When you should leave NoFap

Please forgive me for the eye catching title. This is not a hate post towards NoFap. I believe NoFap is very important for people up to a certain point. After that point the forum becomes counter-productive to reach your goal. To explain what I mean I will expand my understanding of what a porn addiction really is and how it works. I have to make a long d-tour first, but bear with me if you will.

BASIS​

Let's start with you. What would you answer me if I'd ask you What do you mean when you say "I"?
If you are like most people you would say I am my thoughts, my feelings but most of all my body.. Even if you would not say that, if you'd look at yourself critically you will certainly find moments in your day where you act like you identify with one of those things as being you.

However these things can't be you because all they are is memory. Your mind stored memory, your feelings stored memory, your body stored memory of the food you ate, the movements you did and of course all of your ancestors memory too. So all this memory can ever be is past. That's the definition of memory, it's a recording/accumulation of something that happened. But you are not past. You are present. You're not simply a recording, you are self-conscious.

Each of those dimensions, body, emotions and thought, have their own intelligence. This intelligence or in other words internal logic is nothing but the mathematical result of all the data that has been collected by your system thus far. We call this result ego (or karma in certain cultures). Yes, you don't just have one ego, you have several. In fact you know, when's the last time your minds ego planned to get up at 5am in the morning, but your body's ego showed you the finger when the alarm ringed.
See there's a reason why we negatively call people "egoistic". It's when we notice that they're are too identified with whatever they've accumulated so far, because we instinctively know that there's more to us and that whatever we've accumulated is to a great degree nothing but a coincidence. So we somehow rightly feel that the attachment to ones data is foolish, because it is never fully up to date and is nothing but a fraction of a fraction of all the data that is out there. Making our egos filled with flaws and inconsistencies.

This identification with one or all of those egos is the basis for all human suffering.

As you grow up you collect your data and develop your egos. This processes are unconscious, means the egos run even without you paying attention to them. They have to, if they wouldn't, we sleepy idiots would be long dead. But you are not master of the data that comes in, the environment is simply the way it is. So in a way it is not your fault that you started watching porn and that you have difficult time quitting now. It is all just a result of how your egos were built up.

SUFFERING​

It is natural to feel powerless against these strong internal forces. And this feeling of helplessness against their own accumulated egos is exactly what makes people suicide. They feel like they can't help but be this way. A shitty product of their own life. I felt that way for years and not so long ago again, and was in such intense misery that it didn't take more than a couple minutes before I wanted it all to end. I understand why people kill themselves, I also understand why people shoot up a school. Because why not take revenge on life itself when you never chose to become this comparatively unsuccessful pile of uselessness? I get it. Of course I never came close to killing myself and would never want to hurt anybody. I have too much hope and actually not a bad life when I look at it realistically instead of comparatively.

What I didn't understand back then was that I've been an idiot. I felt like because I have an inferiority complex, because my dad left me when I was a baby, because of all the negative shit that happened to me, I have to somehow resolve these issues to be free of them and live a happy life. Nothing could be further from the truth!

WE ARE TERRIBLY BAD AT BEING HUMAN​

See all this mind, body and emotion really are, is an instrument for you. They are your vehicle. They are a device. A rather complex one I might add. One that most people operate by only knowing less than 1% of what could be known about it. But even that little information is enough to make you survive easily.

However ask yourself, if you'd know only 1% of what is to know about a car, would you crash it? Of course you would! Well, we crash ourselves all the time. Every time you get angry. Every time you get sad. Every time you get depressed. People think they have to "go through stuff" in those negative moments. No! You don't!

All you're doing is you want to get from A to B with your car, but because you suck big time at driving you crashed it against the wall on the side of road. But instead of stopping or steering it back to the clear road you keep your foot on the gas paddle. There's a horrible noise as the chassis' being ripped open, you're barely gaining any distance. Yet you are dumb enough to think that you're supposed to drive like that and that you're actually making progress.

In fact there are plenty of professional therapists out there that think it's a good idea to make their patients crash themselves again in therapy, while believing that's how they will learn how to drive.

​

You don't need to "process" anything. What you call "processing information" is done automatically by your internal logic. All you can do is give your LIMITED(!!!) life energy to a fantasy inside your brain, whether it's a memory of the past or a possible future, and live it in the present moment (which causes you to miss the present moment...).​

SO WHAT TO DO?​

Learn to drive of course! What do you want to be if you had the choice: happy or sad? Well the thing is, you do have that choice. Always. Yet you keep sticking your head into the stinking trash-bag of your bad memories and wonder why you can't just be happy. "But the trash bag is following me, and yelling at me!" Let it. It's nothing but a memory. Understand this please. We can be blissful for hours on end without anything bad happening. But we can't stand real misery for longer than a couple minutes before thoughts of suicide appear and we need to distract ourselves. Being angry, sad, depressed literally poisons the body. It is never the right way to conduct oneself.

The first thing you must do is to stop forcing yourself to relive bad moments or draw conclusions about the future. Most of you laugh at astrologists for pretending to know the future, yet you do it all the time in your own head. We are just as clueless as them. All we know for sure is present. Because even our recorded past is skewed by our ego.

The way to deal with this predicament is to gain distance between you and your thoughts, feelings and emotions. See them for what they really are. That process is called meditation.

MEDITATION​

To explain how to get porn out of your life I need to explain this crucial technology to you in detail.

To meditate in the right way might appear difficult especially for beginners. Many people believe that you don't have to do anything but sit there with your eyes closed and meditation will happen. Then they will hear the noise of their memories and will try to turn it off. But since they know so little of this device that they call "self", they don't find the valve that controls the noise. Many give up in frustration at that stage. Some continue to meditate ineffectively, since there are many things you can do sitting there with your eyes closed and only one of them is meditation.

Meditation is like a flower. If you want to produce a flower you don't think "flower". You think "seed, soil, water, sunlight". Similarly you need to create the right conditions within you and meditation will happen automatically.

First you need to calm your body. Sit in a comfortable position. Position your hands symmetrically on your lap. In what way isn't important, especially as a beginner. You can lay them palm up on your thighs.

Now shift your attention to your breath. There's no need to breathe deeply. You can take a couple deep breaths to calm your system down at first, but then continue to breathe easily and regularly. Shifting your attention to your breath is the easiest and quickest method you have to become present.

You will hear your thoughts. A lot of them will revolve around what you're doing at the moment. Commenting how it works, if it works or not. Your thoughts will be more intense, because just like in the cinema when you shut off the lights, the spectacle becomes much more alive.
If you want to shut them off you need to understand the following: Pause your reading and try to not think of an elephant for the next ten seconds.
It's impossible if you're untrained in the art of meditation. Because for your mind to gain distance from a thought it needs to know what that thought is and it can't do that without focusing on it. So if you try to suppress your thoughts, all that will happen is that they will get louder.
To turn them off, you need to shut off their fuel. Their fuel is your life energy. You power them. You don't create your thoughts but you do sustain them. By paying very close attention to how your body, your head, your brain feels as you sit there, you will gradually notice that there's still tension to find, even though you might have judged yourself to be relaxed. Learn to find those tension points and relax them. Relax your brain as much as you can. That is not a "doing" thing. It's stop doing.

Keep turning your attention to your breath as you relax yourself. This is your time to take off from your life problems. This is your time to feel nothing but good. If you don't feel good. That's ok. Relieve yourself of any and all expectations.

Fun fact: Proper meditation has been scientifically proven to remove 80% more stress hormones (which are poisonous in high quantities) from the body than sleep does.

Meditation isn't about shutting off however. You stay aware and become even more aware. Hear every sound and attach yourself to none. Try to feel the blood rushing through your body. It's all one energy and any boundaries are nothing but a construct of your intellectual mind. There is much more to talk about, but since I probably already lost 50% of the readers at this point, I will move on.

PORN ADDICTION​

I had to explain all of this to make you clearly see what a porn addiction is. It's a memory. What you call your urges, are a memory. What I called "the porn goddess" in another thread is nothing but a memory.

Memories create automation/ego/karma and control us exactly to the degree in which we don't control them.

Now that fact might not be news to you if it's read without the introduction I made first. But the truth is that whenever you relapsed because "the urges were too strong" know that you could have stopped it as easily as you can stop yourself from scratching your leg unconsciously. In fact you stop it in the exact same manner as you stop your thoughts during meditation. You stop feeding it energy.

Consider this: You are going to die. The only question is how much are you going to live? All you can do is live more or less intensely but time unravels at the same speed for everybody. You're tied to this vessel, might as well use it to your liking.

So your life energy is limited. Not only that, but your access to your life energy is also limited, depending on how well you know how to use this device called human. So instead of trying to fix negative events that the device has recorded or imagined, focus on living properly right now. Choose where to put your life energy into at this moment. And your issues will disappear like magic. The records will still be there for you to be accessed at your liking. But know the only one that can force yourself to do anything is you. Know that you can force yourself to be happy, not just sad. Being happy is a choice. You chose to give that power to all the outside things of this world. Take it back. Other people and your memories do not have the right or the power to change your mood, it is your sole privilege. So if they do have power over you it's because you let them. Because you are not conscious enough and you're not enlarging your consciousness through practice, all that is unconscious will control you.

HOW TO QUIT​

Quitting is a funny thing, because just like meditation it's not something you do. It's something you don't do. Any second that passes by in which you don't PMO you are quitting porn. That's all it is, you fill the time in your life that you used to fill with PMO or thinking about PMO with something else. So what people refer to as "quitting" is simply the time span in which this process is uncomfortable. Once it becomes automatic, they've successfully quit.
But if it was easy, this forum wouldn't exist. That's why I'm glad it does because it helps many. It also holds many back. But I will get to that in a second.

HOW TO DEAL WITH TRIGGERS​

As you do whatever you do, porn thoughts will come up. The call of the siren. Again, there is nothing real about her, it's just a memory. The frequency and intensity of your porn consumption determines the frequency of the memory being triggered during the day. Think of it like sound (because that's what it essentially is, energy is sound, and sound reverberates). When you PMO you create a sound in your reproductive system in your brain and it reverberates for a while after. Making it sensitive towards triggers.

A trigger is like a little catalyst, it strikes a similar note as you've struck the last time you PMO'd, so it intensifies the sound. But it does it to such a small degree, that the sound is still in the process of dying down. UNLESS you feed it with energy. Whenever you feed it energy, meaning you start to perpetuate the porn thoughts, you make the sound louder again. The more you keep it going, the longer you take to quit.

So the danger isn't in triggers. Triggers are non-consequential. The danger is in you taking the bait even tho you never have to. Of course you do it because it feels good. It feels good just to think about porn and the more you think of it, the better it feels. The louder you make the sound in your brain, the more chain reactions are activated, blood shooting to your genitals and with the good feeling you start to build up expectations for action. It's the birth of the urge and you did all the work, not your karma. You think shutting your mind off during meditation is hard? Try to shut off your mind while your body and emotions are on the same page with it... So don't push it that far in the first place.

When you crash your car, it's never because there was already a bump in the chassis.

But again, it's the don't-think-of-the-elephant dilemma. The solution is not to try to "not think of porn". Simply let the sound pass. Like water under a bridge. It's nothing. Just noise. It has zero significance. Anything significant can always only be found in the present. And if you don't watch porn at the present time, then porn doesn't exist for you, it's that simple.

WHAT PORN COSTS YOU​

This might be the most important chapter. Because all you do when you decide for or against anything in life (like to think of porn, or PMO), is to ask yourself if it's worth the price. Now apart from the little money that goes into your internet connection you might have noticed that PMO influences your sexual performance negatively. It uses your sex energy up and dulls your senses. I've noticed the impact in sexual performance FIRST because porn made me pay more attention towards sex. So I mastered this, I can easily not PMO for a couple days when I'm about to have sex. Because I understand the cost.

What I didn't understand until recently were the unimaginable hidden costs. See you need your reproductive system in your brain for EVERY SINGLE INTERACTION AND COMPUTATION in the relationship between you and the other sex. Every chat you have with other people, every interaction, every decision you make regarding that realm, uses that system. The same system that you distract with porn. And that's what the cost comes down to. Distraction. Porn use absorbs parts of your awareness long after the use, without you even noticing it.

So you might be a little too focused on the physical nature of a girl rather than the content of a conversation. And as a result you say dumber shit and you're less sexy. Being sexy takes awareness, it takes control. The less you have of it, the less sexy you are. How many women could you have fucked if you were just a little more aware? What relationships have you messed up because your system was disturbed? What if those women that left you would've turned out to be your life's love? You will never know for sure! All you know is that your love success in life depends on your capabilities and your capabilities are compromised by porn in a way and to a degree which you don't understand. So be aware of that little fact the next time you think it won't harm a fly if you think of those boobies for a while longer..

WHEN YOU SHOULD LEAVE NOFAP​

So here's the thing. I've explained that the key to quitting is to let the sound wear off without feeding it any more energy. Well guess what you're doing while you're on NoFap. This site is one big trigger. There's porn written all over it. It's the elephant dilemma on a whole other scale. You try to quit something yet you engage how ever many hours on this forum thinking and writing about it! It's like going to a club when actually all you need is some peace and quiet.
But of course it's still great that the site is here. Because it's better to be triggered more for a while but also learn how to quit, rather than never knowing how to get out of your self-built prison in the first place.

But to all of you who read a hundred posts like the one I've written here. To those of you who actually know exactly what to do to quit. Stop coming here. You're trying to forget an ex but you call her everyday. It won't happen.

CLOSURE​

Learn how to drive yourself. It doesn't stop with meditation. Learn how to sleep, how to eat, how to keep yourself happy all the time, that is basic. Not because it's "right".
But because you're literally trying to kill yourself when you're not happy. This life form that you inhabit is innocent. If you want to cut yourself, your body can't run from you. If you want to hurt your emotions, no one can help you. If you send your mind to dark places it will go without question. It will take all the punches you command it to. Please leave your body, mind and emotions in peace. You've done enough damage. Start to consistently walk into one direction, away from death/unconsciousness/sleep and towards life/consciousness/awakeness. Your life will feel better within days, I've experienced it myself. Once you learned how to not sabotage yourself you will learn how to expand your capabilities.

CREDIT​

Finally I would like to refer you to Sadhguru on Youtube. Those of you that know him understand that all I did was repackage his wisdom into my words. But know that I'm not just reciting what I've heard. Just a month ago I felt suicidal. Now that I started to take better care of myself I can't recognize myself.
I am not a Sadhguru "fan". I'm a pragmatist. I search for tools in life that help me to live better. If someone says something that helps, I use that, I don't care who they are and what they've done and what they've also said some other time. That is irrelevant to the usefulness of the tool. I recommend you to approach his material with the same mindset.