PepperBlossoms

Spectrum of Sensitivity Reactions 1 - property damage, hitting, injuring 2 - threatening, bully, harass, intimidate, demean 3 - cry, anger, complain, walk away, refuse to cooperate, separate, block 4 - feel nothing, numb, mute, detached 5 - agree for sake of moving along 6 - try to understand/appreciate 7 - work with/together Note that different situations may call for different responses and one may also have their options to choose from based on skill/experience.

A range of idea exploration. 1 - Keeps worldview the same; only familiar with and studies current view 2 - Aware of other view's existences but does not know much about them; not interested in exploring other views 3 - Knows about other views and disagrees, censors, rejects, and blocks them; others are stupid, wrong, a waste of time; minimal time spent studying other views; feels threatened by other views; tries to convert others to one's own view 4 - Starts to get more curious about other views and purposefully studies opposing/disagreeing views; lots of time studying views; enjoys and appreciates different perspectives 5 - Self's views change constantly with new conversations, books, whatever; self can identify holes in one's current views 6 - Self wants to stop picking and identifying so strongly with a side; doesn't feel the need to convert anyone to any one view; can see the validity and holes in many views at once This is not necessarily fully accurate but meh.

Giving Advice Spectrums: 1 - Give advise without asking; inconsiderate of feelings; mean/rude; does not listen to feedback of receiver; keeps on speaking even if receiver is having struggle with it 2 - Gives advice in rude way and then apologizes for method used 3 - Considerate of feelings; trying to be helpful/caring/pragmatic/insightful; listens and works together 4 - Adapts/modifies advice based on feedback from receiver 5 - So considerate of feelings that advice is never given and everything the other person says is agreed on I would say that #3 & #4 is probably optimal but sometimes one will have to use one of the other methods.

Okay so I am really bad at listening so I decided to make this graph for fun. It is not perfect. 1 - Not even noticing that I am listening; no self awareness; mind is blank; where am I? 2 - Aware that I am not listening; focusing on the other person's face, sound of voice, hand gestures, the environment, some other idea; daydreaming; distracted/elsewhere; not trying; not admitting that I am not listening 3 - Getting some words, missing some words; trying to listen; asking the speaker to repeat oneself; having to repeat what the speaker said to try to process it; admitting to the speaker that I am struggling; May not have enough experience with those words/thoughts 4 - Hearing all the words but not really understanding the message; having to ask what words mean; confused about the message but is still trying 5 - Hearing the words but my interpretation is different from the speaker's; trying to understand; interested; may be some misunderstanding 6 - Fully listening and understanding; able to focus on the message and think about it and respond back and have back and forth conversation; engaged, interested, some experience with those words/ideas before

First, I am not sure if there even is a root cause. If one keeps on "peeling the onion", is there even a final place to peel to that says - ah ha! That is it! You found the root cause! But, we may see that we keep on choosing to feel/be hurt over and over again and think - no there has to be something, otherwise why am I doing it? Here are some theories but I don't know your situation but am just guessing they pertain to mine: -A parent could have been very loud, aggressive, and angry when we did things that he/she was not satisfied with and as a way to protect ourselves, an armor, a survival mechanism - we chose to be upset and may have put ourselves in a ball in a corner- the crying/sadness gave us something to focus on instead of his/her words, loudness, disapproval. We could basically start to tune out everything they said by focusing on our own sadness. It allowed us to retreat and escape from them. They could have kept on going at it but we may have stopped listening and started focusing on sadness but also feeling unworthy. Maybe you were unconsciously trying to make yourself so small to make yourself look hopeless so that the parent would lower their expectations of you and stop being so hard on you and the times you often get upset tend to correlate to the times the parent was very loud, aggressive, and critical of you. You would get upset to try to get them to go away out of self love of protecting yourself from more hurt. -Being upset allows us an excuse to not have to deal with the situation. We could say - "oh I am so upset please go away" and not face it/acknowledge it. It allows us to shrug stuff off and sometimes get away with not taking responsibility for things. -We may have found that we can get our way when we are upset. People may do things to appease us like give us compliments, give us tasty treats, do nice things for us, give us more privileges, etc. all because we were upset. We may find we get rewarded for being upset. Maybe we saw it work for others and then tried it and it worked some for us too. (Heck a military can go invade/bomb another country and find it works to a degree and continue to do it....) -We may get to claim that we are the victim and are in the morally just/correct/right category for being the upset one. "if you upset me, you must be the bad one." However, these methods only go so far and at some point, you may find that you want to be stronger, more adaptive, more functional, and better at working with others and find that cowering all the time is not attractive. You may find that your dissociation every time there is a conflict only makes your peer more upset at you and that you are missing so much of what they are saying because you aren't listening and don't know how to respond. You may find that you want to be better able at addressing things and that not trying to work things out makes it harder for everyone, not just you. You may find that you liked the attention and love for being pitied but also that you prefer being strong rather than weak and that you can get attention and love for being strong and don't have to get it for being weak. You may find that there is possibly a mixture of truth and delusion in every perspective and that stuff we find upsetting could be trying to help us, could be upset itself and is just letting it out at us, could be anything. We may find that being upset all the time isn't going to help us survive in the long run and that if we want to do what we want to do, we have to chose to be strong, try to be honest with ourselves and others, try to work together, take responsibility, and enjoy the ride. -Probably the biggest one: We did not have the skills/knowledge for how to deal with things, how to communicate, how to handle feedback and tough information, identifying delusions, how to handle emotions, self awareness, and also did not have enough broad experience and examples to get a better picture of realistic expectations.

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The dentist is trying to change your teeth. The doctor your health. The physical therapist your pain and movement. The interior designer your house. The plumber your toilet. The pesticides your bug situation. The advertisements your focus and wants. The religion your belief system. The politicians your law. The movie/book/drugs/music your interpretation of reality. The news may try to change your opinions/focus/concerns. Change is good/bad/helpful/hurtful/different/new/old/whatever. It is like stuff is offering the service of changing you for its own survival or it is intentionally changing you for its own survival. It is a weird notion of how we have to change to survive (where we change enough to keep something the same/going).

@catcat69123 Thanks!

Some tips I have thought of: -Notice the delusions the thoughts have for both others criticizing you and the ones you come up with to criticize yourself and situations -See listening to and believing the thoughts as similar to getting entranced by watching tv and forgetting you are watching tv -Notice that we will never have all the information and the thoughts are never going to have the full story/picture -Transform your critic messages that are very simple and negative into something that can be pragmatic, realistic, and allow for growth/change -Study black/white, all or nothing thinking and look at how you can add more nuance to each concept -Notice when you have caught yourself feeling emotional about something but yet you are also having to trick yourself because the story you are trying to tell yourself isn't representative of what happened and you can see that but are having a hard time dropping the emotion/act -Write down all of the ways you have gotten upset and all the ways you have criticized yourself/others/situations and study that -Ask yourself what you think your inner critic is trying to accomplish -Notice thoughts that are saying something is negative when it possibly is okay just the way it is -Look at your environment that you grew up in to see what could have developed your inner critic and may be feeding it - parents, news/social media, religion, relationships, cultural norms, school, thoughts - and stay away, lessen the contact with, or don't shame yourself over it -Distance yourself from those that criticize you in unpragmatic delusional ways and stop trying to criticize/change others/everything -Meditate -Get your needs taken care of for yourself and build up a sense of self worth so that you do not need to rely on other unpragmatic delusional critics for your survival and can stand up for yourself instead of cowering and agreeing with and doing everything that they say and not feeling like you should feel shameful/hopeless/pitiful -Look for reasons to be thankful, look for the beauty in things, look for what you enjoy/are curious about -Healthy diet, sleep, exercise, stretching -Notice that it can be hard to tell if you are delusional or the other person criticizing you is delusional but you can start to notice delusional patterns in both yourself and others

I have started wondering this myself and saw Leo was wondering the same - There can be a desire to not open it for others so to not ruin their way of being, their ability to keep on doing their job, the way society runs, etc. We enjoy lots of things about society and one part of us feels that we don't want to tell others because we like the added info advantage, we like to reap the benefits of the work that they do even though we don't want to do it, we enjoy getting to see different perspectives and don't want to make everyone like us, etc. However, one could also have the perspective - no I don't want to keep these insights a secret. I see how society is and I am open to evolving it. I want to see what will happen when the insights are spread more as I am curious and what's the point of life anyway. Will it be more like - lots of people doing drugs and jobless living on the streets? How would industry change? Would we go back to living in the woods? Will survival be way worse? Will anything really even change? Example - I had posted a question on reddit of my past job sector asking if people had any concerns with the impacts of their work and the responses that I got were that they had no idea what concerns I was talking about - - they have not opened pandora's box nor know it exists. I have mentioned some of the items on pandora's box on that reddit forum before and had been told to "shut the fuck up" and just deleted the thread - the people in the industry did not want to consider new perspectives about the industry that were not within the current mainstream narrative. The way our society works, everyone has to earn A WHOLE LOT of money - - if everyone is opening pandora's box, people may quit doing the jobs that keep society going. But - maybe we want a largely transformed society. Maybe nothing will change. For instance, now that I have opened pandora's box, I don't know if I can ever do my job again. I did it for almost 6 years, am professionally licensed in it, have my degree in it - - now it is like, well how am I going to make money now as eventually my funds will dry up because of the lovely inflation we have as well as just knowing that even without inflation, it won't be enough to last an entire life. I can see that more will have that question. But again, all of the above are thoughts and thoughts are conjecture so meh. How did you keep on doing your job after you opened up pandora's box? Maybe since everything was imaginary, it didn't really matter so you just kept doing it anyway? Maybe I am actually just not "awoken" enough.. ha.

Having thoughts/insights/epiphanies (CONJECTURES) about something when I previously didn't but I guess in this case - it is more complicated conjectures. Instead of just learning say more math or how to do the math problem, you learn about the impact's of solving the math problem and then dealing with - am I okay with this and can I live with this and how do I feel about this. Like - do I feel bad about solving this math problem and is it fair for me to get a paycheck to keep on solving this math problem when xyz is going to happen? Or I guess also, like - oh I am seeing how more pieces seem to be fitting together and morality, shoulds, "norms" start getting poked at. I guess I found it fun to come up with more ways to see something when I previously didn't see it. Like something may have already been there but I had just not noticed it before - or I am imagining that it was previously there but heck - maybe it wasn't there till I noticed it... that sounds so weird to say and feels delusional (and I go with the human norm of saying yes it was there)- but then goes to the whole - you only know what is there based on what you see and if you see nothing, for you, nothing is there. Cool graphic!! Yeah I decided that just sticking with whatever makes you happy is kinda all you can do as well and that no matter what one does, there is going to be a negative consequence for someone/something and that everyone is going to have to do "evil" stuff to survive based on how life works. You have a point - I talked with my coworkers about some of the "pandora's box" items and it didn't seem to phase any of them the way it did me where I quit my job over it. I am still back and forth on how to process/think about the whole thing because it was a really weird, hypocritic thing since I rely and utilize on so much of the stuff that my job made but yet it has such drastic consequences for the non-humans. What is the "but leo but leo but leo" part supposed to represent? The part where you want to be morally in the right and informationally in the knowledgeable but yet hasn't realized that that is impossible?

agreed - with regards to fractal when I put pessimism in the black and white category - even that could have fractals within it - lots of substance and different types and degrees of pessimism and meanings for it and even pessimism itself could be considered its own spectrum and glory of gray yeah just a bunch of conjectures and thoughts about thoughts and like snowyowl said - basically pigeon-holing the multidimensional infinity

Okay so there is black and white thinking, all or nothing, 0 or 100; there is also gray, spectrum, multi-perspectival, relative, flexible, adaptive, thorough thinking. Here are some examples I have thought of and if anyone else comes up with some, please add: Black and white: either optimist or pessimist; Gray: variation of realist, optimist, and pessimist on various topics and is subject to change based on new inputs Black and white: religion is bad; religion is good; Gray: religion has good, bad, confusing, unknown, changing, adapting, stuck, insightful, suppressive stuff Black and white: I am a failure; I am a success; Gray: I am still working on getting better at this and I feel proud of that and I should have done this thing differently Black and white: You are my idol; you are a bully; Gray: Sometimes you hurt my feelings, sometimes we laugh, sometimes we get bored

I guess also - as an actor - you are kinda keeping the illusion going and reinforcing it, normalizing the illusion as a school teacher - you are teaching your students to think in ways to keep the illusion going; also reinforcing and normalizing the illusion as a counselor - you are dealing with the person's life issues and I guess that will depend on whether you are specifically doing it for spiritual awakening assistance or more for mental health and whether you want to open them up to radically seeing the world different or stick to the status quo method would be interesting to hear - teachers and counselors of the forum - whether you keep the illusion going with your clients or are actively trying to break it

How do you stay friends with them or talk to them? Do you suppress yourself or are you unrestricted and say, fuck it? I feel like, yes it would be cool to learn more about why they are religious and the thought process - but other than that - how does one explore various concepts with them when a religious person is basically not supposed to do that?!??? The breath of topics just seems to be not allowed because I will go to an area that they "do not want to talk about". No I can't talk about this or this or this because it is all counter-culture and the religion doesn't want rebels, they want conformists, and so they don't want to rebel either necessarily... MEH I feel like I will just piss them off even if I am just talking out loud. When a religious person says they like me, I am like - WHYYYY - how am I supposed to be myself around you? I feel so restricted. I don't want to fight, I just want to explore - but they don't want to explore. Yeah sure, there are the "safe" topics like the weather but, that can get boring after awhile.

A relative shared this with me and I decided to share it with you: https://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/

@Adamq8 haha yeah woah! I've got lots of reading to do! Thanks.

For those of you like me who have been called a first grader/kindergartener/seventh grader, apparently there is a term for it! http://www.michaelsamsel.com/Content/Individuals/adult_child_syndrome.html This is more useful than being called the derogatory term (you act like a child) which doesn't really help one know what exactly the person means and what one should consider exploring. Cuz like - well, come on - every child acts different so how are we to know what child traits you are referring to? Also, kids laugh, adults laugh, kids smile, adults smile - - so meh looking at the "Adult Child Syndrome" symptoms and causes may be more pragmatic. (Can't believe I never found this syndrome before... but I guess I never looked for it either)

@hyruga Ego is the Enemy sounds cool and I have Power of Now but haven't read it. Thanks. I think I was just mad/upset and started using my ongoing conflict with Christianity as a punching bag instead of just trying to find peace. I will have to look at those. @Brandon Nankivell Yeah true. I am not in a situation where I have to engage with that person. I guess I like the opportunity to learn new things when talking to people with different views; but I am also stepping into the fire doing that and sometimes I can't handle it. I have been trying to get better at not getting upset when someone criticizes me or when they have a different view and it has been a work in progress of wanting to be able to do it but also I can get angry/hurt/reactive. I have also realized that there are many things and ways to learn and that if it is too unstable with one method, that there are other methods. @Adamq8 What is the best way to read these Church fathers? I can see your perspective that there could be some beauty/insights/wisdom in it. I guess I can get upset over how suppressive my church seemed but it would be nice to find some beauty in it as that could ease the tension. @Twentyfirst ha wow interesting way to put it. I guess also there will be variation in what the mafia style is like and how open to interpretation it is versus how much it is "by the book" or "this suggested way only".

Can someone please explain non linear time? (or non linear experience) Experience seems to be one thing leads to another leads to another (or morphs to another) (linear) ; but then, I want the antithesis of that.... I can see that, we can't experience going backwards because we won't have the memory of what previously happened since going backwards would take away the memory so we won't remember that the future already happened and we are reversing... does that have anything to do with it? Is it possible then that we could be going forward and backward in experience at the same time but since going backwards takes away memories and going forwards adds new ones, we only get the forward experience? Maybe its just bs and there is no such thing as backward??? I guess the idea of backward and foreward is kinda irrelevant but yet we tell ourselves that we have a past (or imagine so)

Beautiful response. I can see that we may have to put great effort to stop believing the thoughts such as with meditation, as thoughts are like conjecture and not the full picture, the Enlightened One. Time/past/death are thoughts, ideas. But if we have no thoughts, it is like there is nothing to experience other than nothingness so I can see that it can be nice to experience both listening and not listening to thoughts. So basically any structure of reality that we come up with is a thought and is not necessarily it, including time, start, end. I am no expert but I decided to give some suggestions too. You could look at it as there is only one universal self and that within that universal self, you could look at it that there are a bunch of selves and you, as a human, are just one of them You are the one that does those things. You could create some thoughts to create your own identity (and sense of self) as identity is basically made and exists by thoughts. We don't really know if we exist or not but we can't prove it one way or the other and it kinda doesn't matter - even if this universe is imaginary, we imagine and feel like we are here. The feeling better refers to you. You have power and control. Use your hand and pick something up or wave your hand back and forth - you can do that. You can tell yourself that you will shut one eye and you can get your eye to shut. You were able to get on the computer and type a message using sentences. You choose to feel better and meditate. There is you to meditate. We have thoughts that think about thoughts and use that to come up with more thoughts and we listen to it and it is like watching tv where we forget we are watching tv and we start believing what we are seeing and start crying when the actor is crying or when our thoughts are sad. We start believing every thought we have as that is the main show on and we are giving it our attention. We think a sad thought and then we decide to cry and then our crying reinforces the idea we should be sad and maybe we stop believing and then stop crying. We don't have to believe the thoughts. We can change our thoughts/activities if we want to do that and if we think that that is to cure something or feel better. If it is too confusing, you could have the duality of entire Self and individual selves in various bodies. Ask why you are feeling fear - what about trying to seek calmness and accept things for how they are as they are and try to make peace. Maybe try to quiet the thoughts and peace will arise. Maybe try other ways to think about separate self. Sometimes we can't really solve something and we just have to be okay with it. We have power and also don't have power. Ah well I hope things get better for you!

If there was no beginning and everything always existed, then how does that work? So if everything always existed, then has past/present/future always existed or is it just that the substance that makes up everything has always existed and keeps on changing? But how does something exist forever? It is so hard to imagine forever and infinity.

I guess either way - we are having to imagine that another space-time dimension exists or imagine that past-future exists.

@Carl-Richard If we assume that years/dates are a real thing, then how can say Jan 3, 1991 3:00 pm Eastern Time exist at the same moment as Dec 21, 3046, 12:00 am, Eastern Time? How does that work? Is that basically 4D where we only see the present moment in 3D and if you add another dimension, it can extend in every direction and hence you could draw an imaginary straight line from Jan 3, 1991 3:00 pm Eastern Time to Dec 21, 3046, 12:00 am, Eastern Time but also draw another straight line from May 500 2:00 am Eastern Time to May 50,000,000 2:00 am Eastern Time and it could be that the two lines have different events happening but yet both are possible and may or have happened and you could have an infinite amount of "lines" drawn like this with the center of the lines being the NOW moment that we are currently experiencing??? I guess I am just trying to also tie this to the idea that I have heard some people say where you could have every possible thing happening and each second has a divergent of every possibility as a reality. If the lines are already drawn, then is there the idea of fate or are we actually choosing what happens (free will) or maybe there is an infinite amount of fates already available to choose from and we pick one (free will).... This video which I found after I wrote this says something similar. I guess there are two forms of thought - one that past/future only exist in the mind and one that past/future exist but as say another dimension. I guess with the idea that everything already exists and nothing is changing since it already exists - that is contradictory because one is still having to go through frames and one slice of moment at a "time". With the idea that past and future are just in the mind - I guess the hard part is - how can they be in the mind but not exist?