StrugglingHoneybun posted:

My therapist asked me this week "What do you think you deserve?" And I did not know how to process that question.

I hear "deserve" and associate it with karma. And I don't get to decide what karma does to me, I can only try my best and be grateful if good things happen.

She brought up things like food, shelter, and I don't associate those with "deserve". I think of those basic human needs as rights or entitlements and that if you weren't getting those, there ideally is someone to complain to and get it fixed.

But if I don't feel like I'm living the life I deserve, who do I complain to? Oh, it's me. I'm the one who fixes the things I'm not happy with.

My immediate reaction to this epiphany of being in control of my own trajectory was "well that's not gonna work. I don't listen to me"



Gonna have to try some of that tricking myself into self improvement. Doing it for it's own sake doesn't feel motivating enough.

Al! posted:

there are no good or bad people, theres only the Wheel (and deal)

typhus posted:

BF: you're one of my favorite people in the thread. You're a profoundly thoughtful person. I'm intimately familiar with the journey you're on and it's a loving hard road (and one I'm still working through myself) but keep the faith, because as far as I'm concerned the sheer awareness of self necessary to get on the path to begin with is 90% of the challenge.

This

Squizzle posted:

you cannot get away from any aspect of yrself by backtracking out of it. once something is an experience, you carry its residuüm w you thereäfter. you can only move past yrself by pushing forward and processing. the only way out is thru

Perry Mason Jar posted:

Everyone loves you Barry, now it's your turn!

quote:

Men in Númenor are half-Elves (said Erendis), especially the high men; they are neither the one nor the other. The long life that they were granted deceives them, and they dally in the world, children in mind, until age finds them - and then many only forsake play out of doors for play in their houses. They turn their play into great matters and great matters into play.

They would be craftsmen and loremasters and heroes all at once; and women to them are but fires on the hearth - for others to tend, until they are tired of play in the evening. All things were made for their service: hills are for quarries, rivers to furnish water or to turn wheels, trees for boards, women for their body's need, or if fair to adorn their table and hearth; and children to be teased when nothing else is to do - but they would as soon play with their hounds' whelps.

To all they are gracious and kind, merry as larks in the morning (if the sun shines); for they are never wrathful if they can avoid it. Men should be gay, they hold, generous as the rich, giving away what they do not need. Anger they show only when they become aware, suddenly, that there other wills in the world beside their own. Then they will be as ruthless as the seawind if anything dare to withstand them.

Al! posted:

once youve achieved good personhood, thats when you need to start working on your lies and schemes

Andy Pandy posted:

I think I could keep the secret very closely, as I come from an already secretive part of our society, and I would use all the resources at my disposal to plan ahead very carefully. We are short-sighted creatures, and if I was smart, I would play the long-game and eventually manage all sides of the discourse. Why would I keep any written records to be exposed through government incompetence or leaks? I am not a government, I have no need to store any information there. Why not use ancient encryption methods and steganography to hide any important information that must be written down? Why not develop and use a unique conlang to communicate secrets? Why not continuously fund and invest in areas of science that lead directly away from the truth? I would probably also spend a lot of effort in dividing the population into squabbling factions, feed them drugs and poisoned food, and encourage them to slave away on my behalf - strip mining the planet so I can finally breakaway and leave them all in the mess to destroy each other, while I sail away into the stars or execute whatever my selfish endgame is.

bobmarleysghost posted:

which one are you

Barry Foster posted:

I literally just came across this passage while reading Tolkien's Unfinished Tales, in a startling bit of synchronicity:

Message is coming through loud and clear, universe, lol

Squizzle posted:

gotta come back to this because it is extremely true. ok ok ok: one of the foundational flaws of liberalism is the belief in the objective, scientific, inevitable-and-inescapable truth of their worldview. “reality has a liberal bias” poo poo. look at liberalisms fav books, all of that the world is flat nonsense that dresses up powerfully biased models of economics as popularly-accessible objective observational statements. believing society is soluble conundrum, making the technocratic meritocratic ideal part of the natural order. (also in the same orbit zone: the obsession w making economics feel as much like a hard science as possible, so that market bullshit has the same essential reality) and since its fundamentally scientifically objectively true, it is both rational and moral to play by its rules at all times

thus the liberal fixation on dressed up pop kantianism. real fuckin pearl clutching. if youve ever played one of those games where players get to introduce new rules, you understand the absurdity of trying to play by the rules-state you wish existed, instead of by the rules as they exist at the moment. thats silly, you know you play the game as it is toward the goal of creating the game you want. but liberal morality presupposes the essential primacy of their objectively-ascertained rational understanding of the basic nature of reality, and is shocked when the other players dont play bby the rules of liberal decorum

dont be a foolish liberal. once you have a halfway decent moral compass, you should learn all of the tricks and shenanigans you can, also some tomfooleries. learn the rules that exist, play elegantly toward creating better rules

Squizzle posted:

brain dmg is still forward-moving. it isnt brain reversal. you are changed by experiencing, learning, and resolving. w an icepick

Barry Foster posted:

Funny you should say that, cause I've been pursuing meditation quite diligently over the last six weeks or so and overall it's been very very helpful. It feels like it's really sticking for once. My main problem is that it's all well and good when things are going well or even average, but if something goes wrong in my life in such a way as to make me feel inferior or insecure then - it turns out - I still go back to bad habits. Knowingly, in this recent case, which is both better and worse, I think.

Like, I think overall progression and my progress with meditation specifically meant that I paused outside my front door for a full couple of minutes as my intuition screamed at me to ignore the white hot ball of hate and embarrassment in my head that was telling me to go to the shop and get a bunch of booze and get blind angry-drunk. It was like my stomach was literally weighing me down and trying to bodily stop my feet carrying me past the threshold. 'Just go back inside, cook and eat your dinner, smoke some weed and get some perspective'. But I concentrated really hard, screwed up all my willpower into a tight ball, and triumphed over my better angels, and got blind angry-drunk. Go me.

But maybe next time I will listen. Or the time after that. Or the time after that. But one day I will listen, if not for my sake, then for the sake of the people who love me (whether I think they're allowed to or not - a condition that is its own kind of narcissism itself)

Yeah I hear that. For years - my years of deepest despair, really - I lived by two Vonnegut quotes, those being a) 'pretend to be good always and even god almighty will be fooled' and b) 'we are what we pretend to be'. I lived like that for years. I was behaving - whatever was going on inside was wholly immaterial. Not my business nor anyone else's.

I think what my therapist is trying to get me to realise though is that my bad behaviour and my 'nice guy' persona are two sides of the same coin. It would be better if I could be good or loving authentically, then I wouldn't get so resentful, then I wouldn't get so self-destructive (which I easily forget hurts other people other than just myself). And I'd be better able to take care of myself, and be less dependent (in a toxic manner) on other people.

Anyway, this is not very esoteric, and I am once again very grateful for you all helping me. Oh, and Honeybun - I know exactly how you feel. We'll both keep pushing ahead

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Barry, a lot of this makes me feel as though you and I have experienced struggles in life that may or may not have themselves been similar but have imparted on us similar mental / emotional trauma and screwed up senses of self worth. In particular I feel strongly for your comments on being a good person vs "merely" doing good things. Whether or not those things are eventually synonymous in your perception of self is entirely up to you, but I can certainly tell you that to many people, in perception of other's actions, they are. A person who repeatedly chooses to do good things is, functionally and effectively, a "good person." But that so is much easier said than believed about oneself, I know.

Strong agree with the meditation and mindfulness advice. My most recent psychiatrist was an actual Godsend, who preferred calling internal work like that "self-hypnosis" but the goal was the same: being able to reach the deepest bits of trauma, that were affecting my sense of self and ability to maintain healthy emotional balance, and really look at them and start working through them in the parts of my subconscious where they couldn't hurt me. Every time we tried pulling them up into the light to talk about them that way I imploded elsewhere in life a few days later; so that clearly wasn't working. But until those deep, chronic emotional wounds were cleaned out and healed I just had these huge pockets of trauma fermenting in my mind and afflicting everything else about me that came close to touching it. We did some guided hypnosis at first, so that I could get used to the idea of entering those walled-off danger parts of me and interacting with what was in there. But eventually being able to interact with the bad things in there on my own time, on my own terms, instead of them flaring up and out uncontrollably in the form of trauma reactions, feels like it was a turning point for me. I had been treading water for a long time until that point and I had gotten so, so tired. Choosing to swim down and take a good look at the shape of the monsters affecting me let me start learning about them, why they were still lurking there, how I could banish them.

However making that choice is by no means the hard part and obviously the actual working through the trauma part, healing the infection, banishing the monsters, is hard, and it takes a long time, and it hurts all over again while you're doing it. What has helped for me for my whole peri- and post-traumatic life has been belief in ma'at, which is to say, I think, belief in the general greater Universe, Higher Consciousness, ineffable Ground-of-Being. But I knew it as "ma'at" the first time I met it and so that is the name I return to.

If a person believes there is a fundamental structure to the Universe, then day to day interactions become a participatory function of that structure. We can achieve personal satisfaction in the form of successful participation. I believe Truth, Reality, Being is in its natural state harmonious, balanced, and just; it is a great tranquil beautiful pool of All-That-Is, Was, and Could-Will-Be. But we, and other sentient life forms, are all splashing around in it, Experiencing, and sometimes loving up other people Experiencing while we Experience. The trick is then, of course, to be able to Experience while minimizing negative impact to others' experiences and, most ideally, providing positive impact to those people who are experiencing things in such a way where they would welcome it. Sinking oneself into that pool of By-Any-Name and sensing the currents and flows of it being manipulated by everyone else experiencing it there with you -- I listen to that above anything else, when I am in need of guidance. You can hear/feel where the water wants to be, where it needs to be, where there is too much already. You can let it guide you to where you are most effective and in doing so you learn to do "good things," again and again, until it is habit, and then practice, and then it feels wrong when you do not, and then, I suppose, you are what is generally called "a good person."

You are loved, Barry Foster. Here, and in your personal life, and by All That Is itself, always.

Al! posted:

sensing some people itt were raised in one of the Guilt Religions because being labeled a good person or not is just not a preoccupation ive ever had but my wife who was raised more traditionally Catholic is constantly suffering from delusions of Bad Personhood because she has negative thoughts about people places and things sometimes.

Al! posted:

sensing some people itt were raised in one of the Guilt Religions because being labeled a good person or not is just not a preoccupation ive ever had but my wife who was raised more traditionally Catholic is constantly suffering from delusions of Bad Personhood because she has negative thoughts about people places and things sometimes.

Al! posted:

sensing some people itt were raised in one of the Guilt Religions because being labeled a good person or not is just not a preoccupation ive ever had but my wife who was raised more traditionally Catholic is constantly suffering from delusions of Bad Personhood because she has negative thoughts about people places and things sometimes.

Barry Foster posted:

Al! posted:

sensing some people itt were raised in one of the Guilt Religions because being labeled a good person or not is just not a preoccupation ive ever had but my wife who was raised more traditionally Catholic is constantly suffering from delusions of Bad Personhood because she has negative thoughts about people places and things sometimes.

Barry Foster posted:

Haha, bingo

Cradle catholic and very much raised in a church community, it wasn't just a christmas and easter thing

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

D-Pad posted:

Tarot:

I'd love to get a reading about this new journey I started today. Also can anybody recommend a good basic tarot starter text? I'm getting my first deck in the mail today and I'll post some pictures because it's rad but I need a guide on how to use it.

Al! posted:

it really depends on the deck. your deck should come with a little booklet traditionally. if you bought kind of the bog standard raider-waite deck you can find the meanings on wikipedia

D-Pad posted:

Yeah I know I can find meanings of each individual card but I assume there are some good beginner books that go into more detail and like how to synthesize all the meanings together to give a reading like the pros in this thread are doing. I assumed the little booklet isn't going to go that deep into things beyond basic meanings of cards.

Al! posted:

sensing some people itt were raised in one of the Guilt Religions because being labeled a good person or not is just not a preoccupation ive ever had but my wife who was raised more traditionally Catholic is constantly suffering from delusions of Bad Personhood because she has negative thoughts about people places and things sometimes.

D-Pad posted:

Tarot:

I'd love to get a reading about this new journey I started today. Also can anybody recommend a good basic tarot starter text? I'm getting my first deck in the mail today and I'll post some pictures because it's rad but I need a guide on how to use it.