Journey to Nothing

[LastThursday]

How would you re-invent yourself?

Re-invention is the process of converting the absolute into the relative. We are excellent story tellers and we buy into our own stories; just like an actor learns his parts and reproduces his character on demand with all their woes and manerisms and aspirations. Having had your entire life to refine the character you inhabit you are very good at it. Your character is a kind of absolute and unchanging entity.

You should already be suspicious.

It's plainly obvious if memory is to be trusted, that your character has changed over time and probably in innumarable different ways. Even just the ravages of time have sculpted your appearance if nothing else.

There are no absolutes to your character, just an ever shifting set of stories and equivalences: yesterday I WAS sad, tomorrow I AM enlightened.

What would it be to inhabit a character on demand, but not do that on a stage? How many different scripts do you think your being can hold? Can you switch instantly between a humble, shy, introvert and a brash, in your face, extrovert? How flexible is it possible to be? Is it even desirable?

To understand a thing you have to BE it.  When you meet your friend Jane you have to understand her character enough to even recognise her as Jane; and when you talk and laugh with her, you must understand her point of view and her history. All that has to be summoned on demand. The character/story of Jane is already within you.

You have within you the scripts of thousands of characters each of which you seamlessly bring into consciousness when needed. You already have that experience to draw from, and you probably already do, having picked up all number of manerisms and ways of being from others.

To truly break free is to first realise this: "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players."

And then to realise you can choose to be any player you like, whenever you like, or to be none of them.

[Wisebaxter]

@LastThursday You're welcome buddy. I've now realised maybe you wanted a beat more than something melodic, but still, glad you liked

Edited June 29, 2020 by Wisebaxter

[LastThursday]

Having a love for mathematics, I occasionally think about the use of the word "infinity" on the forums. 

I think we can all agree on the definition: an unbounded amount of something. But if mathematics teaches us anything we know there are different types of infinity.

Georg Cantor really got to grips with infinity and came up with things like countably infinite and infinity of infinities and the Aleph notation for classifying infinities. I think this shows that the everyday understanding of infinity is ambiguous - there's a lot more to it. That makes it difficult to be precise about what we're really talking about when saying that reality is infinite or the universe is infinite or that God is infinity itself.

One way to identify an infinity is as a repeating process. We say that the process carries on without ever stopping. Notice how we seem to intuitively grasp what this means without having explicitly been taught this. Even though we can't fully comprehend an infinity, we seem to know one when we see one. How strange.

How are we able to do this? We do it by compressing down an infinity into a finite thing which our minds can manipulate symbolically using language. The quintessential finite infinity is the circle. We grok the fact that the circle has no ends unlike a piece of rope - which intuitively implies that you can keep walking around a circle without end if you choose to. We can see the circle is somehow unbounded (it has no ends) and we can equate it as an infinity. A circle is a kind of algebra for infinity. Indeed the symbol for infinity is just a twisted circle.

So what sort of infinity is reality? Is it actually an infinity? Answering that requires us to look for lack of boundaries, because any unbounded thing is infinite.

At first glance it seems like everything is bounded everywhere, discreteness prevails. The world is full of "stuff" which has edges and faces and insides and skins and shells and all sorts of membranes and extents. Even the fuzziest of things such as atoms have a kind of ill-defined boundary where its sphere of influence tapers off to zero. And, if you believe scientists even so called empty space is a seething mass of virtual particles.

However, if you contemplate hard enough you come to realise that all these boundaries are illusory. They are mostly convenient handles for our minds to grab hold on to and so that we can label reality with language and perform a type of mental algebra with objects and actions. Once you start removing more and more boundaries everything becomes contiguous with everything else until you are left with a reality with no boundaries - and this is an infinity. This is non-duality. And, non-duality doesn't have any boundaries and so has to be infinite.

How infinite is non-duality? Non-duality by its very nature cannot be pinned down. Any explanation or diagram of it must be done by imposing boundaries on it and this cannot be a non-duality. Non-duality is indescribable. Because it is indescribable it has to be infinite by any definable attribute such as: size, weight, age, density, colour, feel and so on.  It is infinite in an absolute sense.

 

Edited June 29, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Right, so I'm going to have a go at putting my spin on this question. Wish me luck.

Is it possible to explain the nature and origin of conscious phenomena? This means all those feelings and colours, sensations, thoughts, sounds, tastes and basically everything you experience. If you're not a materialist and believe that consciousness is all there is, then explaining consciousness is actually a TOE (Theory Of Everything). That's a pretty bold thing to try and explain - from any paradigm.

------

One place to start is information theory. Information is based on a Platonic idea of states. For example a light switch has two states: on and off. The heat control on your hob may have ten states: off to very hot. We can simplify things by labelling the states with different numbers. For example we might label the light switch states: 0 for off and 1 for on. And the hob states: 0 to 9.

A number is just a set of symbols strung together. For decimal numbers we use the digits 0 to 9. But we can use other bases such as base 2 or base 37, in which case the set of symbols is different.  Or we can use a non-positional notation, for example Roman Numerals use this set of symbols: I, V, X, L, C, M.

A number is just a number, so regardless of the how it's represented it can mean the same thing. For example 150 in decimal is CL in Roman Numerals and 10010110 in base 2 (binary).

Is there a kind of optimal representation for a number? One criterion we can use is to have the minimum number of symbols possible to represent numbers. We could use base 1, in which case we have one symbol. Counting in base 1 would be like this X, XX, XXX, XXXX, XXXXX, XXXXXX. It's ok, but it doesn't seem particularly optimal size-wise.  What about base 2?: 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111. That seems better and only uses two symbols.

Keeping with the positional notation of base 2, it's prudent to ask exactly how many states can be represented. That is, given such and such number of digits how many numbers can it represent?

Clearly with just one digit we can only have two states: 0 and 1. With two digits we have four possible states: 00, 01, 10, 11. In fact for each digit that's added it doubles the number of states we can represent. For sixteen digits we have 65536 different possible states.

Now we can ask the opposite question. For example say I was crazy and I wanted to assign a different number to each unique word in spoken English language. Then instead of using the words themselves, I could just use numbers in base 2. How many digits would I need to represent a spoken word? If you know about 60,000 words (this is generous) then clearly you would need roughty 16 digits. Every word you speak could then be represented like this: 1010111100011101, 0100101000001101 etc

Notice that I've done some sort of witchcraft here.  I've turned English into numbers. And if I wanted to I could turn the numbers back into English.

I'm not restricted to messing about with English words. I can turn ANY discrete set of things into binary numbers. And, I can calculate exactly how many digits I would need to represent those numbers.  For example, I could turn your face into numbers by taking exact measurements of you nose and lips and eyelids and forehead and chin and angle of cheeks and on and on. I could then give someone those numbers and they could reproduce your face in detail.

The are several takeaways here:

• Anything in the real world can be represented with numbers
• The representation always requires a certain number of base 2, binary digits (bits)
• If you decide to capture more detail, you'll need more numbers
• You can only ever represent stuff with a finite amount of numbers

So to formalise things a bit. The number of digits you need to represent a thing is the amount of "information" it contains. Information is simply measured in bits (i.e. binary digits).

We could also represent scientific formulas, scientfic papers, and everything else with just numbers. This is exactly what computers do.

The fundamental thing to grok is, that ANY explanation has to be given in some sort of language (English, Mathematics, diagrams etc). Therefore it is representable by numbers and therefore it has a finite information content (bits).

But pay close attention!

The numbers themselves are NOT the things they represent. The numbers are only matched to the things they represent. My hob may have ten different heat settings which I can label with numbers - but the numbers themselves are not "hot".

-------

The hard problem of consciousness is that we cannot ever explain the sensation of consciousness with numbers. Information theory is not enough. All science uses language, which is just another form of "information" and as such cannot describe the direct experience of consciousness. They can measure the different intensities of things relative to each other yes, but not reproduce the things themselves. The map cannot ever be the territory.

To put this into perspective here is how a scientist is trying to explain my conscious experience: 101010001010010100010010010101001001001001010101011110011101001100100101....

Edited June 29, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I've been working from home since the lockdown started. Some days I find it hard to even start doing work and end up distracting myself. This morning was particularly bad and I had a lot of distracting thoughts and ideas come up. I find this creates tension and irritation because I know the work I need to do isn't going to go away. On top of that someone was using a jackhammer outside all morning.

I did about twenty minutes of meditation. My intention with meditation is to shift my focus to my environment and away from my thoughts. I usually start off with eyes closed and just pay attention to whatever I'm directly experiencing: sounds, tactile feelings, smells. If I find myself starting to lose myself in thought, I interrupt it by opening my eyes. I then look around and look at my environment. I will then let my eyes close naturally when they're ready to. For each cycle of opening and closing my eyes, I find it easier not to get lost in thought or mental chit chat and to just be in the present moment. The mind becomes quieter.

This morning I followed this with about twenty minutes of music practice. I find playing my keyboard also focusses my attention away from thoughts and I can get into flow quite easily.  There is a kind of kinaesthetic thinking that goes on when playing an instrument, but it's very different from every day thought.

All this dissipated the irritation and I felt calmer mentally. I started working. I find I'm quite sensitive to sound and that can be a distraction, so I normally work with music and/or white noise (this site's good: https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php). White noise can be quite effective at blocking speech especially in a noisy office. I never work with a TV or radio on because talking definitely takes my attention away too much.

As for working itself, I tend to work in bursts. Programming is thinking intensive and can be quite fatiguing if I don't take regular breaks. But I don't force the breaks. I will stop if there is a natural place to stop or park a bit of project work, or if I find my attention drifting away. Getting up and walking about or doing ten minutes of house chores works for me.

 

Edited June 30, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

I try and tell myself regularly that all my faults and character flaws are not some God given immutable thing.

I often try and work out where some of my traits originated from. Some of those traits I would like to change or get rid of, others I would like to improve upon. A lot of my traits and habits seem to have originated from my parents, this may seem natural but it isn't.

The influence of my parents on me probably dropped off sharply when I became an adult and left home. That means I had about 19 years of being "programmed" by them. That stacks up against the rest of the 28 years. The impression I get is one of lopsidedness, in that they've had a disporportionate amount of influence.

I can see this turning in a finger pointing exercise. But, it's really just me trying to appreciate that I've largely just "taken on" these traits without much awareness behind them and that there is a reason for me having them. And so in future I can do something positive to change them - they're not immutable or God given.

Here's a rag bag list of my strong traits and their origins:

• Perfectionsism - mother
• Introspection - father
• Analytical thought - father
• Autistic tendencies - father, mother
• Fear of people / Discomfort around people - mother
• Sarcasm - mother
• Hedonism, love of partying - mother
• Anxiety - mother
• Feeling of being different and/or excluded from everyone else - father, mother
• Childlike fascination with / reverence of women - father
• Stubborness - mother
• Tendency to depression and gloom - father
• Learned helplessness - mother
• Weak work ethic - mother
• Cutting myself off from the world - mother
• Lack of emotional intelligence - father, mother
• Caring what other's think / peacocking - mother
• Absentmindedness, lack of attention - father
• Impulsiveness / acting without thinking - mother, father
• Introversion - mother, father
• Being passive and reactive - mother
• Strong value on intelligence - father
• Curtailing excitement and fun and being self restrained - father

Awareness alone is curative. To a large degree I've improved on a lot of these traits over time. But some are proving very hard to shift:

Autistic tendencies / Lack of emotional intelligence

I'd say that my social ability, fluidity, tolerance of people and emotional intelligence have skyrocketed in the last ten years. I'm a proud introvert, so I understand that long bouts of social interaction is exhausting. But on occasion I still find myself feeling and behaving socially awkwardly: I can't think fast enough, or I get overly carried away with getting my point over, or I become very quiet and non-interactional in groups, or I just don't follow social conventions well. It's still a work in progress. I've come to the conclusion that I'm not autistic, it's just learned ingrained behaviour and lack of practice - I can overcome.

Learned helplessness  / Fear of people / Being passive

To a large degree I still try and avoid people I don't know. Until the last few years I strongly avoided speaking on the phone (largely overcome it), and whilst I efficiently run my domestic life, doing anything larger than that, I find nearly impossible. Doing anything at all nearly always involves speaking to strangers or organising other people. My trouble with strangers is about level and confidence - anything which is outside my level of competence I shy away from - I'm happy to speak to people in the shops or on the street however - but even casaually contacting friends I find difficult.

Mentally, I think it's a confluence of not having well defined goals, fear of embarrasment and awkwardness (which I've experienced a lot), not having strong opinions and being a fence sitter (indecisiveness), introversion, and a strong resistance to having my freedom curtailed - i.e. any large investment of time and money to improve myself and circumstances will necessarily involve lack of freedom to do as I wish. There's no simple answer to all this, but practicing "future vision" will remove one of those blocks.

We're all a work in progress.

 

Edited July 1, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

More from my life story. Maybe I can get more of a handle of the character that is "me".

I was always uncomfortable with strong emotions. I was an oversensitive kid, and outbursts of emotion either positive or negative overly stimulated me and overwhelmed me. My natural reaction was to retract, like pulling fingers away from a hot flame.  There was a lot of this as a young kid. On occasion I would blow emotionally myself as it was the only way to express myself. The pattern was set.

I went on to be quite an unemotional and pragmatic teenager. I didn't know it until my thirties, but it was all purely a defence mechanism against overwhelm. I realised very early on that being pragmatic could solve most problems effectively and throughout, pragmatism has been my best friend. I saw a lot of people around me suffering due to over engaging in their emotions: my parents, my sister. I was the lucky one, I could weather the storm of my own emotions and other's emotions and not be affected. 

My pragmatism did indeed bear fruit. I was the first one in my extended family to go to university - perhaps in the deep history of my family. They were all poor working class both English and Spanish sides - my abuelo would go fishing at twilight every morning well into his seventies and sell at market that morning, doing all the prep work along with my abuela.

I also knew that engaging soberly in society's values would propel me along enough that I didn't have to be overwhelmed with the harshness of the world. I had the long term girlfriend. I always wanted a lavish wedding with everyone I ever knew there to celebrate with me. I would have several wonderful children I could mould to be super-adults. I bought the house. I had a close set of friends. I had a steady job and good income. Perfection.

My sister once called me an emotionless robot. The only thing I could think was: "you're the deluded one" - I was so sure of myself.

I had an impulsive streak. 

Mostly this would show itself harmlessly, mostly when I was drunk. Britain has a robust drinking culture, it's how we relax and socialise - most of us are not alcoholics, we understand our poison well.  I would get drunk and behave in an uninhibited manner which was barely tolerated by my introvert friends, but I was loving and mostly fun and it made me brave.  It allowed me the emotional expression I was lacking. 

Whilst sober I would often make rash decisions, which I would always regret later. It makes me cringe to repeat it here, so I won't. The point was, that my emotions would drive me unpredictably at times. I never really understood emotions, I would have them of course, but I just didn't process them naturally, I had no common understanding of what to do with them. I would cry or get angry or lustful, but the energy and message of it was lost on me.

The tipping point came in my mid thirties one year. I don't really know what happened even now. But it was all about emotion.

After splitting up with another long term girlfriend, I had been fairly unaffected by it and just drifted along. My friends had all entered a different phase of life and started to buy houses and have children - I was out of the loop, no house, no children, no partner. We slowly drifted apart. My cousin died of cancer. We were never particularly close as adults, but I'd always had a childish crush on her, she was six months older than me. Something about that really hit home - maybe it was a realisation that I was no longer young, and that I was losing people I loved - I have no idea - but it knocked me off balance.

The group of friends and I took a holiday in France. It was the most relaxed affair and I mostly just took it easy eating sunflower seeds on a hammock and reading. There is something about France which I find very natural, there is that cultural similarity to Spain which I find comforting. It was very warm and a very secluded farm building. Being with friends and eating outside and having a communal life was really something wonderful. I felt this sereneness enter my soul. I would take a freezing cold plunge into the pool each morning, practice Tai-Chi and then do something I hadn't done since being a kid: I rode a bike around the countryside.

That holiday made me realise I desperately needed to re-connect with myself. The cold hard pragmatic adult needed to re-connect with the emotional warm kid inside. As an adult I had been living a lie.

I finally snapped in a restaurant back home in Brighton. My dad had been staying with me for an extended period (a long and different story). We sat there waiting for the food and I said to him: "I wish I could just be myself. The only time I really feel like myself is when I get drunk." I really did hate the person I'd become, I knew I was living a lie. My dad said "What would it be like to be yourself all the time?". And bam! There was no going back, the emotional floodgates had opened.

 

Edited July 3, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

There's a long thread about Time on one of the forums. It's a huge topic, but I wanted to distill down my thoughts and experiences of it.

First things first. What does my direct experience tell me?

It appears that there is an awareness (which I'll call "me" for argument's sake), experiencing a "something". That awareness is peculiar in that it has a kind of recursion built in: the awareness is aware of itself. The "something" I'll call appearances. Appearances is the stuff of awareness, it's all the possible sights, sounds, smells, feelings, thoughts and so on. So appearances covers the entire set of awareness experience; by definition there is nothing more than appearances. Ok, so much for definitions.

Where do the appearances come from? To avoid a kind of paradox I say the appearances are spontaneous and unrelated to each other. This is effect without cause. This is completely different from the materialist "cause and effect" view, where matter affects matter in a long thread stretching back in time.

The paradox with the materialist view, is that the thread must have an "ultimate cause" otherwise it would stretch back infinitely in time. The ultimate cause is the Big Bang. Where does the Big Bang come from? This becomes a meaningless question, the Big Bang is a given.

The other problem with a cause and effect view, is that that long past is being inferred. The past is reconstructed from evidence in the present, it is intelligent guesswork and coarse grained. It is literally a story made up to fit facts. In my view the experience of awareness is primary, any thought story is happening in awareness not apart from it.

To avoid any paradox, appearances come unbidden and randomly, de novo, and I become aware of them. Because there is no cause and effect, there isn't a long chain stretching back in time. There is no cause and effect.  There is no long thread stretching backward or forward, there is no thread at all. In this sense Time doesn't have any extent whatsover, it has no dimension, it is a nothing. Something (appearances) comes from nothing at all (just like the Big Bang).

What else is in my direct experience?

Even though appearances are themselves random and disconnected, there appears to be a strong persistence to my experience. The persistence is a large counterbalance to the rush of appearances. This balance of chaos and persistence causes a kind of "flow" to awareness. This flow is what I am directly aware of as Time. More accurately the appearences happen at a certain rate and rythmn.

Where does the persistence come from?

Since awareness is aware of itself it has a kind of looping structure. This gives it a kind of memory of itself. That memory is what allows the awareness to persist and exist at all. If you were to cut that loop, it would collapse back to nothingness and stop existing.

The source of all persistence in my awareness is actually awareness itself. The persistence can take any shape it likes. Note that the looping of awareness is not just a simple loop like a ring shape. It is fractal and all encompassing in nature. Because the looping is unrestricted, it is allowed to expand out and become any shape it likes. In this way persistence and self awareness invades every aspect of appearances.

This persistence is by nature conservative and unchanging (in its existence), it is ever present and timeless. Persistence is what gives the world structure and patterning. Persistence is the source of your ego. Persistence is the source of all matter and energy. In fact the scientific conservation laws is just that persistence laid bare. Persistence is the platonic ideal.

In a strong sense the world of appearances and the world of persistence are just two sides of the same coin - a duality.

Because the persistence can take on any shape (appearance) it likes it does so. Persistence, and appearance are just the fractal manisfestation of awareness itself. Persistence, appearances and awareness are all one.

Once the loop of self awareness is made, the rest of reality and time crystallises from it in an ever increasingly dense looping fractal. Awareness becomes deeper and deeper without end.

Edited July 4, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Today was productive work-wise. I made a concerted effort to not let the normal distractions take a hold of me. Mostly, it's this site and Quora and well, just about anything except work.

I have never been someone who actively tries to curtail my urges. I'm very easily distracted, because I allow myself to be. I also know that if I don't pay my urges attention they'll go away for a while.  It's not really like there's a build up and the urges get stronger. The only time when urges have become more urgent over time is when I've been addicted. 

My most serious addiction was to nicotine. I think this one substance lays bare the yo-yo dynamic I have between urge and restraint. I have a very strong urge (value?) for freedom above all else. That essentially means being free to do whatever grabs my attention at a particular time, and the "needy" people can have their dose of attention from me some other time.  It can be very easy to become embroiled in the "attention deficit" of friends and family and work colleagues. I actively work hard against it, I have my boundaries and they know it.

Unfortunately, that stubbornness of freedom works against me, and makes me prone to addiction. I thank my secular Gods that I have never directly experienced hard drugs in my life, I suspect that may have fucked me good and proper. 

At least the counterbalance of my self restraint is also strong. I think I've talked about being pragmatic and not overly emotional in a previous post. I've kind of learned to be detached from my own emotions and impulses, which has allowed me to have a kind of nonchalant attitude towards them. "What do you mean you need sex now? Later, I've got more serious stuff to think about now." and so it goes.

But when it came to smoking cigarettes all self restraint went out of the window for long periods. 

I started smoking one weekend at university at the age of 19. Before then I had never really even entertained the thought of smoking, I just didn't care. Of course even at that age I knew it was incredibly bad health-wise. But this particular weekend I had a girl to impress. She smoked, I fancied her somewhat, how else to get her attention? She reluctantly gave me my first cigarette. I somewhat enjoyed the sensation and the headrush and her attention, it was definitely something new. My attachment to the evil weed grew. The girl's attachment to me didn't, it was always going to be "friendzone" - I should have seen it coming.

I went on to smoke to a greater or lesser degree over the years, only to also give up for years at a time. My most recent bout of abstinence has lasted about over four years. It has taught me a lot about addiction and that it's possible to stop being addicted as much as it's possible to start being addicted. And that there's a kind of ebb and flow to addiction, sometimes restraint wins over urge, sometimes not. It's the natural flow of life. It has taught me to value restraint but also to value urges and be happy about engaging with both. They've both been good teachers.

 

Edited July 7, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Manipulation is rife in human relationships. It can be very hard to recognise this on a day to day level, because we can be so blind to it. Manipulation forms a whole spectrum from the blatantly obvious to the extremely subtle.  We do it to each other constantly in a kind of zero sum game, where if we ever drop our guard we lose.

The game of manipulation is learned very early on as children. Some of the manipulation I've seen my friends' children exhibit are:

• Outright lying (yes I am allowed to do that)
• Giving different people (parents) different stories or information
• Constant repetition until they get what they want
• Blatantly ignoring parents
• Crying, screaming, shouting, showing strong emotions in public spaces
• Being bossy or stubborn with other children
• Physically getting into fights or being very physical with other children

And these are pretty normal kids.

Of course it gets much worse as adults. The main tool of manipulation in both the work place and society is:

Control through fear.

This is an excellent tool for manipulation as we tend to switch off our thinking when faced with fearful situations, it makes us compliant:

• If you don't have a job or get money in some way you will go hungry and die or live on cold, dirty streets
• Don't threaten your job security in any way because (i.e. do as we want you to at all times) or otherwise you may go hungry and die
• If you don't do as we say you will be arrested, fined, continually harassed, menaced, shamed, ostracised, beaten up, killed or this will be done to your loved ones. 
• You will do as we say or otherwise your health or well being will be at risk: be locked down and avoid people due to virus, queue at security at airports, random searches by police. This is insidious as this can always be spun as for the "greater good".
• We must keep out immigrants because they take all the jobs, schools places, health care, housing resources etc.
• ... and so on ...

Some of the gentler forms of persuasion (manipulation), I've noticed recently in my friends and work clients and colleagues:

• Being stroppy when something doesn't work (client)
• Saying something is urgent (client)
• Being told (not asked) to do an activity with them (friend)
• Asking for a chat out of boredom in the middle of a work day (friend)
• We (the tribe) need to all make one final push to get the product live (boss)
• Being chased for work already agreed (without deadlines agreed) (client)
• Being given tasks without due consideration first (client)
• Being asked to do something inconvenient (so they don't have to) (friend)
• Being asked for money (and feeling unable to say no) (family)

Some of that stuff seems pretty mundane or normal, and yet it is still manipulation.

Another great source for manipulation is the mass media and corporate advertising. They have their own agendas and stories to sell to you and have to find sometimes very subtle ways to do this. But fear, repetition and being part of the tribe are often used.

One of the most powerful ways to counter most types of manipulation is to ask questions of the manipulator:

• "When did we agree this work should be done?"
• "How exactly does it not work?
• "I was doing 49 miles per hour. Why was I pulled over?"
• "I have complied with everything you've asked for. Why am I still being harassed?"
• "But you said earlier that this was true and and now you're saying it untrue?"
• "Exactly how is you selling me a new mobile going to benefit me?"
• "I loaned you money last year. Why is it you can pay me back, but not save the money in the first place?"
• "Why are you calling me, when you know I'm supposed to be working?"

This forces them to either back down, or give up on the manipulation, or in the worst case try a different form of manipulation.

Keep you eyes and ears open, manipulation is always around every corner!

Edited July 8, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

More distraction, but it has to come out. We are just stories and improvisations anyway:

I woke up. I think.

I couldn't quite work out what I had woken up from. What had been razor sharp and solid just then, had diffused into the husk of a sensation. The serenity had been broken and I began to feel agitated that I had been let go of without my consent. What was it? Where had I been? It was nowhere now.

Out of the husk grew something that I could remember.

Yes, yesterday I had celebrated my birthday. I thought about this. There had been the usual cohort of friends. Jez the joker in the pack, quick to make light of a heavy situation, his disposition rock solid; he was never outwardly melancholy. Cassy was forever warmhearted and would always get me quirky gifts - why is it I never returned the gestures? I couldn't remember just now. Franco idolised himself as some sort of Adonis, but I always found him to be harmless, and he threw a great party, it helped that he was in catering. The rest I couldn't bring to the fore, but boyfriends and wives and friends of my friends, there must have been twenty or so.

Come to think of it, had there been family there? No. Karen was on holiday in France with girlfriends. Mum had died only last year, what a god awful time that had been. Dad? I couldn't recall yet.

My temples began to throb. Ah yes. The Mojitos Franco had mixed one after the other. I was sure I could still smell the mint on my breath. I breathed in sharply. Of course Cassy had told him to stop and offered to show me to bed when I had started to say absurd things. Jez thought I was hilarious. Bed! I reached out and felt if there was a body next to mine. No. I felt a wave of relief and nausea come over me at the same time. I took another deep breath.

Suddenly, an alarm buzzed.

I opened my eyes for the first time. 10:20 am. "Shut the fuck up!" I shouted and the alarm stopped. It felt good to shout, but it also somehow felt like the first thing I had ever said, my voice was rough and raspy and unexpectedly deep. It was at that point that my bodily functions kicked in, and I knew that I had to get up.

I showered and dressed and ventured cautiously downstairs. 

The place had been immaculately cleared of the debris of the night before. In middle of the round oak table in the kitchen sat a small white box with an overly large red bow on it. It had to be. I opened it. 

Inside was a snow Globe, with the motto "Cassy" in red letters underneath. Once the snow slowly drifted down, I began to make out the words "Welcome to Heaven". I half smiled. I sat down and shook the snow globe again.

 

Edited July 8, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

This morning (9:53) is going to a braindump I think. I'm hoping for catharsis of some sort, but it's probably more a picture slide, so I can get out the projector at a later date and laugh or cry at how I was:

Last night I woke up, at who know's what time. It was dark, so most probably before 3 am. This isn't unusual per se, I very often need to pee in the night; I go do my business and then get into bed and sleep again instantly. But it's the second night in a row I've woken up and not been able to sleep for about an hour. I found that I was too hot, like my body thermostat had been turned up to max. Then the thoughts started to churn. 

I have lots of unresolved major and minor stresses in my life. Everyone does I guess, I'm not different, in fact I'm mostly blessed. I'm very good at ignoring them most days, and I manage to stay sane. I know what happens when I give too much weight to my thoughts and it isn't pretty. 

Really it's cognitive dissonance. As a 47 year old man, I should be able to choose exactly what I want to do with my life without interference; if I literally wanted to sit on my couch for the next ten years and do nothing then I should be able to. But the world carries on around me and people demand my constant attention and I get pulled every which way. This constant pull on my attention from others comes from an intense neediness on their part which I find abhorrent. Some people would call it love, but really it's always conditional love.

The neediest person in my life is my mum. At the moment being a Spanish national living in the UK for half her life, she needs to register herself to keep on receiving the state benefits which keeps her alive. She doesn't speak English, she never really learned it to any degree because of her profound deafness, but also because she has always been bailed out by other people in her life, she never properly learned to think and fend for herself. It's not her fault, I feel compassion for her, but it's bloody hard on me. In any case her Spanish passport ran out 12 years ago. Again, she was completely reliant on me to help her with this I managed to put off doing anything about it all that time - I had my own problems and life to lead. It turns out that because she hasn't renewed her passport her Spanish nationality has lapsed. That means re-applying for Spanish citizenship first. She will need her passport to register for the idiotic Brexit process. So I'm embroiled in both Spanish and British bureaucracy for something that isn't even really my problem. I have 6 months to sort it out or my mother will be completely reliant on me financially too! Bollocks to that. I wish my Spanish was better. I wish my sister hadn't cut my mum out of her life. 

 

Edited July 10, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Braindump @ 11:54.

Where does love come from? It seems like to me there are three different levels or framings to it.

First. Love comes from other people. This is a kind of attentional/tactile love. Your girlfriend shows you love by being with you and sharing responsibilities and compromising. You husband shows you love by caressing you and buying you flowers and making the right decisions. Your dog loves you because she's loyal and is always glad to see you. Without these things, you are alone and loveless.

Second. Love comes from within yourself. The sensations of warmth and bliss that is love is only ever experienced by the being that is you. Love is an emotion that you are experiencing irrespective of what the outside world is doing. Other people and pets only trigger that emotion within you, they aren't necessary in particular. Your boyfriend or best friend aren't "giving" you love, you are just doing it to yourself and they are triggering it. It is really self love - love borne from the self. Without self love, it is not possible to experience love at all - other people will not trigger love within you - you must be able to love from within yourself. You can trigger your own love at any time, like turning on a tap.

Third. Love is the stuff of reality. This is a more abstract level of love. This is a kind of love coming from a perfection. It is the perfect juxtaposition of all the elements of reality. The love permeates everything for all time. It's hard to grasp because like a fish in water, it's hard for a fish to know the water it swims in all the time even exists. You can get an understanding of it just by becoming aware of how completely absurd the experience of reality is. 

It's absurd to equate absurdity with love (the irony), but nonetheless. Scale. Why is everything so big? I could easily spend hours walking around my town and not even see the same place twice. My town is just one town in many hundreds in my country. There are hundreds of countries. The surface area of the oceans is bigger than the land area of the globe. There are many planets in our solar system, some bigger than the Earth. There 250,000,000,000 stars in just our galaxy alone. There are 100,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe. What the fuck? Why?

Life. What is that? Stuff that replicates of its own accord, makes itself from the inert matter in the environment, goes about its business and then decides to stop living and dies. All life is related to itself. Why? All life is primarily made from carbon. All life has replicating DNA or RNA. All DNA and RNA is made from the exactly the same repeating units, every single organism. Not only that. Even the simplest single celled life is mindbogglingly complex - its all chains and chains of lifeless chemical reactions all working perfectly together. Why so complex? How does it all work perfectly? And then scale again: there is so much life on Earth, it's literally endless.  It's completely absurd.

Those are two examples. Life and scale and complexity, it all fits perfectly together without a glitch or any gaps. It really should be enough to bring you to tears, that you are here to witness it. It's love.

[LastThursday]

An antidote to love songs and stalkers and abusers. An anti-love song:

I been touched
I been kissed
Don't see why
I won't be missed

Don't wanna be desired
Don't wanna try
Don't want you to be inspired
By me

I been smothered
I been crushed
Don't see why
I won't be missed

Don't wanna be desired
Don't wanna cry
Don't want you to be inspired
By me

I been air-brushed
I been hushed
Don't see why
I won't be missed

Don't wanna be desired
Don't wanna try
Don't want you to be inspired
By me
By me
By me...

Edited July 10, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

The collective good is as worthy as the individual good:

 

[LastThursday]

Dreaming is peculiar.

I very often wake up from dreams feeling a sense of loss. It's like I've been party to some other alternate reality that I can never re-experience; each dream is a one off. There are of course recurring characters but the situations are always different.

The main peculiarity of dreams is that you are doing it with eyes closed. You are seeing without eyes. If nothing else, it emphasises the fact that most of the seeing experience has nothing to do with light impinging on the retina, it is independent of that. That in itself is radical.

Another peculiarity is how real they seem. There's a kind of full embodiment within dreams, just like in the waking state, and there's not usually a sense of unreality, even if you find yourself flying or in bizarre scenarios. Also, there's normally no sense at all that you are actually dreaming. It's only when waking up you realise how strange and disjointed dreams are. 

For me thinking back on dreams they seem to be made up like scenes in a film. Each scene can be wildly different, but somehow the whole fits into a cohesive story line. That story line aspect is telling. There is a strong narrative sense to both dreams and waking, where disparate experiences are fitted together so that they mesh into something that can be understood and re-told. Without that everyday life would be chaotic and choppy.

The only thing that makes real sense to me is that we're dreaming all the time. We're "seeing" and "story telling" in every moment we're conscious (awake or not). When we're awake the dream is directly modulated by the experiences of our senses, but when we're not awake the senses are disengaged but the dreaming continues. The difference is one of degree or intensity of experience.

If that is the case then interpreting dreams is no different from trying to interpret being awake - both are story telling ventures. Both worlds are equally valid.

As examples, two recent dreams of mine:

Dream 1

I'm in a room, that seems to be a kind of student area, I'm on the staircase leading down into it. People are being vetted and chaperoned where they then mysteriously disappear through or behind a long upright locker in the room. I soon realise that each person is being given some sort of baby pet, kittens mostly. Then I realise I'm with an ex of mine, she goes first. But she somehow fails to follow instructions and can't exit the room through the wall/locker, and instead just sits on the floor in a sulk. I'm given my pet. It's a very small palm sized barn owl! I'm surprised in my dream (I can feel it's claws digging into my hand), and I think "what am I supposed to do with it?". I wake up.

Dream 2

We're in a darkened room getting ready to watch a film in a kind of makeshift outdoor/home cinema. The prime seats are chairs arranged so that you are head on to the screen, everyone else is sitting on the ground or standing. I make my way to one of the seats, but find it already has a small towel on it, I sit guiltily anyway. Soon the owner of the seat returns and indicates she wants her seat back. I tease her and say no, and she walks off angrily. I say "I better go and find her". Incidentally this girl/woman is a very old school friend of mine, who I always used to think was well dressed and glamorous, and she was also a rule breaker who smoked.

I follow her (cut scene) and find her outside a night club. She seems to not be angry anymore, but instead offers to buy me entry and it seems as though she is affiliated with the club in some way.  Then she introduces me to her sister who unlike her has long straight dark brown hair. I'm instantly attracted and approach and hold her on the small of her back very gently and stand very close. The attraction is mutual (she doesn't pull away!), but she is busily scribbling away inside a card and she doesn't give any overt signal. I'm unsure but I go for a gentle kiss on her shoulder. She immediately gets frustrated by this places the card on my forehead and furiously scratches out everything she's written.  And yet, she still doesn't disengage. I wake up. My only thought on waking up is how incredibly sweet it was for Louisa to introduce me to her sister, who was clearly unhappy. Ah well, goodbye hot dream psycho sister.

 

 

Edited July 14, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

Of all the physical activities I do, I enjoy walking the most.

Running is about endurance and always reaching for that fast time or improving stamina. Badminton about fast reflexes and mastering different skills. Walking is different.

For me walking is about seeing and exploration and novelty. And there is so much of the world to see, even in your own backyard. In the UK we are blessed with having rights of way through the countryside, through fields and woods and farm buildings and ancient highways. In towns pedestrians are well catered for and you can walk anywhere.

I like to take long hikes, to keep me fit, but mostly because it affords me the pleasure of seeing how places are connected to each other and for discovering new places and scenery and for a sense of accomplishment.

Walking also allows me to meditate. It's very effective for bringing my senses into the present moment, the novelty in my surroundings makes me pay attention, and by body goes into automatic - putting one foot in front of another. I much prefer this to a formal sitting meditation. With that there's a strong feeling of resistance, I'm forcing myself to pay attention and forcing myself to be still. With sitting meditation I can only do 20 minutes, with walking meditation I can do five hours.

The body is evolved for movement, not for being still. If you watch animals they are rarely still, except perhaps when they're sleeping. And in the same way that quietude and meditation is healthy for the mind, so likewise movement and exertion is healthy for the body. Walking is the perfect blend of the two.

I enjoy walking through the countryside or town in equal measure, they both have their own beauty.  This weekend a lengthy hike (15 miles probably) through London with a photographer friend is in order. I believe Charles Dickens got most of his inspiration from doing exactly this: taking long walks through London.

[LastThursday]

When doing shadow work (a.k.a. things that bug you), it's informative to pay attention to people that irritate or upset you. More specifically examine exactly what it is that bugs you about the way they are.

Some of the things can be very subtle so take a bit of work to ferret out. The reason for doing this is that the irritation itself is the shadow - it's a form of suffering. The irritation is just a pointer of course, it's giving you a message. What's the message? The message is that you are lacking awareness in a certain area and this can be improved

Ok. This is going to seem like a rant, but it's not. These are some of the concrete things that irritate me, followed by some potential solutions:

1. People trying to grab my attention when I'm obviously concentrating on other things
2. People's constant need for talking, meeting up, texting, etc. especially if it's about nothing in particular 
3. Anyone who says or insists that I "must" do something, or do things on my behalf without asking
4. Flakiness in general, saying and agreeing to one thing and then doing something different, not manning up or taking responsibility for their actions
5. Craziness: general incoherence, emotional overreaction to everything, constant passive aggressiveness,  explaining everything in terms of signs or theories beyond their comprehension, racists, sexists and so on.
6. Entitled people. This is subtle one. People who expect others to automatically pay deference to them (lots of beautiful people suffer from this or people in official capacities), do things for them on a whim, expect others to tolerate their rudeness, inadequacies, manipulations or to bolster their self image for them. Possibly includes some psychopaths.
7. Psychopaths and sociopaths. People who generally go around leaving devastation in their wake without a thought to the people they've hurt, inconvenienced, stressed out, put out of pocket. Includes people largely lacking empathy: narcissists, neurotics, borderline personality disorder and so on.

Solutions and notes. Kind of more note to self than solutions for anyone else:

1. I should be stronger in setting boundaries. This means having periods of time where I'm uninterruptible and making that clear. Enforcing the boundary when someone oversteps it. This is just a lack of social skill on my part. Conversely having time where it's ok to be interrupted and not getting wound up by it: having better emotional control on my part.

2. Balance. This is about reaching an equilibrium. I know personally I need large swathes of "alone" time. But I realise for more extrovert and gregarious people this might be intolerable. I need to get comfortable with compromising and setting aside time for this. Partially feeds into number 1. And know that largely if I'm in the right frame of mind, I'm happy to be around people and enjoy it.

3. This is definitely about people impinging on my strong values. I have a high value on having freedom of choice. The answer is to be firm and explain that a) I'm more than capable of deciding for myself, b) I will do things when I'm ready. In other words social skills.

4. I know I have a high value on being reliable. How do I tolerate unreliability? Compassion is the answer. Not everyone has the necessary experience, character or awareness to be reliable. I should lead by example and not expect other people to be like me. I should step up and take responsibility if a situation warrants reliability.

5. Having had lots "crazy" people in my life (family included unfortunately), I find this very hard to solve. It's a combination of compassion, patience, leading, explaining and simply just keeping away from it. The problem I find is that giving crazy people oxygen just makes them crazier. I've largely learned to disown crazy people, but sometimes there's no avoiding them. I need to have the social skills to face them head on and point out their craziness to them. But also to realise that I might also be crazy in many ways. I should clear up my own craziness first.

6. Again this goes against my strong value on equality. Absolutely no-one is above or below me in a hierarchy, class, race and so on. Of course it takes guts to admit some people are cleverer, more skilled, wiser, better looking or whatever than me. This is also about it triggering feelings in me that some people are "out of reach" or that my own circumstances are being circumscribed by the narcissistic standards of others. The only thing left for me to do is a) Not pamper to people's sense of entitlement (and take the consequences), b) Lead by example and be as egalitarian as possible in my interactions, or c) Just keep away from people like this.

7. I thank that most people I know aren't like this. But I know many who lack in empathy in certain areas and that still grates. I perhaps also lack empathy at times. I think this comes from being transparent, not wanting to dress things up and being quite direct and largely pragmatic. I don't tolerate too much emotion well. I still have plenty of room for being more empathetic and compassionate, I need to improve this muscle. But it's also about exercising my own boundaries and not letting people take the piss. 

In short: better social skills, enforcing and maintaining better boundaries, raising my awareness and being more empathetic. Easy! Not.

 

 

 

 

[LastThursday]

Why have friends?

This is something I think about sometimes. I think there is a deep rooted need to be in the presence of other people - it's simply a built in imperative for being a human being. The bottom line so I've read is survival. Humans can greatly improve their chances of survival if they co-operate.

Our reliance on other pople can't be overstated. We would die very quickly if we couldn't get other people to provide food and shelter for us. Nearly nobody in modern society has the skills to survive without other people. And even if you had the skills, life would be very tough without other people to back you up.

The more effectively we can co-operate the better our chances of survival. We are evolved to maximise our co-operative strategies. Co-operating is a kind of reciprocal agreement, where one day you help your fellow human and the next day they return the favour. It's a win-win strategy. So we're very good at playing the reciprocation game. We even do it with domesticated animals. Even dogs can be our friends.

But I feel like there is a different dimension to friendships. We come together so we can be "more whole". What I mean by this is that each of us is a different mixture of traits and abilities - it's what makes us, us. The flipside is that we also lack in many areas. For example, we may be good at planning, but bad at coping with emotions. We all lack in some ways.

We make friends so that we can level out our imbalances, by complementing each other with our good traits and abilities and sharing them. The whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. We multiply our potential by having friends.

No person can truly be an island.

Edited July 20, 2020 by LastThursday

[LastThursday]

One of my pet hates is when people talk in riddles.  

Having studied NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), I know that there is a range of language that can be used to convey information. On one end you have scientific or legal documents, which use very specific and long-winded language; on the other you end you have poetry and the soundbites of politicians.

It's all about deletion and equivalence.

 

Deletion comes in many forms, but the main forms of deletion are grammatical and semantic. Here's some examples:

1. She walked through the gardens and smelled the pink flowers.
2. Emily, who had just entered her 36th year was a keen horticulturalist with a fascination for roses. That morning she was walking through the National Trust gardens and smelling the scents of different pink roses.

See how in the first example "she" is referring to someone that hasn't been introduced yet, i.e. "she" could be absolutely anything. This is grammatical deletion. The word "she" is a grammatical placeholder for something that should have already been specified earlier. 

However in the first example "pink flowers" is a semantic deletion. While it is grammatically specific, it is semantically unspecific; what sort of flowers are they, how big are they, what shape, what species?

In the second example, we know that "Emily" is mostly likely a female human, who is 36 years old etc. There is no grammatical deletion here. There is also a lot less semantic deletion here. Although even here there is room to be a lot more semantically specific.

 

Equivalence is a grammatical trick used to connect two things which are normally not associated with each other. It's often used in metaphorical language or in explanatory language. Here's some examples of this:

1. I feel sad because nobody talks to me.
2. The universe is made of love.
3. Light are waves which travel through the vacuum of space

In the first example the word "because" serves to connect two disparate ideas: "feeling sad" and "nobody talking to me". Note that by themselves they are quite distinct concepts. But the grammatical trick serves to make one concept imply the other. 

In the second example the word "is" serves to make the two concepts equivalent to each other. One concept is "the universe" and the other "made of love". Note that semantically, it really makes no sense whatsoever, it's completely a grammatical trick. 

The last example is again another equivalence using "are". Light is being equated to waves. Note that the everyday notions of light and waves are completely different from each other. 

 

So what happens when we're faced with deletion or equivalence in language? We naturally try and mentally "fill in" the deleted information or we try and make the equivalence "work" by creating a new mental model that incorporates both ideas at once. Note how these two activities are similar, extra information has to be supplied by our imaginations - the extra information doesn't in fact exist in the communication itself!

 

Specific language and non-specific language have their places. But when discussing abstract topics, it's much better to stay specific so that as much information is conveyed as possible:

Q: What is consciousness?

A: It's the dragonfly floating on the wind.

Meh!

Edited July 21, 2020 by LastThursday