Tag: Psychology

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All experience is maya/projection

The external reality is a kind of mysterious screen,
On which any movie can be projected.
The source of everything we experience is projected from within.
Things like your possessions, your relationships: like your wife/husband, friends, your children, things you love, stuff you are attached to, your home, are all projections.
So it is possible that a person living in a jungle in Africa may be feeling/thinking/experiencing in a similar way as a person living in the heart of Tokyo city.
Even though every single thing in their environment is different, a similar reality may be experienced.

A romantic essentially feels the same, no matter how he paints the enactment of that feeling.
The sexual lust feels the same, no matter whom it is projected on.
Any place could become your home, if you shift your projection to the new place.
The capacity to shift projections is one of the greatest powers.
All object essences are projected.
Believing that objects have inherent essences contained in them separate from you, is the biggest illusion.

If you are unable to shift your projections, then you stay attached to the original time they were flashed into you.
Attachment itself happens when there isn’t enough power to shift the projection.
It then stays with the person we first projected that feeling on.
That is what is generally called programming/conditioning.

Imagine if an old movie is remade with today’s technology and actors, everything is different, but the movie essence is the same.
Only the props have changed, the same drama and relationship is playing out.
So the implications of this are that:
# 2 people could be living just next to each other, but living in totally different experience worlds.
# Also, 2 people from completely different physical environments could be living a similar experience.

In your internal space, the projection potential is either present or absent.
And when you have it, you can project it on anything or anyone you want.
Its like when you have the love potential in your heart, and it is unblocked, it can be projected on anybody or anything.
You can keep the enactment of the projection at the fantasy level alone, or bring it down to the physical world, if such a choice/power is available to you.

Drugs like marijuana can temporarily vastly enhance your energy/power to access projection potentials and project.
Like I could ask you to look at a tree in front of you, and tell you to love the tree with all of your heart OR hate the tree with all of your heart, and you can experience both directly for yourself.
You can clearly witness how you modulate your experience with your intention.
You can even do this exercise when sober.
The drug only vastly enhances the power of that projection ability because it amps the available energy.
This is the basis of how on LSD, many people report to see the whole world reflected in an ordinary object like an ashtray.

It is like how a newborn experiences the world.
Every object in his/her environment takes on numinous projections.
Really, the experiences we have later in life are pale shadows of the peak experiences that were had at that time.
Those experiences set the tone for our relationship to the world itself.

From this level, there is no such dichotomy between the imagined and what is called real.
Every single thing you experience is real.
There is no such thing really called the physical world.
Everything that you experience is projected.
What a fantastic ride/illusion it is!, to believe the physical world exists independent from you.
It is a mind-boggling magical spell.
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Individual and Society

I will be using some Jungian terms here.
Individual = Personal conscious = Individual light.
For this, there is a corresponding: Personal unconscious = Individual shadow.

Similarly,
There is:
Society = Collective conscious = Collective light.
And a corresponding: Collective unconscious = Collective shadow.
Another related aspect is – Collective karma and Personal karma.

Each culture/societal organization operates with a certain gravity.
Like how the gravity of the nucleus of the atom holds together the orbital electrons.

The actors, celebrities, stars, sportsmen, iconic figures, business magnates, politicians, etc. i.e. all of which that are considered, deemed, and celebrated as success, form the nucleus of society.
The regular consumers and citizens of society, go around this nucleus like electrons.
If there is no other powerful gravity center influencing them, then the society gravity controls their desires/emotions/actions, and pulls them towards its nucleus.
That is why, the driving force of most people is to rise the pyramid of status and popularity, to reach the nucleus of society, where instead of them revolving around society, society revolves around them, and they are in the power position.
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Decision making

Everything starts with acceptance.
Acceptance is the willingness to see things as they are.
It is the precursor and prerequisite for total seeing.
Acceptance is the precondition for “Action”.
Without acceptance your action is not a true action but a “Reaction”.

Then once the whole picture is seen for what it is,
Assessment and Evaluation can happen.
Possibilities and Probabilities can be investigated.
After covering all the realistic ones,
Even wild ones can be brainstormed and fantasized.

Then decisions can be made,
Based on what looks/feels best to you.
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A fantasy of sex and union

Why can’t all women fully surrender,
And receive sex from all men unconditionally? freely?
Why can’t all men fully surrender,
And give sex to all women unconditionally? freely?
With no judgments, rules, restrictions, laws, and boundaries?
Why can’t we just live in an “endless orgy” until we leave this plane?
Why can’t everything just have sex with everything else all the time?
Why can’t there be limitless pleasure of libido?
Instead of it happening just for seconds at a time as the orgasm?
Why can’t everyone just be in an eternal orgasm?
Why can’t all control just end?
Why can’t everything just merge and flow as one?
With no concept of possession?
Where all “desire” is instantly received everywhere and instantly gratified?
Why can’t there be free-love everywhere?
Why can’t there be no disease, suffering, pain, resistance etc.?
Wish there was no such thing as self-preservation,
And its consequent emotions of disgust/fear/threat.
Wish everything just mingled into one flow/dance.
With the cohesion of water, and like a single emerging grand tapestry.
Where “everyone and everything” transforms “everyone and everything”.
And where everyone is part of the hologram, but identified with the whole hologram and its total play.
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Depression seen from a deeper place

fathermothershadow

When we are young, the conditions of love are told to us.
Even if they are not explicitly told, we can easily intuit it.
We look at the environment around us with the question:
“What must I be? What must I do? What must I become?” to get the love I desire?

Love is first for survival, because if nobody loves you, you will not survive.
Even if you were unwanted and parents took care of you just as a duty, that is still because they love to be morally right/socially right etc.
So love is required to survive when you are dependent esp.

After the survival stage is passed, love is still needed for enrichment, growth, expansion, flourishing, prosperity, real wealth, and so on.

So coming back to the topic, depression is from the loss of hope, that you can ever be/become/do something that will get you love.
Thereafter the person just lives hand to mouth existentially.
Some force in him keeps living mechanically like clockwork in cycles, but he loses all hope and falls into grief.
All his mental energies fall like a dead weight on him, like a cross which he carries and walks in despair, in the endless desert.
He becomes totally apathetic, and wishes for deep sleep to carry him away to non-existence permanently.
His daily life with this cross on his back then resembles the ‘Sisyphus myth’ i.e. rolling a rock up the hill only to watch it roll down again and repeat.

What I have described is only the surface. Let’s dive further in.
From the archetypal perspective, the world is your projection.
Everything including love shines forth from you, from the source.
If you give all of your projections away to impossible ideals, depression is inevitable.
How does this happen?
It could be a combination of your own innate tendency to do that (hyper-ambition) coupled with being born in a family (which you might have attracted from a tendency match).
So in such a case, usually the family i.e. parents, siblings etc. feel they are profoundly unworthy and undeserving, and each of them have an impossible ideal which receives their light.
As a result of that, they are always in the dark shadow of undeservingness, poverty, desperation, grief, unworthiness, and deep-ambivalence of hope.
So now when you are born, you osmotically pick up the ideals from them which may go unconscious in you by the time you grow up.
But it is those ideals that are getting your light, which are unconscious to you.
In your conscious experience, you may only see meaninglessness, darkness, apathy, disinterest, futility, despair, dim view about the future etc.
But the far away faint ideal receives all of your light.
It is like how when we have a full solar eclipse, that shadow blocks off a large portion of the earth.
In this case, the ideal that you have given away your love to, casts a huge shadow on you, turning you into its prisoner in deprivation.
This is the abstract description of the situation of depression.

I’ll give an example.
Say you look at magazine images of male and female models, and compare yourself to them.
If you project all of your love on them, and believe only they deserve love, and if you are far from that image, then to that extent you will fall in the shadow of hate.
You see them 100 times more clearly than you see yourself because they have received all of your light, like the other side of the moon in the eclipse.
Loving others more than loving yourself, or co-dependence is likely, because the other has been projected as lovely, which means in relativity to that, you will definitely fall in the shadow of hate.
Hate is darkness, which means literally, you will be mostly unconscious to yourself.
Now many different actions are possible from this condition:
* You can try to become like them, give all of your energies to that, depending on the level of shame you feel and the level of idealization you have projected on them. This will not give you depression, but will make you pursue the ideal like your life depends on it.
* If you realize it is impossible for you to be like them, then you lose hope of ever becoming something worthy of love, and fall into hopelessness, despair, unworthiness, and the smoke of grief we call depression.
For some people these ideals are more literal = like money, body, possessions, achievement etc.
But often, these ideals are more obscure, elusive, and contradict each other.
The contradiction is what makes the depression impossible to overcome on its terms.
Like what if the one who is loved has to be:
“Extraordinary enough to be admired, adored, worshipped.
But ordinary enough to be loved, included, and belong.”
So the 2 conditions above are contradictory almost.
So you could have tons of such impossible ideals.
Then they will definitely paralyze you, take away all of your light, and leave you with nothing, in the shadow.
I see this as one of the chief deeper causes of depression.
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The source of joy

The source of your joy is within yourself.
It can just be brought forth, if you feel you have permission/allowance from others and yourself(internalization of caregiver projected approved images), to be that way.
If you cannot allow yourself or give yourself permission to be like those who are joyful, then you choose between 2 possible responses:
# To resent, hate them, and bring them down
# To get inspired, be drawn to them, and uplift yourself.
In both cases, there is a relationship, between you and the other, be it positive relationship or negative relationship.
The way to transcend needing this relationship at all, is to find out what prevents you from being like them, and investigate that fully.
Those others who are a certain way, which you will not give yourself permission to be, ARE your own disowned potentials.
So then, naturally you will have a positive or negative relationship with your disowned potentials.
You cannot recognize someone unless you can perceive the potential they represent.
All recognition is that.
Look at all the people you hate.
Are they not essentially representing potentials that you will not allow in yourself?
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Placebo vs Nocebo

placebonocebo

Placebo —-vs—- Nocebo
It looks like:
Positive imagination/expectation —-vs—- Negative imagination/expectation

Positive and negative imagination tend to spiral.
* When you life has been going well with better and better things, positive imagination spirals.
* And when your life has loss after loss, negative imagination starts to spiral.

It seems, life is like an indifferent movie, that keeps playing, and you sit in the theater seat and watch it unfold.
* If great things happen, you start to see positive future visions (+ve imagination).
* If bad things happen in the movie, you start to dread the future scenes (-ve imagination).
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Desire is what makes the potential for pleasure possible.

Desire = Potential for Pleasure.
No Desire = No pleasure.
Attachment to pleasure = Attachment to desire.
Attachment to pleasure = Attachment to denying oneself -> by projecting a part/possibility of yourself out on someone or something.
Every desire gives your power away.
Greater the desire = Greater is the power given away.
So ironically, your capacity for pleasure is totally related to your capacity to deny oneself and project outward.

The desiring process is as follows:
First divide/compartmentalize/multiplitize yourself -> then deny yourself of some divided parts and project them into the world -> play complex games to seek for those divided parts (in such a way that you will never get it completely and you can keep playing).
So that inconsistent getting and losing of the desired, keeps you hooked and playing the game round and round.
Greater the inconsistency and the sharper the reward = Greater is the addiction and enslavement (that is why the more addictive drugs have the greatest and shortest possible highs with the greatest drops).
If you want greatest pleasure, then you will seek the most unattainable and impossible.
Because then you can enjoy the greatest possibility for pleasure at the time of reunion.

It is a game of hide and seek.
Game rules: Separate yourself into many fragments, and ask all the fragments to hide into the world, and then play the game of hide and seek in the world to RE-MEMBER yourself back.
Every reunion brings great pleasure.
The soul splits itself into a million fragments(like a big bang event) and then takes on a hero fragment/avatar who searches and unites himself with all the other fragments.
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All identity is relational

The self-other is like a single magnet with its 2 poles arising together.
In our outer life:
* The self is implicit and the other is explicit.
* The self is the background and the other is the foreground.
And this seeing can be reversed too, as is done during deep introspection and contemplation.
* The other can be made the background, and the self can be made the foreground.
* Similarly the other can be made implicit and the self can be made explicit.
So the picture is the same in both cases, but depending on where you focus, the other pole get blurred out. 

The image below shows the 2 possibilities of focus:
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So the self-other arise together mutually and interdependently.
* So whenever there is a self, there is an other.
* And whenever there is an other, there is surely a self.

The sun-signs zodiac literature classifies the signs into 3 kinds of identity natures:
* Cardinal = Identities that have a firm foundation and keep expanding (Rajasic) = mind dominant = positive charge (in the magnetic field) = Symbolizes a Volcano = Conscious mind = Dynamic, Action-oriented, Initiating.
* Fixed = Identities that are fixed (Tamasic) = body dominant = neutral charge = Symbolizes a Mountain = Unconscious mind = Stable, Determined, Unyielding.
* Mutable = Identities that are constantly changing (Sattvic) = soul dominant = negative charge = Symbolizes a New Born baby = Superconscious mind = Subtle, Transformative, Reflective.
There is a lot of deep literature on this subject, I have really said very little above.
But this will help me to speak about certain other points.

You can either change yourself to fit more and more into the world or change the world to fit more and more into your self-conception.
* The cardinal identity type will only associate with things people places concepts etc., that expand its own identity structure. And it will avoid all the negative forces.
* The fixed identity type will try to change the other and the whole world to validate its own attachment to a fixed way of perceiving itself.
So the fixed type is in a way against both positive and negative forces because it wants to maintain the same perception.
* The mutable type will keep adapting and changing/shape-shifting itself into different roles and identities in the world like an explorer. It changes itself to explore the different dimensions of the world, rather than change the world per se.
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Charter of principles for relationships

PRINCIPLES:
***************
Make: “Compulsion” -> “Choice”
Realize: Your compulsions are your unconscious choices.
Become: “Conscious” of “Expectations”
Understand that: “Unsaid Expectations” are the root cause of ruin in all relationships.
{ Work towards: “Communicating expectations” to others, and “RESOLVING” conflicts.
Insist on: Reaching an Agreement. }
Remember to: “Do what you are doing willingly, and don’t do anything that you are not willing to do.”
Remember: All anger is from expectation (said or unsaid).
Replace: “Expectation” with “Truth”
Do things: “Willingly” without “Expectation”
Remember: If you do things willingly from your own desire, it maximizes your intrinsic happiness. The happiness from relationships is only the icing on the cake of your own intrinsic happiness. The icing cannot substitute for the cake, nor will it compensate much for a bitter tasting cake.
The goal is: “Unity in diversity”, not “Unity of sameness”
Focus on: Making “systems” for everyone, that also “maximize” the “freedom of individuals.”
Let: Each person freely and naturally give to others, what they themselves naturally value, without expectation.
Orient your: Life around your values.
Focus on: Discovering your values, and then orient and shape your life around them.
Do not: avoid conflict. Use each conflict to clarify/illuminate/communicate expectations and arrive at a mutual understanding and agreement/validation.
The goal is: Harmonic existence, with maximum freedom (which allows and gives space for the growth and flowering of the individual).