A coffee-fueled round-table discussion about the book, "The Alabaster Girl" by Zan Perrion. Listen in as Zan and his guests explore the themes and concepts of the book in immense and surprising detail. The episodes will be released on a regular basis, so don't forget to subscribe!
In this episode: Part Five of the discussion on the chapter: The Way of Love __________________________________________________
"In Search of the Alabaster Girl" Producer: Zan Perrion Director: Ioan Bati Editor: Gabriel Coroiu Sound Editing: Nikolaos Spyratos Original music: "Tango del'Amor" by DaKsha & Nandi With: Zan Perrion, Jordan Luke Collier, Rich Thompson, Owen Davis
Ars Amorata is a celebration of the art of seduction, the rebirth of romance, and a lifelong quest for beauty and adventure.
Zan Perrion is internationally recognized as one of the most original and insightful voices on relationships and seduction in the world today. A regular media commentator, he has been widely featured in the international press. Zan is the founder of the Ars Amorata philosophy--a celebration of the art of seduction, the rebirth of romance, and a lifelong quest for beauty and adventure. He is also a co-founder of the Amorati network of men. Zan divides his time between Canada and Romania and can be found at www.zanperrion.com and www.arsamorata.com
A coffee-fueled round-table discussion about the book, "The Alabaster Girl" by Zan Perrion. Listen in as Zan and his guests explore the themes and concepts of the book in immense and surprising detail. The episodes will be released on a regular basis, so don't forget to subscribe!
In this episode: Part Five of the discussion on the chapter: The Way of Love __________________________________________________
"In Search of the Alabaster Girl" Producer: Zan Perrion Director: Ioan Bati Editor: Gabriel Coroiu Sound Editing: Nikolaos Spyratos Original music: "Tango del'Amor" by DaKsha & Nandi With: Zan Perrion, Jordan Luke Collier, Rich Thompson, Owen Davis
Ars Amorata is a celebration of the art of seduction, the rebirth of romance, and a lifelong quest for beauty and adventure.
Zan Perrion is internationally recognized as one of the most original and insightful voices on relationships and seduction in the world today. A regular media commentator, he has been widely featured in the international press. Zan is the founder of the Ars Amorata philosophy--a celebration of the art of seduction, the rebirth of romance, and a lifelong quest for beauty and adventure. He is also a co-founder of the Amorati network of men. Zan divides his time between Canada and Romania and can be found at www.zanperrion.com and www.arsamorata.com
music. It's funny. You say all these absolutes boom, boom, and this is the eighth one, this is the way it is, and then you go. I don't know it's crazy yeah.
Speaker 4:
It's one other bit of intimacy before we go on that I want to ask about. There's a couple of places you've said this in the book and I haven't quite got a line or a phrase that encapsulates it properly. But you said here there's a general consensus about self-centered independence. In order to be happy with someone else, you must first have an overall sense of happiness within yourself.
Speaker 4:
You can't find your happiness in another, and that's like the common teaching of self-help of this day, which is your happiness completely comes from within. It's not derived from any external circumstances. We generate that ourselves or we don't, and we're taught that that's the ideal.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, you have to be okay with yourself. You have to come from, create for yourself, right? So what's your thought on that? Well, I think I mean we've never had this, we've always been long, we've always shared our experiences. So there's a question in there. Is that teaching and that train of thought, which is 150 years old or so, that you know, with the industrial age, anybody can succeed, anybody? All the hierarchies and the case systems and all that kind of stuff which kind of melted away, anybody can go from poor to rich? Just a mere dream, racial algae and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:
And that's just a question about it? Because we do, you know. I read the rest of it. It says you know, our experiences are amplified once shared. You're sharing it with somebody. It's a greater experience overall. You see the Grand Canyon, that's breathtaking, wow. But if you're sharing with somebody you love and they're having the same spiritual experience with the Grand Canyon, that amplifies the whole thing and it creates a better you than you were before.
Speaker 4:
I really like how you've like you see, there's a correlation between this worldview that happiness comes from within and this industrial age of the last 150 years, and it's like again going back to these marriage, counseling books and self-help and so on. It's like all that movement is a break away from your codependent, new, deep past and helping establishing you as an independent adult, like high functioning adult in the world that can generate its own success and feelings and so on.
Speaker 4:
Right, and I feel like just in the last couple of years, moving into a new paradigm which is actually that's kind of boring and doesn't feel like it's true or enough anymore. And there was this moment where I remember being in a cafe with Knud, our friend Knud and trying to eat this food but at the same time trying to vomit. And he's turning jokes and laughing at me and I'm crying at the same time because I'm heartbroken over this woman that I've met and it's complicated. And he sits there and says one of the self-help phrases of the day he's like Joulding you're only feeling your thinking. This has no relevance to your external circumstances, it's just your thoughts that fuel in this weird feeling. And I look at him and we both laugh at each other in the moments, thinking that, yeah, there are all these different techniques and ideas to help you calm your state of mind down or put you into a nice place or an effective place for your work, but ultimately I don't think anything is as powerful as that force of love.
Speaker 4:
It's like, at least in my experience, that overrides it all, all the courtiers, that whole independent stage I'm in independent, coherent, self-assuring, self-making, meaning-making man goes out the window when there's some divine, beautiful new presence in my life. That's for sure. And I want to jump to the end of this chapter, actually, because there's a paragraph there. It says it's so well, it's stunning. You're saying what love might be again. And all your paragraphs start with maybe. That's what I ended, jeff. You say maybe. True love is an ancient sentiment as described by the greatest Italian poet, dante. The moment I saw her, I say in all truth that the vital spirit which dwells in the inmost depths of the heart became to trembles so violently that I felt the vibration alarmingly in all my pulses, even the weakest of them. As it trembled, it uttered these words beholded God, more powerful than I, who comes to rule over me.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, you know exactly what that feel is it comes to rule over me.
Speaker 4:
So, under the power of that God that comes to rule over you, you're only feeling, your thinking or your favourite. If you're self-made man, theme of the day goes out the window.
Speaker 2:
Well, this is interesting actually, because most of this whole you know, be detached from the scenario thing comes like Buddhism or Eastern philosophy. But even in that they're still pursuing other things as well. That's saying, don't be attached. They're still pursuing beauty and heart and a good career and honest spirit as well. So to say like, oh, they're just completing their self is only a half truth. Even they're still saying you go to pursue beauty and love and authenticity.
Speaker 1:
Well, I guess I'm not an expert there, but I feel that yeah, I mean we're getting to the philosophy of life now you know, like you know, we're in this in this age now, where we kind of took over from the absurdists and I don't know guys.
Speaker 1:
It's like and here's the thing I'm making comments about love and relationships when I have read notebooks on love and relationships, there might be, might be, a more coherent and more appropriate statements, or people have examined it more than I in my wistful way. That said, you know, you know, relationships are really this, and so this concept that I'm saying because I hear that you know that we're taught that come from yourself and and you have to love yourself first before you can love another, and all these these things. And yet we're, and so this is a question in there of what I've observed and what I've heard and what I've examined and what I've talked to, and this whole chapter could be like because it is all speculation. It's all speculation. Maybe it's death, maybe love is that and, as you can tell, I I haven't read any modern books about relationships. I read some of the classics, like history books, because there's nothing you want in the sun. There's nothing new that I'm saying here that hasn't been said 2000 years ago.
Speaker 4:
I want to touch on what you said. Yeah, because I think that whole happiness comes from within is a beautiful thing to establish within yourself to not fall into more darkness. But in my experience, my greatest moments and my greatest happiness and actually comes from the quality of connection I have with others like if I didn't do special with you guys and just feel like the quality of that connection, like there's no mountain I could climb or no beautiful, and I've traveled the world right seven continents or whatever there's no trip that I could do that would be as beautiful as those nine days or when I did it with a woman.
Speaker 4:
We went in a car to a tropical island and even thinking, like you'd mentioned, like Buddhism and enlightenment and again, I want to talk in maybes because it's not like I've explored this to the death but a lot of the contemporary spiritual thinkers are saying, actually, you know what that whole?
Speaker 4:
Let's go alone and meditate our way to enlightenment. That's an old paradigm and the new kind of waking up is being done in groups. It's not like we're all going to wake up separately and individually with our 10 day meditation retreats on the top of the mountain. People are now saying that there's a statement somewhere which is the the next coming of the Christ it's not going to be an individual, it's going to be in community. The next coming of Christ consciousness or that kind of love and peace and message for the world is going to come as a, as a collective energy, a collective movement. There's a big movement towards this. Let's, let's wake up together with each other, challenge each other and love each other, and that's how we're going to go to the next stage you guys back to what you were saying before, though, about um.
Speaker 3:
You know it's, your perception of yourself is skewed you know, you cannot find out who you are without, without other people yeah, I believe in that too, I believe in the concept of community and the gatherings like this, even this is a co-created gathering and I don't think we, especially this internet age, we just lost it.
Speaker 1:
You feel that? I mean, that's all the next chapter, right?
Speaker 4:
really I think, like don't think anyone ever figured out the, the meaning of love, or the, the mystery of love, by sitting on the mountain alone. I think they might come back with a peaceful or an intellectual understanding, but I think the answers to these questions are like a felt thing. It's like you can't write them, but you can feel them and they come out of the, the entanglement and the Frustration and the dance and the endless head scratching with the women, yep, with friends and business partners.
Speaker 2:
I guess, yeah, but with the women especially, I should probably point out. We're talking all deep, philosophical, and none of us here prescribe in particular Philosophy or worldview. But we are talking about, as a spirit of, it's not just these independence, it's the shared experience. Yes, that's important going forward. Just a application point again.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and I don't know like. I mean like there's communities, there's individuals, there's gurus, there's trains of thought, there's religions, there's new religions, and and, and everyone's trying to latch on to something that has meaning, that seems. That seems aligned with my experience, with my, with what I want, and you know, and, and yet I think it's all they explore In, sometimes in the past. You know, like it just comes back in cycles. Every hairstyle has been explored, every type of politics has been explored, every type of government, everything you think of has been attempted or explored, or you've studied or and it's the same with this Every type of way of relating to man or woman has been explored in the past, and we just come, wrap around new realizations that we think, oh, this is what, this is the new way and this is the new direction that that we're going, and it's, it's a great thing. It's been. We've been here before. That's my point.
Speaker 4:
Is there a clear sense of what is next for you?
Speaker 1:
Personally or in the world in general.
Speaker 4:
No for you personally. I can mean it when you sit there and think of your life in 90 days time.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 4:
Is there something new on your radar that you want to travel and do, or oh explore.
Speaker 1:
I'm this area. I'm going to write more. Yeah, I haven't written anything since this book was done, because I'm Thinking a lot. That's why something's cooking, some cooking, and it's not gonna be anything like this, and that's my ambition is to sit and think and write more. Yeah, that has me excited on a you know general sense. I mean like that you know I'm gonna travel here and I've got plans to go there and but those are just you know the plans, that, and the tradition saying that God laughs when you make plans.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, because you said that you're a seeker or you've been a seeker. There's nothing like, oh, I must go, and I Don't know, go to Nepal and contemplate this in the context of God, or but I'm down this, if you, if you read Behind the scenes of this book, you read it a very surface to, I guess you know, and to say, okay, here's my lesson.
Speaker 1:
I got about that. Girls are saying this and they mean this, which is very surface, but there's an underlying. Maybe it's not obvious, but it's obvious to me and I wrote this book for myself and it's an allegory, as I said, and it's it's called the other dreams and thoughts and ideas and, and it's very much a journey, the book is a journey spirit to me. This whole book has a movement to me. From beginning to end. I could feel that To me, and it's a book written to my young self, it's that I would have a bit of an understanding or a roadmap or just kind of an expression to myself that it's okay, it's going to be okay.
Speaker 1:
And the whole book, for me, is a very spiritual one. The underlying theme is a journey from what we know to what we don't know order to chaos, to great answers, to great questions, to mystery, going further, further, further into the mystery of it all, which is ultimately, as I said in my poem, three things. Man is always searched for the source of light, the perfect note, the alabaster girl. So those three things are my quest and I will always be devoted to it.
Speaker 2:
So, yeah, I'm on a journey, just like anybody else.
Speaker 1:
I'm a seeker, I'm a treasure hunter, I'm trying to find the concept of relevance, what's a life in meaning? So, like anybody else, and everybody says that they've.
Speaker 1:
I have a lot of skepticism, that people say that they, hey, I've got the answer for you, because the more I've explored things in all my years, any kind of answer leads to greater questions. So the questions are greater and greater and greater, and it ultimately is what is our relationship to the earth, to each other, the community, our relationship to God or the cosmos? What is all that? I'm never going to stop trying to understand that journey of my life. I'm going to keep writing about it and talking about it.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, because I'll say this this is an interesting thought and I haven't fully fleshed it out of my head at all, but I'm going to be thinking about it strongly. I have this idea. You know, we've got, for instance, the various religions of the world, and we've got, and on the other side of the spectrum it's so there's a God element for a lot of religions. And then there's atheism. It's purely scientific and it's just atoms and it's just a big bang in the whole thing.
Speaker 1:
But we all, what is the common theme that we all seek, no matter what, in my mind, the common theme is beauty. Even the atheist gravitates toward beauty. Even the Christian, the Buddhist, they love beauty. And I think that when we're talking about the spirit, the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, the variations on the need for the great spirit for the Native Americans, I think, because we all have a concept of that, I think it's beauty and that's my concept, and I can't, I haven't flushed it out, but I do believe that this spirit of God is manifest in beauty. That's what I think, and everyone, I don't care if you're an atheist, whatever you love beauty, whatever that is for you. There you go. That's philosophical and I don't even know what.
Speaker 4:
I'm saying, and that's why I be on women.
Speaker 1:
Oh yeah, this whole book is way beyond women.
Speaker 2:
It's a. It's a it's a. It's a this book is a search.
Speaker 1:
A search. Without it, there's not a nice ending or a pat ending. At the end it's. It goes into into mist.
Speaker 2:
This is interesting. You talk about the beginning, saying your path through biggest passion in life was women. But yeah, here we are, in the way of love and you're saying there's a limit to that, there's a danger in that, because if you make your whole, your whole meaning in life is wrapped up in the woman. You make herself an impossible ideal and you're attracted to that ideal in life, just as people are too attracted to that, and the new source of meaning in life is their career, their relationships. You say here that he knows that she's just a girl, that she's not, nor she can ever be, that impossible ideal. So you're still saying that, even though this is a lofty goal, that the whole meaning of life isn't just about women, if it is, you try and wrap that one girl, then it's going to be an impossible ideal.
Speaker 1:
No, I don't no, that's not exactly what I'm saying, because what I'm saying more is when you give up the notion that an individual woman has to be the ideal which we're all broken, when you give up that and come to terms with that and say make friends with that, say that, okay, that I understand, then you don't, because that's not fair to do with anybody, and then you can relax in the notion that the woman you're with, in all her beauty and all her imperfections, is as ideal of a woman as you're ever going to find on this earth. What a great woman that's a great woman we're always grass is always greener than the other side.
Speaker 1:
We're always looking maybe I want something else over here, but that's as good as it gets. The woman that you're in love with, cares about you, who loves you, who wants you to be successful and happy in life, who doesn't want you to be sick and sad and sits there when you are sick and sad, that woman is as good as it gets on earth. It doesn't get better than that. And yet we're always seeking this mythical ideal. So when I write about the alabaster girl, I'm not talking about the combination of like. Finally I'm going to get that girl I'm talking about. They're all the alabaster girl. They just don't know it. They all represent that. You know Plato's shapes and forms on the wall. They all represent the ideal sense of female spirit, feminist spirit, and they just don't understand it, and we don't either. It's a lofty, undeveloped, half-assed concept that I have in my mind. They're trying to have. They're trying to wrote a book about it.
Speaker 4:
So it seems like your entire approach to seduction and romance, and especially this thing called higher standard to call her and yourself to a higher standard seems like you're wanting to draw out that essence of alabaster girl from the women that come into your life, to draw it out of them so that they see it and believe it and feel it, so that you can experience it and bathe in it and relax into it and that you can live your lives as much as possible with that essence, like that essential beauty of the women that you're with.
Speaker 1:
It's interesting because there's I read a can't remember where I read it there's an anthropologist in the 20s that was talking to like the tribes in the Amazon stuff, and they didn't have the concept of, they didn't have the concept of, for instance, romantic love or the one they said, well, if your woman dies, you just get another one. It's so obvious, you know, and. But they had a wholeness and a completeness in their view of seeing it. I can't remember what they were about, but it was very interesting that I what it said, but it's like it's we're always our generation because we're such a me culture and what about me? Our relationships? Are that what?
Speaker 2:
about me.
Speaker 1:
What are you going to do for me? What do you? What do you promise me, promising me for the next five years? What about me? Right, we have this whole, this whole concept of that all the time, that we're always looking over her shoulder because maybe there's a better woman coming along. We never reckon, we never really see the beauty that we're with and seek out the alabaster girl essence in her. So she feels it too, like you said. And if we would just pause and say this is my girl and it's as good as any? No, it's better than any girl on earth, because she's smart enough that she's with me. She's smarter than all of them, right, she's better than every woman in the world. That's my girl and I'm proud of her. You see, that kind of feeling is like and and and she is a beauty. That makes sense. I'm gonna be hearing your story out soon, quickly.
Speaker 1:
These islanders who would give cows for, for wives like and if she was really desirable, really attractive, she'd command a lot of cows from, from to the father, right, and there's this one woman who was kind of like it's one girl who nobody wanted on this island and she was like, always covered up and she was, like you know, bent over like this and Timid and afraid, and and she wasn't attractive and have attractive qualities and and so In everybody expected she'd get maybe one cow from her father. And this, this young man came along and Said and normally like a high-priced wife, was like ten cows, and he said for her I'm gonna give 20 cows. And the villagers were all shocked. You know, the villagers were all shocked and a year later they saw her.
Speaker 1:
She was this most glowing, glowing, vibrant Beauty, the beauty of the islands. It's what happened, happened because she's a 10 cow or 20 cow wife, it's not a one cow wife. The way he saw her and she became that I Really do believe that. You know, I wrote in the beginning, it's about beauty needs a witness and he really see that, he really tried to see Get out of your normal life sucks when job sucks everything sucks.
Speaker 1:
The world's beating me up and not being fair to me. Get out of that kind of like Thinking. Instead, look for beauty and cast away things that don't feel like beauty. Your job, your obligations, are your commitments, your obligations, and look for the beauty in what you have. Look for the beauty in the gratitude and the grace and what you have, and call for it because, as leaders, this is what this is, this is what the calling is. I Wrote that and this is very much a leadership calls, especially in the end here, and it isn't a call to guys who take you out there and lead a club or lead a you know, I don't know. It's a call to leadership of yourself and and to make choices, of leading your perspectives and reading how you want things to be in your relationship. For instance, to lead it by saying I choose beauty and I want to see is a beauty, so be my beauty.
Speaker 4:
So we've been talking about intimacy. You're going off. How deep do you guys think we are in the ocean right now? Well, it definitely.
Speaker 1:
Boy, I could talk and talk, and talk, and talk, believe me, and it's all a Mix of really absolute things I say in a mix of like, wow, what a, what a glorious opportunity to learn things that we have. How exciting is that that we can learn new ways of being, and they share that and talk about it and what else is there?
Speaker 3:
My job Beauty, and I was just thinking about it, but I have. I have the luxury of operating a machine that sits about 60 meters above the earth. The last job I had was actually overlooking the boardwalk and back in Australia, on the Gold Coast, and you see boats going up and down. Oh wow, you get, you get an oculose. You look at the girls on the street, you know. I remember one one time there's like a little inlet and then broad water goes Along the beach, yeah, and you can see dolphins Going up and down the broad water and you get to sit up there under just looking at it.
Speaker 1:
Look at her, it's beautiful blue water beach girls See that that kind of thing would just like I.
Speaker 3:
to me that's profound, I think wow, how lucky am I, how lucky am I and they give me money to do this. That's just big building frames right.
Speaker 4:
There's a scene in great as a scene in that book that you recommend, the Memoirs of a buck. In here the French guy says guy in France and sells himself into slavery because he's bored of working at home in 17th century France. It becomes a slave and then kills the owner of the ranch and becomes a pirate and takes over a succession of boats until he's Got a fleet of 40 pirates and he sails around the Caribbean and he talks about after a battle he he was coming back and everyone was weary and tired after like five days of cannon fire and Gunpowder and all that kind of stuff. He's sailing across the ocean On to the next place and he finally puts his arms behind his back and has a like a mug of rum Beside him and he says in that moment I started to see these two dolphins and they swam behind us Across the ocean and they just followed up by all the way out and and he's there like Finally on seeing beauty, you know, after all this wild adventure.
Speaker 4:
And then the authorize in the footnotes that there's never been any recorded sightings of dolphins in this part of the Caribbean. The author must have been either hallucinating or making things up for the sake of his death. That's some good rum. That's some good rum, man. That's grog. That's shit grog. That's funny.