Religious Moments Intro

I want to point out what I am doing with this blog, and the videos. If I have already written about a subject here on the blog, and feel it is talked about enough, I won’t post an article to go with the video. You can find the article fairly easy, and I tend to cover the subject way more than the videos allow. The subject of assholes has been talked about here, and is such a deep thing for me it is difficult to write normal articles for it. The last one ended with a cliffhanger, and took me a month to write with 10,000 words to make it. Not an easy task.

I just wanted you to know this, incase you ever think I am ignoring the blog. I am not, in fact, the blog has helped me understand subjects so well, I am now using it as a source for other stuff.

The big thing to know is that I figured out how to use the asshole equations for other subjects. This is a big surprise for me, and has created a lot of excitement. I can talk about the subject, without having to feel depressed afterwards. Not only that, I feel like the videos help create art for the blogs, and even help explain things better. Like I said, the last time I wrote about asshole equations, I wrote 10,000 words and it didn’t feel right.

Religious Moments Intro

The term religious moments is not to denigrate an actual religious moment someone goes through. Instead, it describes how people feel when they are at a convention or other place and suddenly feel a moment of awe or amazement. The people I have spoken to use the term themselves to describe that moment.

For example, when I was at the NorthWest Pinball and Arcade Show, someone told me about finding a game he played at an arcade growing up. When he checked the machine a little closer, it was the actual machine he had played. He was so touched, he felt light headed.

Another case while at the Emerald City Comicon, a someone told me about dressing up as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. He recognized someone dressed in school boy uniform with red hair. It took a moment, but he realized the young man was dressed as Turlough from a series on Doctor Who. They had a three sentence conversation, but he said it felt amazing to have that connection with a fellow fan.

These moments can be described using the asshole equations, and even diagrammed to what is happening.

First off, we need to understand how two people being dressed up can have a meaning. Then we need to see how the equation works within this situation. We also need to understand how badly a rejection will displace this moment.

Conventions, group meet ups, and even places like Disneyland create moments for us that are not entirely real. Your rational mind knows Snow White does not exist, but within the confines of this place, you allow it to be true. You are fully aware that the person you are talking to is an actor, or someone just playing the part, but you ignore these thoughts.

This creates something called Hyperreality. The idea was first introduced by Jean Baudrillard in his PhD thesis. He concludes there are moments where reality is ignored for the non reality presented. The concept of malls, and other places came into the subject by other papers both by him, and others.

The reality is, Walt Disney understood this before the term was created. Disneyland was specifically designed to be almost game like. I nicknamed this a Real Life Game, where the same goals as a game are made, and thus the end result is very similar. Disneyland is literally a videogame world placed in a small part of California.

Scott Rogers, who created the book Level Up, and works at THQ as a game designer, created a wonderful lecture explaining how Disneyland used videogame ideas. Keep in mind, when Disney made and designed his land, videogames did not exist as we know them. In fact, we can say that Disneyland showed game designers how to properly set up their games.

Conventions are unconsciously designed in the same way. You go there, and are excited to see and hear from you favorite characters. People dress up to fulfil this desire, and also to help them with their own.

The reason why this can happen is the greater amount of energy and excitment you put into the event, the easier it becomes to create a non reality. In the chart above, the closer you are to the center of something you like, the more energy and liking it you put it. Although you like it the same amount as you did before hand, your energy level is higher. The disconnect and acceptance can also be higher from this.

In other words, because something touches you so much, you ignore the problems that it can cause. In movies and books, this is called the Rule of Cool. A character shows up in a giant mech, and fights off the monster is accepted because it is so cool when it happens. For example, guns not working against monsters in Power Rangers is one of these things.

The problem with this, is the amount of emotion you put into it can be changed quickly, and thus create a rejection state. The disconnect and acceptance don’t change, but the feelings of like it do. Although you may still like the subject, you don’t like it the same amount, and have a hard time liking it more afterwards.

In a real life event, this can mean having a hard time with a good friend, and watching this small moment destroy it. The feeling of rejection is real, and hard to get over.

To understand this better, we have to take the first equation, and use it in another one. This equation shows our moment to moment response to things as they happen. We can like something, and even dislike things. This will either take energy or create energy for us to use with our own consciousness. I am using the word energy for lack of a better term.

The equation shows our priority, and how it works. Then we take how much we like something, or feel connected to it to add Emotional Joy. The stress we feel from the disconnect of various objects, and our acceptance of it creates Emotional Stress. We take all of the things creating stress, and add them together, and the same with Joy. While priority is broken apart to a single whole. IE, this is what our conscious self is thinking about directly.

At any given moment, we have a finite amount of consciousness to go around. Our brain tries to turn everything into a reflex, which will hopefully give us more energy to focus on other subjects.

The amount of consciousness points means that we can be overpowered by joy or stress depending on the moment. So an amazing moment, where our minds go to above liking something means we will remember it a lot, but it can also overpower the rest of our body, and thus cause fainting. Imagine someone at a wedding being so happy they can’t think anymore.

In the same idea, too much emotion stress and pain can cause a memory to be wiped out. It takes too much consciousness to understand the moment, so the brain erases it. Imagine falling from a cliff. You are conscious the entire time, but you don’t remember hitting it. This is why we wake up from dreams where you are falling, the emotion stress breaks you away from your unconscious state.

Knowing this means that an amazing memory -scoring three or higher- will be something you remember forever. A great big memory you love and love to talk about. However, if you do not give something any priority at all, you won’t remember it. If asked about it later, your mind will not know what to do.

This doesn’t mean the memory has to be a good one. If it causes enough stress that it takes priority from your mind, you will have the same event. So your fear of dogs can have the reason why erased, but the fear itself is still in your reflexes. If you have a good memory, lets say a nice dog befriends you, then the original fear will go away. You replaced it with the new memory.

Memory is a weird thing. We allow moments to be surreal, because we like them so much. In fact, some places are designed to do this. Our memory or consciousness has a finite amount of things it can prioritize, we our brains create reflexes and other things to help us stay awake. Things like rejection or bad memories can make once great things terrible to us. It can also replaced bad memories with good ones.

The next essay will be diagramming one of these moments. The essay after that will be about how some groups use that to their advantage.