Sure. Ask away, but it will take hours for me to reply.
Why would you “actually” want to reveal all, Stuart. This is the internet you know. One has to be careful. If not a predator, at least someone who will take advantage of your revelations.
There are times when I kind of intuit that you may be someone who I feel that you are but of course I may be wrong in this. But I would never give you away even if I am correct. And if you do decide to give yourself away and I am correct in who I sometimes intuit or imagine you to be, perhaps the first thing to do is to ask yourself - why? Why now?
But of course, I may be totally wrong. lol
Maybe you ought to define “appreciate’ first. 
What does that entail for you?
And then you must define 'natural state”. It might be different depending on the individual. Would I be wrong in this?
Does appreciating something that is natural to us silly creatures mean the same as acting on that natural state or acting in full consciousness and reason?
Can we accept and appreciate who we are as human animals in one sense but at the same time rein in our true natural state?
Why? Wouldn’t the answer be different depending on the individual, Stuart? For some it’s missed opportunity. For others, it is just plain laziness. We have to shoot for the highest star but we only have so much potential within us. We all have our limitations. That is not to say that we should not see how far that potential goes.
The human mind may be the final frontier but not all minds are as far-reaching as others.
OK. Your phrasing was a little odd, so I thought you meant something more.
Anyways, I don’t know how to relate to your problem because I don’t understand it. I am at the local community college every day of the week and I consider many of my peers in the STEM disciplines to be sufficiently stimulating and then some. Because I am taking chemistry, pre-med, math, and engineering tract courses – no-bullshit classes – I’m surrounded mostly by proactive and motivated students who are there to learn and do well. I don’t consider anyone I’ve met at the college a genius at all, but genius is extremely irrelevant to me. I find there is plenty to learn by simple interaction and attention to the habits and quirks of other people. No doubt the experience is essentially richer in person than one mediated through an internet message board which lacks body language, facial expression, spoken word, and the timing and pauses of real time conversation.
Actualization requires an uncommon confluence of conditions.
Must one appreciate their natural state at all? By what necessity? For what advantage? What is a natural state when nature does not remain constant?
What is sad about a ballast and why is it pitted against will?
I did thoroughly enjoy The Grey, though. Maybe you’re just suffering from terminal boredom?
Dear Stuart, I’ve been gone for a while, but your lament hasn’t changed much. You’re still extremely egocentric. You still don’t seem to understand that you’re the only one who can answer your questions. And I’m being honest with you, as I’ve always tried to be.
Are you really being totally honest with yourself? If so, that would mean, imm, that you can accept what other people say, without thinking you’re being criticized. To say you’re egocentric isn’t a criticism. We are all egocentric; we must be in order to survive!
In questioning yourself–given total honesty–you have to accept yourself, warts and all. If you disregard those things about yourself that you don’t like or that you feel other people won’t like, you’re not being completely honest with yourself. You may not feel intellectually challenged by anyone here–or anyone anywhere, for that matter. Why not? Do you feel superior to them? Why?
No one can get into your mind. Every thought you have, every word you use, is colored by your unique reactions to your unique memories. No amount of revealing yourself will ever change that. You speak your own language and it’s a language only you can know and try to understand. If you can reach such an understanding of yourself, it’ll only be because you’ve been as honest as you can possibly be–with yourself.
Do you understand what it is I’m trying to say?
I wrote a book, it was 600 pages of high quality work, and I would have put it on a public website, free for all on the internet to judge, but awfully convenie… unfortunately, the ghost in the machine got it, you see I’m near brain dead. I’m an imbecile who didn’t know about online data storage and rewritable cds.
You know what, maybe it wasn’t unfortunate at all. After all, it was full of me repeatedly making the same observations, over and over again, with hardly a word altered. Sometimes I would pick a person and use them as a stereotype to make my arguments, of course afraid to ever fully evaluate, sentence by sentence, any of the words of this person I would criticize.
And most damning of all would have been the fact that the website I would have displayed the book on would have had a forum open for discussion. I fear that I would have cowardly banned anyone who would have asked me questions that I couldn’t deal with. Now that I think about it, I think I left my laptop in the sun where it over heated on purpose. Though I would only admit to myself now how desperate I was for that work to be destroyed; especially the chapter on how to passive-aggressively address people who have cowardly banned them from their forum over a technicality so that they wouldn’t have to deal with them directly. Also, my chapter on obfuscation was probably left to the ghost in the machine; it would have been very useful for some, but really, it is a cowardly act. One who regularly obfuscates is the worst kind of coward, though they can always stop pissing in their pants and obfuscating and create and an account to be only used for PM to address the person without it being a show. But, those prone to obfuscation, wouldn’t do that, being cowards. They would most likely hide behind the pretense of being too superior to speak to them, only about them, as a zoologist would speak of apes in the field. And worse of all, they may have been correct in that judgment many times in the past, so as to make it seem an infallible one. Basically, I’m just saying that my book would have given too much help to cowards, so I’m glad the Ghost in the machine got it.
Stuart: when I come to a state as such you describe above, I always take a drastic temporal slide
Into the joys of masochism, after a reverse reading of how not to influence people by elad eiginrac , and get satisfaction in my antic intelligence. Therefrom to recover take 2 viagras, and a plastic replica of wifey if she is away. Usually works!
This is my up to date modern version of Kant’s synthetic a-priori. (I can almost hear the hisses and boos, and someone in the background whispering something very nasty and derogatory).
Caution: caveat: do not be abusive to your elders, and try not to ground any unsupportable conclusions on your part into who or what you think your self may be.
Sadist and masochists, maybe that is what this is all about. The masochist may follow the neeww tecteminnt and risk death for others, then upon the realization that they are risking nothing for no one, they turn to risk much to become more. Death, though, is always what they run along side, still they very rarely actualize. The sadists, may eerily mirror the masochist, but they interpret the nneww tectimmentt to mean that they should get more form others, and feel ill will when they don’t. Then they move away from that and wish to become more. They know it takes pain, but they refuse to recognize that it takes risk, the risk of death or irreversible decay. The reason they cannot accept the risk of death, like the masochist does so easily, is because they don’t appreciate their pain. They feel it! But, they never had, in their nihilistic days, concerned themselves with their pain becoming an absolute. They never, in their naivety, wished to become there pain, but instead wished for the pain of others to become an absolute. Away from absolutes, now wiser, the sadist, would only knowingly risk others… but for something which others cannot provide!
Hi, Lizbethrose, welcome back. May I ask if you accidently omitted a “not”? If not, then why wouldn’t the egocentrics think they could answer their own questions?
I’d like to think I can, I don’t recall ever taking offence to any of your advice.
I’m challenged to some degree by many here and very much intellectually challenged by some, Obe for one, is extremely challenging to me, and I think there may be others who could also be very challenging; likely a least a few others I’ve spoken to here. But, one who challenges me, is above me. Axiomatically they only have so much time for me, and even I must have varied teachers. But, honesty made me accept that I’m of others, and require what others require, but then more. For those who don’t recognize their hunger, near starvation may be necessary for them to understand that they’re not sustaining all they need.
Why, is a relevant question and I do have tentative answers, but being they are only tentative and unacceptable to most I rather not speak about them now. It’s the simple fact itself that is most difficult. Its difficult to need what isn’t in abundance and it is difficult to be open about that need, it sounds pretentious, how could it sound otherwise?
Yes, but nomads only survive by suppressing themselves, not necessarily hiding who they are to themselves, but reducing who they are to a fragment of humanity, one which can self-sustain. One who by nature must always try to expand themselves may need to obtain the ends of that understanding on their own, but not by themselves; how can one obtain more if not by taking more?
I don’t think that freedom from myself is my concern anymore, but I can understand why you would think it was; half my early posts on ilp were about trying to be free from one thing or another.
What if you must, your nature, push faster than you may possibly be able to prepare for?
That is what is behind such egotistical statements such as the one I made towards the end of the OP. I’d be of average intelligence for one of my background if it wasn’t for that “disposition”.
Dan, for now, being admittedly egocentric, let me ask how you believe you differ from me; as far as you know me, and keep in mind my declaration of superiority to most should you think of holding back.
Fuse, I’ll address the issue of ballast and will, which MM also addressed, later, because it will require more time.
I realize that ego is temporary. I try to not feed it, but I don’t fear it or hate it either. Ego is just a bunch of knots and brain cells firing. It’s not a real or lasting thing. It will die, sooner or later, and all that is left is the highest energy we have managed, and even that might dissipate. I think we differ in allot of ways. I think I have a very rare soul. I’m guessing you were born with some types of gifts, but most humans are born imbalanced, and develop imbalanced. I don’t know you well enough to explain what your main gifts and weaknesses are, but I’m guessing you have some hyper active areas which led you to this forum. Philosophy is not for everyone, and good philosophy is a rare gift. I consider it mostly genetic.
Yes, I was unbalanced in many ways. It’s the integration of foreign elements that creates force.
Genetic, how so?
There is a flip side to most everything, and as has been pointed out above, egotistical may be a good thing in the example in which you bring it up. If you are pushing ahead faster than your ability to prepare a safety, or an escape route, or devices, then that shows you have no time to plan, and at most, your egoism would consist of nothing more than an impatience to get on with it for whatever reason, or not having the means to adequately provide these for your self. If this argument can be sustained here, then the apparent egoism may also be interpreted as one, with which you may be testing the boundaries or risk and safety, censure or free pass.
You may be in fact trying on some level to use such a test to undermine your ego and to break it down to a securely grounded and well understood level.
There may be other aspects to as of yet unexplored facets to egoism, some of which conflate with other’s and this may be also an effect of an intended or unintended effort.
Ultimately, the best judge is one’s self, in the fearless exporation which best defines a person.
Thank you, obe.