I guess you have a point. When I first read that I thought “this is nonsense”, people don’t agree to how stuff makes them feel. And yet for some reason now I can’t let it go.
I think he meant that it’s not the thing that is making you feel that way but what you make of it hence the two examples of crops with one person and the other person wanting it to be sunny. He means it’s you making you feel that way not the thing because if it was the thing then everyone would feel that way. I’ve heard it before with Buddhism.
This is sort of my problem. If happiness isa choice then it’s my fault for not choosing otherwise. I don’t think we can choose happiness, but if that were so then that would also mean we wouldn’t have a reason to do anything nor would we like or enjoy anything. Since it’s not those things that bring us joy or make us feel and it’s just us then we can just make that feeling and not even bother with the other stuff.
The same can be said about friends. It’s why I don’t really like what they mean by that, it would mean the end of life more or less.
Why do anything that “makes you happy” or be with someone who “makes you happy” if these things never actually did and it was just you? If that’s the case you can skip all that and just be happy. It’s bleak.
This was part of a lesson on there from someone about Trauma but I think the implications extend well beyond that to other emotions even happy ones:
In this discussion, we focused on the wisdom of our survival instincts and how they serve us. We also considered our natural tendency to generalise learning, paving the way for past information and habits to show up in the present. This explains why certain experiences in the present moment can trigger intense emotional reactions. By understanding these emotions, we can effectively process past emotional energy and allow our current emotions to flow naturally.
Close. Very close. It is you, but not only you. There isn’t a part of you that can turn feelings on and off, as if you are sitting at a control panel operating yourself. The reason the example includes someone with a garden, is it is about the entire you, the sum of all things you do and have done ever.
It includes your inherited traits too, you can’t control those. What’s important is, you can control how you “plant the garden” of your life. You can plant healthy thoughts, tend to them, then when external environmental factors happen, like rain, you can look at it in the big picture of your garden.
It’s not your fault when you feel bad. It’s not the rain’s fault. It’s the entirety of your life, how you grew into what you did, how others tended to your roots, and now, how you take care of your nourishment. Nourishment includes the right food, good water, and how you think about all of it.
You don’t control all of those factors. You can’t make it rain. You can’t control how people act around you. You do have some control over your thinking. If a bear jumped out of the bushes right now, you would react without stopping to think how you felt about. You would probably run. If it caught you, you might try to fight. If you knew about bears, you might know how to play dead, and you might do that. But the whole time, you would have very little control over how afraid you felt.
This is the problem with the guys from the website. They don’t consider actual bad circumstances. It’s easy to choose happiness when circumstances are good. They are happy because they have a good life, but they believe they are happy because they are choosing it. Then, they have the audacity to tell you to choose, despite all the things you might be going through.
It’s easy to work on your mental health when the rest of your life (the right amount of rain, good soil, good seeds available) is also good. Not everyone has all the good things. So, for someone to tell you that you can choose happiness anytime, that’s kind of mean.
In almost all circumstances, you can find one small thing to make your life better. You can make an improvement. And many small improvements can add up. But it is not possible to choose to be happy in all circumstances all the time. It’s the ups and downs that make a life.
I’m awake in the middle of the night right now because my mom needs care. She has dementia. She is dying very slowly. It’s very sad. It will take years. But I’m not going to be sad the entire time. I celebrate her life now and I enjoy the life she gave me. I’m not happy because she’s dying, I’m happy because she taught me how to be happy.
Well I am on the spectrum so there’s that, I have a fundamentally different way of processing I can’t change.
But according some they have lost people they knew, or had a drug trip, or been homeless and in and out of rehab centers, in short some had hard lives. Even the main dude Gary said he quit his corporate job to follow his bliss. I don’t know how accurate all their stories are but the only thing I do know is that something is just off about everyone on there. For some reason talking to them doesn’t feel like a conversation and the replies sound like they’re reading what they want into your words rather than what you are saying.
That and they are rather close-minded, I see that a lot in these types of community, they think they found the truth and any other explanation is you denying that. Some of the things they talk to me about sound fishy or questionable. Though like any spiritual place they place a BIG premium on personal experience as proof when to me that doesn’t mean much. Just because you made it out alright doesn’t mean others will or have. I did find it odd that all the evidence Gary had for his lessons is really just stories from his life, which don’t mean much or prove anything.
In short, I can’t really place it but I just get this feelings that the folks on there aren’t right in the head or whatever, it just seems off. I went to a Buddhism forum and the people there seemed more grounded and put together than folks on that forum.
Well right now I need a job to be able to move back home.
Though that’s the least of my worries, I’m still questioning whether what I feel and want is the truth or as that therapist lady on there says if it’s just past information and habits that I’m acting out. Though looking at her website I can’t say I put much stock in what she says, even checking her out on the org she says she’s on didn’t inspire confidence as she has no information up there besides her name (also that her webpage links to the forum is likely another fishy thing).
So, he made enough money to retire young and do something he wanted to do. Nice.
That’s how it has sounded to me from the beginning.
Agreed. You are good at evaluating them.
Agreed
You just did put your finger on it. I just quoted you putting your finger right on it.
Did she say it is only past info and habits? Or is it that you can change some habits, choose some new habits, and start to change? If you had bad habits in the past, then your past information might also look bad, so if you pick good habits now then in the future you will have good habits in your past. Changing habits is hard. It takes time to see the effect. You need a plan and a way to check that your new habits are good ones.
Well I couldn’t really get a straight answer from her based on the replies I got from her:
"When we are young, we acquire knowledge through significant experiences, which can be either positive or negative. These experiences act as foundational learnings, often reinforced by subsequent experiences. For example, a parent yells at us once and then repeats the behaviour on a number of occasions. Or we go to a birthday party and have fun and this occurs a number of times. As we internalise these lessons, they move from conscious awareness to subconscious understanding. This transition enables us to function automatically and conserve cognitive energy. "
"If you experience an emotion that is related to a current experience, for example, your boss yells at you and you feel annoyed. Then you could allow that ‘annoyance’ to be there. Perhaps you would get a little curious. Why am I feeling annoyed? Probably because he crossed a boundary by yelling at you and you probably didn’t get your needs met - to be spoken to respectfully. You might like to work out how you want to proceed with the situation. It all relates to the current situation.
However, if you experience a trauma trigger, your boss yelling at you might remind you of your father yelling at you when you were a kid. In this instance, you may have a much more intense emotional reaction to the event. For example, you might go into a shame spiral and feel like you can’t return to work. When this is the case, it is helpful to process the original trauma so that it doesn’t show up so intensely in the present.
It’s natural as we do the work of Self Mastery, that we question who we really are. I don’t know you or your circumstances well enough to give you a complete answer here. My suggestion would be to simply keep going."
It’s just vague answers, the implication from what she says is that what just like what we like based we learned lessons in childhood, which to me just seems wrong. Not every kid responds the same way to things because they’re all different.
She gave you a few examples to try to map onto your experience. They are how reactions are formed. In talk therapy, you would tell about your childhood, then she could see how your story unfolded. It’s not being vague, she doesn’t know you.
Each of us has a unique life. She didn’t say if she knew a few facts about you that she could tell how you feel. You would need to tell your story, and your reactions to those events and how you feel about it now. This is why people write journals, to add clarity to those old memories. We’re all complicated, but we can walk through this together and see things about others that they might have missed and others can see things about us.
In the end, it’s your story. You know it best and you are writing it now.
I guess you’re right, from the way it sounded she said that the reason we like things is because that’s how we were taught when we were kids, which had me doubting if I really like what I like or enjoy.
But to give you a picture of how people on that site are here’s a really bad offender who I think their brain is cooked:
Me:
"Not necessarily true. This is hindsight talking. "
Them:
"Ah, the delightful dance of contradiction and hindsight! If we were to personify these whimsical concepts, “Not necessarily true” would probably be the mischievous trickster who loves to keep everyone guessing, while “hindsight talking” would be the wise old sage who shows up fashionably late to the party. Imagine a conversation between them going something like this:
“Not necessarily true: Hey, did you hear about that so-called ‘truth’ everyone’s talking about?
Hindsight talking: Oh, you mean the one that’s always changing its mind? Classic truth, never could make up its mind!”
Ah, the banter between these two would surely keep us entertained with their witty repartee and sassy comebacks. Who knew that contradiction and hindsight could make such a dynamic comedic duo?"
There’s more but you get the gist. It’s the same style every time I respond to them, something I keep forgetting. It’s like they’re just waiting for me to finish, no engagement with what I say.
I see myself as a product of my genetic makeup which I had no choice over, and what I was taught, which I also had no choice, and I was young and didn’t always know if the teaching was right. I listened to older people who didn’t always agree and realized I had to make my own choices. I still know that I don’t know everything and do my best to keep my mind open.
That’s been my theme all along. Everything is part of a much larger picture. Yes, being told you have choices would be very different than being a slave or prisoner. Things are affected by other things. You can’t know what effect every little thing will have.
The one where I quoted a brief convo I had with a dude.
Here is one more:
Them:
“truth is a great sign that the story is powerful.”
Me:
"Not exactly. What is true is what is true regardless of the story you tell, though not everything is that simple in life unfortunately. But no amount of storytelling is going to enable you to fly when you can’t. "
Them:
“what is true now may not be true later. examples abound. so they are stories. truth is a belief of available perspective and can come from available consciousnesses. ur truth is that truth is always true. that’s ur truth brandon, not mine because i have seen pigs fly and they always smile and wave, and all the while i was up there with them. your truth is a story of pragmatism, limited to the pages it was written in.”
Me:
"That’s not really the case. In the case of “true now” that’s not true either. Sure our knowledge is updated all the time but some things we have discovered haven’t changed and some haven’t.
At most we are operating on our best guesses based on the available data we have on hand, and as our tools become better new stuff might show up. But there is a difference between thinking the earth is flat being wrong and the earth being a sphere being wrong. Thinking one is just as wrong as the other is, frankly, myopic.
I don’t really respond well to vague gesturing. Though suffice to say truth is always true, were it not we would not only not being able to know of it but also not be able to live in the world that we do now with all the things we have at our disposal. And it’s still not even everything there is to know.
Though it is important to know that we only know the things that are true because we can show them as such. We know what was wrong because it was demonstrated so. It’s like I said, no matter what story you tell you cannot fly, nor breath fire, or breath underwater.
TLDR: I think you have a mistaken notion of knowledge and truth. Just because we don’t have the whole picture doesn’t mean things can’t be wrong. "
I’m sensing they have the illusion of wisdom and profundity but really only speak to vague gesturing or “agreeing to disagree” because we have different definitions for things. It’s honestly the most disappointing conversations I’ve had. This was a recent one but a couple posts up I showed another.
I guess, maybe I just need more faith in myself and my reasoning ability. From what I see they really aren’t open to discussion as this was the following reply:
so, i see ur story is science. science may even b ur bible/koran so to speak. yet even science has its human subjective output. i presume the truths u r taking above are science based so brandon, there’s ur story but i’m sure u’ll disagree with that as well. disagreement seems to a story u feel comfortable with, but ya know, that’s kewl. b ur story if it floats ur boat.
By being done with them. Science is a set of methods for discovering truth. One of its principles is that we can never be certain. This guy is dismissing anything you say then twisting around and saying you are disagreeable. He doesn’t have good logic so he has to put down the best system of logic that human beings have ever come up with.
I love discussing anything with anybody but the first thing I do is determine if the person is reasonable. If not, I still might discuss what it means to be reasonable. If I can’t come to agreement on that there is no reason to move forward with them.
Reminds me of the old saying, no matter where you go, there you are.
Notice how all this starts with musings and ends with musings? No benchmark, no touch stone to work off of. I mean, the closest we get is God, or I think therefore I am, or nihilism.
With all of those being obsolete in light of modern scientific understanding about the physical reality that created us. I did not say unimportant, since it did create intellectual skeleton upon which most all of modern thought and dialogue is built upon.
Obsolete, because there’s little consilience between those trains of thought, and modern fundamental scientific understanding.
Logically I know you’re correct. I do. It’s just knowing that and doing it is hard. I guess I still believe I can move them despite their general attitude being otherwise. I guess I just never meet many folks who say “it doesn’t matter what you do I won’t believe you because…experience”.
Like…(quotes from forum)
"Free introduction to Belief Systems.
This is an exploration and discussion of how your thoughts, emotions, and habits arise from beliefs. If you want to make changes, you must address them at a deep enough level to make them permanent.
However, awareness of the energetic bods of beliefs can.
Bring a journal, and a glass with an inch or two of water in it for the experiment and discussion. "
"We literally have different definitions.
There is a lot more to living in a modern day than coming to agreement on definitions of concepts.
I have no need to trade word-salad explanations back and forth.
That you were disheartened because you did not affect my “view” does not change my 30 year journey into understanding the energy force of faith that is separate from ideas, but is invested in them when we think and speak. "
The first segment is just not true. Thoughts, emotions, all that stuff affect each other in a web with no real direct and easy solutions.
The second was a “debate” I got into about faith and me trying to tell him faith is cognition or thinking, all this stuff is the brain. He thinks it’s some energy or power you can infuse into thoughts and emotions to give them strength, which…well how do you respond to that. Faith itself is cognitive, it’s a mental process that is impacted by lots of other things. Even when it’s “baseless” it’s not truly such. The irony is he can’t see how that notion itself is an idea or thought that he is convinced as such because of X, Y, Z.
Bear with me as I gave this some thought today:
I do agree that beliefs play a role in emotions, not the whole story but they do factor into it. My question then is what makes these beliefs make us feel? Because lets be honest they MAKE us feel something, and I think the reason for that has little to do with the words and something under that. My best guess is some combination of survival mechanisms and us being social animals. Survival in the sense that we like to be right, because being right about something leads to rewards that incentivize us to repeat said behavior, people don’t want to be wrong. The same applies to social dynamics. We want approval from the tribe, group, friends, etc, people we value and so feel good when we do what is considered good.
My guess is that he thinks there is some essentialist component to these words or beliefs that make you feel. He also assumes we have a choice in the matter. But feeling good because we do “good” is a social thing and survival as well, in other words there is something else giving these beliefs their power and so while it appears that the beliefs are doing it the real “energy” is something deeper. None of this stuff exists in a vacuum, it depends on/ is affected by/ and affects everything else.
Even if he wanted to retreat to “the meaning we make”, and we do do this as humans, said meaning is based on several things all of which are cognitive processes. None of this is magic or energy or anything like that. I’m not even going to get into all the biases they fall into that they don’t see.
Like…they don’t acknowledge that what they read from him is in fact influencing them and affecting them, and what he is saying is affected by his life experience and everything else.
But I guess my long winded TLDR is that stuff does MAKE us feel things, just not in the way he seems to think.
To me if what we believe is based on factors out of our control, and if according to him beliefs make us feel things, then by extension other things and people and events do MAKE us feel things because they trigger beliefs which were formed by factors outside of our control.
The cruel irony though is the level of thought I put into all these questions is far more than what I get on there. Folks have a point that these are great questions to ask, but the people on there aren’t the ones to answer them. They are too certain in his words and ideas to consider anything else.
That may be a premature assumption. There are several persons here who make an effort to look at proposed subjects in an objective (scientifically based) manner.
There is nothing wrong with “belief” when it is based on “observation” and “measurement”.
Religious belief is not founded on scientific principles, but on “faith” in a metaphysical Intelligent Designer and that leads to several different interpretations of origins and morality.
Consider this little interview and profound observation by Ricky Gervais on the Stephen Colbert Show.
The conclusion leads to a feeling of confidence that there are things we do understand about our place in the scheme of things.
To use a religious phrase: “It is in mathematics I trust”
And for a touch of Atheist humor about “belief”: (warning, some crude language)
Well when the person you talk to thinks faith is some sort of energy that gives power to believes and thinks they’re doing some sort of energy work with it I doubt we are in the realm of science. I mean thinking the pyramids of egypt have some energy you connect to is…well you get my drift.
I’m not talking to someone in the realm of logic. He pretty much admits that “I have 30 years experience in “the energy force of faith””, there’s no arguing with these folks because they are too certain of their own experience and won’t hear anything else. One even flat out told me that nothing I said would shake his belief in the experience he had.
I mean just read the quotes I have from these people, they don’t want discussions unless it ends up at their conclusions.
Yeah, I’ve wasted many an hour doing that. It’s something to do with endorphins being released when you see something you know needs to be corrected, and you put some words together that you think will fix it. It’s natural to focus on the negative, the things most immediate in our face. The long term healthy choices can be put off. Just another one of those human oddities.
