My name is G_________, and for a good while I struggled with the realities and threats that were around me. After a while I came to a decision, that it was foolish to wallow in depression and that the human mind was not meant to be wasted on thought like that. Unlike how you described your ascent from depression, mine started as an epiphany that I had to build on to find answers.
The answers that I came to, through much intensive thought and analysis of myself, other people, and general reaction, are written almost verbatim in your texts, and thus I am highly interested in any other knowledge/theories at all relating to the human mind that you would be willing to send to me.
Just from what I have read, I hold strong respect for your intelligence, and I almost feel like I'm supposed to contact you to learn the things I could not figure out on my own (yet at least). Read and respond if you have time, thank you.
Dear G_____
Thank you so much for your letter. I don't really know how to respond to your request for knowledge/theories relating to the human mind. If you have any questions I'll be glad to answer them.A. B. Curtiss
Dear A. B.
Well, I've thought about the best way to narrow down what I've been wondering about, and here is what I have come up with:
Depression can be caused by chemical imbalances, various stimuli and threats around people, and their own mind (mainly combinations thereof). I was wondering about the limits of the human mind regarding the creation of a "false" state (like how you would use routine to fall asleep, and to take your mind off of your past depression). I know that I can control what I dream about by focusing my last conscious thought (this took a year for me to do consistently), and I also know the fact that my better dreams are in color while my nightmares are in black or white. I don't see a problem with myself really, I've just wondered for the longest time how powerfully the mind can induce a state that is, well, purely mental.
I've also come to the assumption that the human mind naturally thinks methodically outside of volatile situations, thus relating routine to causing mental changes otherwise unrelated except through routine. I'm wondering how key the routine is in all of this, or if someone theoretically could fully believe something as truth (while knowing it was not), just by changing a mind state without a subconscious trigger. I'm not even sure if all of this makes sense or not from a reading standpoint, anything unclear I would be more than happy to reword later. Thank you for your time, once again.
P.S. I have many ideas of the human mind, but I have no college or high school classes specifically trained in psychology so I don't have all the terminology at my disposal, thus making explaniations of my more complicated queries somewhat tougher. G__________
Dear G__________
Thank you for your letter. Have you read my book Brainswitch out of Depression. In it I discuss at length how the brain gets from one thought to another. How thought patterns are formed. You can fall asleep even though depressed because the pain of depression is all produced in the subcortex but you can't feel the pain until the signals go up the brain to the neocortex where they must be not only received but acknowledged. This process is called the process of pain perception. This is why some players can break a bone during a football game and never feel any pain until the game is over because the neocortical concentration on the game blocks the signals from the subcortex that pain is being produced there and thus they are not alerted to the pain of their injury. This is how hypnosis works.
This acknowledgment is usually beneath one's level of awareness but regardless, since a human being can only think one thought at a time, you can block the thought in the neocortex that pain signals are being received from the depression in the subcortex and thus separate the idea that you are depressed from one part of the brain to another. If you think nonsense or non-emotional thoughts which stimulate the neurons in the neocortex and withdraw neural activity from the subcortex you can bore your neocortex with repetition and thus fall asleep. Better than Ambien. As far as state of mind.
There are two modes for the body to be in, the sympathetic or the parasympathetic mode. The sympathetic mode is the body in a state of alarm where the fight or flight response has been triggered and stress chemicals flood the body to prepare the body for immediate action. The parasympathetic is the body’s unstressed state, where the body is at rest.A. B. Curtiss
Dear A. B.
I have not yet read your book, which for the record I have complete intention of buying and reading from what I have seen so far. Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions, and if I come up with any others I will ask you when I think of them.
Today, me and my friends were roughhousing (as you would expect when you pin 3 18 year olds in a room) Then, things simply got stupid as I was slammed in the hand with a wooden sword (a rectangular surface on all sides, but the corner slammed my hand). Honestly, it was a very very painful injury, to the point that I am typing this with one hand. I still believe that it is worth it, though, because I was able to combine both the things I knew and some of the techniques you described to reduce the pain, or at the very least the focus I would have spent on it. That is something I think is worth mentioning. G________
Dear G________
Good for you. It is a test of strength of character when you can access your rational mind while in pain or distress. A. B. Curtiss
Dear A. B.
Here's what I meant in my initial E-mail, I guess, in the best possible wording I have:
I would think that there are things that you are still uncertain about in the field of psychology and the human mind, and though I don't have a degree or anything like that I still feel that I have knowledge beyond the average human in regards to how people behave generally. I was wondering about theories in general to see if they coincided with my own, and because even if they disagree with what I think, it's good to have diverging opinions. And just MAYBE I can help you find a hard to find answer that you could only theorize toward (which I would only be theorizing in return but still). Honestly it's like I want to know what you don't, if that makes sense. It may not be possible to answer something so ambiguous but this is one thing that was meant in my first email. G__________
Dear G.
It seems to me that every person, at some level, knows the answer to life. Every person is born with the capacity to know the truth even though they may not be able to communicate it to others. And often, too many things distract our attention and get in the way of that truth, so it is a matter of fate or Grace when we can look through our "stuff" to the truth of things. But whether we see the truth on Tuesday or Wednesday, the important thing is that, ultimately, all human beings get to the truth. It's not a race. It's a path. A. B. Curtiss
Dear A. B.
I agree with what you said. The only way, however, to understand your own answers (in my opinion) is to have other answers to compare them to. Everyone can find their own answers and accept them, its something I devote a lot of time to. However, I think the only way to understand things better is to understand the differences in understanding instead of leaving them out of the equation. This is one of the major reasons I always try to compare notes with everyone else. Having a lot of different opinions helps me to clarify my own thoughts, and sometimes I think someone else's answer is more correct than mine. I trust in what I think, more than maybe is even good for me, but sometimes other answers just make more sense to me than even my own. This is why I keep my ears open, and sometimes actively seek others' input. G________
Dear G________
What you are saying sounds like a good idea. A. B. Curtiss
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