SonOfBob's Journal

[son_of_bob]

29 Jul 2022 - As per usual the awesomeness and increased felicity didn’t last. Things have been derailed by being ill and multiple emotional triggers. As I believe I mentioned on one of the previous boards, if I have multiple triggers it seems so much harder to get to a happy and harmless baseline again. It is like I get overloaded…short circuited…
Sort of riding out the negative funk at the moment and getting slowly more felicitous. I don’t beat myself up about it anymore which helps aid getting out of those funks quicker.

Now the weeks of increased felicity have made me realise some excellent breakthroughs though.

• I noticed that I was finding this physical intimacy with myself, with my body as a whole, a cosiness. It was great, something new for me.

• I have made more progress as regards resentment, I am still finding it so much easier to do chores and work tasks I didn’t like before. (Like cleaning out the rabbit poop…they sure do poop a lot).

• I am not binge eating as much.

• I used to have a lot of hang ups and guilt about sleep, like it is a waste of time. Then when depressed the opposite, like I want to sleep and never wake up. I seem to be slowly getting back to a better baseline for sleep hygiene.

• I have managed to resolve several confrontations in a non-fearful and non-aggressive way. In such a smooth way that it surprised me. I didn’t have any shakes, butterflies, or other types of symptoms that usual occur when I expect conflict.

• My clarity of thought seems crisper, sharper, I am resolving issues for work easier. In stark contrast to how when I am more emotional/low mood.

• Another weird benefit, I have found myself carrying out the method even in my dreams. I recently had a dream in which I was doing the method and I became lucid. In the dream I had damaged my front tooth and then suddenly all my teeth starting falling and my gums were bleeding badly. But I was applying the method in the dream and I just suddenly became aware that it was a dream and not real. I was just about to start seeing what I could alter and change and play with but then I woke up before the fun could begin.

As soon as I began to feel bad again, I noticed the immediate desire to want to binge eat or to masturbate. The habitual behaviours, those ones that have consistently helped evade/escape negative emotions pre-AF-awareness, post-AF-awareness and through depression and anxiety. There is a reliability to the pleasure of eating especially, hence during a down period during lockdown I found myself gaining weight of just over 2 stones (approx > 12kg). A first for me, always been a pretty skinny guy, such that work colleagues in the past have asked me if I had an eating disorder .

In the past, I always focused on learning and creativity as well. These always produced such an excellent highs. I think before AF-awaress, I had found my own system for getting to happy/positive states much more successful than most people, at least those I had met. Unfortunately, these methods didn’t work under extreme emotion: anxiety, depression, love, jealousy…all derailed the ability to derive happiness by these means. Once I saw their ineffectiveness in the bigger/stronger emotions, I noticed I much more started to lean towards the hedonism and escapism from eating and masturbation (or sex) as comfort far more frequently.

When I am ill, I can’t seem to stop focusing on the internal sensations of discomfort. I have had a sore throat (among other symptoms), so I would constantly swallow to assess the pain or possible change of affairs. It is like being trapped in this weird feedback loop of inspecting internal sensations. Even a few days of my back being sore was hard to not obsess.

Interestingly, when depressed or anxious I found myself not experiencing sorrow very often, I hadn’t noticed that until recently. Now I have started to get healthier, my normal level of sorrow has started kicking in and I have forgotten what it is like to feel it like that. There is a real masochistic quality to it. As I have started feeling better again just this weekend I met up with an old friend and visited old haunts and it provided plenty of opportunities to be overwhelmed with sorrow. I think I coped ok, I think previously I would have stuck in the loops of sorrow for longer. Not taking my sorrow seriously almost feels treacherous…betraying my humanity. Sorrow definitely seems to tie into a personal narrative of one’s life story. My kids, the different milestones they reach and changes they go through provide a ton of sorrow triggering instances. Even over things like when they out grow a favourite item of clothing, like a pang of sadness that I won’t see them wearing that any more.

I really enjoyed reading the Drawing the line between feeling and fact topic. A lot to think about. It reminded me of stuff I have read about the hard problem of consciousness.

@rick

Due in part to the fact that without object there is no subject. The object makes the subject, it makes the experience. The line between the two is arbitrary. So why not say it is all subject then? Or all object then? Pure subjectivity vs pure objectivity? The latter strikes as more correct than the former, but still seems off at the moment. There is just existence and that’s it. Then there is awareness of existence, then awareness of awareness of existence, which is just more existence.

I was wondering whether there will ever be a point when the subjective becomes objective. We will ever reach some technological achievement where the subjective can be known, copied, replicated or editable. I like the show Black Mirror which sort of covers these sort of ideas about downloading the mind and a better version of virtual reality, would love to see such things in my lifetime but probably won’t.

@rick

When fear arises, say for example, pure terror, there is little sense of anything other than that fear. The raw emotion consumes almost the entirety of consciousness. Blind rage is another example. Yet no amount of emotion, no puny or aggrandized self, is able to create a dimension that stands apart or beside an infinitely massive operation that has zero boundaries. The universe produces everything: every conscious or unconscious movement, every degree of understanding or misconception, every instant of doubt or conviction, every flicker or eruption of emotion, every variety of perception and experience, every shape and form and sound, every event bar none. Even the sense of separation is inseparable from the universe from which it arose. There can be no exceptions.

All of this so that matter can remain “alive” longer and replicate more often and continue a lineage of that matter…it is so bizarre when you think about it. Matter influenced by matter to react to matter…

Now the neuro-electrical, chemical, hormonal and biological processes involved in a given brain manifesting that emotional response is something tangible and repeatable. We may not have the fullest absolute understanding and mapping of everything yet and not a complete science of every individual but we could one day potentially. Then we could do such things as stimulate some region and make that fear reaction happen again at a whim. Or create other processes, medicines, etc that elicit that state explicitly. We are still in the infancy of such medications really with the types of medicines currently used (and recreational drugs created).

Now the strange thing for humans and to a lesser degree in some other animals potentially is that these emotions are perceived as a feeler. There is some projected sense of self that perceives things happening, having happened and will happen to them. I tend to see this simplistic view pushed by people that humans have this advanced sense of self and that animals don’t have any but in reality there are probably varying degrees of sophistication of neuronal structures also enabling these animals to perceive past, current and future events, especially in other mammals. Hence, there are possibly different rudimentary “self” structures in nature.

For example, if you consider a different type of organ such as eyes, there are varied levels of sophistication of eyesight, from those that merely detect the presence of light in their sense organ, with no image, or only a polarity of light detected, or some that have an image but no colour vision to our eye sight and even superior eye sight with certain birds etc; there are these different levels of sophistication regarding eye organs and the way their brains process this information, the same can be considered for this sense of self in the animal kingdom. Maybe a dolphin has a more sophisticated sense of self than a cat and a primate more so, etc. I don’t quite know the language for grading these levels of self lol.

@rick

I arrived at a different conclusion: that the illusory feeling-being does exist in this universe; just because the illusory object does not exist outside the skull does not mean that it does not actually exist. Typically, however, people do not regard the objects that arise in the brain as actually existing; they typically relegate as actual only that which has existence outside the skull.

I have thought along similar lines at times. In fact, there was a strong negative reaction when first introduced to AF and this area and type of thoughts were some of the first areas I tried to probe for attacks to weaken the validity of it.

How does one differentiate between the feelings, sensations and components that constitute this sense of a self of a feeler and the actual tangible existence of one. I know I feel like a self but that doesn’t mean I am a self, and that a feeler exists definitively. It is like the phantom limb phenomena, we know the person afflicted doesn’t have another limb only the sensations/experience of having another limb. Sensations and subjective experiences then have a degree of unreliability to them making ascertaining the facts trickier.

I would say that the neuronal mechanisms exist for making illusions, including a sense of an illusory (metaphysical) feeling-being to manifest rather than independently that there is an illusory feeling-being. That brains can make a “sense” of a feeler, an “expriencer”, an agent to whom all of this is happening to. Rather than there is definitely one in existence. In the same way, the neuronal mechanisms exists for allowing a phenomena such as phantom limb to occur.

“The problem with personal identity is, we feel there is a fact that ‘I’m me,’” John Searle, a philosopher of mind at the University of California, Berkeley, said on my TV series “Closer to Truth.” “But that’s hard to pin down philosophically, because all of my experiences change, all of the parts of my body change, all of the molecules in my body change.”

I had the above quote saved from some article I read once. It is crazy when you think about it, atom for atom (the majority at least), I am not the same SonOfBob I was a year ago.

The very body that is me has switched out all of these atoms, as cells regenerate, get replaced, etc. So this state of matter that is in perpetual flux and any sense of self that is derived in me constituently isn’t even the same combination of matter that it was last week. The molecules and proteins that make up the cells of the neurons have changed. Each neuron part of a larger circuit, with some of the circuit changed and altered or lost, failure in cell replication or some other cause of destruction. However, there is some internal means of allowing said circuits to remain functioning despite the constant change it works because these underlying mechanisms allow memory, a sense of self and a feeler to endure despite this constant flux.

That it can compensate for all this change is quite astounding. A sense self, a personal narrative can persist.

It is weird the complexity of the brain. When you think of the molecular structure of water, break it down and split it apart to Hydrogen and Oxygen but you could reconfigure it to be water again. When you try and imagine breaking down and reconstituting all the elements and molecules and systems that give rise to a self and consciousness, it seems beyond comprehension in the breadth of its complexity.

So many questions…so few answers. I used to hate not knowing. Not being able to understand something. Not being able to remember everything. This need for exceptionalism. It can hijack the simple enjoyments of being here, of fascination, wonder and curiosity. It is the same thing that led to my writer’s block. I had to have the best idea, when I first started writing it was purely selfishly writing whatever I desired and gave me pleasure. Then this grandiose need to be some amazing writer grew until it paralysed me with expectation.

I am definitely in newer territory now. I think I am getting back to felicitous states quicker. I have not had any PCE’s since 2007 but plenty of EE’s and felicitous and sensuously pleasant moments.