"Encouragement"

Maybe it's time to take a step back. Go and do something else, let stuff follow along in time. If you aren't getting anywhere now do something else and come back to it later.

Maybe it's time to take a step back. Go and do something else, let stuff follow along in time. If you aren't getting anywhere now do something else and come back to it later.

More than likely, I've already had to do that with the physical training since early this year if not late last year, can't quite remember. I only train now whenever my energy happens to run really high on its own and overflow a bit, usually trickling out of my palms, so I go "well might as well do something with it" and practice stuff until I use up enough that the pressure goes down. I have noticed as I've worked through more and more emotional stuff that those impromptu sessions have gotten smoother and smoother. As in, the energy just behaves better even though it still refuses to properly condense. Though it's getting closer to that. too.

My extrapolations of what my mental state will be like and how it'll feel once I'm able to figure this stuff out and thus no longer have any internal conflicts seems like it would allow things to finally connect. But yeah I think for a bit I should stop working on the logical training too. I've tried to busy myself with other things since stopping the physical training like attempting some fiction writing and programming, though I really can't bring myself to care about it so it largely goes nowhere. Not really sure what to do about the logic stuff though. But I'll figure something out, I always do.

[Laird]

It’s true that no matter how much power you have, you never have any at all.

Do you mean this in the sense that power is relative, and that in a reality which is infinite - at least effectively if not actually - there will always be somebody who has such a vastly greater amount of power than you that your power, no matter how vast itself, will effectively be zero?

Or am I misunderstanding?

I've tried to busy myself with other things since stopping the physical training like attempting some fiction writing and programming, though I really can't bring myself to care about it so it largely goes nowhere.

What sort of programming projects have you been working on (or would be, if you could bring yourself to care)?

Do you mean this in the sense that power is relative, and that in a reality which is infinite - at least effectively if not actually - there will always be somebody who has such a vastly greater amount of power than you that your power, no matter how vast itself, will effectively be zero?

Or am I misunderstanding?

Yes power is relative, yes in an infinite reality there will always be something better than you, but no that it's necessarily another person. It's more general than that. It could be a group of people, it could be environmental factors, etc. Some people might disagree with me on that, that once you hit a certain exponential curve the chance of running into something that is that far beyond your capabilities is effectively zero,

But I tend to consider it still true because you're never going to be alone in whatever power you have no matter how great it might seem. There will always be an infinity of others that came before you and who will come after, you're always right in the middle. so at no point are you functionally omnipotent in the grand scheme of things. At most you might just run into things at or above your level less often. But even that's unlikely to be true given what I've experienced is basically as you get better people on that next higher tier start taking notice of you because you've become relevant to them. but people far, far above don't really care and probably don't know you exist, and likewise for people far, far below for similar reasons. Though its a lot more likely that those people could see you as relevant assuming you've made yourself relevant.

So I guess its not so much that you might run into something that makes whatever you have effectively meaningless, but that you'll never truly rise above 50/50 odds of success assuming you are forced into conflict which isn't guaranteed. Which is another factor that others might point out as to why my view of power doesn't make sense. After a certain point you legitimately don't need anything external anymore, you can provide all that yourself, so why would you care about attaining wealth or resources or etc? Granted there's also the perceptual issue, someone might technically be able to produce all tehse physical things themselves but for whatever reason feel like they can't or that its somehow to the right thing or otherwise that they still depend on the external world for something even when its all in their mind. Or that there's external limitations that don't really exist tht hold them back even though that's not true.

So the only reasons left to bother with the external world after awhile is over petty philosophical difference, because you're a dick, you really like helping people, or something else.

I suspect the path to integration lies in there somewhere, since I recognize that you do sort of have diminishing statistical odds of bad things happening even if technically it never reaches zero. At least that's how I think it should go and arguably have experienced though I guess that's debatable. It's definitely something I'll have to think about more.

What sort of programming projects have you been working on (or would be, if you could bring yourself to care)?

My main project right now isn't a programming one, its a book. But the programming projects I'm working on boil down to a game logic engine that I'm slowly building up by coding simple games, taking their parts and rewriting theme for the engine, then recoding the same game using the engine's snap together template mixin parts to show what it can make. At least that's what I'm working towards, I haven't completed the game stage yet let alone converted all its bits into generic template mixins with an interface to plop them together. But it does inch along.

I find I'm, probably subconsciously, steering clear of anything that could be legitimately helpful in the world. I don't consider games or stories helpful, they're just escapism. And though its true you can legitimately learn things from them that really can teach you a real skill or influence your worldview, etc, its not guaranteed. Nonetheless I just don't want to work on things like the CJDNS or IPFS/IPNS protocols even though those things would do far more to help people than a game engine. Let alone any of the ideas I've had for cryptocurrency adoption, like point of sale systems.  Those are things I think are cool ,and think I arguably should work on if I care to help, but I don't, so I write a fantasy adventure story and code a modified Pokemon clone.

The biggest thing with these is I do them but I really don't care if I complete them or not so there's not much pressure. I'm only doing things I enjoy because there's no reason to do anything else, and if I'm just not feeling like putting in multiple hours for something, I don't.

[Laird]

Some people might disagree with me on that, that once you hit a certain exponential curve the chance of running into something that is that far beyond your capabilities is effectively zero,

Right. That's the sort of thing I'd raise as a possibility. If this universe isn't infinite, then there is a most powerful being in it. And even if the universe is infinite, then there still might be a most powerful being (as opposed to an infinite sequence of increasingly, ever-more powerful beings).

Presumably, in that scenario, as you increased your power towards that most powerful being, there would be fewer and fewer other beings at the same level of power, as you say. However...

There will always be an infinity of others that came before you and who will come after, you're always right in the middle. so at no point are you functionally omnipotent in the grand scheme of things.

...does the goal even need to be functional omnipotence? Isn't it possible that there are others (both more and less powerful) who are allies or who at least share your goals? While life on this planet is hard in many ways, it could be a whole lot worse - so clearly the overall power balance in the world isn't (at least for now) dramatically shifted towards evil. Couldn't increasing your power at least in this world allow you to contribute even more to the good side of the power balance, without needing to achieve total omnipotence?

what I've experienced is basically as you get better people on that next higher tier start taking notice of you because you've become relevant to them. but people far, far above don't really care and probably don't know you exist, and likewise for people far, far below for similar reasons.

OK. Fair point, given that that's your experience. Kind of like humans and ants, I guess.

If so: does that mean that it's no use for one ant to enhance its power compared to another ant? Though an ant's not going to be able to challenge a human, nor in most cases even enter a human's awareness, can't it still improve its chances of winning a fight against an invading ant from another colony? And isn't that enough? Yes, it might get unlucky and get washed down the drain by a human while it's foraging for food, but there's not much it can do about that - it can do something about challenges at its own level.

Or do you think that the power levels aren't so discrete as "human versus ant", and that it's more of a continuum?

So I guess its not so much that you might run into something that makes whatever you have effectively meaningless, but that you'll never truly rise above 50/50 odds of success assuming you are forced into conflict which isn't guaranteed.

What about Mike Tyson? Do you think his odds of success in a fight were never truly above 50/50? An open question, not a rhetorical one - I'm still trying to understand your view.

My main project right now isn't a programming one, its a book.

You'd make a good author, even if all you wrote about was your real-life (/dream/immersion) experiences.

But the programming projects I'm working on boil down to a game logic engine that I'm slowly building up by coding simple games, taking their parts and rewriting theme for the engine, then recoding the same game using the engine's snap together template mixin parts to show what it can make. At least that's what I'm working towards, I haven't completed the game stage yet let alone converted all its bits into generic template mixins with an interface to plop them together. But it does inch along.

Sounds cool. I've never tried coding a complex, and especially graphical game before. The closest I've come is a little scrabble web app.

Right. That's the sort of thing I'd raise as a possibility. If this universe isn't infinite, then there is a most powerful being in it. And even if the universe is infinite, then there still might be a most powerful being (as opposed to an infinite sequence of increasingly, ever-more powerful beings).

Presumably, in that scenario, as you increased your power towards that most powerful being, there would be fewer and fewer other beings at the same level of power, as you say. However...


...does the goal even need to be functional omnipotence? Isn't it possible that there are others (both more and less powerful) who are allies or who at least share your goals? While life on this planet is hard in many ways, it could be a whole lot worse - so clearly the overall power balance in the world isn't (at least for now) dramatically shifted towards evil. Couldn't increasing your power at least in this world allow you to contribute even more to the good side of the power balance, without needing to achieve total omnipotence?


OK. Fair point, given that that's your experience. Kind of like humans and ants, I guess.

If so: does that mean that it's no use for one ant to enhance its power compared to another ant? Though an ant's not going to be able to challenge a human, nor in most cases even enter a human's awareness, can't it still improve its chances of winning a fight against an invading ant from another colony? And isn't that enough? Yes, it might get unlucky and get washed down the drain by a human while it's foraging for food, but there's not much it can do about that - it can do something about challenges at its own level.

Or do you think that the power levels aren't so discrete as "human versus ant", and that it's more of a continuum?


What about Mike Tyson? Do you think his odds of success in a fight were never truly above 50/50? An open question, not a rhetorical one - I'm still trying to understand your view.


You'd make a good author, even if all you wrote about was your real-life (/dream/immersion) experiences.


Sounds cool. I've never tried coding a complex, and especially graphical game before. The closest I've come is a little scrabble web app.

Sorry I haven't replied to this yet, I've wanted to go through each point individually since there's some things I need to clarify or explain but I just haven't yet for various reasons. Some of it I've really had to think about which is good, and I've recognized that I do have some hyper vigilance about certain things which really shouldn't be surprising. Though that doesn't really get me any closer to balancing all this.

Right. That's the sort of thing I'd raise as a possibility. If this universe isn't infinite, then there is a most powerful being in it. And even if the universe is infinite, then there still might be a most powerful being (as opposed to an infinite sequence of increasingly, ever-more powerful beings).

Presumably, in that scenario, as you increased your power towards that most powerful being, there would be fewer and fewer other beings at the same level of power, as you say. However...

I’m not really thinking in terms of just this or any single universe, I’m thinking an lot more mutliversal/multiplanar as that’s what I’m more used to at this point. It also not so much that you run out of people “stronger” than you, its that the more skilled you get, and the more you learn how to do, the more unlikely it becomes that you can be hard countered. Everything theoretically becomes a soft counter at best, and simply adding more energy doesn’t change that after awhile.

...does the goal even need to be functional omnipotence? Isn't it possible that there are others (both more and less powerful) who are allies or who at least share your goals? While life on this planet is hard in many ways, it could be a whole lot worse - so clearly the overall power balance in the world isn't (at least for now) dramatically shifted towards evil. Couldn't increasing your power at least in this world allow you to contribute even more to the good side of the power balance, without needing to achieve total omnipotence?

Well, I’m not thinking just of this world. And mainly I’m just trying to get back to being myself more than anything. But yes there’s no real reason to go for functional omnipotence if I were just thinking of living in this world for one life nor have I been.

I’m assuming by allies you mean for my goal of getting magic in this life specifically. In which case yes, there’s people who have been very happy to help, and also people who very much don’t like the idea and wish I wouldn't, and others who’ve been outright hostile. But if you meant goals in general, like beyond this world and this life and all that. The answer is yes with caveats and extra steps. Basically, sometimes people trying to help are in fact the problem. It’s a lot to go into.

In short, we can see how quickly people bow down to imaginary deities in this world and make everything about them. We also see how obedient people are to governments or anyone else wearing a fancy hat and suit both historically and currently. Now imagine how people would react to people who don’t need large scale organizations, bureaucracy, lies or psychological manipulations to cause large scale devastation. Even if someone has the best of intentions, things have a tendency to very quickly become all about pleasing the person or people with power. Not necessarily out of fear but that can be a big subconscious part of it. On top of that, People’s idea of what they’d do to “fix” society if they were “in charge” always invariably becomes a totalitarian dictatorship of some type. And that assumes someone is actually, genuinely, in their own mind, trying their best to help people. Again, I’ve seen and have had to deal with this more than a few times, and fallout from the latest one is why I ended up incarnating here in the first place.

The people who want to help are usually a far larger problem than the people who are deliberately trying to cause suffering or destroy things for fun or conquer things for whatever reason. Sometimes its not even a person, it’s just a sort of animal, plant or equivalent that has no ill intent but is just doing whatever it or they do. Over time, because of all this, I’ve become a pretty strict non interventionist and I generally think people should just be left alone if at all possible to make their own mistakes and learn from them. Intervention should only be carried out on other outsiders who are attempting to manipulate or otherwise involve themselves in local affairs. And it should be done as covertly as possible, though that’s often easier said than done after a certain point. In Star Trek terms, I’d be a big believer in the Prime Directive.

I sort of still have the goal of teaching magic after I develop it, but there’s so many people doing very serious work on developing their own PK and similar I’d much rather leave it to them. I’d rather someone local get the accolades and be able to take pride in the knowledge that they were the ones who brought magic to the world than me. My goal now is to just become myself again, and get to the point where I can just open a portal and walk through one day instead of needing to die to leave.

OK. Fair point, given that that's your experience. Kind of like humans and ants, I guess.

If so: does that mean that it's no use for one ant to enhance its power compared to another ant? Though an ant's not going to be able to challenge a human, nor in most cases even enter a human's awareness, can't it still improve its chances of winning a fight against an invading ant from another colony? And isn't that enough? Yes, it might get unlucky and get washed down the drain by a human while it's foraging for food, but there's not much it can do about that - it can do something about challenges at its own level.

Or do you think that the power levels aren't so discrete as "human versus ant", and that it's more of a continuum?

This is where my hyper vigilance probably comes in, because yes I would argue there’s always a point to trying to gain more skill and power to help the people you care about. But no, I don’t really like the idea that one day it can all be rendered pointless by some random act of someone or something else. I acknowledge that it’s a thing, and I’ve certainly encountered in in the past. But I’m not sure there’s ever been a time where I could say I was okay with it. It always just seemed like more of a reason to train so that one day I could meet and exceed whatever thing happened to be threatening me or people I cared about at the time. I typically don’t do well with the idea that there’s nothing I can do. Case and point, my eye condition is genetic, its considered just a fact that I will go blind from it, nonetheless I still dedicated myself to magic partly with the intention of re engineering my own genetic code and fixing the damage myself.

I would also honestly say that the power differential can go way, way further than just human vs ant.

What about Mike Tyson? Do you think his odds of success in a fight were never truly above 50/50? An open question, not a rhetorical one - I'm still trying to understand your view.

I mean in the sense that if you think of it as a bell curve, you’d be right in the middle. And chances are anyone you’d be dealing with would be within one, maybe two standard deviations of your level, because people much further beyond that are probably not going to care about you or you them, depending on what side they’re on. So in pure statistics it’s 50/50 odds, though there’s no realistic situation where the numbers would come out that way. I don’t know much about Mike Tyson, I know he was a good boxer who apparently bit someone’s ear off or something. But probably he’d be fighting other people in his bracket so yes it’d be closer to 50/50 unless you’re talking about randomly picking people off the street.

You'd make a good author, even if all you wrote about was your real-life (/dream/immersion) experiences.

Thank you, that’s what people keep telling me. Including one editor who ran their own magazine who told me they would’ve published my stuff if only it’d been the genre of their magazine. Even one discarnate guy who injected himself into one of my dreams to tell he his whole story about how he’d been the jock who married the hot girl and was making good money doing labour type jobs up until 2008 and then spiraled down with his wife leaving him and him presumably committing suicide. He basically told me to focus on things like my writing and magic because intellectual pursuits can last you till you’re eighty, and to write my stories because he wanted to read them.

A lot of people keep telling me I should be a writer and there once was a time where I did want to be but that kinda got destroyed because of all the paranormal stuff that started flooding my life in 2008. Nonetheless I’m trying to at least get one thing done since I sort of feel like I owe it to both Yellow and Teal. Its a purely fictional thing very directly inspired by Yellow and the types of things she’s often had as difficulties in incarnations. Whether I actually get it done or not is another question.

Sounds cool. I've never tried coding a complex, and especially graphical game before. The closest I've come is a little scrabble web app.

I’m mainly doing the internal game logic and making it purely text based. But I’m doing my best to make the graphics and input components modular and generic so that someone else can rather easily make full graphics if they want to. I’m legally blind, I’m not going to bother with that sort of thing. But that’s why it’s going to be free and open source when I feel its done enough to finally put on github or wherever.

Well nothing more has happened with the whole potential Copper situation. The DM hasn't mentioned or done anything odd so I'm assuming that was jut a coincidence, there's been no other poltergeist incidents, there's been nothing I'd consider proof via dreams, so yeah I'm pretty sure nothing else will happen.  The only thing out of all of this that I'm willing to say was paranormal were the injuries themselves, I still doubt Teals stuff with her pen and heating pad were paranormal at all. I also am still on the fence of whether the initial stabbing was anything more than a tulpa like phenomena, given I do have one instance where something I know for sure was just something I created in my mind started showing the ability to act independently, and did cause a mild krueger effect injury to me. I figure the options are either that or one of those shard clone things like before, which likely burned out or something.  Sure its technically possible that things could happen in the future, but I'm really not worried about that at this point and I doubt anything will happen.

In the meantime I'll just keep meditating and trying to work on all my emotional stuff, I don't see a way through it to be honest, but whatever, maybe something will work.