LastThursday

I like myself a good thought experiment. If it's good enough for Einstein then it's good enough for me. One recurring concern is working through discomfort, pain or trauma. I often wish I could just somehow switch off, go on to automatic for the duration of the discomfort, then switch back on. If it were possible it would be a kind of avoidance strategy. Is it actually possible however? That's where the thought experiment comes in. The thought experiment revolves around philosophical zombies (p-zombies). This is the idea that people other than yourself do not have an experience of consciousness. Instead, people only have an outward manifestation; they behave and appear like someone who would have a conscious experience, but this is an illusion. This is the same idea as a non-player character (NPC), i.e. a computer game character that is totally driven by programming, it has no internal world of its own, it is an automaton. It's clear that if another person is going through pain or trauma, that you yourself are not experiencing that trauma directly. What you do experience is a second hand explanation of their trauma. You can them empathise with them or imagine what it would be like to have that trauma. Or you can simply be cold and detached from their trauma and live your life without concern for them. It's also clear that if other people are in fact p-zombies, then they are not experiencing trauma directly at all - because they are not conscious in any way. All there is, is an outward manifestation of their trauma - it's all behaviour. They say the words, cry and so on, but there's nothing going on inside. So the stage is set for the thought experiment. What if it were possible that you yourself are a p-zombie? Or at least temporarily became a p-zombie? For example you fell asleep on 1 March, became a p-zombie for a week and woke up 9 March? You managed to avoid consciously having to go through the trials and tribulations of the week, but outwardly behaved like a normal person. You can see that for dealing with trauma, it would be extremely beneficial. The whole crux of the thought experiment then rides on exactly what happens on 9 March. When your consciousness comes back online and you stop being p-zombie, what exactly is your experience? Here are a few scenarios: A. You wake up but have no memory of the week at all. You have to piece together what you did from second hand information. You have no residual trauma from the week. In fact you don't know if you even had any hardship at all. You "lost" a week of your life. B. You wake up and have full recollection of the week. You can remember exactly what you said and did and thought. You have residual feelings from the trauma and understand why you had the trauma. Which of the two scenarios makes more sense? In scenario A, other people would assume that you'd had some sort of amnesia which had wiped the trauma from your memory: the trauma had been too much to process. It seems far fetched, but could happen. In scenario B, you never consciously directly experienced the trauma, but everything else is consistent: you have memories, and so are not suffering from amnesia. In other words in scenario B, it's almost as if you had never been a p-zombie. Scenario B is strange indeed, because it's indistinguishable from normality. P-zombie or not, you can never go back in time and directly re-live a traumatic experience; all you have at all times is only a memory of the trauma happening. The outcome of the experiment is that we could easily have been p-zombies in the past and we've just woken up. The world just sprung into conscious existence with our memories fully formed. And, that we could easily wake up one day and all the bad things of the past will be forgotten. Time heals all wounds.

Normally I would go to bed by midnight. I've noticed this tendency within myself that I do nothing during the day, but the moment I realise I don't have much time left to do anything at all, I get sudden motivation. It's 23:46. This is a style of approaching things which I adopted in the mists of time. I think originally it was borne out of a need to do things my way or do only the things I wanted. The best way to signal to other people that you either A: won't be pushed around or B: that you're unhappy about being told what to do, is to DO IT SLOWLY and APATHETICALLY or if possible NOT AT ALL. The capitalisation is for effect. In time I internalised this rebellious attitude and started applying it to everything. The upshot is that I now sit on everything until the last minute. I never do things immediately. This strategy has some benefits even if on the whole it's annoying. The main one is thinking time or preparation. Giving myself the space to not just react, but to actually plan what I should do and say, allows me to be more effective if things go wrong. The thing with being an adult is simpy the fact that most things you have to do, are for yourself (especially if you don't have kids). It bodes well to be prepared. It should be blindingly obvious that there are a large number of downsides to not acting "in the moment". Firstly, it doesn't allow my intuition and improvisation skills to kick in (and to practise them). I'm big enough and ugly enough to be able to wing most situations - all the preparedness nonsense is time wasting and sometimes anxiety inducing - I'm doing myself a disservice. Secondly, it gives off the wrong vibe. It's common courtesy to at least acknowledge requests promptly or that you're "looking into" something that somebody else needs from you. It makes people reluctant to bother you or rely on you in future and creates disconnection or even worse to be labelled as "unreliable". Thirdly, most things have to be done anyway, there's no getting around them, putting them off takes up mental space with being concerned about when the thing will be done. Having too many unstarted things to keep track of, creates anxiety and fatigue. In short, my strategy of apathy is no longer working for me, I should stop being so childish and only employ it when there's a strategic benefit. 00:03 another month bites the dust. Over and out.

Nah it's just a useful thing to notice if you're doing your own presentations. And Leo is GOD so there's that.

@EddieEddie1995 agreed. Leo's definitely mastered the art form of his videos. I mean the guy talks for 2.5 hours straight and doesn't stumble, other than occasionally groping for a word or losing his thread, which he then picks back up very quickly. I wasn't implying that he's trying to project authority (although he is to an extent), but that sounding authoratitive makes you sound more interesting, relaxed and fluid.

Because it makes for better presentation style. To speak with more authority speak slower and lower. Also, if you're speaking off the cuff it gives you more time to think. I'm guessing Leo follows an outline for the video but he's not reading a teleprompter, he's winging it.

I'm learning the language of Lurve, but haven't found someone to practise with yet. Yeah ok, alright, erm... I have fluency in Spanish and some comprehension of French and Swedish. There's another language as well, which I forget now.

I don't, I'm just scared shitless of it. Obviously, I meant a persistent vegetative state, not a cabbage, but I guess with Salvia it could go either way.

Personally I'm scared shitless of horrific injury, having a stroke, being a vegetable and so on. Death is low on the list.

We're all mish mashes of things we've embodied over time. Who you truly are is the unique mish mash that is @Flowerfaeiry. Once you've taken on someone else's ideas or mannerisms they are yours not theirs, they are expressed through your unique makeup. There's no pure you waiting to get out.

It's always been more of a marketplace than a temple.

One of my shadows that has haunted me throughout life is embarrassment. Embarrassment, I know now, is closely related to shame, humiliation and fear. I'm not sure of the source of my embarrassment but I'm sure it's from a combination of factors built up over time. One manifestation of this being a reluctance to engage with people and having a certain aloofness as a consequence. I guess the base of it is an inherent shyness either biologically or socialised into me. Another manifestation of my anxiety over embarrassment is my secretive nature. I've recognised my anxiety for a long time and I have done plenty of work to overcome it. My main allies have been a strong curiosity, building a sense of self worth and developing an openness or vulnerability - actively working against all my tendencies. I think in order to try and untangle this embarrassment and finally free myself of it it's worth laying out some of the history of that embarrassment. My mum was naturally a very anxious and defensive person. Unknowingly, I took on that persona from her as a kid. She was profoundly deaf and was badly treated by her siblings growing up. Essentially from what she used to tell me she was ostracised or made out to be stupid. And until she met my dad in her mid twenties her level of communication was bad - she never learned sign language. That history in itself doesn't explain my embarrassment in life, but goes someway to explaining my natural anxiety and fear and suspicion of people. Of course I could have just as easily have identified with my dad and not been that way. But my dad was largely absent and not a strong role model for me growing up. My parents are from two different countries: Spain and England. Since my dad was the breadwinner we eventually gravitated back to England (I was born in Spain). This put my mum in a difficult position in that not only her communication was bad, she also wasn't able to speak English - she never did learn it. But it was the end of the seventies and the man of the house was expected to provide and the woman primarily looked after the kids and kept the house. My dad did anything complicated and worked, my mum took us to school and fed us. As a consequence of the arrangement I would often have to translate from my mum. Whilst this felt "normal" to me at the time, with hindsight I can see that this exacerbated my anxiety and feelings of embarrassment. I was being asked to translate things which I didn't really understand. There was a certain attitude in England that foreigners were dumb and a certain lack of tolerance for non-English speakers. I felt that intensely and was embarrassed by it. That intolerance for non-English speakers is still apparent in 2021, and is a low level form of racism. Of course being "foreign" myself, despite my completely Anglo appearance and fluency, there was casual racism in the school playground. It was minor, but constant. I believe that in itself eroded my self worth and there was a level of embarrassment I felt about being half Spanish. Saying that, I held on to my self worth by knowing and displaying my intellect, I always knew that I was the smartest kid there. But the consequence of all this was that I was always marked as a know-it-all foreigner, and an embarrassed outsider. One of my biggest fears as a young kid was adults and especially teachers. I started school in Spain in the mid seventies and there was a formality to interacting with teachers, very unlike now. I was very young and fearful of teachers. Many times I would need to use the toilet, and would be afraid to ask, and instead would wet myself. Obviously, I found this humiliating and extremely shameful, but my fear of asking was greater. Those incidents I think set up a strong emotional connection between asking people for things and embarrassment. For years afterwards I would wet the bed as a young kid. It was only after my dad took me to a clinic did the bed wetting stop. My mum would always make a drama out of my bed wetting which reinforced the embarrassment. But in the end it stopped. The bullying continued into secondary school, but was less racially motivated, and more because kids don't take well to loners. I had one or two friends I hung around with, but was never really part of any group, so I was easy pickings. I did eventually learn to stand up to myself and toughen myself up, but it ground down my self esteem. Luckily, it was mostly older, bigger kids, and I knew they had to leave school eventually. My last two years at secondary school were easier, I got a girlfriend and life improved. But by this point a lot of my embarrassment and fear of people had taken root and become part of my identity. Around this time, my parents split and I was left as my mum's primary carer. A deaf woman in a country whose language she didn't speak. That time was tough and dealing with adult responsibilities as a teenager was unpleasant. Again, I felt a constant sense of embarrassment when having to deal with authorities and re-explaining the situation every time. For the most part I'd always had other people to lean on after my time at school, to do all the social stuff. I was very sociable at university, but I was still the poor kid amongst middle class friends, I always felt that inside and felt some shame around it. Two close friends lent me a lot of money to keep me going, and as grateful as I was, it marked me out as different. Even after university, I had a long term girlfriend who would set up all the social stuff, I was simply incapable I had that much fear. I finally started to overcome my entrenched embarrassment when I split up with her and was on my own for the first time in my life. I then had to fend for myself socially and to make my own way. That leads me to now. I'm a super capable person and very proud of my achievements, and my social abilities are very good. Yet there is this young embarrassed person still there having to take on adult responsibilities and sometimes just it's too much. Very very recently I've started to realise that the fear and potentially embarrassment that stops me from doing things and talking to some people, is just an emotion - it isn't anything to do with rationality. There are two ways out: one is to eliminate the emotion - because it's not helping me; the other is to push through regardless and have faith that I'm able to handle any situation with confidence. Lastly, whether I choose not to act out of embarrassment or fear, or to take action, it makes no difference, the world still revolves.

Is non-duality really about counting? The duality in non-duality really is mislabelled. It should read something like non-multiplicity. However, the underlying notion is based in arithmetic quantities. The non part of non-duality is also mislabelled. Again the ambiguity is caused by mathematics and more specifically sets. If you have a defined set of items, say different breeds of cats, then the "non" signifier is useful. You could have a non-Siamese and understand that you talking about all breeds of cats except Siamese. It works because the set of breeds of cats is finite in size. But when talking about unbounded (infinite) sets, then non becomes non-sensical. What is non-3? Is it 2 or all positive numbers except 3. Or all positive and negative numbers - except 3. Or all complex numbers except 3+0i? Or what. You see that taking the inverse of a finite item in an infinite set is nonsense. So what does non-duality actually mean, if anything? More strictly what does non-multiplicity mean? If we take multiplicity to mean infinity, then what is the non of that? Is it zero, one? Is it a number at all? What the hell do numbers have to do with transcending everyday reality? Nothing in my opinion. Numbers are simply a mental construct, whether that's zero, one or infinity. And mental constructs are something we are trying to point away from in spirituality. The word non-duality is leading us down the wrong path. Instead there should be a recognition that there is an underlying sameness to all of experience. "Sameness" seems dull and drab, but it's a much better descriptor of where we want to get to. It signifies the strange fact that no matter what seems to happen in our conscious awareness there is this sameness that permeates it at all times. For example, we recognise vision by the sheer fact that it shares a commonality in itself. Red may be different from green, but they share a kind of sameness called colour. And, we can climb this ladder of sameness until we reach a summit where the whole of experience shares a commonality. But there is a paradox to sameness, in that it's defined in terms of itself. We can't use the word colour without invoking the idea of reds and greens. In other words, the differences are involved in the sameness and vice-versa. To have a difference you need to compare to members of the same class. Duality is couched in sameness (or unity) and unity is composed of duality. And that is the key insight or paradigm. We don't care about sameness or difference, unity and duality. We care to recognise that we can't have one without the other. The deep truth is that we are able to recognise non-duality precisely because of duality; and that we're just playing mind games with numbers and ourselves.

@InterruptReQuest it seems like you could figure out two things. First, each situation you're in is unique. To fail at something you must know what the desired outcome is for that particular situation. Most of the time, you're a winner, because a lot of goals are easy to achieve or familiar to you. I'm sure you're not fearful of winning? Occasionally you will fail. Maybe because you didn't put enough planning or effort in, or you didn't have the skills or knowledge, or you took on too much. Or just blind bad luck. Maybe even other people you were relying on didn't do their bit. Second, who is judging your failure at something? Either it comes from yourself or from other people. If it comes from yourself, then your fear of failure is a fear of your own judgement - you can work on this then. If it comes from someone else, then you should ask yourself: "Why do I care about this person's judgement?". Also, you should look at the goals you're trying to achieve, and ask if you're doing it for yourself or just to please others - different people have different motivations. When you're trying to achieve anything, it's always an opportunity to learn something new. Whether you fail or win, you will still learning something. And you will apply that new learning to other things in your life; nothing is ever wasted. There is something to be said for taking on goals that motivate you and are aligned with your values. That will overcome any fear you have.

Is it precognition or law of attraction? Sometimes we have glimpses of the future. We get clear sensations that something is going to happen. And then it happens. We saw the future. Other times we just wished something would happen, and then one day it happens. We affected the future with our thoughts. What if both were true at the same time? That there is a kind of loop where the future affects the present and the present affects the future? How could this be, isn't there a paradox here? Questions questions. Maybe our thoughts and will is directed precisely so that the future occurs. Occasionally that future leaks into the present moment, it's smeared over time and space. Unlike the disconnected still frame of a film, the present moment is an alive process. The present moment has tendrils of possibility growing into the future. We are not disconnected observers of the present moment, we are the present moment, the present moment is us. When a feeling or thought arises about a new potential future, we both affect and are guided by the tendrils feeling their way forward. We both have free will and not. The future is both fixed and totally unknowable.

@Persipnei what would happen if you just gave up trying to fix your autism?

You can't knock a good ritual. There's a reason it's so prevalent especially in the occult. My opinion is that it bypasses the thinking mind and gets you into the right "state" or "alignment" to make things happen more easily. If you're sitting there at your laptop wishing that you could attract a million of your currency into your life, then you're doing it wrong. Inject a bit of ritual into it for improved performance.

If you look in the mirror at yourself who do you see? Who is doing the looking? Is it really you (subject) looking at the mirror (object), or is it really the mirror looking at you? When you look at your feet, is that you (subject) or just flesh and bones (object)? Are you your body? When you (subject) notice yourself having bad thoughts (object), are the thoughts you or not? Are you (subject) separate from yourself (object)?

What makes Beethoven's music great? It's his great dynamic range in volume, he can be quiet and sweet and loud and obnoxious. And so it is with great people. Are you one dimensional? Do you know how to be quiet, pensive, listening, receptive? Do you know how to be brash, abrasive, loud, in your face? Does it feel comfortable to be stupid and unintelligent and a joker? Could you be an intellectual praying mantis, ready to cut the head off people less intelligent than you? Could you change your wardrobe and hairstyle tomorrow? Can you be non-judgemental and diplomatic? What about a rude dickhead? What about a flexible political attitude? A person with criminal tendencies? Or a pragmatic rule follower? No. We are fucking multidimensional entities. There, I swore, so there. I hope you weren't offended?

To get the bottom of it you have to work out what you think exists actually means. To me if a person is standing in front of me, then they exist. But if someone tells me about a person I've never met, they may or may not exist - maybe I'm being gaslighted. The only way to verify they exist is to meet them in person. If a person dies do they still exist? So if by exist you mean having a direct experience of them (or it), then what happens when the person goes out of your direct experience? Could you call that a different type of existence? It's like existence has a sliding scale of 100% exists to 0% no chance. Anything less than 100% is just inference and thought, and outside of direct experience. But not even direct experience is 100% certain. You only have to look at optical illusions to see things that don't exist. And there are many every day situations where you could misjudge things and believe something exists when it doesn't. In a way other people are "optical illusions" because you are inferring things about them that you are not directly aware of - such as if they have consciousness.

@ajs dealing with the unknown is definitely a life skill.

Successful couples avoid the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse: It's a bit ELI5 but hey ho.

It's easy to confuse drama for emotion. Drama is just a story people get lost in and it's possible to detach from it and reduce suffering. Emotion arises from nowhere and makes you pay attention and pushes you in a certain direction, that is its purpose. Drama can be emotional, but emotion is not drama.

The only decision you are really making is: should we go? But it looks like you don't have enough information to work out if moving is a good choice. Here's a few ideas to add to @mandyjw's: Forget about it, drop the idea, stay put Flip a coin: stay or go, heads or tails Ask your children, ask your wife what they think and want, so you have more information Choose a date to move on the calendar, but make it in one or two years' time Go live for a fixed time period in your home country by yourself and see if it's a good idea first - maybe try and find good work there Either you or your wife secures a good job in your home country first and then move Is there an option for working remotely in your existing job from your home country? Use your intuition, wait until the answer comes to you, don't force it Use your intuition, sometimes the scary choice is the right one These may or may not be useful to you. But you always have other options than can remove stress.

Is wisdom a shared experience or a personal one only? If it's shared then the wisdom is only as good as the person receiving it. Consuming reinder blood is not wisdom for a towny like me. Yep, I said it, wisdom is relative.

That our society constantly sits on a knife edge. It makes me grateful to have what we have already. But Corona has made it obvious that society could change very quickly for the better if the will is there. We just need the right people and the right focus.