Anyone care to share a challenging decision they recently made? What I will share is rather strange, but I think may be illustrative anyway.

I personally never face difficult decisions. My own instincts, if you will, are almost strictly autotelic. I am motivated more by innate experience than goals or objectives. I really don’t entertain the idea that I can “accomplish” stuff.

Where I get into trouble is when my decision comes up against interpersonal relationships. I can adapt my own thinking to allow space for others only very poorly. So, when I do come up against a decision with interpersonal conflicting factors, I am often given pause, and my behaviour in those situations is often described as stiff, my decision making strange and arbitrary.

Where does that come from? Well, my personal heuristics as I can’t meaningfully train “socially.” There are parts of my brain that serve social purposes in others but have been appropriated for different functions in me, like facial recognition. For me that’s used for pattern recognition, so when someone acts out of character, I have a hard time following their physical behaviour. So I have adopted over time a personal heuristic that emulates the social. Since in my experience, self-assertion has negative consequences and self-negation has negative consequences, I seek the projection of the other, the part of their thinking that includes some idea of me, and then I “puppet” that. It doesn’t give me a great range of options. Their view of my person is usually fairly narrow, and it fails to allow me much ability to anticipate other people’s behaviour over the long term.

So if I think of you as an ice cream sundae, you will turn into an ice cream sundae? In a sense, I will. I would stop talking and grow cold, just linger and allow myself to be kept track of, or discarded as the person is likely to do.

So how do you manage this. Do you avoid social situations? I don’t. My personal rules require me to be expressive, and peoples projections tend to have weird gaps in them, the picture is incomplete. So I can act with congruence and be the unexpected ice cream sundae, become the ice cream sundae that talks, and share with you the world according to ice cream sundaes.

Remember earlier when I said these rules of thumb are all magical thinking? My experience with finding the gaps in people’s perception, even my personal fascination with the inconsistencies in human consensus perception, well, my middle path is that of the magician or magical thinker. It’s my natural element. When you get used to being monsters, animals, and ice cream sundaes, the world ceases to look at all convincing really. It teaches an entirely different way of understanding all of this.

We perceive the world as a projection of self, and for you that self is mutable so the world is too. Yes, so in the end I’m not faking anything. I feel these things. Even when I am irrational, my behaviours are still based on this. It’s innate, reflexive, same as your personal heuristics are for you.

Pablo Picasso had an interesting comment to offer on the role of the “Sorceror.” He said that one can’t be a sorceror all the time, it’s too tiring. So sometimes I become “nothing”, just that guy in the corner, give no meaningful affect, nothing anyone can relate to. My wife has witnessed that.

This restores your energy? It does yes.

Care to describe it? You’re distant. It’s weird, like being with someone who is not there. It’s not like a regular person who is recharging.

I find I do that too when I am tired. I prefer not to interact. Actually, I suspect you still interact. I suspect you’re what I call a warrior. A true warrior can’t help but be a warrior. They are always in a struggle, but the wise warrior knows the difference between struggle and strife. The wise warrior is most vulnerable, adaptive, and flexible. The warrior is always meeting the other, always meeting the foreigner, always meeting the self, never evasive even when at rest. They dance with the world. Even when they are just quietly humming along with the music, they can join at any time.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~