How to Be Free, Joe Blow [reading tree .txt] 📗

of Naziism could only occur in a society which was sexually repressive. If there is some part of ourselves which we are not accepting then this makes us vulnerable to manipulation and intimidation. This is also something which is understood by many leaders of religious cults. Encourage an individual crying out for acceptance to feel ashamed of masturbating or desiring material goods and you can get them to do anything.

Great progress is being made in fighting disease, but it is still with us. Now I would not claim that the emotional benefits of self-acceptance are going to cure diseases. But how well our bodily system can fight a curable disease or cope with an incurable one depends on how well it is functioning. And the repression of emotion through bodily armouring places immense stress on the body and decreases its ability to deal with problems. And there is evidence that mood plays a tremendous role in making us susceptible to some diseases and affecting our ability to combat them. There is much anecdotal evidence of “faith healing”. While this can be a popular con job practised in some religions, in other cases the results appear to be genuine. Where this does occur the key is clearly not some magical intervention by a cosmic spirit, but evidence of the role of expectation on physical ailments in some individuals. In a case discussed by Laurens van der Post in his book About Blady : A Pattern Out of Time - A Memoir (Morrow, 1991), the faith was faith in a surgeon, rather than a deity. A doctor did an exploratory operation on a peasant and found him to be riddled with cancer. All he could do was sow him up again. But the peasant thought the doctor, who very much impressed him, must have removed the cancer. When the doctor returned to the village a number of years later he found his patient still alive and now cancer free. And Wilhelm Reich, who believed that emotional and sexual repression caused cancer and that sitting in one of his orgone accumulators could cure it, found that it worked for some of his patients. Once again the results were probably due to the patient’s faith in Reich rather than the effectiveness of his accumulators. The placebo effect, in which some patients get better when given a sugar pill and told that it is medicine, is another example. The point is that, while a positive state of mind may not cure an illness, it isn’t going to hurt.

The other factor in dealing with all of these problems is our ability to co-operate. When armoured our ability to work together on problem-solving is limited. In our insecure state we are prone to find ourselves in conflict with others and the process can be frustrating. But in the non-armoured state, not only are we able to co-operate in problem-solving, it becomes the most enjoyable activity imaginable. What we really want is to be in a state of loving communion with others. We strive for something like this at parties by getting together when relaxed and maybe reducing our inhibitions with some alcohol. The results are pretty variable. But the point is that, in the un-armoured state, we are in a state of loving communion with our friends all of the time regardless of what activity we are engaged in. Life, even a life of problem-solving, becomes a non-stop party.

Emotional Scars

Often we will have an experience which will leave us with painful feelings long after it is over in a physical sense. But if that experience was inflicted on us by a person who is no longer present or the result of a situation we are no longer in, then that individual or situation is no longer the source of our suffering. We are suffering because of the nature of our thinking about that event. We are torturing ourselves for no good reason, since the past cannot be changed.

We can see that the emotional scars inflicted by an experience are not based on how painful it was. I once lay strapped in a hospital bed begging the doctors and nurses to kill me. I felt that the whole of human history was going to come to nothing and that it was all my fault. I can’t imagine much more intense psychological suffering than what I went through then, but that memory holds no pain for me now. That experience is in the past.

But if we are caught up in “if only” thoughts or self-recrimination, then we can prolong our suffering indefinitely.

An example of this might be if a guy left his baby to play unsupervised on the front lawn and it crawled out into traffic and was killed. The trauma of this is liable to be greater than if the baby were killed when a car crashed into the back of the car the father was driving. The death of the child is the same, but in one case the father is liable to blame himself, in the other case less so. Similarly, if a girl is raped, how much psychological suffering she experiences afterwards may depend on whether she thinks of herself as a victim or a survivor.

But in all cases the past in still the past. It can’t be changed. Feelings of recrimination or regret are not required, but are almost certain to occur all the same. Like all emotions and thoughts they are best accepted. Thoughts ask only to be thought and feelings ask only to be felt. The path to letting go of them is to not fight them.

Compassion is Projected Self-Pity

As neurotic armoured individuals we are still able to connect with the suffering of others by identifying it with our own suffering in some way. In our suffering state our attention is directed towards ourselves, but, if we can identify our suffering with that of someone else it can motivate us to try to do something to help them and by feeling a sense that our suffering is shared we can achieve some sense of catharsis.

Since, in our neurotic armoured state our inner child is frightened, unloved, oppressed, starved, molested, blind, deaf and crippled, there are few forms of suffering in the world with which we are incapable of identifying.

Clearly in a neurotic society compassion, the ability to feel identification with another’s suffering, is tremendously important as it allows for mutual aid between pathologically self-centred individuals.

However, as we become less neurotic and thus suffer less ourselves we may be worried about the fact that we start to feel less compassion for others. If we express to others the fact that seeing people suffer on the news each night no longer makes  us feel bad, they may tell us that there is something wrong with us. But this is actually a sign of increasing mental health.

Some incredibly armoured individuals feel no compassion for others. We call them sociopaths. These are not healthy individuals. They are totally self-centred and very often behave very destructively towards others. Their lack of compassion is not due to a state of health, but to the fact that their armouring is so complete that it blocks out all awareness of their inner child’s suffering.

The end of compassion, however, does not mean the end of mutual aid buts its true beginning. When we are no longer at war with ourselves we will be full of energy and enthusiasm, and the most enjoyable way of using that energy is in helping others. It is not necessary for us to be motivated by an experience of their pain any more than it is necessary for us to be dirty ourselves in order to feel motivated to clean the kitchen floor.

The Inner Child

While it is true that, in our neurotic state, our inner child suffers greatly, we need to understand that the inner child is not vulnerable in the way that a real child is vulnerable. Nothing can ever kill or injure the inner child in any way. Our scars are a part of our neurotic ego, our inner child, suffer as it may, can never be scarred.

The essence of the inner child (or our original nature) is unconditional love.  We are capable of feeling love that does not depend on the behaviour or nature of the one loved. And this capacity is a function of our inner child.

When we are neurotic, not understanding the nature of the inner child, it is easy for us to feel paranoid, to feel that the inner child judges us harshly for oppressing it. Once again there is the phenomenon of projection. We can assume that the guilt that we feel, the lack of self-acceptance, has its origin in the inner child rather than in the fragility of the neurotic ego structure itself. And, in some cases, we may project aspects of our own state onto that which we have disowned and thus see the inner child as something evil and malicious.

These phenomena account for a tendency in our society for some individuals to feel a fear of children or a hostility towards them. Culturally we have evil child horror movies such as The Omen which reflect this fear. And in religion the concept of original sin projects our awareness of our own selfish nature onto the blank slate of the new born child. And, in the extreme, we have individuals whose fear of their own inner child, and their belief that it may condemn them, drives them to torture, kill or molest children.

All of this is based on a lack of understanding that the inner child is incapable of condemnation. Love is not unconditional if it carries with it any capacity for value judgement. Condemnation and value judgements are functions of the neurotic ego.

Since the voice of the inner child is the un-warped expression of the natural processes of the universe as manifested in the organised form of matter we call humanity, the voice of the inner child is the voice of what religious people call “God”. In the Christian religion we can see this reflected in the concept that God tells us that we are sinful (i.e. selfish) but he loves us anyway. This is nothing more than what our own deepest self has been trying to tell us all along.

So the concept of self-acceptance is not just a gimmick to make us feel better, it is reunion with our deepest instinctive self and a realisation of the promises embodied in our religions that we would some day find salvation from our state of suffering and re-enter paradise. The whole of human history has been little more than an ultimately easily cured state of insanity.

In the Christian religion, much that is said about The Kingdom of Heaven also applies to a non-neurotic global society. The problem with this term is that “kingdom” implies submission to a higher power as we have in neurotically hierarchical forms of social organisation and “heaven” implies that it takes place on some otherworldly plane of existence. Never-the-less, if one ignores the inappropriate name, much of what Jesus said about this state and how it might come about seems very appropriate.

What is Consciousness?

We experience our lives. We think our thoughts. We have our feelings. But what or who is the “we” that experiences these things?

We have a body. We have a mind. We have an ego structure or personality. These give structure to our experience. They are media through which we experience.

We might think of these aspects of ourselves as a musical instrument. But what is the nature of the music itself?

Thinking is the construction and manipulation of patterns of information. But, we can stop thinking (i.e. stop processing or