Status Quo

I am happy.

I am much more able to deal with my vision of the future, which I have had for such a long time.

There was a loop, or a recursive function. In talking to Ben about "Virtue is its own reward", it was clear that the maxim meant by being virtuous, we are rewarded even "before" we perform virtuous acts: the reward of "being virtuous" precedes its instantiation as any act in the world: a loop in time where the reward precedes the reward-worthy action.
(Usually, we think of time going forward as an algorithm whose inputs are the acts we do  and the outputs are future states-of-affairs. A recursive function of the future would also allow us to take future states-of-affairs and then feed them back into the past, so the outputs would also become some of the inputs of the time algorithm.)

So what?

So there are a lot of loops. There are so many loops in time that time itself - or our usual way of looking at time as one-dimensional - becomes a bit suspect.

I was fearful of my vision of the future. I could not deal with it. So I had to struggle for years. The struggle did not destroy me, and now I feel more and more able to deal with that vision of mine which I call "The Future". In essence, my future looped back and terrified me, but in doing so, it made me struggle to be able to meet it when it came into being.

Craziness?
Let's talk again about it every 2 years. Keep notes.
(I will point out that the usual concept of "prophecy" or "foretelling the future" could be interpreted as a temporal recursive algorithm in the sense talked about... not that I make any such claim. Please! I am merely pointing out that the logic is not as bizarre as it may seem at first blush. Even so, it still seems pretty weird. The only difference between "prophesy": what will happen, and a present description: what is happening, is the tense and form of the verb "happen"... that plus our own expectations and emotions.)

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