In therapy today, a cop character appeared, with the expression, “Move along. Nothing to see here.”

Whenever this is said in the movies, there is almost certainly something to be seen! The implications of this are two-fold:

• There is something grisly to behold and the cop is protecting innocent civilians from having to witness the horror; or
• More than likely there is something extremely important going on that citizens ought to know about but the cop, in his corruption, is engaging in a coverup.

Tonight, in discussing my thoughts and feelings about therapy today, the familiar thoughtfeeling of isolation arose. The fact that it arose within me triggered a red flag and I began to explore it in the context of therapy.

Three major fables came to mind:

• The black sheep (whose fleece is prized [this part I added but it makes sense])
• The ugly duckling (who grows into a swan)
• Cinderella (who is married by the prince)

The cop was hiding the meaning behind these fables as well as the grisly remains of the attack that brought the meaning of these fables into being, so even in the Mecosystem, he serves that dual purpose mentioned above (though I would not use the term “corruption” here in the same sense as above, but in the sense that this part is corrupted from whatever his primary purpose might be).

To me, the meaning of these fables is as such:

• You are specially hideous.
• You are deserving of abuse.
• You have or can produce great value or beauty.
• One day you will realize that through no effort of your own.

Of course, these fables are total mind-fucks. An abuser that praises you for your potential is merely setting you up so he or she can abuse you again.

Furthermore, the beauty–if it is even true–is not guaranteed.

Also, the fable instructs that you are the only one in the entire universe who is cast in this way. This is simply not true given the resonance that these fables have among people.

Finally, one of the major lessons of the fable is that good can come out of abuse, which is a blindness wrought by ignoring the awful costs.

So whenever I think about isolation, I tend to think externally… but tonight I gained a new perspective on this: it is not possible for me to not feel isolated socially if I am currently feeling isolated internally. I have certainly experienced isolation internally, whether it be a single voice or simply a feeling of a void or an emptiness.

In truth, the multiplicity has always been there but I’ve rarely–if ever–been conscious of it until relatively recently.

It was this that the cop was hiding–the grisly remains of the attack, but also the truth behind them–the “specialness” was a lie constructed to keep me isolated and alone, even within myself.

There may be more to be shown and explored but I thought I would share this much with you.

Ciao!

I received a comment on Facebook regarding You Are Not Google’s Customer that I thought was quite insightful, and so I thought I would share it here:

I agree to your point about the customer. But the other side is missing too much for my taste: Google is only attractive to advertisers if it pleases a lot of people – and if they are outraged about their privacy, it will have an effect in their desired direction. Most of the time this will not be the conscious rationale, because people are not self-knowledgeable to this degree. And that is certainly most important: If you get worked up on something, find out what it is really. It is most often not what you first think it is.

My reply:

I did think about Google’s actions pissing off their advertiser’s targets, but opted to not mention it because I was mostly speaking to the people who (to the best of my knowledge) were experiencing rage “second-hand”.

My opinion about target audience attractiveness is that I don’t believe that Google Buzz will turn enough people off to Google for it to make a difference. In fact, it will tend to weed out people who weren’t very good targets for the kinds of advertisers that Google wants to attract.

I would put forward that Google made this calculation prior to releasing Buzz. The reason I believe this is because Google did not immediately retract Buzz when news of trauma victims came out, which was pretty much immediately after it was released.

The recent SNAFU from Google has caught a lot of people off-guard, at the very least. Several people have expressed a great deal of rage over the fact that their privacy, which they believed to be safe, was obliterated by Buzz.

In witnessing the very strong emotions that were circling Buzz, I found it difficult to feel the same way. It’s certainly not the case that I have difficulty feeling anger (or even rage), but something about it all seemed “off” to me.

I could understand individuals who were reconnected with dangerous people from their past feeling a great deal of anger–or even rage–but I could not quite understand the level of anger from people who were not affected as directly.

After thinking about this for a couple days, I came across an idea that made a lot of sense, and I would be open to feedback around it as well.

You are not Google’s customer

Google is primarily a deliverer of advertisements (to the tune of 97% of their revenue).

You, as a gmail user, are the target of those advertisements… but you are not the customer.

Google does not have to please you–they have to please the people who pay them money.

There is no reason that this wouldn’t occur to the vast majority of people as we live in a society where “free” is all too often not to be questioned.

However, as we can see, with Google Buzz… “free” in terms of dollars and cents does not mean there is no cost.

I’m not saying it’s evil or wrong to use Google, or even that what they’re doing is evil or wrong. However, I think it’s important–especially those of us who strive for self-awareness–to be empirical and rational, as much as we can.

If you opt to use a service that isn’t charging you any money, then you very likely have little to no guarantee as to your privacy. Email is certainly valuable, and that service is providing that value in order to get something out of you.

Knowing what that something is will help you make an informed decision as to whether you ought to be using it.

Using Google’s services is completely voluntary. There is nobody holding a gun to your head, requiring you to use their email, or online applications, or web browser. However, just be aware that these things are presently for the benefit of Google’s advertisers, not yours.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with that–it’s just a fact to keep in mind as you walk through life.

I had a double session at therapy today, and while I don’t really want to talk about everything that went on in the session, I can say that the 2-hour period of time was intense and fruitful!

I’m starting to get a sense of what parts compose me and the personalities therein. It’s still very difficult and I completely dissociated at least once during the session, but there is a character that I’ve met before, but only via a metaphorical visualization.

The metaphor was that of a wintry earth, lifeless on the surface, but containing underground denizens… and a core that was powerful and alive but not warming the planet.

Today I got to see this core, this powerful, central force. His feet are encased in cement, his wrists are bound with chains, and he has a large hook through his stomach.

How powerful must this character be to be so brutally bound?!

When the therapist would ask this part whether we could loose the chains, it would reply, “Take your time.” It did this several times until we both understood that it wanted me to make the decision… and I can only make that decision if people in the mecosystem are on board.

There’s definitely a part of me that wants to let this power, this central force and source of life and vitality, free! And I don’t get the sense from this power that he would destroy my life or run rampant, though that is certainly a fear that some of my parts have for sure.

This character/power is truly like magma or mantle in so many ways… he is a tremendously powerful source of energy… he creates mountains and landscapes… he erupts a volcano which initially destroys but enriches the area for new growth… he is tectonic; he is just about the most powerful thing on this planet.

There are also some deeply unconscious metaphors that resonate with this character, such as the hook in the stomach–a fish that swallows a hook will get it lodged in his belly and will be trapped–the hook will always be there for others to yank on. The power, the movement, the solidity of this character also evokes images of deep sea, large creatures, ages old…

The reason it was chained and bound and gutted is because the power it can wield was very dangerous to parents such as mine. Imagine all of the power represented by the earth’s core, and what shallow, reactionary, anxiety-managing machines such as my parents would do in the face of the full brunt of it?

I do not yet believe that this creature is loosed, but I do believe it will be loosed soon… and when it is… watch the fuck out.

I’ve been trying to answer this question for the past few days, and I find that I keep going over it again and again, which generally means that I’m missing something!

As it usually happens, once I admitted that to myself, I struck on the core of the issue, which I’d like to share with you.

When I think about this question, all of my answers revolve around my future wife and children. In earlier attempts at answering, I would set off on a tangent in an attempt to explain why it was only this and perhaps why I did not have anything with my career/work in there… and this is what I kept redoing.

When I finally realized I was retreading the same ground, it came to me that the reason my answers all had to do with my family is that it is the absolute most important goal in my life. If all I ever do with my life is have a relationship with my wife and children that is honorable, noble, honest, courageous, loving, beautiful, wonderful–everything that is sung about but rarely lived–then that will be a life well lived!

For me, vocational pursuits are incidental to that end, or a means to that goal, just like therapy.

It’s not that my career is unimportant, because I believe it will play a vital role in attracting the woman of my dreams, but it is not a thing in itself for me. It is not a pursuit that can possibly be separated from my life with my wife. In fact, it is wholly dependent on that relationship, and I generally view it through the context of such a life.

Of course, at this point in time, I am able to do things that I would not want to do if I was in a relationship–and they are things that I do now, such as working 60 hours in a week for several weeks at a time to get some extra cash. I may still elect to do this when I have found Mrs. Pyrich, but it doesn’t feel like it will be the same kind of decision.

So, to actually put forward answers to this question…

In a year, I hope to be done or pretty close to done with therapy. I also hope that I’ve successfully transitioned to voice acting or have put it to rest.

From one to two years, I hope to have met and started a romantic relationship with my wife-to-be.

From two to five years, I hope to get married and start working out the issues of sharing a life with somebody.

From five to ten years, I hope to have built a firm foundation of honesty, trust, respect, and courage with my wife so that we can have had a child, or (dare to dream) children.

I would like to put a few things into perspective here. First, I am turning 31 in less than a month. This means that the above timespans go all throughout my 30s, and that in ten years–by the time I’m nearly 41–I hope to be married with children.

I do not particularly relish the idea of being in my late 50s when my children are graduating high school and/or college, but it is way better than the alternatives of having had children in my 20s when I was woefully unready (and likely would have brought them great harm), or not ever having had children.

Another thing I would like to preemptively address is that I do not consider this to be an inviolate timeframe. It’s not like I will castigate myself as a failure if I am not finished with therapy in a year (of course, if I did, that would mean it’s time to go talk to my therapist ), nor will I refuse to get into a romantic relationship if I somehow meet the woman of my dreams in, say, June of this year.

This is not about making predictions or giving myself a standard with which to self-attack. This is about building my life to get what I want, and what I want the very very most is a wife and children.

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An additional note (a bit of a spoiler, perhaps…)

Something else that could have occurred if I had been successful early is I could have projected my “difficult” emotions onto those around me and caused harm to others, which would be an even worse fate…

New Trusted Content: Next Step(s)

There is a lot of wisdom in proverbs. They are usually short in length, easy to remember, and carry a lot of information.

There was a person in the Freedomain Radio chat the other day that posted the following proverb from Confucius:

To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.

The chatter commented that it seemed that this was what FDR was all about, querying for confirmation.

In the moment, it didn’t feel right–it felt a little like conceding this point would open the door to conceding to the Buddhists that drop by that some of the sayings in their religion also have some alignment with FDR, and I wasn’t quite ready to do that. But I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong with it.

Fortunately (at least for me), somebody on the inside this morning let me know what was up with that proverb (and, by extension, all proverbs):

It’s a conclusion, not a methodology.

Saying that we must set ourselves right and everything else will follow is certainly something that Stef has put forward, but he is not a Man of Wise Sayings in that way. The quote from Confucius is correct (at least to a large extent), but why is it correct?

The thing about religion and even most of the lexicon of wisdom passed down through the copyings of tattered monks is that they are all conclusions. There was some methodology, but the scientific method as we know it today was not the standard of truth, if it was even practiced in such an ancient time.

It is not to say that there is no value in such things, but that a statement about reality–a conclusion–must be validated according to reason and evidence.

I’m not going to completely exhaust the analysis of the Confucian proverb above, but I will give a few reasons as to why it is correct (and hopefully, you will agree).

I’m sure there are ways that the proverb can be interpreted, but the meaning I take from it is that in order to help the world, we must first help ourselves. It is much like the saying, “Physician, heal thyself.” Or, as Stef has pointed out, if you go around preaching the cure but you have not taken it yourself (telling people how to be happy while you are miserable), you actually do more to harm than to help.

The progression of self to family to nation to world is a natural sort of social hierarchy, and I think we can classify this as a fact of reality.

But more than the argument from credibility above is this: it is a psychological fact that whatever we do not acknowledge in ourselves, we re-enact and/or inflict on the world. If I have had an abusive childhood and have never processed it, I will experience the world as abusive or as demanding abuse, and I will act accordingly. So if I do not “set my heart right” (which can be interpreted in many different ways, which is part of why proverbs can only take you so far)–which I will take to mean “process my life according to reason and evidence”–I will inflict my unprocessed trauma in my family, project it onto the nation and to the world.

I think it is safe to say that Confucius (or whoever it was that created the proverb) did not have access to psychology. So the proverb itself is an accumulation of experience, which certainly does have value. But without the methodology, it really does hang in a vacuum. You have to start asking things like, “What did Confucius mean by ‘cultivate our personal life’ and ’set our hearts right?’” And, of course, there’s no way of knowing. Even if he did put out a whole guide on what he meant by it, if he does not include the methodology, it will be fundamentally incomplete.

Furthermore, there is always room for interpretation when dealing solely with conclusions. It is much more difficult to do that with a methodology–either it is rational or it isn’t; either it is empirical or it isn’t.

I did this mostly for my own benefit, but I hope this has been helpful to others.

As of today–actually, in about 4-5 hours or so–I will have been in Denver for a full year.

This move and living in Denver has been such a positive thing for me. This isn’t because of anything intrinsic to Denver, of course, but because of what being here represents to me.

It represents an increase in choice in my life.

I felt trapped in my previous job for lots of reasons. I felt so tired at the end of the day that all I wanted to do was collapse. I didn’t want to take the risk of quitting while I looked for a new job (although I managed to get by just fine after I was fired).

Getting fired was just making official what I had already done in my mind–I was totally not present at work, and I just didn’t care anymore.

While I was in a particularly thorny financial situation at the end of the year last year, I wasn’t willing to take just any job. I did not want a repeat of my last employment. Holding out for something I actually wanted (and working to figure out what I wanted) was essential to create and protect my happiness.

It certainly wasn’t guaranteed that I would find such a job, and I certainly came close to not having any cash or credit… but it did work out, and as far as it did work out, that represents an increase in choice.

The first therapist I met with this year was not well-chosen, but I found my current therapist through a long process of thinking about what it was that I wanted and needed from a therapist, and then taking an approach that I was familiar with to select the therapist.

I have made more conscious choices in 2009 than I have made in the past.

My next steps–whatever they may be–will continue that trend.

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