Mind control is the most important skill that a person can have. If you do not have the skill of mind control, you cannot develop yourself in any other way.

I'm talking, of course, about our own mind. How do we control it?

For every single one of us - there is the person that we are, and the person that we seek to be. Maybe you want to be more "Alpha," maybe you want to be better with girls, more successful. Maybe you want to conquer you fears, or overcome a shitty childhood with a domineering mother. Or maybe we don't have a particular idea in mind for who we want to be; maybe we just have a vague sense of dissatisfaction with our life and realize that something needs to change.

But in order to do that we must have a clear understanding of ourselves. One metaphor that has been used by practitioners of meditation for a long time is the idea that our mind is like a cup. The cup is filled with a liquid - that liquid is the sum of your thoughts, experiences and your personal identity. It has limited space; If your mind is entirely full of one thing, it cannot be entirely full of something else. What you fill it with, this is what you become. We must notice what it is already filled with, and what we are filling it with.

The path of swallowing the redpill is try to pour out part of our cup, which contains our understanding of masculinity, femininity, and the relationship between the two, and displace it with a different, more accurate, more useful understanding. How do we do this? With constant, focused effort. By reading it, thinking about it, practicing it, involving ourselves in a community and intentionally incorporating it into our lives we can functionally change who we are.

In this way, we have poured out blue pill, and replaced it with red pill. The cup of our mind only has space for one. You can have opinions which are degrees of both BP and RP, just as you can fill your cup with equal parts of two substances - but you cannot be both simultaneously.

But so it is with everything. Our behaviors, and our thoughts, have origins very deep in our mind. The choice not to approach a girl because she's "out of your league;" the choice not to go to the gym because you're afraid you'll look stupid if you try to work out; the choice to stay in a relationship that doesn't make you happy because you're afraid to be alone; the choice to eat a whole pizza because you feel sad... the actions aren't the problem, the problem is the aspect of you character, deep in your mind, which directed your behavior. The answer is to mindfully change who you are. Some guys might feel hopeless because they see all these problems with who they are, and they feel like giving up. They don't understand that who they are is fluid, constantly changing, and that the content of their cup can be changed.

I have never been a fan of therapy, for myself, because I feel that this is a process everyone should know how to control for themselves. You must take control of this process of determining what fills the cup in your mind. I can give a solid example in my own life.

I once hated women, very intensely, because of my insane, abusive mother and my constant experiences of rejection which resulted. This feeling of hate was what filled the cup in my mind. By virtue of displacement, that meant that nothing else could fill it. I couldn't fill it with thoughts about brotherhood, or accomplishment, or personal goals, or healthy attraction, or any number of other things. So much of my glass was filled with with this angry attachment... that there was too little room for things that needed to be there. Time spent being angry, focused on someone else, is time spent not being productive focusing on yourself.

I had to displace these feelings - not for the sake of women, but for myself. A person who can control your emotional state, can control you. The opposite of hate isn't love, it's indifference.

The anger stage of swallowing the pill is just a stage. It's useful stage, to propel us forward and motivate us to change ourselves, but it's not the final stage. The final stage is to break free and to fully be in control of yourself and your relationships. We cannot control women, we cannot control society, we can't control societal expectations - nor should we be controlled by them. we can only control ourselves. That is where TRP differs from MRA. And you should be honest with yourself about your goals: is your goal to improve your life, or is your goal to have fun teasing fatties and hating on feminism? Of course, everything has its place, but being oppositional without putting in the real work on yourself is cheap, easy, and frankly, lazy. If you define your TRP nature as "opposite of feminism" then you are still letting them control the terms of the discussion. They've set the terrain, and you've allowed them to determine what you are. Your cup is still filled with thoughts about feminism and women being shitty. I'm not telling you not to be angry. I was angry too, for a long time, it's an unavoidable part of the process. I'm telling you that if they're still making you angry, they're still controlling you, and you still have more to go before you can break free from them. There's a lot of pressure to silence the anger on TRP, and a lot of TRP pushback about how important it is not to censor ourselves, as of course we shouldn't. But you shouldn't take this defense of anger to mean that anger is the goal, it isn't. The goal is for you to build yourself into a great man. Great men must have at least sometimes a mind full of thoughts of greatness. With what do you fill your mind?

So be mindful of what you pour into your glass. What you read enters it: are you reading news about atrocity for entertainment, or to learn? are you benefiting from it? Your hobbies enter it: are you playing video games because gaming is your passion, or because you're using it to hide behind so you don't have to leave your house? Your relationships enter it: do your friends have goals, aspirations? do they challenge you? or are they lazy, and this feels comfortable to you because they never challenge you? Your thoughts enter it: when confronted with an idea or situation, do you react in an impulsive, emotional way? Or do direct your own emotional state?

What are you pouring into your own cup?

tl;dr mindfulness