I’m playing around on my acoustic six string this morning, and have thoughts about improv that I think reverberate and echo widely into game and life.
When I was 16 I’d goof around haphazardly on the family stand up piano in the basement. Being of mild cluster C tentencies (anorexia, obsessive compulsive, struggling against neurotic thoughts) I liked to do a lot of tricky finger excersices. My thinking was that this would naturally lead into musical ability.
Later I wandered into the high school music classroom, during a free period, when all students could structure their own time. One guy was doing some simple chord progressions, with some non-technical melody in the right hand, using a slow tempo. It was a life changeing eye opener that I’ve never forgotten. I tell this story often. He put emotion into his music, and that was far more important than a universe of technical ability. It drew people in, drew him in, drew me in. It was an ability from another universe. I had no idea how he did that.
It would take me many decades of life and feeling and being open to emotions of every kind to be able to have something to bring to and pull out of the piano. The piano now is a completely different thing to me, because I’m a different thing.
We create our realities, within biological and physical and social constraints. But those constraints are bigger than any of us can comprehend. Music itself has been evolving over the centuries, and faster and faster. Social structures are also opening to more and more options. There is tremendous room within the facts to CREATE facts. Technology is the perfect example of this. We not only live within a bounded reality, but we use what we are given to paint and sculpt and compose and dance and sing and write and fuck our way into new worlds, that we create as we discover them.
You can make more beautiful and simply better music, using one string played emotionally, than 6 or 8 played with virtuosity. Guitar teachers, in fact any teacher, will tell you to try to avoid starting with bad habits.
Some teachers will tell you to never play even one note that doesn’t sound sweet. Focus on the sound, not the melody.
It’s similar with seduction and maintaining passionate romance. Technical game ability can get in the way of the moment – it’s not about your routine, or even quite so much about what you say. Or even do. It’s about emotion and what you are mutually creating into and out of your instrument. With seduction and charisma, your instrument is the other person. You are dancing emotions with her, feeding your emotions in and pulling her emotions out. Is the note sweet? Start with the note, and if you move on to melodies and beats, always pay attention to the note.
The guitar string can convey emotion just out of one note, depending on how you play it, and of course single string melodies can bring out more emotions. Add more strings and you can incorporate more elements of music, such as a repeating base line, or even a harmonic melodic base line. You can slide one string while plucking an open one. You can use double entendre and nuance, and convey several emotions at once; longing, sadness, joy, bitter sweet struggle, devotion.
Charisma and game is exactly like that.
You need to be able to first make one sweet note, then expand out, never losing the feel for what music fundamentally is embedded in, which is emotion.
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Ultimately music is about creating and playing our own compositions. Mussorgsky changed the nature of music in his lifetime, it has been said, BECAUSE he was unschooled. He din’t know any better than to make something new. If you learn some musical patterns, or game patterns, these can not only open up possibilities, but they will also usually limit your view of what are your options. You’ll stick to the script, stick to what you believe that the pattern is supposed to be.
But that’s not how you write music, or how you interact with another person. You are always listening to that guitar string, playing with what it is giving to you. Listening to what emotions and sounds and chord progressions and melodies are coming out of the piano.
I’ve been very extreme in my musical development and focus on improv. I’ve learned a few difficult pieces, and these have greately expanded what my improv can be, and I want to learn more and more of other peoples music, but piano or guitar, for me, always comes back to improv. I say piano instead of music, because piano is a person that I interact with – it’s not an abstraction. The guitar is a different person, and brings out very different music.
When you free form improv, either with a woman or guitar, you might use some fundamental structures, but you have to more than merely bend those structures or add a few dissonant notes. You have to be listening to the instrument. Your own moods will come out of it, and yet often surprise you. You’ll be constantly micro-adjusting, or sometimes wildly diverting, based on what you hear. Different parts of your own mind are talking to each other, through your hands, the instrument, and the sound. They could not converse without this medium.
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I’ve switched to playing my acoustic in the laptop position. It suits my interests and abilities better. My left hand is damaged and so I can’t play important bar chords used in a strumming style, and learned to prefer a single (or multiple) string finger or plectrum picking style. It’s easier for me to hammer on and off and slide and move around the fretboard with it on my lap. I also use an open tuning, so that I can also strum chords by simply holding all strings down to one fret.
I’ve seen guys use this style of playing on stage. The body language conveys a more contemplative mood, and their music is always far from the heavy metal that must only come from a different guitar posture. The body language suits the music I prefer to make.
This also has a corresponding analogue in charm. I needn’t explain it; I think if you use your imagination you’ll picture it clearer than if I give you the image.
Or maybe you’ll picture something very different than what I have in mind.
Which will prove my point. Game and charisma and music will be altered by your history, perspective, and interests.
This is not something to fight, but to lean into. You’re going to be leaning into the unknown, over and over, and often living well outside of your comfort zone. That’s what music and social interaction does; it expands what you used to think of were your options. That often comes with some emotional strain.
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As a teenager I was once invited by two of the most handsome and cool guys in the school to join their clique, and hang around with them. That was too far outside of my comfort zone at the time. I rationalized this discomfort by looking down on them a bit, in my mind. It was a missed opportunity, that I passed up because I was safe in my smaller world.
Game is most often taught as a way to make you happy within a small world – game usually is taught in a way that keeps you safe.
But charisma won’t be what other people teach you, and it won’t be safe. You’ll be learning things that others don’t and can’t possibly know, things unique to you.
And you’ll be opening to new women and their worlds.
In order to gain positive reference experiences, it helps to be a social climber. If you are young, you’ll get good feedback from older women. As you become more worldly you may find your girlfriends and lovers getting younger and younger.
When I was 28 I had a 48 year old lover. At 50 I had a 16 year old one. Plus a 17 year old one plus a 24 year old one, plus a 23 year old one, plus a distant 17 year old one who was considering leaving her fiance for me.
People find it too much an insult to their ego to believe that I am a real guy, telling the truth about his life. It’s too much narcissistic injury. This is one reason I write so many diary type posts; to humanize my dating philosophy and ground it in real life experience, so you can see this as part of the human condition.
Many people will dissimulate like mad to claim that my personal currently lived life and my past experiences can’t possibly relate to what are their own possibilities, if they are even true at all. They don’t much care which option to choose – either it’s fake or irrelevent – all they want is a quick way out of personal responsibility to change their own world. This is a defence mechanism, and nearly always comes from people deliberately keeping their options and world narrow, because it’s far more comfortable that way to them.
In researching the biomechenics of addiction for this comment https://xsplat.wordpress.com/2017/10/05/11156/#comment-29344, I came accross information about differences in how the left and right brain process information, and how each can sometimes work as distinct characters that we inhabit.
I think you’ll notice that most of what I advocate, in terms of relationship skills and seduction, is very right brain oriented. I’d like to do a long write up about it.
I’ve spent a great many years working diligently, without being aware of it, to be able to embody my right brain – since age 12 actually – first with self-hypnosis, then mind centered then body centered meditations, intellect to see the edges of intellect through studying Buddhist philosopy, lucid dreaming, post-meditative wide spacial awareness as habit, poetry writing, and later with musical improvisation (that I usually do using the left hand, which is controlled by the right brain).
Lately when talking about seduction I mention improv often, and mindfullness and awareness and music.
Apparently bonding and social relations are handled by the right brain.
It also thinks in terms of quality, instead of quantity. It would be an EXTREMELY left brain approach to go for notches, while not being interested in the quality of the relationship and sex.
The first video is an introduction video with animation, the second is a more in depth talk, and the third repeats information in the 2nd talk but goes into more depth. You can youtube Dr. Iain McGilchrist
In this third talk McGilchrist mentions that left brain music is only involved with beat, there is no harmony and melody.
I’ve often ridiculed hip-hop as lacking in harmony and melody. Amazing. I must assume that hip-hop is both adopted by and leads to left brain oriented people. Also I assume that modern society is heavily influenced by cocaine, meth, adderall and ritalin types of drugs, instead of the pot and lsd and heroin that influenced musicians in the ’60s and ’70s.
He also mentions that culture on the whole is becoming more left brained, and children are now needing to be taught how to recognize facial expressions – a right brained activity.
For me, not drifting into left brain seeming to be the driver of conciousness requires regular habit maintenance. The habits of meditation and chi-kung – especially when combined and practiced daily – have profound changes on how my mind works. Music and improvisation also seem to be making big changes. And I have to include now, only now just realizing it, the improv that happens when talking to my girlfriends – or fucking them. The sex of course can sometimes be a profound meditative bliss experience, or it can slip into something more banal and routine. But the verbal back and forth – I did not realize until now that this is also a type of poetry writing, or left-right integration that is heavily right brained.
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I’ve often been very critical of Rollo, and I assume that a lot of people may be confused by what I’m going on about, and why. I’ve called his worldview a cartoonish diorama, barely representative of the real world. I also have called him a keyboard jockey with little first hand knowledge who instead relies on his diorama. In a recent post I highlighted in bold and magenta that it’s crucial for life satisfaction not to live inside a diorama.
Keyboard jockey knowledge is worse than useless. It’s a diorama. Don’t live in a diorama – that will only get in the way of embodying joy.
After seeing the videos by McGilchrist I have greater clarity into what I meant by that bold statement and why it’s so incredibly fucking important.
The map is not the territory, no matter how much effort you put into detail. Don’t live inside your mental map of the territory. It’s disastrous. The map is a tool you reference – your mind and body can creatively and vividly occupy space, with the intellect helping along as an occasional reference guide. You are not your narrative.
As soon as you get stuck inside the map, you can no longer learn and grow and respond uniquely to the situation. You can’t adapt. You can’t be a better person. You can’t be that confident dominant male that women treat unbelievably well, whether he’s a provider or not.
Being a keyboard jockey is a left brained activity of referring to abstract yet fixed ideas. Forming ideas happens in the right brain, and then the become fixed in the left, where you can refer to the abstract ideas as needed. These ideas can be highly resistant to change unless one steps out of the left brain again, in order to re-organize using new fresh lived experience.
As an example of how abstract left brain knowledge is, a person with right hemisphere brain damage will be able to recognize the abstract category of a bird, and recognize if they see a bird, but will no longer be able to tell any species from any other. Both the wider picture of multiple interacting contexts plus the uniqueness of qualities of character will be missing. Along with much so very much else. “All birds are like that”
Being embodied in the world is completely different than living inside a diorama of left brain narrative. It’s big picture and women are not “fungible” and “all like that”. Each situation and woman is unique, and handled uniquely, on the spot.
It’s left vs right brain.
The left brain ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT handle relationships. DON’T take advice from a predominantly left brained keyboard jockey theorist! It is out of touch. You absolutely need to live the life you write about, and constantly update it. If you aren’t constantly changing your opinion and viewpoint, you are just stuck in left brained book worm knowledge, and I hate to tell you the bad news, but that knowledge is already out of date, and by nature irrelevent to your personal current situation, which is organic and something that you must not only KNOW, but instead GROW.
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I wish I could find the transcripts of Ian McGilchrists talks. He has some real gems in his talks. I don’t mind listening to his same basic talk to different audiences; it’s like a piece of music; I always hear something new in it with each listening.
Another very important researcher who started out as a highly passionate fringe researcher is Susan Blackmore. I’d say that both Susan’s and Ian’s work are foundational to any education, and any life. Really important, basic stuff. Susan for her initial debunking of out of body experiences and esp, but then her work on the nature of consciousness, and memetics. Ian and Susan changed what reality means by showing us what it is; they CREATED a new reality for us. It will never be the same.
I’ll use this comment space for the first draft of the post.
You might be interested in this MA thesis. She investigates links beteen split-brain research and Buddhism, among other things:
https://books.google.com.my/books?id=aRK-CQAAQBAJ&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&dq=louise+bolton+king+beyond+ego&source=bl&ots=xiYXJ9MEaT&sig=jvCw-RNsh8Y5kfzNSd0Lu0TvlTw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj6orT2xqDeAhUHYo8KHUQSBRwQ6AEwCHoECBEQAQ#v=onepage&q=louise%20bolton%20king%20beyond%20ego&f=false
Thanks for that. How and when did you come across that? That’s extremely relevant.
I stumbled upon it sometime in the 1980s. I was very interested in Taoism back then, so I made a (hard) copy.
Amazing.
Such interests are rare, and I love coming across them shared in others.
I used to think that I was spreading interest in Chi-Kung, and so when I heard that Yohami also practices it, I asked him how he heard about it, and he happened to chance upon it himself, I think also decades ago. So although he never speaks about it, it’s certain to inform the world that he’s built and what he sees. He’ll be a very different person and have a very different world and be describing a very different elephant than someone who has not done body centered meditations regularly. And this will very much alter how he deals with women, although he may not know how or why, and would have to put a lot of left brained effort to try to tease out the many ways that happens.
I’m only coming across the left/right brain knowledge in such detail now – just these last few days. It really puts things in context in a very helpful way.
I bet there is also practical application for addiction recovery in the field of left/right brain attention and habit forming somewhere – or at least some initial avenues of exploration.
Yohami made some great comments overy at daysofgame.com, and I’ve been meaning for some time to sift through them and copy them here, and to add commentary.
These are healthier and more productive tools and memes than what is usually circulated.
I can get quite upset about bad memes. I consider them to be akin to addictive drugs or toxic food. They can grow exponentially in popularity yet have horrible negative repurcussions.
So I’m happy to not only refute inadequate and harmful memes (dark triad, beta-bucks, cluster C paroinia and attachment aversion as in-group badges of belonging, etc), but to introduce some of my own, and now here repeat some good ones.
This is Yohami at his best writing that I’ve seen. I disagree with some of his ideas and emphasis at other times, but here he’s really talking from personal experience and explaining it well, in what seems to be a unique and highly insightful way:
From https://daysofgame.com/theory/daygamers-best-social-scientists/
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On a different topic, perhaps for another post, I’m often struck by how low conflict my last two main relationships have beein; the current with J and the last with V. Some other girls seem to rarely be able to calm down for long, and enjoy causing conflict. I guess they are called “high conflict personalities”. I suppose my Mom must have been one, and I’ve had a WAY above average percentage of them as mates and lovers. I’m really enjoying the difference, and am learning a lot about two people just making each other happy, and trying hard not to bother or upset each other. I now know it’s possible, because I did it for 3 years steady with V, and about 10 months so far with J21. Never any arguments, very positive energy all the time. It’s just sharing happiness and warmth and love and passion, with no bothers at all. Such a huge difference. It’s a shame that some of the other girls were really irredeemable; I tried and tried and tried in so many different ways to get them to see the light and moderate and modulate their behaviour, but no, they were simply addicted to conflict, deep down, in a horrible twisted and permanent core of their being way.
Again, I’ll be using this comment as an editing space.