[20:03] <m> oh i used to like chess… its been a while since i don’t play it
[20:05] <m> you know… i feel like we are in the same situation as someone who was taught to play chess but with different rules… the same, board, pieces, etc but other rules
[20:06] <m> so, when we go out to the world, it is nothing but a mess cause, in the middle of the game, we make moves that make no sense to people and we don’t understand people’s moves either
[20:06] <C> or their pieces are defective
[20:06] <C> at least some of them
[20:06] <m> no no… the pieces are in perfect state themselves
[20:07] <m> but we tend to look for causes, so we inevitably reach that kind of conclusions
[20:07] <m> and that is because we are attached to the rules we learned. we can’t tolerate the idea that they are not real… we prefer to deny facts and experience to preserve our ideas
[20:07] <W> People are often playing dirty to step on you, while you try to be rightful about things and follow the truth
[20:08] <W> @m that too, unless you are willing to become the monster to defeat the monster
[20:09] <m> wait… i didn’t understand that… elaborate please
[20:09] <W> once you start to understand how evil people think
[20:10] <W> you start to turn into an evil person
[20:10] <W> to defend yourself
[20:10] <W> “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”
[20:11] <m> right
[20:11] <m> but i’d put it differently… cause there, you are already imposing a certain value judgment when you say evil, bad and so on
[20:12] <m> the choice would be this: whether force ourselves into the normal chess rules forgetting the ones we learned, or accept our learned rules and live by them… or simply try to make new ones forgetting both
[20:12] <C> yeah, pretty much
[20:12] <m> the first option is painful and improbable, it leads to insanity… the second is hard cause one cant play chess by oneself… and the third, well it is the unknown itself
[20:12] <C> i think the third option is optimal
[20:12] <C> but also the hardest
[20:13] <m> yeah, the easy would be the 2nd one, at least when the choice has to be made
[20:14] <m> and the 1st will be called by the chess players as: stupid (if you don’t choose it) or sane (if you do choose it)
[20:16] <C> I’m pretty sure i should be put on some anti depressant medication
[20:17] <C> and go from there
[20:17] <m> it looks like the steps are in that order too: one first tries to play the game… fails without knowing why (one believes in one’s learned rules), then one retreats and blames the world for being bad in order to keep one’s mental stability… and finally (if suicide or psychiatry fail to get you) reality breaks and you learn to learn a new way to be
[20:18] <m> i hope not C… don’t do meds
[20:18] <m> that rots you inside, in every sense
[20:19] <C> i suppose so
[20:19] <W> the third is stoicism
[20:19] <m> the third is beyond any ‘isms’
[20:20] <W> Or you could try to achieve an intellectual goal
[20:21] <m> all such ways have one thing in common: they try to learn how the mind (and the world at large) works in order to live by its rules. the problem is that the only tool for that is precisely the mind… it is like the eye that tries to see itself