what the fuckkk

[Ram27]

del

[Cool As Ice Cream]

hey blame america

[smashingjj]

yeah man, I blame America for everything and I don't even live there

[Shallowed]

lol same

[reprise85]

Originally Posted by teh b0lly!!1

'you' are what is there to witness your thoughts, but not those thoughts.

i tried thinking about this, and if i had to choose a word for what i think the "real self" is, i think it would be Awareness. becoming aware of yourself, almost like the brain and the soul are two distinct entities. it's a little like a liberating sense of depersonalization - you are not your thoughts. you are there to witness your thoughts. if thoughts are the fish inside the water, you are the water.

like it's a symbiosis of physical/mental/spiritual faculties with an overlap, rather than being one primary, cast-iron "you".

I think it's quite a nice feeling to think that you can observe your thoughts without at least somewhat being immersed in them, and mindfulness is very helpful and certainly preferable to doing things without awareness of what you're doing and without perspective or reflection, but I don't know that this is a distinction with a difference. I wasn't saying you can't be aware of what you're doing and your own thoughts and be aware of yourself. I don't see how that type of awareness isn't born out of your experiences as well. I didn't only mean bad experiences.

you are speaking in terms of absolute, raw potential: one is born with X amount of potential, but certain experiences can gravely chip away at that, and then one will never have fulfilled their "full potential". to me that is a fully hypothetical concept. yes, cutting from the fabric of pure potential is reductionist by nature. and yeah, we can definitely experience fucked up shit that can aberrates us severely, and to a degree, irreversibly. but if you perpetually see yourself as damaged and unfulfilled raw potential, you are ultimately looking at yourself through a cruel and unrealistic frame of reference.

I don't think it's cruel to accept that your experiences changed you. The fact is that things were taken from me I can't get back. I can transform these bad things into future good things, and I have perspective on pain that many other people don't have (or at least at the same age didn't have), and if I can somehow help others who are going through bad things that is a good thing. It has changed my potential into different potential. But yeah there are some things you can't get back and it's sad as fuck but I think it's futile to try to think you can be the same person you would have been without it, and trying to be that person in my experience is a lot more painful (as well as impossible) than accepting where you are and growing from there. And I think this applies to less severe things, and even good things. Someone who is good at a sport and focuses their teenage years on that sport is missing out on other things. That doesn't make it bad, it means that choices are made (or made for you) and you can't go back to before that and take a different path.

to me the idea of fulfilling your potential is rooted in the present, any present - how well are you able to apply yourself fully, to anything? what choices and decisions are you make at every moment and every turn of your life Now? are you run by automatic hardwired habits, or do you make choices consciously?

I agree with this. I don't think my ideas about this topic clash with this at all.

humanity is very arrogant about itself and how intelligent we think we are, but ultimately i think it's crucial to remember that our animal brains are in a perpetual state of scanning the outside world in search of undesirable stimuli, so that we can always be kept safe and leery of incoming threats. and that mechanism relies on your objective experiences, the fear of pain repeating itself. but once you let that primitive mechanism of survival run you, you are totally at its mercy.

I also agree with this. I don't see how this is the same thing as what you said ("you' are much more than what momentarily defines you (whatever that is)"). Your ability to have perspective on your current situation is not separate from what is momentarily defining you, it is part of it.