Soundtrack: The Roots “Sacrifice”

In his book, “Tantra: The Supreme Understanding”, Osho talks a lot about awareness. In one of my favorite parts of the book, he gives a solution for people who want to quit smoking. He doesn’t say to get a nicotine patch or some gum or join a support group or none of that. His suggestion on how to quit smoking is to smoke…with awareness. Awareness means being fully conscious of what it is that you’re doing. What is in this cigarette? How much did I pay for this cigarette? What happened right before I decided to spark this cigarette? What happens inside my body as I’m smoking this cigarette? What cumulative effect are all of the cigarettes having inside my body?

If you think about ALL of that, I mean really have it at the front of your mind, every single time you smoke a cigarette, eventually you’ll say to yourself, “THIS SHIT IS STUPID!” And then you’ll stop. Voila! And you won’t have to struggle constantly against relapsing and falling off the wagon. You won’t like cigarettes anymore. You’ll be changed from the inside out because your mind has changed. That’s the power of awareness.

In the past week my awareness has stopped me from doing two things.

A few days ago I bought a bottle of chocolate milk from the store. Milk from good Jersey cows on an organic dairy farm. Not the nasty ass Holstein cows that most farms have where they feed the cows soy and corn and everything other than the grass they would naturally eat. But the point is that as I was buying the bottle, I knew immediately that I couldn’t throw it in the trash when I finished with it. I had to hold onto it until I got to a plastic recycling bin. My conscience wouldn’t allow me to just add another piece of plastic to the landfills that’ll still be sitting there when we’re getting our Jetsons on and commuting from planet to planet. Just couldn’t do it.

Another recent result of my awareness was my development of a new Semen Policy. I won’t bore you with the details of how and why I came up with this policy, at least not in this particular blog post. Suffice it to say that I’ve known for a while that I have magical potion in my balls. I’m not just shooting out useless fluid; I’m providing the Fountain of Youth when I skeet. So my new policy is that from now on, I will only bust directly into a female orifice. Mouth, pussy, or ass. Not in a condom, not on a stomach, not on a towel. If I can’t put it directly into a spot where it can be properly received and put to use, then I’ll keep it to myself (since I’m a Tantra man and I can orgasm without ejaculating). Awareness produces results.

So the real reason why I sat down to write this right now is to share with whoever cares to know that I’m gonna be taking a huge step back away from social media over the next year. We all know that Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are Numbers 1, 2, and 3 on the list of biggest reasons why people procrastinate and argue in 2015. My awareness of what I’m involving myself in is causing me to lose interest in the whole thing really quickly. I feel stupid every time I open my Facebook app.

I’m gonna be making some changes to this website. Making it more user friendly and sharing more of myself. I’ll go on the social media platforms to let people know that I’m posting here and if anyone cares to read my stuff and engage me on it then that would be wonderful, or nah, whatever.

What I won’t be doing is spending hours every week scrolling through a timeline full of shit I couldn’t possibly care less about.

The pictures at the top were taken on September 23, 2015, the autumn equinox, to symbolize this new era in my life. I am stripping away all of the bullshit in my life. All of the distractions. I’m putting 100% of my focus on building my brand, The SOL System, and loving on my biological family and chosen family (friends). Also, I just like being naked. I especially like being naked outside with the sun shining on me. That’s the life.

So, yeah. If you rock with me, then you’ll see what all of this leads to.

My favorite band, The Roots, made one of my favorite songs that serves as the soundtrack for this post. The hook says that if you wanna reach something in life, you ain’t gonna get it unless you give a little bit of sacrifice. And Black Thought raps that he’s got his nose to the grindstone and his head to the stars. That’s me right now.

#TheBlissBook is coming. Pray for me or something, if you’re into that kind of stuff. I need all the support I can get.

P.S. Before I get out of here, I gotta take about the idiom “nose to the grindstone.” What the hell does that shit mean? Well it means to work hard or to focus constantly on work. But why? Yeah, I’m a word nerd.

There are two rival explanations as to the origin of this phrase. One is that it comes from the supposed habit of millers who checked that the stones used for grinding cereal weren’t overheating by putting their nose to the stone in order to smell any burning. The other is that it comes from the practice of knife grinders when sharpening blades to bend over the stone, or even to lie flat on their fronts, with their faces near the grindstone in order to hold the blades against the stone.

All the evidence is against the miller’s tale. Firstly, the stones used by millers were commonly called millstones, not grindstones. The two terms were sometimes interchanged but the distinction between the two was made at least as early as 1400, when this line was printed in Turnament Totenham:

“Ther was gryndulstones in gravy, And mylstones in mawmany.”

The Middle English language there is difficult to interpret but it certainly shows the grindstones and millstones as being distinct from each other. If the derivation was from milling we would expect the phrase to be ‘nose to the millstone’.

A second point in favor of the tool sharpening derivation is that all the early citations refer to holding someone’s nose to the grindstone as a form of punishment. This is more in keeping with the notion of the continuous hard labor implicit in being strapped to one’s bench than it is to the occasional sniffing of ground flour by a miller.

The first known citation is John Frith’s A mirrour or glasse to know thyselfe, 1532:

“This Text holdeth their noses so hard to the grindstone, that it clean disfigureth their faces.”

The phrase appears in print at various dates since the 16th century. It was well-enough known in rural USA in the early 20th century for this picture, which alludes to the ‘holding someone’s nose to the grindstone’ version of the phrase, to have been staged as a joke (circa 1910).