...or perhaps just slightly less stupid? Decide for yourself if these ways of thinking help you over time, ladies & gents.

Do Your Own Defining & Scientific Thought

I don't like words that are either poorly defined, or used to mean 100 different things by different people and are therefore too relativistic.

This is one reason I dislike using the word "drug".

Ask a hundred people what a drug is and you will get nearly as many different answers.

What does it mean when something "alters" you? Everyone is under the influence of something--emotions, every crumb of food they consume, every drop of liquid they swallow. A million factors contribute at any one time to the state of a person's mental and physical well being.

Something either builds the body up, or it tears it down and damages it, and there are nearly infinite things in nature or made by man that fall into either one of those categories.

The question of what is a net win for the body and mind, and what is a net loss for it, has never been easy to answer about most things, I have learned. Some are obvious--don't consume cyanide. Some are not so obvious--the effects of various forms of glucose, and which are healthy or not. Is the starch and energy from a potato worth the anti-nutrients in it?

The effects of gradual change over years have also taught humans much about how something can appear to be innocuous, but be a slow and gradual cancer to the body that develops problems over time.

-

Something is either a net win or it is not. It's up to the individual to put information together to figure it out. Your own body is your science experiment, and no body of priests in white lab coats or government goons will ever be able to decide for you what is definitely best for your body.

Stop thinking inside other people's boxes by assuming definitions for things or categorizing things that you haven't taken the time to try to define yourself.

---

Being 'Against The Grain' Just To Be Against Everything, Is Also Called Being Stupid

If your compulsion is to be against what every one else is doing, in any form, all the time, regardless of the reason others do it (or simply because lots of others do it), then you are just as controlled by what others are doing as you are if you always feel compelled to follow.

Self security comes in being fully content with what you love and who you are, without relation to whether others are similar or are not.

I love or want a thing because I love or want a thing, regardless if one million other people love or want it, or 2 other people, or just me, or 6 billion other people.

---

An Insult IS NOT The Same As An Ad Hom

{But It Does Look Like The White Flag of Surrender}

PSA: An "Ad hom" is not the same as an insult. An ad hom is a fallacy because it uses some aspect of a PERSON as the REASON their idea or argument is somehow wrong or invalid. (see screen cap)

Therefore, a person can BOTH

• Reject an argument for it's illogical conclusions or premises

AND

• Call you a moron

Calling you a moron doesn't invalidate their response to your argument, nor does calling you a moron mean YOUR argument was invalid either.

It just means they BOTH

• Made an attempt to refute your argument

  AND

• Think you're a moron for the way you think.

Personally, I don't mind calling someone who insulted me first an asshole, if they are seeming to be one without warrant, but I will refrain from ADDING insults to my logic--specifically in one-on-one communication--where the other party said nothing to attack me first.

---

Life Is DANGER, Freedom Is RISK, and Safety Is TEMPORARY

The more your goal is safety, the more you must create limitations for yourself. Protection, in any form, is also a form of limitation. We all want to survive to see tomorrow, so basic protections are necessary. But beyond the minimums (and how minimum is defined varies among individuals), the rest is a great balance, a pull between two opposing things in human
nature-- the desire to be secure and safe enough to see tomorrow, and the desire to be free enough to make whatever decisions we so choose... so long as we see tomorrow.

If ultimate safety means every protection from every potential threat in reality is in place, then you are either a dead man among the living, a slave to your own fears, or a slave to someone else... or like the subject of a master-- you are both.

This is because you cannot be protected from everything dangerous without being a prisoner.

Choice is always risk; freedom is necessarily being allowed to take risks.

~*~

Life IS danger, freedom IS risk, and safety is temporary and mostly an illusion.

Let go of the need to protect against everything and you will know more freedom.

---

Your Happiness Is Your Fucking Job

How you feel about the world around you is 100% up to you, no one else.

Shocking, isn't it? Or is it?

Actually owning yourself means even taking back ownership of how you feel. No one's words can make you feel anything without your permission. If someone is mean to me, it is still my FAULT if I feel bad about that.

Emotions only feel as though they own us when we are a slave to habit.

The truth is, we own them.

We go to them, they don't come to us.

The subconscious builds emotional habits. Changing the subconscious starts in the conscious brain. Change your emotional habits, change your life.

Remember, your life is happening for you, not to you.

---

Those Who Say They're Open-Minded

VS

Those Who Really Are

~*~

OPEN

An open mind is best described as a fearlessly curious one. It seeks to understand, and hopes to find merit or what is believable about a thing.

CLOSED

A mind that seeks to learn about a thing only in the hopes of discounting or debunking it, is not only not open, it is already long since shut. It has decided what cannot be allowed in, and wants a reason to easily reject something because it cannot allow an altered view of things.

A CLOSED mind is too uncomfortable with facing the uncertainty that comes with "Maybe, after all, I was wrong."

---

How Creating Your Reality Actually Works

If I tell you to spend the next 5 minutes in the room you are in looking everywhere for the color green, and then ask you (once you have located all the green) to step out of that room and, without looking back, tell me where all the RED was in the room, you won't easily remember it if you weren't already thinking to notice it. You likely won't know where any red
was in the room.

You may not even think there WAS red in the room, because you remember none (you remember only green).

A lot of life is what you're choosing to look for.

If you're looking for it, you're going to always see it.

If you always see it, and not the other things you aren't looking for, your worldview is going to be distorted and lop-sided.

~*~

If you want goodness and good things, and beauty and happiness, it has to be something you're looking for in everything.
I spend a lot of my time in life noticing what is pleasant and good and beautiful, and my life has only proceeded to bring me more beauty and goodness in varying ways.

Or maybe Life didn't bring it to me, maybe I am just noticing the goodness and beauty where it is passing others by who are busy looking for all the darkness and flaws.

You will absolutely GET more of whatever you are FOCUSING ON.

---

The Truth Is "Deep"? What The Hell Is It Beneath, Then?

~*~

I have noticed that when I state something that is a truth about reality, as plain to me as saying "swimming in water will leave you wet", it is sometimes met with a strange reply:

"That's deep."

Why would someone feel as though I said something "deep" when I said something that to me seems painfully obvious?

If something is "deep", it is beneath.

If it is beneath something, what is it beneath?

Often, the very surface of plain reality itself is buried deep beneath mental distortion. Language and communication can, and ARE, used to distort reality. It is done by many intentionally, in this world, in order to manipulate and control others, and then it is spread and perpetuated by many many more.

Most people are walking around in a mental fog, as I once was, and the layers of distortion between them and mere reality are many, so they do not see what SHOULD be obvious.

The surface of the earth is not deep below the earth, I am standing right on it.

If I cannot see the surface of the earth I am standing on, it's because something is blocking my ability to see it.

Help people remove the distortions, the blinders, the things blocking their own vision, as you figure out how to remove your own.

Most truth is not deep, it is obfuscated or distorted.

~*~