Here is an outline of Chapter 2: Needing, from Operating Manual for Enlightenment, Recreating States of Mind. The book’s Kickstarter campaign ends Friday.
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The Family System
We consider our starting point a random genetic draw, and our future a matter of choice, but neither are the case. We cannot understand ourselves as individuals but only as elements in a family system. We are tasked with creating, addressing, and resolving interpersonal, family problems.
Childhood
The roadmap of your adult psyche is laid out in your childhood. What seems like a series of random events you couldn’t plan for were actually an encoded representation of your future life. Like a tree’s instructions written in the seed, childhood is not just formative, it’s definitive.
Recollection
Here is an absurd analogy: your childhood is almost as poorly remembered as your past lives. Don’t compare the reality of one with the fantasy of the other. Compare the fantasies of the two. You don’t really recollect anything, you rebuild images of the past from the symbols and associations you employ in the present.
We forget the importance of our childhood in the same way we forget all things that no longer resonate with who we are. Memory is a deception; you remember next to nothing. What you recall is a network of symbols according to how you understand these things.
Your memory will unfold, and the past will become more meaningful, if you revitalize the old meanings. A memory is only as meaningful as you are able to return to the life you lived when you had it. Doing this can be extremely emotional.
The Social Self
We gradually build a social personality atop the identity we find ourselves possessing at the end of childhood. Adolescence doesn’t give us time to solidify our attitudes before we’re thrust into a social context. Our social self is largely a set of behaviors that protect our feelings.
Some of us take a defensive attitude and lean toward introversion, and others go on the offensive to become declarative and outgoing. Those who develop outgoing personalities are rewarded and exploited. The introverts receive fewer opportunities but build better psychic foundations.
Growing Up
The role of school is more important than we realize. We see it as skill training, but its main purpose is to tame us. Schools were not needed when families and communities were intact. They only became necessary as a means of personality reformation and intellectual brain washing.
There is nothing natural about schools and their effect on personal growth has been pernicious. Those who remember their childhoods recall its formative effects. What we overlook is that most of our childhood traumas happened and our injuries left to fester because of school.
The Scheme of Things
You are controlled by your emotions. Your intellect is superficial. It’s like the car you drive, while you emotions determine where you go.
We ascribe the complex behavior of other social animals to instinct. We say we’re in control but we cannot see what we do by instinct.
Recollecting
Life draws us forward even though we don’t feel time as a force. We navigate the present according to the patterns we remember. Your will is only as free as you are unattached to your past.
Reconstructing
New understanding does not spring into acceptance, it appears as confusion and arouses suspicion. Some of us approach change with courage, confidence, or curiosity, but most of us hang back until we know what we’re getting into.
Recreating
Any situation that threatens our sense of self feels life-threatening. Imagine what would be required for an entire culture to change. My role as a therapist is to be a death Doula to personal traits that are no longer needed, and a midwife to new ideas.
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Operating Manual for Enlightenment-Chapter 2: Needing (podcast)