u/Eka-citta

"Habits of Successful People."
"Secrets of Straight-A Students."
Self-help books are filled with endless examples like these.

If you want to be successful, you must wake up early. If you want to be successful, you must be diligent... If you want to succeed, you must do this and that.

Back when I was young, I read a lot of books on study methods. Among them was one called The Daniel Study Method, written by a Christian author.

Reading that studying at dawn was effective, I started waking up at dawn to study... I was just a middle school student back then, so the schoolwork wasn't even that difficult, yet after putting that method into practice, I hit rock bottom with the worst grades of my life.

Waking up at dawn to study is the key to doing well? It varies from person to person.

To succeed, you have to wake up early, you have to read the newspaper every single day...

It may sound bleak, but all these success secrets from self-help books are utterly useless in the face of luck.

The most miserable people in the world are those who have bad luck yet work relentlessly hard. In other words, these people bust their backs putting effort solely into failing, and work to the bone putting effort solely into going broke.

What is luck?

Call it destiny, call it karma from a past life, or call it a test from God.

Whatever it may be, in the face of luck, all of humanity’s secrets to success become entirely useless.

In the end, luck is energy. To put it more simply, it is a person’s level of consciousness.

If my level of consciousness is low... things that match that low state will follow.

If my level of consciousness is high, whether I sleep in lazily for 12 hours a day, skip breakfast altogether, or only work two to three hours a day, things aligned with my level of consciousness will naturally follow.

Then, is luck fixed?

Whether it is genetics, destiny, or karma, it is certain that one's patterns of thought and behavior are fixed from the moment of birth.

Before money, before women, before power, people’s true nature and behavior inevitably reveal themselves.

When breaking up with someone you truly loved, you probably have a memory of clinging to that person and exposing a side of yourself you never wished to show.

Then, you grow... you love again... and as you mature, your mental consciousness evolves.

And depending on the state of your mental consciousness, luck is always changing.

Depending on what thoughts you harbor when faced with a certain situation, luck is constantly in flux.

Most people do not know how to think for themselves. They live under the illusion that they are thinking, but mostly, they are merely borrowing other people’s thoughts.

To genuinely feel and think on your own, you need time alone.

A time of absolute solitude...

If your mind or body is constantly busy, or if you cannot endure moments of solitude, you will eventually lose the power to think.

Semen retention gives meaning to this time of solitude, and ultimately grants the peace of mind needed to think for yourself.

And once you begin to think for yourself, consciousness shifts; and when consciousness shifts, luck, too, gradually begins to transform.

There are people who repeatedly attract nothing but toxic connections. Usually, according to one's karma, according to one's destiny, one meets the kind of ties that match who they are.

Ordinary people rarely have a reason to cross paths with top celebrities, tycoons, or high-ranking officials. In childhood, the people you meet are decided by the status of your parents, and depending on the level of those people, the level of your own consciousness is formed. Birds of a feather flock together; that remains true even today.

If you are unsatisfied with the connections you draw and wish to change them, you must either change your environment or undergo a radical awakening. Changing your environment means changing the very country you live in—and achieving a radical awakening means gaining profound realization out of absolute, extreme suffering. Yet for ordinary men, neither of these paths is easy.

However, the longer you practice semen retention, it raises the caliber of people you attract by a level—no, the longer it endures, by dozens of levels.

When you practice semen retention, you gradually become solitary. You cut ties with those around you, step out of the circle you once belonged to... and begin to savor your time alone. If such signs appear, it means your circle of connections is about to be entirely reorganized.

Through semen retention, as your body becomes clean and your mind turns pure, you can no longer communicate with the group you once belonged to. And after walking a quiet, desolate road alone for a while... when the time is ripe, you will finally meet the ties that truly match the elevated body and consciousness you built through semen retention.

For men who find it difficult to change their environment and hard to reach a radical awakening, if you want to elevate the quality of your relationships, you must practice semen retention.

Over the weekend, I binge-watched the hit Korean drama True Education (Chamgyoyuk / Get Schooled — a widely discussed series revolving around field agents dispatched to enforce order in dysfunctional schools).

It left me feeling both bitter about the current state of education and deeply vindicated.

In it, the protagonist Na Hee-jin delivers a striking line:

>"Do not assume that your minute is the same as someone else’s. Right now, it looks like the exact same minute—later on, it will amount to a difference of decades."

Time is impartial to everyone.

It cannot be halted, nor can it be wound backward.

Minutes gather into an hour;
an hour becomes a day;
a day turns into a week;
a week into a month;
a month into a year;
a year into a decade...

Depending on what thoughts and actions you consciously cultivate every single hour, the gap that emerges down the road widens exponentially.

In the Liao-Fan’s Four Lessons (Liaofan Sixun) I introduced previously, what the author did daily to reshape his destiny was nothing extravagant.

It was merely offering one more kind word, mastering his anger when provoked—the smallest, seemingly trivial adjustments.

Yet ten years later, he was blessed with an heir he was never destined to have, and his government station changed entirely.

Even if today appears devoid of special meaning, perseverance is what counts.

Even if a single day of Semen Retention feels insignificant, as it builds and compounds, you will eventually look back and realize how remarkably far you have traveled.

People rarely know themselves.

They remain largely unconscious of their own actions. They fail to recall their own words. They merely live under the illusion that they are mindful and aware.

Why is this?

Because they invest more attention in the lives of others than in their own.

Instagram, YouTube, the high-achieving peers parents boast about, updates from old classmates...

If you redirect the hours spent dwelling on strangers toward consciously governing your own speech and conduct, your life will, without question, steadily transform for the better.

Semen Retention operates on the very same truth.

Whether you maintain it for 100 days, 500 days, or 10,000 days—

turn a deaf ear to how long others have retained or their endless chatter about supposed benefits and side effects.

Only you can do the work, and only you can prove it to yourself.

Today—and within this very day, every single minute and second—

simply continue to build, faithfully and in silence.