My personal framework for how we individual humans become the way we do and how to alter that to become freer if we wish

I am going to expand on my own personal framework for how we individual humans become the way we do and how to alter that to become freer if we wish.  I doubt this expansion will be very persuasive, but it could help someone understand where I am coming from if they were interested. 

It all starts with what I call our experiencing and integrating mind (EIM).  When we are first born and cannot even differentiate ourselves from anything beyond ourselves, we are pure EIM.   We first learn that we are in ways separate from everything else as we intuitively learn that some things we do make our caregivers happy, sad, mad, etc, as well as intuitively learn that we have felt needs, which are sometimes at odds with our caregiver’s.  

In order to fit into our environment and best get our felt needs met our EIM develops emotions to guide us.  These emotions are solidified and backed up by what I call visceral beliefs, which are our EIMs interpretation and integration of what we are, how the world operates, and how we fit into our world.  Next, our EIM develops learned behaviors (LBs), which are its strategy (based upon its visceral beliefs and its unique tendencies and strengths and weakness as a human) for how best to act to get our felt needs met in the environment we find ourselves. 

Before proceeding I’d like to note that all of this will vary enormously from person to person, because we have a number of things that can vary greatly from person to person, as well as each person’s experience of the world obviously varies a lot.  Each person’s felt needs vary, especially in their relative strengths, and this is getting way ahead of myself but they also vary greatly at different times in the same person’s life.  A person’s natural tendencies from the outset vary greatly, such as to be timid or bold, and as previously mentioned a person’s natural strengths and weakness vary greatly.  When you compound all of these variances hardly anything can be prescribed as blanket statements for what is best for all people. 

At the same time, I’d suggest that having the framework to help think through things and come up with helpful solutions for individuals is very useful.  Otherwise we tend to become overwhelmed and poorly choose corrective actions and suggestions.  Additionally, I’d suggest we all have an intuitive understanding of something like the above framework, which we use to try to guide our own children, at least if we have the time and are willing to expend the effort and enter the unknowable enough to really contemplate what is best for a particular adored child of ours. 

Moving on, when we get to the age of reason, our EIM, which is what is doing the thinking and reasoning, mostly use reasoning to provide support for our emotions, visceral beliefs, learned behaviors, and the thinking and reasoning itself.  This thinking and reasoning has a large amount of variance from person to person as far as if it is a strength or weakness for them and in how much they tend to try to use it independently of whether it is a strength or weakness. 

Cobbled all together the above is what I refer to broadly as our unconsciously constructed framework (UCF) guided by our individually repetitive emotions and thinking/reasoning and manifested primarily as learned behaviors/default strategies for interacting with the world and ourselves.  This has all been constructed by our EIM to successfully operate in something like autopilot most of the time and not require the constant presence of our EIM.  This is because our EIM knows we are hopelessly inseparable from everything else and thus vulnerable to everything else, which is overwhelming for us to consider and others will often act as maliciously as needed to prevent us from making them consider it. 

As we fall in line with our surroundings these emotions and thinking/reasoning become blocks from experiencing reality as it is (with us all being hopelessly inseparable) and substitute our group’s story of what reality is.  If we are part of a group that operates similarly and compassionately enough or find such a group we often eke out a fairly satisfying existence.  However, if our own UCF cannot find and align with something larger than ourselves, we have some variety and intensity of angst and in today’s society that is labelled mental illness. 

The above framework for how we operate has come primarily from reflecting upon my own struggles that seemed like they would never dissipate.  However, they also try to encompass the things I have learned from consistent relationships with a few trusted mentors 20 to 50 years older than me, various types of therapy, what I believe to be 100-200 of the most remarkable stories of transformation in the transformed own words, as well as a lot of trying to help others and trying to grow up quickly enough to be useful to my kids and be a decent husband. 

It took me a very long time to become something like decently adjusted to life.  I did not really have friends growing up because people generally made me very uncomfortable.  The last few years of undergraduate college were somewhat of an exception because I drank heavily and took on a partying persona that was fairly easy and enjoyable for me.  But the drinking often got out of hand and even when it did not I drank heavily every day.  When my own angst was too much for the alcohol to get rid of for long at all I decided I needed to stop, but I could not get through the torment of a single day unaided and started taking lots of drugs for a short period of time.  Next came a decade of a lot of desperate searching anywhere and everywhere for a way to live without chemical numbing because my ability to earn a good living and continue to be married and even out of jail was undeniably at stake after getting caught and monitored closely but with a narrow path of freedom left open and encouraged.  This probably looked mostly successful from the outside, but not from the inside or to those nearest to me, feeling tormented and inevitably sharing that torment with others in various ways, mostly consistently and intensely with my wife. 

After about a decade of very often felt like futile searching without much relief from the torment no matter what I explored and tried, over the course of a year or so I realized that things were coalescing from all the different things I had tried into something that allowed me to feel peace and a sense of well-being more often than not and even quite a bit of non-chemically induced euphoria or feeling really good.  I was now generally able to choose a life for myself that was fair to others, useful in the big scheme of things, and let me be and feel like a decent husband, father, and friend.  In other words I was fairly well adjusted to life or I like to term it reconciled to life, and I have been able to maintain this for many years with it slowly getting even better over time. 

Now I still have struggles and am 50 pounds or more overweight and my eating is often still a mess.  However, from what I can tell, after starting out with 30 plus years of being much less happy and more poorly adjusted to life than most, I have gone to being much happier than most while being a pretty good husband, father, employee, and friend.  I have gone from feeling violated with any physical contact with my wife (even though she never treated me poorly), to having a very fulfilling and comfortable physical intimacy.  I have gone from not having any close friends (other than relatives) to having a lot and really enjoying them.  I have gone from being a real burden to my son, as I could not help but share my torment with him no matter how hard I tried (and I did try my hardest and knowing I could not added greatly to the torment) to mostly being a good guide, support, and companion. Fortunately, my daughter arrived late enough to miss most of my torment. 

I do not share all of these things to say my ideas are definitely right or better than someone else.  I do share them though because I like to know where and how someone’s ideas formed.  It seems to help me intuitively grasp what might be applicable and helpful to my own life and why. 

Having laid out the framework and a little of where it came from, I can turn to the exciting part, which is the countless ways I or others can use it to find freedom, wholeness, and connection that we all most crave.  The essence of that is always spending time with our experiencing and integrating mind (EIM) and allowing it to teach us how to create and engage in a life true to it, which is what we identify with as being our deepest self.  Simply spending time here is remarkable and learning to live from it is even better. 

The first and most important thing to remember is that our EIM created our perception of everything to begin with and created the blocks to itself to protect itself from a hostile (to it) world.  As such using those feelings and thoughts as bread crumbs to guide us back to where and why they formed, is one way.  (Bread crumbs metaphor compliments of Joshua Lawson when I was explaining some of my theories to him.)

Prayer, if praying for ways to have the strength and courage to act in the interest of this part of us that knows we are all connected and thus in the interests of the whole or marginalized as opposed to for our own safety or self-interests. 

Likewise taking actions to further the interests of the whole or marginalized as opposed to for our own safety or self-interests. 

Enjoying arts, including music and dance, which are generally meant to conjure up a recollection of our connectness.

Reflecting upon things important to us and why.  Spending time with the part of us that knows we are connected to things beyond us. 

Sharing more than superficially with trusted others.

Meditating to get beyond our thoughts and feelings to their source internally and beyond.

Reading sacred texts, which are sacred because they talk and point towards this source within and beyond and discuss the pitfalls and triumphs of finding it and living from it.