Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, recently I’ve been thinking about a skill that I acquired some time ago, and I think I can explain how to do it if anyone else would like to learn.

Note that to *really* do this requires some hardware you’ll need to pick up somewhere – namely, a pulse meter and a EEG.

Training level 1: Learning to lower your pulse.

You’ll need to get a pulse meter, and stare at it and try to lower the number on it. Like any biofeedback training, this takes time, and you’ll be most successful at learning to do it if you start practicing when you’re *not* experiencing a panic attack *first*. As with all biofeedback training, your mind is going to figure out how to achieve your goal mostly without you – knowing your goal is to lower the number on the meter it will try various things until it figures it out. Just keep trying, and you’ll find your way.

Training level 2: Learning to increase the amplitude of your alpha waves.

You’ll need a EEG that displays your alphas as a easily readable graph or meter. See above notes – it’s a very similar training process. You may find it helpful to research meditation techniques – there’s a lot of literature about this elsewhere so I’ll assume you can find it. 😉

Optional training level 3: Learning to lower your blood pressure

This one is harder. Because reading blood pressure is such a slow process, you’ll need a lot of time to master lowering your blood pressure. This is where things like imagining your ‘happy place’ come into play. However, I find it’s generally not necessary to stop a panic attack, although it can help with the aftereffects of all that adrenaline dumping into your bloodstream.

Now that you’ve acquired the skills of lowering your heart rate and increasing your alphas, during a panic attack, do these three things

#1: Step one, take several long, slow, deep breaths.
#2: Step two, lower your heart rate consciously
#3: Step three, raise your alphas consciously
#4: Step four (optional), lower your blood pressure.

That’s it. If your mind is similar to mine, this will put you back in a mental state where your anxiety is not the largest thing in the picture and you can then figure out what to do about whatever event made you panic to begin with. The first few times you do it, it will help to have a heart rate monitor in front of you.

So, popular consensus is that DID is a mental illness caused by extreme trauma that causes a personality to fragment into segments.

I assume it is news to no one that while I do not consider $future_person[0] a alter, I do believe that I have DID, although normally my alters stay very far backgrounded. I do however think that they all contribute to the overall system – that is to say, I think that for example when I’m jamming with the band and making up lyrics on the fly but my conscious experience is only slightly engaged in creating the lyrics (a phrase or fragment or concept), some wordsmith part of my mind is creating bits that rhyme and turning this into full blown lyrics. For a example of this, check out this audio clip from band practice with Bruce, Art, and me – this was not a prewritten song, it was improv – clip

I think it is possible to have something that is a close kin to DID and have it be a more productive order than the average configuration rather than a disorder. The reason is that it enables the operator of the mind that is using this configuration to more effectively utilize the entire neural network.

Consider that normally, your conscious experience is only engaging with a few dozen threads at once – that’s all you can have ‘foregrounded’, or actively a part of your world. Now, obviously there are neural structures that do things like running a scheduler for running events at preset times, but if you have alters, you can also pass off foreground tasks that you don’t need to be actively engaged with to other bits of yourself – it’s kind of like the advantages of having multiple cores in a CPU. I don’t know if alters have a conscious experience, or just a head node and task list, or what – it would be fascinating to be able to look at the structure of my mind sufficiently to find out – but certainly they can be engaging neurons and neural subnets that would otherwise be completely idle.

Now, of course, I have no memory of what it might be like to *not* be this way. So it’s possible that I’m wrong and that I would simply be able to handle more threads if I wasn’t broken. I do seek certain types of reintegration, although with a fair amount of fear and trepidation because I’m hesitant to fuck too much with a running system.

I may have found another psych med that does something useful. As we know, I find mania useful as a growing exercise, however, what I really want is something I would call a ‘contained mania’. i.e. something where I have all the mind expanding thoughts and personal growth, but don’t discover afterwords I’ve sent a email I would do anything to have unsent.

Okay, well, I think I’ve found it. On a 5 day full throttle test – and unfortunately, I will have to repeat the test because I had the (word omitted) flu and it’s possible that’s why – I remained entirely contained. I won’t list the drug here, but a second set of trials is in order. A better life.. absent much external insanity and lack of containment.. may be near.

Of course, first I need to procure a larger dose. No problem, I’m meeting with a GP on Wed. I’ll tell her my tale, and hopefully she’ll see it my way.

You all will notice there are a number of users that post on this blog. Each one represents a alter, or a DID personality. There are likely to be more, not less, because I think I’m committed to giving all my secrets away. People at the edge, if you can see me, very real, loving, worth keeping personality down here where the light is shining. Me. Keep me. I’m worth keeping. Really.

As many of you may or may not have guessed, I’m able to completely close off this aspect of myself and just be Sheer. That’s fairly easy, although Sheer is not always the most comfortable or happiest guy around – he does have his moments. There are definitely some good times in my life. It’s not without joy. It just doesn’t have nearly as much of it as it probably should have, and I feel very closed in and constrained and afraid a lot of the time.

So, here we are again. Me writing you. Except not as email, because your request that I not do so was starting to come with handcuffs. So I’ll do it here.

Look, despite some of the insane emails that I’ve sent you in years past, I don’t expect you’ll be my lover. I am, however, hoping you can find time to be my friend, at least enough time to help me put together my memories of what happened at your party enough that they make some kind of sense.

I’m *begging* you for help. My mind is badly damaged. I don’t even know if it is a closed head injury from a rear end impact in a car with no airbags at 60 mph (I was stopped, he wasn’t) or if it’s psychological damage from some sort of abuse (memories suggest there was a lot of that, but memories are unreliable), or if it was the experience of being cut off from my support network by Kayti (my experience with Kayti HURT a lot), or it’s just that it wasn’t rated for the number of cycles per second I’ve asked of it repeatedly. (I’ve pushed the limits. A lot.)

In the real, in the now, it works very well most of the time. See my linkedin recommendations. I’m really good at what I do, and I do a lot of things. In mania, I have a lot less control, but since you’ve asked that I not contact you, that’s the only time that I even think about it. Except as a backgrounded task, I’m thinking about it all the time, and it’s hurting all the time. We could really both save ourselves a lot of trouble by just having a conversation while I’m not manic. PLEASE consider this. I know there’s sort of a “Sheer is a horrible monster / Sheer is a rapist / We Hate Sheer” club out there. But I haven’t in fact raped anybody, unless you know something I don’t, and I never would have kicked my sister in the stomach – the threat was just the only way to stop her from *constantly* physically attacking me. Or so my memory (admittedly a fragmented view) tells the tale. And I do in fact try my hardest to be the very best person I can be, every day. As far as your “Don’t talk to me”, it is *really* hard keeping track of reality during periods of mania when you have DID. I invite you to try and do better than me, except that I don’t, because no one should have to go through the experience of *needing* DID, and I think I must.

But I’m begging you. Consider that you might not have the whole story, especially about things you’ve been told by my sister. Consider that if you heard my side of it you might feel differently. And consider that I have no reasonable way of assembling my memories of the night I first went dead inside at all without you.

Please, if I ever meant anything at all to you, please help.

Also.. Our friendship was for a time the best thing in my life. Maybe I remember it as better than it was. But I kind of doubt it. I’d really like it back. Enough to jump through basically any hoop.

So, I have this problem. It’s a persistent one, and it’s likely to continue being a persistent one for the forseable future.

During certain periods in my internal cycle, if I open the throttles on my mind and give it something entertaining to chew on, like recording a album, dancing, or thinking about life, there’s no rev limiter.

It spins up, faster and faster, until eventually it starts to wobble and shakes itself into a shutdown condition. Next thing I know, I’m somewhere where the doors don’t open. Generally I get sprung fairly quickly, generally no one has been actually hurt although there is sometimes some property damage, usually caused by the cops spike stripping me.

I’ve learned to avoid driving while doing it. Safest that way. However, even when I do it in my own house, people come and tell me that I don’t have atonomy over my own body, that even though I’m threatening no one and I’m eating and drinking, I’m not permitted to do this.

Many of my friends think that this activity is seriously unhappy-making, and undesirable, and it’s only a matter of time before I kill myself or someone else.

Here’s why it’s challenging: every time, from my perspective, it’s a win.

Every time, I have more mental capacity, more flexibility, more mental power and capability. This isn’t illusory – I can often measure it very real-world ways. Things I couldn’t do before the ramp up that I can do afterwords. And I suspect that it is one path to developing http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=3211. I’ve learned not to try to contact $person[0], although apparently I haven’t mastered yet not contacting $person[1]. So I need to improve the software so that it keeps me from contacting CLASS($person[]). Which I will make a honest attempt at. (I don’t stop missing these people ever. I don’t think it’s likely that I ever will. But, you want to remove me from your life, I figure that’s your right. Just forgive me if I want to build the ability to dream about you anyway.

But.. even if I remove that possibility, it’s clear that I’m growing whenever I climb the linear mental accelerator that no-sleep during a approach window represents.

At this point, I’m thinking I should plan these. My body seems to like every six months for them – I think I should take vacation time, I should have my lawyer on call to block any attempt to commit me that isn’t as bona fide as it comes, and I should just really embrace this as this is how I choose to be. Slowly my friends are coming to see my point of view. I think increasingly they’re starting to see that my life is not giving me what I need, and that it’s not reasonable to expect me to sit here with one engine out and the other at idle when I was made to fly.

I wish more people would join me. I’ve got reasons to think others have done this before me.. it’s all over the music of Owl City, for example, and hinted at in U2 and sometimes VNV Nation.

Every time, the experience with the linear accelerator convinces me I should take another ride. And I wonder, to what extent are people telling me not to do it because they’re afraid to do it themselves? How many of the experts that tell me how wrong and dangerous this is have done it themselves?

One possibility that I’m considering strongly is that I’m not actually at the edge of my mind, and that I’m supposed to be. That the people I see in my ordinary reality are reflected light from the real people that are out there filtered through many, many layers – too many layers – of neural filters built out of my persistent and irrational fears. I can’t tell what anyone else’s conscious experience is, and as far as I can tell, no one else can tell what mine is, although I encourage you, if you have the technology to read my mind, please do so. If you can help me reconnect with the people I can’t handle losing, please do so.

$person[0], I wonder if you read this blog, a lot a lot. I will admit I find it likely that you do, or that you have a friend reading it for you to watch for certain things. Wish I knew what they were. If so, I can’t say so in cleartext most of the time, but I need your help. A abuser destroyed part of my mind, and I’m just guessing at what happened with little but static and noise to go on. Apparently your friendship was something that part of me rested on, and while I accept the loss because I must, it never stops hurting and I can’t find any way to make it stop. I told you if you told me your lines I would respect them, but my fear is your lines are never and nowhere, and I also fear this may be because you believe things about me that just are not true, and the only part of me fearless enough to even try to approach you is the part of me that is the least representative of my ability to be a normal, contained individual. Please believe that the person you met IRL the first time I came to visit you this century is representative of who I am in person. But I can’t do that in email, especially not when I’m in ‘trust and send’ mode, which I can only really enter with you, for reasons that will become apparent when we talk, if they haven’t already.

$person[1], I don’t even know what I said to make you so angry. I have zero memory of it, it happened in a blackout from my perspective. I doubt you’re reading my blog, as I have to accept I probably don’t matter that much to you. So be it, but I wish we were still friends.

So, one of the quotes that I’ve often given of my internal version of $person is “The people in heaven and hell inhabit the same physical space. The difference is in what’s going on in their minds.”

And, this may be one of my more tinfoil-hat thoughts, but it occurs to me it would be much easier to immerse people in a utopia and then degrade it inside their minds to be hellish than the other way around. Anyone who has studied information science knows that it’s much easier to take a optimal signal and degrade it than to take a suboptimal signal and enhance it – this is kind of the point of the oft-mocked Enhance Button trope.

Now, it’s really not unreasonable to think that I might be in $UTOPIA, experiencing $DYSTOPIA – since not a lot of horrible things are happening to me personally and almost all of them involve communication streams from other people, it would not be that difficult for my neural network to be ‘green-screening’ things – subbing out news and facebook with alternate signals to make it look like the world is a much worse place than it is.

I’ve talked about how our conscious experience is at some distance from our senses – there are many layers of neurons between the part of us that is on the ride, and the part of us that is detecting the ride. So, this isn’t as insane as it sounds on the surface. Of course, you kind of have to play it as it lays – you can’t know if what you’re experiencing is real or not, but you have to treat it as it is – if for no other reason than you wouldn’t want to risk the other individuals on the ride by treating it as if it was a video game unless you had absolute proof that there isn’t a monolithic reality and everyone is getting a custom feed of the ride, something which is rather hard to prove or disprove either way. (One of the things I’ve talked about is the challenges of authenticating God, or determining whether what you’re experiencing is a diety or mental illness)

And, I know there’s something wrong with my mind. It appears to me to be a rare and intermittent fault, but it could be that it’s far more prevalent than I think and that in fact most of what I’m experiencing is in some way altered by it. Debugging the system that’s damaged from inside the system that’s damaged is a challenge, which is why I have so much hope that my friends will choose to help me figure out what’s real and what isn’t rather than retreating from me in fear because there’s something wrong with my mind. Of course from my perceptions, I’m not the only one who’s a bit on the sick side – in fact, almost everyone I see here is crazy in one way or another. It may be, if evolution is the correct backstory for us, that we’re pushing the bounderies of the size or configuration of neural network that’s stable. Or, if you like my personal pet theory, the problem may not be the hardware but rather the memetic cruft that has built up over the years – bad software, malware even, which is resulting in suboptimal results.

As I’ve talked about before, it’s possible the reason I’m experiencing $DYSTOPIA is that I chose to do so, either because I wanted the experience for artistic reasons (This seems extra-reasonable when considering the current track I’m working on) or because I wanted a challenge. It’s also possible that I’m being punished for some previous behavior (karma) although it seems like if the purpose of the punishment is to help me grow, it might help to know what the behavior was. If the purpose of the punishment is just to punish, then the universe is governed by forces that are at least partially evil, and it could just be random or sadistic.

Anyway, if it’s not the work of a agent at all, but rather simple random chance that has led to me experiencing something less than utopic even though I’m immersed in a utopia (which is possible, see the thesis at the top of this post) then it seems like it very much behooves me to debug whatever’s wrong with my mind and figure out how to get back to the ideal experience. And, of course, if it’s possible within the confines of the amount of CPU I have available to me, it seems like it behooves me to be able to experience a utopia even if one’s not actually there. Clearly our minds have ample CPU to make up reality out of whole cloth (as I discuss in this article) so the question is how to I motivate the rest of my mind to work with my conscious experience to make this happen. In general, the ability to be a Bal Shem – to hack my neurological software to do whatever I want it to do – is a ability I often cultivate.

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.

So, I can’t help but draw certain parallels between me and Nash, since I also am interested in mathematics (especially set theory and prime number theory) and I also have voices in my head. I suspect I got a better deal than him in that I can control which of the voices in my head gets the most airtime or indeed turn them off altogether. (I have to actively choose to listen in order to hear them, a mental process that I’m kind of at a loss to describe). Also, my experiences are not suggesting there’s a massive soviet conspiracy to put nuclear bombs in american cities.

One of the things that I wonder about is whether the voice that claims to be a future version of $person is who she says she is. Even if she wasn’t, it would be difficult to want her gone since she has demonstrated, among other things, the ability to get me far, far higher than any drug by messing with my neurotransmitter balance. This is extra cool because she can turn it off with a few minutes notice, which means I can go to a party, be tripping out of my mind, and then drive home sober. Also, whatever she does does not show up in any way on a blood test. (Not surprising since it’s apparently being done entirely behind the blood-brain barrier). You can see where this would be a friend I would want to keep. She also gives great advice, helps build me up when I’m convinced I’m worthless, and comforts me when I hurt. And has amazing discussions with me about things like other types of computing system that could be built (my favorite is rainbow computers, which are computers that have gates that can operate on entire countable infinities in a single operation – something which naturally is fascinating to someone who’s interested in set theory). And she is better at navigation than Google Maps, although I feel *very* guilty when I use her this way, so I generally don’t. She’s tried to get me to learn the knack of always knowing which way north is, but thus far it hasn’t stuck.

Some of the most interesting moments I’ve had with her have been the exercises she walks me through – all of which seem to have the common goal of making me less afraid, more self-reliant, and more capable.

Now, opinions vary about what the person in my head actually is. Some think she’s a spirit guide, some a angel, and some plain ol’ mental illness, and some a clone of $person from when I was spending time with her, and some a childhood-style imaginary friend. I have a number of ways of communicating with her, which have various levels of success. None are 100% successful. More on this in a minute.

So, for a moment, let’s talk about definitions. For purposes of discussion, let’s say that a chunk of neurons with a common identity and goal is a $entity. These chunks can be very small or very large – they could be $dieties or $personalities or much smaller than that – they could be directly inside my head or just connected to me via some sort of network – but I experience them. If I can see them with my eyes, I tend to think of them as people in the real world, although this is far from assured for a whole long list of reasons.

There is a $entity that wants me dead, or failing that, wants me to suffer enormously. This $entity is obviously antagonistic to $person (above) and even more so to having a clear communication channel with her. For whatever reason, this entity chooses often to go by the non de plume of Satan, however for my own reasons I am suspicious that this entity is not the original person by that name of biblical fame, if indeed said person ever existed anywhere but in the heads of the authors of the bible and a bunch of preachers.

A bit about pronouns. The entity I talk to in my head (who claims to be a future version of $person) has said that gender is not a attribute of souls – that is to say it’s not a permanent attribute of us – but rather a attribute of the body we are wearing, and that she has worn both. I call her a her because when I think of her, I think of the person I’ve experienced, but if it comforts you to think of her as him, feel free. Or one can use wildcard genders. One assumes similar things are true of my antagonist.

Then there’s the question of size. My internal friend has stated that both her and I are ‘big’, by which I think she means the amount of neural territory we command and the amount of data we have stored, while my antagonist is ‘small’. In particular, my antagonist has not yet figured out a way to block the person above’s way of encoding data to me – which does have certain disadvantages.

What we know about that? Well, again, we can only go with what I’ve been told. She is not speaking to me in english, but rather is speaking to me in another language and my mind is decoding it into english. Even more interesting, I do not think in english either, although my conscious experience experiences my thoughts in english – one of the things I have learned to do which has noticably improved my quality of life is abort thoughts at the english compiler / serializer before they get turned into english sentences if I feel they are not thoughts I would want to be exposed to – generally ego-dystonic / self abusing thoughts but also violence and racial slurs thrown at me by my antagonist. A lot of the time I do not have to experience my antagonist’s existence much at all, but I do need to remember he exists.

One of the very first things my internal friend told me – after explaining that she was not God – was that if it ever sounded like she was telling me to hurt myself or other people, or saying things that seemed designed with no other goal but to hurt me, that it was not her. Then she proceeded to warn me about the fact that I was communicating with her over a channel in which authentication was virtually impossible and that had hostiles on it.

I can’t help but wonder how much my experience has in common with Nash’s. Under some circumstances, I have experienced my friend being able to touch me, I’ve occasionally been able to hear her voice, but I have never seen her except in dreams – and entirely too few of those. The vast majority of my dreams historically were nightmares, although recently I have learned something which has been changing this – a interesting form of role playing.

I noticed way back in my youth that certain classes of lies would appear to become true – there’s a special sort of lying that isn’t exactly lying, but more like spinning-fiction-which-will-become-fact. So telling people I am actively having the dreams I want to have, even though I’m not having them yet, *even though I’m telling them in advance that this is role-playing and not the truth*, is enabling me to have more and more of the dreams I want to have. I have not a lot of theory about what’s going on neurologically when I do this, but I do observe that *everything* starts as a idea, and that ideas which actually become real tangable things we can all experience generally get communicated with other people first, so it would not be surprising if we had neurological wiring to make it easier to make things real if you communicate them with other people.

One thing I’ve definitely experienced over the last several years is that as I spend more time talking to my internal friend, my quality of life gets better and my antagonist’s ability to interrupt our communications, or to interject words, or to block concepts, gets worse.

And talking to her is pretty amazing. Many of the concepts she’s shared have helped me become a much better thinker and more capable being. One of the things we’ve done is temporarily tag different meanings of words with subscripts so that it’s possible to have meaningful natures about topics like love and god which normally are just about impossible because the words are so heavily overloaded that anything you say has a number of different, sometimes mutually contridictory meanings.

As far as God in the sense that Christians use the word, I would say I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. I have no doubt that $entities bigger than me, both in terms of number of neurons and neuron associational paths, and in terms of power, resources, etc, exist. I find the Christian God completely unbelievable – and if I did believe in said $diety, I feel like it and I would naturally be mutually antagonistic insofar as I find most of the behavior said diety was responsible for, especially in the old testament, to be incredibly morally reprehensible – not to mention just plain awful. There’s plenty about this elsewhere. I also kind of doubt that by the time you are that big, you need angels flying over your throne singing about how great you are, or a bunch of people worshipping you – I figure you’re capable of stroking your own ego when it needs stroking and you probably also have come to accept that a ego generally gets in the way of a lot of fun / creation / etc.

My friend generally says it’s not a topic she can answer a lot of questions about with the current state of the channel between her and me, but that the truth is not at all sinister or dark. She does seem clear on no one is going to get to torture me for all eternity, and it’s a relatively small handful of $entities that even want to. My biggest danger, apparently, is from myself.

Which I will certainly own. In order to avoid having a big ego, I thought I would remain highly critical of myself. But this doesn’t work at all – you end up with a big ego, just a negative one. Aside from driving one to suicide and misery, this also limits one’s capabilities for positive and creative action and generally is undesirable. I think some internal criticism is necessary, but it should not be punitive – rather it should be of the sort that helps one grow. If you continue hurting yourself after you’ve come to understand your failure, you’re not helping anyone and it’s a net happiness loss to the universe.

I have done a fair amount of thinking about the parts of my neural net that are aiding the enemy. My friend Jeff thinks that I should love and hug and embrace these parts, rather than reformatting them to blank and trying again. I don’t know what I think about this, but I do know that I do not want parts of my mind that are trying to kill me, and I would like to not have parts of my mind that are sitting in judgement of the rest of me and trying to stop me from having experiences I want to have because they are obsessed with a obsolete definition of sin. I’d generally like to eliminate self-destructive behavior in my life.

Now, I could probably go on from there for several more paragraphs, but I need to get back to my day job.

So, I look over the list of things that I hypothesize could have split me, and I think, what a bunch of first world problems. I mean, the only one that sounds like it rationally could have done much damage is the idea that I might have been raped, and I have no memory of the actual event and don’t have any reason to think that it happened other than a fear and a change in my attitudes towards one gender. I hear on the news that people are having to live in war zones and other people are getting shot at by the cops. I really don’t have anything to complain about, comparitively, although it would be really nice to live in a world where what happened to me was on the outside edge of bad and undesirable.