midoridrops blog

I’ve finally faced it and I’m now moving one step at a time in a new direction.

I am still worried, but happy.

カメレオン君は色んな色に変わるのが得意です。
もっとも色を変えることによって色んな良さと悪さが見えるのです。
しかし、普段なら素の色でいるのです。

カメレオン君はある日、自分に１つの疑問を持ったのでした。
「僕って色んな色に変身出来るけど、それも含めた上で僕なの？」と。
その質問を周りのカメレオン達に聞いても皆の答えは全て同じでした、

「 そんなのどうでもいい。食われぬまま、生きれ」と。
カメレオン君が求めてた答えとはちょっと違いました。
カメレオン君はひとりぼっちになった気分でした。

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Chameleon is good at changing its color.
The advantage to this is that it can see the good and the bad in everything.
But it’s normally its own color.

One day, Chameleon came up with a question for itself,
“I know that I can transform into different colors, but do all those colors define me as a whole?”
This question was asked to the rest of its kind around but they all said the same thing.

“There is no use in thinking about such thing. Just survive without being eaten”
Unfortunately, this was not really the answer it was looking for.
Chamelon felt alone.

今朝考えてた。

どこの国、家族にでも教われる文化や一般常識って宗教とあまり変わらないなって。
周りや上の人には守るべきことだと言われながら生きてゆく訳でさー　正しいか正しくないかは別で。
それによって皆はバラバラになってって似た者同士はくっついてって….

例えばの話だけど、「日本人だから周りを先に考えるべき」「アメリカ人だから自分の意見をはっきりさせるべき」とか。
そんなの間違ってると思うんだ。国とか、性別とか、歳とか、皮膚の色とか関係ないはず。
「人間として、周りの意見を尊重しつつも自分の意見も伝えるべき」の方が正しいんではないか？

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This morning I was thinking.

The traditions and societal norms that are taught in every country and households aren’t very different from “religion”.
We’re expected by the people around us and our elders to follow and live each day with them; right or wrong is a different matter.
With these rules, people separate and similar people stick together…

Some examples such as, “You need to think about others first, if you’re Japanese” and “You need to state your own opinion clearly, if you’re American“.
I think they are both wrong.  Country, sex, age, color of the skin should be irrelevant.
Shouldn’t it be, “As a human being, you should think about others as well as making yourself clear to others”?

We all have our life stories.

Good, or bad… secret, or not, we still try to live on.

I’m not entirely sure about a lot of things lately;  fatigue, stress, days of caffeine, lone nights of alcoholic consumption, and to top it off, a couple of enlightening experiences.  My mind has been completely overfilled with useless and useful information, and not having the time to organize and defragment these memories have been increasingly annoying.  I’m somewhat hoping that writing these thoughts down again somewhere, will help me run my mind back to 100% (well, 80% is good enough, heh); I just feel impulsive about a lot of things going on with my life at the moment. I sense inconsistencies of my current actions compared to actions that I’ve taken in the past and it’s driving me nuts. It’s like an obsession  of mental organization. Mind you, I’m not in a right mindset.. (not sure if I ever will be), so take this with a grain of salt.

Here is something that I have been wondering.  I’ve always been up for change. Change. Change. I feel like I’m definitely up for changes in the surrounding environment on a macro-level basis, such as technology. But these drastic internal changes have been very… uncomfortable to say the least.  Am I really a proponent for change? I’ve started to realize that I’m not. But this is perhaps due to the fear of contradiction. The contradiction as a result of taking in different perspectives and comparing them to each other; you are almost guaranteed to find a hole in your rationale, especially when it is subjective.  I feel responsible for this though, as it was my decision for working part-time, interning, going to school and… experimenting.  On one hand, I feel like I can make a difference in my situations and on the other, I feel like I’m not thinking through it.  I’ve even considered just going with the flow, but I know how much trouble that can cause later down the road; nuh-uh.

Relationships. Where should I start with that?  I think it’s awesome, but I seem to have some kind of mental lockdown at the moment.  It’s like a shop that had its jewelry stolen, and the alarms are going off; things must be taken care of first, before the store can go back to its operational state.  Digging into my mind and searching around right now, I can’t seem to pull it up easily.  What if nothing comes out anymore? Am I to rationalize this thought? Plant this seed , and let it run its course? If I was to ask myself 5 months ago, I would refuse such situation. Upon some reflection of this thought process, however, I’ve often come to the conclusion that “I would never be understood”. This likely comes from the desire to want to be understood; have I done my part for others though? That is one question I must ask myself.

How do you “improve” yourself? Is it strengthening the strengths you currently have, or is it putting yourself into situations you aren’t used to? I believe that there are 2 ways of improving yourself on each aspect of your personality; there is specialization and rounded-ness.  One thing that must be known is that they both require some interaction with people other than yourself.  I feel like I’ve already done enough of the latter by being naive in the beginning of college, only to realize that you are most likely going to be screwed by being backstabbed, in addition to all the drama. Done with that crap.  Therefore, I am looking at interaction with people on a specialization -> rounded-ness basis.  Why deal with all the likely bullshit people can bring by randomly putting yourself into situations?  I find that far too inefficient and tiring, but whatever floats your boat, is it not?

I refuse to take some negative view of the world in this mindset, but I can somewhat relate to the saying of “life being a prison”.  When I flip my thought over to the other side however, your life is what you make of it, for the fact that you were born which would include happiness, sadness, frustration, celebration, curiousity…. Life really is a double-edged sword.

Going onto another tangent idea, and totally based on a thought experiment I just had… What if we condemned the birth of human being? Not from a shallow perspective (“oh the condom broke”) but on a philosophical perspective.  I mean, I’ve often heard of atheist grave ceremonies in which they “celebrate the life” that person had with their death. Meh, I guess the opposite wouldn’t work as time moves forward.

I guess based on that thought experiment, I would have to say at this point that “life is a double-edged sword…. that slants toward positivity”. Unless I can come up with some other opposite logic.. but it’s time for me to go to sleep

So it might bash the “Christians” and any other “religion” out there, but I kind of find it ridiculous that people rely on books to tell them how they should live their lives. Really? Ever since I was small, I was shaped by what I believe in and what others believe in and the things I have experienced first-hand and seeing the consequences of my actions; these shaped my values and morals.  In my mind, philosophy is the personal interaction between the mind and the environment, constantly changing in order for it to make sense under as many situations as possible and this requires constant addition of knowledge received in the external environment.

People can create their own values and morals if they put enough effort in; they don’t need a book or a person to tell them how they should act in the world.  Instead, strive to form your own perception, your values, beliefs, morals, anything, by remembering what has happened in the past and truly living by what you believe in, in the present to form the future that you want.

After some of the things I’ve researched lately and talking with my neuroscience friend, I believe that some people’s minds are hard-coded to take in a specific information, whether that is visual, numerical, conceptual, etc. Selective perception and retention concepts are highly related to this; picking what is most important and only retaining the information that is found to be important. With this theory, I must say that those that believe anything that they hear and change depending on the situation, do not have the ability to introspect and think of their own ideas; however, they are very good at relating to others (whether that is superficial or not, is a different matter) and are better with focus and hand-eye motor coordination.  They are also likely to be susceptible to cultural influences. Perhaps Japanese people are agnostic not because they choose to, but because conversation of “religion” is known as taboo and the cultural traditions are so often used in public that it replaces the faith structure — the opposite can be said about the American public where there is minimal “cultural” influence telling people how to behave and act, thus Christianity is used in place of it.

Selective perception… A good example will be myself.  Before I look at an object, I am living in my head with prior ideas and concepts.  When I realize the object, person or idea in front of me, my mind instantly looks for the internal “book” full of knowledge I have on the target.  When there is a discrepancy between the knowledge that I have formed and the knowledge given to me, I try to look for what the discrepancies are.  Usually, this discrepancy is more about the context rather than the physical characteristics of the object, person, or idea. After capturing what I see in my vision, I selectively retain the contextual part of the information, rather than the visual aspects (colors, shape, etc.) and I try to fit this information in like a puzzle until no contradictions or holes can be seen, striving for perfection, otherwise I don’t feel comfortable.  One can say that it is extremely similar to OCD symptoms, except it occurring inside of the mind. tl;dr My focus is entirely centered inside of my mind, not on the external world I see with my eyes like many people. This is perhaps what is known as hyperfocus, often a common attribute among ADHD-diagnosed people.

So, in making a roundabout, possibly many of the truly ADHD diagnosed people, and high IQ people (especially the intuitive types) tend to be Athiests because they tend to see the contradictions in the “closed-belief” systems such as Christianity or other Philosophers that claim their writings to be “the universal truth”.  In this sense, on a level higher, I don’t see that much difference between Jesus and Philosophers; they are both claiming something, perhaps opposite ideas, but from the eyes of the common people, they are often looked to as the authority figures that shape their world — There must be a way for people to access the critical thinking ability that these figures have used in order to shape their own environment.

Something I’m very curious is whether or not there are “religious” people that have this thought process as well.  I see Christianity and other religions such as Islam providing what the after-life will be (another reason why I think of it as a closed-belief system), but I haven’t really heard Philosophers talk about the after-life and I have rarely given thought to it either to be honest.  Maybe both concepts have to be taken into consideration? Maybe there is some truth to religions when it comes to the after-life?  Considering that a lot of the religion have distinct differences with subtle similarities (such as the concept of a “heaven”), I can’t stop thinking that there must have been a root belief or incident that branched out to the religions that exist today. Like..  a visit from the extraterrestrials? Or experiencing another dimension? Very interesting stuff that I’d like to think more about.

what is to settle?

what is to keep looking?

で？どうすれば良いんだろうかー！ってね！

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