Breakthrough

Did you ever feel completely at peace with the world? I'm sure everybody has at one point experienced this in their life, and I'm sure that many people experience this daily. It's hard to describe the feeling exactly, but it's a state of pure optimism and relaxedness. Based on this description I guess that potsmokers and godworshippers may also reach for this feeling. For me, it's been particularly hard to grasp this feeling. Usually it comes to me when I am on the way to somewhere, like the last time I went to Tokyo to do some visa-related stuff, or when I'm waiting for someone, in particular at Hon Atsugi station, observing the people walking by, or when climbing up the stairs to my room late at night and suddenly realizing that I'm in Japan, thousands of kilometers away from home. As you probably know my now I'm quite interested in human brains, so I've been analyzing why this happens for quite some time now, and I'm trying to reproduce the feeling. So far the results I'm getting are not consistent. Switching perspective seems to work the best. I found that listening to music helps. For example, switching from calm, mildly depressing music (like the House MD soundtrack) to something active and uplifiting (virtually any anime soundtrack will do, Eurobeat in particular works very well for me) . Strangely enough the other way around works too. I guess my brain just needs a strong stimulus to activate it, be it negative or positive, that doesn't really matter. Another nice brain exercise is to switch perspective in time, remembering events from the past years, and then suddenly switching to a projection of what you think the near/far future will be like for you, personally.

And then I remembered self actualization. When I started to write this post I did not think about self actualization at all, but while writing about this particular feeling and the method used to create it I realized the connection. I see this as proof that it's important to write down your thoughts from time to time, as you may find things inside your brain that you didn't know were there.

Realizing and understanding completely your own past, present and future, and being at peace with what you see.
Gentlemen, the year 2010 is approaching! I'm so excited I can hardly sleep!

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