The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I narrowed down the span of possibilities to roughly two options:
1.I'm a meat clockwork with a peculiar quality of being obsessed with the fact that it is a meat clockwork.
2.I'm a soul with acute awareness of the inadequacy of a merely material universe, yet unable to even confirm any that "outside" exists, let alone make any other progress
Either way, this is so very tiresome.
More generally, as I age I find I'm just getting increasingly fed up with my eccentricities, rather overcoming, integrating or getting used to them as I'd have hoped.
Welcome to the Motte. When you say "this" is so very tiresome, what is the "this" you are referring to? Existence? Or the navel-gazing that you may be prone to? In my experience eccentricities are what make the world go round. Short of those who are intolerable, I like variety in individuals (and in the end I may be one of the intolerable ones for many).
Also is there not always the opportunity to--once you know what you do not like about yourself--change it? Generally I agree with those who say most people do not change, or, if they do, they become worse, but I don't believe this is true for people who take a sudden decision to alter themselves. Sometimes this is because of an outside event (e.g. someone dies, they themselves almost die, etc.) but it can also be a moment of realization, a quiet epiphany brought on by something otherwise benign. It's possible to do better.
Neither? Both? I want answers, a resolution, good or bad.
I don't know if you are going to be able to get that here. Certainly nothing definitive. Though you may get reassurance--that everyone at some point, or at many points, has experienced and will experience a similar feeling.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Where do you feel stuck?
Gaining firm footing under my feet, existentially, meta-narratively speaking
Yeah pretty fkin hard man. It took me a while but it does feel good after you get there.
I would tell you what worked for me if you're interested, but idk it seems like most people need to find their own answer to this sort of question, unfortunately.
God be with you. :)
I’m curious, mind sharing?
Well... since you asked! I'll go ahead and ping @Bottomless_pit_supervisor in case he's interested.
Basically I had what I imagine is a common upbringing for a Mottizen. Stopped believing in God in early teens, oscillated back and forth between being really into Buddhism and then angry rationalist atheism.
Started to get a sense that something was missing. Dove even deeper into reading about Buddhism and trying to learn more. Got to the point where I was delving quite deep into 'no-self' and that sort of esoteric stuff. Btw, I DO NOT recommend you try this. I ended up having an almost week long like... not psychotic break exactly but very intensely black nihilistic episode followed by over a year of very difficult personal struggle.
Throughout that process I ended up coming back to Christianity, via the Orthodox Church. I got really into it at first, staking all of my worldview on it being True. That helped me stabilize, gave me a local community, and some guidance from kind older men which I desperately needed.
Over time as I got more stable I started questioning things again, going back into Buddhism. Started working with a solid therapist. He helped me understand that as humans we are flawed, and no matter what we do we can't get to actual, capital-T Truth. At best we can have models that approximate truth, and our goal is to figure out what we care about, and work with the models that help us get there.
Throughout this whole process, for years, I also dealt with a lot of chronic pain issues, and learned that my pain was coming from repressed emotions. I began to work with those directly doing somatic work, hypnosis, emotional expression stuff and meditation. That's a whole nother rabbit hole.
I decided that I cared about Love in an abstract sense. My goal is to love myself and others, and to try to spread that. It's simple, but deep and profound. At least for me.
I still go to church and think of myself as a Christian, but I would say I'm not staked entirely on that view anymore. I have finally become a bit more comfortable with the fact that I'll never know the actual Truth. It's still something that bothers me occasionally, but it doesn't keep me up at night like it used do.
Hi there, delurking to say thanks for your comment--there's lots here that I identify with myself!
So, umm, would you mind saying more about the black nihilistic episode that you experienced? If not I totally understand, it's just, well, I actually took the cosmic black pill myself (and managed to come out the other side) what seems like a lifetime ago and I'm intensely interested in learning more about what it was like for you and having a conversation about that if you're open to it.
Yeah np. I read Spiritual Enlightenment by Jed McKenna and there was a scene where he talks about like a black cloud coming over people when they realize that no belief is ultimately true.
It really struck me deeply - there were other big things going on in my life at the time like I was struggling in my job and my relationship quite a bit - but that just kind of broke me.
For a few days I went around asking my friends and family and partner what the point of life was, how do they deal with the fact of their death, and did and said some really like unhinged things like threatened some people etc.
Luckily I had a really good support network of close ppl and they helped pull me out of it over the course of like a week. But if not for them I easily could've fallen into a much worse place.
Hello again and thank you for sharing! Although my experience significantly differed in some key ways, (I was having an amazing trip on the best acid I'd ever had before things took a turn, for instance) I can really sympathize with what you went through. My sense at the time was essentially the blackest version of Hindu and Buddhist belief that I could contain; that existence itself is a deep, pervasive, and conscious lie that we believe, that our lives hold no greater meaning than what we personally instill them with, and that with said conscious belief in life we were actively participating in our own torture and suffering.
Yeah, I was a struggling, wangsty kid from the wrong side of the tracks coming to the end of his teen-aged years at the time. I'm happy to report that thanks to the actions of some friends and their families in key places at exactly the right time, I pulled out of it (probably narrowly avoiding inpatient mental hospitalization in the process) and got better! I'm grateful that your support network helped you out, too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Thanks for sharing. I'm not sure how much of it I understand though.
Do you believe in God? Are you trying to believe, act as if you do, or some other variant, or do you have a firm "faith" of some kind, a feeling you didn't have before, but now do?
I do believe in God, now. Not exactly the Christian God necessarily, although I do think that the Christian conception of God tries to point at the type of God I believe in.
I see God as basically the ground of reality, the ultimate Source, First Mover, all that jazz. Basically the cause of the universe instead of like some dude in the sky who's all powerful.
For a long time I tried to believe, and acted as I did. It was difficult and painful, and I did a lot of soul searching and had some pretty intense/weird experiences, but eventually I did start to believe. Now I do have a kind of firm "faith," grounded in the felt sense of love in my body. To me, whatever the source of that feeling of love is, which feels vast and boundless in the right mental state, is God.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link