh..

One of my biggest fears with starting an intimate relationship is from why i joined this forum in the first place. They get close to me, know all about my clandestine activities, then betrays me. All it takes is one phone call to the popo.

I can't shake that feeling of being vulnerable, regarding my personal liberty. I have no qualsms about being vulnerable about other things, but not psychs. I know many of you Nexians are married or in loving relationships, but this feeling is my biggest deterrent from pursuing a relationship. Maybe it explains why i settled for dwelling in a shallow fantasy.

I know your mileage may vary, but I can't see myself even considering a relationship with someone who wasn't open to entheogens. It's such a fundamental thing to me. What would we have in common?

I mean I've built my entire life around entheogens, and Ayahuasca in particular. I envision that if I ever meet 'the one', she will be someone who walks the same Path and whose devotion is of the same order of magnitude as mine. Of course I can't know and anything is possible, but almost all my friends are drinkers and pretty much all of my social activity is related to Ayahuasca in one way or another, so how can it be otherwise?

How couldn't it be? Serious question...

I think you nailed it right there.

Many years ago I was bitching to a friend about my failed love life, and how I was looking for a woman with certain qualities, and this friend, who also happened to be a sort-of ex girlfriend of mine too, said that the perfect woman I was looking for sounded an awful lot like myself, and that maybe if I concentrated on building a more solid relationship with myself, I wouldn't have to rely on women to fill in the various gaps in my inner life.
And, she said, once I had accomplished that (I'm still working on it!), I would be able to treat all the people in my life, incuding my romantic interests, as individuals rather than props for my fragile ego.

Women can be so fucking wise!

Ha ha! No shit! I think most people who cut their own twig 'n' berries off are not addressing the true, underlying problem, i.e. that they are completely psychotic!

This is what I use when my excess sexual energy gets overwhelming to help refocus this amazing creative energy source into something that isn't so frustrating https://www.3ho.org/arti...erything-kriya-sat-kriya

This can also help with the "not-enoughness" feelings of unrequited love. I hope this helps someone.

when in doubt, read a few of these stories & essays. They describe the pleasure principle very well & our inability to escape it without dying in the process

http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~raha/793CA_web/PenalColony.pdf

http://heavysideindustri...etter-to-his-father1.pdf

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~mshell/Shell.%20EK.Chapter%201.pdf

Our natures do pursue,
Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,
A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die.

Or just grab a (sterile) scalpel and manually sever your genitalia from your body if you want to eliminate the physical end-point of your eros. It's up to you. I am not a medical professional. I am not a licensed counselor or mental health professional or some stupid stuck-up shaman/guru who is in the know on twelve "secret" paths to enlightenment.... I'm a human being typing away on a clickety-clacking keyboard suggesting you do what I do when suppressing the sex drive: ignore it, and channel the energy and nature of The Eros into reading great literature, alongside practicing your art of choice (e.g. Newton & Tesla died virgins).

I did not mean to recommend castration as a solution to unrequited love (as it obviously would not work for the reasons you listed - love is deeper than our genitals). I recommended it as an option if Psilo truly does want to eliminate sexual feelings and hormonal urges altogether.

This was the sense I got from his original post: that he wanted to eliminate his sexuality entirely and use his refreshed focus to become a polymath. With statements like "I am just sick and tired of being a slave to my hormones," "I just don't want to be sex driven," and "I can't control those external sensory inputs. And it destroys me" I got the impression that he might think there is something biologically off that can be corrected medically. Also the title of the thread is "Eliminating sexual desire and romantic love. Permanently." which implies a desire to do so.

Psilo: I'm sorry if my mention of castration is scary or not useful; it was just something I thought about in response to your statements above. If you believe that your problem solely derives from your unrequited love and not from any deeper desire to totally eliminate biological sexual urges, then please ignore my recommendation and work on spiritually addressing your true issue.

I have feelings for this woman because my primitive primate brain is only thinking about what it is programmed to do. As Rick Sanchez once said, "Listen Morty, I hate to break it to you, but what people calls "love" is just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed. It hits hard, Morty, then it slowly fades, leaving you stranded in a failing marriage. I did it. Your parents are gonna do it. Break the cycle, Morty. Rise above. Focus on science. " But as AstraLex would say, Rick Sanchez is also a bitter old man, like Severus Snape.

I don't care for children, i don't want any tethers. I don't want to live in a suburban house, with a 9-5 job, and dreaming about what could have been had i not settled down.

I just want to silence that stupid inner primate. Cutting off my genitals would deprive me of testosterone, which isn't only a sex hormone. It's a growth hormone. I highly doubt most Buddhist and Shaolin monks have castrated themselves. They have the mental discipline to keep focus on what they want to do. I need to get to that level. Maybe i should join a monastery...

I dont mean to be offensive, but what is with all the frustration and resignation? I mean seriously just because you cannot get what you wanted, doesnt mean you have to resign sex forever. And if it wouldnt be more then a primitive urge of your primate brain, you would have long forgotten about this one women, and just found the next best uterus. Do you believe most animals still cry about the missed opportunity of the past mating season?

Yes we as humans are in a pretty messed up situation, still bound to our instincts, but at the same time with a conscious access to a rational mind, and also the deepest mystical dimensions of life. Of course we get entangled at times. But that doesnt mean we have to throw the towel completely. I see it as an oppurtunity to rise above! To evolve! Here a agree with your citation of Rick, but to me rising above means to transform those feelings, to ride them like a wave. We are co-constructing our future culture. Would you prefer to see humanities future (well if there is one, I admit, thats not so certain atm)as genderless asexual beings or as beings that are able to consciously enjoy sex and love, and use those activities in their fullest potential.
Yes there are Monks in this world that want to spend their entire life in monasteries, denying there sex lifes. But there are also those traditions that fully embrace coitus as something mystical and as an expression of the deepest mysteries of life.

If you choose to decide that sex and being drawn to another person isnt more then a play of chemicals thats your decision, but dont believe that there arent some other people who have managed to frame all that in a completely different light, and hold those experiences as high in mind as a lot of us here do so with the psychedelic experience.

Hello Nexians and guests!

I understand where you are coming from. Indeed, all of us are guilty of breaking the law in one way or another. The thoughts about wanting to live a secluded life and accompanying feelings of fear, as a result of our law-breaking activities, are quite natural and automatic. However, a relationship, as far as I can tell, is all about trust.

You see, there is no way of knowing for sure whether you partner is sincere when she tells you that she loves you, that she will stay with you no matter what, that she never cheats on you, doesn’t lie to you etc. You simply believe that it is the case and trust her. This is the greatest form of trust a person can give to an another person and that’s why it hurts so much if your love partner betrays you. So, in order to start and continue a true, loving, intimate, and (hopefully) everlasting relationship, you have to learn to shut down the thoughts about distrust, doubt, fear and disbelief as soon as you spot them entering your mind. Because, like I said, the whole relationship thing is based primarily on faith and not on knowledge. If you lose faith in your partner, you will most likely lose your relationship.

So, returning to your point about calling the cops – don’t worry about this too much. Unless you are running a full-blown drugs lab from your home apartment (in this case you might consider relocating your activities to somewhere else as to not put your innocent partner at risk), you would be fine. It might indeed imply that you wouldn’t be able to extract and do psychedelics at any given moment like you do now, but you would make a schedule instead: “on Monday, I spend the whole evening with my girlfriend and on Tuesday, when my girlfriend is having her dancing classes, I dedicate 2 hours to extracting DMT”. Again, if extracting and doing psychedelics forms such an important part of your life, your girlfriend should have a certain tolerance towards drugs related issues, so it will not create unnecessary tensions in your relation.

At times, it would feel that having a loving relationship requires you to make lots of compromises, limiting your personal freedom. And guess what? It is! And that’s exactly why having an intimate relationship is such a good thing for your spiritual growth. You see, for our ego it’s all about “Me, me, me!”: only our personal freedom counts, we want to have everything in our way and our ego is hurt badly when we have to listen, negotiate and make compromises with others.

So, having a deep, all-encompassing relationship with an another human being requires us to learn to control our ego, shutting it down at will at any given moment. If cultivating the unconditional love towards all is indeed what you want, the first step towards this goal would be learning to control your ego and its selfish desires, because it is the nature of ego to place self-centered conditions to unconditional love one ought to have. I can’t think of a better way of learning to control your ego than having a full commitment to a relationship. Your ego would prefer the eternal dwelling in a shallow fantasy than to lose even a bit of its reign.

I would indeed say that You see, there are two kinds of people who decide to not have a loving relationship. The former say something along the lines: “Loving relation is a beautiful thing, but I found something better (e.g. God, science, art etc.) and I commit myself fully to this other cause.” The latter, like Severus Snape and Rick Sanchez, are thinking in the way: “I wanted to love and be loved once, but it didn’t work out for me, so the whole love thing is pointless! Anybody believing otherwise is a fool!” In order to deal with the resulting feelings of bitterness, this kind of people resorts to cynicism and self-pity, downplaying love as “just a chemical reaction and biological programming to breed”, desperately trying to lose themselves in their hobbies and professional activities, or alcohol and drugs. So, if you decide to not have a relationship, it should be a decision based on love for something else and not out of bitterness.

Our desires are prone to change. What you want now, is probably not what you wanted 10 years ago, and is perhaps not what you would want 10 years later. So, not wanting children or settling down might change for you in the future.

How do you think a person acquires the mental discipline to do anything, including “silencing that stupid inner primate”? Is it magically given to you when you join a monastery, or is it a result of a hard mental training? Of course it is the latter. The key here is to learn to control your thoughts, only giving attention to the thoughts that you want, and keeping all other thoughts out. Mastering your thought process is not something that can only learned at a monastery far away, but it is a virtue you can practice every day, all day long. Make a list of thoughts you don’t want to enter your mind: all thoughts about Cat, fear, doubt, disbelief, anger etc. Basically, refuse the access for all thoughts that are accompanied by feelings of fear, frustration and/or irritation.

It might be helpful to see your thoughts as separate entities that are not part of your being, so you can de-attach from them more easily. If you spot an unwanted thought, just say to it calmly: “This is an unwanted thought, I refuse this thought to enter my mind” and move your attention to a wanted thought or the task at hand. The more progress you make, the less you will become a slave to your (automatic) thoughts, and the more you will become a master of concentration and mental willpower. And be thankful to Cat that she presented you with such a rich array of unwanted thoughts that you now can master and get a full control of your mind as a result.

There are two ways how this will work out for you. First, your soul partner, the love of your life, might indeed be an Ayahuasca drinker, so you would follow this path together. Second, your partner wouldn’t be an Aya lover, maybe she wouldn’t do any psychedelics at all. And you know, this would be a good thing! It might sound strange to you, as you have built your entire life around entheogens, but there is much more to life than only drinking Aya. In fact, doing psychedelics is just a small portion of the whole human experience. Open up to the very notion of having a relationship and you might find the right girl for you! Will it mean that your life will become less Aya-centered and more diverse? Yes! Will it be a good thing? Definitely yes!

With kind regards,
A.

The feelings we sometimes develop for another is a different thing to sexual drive.

The purpose of sexual drive is the production of offspring and it is primitive indeed - it occurs even in invertebrates.
Romantic love is a much more recent evolutionary invention and its purpose is to create bonding between parents (or in the case of humans, potential parents, even when such an eventuality is only a fantasy) for the protection and upbringing of their offspring.
So it's not that primitive and probably has to do more with the higher, conscious brain. It takes some fantasizing - and therefore consciousness and intelligence - to fall in love.

While castration might solve the 'problem' of sex drive, I'm not sure it would be an effective vaccine against the kind of hopeless and painful love the OP has been experiencing, which is a kind of mental obsession.


Thanks for the thoughtful reply. If you asked me which fate I'd prefer, I'd choose option 1
I have a great passion for this work and really don't see life for myself outside of it. It has given my life a meaning; after years of my believing the Universe was a hostile, hopeless and uninteresting place, these plants came along and showed me that wasn't the case.

I've made the following observations about my Aya friends:

* Relatively few (compared to the general population) are in relationships
* They have more friends and more close friends than the general population
* Many believe love should not be limited to loving one person, and relationships should not be limited to the romantic type
* They tend to favor community living, doing things together, they like to call themselves a family or a tribe
* Because of the wider social network and [apparently] more meaningful non-romantic relationships, they seem to have less of a need for romantic relationships
* When they are in relationships, it's with another Aya brother or sister. The stronger their commitment to the Path, the stronger that of their partner.
* In many cases those relationships don't last. But when they end, the ex-partners remain friends and often continue to work together (the fact the 'medicine family' is a relatively small one may be a contributing factor)


I don't know where you're coming from, but it's not just drinking Aya, it's a way of life. Gathering together in singing circles, studying medicine music, spending time in and appreciating nature, growing plants, having curiosity about Life and the Universe, being on a path of spiritual discovery and a quest to become a better person.

I don't exclude the possibility that my future partner may not be an Aya drinker, but it's very unlikely that she wouldn't relate to at least a couple of things mentioned in the above paragraph.
So let me repeat: if she doesn't relate to any of it, what will we have in common? What will make me want to spend time with her?

And if she does, she'll probably be open-minded enough to embrace my Aya drinking even if she doesn't participate herself... initially anyway

My reasons for resigning from sex forever stems from the fact that i idolise the asetic monastic lifestyle, in conjunction with the loss of love. Every time i got laid, it was because alcohol was part of the equation. I hate that part of myself, and often think that i'd rather be a virgin than the way it happened. The idea of love has been closed off since falling for her. I laid my heart at her feet, and she walked away. So it sat there for years, deacying into the earth. So it's pretty dead and gone. One would need to perform the equivalent of a necromantic blood ritual, complete with mass human sacrifice to bring it back to life.