This is our main point of disagreement now. I think that being self-conscious in no way necessitates any degree of empathy. This is why it is necessary to posit the existence of love, to account for the empathy which is observed. If the self-conscious being can establish autonomy by freeing oneself from the conformities of society, and this autonomy is authentic, then the relationship between this being and others is not necessarily respectful or empathetic, unless there is something like love within, which guides the autonomous, self-conscious agent in this direction. — Metaphysician Undercover

Everything is about our will or motivations; our ego, reason and rational thought, knowledge, personality, all of what we are is dependent on our will. The problem is not the ego or the mind, neither is it society, but how our will motivates the ego or mind to act or think. We do not need to remove them completely in order to obtain some purity in our motivations, no annihilation of an ego - the 'self' - will make any difference. All we have is a healthy ego (moral consciousness) or a toxic one (i.e. narcissism) and our motives depend on this transcendence.

The ego regulates the decisions between our instinctual drives (immoral) and our conception of what is correct behaviour (moral) that we learn through our experiences with the external world, such as our family and society. Our instinctual drives are unconscious just as much as conforming to society and so one is not consciously malicious but rather mindlessly driven to act. There is a unity between these two - conformism and instinctual drives - where one has conformed to social expectations and so adapted to present themselves as "good" while underlying all that is a will driven by unconscious desires. This is why so many people do immoral things like cheating or other socially unacceptable acts while still pretending to be good; their "goodness" is just an act, an archetype to save them from getting into trouble (think Ring of Gyges). It is also why people have been driven by "love" to do bad things because their conception of love is wrong and why rational thought is imperative. In this situation, love is not the wrong, just the motivation; so why do we think that our ego is bad?

This love within that you speak of is moral consciousness. What I am saying is that "love" IS "moral consciousness" and one cannot love unless they are morally conscious. Love is not given to us by some gracious external force, it is something we already have but remains dormant until we transcend that mindlessness and where our will is driven by our understanding. There is still "ego" here, an egoism that motivates altruism because you exist and you are the one motivated to act. Altruism can be genuine or authentic because our ego is just the regulator between our unconscious drives and our rational values.

Returning back to symbols and imagination, when we become conscious of ourselves as separate to our environment, that we have the self-awareness and the capacity to think and take responsibility for our own behaviour, we begin to understand that others can experience the same (hence empathy) but the feeling - the feeling of pain or hurt at the suffering in others - is just projection, hence why one begins to give love or becoming morally conscious. It is a closer understanding of your own mental state and the emotional responses that you experience and we merely share in defining the psychological experience. You are mistaking this feeling as authenticating the experience, but feelings themselves are also dependent on our will or motivations; evil people can feel pleasure at the pain in others.

We could become "aware" that we have done wrong long after we have done it, and that could produce feelings of "guilt" and such feelings could arouse a change in our behaviour. The awareness is the key, the consciousness and the feelings follow that leads to moral behaviour. This is what I meant when I said "beginning of love" and the authenticity here is that an autonomous agent chooses willingly and independently to be "good" rather than driven by society.

5. Due to 3 and 4, the universe is evolving towards a state of perfection. — Justin1

What happens to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and Entropy?

This recognizing oneself as an autonomous agent only puts one into a position of selfishness. — Metaphysician Undercover

It puts one into a position of consciousness, a unity of apperception or consciousness-self consciousness and that objectively you are separate; transcendence is this awareness that enables your sensibility and understanding to be constructed rationally or honestly. This awareness of your own existence enables you to be conscious of the existence of others in space and time and that is the beginning of being empathetic, that you identify with the world around you and this is the exact opposite of being selfish. A person who blindly conforms does so because they are selfish, unable to give love and even if they technically do nothing wrong or immoral, their 'good behaviour' is only because they follow rather than actually feel, so you have it the wrong way around. An genuine, autonomous agent and this transcendence is the beginning of love - i.e., moral consciousness.

This love or moral consciousness thus unifies us with the world of objects in space and time, we care for all things and this is why I say that an indication of a person who has not transcended is a person who is unable to be a friend.

So the person who has broken these ties of conformity and found one's authentic being as an autonomous agent, must now find love to transcend one's own being and re-establish one's position in society. — Metaphysician Undercover

When we have reached this moral consciousness, meaning is no longer given to us but rather we form meaning of our self as part of objects in space in the observable world simultaneously with idealisms that we construct to understand our experiences symbolically - that we form meaning through a story of ourselves - and this is the unity between consciousness and imagination and why we are even capable of love and morality. The process following the moment we reach transcendence is really about practice, about articulating love and experiencing the 'I' in the 'We'. This is why God epitomises the ultimate and everlasting, the foremost symbol of Good and we begin to adapt our behaviour to explain how to be moral or loving. We are just a story because meaning is ultimately symbolic. So when you say:

So the authentic, autonomous agent, desires to remember things precisely as they were, in images, while the inauthentic puts words to the images, seeking a technique to communicate the event to others, rather than seeking to remember the event precisely as it was. So using words or symbols as a memory aid is an element of inauthenticity, and the inauthenticity is evident from the way that people embellish the events by changing the words in small ways. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is kind of interesting, because our interpretation of these symbolic inferences is really dependent on our understanding since it is about what we experience as a thinking subject, but it nevertheless depends on this unity between our experiences in the natural and observable world and the symbolic construction of our experiences that gives meaning to them. This is why being rational is essential, the absence of fear that causes us to retreat into the safety of conformism. Think of repressed memories and how we are capable of diluting our actual experiences.

Think of a biblical parable; there is a moral symbol in the story - the story itself is just a story put in words but the symbol is not articulated in the written format - and to understand the symbol is dependent on your own state of mind. If we articulate or put words to this symbol and explain that the parable means 'such and such', it loses the purpose of being a parable so to speak because people can believe that this parable means exactly 'such and such'. It is meaning that is given to them and they have conformed to, thus inauthentic. The purpose of the parable is no longer as it was supposed to be - our interpretation - because what is our interpretation is authentic.

All right, I can accept this principle. When it appears like love, internal feelings, emotions, and things of the subconscious are illogical and irrational, it is not really the case that they are, what is really the case is that the conscious mind is being irrational by trying to understand them through principles which do not apply. Love is not really contrary to reason at all, it's just that the rational mind hasn't developed the principles required to properly understand it, so it attempts to understand with principles that are not suited. Because love doesn't conform to these principles, it appears to be irrational, when in reality the mind is being irrational. — Metaphysician Undercover

(Y)

Exactly. So, when a person conforms or follows and has yet to transcend to become an autonomous agent, he is incapable of 'true love' because he simply cannot consciously and rationally understand what that actually is. He instead forms symbiotic attachments to people or objects based on his social environment that enables him to be accepted and congratulated as he seeks only to be loved. This 'anxiety' within him is telling him through his feelings that something is wrong with this, but he just doesn't get it. We are loving or moral by our very nature, but it only switches on or is authentic when we become conscious of our own existence and accept our separateness, thus when we become capable of thinking rationally. That is when we become aware of right kind of person and have the courage to go against our family or friends to follow our heart because we see the beauty in goodness and not what we have been taught to think is beautiful that we blindly follow and accept.

Problem here is that people are becoming better and better at prolonging the blindness, making submission to this conformism more tempting, more trustworthy. Being irrational is appearing more and more reasonable. But I can tell because a person incapable of being a friend is incapable of understanding love. Friendship, to me, is the very symbol of empathy, because those that lack moral consciousness refuse the virtue of happiness and respect in others and only care for themselves and those objects that they need.

Perhaps you should not include letting go of the past, as a condition. There is always a relationship of dependency between the past and the present, as well as the present and the future, and this makes us who we are. — Metaphysician Undercover

Some people think that our memories are recorded and that when we reflect, we are rewinding and playing those moments as they are. This is not true. Our brains are dynamic, improving as we continue to learn and progress and when we reflect, we are reinterpreting, adding to existing gaps, forming connections that were never actually there in the first place. We continuously reconstruct our own memories and history and so, if you really think about it, there is even neuroscientifically an arrow of time that compels us forward as we progress and while our past experiences are embedded in this process, our memories are actually what you are at this very moment. There is no 'past' and 'we' are just symbols of our experiences.

This is why symbols is a very interesting aspect to how we identify and interpret our experiences, the idealism here that makes stories, parables - even dream interpretation - all dependent on this symbolic realm that has a language independent of words. A sign, for instance, holding up my fore and middle finger forward speaks of 'peace' and parables say one thing but mean something else. Meaning is beyond language and that is why moral concepts like virtue, righteousness, justice - love - is all beyond what we can articulate. I mean, we can draw inferences to particular objects or experiences, but we never able to explain the very form of beauty, or good.

So, when you say:

Suppose you desire a relationship of love. This is a desire to create something beautiful, a loving relationship. — Metaphysician Undercover

We desire a story that we interpret through symbolic representations that gives us meaning. Our life is just a story.

How sad it is for a vast majority who play minor characters doing the same bullshit that everyone else is doing. They haven't created their own story, they just play a silent, inconsequential part thinking that the applaud is to them.

Native Title in Australia overturned the legal doctrine of Terra Nullius with the Mabo v Queen case that changed our understanding of traditional land ownership.



Outer Space Treaty clearly outlines that sovereignty over any celestial bodies - including the moon - cannot be made, furthered by the Moon Agreement which ameliorates details vis-a-vis property in outer space, but the agreement has had a poor response rate and only a minimal number of states ratified, certainly not the major states that play a role in international space exploration anyway. These treaties are binding only for those who agree meaning that a number of states could contravene the provisions laid out in such treaties and whilst such acts may not be recognised as legally binding, there is really nothing that can stop them since it is merely an agreement. For instance, the Bogotá Declaration.

Look at Chevron - a multinational corporation - who not only ruined the livelihoods and lives of the indigenous population of Ecuador, ruined the environment and other extensive damaged told everyone to sod off. This renders an important distinction between the national and international legal landscapes. Launching space rockets, for instance, is regulated at national level and international regulations are based on an agreement and ultimately their cooperation. Like Chevron, private organisations by wealthy moguls could potentially claim territories of the moon without really breaking the law.

Transcendental idealism is not a new form of philosophy.

Do I actually have to ask why, because I am sure your response is going to be as agitating as your use of emoticons.

Don't take mind altering substances such as cannabis unless your ready to face your faults and meet them head on . I found that weed EXPOSES your weaknesses , take it apart because you have the duty to write your own story . It's ok give in to the things you CAN control . You're right you do have a problem but its not what you might think , most of the time is fear . — Leandro Monzon

Cannabis can have a more potent impact on those with pre-existing mental health issues that could increase the risk of making this condition more severe, particularly to psychosis and depression/anxiety that leads to a reliance on the substance due to the temporary alleviation of the symptoms. The reasons for mental health problems need to be understood and resolved and not by using substances, but by seeing a psychologist and perhaps taking medication if necessary.

You need to smoke more, although I don't smoke that much anymore, vaping baby! — Cavacava

This is the worst advice I have ever seen.

Love lies between the subject and the object which the lover apprehends as beautiful. — Metaphysician Undercover

This unity is symbolic. I have never fallen in love and I am still searching. I believe in this rational, authentic love that I write above so much so that I am waiting rather than attempting to alleviate this isolation by forming faux attachments. My desires are not in control of my motivations neither do I care about societal expectations of what apparently makes a perfect man, but I can rationally determine and can see straight through liars and they make up a vast majority.

I have said earlier that no one can see me because I have yet to meet a man that is not blindly following in some way, neither have I met a man who has the courage to let go of his past as well as his social conditions to improve himself and epitomise this form of Good - to be capable of giving love through virtue, righteousness, justice - rather than focusing his attention to try and be lovable through power, popularity or money.

I have not met a man who I admire and this admiration is what is beautiful. Someone who can think for themselves, who stands apart from society, who understands how to give love to all things and thus is capable of moral consciousness. Someone who can feel the world around him, to be a part of it and improve it just as he would himself.

Someone who is conscious and can see, likewise, who I actually am in return. Only when two people are capable of giving love - rather than wanting it - can actually know how to give love to one another.

In reality love is always two-sided, the lover and the beloved, and this makes love more like a part of something which negates one's autonomy, it connects us. — Metaphysician Undercover

Love can only be possible under autonomous conditions and so many people believe love is somehow unconditional. If that were so, why - realistically - are there so many examples of how unsuccessful love is, of how miserable people can be in relationships, or how obvious it is that it is not lasting? People form attachments based on false perceptions that they have conformed to from their social environment because they are consistently told that love is irrational or illogical, that it is beyond them in someway, given to them and that they must sacrifice themselves and let things be.

How stupid!

This is the same with those who have anxiety or depression; that is our voice and we are speaking to ourselves but we cannot articulate what it is attempting to convey, and while it is all coming from within us, how can you assume that being rational is wrong when it is being rational that would allow us to understand what it is trying to say? Just because we do not understand what we are saying to ourselves through our feelings does not mean it makes no sense, but it makes no sense only because we are not rational enough to understand ourselves independent from the social conditions. Having transcended to autonomous agency, our agility to use our mind and our observations or perceptions of the external world, our identification with it and understanding of it becomes objective, it has that sense of clarity and only then can a person know how to love.

You can only give love to the world rationally or appropriately when you have learnt to love and respect yourself, because only then are you even capable of giving love. Otherwise, how you give love is faux, adapting to the social requisites and indoctrinated perceptions given to you. The problem with your view about this whole negation of one's autonomy is that you assume the latter (to love yourself) to be a type of self-conceit or arrogance, probably because you have mistaken the vast majority of people who are conceited to love themselves, that, and moral worthiness to be a type of self-sacrifice or meekness and solitude.

On the contrary, these are just archetypes and people who are self-conceited actually hate themselves just as much as moral pretenders have learnt to present themselves as meek; liars are incapable of loving. Their identification with the external world is not independent or autonomous, it is just a game or a presentation as they react or identify to the social conditions in different ways. They are mindless in their approach to love and then state love is illogical as though attempting to justify their refusal to accept their own autonomy.

While love is paradoxical, it is a result of the human condition, of us being capable or being aware of our own existence. When we are capable of accepting this existential reality - hence overcoming the fear to let go of all the false perceptions given to us and where we have epistemically adapted to our identification to the world around us - we become rational or objective in our approach and no longer see the world as it is given to us.

The rational mind thinks according to the laws of logic, in terms of have and have not, is and is not, and deceives itself into thinking that this "must be the case", that all questions of truth are answerable with is or is not. In this way it is in complete ignorance of the truth and reality of temporal existence. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, a rational mind thinks according to reason and common sense that includes logic and as Voltaire once said, common sense is not so common.

Turning the mind toward love, though it is irrational, is to turn the mind toward truth. — Metaphysician Undercover

Let me break LOVE down for you.

When you are trapped in a mind conformed to social requirements as per your learning, one continues to "love" only specific people or objects and it is usually those who "love" them return (which is really just acceptance or a type of social congratulations for following these unwritten rules), and that gives one that sense of unity because such social acceptance alleviates the anxiety we feel since it enables or justifies our conformism and silences our desire for autonomy. Ignorance is bliss. To do this, they themselves make every effort to be loving or to have the qualities that make them loving, such as physical attractiveness, popularity, wealth, even being lovable as a person. All of this is really just a group of people trying to be loving by conforming or following and no one is actually giving love.

They are incapable of giving love and they continue throughout their lives to play games with themselves by trying to convince others that they deserve to be loved, others who can never be convinced because they are doing the exact same thing. They are not rational.

When you are elevated to a level of autonomous agency and begin identifying with the world independently, you are capable of true love and this is love to all things and not objects. This capacity to give love to all things is really defined as moral consciousness, and so that feeling within is real or authentic. What that means is that when you have learnt to give love rather than want love, you are actually being loving and not falsely.

An autonomous agent can see or perceive the world correctly and they can see that most people are blindly conforming. This is very isolating. I have always said that no one can see me for this reason. As true love or moral consciousness is to love all things and not something specific, all things are symbolic of the form of Good. It is our capacity to understand virtue, righteousness, justice and to apply ourselves by giving this to the world around us, rather than attractiveness, power, popularity which is just our desire to want. So, those who are capable of giving love because they are rational or autonomous form another group - albeit a very small one - and so this bond between two rational, autonomous agents is real or genuine because of how they identify with the external world.

Because moral consciousness is symbolic to the identification of Good, our love for a person is really our love for them for adopting the principles of Good. We admire them for being virtuous, righteous, just and applying themselves accordingly. We connect with them because they are autonomous, rational. They actually communicate and understand one another rationally, unlike the cohort who blindly follow.

The love cannot be motivated by something else because it would not be true love to expect that the love would bring something in return. — Metaphysician Undercover

Love is not something independent of us and while indeed our will or motivation enables concepts to be authentic or genuine, it returns back to our original discussion about anxiety and the heart. What we feel without words is our 'real' self embedded into our subjective or intuitive emotions that we cannot articulate or describe. I believe that the root of all anxiety lies in our unwillingness to accept or understand our separateness or autonomy and when we start to become conscious of our self-awareness, without the right mechanisms to enable a proper transcendence toward becoming an autonomous agent, anxiety is thus borne. The responsibility of our aloneness is too difficult to accept because that would mean that everything - including how we interpret our experiences - are translations that have been given to us and not 'real' (since our will or motivation enables authenticity).

We get anxiety because we simply cannot understand or articulate how to transcend and start learning to think for ourselves, so we escape from ourselves, follow others, do what others expect, form bonds or relationships with people - even if they are shit people - and so give up rational thinking to conform to society. They give up their self. The attachments these people form are what is generally imagined as love, this external, emotional force given to them - and indeed they do form attachments to people who present themselves in the way that is socially accepted - and because it is not there own choice there is no authenticity behind these attachments. These are the types of people who present themselves as normal but do bad things behind the scenes, or who have terrible anxiety or depression, or who lack complete empathy that they see others as nothing but objects for sexual or economical purposes. These people make every effort to be loved by presenting qualities about themselves that are loveable like attractiveness, power, money, popularity.

Yet, none of them know how to be loving, to give love - just like how they cannot think for themselves - because to know how to be loving or to give love, one needs to transcend to that level of autonomy - they need to be able to think for themselves and dislocate their attachments to the people in their environment. You need to accept that you are alone. You are separate and no unity is ever really possible - this is rational - and that in our separateness we are only a part of the overall whole and thus symbolically there is unity. Our attachments should thus be to Forms - concepts like goodness, virtue, righteousness - as we endeavour to improve ourselves through the external world and that is how we learn to give love and not to an object.

If there is unity possible, it is only when you meet someone conscious as you are, who is also independent and autonomous and who understands what this transcendence implies, which is the will or motivation to moral giving. Two such people are capable of giving love and share in this experience of improving themselves through one another. They are not compelled by false or inauthentic drives to conform into society and lose the self along the way. They are both rational, autonomous agents who form a friendship that share the same understanding and this friendship is forever - symbolically - and if they share experiences of sexual, emotional and economical unity together, despite knowing it is fleeting and can end, nevertheless will continue to care for one another because they know how to give love.

They love the other person because they symbolically represent or epitomise those Forms or concepts - goodness, virtue, righteousness - and so you admire them for who they are, just as much as you would feel overjoyed seeing good things happen.

The unity which you refer to here is "all wrong" because it is not the unity of true love. It is a unity of purpose. This person wants to be close to this other person for some purpose, and so on, just like "networking" except that the purpose is often not revealed, disguised as "friendship", or even "love". When the ulterior motive is revealed there is the inevitable disappointment, the feeling of deception. We can't go on living like this, where the appearance of love is just an illusion, a veil covering the ulterior motive. — Metaphysician Undercover

Love is a part of our rational faculty and there are conditions that are necessary before it can transcend to a level of authenticity to be rendered as 'true love' where two people embody all the forms of love through one another. Almost everyone believes that love is spontaneous and that if it were to be rationally applied it must therefore be in contravention of this 'real' but that is just an imagined or delusional way we fool ourselves into forming bonds with people to escape from our loneliness. The 'real' here is that the emotional bond or attachment we have and so conversely when people attach for economic or sexual reasons they actually lack 'love' and when you focus on this latter example, it is lacking in humanity or what makes us human. There is no 'love' in a trophy wife or girlfriend, there is no 'love' for a man who works and brings home the money. The question is how can we form this bond rationally and with authenticity?

When I say "start all over again" or "be born again" it is finding the capacity (and the courage) to understand the network of our relationships from social or environmental, genetic or biological, epistemic or instinctual that forms our perceptual interpretations and this is achieved through rational thinking. We begin to choose for ourselves and this autonomy enables us to remove toxic people from our lives despite having emotional attachments to them, it makes us choose people to associate with that are worthy and that you feel good when you are around. We are endowed with the capacity to objectively become conscious of our own existence or to become self-aware and this self-awareness is in part achieved by our relationship with the external world. We begin to use our rational faculty rather than blindly conform to or follow those in our environment.

What makes us human or gives us humanity is our moral substance, this empathy or ability to care for others, so it is about giving love and not specifically to an object but the rational application of being empathetic, caring, desirous to see the negative improve. Love is moral consciousness and this is impossible if one blindly follows the herd, thus being an autonomous agent in order to be rationally self-aware is a pre-condition to this moral consciousness. One cannot love unless they are an autonomous agent and when we authentically and consciously understand how to give love, it reshapes our perceptions of the external world. Which means, we begin to see the world differently that we are no longer what we once were; transcendence from blind conformism.

While there is no exclusive capacity to undertake introspection without there being some limitations since any examination of our mental states are riddled with perceptual inaccuracies, I think that externalism is probably a better way of looking at introspection since the language that enables us to interpret the content in our minds is in part determined by our social environment. The epistemic possibilities thus enables a transmission of information that strengthens a better understanding of our own thought processes.

True love is two autonomous agents who recognise and improve one another by sharing this examination and analysing these perceptual inaccuracies; they form a bond because they are for and respect what is good and right and this bond is an eternal friendship. This love is forever because when two autonomous agents 'connect' they connect rationally and it is rational to accept the entropy of our existence and that nothing is forever. I could meet a man who is also this autonomous agent and we could love one another, share in sexual experiences, even marry, but these experiences will change and eventually end, but the friendship wont (the love itself).

Are you talking about the gravitational field? It really doesn't deserve "quotation marks" as there is no real mystery behind it.

I think that the importance of true love is often underestimated. — Metaphysician Undercover

Praise science! I just love this subject...

Love is the foundation, in my opinion, the very core of who we are and this is clear in children who have caregivers that fail to provide adequate love or care that such neglect often has a massive impact right into adulthood, including anxiety and attachment issues. Our experience of love alleviates this feeling (hence why if you are in a relationship and feel anxiety, you do not love your partner) and for me that is proof that love is the source of all that makes us human; empathy, care, charity, it is moral consciousness.

When we are young, our perceptions have the solidity of something definite until we become aware of ourselves, at which point we lose this solidity and thus the source of our anxiety becomes this inability to acknowledge an indefinite existence, the fact that we are separate and alone. We don't like feeling helpless and so in our desperation we reach out, to a partner or friends or anything in the external world that we can attach ourselves to, conform and finally 'unite' to return back to that same solidity and definite feeling we had when young. But this solution, this union is all wrong, we trick ourselves and falsely fill that void. It is why what is commonly done to explain existence by the masses does not produce anxiety in us when we follow; anxiety is proof that we have a problem following, but we have not yet 'let go' - it is the unity between automatons that gives meaning through common approval.

People incorrectly believe in this idea that they have "fallen in love" when it is really initiated by the same conformism where sexual consummation is really an attempt to overcome the preceding loneliness. Such love fails so often in our society because we do not see the application of love to be rational but rather 'spontaneous' and so we do not correctly examine that we need to learn how to give it. We study courses or subjects over a number of years to gain a basic understanding of a subject, before proceeding further for another number of years working in the field to gain experience. Why is it that we neglect the study and practice of love? And it is not to one person, but to learn how to give it to all people, it is to basically be a friend.

u suggest that one could proceed on the basis of examining possibilities. This would be like trial and error. However, in trial and error by the conscious mind, there must be a clearly defined "success", such that we would know when the trial has success. In this case, we'd examine all sorts of possibilities with no way of knowing which is the correct one. Furthermore, it is likely that each of the possibilities contributes its own bit toward compounding the problem. So it appears to me, like there are no parameters for judging "success", in determining which of the possibilities is the correct one. Then there is no way of knowing whether any such understanding of the subconscious by the conscious is a correct one. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I completely agree but what I am attempting to convey is that the process itself, of being able to articulate and examine their past and memories, to be able to understand causal connections particularly that of biological - including health and sleep - as well as genetic, of attempting to analyse and ascertain the authenticity of their perceptions, all this is the process that leads one toward the successful and indeed permanent alleviation of such anxiety.

This is because we begin to understand ourselves as an autonomous agent with better clarity and we begin to mature the existential properties that reduce ambiguous mental states, enabling us to exercise better control of our lives. The concept of "being born again" - removing any Christian connotations to this - is really just the ability to start all over again, to overcome the given way to interpret our perceptions and experiences with the external world according to our parents and friends and begin interpreting that independently or autonomously and that often means a complete transformation in their environment and the people that they associate with. A healthy psychology is a person who has achieved that kind of balance, that peace which leads one to happiness.

You can never directly know, but the process maximises our agency, the ability to feel, our moral well-being and virtuous conduct, and so we become distinct and our actions intentional and authentic. This is what 'wisdom' is, which is basically knowledge of our experience.

Are there any practical ways by which the study of philosophy can be used to overcome issues with depression, self esteem etc.? — LSDC

It entirely depends on the mind or the individual, but I believe it can although not in the way that it seems. Philosophy enables one to begin thinking objectively, to articulate and explain concepts rationally. Parallel to this is depression and self-esteem that are subjective and often elusive, thus philosophical enquiry can enable one to understand how to think and process information better and by doing so one begins to think and process their own experiences better. They are better equipped to articulate themselves and their experiences objectively and thus begin to see their own experiences more rationally rather than emotionally.

However, philosophy cannot help someone delusional (by delusional I mean someone too egocentric) and while we have ethics and moral philosophy to try and release such people from the grips of their own subjective reality and to begin to form empathy, they instead find the most obscure areas of metaphysics to try and justify their own egocentrism, ignoring what philosophical enquiry is and even so profound in their own delusions that they think they are better at it to form their own philosophy.

I have seen some people who were very positive and respectful preceding their philosophical journey only to eventually decline to a mental state much worse than they originally had because they are too egocentric. Other than that, yes, philosophy can help you better clarify objective reality that you can begin to understand your own mode of existence with more clarity (and courage).

However, as discussed, and I think we agree, there is no avenue here. The conscious mind is incapable of understanding the subconscious, and these attempts would only lead to frustration. — Metaphysician Undercover

Indeed, no clear avenue, but there is a way to reach that 'core' problem or to find out the root cause of those subconscious fears because they mostly exist through past experiences and it is about accessing that repository of memories and reasoning or calculating a number of possible factors that network the formation of this negative feeling. For instance, that girl has irrational fears of leaving home and venturing into independence because of a dominating mother and a normalisation of her behaviour culturally, but she is unaware of that consciously and she clearly ensures or fights any possible access to the truth by getting upset at those who bring it up and pushing them away.

Even so, the avenue remains unclear aside from the fact that we need to find the courage to stop deceiving ourselves, such as forgiving our parents and objectively recognising that they are human beings with flaws and that we need to take responsibility for our own life, ascertaining potential genetic affiliations and predispositions, understanding nutrition, sleep and how the brain works etc &c. For me, the sensation of anxiety all but disappeared the moment I stopped deceiving myself and the transformation was long and very painful. It mostly involved removing toxic people from my life and trying to resolve what being 'alone' actually meant by starting a clean slate. It took years of continuous errors, deliberations, a hefty amount of tears and even existentially wanting to just give up and shut down despite the protestations of reason. I am quite literally at peace and very happy within now, but the process was tough.

There are two types of fear as mentioned; that learned or epistemic fear because of our social environment and this is subconscious, and then the evolutionary, the one in the brain that desires pleasure and seeks to avoid pain and this instinctual prompt is without consciousness so completely unconscious; when we feel anxiety from something we learnt from our social environment, despite reason telling us it is irrational or silly, our brains instinctually mark the experience as a 'danger' or bad and seeks to immediately alleviate the feeling, sometimes even amplifying the anxiety as though attempting to clarify that it is really bad and needs to end. That prompts us to delude ourselves or escape from the feelings - even within mindfulness or new ageism - some people even continue living in a miserable relationship, or having toxic people in their life to stop them from facing the 'quiet' of their own mind. The conflict is really between the instinctual and the learned.

But this is where metaphors serve us, so I'll say that it's like listening, metaphorically. And the disposition which the subconscious must have, in order that it "listens" to the conscious mind, is like "respect", or "trust". So I'll refer to this as a disposition of respect, metaphorically. The subconscious has respect for the conscious, and allows itself to be told how to behave. — Metaphysician Undercover

If language - as in reason or rational thought - is not serving us to articulate experience, stories seem to work as that next level of communication, like semiotics in that it provides symbolic connections between our experiences in a fictional story. This is why we dream and perhaps even the purpose of our imagination, that intuitive realm of communication. Sometimes (not all the time) our dreams are showing us those subjective, underlying problems and desires but the actual dream itself is completely fantastical and makes no sense until you attempt to interpret it. This is why writing your own story or painting or other creative arts helps us explain those deeper behavioural feelings as much as parables or allegories can explain underlying moral concepts without actually detailing what.

Here we find the importance of the unconditional love of the caregiver. The baby's subconscious receives, and benefits from the love given by the caregiver, through the medium of the baby's consciousness. This loving nurtures and enhances the naturally existing respect which the subconscious has for the conscious. — Metaphysician Undercover

(Y) Even just the warmth of presence, to listen, to play, to read and all this nurtures the child to develop correctly and makes the process of transcendence much more smoother. A human being requires love to be full functional.

This thread has got me thinking that maybe feeling unable to cope with life is a problem created by society more than I originally thought. — Andrew4Handel

As I mentioned to you in our correspondence, there is a parallel here between this inability to cope with life and a lack of recognition from others. You were severely bullied and as a way to articulate that hurt, the rejection, you may be attempting to justify their behaviour with Aspergers. While most of us have symptoms of high functioning social awkwardness, Aspergers is very clear in its behavioural difficulties. The bullies have something wrong with them, they are reacting and responding viciously likely because they can (perhaps you are/were vulnerable) and because they themselves are miserable.

We often identify pleasure when people approve of us, treat us nicely and respectfully and this gives us meaning. This is why people are addicted to social networking. Contrary to this begets the hurt and the hopelessness because when people tell us we are "bad" we believe it. Maybe not consciously, but the hurt and depression/anxiety is evidence of this. To overcome this, you need to find the courage to be independent and to find that self love or respect for yourself without needing the recognition from others. You'll eventually meet good people who will treat you with the respect you deserve.

You have it in me ;)

Flowers are very uplifting, but no substitute for expert advice on the right tie for the occasion. — unenlightened

Or a cravat.

A man who knows his flowers is a man worthy of tie-advice.

So this would be what happens with childhood learning. The subconscious is listening to, and in a way, communicating with the conscious, but the communication is sort of one way. The subconscious "understands" what the conscious mind gives it, receiving and remembering, but the conscious mind doesn't understand anything that is going on in the subconscious. — Metaphysician Undercover

I knew this guy who followed his girlfriend and copied her - she would do something, he would do something - but then it was almost like he realised he was copying her and he would retract or stop, as though recognising that he should not follow her or even that he was following someone unworthy, back and forth like that repeatedly over the years. I knew he had attachment issues and I assume that this was formed from an unreliable and yet dominating mother, but whatever the case is he was having a battle in himself that he literally was completely undecided as to who he was. He followed and copied his girlfriend before sharply changing to doing what he felt was right, ossiclating between different behaviours and feeling anxious almost all the time that he resorted to secretive behaviour, playing games, aggressive. He refused to listen to me, consistently misunderstood what I was attempting to say to help him when I tried to get him to understand his anxiety that I gave up on him because it is exactly as you say, the subconscious "understands" what the conscious mind gives it. But, what if what it is given is irrational?

Everything about who we are is dependent on the quality and capacity to reason adequately and fear stands as an obstacle only because of its ability to influence irrational thoughts. To improve is really about ameliorating our knowledge, advancing our experience and ultimately broadening our language and this enables us with the capacity to interpret our past experiences and relate it to our currents beliefs or opinions, to understand the difference between a rational and irrational opinion, and thus form a stronger relationship with our intuitive system. "Since it is reason which shapes and regulates all other things, it ought not itself to be left in disorder."

Everything about who we are is also dependent on the quality of our relationships and connections with others, but particularly during developmental stages when our brains and personalities are beginning to form. Children can also experience anxiety, despite their brains not being fully developed; the anxiety can be caused by a poor caregiver - such as a dominating mother or an absent father - but in particular emotional distance or a lack of responsiveness to the needs of the child can cause significant barriers in the harmonious development of their personality. I knew a girl who had a very dominating mother and although she was in her mid-twenties, even a conversation about her moving into an independent lifestyle was simply unfathomable and evoked such irrational fear in her that one would think her life was threatened. There was nothing of the sort, but her mother's behaviour had taught her to believe that disobeying would be "bad" and made her respond to the suggestion with intense anxiety as though I were "bad" for suggesting it.

When we reach a level of cognitive maturity, we have the capacity to reason and rationalise our responses and so it is up to her to find the courage to analyse her responses objectively and that takes knowledge and experience so that she has the capacity to identify those past experiences and connect them to her responses. Many people resort to other sources to articulate their identity, such as new ageism, religion or dogma, even some areas of metaphysics and sometimes even other people, functioning as a way to avoid this responsibility of beginning this process to rationalise the past. That is a different anxiety, this fear to think independently and there is an element of our learning but also it is embedded into our genes. We respond negatively to the concept of our separateness from others because our attachment to others is comforting; our brains seek the pleasure of this attachment and avoid this displeasure that we are separate, individual and thus alone.

This same anxiety can be seen in children who have attachment issues and other demonstrably negative behavioural traits caused by difficulties to connect to caregivers (the result of poor parenting for instance) such as feeling clingy or needy, desperate, suspicious, emotionally insensitive, all of which are merely responses that form during this pivotal time during childhood. When parents or guardians oscillate between different behaviours or say when there is a divorce or separation, such unreliability confuses and effects the child that they form irrational attachments and these behavioural responses continues through to adulthood. In addition, we are also socially and culturally often told that we are "bad" if we believe our caregivers to be wrong in someway and so we automatically assume some infallibility, but a rational approach in adulthood is to realise that our parents are just human and that we are now grown up and do not need to emotionally rely on them. That would mean accepting and transforming the entire structure of your mode of existence, hence the difficulty.

Everyone makes a shitload of mistakes. If you cannot cope, it is probably because you do not have a good butler to cover for you.

Edit: Or a wife. — unenlightened

Or a secret admirer who sends you flowers. How much would existence improve if we spent our days merely entertaining each other?

Remember what I said about real unity? Within each of us there is a real unity, which is not duplicated between us. This makes the communication between us inauthentic compared to the communication within us. The inauthenticity is built in, inherent within the languages. So when we turn inward there is an incompatibility between the language within, and the outward language, which makes understanding of the inner impossible from the perspective of the outer. The subconscious cannot be understood by the conscious. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is just the best, however I believe that it may be accessible, only not completely, like a puzzle that you need to work through because if there appears to be that 'alarm bell' feeling we get from anxiety -which is our subconscious telling us that something is wrong - in order to have that, it would need linguistic capacity, there needs to be some meaning to that experience that it merely cannot articulate consciously because there is a lack of understanding. When you teach a child that behaving someway is wrong, they often do not understand at conscious level why it is wrong, but this belief retreats into that subconscious domain as though the voice of this parent remains embedded and echoes doubts that we feel when we encounter similar experiences.

Only our instinctual drives remain completely unconscious, completely without any thought and really, as humans who are capable of identifying or becoming self-aware, consciousness is really the medium or tool that attempts to manage our instinctual drives with our social or moral development that we obtain for the external world.



It is experience that is not yet understood but considering that this moral development is within us, it is about raising it to the surface, to explain it at conscious level. This is a process embedded into the structure of our cognitive system, hence why Kant' formula that we as rational agents are bound by moral law makes perfect sense. We begin to deliberate a philosophical process using our own will or consciousness to begin formulating our own moral laws; which is, basically, adopting our own interpretation of the external world and our experience with it rather than listening to that echo telling us what to think and how to behave.

There is something important missed here though, and that is that we are born with only the inner language. So all of our learning from others, as children, can only proceed to the extent that the inner may translate the outer. This, "being born with" is like a preconditioning, to accept the identity which will be given to us. — Metaphysician Undercover

We are not born with a language, we learn it socially but that the brain itself is a tool, an instrument that - upon maturation - is enabled with the capacity to become self-aware, to identify and calculate experience autonomously but through this very learning or determinism. Again, free-will and determinism is not mutually exclusive but in actually rather compatible, and the only problem is that this develops later and the experience of this 'self-awareness' and therefore this distinct separateness from our environment and the identity that we had formed through it is extremely frightening. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

I am confident that there may be a way in which that transition could be eased with adequate support, but unfortunately society and religion and other institutions seem to do everything in their power to ensure you avoid this independent voice. It equates to libertarianism, vice, even evil and all that really is just a way to frighten you to submit.

I do, however, believe that some people are born with particular - or unique - personality traits, certain attributes that you could say is very individual to that character and not a learned behaviour. I have seen it in some toddlers, and these traits could be genetic.

Helping someone survive cancer or move house or find a partner are problems that are well defined so specific advice can be targeted and these issues don't seem to have wider connotations. — Andrew4Handel

I know those who have found the right person, their 'soul mate' or someone they deeply and intellectually connect with and could really love and be happy with, but they chose to turn away from that in order to be in a more generally accepted and yet superficial relationship. People do not like a challenge, they are afraid of feeling and thinking to a point that they would rather live in this quiet misery pretending to themselves that somehow it will get better than live in the freedom of choice (or the freedom that one feels when they make their own choices); we are constantly told since childhood that if we act on our own accord it is "bad" or "wrong" and that we will get hurt or in trouble - thus epistemically, we grow to think that thinking for ourselves is thus "bad" or "wrong" and unconsciously stop ourselves from being ourselves. We are also taught that following and listening and doing what others tell us is "right" and "good" and when society promises that as long as you continue to conform and follow everything will get better, you believe it. Until you realise years, even decades later that this was complete bullshit, tricking you into absorbing your self into a collective delusion.

But, the fact here is, he did find the right person but he chose to deny her and therein lies the problem. We are not as ignorant as we make ourselves out to be, like those children who intentionally do something wrong and when caught immediately pretend that they had nothing to do with it and don't know anything about it. He chose to be malicious to her as a way to pretend to himself that he did not care, chose to continue pretending to be happy, pretending to build a life, pretending to build a career but all with an underlying misery. What we are in life is a collection of choices that we make, even if it is ultimately one choice of mindless conformism and allowing others to think on our behalf.

If you are unhappy, unable to cope with life, the reason for this is probably because you have made a shitload of mistakes. We create meaning through our choices. That's ok, the great thing about free will is that there is always a chance to fix it and while this resolve to remove the toxicity in your life would probably mean pulling everything apart and starting all over again, but so great is this meaning to your own identity that you will eventually sense and experience genuine happiness.

My long post was in response to your long post, so we're even. :P

The synaptic pruning is to throw away all the errors of trial and error. The inner voice may be very excited in fits of passion, and that's why those passages need to be pruned, to ensure that we don't mistakenly go back to what was already been determined as the wrong way. But that does not mean that we cannot continue to seek new ways, continue in our method of trial and error, long past the days of childhood. — Metaphysician Undercover

I merely brought up synaptic pruning as a comparative analogy to show how the brain - when a person' cognitive maturity reaches the right age - sheds useless aspects of our developmental learning in order to make it more open and sophisticated for adulthood; so when we reach this transcendence and begin to think as an autonomous agent, we shed or prune our reliance to conform to society or those close or around us, removing toxic people from our life, having the courage to experience the things that we want and not what others want from us. We shed those things in order to start improving our own language and identification to the external world.

Recently, in a dream, I climbed onto a high roof with someone else, to do some repair. Suddenly, I started screaming as if for help, like a little child. This surprised me, even in the dream, because the roof wasn't extremely steep and I'm not afraid of heights. Then I was going down the sloop of the roof as if I was being drawn toward the edge. I was panicked with fear, but at the same time, I knew that this is not difficult, the roof is not too steep, I must just keep away from the edge, and I will not fall. For some reason though, I could not control the fear. And the fear overwhelmed my power to do what I knew I could do, stay away from the edge. The fear overcame me to such a great extent, that I was ready to give in and let the thing I feared take me. It was like the fear was so strong that it forced me to give in to the thing that I feared, when I knew that I could avoid it. This dream very much surprised me because that is not something I would normally do. In a dangerous situation, such as driving a car which has gone out of control, I'll fight it to the end, trying to regain control. — Metaphysician Undercover

You know, while Jung did have rather ambiguous theories, I am compelled to believe that our subconscious does speak to us in a language that we understand and does this through stories. When I think of the bible, for instance, it is attempting a moral education through stories, or like parables where we seem to understand or interpret aspects of our deeper, subjective self in them. In a way, this consciousness of our own being is really attempting to piece together and articulate our own story. It is as though you are reasonable and conscious enough to see the absurdity of this fear and yet you are still somehow afraid, that while not that high up seem to be overcome with the idea that you were in danger and this somehow epitomises the angst that prevents those from letting go of the irrational fear to reject our former, given identity and to start creating our own. It is interesting that it appears to be at home, as though there is a fear of independence.

I suppose this is just like death itself. It's one of those things that you try to avoid, and we can usually avoid it by being in control of ourselves. However, eventually we have to face the decision. Am I going to resist and fight it to the end, in which case, the fear, panic, or even just the effort, might actually bring it on earlier, or should I just go with the flow? — Metaphysician Undercover

Heidegger does not speak of overcoming death - in the sense of 'death' being one actually dying physically - but rather overcoming the death of this given identity; as mentioned, when we are young, we are given the translations of our perceptions and experiences by others, that they tell us how to think and behave and we form our reality based on these given themes, but when our brains reach that cognitive maturity, it begins to translate these experiences autonomously only we do not understand or cannot articulate what they mean since we are brand-new at the experience. We suddenly become conscious that we are shifting away from that given identity or that given language that we use to translate reality and that is frightening, it is like everything that you are is untrue or false.

This is the 'angst' this moving away from what we thought was reality or the truth and most are unsuccessful in reaching that level of autonomy; they often retreat back to conforming, back to doing what others tell them whether it is friends or parents or partners, and with capitalism and the social media or network, it is becoming easier and easier for people to think that they are autonomous or independent, tricking themselves and others alike, this idea that they are individuals when they blindly move in masses. Changing your hair colour or wearing different clothes does not make you different. As we have the capacity to be self-aware, we have the capacity to recognise our separateness and this detatchment is the very anxiety that overcomes us.

Yeah, ok, well nice chat. :-}

What can I say, I just like sports cars, always have. Some people like large homes, I could care less about having a large home. By the way, my body is full of tattoos. I have one of Wittgenstein on my chest. :-} I'm not into fancy clothes, not into having expensive watches, I just like sports cars. Can't I have one vice, please? I'm not rich, nor am I married, I just have a little extra money to spend. Why not have a little fun. Beside I'm 67, who knows how much time I have left. — Sam26

Damnation. Wittgenstein on your chest? I say, but I hope you don't have "get it here" on your lower abdomen... in Latin.

Nevertheless, I approve of your vice, I love the idea of tinkering away restoring classic cars. I brought my first car the day I turned 18 and it was a beaten-up, rusty 1983 model Toyota Cressida in brown for $800 that I saved working at KFC while studying in high school - mind you, I was earning $4.50 hr and I was paying rent at the same time - and it was pure freedom for me or at least it represented that; it really allowed me to understand why the freedom of movement is paramount to self-determination. It was an old car, but it was the only car I could afford and it remains the best thing I ever had. And anyway, the engine was powerful enough for me to escape the late-night attention from guys in their cars compelled by my girlfriends who would flirtatiously taunt them, those days straight out of high school where we embraced the entropy of existence. :D

I don't even drive that fast, at most I'll drive 150 in a 30 mph school zone, but that's it; and I do it on Sundays while texting. — Sam26

To be perfectly honest, there is no point getting a sportscar if you are not going to drive it fast and that is why it is really silly to buy one if you live in the suburbs. I would recommend getting something sophisticated, slightly luxurious but nevertheless economical that you can enjoy and maybe just hire a sports car in Germany and speed in designated areas around Europe.

Ya, if you've ever been in an accident that will cure you of sports cars. I've seen some bad accidents, but was never involved in one. My best friend, who loved sports cars, always said he would die before he was 21, but that if he died he wanted to die in his car. Well, he wasn't in it, but under it, it fell on him. He was 20 when he died. I was in Marines at the time, just left Vietnam, when I got the news. It's a crazy world, I go to Vietnam and survive, he dies under his car in his driveway. — Sam26

I am very conscious of how I drive and I prefer to drive manual so I can be more in control and I never had an accident until this really terrible driver caused the collision (it was not my fault). It really shocked me more then I thought an experience like that would and shaped how I understand cars, which is why safety is a big priority for me now. I did drive fast, but I was sensible and knew where and how to drive at the right time. Despite that, I am still fond of sportscars but not for everyday use because the utility of it seems absurd; more for the respect to the mechanics and horsepower and aesthetics, but not for actual driving. If I had any money, I would prefer to purchase with safety my top priority, before value and economy and then luxury, but alas.

Was he a mechanic?

He wasn't seeking advice on finding a car that could make him yawn the fastest. — Hanover

If I had the money, I would love to have one of those cars. Just so you know, a man can still be a man despite driving a canary yellow Holden Barina. It is the utility of the car, whether you will save money in the long run, whether it can hold its value should you decide to sell later, insurance, safety etc.

Meanie.

You know, last year I was asked out on a date by a guy who drives an Amarok V6, he had tattoo down his right arm, big, brawny thing who seemed to compare his masculinity to this material archetype and so driving this Amarok meant he epitomised the 'manliness' as much as a Mercedes or a BMW epitomises prestige and wealth. I could not get myself to say yes.

You seem like an intelligent, old man, why do you want a sports car? To feel young again? While I think that useful, material objects can represent the type of character and personality one has - a person who dresses like a clown is likely deranged despite calling it "fashion" - there needs to be some sense and utility in what you are purchasing, what is most cost-effective, economical, better for the environment.

Above all, after the wreckage that was my car following the road accident, I think you should be thinking mostly about safety and this can be achieved without having to resort to sluggish speeds. Like the Chevrolet Volt that is enabled with an electric engine but if necessary also has petrol, it incidentally is very attractive and sportish, it has a great safety rating and holds good speeds.

But, I would drive a Ford Focus or a Mazda 3 because it has the highest safety rating, economical, and I am not a rally driver to need anything fancy. Plus they are much cheaper, though still too expensive for me.

I think you might do well to recognize that this "inner voice" is not a voice within you, it is you. Otherwise you're like Agustino, seeing a need to suppress it. That is authenticity, the voice that comes from within you. the most trustworthy source. It is necessary to recognize this in order that there is a whole you, unified. We, as members of society are urged to suppress the inner voice, to parrot the others, what Plato called the mob. But the mob is a false unity, an inauthentic sameness of individuals, created by those who desire similar pleasures. You will not understand unity until you grasp the authentic unity, yourself. Then only you can tell yourself what you really want, and sometimes this is not easy to determine. — Metaphysician Undercover

That certainly is exactly what I mean; ever had those dreams where you need to move or get out of somewhere, but you physically just cannot go and try all you can, your body will not move? Or, say you are afraid in this dream and want to scream but there is no sound to the scream? Is there any direction or energy without the arrow of time? We all each have - as part of our mind - our own individuality formed through our cognitive capacity to store memories, something that computes and creates decisions and opinions and ideas independently because we are capable of becoming self-aware; but if this consciousness has never been used, its function lacks the stimulation needed to actually work and so it appears to be some sort of an abyss.

I do not agree with the suppression of this voice, but really to simply transcend the noise that makes it hard to hear what it is attempting to convey. Like a muscle that requires exercise, we need to build a new language as an autonomous agent, similar to synaptic pruning where we begin to selectively discard what is unnecessary and keep what is necessary.

Question: Can an obese person be "beautiful"? ("Obesity" generally means grossly fat, not just a little over-weight.) 40 to 60 extra pounds generally lands one in or close to obese territory. It'd be very unusual for the average person to carry 50 extra pounds so well distributed that there wouldn't be rolls and bagging, which is generally not considered lovely. Rubenesque is luscious and voluptuous. Obese is just lard-assesque. — Bitter Crank

I thought about this. A person who has mental health problems does not know how to properly take care of themselves, they lack hygeine, they are obese or underweight, they smoke or drink or take drugs, their material belongings and physical body represent the state of their mind and that is what is considered either ugly or lovely. You can feel the same displeasure - despite being sympathetic - to those who have other mental health issues and why happiness and peace in others is pleasurable.

I eat really well (aside from all the damn apples), I exercise regularly, and my body mass index is in the healthy weight range. I do not smoke, drink and have never taken any drugs. I like to dress well too. I am athletic and feminine. What that shows or represents is the state of my mental health; beauty is irrelevant here, it is simply what is attractive or pleasurable.

Beauty of form is not fleeting, the world is truly richer thank to the manifestation of such perfection of form. — Akanthinos

A couple of months ago, I walked into a hairdressing salon I had never been to before and when I walked in - to my everlasting dismay - almost everyone in there looked like the Kardashians. They had their eyebrows drawn, fake eyelashes, thick layer of make-up, they were all the same apart from parts of their appearance like their hair-colour, all the while spending hundreds upon hundreds on make-up and clothing trying to apparently pull of this "fashionable" (when they look like clowns). They even mimic behaviour where they present themselves as having pleasant manners but all they were doing was copying; they was no real substance to them. I find this behaviour to be pathological.

I then question why men find that beautiful. Or do people identify 'beauty' to what the masses consider most 'popular' and that they love what everyone else loves because they want to be like everyone else? Think of the biblical reference to Jezebel, who presents herself as a good woman and by doing so influences people to practice the wrong things; she controls a King who as a man clearly has no subjective power and merely follows and the problem here is that people who tolerate such behaviour become complicit to it, like the bystander who watches others do wrong and does nothing.

I question your motivation. It is not that Kristen Kruek is ugly, it has nothing to do with her, my concern relates to this so-called manifestation of perfection. Compared to what? This is the same with men who are subject to masculine ideals of physical strength and other behavioural attributes that subject them to contrast themselves with an archetype, before taking steroids and acting all macho all the while abandoning who 'they' are.

For an interesting genetic experience, try this at home: try breeding ever darker petunias. At some point, your two very dark, dark parents will produce a white off-spring. I don't remember what the genetic mechanism was, but something along the lines of "the plant rejected the final attempt and cut the color off altogether". — Bitter Crank

Interesting, but I actually have a fondness for pastel colours, particularly pink that lightly streams though white with a gentle, fresh scent - hence peonies - along with lilies and I am even more impressed when such perfection exists in the wild. Even when I wear pink, people are always drawn to me as though the colour just works for me.

Like pastel pink cherry blossoms.

Men can be beautiful too, but they simply do not strike me as such like a beautiful woman does. — Akanthinos

I think this is the point, about whether this 'striking' feeling enables something to be beautiful or whether you are merely projecting your instinctual desires to something fleeting. Rosa Parks is beautiful because she represents something more than just this fleeting appearance, but that honour, courage, compassion elevate her to something more than just our desires, to something eternal.

Ascertaining 'the causes' is a bit misleading, as what started the anxiety and what keeps it going ontically aren't necessarily what structures anxiety and its necessary features ontologically. It may be that an anxious person can address their issues by eschewing the inappropriate application of some norms to their lives, or it may be that they can lessen the harsh distinction between their real and ideal selves based on inauthentic adherence to those norms. — fdrake

People can certainly formulate a normalcy of negative thoughts through ideals as our brains are naturally compelled and captivated by stories and story-telling, only in this instance our imagination is not alleviating but rather prolonging the problem. That is because the stories are given to us and our relationships to characters - including real people - become representative of what shapes these values, particularly those of a dogmatic nature. When we listen to great figures of history or biblical stories, it activates our sensory cortex and we are enabled with a contrast that allows us to interpret memories or experiences because our brain organises these memories and articulates it into stories; the puzzle is piecing the bits and pieces of these shattered memories to formulate an actual plot, the person that you are.

There is a biological dimension of why we like the experience and why stories form some semiotic representation that can explain our relationship with the external world; the Ottoman Empire had it's roots in stories about prophetic dreams, wolves, supernatural concepts that compelled mobilisation. Nazism compelled mobilisation through fictional Aryan ideology (for which Heidegger himself was drawn like a moron). Don't get me started on Catholicism. These narratives organise our experiences but they are nevertheless given to us and so we are not articulating our own story, authentically, as it was and is experienced but our experiences are interpreted by these social constructed narratives and thus the conflict begins.

I would not call it persecution fantasies but rather clusters of socially constructed spaces - whether in the home or in the community - that broadly educate this identification to bad behaviour as normal. There are clusters of women in parts of the world that experience hysteria, for instance, and their behaviour is aligned with high levels of gender-based violence and so they are physically and psychologically responding - albeit in a more pathological manner - to the social conditions. Hysteria becomes a responsive way to articulate 'no' or 'bad' and any consideration of the mental health of these women in these environments are non-existent. Some of these women from these cultures have arrived as migrants or refugees into Australia and the idea of even communicating about domestic problems to psychologists is very uncomfortable for them as though the therapist is an enemy trying to wreak havoc to the family, the capacity to educate them about human rights is confusing and the suggestion that we have mechanisms here that will protect them from harm such as the police is distrusted to say the least. These responses and behaviours become learned and they see anxiety as normal and are told or taught culturally that they have to be strong and deal with what they get rather than actually say that violence is bad and that they deserve better. They have no independent voice.

Not everyone has the intellectual capacity to rationalise their circumstances utilising phenomenological or philosophical themes since our understanding of the world is largely dependent on language, but ideals or stories enables this comparative that we begin a process of communicating our history and experiences through the memories that we have. Those women that I have encountered would never understand me if I were to just straight-up say that violence from men is bad and so in order to get them to understand, I could write a song or create a television soap opera or use some historical figure that would explain human rights and gender-empowerment using fiction.

Essentially, there is only one root cause and that is the 'self' or the 'I' or 'me' that is autonomously or independently attempting to communicate a thought or opinion, but that the social and environmental conditions have never enabled them with the capacity to understand how to do this. It is a part of the human mind to have the capacity to become self-aware, but with the continuous bombardment of how one should think and behave - inauthenticity - is consistently given to us, for us to give back or communicate back as an autonomous agent - authenticity - becomes very difficult.

Being earnest about pathological behaviour and mental states is probably required to enter into a therapeutic relationship with yourself or another, but its negation - delusion or lack of insight depending on the specifics - are epistemic properties of a sufferer and their capacity for articulating their symptoms, not ontological ones. — fdrake

Introspection is difficult to say the least, it is a process and a lengthy one at best where one consistently encounters perceptual inadequacies but this very process is articulating ones own narrative, to start building a language in what is a very empty mental space. Thus epistemically knowledge and language is social and that much of what we understand is given to us in a shared space and this forms our identity and how we perceive the external world, but the process of being able to take that knowledge or language and reverse it and thus to start using it autonomously from the 'self' directed outwardly to the external is the very interaction that is absent from our experience and what we need to learn to do. Our pathological positions or ego or self-defence mechanisms that stand as blockages to prevent one from ever reaching this capacity is entirely unique and dependent on the individual.

Yeah, if that is a threat then you have more problems then you think.

As I just suggested to fdrake, death, finitude, uniqueness, and individuality, are all properties of the everydayness of the particular. And this is the inauthentic. When we recognize the abstracted principles by which we act, as the authentic, this encourages us to conform. Conformation is a requirement to understand the vast realm of abstracted principles, and since this is recognized as authentic the will to conform flourishes. — Metaphysician Undercover

I was having lunch with my sister yesterday (as part of my process of forgiving the past) and we were discussing this very topic (I had read what you wrote and wanted to give it some more thought) and our personalities are very different, despite being close in age and witnessing similar experiences. She has anxiety and it stems from a continuity of these intrusive thoughts - particularly of dissatisfaction - where she consistently believes that she is not good enough. For her, doing well in her studies is an example of being satisfactory - this inauthentic influence portrayed by our social environment - and so prior to submitting an essay and the weeks following, she would experience anxiety and when she would receive her results for several days she will continue to feel that C or a B was not good enough. She was never satisfied. She identified what was 'good' and 'bad' according to socially constructed expectations and the cognitive and behavioural processes that followed identified 'reality' for her to be nothing else other than what was given to her.

While her voice is essentially trapped in this social network, her anxiety is evidence of this inner voice calling out to her that she still does not know or understand how to use. We both had bad parents, but her response was to obey and that is how we differ. No amount of coercion works on me because I only obey when I respect and admire the person asking - which is why I was compelled to philosophy - but while I never had those intrusive thoughts on an everyday basis, the reason was because I was vastly more deluded then she was. I processed my identification with the external world in a more fatalistic manner, whereby if I am not good enough then I would give up completely; the belief that I was unworthy was so entrenched that I literally believed it. I did not experience that anxiety as I identified with the world around me by normalising my alienation perceptually. It was only when I got harassed and then had the car accident that the anxiety surfaced because my identification started changing; it became the impetus to recognise this 'voice' within me that something is wrong.

I am going to think about this a bit further today as I have purchased a book I want to read on this subject and because I trust in you and my sister that your experiences of this - including those who experience disassociation and depersonalisation - is real, I want to be able to realise the difference before continuing.

If an anxious person experiences their anxious coping mechanisms and general anxious behaviours as something bad to be worked on, it's egodystonic and approached differently. This is to say whether anxiety is part of the 'real' or 'ideal' self depends on the person!. — fdrake

It is about ascertaining the seed of the anxiety and not the strategies to cope such as mindfulness or meditation or even medication; if we return back to when you mentioned that there are a number of factors that form our identity and perceptions of the external world including our developmental and social environment, a person could form something like Body Dysmorphic Disorder or Depersonalisation and become obsessed with intrusive and negative thoughts to a point that they are incapable of functioning correctly and even in the process isolate or withdraw themselves that ignites ongoing anxiety. It is about ascertaining causes and not about strategies to deal with it - which is merely a temporary solution - such as telling yourself to be strong or ignore it.

By focusing on the authenticity, the actuality of why it exists in the first place, one would need to acknowledge and articulate that temporal influence because meaning is formed by our interpretation of our experiences and if our interpretations of our perceptions is a result of learned behaviour given to us and if we have not yet learned how to articulate our autonomous understanding of these experience, then coping mechanisms are usually enforced to manage the physical and emotional responses. So, a person could have BDD because of verbal or psychological abuse, they could have been shamed or other social and environmental factors, maltreatment or childhood neglect, and all this while taking into account biological and genetic personality traits (which is why some people can be more affected than others).

It may perhaps be coping mechanism, but if they were aware of why they were miserable, they would consciously recognise and reform their environment that would ultimately refine their behaviour and responses.

The point though is that in such dire situations, everyone would be anxious and afraid. Even the Buddha would experience anxiety in his mind - he may not react to it fully, and internally may maintain some sort of equilibrium, but the mind will keep on doing its thing, which is being anxious in that situation. So anxiety (and the negative emotions) cannot be eliminated, but one can gain cognitive distance from them. — Agustino

You can speak directly to me, I am right here. I would also appreciate if you actually read what I have wrote previously rather than continuously force me to repeat myself. As I mentioned earlier, stressors caused by an accident or an incident is not the subjective anxiety that we are discussing; the responses by the brain to those stressors as one would experience from PTSD is clear, the hormonal imbalances that cause a lack of sleep and disable or dysfunction the correct cognitive processes of the limbic system. We get that. My place got flooded recently, it was stressful, I had to move into a new place, but equating stress with anxiety is no different to equating nerves to anxiety. Those temporary stressors can be overcome, which is why it is temporary.

We are talking about the subjective anxiety that is not temporary caused by an inability to articulate our identification to the external world. It is actually you that is engaging in self-deception so I am going to ask you one last time before I stop responding to you, read what I am attempting to convey and respond accordingly.

Picard will not guilt me to change my mind you small-headed rodent.

I don't even know what it means to live authentically. — Agustino

Quite.

In my opinion, this is a self-created problem - you hold yourself accountable to living an "authentic" life, whatever that is supposed to mean, and then feel bad if you fail to meet that goal. I don't do that - I just don't care if I live an authentic life or not — Agustino

Are you someone who takes the blue pill?

Authenticity is about how we identify with the external world and interpret representations and this is dependent on the quality of our mental states. The alienation from any relatedness both to our own being as well as to the external world largely causes this anxious experience, because something autonomous or individual within us is telling us - without language but with physical responses and emotions - that something is wrong with an experience in the external world. We are just unable to articulate it.

There are numerous ways one can overcome this. One of these - which most often occurs - is through conforming, by allowing others to think on our behalf until we reach a point where we silence the anxiety - which is 'our' voice - that we ultimately lose any identification to our own self-hood. Others drown it with drugs and alcohol, or suicide, or even losing their minds. Small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life, and only a few find it.

My way is through authenticity, which is to be brutally honest with oneself about their past, the present, interpretations and trying to ascertain the difference between 'my' opinion and conditioned beliefs that have been given to me; it is a process of practice, like recognising that you are thin-skinned. To learn a new language of my own, giving sound to my voice by re-wiring the brain and so it is a lengthy process. It is basically about being subjectively honest to yourself and to have your own autonomous voice. I think you know what I am talking about since we've had this discussion like so many times before, don't be a Diogenes shmartypants.

I think the reason why you're feeling much happier now is simply because your external circumstances are much better - ie, due to Lady Fortune, who sometimes gives, and sometimes takes away. It's easy to be happy when things are going well - most people are. — Agustino

Wrong. Indeed, I was given the opportunity to work and develop a career in an organisation predominately with women who were very warm and protective of me during those difficult early stages - particularly following the harassment from men I had in my previous job - that I felt safe enough to start healing, so I was fortunate I got such an amazing job. I was also fortunate that I got an opportunity to holiday to Italy purely by luck, which rescued me from that alienation because it reminded me about culture and arts that I dearly love and allowed me to re-connect with myself.

However, what was 'fortunate' here was that I was rescued from the severity of that existential crises at a time where I was incapable of thinking correctly and not the anxiety. It stayed with me for quite some time as I slowly began to articulate 'my' voice and so slowly but surely the way that I started living my life changed because my interpretation of the external world changed, along with my perceptions and consequently my mental states. I transformed from a fragile, emotional mess who almost died and my happiness is now solid because I removed all the toxic people from my life and started a clean slate being aware of both my vulnerability and my capacity, and being proud enough to say that I respect who I am especially for never giving up on my virtue.

It is impossible to feel anxiety now; I have encountered numerous difficulties since then and I have had nothing affect me because I have formed a permanent environment for myself that will ensure this peace, just as much as I am now flexible and fluid enough to work with the ebb and flow both with positive and negatives, meaning that when I encounter a bad experience, I work at resolving it and not getting anxious about it. Sorry, buddy, but this peace is permanent and I know that from experience.