Getting an accurate "sense of self"

I've been having an overly-philosophical hang-up in therapy lately and I wanted to get y'all's thoughts. For anyone not familiar with Acceptance and Commitment therapy, here are some core principles from wikipedia: 1. Cognitive defusion: Learning methods to reduce the tendency to reify thoughts, images, emotions, and memories. 2. Acceptance: Allowing unwanted private experiences (thoughts, feelings and urges) to come and go without struggling with them. 3. Contact with the present moment: Awareness of the here and now, experienced with openness, interest, and receptiveness. (e.g., mindfulness) 4. The observing self: Accessing a transcendent sense of self, a continuity of consciousness which is unchanging. 5. Values: Discovering what is most important to oneself. 6. Committed action: Setting goals according to values and carrying them out responsibly, in the service of a meaningful life. I've been appreciating how grounded this is. "Acceptance" in particular has been a huge benefit for me when I'm dealing with stress or questions about my identity. That said, "the observing self" has me mixed up. On the one side, thinking that my "self" is its own thing can be freeing. My actions are not just reactions. I may dread a difficult conversation that I need to have with someone, and I may even think that it's going to go poorly, but I am not my thoughts and feelings: I can determine that I value openness and transparency over comfort and decide to have the conversation, despite my fears. On the other side, research seems to show that electrical signals indicating a decision build in the human brain, before we are even aware of our own intention. It seems likely that my awareness is an emergent property of my brain, and at any rate I don't believe that my consciousness is its own thing that is able to influence my actions and yet is somehow cleanly separate from my experiences. Unconscious biases influence my decisions. I make decisions with varying degrees of intention and thoughtfulness. My conscious decisions can be different when I'm tired or sad or under the influence, and most importantly, all of that is still *me*. I guess it just doesn't seem holistic to "reify" my observing self. ... and yet, clearly it's practical to do so. I do perceive some sort of difference in myself when I'm acting automatically vs when I stop to make a conscious decision, and this concept specifically has been empowering to more than one friend. That said, I'm feeling resistant to developing a "transcendent sense of self" when it might be more productive to understand what's underneath all this. So: How do you reconcile your self-awareness and ability to make decisions with the knowledge that your brain is a messy and subjective place? Or, is this way off-base from how you perceive yourself?

>>67561 >Cognitive defusion Not to be confused with cognitive diffusion? >signals indicating a decision build in the human brain build, cascade, diffuse >action, reaction >before If you jump out of a plane at 13,500 feet without a parachute, you won't die. For 72 seconds. At 71 seconds, you may try to make a choice, but find you can't. It's not because you never had a choice, but it's because you made your choice 71 seconds ago, and only now are the consequences of that choice catching up with you. Or perhaps you do take a parachute, but when you pull to deploy it at 5,000 feet, it fails. In this case, you made a choice hours ago when you packed the parachute incorrectly, or didn't take a backup; and again, the consequences of that choice are only just now catching up with you. The point is, when "signals build before a decision", that doesn't mean you never had a decision, it means you have to make your decision ahead of time, to think through your biases and practice your countermeasures ahead of time. = What I say applies to not just individuals, but societies. A car, a train, an entire continent can likewise jump off a cliff without dying. For 72 seconds. Except 1 second for a civilization is 1 year for a human. Look around you, see the dead man walking, the dead civ walking. The speed of light is the speed of signal propogation is the speed of sentience. Return path length.

Long answer? We are all going to die and we ahould live as if we are already dead. Do a bunch of things, speed can evade trauma and depression, especially if you have more fun experiences along the way. Past is but a short speck in the road of life. Short answer? Drugs, lots of them. LSD, MDMA, shrooms, 2CB, megadose them, microdose them, flip them upside down.

>>67602 Lain is describing as above, so below. That logic is the same at all levels of organization. Self similarity all the way down. People come together into groups to try to be a more fit organism on the macroscale, like cells in our bodies. Just as an individual can choose to make a choice which will inevitably lead to death, societies can enter "cognitive sink" states where a decay chain is triggered and cannot be reversed.

>>67605 >as above so below Ayo you masonic satanic f4g We are getting into inflationary phase of cultural shift. Everything with value is being requestioned and put on hold. We can't understand current reality with much of a refference and that doesn't mean that we are God, but that God gave us bigger playground to play because we were really good as of late. Ya dig?