I've never heard it explained this way, that's very interesting! The child/critic schema is what helped me break through but I've since internalized it as my emotional self and logical self, left brains and right brain. My logical self kept my emotional self under very strict control in the effort to protect him. Once I made sure my emotional self was safe, especially from my logical self, he is now able to come out and experience life. With both my logical and emotional selfs working in concert I can bring my full self to bear on life and as a result it gets much easier and clearer.

It ultimately is but man can it be uncomfortable and painful too.

This one brought a tear to my eye. I recently found myself again and it's been amazing. That dude did change my life in a very good way once I started taking care of him. He is awesome, I love him so much.

Shits hard, especially with people dragging you down.

My fucking god man. This dude is in my brain! Just the first chapter is making me feel so much validation! I have been sitting here wondering if I'm just making all this shit up to make myself feel better but no. This is actually it. Thank you so very much for this book!

The nature of I, experiencing and experiencer, connecting to myself by disconnecting from what isn't real, the nature of reality, the power of love that is under it all. It all really jives with me. Two minds that I call my thinking Self and the other I call my emotional Self. The emotional Self is where we are all connected. It's where beauty and joy and hope lives. It's why when I get close to it I want to connect with others. The thinking Self is isolation. It's where judgement and blame and hate lives. It's why when I get close to it I want to be alone.

The more I read this the more I start thinking there are multiple realities. Each moment, each experience, is composed of the reality of the thinking Self and the reality of the emotional Self. It seems like he managed to exist in the emotional reality by denying the thinking reality. I lived my life in the thinking reality by denying the emotional reality. The thinking reality was extremely logical, constant awareness of the outside, and full of hate. It was the epitome of control. The emotional reality denies logic, concentrates awareness on the inside, and is full of love. It is the epitome of surrender. Living competely in the thinking reality and suppressing my emotional Self I was depressed and suicidal. Right now I'm leaning heavily into the emotional reality and as a result I'm full of laughter and hope. I'm also intentionally suppressing my thinking Self so I'm naive and vulnerable. This shift is how I have experienced life over the past few weeks. It is a war between my thinking and emotional Self. I was fully on the thinking side and I'm now struggling to stay on the emotional side. I'm doing trauma therapy.

There is something above this though, another reality. The place where belief and doubt lie. Those beliefs determine the reality we experience. Beliefs are also changed through experience. Experiences that can come entirely from my Self. With sufficient connection to my Self I can experience whatever I want. If I can experience whatever I want then I can change my beliefs. If I can change my beliefs then I should be able to willingly believe anything. But if I can willingly believe anything that makes an infinite loop, or redundancy, idk the words to explain this. It immediately breaks down. I would experience everything and nothing. I would exist everywhere and nowhere. If this were possible it would have already happened and it would always be happening. I feel like that all describes a singularity. Ultimately that's what we all are. What he calls the shining light. The best way I can describe it is we are the ability to believe and doubt. That is the true nature of Self. We are an unimaginable being going through the belief sim.

You can have an emotion or thought, an experience, without understanding it so understanding is a component of all this too. You need knowledge to get to an understanding. Knowledge and understanding is somewhere between experience and belief. Experiences grant knowledge which becomes understanding and (with enough of them? sufficient strength of them? I feel like understanding is binary) eventually belief. So it's Experience -> Knowledge -> Understanding -> Belief. Which is painfully obvious when I write it out like that.

So to willfully change a belief you have to change the understandings that compose it. You need to experience to gain knowledge to change the understanding. Ultimately, specific experiences can result in a specific belief. But this new belief has to fight with all existing beliefs. So it takes a sufficiently powerful experience or a great many smaller ones to change a belief, all while knowing and understanding. Again, this seems pretty obvious.

It's like a stack. My thinking reality affects my emotional reality, and vice versa, and they both roll up to affect my belief reality. So by having control over my experience I should be able to control my beliefs. But then control is a thinking concept while surrender is an emotional concept. I have to control my thoughts while surrendering my emotions. That's how I connect to Self. With a pure connection to Self I have complete control over my experience and with complete control over my experience I can directly control my beliefs. With a strong enough belief I become the singularity. I become Self.

Now I understand how people can spend their lives in meditation.

I just had an epiphany. I am an Idea. Shaped by belief that is built from experience.

I just read the synopsis and that's exactly in line with what I have been thinking. I love the validation I'm feeling here. Just ordered the book. Thanks!

To go a bit further it's like we're this perfect being that has the ability to believe and that belief is responsible for reality as we know it. That belief is shaped by the experiences we go through, the processes and interpretations in our brain. That ability to believe is our self. It's shaped by the sum total of everything we have ever experienced up to that moment in time. That moment we experience. The total experience is the being we present to the world. It's the beauty of humanity. It's the human condition shaped by the human experience. It's belief filtered through a brain and presented through a body and it's all intermeshed on a level that is truly incomprehensible.

It's ultimately all powered by our self and the power of the belief in our self. That's why I worship at the altar of self. The more secure I am in my self the stronger I can be for those that really need me. I need to find people that can help support me living my authentic self by helping them to do the same.

You truly strengthen the belief in self by living our authentic selves and showing understanding and acceptance for the experience that led us to that moment. Showing comfort and care. Kindness and respect. Showing love. You strengthen the belief in self by showing love to yourself. You strengthen the belief in others by showing love to them. By helping them to live their authentic selves. Showing them understanding and acceptance and kindness and care. The stronger the belief in self the stronger we will all be and the stronger will be our love. I would much rather live in a world full of love rather than the darkness I have known my entire life. That really strengthens my belief.

You could say it's my religion if I believed in that. It actually feels like at it's core we're all these perfect beings going through the belief/doubt sim. I think that's amazing and I can't wait to discover what's next. We will all benefit from the power of belief in self regardless if we believe in it or not. The stronger each one of us believes in ourselves the quicker it will happen. That's why its so beautiful.

That is the ideal state but I'm starting to see that so many of us are unable to see or understand this and as a result have a weak sense of self. That fundamental lack of authentic self, the inability to exist as our self with our self without judgement, drives us in so many ways. We mask our selves even from our selves and that's the most tragic mask of them all. It's the mask that you never put on and can never take off. It's what self doubt does to us and we all suffer from it to some degree.

This exact thing hit me really hard last night and it's rough. It is an absolute tragedy and it's been my entire life.

I disagree with this with all of my being. Security in self is the root of everything good in this world. When you truly love yourself it is so much easier to understand and love others. It's exactly how you understand the nature of everything. Everything described here is from a fundamental disconnect with their self. It's why they are able to commit such atrocities.

Nope. After all this I believe even less in any kind of spiritually. I fully believe that none of that is real. But that's not entirely accurate, it's absolutely real to some of us depending on the strength of our belief. It's all in our brains and I find that amazing and remarkable. I think of it as I found gods grace within me and it didn't require belief in anything but myself. It's within us all because at the core of each of us is a beautiful person full of joy and wonder and hope. It's the world and it's experiences that drags us all into the dark and keeps us from seeing the light within our selves.

So yea. I worship at the altar of self now. All of this made me a true believer in each of us. I went my entire life without even knowing about half of it. Even the fact that that is possible is amazing. Now that I've found myself it's even more amazing. Humanity is so beautiful and so ridiculously complex and we have our brains to thank for all of it.

I'm about to go down the somatic path to try to strengthen this connection. Any suggestions on good books? I really love that you are believing in yourself. That's some really good shit. You fucking rock man!

I don't mind whatsoever. Here is a decent overview I wrote. The two links in it are how I've interpreted the schema I'm using along with the ketamine sessions that instilled the belief in me on such a ridiculously deep level.

I've been really disconnected from my emotions due to CPTSD. I recently reconnected and man this is so true. There's a whole subtle world based on emotions out there that I've never been able to truly see and understand. I never even knew that because this missing piece was not an actual part of my reality since I was a kid. It's been an absolutely wild experience.

It's exactly what I'm learning through my CPTSD therapy and ketamine sessions too just worded differently.

This message was brought to you by Alpha Stim.

If everyone is on their phones I seriously doubt there would be an uproar if you whipped out a book.