What is Irrational in the Mind of One is Completely Sane in Another (Part I)

I have been facing some VERY strange life path issues today and within the last week. After having an amazing channeling session with my friend Joshua Magee (http://yournotthat.com/) about what to do with our lives once we acquire all this wonderful knowledge about the Spiritual development and workings within the Universe. I have been blessed by the answers, which include the fact that I AM always swimming in the right direction because the Universe will change us according to our will and our final destinations. We are designed to learn lessons in this lifetime (or recall those that may have been from other lifetimes) to teach us something, whether they be considered pleasurable or painful lessons (after all, our human selves react to ALL situations based on PAIN or PLEASURE). We create a thought form that becomes a belief based on our reaction. Our reactions, of course, are partially spiritually and partially genetically designed to determine our outcome responses.

For instance, a child goes to school and realized she is smarter than everyone else in her class. (Sorry, daughter of mine, I AM using you as an example). Her mother has spent a great amount of time educating her to read and to be aware of her Universe long before she even turns four. So her experiences within her realm of reality are based on 1. her knowledge base that was passed along to her by her mother and 2. the fact that she is already genetically pre-disposed to intelligence since both her parents were scholars. Now, within her framework, this child has a choice to use this knowledge and intelligence to baffle her teachers, to hold her superiority over her classmates, or to become lazy in school.

All these are normal responses for children to experience, especially in the realm of American school dynamics and the sociological upbringings these dynamics have manifested throughout the years. HOWEVER, my child responded to these "gifts" (knowledge, wisdom and information) with humility and often with questioning and wonder at the Universe, rather than with pride and superiority. So I am SUPER proud to say that this child grew up to be an amazing brilliant, responsible AND humble young woman who truly understands her gifts are also that and her Universe is created through her gratefulness. SO she took her spiritual self (higher self) into consideration and has been blessed because of these decisions. She created a world of positive feedback, which activates the PLEASURE center of her brain, to feed her desire to succeed in both her educational and her relational life.

I have several friends with children with disabilities. They are amazing parents! I don't know that ALL parents with children with disabilities are amazing, but my friends are. A couple of examples in particular have stuck with me. We had a young boy in our neighborhood growing up with cerebral palsy. He was a great friend to all and loved immensely among the kids. I watched how his mother, who had 2 sons much older and born "normal", was such a patient and loving and calm woman. I was so grateful and will always be grateful for her in my neighborhood because she was the mom-figure I aspired to be like the most. Her son turned out to be a great young man, who not only graduated with his high school class, but finished college. Her patience and beauty were memories that always gave me the feelings of PLEASURE. I used to babysit often for this young man when I was a teenager because I loved being around him and their family.

The other woman I am thinking of as an example is a childhood friend who still lives in our home town. She is also an amazing woman. In her case, she overcame a lot of family adversity and skewed belief systems that allowed her own mother to treat her very poorly as a child and treat her sister like she could not do anything wrong (both family patterning examples are irrational, but they seem to be ingrained beliefs that are deeply rooted). Black and white thinking is very abusive and also very common. In my friend's case, she has one son who was born with Autism. And I have never seen a more lovely example of a mother! She is such a wonderful, patient, loving woman who is raising her son to be so happy and brilliant. Her amazing tenacity and steadfast unconditional love shine through when she talks about her son. I watched her interact with him and it was apparent he is the luckiest boy on the planet to have a mother like her. He can integrate his PLEASURE feelings with those of memories with his mother.

If a child grows up with an abusive parent, in a controlling scenario, or is repeatedly rejected based on the family's "treatment" of him or her, that child may have completely different responses or reject their family altogether, depending upon the influences in his or her life. In my life, my father was and is a wonderful man. However, during my childhood, he wasn't around much. He had the responsibility, chosen or imposed, to care for many children financially (I am the oldest). My mother, on the other hand, was very Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. One day she was amazing, supportive, loving, and created a world of possibilities and experiences for us. The next, she would be upset by something and would freak out on everyone around her and impose her displeasure those closest to her, mainly her children, and principally me as the oldest.

I was NOT a quiet child. I would fight back. So by the time my father would come home, it was just a matter of time before whatever really bothered her in the first place was stuffed and not dealt with because the most pressing issue would then become her imposition of her feelings on me and my blatant disrespect for not allowing her to rant and scream without fighting back (like my poor sister often did). My brother always tried to "logically reason" with her (he is great in that way), but often she would still fly off the handle and all the logic in the world did nothing to console her aggressive and often violent outbursts. But it was only consistent in the fact that we knew, eventually every week at some point, she would lose control and we would have to emotionally be prepared for a verbal lashing.

I was not a perfect parent, especially given these examples that were definitely and deeply ingrained in my psyche. Of course, they were obviously ingrained in my mother's psyche as well, and her father, and so forth and so on... I spent the first few years of parenthood absolutely doting all over my children and couldn't be apart from them for 2 minutes. I was a "supermom" type, but I was extremely unhappy without the balance of my own self-worth and career. I became a "martyr"--home raising children because my husband told me I was not "allowed" to return to school, which imprinted a very negative and PAINFUL bitterness that festered for years. I found myself in the same stale marital situation as my parents, and my kids' father was never around and he was truly never there for me emotionally because he was too busy appeasing his parents and put his work over his family. In the long run, the ideal marriage that was suppose to be a lifetime commitment was undermined by his inappropriate action to make all our marital decisions with his father's control and his mother's passive insistence. But that is not the point of this reflection today. Our marriage did fall apart and I left him because I had had enough being ignored and disrespected and dishonored. And it is totally okay not to put up with verbal and emotional abuse.

But in the course of life events after I went to college and before I actually left my lifeless marriage ten years later, there was a time I could feel myself slipping into the role and becoming the very mother figure with whom I was raised (miserable about my failing marriage, lonely, sad, and several times I lost my temper--yet I always curbed it and ALWAYS apologized to my children, which changes the story drastically). This subtle transformation into negativity was a shock and a horror to me! I never ever in a million years wanted to pass that to my children! So I left the man who was imposing these beliefs on me (male superiority, male and religious privilege, financial superiority, and emotional berating), and I chose to be a single mother. As stated in previous chapter, that didn't turn out well, because there were so many moments I was lonely and would not allow myself to be alone, which led to several bad relationships and several plans to escape. The PAIN center of my life was becoming difficult to manage, so I would run from it, but it always appeared in a new and different form because it was one of my life path lessons.

So the PAIN of the marital situation, which mimicked the PAIN Of the parental situation (I married a version of my mother), led me to pull my proverbial hand away from the stove and I chose to leave. Since then, their reactions (both of them) have responded to me out of jealousy, hatred, vengeance and my mother tried everything to ruin my relationship with my children. Once again, one person's skewed view of life being "unfair" and that because they were not given a break gives one false liberty to hurt others or martyr themselves. Classic Greek Tragedy stories. Which I maintain to this day were and are also genetically linked behaviors in humanity. Betrayal, however, is in my judgment and in MY belief system, the most unforgivable crime. Though this is truly not a reality (everything is an illusion), it is only an attachment that remains from my feelings attached to the divorce, my mother siding with my ex-husband, my youngest sister's betrayal by lying in court to give him custody (and having a relationship with him, also out of vengeance) and my ex-father-in-law still imposing his control by imprinting his male superiority onto his son and maintaining that belief system to this day. It has, however, caused my children and I GREAT PAIN and so we all have reacted differently to it according to our mind's pain reaction to the situation. I continue to write and fight for the just outcome to be done, but my three children are just trying to forget it had ever happened and run from the PAIN, rather than face it.

So we have covered that successes and positive feedback lead to PLEASURE responses and negative and dishonoring feedback lead to PAIN responses. We call the latter in psychology fight or flight. Obviously my most painful examples are used as thus because I am going through this major transformation with them as they are deeply embedded into my PAIN centers of my brain. in my discovery, I have established a median line: all experiences cause both PAIN and PLEASURE. For example, one event that brings a PLEASURE response, like meeting a love interest for the first time, may be the cause of PAIN for that partner's ex. The love interest (in my case, several of them) then finds himself wandering off or getting back together with the ex, both to avoid PAIN and instigate PLEASURE. And thus that first memory of the meeting of that person can no longer be thought of as exclusively a pleasurable experience.

Thus this leads me to my most current situations. I have found that a series of enjoyable events, mainly in traveling across the country with my partner, are not as enjoyable in my memory as they once were. We have torn apart the trip and both assigned negative consequences to everything pleasurable about the trip. It was an amazing learning experience and I definitely felt at the time I was swimming in the right direction. However, now that there are negative memories attached to each of those experiences, I have to reevaluate what is PLEASURE to my memory is not necessarily that to my partner, nor the other way around. But once again, the reality is that what I believe to be a great memory may not be what another would find as great. As we are analyzing our successes and failure over the last year, I have come to discover I find that most of our PAIN-based experiences were our greatest learning lessons, but our minds cannot fathom letting the PAIN out of our consciousness in order to let the experience go.

For example, when we were in Florida this past Spring, we made a 2 week detour to Orlando. We found that hotels in Kissimmee were by the national average the least expensive hotel rates per week of any hotel in the country. So we checked into a weekly hotel and had a few extra days intermittently while we were there at other places. We had made a little money while acting in New Orleans and between that and a tax return, we were able to get a 4-day pass to Universal Studios. That adventure, by far, was my favorite part of our trip and to this day the memories attached to the theme park and how we are both avid movie fans (thus why we own a production company) gave us childlike joy when experiencing the adventures we did. We rode The Hulk ride and saw The Blues Brothers Show and experienced Harry Potter's Hogworts Kingdom and laughed hysterically at the Simpsons ride...and the tribute to Lucille Ball and the Tower of Doom and the Jurassic Park ride...okay, I could go on. But it was in the 4 days that I felt the closest to James and felt that overwhelming PLEASURE of our closeness and our happy memories.

But in a most recent argument, as all couples do, we are stressing over money and our trip to Orlando came up. He is still angry at the amount of money it cost to be there and take that trip. That was a surprise because I thought it was such a magical time together, and it really hurt me. I was saddened by the response. Since then we have begun to talk through why it is SO important to create these memories that are positive. As I pressured him into staying the extra time, I have to apologize for my part in making the memories attached more PAINFUL than PLEASURABLE. In the apology, he has two ways to respond: accept it for an error in judgment and let it go, or hold onto the regret and not allow it to heal as a memory that carries both LOVE and FEAR (the pain of losing money).

This goes back to my example of parenting. If we make a mistake as a parent, we cannot expect our children to forgive us! But we can expect them to have a different memory attached to a bad parenting experience IF we choose to say we are sorry for what we have done. This is truly the only way to change a "bad" memory into a "good" one. This actually has a similar resonance that vibrates with emotions. We can either vibrate in Love or in Fear. I have covered this in many of my past writings. However this vibration, this memory, this attached emotion can only be totally resolved if there is a consistent change in parenting as well, such as in this example. Any experience that leads one to have to repeatedly say "I'm sorry" but never really mean it or resolve it, will then have to continue to get the same responses from the injured parties of such decisions.

So we can only lead by example. We can create great memories for ourselves, our children, and those around us. We have the choice to deal with all life experiences and attach emotions to those experiences. However, as I will further in the second half of my resolution, I will show that it is in the process of transforming all of these memories and thoughts into learning moments by NOT attaching a label to the experience (as I learned in our talk on Saturday with Joshua and his friends) that we are truly free then to vibrate only in accordance to our TRUE NATURE, or higher self, and only allow experiences that resurface to do so in order to process them, not to use them to fuel an emotional flame from days past. This process is not easy and I would LOVE to walk everyone through it in my next writing.

Chapter 4: Relationships---People Pressure and the Gift of Discernment

Once you begin to familiarize yourself with the worlds of love that benefit your environment—your agape (your being, doing, wants, needs and desires), you will begin to see that there are objects, experiences and paths you don’t need! This is a great revelation for those who are bombarded with peer pressure or feel compelled to act or look like what we are “told” is successful or beautiful or popular. People will begin to see that your inner being is reflecting more and you will notice others around you that want to know what you have been doing that makes you so, well, different.

The truth is once you start looking at everything you are given as a gift—your family, your friends, your city, your body, your situation—you will desire to be centered more and more. You will be blessed with more and more abundance of gifts because the Universe responds to your gratefulness as a reflection of the receiving of gifts. Going back to the example of the visualization: Do you really desire that which you visualized? Do you need that cell phone (whatever object you chose)? Is it important to you for the right reason (your beliefs)? And can you look upon it objectively as just that—an experience for this lifetime?

Let me explain a little more before I am ready to explore another “world.” You may ask, “Why would I receive more blessings by being more grateful?” Well, the Universe sees everything as a gift! The “good” and the “bad” are gifts we receive regardless of their initial origin. Okay, bear with me. IF we have thoughts that go out to the Universe/Collective Consciousness that are constantly “negative” in nature by definition, we will receive what we send out. It’s like a radio system that allows us to gauge the outcome of our thoughts, whether or not we are aware of it, that allows us to receive what we believe we deserve!! Is this starting to make sense?

If we believe we deserve what the world around us gives us, we cannot change the outcome of our thoughts which then give us what we have sent out. Therefore if we constantly think upon the negative of the Universe—disasters, accidents, and our fears of death—we create those realms around us. NOW I am not saying we subconsciously want cancer or a terminal illness, but these too are given to us as part of our life experience! It’s a weird concept, I know, but it’s true.

Now, being grateful for everything, including disasters and illnesses, then allows the Universe to give us the experiences and needs we desire by returning higher vibrations. We find disasters heart-wrenching and we are saddened by the loss of human lives, especially if they are around us or we are directly impacted by them. But after the sadness dissipates, what can we find grateful about those experiences? Maybe that we are alive!! Or that they are not suffering from illness or poverty or anything that physically challenged them. Or that the loss creates awareness of our own humanity (this will definitely be explored later).

We desire what we need. And we think about these needs. Our needs may be elemental like housing and food and shelter, but they can be more in depth such as recovering from a loss and safe travel and passage. They can also be the higher thoughts that can help a child that is raised impoverished to achieve their goals—they are focused more on the outcome and whatever it takes by the gifts of the challenges of their environment.

So again, I challenge you to look within. What do you think? What is going through your head? Do you sit and watch the news and find yourself miserable in your daily life? Or do you find outlets to learn that create a more pleasant environment? Remember I talked about agape love? What is your environment like?

People Are Strange—Creating our Own Worlds in the Company of Others

In this chapter, I want to explore philia love – the relationships we have with other souls who connect us together with our world. You love those who are around you for different reasons. You love your parents (possibly), or siblings, or friends, or spouse, or coworkers, or the guy who serves you coffee in the mornings, as a way of reflecting your own love for humanity. It’s the construct of the human “family” that gives you that kind of love. We are all created to look, sound, and breathe alike. I mean, yes, we may not understand each other exactly (some people speak other languages, others have a different physical appearance), but we all are born, live and die. Right?

Interestingly, our thoughts internally are also fed and nurtured by our relationships with others around us. For instance, we may spend an hour everyday meditating, focusing on our dreams, imagining a beautiful world around us. But as soon as the meditation and quiet time is over, we enter the real world and spend the other 16 hours or so in the day with other people awake. Then if we are lucky, we can focus our minds in our dreams on those pleasant experiences we want to manifest unconsciously. But that is not always something we can remember.

So how do we see and react to those around us? Who is closest to you in your inner circle? Do you have intimate relationships with others, such as parents, children, or partners, who are a positive reflection of you, who tell you the good and the bad, and who can nurture your dreams and growth? This is all too often not a reality. It is usually those closest to us that are the most challenging to our growth.

Let’s dispel a major obstacle to this kind of relationship love: prejudice. We are taught to create a barrier between us and “them”. Do you have a “them” from whom you learned to be separate? Again, this goes back to your thoughts. Dig deep. Or maybe just look at the surface of those around you. What color is your skin? What color do you “see” yourself? This is not rocket science. Your eyes tell you that your skin is the shade you see it. Right? Now, what do you see around you with your closest relationships? What do you feel about the color of the skin of those around you?? Do you have any prejudices? Do you think to yourself, “those people are not related to me because they have a different skin color.” If so, we need to work on this before we move on.

More Than Skin Deep – Going Further Within

Now, seeing that those around us are the most challenging most often, did anyone in your family or your life teach you that we are different because of skin color? Okay, if that’s the case, then that’s where you start to peel away the layers of thought. Radical idea number one: Nobody is different because of skin color. That is a learned social construct, and it is not real. It is only as real as we make it out to be. We may not “relate” to someone because our parents, friends and family tell us that those of another “color” act or think differently from us. But do they really? I mean, don’t they too worry about what others think of them? Don’t they too have parents and siblings and friends? Don’t they too face challenges because of their personal experiences. Of course they do. So what separates us by color is only based on a system of irrational fear and false teachings.

The first time I experienced a truly racist experience was in high school. We used to travel a lot with our acting competitions, called Speech Teams, throughout the Chicago area. I remember the reactions of my teammates going into predominantly racially differing neighborhoods and the false elicitations of fear. Once we traveled to a high school that had locks on the doors and metal detectors at the entrances. This was because there were gang problems within their city’s social systems. We never truly understood the challenge by analyzing our own reactions. All we knew was that they lived in a “different” world because they had to deal with local violence and prevention, whereas we did not have those challenges in our school.

Yet, the immediate association was that it was because they were African-Americans living in an inner city school system. Wow. How do we go from metal detectors and violence to skin color? We are taught this. So that is how we reacted—associating the two together. I can’t recall an exact comment from anyone on the team, I just remember the sentiments of uneasiness caused by the entranceway of the school.

Does this mean all African-American schools have that kind of violence because they are a violent group of people? Heck no! But we have to deal with the media’s idea of African-based countries and the violence and terrorism that is caused by the social constructs of some, not all, of these environmental systems. We see what has happened to dictatorships in Africa, the destruction to Haiti (most recently with the series of earthquakes that has changed their nation completely), the gang violence in major cities in our country, and the poverty that is associated within these communities.

But this has nothing to do with skin color. It has to do with hundreds of years of being told that skin color mattered that created systems of imbalance, like apartheid in South Africa and European-based dominance and slavery. These conditions exist. Yes. But does that mean that all babies born with brown or black-hued skin are violent? No way!! So why do we as a nation “label” and treat people differently?

How about you? Using more than just that example, how do you see people around you with different colored skin? Do you look upon them as equals? Or do you see that maybe your life lessons are not much different than theirs? Do you think that on this gigantic planet we call Earth that there may be people that have a different language or country or skin color that are more loving, more caring and more attentive to their compassionate, giving self than you? Of course there are. And does it not occur to you that maybe they have it better off because of whatever their situation because then they are given tools that we may not have in their society to learn to love fully?

One Big Happy Family – Learning to Love the World We Live In

Let’s step outside ourselves and our family for a moment. Evaluate your immediate surroundings. Take our your notebook. Write down your closest relationships. Include everyone you experience or have experienced in your lifetime thus far that has been close to you (remember, include those who are no longer with us):

• Parents. The obvious first relationship you had was with your parents. It may have or have not been one or both biological beings that created you. It may include a step-parent, a grandparent, or a guardian who raised you. Write them all down.
• Siblings. Write down everyone that you include as a sibling, biological, by marriage, or somehow connected to you through a parental figure.
• Immediate Family. Include grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and all relatives as far out as you can go. List everyone you know influences you from your family tree.
• First Friends. Who are the closest friends you had in your life? Think of who you talk to on your social networks. But also remember those who you grew up with in your neighborhood environment.
• Teachers, Mentors and Leaders. Do you remember all your grade school teachers? Can you remember who taught you music, art, or coached your little league team? Do you have a memory of your family’s religious leaders (pastors, priests, rabbis, and so on). Or your parents’ friends and the neighbor kids’ parents?
• Associates, Coworkers, and Classmates. Who were closest to you in your early years growing up? Who did you hang out with, and who did you have to see on a regular basis? What clubs, sports, activities were you in? And how well did you get to know them? Do you remember that one person from summer camp or from the playground? Do you have a memory of that family that lived down the street, or the classmates who were with you throughout your life in school?
• Societal Members. And finally, take a look at those in your community, now and before, who had some kind of impact on you for some reason.

Once you have written down all those you can remember (if you are like me, there will be dozens of names to recollect), you can start by taking a few at a time, or working through until you have them all down. Now, write next to each name all the physical characteristics you know about them--height, weight, ethnicity, appearance. Write down your first thought about that person. You don’t have to go into much detail, but now finally write an emotion you have about them.

This is going to be your relationship guide. This is how you associate yourself with other people. Once you finish a simple list, go back and read every word you wrote. Here’s what I want you to do:

1. Physical appearance is a non-judgmental characteristic. It is a given—they were born into this particular appearance. Therefore this is not going to influence how you look at them unless you see a difference in them that causes you to think of them as “different”. For instance, if they were in a wheelchair, you would look at them as “handicapped” physically in some way, but do you see them as more or less fortunate than you?

2. Take a look at your emotional response to each individual you listed. Why did you write that particular word? Or why did you use that particular description? This is thus what YOU see in them and in the world. NOT who they may be.

3. Now the fun part begins: Take each name, and each one’s characteristics and emotions, and find ONE thing per person you see in them when you knew them that is the same as something about YOU. This is the mirror from which I want to see all your relationships as we progress throughout these chapters. How do you see them in relationship to yourself?

Here are some good examples:

Mother – physical appearance is obviously like me since it is related to me biologically. Socially, she is very outgoing and talkative like me. Emotionally, I find she is different because she likes to talk about other people often to others, which is a source of major contention between us. Do I find I do that? Sometimes. But do I mean it to be mean? Not really. Thus, should I be careful about what I say to other people about those closest to me. This is a resounding yes.

Son – looks just like my family, like me and my brothers especially. Shy and reflective. Dry sense of humor. Loving. But also sometimes gets angry at injustices and loses his temper. Do I do that too? Of course I do. Do I let it get at me? Yes. And do I sometimes say things out loud that may be hurtful when I feel wronged? Well…where do you think he got that from?

Best friend in high school – Very talented, beautiful voice, loving, great mom, adoring wife, amazing as a spiritual leader. When we spent time together in the younger years, she was very insecure with her relationships with men before she was married. It was a direct reflection of what I too experienced. Our methodologies were different, but we were the same type of woman—physically attractive women with insecurities within ourselves that limited us intimately. She was able to overcome this within her marriage. I was not. But I remembered what I learned from her—how to stand up for myself and not be a “door mat” in relationships with men. But it worked within my social construct for a time, but I eventually outgrew the paradigm of a submissive wife. It didn’t work for me.

Cousin – Compassionate to me as an adult when my children and I were homeless and needed a place to stay. But angry and reactive to her own children, and unable to relate to mine. Jealousy and a negative reaction to me caused us not to talk any longer. Do I still love her? Yes. Do I have negative feelings of that summer? Not really, but I do feel bad that she felt let down by what she thought I was and was not doing—it took me a long time to find a good job and I felt I was not able to pay her and her husband back for their generosity. My kids were affected by her reaction to her own children, which came across as angry and negative. But in the end, we both felt wronged in some way. Do I want to hear from her again? Most definitely. And I always think the best about her and her family.

Most difficult boss – I worked for a man once who had all the money you could ask for but was never happy. This sounds like an allegory but I guarantee he does exist. He had a beautiful and famous wife, two intelligent and creative children, and a multi-million dollar home within which I worked. Was I a great employee? Not always. But did I learn from him anything? Yes. I learned I would never marry an unhappy person again, I would never yell at my children and treat them disrespectfully. But mostly I learned that a shrewd business man can run a really tight ship and still never have what he truly wants: joy in his life. Why strive for monetary success if you have to belittle others to get it? Does it make me question my decision to work for him? No, it was one of my lessons. Was I happy that time in my life? Not really, so I attracted the same type of unhappiness—appeared on the outside as altogether, but inside he must have felt as empty as I did.

I could go on and come up with hundreds of examples. I have lived a fully experienced life when it comes to relationships. I have met the poorest people on Earth who are surrounded by love and contentment because of their family. And I have met the wealthiest and most miserable people that I could ever know. I met movie stars who were really humble and had nice families. I met drug dealers who really only cared about their children and thus created that lifestyle out of necessity. I have met religious leaders who beat their children. And I have met talented artists who hate being exploited in the press. And yet I still encounter the hurt and the downtrodden. What am I learning from them?