| effective, enhancing logical, practical strategies for empowerment, self-control, relaxation & hope |  | dr. j's head-cleaners shrink rap & shrink think for practical, powerful healing & hope |
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She is angry and frustrated with herself that she is so irritable, critical and sarcastic to her family at times. She loves her husband and her children dearly and feels very badly about being harsh with him. She is a very bright woman, very loving and insightful, very caring to her family, very bright how she loves. But she only sort of sees that and harbors great doubt that she may be harming her children with her anger at times and that she's unfair to her husband who is patient and kind. He and the kids are pretty much happy and easy going beings and there is no evidence of anyone being hurt by her anger. He and the kids forget things and blow things off and this means not only are they good at forgiving and being patient with her, they are also good at making mistakes and forgetting important things -- so she doesn't have to feel like she is the only one with dents in her finish.
Her childhood was complicated and hard. She was told frequently that she was responsible for her own situation. Three times the molestation had come to the attention of authorities through suspicions of teachers or friends or their folks. She was six the first time. Three times it went to court and three times she was asked to decide if he should be forgiven and sent home. Three times judges asked her to be responsible for telling if he did it again -- to "stand in" for policemen, "stand" in for the court. At home her mother was forgiving and needy of her step father and put up with his anger and made sure it was known life might not go on without dad. The molesting was frequent and spiced with little games -- like when, after blindfolding her he might say, "open your mouth and I will give you a lollipop to suck." And she was told to be good and be responsible for his actions and his anger and upset. And it was her fault if he yelled and was angry -- especially if she was laughing or seemed contended or happy at play. Her stepdad wanted her seeing the world just his way. Now she grows and is softer with self and loved ones, but it doesn't come quickly and this means she is dumb. She looks at her victories, growth and her gains and she says they don't mean much as long as theres pains. She can't seem to just trust ideas from her shrink, even after some years of exploring his think. Even when she is trying to think only plus, it seems sooner or later her center is puss. The gains don't seem stable and a negative much seems to often for days make her life really suck. Then the crap overwhelms and intrudes and she snaps and she bites and she's bitchy and she often starts fights. When feelings say one thing but logic does not, she goes with the feelings, having less trust in thought. And to top it all off, she never gets close because it is scary risk what she certainly knows -- that if she shares who she is with a friend or what not, her world goes to chaos and she gets quite caught -- she's questioned and frightened by police and some judges and she might get more hurt but nothing else budges. So she watches how others appear to behave and assumes that they never inside rant and rave. She watches how others just smile and seem cool and that they have few struggles or pains as a rule and this means she should hide that she's really a fool and pretend she's just "normal" in public and school. Others don't struggle, or get hurt by their dad, others don't worry about bad times they've had. Others are happy and don't need to think because everything's easy, they never do sink. How many times does a little girl have to be told she has the ultimate responsibility for her being molested before she sees that as true and sees herself as stupid for not having the skills that judges and her mother and all the adults tell her she has. Why wouldn't she think she is dumb after so many had told her that things were different than they were, that she had skills she could not seem to access, that she had capabilities that could keep her from any harm though she could not seem to be able to make use of them? Why wouldn't she be very distrustful of authority figures who tell her if she would just do this or that and she will like it? Wouldn't it be amazing if she could ever trust anyone's advice or help? Wouldn't it be much more natural for her to trust her feelings rather than some thoughts someone suggested? Wouldn't it be "normal" for her to be impatient with herself when she might be "normal" in not being able to sustain a positive attitude 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
What a terrible struggle to see with those eyes, but to see through the bullshit and the ugliest lies? "Wake up, Neo, the Matrix has you," sounds simple -- but in practice its not. It's a process of patience and feelings and thought. |
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This can sound like it's just a simple, silly metaphor. Actually, in a very interesting way, this is a key to power, disguised by it's apparent simplicity. The fact is it is this "Matrix" thing is not a silly, simple metaphor. This is a complex key to complex power. Real power.
It is not easy to understand this idea and it is harder still to achieve the ability to see and perceive past, through and around what your biology and experience has programmed you to see and perceive. The movie, the Matrix provides an excellent illustration of the challenges involved in seeing beyond the programming of one's mind. Reality is a subjective experience. Put twelve people in a room with something happening and carefully interview each after an hour and you find that there were twelve different realities in that room, with each person believing that the room and the experience was the same for all twelve. Each person's experience of the room is based on his or her experiences, biology and "programming" -- the ways he or she has viewed life and rooms in the past which have been influenced and shaped by how he or she has viewed such rooms and experiences before that, and all colored or shaped by biological factors that influence perception. A person raised in a household where rooms and people were discussed in negative ways would have a different experience compared to a person raised in a household where such rooms were discussed in positive terms. A person raised in a situation where he or she had no experiencing of rooms or groups of strangers would have a very different experience compared to a person raised in a house with rooms. A person who had experienced many rooms growing up but whose experience of rooms was that they often made a person vulnerable to violence that could not be escaped from, or that experienced rooms as places where there was safety from storms or violence outside the rooms, would have a different experience from those who had more run-of-the-mill -type experiences in the rooms of their past. There are thousands of potential differences in how people might perceive even such a simple thing as a room. There are a host of different ways that a person might grow up thinking about groups of people, about him- or herself, about justice, fairness, the meaning of life, etc. What makes right right and wrong wrong? What is the thing to do if you are wronged -- how is it most practical to look at such an experience? How does life work? Is the goal of life to get the most toys, the greatest wealth, the most sexy shape, the most sexual experiences, the happiest time? What are other people all about -- are they interlopers, cutthroat competitors, jerks? Are they due respect, hostility, compassion? What are the rules in life? Who says the rules are the rules and why are the rules the rules? Why do some people have such harsh things happen to them while others become wealthy and deal with the stresses of business, beauty and wealth? Many people looking at people in poverty, for example, see people who have chosen to be lazy, unhealthy and poor -- people who have chosen not to take advantage of opportunities and who have poor attitudes about work. Other people looking at the same time at the same people in the same circumstances, see people who are relentlessly striving, constantly working and valiantly battling against powerful forces that push them down, bar them from work, deny or refuse them opportunities. Instead of people taking advantage of easy opportunities, they see people who are surviving in the face of ugly inequality, discrimination and hostility. Seeing Past Programming - Wake Up, Neo, The Matrix Has You From conception a person begins to develop perceptual abilities that will have tiny but often very powerful differences. From birth a person is "programmed," in basically the same way a computer is programmed, to see life and its various aspects in particular ways. In the movie, the Matrix, mankind is individually packaged and kept sedated and dreaming. The dream that each person is dreaming is created and programmed into his or her mind by a complex of machines that have taken over the world and that keep mankind asleep and enslaved and docilely under control by feeding them a hallucinated reality that they do not realize is not real. The hero(s) of the movie find that they are greatly empowered by recognizing that what seems to be "reality" is not really real. This does not need to be a question of whether or not we are actually enslaved as batteries, spending our lives sleeping in accommodations similar to those suggested in the Matrix. Though one can consider this possibility, it does not have as practical a value as does the consideration of our attitudes and judgements that create our subjective experience in life. Just as in the Matrix, where Neo must find the way to see through the programming that the Matrix is feeding into his brain when he is "plugged in," the challenge for anyone trying to see beyond the programming of his or her DNA and experience is to find a way to see beyond what is imposed by the bioelectric and psychosocial systems he or she is reliant on for experiencing the world. This is no easy feat. It in fact takes a good deal of time to recognize and accept these truths and then it is a challenge to hold on to this perspective. The practical value of this exercise in reality awareness -- or in the awareness of the subjective nature of reality -- is that you can pick and choose which realities you will penicil in as the most practical way to view your experience once you can achieve a real understanding that you are actually deep inside in a system of sensors and sensor interpreters, cut off from any real contact with whatever may be just outside yourself. As Morpheus explains to Neo in the Matrix, you are in a system in which there are rules but some of those rules can be bent and some can be broken. Once you can hold on to this perspective for a sufficient length of time to make decisions, you can alter much of how you perceive life -- not everything, mind you, but a great deal. As one begins to accept the subjectivity of reality, one can ask one's self how many ways there might be to experience something -- and then one can ask one's self which way is the most practical, most helpful, most healthy and happiest way to look at a thing. Here is the meat of this: If you know nothing for certain, you can actually decide whether in any circumstance there is any practical reason to feel anxious, angry, helpless, hopeless, hurt or hassled. If there is no way to know what the actual Purpose of life is or isn't -- if there is no way to know for sure whether there is a God, an Afterlife or whatever -- if there is no way to know what, in the long, long term is really good and what is really bad, then everything is up for interpretation. And everything is available to view, experience and pencil in as reality in whatever way you want. This isn't easy. It sounds flippant and silly to many. But if you can wrap your mind around the fact that there is no real evidence -- no way to prove -- whether you have hands and legs and a past that you seem to remember because these could be a dream or hallucination... if you can wrap your mind around this (for some) very frightening realization, there are huge numbers of "bullets" (painful experiences) in life that you will not only be able to dodge but that you often will not even have to take seriously. A suggested formula for dealing with life success: Here is an interestingly simple (sort of) and very supportive strategy for dealing with things you can't control. 1) Try to deal with life as best you can, making everything you can go as you want it to go AND assume that what won't seem to cooperate and go your way is going the way it is going because it is guided by a Higher Power. 2) Try to deal with life as best you can, making everything go as you want it to go AND assume that whatever ugly, bad, terrible, frightening things you find yourself not being able to control and avoid, assume that there is a Higher Power guiding things and that you cannot know what is, in actual fact, bad because so often really bad things have silver linings. Why not? Why not assume that either there is a Higher Power or there isn't and you have just as much evidence of one position as the other? Just as it is the case that you really cannot prove you have arms and legs and a past as you remember it -- but it seems life goes more smoothly assuming you do have arms and legs and assuming your memories of past experiences are accurate -- it may be that there is no Higher Power but life goes much smoother if you assume you do have a Higher Power watching over you and guiding your life. Why not assume your shortcomings and your deficits are purposefully crafted by a Higher Power that knows what It is doing? Try to get rid of all shortcomings and try to get all deficits corrected but why not assume that what part of these you can't avoid or correct are dictated by a Higher Power? Why not try to protect yourself and your loved ones from hurt and bad things but assume that if they do happen, they might actually turn out to be good -- because you really don't have clue one about what life is supposed to be about nor do you really know what is bad. (How could dying of starvation be good? How could spending life in prison be good? Here's the logic. Yes. Try to avoid starvation and prison. But if life is not about anything, everyone dies and everything is meaningless. So at worst, it is unfortunate that we might starve or spend life in prison. But if life is about something, then spending 100 years in prison might have a beneficial effect in the context of trillions of trillions of years. So might starvation. I don't know if life goes on and I don't know how it works but I do know that since I don't know anything for sure, I can't know that these things are bad. I would avoid them if at all possible, yes. But if unavoidable, can they be accepted? Yes. What if life after death is as the New Age people say it is -- like a dream world where whatever you want you get immediately. If that is the case then nobody will be able to experience the freedom of going where they want when they want to more than someone who has spent a whole lifetime in this life in prison. And nobody will appreciate food in the afterlife as much as someone who spent this life dying of starvation. If it is that way -- where everything is at one's fingertips for the taking in heaven, then how could you ever appreciate anything unless you had spent a lifetime here in this life going without and desperately wanting it? -- It is only a possible way it could work. Again, I say avoid starvation and prison if you can. And tell your loved ones to avoid them, too. But don't be so certain that if a loved one dies of starvation that it was evidence of either no God or a hateful God. Till you find out what goes on -- till you die -- you haven't a clue whether prison and starvation are really, in the long term, bad.) the psychology of self-fulfilling prophesy The facts about perception are that we have glaring huge holes in our visual field (just to the outside and up a little from where you focus) where our retnas have no receptors -- it is where the blood vessels come in from the back of the eye. Our brain fills in the blanks. The facts of perception includes the fact that the things we hear in a conversation are also to a large extent made up by our brain -- simply imagined, constructed, arbitrarily decided on the basis of expectations, wishes and fears -- to the extent that we are actually making up 30-70% of what we seem to hear. And, when we wish for, expect or fear something might happen, we tend to find out that it does. For a thousand psychological reasons, when we buy into an idea, we find that idea coming true. Some call this self-fulfilling prophesy. There is no way to tell what you are making up and what is really there. Someone else can confirm what you think you see or hear but they, too, could be making things up. Someone could tell you they don't see or hear what you do but there is no way to tell which of you is correct. No verifiable, reliable way. This is why some people can tell you that they Know there is a God. They believe it strongly, so strongly that it becomes as real as their hands and legs. This is an amazingly interesting fact of life, perception, psychology and experience. If you believe something, you will find all sorts of evidence popping up all around you -- whether that is a belief in your hands or a belief in God. Some people find this so scary that they really don't like thinking it or trying to think about it. I doubt that this all boils down to a necessary understanding of life, so for them, they can live their lives without these thoughts. When it comes to the issue of life ongoing -- of a life beyond this life and of Higher Powers and such -- many react as if this was a very, very frightening prospect. Some people who strongly believe in God seem to find it a threat to recognize that they believe rather than Know. Some people who strongly believe there is no God react as if this was a suspicious trick that might lure them into believing something dangerous. I don't think this needs to be dangerous. I think it is possible to recognize that you don't really know what is going on in life, really, without harming the ability to function. I offer these thoughts as help. They can be very helpful. When you cannot be certain of anything except that you must exist (I think, therefor I am), then you have the luxury of deciding to see things in whatever way is most advantageous to you. There is no reason to be fearful. There is no reason to panic. There is nothing to be angry about. There is no reason to hate. There is as much evidence that your life is perfect -- that you have the exact skills at the exact skills levels that you are supposed to have -- that you question or slip up exactly as often as you are supposed to -- that you are perfect.
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