"Relate"
Soooooooooo.
I thought of something on the bus today that I realized was new-ish but I didn't write it down and by the time I was eating dinner, I'd forgotten about it. UNTIL NOW. Now I must make haste and scribble it into my jurnul b4 i forgets it.
I was thinking about compassion. And I was trying to understand why I was right (shut up) about love (read: "ideal relationship") was about similarities. Because normally, when you relate something (transitive verb, yo), the important thing is the differences, right? Not the sames. But when it comes to companions, the brain gravitates towards similarities. You don't really accept someone as a companion until you subconsciously accept them as pretty similar.
And I was like... that's totally weird, man. It's not logical. What the hell? Am I whack?
And then I got it!
Patterns.
Brains are fucking built on patterns. They're pattern matchers. And when checking out identities, it looks for patterns.
Of course, that probably doesn't explain to you anything whatsoever, because there's a piece missing. Because the whole pattern thing exists for typical relations (read: "explanations"), too. So there's this missing connection between "pattern" and "similarities".
But of course I have an answer.
The pattern isn't "between things", it's "between people". When you explain someone to someone else, you don't tell them, "Oh, and he's completely not like you. He doesn't do this, he doesn't do that, even though you do." No, you tell them about the similarities, either between you and the third person (#3), or between #2 and #3.
And people grok themselves completely differently than they grok things. So the point, as I already knew (rawr) isn't that compassion is about similarities. But rather compassion is about similarity to yourself. That's the whole point of the selfishness bit. You are the context for your subjective world, and the only context for it, and so the Good stuff is generated via your self-regard and the correlation of positivity and self-similarity.
And that works in reverse.
If you fear yourself, you'll be compassionate towards things/people that are unlike you.
And if you read that correctly, you'll also see the whole New Agey thing about how if you stop fearing yourself, you'll be confident and all that shizzle.
And now I'm out of steam and this is over goodbye.
I thought of something on the bus today that I realized was new-ish but I didn't write it down and by the time I was eating dinner, I'd forgotten about it. UNTIL NOW. Now I must make haste and scribble it into my jurnul b4 i forgets it.
I was thinking about compassion. And I was trying to understand why I was right (shut up) about love (read: "ideal relationship") was about similarities. Because normally, when you relate something (transitive verb, yo), the important thing is the differences, right? Not the sames. But when it comes to companions, the brain gravitates towards similarities. You don't really accept someone as a companion until you subconsciously accept them as pretty similar.
And I was like... that's totally weird, man. It's not logical. What the hell? Am I whack?
And then I got it!
Patterns.
Brains are fucking built on patterns. They're pattern matchers. And when checking out identities, it looks for patterns.
Of course, that probably doesn't explain to you anything whatsoever, because there's a piece missing. Because the whole pattern thing exists for typical relations (read: "explanations"), too. So there's this missing connection between "pattern" and "similarities".
But of course I have an answer.
The pattern isn't "between things", it's "between people". When you explain someone to someone else, you don't tell them, "Oh, and he's completely not like you. He doesn't do this, he doesn't do that, even though you do." No, you tell them about the similarities, either between you and the third person (#3), or between #2 and #3.
And people grok themselves completely differently than they grok things. So the point, as I already knew (rawr) isn't that compassion is about similarities. But rather compassion is about similarity to yourself. That's the whole point of the selfishness bit. You are the context for your subjective world, and the only context for it, and so the Good stuff is generated via your self-regard and the correlation of positivity and self-similarity.
And that works in reverse.
If you fear yourself, you'll be compassionate towards things/people that are unlike you.
And if you read that correctly, you'll also see the whole New Agey thing about how if you stop fearing yourself, you'll be confident and all that shizzle.
And now I'm out of steam and this is over goodbye.