Aversions

Avoiding or Inducing an Aversion

Some nodes on your network can create aversions to change your behavior. The most common thing that they do this with is food. As mentioned in 6.1 Your Body’s Preferences, if you eat the same item frequently enough, and your body is trying to keep you from eating it, it can put up an aversion to stop you from eating it. With foods, this takes a few repititions. The more a behavior is in your network’s court, the faster it is at putting up an aversion to performing that behavior. The amount your network cares about stopping the behavior also affects the speed at which it puts up an aversion. So while eating food that isn’t poisonous may take a few meals to create an aversion, eating bad meat will likely only take a single event to trigger an aversion, because your network sees it as a very high priority. An action in the relm of sexuality is likely to take only a single query as well, since sexuality is something that your network has direct control over.

A lot of people experience burnout from work. Burnout is an aversion that makes it very difficult to continue doing your job. If you don’t want to trigger an aversion to something that you do a lot, such as your work, the easiest thing to do is just follow your body’s directions and negotiate with your body on any actions that you need to perform that it is currently discouraging. If you never resist your body, your body will see no need to put an aversion in place.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are some aversions that you might want to trigger. For instance, if you have a sweet tooth and there’s no way to keep sweets out of your home, one way to help yourself stay away from them is to query your body about eating those sweets, repeatedly, until you have an aversion to them. With that aversion, you do not have to control yourself at all. If you are querying your body about what to eat, you will reinforce the aversion. If you eat it anyway, the flavor will be worse than usual and the aversion will be reinforced even more. Regardless of what you do, with an aversion in place, your eating of sweets will likely come to an unexpected end.

These aversions last well over a month, and you cannot remove them yourself. If they are there, you are stuck with them. You can, however, help choose what you do and do not become averse to. It’s a very useful ability, in many areas of life, including diet, drugs, thoughts, memories, feelings, kinks, and even a chair that’s bad for your back. Negative responses lead to aversions, and aversions can be a great tool at your disposal.

Violent Tendencies

There is a lot of violence in society, from homes and schools to wars. Even entertainment is filled with violence. Violence is a big part of life. Women cary around methods to protect themselves. Self-defense classes are commonplace. Police are trained to treat every situation as possibly harmful to themselves, frequently resulting in them instigating violence themselves.

In my youth, I only instigated violence once, to deter a bully in my teens. However, I did like violence. I watched it and I’m embarrassed to say that I wanted it. At first, laws kept me in check. After that, religion and empathy kept me in check, but it wasn’t perfect. I still liked violence, and there were situations in which that could come out. Anger at a bully, righteous fury at someone harming a loved one (sometimes in situations that I understood and sometimes in situations that I did not), and the occasional unfulfilled BDSM-related desire. These thoughts and behaviors seem to be pretty normal in society. Judgement is clouded, acting out is common, and people can get hurt.

This all changed for me when I started querying my body about those behaviors. It rejected them, strongly and in no uncertain terms. I stopped enjoying violent media. I started feeling empathy for everyone. In difficult situations, I could still think things through. Violence stopped being an option, and when considered, an aversion would show up to prevent even the thought process. I literally couldn’t, and I’m happy that I can’t. It was a major change to who I am. Nonviolence is an important part of who I am now. I can feel for everyone and deal with anything. I love this change. I love the new me.

The Big Picture

I’m only one individual. Imagine living in a society where violence isn’t an option. Isn’t that a worthy goal to work towards? With this, it could be possible. For each person to make it a reality for themselves, all they would have to do is learn how to query their own needs. Then have them pay attention to their body’s responses while they are mentally walked through violent scenarios or while they watch attentively to violent videos. The aversions that this results in should remove violent tendencies. It should stop being an option. This could be rolled out in teaching materials on a large scale, and greatly benefit society as a whole.

This does not, however, guarantee that it will work for everyone. There are likely conditions and developmental outliers in which this will not work. In those situations, employing a little more work with them to determine the specific network issue and help fix the issue could work. Society can be peaceful. This is one of the primary reasons why I have pursued this research so hard for so long. The world may not be safe and peaceful, but humanity can be. That’s a goal that everyone should work towards.

Negative & Depressive Thought Patterns & Memories

As mentioned in 13.3 Depression, I lost my ability to access the behavior patterns and remembered feelings of depression because an aversion was put in place to stop me from accessing those behavior patterns and the feelings attached to those memories. This was a very effective solution to the non-biological part of my depression; the only part that remained after I started taking care of my body well enough for it to stop triggering depression for bodily needs.

If you are taking care of your body well enough to eliminate a large portion of your depression, you can trigger this aversion yourself by running queries on remembering the feelings of depression and performing actions that are associated with your depression. Run queries on these topics until you identify some that produce strong negative responses. Then repeat those queries until you have a strong aversion. This appears to be all that’s required for depression behavior blocking to be effective.

Rapid-fire Grocery Querying

Querying for bodily needs is slow. This can make it difficult to determine the ideal items in a grocery store to buy to make up your general meal cycles, as every item should be tested individually. Each query has to be intended, send a signal down to the muscle being attended to, and activate sensory nerves which then have to send a signal all the way back up to the brain. It can take half a second. This can make grocery shopping slow.

To speed up the process of going through a grocery store with body communication, you need to do something your body doesn't want until it puts an aversion in place to stop you. That aversion then speeds up the querying process by cutting out the delay it takes for a negative response to go from your brain to your limb and back to your brain. It's a hacky shortcut that takes a very long time to implement. I happened upon it because when I started out, I was only using the abdominal responses, as I didn't know about any others.

To start the process of getting rapid-fire grocery querying to work, you need to overuse the negative abdominal response. That response is a weak form of the vomit response. The body doesn’t like triggering it frequently. Overuse will result in an inhibitor being put in place to block the formation of queries that will result in negative responses. As a result of this, instead of waiting to notice a response in your hand or any other body part, your mental imagery of trying to pick up an item at the grocery store simply will not form in your mind when you attempt to run a query. You will not be able to imagine performing the action if performing the action would result in a negative response. Keep switching between food items in your imagination until you can actually form a mental picture. You will receive a positive response when the mental image forms, as negative or neutral items will not form images.

Since the time a query takes depends on the time it takes a signal to travel from your central nervous system to your peripheral nervous system and back, cutting out that process greatly improves the speed at which queries can be run. An entire grocery store can be rapidly covered for cross-comparison of digestive system preferences of all items in the store, in a fraction of the time that it would normally take. This block on providing negative abdominal responses does, however, take a long time of constant use of the abdominal responses to set up, so it may not be practical to set up just to use in one situation.

---