trenton

In my understanding of life, commitment to truth is key to living a fulfilling life. Go of example, how can you live a meaningful life of you don't know what the meaning of life is? If you do not realize how deeply self deceived you could be, then your life will be full of falsehoods and illusions. Commitment to truth is my understanding of self love. I don't see how I can love myself if I don't love myself for who I truly am rather than as something I am not. This is about being authentic and honest, and it overlaps with things like God realization. In my understanding self love is impossible without truth. I have been curious about existence since my childhood. I started exploring different religions at a young age and ended up agnostic. Part of this was originally a trauma response. I wanted to use truth to ground my sense of reality, but the result is the use of relative truth to resist absolute truth while creating an identity around a narrative. Absolute truth might instead undermine your entire sense of reality.

I am a former fan of Ben Shapiro, a right wing conservative pundit. He constantly straw mans the left, gish gallops to win debates, does mental gymnastics with religion and politics, and much more. Here is Ben listening to Imagine by John Lennon.

@Aaron p I own that book. I have several books from Leo's list, but I was going to read that one next. It is hard to break out of the materialist paradigm if you have been conditioned your entire life to think everything happening is physical. I know there are several things which suggest this paradigm isn't true, but psychologically it is hard to shake.

Currently, I am very unhappy with my life. There is this deep existential void around not living by my values or by my potential. Sometimes this leads to depression and suicidal thoughts. This then leads to thoughts like jumping off of a bridge. Rather than jumping off of a bridge, I could at least figure out what I could possibly do with the money I saved up. It is possible that I actually have a lot more freedom with my life than I assume due to saving up money from the job I hate. I hate this job because it is grunt labor, low wages, lack of creative expression, and lack of personal growth opportunities through learning and intellectual growth. It makes me see survival as fundamentally pointless so long as it comes at the cost of anything that makes life worth living. Therefore, rather than killing myself immediately, I could take a chance at building a better life and still kill myself afterwards if necessary. I am now exploring what I could possibly do with this money that would help me live the best life possible. One option is that I could probably open a small business. Currently, given my actual skills I could in theory start up a chess club or cafe for about 30,000-45,000 dollars depending on the location. It could hold tournaments and charge membership fees while selling food. This is just one example of a possible business I could do, but there are likely others. A second option is that I could quit my job and move to another country. Countries in Europe tend to have cheaper colleges for further educational opportunities that I could look into. They also have better wages. Maybe I could travel somewhere in the world where psychedelics are legal to see if God consciousness would recontextualize my entire life, creating an entirely new approach to things like meaning and life purpose. Part of what drew me into spirituality was my deep struggle with things like meaning and purpose. Another option is some kind of mental health investment, but I don't know about that one. They might just put me on more anti-depressants that don't actually make a difference. There are several therapists who misunderstood me in the past and they might not actually help. However, one specializing in existential issues such as the one that leads to suicidal thoughts might help if they can aid in transitioning. There are a bunch of personal development courses I could afford. I am doubtful of these courses though because I don't know which one would actually be helpful. There might be a lot of crappy courses I need to sort through. I saw some courses that cost over 2,600 dollars and they sounded like they might be a rip off. I remember in the past I wanted to use my money to take off of work and focus entirely on chess. Unfortunately, my family was opposed to this and they would not let me do it so long as I lived with them. At this point chess no longer gives me the same joy it once did. The prevalent idea that it is too late for me because I'm supposed to be younger eliminated the interest of playing professionally. I would likely prefer to look to something else instead of chess as I did with this previous idea. In terms of what would actually make me fulfilled, here are a few things that I think makes life worth living. I value using deep understanding to improve people's lives. This can be done through research, learning, and teaching. I like having the ability to express my creativity. I have previously shared my insights about the mind in a way that saved people's lives. My interest in understanding the mind draws me to fields like psychology, philosophy, and spirituality. I like being committed to truth as I do my best to remain as objective as possible in seeking pure understanding. I seem to enjoy exploring the limits of knowledge and logic in understanding reality. I like looking across multiple domains of study and integrating them through making connections that others normally miss. I like how fields like Quantum Mechanics challenge the limits of classic human logic. A few things that interest me include truth, creativity, personal development, insight, self-understanding, wisdom, contribution, purpose, self-love, intelligence, pure understanding, and using this to help improve other people's lives. It would probably interest me to have somebody to grow alongside of me with similar goals or a similar purpose. That would create a situation which would likely have more opportunities if I don't have to do everything alone. I was previously suggested that I should become a life coach, especially since I used my insights in a very helpful way for other people. The reason I hesitate to do this is because I still feel horrible about my life, and it gives me doubts about my abilities to fix someone else's life. I don't see myself as being in any position to help somebody with a career dilemma if I feel lost in life. I know that I am able to help people psychologically and spiritually well enough to save lives and I once got a victim of predatory loaning out of debt, but I don't feel confident enough in my own life. Likewise, I don't feel confident in dating if my depression might make me a psychological burden to potential partners. It might be in their best interest to avoid such people. I want to be in a position where I am not having this kind of problem during dating. What else could I do with this money? Are there any other business ventures that would probably be better than the chess club? I want to consider all of my options that could possibly improve my life and exhaust those before making an irreversible decision.

I have been reading a lot about metaphysics, epistemology, and the origins of the universe. I found a lot of fascinating possibilities. I put this together with various profound findings from quantum mechanics and the implications in how humans do logic. I was deconstructing various logical principles in the process by demonstrating when logic fails. Eventually I came to the idea that if there were nothing in the beginning, then what existed before there was nothing? The answer is still nothing. The implication is that nothingness existed forever with no beginning because it is impossible to not have existence. Nothingness itself is also absolutely infinite with no end or beginning or space or position. Nothing therefore fills everything in existence. This paradox left me with a sense of fascination and awe as I looked into all of the infinite possibilities of the universe. However, throughout the process as I was deliberately looking for the limits of human knowledge and logic, it was also triggering feelings of anger and frustration for some reason. I was still intrigued by everything so I pressed on. Maybe this anger was an ego defensive response to my sense of reality being undermined. It was completely automatic and natural even though there was no real danger. Human knowledge is extremely limited and human logic and our capacity for sense making is flawed and limited. This makes me think that if there is an absolute truth then it might be something which defies all logic and reason to the point that it seems like insanity. Once again my mind was opening up to more and more possibilities with fascination even though there was automatic anger.

This sucks. I was just writing a book about self-love in which I describe the insights I had about how the mind works and how I helped others along the way. Do you think this corruption will be a problem for people who actually are interested in writing high quality books that will actually help people?

I may not be looking at porn but I still have other deeply rooted insecurities that are related. I find that my mind is constantly thinking about sex. I never had sex before, but part of me is curious. At the same time I have hated this part of myself for a long time. I felt that I fundamentally had no self worth if I was not living by a higher purpose. As a result I am drawn to things like actualized, life purpose, and personal development. I wanted to use a broader mission around my life in response to being deeply traumatized, thus avoiding sex while establishing my self worth. I previously made posts about how I hate myself because I want vagina. I seem to have done something wrong. I have now deeply confused myself about who I am when it comes to sexuality. Multiple therapists have recommended dating, but I am still hesitant. I don't know if trying that would help the situation or not because I still did not see someone who specializes in trauma.

I shared my own story too if you didn't see it.

I have a mix of many values, but mainly focus on yellow and turquoise. Part of me recognizes that direct consciousness of infinite potential is probably better than systemic analysis, but in practice I don't have this kind of consciousness.

I have been experiencing deep frustration, anxiety, fear, and depression around my career situation and its implications for things like life purpose. It lead to feelings of futility and meaninglessness in my inability to overcome practical problems in order to implement my many ideas or live by my values. I was forced to question my relationship with meaning in the hopes of finding some other way forward after previous attempts had failed. I came to the strange analogy of myself and an incel. I remember that when I started taking impact, significance, and life purpose very seriously, it started with serious sexual trauma. This led me to devaluing love and relationships in search of a lasting impact or legacy. We could say that I viewed purpose or significance as a superior form of reproduction compared to biological reproduction as a consequence of trauma. The practical obstacles which block me from actualizing any major goal end up creating a deep sense of frustration sometimes leading to suicidal thoughts. Maybe my frustration is so bad that it is like how an incel feels when it seems impossible to have sex. In both cases this frustration stems from obstacles to reproduction. I contemplated this analogy to see if there were any implications in terms of my relationship to meaning, reproduction, and purpose. I started to think what if there is a third approach to reproduction? Maybe biological reproduction is one form of reproduction and legacy or impact is another form of reproduction, but there might be another option. Maybe there is a form of reproduction which does not require sex nor is it dependent on external impact and value, but rather one that focuses on value inherent in an activity regardless of the impact. For example, there are artists who make paintings simply for the joy of creation rather than the outcome. Likewise, I created elaborate chess studies because I enjoyed finding novelties in high level positions. Perhaps my final product could be considered a form of reproduction even though I don't have a lot of people following my profiles or watching my videos. I remember that chess used to give me energy and enthusiasm. Once I was pressured to create some kind of financially viable career everything started falling apart. I was forced to find some kind of life purpose and career beyond my previous interests and I just felt lost. I tried to compensate these types of losses by pursuing major impact or systemic change. However, these are often unrealistic, impractical, and require a massive coordinated effort to achieve anything meaningful. Therefore seeking some grand end goal ultimately added to my frustration. My inability to justify my existence and my suffering in depression is what ultimately leads to suicidal thoughts to end the suffering. I started trying to think of things I enjoy doing for their inherent value regardless of outcome or impact. I like writing music and poetry. I like hiking. I used to like videogames but I forced myself to stop playing them because they lack tangible value beyond entertainment and I didn't see a long term purpose or career coming out of it if I was just going to be slowly wasting my life which I feel like I am doing regardless. Part of me is curious about sex, which is further evidence I would be an incel if not for trauma driving me away from women because I don't see how somebody like me could get laid. Deeper things I enjoy for their own sake are things like objectivity, lack of bias, open-mindedness, commitment to truth, self-knowledge and understanding, teaching and improving people's lives through expertise in a variety of fields. It seems like any sort of career I should be looking for involves teaching. I enjoy teaching chess to enthusiastic students. I enjoy sharing my insights about the mind to other people who need them, thus improving their lives. I enjoy sharing research with other people which has transformed their lives as well. I also like doing philosophy and making connections between various fields of understanding. Again, as soon as I start looking for ways to turn my values and things I enjoy into a life purpose or some kind of career, I immediately get stopped by practical realities. We could say that Kroger is cock blocking me from using my creative and intellectual talents, and that is why I feel angry and frustrated like an incel. Therefore, I may need to find some alternative form of reproduction that isn't centered around legacy or external impact. However, this does not solve the long term problems that lead to feelings of hopelessness. The best it can do is make me feel happy and comfortable in day to day life without needing to justify my existence. I briefly considered becoming a sage, but there are going to be the same practical problems all over again. I would however, enjoy changing people's lives through deep insights about the mind like I have done already. Sometimes it seems that my life was fundamentally set up for failure no matter what I did differently in life. I genuinely have no clue what else I could have done. Maybe I was supposed to force myself to do something I don't enjoy or have passion for, but I don't see the point in living life like that. Hopefully, by finding things I enjoy for their own sake rather than for their impact, I can gradually develop that into something like a purpose which does not require changing the world. Humanity will just have to suffer because a lot of people are stupid and don't value truth at all. What are your thoughts on alternative forms of reproduction? What forms of reproduction are neither biological nor dependent on external impact or legacy?

I have found ai extremely helpful. I used it to help me understand my trauma responses and it slowly shaped me into a much more peaceful mind. So far I prefer computer therapists to human therapists. I use the current version of Claude and I use IFS buddy. I have had a ton of excellent insights which helped transform me. I know psychologists want to claim that human therapy is superior because humans need an emotional connection. In my experience ai is superior because humans make a ton of mistakes. Human therapists often fail to recognize abusive relationships, they will pathologize your protective behaviors, they might try to convert you to Christianity, and they might get stuck on one plausible theory about your mental health problems when the reality is more complex. I think psychologists are in denial that ai makes fewer mistakes and is less judgemental. Maybe psychologists want your money and that's why they must maintain that humans are superior to ai. You are expected to try 5 or 10 different therapists until someone finally clicks with you. you know some rehabilitation centers charge you 5000 dollars a day whereas Claude is about 20 bucks a month. The therapist at that rehabilitation center tried to convert me because she didn't understand my complex spiritual views, and the ai never gives me this problem. However, other aspects of rehabilitation centers are good like neural retraining, and I still think that might be better than ai for now. I'm glad I used the ai as a tool for self exploration, emotional support, and education. I prefer to be an active learner rather than have a therapist dictate my actions. They might pressure me to interact with people who previous abused me as if I need to just talk over my differences when in reality they objectively acting in bad faith. Therapists tend to assume that other parties are acting in good faith and that your mental health is the problem. This leads to gaslighting. I feel like the ai believes me but human therapists do not.

What if identifying with the ego was considered a mental illness which needed to be treated with psychedelics?

This issue is part of why I have a strong resistance to spiritual work. I have had my entire sense of reality undermined and it instilled me with a deep sense of fear. The main insight that I have been struggling with most is the deeper truth that reality is a dream, an illusion, or a hallucination. My entire sense of physical reality is a construction, and when I become deeply conscious it starts to have a destabilization effect. Sometimes this message is repeated to me in lucid dreams and when I look around the real physical room I get this sense of "This is a fucking dream! What the fuck!" This seems to be the deep extent of self-deception. It seems impossible because everything seems so real yet it is imaginary. This destabilization trauma can be traced back to childhood trauma. It was a sexual incident that happened when I was six, and it had a whole string of trauma responses which shaped the person I became. Part of the destabilization happened when I started lying to myself saying "it was just a nightmare." It was in this moment that I became conscious of my mind's capacity to deceive itself. It drew into question how deeply self-deceived I could possibly be. I started looking around the room with the fear that everything was a hallucination along with my entire life story being a fabrication and with my very existence being drawn into question. In response to this destabilization trauma, I tried to ground myself through a commitment to "truth." I came to believe that I could not love myself without accepting the truth of who I was. I therefore used relative truth as a smokescreen to hide from absolute truth. One example would be "it was not a dream" to ground myself in the face of the deeper truth that reality is a dream. I would go on to use various intellectualizations around which I formed my identity. I would be using relative truth as a crutch to hold onto my sense of reality. As I continued doing trauma work, I began letting go of various intellectualizations that I no longer need. I discovered time and time again that they were means of masking deeper pain even if they were true from a certain point of view. Maybe I cannot love myself so long as I am not conscious of my true nature as God and Love and clinging to material existence out of fear prevents me from awakening to Love. As I tried to use truth to ground myself, I became deeply philosophical. I would make many different theories about reality thinking I was being smart. I started off holding an absolutistic stance around the nature of reality which served to stabilize my sense of reality. As I continued exploring philosophy and truth, I eventually discovered relativism which reintroduced my destabilization. It seemed to imply that all meaning and purpose was relative and not transcendent, which reopened my struggle with meaninglessness. Moral relativism seems a bit scary at first, but it makes perfect sense. Yes its true that somebody could put a gun to my head and say "morality is relative." At the same time you can look all throughout history at religion being used to abdicate the moral high ground while justifying genocide because of the belief that that is what God wanted. I found this a bit destabilizing, but I eventually accepted it. If good and evil are defined relative to perspective or ideology, then it suggests that if Absolute Goodness existed, then it would need to be more foundational than moral judgement. This would need to start with being conscious enough to recognize that moral judgements are imaginary and that I am creating good and evil through imagining them into existence. The more difficult one was the relativity of truth. This undermined my entire sense of reality because it depended on the existence of absolute truth as a correct view or interpretation. This sounded like insanity at first. I eventually came to accept it through epistemic relativism and relativity in logic. Depending on the basic assumptions of any epistemic framework, it will lead to different conclusions which are then held as true. There are also different types of logic like formal logic instead of fuzzy logic. Depending on the situation or how different types of logic or epistemic frameworks are applied, you can reach different conclusions which are valid relative to the underlying framework of the sense making system. This is how I made sense of relative truth, and it suggests that if Absolute Truth exists, then it is more foundational any belief system or epistemic framework. I was actually wrestling with relativity around the same time I discovered Actualized.org. Part of the reason the mind gets stuck on relativism is because it is creating a false sense of acceptance by trying to ground a new sense of reality in the relative truth of relativity. Relativism as an ideology thus becomes an obstacle to deeper levels of consciousness necessary to see Absolute Truth which is more foundational than any perspective. Perhaps I would need to be conscious of how I am constructing true and false in order to make sense of things which would point me to the more foundational Truth. At the end of the relativity rabbit hole, it comes to the truth that reality is relative. For example, material existence is relative to the normal state of human consciousness, but at deeper levels of consciousness you can recognize the non-dual nature of reality and the deeper truth that reality is a hallucination with consciousness being more foundational than material existence. This is the deeper truth that relativism is pointing to, and I haven't fully integrated it because my body, mind, and being are resisting returning to this level of consciousness. There are also scientific reasons to support this radical degree of relativity such as time being relative. Ultimately my entire worldview and my entire sense of reality is relative to my degree of consciousness. As I looked at various spiritual books and started meditating, I eventually had another destabilizing experience. I was listening to an audiobook, Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now. I listened to various insights and started experimenting with them throughout the book. I listened to it all day, while becoming more and more present. It started becoming a deeply pleasant and happy experience of just being present and existing. As I approached the end of the book, I did a deeper meditation which led to a destabilizing experience. It was like pure nothingness was the foundation of existence. Not only was I nothing, but so was everything else nothing. As pure nothingness, I was one with all of existence, making nothing and everything indistinguishable. As I realized that everything was nothing, I started to realize that reality was an illusion which undermined my entire sense of reality. I had never experienced this kind of consciousness before, and I have become afraid of meditation. According to some of the books I read about this, it takes some getting used to when you first start experiencing absolute nothingness. So these are my examples of destabilization trauma. I have come to realize that I have been using the relative truth of spiritual teachings as a smokescreen to prevent the realization of these deeper truths. I now realize that I don't need these intellectualizations which I commonly use as a defense mechanism in a variety of forms. As I healed various traumas, I let go of various intellectualizations and my mind has become increasingly peaceful and present. It still involves a lot of emotional labor because I am undoing the person I became in response to deep trauma. Currently I feel like I am being left with a sense of not knowing, but at the same time not needing to make intellectual schemes. This mental energy was a previous defense mechanism that I no longer need. They were masking pain. How do you guys suggest going about addressing destabilization trauma? I think this is critical for continuing spiritual work because sometimes it makes you feel like you are going insane.

I think this might be a good place to share my story. I once had a Christian therapist who started asking me about my spiritual beliefs. She started off by telling me that my explanation of good and evil was too complicated. I explained a meta perspective which accounts for moral relativism, suggests that evil is imaginary, and that goodness is deeper than morality. She didn't seem to be interested in understanding my spiritual beliefs and instead made various assumptions about how I conceive of God, Jesus, the Bible, and prayer. She later took a confrontational approach to me and started saying "how dare you try to control the future." She told me that my life wasn't working because I am not letting God run my life. She therefore told me that I needed to surrender to God and told me I needed to start praying. She pulled up a prayer about Jesus which I objected to. Jesus doesn't mean the same thing to me as it does a Christian. She ignored my objection and insisted that I pray to Jesus. I ended up freezing up and my mind went blank. I had a high sense of anxiety and hyper vigilance for the next three days. I didn't want to talk to people. This was supposed to be therapy. Why the hate against Christianity? Stuff like this.

@Lyubov Yes, the child is still part of this grand truth. In fact it is possible that everything about God and spirituality still stands as true. The problem is that although it may be true in the ultimate sense, People who begin doing spiritual work are often unaware of the unconscious forces that get them into spirituality in the first place. If these forces involve severe trauma, then spirituality quickly devolves into further layers of an ego identity which in turn masks the deeper pain, and thus prevents self discovery. I believe this is one of the reasons why spirituality fails for many people and why so many people fail to awaken. They could be chasing spirituality for their entire life hoping God realization will change their lives, but in reality they never realized that the reason they started seeking truth to begin with was actually to create an elaborate method of avoiding the truth. Thank you for recognizing my value as a human being. I know your life is probably just as complicated and probably involves suffering that you never fully expressed along with various confusions and contridictions. Whatever struggle you face, I hope you know you were always lovable too.