Powerlessness, Control, Love, Letting Go

There seems to be a strong, unconscious, emotional response to losing control and/or becoming powerless. Horror movies often leverage this reaction; e.g., Jaws. Consciously, when I've "thought" about this, I think I've focused on the idea of death, the threat of death as the "cause" of my strong, fearful feelings which come up during horror movies. I.e., in horror, usually something/one is trying to kill some person/people.

There's much more to say here, but jumping the gun a little, my sense is that, when I watch horror, the emotional experience is about loss of control and powerlessness. Jacob talks also about the "illusion of control." I.e., that any sense we have of being "in control" or controlling things, this sense is not real, not true. In fact, there are so many things which we cannot control, that for all practical purposes, we have no control. At any moment, things _could_ go completely out of our control: heart attack, earthquake, car accident, etc. There _is_ a certain amount of predictability in our experience, and we rely on this in our everyday experience, to live and survive. But predictability and control are not at all the same thing (are they?).

At the same time, it's very common for people to try and maintain a sense of control. Maybe this is a survival tactic, a way to support ourselves in an existence which we cannot control, one which we know we will inevitably lose. This has the sense of a biological/genetic agency. I can also see a learned behavior, and here's how it looks to me:

• I am very young.
• I recognize that my parents give me rewards and attention (pseudo-love) when I perform in certain ways (ways they like).
• I recognize this pseudo-love as the best love I'm going to get. I have a deep need for it. In a very real sense, there are (often) times when it's the only thing that matters to me. At these times, if I don't get the pseudo-love, I experience the most abject terror; it feels as though I will perish without the pseudo-love.
• So, I learn to perform properly, so as to get the pseudo-love as often as possible, and as predictably as possible. Among others, I learn one useful strategy which helps me perform properly: I believe that I am in control of myself and my surroundings.
• I use this strategy, of believing that I am "in control," so often, that it becomes in implicit sense of my reality. It is also tightly linked to my (also implicit) need to perform properly so that I can obtain pseudo-love. I am at the same time, learning to treat myself and others the way I am being treated, so that I give myself pseudo-love when I "perform properly."
• Because all of this is linked together, if I sense that I am losing control (becoming powerless), I start to feel horrible/terrified. Not only am I failing to perform properly, but even worse, I'm losing the agency and context which _allows_ me to perform properly in the first place. I'm losing the most fundamental strategy which I use to get pseudo-love. As an adult, I am losing my deepest sense of self-love, self-worth . . . I am spiraling into utter shame, and (at least to some extent) my sense of who I am is collapsing.

Bad Dog

Humans do what they do for identifiable reasons. We are "caused" to behave the way we do. We also make choices, but we often (always?) make choices based on "information" which is unclear, biased, incomplete, etc. So that, even when we make choices to the best of our ability, we can make "wrong" choices; i.e., mistakes. Making mistakes is a very normal, sometimes helpful, other times harmful, and exceptionally common aspect of human existence.

I want to say something like: whatever I do, I tried my best to do the right thing, the good thing. But what if I am "willfully bad?" I.e., what if I consciously choose to do something "bad?" Part of me thinks that I simply wouldn't do this "in full consciousness." I.e., if I had time to sit and sense my own feelings and thoughts around a given choice, and if I had time to work out a reasonably true understanding of these aspects of myself, that I wouldn't do something intentionally "bad." Another way to say this is that even someone who appears to be doing bad or evil things doesn't think he/she is doing the wrong thing at that moment...?

In the heat of the moment, I will certainly make choices that I wouldn't make if I had more time. There's nothing bad about this. I can only do my best.... Or maybe, I can only do what I do. Or maybe, I only do what I do. I do what I do.

What if I decide to go hit someone "for no reason." Why would I do that? Where is the "badness" in me that would make me do something like that? What I mean is, I can't identify a "source of badness" (or of goodness) in me. There's no "badness injecting component," like the classic devil on the shoulder. There _is_ humanness: feelings, unconscious motives, logic, etc. A complex combination of these things in a person are what lead to behaviour. This is how I am. All of these things which go into making a human behave, these are NEITHER BAD NOR GOOD. They are only what they are. A feeling of anger. An perception of threat. The thought (feeling) to run.

So, I am neither bad nor good, but only what I am, which is emotion and memory and humanness, etc.

I am responsible for my actions, so that when I do something "wrong," I feel bad.

Telling myself (believing) that I am bad, fucked up, wrong, a failure, etc. This does me no good. It doesn't help me at all. It doesn't make me happy, or make me a better person. It certainly hurts me. It's what I learned to believe about myself. I don't believe it because I think it will help to counteract bad behaviour. I believe it because that's how I felt: I felt that when I did the wrong thing (or even nothing!), I was (passively or actively)abandoned, and that is-was all my fault, so that I must be _very_ bad. I was also sometimes told (indirectly) that the "wrong" things I did meant that I was "wrong."

Everything is one thing, and I am part of that thing. Or, non-dualistically, I am it. All of this seems to point to: no being can be bad or good. Events and actions can be bad or good, but not beings.

More Being

Being versus doing. The idea is that there is part of me which is called "being." This is a distinct part of myself. By definition, being is nothing but being. Another word to describe this is existence. To exist is nothing more than that; i.e., only to be. This is distinct, or in some way separate from, everything else about a thing, about myself. I may be a carpenter, and my skin may be green, but these things do not affect my being in any way. They say nothing about the part of me which is being, since being is only what it is, and nothing else.

Does that mean that being is "that part of me which is nothing else"? It could be that being is nothing.

This starts from an attempt to distinguish between what I do and what I am.

It might make more sense to talk about it like this: whatever I do, I do for a reason. Those reasons may be unclear to me and others. But, my actions, all of them, occur within a human context, which is my mind, body, and environment. There _can_ be (I can create?) a part of me which "exists" irrespective of anything else, except (maybe) that I've created (imagined) it.

We really don't know what it means to exist. Is there anything we understand which does not exist? What does not exist? So, to say that "all things" share a common aspect of being . . . this seems a bit forced. It does seem like we can say one thing exists and one thing does not, but where is the rock, say, which doesn't exist? Is it "gone"? If a thing "is," then it "exists," which is true of all things. This is like saying, "All things are things." Humans have a sense of "being," but I think this is very different than a rock's sense of being. So, we want to say something like: "Being is that part of a thing which is common to all things." So that, if a thing contains fundamental particles ((fermions and bosons) quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons), it exists.

Hmmm. It just seems less than air-tight.

This all comes from wanting to say: "What I do is different than what I am." So that, if I do something terrible (for whatever reason?), I can still recover myself into a stable state. It's an "out" for the mind-body. This really makes good sense to me, even if I can't prove to myself that it's true. What seems true is that, whatever I do, I do for a reason; and, the reasons will almost always (always?) be complex and hard to know or understand. I.e., I have a massive and constantly flowing river of emotional, hormonal, biological, psychological (etc.) forces within me which are "doing stuff" outside of my consciousness. The system here is very complex, recursive, self-referencing, and updated at every moment with new internal and external input. So that, whatever I do, there is a very real sense in which it's beyond my conscious control. Because of this way in which I am constructed, it makes a lot of sense to take it easy on myself, and to say: "I will create a part of me which is safe, stable, ever-loved by me. This place needs no approval from anyone, even myself. It's there, and nothing else. It's central to who I am."

Since a person can choose to be either cruel or kind, he/she is neither of these things, in essence. This part of us which can choose, this is our existence?

being is not doing, and neither is doing being

When I did something bad, my parents didn't make a distinction between what I did and who I was. what i do and who I am. Or, I learned that what I do and who I am are the same thing. and that if I do something wrong, i _am_ wrong. I learned this, internalized it, and I believe it. If I think I've done something wrong, I remind myself that I am bad, wrong, flawed. This has built up over time. It's pervasive, and largely subconcious.

When someone tells me that I've done something wrong, it hurts, I feel pain. The pain is residual, a "mapped" experience, again from childhood. The pain is the pain of abandonment I experienced as a child, the pain of separation from my only safety, caregiving, and love. It is felt, not understood. At that time in my life when I learned these messages/experiences, I couldn't think the way I do now. I couldn't reason. All I could do was feel, and my only conclusion was the deeply painful and overwhelming emotion of being unloved. This pain became paired with the similar notion of "being wrong". I.e., I would later associate similar experiences of punishment with these same traumatic emotions, so that the emotional-physical pain and "sense of badness" were and are often sharing the same mind-body "messaging systems."

What am I if I'm not what I do? To me, it's very natural, because it is what I learned, to think of the self as the sum of my actions. I am a typist. I am a programmer; not, I do programming. But, another way to think of "things" is that I do what I do, and I am what I am. These aren't the same, they are distinct.

There is an aspect of existence which seems (is) distinct from action. This is being. Being is nothing else, it is only being. It seems hard to know what being is. Jacob was talking about it as the absense of the self, the absence of the ego. I think I can believe that there is something which is doing, and that there is something which is being, and that being is what is when there is no doing. Is there ever no doing? I don't know about this....

I am still responsible for what I do. But, whatever I do, it seems there is a part of me which does not change, which is neither good nor bad, it only is: my being. So, I am never bad, nor good. Nor do I need to feel bad or good about what I do. You might say: you have done something terrible, which makes me angry, and I don't want you to do it again. I and I can say: how does it feel to be angry? And I can say: tell me more about what I did, because I want to understand how it was terrible.

Jacob was relating that recognizing the central nature of being is inherently connective, because there is only one whole being. We all and everything share in this connected aspect of reality. So that what I do affects my own being...? If I hurt another, I am hurting myself. And in caring for another, I care for myself.

If someone is angry with me, then I will feel pain and I will repremand myself (yet again), and feel fear and shame and the danger. I will want to hide and run and close down. But, if I can acknowledge these things, and in doing so experience my own love for myself, and if I can remember that I am not what I've done, and that my own being is inviolate, then I may realize that it's not me who is under attack, but only what I've done. And even that someone else's anger is generated by their own "doer", not be me.