LastThursday

I would see a metaphor as a short story using something concrete in the real world as a substitue for something complex or ineffable. Because of this metaphors are interchangeable. For example: "I can't solve this problem, I've hit a brick wall." The metaphor here is "hit a brick wall", because you are not literally hitting a brick wall. You could also say: "I can't solve this problem, I wish I could breeze through it." - you're not literally breezing through anything, in any sense. See how the metaphors can be interchanged? So some metaphors in regular use for memory is: Memories are contained or stored. Memories are processed. Memories are hidden from view. Memories are held down. Memories are immutable. If a memory isn't dealt with it will cause you harm. Negative memories get worse over time Some metaphors for mind: Mind is controlling Mind belongs to someone Mind is an independent entitity and acts independently Mind processes things None of the metaphors are literally true, they are just ways of understanding. You could argue that we can't get away from using metaphors to explain stuff and that would be right - explanation is always metaphor. So the question becomes which are the best metaphors to understand a thing? It's not that the "repressed memory" metaphor is wrong, it's just that there are better metaphors than can be used (in a therapeutic context).

To be honest I have no idea, except I know that personally I don't like thinking about stuff I can't deal with because it is emotionally overwhelming or conflicting. Again that is just a survival mechanism. It is not optimal for survival if you go around being paralysed by your emotions triggered by memories, so you deny them or at least skirt around them. I suppose that the denial could become a reflex action with enough practice, but it starts off as a conscious action. I'm not of the opinion that denial is bad, if you never experience a particular negative memory ever again then good: who needs therapy for that? I suppose my meta-point is that when it comes to mind and memory, we're working in the land of metaphors. So the question becomes, are these metaphors pragmatically useful? If not, or if there are better ones, then they should be replaced. The problem here is, is that it's known that the hippocampus is involved in making memories, but no one knows how they're stored. That being the case then you can't be certain about anything to do with memory, other than what we subjectively experience. It's even possible that memories are not stored in the brain at all, but the brain is somehow like a radio receiver for memories, and the hippocampus is just part of the circuitry of the receiver. Also memories don't come fully formed in one blob. They unfold over a short amount of time, that being the case there is room for a stimulus and response. In other words the body learns to associate the neutral memory which appears first, with a traumatic emotion which is triggered by it. You can see this for example when watching something unpleasant, it may be a novel experience, but you have an emotional reaction to it.

I'm not sure how you would know if a memory is permanently repressed? The only way to know you have a memory is to have the memory appear, until that happens you don't know if you have the memory or not. I have a million things I'm sure that I remembered a few a years ago, that haven't been remembered again since. But that's mostly because they were either unimportant, or are not relevant now. It's nothing to do with repression. Why is it that normal everyday memories (non-traumatic) can just be experienced, but traumatic memories must be "processed"? What exactly is this "processing" you are talking about? You use the word "surface" as well. This presupposes that there is somehow a pool of memories hidden from view waiting to burst out, and that the "mind" is the gatekeeper of that pool of memories. I'm not picking on you particularly. I just see that these metaphors of "repression" and "processing" and "hidden memories" are widespread. You probably won't like it, and think I'm dumb, but here are some different metaphors: The mind has limited bandwidth. In effect you can only deal with one memory at a time. Memories are not well defined. They are malleable. Every single time you recollect something it changes and becomes different. The memories which appear regularly are mostly those with the greatest importance to your survival, or have high emotional connection. Traumatic memories are just those with very high emotional content (or tension in the body). Memories are tagged with an "emotion" label on a sliding scale. Generally the higher the emotion the greater importance to survival. Memories can provoke a stimulus-response reaction, i.e. you have a memory and it immediately provokes an emotional reaction maybe a strong one. Memories can be untagged from their emotions (via therapy or of their own accord over time). There is no control over which memories appear, it's just those that are most important in the moment. What do you think?

I respect your point of view. Yeah exploring systems thinking is like explaining maths to most - boring and difficult and pointless. But for example Spiral Dynamics is systems thinking and there's a LOT of talk about that on the forum. People do care if they can see its worth.

I wouldn't bash the forum members too much. Systems thinking doesn't come naturally to 99% of people. Even thinking differently is very hard for most. It's not lack of care, it's lack of ability. There should be a lot more topics on systems thinking on the forum.

I think there is a lot of juice to be squeezed by thinking about the self this way. There is a lot of talk on here about how the self is an illusion or a construction. To say that anything is a "construction" is to think about it like a system. In other words a construction is made up of interacting parts. The idea of parts of the self can be most clearly experienced when you can't make a decision about something. For example say I can't decide whether going to university is beneficial or not. Maybe one part of me wants to experience the social life and loves learning. Maybe another part of me wants to just start earning money and getting experience in the real world and get a head start. Treating the self like a system of parts (sometimes conflicting with each other), can help resolve decision paralysis and other similar problems. The idea is to examine what each part wants and to come to some sort of common agreement or goal. This is a process of getting the parts to communicate better together. For example maybe you go to university, but take a year out in industry - both parts would be satisfied. What happens in reality is that the system of the self is built up haphazardly over time without any real planning. It's like building a house with non-standard parts and no blueprints: it's possible, but it can lead to a dysfunctional design. Anyway, I'm sure the are many more ideas from systems thinking that can be applied to the self.

I would reword that as: "I haven't found a way to remember stuff I can't remember". I think that gets to the core of the problem. How would you know if a memory is suppressed until your remember it again (in which case it's no longer suppressed)?

Lifting your hand is not free will, deciding to lift your hand is free will. There's a difference. One is actuality, one is potentiality. For the word nerds: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/will#English

Neither is false. It's just a matter of which way you're looking. Achievement is looking to the future. Being alive is just looking at the present. It's like sitting on a train, the future is rushing towards you and you're going somewhere, but if you close your eyes you don't feel like you're moving at all. You could also look towards the past and see how much has changed - and this is also the source of your identity and history.

This. The tension could be strong emotions, fear, anxiety and so on. "Solving" just means unlinking the event from the tension again, so the tension no longer gets triggered by thoughts of the event or when encountering similar situations. There are techniques for doing this and one way is to re-link the event to different more positive emotions (good tension). A different tack is to recontextualize or reframe the original event, so it no longer has the same meaning for the body, and it can no longer trigger the same bad tension. This linking/unlinking process is a completely different way of seeing trauma than the processing or pressure building up or accumulation ideas.

@Vibroverse your memories are like the edited highlights of a sports match. You could re-edit them or change them completely and you could rewire your identity that way (this is kind of what therapy does). But some things, like learning a language, can only be done by actually going through the process, which always takes time. It's like the difference between moving chairs around for better feng shui or making a chair from scratch. It's the difference between autobiographical memory and procedural memory. Of course if you were God you could do anything you liked.

See. It's all a matter of perspective. What repeats is what you interpret as being "the same". 1 is not 11 and is not 111 they are all distinct, but from a different perspective they repeat.

What really is a repetition? It is a symmetry - mathematically. If you swap A for B then it would look the same. Sure you can have infinity without repetition, just start counting up from 1, do any numbers repeat? Absolute infinity can be anything it likes with or without repetition. Distinctions are a feature not a bug. Two things may be distinct and the same simultaneously. Red and green are different, but they are both colours. Non-duality just goes to the extreme and calls everything "the same". You can have duality and non-duality simultaneously.

Something for the dating section no?

You have a week to live. What would you do? I've never been a fan of this type of approach to motivation. I think it's meant to get you thinking differently than you normally would, and make you realise that you can be different. It's an admirable sentiment, but the setting is too morbid. I think I would choose one of three responses, but I'm not sure which one: Just carry on in the same way and do nothing special, Have a mad rush to get my affairs in order and say goodbyes to those I care about, Wallow in self pity and anxiety. It's not a good motivator. Mostly if you only have a week to live, then you are gravely ill and probably bed ridden. It seems like the only thing I wouldn't do is have time to do all the things I've always wanted to do. As a general principle for living life, it's also not that great. Firstly, there's that constant underlying fear of your imminent death and not knowing exactly when it's going to occur. You could say, that indeed none of us know when death will occur, it could happen today crossing the road. But using that as a guiding principle is not necessarily motivating, but actually neurotic. I think it would install an uneasiness and impatience in a person. Secondly, it's short termist. We're all very prone to short term thinking in any case without emphasising it. Some of us want to live "in the moment" which is short termism in the extreme. Constantly thinking that you have a sell-by-date doesn't allow you to plan for the long term. Whilst it's true that we don't really know what's going to happen in the future, we should at least guide ourselves towards some sort of destination and plan it. Put another way we have better lives by having a long term purpose - the week-to-live principle goes against this. It's all stick and no carrot. The last jab at the concept is that it falls into the quick fix category of self help. People have busy lives and short attention spans, quick fixes sell better. Can you really solve motivation problems in an individual by scaring them with death? I suspect not. No. Leave death to those that are actually dying next week. In fact, go and visit them and get a taste of what death could be like - and it would make you appreciate more what a joy being alive is. That is the right way to use death as a motivator, to highlight how good being alive is. Most demotivation in life comes from being down on life and just seeing and being in negativity. A well-adjusted human is naturally motivated, an actualised human is naturally motivated. Self actualisation is a long term process, because society is not built around it, and there's a lot of societal programming to undo, to make it even harder, largely you have to deprogram yourself. Luckily it's a virtuous loop; the more you actualise the easier it gets, and the more motivated you become. That is exactly the sort of thing that should be taught. How do you sell such a long term process to the masses? I don't know. I suspect you either have the right temperament and circumstances, or you don't. Only very few of us will actualise.

I think it largely depends on which point of view you take. If you're an idealist then consciousness is supposed to be the bedrock and so consciousness must be constant. There's a link with truth also, because truth is that which is constant. Your view on time and space and all that stuff comes into it too. If there is no time and no space, then it's clear that there is still existence/consciousness so that is constant (my original answer). If there is time, then all moments are strung together by time itself, so time is constant - equally for space. In other words whatever feature of reality you choose to focus on, it must be constant in order to be able to focus on it.

Don't know if I've written about this before here - probably - tulpa creation. What is a tulpa? The concept is basically an imaginary friend on steroids. You create and maintain a separate entity - normally a person - using thought alone. See Wikipedia for more. I don't know why exactly the idea appeals to me, after all I'm in 40's not my 00's . I think it ties in with my philosophy of thinking that we should all regularly inhabit different characters, as a way to expand ourselves, and to not get too stuck in ourselves. To be honest this is what we all already do (see earlier posts), so the only difference here in creating a tulpa is doing it consciously rather than unconciously. Effectively, you are already a bunch of thought-forms vying for attention and control of your body. Further to this, everyone in your life - male and female - is also a thought-form. Unconsciously created tulpas abound rattling around inside you. I thought I would create a female tulpa, because why not? Ok, well this is kind of related to my earlier phase of needing to work through what feminity meant for myself (yes I'm male) - we're all a balance of feminine and masculine qualities - whatever they are. Earlier I was interested in tipping the scales and embodying or expressing what I thought were more feminine qualities. Creating a female tulpa would allow me a chance of feminine creative expression even if just in thought. I have plenty of material to work from, half the people in the world are feminine. I'm not sure where exactly this need to explore a more feminine identity comes from, it's certainly not from sexual orientation (men don't turn me on, but I can appreciate a good looking one and why he's good looking). However, I was often confused for a girl when I was very young (longish hair), I have enjoyed the odd bit of cross-dressing (but hadn't done a huge amount of it). I was a little bit of a mummy's boy but not that much. In my twenties or thirties I was questioned on occasion whether I was gay or bi (nope) - even my own sister wanted me to work it out by experimenting, which I did and I definitely wasn't. This questioning made me wonder what about my behaviour made people think I was. In my forties I've worked hard to be more masculine in my character to stop this confusion in people; especially not to put off potential women I was interested in. This is not something I've ever spoken about to anyone. Lucky you, you're the first or at least in the low tens! I do think that I'm lost translation though. Being much more masculine just isn't really me, it's just a show. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's inauthentic, because I am being an authentic masculine version of myself. It's just that it takes conscious maintenance and suppression of what I used to think were "natural" expressions of my character. So here we are. In a way the female tulpa perhaps would be the more extreme version of that younger more femininely balanced self. She would have to be the female me. I have a good template as I have a sister! But we are quite different characters, so I can't just steal her character for myself - it's also kind of creepy to do that - the thought-form I already have of my sister doesn't need corruption. But despite our differences we are the closest two humans in terms of upbringing and some of our thought patterns and behaviours. Name your tulpa. I originally called her Christine, but wavered and eventually settled on Charlotte (I like CH right?). She kind of needed her own mind and body shape, but to be averagely me. When I first tried I found the maintenance side of the tulpa onerous. My visual imagination is good, but imagining a whole being from nothing except some vague template I found to be very tough. I had a long hiatus where I just forgot about the whole thing. But the idea didn't really go away. In adjusting myself to be more masculine the more feminine side of me screamed louder. Life is like that, some things are impossible to ignore and like it or not eventually you have to deal with it somehow. When I came across hypnosis videos online, there were various "feminine transformation" videos, for men I presume. The sheer fact it even grabbed my attention spoke to me. I'm a curious sort so I tried it out and it had a curious effect on me. What I had missed with the tulpa creation is what I should have done all along and that is: embodiment. After all, it was embodiment of more feminine qualities that I was missing in the first place and the reason for the tulpa creation. Embodiment is far more potent because you become the character, albeit a female character in a male body. It allowed me to explore the tulpa more fully. Although, I may have unconsciously shied away from what I felt could be a slippery slope - to what, I don't know. Some of the videos were straight become a woman type affairs. Some of them were more to do with cross-dressing. Knowing NLP well enough, I anchored Charlotte (the name) to these hypnotic moments of feminine embodiment so I could "recall" her more quickly. In a strange twist (the universe provides) I temporarily became the owner of a bunch of clothing which I promised to take to charity. I took the opportunity to actually cross-dress, specifically to fill out the Charlotte character. You really are the first know this, and as you can imagine it's odd spilling my guts like this on many levels. It's giving me the outlet I need to explore more feminine characteristics and it feels like a holiday from my normally straightjacketed-everyday-masculine self. How far am I going to push it? I don't know, it's quite possibly just a phase and I'll get bored with it. Maybe when I feel I've rebalanced myself again and can put an acceptable version of myself for public consumption it will end (acceptable to me and to others). What it also allows me to do is experiment with being someone else, albeit in private, but my hope is that the good parts of that experimentation will spill over into @LastThursday and go some way to "fixing" parts of me I don't like or "improving" other parts. I haven't actively bought any female clothing; not sure I will. I have bought nail varnish. I am very very weary about being caught out cross-dressing. Already I've probably been caught with a neighbour peering through my window from across the way. Part of me doesn't GAF, part of me really does. The social stigma is just too much. Definitely my friends can't know and neither can my family not because I don't think they wouldn't be accommodating, but because I'd never hear the end of it and I don't want to be identified by it. I also have a social image to upkeep unfortunately. In a bizarre sense I feel I'm not really cross-dressing but more like dressing a shop dummy called Charlotte in order to bring her to life. It is definitely fun and strangely cathartic though. Hey ho.

It's only when the noise stops you realise how peaceful it can be. Classic tune!

@WelcometoReality putting my meta-hat on, I wouldn't use a word at all. The problem as I see it is as soon I try to explain whatever this is, I'm already into map and not territory. I think I was using the word existence in a sense with as little map as possible, which explains my nitpickiness. But even using the word this is going too far. Maybe I'm wrong and there isn't any constancy whatsoever, just a story about constancy that I believe: after all how do you compare this moment with this moment with this moment? Aren't they all different in quality? Is there really any commonality at all between moments?

I think "arises" is too strong a word, unexistence is always made with reference to existence. But I'm just being nitpicky, please ignore me. Your sentiment is correct.

There aren't any rules about how you should use the forum (generally), so it's not possible to misuse the forum. <<< this me procrastinating ahahaha...

That the world seems to carrying on existing. Existence.

@Carl-Richard this is good stuff. Even if you are deep into systems type thinking, it's always good to keep in the back of your mind that you can go beyond it. For example: A system is always part of a larger system (a car is part of traffic, the internet). A system nearly always interacts in some way with other adjacent systems (a car emits air pollution). The difference between a unit in a system and its relationships is often arbitrary. For example a cell sends out chemical signals, those chemical signals (relationships) are themselves units. Or, in physics a gluon (relationship) is the same as a quark (unit), both being disturbances in the underlying field. Or a person (unit) speaks (relationship) by disturbing the air-system. Anyway I'll stop there. Good post!

Liberation is a perspective. And yet the delusion doesn't come from nowhere, it isn't a separate thing. The delusion is made of the same stuff as the non-delusion.

There really is nothing to be said. If I take a warm bath, should I actually say something about that? There are an infinitude of things I could say. None of them are actually a replacement for the sensation of taking a warm bath. The sensation of the warm bath is a truth, any talk about taking a warm bath is not the truth but an account or a story. Why talk? We talk for one reason only and that's to convey information. Information is just the process of revealing something that was previously hidden. If I never told you that I took a warm bath yesterday, then you would never know: it stays hidden and no information has been conveyed. Talking is for the benefit of others. But hey don't you also talk to yourself? If you find yourself doing this, then what purpose is it serving; don't you already know about everything that you could talk about? I don't need to inform myself that I've taken a bath, I already know it. One purpose for talking to yourself is to maintain a sense of separation. Somehow you are the entity that experiences a warm bath, but also (separately) a person who needs informing that you took a bath. Talk is always about recognising separation, because talk is always about revealing what's hidden from others, and the implicit assumption is that others are not part of your private (hidden) world. By treating yourself the same way (by talking to yourself), you a bolstering a sense that you are a person separate from your raw experiences. You try and prop up your raw experience by talking it through with yourself as if you were someone else. You become two: the person who listens, and the entity that is being. The person who listens learns to distrust that raw experience as something "other" than itself, it only ever trusts what is being said to itself. Raw experience is relegated to a lesser thing and truth becomes the words you say to yourself and others. In order to even be able to communicate at all with someone else, a huge amount of context has to be factored in first. The elephant in the room is that you have to assume the other person has a mind (at all) that can understand your communication. You have a theory of mind, their mind, and you use that theory to talk to them. When you talk to yourself, you are applying the same model of "theory of mind" to yourself; in this way you give yourself a credible excuse for having a mind. It's no coincidence that having a mind, thinking and talking to yourself are often used synonyms for each other. The reality is is that you don't have a mind per se. What you have instead is a theory of mind, a construction useful for communicating with. That construction takes on a life of its own and becomes a layer separate from raw experience. Effectively the "theory of mind" is misused in applying it to yourself, because you have nothing to reveal to yourself, it's all there in plain sight. In the process you do yourself an injustice because you install within yourself a separation that is parasitic to your direct raw experience. It's like blowing up a balloon called "self" and then talking to it as if it were real. How often have you talked to yourself and given yourself reasons for your behaviour, or a story about your past, or about how worthless or incapable you are? This is just you talking to a "theory of mind" entity, it is self-sustaining. Talking to yourself keeps the balloon of the "self" inflated. Other people have no choice but to buy into your story of yourself, because they have to use "theory of mind" to communicate with you. This also keeps the balloon inflated: I believe that you believe that I have a mind. Having a mind would seem inevitable, really, a very convenient thing. Can the balloon of the self be popped? Should it be popped? Would you take the bottom Jenga brick out and watch the tower of the self collapse? Yes. What remains after is then the raw experience which was always there in any case. You no longer have a mind, but you are still alive and breathing. Are you then a zombie of sorts? No. It's nearly the opposite, you are no longer constrained by your own "theory of mind" or conception. All that negative self-talk and all those stories you couldn't escape no longer mean anything, poof, they disappeared in a puff of smoke. You are free just to be without the burden of keeping the balloon of the self constantly inflated. You can still plan and talk to yourself, but you no longer take it seriously or identify with it, it is just another thing happening in raw experience: just in the same way you can choose to take someone seriously, or just let them talk without it affecting you.