Uncertainty is a mathematical thing. Math is the language of the physical. The physical creates emotions, which in turn, influence the physical. Where does the mind fall – thoughts? Thoughts can impact the physical and vice versa. Do thoughts fall somewhere between, serving as a bridge between the physical and the emotional? Are we our thoughts, or something separate? Words are the language of the emotional. Words are physical. They say that words can hurt. Math speaks about the physical world to the emotional, the emotional world speaks to the mental world with words. Physical = math. Emotional = words. Thoughts are the how. What is truly the distinction between mental and emotional? If the difference is the presence of rationale, then math or logic has to be its language. I keep seeing a triangle in my mind. Flow charts too. Thoughts impact the emotional. Physical – MATH -> Emotional – WORDS -> Mental – LOGIC. Math transforms the physical into emotional, words translate the emotional into thoughts, and logic transforms thoughts into the physical. There is a bigger thought here. If I am not my body, then we can also infer that I am not my emotions, and I am not my thoughts. I am aware of and separate from all three. Awareness. Awareness is the only element that exists without translation or transformation. That is what I am.
Tag: #thoughts
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I had a conversation recently with a friend of mine and he was telling me about a comedy show where the dude also hypnotized the audience members. During the show, the dude instructed the audience members in a few things, but the final part was to put your palms together, press them together as hard as you can, and imagine that the two hands fused into one.
My friend told me he could not separate his hands after being brought out of the hypnosis, try as he might. This got me thinking.
Your mind really does have amazing power over your experience. In this case, you are guided to a place of openness by the hypnotist, given a task that makes you imagine something, reinforces that imagined reality with something physical, and once you bring your focus back to the moment, that imagined thing becomes your reality.
I don’t think most people realize how much your mindset and thoughts truly do shape your reality. If you want to change your reality, you have to start with your thoughts…
Interesting factoid. I read somewhere that your brain reacts the same no matter if you are experiencing an event, remembering it, or imagining it.
My friend is fine now, by the way. His hands are no longer fused together by the power of his mind.
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Which is worse for a child? Having parents who think you will never amount to anything, or parents who expect you to accomplish things that may be unreasonable?
There are bad consequences to each circumstance, without a doubt, but which is more damaging to the child in the long run? I think it kinda depends on the child, honestly.
There could be a child in situation 1, whose parents believe they will never accomplish anything, but they make a choice to prove the parents wrong, and wind up being a successful individual, but they deal with the knowledge that no one believed in them from the get-go. There could also be a child in situation 2, who does their absolute best to accomplish everything, but falls short, because, well… they are human and can’t do everything. They carry a sense of guilt and the idea of “I should have….” when in reality, they did everything they could at the time.
I am curious about this… admittedly, I feel that I belong to group 2, because I tried my damnedest to do what my parents expected, but that just wasn’t going to happen because, well…. life. At this point, I don’t blame my parents for any of that. They certainly had their own issues to work through, which bled on to me. But, what is it like on the other side of this? I don’t know what it is to be in group 1, but I want to know and understand that side of things.
If anyone reading this belongs to group 1, please reach out, I want to know your story. If you belong to group 2, please reach out, I want to know your story. I love to hear people’s struggles, and what they have done to cope with/mitigate them. Understanding one another and our various circumstances is one of the keys to growth….
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I’ve been thinking. There cannot even be a plan, at least not a singular one.
I have been preparing a piece on consciousness, and that will explain some of this thought process. but bear with me. I need to get this out.
We are going to assume that any deity – God, Allah, The Moon Goddess, Vishnu, Spirit, Zeus, whomever – they are all human made representations of the grand consciousness that unites everything in the universe. Furthermore, we are going to assume – in a quantum field type perspective – that all possibilities for your life exist, but your observations of this particular version are what cause the field to collapse, and you living the life you have. So, in this thought process, your observation – your perspective, if you will – determines the life that you experience.
Now, in many religions, it is believed that the deity of choice has a plan, a way that things are supposed to happen. But, if we assume the quantum field perspective, that doesn’t make sense. There can be no concrete plan if literally anything is possible.
I am reminded of an episode of Star Trek: TNG where there was some sort of wormhole or tear in space or singularity that was pulling Enterprises from alternate dimensions/universes and popping them all in the same area of space and time, and they could speak to each other and see how life could be very, very different. I believe one of the ships actually exploded after being “relocated”.
This is similar, albeit in a more subtle, elegant, quantum insanity kind of way. All of the possibilities for your life exist in the quantum field – you could be a rockstar, you could be a janitor, you could be a world-renowned artist, you could be a drug addict, or anything and everything in between or outside of that range. You only experience one of those possibilities. But what if it were possible to move between those possibilities? I’m not necessarily saying that we change realities like we change socks (and boy, would that be a trip!), but what if, through enough energy transfer, a person was able to shift themselves into a different possibility? To leave the old set of possibilities behind because they had surpassed the maximum energy level that that one possibility could handle/tolerate? Because, if I remember correctly, there is a maximum energy that photons can hold, so the same could be said about other subatomic structures, or even molecules, right?
And what if the plan changes with your actions? The plan is to get you from birth to death, but the how depends mostly on your free will. So, if you make a particular choice, change the energy levels involved, you bump yourself up or down to a different set of possibilities.
This idea is intriguing and fascinating. I have to explore this more, but I needed to get these thoughts out.
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Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life.
Well, this is a bit of a loaded question since hindsight is 20/20 and I don’t think I know a single person who would not want the opportunity to be better prepared for things. Having said that….
I wish I knew earlier in life that not everyone is going to work, play, and/or love as hard or as much as you do, and that it is unfair to expect yourself from other people. Had I known that from the get go, I could have saved myself a lot of stress, pain, and frustration.
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I had an awesome conversation with a friend of mine over breakfast today. For the record, conversation with her is always awesome, but I’m going to share this particular part of this one.
In the somewhat crazy and always varied range of topics, the word selfless came up, and how being selfless is generally considered to be a good quality. At most points in my life, I definitely agreed with this. But, I have learned that it can be taken to an unhealthy extreme. Like anything else in life, moderation is key. It is possible to be so selfless in your service of others that you literally find yourself without a sense of self (i.e. – “self-less”). Also, without a concept of caring for yourself, and knowledge of the fact that if you don’t do so, you cannot take care of other people.
It’s conversations like this that drive me and inspire me, talking about the human condition, why and how we do the things we do, how balance in everything is essential. All of it, and more. I just love it. This was a great start to the day.
Happy Sunday!
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I’ve been thinking about this a lot the past few days…. I do talk about myself in the third person sometimes, especially when writing in my journal, and I am very curious as to two things. 1 – does anyone else do this? and 2 – what does this stem from? Why does my brain/mind sometimes choose to ignore or diminish its own existence? What is the coping mechanism at play here, because I have this sneaking suspicion that this is not a “normal” thing.
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I disagree with this idea, for a couple of reasons.
First, it defies logic. 1+1 does not equal 1, unless we’re talking about one sperm and one egg joining to create an embryo. But in that case, the sperm and the egg each only have half the genetic material necessary to create an embryo, so that situation is actually 0.5 + 0.5 =1, which makes sense.
Now, since we are each born as a whole being, that means we are complete on our own. Any completeness that someone may be seeking will only be found within themselves, not from any external thing or entity.
I believe this idea started in Greek mythology, and humans were said to be these strange beings with 4 arms, 4 legs and two faces….Even now, the mental image of this is bizarre and difficult to comprehend… Anyway, for whatever reason, Zeus got a bug up his ass, split all the humans, scattered them, and we were then doomed to roam the earth in search of our other half. Nice story, but I don’t buy it.
I just wonder why we’ve held on to this idea, why we curse ourselves generation after generation with this delusion that we are incomplete without this elusive counterpart. Why do we not instead think of ourselves as intact from the get go, and view relationships to/with others as ways to accentuate our qualities and experience things in life?
I also wonder where the world would be by now if had it been populated the whole time with people who knew their entire lives that they were complete as they were? A bunch of people searching only for experiences and things they are passionate about, not someone to make them whole or worthy as a result of that wholeness. How much happier would humanity be?
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What do you enjoy most about writing?
Where to start here? I know the question is limited to a single answer because it says, “what do you enjoy most“, but you have to evaluate the options first, right?
Writing can be an emotional outlet, first and foremost, and though I may not “enjoy” the process of a particular emotional release, I love that writing provides that for me. And then, I can enjoy or appreciate what I have written after the fact, so there is that.
Writing can be a beautiful form of communication, sometimes portraying things that the spoken word simply doesn’t allow for due to the immediate nature of that form of communication. You can’t say something, reach out, erase the words that you blurted out, and replace them with something else. With writing, you can; you can take your time and edit a piece until it’s just right.
Writing has dualistic qualities that I admire. It can be soft or harsh, painfully direct or compassionately subtle, immensely complex or incredibly simple – it all depends on the context and needs of the situation. Writing can be a vessel for nuance and undertone, and the interpretation of that depends on the reader. That’s why it is important to know your audience, I suppose.
Writing also supplies a hard copy back up of your thoughts, your feelings, your ideas and explorations. Speaking about these things can be great, but it can also be forgotten or mis-remembered. Writing, at least for me, provides a snapshot of the truth of my existence at any given point, and can also provide a robust history of that truth over the years.
What it boils down to is that I enjoy using writing in a variety of ways, and it always delivers. Writing is an extremely adaptable, completely dependable thing to have in your life.
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I have a bunch of random inspirations, ideas half formed that I want to turn into interesting pieces going down various rabbit holes. But, there is something more interesting to me at the moment that I want to explore, and that is the idea of anger. I’ve written before that Anger is a gift, and that anger is actually rooted in self-preservation.
If these things are true, which I believe they are – why, then, do some people have such a hard time dealing with anger, attempting to stifle it rather than let it serve its purpose?
In some cases, it’s truly a case of “this is not the time”, which is fine – it is actually impressive in some situations that people recognize that. In other cases, we try to spare the feelings of whomever we are mad at, which could be questionable depending on the circumstances. In other cases, a person is taught that having “negative” emotions of any kind is bad, wrong, not acceptable, or flat out dangerous in terms of their own safety. This, in my opinion, is the wrong approach. Anger, just like any emotion, is valid and acceptable, discounting cases of anger being the excuse for abuse. That just makes you an asshole who can’t deal with their emotions or control their actions. But, I digress.
In this last case, why do we, as a society, tell people that an emotion that stems from a need to protect ourselves from some threat is bad? Why do we not, instead, teach people how to properly express or experience anger and teach them appropriate, safe, and effective ways to deal with it? Why do we assign any objective value to a subjective experience? Sadness or anger or grief or whatever the case is, are not inherently negative, though it does suck to experience them. Why do we attempt to stop what the person is feeling rather than allow them to feel it, process it, and then let it go in time? Or simply sit with them in the thick of the sludge until they are ready and then help them to find a way to climb out, clean off, and move on?
I think perhaps it’s because these “negative” emotions make people uncomfortable for some reason. Maybe they’re not healed themselves, or they have a good handle on dealing with their own emotions but are uncomfortable with sitting with someone going through an emotional shit storm of their own. I don’t know. But, it may be helpful to look to animals to answer this question. Animals have emotions just like we do. If you don’t believe that, you lack a soul. Just sayin.
Anyway – back to what I was saying. I have three dogs. Two of them are brothers, and before they were neutered, went after each other sometimes. Over food, over attention, or because one of them just got a bug up their ass and was cranky that day. But, one is devastated and lost if the other leaves without them (like to the vet), and any random 20 seconds of teeth baring, growling, ferocious interaction is forgotten within minutes. They recognize something that I think a lot of us don’t – emotions serve a purpose and should be experienced/expressed, but are transient in the sense that the immediate anger does not negate the fact that they love each other. As humans, we tend to think too much. “I’m mad, and if I tell this person I am mad at them, they will hate me, or think I’m a bad person, or don’t love them” or whatever. The dog thought process? “Hey, that’s my human, get away! Fuck you! *growling/snarling, etc* oh, ok, we’re good now. wanna sniff some poop and then go cuddle on the couch?” Seriously, how did we let these big frontal cortexes of ours interfere with something so beautiful and natural?
I have said before, and experienced plenty of times, that the only way to get through an emotion and let it go is to go through it. Or, in more familiar terms, “the only way out is through.” It really is true. If you allow yourself to feel something – no matter what it is – it will have its moment of occupying space and time in your mind, and then move on to whatever is next in its ethereal existence. Trying to suppress emotions only forces them to find other ways to have the effect they were meant to have, and makes it that much more intense to deal with when you are forced to. And I promise, you will be forced to at some point.
A Peculiar Cerebral Tangle 