Month: September 2012

A while back, I wrote about being/feeling alone and I wanted to solidify the main point, since it has become more coherent to me over time.

When we choose to make someone part of our life, it relieves us from the feeling of being alone. But the point is that this decision takes active choice on OUR behalf – or the fact that someone chooses to be with us does not amount to anything regarding feeling alone.

The above is true for FEELING ALONE.  However, BEING ALONE, is just the opposite.  We can think we are alone, when in truth, we have lots of friends who have chosen us, and we are in fact NOT alone. On the other hand, we can think we are not alone, when in reality no one chooses to be with us, and if fact we ARE alone.

If you think about this, it is ironic, since it turns out that while feeling alone is up to us, being alone is up to our friends and family.  Usually, we see it the other way.

Of course, when it comes to choosing how we feel, that is actually an arbitrary decision (well, unless we have no close friends or family), so we might as well assume we are not alone!

Having thought about causation this past year, I have come to the appreciation of the fact that there are some base emotions that we all have, that are part of our core psyche, and we can’t really change.

We can work on them, temper them, and otherwise deal with them, but we can’t remove them as impacts on ourselves.

The emotions, similar to instincts in animals, through natural selection have supported our survival, and are now so deeply engrained, that there really is not much we can do about them, except recognize that they exist, accept their influence, and take it into consideration.

With that introduction in mind, here is what I have learned.  There are actually two base feelings (or instincts).

1) Not to be alone
2) Productive action

From these two primary instincts, three higher level instincts are borne:

1) To be liked by our community (subset of 1)
2) To control (subset of 2)
3) To understand (subset of 1 and 2)

Of course, it could be that I haven’t worked enough on exorcising these traits from my personality, but my current feeling is that these five human instincts are intertwined with the totality of the human experience and inseparable.

Lately, I have come to notice that I have a big ego, and to be honest, I’m not really sure what to do about it.

Now, in my mind, there are two types of people I attribute with big egos – those who are pretending to have a big ego due to really feeling insecure about who they are and those who actually recognize their strengths and actually like who what they see in the mirror.

While certainly over a large part of my life, I fell into the first crowd of people, at this point I couldn’t help to think that I fall into the latter.

So it came as a surprise to me when I realized my ego was getting in the way of my personal growth.

I asked myself what I should do.

Value myself less?  No that doesn’t seem healthy.

Value others more?  That doesn’t really work since when I do that, it tends to inflates my ego (often falsely).

So what was I to do?

Which is when I realized that the issue is that I attribute any value to myself in the first place.  You see, value is relative to another set point, so by assessing my own personal value, by definition, I was insecure and still in the former category.

The only way out is to stop the compulsion to compare myself to others and create figures of value altogether.  There are natural effects that I think get in the way of this goal. But with focus, I do think that we can minimize the ego’s menace.

The upshot is that the goal is not to have a “healthy ego” rather to have no ego altogether.  Which probably isn’t conventional wisdom, I don’t think.  But that is just my ego talking. 😉

A friend of mine forwarded a nice quote this morning made by James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans:

“the truth of nature … is a primitive law of the human mind.”

I wanted to take some time to talk about the nature of truth, which I think he nailed, and is not really what we typically think of when we consider truth.

For most of us, truth is an ideal, a moral, or some other positive way of living life.  However, while this is correct, it isn’t true.  Since, in truth, truth is a reflection of life itself.

Restated, Truth is a reflection of the real nature of the world.

So in fact, truth is a noun, and reflects a tangible reality.  It can be discerned in nature, and within ourselves, if we are open to receiving it.

On an aside, anything which isn’t truth, is fiction.

Truth is important, not because of the emotional and societal values, which while important, aren’t the true reason of their importance.
We can know this because truth, like life, is in its nature is simple, and both of these values are complex.

Rather, truth is important because it aligns us with the world – with nature if you will – and in doing so connects us to our essential form, our true form, which further serves to settle our mind and bring us closer to what we call the divine.

It calls to mind my friend, who tells the truth, but it stems from fear of getting caught.  While this perhaps is a good outcome, the fact that it stems from fear, means that this action isn’t truly true.  It is in fact false.

The true action would be to do the right thing, because it is the right thing to do.  The fear aspect impacts his action, and moves it from truth to falsehood.

Having finished this post, I will admit that it could all be false, but in my gut, I think it is true.

 

I wanted to write a post about divorce, being inspired by an article that my sister shared via Facebook.

Divorce is an opportunity.

Of course, this strikes one as at odd at first blanch, since we know that divorce is full loneliness, horrid pain from loss, and more unintended consequences than you can shake a stick at.

However, like all events that transpire in our life, it too is an opportunity.  An opportunity for growth, which like all opportunities that come our way, we can ignore, and squander, or grasp, and come out on the other side with a new version of ourselves.

Josh 2.0, if you will.

Having finished a year since my separation, I can now look back at the amazing opportunities that this past year has provided, that there is no way that I would have had, if I had remained married.  It’s not that they couldn’t have happened, but my environment and emotional self was not set up in such a way to allow for them.

A year ago, I never would have had the amazing opportunity to travel to Portland this past weekend, where I would eat lunch with a stranger named Rick and discuss an experience he had when he was five, and he experienced an intimate connection with the world; or meet and spend the morning touring around with Leanne learning about her school she started in Africa, and an amazing discussion about place and energy; or met the homeless man who offered me what he had collected so far that morning, when I bought him breakfast.

Ironically, the main issue with divorce is not that we can’t live with the person we were with, rather that we can’t live with ourselves.  So we leave our situation, only to find that we are still there.   I would bet that most people who get divorced, then settle for someone else just so they don’t have to be alone.  Sounds familiar doesn’t it?  They should have just stayed married in an imperfect relationship and they could have saved themselves the pain of divorce.  Now that is a squandered opportunity.

Rather, divorce serves as an opportunity, not to find someone else, rather to find ourselves. And commune with ourselves.  And enjoy ourselves.  And just be one on one with the world.

And to patiently wait for that next special person, who has already done the same.