Quote:
Originally Posted by Angela  To all you naysayers: I'm missing something in what you're saying... you don't want to be exposed to political discussion, you want to be free of its influence here, where you feel it's detrimental to your personal development. You want to feel safely sequestered from that area of talk. Right?
Steve and Erin are not likely to banish or censor talk of politics and current world affairs. So posts and threads containing that kind of diatribe will continue to show up all over any and all of the forum topics, ready to spring up on you unannounced at any moment! You might think you're going to hear about relationships or the law of attraction and -- BAM -- there's Ron Paul interfering with your enjoyment of your morning raw breakfast.
Why would you oppose a whole separate forum to house that kind of talk, so that you're safe from an accidental encounter? The moderators would pick up stray political posts and move them to the Political Forum. You would have to go out of your way to stumble across Ron Paul or Benazhir Bhutto. You would be safe, safer than you are now!
What am I missing? |
It's a user thing. I've seen this pattern lots and lots of times in online systems, games, and even in the real world. It doesn't always work like this, but from what I've seen, with some people, no matter how much logic you throw at them, they continue to be heavily influenced -- sometimes even unconsciously controlled -- by their personal preference and various internal forces, no matter how irrational it may seem.
I believe this phenomena comes from (A) people wanting to feel good/get what they want, (B) those people thinking they have to control their circumstances and external conditions (including people) to do that, and (C) the fact that a lot of people try to understand everyone else relative to their personal perspective (which is suboptimal, I find; I've built an extremely flexible model of reality by trying to understand other people and the reasons they do what they do).
Suffice to say it doesn't work so well, but it doesn't stop people from trying because physical action seems like the only option available to improve your internal state. Fortunatly it seems it is not the only way to "manifest" things in reality (whether you have spiritual beliefs or not, and whether the things you manifest show up externally or internally), but it tends to take a while for people to adapt to new things.
A second cause of it seems to have a lot to do with projection. In my experience, there are very, very,
very few people (myself included) who can interact with the world without their "personal baggage" (memories, thoughts, beliefs, etc) coming into play and -- sometimes irrationally -- tainting their interaction. You see this effect in play when people are fighting against a certain experience they are having now, when really, they're fighting against the experience that happened to them when they were little
through the experience they are having now -- an experience they still have a lot of resistance to.
All of what I describe above seems to be greatly reduced (after a certain amount of practice/experience) when you have absolutely no resistance to the present moment, but resisting the present moment is the new "in thing". I mean, you're just not cool unless your angry at someone or upset because you think you can't go out and <insert activity here> because <insert arch nemesis here> is stopping you.
Postscript:
After I wrote this post I realised it's a bit poorly written. To me, I seem to be writing from a standpoint of "I'm better then you". This comes from my lack of ability to express my ideas clearly. Many years ago I did have quite the superiority complex, and while my thinking is very different now, a lot of my old ways of operating (including how I write) is still influenced by my prior conditioning. I'm not perfect, but I'm constantly becoming more congruent with my new, consciously chosen ideals. Please know that I wrote this post to share ideas and to make a positive contribution, and I'm sorry if my various deficiencies got in the way of that. As always, I'll keep working to improve myself so hopefully one day I won't need to write postscripts like these.
