Sunday Sermon [Superboy!]

¡Hola! Everybody...
Easter is my favorite Christian observance. It’s a redemption song...

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-=[ Magical Thinking ]=-

I remember as a child I would tie a towel around my neck and pretend I was Superboy. It was a lot of fun, however, it never gave me the power to fly. People who sell the pop psychology “power of positive thinking, or shit like The Secret, remind me of myself as a boy, running around the house, ruining my mother’s towels, and pretending I had superpowers.

I recently posted a critique of the wildly popular, narcissism-enabling pabulum, The Secret. What is the “secret” of The Secret? You create your own reality! You are responsible as the source of whatever arises in your life. Got cancer?!! You created it! Were you raped? You brought it upon yourself! Moreover, if you’re a loser it’s only because you haven’t come up with the right affirmation or powerful positive thought.

It would be almost impossibly difficult to overstate how cruel and insulting such a notion is. It’s a sick premise. I would shut up if it weren’t for the fact that literally millions follow this snake oil “spirituality.”

There is a basic flaw in the “power of positive thinking” (and let’s face it, the Secret is just warmed over power of positive thinking bullshit), but it never stops certain people from getting rich selling it. There are many aspects of reality, different dimensions. The Secret is not only selling a shallow dimension of self and reality but it is also only acknowledges one aspect of self.

Let me be fair: The Secret works in one realm and it actually serves a useful function. Positive thought is important. We can change the way in which our thoughts and feelings work together produce healthier behavior. That’s a good thing.

::Martha Stewart Smile::

What pisses me off is that this isn’t the full story. We have an inside, and an outside. We are individuals, but we are also social beings. These aspects of reality are all part of who we are. All four aspects come together at once -- they co-arise as reality. No one aspect “creates” the others. Each is equally important. The interior of an individual (where thought occurs) does have parallels in the exterior of the individual (measurable as biological change). We are beings with inner and outer worlds. Fortunately, reality is not composed of individuals. We are also relational beings, with shared interiors such as culture, collective consciousness, and all that goes with the inner world of We. That shared inner world is accompanied by an outer world, the world of nature, the biosphere, and all that can be observed and measured in physical form. There are four aspects (Four Quadrants) of reality:

The Interior of an Individual (where thought occurs, for instance)

The Exterior of an Individual (the body, what can be measured and seen objectively)

The Interior of the Collective (Culture, invisible features of similarity, inter-subjective social)

The Exterior of The Collective (Biosphere, planet, infrastructure, the inter-objective realm)

While the positive thinking clique promotes it as the magic wand for everything, thoughts actually deal with one part of one realm, and misrepresents itself while doing it.

To claim any one of them “creates” the other is a disaster, and is, unfortunately, a common practice. Whenever you find a discipline which focuses on a particular domain (which can be healthy) you find it often claims that one quadrant is the only “real” one, or the only “true” one, or the only important one (which is unhealthy). That is the major defect of The Secret or “positive thinking.” It takes one perspective (The Interior of an Individual) and claims it creates all the others.

Wow!

YOU, your thoughts, create your body. And the biosphere, and the entire culture, and history of the planet, origin of species, all the cities you could visit, all the planets in the Galaxy, all the Galaxies, all... and you’re so fuckin powerful!. And so wrong. Terribly wrong. Your thoughts, your feelings, while being important and valuable, are but two aspects of a much more complicated reality.

Your thoughts and feelings are not the basis for reality, they are only two of its features. You do not “create” your reality, you participate in it, and in certain circumstances, under certain conditions, you can influence it. And it is good and useful to cultivate that influence, to positively nurture that as much as possible, in the interest of love.

It is seductive to a person’s desire to attain, achieve, and better their personal station. It is promising you a better personal narrative. And that is indeed one level of spirituality. But it’s the lowest level, and inflating it keeps people unnecessarily stuck in a cycle of suffering.

For me, a true spirituality includes all four domains (inner, outer, individual, collective) and does not advantage one over the other. It engages them as co-arising. It sees them as inextricably intertwined, yet distinct in important ways. Spirituality includes every level of every domain, and values each of them, but also understands their differences. Spirituality includes every methodology, every way of knowing, but it also understands what they do, and what they don't do. The Secret or the “power of positive thinking” offers but a method, and it will not set you free from your personal drama. In fact, it will probably suck you deeper into it. It promises money, power, increased attraction, and tells you it is “spiritual” practice.

Here’s a fresh idea: use the right tool for the right job. I think it is good to improve our financial situation or to have an exciting love life. That’s why I seek financial advice and why I’ve been to therapy. I want to improve my relative reality, but I don’t need to invoke a magical-narcissistic mysticism (or quantum mechanics) to do so.

Even if you could (as I believed as a child wearing my mother’s towel) bend reality with your thoughts and feelings, chances are you would still be a terribly miserable creature. For as long as you’re neurotically attached to the small story of your small self, you’ll never break free from human bondage.

Love,

Eddie

The Tyranny of Positive Thinking

¡Hola! Everybody...
The first time I posted the following, I lost all the “Power of Positive Thinking” crowd, most of the “Daily Affirmations” crowd, and “The Secret” crowd just continued to stay away... LOL! Last night I was “engaging” yet another “Power of Positive Thinking” disciple, who managed to call it Buddhist meditation. People? mindfulness meditation is not positive thinking!

::rolls eyes::

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-=[ Thoughts, Emotions, Actions ]=-

Smile or die!

I have a favorite story that occurred when Sir Lawrence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman were making the Marathon Man. Just before filming the famous scene in the dentist’s chair, Olivier was waiting and not too pleased that Hoffman was late. In the near distance, he saw a running figure and was surprised to discover it was Hoffman, the Hollywood superstar. He arrived panting at Olivier’s side and the great British stage actor looked down at Hoffman and asked what he was up to. When Hoffman was eventually able to get his breath, he managed to get out that because the scene called for the character to be out of breath from running that was what he had to do to make the scene authentic. The haughty Olivier raised an eyebrow and said, “My dear, haven’t you heard of acting?”

The point here is that just as we can control and change our external behaviors, words, and actions, and our internal processes, thoughts and beliefs, we can also change our responses to our internal thoughts, feelings, emotions, and values.

In my work, I often run into the stiff wall of resistance that is expressed thus, “… because that’s the way he made me feel,” or “… because that’s the way I am!” Perhaps you have come across such phrases, or maybe you have uttered something similar yourself. We go about spending the bulk of our lives believing we’re at the mercy of our feelings, thoughts, and actions (“He made me do it” “My negative feelings defeat me”).

We all do it, period.

In fact, we all concentrate on one area of our perception whether they be our thoughts, feelings, and actions, at the expense of others. What we do here in our culture is concentrate on what we do well -- on the positive. My invitation/ challenge is for you to pay more attention to what you don’t do so well (the so-called negative) and develop more flexibility around those things.

Let me use “health” as an example to better illustrate what I am trying to communicate.

In the West, we believe that it is best to go for the burn, push ourselves to the limit; it’s all or nothing. This explains the constant flow of how to books touting the new diet or exercise program that will change your life. We have to go for one of these completely or it won’t work.

If we look at this from the model of thoughts, emotions, and actions, we get three different worldviews. In the interest of brevity, I will elaborate mostly on thoughts.

Thoughts and Health

In the thought-centered world, the way to health is through -- duh! -- our thoughts. Here we believe that we have created health or illness by the power of our own thoughts. All we need to do is change the way that we think about ourselves and our relationship to health. As long as we believe that we are healthy then -- voila! -- we are!

In the thought-world existence we have certain beliefs about ourselves and the world around us that we probably picked up from our toxic parents, our apathetic teachers, our repressive church, our disjointed community. We start to believe that these are true and in this way our perspective of health is developed. Once we have taken control of this we can then become healthy merely by thinking ourselves healthy. This perspective makes it imperative that we find the “right” (i.e., positive) thought, or the perfect affirmation and then repeat them ad infinitum in order to become healthy. Many New Agers love this world and have developed many techniques for transforming limiting (or negative) beliefs. Got it? In this world, you erase (kill!) negative thoughts and create (cling!) positive thoughts. Annie, go get your gun...

Let’s follow the logic of this worldview, or mindset: if you believe that your thoughts can create health, then it follows that if you’re not healthy then at some level you believe that you have created your illness. In this sense, you are a mind that exists separately from your body. Welcome to the world of The Matrix! LOL

If my analysis seems harsh, then consider the story of a good friend, Danielle. Danielle was a devoted mother of a 15-year-old daughter. She was known within my circle as a healer who had a transformative experience and spent the rest of her life running workshops in the area of personal growth and development. She made a huge difference in her life and the lives of others. People loved Danielle and what she did for them.

It was a shock for all of us when we found out she had been diagnosed with cancer and an even bigger shock when it became clear that the cancer was terminal. My memories of her during her last days are marked by the last time I saw her and she was still wrestling with her problems -- what had she done to bring on the cancer, what had she done to deserve the cancer? This is the legacy of the thought-world -- a good woman, a loving wife, a devoted mother, blaming herself for her cancer.

Emotions and Health

In this world, we forget the body. We disregard all the unnecessary exercising and dieting. Here we achieve our health through our emotions. Once we get in touch with our Inner Child (the one that was badly damaged and abused by our parents and society), we can heal all of the hurts imposed by a life that sucks and that controls us until we take charge.

In this world we believe that our blocked and unhealthy emotions created our own sickness. Only when we have realized this simple fact, we can start to heal. We need to revisit all the traumas that the world has inflicted upon us. We need to emote, emote, emote! in order to clear ourselves of these unhealthy emotions. We look for person-centered, or psychodynamically oriented counseling – or even better – find a group of like-minded individuals where we can share the catharsis.

Once we have sorted this whole mess out, we can then achieve the Eden-like state of childhood innocence and wisdom that was ours before we were defiled by modern society. Again, as in the thought-world, this world seeks to slay the negative emotions. Fight!

Actions and Health

In the action-centered-world we believe our actions and external behaviors are most important; we fall into the trap of believing that is all we need to pay attention to if we are to be healthy. We believe that all we need to do is buy the right equipment of the right video and we too can develop the body of an athlete of the supermodel in the ads.

We believe that if we join the best hi-tech gym with the newest equipment, it will take out the work of exercising (just 20 minutes a day… ). It’s almost as though we believe that a gym membership leads to good health.

The same is true of weight loss. We buy into the latest pill or latest book of the latest system that some celebrity (hello Oprah!) pitches. We all know deep down inside that the key to achieving an optimum weight is simply not putting more stuff into our bodies -- that only by eating more healthily will we be healthy. However, like exercise, this would be hard to maintain and would require work and effort. We know that balance and moderation will lead to a more integrated life, but we battle on regardless.

What we know, of course, is that none of these three worldviews -- thoughts, emotions, and actions -- alone holds the full picture. And no matter how well you affirm, how good you become at being positive, or how much you exercise, or get in touch with your emotions, eventually you will get old, ugly, sick, and die.

What then? What will you do then?

What we really need to do is utilize all three aspects of ourselves in our quest to be healthy. And even then, this is not the full picture. But that is for another time and another day.

I will say this much: if you’re engaged in an inner battle who loses eventually?

Love,

Eddie

Welcome to the Real

¡Hola! Everybody...
One day I found myself at a maximum-security prison sitting in the mess hall mentally criticizing everyone else there. I did this daily. How stupid these people were, how selfish, how unaware... everyday. I wasn’t like “them” I would tell myself, feeling some measure of satisfaction. I did this until the very real fact that I was there also became clear. If those people were are all that, then what did it say about me?

Sometimes I read comments on my blog and elsewhere or just listen to people in general and they remind me of myself at that time...

Today... Repost!

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-=[ Reality and the War on Our Senses ]=-

“We throw our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark.”

-- Unknown

We use one sense at the expense of the others. Ever since the invention of the photograph, for example, the visual sense has taken predominance over the others. We’ve become more and more insistent of having illustrations with stories. Eventually movies became all the rage. Then television arrived in our homes, followed by video, cable, computer graphics, digital animation, and virtual reality. Imagine someone in the far future trying to explain our obsession with this piece of furniture...

Our taste buds take second place. Fruits and vegetables are genetically engineered to satisfy our visual appetites, regardless of the sacrifice in flavor and nutrition. Poisons of every kind assault our biochemistry. Electromagnetic radiation zaps our natural bioelectrical fields that shape us.

Air pollution and synthetic fragrances dominate our sense of smell. Traffic, loud radios, and congested population over stimulate our hearing. In watching television, our right-brain hemispheres have to assemble the dots into a picture. As a result, we haven’t sufficient energy needed for left-brain discrimination. In actuality, heavy viewers literally become heavy; something in the habit of watching television slows down the metabolism.

“Natural flavors” are natural in name only, extracted from organic chemicals through harsh chemical processing. The multinational corporations that sell us these toxins call it “clean labeling” and the Food and Drug Administration calls it “okay.”

Our senses have become the pawns in a foolish game. Only when we awaken to our deepest, genuine sense will our intelligence flourish. I’m speaking here of a deep-seated common sense that chooses to remember, to know, to open up all the sensory channels and explore our intuitive common sense, what we call our imagination. Instead of asking, “Will we make it?” we should be asking, “What should I be doing now?”

As the historian Howard Zinn noted, we can’t be neutral on a moving train and we’re moving all the time, whether we want to or not. The wise among us are gathering their clues and direction from everywhere, even the knowledge of children and eccentrics, and those with whom they disagree.

The ability to question will be our saving grace. Our questions will be our liberators. When a large enough question has been asked, the lesson plan will appear. Years a go, a leader challenged the nation by asserting that in ten years a man would land on the moon. There is no such leadership available today (if there ever really was). Today we must become our own leaders, asking the questions needing asking and facing with creativity and innovation the challenges such questions pose.

It we are to thrive as individuals and as a society, the solution is the same: the deepest good sense to take leadership for ourselves. True visionaries identify with a cause that transcends themselves, family, and friends. Something bigger than a mere grasp for personal success. And we can get there from here. We are a problem-solving species. When we finally make the decision to call upon our resources we make the impossible possible, and the possible inevitable.

The good news is that we’re living in a moment in time where we have the advantage of the fruits of the cross-fertilization of art and science, of spirituality and science, of analysis and intuitive flashes. By pulling together the scattered threads of psychology and brain science, we can consciously learn to tap into our deepest common sense. The next evolutionary leap demands that we, in fact, become the people we were always meant to be.

Love,

Eddie