Hi jock

Good timing.

I was just contemplating this issue after surfing across one of King’s speeches/sermons on this subject.
http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_loving_your_enemies/

One part in particular that stood out as relevant for me at this point in my life was this:

“There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate.”
MLKJ

A bit back I recommended an article from Robert Berezin to someone:

Dreaming and Wakefulness in the Theater of the Brain. Everything is a neurological illusion of consciousness

The article does a good job of talking about the reality of how we control our reality. We live out our lives in the theater of the mind. It is our own mind that creates the set, cast, and the protagonist. Our emotions add color to the set, control the weather so to speak. If I focus on events and others who have wronged me in life, spending my time hating on them, then I color my world gray with an overcast dark sky.

What got me surfing in this direction in the first place is that for whatever reason, life has dealt me a rather unbalanced hand of karma over the last several years. Both chance and others have seemed to be piling on the negatives with fewer positives in-between to keep me going. Though I try not to, I keep finding myself ruminating over it all and hating on those who have wronged me. What becomes apparent is how exhausting this can become and how much energy it can sap. Even though I know that ruminating over my wrongs is only hurting me it is a rather hard thing to stop doing. One part of me is saying “stop thinking about all this it is only dragging you down.” Yet another part of me is angry and fixated on finding some way to balance the scales of justice. It’s like a little battle between good and evil going on within my mind. You see people who have grown bitter and hateful as they have grown old, I don’t want to become one of them. Like everyone else, I live in my own world, created by my own mind, if I fixate on what I hate, then that world will be a dark place. Yet even knowing this, it is still hard to let go of anger and hate.

Hang in there Birdyy, help is on the way! Humanity is going to invent machines to do everything for us and then we will just lie around in hammocks under shade trees while sexy fembots (or hunkbots) fan us and feed us grapes. More technology is what we need around here, and we are really close to the time when “one and all” can “have it all”, but for now we seem to be in the dark before the dawn.

But on a more serious note, you must understand that the whole point of life, the true meaning, is to accumulate and achieve. How much? More then the next person for starters. Your going to want to be fitter than you friends or they may think you to be lazy. Also, the fitter you are, the longer you will live (barring any unforeseen strokes or heart attacks) and the more you will be able to accumulate and achieve. Which as you probably can sense, if you didn’t already know, is in direct correlation to your true self worth. Your going to want some awesome sounding letters next to your name like MS, PhD, JD, MD, or even CEO as that is how we will know you are smarter (i.e. better) and have more knowledge than others. This is how we can tell and that we should pay attention to what you say. BS are OK letters, but not too impressive these days in the US, unless it is the other kind of BS which can in fact Trump all the other letters combined (except maybe POTUS). We may even pay lots of money for you to come and tell us what we are doing wrong, and what we just don’t know about how to “have it all”. And with that money, and your book proceeds, you are going to want to get some bling, and I do mean bling baby? One of the greatest joys in life is pulling into the parking lot of a chic coffee house to get a latte and parking your BMW right next to your old college roommates Toyota. It’s almost like lapping them on the track at the gym… I meant health club. Then you can go home to your 5000 sqft house and park in the third, or maybe dare I say forth?, parking stall, go in and say hi to the nanny, hubby number?, kids (what are their names again?) and head back up to you home office with walnut trim and matching desk, open the laptop (Mac Airbook of course) and get back to work. This is the life you need. It is the life we all really want to have. I know because I watch TV and read many magazines….. well, some I just subscribe to so I can leave them around the office in strategic places where others can see the titles. BTW, it also helps to have impressive books lying around from classic authors (e.g. F. Scott Fitzgerald) so people will know you are refined as well as rich. Truth be told, many would probably rather have Kim Kardashian’s life but there are only so many channels on cable TV and we need room to watch the Real Housewives pull out each others hair. Silly housewives, don’t they know they already “have it all”? Anyhow, don’t worry about the housewives, you really can have it all, you just need to lean in a little more.

Good luck and God’s speed (or higher power’s speed) or maybe just good luck and go get em (or go lean…in?)

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/05/06/sheryl-sandberg-hard-lean-single-mom/84041588/

@Christopher

Realize that the “you” or “I” you keep referring to is not something that was there at birth, but rather something created by the mind/brain as you grew up and continues to be formed throughout life. It is a picture or character created by the mind to represent “self”.

Past experience (abuse) can create an image of “self” that says we are “not good enough” and “unlovable”. Then we take that image of “self” out into the world, believing it without even thinking about it, perhaps never questioning it. We go about living our lives without fully realizing the impact it has on everything we do, everyone we try to bond with, and how we see the world as a whole. We tend to see this image as our “true self” and forget it is just a character made up by our own mind.

We try to find “things” to make us happy, but they only bring happiness for a short time. We try to find “others” to make us happy, but when they can’t take away the pain, we end up resenting them for letting us down. We chase achievement hoping to show others and ourselves that we really are “good enough”, yet when we achieve our goals, we resent others who don’t seem to see us as we thought they would and should.

Everything you told me in your post makes perfect sense to me. I lived through a very similar story. If you are like me, then you are probably running away from your “self”. You grasp at “other” to find something to make up for your own inherent sense of defectiveness. You simultaneously resent others for not making you feel better, yet go running back to them and cling to them as you fear nobody else would want defective you.

In my experience, the only thing that helps is to go back into this character your mind has created called “you” and gain an understanding of what it is, what it is not, and just how ephemeral and fictional it really is. This is your “ego”. You were not born with it, it was created by your mind. Now it is leading you on a life experience full of sadness, fear, loneliness, and despair. Some seem to find a way to numb out and experience life as a spectator (for a time anyway). IMO, this is not how to get the most from the life experience. One way or another, there is no sense of an individual “I” without the ego and to have a personal experience of life you need a “you”. It is your mind that created this ego image of self, and your mind can pull it back apart and rebuild it. Old beliefs can, with work and time, give way to new ones. The effects of emotional abuse, particularly during childhood, are carved deeply into the foundation of the ego. Never the less, they can be repaired, and this starts with coming to understand what the ego is, how it was formed, what it contains, how your mind uses it to guide your decisions and opinions throughout life, and that most of all, it is just a fictional character, a character your mind can re-characterize. This may seem like a rather nasty lot to be given in life. The upshot is that if you face your task with courage, and most of all compassion for this “self”, you may just come out the other end understanding a great deal more about your “self”, other’s “selves”, and what IMO, what Christ’s teachings were really all about. Good luck, it’s a tall mountain to climb, and even harder when starting from low in the valley, but the view is worth it.

I like rambling. Rambling is often how some of the best points are arrived at.

Scientists have been searching for the elementary building blocks of “reality” for a long time. Each time they think they get to the smallest, they start looking for and eventually find something a bit smaller yet. They thought that an electron is an “elementary particle” and that it cannot be divided into anything smaller, then someone discovered that under certain circumstances perhaps you can.
http://www.nature.com/news/not-quite-so-elementary-my-dear-electron-1.10471
Perhaps more interesting is that the electron may not even be there at all, until you go to look for it. It is not until you ask the universe where the particle is that it obligingly pops it into existence as an electron. (Google double slit experiment if you are interested).
Until then, only the potential for it to exist as a particle is there, and by there is meant, everywhere. Although it is far more probable to appear in certain places than others, the potential for it to appear anywhere in the universe is, though exceedingly small, never the less, non-zero. They say it is “non-localized” until you go to observer it. Or another way to look at it is that until you look for the electron and cause it to appear as a particle, it is as big as the universe itself…perhaps infinitely big. So the questions becomes, when scientist “discover” smaller and smaller particles, are they finding particles that are already there, or are they bringing them into existence by going to look for them. And if the latter is the case, will the universe simply continue to create smaller and smaller particles for science to discover for as long as we continue to look closer and closer.

Some say that “all is one” and that we are simply the universe’s way of looking at itself. Some say that physical reality is only a product of conciseness, created on the fly, that the moon is not really there when no one is looking at it, and that we ourselves are a part of this universal consciousness as it dreams up the universe. Silly universe, of course it is going to find a particle there when it goes to look for it, it is the one putting it there. And as for those quantum super computers, they, just like us, and everything else, would be a creation of the universal consciousness, drawn from the same well as everything else that “exists”. So who is to say that just like us, they will not in fact be, “conscious”.

Pongo

1) The most important thing you can do to help your daughter is to help yourself. You will play a significant role in influencing who she becomes whether you want to or not. Understanding how your father’s past contributed to him becoming who he was and how your past has lead you down the path you have walked can give you a great deal of the wisdom needed to help raise your daughter and steer her down the right paths. We have far less control over what we communicate to each other than our conscious minds are aware of. The best way to communicate the right things to your daughter is to understand them yourself.

2) A good psychotherapist can be an enormous help in understanding yourself. Unfortunately, not all of them are good, so don’t feel like you can’t doctor shop when looking for a good therapist.

3) We all live our lives in what can be called the “theater of the mind”. In that theater you are the writer, set designer, protagonist, and you create the entire cast. The “self” you believe yourself to be is not who you truly are, but merely the main character created by the mind in this drama of you and it goes by the handle of “ego”. The mind creates the ego, and then identifies with it as self, forgetting that it is something it invented. This is often disparaged in spiritual circles, but I believe it is a necessary thing for us to experience life in a close and personal way (which you have). However, when you come to understand this, it becomes easier to not take this ego so personally, and to look at it with the mind with some degree of objectivity.
Since you are on a site called “Tiny Buddha” I would recommend reading up on the Buddha’s concept of “Anatta” or no-self. It is subtle, and I am not sure anyone truly understands it, but contemplating it does help the mind see beyond its fixation of the ego as “self”. I doubt you would lose the ego, but you might develop the ability to look inward (insight) with a better degree of objectivity. The mind is fully capable of examining its own creation with some degree of objectivity, it just needs to see it as such first. Also, key here is looking inward with an eye toward understand the ego (and the theater for that matter) rather than judging and condemning. The more we cast judgment on something, the more the mind paints it as we see it rather then what it is.
If you are interested in the “theater of the mind”, I would also recommend this guy, http://robertberezin.com/.