Thoughts
Welcome to Time Out.
I think I was the only child that dictated when she should go to time out. I don't mind it, it's a wonderful way to think as long as you have something to occupy your mind. I recently decided that due to my thinking and overactive imagination I have produced in myself the psychological after effects of being raped simply based on my thinking of it so much. I have lately been given some wonderful resources from random strangers, to therapy, to magazines, to botched internet searches and television and while this post will not attempt to sort through where I am at with everything, it will attempt to catalogue some of what is currently interesting to me.
Seattle period of dormancy and winter only lasts six weeks: during the period of heavy snow and now with the tremendous onslaught of rain I was talking to someone about the true length of winter in this city. The person I was talking with reminded me that we are quite soon to be at winter solstice: the 21st and that the days would commence lengthening. He also was quick to point out that Seattle is unique for its vegetation as well. Seattle has winter blooming plans, many with beautiful flowers that will bud in January. The point is that even with the rain, the gloom in Seattle, it is truly a short winter.
Facial Expressions: Isreali researchers did this experiment to determine how much of our facial expressions are hard wired in. The did this test where they took people who were blind from birth and compared their facial expressions to members of the family and the results were an impressive similarity. I think it is interesting to consider why we might have these hard wired in and then to consider the universality of the expressions.
Bird in the Hand: Reading through all of these I began to think about what I said the other day about not feeling the need to prove I am right anymore, about not enjoying debating. There is nothing about it that pulls me and I began thinking about value. This one might get a bit complicated but only because it has been reinforced in different ways. Basically, here is how the thought itself went: this magazine claims that there has been little in terms of true and impressive philosophical break throughs in the past decade. I started wondering how true that was and thinking if it was me and I had this amazing, earth shattering thought, I wouldn't pursue it that far. So, how much value does it possess. It seems to me that the thought itself contains no value, that the only value it could gain is from it being shared. I think that is an interesting concept. We have completely evolved into group beings, we need communities, things are without value if they are not in benefit to the group, in fact, value effectively is group.
Bird in the Bush: so, if it is determined that something is no longer functioning, say a person, then they are reverted to nothing, they have no value. So for someone who is say depressed, they contain no merit or worth because they effectively contribute nothing to the present collective. This then is the perfect time for them to be rehabilitated. So if a person is nothing, keeping them at nothing and retraining them actually allows them to gain worth. Talking to someone about i feel nothing after everything with Evan his response was "good, that means you are ready to be molded by your next guy." It occurred to be that being nothing was actually what i am and that that was valuable only because of what that could be turned into. The fact that I am a bit broken at the moment means only that I am someones found object to do with what he desires to gain value.
Conscious: "given that conscious experience has neural correlates in the brain, why doe the activity in some parts of the brain lead to conscious experience, while activity in other parts does not?" Free will ties in here nicely to me. When researchers tested people about free will and asked them their thoughts most people were inclined to say they believed in free will dispute the amount of scientific evidence to the contrary. Then, as if to prove that, people in subsequent questions more inclined to cheat. I think it is interesting to look at why there is such a need to prove that we are creatures that possess free will. From an evolutionary standpoint, what is the benefit of having it? Why should it be better that we do not simply have good instincts and are predisposed to do what is in our best interest? From a religious standpoint, what did God want to prove by giving us free will. If he was the one who donated that to us at all. But more on that to come.
"Dark times are usually foreshadowed by discrimination against vulnerable minorities"
Lashing out: "Nothing is more human that the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning for life" in the article the author suggests that the greatest human flaw is this belief that an action in life will secure a place in the afterlife. The idea is that God alone is capable to deciding who shall be admitted into an afterlife and all of our attempts at action in uniform during life is just our own frustration with the system and our attempt to provide significance to our temporal existence.
The Voice of Science: IN this article the author proports that part of the trouble with the freedom of academic voice is where it is going. In the past science has been closely tied with an authority, so the Church or the government which has directed it and stood by it. Now, in a time where science is, in some sense, run away, it says and does what it likes then turns back to the government for protection when the public does not agree with it. What I find interesting is that science seems to be operating then under this guise that it is for public benefit but in the same breath feels it is above that as well. It feels it alone is capable of determining what the public should want and when the results do not align it then seeks comfort and protection from the institutions it otherwise shuns. It wants fairness and impartiality but in a sense offers nothing back.
Knowledge: Someone suggested to me recently that it is not that we investigate what we know but that we investigate under what circumstances do we know it.
Boundaries: I remember in a class I took in college one of the heavy themes of the course was boundaries. The thought was that people naturally tend to avoid boundaries and that things that cross boundaries, make us feel uncomfortable: rats, crust, etc. Looking at medicine and the fact that I feel every day I am bombarded on my AOL welcome page with the world's oldest this and world's oldest that, I read about some people who are questioning what it means to be human with things like hybrids and other such computer geeky things. I think we take some form of pleasure from the idea of death, it is a finality and it is comforting, it sets and equal playing field and I think it provides meaning. If we all live forever than what good is it to say that so and so accomplished so much when I could easily say "wait and see what I do next century." I actually hate this idea. We need this to add value to ourselves. I guess the question would be, in keeping with the previously established idea of value, how does this effect the community and the truth is that it doesn't. Not being able to die does not help us in our forming of communities, it does nothing to strength the bonds or work together.
Consequentialism: This theory of act-consquentialism claims that any action that fails to produce the best outcome must be considered wrong. This will lead me into the "trolley problem" which I had just learned about. The basic premise is that there is this run away trolley with half a dozen people on board. The trolley is going down this hill and will crash and kill everyone on board if you do not do something. There is a switch that you could pull to stop it from going that route. You would be obligated to do so, right? Well mostly yes. What if there was an innocent man walking across that track and he would be killed but the 6 people on the trolley would live. Still obligated? Most would say yes. There are all of these variations on this though. If you pull the level than you are involved and you effectively made the choice to end the mans life and according to act-consuquentialism you would be at fault for that. You made the choice and were put inside the framework of the problem. Now, if you had just stood by then wouldn't you also be guilty? In the eyes of the law the answer is actually yes. You do have an obligation to step in and act. Ok so pretend you are standing above this scene and there is a heavy man next to you, in this case the weight of the fat man could stop the trolley and save the passengers but would kill the fat man. Do you push him down the hill and onto the track? Gets a bit messier. Another philosopher asked if you have five patients needing a transplant or they will die and one healthy man walks into the hospital who's organize would perfectly match the five, do you as the doctor get to say that it is right to take his organs? Seems like an obvious no but how much different is it than the trolley? In my whole view I generally adopt the "don't mess up others" policy. I couldn't push the man onto the track, I couldn't pull the switch if it would kill someone else, in that moment my instinct would not even have thought that. My value to society is skewed.
LIke/Follow: Did you know that at this moment there are 200,300 people "following" Elvis on iTunes. Could someone explain that to me? Are you waiting for him to make the next big announcement? New record? New grammy? I mean list of concert dates?
Emotional Space: This whole fMRI has revolutionized so much more than health care! If you could see the number of times it is cited in philosophical writings… this article argues that emotions are tangible objects. The researchers take patients and put them into one of them fMRI's and when the subjects had an emotion it shows up on the machine, right? Well, that in some sense means that the emotion is firing up all of the neurons or whatever in the person's brain. In that moment the feeling of happiness or anger is physically taking up space, it has an actual space in the person's brain and in the world. The emotions themselves have physical weight and are physically present.
Yes: Going along with the above it is interesting to think about the chemicals in the body that are released when we have that feeling of anger. We have known for a few years now that pressure during surgery on a certain area of the brain can produce laughter, etc, in the patient. I think it is interesting than to look at what truly makes up a feeling of "happy." In happy, which occupies this location, we have such amount of chemical A and this many neurons and so forth. I think the idea of manufacturing emotions has been long considered. Goodness knows that we have happy pills by the truckload. I think what would be more interesting is looking at how to manufacture a reaction. I think we have all seen what I have been able to do to myself in regards to my physical reaction to something born in my head and we all know about hypnotism. But what about simply manufacturing an answer of yes. Surely, if emotions have a physical space and are made up the same way and produce the same facial expressions than answers in an affirmative or negative must have a formula. I should like to know it.
The Army: I started a letter writing campaign to send letters to soilders who are far from home during the holidays. It, for the most part, went well. I was impressed with the turn out. Many people wrote letters and I think it is a lovely idea. That said I had some people tell me that they had recently watched a documentary that showed soldiers laughing at the foolish letters that had been sent to them through people like me. I found this somewhat distasteful and surprised but after thinking about it, it was easy to see. I remember someone else telling me that in places like Afhganistan, adults will have their children stand in the middle of the road while American tanks are coming so that the tanks would have to run over and kill the children before they would get to the adults. The idea of this being so psychologically awful on the soldiers has stuck with me. I remember highschool was the first time I had heard about this idea of enemy soldiers having conquered an area running around and raping women, getting them pregnant, so that the women would hate themselves so that they would either commit suicide directly or nearly indirectly by using a hanger. Now, jump forward a bit to me reading about soldiers coming back from war and being overwhelmed by their emotions of what they did during war. Anger is a strong emotion that is useful to us because it helps us be stronger than we otherwise would. We fight harder and longer with anger than we otherwise would. The anger the soldiers must feel and the amount of training to become desensitized to running over and killing a child would have to take a fair amount of work. If one is able to do that than of coarse a silly letter from a girl back in the states would seem corny and so unrelatable as to be comical. Now then people who have come back from war have a difficult time emerging back into everyday life right? They mention this "shame of triumph" this shame that they were able to be successful and this shame that they watched someone else die, or give up information, or betray themselves. This shame of triumph is fascinating to me. In so many ways we are still at the stage of evolution that puts in a war based cycle. We have evolved to function best in war and yet everything we see above works to prove that we have all of this inner wiring and natural instincts so that we will function in a group. I think what we are looking at is a maximum size. We evolved to function in small groups at war with other small groups. Why. What did we need that for? Was it to see if the neandrathals would win? Was it Satan? Why.
Disagreement: Why is it important to debate? Recently someone took me on this very long winder lecture about the merits of debate. I fell asleep. It was obvious what his motives were and they failed to benefit me in anyway. In addition, my arguing back failed even further to do anything of worth. So what then is the point? In this article the writer says that old cliche about two rational beings are bond to disagree is a fable. Two rational people should not disagree. If person A sets forth that the argument about the street trolley should end thus and person B says no it should go a different way, the two may list out their reasons for thinking the way they do and inevitably one person will say "oh but no, I see it as" and there in is the problem. If both people are rational and see the good points in the argument than they must admit that the other person's side is equally valid and would have to seriously alter their own. I happen to very much like this article.
Getting over: Obviously the next person who tells me that I should simply get over Evan will get hit. I don't do well with such stupidity and fail to see why I should. Anyway, so tonight my therapist asked me what I hoped to gain from therapy. Sadly, she is probably the only one who doesn't know what my goal is. She said that on the first day I had told her that I wanted three things (they were my markers for a successful life) and that I had been thus far unable to get them on my own. They were: career, relationship with God, and romantic relationship. I agreed that overall those were my goals. I then specified to say that in terms of relationship I wanted to either be with Evan again or be ok with never having a relationship again. She was startled by this and preassured me to try to explain why I thought that. She asked if I believed that for every person there is but one soul mate which I actually do not think. This surprised her even more and, based on my prior answers, for good reason. It is strange that I don't feel that way. What I do think is that if we are the best we can possibly be than we should be able to be with anyone. There might be some point that God feels would be even better for us and that is where all the little triggers go off when you kiss someone as your immune system is figuring that out. There are these people then that do even better with you, these are the gifts from God. The rest is up to you though, what you do with that relationship and how good you are at it. I tried to explain this to her. She said she had two problems with this: the first is that it sets up an expectation that everyone can fall in love with you and second that it has unrealistic expectations. Most people would guess my response to both. Everyone should be able to fall in love with someone who is perfect in the same way everyone would love God and Jesus. Secondly, I fail to see why I should encourage failure and anything less than perfection is in partnership with Satan and therefor evil. Now, what does this mean smaller picture. It means that if I fall in love with someone and we break up, as I have said in the past, if I am ok with that it suggests that the relationship truly meant nothing. It would be like saying on my wedding day "well if it doesn't work out I can always divorce and remarry." If that is the aim than the feelings are not legitimate. They serve no purpose. The reverse is to say that I will fall in love in the future which means that the feelings I feel now are untrue but that sets up the problem of how would I be able to trust future feelings. (it is like the self reflective nature of the sentence "this statement is false" which would then suggest it is true which it cannot be then right?) My therapist didn't go here but I started to ask myself about parents who have lost a child and somehow decide they want another, if they love that second one as much. They would all say yes. They would argue that your heart grows and has more room, more capacity for love. Ok, let's follow this through to the end. That would suggest that Fred still loves me if he ever once did. It would mean that Evan still loves me. It would suggest then that at any point, I would be able to stand in a line with all of the people he has loved and he would feel just as pulled to me as anyone else. See where I'm going with this? It would only make sense than that he would chose with convention and simply pick someone else due to expectation. Unless we admit this cannot be true. That in fact the heart doesn't only grow, it also takes the old person, the only memory and does what a computer does. It "deletes" them meaning they are still there but their space is hidden now, their space is going to EVENTUALLY be written over. So now, even though we cannot acknowledge what is going on, we cannot see that person's space, that person's emotional space, they are still there and we are actively waiting to write over them, to replace them and in that moment we are deciding that we were at one point wrong in our previous feelings because we have to be, because otherwise we could not fit in society, into our communities, we have to do this, and we have to have these "fancy emotions" which tell us we are feeling things while really only discrediting this just so that we can make peace and continue to live in the community.
The very last thing I want to bring up is Lilith. I will confess complete ignorance on this matter until a random stranger started talking to me about it. Lilith, according to Jewish mysticism, was here before Eve and potentially before Adam. She refused to submit to Adam and was therefor banished and, well, replaced almost entirely by Eve who was then born from Adam. Lilith went on to have relations with Arch Angel Samael. The two had an affair and gave birth to evil. Lilith became a seducer and associated with darkness. It was her sin than that first gave forth the idea of the fighting against submitting. She was unwilling to submit to God and unwilling to submit to Adam. Hers was then the first example of pride. But what of the angel? He has been charged with seducing Eve and getting her pregnant with Cain. He has also been charged with being the snake in the garden. All of this to me says that really all he wanted was God's power. He then takes the first form of pride. Have you ever created something you love so much it nearly takes on a life of it's own. How did God create something so powerful and so beautiful than it has been able to try and intercept God's own will thrice in the beginning of time? Once through Lilith, once as a snake, and once to make Cain. The entire notion of this is so fascinating to me that I can't yet fully form my ideas.
Anyway, that's where I am at for the moment, all of the thoughts that have been occupying my mind and what I should do about them. I am bombarded with thoughts about emotions and emotion regulation. About how it is only supposed to be anger that is self perpetuating and that I should want to be happy. About how I should want to move on. About why I am holding to the things I am believing. About how Evan never wanted to think that I could or would feel this way for this long. And yet. And yet.
side note. you know whats slightly odd? all the things my father always bought me all the traditions? going under. used to get a train car every year... LGB went under. used to get jewelry from bailey banks and biddle each year...after over 100 years they went under. dont know why i thought of that.
I think I was the only child that dictated when she should go to time out. I don't mind it, it's a wonderful way to think as long as you have something to occupy your mind. I recently decided that due to my thinking and overactive imagination I have produced in myself the psychological after effects of being raped simply based on my thinking of it so much. I have lately been given some wonderful resources from random strangers, to therapy, to magazines, to botched internet searches and television and while this post will not attempt to sort through where I am at with everything, it will attempt to catalogue some of what is currently interesting to me.
Seattle period of dormancy and winter only lasts six weeks: during the period of heavy snow and now with the tremendous onslaught of rain I was talking to someone about the true length of winter in this city. The person I was talking with reminded me that we are quite soon to be at winter solstice: the 21st and that the days would commence lengthening. He also was quick to point out that Seattle is unique for its vegetation as well. Seattle has winter blooming plans, many with beautiful flowers that will bud in January. The point is that even with the rain, the gloom in Seattle, it is truly a short winter.
Facial Expressions: Isreali researchers did this experiment to determine how much of our facial expressions are hard wired in. The did this test where they took people who were blind from birth and compared their facial expressions to members of the family and the results were an impressive similarity. I think it is interesting to consider why we might have these hard wired in and then to consider the universality of the expressions.
Bird in the Hand: Reading through all of these I began to think about what I said the other day about not feeling the need to prove I am right anymore, about not enjoying debating. There is nothing about it that pulls me and I began thinking about value. This one might get a bit complicated but only because it has been reinforced in different ways. Basically, here is how the thought itself went: this magazine claims that there has been little in terms of true and impressive philosophical break throughs in the past decade. I started wondering how true that was and thinking if it was me and I had this amazing, earth shattering thought, I wouldn't pursue it that far. So, how much value does it possess. It seems to me that the thought itself contains no value, that the only value it could gain is from it being shared. I think that is an interesting concept. We have completely evolved into group beings, we need communities, things are without value if they are not in benefit to the group, in fact, value effectively is group.
Bird in the Bush: so, if it is determined that something is no longer functioning, say a person, then they are reverted to nothing, they have no value. So for someone who is say depressed, they contain no merit or worth because they effectively contribute nothing to the present collective. This then is the perfect time for them to be rehabilitated. So if a person is nothing, keeping them at nothing and retraining them actually allows them to gain worth. Talking to someone about i feel nothing after everything with Evan his response was "good, that means you are ready to be molded by your next guy." It occurred to be that being nothing was actually what i am and that that was valuable only because of what that could be turned into. The fact that I am a bit broken at the moment means only that I am someones found object to do with what he desires to gain value.
Conscious: "given that conscious experience has neural correlates in the brain, why doe the activity in some parts of the brain lead to conscious experience, while activity in other parts does not?" Free will ties in here nicely to me. When researchers tested people about free will and asked them their thoughts most people were inclined to say they believed in free will dispute the amount of scientific evidence to the contrary. Then, as if to prove that, people in subsequent questions more inclined to cheat. I think it is interesting to look at why there is such a need to prove that we are creatures that possess free will. From an evolutionary standpoint, what is the benefit of having it? Why should it be better that we do not simply have good instincts and are predisposed to do what is in our best interest? From a religious standpoint, what did God want to prove by giving us free will. If he was the one who donated that to us at all. But more on that to come.
"Dark times are usually foreshadowed by discrimination against vulnerable minorities"
Lashing out: "Nothing is more human that the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning for life" in the article the author suggests that the greatest human flaw is this belief that an action in life will secure a place in the afterlife. The idea is that God alone is capable to deciding who shall be admitted into an afterlife and all of our attempts at action in uniform during life is just our own frustration with the system and our attempt to provide significance to our temporal existence.
The Voice of Science: IN this article the author proports that part of the trouble with the freedom of academic voice is where it is going. In the past science has been closely tied with an authority, so the Church or the government which has directed it and stood by it. Now, in a time where science is, in some sense, run away, it says and does what it likes then turns back to the government for protection when the public does not agree with it. What I find interesting is that science seems to be operating then under this guise that it is for public benefit but in the same breath feels it is above that as well. It feels it alone is capable of determining what the public should want and when the results do not align it then seeks comfort and protection from the institutions it otherwise shuns. It wants fairness and impartiality but in a sense offers nothing back.
Knowledge: Someone suggested to me recently that it is not that we investigate what we know but that we investigate under what circumstances do we know it.
Boundaries: I remember in a class I took in college one of the heavy themes of the course was boundaries. The thought was that people naturally tend to avoid boundaries and that things that cross boundaries, make us feel uncomfortable: rats, crust, etc. Looking at medicine and the fact that I feel every day I am bombarded on my AOL welcome page with the world's oldest this and world's oldest that, I read about some people who are questioning what it means to be human with things like hybrids and other such computer geeky things. I think we take some form of pleasure from the idea of death, it is a finality and it is comforting, it sets and equal playing field and I think it provides meaning. If we all live forever than what good is it to say that so and so accomplished so much when I could easily say "wait and see what I do next century." I actually hate this idea. We need this to add value to ourselves. I guess the question would be, in keeping with the previously established idea of value, how does this effect the community and the truth is that it doesn't. Not being able to die does not help us in our forming of communities, it does nothing to strength the bonds or work together.
Consequentialism: This theory of act-consquentialism claims that any action that fails to produce the best outcome must be considered wrong. This will lead me into the "trolley problem" which I had just learned about. The basic premise is that there is this run away trolley with half a dozen people on board. The trolley is going down this hill and will crash and kill everyone on board if you do not do something. There is a switch that you could pull to stop it from going that route. You would be obligated to do so, right? Well mostly yes. What if there was an innocent man walking across that track and he would be killed but the 6 people on the trolley would live. Still obligated? Most would say yes. There are all of these variations on this though. If you pull the level than you are involved and you effectively made the choice to end the mans life and according to act-consuquentialism you would be at fault for that. You made the choice and were put inside the framework of the problem. Now, if you had just stood by then wouldn't you also be guilty? In the eyes of the law the answer is actually yes. You do have an obligation to step in and act. Ok so pretend you are standing above this scene and there is a heavy man next to you, in this case the weight of the fat man could stop the trolley and save the passengers but would kill the fat man. Do you push him down the hill and onto the track? Gets a bit messier. Another philosopher asked if you have five patients needing a transplant or they will die and one healthy man walks into the hospital who's organize would perfectly match the five, do you as the doctor get to say that it is right to take his organs? Seems like an obvious no but how much different is it than the trolley? In my whole view I generally adopt the "don't mess up others" policy. I couldn't push the man onto the track, I couldn't pull the switch if it would kill someone else, in that moment my instinct would not even have thought that. My value to society is skewed.
LIke/Follow: Did you know that at this moment there are 200,300 people "following" Elvis on iTunes. Could someone explain that to me? Are you waiting for him to make the next big announcement? New record? New grammy? I mean list of concert dates?
Emotional Space: This whole fMRI has revolutionized so much more than health care! If you could see the number of times it is cited in philosophical writings… this article argues that emotions are tangible objects. The researchers take patients and put them into one of them fMRI's and when the subjects had an emotion it shows up on the machine, right? Well, that in some sense means that the emotion is firing up all of the neurons or whatever in the person's brain. In that moment the feeling of happiness or anger is physically taking up space, it has an actual space in the person's brain and in the world. The emotions themselves have physical weight and are physically present.
Yes: Going along with the above it is interesting to think about the chemicals in the body that are released when we have that feeling of anger. We have known for a few years now that pressure during surgery on a certain area of the brain can produce laughter, etc, in the patient. I think it is interesting than to look at what truly makes up a feeling of "happy." In happy, which occupies this location, we have such amount of chemical A and this many neurons and so forth. I think the idea of manufacturing emotions has been long considered. Goodness knows that we have happy pills by the truckload. I think what would be more interesting is looking at how to manufacture a reaction. I think we have all seen what I have been able to do to myself in regards to my physical reaction to something born in my head and we all know about hypnotism. But what about simply manufacturing an answer of yes. Surely, if emotions have a physical space and are made up the same way and produce the same facial expressions than answers in an affirmative or negative must have a formula. I should like to know it.
The Army: I started a letter writing campaign to send letters to soilders who are far from home during the holidays. It, for the most part, went well. I was impressed with the turn out. Many people wrote letters and I think it is a lovely idea. That said I had some people tell me that they had recently watched a documentary that showed soldiers laughing at the foolish letters that had been sent to them through people like me. I found this somewhat distasteful and surprised but after thinking about it, it was easy to see. I remember someone else telling me that in places like Afhganistan, adults will have their children stand in the middle of the road while American tanks are coming so that the tanks would have to run over and kill the children before they would get to the adults. The idea of this being so psychologically awful on the soldiers has stuck with me. I remember highschool was the first time I had heard about this idea of enemy soldiers having conquered an area running around and raping women, getting them pregnant, so that the women would hate themselves so that they would either commit suicide directly or nearly indirectly by using a hanger. Now, jump forward a bit to me reading about soldiers coming back from war and being overwhelmed by their emotions of what they did during war. Anger is a strong emotion that is useful to us because it helps us be stronger than we otherwise would. We fight harder and longer with anger than we otherwise would. The anger the soldiers must feel and the amount of training to become desensitized to running over and killing a child would have to take a fair amount of work. If one is able to do that than of coarse a silly letter from a girl back in the states would seem corny and so unrelatable as to be comical. Now then people who have come back from war have a difficult time emerging back into everyday life right? They mention this "shame of triumph" this shame that they were able to be successful and this shame that they watched someone else die, or give up information, or betray themselves. This shame of triumph is fascinating to me. In so many ways we are still at the stage of evolution that puts in a war based cycle. We have evolved to function best in war and yet everything we see above works to prove that we have all of this inner wiring and natural instincts so that we will function in a group. I think what we are looking at is a maximum size. We evolved to function in small groups at war with other small groups. Why. What did we need that for? Was it to see if the neandrathals would win? Was it Satan? Why.
Disagreement: Why is it important to debate? Recently someone took me on this very long winder lecture about the merits of debate. I fell asleep. It was obvious what his motives were and they failed to benefit me in anyway. In addition, my arguing back failed even further to do anything of worth. So what then is the point? In this article the writer says that old cliche about two rational beings are bond to disagree is a fable. Two rational people should not disagree. If person A sets forth that the argument about the street trolley should end thus and person B says no it should go a different way, the two may list out their reasons for thinking the way they do and inevitably one person will say "oh but no, I see it as" and there in is the problem. If both people are rational and see the good points in the argument than they must admit that the other person's side is equally valid and would have to seriously alter their own. I happen to very much like this article.
Getting over: Obviously the next person who tells me that I should simply get over Evan will get hit. I don't do well with such stupidity and fail to see why I should. Anyway, so tonight my therapist asked me what I hoped to gain from therapy. Sadly, she is probably the only one who doesn't know what my goal is. She said that on the first day I had told her that I wanted three things (they were my markers for a successful life) and that I had been thus far unable to get them on my own. They were: career, relationship with God, and romantic relationship. I agreed that overall those were my goals. I then specified to say that in terms of relationship I wanted to either be with Evan again or be ok with never having a relationship again. She was startled by this and preassured me to try to explain why I thought that. She asked if I believed that for every person there is but one soul mate which I actually do not think. This surprised her even more and, based on my prior answers, for good reason. It is strange that I don't feel that way. What I do think is that if we are the best we can possibly be than we should be able to be with anyone. There might be some point that God feels would be even better for us and that is where all the little triggers go off when you kiss someone as your immune system is figuring that out. There are these people then that do even better with you, these are the gifts from God. The rest is up to you though, what you do with that relationship and how good you are at it. I tried to explain this to her. She said she had two problems with this: the first is that it sets up an expectation that everyone can fall in love with you and second that it has unrealistic expectations. Most people would guess my response to both. Everyone should be able to fall in love with someone who is perfect in the same way everyone would love God and Jesus. Secondly, I fail to see why I should encourage failure and anything less than perfection is in partnership with Satan and therefor evil. Now, what does this mean smaller picture. It means that if I fall in love with someone and we break up, as I have said in the past, if I am ok with that it suggests that the relationship truly meant nothing. It would be like saying on my wedding day "well if it doesn't work out I can always divorce and remarry." If that is the aim than the feelings are not legitimate. They serve no purpose. The reverse is to say that I will fall in love in the future which means that the feelings I feel now are untrue but that sets up the problem of how would I be able to trust future feelings. (it is like the self reflective nature of the sentence "this statement is false" which would then suggest it is true which it cannot be then right?) My therapist didn't go here but I started to ask myself about parents who have lost a child and somehow decide they want another, if they love that second one as much. They would all say yes. They would argue that your heart grows and has more room, more capacity for love. Ok, let's follow this through to the end. That would suggest that Fred still loves me if he ever once did. It would mean that Evan still loves me. It would suggest then that at any point, I would be able to stand in a line with all of the people he has loved and he would feel just as pulled to me as anyone else. See where I'm going with this? It would only make sense than that he would chose with convention and simply pick someone else due to expectation. Unless we admit this cannot be true. That in fact the heart doesn't only grow, it also takes the old person, the only memory and does what a computer does. It "deletes" them meaning they are still there but their space is hidden now, their space is going to EVENTUALLY be written over. So now, even though we cannot acknowledge what is going on, we cannot see that person's space, that person's emotional space, they are still there and we are actively waiting to write over them, to replace them and in that moment we are deciding that we were at one point wrong in our previous feelings because we have to be, because otherwise we could not fit in society, into our communities, we have to do this, and we have to have these "fancy emotions" which tell us we are feeling things while really only discrediting this just so that we can make peace and continue to live in the community.
The very last thing I want to bring up is Lilith. I will confess complete ignorance on this matter until a random stranger started talking to me about it. Lilith, according to Jewish mysticism, was here before Eve and potentially before Adam. She refused to submit to Adam and was therefor banished and, well, replaced almost entirely by Eve who was then born from Adam. Lilith went on to have relations with Arch Angel Samael. The two had an affair and gave birth to evil. Lilith became a seducer and associated with darkness. It was her sin than that first gave forth the idea of the fighting against submitting. She was unwilling to submit to God and unwilling to submit to Adam. Hers was then the first example of pride. But what of the angel? He has been charged with seducing Eve and getting her pregnant with Cain. He has also been charged with being the snake in the garden. All of this to me says that really all he wanted was God's power. He then takes the first form of pride. Have you ever created something you love so much it nearly takes on a life of it's own. How did God create something so powerful and so beautiful than it has been able to try and intercept God's own will thrice in the beginning of time? Once through Lilith, once as a snake, and once to make Cain. The entire notion of this is so fascinating to me that I can't yet fully form my ideas.
Anyway, that's where I am at for the moment, all of the thoughts that have been occupying my mind and what I should do about them. I am bombarded with thoughts about emotions and emotion regulation. About how it is only supposed to be anger that is self perpetuating and that I should want to be happy. About how I should want to move on. About why I am holding to the things I am believing. About how Evan never wanted to think that I could or would feel this way for this long. And yet. And yet.
side note. you know whats slightly odd? all the things my father always bought me all the traditions? going under. used to get a train car every year... LGB went under. used to get jewelry from bailey banks and biddle each year...after over 100 years they went under. dont know why i thought of that.