As I sat and shuffled the deck of our upcoming Mastery course topics, I realised that this post from the 2018 edition was no longer needed. Time to share some real-life stories of seduction with you gentlemen here, then!

So settle in, grab a cup of tea or a glass of wine, and enjoy some tales about sub-communication, audacity, and how to master and re-imagine the very rules of Masculine Edge.

* * *

Two men, standing shoulder to shoulder at the bar. Similar height, similar build, similar-looking clothes even. Although one of the men’s attire is a little more embellished.

They stand, shoulder to shoulder, sipping on bottles of beer. They lean back against the bar. They’re silent. They both look around the room. Minutes tick by and still they stand, these two gentlemen. Barely a drop of activity to observe between them.

To the eye that observes only the concrete level of reality, there’s little that separates these two men. However, one of these chaps is the greatest seducer in the world. He’s bedded over three-thousand girls and is paid to fly — first class — across continents, to make hours upon hours of ecstatic love to successful, talented and powerful women.

The other chap wouldn’t even go by the name of novice, so paralysed is he by his anxiety. Too afraid to take one forward step.

* * *

I met “Marcus” at a Bucharest house party back in the Spring of 2012. A friend of one of the old Amorati Elite Corsairs, he sat towards the back of the gathering, sipping quietly from his rocks glass. There was clearly something powerful about him, although he did not embody the kind of aliveness I’d come to associate with the great seducers I’d heard about during my time on the Way of the Amorati.

Just sat in the corner of the room, watching the world go by. I mean, even I, after my mere five months’ association with the Amorati, was ‘showing up’ more than him.

Later, the gathering of twenty-or-so people circled together for a round of Vespers, and one by one we each spoke our gratitude of the day, and our intention for the evening, into the centre of the circle.

As the round progressed we found ourselves laughing, giggling, having to remind each other not to talk out of turn. Sometimes we were touched by what was shared. But as Marcus opened his mouth (for the first time that evening, I thought to myself), a cold, unnerving wind spread through the room.

“My intention for tonight is to find the loneliest woman in Bucharest, and give her a night she’ll remember for the rest of her life.”

Usually, when an intention is spoken, we can feel in our bones the likelihood that the intention has of actually materialising. I was under no doubt that Marcus would create the experience of which he spoke.

But how will he recognise the loneliest woman when he saw her? I wondered.

How will he show up when he does see her? I thought to myself; for this man didn’t seem to have the typical charm and aliveness that the Amorati here employed to open women up as they moved through the city’s nightlife.

Instead, Marcus seemed to embody an entirely different approach. And half the people from the gathering that night discussed and gossiped about this man’s presence for days.

What I glimpsed that night in Marcus was a modus operandi that haunted me throughout the following years. A mystique that I wanted to make my own.

* * *

A few months later I was guided into getting my first glimpses into the matrix; fortunate to be shown some of the dynamics that dictate the rhythm and play of all human activity.

I spent a few days with my shaman-gigolo friend, Pablo, in the playground that is New York City.

Now Pablo’s a pretty interesting guy. The professional “best friend of a really fucking rich guy”, we visited some of Manhattan’s premier restaurants and lounges together, laughingly racking up expensive bar tabs and paying it all off with a borrowed black AMEX. In the meantime, we toyed with the unfolding of the Universe.

In some drunken, messy Irish bar a few blocks from Central Park, Pablo invited me to observe the characteristics of New Yorkers. “People here are uptight and all trying to be cool,” he told me. “You’ll never see anyone here raise their hands above elbow height.”

“Okaaaayyy,” I responded.

“Watch this!”

And in a split-second, Pablo grabbed the pool cue between his hands, raising his arms into the air like a rock fan at the concert of his favourite band. A gurning look of agonising ecstasy crept over his face, and he added a slow thrusting of his loins. He writhed there for a few minutes, as if masturbating into a warm towel. Yet he remained awake all the while in complete, scheming consciousness.

“Woo-hoo! Yeah!! Paarrrtt-yyy!!!”

A drunken blonde approached us within seconds, and started dancing with Pablo.

Pablo turned his head and winked at me. “Go against the current,” he later said, “and you create whatever you want.”

A few moments passed and Pablo took the blonde by the hand, and led her into the toilet.

* * *

It didn’t exactly happen immediately, but as the months rolled by, I started to see into the matrix for myself.

It was deep into the summer of the following year and I found myself alone one weekday night in a humid and sticky Budapest. Well on my way to ‘cracking’ some of the energetic codes of seduction, I decided to do a little experiment, and I shaped myself into a “pole” for the soirée.

I decided to stand, for an entire evening, as an inert, phallic beam — calculatedly placed — on the midpoint between the bar, the dance-floor, and the women’s toilet.

As I stood there, the night’s action seemed to brush right up against me and past me, and I watched and smirked as a woman approached me, made herself available to me, seduced herself all over me, and invited herself back to my room as I got tired of the venue and left. Holding my hand out behind me, she simply clutched it and followed.

It wasn’t a seduction I felt proud of. There wasn’t exactly a ‘deep human connection’ that gratified my spirit and my heart. But I had perfected a way of standing that seemed to work. Watching on, I *did* absolutely nothing to go home accompanied that night.

* * *

And in this way, with the kind of effortlessness you might observe in an advanced qigong class, I added a number of notches to my bedpost.

But the cooler I got and the more deeply into sub-communication I saw, the more I seemed to miss the innocent audacity and romantic recklessness of my Amorati early days. Then Camilo, a young man from Italy, came into a Way of the Amorati group I was leading at the time.

He won our hearts as he defied the ‘cool seducer’s message’, you know, the law that tells us to never chase.

“I wanna share with you an adventure I lived this weekend,” Camilo writes, “a story where I tried to put into practice all the teaching so far in this amazing course.” And I quote Camilo verbatim:

“Since the course started I must have approached or talked to well over two-hundred girls, and of this two-hundred a small percentage were nice and I followed up either by talking to them on the phone and text or seeing them.

“About two weeks ago I stopped on the street this amazing looking girl. I would have never been able to do it if I hadn’t stopped the hundred or more girls before. This girl turned out to be super interesting. In our brief first meeting she did not want to give me her mobile but I insisted and managed to get her email. So we exchanged some emails and a week later we met, had an amazing time out, but she was leaving she said with friends on holidays for a remote seaside resort on a island in another country some eight hundred kilometres far away, only reachable by thirteen hours trip, by train, various buses, and a boat.

“I wanted to see her again right there and then, and since I had the weekend off, on Friday morning at seven fifteen and without thinking too much about it, I caught a five-hour train toward her, followed by a four-hour bus ride, followed by an hour-and-a-half boat ride, followed by a one-hour bus ride, followed by a twenty-minute hitch hike lift. And so I was at sunset on this island in this little fisherman’s village with no idea of her address or where she was staying. And her having no idea I was about to show up.

“The thirteen-hour trip was amazing. I met countless women and people who I shared the journey with and have a few exciting stories about it. I will share these maybe some other time.

“As I arrived to the village the sun was setting and that was my main worry, so I rushed to the only local bar/restaurant to the elder people and asked to point me to the person in town that knows everything about everyone.

“They did, they pointed me to a house and a person. I went over and found this man standing with a big knife covered with blood skinning a pig from a tree! So I told him that I was looking for a girl that arrived in a car with others the day before at around 9pm… very very vague clues!!!

“He talked to other elderly people of the village and they came to the conclusion that it might have been a house down the mountain by the sea only reachable by foot. Since I would have never found it by myself he had his son drive me and escort me down the trails. We walked by a few houses and after a thirty-minute hike by the sea and through trails in the woods we came to the last fisherman house on a secluded beach.

“In the distance I could see that the guests of that house were all sitting outside by the sea having dinner, but most of all I could see that they could have not been her friends as she mentioned, as they were not young people but some older, some little kids, some very old…. and she was not among them. So I assumed that it was not the house, but since I got there and my guide was saying that was the house I just asked anyway.

“So I asked if they were from the city she was from, and they answered YES, and I asked them if they arrived yesterday, and two of them said YES, so they asked me why I was asking? So I asked if they knew the girl, and they said YES and that she was up in then town…. so they asked me who was I??? So I said a “friend” that wanted to do a surprise to her…. and one lady stood up and introduced herself to me as her mother!!!!!! All the other people where either her uncles, nephews, grandma and so on!!!!! It was her family to the full!!!!!!!

“How did I feel? Well, rather awkward, I did not expect to meet all her family! But at the same time very righteous about my desires and intentions to see her so I felt no shame or massive embarrassment.

“So I excused myself, asked them not to text or call her about seeing me as I wanted it to be a surprise, and proceeded back to town with my guide.

“Then something interesting happened to me, to test me. Along the same secluded beach there was another house we passed with some young local friends of my guide. Me and my guide where laughing at the situation as we were leaving the family and he could not help himself but tell his friends about what had just happened. One funny friend, jokingly told me that he saw her holding hands with another guy. Well after what had just happened my sense of humour was not very alert so I was not sure if he was joking or if he was serious. In fact the thought came to mind for the first time that she could have been there with her boyfriend. I did feel bad about the idea, but not so bad as I did truly my best and showed up.

“In the village, news of my arrival must have gone around pretty fast because ten minutes up the trail back into town, I got a message from her to go back to the pig that was being skinned.

“We met. She was so excited about my surprise. We had an amazing two days. Her family was lovely and welcomed me to stay with them. On Sunday morning at six o’clock I had to leave.

“But I definitely had probably one of the best weekends of my life, a memory I will cherish for a long, long time.”

* * *

Delighted by Camilo’s story, I thought to myself that “if only I were to fall in love this much, then this kind of action would surely inspire itself!”

Then I met Fernanda.

I’d recently racked up ten-thousand miles, traveling the breadth of North America in a rusty Jeep we bought for some fifteen-hundred dollars in Brockton, Massachusetts. The last few weeks of the trip had ended up rather sexless and claustrophobic, as the towns and states and miles added up and in our poverty we’d sleep, four very tall and fiery gentlemen, on air mattresses spread across an array of charitable host’s living-room floors. I was understandably knackered, grabbing some recovery time on a quiet hostel patio in Guadalajara, Jalisco.

Fernanda glided in, and sprinkled fairy-dust onto every surface her being graced. There was nothing normal about this woman: she possessed a manner that was beyond human, a kindness worthy of royalty, and a smile that could melt even the most hardened traveler. Class, beauty and feminine education unparalleled. She was the kind of woman that squirrels and deer and magical leprechaun would follow in her wake. Pure-hearted, fresh-as-snow, feminine majesty.

I’d finally found my muse. Here, I could lose myself in romance. I decided that I’d do anything it took to possess this heavenly creature.

Apart from stealing a taco from the corner stand, and a brief visit to the seven-eleven, I didn’t leave my patio chair for the rest of the day. I waited for Fernanda’s return, crucified inside by the weight of my own romantic hopes and expectations. Around eleven o’clock that night, she reappeared.

We sat. We spoke. We embraced an arm or held a hand here and there. It seemed we were touched by one another. Mutual shyness descended on our flowering connection. Could this be it?

I remember asking Zan one time if he felt that he’d lost anything along the way to becoming the seducer he became. “There is one little thing,” he’d tell me. “In the early days, if a girl ever gave me so much as a kiss on the cheek as I dropped her off at her place, I’d run back to my car on the lightest of feet, clicking my heels together three times from glee!”

“Now I see everything before it unfolds. There’s no mystery in it for me anymore.”

But Fernanda had gracefully excused herself from my presence before I could even conjure a plan to seduce her, and I sat on the stone wall alone, in the brisk night air of the Guadalajara hostel garden, dumbfounded. The pureness of this woman had stultified my scheming mind. I hadn’t even “shown up”. I was rendered afraid. A level of vulnerability, the kind I hadn’t felt for a couple of years, was opening back up.

A desperate fire lit up inside me: my hands, arms and whole body shimmered with tingling, and my heart pounded like that of a teenager. Fifteen minutes after she’d retired to her room, I plucked up the courage to creep down the corridor of the colonial Mexican house, and I remember touching my hands on every cold rock on the way, in an attempt to not be swallowed whole by my anxiety, and so I could bring myself again and again to the present moment. With the desperate, terrified audacity one might feel before asking a girl out for the very first time, I timidly knocked on Fernanda’s wooden bedroom door, and as she opened it with the freshest of smiles, my truth about my feelings for her fell from my mouth like a confession: rendered once more a helpless lost boy, I looked into the eyes of this angel who enraptured and astonished and reduced me to servitude. My power, my solidity, my mystique, evaporated before the deeper power of a true Goddess.

But in spite of — or perhaps because of — my stammering invitation, Fernanda followed me back along the stone corridors of that colonial Mexican house at midnight, and she followed me back into the courtyard under the moonlight and now, half-dressed in pyjama and hair fully relaxed, with her big dark eyes ablaze she kissed me shyly, tenderly, and melted into me… we melted into each other, two lovers, under the starry night. The sweetest relief to my desperation and insecurity had arrived. My entire body was on fire. Half an hour later, I’d skip back to my room, heels clicking.

Within twelve hours, she was fully mine.

Strolling through the Sunday chaos of central Guadalajara, she wrapped her arm in mine. We were the height of romantic elegance, Fernanda and I. A sight of new love to be seen. And we drank coffee and we ate and shared stories of lovers past. She laughed and derided one former pursuer who, infatuated with Fernanda as I’d been just one night before, had transported a piano to the street underneath Fernanda’s bedroom, and played and sung all kinds of love songs to her all night in a bid to win her affection. Fernanda charmingly mocked his efforts of seduction. Yet all the while, I felt jealous of his theatrical audacity. I longed to possess the cinematic quality of his romance: a quality I felt lacking in me. A necessity I had perhaps now transcended.

For just half a day earlier, having lost all composure and mystique, I still did relatively little, and got my dream girl…

* * *

I guess it now goes without saying: I was becoming more confident in my prowess as a seducer. Observant, bold, and in tune with my own impulses, I could see an opportunity in the land of women, and I knew how to take it. But there’s nothing quite like being well-versed in the dance of seduction, and then meeting one of your own…

The siren of all sirens sat opposite me in emerald green, and lured me in with her beauty song and with the motion of her hands. Delicate, playful, sensitive, ethereal… was she the end of my entire journey? Was she it, my destination, my place of rest? It felt very much like it as I now sat before her, smiling deeply into her eyes and entranced by her tune. And for the rest of the day I would arrange things: people, furniture, locks on doors, so that we could melt together in a primal embrace upon leather seats in a darkened backroom.

I wouldn’t know until years later that as I was busy arranging things, she had already arranged me.

A couple of days later I was on the train to visit this wafer-thin girl in her waif-like house. Secluded in a lover’s nest, it was the best forty-eight hour date I’d experienced in my entire life. So confident was I in my prowess that I laughed when I heard that my friend had also met her on the same day I did. And how he wanted to date her a little, too, just as I had. And I gleefully supported him as he traveled out to the same waif-like house that I did, soon after I had arrived back, so he could taste forty-eight hours of delight… or fall flat on his face trying.

There was no way in hell that he would be more smooth than I, that he’d be a greater lover than I, that he’d delight her heart and her body as well as I. No way in hell. Like the hare racing the tortoise, I sat back under the shade and revelled in my accomplishments of the week.

It was therefore to my great surprise that I soon received a message from my conquest that I, along with the rest of her lovers, would be relinquished of my duties, for she had decided on the path of monogamy, and that my ‘hapless’ friend had been the victor. Shocked — and too awestruck to actually be upset — I asked my friend what he’d done to conquer this beauty, especially in the wake of the magic I’d weaved.

“Well, I was in her house for about five minutes,” he began regaling, “and the energy was just really strong. So I looked at her, breaking open, breaking down I guess, and I told her that I needed her. I said to her, and I was kind of shaking when I said it, “I need you.” I guess the rest went on from there. It was intense!”

Shit. If I’d learned anything in my training as a seducer, to “need” a woman was the one thing to never do, let alone to express. And here I was again, single, stumped and scratching my head, the best of my efforts trumped by the “I need you” card!

Maybe, after all these meandering experiences on the road… after all these glimpses through the matrix…

Maybe I did know nothing about women after all.

* * *

The house music’s loud. And the strobe light makes things difficult to see. Yet facing away from the dance-floor and looking through the smoke, I make out the bar once more in this Bucharest nightspot.

I make out the first man, his energy seeming lower than before, his head now looking further and further down. He’s reading the label of his bottle of beer between furtive glances around the room. It’s an posture I’ve seen in men before: hoping someone new has entered the building — a new opportunity, perhaps — or at least someone new to look at before inevitably leaving the club alone, blaming the night on how ‘closed’ everyone in this city is, if he doesn’t violate himself instead with self-hate.

But where was the other man? I guess he went somewhere.

I guess he went somewhere, and struck.

* * *