You've got to...accentuate the negative

[Bud Jetsun]

What one chooses to trade Now to focus upon is what one worships with most sincerity.

 

If a being wishes to self-induce masochistic suffering and worship it, then this thread title is aptly named towards that end.

 

If a being wishes to conclude suffering, it requires not accentuating negative or positive, but instead worshiping/focusing on the peaceful equanimity behind the illusion of ego that appears capable of getting bent one way or the other.

 

Your minds domain is yours exclusively. You can decorate it with as much pain and suffering you choose. Just as its a mindful choice to choose to suffer some phenomena, it's exactly equally possible to make the same mindful choice to love and appreciate the phenomena.

 

All content in the phenomena and all forms of phenomena remain unrelated to suffering it as negative or enjoying it as positive exclusively depending on the perceivers choice to show themselves compassion or not.

 

Forgive all beings with a sincerity driven by self-compassion for your own liberation. Forgive all things arisen or that may yet arise. Begin the forgiveness with yourself and complete it. Loving yourself removes the masochistic need to self-torture through unmindful choice in thought/behavior.

 

Unlimited Love,

-Bud

[ilumairen]

The rats that hatch their mutinous plans below the poop deck...

 

So last night I had a dream about people living in a place full of poop and vomit (which is how I sometimes categorize too many words, word vomit - heck too many words can also be diarrhea of the mouth to me). They thought it was good and normal, and the longer I stayed the more I wretched out.

 

It was not what I would call pleasant experience, but it was still experience - which I prefer not to confuse with who I am.

 

(just a happy song)

[ilumairen]

Would just like to add, go ahead, let it out, but don't forget to flush it away.

[Michael Sternbach]

[Bindi]

Great  ! , how far did looking at it get you? 

 

 

You said this...

 

To me it's not about dwelling on the negative things, but noticing the negative emotions/states that hijack me, and making them conscious, which allows them to be removed. Things like fear, shame, anger, ego etc, I am strongly of the opinion that these hijackers cannot be removed by 'imagining figures of light', but have to be addressed directly. 

 

The alternative, imagining figures of light, will only bury the hijackers deeper, more hidden from the world and self perhaps (for a while), but ultimately more in control.

 

Frankly I dont see why you'd object to the idea when I say it.

To me it appears that you have some conflicting ideas about whether examination of problems makes them disappear. I agree,, Imagining figures of light - the good opposing the bad , just preserves the polemic, magnifies guilt , enlarges the emotional obstacles. The hijacker , IMO is the idea that things have a right way to be, and that one rebels at having to fix things. That there is some justice that hasnt been meted out, and stubbornly we dig our heels in because we want to force the world to do the justice we figured was appropriate. 

The world doesnt care , it laughs at us and our petty concerns, while we fume and fret ,and have little ol temper tantrums about the things we imagine. Right ,wrong, justice , broken -all dissolve when it comes the the serene impassivity of the universe.

We preserve these things which we imagine , because we love them , whether or not ! they cause us just as much misery. ( I can explain that if it seems ironic but I figure it should stand on its own as true , with a bit of introspection)

 

When I refer to hijackers, I am referring to the energies that block the chakras as being those energies that hijack my mind. My focus is on removing those blocks, leaving the positive energy fee to flow. So for example:

 

1st chakra - Deals with survival and is blocked by fear

2nd chakra - Deals with pleasure and is blocked by guilt/desire

3rd chakra - Deals with willpower and is blocked by shame

4th chakra - Deals with love and is blocked by grief/depression

 

I didn’t set out to deal with any of these things in particular, but was guided by dreams to look in the direction of the negative blocks, starting with fear. I only realised very much later that I was working through the chakras one by one from the base up.

 

In taking my cue from my dreams, what I choose to focus on is always what my dreams choose to focus on, and I do see progress, as the focus (and the relevant chakra) changes over time though it always remains on the side of the blocks. So I could characterise my approach as a dreamwork method that has it's own rules for operating, rules which I fully accept.

[Bindi]

So last night I had a dream about people living in a place full of poop and vomit (which is how I sometimes categorize too many words, word vomit - heck too many words can also be diarrhea of the mouth to me). They thought it was good and normal, and the longer I stayed the more I wretched out. It was not what I would call pleasant experience, but it was still experience - which I prefer not to confuse with who I am.

(just a happy song)

 

I think this place full of poop and vomit is where many people live. Some just ignore it, some get depressed, some try to climb out, and some prefer to imagine figures of light.

Edited March 4, 2016 by Bindi

[Bindi]

But nor is it all doom and gloom.

 

After actively following this dreamwork method for a couple of years a friend of mine dreamed of a very large pot full of hot water, hot enough to cook  some chickens which he had put in there. He was stirring the pot with a long ladle, aware that the chickens would be nourishing food when they were cooked. 

 

To my mind this is a great image of the positive that seems to naturally fill the space created by removing the negative. 

[Karl]

But nor is it all doom and gloom.

 

After actively following this dreamwork method for a couple of years a friend of mine dreamed of a very large pot full of hot water, hot enough to cook  some chickens which he had put in there. He was stirring the pot with a long ladle, aware that the chickens would be nourishing food when they were cooked. 

 

To my mind this is a great image of the positive that seems to naturally fill the space created by removing the negative. 

 

That's what I used to do with time line therapy more or less. The idea being to remove the negative blockages and replace them with learnings.

 

The problem with this is that the integrations can remain poorly formed and the conclusions reached faulty. So, although the unwarranted negative emotion gets resolved this doesn't necessarily mean that the resolution is any better than the emotion that caused the blockage. In the end, to coin a phrase, you cannot polish a turd. So, in order to resolve unwarranted negative emotions correctly it's necessary to have first corrected any faulty thinking that led to the emotion being created. It isn't a matter of unblocking a U bend, it's a web of badly integrated concepts of which the emotion is the result. Clearing the emotion can leave the conceptual levels broken, but allow a permission to-for instance- guiltlessly pull the wings off flies.

[Bindi]

Fair point, dreams will work at rooting out all the mental and emotional connections to the basic fundamental blocks, they’re nothing if not thorough, they will work on one issue and the hundreds of related strands for literally years, cleared is thoroughly cleared.

Also in dreamwork, there is no replacing with any learning or emotion or thought unless directed by dreams themselves. 

[Karl]

Fair point, dreams will work at rooting out all the mental and emotional connections to the basic fundamental blocks, they’re nothing if not thorough, they will work on one issue and the hundreds of related strands for literally years, cleared is thoroughly cleared.

Also in dreamwork, there is no replacing with any learning or emotion or thought unless directed by dreams themselves. 

 

It's the conceptual formation and how accurate that is.

 

There is a tendency to think of knowledge as a group of low lying huts which are connected by pathways on the horizontal plane. So, that it is relatively easy to form new pathways, knock down huts or shift things around. However, knowledge is hierachical. It's like a skyscraper and every lower block supports the entire structure. The mind therefore has an inbuilt safety device if one tries to rearrange, change, or remove certain pieces. It simply transfers the previous errors in a new kind of way in order that the structure remains in relative equilibrium. Effectively it is only the very topmost layers that are disturbed, but it is the foundations that must be strengthened first in order that reason/logic cascades upwards from the very first primary concepts to the higher levels.

 

It isn't possible to start at the top and work down and to do so effectively. The hierarchy must be entirely rebuilt from the ground up and that means revisiting some basics that have been deliberately omitted by social engineering.

[Stosh]

It's the conceptual formation and how accurate that is. There is a tendency to think of knowledge as a group of low lying huts which are connected by pathways on the horizontal plane. So, that it is relatively easy to form new pathways, knock down huts or shift things around. However, knowledge is hierachical. It's like a skyscraper and every lower block supports the entire structure. The mind therefore has an inbuilt safety device if one tries to rearrange, change, or remove certain pieces. It simply transfers the previous errors in a new kind of way in order that the structure remains in relative equilibrium. Effectively it is only the very topmost layers that are disturbed, but it is the foundations that must be strengthened first in order that reason/logic cascades upwards from the very first primary concepts to the higher levels. It isn't possible to start at the top and work down and to do so effectively. The hierarchy must be entirely rebuilt from the ground up and that means revisiting some basics that have been deliberately omitted by social engineering.

Disagreed, recent studies suggest The retained recent experience,  filters back and rewrites over  the older connections , over time. Like the regeneration of bone. 

[Marblehead]

Disagreed, recent studies suggest The retained recent experience,  filters back and rewrites over  the older connections , over time. Like the regeneration of bone. 

This is true but only if the older ones are ignored from that point on. 

[Karl]

Disagreed, recent studies suggest The retained recent experience, filters back and rewrites over the older connections , over time. Like the regeneration of bone.

It's not the metaphysical connections I'm talking of, but the way in which we build perceptual experiences into ever more complex integrated concepts in an epistemological sense.

 

So, we must reverse down the chain of conceptual abstractions right back to the hard anchor of perceptual reality in order to know where we derived something, then build it all back up to eliminate the error.

 

Why did we gain inappropriate and unearned negative values ? We can only figure this out by digging right down to the base perceptual level and eradicating the epistemological error that occurred at that point.

 

If we only reverse sufficiently to eradicate the negative value, then the root is not cut and the error will re-occur as a variant. It won't be the exact same error, but a new offshoot.

Edited March 4, 2016 by Karl

[Stosh]

It's not the metaphysical connections I'm talking of, but the way in which we build perceptual experiences into ever more complex integrated concepts in an epistemological sense.

 

So, we must reverse down the chain of conceptual abstractions right back to the hard anchor of perceptual reality in order to know where we derived something, then build it all back up to eliminate the error.

 

Why did we gain inappropriate and unearned negative values ? We can only figure this out by digging right down to the base perceptual level and eradicating the epistemological error that occurred at that point.

 

If we only reverse sufficiently to eradicate the negative value, then the root is not cut and the error will re-occur as a variant. It won't be the exact same error, but a new offshoot.

I don't think I was speaking metaphysically , I'm just saying that our rationale, our emotional basis for behaviors , is rebuilt as we proceed through new experiences retroactively ,changing the mind structure which predicates our upcoming behaviors.

 

You don't have to regress to your childhood and root out 'negative attitudes"

you need to go forward and have healthy experiences which over-write problematic issues.

 

 I dont think reliving-remembering that event is ever going to fix your fear , it tends to grind it deeper, UNLESS you replace the emotions with new ones.

 

Lets say you're adverse to dogs after getting bitten,,

Being scared about being bitten more , is actually a rather rational response , considering that your personal evidence , (which you truly and actually have ,, rather than theorize about ), suggests that dog bites hurt.

Theres no actual  'epistemological error' the past here , to 'correct'.

You were bitten , it did hurt, you wish to avoid more of that. 

If theres a problematic aspect, its in the improper application of this learning,  in the present , or near future.

 

I seen  advertisement telling folks they can lose weight by eating,, or learn french while you sleep..etc, 

I admit ! it  certainly would be desirable not to ever have to apply discipline , not to address hard truths ,, and pretend one can sleep away their problems.

But that there, IMO,  is merely a tactic in procrastination which depends on magical events to perpetuate. 

 

Having a healthy attitude towards taking concrete steps in recovery , or towards ones ambitions , is of proven value. And it certainly doesnt do any good to say the world is bad , or ones mind is broken.

[Karl]

I don't think I was speaking metaphysically , I'm just saying that our rationale, our emotional basis for behaviors , is rebuilt as we proceed through new experiences retroactively ,changing the mind structure which predicates our upcoming behaviors.

 

You don't have to regress to your childhood and root out 'negative attitudes"

you need to go forward and have healthy experiences which over-write problematic issues.

 

 I dont think reliving-remembering that event is ever going to fix your fear , it tends to grind it deeper, UNLESS you replace the emotions with new ones.

 

Lets say you're adverse to dogs after getting bitten,,

Being scared about being bitten more , is actually a rather rational response , considering that your personal evidence , (which you truly and actually have ,, rather than theorize about ), suggests that dog bites hurt.

Theres no actual  'epistemological error' the past here , to 'correct'.

You were bitten , it did hurt, you wish to avoid more of that. 

If theres a problematic aspect, its in the improper application of this learning,  in the present , or near future.

 

I seen  advertisement telling folks they can lose weight by eating,, or learn french while you sleep..etc, 

I admit ! it  certainly would be desirable not to ever have to apply discipline , not to address hard truths ,, and pretend one can sleep away their problems.

But that there, IMO,  is merely a tactic in procrastination which depends on magical events to perpetuate. 

 

Having a healthy attitude towards taking concrete steps in recovery , or towards ones ambitions , is of proven value. And it certainly doesnt do any good to say the world is bad , or ones mind is broken.

 

We are talking about different things. I'm not talking about emotional responses, but negative values.

 

It is not necessary to regress to childhood to correct the errors, nor to work through every distinct point. It's only necessary to reach an overview of the interconnecting links and then decend from the higher abstraction to the perceptual level in as few a jumps as possible. It's like looking down a tree, there are lots of interconnections, but it becomes clear that the major branches are somewhat fewer and then the trunk and roots are more easily attained.

 

To sum up. An inappropriate emotional response may, or may not be part of the reaction to abstracted higher conception. This is immaterial. What is important is to remove negative values that were attained by a dishonest philosophy. These values are disconnected from reality, they are unearned because the concepts on which they are based are floating abstractions tied to nothing at all.

 

One of the commonest problems I discovered with small business start ups was a guilt around money. The way in which we tackled this-from an NLP perspective-was as equally bereft of logic as the clients own conceptions. We would rearrange their value tables in order that money attained a higher position, this was really a bit of a salesmans slight of hand. It meant the client never restructured their knowledge hierarchy, we effectively did a bit of trickery to transfer the guilt somewhere else. We didn't get rid of the guilt at all, we just manoeuvred it in order to get the client to perform in the way they told us they wanted-and we naturally wanted to do that in order to help them succeed.

 

If I had known then what I know today I wouldn't have carried out the therapy. The client became Aladdin and I became the genie with the three wishes. The wishes would give the client an immediate outcome, but not without causing damage somewhere else. Instead of being guilty about making money, they would become obsessive money makers, the guilt remained but was masked behind other drivers.

 

 

[Stosh]

We ARE talking about different things , youve described you ,creating a mental disassociation  in your customers mind.

What a person considers rational, and the emotional associations one has with a particular instance, ARE two different things.

 

But I still contend that over time, the new OK associations about making money will filter back,,if the new associations relate to the original reason for having guilt about what they were doing.

 

Your description of damage is where we differ.

Sometimes a person is considered perfect,or "healthy'  if they dont experience any sadness or guilt or fear. But those are indeed normal human emotional states.

 

Conscience , in and of itself , is not a malfunction. What you did was NOT therapy , my friend , at their behest , you fucked with their properly functioning minds so that they got a particular behavior pattern to emerge.

 

( You bought-in , to the idea , that if they had guilt about exploitation it was a 'flaw' to be corrected. 

When, what it really was , was an undesirable application of a normal moral paradigm in real time , and going forward, which positive feedback couldve fixed anyway. )

Edited March 5, 2016 by Stosh

[thelerner]

The poem in the OP made me think of this powerful one by Thich Nhat Hanh.  It's sad, filled with pain but at the same time, its real and points to a wider maybe inhuman or divine perspective.

 

Please Call Me by My True Name

..

I am a frog swimming happily

in the clear water of a pond.

And I am the grass-snake

that silently feeds itself on the frog.

 

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

my legs as thin a bamboo sticks.

And I am the arms merchant,

selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

 

I am the twelve-year-old girl,

refugee on a small boat,

who throws herself into the ocean

after being raped by a sea pirate.

 

And I am the pirate,

my heart not yet capable

of seeing and loving.

 

I am a member of the politburo,

with plenty of power in my hands.

And I am the man who has to pay

his "debt of blood" to, my people,

dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

 

My joy is like Spring, so warm

it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.

My pain is like a river of tears,

so vast it fills the four oceans.

 

Please call me by my true names,

..

Edited March 5, 2016 by thelerner

[Karl]

We ARE talking about different things , youve described you ,creating a mental disassociation  in your customers mind.

What a person considers rational, and the emotional associations one has with a particular instance, ARE two different things.

 

But I still contend that over time, the new OK associations about making money will filter back,,if the new associations relate to the original reason for having guilt about what they were doing.

 

Your description of damage is where we differ.

Sometimes a person is considered perfect,or "healthy'  if they dont experience any sadness or guilt or fear. But those are indeed normal human emotional states.

 

Conscience , in and of itself , is not a malfunction. What you did was NOT therapy , my friend , at their behest , you fucked with their properly functioning minds so that they got a particular behavior pattern to emerge.

 

( You bought-in , to the idea , that if they had guilt about exploitation it was a 'flaw' to be corrected. 

When, what it really was , was an undesirable application of a normal moral paradigm in real time , and going forward, which positive feedback couldve fixed anyway. )

 

We aren't yet on one datum here by the looks of things.

 

My contention is that ALL emotions are the result of concepts, be they conscious or sub conscious. They are predetermined value-judgements based on precepts. In effect they are a warning buzzer connected to a very complex and contextual set of conceptions. They aren't any kind of cognition, in and of themselves.

 

In the case of my client I did a simple bait and switch. Salesman use this technique all the time. Say the man felt that his highest value was family, followed by charity then at the bottom/or missing is money. It's pretty easy to show how having money could provide better support for the family and charities by putting it higher in the ranking. This, to some extent, does tie the concept of money with reality (the man has an existent family, money is an existent and so are the charities he gives to). The guilt of having money no longer bothers him. It works very well and I did this many times-on two occasions created millionaires from struggling businessmen.

 

The problem is that I don't know what else was changed. Maybe nothing. Maybe I just got him to see that money wasn't a floating concept attached to guilt, he could function with it as a force for good. So, thinking about it, perhaps it was a safe and effective way of re-jigging a long conceptual chain by shorting it to perceptual reality ?

[Marblehead]

The poem in the OP made me think of this powerful one by Thich Nhat Hanh.  It's sad, filled with pain but at the same time, its real and points to a wider maybe inhuman or divine perspective.

Yes, sad and filled with pain.  But I'm not any of them.  And neither are you (at least I hope not).

 

Granted that we should make our self aware of the negatives.  But we don't need to practice them in order to have empathy for those who are effected by them.  And we also should make our self aware of them so that we can prevent them from entering our life as well as preventing any of them that we are capable of preventing.

 

We don't have to know hate in order to know love.  All the dualities, they don't have to exist and most of the negative don't have to exist either.  (Remembering that shit happens, some negatives simply cannot be prevented.)

[Michael Sternbach]

That's what I used to do with time line therapy more or less. The idea being to remove the negative blockages and replace them with learnings.

 

The problem with this is that the integrations can remain poorly formed and the conclusions reached faulty. So, although the unwarranted negative emotion gets resolved this doesn't necessarily mean that the resolution is any better than the emotion that caused the blockage. In the end, to coin a phrase, you cannot polish a turd. So, in order to resolve unwarranted negative emotions correctly it's necessary to have first corrected any faulty thinking that led to the emotion being created. It isn't a matter of unblocking a U bend, it's a web of badly integrated concepts of which the emotion is the result. Clearing the emotion can leave the conceptual levels broken, but allow a permission to-for instance- guiltlessly pull the wings off flies.

 

I partially agree. Negative emotions are often the result of negative thinking and beliefs, and generally speaking, those must be dealt with in order to achieve truly constructive and lasting improvements, and not merely cover-ups.

[Michael Sternbach]

It's the conceptual formation and how accurate that is.

 

There is a tendency to think of knowledge as a group of low lying huts which are connected by pathways on the horizontal plane. So, that it is relatively easy to form new pathways, knock down huts or shift things around. However, knowledge is hierachical. It's like a skyscraper and every lower block supports the entire structure. The mind therefore has an inbuilt safety device if one tries to rearrange, change, or remove certain pieces. It simply transfers the previous errors in a new kind of way in order that the structure remains in relative equilibrium. Effectively it is only the very topmost layers that are disturbed, but it is the foundations that must be strengthened first in order that reason/logic cascades upwards from the very first primary concepts to the higher levels.

 

It isn't possible to start at the top and work down and to do so effectively. The hierarchy must be entirely rebuilt from the ground up and that means revisiting some basics that have been deliberately omitted by social engineering.

 

Good observation there as to the mind having "anti bodies" to fight back to alterations, even constructive ones.

[Michael Sternbach]

Disagreed, recent studies suggest The retained recent experience,  filters back and rewrites over  the older connections , over time. Like the regeneration of bone. 

 

Yes. Going back to the original creation of a certain belief is not always necessary or the most effective way. The problem is not so much why we believe a certain thing, rather that we believe it. And any detrimental belief can be changed - here and now.

[Michael Sternbach]

This is true but only if the older ones are ignored from that point on. 

 

There is a difference between "ignorance" in form of violently suppressing thoughts and emotions (which is never a good thing) and simply directing one's mind in a more positive direction. This way, denying negative beliefs further attention will weaken them, while their positive counterparts are being strengthened. However, we are treading a thin line here.

[Marblehead]

Yeah, I didn't do well with that one.  I'm sure I will do better the next time.

[Bindi]

Yes. Going back to the original creation of a certain belief is not always necessary or the most effective way. The problem is not so much why we believe a certain thing, rather that we believe it. And any detrimental belief can be changed - here and now.

 

There is certainly a belief that any detrimental belief can be changed here and now. In psychology it's most modern expression is cognitive behavioural therapy. Change the thoughts and the behaviours, and things will get better. And in the standard 6 month follow up of a short course of CBT the good effect is often still holding, so it is deemed successful and our government funds short course CBT treatment in the health care system.

 

When the cure unravels months later, you could always try electro-convulsive shock treatment, or pills, or both, though success rates vary. Or you could try to find the answer in a religion or a cult, especially one that suggests that detrimental beliefs can be changed here and now.

 

Sure, the people in need of therapy are the minority, but how they fare can be seen as the canary in the cage.