Some Highlights from Hawaii

The view from the balcony of our room at the Royal Kona on the Big Island

Friday, 2/2/18

We tried to go to Mauna Kea beach to snorkel, but they said they were already full.  They only let in 40 cars at a time from the public.

Waipio Valley, the Valley of the Kings – The valley is about 6 miles deep and 1 mile across.  The road down to the valley descends 900’ in 0.6 miles and is said to average a 25% incline with parts up to 45%.  People going down must yield to those coming up and most of it is only 1 lane.  We had to go backwards around 3-4 turns for maybe 100 yards to get out of someone’s way.  At the bottom you can go towards the ocean about ½ mile where you find a black sand beach.  We saw a small wild horse on the way to the ocean.  Or you can go about a mile the other way and at one point we crossed a small river in our jeep.  Could this be the only place you go through a river while on a county road.  We could not get close but did see the 1200’ waterfall at the back of the valley, and a sign for flying rocks.  Most places warn about falling rocks but the residents of this valley are said to not like visitors much and that might be the reason for their sign warning about “flying rocks” instead. 

(From the lookout above Waipio Valley)

Pololu Valley Lookout – The lookout is 400’ above the Ocean and has a nice view, but the view gets much better as you go down.  We turned around probably about 100’ above the ocean when it did not look like the view would get better and that seemed to be what we had heard also. 

Kauhola Point and shoreline – We had to have help from some annoyed ATV guides to find this one and it did not seem like many people visited, which made it more enjoyable.  We seemed to have a ½ mile of cliff type shoreline all to ourselves, and viewed it from a variety of spots, after making it the mile or so of fairly challenging 4x4ing, at least with a stock jeep and trying to be more cautious that my earlier days. 

(I'm a fan of having my own shoreline)

Royal Kona Lu’au – We had bad traffic heading back to our hotel and did not get back with as much time as we would have liked to get ready for a Lu’au, but we did make it and enjoyed ourselves.

Saturday, 2/3/18

Snorkeling at sun up at Two-Step, which is so named because it has nice steps in the lava rock to get into and out of the water.  My snorkeling gear was fogging up too much, but after switching to Cori’s (who was not snorkeling) I could see well and saw a large number of fish of a wide variety of species and some nice coral. 

(I'm trying to figure out how best to get in and out of the water for snorkeling.  We arrived before anyone else at 7am.  Fortunately, someone who knew arrived soon.)

A Green Sand Beach is where we went next.  It is 2.5 miles (as the bird flies) of fairly challenging 4x4ing, and there are a maze of a few to many more self made roads going there.  So we probably traveled 3-4 miles each way, and we stopped about 90% of the way there because it looked a little too challenging for our stock Jeep Wrangler, such that we might have caused it damage or gotten stuck 10% of the time, which is what I tried to use as my risk cutoff.  All of this was right on the coast and was a blast even though a little nerve racking for myself and more so for Cori.

South Point – The southern most point of the US, even though Key West often says it is.  There is a black sand beach there and quite a few local fisherman spread out.  There is also maybe 25’ cliffs people jump off.  We enjoyed watching them but did not jump ourselves. 

Punalu’u Black sand beach.  The easiest black sand beach to get to and a popular place with a lot of people and a few life guards.  We saw a few sea turtles out of the water on sand or rock and then saw a few more in the water.  My only regret of the trip was not swimming with the ones in the water.

Volcano National Park –

We spent 4-5 hours in the park.  Maybe 3 of those hours were driving the roads and stopping at a number of lookouts.  We did the Thurston Lava Tube after dark, which is basically a cave created by hot lava.  The highlight was probably watching the glowing lava in a lava lake after dark.  I did that for about an hour while Cori spent much of that time in the Jagger Museum, which was connected to the viewing area. 

This was by far our longest day.  We left our hotel at 6:30am and did not get back until 10:20pm. 

Sunday, 2/4/18

Having had such a long day before, we slept in a bit, until 8am or so.  I had been frequently checking to see if Mauna Kea Mtn road was open, and found out it had opened around 8:30am Sunday.  It had been closed for 5-6 days prior to this.  We immediately packed a few things and started driving.  Mauna Kea is about 13,800 feet.  The road to the visitor ctr at 9200 feet is almost always open, but past there is spotty in the winter.  The first 5 miles past the visitor center is not paved and requires 4wd.  The last 3.5 miles is paved.  We climbed on foot an additional 100’ or so in elevation to reach the summit.

Monday, 2/5/18

We went back to Mauna Kea beach, arriving close to when they open at 7am to make sure would get in.  We were the first to arrive, I think.  Unfortunately, it was too rough for the snorkeling to be any good. It was not safe to get near the rocks where the fish often are and the sand being constantly kicked up created low visibility.  I still swam a lot and enjoyed bobbing and a little body surfing. 

We did some shopping in Kona near our hotel and then had a late lunch.  After lunch Cori kept shopping and I went to snorkel 5 miles south of our hotel at Kahalu’u, which had a ton of fish and variety. 

Tuesday, 2/6/18

We had breakfast at our hotel, which had a very good buffet.  The birds enjoyed that it was an open air venue. 

We flew from the Big Island to Oahu and got a 2018 Camaro convertible to rent.  Our place was on the northeast coast and took about an hour to get to.  Most of Oahu was very scenic with beach on one side of the road and steep lush mountains on the other.  It was too crowded for my taste though. 

View from our room we booked through AirBnB on Oahu

(Not a great picture, but it was a nice view of the ocean.)

Wednesday, 2/7/18

Pearl Harbor –

Dole Pineapple Plantation –

Scoped out a couple snorkeling spots on the way home and decided against both.

Thursday, 2/8/18

Makapu’u Hike – 2.5 mile hike on a paved path that climbed 647’.  Very scenic and could see a great deal of the coast from this SE point of Oahu.  We also saw a few humpback whales several times from near the top and at the top. 

Ho’omaluhia Botanical Gardens – very scenic drive going slightly into the mountains and having a great view of the mountains. 

Tantalus sights and lookout – great view from near the top of a mountain overlooking Honolulu and surrounding areas. 

Friday, 2/9/18

(I do not know where this picture is from, but this kind of scenery was everywhere, especially on Oahu.)

Checked out the northwest coast of Oahu

Nu’uanu Lookout – very windy

And a Buddhist Temple

Flight back to Ohio left at 9pm Hawaii time on Friday.  8 hours is almost 8 hours too long to be cooped up in the tiny space allotted in an airplane.

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. 

Experiencing and Integrating Mind (EIM)

Comment to a FB friends comment to "Never let you head overthrow your heart."

I'd say the reverse is almost as true. We really cannot be whole with ourselves or anything else if we are not willing to do the work to sift through issues until our heart and head find agreement. The heart might need to slightly lead the way, but unless each treats the other as an indispensable and revered partner we are bound to be hiding or suppressing a big part of reality.

I personally go back and forth between believing my heart must take a slight lead or dominant role and thinking they ought to be equal revered partners of each other and then oddly I normally decide there is no actual difference between the two approaches. If both are treating the other as completely revered/trusted partners they will listen to the other until a consensus if found and that will be the nearest thing to truth for that situation and moment in time.

At this point another friend asked, "Perhaps the more significant question: Who is this “I” you speak of who goes back and forth between your head and your heart?"  To which I replied:

This probably will not make any sense to anyone else, but I view this “I” as my Experiencing and Integrating Mind (EIM) from which my thinking (head) and emotions/feelings (heart) originate. My thinking and emotions are the result of this deepest and oldest self (EIM) experiencing and trying to integrate itself into the world it experiences. 

Oddly, in order to fit into its surroundings and world that it intuitively knows it is hopelessly an inseparable part of our EIM has to adopt the collective paradigms of our clan and culture, which are mostly unconsciously agreed upon illusions. It starts to do this from a very young age with emotions, well before we develop any reliable thinking or reasoning, as we figure out what leads to feeling secure or scared and otherwise good or bad in our family/preschool/etc environment. Later we are taught how to reason and view things from our culture and clan’s perspective. Sometimes our emotions and/or reasoning do rebel against part or all of our culture’s perspective/paradigms but we are still stuck in them if we are fighting for or against them.

Ironically, as our original, oldest and deepest self (EIM) is experiencing and integrating ourselves into our world it is tragically writing itself mostly out of the script/picture. (I’m not a big fan of true self and false self lingo because if we are operating out of what is meant by our false self then that is what we are and what our reality is at that moment. At the same time the traditional meaning of the concepts of true self and false self might be helpful, compared to my own mumbo jumbo, if anyone is actually trying to understand what I am saying.) Basically what I am saying is our true self (EIM) creates our false self/ego in order to fit into the world we find ourselves.

It does this because this EIM/true self/image of God within each of us is the part of us that knows we are unavoidably a part of our surroundings and everything else. Being a part of something inescapably means we are vulnerable to the fate of that which we are a part. We intuitively, through our emotions bolstered by our reasoning, realize the last thing we want to be is vulnerable. As such, we hide and deny our true self in order to try to fit into our world safely. In the process, generally without realizing it, we try to make ourselves less vulnerable at the expense of others by shifting our inherent burden, which is the creation and living out of our false self. And since most of the world operates out of this paradigm any vulnerability/weakness exposed is generally a target to receive another’s burden, reinforcing the need to hide and deny our true self with its known vulnerability.

We generally do not try it unless we are out of options to hide and deny it, but everyone’s greatest yearning is to get to be with their own true self and experience the world through it. Since our true self has created our false self by developing emotions and thinking to try to fit into our world, the path back to our original/true self is to evaluate/contemplate these emotions and thoughts/concepts from their source within, our deepest/original/true self. And this process of contemplation/evaluation always consists of a gentle interplay between the heart (emotions) and head (reasoning) until they align into an epiphany of sorts from their common source within for at least that moment when that source or true/deepest/oldest/original self is experiencing and present/whole with its surroundings. This is of course commonly described as letting go, because it is the head helping the heart or the heart helping the head to let go of the block to our true self.

If we go yet deeper we actually find this “I” or true/deepest/original self vanishes into union with everything else (including the past and future) to the extent we are successful in letting go of our false self/ways of the flesh/ego/shell/emotional and mental blocks. To whatever extent we are successful in this letting go process at any given moment we will discover we have removed what keeps us separate or lost or broken (off) from complete union/communion. This is what Jesus was alluding to when he would talk about he and the Father being one and only doing his Father’s will, and is how Jesus was in this sense fully human and fully divine, after relinquishing all of his false self/ways of the flesh/ego/shell/emotional and mental blocks. It is also what the Buddha was alluding to when he said “Actions do exist, and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not.” 

To the extent we are not using our emotional and mental faculties to protect ourselves and seek advantages for ourselves and our group we will be united with God (The Entirety). And we will feel united, which is bliss. We will still have this creating part of us within, but we will know it is a small indistinguishable part of The Creator, and we will accurately recognize this as our Source.

Please do not think I am implying I spend much of my time being very successful in this letting go process. Unconsciously adopting the opposite as the wise approach I started out as someone almost entirely and exclusively committed to emotional and mental blocks with their commonly resulting behaviors, including the frivolous pleasure seeking and worldly success since meaningful enjoyment only comes from some variety of union. Through this approach becoming repeatedly untenable and an enormous amount of luck/good fortune/grace, including great people wanting to be helpful and viable paths to a better way, I have stumbled into some mystical adventures that at times bring great clarity, when I successfully surrender to the letting go process. When considering the tremendous amount of grace I have received and how guarded I still am most of the time though my life is nothing to even consider bragging about.

Is humanity doomed

The thing that gives me some hope for humanities future is that we are geared more than anything else to survive and create the best living conditions possible. 

Generally in human history, often with some lag time, we have done what would or has achieved this goal best. When we were hunter and gatherer type people this skewed towards looking out for the tribe ahead of the individual because we had not yet conquered the earth and most could not survive well for even brief periods without the tribe. With the industrial revolution, innovation, and conquering the earth it swung towards emphasizing personal responsibility and rewards.

Now that we have conquered the earth and are wearing out/depleting the earth, not to mention found ways to quickly be able to obliterate ourselves, we are going to have to again shift towards a more collective approach to survive and create the best living conditions possible.

In a lot of ways WW1 and WW2 were probably the start of realizing this. And some changes were made in the aftermath as you have often mentioned. If you look at some of FDRs ideas of what would be needed to form a better society that did not require so much big and small conflict, there was also this understanding politically, at least from some. However, as the new great power in the world it was still in the US’s short term (say 50 years or less) interest to use that power primarily for its own prosperity rather than a global prosperity that might be more stable.

A similar dynamic was occurring at the individual level in the US. For those individuals who had a moderate amount of comfort and prosperity, they were more likely to keep that and increase it a little in the short term (here maybe 5-10 years) by focusing mostly on their own self interests, especially if they could mask that under ideologies and jargon that made it seem best for the whole of society.

However, as mentioned to start, we are quickly approaching a time when surviving and having an improving way of life is simply not going to be possible without a radical change in the way we view things and operate. Up to this point in time someone trying to prematurely start this better way of life has been marginalized in various ways. Soon though it will be the only way to do what we are most geared towards doing, and thus we might actually do it on a large scale.

Social responsibility or personal responsibility

I agree with all your observations on personal responsibility, such as:
1 -People don't like to admit their own failings,
2 - We've been led to believe that personal responsibility is what determines one's lot in life, w/o learning that personal responsibility only goes so far in a universe filled w/ events that one has no control over,
3 - We also fail to take into account that no one is independent. We ALL depend on the actions and accomplishments of others,
4 - People would rather insist that they were right, instead of actually BEING right, but being right also means that you have to be able to accept when you’re not. 
5- People insist that they're right when they're not because they haven't experienced enough success in their lives to be comfortable w/ accepting their failures also.

I would note though that while we have been led to believe and in some ways bought into personal responsibility being what determines one’s lot in life, we must not have bought into it too much if 1, 4, and 5 are accurate observations. It seems to be something we say we believe, vote like we believe, but apply more to others than ourselves. 

I only gave a partial answer previously when we were discussing personal and social responsibility, as I was being a little cantankerous insisting upon both with only partially explaining what I meant. I’ll see if I can do a little better job now, although only briefly (hopefully).

It seems to me people error mainly in thinking one precludes the other when in actuality complete personal responsibility and complete social responsibility are needed for an ideal community. 

It is our community’s social responsibility to tell us we must be productive or useful (in some way) member of that community and give us the opportunity (with as many options as possible) to actually do that. This includes giving us opportunities to admit and to the best of our ability make up for our mistakes or failures. However, as we all intuitively know there is no use in giving people unlimited chances until they seem to have understood, acknowledge, and done what they could to correct/make up for their mistakes. It would be irresponsible for the person and community to allow a member to continually extract resources from mistakes without demonstrating they have learned from past ones. 

Our personal responsibility is to be a useful or productive member of the community, to admit and make up for our mistakes to the best of our ability, and to learn/mature in the process to become more useful in our own direct contributions, our mentoring of other community members, and our administration of the community. 

I’d also suggest something like this is already practiced by a good portion of the privileged, amongst themselves. Of course a community should be considered the whole of a town or city at the very least and probably all of humanity or all of earth inhabitants.


After a friend asks me what I mean by "probably all of humanity."

I had done a better job than I often do with brevity and you aren’t going to let me get away with it? 

In that last sentence I was trying to very briefly define the scope of the community that owes this social responsibility to the individual in that community/society and that the individual owes the personal responsibility. Having further defined it like this taking it past all humans is problematic. 

We of course have a ton of different layers of communities within this largest community. For me examples would include my marriage, immediate family, extended family, friends, workplace, profession, neighborhood, my kid’s friend’s and families, school district, city, state, nation, etc. There would be nuances to each, but I think the basic dynamics I shared would apply to each, as well as how each of those layers or smaller communities would owe something akin to the personal responsibility to one another and the larger communities that encompass them.

Common Ground

FB comment on a friend's post asking if there is common ground between the far right and far left on the political spectrum. 

The common ground is buried so deep that few find it. A lot more are going to need to find it if we are going to survive as a human race without a nanny state or catastrophe that makes us mostly start over. I’ll again start with observations from recent discussions. We humans are social/connected creatures. Whether we can see it and admit it or not we are connected to each other and to our surroundings, which are connected to everything else. When we are born we cannot even distinguish that we are separate from our surroundings and caregivers. Soon we learn that things we do seem to make those around us happy, mad, sad, etc, and that our felt needs/desires are sometimes at odds with our caregiver’s. This is how we first learn that we are also in ways separate from everything else. In order to try to fit in and prosper we develop what I’ll call unconsciously constructed frameworks (UCF) for the way the world works and how we fit into it. This primarily forms with what I call visceral beliefs guiding our emotions very early in life, well before we develop any reliable thinking or reasoning, as we figure out what leads to feeling secure or scared and otherwise good or bad in our family/preschool/etc environment. Later we are taught how to reason and view things from our family’s/groups’s/culture’s perspective. Most of the time we are taught and naturally want to use our reasoning to justify and fortify our UCF, rather than to challenge it. This mostly static UCF of emotions and thinking/reasoning to support it are blocks to experiencing life as it actually is at any given moment. I should step back to try to explain why that is. The fact that we are hopelessly inseparable and dependant upon things beyond ourselves is obvious when we are very little, but no less true when we get older. We cannot tolerate the vulnerability that is an escapable part of being a part of things beyond us though, and adopting some variety of our group’s UCF with our own nuances is how we attempt to get around that. As long as we choose an acceptable role within the group’s UCF and do an adequate job of fulfilling that role, our group lets us fairly successfully avoid feeling the vulnerability of actual reality. Anthony De Mello does a great job of discussing this at length and how this is the illusion we live within. And how these emotions and thinking/reasoning/concepts are the attachments (blocks) we will have to let go of or give up if we are to awaken to Life. Alan Watts also discuses it as the illusion we must break free of, but he more often refers to it as seeing through the game of life. Humans have always operated primarily on this basis of substituting a shared religion/story/philosophy/collective UCF for actual reality. However, that has gotten much harder to do recently. Until recently different groups with different religions did not have much contact with each other in their daily lives, and it was thus easier to have everyone in the group operating from a fairly consistent perspective and get those who did not in line or do away with them. With the melting pot of the US and globalization though this has now become impossible without an authoritarian and overly invasive regime demanding and enforcing a collective UCF. Unfortunately, instead of recognizing this and moving towards reality by recognizing, admitting and letting go of our blocks/attachments/illusions, many are pushing harder and harder for their version of masking it. The common ground is that everyone is trying to avoid the vulnerability inherent in being a part of everything else. The far left’s approach is to get rid of vulnerability by making the world safer and easier than reality allows. The far rights approach is to act like they are not vulnerable and sufficiently rebuke anyone who displays vulnerability. This vulnerability inherent in Life is hard to come to grips with by itself and that becomes almost impossible when almost everyone is trying to avoid it and are inclined to try to suppress anything that makes them feel it. After a friend's comment If we were to briefly entertain my obnoxious psychobabble about us forming unconsciously constructed frameworks (UCFs) to try to best get our felt needs (including safety) met in the situations we find ourselves, and this takes the form of adopting ourgroup’s/culture’s paradigm(s) in order to avoid the felt vulnerability of realizing we are all part of the same thing and dependent upon one another, and this is guided by our emotions and adopted group’s reasonings, which are blocks/barriers to experiencing reality as it actually is, it might make sense for people to choose the neatly dressed confident clones to represent them. The fact that these people have made themselves into these neatly dressed clones is the proof they are the most committed to the paradigm and thus the least likely to push people past the felt safety of their barriers/blocks and experience the vulnerability of being a part of everything else.

Shame

Comment on friend's FB asking where does shame come from, it is ever beneficial and do some experience more of it than others or have more problems from it even with similar experiences.

We humans are social/connected creatures. Whether we can see it and admit it or not we are connected to each other and to our surroundings, which are connected to everything else.

When we are born we cannot even distinguish that we are separate from our surroundings and caregivers. Soon we learn that things we do seem to make those around us happy, mad, sad, etc, and that our felt needs/desires are sometimes at odds with our caregiver’s. This is how we first learn that we are also in ways separate from everything else.

Operating successfully shame is what teaches us (along with our caregivers) how to get our felt needs met in ways that are pleasing and beneficial to our surroundings because shame is the feeling we get when our felt needs are at odds with our surroundings.

Unfortunately, as parents and society we rarely have the time or patience or it seems wisdom or desire to model and teach our young how to get their felt needs met in ways that are pleasing and beneficial to others. In fact we often demonize/shame the felt needs in order to get our young (or really those of all ages) to do what we want them to do or to shield or disguise our own. Or with slightly better motives we might be teaching them to hide/suppress/deny their felt needs/vulnerabilities so that others cannot hurt or manipulate them as easily.

Tragically, this means that someone trying to get their felt needs met in ways that are pleasing and beneficial to others are often exploited and deeply hurt, and thus most learn well to keep them buried. At this point if we go back to my definition of shame – the feeling we get when our felt needs are at odds with others – we see how understandable it is to get paralyzed by this shame as something hopelessly defective within us that has these felt needs that keeps us at odds with our surroundings.

If we cannot live from these primordial felt needs, which are all related to being a connected and valuable/useful part of things beyond ourselves, we are cut off from the part of us that connects to things beyond us, and we have to find some way to numb that pain or distract ourselves from that pain/disconnection/emptiness, which typically seems to reinforce the defectiveness since we are rejecting this part of ourselves and often doing things we are less than proud of trying to suppress/hide/reject it.

One of the countless ways to try to numb and/or distract ourselves from this pain of being isolated from ourselves and everything else is adopting a religion that seems to validate our experience of being hopelessly defective due to our felt needs, which promises some solution either now or in an afterlife. As long as we are using the religion to try to get around doing the often excruciating, but just as rewarding, work of learning how to satisfy our inherent felt needs in ways beneficial to others, we will remain isolated and empty. At the same time, if we realize that in countless ways (one for each of us) we can get our felt needs met in ways beneficial to others, we will realize that was what all the great spiritual teachers have always been sharing and demonstrating.

Before moving on I want to clarify that it is not just because of our often subtlely hostile environment that we hide our felt needs/vulnerabilities. Unless we are taught and shown how to get our felt needs met in ways that are pleasing and beneficial to others, we will naturally try the easiest and safest ways to satisfy them without nearly enough regard for whether that is useful or even fair to others.

It probably goes without saying but most of the felt needs part of the above is biological/nature and most of the learning how to get them met in beneficial ways for others, as well as having them shunned and demonized is primarily environmental/nurture.

The environmental obviously varies from person to person as they experience the world, but I’d guess the felt needs vary almost as much in their flavor and intensity from person to person. Beyond that some people are inherently much more sensitive to feeling hurt or threatened. Further variation between people occurs in how people are willing and able to sort through things to come to some resolution and new path forward. Some are much more susceptible to getting stuck in thoughts or feelings and forever being crippled by them.

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