Friday, 1 March 2024 ------------------------ I'm 14 minutes into march. Tired an I'd prefer to be sleeping right now but my body doesn't agree for now. What it means for us to sleep and how lack of sleep affects us is something I want to learn more. But generally also just the idea of being tired or being weak from things like sickness, feeling cold, starving, chronic pains. How much do these things affect us in terms of the emotions we feel and our ability to shape them. Right now I feel okay, nothing pointing to the negative, only small hints of good feelings showing up for brief moments. Though I can definetely feel my ability to generate loving kindness with conscious effort is greatly limited as I feel tired. So more prone to act from old patterns, if my environment was more challenging right now, I'd probably have a harder time not losing myself in bad emotions and thoughts. The first few days of writing I was sleeping well. When I went to bed I felt my mind being clear of thoughts by itself. The past days I've had a lot more thoughts, not bad ones but it still disturbs things such as sleep. Also something odd has started happening the last days. I wake up in the middle of the night with the lights on but I don't remember turning them on. I have to physically get up from bed and walk across my room to switch the light so I must be sleep walking in some capacity. I don't remember doing this before. A bit funny but also a little scary. Today I'm shutting down the servers for my last remaining Minecraft server. Running Minecraft servers has been a big part of my life the past 10 years. I created my 'SpigotMC' account in 2014, a forum related to Minecraft server software. I feel neutral about ending this chapter of my life. A sort of acceptance that feels grounded. I've done most of the emotional processing of saying bye the past few months. I'll probably write more about it in the future. What on earth. Am I testing myself? I just woke up from a bad dream. I was accused of planning to bomb something, people gossiping about it, my house being searched, and long story short, me completely losing myself, crying on the floor. I was relieved when I woke up to say the least. I was mainly concerned of having lost myself funnily enough. One of the last things I wrote before going to bed was in a challenging environment I might have more difficulty composing my loving kindness. Was my brain running a simulation for me to check that? Haha. Also, I got around watching the oppenheimer movie a week ago, that may explain the bomb thing, don't worry.. The third chapter talks about 'priming' (like prompting?). It's like if I say the word happiness your brain will simulate stuff encapsulating what that concept in your brain is made out of. You may visualize smiling faces. If you are primed in a given situation, how you percieve the world will be biased to that. In the book, it gives an example of this, where you see a face with no context. Depending on priming, you can either interpret as someone screaming in pain or someone celebrating triumphantly. Priming is given as one of the reasons that previous experiments that support classic view of universal emotions is flawed. The book goes more into detail about the experiments, and shows new experiments that makes the theory of constructed emotions compelling, such as participants doing very poor labelling facial configurations by removing priming from the experiment and reducing or using subjects with poor ability to construct concepts due to brain lesions. Even more, that I found really interesting, was that in some smaller societies, far away from western society, they don't view it or describe it as an emotional state but a behaviour or action, like someone we view as having fear they view as someone looking and someone we attach happiness to, they don't, at least not in the same way, and simply view them as laughing. So their concept involving a facial configuration involves more about the action instead of involving emotional states. About priming, I think this is a good one to remember for practical life. If one can tap into that, becoming better at priming oneself in a way one wants to percieve the world. It can remind us of the great power we hold in our conscious thought, to take great responsibility of our thoughts to take us on the path we want. From experience (here I go again) priming myself with loving kindness has been a very positive experience so far, with an understanding that my conscious thought only make up a small part of who I am, but is where I have agency to influence my brain, so as to not expect unrealistic transformation. Funny enough, my concept of what loving kindness is, is of course not a universal concept, and for myself, I also wish to define it more clearly, which I intend to do in the future after learning more about it. But in short, for me it's sort of the difference you feel around people you care the most about and those you fear. I think maybe you can fear yourself too? The most practical improvement I feel is that I'm not afraid to the same extent to be goofy and weird because I love those around me more and fear them less. I find it more natural to just want what's best for everyone and that makes me think less about what I want, in turn making me less afraid of not performing in a way that makes me get what I want. Now this is a complicated matter that requires more thought because I don't think it can be an ideal in some environments though I will say that I think it has the potential to actually make you better at getting what you want as there is less desperation and performance anxiety involved with loving kindness. I think when I said I care less about what I want and more about what everyone wants is not quite right. It's more like I change what I care about to involve more than just my human. That sounds off but I think you can understand like how you want your child to have good health, you add your child to you sphere of care. But I think maybe you also need more than loving kindness, something I may take for granted and isn't productive to add to this concept. Things like how you attach to things, on an emotional level, else I can imagine one can become very miserable in a world with a lot of misery.