Ray Peat Philosophy Gems

[Vileplume]

“An animal experiencing nature around it, or people, is aware of its needs, and hopes, and also any fears that it has. It interprets particular objects or processes as either hopeful or fearsome, and otherwise, it’s in the process of going through the present situation with the intention of finding the realization of what it wants.

And the culture has piled up beliefs, and stories, that complicate that, so that we don’t see ourselves as surrounded by future possibilities, dangers, and threats.

And I think anytime you’re going to get back on the track of realizing yourself, the larger intention, the thing that religious people feel as some sort of overarching meaning, for the animal, for the human, hopefully biologically amplified animal doing some things that animals can’t do, by our energy amplification, we can have the animal intentionality encompassing future possibilities on a trans personal scale, seeing the need for the ecosystem, and for the society, for other individuals, even for different kinds of organisms, taking responsibility in a straight line with yourself, feeling that you are responsible for all of the stuff around you, that you see it all as hopeful, moving towards the future, and don’t have any of these cultural kinks, that say ‘I own this,’ or ‘I have to do this to destroy this,’ and so on.

You try to picture overarching series of meanings, so that everything can get into a better future.”
-RP, from Generative Energy Podcast #19
View: https://youtu.be/PF27zr95Lhg

 

[Kykeon]

i always really enjoy reading this article Can art instruct science? William Blake as biological visionary
When you believe that you have adequate, expert knowledge, a passive, logical, deductive form of mental activity seems appropriate. Deduction always goes from a higher level of generality to a lower level of generality. Mental passivity therefore is likely to be associated with the belief that we have the decisive knowledge already stored in memory
If we believe that we create higher degrees of generality, as appropriate solutions to novel problems, then we are committed to an active mental life. Perception, combined with the discovery and invention of new patterns in the world, will be actively oriented toward the future, while the deductive, merely analytical, manner of thought will be tied to the past.

Blake’s work, I think, is of continued and increased interest because he discovered something of great importance, namely, how to avoid dogmatisms of all sorts. Many students who are assigned to write about a poem of Blake’s are puzzled, and ask what it means. When they find out that they understand the words and the syntax, it turns out that the only problem was that they were taught that they had to “interpret” poetry. And that they don’t think he could have meant what he said. Most twentieth century students are too stodgy to accept Blake’s writing easily.

Essentially, rationalism consists of thinking something is true because you thought of it.
I think of the philosophical Rationalists as being the bureaucrats of the mind, making everything tedious and boring and repetitive. Eliminating Rationalism, then actual individualized full mental life can begin.

Rays understanding of dogmatism and authority/holism is very refreshing.


View: https://youtu.be/MBsFWsHgSCY?t=655
Really like this part as well.
From another podcast:
"I always think of Heraclitus in connection to any seemingly simple biological issues nothing is simple, everything goes on forever and changes"
​

 

[Vileplume]

i always really enjoy reading this article Can art instruct science? William Blake as biological visionary
When you believe that you have adequate, expert knowledge, a passive, logical, deductive form of mental activity seems appropriate. Deduction always goes from a higher level of generality to a lower level of generality. Mental passivity therefore is likely to be associated with the belief that we have the decisive knowledge already stored in memory. If we believe that we create higher degrees of generality, as appropriate solutions to novel problems, then we are committed to an active mental life. Perception, combined with the discovery and invention of new patterns in the world, will be actively oriented toward the future, while the deductive, merely analytical, manner of thought will be tied to the past.

Blake’s work, I think, is of continued and increased interest because he discovered something of great importance, namely, how to avoid dogmatisms of all sorts. Many students who are assigned to write about a poem of Blake’s are puzzled, and ask what it means. When they find out that they understand the words and the syntax, it turns out that the only problem was that they were taught that they had to “interpret” poetry. And that they don’t think he could have meant what he said. Most twentieth century students are too stodgy to accept Blake’s writing easily.

Except for the dangers involved in committing a heresy, it is very easy to follow the implications of the system that one finds in one’s own mind, since self-assertion contains no principle of corrective contradiction. Essentially, rationalism consists of thinking something is true because you thought of it.
I think of the philosophical Rationalists as being the bureaucrats of the mind, making everything tedious and boring and repetitive. Eliminating Rationalism, then actual individualized full mental life can begin.

Rays understanding of dogmatism and authority/holism is very refreshing.


View: https://youtu.be/MBsFWsHgSCY?t=655
Really like this part as well.

"I always think of Heraclitus in connection to any seemingly simple biological issues nothing is simple, everything goes on forever and changes"
​

Great ones. I would love to find out for myself how to avoid dogma, how to avoid cliches. Hearing Ray talk about language, it seems like newness in speech and thought is the goal. And it can only happen with appropriate metabolic energy.

It makes me think of all the KMUD Herb Doctors interviews, where Andrew has the same spiel every. single. time. He says something like “we’re both licensed herbalists who studied in England,” etc etc (sorry Andrew if you read this.) And then they give Ray the same prompt to begin every episode: describe your background. I didn’t reallly notice until Sarah pointed it out in one episode, but Dr. Peat describes his background differently every time. He never settles into a cliche or repetition. We only default to cliches when we don’t have the mental energy to see a new sentence or idea through to its completion, to its genesis in the world.

“The question never looks the same the second time.” -RP

 

[Kykeon]

Great ones. I would love to find out for myself how to avoid dogma, how to avoid cliches. Hearing Ray talk about language, it seems like newness in speech and thought is the goal. And it can only happen with appropriate metabolic energy.

yes he writes about it too in New Page Title Here

"I have always felt that the cybernetic definition of communication as the transfer of something that makes a difference should be applied to speech and writing. As a student and teacher, I saw that information which made a difference was the essence of intellectual excitement and growth. But making a difference is exactly what university administrators and journal editors don't want. "

Ray never repeats himself, he actively avoids it. That is why so many do not get it at first and i got very confused in the beginning, but after reading and listening more to him i understand how much he invests into the idea of "becoming" and tries to avoid "being" something. (Parmenides vs heraclitus) He even weaves it in with the sentence "it is very easy to follow the implications of the system that one finds in one’s own mind, since self-assertion contains no principle of corrective contradiction".
Heraclitus - Wikipedia "one who denied the law of non-contradiction; "

If heraclitus is interesting i can recommend the following video going more into detail, as much is lost in translation because heraclitus used aphorisms, and was very artistic in his expressions and much can not be translated (
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W80ToU1tvpI
)

That is why ray thinks so lowly of authoritarianism or traditionalism i think, because these are philosophical frameworks that see the supremacy in unchanged being, while ray recognizes the ever changing flux in all things ( becoming) and also reflects it in his personality and approach to finding solutions and that more or less automatically leads to avoiding dogmatic thinking. He really has managed to stay curious, looking at new information as unique each time it is presented, because the context is new every time. The more i think about it the more i see how congruent his whole personality is with his philosophical views, it is a great inspiration and his friendliness and wholesomeness make me think that this is the modus operandi that one should strive for.

Ray also said in a podcast that repetition and routine leads to increased serotonin.
I really wonder how he is learning a new language for example. I think he would not repeat vocabulary until it is memorized but simply approaching the language again and again as a process, not with a memory endgoal in mind.

How do you know? Students, patients, and discovery

I think comparing the doctor-patient relationship with the teacher-student relationship can be useful, and it might suggest ways that both of them could be made more productive, with implications for the nature of learning and knowing.

raypeat.com

Korzybski was right in warning about the dangers of letting names become “elements.” This perception led Paolo Freire to emphasize the educational importance of critically giving things their appropriate names, rather than just “banking” the names given by an authority. “To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. Human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.” “. . . to speak a true word is to transform the world.” “'Problem-posing' education, responding to the essence of consciousness--intentionality--rejects communiques and embodies communication” (Freire, 1993).

 

[des yeux]

while ray recognizes the ever changing flux in all things ( becoming)

I think one of Peat's central themes is this idea of becoming. He speaks often of Plato vs Aristotle. Platonic ideals, i.e: that all things have an abstract, idealistic form which all real things are created) is central to maintaining a hierarchical populace, since you can say "kings have that immutable noble characteristic, peasants don't" etc. He contrasts that with Aristotelian thinking that everything is constantly becoming, and in his first book (Mind and Tissue) argues that the Russians have preserved that tradition (through the Orthodox church and other means).

I think that some traits seem immutable at some point, for example many kings have attained nobility through courage on the battlefield, but: change is possible! Every individual organism can take meaningful action to become something new. That's why I find far-right ideas of e.g the unsalvageability of minorities laughable.

That's also why Peat finds the central dogma of molecular biology and related ideas ridiculous. That information can only flow from DNA to proteins. Can the individual really do nothing with respect to the future of their species except "eat salad and exercise"? Is the only way a species or an individual can advance is prayer to the gods of random mutations to give you something good and spare you the bad? Some groups claim eugenics is the answer, but I think even the best specimen can be decimated within one generation of terrible environment.

So I think that's the central idea to Peat's work. If you believe that you can take steps that meaningfully change your being, you can ask: what can those steps be? Peat mentions Pavlov's quote that nutrition is the closest interaction one has with their environment, and I think that's why Peat focuses so much on it.

Great thread! I think this is the direction the discussions on this forum should take.

 

[LUH 3417]

I think one of Peat's central themes is this idea of becoming. He speaks often of Plato vs Aristotle. Platonic ideals, i.e: that all things have an abstract, idealistic form which all real things are created) is central to maintaining a hierarchical populace, since you can say "kings have that immutable noble characteristic, peasants don't" etc. He contrasts that with Aristotelian thinking that everything is constantly becoming, and in his first book (Mind and Tissue) argues that the Russians have preserved that tradition (through the Orthodox church and other means).

I think that some traits seem immutable at some point, for example many kings have attained nobility through courage on the battlefield, but: change is possible! Every individual organism can take meaningful action to become something new. That's why I find far-right ideas of e.g the unsalvageability of minorities laughable.

That's also why Peat finds the central dogma of molecular biology and related ideas ridiculous. That information can only flow from DNA to proteins. Can the individual really do nothing with respect to the future of their species except "eat salad and exercise"? Is the only way a species or an individual can advance is prayer to the gods of random mutations to give you something good and spare you the bad? Some groups claim eugenics is the answer, but I think even the best specimen can be decimated within one generation of terrible environment.

So I think that's the central idea to Peat's work. If you believe that you can take steps that meaningfully change your being, you can ask: what can those steps be? Peat mentions Pavlov's quote that nutrition is the closest interaction one has with their environment, and I think that's why Peat focuses so much on it.

Great thread! I think this is the direction the discussions on this forum should take.

There’s this line in the intro of mind and tissue that really stuck with me, about how materialists are concerned with change whereas traditionalists are concerned with ideals. I think a concern with ideals and abstractions robs us of an experience of material consciousness, our direct experience of ourselves and others. It’s why I believe we have a culture that’s more obsessed with statistics and computer modeling, for instance with covid, and can be completely propagandized with this ideal, rather than having an objective understanding of the organism and the environment. Ray has spoken about the intentional war on objectivity and I think it’s true, there does appear to be a threat to objective knowledge and a complete push for irrationality. I go back to the authoritarianism episode so many times because it’s just that good. I too really love threads like these.

 

[des yeux]

There’s this line in the intro of mind and tissue that really stuck with me, about how materialists are concerned with change whereas traditionalists are concerned with ideals. I think a concern with ideals and abstractions robs us of an experience of material consciousness, our direct experience of ourselves and others. It’s why I believe we have a culture that’s more obsessed with statistics and computer modeling, for instance with covid, and can be completely propagandized with this ideal, rather than having an objective understanding of the organism and the environment. Ray has spoken about the intentional war on objectivity and I think it’s true, there does appear to be a threat to objective knowledge and a complete push for irrationality. I go back to the authoritarianism episode so many times because it’s just that good. I too really love threads like these.

Absolutely. Ray speaks highly of Reich but I think it's Karen Horney who really showed how neurosis is disastrous for the individual (and at large scale, society). She describes the process by which unmet needs in childhood pushes the individual to create an idealized self with certain patterns for pleasing, defying, or avoiding others. The vital energy of the individual is then used to maintain that image rather than developing his real potential.

The dominant culture right now is breeding neurosis and sapping all energy of developing real potential from the youth, who are oversocalized and have no sense of direction. I wonder how we can wake up from this stupor.

 

[LUH 3417]

Absolutely. Ray speaks highly of Reich but I think it's Karen Horney who really showed how neurosis is disastrous for the individual (and at large scale, society). She describes the process by which unmet needs in childhood pushes the individual to create an idealized self with certain patterns for pleasing, defying, or avoiding others. The vital energy of the individual is then used to maintain that image rather than developing his real potential.

The dominant culture right now is breeding neurosis and sapping all energy of developing real potential from the youth, who are oversocalized and have no sense of direction. I wonder how we can wake up from this stupor.

It feels as if social media is the culmination of that image into something as close as possible to being real, without actually being real. For me engaging with the real, just being outside, talking to people in real life, trying to figure out how to grow food, milk goats, have chickens, are useful goals. Sometimes it feels reclusive and escapist, I don’t really know the answer, but I know it’s not whatever I’m being told by the popular culture to do.

 

[LUH 3417]

Absolutely. Ray speaks highly of Reich but I think it's Karen Horney who really showed how neurosis is disastrous for the individual (and at large scale, society). She describes the process by which unmet needs in childhood pushes the individual to create an idealized self with certain patterns for pleasing, defying, or avoiding others. The vital energy of the individual is then used to maintain that image rather than developing his real potential.

The dominant culture right now is breeding neurosis and sapping all energy of developing real potential from the youth, who are oversocalized and have no sense of direction. I wonder how we can wake up from this stupor.

You got me reading Karen Horney now ? found this quote which I think is great:

The goal of psychotherapy is not to create perfect human beings; rather, it is to help persons who have been diverted from their self-realization process to become “real” people again instead of fictitious ones. Real people have real problems, real anxiety, real failures, and real successes. Horney (1939) said, “The aim of analysis is not to render life devoid of risks and conflicts, but to enable an individual eventually to solve his problems himself” (p. 305).

 

[des yeux]

It feels as if social media is the culmination of that image into something as close as possible to being real, without actually being real. For me engaging with the real, just being outside, talking to people in real life, trying to figure out how to grow food, milk goats, have chickens, are useful goals. Sometimes it feels reclusive and escapist, I don’t really know the answer, but I know it’s not whatever I’m being told by the popular culture to do.

You're right. Both the mainstream media and social media (in its current form, 10 years ago it was different) serve to amplify the same goals. The key thing is to reject their whole framing, not try to 'reform' or 'shape' opinions on their platforms. i.e: The key is not being pulled to their framing. A post from the blog The Last Psychiatrist elaborately explains how advertising and media companies essentially force you to look through their lens, and gives the example of a very insidious Dove soap ad that discusses womanly beauty and (harsh) self-judgment etc. The ad never mentions even anything about soap or selling it, but by the end of it if you find yourself saying discussing it, then they won. It is doubly so if you find yourself disagreeing with it: they have already pulled you in to their frame, and you didn't even notice! (Highly recommend the article.)

You are right. Are you trying to start a farm? Some friends bought a piece of land in Quebec wilderness, no house, no electricity, no signal, and also no capital, and I wonder wonder how one might go about colonizing it haha.

 

[LUH 3417]

You're right. Both the mainstream media and social media (in its current form, 10 years ago it was different) serve to amplify the same goals. The key thing is to reject their whole framing, not try to 'reform' or 'shape' opinions on their platforms. i.e: The key is not being pulled to their framing. A post from the blog The Last Psychiatrist elaborately explains how advertising and media companies essentially force you to look through their lens, and gives the example of a very insidious Dove soap ad that discusses womanly beauty and (harsh) self-judgment etc. The ad never mentions even anything about soap or selling it, but by the end of it if you find yourself saying discussing it, then they won. It is doubly so if you find yourself disagreeing with it: they have already pulled you in to their frame, and you didn't even notice! (Highly recommend the article.)

You are right. Are you trying to start a farm? Some friends bought a piece of land in Quebec wilderness, no house, no electricity, no signal, and also no capital, and I wonder wonder how one might go about colonizing it haha.

One thing I have struggled with, trying to work with therapists in the current culture, and being that I am in NY, is they are more like post modern personality managers than the radical therapists of the 50s and 60s. Both therapists I worked with, who claimed they were practitioners in the Rogerian and Reichian tradition, pretty much ridiculed me whenever I would talk about the rules of the empire, or some elite conspiracy to destroy human freedom and autonomy. Maybe I didn’t make my case well enough, but the current therapist won’t even see me in person because I’m not vaccinated. He kept yelling at me via FaceTime about how every single medical association is on the same page about the vaccine. I asked him if these were the same medical associations that were also on the same page about lobotomies. I was actually half joking but he replied sort of earnestly, no! They disagreed about lobotomies! More so, both tried to frame me as a paranoid neurotic, whose ideas about the world relate to my childhood. This current therapist literally said I should learn to love the bomb instead of living like ***t in fear of the bomb (here the bomb being a euphemism for the vaccine I suppose?)

I am taking a job in an Amish community to work with a homebirth practice and try to figure out how to be more self sufficient. That’s pretty courageous of your friends, what are their plans for the winter?

 

[des yeux]

One thing I have struggled with, trying to work with therapists in the current culture, and being that I am in NY, is they are more like post modern personality managers than the radical therapists of the 50s and 60s. Both therapists I worked with, who claimed they were practitioners in the Rogerian and Reichian tradition, pretty much ridiculed me whenever I would talk about the rules of the empire, or some elite conspiracy to destroy human freedom and autonomy. Maybe I didn’t make my case well enough, but the current therapist won’t even see me in person because I’m not vaccinated. He kept yelling at me via FaceTime about how every single medical association is on the same page about the vaccine. I asked him if these were the same medical associations that were also on the same page about lobotomies. I was actually half joking but he replied sort of earnestly, no! They disagreed about lobotomies! More so, both tried to frame me as a paranoid neurotic, whose ideas about the world relate to my childhood. This current therapist literally said I should learn to love the bomb instead of living like ***t in fear of the bomb (here the bomb being a euphemism for the vaccine I suppose?)

I am taking a job in an Amish community to work with a homebirth practice and try to figure out how to be more self sufficient. That’s pretty courageous of your friends, what are their plans for the winter?

Rogers and Reich are rolling in their graves. Sorry you have to deal with that. Do you glean any benefit from your sessions recently? I spent almost two years in therapy and find the benefits plateaued completely in the end. I think a massage or somatic experiencing therapy is the next step after you spend some time talking and recognizing your thought patterns with the help of the therapist. As for the FaceTime/video call and this particular therapist I think you should reject it, it's taking an already disembodied experience and making it hyper-disembodied. Go get a massage (or somatic experiencing therapy) while all this covid bananas blow over.

My friends are do not know what to do with the land yet, I wish they were so courageous as to live on it haha. It's wonderful what you will be doing!

 

[LUH 3417]

Rogers and Reich are rolling in their graves. Sorry you have to deal with that. Do you glean any benefit from your sessions recently? I spent almost two years in therapy and find the benefits plateaued completely in the end. I think a massage or somatic experiencing therapy is the next step after you spend some time talking and recognizing your thought patterns with the help of the therapist. As for the FaceTime/video call and this particular therapist I think you should reject it, it's taking an already disembodied experience and making it hyper-disembodied. Go get a massage (or somatic experiencing therapy) while all this covid bananas blow over.

My friends are do not know what to do with the land yet, I wish they were so courageous as to live on it haha. It's wonderful what you will be doing!

This last psychiatrist article is great.

I would say the therapist is trying expose the gap between who I am and who I want to be. There have been some good insights, him suggesting I just accept who I am rather than telling me to do yoga or drink green juice (which were actual suggestions of the previous therapist). He is Buddhist, goes on meditation retreats and what not, so it also can feel like platitudes of just be, be still, don’t do. It does feel like it’s about to plateau. The last session he insisted on the need for “contact” in the reichian sense and I made it clear that I am having emotions and feeling things the entire time we are talking, but we are on FT so I said I feel limited to how deep we can connect. The vaccine thing is basically where the therapeutic relationship ends and there’s no getting around it so that’s that. I was very excited to work with him because apparently he does reichian body work.

Part of the freedom I feel is getting over this need for a therapist in the general sense and realizing they have their own limitations as people. I am 30 and I spent a large part of my 20s feeling like other people had it figured out and that’s why I should talk to them about my figuring it out.

 

[Perry Staltic]

That's why I find far-right ideas of e.g the unsalvageability of minorities laughable.

That may be the state of affairs in your country (Canada?), but it's far from reality in the US. The left are the biggest racists, and always have been (e.g., plantation owners). They've simply morphed into a more subtle and insidious racism of low expectations.

 

[Ben.]

The vaccine thing is basically where the therapeutic relationship ends and there’s no getting around it so that’s that.

Part of the freedom I feel is getting over this need for a therapist in the general sense and realizing they have their own limitations as people.

Did alot alot of work on my emotional self in my early 20s with alot of therapy and came to realize that therapists can be helpful to work and overcome certain issues when one has no family/friends that usually help a person to understand and deal with the world. But this has a expiration date and is kinda sorta limited to damage induced by social traumas.
Everything beyond that it does not realy help. And often or even most times it is/was a unrecognized health issue that led to social/emotional disfunction in the first place. It's like trying to live life but somewhere the game developer ("insert allmighty entity here") integrated a handicap that does not allow for progress.

I believe the majority of people in reality have a issue with their internal health wether that is a gut issue or energy metabolism, neurotransmitters etc..

In not acknowledging that the gut, the food and bugs inside of a person has insane influence in mood and feelings, many people keep running to these therapists, spending horrific sums of money and only advancing within the space that the therapy "works" in.

No amount of sessions nor drugs like SSRIS will solve a persons chronic inflammation, impaired cell metabolism, postural damage, liver/kidney failure or gum/tooth disease. Which might be the actual reason for the chronic depression, social helplesness, panick attacks and so ond and so forth.

I ended up seeing them as something like makeup or expenssive skin/hair shampoo as in:
They may help or overshadow the condition but if the body and internal mechanisms would work properly we woudn't need any of them and the underlying issue is not fixed from it.

But that is just my opinion/experience ofcourse.

I am 30 and I spent a large part of my 20s feeling like other people had it figured out and that’s why I should talk to them about my figuring it out.

I feel that. But i came to realize that many or most of them never have or had to deal with serious issues before. Comparison can motivate but for the most part it is poision for the mind.

The person with 2 legs can be all succesfull and smartmouthed about walking and running but that does not help the one legged guy. They even fail to realize that the person in question is actually missing a leg to begin with.

 

[LUH 3417]

Did alot alot of work on my emotional self in my early 20s with alot of therapy and came to realize that therapists can be helpful to work and overcome certain issues when one has no family/friends that usually help a person to understand and deal with the world. But this has a expiration date and is kinda sorta limited to damage induced by social traumas.
Everything beyond that it does not realy help. And often or even most times it is/was a unrecognized health issue that led to social/emotional disfunction in the first place. It's like trying to live life but somewhere the game developer ("insert allmighty entity here") integrated a handicap that does not allow for progress.

I believe the majority of people in reality have a issue with their internal health wether that is a gut issue or energy metabolism, neurotransmitters etc..

In not acknowledging that the gut, the food and bugs inside of a person has insane influence in mood and feelings, many people keep running to these therapists, spending horrific sums of money and only advancing within the space that the therapy "works" in.

No amount of sessions nor drugs like SSRIS will solve a persons chronic inflammation, impaired cell metabolism, postural damage, liver/kidney failure or gum/tooth disease. Which might be the actual reason for the chronic depression, social helplesness, panick attacks and so ond and so forth.

I ended up seeing them as something like makeup or expenssive skin/hair shampoo as in:
They may help or overshadow the condition but if the body and internal mechanisms would work properly we woudn't need any of them and the underlying issue is not fixed from it.

But that is just my opinion/experience ofcourse.



I feel that. But i came to realize that many or most of them never have or had to deal with serious issues before. Comparison can motivate but for the most part it is poision for the mind.

The person with 2 legs can be all succesfull and smartmouthed about walking and running but that does not help the one legged guy. They even fail to realize that the person in question is actually missing a leg to begin with.

The leg metaphor is on point, and what I’ve gleaned from this experience is the contradiction in someone trying to help me become more self aware of my reality, lacking insight into their own reality, and the limitations of that. This goes back to Parmenides and the ideal of immutability, non change, monism, being more real or true than becoming. Persephone apparently gave Parmenides insight into the “way” of truth, which differed from the way of opinion. It’s interesting to think about reality as socially constituted - what is real, or Royal - and truth as self evident and arising from nature, inherent in the world and objectively discernible.

To move away from abstraction, I mentioned to this therapist that I keep waking up to pee, and he told me it’s because I have sexual tension in my bladder. I felt annoyed and wanted to talk about gut irritation and this waking up to pee happening more frequently after I ovulate, and the way the bladder is enervated and excited by excessive estrogen, and my issues with fat digestion, and hey wait maybe that time I got the tdap vaccine really did **** up my ability to digest fats and proteins, and the implications of poor health as an intentional weapon and political tool, but he kept interrupting me and I just felt defeated when the entire point of the therapy was to help me feel less defeated and more potent, right? Which experience of reality - my own of my own biology and the frame work of anatomy vs his, of understanding the body through the lens of orgonomy and reich - is more real or true? For me therapy has become more about power and who is right and who is wrong.

I had health insurance so I never paid much which does make me feel like it was always sort of an accessory thing as you say, a conditioner or skin cream that never really addressed the root problems. It was useful to reach a certain level of self awareness about myself in silo, but in terms of understanding myself within the constellation of nature, culture, false reality and the truth, I don’t think therapy is sophisticated or disentangled enough from the dominant power structure to even attempt such a spiritual endeavor.

 

[Rafe]

“You see it all as hopeful.”

This helps.
When I feel the opposite of this it’s time for a coke.

 

[des yeux]

That may be the state of affairs in your country (Canada?), but it's far from reality in the US. The left are the biggest racists, and always have been (e.g., plantation owners). They've simply morphed into a more subtle and insidious racism of low expectations.

I had in mind the Génération Identitaire and Europe in general where I used to live. I'm actually a 'racial minority' and find the current brand of leftism, at best, infantilizing and insulting to my individual being. The indvidual is the smallest minority. Ted Kaczynski in the Unabomber's manifesto explains poignantly the dangers of modern leftism, how it partially stems from a feeling of inferiority and powerlessness combined with oversocalization in some cases.

This oversocalization splits the psyche of the indvidual whenever they want to feel something deemed immoral. It ties back to neurosis and wasting your vital energy on maintaining an image vs using your energy to realize your potential. I recommend the Unabomber's manifesto and the somewhat esoteric but great alt-right book "Bronze Age Mindset" for an alternative view on the current political situation.

 

[Kykeon]

That's also why Peat finds the central dogma of molecular biology and related ideas ridiculous.

View: https://youtu.be/QMVfafAYTMg?t=1487
good talk about the topic. "His ideas on biological causation are very important" is what ray told me when asked about noble.