Journey to Nothing

[LastThursday]

One aspect I like about music is that it allows you to time travel. You can sort of get yourself back into an earlier version of yourself. It doesn't even have to be music you actually listened to, just the musical genre can be enough:

This is modern stuff, but in a very early 80's style, which was very prevalent here in the UK, mostly from about 1979 to 1983. When I first heard this type of music in 1979:

it was like aliens had landed and taken over music. I was hooked even at the age of six or seven and I've liked electronic music ever since. It is very much a part of me.

Of course all pop music is electronic nowadays, it's just morphed itself and become so sophisticated it just seems so natural and normal. I'm still waiting for the aliens to land again though!

[LastThursday]

When I said the aliens didn't land again in my last post. I did kind of slap my head. Who could forget Portishead? (me obviously)

Arguably they started the whole trip hop genre. This sounded really different from everything else in the 90's. But somehow it had less of a long-term impact than synth music in general did. I'd say it still stands the test of time for originality in any case.

Edited December 5, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

How do you stop yourself from becoming the centre of the universe?

There's always a tug-of-war between the collective and the individual. We want to both belong, and to be recognised for our uniqueness. This two-faceted reality expresses itself in many ways. At its base it's really down to aspect. If you are the collective then it would seem the individual is insignificant and perhaps powerless. If you are the individual then the collective is less important and brainwashed and restricted. Which is right?

One model for existence is to invert the big bang idea and make you ground zero. It goes like this: here I am, what has to be true for me to be here? Then a wave of inference crystalises out from the fact of your existence. Out of this wave of inference the whole universe is created. You are the big bang, but it isn't matter, time and space that is created but subjective experience. This squares up with our tendency to solipsism, and perhaps narcisism, we have the intense sensation that we are at the centre of our universe. Right at the heart of that universe is the sensation that we are invisibly observing everything unfold before us, and all perhaps just for our amusement. That idea of observation is our unravelling however.

That observation is happening at all presupposes that there is the universe and then an observer separate from it. That idea is individualism at its core, that we are separate from everything else and somehow special and privileged. What is the observer exactly? Since it is not part of the universe, it has none of its qualities: no mass, no time, no space. It hangs in its own platonic realm. What happens when the universe is removed, what is being observed then? This is actually a non-question. It seems like one needs the other, a universe without an observer is not a universe at all. An observer without a universe is not an observer in any sense.

What is more productive is to fuse the universe and observer together into a universe/observer. In fact the two are one thing, one needing the other, like the two faces of a coin. But now since the observer doesn't exist independently of the universe, there is no longer a ground zero and there is no special place removed from the universe.

Equally with the collective/individualist dichotomy. Neither are true, it is one entity with aspects of both depending on how you divide things up. Even individuals must bow to the collective (even if just to survive) and the collective is nothing without individuals (it needs variety and originality to survive).

Edited December 6, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Planning.

It's a word that both wants me to roll my eyes and fills me with anxiety. As a consequence I try to do it very little if I can. As alluded to in my earlier posts about directions of perspective (past, present, future, inward, outward), I'm very much inward and past/present. I have to actively work against my natural tendencies to dwell on the past and myself, i.e. looking to the future and planning (outward perspective) is unnatural for me.

The mix of anxieties I have about planning, is centred around commitment and communication. Making a plan requires a certain amount of commitment, carrying it out requires a larger amount of commitment, and nearly always other people. The other people aspect is where I come unstuck. I have a natural aversion to asking for help, asking for stuff to be done or just generally asking. I know this to be a deep seated anxiety with me, and has taken a huge amount of work to even get to a reasonable place with "asking". It's still a work in progress (it's one of the things I absolutely hate about myself). I'm sure it's rooted in my past and character... hang on, here I go off on past and inward... back on track now...

Also, other people can be a pain in the posterior, in terms of just plain being unhelpful when being asked questions (and my personal discomfort which goes along with that) or when trying to get them to do things in a timely manner. Managing people is definitely something I try to avoid like the plague. However. I am very good at communicating (look at the evidence...), so some of that stigma I used to feel about looking dumb in front of other people when I was younger, has largely evaporated, and I'm relieved. But there's still a residual of that in interactions. I also used to be a lot worse at thinking on my feet. I'm a kind of mull things over kind of guy, especially if it's in an area I don't have a perfect understanding of; being asked to make instant decisions I find paralysing. I have improved on this also, through sheer weight of practice. Anyway, so much for people.

When it comes to simpler types of planning, the type that doesn't involve people or just one other person perhaps (and I know them well), I'm a lot more comfortable with. If can do everything online without having to interact with people at all then woo hoo! The 21st century was made for people like me. So I actually find mentally planning activities quite easy: it's so much like programming, step by step, B follows A. I find myself being extremely good at my time planning and being punctual to events. So there is a bit of me that sort of enjoys planning stuff for myself, I can commit to that sort of planning quite easily. But if I start to need to write stuff down and use a calendar then forget it! I'm allergic to calendars and schedules. I'd rather wing it and keep it all in my head (yes I'm a sadist, but it's good practice for the memory). As you can imagine I'm shit at remembering birthdays.

Execution of a plan can be problematic. Any lengthy plan that isn't a one-shot process (happens in one block of time), can go off the rails. This is for several reasons, but mostly I get bored and and distracted very easily. For example at work stuff can take weeks or months to complete. I find it a real grind to constantly work against my tendencies. The only half-solution I've find is to work on several different projects at once to stop the boredom. Distraction is a lot harder to fix. The only two things that have any effect is self-hypnosis and using the Pomodoro method (30 minute chunks of work) and lots of music. Maybe the 21st century wasn't made for me (Internet I'm looking at your distracting ways). I don't have proper solutions to either my boredom or distraction (supposing they are actual real problems, after all, the nature of my work imposes certain ways of working on me so perhaps the problem lies there, in a word the problems are: systemic).

I suggested on a post on the forum today for someone to effectively make a 25 year plan so they can get a handle of how much luxury of time they have to fulfill their dreams (punctuation?). Of course I'm a total hypochrite and I apologise, but it's still good advice. Anyone is allowed to give good advice right?

In fact; one of the things that helps to keep me on track and give my mind something to latch on to is precisely what I don't do: write stuff down in a calendar. I absolutely detest being nagged to do something  - a friend of mine does it incessantly and I ignore him mostly. But it's a lot harder to ignore your slightly younger self nagging your slightly older self, I ignore myself at my own peril. I think I don't do will with that guilt and so avoid calendars altogether. What strange beings we are!

Another problem I have with more complex planning is research. All reasonably complex plans needs a bit of time to research stuff, because generally you have holes in your knowledge. Either you fill in your knowledge by asking other people (big red cross) or you go to the internet (better). I generally don't like the scanning type of research. Say I want plan a cheap journey to France for a holiday. My idea of hell would be to scour the cheap flights for hours looking for that one bargain. Just, no. However, I'm happy to read about spin in quantum particles for hours on end. One is mindless scanning, the other active reading. It seems to me that there are certain types of people who seem to love just scanning for hours on end. Why? What is wrong with them?

All this comes down to one thing: I don't enjoy being coralled into something long term, especially if it requires unwanted exertion and/or is something I find uninteresting. Call me a commitmentphobe. My lack of planning desire is to my detriment though and I'm feeling it intensely. Ah well.

[LastThursday]

It makes me kind of sad when people tell my they don't feel confident. I understand their discomfort. I see two types of troubles. The first is not being confident in something someone wants to do: a friend told me yesterday that she likes the idea of singing in a choir, but couldn't possibly do it in a small group in public. The second is not feeling confident in general and this is a less defined sense of unease. Another friend told me she is taking acting lessons so that she can feel more confident; this is a woman who regularly trains people in a hospital setting. I felt sad for her, because on the surface I wouldn't have said she wasn't confident - it made me wonder what was going on.

There is another source of not feeling confident and that is lack of experience or practice. This to me is the more comprehensible side of confidence. It seems natural to want to shy away from doing things you have little experience in, especially if you are being judged by other people. We can all safely say we're not confident in lots of different things: I'm not confident in fire-breathing for example. Generally, this sort of confidence can be gained by practice and exposure. If you're keen on learning something new then that excitement can be enough to push through any feelings of unease.

The lack of experience may be driving the feelings of anxiety, but it could be that exposure to something new is just too terrifying to consider doing, or even after prolonged exposure you still don't feel confident. Saying you lack confidence can just be a code-word for a lack of self esteem. I've noticed women masking a lack of self esteem with saying they're not confident more so than men do. One of the reasons is it's unacceptible for men to say they lack confidence, it's a trait all men are expected (tacitly) to have - women have it slightly easier in this respect. However, I think women suffer from different types of self esteem problems than men and this arises mainly from being judged more harshly than men are in some areas. Neither men nor women feel openly comfortable with saying "I lack self esteem please help me". This is the sadness I felt for my friends.

In my own history I've hidden my lack of confidence (self esteem) by steering well clear of situations that would need me to expose myself. Or, when I got older I took on the fake-it-till-you-make-it mentally. I realised that even if I lacked confidence people would accept it if you just faked it. I was only ever to reach this position because over time I came to the recognition that I was worthy of attention and love and, I slowly regained my self esteem. What is the outward difference between faking it and actually being confident? Nothing. But what a shame it is to fake something and feel awful every time you do, than it is to just confidently enjoy a thing. If I could engender confidence in someone, then I would; it seems to me to be at the root of lots of mental health problems, suffering and just plain not enjoying being yourself. There is no worse hell than being someone you don't want to be, with no form of escape.

Are there solutions? Yes. Exposure and practice is one thing, keep putting yourself in uncomfortable and novel situations, push yourself to do it regularly - it will work wonders for self esteem and confidence as a result. Get professional help, therapy and talk through your self esteem problems. Put yourself in a supportive peer group, one that you feel comfortable with and where you can practise just "being yourself"; this will make you realise that you can be who you want to be and be accepted for it. Fake it, honestly it works, done enough times your self esteem will slowly improve and you will be accepted for your fake confidence, eventually you'll stop needing to fake it. Lastly, just know deep within yourself that it's possible to change and feel completely differently about whatever is filling you with anxiety and dread - there is escape - you can be confident.

 

[LastThursday]

There really is nothing to be said. If I take a warm bath, should I actually say something about that? There are an infinitude of things I could say. None of them are actually a replacement for the sensation of taking a warm bath. The sensation of the warm bath is a truth, any talk about taking a warm bath is not the truth but an account or a story. Why talk?

We talk for one reason only and that's to convey information. Information is just the process of revealing something that was previously hidden. If I never told you that I took a warm bath yesterday, then you would never know: it stays hidden and no information has been conveyed. Talking is for the benefit of others. But hey don't you also talk to yourself? If you find yourself doing this, then what purpose is it serving; don't you already know about everything that you could talk about? I don't need to inform myself that I've taken a bath, I already know it.

One purpose for talking to yourself is to maintain a sense of separation. Somehow you are the entity that experiences a warm bath, but also (separately) a person who needs informing that you took a bath. Talk is always about recognising separation, because talk is always about revealing what's hidden from others, and the implicit assumption is that others are not part of your private (hidden) world. By treating yourself the same way (by talking to yourself), you a bolstering a sense that you are a person separate from your raw experiences. You try and prop up your raw experience by talking it through with yourself as if you were someone else. You become two: the person who listens, and the entity that is being. The person who listens learns to distrust that raw experience as something "other" than itself, it only ever trusts what is being said to itself. Raw experience is relegated to a lesser thing and truth becomes the words you say to yourself and others.

In order to even be able to communicate at all with someone else, a huge amount of context has to be factored in first. The elephant in the room is that you have to assume the other person has a mind (at all) that can understand your communication. You have a theory of mind, their mind, and you use that theory to talk to them. When you talk to yourself, you are applying the same model of "theory of mind" to yourself; in this way you give yourself a credible excuse for having a mind. It's no coincidence that having a mind, thinking and talking to yourself are often used synonyms for each other.

The reality is is that you don't have a mind per se. What you have instead is a theory of mind, a construction useful for communicating with. That construction takes on a life of its own and becomes a layer separate from raw experience. Effectively the "theory of mind" is misused in applying it to yourself, because you have nothing to reveal to yourself, it's all there in plain sight. In the process you do yourself an injustice because you install within yourself a separation that is parasitic to your direct raw experience. It's like blowing up a balloon called "self" and then talking to it as if it were real.

How often have you talked to yourself and given yourself reasons for your behaviour, or a story about your past, or about how worthless or incapable you are? This is just you talking to a "theory of mind" entity, it is self-sustaining. Talking to yourself keeps the balloon of the "self" inflated. Other people have no choice but to buy into your story of yourself, because they have to use "theory of mind" to communicate with you. This also keeps the balloon inflated: I believe that you believe that I have a mind. Having a mind would seem inevitable, really, a very convenient thing.

Can the balloon of the self be popped? Should it be popped? Would you take the bottom Jenga brick out and watch the tower of the self collapse? Yes. What remains after is then the raw experience which was always there in any case. You no longer have a mind, but you are still alive and breathing. Are you then a zombie of sorts? No. It's nearly the opposite, you are no longer constrained by your own "theory of mind" or conception. All that negative self-talk and all those stories you couldn't escape no longer mean anything, poof, they disappeared in a puff of smoke. You are free just to be without the burden of keeping the balloon of the self constantly inflated. You can still plan and talk to yourself, but you no longer take it seriously or identify with it, it is just another thing happening in raw experience: just in the same way you can choose to take someone seriously, or just let them talk without it affecting you.

Edited December 14, 2021 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Don't know if I've written about this before here - probably - tulpa creation.

What is a tulpa? The concept is basically an imaginary friend on steroids. You create and maintain a separate entity - normally a person - using thought alone. See Wikipedia for more.

I don't know why exactly the idea appeals to me, after all I'm in 40's not my 00's . I think it ties in with my philosophy of thinking that we should all regularly inhabit different characters, as a way to expand ourselves, and to not get too stuck in ourselves. To be honest this is what we all already do (see earlier posts), so the only difference here in creating a tulpa is doing it consciously rather than unconciously. Effectively, you are already a bunch of thought-forms vying for attention and control of your body. Further to this, everyone in your life - male and female - is also a thought-form. Unconsciously created tulpas abound rattling around inside you.

I thought I would create a female tulpa, because why not? Ok, well this is kind of related to my earlier phase of needing to work through what feminity meant for myself (yes I'm male) - we're all a balance of feminine and masculine qualities - whatever they are. Earlier I was interested in tipping the scales and embodying or expressing what I thought were more feminine qualities. Creating a female tulpa would allow me a chance of feminine creative expression even if just in thought. I have plenty of material to work from, half the people in the world are feminine.

I'm not sure where exactly this need to explore a more feminine identity comes from, it's certainly not from sexual orientation (men don't turn me on, but I can appreciate a good looking one and why he's good looking). However, I was often confused for a girl when I was very young (longish hair), I have enjoyed the odd bit of cross-dressing (but hadn't done a huge amount of it). I was a little bit of a mummy's boy but not that much. In my twenties or thirties I was questioned on occasion whether I was gay or bi (nope) - even my own sister wanted me to work it out by experimenting, which I did and I definitely wasn't. This questioning made me wonder what about my behaviour made people think I was. In my forties I've worked hard to be more masculine in my character to stop this confusion in people; especially not to put off potential women I was interested in.

This is not something I've ever spoken about to anyone. Lucky you, you're the first or at least in the low tens!

I do think that I'm lost translation though. Being much more masculine just isn't really me, it's just a show. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's inauthentic, because I am being an authentic masculine version of myself. It's just that it takes conscious maintenance and suppression of what I used to think were "natural" expressions of my character. So here we are.

In a way the female tulpa perhaps would be the more extreme version of that younger more femininely balanced self. She would have to be the female me. I have a good template as I have a sister! But we are quite different characters, so I can't just steal her character for myself - it's also kind of creepy to do that - the thought-form I already have of my sister doesn't need corruption. But despite our differences we are the closest two humans in terms of upbringing and some of our thought patterns and behaviours.

Name your tulpa. I originally called her Christine, but wavered and eventually settled on Charlotte (I like CH right?). She kind of needed her own mind and body shape, but to be averagely me. When I first tried I found the maintenance side of the tulpa onerous. My visual imagination is good, but imagining a whole being from nothing except some vague template I found to be very tough. I had a long hiatus where I just forgot about the whole thing. But the idea didn't really go away. In adjusting myself to be more masculine the more feminine side of me screamed louder. Life is like that, some things are impossible to ignore and like it or not eventually you have to deal with it somehow.

When I came across hypnosis videos online, there were various "feminine transformation" videos, for men I presume. The sheer fact it even grabbed my attention spoke to me. I'm a curious sort so I tried it out and it had a curious effect on me. What I had missed with the tulpa creation is what I should have done all along and that is: embodiment. After all, it was embodiment of more feminine qualities that I was missing in the first place and the reason for the tulpa creation. Embodiment is far more potent because you become the character, albeit a female character in a male body. It allowed me to explore the tulpa more fully. Although, I may have unconsciously shied away from what I felt could be a slippery slope - to what, I don't know.

Some of the videos were straight become a woman type affairs. Some of them were more to do with cross-dressing. Knowing NLP well enough, I anchored Charlotte (the name) to these hypnotic moments of feminine embodiment so I could "recall" her more quickly. In a strange twist (the universe provides) I temporarily became the owner of a bunch of clothing which I promised to take to charity. I took the opportunity to actually cross-dress, specifically to fill out the Charlotte character. You really are the first know this, and as you can imagine it's odd spilling my guts like this on many levels. It's giving me the outlet I need to explore more feminine characteristics and it feels like a holiday from my normally straightjacketed-everyday-masculine self.

How far am I going to push it? I don't know, it's quite possibly just a phase and I'll get bored with it. Maybe when I feel I've rebalanced myself again and can put an acceptable version of myself for public consumption it will end (acceptable to me and to others). What it also allows me to do is experiment with being someone else, albeit in private, but my hope is that the good parts of that experimentation will spill over into @LastThursday and go some way to "fixing" parts of me I don't like or "improving" other parts. I haven't actively bought any female clothing; not sure I will. I have bought nail varnish.

I am very very weary about being caught out cross-dressing. Already I've probably been caught with a neighbour peering through my window from across the way. Part of me doesn't GAF, part of me really does. The social stigma is just too much. Definitely my friends can't know and neither can my family not because I don't think they wouldn't be accommodating, but because I'd never hear the end of it and I don't want to be identified by it. I also have a social image to upkeep unfortunately. In a bizarre sense I feel I'm not really cross-dressing but more like dressing a shop dummy called Charlotte in order to bring her to life. It is definitely fun and strangely cathartic though. Hey ho.

[LastThursday]

You have a week to live. What would you do?

I've never been a fan of this type of approach to motivation. I think it's meant to get you thinking differently than you normally would, and make you realise that you can be different. It's an admirable sentiment, but the setting is too morbid. I think I would choose one of three responses, but I'm not sure which one:

• Just carry on in the same way and do nothing special,
• Have a mad rush to get my affairs in order and say goodbyes to those I care about,
• Wallow in self pity and anxiety.

It's not a good motivator. Mostly if you only have a week to live, then you are gravely ill and probably bed ridden. It seems like the only thing I wouldn't do is have time to do all the things I've always wanted to do.

As a general principle for living life, it's also not that great. Firstly, there's that constant underlying fear of your imminent death and not knowing exactly when it's going to occur. You could say, that indeed none of us know when death will occur, it could happen today crossing the road. But using that as a guiding principle is not necessarily motivating, but actually neurotic. I think it would install an uneasiness and impatience in a person. Secondly, it's short termist. We're all very prone to short term thinking in any case without emphasising it. Some of us want to live "in the moment" which is short termism in the extreme. Constantly thinking that you have a sell-by-date doesn't allow you to plan for the long term. Whilst it's true that we don't really know what's going to happen in the future, we should at least guide ourselves towards some sort of destination and plan it. Put another way we have better lives by having a long term purpose - the week-to-live principle goes against this. It's all stick and no carrot.

The last jab at the concept is that it falls into the quick fix category of self help. People have busy lives and short attention spans, quick fixes sell better. Can you really solve motivation problems in an individual by scaring them with death? I suspect not. No. Leave death to those that are actually dying next week. In fact, go and visit them and get a taste of what death could be like - and it would make you appreciate more what a joy being alive is. That is the right way to use death as a motivator, to highlight how good being alive is.

Most demotivation in life comes from being down on life and just seeing and being in negativity. A well-adjusted human is naturally motivated, an actualised human is naturally motivated.  Self actualisation is a long term process, because society is not built around it, and there's a lot of societal programming to undo, to make it even harder, largely you have to deprogram yourself. Luckily it's a virtuous loop; the more you actualise the easier it gets, and the more motivated you become. That is exactly the sort of thing that should be taught. How do you sell such a long term process to the masses? I don't know. I suspect you either have the right temperament and circumstances, or you don't. Only very few of us will actualise.

 

 

[LastThursday]

Something for the dating section no?

 

[LastThursday]

It's Saturday and I have an idle hour or two before going up to London.

I'm lifting a friend up to London to meet another friend to do some night photography. I'm sure I could have worded that better, anwyay. We'll take in the sights of central London starting with the Millenium Bridge with St Paul's cathedral in the background. Then we'll probably go Tower Bridge at some point on our meander. I'm not looking forward to freezing my bits off though, but the reward of restaurant food at the end will make up for it. Here's a shot of the cathedral I took a few months ago from the window of a restaurant.

---

I've also been working on writing a book. I'm sort of cheating because I've just dumped this journal into Word. I have 220 pages and 125,000 words. Sheesh! I think it might actually take me the rest of the year to organise all that to make it coherent, rewrite parts, add parts and on and on. It was never my intention to use this journal in that way, but hey c'est la vie. As an aide to encourage myself to publish the book at the end of it, I investigated how much it would cost to have a three or four actual books professionally done. Yikes! Nearly £2000 just for proofreading and grammar alone. The printing itself was more like £400. Anyway, I'll cross that bridge when and if I come to it. The idea of having my book in a bookstore fills me with joy and pride.

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Other than that I've been playing a huge amount of chess. I've played over 1000 games of blitz in the last few months (too much time on my hands). Annoyingly I know I've improved immensely, and yet my rating has yo-yoed like Bitcoin. What happens is that the playing style of some opponents really screws me up and I lose to lower rated players. But what I have on my side is speed and the ability to pluck off weak pieces. But my checkmating skills (and recognising impending checkmate) is abysmal - the only way to solve that is to do lots of puzzles. Anyway, I feel myself improving slowly slowly and I like that feeling.

Ciao!

[LastThursday]

I thought I would revisit the subject of tension in the body. This interests me because I think a lot of the anxiety and uneasiness I feel in my life are directly connected with sensations in my body. If I can crack the nut of releasing bodily tension then I think that will make for a more relaxed and fulfilled life. 

There's two sides I want to explore: why do I have tension and how do I get rid of it? 

The tension I do have is mostly from the shoulders and above, specifically the shoulders, neck and jaw area. This pattern of tension has certainly changed over time. In my teenage years I remember distinctly having a lot of tension around my stomach. This is interesting because I think that stomach tension came very much as a response to low level bullying at school: it was a defence mechanism, fight or flight. Growing up in the neighbourhood that I did, I was exposed to potential aggression from a young age from other kids. I suspect my body learned to be constantly on guard, which created the tension in the first place.

So, there is a strong connection between the anxiety I've felt most of my life and the learned tension in my body. Remove the tension, remove the anxiety; well that's my theory. It is totally possible to have anxiety without any bodily tension per se. For example anxiety for me manifests as sort of butterflies around my chest area - probably the effects of adrenaline - it's definitely not positive! But it is almost always accompanied by tension around the shoulders and jaw. I also think that the tension throughout the day contributes to fatigue and regular headaches, although I'm very good at sleeping to counteract it (!).

My mother was also quite an anxious person around people (because of her deafness and inability to speak English), and that's rubbed off on to me from a young age. It has taken me a huge amount of time and experience to unlearn most of that anxious behaviour around people, and it's still not fully conquered. 

I've been using self-hypnotism as a way to truly and completely relax my body. It has also allowed me to become a lot more aware of exactly where the tension sits in my body; and I've built up that awareness throughout the day to continually relieve the tension. But it's no solution as yet, I'm really hoping that sheer determination and practise will release the tension permanently. I have noticed an improvement since I started the hypnotism, but it's slow going. 

I could go conventional and try to get to the root causes of the tension (which I touched on above), but I feel that's a rats nest of entangled memories and emotions that I have no way to untangle by myself. And to go through therapy and have to relive all that negativity I see as utterly pointless.

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On a tangentially related subject I have been dabbling in dream control. I think a lot of my anxiety spills over into my dreams in the form of unpleasant or frustrating situations I dream about. Some examples are: stairs that stop at walls, my feet being on fire, flooded toilet areas, being naked in public, not being able to find clothing, aloof dream characters, light switches not working and on and on. 

I have been having words with my subconscious right before sleep so that I don't have so much of this unpleasantness. I specifically talk to that part of my subconscious that deals with dreams. Over time I've built up the ability to communicate with my subconscious via bodily signals: I ask it a question and it responds yes/no/maybe often by bodily "jerks" maybe in the fingers or foot or whatever. How I built up that ability is interesting and I'll post about it some time. 

It seems to be working (to my surprise). My dreams have been less frustrating and characters in my dreams have been far more approachable and willing to interact with me. But there's still some work to do there. 

I do think that dreams are partly an emotional outlet for things that don't get resolved whilst awake. But I also think that a lot of the worries and concerns of waking life get encoded into emotions and situations in dreams - if not directly translated.

I'm hitting the tension and anxiety from all angles and I hope that will resolve it once and for all.

[LastThursday]

Change the world or change yourself?

I reckon we often feel completely helpless against what the world throws at us. There is a truth to this. Also, we have a desire to mould the world in our image and leave a lasting impression in it. I think the reason for this is that this gives our lives some meaning, otherwise we may as just well be rocks being battered by the ocean waves. Perhaps when we were hunter gatherers not so long ago, directly providing for ourselves and each other and using all our wits just to stay alive and being super connected to the land, all that was enough meaning. Our modern world is not enough and doesn't nourish our souls and often sucks them dry.

But whatever the modern world of towns and cities doesn't give us, we still have our inner world as a source of nourishment. We hugely underestimate our potentials and our ability to sculpt ourselves. So why don't we engage with this potential and why are we so scared of changing ourselves? The largest thing holding us back is our attachment to our identities - we are scared of what will happen if we let go of who we are. We spend so much time and effort building ourselves up and positioning ourselves within our social web; we need love and recognition for our identities. Society expects us to do this and we don't know any better.

All those millions of years of hunting and gathering and being part of nature has imbued us with super human abilities. We had to be able to remember a million facts and reason deeply about the natural world in order to survive. We had to tell each other stories to inform and entertain each other; we live and die by our stories. We lived in each others' faces, constantly and up close and personal and that was natural. We constantly moved and used and understood our bodies. All this innate ability makes for a potent brew.

We don't engage with our potential because we stay ignorant, and we don't know what we don't know. We fear the unknown and rightly so, it threatens our survival or could take away our hard earned lifestyles. We are also keen on not expending any more energy than we need to, every animal is like this. Given the choice of doing something hard and energy intensive or doing nothing, we will often choose doing nothing. In the end doing nothing becomes ingrained.

To change ourselves is to let go of our identities and to engage in a long hard slog of mastering our potentials into the large unknown. But the reward is that when we change ourselves, we also change our world.

Edited January 28, 2022 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I'm a big fan of the Matrix movies. I think the amalgam of action and existentialism draws me in. Are we living in a simulated reality?

The whole idea of a simulated reality is predicated on being able to escape it; that it is actually possible to do or even desirable. Neo finds out it is possible to do despite finding it undesirable at first. If the desire increases enough then it will reach some threshold whereby there is no going back: a choice has to be made. Is it the red pill or the blue pill?

I think that, already, if you know that it is possible to escape reality because you've glimpsed it, then the choice is already made and you've swallowed the red pill without knowing it.

The other idea behind simulated reality is that it is being simulated by someone totally outside of the simulated reality. They are like the Gods on Mount Olympus whose soap opera has consequences for their creations. But unlike the Greek Gods our simulator overlords are shadowy and cryptic. Hope is not lost however because once we unplug from the simulation we become one of those Gods and we too can play with the simulation itself. It's the difference between being the user of an app and being the programmer of the app.

The parallels with Enlightenment should be obvious because we are looking to "wake up" from reality. Once we have glimpsed the ox's tail we have already taken the red pill.

One of the biggest drawbacks of the simulation hypothesis is the possibility of infinite regress. What if the simulators themselves are being simulated? How many levels of simulation could you wake up from? The unspoken problem here is the assumption that Thomas Anderson is Neo or knowing if Chuang Tzu was a human or a butterfly. If and when you awake from the simulation, do you in fact get to keep your identity or do you wake up as someone else? This idea is at the heart of reincarnation whereby some essence of you lingers when you wake up into your new body and reality. And this leads on to asking if consciousness itself persists after death or does the whole world (simulation) disappear with you?

It may be that when Enlightenment occurs the old you will simply disappear and be thoroughly forgotten. But. Neo can always jack back into the simulation when he likes and he effectively lives in two different worlds. Enlightenment is not a one way street, you could have a foot in both worlds. This is what the quote "Before Enlightenment carry wood chop water. After Enlightenment carry wood chop water." means. 

The idea of infinite levels of simulation may also mean that there is not just one Enlightenment but many awakenings available to you. This actually seems sensible. There should be nothing special about where you wake up to, except maybe becoming a God comparatively. In fact in Neo's case his "real" reality is quite miserable and tough despite being a kind of God in the Matrix itself.

What if there is no simulation? Until you awaken you won't know.

 

[LastThursday]

What is everything I think and yearn for pointing to? I find it very easy to get lost in the labyrinth of my own thoughts and sensations, I'm a sensationalist (new meaning freshly minted) by nature. Often this sensationlism has taken me into hedonism, clubs, drinking and ending up in strangers' flats. Is there a word for that one particular meaning of a word like "set" for example? Nuance, nope, aspect, nope, trope, nope, uh dunno moving on... What I often lack is that bird's eye view but sometimes it comes together.

I've gotten into the unenforced habit of doing an hour of hypnotic relaxation and then doing my old Tai Chi warm up exercises. This completely loosens my body and disolves tension, and also quietens my ADHD mind. I get a mild (dopamine?) buzz from it too, which is great. Who needs drugs.

What I yearned for hit me this morning after doing my routine, I'll try and describe it. It's the sensation you get when you first open the shutters to your windows. In Spain when I was young the windows had wooden door shutters to keep out the heat and bright sunlight in the mornings. I always had this sensation of joy or whatever when those shutters opened and the light and sound came flooding in. I get the same feeling waking up in a hotel room on holiday and sliding open the balcony door and just sucking in the essence of the morning and its goings on. There's a kind of excitement about what the day ahead will bring.

I might get a taste of that "first light" sensation here in the UK, but it never quite hits the spot for me. I'm always super disappointed when the whole day is overcast and/or wet, like deep down in my soul. It feels like over time that soul-disappoinment has taken root permanently and there's no way to excoriate it. How do I get back to joy? I suspect my strong need for nostalgia is also a way for me to re-experience a more joyful state I used to have. I watch the old cartoons and TV programs of my youth and old music. It's only a temporary salve. All the moments of excitement or joy seem so fleeting to me and I can never seem to hold on to them. I can see the same need in other people with their constant need to get together and socialise. I disparage it so much, because it always feels so shortlived and I get disappointed when it stops. And, I can see straight through to that need, which feels more like an addiction and duty than a genuine desire to be together. I can't blame people for this, I too am exactly the same. We can't genuinely be together because there are too many other distractions and obligations to being an adult. Instead we have this poor cloying substitute.

All that is to say that my mind and body is screaming at me and knows exactly what it wants - I want to be someone else and somewhen else and someplace else. Yet, I'm too paralysed to do or know what to do about it. Those obligations and distractions are too strong and I'm stuck fast in the spider's web, and the spider of disappointment is slowly cocooning me, ready to devour me.

 

Edited February 2, 2022 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Let's see if I can articulate this sensibly...

A lot of what I write about here is shadow work. I don't particularly cling to that title, I mean it's really good old fashioned "working through shit", that is actually a better, more descriptive title. Maybe it's because I have a distaste of clinging to buzzwords that try and make me sound intelligent. Nevertheless, shadow work it is. 

Off the bat there's already a negative feeling to shadow work. Shadows are mysterious and deceptive, they only give you a sense of what might be lurking around that corner: it could be small and benign or large and terrifying.  That unknown is itself unsettling. And so it is. When you start digging around and confronting memories and emotions you would rather not it can be overwhelming and instil fear in you or at the very least anxiety and embarrassment. Maybe most of us are not really courageous enough to confront ourselves. I for one have always consciously tried to have a very non-emotional and direct way of dealing with my problems. But I have found out (to my cost) that most of this shadow work stuff is pure emotion, and has nothing to do with rationality. 

My rationale in not confronting my problems has mostly been "out of sight out of mind". I 100% espouse this view. If I only have thoughts of a particularly horrific incident say once a year, then so what? What work is there to do here? None. This is what I call - for myself - the frequentist view of trauma. It's only when the frequency of a problematic thought or emotion crosses a certain threshold do you then need to do something about it. In other words, without prompting, the problem manifests enough to affect your every-day functioning. 

There is a nuance here. What happens a lot is that your shadows can be so frequent that they become enmeshed with your identity: "Hey Harry's a miserable so and so", "Charlotte's always so timid" and so on. Often the character descriptions people give you stick, and you start describing yourself that way: "I'm depressed". This makes it doubly hard to confront your shadows, because you're also having to chip away at your identity. There's this fear that if you were to suddenly become happy and problem free one day (by some miracle), then people wouldn't take you seriously and think you were being fake and inauthentic. No, it all has to happen very gradually and slow enough that people (and yourself) are not surprised by your transformation. Traditional therapy is supposed to be a long-drawn-out process for this very reason; not because it can't be a quick transformation, but because a quick transformation is too unsettling and fake sounding. Imagine a parent dying, you have therapy and three days later you're having a great time and you've never been happier! It's just not socially acceptable and it seems like a wholly unreasonable timescale and worst of all inauthentic.

I know from personal experience however, that transformation and removing or resolving shadows can be very quick indeed. In most cases shadows are long lasting only because they're never confronted or understood well enough to resolve. Say for example I have a fear of organising events with friends. This fear stops me from ever doing the things I'm interested in and I end up unhappy because of this. How would you attack this shadow? It seems insurmountable. If you have no clue as to what specifically triggers the fear (and it may actually be lots of different things), then it's going to be impossible to fix. You end up with the label "unambitious" or "uninterested" or "dull" perhaps - maybe especially so in a workplace setting.

My point for this post was that it's very easy to fall into the negativity trap. Transformation seems to always be a process of inspecting and then resolving negativity. How could it be any other way? It seems like you have to constantly trigger or deal with negativity within yourself in order that you can be negativity free. Seen that way it's an absurd process. It's like asking a depressive to be happy by going deeper into their depression.  But it can be countered with positivity; there is a certain power to positivity.

On the whole given the choice between a positive thing and a negative thing, most of us would choose positivity. We have to learn to transform ourselves by crowding out our negativity with positivity. This can seem a bit Pollyanna at first, but if the frequentist view of things is correct then it's very sensible. The idea here is that there is only a finite space for stuff in your mind and body to express itself. If you fill that space with positivity then the negativity has less space to express itself (it becomes less frequent). I literally mean here filling your life with: laughter, joy, connection, purpose, goals, pleasure etc. This has to be an active and conscious process, it takes dedication and stamina and an eye for knowing how to bring that joy in. Positivity is a habit.

 

 

Edited February 7, 2022 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

It's just not happening this morning (work that is). So I'll spew some more words for entertainment (whose?).

Headless Incense Burner

I have a dark wooden incense burner which I rather like. I bought it in Brighton many moons ago, which is a hippy new agey place - not that that's relevant. On one end it has a tiny Buddha sitting there cross-legged forever contemplating the smoke. At one point or another I managed to knock Buddha's head off. Luckily I salvaged the head. If I were the sort to believe in omens I might have quivered in my boots. But I'm not. I did however laugh at the profound joke of it all: a headless Buddha contemplating the smoke. Are we not all headless Buddha's contemplating ephemeral smoke?

Yesterday I glued his head back on and his identity came back. He's a very serious sort, he should take some hints from his jovial fat bellied alter ego.

Dog In Heat

I noticed that I'm super guilty of this. No, not of being an insatiable horny dog. But, of sitting in ignorance. Like a dog who lies there panting from heat exhaustion sitting directly in the midday sun until her owner admonishes her and tells her to go lie in the shade. Aren't we all like this? Ignorant enough and stuck in our ways, that we don't realise that relief is "just over there" in the shade. This is why I go for walks and listen to music and consume art and force myself to write, it's my way of not stupidly getting stuck in myself and dying of heat exhaustion.

Jumping Through Hoops

Notice how everything is so god-damned complicated? I very much feel that in my work writing software. Even doing the simplest thing takes effing hours to construct, test and push live. It's a matter of steps. There are a bajillion steps to most things in life. Even making a cup of tea has at least four steps. Inside of me is a small impatient child which sometimes manifests and gets frustrated at it all. It seems like what society really wants from us is to be performing thousands of steps all the bloody time, like headless chickens (which are very unlike headless Buddhas). The petulant child inside me wants to say "F**k right off" and then go and do something that doesn't involve behaving like a machine. What is that then? Listening to music and burning incense after a nice walk on a sunny day. I guess the irony is that going for a walk takes many steps.

Edited February 7, 2022 by LastThursday

[Leo Nordin]

Hello LastThursday, I am sorry for how I've been. Glad to see your doing well. Nice to see you 

[Leo Nordin]

Are you? 

Abyss was sucking, and I was aline with thee, now he wants me to do. And immensely happy I am to share not wither away

Edited February 8, 2022 by Leo Nordin

[LastThursday]

17 hours ago, Leo Nordin said:

Glad to see your doing well. Nice to see you 

Thanks.

--

On 24/01/2022 at 0:00 PM, LastThursday said:

I have been having words with my subconscious right before sleep so that I don't have so much of this unpleasantness. I specifically talk to that part of my subconscious that deals with dreams. Over time I've built up the ability to communicate with my subconscious via bodily signals: I ask it a question and it responds yes/no/maybe often by bodily "jerks" maybe in the fingers or foot or whatever. How I built up that ability is interesting and I'll post about it some time. 

It seems to be working (to my surprise). My dreams have been less frustrating and characters in my dreams have been far more approachable and willing to interact with me. But there's still some work to do there. 

This went to pot last night. I had three separate unpleasant mini dreams. 

In the first I was living on Mars. I think I was having discussions about escaping or revolution, as if I was somehow enslaved or oppressed in some way. I looked down at my trousers and patted them to shake the Martian dust out, but had the sense that the dust itself was really coming out of my body. My patting myself was actually just trying to get the dust from inside my body out. Eughh.

In order to start the escape I found I had a screwdriver in my hand, and when I was questioned by a superior (with potential of them finding out my plans) I had no choice but to drive it through his throat. There was no blood, but I could feel the give in his flesh. Again eughhh.

Saying all that, it would make an excellent plot for a story. Next, weirdness:

I was lying in a dark room and I could hear a radio station very clearly. I realised that it was inside my head, because if I moved it it faded in and out. The announcer (who called himself Churchill) was giving a monologue on climate change. I had the impression it was a talk radio show. The name of the radio station was Ali FM. 

And last:

Again I'm lying in the dark in bed, and I suddenly realised a persistent hissing sound and the shadow of a snake on the wall. I mean it was B-movie style, it unnerved me, but I found myself saying "Stop it now!" several times. I actually work up at this point, overheating in bed. 

I generally find analysing my dreams pointless. But thinking about the screwdriver incident after I woke up made me think of skewering for some reason (which I guess it was). This is relevant because a skewer is a position in chess, which I've been playing a lot lately. Maybe the whole dream about Mars was really about chess?

I'm still hoping the weirdness and unpleasantness stops in my dreams. I do think that I have always had the "if it can go wrong it will go wrong" feeling about life, because bad luck just seems to stick to me lack a bad smell. I'm sure that sentiment just translates into my dreams. If I was inclined in a particular way, I would even say that I've been cursed at some point. Any curse removal strategies would be gratefully received.

[LastThursday]

Is ignorance bliss or is ignorance suffering? 

Yesterday I was crossing a road on my daily walk. The road is a small junction onto a busy road and it's slightly uphill. There's always a car waiting to pull out of the junction, so people tend to cross behind the waiting car. If you drive a manual, then you know you have to keep good clutch control to stop the car rolling back down the hill before pulling away. Inevitably, there is a small amount of roll backwards. Enough roll to make contact with any pedestrians crossing immediately behind you. This in fact happened, and the pedestrian was slightly taken aback and glared at the driver in disgust. 

Who's at fault here? I'd say the pedestrian. His own ignorance caused him suffering, both in terms of being angry, but also the potential for being physically harmed. I'd like to think he's no longer ignorant. 

On the surface it seems that ignorance is a good strategy for living life. You only worry about the things happening in your immediate environment, and everything else is irrelevant or for somebody else to deal with. It allows you to be carefree and not be burdened worrying about things over which you have little control. We are all ignorant to greater or lesser degrees: we can't know everything. What about the things you ignore over which you do have control?

The problem with ignorance is that you don't know what you don't know. It's possible there are many things you could do to reduce your suffering (e.g. keeping more space when cross behind cars), but you're unaware of them until something happens that brings them to your attention. This is how we all mature (by becoming less ignorant), we simply learn the hard way through experience and often by suffering. But the process of becoming less ignorant doesn't have to be completely passive. We can actively choose to reduce our ignorance, so that we can pre-empt and avoid future suffering.

The main way to do this is through learning. I don't particularly mean formal learning such as a course in mathematics, but more informal curiosity driven learning. For example asking: why do cars roll backwards? And then doing a quick investigation. I would say that most people are not actively reducing their ignorance in this way.  It all seems so frivolous and pointless. However, over time all these tiny reductions in ignorance amount to a big reduction in ignorance and potential suffering. The tiny learnings about how the world works often synergise with each other, and you end up with a deep understanding of things. This then affords you the ability to be strategic and actively avoid future suffering: you get X-ray vision and begin to see things others can't.

To really deeply self-actualise you should actively and continuously choose to reduce your ignorance as much as possible. Ignorance is not bliss.