LastThursday

I'm going to go meta. "Who am I?" is the perennial question isn't it? The main thrust of your OP is really to do with identity more than anything else. The confusion with identity is that it's not some monolithic abstract entity. Instead, it is the sum of all those parts that jostle with each other for attention. It is all your thoughts, behaviours, emotions and bodily sensations, right now. What a therapist enables is no different to what a doctor does in a hospital, and that is to prepare the environment well enough that the body heals itself. It can be done more or less well, a doctor that doesn't wash their hands before cutting you open is going to make things worse. But on balance, having a therapist is better than not having a therapist, you just have to find a respectable one. It is not impossible to heal yourself. The remarkable thing is that it's possible to observe the different parts of your identity at all. That observer does exactly the same thing a therapist does. A therapist works because they are detached from the melange of your identity and are able to re-align those parts that are not working together, mostly through observation and careful questioning. You've shown above that you are well able to "step outside yourself" and observe what is going on. Isn't that strange? You have all this stuff going on, and yet some part of you is able to detach itself from it. Aside from the mental and narrative aspect of identity, you have bodily reactions. To a large degree the body is an automaton that is programmed through repetition and extreme circumstances. Given a trigger in the environment or through thought it will consistently react in the same way. All trauma has already happened and no longer exists, yet the body is "programmed" by that trauma and continues it indefinitely. It does this as a protective survival mechanism. This is often the bit talking therapy doesn't get at. Sometimes no amount of talking can change the body's programming. But, that programming is not permanent, it can be changed (e.g. CBT). Often there is a lot of mental elaboration around what the body is doing instinctively to protect you from harm, which doesn't address how it can be reprogrammed.

@trenton this sounds like a mentally and emotionally complex situation you have going on. I don't have direct any answers, just observations on what you wrote. The consequences of sex for men and women are assymetrical. Women are the ones who get pregnant and carry to term, and very often are the primary caregivers of the child. Men can and do walk away without much comeback from society. That's a heavy burden for women, so they have to be picky and make sure first before engaging. Basically, men and women have different sexual strategies. I would question this assumption. For a man, disinterest after climax, sure, euphoria after climax, sure. Repulsion and shame don't ring true. Indeed it's harder to understand feelings both your own and others'. Essentially, feelings can't be reasoned out, most reasoning that normies have about feelings is post-hoc elaboration. But there is a tacit understanding of what feelings are signalling, and I would say this is harder for someone with autism to get to grips with: you have the feelings but don't know what to do with them. I'd say this is a more modern worry. I would say that men naturally express vulnerability a lot less than women, and wouldn't be expected in all relationships. But expressing vulnerability is really just talking about yourself and what's going on in your head, which judging from your post you're more than capable of doing. It's a shame @Emerald isn't around a the mo, she would know what to say about shame. Otherwise therapy is one way to go, in order to heal your traumas and negative associations. But in short: There is a wide spectrum of standards. The joy of that is that there is someone for everyone. The trap a lot of people fall into is worrying about how they will be judged, instead of simply expressing who they are. More outwards, less inwards.

@Joseph Maynor I saw Hiromi Uehara play live at a festival a few years ago, to a full tent. She's unbelievable and great energy. I really like stride piano too, reminds of black and white films I watched as a kid:

So simple, yet this piece of music always gives me the shivers. It's like Bach was channeling god.

@shahar uriel I know it's early stages but you should do it anyway. AI didn't learn from nothing, it learned from human coders. In fact human coders invented the AI in the first place. For some high level insight into how AI is affecting the industry then this is enlightening:

Threesome? Honestly, joking aside, who cares what we think. Go with your instinct. When I'm unsure about things, I just sit in a quiet place for as long as it takes to be still, and then ask myself the question "what do you want?", and then just let the answer come.

I can sort of see this. I get sick with cold or whatever less than once a year. 15 years is a bit of a stretch though. And of course you might be infected but show no or very minor symptoms. And people have various tolerances for what the deem being sick.

Put it this way, I'm voluntarily not working at the moment, and I'm not concerned about money.

You're right, the detail can be complex, but trust me, running a business you've got to know what's going in and going out, and how much it will cost to borrow money. Once you have the basics down, everything else becomes a lot easier.

From a systems point of view capitalism wasn't invented from scratch, but was an evolution of what went before. Inventing a new stable system from scratch, like Communism, is nearly impossible. Communism collapsed because it isn't workable in practice in the long run, even China has partially embraced capitalism. Capitalism will eat itself eventually, and it will evolve into something else, the best we can do is nudge it in the right direction.

Money is fundamentally simple you don't need a book. The rules are: have as much as possible coming in, have as little as possible going out, and there's no such thing as free money. Everything else builds on that foundation.

Consciousness is way trippy. An eye can't look at itself. But consciousness can look at itself, in fact it's its primary attribute. That being so, what does consciousness "see" so to speak? I think if there was no meaning making at all, then consciousness wouldn't happen at all. What consciousness sees is then all meaning and nothing else. If there was no meaning, you wouldn't go insane, you'd disappear into a void. Raising consciousness is then making ever finer and more intricate meaning from itself, this happens naturally as it goes about its business. There are levels of meaning, when you're sleeping a night dream has less meaning. You wake up and realise the dream was nonsensical.

Immortality, it's not just for Christmas (other religions welcome).

I'm saying nothing.

In my experience if you're interested then most women will realise your interest. If you persist enough they will generally let you know if they have a partner, often in a passing comment. In other words, there's nothing wrong with expressing your true intentions, how else will you progress things?

@Carl-Richard is this then an example of an organic change, one that happens of its own accord? Or is it moreso that there is an underlying potential change that eventually gets picked up on? I ask because this seems borderline between "stuff that just happens" and "stuff I want to happen".

Super briefly: Environment Social matrix Mental health / therapy Self-awareness Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Averitasia - a condition where someone is unable to experience Truth. Actualisationable (say it three times fast) - something or someone that can be made to actualise, eventually. Spirito-arguecringement - a one-sided hostile conversation about spirtuality that is about nothing in particular. Deusmaxxing - trying your best to look like a god. This is too much fun: Double-salad - an intellectual sounding paragraph that makes sense the first time you read it, but not the second. One more: Egomortgage - the thing you keep paying for until your ego dies.

It does. But saying it's one possibility out many doesn't explain it. Furthermore it doesn't explain the quality of this particular experience. It's not as if it's just a blank field of X, it's a chaotic, structured, "full" experience.

I could be provocative and say that god is just a construction of the mind or just a word. But I'm not going to say that. In the spirit of the question, god is the thing you fall back on when you run out of explanation. For example I look around me and there's all this stuff happening, I can come up with an explanation as to why all this stuff is happening, but I can't come up with an explanation of why this in particular. There seems to be complete arbitrariness about what I'm experiencing, I could have been any one of 8 billion people at any moment in history, indeed even an animal. So I invoke god. Once you invoke god, then you have to ask what is god's nature? And the only satisfactory answer (to me) is that it is exactly what I'm experiencing - the two are the same. So it's the other way round, me and my mind are a construction of god.

I walked in the footsteps of your shadows, never looking up, afraid of the light. When you stopped, I looked away, choking with tears. However hard I listened, I could never hear your voice, just the birds in the sky. Do you see me as I see you? How is it that you're in my heart and thoughts, even though I'm cleansed, pure? Some time I will walk away and see the light, bright and blinking, I think I hope. Then there will be no shadows, and all will be a beautiful cacophony, all will be love and laughter.

I think it'll be good to get out things that arise and put them down in written form. I have so many lost thoughts and ideas, and some of them were very good.

@Someone here you are of course, right.

@Franz_ with thinking the only fundamental limit is time and patience, thinking is a slow process, thinking about new things is hard. Thinking has a kind of ratchet effect whereby you commit new knowledge to long-term memory and thinking becomes easier because of that. Take someone like a mathematician, all they do is think, but they can learn new abstractions without limit. Mathematics is bigger than any one person can take on in a lifetime. With physical bodily stuff, the limits are absolute physical limits like strength, speed, endurance and so on. I think for those sorts of things you will hit your own limits if you push things far enough, and you'll have a very good idea of what those are. But still, you don't know what you don't know. If you were to try and run a marathon and you've never run before then you might mistakenly think that you've reached a limit of your abilities. Clearly if you keep practising then you'll realise you were wrong. But even with physical stuff it's not as if it's just physical limits, you also have a brain controlling things. I would say there's no end of nuance in how you use your body. For example sprinters train with a coach because there's a lot to master about exactly how you should be running, outside of pure speed and stamina. So you can reach a biological limit of mastery, but still improve on technical ability. To re-iterate the point I made before, nearly always a domain is not strictly defined, it's fuzzy around the edges and you're free to explore and improve around those edges.

Most people are hung up on survival and that often means doing things in their own self interest, often to the detriment of others. The bottom line is that if your interests don't align with others then you will chose yourself over them, otherwise you don't survive. The thing is, most of the time your survial interests do align with others' because we're all just human and have the same needs. You have your family, community, country. But culturally we're being indoctrinated into individualism, where everything that must be done and are responsible for is ultimately pinned on you as an individual. Fundamentally this idealogy goes against our collective instincts as humans, because in reality we can't survive without other people, both on a social level, and on a material level: we feel lonely.