Day 4 renamed - Day of Rebirth

(stop reading this post if you're not interested in the psychological background of me doing this sleep-experiment. Also don't read this if you're the kind of person that gets all frustrated with people doing things with conviction that are not 'scientifically proveable. Experiment-progress-wise, this post comes down to me feeling energetic again using my epic willpower skillz, without having reached REM-phase in my naps yet. If you wanna know more about how I managed this, who I am and what drives me, read on.)

Renaissance, the pseudonym that I'm using, meaning rebirth, has various meanings to me, even though I didn't come up with it myself. The name was given to me on the 2th of december 2007 by Kane, a person I admired at that time, and that I can call a friend since then. There's a Latin saying 'nomen est omen', which means literally: Your name becomes your destiny. Coincidence or not, from that period on, my life has been a rapid succession of symbolic rebirth after rebirth. In order for you as reader to understand the reason of today's events in my uberman experiment, and the reason behind my drive to do this experiment in the first place, I must talk a bit about myself. I haven't introduced myself yet anywayz.

I'm Belgian, male and close to 22 years old to this point. I've always been an introvert. As far as I can remember, I've always had big projects that I have been working on, on my own. May it be puzzles and videogames that I took really serious as a child, and various types of personal development at my current age. Those loner-projects have always had priority in my life, over the social aspect of it. (although this changed majorly around my 'Renaissance' in the end of 2007.) When I'm alone, I feel at home. For most of my life, I have been dealing with the paradox of having high self-confidence and motivational drive in the stuff I'm doing and myself in general, but low self-esteem and confidence in social situations. I've never had trouble in social situations where I felt like I was qualified to get respect. For example in primary school, where I was the smartest kid in class, and child of the headmaster, I felt completely at ease, no problem. (hiding behind symbols that aren't of any value anyway) But in social situations on the other hand where I didn't feel like I didn't have any real qualification to get respect, where I had no fake symbols to hide myself behind, I felt like a total piece of crapshit basically, especially in guy-groups. (for some reason I don't have that problem with girls. I'm probably an exception in the fact that I have more trouble having male friends than girlfriends.)

(I took some pics today)

Needless to say, I had accumulated a lot of negative emotional baggage up to 2 years ago. I was never really aware of it, that something had gone wrong that could be fixed. I knew/thought I was fucked up, but I thought it was a fundamental part of who I was, and there was nothing that I could do about it. Although I'm not writing this blog anonymously, I'm saying this because it's the reason behind getting into the personal development stuff. Although talking about this stuff used to freak me out 2 years ago, I've pretty much come to a point now where I've come to peace and acceptance with this aspect of my past, and got rid of most of the emotional weight of these matters.

Because I'm just giving a quick overview here, I'm not gna go into the thing that really got me to look into personal development. For some reason it's culturally pretty taboo and it's not something that I only want to press into a few lines. I might go into it later as a separate post. Anywayz, from that thing that I started my personal development with, I later got into the metaphysical views on personal development. Most of this stuff is considered New-Age, and people who haven't looked into it have a first instinct of declaring everything here as flower-smoke crap. I won't be going into details, but I thinkt there's a lot of crap out there, but also a lot of truth. What's important for today is just the notion of your body (source of feelings and emotions), mind (source of thoughts) and core/soul (source of willpower) being separate entities. This is pretty much accepted by every spirituality and meta-physical theory. If you've never

thought/heard/read about it, know that it's pretty common sense for nearly all people who have thought about it.

The metaphysical notion of happiness and freedom (these two are very directly connected), is that happiness and freedom is actually the default state of our soul/core. It's our mind and bodies that blur the default state of happiness and freedom through unwanted thoughts (mind) and emotions/feelings (body). The ultimate happiness and freedom in this concept, is using your body and mind as tools that you're in control of, instead of being controlled by every crap your mind and body send at you. The way how you can be the master of your body and mind is the part where a lot of spiritualities and new-age theories go completely in a wrong direction in my opinion and experience. They say that you can, by year-long-practice or whatever, condition

your body and mind to only send you thoughts and emotions that you want. In my opinion, this is utter crap, and it's never possible to control what the next thought is you're going to think or the next feeling/emotion you're going to have. Although there are definitely elements of truth in the popular book/movie 'The Secret' and positive-thinking stuff like it, it's still impossible to condition yourself to think only positive thoughts.

The way to go in my opinion, is losing the emotional charge that your thoughts and bodily

sensations have over you. In that way you can see your thoughts as some kind of tv channel that's not directly influencing you, but where you can pick the things from that are useful for you. Losing the emotional charge of your thoughts sounds complicated, but is actually pretty easy to do as a habit, once you get used to it. (something I'm working at since last month)

Your thoughts come in different categories, and the ones that you suffer from the most are thougths that are caused by a want of approval, want of safety, want of control, want of seperation, or want to be closer to/be one with. I'm not really going into the technical stuff, because it's not really the point of this point/blog anyway.

The big reason behind the other reasons why I'm doing this uberman-challenge, is because I want to prove for myself that I choose the boundaries of my life myself, hence the name of this blog.

From early today until after my 4pm nap, I was feeling completely exhausted and useless, like my previous post described so well as a zombie-state. I was thinking about the fact that in the last few days, when I felt tired I was often able to make the tiredness go away a

little bit by concentrating my attention on something interesting that kept my head involved. Then I came up with the idea of 'letting loose' of the feeling of tiredness that my body was

sending me. Since the default state of every being at any time is freedom and happiness, there must be a way to 'let go' of this tiredness or at least not having it bother me. I noticed that I had destined myself to feel like crap because I had read people's experiences on uberman, and assuming that the same was coming for me. I thought about this, and decided to give it a try if I could just release this feeling of tiredness without resisting it. I'm not going into the technicities of this, because it might make this post way too long, but long story short, I succeeded pretty well at doing this.

The weather was good and I was feeling better again, and I decided to go for a walk, from my house through the farm-fields to the next town. Having let go of the influence of my thoughts over me, I really enjoyed myself in the present moment. I was amazed by the nice colors of the flowers and plants, I climbed over a bridge instead of passing under it just for the adventure of it, talked to the cows... and gave my grand-mother a visit. It's been really ages that I visitted my grandmother on my own initiative. She was very surprised and happy to see me. For some reason or another, I realized that I had never had a real conversation from person to person with her in my entire life. She's very traditional and catholic, and until today I had always been afraid that it would shock her too much if I would talk openly to her about the things that were going on in my life, and how I thought about life. I saw my grandmother as a real person for the first time in my life I think... We talked about all kinds of stuff, how we both see religion, my grandfather that died a few years ago and she told me about stuff that happened before I was born. (something she rarely had done to me when I was a child) Her eyes were shining as she was talking to me, something I hadn't seen from her for quite a while.

(count ladybugs ;))

When I went home, I had a nice feeling... Seeing my grandmother so happy had made me happy too. (I didn't tell her about my sleeping experiment though :P Surprisingly enough, you can't see it on my face that I'm suffering from sleep deprivation )

I came home just before 8pm nap-time, and woke up with an exhausted feeling again. Pretty quickly, I was able to release that feeling again to feel pretty awake again.

Good news, I think I started dreaming a bit in my last nap at midnight. I'm not 100% sure because I can't remember anything, but I have the feeling that I did dream for a short time. If I'm right, the toughest part of the challenge might be over already!