Beginners Guide To Stuff & Nonsense

"Medieval alchemical thought, serving as a bridge between the extreme spiritualism of European Christianity and the later materialism of science, took to itself the dictum in sterquiliniis invenitur – in filth it shall be found." (Jung, 1967, p. 35). Peterson says it translates as "What you most what to find will be found where you least want to look."

When you're tring to lead people out of the darkness of depair, you get them to stop avoiding confronting the terrible things which are happening to them. Scrutinise your problems even more than you normally would even if you are not ignoring them - voluntarily confront what you would normally avoid. Do what is meaningful, pay attention and follow the truth, and it will take you to the worst places in your psyche, and only then will you have a chance at enlightenment.

Let go on self-centredness - do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.
Use your abilities to generate the maximum amount of love and compassion and stay alert to opportunities to be useful and generous.

Conservatives promote the usefulness, progressives promote generosity. Both left and right wing governments have produced roughly the same amounts of inequality. Our political systems offer us an insufficiency of choice to solve the problem of inequality. The only rigorous constant is that people absoultely refuse to learn to know themselves very well.

If you do a little bit more for others than they do for you, then they have a reason to continue interacting with you. The first rule of intelligence: Don’t talk about your intelligence. It’s something you prove, not something you claim. If you want people to really know you, weekly meetings don’t cut it. You need deep dives with them in high-intensity situations. Looking under your own hood at what makes you tick and writing it down can provide a useful reference. Put yourself in situations where you can’t ignore feedback from multiple sources.

Humans’ blind spots are predictable: There are certain types of traits where people can’t see themselves clearly, but others where they can. The psychologist Simine Vazire asked people to rate themselves and four friends on a bunch of traits, ranging from emotional stability and intelligence to creativity and assertiveness. Then, to see if they had predicted their own personalities better than their friends had, they took a bunch of tests that measured these traits.

The good news: You have some unique insight into your emotional stability. In the study, people outperformed their friends at predicting how anxious they’d look and sound when giving a speech about how they felt about their bodies. But they did no better than their friends (or than strangers who had met them just eight minutes earlier) at forecasting how assertive they’d be in a group discussion. And when they tried to predict their performance on an IQ test and a creativity test, they were less accurate than their friends. The real geniuses will know it’s not their place to judge.

When I was five years old my family moved from rural Queensland to Brisbane and I started school. I was invited to a birthday party where there were lots of boys and girls. This was in the early 1980's and gender roles were rigidly enforced. I wanted to play with the girls, and while they were somewhat accepting they thought I was weird, so the adults in charge kept moving me back into the boys group. The girls were talking, playing clapping games, trading party trinkets, helping each other do their hair, and (I felt) sharing a sense of community. The boys were playing thumb wars and wrestling. I was small and weak and of course quickly wound up being hurt then crying, so to rid the party of my undue influence my parents were summoned by phone to take me home early.
At home, while the sun was setting, I went for a swim in my parent's pool. I dove underwater and breathed out and thought about how difficult it would be to just inhale water and see what happened, and something stopped me, and I came up and floated in the water watching the sun, and started sobbing profusely. I begged the universe, the sun, and God to change me into a girl, knowing it wouldn't happen but hoping something would come of it. I wished I could change my body, with a child's naivety, I wondered if merely wishing something badly enough could possibly make it happen - and of course was to be sorely disappointed with the harsh reality of my situation.
The following day I said to my parents over breakfast. "I wish I was a girl."
I think I said it every day for quite a long time.
Eventually they, and everyone I said this to, told me never to mention this to anyone.
The shame of caring for a transgender child in that time period was too great for to bear, especially for religious church-going people, pillars of the community who wanted the respect of their peers.
Over time I tried to seek treatment, at age 15, and again at 16, my parents stopped me from accessing medical intervention.
I finally started with the help of a court intervention order at 17 and 9 months, just a few months shy of 18.
But that's a different story which involves a hospitalisation. But let's just say the medical community has been very kind to me.
I see it more as a "missed opportunity" on behalf of my parents and other caregivers, who were presented with an opportunity to show kindness and love, to help me to grow in the way I wanted to. Instead, like harshly pruing a plant back far beyond what it can bear if it is to remain healthy, I was profoundly damaged and retarded in my growth, which has only been allowed to heal and complete far into my adulthood.
I am happy that things are different now. Nobody ought to go through childhood this way.

For most, conventional paths lead to average results. Your Key Performance Indicies only matter to people who find nothing else interesting. Give people different reasons to find you interesting. Giving up other people’s definitions of success is liberating and ultimately grants fuller expression of who you are and what matters to you.
Other people won't live with any consequences of choices you’ve made. So why live according to their definition of success? When you give that up, you cast off lots of baggage. You can enjoy a sense of lightness, peace, and freedom which casts light into everything you do. As long as you push through that short term, you have the opportunity to accomplish incredible things.
But you’ve got to want it, stick to it, and fight for it.
The heightened level of awareness, the calm outlook, the new job, the paid off debts, the flourishing startup business you desperately want to build. Any meaningful benefits in your life will always come attached to short term pain. Build something. Make Something.
Be consistently confident that by doing anything with the intention of doing good, good will come from it.

But everyone deserves the opportunity to be on the receiving end of some sage advice at least now and again. S
The decisions that you make, every day, about how you'll act, these decisions foment into who'll you'll be - within the psyche they all have minute ongoing consequences which never, ever stop fermenting our personality and our interactions with observer-independent, objective shared reality.
Our decisions act as a "weakly-interacting nexus of causal pathways" which, acting in synergy, combine to distill the very essence of our consciousness and core identities.
So, whatever you choose to do, whoever you choose to be, be as confident as possible you are making the best choices for yourself. You will know if you are making the correct choices - because you won't have to lie; especially to yourself.
As Shakespeare's Polonius spake unto his departed fated son Laertes within the pages of 'Hamlet', "This above all, to thine own self be true, then thou cans't not be false to any other...", and that beautiful truth alone shall set you completely free.
(this message of integrity brought to you by insomnia, and an innate desire to finally opening up about something important)

Is it wrong to always be right? Or just always think you're right (even if you're always right)? Is all that matters in objective view of the world? Nobody has a monopoly on objectivity. By causal determinism we are hardwired to need answers. The hominid which hears a rustling in the bushes and checks to see the reason why lives longer than the ones who are disinterested in their surroundings.

But just as there is no line in the sand between strong and weak evolutionary selection processes, there is fine distinction to be drawn between good and evil in the landscape of ethics or morals. There is only action which an intelligence can tolerate, or that which is intolerable and these happen in degrees. Rontgen probably killed his own wife discovering the X-ray, just as Marie Curie died from radiation poisoning researching the radioactive properties of radium. Anna was terrified when she saw Roentgen's photograph of her hand, showing the bones and her wedding ring. After winning two Nobel prizes, dying through a little-understood poisoning interaction as a result of scientific investigation must have similarly terrified the brilliant Mari's husband Pierre. The invisible causes of death are as incomprehensible as our attempts to navigate the landscape of ethical action.

Most of the motivations of science which are conducted unethically are to uncover what is possible in the course of the research, bury the evidence of how the discoveries were made, then turning a profit before the researchers can forget what they went through to obtain their results.

Somehow in my juvenile way my knee-jerk reactions to stimuli made me trip, falling into an adult response by accident. It's too bad that in the course of my transgressions I've wandered in and out of people's lives drunk and incoherent. I guess somewhere in the midst of my family dysfunction I found a way to be intellectually successful in order to find an escape hatch into my own mind, my rich inner life compensating for the emotional paucity of my surroundings. Watching someone get blind drunk then giving them crap for acting like a drunk is like dating someone until they're emotinoally invested enough to love you, then dumping them and giving them crap for being upset.

Realtionship studies show people who sleep around are miserable. The fewer partners you have, the happier you are with the person you'll iultimately end up with. Asexuality will only get you so far (ACE people may simply have an underlying medical condition causing their asexual behavior traits, like tumourous growths or debilitated pituitary glands which causing erectile dysfunction or loss of sexual drive). Sex is the fundamental drive of sexually reproducing species, and a healthy sexual appetite and ability to satiate it is a strong signifier of overall health. Orgasms oxygenate the brain, lighting up the neuronal networks with activity, which in turn floods other organ systems iwth endocrinal stimulants, pain relievers, and oxytocin - a neuromodulation chemical basis for bonding. Lots of people don't have sex, the only people who don't want its effects are either unaware of them, sick, lying, dead, or lonely.

How do you fight lonelieness? By smiling? Love hopes all things. You cannot love someone without making yourself open to thier fears, you cannot connect with someone without becoming sensitive to their hopes. But when someone is disconnected they're often driven to ask what is the meaning of life, asking "Why me?" in response to the indifference of nature to any existence, conscious or unconscious, rational or irrational, examined or unseen. "Why bother?: is often the response, but it's cruel advice, just beacuse there may be no greater meaning doesn't invalid the search, else why bother with any inquiry into anything? People try to make sense of what happens to them to make them the way they are, especially in the face of an uncaring universe. One method of coping is to live like nothing matters, to be a manipulative self-centered narcissistic jerk who brings misery to everyone in life by constantly reminding everyone that nothing matters and behaves terribly as a result. The advantage of this method is that when karma fights back at least it's deserved.

Girls get mad irraiontaly because they are genetically programmed to make a big deal out of every little thing. This is because in order to more heavily invest in children they must feel they can do as they please while still being able to act like they don't want to do so. This way they don't feel like sluts, ot get called out by other girls for being a slut. In the gender hierarchy women lead from the rear ranks, meaning they're surrounded by underling morons who are either afraid of her or want to kiss up to her. To cope, she needs to be respected enough to not be treated like some tender flower who needs coddling. Yet, it's wrong to treat your girlfriend as if she's weaker than you, even though she may be. Your girlfriend wants you to care about more than just what you want, what you think she thinks, she wants you to care about her, because she deserves someone who does.

Last night was an interesting one. A great way to ring in the new year, being around wonderful supportive old friends and forging interesting new bonds with those people moving from online friendships to IRL. From sight-unseen to new friends, such a difficult journey of discovery for everyone involved, I'm amazed we do it. I'm happy I've done it, I feel braver socialising with people I know little of than jumping from cliff-faces, or risking my own life. I suppose I feel in those activities the solitude grants a greater degree of certainty in that I know what I am thinking, but I cannot ever know what someone else is thinking - even when their communication is as raw, as honest as possible.

My oldest, closest, dearest friend, the biological father of my ten-year-old son, is clearly still feeling the loss of his much beloved maternal parent even after more than a year. I don't think we ever really, truly recover from that particular loss - I don't think we're ever really meant to. This person who carried us in a specialised organ, or even if they're not our biological parents, there is a special bond of caring and love which is the most enduring thing in our entire lives. It would be more strange (not to mention mechanical) if we did recover from such a severance quickly and completely. Through their continuous acts of love, good parents refuse to allow children to "fail to thrive", because of their emotional this intense emotional bond. They are our models for life, for compassion, for understanding - but they are mortal, like the reality we find ourselves populating. This is a strange and hostile place we find ourselves alive within, this water-soaked rock floating and spinning through space around a ball of burning gaseous light which lives and dies in the same breath of fusion-fire even as we do, such connection we have, yet we are bound by distance from each other as far as our planet is held in isolation by gravity from the sun, orbiting slowly, aphelion, perihelion.

Which brings me to my beautiful lover whom I've treated so badly. For two years I've behaved abhorrently, refused to open up and tell my feelings to, refused to treat well in deepest fear that the bonds of intimacy might tie me tightly when to be tied up in every way was all I wanted. I am responsible for disrupting the course and flow of our deepening feelings, and I feel like a misbehaving child who needs a scolding and a spanking. I want to scream, "It was all an act of defiance!" but there's nothing I can do except admit responsibility and hand my head. The abused child has become an abusive adult as all the awful things I've done to fight this emotional life of the heart have returned in spades to slash my dreams for the future. Defiance in the face of wisdom enough to return good affection might be likened to swimming against the current in an endless, slow moving river. Rather than splash in futility it would be better to do nothing, to sit on the bank this powerful and great course as, indifferent to your preferred direction, it flows as it will. Carried from independence by this flow, my thrashing has turned me away from closeness, now there is nothing to be done but longing for a return to closeness. A return to safe, shallow and slow-moving waters in preference to rocky white rapid flows of turbulent times. Longing and hopefulness much characterise this gravitas outlook of predestination of the life of the heart, we less choose our emotional lives regarding others as are wholly immersed in the flow of feelings they create for us by their actions and our interpretations of their affection for us. For me, this kindness, this understanding, this gentle forgiveness is like a warm decalcified spring water source in the high mountains, a source of immense immersive longing for greater connection.

Feeling slightly better today. Still sad from difficult conversations yesterday and last night. Came out to lots of people, trying to decide what the criteria for doing so ought to be, so selected several people I've known for years who I've pulled away from intentionally and isolated myself from because withdrawing from intimacy they were seeking was easier than being brave, open, and honest about my personal history. I'm not feeling any kind of overwhelming need to go public, but I feel some people in particular were owed an explanation. Also, I've been apologising for past misbehaviour as well. It is making me feel sad, but eventually I hope an unburdening of sorts.