Wednesday, September 25, 2024
8:40 a.m. Somehow the telephone thing is a sort of last straw. I cannot imagine it actually resolving, though I will go to Comcast in person in an hour or two to try again, which quite possibly will result in it getting fixed.
But there are too many unnamed unlisted things that spell doom. I do not feel like the soul, merely the avatar, and not a very powerful or autonomous avatar, at that. It is as if all I can really do is talk via ILC to whoever it is I do talk to. I have a feeling that depression instead of explosion is how I am being affected by all this upset. Depression and a feeling of helplessness and isolation and wrong-paths-chosen. (Lungs let up recently, though.)
Oh God, what am I going to do?
Just continue being you, refining away any part of “you” that you’d rather not play.
Is that even possible?
Isn’t it choosing? You are not being driven into explosion, mostly because you brought that under your conscious control.
I could do the same with depression?
Do you have any reason to think you couldn’t? It is a matter of reinterpreting a mood, into seeing it as a mood rather than reality. And you have been doing that for a while now.
Viktor Frankl again.
You recognizing that it is the key is itself a key for you. Frankl’s external life didn’t change as a result of the decision, but it did change and as it changed, his changed-resolve (call it) led him to make choices in a continuous direction, restoring and preserving his sense of being not a helpless chip floating in eddies but, say, a passenger observing the voyage. Still not under his conscious control, but his attitude toward whatever came at him altered the experience and what he could get out of it. It is not control that is the point here, but input.
I searched and searched for that final word. “Input” isn’t right, but I had to end the sentence somehow. What is the right word?
As usual, when we get stuck, we need only step around the obstacle and continue.
That’s what I’m doing, giving you a chance to step around.
We’re making a point for others who may encounter the same problem. When you can’t find the word or the concept, start again a few words or sentences back, and see what comes.
We’ve told people that before.
Repetition, remember.
The point about Frankl’s approach was that life – his life, your life, anyone’s life – is not about you controlling it, it is about you getting what you can from it. Absorbing experience, drawing conclusions, changing your mind if it seems called for. If you think you should be controlling what happens to you, and that greater mastership will result in greater control, well, that is one possible path. That is the lure that tempts people into white – and often enough into black – magic. But it also leads easily to depression or disbelief or despair, or all three.
If instead you concentrate on absorbing what happens to you – letting life drive, so to speak – you are concentrating not on manipulating the outer world, but on shaping and reshaping your inner world.
And look carefully at that! That amounts to saying, you in paying attention to the inner world, so called (the you-ness rather than the world-ness, other-ness) are taking the more direct route, though we know it will sound backwards.
No, I understand what you mean. If the outer world as we experience it is for all practical purposes our unknown self, our shadow, then in concentrating on externals we are trying to manipulate the reflection in hope of the reflection changing the original. But if we stay focused on the original, and see the external as the reflection that it is, we can know what it is telling us we need to (or anyway have the opportunity to) address.
We don’t know how many people will be able to follow what you just said in the way you said it, but yes, that’s the idea. All paths are good, remember, but in practice one or another particular path will be good for you. Your construction as avatar will have made you in such a way that you will naturally prefer this or that as more natural to you. (And some will choose what is less natural to them, they seeking the challenge.) So for some, close engagement with the outer world as reality; for others, engagement as symbol. Whichever you choose, you may do well or badly, efficiently or not, consistently or not. But any path per se offers opportunities.
Well, I don’t know if it is the content of your talk or the experience itself, but I do feel better. Soldiering on is something I can do.
But you don’t have to be quite so grim about it. Life also contains coffee and chocolate, you know.
Smiling. Thanks.
(you’re receiving the wall of text below because I’ve read several of your books, plus your blog on and off for years, and seeing your comments re: depression/helplessness/isolation made me want to reach out ASAP)
Frank,
I learned recently (well, it *clicked* recently) that I don’t have the suffer the way I have my entire life. For me it has been a life of extreme frustration punctuated by depressive periods – not to mention enough alienation for a small village.
Please look into “The Three Principles” teachings post-haste. I’ll explain it below, but there are only a gazillion videos on Youtube about it, and many books as well. I can make specific recommendations if you’d rather not wade through them.
It’s incredibly simple to convey, some people can learn it in a few minutes, others might take longer (days perhaps, with an in-person explainer). It actually took me a few years, on and off, because I was bringing way too much preconceived baggage to the table, which was preventing me from SEEING it in its utter simplicity.
It’s not even a technique per se, it’s simply an understanding which automatically changes our relationship to our thinking-and-feelings, much as you don’t need learned skills to remove your hand from a hot stove.
OK, enough prologue. Are you ready???
ALL FEELINGS COME ONLY FROM OUR OWN THINKING, IN THIS MOMENT. If we are feeling bad, it’s purely as a side effect of our engagement with our own thinking, NOW. There has never been any other source. It’s not possible to have a direct feeling about any outside circumstance in life, EVER.
There’s nothing you need to DO about this (hence no technique). Merely to understand, “Oh, that’s where the pain is actually coming from. Not from the situation about which I’m thinking.” It’s not the content of our thinking, it’s THAT we are thinking, the very fact of our thinking.
Situations, circumstances, people, alleged “causes” don’t have one little tiny bit to do with how we feel – EVER. Feelings are simply the inseparable flavor of certain thoughts. Angry thoughts, angry feelings. Sad thoughts, sad feelings – etc.
But there’s nothing to DO about it!! Once you understand how this works, you don’t need to make ANY EFFORT WHATSOEVER to modify your thinking. This is not a “positive thinking” psychology – nothing of the sort. You don’t make any attempt to analyze or dissect or improve thinking – that’s just more thinking! And it will only exacerbate whatever bad feelings are already present.
The moment you really grasp WHY you feel bad (and it’s never the thing you are thinking about, merely THE FACT of your thinking itself), suddenly feelings aren’t a problem anymore. You can be momentarily upset and let go of it orders of a magnitude more quickly, because “oh, it’s just my upset thinking making me feel this way.” There’s no reason to resist any bad feeling when we can understand that, by not “diving in” with yet more thinking, it will soon evaporate on its own, like a fart in a hallway. Do we stop to fight with it, or keep walking?
Like many people, when I originally encountered this, it seemed trivial and kind of insulting. “Well OF COURSE my thinking affects how I feel. But I don’t know how to change it.” Ah, but I didn’t really understand. I was looking for some magic way to reinterpret life events, to “reframe” things to have different/better/more constructive thinking. I thought that maybe my perceptions and reactions were distorted, out of wack, self-sabotaging, whatever. I believed I needed some way to “fix” myself internally, so that I could think clearly.
But my very thinking was the origin of all bad feelings to begin with! And since I didn’t know that, I was just putting fuel on the fire, amplifying feelings, or branching out into even more feelings (eg frustration turning into extreme depression, as I indulged thoughts of powerlessness)
A major part of this teaching is that we are all 100% innately mentally healthy, forever – it’s only ever clouded over by our momentary thinking-feelings. And we have a habit of turning fledgling thought-feeling clouds into massive hurricanes, by pouring more thinking onto them. We can become so enveloped by an endless chain of thinking-feeling-thinking-feeling that we become chronically disturbed, seemingly hopelessly mentally ill. But it can all drop away in a very short time as soon as we understand the actual mechanism involved.
Another thing to understand, is that thinking is always ongoing, and largely out of our control. There’s no stopping it, only the freedom to take it seriously or not. It’s like our mind is presenting us options to choose from. “Hey, do you want more of this? Yes or no?” If we engage (take seriously) a given thought, the next thoughts will be along that same line, bringing with them all the corresponding feelings. Conversely, thoughts not taken seriously will appear less and less frequently.
And extreme bad feelings, like those bumps on the side of the highway, are an indicator to let us know we’ve been asleep at the wheel and are engaging a bunch of negative thinking without realizing it.
(Now I’m going to email this to Charles, because I had brought this up to him back when my understanding of it was still dim and secondhand)
Hope this helps!
cheers,
-d
PS. For your breathing issues, have you ever looked into Christian Science? Could be worth a shot – not advocating you subscribe to their beliefs wholesale, but maybe seeing a “practitioner”. Worst case you’re out $60 or whatever. Robert Anton Wilson wrote that they managed to cure him of an allergy, and it seems they have the occasional success with outsiders for whom conventional medicine has no cures.
Thanks. This deserves a much longer reply than I have time and energy to provide. I have been surprised to see that people interpret my discussion of depression as some kind of crisis. Things are not that bad, I promise! 🙂 What i got in the discussion did in fact change where I was.
To me the crucial insight is that emotions are an interface between what we know of ourselves and what we don’t. Once we see them not as good or bad, nor even merely as painful or pleasant, but as indicators, many things change. I am glad your way worked for you, and I thank you for it (also on behalf of anyone who might read your comment and find in it something they need and had not found elsewhere). I don’t actually agree with the premises as you have sketched them, but that may be my misunderstanding, or may be that we are on different, if perhaps parallel, paths.
(the preview on my other comment isn’t showing line breaks – if that’s how it renders after approval, let me know and I can re-send it as an email or something)
As you can see, it came across fine. Thanks again.