by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I hope I don’t seem to be a scold.

It suits my ends to poke around in the trash can inside your brain, but I’m not doing it to be mean — nor to induce you to feel bad about yourself. I know a whole lot about the interior mental processes that motivate the pursuit of values and disvalues — and about the subsequent and secondary consequences of those mental processes — but it’s not as if I can actually read your mind.

So how do I know so much about how your mind works? I don’t, not by any means except inference. What I know about is how my mind works. We are alike as things — we are ontological equals — so I know that your mind works the same way mine does — no less than and for the same reasons that your heart works the same way mine does. Moreover, I can look you in the eye and tell you the truth of your life in excruciating detail, working from nothing other than past experience with myself and other people. Our differences make us unique and beautiful, but our similarities make us comprehensible to each other.

So without intending to scold you, I need to say something to you in the gentlest way I can:

You’re getting everything wrong!!

Wrong, wrong, wrong. All the time, for all your life. Everyone, everywhere, for all of human history. Wrong, wrong, wrong — always and everywhere wrong — with wrong heaped upon wrong in twisted, corrupt dogmas of wrongness.

Do you want proof?

It could be you’re all hunched up in resentment at being called wrong. Or maybe you’re folded in on yourself in guilt, revisiting all of your past perceived sins. But here’s how I know that you’re wrong, and that you’ve been wrong about nearly everything, for almost all of your life:

Because being wrong doesn’t matter. Being right is the only thing that matters.

We all tell lies, the worst of them to ourselves. We all shirk our responsibilities, crafting sullen silent soliloquies to justify our laziness. We all hurt other people, and we are all Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s an eye-opening item from the news feeds: Up to four out of five women are faking orgasms, at least some of the time. Last weekend, I was incredulous at Camille Paglia’s lamentations about sexlessness in the middle class, but, even though I’ve read — and doubted — all of the claims about anorgasmic women, still, I have never been prepared to lend any of this any credence.

And, yes, I’m talking about adult subject matter. If you’re still a giggling pre-teen, you might giggle off elsewhere. I intend to approach this as philosophy, but, if anything, that will just bring out more self-induced juvenility. The actual reason that normal adult Americans have bad sex is because they refuse — very probably in every realm of their lives — to take joy seriously. But we can’t even get that far without a commitment on your part to stop blushing and start thinking. If you won’t do this, what I plan to do here will be a waste of your time.

And must I also defend this as real estate? If you want to learn every new vendorslut trick for not making money while you betray your own soul, get thee to Agent Shortbus or any one of a hundred other sites. If you want to learn how to be a whole soul, to be the highest and best person you can be — at work, at home and in the privacy of the bedroom — let’s talk. But the only subject that matters to me is being alive as a self-conscious human being — and being good at it — and this post is 100% on-topic for that theme.

Are we down to nothing but adults who are prepared to be serious about human joy? Let’s start with a very basic premise: Normal, healthy adult human beings who love each other romantically should have great sex together virtually all of the time. Disabled? That could be a problem. Disabled in the mission-critical hardware? A bigger problem, but not an insuperable one. Stressed? Distracted? Drunk? Your timing is bad. Not in love? You’re screwed — Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is a dumb thing to say, but at the same time, I think it’s the essence of everything, the one thing that most needs to be said:

I love life. I love living. I love being alive as a human being — a genetic homo sapiens within whom has been cultivated a self — and I love, love, love being that self with a deep and abiding adoration. I don’t want to be anyone but me, but I want to be me to the utmost, to the evermost — without shame, without hiding or disguising myself in any way and without one word of apology to anyone, ever.

This is fact, obvious and dumb to say but utterly necessary to understand: We are each of us all alone inside the mind, and the self of atoms, actions and events that others see is the physical expression of the self of the imagination that each one of us sees only of his own self and only alone, within that perfect solitude of the mind.

Just that much is breathtakingly beautiful, if you take the time to think about it: A reflexively recollecting mental process, by iteratively expressing itself — in the observable world, of course, but first and most and almost continuously in purely introspective activity — essentially becomes itself and then, over time, progressively recreates itself — learning, changing, growing — over and over again. The self is its own self-abstracted abstraction, and your relationship with your own unique self is by far the most important relationship in your life.

The self is the song of itself, and each one of us is his own song, his own soul, unique and incomparable and fundamentally inexpressible to others. Without human upbringing, we are bad imitations of animals, at best. But with it, by age five each one of us is his own song, his own soul, his own ego, his own “I am.” Are we but ghosts, lost and horrified in a lurching, chaotic machine? Are we mindless fleshy worms squirming without purpose across the fertile fields of time? Or is each one of us Read more