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Love Kills Porn.

Discussion in 'Self Improvement' started by Battlemaster Lotus Praxis, Feb 29, 2016.

  1. Today's triple dose of reality inspired recovery:

    [​IMG]

    'Porn damages relationships by creating harmful expectations and ideals about love.' Obviously.

    [​IMG]

    'Many sex trafficking victims forcibly have porn made of them while in captivity.
    Prostitutes report that porn is frequently used to ingrain in them what is expected.
    STOP THE DEMAND.' Clicking it is supporting it.

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    'If only we saw people instead of bodies, how different our ideals of beauty would be…

    Porn objectifies, demeans, and degrades human beings. Be a Fighter and stand up for real beauty.'



    [​IMG]
     
  2. [​IMG]

    Well now that everyone is up to date with porn, I will leave it to the powers that be to decide the fate of the industry.

    I think Fight the New Drug is a watered down organization that likes to jerk off their own reputation while looking in the mirror so to speak rather than actually do something about ending human trafficking, sex slavery, and the jacked up demand for prostitution that porn fuels. I realized they are probably just a bunch of spoiled idiots who care more about how they look on social media rather than actually accomplishing world change.

    Call me jaded or angry with em, I am, but I won't rebuke my likes on social media as there really isn't another prominent organization informing as many people about the harms of porn as they are. So they still serve a worthy purpose in that respect. Will still be posting images and videos from their site. Just had to shine light on the reality of the majority of the shit they post on social media.

     
    Last edited: Mar 8, 2016
  3. Before I get back to spamming anti-porn propaganda from the FTND site in hopes of making recovery as simple as improving one's perceptions of sex and relationships (hopefully) and correcting the warp that porn caused in one's mind to keep one going back for more thinking it is a perfectly normal and healthy sexual outlet, a fun link :D:

    https://www.inverse.com/article/124...cemail-changes-greeting-and-releases-messages

    Oh ya and a personal update, I actually deleted my Fortify Program account as it is designed by FTND and I was feeling they are not as genuine as they claim to be granted that shit was the best porn recovery program out there for younger people (free if you are 20 or under). Just going to study eminent addiction specialists and really try to grasp the psychology behind addiction and stay connected to the people in my life who know about my problem offline and want to see me improve.
     
  4. [​IMG]

    'Porn is addictive, kills love, and harms society. Stand up and join the Fight!'

    [​IMG]

    'To viewers, pornography can appear as a fantasy world of pleasure and thrills. However, those who participate in and create pornography often become a part of a flood of drugs, disease, slavery, trafficking, rape, and abuse.'

    http://store.fightthenewdrug.org/products/stop-the-demand-tee

    I actually just bought this shirt along with 2 others. Wearing them in public inevitably creates a shift in consciousness in society. It's not like they are profiting off selling this stuff.

    [​IMG]
    *All funds from our online store go to educate on the harms of pornography and help stop the demand for sex trafficking
     
    TakingTheSteps likes this.
  5. This anti-porn rant will not go on forever by me here guys I promise. Thank you for being tolerant and patient with my ludicrous activity here.

    This thread will eventually morph into all out self improvement awesomeness based on love for your own mind, body, and lifestyle and love for others. I have been showing mad love to women and slaves around the world on social media.

    I know I said one post a day but that is restricted to the FTND anti-porn ranting.

    Today is International Women's Day, Happy Women's day!



    3 cool links,

    Slavery still exists believe it or not:
    http://enditmovement.com

    This organization is for real, they rescue children from sex trafficking:
    https://ourrescue.org





    www.unwomen.org
     
  6. Shout out to @OheyApple for sharing this awesome video:



    Weather is getting warmer where I live. Awesome. Time to improve my outdoor fitness sessions. Got my eyes on back handsprings and back flips this summer. I had em several years ago but lost em when I stopped training (kung fu). Definitely feeling the acrobatics in me this year.



    Pretty kick ass channel if you wanna learn parkour or just wanna get fit and strong and have really never partaken of it before: https://www.youtube.com/user/TappBrothers
     
    Last edited: Mar 8, 2016
    OheyApple likes this.
  7. Today's self improving truth based on the timeless concept of interpersonal love,

    It’s simple: Love Takes Two.

    [​IMG]
     
  8. This week's classical self improvement reading recommendation is Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays: First Series. I doubt many people have the desire let alone the attention span to actually sit down and read this old stuff. We live in a world where attention spans are dwindling by the day. Constant stimuli and a barrage of consumerist propaganda, entertainment, and novelty from all directions makes for a frail mind gentlemen.

    [​IMG]

    An essay from the above link:

    Love

    I was as a gem concealed;
    Me my burning ray revealed.
    —Koran

    Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfillment; each of its joys ripens into a new want. Nature, uncontainable, flowing, fore-looking, in the first sentiment of kindness anticipates already a benevolence which shall lose all particular regards in its general light. The introduction to this felicity is in a private and tender relation of one to one, which is the enchantment of human life; which, like a certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period, and works a revolution in his mind and body; unites him to his race, pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new sympathy into nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens the imagination, adds to his character heroic and sacred attributes, establishes marriage, and gives permanence to human society.

    The natural association of the sentiment of love with the heyday of the blood seems to require, that in order to portray it in vivid tints, which every youth and maid should confess to be true to their throbbing experience, one must not be too old. The delicious fancies of youth reject the least savoir of a mature philosophy, as chilling with age and pedantry their purple bloom. And, therefore, I know I incur the imputation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism from those who compose the Court and Parliament of Love. But from these formidable censors I shall appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered that this passion of which we speak, though it begin with the young, yet forsakes not the old, or rather suffers no one who is truly its servant to grow old, but makes the aged participators of it, not less than the tender maiden, though in a different and nobler sort. For it is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature with its generous flames. It matters not, therefore, whether we attempt to describe the passion at twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years. He who paints it at the first period will lose some of its later, he who paints it at the last, some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be hoped that, by patience and the Muses' aid, we may attain to that inward view of the law, which shall describe a truth ever young and beautiful, so central that it shall commend itself to the eye, at whatever angle beholden.

    And the first condition is, that we must leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in hope and not in history. For each man sees his own life defaced and disfigured, as the life of man is not, to his imagination. Each man sees over his own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man go back to those delicious relations which make the beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas! I know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in mature life the remembrances of budding joy, and cover every beloved name. Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour, if seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual world—the painful kingdom of time and place—dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the Muses sing. But grief cleaves to names, and persons, and the partial interests of today and yesterday.

    The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of personal relations usurps in the conversation of society. What do we wish to know of any worthy person so much, as how he has sped in the history of this sentiment? What books in the circulating libraries circulate? How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness are nature's most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility and grace in the coarse and rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls about the schoolhouse door—but today he comes running into the entry, and meets one fair child disposing her satchel; he holds her books to help her, and instantly it seems to him as if she removed herself from him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct. Among the throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone distances him; and these two little neighbors, that were so close just now, have learned to respect each other's personality. Or who can avert his eyes from the engaging, half-artful, half-artless ways of school girls who go into the country shops to buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk half an hour about nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy. In the village they are on a perfect equality, which love delights in, and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish between them and the good boy the most agreeable, confiding relations, what with their fun and their earnest, about Edgar, and Jonas, and Almira, and who was invited to the party, and who danced at the dancing school, and when the singing school would begin, and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By and by that boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any risk such as Milton deplores as incident to scholars and great men.

    I have been told, that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are love's world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts. For, though the celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of tender age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison, and putting us quite beside ourselves, we can seldom see after thirty years, yet the remembrance of these visions outlasts all other remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. But here is a strange fact; it may seem to many men, in revising their experience, that they have no fairer page in their life's book than the delicious memory of some passages wherein affection contrived to give a witchcraft surpassing the deep attraction of its own truth to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances. In looking backward, they may find that several things which were not the charm have more reality to this groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed them. But be our experience in particulars what it may, no man ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which created all things new; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art; which made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of memory; when he became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows, and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage; when no place is too solitary, and none too silent, for him who has richer company and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts, than any old friends, though best and purest, can give him; for the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object are not like other images written in water, but, as Plutarch said, "enameled in fire," and make the study of midnight.

    Thou art not gone being gone, where'er thou art,
    Thou leav'st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving heart.
    In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the recollection of days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and fear; for he touched the secret of the matter, who said of love—

    All other pleasures are not worth its pains;
    and when the day was not long enough, but the night, too, must be consumed in keen recollections; when the head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on; when the moonlight was a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, and the flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into song; when all business seemed an impertinence, and all the men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere pictures.

    The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant. Nature grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his heart and soul. The notes are almost articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the forest, the waving grass, and the peeping flowers have grown intelligent; and he almost fears to trust them with the secret which they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and sympathizes. In the green solitude he finds a dearer home than with men.

    Fountain-heads and pathless groves,
    Places which pale passion loves,
    Moonlight walks, when all the fowls
    Are safely housed, save bats and owls,
    A midnight bell, a passing groan—
    These are the sounds we feed upon.
    —John Fletcher in "Melancholy"

    Behold there in the wood the fine madman! He is a palace of sweet sounds and sights; he dilates; he is twice a man; he walks with arms akimbo; he soliloquizes; he accosts the grass and the trees; he feels the blood of the violet, the clover, and the lily in his veins; and he talks with the brook that wets his foot.

    The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural beauty have made him love music and verse. It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under any other circumstances.

    The like force has the passion over all his nature. It expands the sentiment; it makes the clown gentle, and gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object. In giving him to another, it still more gives him to himself. He is a new man, with new perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and aims. He does not longer appertain to his family and society; he is somewhat; he is a person; he is a soul.

    And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence which is thus potent over the human youth. Beauty, whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself. The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding, informing loveliness is society for itself, and she teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her existence makes the world rich. Though she extrudes all other persons from his attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so that the maiden stands to him for a representative of all select things and virtues. For that reason, the lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.

    The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and fore-show. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves' neck lusters, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he said to music, "Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have not found, and shall not find." The same fluency may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is not. Then first it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of painting. And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable. Concerning it, Landor inquires "whether it is not to be referred to some purer state of sensation and existence."

    In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions, and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

    Hence arose the saying, "If I love you, what is that to you?" We say so, because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it. It is not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself, and can never know.

    This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty which the ancient writers delighted in; for they said that the soul of man, embodied here on earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that other world of its own, out of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by the light of the natural sun, and unable to see any other objects than those of this world, which are but shadows of real things. Therefore, the Deity sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and fair; and the man beholding such a person in the female sex runs to her, and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form, movement, and intelligence of this person, because it suggests to him the presence of that which indeed is within the beauty, and the cause of the beauty.

    If, however, from too much conversing with material objects, the soul was gross, and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sorrow; body being unable to fulfill the promise which beauty holds out; but if, accepting the hint of these visions and suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul passes through the body, and falls to admire strokes of character, and the lovers contemplate one another in their discourses and their actions, then they pass to the true palace of beauty, more and more inflame their love of it, and by this love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts out the fire by shining on the hearth, they become pure and hallowed. By conversation with that which is in itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of these nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of them. Then he passes from loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is the one beautiful soul only the door through which he enters to the society of all true and pure souls. In the particular society of his mate, he attains a clearer sight of any spot, any taint, which her beauty has contracted from this world, and is able to point it out, and this with mutual joy that they are now able, without offense, to indicate blemishes and hindrances in each other, and give to each all help and comfort in curing the same. And, beholding in many souls the traits of the divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divine from the taint which it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this ladder of created souls.

    Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love in all ages. The doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If Plato, Plutarch, and Apuleius taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo, and Milton. It awaits a truer unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which presides at marriages with words that take hold of the upper world, whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar, so that its gravest discourse has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs. Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and affection of human nature, by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife's thrift, and that woman's life has no other aim.

    But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our play. In the procession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges its circles ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond, or the light proceeding from an orb. The rays of the soul alight first on things nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the house, and yard, and passengers, on the circle of household acquaintance, on politics, and geography, and history. But things are ever grouping themselves according to higher or more interior laws. Neighborhood, size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over us. Cause and effect, real affinities, the longing for harmony between the soul and the circumstance, the progressive, idealizing instinct, predominate later, and the step backward from the higher to the lower relations is impossible. Thus even love, which is the deification of persons, must become more impersonal every day. Of this at first it gives no hint. Little think the youth and maiden who are glancing at each other across crowded rooms, with eyes so full of mutual intelligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this new, quite external stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances, they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting troth, and marriage. Passion beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is wholly ensouled.

    Her pure and eloquent blood
    Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
    That one might almost say her body thought.
    —John Donne

    Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more, than Juliet—than Romeo. Night, day, studies, talents, kingdoms, religion, are all contained in this form full of soul, in this soul which is all form. The lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards. When alone, they solace themselves with the remembered image of the other. Does that other see the same star, the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the same emotion, that now delight me? They try and weigh their affection, and, adding up costly advantages, friends, opportunities, properties, exult in discovering that willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be harmed. But the lot of humanity is on these children. Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them, as to all. Love prays. It makes covenants with Eternal Power in behalf of this dear mate. The union which is thus effected, and which adds a new value to every atom in nature, for it transmutes every thread throughout the whole web of relation into a golden ray, and bathes the soul in a new and sweeter element, is yet a temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay. It arouses itself at last from these endearments, as toys, and puts on the harness, and aspires to vast and universal aims. The soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise surprise, expostulation, and pain. Yet that which drew them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed. They appear and reappear, and continue to attract; but the regard changes, quits the sign, and attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded affection. Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and combination of all possible positions of the parties, to employ all the resources of each, and acquaint each with the strength and weakness of the other. For it is the nature and end of this relation, that they should represent the human race to each other. All that is in the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the texture of man, of woman.

    The person love does to us fit,
    Like manna, has the taste of all in it.
    —Abraham Cowley in "The Mistress"

    The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour. The angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are known as such; they confess and flee. Their once flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and, losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding. They resign each other, without complaint, to the good offices which man and woman are severally appointed to discharge in time, and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its object, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or absent, of each other's designs. At last they discover that all which at first drew them together—those once sacred features, that magical play of charms—was deciduous, had a prospective end, like the scaffolding by which the house was built; and the purification of the intellect and the heart, from year to year, is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from the first, and wholly above their consciousness. Looking at these aims with which two persons, a man and a woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this crisis from early infancy, at the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck the nuptial bower, and nature, and intellect, and art emulate each other in the gifts and the melody they bring to the epithalamium.

    Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state. But we are often made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night. Though slowly and with pain, the objects of the affections change, as the objects of thought do. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in health the mind is presently seen again—its overarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds, must lose their finite character and blend with God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on for ever.

     
    Last edited: Mar 10, 2016
  9. Self Improvement "Guru" or "Guide" of the Week



    New Age self improvement guru and psychologist Ralph Smart aka Infinite Waters can lead you to a higher place in life (if his style is your cup of tea). I definitely recommend his videos if they are your style. Personally he is too New Age for me but I respect the gent and know he has genuine insight into alot of topics and has a large following. He does use images of females in his videos so if you get triggered by the sight of a beautiful woman best stay in your shell until you gain control over your senses or fix the fault inside you that causes you to lust after seeing a pretty lady (I've been there, used to fantasize all the time about girls in school, then I started meditating and respecting all women in my thoughts quite naturally, granted I realize how easy it can be to fall prey to random images online as I have been there as well).



    His channel and website,

    youtube.com/channel/UCjt7bEwtlk6A6f_CiY2ZOlQ
    ralphsmart.com
     
  10. Ok the anti-porn posts will be no more. I think the first 2 pages of this thread paint a clear enough picture of the reality of the industry and how it affects the world.

    http://smashd.co/falling-in-love-with-screens/

    Great article right here, copied from that link:

    Love makes us do stupid things.

    And when we’re heartbroken, even stupider things.

    So goes a synopsis for humanity itself, but in this case I’m referring specifically to the plot for Her, the 2013 Spike Jonez film that depicts Joaquin Phoenix as an emotional vagabond reeling from a shattered marriage. He’s a man so desperate for intimate contact that he falls for the operating system plugged into his ear.

    In the end, the relationship doesn’t work—and to boot, the tempestuous machine isn’t even exclusive with only him.

    The film is already three years old. Still, we’re not far from that man-machine eventuality as today’s smartphones seem smart enough to hold our attention.

    It’s become increasingly common for many of us to choose our screens over the real thing.

    Digital bonds are trumping human relationships, and the dangers range beyond being branded a social pariah.

    When it comes to our relationships with our machines — the results can be addictive, and mind-altering.

    “Sex is a very powerful reward,” explained Dr. Donald Hilton Jr., a neurosurgeon and University of Texas professor who in 2011 predicted that our addiction to online pleasure can literally harm our mental health.

    Hilton’s work has been very controversial—researchers at UCLA have called him out, saying there’s no such thing as porn addiction, therefore viewers don’t suffer the same effects as addicts.

    Webster’s defines addiction as a person “devoting or surrendering oneself to something habitually or excessively.”

    Anything in excess can be addiction, all of it is learned behavior changing the brain to associate experience with pleasure. Many in the field share Hilton’s leanings.

    In 2014, scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany confirmed a correlation between the number of hours subjects spent watching porn and the amount of grey matter in a subject’s brain.

    The more they watched, the lower the volume of the striatum, the area responsible for the rewards system, a cause-and-effect echoing the hallmarks of addiction.

    “The more porn per week individuals watch, the more physical rewirings occur in their brains,” Hilton added. “Our brains change physically when we learn, and addiction is a form of learning, a pathological form. Addictions can be to substances or they can be to behaviors, the same neuropathways are involved. All addiction is a form of learning gone awry.”

    Meaning that like other addicts, both the lengths to get their high, and the continued desensitization in their brain’s rewards center as addiction ensues, are consistent.

    So what? Addicts, they’re only hurting themselves, right? If only.

    This bonding can have a worse effect than even the staunchest conservative conjuring: Not only does prolonged exposure inhibit intimacy with a human partner—where reality doesn’t match the fantasy—but some viewers end up acting out the imagery they watch. And that often includes highly dangerous behavior.

    “Ninety percent of the most common scenes presented in porn today show aggression towards women,” Hilton pointed out, letting that sink in before continuing. “Watching porn is not about human connection. It’s more about subjugation.”

    Worldwide viewing habits are difficult to gauge, but PornHub, one of the industry’s biggest providers, claim their site streamed 75 GB of data a second last year—enough to fill 175 million 16 GB iPhones—a total of 87.8 billion views, up ten billion from 2014, another 15 billion over2013. An estimated 87% of college-age men—and around 30% of women—doubleclick for sex either weekly or every day.

    “A 14 year-old back in the 1970s, his exposure to porn was a centerfold in Playboy,” Hilton noted. “Now almost every 14 year-old can see a hardcore scene any time he wants, via the device in his pocket. That’s a totally different experience of boys a generation ago.”

    Both advocates and detractors largely frame this carnality as a question of morality and stigma, but Hilton calls it an unsung public health issue with social and biological effects that often remain trivialized because of their subversive nature. From erectile dysfunction to abuse, this correlation remains contentious and disturbing, but as painful as it is to address, burying our heads doesn’t help.

    “People are pair-bonding to their devices and their screens,” said Harmony Dust, a former exotic dancer turned UCLA social work MA who in 2003 founded Treasures, a Sherman Oaks 501(c)3 focused on sex industry outreach and rehabilitation.

    “There’s this myth that porn is a great outlet for people that would otherwise do bad things. The opposite is true—he’s going to watch that scene and get to the point where it’s not enough and he’s going to have to find someone to act out these fantasies with. And he’s not going to go to a coffee shop and say what he wants, he’ll hire a woman and engage in prostitution.”

    Dust says 80% of sex trafficking victims report porn was used as part of their “grooming process” to teach them what to do.

    She says many of these women are then filmed without their consent, content that is then uploaded to the Internet, where the cycle continues.

    There’s no way we’re going to scrub the Web clean, it’s a multi-billion dollar business, one most of us continue to watch. But there is hope for hardliners.

    “Recovery is a form of relearning,” Hilton says. “Two years or more to rewire the brain in a positive way.”

    For young adults whose first sexual experience was with a screen, Dust says “it’s harder to recover from excessive porn watching than if you initially learned to pair bond with a human.”

    Can the worst of us really relent from forming a bond with our inanimate objects? Especially if they’re so easy to access?

    I asked KK Barrett, the Oscar-nominated production designer who created the world of Spike Jonez’s Her. What does he think?

    “It bores me,” he laughed. “The whole topic bores me. It seems to be talked about more than it’s warranted.”

    He didn’t give me a chance to share all the facts, he was too busy explaining the true meaning of the film, which wasn’t about falling for a tech device, “it was about the human condition.”

    “Pair bonding,” he chuckled again. “I think that our whole point is to define love in different places and different things, but it’s still a human condition.”

    He’s right, it is a human condition, even if that act is with a screen. But if the act itself can cause so much alienation, social confusion, and yes, even pain, do we still call it love?
     
    Last edited: Mar 10, 2016
  11. Reading back I remember talking about a "War" that is coming lol, and there is but very very slowly and subtly and it has already been set in motion. I also called this thread a battle camp of sorts, and it is in the respect that we are fighting to completely eliminate the desire to watch porn from our own lives (this is entirely possible if you meditate and change the way you view sex) and if you choose raising awareness or informing others of the truth about porn through the ways Fight the New Drug has built for fighters to do so.

    This is the last update on porn for quite a while in this thread.

    Porn is completely fake and is a corruption of sexuality, it is dehumanizing in every sense of the word. Even if the industry were somehow 'harm free' the very act of fucking strangers for a camera is anti-human and is the activity of demons. There is no love involved in this type of sex, and whether you believe in demons or not the fact is this type of sex is grounded on a demonic energy, most people understand it as lust. The Buddhist figure Mara or the Jewish figure Asmodeus or the Catholic and Christian's Lucifer/Devil feeds off of this lustful energy. Porn is a gateway to some very deep levels of the hells/hell in this respect.

    I already ignited the war by alerting government agencies around the world on social media as well as Anonymous (no I don't belong to Anonymous hahah) about the realities of the porn industry in case they were not up to date. Surely some of them want to see porn die as I do, but the reality is it may be many years before anyone takes action against the industry. As we can see society's view of porn is rapidly changing by the day and all I can hope is to raise awareness and perhaps once there is a big enough shift in people's perspectives someone will take action against the industry. The chances of this happening in this lifetime are slim.

    Another scary reality is society becomes so hypersexualized that porn consumes all of humanity hahah and the world becomes nothing but porn culture. What a sick ignorant fucking world if that happens.

    I'm just so glad I have a purpose in life and vision for my future as well as people I have plans for the future with.
     
    Last edited: Mar 10, 2016
  12. Landomike

    Landomike Fapstronaut

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  13. Highly NSFW and triggering if you are still in active addiction/early recovery or rebooting, but sheds light on the dark side of the porn empire:

    SERIOUSLY DON'T LISTEN TO IT IF YOU ARE EASILY TRIGGERED AS THERE ARE VOICEOVERS FROM P CLIPS IN THE BEGINNING AND FILTHY LYRICS, THIS IS FOR THE VETERANS WHO WANT TO SMASH THE ILLUSION OF THE INDUSTRY AND REACH 'GOD STATUS' IN THEIR NOFAP PROGRESS, COMPLETELY ELIMINATING THE DESIRE TO VIEW PORN,


    Seriously think twice before clicking play on the above.



    AT DAGGERS DRAWN WITH ALL GODS
    AT DAGGERS DRAWN WITH ALL TYRANTS

    WAR
    ON AUTHORITY

    REBORN
    THROUGH INSURGENCY

    OPPRESSOR, OUR PACK HAS TRACED YOUR SCENT
    RETRIBUTION FOR YOUR DEEDS OUR ONLY INTENT
    FORGED BONDS OF RESISTANCE ACROSS THE EARTH
    YOU CAN’T CRUSH THE MOVEMENT’S ONCOMING REBIRTH



    Dale Carnegie is dubbed the Father of the self help movement in America. I have no qualms with that, and I believe James Allen was the Godfather of the entire modern self improvement movement.

    Nice lil piece:

    http://www.economist.com/news/books...ksy-tips-father-self-help-america-how-succeed
     
    Last edited: Mar 10, 2016
    Landomike likes this.
  14. Alright lol that post above really is the last porn bit for sometime in this thread.

    This song is for anyone reading this thread who is feeling anxious, depressed, or stuck in a cycle of failure and unable to break the chains of fapping to porn. I know how much that shit sucks and hurts. Porn is as addictive if not moreso than hard drugs like meth, cocaine, and heroin. Don't ask me for the studies if you are a naysayer, go do your own research with credible peer reviewed journals as I've done over the years.

    Know that once you quit viewing any porn and start a new lifestyle of awesomeness your symptoms will naturally diminish over time. I was horribly anxious and depressed as a teenager fapping to porn.

    Ok lol no more talk of porn in this thread for real, for a while at least until some new amazing news surfaces hehe.



    "Strife"

    My anxiety's clawing
    Out from deep within me
    It burns within as my throat begins to cauterize

    This negativity's leeching
    Any shred of composure
    Rationale has decayed and left me bound in madness

    I reach for calm
    I starve for a balance unknown
    This burden tortures me deep in my soul

    I've found that strife won't make the bleeding stop
    Nor will it take away the pain
    I feel like this search is all in vain
    And I struggle to find my way

    How I yearn for the silence
    For an end to the voices
    The calamity grows and the deafness leads to disarray

    Guilt buries me alive
    In a coffin - criticized
    I shouldered the blame and dug this hole for me to lay in

    I reach for calm
    I starve for a balance unknown
    This burden tortures me deep in my bones

    I've found that strife won't make the bleeding stop
    Nor will it take away the pain
    I feel like this search is all in vain
    And I struggle to find my way

    I've found that strife won't make the bleeding stop
    Nor will it take away the pain
    I feel like this search has been all in vain
    And I struggle to find my way

    I've found that strife won't make the bleeding stop
    Nor will it take away the pain
    I feel like this search is all in vain
    And I struggle to find my way

    I've found that strife won't make the bleeding stop
    Nor will it take away the pain
    I feel like this search has been all in vain
    And I struggle to find my way
     
  15. Here is an interesting self improvement thought, don't be scared of what you don't know and don't allow your ego to cling to self absorbed biased viewpoints that are actually incorrect in the grand scheme of things. This is hard to do of course given the world we live in. Really don't feel like writing an essay up on this so I'll keep it short and post a music video in line with this point:



    It appears that we can’t rely on common sense.
    Let’s act our age and turn the page on this intolerance.
    Because we’re not meant to live like this. By-products of ignorance.

    This is out of control, it’s out of control, it's gotta go. You're scared of what you don’t know.
    I’ll say this over again, and over again, until it ends. A house divided will never stand.

    Always failing to be accepting cause hatred stems from uncertainty.
    Speaking down from above casts a shadow on the ones in search of the sun.
    You think you’re better than me? Your words of “wisdom” are spreading disease.
    But you won’t get the better of me. Walk in these shoes before you trample my feet.

    This is out of control, it’s out of control, it's gotta go. You're scared of what you don’t know.
    I’ll say this over again, and over again, until it ends. A house divided will never stand.

    We tear each other down to build ourselves up. A system failure, enough is enough.
    “Cause in a world this shaky and unstable, we've got to be less fucking hateful.”

    Knuckles white. This is beyond aggression.
    Knuckles white. Because we need new direction.

    This is out of control, it’s out of control, it's gotta go. You're scared of what you don’t know.
    I’ll say this over again, and over again, until it ends. A house divided will never stand.

    This is out of control. I’ll say this over again.
    A house divided will never stand.
     
  16. Knight Solaire

    Knight Solaire Fapstronaut

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    Really inspiring and wonderful journal you've got here buddy. I just got bored today and wound up here on your journal. It's so refreshing see someone so passionate like myself and the people in my group.

    I just noticed your signature and that you were in the group! Wow! Lol

    Well, I hope to see you active around the barracks and lifting more spirits as you have mine today. Stay inspiring my friend, for you will go far.

    Hope you have a great weekend and spring break if you have it. Stay strong, stay in the light, and Praise the Sun! \o/
     
  17. Landomike

    Landomike Fapstronaut

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  18. Image isn't displaying :)
     
  19. I joined on Reddit, I was in the group here but not anymore as I will only be active with the Heirs on Reddit. I have been totally clean since I joined up with the group so don't think I'm avoiding accountability or anything it's just I feel a need to vehemently lay down this thread of sorts here hahaha! I will become active in due time on Reddit once this sucker is firmly established.

     
    Last edited: Mar 11, 2016


  20. You (lol just roleplaying) think I'm gonna sit around like some passive fuck and watch the world fall to pieces and the porn industry just ravage our children by hooking them before they are even teens? FUCK NO, I WILL FIGHT, and make sure I completely fix the faults inside me that caused me to look at P.

    "Empires"

    This is a call to arms

    This is a call to arms
    to the ones that want to fight
    for all they love, for all that's good
    and for all that's right

    You didn't think this through
    you will be hunted down
    There is no sink or swim
    There's only sink and drown

    We will not stop at no
    We will climb your walls
    We are making all the calls
    Until this empire falls

    Because all empires fall

    [​IMG]

    What will future generations say
    When they look back someday?
    Will they see that we all just quit?
    Or will they see how we fought for it?

    *Bleahh*

    Chorus
    We will always remember WOHOHOOOO
    These dark days we are going through
    We will never surrender WOHOHOOOO
    Until justice is done upon you

    Be free, and free your mind
    Unleash the beast you have inside
    If we're effective only time will tell
    if there's a heaven, then earth is hell

    Some songs and bands just RADIATE AND EMBODY self improvement. Like some albums are a self improvement book if you actually listen to the lyrics. Taped's album Empires is one such masterpiece.

    http://taped.bigcartel.com/product/taped-empires

     
    Last edited: Mar 11, 2016

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