Tag Archives: sanity

The Fallacy of One-upmanship

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
Jiddu Krishnamurt

As modern society became increasingly competitive, we adopted as one of ego’s justifications for competitive modes of living the “survival of the fittest” aspect of Darwin’s theory of evolution. We thereby chose to glorify one-upmanship as the wave of our future. Competition became a dominant theme in economic life as well as personal life, with professional sports offering a way to combine the two and fabricate vicarious opportunities to be a winner or loser by over-identifying with other people’s achievements. In doing so we neglected to notice that Darwin’s theory also incorporated cooperation among members of a species for survival.

In our self-deprecating neglect, for centuries we’ve been one-upping each other as if that process carried to its extreme and unbalanced by concern for the human species as whole creates a better future. By measuring our progress mainly in materialistic terms and accepting collateral damage (even among our own loved ones) as a norm, we’ve ignored other measures of the quality of life and failed to notice life’s decline. In glorifying one-upmanship as the wave of the future upon which to surf to shore as champions of injustice, we failed to notice that we are riding that wave into shallower and shallower waters and waving good-bye to a deeper, more enriching future. Now storm-generated waves of competition crash upon the shore to produce tremendously powerful undertows that drag many of us along the grinding bottom to drown in self-pity and self-contempt for our failure to thrive as upmanshippers.

If you are one of the disenchanted surfers who wants to find a way out of the shallows to avoid the grind and not be as likely to drown, consider what I share in the ABCs of love portion of this web site. There you will find promising ideals to put into practice in cooperation with others as practitioners of love. The principles of love are worthy of your heart’s desire for an upgraded lifestyle as you renew your capacity to sail the high seas. The adventure of truth-seeking awaits you as you discover the treasure chest of love that your fear of pirates has caused you to bury in your heart.

Overcoming Pampered Class Short-sightedness

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In the United States and many of the developed and developing nations, we are creating a worldwide culture that aims as its measure of success to provide ever-expanding creature comforts and conveniences to as many of its members as it can or bust. And bust it may because the unspoken way of achieving this goal requires that it do so without including everyone in the pampering. We seek to balloon the pampered class as large as we can make it but recognize only vaguely that our way of doing so cannot include everyone. It is only our way of doing so that prevents us from succeeding in including everyone.

The flaw in our plan is the incentive aspect of our way of achieving a pampered class. We mistakenly seek to pamper as many of us as we can by measuring all achievements by the money we have to spend to acquire pampering and by setting up comparative scales of pampering that indulge our ego’s tendency to seek to have more than others to prove our greater self-worth. Our egos would have us prove our greater self-worth by climbing higher on ladders of our preferred ways of self-pampering. So long as we indulge our egos’ envy, greed and lust for comparatively “more and more without end,” our way of pampering ourselves will not achieve universal pampering because our egos need to have disparities to prove their success in achieving comparatively more than others have achieved. Our standards of comparison may differ among our egos but they invariably translate into the relative cost of each achievement in greater pampering. The incentive to participate in this competitive way of life translates into increasing the money that flows to us so that we can spend more of it to increase our self-pampering – and to thereby mistakenly try to prove our self-worth, when the very system of incentives implies that we have little natural self-worth.

We establish incentive plans because the ego initially comes into being to cover up our mistaken sense of low self-worth and by circuitous rationalization convinces us that no one will participate as a productive member of society without being essentially bribed to do so. We think so little of ourselves (and by projection of others) that we believe we’ll all slack off and indulge in sloth if we were to receive a share of pampering without tying that share to earning it. The possibility of everyone’s being willing to share in both the work and the rewards simply because it’s our nature to want to be productive, responsible members of our families and communities and to celebrate life together escapes most people. It seems too idealistic. And given how our society has been functioning on the ego’s basis for many generations, our skepticism seems firmly supported by evidence. When we see how many people initially act once incentives to produce are reduced or removed, we point to their behaviors as “proof” that sloth is a part of human nature and will take over in the absence of an incentive program sufficient to overcome the predictable entropy of sloth. We refuse to recognize as fact that the very incentive programs we insist on putting in place themselves cause the reaction of lower productivity when incentives seem inadequate or are removed entirely. We are trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy by the very social training by which we establish the social norm of productivity tied to economic incentives.

Can we ever transition to a culture in which productivity is entirely voluntary and pampering shared with at least less regard and perhaps with no regard for levels of productivity? Might this idea be worth trying experimentally? I suggest that some people may not be socially oriented to be included in this experiment at the outset due to their prior social programming that has caused them to feel extremely low self-worth. But some people who have a sense of their value as human beings regardless of how much they may be compensated for their productivity could band together to co-create a subculture in which the group’s collective productivity is shared among the members of the group equitably without regard to any one individual’s measure of productivity. I suggest that such an alternative subculture would be by its nature non-competitive, non-comparative and egalitarian in its values. It would be based on trust in the natural tendency of people to want to maximize the development of their gifts and talents and to invest them in ways beneficial to the greatest good of the greatest number.

Suppose the “incentive” for participating in this alternative subculture were defined not in terms of disparities in pampering (economic power, social status, etc.) but in generously and equitably available, expansive opportunities for self-development and expressions of creativity and curiosity lightly monitored by a nurturing leadership who is concerned about the development of every member of the subculture and who arranges for resources to be available to encourage self-development. Might some people realize that this “incentive” appeals to their deepest inner natures (their very souls) and allows for and encourages the most enriching lives possible? Infinite opportunities to participate as a responsible member of a self-nurturing culture might draw together the most creative, socially responsible people to collectively “make it happen.” That it has not yet happened does not mean that it cannot be created today. Perhaps the time has come for this experiment to be explored and placed in motion by those drawn to its promise to defuse the ego’s tendency to progressively escalate problems out of control and cause all things of any significant value to humans to be disparaged as irrelevant and subordinated to the ego’s relentless pursuit of power, wealth and pampering as indications of its ascension up ladders of success by which monetarily incentivized economies operate.

In essence, I’m wondering out loud whether the time has come to recognize the error multiple generations have committed in worshipping money as their cultural god and putting their trust not in each other’s responsible, trustworthy nature but instead replacing trust with bribery that insults our true nature and corrupts the very fabric of our society. What if the very system by which we currently expect to achieve success as measured by money’s power to purchase pampering has itself corrupted many of us into being less willing to act responsibly for the good of the whole when opportunities to do so are available? What if the idealism older folks once held dear when we were younger were to resurrect itself to throw off the chains of economic incentives and guide us forward not into some form of godless communism as the only possible alternative to godless capitalism but into a third, now largely invisible alternative that will become visible as it is co-created by those who dare to believe in its vision for humanity’s long-range benefit? What if the faded idealism of members of older generations were revived and joined forces with the idealism of members of the younger generations to create the most powerful blend of idealism known on Earth? What if multi-generational idealism took root, connected with and drew strength from the Eternal Optimist and bore fruit for the healing of the nations?

Hating Our Helpers

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As we were raised to believe ourselves to be false identities called “egos,” we were raised within a system of reward and punished to conform to the ego’s rules prevailing at the time of our upbringing. As these rules changed throughout our lifetime, we’ve done our best to adjust to the changes based on the same core principles of reward and punishment. We seek reward and avoid punishment as best we can, unless we become convinced that there is reward in being punished, a reversal that happens often.

The twisting changes required of us to adjust our actions and reactions to conform to the unstable rules of the ego eventually twist each of us into a pretzel of confusion and despair. We become convinced that there is no way to sort out the twists and turns of our lives and move forward along a simpler, straightforward path. Convinced of the futility of sorting out the confusion we’ve adjusted to, we seek instead to become masters of the realm of confusion – by whatever dishonest means our mastery must be achieved. Although it is impossible to consistently enjoy mastering confusion as our way of life, we seek as best we can to do so on the basis of reaping as many rewards and avoiding as many punishing consequences of mistakes as we can. This is the ego’s game. Within it, pride is a reward and shame a punishment. There are other rewards and punishments, too. Our goal becomes to experience as much pride and avoid as much shame as we can manage. It’s an impossible task to achieve with any degree of reliability, but we’ll silence anyone who attempts to tell us that we’ve not done it well enough.

There are many ways to silence those who might tell at that our egos’ efforts to amass pride and avoid shame are inadequate. All of them are forms of punishment we seek to allocate to others of whom we do not approve because we believe that they do not approve of us. Within the ego’s realm, social approval becomes our demigod. We reward those of whom we approve and punish those of whom we do not. How we allocate rewards and punishments reveals how we judge ourselves and the values we hold dearest. Yet, we prefer to think that we are judging others and evaluating their values instead. We are blind to our truths and the manner in which we reveal them in twisted ways as we struggle through life according to the ego’s pretzel plan.

Thus it is that we come to hate those who truly try to help us unravel the ego’s pretzel plan and straighten out our lives to live in simpler, egoless ways. Actually it is our egos that hate being uncloaked and exposed in this way. It feels painful to have our egos revealed to us. It feels harsh and cruel simply because one of the ego’s main agenda items is to remain unseen and unchallenged. When a helpful person challenges our ego, the challenge causes us to look at what the ego prefers we do not see. Because we’ve come to completely identify with our ego as if it is truly who we are, we believe that the ego’s shortcomings are our flaws, even our “sins.” The ego’s reaction is defensive, an attempt to make the helper regret having offended our ego.

To defend our ego (as if we defending our true nature instead of a false substitute), we may directly attack the helper in ways to make the helper feel pain or we may dismiss the helper in some manner to avoid having to deal with him or her. We justify our defensive maneuvers by the ego’s primary justification: “It’s not fair,” so the ego says, “for ‘me’ to feel shame or guilt or any other painful emotion that it has taken ‘me’ so much effort to deny exists.” So long as we allow our ego to think, decide, communicate and act for us, we will remain confused and at the mercy of the ego’s pretzel plan.

The helper’s dilemma is that the shame or guilt that the helper brings to light by challenging the ego is already at work within the person being helped. It’s already buried in that person’s heart undermining that person’s health and happiness. Yet, the burdened person does not know of this buried toxin and continues to deny its existence as best he or she can by resorting to the ego’s standard operating procedures. “Do not be that honest with me,” cries the burdened person whose ego-based reactions are rooted in fear. The burdened person mistakes the honest helper for the person who originally inflicted the pain and now attacks or dismisses the helper as the burdened person could not (but would have liked to) attack or dismiss the pain-inflicter earlier in his or her life.

No truly helpful person can avoid triggering painful memories and raising to awareness buried painful emotions from their tombs within the burdened person’s heart. These tombs are hallowed ground, enshrined pockets of holiness within the burdened person’s heart. To help a burdened person to resume being aware of his or her true nature as an innocent, holy child of Love, the helper must eventually lead the burdened person to look at and address these buried pockets of his or her heart and resurrect the qualities of life entombed there.

So long as the ego is allowed to maintain its guardianship of these entombed qualities of tender holiness, the burdened person will remain burdened by buried grief and a victim of his or her own perceived grievances because he or she will remain blind to his or her natural innocence and holiness — as well as to the natural innocence and holiness of others. The ego insists that none of us is innocent and holy. It insists instead that all of us are guilty and unholy, often beyond redemption no matter how great may be the power of redemption that is available. Its final defense is often to assert that the helper may be an exception to the rule and be in fact innocent and holy (a “saint” says the ego with scorn) but the burdened person cannot also be that way. From the perspective of that defensive posture within which the burdened person must remained condemned by his or her own ego, the burdened person hates and distrusts the helper all the more. Thus those who seek to lead us into awareness of the sacred life we all share suffer at the hands of egos the consequences of their efforts.

Let us salute those who risk being helpers who challenge the ego’s dominion at whatever risk to their own well-being may appear to happen. Jesus risked his own physical existence as a helper who challenged the conformist traditions of the egos of his day. Yet, what he risked losing was nothing compared to what he ultimately revealed is true of all of us. None of us are defined by or confined to our bodies as the sum and substance of our lives. As A Course in Miracles states more than once for emphasis, “I am not a body. I am free for I am still as God created me.” This insight is as true for you as it is for me as it ever was and still is for Jesus.

Let us confront our ego’s habits of crucifying those who come along to help us become free of our egos. Let us no longer hate those who seem to be such radical enemies of our egos and embrace them as lovers of our spirits who help our spirits rise free of ego’s tombs to soar into the light of God’s love – even while yet experiencing and expressing ourselves through bodily forms. In truth we have no enemies. Only our egos can perceive of our fellow pilgrims on the planet as anything but friends and helpmates. An honest helper is merely one whom we’ve dared to trust so much that he or she takes the risk of being honest with us and touches our heart with love — even when the touch reminds us of hurts we’ve tried so hard to forget we carry in our hearts. We are not betrayed when we allow our hurting hearts to be revealed and brought to the light of divine love’s healing and redemption.

Co-Conspirators in Deceiving Ourselves

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Unless you are willing to be diligently honest with yourself about your emotions and learn how to express them in helpful instead of harmful ways, you participate in your family and all groups and communities including society at large as a co-conspirator in perpetuating lies. Pretenses, deceptions, images, roleplaying, lies, propaganda, marketing, spin-doctoring, excuses, justifications, rationalizations . . . It does not matter what we call them. They are all classified as unhealthy for relationships at all levels or “dysfunctional.” Don’t let the variety of terms fool you. What matters is that they are all of the same nature at heart. In their essence, they are all expressions of our failure to be honest with ourselves about our emotions and about our lack of skills in processing our emotions in healthy, caring ways.

Failure to be in touch with, aware of and capable of expressing our emotions in healthy, helpful ways causes our hearts to be deceitful because we need habits of deceit to keep our emotions from coming to our awareness or letting them be spontaneously expressed. We each build our habits of deceit to mask our emotions. We build these habits one step at a time through painful experiences as we practice denying how we feel and instead pretend that we either feel some other way or do not feel emotions at all. For most of us, our habits become reactive and we operate on autopilot while no longer aware of how we hide our emotions from ourselves and others as if emotions are dangerous. Might we want to practice another, deceit-free way of relating to ourselves and one another and stop pretending that we enjoy our deceptive lifestyles? Might we want to unwire our autopilot and become consciously aware of and responsible for our emotions again? The automated deceptive way is not our only option. We are merely mistaken to believe it is. We could choose to become diligently, courageously and compassionately honest in all humility and enjoy life a whole lot more simply because we’d be a whole lot more whole.

The root cause of the painful emotions we feel is the way we crucify ourselves and others on the cross of pride and shame as the horizontal bar and guilt and blame as the vertical shaft. By pride and shame we bar the door to heartfelt intimacy. By guilt and blame we continuously give ourselves and each other the shaft. We draw and quarter ourselves on this quadrant of crucifixion when, truth be known, we do not need to crucify ourselves or anyone else if we’d let go of the habits of judging ourselves and others by how successful we are at being dishonest. We could instead appreciate each other for doing our best to be honest as we struggle together to change our habits and master the art of humble honesty. And we’d no longer have reason to hate ourselves for lacking the courage to be honest about the sensitive nature of our hearts.

No one starts out with the intention of building a life based on lies. Every one of us without exception begins life as a sensitive, innocent child who knows no better than to blurt out the truth about how we feel. Yet, so long as we are raised around people who have been well-trained in the social rules and traditions of censoring and silencing their hearts, we will learn to censor and silence ours as well. We learn as we are punished for being honest and rewarded for pretending. To get along with others whose hearts are censored and silenced according to the “reward-and-punishment rules of the game,” we must learn to play the game of pretending. If we learn the game well, we’ll learn to punish ourselves before anyone has to punish us or to shift the punishment to others by blaming or shaming them. “He started it” is a good start in shifting disapproval to the other towards whom we point our finger of ill-fate. The other fingers point back towards ourselves in silent self-hate.

To fail to learn to play the game well is to be exiled into loneliness or condemned to suffer at or near the bottom of every pecking order in town. We learn to scratch in the earth in the barnyard for our tidbits of approval and be afraid of those with more powerful social status and pecking power than ours. Only when we can peck as well the best of them do we dare to challenge those who previously pecked us and take our turn as a pecker. Most of us live as chickens, too scared to challenge the roosters in the barnyard, but a few dare to challenge them and learn to crow as loudly and peck and kick as furiously. But few challenge the whole idea of being a member of the farmer’s cooped-up flock. To sustain such a challenge promises only more heartache of the most primal nature – total rejection from the group by whatever criteria we identify the group.

The roosters compete to rule the roost. In the human flock, a rooster need not be a male cock. She may be a hen who decided to copy a cock’s ways and out-do cocks at their own game. Female roosters are increasingly more prevalent in modern times as feminism asserts the rights of women to be as nasty in their ways of competition as men have ever been. The rules of the game don’t change. Only the players change according to the current trends favoring dominance under the group’s rules for power-grabbing. And when competing within the rules fails to gain the goals we seek, we subvert the rules and grab power some other way if we can get away with it. Layers of deceit hide our corruption of the rules. Politics continues as business as usual in all arenas of life in which power-dominance rather than power-sharing prevails as both the means and the end. Only the rare bird who declares there is another way of honoring power as a shared community asset to bless the whole community dares to stand apart from the politics of the day and show himself or herself as an example of what could be “if only” we dared collectively to try this alternative long enough to give it a realistic opportunity to prove itself.

On the way to proving that an alternative does truly exist, those who dare to stand apart as examples fall and disappear because the roosters in the barnyard set no self-restraining limits on how they will exercise power to keep and advance their rooster status as they also protect the game that favors their dominance. Assassination is an acceptable means for those who have in mind as their ultimate goal the maintenance and advancement of their deceitful claims to roosterhood. Rather than be exposed for their ruthless means of maintaining their roosterhood, current roosters will go to any length to wipe out (or at least disembowel) the opposition’s leadership, oppress the opposition’s followership and write history to demonstrate the superiority of maintaining the status quo of the roosters’ dominance in the face of claims that an alternative exists. It’s always better that one man or woman should perish than that a whole barnyard of peckers in their pecking order should perish. By whatever means necessary, these truthseekers – and worse, truth-tellers — must be silenced.

And so it goes throughout human history. Men and women who seek to stand up for justice for the whole flock and dare to challenge the way things have always been die if they are not willing to be silenced some other way. The more they speak from positions that may be heard by the flock, the more likely it is that they must die. Silencing them simply will not be permanent enough for the sake of roosters’ collective claim upon permanent dominance. Roosters prefer to fight beak and spur against other roosters on rooster terms than to see the whole system by which rooster dominance is preserved be replaced by a system with other values, means and ends. Roosters fight for preservation of the status quo even when they have to switch out their positions of dominance and take up other roles of power within the flock. Why? Because they have no idea how to participate in the alternative way of distributing power equitably among the members of the flock for the benefit of the flock instead of for the roosters’ own private benefit. Private benefits, private property, exclusive control and dominance and similar values swing widely out of balance when the roosters become desperate to preserve their positions of power by any means available. Heartlessly deceptive means are as good a means as any other when the chips are down. What is heartlessness to the man or woman who long ago gave up having a heart in favor of pretending to be satisfied with amassing power for powers sake?

How might we stop playing by the roosters’ game and participate in the alternative way of shared power? We must stop being self-deceptive and start being honest with ourselves and others about our emotions. Denial of emotions produces egos that are more than willing to continue to play games to manipulate other people to amass power, property and popularity by any means. The more hardhearted the ego, the less the rules — as well as personal character, integrity and authenticity — matter. All that matters is gaining more power. What the cocks and their competitors for power among the hens won’t tell you is what they do not know for sure but likely do suspect. In their lust for power, greed for prosperity and vanity for insanity there’s something of great value missing from their lives.

What might that “missing element of life” be that can only be experienced by those who are honest about their emotions and free their hearts once again to be tender and compassionate? What do the defenseless have an opportunity to experience that competitive egos miss? Listen to your heart. You may well sense the answer there. It’s a truth that we all share. It’s the one true power that really matters. It is love that has gone missing while we’ve scrambled in the dusty barnyard for our bits of grainy approval flung to us by very few who own the barnyard and pen us up so deceitfully. It is love that can come our way as unexpectedly as insects and worms might pass our way to supplement our artificial diet of bits of putrefying grain. Love has the power to liberate us to range cage-free.

Might we dare to value love more than another insect or worm that holds protein for our bodies but no energy for our spirits? Might the owners of the barnyard and our pens be amazed if we were to fly the coop entirely and cease to be imprisoned by our egos? Might we be willing to discover once again that we have wings meant to fly free and range beyond our cramped cages and fenced-in barnyards? Might we discover what’s been too long missing in our own lives and value it so highly as to stop pecking on each other long enough to discover that in each of us is a sister or brother who once was a good egg until she or he mistakenly learned the barnyard’s games of power-dominance and mistook it as the only way to survive? Might by love’s power it be possible that we all may thrive – all without exception or exclusion, including the roosters who previously believed so cruelly and self-deceptively otherwise? As we each forsake the way of self-deception let us always remember that we once, too, were deceived into forming ego’s habits of dishonesty. May we allow every other person to rise free of ego too – without pride or shame, guilt or blame remaining to taint their risen presence. We all need to be resurrected from the ego’s tomb and allowed to see and be the light again.

We Brought the War Home to Us

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While I was in college and exiting into the work place, the Vietnam War was still actively causing US citizens to take a stand for or against war in general or for or against that particular war. It hit home for many of us because of the draft. We could not avoid struggling to make up our minds whether or not we agreed with the use of weapons to impose our will on other people and, more intimately, whether or not we’d kill anyone to end a difference of viewpoints of any kind. Could I see myself learning to use weapons in order to kill someone? That issue remained a struggle for me. I did not resolve it in my own personal life until many years after the Vietnam War was over.

Today I’m less concerned about death than I used to be because my experiences with God reassure me that there is definitely life beyond the death of our bodies and that no one is going to hell after his or her body ceases to function. It’s amazing how knowing those simple facts to be true has clarified in my mind whether or not I’d use a weapon to settle a dispute or protect myself from harm. Since I no longer believe in settling disputes by any means of violence, there’s no question in my mind that I’d not use a weapon to protect myself. I’m simply willing to go to be with God free of my body’s limitations under whatever circumstances may come along to free me from my body.

Meanwhile, as I was gradually increasing my awareness of God’s reality and my opportunity to relate intimately with God’s reality while yet in the body as well as beyond, I watched us bring the Vietnam War’s issue about taking another person’s life home to us. It’s no longer a question of whether or not we’ll kill or harm another person who is one of “them” beyond the US borders. It’s become a question of whether or not we’ll kill or harm another person here at home to settle a dispute “once and for all” or do so to revenge a wrong we believe has happened that matters enough to us to use violence in anger to redress it. The violence we used to export we have domesticated. It’s ironic that at the same time we’ve out-sourced so many life-sustaining jobs to places beyond our borders we’ve managed to in-source use of weapons as a more and more acceptable life-terminating solution. Is there some sort of correlation? Has the growing hopelessness of finding the means to support ourselves and our families increased our willingness to kill someone we may be able to blame for our loss of self-sufficiency and accompanying sense of dignity and self-worth? Has our gradually declining sense of self-worth caused us to view life in general as less valuable and assume that everyone’s life has little worth?

I’m not in a position to answer all aspects of the questions that were commonly on many people’s minds during the Vietnam War – nor those commonly on many of our minds today. I still don’t know what I’d do if I were armed and had the choice to protect a loved one or even a stranger from harm by using my weapon. I’d hope that I would be well-trained in the use of my weapon and in taking full responsibility for exercising wisdom and calm reason in deciding whether or not to use it under any circumstance that confronted me. I could make conscious decisions to undergo such training to the fullest extent possible and remain current in my training. But what I’d do after that remains unknown to me. How would adrenaline and other by-products of fear affect my decision-making and performance? Would I want to be trained so at least I had the additional option of appropriately using (or not using) a weapon?

Unresolved. By default I’m not trained or likely to ever be trained. So, unarmed I continue to be. After being so grateful for having not been in combat at any time in my life, I’m reluctant to participate in domestic combat now. My saying that does not denigrate those who have made an alternative choice to become well trained in the use of weapons under the terms specified by the law and according to wisdom and reason. Until we’ve resolved the issue of violence in our society at large, we need to carefully consider how widely available weapons are and in whose hands we allow them to come. Continuing to escalate violence as an option while arming ourselves with increasingly more powerful weapons seems unwise to me when we seem to have so little control over the emotional and mental state of those who access those weapons and what their motives to use them may be.

For now I remain committed to investing all of my time and energy in promoting ways to reduce violence and reduce motives for using violence to settle disputes or seek revenge. It seems to me that to the extent that we can reduce tendencies towards violence in our society and truly promote domestic tranquility intentionally by A) nurturing emotional and mental health for all of us and B) encouraging us all to be forgiving rather than vengeful, the issue of weapons and their use will fade in significance. We simply would not need to bring any kind of warfare home to us anymore because we would have ended the emotional warfare that rages within so many of us in our private inner battles and spills out as domestic violence in our homes, onto our streets and into our schools, businesses and other gathering places. Our emotional battles within us extend outward into acts of violence. It’s time to learn how to nurture lasting inner peace and allow our peace to extend outward instead.

What If We’re All to Blame?

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The blame game is sheerest nonsense since most of us adults who are participants in the US economy and have the right to vote both with our money and our polling place opportunities share the blame for the deplorable state of the world. If you’re as convinced as I am that the blame game takes us nowhere closer to understanding how the US has fallen to the low we’ve reached, perhaps you’ll consider with me this solution: Let’s treat the situation as if we’re all to blame and take up responsibility for our part in generating this deplorable condition and for our part in co-creating the true alternative. The false alternative, of course, remains to deny that the US society is in deplorable condition and keep right on going down the drain with our eyes closed. If we try that approach, we won’t need to worry about being blamed for sticking our heads in the sand because we’ll have already stuck them somewhere darker to prepare for our future drainhood.

For myself, my children, my grandchildren and others about whom I care, I prefer not to go blindly down the drain without doing my best to head back up towards the rim of the basin and perhaps even climb out of the tub, sink or toilet bowl we’re in. I believe we’re flushing our future down the drain no matter what downward spiral we say we’re stuck in. I want to be honest enough to see that pattern at work as we whirl around in our confusion pointing fingers at each other while trying to transfer blame to someone else. We’re acting like terrified children on a merry-go-round screaming at each other to make it stop so we can get off and blaming the person on the other side of the merry-go-round for making it go around faster and faster. Just because we keep seeing the same people on the other side of the merry-go-round does not mean that they are more to blame than we are for the ride we’re all taking. We’re all being taken for a ride. (That last sentence uses a verb in the passive voice that does not disclose who’s doing the taking.)

Perhaps you find spinning in circles amusing. I don’t. After a while it makes me sick to my stomach. So, I decided to listen to my gut and search for a way off the merry-go-round. I found it. I’ve found that the process of getting off made me feel confused and disoriented at first because while standing on solid ground beyond the merry-go-round my head was still spinning as if I were still on board. It took a while to adjust to standing on stable ground rather than spinning around. At first I was still dizzy, even more aware of my dizziness than before. In the process of regaining my balance, I learned that I had adjusted to the spinning as best I could and now needed to re-adjust to non-spinning stability again. In time, I did. Now my stomach has settled and my mind is at ease. Now I can heed my gut intuition as well as reason with my mind as a unified field of feeling and thinking my way forward through life with wisdom as my guide. I enjoy using this new orientation to guide me forward beyond the merry-go-round into more promising, stable territory.

To stay off the merry-go-round in all of its forms and formats in the world, I had to shed the part of me that is tempted to ride along and play the game of spinning tales and using circular justifications and excuses for my decisions and actions. I had to stop pointing my finger “over there” and claiming that the “other guy or gal or they” made me do it. I even had to stop claiming that God or the Devil made me do it. I had to take full responsibility for “doing it,” whatever “it” was from time to time. “Yes, I did it and I accept full responsibility for doing it.” Tough sledding sometimes.

It was not easy to offend the popular opinions of powerful people and go against the flow of social conformity to act according to my heart’s intuition and my mind’s reason as best I could. It has not been easy to make mistakes and take responsibility for them so as to learn all I could from them rather than close myself off from these ofttimes painful learning opportunities. It has been no easier to make right decisions, be roundly condemned for them by others and still take responsibility for them as if they might, perchance, have been right or at least closer to the target than I’d been before. Whether I decided or acted “right” or “wrong” in the eyes of others depended on the views of those who judged my decisions and actions according to their own preferences, prejudices and power to control what I did. The characterization of my decisions and actions as “right” or “wrong” did not depend on their objective nature but on the subjective viewpoint of those who judged. Some judges even relished the chance to punish others so much that they would leap at the opportunity to wield power over me, even arbitrarily, just to feel powerful. I’ve offended a lot of viewpoints as I did my best to swim upstream as a nonconformist against the current of conformity that’s relentlessly sweeping us all down the drain.

What part of me is tempted to go along with the crowd and not offend the status quo of the drain-heading flow? It’s the part of me that’s susceptible to being influenced by social approval, an experience I admit I crave. I much prefer to be approved of than disapproved of. The part of me addicted to social approval is the same part of me that is susceptible to other forms of addiction or dependency under the influence of any of my natural appetites. It’s my ego. Based on any appetite, my ego may turn me back drainward at the least little excuse if I let it. The patterns of my life are aligned with drainward compliance because I was taught all my life to be a “good little boy.” Translations for that phrase for me turned out to be “conformist,” “people-pleaser” and “conflict avoider.” To fail to conform to the expectations of others, displease someone important or stir up controversy was “bad” and was punished by social disapproval. I had to learn to stand up in the harshest streams of social disapproval and nevertheless face away from the drain and do my best to swim away. Sometimes, the best I could do was root myself in place and resist the drainward flow, like the post of a pier resists the flow of the tide swirling by it. The tide of social opinion blames me for resisting its flow. Yet the truth is that all I am doing is standing my ground and refusing to go along with the riptide of popular social viewpoints or the egotistical preferences of authority figures supported by those who blindly follow them as frightened, compulsive people-pleasers, as once was I.

It’s not been easy to learn to stand up for myself after spending my first decades learning to go with the flow and not assert any viewpoint not pre-ordained to win me social approval or at least avoid social disapproval. I had learned to be silent when the risk of disapproval presented itself. In fact, I had learned to take no risks and hide myself from the mainstream of the drainward flow. For some time, I clung to the rim of the basin and held on for dear life. Eventually I let go of the rim and allowed myself to be swept totally down the drain while being characterized as totally disapproved of. There turned out to be no greater freedom from fear of lost approval than to lose it all, drown in disapproval and resurface somewhere down the drain where the flow is freer of the ego’s judgmental attitudes and assumptions.

Freedom turned out for me to be downstream, drainward and then out the drain into natural channels into which artificial drains arbitrarily dump their social outcasts. There are unflattering terms to use as labels for such outcasts. I became identified with them and their social exile. And I found myself in good company. What do I mean “good” in this sense? I mean spiritually free to rise up to become new lives without blaming anyone for our circumstances but ourselves.

Yes, I’m to blame for my going down the drain and being flushed out of the pools of social approval amid which I once swam. I think it helped me to slip readily down the drain that I never swelled with pride when I swam in such pools because secretly I knew in my heart that I did not belong there. Not swelled by pride, I did not clog the drain and readily slipped through. I did not belong in the pools, especially in the sense that no one owned me as their belonging. I was not bought and paid for and required to do my owner’s bidding no matter how degrading it might be, like some slave or prostitute or junior partner in a firm. I always had the option of dropping out and not participating in the pool. And I found that the option to drop out could also transform into the option to rise out.

Both dropping out and rising out diverge from conformity to social norms. To the extent that modern society embraces the norm of citizenry enslavement within the economy, I became abnormal to find freedom from our social institutions of slavery. To the extent that modern society imposes the norm of poor physical, emotional and mental health and loveless relationships upon its citizenry, I became abnormal to discover how to be progressively healthier to the point of wholeness and how to experience divinely defined love. I highly recommend exploring and engaging in such social abnormalities!

Yes, I’m to blame for what has happened in my life and for the decisions and actions that flowed from my life. I still am. By accepting the “blame,” I accepted and still accept full responsibility. And I discovered that with great responsibility comes great power. The converse of the Spiderman Principle is true! My life has proved it to my own satisfaction. If you don’t like being blamed for other people’s decisions and actions, try taking full responsibility for putting yourself in the position to be blamed and then consider exiting that position for higher ground. In the long run, drainward is not really as fun and rewarding at it looks. No addiction or dependency is. Just when you fear most falling ignominiously into utter failure in the pursuit of your highest ideals and most heartfelt dreams, let go, sink to the bottom and swim out the drain to freedom beyond the pools of social approval within which you fear being judged and condemned. Down there in the dark you may be surprised to find your way to the higher, more lighthearted ground you’re looking for.

Chickens Coming Home to Roost

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We live in a distressing time in the US because we live amid the nests to which the chickens are coming home to roost. The phrase “chickens coming home to roost” refers to the cycle of insanity that returns to those who act insanely the consequences of their deeds. “Chicken” is an especially apt term because it’s also typically used as a label for a person who is extremely afraid. (Supposedly, chickens are easily scared and scattered in fear before a marauding fox. Yet, if one has tried to interfere with a hen who is protecting her brood of chicks, one might not be convinced that all chickens are readily frightened away.)

Let’s look at the possibility that “chickens coming home to roost” refers to the actions of scared people returning to haunt them. Since actions arise from thoughts and since feelings of fear can cause thoughts that are irrational, one can readily see how actions that are of chicken nature are based on fear. Fear distorts minds to think irrationally, even to the point of causing chronic irrationality we label “insanity.” In recent generations, the US has become a society of chronically frightened and irrational people who prefer to deny our emotions and hide behind the masks of our egos in pride than to admit that we are afraid most of the time. We acquired the habit of denying our fears by many decades and multiple generations of denial of emotions in general.

For example, during one insane cycle of fear-generated violence, one generation created nuclear weapons to solve the problem of needing to feel more secure and then faced the very real possibility of triggering a nuclear holocaust to destroy humanity and render our planet cruelly less habitable. Chickens threatened then to come home to roost. But, we learned to live under that cloud of nuclear fear and march on undeterred in our commitment to our consumerist militarism. We proudly called our lifestyle Darwinian capitalism and by well-crafted propaganda fooled many of us into believing it was “free enterprise” — an expression of our more expansive freedoms as free people, who, as it turns out, failed to realize how seductively our egos were enslaving us on account of our unconscious fears.

We still live under the fear of pending doom of nuclear disaster and many other fears that have piled on top of it in the dark caverns of our minds where our egos entomb them rather than face them. We still march on undeterred as long as we can manage to remain undisturbed by the consequences of our decisions. On account of our habit of denial, we’ve become increasingly indifferent to the legitimate needs of human beings, others and ourselves. Instead of caring how our actions may affect “others,” we carefully plan our actions to make sure that their ill-effects fall on others but not upon us. We’ve practiced this principle of exporting ill-effects for many generations in both our military ventures and our business ventures.

In our military ventures, we expected US citizens to go “off to war” in two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and many other smaller scale combat actions. And somehow we expected them to function within horrifically terrifying battlefield conditions without falling apart or being adversely affected by their experiences. We expected them to be brave and strong and committed to protecting their faraway homes from the threats we believed were so significant that we placed our citizens in harm’s way in distant lands to avoid those threats. Those who survived physically, we welcomed home as heroes with far too little regard for how their service to our welfare cost them emotionally. We saw physical wounds and disabilities but not emotional ones. We failed to expect, as reason dictates, that after the intensity of battle is over, the falling apart comes along naturally as a part of grieving. It must if anyone is to regain his or her sanity after being subject to such insanity. To us who had learned to harden our hearts and deny to our emotions their sane, healthy role in our lives, emotions became invisible and readily ignored. It takes sensitivity and empathy to detect emotions in ourselves and others and we learned well how to deaden those human attributes of sanity and pretend to live “well” without them in operation in our lives. In fact, we often ridicule and look down upon as “weak” and certainly unmasculine those who have not deadened their sensitive, empathetic nature. We too have learned not to fall apart nor to grieve to restore our sanity. Insanity — to one degree or another preserved by unprocessed emotions — has become our national norm.

We have avoided bringing the battlefield home to us by exporting it abroad to other cultures and lands where we felt freer to resort to violence that spilled over into civilian populations, but not our own. Now the chaos and violence of the battlefields we exported under the influence of our fears are coming home to roost.

We also have exported the harmful commercial side-effects of a materialistic, hedonistic society to place those burdens on others as much as possible. We’ve used the “toilet bowl theory” to justify dumping toxic wastes where we who enjoy the byproducts of that waste are not directly affected or even confronted by the sights and smells of toxins that are robbing others of life, liberty and their pursuit of happiness. Extraction and use of fossil fuels — and the disposal of waste produced by their extraction and use — proceed apace so long as the harmful consequences of the their extraction, use and disposal fall on others. We don’t care unless toxic waste or garbage dumps show up in our backyard. Someone else’s backyard is just fine with us. Pollution is other people’s problem so long as we have options to avoid it.

As a long-term consequence of playing chicken with the truth and failing to honestly face our fears throughout multiple generations, we are now no longer able to reroute the chickens from returning to the roost from which they originally flew. The chickens of our militarism and consumerism are coming home to roost. The empire we’ve enjoyed living within for many generations is now undeniably soiling its own nest. Our lifestyles of denial, of pride and of shifting blame no longer protect us from facing the consequences of our insane, heartless decisions. We are faced with the consequences whether or not we want to be. And we find it difficult to see the justice in this backflow of chickens to their roosts. But just it is. How we’ve come to abhor justice! We fear justice most of all!

If we are to adequately address the escalating violence rising in our society, we must hear and heed the call of justice and do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God — not “our” God as if we define God but “God” as if God defines His/Her own nature. Micah 6:8 states what is required of us, oh, fallible mortals that we are. We must face the fact that those whom we trained to use weapons to protect our insane lifestyles are returning home to find other uses for their training and their weapons. We trained them to become insanely insensitive and lacking in empathy like us and we now object to their teaching us the consequences of our heartlessness.

Certainly, we find it attractive to hire some of our former military personnel to staff our internal civilian military forces to protect us internally from harm that we have created through our heartless lifestyles and to route some of our citizens off to prison. Mass incarceration is another form of dumping ground for the waste products of our militarism and consumerism but we must face the fact that God created no human being to be labeled “waste” and so unjustly treated. Although we claim to be, we are hardly entitled to critique those whom we’ve trained to do our dirty work of harming others on our behalf in the course of their assigned duties as if we might expect them to be always capable of setting aside their emotions and acting reasonably – with sensitivity and empathy – in the face of perceived threats to their well-being. We’ve trained them to react instantly without out consideration for the harm that might flow to others from their defensive reactions and then later purport to hold them accountable for using reflexively the training that we required of them. Having required of our guardians of domestic tranquility other than the duty to do justice, love mercy and walking humbly with a merciful, forgiving and gracious God, we reap the consequences of our unholy expectations. We must hold ourselves accountable!

We also object to finding scummy green algae clogging the beaches upon which we prefer to frolic in our escapist activities so necessary to offset our denied internal emotional pain. We have learned to flee from the natural consequences of our harmful, heartless lifestyles to beaches, parklands and other scenic nature preserves to which we have consigned the last remnants of nature by which we feel rejuvenated while we cause it to become ultimately extinct. The loss of beaches and waterways to algae on account of unfettered use of fertilizers to grow profitable crops and the loss of picturesque mountain vistas to rapacious mining and deforestation or to acid rain from the byproducts of industry to feed our materialistic appetites are chickens coming home to roost too close to home for us to ignore. But ignore them we will if we can.

And if we can no longer ignore them, we will shift to others the blame for causing them and the responsibility for correcting and cleaning up our messes – if we can. As taxpayers who have already funded construction of the highways and airports we use to escape on our vacations to beaches, waterways and mountains, we hardly think it’s fair to also expect us to accept responsibility for the harmful side-effects of our lifestyles and bear the cost of cleaning up after ourselves. Let someone else bear the brunt of our insanity!

And if you say that there is no one else available upon whom to shift the burdens, you are wrong. We may no longer be able to find others in different parts of the 3-dimensional physical world upon whom to foist the consequences of our insanity, but we are creative thinkers. We can export the consequences into the 4^th dimension – to the future and let the next generation deal with it. Or perhaps not. Perhaps we are living amid the time frame of that “next generation” even now as the chickens we raised and exported to the winds now journey home to roost among us.

We Kill Those Who Come to Save Us

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On a Memorial Day weekend as we honor heroes, it seems apt to remember that not all who threaten the status quo are enemies that we need to eradicate as if the gardens of our minds have no room for new ideas. Not every plant not previously encountered is a weed. Some newly arriving people in our monolithic culture . . . including incoming young members of our society who immigrate from heaven to our lands . . . bring gifts of healing and restoration to new life beyond the culture of violence to which we’ve become so well adjusted that we consider its norms sacred. Truly sacred bearers of glad tidings of great joy arrive moment by moment to serve as reminders of what’s truly valuable. In fact, the more violent our culture becomes, the more frequently and earnestly these message-bearers strive to capture our attention and tell us that violence is not the only alternative. Might such nonconformist violators of the status quo not also be heroes we could welcome and value more?

Certainly we are grateful for the heroes who have protected and continue to protect us from harm. We are also increasingly aware that a hero’s experiences in the face of violence include being harmed, emotionally if not also physically, as he or she stands up for us to stem the tide of violence that threatens to overrun us. We ask our heroes to endure the pain we’re afraid to experience on our own behalf. And to help us remain blind to our decision to use others as heroes to protect our comfortable lifestyles, we deny that the enemies our heroes fight are products of our own self-indulgent creature comforts and conveniences. We deny that there are consequences to our choices and prefer to fashion scapegoats to excuse our self-indulgence lifestyles by blaming others for being envious of us — and eventually perhaps hateful towards us when we deny the legitimacy of their envy.

Although we perpetuate the expansion of our lifestyles through the operation of institutionalized envy, we refuse to see the woe we cause to others by not taking their wants and needs into account as we satisfy our own. We are driven by our habit of comparing what “little” we have to what “more” others have. This habit of comparison is selective. It selects for justifications for our continued pursuit of more while keeping us blind to our own envy of those with more. Other habits of valuing socially approved images and superficial, materialistic possessions keep us focused on “things” and luxuries as objects of desire, feeding our envy continuously to keep our economy in motion. Earn, spend, earn, spend, earn, spend . . . the never-satisfying, ever-accelerating cycle of our lifestyles.

And yet when others seek to join us in our plentiful opportunities, we protest as if there’s not enough to share. That we might no longer gain more and more threatens the foundation of our aspirations. How could we go on comparing ourselves to what others enjoy if everyone has nearly the same? What good is our socially popular image and our material possessions if they do not make us “special?” How can we prove that God favors us if we live as if the concerns, needs and wants of others might be equal to our own and equally worthy of satisfaction? Does not God play favorites just as we like to play favorites? Is not that how one proves one’s power — by dispensing power and its accompanying perks on some basis one personally defines with little or no regard for any other standard? Does not Facebook’s system of “Like” and “Dislike” prove the value of being liked even when we are not truly known or loved for ourselves because we hide behind the social images we project to score points as heroes and avoid becoming scapegoats?

Let us this weekend honor those who believed in the values of superiority claimed by the United States in comparison to other nations, or if not fully believing, nevertheless put themselves at risk to defend our claim and our opportunity to prove ourselves right rather than be destroyed by those who violently disagree with our claim of superiority. But . . . and here’s a “but” worthy of due consideration . . . let us also carefully review the basis for our claim to superiority and remove from it the arrogance and ignorance we’ve religiously cultivated concerning the claims to value put forth by other nations and cultures. In what way might we be right in claiming superiority that does not deny the value of other people’s claims to equally high value? Might we be most right in the ideals to which we claim to subscribe such as “liberty and justice for all” and most need now to reveal our humility in admitting how far short of our own ideals we’ve often fallen? Is a blend of humility and superiority possible or must one exclude the other? Might our greatest claim to superiority be in the fitful but relentless progress we’ve endeavored to make in upholding and living true to our ideals? Perhaps this weekend is one occasion among many to be grateful from the depths of our hearts for all who have stood up for us and sung our praises even when we’ve stumbled badly — or may yet be stumbling now.

Is this weekend an occasion to soberly consider the sacrifices we expect of heroes and ask ourselves, “Are we letting our heroes down when we fail to live according to our highest ideals?” Are we mocking these heroic sacrifices when we fail to examine our own lifestyles for ways we’ve not ourselves been devoted to our stated highest ideals and instead neglected them as readily as we neglect our heroes when they come back home to our care? Might we too often be a neglectful culture hypnotized by our pursuit of image-based, materialistic definitions of happiness while remaining blind to the consequences of our shallow pursuits as they spiral more and more out of control? Our pursuit of shallowness and trivialities as a way of escaping from the deeper, heartfelt truths may be why our ship of state has run aground. Deeper waters are calling to us from within our hearts. Will we heed their call and learn to navigate their depths again?

Sincerely Held Religious Beliefs

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(Dialogue is a precious, fruitful process for wisdom-mining. Please let others know what you sense in your heart about what I write here and elsewhere — and about what others write too. Dialogue is wisdom-minding as much as wisdom-mining. It is the way we mine our hearts for wisdom and remind our minds of wisdom’s value as an eternally available natural resource. Unlike fossil fuels, wisdom is a living, replenishable and timeless resource to fuel our mental engines.)

Spokespersons for the LGBTQ community seem to be in an uproar about a piece of legislation recently signed into law in Tennessee protecting therapists who refuse to treat LGBTQ clients because providing such treatment conflicts with the therapist’s “sincerely held religious beliefs.” I believe this law is worthy of note on account of its legal as well as community health and social justice implications but not for the reasons offered by those who oppose the law on the grounds of separation of “church and hate.” (The eloquent article from which I extract that quote can be found at http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2016/4/21/tennessee-needs-lesson-separation-church-and-hate.)

I look at this piece of legislation as merely the first step towards protecting clients who are members of the LGBTQ community, allies of this community or members of any other frequently stigmatized community and its allies. I propose that Tennessee and all other states pass laws that require psychotherapists of all stripes to file an annual disclosure form with the state’s professional licensing agency disclosing all forms of biases, prejudices and phobias by which the therapist is beset. The comparable situation for a massage therapist who has an active case of tuberculosis would be to require that the massage therapist openly disclose his or her active disease so that clients who prefer not to become infected by TB might find someone else to provide massages during the masseur’s infectious period.

Closeted bigots (homophobics and others) who become licensed psychotherapists do great damage to those who open their hearts and minds to them because the therapist’s fears transmit to the client as surely as TB bacteria transmit through the air in closed spaces when the carrier of TB is in close proximity to the potential recipient of the bacteria. Fear is an infectious emotional energy that radiates from each of us as surely as the air we breathe exits from our lungs when we breathe out. Just as surely, the energy of fear transmitted by another person in close proximity to us contaminates our own energy field as if we’ve breathed it in. Clients who trust a therapist of any kind to be a source of health and well-being rather than a transmitter of pollutants can be protected by mandatory disclosure of emotional infections of which a therapist is a carrier.

To go a step further, it may be even more protective of the public’s welfare to require that all therapists undergo annual emissions tests to determine the nature of the emotional pollutants they are transmitting into the energy field into which their clients enter during therapy sessions. We require mandatory emissions tests for automobiles. Why allow therapists to escape this responsibility when their noxious emotional fumes’ effects are comparably toxic and harmful?

If a therapist sincerely holds religious beliefs that prevent him or her from seeing a client accurately, let’s get those beliefs publicized as broadly as necessary to alert existing and potential clients to the therapist’s fear-distorted perspective. Perhaps we should establish a public registry of offenders who sincerely hold both professional licenses as well as fear-based beliefs that they reinforce and justify by citation to religious texts. If a therapist is afraid that God will condemn him or her to hell for treating a client of a particular protected class with respect, honor and dignity as a highly valued person, let’s have that fact known and do indeed protect that client and his or her whole class from that therapist. Let’s no longer allow therapists to creep around in the dark lying and lurking in wait to spring themselves upon unsuspecting innocent clients. Enough of this heretofore unacknowledged lying and lurking in secret! Ambush-by-therapist should be outlawed! Let’s have the lying out in the open and the lurking publicly disclosed. Would that not reduce the incidence of private indecency to which unsuspecting clients would be otherwise exposed?

Of course, we should also allow provision of mercy for those therapists who later repent and remove them from the registry upon adequate proof of their sincerely held repentance. We must allow no law establishing mandatory reporting or setting up an offenders’ registry to become itself an instrument of injustice. The unforgiving nature of the Internet’s memory and the implications of an unpurgeable public record are additional concerns we may also want to wrestle with. Surely we do not believe, “Once a bigot, always a bigot!” With adequate help even the foulest of spiritual offenders may be redeemed and provide helpful public service. Does not the life of the apostle known as Paul prove that point?

Dear Reader, what do you think about mandatory reporting of this nature and the utility of a public registry for spiritual offenders who prefer to retain their fear-based judgmental attitudes on the pretense that their attitudes are ordained of God?

The Rush of Insanity and Its Telltale Signs

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If one is wondering how to make sense out of the patterns of violence, vengeance, venality and vanity vibrating across our planet, it will help to spot the nature of the addictive personality in operation beneath all of these patterns. The addictive personality comes in a wide assortment of flavors, colors and disguises but is rooted in the same soil of insanity. If it were unmasked one would see that the addictive personality always pursues self-aggrandizement and social approval from at least some group meaningful to that personality (if it cannot win approval from all people). To the addictive personality, the rush of winning social approval overrides all other considerations, even if the social approval may be short-lived and come at a great cost. It does not weigh costs and believes that the opportunity to win more social approval will arise should previously won social approval fade. The addictive personality, aka Ego, moves from one rush-promising opportunity to the next without looking to either side for perspective beyond the single-minded goal of immediate gratification of its craving for the rush.

In addition to its purpose of rush-production, the addictive personality can be spotted as it outs itself in the progressive nature of its increasingly manic pursuit of the rush. Whatever rush first hooked it into the pursuit of that species of rush, the addictive personality will not be satisfied for long by the current level of rush it experiences. It will become dissatisfied with the current level of rush and crave more and more rush. Whether the rush or “high” comes from an externally acquired chemical like cocaine, heroin, meth or some other legal or illegal drug or comes from an internally acquired chemical such as adrenalin, endorphins or other bodily produced high or power trip, the addiction is chemical as well as mental, emotional, social and behavioral. It’s a package deal. And the package of rush-production must expand to meet the addictive personality’s demand for increasingly more intense gratification.

If you’ll examine the behaviors and statements of celebrities, drug addicts, power-wielders, law-breakers, risk-takers and others whose behaviors and attitudes you have difficulty comprehending, you’ll see a pattern that helps you see what’s going on. Watch for telltale signs of failure to appreciate the consequences of words and deeds beyond their capacity to draw the instant gratification of social approval (better yet, admiration and hero-worship) from some group — however large or small. Watch for failure to connect the dots and display the capacity for reasoned consideration of facts, contested or otherwise. Watch for reactions rather than responses to stimuli that the addictive personality has learned will generate a rush for which he or she has acquired a taste. Watch for signs that the person displaying addictive qualities is personally out of control while demanding that others be controlled by external means such as force or threat of force. Watch for signs that the person is actually confessing indirectly how much he or she hopes that someone will control him or her by external means and prevent the further progression of his or her addiction and the adverse consequences he or she sees rushing towards him or her. The addictive personality is afraid and yet cannot admit how afraid he or she has become under the influence of the addiction within which he or she is enslaved.

Don’t assume that every addictive personality has the same acquired tastes or means and manner of enslavement. The stimuli and means of acquiring a rush may vary on the surface while beneath the surface at the root of causation it’s the same root cause: namely, fears that have grown beyond the scope of all reason and now dominate the person’s decision-making process. Such fears are common to us all. The fear may be of looking foolish in the eyes of others, of losing face or social status, of failure to achieve an outcome especially desired by the person or of the unknown or strange in life. Because the addictive personality has lost the ability to be honest about his or her emotions, he or she has also lost connection with his or her own heartfelt capacity for empathy and marches relentlessly onward towards the brink of self-destruction and destruction of others. He or she no longer is free to see and admit to the fears that drive him or her. He or she no longer trusts that others with whom he or she fails to see eye to eye can be reasoned with and included in the realm of trustworthy associates. He does not trust anyone to accept the confusion that has overtaken him or her and help resolve the inner turmoil that besets him or her. If he or she still has intimate life companions, they are likely to feel powerless to help. He or she is more concerned about maintaining an image of success than about the reality of self-exposure as a loser of his or her grip on sanity. Even while poised on the brink of ruin, he or she will claim the opposite is true.

Trust has broken down and the world as seen by the addictive personality is a shattered mirror reflecting back in fragments the confusion inherent in the addiction to which the person has succumbed. Most often he or she has succumbed to some type of addiction (or dependency including codependency) unwittingly but nevertheless relentlessly one step at a time until the slippery slope of addiction/dependency has taken over and substituted itself for the person’s power of well-reasoned choices. The addictive personality no longer even trusts himself or herself because he or she can no longer hold himself or herself accountable for being honest and is willing to use any means, no matter how dishonest, to gain the next rush to which he or she is addicted. He or she will steal from a beloved grandmother to gain the money needed to buy the next fix or steal from the fans to gain the necessary votes to win the next election or draw the attention he or she craves. Negative attention has become more desirable than loss of all attention and disappearance into anonymity. It’s all the same pattern. People who are trusting and vulnerable are considered the easiest victims to manipulate. The addictive personality truly believes that he or she can fool all of the people all of the time.

Is he or she right? Can he or she fool us all? It’s really up to you whether or not he or she is right. What you are willing to see at work beneath surface depends on your willingness to be open-minded as well as open-hearted and see with your inner vision – a vision some call intuition and others call wisdom. If you will admit that you may be afraid of being played for a fool, then the wisdom of your honesty about that fear may release you to see more clearly whether or not the other person is actually trying to do so.

The surest way to prevent yourself from being played for a fool is to search out from within your own life the patterns of an addictive personality and do all you need to do to prevent yourself from remaining enslaved to them. Until we examine ourselves for such patterns and admit our vulnerability to falling into them, we are all enslaved to the Matrix of such patterns and doomed to repeat them until we value freedom from them more than we value the comforts and conveniences of remaining addicted to them.