wikkidpissah
Footballguy
All politics are local. The fault lies not in our stars.
Before i indulge any other cliches and, since i'm guessing we're going to have a substantial dialogue in the near and perhaps far future, AAA, and since i can't assume you've read everything i've written on these boards, allow me a brief introduction.
I've always been bright & tremendously curious, so much so that school was of no use to me and i struck out on my own @ 15yo to sample EVERYTHING, twice. I fell into a lucky gig in entertainment in my early teens, did a decade of that, a decade working in mental health programs, and 25 yrs in the gaming biz (the first 5 as a pro gambler). If i may be indelicate, i used to tell my poker students, "I been in the showbiz, the psych biz & the gamblin' biz - if i don't know what licks the human clit, no one does".
After a dozen years with my wife - a brilliant savage phenomenon who's the only person who never bored me - i lost her to a long, ugly battle with cancer 20 years ago. Because i could never make her happy - she was not only molested for years by her father, but traded to other perv dads like a baseball card and, from the age of 8, had to regularly "seduce" her father to keep him off her younger siblings - there was a tremendous amount of guilt (which, as an altar boy, i had promised myself never to indulge) mixed in with my grief when she passed. I detoxed, moved to NM, and paid the bills dealing poker on the weekends in order to give myself time to explore precisely what happiness was as my way of resolving both the guilt & grief. The problem i always felt with the psych biz was that there were only models of disease and none of health.
What is a healthy mind? What is happiness (or contentment)? "Balance" is a good start, but not enough, actually, and just what are we balancing? After two decades of reading & thinking & watching & helping, i think i have a pretty good idea. It's largely two things:
1) Biology. The first job of the human mind is not thought. The job of the human mind is the same as that of any organism - survival. Therefore, even though we possess the miraculous cerebral cortex, capable of more combinations than there are atoms in this solar systems, it sits upon a structure entirely based entirely upon survival. As a result, our "alarm" systems will always be the quickest and loudest entities in our heads. The pre-frontal cortex can manage how we deal with alarms, but can not stop them from alarming us. As a result, instead of overriding our lower brains, our higher functions have largely been used to indulge them. Simply put, we have Siri and a poop-throwing monkey arguing over control of our systems and, 99.8% of the time, the ape wins. Why? Well, he's got poop.
2) Upbringing. The major psychologically-philosophical question which kept arising in my wonderings was, "How can a billionaire living the dream be more miserable than a Bidi girl in India sold into slavery by her family to roll cigarettes 16 hrs a day before being raped to sleep?". Because we are pretty much equally prone to think we have it worse than anyone else, no matter our circumstances. Why? Fifteen years it took me to figure this out. The pre-frontal cortex (the highest functioning portion of the brain, the so-called "conductor of the orchestra") grows in two spurts - from six months to two yrs of age and for another 18-month period @ puberty, when executive function becomes hard-wired to our processes. For the time between we are a sponge, able to learn anything & everything which is all sealed in @ puberty and used as required as an adult.
Except for one thing - rage. Never in your adult life will you be as upset as you were at 3yo when you didnt get the impulse item you wanted at the checkout stand. Never will you be as mortified as when you lost your blue blankie. There was no executive function to manage your primitive impulses just as there was none to interfere with your learning. Mommies and daddies were there for that, to frustrate the dominance needs of your animal self to make you a functioning human. Well, the biproduct of frustration is rage. We each have an untold number of memories of being frustrated, shamed & enraged sealed in with the alphabets, manners & times tables in our juvenile memory banks. But no real way to get at them, because we are, now in charge of ourselves, essentially no longer the person who experienced those bad feelings. So, no matter how well or poorly we were raised, we house as much wordless, unresolved rage as we do of process knowledge.
Back to local politics. Passive paranoiacs, each and every one of us, not actually knowing what anyone else, even those closest, thinks of us but sure it's the worst. Unlike a century and more ago, when putting bread on the table for ourselves & family and roofs above them was an allday, everyday necessity, we now have the time and space to entertain these fears and selfish indulgences. What's more, we used to have a book that told us how to act but we pretty much threw that away because it was written by 2000-yrs-dead shepherds & fishermen and what do they know?! Yeah, we can figure it out on our own, taking life personally. That'll work.
I disagree. What's more, since i've developed methods for handling modern life, i've tried them on a few dozen folks until i've become satisfied that they're a good start.
The key to happiness is that it is a condition of being that comes in as one invites it. The matter is to learn how to keep the decks clear of unhappiness so that contentment can rest easy in one's soul. Clearing the decks requires understanding & contextualizing old issues and learning to let "personal weather" pass thru like gas or cramps as the biproduct of activity. I've substituted new disciplines, like checklists & digestions, for old control functions like counting-to-ten & nightly prayers, so that a person can comfortably practice healthy living until they have a base and a second-level where one mines their higher instincts to achieve ongoing interest & renewal of purpose. Other than making "students" notice how silly the rest of the world looks once one has resolved their inner processes, i'd say it's been a success.
Dr Lustig's is some of the science i've trusted along the way to forming my theories, but his answers are partial. Because of the conflict between our higher & lower brain, everything actually is moral. It's just that morality isn't what we've always thought it was and information like Dr Lustig's will be how we resolve the local politics of that.
