Er, I also think you can’t consciously decide to believe something. You can decide to act like you believe it, operating on trust and such, but whether or not you actually believe something is not in the realm of conscious decision making - it’s more a subconscious thing.
If you want to change your beliefs, you have to change the factset your subconscious is working with. Seek out more information, analize the information you already have, work to recognize your biases and stress to yourself that they are biases and that buddhism isn’t some magical truth-bastion that should be trusted without proof. Stuff like that. But you can’t just decide to believe in the FSM and such.
I find that hard to picture - to the point that I think we must be misunderstanding each other.
Could you, right now, start fervently believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Could you, right now, replace your belief that gravity is correlated with mass with a belief that gravity pulls like it does because magical elves just arbitrarily decide which directions to push things in?
I don’t get why it has to be one or the other, you can miss the person and miss the times you had at the same time.
Sometimes people change for the worse, like let’s say they become a bad drug addict, they undergo personality changes and they aren’t the same person, they have changed but you can still miss the person that they used to be.
Also you can love or enjoy being with a person not just because of how you feel about them, but how they make you feel about yourself.
The fact that you are choosing to believe that your dog wasn’t important because a website says so, means that this statement is false:
For the record, I also believe that you can decide to believe something. Sometimes you have evidence, sometimes you don’t, sometimes you go with your gut, and sometimes you tell your gut what it believes.
Every time I’ve told my gut we were going to believe something my gut responded with, “No chance bucko, but if you want to go along and pretend to buy it, acting like a looby all the while, I’ll just hang back watching and quietly saying ‘I told you so’.”
No, a therapist can help you stop obsessing about all of this in the first place. It has nothing to do with “casual dismissals”. You do sound honestly obsessed.
If you’re so worried about that, you can find a therapist who’s a Buddhist. But a therapist isn’t there to debate with you, or just tell you what you want to hear.
That’s why a therapist can’t help because none of them can dispute the claims with a good argument.
I have read what people have written, but those still fall under the “missing the times you had and not the person” component of the argument. Same with the paragraph saying you like the abstract parts but not the person (care, humor, kindness).
All apologies, but you kinda tipped your hand with “Well a Buddhist site said it so it must be the truth”: we now know what you hold up as a good argument, and it’s the exact opposite of one. We now know what apparently impresses you, but mimicking that approach — even to win you over — would be shameful.
Take a long look at what you’re blithely insisting, there: you’re not claiming that Buddhist arguments are true because you think they’re true; you’re claiming that they’re true because you think they’re Buddhist.
That’s, uh, wrong, is the thing. Might be your fundamental error, right there.
It is not their fucking job to be your rhetorical sparring partner. That you believe that you have the right harangue every person you meet with your incessant bullshit is some new level of entitlement. Get it through your head: Nobody cares about your struggle for the Truth because it’s delusional and obsessive. That your therapist doesn’t engage you in this wankery is a credit to him/her. They are there to treat you. But if you refuse to cooperate with your treatment, they will just take your money and see you next week.
Much like us. Though I feel like we should be getting paid at this point as well.
There are people I’ve cared for despite not seeing them for long periods of time. According to your position I should be no more saddened by their death then I am by their departure. This is wrong, because your position is wrong.
If the only interest you have in a person/animal is what they can do for you and what you can get out of them, I think that’s sociopathy.
As others have said, I think you miss both ways, missing the times you shared, and the person themselves.
I’ve often felt I miss my departed brother in 3 ways:
a) Miss growing up with him, the fun times we used to have.
b) Miss being able to see him as often as I’d like, when he had a busy career and I could hardly get to see him. So, I missed having access to him during this period.
c) Miss him, now that he’s gone. I can’t call him up and talk with him, and share experiences with him that I am sure he’d really appreciate. I often stop and think “wow, he’d really think that is cool. I wish I could tell him about it…” So I’m left to imagine how he would react.
I think you are right in that it is one and the same. Because as you say all we have is the time we have with them and when they are gone then there is no more of that, but even more than that there is a certain absence felt that’s more than just the time you had with them but the person themselves. The time you spent with someone is essentially the person since it is hard to miss someone you didn’t spend any time with or got to know.