Male vs. Female: Compliments and Support

[Angela]

Originally Posted by The Cloud

How come every answer only leads to more questions?

Yes, that is my experience of life, too -- the more I learn the less I know.

But I have nobody to really implicitly show me how to live that way. It's one thing to have a blueprint, and another thing entirely to build a house.

I think everyone in your life is giving you feedback about how to build your house, all the time. But you, you lucky devil, have 100% say-so on what kind of house you're going to create for yourself. It can be a normal, from-blueprints house, or you can go all Frank Gehry and build your life to be a bold, swooping, hitherto unknown behemoth of joy, abundance, love, and power. Or you could have no house at all, like Siddartha. Nobody but you gets to choose how to build your life, not your mom or step-dad, not your government, not nobody. Just you. Isn't that wonderful?

Creation -- the great joy of life!

[The Cloud]

I figured out another piece of the puzzle today. It can be summed up in the words "I can't be happy." In a few more words, it's "As long as everybody is miserable, I can't be happy." According to this belief, most everybody is miserable and incapable of pulling themselves out of that misery. The whole world is sitting in a cesspool because it's just too stupid to look for a way out. People are ignorant, worthless scum, and I have to spend all my time trying to get their lead bottoms up out of the stinking hole that they're sitting in. Some people are smart enough to figure this out, but most of them are too stupid to even think that it's possible. And I can't be happy as long as anyone else isn't.

But then I thought about it, and I realized that I can't help these people. They are worthless by their own choice, and I can't help them against that. I'm free of them, because I can't help them. I can't stop them from being miserable, I can't stop them from wasting or destroying their lives, I can't make them realize that they deserve happiness and should search for a way to have it. I CAN'T! I'm utterly powerless, and no longer need to worry about the people I know that are throwing away their lives.

I know this isn't all there is. There's more that I need to figure out before I can truly and honestly live and believe the way I want to. But knowing where I am powerless is a big step in getting there.

(And for those of you that think that I'm being negative, look at the world around you. A lot of people ARE stupid. But they are stupid by choice. They are powerful in that they can be as stupid and miserable as they could ever want to be in their wildest dreams. And I have no power against their power to choose their own lives.)

*(upon further consideration, stupid probably isn't the best word. Confused, maybe? I dunno. Whatever it is, it's what they choose to be.)

[The Cloud]

So I've discovered that I have created in myself an anti-me; a make-believe entity that is always opposed to whatever I'm doing in the moment. When I was little, I was often opposed in the things that I wanted and told that they weren't important or necessary. So I decided to create an entity in my head that fulfilled that belief, assuming that no matter what I did the issue would come up anyways so I may as well assume that it's going to be there before I even do anything. Opposition became an inherent part of anything that I did. No matter what, there was always somebody to fight it; I made sure of that.

I actually think that might be just a generalized response, for just about anybody. We make an assumption about how people are going to be, and we create a person in our head that fulfills that belief so that they are always present. For me, that person always opposed me. For some, that person may always be better than them, or judging them, or telling them that something is wrong with them. I don't know, it's new to me, but I think that this little devil on the shoulder is a fairly universal construct. It's an interesting concept that I shall be exploring further.

I'm not sure what exactly to do to prove to myself that this little person doesn't exist, but I'm going to try doing experiments to disprove his existence.

[Susie]

I didn't get to read all of the responses to this thread but I just wanted to say to the OP that you're right, compliments can be condescending, but they don't have to be!

[The Cloud]

I just realized something. I destroy myself, sabotage myself, go against everything that I want, to exercise my own power in a perverse kind of way. I perceive that the people of the world want me to fail, but they can't make me. They can do so many things to me, they can hurt me in so many other ways, but they can never actually make me fail myself fundamentally. They need ME to do that for them. And I do it, just to spite them, to show them that I can do what they cannot. To show them that I have power where they have none. They get what they want, but they are beholden to me for it because they can't do it for themselves. Anyone can succeed; it is through my failure that I show that I own them rather than them owning me.

I don't know why I do this, but I'm not going to fight it until I know why I should. I finally feel like I'm moving forward, like things are really coming together and that all this effort was not for nothing. Like this whole system I've built up for myself has a sense of logic, a sense that can be figured out and finally be dismantled once I know what it is and how it was built.

[Apollia]

Wow, that's pretty complicated. I'll just keep my reply short, though.

Originally Posted by The Cloud

I perceive that the people of the world want me to fail,

I doubt that's true in general, though there are _some_ mean people who are like that. I think they're in the minority, though. I'm happiest just ignoring such people's meanness as much as possible, and not even bothering to go out of my way to spite them or to please them.

Here a few questions that came to mind when I was reading your post. How would you react to someone who wants you to succeed?

What if the only three people in the world were you, a person who wants you to succeed, and a person who wants you to fail? What would you do/think/feel then?

Best wishes,
Apollia

[The Cloud]

Until now, I've never known what people were talking about when they babbled on about the courage it takes to take a good look at yourself and your life. I've been afraid when doing (or planning on doing) things that I know I have some kind of irrational fear of, but never when just thinking about them in an abstract sense. But just tonight, I was thinking that the answer to my questions must be something that I've never ever questioned before, and I was afraid. It was fleeting and weak, but it was the kind of fear normally reserved for public speaking or talking about personal subjects, the kind that gives you that acid-reflux feeling in your belly. It's like fear is the defense mechanism of this deeply implanted program in my mind, fear to prevent me from looking too closely at the thing that is directing my body. I kept wanting to go off and do something else, like read a book or check my e-mail, anything just to stop asking questions.