Self-Transformation & Build A Better You.
- Thread starter luka
- Start date
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
I was just listening to Brogan saying how he likes weed cos it's put him in a vulnerable state where he doesn't feel confident about anything, because those things that you think about then - those worries - are important.
I'm not saying people should rush towards the things they hate but I also believe in that suffering in the name of self improvement. I sometimes inadvertently picture it is as a hand over a flame, thickening the skin.
Could be the pure figment of my self torturing mind of course lol
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Corpsey
bandz ahoy
A fascinating thread to me particularly because I've flirted with self improvement literature many times - and still do actually. Not of the hokey kind, but psychological theories, pop psych discoveries about the brain and how to integrate them etc. I think those books are useful. I don't see anything productive about being depressed. Depression can breed empathy I think but also while you're depressed you are naturally less empathetic.
Advice can be toxic if it's making you self obsessed but there's a lot of good stuff out there.
* I realise I HAVE flirted with hokey and iffy stuff, specifically by reading the Game. I hated what I read of it, couldn't stand the author, realised that the people using these techniques were cringey and/or insane. But I definitely was hoping that it might contain some trick that could give me confidence. Interesting link between PUA stuff and gamification of life, I bet. Programmers as billionaires.
Advice can be toxic if it's making you self obsessed but there's a lot of good stuff out there.
* I realise I HAVE flirted with hokey and iffy stuff, specifically by reading the Game. I hated what I read of it, couldn't stand the author, realised that the people using these techniques were cringey and/or insane. But I definitely was hoping that it might contain some trick that could give me confidence. Interesting link between PUA stuff and gamification of life, I bet. Programmers as billionaires.
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luka
Well-known member
One of the things I grew to dislike about weed was precisely that, the way it pulls the rug out from under your ego. I'd be happily talking awY with a friend, enjoying projecting a basically fictional character in a big loud voice then they'd pass me a spliff and almost instantly it became Impossible to play that role.
It makes the shared fictions and game playing that underlie socilialising almost impossible. Terrible, terrible. Locked in schizoid silence.
It makes the shared fictions and game playing that underlie socilialising almost impossible. Terrible, terrible. Locked in schizoid silence.
luka
Well-known member
An Important part of all this is that the rewarding thing is not always, is rarely, the path of least resistance. In my own case there's days when I think ugh it's grey and cold and miserable out there maybe I should just stay in and annoy people on dissensus but usually I get out anyway and 9 times out of 10 I make a bit of pocket money, make a few people happy, get some writing done, feel generally better about myself as a result. You do have to win these wrestling matches against sloth. It's very very bad if you don't win them, at least some of the time.
It's not really true that I want to extirpate all magical thought, you know.
I'm mainly not an animist: I think human beings have an evolved sensitivity towards autonomous agency in their environment, and tend to see it where it isn't as well as where it is. There's that line of Larkin's about his unmagical childhood in Coventry where, as he says, he "wasn't spoken to by an old hat".
As a small child I knew of the existence of a spirit I called the Electric Ghost, a shimmering blue apparation that floated in the darkness at the top of the stairs. It sometimes spoke to me. I have a lifelong phobia of malfunctioning electrical equipment, and sometimes wonder if the Electric Ghost was an early premonition of my eventual death. I'll plug a guitar into a faulty amplifier, and ZAP.
These phantoms we conjure are intriguing and frightening emanations of our own minds. I don't believe they exist independently of us, but they appear to us as if they do.
I'm mainly not an animist: I think human beings have an evolved sensitivity towards autonomous agency in their environment, and tend to see it where it isn't as well as where it is. There's that line of Larkin's about his unmagical childhood in Coventry where, as he says, he "wasn't spoken to by an old hat".
As a small child I knew of the existence of a spirit I called the Electric Ghost, a shimmering blue apparation that floated in the darkness at the top of the stairs. It sometimes spoke to me. I have a lifelong phobia of malfunctioning electrical equipment, and sometimes wonder if the Electric Ghost was an early premonition of my eventual death. I'll plug a guitar into a faulty amplifier, and ZAP.
These phantoms we conjure are intriguing and frightening emanations of our own minds. I don't believe they exist independently of us, but they appear to us as if they do.
The argument I'm having with people about rationalism is against those who think something like Nazism can be explained as a plan for total rational control of society. They have mixed up their dystopias. Nazism was not by any means a rationalist ideology. Some forms of communism were tied to a rather naive scientism, but even this has to he understood as a sort of voluntaristic magical thinking - everything is possible if we will it hard enough! - LARPing in a labcoat.
luka
Well-known member
For me poetry, is, in part, communication with the not-I. A conversation between ego and outside.
But just as you don't want to banish all magical thinking I don't actually dress up in a reindeer headdress and conduct ceremonies under the full moon. I'm very normal person, very rational, common sense man.
But just as you don't want to banish all magical thinking I don't actually dress up in a reindeer headdress and conduct ceremonies under the full moon. I'm very normal person, very rational, common sense man.
luka
Well-known member
Ever since marks 'cold rationalist' phase I've been triggered by the very word.
Good thread this, sorry not to have contributed more. You could count me in the magical thinking camp as (to name but one practice) I regularly use divination systems. The I Ching in particular and I regularly get answers that clarify problems for me, and I've chosen to take that as "proof" that material casuality isn't the only game in town. I've been doing it for 20 years and it's now such a reflexive part of what I do that I'll happily do it in the lav at work if I need to. I don't feel it proves or points to the existence of anything beyond the phenomena itself though, and that's extraordinary enough. An answer to "what makes it work" isn't something I see as accessible. So I guess there are limits to my magical thinking and I try and be quite precise about my practices.
If anyone wants a divination done by the way just PM me. You'll need a clear question though.
If anyone wants a divination done by the way just PM me. You'll need a clear question though.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Orwell wrote a good essay on Yeats and why he thought fascism and mysticism were such common fuckbuddies.