Lost in a Crowd

Depression makes you fundamentally unaware of the people around you.

Even your closest most intimate companions are mysteries to you, because you don’t relate to them as people. They are simply “part of the world” and “the world” oppresses and hates you.

The only thing that matters to a depressed person is the internal dialog. The only relationships you have are with the demons inside of your mind.

Other people are just distractions. You don’t relate to them. You deal with them. You don’t interact with them. You get rid of them.

When you are living within this frame of mind, you do not know that this is how you are interacting with the real world. You couldn’t form the ideas above. You would be immersed in dialog with your demons while physically struggling through your oppression in “the world” that won’t just leave you alone.

Every now and then I would look up from this stupor and see the horizon. I would realize for a moment that this way of being was not something I had to accept. I would imagine what a healthy mindset might be like. And I would plot ways to change my consciousness so it would work correctly.

I’m proud of the fact that I managed to make these moments of clarity accumulate. Over years, some of my plots worked out.

But they were bursts of clarity that might last for a week or a month. They were melodies hovering weakly above the base line of the demon’s discourse.

I would be awake in the world for periods of time, and would try to gather my wits and find a way forward. But then I would move back into an entirely spiritual mode, where only consciousness itself mattered, and material reality in general was a secondary consideration.

Inertia would carry my life forward in society, but as of this moment that inertia has run out and I will be left with nothing but the demons.

It was the classic “fake it till you make it” method. I imagined being mentally healthy, and it primed me for making real transitions. My path has always been three steps forward, two steps back, but there have been steps forward.

I have made permanent changes in my consciousness. But I do not yet perform

Filed under: Uncategorized, asea, consciousness, depression, law of attraction, obsessive compulsive disorder, redox signaling

Napoleon Hill, James Allan, and the Modern Self-Help Industry

Self-help literature and elaborate descriptions of how to work the Law of Attraction surround us on all sides, but let be briefly describe it anyway.

The fundamental concept behind the Law of Attraction is that your thoughts create your life. This idea is ancient. Probably the earliest example of it is from the Isa Upanishad, which is a text so old  parts of it may come from before the last Ice Age. It’s called a Buddhist text now, but it pre-dates Buddhism by centuries. The opening passage goes like this:

What we are today comes from out thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.

That translation is from the Penguin Edition of The Dhammapada by a guy named Juan Mascaro, who I consider to be the greatest translator of all time.

You now know everything you need to know about the Law of Attraction, but there are two other classics you might want to read as well. This basic idea was re-expressed by an Englishman named James Allen at the end of the 1800s, and his book, As A Man Thinketh is widely considered the classic on the Law of Attraction. It’s about 25 pages long and you can get a digital copy for free.

The other classic, and by far the most widely read and most influential, is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Hill interviewed hundreds of highly successful people in the early 1900s — guys like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and Dale Carnegie — and described the way they think.

All of these guys went through periods of extreme poverty and hardship on their way to success. Henry Ford, for example, went bankrupt three or four times before he invented the assembly line for manufacturing automobiles. Napoleon Hill teaches you how they survived these misfortunes.

But by far more importantly, Hill teaches you how to modify your consciousness so you, too, can become successful. He was writing his book for publication during the depression decade. He was writing for people who had lost everything — their homes, their money, their family, their sense of pride, their optimism and their hope. And he explains exactly what you can do to rescue yourself from a situation that dire.

I hope you read the book. I’ll give you one part of it here: he explains that the whole project of becoming who you really ought to be arises from faith. You must have faith that you will become what you want to become. But of course you don’t have that faith when you are penniless and eating charity food. So he tells you to create your Definite Chief Aim, which is a long description of what you want to have happen in your life and who you will become. He has you commit it to memory. And every day, at least in twice a day, you concentrate on your Definite Chief Aim and you recite it out loud to yourself, really focusing on it.

Faith, he explains, arises from the sub-conscious mind, where our deepest beliefs are held. The whole point behind creating and reciting your Definite Chief Aim is to train your sub-conscious mind and to create faith.

The simple fact is that this method works. That’s why his book is still studied — intently studied — world wide.

But it only works if your sub-conscious mind and your conscious mind function properly. Which mine doesn’t, and which yours probably doesn’t either.

My experience of consciousness, for decades, has been helplessly watching while my demented sub-conscious mind goes off on some horrific story. My whole project has been trying to prevent my mind from producing negative thoughts.

Which is really, really unfortunate, especially since The Dhammapada, As A Man Thinketh, and Think and Grow Rich are all true statements about reality.

Because what you think about is what comes to pass in your life.

And if you are thinking horrible thoughts, then your life will be driven in a horrible direction. Even if you can’t help thinking these thoughts, even if you are suffering from a disease, even if your wholeproblem is a lack of dopamine or steronintin or redox signalling molecules in your brain, it doesn’t matter.

The thoughts going on in your head ARE your life.

And if you can’t change them, you’re screwed. That is my situation.

I’ve written my Definite Chief Aim. I’ve memorized it. And I repeat it to myself twice a day. And I think it is helping. But my mind is defective — very few people are like us — and because my mind is defective, I don’t know if or when Hill’s method might work for me.

Filed under: 3a. Think and Grow Poor, as a man thinketh, cure, depression, help, james allan, law of attraction, napoleon hill, obsessive compulsive disorder, secret, therapy, think and grow rich

Negative Feedback

You’re depressed

Which causes things to go wrong in the real world.

Which makes you more depressed.

And the longer this lasts the more impossible it seems to get out of it.

This is the opposite pole of the Law of Attraction.

Napoleon Hill talked about your Definite Chief Aim, and how you should repeat this aloud all the time to train your subconscious mind to attract to you what you want in life.

The opposite works just as well.

If your subconscious is depressed, negative and in pain all the time, the universe responds and gives you what your subconscious is asking for — more pain and more misfortune.

And you — your life, your time — are attached to this drama like an appendage, watching things fall to pieces, and there is literally nothing you can do about it.

Still, you go on struggling to gain control over your mind, since that is your only hope.

Filed under: 2a. Caged, asea, cure, depression, description, expereince, help, law of attraction, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, redox signaling, secret, thearpy

How OCD Makes It Much Worse

repetition of thoughts drives you crazy

reviewing the same story over and over for hours

Depression is bad enough, don’t you think?

But it often comes along with one or more additional disorders. Often, it comes along with anxiety, which I do not have.

I have obsessive compulsive disorder, which people usually associate with cleaning things over and over or having a ritual around closing a door. I’m not like that. In my case, it takes place entirely within my consciousness and has no outward manifestation.

I repeat the same story over and over again in my mind.

Filed under: 2c. How OCD Makes It Much Worse, asea, consciousness, cure, depression, description, expereince, help, law of attraction, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, redox signaling, thearpy