| |
Self Improvement > The Mirror On The Mind
0
Reviews [ add review ],
Article rating : 0.00, 0 votes. Author : Eldon Taylor
Plummeting the unconscious is not as easy as some might
think. And yet, working as our ally, the unconscious has a
vast reservoir of knowledge, wisdom and strength that
makes taking control of our minds not only very fruitful but
stimulating. Life is a process of growth. Growth means
letting go of the past. Letting go can seem difficult at times.
Where it is easy to let go of the stuff we don't want to
remember, the pain and fear identities that we have stored
in memory are a little tougher. As we grow, we discover that
we are responsible for everything in our lives---oh, but
perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. Pause---what we have
seen up to now have had to do more with some of the
mechanics that can trap one in a mere shadow of self. Let's
take a look at some alternatives.
Choices
What makes the difference between two children raised in
the same environment with the same parents when one
ends up a neuro-surgeon and the other a hardened violent
criminal? What makes the difference between two patients
suffering in a hospice center from identical conditions when
one requires very little medication and is liked by all, while
the other suffers bitterly regardless of the medication and no
one really wants to be around them? What are the subtle
differences that seem to allow one person to live a certain
life style free of illness while another doing the same things
becomes ill as a result? What defines a stimulus as
stressful to one while the same exact stimulus is welcomed
with excitement by another? The answer is so simple as to
be overly obvious.
In my work, I have had the opportunity to work with a wide
range of individuals in differing settings, ranging from the
inmate incarcerated in maximum security to the terminal
patient in the hospice center. Over the years my
observations ultimately led to this hypothesis: the persons
who seem to suffer most consider themselves to be victims.
The classic victim scenario in the prison generally goes
something like this: all but for the grace of God there go you.
Translated by the inmate population, this means something
like, "What would you do? Where would you be? After all, my
daddy was an alcoholic, my mother was a prostitute and the
neighbor boy hung heroine on me when I was only eight".
The fact is, our environment and circumstance do imprint us
in profound ways. Our very ability to cope depends in large
on our choices and they are predetermined in large by our
enculturation process. Thus, what else could the victim of
these tragedies do?
Our choices are predicated on our beliefs and our beliefs
have been adopted from from the victimization
expectation---or what I call the right to "get even." Here is an
example of how this kind of reason pervades who and what
we are.
One day a man walking the streets of Manhattan passed
beneath a high rise complex that consisted of very
expensive condominiums. As he passed under the balcony
of one of the two story units a flower pot which had been
placed precariously close to the balcony edge fell and
crashed down on his head. Now imagine this man's
choices.
What could he do? What would be the normal thing to do?
Well, he could take the broken pot back to its owners and
put it guess where. Administer a beating to the idiot that put
the flower pot too close to the edge, that's what most people
respond with as their first thought when I have presented
this scenario to audiences. What else could he do? Well, he
could be metaphysical. You know, kismet, what's to be will
be, after all, maybe the blow to his head rearranged some
neurons and now he will experience higher consciousness.
So just be metaphysical and act as if it was supposed to
happen and just go on down the road. What else could he
do? Well, he could be an opportunist. You know that flower
pot fell from a wealthy person's ledge. Whip lash,
concussion, something like that---sue the sucker!
What else could he do? What would you do? How about
taking the flower to a florist, potting it and returning it as a gift
of love? Could you just as well do that? Of all the
possibilities, which one do you think would produce the best
outcome for yourself in terms of happiness, wholeness and
even health?
The Healer Within
The fact is, the normal person has been trained to behave in
a normal manner. Normal means that they have a right to
become angry and exact punishment. Robert Laing once
said something like "normal man has educated himself to
be normal and thus to become absurd" in his book THE
POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE. The emotional reaction termed
anger is just one such absurdity. What happens to the body
when one becomes normal is no less than a weakening of
the immune system and further, suspended states of fight
flight, or as we know it in more modern man, anxiety and
depression, literally produce chemistry that is toxic to the
human condition. As Dr.'s Steven Locke and Douglas
Colligan point out in their book, THE HEALER WITHIN,
these hostile emotions, victim, if you will, feelings, literally
can condition the body in the direction of disease as well as
produce certain diseases in and of themselves (1986).
Anger
The correct answer in our flower pot analogy is of course,
pot the flower and return it as a gift. The idea is not foreign in
terms of possible alternatives and yet it is seldom ever
considered. Our choices arise from our definitions and they
have been incubated all too often in chicken houses, but
let's stop for a moment and look at one of the preferred
enculturated choices from the human chicken house. My
work and research has demonstrated that for every fear
there is an anger response. Sometimes the anger is
withheld, turned in, and sometimes it is acted out.
Nevertheless, there is no such thing as anger without some
fear underpinning it! Now, what exactly is anger? My
examination of this cycle of fear and anger has given rise to
an acronym that I often use when describing anger. A---a,
N---nasty, G---getting, E---even, R---response. A nasty
getting even response. If fear and anger are circular, what is
it that gives rise to feeling frightened, anxious or nervous,
becoming angry and responding in a fight/flight way when
the stimulus is something like the way my employer speaks
to me, the way my significant other looks at me, or just the
stuff one feels when cut off in five o'clock traffic and given the
infamous bird. None of these things are truly life threatening
and after all, isn't that what the fight/flight functions are wired
in for, the preservation of the species?
Dr. Carl LaPresch used to speak of the four "F's" in his
introductory lectures regarding basic psychology. These four
primitive drives were the basis for most behavior. In fact, it
was Carl who first suggested to me that perhaps the
highest act of human consciousness was cortical
inhibition---over riding the wired in responses that can occur
in the primitive brain. The four "f's" are easy to remember
and oriented to species preservation: fight, flight, feeding
and---well the propagation of the species.
Why then a fight/flight response to a synthetic stimuli---that
is a stimuli that is not life threatening? What special lens do
we attach to certain events in life that give rise to a
perception of threat when indeed the threat is not a tiger in
hot pursuit? My early hypothesis regarding the fear/anger
loop eventually led to the conclusion that perceived threats
were rejection oriented. In other words, our individual
intrinsic value was denied. Interestingly though, for most of
us, the normal strategy for avoiding rejection is itself the
ultimate rejection. There are two ways to be tied up in the
world. One is to have someone literally bind you and
another is simply to tether oneself to a thread, refusing
either to pull hard enough to break it or to let it go. Many of
our beliefs are the product of the latter. We refuse to let them
go. Like the eagle raised by the chickens, we know what we
are expected to do and define our behavior accordingly.
Thus, to resolve conflict we establish strategies designed to
protect us from rejection. Among these strategies our
defense mechanisms function, as well as our attitudes,
toward everything we will encounter in our lives.
When I was a boy my definitions included labels and what I
have termed for years as the no-don't syndrome. In my many
lectures throughout America and Europe, the audience has
repeatedly verified that my experience was not unique.
Indeed, it was the rule. If this generalization applies, then
most of us were raised with statements like: "You're not old
enough." "You're stupid or that's stupid." "Children are to be
seen and not heard." "Don't do this"---"you can't do
that"---and so forth as well as a host of labels.
We develop defense strategies to cope with the negative.
For example, I was often told that I wasn't tough enough or
smart enough. My defense strategy was
compensatory---aggression oriented. The result was
devastating. Not only did I poison myself, but the never
ending quest to justify my actions produced increasing
needs for aggression. My relationships deteriorated and/or
were destroyed, and well, you can just imagine the havoc
wreaked in my own life. The method of choice for conflict in
my particular upbringing was aggressive---and hostility was
the norm.
What I have found over the years of life and work is that once
again, this was not a unique pattern. Oh, the circumstances
may vary from individual to individual, but the essence of the
lesson never did. The result for many of us is a mechanism
called blame. That brings us right back to our inmate whose
daddy was an alcoholic and so forth. Alas, a light went on
that set years of work and research into perspective, at least
for me.
Blame
Now here is the bottom line: as long as one blames
anything or anyone they are effectively tied up. There is
nothing they can do. They are victims of their circumstances.
They can only but whimper. As victims, they are helpless. As
victims, perhaps they are even due benefits such as
sympathy, attention, special care and so on. But as victims,
they are not in charge of their circumstances and/or their
responses.
Applying this theory I discovered that regardless of the
circumstances, from hospice to prison, the suffering was
directly related to blame or "victim-hood". What is more, I
discovered that on the opposite side of this continuum,
rested the self responsible. The person who assumed
control of their own life and found creative solutions for
difficult situations---returning the flower, if you will, replanted
in a new flower pot.
These responsible individuals were in charge of their own
inner environments. Their secret was simple, they did not
become angry and involved in blame. Oh they did not
necessarily accept everyone or anything, in fact, quite the
contrary in some instances, but they did not waste time
eliminating their possibilities by divesting their power via
blame. They took the initiative to resolve situations positively
and assumed the responsibility for doing so. Unlike the
whimpering victim, they were what they made of the stuff of
life and accepted so.
There is an interesting experiment that has been replicated
many times and perhaps addresses the effect this kind of
hopelessness/helplessness mentality can have on physical
health. Dogs were placed in Pavlovian slings where they
could do nothing when electric shock was administered by
psychologist Martin Seligman at the University of
Pennsylvania in an experiment to determine the effects of
helplessness. Seligman suggests that many of us have
learned that nothing can be done in many circumstances to
make a difference. Once the dogs were conditioned to the
shock they were then placed in cages with floors that on
one
side of the cage an electric grid could be used to apply
shock while on the other side of a low barrier wall the dog
could escape the shock. What Seligman discovered has
many ramifications. Dogs who had not been conditioned in
the sling ran around frantically when shock was first
administered. They learned to jump the small wall and
escape the shock. They became so good at it that when the
electricity was turned on, they simply got up and casually
jumped over the wall. However, dogs that had been
conditioned to the sling ran frantically at first just as the
unconditioned dogs but soon quit and only whimpered.
They accepted the shock passively and thus the whimpering
shocked dog metaphor (Ibid). This sense or conditioned
belief in victim-hood has been demonstrated to effect the
immune system in a negative manner. The Institute of
Noetic Sciences has funded much of the research in what is
now termed PNI or psychoneuroimmunology and this body
of work shows clearly, as does the entire body of literature
regarding mind/body wellness, that the deleterious effects
of certain mental processes on the body can literally kill.
Nothing I could do---helplessness---victim-hood---this side
of the responsibility equation is among the worst of mental
processes one can adopt regardless of its source. In fact, in
a paper that is now in press, we learned from a follow-up
study of terminally diagnosed patients conducted by
PROGRESSIVE AWARENESS RESEARCH, that the
physicians attitude is somehow more influential on patient
life expectancy than either the treatment modality or the
patients attitude toward their future, their responsibility
regarding the disease and/or their outcome expectation.
Somehow the attitude of the physician is assumed to have
been communicated to the patient for in every single
instance where the physicians responded to the
questionnaire regarding patients role in terms of the
positive use of their mind with neutral to negative evaluation,
the patient died. The study generally indicated a survival rate
of over 30% for all respondents (remission) and an
increase in life by up to three years over time given in
prognosis for those patients whose physicians generally
agreed that the mind has a role in patient health even in the
face of "terminal" illness. The assumption suggests that
one must fully accept the responsibility for their own lives
and mental processes even if that means guarding against
the influence of another.
What then is the pragmatic to overcome, or I prefer, to
outgrow, this early conditioning. Once again, it's so simple
as to be difficult---difficult to believe and difficult to do. The
answer is forgive! In my research we began applying three
messages as cognitive tools to untie the victim. They are
called the forgiveness set and consist of these three
statements: I forgive myself; I forgive all others; and I am
forgiven.
When you forgive, you can not blame. If you do not blame it's
exceedingly difficult to become angry. What you cannot
become angry about, you do not fear. When there is nothing
to fear, there is nothing to become angry about or no one to
blame. Life is simply a miracle and living is the process of
maximizing the miraculous experience. Every thought or
deed becomes therefore differently oriented. When you
accept responsibility for everything in your universe, you gain
the power to make changes. The real changes are made in
you and thus your experience of life and self become
qualitatively different almost immediately.
You are in charge of your inner environment, and your
beliefs, attitudes and emotions do matter to you. Your
health, your enjoyment of life, your ability to become all that
you are is inescapably involved in your ability to forgive and
let go.
But alas, you may say, that's all too simple and further life
sucks and then we die. And I am sure you can find many
that will agree. Still, if you want to see the barnyard from the
sky, spread your wings and see for yourself. Seeing is
believing. Try it---I promise, you'll like it.
Alternatives
The choices we make, the alternatives we consider, the
path we choose is our response to stimuli. My mother used
to say, "Thee is more than one way to skin a cat?" Well, I'm a
vegetarian and skinning cats is not for me. Still, the idea is a
simple one. There are always alternatives to our
interpretations and responses. I like to try to think of ten.
Indeed, that is a good way to keep that old adage, "Count to
ten before reacting." Each count is coupled with an
alternative reaction/response. I'd like to think that by the
count of three or four, I begin to think of proactive as
opposed to reactive responses. By the count of seven or
eight, one begins to gravitate in thoughts toward more
spiritually satisfying ideas. Regardless of the final result, the
process begins a subtle yet distinctive shift in personal
control and our general sense of well being. Try it and write
me.
Eldon Taylor, Ph.D. is the Director of Progressive
Awareness Research and the author of over 200 books and
self improvement programs (http://www.innertalk.com). He is a
Diplomat in the American Psychotherapy Association and
received the 2005 International Peace Prize awarded by the
United Cultural Convention for his work in
self-responsibility.
Article reviews
Post your review
[ Note : no HTML/URLs - will removed automatically ]
More articles from Self Improvement
|
