The difficult thing about consciousness is the level of detail and nuance with which you can 'do' it.

Imagine writing down everything that is going on inside you right now:

• You are a little tired.
• You are a little bit in love.
• You are a little sad.
• You are in a little bit of pain.
• You are thinking about X and Y.

All of this happens at the same time, and sometimes one thing takes over completely.

Some people know themselves so well that they can identify all of this on a very detailed level.

Let’s take one element:

“I am tired.”

• Are you tired because you have been sitting behind a computer for too long and need to exercise?
• Are you tired because you have exercised too much?
• Are you tired because you are overstimulated?

“I want to exercise.”

• Do I want to exercise because I genuinely feel like exercising and I know it is good for me?
• Do I want to exercise because I want to get rid of another unpleasant feeling?

This is extremely difficult in practice because you have to learn to recognize certain patterns. It is also something you learn through life experience. You have to make the mistakes first before you know where the boundary lies.

Sometimes you are thinking about something that is difficult and interesting, but it also takes a lot of energy. And that can be good. But sometimes you are stuck in an endless, compulsive loop of thinking. Being able to see the difference is the real skill.

This is something women can be very good at. They can hear a child crying and sense whether it is a genuine cry or not. It is a little bit like that.

Buddhists don’t really understand this. They tend to treat all forms of thinking as if they are the same. But no two thoughts are exactly alike, or even come close to each other. They can feel completely different and arise in different places in your body.

Learning to calmly respect your own feelings.

You’re going to make mistakes, and you don’t always have to act on your feelings or do what they tell you. But over the long term, you need to develop respect for your inner feelings. That is an important part of self-respect.

These are long, spiritual processes.

It’s like your voice: it matters too. You have to express yourself. Without that, it means nothing.

When you are emotional, one thing often takes over. That can be useful, but it is also helpful to be able to take a little step back. You can do that like this:

What you want to know is where you are as a whole. So, all the things at the same time.

For example: I am stressed, and at the same time a little bit in love, and at the same time sad, and at the same time tired, and at the same time relieved. You name all those separate things.

The art of this level is to become better at identifying those separate things. Then you can see all of them at once.

In a way, you know the state of your whole body. Then you can look at what you want to do with each part of it.

This is what you call emotional intelligence. You have a good understanding of all the different things that are going on inside you at that moment.

The most important thing is where you are as a whole.

Showing a different side of yourself each time, like a flower unfolding.

Really getting completely into that feeling.

What is that feeling telling you? That things will never be okay again?

“And I feel so awful all the time! It’s not fair!”

Thoughts come in waves, just like emotions. Let them wash over you in waves. At some point, you’ll know exactly what they are.

I saw a video yesterday of someone saying that you can’t find yourself, because when you search, you only find separate parts. There is no “you” behind it all.

This is typically the kind of thing that is technically true but irrelevant. If I could put the thoughts of two people next to each other, you would see very clear patterns in what they are thinking about and what occupies their minds. So what you think about actually tells you a lot about who you are.

All those thoughts show a different side of you, with the “you” in the middle.

For me, there are numerous reasons why the way we currently treat mental disorders is simply not possible.

1) We all have roughly the number of neurons you could compare to the number of stars in a galaxy in our heads. There are simply too many variables.

2) During a single day, this happens:

• “I am a little bit tired.”
• “I am a little bit in love.”
• “I am a little bit sad.”

This gradually changes throughout the day, like water being poured into and out of a cup. The state of your body and mind is constantly shifting. Even distinguishing between these states is already incredibly difficult.

If you say, “I am anxious,” there are no two experiences of anxiety that are exactly the same.

Some anxiety might come from social media. Some might be excitement that has been pushed down. Some might be fear because something happened to you. Other anxiety might come from anticipating something that is about to happen.

If you cannot distinguish between these different experiences, it becomes very difficult to say what you actually need to do about them.

There are also a lot of strange narratives about mental disorders, as if the fundamental cause of fear is simply that we might encounter a snake. That seems ridiculously simplistic.

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So what we basically do is take a system containing billions of neurons, whose state changes constantly, sometimes from second to second, and then put a label on one particular pattern and call it Generalized Anxiety Disorder.

If that doesn't make you stop and think, I don't know what will.

If the reason you are anxious is that something happened to you, then the anxiety itself may actually be understandable and meaningful. If we automatically classify that anxiety as a disorder, we risk missing what the person is actually responding to.

Doctors should also be looking for people whose anxiety has a legitimate underlying cause but who don't fit the diagnostic criteria for GAD. In some cases, overlooking meaningful anxiety could be more dangerous than diagnosing GAD in someone whose symptoms fit the disorder.

 

*ChatGPT changed it

There Are No Two the Same 1 + 1s

What quantum mechanics teaches us is that you can mathematically calculate something, but still don't get what it means. That there is more to things than calculating it or “understanding how it moves.” There are completely different dimensions of understanding, which sometimes have to do with working around it, without touching the thing, like a boxer dancing around, or deliberately not trying to get something because it's the appropriate thing to do. Like deliberately not trying to understand how to make a nuclear bomb, which is also a skill in itself.

I can honestly say that I have a very good feel for reality, my body, and I have a high-school-level understanding of mathematics. It's still unbelievably impressive, but sometimes you can mistake the “learned trick,” which parts of mathematics really are, versus knowledge.

A lot of knowledge is about seeing the uniqueness in things and are very timing-based, like emotional intelligence.

If you write down an equation that's the same wherever, whenever, that's a mistake in your thinking.

Reality Is More Emotionally Intelligent-Based Than You Think

Emotional intelligence is timing-based.

It's knowing, in the exact same situation:

1. when to speak out or not
2. when not to speak out.

It's giving the exact right hint to someone at exactly the right moment.

The highest point you can get to in life is living it with high emotional intelligence. Which basically makes you cry about how beautiful reality is, and how ordinary situations become super emotional.

There is no amount of money that you can earn to give you that way of looking at reality.