LastThursday

I respect your point of view. Yeah exploring systems thinking is like explaining maths to most - boring and difficult and pointless. But for example Spiral Dynamics is systems thinking and there's a LOT of talk about that on the forum. People do care if they can see its worth.

I wouldn't bash the forum members too much. Systems thinking doesn't come naturally to 99% of people. Even thinking differently is very hard for most. It's not lack of care, it's lack of ability. There should be a lot more topics on systems thinking on the forum.

I think there is a lot of juice to be squeezed by thinking about the self this way. There is a lot of talk on here about how the self is an illusion or a construction. To say that anything is a "construction" is to think about it like a system. In other words a construction is made up of interacting parts. The idea of parts of the self can be most clearly experienced when you can't make a decision about something. For example say I can't decide whether going to university is beneficial or not. Maybe one part of me wants to experience the social life and loves learning. Maybe another part of me wants to just start earning money and getting experience in the real world and get a head start. Treating the self like a system of parts (sometimes conflicting with each other), can help resolve decision paralysis and other similar problems. The idea is to examine what each part wants and to come to some sort of common agreement or goal. This is a process of getting the parts to communicate better together. For example maybe you go to university, but take a year out in industry - both parts would be satisfied. What happens in reality is that the system of the self is built up haphazardly over time without any real planning. It's like building a house with non-standard parts and no blueprints: it's possible, but it can lead to a dysfunctional design. Anyway, I'm sure the are many more ideas from systems thinking that can be applied to the self.

I would reword that as: "I haven't found a way to remember stuff I can't remember". I think that gets to the core of the problem. How would you know if a memory is suppressed until your remember it again (in which case it's no longer suppressed)?

Lifting your hand is not free will, deciding to lift your hand is free will. There's a difference. One is actuality, one is potentiality. For the word nerds: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/will#English

Neither is false. It's just a matter of which way you're looking. Achievement is looking to the future. Being alive is just looking at the present. It's like sitting on a train, the future is rushing towards you and you're going somewhere, but if you close your eyes you don't feel like you're moving at all. You could also look towards the past and see how much has changed - and this is also the source of your identity and history.

This. The tension could be strong emotions, fear, anxiety and so on. "Solving" just means unlinking the event from the tension again, so the tension no longer gets triggered by thoughts of the event or when encountering similar situations. There are techniques for doing this and one way is to re-link the event to different more positive emotions (good tension). A different tack is to recontextualize or reframe the original event, so it no longer has the same meaning for the body, and it can no longer trigger the same bad tension. This linking/unlinking process is a completely different way of seeing trauma than the processing or pressure building up or accumulation ideas.

@Vibroverse your memories are like the edited highlights of a sports match. You could re-edit them or change them completely and you could rewire your identity that way (this is kind of what therapy does). But some things, like learning a language, can only be done by actually going through the process, which always takes time. It's like the difference between moving chairs around for better feng shui or making a chair from scratch. It's the difference between autobiographical memory and procedural memory. Of course if you were God you could do anything you liked.

See. It's all a matter of perspective. What repeats is what you interpret as being "the same". 1 is not 11 and is not 111 they are all distinct, but from a different perspective they repeat.

What really is a repetition? It is a symmetry - mathematically. If you swap A for B then it would look the same. Sure you can have infinity without repetition, just start counting up from 1, do any numbers repeat? Absolute infinity can be anything it likes with or without repetition. Distinctions are a feature not a bug. Two things may be distinct and the same simultaneously. Red and green are different, but they are both colours. Non-duality just goes to the extreme and calls everything "the same". You can have duality and non-duality simultaneously.

Something for the dating section no?

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.

I think it largely depends on which point of view you take. If you're an idealist then consciousness is supposed to be the bedrock and so consciousness must be constant. There's a link with truth also, because truth is that which is constant. Your view on time and space and all that stuff comes into it too. If there is no time and no space, then it's clear that there is still existence/consciousness so that is constant (my original answer). If there is time, then all moments are strung together by time itself, so time is constant - equally for space. In other words whatever feature of reality you choose to focus on, it must be constant in order to be able to focus on it.

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.

It's only when the noise stops you realise how peaceful it can be. Classic tune!

@WelcometoReality putting my meta-hat on, I wouldn't use a word at all. The problem as I see it is as soon I try to explain whatever this is, I'm already into map and not territory. I think I was using the word existence in a sense with as little map as possible, which explains my nitpickiness. But even using the word this is going too far. Maybe I'm wrong and there isn't any constancy whatsoever, just a story about constancy that I believe: after all how do you compare this moment with this moment with this moment? Aren't they all different in quality? Is there really any commonality at all between moments?

I think "arises" is too strong a word, unexistence is always made with reference to existence. But I'm just being nitpicky, please ignore me. Your sentiment is correct.

There aren't any rules about how you should use the forum (generally), so it's not possible to misuse the forum. <<< this me procrastinating ahahaha...

That the world seems to carrying on existing. Existence.

@Carl-Richard this is good stuff. Even if you are deep into systems type thinking, it's always good to keep in the back of your mind that you can go beyond it. For example: A system is always part of a larger system (a car is part of traffic, the internet). A system nearly always interacts in some way with other adjacent systems (a car emits air pollution). The difference between a unit in a system and its relationships is often arbitrary. For example a cell sends out chemical signals, those chemical signals (relationships) are themselves units. Or, in physics a gluon (relationship) is the same as a quark (unit), both being disturbances in the underlying field. Or a person (unit) speaks (relationship) by disturbing the air-system. Anyway I'll stop there. Good post!

Liberation is a perspective. And yet the delusion doesn't come from nowhere, it isn't a separate thing. The delusion is made of the same stuff as the non-delusion.

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.

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.

Postmodernism, language and truth:

Spirituality is not about counting.