Reread:
INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions
PART 4 - Broaden your Perspective: Situations
PART 5 - Broaden your Perspective: Truth
PART 6 - Be Individual
PART 7 - Be Constructive
BALANCE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE
Bad things are good now and again, and good things are bad if you have too much of them. Forcing yourself to be positive 100% of the time because you have an image in your head of a happy-go-lucky, ultra-positive individual --who you want to be--can really stress you out and make you less happy with yourself.
I specifically put this ingredient last on the list because if you don't understand the other 7 you might not understand what I try to say here, or worse you could end up in a more difficult situation to pull out of. Go back and reread the other ingredients because they're crucial.
Life isn't black and white, it isn't all good and all bad, it isn't all positive and all negative, but for whatever reason these are the things we focus on most and we try to make sense of everything in polar terms. Let's face it, life is incredibly complex and it changes so rapidly that to attempt to understand and make a firm pattern out of it could prove futile--you can't accurately describe something as black or white, good or bad. Many of the things that, upon initial inspection, appear to be good for us come to harm us later and most of the bad things that happen to us in life end up being good for us because of how we change because of them. It's easy to get caught up first in the present--and to think that everything is so horrible because we are facing hard times right now--and second in the black and white, thinking that everything is so horrible because of our perspective. I tried to point this out in Part 4 and Part 5 that if you want to live happily in this life, you need to get comfortable with the idea that you don't know everything and your circumstances right now aren't how they will always be.
Instead of focusing so much effort on trying to figure out if something is good for you or bad for you, focus on balancing your life. Balance is a synonym for control--when things start to tip in a direction that you don't want them to, you compensate by making changes--you control the acts that create the stability.
Everyone goes through rough times and at one point or another you will have something horribly bad happen to you. No one escapes life without at least one incredibly bad thing happening to them, whether its being molested as a child, taken advantage of when you were defenseless, having to face some abnormality or disease, being cheated, beat up, abandoned, retaliated against, betrayed--the list goes on and on. The only people who don't have these things happen to them die before they are old enough to face them and I would argue that they got the worst fate of all because they never got to experience life. With all of these horrible things that happen to us it's a wonder that we are able to not only survive them but thrive in spite of them!
Happiness isn't as simple as only good things happening to us, happiness is being comfortable with the bad and good that happens to us. If you go through life thinking you'll get your fair share of the good you deserve, you'll be incredibly disappointed; and if you think you don't deserve all of the bad that you're getting, you might be wrong as well.
The 8th ingredient to my All-natural Anti-Depressant is to accept the positive and the negative. Don't be greedy, it will eat you alive! You will get exactly what you deserve in life based on what you fight to obtain or what you fight to defend; you will not get what you think you deserve, ever. Life is too complicated for you to know what you deserve and it is a waste of time and energy to look back and reflect on it until you have made it out of your depressed state. Instead of focusing on how and why you are in the situation you are in right now, focus on how you're going to get out.
Acceptance means you take what life gives you and you roll with it. To accept the positive things that happen to you is to realize that, "this may be the only positive thing that happens for a while, but that's okay, I'll enjoy it while it lasts." It means that you accept the negative things that happen to you because, in that moment, you have no control over the negative things. We live in a delayed-present. The positive and negative things that are happening to us right now were triggered by things in our past. Once the trigger is pulled you can't go back and untrigger it, at the present time you only have two options: accept them for what they are, or fight them by arguing, denying, beating yourself up over them, and ultimately prolonging your unhappiness.
When you accept the positive and the negative, you establish balance in your life. You let life happen the way it is supposed to happen and you free yourself to enjoy life and not be depressed. Happiness is in you, you just need to recognize it and stop suppressing it. The only thing that can prevent you from being happy is your own mind--your actions don't lead you to unhappiness, actions lead to different situations--true happiness is founded on the only thing you have complete control over 100% of the time: your conscious.
You can heal yourself. I know you can do it!
NEXT PART 9
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Saturday, November 23, 2013
All-Natural Anti-Depressant: Part 7
Reread:
INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions
PART 4 - Broaden your Perspective: Situations
PART 5 - Broaden your Perspective: Truth
PART 6 - Be Individual
BE CONSTRUCTIVE
Hey, you made it to my favorite part! This is my favorite ingredient to add to the mixture: be constructive.
When you're depressed, it's easy to want to just lay in bed and mope. It's easy to be lazy or to just sit around doing nothing because you think you have nothing to do. When all you are doing is sitting around or laying in bed, it leaves your mind wide open to whatever it wants to do--including reflecting on how miserable you are.
I may have only had two major depressions, but I have also had a lot of mild depressions and extended periods of time where I was unhappy. I learned something incredibly simple though: when I was doing things I enjoyed, it took my mind off of how unhappy I was and helped me to focus on other things outside of myself. When I was thinking of things outside of myself, I was momentarily happy, and it was that brief glimmer of happiness that gave me hope that I could one day be completely happy the way that I am today.
This is where I have to get very serious with you and break a few rules of writing by taking a tangent before proceeding and speaking directly to you. In life, there are people all around you who are unhappy for whatever reason. In fact, most people are unhappy and it is rare to find someone who is really happy--someone who isn't blown about by their emotions like a leaf on the wind--those people are rare, and let me tell you, no one is happy all of the time. Life can be pretty rough.
From this unhappiness, people turn to addictions: alcohol, cigarettes, porn, money, sex, power, and food to name a few. It isn't the alcohol it isn't the food, it isn't the sex that is bad--its the fact that they are using these things as means to an end rather than finding ways to understand their unhappiness and what triggers it and to gain more control over it. Sex is good, power is good, and food is good too--provided you aren't using them to numb your unhappiness.
With that in mind, I'll proceed.
My seventh ingredient, being constructive, is to turn your attention to something positive that can benefit yourself or others. Cleaning your house, using a toothbrush to scrub grout or some other intricate work, can turn your mind away from your depression and towards the benefit of other people--including yourself. I like to write poetry every now and again when I start feeling down--that's why my poems are always sad or angry--poetry has been an avenue for getting these emotions out of my system. --I don't recommend that you read my poems, and I've stopped publishing those poems, but you get the idea: the poems benefit me.
Do something constructive: build something, clean something, exercise, or volunteer (or just go out and help people), start projects, start a collection, walk around the block looking for interesting things, go learn something new--do something! Not only does this take your mind off of your depression, it also helps build up your sense of worth and gives you hope that you can be happy because everything you accomplish is another good experience to balance out the bad ones.
You might could say that I'm advocating building addictions--and you'd be absolutely correct to make that observation, but if you're in a situation where you're going to be addicted either way, be addicted to something that improves lives. I can recall a distinct thought I had a long time ago which was, "if I'm going to be miserable either way, I might as well be miserable doing something that will make someone else's life better." All of those things people think are chores (yes, scrubbing grout with a toothbrush), you might as well do them while you're at your lowest, because they aren't going to make you any lower and when you've completed them you'll feel a sense of relief that they're done.
I have heard many times, and experienced it first hand, that when you have other people to look after or other people--or animals--that you care about, you're less likely to be depressed. I think the reason for this is because your responsibility to other people distracts you from your own problems. It it almost as if there is too much time in one day for a single person to take care of themselves and build themselves up, and then with their extra time they tear themselves down and become depressed. When you add another person into the mix, suddenly you have to take care of yourself and assist that other person and you take it from that time that you would have otherwise devoted to being sad and lonely.
NEXT: Part 8
INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions
PART 4 - Broaden your Perspective: Situations
PART 5 - Broaden your Perspective: Truth
PART 6 - Be Individual
BE CONSTRUCTIVE
Hey, you made it to my favorite part! This is my favorite ingredient to add to the mixture: be constructive.
When you're depressed, it's easy to want to just lay in bed and mope. It's easy to be lazy or to just sit around doing nothing because you think you have nothing to do. When all you are doing is sitting around or laying in bed, it leaves your mind wide open to whatever it wants to do--including reflecting on how miserable you are.
I may have only had two major depressions, but I have also had a lot of mild depressions and extended periods of time where I was unhappy. I learned something incredibly simple though: when I was doing things I enjoyed, it took my mind off of how unhappy I was and helped me to focus on other things outside of myself. When I was thinking of things outside of myself, I was momentarily happy, and it was that brief glimmer of happiness that gave me hope that I could one day be completely happy the way that I am today.
This is where I have to get very serious with you and break a few rules of writing by taking a tangent before proceeding and speaking directly to you. In life, there are people all around you who are unhappy for whatever reason. In fact, most people are unhappy and it is rare to find someone who is really happy--someone who isn't blown about by their emotions like a leaf on the wind--those people are rare, and let me tell you, no one is happy all of the time. Life can be pretty rough.
From this unhappiness, people turn to addictions: alcohol, cigarettes, porn, money, sex, power, and food to name a few. It isn't the alcohol it isn't the food, it isn't the sex that is bad--its the fact that they are using these things as means to an end rather than finding ways to understand their unhappiness and what triggers it and to gain more control over it. Sex is good, power is good, and food is good too--provided you aren't using them to numb your unhappiness.
With that in mind, I'll proceed.
My seventh ingredient, being constructive, is to turn your attention to something positive that can benefit yourself or others. Cleaning your house, using a toothbrush to scrub grout or some other intricate work, can turn your mind away from your depression and towards the benefit of other people--including yourself. I like to write poetry every now and again when I start feeling down--that's why my poems are always sad or angry--poetry has been an avenue for getting these emotions out of my system. --I don't recommend that you read my poems, and I've stopped publishing those poems, but you get the idea: the poems benefit me.
Do something constructive: build something, clean something, exercise, or volunteer (or just go out and help people), start projects, start a collection, walk around the block looking for interesting things, go learn something new--do something! Not only does this take your mind off of your depression, it also helps build up your sense of worth and gives you hope that you can be happy because everything you accomplish is another good experience to balance out the bad ones.
You might could say that I'm advocating building addictions--and you'd be absolutely correct to make that observation, but if you're in a situation where you're going to be addicted either way, be addicted to something that improves lives. I can recall a distinct thought I had a long time ago which was, "if I'm going to be miserable either way, I might as well be miserable doing something that will make someone else's life better." All of those things people think are chores (yes, scrubbing grout with a toothbrush), you might as well do them while you're at your lowest, because they aren't going to make you any lower and when you've completed them you'll feel a sense of relief that they're done.
I have heard many times, and experienced it first hand, that when you have other people to look after or other people--or animals--that you care about, you're less likely to be depressed. I think the reason for this is because your responsibility to other people distracts you from your own problems. It it almost as if there is too much time in one day for a single person to take care of themselves and build themselves up, and then with their extra time they tear themselves down and become depressed. When you add another person into the mix, suddenly you have to take care of yourself and assist that other person and you take it from that time that you would have otherwise devoted to being sad and lonely.
NEXT: Part 8
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
All-Natural Anti-Depressant: Part 6
Reread:
INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions
PART 4 - Broaden your Perspective: Situations
PART 5 - Broaden your Perspective: Truth
BE INDIVIDUAL
INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions
PART 4 - Broaden your Perspective: Situations
PART 5 - Broaden your Perspective: Truth
BE INDIVIDUAL
American culture is deep rooted in Independence, yet we often lose focus and trade independence for dependency. The social pressure and cultural desire to be independent often creates an internal conflict that contributes to depression. Furthermore, dependency--whether emotional, physical, or intellectual--can cause further conflicts as we try to juggle the desires of those who we depend on. Conflict with others we depend on can leave us feeling hopeless and can wear on us physically and emotionally. Worse still, conflict with ourselves can be the worst kind of conflict because we think we ought to have full control over ourselves and yet we realize that we do not.
As children, we are very dependent on our parents and caretakers to survive. The institution of the family provides us with our most influential learning experiences, it teaches us how to cope with our emotions, develop relationships and make decisions. The natural progression of a man or woman is to leave the confines of his or her parents and venture into the world on our own to ultimately start our own families and continue the cycle.
Venturing into the real world is a difficult process and many individuals struggle with integrating into it. When faced with difficult situations, we tend to revert back to what we know and what is familiar--this includes our family and friends. We give up our independence and our chance to learn independence in order to keep things the way they are, but we aren't meant to stagnate in life, we are meant to adapt and change and move forward.
Because we prefer to revert back to the familiar when life becomes challenging, I have found that depression and independence tend to be at odds. Instead of dealing with emotions on our own, we revert back to our childhood when we would cry and whine and our parents or other family members would take care of us--this is a familiar pattern that has worked for us in the past and so our instinct is to remain in that dependent state in hopes that it will continue working into the future.
The sixth ingredient to my All-Natural Anti-Depressant is to look at yourself as an individual. Individuals make decisions for themselves, by themselves. Individuals, although they may be apart of social units such as family and community, remain independent of those social units.
I originally planned to put this article in part 3, but I realized as I was writing it that I needed to refer to the previous parts in order to explain the importance of this ingredient.
The first ingredient to my anti-depressant may be to create space, but the space isn't an end, it is a means to an end. It is difficult to gain your own independence if you rely on your family, friends, religion, school, or other community membership to tell you whether you are living life correctly. If you use other people to gauge whether you are making correct decisions or you use them as a comparison to determine what happiness is, you will never learn what makes you happy--all you will know is what makes other people happy. Without experiencing things you cannot develop a refined enough palate to truly understand what is making you happy or unhappy.
The hardest thing for me to overcome, and I recognize that this is true for many other people, was learning how to comfort myself and deal with my own emotions. When I was angry, I always--ALWAYS--attributed them to other people. Sometimes I did this directly by telling myself that X made me angry or Y made me unhappy, and sometimes I would do this by saying I did this to myself because of what X has done. It took me a long time to realize that other people trigger emotions in me, and emotions are my subconscious' attempt to influence my decisions based on patterns of events in my past, however that does not make them good or bad. I used to always think loneliness was a bad feeling (I still do sometimes) but it isn't the feeling that is bad, it is how I react to it. If I embrace loneliness and it leads me to make new friends and break out of my comfort zone, then loneliness has served a good purpose. But if I resort to blaming other people for my sorrows, then I am merely slipping back into that dependent stage that I did as a child.
If you want to learn how to be happy and not slip into depression, you need to learn how to do it independently. Other people can't give you happiness, you have to learn it; and because each of us is unique, what makes one person happy doesn't necessarily make another person happy. The only way you can know what makes you happy is to broaden your perspective of the truth: to experience many things that make you happy and many things that make you sad.
It took a long time for me to realize that other people were telling me what would make me happy and what would make me sad. Because so many people told me about things that would make me sad, I avoided those things only to realize that they made me very happy. Getting a degree in English was one of those things: many people told me that it was a useless degree and would not help me to have a nice career. --What those people didn't realize is that I don't value the same careers that they do, and now that I have obtained my bachelors in English, I know that it has made me more happy than not having a degree. I also think there is still plenty of time for me to have a "nice career," even if it doesn't lead me to be a doctor or engineer. If I would have listened to other people, I would have been limiting myself to a state of less happiness, it wasn't until I ventured out independent of other people that I was able to learn for myself what made me happy.--And guess what? My degree in English was a crucial component along my path to discovering this All-natural Anti-depressant.
As an individual I make decisions on my own rather than follow the decisions of others. Sometimes my decisions coincide with decisions others wish I would make, but most of the time I have to make decisions for myself because no one else knows my situation better than me. To be happy, you need to be an individual as well. You need to become less emotionally dependent on other people and discover ways that you can be physically and mentally independent as well. When you can embrace who you are because you made all of the decisions that lead you to where you are now, you will be less prone to feelings of depression, you will have more control over your happiness, and you will have a new sense of purpose in life.
NEXT: Part 7
As children, we are very dependent on our parents and caretakers to survive. The institution of the family provides us with our most influential learning experiences, it teaches us how to cope with our emotions, develop relationships and make decisions. The natural progression of a man or woman is to leave the confines of his or her parents and venture into the world on our own to ultimately start our own families and continue the cycle.
Venturing into the real world is a difficult process and many individuals struggle with integrating into it. When faced with difficult situations, we tend to revert back to what we know and what is familiar--this includes our family and friends. We give up our independence and our chance to learn independence in order to keep things the way they are, but we aren't meant to stagnate in life, we are meant to adapt and change and move forward.
Because we prefer to revert back to the familiar when life becomes challenging, I have found that depression and independence tend to be at odds. Instead of dealing with emotions on our own, we revert back to our childhood when we would cry and whine and our parents or other family members would take care of us--this is a familiar pattern that has worked for us in the past and so our instinct is to remain in that dependent state in hopes that it will continue working into the future.
The sixth ingredient to my All-Natural Anti-Depressant is to look at yourself as an individual. Individuals make decisions for themselves, by themselves. Individuals, although they may be apart of social units such as family and community, remain independent of those social units.
I originally planned to put this article in part 3, but I realized as I was writing it that I needed to refer to the previous parts in order to explain the importance of this ingredient.
The first ingredient to my anti-depressant may be to create space, but the space isn't an end, it is a means to an end. It is difficult to gain your own independence if you rely on your family, friends, religion, school, or other community membership to tell you whether you are living life correctly. If you use other people to gauge whether you are making correct decisions or you use them as a comparison to determine what happiness is, you will never learn what makes you happy--all you will know is what makes other people happy. Without experiencing things you cannot develop a refined enough palate to truly understand what is making you happy or unhappy.
The hardest thing for me to overcome, and I recognize that this is true for many other people, was learning how to comfort myself and deal with my own emotions. When I was angry, I always--ALWAYS--attributed them to other people. Sometimes I did this directly by telling myself that X made me angry or Y made me unhappy, and sometimes I would do this by saying I did this to myself because of what X has done. It took me a long time to realize that other people trigger emotions in me, and emotions are my subconscious' attempt to influence my decisions based on patterns of events in my past, however that does not make them good or bad. I used to always think loneliness was a bad feeling (I still do sometimes) but it isn't the feeling that is bad, it is how I react to it. If I embrace loneliness and it leads me to make new friends and break out of my comfort zone, then loneliness has served a good purpose. But if I resort to blaming other people for my sorrows, then I am merely slipping back into that dependent stage that I did as a child.
If you want to learn how to be happy and not slip into depression, you need to learn how to do it independently. Other people can't give you happiness, you have to learn it; and because each of us is unique, what makes one person happy doesn't necessarily make another person happy. The only way you can know what makes you happy is to broaden your perspective of the truth: to experience many things that make you happy and many things that make you sad.
It took a long time for me to realize that other people were telling me what would make me happy and what would make me sad. Because so many people told me about things that would make me sad, I avoided those things only to realize that they made me very happy. Getting a degree in English was one of those things: many people told me that it was a useless degree and would not help me to have a nice career. --What those people didn't realize is that I don't value the same careers that they do, and now that I have obtained my bachelors in English, I know that it has made me more happy than not having a degree. I also think there is still plenty of time for me to have a "nice career," even if it doesn't lead me to be a doctor or engineer. If I would have listened to other people, I would have been limiting myself to a state of less happiness, it wasn't until I ventured out independent of other people that I was able to learn for myself what made me happy.--And guess what? My degree in English was a crucial component along my path to discovering this All-natural Anti-depressant.
As an individual I make decisions on my own rather than follow the decisions of others. Sometimes my decisions coincide with decisions others wish I would make, but most of the time I have to make decisions for myself because no one else knows my situation better than me. To be happy, you need to be an individual as well. You need to become less emotionally dependent on other people and discover ways that you can be physically and mentally independent as well. When you can embrace who you are because you made all of the decisions that lead you to where you are now, you will be less prone to feelings of depression, you will have more control over your happiness, and you will have a new sense of purpose in life.
NEXT: Part 7
Saturday, November 16, 2013
All-Natural Anti-Depressant: Part 5
Reread:
INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions
PART 4 - Broaden your Perspective: Situations
BROADEN YOUR PERSPECTIVE: TRUTH
The following section might repeat a few things from the previous section because they are both about broadening your perspective. Self doubt seems to be a common problem with many people who are depressed, including myself. Self doubt extends depression because in order to heal yourself you need to trust in yourself and your capabilities.
Most people will attempt to tell you about some truth that they know, whether it's truth about their area of expertise, truth about life in general, religion, spirituality, etc. The real truth is that everything that people think they know to be universal may not apply to you because of lack of experience.
The only way you can "know" anything is to experience it and to experience it's opposite, the rest of the time you merely "think" things. The English word "to know" gets abused all of the time when a majority of the time the person using it really means "to think." Someone, myself included, may tell you that they know that if you devote a whole day to smiling, you'll feel better and feel happier; but what they really mean is they think that if you devote a whole day to smiling you'll feel better and happier.
The way our human knowledge works, we have to experience the outcome and the inverse outcome in order to claim we know something. We know about gravity because we have seen an object at rest and an object being pulled by gravity. If all we saw, or rather all we recognized, was one of the two, we could make no assumption about the universal force called gravity.
Another example of truth: most people are able to claim, rightly, that they know what it means to be loved, because they had parents and family who loved them, and they have probably felt the uncaring world where there was a lack of love. However, some people grow up sheltered enough that they don't really know what love is because they remain among those who love them for such a long time. When they finally face the uncaring world, they don't know what to make of it and they don't recognize that it is the lack of love. It takes a few experiences for them to recognize the difference between what being loved and not being loved is like.
Taking "truth" further, it is possible to know something then to forget it: for example, people who drive a manual transmission car and then switch to an automatic for the majority of their life have a hard time remembering how to drive a manual transmission vehicle. Some people go for extended periods of time without love and forget what it feels like to be loved. The conclusion I am trying to lead you to is that it's possible to be depressed for such a long period of time that you forget what it means to be happy and you forget WHAT makes you happy.
There is a lot of false information out there--I don't mean that it's necessarily wrong either, just that it might not work for you. Each of us is unique, what works for one person might not work for another. Whenever someone gives you advice, myself included, keep your perspective broad--it may or may not work. Even all of the ingredients in my All-natural Anti-depressant might not work for you--they worked for me, but that doesn't mean they will work for you; you have to find what works for you through experimentation.
The Firth ingredient to my All-Natural Anti-Depressant is broaden your perspective of the truth. No one can "give" you the truth and the only way you'll "know" anything is if you try it. In other words: until you try those things that other people tell you to do or not do, you won't know if they will make you happy or if the opposite will make you happy. You might be surprised what you discover!
NEXT
INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions
PART 4 - Broaden your Perspective: Situations
BROADEN YOUR PERSPECTIVE: TRUTH
The following section might repeat a few things from the previous section because they are both about broadening your perspective. Self doubt seems to be a common problem with many people who are depressed, including myself. Self doubt extends depression because in order to heal yourself you need to trust in yourself and your capabilities.
Most people will attempt to tell you about some truth that they know, whether it's truth about their area of expertise, truth about life in general, religion, spirituality, etc. The real truth is that everything that people think they know to be universal may not apply to you because of lack of experience.
The only way you can "know" anything is to experience it and to experience it's opposite, the rest of the time you merely "think" things. The English word "to know" gets abused all of the time when a majority of the time the person using it really means "to think." Someone, myself included, may tell you that they know that if you devote a whole day to smiling, you'll feel better and feel happier; but what they really mean is they think that if you devote a whole day to smiling you'll feel better and happier.
The way our human knowledge works, we have to experience the outcome and the inverse outcome in order to claim we know something. We know about gravity because we have seen an object at rest and an object being pulled by gravity. If all we saw, or rather all we recognized, was one of the two, we could make no assumption about the universal force called gravity.
Another example of truth: most people are able to claim, rightly, that they know what it means to be loved, because they had parents and family who loved them, and they have probably felt the uncaring world where there was a lack of love. However, some people grow up sheltered enough that they don't really know what love is because they remain among those who love them for such a long time. When they finally face the uncaring world, they don't know what to make of it and they don't recognize that it is the lack of love. It takes a few experiences for them to recognize the difference between what being loved and not being loved is like.
Taking "truth" further, it is possible to know something then to forget it: for example, people who drive a manual transmission car and then switch to an automatic for the majority of their life have a hard time remembering how to drive a manual transmission vehicle. Some people go for extended periods of time without love and forget what it feels like to be loved. The conclusion I am trying to lead you to is that it's possible to be depressed for such a long period of time that you forget what it means to be happy and you forget WHAT makes you happy.
There is a lot of false information out there--I don't mean that it's necessarily wrong either, just that it might not work for you. Each of us is unique, what works for one person might not work for another. Whenever someone gives you advice, myself included, keep your perspective broad--it may or may not work. Even all of the ingredients in my All-natural Anti-depressant might not work for you--they worked for me, but that doesn't mean they will work for you; you have to find what works for you through experimentation.
The Firth ingredient to my All-Natural Anti-Depressant is broaden your perspective of the truth. No one can "give" you the truth and the only way you'll "know" anything is if you try it. In other words: until you try those things that other people tell you to do or not do, you won't know if they will make you happy or if the opposite will make you happy. You might be surprised what you discover!
NEXT
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
All-natural Anti-Depressant: Part 4
Reread:
INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions
BROADEN YOUR PERSPECTIVE: SITUATIONS
Both of the times in my life that I had severe depression were influenced greatly by my perception of my situation. The situation of my first bout of depression was similar to many young teenagers: I was trying to cope with physical and emotional growth in a hostile environment and I wasn't hacking it. In my second bout of severe depression, my situation was conducive to self-doubt, guilt, and fear of consequences. It wasn't until I took a step back and critically looked at the things I valued and believed in firmly that I realized how to pull myself out. You have to have a plan if you want to get out of depression for good, it will not happen to you unless you make changes to your life.
When I was 13-15, the first time I was depressed, I didn't instantly conclude that my friends were causing my problems. It seems obvious now that the situation I had gotten into was the biggest influence on what was causing me stress and sadness. I had put myself into a situation that made me unhappy--or rather, I didn't do anything with my life and that's what put me in that situation. I didn't try to control my situation, I let my situation control me. Because I let life happen to me rather than make life happen for me, I had (and thought) that I had no control over my life and that is was miserable because of things outside of me.
I don't want to get into the details of the situation when I was 20 years old and facing another severe depression, but I can remember waking up every day in a bad, depressed mood and thinking that I must be under some sort of punishment for decisions I made already and couldn't change or correct. To add to my situation, I was among people who I didn't trust and I wasn't allowed to speak to my family and friends about my situation. Things were bad.
In both of my worst moments, I didn't realize that my depression was primarily situational. Once I got out of the bad situation, created some space from it, it eventually got better, but I wasn't sure at the time that it ever would. Once you get out a bad situation, life really does gradually get better, but sometimes that only makes you feel more depressed because the task of getting out of your situation can seem daunting. Don't be discouraged, because your problem isn't that you are in a bad situation, it is that right now you lack the knowledge of how to get out.
When I was 13 till I was 15, I didn't seize control of my life and therefore I didn't have any control over what happened to me. Instead of putting myself out into the world and into situations where I could make friends, I stayed at home and was comfortable with the "friends" who latched on to me, rather than me reaching out to make friends for myself. Instead of doing anything that would have given me accomplishments and would have made me feel good about myself, I did things that I thought made me smarter such as studying and reading. Don't get me wrong, I had a few good friends and I really was becoming smarter, but I was focusing on the wrong things and I wasn't making any kind of decisions! I thought being smart would make me friends and I thought that they would just come to me if they liked me--never did I realize that smart people have few friends and you have to reach out to other people to make friends.
The fourth ingredient to my all-natural anti-depressant is to broaden your perspective of your situation. The things that you're doing right now, the things that you value, you have to take a hard look at them and determine if they are contributing to what you ultimately want or if they are taking you in a different direction. The things that I valued and believed were good things, but they weren't directly correlated with what my desires were (to be happy). It has taken me many years to come to the conclusion that smart people have benefits, but making friends isn't related to being smart--it isn't one of the benefits of being smart--respect might be a benefit of being smart, but respect doesn't mean you'll make friends, it just means that the friends you make will be more likely to respect you.
In science, if a claim is considered "valid" that means that whatever the claim to do relates to what it claims will happen. One way you can look at this is that some of your values might not be valid values. Some of the things that you think will make you happy, such as having more money, possessions, or even things you have no control over, like better genetics, or pleasing your family or friends, or anything related to other people for that matter--these things might not actually make you happy or worse, they might not be possible.
Broadening your perspective of your situation will require you to make a list (mental or on paper) of all the things you currently believe will make you happy and to be open to the possibility that other things might be true, even the opposite might be true. For example, living your life trying to please your parents and not be seen as selfish might contribute to depression, but living your life to please your self and be independent of your parents might actually make you very happy. You never know if something is true or not unless you try it out, so don't limit yourself to false preconceptions and you might be surprised at how well they work!
NEXT Part 5
INTRODUCTION
PART 1- Create Space
PART 2- Persuade Yourself
PART 3- Emotions
BROADEN YOUR PERSPECTIVE: SITUATIONS
Both of the times in my life that I had severe depression were influenced greatly by my perception of my situation. The situation of my first bout of depression was similar to many young teenagers: I was trying to cope with physical and emotional growth in a hostile environment and I wasn't hacking it. In my second bout of severe depression, my situation was conducive to self-doubt, guilt, and fear of consequences. It wasn't until I took a step back and critically looked at the things I valued and believed in firmly that I realized how to pull myself out. You have to have a plan if you want to get out of depression for good, it will not happen to you unless you make changes to your life.
When I was 13-15, the first time I was depressed, I didn't instantly conclude that my friends were causing my problems. It seems obvious now that the situation I had gotten into was the biggest influence on what was causing me stress and sadness. I had put myself into a situation that made me unhappy--or rather, I didn't do anything with my life and that's what put me in that situation. I didn't try to control my situation, I let my situation control me. Because I let life happen to me rather than make life happen for me, I had (and thought) that I had no control over my life and that is was miserable because of things outside of me.
I don't want to get into the details of the situation when I was 20 years old and facing another severe depression, but I can remember waking up every day in a bad, depressed mood and thinking that I must be under some sort of punishment for decisions I made already and couldn't change or correct. To add to my situation, I was among people who I didn't trust and I wasn't allowed to speak to my family and friends about my situation. Things were bad.
In both of my worst moments, I didn't realize that my depression was primarily situational. Once I got out of the bad situation, created some space from it, it eventually got better, but I wasn't sure at the time that it ever would. Once you get out a bad situation, life really does gradually get better, but sometimes that only makes you feel more depressed because the task of getting out of your situation can seem daunting. Don't be discouraged, because your problem isn't that you are in a bad situation, it is that right now you lack the knowledge of how to get out.
When I was 13 till I was 15, I didn't seize control of my life and therefore I didn't have any control over what happened to me. Instead of putting myself out into the world and into situations where I could make friends, I stayed at home and was comfortable with the "friends" who latched on to me, rather than me reaching out to make friends for myself. Instead of doing anything that would have given me accomplishments and would have made me feel good about myself, I did things that I thought made me smarter such as studying and reading. Don't get me wrong, I had a few good friends and I really was becoming smarter, but I was focusing on the wrong things and I wasn't making any kind of decisions! I thought being smart would make me friends and I thought that they would just come to me if they liked me--never did I realize that smart people have few friends and you have to reach out to other people to make friends.
The fourth ingredient to my all-natural anti-depressant is to broaden your perspective of your situation. The things that you're doing right now, the things that you value, you have to take a hard look at them and determine if they are contributing to what you ultimately want or if they are taking you in a different direction. The things that I valued and believed were good things, but they weren't directly correlated with what my desires were (to be happy). It has taken me many years to come to the conclusion that smart people have benefits, but making friends isn't related to being smart--it isn't one of the benefits of being smart--respect might be a benefit of being smart, but respect doesn't mean you'll make friends, it just means that the friends you make will be more likely to respect you.
In science, if a claim is considered "valid" that means that whatever the claim to do relates to what it claims will happen. One way you can look at this is that some of your values might not be valid values. Some of the things that you think will make you happy, such as having more money, possessions, or even things you have no control over, like better genetics, or pleasing your family or friends, or anything related to other people for that matter--these things might not actually make you happy or worse, they might not be possible.
Broadening your perspective of your situation will require you to make a list (mental or on paper) of all the things you currently believe will make you happy and to be open to the possibility that other things might be true, even the opposite might be true. For example, living your life trying to please your parents and not be seen as selfish might contribute to depression, but living your life to please your self and be independent of your parents might actually make you very happy. You never know if something is true or not unless you try it out, so don't limit yourself to false preconceptions and you might be surprised at how well they work!
NEXT Part 5
Sunday, November 3, 2013
All-Natural Anti-Depressant: Part 3
I started to write this article in the original order (Part 3 was titled "Be Individual") but I realized that I needed to explain something that I was going to talk about in part 6, so I switched the order of things.
Reread:
INTRODUCTION
PART 1 - Create Space
PART 2 - Persuade Yourself
EMOTIONS
Most people look at life with the lens that being emotional is bad and that we should try to be rational at every opportunity, but I have learned from my depression that Emotions are superior to rational thought. The problem that most people have is that they don't deal with their emotions correctly and so their emotions come across as a bad thing. If you want to be happy, you need to understand the role that emotions have, after all, Happiness is an emotion of itself!
The common consensus is that decisions made based on emotion are, more often than not, poor decisions. They are often described as irrational, hasty, not well-thought out, and carry a lot of negative connotations. Generally, people consider being "overly-emotional" to a bad thing as though the individual's judgement is clouded and that they aren't experiencing life normally. This is why people look at depression as such a bad thing.
Contrary to what everyone says, Emotions are not bad, Emotions are very positive. Happiness is one of the most positive emotions. People who are happy are said to be more efficient, make better decisions, are more in tune with reality and better contributors to their community and the world around them. Happiness is an emotion just like sadness is an emotion.
At the most basic level, I have determined 12 primary emotions: Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Guilt, Anger, Confusion, Disgust, Boredom, Loneliness, Frustration, Love, and Passion as well as Pain, Hunger, Thirst, and Fatigue, and being too Hot or too Cold. The six that I excluded from the main list are actually clues into the purpose of the other emotions. We feel hungry, thirsty or tired when our bodies need food, water or rest, and we feel hot when our bodies need to cool down or cold when our bodies need to warm up. These emotions are messages from our subconscious to our conscious prompting a response.
The human brain is a sophisticated tool for automating and condensing information and emotions are the link between the conscious and subconscious. Think of it this way, the subconscious is constantly gathering and interpreting information from our senses. Much of the information that we receive is useless on its own, but used together it creates meaning. For example, smelling smoke indoors could mean that your neighbor is holding a bonfire, or it could mean the house is on fire; seeing smoke indoors at the same time and feeling heat could mean there is a fire in the building. Your subconscious can interpret these senses and synthesize them so that you don't have to consciously think about them and then send you the message to run--but the message that your subconscious communicates to your conscious isn't the clear and concise "run", the message is generally an emotion: fear, confusion, anger, etc. The emotion you feel is what prompts you to run outside or to charge in with a fire extinguisher. Feeling confusion/curiosity could prompt you to investigate further only to realize that someone lit the fireplace and it went out leaving smoke everywhere.
We learn emotions through our experiences. Many toddlers are considered "fearless" until something happens that they don't like. As a baby we learn through mimicry and observation what happiness is when our parents show us attention and play with us. As we get older, our emotions become more sophisticated because we have more experiences to draw on and some of our experiences are emotions reacting to emotions. Think of a time where a good friend scared you--you were scared at first, but then you might have been angry at your friend.
Our modern language still has a hard time expressing emotions. The sentence above "you were scared at first, but then you might have been angry at your friend" isn't entirely accurate: you first felt fear, then you felt anger, then you attributed it to your friend. In describing what actually happened however, you might have thought you were angry at your friend, which is only partly true. I point out this distinction because it isn't universal. Some people feel fear and then they feel happy and laugh at their friend, other people feel fear and then feel sadness and cry, still others don't feel fear at all and instead feel confusion or frustration. The feeling that you are feeling isn't directed at your friend, it is triggered by your friend.
Emotions are triggered responses. Jumping back to the topic of the subconscious and conscious, your emotions aren't caused by other people, they are caused by yourself. Miles Sherts, in his book "Conscious Communcation" drove this point home to me, that we don't feel things because of other people, we feel things because of ourselves, other people just trigger those feelings in us. The reason that we feel fear is because we learned when we were young to steer clear of people or things that might do us harm. Loud noises and abrupt movements scare most people because they are generally associated in our minds with accidentally getting hurt so when your friend makes a loud noise while jumping up from behind you it triggers fear.
The reason that I would argue that emotions are superior to rational thought is that they are founded on experience--experiences that we often don't even remember--and they happen at lightning speeds. Rational thought takes time in order to come to any conclusion and we have to research and recall the experiences that are pertinent to the decision at hand.
As I mentioned earlier, in society, emotions are generally considered a bad thing. I think this is a fatal flaw of our society--one that we as a society have only recently started dealing with since the start of the millennium. Because we look at emotions as a bad thing, whenever we feel a negative emotion, we don't deal with that emotion but instead we brush it aside in order to make room for more rational thought.
On my path to permanently overcoming depression, I noticed two things I was doing in regards to my emotions:
First and foremost, I never really learned how to accurately describe my emotions--there isn't an emphasis on learning this in our society, so I never really made an attempt to learn what I was feeling. I would, and still do, feel hungry and think that I am feeling anger. I would feel loneliness and think that I was feeling sadness. I'm a very thin person by my natural genetics, so this doesn't apply to me, but I know many people who when they feel bored they think they are hungry. Before I could overcome depression, I needed to correct my interpretation of myself and my emotions. The word "depression" is such an overbearing term that it makes it unmanageable, but when you break it down into its individual components: Sadness, loneliness, fear, etc. Those emotions are manageable.
The second thing I was doing with my emotions was that I wasn't really addressing them. Part of this was because I didn't know what emotion I was feeling, and the other part was because I thought it wasn't acceptable to feel emotions and to act on those emotions and a third part of this was that I didn't know how to address my emotions. We are generally taught that if we feel anger we should put it aside because it can never lead to a good outcome; but this is an incorrect statement and only leads us to never addressing the emotion! Anger is just an emotion--the acts that people do because of it are bad, but the Anger is just an indication that you are in conflict with someone else or with yourself. You need to resolve your conflicts in order to stop feeling angry and you can't push them aside and forget about them without first addressing them.
The third ingredient to my all-natural anti-depressant is addressing your emotions. You will have to first learn what emotions you are feeling, and then learn the appropriate response for dealing with them. The next time you recognize that you feel a certain way, you will probably have to put conscious effort into determining why you feel that way. Again, remember that other people don't make you feel a certain way--our language is such that it would make us think that they do simply because the natural response is to say: so and so is making my angry--other people trigger the emotion, they don't force it upon you. Once you can determine what triggered the emotion you can address it. If your friend jumping out of a bush scared you and you were angry because of it, you could appropriately address that emotion by telling your friend that you are angry and to please not do that again.
Everyone handles their emotions differently, for some people having some room to breath (being away from others) helps them to calm down and release the emotion. For others, doing something enjoyable that takes their mind off of the emotion helps them release the emotion. Sometimes verbalizing or talking about the emotion with someone else can help you release the emotion. You may even have to try all of the above depending on what emotion you are feeling. The key here is to make a conscious effort to do these things. You want to allow yourself to feel sad, you want to allow yourself to feel angry, you want to allow yourself to feel scared, because after you have had the time to feel the emotion, (in other words to address it) you will no longer feel that emotion.
Addressing your emotions can take time. We don't always have consecutive time to address our emotions and so sometimes you might find that you can only squeeze 10 min of time here and 10 min of time there to focus on that emotion, but if you make a conscious effort to resolve the emotion and you come back to that conscious effort at every earliest opportunity, eventually you won't feel that emotion anymore. Once you no longer feel the predominant emotion, you can start focusing on doing the things that will make you feel happy.
NEXT: Part 4
Reread:
INTRODUCTION
PART 1 - Create Space
PART 2 - Persuade Yourself
EMOTIONS
Most people look at life with the lens that being emotional is bad and that we should try to be rational at every opportunity, but I have learned from my depression that Emotions are superior to rational thought. The problem that most people have is that they don't deal with their emotions correctly and so their emotions come across as a bad thing. If you want to be happy, you need to understand the role that emotions have, after all, Happiness is an emotion of itself!
The common consensus is that decisions made based on emotion are, more often than not, poor decisions. They are often described as irrational, hasty, not well-thought out, and carry a lot of negative connotations. Generally, people consider being "overly-emotional" to a bad thing as though the individual's judgement is clouded and that they aren't experiencing life normally. This is why people look at depression as such a bad thing.
Contrary to what everyone says, Emotions are not bad, Emotions are very positive. Happiness is one of the most positive emotions. People who are happy are said to be more efficient, make better decisions, are more in tune with reality and better contributors to their community and the world around them. Happiness is an emotion just like sadness is an emotion.
At the most basic level, I have determined 12 primary emotions: Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Guilt, Anger, Confusion, Disgust, Boredom, Loneliness, Frustration, Love, and Passion as well as Pain, Hunger, Thirst, and Fatigue, and being too Hot or too Cold. The six that I excluded from the main list are actually clues into the purpose of the other emotions. We feel hungry, thirsty or tired when our bodies need food, water or rest, and we feel hot when our bodies need to cool down or cold when our bodies need to warm up. These emotions are messages from our subconscious to our conscious prompting a response.
The human brain is a sophisticated tool for automating and condensing information and emotions are the link between the conscious and subconscious. Think of it this way, the subconscious is constantly gathering and interpreting information from our senses. Much of the information that we receive is useless on its own, but used together it creates meaning. For example, smelling smoke indoors could mean that your neighbor is holding a bonfire, or it could mean the house is on fire; seeing smoke indoors at the same time and feeling heat could mean there is a fire in the building. Your subconscious can interpret these senses and synthesize them so that you don't have to consciously think about them and then send you the message to run--but the message that your subconscious communicates to your conscious isn't the clear and concise "run", the message is generally an emotion: fear, confusion, anger, etc. The emotion you feel is what prompts you to run outside or to charge in with a fire extinguisher. Feeling confusion/curiosity could prompt you to investigate further only to realize that someone lit the fireplace and it went out leaving smoke everywhere.
We learn emotions through our experiences. Many toddlers are considered "fearless" until something happens that they don't like. As a baby we learn through mimicry and observation what happiness is when our parents show us attention and play with us. As we get older, our emotions become more sophisticated because we have more experiences to draw on and some of our experiences are emotions reacting to emotions. Think of a time where a good friend scared you--you were scared at first, but then you might have been angry at your friend.
Our modern language still has a hard time expressing emotions. The sentence above "you were scared at first, but then you might have been angry at your friend" isn't entirely accurate: you first felt fear, then you felt anger, then you attributed it to your friend. In describing what actually happened however, you might have thought you were angry at your friend, which is only partly true. I point out this distinction because it isn't universal. Some people feel fear and then they feel happy and laugh at their friend, other people feel fear and then feel sadness and cry, still others don't feel fear at all and instead feel confusion or frustration. The feeling that you are feeling isn't directed at your friend, it is triggered by your friend.
Emotions are triggered responses. Jumping back to the topic of the subconscious and conscious, your emotions aren't caused by other people, they are caused by yourself. Miles Sherts, in his book "Conscious Communcation" drove this point home to me, that we don't feel things because of other people, we feel things because of ourselves, other people just trigger those feelings in us. The reason that we feel fear is because we learned when we were young to steer clear of people or things that might do us harm. Loud noises and abrupt movements scare most people because they are generally associated in our minds with accidentally getting hurt so when your friend makes a loud noise while jumping up from behind you it triggers fear.
The reason that I would argue that emotions are superior to rational thought is that they are founded on experience--experiences that we often don't even remember--and they happen at lightning speeds. Rational thought takes time in order to come to any conclusion and we have to research and recall the experiences that are pertinent to the decision at hand.
As I mentioned earlier, in society, emotions are generally considered a bad thing. I think this is a fatal flaw of our society--one that we as a society have only recently started dealing with since the start of the millennium. Because we look at emotions as a bad thing, whenever we feel a negative emotion, we don't deal with that emotion but instead we brush it aside in order to make room for more rational thought.
On my path to permanently overcoming depression, I noticed two things I was doing in regards to my emotions:
First and foremost, I never really learned how to accurately describe my emotions--there isn't an emphasis on learning this in our society, so I never really made an attempt to learn what I was feeling. I would, and still do, feel hungry and think that I am feeling anger. I would feel loneliness and think that I was feeling sadness. I'm a very thin person by my natural genetics, so this doesn't apply to me, but I know many people who when they feel bored they think they are hungry. Before I could overcome depression, I needed to correct my interpretation of myself and my emotions. The word "depression" is such an overbearing term that it makes it unmanageable, but when you break it down into its individual components: Sadness, loneliness, fear, etc. Those emotions are manageable.
The second thing I was doing with my emotions was that I wasn't really addressing them. Part of this was because I didn't know what emotion I was feeling, and the other part was because I thought it wasn't acceptable to feel emotions and to act on those emotions and a third part of this was that I didn't know how to address my emotions. We are generally taught that if we feel anger we should put it aside because it can never lead to a good outcome; but this is an incorrect statement and only leads us to never addressing the emotion! Anger is just an emotion--the acts that people do because of it are bad, but the Anger is just an indication that you are in conflict with someone else or with yourself. You need to resolve your conflicts in order to stop feeling angry and you can't push them aside and forget about them without first addressing them.
The third ingredient to my all-natural anti-depressant is addressing your emotions. You will have to first learn what emotions you are feeling, and then learn the appropriate response for dealing with them. The next time you recognize that you feel a certain way, you will probably have to put conscious effort into determining why you feel that way. Again, remember that other people don't make you feel a certain way--our language is such that it would make us think that they do simply because the natural response is to say: so and so is making my angry--other people trigger the emotion, they don't force it upon you. Once you can determine what triggered the emotion you can address it. If your friend jumping out of a bush scared you and you were angry because of it, you could appropriately address that emotion by telling your friend that you are angry and to please not do that again.
Everyone handles their emotions differently, for some people having some room to breath (being away from others) helps them to calm down and release the emotion. For others, doing something enjoyable that takes their mind off of the emotion helps them release the emotion. Sometimes verbalizing or talking about the emotion with someone else can help you release the emotion. You may even have to try all of the above depending on what emotion you are feeling. The key here is to make a conscious effort to do these things. You want to allow yourself to feel sad, you want to allow yourself to feel angry, you want to allow yourself to feel scared, because after you have had the time to feel the emotion, (in other words to address it) you will no longer feel that emotion.
Addressing your emotions can take time. We don't always have consecutive time to address our emotions and so sometimes you might find that you can only squeeze 10 min of time here and 10 min of time there to focus on that emotion, but if you make a conscious effort to resolve the emotion and you come back to that conscious effort at every earliest opportunity, eventually you won't feel that emotion anymore. Once you no longer feel the predominant emotion, you can start focusing on doing the things that will make you feel happy.
NEXT: Part 4
13 Beliefs
[[I updated this and re-posted to add 3 more and adjust some phrases]]
Although some people might disagree when I say this, I am very open to reason and not stubborn.--The thing is, I believe what I believe very firmly until I am presented with an overpowering argument. I feel like being stubborn is to refuse to listen to other peoples' arguments. Being stubborn is to not give people the benefit of the doubt. Being stubborn is when you fully know that you are wrong and yet you stick with it.--I'm not stubborn. Just like many rhetoricians instruct, I try to be open to the truth and argument and consensus.
Although some people might disagree when I say this, I am very open to reason and not stubborn.--The thing is, I believe what I believe very firmly until I am presented with an overpowering argument. I feel like being stubborn is to refuse to listen to other peoples' arguments. Being stubborn is to not give people the benefit of the doubt. Being stubborn is when you fully know that you are wrong and yet you stick with it.--I'm not stubborn. Just like many rhetoricians instruct, I try to be open to the truth and argument and consensus.
I have been working on this weighty project for several months. It is a list of core things that I believe in. I have taken into account as many viewpoints as possible, I have asked questions, had discussions, and spent hours thinking about these things and I feel as though this list is a list of things that I stand firm in. I am open to changing my mind provided an overpowering argument is presented to me, but as I already stated, I've been working on this for several months--you might even say years--and these are the things that I have rooted myself in:
I believe in:
1.
Universal Truth and Universal Constants
a.
Yes, there is ALWAYS one thing that is true and
a lot of partial or non-truths.
b.
But the truth is trumped by how it affects
people.
2.
Life is a compilation of memorable experiences
a.
All we know is what we have experienced.
b.
Life is the combination of our spirit-body and
our physical-body.
i.
We existed in our spirit-body before we had a
physical body.
ii.
Our physical body can be destroyed.
iii.
Our spirit body is indestructible and
constitutes our whole persona.
iv.
Before we were born we were learning universal
skillsets, which are manifested as natural talent here in this life.
3.
Everything must eventually end
a.
There are only two things that will always
exist: our spirits and universal truth.
b.
Spiritual beings and universal truth is all that
really matters because it is constant.
i.
(1-b) Spiritual beings trump universal truth,
because spiritual beings are active and universal truth is passive and cannot
change.
c.
Everything must end because spiritual beings
exist
i.
Unlike universal truth, spiritual beings change
things and make an impact.
ii.
Spiritual beings aren’t always constant, they
may make one decision one day and another decision another day.
d.
More correctly, everything goes through a cycle
of phases: beginning and ending and then beginning again
i.
Once created, the basis of our universe—the
elements—can never be destroyed but are merely recyclable.
ii.
Endings are the pre-cursor to beginnings.
iii.
Things don’t begin and end—these are just
states—things change.
e.
Even though things are beginning and ending all
of the time, they are not returning to their original state; each time they
change they become different.
f.
Even when they change from one state to another
and back again they come back as a different version of the same thing.
4.
We--sentient spirits--are the most powerful
things in the universe
a.
Because we are spiritual, we have the potential
to affect everything in the universe.
b.
We are also the dominant spiritual being, more
dominant than animals because of our intelligence and power.
5.
What we experience through life is based on how
we react to new events in our life
a.
True, the events in our life shape us, but
ultimately we control how we react to them.
i.
We may not be able to control all of the events
in our life and therefore sometimes we are forced to make decisions and changes
ii.
But we can always control how we feel about such
things: positive or negative
b.
One of the greatest skills we can develop is the
ability to accept whatever life gives us
6.
When life is not forcing us to change and shape, we have unlimited possibilities
a.
We are such powerful beings that we can
accomplish anything that we set our minds to
i.
Our minds, the connection between spirit and
body, are so powerful that we can overcome our physical limitations
ii.
Our minds can reframe our realities into
enjoying the bad moments and we can find happiness from anything (but only if
we learn to use our minds)
b.
Even if life forces us to change, we can change
back so long as we want to
i.
Sometimes forced change is caused by universal
constants and other times it is caused by other people
1.
Universal constants are always going to force us
to change, and attempting to live contrary to them will always be difficult but
possible.
2.
Change caused by other people will not always
come by force and we can oftentimes find a balance between the wants of others
and the wants of ourselves.
7.
No two people are the same
a.
Our experiences shape us, and different
combinations of experiences have different effects on different people
b.
It is impossible for two people to experience
the same things
i.
Past experiences emphasize or de-emphasize our
present experiences
1.
Certain combinations of experiences in the
correct order shape people in similar ways, but having the correct combinations
is very difficult.
2.
Sex is one of the closest experiences two people
can share, because one causes the experiences of the other and vice versa.
ii.
Location and distance prevents people from
experiencing the same results in the same way.
iii.
The time when people experience similar things
can have an effect on how the individual experiences those things.
iv.
Pre-disposition, perceptions, beliefs, and
desires effect how people experience the same things.
8.
There are four distinct obstacles facing all
mankind
a.
Death
i.
We all die, but we don’t all cope with it in the
same way because we are different
ii.
To overcome death we either need to make
something out of the lives we are living, develop a way to live forever in
happiness, or find a way to live life comfortable with everything that happens.
1.
Making something out of our lives is called
building a heritage, and pharaohs, kings, and even great minds do this by
creating that their name gets attached to whether it is a tomb, a kingdom, or
an invention or way of thinking.
b.
Curiosity
i.
We are always striving to learn and experience
new things and make sense of things that don’t make sense. However, there is no
limit to the thing we can learn and experience
ii.
To overcome curiosity, we either need to accept
that there is no limit and to learn to be comfortable with what we do know and
experience, or to forever pacify our curiosity by exploring everything.
c.
Purpose
i.
No one wants to do things aimlessly. We desire
that everything we do contributes to a greater aspect of life.
ii.
To overcome our desire for purpose, we need to
have goals, dreams and desires and know ourselves—our wants and desires—then we
need to apply all of our actions towards those things.
d.
Desires for connection with others
i.
There is a universal constant related to the
change that is ever present from life (3-c), that as people change they move
apart from one another unless they are growing together.
ii.
If both people are not growing together, then
they are getting further apart.
iii.
To overcome our desires to connect with others,
we need to find people who are willing to grow towards us, and we need to grow
towards them.
9.
Relationships are what matter most in this life
a.
Because people are always changing and
everything else is constant, people are the catalyst of everything in life
i.
Although universal truth is important, it will
always remain the same and never change—once you know the truth you are no
longer curious about it.
ii.
Because people change, you can always point your
curiosity towards them.
b.
People contain infinite energy, infinite power,
and infinite ability
i.
It is easier to access the power inside of us when
we are joined with other people
1.
When people are paired, the reaction that one
person has on the other can spark a greater impact than for an individual to
make decisions and changes on their own.
2.
In good relationships one will improve the
quality of life and experience of the other through motivating and beneficially
influencing the other person.
3.
However, in bad relationships, the pairing will
have a negative effect; it can limit one’s potential, energy, ability and
power.
10.
Society and Community are important aspects of
individual life
a.
Society and community is an interconnectedness
of individuals to one another
b.
Societies require a slight contract in order to
remain in balance
i.
We are obligated to follow commonly consented
social contracts simply because we are a part of society
ii.
Unless we discover a way to truly live in
isolation, we will always have to submit to some form of society’s contracts.
c.
Societies help individuals accomplish things
they might not otherwise accomplish
1.
[such as peace, civility, freedom, etc.]
11.
We have a responsibility to act ethically
a.
There is a disturbance in the universe that
prevents
b.
Each act we make creates a consequence, which
causes that disturbance, therefore we need to align our acts with universal
truth as much as possible in order to balance the natural movement of the
universe.
12.
An Ethical act is one that brings about a good
outcome
a.
Regardless of intent or what it says about you,
the universally ethical act is the one that creates a good outcome.
b.
We can only judge other people, and ourselves,
by the outcomes that we bring about.
c.
We should make every attempt to create good
outcomes.
d.
It is our responsibility to correct all of the
bad outcomes we create, regardless of intent.
13.
Conflict occurs when the universe is unbalanced
a.
Conflict is a disagreement through which two forces
involved perceive a threat to their needs, interests or concerns.
b.
Sentient beings can have conflicts with Universal
constants.
c.
In order to overcome the human condition, we
have to resolve our conflicts with Universal constants and other sentient
beings.
I'm still working on this list and will continue to develop my ideas as I become more and more firm about beliefs I will add to it, though I have tried to start with what I thought was most important.
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Pure Love
Listening to a few songs by Christians and by agnostics or otherwise, I started to think about Pure Love. Let me describe it to you:
It is universal--the way you love your dog, your friend, your parents, your spouse--it's the same.
Love never ends, once you love someone this way, you can't retract it or else you will invalidate your love
Love protects others
But Love lets others protect themselves because, Love is freedom from intervention
Love is learning about the life of the person you are loving; their strengths, weaknesses, goals, dreams, desires, and the problems they are facing presently.
Love is listening and expressing empathy
Love is being proactive instead of reactive
Love leads you to take full accountability for your actions
Love is apologizing and correcting yourself
Love is never walking away from someone because Love is always being available
Love is overcoming fears
Love is overcoming the pain those we love cause us by forgiving them
Love is thinking in groups rather than as an individual
Love is always unique
Love is desirable to give as much as it is to receive
Love is what I'm trying to have for you
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)