Narcissism of the Spirit

First off, the reason I am talking about this is because it is something I personally struggle with. Here we have some of my perhaps incoherent musings on souls and existence.

Self-esteem is a tricky subject. If yours is too low there's really no way you can go through life being happy. But if you have high self-esteem does that mean you think you are better than other people?

Because let's face it, if you thought were merely average in every way, you probably wouldn't feel that good about yourself. Or if you felt you were above average in some ways but that the areas you were below average in outweighed the areas you were above average in, or they cancelled each other out, you wouldn't feel that good about yourself either. You need to feel like you are in general above average. Problem is, only half the population is above average.

In order to be healthy, you have to break the competitive mindset and focus on unity. You have to feel that you are a member of the group, the family of humanity, and that you contribute something unique to the group yet you are no better than anyone else in the group. But the tricky part is that you have to really believe that, not just say you believe it.

Because the truth is, or rather, my current understanding of the truth is, all souls are equal. Because your physical attractiveness isn't who you are, you're intelligence isn't who you are, nor is your sense of humor. Who you are is your soul and the knowledge that it contains. Not the knowledge that your brain contains, but that your soul contains, which transcends death. Some souls are further along in the process of knowledge acquisition than other souls. Some souls move along at a faster pace than others. This is their own choice and doesn't mean they're better. Being an old soul doesn't mean your soul is better. We are all merely a different piece of a shattered whole, and there is distance between us and other people and we strive to make that distance smaller.

But we have to be competitive to survive, and when you find yourself winning it's extremely hard to view all people and their souls as equals, because some of us have more advanced souls and we all have unequal temporary earthly traits. I know that I for one suffer from narcissism of the spirit.

And if you do suffer from this, you better not let it show. Because people don't like people who seem to think that they're better than other people, or who admit to it. Which I just sort of did. God dammit.

Writer's Block

So I've sat down to write and I can't figure out what I should be writing about. There are always topics flooding through my head, but in order to write about one of them I have to feel a certain passion about it or else it just kind of flops and it doesn't come off as good as it could. Which is why I'm wondering now if I should even go off Adderall because that's what generates that spark for me which allows me to write passionately. No, I haven't gone off it yet and now I'm questioning whether or not I should. I was going to write about a dream I had last night but now the meat of the dream is covered by a large blank spot in my memory. I hate it when that happens, and that always happens. I wonder why I always have good dreams on Sunday nights.

Actually, as I write this I'm starting to remember. It was struggling to find a computer to get on Facebook. Why did I need to go on Facebook? I don't remember. There were a lot of houses, and someone suggested I go into a random person's house to use their computer. I think there was something about my book.

The ending part was about water parks. Water parks made me feel sick, but it was an emotional sickness and not a physical sickness. This has delusional significance to me but I'm not sure it was about my delusions. I wanted to get on this one elliptical that sprays water but it was too close to the ocean, or something like that. There was the color blue.

I think Freud would have a good time interpreting this dream.

Freud: An Amusing Weirdo

I'll keep this blog entry short as I don't have much time. It seems that I reject Freudian theories in my dreams without knowing that they're Freudian theories.

I had a dream a few months back where there was this guy putting people under hypnosis, and then he would ask them about the first time they were cut. "Was it traumatizing?" he would ask. And he thought that this was a pretty intense question, too intense for some people to answer, because being cut for the first time would be pretty traumatizing. He put me under hypnosis and I answered: "The first time you are cut is not traumatizing! It's normal, natural, and necessary! Start by asking a different question!" And that's when the hypnosis starts going somewhere. I realized after I woke up that the first time you are cut is when they cut your umbilical cord. I wrote about this dream in a Facebook note.

I realize now that I was rejecting Freud. It says in my sociology book that Freud believed growing up was a traumatizing process. I used to read about him and he believed that what everyone desires is to return to the womb. Guys can do this in a sense by having sex with their mother. Freud was kind of a screwed up nutcase.

I used to read about Freud because I was interested in dream interpretation. Freud believes that women envy the male sex organ. I read about this in my sociology book but I already knew this. This is actually a very amusing theory. I probably don't need to say that it is not true. I would be very upset if I had a penis. It's actually a very disturbing thought. And it shows how ridiculous Freud was.

I always liked Carl Jung. He was awesome and understood things better.

If you ask me, I think that what people desire more than getting off is to fulfill the ideal role for their gender. Children get an idea about gender roles at a very young age from television and movies. It becomes ingrained and subconcious. I have a desire for long hair because the princesses in Disney movies always had long hair. But my hair isn't as long as it used to be. I never made the decision to cut it, one time a hairdresser cut it more than I wanted it cut, I never got it even trimmed again but it never grew back, it just stayed the same length. The hair continued to grow though because I still got roots. True story.

Religious Insects, Musical Delusions, and the Big Empty Future

So here I am at the local college. I have a 3-hour study session before my first sociology class. So I do a little bit of text book reading. Reading about sociology makes me think of the computer game I programmed in high school. It was basically a society of bugs, a bug life simulation game, the bugs faced many challenges but the most notable of which was that they had religions. Anyway, I start thinking about that, and I am full of ideas of how I could improve it. Or just start over and program it all over again, with the same basic idea of a society of bugs, but I can make it cooler and totally different. I mean, that was eight years ago when I started working on it. I could make it totally cooler now.

What am I going to do with my life? I know the reason I am shying away from pursuing a degree in computer science is because I don't want to be stuck in a monotonous coding job. Creating a bug game was creative. I want to create my own computer games. Intelligent computer games. There are too many shoot-em-up games out there.

But I also feel this drive to be famous. And I don't just want 15 minutes of fame, I want to stay famous. And I don't know why I want this, but I do. Maybe it's the kind of thing that once I have it I won't want it anymore. But for some reason, being a famous author seems like the most realistic goal I have right now.

I'd also like to dabble in acting. Like, they could make my book into a movie and I could play myself. Then they couldn't say that I didn't have the right look for the part because I look absolutely perfect for the role because it's me. Except I have no acting experience. But it's never too late to start, right? That was my dream when I was really young, to be an actress. In fact, when I was young I knew I was going to grow up to be famous, and I thought it was going to be because I was going to be an actress. It was just like, I had this feeling like I was someone important, someone whom other people would be interested in.

And then I want to dabble in music. I wanted to turn my life into a musical. Or at least the part that had to do with me becoming delusional. And I wrote some songs, with lyrics and everything, and I thought they were good. Sometimes I have a talent for poetry. Except when you write poetry for songs, you have to mix up the rhythms more, or else all your songs will sound the same.

What else do I want to do? Why, I'd like to become Buddhist. Maybe even a Buddhist monk, and then I can teach other Buddhists. Actually, I don't know that much about Buddhism, but from what I know it's probably the most fitting spiritual path for me.

And there are more things I want to do, like write more. So the problem is, none of these really seem that attainable right now, the closest one is getting a published book, but that's not a permanent career. So if I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do, I could focus on that and move full force in that direction, and maybe I would get somewhere. Except I don't know what I want to do because I want to do everything, so I can't focus. So I'm left unemployed and in a program, and the future is just this big blank spot in my mind.