Noise is around us constantly. It permeates every pore, it seeps into every crevice like a disease. Noise is medication for some. Those who cannot bear the weight of silence must fill every void with chatter or some kind. Silence is called “awkward” for this reason, people cannot handle quiet because it requires them to think. Men can handle silence. Men love and crave silence, even extroverted men. They know that tremendous power rests in silence, for in it every dark query of the mind can be answered.
Sound vibrations accomplish very little, unless you are one of the few whose livelihood depends on speech or music. Most of those individuals have not even properly mastered speech themselves, and the result is that they utter empty sounds that just take up space and the attention of men.
You, however, are a master of silence.
If you master silence then you will have a great power in your back pocket. The beta is uncomfortable in silence, because he knows that through it, others can sense his thoughts. They can smell his weakness and lack of masculinity. All of his insecurities come rushing into his mind the moment he can no longer distract himself from his insufficiency by using noise. You can know a great deal about a person based on how they deal with pure quietness.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Mantra
None. Be silent.
Application
Sit in silence. Just for 120 seconds. Or take a walk outside and say nothing and do not look at your phone. Get comfortable being quiet, it is a great power. Through this quietness you are forced to deal with the darkness in your heart without distraction. You train yourself to be comfortable with it. This will benefit you when you need to negotiate or extract information from other people. If you ask someone a question and you can tell they only gave you a partial answer, just be silent for a moment. Most of the time, other people will crack from the lack of sound and tell you everything you want to know if you just give them a small moment of quiet. Silence is a weapon for better communication.
The Modern Church is almost to the point of ignoring the tremendous evil of adultery. If you find a Church liberal enough, you can maintain your adulterous relationship and still feign “Christianity” while clapping along to “Light the Fire”. I call these the “Adulterer’s Haven Churches”.
The man who cheats on his wife answers many questions about his individual character. He has shown that he has no integrity. He has behaved like a savage.
Adultery is not the way of Men, it is the way of impassioned boys who have no control over their penises and accompanying passions.
Here is a philosophy about adultery you will not hear about in many places: If you cheat on your wife, you don’t have the right to tell her. No, you do not deserve to tell her.
Answer me this: why would you confess to her what you have done? Don’t use the common lie of “it’s the right thing to do”; it isn’t.
If you tell your wife what you have done, all you are doing is alleviating yourself of the guilt you feel inside, and simultaneously breaking the heart of your wife.
You would only confess to get rid of the guilty feelings inside, making that “confession” and completely selfish maneuver. You don’t deserve to tell her, you deserve to go to the grave carrying your guilt alone.
Do not commit adultery. It was a simple command. The sexual needs of man have been manipulated by the world to create many great evils, adultery being one of them. We cannot sit around and pretend that having multiple sex partners is not a temptation, because it is. This is another problem with the classic teachings you hear from people. They pretend that being chaste is desirable, yet give no real, living reasons why chastity is good. Their own lives don’t represent the benefits of chastity, therefore no one will care what their mouth has to say about chastity. Who wants to listen to the miserable married guy who has sex once a year talk about the benefits of chaste conduct?
You must be a man and learn to redirect these sexual desires. We’ve talked about it before: convert all negative emotions into constructive endeavors. You must do this in order to survive the onslaught of temptation in the world.
Mantra
Keep your penis in your pants.
Application
This is simple, do not commit adultery. Yet every time we are commanded to do something, we instantly want to break the rule. This is human nature and the tendency for free will to move towards evil. As with all evil, adultery begins with thoughts of the mind. Thoughts become reality if given enough time to develop. “Desire when it has conceived brings forth sin” (James 1:15).
You have to win this fight early. You must give no mental ground to the Devil. The second an evil thought enters the mind, you must crush it instantly, and then redirect your mind to some other kind of work. These thoughts have no place in your mind.
You cannot be friends with other women.
I know this is an extreme stance to take and many will disagree with me. It can be difficult to accept this, and it is okay if you choose to ignore it. Just know that in this case, I am an extremist. And when it comes to sexuality, extremism is the high ground, and it is the safest path.
Friendship can become sexual in an instant, especially if you have been in a prior relationship for some time and the fire has died down. The new person seems extra funny and exciting. You start to think she is more than just a friend, that she is interested sexually. You start noticing her body more. The slide down the slippery slope begins. Eventually you are thinking about and visualizing having sex with her. At this point you have gone too far (Matt 5:28).
The reason Christ tells us not to think about having sex with women is because He knows that “Thoughts Become Things”.
You cannot even get to this point in your relationships with women. Do not be alone with women. I would urge you to consider avoiding all contact outside of evangelism. Be honest with yourself, look in the mirror and you will know why you interact with women. Very few men talk to women unless they have an angle.
You have to understand yourself as a man. Your sex drive will get you into a massive amount of trouble if you are not extreme about controlling it.
I am a lover of freedom, but the way I govern my body should resemble a totalitarian dictatorship. You must declare martial law on your body. You must rule your body and mind with an iron fist.
Be a man; Do not have sex with someone who is not your wife.
Please leave a comment below if you want to hear more about depression.
It is a major topic that is not addressed often in the Church. This is because people think your “faith should be enough”. Faith does not cure depression, we need more options for treatment.
“Answer me quickly, O Lord! My spirit fails! Hide not your face from me, lest I be like those who go down to the pit. Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love, for in you I trust. Make me know the way I should go, for to you I lift up my soul.”
Depression happens often for many people. For some it is triggered by unfortunate events, a depression which here may be more accurately labeled as a “response to tragedy”. These people usually are not chemically depressed, instead they have had horrible things happen to them. They have lost a job, lost a family member or some other external event. Other individuals are tormented by chemical depression, whether constant or periodic. It is triggered by nothing, it just comes on, and it sends an individual spiraling into the abyss. Either way, depression is a great evil.
The weak demagogues in the Church are no help when it comes to dealing with depression.
They assume that simply praying and being thankful can combat biochemical reactions in the brain.
Would prayer combat other chemical reactions as well? Would you drink some Cyanide and pray that God would undo the chemical reaction of the cyanide with your system so that you wouldn’t die? No. God does not directly alter His Laws of nature. You would die despite praying for help. God allows the laws of chemistry to continue uninterrupted. Prayer will not save you from the chemistry that God Himself created. There is more required for combating depression than prayer and being thankful.
Depression will crush your faith if you allow it to. Depression will make you want to leave the Church. The classic, weak-minded questions enter our minds: “Why would God allow me to feel this way?”. We cannot allow these questions to enter our minds, they are for the weak. We must insulate our minds against these thoughts. Keep the mind working through depression. Take in information constantly. Start moving. Start Growing. Otherwise you will die.
Depression is not taken seriously by the modern Church, so you may have to deal with this alone or in small groups.
If you do need help, do not become accustomed to using other people as crutches. Accountability is a crutch, you must learn to rely on yourself. If you cannot deal with things alone, then you need more strength. There is nothing wrong with leaning on others, however you need to endure at least some negative events in life on your own so you will have the strength to hold yourself and to hold someone else when they need to lean on you. Relying on yourself builds massive strength, so that you can support others. Suffer now, so you can be more valuable later. Your depression will leave in a few days or weeks at most.
Mantra
This will pass.
Application
Get moving. Get outside. Stagnation and isolation lengthen depression. Get in the gym, even though you don’t feel like it. Training is going to be one of the few constants in your life that you should always be consistent with. Biochemical reactions from training can combat depression. If you get in the gym, you will release norepinephrine, epinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin among other hormones. These work together to alleviate the symptoms of depression. So the second you feel depression coming on, get moving, you can keep it at bay through training the body.
Do not let depression crush your faith. You need to have your faith fortified before you enter a depression so that you can outlast the siege. Every chink in the armor of faith needs to be addressed, because it will be targeted when you fall into darkness. Have your faith issues worked out while you are happy, so that when you are assaulted, you can go back to what you know to be fact and use it to endure the sorrow. This is just like the general who trains his soldiers in times of peace so they can be well prepared for times of war. Depression is an endurance game, you have you outlast it.
We hear about “challenge” far too much in the church. Some round faced, Low-Testosterone loser gets up before the assembly and gives a “devotional” talk or sermon with precisely zero challenging ideas in it. Then some other eunuch will get up after him and say “Thank you, brother, for that challenging lesson”.
Really? This is what has become of challenges? Challenges are supposed to be something that is actually difficult to think about or accomplish; hearing yet another effeminate, emotional sermon about the infinite grace of God is not exactly a War Cry.
The word “Challenge” implies obstacles, difficulty or even the desire not to embark on the challenge because of how difficult it is. Not every lesson given by a college kid with less Bible knowledge than a single-celled organism is a “Challenge”. We have grown up in the 20th-21st century without any violent religious persecution. This prolonged peace and ease has resulted in an epidemic of weak men who think everything is a challenge.
“Let me just leave you with this challenge tonight”.
“Let me challenge you to be a good Christian”. What a profound, groundbreaking statement.
These phrases and any others like them should be trampled under the foot of Man, for they are not challenges, they are the manifestation of pseudo-spiritual emotionalism. If we are constantly being challenged, then why is no one in the Church improving? They remain spiritually, emotionally and physically stagnant. They do not improve their minds or their finances. They do not improve their bodies or their souls. The only thing most young men improve at is the ability to sneak girls into their dorms at the so-called “Christian Universities”. Yet we are still being “challenged” all the time. In order for a person to improve, they have to be stressed outside their current abilities or they will never have anything to adapt to – This is called the Overload Principle.
We must challenge the modern definition of “challenge”.
In the old days when you challenged someone, it was a duel, a fight, a legal argument, something men participated in. A Challenge is a dare, a call-to-arms, a difficult to achieve goal, which implies that there is possibility for pain or for loss. That is something boys in the church know nothing about anymore. So stop using the word “challenge”, because the probability that anything you are dealing with is challenging is low.
At one point in history, men your age stormed Normandy’s beaches, charging into a storm of lead with the near certainty of death in the back of their minds. Many of those men were very young, sometimes 16 years old, and they lied about their age and said they were older so they could join the military because they felt a sense of duty. They had unparalleled courage and strength of will to charge into the face of death. They had unimaginable selflessness to give up another 80 years of living for the sake of the ideals of freedom.
And now you sit here complaining about how hard it is to finish that English degree.
Because the presence of true challenges is low, you must seek out challenges, for it is within the challenge and the pain that we grow as individuals. Seek and destroy real challenges and improve yourself. And until you are willing to truly push yourself to be better through discomfort and the application of work ethic, discard the word “challenge”, it’s a cliche` Christian Buzzword. Be a man.
Mantra
This is not even difficult.
Application
You are going to have to actively seek out difficulty if you want to grow. All the comforts of the modern age have softened males. Seek out the most difficult task at your work and do it. Crush the most difficult task at the beginning of the day, do not leave it till the end of the day.
Get yourself in the gymnasium. We can simulate difficulty and adversity on our terms when we go to the gym, which makes it an incredible tool for the mind. Before you even start your training you must decide that you are going to push past the discomfort in your body and drive yourself to be more. Tell yourself that once you feel pain, you will push yourself for two more repetitions. Then the next training session with the same exercise, push yourself to three repetitions past when you feel discomfort. In this way you build your work ethic.
Work ethic can be built, but it will not happen sooner than a month.
Most likely it will take even longer than six months of focused work to build any respectable level of work ethic. But if you put in the time and build the work ethic, your capacity to do work will grow. You now have the ability to do greater volumes of work for longer periods of time. Work ethic is one of the foundational principles of success. If you can develop the ability to push yourself physically, it will have a spillover effect on your mind. Over time you will be better able to push past mental barriers and mental discomfort in the same way that you pushed past mental and physical barriers in the gym. It is not a difficult thing to comprehend, you simply have to do the work.
Get up. Do the difficult things, and you will find that eventually what you once thought was difficult is now easy. And the tasks that betas in the Church call “Challenging”, you will be able to mock with your personal accomplishments.
Wealth is not evil. The attitudes of men are evil.
“As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, thus storing up treasure for themselves as a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is truly life”.
“You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day”.
There is nothing at all wrong with having wealth. Job was wealthy (Job 1 – Job’s character and wealth). So was Abraham (Gen 13:2). Highly righteous men in the Bible had great wealth. The difference between them and the rest of the world is that the righteous did not and do not place their wealth above God.
Weak men in the Church demonize wealth. They conflate wealth and worldliness. They also conflate poverty with virtue. You cannot correlate these things.
There are plenty of evil, greedy poor people. Also, there are plenty of righteous generous wealthy people.
There is nothing wrong with accumulating wealth. Wealth in the hands of the righteous is better than wealth in the hands of the wicked.
Some weak men in the Church will conflate wealth and evil in an effort to justify their lack of work ethic. This is a great evil. Men of God should have an unparalleled work ethic in all things, as they should be doing their work “as to the Lord, rather than to man”(Colossians 3:23/Ephesians 6:7). This does not guarantee wealth, but it does ensure that you will be satisfied with your work day. Extreme wealth is not necessary in life, though it is not wrong if you achieve it.
Not having wealth in life does not magically make you righteous.
I have heard such statements from the pulpit many times, “I’m not focused on the things of this world”. “I’m not materialistic, so I’m not wealthy”. The problem with these statements, again, is that they assume that not having wealth means that one is righteous. This is not the case. The same people in the Church might also make the absurd statement: I would rather have virtue/righteousness/holiness than wealth”. Not only are those people lying in an effort to look good, but they just so happen to not be righteous either.
The people who say “I would rather have righteousness than wealth” are the same ones who say “I would rather have brains than brawn”. The only people saying they would rather have brains than brawn are fat people with neither brains nor brawn. Every time you hear that statement it is made by some obese diabetic who is trying to devalue the physical success of a fit man.
In an attempt to make themselves feel better, unfit people demonize the fitness of others. In an attempt to make themselves feel better and more righteous, poor people demonize the wealth of the successful.
This is extremely inappropriate and intellectually dishonest.
This statement is my speculation, so take it with a grain of salt: God would not assign wealth to those who could not handle it well. If God knew that you were the type of individual to be corrupted by wealth, or to assume that you earned everything yourself with no help from God (Daniel 4:30), then it would be in His best interest to not give you great wealth simply out of love for you (remembering that love is an action, not an emotion).
So perhaps you are not wealthy not because you don’t work hard, but because you do not have the temperament to handle wealth righteously. It could be that if you were given wealth, you would place it above God and fall from grace.
Mantra
Wealth is not evil.
Application
First: The key to managing wealth is to build the character today that can handle the pressure of wealth later.
Start viewing yourself as the overseer of your possessions, rather than the owner. This isn’t just some pseudo-spiritual nonsense that people in the church who have no money try to make you believe. If you take a managerial view of your finances, that level of emotional and mental detachment allows clarity of the mind that leads to better business decisions.
Think of the general who elevates his perspective high above the battlefield. This general is not influenced by his emotions in the same way as a man on the front line of the battle. You must have this same level of emotional detachment when it comes to wealth.
When we aren’t emotionally attached to our possessions, we do better when managing them.
Second: work as if you were trying to build a fortune, but don’t be disappointed if you don’t.
Make as much money as you can, but be wise in what you do with it. Invest in things that better you or that better others, instead of cheap pleasures. When you invest in people or your own character, the return on that investment is greater satisfaction than anything you would buy for enjoyment. That’s not to say don’t enjoy things, you need to enjoy things (Ecclesiastes 2:24). Invest in books that will cause you to improve yourself, in workshops or seminars, hobbies and skills and in family. Spend time and money on things that are positive for the mind.
Do not invest in cheap toys or prostitutes. Do not buy things to keep up with your neighbors. Trying to “out-lifestyle” others is a surefire way to financial failure in 95% of cases.
Weak men in the Church are in the habit of glorifying a boring and sorrowful life. Enjoy your life, but be wise. Be a man.
