Are we served by holding beliefs that block or discourage our paying attention to life and the world around us? Is it in any way practical?

When I was younger, I had ‘rose coloured glasses’. I realize now that made me an easy target. Ah, another statement of apathy.

In what way? Your belief discourages you from looking for positives, or at least looking for positives with much commitment or passion. It likely limits creativity as well. We don’t want to create when everything seems like trash. You have to value something to be creative.

I agree with you about being discouraged to create. Ever since I realized how rampant copybotting is in Second Life, I really have a strong disincentive to create anything in here.

You hold beliefs until something else changes them. The idea that something else has to change your beliefs is apathy. Why is it that we can’t or shouldn’t change our own beliefs at will?

How well would you say you really understand your life? Let’s just focus on one day. In the fullness of the day, do you feel confident you understood what happened to you and for you? What it meant and why you were involved? If not why not?

Personally? I analyze my own life quite a lot, but I know most people aren’t like that.

You can practice a mantra, is that the same as a belief? No.

Yeah, I know exactly why I didn’t get anything done that day.

No, because so much seems habitual or programmed thinking.

Sometimes I’ve thought, ‘I’ve learned that lesson from that experience’ then a few months later I think it meant something entirely different.

I know why my books get started but not actually written.

I’ve had people tell me not to dwell on the past, and I think, “but how do you ever learn from your mistakes?” The advice not to dwell on the past is perhaps the ultimate apathy.

As for the question I asked earlier, there is a natural instinctive reaction that does indeed serve a practical purpose. When our stress level exceeds our endurance, we do have to be able to disengage. To disengage we have to temporarily relax what would otherwise be a natural degree of reactivity, responsivity. In order to keep our sanity we have to move away from the thing that pushed past our limit.

Now the purpose of this disengagement, like the shell shock experienced by war vets, is to allow the mind to clear to stand some chance of returning to our senses, sensitivity, sanity. We aren’t supposed to stay in that state of apathy.

Yes, I’ve felt that before… needing to escape into a fictional world for a while.

But the communal social creed calls us to try to account for more than anything any human being could even remotely be able to handle. The model of real life, the real world, is something we are just supposed to shut up and deal with. It’s even a meme. Some troll puts on a pair of shades and just says, “Deal with it …” Even the popular use of that text convention, the ellipsis I think it’s called…, just reflects apathy.

Big whoop wanna fight about it? That statement is apathy.

The stereo typical New Yorker right? Full of apathy though I’ve read that New Yorkers are actually the friendliest you could ever meet. Ah, that resilience, it’s a natural trigger. We cannot tolerate prolonged apathy. People even manifest strange delusions, even psychosis just to deal with the toxin that is apathy. Apathy is not the same as disengagement. Apathy is what disengagement becomes when it’s become spoiled, when you stop crying over the spilled milk but refuse to clean it up, instead blaming the world and the authorities for the spilled milk and that the whole world smells of rotten milk.

What does our modern culture offer us today that isn’t apathy?

Oh yes, the government is full of secrets that we are supposed to trust and hence we get people talking about conspiracy? Yes, conspiracy cults are manifest apathy.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~