Reverse Thinking

A God of passion

Wow! Yesterday's blog - 'Why Religion Doesn't Work For Me' - drew the biggest postbag I have ever received for any of my articles. Some were shocked by the picture, some liked the way I tried to show how religion can be anti-life, others disliked my criticisms of (some) religious people, others appreciated that, while I was not insulting Christ, Buddha or Mohammed, I was drawing attention to the mystery that surrounds what they actually taught. One reader said she would reserve judgment on my 'provocative' comments until she had read what I had to say about my suggested alternative to the religious life saying, ominously, that 'it had better be good...'

So here goes.

The divine would not exist if there were no human beings

Start with the assumption that whatever is holy, sacred or God-like needs human beings to make it so. In other words - we are the channels for the divine. Whatever God is (and I believe she is just energy) she needs human beings to work her magic. So it is human beings that have created great spiritual teachings, works of art, just and compassionate societies, the cultivation of nature, works of art, science, and so on. The divine cannot exist without the human. You could even argue that that is what we humans are for.

So we don't really need to think about God to become divine and we don't need religion for that purpose either.

All we need to do is follow our personal genius and make the most of the gifts we have. Living by the truth, contributing to the community, and nurturing others are also vital if we want to become truly human, and thus divine.

There is no ONE God or one way to God

Next it follows that, if we are to become all that we can be, we need to explore the often contradictory aspects of what it means to be human. That may mean engaging in practices that some religious people dismiss as 'evil' - experimenting with sex, creating wealth, fighting the Pharisees, exercising aggression, being a Good Samaritan, taking mind-expanding drugs (that does not mean misusing them), and making/enjoying art. Sometimes, too, we need to be 'selfish' in pursuing what is right for us when others try to stop us. It was partly for that reason that Buddha, Christ and Mohammed all went into exile for a time.

The body is sacred

The third observation I want to make is that spiritual people are passionate, emotional, often angry people. They work through Bodymind rather than trying to deny it. Many Buddhists, Christians and Muslims are ascetics who claim that God wants us to suppress our desires. I don't agree with that. If you read the sayings of the Buddha, the Gospels and the Koran, they all say that we need to channel the passions, not deny them. Without them we can do nothing god-like.

God is a tease

The last attitude I want to recommend works like this: there is no final perfection or salvation, there is only endless becoming. The divine energy expresses itself through change, surprise, creativity, playfulness and joy. The Bisexual Hindu Goddess Shiva is always shown dancing. S/he also has many arms - two are held in prayer, one conjoins silence, another encourages singing, one points upward (heaven), one downward (hell), and so on (the picture shows a dance to Shiva). The Hindu images of Shiva imply that God-in-Man (or Son of Man if you prefer the Hebrew version) is constantly expressing the dance of life - playfully, comically, teasingly, comically. Knowing that there is no final truth and finding it amusing when people think there is.

Shiva gives us some clues for deciding whether we are living in the divine or not:

• We accept that we are contradictory
• We express all contradictions
• We are playful
• We have a wonderful inner joy
• We know that there is no final truth
• We take nothing really seriously
• We toy with experiences, as does God
• We approach everything we do as a kind of game
• We dance, laugh, cry - often

In my next post I will provide the final - and most important - thing that we have do if we want to become god-like. And that is to practice Awareness.

    "Jesus' ministry was clearly defined, and the alternatives to the illusion and temptations of the desert were spelled out. A choice was made - life abundant, full, and free for all. Make no mistake about it, the day that choice was made, Jesus became suspect. That day in the temple he sealed the fate already prepared for him. How was the world to understand one who rejected an offer of power and control?"

    Joan Campbell

Image of Shiva dancing by sprungli

Why religion doesn't work for me

I have wasted most of my life trying to be religious. Here's what it got me:

Worrying about the life to come rather than the one I have right here.

Despising my body, my emotions, and my mistakes, for being human-all-too-human.

Thinking that going to a temple discharged me from working on myself.

Obsessing that if I prayed or meditated hard enough I would eventually 'get it'.

Giving away my power to priests, psychics and gurus.

Falling in with the judgment that anger, sex, ambition and pleasure are evil.

Thinking that being moral and being spiritual are the same thing.

Wasting time trying to work out what Buddha, Krishna, Christ and Mohammed really meant (if their immediate hearers didn't get it then how can we?).

Ignoring the fact that many religious are smug, elitist, judgmental, intolerant.......

Looking the other way when evil was at work and explaining it away with ideas like 'karma', 'sin', 'God's will', 'heresy', 'holy martyrs'.

Missing the the fact that superstitions are obsessive-compulsive disorders. The anxiety-averting idea that, if you repeat the rosary, the chant, the sacrifice, enough times then you will stave off misfortune and become worthy of salvation.

Excusing the fact that many people acclaimed as divinely inspired are in fact egomaniacs.

Riding over the fact that most psychic predictions and prophecies are either wrong or so vague that they could mean anything.

Trying to be a 'good' person and ending up being a nonentity.

Torturing myself that I never seemed to be any nearer to God.

Next up I will be writing about the alternative spiritual life I recommend. But please don't read it if you are looking for the meaning of life. Seems to me that the religious sickness depends precisely on asking yourself unanswerable questions.

      "Once people find God they cease to be human beings".

       Erich Maria Remarque.

Image By † Jimmy MacDonald †

Good and faithful slaves

On Friday I wrote about how obedience can kill. I should really have used the word 'slavery' as there is nothing wrong with obedience in itself (as people in hospital who broke the Highway code will tell you).

Slavery means doing what you are told without courage, without emotion and without reflection. If you are a slave you have become an automaton.

• Work-slaves stay in jobs they hate
• Timid slaves stay in relationships they have outgrown
• Grown-up slaves do what their parents tell them
• Success slaves bully their children
• Drug slaves do it because they can't imagine a life without it
• Intellectual slaves believe what scientists, lawyers,    politicians, academics and newspaper editors tell them to think
• Fashion slaves want to be one of the crowd
• Murderous slaves do it because they have their orders in writing

Wilhelm Reich - one of the grandfathers of Reverse Therapy - explains how humans become slaves in Listen Little Man. Because they are afraid of their own passion, of life itself. They would rather remain small because it's safer in crowds. But secretly they envy people who have broken free. And when that happens, Reich tells us, slavery can become spiteful, cynical, vindictive.

Now would you rather be a slave or would you rather be Spartacus?

If you want to be Spartacus then take a risk right now! Say it! Do it. Try it!

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we’re liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.

Marianne Williamson

First image by dailyinvention

Murderous obedience

In the 1960s Stanley Milgram was reading about the trial of Adolf Eichmann - the SS Colonel who participated in The Final Solution during World War II. He was struck by the fact that, like many war criminals, Eichmann relied repeatedly on the defence that he was 'only obeying orders' and that he did not have a choice on whether or not to sign the orders that transported Jews to the death camps.

So what, thought Milgram, if Eichmann was telling the truth? That would mean that anyone would do what Eichmann did if they were given an order to do it. Even if that meant sending someone to their death.

So Milgram designed an experiment to test whether that could happen. It turned into the most famous experiment in the entire history of Psychology. The experiment would be banned now - which is why most Psychological experiments nowadays are so boring.

Here's what he set up:

People were recruited from newspaper ads and paid large fees for participating in what they were told was an important scientific experiment on human learning. They were paired up with a 'student' (in fact an actor who pretended to be a poor learner) who was strapped in a chair with (false) electrodes strapped to his arms (see picture below).

The 'teacher' was taken to a room next door and handed over to a 'Psychologist' in a white coat and clip-board who gave them their orders. They were told that the student had to learn a list of words. Each time he got one wrong the teacher was to deliver an electric shock, starting at 15 volts and going all the way up to 450 volts. As each shock was delivered the actor-student would groan, cry, plead, yell, beg for mercy. As his sufferings went on a minority of 'teachers' would question whether it was right to deliver heavier shocks and were given the stock answer - that they had no choice but to keep going.

Before you read on - ask yourself how what percentage of people do you think would go all the way on to to 300 volts - enough to inflict severe pain (at which point the teacher could hear the 'student' pounding on the wall begging them to stop)? 

The actual figure was 100%.  And - still more disturbing - 65% of all people tested went all the way up to 450 volts - enough to kill some people even though the 'student' was unconscious and no longer answering questions.

Meaning that people (that's you and me) are capable of injuring or killing their fellow human beings because they are paid to do so, told to do so and because they think they are doing it all in the cause of 'progress'. Exactly like Eichmann.

Unless you are a Psychopath you will not be indifferent to suffering. You will, in most circumstances, be unwilling to inflict it. That is because you have built-in empathy - the ability to feel other peoples' pain. You also come ready-made with emotions that drive you towards compassion.

The fact that Bodymind connections to our fellow human beings can be over-ridden by blind obedience tells a lot about why we become dysfunctional.

In my next post on Monday I will be writing about how the habit of obedience can make you trapped, unhappy, depressed and ill. How it can damage your work and the relationship you have with yourself and those you love. And how you can reverse that.

First Image By Ed_45

Why releasing anger is better than controlling it

The myth about anger

A while ago the BBC carried an item about the effects of anger on health.

The argument runs that people who control their anger rather than expressing it are healthier.

This is a common myth and I want to explain why it is wrong. And why expressing your anger is actually better for you in the long run, provided you do it in the right way.

Bodymind creates anger for a purpose

The human body is designed to produce anger and it uses a very sophisticated circuitry to do that - running from the thalamus, through the amygdala and then on through the adrenal glands and the sympathetic nervous system. So we know anger must have an important purpose. Dismissing an emotion like that as harmful or 'bad for your health' is just disrespectful.

The purpose of anger is to ensure that you are treated with respect, protected against exploitation, have your wishes taken seriously, or to cue you towards self-defence.

Your righteous anger

Without anger we would be defenceless against attacks on ourselves or the people we love, against exploitation, cruelty and injustice. What keeps Aung San Suu Kyi fighting against the military in Burma? Her desire to keep her father's dreams for Burma alive are important, to be sure. But I suspect that her passion is what keeps her going when others would just give up.

Even Christ was furious when he noticed the wide boys outside the Temple degrading the holy places. All prophets, all heroes, all crusaders against injustice (think Martin Luther King) have possessed that righteous anger. But they also knew how to channel it in the right direction.

Misusing anger

In Reverse Therapy I notice that people who don't do anger well make three common mistakes:

1. They bottle up anger and later on, once the pot is filled to boiling point, they explode in uncontrollable rage (which creates stress and damages your health)
2. They express anger but don't follow up and ensure that they get what they need (for example, you yell at your daughter for not keeping her room tidy but you don't enforce the rule - so it happens all over again).
3. When they express anger they shout, swear, call names, blame, scream and try to make the other person feel as bad as possible.

The reason for these mistakes is simply lack of education in emotional intelligence. We are told as children that anger is 'bad', 'destructive', 'self-indulgent', etc. So we aren't given permission to explore the emotion in more depth. At the same time we watch the adults around us having tantrums and so we conclude that anger must, indeed, be an evil thing.

Anger is a hot emotion

Anger is a 'hot' emotion. Meaning that most people feel it very powerfully in Bodymind, rising up and demanding fast expression. But that doesn't mean your body wants you to go into a rage. What it means instead is that your body is warning you that something deeply important to you or the people you love is at stake and you need to speak up quickly.

Releasing anger

You can use the Reverse Assertiveness process to channel your anger into words that get people listening to you and ensure that you actually get what you want. Instead of just blowing off.

Just as important as using a formula like this is to practice expressing your disatisfaction every day. No matter how trivial your complaint is, make your likes and dislikes known. If you get them out at an early stage then they you can stay calm and you won't get angry. Nor will you explode in rage. Or get stressed. Or unwell.

One more point. Anger can be divine. Especially when you speak up for the defenceless, the innocent, for those who live in hunger, terror, torture and exile.

If you agree with me that Aung San Suu Kyi's cause is just then please sign the petition calling for her release here.

        "It is wise to direct your anger towards problems - not people. To focus your energies on answers - not excuses."

        W. A. Ward.

Jealous? Get over it.

How jealousy works

In my last blog - Suspicious minds - we looked at what jealousy actually is. It's not an emotion but an obsession that's created by ineffective thinking. Now we want to know how to reverse out of it.

Reverse thinking teaches us that the first step is to recognise that your mind is in fact playing tricks on you. It's doing that because it doesn't believe you are worthy of being loved.

It may be that this is your first serious love affair so your personal Headmind doesn't have any experience of love. It thinks that it is too good to last and must be a delusion.

Or maybe your Head thinks that no one could possibly love a geek like you. So it tries to protect you by finding 'evidence' that your partner is unreliable.

Another possibility is that Headmind sees other men/women as more powerful, attractive, confident than you are - so every person who talks to your partner is bound to take him/her away from you.

But the worse thing your jealous head does to you is to make up movies of your partner being ravished by someone else. Those movies can feel so horrific that you assume they must be true.

Reversing out of jealousy

Now, I am assuming that you know, at some level, that your partner is trustworthy. The s/he has told you often enough that s/he is interested only in being with you. That s/he gets exasperated when you keep bringing up your suspicions over and over again. You may even have been told that you need to get a grip or your relationship will soon be over. If that is NOT the case you are probably not jealous but scared because your partner has let you down in the past. If that is so then this advice will not apply to you.

Once you accept that Headmind has got it all wrong then you can use the worry treatment on your jealous thoughts.

When you use that process one of the things you are asked to do is to switch out of Headmind and connect instead to the emotional intelligence of Bodymind. Go into your body and recall a moment when you and your partner were sharing love (it helps to pick an intimate moment when you were both sexed up). Register the emotions you are reliving. Sense them in each part of your body and register how that feels for you. Do this often so that you can get the same state back automatically (an upcoming article will describe how you can do this in more depth).

Each time you catch yourself going into the jealous mind-state and listening to the 'script' that Headmind has prepared for you then you press 'stop' on the head-tape recorder and go back into the state you created in the previous paragraph. Stay there for a moment and then immediately get on with a more worthwhile activity that occupies your full attention. It is vital that you don't give any head-room to jealousy. Once Headmind realises that you are not listening any more it will get bored and give up.

If this doesn't work then there is another technique you can use which utilises Bodymind learning states. I will describe that in my next article.

            'In jealousy there is more of self-love than love.'

            La Rochefoucauld

Suspicious minds

I have been asked by one reader to write something about Jealousy.

This is a problem I know well because, years ago, before I married, I would get jealous whenever my fiancee spoke to another man. I would even get jealous just imagining she was doing that. The problem got so bad I was told that we wouldn't be getting married at all unless I learned to control it. Eventually, I did learn to do that. But I remember thinking at the time that is was crazy, out of control, destructive behavior on my part.

First, we need to make some distinctions.

Jealousy is not hurt. Hurt is the emotion you get when your partner flirts with other people, neglects you, or is unfaithful to you. When you get hurt you will feel scared and angry. At such moments you need to do some straight talking and either leave the relationship or demand proof that your partner is committed to you. (Unless, of course, you and your partner have given each other leave to have other relationships).

Jealousy is not envy. Envy is a mind-state based on powerlessness and competition. You imagine that others are happier, luckier, better than you are. Because you secretly think you are a loser, you feel frustrated that you can't do anything about that. Envious people are usually bitter people who try to blacken other peoples' achievements. I will write more about this in another blog.

Jealousy is partly based on possessiveness (the two frequently go together). Possessive people try to control their partner, putting restrictions on where they can go and who they go with. They also spend a lot of time checking up on, and cross-questioning, their 'loved one' about where they have been. Possessiveness is based on low self-worth: you get an ego-boost from controlling someone you consider more attractive than you are.

If you are jealous then you get angry when your partner gets attention from other people. It's as simple as that. It makes no difference whether the other party has sexual intentions or not - either way, you still get upset. Some jealous people get aggressive with their partner or the other party, while some just sulk, smouldering away and exacting revenge later on. A few try to conceal it, realising that jealousy is ignoble, but their rage festers and poisons the relationship.

Jealousy is based partly on insecurity, partly on imagination, and partly on disbelief.

Jealous people are often inexperienced in relationships. Either that, or they were hurt by a previous relationship. The result is they live in fear that their partner will abandon them at any moment.

Jealous people have uncontrolled imaginations. They 'see' their partner flirting, getting turned on, or having sex with the other party. In fact they 'see' it so vividly they assume it must have happened. It is strange how many people who are compulsively unfaithful are also the most jealous. In fact, what they 'see' is their partner doing what they do (or want to do) themselves. This hidden desire adds to the 'reality' of what they think they are seeing.

Jealous people do not believe they are worthy of their partner. They cannot believe their partner has chosen to be with an ugly, poor, boring, too young/too old, uninteresting failure such as they are. They put the partner on a pedestal, seeing him/her as more fascinating, beautiful, and attractive than they really are. Consequently, they do not trust what is going to happen when their partner is approached by a competitor.

Next up, I will be writing about how to solve these problems.

James Stewart

James Stewart was born 100 years ago next month.

Some people think It's a Wonderful Life is his greatest film but, as good as that film is, my favorite is still Harvey.

Harvey is a dark but also a very funny film. Stewart plays Elwood P. Dowd, an amiable drunk who spends all his time with Harvey, a 6-foot tall white rabbit.

The satire is that while everybody else in town is worrying about being 'normal' Elwood is the only person who is actually happy. In fact, he is the most popular person in town because he is interested in people, rather than what they pretend to be.

Predictably, some folk conclude that he must be insane. When he keeps trying to introduce them to Harvey, telling them that he is a Pooka - a fairy spirit who takes the form of a rabbit, and who only he can see, his family try to commit him to the asylum.

My favorite quote from the comes from the scene in which Elwood is interviewed by the psychiatrist:

“I have wrestled with reality for 35 years and I am happy to report that I finally won out over it."

Fortunately, the psychiatrist proves to be even more screwed up than the rest and Elwood is set free.

If you want to see a trailer for the film then use this link here.