Two Blogs in One

Recently, I decided I was going to appreciate freely, without regard to what anyone else was doing. If you asked me how that’s coming along, I’d have to say that it needs work. I’ve been struggling. I wrote the following two blogs to help work out the issues. They’re really two different approaches to the same thing, so I’m including them together.

1. Chaos Theory
About two years ago, I was doing some housework, and not feeling particularly happy, when I realized that almost every motion, movement or thought I had during a day was motivated by a negative. That is, I made the bed so that the bed wouldn’t be messy. I cleaned the dishes so the kitchen wouldn’t be a disaster. I nagged my son so that he wouldn’t end up without survival skills. It was as if I was a robot. There was no me that was deciding to do anything. All of my actions were reactions. I was a puppet, doing, saying, and thinking to prevent other acts that I feared would result if I didn’t perform the particular act in question.

It seemed to me that this was no life. I’d been living variations of this no life since I was 11 years old. Not wanting to perpetrate the situation further, I decided to take my first real vacation ever. I told my family that I wasn’t going to do anything that was expected of me for two weeks. No laundry, no dishes, no cooking, no advice, no moral support, etc. It was unbelievably difficult. Not surprisingly, the very first day, I got a call from a family member who was upset about a pretty serious situation and who, in my estimation, “needed help.” I was immersed in guilt at the mere thought of not offering moral support. So I got involved and offered the support.

Like an addict, after I’d offered the support, I said to myself, “No more. You’re going to go two weeks and not provide any benefit to anyone.” I wanted to find out who I was if I wasn’t providing service to other people. It was such a simple idea, but it was amazingly torturous. I felt like I was a horrible person. I felt that I was a burden to my family. I felt that I wasn’t pulling my weight. I felt that I had no right to take a vacation and even less right to be happy because I hadn’t earned the right. Changing those kinds of associations and behaviors has been a bitch.

Two years later, I’m still working on it. To this day, even though I’ve made inroads, other people’s dramas, sorrows, and screw-ups are still more important than my own joy. I have continued to put aside my own life and well-being to help others, and sometimes this blows up in my face. I’ve finally figured out why. I’ve been running on the assumption that I’m somehow responsible for other people’s happiness. This is a pretty odd idea considering the fact that I can’t make another person happy. Only they can do that.

Underneath everything, my behavior has been motivated by the idea that I have no right to be happy and make my own independent life if someone I know is unhappy or in pain. I’m supposed to take on that pain and fix it because that’s what a good, caring person does. I’ve spent thirty years of my life doing just that, and all it has done is net me a consistent crop of frustration because there’s a never-ending stream of things that need to be fixed depending on the next decision someone makes or doesn’t make. How on earth can I be responsible for all those decisions that other people make? And where does it end? At what point do I get the whole world around me to be happy and content? I can’t. It’s not my burden. It’s not even within my abilities to perform such a feat. Furthermore, there’s an assumption in there somewhere that the person I’m helping can’t help themselves.

So I’m done. Everyone is responsible for his or her self. The truth is that everyone, without exception, is capable. I have always believed this. The only difference in my behavior is that I’m not going to spend any more time trying to convince other people of the fact. In a way, I think I’m finally growing up. I can understand now the fundamental importance of being selfish. I can’t have it both ways. I’m either putting my own well-being first, or I’m putting someone else’s well-being first. Since I can’t make decisions for other people, if I put them first, then I’m in deep water, and I don’t like deep water.

In other words, personal responsibility for others is really chaos theory. And when you no longer want the chaos, you have to put your own joy and well-being ahead of the woes of others. This doesn’t make you a bad person; it makes you an example. It’s the point I’ve been reading about for years now, and I’m finally getting it.

2. Superstition and The Rock Analogy
I think it’s interesting that the next wave in consciousness is that of emotion. Thanks to all of the wonderful Elias folks, I listened to the audio for the session on emotion, and at the end of last year, I bought the most recent Abraham book titled, “The Astonishing Power of Emotion,” which addresses to the same subject matter. More recently I endeavored to gain control of my communications and direct them. I promised myself that I would be giving appreciation out for free. And yet, even with all of this splendid guidance from myself and others, it’s been a bumpy ride. It turns out, I’m more of a trained monkey than I thought, and certain situations elicit certain reactions out of me like clock work.

When I get stuck like a skipping record, I try to parse ideas to their essentials to see what I’m really doing. I’m speaking specifically of when someone says something to you that you don’t like, and you explode, which I’ve been known to do from time to time. When that happens, I feel like I’m swimming in a murky sea, not knowing which way is up and longing to break the surface of the water into daylight.

My assumption is that the automatics are not going to get easier over time, especially heading into this next wave in consciousness, so that’s been a big motivation for me to get a handle on why I have certain reactions. From a bit of pondering and parsing, I’ve drawn this conclusion: Most of what I have felt on a daily basis has been motivated by superstition. Essentially, superstition is the belief that people, objects, behaviors, circumstances or events can give us things. In particular, that these outside events can give us feelings. For example:

Someone says that they love you, and you allow yourself to feel loved.

You make a mistake, and you allow yourself to feel incompetent.

You get a pay raise, and you allow yourself to feel successful.

You exercise, eat certain foods or take certain supplements, and you allow yourself to feel healthy.

You eat or drink certain other substances, and you allow yourself to feel bad.

Someone says something nasty to you, and you allow yourself to feel hurt.

You say something nasty to someone, and you allow yourself to feel like a bad person.

Someone you’re attracted to says that you’re gorgeous, and you allow yourself to feel beautiful.

You’re kind to someone, and you allow yourself to feel like a good person.

You receive an influx of cash, and you allow yourself to feel rich.

You get robbed, and you allow yourself to feel vulnerable.

In reality, your ability to feel anything is not dependent on any situation. You simply use those situations as triggers to induce the feeling.

The reason that each of these situations above is an example of superstition is that most people believe (read: I have believed) that the situation is causing the feeling. And yet, another person can’t make you feel anything, neither can a situation or an object because these things don’t control your feelings. You do. You’re the only one who can induce a feeling within you. You determine the triggers. Individuals have the power to induce any feeling at any time based on anything. That’s pretty amazing if you think about it.

Most people believe that it’s the situation or other individual that’s causing the feeling that they’re feeling because we’ve set up cultural norms for when it’s appropriate or inappropriate to feel a particular thing, and over time we’ve grown accustomed to viewing the situation as the cause instead of the individual who is creating the feeling. It’s an automatic response.

In a simple example, you’re not allowed to love your spouse in the same way that you have in the past when your spouse decides to leave you for someone else. That would be breaking the cultural norm that says that his or her behavior is a reflection on you. The appropriate response in cultural terms is to feel bad, and to stop loving him or her. Of course, this is tremendously limiting, and unhelpful to boot.

Underlying many automatic responses is the idea that you can add or subtract from yourself, and this forms the basis for the idea that things outside ourselves can give to us or take away from us. But really, you can’t add or subtract from yourself. What you’re actually doing when you think something is happening to you is inducing a feeling based on your associations. Most people do this automatically based on cultural norms. I think it’s time to learn to induce feelings in new ways, so I came up with this analogy to help myself out.

The Rock Analogy

We would, most of us, find it ridiculous if you placed a rock next to someone who was sitting at a table and that person was now supposed to feel good about his or her self simply because the rock was there. Or, if you want, you could use the opposite example, that it would be ridiculous if a person was supposed to feel good about his or her self if you removed the rock that was next to him or her. In either case, the rock bears no relation to the validity of the individual, so it would have no impact on how the individual felt about his or her self. The individual is neither better off as a being with the rock or without the rock sitting next to him or her. We’re not taught that good people have rocks next to them (or don’t have rocks next to them), or that well-being is dependent on a rock, so no-one is likely to feel one way or the other about his or her self when a rock is present or missing.

Replace the rock with a loved one or money or ownership or an ability or knowledge or health or companionship or beauty or understanding or a certain behavior or whatnot and we would say that it was an entirely different situation. And yet it’s not a different situation. It’s the same situation; we’re just not accustomed to viewing it that way.

Your value as a being has nothing to do with whether any particular thing is present or missing from your experience. To say otherwise is to indulge in superstition because you believe that something has power that does not have power. To cut to the chase, you have the ability to induce any feeling based on anything or nothing. In an act of enormous creativity, you can create new triggers for the way you feel. You can say that you’re going to create the feeling of total elation every time you eat breakfast. Or you can create the feeling of humor every time someone makes a comment about the news. Or you can get to the center of it all and create the feeling of pure joy for no reason at all and no matter what anyone says or does and in the face of all circumstances and events. The only reason that you may feel resistance to these types of ideas is that they’re unfamiliar, but they’re certainly options, and that’s the point.

A feeling is totally independent of circumstances. It really is. For example, you can look like hell and still feel beautiful because the feeling of beauty is not dependent on any particular form. It may not be a familiar action to divorce the feeling from the circumstances around you, but it can be done nonetheless.

Viewing yourself as less worthy when someone you respect doesn’t believe in you, for example, and then feeling bad is a conditioned response, and a pretty common one. Your behavior is no different than Pavlov’s dog. The same goes for saying that you have to have a particular body or looks or relationship or financial state for you to feel good about yourself. This is not the case. It’s the response you’ve conditioned yourself into for various reasons. That’s fine at first, to acclimatize yourself to the culture you live in, but it will only get you so far if you’re seeking satisfaction. When you want more than culture is dishing out, you have to learn to think independently. You have to train yourself into new responses.

You have the ability to say that you’ll feel good about yourself no matter what anyone says or does or thinks, no matter what the evaluation from others on your character, appearance, aptitude or a myriad of other things that we normally say have to be in alignment before we feel good about ourselves. You can condition yourself to set the feeling without reference to anything outside of yourself. In other words, you can say that the rock doesn’t matter. Whether it’s present or not is no reflection on your state of mind.

You have total control over how you feel, and you can use that power deliberately. When you do that, you’re no longer acting from superstition, and I think that’s a wonderful place to be. When you’re no longer re-acting, you’re putting power back in its rightful seat—you. And that’s a state that I’m going to arrive at sooner or later, even if I have to interrupt my behavior two hundred times a day to get there. Even if it takes decades of practice.

However, my suspicion is that setting the intent is all that’s required. The rest unfolds one notion at a time.