“Stop crying, Danny!”
That tears are a bad thing is so baked into our social fabric that parents might find themselves renouncing crying without any awareness of the deeper implications. It might not even present as admonishment… “Don’t cry Sara, you’re fine, do you want a popsicle?” is drawn from the same pool of feeling-shaming, hurt-distracting, and pain-minimizing consciousness.
Have you ever stopped yourself from crying? Why? Because you don’t want to feel out of control, or make someone you’re with uncomfortable? Because you don’t have time for the arc that tears — real, deep tears — demand?
We value toughness. We value cooperation. We value rational predictability. And feelings — when they are truly felt — are messy, wild, and sometimes ugly to our constrained sensibilities.
But the only way out of the epidemic of feeling-people-turned-medicated-psychiatric-patients is to rebrand and reframe feeling as a cultural collective. And I believe it starts with our messaging as parents and our orientation toward shadow elements like anger and sadness. We have to model a conscious relationship to our own dark parts, and we have to show our children what it looks like to move through these spaces.
Is Depression Sadness or The Fight Against It?
Through this process of rebranding sadness as necessary, we may even learn that what we are calling depression has less to do with felt sadness than with the persistent resistance against it. Sadness, sorrow, grief, and pain are kinetic and dynamic. They rise and release. They move.
It is the fight against these forces, the conditioned fear of them, and the effort to ignore the banging from the room you locked them in that collapses one’s life experience. Depression feels like a wired tiredness. The agitation of disconnection. It is a silent war against the soul.
Thus, healing from depression necessarily involves a reframing of beliefs and a shifting of mindset around the meaning of this emotional bandwidth and more inclusive orientation. These beliefs are the portal to change.
“Where do these beliefs come from?” Beliefs are handed down within families, like psychological DNA base pairs, and it is the journey from our homes out into the wild blue yonder that tests, reifies, and perhaps transforms these beliefs.
I have taken this journey — am on it now — and recognize the urgency of consciously shaping the beliefs around emotions that my daughters will marinate in.
For this reason, my daughter and I sat down one rainy day and drew up a tale in defense of feelings. We wrote a book about the land of Sangati where Asha and her family were praying for rain during a mysteriously dry period that was causing everything to fall out of balance, and her grandmother to be ill. Little did she know that the Sky Beings in charge of the weather and natural cycles were all under a happiness spell, taking a potion from a sun god who promised ease and comfort. A young goddess, Indra, had forgotten that her tears were important, however, not only to her, but to the very land below. In this story, she breaks the spell, saves Asha and her family, and heals the land with the sensitivity of her heart. We called it A Time For Rain.
As I witness the reclamation of feelings once relegated to the catacombs of wrongness in my patients and online community, I see that feeling grief, sadness, and pain are a way to reconnect to the fabric of humanity. It is an opportunity to tap into a current of energy that runs through us all. And perhaps, allowing this current to pass through sensitizes us to wise response and relationship to the earth itself. Because it may not be carbon quotas the earth needs. The earth may need us to feel the sorrow of her abuse, mistreatment, and disregard. Felt sadness has this wisdom to offer.
And the greatest gift we can give to our children, and to this planet, is permission to feel it all, every day.
Thank you. This is a beautiful reminder to listen to our children and grandchildren and talk to them about sadness. My son, when he was little would go into crying rages and tantrums that I would sometimes dread going into public. He didn’t get diagnosed or drugged though and although he continued to have mental and emotional issues well into early adulthood, (including a failed suicide attempt five years ago) he did a phenomenal job finding appropriate ways to handle his sadness (diet, exercise, meaningful employment, hobbies, volunteer work, spirituality, friendship, etc.) and is now doing very well overall. His son (my eight year old grandson) has a much different way of expressing sadness. Friday, I was exhausted and didn’t play with him and he had to go to bed at 8:30. He cried himself to sleep saying that I had broken my promise but it was a gentle weeping sadness. On other occasions, hears voices and although I haven’t figured out what triggers them, they can be angry and hostile, and he doesn’t like to talk about them. We are very keen to avoid him ever getting psychiatrized. It can be a very difficult task protecting children from psychiatrization. The issue of whether to seek ‘professional’ help for a child can divide families and cause the system to initiate extraordinarily draconian measures which one would only expect in a totalitarian society. Not only to we need to educate parents about creative alternative ways of handling sadness, we need to legislatively protect humans from psychiatrization and forced treatment.
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Madmom, you are doing the right thing. Children cannot identify with “get well theories”. It is difficult enough to be a kid, nevermind having to listen to words, constructs, ideas that are alien to a child. I think the best thing for kids is not to make them feel different, even though they may have major issues.
Even a therapist can make a child feel “sick”. “something is wrong with me, because they are trying to “help” me”
I know from my past that diversion and inclusion go a long way, and not in that ‘helpful’ kind of way.
The brain can only change if one sheds the idea that the child is different.
Dr Breggin does this successfully.
People hold grudges for the way they feel. It could be that one day your kid says “you should have helped me”. If that happens, you can tell that child you did your best. You will feel a hell of a lot better about that than getting psychiatry involved and seeing the damage and having your child blame you with reason.
When we have kids, there is just a lot of hoping. And there are no guarantees, because indeed some people simply experience suffering to different degrees, Somewhere along the line we imagined that no one should. That is like saying no one should get a cold or heart disease.
The only thing we can try to somewhat teach a kid is how to deal with stress but also how to avoid it.
I as a kid found it very stressful to talk about me or my feelings. There is a message behind it that I am not quite the way the adult thinks I should be. Adults want to prevent.
I look to nature and I see blight in plants, and I see medications for the blight to not infect my other plants. I see that my crops are full of bugs and I spray them. Our views and treatments of the deviations are a huge problem across the world of nature.
We as humans are not able to see what part of nature is the ‘wrong’ part’
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I appreciate your willingness to allow me to respectfully disagree with you; I agree with your hypothesis but disagree with your conclusion. I agree with your hypothesis: “But the only way out of the epidemic of feeling-people-turned-medicated-psychiatric-patients is to rebrand and reframe feeling as a cultural collective.” But I disagree with your conclusion; “Thus, healing from depression necessarily involves a reframing of beliefs and a shifting of mindset around the meaning of this emotional bandwidth and more inclusive orientation.”
While much of your article implies that sadness is a natural human emotion, your conclusion implies that sadness is not directly related to sad experiences. Within the current psychology paradigm that pathologizes sadness, it may be difficult to understand the natural, direct connection. I contend that depressing experiences cause depression and that “healing” from depression involves avoiding depressing experiences. This typically means understanding causation (that can be difficult within the current psychology paradigm) and thereafter avoiding or countering the causal experiences. Unfortunately, it may be difficult to figure how to avoid significantly depressing experiences in our society today. Nevertheless, “clinical depression” pathologizes natural depression (especially of the marginalized and disenfranchised) that typically starts within a family nexus but is not limited therein.
The only way out of the epidemic of “feeling-people-turned-medicated-psychiatric-patients” is to reframe sadness as the natural response to sad experiences (and reframe depression as the natural response to depressing experiences). People experience the world differently; depressed victims of incestuous rape will generally “heal” faster with “justice” (an acknowledgement of the atypical injustice and a concerted effort by the community to “right the wrong”) than by rebranding the experience.
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Sadness it is state per se, the same with psychosis. Searching for the causes result in the lack of meaning of the state per se. THIS IS DANGEROUS MISCONCEPTION. TRAUMA IS NOT the CAUSE OF DIFFERENT—- unacceptable by apollonian EGO culture—- STYLE OF THINKING/PERCEPTION. Ego on apollonian level rejects every other archetype/ style of thinking, this is FORM OF self defence and also the lack of the courage. Apollonians are extreme cowards if there is a death on the psychological horizon. APOLLONIAN EGO REJECTED AND RIDICULED PSYCHE AND THE TRAITS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL MAN. THIS IS AN IDEOLOGICAL USURPATION.
James Hillman – Re -visioning psychology.
Do not search for the causes of the state , just give the meaning to the state per se. LEGALIZE PSYCHE OR DIE FOR IT.
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Beautifully expressed.
But I also take issue with your understanding of what you are describing here as ‘depression’. Sadness is not depression. The drive to conflate these two distinct human conditions is part of psychiatry’s seemingly successful expansionist ambition to ‘treat’ and medicate even larger swathes of the population.
In my opinion, depression is not an emotion. it is is one of the strongest internal demands to pay attention and take radical action to change our lives that we can experience. While we are living it we cannot continue on the same path in our lives (as we are quite capable of doing with sadness and other kinds of pain). It takes us off that path and allows us to think the unthinkable. As such it is a crisis – a dangerous opportunity.
Sadness is a painful state of readjustment that we need to attend to with tenderness, but it is not even similar to the experience of depression.
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The lesson of my own life experience as I understand it better than any outside observer, having been captured in some fashion or another by the pharma/psychiatric/electric/ mental death/gestapo complex for near 40 years before extracting myself to freedom with a little help from friends with no connection to the “complex”. Looking back now for the sake of the children, if you all can handle the truth I don’t know . Short Version : #1 Make a Traditional Naturopath your primary care physician take their advice, if they also know Homeopathy so much the better.#2( don’t vaccinate your children with AMA pueutrifications learn what homeopathic remedies are recommended if needed #3 ( Avoid the AMA like the plague ) only about 1/3 at the most , of what they do has any validity, some of them do know how to deal with car accident type injuries in an emergency situation.#4 Avoid conventional ADA dentists like the plague get yourself a Hal Huggins trained dentist ( we are trying to avoid heavy metal installations, root canals , and cavitations).#5 kindness , listening , spending time with , not allowing your child to be beaten or molested by anyone ever. Your now on the road of creating a psychiatry free zone for your child. Check this out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8LdbZjVAa8
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Hi Fred. Of course you are the uncovering and unfolding of your unique life focus – but in sharing the fruit of your learning you are the ‘outside’ observer to others. But in your desire and alignment in purpose you resonate a kindness to all of a like kind – and this shares a significance of communion-ication rather than using communication as a weapon.
Why do we suffer so?
For myself I can say it takes whatever it takes to come to the point of willingness to change. I cannot go back and change ‘the past’, but I can revisit the sins of the past even down the generations and reinterpret into terms of true presence – with a little help from my friends.
I chose to be terrified, unmanned, isolated and helpless rather than risk the loss of an awakening of truly living to the world of denial that society at large and psychiatry in particular operate from and protect – unwitting. I do not want to be adapted to an insane world at cost of Soul awareness, and the conviction of a better way arose from the desire to find and be found in it.
I now see that the fear of a greater terror frames the ‘choice’ to persist in seemingly lesser evils. Living from a fearfully defined self-sense is not living. To give a love, we have to accept it for ourselves. Self-hate runs the ‘Deep State’ of a dissociated fear of living. your #5 is in my eyes the context for your #1-4. Listening, being with, and no longer idly allowing the hurtful to run your mind and behaviour – however disguised.
(PS I wanted to acknowledge Steve McCrea’s comment that is in my inbox but not on this page – even after refresh).
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We imbibe, induct and acquire the masking, suppression or denial of feelings in our learning and adaptation to the world we are born into – which is a human construct through which life (self and world) is experienced.
The way to teach that feeling is acceptable is to both own it and accept it as an outcome that offers genuine feedback to our current choice.
The structure of our current consciousness generally tends to inhibit the action phase of emotional movement as well as the communication or acceptance of love as a true intimacy both within and between us. This is because both are seen as a threat to the sense of control over experience and by extension over others and our world (over life).
The effect of a block to the expression of felt being – when translated into body terms – is in part necessary for society. The desire to possess, fuck, manipulate or kill is a distorted form of ‘self’ fulfilment that engenders guilt and penalty. It is also a dissociated or blind urge of a lack-driven identity seeking its completion in ways that do or perpetuate the very patterns of behaviour that are implicit in generating the sense of self-lack in the perpetrator.
The dis-inhibiting of love – as a living quality of a higher willing conscious embrace – is the releasing of a falsely imprisoning self deprivation to a presence of appreciation in which body impulses are reintegrated to their true root as an expression and extending of love – rather than attempts to get it or do it privately or behind a masking separation.
Inspiration is the nature of the disinhibiting of love – but this has to be a step by step process in willingness because to the identity in the mask of control, nothing is more terrifying or damning to its ‘self-survival’ than love, communication, intimacy, as the shared nature of being truly moved. Hence the feared and denied are associated with our fear so as to be demonized or guarded by terror symbols that serve to lock the mind in the ‘body’ as a limitation and separator.
What we live, or demonstrate by example teaches. Children must induct much of what they are initiatlly exposed to as the ability to survive their world – and often take on parents burdens in a loyalty of love.
However what we choose to learn from what anyone teaches is not forced on us – and even temporary accommodations to parents can be and are dropped later in life as a result of awakening self-responsibility.
Acceptance of our feeling being is both a non-exclusion and a willing self-inclusion. Society is generally predicated upon exclusive conditional rules as to the permission to feel, know, share and appreciate, from a hidden fear of self-exclusion in terms of rejection, invalidation, vilification or ridicule as well as persecution and death.
Depression is normal to those locked in a body in a world of loveless or coercive and blind intent and attempts to escape in dissociation or addiction to substitution for living only compound the belief in the reality of the greater fear that is then replaced by lesser evils.
So the attempt to escape or overcome a part of our own denied relational-conflct IS the persistence of the energetic of that conflict in masking forms that seem or present themselves to be justified and acceptable.
A lack of conditional support can lead to the withdrawal of willingness to relate except in terms of refusal to relate – ie passive aggression. This can be a form of “Look at what you have done / are doing to me. At your hand, I suffer! This can be interpersonal or in a sense directed at God or Life or some symbolic representation of our greater being.
The willingness to learn of a different ‘teacher’ than our past thinking or conditioning is of a present willingness for healing that rises from truly evaluating the pain or isolation as the need and the call FOR healing – in recognition that the old way cannot work or support who you now accept and feel yourself to be.
This is often a ‘breakdown’ of the sense of control amidst conflicted purpose and distressing experience, until a new direction is accepted and aligned in. This is the need for ongoing and persistent inspiration and a discernment of the non-indulgence of thinking that is inherently depressive.
You may lead a horse to water but you cant make them drink is both intra-personally and interpersonally relevant. Much of our ‘helping’ is an attempt to solve our denied conflicts upon others. We do not want to feel helpless and so we get others to carry OUR burden for us by taking the role of victim, whilst presenting a ‘sympathetic concern’ that distances and ‘rationalises’ them into our framing.
Seeking self-validation from others is the child to parent dependency.
Many of us seek in the world for what we never had from our parents – who for the same reasons, used their children to seek self validation.
No one can recognize they are love but that they extend it and this is the nature of our predicament in a world of seemingly fixed judgements. An untrustworthy, treacherous and fickle world where love seems to turn to hate in an instant. But is this not a true reflection of our own conflicted state?
You belong because you exist. The attempt to deny or exclude parts of yourself (others) will always usurp your feeling awareness of Existence with struggle – including the attempt to evade, escape or withdraw from ‘conflict’.
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Is Depression Sadness or The Fight Against It?
(Isn’t it simply a choice? A simple choice, dependent on ones choice of belief?)
That tears are a bad thing?
(Tears are neither good or bad, simply a natural result of ones beliefs)
We have to model a conscious relationship to our own dark parts?
(Why? Why have, or relate with darkness?)
and we have to show our children what it looks like to move through these spaces?
(Really? What about facilitating realization of freedom, choice, and responsibility?)
Have you ever stopped yourself from crying? Why?
(Why indeed, Why be unhappy?)
-Is it Because you don’t want to feel out of control?
(Does anyone want to feel out of control? helpless, trapped, without options?)
or make someone you’re with uncomfortable?
(? you want to contribute to others feeling helpless? uncomfortable?)
Because you don’t have time for the arc that tears — real, deep tears — demand?
(Huh? Isn’t everyone free? free to make up whatever beliefs, and how one relates oneself emotionally, and responsible for the flavor of how one relates oneself, with whatever?)
Its all about beliefs. “Where do beliefs come from?”
(We’re all belief creating organisms. Facilitating others to realize and accept this, leads to considering and embracing Ones freedom, and responsibility, for whose, or what beliefs one ‘buys’ and uses to operate oneself emotionally, and behavorily, and discerning for oneself what beliefs truly serve one, in going forward towards wants, vs not wants.)
The greatest gift we can give to our children, and to this planet,
is permission to feel ‘it all’? every day?
(Arggg. Isn’t a greater gift, and usefulnes? to facilitate emotional maturity, self empowement, respect towards oneself, and the freedom/responsibility each have, for the quality of beliefs one creates, holds, uses to move oneself either to love, be happy with, or not, ie, be sad, unhappy?)
When one finds someone has jumped into a well of depression, struggling, possibly drowning, by all means don’t ignore. Fearlessly trust, love, and support with genuine joy for the opportunity to be with, and assist with exploring, discovering ones gifts, freedom, and ability to trust oneself as being ones own best expert, and indeed having the wisdom, and inviting them to explore, and discover it for themselves. Acceptance, not judgementally attempting to get one to change, but in exploring their own belief in being sad, unhappy, is it helping? is it really facilitating useful change, or simply perpetuating sadness, as if healthy, useful, normal, or unavoidable.
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Yes it is our defences we suffer. What is sadness but loss and an identity in lack?
Beliefs are accepted by acting (or reacting) as if ideas are true (of us).
The belief we are lacking – as a sense of loss of peace, love, power, connection, and support, generates a need-driven sense of self-seeking. The very act of trying to put Humpty together again is the reinforcement of victimhood – regardless the story of the Fall. Yet the struggle for wholeness or fulfilment in fragmented isolated terms is both a powerlessness and a power struggle – or rather the assertion of power rooted in fear of powerlessness as well as the presentation of powerlessness expressing the fear of power.
This seemingly simple ‘splitting of self’ take any and every form in our personal and collective Self-Evasion of complex of psychic-emtional defences against pain of loss and indeed of total loss.
The power of our belief creates our experience of reality and is evident in the mis-creation of a conflicted sense of self-separate struggle. But all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can never put Humpty together again. This is because the ‘Fall’ was a breakdown in communication and not a Fact.
Release and be released is inescapable as an expression of the Law of Mind. But until we challenge our own thinking and the perception-reaction of its experience, we do not see our own emotionally driven demands and conditions upon others or ourself, but merely the failure of the world, others or ourself to fit or conform to what we WANT it to be or believe it SHOULD be.
“I WANT IT THUS!” screams the sense of self deprived and denied. This is hardly a premise upon which to establish our life, yet this is the basis of a hatred or refusal of Life that then dissociates in search of self-vindication as a fantasy enactment upon the ‘otherness’ of self and life discarded and unrecognized.
While the identity investment in a masking sense of self is strong, there is no need, desire or willingness to look within and every sense of necessity to look out and away. No one can teach anyone what they are unwilling to accept. But we always learn from what we teach, demonstrate or behave as if true and we may also learn from a recognition of qualities in others or indeed in nature.
To a large extent, we suffer from thinking that our thinking is in fact thinking. In a world of the exposure of ‘fake’ news, fake science, fake history etc – I invite the recognition of fake thinking. Much of what we give attention to is serving as a way of not looking at what we have in a sense programmed ourself NOT to see as a matter of our own survival or self-reinforcement (power and protection).
Madness itself works a defence against a greater terror. The burden of feeling trapped in conflicted limitation is depressing. We all have different patterns of strategy and defence that are also entanglements with each other. All attempts to escape only reinforce our sense of powerlessness.
What if “I cant do it!” is a statement of release from the belief that we either could or should – rather than a sense of self-lack under a world of pain and confusion?
The framing of mind sets the experience. The mind set of internal contradictions cannot be the guide or teacher for the release of such contradiction. So releasing what does not work (bring peace or joy) by not acting from it or investing further attention in it, and holding in the willingness to be shown what does work without preconceiving the ‘how’ or the form it must take. Such willingness need only be a spark to allow life in, and grow the spark.
Holding willingness by attending and acting in accord with its call is the capacity to move through what otherwise stands as an immovable and irrevocable block to your own release. Where we give attention is our choice and our decision or extension of value. In this we are the determiner of what we give power TO – according to beliefs we accept true – for whatever reason.
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Yes. Precisely Binra.
“we are the determiner of what we give power TO – according to beliefs we accept true – for whatever reason.”
I suggest the habit of focusing on truth, is not useful,
as it is a subjective judgement, and advesarial.
We are designed as belief creating creatures endowed with volitional consciousness. and responsible for how one choose to make up, what is happening, and what stimuli might represent and how one relates with it.
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Hi Larry,
There is also a real world and experiences.
Twenty-odd years spent in meditation might allow some people in some circumstances the ability to choose their attitudes and feelings regardless of external circumstances. (At least as long as those few people maintain a distance from the ordinary world and its messy relationships). Possibly.
Most people are constantly interacting with circumstances, both internal and external, and will never reach the enightenment you are suggesting we shoud just ‘adopt’.
I’m not sure why I’m responding to this. I guess I feel very ambivalent about this kind of approach being touted as an alternative to psychiatry in answering human misery. It seems to be happily endorsed by both psycihiatry and peer movements, (even if psychiatry doesn’t actually believe it will make much or any difference to ‘mental illnesses’. )
It seems to me that it is no coincidence that both approaches maintain and do not challenge the status quo including existing power structures. Both locate the problem in the individual and endorse the idea that nothing outside the individual is particlarly relevant. Both also have a strong, faith-based, guru-supplicant element.
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We all have our ‘real world’ experiences.
You presume the cart before the horse, because the inability to persist in the loveless (messy entanglement of conflicted relationships) is seen as the problem rather than the emergency of the answer.
It may well be needed to separate from that which separates as part of establishing a consciousness of a different purpose – whatever that looks like, but the underlying purpose is a reintegrative or healing movement of being that the ‘mind’ may attempt to control or claim for itself but only as the persistence of old habits that call for persistence in new choices.
The unhealed healer seeks to change others to resolve his or her own denied conflict. It is denied BY the projection onto, and attack or coercive manipulation of, ‘others’ unlike our self. This is as true in psychiatry as in politics.
One of the symptoms I see is of believing our own evil intentions are in the mind of others and WANTING them there – as well as WANTING to attack them there (self righteous vindication).
What I join with is the idea of giving true witness instead of false. ‘Speaking truth to power’ is really a matter of abiding in and trusting in the power of truth.
Insofar as people act from false presumptions in which they have emotional investment in wanting to be true, merely accusing and attacking the evil that you assign to their intent and action and not your own offers them the justified defence against threat.
The real ‘status quo’ is not the forms or arrangements of power so much as the framing of the mind in power struggle. That the call to war works the denial of truth ought to be well known. But to the separated ones, war is the very basis of maintaining a split off sense of power OVER life, OVER relationships and thus the basis for our subjection to what we WANTED true.
I am not in ANY way advising what anyone should DO regarding the seeking of help or the providing of it.
I am saying that what we DO will always embody and express the THOUGHT we are accepting as true BY such action. This is a true choice that currently runs as an unconscious habit. That is the ‘status quo’ that I challenge. Freedom is not what we do – and no more is our true responsibility for those who know not what they do are acting from a false sense of self and world.
So the willingness to associate our world experience or outcome with the thoughts we hold and accept as currency is the opening of the capacity to evaluate them in terms of what they bring, and discern the basis from which to choose in alignment with our wholeness and peace of being – that cannot be manufactured in thinking and presentations seeking validation. Wholeness extends a sense of validity to others regardless whether they be currently acting ‘out-of-true’ with their own Good (wellbeing).
Establishing a channel of communication is accepting and extending relationship in place of judging another in terms of power struggle. All ego relationships are seen in terms of getting from or getting away from.
I like the term ‘health is inner peace; illness is external searching’. A moment of inner peace is a willingness away and not at the end of twenty years of meditation ‘training’.
Nothing could ever be closer or more natural to us than our being. If you can simply feel this, then you have a basis to question the ‘status quo’ of an unnatural interjection of thinking. Not to break it or war with it but to recognize and release what does not belong to you while consciously accepting what does.
If your being is the truth of your existence regardless how the mind frames it in experience, then yielding to truth is the willingness to let your mind be renewed. No one can come between you and your Self – but that you give it the power to do so. The faith that you give to the maintaining of your ego has developed abilities of allegiance that can just as easily serve a reintegrative purpose. There is never a moment of lack of faith – so much as vacillation between what you decide to give it to.
The true individual ONLY has awareness of existence in relationship. Indivisibility is the nature of being one and at one with. The concept of an independent body based individual symbolising freedom to DO, is a corruption in thought and not true in being. The mind of such an embodied concept is a reversal of effect and cause.
Everything is BACKWARDS; everything is upside down! Doctors destroy health, Lawyers destroy justice, Universities destroy knowledge, Governments destroy freedom, Major media destroys information, And religions destroy spirituality”. Michael Ellner
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What are you searching for here binra?
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I am finding – and sharing of what finds me.
Our ‘story’ frames us in judgements.
That is not the only way of seeing and in truth is a way of seeing what is not really there.
The disintegrative effects of a fundamental dis-integrity are depressing.
The attempt to make depression a cause is backwards.
But… if we are subject to the effects of such belief, we have to undo it at the level of our belief.
A mind trapped in its own thought is a lost cause!
If you would uncover cause, you have to uncover the filters, distortions and blocks to true cause.
Or else persist in a filtered distorted and blocked experience of your existence and interpret everyone and everything therefrom.
The attraction of guilt lies in its apparent escape from ‘what fear has made of’ love.
What is the pay off for beliefs and outcomes that you say you do not want?
The meaningless falls way of itself – so what is the meaning you have given (or accepted as given) to your experience or relationship?
Curiosity is a primary movement of the innocence of being. When the unthinkable breaks into ‘your reality’ – the still small voice may be heard regardless the noise of drama – but only to your willingness to hear it.
The mind only ‘rules’ its kingdom, by the ruling out of wholeness.
In truth it takes a moment to be still and know. In practice it may be a process over time of disinvestment from diversion so as to reconfigure as the simplicity of pausing to listen to the movement of the heart’s knowing – which is wordless in human terms – and yet the word or vibratory signature of who you are in truth.
Alight in what resonates and is relevant to who you are currently accepting or choosing to be.
That you asked a question is some sign of stirring. That you framed it in seeking is perhaps the presumption that seeking is the reason for communicating. As if relationships are something to get and get from.
I am open to sharing in purpose. At a level that repurposes the mind to serve healing rather than interject rules and judgements that keep the mind employed and healing obscure.
Truly shared purpose is one mind because purpose is the aligning context of all that is here to be lived and shared and appreciated.
Self-honesty is the way in. If you are experiencing dis-ease, dissonance or discord – accept this but only as the basis from which to be curious, open and receptive to healing. Which is not what you think.
Depression is a self-definition. Perhaps this protects from a greater sense of insecurity. Perhaps it persists as sense of self-judging rejection and powerlessness. Perhaps it intends to hurt those who you see as denying and depriving you. There are as many ways to be depressed as there are to be inspired.
A cynical mask in scientism asserts there are no cures. But what if the disease itself is founded on a mistaken identity? What if you have been ‘phished’ by thinking, judgements and beliefs that protect the judgement – at your expense!
What am I seeking?
In the aftermath of a disaster one cannot attend the dead but must first seek for signs of life and attend them first. False thinking is a disaster and the dead know not what they do until they release their grip on it.
What am I finding?
Re-cognition, re-membering presence – the benefit of giving what I value in order to keep it.
The world gives to get rid of. Hence the pharmakoi. But what we project onto others in this way is what we get to keep – unconscious of our own giving and receiving. This is growing a (perception of) world run by denials that seem to be an evil or cowardly unworthiness of love. here is the call to war. And here is the call to peace and healing. I am seeking to extend the recognition that we are beings of the Creator and are likewise Creative – but have lost trust and connection to our true nature through the attempt to ‘create’ in our own image or judgement. Would you rather be right or happy? So often the latter is a default to the saving of face or maintaining of the persona through which you are having your experience and which you may equate with your Self.
True science dies not seek consensus – but seeks to challenge it by any and every means as a final conclusion of definitive ‘truth’. Because truth is Alive and not an object to your own sense of ‘private’ definition.
To choose to embrace Life is not to set the terms of bargaining, but to stop killing it by the act of doing so.
We are killing ourselves under the guise of ‘survival’.
At what point do we wake from an evil dream rather than give consent and allegiance to it?
I do not know when you will choose to accept and embrace Life – but I know it is your true Inherence to receive – even if you are currently ‘poor in spirit’ or depressed. All are called but few choose to listen… as yet.
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I think the most viable alternative to psychiatry is religion. I choose Jesus, so I go for Christianity. Even though I believe that Jesus is -the- Ultimate Answer, I recognize that people find meaning, purpose, and community in any number of other faiths. For those who do not believe in God or a Higher Power, I don’t know…maybe strong commitment to social movements, volunteering, etc. could be of help. As Szasz and numerous others have noted, one of psychiatry’s functions is a state-sponsored religion (death cult, if you ask me). Its a fake religion that undermines real religions, and –“paranoid” as this may sound to some– I highly doubt the shrinks’ work in weakening real religions is simply “secularization…” I sense an actual concerted effort to damage the competition.
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Indeed the reintegration and reconciliation within ourself and with one another is te undoing or the remedy for a process of disintegrity-disintegration – that gives rise to power struggle instead of alignment in the true nature of power. But religion is the willingness and desire of aligning in true rather than assertions, conformity and sacrifice to idols or ideals of truth that serve exclusion, self-specialness and ‘justification’ for power struggle (attack on the living in the name of a false self sense).
Because the word ‘religion’ is associated with organised institutional belief systems – its deeper sense of uniting us with God (All That Is) is lost, forgot or covered over.
That our true desire and fulfilment can be lost, forgot or covered over by the call to war (struggle) is easy to notice unless all of our attention is locked up in reaction with no free awareness to notice anything but the dictates of war (struggle of a sense of survival in defence of a separative self sense.
The releasing of the attempt to ‘go it alone’ in the context of desire for peace, healing, and wholeness is the opening of the way through which the ‘Holy Spirit’ moves through you to uncover you to your own inherence – as you are willing to accept it.
In this way I hold that we do not have to ‘believe in God’ so much as release attachment to the beliefs against God. Faith is a gift of our being, and not a self-generated effort, assertion or means to BECOME fit or worthy.
The mind’s substitution for true relation is legion – that is it takes many forms. But only truth extended, recognized and shared is alive and knows itself alive – and truth is not determined or manufactured by the attempt to possess or claim it for ourself over or against our brother.
Just as maggots are used to remove necrotic tissue from wounds, I see the ‘persecutions’ as conditions in which that which is only masking in religion or idols of truth and freedom, will not stand – and that which is true will in a sense have to come forth to shine or live by example of true witness in place of compliance and conformity to Caesar (power in the world).
The ego of mind-substitution for Life is the attack on Life under the wish to remake it (conform it) to its own image. This is where we came in – or in the words of T.S Elliot, to arrive at our beginning and know t for the first time. We are created in the image and likeness of our Creator – howsoever we may judge and believe ourself lost, love forgot and covered over with an insane mind in an insane world.
There is no way to communicate with the insane, and yet all who come to recognize their own insanity have opened a self honesty that is no longer wholly lost, and so there is a spark of awareness, willingness and curiosity through which a different voice can be heard.
I allowed difficult to become delicate to become different.The ‘ego centric’ think different from God/Creation and learned this through very difficult experience of guilt, fear, pain, loss, struggle and sacrifice. We are so expert at this that a second nature masks as if our first, and a highly complex construct in consciousness runs as if a self evident and unchallengable reality. The willingness to unlearn what we thought to know and be is not the destruction of our thought system, but it reintegration as a process of purification and discernment. Recognizing the ‘anti Life’ mind in ourself is the key to its relinquishment. The projection of ‘sins’ away from ourself is a self-protective attempt to hide our Self-attack while persisting in the sense of self-specialness that it generates (both negatively and positively as victor or victim). The undoing of self-attack and its progeny is the gift of our true whole or Holy Spirit that will never force itself coercively or by suggestive appeal to fear’s protection. It speaks for the truth of you as the recognition of truth in all. The gift of any such moment of shared being is witness to love’s creation in which we are identified perfectly. Our own attempt to make an identity is the symptom of the loss, covering and forgetting of a love that is beyond belief, but not beyond acceptance, now.
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Binra, a few questions. Do you get angry? Do you ever feel hatred?
Elated?
Are you a stoic? Or a mishmash of things learned, gathered and due to your willingness to adopt those things which spoke to you?
I play online games to pass time while I wait for things to happen.
I noticed that when I lose, I get an awful feeling. A feeling of hopelessness, being defeated, anger, probably some deep seated hatred.
How do I overcome that automatic response that works in an instant? I know all about choice, recognizing. Obviously I experienced this many times and it has become hardwired.
After all it is a defense mechanism, learned, used, fostered in unaware state.
How can I learn to be free of true pain of loss? I understand perfectly well that the loss of a life within my life, and that I can choose to carry anger at people responsible for that loss, or sadness and despair. Or I can take action and lose.
Yet always knowing that ultimately the despair is from my core.
So now I just have to be willing to let crap play out, not let it connect with my core. But we must not ‘think’ on how to do that, just learn.
Learn from ourselves?
So how do you deal with oppression? When you see people being victimized? Do you teach people how to escape that oppression from their core? Meaning they get mentally well enough to leave a ward? Teach them they are NOT victims?
And if they do not understand you because they are not ‘willing’, do you ACT for them or let the oppression take place.
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I believed in Christian doctrine, but thanks to the drugs I couldn’t integrate them into my heart. My animal mind was dumbed down but functional. My soul–ability to love, dream, hope, pray–was in a coma. I wanted to kill myself since my soul felt dead already. 🙁
Thank God I got off those pills. They did not make me a kinder, more loving, generous person after all. Man, did they pull one over on me. Sucker that I was.
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One of my nicknames for the ‘ego’ is “I hate myself and want to die!”. This face is usually hidden and a face looks out into the world in the wish to cover over and escape. But various conditions can trigger its exposure which in turn invoke the attempt to escape the pain. For it isn’t really hate so much as intolerable pain.
Conflicted self is not a theory when the pain of it shuts out all else.
My ‘faith’ or conviction is that Soul awareness can be covered over and blocked from our awareness but never truly lost for it is our true Home no matter what the mind creates as experience. I also hold it is not IN the world and so look in all the wrong places – and yet when we accept open where it is – we see it in the world because we give it to the world. This is a total reversal of the ‘getting mind of a sense of disconnection, deprivation and lack. It is the extension of worth that opens and strengthens our own. But the attempt to get it from contrast with the judged unworthy is like needing someone to look down on so as to be relatively ‘right’ or validated.
People (us) believe all kinds of things and act as if they are true. People (us) are therefore often dissociated and seeking to get things from others that they have ‘lost’ in themselves. So yes ‘helpers can be destructive. Living is learning and to wake up in that is to embrace what is with some willingness and curiosity rather than die under the spell of self-negative thinking.
Your experience reminds me of “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” – not that I promote shame but as an example of learning from our experience.
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Rachel777.
Long ago I was in a plane and I looked down at all the smallness and in it’s smallness everything was equal.
Long ago I looked up at hospital windows lit up at night and saw the pain, and felt the pain, while going about my fun evening, or grind.
Long ago I watched anthills. I spent many hours watching anthills. I fed them, and watched for their responses.
I learned a lot from watching. I found an anthill to be the most therapeutic of all. I saw them have anger, responses, fear, and I never did ask them to explain if they were going to heaven, or if they were happy. I really don’t want to pretend that my ability to understand the world or understand myself is superior to what you, or the ant perceive as their world.
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((( Author: out
Comment: Binra, You have addressed this to me and you use the word ‘you’ throughout.
It contains many assumptions so I’d like to clarify using just one example:
“My living choice is not to support your identity in sickness”
Are you saying you believe I have an identity in sickness? and if not me as the addressee who are you referring to? Thanks)))
Hi Out, your post isn’t showing on the page so I include it in my answer.
You may assign an identity in sickness to ‘most people’ but at the level I address, the perceiving others as lacking, unworthy, or victim to lack of love and denial of worth is pervasive and systemic to accepted or mainstream belief. So I am not singling you out.
The identification in sickness is one of many forms of lack and limitation within which we find, acquire, make or adapt an identity.
The exclusive identification in the personal that then interprets everyone and everything through its own conditioned adaptation, is itself a form of self limitation for the purpose of hiding. Hiding what we are unwilling to own or see in forms of others or of the world is a dissociation of which we are then unaware.
We all have different facets of an entanglement in separation trauma. You are ‘reading me’ where I am not – in the terms you set. Insofar as you took me as ‘reading you’ in terms of an ‘identification in sickness’ – as if that is a smear, I apologize, because my intent it to bring to awareness an active choice that can as actively be released to a better one. Insofar as there is any willingness to notice choices we are making – perhaps as ‘habits’ that are now in the realm of choice – so there is the opportunity for aligning in healing rather than victimhood. One can only start from an honesty to where one is the belief, experience and identification of. But what we are in some willingness to accept and align in is already whole – even if that is beyond our current capacity to recognise. And so of course one has to work with the belief system in order to invite and support expansion of embrace and integration.
One finds that speaking in terms of oneself to be somewhat impractical and so I allow the fluidity of I and you and we and even they. Verbal mental concept is the symptom of a broken mind in search of identity reinforcement, but as with swords to ploughshares, the purpose is the energetic communication between the lines.
My responses are almost always to the idea being shared or asserted. I see the world as a symptom or effect of ideas being shared or asserted and not as an evil drama – though of course I can see the personae and the struggle to assert narrative control etcetera. It is not where I feel any freedom is to be found – excepting that wherever you go, there you are.
I include myself here not least on my recognition and appreciation for the spirit (active willingness) of all who are reclaiming freedom from false ideas and destructive consequence. As one who did not take the phamakoi route, and instead accepted a path of progressively awakening self-responsibility from the trap of guilt and blame thinking, I witness another facet in the discussion. It is not the invalidation of any other equally valid facet. The invalidation of others is the key to mental dis-ease – and I hyphenate that to indicate I hold dis-ease to be primarily a psychic emotional conflict – while also allowing that the pattern of such conflicts can stretch down through generations of rejection, exclusion, denial and separate self-survival dictates. The persona is a facet within the whole script of rejected and excluded personae. I make a version of you in the interaction of our exchange – but I do not hold you to it or mistake it for you for you are no less of the Living than I and everyone else.
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I didn’t feel “singled out” your comment was addressed to me ‘out’ and contained assumptions adressed to “you”.
In my original comment, I was neither assigning “sickness” to others nor adopting it as an identity. I was talking about a human condition and one that I experienced in the past, and talking about what it meant to me and the change i believe it was demanding of me.
“We all have different facets of an entanglement in separation trauma. You are ‘reading me’ where I am not – in the terms you set”
No, I asked you to clarify your meaning.
.”Insofar as you took me as ‘reading you’ in terms of an ‘identification in sickness’ – as if that is a smear, I apologize, because my intent it to bring to awareness an active choice that can as actively be released to a better one.”
Sorry, what do you mean by this exactly? What and whose “active choice” are you talking about? The context of this is that you are responding to my question of you?
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The human conditioning – yes that is what I mean by an identity in sickness.
The reactive conditioning is effectively programmed. But I hold you to be a living one and so I extend the quality of active choice to where it belongs. I have it by giving it. Or rather I have awareness of who I am by extending it to others.
Everyone who perceives, interprets their perception through the lens of their filtering thought of self definition and belief. Although others may teach you untruth, it is still your choice to accept and protect it as if true. That does not mean you are to blame for choices made under a sense of necessity, but it does mean that you can recognize consequences and open new choices.
I don’t require you to be interested in what I write of.
Active choice is the current choice. Preoccupation with a personal sense of story in past and future is also a choice in which to lose awareness of choice.
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The following comment does not show up – but arrived in my inbox as posted:
Author: Steve McCrea
Comment:
I see that this kind of thinking can be really helpful for certain kinds of issues. However, there really ARE situations where people have limited control, whether economically, socially, physically or whatever. Children are a great example. A baby who isn’t being fed is genuinely in crisis and is a victim of poor parenting, regardless of how they think or what they believe. They NEED someone to feed them. They will die if they don’t.
Other examples: a person has to take antipsychotic drugs or else they’ll be arrested and tossed back into the “hospital” and forcibly injected. More control than the baby has, but a lot there the person doesn’t control, and his/her options are limited.
A black person can’t alter society and make it so that the person they’re applying to for a job or an apartment suddenly isn’t going to go against them because they have dark skin.
The “victim identity” concept has applicability, but it can also be used to allow those with social power to abdicate their responsibility for doing harm. I would have LOVED to escape from school as a child, and yet I spent 13 years there. Was that because I had a victim mentality? Or because I had no practical option to survive?
—-
My response is that the perspective I sketch out is a basis for action and not somthing to put on anyone else. So of course the answer is not either / or – but both AND.
If you are supporting someone who has little sense of choice in their predicament – then they do not need your pity in confirming their current sense of self but your willingness to BE WITH them in ways that join with their capacity to acknowledge and look at and see what their situation is – as they are ready to see it. There is always the opportunity to change our thinking once we recognize that it doesn’t help. But if one is not ready then thinking that confirms self-limitation may helpful as a sense of keeping a lid over a worse or more feared situation.
If a reader here is the one who is blocked, trapped, denied, deprived in whatever form of suffering then they have to actively want the freedom from such conflict that true peace is, MORE than they want the conflict. It may not be at all apparent that you ‘want’ conflict, because the mind works from an identity made BY it.
My experience is that true desire or willingness to learn is both active and attractive to align in steps that bring us from subjection to a more consciously aligned direction. The knowing that I NEED help is the basis for looking and listening with a much greater honesty than my ‘ego’ would otherwise allow. The belief or delusion that I can or should or must do it all by myself is also all on ‘my terms’ that effective deny, deprive, block or subject me to a conflicted sense of self and world.
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I appreciate you reposting this for me.
I’m not sure you got my point, though. I definitely agree that people sometimes need to be reminded that their attitude and beliefs are within their own control. Where we diverge is the idea that all forms of suffering come from attitude or belief issues. I think it comes across as insulting to people who have been in places where they don’t actually have control of their environment and they are directly and specifically harmed by that environment. It sounds like you’re saying that the ONLY reason people are suffering is because of their attitudes/beliefs, and I don’t think that is factually true. I gave a couple examples, such as me going to school as a kid for me, where a person realistically doesn’t HAVE a choice about the environment. Sure, I could choose an attitude toward school that might make it feel less onerous to me, but it was still an oppressive environment where I had to, for instance, hold in my pee or suffer consequences for going to the bathroom without permission. I don’t think there is an attitude that could make that kind of decision feel anything but oppressive. I probably would have felt LESS disempowered if I’d gone ahead to the bathroom and accepted the consequences, but seriously, why should I have had to make that kind of choice?
I think it’s quite appropriate for me to object to this kind of double bind and to feel and express righteous indignation toward such situations, and I don’t think it’s helpful at all to tell people anything that suggests “if you just change your attitude, you’ll feel OK.” It provides a great cover for abusive people to claim that they’re not really being abusive, you just have a bad attitude.
I don’t want to say that applying your kind of reasoning can’t be helpful at times, because it really can. I’m saying that it doesn’t apply to all situations, and that saying it does can really feel invalidative to people who are in bad situations that a change of attitude simply won’t be sufficient to address.
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Hi Steve. I feel your point is a significant one.
My sense is that the level of (unconscious) mind I am pointing to is embodied AS the archetypal experience of separation trauma ‘within which runs a dissociated and conflicted sense of self in search of security, support, connection because it is a profound sense of disconnection, insecurity and rejection or lack of support.
I do not expect anyone to ‘get this’ at the level of their thinking. Nor can changing ‘attitudes’ do anything but add MORE layers of masking what is.
We have to address our problems as we experience and perceive them until such time as we SEE more than the original definition or judgement allowed – and this means seeing the ideas that defined us from another level than acting from the presumption they are true.
Feeling what you feel is not the truth of you so much as the faithful result of choices you are making. If someone offends you – are you choosing to be offended? or offended because they are reinforcing self-judgements you already hold about yourself? By all means give voice to your integrity as you see it and don’t be a doormat for others to dump on – but that is no call to self righteous indignation. It is simply asserting the communication of who you are to the attention of those who must then relate to you rather than persist their behaviours that you feel to be unacceptable and thus calling for correction. IE: NO! I am not ok with or supportive of what I see you doing or saying. Or you can simply give witness to what you DO support and leave the bait of personal reaction behind you.
What IS within your control is what you are willing to accept responsibility for. But I use the word response-ability to mean the ability to choose and not a blame term AT ALL.
I cannot get through to a world that is predicated on blame, guilt and punishment – along with the attempt to escape it, project it onto others or adapt other strategies of using it for personal power.
In simple terms what you have is what you make of it. And what you make of it determines what you have. If you accept any self definition in lack – then what you make of a sense of denial and deprivation WILL MAKE YOU.
Jesus put it thus:
To those who have more will be added. But to those who have not, more shall be taken – even the little that they have.
Those who have, give and grow in what they have. Those who lack – seek to get and grow in their sense of using others only to get from.
No matter where you are, you can find something to be grateful for, or take a moment of appreciation for IF YOU WILL.
No one can make you accept and appreciate your life. And no one can take you from a negative appreciation of your life.
Nor can I live anyone else’s life or judge their choices.
But I can reflect where choices that bring poor results may be re-evaluated in the desire for a better result or experience. Until we wake to that we create our experience OF Life we are conditioned by such experience as our survival within its terms.
I escaped school by being run over as an 11 year old at 50mph by a Mercedes – for a term… and shifted self/world somewhat from that experience to feel a ‘someone’ or find some place within it until I escaped a year early by being asked to leave. But in terms of a true education, I woke up to that Life is a school and joy is the true teacher.
The experience of intense episodes can serve the shift of our self/world in ways that we simply would never casually accept or allow.
As you sow so shall you reap is about what we hold true and live from Now. Always now. There is another guide in a freedom to feel and know that the mind of conflict blocks out – or at least tries to mask or cover over. When you bottom out on conflict, you become open and interested in other ways to think and see and be. Until then the war goes on regardless who or what is targeted.
I appreciate your willingness to speak from where you are and I do not argue with or judge you for doing what you can with what you have. No one can do more. But in any willingness to align in a self-honesty we become open to life to move through us in ways we could not pre-figure or make up. This is what shifts and grows our perspective. Not thinking.
When I feel forced to do what I do not WANT or to NOT do what I don’t want – I find anger and depression, anxiety or powerlessness. The key is looking at what I WANT (or want to avoid) and re-evaluation how much I want it in the light of my suffering.
If my suffering is my coded rage at life, school parents or whoever – then It serves what I want even while persisting in what I say I don’t want. This reads a muddle but it means we can persist in what we hate to serve a deeper but hidden purpose.
I hated my parents for ‘forcing me’ to a school I did not want by attracting injury and then behaving badly every time they visited. I had NO awareness of making choices at the time. It was grabbing whatever was at hand to survive in the terms of something I felt I couldn’t abide. Much that was unconscious is now conscious. Learned habits under duress are replaced with conscious choices of awakened responsibility – because if I do not stand for and stand in who I truly am – no one else can join me there.
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Again, I get what you are saying, and from the point of view of an adult who has sufficient control of his/her own environment, this kind of thinking can in fact lead to healing. But what about you or me at the time we were IN school? Did we really have a reasonable alternative at the time? I’m not talking about holding onto resentment – I’m talking about POWER here. There are times when a person is unable to exercise much if any control of his/her environment. To me, this is a totally separate issue than how one views one’s experience in retrospect. There IS real oppression toward black people, toward women, toward the so-called “mentally ill,” and it does genuine, real damage, both spiritually and physiologically. I’m all for dealing with the spiritual damage after the fact, or even learning to deal with oppression directly when it is happening. But it definitely feels very judgmental to suggest, as you seem to, that the only variable in gaining control of one’s life is internal. There are times when one is under suppression and at such times, simply adopting a different attitude is not sufficient to maintain one’s integrity. This is not because I don’t understand what you’re saying. I simply don’t agree that it is as broadly applicable as you seem to think.
I find it unlikely you will allow this perspective, so I don’t plan to comment further on it. I simply ask that you recognize that your framing of your philosophy comes across as invalidative to those who have been injured by the oppressive conditions in the “mental health” system.
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To that point I have already responded in BOTH/AND where you are seeing in terms of either/or.
The exclusive sense of self in victimhood IS ‘separation trauma. It is a result of exclusion, denial or rejection. That we experience the result of this as done to us without or against our will is part of the human condition which is the conditioning that splits our will as the basis of ‘power struggle’.
The inner is hidden or covered over by an exclusive focus in the outer. Our personality construct is formed by experiences that at a deeper level are ‘attracted’ – one might say as a Soul theme that that particular life focus is the exploration and experience of.
The denial and suppression of the inner is the nature of such a focus and it is blind and heartless excepting for conditional ‘love’ or conditions in which it will offset hate with social reinforcement of a love – that turns to hate if those conditions are not kept.
What you call ‘my philosophy’ is a fruit of choosing NOT to use victimhood. This opens a capacity of compassion instead of the destructive reinforcement of the victim in those who have pain, fear and confusion. I relate to others in terms of being with them and NOT in terms of confirming them in sickness. If someone needs their diagnosis to keep out greater fears I do not question it openly but look for where there IS willingness and join with them there.
The identity in sickness is a self reinforcing loop. That is not to say it isn’t pervasive to the human condition. One can refuse the term sickness – but I am pointing not to ‘diagnosis’ but to conflict, pain, fear, guilt or shame, resentment, anger, rage, powerlessness, impotence and inability to feel anything, loss of control, loss of will, all the way down. You can make this ‘normal’ if you want but it is not our natural being.
So of course we experience the outer in terms of our world – as if our cause is eg an abusive parent. But you know that they are a symptom just like you, and so it is with all causes in the world.
You don’t have to look within and I do not say that anyone should. But the first attack on love is our own. In fact I do not think you could enter the human condition without passing through the ‘self-attack’ and its denial. Welcome to the human condition.
I also join with calling false or corrupted power to account and stand in freedom. To consider bad behaviours as normal or justified or best kept hidden is itself joining not just in the behaviour but in the thinking that such actions embody – which is where a true healing is to be found and not in vengeance of ‘self-vindication’.
Victim and vengeance lie together. It takes many forms as the world shows, but the uncovering of a wholeness of being is the release of investment in victimhood and vengeance. You are created whole – regardless the circumstance of birth. But that is to say Creation is creator-hood – that is a Gift that shares on. Hatred of life operates as the denial and suppression of love under guise of power and protection.
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“I do not expect anyone to ‘get this’ at the level of their thinking. Nor can changing ‘attitudes’ do anything but add MORE layers of masking what is.”
If you don’t expect anyone to ‘get this’ what are you trying to communicate?
You seem to believe you have deep understanding of ‘reality’, and equally, that readers have not attained a high enough level of understanding to appreciate your knowledge. My question is, why don’t you communicate at the level you see readers as being able to comprehend to enable discussion?
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Hi ‘out’
I do not regard the ‘thinking’ as anything but a distortion of true communication made by fear. I invite the stirring of what you do not accept or understand, as a quality or part of yourself that is not framed in the divide and rule ‘thinking’ and is therefore a point from which you can observe and evaluate what otherwise seeks its survival at your (and others) expense.
Standing under reality is different from the presumprion to judge and determine it. The latter is an arrogance and ignorance of personal self specialness but the former is the active willingness to align in truth and recognize it in another.
I have already said that I see an active willingness in many readers in their own healing. I speak to an active willingness. We are having a discussion because you have engaged with me. If you understood the nature of true knowledge you would not identify it with specialness. The nature of love – that knows itself perfectly in the act of its own extension, is equally yours. Awareness of this fact may temporarily not be.
In simple terms, I see that our meaningless thoughts make a perception and experience of a meaningless world. Perhaps it seems meaningful to struggle in fear, pain, hate and die. But seeming is not the same us reality. Confusion about who we are is fundamental to all that then follows.
Persisting in confusion is not looking upon it. While my ability to articulate is something grown through my life, the core principle is simply true willingness and not any kind of thinking. Willingness and desire to heal and be healed is not founded in confusion and the attempt to do so as if to force a false sense of unity is simply more confusion.
It is the framing of false thinking that denies awareness of the choice to put it down or give it disregard.
Such thinking is always tyrannous or coercive.
I believe that the mind of which I am willing to speak is the mind of your ability to receive, understand and appreciate. But that is your freedom. I speak not to your thinking, but to your freedom. perhaps this offends you because it implies you are to blame for your condition, rather than you HAVE choice now! I cannot change how your mind interprets – but I can perhaps illuminate that that too is a choice you are making in the form of learned habit and that once you recognize a habit, you have changed it to a choice. How you then choose is a matter of what you want most. It may seem easier to die in our habits than live in our choices – because habit is an unconsciousness of what is really going on under the belief it is the same as the past that formed the habit.
Breaking habits is making new choices and persisting in them – because you are worth it – and also because the only way to honour others – and life itself is through honouring yourself. This is not the same as defending your current thinking. That does not extend an appreciation. Nor does it heal.
Self honesty is something our thinking minds are made to hide. Extreme challenge in life can awaken the awareness of the NEED for healing and therefore the willingness to open a greater self-honesty than ever before. So there is MUCH that is ‘hidden’ that creates of generates our experience of our physical, social and personal world. I only invite the stirring of an innocent curiosity – perhaps made possible by a release of persisting in futility. The child who sees the Emperor has no clothes is innocent of the trick by which NOT SEEING THEM called down illegitimacy and loss of self.
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I don’t appreciate having my experiences, beliefs and understandings overwritten by you and consider such gaslighting to be abuse. i have had plenty of experience of this kind of behaviour from psychiatry and the effects on me are something that I am working to overcome.
You are welcome to talk about your own experiences you are not welcome to lecture me about your beliefs about mine.
Just as an aside, everything you have written is “thinking”.
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binra, I found it of interest that you seemed to know which people on here have a “willingness” .
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Kelly B. – There is a Spirit that is heavenly blue. He gives eyes to see & ears to hear too. I saw tears. I listened to pain. I’ve known that the body sheds the tears the eyes don’t for 2 1/2 decades. So – thanks. But, do you know that held trauma energy is potential, not kinetic?
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Thank you for that beautiful collaboration. It’s an important reminder to being. I will seek it out because I love the lessons we can learn from books (when we can not have the authors in our community). I watched my daughter take care of a caterpillar one day, all day. She took care of a lovely bug like one would take care of an infant. It reminded me of how far we grow away, we move away, from our child’s self. Why do we require that children fit the adult world when some of us have forgotten what it is to be a child. The occasional tears are a relief, to me. Just as the occasional smile is a welcome.
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I read all the comments and I can only identify with madmom’s.
The article is about children. The comments I read are for 60 year old people and even at that, I don’t find much of it helpful, since it seems to come from an “arrived at” personal experiences, views and understanding.
I do not subscribe to “attitudes and choice”, but the idea of it does not escape me. You can try all the mindfulness and meditation, yet if your underlying programming (if you will) are negative, they remain part of you.
I really often feel shamed not just by psychiatry but also by healed, insightful folks who discovered this new path of living.
I tend to compare myself and internalize because I believe people send a very subconscious unconscious message that their truth is the truth. And that has a lot in common with psychiatry.
I remain unwilling I guess.
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