~~~ This Disappearing World ~~~

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Beyond anything you could imagine…had an unbelievably great childhood.

Fun, friends, family, happy, playing ALL the time. Playing ALL the time.

No pressure, just FUN. Extremely physically active. Loved to move. Just move.

Great, GREAT life.[/size]

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Had a hundred jobs, loving parents. Many friends. Enjoyed art & drawing. Great family.

Towards the end of high school, was introduced to drugs.

Marijuana and hash consumed me.

After high school my entire life revolved around being high. CONSTANTLY high. 24 hrs. high. High for months at a time.

Then I got got caught. Just so happened that I lost a job that tied me to my fellow friends who were also fellow users. In every quarter, my life imploded.
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Went into a deep depression. Deep, deep, deep. Catatonic-type deep.

Don’t remember my father speaking a lot to me or giving me advice but when he did, I listened. I remember him saying, Why don’t you go to college? I did.

My first quarter grades initially reflected the grades I enjoyed my entire life in formal education - horrible.

Then, towards the end of my first quarter, I happened upon a Saturday seminar on How to Study. Was still outwardly catatonic-like but the teacher and his one-time seminar impressed me.

Changed my study habits and for the first time in my life I was scoring consistently above 100% on each and every class and test that I took. Some physical education related classes I had I did not receive an A but that was unimportant.

What was important was that around the same time I was immersed in an extremely heavy college class load a thread began to appear. A golden thread. A slender thread of authors that I read aside and unrelated from my intense formal class-related work.

No longer can I remember the sequential order of authors but I know the trail passed through Vonnegut, Jung, J.J. VanDerLeeuw, Hubert Benoit, Wilhelm, Hesse, Colin Wilson, and many others that I have forgotten. Within each book another author would be revealed to me and the golden thread seemed to take me deeper and deeper upon a increasingly consuming sub-conscious path that ended when I found P.D. Ouspensky.

Not only did I read Ouspensky I breathed Ouspensky. I ate & I saw things Ouspensky.

Sitting in a mathematics class something totally unexpected happened to me. Though I had experimented with every mind-altering drug on earth NOTHING could have prepared me for that life-altering experience that happened to me while I sat, stone cold sober upon a chair in a morning math class.[/size]

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Inside-out.

There is no way I can describe or attempt to share with anyone what I actually experienced.

Time took a different dimension. Up & down. Not sequential.

I became my fellow students that shared the room at the time.

I lost me.

I remember having a consciously formed thought, I’m going out of my mind.

That thought brought me back. Back to me. Back to the persona of Bill Wiltrack.

The deepest, most uncontrollable psychic fear came from somewhere. It brought me back. To what or from what I do not know.

Fear.

I read & re-read & reread Ouspensky for years & YEARS afterward.

Joined an ashram in Cleveland, Ohio and a commune outside of Benwood, West Virginia.

Could never get back.

Never meant for this post to be this long but I want to provide a framework for someone who reads this to get something out of my writing.

The only thing I could share from this, the most important single experience of my life is that philosophy is important. Philosophy is experiential. Philosophy is lived.

The experience itself left me with one certainty. That certainty is, that we repeat our lives over & over again. One other thing, I’m not certain of anything out here; here in our three dimensional world.

Don’t know why I didn’t kill myself during the severe depression that happened to me in my early adulthood but somehow, I am convinced that - that depression, that deep, dark, inescapable and debilitating depression precluded & prepared me for an equally uncontrollable mind-blowing, life-changing unforeseeable explosion of an overall indescribable positive experience that I am so appreciative to have experienced later. [/size]

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[size=117]Philosophy is intertwined in each of my moments.

The inseparable thread of philosophy is intertwined within my reality. In everything that I love, philosophy is there.

There is a tremendous more amount of me and my relationship to philosophy that I have to share but this post is already waaaaay too long.

Like all of you who are reading this I have MUCH more that I could write about in my life’s relationship to philosophy. For now I will stop here.[/size]

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[size=150]…You will not stop here.

…You will keep going here.

…I accept the premise of this thread.

…Thank you Bill.[/size]

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Same here I not only accept it, I embrace it. Thank you too.

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How do you get over 100% on any test?.
Change is living, ruts are existing. Don’t forget to not only smell the roses, observe and learn the rose.

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For whatever reason, I found that many tests that I took at the time came with an extra point question or two. I would ALWAYS answer those questions AND get them correct. I really fucked-up bell curves.[/size]

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You answered 100% of the questions correctly, that adds up to 100%. Extra credit is just pandering.

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[size=117]Yeah, I agree.

It was just the mindset I was in at the time. It was strange.

College classes were just a distraction that I had to attend to in order to read, and apply, the philosophical discipline of Ouspensky.

Studying and taking tests were a canvas in a way. A responsibility.

My venture into a really clear intellectual state was relatively short lived.

After I had some sort of deep understanding in a college math class my life changed in a way that I could not have imagined.

College seemed pointless. In the following weeks after I had a deep understanding, my consciousness changed again.

It changed in a way that I cannot explain or relay to you. My perspective, my being, flipped back to a state that I normally assumed.[/size]

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I believe that there are many underhanded forces which keep most people inside of their bodies.
The deep subconscious insane fear is one of them.
I think you may have tasted it.

For me, I had the fear once, and other times it was just a total seizure type of a thing which locked me back into my body.
That is why something needs to kill your body before it will let go. It’s hell bent on locking you down into it.

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A kindred soul.

Who would have figured.

Thank you for responding to this thread.

Somehow we can capture or understand the self part of what we generally recognize to be self in time of great distress or in times of GREAT effort in order to gain a new perspective. A new understanding.

We need a separation within our consciousness.

But anymore I don’t know how to do that. Sometimes I think I have to outsmart my self.[/size]

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The identity of people I love is far more important than what their combined “goods” benefit the world. They are more than a sum of their parts ,and I love them for that. :sunglasses:

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These 2 paragraphs explain just why I am trying to move on from philosophy: philosophy leaves you with nothing practical for living, no certainties. All it leaves you with are doubts and indecision. The uncertainty you talk of is intolerable and I cannot imagine will not in the end lead to further mental illness.

My advice to you would be to drop the philosophy, or at any rate to cut it right back to something much less significant in your life. I would further advise that if you have time on your hands, you use it up playing video games. Fantasy-adventure games provide you with an environment where you can learn many, even most, of the practical abilities you need for living: e.g. decision making, organizing, prioritizing, planning, improvisation, puzzle solving etc, etc. Also, I would advise learning to meditate, though since you have joined an ashram, you may already have done so.

I like your writing. It is very expressive. However, I’m not sure what response you’re looking for. I can see so many problems in your life and where they have come from, and I know how to deal with them – even that big fear, that experience of being other people – I know what that is and why it happened; I have even had a more or less identical experience myself and have dealt with it successfully and to my advantage. But maybe you just want to express yourself, maybe just want to share your admiration of philosophy, so I’ll keep my further advice to myself unless you specifically ask for it.

Just one more thing: Ouspensky should carry a health warning. All this obsession with the self is really, really bad news. Take a lesson from Jung: his internal explorations lead to psychosis. If you read his memoires, which I daresay you have done, those experiences of Philomen appearing to him and all the other hallucinations and odd experiences are schizophrenia. Jung recovered, and I have never heard any acknowledgement that he succumbed to schizophrenia, but he did, and it was a result of his tampering with his own mind.

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I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you taking the time to follow this thread and add your thoughts.

I appreciate your thoughts. I take them to heart.

Could you, one day, either add to this thread or start your own thread that reveals more about your, more or less identical experience of the empathy that I felt with other individuals in a math class that I attended which I relayed earlier within this thread?[/size]

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Move to Mundane Babble.

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I have, what may be, a better idea for you.

Just don’t click onto this thread if you cannot add or relate to the philosophical concepts.
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[size=150]…THANK YOU, Bill.[/size]

…I must have overlooked the philosophical concepts.

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…YOU ARE RIGHT.

…This thread must stay, IN FILAZOFI[/size]

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Thank you.

That means a lot to me.

I’ve read your posts here. You are an expert in Mundane Babble.[/size]

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The carping ends here, gents.

The OP contained a view of what philosophy is. Should this thread degenerate into a self-help meeting, it will be moved.

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I am afraid I was a little precipitate in offering to give my take on your life – as someone commented, this is a philosophy forum, not a psychology forum. But, actually, more than that is this: The experience I talked about was a bad experience. It traumatized me. I have recovered, but my way with bad experiences is to take what I can learn from them, recover from them, take pride in the fact that I was able to deal with it, and then FORGET them. That is a very active process: go somewhere away from all associations with the bad experience; get rid of all things that I associate with the bad experience – basically, weed out of my life, as much as possible, all things that might remind me of that bad experience – our memories are not perfect for a reason; use that imperfection.

So, just briefly, and confining myself to that one experience: it happened at night when I was alone in bed. I did not become someone else, as you did; I became nothing. It was as though my mind was disembodied and floating feely in a black void. I did not know who or what I was. Over about an hour, I ‘reconstructed’ myself. The first thing was that I became aware of weight. Then I remembered the name of the place where I was born. I think the next thing was that I became aware that I had a body. It took a while to know that I was lying in a bed, and even longer to remember my name. Yes, HUGE fear. Traumatic. It took years to recover.

But you should look on incidents like that as just dreams, for that is what they are. Dreams can take many forms, and you can have them while you are awake – hallucinations. So it’s actually nothing to worry about. But it DOES have meaning, and that can be important.

Your experience of becoming the other boys in your class interprets just as you said yourself: you were losing yourself, becoming someone else. The point is that we are all unique individuals, each have our own unique spirit, and if we do not maintain our own individuality, then we, quite literally, lose our ‘self’, become someone else. And even before you had that experience, that would have been a source of anxiety and lack of self-confidence that would have been growing and becoming ever more troublesome.

The ‘golden thread’ you found – that is actually another ‘dream’ experience. It tells you that that is what you NEED to find: you need to find the thread that runs through your life, need to see that your life is not a series of random events but that it has a story, and that is related to your uniqueness, your individuality, your spirit, and to pick up that thread and to follow it is to become your ‘self’, become ‘you’, and to follow a path that will take you where you are meant to go. If you find that thread, it will be “pure gold”, hence the Golden Thread.

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[size=121]Thank you again.

I appreciate your honesty & openness.

It is individuals like you that maintain my faith in this forum.[/size]

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