So how to control rather than be controlled?
It’s a simple matter of context and again would seem crazy until you practice it. It involves interrupting your internal dialogue, not just the words in your head, but the entire pattern of visual search, internal narrative, the whole mess, and how you do that is either overtly or covertly break your own habits. Bite your own tongue just enough for it to ache if you aren’t habitually a masochist, or begin filling your mind with a nonsense narrative about what you are seeing, about how the bottles of soda in the freezer case are really having a hockey game. Really try to convince yourself of it. Imagine it as vividly as possible.
What if my mind is always filled with nonsense? Ah, then do math in your head. What you are trying to do is not act crazy, but train yourself out of your habitual suspension of disbelief. This is why this sort of thing can be a bit dangerous. People too easily just fall into self-delusion. They like their habitual fantasies, so just train themselves to confine more and more of their attention in these fantasies with the natural consequence of perceptual and emotional stagnation that eventually twists into toxicity.
The idea is not to just get a new dream, but to get a handle on the entire dreaming process, to be able to have any dream at all, at will ideally.
The bitter old person who derides anything “new fangled.” Yes. That is an example of the emotional toxicity. Their old dream has begun to necrotize, and if it doesn’t necrotize it instead encysts, even metastasizes, spreads to others. Thus we have a world ruled by orthodox thinking that permits very little else, unless you are willing to be branded part of the lunatic fringe, which is one of my favorite songs by the way.
Everyone is ‘phoning it in’ as they say vs. engaging. Yes, which is why you so often hear the phrase, and I mean phrase not question, “Why doesn’t someone … ?” No one is really asking that question. They do know the reason why.
Some people really get freaked out by things just a little strange. Indeed, normopaths. It’s a serious epidemic. Shall we start a cause? Pass out arm bands?
It seems like the closer an unexpected thing is to normal, the more it bothers people because they can’t label it. They have discovered that even scientifically. There is an irritation that arises in the nervous system when something resembles a human being too closely without being a literal depiction of a human being. This is why they have to steer away from too realistic computer graphics when trying to depict people in movies. It’s part of why movies like Final Fantasy struggled despite having a good working budget. They can do it, but people subconsciously don’t want them to. Even monkeys take offense when shown similar images.
They should have used motion capture in the faces as well as the bodies which is what they do now like in ‘Avatar.’ Indeed, that was better received and likely for that reason. Its plot wasn’t any deeper. I liked both movies myself, but to my brain real-life people look weird so I’m numbed to it. People sometimes find my smile uncomfortable. I have learned to soften it, but that harder smile is what I saw, even as a very young child.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~