More thoughts on transcendence

TLDR: One of the most important things humans look for in a mate is transcendence.

One of the most common red pill “truths” is that women are hypergamous, which means that women are generally attracted to men that, at the very least, are “higher” than them (in looks, status, power, age, wealth, emotional stability), and ideally also higher than other men. A man need not be better than a woman in every single way, but a woman will generally not be attracted unless the man is better than her in certain areas that are biologically important to her.

I agree that women are hypergamous. But I think that women are also attracted to transcendence. Transcendence is hypergamy on steroids: women are not just attracted to guys that are higher than them, women are attracted to men that are infinitely higher than them. A woman is not just attracted to guy who is smarter than her, but a guy who, through his frame and actions, makes it appear that he may actually be INFINITELY smarter than her. If this sounds absurd, you are correct. Often, transcendence is an optical illusion and appeals more to the primal, base areas of our brain rather than the rational part.

Men have lots of theories about what women want: money, physical attractiveness, social proof, nice cars, “alpha male” behavior, etc… These explanations are not wrong, but I think they are missing something. Tangible things like money, social standing, or alpha male behavior are ancillary to a woman’s desire for transcendence OR are simply an indicator of transcendence.

It is difficult to define the word transcendence because it refers to something inherently indefinable. Here are some attempts at a definition:

Transcendence is something that is fundamentally out of our reach. Transcendence is something our mind cannot fathom or comprehend. Transcendence is something infinitely higher than us. Transcendence is something that exists beyond our reality. Transcendence is something we are drawn to and feeds all of our emotional and intellectual desires and then exceeds them. Transcendence is something that expands our mind. Transcendence is something that gives us a window into infinity.

I can go on forever, but I will never be able to completely define transcendence for the same reason I cannot completely define “love” or “God.”

Perhaps we are attracted to transcendence because our brains are awed by and cannot handle the concepts of uncertainty, infinity, and power, which is why these concepts are represented by God in many religions. Uncertainty and infinity make us feel powerless and insecure because we know that no matter who we are and what we have, we are ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe, and some force can appear out of nowhere and zap us at any time. And for most people, random things do come out of nowhere and zap them: getting cheated on, getting fired, getting sick, etc…

Weak minds try to minimize the uncertainty and fear of infinity by lying to themselves and pretending they’ve figured out infinity – this is the basis for stupid people religion. Smart religion and philosophy teaches that people need to learn to live with uncertainty and infinity. Sometimes religion seeks to ease the terror by teaching that uncertainty and infinity will be “on our side” if we do some otherwise meaningless rituals.

When men see a woman attracted to a celebrity or a billionaire, they think to themselves “she just wants money or fame.” And that may be true in some cases. But oftentimes, a woman is attracted to a billionaire because he is TRANSCENDENT to her. For example, if she is a bartender or waitress, a rich businessman represents something that she can never accomplish and a world she can never enter on her own. If she could become a billionaire on her own, she would. But if she cannot, a billionaire represents something fundamentally beyond her. It’s not a matter of “I know how to clean my room, I am just too lazy to do it.” The woman does not even know where to start to become a billionaire. His intelligence, his ambition, his creativity, his ability to work hard – those things are beyond her reach, which is why she is attracted to him. The same goes for a woman’s attraction to a celebrity, a famous artist, or anybody else that excites her emotions and intellect.

Why material things and money are not enough to keep a girl attracted

Trying to impress a girl with money or material things will always fail because money and material things are always finite and she will always eventually get bored with whatever you have.

If she has $5, and you have $10, you are “better” than her, and under a traditional hypergamy theory she should be attracted to you. But if she knows you have $10, you do not appear transcendent to her: you just look like a guy with $10. Even though she does not have $10, her mind understands what $10 is, so there is no “magic” to your $10. And when she has experienced your $10, or when she finds a guy with $11, she will get bored and leave you. The same principle applies if you have a billion dollars.

If she does not know exactly how much money you have, the part of her brain attracted to transcendence will go crazy and excited trying to figure it out. Does he have $10? $15? A billion? A trillion? But money generally is not a good way to keep a woman because it is always finite and she will eventually figure out approximately what you have.

I had a friend who was a tech millionaire, and I was a struggling artist, and we would party with models on his yacht. Guess who the girls were more interested in? Well, some of the girls just wanted money because they were poor and struggling, so they stuck with my tech millionaire friend. Sometimes you have to repress your desire for transcendence when you have other, immediately pressing needs. But my tech millionaire friend was boring, and many of the girls found me more interesting and spent all day talking to me about my-then nonexistent art career. The yacht and the champagne and the money immediately bored them, but my struggle as an artist was interesting to them.

I tried to explain to my tech millionaire friend that girls would like him more if he told them the story of his struggle and how he was poor for many years before he made it, rather than just bragging about his money and yacht. My friend disagreed, saying that girls were not interested. Here is what he did not understand: if he tells a bartender or waitress your story of becoming a tech millionaire, she will look bored because she has nothing in that story she can emotionally relate to. But that story will stay in her mind as an indicator of his transcendence and she will be awed and grateful that he allowed her into his mind and took her on that journey. In other words, the fact that she cannot emotionally relate to that story is why it is so impressive to her. This is why one of the hardest parts of game is sometimes speaking what is on your mind rather than dumbing down everything to make her happy.

Men often believe that all women are stupid bimbos that just want to get drunk and have fun, and you cannot have a serious or deep conversation with them. That’s not true. Women have many of the same fundamental desires that men have, but they cannot pursue those desires, so they default to cheap pleasure like alcohol and parties.

The infinite mind

The key to attracting women is showing you have a transcendent mind.

When I say “mind,” I am not sure what I mean. Nor do most philosophers. The best I can do is to say that “mind” is an amalgamation of all of your thoughts and emotions.

The human mind, for all intents and purposes, has the capacity to be infinite. Some religions say that the human mind is the same thing as God’s mind. God obviously knows more shit than us because he has had more time to learn stuff and think about it, but the fundamental “stuff” of our mind is the same as God’s. In the story about the Tower of Babel in the Bible, God says that if all humanity put their minds together, they will be able to do anything, including be God himself. You may argue that God does not have emotions, but that cannot be true – if God were pure rationality he would never do anything. Rationality and logic are only tools – emotion supplies the goals for that tool to work toward. If God did not fundamentally “want” something, he would have never created the world.

If you are an atheist and God talk makes you queasy, think about the infinite mind in this way: scientifically, our brain is a network of billions of neural connections. And those connections can rewire themselves in trillions of different patterns. Our mind therefore has the capacity to wire itself into such a large number of different configurations it might as well be infinity.

A prominent evolutionary biologist was asked to explain how human brains differ from those of our ape ancestors. His response was that the primary difference between ape and human brains is that the human brain can say “what if?” That’s it! The capability to say what if – in other words, to consider alternative possibilities that are not immediately present and may not even exist yet – is what makes humans “rational” and the most intelligent, powerful species on earth. This capability is also what separates humans from computers. Computers have processing power that far exceeds what the human brain can do, but at the end of the day, computers follow the instructions that humans give them. New artificial software gives computers the ability to “learn” and formulate their own instructions, but computers under current technology still do not have the complete and unimpeded ability to consider every “what if” in every situation and therefore cannot be as intelligent as humans.

In summary, your mind is potentially infinite. So is hers. And if your infinite mind is more “advanced” than her infinite mind (I’ll explain what that means in a little bit), you will remain transcendent to her.

Here is a philosophical thought experiment: If person A truly is smarter than person B, person B will never be able to understand HOW MUCH smarter person A is, because if person B did understand how much smarter person A is, then person B would be smarter than person A. In other words, if person B knew exactly what person A knows more than him, then person B would be just as smart as person A. As far as person B is concerned, person A’s mind is infinitely deeper than person B’s mind because there is always some shit in person A’s mind than person B does not have access to.

Pure intelligence, however, is not enough to keep a woman attracted because intelligence is also finite. There is only a finite list of things a human being can know, and if your list contains a bunch of irrelevant information then she’s not going to give a shit. If you’ve memorized the ins and outs of DragonBall Z, she may feel like you are “infinitely smarter” than her with respect to DragonBall Z, but she won’t care. Your transcendence must affect her emotionally.

So if material possessions are not enough to make you feel transcendent to her, and intelligence is not enough, then what is?

True transcendence can only be achieved by a man that is on a mission. A man on a mission is directing his infinite mind to a goal that is infinitely rewarding. Pursuing one’s mission is infinitely rewarding because, as I stated in my article “You are your mission,” following your mission includes within it all of the other pleasures. You learn things, you become more spiritually enlightened, you make money, you gain honor, and you overcome challenges, you form relationships, etc… Any emotion she has will be tickled by a man on a mission, provided that man is further along in his mission than her. She likes money? The man is making money. She likes power? He is becoming more powerful by the day. She likes intelligence? He is becoming smarter. Etc…

In the previous section I stated that women get bored of material things. But a woman can never get bored of a man on a mission because he is a moving target. She can’t get bored of his $10, because tomorrow he may have $15, and on top of that every day he is becoming more interesting, intelligent, spiritually enlightened, etc…. A woman does not stay with a billionaire just because she counted the 0s in his bank account, but because his mind is fundamentally transcendent to her.

The mental connection

A human’s relationship to another human is different than a human’s relationship to a material object, because a human can vicariously feel emotions through other humans. If you like somebody, and something bad happens to them, you feel like something bad happened to yourself. Similarly, if you have an emotional connection to somebody, and something good happens to them, you feel like something good happened to yourself.

The human’s mind ability to vicariously feel emotions can cause a person to disassociate their “self” (whatever that is) from their body. For example, when a man is willing to die for his country, he no longer bases his emotions on his own body, but with the abstract concept of his “nation.” On a less grandiose scale, there are men who let their lives go to complete shit, yet feel like heroes because their videogame characters are level 78 paladins. This “self-disassociation,” for lack of a better term, can be very dangerous in the context of relationship.

When two people form an emotional connection, it is almost as if their minds “connect” and they vicariously experience the other’s emotions. An emotional connection is like adding another mind to your own mind. And naturally, people want to connect with a mind that is better than their own: a mind that is smarter, thinks more interesting thoughts, feels better emotions, etc…

Women are attracted to a confident, joyful, positive, man living an interesting life because she can attach her mind to his and have a “better” mind to filter her thoughts and feelings through. If she’s feeling anxious, she can filter her anxiety through his confidence. If she’s feeling weak, she can filter her feelings of weakness through his power. If she’s sad, she can filter her sadness through his joy.

Ultimately, women are attracted to the alpha male because they want to BE the alpha male. This is also why a shit test is a sign of interest – she is giving her new mind a test drive. Shit tests are anxieties that torment women projected to you to see if she will still feel that anxiety with her new mind. Of course, if your mind is inferior to hers, she will disconnect and go find somebody else.

Relationships, however, are not pure transcendence. Like the models on the yacht, people have needs and they will often fill it with somebody who is not transcendent just because they need some immediate sex, companionship, affection, beta bucks, etc… But this transcendence is to me the deepest and most attractive thing about a human.

Many people in relationships choose to disassociate their self from their own body and simply live in their partner’s mind, experiencing their partners’ emotions rather than their own, because their own emotions suck. These people often lose their identities and become worthless appendages to their partner. Why develop a personality and interesting life when I can just free ride off of the interesting life my partner created? This is obviously incredibly dangerous because once these people lose their partners their life becomes shattered and the source of all their positive emotions disappears, and it is a long, difficult road for them to develop their own identity again.

Sometimes two people vicariously experiencing each others’ emotions creates an infinite loop, like two mirrors facing each other and reflecting the other infinitely. When a man and woman emotionally connect, the man vicariously experiences emotions through the woman’s mind. But the woman vicariously experiences emotions through the man’s mind. So the man is experiencing himself vicariously through her, but she is experiencing herself vicariously through him, so therefore he is experiencing herself through himself through herself through himself, ad infinitum. This infinite loop of vicarious emotions is why relationships are a mindfuck for so many people. And if you are stuck in this infinite loop, you sometimes forget that your “self” belongs to your own body, not hers, and now your “self” is floating between your two minds, and she can destroy your “self” by simply disconnecting her mind from yours.

How to ruin your transcendence

To ruin your transcendence, just fill your mind with junk. If she peers into your mind and all she sees is video games, porn, and garbage, she will not be impressed. I don’t play a lot of video games, but I basically know that the joy and growth you can get from video games is limited compared to other pursuits, so there is no infinity at the end of the rainbow. Maybe one of you gamers can prove me wrong, but I’m pretty sure I am right, and I am also pretty sure that most women would agree with me.

Another way to ruin transcendence is by having a mind full of anxiety, depression, negative thoughts, etc… When she peers in your mind, she wants a better experience than her own mind. Depression and anxiety are also not transcendent: they are limiting and paralyzing. Depressed people are not “interesting”: they are easy to figure out.

Fortunately, women cannot really see into your mind because mind-reading is not real yet. She can only see the image you project. Women can get a good sense of what’s going on in there because they’ve developed a very good ability to read men’s emotions, but it is possibly to successfully “fake it till you make it” and give off a confident, joyful demeanor, at least on the outside.

A more common way men ruin their transcendence is getting overly emotionally invested in the woman, which means filling your thoughts and emotions with her and not your mission. If she peers into your mind and just sees herself, she will not think you are transcendent because she is not getting access to anything beyond herself. She is just back where she started. Even if you do have a cool life, she will be forced to think that whatever cool shit is in your mind is less interesting and exciting than her, because if it was more interesting and exciting than her, you would be focused on that other stuff, not her. And women know exactly how cool and interesting they are.

Even worse, if a woman’s mind if full of anxiety and depression, she will not want to emotionally connect with a guy who is emotionally invested in her because if she vicariously experiences life through him, she will be vicariously experiencing herself and her own anxiety and depression again, creating an infinite feedback loop where she feels infinite anxiety and depression. This is why even a little emotional over-investment makes women run.

Similarly, validating yourself to a woman, supplicating to a woman, doing things for her that she doesn’t deserve, and letting her throw you off of your mission will ruin your transcendence because she will again think that your life is not transcendent if you are going out of your way to accommodate her.

The danger of transcendence

Like all human impulses that are originally designed to be noble, our desire for transcendence has dangers.

For one, it is easy for losers to create an optical illusion of transcendence even when their mind sucks. No matter what is actually going on in your mind, if you ignore somebody they may think you are transcendent because they just assume that what’s going on in there is more interesting and better than them. This is where the brain’s attraction to uncertainty dooms it.

Often when a person gets dumped they obsess over what their crush is thinking about and they seek “closure.” But their crush is not thinking about anything interesting or amazing – they just are not thinking about them. The more impressive of a girl I am around, the more I force myself to think about other stuff around her because it makes me look mysterious. If she is the most interesting girl in the world, and I do not fill my thoughts and emotions with her like most guys do, she will assume that my mind is full of much more interesting things, even if it is not.

Secondly, our attraction to transcendence makes us attracted to weird, crazy and damaged people simply because our minds cannot figure their minds. Like many guys, I have been attracted to “crazy” girls because I wanted to figure out what the fuck was going in her mind.

Our desire for transcendence can motivate us to work hard to achieve our goals, to learn about the universe, and to become a better person. That same desire, however, is what pushes some people to push their body’s limits with drugs, to explore bizarre and harmful sexual fetishes, and to indulge the darker parts of their mind. Just like a weightlifter who successfully completes a lift wants to increase the weight next time, an alcoholic who goes on a bender will want to go on an even crazier bender next time. A crazy lady who destroyed her face with plastic surgery, or a hoarder who is living in filth are people who had indulged their desire for transcendence in a negative way. Sometimes positive people get so hooked on transcendence that they seek negative transcendence as well. Many of the most talented artists and successful businessmen also become the biggest drug addicts, form some of the weirdest habits, and go down some of the weirdest political/social/religious wormholes.

People seeking transcendence in negative ways are sometimes attractive because their desire to push the limits of their mind makes us feel like they are transcendent. I have noticed that men get oneitis most often when the girl is a mixture of positive transcendence and negative transcendence. He starts to not be able to tell the difference and instead of realizing that she is an asshole or an impulsive alcoholic, he thinks of her attitude or her impulsivity is part of her awesomeness.

Does this apply to men?

Although men are different than women emotionally, men are also attracted to sex. Men have an immediate desire for sex, and are often willing to overlook a woman’s mind to get straight to the sex. Once the excitement of the sex wears off, however, men oftentimes lose attraction because the woman’s mind is boring, oftentimes because she is overly emotionally invested in him.

On a deeper level, men oftentimes put a woman on a pedestal not because she deserves it, but because the man is unhappy with his own life and wants to live a “better” life through her. Men who put women on a pedestal often think that all hot women have amazing, fun lives where they get everything for free and do not face the same challenges and struggles other people face. These guys usually do not have a lot of experience hanging out with and talking to beautiful women so the very fact that she is a beautiful woman makes her transcendent to him and he feels like she is some magical creature that exists in a reality fundamentally apart from his own.

Men also place women on a pedestal because they think, sometimes consciously and sometimes subconsciously, that the woman will make their sadness disappear: the sex will make them feel better, society will respect them more, she will stroke his ego, etc… Essentially, they will be able to wash all of their negative emotions through her because of her incredible life. This is, of course, wrong – women want to wash their negative emotions through YOU, not vice versa. Your oneitis is selfish – you don’t “love” her; you want to use her to make yourself feel better. Women know that, which is why they run from guys with oneitis and run towards guys with little emotional investment.

In an ideal relationship, both parties are transcendent in their own ways and help each other grow and expand each other’s minds, without one party being a worthless appendage to the other. In most successful relationships, the two parties spend a lot of time apart, and have their own separate hobbies and interests.

Call to action

• Follow your mission at all costs. If a woman does not fundamentally understand your mission, do not feel like you need to “dumb down” your life or give up your hobbies to make her happy. You resisting your efforts at pulling you down will make you more attractive to her.

• When interacting with women, there should always be a part of your mind that she does not have access to. These can be hobbies, interests, whatever. You need alone time to pursue your passions without her monitoring you.

• You should always be improving yourself – remember, you must be a moving target!

• Don’t base your happiness on somebody else’s life.

• Keep a transcendent frame.

The “transcendent frame” is a tricky concept, so I need to explain it.

To hold a “transcendent frame,” when you interact with a woman, you must feel and speak like you are infinitely higher than her in every way. This is easier said than done: it takes a lot of work to transform your feelings, thoughts, and actions to the point where you feel worthy of her, much less better than her, much less INFINITELY better than her. “Get confident quick” PUA schemes are bullshit and play on the fragility of the male ego and our desire to get results quick. But those schemes only teach you some of the things a confident man would do or say – they do not fundamentally transform you into a confident person because that transformation takes WORK. To be able to hold this frame, you must clear your mind of insecurities, depression, anxiety, self-limiting beliefs, etc… Here are the steps to create a transcendent frame, but it may take you a lot of work before you can actually follow the steps:

1) Look at all of her thoughts and emotions. Eliminate the negative ones. You don’t accept or entertain negativity in your thoughts and emotions under any circumstances. You have no absolute need for anybody, so the moment they introduce negativity, you can let them go.

2) Of her positive thoughts and emotions that are left, you can produce those as well, but infinitely moreso than her. If she is happy, you are infinitely happier. If she is confident, you are infinitely more confident.

3) Don’t get mired in her anxiety, or negativity, or petty thoughts. If she wants to talk about something that isn’t awesome, don’t. Imagine you just walked off stage from playing Madison Square Garden to thousands of adoring fans. If some woman walked up to you, would you want to talk about her cat or some argument she had at work?

4) Be confident. If your emotions are just her emotions but times infinity, you can do and say anything because fundamentally, a conversation is just an exchange of emotions, and your emotions are in the right state.

5) Stimulate yourself and her by constantly raising the intelligence and emotional level of the conversation. The conversation is not you supplicating to her; you should also enjoy it. Make the conversation interesting, smart and fun.

One last note

You may ask yourself “if a man is transcendent, why would he ever need a woman or want to talk to her?” My response is that a man can be transcendent but still need others. No man is an island, and every man needs help from his friends, his community, and ultimately, he needs a woman. Just as a CEO needs employees and God needs humanity, a transcendent man needs good people in his life. The difference between a transcendent man and a beta male is that a transcendent man has options and will quickly kick his friends or women to the curb if they mistreat him.