About Me II

About Me

My first word was 'papa' - 'dad' - my father read somewhere that if you whisper in the ear of a sleeping baby words, then in this way you can teach the child to speak. That's how he taught me my first word (although usually for the Russians it's 'mama'- 'mom'.) As it turned out later, that wasn't the end of his experimenting with whispering in my ears; and when I became a teenager and started to fight for my independence, he and my mother began to apply this method for my upbringing. Needless to say that what they whispered to me were only prohibitions (someday, maybe I'll tell you what exactly they whispered: I don't think this can already make me vulnerable.)

General Rules for Overcoming Mental Problems

See also
The Main Obstacle,
One Wonderful Technique,
The Hell Gate 

 and here

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.

The Trouble with Self-Compassion

To get rid of a neurosis, your ego should be changed entirely: you should not cherish it, but, calling things by their proper names, kill it. So there's no room for self compassion. Self compassion can reconcile you with your neurosis but won't solve the very problem (although if someone starts arguing that you should fit in some standards of behaviour, be 'normal' like everybody else, then it's appropriate to recall that you're a unique personality and have the right to your own imperfections.) Even after getting rid of the neurosis, you'll still have crises - and that's great! - and each time you'll face a choice: whether to reconcile yourself with your imperfections or to bring the crisis to the limit, which is a great skill, and get over yourself. This is difficult only with your first neurosis, but then you'll become like Phoenix.

The Four Noble Truths :-)

The First Noble Truth: to reveal your true self, you should just remove the shit that obscures it; and don't be embarrassed by the fact that you have to create nothing but only to destroy.

I remind you that when concentrating on the external world, you should also be fully aware of your body (see Zen Training : Methods and Philosophy by Katsuki Sekida.) Otherwise, no special skills are required ift when focusing on something, you lose the feeling of your body.

And you can really be aware of your body only by denying the outer world - the context - zazen in fact is a total denial of everything. That's why spiritual practices have always attached great importance to such challenges as dousing with cold water, for example. Otherwise, you can easily concentrate on a sexual object, but it will dissolve your self - to what 'elimination of dualism' could this possibly refer?

The Hell Gate

See also
The Main Obstacle,
One Wonderful Technique,

 and here

So, What Makes the Female Aspect So Special? 

Let me remind you my thesis: if you have mental problems, obsessive thoughts, for example, you can't just remove them like a sick tooth leaving everything else as it was: you have to change yourself, change your attitude to the problem - sounds logical, but what does this really mean?

From my own experience of depression, if you feel depressed, in the end you still feel better, and only then you can change something. But if you already feel good, is it necessary to change anything?  And if yes, in what way? The first step, therefore, is to realize that you have problems not only when you're depressed but also when you're feeling high so the recovery will require much greater changes than just getting rid of some unpleasant symptoms. When we're depressed, we're obsessed with unpleasant thoughts, but the very thought obsession usually begins when we're feeling high - that's when we usually get seduced by tempting, happy thoughts, and later when we're exhausted, nightmares overtake us.

This is a general rule: unpleasant thoughts are preceded by pleasant ones; before unpleasant thoughts invade, pleasant thoughts must already prepare the ground for them: make us malleable. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin: pleasant thoughts are the cause of unpleasant - somehow they are associated - there is some reason why we became attached to our nightmares. So to get rid of a neurosis, you should start with its pleasant aspect - this at least will deprive the unpleasant aspect of its energy. What seduces you - I called it the female aspect - acts as a Trojan horse when it comes to entering within you, and the same substance is also the reason why negative experiences associated with it linger inside of you, so to reverse the neurosis, you should start again with its pleasant aspect.

Those dark sides of our personalities that Freud describes (and which shock some so much that they refuse to believe in them) manifest themselves only when we're merging with someone, that is, when we're creating new or maintaining old ties (any relationship, even altruistic, has its dark side.) But this doesn't mean that we're doomed to such duplicity: when seeking independence, we sever ties, we can well be honest with ourselves and others.