Peace of Mind Healing 5. Ending this SAD Game

In his book, "Function of the Orgasm", Wilhelm Reich used the analogy of a bladder to explain how our bodies behave. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico, as reported by Carlos Castaneda, seen us in ancient times as luminous eggs. Modern man, they contended, looks like spheres.

I prefer to see us as bubbles.

God is everywhere. God is Love. Love is everywhere.

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico seen love as a glue that held everything together. A Course in Miracles stresses that Love is all there is.

In our first month as babies all we are is Love. It flows freely in and around us. As we begin our attachment process to our parents we begin to identify with them as they see themselves. This process leads to the development of our senses and to our identification with images, sounds and body sensations. By the time it is complete we are totally convinced that we are bodies.

We see ourselves as separate entities subjected to encounters with other separate entities. The nature of these encounters varies depending on the nature of our childhood circumstances. If we were brought up in a caring tolerant environment then, most likely, we will be caring and tolerant. If we were brought up in an angry, argumentative and belligerent environment its highly unlikely that we will not have absorbed some of these traits.

Even though we see ourselves as separate, there really is no such thing. We can convince ourselves that we are isolated and alone, that we are worthless, or that no one loves us. Not only can we, we are totally convinced that we are these things and much worse.

We see ourselves as subjects of attack and abuse who need lots of protective defenses. Instead of bubbles of Love we see ourselves inside a dense encrusted shell. A shell that lets nothing in and lets nothing out.

To end this game we need to change our thinking. "Easier said than done" is the most frequent response I get to that idea. We need to become aware of what we are thinking at any given moment. To do this we become present.

Presence techniques are primarily based on observation of what we perceive with the senses of the body. Perception and observation are qualities of our mind and are determined by our thinking. What we look for we find! To observe is to pay attention. An observation is just an observation until we decide what to do with it. We can blame-game-guilt-trip or we can learn.

To Observe Truly

1. First suspend all belief and thought systems.
2. Then switch off any pattern recognition systems.
3. And then when we've become rightly (or leftly or wrongly) confused we may begin to know reality.
4. Having observed, accept our observations for what they are, our observations. Do not go looking for agreement for them; do not go looking for approval for them. No-one else will have switched off our belief, thought and pattern recognition systems and they will not want us breaking down their defenses.

Blame-Game-Guilt-Trip

1. We make an observation.
2. We analyse and compare our observation with our memories or with what we think is right.
3. We look for someone or something to blame.
4. We start trying to make the offender guilty and whether that works or not we end up making ourselves feel guilty.
5. Our guilt trip locks up one or more energy system.
6. This locked energy leads to disease or decay.
7. Eventually we drop the body in a ritual called death.

Learning

1. We make an observation.
2. We use our intellect to understand what it means to us.
3. Based on our understanding we appreciate what we have learned.
4. Appreciation leads to Love.
5. Love leads to eternal life, to Heaven.

At any stage in the blame-game-guilt-trip process we can convert to learning. At step 2, for example, we can change from analysis and comparison to synthesis and learn, or at step 3,4 we can realise that all we are all here to do is to learn.

Note: The text from presence techniques onwards is taken from this site with slight editing.

Peace of Mind Healing 4. Becoming a SAD Gamer

SAD, as an acronym, usually stands for Seasonal Affective Disorder, a type of depression caused by lack of sunlight in the upper reaches of the Northern Hemisphere. In this blog it stands for Suffering And Death, the game we all engage in here.

Unfortunately, we don't see it as a game. We see it as all there is.

During my Catholic religious education, some might say indoctrination, there were many sayings we had to learn off. One that stuck with me was "Unless we become as little children, we cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven." (Matthew 18.3) I thought about this a lot and tried to figure out what it meant.

In A.H. Almaas's book "A Pearl Beyond Price" he talks about child psychology and how as babies we develop and absorb our behaviour patterns. He stresses that the period between one month and ten months is critical since during this period we form a "dual unity" with our primary care giver, usually our mother. He references the work of Margaret Schönberger Mahler.

The irony in all this is that while I was busy trying to figure it out, there were child psychologists out there who had been studying it for years. And they had the answers.

Also, I had wondered about our eyesight as babies. What do babies really see? The answer to this may never be known since as babies we have no verbal ability to tell anyone what we are seeing.

"When a baby is born, although her eyes are physically capable of seeing well, the brain is not yet mature enough to interpret all of the visual information, hence things will remain pretty blurry for the first few months. As the brain matures and becomes more complex, the baby’s vision will improve." (Wikiparenting)

"From the day your baby's born, his eyes will aid his physical, mental, and emotional development by allowing him to take in information — a little bit at first, and eventually much more — about the world around him." (Babycenter)

Although these sites differ on whether your child is a boy or a girl, they both agree that our eyesight is fully developed by eight months old. Walking and talking usually develop in the last quarter of our first year. As one grandmother put it to me, "Aren't we terrible, at six months we are busy encouraging them to walk and to talk. By the time they get to two or three we are shouting at them to sit down and shut up."

Our first year is very critical to our overall development. We are absorbing the stuff that will be with us all our lives. This absorption period continues until we are seven or eight, but is mostly complete by the time we are three. It is the most intensive learning period of our lives. And it is a period that we have absolutely no control over.

We are taking everything on board without any ability to discern whether it is good, bad or indifferent. We are absorbing the mental and emotional patterns of our parents and alloparents (individuals other than our actual parents who act in a parental role - grandparents, brothers, sisters, relations, minders and carers).

And, curiously enough, we are trying to heal them. When we are born we have no sense of separation. We are one with everyone and everything. Innately, we share our parents and alloparents mental and emotional states, their ups and downs, their pain and their suffering.

We replicate these states within ourselves, just like our parents did and their parents before them. They become our behaviour patterns, and even though as we get older we learn that some of these may not be useful, they are the ones that we resort to in times of stress.

The big problem is that, as adults, we are not aware of them. They are, seemingly, not under our control. They are buried deep in our minds and rise to take us over with alarming speed and with little concern for their consequences.

They all hinge on our identification with our bodies. We believe that we are bodies and that our bodies control our minds. In fact, it's the other way round. Our thinking controls our bodies.

That our bodies control our minds is the basis of all allopathic medicine. The idea that putting something into our mouths or injecting it into our bodies will fix our problems is based on the belief that we are chemical beakers. Something has gone wrong in our bio-chemistry and chemical intervention is required to put it right. While the body is perceived as a bio-chemical factory this may make sense. Once we see the mind as the root cause of all our problems, we realise that all we have to do to heal our mental and emotional problems as well as our physical one is to change our thinking.

Let us not continue to ignore all that we have learned about the mind. Let us not continue to see ourselves as limited, powerless and doomed bodies. Let us give up the idea that "someone knows better". That there is some expert out there that can fix us. The body is an amazing design that will heal itself the instant we stop playing our SAD game.