How to Reconcile Beliefs and Souls?

[Guest]

1. Don't worry about things you can't change.

2. Don't blame yourself for things you didn't have any control over (even choices)

3. Don't dwell on past mistakes, learn from them, make them right if you can, but move on.

 

You say you hate yourself, I don't see how you can move on from depression then. That's where the system is failing you. I wish I could help, but my system is built on love, respect, and mutual support. I don't think we could do that if anyone hated anyone else even themselves. Happiness didn't come easy, it takes work and resolving the three above and also learning to like yourself is a big part of it.

[Luminesce]

It seems the root of your problem isn't your beliefs in the afterlife, then, but in your feelings about yourself. Normally that's where a therapist comes in, or at least they can direct you to someone who's more suited to help you. But for sure, every therapist is different, some more understanding than others (like when it comes to tulpamancy), some more helpful than others. I guess my only advice is to try another one if your current one isn't helping. But yeah, this is again outside my area of helping, it'll probably be up to you to take charge and do something about your problems. Asking for help (as you're doing here) is the first step when you can't help yourself, and an important one, but I suppose part of that is figuring out who and where to ask.

[TB]

I try to do everything I can think of about my problems, but then I mess up and go backwards very far... I love my tulpa, and she somehow loves me, and she even loves herself, but I don't know how to learn to love myself. I think I've gotten close sometimes, but now I've messed it up so bad I don't know how I ever will. What is moving on and how does one do it? I keep begging my therapist for help but I do not get help. I will ask my therapist one more time to help me, and if he doesn't help me or direct me someplace where I can be helped, then... I don't know what I'll do.

[Luminesce]

Is seeing a different therapist not an option? Like with any individual, it's totally random who they are and how they think, so I think your chances of being helped even a little more are pretty high if you see someone else. No sense in paying someone if they aren't helping. Maybe they don't even know how, but someone else could.

[TB]

I would have to hope he or my dad can put me somewhere else. I don't know how to do any of these things and was just put into therapy by my parents. I don't know how to do anything on my own. I will just ask about it again when I see them next, and be more direct about how to see another therapist. I don't feel very confident about it though.

[Luminesce]

Yeah I'd definitely recommend telling them this one isn't being very helpful. I'm not saying the next-in-line will suddenly fix all your problems, but you can at least try.

[ManSpider]

I believe in God and in the possibility of an afterlife.

 

I believe the most important thing is to try to be a good person. Respect God and the karma he can dole out to you. Love is a big part of what my answer to the meaning of life would be.

 

If you open your mind to the possibility of a loving God you might become aware of Him or He might seem more likely to be real to you. If you consider what would happen if everybody believed in the supernatural you may come to realize why you can't just have an easy answer to whether God exists or an afterlife exists.

[ShadowsDancing]

Plural/Tulpamancer here: We have always had a bunch of different models of reality going on.

 

I would suggest working on NOT insisting on finding the "One True Magikal Answer".

[solarchariot]

I find the things you are struggling with are things that many of, most of humanity? struggle with. You're not alone. I love Bear's three points. I always find Bear comforting. ShadowDancing response, 'no one true magical answer...' also gold.

 

I am finishing up a book called 'Conscious" by Annaka Harris. If you can find it at the library, it's worth the read. It won't answer any of your questions. It will summarize the present deliberation over the very questions you pose. There is really some bizarre, no shadow of doubt, facts about existence that are inescapable- and that book really give some substance to chew on. I have enjoyed this more than say, "Who's in Charge," by Michael Gazanniga, but his book makes for a nice prelude, and Annaka quotes him. My next book in the line up is "Jung, Buddhism, and the Incarnation of Sophia..." It's already on my bed, next in line. I usually read two or three at once, and I am reading the latest book by Jeffery Kripal, author of "Kali's child" and he offers just as much history and science Gazinniga, but clearly leans towards the esoteric, instead of the materialist perspective.

 

It probably doesn't help to know, all human beings fail to meet ideal. Our ideal, society's ideal, 'god's' ideal. Some fail bigger than others. Some of us feel like we failed worse than we have, but that is just evidence for loving and wanting the ideal. One of my favorite Buddhist/Yoda-isms (Buddhist didn't say it, neither did Yoda...) "I feel much better now that I have lost all hope." I think you're in a good club. you're thinking about things. We make models of the world, the physical world, the social world, and we have models for every person we ever met, and the ideal other, archetypes... They're all in our heads. The split brain surgery where they severe the corpus callosom suggests the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere are two very distinctly different personalities. Freud, more so Jung, suggested there are more personalities in our subconscious. If we were try to reduce this to something, it would have to be something to the affect that we are much more complex than we believe, maybe greater than we can possibly understand.

 

Back to making models. That's what our brain does best. It makes models so we can navigate the world. The physical world, and the social world. They overlap. Sometimes the social word is more solid than the physical world. I sometimes say 'real' world and social world, but there is solid evidence that the 'real' world isn't what we think it is. This is partly because of social norms, but also because we innately make assumptions. Again, the split brain things reveals that quite well. They figured out how to deliver a message to the right brain, like get up and go for a walk, but the left brain isn't privy to the command, and when they ask the left brain why did you get up and walk, it always has an explanation; the explanation is never correct. What gets uploaded into conscious mind might not always be right, but it doesn't invalidate the subjective experience that you had an experience.

 

Conclusion: you exist. I would argue, your tulpa exists. Do we exist prior to and or after existence? Non sequitur. Contextually irrelevant. This is exactly what a physicist would say if you asked, "What existed before the big bang..." The question is considered contextually irrelevant because only that which exist in space/time can be quantified and qualified. (Multi-verse, and or alternative universes still fit within that contextual argument.) If you were to read some physics books about time, there are a quite a few that believe there is no time, it's all an ever present now. If there is any truth in that concept, we exist in an ever present now, by definition an eternity, then even though we have speculative evidence that there was a time we didn't exist, and time that we might not exist, we still exist in an eternity- the length of time is the illusion. We don't exist in a vacuum. We all exist in context to everything and everyone else, which makes your existence absolutely a hundred percent necessary and valuable beyond anything that can be measured. From this perspective, the future informs the past just as much as the past influences the future.

 

From a Jungian perspective, internal conflict is necessary for growth. It allows us to experience courage. We improve not from running from the darkness, but when we move towards that which is uncomfortable. Go towards the shadows, the light is on the other side. If your present internal conflict is too great, perhaps it is because you have come up upon a new threshold- something that requires your model for what you know to be expanded to include or dispose of data that doesn't fit. This is okay. This is what we do. It doesn't matter where you get a model from. Self help book, watching Ted Talks, or even fiction! Fiction is a model. If past abuse was your thing, I might recommend watching "good will hunting" over and over and over. Lots of people get better in that movie. "Death Wish Three" is not a viable model for long term health. It's fun, society likes that model, but it's not ultimately productive. Beating yourself up for real sins or perceived failures is a Death Wish Three model. You need a growth model. I have lots of go to models that I use for comfort. I recommend "The Kid" staring Bruce Willis; it's a Disney film, about time travel and growth, and it really is a feel good movie. I cry every time i watch it and I have seen it over a hundred times. I cry because it was relevant to what i needed to model for my own growth. It helped me find an inner compassion for my younger self. The thing is, though this worked for me, it might not work for you. You got to find your model. You clearly like thinking about things. I think if you keep asking questions like these, you will find an answer that fits where you are. Keep up the good work!

[theholodoc]

 but I don't know how to learn to love myself.

Hey ghost. I know of one sure fire way to love yourself. Choose to do it.  thats it, the whole thing. You make a choice to love yourself every time the question comes up. You have made a choice to love your tulpa, same with yourself. Just as arbitrary, you deserve all the love you can give to yourself, you do not need to earn it, or be worthy of it or be good in anybody's eyes, or live up to what the bible tells you to do, you are completely, one-hundred percent entitled to love. Give it to yourself, and if some voice in your head, even if you think it is your voice, tells you otherwise, reject it out of hand. If something about you, doesn't work for you, so what. change it or not, you are all you really have, so choose to love. Yourself (and others too, if you want). 

My best to you, Dr. Bob