A recovering thinker!

It started out innocently enough.
I began to think at parties now and then — to loosen up.
Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker.

I began to think alone — “to relax,” I told myself — but I knew it wasn’t true.
Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time. That was when things began to sour at home.

One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life.
She spent that night at her mother’s.

I began to think on the job.
I knew that thinking and employment don’t mix, but I couldn’t stop myself.
I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka.
I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, “What is it exactly we are doing here?”

One day the boss called me in. He said, “Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don’t stop thinking on the job, you’ll have to find another job.”

This gave me a lot to think about. I came home early after my conversation with the boss.
“Honey,” I confessed, “I’ve been thinking…”
“I know you’ve been thinking,” she said, “and I want a divorce!”
“But Honey, surely it’s not that serious.”
“It is serious,” she said, lower lip aquiver. “You think as much as college professors, and college professors don’t make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won’t have any money!”

“That’s a faulty syllogism,” I said impatiently.

She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama.
“I’m going to the library,” I snarled as I stomped out the door.

I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche.
I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors…

They didn’t open. The library was closed.

To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night.
Leaning on the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye. “Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?” it asked.

You probably recognize that line.
It comes from the standard Thinker’s Anonymous poster.
Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker.

I never miss a TA meeting.

At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was “Porky’s.” Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.

I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home.

Life just seemed…easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking.

I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.

Today, I registered to vote as a Republican…

(Author Anonymous)

Where do I go from here?

I have begun to realise that I often forget to give myself a break. Forget to give myself a chance to absorb things. Instead I strap on a helmet and trooper on in my search for answers with an incredible sense of urgency, which confirms that yet again I have forgotten the fact that there is no end result! Yet again, I have forgotten to focus on the journey itself!

Was it perhaps the constant sense of urgency that allowed me to be influenced into believing in the “Magic Pill” approach so often adopted by some of the “Gurus”? The only answer I can draw from this is yes, which begs a more important question: Why the sense of urgency? What was I looking for? What am I hoping the “Magic Pill” will resolve?

I am not going to attempt to answer these questions right now as I feel they need exploring further at a much slower pace.

Where do I go from here?

I think I will take a break from the whole self help arena for a while and put an end to the search for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and instead try to focus inwards.

Time to reflect on lessons learned/unlearned.

A conversation with myself

When I write my journal I sometimes write in the form of a conversation with myself and the following is what came out last week before I got side tracked into writing the previous post.

 

What are you trying to achieve?

I am trying to track my life back to find the root cause of some of the symptoms present in my life today.

How far back do you think you have to go?

I have been thinking about this for a while and I may have to go back to before I was born.

What do you mean?

Mum was in hospital for the last 6 months of her pregnancy. I was born on the 7th December 1971 by a Caesarean section.
I think being stuck in hospital for that length of time must have been terrible and I think she somehow may have felt resentment towards me for taking away the life she had before she became pregnant. If this is the case I can understand that.

If she resented you then do you think she still resents you today?

No I don’t think resentment is the right word anymore. But I think I am a disappointment to her.

Why?

Because I am not more like my brother and because of the mistakes I have made in my life which has left me in a financial situation where at times I have had to ask my parents for help.

Are you holding on to something?

I am thinking that what I am after is a sign of love from her. A sign that will allow me to finally begin my life. I am 38 years of age in just over a month and most of the time I feel like a child.

Why do you need that?

So I can stop punishing her by asking for financial help, which I have come to realise is punishing myself if that makes sense.

Why did you rebel against her so much?

Because I felt unwanted, as if I was always in the way. I always felt (and still do) that she loves my brother more. Perhaps the rebellion was my way of crying out for love.

If she could see you now how do you think she would feel?

I think she’d be upset but I don’t think she’d understand.

Understand what?

That I am not blaming her. I have tried to ask questions on a number of occassions and it has always resulted in her getting upset thinking I blame her.

Is it time to let go?

Yes but it scares me and I don’t know how to.

Keep peeling away the layers and be brave. You have a purpose and it is ok to be you.

Self Help Gurus or Marketing Experts?

When I got home from work last Thursday I was  ”encouraged” to take an honest look at how I feel my life is at the moment. By that I mean writing with no self censoring, no self lies or justifications for previous actions. No blame or excuses, just honesty and facts without any kind of judgment.

The “encouragement” came in the shape of a thought. A thought telling me to sit down and basically just find a starting point. A place from which to look forward instead of moving blindly in all directions. For a very long time I have wanted to change things but have never really worked out where to start from.

I started and found it difficult to stop. There is no particular order to what has come out so far. Memories from when I was a child, back to present-day, then back to childhood again. Then I somehow got side tracked into the area of self-help and gurus and whether or not it actually works. (Viv I think your post and our conversation may have had some influence here!!).

The hot topic on the news, at least in the US is the tragic events that occurred at a sweat lodge session in Sedona during James Ray’s “Spiritual Warrior” Seminar. The title itself kind of make alarm bells ring with me as the 2 words, in my mind, don’t belong together. I decided to dig further into this. Not so much the event itself but what made people pay between $9,000 – $10,000 to a guy no one had really heard much about until he was featured in “The Secret”. I am speaking from my own viewpoint here. If he was a well-known “guru” prior to “The Secret” I stand corrected!
I then wondered ; What credibility does he have, other than the popular culture seal of approval, that will make people part with that kind of money. What problem(s) were they hoping to alleviate or what kind of experience were they hoping to have. If they were hoping to alleviate a problem, how much therapy or counselling can $10,000 buy you?

I am not here to pass judgment on James Ray, it is the industry as a whole I want to question. To be precise I want to question the validity of what these self-proclaimed experts and gurus teach. What qualifications and experiences do they have that gives them the right to label themselves experts in this field? How many of them actually have a real doctorate degree? A lot of them seem to usethe “Dr” title! Is this what gives them their credibility? Or is just our perception?
More importantly, why did I believe that everything I read would propel me to great heights where problems simply could not exist?
The answer to that question for me lies with the field in which these gurus really are experts; Marketing!
In order to get an idea of how I viewed this self-help stuff in the past, I had a read through old journals and old posts on here and as much as I hate to admit this; I was astonished to see the naivety with which I was absorbing this information!

The interesting thing is that the self-help guru can’t really lose out because they have a safety valve in terms of validity.
To give you an example, one book suggested that in order to feel better about myself I should affirm to myself a certain phrase. I did as instructed and continued to do so for months and months. Did it work? Well, this is where the safety valve comes in, because there is absolutely no way of measuring it. The only way it can ever be measured is if I had the facility to live a dual existence in which I could compare how I felt after I had followed the instructions for a given set of time with how I felt had I not followed the instructions for the same amount of time.
Compared to how I was a few years ago, I feel better in myself I feel more confident in my abilities, I feel less afraid of saying what is on my mind even if that results in conflicting opinions of others. Normally I would credit positive improvement to whatever book or programme I was following at that time but now I am thinking that other factors had a part to play. If, however, it didn’t work or I didn’t experience any improvement, did I draw the conclusion that the material was rubbish? No, I put it down to the fact that I must have done it wrong, safety valve has kicked in again!

I was having a conversation with Viv the other night (See what you have started!!!!) about some of this and she raised a very interesting question. If their knowledge and expertise is written into a book, why the need to keep churning out book after book covering pretty much the same stuff? I know of a particular couple of gurus who have released in excess of 20 books saying pretty much the same thing.

I am not here to start a crusade against the whole self-help industry nor do I suggest that they are all a bunch of excellent marketers with only financial gain in mind. I know there is excellent high quality material available. Material that offers real and honest help and opportunity for growth.
But it may be worth remembering that the self-help industry is a multi billion dollar industry. In 2008 it grossed $11.3 billion in US alone. Personally I have no problem with people making money, quite the opposite.
What I do have a problem with is how a selection of individuals in this industry prey on people desperate for a quick fix to whatever problem they have, who will buy into whatever the “experts” are selling because it gives them a sense of hope, (I am talking about me here) at least until they realise that the quick fix promised on the packaging failed to deliver on its promise. Leaving one (well, me) confused as to why it didn’t work when it so clearly worked for the “expert” who wrote it as well as the hundreds of happy customers who were conveniently kind enough to write a testimonial.

I also think that there’s an element of transference operating here. Again I am speaking from personal experience where I would get drawn in to the point where whatever Guru I was following at the time could say or do nothing wrong!
If, at the sweat lodge session, people had exercised a measure of common sense, how many of them would have stayed in the sweat lodge as opposed to leave in the interest of personal safety? I also questioned if I would have exercised common sense and questioned the methods adopted by the guru or would I have conformed to the sheep mentality and followed the majority? I fear the honest answer would have been the latter!

I have left out specific books and authors (except of course Mr Ray, whose material I have never read or followed) purely because, what I think has worked for me may not work for you and vice versa. The only other one mentioned of course is “The Secret”, which in my view is the worst load of nonsense ever written, the sole purpose of which was to line the pockets of Rhonda Byrne, who in the space of approximately 3 weeks became an expert in the so-called “Law of Attraction” on the basis of Wallace D Wattle’s The Science of Getting Rich. The worst part of the secret is the fact that I believed in the concept when I first read it!! And I cringe when I think about how I walked around like a complete fucking moron repeatedly saying some mantra while cosmically ordering things from the ever so generous catalogue of the universe. By the way their delivery service need some work!! Or maybe I just did it wrong again!!

I could write an entire blog about my views of “The Secret” but in the interest of reader safety I won’t. If reading or watching “The Secret” helped you, disregard anything I have said.
There is, however, an excellent article on it HERE (Scroll down a little bit to get to the article)
Statistically there is something like 3,000 new self-help titles being released every year, which begs the question; How much of it is quality based on real experiences as opposed to just another marketing exercise?
Another worrying fact is that anyone can write a self-help book under the pretence of it being expert advice often derived from ancient wisdom or whatever fancy metaphor you want to add to it to make it sell!
In fact one doesn’t even have to write the book. There are places available online where you can buy pretty much any type of ebook along with rights to rebrand it as your own work!

As I have mentioned before, I know there is real quality material available out there and it can be found if one applies some common sense filtering before buying the quick fix! Why it took me so long to learn is no longer important!