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If we are constantly hurt and disappointed by the world, if our system of understanding how we should be treated by others keeps failing, we need to admit that the problem is not in the world but in ourselves.
Our reactions, wants, and pains are based upon expectations not met. Our idealism sets us up for failure, which is to be hurt and victimized.
Bad things happen in the world, but our purposeful obtusity provokes repeated failure.
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When we feel hurt by someone, we take it out on them: we keep them on the hook.
Rather than attending to our own hurt (like physical injury), we blame and rage at them. Thrashing about we further hurt ourselves: the barbed hook is actually in us.
Until we can approach the pain, and feel it for what it is (ourselves being hurt) we cannot remove the barb, feel forgiveness, and heal.
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Melancholy is being in love with your pain.
What this looks like is a paralyzed state of holding onto the past: repeating the wanting for a relationship (or a time) that shifted. This plays out as a compulsive reenactment of the past, replaying the pattern, clinging to and controlling the uncontrollable through re-narrating. It becomes a favorite story, a mantra.
To be fixated (unwaveringly focused) on pain is a recipe for insanity: sad or zealous, it narrows you out of wider awareness. It is more akin to suicidal self-hypnosis: replay your favorite movie until death.
In part from Julian de Medeiros
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There is, in judgment, a resistance to forgiveness.
We hold the judged outside of us, yet “the judged” persistently returns as a beleaguered challenger, demanding forgiveness.
We do not forgive through an effort of will: that only masks and creates resentment. We must turn towards the pain and open ourselves in order to see beyond it: to merge with the other is forgiveness, not holding them away.
In seeing through the pain we encounter understanding: we encounter an innate kindness on the other side of understanding.
Open kindness exists outside of us (the same place we put the judged) and yet is also within us (as the other can be too).
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While we find it relatively easy to forgive others, it is more difficult to forgive ourselves.
We feel wounded and blame our internal pain on another, which justifies lashing out. Yet, as Anthony DeMello, Alfred Adler, and Victor Frankl reveal, you have chosen to be hurt and hold onto your pain.
This is why you can forgive them easier than yourself: they did not cause the pain as much as you held onto it and weaponized it.
The focus of your rage is merely a proxy projection for your internal disgruntlement. The trick of forgiving yourself is now doubly tricky because you allowed yourself to treat someone else poorly: to forgive yourself after lashing out is to accept your monstrosity.
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For the novelty seeker who will always keep up with new media and releases yet is compelled to consume all old media, everything is instant on-demand until gluttonously stuffed.
Your overfullness is in direct proportion to the emptiness of your life.
Our capacity to reside in the present, detached from media, has vanished. Yet our overconsumptive addiction thrusts us into the past, as our apathy for keeping up is overrun.
Nostalgia is the lazy desert of the overindulged.
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You create most of your own misery.
Through your thoughts and feelings, you develop and then run simulations, which become anxiety-producing ruminations on possible harms. However, “survival” (which is why we undertake misery-making destructive behavior) is about ensuring the next step, not the fourth or fifth possibility.
Staying present deflates enduring into being.
(Staying present means rejecting the past harms from shaping your present reaction while not projecting into the future possible worries.)
While this may not appear as thriving, it actively rejects self-harm until a moment when an opportunity opens from which you can succeed.
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We push to test if our standing has changed: can we change our fate, prod our stars into an alternate alignment?
If we push hard enough, will we become something more? Will we escape our own insecurity?
More complicated: Do we revel in our pain to see ourselves clearly?
By pushing and receiving pushback or encountering limits that revoke our desires, do we demarcate ourselves through pain or rejection, that is, find the shape of ourselves by encountering our limits painfully? And in retreat, when reassessing, do we lick our wounds engaged in self-pity, finding within the pity a vital core that will try again?
inspired by Albert Camus
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If we are programmed, the question is: “how do we know that we are alive and free rather than performing scripted responses?”
Consider this: It appears that our conscious attempts to dissuade us from painful actions, yet once we are comfortable, we seek out and find more pain and revel in it. This new pain we embrace gives us a new purpose: avoiding pain again.
This causal circularity allows us to continually overcome or to continually fail, both of which provide movement, purpose, and drive even if they achieve nothing.
For comparison, we have programmed machines that also attempt specific repetitive actions and either succeed or fail but look as if they have drive and purpose through movement. They just don’t rationalize their behavior through happiness, contentment, or pain.
(from Samuel Butler)
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The most effective way to hurt something/someone is through studied intimacy.
The "blunderer" is forgivable out of their ignorance: in the unlikely event they land a haymaker to your soul or sabotage your company it is by chance or luck.
The devoted acolyte who accessed the inner sanctum through devotion knows precisely where best to strike. In knowing the betrayal is doubled. It is no longer simply a devastating wound, but the loss of trauma support. (This is why family and partners can hurt us so profoundly.)
