4a Unimpressed - Blame, Fear & Choice

Part I, Chapter 4. BUT WE ARE NOT IMPRESSED.  (4)

This chapter has 2 sections labeled

Blame 4A, Fear 4B and Choice 4C,

Suffering and Pain 4D and Death 4E.

Introduction to Chapter 4.

This chapter deals with the difficult topics of Life, and how we get caught up in them, leaving us very unimpressed by Life.

We argue that because we have to put up with all this shite, Life is a monumental pain in the arse, (and so is God).

I am arguing that you are in this shite because you don’t know why you’re here, and our spirit-based mainstream religions (SBR, see above) don’t know either, and therefore do not know how to turn this shite into fertilizer, ie, use it to help yourself grow.

We don't believe in the unconscious, much less that it rules the show.

So what follows are the main ways we get it wrong because we refuse to consider ourselves as 2 people and remain split. Thus these topics contribute to this split.

The first topic is Blame.

BLAME. (4A)

JUDGEMENT AND EXPECTATIONS. (4A1)

Judgement and expectation are some of what I mean when I talk about ‘useless thinking or concepts about life’.

The axiom “no judgement and no expectations” basically sums it up here as a method for finding a better life for yourself.

But, another version of this could be, ‘If everything ‘out there’ has to be OK before you are happy, you’ve got a problem’.

Our society has judgement, blame and victim so built in to it that it is hard to see anything differently at all. Much of this ‘judgement’ comes ‘built-in’ with our single-life religious teachings which are absolutely based on external authority (Power & Control (P&C)) and the judgement of whether we are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, with the consequence that we spend our whole lives deciding whether things are good or bad. But ‘nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so’. Shakespeare said it, and lots of other people say it, and it is part of some non-Western teachings.

It may be hard for us to believe, but God is not judging us. In God’s eyes we’re doing normal human being (= bumble, bumble, fart and stumble). This is not to say that there are no consequences to our actions because we are still learning about the rules of Energy. I discuss this in Mirror Laws, which see. Much of what Jesus was implying in the word ‘father’ which is so different today is that God knows that we are children learning about life. We fall down and we pick ourselves up again. “There is no failure, only feedback.”

We judge so much and we are so afraid, so what are we actually doing here?

When we judge, we are actually turning our awareness to the external world, (this is where we are taught from), and we are thinking that we know what good or bad would be.

We are forever turning our awareness to, and focusing on the external world. Our society rarely considers the internal world, but introverts are more aware of it than extroverts.

When we look ‘outside’ to the external world and engage in comparing and contrasting, we’re actually trying to encompass too much and we can’t. It’s too much for us and we can’t comprehend. We try, but we’re like a frog blowing itself up to make itself look bigger and it’s all air, as in, nothing inside, and in so doing we lose sight of our InSelf.

Judging, ie, Thinking we Know What ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ Would Be. (4A1a)

The trouble is, we don’t; we really don’t. Turning our awareness to the external world and making decisions about it in the absence of actually knowing the future or the longer term effects of whatever, simply dis-empowers us. God doesn’t really know how things are actually going to work out, and neither do we.

This sounds perfectly blasphemous etc, etc, but as I wrote above, God is using the laws of Energy and knows how they work and She trusts that it will work out eventually while we find out on the way; we are being given the time to ‘sort it out’ ourselves. She also knows how our minds function, because we’re bits of her, and She has actually tried to warn us about it in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden (see addendum). ‘Thinking you know’ = ‘eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (=judging)’.

We think we know ‘how the world should be towards me’ and get very upset when it won’t do what we want, and thus we want it to change to suit us. This is called ‘control’ which is actually the opposite of trust.

Thinking you know is your making of a decision about ‘out there’. You are judging Life (as the ‘out there’ or ‘the other’).

However, as we judge out there so we are judging ‘in here’; unconsciously of course, but we’re still doing it. It’s a comparison.

If it’s about the other, then the worse we think they are, the harder it is for us to access the parts of our inner selves that are like that. A current wonderful example would be the general opinion of Muslim terrorists; before that it was 'Reds under the beds'.

We feel guilt and shame about our ‘bad’ bits and congratulate ourselves and feel superior about our ‘good’ bits. But it leaves us worrying about ‘not good enough’ (NGE), and trying harder to pride ourselves as well as deny the NGE’s.

If it’s an event, then we want the supposed ‘good’ by whatever criteria we use and become frightened of the ‘bad’ as potential to happen to us. Insurance ads reinforce this all the time; ‘you’ll get sick, have an accident, etc’.

The upshot of this is fear of what could happen to us and the inability to trust life at all.

This is not to say there is no need to be careful as well as to take out insurance (’in God we trust, but keep your powder dry’) but that it’s actually your judging that makes you feel unsafe and afraid of life, ie fear. Thus, the more you can withdraw any form of judgement about life whatsoever, the safer and actually ‘good enough’ you will come to feel, which translates as a ‘trust’ in life.

Expectation. (4A1b)

Expectation is similar. This is when we are expecting ‘out there’ to conform with our concepts of how things ‘should be’. The ‘should’ is the giveaway. Once again this is a ‘thinking we know’ when we don’t, but this time we cannot be grateful. We feel entitled. (The age of entitlement rather than enlightenment.) If we get what we want we take it for granted, and if we don’t we winge. We want to take all the time.

We want out there to be how we think it should be and get very cross/angry/sad when it’s not, as in, we have a whopping snit when Life doesn’t ‘play ball’ and get even crosser when others appear to get ‘good’ things when we don’t.

This is the ‘child’ expecting to take or be given whatever it wants from Life and having a whopping tantrum when it cannot.

They (judgement and expectation) are about your decisions about life out there and thinking you know about what is external to you. You don’t.

Both are a refusal to allow Life to serve you and an attempt at domination on your part and thus, no submission. [Have I said this before?] Life is more powerful than you, but it is there to serve and guide you.

Refusing to allow Life to serve you leads to a waste of your life (’refuse’ is an interesting word) and an inability to love your InSelf.

They are also the basic cause of the ‘Internal Dialogue’, which is that racket/noise in your head that you are so used to that never goes away. This racket is disempowering in many ways, and we also try many things to cover it up or drown it out. ‘Stopping the Internal Dialogue’ is a Toltec goal that is very empowering. I will discuss it in the goal-setting chapter.

An Eastern ‘cure’ (read ‘discipline’) for judging is ‘how am I that?’ (whatever I am judging).

BLAME. (4A2)

Blame, whether of others or self is the next step along from judgement and expectation.

Blame is basically sending out anger (an ‘attack thought’) to someone or something, either out there or to our InSelf which is just as bad. We would like to attack and would if we could which means that ‘the other’ is not safe from you.

If the other is not safe from you, you are not safe from you, as in, your InSelf is not safe from your outself (MLs).

Safety is a primary issue for all life on earth. (See also chapter 7a.)

Blame stops any relationship in its tracks, and leaves us alone (and still angry/afraid).

Your fear is being expressed as anger toward another, ‘Fate/God’ and your InSelf (all of which are ‘the other’). But it leaves you the victim and powerless, in pain and suffering, and alienated from Life.

In blame, we are angry and afraid because we wanted something and think we cannot have it. We can blame externally or internally but that is the same thing in reality because the effect on your body is the same. Your anger and fear tighten the body and will bring you discomfort and pain if it continues to continue. The greater the tightness, the greater the pain. It is peace, joy and happiness that relax the body.

Depression is a way to stop any feeling because internally there is the perception that we can’t do anything about our wants, but the tightness remains.

[In general, those who blame themselves are likely to have been ‘bopped’ or punished in some manner in one or more previous lives, by receiving rather more aggression from (an)other(s) than they were sending out themselves. But, it’s still a blaming.]

The Victim and the Bully. (4A2a)

Our powerlessness and ‘victim’ leave us feeling trapped, which means we cannot explore and like a caged tiger we tend to pace out the same path. Feeling trapped leads to rage. (GRANDIN quoting PANKSEPP.) We also get terribly bored. “If we do what we’ve always done, we will get what we’ve always got”. Our terribly clever society deals with this by giving out anti-depressants which is a bit like giving a captive tiger pills to make it lie down and stop pacing in its small cage. Then we can say, there’s no problem - enjoy your cage.

Our main ‘answer’ to boredom is to look for stimulation, which our world can provide in spades if the ‘racket’ of opinions, noise, entertainment, drugs of all kinds, and all forms of the media is sufficient to distract us, not to mention occupying yourself chasing P&C (see Part 2) in whatever form is available to you. The trouble here is that this can lead to overwhelm, and is basically like telling the tiger to be happy because its cage is now full of toys, not to mention a radio/TV blasting away, as in, ‘interesting/stimulating’ things for its mind. It's a pity about its body and its need to explore and to be a tiger, but there you go.

Victims want pity because of the powerlessness and self-pity and can be very angry (not necessarily consciously) when they don’t get it. (Remember, feeling trapped makes us enraged.) This anger can turn them into a bully if/when they can be, especially to someone weaker or smaller eg, women or children. It is axiomatic that the victim and the bully are two ends of a single continuum, as in, both of them will be there in the one person, again, unconsciously. To repeat, in the adult, where there is victim, there will be a bully, and vice versa. Being bullied/ab-used as a child sets up the pattern for the adult who will present as a bully or a victim, but the other side will be there in the unconscious. (We sure don’t like this bit!)

The Difference Between Wanting and Having. (4A2b)

The general social myth is that you can have all that you want if you work hard enough, try hard enough etc, etc, and that happiness is found ‘out there’, and boy, do we keep trying if we can and too bad if we can’t! We are so far away from considering ‘in here’ that it may as well not exist; and thus it feels as if there is no other place to look except ‘out there’, so that is where we focus for everything that we want.

But this is a ‘wanting’ on our part because we don’t, or think we don’t, have it/whatever. But since life ‘out there’ is reflecting who is ‘in here’ (= unconscious/InSelf) whatever you want stays a ‘want’. We continue to search out there and try to force life to conform to our wishes. This is actually an attempt at domination on our part; we try to use power and control and connive and contrive and take, take, take as much as we possibly can for ourselves. This is our great picture of the ‘successful’ person, and some of us do ‘succeed’ in this life, but you may or may not have noticed that they are still ‘wanting’.

What’s really happening is the absolute fact of energy which is that you will never perceive yourself as having what you want unless you can give it to yourself, ie your InSelf = your internal ‘other’; your ‘in here’.

Turning your focus of attention away from the external to ask your ‘in here’ what it is that is really wanted by your InSelf is the submission, the ‘giving up’ trying to control the external to your tune.

This ‘taking responsibility’ for yourself is you working out how you can give your InSelf the internal State of having what you want. This, of course involves working out what these wishes are, and to do this you go inside and ask. (see Goal Setting) [And sometimes you have to ask quite nicely and repeatedly if you have been neglecting or bashing up your InSelf over the years.]

States belong in our physiology, ie, the body with its emotions (the soul), which are part of the InSelf, and thus it is the body that knows what we really want. Thus we have to go and ask it before we can get anywhere really. As I may have intimated above, this process requires your Time and Interest, Sustain and Protect (TISP), and it takes time to learn how to do that, but essentially what I am saying is that it can be done.

Learning how to give TISP to InSelf is how we get to Adult and full self-sufficiency and autonomy. Successfully giving TISP means being able to feed the emotional self which leaves us feeling ‘fed’ and ‘full’ ie, ‘fulfilled’.

This is how you become powerful for yourself.

If you cannot find a way to love your InSelf, ie, ’the other’ (=GLS), you will not be able to grow, and will run from life because you cannot face it.

The interesting thing to me is that if we understood the bible story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden properly (see Addendum) we would be able to see that God tries to warn us not to judge (eat of the Tree) and especially not to blame because the outcome is pain felt by the body, and disconnection/alienation from the other and Life and the Garden of Eden. We insist on refusing to look at this story correctly and want to go on and on blaming when things don’t go our way. Is this having a tantrum or is this having a tantrum?

Taking Responsibility. (4A2c)

Thus my definition of ‘taking responsibility’ is the opposite of blame, and its effects are the opposite of blame as well because doing so empowers you.

However, to some blamers, the concept of ‘taking responsibility’ simply means blaming themselves which instantly leads to guilt/shame which feels much worse than anger or fear, and that person will simply run. This form of ‘taking responsibility’ is still a type of blame and is disempowering; ‘in spades’ really. This form is not what this UUS is advocating.

What about forgiveness? (4A2d)

Forgiveness may help us feel like a ‘nice’ person but it still implies blame. The idea is to stop blame in the first place, then what’s to forgive? (lot’s more below) [PS. Eve doesn’t really want Adam to forgive her; she wants him to grow up and stop blaming her in the 1st place.]

What about Karma? (4A2e)

In the Western world, we are using the word ‘Karma’ as a word for fate which implies no choice. However, much of our ‘karma’ is actually our own useless thinking, as in, concepts that don’t get us to TISP.

In sum.

Judgement and blame are an enormous part of our social legacy and we just don’t question them unless we are trying to learn to be more conscious.

Our fears about safety and wanting to get back to heaven are absolutely played upon by our current religions (and other institutions). Their teachings of the reasons for life are based upon maintaining P&C and keeping you as a child and staying fearful and thus more easily controlled, and we don’t like that either actually, so we get stuck.

This UUS has to address these fears, (which is why I ‘bang on’ a bit); as well as how to overcome them, which see below, but there has to be a reason to do so, else, why bother?

If you cannot find a way to love your InSelf, you will not be able to grow, and will run from life because you cannot face it. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ = love your InSelf first. Your InSelf is ‘the other’. Loving (giving TISP) your InSelf properly will lead to loving others, but InSelf has to be first.

FEAR. (4B)

Fear makes us shrink. (4B1)

Fear makes us shrink; it makes us little and keeps us trapped in our own concepts. Facing our fears (one by one) helps us grow and become bigger and thus increasingly able to face life as we go on. To ‘address’ life means we have to face it, as in, look at it, and begin a relationship with it. This is how we begin a relationship with anyone or anything. You cannot ‘know’ anyone if you refuse to have a relationship with them in the first place.

And it stops us thinking. (4B2)

And it stops us thinking; we can’t think when we’re running. Our bodies are built to get the blood to the muscles when we need to scram; this blood is then not available to the brain under duress. We need to think if we want to reduce our fear of life, but fear is stopping us thinking; a very big cleft stick, and we get stuck. As we get stuck, we get bored and depressed and more afraid, and so on.

But, it’s useful too.

We do need to be careful; lots of things are dangerous. As human beings as an animal, it is terribly easy to get hurt or killed. We have ‘gut feelings’ that can warn us of potential danger if we allow that.

Many men pride themselves on ‘no fear’, but I consider it wise to learn for one’s self what to avoid and choose a different tack.

Fear and the inability to face life and getting stuck are primary reasons for misery and suffering. The question of suffering has stumped many experts so I can be free to have a crack at this too.

The problem is the huge amount of suffering on earth and we find it very difficult to believe that …

1.       Anyone who loved us would ‘drop us in it’, or, even more difficult to believe..

2.       That anyone would choose to suffer.

So, which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Choice or Suffering?

I’ll choose choice first.

CHOICE.  (4B)

The whole of this UUS is predicated on choice. You can choose to believe it or not. The person affected by this understanding is you. Your life is affected by your decisions and realizations/understandings. So, what’s the difference whether choice or not?

IFF (= if and only if) your whole life is your choice in line with the Universe for your highest good (and others, incidentally), then, your attitude to your life changes completely to considering using the events in your life and your reactions to them as information for you, your Self, personally, about your InSelf whom you don’t know about.

These events and your reactions to them can be used, and I will outline below how to use them. See Treasure Tool chapter.

But it is your attitude that is the key.

However hard the circumstances can be, and hard can be hard, it is possible to change your attitude to one of ‘what do I need to know/See/understand about my InSelf here?’ and that allows us to take responsibility knowing that the outer world reflects our inner world. This attitude actually requires a kind of submission on your part, whereby you are accepting and allowing the actuality of Life out there to inform you about the Self inside you. So, there’s a strange irony here; in normal life we are told that we should be directing our lives in a purposeful fashion and so on, yet all spiritual teachings try to coach people to submit to life, which can feel ‘powerless’ on your part. Yet the effect is the opposite.

Taking Responsibility. (4C1a)

Taking responsibility empowers us. Considering that we may be at choice is the first step in the process. That is why some people say, ‘how have you chosen this?’, which to normal victims can sound perfectly awful. It is not a blaming, or a ‘fend for yourself’; it is the first question in a series of questions whereby you arrive at your own insights about your Self. Your insights help you to grow. Every time you encompass more experiences and events for your own insights, you expand/grow and are able to assimilate and face more of life’s experiences. The opposite is to blame others and be a victim and to become fearful of life, which will shrink you and make you ever more fearful or angry and so on. Blame dis-empowers you – always; however ‘easier’ or ‘more fun’ it seems to be. Taking responsibility empowers you.

It is much easier to take responsibility if you are able to consider the concept that at some level you have chosen whatever these circumstances may be that you have just dropped yourself in once again. (Grammar???)

Apart from that, there is no point whatsoever is coercing or forcing people to do whatever. Love has to give choice, otherwise it is not love.

It is also true that the less conscious you are about your own inner workings the less you will feel at choice in your life. One of the many advantages of becoming conscious is the increased feeling of choice in your world.

If you can come at choice in this and thus able to submit to the information that life can give you; you can use Mirror Laws with the Treasure Tool to find out what that usefulness might be, which see below.

Two other useful concepts and their attendant attitudes are ‘Nothing is an accident’ and ‘Most Beneficial Outcome (MBO)’. They do slightly different things.

Nothing is an accident. (4C1b)

This is quite a concept and a very strong/forceful one in terms of confronting you with Life’s (and your InSelf’s) effort to Serve you. Accepting it helps you focus on what you are judging, and facing it in terms of making any particular event/thing/matter more defined by you. Not easy, but useful. It is hardly generally socially acceptable, because most people consider it a form of blame.

Most Beneficial Outcome (MBO). (4C1c)

This one is ‘softer’ and it’s a way of reminding you that things can and do turn out well (eventually). It helps you relax and stop worrying which leads to a better outcome anyway, as well as helping you learn to trust that anything that happens to you can be useful for you. It is thus great for helping build trust in GLS.

In Sum.

This UUS provides spiritual/’inSpiritive’/motivational support as a reason and method (see below) for facing one’s own problems in the physical, mental and emotional domains of life. It’s a useful way to support one’s self in finding meaning in life and learn how to live it in a ‘proper’ manner, i.e. ‘right living’ for you. ‘Right living’ means living in a manner that is ‘right’ for you; not anyone else’s definition.

(NB. ‘Righteous’ as used in the Bible means proper or correct or right, as in ‘right living’; it has nothing to do with ‘self-righteousness’, which = I am right. My understanding of Job’s complaints is that he mixed them up.)

Now we turn to Suffering.