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Go Back   Spiritual Forums > Spirituality & Beliefs > Spiritual Development

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  #71  
Old 18-04-2011, 03:30 AM
Mountain-Goat
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Part 2 of 3
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I was aware that the void left where my belief that there is hope for everyone used to be was a major source of my problems. I revisit this occasionally to try to figure out some solution, but I just come across the same irreconcilable differences between different parts of my mind. What complicates this more than anything is the existence of classical narcissists. Of course, it was a narcissist who wounded me pretty badly, among others. Looking at it objectively, there is currently no solid proof either way that narcissists can get better. Only one person, who has no expert background, claims that some have recovered from the disorder, which is entirely anecdotal. I can find hardly anything written by an actual expert in the field of psychology about this question. Most of the information, even on health web sites, comes from one narcissist with a pretend degree he bought on some web site. There’s really not much reliable information out there. So for now it comes down to what I want to believe and what I am able to believe.

The harsh reality is arive, that in order to fix a problem, one must be willing to continue passionately till a solution is found.
But oh how reality transforms into deep joy when the solution is found.
Working toward the solution is the hard part, but in order to obtain the solution, the work must be done.

What is the relationship between narcissists and you, apart from the one that hurt you deeply?
Or asked this way, what influence do narcissists have on your current life?
Is not your desire to heal yourself, and if yes, then what has narcissism got to do with this task?
These differences you percieve to be irreconcilable, have you explored why they are?
If you have and that's why you conclude them to be irreconcilable, have you considered that it's because you have not yet found a solution so you resign yourself to classifying them irreconcilable?

Consider Edison...he tried 10 000 times till he found the right combinations of metals for the filament till he got his light bulb to work.
If you believe them to be irreconcilable, will this cause you to not even try to find a solution, or at least, reduce the amount of time and energy spent in looking for solutions?
Would not the belief of irreconcilability be in conflict with trying to find solutions?
Quote:
On the one hand, while I had the belief that there is hope for everyone it worked quite well as a base to support a more organized and healthy mind. That should be evidence that there could be truth in it. On the other hand, it wasn’t strong enough to stand up to certain realities that seemed to contradict this belief. It took more energy to keep holding on to it in spite of what I had witnessed. That is evidence that it could be wrong. But without it, everything that I had built upon it fell apart. I can’t build anything on hopelessness, even if it is only partial hopelessness for about 1% of humanity. Things I used to know and understand back then no longer make sense to me. I wrote about them a lot, but now I can’t understand my own writings from that time. So we are back to some evidence that the belief could be right. Still, I have seen and experienced things that make it very difficult to believe that this 1% of the population has any chance of getting past their delusions at all. Hope for 99% is not enough to be able to understand what I used to understand that gave me peace. *looks around my mind...* This place is a disaster.

Here's what I have discovered regarding my beliefs. If it takes effort to maintain it, hold onto it, keep it as a truth, then there is something incomplete about it, something unstable that requires energy from me to keep it intact.
But if it's something I know, there is no energy involved in maintaining my knowns.
So, is a belief the middle stage from an idea/theory to a known?
An idea is a theory, the first thoughts upon observing and evaluating an experience.
To go to a state of knowing, the theories are tested and modified through more experiences till one has filled in all the missing pieces, all the math adds up, all the links to the chain are found.
Inbetween these two are beliefs, which are temporary truths, to aid in one's continuous evaluations and tests.
Stepping stones of faith used to make progress. Temporarily assigning a truth tag to a part of the equation in order to test the theory.
The problems arise when these temporary truths are locked in as absolute truths.

I feel for you arive.
Here's the two ways I used to describe the mess in my head.
1: A massive ball of string, every inch tangled so badly, with knots pulled so tight that you could harldy see them.
I saw this whenever I was emotionally upset, my heart aching, my gut contracted and tense, the weight of the world upn my shoulders as I tried to comprehend my reality.
2: A glass vase violently shattered onto the floor into millions of tiny shards.
This is when I was numb from the confusion and pain. As I looked at the shattered vase, I was speechless as to how I was going to put it back together again.

Mess, disaster, tangled and shattered beyond repair...these are all expressions of being overwhelmed. And within journeys, there will be times of being overwhelmed.
The good news is that being overwhelmed is also self created.

When you go jogging, you set a pace and you're feeling energetic, you come to a hill and keep the pace up,
by the time you become aware you can't keep the same pace, it's too late and your body is overwhelmed and you have to stop for a breather.
You are in charge of your pace, but it's your perception of your abilities and your expectations or desires to do things a certain way that control what happens to you on the journey.
It's not the hill that overwhelms you, it's how you chose to take it on.

When I got out of hospital, it wasn't till 12 months later that I was physically able to ride each day.
It took me a few weeks of riding experiences to change my riding style so I could ride for longer but maintain a level of energy for the whole ride.
My only rule was I would never hop off the bike and walk it. This way I was still pushing to become stronger.
So, I soon learnt that when hills came I would exert compassion on myself and go as slow as I needed up these hills.

If I rode hard, and it felt physically empowering to ride hard up hills, before I got to the top, I had no energy left and I was on the lowest gear, panting, wobbling, wishing I never got out of bed.
Add to that, after recouping my breath and energy, the rest of the ride was painful and not enjoyable.
So much so that it would be days before I would consider going for another ride.
But once I learned to be self compassionate and ride easily up the hills, the rest of the ride was enjoyable, I could ride longer, thus exercise more,
and most days I would go out again in the afternoon because it was so enjoyable and I had reserves of energy.
I made more progress doing it this way than overdoing it up hills.
The wisdom was realising my goal was a long term process. It was going to take me months to get back to a level of fitness I used to have.
Oh I wanted to return to active duty in days, but the reality is because of how much damage there was, it was going to be a long process.

The other half of this is there were hills that were huge, they actually were extremely difficult.
These hills were a mess, a disaster.
I tackled these huge hills by looking at my front wheel and focusing on one pedal stoke, then the next, instead of looking at the whole hill and seeing the top seemingly not geting any closer.
I found that if I pedaled the same pace, I would use more energy if I looked at the whole hill compared to looking at right in front of me, my next step.
Looking at the whole hill and using more energy is called psyching yourself out.
The distance and pace was the same but energy was being lost by being psychologically overwhelmed.
How do you clean a mess, restore an area that has been devastated? One thing at a time.
And you will find that as each thing is fixed, the energy, pace and enthusiasm increases.
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  #72  
Old 18-04-2011, 03:36 AM
Mountain-Goat
Posts: n/a
 
Part 3 of 3
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I remember that I wasn’t of the opinion that people choose to feel hurt when back I was healthier. Looking back at some old writings, I had explored the belief that pain is willingly chosen for a while, but then found that it did not make sense and I was better off without it. This did not mean that people can’t find a way to prevent the reaction of suffering or hurting when certain things happen. But I found that believing that suffering and hurt is willingly chosen brought me further away from the truth instead of closer to it. I treated hurt feelings as something that happens naturally when people do not thoroughly understand what is going on with them or the other people involved. Believing that it is always chosen even when people don’t know what is going on exactly would not make sense would complicate the process of overcoming it for me. So I replaced it with the theory that hurt happens naturally although it can be prevented with the right understanding. This seemed to have been working at the time, and I think it would work again if I could relearn how to understand the stuff that needs to be understood.
"Pain happens, but suffering is optional. When pain comes, make use of the experience, but do not wallow in it.
When you accidentally place your finger in a flame, it is supposed to hurt just long enough for you to pull it out.
If you think there is value in keeping it there, you will be a crispy critter. Pain is a minor element of life, unless you are indulging it.
Then it becomes suffering. Get the message and then get on with your life, which is far more about joy than sorrow." - Alan Cohen

This is one of my fav quotes. When I contemplate this, I see suffering as holding onto a painful experience well after the incident has gone. The wound part of the experience.
But, a physical wound remains long after the experience. I get that.
But inner wounds are not exactly like physical wounds, but I do take the similarity into account.

Grieving for example. It's called the grieving process. It's a journey, to go from one state to another.
But alarm bells start ringing in other's minds when another is still in the process well beyond the norm.
Or like when you're angry with someone and you're still angry about that mild practical joke 20 years later.

An unusual process takes place where one is going from a rational response of pain of an experience, to holding onto the pain, perpetuating it. The wound remains.
Yes, there is no universal time limit for each particular painful experience. Each person will process at their own pace.
But, from what I have learnt of myself, suffering, this self perpetuating pain can manifest so subtley that one can not see it happen.
You think you're still rationally responding to a painful experience.
"Hey, that was painful, so I have every right to feel pain. It's logical, that hurt so I will feel pain."

Plus, suffering can manifest because the pain of one experience triggers other past experiences. Pain creating new pains or re engaging old pains.
Pain is in one sense, a natural part of life, but suffering, prolonging the pain well after the experience, is the dysfunction self inflicting element ot it all.
And I will go even further and state that the initial pain is also partially or wholly created by self.
Anyways...I have not looked into this till a day or so ago so here's some more quotes.

"Be not the slave of your own past – plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim fast, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience, that shall explain and overlook the old." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Generally speaking, we regard discomfort in any form as bad news. But for practitioners or spiritual warriors - people who have a certain hunger to know what is true - feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we're holding back.
They teach us to perk up and lean in, when we feel we'd rather collapse and back away. They're like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we're stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it's with us wherever we are." - Pema Chödrön

"Sometimes things have to fall apart, so that we can choose again, and put ourselves back together the way we want, and are meant to be..." - Jeff Anderson

"We don't get through human life without problems that appear unsolvable. It may be a diagnosis, it may be a downsizing, it may be rejection or betrayal, or even surrendering a freedom we had, such as being unable to drive anymore. But even as some problems lie beyond our own capacity, we grow in other ways... By lifting out of ordinary thinking, we discover something extraordinary in ourselves." - Mary Manin Morrissey

"We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies." - Roderick Thorpe

"A good way to let go of unconscious beliefs and to see yourself more honestly is to examine the secrets you keep from others. I have never met anyone who doesn't have secrets. But consider this: the fact that you have secrets is the same thing as affirming, "If people really knew me, they wouldn't accept me" (translation: "I'm not acceptable as I am"). We knock
ourselves out to appear acceptable by doing things that reinforce the feeling that we are not." - Susan Campbell

"It is the Law that any difficulties that can come to you at any time, no matter what they are, must be exactly what you need most at the moment, to enable you to take the next step forward by overcoming them. The only real misfortune, the only real tragedy, comes when we suffer without learning the lesson." - Emmet Fox

"No situation can be difficult of itself; it is the lack of insight into its intricacies, and the want of wisdom in dealing with it, which give rise to the difficulty. Immeasurable, therefore, is the gain of a difficulty transcended." - James Allen

"Calamities can bring growth and Enlightenment," said the Master.
And he explained it thus: "Each day a bird would shelter in the withered branches of a tree that stood in the middle of a vast deserted plain. One day a whirlwind uprooted the tree, forcing the poor bird to fly a hundred miles in search of shelter -- till it finally came to a forest of fruit-laden trees." And he concluded: "If the withered tree had survived, nothing would have induced the bird to give up its security and fly."" - Anthony de Mello

"Our soul work...is to repair ourselves, to heal into wholeness. It is, simply put, to identify and remove whatever gets in the way of being truly who we are. It is the task of uncovering our authentic self from the encrustations that overlay it, concealing it from us." - M.J. Abadie

"The places in our personality where we tend to deviate from love are not our faults, but our wounds." - Marianne Williamson

"The spiritual journey, the path of recovery and personal growth, is a detoxification process in which we bring up and out the negative beliefs we have carried with us from the past and that no longer serve us in the present." - Marianne Williamson

"Stopping, calming and restoring are preconditions for healing. When animals in the forest are wounded they find a place to lie down and rest for many days... They just rest, and get the healing they need." - Thich Nhat Hanh

"People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar." - Thich Nhat Hanh

"There comes a time when the pain of continuing exceeds the pain of stopping. At that moment, a threshold is crossed. What seemed unthinkable becomes thinkable. Slowly, the realization emerges that the choice to continue what you have been doing is the choice to live in discomfort, and the choice to stop what you have been doing is the choice to breathe deeply and freely again. Once that realization has emerged, you can either honor it or ignore it, but you cannot forget it. What has become known can not become unknown again." - Gary Zukav

"By clinging to our pain we depower ourselves. We begin to believe we have no other choice but to feel pain. We argue for our limitations thereby adopting them and limiting ourselves." - Lynn Atkinson

"Finding joy doesn't mean that life will always be easy; rather life becomes rich because we live near the pulse of possibility. To open the door, you can start by saying I am willing. I am willing to feel, to Know, to love, and to expand. I am willing to let the concrete walls of my beliefs slip away and move into a new level of awareness." - Charlotte Davis Kas
 
Quote:
However, there is the problem that I still don’t entirely understand the things I used to understand that made people seem less offensive even whey they were trying to offend. Some of the same people who I used to be explaining these things to are currently better at it than I am now, both because they got better and I got worse. I see them being much more calm about something that I feel incensed by and saying that the person is just scared or not right in the head and I find myself wishing I could be that wise. Then I remember that I used to be and I was saying the same sort of things to them years ago. Being aware that people hurt others because they are hurting and concentrating on that awareness was part of that understanding. It has been lying around here in the clutter of my mind somewhere, forgotten and neglected and buried under debris. It helps a bit to excavate that and see what I can still do with it.
In a sense, it's like you have taken a step forward but then two steps back.
Which could be from building positive or truth structures on top of old negative or false ones, and then the negative/false ones collapsed, thus collapsing the positive/truth ones that were on top.
Or, it's now time to heal wounds that have been put aside. They have bubbled to the surface, now it's time to address them.
You're containment tank has filled and has spilled over the sides into your day to day life.
There are so many ways to look at it, arive. Only you can determine what's going on.
Or, this mess, this disaster, has come about because you have been excavating.
You have uncovered them, which means you want to deal with them at this time in your life.
Maybe you weren't aware excavating would reveal these things, but from what you've shared thus far,
it seems logical to me that the journey you're on will bring these things to the fore.
If your desire is to sort yourself out, it's logical that the things that need sorting will manifest, you are calling them out.
They aren't coming into your life, you are going into your life, into yourself.

Just read this passage this morning. It's from Bruce Liptons, The Biology of Belief.

"As you've learned in this chapter, scientists have recently made great progress towards unraveling the complexity of the simple looking membrane(of a cell).
But even twenty years ago, the rough outlines of the membrane's functions were known.
In fact, it was twenty years ago when I first realised how understanding the workings of the membrane could be life changing.
My eureka moment resembled the dynamics of super saturated solutions in chemistry.
These solutions, which look like plain water, are fully saturated with a dissolved substance.
They are so saturated that just one more drop of the solute causes a dramatic reaction in which all of hte dissolved materials instantly coalesce into a giant crystal."

The way he described his eureka moment, his realisation/revelation/lightbulb moment/awakening/moment of enlightenment/of understanding of something, is brilliant.
Just one more piece of the puzzle, just one more bit of information and instantly, you see the answer to your problem. The whole thing instantly makes sense.
It's like you are building an art piece of a complex arrangement of lights. Bulbs, wires, structures to hold it all. Not a pretty sight, bit of a mess really.
But it's designed in a way that it won't light up till the last bulb is in place, and then all the lights go on and then you see the beauty of the piece.
The sun can't be seen till you have climbed the last bit of the mountain. But you can't climb the last bit till you have climbed all the other bits before it.
No glorious experience of sunshine till you have traversed the darkened side of the mountain to get to the point where you can see recieve the benefits of all your labors.

I was driving home early this morning, taking my new sis in law to work.
The sky is beautifully overcast, huge grey clouds of various shades gliding through the air at a fairly brisk pace... 100mph or more.
Lots of rolling hills on the way home, some covered in trees, others grassed fields for livestock or grain or vegetables.

Either way, Tazzie, in this area, it's all lush dark green, especially under a clouded sky.
One particular hill was illuminated by rays of light as the sun broke through the cloud canopy.
The contrast generated a vibrant quality to this sunlight and was most breathtaking.
Funny how you don't notice the sun when it's a cloudless day, but when the sun breaks through the darkness, you take extra notice of it.
You appreciate it as opposed to taking it for granted.
Such is the healing journey. Appreciating the positives, abilities, strengths and beauty of oneself in contrast of all the pain and dysfunction one has.
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  #73  
Old 18-04-2011, 03:39 AM
Mountain-Goat
Posts: n/a
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by sound
Well there you go ... very cool ... I look up at my bookshelf behind my computer screen and locate my little book of '50 philosophy ideas you really need to know' ... by Ben Dupre different author but i am thinking same ideas yeah?

I haven't read it all however, yes i agree, it does contain some quotes, which are quite the bomb ...
YAY ! I bought the philosophy one as well.
Post office has a whole stack of them.
The format is the same for each topic, just different authors.
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  #74  
Old 18-04-2011, 03:47 AM
Mountain-Goat
Posts: n/a
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by sound
Just pulling bits and pieces out as I go AC ... yes to the above ... poor choice of words on my behalf. You encourage people is what you do ... purely through your ability to 'relate' ...
I have found that finding the exact words to describe what's on my mind or in my heart is not as easy as it looks inside.
It makes sense to me when I speak to myself, but I have no idea how another will interpret those words.

The joy is, understanding and knowing that communication "errors" are part of the experience.
This frees one up from worrying about making mistakes or being misunderstood.
And how bonding is a simple, "please clarify what you mean."

I like your updated version Sound.
Sharing our lives with each other...openly, compassionately, graciously...I can think of no better way to be with others.
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  #75  
Old 20-04-2011, 10:06 PM
arive nan
Posts: n/a
 
I just want to say, thank you again AC for the thoughtful post . I have been reading through it and will respond in more detail when I can.
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  #76  
Old 21-04-2011, 02:54 AM
Mountain-Goat
Posts: n/a
 
As an eternal being arive, I have all the time in the world.
Please respond when you are ready, no rush. Take months if you require.
And you're welcome. I enjoy your openness. Bonus if you find something of value in what I have shared.

I know this stuff works for me because these are the experiences of my life.
This is not proof that it will be of benefit to others.
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  #77  
Old 21-04-2011, 05:01 AM
Tosh
Posts: n/a
 
I'm on this path but, how do I move foward whithout my husband. I can't leave him behind? He wants to learn but, he is stuck with things to overcome!!
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  #78  
Old 26-04-2011, 05:23 AM
Mountain-Goat
Posts: n/a
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tosh
I'm on this path but, how do I move foward whithout my husband. I can't leave him behind? He wants to learn but, he is stuck with things to overcome!!
The inner realm is timeless so you can be eleventee hundred miles ahead of your husband and at the same time be right next to him.
If you can't leave him behind, then don't.

Consider that part of your journey is to stay and help him.
I do not know if it is, only you can know this.
Choose love as your foundation for all the decisions and actions you take.
It's not how long a journey takes, but the quality of your life within the journey.
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