Other people exist. THAT'S AMAZING!! !
If you are really 17, I'll bet your body and mind are both quite different than they were just a short time ago.
Here is a simple experiment you can do that will cause a subtle but perceptible shift in your personality. Read a book about a subject about which you know practically nothing and hold few if any pre-conceived notions. I said it was simple, not easy. When you are done, if you've done it well, you ought to be subtly but definitely changed.
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oblio
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Meanwhile [I love that word for an opener], this thread is providing evermore food for my theory on exactly who it was that felt different.
I'll elaborate. Very recently there was a thread something like "When did you first realize you were different?". My response basically: always.
In my case there were circumstances that made that normal. I was a bloody fair lightblond young white prince in the darkest of Africa, for some three years, then two more in the nastiest of Africa. Later,... the list goes on, and that will be for another thread (?). I was more or less unique.
However, I am also still very much in the phase of reading up, hampered by the facts that I have no real place to live, nor an own computer - nor the cash to buy stuff. I am totally dependent on what the meagerly stocked local library happens to grant me in its infinite coincidence. I was very lucky in the books that came available over the months, and the order in which they did. And very occasionally, I bought.
Oliver Sacks' An anthropologist on Mars for sale; whatever my financial manager might mutter, the impatient entrepreneur decided there was no excuse. It was time I read up on Temple Grandin. I knew about the squeeze contraption, but her description of the feeling when squeezed - there was an instant echo. That too, will have to be for another thread.
Back on topic: in 'Mars', Temple talks about how at school she yearned for friendship but somehow somewhy never found herself included. In my reverse-translation: "I could not figure out what I did wrong. Strangely, I did not realize that I was different. I thought the other kids were different. I just could never figure out why I did not fit in with them." (my italics).
Now, given the above autobiographical indication for me feeling different from them, why did did exact phrasing it echo so strongly inside me. That must have been recognition, as well.
I've got a virtual tenner that says that, primarily & emotionally, most of us did not come to the realization we are different, it's THEM - they are different.
This realization, off course would have to come at the age when contributors to this thread discovered, amazingly, that other people exist.
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The discovery is this: Other people actually exist as their own consciousness. I mean, they think about things and have emotions and everything and are their own person. They actually have a life that exists even when I am not thinking about their life! There are billions of people, all thinking and acting and feeling all at once and they're only connected to me by the most tenuous links! People exist independantly of my mind! Well, it is possible that it's all an illusion, but I've decided to trust my perception, just this once.
Maybe this is something that other people realise a lot younger than I have (I'm 21). Maybe it's really simple. But it's still so incredibly new and exciting to me that I just had to talk about it for a bit.
Before now, I was so caught up in my own head that I didn't really notice that other people could exist independantly of me. I think I just assumed that because I can't seem to exist independantly of myself, that no-one else could either. Now I think that this assumption was wrong. And it's really mindbending. Sometimes I just stop and think about the fact that other people have minds, and I feel like I'm reeling backwards or freefalling.
It's just SO AMAZING!
Has anyone else ever had a moment like that, when suddenly something about the world goes from being foggy and strange to being absolutely clear (and even stranger)?
Grats. I figured that it did not pay to immerse myself within my own internal reality when I was 6, was almost clueless to the fact that I was not living within perceptive idealism until I was 8, only started to actually apply a theory of mind when I was 14 (much to my downfall), and at that, only started to apply the knowledge somewhat automatically (ie not just on reflection) when I was 16. Yay.
I never felt different. I felt that everybody else was different to me- because I was the only once to exist within reality as I knew it.
Last edited by lexis on 26 Nov 2008, 6:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
[quote=, I did not realize that I was different. I thought the other kids were different. I just could never figure out why I did not fit in with them." (my italics).
[/quote]
As a child in school, I had no concept of being different, for all I knew we were all thrown in this strange playground and it was everyone for themselves.
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Hi welcome, your truly not alone, just a small part of my ongoing journey:
Where do I fit! (Oct.08)
http://asplanet.info/index.php?option=c ... &Itemid=73
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oblio
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That doesn't even make sense. The property of being different is mutual. One thing isn't different from another thing; both things are different from each other.
Correct, and Totally beside the point
sense, truth & logic (may) have little to do with fact of emotional reality -
where subjective sensing and awareness meet with point of view
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a point in every direction is the same as no point at all - or is it
may your god forgive you
Isn’t it amazing that out of all these people it is YOU personally that is observing the universe from where you are when it could have been some other person in some other place.
Yeah, I know. I'm pretty amazed by that, too. Every so often I stop and wonder whether I'm really me, and not someone else.
It's probably a moot point, but oh well.
When I have a close call, such as almost getting in a car accident, I always think "Some alternate reality me just got killed!" or "Maybe I died and havent realized it yet!"
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