Buy the whole book The Shadowed Soul with a chapter on how I’ve overcome ADHD, Dyslexia, Suicidal Depression, PSTD and Anxiety, Schizophrenia and Bipolar, Epilepsy and Autism, Brain Damage and Digital Dementia and the Retardation of Thoughts in the link below:
CHAPTER 10: DIGTAL DEMENTIA, BRAIN DAMAGE, REUBILIDNG MEMORY, AND DEVELOPING CONGNITION
I am someone who likes to impress people with my memory constantly. It is an egotistical thing I have done throughout my life. The point of Vedanta is we are neither our bodies nor our minds. So, my mind, or anything to do with it, is not who I truly am. Both the body and my mind would be the ego in Vedanta, which the ego needs to let go of completely if we are going to discover “Reality.” The Ture Self, or Atman, in me is the True Self in you in Vedanta, which is nothing but the Pure Consciousness which is the Brahman (God). Yet, to tell anyone the truth, I had to rebuild my savant skills of my memory completely when I got sober because of all the seizures I had from my epilepsy and all the drugs I abused that magnified those seizures.
Drug abuse can give anyone a seizure, and seizures can cause brain damage. I did lots of drugs at one time in my life! I should have been dead years ago because most epileptics can’t do any of the drugs I did and survive! I would argue it was my abnormal tolerance to all drugs which kept me alive. This has been a bit of a double edge sword in my life because it has made it that most anticonvulsant and psych medications don’t work for me either, and if they do work, they stop working, but without my abnormal reactions and drugs and alcohol I would not be alive. That being said, I still suffered from some mild brain damage from all my drug usage when I got sober because of the seizure that they gave me.
Nothing magnified my brain damage like the drug speed. Nothing is worse for either the brain or the body than speed, especially if you are an epileptic. The speed people get on the streets are made from household chemicals, so one can just imagine what they do to the brain, but how speed, and specifically crystal methamphetamine work is they over load the electrolytes in the brain and drill holes in it. This with my seizures made me have some mild brain damage when I got sober, so I had to work very hard on my memory daily to get it back.
I would exercise my memory by quizzing myself on stuff every single day. It was only the daily mental exercises that brought my memory back and have even enhanced my memory with pictures and other things like remembering names, which I had always been quite terrible at. Remembering names was something I was never really good at because I am someone who does not think in pictures. Aphantasia is what this is called when someone only thinks in words, and not too much is known about people who think like this because it is a rare phenomenon. To only think in words is something that is abnormal. Most people think in both pictures and words, then there are those who only think in pictures, and the smallest percentage of humans only think in words: Aphantasia.
I listened to a Buddhist monk, who specialized in meditation and helping people overcome drug addiction, tell a room full of people once that he learned from a scientific journal that the average mind has anywhere from 16,000 to 60,000 thoughts a day, and most of those thoughts are just repetitious thoughts from the previous days of their lives. The whole point of this book is to work on emptying our minds, realize that our body or our mind is not who we truly are, and acknowledge that if we all want to change our insanity, it all starts with awareness through daily mediation. Most of what we all do is nothing but the same thing over and over, and we all have the insanity of expecting something different. It is why the whole world related to that Einsteinian quote: “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” We all do the same thing over and over and we all expect something different from it eventually because what worked at one time no longer does. It is not until we respond to our pain and consequences that we can change to a better life. The Buddhist Monk also said some minds have over 60,000 thoughts a day, and he agreed when I shared that mind my sure did because he knew me for over 20 years.
The neurological testing I had done at UCSF, by Brandon E. Kopald, Psy.D., taught me serval amazing things about my memory as well. When it came to seeing the obstructed neuropathways of my brain, it was the female doctorial assistant, who was giving me the neurological examination, showed me this clue. She asked to recall certain things she had told me about just a bit earlier. When she asked me, my mind then would go blank! She would then give me a little hint of some kind, and everything that I could not remember I would suddenly recall! This was also shown to me when I first started to read at Linda Mood Bell. They would ask me to describe to them what I had just read out loud and my mind would go blank, then they would give me a little hint, and I could recall the whole article, or I would reread it, and everything I was reading would come right back to me with the feeling of familiarity. I could tell I had read it all before and had the information absorbed somewhere in my brain!
This recollection told me that these memories were registered somewhere in my brain because I could recall what I had just read with a little hint. It was as though there was this obstruction in the neuropathways from the brain damage, as well as my brain jumping in and out of those eight different brain states, because of my history of all the seizures I constantly had from the heterotopic grey matter. All these issues, as well as my dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, and autism, I believe, obstructed my ability to recall things that had just been told me, or I had read, even five minutes before.
Something which also made it quite difficult for me to even try and recall anything was to be able to pause in any way because, as was stated, my neurological impulse control was at a frightening zero! I say frightening because that doctorial assistant seemed terrified and gasped when she told me: “you have exactly zero impulse control!” This lack of impulse control has been one of my biggest problems my whole life. I had gotten beaten up more times in my life than I can possibly imagine because I had no ability to pause and back down from a conflict no matter how big the person was! I was never violent! I just couldn’t shut up!
Nothing, absolutely nothing, has helped me more than the ability to pause, which I have only gotten through meditation. That ability to pause has also helped me work on rebuilding my memory by opening up the pathways where those memories were stored. Just to be able to sit even 30 seconds to try and work on recollecting a specific name or get to the end or a paragraph and quiz myself on what I had just read. I still quiz myself on names when I am at work. I practice recollecting names from the customers I am looking up on the computer. In the past, I would always just give up when I was searching for a customer’s name in the computer system. Now I look at their name on the report, go the computer, sit for just 30 seconds at the most, which was impossible at first, and lots of times I can recall the specific name. The more I try on memorizing different things, the easier it gets. So much of what we do is just training our minds (brains) to adapt to this shifting empirical world (Maya) around us, and all of this comes with awareness, and if anyone wants awareness the best way to get it is through meditation.
One of the main things that makes be believe we are not born with “IQ’s,” for lack of a better term, is how I have been able to rebuild my memory after all these issues. Given all that, I exercise my mind daily rebuilding my memory closer to that numerical recollection I had earlier in my life and have even expanding upon it. That memory I had is known as a rote memory. I am now extremely good at quoting literature verbatim, which some Doctors in philosophy find quite obnoxious and threating.
That ability to develop the parts of my brain that were underdeveloped at the Linda Mood Bell program is what really convinced me to rewrite this book. I had always wanted to be a writer as a child, and I wrote those poems that I open up this book with as a kid locked up in a boarding school. I had a third-grade reading level when I wrote them, and for most of my life, I could not process and comprehend anything in more than a couple of sentences at a time. If I had written anything, I always needed someone to help me with the spell checker on the computer because I could not even decipher words from each other that the spell checker would give to me as a possible correction for the spelling error I had made. That is how terrible my English skills were. I am still not that great of a speller still to this day, but I can read and comprehend anything in English now, I am much better at catching my own typos. I have no problem with the spell checker either. Linda Mood Bell also told me that spelling is the last aspect of reading to increase for anyone who is dyslexic, but my biggest problem when it came to reading was absorbing what I read and truly comprehending it. I can read such books as The Enneads now! The Enneads is an Ancient Greek literature from Plotinus, the first of the Neoplatonist. The average citizen cannot read that book, nor would they like to try, but this is why it is more about training our brains to do different things as soon as we are aware a part of our mind is not working correctly.
What I did for my numerical memory, or rote memory, when it was damaged was whenever someone gave me their new phone number, I would type it into the texting app on my iPhone instead of entering their contact information with name and number. This meant I had to recollect and quiz myself on their number in the texting app if I was going to contact them because I could not type their name in and get the number automatically. This was difficult and is something I still work on to this day. It is also something anyone at any age can do to enhance their memory. I would argue everyone can practice quizzing themselves with the info on their smartphones because I have seen homeless people with smartphones in the country now, and one of the bigger issues our society is having is the Digital Dementia brought about by this smartphone technology.
Digital Dementia is all about the mental health issues with smartphones we can all experience. These “smart” phones cause such issues as retardation of thoughts and memories, adult ADHD, and depression and anxiety. This is because we are letting the “smart” phones do thinking for us.
With the retardation of thoughts, when all we do is record things with our smartphone, instead of committing them to memory, we lose our capacity to remember things. This tells us the brain is meant to be exercised daily with our interactions in the empirical world (Maya). With my grandmother, first she lost her hearing, then she lost her eyesight. Once she lost both her hearing and eyesight, her mind quickly faded. We all need to exercise our minds daily by engaging with the Maya around us no matter what our age. When we see how our own minds function, through things like neurological testing, and the observation of awareness through daily meditation, we can work on what needs to be rebuilt or enhanced in our own cognition.
When I first got sober, I would spend hours typing numbers into the search box of the smartphone. If the phone number popped right away, I would know who’s the name and number of the person I was thinking about was in my mind. If not, I would have to hunt through a list of hundreds of numbers or so till I found it. It was a daily effort, and I messed up a lot of the time. When I would meet those people sometimes it would shock them when I could quote their phone number too them. It was funny because sometimes some of those people thought I was coming onto them when I did that, or it would just scare them because most people, in this day and age, don’t know anyone’s number besides their own. But just realize, that the average citizen of Ancient Greece would memorize the Iliad. The Iliad is a poem which is over six-hundred-pages! The Iliad was passed on verbally for years before it was ever written down! This tells me that there is so much of our memories we are not using these days, and this “smart” phone technology can make it better or worse! If you use your phone to quiz your brain, then it can make you smarter. If you use your phone to record everything on, and as a memory device, then you won’t have that good of a functioning memory.
My biggest problem with this smartphone technology is how they are causing all kinds of neurological issues to everyone, like Adult ADHD. Adult ADHD is caused by all of the notifications that are constantly going off on the different apps people have on their phone. With my ADHD, I have to make sure all the notifications are completely off except something that is extremely important like a call or a text from someone. I cannot proceed in my daily activities without all the notifications being taken care of on my smartphone with my OCD. It is also my obsession with detail that makes my day impossible to proceed when I have a notification that is not taken care of on my phone. These notifications can make it so people that don’t have ADHD can develop it if they have the same reactions to their apps as I do.
Smartphones are even causing mental health issues such as depression and anxiety because people go onto Facebook constantly throughout their day and are comparing their miserable lives to what they see others’ showing the world. What people post on Facebook is not reality. They are posting information for approval. When we all go onto these platforms like Facebook, we are just looking at what others what to show us about that they think is cool, so they can get a like or a love mark on their post. We are just seeing what someone wants to show us so that person can get approval. Not what their life really is. When we go onto Facebook, we are comparing our insides, to another person’s fantasy, so it makes us depressed and anxious because our lives are not as good as the fiction someone else is posting. This makes us feel hopeless and inadequate because everyone else has these “wonderful” lives, or so we think.
I pointed that out to a girl who was suffering from lots of medical issues I made friends with on Facebook. I told her, “Facebook is not reality. It is just what they want you to see of them. They want attention, which is just their addiction to everyone else’s approval of them. Everyone suffers. Not just you and not just me with our physical disabilities, but everyone. Suffering is a key principle of life and one of the two ways we learn. The other is pleasure. We all experience pleasure and pain to varying degrees. Don’t look to Facebook for reality.” She had severe disabilities, so she always felt inadequate. She was doing what we all do, especially when we are on Facebook. Jealousy is a sin for that very reason. It messes up our minds and causes all kinds of psychological issues which we take out on others and ourselves.
The main problem with smartphones is that smartphones stimulate the same parts of the brain as drugs and alcohol, which will cause a chemical imbalance as well. When we boost pleasure centers in the brain, they get depleted, and when they go way up and way down too much, that throughs the chemicals in our brains off. This chemical imbalance happens especially with smartphone technology! I am completely against legalizing gambling on smartphone technology for this very reason, which was on the ballot for November of 2022 in California. I see that causing nothing but chaos throughout a society that does not need any more addiction issues. It also consolidates wealth to people who don’t need it, takes money away from Native American Tribes, and will enhance other addictions and isolation issues, which will cause even more mental illness throughout society!
I was given an IQ test in the fifth grade, most likely because they thought I was too stupid. I had gotten Fs in every grade except the 3rd, and that was only because of an amazing teacher, Ms. Write. In the fifth grade I had gotten Fs all semester as well, but on that IQ test I was able to recite 12 digits backwards, which is as high as they go. I got a score of 124 on my IQ test as a kid, and that is in the top 5%. I was about twelve years old at the time. That immediate recollection was gone at one time because of the brain damage from the seizure and the different levels of cognition from the brain states that my brain is constantly jumping in and out of. I do have a video I made of me talking to a college philosophy class I took called The Philosophy of Personal Development. In this video I wrote the first thirty-nine digits of Pi, the first twelve digits of the first seven irrational square roots, which is just 2 thought 10, and the first thirty-two digits of Euler’s number all on the blackboard boggling all the other student’s minds! I have rebuilt that recollection dramatically! I would also argue that most people can do this with daily practice! I can now recite twelve digits backwards again.
It took to about nineteen and a half years of sobriety for the wholes to be batched up in my memory with my recall on just basic daily things like paying checks at a certain time of the month for taxes on a hotel, or other utility bills. I would have to put a notification on the Microsoft calendar. Today I don’t need to do that and can recollect what I just read as well. It was like one day it all just improved! I also continue to quiz myself and work on it daily! It can always be improved upon if it is your memory!
As I have stated before, I do not think in pictures whatsoever, so any memory I have is all verbal, which was a huge problem with learning how to read in Linda Mood Bell program. It made them quite nervous when they found out because their whole system is about trying to get the student to draw a picture in their mind with the words they just read. I noticed that I did not really process symbols all that well with my dyslexia too. This is where I got myself to use my smartphone to enhance my cognition again!
It has been proven that video games are a good thing to help increase anyone’s IQ. There is lots of evidence that it is not just me that can do this. There are all kinds of websites that are about brain games and increasing IQ, but anyone can also get a memory game on their smartphone for free. It’s just matching one picture with another. I also realized it was working on my visual memory that helped me process the word cognition and process the information on the pages as well as recollect them. My visual memory was quite terrible, so just processing what I read was probably even more difficult for me than some others who have ADHD and dyslexia. I am someone who needs to meet someone a couple of times before I can recall their face at all. That is how bad my pictorial memory is.
The reason I believe my brain did not learn to think in pictures at all was because I was basically blind as a kid without my parents knowing it. I had extremely terrible eyesight. I could not see much, and no one even knew till I was about five and my mom took me to the doctors for glasses. I put them on, the doctor pointed out a picture to me and said this is a tree, then I shouted, “Wow! A Tree?” That is when my mother started crying hysterically because she just realized I had not seen much of anything besides light my whole life. Remember 90% of what someone learns happens between the ages of one and five, so if I could not really see at all for those years of my life, my brain did not learn to develop that at the prime time of my life that it should have. This to me is my theory of why I have a brain that functions off of aphantasia.
Not being able to think in pictures is also an extremely good argument of why I am so good with verbale communication. It got those parts of my brain to be over developed in that time of my life. My first words to anyone were to my mother when she handed me a strawberry. I was on her back and I said, “Thank you.” That gave her tears of joy because not too many little kids first words are “thank you.” Most little kids do not have any words that really mean much as their first words. It is just a random word, but the words I used were for an exact purpose, which was of gratitude, but either way, I only think in words. The majority of all people think in both pictures and words as I stated, and Einstein was someone who only thought in pictures, and is why they said he had a delay in speech when he would talk to people. Einstein’s delay in speech was about needing to process the pictures and then put them into verbale communication.
When I was in Portland Community College, at the age of 18, I had a 3rd grade reading level, and passed two classes with A’s: Astrology and Music. I did not even read the book! I was really unable to read full pages at the time I took those classes. I was completely an auditorial learner who took amazing notes by hand, and then I’d typed them up. I also had my little sister do the spell check for me on the computer. I would tell her what I wanted for the different words because my reading was so terrible. She would select the right word for me each time. That is how bad my reading, and especially my spelling was, but in those two classes I got A’s! My teachers even asked me for my notes in both classes because I passed them out to the whole class, and everyone basically got A’s!
People with learning disabilities are known to overcompensate and over develop parts of the brains that the average person does not in the early stages of their lives, because of the issues they have with the dysfunction of other parts of their brain. It has been only within the last hundred years or so at the most that the average citizen of any country needed to be a good reader in order to get a job. That is one of the arguments for dyslexia and why so many people have it in the common day: human evolution. They have deficiencies with certain cognitive abilities, that are just now needing to be utilized in our societies. Most dyslexics are good with math. I am very good at math. That is why Einstein was so good at math. It is a part of his brain that did not have any deficiency and that parts of our brains were over developed because we struggled so much with reading and writing. It got us to engage and enhance the parts of our brains that use math. I only developed the dyscalculia because of the brain damage I had through the seizures. I was not born with dyscalculia, and today, because of awareness, the dyscalculia is something I can always catch when I am mistyping something in numbers. I am also still good at memorizing numbers and doing basic math in my head which I do constantly.
Einstein had to go to a special school too to read and write as a kid. His brain is held in the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia and was shown to be smaller than the average brain! Some say he was on the Autism spectrum as well because of this, which more and more people are being diagnosed with Autism all the time these days. It is impossible to get any appointment with an Autism specialist at UCSF because so many kids are now being diagnosed with Autism. It takes years even if they allow it. That is how many people are being diagnosed with Autism recently. Bill Gates is a good example of another famous person on the Autism spectrum, but it has taken me years of practicing reading and writing daily to get anywhere with writing. Steven King in his book on writing can be summed up like this: read and write daily if you want to be a good writer! Just like I am saying meditate daily if you want to get over your mental health issues by increasing awareness and cognitive abilities so you can see where your own mind falls short. Practice committing things to memory daily if you want to increase your memory. So much of what we do is nothing but repetition. That is how we build neuropathways.
Overcoming this brain damage is something I encourage every epileptic to do when I talk to them on social media, or even someone with a stroke. Some of them get offended when I tell them: “don’t give up and practice daily,” because I show them the video of me putting those numbers on the board and they don’t think they can do it, nor do they want to try. They also do not want to give up using their smartphone technology for their memory because it is easy, convenient, and addictive. I have also been able to demonstrate to my neurologist, Paul Garcia, I have two-hundred-sixteen phone numbers in my head. I had him and his student quiz me on them after I rebuilt my memory completely! We all can increase our memories! Sure, some of it will be easier for some than others, but our intelligences is just as much to do with circumstances as it does with our genetics. Nobody is born a genus! They develop it!
People with dyscalculia have problems with intermixing numbers. I noticed, since my brain damage, that I intermixed numbers. Especially if there are two numbers that are identical that come together. Like with pi, 3.1415926535897 93238462643383279502884197, which are the first 39 digits, but when writing them and saying them out loud at the same time, I would have to catch myself not mixing them up when I wrote them on the blackboard to the class. I would usually mess two numbers up that were identical with the next number that was not. Like with Pi above sometimes I would write 443 instead of 433. This shows me an issue I never had before because of these seizures and the brain damage induced from those seizures. The pathways were obstructed and damaged with the numerical aspects of my brain now as well. This is something I am aware of and am able to work daily. I still work with numbers all the time. I do accounting for a living. I edited books for hotels daily, so I am meant to catch other people’s mistakes with numbers, and I am constantly correcting my own at the same time now too. This also tells me that my brain adapted and tried to reroute parts of my brain functions with numbers that were damaged.
One of the most interesting things I have taken to be true is something I read in the book Brains that Work a Bit Differently, they stated that people with Autism and ADHD are known to have extremely good rote memories. It is why I have always been so good at memorizing phone numbers and writings that I hear over and over. Numbers themselves only go from 0 to 9, then they will always end up repeating themselves the more they expand, so people with good rote memories are known for the memorization of numbers like in the movie Rain Man, and that movie was inspired by a true individual.
Something it said in that book: Brains that Work a Bit Differently, which I have noticed recently for myself, is that if someone with an extremely good rote memory will try and expand their memory to memorizing all kinds of things, their rote memory will decline. I am noticing it is much harder for me to commit anyone’s phone number to memory as easily as I have been able to in the past now that I am working on memorizing all kinds of things like people names and processing pictures. Today, I constantly try to memorize all kinds of things: pictorial and verbal. I also continue to work on my rote memory as I expand my overall memory.
But I want to reiterate the issue all developed societies are having with smartphones. The smartphone companies are also doing a good job at keeping lots of this new info out against them off the web! They do not want their profits going down, nor do they want the bad press of the mental issues these devices cause, which could easily cause government regulation they do not want. Facebook has worked extremely hard to keep any government regulation from being enacted and passed. Just like corporate executives did their best for a long time to hide all the mental issues in the NFL from the damaged brains of the football players. Smartphone technology is making lots of us much, much stupider!
It was my math tutor at Discovery Academy, Mr. Edwards, told me: “technology is the only thing that rises in exponents and decreases in value.” The biggest problem with smartphones is they are being used as people’s memory and even some basic brain function with solving problems. I would say reading comprehension is going way down too because people want to listen to books instead, but we can overcome this with fun as well like video games on these devices and finding things we enjoy reading. I also see commercials for these brain supplements that I have a big problem with like Prevagen.
A big issue with dementia in elderly patients is complacency. They are in a retirement home with nothing to do, so they do not do anything. They are also old so they lack engery, then their minds slowly slip away from them. Complacency is a huge problem with dementia patients. I take a wild king mushroom supplement, it is just the same type of mushrooms we put in salads, not a hallucinogen, and they are known to help cognition. I am trying it out, but you see these Prevagen commercials make it seem like all you need to do it take this brain supplement and you’ll have “a memory like an elephant!” as the old mad tells the viewer. I am not saying what we eat and take as pills, or vitamin supplements, does not help the brain. I am trying that wild king mushroom supplement myself, but I find that quite dishonest of these companies, just like hiding current info on the issues of mental health and smartphone technology, to say just take Prevagen and your memory will be amazing! Take the Prevagen if you think it will help, but don’t forget to exercise your memory daily or it won’t do anything!
I exercise my mind daily with my memory and my cognition. I read daily. I meditate daily. I do all the exercises in these chapters daily! I believe I can still work on my “social IQ,” so I ask people all the time to point out my behavior to me which I do not see that clearly. I am noticing when I am shouting or talking too much only recently. I was oblivious to those behaviors and meditation and mental exercises have been the key. I make daily rational efforts on expanding all areas of my mind. I would argue if they took this supplement, and did not exercise their minds, their minds will still slip away no matter what! It is completely dishonest to advertise to an elderly person, who wants to relax, be lazy, and enjoy their retirement, that all they need to do is take a pill! The pricing for the Prevagen was ridiculous too!
I showed my issues with drug commercials in The Power of Inaction. We all want to be Einstein, but not lots of us want to put in the work! Exercise your brain daily! I would tell them to just spend 10 to 20 minutes a day on a memory game on a phone, or just quiz yourself on something you read or listen to daily if you do not want your mind to vanish with dementia! Sure, some dementia is inevitable like Alzheimer’s or something with a stroke or seizure, but even with those they encourage mental exercises to increase brain function. With Alzheimer’s, this daily exercise can even slow the process. There is documentation that people who have more than one language they can speak lowers the risk of something like Alzheimer’s, so a lot of our intellect is about daily mental exercises. I am using the Duolingo app on my smartphone to try to teach myself Spanish. I am quite terrible at it, but I see how much it is helping my brain by working at it daily!
I am a firm believer that anyone can increase their “IQ” at any age because I have completely recovered my memory from brain damage, I learned how to read at the age of thirty from the Linda Mood Bell program, and so far, I have written two books, gotten two college degrees, and was in the middle of seeking my third in a master’s in philosophy, but have that on hold and want to switch to law someday.
I dropped the philosophy classes and am wanting to switch to law because I cannot argue in favor of things I don’t believe in just to get a good grade. This is something a certain philosophy professor wanted me to do at SFSU in graduate school. Justin Tiwald was his name, and he was screaming at me in the dean’s office because every time I disagreed with him I would quote him someone verbatim in front of the class. I also got his hand picked speaker to change her mind in front of the whole class on the topic “is pain a touchstone to virtue,” which is something I prove throughout this book, but I just can’t argue in favor of things I don’t believe in, and I took his class on Aristotle to argue against Aristotle, not if favor of him. I also never had a professor tell me I couldn’t use a source on a paper because he didn’t want me to make a good argument against him. I do not think that would be an issue with law, but it is this neuroplasticity which tells me all humans can if 99.9% of all human DNA is identical. Sure, an “IQ” is about two things: genetics and circumstances. None of us have any control over the genetics we are born with, but we can make daily efforts on our circumstances through awareness, which those circumstances do affect the genetic mutation of each one of our own cells and putting effort into learning daily with things like memory, math, and other video games is a good way to do that, and just make a daily effort to increase your “IQ” continually throughout your day.
It has only been with nineteen years of sobriety that I have started to have dreams again. I was someone who had very vivid dreams. My dreams always had plots and stories. Because of my drug usage, and the seizures I had, I stopped having any dreams. My dreams returned to me at nineteen years of sobriety, and they are back to full on stories with plots. I even read a friend’s book on lucid dreaming and have been having lots of those recently. It has been amazing! And it is all because I have been treating my brain well!
Today, I have the ability to read and comprehend things most people have no ability to like The Enneads. I spent days reading things and not having any idea what it was even saying, but I did not give up. I also make a daily effort to memorize new things using pictures and words daily. It is not that hard to use a smartphone to make yourself smarter instead of using it to make you and your brain stupider. Just make a conscious daily effort. Today I strive for perfection and am grateful for progress. It is good to have impossible goals and standers that we have for ourselves as is written in The Enneads:
“For it is to the Gods, not to the good, that our likeness must look: to model ourselves upon good men is to produce and image of an image: we must fix our gaze above the image and attain the likeness to the Supreme Exemplar.”
It is good to have impossible goals. That is what this quote is telling me. Strive for perfection, strive for God, strive towards these Platonic Forms, just realize we all will always fall short with the body and the mind, for that is not what we truly are. Do your best and let go. See the deficiencies you have with your brain and work on developing them daily. There is no problem with defects of your mind as long as we all continue to try, know, and accept, we all will always fall short. Try hard but do it with self-love. Make sure to accept the fact that you have your shortcomings, and always keep that understanding of yourself in the for front of your mind; remember when it comes to anything in this empirical world be willing to say, “who cares?” A thought is only important if your mind tells you it is! Address the paradoxes of an empirical world of relativity and duality as well, and realize our minds always tell us things out of fear because fear is one of our necessary tools for survival that we all miss use. Make sure you accept yourself no matter where you are because you were created this way for a reason, so you are perfect the way you are; it is just the paradox of life that life is about learning; so, there is always room for improvement!
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