[Random Journal]
Hey, back again at midnight, just felt like writing a little before going to sleep, as it helps me sort my thoughts for the day and wind down.
Today was a really good day, my mood was good, which means I’m on an upwards swing in my depression curve, my energy levele were really great, thanks to the huberman morning protocol and to waking up when the sun isn’t already high up. Means my circadian rhythm is slowly recovering.
It’s not like I feel normal energy levels again, but definitely a vast improvement to just a week ago, when I fell asleep while sitting in the backseat of the car, even though music was blasting in my ear and it was the middle of the day…
Some further thoughts on abstinence:
While many people on this forum are very religious and draw strength from praying to god (or their respective religious entity), I am thoroughly atheistic and it’s impossible for me to believe in such things.
I normally am proud of that and think it’s a good thing, but in this case of practicing abstinence, I have to draw my spirituality from within, from my values system, my ethic.
So I need to go and debate - in my head - how I feel about masturbation and sexuality in a moral way.
That can bring a number of difficulties, because it’s not an external force imposing rules on me, but it’s myself. Meaning, I have to stay true to myself when judging the morality of what I do and separating my sex drive or arousedness from my logically thought out rules for abstinence.
I do want to accept and love my own body more and I believe I can achieve that, even prohibiting myself to masturbate at all, but there will probably be a day where I’m so horny that I use this reasoning to be able to - in good conscience - go to town on myself.
“Well if i love myself and my body and I respect my sexual desires, why can’t I make myself feel good and masturbate?”
I might have to get a system in place to somehow prevent that from happening, at least until I have a somewhat better picture of how sex and sexuality really should look like.
We can always write the rules down ourselves, but I think it’s not that we don’t know them. I mean we do need to reason and rationalize with our logical side every time our primal brain wants to relapse. It’s more that we let those rules be touchable in a moment of weakness. We need a rule that stands between the rules and the haggling and debating primate and the logical side, thats eventually getting ripped apart by rationalizations.
We need something you can’t argue away.
Let’s say, the one rule that comes before the others would be: “If you want to question the rules, you have to at least wait a day”. Good, that lowers the possibility of relapsing, because the next day, the urges might be weaker and the logic brain strong enough to overrule them. Now we relapse more seldom.
But we don’t want to relapse at all. So we need a better “Rule 1”. How about:
“If you want to question the rules, you need to read a manifest of why this ruleset of abstinence is in place.” That would put the primal brain up against an argument from a time where the logical side was extremely strong. Theres only a very slim chance we could rationalize that.
But slim is still not none.
And we also still need a way to enforce this rule. Because if I’m really horny I will probably just say “fuck it, I won’t abide to even one rule”. We can make that one rule very present, reroute our adult site blocker to a copy of the manifesto and ruleset everytime we try and open bad things. But even then, we may ignore it still.
But yeah, I think these steps may help those atheists among you, who are very vulnerable towards breaking their own rules and rationalizing their overstepping until its too late. It’s just something I thought about and it kind of developed while writing this.
If I think of a complete solution, there’s gonna be another journal entry here. For now, I am really tired and will sleep, because I have to drive very far tomorrow and I need to be awake to do that.
It’s late, so watch out and don’t let your primal brain catch you off guard. Focus on being kind to yourself and do the things that bring you calm and tranquility in the evenings. Really feel the importance of them too - when meditating, really feel like you are a monk that controls his body and that people look up to.
Focus on how good and pure these evening rituals feel. Experience calming down in the evening with the same attention you would experience the slowly smoothing surface of a pond, in which the ripples of a thrown stone fade away - one after another until it’s a near mirrorlike and perfect reflection of the forest behind it.
Cheers!
(7:55am)
(well, I’m on vacation)
Maybe I’m a little narcissistic, but I think scientists call it autoeroticism and it’s pretty common. It went away easily, because I took a cold shower and I had no intentions of touching it anyway.