Didn’t ya get the memo?

This blog has moved to www.jonathan-frost.com

Bookmark it, Subscribe to the RSS feed, don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.

Note: I’m writing at a new site now. Finish reading this post at www.jonathan-frost.com

The vast majority of my friends don’t believe in me. My family doesn’t believe in me. Most of the people I meet on a day to day basis probably don’t believe in me either.

Sometimes I try to convince them that the path I’m on exists, or will exist, that the current generation of bloggers really are going to spearhead an artistic and intellectual renaissance. I try to convince them that while no, not many people actually read my blog posts, and no, not many people have actually bought my books, this is just what a revolution looks like in the very early stages…

Finish reading this post at www.jonathan-frost.com

This blog has been quiet over the past couple of months. There are a few reasons for this, but the most important is that sometimes it’s better to just shut up and listen for a while. Not forever though.

My next book is finished.

The 2012 End Of The World Tour will be available for sale on June 1st. It’s a collection of stories from my first two months in Southeast Asia, and it’s pretty damn good if you ask me. I’ve sent out about a hundred review copies, so you won’t have to take my word for it. I’m releasing it on every digital format you can shake your dick at, and the price will be $8.99 .

Humility has never come easily to me, so I will just come out and say it: I’m really excited about this book. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written, and I think a lot of other people are going to recognize that. Keep an eye on the new blog, Twitter, Facebook, and the RooshV Forum for details.

Now, drum roll please – I am shutting down this blog.

(Gasps, screams, sobs, women fainting)

But, I’m continuing at a new URL: www.jonathan-frost.com

Why must I impose on my loyal readers the ten-second burden of re-bookmarking and re-subscribing to a new blog?

Part of it is a desire for a fresh start with a clean slate, even if it’s only symbolic. I feel like a very different person than the man who started writing Freedom Twenty-Five almost two years ago. More practically, I think that it’s confusing branding to be a multi-title author with a website that shares a name with one of those titles. Freedom Twenty-Five is now only a small part of what I’m doing, and I want a new site that reflects that.

Besides, I’m twenty-seven. The URL was never destined to age well.

Head over to www.jonathan-frost.com right now to read my first post. Make sure you Subscribe to the RSS feed, Follow Me on Twitter, Like Me on Facebook, write on the MySpace wall, and send me your ICQ number so we can chat. Mark June 1st on your calendar, and start telling your friends about the dope book coming soon to a virtual store near you.

The Freedom Twenty-Five Lifestyle Guide is now available in pretty much any format  you could reasonably ask for, courtesy of the fine gentlemen at Smashwords. Apple, B&N and Sony will be available once the book clears the format police.

Buy The Freedom Twenty-Five Lifestyle Guide in PDF, Epub, Apple, B&N and Sony E-reader format

Somehow, I’ve caught a cold. Not an easy task in the 40-degree heat of the Rajastan desert.

Fortunately I’m in Udaipur, which is a nice little town to kick back in a cafe with a book and let snotty tissues accumulate around me.

This morning, I read Steve-Os autobiography and I highly recommend it. His absurd and single-minded commitment to a career as a… well, whatever the hell Steve-O was... is inspiring and hilarious.

I’ve been in India for almost a month now, and my impressions of the country have been all over the place. I won’t say any more than that until I’ve got an exit stamp in my passport, and I still have a week in Bombay before I fly into Rome on the 14th.

Consulting my bank account and doing some back-of-the-envelope math, not only am I going to be one broke motherfucker by the end of the summer, I’ll only make it that far if I travel through Europe for the next four months on a ridiculously tight budget. This felt unpleasant at first, but then I thought: What would I have done with that money anyways? What needs of mine will go unfulfilled as a result of not having it?

I actually kind of  like the idea of being broke, in a nothing-to-lose, Henry-Miller-esque, make-it-or-die-tryin’ kind of way.

(Then again, I don’t like the idea enough to get rid of the chunk of my savings I’ve put in illiquid, long-term investments. I just like the idea of feeling broker.)

Six months ago, I would have expected to be a moderately famous author by now. My first book has certainly done OK, for a self-published book by an incredibly obscure first-time author. But I expected break-out success. I expected interviews, exploding traffic, name recognition, strippers in cages. So far none of the above have materialized.

I’m not bothered by this though. I’ve received a ton of positive feedback on the book, both in reviews from other bloggers and emails from readers. I’ve sold enough copies for this blog to be a legitimate, though modest, stream of secondary income. I’ve learned enough about the creative and publishing process that writing and marketing books is no longer some big scary thing to me – it’s a part of my reality.

I haven’t received any feedback yet on the draft edition of my second book, an account of my adventures in Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, but I think it’s great. I think it’s hilarious, thoughtful, occasionally deep, and always entertaining. I think it’s going to blow up. But, as we’ve seen, my track record at predicting my own success has been… mixed.

But again, I don’t think I’d be that bothered if the next book flops. I’ve found my path. I’m going to write. Hopefully, I’ll figure out a way to get paid for my writing, but if not, that’s fine too. Maybe the reality of the publishing industry in the 21st century and beyond is that writing for money just isn’t feasible. Or, maybe it is possible to earn a living as a writer, and I’m just not one of the few who are smart, interesting and creative enough to do it.

I don’t believe either of these for a second, but if I’m wrong – that’s OK by me. I’ll still have a blog, and there are other ways to make a living.

Anyways, there’s my soul-dump for the day. Clearly I’ve been posting a lot less lately, partially due to the time and technical constraints of backpacking through India, and partially because I’ve been devoting my time to experiences, books and meditation. I’ll likely continue with sporadic updates until the June 1st launch of the new book.

Taker easy, as we say where I’m from, and if she’s easy taker twice.

The Freedom Twenty Five Book is temporarily only available in the Kindle edition, pending technical difficulties as I switch from E-junkie to Smashwords, I’ll be making it available in PDF and a variety of new formats soon, but until then there is still one way to get The Freedom Twenty-Five Lifestyle Guide in PDF…

If you donate to In Mala Fide any time in the next month, Ferdinand is offering free copies of his ebooklets as incentives. Ten bucks gets you one, twenty gets you both.

Well hold onto your dicks, because the deal’s about to get sweeter. If you make a double-digit donation ($10 or more) you will also receive a free copy of my book. I’ve passed along a non-DRM pdf to Ferdinand and given him permission to pass it around like Rohypnol at a frat party.

So, go donate to In Mala Fide, feel warm and fuzzy inside, and get free books. Pretty good deal, yeah?

OK, as some of you picked up, yesterday’s post was April Fool’s Day Shenanigans.

But, like last year’s prank, there was an outline of truth to it.

Two weeks of meditation at Yoga Niketan Ashram in Rishikesh has been a really cool experience. I really have learned a lot about myself, greatly improved my ability to focus, and I’m much more Stoically aware of my thought patterns and emotions. Deep meditation really does create feelings of incomparable joy (so I’ve heard) and certainly at the level I’ve reached, it produces a feeling of peace, tranquility, and general contentedness. In a word, happiness.

My views on all matters political and supernatural however, remain unchanged.

My first-pass impressions of Yoga are as follows:

1) Yoga is a very beneficial physical practice for strength, flexibility,, and general health. There is some bullshit to it, and there are some flawed rationalizations for beneficial postures, but overall, regular yoga practice is a great (and for the traveling man, portable) way to improve your health.

2) Meditation is an invaluable tool to combat technology-assisted ADHD, and for self-awareness.

3) Skilled practitioners of Yoga, and meditation more generally, really can achieve a joyful, blissful state, and it is more powerful than heroin. Many people have explained the same phenomenon of feeling surrounded by and consumed with love, joy, awareness, etc, and I have felt little flashes of what they are talking about. It is some very real shit.

4) What is this Nirvana? Well, it’s certainly not God. I view it as a sort of hack that people have developed to get themselves high as fuck without resort to actual mind-altering substances. India is full of meditation-addicts, who go about their lives doing little but rant about the joy and love and closeness with God that they’ve achieved. I don’t think they’re making it up. But, unless you really do believe they’re communing with God (which I don’t), you can’t help but view is as something of a waste of a life.

So, conclusion: If your disposition is similar to mine, i.e. a hedonist with a lust for wealth, power, accomplishment, and perhaps a better world, dip your toes into the world of Yoga, but don’t jump in head first. If you ever look in the mirror and see Japa mala beads and dreadlocks, check yourself into spiritual detox, i.e. Sihanoukville, Bangkok or Vang Vieng, and get back in touch with the pleasures of the material world.

Wow.

Who would have thought that two weeks could be such a long time? I honestly feel like it’s been months since I’ve written in this blog. After six hours a day of meditation, introspection, and contemplation, my thinking and attitudes have changed so much.

Needless to say, this is only the start of my journey. I’ll be in Rishikesh for at least another two or three months.

So, how to describe meditation? Well, at first it’s extremely difficult, and boring, and physically painful if you’re not especially flexible. After that, it is drug-like. It is pure emotion, and it rivals anything I’ve ever felt before. And remember, I have only scratched the surface of the joy that Vipanassa meditation can offer devout practitioners.

But of course, it’s more than just a high. Communion with God (a concept and entity I define very broadly) is ultimately the source of the highest level of wisdom that humankind can reach. Believe me, if my old self with my old perspectives heard this, he wouldn’t understand it either, so I fully expect 99% of my readers to dismiss this claim at first – but the truth is, the tools of reason and empirical observation are not nearly adequate, nor are they the most useful at our disposal.

I ended my first book with a chapter on finding purpose in life – you know, Purpose, Meaning, God. And when I wrote it, I wasn’t particularly hopeful. Well, so much for that. God is out there, God is inside you, and it is within our power to commune with him. I can only say this much, since I’m just at the start of my journey, but if you have ever followed a piece of advice from this site, follow this one: Start your search for God now, and search within. Don’t look to the sky, look to the heart. And yes, I know that most of you are going to think I sound like a huge tool right now. I don’t care.

Related to all of this, I have an announcement to make.

This blog is about to become very, very different from what it used to be.

In many ways, I tried to make this a positive space and I wrote a lot about how to improve your health, free yourself from the strict demands of a materialistic life, and so on. But it was also a source of much negativity. Skimming through my old articles, I almost feel like I’m reading something written by a stranger sometimes.

It took a lot of looking inward to realize it, but I’ve been holding a lot of anger, for a long time. This came out on this blog as negativity directed at things like feminism, progressivism, “hippies” (whatever those are), and the general direction the world is heading in.

Well, you know what? Forget about all of that. I don’t want to discuss whether the things I’ve written are accurate or not. Maybe some of them are. But the important thing is that they aren’t useful, and they aren’t good. It’s not something that can be explained rationally, but probably a good many of my readers are holding on to similar anger. Please, just try and let it go, learn how to forgive, learn how to love, and just try that perspective on like a new pair of shoes. See if it makes you happier, and see if it makes the world seem a little bit clearer to you.

I’m sorry if this feels like a betrayal, or a rapid change, or anything like that. But I have seen something that I cannot un-see, and even if I could, I would have no desire to.

So please, live a good and happy life, let go of whatever is holding you back, and open your mind to the possibility that God lives inside of you, he loves you, and he wants to be with you.

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.“ – Mother Theresa

-Namaste!

I know, I just wrote a super deep and authentic post about the beginning of my great spiritual journey to the center of my being, but I can’t resist spitting out some first impressions of India:

- Indians are very cool, friendly, and approachable. Also, zero attempts to scam me and very little harassment from touts and taxi drivers.

- Very few tourists. I’m staying right in New Delhi’s answer to Khao San Road, on the main bazaar by Ashram Marg station. Not to say this is incredibly important to me (or even a good thing on net, I’m a fan of backpacker girls), but not many tourists make it out here.

- I’ve always loved Indian food, and I love how dirt cheap it is here.

- Very strong British influence in the nicer areas, even stronger than I was expecting.

- I have literally not seen a single attractive girl in the twelve hours I’ve been here. I love sexy Indian girls, but sadly they are few and far between. Also the backpacker girls who come to India are more of the frumpy and crunchy granola-eating authenticity-hunters, in contrast to the fit, blonde and tanned Scandinavians populating Thailand.

Bottom line: Aside from the lack of girls and the apparent requirement that every Indian driver conduct a test of their car horn every ten seconds, New Delhi seems like a cool, fun place.

I’m heading to Rishikesh tonight for the next 3-5 weeks, but after that my tentative itinerary is:

New Delhi

Agra

Jaipur

Chittorgarh

Udaipur

Bombay

*

Thoughts? Recommended bars/clubs/restaurants/mid-range hotels?

I won’t see your comments now, but I’ll be checking this thread out when I’m back in Delhi.

You’ll have to excuse the slow posting recently. If you’re looking for reading material, the SPLC has been kind enough to publish a handy list of the best masculinist writers of our generation. I’m especially fond of the Business Insider headline: A Civil Rights Group Is Now Criticizing Random Jerks For Not Calling Women Back After Sex.

Part of the reason I’ve been neglecting this blog is lack of time – I’ve been bouncing around Bangkok and the Thai Islands, and finishing the first draft of my next book. But over and above that, I’ve been writing less (publicly) lately because I’m not sure exactly what it is I have to say. I’ve been spending more time inside my own head recently, asking the big questions: Who Am I? What Do I Want To Do? What Should I Do? What Can I Do?

I’ve previously mocked people who claim that traveling is a deep, life-changing experience. But one thing I will definitely grant is that solo travel forces you to evaluate who you really are, outside the context of your family and social circle. You also end up spending a lot of quiet, reflective moments on buses, trains and planes. Nothing to do but sit, think, and observe. Often, there’s not much going on around you worth observing, so you turn inward. You become conscious of your emotions, your thoughts, your body and mind.

(Feel free to picture me, from now on, in dreadlocks, parachute pants, and a gravity bong.)

Have you ever had a moment where your mind just sort of says: “Well, here I am.” ?

Ever looked in the mirror and thought: “Holy shit. That’s ME.” ?

It’s easy to build a life for yourself that keeps you protected from those moments. As long as you’re never more than an arm’s reach from other people or your iPad, you’ll always be safe from introspection. On the road, things happen: Buses are canceled, flights are late, you’re eating a meal by yourself, you’re shadow-boxing in a park because the cheapest gym charges twenty bucks for a drop in.

(Rolexes for five bucks, nice dress shirts for ten, and I just had a gourmet all-you-can-eat lunch buffet in the trendiest neighbourhood in Bangkok, for seven dollars. But if I want to lift pieces of metal for an hour, it costs me a week’s rent. Go figure.)

Anyways. Travel forces introspection, and I think that’s a good thing. You can replicate these positive effects in your hometown with a transit pass and a willingness to leave your Kindle at home, but sometimes it’s hard to force it, especially if you’ve developed an information addiction over a lifetime of instant gratification. Everyone can benefit from silence, and the ability to tame your mind for even a minute or two at a time. Try it sometime: Sit still and quiet your brain. Let your inner monologue STFU for a minute, or repeat a mantra. It’s surprisingly difficult.

So that’s where I find myself today. Happy, healthy, and greatly enjoying my travel/write/party lifestyle. But can I do this forever? Maybe, maybe not.

I’m spending the next month at an Ashram. Three hours a day of Yoga, three hours of meditation. No electronics, no alcohol, no smoking, no meat, no sex, and no thoughts about any of the above. I’m flying into New Delhi this evening, and I’ll be completely off the grid until mid-April.

When I return, I’ll be releasing the next book and a series of posts about my three months of living and traveling in Southeast Asia.

Until then… Namaste, hombres.