I wonder how many of these patterns we see are real and how many imagined. I guess that’s the difference between genius and insanity, a scientist and a holy man. Though I believe the holy men have more wisdom than the scientists give them credit for. Don’t we have appx twice as many interoceptive nerves as exteroceptive? Yet science is woefully unprepared to describe the subjective experience.
Anyway the holy trinity. Threes. Everything seems to be threes. I wonder what my third mental health disorder might be. Just plain old insanity maybe. Vanilla with sprinkles. Maybe this is all a dream after all. Maybe I’m the only thing being rendered, as 10 year old James would ponder. Am I the tree? And these folks saying they feel like fucking ‘aliens’. What? I have little doubt of my own self, as in senses feeding data to brain; it’s where the data comes from that I doubt ha!
Anyway now I have art, for adhd, knives for asd, and this site for philosophical pontificating. It’s like Facebook without the faces; back when I had 5 friends and they were nice. Those were the days. That’s definitely what Mark had in mind; none of this metaverse shite he’s had to do for money. I reckon he just wanted some friends, and electronic communication was an easier way for him to… wait a minute…
But I never knew this because I had adhd. I was jetting around and thrill seeking. Susan Jeffers had me seeking out that fear and feeling the shit out of it. I was positively hooked on pushing my comfort zone out, methodically, inch by inch, until I was mapping out the back country mountains solo and setting up companies on a whim. Doing dumb shit basically. Putting my life at risk while I have kids to support and when I really don’t want to but god I just can’t not.
Anyway that’s over now. It’s amazing; I still have some drive, sure. More than most. But the crazy days are finished. I’ve been chemically awakened, but I think it’s more than that and the dosing issue merely crammed 6 months of processing into 6 days. So a lot of the changes - especially the ones wrought by the site - should be permanent.
I’ve always liked the ‘you are the sculptor and the clay’ analogy and recent events made the clay of James incredibly malleable. But only for a limited time, as psychedelics have shown me before, so I’m trying to use this time to reprogram myself at a pretty fundamental level.
The plan was to identify the system and its limitations, and then after that to try to build a coherent self. I have all these moral codes and modalities of thought bodged together and the rules - the wool - had become unmanageable. How do you marry a strong moral compass and minimalist mindset with the world of business and consumption? You can’t. So you implode, eventually, at 42. Fucking hitchhiker’s guide there you see; that’s surely a false connection?
Speaking with my wife yesterday she mentioned that I am very introspective while she seems to be more extrospective since becoming an adult; she was introspective as a teen. And I think as kids we tend to have ‘people’ as our own persona. The baby is an extension of mum, and then it inherits parts of dad, and then goes to school.
Over time this person ends up with all these people, and because of regular dopamine signalling, I think their brain is able to extract the salience from their personage. Speculation Lv3 here. I think that most people then - as their brain nears completion in their early 20s - build a real self without even thinking about it. This is why the majority of people look at you like a crazy person when you talk about finding yourself, with the minority nodding in agreement.
Anyway I think dopamine signalling enables the separation of person and value. Eg. Mum = kindness, but kindness =/= mum. I kind of think this happened with me but kind of think it didn’t. I kind of think that my moral code is just a bastardisation of buddhist and christian principles which completely neglects the self.
So I guess these moral codes probably fed into the burnout and breakdown. The unsustainable nature of them; neglecting the self but also their incompatibility with various things we have to do in life.
The language is not suitable, that’s all. J man and b man would have used different words to say ‘be nice to each other’ but if they were here, now, they would probably stress the ‘be nice to yourself, too’ side a little more. Cos fuck me I was not nice to myself, and I don’t wish that level of drive on anybody else.
Anyhow. Curled that one out nicely. Like a Cheeto.
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