(no subject)

Once again, I am inspired by star trek. Ok not really, but I like to point out time and time again what a dorky geekmeister I am. Voyager, the Gilligan's island of star treks, was the one rest break I had yesterday. It was an episode where Kim wakes up in an alternate timeline - one that was arguably much more favorable to his situation. I put myself in his place, and imagined the traitor in the Matrix...and noted that my current reality is pretty damn good. Which takes me to me.

Well publicized fact is that my favorite fantasy is "what if I could have all of my knowledge and personality (me) stuffed back into my own head as a child." It's sort of a bizarre what if I could do it all again, what would I do different scenario, only with amazing stock-picking ability. I spend a lot of mental time on this idea, more than you realize.

On the way to bar-prep class I gave myself a pep talk - sure this is going to be a tough 8 weeks (I was checking the course plan vs. my calendar) but I can do this, and I can pass, and once I do...and I thought about all the things I'll be able to do with my newfoundtime. It was a real fantasy about something that can be reasonably expected to occur - it was based on past experience and reasonable extrapolation to predictable future events. Imagine that - just like the daily fantasy, only based in the real world.

Then I had a eureka moment - I am against god/religion as a waste of time because it is not supported by tangible data. I was being inconsistent - I wouldn't waste time on god/religion because I lack any experience or knowledge of valid data that supported it, but I also had even less reason to believe my 'self' would suddenly pop back into my brain at 5/10/15. At least people have been faking and hallucinating god for ions - what was my excuse? I was actually ignoring data and wasting time with my little fantasy. One hell of an inconsistency! Perhaps I shouldn't reject religion - after all, I had mental time for something even less likely to exist.

Why would I pursue my fantasy in lieu of the data about god/religion? The answer was glaringly obvious - my fantasy was highly beneficial to me, while the converse ranged from a random to outright arbitrarily evil god who punishes people for the biology he cursed them with, who allows the wicked to flourish and the innocent to suffer, and is otherwise a real dick, or we don't understand him and he just appears mean, or his message is distorted by his evil followers and false prophets... God got lucky this time - I will not be researching him only to bother him with all my complaints.

Following the data-is-reality construct, I realized that between geology, astronomy, chemistry, physics, and my friend probability - alien life is a far more likely reality than god. While the data on aliens themselves is scant - there is plenty of reason to consider them a statistical probability. Aliens > god/religion. That was a relief (for both me and god).

I know this sounds crazy, and may well be, but I released myself just now. I have a sad friend who I gave one of my few pieces of self-therapy advice: fight emotions with logic. Acknowledge, experience, feel, and deal with your emotions - but don't let them move your logical mind. If you find yourself, for instance - riddled with guilt over things you did, or should have done, decades ago - lessons long since learned and adopted into your actions today, there is no logical reason to keep replaying your worst horrors over and over in your mind, making you physically wince with pain. There is no reason to imagine what "life could have been like if." We all have those thoughts, but you must not let them consume you. So when you find yourself in spirals of negative thought patterns, and they repeat without resolution or growth, replace them with your conscious logical thought. Feel the emotions and don't try to control them (well unless you're at work or other priorities are pressing), but make your mind, your rational mind, remain rational. You can be sad, but you can't declare yourself a loser or look or every less-than-perfect thing in your life to justify why you feel sad. You must remain objective and rational, and if you have reasons to be sad then find ways to grow and fix them. If you don't have reasons to be sad, the sad will dissipate on its own eventually.

That's the therapy. Talk to your emotions - argue with them. Don't beat them down - if they have reason to be, rational reasons, work with them and address the issues they raise. However, if they are causing you to lose your objectivity, being happy or sad without adequate reason, then you need to point them to reality. This takes many conversations, over and over, for they are emotions. They do not argue rationally, but like a stamping-seven-year-old, even they will eventually succumb to your conscious mind's unarguable truths.

That's easier advice to a miserable person. My thought pattern is a happy daydream from someone who is already pretty happy with their life. I'm satisfied - I am happy with what I have. Sure I'd like more, but this is pretty damn good as-is and shows predictable improvement over measurable time. Still, despite that, I've spent hours thinking "what if." I have just released myself from "what if," and will be replacing it with "when, and specifically what?" I'm going to take my own advice, and turn off that pattern of thought because it is not logical. When it pops up, and it will, I will quickly counter with reality. Now I have several likely scenarios that make more sense to play - 2 months from now, what will life be like? A to-do list will be my new daily fantasy.

The heart guides the mind, but the mind must rule the heart.