There is absolutely no reason that the set of rules you learned first would be the actual set of rules that governs people.
As you have learned, being non-aggressive is not sufficient strategy to avoid others’ aggression.
There’s no reason to think it would be, except that it was in kindergarten when large authority giants would easily overpower any aggressor, and would by policy do so on behalf of the nonagressive ones.
Don’t confuse kindergarten rules for global culture. Huge mistake.
Actual culture evolved from nature, and in nature in order to protect yourself you must retaliate when attacked. Every organism has weapons. Every organism.
Meditate on that. Why would every organism use some of its previous energy budget building weapons? Why would evolution select for that 100% of the time?
The polarity of evil has flipped so far that you can’t escape. Now anything good Musk does becomes bad in your view. Musk switches the polarity of the thing, rather than the other way around.
Musk kisses a puppy, you unfortunately must now hate puppies. Such a strong statement.
But they don’t treat the depression by simply forcing consciousness upward through the emotional landscape. They facilitate a restructuring of conceptual maps and perceptions, and lots of this is in relation to the world and to others.
The fact that psychedelics can do this, but only tend to when they produce this big restructuring, means it’s the restructuring that does it.
And the happiness often is associated with an improved relationship with the world, an improved approach to life.
I know the relief comes before the new approach manifests, but that doesn’t mean the relief comes before the mental identification and exploration of that new approach.
The person’s karma changes before it manifests into their life. Like, even though you couldn’t measure it with a video camera, the new behavioral program’s been written. The new path has been seen.
So I think psychedelics just further indicate how non-arbitrary happiness is.
Like a person might be happier in their poverty and disease, but that doesn’t mean their life didn’t change. Their life changed because they changed — instead of snapping at their spouse they see it coming and stop to take a breath. That’s a little micro-change they got from seeing themselves and reorganizing their perceptions with psychedelics.
But when they go to family christmas they aren’t going to tell their father-in-law “I stopped snapping at her so much. I was doing it all the time and then I became conscious of it and I do it a lot less”.
That’s a change in the person’s life, which slips past our notice when we conceptualize “what were his circumstances? Did the mood change come from a change in circumstances or some chemical thing?”
If those are the only two categories, taking a heroic dose of shrooms to explore one’s depression and anxiety might seem like it falls under “some chemical thing” being the change that happened.
But if we allow more categories, it’s better to say he changed his karma. It may manifest later in a higher paying job or a new house, but for now it’s only manifest in a change of the amount of tension in the room between him and his wife.
Just because something doesn’t happen doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It’s like saying one can grow an orchid over six feet tall. One can get a PhD. One can bench their body weight.
Not that it happens all the time, but that it’s possible.
I’m only saying that it’s possible to resolve differences in “beliefs” using mutual presentation and examination of evidence.
Of course perception cannot be articulated, and can differ, and so may present unresplvable differences. But those differences can be reasoned about and recognized. A person is less touchy about their perceptions than about their values, so if you can prove to me something like “You tend to see 90 degree angles as acute”, I can (a) be thankful about that and (b) work around it.
It’s harder to do that with values. Values are built into a person like perceptions are, below articulated knowledge, but they’re also (by definition) too important to “work around” or “correct for”.
My brain’s been fried at times too man, from drugs, trauma, brain impacts, etc.
One time I had a mold problem in my apartment and didn’t know how to handle it and part of the problem was the mold itself was making it hard to function mentally and otherwise.
In that case, having a premium subscription to chatgpt helped. Meaning having access to GPT4 instead of what they had free at the time which was GPT3.
The LLM wrote me up a step by step plan for exactly how to determine if I had mold and then whom to email when and how and in what sequence to handle it.
It was really helpful.
If you can afford it, $20 to have a month’s access to talk to GPT4 or maybe Claude 3.7 might be a good idea.
If you can’t afford it, I can spot you a month of one of these. AI isn’t necessarily superhuman in terms of precise reasoning, but it’s already superhuman in terms of just being able to articulate knowledge about all sorts of crap.
Really useful when your brain’s recovering from being cooked or fucked up, too.
I guess that’s why they call them singers?