More on Time Theory
I'm overdue for writing as usual. I've had lots of stuff to write about but because I've been delaying most, if not all of it, has slipped my mind. I've got one thing I've been remembering for like 2 months now. Let's see if I can reconstruct more from that.
This is a follow-up to my discussion about how I view time.
I view time in a mechnanistic sort of way, like how the Newtonian view of physics was mechanistic, strictly cause and effect. The future is made up of an ever-recurring series of moments defined as the present. The present is almost entirely determined by the past though. Therefore, the past controls the future. If you're one of those people who likes to see the future as being undetermined or filled with possibility, you're already gotten off at this station.
In theory, if you can identify and quantify all of the variables, the equation is solvable. If you can do that for most of the variables, you can predict a range of outcomes. Predicting the future is this equation in my mind. You just need to identify and quantify as many of the variables as possible. To do that, you need to query the past and the present for all possible influences. Understand the experiences of a person's life and determine what values it instilled in them. From there you look to see if there's any trend in the present which bucks those values. Barring that, people's responses will be consistent.
Everyone can agree people are consistent in their behavior. When you meet someone who isn't you're confused as hell, but that's another theory that all such inconsistencies are just illusions as we fail to identify the real value working behind the scenes. Consistent is repetitive, is predictable. And with that, we predict the person's future actions.
The further out you go, the less accurate these predictions get because you can't account for the possibility of new and more outside influences affecting the current trajectory. People change over time after all. Not entirely though, a core still remains in tact - bedrock principles and values that can't be dislodged so easily. Something earth-shattering has to alter those, and those aren't so common.
As such, to me, people are equations to be solved. It's my form of control of my environment. I don't need to steer the outcome so much as I need to know the outcome in advance and then decide whether or not I'm ok with it. It gets easier to solve people over time. The first dozen or two are pretty difficult to figure out, but after that you get repeating personalities and values. After awhile you begin to see the deeper patterns below the personality, the cause and effect. This is what therapists see.
To me, a therapist is someone who is handed a real mess of a knot. Their job is to study the knot and see what connects where, to follow each thread and slowly untangle it. It's a reverse-engineering process, to take someone's stated values, beliefs and actions and connect them to the experiences which spawned them. Then to get the person to view those experiences differently and change the current beliefs, values etc.
To me, this is a form of time travel. It is going back into the past, via memory, and not changing the events, but changing how we view these events. In doing so, the present and by extension, the future, are reshaped.
When I look at the future, I don't see hope, I see a continuation of the present moment. If the present is good, the future is good. If the present is bad, it's more of that. While this view flows from the above chain of logic, it is flawed. It's flaw is that is inherently unstable. As the present shifts, so too does the future. The future is too closely married to the present and thus shifting on a whim. There needs to be some middle ground to tether it. For me, this only comes in the form of emotional resilience - my ability to take in stride bad things that happen without losing faith in the direction of thingsl to retain my sense of value in the goodness of the present in the face of adversity. Counter to this is the constant battle I face with anxiety, fear of an uncertain future that is always looming overhead. This anxiety inflicts severe sleep issues on me that I grapple with pretty constantly.
This whole tract did not go the direction I was planning, but it still yielded a fine result in understanding that my anxiety is a byproduct of my understanding of the future.
Where I was intending to go was to discuss my anger issues. I have found I am able to hold on to anger in ways others cannot, for lengths and intensities others I know cannot muster. The secret to that lies in this world view.
To me, the past is never the past, but a fact of the present. It does not vanish into the ether, but continues to exert influence over and/or control the present. When someone hurt or angered me, it didn't go away, it's still there hounding me. I can stay perpetually angry because the event is still going on in the present, it never really ended. As for intensity, likely for the same reason. Anger fades in time, but if the wound is always fresh, so too is the anger. It is anger of something that has just happened, not of something weeks, months or years ago. I joking refer to this as investing in renewable sources of anger, a pun on the eco-friendly renewable sources of energy.
The only means I know of to alter this, is to alter the past. Not the event, but my view on it. I'm not one to simply let things go just because. Most things that make me angry involve a person and their actions. To let go of the anger is to stop having been hurt by what happened or to simply ignore it. I don't do that, because it doesn't feel safe.
My sense of forgiveness premises upon admission of guilt, contrition and change. It flows in that order or it doesn't make sense. You can't be sorry if you can't admit you did anything wrong. That's saying an outcome is regretable, but absolving yourself of your part in it. To promise change without any sense of contrition means any change will be as an act of will which will always falter in time or be something forgotten because it'sa detail to be consciously remembered. Real change comes when we are no longer tempted to act in the way we did, which comes only after a shift in perspective. In this case, that means empathy, and that is what inspires contrition. The first act, admission of guilt, can stem from principle, a purely intellectual exercise, but can stem from the emotional place of empathy. The jump to contrition is an emotional reaction though, it cannot be reached purely through the intellect. Change sees this jump from emotion back to the intellect, a shift in perspective. The emotion of guilt will fade over time, and therefore cannot foster long-term change. The emotion has to shift the way we see things so there is no temptation to do it again.
Without this process, without real change, the events are doomed to replay. No lesson is learned, the path once called a mistake is still seen as viable, as a temptation. It is only a matter of time before something slips through that crack. And as such, I never feel safe, and therefore anxiety and all the problems that filters into with depression, social aversion, sleep issues etc.
I staved off these things for years by choosing to be angry about the past instead of focusing on the hurt. Anger and being hurt are just opposite reactions to pain. I consciously chose anger for years and I came up with all sorts of rationalizations for it. As I came to a more of a place of loneliness and later empathy, much of the temptation to choose anger went away. Now, my anger is tempting only as a way to avoid feeling pain. The anger and desire to see others hurt is no longer the temptation. But, in choosing to step back from the anger, all of the pain I was staving off washed over and engulfed me. I'm still trying to learn how to swim. At the last I can get my head above water and gasp for air, but I am still submerged much of the time.
I know only 2 ways to change this. The first is to alter the past, to lessen the pain. But I am never capable of doing so in isolation, it always requires the cooperation of the other party. And that doesn't work so well. The second is to fill my life with friends and support. And that has always seemed to be cyclical with its successes and losses. I never seem to hold on to gains for long or to many of them at all. Those gains feel ephemeral, temporary things that will inevitably lost and so never truly relied upon.
This is a follow-up to my discussion about how I view time.
I view time in a mechnanistic sort of way, like how the Newtonian view of physics was mechanistic, strictly cause and effect. The future is made up of an ever-recurring series of moments defined as the present. The present is almost entirely determined by the past though. Therefore, the past controls the future. If you're one of those people who likes to see the future as being undetermined or filled with possibility, you're already gotten off at this station.
In theory, if you can identify and quantify all of the variables, the equation is solvable. If you can do that for most of the variables, you can predict a range of outcomes. Predicting the future is this equation in my mind. You just need to identify and quantify as many of the variables as possible. To do that, you need to query the past and the present for all possible influences. Understand the experiences of a person's life and determine what values it instilled in them. From there you look to see if there's any trend in the present which bucks those values. Barring that, people's responses will be consistent.
Everyone can agree people are consistent in their behavior. When you meet someone who isn't you're confused as hell, but that's another theory that all such inconsistencies are just illusions as we fail to identify the real value working behind the scenes. Consistent is repetitive, is predictable. And with that, we predict the person's future actions.
The further out you go, the less accurate these predictions get because you can't account for the possibility of new and more outside influences affecting the current trajectory. People change over time after all. Not entirely though, a core still remains in tact - bedrock principles and values that can't be dislodged so easily. Something earth-shattering has to alter those, and those aren't so common.
As such, to me, people are equations to be solved. It's my form of control of my environment. I don't need to steer the outcome so much as I need to know the outcome in advance and then decide whether or not I'm ok with it. It gets easier to solve people over time. The first dozen or two are pretty difficult to figure out, but after that you get repeating personalities and values. After awhile you begin to see the deeper patterns below the personality, the cause and effect. This is what therapists see.
To me, a therapist is someone who is handed a real mess of a knot. Their job is to study the knot and see what connects where, to follow each thread and slowly untangle it. It's a reverse-engineering process, to take someone's stated values, beliefs and actions and connect them to the experiences which spawned them. Then to get the person to view those experiences differently and change the current beliefs, values etc.
To me, this is a form of time travel. It is going back into the past, via memory, and not changing the events, but changing how we view these events. In doing so, the present and by extension, the future, are reshaped.
When I look at the future, I don't see hope, I see a continuation of the present moment. If the present is good, the future is good. If the present is bad, it's more of that. While this view flows from the above chain of logic, it is flawed. It's flaw is that is inherently unstable. As the present shifts, so too does the future. The future is too closely married to the present and thus shifting on a whim. There needs to be some middle ground to tether it. For me, this only comes in the form of emotional resilience - my ability to take in stride bad things that happen without losing faith in the direction of thingsl to retain my sense of value in the goodness of the present in the face of adversity. Counter to this is the constant battle I face with anxiety, fear of an uncertain future that is always looming overhead. This anxiety inflicts severe sleep issues on me that I grapple with pretty constantly.
This whole tract did not go the direction I was planning, but it still yielded a fine result in understanding that my anxiety is a byproduct of my understanding of the future.
Where I was intending to go was to discuss my anger issues. I have found I am able to hold on to anger in ways others cannot, for lengths and intensities others I know cannot muster. The secret to that lies in this world view.
To me, the past is never the past, but a fact of the present. It does not vanish into the ether, but continues to exert influence over and/or control the present. When someone hurt or angered me, it didn't go away, it's still there hounding me. I can stay perpetually angry because the event is still going on in the present, it never really ended. As for intensity, likely for the same reason. Anger fades in time, but if the wound is always fresh, so too is the anger. It is anger of something that has just happened, not of something weeks, months or years ago. I joking refer to this as investing in renewable sources of anger, a pun on the eco-friendly renewable sources of energy.
The only means I know of to alter this, is to alter the past. Not the event, but my view on it. I'm not one to simply let things go just because. Most things that make me angry involve a person and their actions. To let go of the anger is to stop having been hurt by what happened or to simply ignore it. I don't do that, because it doesn't feel safe.
My sense of forgiveness premises upon admission of guilt, contrition and change. It flows in that order or it doesn't make sense. You can't be sorry if you can't admit you did anything wrong. That's saying an outcome is regretable, but absolving yourself of your part in it. To promise change without any sense of contrition means any change will be as an act of will which will always falter in time or be something forgotten because it'sa detail to be consciously remembered. Real change comes when we are no longer tempted to act in the way we did, which comes only after a shift in perspective. In this case, that means empathy, and that is what inspires contrition. The first act, admission of guilt, can stem from principle, a purely intellectual exercise, but can stem from the emotional place of empathy. The jump to contrition is an emotional reaction though, it cannot be reached purely through the intellect. Change sees this jump from emotion back to the intellect, a shift in perspective. The emotion of guilt will fade over time, and therefore cannot foster long-term change. The emotion has to shift the way we see things so there is no temptation to do it again.
Without this process, without real change, the events are doomed to replay. No lesson is learned, the path once called a mistake is still seen as viable, as a temptation. It is only a matter of time before something slips through that crack. And as such, I never feel safe, and therefore anxiety and all the problems that filters into with depression, social aversion, sleep issues etc.
I staved off these things for years by choosing to be angry about the past instead of focusing on the hurt. Anger and being hurt are just opposite reactions to pain. I consciously chose anger for years and I came up with all sorts of rationalizations for it. As I came to a more of a place of loneliness and later empathy, much of the temptation to choose anger went away. Now, my anger is tempting only as a way to avoid feeling pain. The anger and desire to see others hurt is no longer the temptation. But, in choosing to step back from the anger, all of the pain I was staving off washed over and engulfed me. I'm still trying to learn how to swim. At the last I can get my head above water and gasp for air, but I am still submerged much of the time.
I know only 2 ways to change this. The first is to alter the past, to lessen the pain. But I am never capable of doing so in isolation, it always requires the cooperation of the other party. And that doesn't work so well. The second is to fill my life with friends and support. And that has always seemed to be cyclical with its successes and losses. I never seem to hold on to gains for long or to many of them at all. Those gains feel ephemeral, temporary things that will inevitably lost and so never truly relied upon.