Insanity E-Book

Ari Airio

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 109

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Is God Swedish? Is Santa a better person than Hitler? Who gave us gonorrhea and what is the meaning of life?

Leseprobe

Dedicated to all the brilliant people who are promoting reasonable and civilized conversation in the world.

I was gradually coming back to reality when I realized that all this is only happening inside our heads. There are some things happening out there also, and in the heads of the others as well, but our perception of those things is severely delusional. Someone else could see pink as black and hear all the sounds completely different than us, but if all the time the same way, we could never understand how fundamentally different our experiences of the world were. Even our own experience varies over time and in different situations; our favorite music and food usually changes with age and the same face might in different states of mind look either appealing or repulsive to us, same make-up either stylish or grotesque. Some animals see infra-red light, use echolocation and sense the earth’s magnetic field or other animals´ electric fields. Their experience differs so fundamentally from ours that we can´t even begin to understand it. And even if we forget the limits of our senses and how they are constantly deceiving us, we are still prisoners of language; how differently we may understand the value and meaning of things. And it´s not even a matter of taste but rather the illusion that our brain creates of the world. In our own reality we all have great taste and reasonable opinions.

Different levels of consciousness are like layers of lenses through which our worldview reflects. Deeper levels are limiting the way we can see things on the more superficial levels and the more conflict there is between different layers, the more unclear the image gets. That image starts forming already before our birth and the things that affect us the most are the things that happen to us when we are so young that we can´t really understand them, process them intellectually, or even remember them afterwards. They affect straight to the core that we can´t really get our hands on later in life and everything else is built around it. And since we can´t get our hands on in, we experience it as ourselves. But our personalities only exist as our reactions to our surroundings, there is no us unrelated to everything else. Every moment we react to our environment based on our earlier experiences and we stack new layers, through which we see the world and ourselves, on that core. That is why we might react to our environment in a completely different way than someone else despite growing up in similar circumstances; the way we react to things that are happening to us is way more important than the actual things themselves. And the way we react to them is based on our state of mind, which depends on the previous thing that happened to us, as well as on our reactions to everything else that has ever happened to us.

The deeper the layer which we form delusional opinions on, the harder it is to later change them, because we have been building on them so much beliefs that would just crumble if we would admit that the base assumptions behind them were wrong. Hence a relatively small incident could at its worst distort all our experiences afterwards and grow into enormous proportions. Our most powerful experiences and the feelings related to them sink so deep into our subconscious that whenever they rise back to the surface, they take us, in both good and bad, back to the same state we were in when they were born. This is how passions, traumas and obsessions are born, and everything that we can´t handle emotionally and process intellectually, becomes part of our personality. Every once in a while, some kind of strong experience, like falling in love or the death of a loved one, is able to penetrate those deeper layers and fundamentally changes our perspective on life. But usually those beliefs are not in our conscious mind, or at least we are not questioning them in any way. They are the absolute truths that any reasonable person should understand, even though we can´t necessarily rationalize them in any way. They can be tied to so strong emotions, that we rather die than face and question them, and even trying can cause panic attacks, dissociation, psychosis and crippling depression, or all of those in different combinations.

Opinions are just thoughts tied to emotions. Generalizations lead from generalizations. That´s why our brain stops us from thinking too much or too unpleasant thoughts and keeps up a little optimistic illusion about ourselves and the world, so we would keep on trying and living and trying to live, and foremost passing on our genes. Our selfish genes who are willing to sacrifice us, as long as they can keep on living with the next generation. Most of the time we are on the level of consciousness that differs very little from other animals, and we don´t necessarily leave that level even once in our whole lifetime. On that level there is mainly happening the observation of the end results of different thought processes but not too much anything that could be called actual thinking. We see things from our own perspective and interpret the world in a way that fits into our previous assumptions of it, our thinking is serving our will instead of being able to truly question it. What we think of as ourselves is however just a collection of different conditioned reactions, behavior patterns and prejudices, deep down we are all just big babies experiencing fear or love. If we are able to, even momentarily, free ourselves from everything that we think we are and what we believe in, we can create ourselves endlessly again and little by little get closer to true freedom. The final step of evolution is not biological but spiritual.

Deeper levels of consciousness demand the ability to withstand extreme emotions and drastically different states of mind, but they are not just different emotional states. We can experience the same emotions on all levels on consciousness, but the higher levels also include the kind of freedom of thought that can be extremely difficult to handle. When we go to a deeper level, all the options on the more superficial levels are freed as equal, since they no more have emotional meaning to us. We can put pineapple on pizza if we may, gays can get married and it´s allowed to wear socks with sandals. None of those things really matter compared to the fact that all our loved ones are one day going to die, as are we all. Someone might, although, kill their offspring rather than let them marry the wrong person, and honor killings are a prime example of how mental health problems are passed on through religion and culture.

In the deeper levels of consciousness, we see how our opinions and wants are formed for the more superficial levels; we kind of get to take a peek into our subconscious. Because there are more options and less made-up truths, we also get more complete misses. If we go deep enough, we might forget things like gravity, direction of time, existence of different languages, who we are and other limiting factors that usually rule out some options. Our logic functions like in a dream-like state and we return to the same level of imagination that we had as a child, yet we still possess all the information that we have of the world and we try to rearrange our worldview again based on that information. If we are not aware of our condition and just hold on to the first thing that comes to mind, we might think that we are Santa Claus or Napoleon or that we are able to read minds, at least we forget so many norms of behavior and everyday routines that we seem to have completely lost our minds. The downside of going insane is that it makes it really difficult to act rationally. Pure genius is total insanity.

When we encounter enough things that are in conflict with our fundamental beliefs, we start getting conflicting signals from the levels where those beliefs are located and the harder we hang on to those beliefs, the bigger the conflicts get and the stronger symptoms they bring about. We understand things on the superficial level but on the deeper level we are unable to let go. Or we hang on to something that we deep down already know not to be true. Those conflicts between the different levels of consciousness are the taproot of our problems and we are going to have to face them sooner or later, whether we are willing or not. Usually not, a terrifyingly large proportion of us would rather give themselves electric shocks than sit quietly for 15 minutes with just their own thoughts.

If we hang on for too long to something that we already deep down know to be false, and there are plenty of those since our subconscious is constantly rearranging things, we have to constantly lie to ourselves more and more. Just like when we tell a little white lie and are forced to cover it up with new lies that get more and more ridiculous. The bigger that inner lie gets to grow, the stronger feelings are tied to it and when it finally breaks up to the surface, we are forced into a level of consciousness where we are unable to understand reality anymore. All the possible and impossible possibilities feel equally plausible and we just pick one that we desperately cling on to. At the same time our brain might also rearrange the way we interpret our sensory input and we can see, hear and feel things that other people can´t. But inside our heads, where everything is happening anyway, those things are completely real.

Too accurate perception of the reality is not too good either. If we understand more than we can handle, we get stuck on a level where we are constantly aware of the injustice of the world, our own mortality and the meaninglessness of it all. Suicide is said to be the only purely rational act and pure rationality should literally be avoided like our life depended on it. Happiness in intelligent people is however not the rarest thing in the world because intelligence makes us unhappy but because unhappiness makes us intelligent. Depression in moderate doses is a perfectly natural and useful part of our lives that helps us to grow. When the egocentric worldview becomes unbearable, it forces us to look at things from a broader spectrum. In essence, depression is narcissistic despair, the inability to accept that the world is not the way we want it to be. Yet depression is not caused by us being selfish, but usually quite on the contrary. Being unselfish makes it even harder to bare the cruelty and injustice of the world and our inner conflicts may lie so deep within ourselves that they are almost impossible to reach, since we are not just suffering for ourselves but for the whole world as well. And because we see only the negative side of things in that state, by trying to think ourselves out of depression, we just keep sinking deeper and deeper.

Incoherent signals between different levels on consciousness affect different neurotransmitters, through which they cause different kind of psychological and physiological symptoms and the magnitude of those symptoms is directly comparative with how much of our feelings we can handle. And on the other hand, some external factors such as malnutrition or overstraining affect those signals through neurotransmitters. And besides that, our diet affects our mental balance, our mental balance also affects what kind of diet is good for us, since our stomach and brain live in symbiosis.

Natural athleticism and superintelligence are an almost impossible combination because they both strain the same systems from different directions and demand contradicting qualities. Stress makes us sick and overstaining can even kill us through different illnesses. The deeper we go to our consciousness, the more we are also controlling our vital functions and if we realize something too far out of our capabilities to withstand, without going insane, our body starts a self-destruction mechanism because it can´t bare itself anymore. We don´t get sick because we are knowingly lazy, and we can´t kill ourselves by pure willpower. We don´t get depressed or manic because of the things that are in our conscious mind, but because of those that we cannot consciously handle. Understanding evolution and its meaning cost Darwin his physical health. The Will to Power cost Nietzsche also his mind.