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At the heart of all mental problems are always ties (attachments in traditional Buddhist terminology); they hinder the expression of your true self, which is a pure negation. By mistake you identify yourself with your attachments, ie, instead of identifying yourself with your potential, you identify with the past. Therefore, in the long term, it makes no sense to separate attachments into 'bad', which cause suffering, and 'good', which cause positive emotions: to get rid of the former, you should start with the later, and there are several general rules how to do this effectively.
Rule one, there is no such thing as back to normal. The presence of some neurosis indicates that you have childish or adolescent problems that you haven't overcome yet: you still have to overcome them (In fact, Buddhist practice is the way from childhood to maturity, from dependence to independence.) The cause of mental problems is always in the past, in the roots, so if your problems are serious, it's better to deny all your childhood: the time when you were dependent. (Nowadays, when we're all connected via the Internet, to break with the past is particularly difficult but if desired, not impossible - from my own experience, the absence of old ties, even the most cherished ones, gives the feeling of carelessness and freedom.)
Rule two, be patient. Begin with the recent problems gradually shifting to the older ones.
Rule three, to get rid of the 'bad' experiences, first get rid of the 'good' ones, which means that first you should deal with the female aspect. From this, in particular, it follows that your main problem most likely is your relationship with the mother, not your father complex. The father complex in this respect is secondary: to get rid of it, you first need to deal with your memories of the mother (to imagine her pure female aspect and... realize it) and then move to the father (similarly, to imagine his female aspect and destroy it.) After that, you can already work with those concepts that symbolize mother - that is, desymbolize them - such as Motherland, for example. Dealing with your mother - ie, to seeing her as she was or is in fact - is the simplest, fastest, and most radical way to change yourself. It is no accident that the more archaic the mentality, the lower the social class, the more respectful attitude to mother we find there, and vice versa.
It can be said that ties that really pose a problem are those that oblige you to keep them: for some reason you feel that you can't (don't have the right to) sever them; and this is everywhere: for example, you even feel obliged to say hello to your neighbor. Sometimes it's enough just to have the courage to break such rules to get the feeling that you control your life. After that, you can already move on to more serious things: for instance, to those ties that cause fear.
Rule four, whatever is the cause of your anxiety, you can take it calmly, and the goal of the practice is to find and develop such a viewpoint: the viewpoint of a mature person. In other words, if there is a problem, it's always not what happened to you, but your reaction to it, that is, the problem is always you. Maybe this doesn't sound merciful, but that's how I overcame my problems. Someone might say that you can't demand of a neurotic such an understanding, but I'm sure that with the right approach - ie, through the practice of curbing the female aspect instead of sparing ego methods, see rule nine - this is quite possible. A neurosis is a cycle - a vicious cycle - and the only way to get rid of it is to break it.
Rule five, directly follows from the previous, don't try to get away from what you fear, take it as inevitable - that's how I once overcame my post-traumatic stress disorder and paranoid syndrome. And even earlier in this way I overcame the hypochondria: it might not be wise to ignore symptoms in the sense that it can make your life shorter, but that's how I made my life much happier - it's up to you, in a word.
Rule six, learn to ignore public opinion: this is the shortest way to influence how the super-ego manifests itself in your personality, and this is also a necessary condition for becoming a Buddha. Remember that the people you want to impress, whose approval you want to win are those who you obey in fact, and who have control over you.
Rule seven, analyze your relationships with other people: maybe some of them, including your relatives, treat you arrogantly, condescendingly, like a child? If so, it's no wonder that you got depressed. In any case, your goal should be to act as an adult (about the three ego-states - the Parent, Adult, and Child - see Games People Play by Eric Berne); the child inside of you should be killed. Although having overcome the neurosis, you, in jest, sometimes can afford to act like a child. And if you sometimes have to act as a parent, at least try to do this with a certain amount of self-irony.
Rule eight, learn to release your aggression, but try to do this in the right way: taking into account the long-term perspective. On the contrary, to think and act like a pacifist if you're depressed is highly undesirable although this is very common as a defense mechanism.
Melancholy, as Freud remarks, is an aggression directed inward (quite possibly, as a result of the upbringing.) The sense of guilt just points to the roadblocks that should be eliminated; rightly directed aggression is the energy for creativity, or even the energy OF creativity. But if you just want to turn from an oppressed (depression is a hidden fear) into an oppressor, this won't save you from your neurosis: you'll just turn it inside out. I find that the best strategy is the desire for independence: it allows you to maintain a delicate balance between the need to release aggression and the realization that the problem, in fact, is you - that is, the correct Zen practice puts everything in its place.
Rule ten, at least a general idea of psychoanalysis you need to have.
PS Getting rid of neurosis means finding a new viewpoint, it's akin to an actor's getting into a new role, so something like catharsis can happen sooner than you expect. But it must be remembered that regression is always possible, so you need to prepare yourself for the fact that this is a work for several years. It's not a straight path: you'll keep curbing your ego, it'll keep taking revenge, but in general, looking back, you'll note that you're already quite different from what you were six months ago.
PSPS I think it's time to write more about myself, and which I'll probably do in the next posts. I already mentioned what happened to me at my twenty-six (at that time, I
had all the signs of PTSD.) But before that, when I was nineteen, I was
diagnosed with psychasthenia. Interesting was the reason that caused it , but I overcame it on my own so when seven years later I
had to face Christian sectarians, I acted quite well for a former
psychasthenic. In short, there are reasons why I consider myself
competent to give advice on how to change yourself radically.
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