theandresanchez

A couple months after posting this I actually had experienced a visual sensation. It was a flash of light just inside my peripheral vision. Hasn't happened since. I try to avoid waking up in sleep paralysis by sleeping on my side or stomach.

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

The "normal" emotional state for human beings is irrationally optimistic - life is a "Comedy to those who think and a tragedy for those who feel", and so on. There is no reason we should enjoy life in a world which is so full of ugliness and injustice, or plan for a future which may not come, but evolution ensures that we do - and probably did even back when everyone's life really was"nasty, brutish and short.

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?

I'm starting to feel like the local OL drug pusher, sidling up to you under the disapproving eyes of the neighbours.

lol, thanks.

I used to do a butt load of it.

It's called know-it-all mouthing off.

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?

Your prior post (“Please help, if you can”) amounts to a cavalier negation of all the help that has been offered you to this point...

No.

You have obviously not been treated by a qualified cognitive-behavioral therapist, so I seriously question whether you really want help.

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.

When a person asks for help getting out of deep mental pain, it has to start with the humility of knowing that what he has been doing so far ain't resolving it. The best he has been able to do is ease it for short stretches. So when someone offers a suggestion, he either listens and analyzes--or decides he knows better and mouths off.

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.

If Andre really opens up, I'm more than here (as are many here on OL--witness this thread). But I'm only here for him, not for his bullshit.

How would you know that I have opened up? How do you make this distinction between "my bullshit" and "real openness"?

So Andre, are you taking the meds you were prescribed?

Yes.

We ain't causing your pain (which I believe is real).

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

I believe you are seeking to blame this on something outside yourself and we are merely the fresh meat in that game.

You are mistaken.

In psychology, we call this "secondary gain."

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?

But his mind games and arrogant presumptions with people who try to be nice to him--which to me signal nothing more than a cry for attention and the wish to scratch a neurotic itch at the expense of others--are as thick as molasses.

My what?

Anyone?

And in case anyone should suffer the illusion that following a thread like this one is likely to help without taking further action:

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.

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.

All that there is, is physical nature. There is nothing else.

Ba'al Chatzaf

That is a tautology.

You are on to something when you write that the standard cure for depression appears to be a kind of self-deception.

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.

People like you are the reason why I was disappointed that Andre came here looking for help.

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.

Well, you can say that kind of stuff, and be confident, but let's look at one fact--you are depressed, and you called in the Big Dogs for some help, right? So, whatever you are doing, thinking, however confident you are in your assumptions, your shit is not working. If it was, you would not be depressed--you would be joyous, which, by-the-way, is an appropriate condition for human living. You are, at the least, portraying misery. Consider your actions, consider your happiness level. All I get from your writing is various forms of logical/philosophical arguments, punctuated by a general tone of misery. Never once have you said anything about what you do, or enjoy. That means that your shit isn't working, and you could find something different. You are hanging on to something that is, apparently, dragging your miserable, sorry ass down.

So, you can have that. I have pretty hard skin to read that stuff, and I will help when I can, but eventually I will pull away because I can't stand the fucking drag, drafting. You are very close to becoming an energy vampire.

Man up. Choose who you want to be; either a miserable bastard, or maybe a person that loves waking up every morning.

rde

Good Luck On Your Mission!

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.

Wow, that has to go into textbooks as the perfect False Dichotomy.

Caught between non-existence and non-existence, we exist.

How completely, is up to us, don't you think?

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?

The second law of thermodynamics has been more thoroughly tested than any other physical law. It has never been falsified in nearly two hundred years of testing. It is a fact of nature. The reality is that the Cosmos is wearing out. It will become thinner, cooler and eventually no more stars will shine. Life will not go on forever in this cosmos.

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.

(through megaphone): "Sir, put down the Rand books, and no one will get hurt. Exit the reading room with your hands interlaced on top of your head."

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.

And as far as your comments about terminally ill patients, that just flat out made me want to bitch-slap you, because, well, even if you have up-close knowledge of such, that would make you even more clueless. Are you suffering from a terminal illness? If so, that would be a different thing, and I apologize. I know one of the strongest, venerable terminally ill men on the planet, and he would either tweak your nose or just start laughing at what you wrote.

Why?

I am not sure what you mean by holding death as an absolute. Death is a fact. We are all going to die. Why? The second law of thermodynamics holds. All organized energy exchange systems will eventually become disordered and they will dissipate. Entropy increases with time. Everything eventually wears out and falls apart. High grade energy does its thing and becomes attenuated energy incapable of doing physical work. This is just the way things are.

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.

Even so, there is no reason not to live, while living is physically possible.

That may be, but embracing death as inevitable leads to one of two options: hedonism or apathy.

On the cognitive part, you make too many presumptions based on too little observation (at least in your posts). For instance, your understanding of the law of identity seems to be premised on speculation and deduction from abstractions of what you imagine should be, not premised on observation.

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.

You're stuck.

--Brant

Tell me more.

Andre,

Brant's got a great point.

What do you know about Objectivism?

You sound like you don't know anything about it.

Michael

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.

Andre,

Brant's got a great point.

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.

What do you know about Objectivism?

A lot.

You sound like you don't know anything about it.

Why?