Jack is always talking about "getting comfortable with your discomfort." I've been thinking about this from a thermodynamic perspective...

For a living organism, the idea of “chronically seeking comfort” is extremely problematic because comfort is nothing but a state of psychological ease or equilibrium, which for a human means physical and mental relaxation, which if practiced chronically means the loss of the ability to adapt, stagnation, and then illness, atrophy, and eventually permanent equilibrium, better known as death.

By contrast, embracing discomfort as a policy means remaining in an "athletic mental posture," ready to respond to any current or future challenge, known or unknown. It means placing the laws of the universe and the requirements of life ahead of one’s habits, wants, and desires. It is the policy of psychological adaptability and metastability. The psychological analog to the living state. One's acceptance of the responsibility implied by the laws of thermodynamics. Humans must aggressively avoid equilibrium in every way and seek metastability instead.

Gretchen, why is the most depraved individual the one without a purpose? Because he values comfort more than productiveness. He increases rather than decreases both his own entropy and also the entropy of humanity. Productiveness really boils down to adaptability and metastability. Life requires movement and action. Physically and mentally. Literally and figuratively. Comfort is like a vacation. OK in small doses, but not as a lifetime aspiration.

In medicine, "comfort" is really the tool of hospice, applicable to the dying, not the living. Yet our current medical system emphasizes satisfaction surveys over the hard reality of valid therapy, and pills over lifestyle adaptation. The entire modern world, in fact, happens to be built around the idea of maximizing the "comfort and convenience of the masses," regardless of consequences. It is basically the organizing principle of modern economic consumerism... Think about it... And then just look around to see the consequences…

The "dream" that we have all been sold by the modern marketing machine is actually a nightmare which has blunted us to what it really means to have the responsibility of living. That responsibility is not about comfort, it is about metastability.

 

Neil,not only clever but a wise conclusion. I was thinking along the same lines just now but notin as much depth.

 

I agree with this and feel there is resource that waits for those beyond the "posturing"…..a sense of connection and exhilaration and harmony that come about with all the moving and changing that you describe. So in the end the discomfort leads to something far greater than an appeasement of pain by modern means.

I'm not sure that "productiveness" is a helpful term…I know what you mean, but it is a kind of manufacturing metaphor…I like how you link responsibility or responsiveness with metastability…..less protestant work ethic, more laws of nature. We are holding up our end of the universe so to speak.

 

I used that term for Gretchen cause its an important technical term in Ayn Rand's ethics that is related to her tagline.

 

It's quite funny to see how everybody seems to be trying to throw their old brain to the bin and replace it with a new one that sees the world as a system that exchanges information at all levels, driven by the laws of thermodynamics, entropy and physics... I bet this is all an experiment from Jack to awaken in us our 'quantum sense'. Could that really be the 6th sense? I was thinking on posting this on my crazy ideas thread but I found a good excuse here.

 

Mother nature also gave us another great alternative to "seeking comfort" throughout all our waking hours. A great method to recharge us, mentally and physically, one that the modern world constantly marginalizes and few of my patients are able to utilize any more...

Quality sleep at night.

 

I know…it's why I'm not so keen on some of Ayn's stuff.

As for sleep…..it is a source of comfort through connection to energy isn't it?

 

Well.........I think you're getting to awaken very soon........in a quantized sense when you see OSF 3

 

What I like about this idea of brains and systems is that it's not mechanical…. quantum life isn't predictable and therefore nobody is going to be able to control and "own" it like they try to do with other systems in life.

 

Meher Baba said that "comfort" was the worst thing to get hooked on and the hardest addiction to kick.....go take a look at the "discomfort" he created in his students to teach them...

www.lordmeher.org

Check out how his "teachers" lived.....

 

I've always updated my brain in the face of new knowledge. It's the only way to avoid being controlled by the dogma of others.

Your ideas aren't crazy. But the world would like you to think they are. Creative thought is a threat to dogma

 

When we sleep we enter an unconscious state, which in the lens of physics is described by wide length waves... considering that we already know how brain activity changes our behaviour and perception of reality... tied to the wave-particle duality... all the stuff regarding how EMF blocks proper sleep... which is no more than an altered electromagnetic field in the form of waves... and the latest ideas on the M-Theory to explain everything that just now I'm reading from Stephen Hawking... that there may be infinite universes and that a universe might be seen as a string that vibrates... and considering that dreams seem a reality in itself until you awake... I wonder If we are really entering a different universe when we sleep by tuning in a different frequency? I also wonder if we're more connected to our universe when we sleep and more disconnected when we're awake but even more in the world we have created... last weekend I went to the beach... for a moment I looked at some rocks... the feeling I got was kind of... 'weak' to say, but I remember that when I was a child all these things in nature fascinated me, the whole experience of being in the beach and seeing the living things that it has evoked me strong feelings, like flavours... that hit me very strongly, I would come back home and devour books about marine life, paint them... in my latest years I feel like I forgot about all these things, as if I've been unpluged to tune in the automated consciousness that society has created for us... only recently I seem to start thinking again for myself and tune more with nature... yet not so strongly as when I was a child. Then I remember about the 'What is Biologic Concrete?' post... I think I now understand more what biologic concrete is.

I'd love to see some of this topics about the universe explained in OSF3 or maybe 4 if it was not planned for the upcoming.

 

Electron collection make us consciously aware of what we were previously unconsciously aware of........why? electrons carry a near mass form of energy and info for our brain to harvest provide we can catch and assimilate it.

 

You're going to see a lot in OSF 3. 22K words of knowledge bombs.

 

http://jackkruse.com/what-is-biologic-concrete/ What was this blog telling? How a falling redox potential manifests.

 

Not only that we are constantly bombarded by the idea that we "deserve" or are "entitled" to that comfort.... fascinating line of thought.

RobH

 

This isn't just abstract BS to me. It's my everyday reality. The medical system today is overloaded with very sick patients who believe that the discomfort they would have to endure to make a significant change is just not worth the effort, even if it means saving their own lives. That's what our "worship of comfort" has led us to.

 

I know........that is why I have to get you to the quantum mechanism. It predicts chemical evolution and shows you directly how biochemical evolution began and where its trajectory changed. Then you begin to make sense of what you face daily in clinic.

 

I get so excited about the nature all the time Albert.. i cannot get enough of it really! I can just be on the pasture for hours and do nothing... just listen to the birds and watch the lambs... watch the heaven and my surroundings - i could do it forever
I just was out to let the sheep eat before the night on the neighbors pasture and I ate plenty of wild herbs too, just the ram who followed me closely wanted to eat the out of my mouth LOL

So, I wonder about something too that have happened to me quite some times.
If I have had a rough day with big mental challenges, and I have faced them and the pain, i then in the following night have had the most awesome dreams, very sensual, seriously strong oxy dreams and I wake up feeling amazing!
It have happened so many times I nowadays tell myself if times get rough - ahhh, do not worry, just do the right things (and the right thing tend to be the hardest, darn!) and you will be rewarded in your dreams...

I really wonder why this is?

 

I've been thinking about these ideas around discomfort and sleep and then started wondering about trauma. Animals who have access to their natural environments and can express their species behaviours often have lives full of trauma…prey animals particularly. But their nervous systems allow for the "excess energy" to disperse after the flight, fight, freeze period is over. They know what to do and they do not stay traumatized…it would lead to extinction. Domestic animals are another story.

We western humans are educated out of knowing how to dispel and overcome trauma naturally. Our traumas are maintained in our nervous systems through our belief systems about appropriate behaviours and sanctioned therapies. I think this is getting exponentially worse as we lose health individually and as a species.
This connects in with the difficulties of experiencing discomfort and some of the victim mentality that exists in the health field. (Just to be clear, I'm not discounting the devastation that trauma carries or talking about cultures that have more successful ways of dealing with trauma i.e. being in nature)

So how does this tie into sleep??
It's often only during sleep, at the unconscious level or the cellular level that we can find or access the traumas we carry around.….if we start feeding ourselves more electrons and building a metastable system of integrated health….isn't our nervous system going to naturally start wanting to kick these blockages out the door? This might involve a lot of discomfort, but isn't that how the laws of nature work in all animals? So once again our brains distinguish us from the rest of the animal kingdom. We build such elaborate intellectual constructs and cultures they end up taking us away from the innate wisdom we are born with and operate under according to nature.

So Inger…perhaps you are dreaming the way all humans should…for recovery and dispersal of "negative" energy experienced during the day rather than the kind of nightmares that so many people have where they are dipping into their unprocessed pain which they constantly carry within.

Phew…I have no idea if that makes any sense put pressing the send button anyway...