theandresanchez

Why would you want to avoid waking up in sleep paralysis?

I find the idea of becoming irrationally optimistic (delusional) terrifying. If the goal of mental health professionals is to induce delusion, that's kind of... insane. Is it not?

lol, thanks.

I think your use of the past tense is unwarranted. You have in fact offered advice by way of relating experiences and asking rhetorical questions, or at least I assume that was an attempt to help. If it was not, I don't know how to interpret what you wrote or why you wrote it. Are you just bored and toying with me?

No. I have limited financial resources. This issue (finances) takes most of my attention as without resources I have limited treatment options. There are also other issues that I have to deal with. The psychiatrist is already a stretch. There is a vicious cycle with the depression, I know. I have to make a judgement of what is more likely to help: this doctor, that doctor, or using the resources, when I have them, to perform my own, self-treatment? My experience with doctors so far has not been positive, though the psychiatrist seems to be a reasonable man. Can you tell me how cognitive-behavioral therapy deals with death anxiety? I know some people who do this type of therapy and while they may be better off than they would otherwise be (I have no way of knowing), they are far from well.

You are making the assumption that my "mouthing off" happens previous the listening and analyzing. I take the suggestions quite seriously. But I have heard, and TRIED these all before, with the exception of the drug route, because I always thought the problem could not be biological in nature. Yet I'm going to a doctor because I haven't found an alternative solution, and maybe I'm wrong about that, so I might as well check. I'm not retarded. I don't need others to tell me "If you are feeling down, go watch a comedy". Yes, it helps, as you have suggested, to pursue a "passion", or excitement, but I have found no way to sustain this. I will enter a manic state (at best) for a short while but then I crash into a deep sense of futility, despair, loss, fear. I have gone through this cycle many, many times. There might be a psychotherapist that is useful to me, but I have studied WHAT they do, so I doubt it. I have studied Branden and countless other perspectives and models. I have patiently listened to complete nutjobs until coming to the conclusion that they were just leading me around in circles, because until I understood what they were saying, I did not know that this was the case. The problem is not that I'm ignoring your advice in order to hold on to the way I'm doing things, the problem is that your advice is not in any sense new to me. I have followed it. It IS the way I did (and in many ways, still do) things. It has not worked for me. Do not assume that you can psychoanalyze me from your limited perspective of a few posts on a forum. The only times I have left depression is when I have felt fundamentally safe in the universe, when I have felt competent to live, to enjoy life. Not competent to move along through life "doing the best I can until I finally die", but to actually live a joyful life. Not necessarily in the immediate moment, but as something that was open to me. This was produced by a "religious" experience of creating what people call a "personal relationship with God" (no, I don't mean in the christian sense). The problem is that looking back, it seems that perspective was an illusion and that my fundamental nature in the universe is of insecurity and powerlessness. I have sought to find a way out of this without self-delusion, without trying to rationalize things. If you cannot help me find this way, your words have no value to me. I do not find them entertaining. How would you know that I have opened up? How do you make this distinction between "my bullshit" and "real openness"?

Yes.

Why are you under the impression that I am not aware of this? You are mistaken.

It is bizarre to ask if others have insight, understanding, that is of value to me when I am faced with a problem that causes me great suffering and which I have been unable to resolve? Are you proposing that the proper course of action is to ask for pity instead?

My what?

Anyone?

Yes, computers are tools. This thread is turning into a "debate" and not helping me figure out what to actually do. If nothing of value gets added to it in the next couple of days, I'll stop checking for replies. Please help, if you can.

All that there is, is physical nature. There is nothing else. Ba'al Chatzaf That is a tautology.

Unfortunately, I think Jeff is right on the money here. The "self-deception" also explains why religion has survived for as long as it has. Some people have seen the bankruptcy of religion and have tried other things--Landmark Education, The Secret, and other baloney. http://www.viewzone.com/TMT.html For a deeper understanding of this process applied, see 1984.

Chris, can you recommend a better place I could go to for help? To be clear, I'm not interested in having a pity party, I would rather people be rude and helpful than nice and useless. Sometimes it is better to hear someone say "you're fat, ugly and stupid" and be shocked out of that life than to hear "you're perfect just the way you are" and remain in it.

Just to be clear, I do not dismiss hedonism out of hand. That I'm identifying this way of thinking as hedonism does not mean I reject it. Rand explicitly rejected hedonism, but due to her own cognitive dissonance, implicitly accepted it. She just had a relatively long range view of hedonism, just as the philosophers from which the term came to us did. I can tell you of things I enjoy. I enjoy beautiful women. I enjoy the morning sun. I enjoy iCarly. I enjoy being productive. I have been working (to the degree that I can overcome depression) on a system for the learning of absolute pitch. I enjoy the idea that this is (as far as I can tell) possible.

There is no such thing as a degree of existence. What you are describing is precisely the hedonistic credo, which states that we should live life "to the fullest", the standard of "fullness" being pleasure versus pain or apathy. Am I mistaken? If yes, how?

It is falsified by the current state of the universe. The second law of thermodynamics is the identification of a pattern which exists within a specific context. This pattern is a fact of nature. The wider extrapolation you are making is not.

The most significant experience I've had of this is when I stayed awake for most of three days, with only a short nap or two. Strangely, I felt less tired at the end of day 3 than at the end of day 1. It helped that I was very excited about things that I was looking into. When I finally went to sleep, I ended up waking up in sleep paralysis. While my mind was fully awake, I could not move the body. I had been studying lucid dreaming before, so I tried to "separate from the body", but I could not move my phantom limbs very far away from the bed and got frustrated, so I relaxed, stopped struggling, and immediately my body was de-paralysed. There were no visual or auditory sensations. I should try this again.

It would be a mistake to believe that I am obsessed with Rand's writings. Her books and articles only compose 99% of my reading material. See, I have a sense of humour. I haven't read any of her books in years, except for re-reading Philosophy Who Needs It a couple of weeks ago. Rand is very insightful, but she did not understand everything. I did not come here to discuss objectivism, I came here to discuss a personal problem. I have tried discussing this problem with other people before, people who wouldn't even recognize the name "Ayn Rand", but they were not helpful, so I thought I would try this, since Rand's philosophy is premised on the choice to live, not acceptance of death. Why?

You are confusing your model of reality with the actual thing. The actual reality invalidates this hypothesis. The second law of thermodynamics exists within a context which you are ignoring. That may be, but embracing death as inevitable leads to one of two options: hedonism or apathy.

Objectivist ethics does not require living beings to be infalible in the maintenance of life, it merely requires them to choose, when the choice is open, life over death. The problem here is that you seem to think this is a range of the moment thing, "do I choose to live for another 15 minutes or not?". It is not, and certainly not in humans. Existence is a pre-condition for continued existence, and as such, the "short term" cannot be ignored. The human being suffering from a so-called "terminal illness" must choose to live day by day, because that is a pre-condition for his long term survival, not because he earns points in the game of life for having lived a few more days, or having experienced more pleasure during those days, or whatever. He cannot make the choice to live once he is dead. The alternative is range of the moment hedonism, because it means man is divorced from past and future. You are stuck in a game mentality. This is a classic psychological process of death (awareness) evasion known as "Terror Management". It is a process which Rand herself struggled with and which is a fundamental part of the human psyche, so I'm not going to pound at you for this. You can choose to be aware of this, or you can choose to evade it. The unspoken truth is that Rand did not regard life as such to be the primary value, but freedom, which means the capacity to choose. Values do not depend on life in the sense of the capacity to exist and have experience, they depend on the capacity to choose between alternatives, to act as opposed to reacting. Planets have a conditional existence, but they have no choice in the matter. It is only within this context that values exist, and thus ethics is possible. Life is simply the primary requirement of this. Ethics is the study of a being's field of choice, and objectivism identifies the things (principles) that expand, sustain, or contract this field, particularly with regards to the human identity, in a long range context.

Tell me more.

I know what Andre is, but my lip is zipped. --Brant What am I? Don't worry about your lips, you can type the answer.

No, he does not. Rand explicitly rejected hedonism, yet this is the premise of YOUR post, which is what I was addressing. That values exist outside of the context of survival. There is no objectivist ethics without survival. There is no objectivist aesthethics without survival. There is still objectivist philosophy as such, but it is of no value to man. If you hold death as an absolute, you cannot be an objectivist. A lot. Why?