I can't seem to write short posts these days. I keep trying.

You know what's interesting? How much it hurts when I confuse my feelings with my thoughts/stories.

This is a very interesting dynamic I've noticed. Here's how to see it for yourself:

When you are going through a rough time emotionally, pay attention to what your body feels like. Is there a tightness in your chest, a pressure in your forehead, a constriction in your thought? What does that actually feel like? Without all the thoughts about what's wrong and how your dieing and life is horrible. Just the literal sensation.

When I do that, I realize first hand: this is really not so bad. This is not very painful, physically. It's usually no worse than slightly uncomfortable. When it's by itself.

There is something that happens, when thoughts link up with physical sensations. It kind of looks like two crystals linked together by some sticky goo, maybe a green color, spinning around in space.

...

erm, I'm not sure that's really relevant. Anyhoo, when there is a thought that says something, like the thought, "something is wrong with me." and it is attached to a feeling, maybe a tightness in the chest, then it suddenly becomes this thing that we are really scared to face, that we are willing to do almost anything to try and escape from, and that we seem powerless to be able to control or understand.

I think this is because when this happens, we are dealing with something that doesn't actually exist. There isn't actually a connection between the mental auditory phenomena we call "thought" and the tactile internal phenomena we call "feelings." But we use one as proof of the other. For some reason, we assume that because our chest feels tight and our temples are throbbing, that means the thought that is going through our head about being a failure is true.

Once that imaginary connection between the two is snipped via direct perception (aka, looking at it, perhaps via the questions: what am I feeling in the body right now, and then, what am I thinking.) For some reason, for me, they loose there power. The situation is seen for what it is: some sensations, and some talking going on in my head. Vs. actually believing the story that the voice is telling me.

As far as I can tell, all suffering comes from these weird entity's I'm calling beliefs. We take these individual experiences, these crystals, and we try to link them together in weird ways, make up stories about them. Sometimes the stories are fine, or even nice. But often they are nightmares, or turn into nightmares, and then is when it's nice to know the dis-assembly instructions.

I've tried to just stop believing beliefs, but that doesn't seem to work at all. You cant' stop believing, as the song goes. But you can look for truth. If you look close enough at beliefs, with the intention of finding the truth of them, they dissolve. That is my experience. So far, the process of learning how this works has been both simple and complex. The actual process, when it works, is simple. You see how what you were believing isn't necessarily true, and you can no longer believe it is true. In practice, it's taken a long time, and I'm still learning, because a lot of the minds job seems to be erecting and maintaining defenses around your beliefs, and these are as complex and confusing as the mind can get. And for someone with a mind like mine, that gets pretty fucking labyrinthine.

What amazes me is that the mind can create the elaborate and ingenious defenses that it does, without even being conscious it's doing it. If I were to do what I love for a live, I suppose I would be a dream mechanic. I would use my belief engineering skills (almost entirely demolition based ;) to help people who's dreams had become nightmares. I would help them dismantle the beliefs that cause them pain, that make there life hell.

Fuck, that's an awesome job. I should create that. Heh. Just as soon as I'm done with the prototype (me).

Anyways, lesson out of my engineering scrapbook:

Figure 72.

a) Belief, Front View: "I'm not good enough"

i) I'm doing something wrong

ii) I'm a failure

iii) I need to do something different than I'm doing

notes: this is one of my core belies. It hurts like a mother fucker out of hell and makes everything not fun. Saps my desire to do anything (why bother, if I just keep telling myself I'm doing it wrong) It's one of the most resistant to dismantling I've ever come across. This is because of the much lesser known:

b) Supporting belief, side view: "This belief is true and if I stop believing it I will become an even bigger failure"

notes: The reason a) remains in place inspite of all my attempts to reverse engineer it is simple.

I don't want to stop believing it.

This is an important, very important lesson for anyone engaging in dream mechanics. You need to be coming from a desire for Truth. If you are instead coming from a desire to have a tighter butt, or more money, or a girlfriend, etc., then the belief will remain in place. It will remain in place because you have decided to hold onto the desire for a "thing" rather than trust that the truth will give you what you really want. Maybe I think I want a girlfriend. So I do the work (belief engineering) to try and get one. If I was able to approach that issue from the motive of truth instead, then I may or may not get a girlfriend, but I would have access to the love, acceptance, worthiness, and joy, that I was trying to get, by obtaining a girlfriend. From there, everything else is icing on the cake.

It's like the monkey traps they have in India: there's some fruit placed into a jar with a small mouth. The monkey's hand can fit in, to grab the fruit, but once wrapped around the fruit, the monkeys fist is too big to come out again. And the monkey refuses to let go of the fruit, thus remaining trapped.

So too, by holding onto our desires, we are trapped in suffering. Byron Katie, a belief engineer par excellence, suggests that, if there is some belief that you can't come at with the motive of truth, then work on another belief instead. Something smaller, because it's hopeless to confront the one you're not willing to look at for the sake of truth. There are always plenty of others.

[end of scrapbook section]

I should mention that you're not going to understand this from reading it alone. You have to get your hands dirty, to get the experience that will make this make sense.

Anyways, that is where I am right now: poised on the brink of the belief, "I'm not good enough. I'm not a success. I need to do more than I am doing." asking myself the question: "are you willing to be no more than exactly what you are right now?"

Of course, if I was happy and skipping, I'd say, "hell no. I want to be super awesome, if I can." But right now, the pain of that thought has become so great that just being who I am, without that thought, is starting to look like a better option.

The bottom line is I'm going to be that anyways. I can be miserable about it and fighting it every moment. Or I can be happy about it.

"I'm not enough."

is it true?

A long time ago, in a michael far, far away

I was going to do a charecter sketch of Michael Cook, a friend of mine, many months ago. I asked permission and everything. Well, now I'm doing it.

Michael Cook is one of the people I turn to when I want to feel bad about myself.

I turn to him, internally, and think about him, who he is, what he has accomplished and is accomplishing, and then feel very, very bad about how little I've done and am in comparison.

Phyisicaly and in demeanor, he is unassuming. Brown curly hair, usually short, thin, average hight, soft spoken and humble.

He's also one of the funniest people I've ever met. Genuinely funny, not forced. Maybe it just matches my sense of humor, but something about his demeanor, mixed with his creative mind makes me laugh as much as anyone I've ever met.

I only know this from hearsay, not being a part of the program called Destination Imagination, which is a kind of competitive problem solving contest, mostly for highschoolers I think, but apparently Michael was awe inspiring to watch at work. Of course this is from his girlfriend, now wife, who also did DI, so it's a little biased but it's easy to believe, interacting with him. She knows how to speak and write elven, is extremely smart and sweet and as cool as you would expect someone who knows elven to be.

The impression I have of Michael is someone who is always doing something new, creative, exciting and well done. He's got so much danm enthusiasim in all that he's doing. He's so excited about it, so passionate. He's working for a city repair group, bringing community back to the fractured and isolated suburbia and city-scapes. He's single handedly invigorating the program, creating his own projects and pushing the already existent projects further than they were.

Last I heard, he's doing this all for no pay, using his ingenuity and the goodwill he genrates in people to live. That's tough. Hell, all of what he's doing sounds tough. Tough and amazing. I already told you, he's who I turn to when I want to beat myself up. Because he's doing so much good. As far as I'm concerned he's living the dream. Not nessisarily an easy dream, but an adventursome dream, a meaningful dream, a life that he can be happy to have lived.

Passion. Mike has passion. He has this bright shining enthusiasm for life that makes you feel confident whatever he decides to do, he's going to do very well. And he is dynamic. He doesn't sit around and talk and think about what to do without moving forward. Mike is always dynamic, doing something. Working on his delightful, whismical illistrations, designing and creating videogames, improving, gardening, learning, community making, street running...

I wanted to do this charecter sketch, incompleate and vauge as it is, to illustrate part of a point I want to make.

The point runns something like this: "I really wish I was more like _____" where the blank is the charecter traits I'm trying to describe in this wonderful Michael person. He is a real person, I assure you. So being like that is possible. I'm not sure his reaction to to this, probubly embaressment. He is a human to, of course, he's not a plastic perfection. But that enthusiasm and dynamic action, that willingness pursue his passion, that bravery to pursue his dream...

Those are great qualities, qualites I wish dearly that I had, and that I constenly try to figure out how to get.

That's what I'm trying to figure out right now. Well, a part of that, anyways. I'm serching for my passion. I'm searching for passion in general.

This is one of those phrases, like "self love" that, when I sit down to think about, I realize I actualy have no idea what that phrase is reffering to. Sure I could give you a dictionary definition, like anyone else, or even a pretty philisophical explenation, which would satisfy those looking for something more complex. But I fundementaly do not have a connection between an experience that lives within me and the phrase, "live with passion." And so it is meaningless. Just as the phrase, "self love" is just meaningless sound until I find the living exprience that correlates with what I am looking for in that phrase.

To get to either of these, we need to go behond the catch-phrase and get to the operational meaning. What does the phrase, "self love" mean, in the senes you are using it? Insead of "self love" we can just say "X", which is as good a name, for now. So, what I am looking for, in that case, is a way of being where I feel the appreciation, intimacy, and confidence that I get when I feel really loved by someone. "X" is when I have that feeling in some fundemental way, all the time, without reliance on changing circumstances/apperences.

"live with passion" refferes to a way of being that is highly internaly motivated to action in a positive way. That is, motivated by strong positive emotioins. Really enjoying doing something, or doing it for a reason that feels very meaninful or worthwile. Or both. Also, it should be the most effective form of motivation, creating results that are far more powerful, than any other form of motivation, because this method of motivation generates more engergy, rather than takig away energy or keeping it the same, and generates the greatest focus, becuse what is being focused on is inherently very enjoyable, or very meaninful and applicable to some goal that is very importaint to you.

I have on occasioin lived this way. The main block I see to living this way is my extream discomfort at not achieving my goals. When I am passionate about something, and it doesnt' happen, I am crushed.

Insanity and Relationships

Girlfriends. Romance. Addiction.

It's not fair to anyone, the illusions we cast over ourselves and other people, playing make believe. I was never good at acting charming. I used to be good at manipulation, but it hurts way to much to do that any more. So my illusions hurt mainly just myself. Internal fantasy, rather than externally acted out. I guess it hurts the people in that they don't get to meet the cool person named Isaac, when I withdraw.

And it certainly hurts me, when I decide I need someone else to be happy, and I don't have someone else. I'd like to meet me, and become intimate with that person. But I have the hardest time of all loving myself. But I'm the only one I can count on for sure. If I can't get what I'm searching for, inside, then getting it outside is a lot harder for me.

Not for some people. Not everyone has trouble with getting relationships. Perhaps most people have trouble getting relationships that are consistently nice, but they still exist. And probably without all the time spent on internal work that I've spent. Most likely, I'm either in a remedial class, or else I've just got a specific relational problem. Or else it's just a part of my personality that's not actually a problem but becomes a problem because I think it should be different, and because I think I need to have a relationship to be happy.

Lets take a look at a transactional relationship analysis of recent days.

Me meet girl. Previous acquaintance. Attracted to girl, think that I want a relationship with girl. Want to share my feelings honestly about these feelings, way, way, way too much thinking beforehand about it. What I'm going to say. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of conversations in my head. None of them satisfactory, because I don't know what a satisfactory initiation of "dating" looks like. My experiences with dating girls has been woeful. Perhaps not significantly more woeful than the rest of the population, is essence, but in appearance, more woeful, because they haven't even resulted in a relationship. Part of that is my inability to date someone I'm not attracted too. It feels sleazy to me. Like I'm using there infatuation for my own personal ego stoking. I want something mutual, but perhaps that is too much to ask for the beginning of a relationship.

Anyways, girl mentions "incidentally" that she is dating someone. Obviously she wants to clarify our relationship, not get my hopes up, because I've been fairly upfront and I'm sure she strongly suspects, if not outright knows, that I have a crush on her. I on the other hand, am very confused about her. Sometimes I think she's interested in having a relationship, other times (certainly when she has a boyfriend) there is definitely not that vibe there. Not sure if she 'just wants to be friends' (blow my brains out, but fine, at least I've got someone who really triggers my emotional romance issues to help me find hidden places of pain) or is keeping me around as a back up boyfriend (not sure how I feel about that either, kind of disposable and cheap.)

Anyways, I get sad, because when I ever have expectations about women and romance they get kicked in the balls repeatedly and then thrown into a sewage treatment pool with concrete boots on. (the ideas, not the women) This is no exception. Expectation = let down, in my book, specifically in regards to women/romance.

What I really need is probably very simple: I need to learn how to give to myself the feelings of acceptance, love, safety and constancy of love, and worthiness that I seek through the validation of a loving partner. I think there must be more to it though, since there are plenty of people who have relationships and still seek those things. I think part of that is maybe an ability to settle. Another part is an ability to present an attractive image and be charming. Another part is perhaps the ability to quickly connect with people and keep then interested/feeling good around you.

I'm not sure if I should try and develop these skills, or just work on the primary problem:

that I am deeply attached to having a relationship. it would be a lot simpler, perhaps, if I could actually just get a relationship and then see for myself if it gave me any of what I'm looking for. I know, in the part of my mind that's not insane, that it won't. Just like I knew with sex. With sex I ended up learning through experience. It was useful to know, but it was only necessary because I didn't trust myself and my knowing.

So I need to trust myself, here, if I want to move through this issue quickly.

Here's the problem in a nutshell: I have a strong attachment to having a relationship where I like a girl romantically and she feels the same about me. I get my feelings of love and particularly worthiness, from other people, though it always feels partial, not enough. I believe, insane as it is, that someone I 'love' 'loving' me the same way, is how I will finally be able to believe in myself. Without that, it seems impossible. That love is an ideal for me. it's the highest, bestest most complete form of acceptance and validation I can imagine. The fact that I haven't had that kind of relationship is proof to my subconscious that I am not worthy, not a worthwhile human being. Maybe this is hard to believe that someone could actually think this way, but it's entirely probable that you, the reader, have something that you believe that is of a similar level of insanity. the trick is it hides itself, justifies itself, so you don't see it. Because if you did see it, it would start to shrivel up and die in the light of obvious common sense.

However, with some of these big issues, even recognizing the insanity isn't enough to heal it. Eventually, the belief is hanging on through shear emotional tenacity. It is completely illogical, it is just a crazy person, railing against the world, blinded and maddened by hurt or fear or rage.

Like this thing. The bottom line is, for whatever reason, I feel like the crud you scrape off the bottom of your shoes with a stick, and I see a mutual romantic relationship as a way out.

No wonder there is so much energy being put into it. It's almost unavoidable, for anyone put into a similar internal environment: factor a) you feel horrible. factor b) you've been led to believe that there is a way out of feeling horrible.

It's an innocent movement, though it is sad in that it's doomed from the get go.

But until I can find a way to give myself the feelings I'm looking for, I too am doomed to search for it. As long as I'm suffering and sad, I'm not going to stop searching. The pain eggs me on. Say what you will, but pain is an powerful motivator.

The best I can do, as far as I can figure, is to search in the most likely location. Which is within me. As for methodology, I think my principle angle is the right angle for this problem: Truth. Be truthful. Particularly with yourself.

I am grateful for the opportunity to heal, though it hurts quite a bit.

signing off

-me