How I cured my anxiety

There are four types of anxiety, related to pain, failure, violence and death. There are multiple strategies to control these forms and anxieties but ultimately all boils down to avoiding one or more out of this four consequences.

Because life happens in cycle to some degree we all suffer the four consequences at some point in our lives. Healthy people simply flow between negative and positive with relative ease, people who suffer some degree of abuse are confused and deny the negative aspects of life which make them persist. As Socrates said that all evil in the world happens because of ignorance is not only true for the abuser but also for the victim of chronic abuse, after all this is how you become ignorant by being abused and not examining yourself. When you reject part of life, you don't only rejected in others but you also rejected in yourself, for example if you are the victim of chronic physical abuse, you reject violence and if this goes long enough you risk becoming a bully because you deny the fact that you are capable of violence so you are going to wrongly justify somehow your aggression as not being violence.

Because you deny the negative aspects of life you are trapped in a feedback loop, whenever you encounter the chance of something negative happening to you, in order to maintain your denial you have to avoid it. This is why anxiety can persist long after the traumatic event that triggered it.

Anxiety is a discrepancy between your intentions and your emotions, for example if you have an elevator phobia, you might intend to use the elevator because is the easiest way to get at the highest levels of a building but your emotions are going to dictate you the opposite.

Unfortunately we don't have any conscious control over our emotions, so changing the emotions it is impossible, the only variable left that you have some control over is your intention. The problem with this is that if you change the intention to match your emotions you are back at square one, in the example above the person that is afraid of elevator would have to keep avoiding elevators in order to control his anxiety.

Luckely your emotions change constantly, if you match your intentions with your emotions, the emotions will eventually change and after the emotion changes you can have a new intention that matches the new emotion. The contraintuitive part out of dealing with anxiety is that in order to change it you have to first accept it, which creates a seemingly paradox when the first step out of the action of addressing a problem is to don't do anything about it.

But it is important to understand that you are dealing with forces and events that are out of your control, the psychologist Abraham Mallsow coined the term paradox of change that states that you can only change when you are satisfy where you already are.        

Accepting your emotions and behaviors means that you should expect that the situation in which you are won't change. Doing that will allow it to pas quicker, and allow you to move on. There is not much to lose, if you have something that you are unhappy with about yourself, if you can change it you have to accept it first, if you can't you have to live with it for the rest of your life so accepting it will make your life easier.  

Why it is impossible to live life without "religion"

Religion is accepting speculation as truth, that creates the fake sensation of control over things that are impossible to control like death for example.

All traditional religion are cults of death and resurrection, where the main prophet ultimately overcomes his human nature by facing death and coming back or live forever in haven.

People that follow traditional religions do so because by worshiping God they expect to gain magical power that defy the laws of nature that we are all ultimately bound to. If you really believe in God and you pray you can expect miracles, not to mention that they believe that to some degree they re immortal, because the soul outlives the body and joins God in Haven.

This tradition allows them to deny their own mortality and soothe the anxiety that always exist, because we are aware of the fact that we are going to dye one day.

If you are not a religious person, you might be an atheist or a man of science etc., this are religions within themselves because they are still based on speculation design to sooth ones anxiety by giving him a false sense of control over things that are impossible to control. It is impossible to know everything, you can only have seeds of truth, you ultimately have to fill the holes with speculation which means that you have to have faith that your speculation is truth.  

If in a traditional religion the syntheses is put on having faith in God, in all the other religion that doesn't call themselves a religion the faith is place on the impossible to fully prove hypotheses.

Because ultimately our anxiety is based on the fact that we are eventually going to feel pain, fail, be a victim of violence and eventually dye. In order to remain functional you have to somehow suppress it other wise you would just be in a state of grief all day and wouldn't be able to accomplish anything. You could say that you can be only in two states in life, suppression or grief.

From this need of suppressing our anxiety, we have to always speculate and place our faith in the fact that what we speculate is truth, to remain functional. Even if you reject all traditional religion or science, you will basically end up with your own unique philosophy which it is impossible to fully be proven so you are basically creating your own religion.

The old idea introduced by Sigmund Freud that suppression causes mental illness, is like saying that sugar consumption causes diabetes. If that would be true why doesn't everybody that eats some candy develops diabetes, there must be other factors that determines the cause of the disease.

Suppression means you have a healthy mind that keeps you functional, by not allowing you to constantly think of all the horrible things that could happen to you at any moment. It is the complete rejection of these facts that will make them linger even to the point that will make you dysfunctional. For example if you want to never fail, you wont take any risks which means that you will hardly learn anything so ultimately you end up being incompetent because you don't accumulate any skills, which is going to increase the amount of failure in your life.

The world was already broken!

If you are like me you spent majority of your life, trying to fix yourself or thinking about how to fix the world. I always find it bizarre how everything seems to be just fine for small periods of times, after which hell brakes loose. People that were once friends are now enemies, trying to hurt each-others.

If you think you are sane you might try to don't participate in such a horrible thing. You see that is the problem you assumed that you are sane.

You lied to yourself that you are a nice person incapable of hurting even a fly. Well i have news for you violence is just a normal part of life, there is no way to eliminate it. If a lion is going to eat he has to hunt down an innocent animal kill it and eat it. By default self-preservation requires violence, if you have to eat you have to kill.

But we are special we are different then other animals, we are smart and conscious. This is exactly the problem, this is why we are the most violent animal that exist on this planet. Like all the animals we have only one motivation self-preservation, but be cause we are self conscious, we are aware that we exist, we will eventually discover that like all forms of life we will eventually stop to exist. This makes self-preservation a lot harder, for your typical animal eating, sex and safety will generally make him be contempt, but if you are a human being how can you be contempt when you know that no matter what you do you can't change the end of the story and this creates constant anxiety.

If i learned one true fact about anxiety is that it is never over, being aware of your own mortality creates a never ending anxiety you will never get ride off. This leaves human beings in a bizarre situation, if you become a hedonist and chose to pay attention only on what gives you pleasure, you are missing your life how can you live your life fully when you chose to exclude so much of it, if you subject yourself to finding the truth and living your life based on the truth, you will constantly encounter sad unpleasant facts that will diminish the quality of your life.    

So if you haven't yet realize this you might be looking for external ways to get ride of your anxiety like things that gives you the sensation that you are of a great importance and that you are going to live something behind that will make you immortal in a way. This in itself doesn't sound too bad, if you are going to find the cure for cancer to become famous and rich. But unfortunately this is not the only thing that we do, because we are uncertain about so many things we have to speculate, so the only reasonable thing to do is pick a side.

This is why all groups organisations will eventually go through a schism, because of this you always end up with at least two groups competing against each other. You see it is impossible to know everything about anything so the things that we don't know we have to fill with speculation. So when you run in to someone that chose the other camp you start questioning yourself about your decisions, so that will give you anxiety because now you realize that there is a chance you made a mistake.

We often use the people from the other camp as a scapegoat to blame for our internal existential anxiety, we lye to ourselves that if we would just make this people accept our ideology or get rid of them we will achieve haven on earth.

I could argue that this form of scapegotism is what generates the most amount of violence on the planet, including all the wars we ever had.

Saying that you never lye it is a lye in itself, because it is an impossible standard to live to, the same way as saying that you are not a violent person it is an impossible standard to live. Good people are not the one that are never violent, are those that know that they are capable of being, and actually practiced it at times through out their lives but feel bad for what they did.

This is how you end up with the lowest levels of violence in the world, by being aware of your own nature and the negative consequences, by not denying violence you can become self disciplined enough to be as less violent as possible.

This is why the world is already broken! You don't have to change it, that is impossible, you just have to accept it.

Why optimism is a vice

It is better to always assume that bad things are going to happen to you, not feel satisfy even when good things happen to you. Or always assume that nothing bad can ever happen to you, take big and unnecessary risks, accept a work load that it is going to lead to an unbalanced hectic life?

They both seem pretty unreasonable ways to live your life, regardless that you are a pessimist or an optimist. Virtue is the point between deficiency and excess, pessimism is about deficiency seeing the world as being a dark and cruel place where you have to survive the food chain. The other extreme optimism is seeing the world with the exclusion of the negative aspects of life. Everybody is nice and friendly, you can do anything you want, there is no failure.

The problem with this is that they are not accurate portraits of reality, the world is neither just dark and violent or happy and free of failure. You could say that when the reality from the outside doesn't mach the reality from inside your head you are in trouble.

There are good and bad things that can happen to you at any point. The person that is in either of this extreme denies certain negative aspects of life.

Regardless that you are talking about pessimism or optimism, both of them are strategies through which the individual denies that he can fail.

The optimist develops a blind spot because, he is not able to accept that failure is a normal part of life so he constantly engages in activities that proves him that failure doesn't exist and when failure happens he brush it away or wrongly justify it.

The pessimist deals with the chances of failing by constantly thinking of failure and anticipating it, the same way that someone that is having a hard time accepting death might develop an interest for extreme sports. By facing death multiple times and survive it he hopes that he will eventually become so numb and immune to his fear of death.

The pessimist hopes that by constantly anticipating failure he won't suffer when failure happens.    

If both of this are unbalanced ways of living your life, and could be considered vices, than what is the ideal way to live your life?

Optimism and pessimism are poor perceptions of reality they exclude either the negative aspects of life or the positive ones. Keeping a close grip of reality has to be important for your happiness, so in my opinion realism is the virtue between pessimism and optimism. It is the point of balance, because the realist doesn't excludes any of the possible outcome of any situations.

There are only three possible outcomes you can have in any situation. You either fail to do what you propose to do in the first place like you don't even try, the second possible outcome is when you try but you fail and the third is try and succeed.  

How did your parents screwed you

Childhood is an important forming period, out of someones life. We don't inherit just the genes from our parents, you also inherit the way your parents saw the world and their habits and behaviors. This are generally transmitted to the child based on the quality of the relationship the child has with the parent and from the environment the parents provide the child to grow in.

It is not so much the emotions that you experience as child as much as what did you learn from them that still holds a certain degree of power over you.

Because when we are born we have no concept of our own mortality, we live like any other animals completely ignorant over the fact that we are going to be dead one day. According to the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard human beings are the only animals that are aware of the fact that one day they will die. So by nature after birth we are all in death denial.

We get exposed to the concept of death gradually through out our lives, and slowly we realize that one day we are going to die. When this happens like with all the realization of truth that has some negative implication it is uncomfortable and generally creates an existential crisis. This is why we have the tendency to stay in denial and reject the truth because this is giving us immediate comfort. It is partially the responsibility of the parents to teach the child about death. But so many of the adults today chose to deny death so how can you help someone accept his own mortality if you didn't accepted your own. If your parents had any problem accepting death they probably encourage you to deny it as well.

In the book "Denial of Death" written by Ernest Becker, he argues that because we deny death we live life in such away to avoid our anxiety of it and engage in thinks that create the illusion of immortality. This might involve: wanting to become famous, making a lot of money, religion, having a lot of sexual partners or making a great discovery. The think that all this activities have in common is that it gives the individual the impression that he is of some grater importance or he/she is going to live something behind that will outlast the person.

Equally there are people that self tranquilize to avoid their anxiety, with all kind of various distractions just to avoid asking themselves the important questions about their own nature of existence.

Either of this addictions will consume someones life the same way any addiction does. Attempting to do anything great or change the world is the worst thing you can do for your happiness. There is very little control you have over the outcome of your actions. There is no guaranty that you will be successful this is why you have to look for happiness somewhere else, some of the most bitter people i know are people who are trying to make a mark on the world. Not to say that you shouldn't have any goals or ambitions, it is in the realization that happiness doesn't comes out of great accomplishment as much the daily work.

As ones life progresses beyond infancy, he/she has to learn the first skills like talking and walking first later in life more complex skills.    

The first skills you learn organically by observing the adults around you and imitate them, when you are going to learn a new skill there will be the inevitable failure, if you ever had a chance to observe a baby practicing his verbal skills.

They seem very contempt repeating simple silable without being frustrated that they are not able to pronounce full words, and everybody around the child seem to find it normal that an infant is not being able to speek fluently.

Later one when the child grows up and has to be learned skills the role of the adults plays an important role, because now the child looks at them for feedback.

For example when you are in school and you draw your first letter is inevitable not going to be perfect you will make a couple of mistake. Only that now you have a teacher that comes and tells you that it is wrong and eventually he punishes natural normal consequences of practicing a skill.

So the child receives negative feedback for normal behavior, this could eventually lead the child that there is something wrong with them, and make him avoid all failure. Which long term will create incompetence.

Some of us are very unlucky and ended up with violent parents and families. Statistically approximately 80% of parents physically abuse their children and call it education. Regardless that you suffered from physical or emotional abuse it is equally damaging, just because it dosen't live a physical mark it doesn't mean it is not violence.

If you are an adult and you are in a relationship with an abusive person you can live at any point because you can be independent, it might be hard or you might have psychological problems like Stockholm Syndrome, but there is nothing physically that is stooping you.

A child is dependent on the adults around them, he or she doesn't has the skills to be self sufficient, the option of living is not available. Your own survival depends on how much the adults around you like you and take care of you. Because of that it is a matter of life and death to be liked by adults, so not only you have to tolerate the abuse because you can't live but you have to justify it to yourself as not being violence, because that love is necessary for your survival and security.

So you refuse to accept that violence exist or that you are the victim of it. It is only after the child grows up and is capable to care of himself that he finally stands up to his parents. Generally this happens during the teenage years.

Unfortunately by that time the damage is substantial, the relationships you have with your parents become patterns you replicate in your life. If you had an abusive relationship with your parents you are more likely to have abusive dysfunctional relationships as an adult.    

Facing adversity in life is a certainty, the way you were treated when you encountered adversity during childhood pretty much sets your attitude towards it today. If you grew up that were in denial about pain, there is a possibility that they might have had a hard time being around you when it happen. This creates the impression that there is something wrong with pain and adversity leading one to the conclusion that there is something wrong with encountering pain. Which makes it very hard to accept it.

Suffering any of the scenarios describes above can create havoc k in someones adult life. Unfortunately there is no exact way how someone can change or heal from abuse experience during childhood.

It seems that so many of us struggle to lose the status of abused and neglected children through out life even decades after one becomes an adult and lives the house oh his parents. Unwilling to fully accept adulthood despise that we now have an adult body.

I think that in suffering from this forms of abuse, pushes one in a state of denial about certain negative aspects of life, creating the chronic counterpart of what is being denied.

Ultimately there are only four things you can deny: pain, violence, failure and death. When we fail to accept this we act in a way that create more of the very own thing that we deny. So we end up with: agony, war, incompetence and decay.

As i started the post by telling you that is not the experience that is making you suffer today, it is what you learned during childhood that still holds power over you today. What your parents unwillingly thought you is to deny: pain, failure, violence and pain.

The mark of a mature mind is that it is able to accept the negative aspects of life.

Why do we pretend we are fine

It is a strange phenomena that occurs with some people, you would think that sharing your adversity with other people might help you to get over it easier. Yet most of us chose to just suffer in silence.

If you ever been around people that didn't care to much about you, as soon as they feel that you might go through some adversity they become like magicians and disappear. It is impossible for everybody to like you, if some people abandon you in those moments you are normal. But some people don't even go there to began with, they are always putting a fake front.

This happens because this people grow up around people that didn't love them enough to deal with the adversity that they went trough at times. If they encountered any degree of it they were probably the target of ridicule or abandonment. So for the most part of their life they learned that it is better to just suffer in silence.

If adversity is unavoidable to stay loyal to something or someone you need to love it, you need to trust that it will eventually get better, otherwise you will quit as soon as things get a little harder. Growing up without loving parents has devastating effects on someone even as an adult.

Unfortunately we can't turn back time what was done in the past was done, the true problem is that your past experience is still affecting you in the present. I don't think that the damage is done with what do you experience emotionally as much as how you interpret-ate those emotions, what do you learn from them.

If you are not happy and can't do anything immediate that will solve your problem, as far as i know you have three options. You can either suppress, express or accept your emotions, people who wore abandoned have the tendency to suppress because they gotten condition to do so in the past, this is how they avoided even more pain.

Not being abandoned when you are not well, it doesn't mean that someone is going to fix you or your problems, as much as it is going to give you the impression that there is nothing wrong with you or the fact that you are experience pain. Which allows you to accept your pain and all the flaws you can't change.

Expressing that type of pain it is almost as equally toxic, not only you are going to drive yourself crazy but you are going to drive everybody around you crazy. This is what i call emotional terrorism, dumping your emotions on others in the hope that they will fix it or by sharing them it will give you relief.  

Expressing or suppressing your emotions it is a form of denying your pain, the assumption is made that there is something wrong or unusual with the fact that you are experiencing pain from time to time. If you are going to deny your own pain, everybody else that you encounter that is in pain is going to remained you of your own pain. In order to successfully deny your own pain you also have to deny everyone else. And this is why some people will abandon you when you are in pain.      
    

The truth about denial!

When it comes to denial there are only four aspects you can deny. We adopt multiple strategies to avoid certain things in our lives for example if you are in denial about being an alcoholic you deny your emotional pain, if you are in an abusive relationship you deny violence or if you suffer form depression you deny failure etc.

By denying thinks like: pain, failure, death or violence, you can't adopt the best strategies in life so you are going to self-sabotage yourself, for example if you deny violence you might get in an abusive relationship and fail to see that the person whit who you have a relationship is being abusive towards you, this is going to lead to mental disorders like Stockholm syndrome.

Self-sabotaging yourself on a longer term is going to lead to chronic lose that your body is going to give you feedback by making you hurt emotionally. When you are mentally healthy you flow relatively easy from negative to positive, you experience pain followed by pleasurable moments followed by pain etc. If you deny pain in any way like you think that when you are going to achieve certain goals in your life: like make enough money or find the right partner or subscribe to any of those philosophies dedicated to create an utopia.

Even if you are successful in accomplishing this goals there is still going to be pain after you accomplish these goals, so now when pain comes in your life you think that this shouldn't happen, that it is abnormal to be hurting, now you are felling the usual inescapable pain but you are creating pain in your life by thinking that there should be no more pain. You start sabotaging yourself and the pain you experience becomes chronic, it becomes agony.    

Whenever you are in denial about something negative you start sabotaging yourself and that aspect you deny becomes chronic. From pain you end up with agony, from failure you end up with incompetence, from violence you end up with war and from death you end up with decay.

Opposites attract each-other the same way that magnets do, this is why you can't be in a constant state of bliss. The best you can do is flow easy from one extreme to the other.

1. Pain, if there is a certainty in life is that you are going to experience pain through out your life. Whenever you deny the pain you don't only will still feel pain but you will stress yourself about being stressed.  

2. Failure, what we call failure for most of the time is just the natural process of learning. When you are learning to ride a bike you are going to fall a couple of times but this doesn't mean that you fail as much that you need that repetition and to learn what works and what doesn't in order to become successful. When you are not willing to fail there is no growth or accumulation of skills so you become incompetent.

3. Violence, it seems that in all the recorded human history we had peace for about 3% of the time for the rest of it there was some major conflict going on, this is why pacifism is fundamentally wrong, they attempt to achieve something that is impossible constant peace. Not only this makes them miserable but it goes against self-preservation if you fail to see violence you are not able to protect yourself against it. I think violence is like earthquakes if you have a lot of small one it is less likely that a major one is going to happen. Avoiding the small conflicts in your life is going to lead to chronic Unsatisfaction for you and the other person which will cause thinks to escalate.

4. Death, the irony about death is that in order to live your life fully you have to make peace with death because death is in fact just a natural part of life. Denying death often leads to chronic anxiety, by realizing that you have very little control over when and how you will die. Anxiety is then redundant because the purpose of anxiety is to prevent dangerous or lethal situations.   

What is mental health

The approach often used in psychology is to focus on whats wrong, on the daises, create big diagnosis manuals to inventory all the diagnoses and symptoms. As well on various treatments that is supposed to fix what is "wrong", one thing that is massively undermined is to actually define what does it actually means to be mentally healthy. A quick Google search for mental health there is hardly any information that defines what mental health is, there is a lot information about various diseases.

It is impossible to live life without pain, failure and eventually death. Most people go through the ebbs and flows of life relatively easy without being paralyzed by the negativity that naturally comes in everyone life. While others get trapped in the negative aspects of life for extended periods.  

Mental health is the ability to transition, when you are being confronted with the three negative inescapable facts of life: pain, failure and death to the opposite of them: pleasure, success and life.

Chronic pain causes a big discrepancy between your emotions and your intentions, because your behavior is pretty much shaped by your emotions now your actions don't match the positive things you want to do for yourself and others. A great example of this is addiction there are so many people that struggle to give up various vices, but because they are in to much pain they always seem to relapse and return to square one.

Because of this discrepancy the mind now adapts and you have all kind of mechanism, like justification, the mental gymnastics we all do to make ourselves feel good when we do bad things. So your minds now becomes spited there is a part of you that wants to change and a part of you that wants to just keep going because of the immediate comfort you are receiving. In some severe cases some people will form various personalities as a cathartic form of dealing with the pain. This is what in psychology is called split personality syndrome.

The pain is what maintains the split in the mind, in order to change the behavior you have to address the emotions in this case emotional pain.

So what do you do about pain?

There is a misconception out there that says that you have to expose yourself gradually to pain in order to desensitize yourself to it. The purpose of pain is to help you avoid dangerous situation or potentially lethal, this is why it is impossible to desensitize yourself from it, the more you experience pain the more that pain is going to persist. Think of it like this if you have a sprained ankle walking on that ankle to desensitize yourself from the pain is not going to help, by walking on the ankle prematurely you are going to get injured even worse and experience even more pain.

Pain is always a transient experience, staying with the pain is going to make it persist and it requires willpower which eventually is going to lead to burn out and cause you to give up, avoiding the pain works as far as keeping you comfortable but you are pretty much wasting your life missing on important experiences. The most effective way i found to deal with pain is to go through it, if you ever had to get up on a stage in front of a crowd of people you might had experienced performances anxiety, as soon as you stepped on that stage your anxiety was pretty much over in seconds.

You don't wait for the pain to go away or run away from it, you go through it. If you wait it will persist if you run it will lower the quality of your life, by going through you actually eliminate the reason why you feel it in the first place. 

What does the devil want from you

I have been on a strange research journey in the past few months, ever since the spirit cooking and pizza gate events, i have probably accumulated over hundreds of hours of research and ours spend contemplating about this, trying to understand why would someone do something like that or what their motivation might be.

I am not sure if the Devil actually exist as an entity, i guess nobody can really be sure all the evidence that prove that it does are mystical experiences. Like someone having a near death experience and having a very lucid dream. Or maybe the Devil is just an archetype, it is a story that exemplify a common dynamic that can happen in someone life. So what we can learn from the Devil?

The Devil is often portrayed as possessing a great amount of physical strength and magical powers that defies the realm of normal physics we mortal are forced to obey. Yet he almost never directly uses his power to get what he wants from the people of which souls he will torture. It rather relay on seducing them in to sin.

Why would an entity that is so strong and powerful never uses direct force to take what he wants? I can tell you for sure that it is not honor or empathy, because this are not necessary characteristics of the Devil.

He reason talks and treys to convince them to voluntarily make a deal, this is why we have the archetype of the contract with the Devil. That describes the apparition of the Devil in someones life whenever he experience some difficulties or is experiencing a low. The Devil takes various appearances, not necessarily a humanoid with red skin hoofs and horns holding a pitch fork that is just an artistic interpretation of the concept of the Devil. The Devil can take the form of almost anything that is material like a car, a beautiful women or a piece of property etc.

He is attempting to convince his victim to make an unfair deal, often symbolized through the metaphor of a contract with hidden and unfair clauses trough which you exchange your soul for immediate material pleasure.

    
It is hard to define the soul because we know almost nothing about it, so what are you really trading for material pleasure. If you undervalue something it is easy to be fooled and give it up for almost nothing. Similarly the way the native Americans did, they traded massive amounts of gold and land for almost nothing because they didn't understand how rare this things were for other people. Not only they suffered but generations after generations that followed them after those deals still suffer.

So what are you trading?

By choosing immediate pleasure when life gets hard, you are not practicing virtue, and when you lack virtue it is hard to be loved by others, because love is an involuntary response to virtue. Also by stop trying because the adversity that unavoidable happens in your life, you now have no chances of success and because you lack effort and drive it is almost impossible to be happy. You are basically trading your chance at having true love and happiness for pleasure.    

There is an interview with Anton LaVey the founder of the Satanist Church, interviewed by Joe Pyne. Where at the question "are you planing in training a lot of little devils" he answered: "only the one who wish to become little devils", further in the interview he goes on to say that the purpose of satanism is to provide opposition, and offer the people that are unhappy an alternative to a way to live their live. He also makes various claims to pleasure and hedonism as being freedom.

The Devil wants something that it is impossible to take from you, your freedom this is why he doesn't uses force because through force he would never take something that is impossible to take. This is why he is trying to confuse and deceive his victims. Freedom is never lost, because there is always some options and choice you can have in your life. It is only when you are confused enough to believe that you are not free you can become a slave. This is why taking something with force is not a satanic concept. As far as i am concerned a contract that claims to take something for you that it is impossible to take has no value. The only thing that maintains the binding is your confusion.

Trading your immediate pleasure for pain is not going to guarantee that you are not going to experience any pain in your life. Pleasure and pain are cyclical, if you feel pain it is almost a guarantee that you will eventually experience pleasure and vice-versa. You are basically trading something that is impossible to avoid like pleasure for your chance of being happy and loved. That is like trading gold for air. 

How to be free!

Putting someone in a cage or another form of physical restraint doesn't necessarily take his freedom away, it only limits his options of mobility. Freedom is about choice, you can still have plenty of choice on what to do inside that cage.

It is only when the assumption of the caged person that there is no choices that he can make is when freedom is completely lost. Putting someone under physical restraints is a form of control, loosing your freedom happens when someone is attempting to control you and based of that you make the assumption that you have no more choices.

I am not saying that you necessary should resist, like for example if you are being arrested, attempting to resist it is only going to make your situation worse, because the more you resist the more force is going to be used against you. It is wise to surrender to the fights you can't win. I am also not saying that we shouldn't arrest and isolate people away from the rest of society if they are violent.

But most of us don't have problems with the law anyway, yet we are still not free, because there are still people willing to control us in certain way.

This people are being successful in doing so only because we allow them to do so, as we already established freedom is not something that can be taken away from you it is something you have to give up voluntarily. You have to sell yourself before anybody can buy you.

The most common form of control practiced today is mind control, which is enforced through various forms of manipulation. Most people live inside a cage that is not made out of metal bars and concrete walls as much as it is made out of confusion and comfort. If you are going to become free it is your responsibility to give up this vices, because fortunately you have that choice.

The antidote to manipulation is truth, honesty makes you immune to being manipulated. The persons that are susceptible to manipulation are the ones that are willing to be lie to themselves to maintain their state of comfort.

It is true the self discipline of living your life based on truth that will keep you free, the problem with truth is  that it doesn't always lead to comfort.

But then what is the truth of comfort? It seems that it is impossible to live your life in such a way that it is free of discomfort. Trying to live a life free of pain is like trying to go for a swim without getting wet.

What is true doesn't changes no matter the time place or the activity you are participating in. The nature of life is one of constantly alternating between pleasure and pain. Like all sentient being that ever walked the earth, pain is just a normal part of life every single day has some degree and intensity of pain.

It is when you try to avoid it that your life becomes especially hard, you are trading freedom for comfort. Denying pain keeps you in a state of slavery, while transcending pain will set you free!

How to become enlightened

All of us that ever started a self improvement journey, probably considered at a point in time enlightenment. You can only get so good at meting your needs, but eventually something is going to go "wrong" and you will encounter some pain. Which is enough to dramatically lower the quality of your life, human have a bias towards negativity. One bad experience is  enough to ruin your entire day. While in order to have a good day you need multiple positive experiences.

Trying to become enlightened is like going on a treasure hunt. The stake is enormous and the odds are small, very little people that set this goals actually accomplish it.There is a chance that we don't have a good enough map of it, we simply don't understand enough of it to have an exact step by step process to follow.

After all this is what happened with so many things like curing alcoholism for example. Before AA, alcoholism was considered impossible to cure, until Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith created a process for people to follow. It didn't cure everybody or made the act of giving up alcohol easy, it just made it possible.

So now instead of just the occasional cases of spontaneous healing considered almost a miracle, we have a considerable higher number of people that are successful.

Before we understand how to get there we have to know where do we have to arrive. So what is enlightenment?

The word "enlightenment" was used for the first time in translation of spiritual texts of Buddhism and Zen, for a replacement of words like Gautama's moment of enlightenment of seeing the morning star for the first time or Satori of which literal translation is the gap in the clouds that happens during a cloudy day that allows the sun rays to shine through.

Words that refer to short lived momentary moments that allows you to have a momentary shift in perception over the nature of your own existence.

The word becomes very popular during the 60's and 70's in the psychedelic revolution, where a lot of people sought to understand their experiences by looking at Buddhist texts. As a possibility that maybe drugs like LSD and other psychedelics are a way to reproduce enlightenment experiences.

As this religions and philosophies were imported all over the world a lot of misconceptions were formed.

One of the most prevalent is that the person that is enlightened it is happy all the time or doesn't have any problems.This is of course false there are various stories that depicted Buddha as experiencing grief or physical or emotional pain. The philosophy was never about escapism or about reaching the end of your pain.

Another misconception is that the enlightened person is somehow good at anything, he or she can master any skill or even gains magical powers or the capacity to perform miracles. This was never proven, it is hardly ever mentioned in most texts, there are some interesting cases of people with impressive meditation skills that gained more control over certain abilities of their bodies. But this was achieved through a life time of practice and is far from being magic.

There are also cases of fraud where various individuals made various spectacular claims, just to attract crowds. The way i like to think of it as being the primitive form of click bait. The same way most article online make extraordinarily claims but under deliver.    

Having an experience like a Satori is not necessarily the goal as much as what you learn from it and how your perception about life changes.

Unfortunately we don't have any conscious control over our capacity to experience certain things, you can at best engage in certain practices and hope that something useful is going to come out of them.

Traditionally practices like yoga, meditation or asceticism were used as vehicles to create enlightenment but they are far from being efficient.

As far as my experience goes i start to experience satori type experience couple years ago at low moment of my life, where i was under a lot of emotional pain. I had suffer from depression and had a couple of suicide attempts. Form time to time i would experience a spontaneous huge release from my pain, it would also feel like time slowed down the colors look a lot more vivid and bright and it just felt like nothing was wrong in the world i would be completely detached for a while.  

I remember once waiting at a traffic light just waiting to cross the street and it suddenly happened, my body almost start convulsing with pleasure to the point that i was worried that other people will notice and think that i am on some sort of drugs.

For years i hardly understand what i was experienced or how can i reproduce or make it last longer. I some how always would end up back in to my depression. I start reading almost everything that i could get my hands on, most of the information i found was various old spiritual texts or sort of new age philosophies written by authors like Eckhart Tolle. They were contaminated with  mysticism and often confused me more than clarified anything.

After years of struggle and study i am getting closer of finding a balance in my life, i don't claim to be enlightened. There is nothing special about me at best i just have a fairly advanced set of skills. I am still not sure exactly what cases this type of experience at best i can only speculate.

My take on it, is that from the observation that most spiritual practices that claim to make you enlightened are often painful practices, that requires the practitioner to expose himself to pain in a controlled way and the fact that all my experience came at moments where i was in almost complete agony. I think the pain is used in such a way to stimulate your endocrine system to secret endorphin's which also explains why the experience feel in a similar way to actually synthetic drugs, that mimic the effect of your hormones.

As far as what i learned out of this experience i learned that there is no end to pain, no matter what do you accomplish pain and death are inescapable and unavoidable. Which gives me a sens of comfort and detachment because now i know that the outcome of my life no matter what i do is the same. I will still eventually experience pain and eventually die. Somehow this now stays in the back of my mind almost constantly, in the past i used to get distracted by the details of life and lose the big picture of it, and eventually end up with a great deal of sufferance.

Also i learned how to gain control over my satori experiences, i found that is not so much about staying with the pain until it ends, as much as going in to the pain and allowing yourself to retreat periodically if you stay persistent and you keep focusing on your pain over and over again, it is almost impossible to don't happen. Now i feel like going to life with a morphine drip attached to my arm every time when life doesn't work out i can just press that button and eventually i will be happy no matter what.

I think the mistakes in most spiritual teaching is that they present pain and all the negative aspects of life as something that you have to purge. Like for example if you meditate long enough on pain you will eventually stop experiencing pain, similarly to when you eat something bad and you need to trow up to feel better after which if you never eat something bad you should never have a stomach ache in your entire life. Avoiding experience like pain it is simply impossible it is more about coming to terms with it rather then find the end of it.

I still find it necessary to practice moderation and maintain a balance in my life. It takes both the matter and the spirit to have a life. Focus to much on either one and you will neglect the other.

Nobody really wants to be special

As social animals our first instincts is to want to belong and be part of a group, not stand out. As we grow up and mature we become more independent so we don't need total group identity, but because we have social needs we need to maintain some of the identification with the group.

To achieve excellence in any area of life you have to pretty much stop identifying with the group. Being excellent means to become better than everybody else in a niche. So if you see yourself as a the group this will hold you back.

When the group rejects you, this creates an even stronger intensive to achieve mastery or excellence. This creates the desire of retribution with the people that rejected you, in the hope that if you become better than everybody that rejected you in the past you can now get closure and feel normal.

I could argue that we don't want to be special as much as we want to be normal, we want to be accepted in our communities.  

This is why often the people that have the most are the least satisfied, the chronic satisfaction is what keeps them motivated to become overachievers. It ultimately becomes an addiction, people who are addicted don't engage in their addiction to get high they do it to feel normal. And this is the difference between an addict and a normal person that can just have a drink with dinner and an alcoholic. Being deprived for a long time always create the desire for excess, and when do you indulge in excess you lose your integrity and with it your chance at being happy.

The problem is not so much with wanting to be rich or live a certain lifestyle, as much as it is just a poor strategy for accomplish what you really want, that being happiness. I have no problem with anybody that is trying to become wealthy as much time they are not practicing any violence.

The social approval game is a rigged game that you can't really win, when you are weak and vulnerable some people will take advantage of that, if you work hard and overcome your condition and you are better than a lot of people now they are jealous on you. There will always be someone that doesn't like you, it is simply an inconvenience of life.

It is wise to surrender to the fights that are impossible to win, social approval is one of this things where is better to let go. Happiness and love comes out of practicing virtues not from being liked or great at anything.  
    

How pessimism can make you happy and why you should always expect the worse!

If your expectation are high accomplishing your goal is only going to make you feel normal if you accomplish your goal and unhappy if you don't it almost eliminates your chance of being happy, when your expectations are low you have more chances to be happy, but there is still a chance you are not going to meet does expectation. From a strategy point of view expecting the worse thing to happen gives you the highest chance to be happy.

If your worst expectations are meet you are going to feel the same maybe a little worse because your body gives you feedback based on how do you perform in the world, and if you are wrong about what did you expected is even better.

There is a myth about pessimist that, they are grumpy all the time, if they would be true pessimist they would either be calm and collected all the time or happy. They are grumpy because they have to high standards and when this standard are constantly unmet this leads to chronic disappointment and and grumpiness.

The philosophy that teaches people that in order to accomplish your goals you have to think positive or visualize yourself as already accomplished. I don't know you but i never accomplished anything by just visualizing or thinking positive, thinks happened when i worked hard and stayed persistent and didn't when i got lazy.

As a matter of fact performing well is making me slack off, i never work harder when i see myself as flawed and deficient, my best work comes out of periods like this. I think this is the best attitude to have for performance.

At the end of the day this emotions have a purpose they are here to help you, why would nature build such a sabotaging emotional system that is making you do worse when you do worse. Pessimism is part of your self-preservation is here to help you to make you resilient enough so you survive even the lowest moments of your life.

Another think i noticed is that pessimism is great for anxiety, think of it if anxiety is a mechanism that it suppose to help you prevent potential threats to your life and well being. If you expect this things to happen to you there is no point in having an emotion that is suppose to make you avoid. Where i live there was recently a pretty big earthquake, as i live in an old apartment building at a high floor, this could be devastating. As soon as i realize that there is an earthquake a wave of panic and anxiety washed over me, when i shifted my attention on the worst cased scenario and i accepted that the anxiety almost disappeared instantaneously even before the earthquake was over.    

       

When Rebellion doesn't Work

Rebellion is a natural instinct we all have, human beings were design to be free, to have autonomy and as soon as we fell like we are not free anymore we wan't to do the opposite of what the person that is trying to control us is attempting to make us do.

Freedom is not so much a right or a privilege as much it is a need, we need freedom the same way we need water, food or the company of other human beings. When you deprive people of one of any of their needs including freedom they get physical and mental sickness. So rebellion it is part of your self preservation instincts, you could consider it an act of self defense that protects your need of autonomy even when this includes the use of force.

The political argument about regulation and the amount of freedom we should all have, to "protect" us is like arguing that it is better to keep people in a constant state of semi starvation out of the fear to don't get fat. Not only this will cause rebellion but it will lead to people trying to cheat the system, the creation of a black market and many other negative side effects. If you want people to don't get fat you have to teach them how to eat healthy, the same is valid about violence if we are going to have a reduction in violence we have to learn how to be happy.

Happiness is the opposite of violence because when you are happy you don't want much of anything else you don't already have so you won't feel like hurting anybody.

Then the purpose of the regulations are not so much to provide effective strategies to your needs as much as to further control and confuse you that the control is necessary for a functional society, and confusion like this is going to lead to a constant cycle of rebellion. Where majority of the people accept the regulation because they are confused and a small minority that waked up and can see things clearly are going to be in opposition and form rebellion.

Rebellion is a short term strategy the purpose of rebellion is to demonstrate to the person that it is trying to control you that you are not willing to do his beading. The best way to do this is to do the exact opposite of what the person who is attempting to control you. Because the person that is attempting the control is not very balanced and mentally healthy you, doing the opposite of what is required from you for one of this person is going to push you in to the other extreme of the spectrum. The opposite of the unbalance is unbalance, imagine one of those old scales that requires weights, if you have a small weight on one of the taller and another bigger weight on the other taller the scale is going to be unbalanced, if you just change the weights between them you are still in a place of imbalance. You are not practicing any virtues, you are still practicing vices just the opposite of the vices of the person that attempted to control you, like this regardless the fact that you are fighting suppression and you are making an effort to better your life you are still unbalanced unhappy and sick.

Changing yourself or the world it is a constructive process not a destructive one, the long term strategy of chance has to be about finding alternatives or creating alternatives not rebellion. It is true the cultivation of virtues that one can achieve happiness, The way Aristotle defined virtues as the point between deficiency and excess. Control it is meant to create deficiency in the life of the person that is being controlled while rebellion is a form of excess.         

What is Morality

Morality is the capacity to determine write from wrong. This is important because when you can clearly see the difference between this is a lot easy to act and know when self defense is necessary. The world moral unfortunately has some negative connotation attached to it, because it was used in the past by some people to camouflage their vices. Like for example judging others from a moral higher standard or justifying their vices or suppressing others free expressions on the justification that is immoral to act in a certain way. Well this is not what true morality is the definition according to the Merriam Webster dictionary for morality is: of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior.

Morality it is simply determining the right and wrong behavior according to certain principles. It is important to note that it is based on principles not rules, this are two different concepts. Rules are the tools used by the ruler the person who is making the rules it is a component form the dynamic of master and slave, in order for someone to be the ruler you need someone to be ruled. And this always creates an unfair dynamic a win - lose situation, because if you are making the rules you can make rules that make you immune from the negative consequences others aren’t giving you an unfair advantage. So then morality is just the justification of the abuse.

This is why true morality is based on principles not rules, and the definition for principles is: the laws or facts of nature underlying the working of an artificial device. Principles are based on the universal laws of nature they are not based on arbitrary decision made by a person or a small group of persons. They are based on the laws of which nature functions and they apply to everybody nondiscriminatory. In the case they are not respected the consequences are imminent and inescapable indifferent of who you are, this is why you don’t need rulers or police to enforce principles because they are nondiscriminatory and inescapable when people are not confused they tend to respect them because of the direct benefits they receive from it or to avoid the negative consequences of not respecting it. So you don’t need to force people with violence to respect this.

However some people are confused and don’t respect some principles, this is why based on the principle of self defense you have the right to use self defence force against every body that is using violence towards you.

So what would make something right or moral? Something that is right is an action that is in accordance with the principle that respect the natural laws that facilitates one's happiness without diminishing others. While wrong or immoral is the opposite is when you violate the natural law, it is when your actions are making you happy at the expense of other people happiness.  

Morality is not so much about judgment or enslavement or suppression as much it is about happiness. It is the interdependence between people, the capacity we all have to live with each other and use each other in a way that is not diminishing. You are entitled to this and have the right to defend against anybody that is going to try to steal it from you.

Persistence the key to your happiness

There are lots of important virtues to cultivate, it  is hard to pick one that would make the most amount of difference in your life but if I had to pick one other then honesty that would be persistence.

Persistence is ones capacity to continue an activity or opinion despite difficulty or opposition.

Difficulty and opposition it's almost impossible to avoid so without persistence you'd hardly achieve anything. Quitting early is not only going to make it impossible to achieve anything in life but because you're not achieving anything it's going to be really hard to be happy.


I don't know you but I never made a plan in my mind that actually worked out perfect in reality. There is always something going wrong something unpredictable that you didn't even think that it was going to happen or we're able to predict.

This means that difficulty is just a normal inevitable part of life, that is inescapable. It is when you think that this shouldn't happen to you that you create an abnormal level of stress in your life. Not like this shouldn't give you a certain degree of emotional discomfort this is simply your body giving you feedback on how you are performing in the world.

It is when you ask the question: why does this things have to happen to me? Well the answer to this question is very simple, it is because you are alive, this is just an inconvenient of life, not a horror story.

Persistence is the extreme between quitting early and being continuing to spent your time and energy on something that has no chance of ever happening. If you quit early it is impossible to accomplish anything maybe just by luck occasionally. The other unbalanced extreme would be spending too much energy and time on unachievable dreams.

You have to know when to cut your losses, in my opinion this is the only acceptable reason to quit doing something.

This is not always very easy to determined because sometimes you're lacking important information or the experience to take the best decisions. But there is also a reason why we are we order something it's not going so well but we continue regardless the fact that we know that's not going so well, this is because we justify our wrong actions. And this keeps us in a state of denial, which can easily be avoided if you are honest with yourself. This can be achieved through being self disciplined enough to chose to tell yourself the truth regardless that it is not a pleasant thing and it might cause you discomfort in the present, but because of it you will avoid the sufferance that is about to happen in your future.    

How I Cured my Insomnia

I have had problem sleeping for years, until recently. If you suffer from this you know how debilitating it could be, to go through your life in a state of semi sleep deprivation. I have tried everything from counting sheep to meditation, teas, weed etc.

All proven to be inefficient and the symptoms war getting slightly worse over the year. I guess you could look at it as me not treating the underlying problem that was stressing me and make my mind race and stress myself unnecessarily at the time when i was suppose to get some rest and sleep, the problem with this wive is that there is always something to stress about if you really want this is an infinite cycle.

Not to say that you shouldn't address the underlining problems, and tackling your problems will give you stress relief but only for a while until the next set of problems are going to come in your life. If the fact that you can't sleep because you have certain problem in your life then nobody should be able to sleep, because everybody has problems. You might think like i did for a long period of time that what was keeping me awake when i should sleep, is the fact that my problem are worse then others so i am more stressed then they are.

Stress is a subjective experience, people perceive things different some people barley flinch to things that others would have a life crisis over. So is not so much the severity of your problem as much as it is your resilience to your stress.    

You have very little control over external factors other than yourself and even the control you have over yourself is limited. The way you master your life is through finding a certain degree of balance rather then control. If by the time is night fall and you are still wired and stressed and have problem falling asleep there is very little you can do about that, i found that it is better to just ride that wave.

It is in finding that balance between escaping completely from your stress through dissociation and confronting that emotion. If you attempt to go to bed while you are still stressed then the pain becomes unbearable relatively quickly and you are either going to stay there being stressed and not fall asleep for a long period of time, or you are going to get up and do something else instead of sleep or rest. Finding a way to control your pain, moving between experiencing your pain and having a safe place to retreat in to, if the pain becomes too much, it will eventually allow you to relax enough to be able to fall asleep. This is more like a interval training rather than a marathon or an endurance.    

What does it mean to be balanced

Balance or a state of equilibrium can be achieved only true constant small adjustment. Think of it like Balancing a pencil on your finger just to keep pencil Still you have to make constant adjustment with your hand.

Because everything constantly changes it is impossible to remain still.

If you haven't made this realization yet, it is easy to look at these natural fluctuations and believe that something is wrong. Which is going to make the experience a lot more stressful. Being crazy is not so much about being abnormal as much as it is being normal and believing that you are abnormal. And this is going to provide an abnormal level of stress.

When you're trying to achieve balance in your life like for example between your work life and your personal life, you will occasionally become unbalanced a slide from an extreme to another. This is pretty much an unavoidable dynamic, but left unchecked it will destroy your life.

So it takes your awareness to realize that you need to make some adjustments to your life, to make sure you are not neglecting any of the important things.

But because Balance it's not so much about being still it's about constantly moving in a way that it allows you to grow and improve. It is also about virtue the way the Greek philosopher Aristotle defines it as the point between a deficiency and an excess of a trait.

It is not moderation as some people see it as doing a little bit of everything. If doing everything in a small quantity would be moderation then, this would mean that steeling from time to time or raping someone as much as you are not doing it in excess you are a healthy balanced human being. That is not moderation, is excess even if you are doing this activities in small quantities you are still indulging in excess, even if you rape only one person in your entire life you are still a rapist. You can't be to much or to little of a rapist, or to nice, or to bad. This are all extremes and from a grammar point of view don't make to much seance.

There is some confusion around this because people sometimes use things like balance or moderation to justify their vices. The person that is an alcoholic might say that he/she is just having fun and enjoying the evening, after all this is how vices are maintained you need to maintain your ignorance by justifying your bad habits. I never meet anybody who had a vice and was aware or honest about it.    
Moderation is doing enough of a certain thing until the objective is reached without hurting yourself or anybody else. 

Successful and Unhappy

On one hand you have to master the Game of Life, and know how to play the best the hand you were served.
You have to learn all the necessary skills that you require in life, like knowing how to manage your relationships, earn your existence  or protect yourself.
And based on how well you will perform at this will have a certain degree of influence over your happiness. Because the body gives you feedback in an attempt to help you take the best decision as possible. For example when you are making a lot of money you'll feel happy and when you're not making so much you feel sad or disappointed.


Unfortunately it is impossible to avoid this fluctuations in life, there will always be times where you do better or worse. So your happiness will always fluctuate, to more exactly answer the question are you happy you need to know at what point in your life.

So then we have the interesting phenomena of Fairly successful people being chronically unhappy. Regardless that  achieved, many enviable accomplishments and from the outside everything looks perfect, sometimes these people are quite miserable. Think of all the examples of famous people that either had problems with addiction or committed suicide.

This is a problem, if being unhappy for a short period of time is unavoidable, being chronically unhappy is problematic or we could consider it a disease.

There are two reasons why you could be unhappy:

1. Passivity: some people are simply too passive they've given up on the effort in accomplishing anything great in their lives. The sacrificed a lot of important things for pleasure. I guess you could think of the classic archetype of signing a contract with the Devil, where you sell your soul or you're chance of being happy for immediate materialistic pleasure.

Happiness requires a certain intensity of effort, for the most part we live in an environment where we didn't have all the modern convenience and labor saving devices that we have today. So we developed an insurance called happiness that assures us that we are more likely to do the work when there is some pleasure in the process of working towards pleasure.    

2. Unreasonable expectations: as we discussed earlier life has many ups and downs. It is easy to get confused when you are in a down to exaggerate it and blow it out of proportions. This could lead to the situation in which regardless the fact that you are performing well you are still unhappy, it can give you the sensation that it is always something missing. No matter how much resources you accumulate or what you accomplish you remain chronically unhappy.

If there is a solution to this it has to be finding out the truth, as mental health is having an accurate model of reality inside your mind. This can only be established through the self discipline of always finding the truth. I don't mean like control your thoughts or emotions, because over this you have very little control, if you could control your emotion you would already feel happy all the time. Attempting to control things over which you have no control you are rather suppressing your emotions, which on a long term it will lead only temporary periods over which you feel under control followed by aggressive outbursts and relapse.

The truth sets you free, not free of your emotions like your pain free from sufferance the chronic pain. Like the classic Greek philosophers argued to know is to do. When you truly know something it is impossible to don't practice it as well.