Detachment from Needs

If you're not meeting your needs, suppressing them won't make them go away.

What are some of my needs? Creativity, moral independence acting on my own principles having the choice to, need to understand how things work - to explain how things work. Need for truthfulness. Social interaction.

There's no promised future, that is an illusion. Everything and anything must be hunted by your own hunger for it.

Some problems have no solution. It is impossible to fit a square block into a round hole. Why do we demand that the problem we constructed must be solvable? When we can accept that the square has no intention to be in that round space, the problem evaporates.

The root of a problem requires intention. Total apathy implies problems cannot exist. If we do not expect anything of what happens, anything that happens is equally as acceptable as any other outcome.

But that is not life. Not caring is not the answer to our problems, because as beings with life we are inseparable from certain needs. Basic needs to physically survive, as well as behavioral and societal needs that allow our construct of reality and understanding to exist that enables us to filter our experiences and interact with the external environment in a more or less self-consistent, functional way.

It is not enough that we have physical sustenance through nutrients and local climate. Our brains need something to do. We need to act and have some affirmation of our actions to develop a behavior, a process that has some consistency to translate our intention into physical reality. Without brain activity, we would not be sentient beings, we would not be persons, just biological entities like an earthworm or a bacterium. The consequence of having a brain, is that we must use it. It is inseparable from our existence as persons.

We cannot let go of our needs. Those can be programmed at birth (as in basic normal functions common to all, as well as needs unique or to varying extents), or they can be acquired through early development and learning. Our needs can be directed or channeled to various activities, but without physically altering the neurological network of the brain, these needs cannot be willed away by one's own intention. It requires new experiences, memories, and brain development to mollify or augment acquired needs. In other words, if we want to adopt new perceptions and beliefs, then reality has to some how match our thoughts sufficiently to override or supplement the experiences and memories that we had been acting on up to that point. It is not enough to accept emotions in a vacuum, an opinion does not sway belief in the absence of experience.

No rational argument or explanation can instill opinion. It must be experienced to be convincing. You cannot give a rational argument that "I love you" or that "I care". It must be felt. It must be experienced. "I spent X dollars on this gift for you therefore I love you" does not make an effect on its own logic. "I spent time this holiday with you, therefore it means I care about you" is likewise flawed. It's trying to bottle an unquantifiable experience of reality into facts and figures.

The grounds for behavior must not be solely logical in natural, but emotional, remembered, backed by the reality of experience. Reality of experience is a powerful shaper of belief. It says that no matter what anyone is now, or was before, or any principle idea or theory can state otherwise, nobody can disprove that this thing happened. No matter how you want to interpret it or rationalize it, the reality is its own validation of truth. Nobody can prove me wrong that I experienced it. We may argue endlessly without any progress on what it "means", how we can fit it into our own models of perception of what reality is and how it works. But it is an Elephant in the room that no denial or guile deception grace social dexterity can obscure. It happened. Nuff said.

Loss of credibility is the primary attack of reality of experience. We say someone is crazy, their perceptions are distorted, their experience of it is inaccurate. We can no longer trust their judgment on anything.

That is one of the most condescending, hypocritical, self-serving mistreatments one person can make on another. Not only do we discredit their beliefs and behavior, we are invalidating their capacity to be a person rather than a biological mass of living tissue.

We are saying we in a more accurate position to experience reality, our experiences are valid while yours are not. We are persons, you are merely uncollected, confused bundle of nerves and impulses. While we are directed, well-tuned and masters of reality. It's bullshit. It's biased. It's a blatant exposition of one's self-serving interest rather than the objective, qualified assessment it claims to be when you put yourself above another in human experience.

Who is more qualified to experience reality than any other? I drink finer champagne and I have power over more people than you, therefore when we breathe the same air it is far more exquisite and precise sensation that I experience? I smoke better cigarettes than you, so I understand love a little more deeply? When I die, the collection of my experiences will be shelved in the memories of the universe a little higher than yours in having true understanding?

The distinction that might be a saving grace is that the past is in the past. Our personal history. There's no denying our memories or how we are to behave when we are certain situations. But there is a way we can liberate ourselves from the entire past leading up to our current situation. If we don't bring all the events leading up to this point into the discussion. But just look at the place we are in now. We don't have to hold on to all the implications that the past brings upon our present behavior.

If I keep thinking in terms of all the mistakes and unfulfilled promises that brought me to this point, I will always have to behave according to that entire sequence of events. If I isolate the present and think only in terms of where I stand now and what lies open before me, there is no need for guilt or recompense. Like a gambler who's $2 mil in the hole, will be burdened still when he wins $1 mil. But someone with no past gambling, is levitated by the same winnings.

At some point we need to realign our minds with the present. Leave the memories and behaviors as they are, not spend every waking moment trying to correct or erase them, because those past behaviors were and still are "correct" to what happened in the context of the past. There's nothing wrong with them. They belong in the past, behaviors that don't apply to the current situation so they can be shelved and stored while not in use. We have to behave like Markov Chains where we are influenced by our current situation and not how we arrived in it. It's not that we must purge our memory of our past, or that Markov Chains are truly "memoryless". It's just that in the Markov process only events in the present are active choices, prior events are inactive, and that model of what happens is useful to represent reality in many situations.

Undergo a spiritual death. Let who we were rest in peace. We are reborn without the circumstances that led to our demise. It's not about actively blocking our problems and suppressing. It's about letting go of attachments like in the Buddhist sense to our past situation.