Illuminatus Interviews Aaron Sleazy

Some time ago I have hinted at an upcoming interview Illuminatus from Personal Power Meditation conducted with me. It's long, but it will be worth it, especially if you want to learn more about my meditative practice and my general outlook on life, both of which had a big positive impact on my level of success with women.

This is from the introduction:

I made Sleazy my mentor, paying strict attention to his writings and exchanging emails with him regularly. As a meditation teacher, I became particularly interested in how Sleazy had used meditative methods to create the mindset of clarity and focus which he attributes much of his success to. Thus, instead of focusing on his adventures in seduction (which are already well-documented), in this interview I have chosen to focus on the mental basis of Aaron Sleazy: the man himself, and how he developed the psychological wherewithal to become a master seducer capable of flouting social norms and behaving on his own agenda at will – a feat most men only dream of.

Please go ahead and read Illuminatus's "Interview With Aaron Sleazy"!

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Three interesting posts at The Seduction Community

The magic over at The Seduction Community is already happening, and some very good posts have already appeared.

My buddy Sixty has re-posted his classic "Anti-Manifesto", which you should definitely check out if you haven't already.

I consider this an anti-manifesto because most strategies usually focus on what you need to do or say. There is nothing to say. There is nothing to do.

Your whole life you have been doing things to lessen tension. You have always tried to make everybody else around you feel more comfortable at your own expense. You do this with your friends, your co-workers and especially the women you like. When things get tense or awkward you're the big clown making everyone laugh and feel comfortable. Even when girls reject you, you are more worried about their comfort level than your own. You don't want her to feel awkward. Aw!

This is bad because doing things to help women feel more comfortable with the sexual tension will be viewed by her as supplication. A woman is never going to be attracted to a man that can handle LESS sexual tension than she can.

But there is some new blood, too. Warped Mindless wrote an article on "The ESP Model of Escalation." The acronym stands for Eye Contact, Sexualization, Physical Touch.

Most guys go about touching women the wrong way. They give her a little should touch when she says something funny, or gives her a little high five to reward her for something she does that he likes. Lame touches like this isn't going to turn the woman on. She isn't going to want to drop her pants and spread her legs because you gave her a tap on the shoulder or a small pat on the back. If anything she will just think your weird and honestly, she would be right.

The right way to touch a woman in to touch her like a man. Every thing you do in an interaction should be "From a man to a woman" kind of way. Not as her friend, not as her buddy, but as a MAN.

It is definitely a good reminder for guys who are afraid of being sexual when they are out to pick up women.

Lastly, Illuminatus wrote an insightful post with the title "Women do not actually know why they find you attractive!". If you are not familiar with Illuminatus's writing, you should definitely check him out, because he has a gift for getting at the core of problems (and in a completely non-rambling way, too).

The issue with asking women what it is they like, at its core, is neither that the reasons women give are all different, nor that they share some hidden commonality, but rather that the feeling of attraction in a woman is based in such primitive pre-language circuits that it happens too quickly and they have no hope of articulating the actual THING they liked.

This leads to women completely rationalizing their attraction after-the-fact, often with the first reason that pops into their heads! Like all humans, women cannot stand the cognitive dissonance of feeling something but not knowing why -- so they rationalize it away. Except women are not too interested in accuracy generally, so they will attribute ANY trait as the causative factor of their attraction.

So, join us over there at The Seduction Community!

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Review: The End of Social Anxiety by Edward Cottrill (Illuminatus)

I am not the biggest fan of classical self-help books, and I only have to refer to a well-known title such as Tony Robbins’s Awaken the Giant Within to demonstrate why. First of all, a lot of those books are tomes. You could probably substitute your dumbbells with them. But filling hundreds of pages is not so easy, which is why you will find page after page full of jargon, hackneyed phrases with a kernel of truth and lengthy attempts to sell you seminars, often with greatly exaggerated claims. Reading those books almost makes you think that used car salesmen are pleasant to be around in comparison.

On the other hand, The End of Social Anxiety is presented in a down-to-earth tone. If you are looking for another story along the lines of “I used to sleep in my car --- and now I live in a castle”, you will therefore be disappointed. However, if your motivation is to get help for some very specific problems, all related to social anxiety to varying degrees, then please read on.

I have known Edward as “Corvette” for many years now. He used to be one of the most prominent contributors to the seduction forum mASF, but he eventually left to set up his own Internet presence at Personal Power Meditation and now calls himself “Illuminatus”. He had a similar motivation to me, namely to look for a venue in which he could express his views and experiences without being attacked by narrow-minded people who felt threatened by someone who undermined their view of the world. One of his projects was to use meditation as a tool for overcoming certain psychological problems. It has worked for him, and now he is sharing his success story.

But if you read “success story” and want to roll your eyes in reflex, you should take it easy, because The End of Social Anxiety focuses on tried-and-true methods for overcoming social anxiety. It won’t promise you the world, and Edward doesn’t claim that he will magically transform you into a superhuman being either. I found it particularly refreshing that there was not even a trace of sensationalist language in the book. Instead, he writes very clearly, and if you have read other books in the self-help area, you may wonder why he doesn’t “motivate” you more strongly. Hopefully, though, you will quickly realize that this is by design, and that it will be good for you as it will keep you from forming unrealistic expectations, therefore potentially making you more content as well:

The point here is that life goes on, and what bored you before will probably still bore you, and what made you happy before will still make you happy, but the difference is that you aren’t getting any unnecessary suffering from being out in public, or having thoughts all the time about your social anxiety and how to deal with it. It’s a huge weight off your shoulders. The message here is, if you do make images of your future life without social anxiety, make them as realistic as possible. Simply not feeling fear is a great place to start.

In order to help you get rid of social anxiety, Edward tells his story to help you relate to typical problems you may face. It also helps you to put some of the exercises into context. So, even if you are not an especially anxious person, the book also deals with aspects you may very well be familiar with although you may view yourself as a confident person. Or wouldn’t you want to have fewer distracting thoughts in addition to feeling a bit happier? I thought so.

Two parts stuck out to me. In one, Edward analyses “overlays”, which could also be called flash images. The example he uses is rather drastic, but you are surely familiar with having sudden thoughts that deal with how you should have acted in a certain situation, or what you want to do some time in the future. A simple example is you caving in to some inane wish of your partner. You really don’t want to, but you do it just because you want her to stop throwing a childish tantrum. But later on, you think back and paint a picture in your mind about how you should have resisted that urge to give in. This is an example of an “overlay”, and I am sure that most of you have overlays popping into your mind on a pretty regular basis.

Of course, overlays can be very distracting and emotionally consuming. Edward then describes a method to overcome them that shares some similarities with my experiences from meditation. In fact, I managed to get rid of overlays, which I more broadly refer to as “distracting thoughts”, through years of meditation, and the mental process I have used is close to the one described in this book.

Another high point was the description of how to get rid of negative feelings by simply focusing on them and allowing yourself to experience them without resistance. As a practical application, Edward even tells you how to use this skill to get rid of pain much quicker. Again, this is something I am very familiar with as well. As is described in the book, by making use of the example of a cold shower, it is often the case that the mere thoughts surrounding an action determine your reaction to it, and if you learn to control your thoughts, you will realize that what you perceive as a negative experience, which you naturally seek to avoid, may not be so bad after all. Of course, you don’t have to go as far as Edward and take a cold shower every day to hammer home this point. It is not mentioned in the book in particular, but the problem of procrastination is deeply related as well, where the focus is too much on avoiding potentially negative emotions. This applies to the student who has to work on a term paper the same way as it applies to the office worker who has wanted to ask his boss for a salary rise for half a year now.

Those were just two examples, but they have hopefully whet your appetite. The book also has a very good culmination in a chapter on happiness, which analyses a key problem of Western civilization, namely the motive of delayed gratification. This keeps you in a loop of constant discontent, always wanting the next shiny thing, which will make you happy for a while, but then you have go out again to shop for a new pair of shoes, a dress, or a smart phone. As a consequence, this might affect your whole life as it could make you hold on to a job you don’t enjoy much, just because it is well paid. But all is good in the end, because after toiling away for decades, you will finally be able to enjoy retirement. Of course, you can already see what is wrong with this kind of reasoning, and what the path to happiness might consist of instead.

Overall, I have greatly enjoyed The End of Social Anxiety. If you feel uncomfortable in social situations and want to change this, I would definitely recommend this book. Admittedly, social anxiety is none of my personal concerns, at least not any more. However, I did recognize some of the issues I had in Edward’s descriptions, and the method I used to overcome them was similar to the techniques he recommends. The effects were the same, though. Thus, I can attest to their effectiveness.

The End of Social Anxiety is available as a PDF. It is also available for Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader.

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Upcoming: Review of Illuminatus's "The End of Social Anxiety"

I just finished reading Illuminatus's "The End of Social Anxiety". I'll re-read some parts of it tomorrow, and will write a review shortly afterwards. The book has made a very good impression on me, and even if you don't suffer from social anxiety, you will benefit from reading it. But this short statement has to suffice for now. Look forward to the review!

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"A Week with Sleazy" by Illuminatus

In late August I spent one week at Illuminatus's place in England. He has recorded his impressions in a post called "A Week with Sleazy" on his forum, and he covers a whole range of issues: meditation, breathing techniques, my world view,  but of course he also gives an outside view of seeing me in the club interacting with women.

Check it out!

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Update on Interview by Illuminatus

Some time ago I mentioned an upcoming interview Illuminatus from Personal Power Meditation has conducted with me. I can already tell you that the interview is done now. The word count is close to 7,000. This means that there will be a lot of content in it. The focus is not on seduction, though, but more on my worldview.

Now you may ask why the interview hasn't been released if it's done. Well, the reason is simple: it got picked up by Interesting Times magazine, a PDF publication that describes itself as a "self-help magazine for extreme people".

The next issue should be released in September. I will keep you posted.

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Upcoming: Illuminatus interviews Aaron Sleazy

My little piece on Vin DiCarlo and loneliness wasn't the surprise I had hinted at in my little teaser on the upcoming German translation of Sleazy Stories. No, it's something even better: while I have been incredibly busy the last 10 months or so, I'm now in the fortunate position to finally see some of my projects come to fruition. I've previously mentioned another book I'm working on already, but there is much more going on behind the scenes, such as an interview with Illuminatus. You may know him as Corvette from mASF, but like pretty much every other big name, he doesn't post there anymore.

I've been in email conversation with Illuminatus for about three years now. At first, he took an intense interest in what I called "God Mode", a state of mind in which picking up girls is about as challenging as picking your nose. There was some confusion about the concept. For instance, people often mixed it up with the nonsense concept of "state" (acting as if you are drunk and pretend to be a rude a**hole) or "Social God Mode" (a phrase my buddy Sixty coined, which refers to a person who is naturally outgoing and nonchalantly talking to everyone in the bar). While I have been exchanging many thoughts with him, about a year ago he approached me with the idea of doing an interview for his forum, Personal Power Meditation, to explore some issues relevant to personal development as well as seduction in a broader context, and to the benefit of all.

The end result was a long dialogue in which Illuminatus picked my brain on mental states, meditation, perception of reality, philosophy of life, women, and everything in between. Currently, the text is undergoing its final editing phase, but it will be posted very soon. Once the text has been green-lighted, Illuminatus will release it, and I'll let you know about it immediately afterwards.

Look forward to it!

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Joint Seminar with Illuminatus & Aaron Sleazy / Nottingham, England / 27th August 2011

Hello,

it is my great pleasure to announce my upcoming seminar with Illuminatus aka. Corvette. If you have first come across my articles when I was still actively posting on seduction forums, you have surely read some of his writings as well, and if not, I urge you to check out his homepage as he has written a great number of interesting articles, and recently he has released his first book, too. Please note that this will be my only seminar in 2011.

Illuminatus will speak on overcoming social anxieties, a topic most relevant for seduction. My talk will be based on my upcoming third book, in which I will outline the by far clearest, simplest, and easiest to implement "method" of seduction. It will blow your socks off!

The full announcement is attached.

Best regards,
Aaron Sleazy



Joint Seminar with Illuminatus & Aaron Sleazy / Nottingham, England / 27th August 2011


Overview

Illuminatus (http://www.personalpowermeditation.com) and Aaron Sleazy (http://www.aaronsleazy.com) team up for a seminar for anyone interested in fixing fundamental issues about social anxieties. While Illuminatus will talk about the topic of social anxiety in general, Aaron Sleazy will tell you how to put this knowledge to good use when it comes to bedding women.

The seminar will take place on 27th August 2011 in Nottingham, England (*), in a central, easy-to-access location.
Start: 4.00pm
End: 8.00pm

(*) Nottingham can easily be reached via Birmingham Airport or East Midlands Airport. Also, there are very frequent train and bus rides to and from London.



The Speakers

Illuminatus is a leading authority on meditation and personal development. He has enjoyed a cult following on the seduction forum mASF as "Corvette", and has gained widespread attention due to his ability to analyse social interactions and emotional states at a level deeper than anybody else. Due to the dogmatic and restrictive nature of seduction-related forums, he searched for other venues to discuss his insights, but being discontented, he founded Personal Power Meditation in 2009. He has recently released his first book, "The End of Social Anxiety", which establishes a comprehensive model of the formation and experience of social anxiety and provides straightforward and easy-to-understand practical exercises to facilitate a total recovery from the condition.

Aaron Sleazy first gained notoriety on mASF also. He is mostly known for a very quick style of sexual escalation and seduction that is completely opposed to the mainstream dogmas advocating processes which, in his view, are countereffective in most cases. Due to his outstanding success and rapidly growing popularity, the owners of mASF saw their financial success threatened and consequently banned him and anyone associated with him. Since then, Aaron Sleazy has built his own presence on the Internet and released two books. His first book, "Sleazy Stories", is an illustration of his extremely powerful style of seduction. In his second book, "Debunking the Seduction Community", he attacked the seduction industry for teaching ineffective methods and financially exploiting desperate men. He is currently working on a third book, which will reveal the basics of seduction. This work is influenced by his experience as a seducer and coach, and thus focuses on relatively simple steps which anybody can do to improve their level of success.

Programme

1) Illuminatus on Overcoming Social Anxiety (90 min)
- What social anxiety is and its negative behavioural effects
- Your reality model: Beliefs at the core of social anxiety, how those beliefs were formed, and how they manifest to affect your behaviour today
- Why drugs (including alcohol) aren't a long-term solution
- How to experience your anxiety intentionally and think about it more like a scientist
- Seeing how your brain edits your reality via 'overlays', and training yourself to detach from those overlays
- Understanding equanimity and training yourself to stop labelling emotions "good" and "bad" in order to reduce resistance and suffering
- The biological basis of the stress response: the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and how to manipulate them intentionally
- Cultivating unconditional happiness by changing your perspectives, plus exercises for feeling good on purpose
- How to deal with trauma and other "bad things" when they arise

2) Break: 15 min

3) Aaron Sleazy on Foundations of Success with Women (90 min)
- Figuring out what you want and whether you can get it
- Why some men are successful, but most are not
- What women want, and what you can do if you can't quite deliver
- Some easy fixes, some hard ones, and some impossible ones
- Various roadblocks and how to overcome them
- Realistic expectations, a.k.a. becoming the "Guy Next Door"
- Meeting girls in different scenarios (work, nightclubs, and everywhere in between except online)
- Minimal investment, maximal outcome
- Starting and ending relationships

4) Break: 15 min

5) Joint Q&A Session: 45 min


Registration details

1) Send an email to illuminatus@personalpowermeditation.com
2) Either pay 69.00 pounds (GBP) via PayPal (offer valid until: 12th August 2011)
or pay 89.00 pounds at the door (cash only)
3) You will receive a confirmation of your registration and, if applicable, of your PayPal payment as well, within 24 hours
4) You will be informed about the exact location of the seminar in due time

See you soon in Nottingham!

Best regards,
Illuminatus & Aaron Sleazy

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