Came across this and I wanted to point out a rather profound point it shows about human neurology and identity.
It sounds silly and funny at first, but precisely because it is so obviously absurd, it best highlights exactly how the human brain functions for most humans. As well as why it is so very difficult for people to let go of completely wrong ideas about themselves above all, but also of life in general, beliefs they associate with their own persona and so on.
The seemingly absurd idea that trying some cheese causes such emotional and psychological angst to this guy makes it clear that he’s obviously mistaken about the importance of cheese in general and almost certainly of cheese specifically as it refers to him. Eat the cheese, don’t eat the cheese, he’ll be fine. Barring some exotic allergy that will kill him the minute he tries cheese that is. HA! See? Made you doubt it too now.
Ha, ha, silly guy, right? Cheese. So funny.
Now do Protestantism. It’s at least as retarded, but look at all you Protties reading this now suddenly getting a thin line where your mouth used to be and furrowed brows of disapproval.
The reason this guy is so hung up on cheese is most likely because all the old traditional things people used to fight and die over have been corrupted to a degree whereby, the average boomer now considers the most trivial and idiotic things as being fundamental aspects of his personality. Like not eating cheese. The alternative is considering almost NOTHING as being fundamental to your personality, which is why there is a heavy uptick in teenagers pretending to be the opposite sex, or taking part in orgies, or believing the Earth is flat, and the Moon is made of cheese.
Not only are the traditions corrupted and in many cases destroyed, but the very tools of basic logic and basic reasoning have been intentionally kept from these people. They literally do NOT have the mental ability to reason their way into a reasonable position. They are, in effect, magical thinkers. Cargo cultists to Nth degree.
Leaving aside for a moment the religious or other ideologies, and focussing purely on the neurological element, the reality is that all humans have an idea, a representation of themselves in their own head. Depending on what that idea is composed of, how those beliefs came about and how attached one is to them, changing can be nigh on impossible.
I was lucky that at an early age I put it into my head that anything any one human being on Earth could do, was possible, so if I applied myself, it was likely I too could do it eventually. I also had persistence and never giving up drilled into me and reinforced by myself and my own choices throughout my life, and still do. Even so, certain patterns and behaviours that I felt were a fundamental part of who I was were very difficult for me to break out too. Part of why I learnt to do deep hypnosis was precisely so I could delve into my own psyche at the deepest level I could. And before I hypnotised anyone else, I put myself into trances that lasted up to a couple or more hours regularly. In this manner I did at first shift, then crack, then removed beliefs about who I was that were not ideal for me. I wrote briefly about this in Reclaiming the Catholic Church, but the point is that we are NOT our beliefs about who we are. We have an infinitely larger potential and amplitude of behaviour and personality colouring.
Martial arts can change this but it usually takes years. So does any endeavour indulged in almost fanatically for a couple of decades, but aside from controlled LSD trips under clinical settings, the fastest way I know to do this is with Hypnosis. After you have changed a few really core (but erroneous) beliefs about your of identity, and if you have the requisite faculties to do so, you can learn to change other patterns. I have done it several times throughout my life, and the longest and hardest pattern to break was the one I described in RTCC as erroneous loyalty.
The problem, of course, is not loyalty, which is a virtue, but loyalty to the erroneous concept, idea or person. If you have “being loyal” as one of your core beliefs about yourself, it becomes very difficult to see the errors, evil, or even outright lies and negative values that you don’t share, with your guru, your religion, your family, friends or whatever. It took a long time for me to realise that being objective and letting go of people or thoughts that were ultimately negative was the correct action to take, and was NOT a negative reflection of me or of my being “disloyal”. Since then I have had ample occasion to not only confirm that changing that aspect of myself was the intelligent, correct and good thing to do, but also to confirm that I am indeed, loyal unto death when it is for the right reason. In short, it was a drastic improvement not just for me, but in general, in terms of how I related to the world.
If you take any of the important things, like your belief in your religion, your beliefs about loyalty, love, kindness, and what part or aspect of these you consider to be core parts of who you are, it will feel absolutely horrifically difficult and wrong to change any of them. And yet, many of these patterns are probably not serving you best.
No one sane born in a neutral, objective, honest household would become a Muslim or a Jew, since both religion permit sex with underage children and don’t consider sex with toddlers to be a crime.
Similarly, no one capable of doing basic logic can possibly assume that Protestantism is any kind of thing other than a total perversion of Christianity. And with a little more digging, no one sane could possibly mistake the Novus Ordo Impostors for actual Catholic Clergy.
No more than anyone would mistake 6’2″ me for an African pigmy.
But you have no skin in the personality of seeing me as my 6’2″ self, so you see me as what I am, not as a 4′ pigmy.
You might dislike me, you might be insulted by the undeniable facts about your fake “Christianity” I point out to you, and you will in at least some cases, choose to die rather than admit your error. Not because you are especially brave, but because changing such a core aspect of who you think you are, feels to you, like a fate, even worse than death. Death of the ego feels, to the human brain, very much like impending and undignified death at that. So, truly worse than just mere death. And as a result your brain will fight back with everything it has. Which is quite a lot since the Sub and Unconscious together form at least 90% of your brain by my reckoning.
The thing is, if you consider the level of lies you have noted in the last 4 years, then begin to realise that your ENTIRE LIFE you have been exposed to lies just as pervasive, just as big, just as pernicious, as the ones you have noted more recently, what do you think the odds are that all your core beliefs about yourself that you hold dear are true, and objective, and good and correct? Yup. Pretty much zero.
Problem is, if you can’t do at least rudimentary logic, you’re never going to learn how to get out of the erroneous thoughts you think are you.
Usually people who DO change change only as a result of long and determined effort over a long time, or if and when a big Significant Emotional Event (SEE) happens to them. The Alcoholic kills a kid in his car and never touches alcohol again. The drug addict sees himself in the mirror and something triggers deep in his limbic brain and he stops being an addict. The tough cop that just “get the job done” quits his job, takes time out, realises how all the crap he has seen has hurt him, and takes up landscaping as his next job because it helps him feel good.
A few people do it consciously by themselves by learning hypnosis and also just working obsessively on themselves, but these are a TINY minority.
And remember, you are NOT your personality. You are NOT what or who you think about yourself. Those things, in a great many cases, are almost just like persistent clothing in a video game. You can change the colour and shape of your clothes, just like you can change the type of personality you want to have.
