What does it mean to deserve something

We sometime get the wrong impression that simply because we exist we deserve to have everything we want.

Especially in today's world of participation trophies, where everybody seems to be more concerned about not hurting each other's feelings rather than living in reality.

This type of behaviour can lead you to a fake sense of entitlement and constant dissatisfaction for where you are right now. So instead of trying to earn what you need you are complaining that you don't already have it, unfortunately complaining works only when you were wrong to begin with, when you complain and you are wrong nobody is going to help you.

Deserving something means having the skills to gain and keep that thing, as a simple rule of thumb if you don't have something you probably don't deserve it. I am not saying that that it can change in the future, but in order for that to change you have to earn it.

Sometime we are exposed to unfair life situations like abuse, this might leave you with an increase perception that you deserve things that you don't have because your deficiencies exists based on a scenario in which you had no responsibility at the time, like being abused as a child. It is not like you just spent most of your time in your room playing video games and now you are unhappy because you are not a billionaire.

For the long term victim of abuse it is rather unfair the fact that he or she has so many deficiencies, but this doesn't mean that the world has to bend over backwards and provide for people who have not earn the skills to gain what they need. Because that would be an unhealthy dependent relationship which is going to lead to a deterioration in the quality of life for both parties.

Charity benefits the most the people that truly can't provide for themselves like the handicapped ones or the mentally retarded, you will have a much better quality of life when you provide for yourself, and if you have an able mind and body there is really no excuse for not doing so.  

Perhaps the only thing that it is impossible to offer as charity is love, charity works for material possessions like food, shelter, money etc. But because love is an involuntary response, it is impossible to give it to the people who need it the most, because you can take that decision consciously.

 Your love must be earned, this is why you wont get in a relationship or sleep with someone just because you feel pity for him or her, and if you do that is probably not love. As much as it is a charity act, an unfair trade, where one of the partner is getting more than the other, which makes things problematic to say at least. You are not exchanging love as much you do company, sex or other different services. 

Why trying to change the world is problematic!

Changing the world is a colossal task, a huge burden one can put on his shoulders. Some of the most stressed people i ever meet are people who are trying to change the world.

Not only you are taking responsibility for things that you are not control which is incredibly stressful.

But also that if you are going to try to make others adapt your values and strategies of doing certain things, this means being very persistent at conveying what do you believe in which can easily turn in to abusing others. After all all vices exist under the shadow of ignorance, "bad" people are not aware of the full extent of their consequences of their actions, they always find a way to justify how what are they are doing is good.

To his own standards Hitler probably considered himself a great and kind person, he just wanted to make his own country the greatest in the world how could that be wrong. Even that involved being at war with everybody and killing millions just a small obstacle in the way of a great cause.

Changing people is hard because they have free-will, they just want to do whatever they want when they want. In order to advance your cause you either have to somehow erase their free-will with violence and lies or by trying to educate them and hope that they will voluntarily make better decisions based on the information that you are presenting to them.

Either way it is problematic you will encounter resistance if you are abusive people will rebel against you, if you try to educate people they will contradict and argue with you.

Your job is not to change others it is to help them, through helping them your give your life meaning. So simply the act of helping should be emotionally rewarding in itself, when you approach life by changing others you can be happy just when other people around you are living in according with your values which is never going to happen fully.

This is why the people that took the responsibility of changing the world are chronically unhappy, it is not necessary an altruistic act as much it is a selfish attempt to control your own anxiety by controlling others. It make sense to don't limit yourself to changing others even if that involves abusing them, because you don't want to change them because you care about their well being as much as you are trying to get some relief on your anxiety.           

What does it means to have patience

Victims of long term abuse not only have significant deficiencies and a scattered mind but they are also in a time crysys, because their time was wasted by the abuse they experienced chronic loss instead to accumulate. With this comes a lot of impatience, which can lead to one temptation to take risks that are way too high which ultimately are going to lead to big losses which makes it impossible to accumulate skills and resources.

Like any other virtue it is the point between deficency and excess, the deficient extreme for patience is laziness, passivity in order to avoid the potential failure rejection or any other opportunity for discomfort. The excess point of patience is instant gratification, engaging only in activities that are instantly rewarding like addiction for example.

When you have someone that smokes, the benefit of smoking is stress relief, as tobacco is a very mild sedative. Smoking gives you an instant calming effect for your stress, on the other hand if you just wait for few minutes your anxiety might just drop by itself, as emotion constantly change. It also takes patience to deal with the cause of the reason why you are overstressed in the first place.

Patience is endurance, the word is derived from the Latin patientia which translates as "patience, endurance, submission". In order to have patience you need to relinquish control.

If you are going to wait longer to reap a better reward on something, this means that there is a much higher risk for something bad to happen than being lazy where there is basically no immediate risk while if you rush things of like in an instant gratification scenario you reduce the time where things could go wrong, both of this vices are forms of controlling yourself in order to avoid potential danger.

In order to be able to practice patience you first have to cultivate humility, being humble means to believe that you are not special and everything can happen to you good or bad. As humility build endurance, when you are certain about something you are in a calm state because you know what is possible to avoid and what is not. When you are uncertain about the potential threats you could anticipate danger with almost everything which makes you more stress.

Is like having a tummy ache, when you are uncertain over the fact that you are going to throw up or not, you not only hurt physically but you also are more stressed because you are not sure if you are going to throw up in the first place, if you are going to be in a safe place where you can do it etc. After you finally do it you might still be in physical pain but you feel a lot calmer because now you know throwing up again it is very unlikely.

Humility is recognising the inescapability of failure, pain and rejection, accepting this three facts is like throwing up which makes you more calmer which ultimately gives you the endurance that you need to build the life you want and keep your integrity.      

Why you shouldn't fake it until you make it

I have made a mistake, in some of my past posts I wrote that the first step of the recovery process is honesty. As a result of some recent experience I do no longer hold that to be truth, It takes humility to even admit in the first place that you have been living your life on fake values and you are partially responsible of your sufferance.

Telling people to be honest with themselves and the rest of the world is like telling them that they have to feel full without telling them that they have to eat first. The first step to take if you are in a tough place and you want to rehabilitate yourself is to humble yourself.

I am sure you heard the age old wisdom "fake it until you make it!", the problem with this is that by faking it you are not becoming it. If you are going to practice to be fake for years and years, you are going to get very good at being fake.

Under the assumption that when you are going to have enough and have built the skills you are after you can relax and become authentic. This is delusional you will never have enough and there is always something to learn. If you wait to be in a favorable situation to don't embarrass yourself you will never be authentic so by faking who you are, you are actually trapped in a vicious cycle.

In order to master something you will have to practice it which means failing over and over again, If you think that you are great in the beginning and you deserve to accomplish your goals easy. You won't work hard enough and feel entitle, when you experience failure which is just the natural process of learning.

Being very reassuring with yourself and assertive it is a symptom of incompetence, according to the Dunning-Kruger effect people who are poor performers almost always overestimate their performance, while people who are good performers underestimate their performance.  

To humble yourself you have to be humiliated, not in an abusive way by other people or in a masochistic way, humiliated by the life itself in order to realise the true nature of it and find your true nature as well.

You humble yourself by failing at what do you believe in, trough the process of learning you experience failure over and over again, so you realize that you are not special or immune to anything, everything can happen to you good or bad. Because of that no matter what your accomplishments you stay modest because you are never too good to fail or relapse.

What does it mean to be spiritual

We discussed in previous post the toxic effect of admiring and worshiping a hero in any given areas of your life. Like how the exchange between the worshiper and the hero is by definition an uneven and unfair exchange, and is a temptation to self-sabotage.

One of the most admired hero in our culture is God or any other prophet or guru. I am not arguing over the fact that God exist or it doesn't. I don't have any evidence to confirm or deny, but I know that praying and worshiping a God is no different than having any other idols and hero. You are giving your responsibilities to someone else as a form of denial for your vices and flaws.

Institutionalizing spirituality reduced it to meaningless rituals that hardly anybody knows what do they mean and why do we do them, empty rituals are nothing than superstition. As the point of the ritual is to remind and reconnect you with certain values periodically to bring you back on the right path, losing the meaning renders the ritual useless.

Churches today have the lowest attendance ever recorded, and this is not happening because people are sinners and they abandoned God it is because the church has hardly any value and truth to offer you.

The benefit from worshiping a heroic figure is not a direct exchange of value as much is the hope that you can become like him one day. Worshiping God is an attempt to become God, and this is how do we behave. For example when something bad happens to you, as a part of the grief process we pray to God to spare us from the pain and sufferance, we expect miracles that defies the laws of physics. We expect incurable disease to be cured overnight, we expect miraculous resurrections etc. And perhaps the worst thing that comes from praising a God is that we expect to become immortal, by going in to a perfect world without pain and sufferance after we die.      

We are born completely ignorant to all this, in a dualistic world in which the main forces that influence as and shapes our behaviour is love and fear, your job in this life is to chose a side. This can be done by learning the true nature of the world. The spiritual quest is not about worshiping a God, it is about finding the truth.

Truth is what dosen't changes regardless of the time, place and circumstances, it is the only thing that it will give you closer in life. Truth is reality fear is an illusion as it is the pain in the anticipation of pain. Creating the illusion that you are hurt in the present while in reality you are perfectly fine.

Practicing spirituality is not by taking symbolic action, like participating in rituals. Practicing spirituality means living your life in the most authentic way you are capable of. It means finding purpose in your life by reducing others sufferance, not by assuming that after you die you will go to a perfect world in another dimension without pain and sufferance.

The spiritual person is like a detective, relentlessly questioning everything and unwilling to settle for anything else other than the truth.

What does it mean to have integrity!

You have three tasks to accomplish in this life, you have to provide for your needs in order to survive, you have to reproduce and avoid immediate danger in order to survive long enough. Someone with integrity is able to do any of the tasks without sacrificing the other two.

When you are going through a period of adversity you might find it very tempting to start cheating, in order to provide for the area of life where you now have a deficiency.

As we already discussed in previous post there are two ways to cheat other people that create the same outcome, you can do it through violence or through lyes. This are two different strategies that accomplish the same outcome.

By cheating to overcome a deficiency in an area of your life it will not only lead to another deficiency in another area of your life, but you are also creating a deficiency to another person. Win/lose dynamics are win/lose only on the short term, because ultimately when you hurt another person you also end up hurting yourself.

For example if you are poor and decide to do armed robberies in a dark alley to make some quick money, this will make you unlovable. Love is an involuntary response to virtue, when you are not practicing any virtues it is really hard for other people to love you, so your relationships will suffer. Also because you are taking a very big risk you the potential down fall from that could be catastrophic, like what is going to happen to you if one of the people you robe is also armed.

The motivation behind the destructive actions is always fear, the people that are willing to hurt you are scared of something, there is always anxiety behind abuse.  Not only you will experience external changes in your life but you also will experience internal changes. By not overcoming your anxiety, the person without integrity remains trapped in to it. And from living with constant anxiety a hole range of other problems will be created in your life like addiction or any other mental health problems.

Because we live in a world of duality, there will always be something to challenge your existence. Integrity is not something you have as much it is something you practice every day. There is always a temptation or something to inspire fear. Integrity is not the absence of adversity as much it is one's personal self discipline to always find his way out of the anxiety through the practice of virtues.

One of the most important virtue is patience, because patience is the process of accumulation. What makes you lose your integrity is a deficiency or a threat to a potential deficiency. So in order to overcome that deficiency you need patience to accumulate skills and resources to the best of your ability.

As life will constantly tempt and challenge you the solution to all the possible imaginable scenarios it always consist from the three most important virtues: honesty, patience and humbleness. 

Hedonists need Heroes!

There is a dependent relationship between hedonist and heroes, this two types of archetypes can't exist without each other. Hedonist need people to admire to voyeuristically live their boring underachieving lives through, and heroes need hedonist to admire and prey on. One without the others can't exist.

Just to be very clear a hero is someone who is willing to work hard and take big risk in order to accomplish things that not a lot of people are capable to do, even if this mean living a compromised life and sacrifice their comfort and pleasure in the present to accomplish their goals. While a hedonist is someone that prioritizes pleasure and happiness above everything else including his own faith in the future or the well being of the people around him.

If you are someone that is eating whatever whenever with a very little concern about what is doing to your body and health, you might find it comforting that reality TV shows exist where people have magical transformation overnight, losing massive amounts of weight and looking shockingly different because you use this examples to justify your poor behaviour in the moment. It is ok for me to eat this burger if I get fat or sick I can be like this person i saw on television and lose all the weight in few weeks and get healthy. This is fiction because it takes most people years to lose a big amount of weight and it is a pretty hard journey where you need to do research, test various diets, and you always have the danger of a relapse. In my experience the way you live one decade of your life determines the quality of your next decade in life.

When you have agency, and you grow in a normal sustainable way, it is actually annoying having to compete with people that are willing to take risk that are way to big. They will often surpass you, but they will also fail and fall back to zero while youre grow tendency remains almost constant. Not to mention the risk of being tented to adopt their strategies when you see them succeed for brief periods of time.

There is no direct exchange of value between you and your hero, people admire this people not because they are making your life any better but because they hope that one day they will be more like them. For example if you go to watch a movie with one of your favorite actors, that you might consider a hero. I could say that there is an uneven exchange of value you pay for two hours of empty entertainment while the actor on the screen gets payed millions of dollars to play that part in the movie and is worshiped like a demigod. If you watch a lot of movie the quality of your life won't increase, it is actually going to go down because you are not doing anything usefull for yourself.

This is why heroes are actually toxic for society and culture, they destroy value and sabotage others for their own benefits. 

Why life is long

There is an increasing epidemic of nihilism, people living life without a purpose, finding life short, meaningless and found themselves hopelessly trapped in less then favorable situation. For which the only apparent way out is hedonism, the relentless pursue of pleasure at the sacrifice of everything else.

If you look very objectively at the duration of modern people life it is the longest it ever was. If you would be sentenced to ten years in prison that basically feels like an eternity, so living more than seventy years is like living for seven eternities. I don't think that the problem is the duration of life as much as it is the quality of life most of us have.

When you are eating junk food, design to give you the most amount of pleasure food could give you, this leads to a compromise, the food is horrible for your health and there is no nutrition in it, which paradoxically will make you want to eat more because despite the fact you are eating enough calories you are not receiving sufficient nutrition. You are over feed and malnourished at the same time.  

This leads to a constant anxiety of missing out on certain experience which create a sense of urgency, particularly in the area of life you have the most amount of problems and deficiencies. Which is going to lead to self sabotaging behaviour, taking big risks in the hope of gaining skills and resources fast, unfortunately big risks also come with big losses which makes it impossible for you to accumulate anything.

And this lack of accumulation leads to one selfish and nihilistic attitude towards life, because the more you struggle the more loss you experience, so this maintains the felling that you are missing out on certain experience and there is not sufficient time. This can get so bad that people don't even want to die anymore.

Creating a fake time constraint is a tool of manipulation, is it often used in sails and in the media to cause people to make bad rushed decisions. As all tools of manipulation are based on lies, the lye here is that almost a century of life is not enough time to enjoy your experience here and accomplish your goals. So you need "special" help to accomplish those things, this help usually being a form of sabotage that allow others to profit from you in an unfair way.

Running out of time is anxiety provoking, fear is a survival mechanism not a way to live your day to day life. When you survive you don't live, the first step in having a life is to deal with your fear, the good news is that most of what people are afraid of is not real, there is no real threat behind it this is why learning the truth about it will diminish it.

Iodine the missing link

Iodine is one of the nutrient that our diets becomed deficient in, between the soils being depleted by modern agriculture techniques to the fact that western and European diets don't generally include a lot of foods high in iodine.

It is a common practice to add iodine to salt in order to prevent diseases like goiter, tho if you are like me a bit of a health nut you might have chose to reduce the amount the salt you eat for health reasons. Beside that even if you eat iodize salt it might not be enough for you to don't develop goiter but not enough to maintain your body functioning at an optimum level.

 Iodine is not important only for your thyroid but it also plays a role in protecting you from radiation like the one caused by nuclear central meltdown and bombs but also microwaves like the ones emitted by your cellphone and wi-fi routers, as it is one of the most important thing to help you heal from electromagnetic hypersensitivity.

It helps you to detoxify from other halogens like fluoride, chlorine, bromine. That unfortunately now are very abundant in our environment from various foods like bread and soft drinks to tap water. It is also in plastic, clothes and new furniture you can actually smell the bromine is that specific smell that you feel when you buy something new.

People that are deficient in iodine have lower iq's, and mother that are deficient while pregnant have children with a 20-30% lover iq. It was proven to offer protection for various forms of cancer and even revers it.

It is one of the best thing I did that improve my mental clarity and energy, if you have any mental health problems you can't really go wrong with iodine. Unless you have thyroid problems.

I wouldn't rush to the pharmacy to buy some iodine supplement, as we are design to get our nutrients from the food not from pills, supplements are the last measure when it is absolutely impossible to get it from food.

In my opinion the best source of iodine is algae, there are a various chinese and japanese foods that include algae as an ingredient like miso soup for example. We are not used to eat algae they have a very strong smell and specific flavor this might be the only downside of algaes.

Fish is another food that contains iodine but unfortunately is one of the highest source of mercury in people's diet today. The amount of mercury in algae is miniscule close to zero, because algaes alre low on the food chain, as toxins concentrate the higher you go on the food chain.   

Electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome is not a myth!

It is a cliche often used to mock people and make them look crazy, they are often portrayed in movies and TV-shows as crazy people with irrational fears of electronics  like in the TV show "Better call Saul".

It is a very used strategy that the media uses when information that threatens their prejudice gets to the public in some way, they will insult everybody that believes that information to be true, it serves as a form of deterrent people will disregard that information not necessarily because the information is not true but people are afraid to don't be ridiculed and ostracized. This is what happened with many thing that proven to be true after all like the link between cancer and smoking, the government recording phone conversations and other data, and more recently with the implication of some politicians in the occult, satanic rituals and pedophilia.  

I have been rejecting this idea for a long period of time, I remember years ago when I had some health issues and start doing research online to figure out what might be wrong with me, after visiting the doctor and being sent home despise the fact that i wasn't felling good.

At that time I thought that it is to crazy to be real, until recently after some of the symptom that I had for years aggravated, I decided to actually give this a test. Often desperation is what gives you the final push in the right direction.

I made an improvised tarp over my bed made out of aluminum foil just to test it out without breaking the bank. As you can block most of the radiation with something called a Faraday cage, basically if you wrap you cellphone in aluminum foil you loos all the service and wifi connection.

The results were shocking to say at least, my simptom improved almost immediately and I had some of the most restful sleep I had in a long time. The only crazy thing about wearing a tinfoilhat is that it actually works.

If you read the instruction manual of your phone they actually tell you that it is not safe to keep your phone closer than 1,5 cm to your body and is not recommended to keep it very close to your brain for too long. There is evidence that proves that it affects the bees population, plants that grow near cellphone towers and perhaps humans.

Some of your emotional and behavioural problems might be of a different cause than just psychological. Stress is the body's response to multiple issue not just an emotional trauma, it can also be toxicity, deficiency or a physical trauma like being radiated since the day you were born.

Pain changes the way you behave and and think, like for example if you are a spy and you get captured by the enemy they use pain to break you down psychologically.

If you have a low grade pain that is there pretty much since the beginning of your life, you will get use to it. You don't even realise how bad it is until you start to heal.

The five most common symptoms of electromagnetic hypersensitivity are:

1. skin itch/rash/flushing/burning, and/or tingling
2. confusion/poor concentration, and/or memory loss
3. fatigue and weakness
4. headache
5. chest pain and heart problems

Less commonly reported symptoms include:

• nausea
• panic attacks
• insomnia
• seizures
• ear pain/ringing in the ears
• feeling a vibration
• paralysis
• dizziness

Authority is Competence!

If I am one of the best people in an certain field, like for example if I am a doctor that is really good at doing a certain type of surgery. Other doctors and patience are going to naturally be very interested in what I have to say and what I am doing because they want to replicate my results and benefits from the services I have to offer.

So competence makes you naturally the leader in that field, the problem with competence is that because there are other people competing with you there is always the chance of someone else doing what you do better than you. Which is going to change the leader, people are always going to gravitate towards the person that have to offer them the most.

This dynamic is win/win because like this you keep the incentive for progress, and for people to help each other rather than hurt each other. If I want more resources and friends what I have to do is increase my competence at doing my job.

Leadership is not a fix position is it actually a very dynamic process when is let naturally and unregulated. This very own fact about leadership is anxiety provoking, knowing that at any point someone else that is slightly better than you could come out of nowhere and take your position.

Because of the anxiety there are people willing to cheat, instead of trying to be as competent as it is humanly possible, they look for ways to sabotage the competition and stunt their growth. One of this form of sabotage is called bureaucracy. Which is a way of creating arbitrary rules, independent from the natural rules of nature. One of the things you can do with bureaucracy is to create negative consequences for innocent actions, in other words it gives you the authority to punish other people for doing something that is neither bad for you or anybody else but is threatening their leadership position.

 The perception most people have about the authorities is one of fear, because they know that this people are not going to hesitate to hurt them if they are disobeying. So unfortunately authority becomes a synonymous for thirany.

Where most people pay their taxes not because they are satisfied with the services that they received in the exchange for they money but they do so because they are afraid of it can happen to them if they don't.

In the world we live authority is really terrorism, not competence, we accepted the most aggressive group of people to lead us instead of choosing competence.

A huge part of our seemingly irrational decisions is first of all the lack of wisdom majority of us suffer, it is in our failure to fully understand what things are that prevent us from taking better decisions.

Yet the biggest barrier from becoming truly liberated and the main tool that the enslavers use is fear. It is not a direct confrontation with the oppressors that is going to liberate, they are far to strong for us to be able to win a direct confrontation. This is an internal battle with your own fears and dedications to find out the truth.

Patience is the antidote to anxiety!

Time is a decisive factor in anxiety, if you know you are going to die in fifty years from now this fact is not very anxiety provoking, because fifty years is a very long time from now, so there is nothing to fight or run away from.

On the other hand if you learn that you have a terminal disease and you are left with only few days to live, most likely your body will step into overdrive and you will experience some anxiety.

I don't think the word anxiety is a very precise word to describe what people are experience, a more precise word is perhaps urgency.  

When you perceive danger that is going to happen in the very close future is when anxiety shows up wile more distant danger is not as anxiety provoking.

 It is impossible to avoid danger, everybody is under some degree of danger, it is only the people that are in a direct confrontation with it or thing that they are in a direct confrontation with it that suffer from anxiety.

There are two mayn energies that influence the world that we live in, everything you do comes either from a place of love or fear. Expressing love means being creative, nurturing to yourself and other people. While the main themes of fear is selfishness and destruction.

Behind aggression there is always fear, the people that are willing to hurt you are scared of you. Not only the energy that you express in the world is going to have different direct consequences but it will also create more of itself. If you interact with others while you are in a state of fear, it is very likely that they will also become fearful.

 Fear is often use as a manipulation technique, for example if you ever watched the news they will always try to create a sens of urgency as really bad things are happening all the time and things are just getting worse and worse. This is a bias view of the world there are always good and bad things happening everyday. We live in a world of duality it is impossible to create an utopia or a dystopia there will always be some good and bad people. The only thing you can do in this world is to pick a side.

This form of abuse create fake anxiety, that is sabotaging you instead of helping you survive. Your anxiety is reacting to threats that doesn't really exist that wore never a problem for you to begin with. It is with this type of fake urgency that is really affecting your life in a negative way.

The recovery journey always starts with honesty because without honesty you never know that you are over reacting in certain situations in your life. Unfortunately truth is not enough emotions don't respond to logic, they respond to the environment. Until your perception about the environment won't change your emotions will remain the same so does your behaviour despite the fact that you know the truth about your situation.

The second step of recovery is patience, if you have a sense of urgency in a certain situation but you have reasons to believe that you are over reacting the way you will change your perception about that situation is by being patient enough in that situation. To give your brain the proof that the information you previously acquired was wrong and there is no need for urgency.  

You might consider yourself a patient person, there is a strange phenomenon that takes place where the things that we need the most creat the most amount of urgency which makes us act in a very ineffective way. This creates a vicious cycle where the more you need something the more deprive you are going to become in that area.

Patience is the process of accumulation, through patience you accumulate skills that you can then convert in to resources. If you lack the patience to accumulate the skills where you need it the most, you will always be deficient in those areas.

There are only three virtues!

Attempting to better yourself as a person, means to cultivate and act in accordance with certain principles based on virtue. It can be very confusing to do that because there are so many different virtues where do you even start.

After a couple of years of introspection I have reach the conclusion that there are three most important one, everything else is either a different nuance of these three or you need them as a precursor before you can cultivate something else.

Those three virtues are in the order of importance: honesty, patience and humbleness.

1. Perhaps the most important virtue is honesty, it is impossible to have healthy relationships without honesty, an important step in abusing someone is to confuse the other person with a lye.

Honesty is it also important if you want to break out of a vicious cycle, it is pretty much the first step out of recovery. If you are going to change your behaviour you need to be honest with yourself about the consequences that your present behaviour is having over your life.

2. The second most important virtue is patience, any significant change takes time, unfortunately nature works slow. In order to reap the benefits of your actions you have to stay long enough in the game to accumulate the necessary skills. If you have no patience there is no pay chance.

Patience is also the precursor of others virtues, like empathy for example which is the capacity to understand the motivation behind someones action. In order to do that you need the patience to try to understand that person rather than jump to any preform conclusion.

In today's world we put so much emphasis on instant gratification which is great where there is no long term negative consequences, lack of patience is probably on of the most common reason of self-sabotage.

Patience is like an endurance race it is more sustainable, the same way if you run a marathon you run much slower than if you would run a 5k, courage is like a sprint race take big risks for high rewards. The problem with courage is that it is exhausting to do, not very sustainable and it can be also dangerous.

3. I don't know if you ever heard about the Dunning-Kruger effect that states that the people that underestimate their performance tend to be the best performers while the people that have a very high expectation about themselves tend to be the worst performers.

I think there is a very justify reason why we don't like people who are arrogant, it is not just an arbitrary social taboo.

Not only you can predict how other people perform in the world based on their own opinion about themselves but you can actually self diagnose yourself based on your own opinion about yourself. So you can give yourself more accurate feedback.  

The socialist love program!

Like the workers from a socialist factory, that are protected by the unions and they are almost impossible to be fired.

The quality of the work they do dramatically decreases instead of working really hard to pleas the customers and their boss to potentially get a salary raise, there is a substantial effort to create the illusion of hard work to don't seem useless and replaceable, also the amount of innovation and progress is closed to zero.

The same thing happens in relationships that people take for granted.

The fist relationships you have are with your parents, sibling and more distant relatives, this relationships are unique in the sense that you didn't chose thees people to be your family, yet they will probably have the biggest influence on you.

This is why it is very important for the adults that choose to bring new people in to the world to be responsible and do a good job at parenting.  

The way things have been going so far, if you did a horrible job at being a parent for as long as you are not doing something illegal there are no negative consequences for being a bad parent.

This is why for the most part the quality of the parenting is comparable with the work done in a socialist factory.

When I was a child love was presented to me as an obligation, my mother would force me to hug and kiss all the relatives that would come and visit us even the weird ones that smelled funny that you would see only once a year at family events.

The problem with this view of love is that, it is actually not love. You can't chose who to love and who you don't love is involuntary and is something you earn. The reason why this happens is a form of forcing the child to pretend to like his family instead of earning his love.

Unfortunately there is a selfish reason for having children, is to have someone to take care of you you when you get old not so much to be responsible of creating a new human beings. I have no problem with people taking care of their parents, but this can become an unfair trade, when the quality of the parenting you received is not to great.

This learn behaviours and patterns left unchecked can sadly be carry in your relationships as an adult. I could argue that celebrations like valentine's day and even marriage have a socialist component. Where instead of people taking care of each other's need they manipulate or bribe each others.

To care about someone is to cater to someones needs, if someone is showering you with compliments and buy you present that doesn't necessarily means that that person is loving you as much as is trying to create the illusion of love, as an attempt to distract your attention to how unfair your relationship is.  

The difference between knowledge and truth

Knowledge can be a lot of things it can be fiction, correct information, speculation or a lye. Truth on the other hand it is only one thing it doesn't change no matter of the circumstances that you are in, or the time and place, what was true a hundred years ago it is still true today.

This is why knowledge can actually corrupt and confuse you, it can hurt you more than help you. If you are trying to solve a problem by accumulating more knowledge about that problem if that knowledge is not going to lead you to finding the truth, it will increase your confusion and in a way make your problem worse.

Knowledge is just another infinite cycle the same way all material things are, the same way you can't ever eat enough food or drink enough water, it is also impossible to know enough. I think this is what the Christian story about Eva eating from the three of knowledge was all about. By knowing more they become corrupted and fall from the grace of God, it is important to mention that it wasn't the tree of truth.

Gnostic religion and cults work by withholding truth and information from the people in order to control them with that. By hiding the truth you can manipulate people, as most of the abuse today is not done with violence as much it is done with lies.

Sometimes people get trapped in a vicious cycle of research and no action, under the illusion that they have to know everything before they can act.

This is a trap because it is impossible to know everything, so if you are trying to accumulate all the knowledge before you are taking action you will never take action.

Knowledge you can get it from multiple sources like a book or a documentary, truth you will get only out of experience of other people or yours. Not to say that other people can lye to you or that you can't be fouled by illusions, but until you don't test the knowledge that you are receiving you have no way of knowing if you are receiving any truth.

In order to find closure with something you have to learn the truth about that thing, knowledge is only going to lead to an infinite cycle of being unsatisfied with how much you know. When you find out the truth it is over because those facts that you find out will never change. This is how you get closure regardless if you are talking of a problem or a failed relationship.

Knowledge is just an intermediary step in finding out the truth!

Fear is an illusion

Fear is the pain that we experience when we anticipate physical or emotional pain. The purpose of physical pain is to prevent tissue damage while the one of emotional pain is to prevent loss.

When I say that fear is an illusion I don't mean like it dosen't exist at all, the pain is as real as it gets.

An illusion is something that is creating the impression of being something else.

There are experiments where they have study the brain of people that experienced fear and the same area of the brain are active that are when you experience physical pain. On the other hand when you experience fear as pain there is no real damage.

If I stab your hand with a knife you will hurt, and that pain is very justified because there is an injury behind it, if i just hover the knife on top of your hand there is a chance you will experience pain from fear. The illusion of fear is that it makes you believe that something is wrong with you that your body is injured or that you experience loss when in fact you are just fine in that moment.  

It is a prevention mechanism, that it supposed to make you avoid danger before it even happens to you and for the most part it works just fine. Fear is also something you learn if you had a series of negative experiences with a thing, if you have to interact with that thing in the future in anticipation to that you will experience fear. Which again for the most part is a good thing is part out of self preservation.

However if you had a very traumatic past, anticipating pain can destroy your present life. When you had so much negative experience almost everything makes you scared, fear is what causes dissociation and when you are dissociated your performance in life is going to be very poor. So now fear is a sabotaging mechanism instead of a self preservation one.

Because fear is a learned thing this means that it can also be unlearned to some degree. Which means that having new positive experiences with the thing that is triggering your fear is going to eventually stop your fear.    

But in order to have positive experiences you have to keep your integrity while your fear is present. By realizing the illusion of fear, that in that moment despise the fact that you feel pain there is actually nothing wrong with you, gives you a certain amount of free will.

Which gives you the choice to run away like you have been doing in the past or act, when you do that your actions are going to be clumsy and awkward because they don't match your emotions. You might even become overwhelmed and relapse, try to run away again.

What I would consider success at this point is action at the limit of your circumstances and your emotions. The repetition of imperfect action over time builds the necessary skills you need in life.