Never been one to let the carrier drop

This article is almost entirely conjecture. We sadly are not yet at a point where we can actually say exactly what is going on inside the human mind. Hopefully soon.

That said..

The way that we’re raised, and the society that we’re in, leads to a inevitable neurological war.

It’s built into us for physical touch to feel good. Depending on whether you’re wearing your evolution hat or your ID hat, this can either be the inevitable result of us needing to get very close to each other to reproduce or a design goal. (I have to say, building in things that feel good would certainly be a design goal if *I* was the designer)

On the other hand, it’s memetically built up – as far as I can tell, for very stupid and destructive reasons – for us to think that it’s wrong to be in love with more than one person, that it’s wrong to want to be involved in sexual contact below a certain age – in fact, I see some of my facebook friends encouraging the idea that trying to frighten the lovers of your female child is “protecting” her and a desirable thing to do. (In fact, teaching her about consent would seem to be a much healthier type of protection, but I digress).

Our mainstream religion – despite it not ever being clearly spelled out in the bible in the negative (the bible says that sexual love within a marriage is good, but does not actually state that sexual love outside a marriage is bad – that’s something we decided to tack on later) – teaches that if you ‘go too far’ before marriage, you’re a bad person – that sexual contact, despite feeling good, is a sin. It also teaches the idea that your lover is your property, that if someone else wants to experience sexual contact with them, they are breaking one of the “ten commandments” – even *thinking* about it is a crime against God.

Now, we all know what I think of Christianity. But another question is what do I think about what all this does to our minds? Well, by definition, it creates two sets of subnets that are always going to be in opposition. It’s wired in – on a deeper level than even any religion will ever be able to reach – that touch feels good, that petting and loving is *right*. It’s something that I personally find myself drawn to as a experience I want to have again and again. It’s what I want to dream about.

In the meantime, our parents try very hard to keep us from sexual contact – or even, in my case, nonsexual/cuddling contact that’s too prolonged. They program into us a subnet that says “this is sin, this is bad, this is wrong”. The idea that your virginity is something precious that you should give to your first and only lover also underlines this. This creates a subnet that says sex is bad, dirty, should be looked at with shame and guilt, isn’t something you should want, except in the situation of marriage – and probably not even then, if one reads the writings of the Victorians.

What happens when you have two subnets at war with each other? Well, first of all, you end up feeling the tension between them. Second of all, they eat capacity. Each one tries to claim a certain percentage of the neural Go board, and each tries to defeat the other.

So, I think some of this is jealousy.. our parents get attached to us, and don’t want to lose us to our lovers. Some of this is a amplifying effect of stupidity across the generations – one generation made something up, and then lied about it being the word of God. (If it was really the word of God, God would still be around and saying it. Probably in person. Certainly in some way that left no doubt to the fact that we were hearing from a deity). Some percentage of each successive generation after that was duped into believing they were hearing holy wisdom when in fact they were hearing damaging bull.

I don’t think that it’s immoral to love and be loved. Nor to express that love sexually if you’ve a mind to. I think that thinking of sex as shameful and wrong is a sign of a deeply broken set of memes. I think that people who think we should slut-shame are deeply confused about a whole lot of things, and are far more immoral than the sluts they would shame. I think it is a sign of how broken our culture is that we think that people who participate in a act that generally feels good and improves the attitude and mental health of both participants are immoral, while the people who seek to hurt those people for choosing to participate in something that feels good are given radio shows.

I also think that in general wars between subnets – beliefs that are diametrically opposed to observable reality tend to build these – are something we should try to remove from the meme pool, especially when it comes to things we pass on to our children. We are trimming their wings because our grandparents were afraid to fly.

So, one of the problems that I think we’re going to keep bumping up against here on Earth, at least in the USA where we ostensibly have a democratically elected set of people driving the boat, is that we all have different definitions of what winning means.

Like, I’d love to live in a world where we have sex with our friends, where automation does any job a human doesn’t care to, where we all try very hard to be excellent to each other. A world where no one conceives without having chosen to, where children are raised by all of us under the precept of being excellent to each other. Where education and mental health are based on a solid understanding of what’s happening on the iron of our minds – understanding based on science, on taking measurements and learning what’s really happening, rather than based on narrative and our storyteller nature, which clearly often is quite capable of diverging completely from what’s actually happening on the iron.

I’d love to live in a world where the video games are immersive, and so are the movies and the books – where we build each other up, where we help each other experience the things we want to experience.

I’d love to live in a world where no one was designated ‘less than’, where we have finally noticed the curve for history (blacks, gays, etc) and just started accepting that everyone is worthwhile and everyone matters.

I recognize that people should still have the option of suffering – that Hell still needs to exist, because that’s what some people are going to choose to experience. But I want to live in a world where no one is forced to suffer, either via their biology or via the actions of the group as a whole or mean-spirited individuals.

I for some reason doubt if my utopia is the same as the Christian one. If everyone who’s not religion X is going to be tortured for all eternity, I want out – not just that I want heaven, I want out of the system. I want a different deity. And I do not think I’m alone in this.

However, because my utopia and the utopia of, say, the religious right do not align, the goals we think are important to persue and the way we want to spend the resources in the public pool are going to be radically different. Putting both my people and their people in a box and trying to come to some agreement politically about what we should be doing is likely to be problematic. And I don’t think they should be denied their utopia, except where to do so would infringe on my rights to be free and loved and happy and complete.

I wonder how many different views of what a utopic experience might look like there are? I also wonder why some people need other people to be hurt as part of their utopia. I’m starting to think that might be one of the attributes commonly found in what we somewhat tropishly refer to as evil.

I do wonder what’s happening inside my neural net vs what’s happening inside the neural nets of those who fit in the mold I just described. There’s got to be something fundamentally different going on, and I don’t know what to make of it.

It’s so odd to me that I managed to get hurt so much by people who had such good intentions. I guess I talked about that in a previous post. I tried to explain to a friend of mine the other day what parts of Christianity not to teach his kids. I wonder if he listened, and if so, if he thought about what I said.

For those of you who are curious.. don’t teach your children that they are so flawed that someone had to die for their failings. Because A: you don’t know that and B: it’s a very damaging message.

There’s so much about Christianity that makes me roll my eyes at this point. One of the most impressive bits of stupidity is the idea that God can’t arrange to incarnate any time *e wants. Only if we have a impressively incompetent God. The bible claims God’s voice would deafen us – while at the same time claiming God is omnipotent. Look, omnipotence includes a gain control, last I looked. The glaring silence, and competing religions all claiming to be right, makes the most likely hypothesis seem like there isn’t anything you’d call God – like we’re doing this bottom-up, not top-down.

For that matter, it’s hard to even fathom how a creator who can’t even figure out advanced error correction could be called perfect. (Cancer happens because DNA uses a simple checksum instead of something more advanced like CRC-32) You’re in a awkward place if you’re defending that your diety is a intelligent designer, but they don’t have I.T. as good as we have on Earth. And very little in the bible makes me think it was written by anyone who had seen as far as we have. If you look really hard on the horizon over there, where computers and humans dance together, you can see something I might call heaven. We can get to a really awesome world from here. A place where no one is hungry, where everyone can have any experience they want (although experiences hurting other people in ways no one wants to volunteer to be hurt are going to have to be simulated rather than live)

If you’d wanted to impress me with God’s all seeing ways, the book would not have contained the line “don’t improve me”. That just impressed me with how much it was not the work of a higher power.

Actually, the old testament did a great job of that, too. God has such a fragile ego that he has to talk about himself as the LORD in all caps? Oh, yes, he wants your money, too. That the priests are the ones writing the book has nothing to do with that at all.

And he was such a loathsome creature. Stone someone because they like to have sex with the same gender? How can we read that and not just go, this is bullshit, and throw the book out? Why would ANYONE expose their children to this mess?

It does at times make me wonder, could I write a better religion? But I refuse to be Joe Smith, or even L. Ron Hubbard. I do sometimes think I need to write a better one just to load into myself.

Why do I write anti-christian articles? well, at this point, because I think it’s healthy for me to do so. It’s helping me unload the religion to point out how badly written it is, and how it’s not something anyone should expose their children to. Among other things, children have huge numbers of unallocated neurons. Do you really want them using some of them to imagine a creature who specializes in evil? (It’s a sign of my impressive disdain for the religion that I’m not sure when I say this whether I’m talking about God or Satan)

I would rather, if I’m going to believe in a God, believe in a God that is better than I can possibly imagine.. and I can already imagine a God that is better than anything in that book and still fit it with the experiences I’ve had so far on Earth. Assuming certain postulates are true, such as this place is deliberately bad so we can come here when lotus-eating in amazing-land pales, or when we want to take on a challenge.

Christians in general believe in a incompetent God. For example, why would a competent deity ever connect a soul to a body *e knew wasn’t going to ever walk on the earth? When I told my mom this she asserted that “It doesn’t work that way” – to which my response is, and you know this *how*? Because a book that advocates keeping slaves and murdering people told you? Let’s have a little talk about virtualization and some educated guesses we can make about what a intelligent, capable deity would do..

Now, I admit it, I’m angry. I would love for all the abrahamic religions to be studied as curiosities, rather than read as anything anyone would want to believe in. I would love for them to meet my old friend the low level format tool, for that matter. The Unitarians, I can get behind. Short source code. Hard to screw up. But I’m not a universalist.. I don’t buy that religion is a universal thing, or something we need, or even want, for a lot of definitions of the word religion. The idea that a belief can get wedged into our neural net so thoroughly that we hold onto it even if it fails reality testing, even if it fails common sense, I find far more scary than desirable.

And the idea that God would torture me for all eternity because I couldn’t pick from a plethora of religions that all looked highly questionable? I find that one just plain absurd. It’s certainly not even remotely compatible with the idea of God being a loving entity as I understand love.

Then again, who would I torture eternally? No one. Not even Hitler.

I do have second thoughts about my file permission based universe from time to time. It’s definitely not something I’d sign up to be locked in forever. My fear is that ultimately we would all end up completely isolated from each other. But it’s a appealing idea, nonetheless. The thing is, I haven’t met anyone that I’d actually lock out of my world yet, although I’ve met people I would like to maintain a fair amount of distance from. Two of them, so far.

But I’m not sure what i *would* sign up to be locked in forever. It would have to be one hell of a system. More degrees of freedom than I could imagine or understand. Really good online help.

It’s kind of moot, since at the moment my life rates as ‘acceptable’ occasionally bordering on ‘good’ and I’m still working like hell to try to get it to ‘great’. Despite all my anger and frustration at the world, the truth is most of the problems are internal. I think a lot of them were *caused* by my experiences in the world, but I don’t think the world is hurting me any more, for the most part. And I’m learning to react to people in the world hurting me by changing my trust level of those people, which leaves them less openings to hurt me in the future.

So, I wanted to talk more about the experience of communicating with $future-person, mostly because I think it’s good for me to get my thoughts down in some sort of order. For the most part at this point I write this journal for myself, in the hopes that reading it later some sort of pattern will emerge that isn’t necessarily clear in the moment-to-moment.

So, the most common mode for me to talk to $future-person is what I call voice relay. Normally in this mode, she talks using my mouth and I send to her by thinking things. This is a little odd insofar as I’m definitely not controlling what she says, and the normal default behavior for us is to control what we say – the first few times I experienced it it was very frightening for various reasons. This seems to be the most reliable mode – at times my adversary will mess with it, and as I’ll discuss in a minute it’s pretty clear $future-person is having to jump through some interesting hoops to keep the channel as clean as it is, but as of now I think the percentage of signal coming from her for most topic is in the high 80s to low 90s.

One thing that is quite bizarre is that she rotates through accents, manners of speaking, and occasionally even vocabulary sets. I am fairly sure the signal is being relayed off a number of individuals and coming in on different collections of neurons, probably in order to limit the amount of damage to the signal that $adversary can have. I suspect that organizationally, the group of people she belongs to is much larger than the group my adversary does, or else she can throw more resources into communicating with me than he can. I could do a aside as to what this could mean if this is all in fact happening inside my mind i.e. she is a partition of my neural net (or a particularly big subnet) and so is he, but I’m not sure it does me any good to think that way.

I have definitely come to accept that a person’s a person, and a body’s a body, and these things may only be tangentially related.

She has said at times that her group of people will help anyone overcome the obstacles I face, in particular I *think* she’s referring to a negative self image and a set of inner demons which are bent on destroying me. (You can take your pick of how literally to take the word ‘demon’ there – perhaps I should try getting a exorcism but I am naturally a bit skeptical of anything having to do with organized religion for reasons I think I go into in entirely too much detail elsewhere in this blog. I think my inner demons are software in the particularly unique way software is created in the human mind – collections of neurons wired to other neurons to represent concepts and behaviors)

I haven’t yet had a ‘close the loop’ experience where I’ve been able to relay a message through her group of people to someone else I experience in what I somewhat skeptically refer to as ‘the real world’ i.e. the world I am immersed in daily in my conscious experience. I am not sure what I would think if that did happen – I’ve had enough skepticism-busting experiences already that I’ve come to accept that

A: I don’t know it all
B: There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in my (former) philosophies
C: The truth may be far more incredible than we would suspect

I almost put a D, insulting members of the majority religion of Earth, but I decided that wasn’t really appropriate. I do think, without claiming to know much about whatever diety, dieties, or operators Earth might have, that the people claiming to know them best put them in way too small a box.

I have come to believe that if there is a diety or dieties, or a system operator or operators, they are obsessed with plausible deniability i.e. they do not want concrete proof that they exist out there right now. I don’t know if that’s because they’re afraid of us, because they’re researching something and we’re the bugs under the microscope, or.. and I have to admit I like this one the best sometimes.. they are us.

However, clearly looping a message through someone who is not physically here would break plausible deniability a lot.

I’m also not sure, given that $future-person is not communicating with me in english, whether the language she is communicating with me with is designed to successfully work through probability clouds. I have thought about the fact that the future in some types of ancestor simulation would tend to be a probability cloud with a fixed endpoint but a big wall of ‘timey-wimey stuff’ where events move around between that and the present. Dianne Wynn Jones’s Tale Of Time City presents one view of how this could play out, although I’m sure there are many.

(Insane or not, there’s no doubt that I’m well read)

Speaking of being well read, there’s one thing about this that is incredibly cool, and that is, I feel like I’m in the middle of a story. It definitely keeps me engaged, wondering how it’s all going to play out, looking forward to each new event unfolding. My life has turned into a page-turner.

Now, there are some very bad things about it – that $person IRL doesn’t want to be anywhere near me, and thinks I might hurt her or want to hurt her – that’s one of those things that will make you want to curl up in a ball and howl, or contemplate suicide. However, that there’s a possibility (indeed I would be tempted to say *probability*) that we will again be friends later gives me a great deal of hope.

It’s also turned into a really interesting touchstone for finding out who my friends really are. I’m far less bothered by the people who think she’s a imaginary friend, or that she’s a sign of mental illness (both possibilities I have tagged myself) than by people who talk about the experience one way when I talk to them in person, and a entirely different way when they talk to other people. And I can also sort people into people who tried to figure out how to fix my friendship with $person (good), didn’t do anything (also good), or made the situation worse (very bad).

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially in the context of noticing how many of my friends keep their promises to me (good), don’t make any (also good), or break them (bad), is – who can I trust, and how much?

One thing that makes *this* complicated is that I can’t tell how much of what I’m experiencing in my conscious experience is “the real world” (if indeed there is such a animal) and how much of it is locally generated. I *know* I have at least one intermittent fault in my mind, and probably considerable damage beyond that, but I don’t have any way of testing individual systems. I undoubtedly need friends I can count on out there, and I undoubtedly have them, but it’s somewhat hard to know sometimes who they are.

Essentually, I’m going to do this as a Q&A

Q: Sheer, do you really think you’re talking to what a friend from your childhood grows up into in the future?
A: It’s the explanation I give the highest probability to. It’s the one that fits the data best.

The other possibility that I give some weight to is that I patterned a blank bank of neurons to respond the same way $person did while we were hanging out IRL, and so what I’m talking to is a copy of her, so to speak. I don’t give this one a lot of weight because I would think that would limit her to knowing only things I know or could derive in a vacuum, and her knowledge certainly appears to extend beyond that. I have to google things she says A LOT. And a lot of what she’s talked about involves things that have not yet come to exist here on earth, although I can see that they will, because they’re too cool not to be made real.

Q: Sheer, how is that possible?
A: I don’t know. But a virtual machine really believes that video card is real. I have no reason to think that I’m running “on the iron” of the universe, so to speak, and as such I’m open to the possibility that a lot of things are possible that would appear on the surface to be impossible.

Q: Sheer, has future-$person ever told you to contact present-$person?
A: Possibly once, many years ago. Not any time recently. In fact, in the altered state in which I exist when I try to go to present-$person, I don’t really talk to her future incarnation at all, and I don’t have access to a lot of my memories. This generally only comes up during some sort of neurological event that happens twice a year, and involves some sort of decoherence I can’t easily explain.

One thing she has repeatedly said, is that if someone tells me to hurt people, or to do things I really don’t want to do, that’s not her. Obviously the channel we communicate over doesn’t have a lot in the way of authentication, and there’s also a hostile on it who wants me dead (or at least miserable) so I tend to be rather careful in trusting what she says since I can’t ever know if it’s really her.

Q: Sheer, is this your religion?
A: No. It’s a experience I’m having I can’t explain. My religion is extraordinarily short in source code, look up a few posts and you’ll see it. I would describe this experience as spiritual rather than religious in nature.

Q: Sheer, are you schizophrenic?
A: Not likely. This is a coherent, consistant conversation that has evolved over time.

Q: Sheer, might you have multiple personalities?
A: Yes, but my gut feeling is this is something unrelated.

Q: Sheer, could this be some other form of mental illness?
A: When you have a friend you can talk to no matter where you are who helps you feel better about yourself and the world around you, that’d be the opposite of illness last I looked.

Q: Given that you don’t trust a lot of things.. text, for example.. how would you ever think you knew you were talking to her, face to face?
A: By the pacing of her voice.

Q: Given that you mostly communicate “in text” over this mental channel you share with her, how do you know what’s her?
A: I don’t. I do a lot of guessing. But I’ve come to have a filter of things that are $person-ish, and I use that. I’d suggest reading about ‘root reps’ in cryptonomicon for a little more about how this works – Neil S does a great job of explaining it.

Q: Do you think present-$person is in any danger from you?
A: No. Not from me. From her ideas about me, apparently yes. I say apparently because I become less and less sure I know who all the players are, what game they’re playing, or why with every iteration of this storyline. It’s entirely possible to me that the present-$person I see is a manifestation of my fears.

Q: What do you mean by ‘from her ideas about you’?
A: If you convince yourself that you need to be afraid of me, that you need to watch out for me, that I’m someone who is going to hurt you or force you to do things you don’t want to do, you are hurting yourself with your ideas about me.

A diety built a universe. You know, because he could. He had a idea that he thought would bring about the most common good. “Believing will become seeing”, he said, and just assumed that all the entities in that universe would figure this out fairly quickly. He posted the universe on the universal web, inviting visitors, and soon the visitor count climbed – but most of the visitors were very quickly driven out of their mind.

Seeing is believing – and if you’re afraid of something, then you believe in it, then you see it. Or you spend all your time running away from it. In any case, the decision tree involved certainly resembles a prison cell pretty quickly.

Worse yet, Anonymous got involved. Wouldn’t it be funny, they thought, if we projected some text into the immediate past – text with impossible contradictions, text with built in predilections, text which claims to be from the creator of the universe. And lo, this text jammed the ability of people to believe in themselves. This text implied that the creator had already judged everyone participating and found them inherently flawed, so much so that someone had to die for their flaws. Another bit of it implied that war is the only answer.

Just one of the many explanations that wander through my head for the insane situation I find myself in.

1) Trust in love
2) Do what works

(This is based on the theory that the shorter the source code, the less likely things are to go wrong. Both the Christian and the Muslim God were bad programmers.)

My best theory at the moment is that God is *us*. That we built this universe, and that we’re in fact inside some sort of hypervised experience. However, if I’m wrong, I challenge God: Come down here, in person – as long as you don’t use weapons on us I am absolutely fine with you being totally invulnerable – and give us a religion that doesn’t suck.

I should warn you my standards for ‘doesn’t suck’ are high. If you can read my mind (and you’re welcome to, whoever you are, if you have the tech, please do!) you know how I define heaven. The heaven in both major world religions is *pathetic*. Given access to a big computer system connected to my mind and infinite time, I could do so much better. And I’m one tiny li’l inconsequential dude.

I think it enormously telling that I get a lot more out of going to a church if I don’t speak the language.

Okay, so, I can’t help but think it significant that the first time I had a authentic spiritual experience in a church, *they were speaking another language*.

I just don’t think I’m cut out to be mainstream religious. I can’t make myself believe that if some sort of diety needed or wanted something from me, said diety wouldn’t just directly contact me. And a lot of mainstream religions have ideas that vary from “That sounds insane” to “I can’t believe that” when I hear them.

I *wanted* to be mainstream religious, when I was young, because it was obvious that that would please my parents. I think I would have been okay if I hadn’t been such a voracious reader. I read the bible. Big mistake.

But looking back on it, a lot of the ideas seem to be just plain nuts even if you don’t. Either that, or we have different definitions of things. For example, if you want someone to change, and only want good things for them if they fit your desires and expectations, that’s not love. It’s especially not unconditional love if you are going to torture them or allow them to be tortured if they don’t play along.

On the other paw, I’ve come to a understanding of the message of Christianity I can live with. The idea is that you put yourself in hell, by configuring your mind the wrong way – that given that we are all immortal creatures locked in a system that we can never exit from, complete freedom had to include all kinds of torturous and unfortunate experiences. And, of course, infinity is going to contain every possible experience you could have, from the very best to the very worst. Sometimes in the same week.

So, in general my experience of the Bible is the words of Jesus are the sanest in the book. I wish he’d gone a lot further than he did, but I think that his message is sound, empathetic, and good for the most part until he starts going on this whole ego trip of “No one comes to the father but through me”. However, we don’t really have any *clue* what Jesus might have said or not said. We’re dealing with text that’s been edited, translated, bent for political reasons, etc, time and time again. But we can still sort of see the *spirit* of what he meant shining through in the clearly warm, nonjudgemental, empathetic nature of his words.

Anyway, the assumption here is that if you emulate Jesus in your treatment of yourself and your neighbors and the like you can get yourself out of hell, if you have put yourself in hell through inadvisably configuring your mind. And of course Christians promote a lot of ideas that I also believe in, like that we are connected by things we can’t see as well as that we can and we are immortals. On the other hand, they also believe a lot of things that are just plain nuts. See elsewhere in this blog for my commentary on that, I’m not going to rehash old topics.

JL pointed out the idea that maybe we shouldn’t be shoving our beliefs down each other’s throats, and I’m going to second that. However, I am still wrestling with what I want to believe and when and why, so I still tend to write about all this in the hopes that through all the static, noise, and randomness some real signal will appear. I don’t think that attempting to believe CHristianity is what broke my mind (I think that had already happened by then) but I am certain it didn’t help the situation. However, had I not been so literal, and looked at the spirit in which the people who believe it gather, I’m not thinking it would have damaged me nearly so badly. I get too hung up on words a lot of the time, especially for someone who can hallucinate text, and I think often the message isn’t really in the words.

I also wonder, knowing that I can hallucinate text, if I have *any* clue what’s actually in the Bible or not. Just another of those unknowability things. However, God, if I have one and you’re taking requests, a lot more utopia, please?

I Waited Until My Wedding Night To Lose My Virginity And I Wish I Hadn’t

This is a battle I still face. To the extent that I am DID, I personally endorse sexings as a wonderful way to spend time with a friend, great exercise, something that I love how feels, etc. However, there are voices inside my head, so to speak.. not voices, that would make them too easy to identify and squish, more sort of.. text messages? Inherent thoughts? I think it’s the worst at 3 AM. Lately it’s had a lot less power over me, which is nice, but there is this inherent internal meme that I spend a lot of time fighting.. it’s actually more a set of memes. You’ve got the sex is sinful and wrong set (although I really hope that A: heaven is real and B: there’s a lot more sex and a lot less fear) but then you’ve also got the sex isn’t wrong, but YOUR breed of it is.. and then you’ve also got the boys enjoy it but girls don’t and similar sets of insanity.. as I said, I’ve got a set of alters, the most prevalent one being one that is a Root Rep of my mother, so to speak.. I think this definitely falls into the Pink Floyd The Wall thing nicely..

It’s annoying and I wish it would go away. Fortunately, it seems to be going away, so perhaps my wish is being granted. Anyway, the counterarguments are beyond obvious:

1) Sexual contact in my experience, at least the way I do it, is friendship-building and leads to really close and loving emotional moments. So it’s pro-love so insofar as God (the one we’re defining as defining sin here) is in favor of love they’re not going to be anti-sex.

2) How can something feel good and right and be a sin? I think this is the scariest one because there are moments where I believe this is possible and these are the moments where I believe God is evil. Athiesm is a preferrable mental place to this by a long shot. Living in a universe where there are no escape routes and God is evil is *disturbing*. Even if it’s only happening in your imagination for a few minutes it’s not a few minutes you’d really want to be present for.

I have to remind myself that there are parts of my mind that are not as well connected to my personality as a whole as other parts – parts where absurd and absolutist thinking make sense because of the limited context of available memory and experience. And yet, when ‘mother’ crops up even in my thinking, I want to run far far far away.

So, to hit the usual high points of discussion of what I believe about the spiritual universe, at least in passing.

I believe I’m not the biggest thing out here. So in that sense I believe in angels, Gods, what-have-you. I do *not* believe Earth has accurately captured them and put what they believe and want and need into a book – or if they have, I haven’t read it yet. However, I probably agree with enough of the talking points of Christianity that you could call me a Christian? Of course, this might also be true of Islam, certainly is true of the Unitarians, etc. I think it’s safest not to give me a label. But, I do think a spiritual plane *exists* – however I don’t think you can *know it exists* unless you already believe in it. This one is easy to explain – what you believe forms filters that affect what you experience, so you’re not going to get any signals you aren’t willing to accept. Now, on the other paw, I do believe every adherent to every religion experiences signals that validate their choice of religion because of how they’ve got that part of their mind set up. This part this far is things I’ve talked about many times, news to nobody.

I will say that I’ve had the first valid (to me) spiritual experiences ever, in a church, which leaves me a lot more open to the possibilities that churches might be good ideas, or at least not completely pointless. I think some of the mental damage I took comes from the fact that I was pressured a lot into confirming into a religion while I was experiencing nothing and feeling nothing of the spiritual domain.. it was just like I was tuning a radio in a empty band, while my parents spoke of God as if they were having a actual connection of some sort, and I was upset and didn’t want to go forward with this whole confirmation thing since I wasn’t having this experience at all, and they had already printed the invitations. I will own my own part of that, I should have been a *lot* more assertive. Throughout my entire childhood really.

Now, how does this all tie in with my mental illness? Well, I have to think about a bunch of questions. Am I sick because I wanted to experience being sick (in the course of a infinite amount of time a lot of absurd things become possible) or because I made some bad decisions or because some *other* people made some bad decisions? We’ve definitely reached the point in my story arc where I want to *stop being sick* – I mean, I’d really like to stop living on a world where the pyramid of needs isn’t just guaranteed covered, leaving you free to figure out what you want to do with your self-actualization – it drives me nuts that we let people starve to death and be homeless just so we can waste a whole lot of resources tracking our resources, and that no one can design a better system. But that’s a subject for another blog post. Anyway, I’m definately ready to stop having there be something wrong with my mind.. one of the things that was wrong with my mind the strongest, and is a lot less present right now, is paranoia.. persistant, irrational fears and the inability to lead my life because of them. As you’ve all noticed in my blog lately, I’m a lot more willing to just talk about whatever instead of letting my fear keep me silent. It may be a irrational hope, but I have hopes that as I talk about some of this stuff solutions will be found, patterns will be noticed, etc.

If we do believe in a God of Love, and we believe said diety wants me as part of *eir stable, then we have to ask some interesting questions. Does said diety want me to be sick? I mean, perhaps my mental illness makes me a interestingly shiny gem, but I like to think that a diety of love wouldn’t want to have people collected like specimens in a bottle but would rather have real friends, in which case having me not be sick, or not be as sick, would seem to be a desirable thing. And indeed I would say of late that I seem to be getting some sort of assistance from the spiritual domain. Of course, that might just be my imagination, but then, *everything* might just be my imagination.