Supertramp – logical song

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily
Oh joyfully, playfully watching me
But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible
Logical, oh responsible, practical
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable
Oh clinical, oh intellectual, cynical

There are times when all the world’s asleep
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man
Won’t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned
I know it sounds absurd
Please tell me who I am

I said, watch what you say or they’ll be calling you a radical
Liberal, oh fanatical, criminal
Won’t you sign up your name, we’d like to feel you’re acceptable
Respectable, oh presentable, a vegetable
Oh, take it take it yeah

But at night, when all the world’s asleep
The questions run so deep
For such a simple man
Won’t you please tell me what we’ve learned
I know it sounds absurd
Please tell me who I am, who I am, who I am, who I am
‘Cause I was feeling so logical
D-d-digital
One, two, three, five
Oh, oh, oh, oh
It’s getting unbelievable

So many grammar issues in my post – it’s a vision thing – let me try again

Hi Murtaza

It takes a strong person to get help when they need it so well done. I watch my brother struggle with mental health issues, and I know its not easy.  Do you have access to talk therapy to go along with the medication assistance?  My brother found it helpful if only to accept that he needed the medication.

You are asking a question that often comes up with the practice of Buddhism and the concept of detachment. I recognize that in your case the detachment your experiencing isn’t the same as choosing to practice the art of detachment. I wonder though if an intentional practice of detachment might help?

A skillful practice of detachment is difficult, and my observation is that it often leads to the trap of indifference. If I’m detached from desire or an outcome why bother, what the point? Its not unusual to find that the more someone progress in the practice the more they tend to disengage with life.  I know that is a trap I often fall into.

The intention of the practice is to be fully engaged in life, as it is in the moment, without attaching expectations, fears, hopes. Such Attachments tend to be based on the past with the affect of projecting oneself into some imagined future.

What is the motivation to do things?  Life

Regardless of circumstances, regardless of like or don’t like, you’re it, where even a choice of not playing is playing.  Life does not care, (in the usual way we define care) though Life does push, even demand, growth and new life. (Which is a kind of care) It’s just that the ego desire is that we had control of the process and that it be painless. (Growth always involves something “dying” so painless isn’t going to happen. Life devours life for Life. Every creation is a destruction, every destruction a creation)

… I like watching movies and stories about mountain climbers. Have you noticed that 95 percent of the story tends to be focused on the struggle to get to the top, 1 or 2 percent about being on top with the remainder if any about the climb down and return to, what comes next… Happy ever after, we assume and don’t really wish to look further as the next story starts.   (As a metaphor the most important part of a journey is the return. To take back and apply what was learned. )

As a society we like the moment on the top, the gold metal. But you can’t live on top a mountain. Can you taste the conflict? Its the drama of the engagement with the struggle that pulls us into the story is the struggle, while the moment on the top is almost a bitter sweet one. At some level we know that the moment at the top doesn’t mean that much…

So which is it? The moment on top or the engagement that matters? When we tell our stories where do we spend the most time?

I enjoy watching the Olympics and like to hear the stories about what happened after the gold metal winners go home. After achieving that height, how well did they descend?  How many handled the descent as well as the assent? How many suffered depression? It seems to me that win or lose depression doesn’t care who to won or lost. In either case it is the ability to descend well that is a determining factor.

Is their choice here? I don’t know. I act as if there is. Its a work in progress… to engage in life as it is in the moment, saying Yes to Life as it is (A “knowing” that Life as it is, is Love) while detached from desire or outcome. Sounds like a contradiction but it isn’t.

Joseph Campbell when asked a question about meaning and purpose said that There was no point in asking the question when You are the answer.  Life does not give you meaning or purpose it is you, regardless of circumstance, that gives meaning and purpose to Life. So, play????

What is the motivation to do things without dopamine or reward?  What is the motivation to do things with dopamine with and without reward?

I suspect the answer may be the same. You’re writing the story,

I would like to say something about this idea of love being communicated.

When a relationship ends its common to hear someone say. “I don’t love you anymore”, – “you never did”…

Is it possible to end a relationship as a experience of Love?

Joseph Campbell* liked to tell this story of a samurai warrior, a Japanese warrior, who had the duty to avenge the murder of his overlord. After some time, the samurai found and cornered the man who had murdered his overlord. He was about to deal with him with his samurai sword, when this man in the corner, in the passion of terror, spat in his face. And the samurai sheathed the sword and walked away.

Whether the samurai kill the man as a act of honoring his code (his center of “being”), or anger the murder would be just as dead. However, this is not a story about the murderer nor is it a story about justice, mortality or even the code of the samurai. It is about acting from a place of ones “being”, ones truth, responding to life needs from ones authentic center.

If I say Love is the code from which I serve and respond to life, and someone has “murdered” – crossed a boundary that duty requires a response. It is possible to pursue that responsibility of accountability as an act of Love?

(I argue here that personal, social wellbeing… meaning, purpose, joy.. arise from a experience of being loved which cannot exist without the experience of getting to be accountable. That nothing we do or are could be experienced as mattering and or experienced as “being” loved without the experience of accountability for the “good” and the “bad”).

Love, accountability, responsibility, fear, hate, forgiveness, vengeance, justice, freedom… all have something in common. They all involve the setting boundaries. The question, from which do we draw on to build the boundary?

With regards to relationship, it might feel necessary to use the energy of anger to create the boundary to end a unhealthy relationship. Perhaps better to say ending contact, as that is also a kind of relationship?

The problem with creating a boundary using the energy of anger is that it burns and does not care what or who it burns. I would suggest that the boundary that ends a person relationship can be maintained from the energy of Love.  Ether way a boundary is created. It is possible to create the boundary without damaging the ‘code’ in order to fulfill the ‘duty required of the code’

It may seem to be a impossible paradox, as a seeming paradox words fail… here is a riddle to ponder

“Stillness is what creates love,
Movement is what creates life,
To be still, Yet still moving
– That is everything!” 
Do Hyun Choe

There is a time for everything even the creation of boundaries from a place of hurt that may not feel like love, yet it still may be.

From what I’ve observed Anita response to those seeking dialog always comes from a place of love even when healthy boundaries require a dialog relationship to end.

* Google Ep. 2: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth – interview with Bill Moyers

Here i am, no feelings, no desires, no goals, only consuming, like an animal, at least an animal doesn’t have awareness, the drugs has made me even more apathetic, more numb, i kinda like it, this is why i laugh at everything that happens to me, because its all just a big joke, all of this

Beautiful… agony, bitter sweet. I used to wonder how it was that I felt so much, that I felt nothing at all? Why is it that the Buddha is most often pictured laughing?   “Dad I’m big but we’re smaller than small, In the scheme of things, well we’re nothing at all, Still every mother’s child sings a lonely song, So play with me, come play with me”

It’s all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for… it’s all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can’t you see the funny side? Why aren’t you laughing? ― Alan Moore: Batman: The Killing Joke

“We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.” ― Alan Wilson Watts  – “The universe is the game of the self which plays hide and seek for ever and ever.” Come Play with me

Most Conflict, inner and outer, has nothing to do with the present. It is always about the past or the future. We can’t agree on the details of what has happened or is going to happen. We desire certainties… but memory is a trickster, a work in progress, ever changing and we never know what is going to happen.  What is really in dispute is how we will deal with not knowing… For my part I prefer the gift of doubt

• This reply was modified 3 years, 4 months ago by Peter.

This close to the experience it may be difficult to detach the emotions from the analysis of the experience and learn from it.  Detachment here does not mean not feeling the emotions you have only that you avoid attaching your sense of self to them. We have emotions we are not our emotions. We have experience’s we are not our experiences. (That can be a hard one to grasp, as its all to easy to define ourselves and or be defined by a single experience. )

You are not a ‘bad’ person because you feel bad or have done hurtful things to others. We all struggle and we all hurt the ones we care about most sometimes. Relationships are a crucible which will revel our best and worst qualities.  Shadow work (often projected onto the other) and mindfulness can help us separate the things that belong to us and the things that belong to our partner. Forgiveness, accountability, responsibility… are all tools that help us develop the ability to learn better, and learning better do better.

Sadly its a reality that it is often the pain of a relationship ending the pushes us to do the work that might have saved the relationship.

My experience and observations is that their is a tipping point when the past of a relationship becomes so heavy that only those where both those involved have truly learned to know themselves AND a have developed the art of Forgiveness AND have above, above average ability to communicate can over come. (Depending on those factors (and others) every relationship has a different tipping point that love, as understood in that experience, cannot over come. )  Love pushes towards life and growth, when the tipping point has been reached, LOVE may require a relationship to end if only to push us.

Their is a lot to unpack in your post, a lot that you might learn from. Keep writing. Keep a look out for your victim and villain story’s. These types of stories can shine a light on our own projections and fears, areas that might require work.

Other questions you might ask. Where in the relationship did you feel safe? Did you react or respond to you partner when you felt unsafe?  How so? How did your partner respond or react to you when they felt unsafe? Where your boundaries healthy ones?  How many of your boundaries were defined by fear and how many maintained by love? (Using the energy of fear and anger to maintain boundaries may be easier then using the energy of love. At least that has been my experience. )

I wish you well on your journey. Its sounds so odd… but LOVE opens the door to being able to be grateful for the very things you wished never happened.

From a interview of Stephen Colbert

“…he is the youngest of eleven kids and … his father and two of his brothers, Peter and Paul, the two closest to him in age, were killed in a plane crash when he was 10.”

“I learned to love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien’s mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of G_d are not gifts?’ ”

Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of G_d are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn’t mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I’m grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.  I felt so guilty to be grateful’. But I knew it was true.

“It’s not the same thing as wanting it to have happened,” he said. “But you can’t change everything about the world. You certainly can’t change things that have already happened.”

Consider that this is coming from a man who millions of people will soon watch on their televisions every night—if only there were a way to measure the virality of this, which he’ll never say on TV, I imagine, but which, as far as I can tell, he practices every waking minute of his life.

The next thing he said I wrote on a slip of paper in his office and have carried it around with me since. It’s our choice, whether to hate something in our lives or to love every moment of them, even the parts that bring us pain. “At every moment, we are volunteers.”

I’d like to add on to what TeaK Mentioned – I very much agree that a good Therapist would be helpful in the healing of past. They can help you give to yourself what others should have given you.  

“Sometimes you have to find a way to to give yourself what someone else should have given you”.

In Jung’s path to Individuation the first task is coming to terms with the mother and father complex. Your parents may have influenced how you relate to the mother and father architype however this is not about one parents. This is coming to terms with your own ability to nurture and protect (healthy boundaries) and provide for yourself. Individuation requires that at some point one takes ownership of becoming their own ‘mother‘ and ‘father‘. Our life experience with our parents and other family  may have given a good or bad examples, and influenced our own ability to care for ourselves but it does not define it. Even so we must take ownership.

It’s not easy, by the age of 5 most of use have determined how we are we will respond to life. How we will nurture and protect ourselves.  That is what TeaK is getting at. If we want to move past that 5 year old response to life you need to ‘talk to him.

Last thought. Some mistake the call to ‘love others as oneself ‘ as a command. I view it as the reality in how we love and that if we can’t love ourselves we are going to find it difficult to love others. How you love yourself will be reflected in how you love others and what they intern reflect back to you. (Why relationships are crucibles of self discovery (becoming). The good the bad and the ugly will show themselves).

You can’t ‘fix’ what others failed to give you but you can start learning to love yourself in more skillful ways.  A part of that will be accepting the things you cannot change about yourself and focusing on what you can.

You asked for advice, so here it is: first thing for you to do is to stop trying to find a solution to suffering, stop looking for a way out- for the rest of 2021. For the rest of this year, give zero thought to ending your suffering, completely remove your attention from this topic. Do this today,  let me know how it feels for you, and we’ll take it from there (one step at a time).

For what its worth I think that’s good advice from Anita.

There was a time in my life when I felt similar to what you talk about.  Like you I got discouraged when people  suggested I be more positive. The ‘think positive’ advice, as a defensive pessimist I wasn’t built that way and that wasn’t going to change. I was not going to be able to change my thinking by replacing it with ‘positive thinking’. Then it occurred to me. What if I just left the space blank. That to my surprise I was able to do. I changed the stories I was constantly repeating to myself with no story. A kind of mindfulness I guess thought didn’t know it at the time. When the negative stories came, I didn’t try to change them but more important in time I found I didn’t have to dwell on them. Its difficult to describe.

I shared some of T.S Eliot’s pomes before. I repeat this to myself when I find myself filling the space of my self talk unskillfully

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing”  – I discovered as you mentioned that like toxic positivity, hope is a double edged sword, to easily done unskillfully.  Better not to hope then hope unskillfully.  It is important to say that this is not hopelessness.

“wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing;” I was very naïve and didn’t have a great relationship with the ‘idea of Love’. Not having to fill a time of waiting with unskillful stories of ‘Love’ turned out to be very freeing.

“there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting“. That the  waiting becomes the faith and love??? I love that.  Challenged me to re-evaluate my relationship with faith and love. *

“Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:” How very true for me at the time. Wait without filling the space with stories, negative or positive.  I live in my head so was very surprised to discover it was possible. Those moments when I let thoughts go…

“So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” The problem of opposites. A change in perspective, the possibility that one can be detached and engaged, still while dancing! Find that the way out of our suffering isn’t the light but first the darkness, isn’t up but going down. A experience discovered in the waiting..

* Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to consider that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled pistis into us—that is, trust and loyalty. – Jung

Waiting becomes trust becomes a experience one can lean into.

“If you think you imagine yourself taking the position of esthetic stasis, you’ll understand about withdrawing fear and desire for what happens, and about samsara being nirvana, the still point in the mist of the turning world. That’s all there is to it. Then the world becomes a display of things from which you are disengaged, and yet, voluntarily, you can become engaged “joyous participation in the sorrows of the world.” It is very different from being compulsively linked.”

Still

“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”
― W H Auden

But then what our our illusions? Choice? Skillful or unskillful choice?