WHY WE SUFFER

How You Can Save the World

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I cringe at the thought of being cursed by future generations for not doing enough to stem the environmental degradation of our planet. My hope is they’ll just call me stupid and refrain from searing a big X—a token of eternal shame—upon any trace of my existence.

Boost your bravery by feeling more deeply what future generations will face.

My instinct is to defend myself, saying “I cared, I worried, I recycled, and over the past nine years I’ve driven my 2010 four-cylinder Toyota Rav4 just 4,500 miles a year, only a third of the national average.”

What would my descendants, inheritors of the wreckage of 80 or 800 years hence, likely say about this sort of defense? “It’s pathetic,” I imagine them decreeing. “Your defense is all about you! You’re trying to look innocent in your own eyes. Your feelings for us are superficial. You don’t understand that our suffering is your fate, too. We’re all in this together—your death will not save you. Our relationship transcends time and place, past and future. Your eternity passes through our pain.”

Well, damn, did I just channel those words? Here I am writing this down, spooked at the thought it’s true. Will my spirit be obliged to hang around for millennia to observe and feel what my descendants are enduring? Please sweep this thought away in a Texas tornado!

Should I just plead ignorance? I’m no expert on spiritual matters, and my alleged fellowship with future beings and this notion of being sandblasted alongside them in a Florida mega-storm seems like one of those mystical puzzlers. [Read more…]

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Get Rid of Guilt with Deeper Insight (II)

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“I have never smuggled anything in my life,” the great novelist John Steinbeck wrote in Travels With Charley. “Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?” Steinbeck’s guilt was irrational because, as he said, he had nothing to hide. So where did his guilt come from?

Guilt is easier to get rid of when we understand its hidden origins.

On approaching a customs barrier, he was aware, of course, that he was going to be dealing with an official vested with government authority. Steinbeck was likely being triggered by emotional impressions that the custom agent was going to view him as a potential smuggler or criminal. The agent had the power to hold him accountable. It appears that Steinbeck was entertaining the prospect of being confronted by a gruff agent who was prepared to intimidate him.

Of course, Steinbeck had a great imagination, and it was easy for him to imagine being a smuggler. To write so convincingly, he had to be able to bring to life the emotional experiences of his fictional characters. Yet most people have a talent for imagining doing bad things and also for imagining bad things happening to them. Feelings of being wrong, bad, and helpless are common to human nature. That stems, in part, from a lingering emotional resonance in our psyche with feelings of being naughty and being helpless. We can remember times as children when we faced the prospect of a scolding or punishment, whether we’d done wrong or not.

As Steinbeck approached a border crossing, he would have started resonating emotionally with the prospect of being exposed as a lawbreaker. At this point, guilt would be aroused in him because he was identifying emotionally with the plight of someone being caught, exposed, and taken into custody. He was experiencing guilt because he was starting to replay familiar passive feelings that are negative in nature. In his mind, the custom agent would soon be looming over him with dark, suspicious eyes. Steinbeck’s guilt was directly associated with his unconscious willingness in that moment to experience himself as a passive creature at the mercy of an authority figure. [Read more…]

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The U.S. Government’s Flawed Intelligence on Clinical Depression

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The whole world dwells in the dark when it comes to understanding human nature. Even the largest organization in the world specializing in mental illness, the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), has a huge blind spot.

The full story of emotional weakness is told in Why We Suffer. Order it at the Books link.

This agency of the U.S. government is giving us misleading information about the nature of clinical depression. In its information booklet on depression, the NIMH says, “It [clinical depression] is a real illness. It is not a sign of a person’s weakness or a character flaw.” Clinical depression, however, is a sign of a person’s weakness. In claiming otherwise in this booklet and on its website, the NIMH has rejected 100 years of painstakingly acquired intelligence and knowledge concerning the dynamics of the unconscious mind.

In doing so, the NIMH is also overlooking modern research. Brain imaging has found evidence that depression results from unresolved negative emotions associated with guilt and self-blame.* It’s not our fault that we have these negative emotions. We’re dealing here with what is still primitive and undeveloped in human nature. Nonetheless, these negative emotions do constitute a weakness within us.

Depression is a psychological weakness, a symptom of inner conflict in the unconscious mind or psyche. Just about everyone has some degree of inner conflict, and people with clinical depression are likely to be more conflicted than the average person. Inner conflict produces negative emotions, including self-blame and guilt, that in turn produce depression. Again, this is not anybody’s fault: still, it is a weakness.

When we can’t see where we’re weak or ignorant, we’re unlikely to become smarter or wiser. By assimilating self-knowledge, we’re able to offset these concealed, self-defeating dynamics, just as bugs in a software program can be neutralized. [Read more…]

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12 Ways We Fail to See or Experience Reality

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We humans are capable of acquiring profoundly deep understandings of reality. We’ll likely at some future time have a much deeper intellectual grasp of what are now scientific, metaphysical, and cosmic mysteries.

Our lack of objectivity produces negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors.

Reality is defined more narrowly, however, for the purposes of this article. Here, reality refers to what makes us tick psychologically and what it’s important to know about our mental and emotional operating systems.

This inner reality reveals what is right, proper, and true for our emotional wellbeing. The quality with which we experience ourselves and the world around us depends on how well we appreciate this inner reality. Civilization and the planet are depending on us to understand our inner nature.

To a large degree, people unwittingly experience themselves and the world around them through misperceptions and misinterpretations. This lack of objectivity produces negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors. As we uncover these distortions and make them conscious, we empower our intelligence and acquire a growing ability to live in inner peace while fulfilling our aspirations.

Below are twelve common misperceptions of ourselves, others, inner reality, as well as aspects of outer reality. These misperceptions are all interwoven, overlapping with one another.

1) Perceiving the world through too much self-centeredness. We’re all born in a state of self-centeredness. The infant, with no experience of dealing with people and the world, feels self-contained and self-sufficient, despite the obvious total dependence on caregivers. The child’s sense of reality is not only limited, it’s also distorted. A child feels as if he or she is at the center of existence. It takes many years for a child to begin to feel empathy for others. [Read more…]

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A Psychological Hindrance to National Unity

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Psychology issues are the heavy artillery and heavy armor on the battlefield of our dissension. A variety of these issues are besieging national unity. Civil conflict reflects the extent of widespread neurosis and ignorance of depth psychology. The psyche of citizens is being poisoned by divisive political propaganda that poses as news and informed comment.

Many Americans are immobilized and bewildered by feelings of uncanniness.

We tend, as well, to be highly resistant to deeper truth about ourselves. Rich or poor, liberal or conservative, we staunchly protect our egotism and tribal identifications. We resort to blaming others to cover up our injustice collecting, our largely unconscious readiness to feel victimized and disrespected, and our quickness to become negative, reactive, and cynical.

In this post, I address another psychological factor in civil unrest, the manner in which people unconsciously maintain and even embrace a sense of uncanniness concerning themselves and the world around them. (The word uncanny is a psychological term found here at Wikipedia.)

Uncanniness has a long history in personal and world affairs. People who resisted the scientific discovery that the Earth was round instead of flat experienced a sense of uncanniness. People who resisted the scientific discovery that humans have evolved from primates experienced uncanniness. Even those who, at the time of these discoveries, accepted these truths intellectually would likely have felt some uncanniness in their delayed reaction to accepting them emotionally. [Read more…]

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Why We Urgently Need Inner Truth

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Is there perhaps one basic insight, one key awareness, that we humans have to learn, and learn quickly, to help us avoid catastrophe from climate change, nuclear weapons, spreading psychosis, and multispecies extinction?

Lacking inner truth, we’re compelled to be enablers of our suffering self.

I recently purchased a book titled A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World’s Extinct Animals, which has on its book jacket an artful rendering of a Dodo bird. When I was a young teenager, I spoke about this bird, this phoenix of Mauritius, at a school speaking contest. I mentioned that human interventions had wiped them out, and apparently my voice’s sorrowful mystification at that point convinced judges (did I guilt-trip them?) to award me first place.

I’m not mystified now as to why we might soon follow the dodo into the void. I understand why the human race is fated to self-destruct. The knowledge is found in depth psychology, which exposes our compulsion to recycle and replay unresolved negative emotions and to suffer the accompanying self-defeat. Are climate change and nuclear weapons just props or means we’ve created to act out this fate?

Our extinction can and must be avoided. We may be fated collectively to self-destruct, yet we’re not destined to do so. We’re destined, I’m sure, to create a world in which we become increasingly peaceful, united, and wise. When we learn, one person at a time, to see ourselves more objectively, with insight into our compulsion to act self-destructively, we acquire the knowledge and wisdom to fulfill our destiny.

The notion that our species is compulsively self-defeating and self-destructive has been explored extensively by psychoanalysts for more than 100 years. (Readers can find summaries of these discussions at Wikipedia, under repetition compulsion and death drive.) Many people desperately don’t want to believe we’re so foolish and obtuse. They can’t deal emotionally with inner truth, which is experienced as highly offensive to our ego and self-image. Even modern psychology denies the fact that hidden dynamics in our psyche make us our own worst enemy, claiming that such a contention blames the “poor” victims of emotional suffering for fostering their own misery. [Read more…]

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Are You Living Your True Story?

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Everyone needs a story, as the saying goes. The best kind of story provides us with meaning and purpose, and it reflects values and beliefs to which we subscribe. Ideally, it tells us right from wrong, explains our suffering, and guides us going forward. Such stories, which go back in history to ancient creation myths, are cornerstones of our humanity.

The best kind of story provides us with meaning and purpose.

Many of us, in order to flourish, need to change our story. Some stories that people adopt (or are unconsciously burdened with) do their existence and intelligence a great disservice. “I am a worthless nobody and a loser” is a story that many people follow. Some people believe, as another common story, that they are the helpless victims of what is (or what they subjectively perceive to be) injustice and malice. Such stories develop out of our inner conflict, and invariably they produce self-defeat and self-sabotage.

Keep in mind that terrorists and criminals, along with greedy and self-aggrandizing people, operate according to stories that feel real and true to them. Sometimes the stories most fervently subscribed to are rationalizations for being cold-hearted and close-minded. We obviously don’t want to be acting out a story that incorporates a lack of belief or trust in oneself, is borrowed from others, or has been contaminated by unresolved emotional issues.

We can have more than one story at a time, a personal story, for instance, as well as a story that frames our worldview. It’s normal that our story would borrow heavily from parents and culture, even as we’re struggling to forge a unique, personal story. [Read more…]

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Get to Know Your Psyche’s Operating Systems

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People tend unconsciously to falsify reality. We’re usually not aware of how and why our sense of reality is distorted, which is an impediment to our intelligence.

Separate operating systems in our psyche can distort our objectivity.

What’s causing this distortion of reality? At play in our psyche, with distinct and separate “operating systems,” are the inner critic, ego, id, psychological defenses, inner passivity, and resistance. Not only do these systems tend to operate outside our awareness, they’re also at odds with one another as they churn up inner conflict, negative emotions, and self-defeating behaviors. I have illustrated and described them here as aspects or “characters” of our psyche.

As we grow psychologically, a dominant and healthy inner operating system arises from our solid connection to (and embrace of) our authentic self.

For this article, I focus on the operating system known as inner passivity. It’s the least well-known and perhaps the most problematic of these inner systems. This passivity, which affects almost everyone, is a mental-emotional state of mind through which we stumble into suffering and self-defeat. Humankind has not yet begun to appreciate this aspect of our human nature.

We are in the throes of this passivity when we interpret situations and challenges through feelings of being overwhelmed, helpless, indecisive, trapped, constrained, restricted, controlled, held accountable, required to submit, and otherwise victimized. [Read more…]

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Illustrating the Characters Who Mess With Our Mind

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A visual image can help us recognize the main players in our psyche.

I’ve been slowing down my writing production over the past year, as my mind and psyche shift away from the mental side into more intuitive and contemplative states. For many years I’ve been “drawing” portraits of the psyche in the language of depth psychology—with words, phrases, theory, examples, and explanations.

As I write, I try to express my words artfully, but here I’ve also added artwork that illustrates some of the dynamics of inner conflict and human dysfunction. (The illustration I’ve done here is a bit washed out–the original looks better.)

This artwork still needs text to explain what is portrayed, and this post provides that information. The image (click to enlarge) has eleven characters and symbols. It is missing a background: my artistic ability is awaiting further development.

Seven of these images represent troublesome parts of our psyche. For whimsy’s sake, call them the Seven Dworks. They’re like renegade operating systems, totally out of harmony with one another and with our better self. The four other depictions represent what is good, creative, and great about us. I’ll say a tiny bit about each of these—and save the best for last.

Let’s start with the gruesome figure at bottom right. It represents our nasty, primitive inner critic, the seat of self-aggression. It (it’s certainly not a he or she) is wearing a crown because it assumes to be our rightful voice of authority, although its power is irrational, illegitimate, and downright abusive. [Read more…]

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