What does it mean to be lazy

Laziness is often perceived as a personality flaw, a thing that you need to resist and push yourself away from it to avoid the negative consequences.

A lot of human emotions that are negative are being vilified and made to be a taboo or just a personal flaw by society, rather than an intelligent response from your body for which there is a cause and an effect.  

Lazy is not a very precise word to describe what is happening, I prefer the synonymous apathy which comes from: the early 17th century: from French apathie, via Latin from Greek apatheia, from apathēs ‘without feeling’, from a- ‘without’ + pathos ‘suffering’.

Laziness is a way to reduce what you are felling at the moment because it is particularly unpleasant. Whenever you realize that most of your actions lead to sufferance the way to avoid that sufferance at least temporarily is to stop taking any action.

There is not only a personal responsibility one individual can take in order to reduce the amount of apathy he would experience in his life, but there is also a collective global responsibility that increases or decreases the amount of sufferance and apathy in the world.

For example non-productivity is very common in certain governance programs like communism and socialism or the modern re-branded version of it globalism, where there is a lot of coercion from the state and centralized power people tend to give up and stop working hard because the more money they make the more it is going to be taken away from them, the more they contribute to they're community the more attempts there will be to suppress them.

So then the way to minimize the amount of damage they experience is to stop being so productive, laziness is like hibernation you stop being active and limit yourself to doing only what is necessary to survive until the big threat that you cant face and overcome by yourself goes away or you find a way to fight back. The same a bear does in the winter, because there is not enough food in the winter there is no point in staying awake and wasting more energy to procure food, so a better strategy is to just sleep it off.

There are two very common patterns as far as I am aware of, some people when they are coerce they realize that you can't stand up to your abusers so they become abusive themselves towards other people that are weaker then they are, this is how they minimize their loss at the expense of someone else. You either get eaten or eat someone, is their general philosophy.

And than there are some people that when they are coerce they just go in to hibernation they won't reach their full potential because they wan't to minimize the amount of predation they are going to suffer, but they will also won't become abusive towards others because they have empathy and they understand the destruction that is going to cause to them and other people.        

This unfortunately means that they are trapped in their apathy, until the abuse and their chronic pain caused by the abuse will stop.       

What does it mean to have empathy

There is a big misconception when it comes to empathy. Some people will tell you that people with empathy are weak or that they're not capable to defend themselves. That having empathy men's to treat people who are bad to you good.

Well what having empathy means it's understanding cause and effect. Understanding why someone is behaving the way they are, or why does someone experience those emotions at that time.

If you're going to do a good enough job to understand other people around you. You're also going to understand the risks and limitations that other people bring, so you're more likely to defend yourself or separate yourself from others who are dangerous towards you.

Empathy doesn't contradict self-preservation it's actually part of self preservation. Tolerating abuse is not empathy it's naivety. Empathy sometimes leads to forgiveness and repairing the relationship you have with that other person, and  sometimes through understanding the cause and effect you might reach the conclusion that it is best to go in separate ways.

If you keep your connections with people who treat you unfairly it means that you don't understand them enough to realize the risk that this people bring to your life. Or that you don't understand yourself and you don't have enough empathy toward yourself to manage your own emotions and behavior in a way that keep's you safe.

In order to stop the abuse you have to develop empathy towards yourself and towards your abuser. From that clarity you'll be able to deck the best course of action possible at that time.

Understanding the wrong and the effect that those wrong actions created, it what allows you to blame the right people and hold them responsible. As well as rejecting to cause other people the same type of sufferance.

People with a high amount of empathy don't mix well with people with a low amount of empathy. Empathy is a generally speaking, higher in intelligent people, it is based on the ability to recognize patterns and making associations, which is what intelligence is, this is what we measure with an IQ test.

It is almost impossible to have fair relationships with them. Because they will hurt you and don't register any bad emotions after they do, this would trigger the cycle of retaliation, making the relationship somehow more fair, with someone with a low amount of empathy.

But if you have a lot of empathy, you probably will understand that retaliation is an infinite cycle, in which both parties involved are constantly hurting each other for they're own personal gain. So you might have a problem doing that. If you are around abusive people and you don't retaliate you are in a massive disadvantage. So that makes it impossible for you to be treated fairly by this people this is why you have to avoid them.

Your reservation to retaliate don't necessarily come from the desire to protect your abuser, but from the desire to protect yourself, because if you retaliate you continue the infinite cycle of causing each other pain.

I am not saying to dance sick retribution if any of your property was damaged. That would be considered a self defense action. There is a very big difference between retaliation and retribution.

Retribution means recovering something that was previously yours from someone who took it through force, through committing a crime. While retaliation is not necessarily a way to recover something that was previously taken from you in an unfair way, as much at it is about defending your ego.

What does it mean to be corupted

Being corrupt means that you have difficulties differentiating between good and evil not necessarily because you don't understand this concepts, or that you are unaware of the consequences of your actions. But because you're in denial about what you're doing.

Whenever you're suffering from chronic pain what ever the causes of that pain might be, it is going to bring your denial about it.

As the purpose of denial is to keep you functional whenever you are in chronic pain. If there's nothing to do immediately about the pain, then there is no point in paying attention to it or acknowledging it.

So then the pain will bring your denial and your denial will bring your vices.

Not to say that you are not responsible, or that you don't have any agency. But resisting a strong impulses like pain, makes it a lot harder to be consistent in your behavior. The same way it is hard for people that are trying to lose weight to follow a caloric restrictive diet. The longer you have been on the diet the more hungry you get, the less likely to keep staying on that diet. The same with morality the longer you force yourself to have integrity the more intense your pain is going to become for not suiting it with your vices, which is eventually going to cause you to relapse back in to denial and then back in to your vices.  

And then there is a vicious cycle of people blaming themselves for using a poor strategy, because they don't understand how their physiology and mind works. Instead of looking at the situation empirically and acknowledging what they know and what they don't, they just conclude that there is something wrong with them.

So then the priority in restoring someone's integrity is to address the underlying chronic pain that creates the Inconsistent behavior. Rather than educate them on morality, or giving them facts, chances are that they are very aware of those.

Whenever you suffer from chronic pain emotional or physical, you are to some degree compromised, you can't hold yourself to the same standards as if you would be well. Because you are always going to fall short from those standards because under present situations it is nearly impossible for you to meet them.

It is better to address your problem sooner than later, because there is such a thing as doing permanent damage. Like if you smoke and you stop soon enough you are going to recover almost completely, however if you smoke for to long and you end up with lung cancer or breathing through a tube in your through, you can stop smoking but it won't make much difference at that point. There will always be sufferance in the present caused by your past actions, if you stop early enough.      

Stress management

There are two types of stress, natural stress that comes from the process of being alive. Things like aging, disease and death, this type of stress happens gradually over long periods of time and at large intervals of time in between.

For example someone close to you will die and before someone else that is close to you is going to die there will be a substantial amount of time.

You have time to grief and recover, generally speaking natural stress is not chronic.

In order for stress to become chronic it needs to be induce by the people that are around you. If I am going to be stressful to you I can induce stress multiple times per day. Not giving you time to recover, I can keep you in a constant state of stress.

If the source of chronic stress is other people, then stress management is learning how to have boundaries, learn to say no and distance yourself from those people. You can do all the breathing exercises in the world and meditation, I doubt that they are going to have any substantial effects on your stress.

Even the stress that comes from being sick, or economical crisis, war etc. is generally caused by other people since most diseases and crises these days are just symptoms of a sick culture.

There are still some isolated places in the world where most people are generally healthy, they eat a simple diet of mostly plants that they get locally, spend time in the sun doing mostly what they want etc. In those society almost everybody reaches the age of ninety is disease free and generally happy.

The source of your chronic stress is always external, we are design to be healthy and happy. The good news is that there is nothing wrong with you, like your genetics or mind, and the bad news is that you live in a sick culture and by association to it you are sick.

You can't change others as human beings have autonomy and free will, your won't find your power in what can you make others do, if you try to do that you are just going to become a source of stress to them. Your true power is in what can you do!

Being well adjusted to a sick and dysfunctional culture is not something to brag about. If you are going to have any chance at being happy and healthy you have to be "weird". Stress management is learning to reject the right people and the right ideas!           

Relativism kills assertivness

The purpose of assertiveness is social cohesion, basically it allows us to be together in close proximity even if we are disagreeing on certain things without wanting to strangle each other.

You don't necessarily have intimacy in this scenarios, where there is a lot of disagreements between two or more people it is hard to be yourself uncensored in their presence, you have to self censor yourself for the sake of the group.  

Assertiveness, it is part of your self preservation instincts, if you need to assert your needs it means that they are under a certain degree of attack from the outside. So generally speaking behind assertiveness there is anger, if the individual that is being under attack considers the group to be of any benefit to himself, he is going to suppress his anger and tolerate the inconvenient.

However sometimes we are confused of the benefits that we receive from others, so we censure our anger and tolerate the inconvenient for absolutely no gain. Then this is an unfair exchange, and it becomes abuse.

To restore your ability to be assertive and express your anger, you almost have to see the world in black and white. Things either help you or not.

Passive people will dig themselves in a corner by confusing themselves, generally speaking the inner dialogue goes something like this: "this is good because x reason, but on the other hand it is also bad because the y reason". The conclusion being that the situation is so bad that is good.

So then off course that when the logistics look like that the best course of action is inaction. In order to act you need clarity, the conclusion needs to be very clear this is good, I should continue it or this is bad, I should stop.  

As always the explanation to all irrational behavior is anxiety, the reason why people do this is to control their anxiety of making a bad decision to stop themselves from taking any decision at all.

Taking decision unfortunately is inherently painful, all decision that you will ever take will lead to regret. This is why it is impossible to avoid the pain, if you don't act you will regret that you didn't and if you do regardless how it goes, you will regret that you did or that you didn't do it differently.

It is only when you accept the pain of making a decision that it will stop paralaizing you, in realaizing that you can't avoid regret you set yourself free. Not from regret itself but from your inability to decide. 

Giving up without quitting

The best thing you can do in life is to give up without quitting. It might seem like a paradox, however giving up and quitting are two different concepts.

Giving up means to stop making an effort, or to admit to yourself that you are defeated, while quitting means to leave a place  usually permanently. To quit life when it gets hard means to die or kill yourself, to give up on life means to stop trying to control and micromanage things.

Failure, pain and death are unavoidable for everybody at the end of the day what choice does a human being has other than play the game being fully aware that it all leads to nothing, and his inevitable demise.

However if you are aware of this facts how can you enjoy life and ever be contempt, so far we found all kind of ways to deny reality to soften the blow of life with fiction. One of the most efficient way we used in the past was religion.

By introducing the idea of a miracle which is a way to deny failure and pain, or the concept of life after death in another dimension which is a way to deny death.

Pain is like hunger, it is a very strong impulse almost impossible to resist, if you are hungry but you have food available you are not going to resist for to long without eating. If you are in pain you can maybe endure it a little bit but you will eventually deny it somehow with whatever tools you have available.

The only way to stop the denial is to don't be in pain, but if you don't deny reality you have to look at it for what it really is, and that is painful.

Being completely out of denial is a characteristic of a God not a human being, the same way honesty it is impossible to fully accomplish by a human.

The root of sufferance is not desire it is life itself, if you are alive you are going to suffer. Desire is just the necessary drive that push us to accomplish and acquire things. Even choosing to live a simple and spiritual life or to become enlightened, you are still motivated by desire, you desire to acquire knowledge and achieve bliss. It is impossible to live without desire, so it is impossible to live life without pain.    

Pain comes from loss, the more you have the more you have to lose, so the more anxiety you have. We are really design to live with scarcity like all the other animals, without to much certainty, when you don't have nothing the only thing you can lose is your life, so there is not much anxiety about losing anything else.

If you want a happy life, a life in which you are happy while functional, you have to give up on everything. Things like relationships or comfort etc. but not quit them. 

When it is OK to lie

There are two reasons why people will lie to you, the first reason is to take advantage of you, as a form of abuse, they will either hide important information or replace real facts with fiction in order convince you to give them something, that you wouldn't give them if you would know the truth.

The second reason people lie is to protect themselves, the same way it is moral to physically hurt someone or even kill someone in order to defend yourself, it is also moral to lie in order to protect yourself. Withholding information, that if it is going to get on other people hands that are not so well intended they could use it against you to hurt you. This type of lying is called privacy, it is not information that is necessary for others to form their decisions about what they should share with you or if it is fair or not.

If you share your private information with someone who is benevolent it is not going to improve your relationship or really offer any benefit. On the other hand if this type of information ends up in someones hands that is not so well intended they could really steal from you or hurt you.

This is one of the problem we have in the modern society, with various companies collecting information's about their customers to learn how to manipulate them to spend more money in order to increase their business by offering more value to their customers. Or perhaps the worst violation of privacy is the way governments record private conversation, emails, browser history etc. of their citizens to "protect" them.

The fact that there is even a debate over the necessity for certain entity to violate privacy, it is an indication that most people lost their capacity to protect themselves, which is a common side effect of long term abuse, the victims internalize the abuse and lower their defenses because they believe that there is nothing you can do to stop it.

You are not fully protecting yourself if you are not lying to maintain your privacy, you could carry a gun lock yourself in a bunker, without privacy you are not safe.

It gets a little gray sometimes, like what do you do when someone ask your opinion about something that they are doing wrong. Like for example someone ask your opinion about what are they wearing and they are not dress well.

Telling people the truth it is hard work that it is going to require a lot of your time and energy, which you have in limited supply. If you are going to reason in a very effective way with that person, you need to take the time to ask all the questions to understand, before you state your opinions.

The same way it is not a good idea to waste physical resources, you have to be cautious with your time and energy. Intimacy is like money it needs to be earn and managed well other wise you are going to end up alone. I would take the time to be honest in a though situation with someone if he earned my intimacy, there is less of a chance for me to do it with a stranger on the street, the same way I would more likely lend money to a friend than a stranger, because there is a much less risky trade.    

We all have blind spots, the nicest thing someone can do to you is to tell you the truth about what you are doing wrong, but that can go wrong, because if you are in denial you are blocking the pain associated with the negative things that you are doing. So when that pain it is brought to the surface by someone, it could be blamed on the person that brought it up rather then on the action of that individual. Because it is dangerous it needs to be earned and used with caution. Honesty is like a weapon it not only going to protect you but it is also can end a relationship or get you killed.   

The cause of your anxiety is external

The purpose of anxiety is to control your life! This is why it is impossible to control it.

It is an impulse design to control you in case of emergency in order to save your life.

Trying to control it is the worse thing you can do in regards to anxiety, because it is impossible you are going to struggle and fail, also in the process of doing so, you are going to destroy your self esteem from the repeated failure.

Behind anxiety there is always rage, whenever something puts you in danger and there is no way to stop it, the last solution is to destroy that threat.

However when you can't do that you will repress your rage and experience the same energy as anxiety.

Which it is a very strong impulse to avoid that threat. The only solution to anxiety is separation, also simultaneously the healthy expression of rage is separation.

Because if you separate from the person that makes you feel, rage you don't have to hurt it or tolerate the abuse until it turns into anxiety.

I'am not saying that you shouldn't seek retribution if there is any significant damage that occurred to your propriety, but it is probably wise to don't keep contact with abusive people in your life.

As a side effect of extended abuse, we internalize the abuse and start blaming ourselves for the abusive action of other people.

This is why people who suffer from anxiety, generally speaking blame their symptoms on themselves. If you talk with them, they will tell you that they have anxiety not that certain elements of the world gives them anxiety. Which is really always the truth.

Sometimes people are anxious about things that they desire. Which is really where it gets confusing because a part of you want's to run away screaming while another part of you want's to interact with that thing that is causing your anxiety.

In this case separation is not as easy because the part of you that desire that thing is going to keep driving you forward. Regardless of that the solution is still separation, there are always more ways to meet ones needs.

For example if you are in a relationship with someone who is giving you anxiety, the solution is to separate yourself from that person and find someone that is not giving you anxiety.   

Why are you repeating your mistakes over and over again!

We don't learn out of experience, nobody lacks experience except maybe baby's, if experience would be enough by itself to learn, everybody would be self actualized.

The reality is that most people just repeat the same mistakes over and over again for a lifetime all the experience of an entire life sometimes just leads to nothing.

They even repeat some of the mistakes that they used to do since childhood. That is the unfortunate waste of human potential.

In order to learn you need to accumulate new information about reality, which is going to let you know what works and what you are doing wrong. We really learn out of consciousness, the experience it is necessary, but is not the direct cause of learning and positive change. It is the conscious awareness of your experience that it is going to allow you to experience positive change.

Even if you are doing the wrong thing over and over again, if you are conscious to it you are going to eventually realize it. And then it is going to fell bad, so it is more likely to experiment with alternatives and eventually find what works.

Traumatized people are particularly struggle with this, because they are trapped in pain. And when you are trapped in pain you get in to denial, even if you are not sedating yourself directly, through certain vices like drinking alcohol.

You are sedating yourself by using your mind, because you are in pain and you lost hope that your pain will ever stop, you are absent minded and unconscious. The same way you are when you are a sleep, you have an experience of the world but it is massively distorted, so you can't get an accurate feedback to correct your actions.

A tool that it is design to help with making people more conscious is meditation.

However there is a misconception with the way most people use it, so it remains largely ineffective. Meditation is a tool, learning to meditate is like buying that tool, meditating periodically is like taking care of that tool and maintaining it.

In order to actually get any real benefit from it you have to use it for practical applications in real life. In those particular situation where you struggle, where it is very likely that you are unconscious and become dissociated, bringing presence there is when you truly receive the benefit of meditation.

If you just meditate periodically and expect for the benefits to flow into your life by themselves. That is like saying that buying a hammer and polishing it every day, when it is polished enough it is going to build a house by itself.          

The paradox of change

The paradox of change states that it is more likely to change in good, whenever you are satisfy wherever you are.

It seems like a cruel game nature play with us, where the people that most dispersal need change and have the biggest desire to do so, actually have the lowest chance to change in good.

There are two types of problems you can have in life, problems with a practical solution that you can make it better or resolve it through a series of actions.

And problems that are unsolvable like a terminal disease for example, regardless that you can't do anything about the disease itself, you have some option over your perception of that unfortunate situation.

Which will result in different outcomes of quality of life. If you resent and resist your disease you are going to experience a lot of anxiety which is going to lower the quality of your life. If you accept the fact that you have an incurable disease and that you are going to die early you are living your life based on certainty, which is the opposite of anxiety, you are still going to die early but you don't have to have the last part of your life dominated by anxiety.

Whenever something is wrong, your body will send you feedback as pain. Regardless the fact that the problem is one with a practical solution or it is unsolvable and you just have to learn to accept it. There is not an immediate practical solution to the pain itself, there is very little you can do for the pain.

Even if we are talking about a problem with a practical solution, there is a delayed effect until you start taking action and you start solving your problem it is going to take a while, so you will have to experience pain for a significant period of time.

This is where a lot of people struggle, because they don't realize that pain is an unsolvable problem with no practical solution, that you just need to learn to accept they go back into denial, after a short attempt to change, the pain still persist so they relapse. And they are trapped in this vicious cycle their entire lives sometimes.

This is why the immediate solution to any problem is acceptance, even if there is something practical you can do, before you act you must accept the pain.

Without acceptance of pain you will slip back into denial and reverse back at having severe blind spots, that will cause you to repeat your mistakes over and over again.      

It is not the intensity of pain that causes the denial, it is the lost of hope that your pain is going to get any better, which is never true because you can either do something about it or accept it and reduce your anxiety about it.

If you have some pain in your body, you can definitely bare it otherwise it wouldn't be there. It is not the pain that it is harmful, as the pain is just the alarm that is letting you know that something is wrong. Turning the alarm to early with any form of sedation it will decrease your chance of properly taking care of yourself.

The moment you sedate yourself is the moment you stop learning, experience is not enough to learn. Everybody has experience, but not everybody is self-actualized. We learn out of consciousness not experience. It is being conscious of your experience that allows you to learn.    

How to get out of denial

The purpose of denial is to keep you partially functional whenever you find yourself trapped in abusive situations.

You develope a selective blindspot to your pain you experience on a daily basis because there is nothing you can do about it. Often the pain is covered with a series of addictions, constant pleasurable distractions.

The way we deny is by self controlling our own thoughts, we restrict ourselfes from thinking certain things because we believe it is beneficial in some way. Generally speaking people think there are two benefits from controlling what you think. The first reason is to stop yourself from hurting others, and the second reason is to stop yourself from self-sabotage.

Ironically controlling your mind achieves the opposite of the reason why people think they should control their thoughts and emotions.

If you want to control someone you have to give them a disease over which you have control over their symptoms, that disease is called anxiety. There are three steps to that need to happen in order to successfully abuse someone:

1. create anxiety in someone:

The immediate objective of abuse is to induce anxiety in someone in order to make him behave in the way you want to. This could happen either through violence or through lies.

2. convince that person that he is responsible for his anxiety:

If the person that is being abused becomes self loathing and blames himself for the abuse, it means that you disable his capacity to self defend. The emotions associated with self defence like anger or frustration, of which purpose is to create safety. That person is going to chose to suppress them and they are going to turn in too chronic depression or anxiety. As anxiety is suppressed rage.

3. temporarily relieve their anxiety to reward them for behaviours that reward the abuser:

Because the victim now creates their own anxiety by suppressing their rage, by blaming themselves for the abuse. Now they are in almost constant anxiety, which means that the abuser can give temporarily relief from the anxiety to the victim by not abusing them if they comply to his wants.

Self control is the cause of your anxiety and self sabotage, not the way to stop it, or protect yourself and others. In order to get out of this cycle you need a permanent antidote to your anxiety. Slavery is not living your life in chains as much as it is living your life in fear. The purpose of violence including putting someone in chains is to create anxiety.    

To cure your anxiety, you need to live life based on what you know to be certain. Things that are certain are not always positive, negative certainties will cause us pain in the future this is why when we conclude that we can't avoid them we get into denial, we stop thinking about those things, and because of that we can't be present in our lives.

If denial is an adaptation when we reach the conclusion that there is no way out of the pain, in order to get out of denial you need to find a way out, a solution to your problems.

There are two types of problems you can have in life, problems for which you can find a practical solution, that will require you to take a series of actions in order to solve it. And problems for which you can't find a practical solution that currently have no solutions you can apply.

This means that there are two types of solutions you can apply to your problems. The first type of solution is a series of actions, and the second type of solution for the problems that have no resolution is acceptance.

Why controlling your thoughts is bad for you

There are two ways to really hurt someone, both of them target the mind. The first one is violence, for example if you walk on a dark alley and someone puts a gun to your temple, it does so to induce anxiety in order to control your mind to finally get control over your behaviour.

The second way to hurt someone is with lies, if I find the wright words to tell you I can basically make you behave like I would hold a gun to your temple. Words act on the same path as violence does, you first gain control over the mind and after you have control over the mind you can make that person behave in such a way that it is more beneficial for the abuser and detrimental towards the victim.

Words are for the most part harmless expression of more complex things, they are really just symbols we use to exchange information with each others and ourselves. There is only one circumstance where words are dangerous, it is when they become lyes. A lye it is like being infected by a virus, it will take over your mind and make it serve someone else's agenda instead of yours.

When you control your mind you are lying to yourself, you are not giving yourself the hones information based on your reaction in the moment. Which is a form of self abuse, this is how we internalize external abuse. If you are trapped in a situation where you are going to be constantly abused, it makes sense that if you control your own mind instead of letting other control it, you will receive less abuse from the outside.

Thoughts can be scary sometimes, all kinds of things will go through your mind, without having any concern about morality or ethics. You could be fantasizing about hurting, or taking advantage of someone, just thinking about it doesn't have any negative impact on reality.

The thoughts in your head are like a simulation of reality, not reality itself, thinking about how you want to kill someone it is more like killing someone in a video game rather than actually committing a crime. But there is the concern of someone negative thoughts actually leading to enact them.

The same way people are concern that, violent music, video games or movies instigate people to become violent. Well not really it is pretty clear that in order to enact things that you hear or see in art you need to have a certain type of background, like for example a traumatic childhood.

This is why we have the capacity to self suppress, because we shouldn't act on all our instincts or thoughts. The problem is when people suppress themselves in a way that let other benefit from it.

There is no noticeable benefit i can found from self controlling my mind, as far as my negative thoughts are like clouds on a sunny day, they come and pass, the therapeutic benefit is from knowing your mind not controlling it, control is just another way to say abuse.

A lot of the therapeutic techniques for mental illness, are in fact self suppression techniques. A few years ago when my depression was at it worse, I went and visit a therapist, he sent me home with a worksheet where I was supposed to write down my negative thoughts that supposedly caused my depression and replace them with positive ones.

There was very little effort made to understand cause and effect, or to see if there are other external causes, as depression is a pretty vague symptoms and can be caused by a lot of things including non psychological causes, like a concussion. Sadly this is a pretty common approach to treating this simptoms.  

How to use the force!

There is a reason why we find stories pleasurable, that is because we are trying to extract the wisdom out of it and apply it to our own lives in order to avoid the mistakes of the characters and emulate their success.

It is funny how sometimes you watch or read something, and you didn't fully understand it, that information becomes dormant in your mind, you can't really make much sense or use of it until you are ready.

And then your mind gets flooded with it and you finally start to understand what you watched years ago.

A good story like the "Star Wars" movies especially the original trilogy, will get the archetypes right.

Even if it is a science fiction story and it is set in space and situation that you will never find yourself in, you identify with characters and become emotionally invested because they're emotional struggle and moral dilemmas and challenges are facing, are as real as it gets.

At the core the series of movies, is really about moderation, which is one of the biggest innovation of the western civilization. Moderation being especially a masculine value, which makes the movies very popular especially with boys and young males.

The force is a metaphor for anger, the energy inside of our body that makes us stronger for brief periods of time when we are endangered. There are stories about women lifting an entire car while angry to rescue their children.

Because anger is an impulse, you can't stop it, you can only channel it in a constructive or destructive way. This is why there is no middle way, because you are not in control over when you are going to be under is influence and when it is going to stop you can only choose one side, the dark side or the light side. Moderation is an extreme in itself rather than a ballance, this is why it is not doing a little of everything, it is doing the right thing to the full extent.

In the movie there is a perpetual fight between Jedi's and Sith's, highly trained and skilled warriors to use the same energy the "force", in two different ways.

The sith warrior derives his power from rage, which is the type of anger we experience when we lose hope, you reach the conclusion that there is no way to get what you need while the other parties are around, so the only way for you to meet your needs and want's is by destroying the other parties.

The name of the first movie is: "A new hope", by rediscovering someone who is fit to challenge the sith you rediscover hope, and with it moderation. The jedi uses the force in a way that makes him assertive.

Which is a way to use the force in a way to assert your needs and use it only in self defence. Joining the light side it is not the absence of anger as anger is the "force", it is the conscious choice that is made to express the anger to assert yourself rather than destroy others.

The jedi is vulnerable because it can become corrupted, one of the most iconic scene of the movie is the dialog between the Sith and the Jedi. In which the Sith tries to convince the Jedi to join the dark side. On the other hand the Sith is irredeemable, after you have committed so many atrouches things against others you will either spend the rest of your life in pain of what you have done or denial and continue to hurt others.

Another interesting aspect of the movie is that the negative character is the father of the hero, which is a way to illustrate the cycle through which societies go. They become powerful and prosper after which there is an epidemic of corruption and collapse.  

The past generation have been powerful enough to become corrupted, so the neglected and abused new generation have to become strong enough to assert themselves to stop the evil of their parents, in order to start a new period of prosperity.        

Break the freeze

As a part of our biology we are equipped with a mechanism to help us manage threats in our life, the so called fight-flight-freeze instincts.

Whenever you can't either eliminate or get away from a threat there is a last attempt your body is going to try in order to survive.

It is going to freeze, if you ever played with a cat you probably noticed that they have the tendency to attack things that move, they will wait until you move and than jump on you. This is a typical predatory instincts a lot of carnivorous animals have, so it makes sense that if you don't move you have an increase chance of survival.

But today we have other threats more complex than big cats. So our freeze response adapted to the modern threats. Today being frozen it is not staying unmoved to avoid the potential attack of a predator animal it is avoiding confrontation with certain people in your life. Just because you are moving it doesn't mean that you are not frozen.

Ideally if it is possible, if you are not really trapped in that abusive situation, which are very little cases where people are trapped and there is no really way out. Basically if you are a child with abusive parents or you are in a gulag there is not much you can do about that abuse, you pretty much have to adapt to it.

But for the rest of the people that don't find themselves in those situations you can get out. But in order to do that you can't stay passive. As the freeze is an impulse, it is impossible to stop it, impulses are massive releases of energy design to make you stop everything you are doing and start something new, generally speaking they are automatically triggered by your body in emergencies.

So because you don't have any control about not being impulsive anymore, the only thing you can do is to re channel that energy, in a constructive way. It is better to be angry on a threat than be paralyzed by it if you have a chance to win that confrontation.

Because impulses are masive releases of energy, you cant think or rationalize your way through or out of them. The way to re channel that energy is not with your mind, it is more with your body.

If you are frozen in fear, the way to unfreeze yourself is to start moving towards the threat or away from it. The only thing that will eliminate it from your life is you moving towards it.

The purpose of the abuse is to control someones body. Regardless if you abuse that person with violence or lies, you are targeting that persons mind.

When you got control over someones mind you got control over their body. As the purpose of abuse is to use someone for your own benefit not just to make someone think certain things. So the final purpose of abuse is to control someones body.

In order to stop the abuse you have to reclaim your body, in this case the mind follows the body. Because the mind is broken so it won't let you in the right place. As it is commonly said you have to act from the heart.