Thank you for the reassurance. Honestly, I am not sure if what I said there while feeling bad is entirely true; I perceive the world in radically different ways in different emotional states and when I feel okay the idea of changing my mind doesn’t seem like as big a deal. Still big, but not impossible and soul-crushing. Just terrifying and life-changing lol.
Also, a lot of what I used to call “beliefs” were actually more like… hm, I know there’s an Eliezer post for this, but I’m not sure which… mantras, in a sense. Stuff that you say it and you go “yay” and feel very faithful and spiritual for having said it but you don’t actually stop to think about whether it means anything. I still have a huge amount of such patterns left over from my possibly-schizotypal early teen years, but nowadays I am trying to redefine beliefs in terms of what predictions about future experiences I am making.
I do not have to believe in false things in order to be mentally healthy—I just have to have the right values, and I think that’s what makes me scared when talking to people—I feel like people are going to try to make me change my value system, which puts “spirituality” (which feels like a very specific real thing to me but is very hard to define quickly) at a very high level of importance. And changing my value system is tantamount to a kind of death in itself.
Thank you for the reassurance. Honestly, I am not sure if what I said there while feeling bad is entirely true; I perceive the world in radically different ways in different emotional states and when I feel okay the idea of changing my mind doesn’t seem like as big a deal. Still big, but not impossible and soul-crushing. Just terrifying and life-changing lol.
Also, a lot of what I used to call “beliefs” were actually more like… hm, I know there’s an Eliezer post for this, but I’m not sure which… mantras, in a sense. Stuff that you say it and you go “yay” and feel very faithful and spiritual for having said it but you don’t actually stop to think about whether it means anything. I still have a huge amount of such patterns left over from my possibly-schizotypal early teen years, but nowadays I am trying to redefine beliefs in terms of what predictions about future experiences I am making.
I do not have to believe in false things in order to be mentally healthy—I just have to have the right values, and I think that’s what makes me scared when talking to people—I feel like people are going to try to make me change my value system, which puts “spirituality” (which feels like a very specific real thing to me but is very hard to define quickly) at a very high level of importance. And changing my value system is tantamount to a kind of death in itself.