Originally Posted by
Allie
AGH. Did you read what you just responded to?? lol
What I meant... was that for some reason your words honestly make me question what I say and make me want to be a better person. So if my words have ever offended you or bothered/upset you... if you responded to them I would probably stop and listen to you and end up understanding things from a perspective that I usually ignore. And I actually value that. It's a strange thing.
I've seen people try to change what they mean or act differently to conform to the desires of other people. But wow. This isn't like that at all. I'm not trying to impress anyone or agreeing to get people to like me. Entirely different. I don't experience this often, but I think what's happening is that the way you illustrate your ideas makes so much sense to me that it actually has the ability to influence me. Perhaps people are looking at their duals as their ideal relations instead of the potential ideal.
The way you're looking at it, it's almost as if you're assuming that you're not there. You're so significant in this. Sure, if you look at who I am right now you would not want to be friends with me. I offend and upset you. But you're forgetting that a friendship is interaction. Reading my posts isn't interacting with me. You being there makes it different. You're influential. You can look at an ENTp right now and decide that duality doesn't make sense because you dislike the way they act. But if you interact with them, I think you'll find that your presence is what makes you like them more. Do you like who I am now more than who I was when I first posted in this thread? Duality is the potential for two people to like/understand each other. They aren't right for each other separately, but as they interact and influence each other... I think that they become their ideal selves.
I change, not for you, but by you. It's not necessarily something that I try to do... I just feel like even though there are so many different perspectives on reality, my dual's is the one that actually makes sense with mine. So these two perspectives make sense to each other, and they take these new insights and experience them and use them to benefit themselves.
If you study me, or look at me alone... I'm not right for an ISFp. I think it's because I'm missing that other perspective... their perspective... which is all I need to be right for them. So don't judge me based on who I am now, but who I am after you take a chance to affect me for a while. I'm completely different.
To keep our beliefs we are not only willing to isolate ourselves, but also to change our environments... which is what I described to BulletsAndDoves in my last post:
But I think both means of attaching to our beliefs are unhealthy. Isolation is bad... trying to mold everyone else's beliefs to conform to ours is even worse...
Isolating yourself is going to be a negative approach for obvious reasons... limiting yourself from the world.
And the opposite approach, changing your environment, is bad because not only is it difficult to actually do, but there's also the question of whether it's right to do in the first place. Which I explained in that post... the whole 'we don't know what is universally right for all people' thing.
So if both means of keeping strongly opposed beliefs are flawed... then what does one do with these beliefs?
IMO: these sort of beliefs are only limitations.
And what exactly is being limited?
-our understanding (actual comprehension of our interaction and experience within life)
-our interactions (to feel alive: interacting with things outside of oneself)
-our experiences (what is fundamental for life to be a continuum, rather than a state)
To understand something is the potential to solve problems; to interact with something is to share understandings, to create, and also to have relations with things, which causes us to feel things- one of the greatest things about being alive is the ability to feel (both physical sensations and emotional ones); and to experience something is to occupy time and to appreciate and enjoy being in the present, to make use of our understandings and interactions... what we do while we are alive.
I think these three things are ways to find contentment. I'm not going to claim to know for sure, I have no fucking clue. But for some reason I think these things could be significant. The way they work together makes sense right now, like they build off of each other:
We understand through interactions and experiences; we interact to gain understanding, to share understanding, and also to occupy an experience; and we experience as a means of existing in reality, or more specifically: using understanding and interaction to confirm our being.
All we know about what reality even is is from experiences. Experiencing things is what we do here, without an "experience" there is no indication of time, this is where our understandings are made and used and where our interactions take place. Isolating oneself from experience inevitably limits one's opportunity to understand and to actually use one's understanding and it limits one's opportunity to interact and enjoy interactions... these are the two things that we know exist in our reality (because to us, reality is only whatever we can experience) and these two things are what we do in reality. You understand and you interact within an experience.
So to me, having preconceived beliefs limits what you're willing to understand (because you already have universal truth on some subjects), it limits how you're willing to interact (because you have already labeled certain actions/people/ideas as things to not experience), and due to limited understanding and interaction a person is going to be incapable of experiencing life AND reality.
You're right. He IS just trying to survive. That's exactly my point.
I think in all honesty, that that is exactly what people with strong, preconceived beliefs are doing to themselves. They aren't experiencing life and reality to the extent we as human beings are capable of...
And if he wants to continue on with life without a search for understanding and without seeking as many interactions with reality as he possibly can... how does he know he's actually experienced life?