Human Nature

What does it mean BEING HUMAN? Where have we lost the meaning of being human? We have been brainwashed by the spirit of competition. We don't see others as people, we see others from their school grades, degree, income, job title, the size of the house, the size of their company, success/failure, normal/disorder. We don't see them as human, we see them as successful or less than successful person. We worship those who are successful and ignore those who are less successful.

We put Value on people. We have prejudice against humanity. Those who are healthy, wealthy, popular, famous, powerful, nice, attractive are the dominant group. Those who are not are the minority. This is the main prejudice.

We confuse who we are with who we want to be.  We are what social desire and avoid undesirable. Two logic.We see people's status or persona. We run all the time chasing status or social masks. we discriminate the undesirable. We are social puppets. We are the puppet of corporation and government to compete. Like communist countries pose its people to look happy for pictures.

cheating in relationship

Now, we are going to talk about cheating in specific population.

The "Cheating" to oneself have been discussed in the articles Shadow, Johari Window, etc. Awareness of this "Cheating" is an invitation to "Spiritual Journey". Sometimes, it's called "Looking for Self". People who realize their own suffering sometimes go to "Spiritual Retreat", "Counseling" or "Self Development Workshops" with one thought "There is more than meet the eyes".

We all have secrets that we keep from others. Our relationship with others have several levels: Strangers, acquaintance, friendship, and intimate. It is appropriate to keep personal information when talking with strangers. With acquaintance, we share some general personal information. With friendship, we are expected to share deeper personal information. Hopefully, we can share our deepest personal information in intimate relationship. It is considered "awkward" to violate these boundaries. Such as, talking about deep personal information with strangers or inability to talk about deep personal information with intimate partners. This inability to talk about deep personal information with intimate partners is a form of "Cheating".

In intimate relationship, this "Cheating" in relationship usually occur in unhealthy relationships, Independent, Dependent, and Co-dependent relationships. There are two causes of this "Cheating" in relationship: A person's past traumatic experience in intimate relationship and lack of trust in the relationship.

There is no trust in the Independent relationship, and thus, there is no relationship. In dysfunctional Dependent and Co-dependent relationships, the partners' mood fluctuate so much to establish any kind of trust. For example, in "Dominance Submissive" relationship, the Dominant is not happy when his dominance is being questioned and the Submissive is not happy because he is not free.

In Dependent and Co-dependent relationships, there is an immature person (s) in the relationship who still is not yet independent. To cover up the immaturities, a person will pretend or use a mask to cover the dependence. Please differentiate between Love and Symbols of Love. A husband came to counseling and said that he doesn't understand why his wife is angry at him. He said that he kiss her everyday, he buys her flower, tells her "I love you" everyday. He confuses the difference between loving and giving symbol of love to his wife. Even an abusive husband always buy flowers and apologize after beating his wife.

Spirituality quotes

“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” ANNE LAMMOTT

Healing is a process of handling pain and pleasure in positive ways rather than self-destructive ways.

"It is not the great temptations that ruin us;

it is the little ones." 

-John W. DeForest

If you want to enjoy the rainbow, be prepared to endure the storm.

-Warren Wendel Wiersbe

Wise men speak because they have something to say;

Fools because they have to say something.”

-Plato

"When you were born, you were crying and everyone around you was smiling. Live your life so that when you die, you're the one smiling and everyone around you is crying." —Unknown

"Blessed are those who can give without remembering and take without forgetting." —Elizabeth Bibesco

"Choose being kind over being right, and you'll be right every time." —Richard Carlson
"Each today, well-lived, makes yesterday a dream of happiness and each tomorrow a vision of hope. Look, therefore, to this one day, for it and it alone is life." —Sanskrit poem 

IF YOU WANT TO HAVE A BETTER 'YESTERDAY' TOMORROW, LIVE WELL TODAY.
"Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty - they merely move it from their faces into their hearts." —Martin Buxbaum
"There are no guarantees. From the viewpoint of fear, none are strong enough. From the viewpoint of love, none are necessary." —Emmanuel
"Light that is One though the lamps be many." —Robin Williamson
"You think of yourselves as humans searching for a spiritual awakening, when in fact you are spiritual beings attempting to cope with a human awakening. Seeing yourselves from the perspective of the spirit within will help you to remember why you came here and what you came here to do." —The Group
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." –Philip K. Dick
"I sought my God and my God I could not find. I sought my soul and my soul eluded me. I sought my brother to serve him in his need, and I found all three—my God, my soul, and thee."
"Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny." —Carl Schurz
"Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity." —Henry Van Dyke
"The highest form of spiritual work is the realization of the essence of man.... You never learn the answer; you can only become the answer." —Richard Rose

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
- André Gide

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
- Aristotle

I’d rather live with a good question than a bad answer.
- Aryeh Frimer

We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.
- Bill Vaughan



IN SCHOOL, WE ARE TESTED AFTER WE STUDY. IN LIFE, WE LEARN AFTER WE ARE TESTED.

The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
– Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

“I do not believe in taking the right decision, I take a decision and make it right.”
― Muhammad Ali Jinnah

“The human mind isn't a terribly logical or consistent place. Most people, given the choice to face a hideous or terrifying truth or to conveniently avoid it, choose the convenience and peace of normality. That doesn't make them strong or weak people, or good or bad people. It just makes them people.”

“I protect myself by refusing to know myself.”

“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”

If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.” Bernard M. Baruch

“Never complain, never explain. Resist the temptation to defend yourself or make excuses.” 

DON'T EXPLAIN. YOUR ENEMIES DON'T CARE AND YOUR FRIENDS DON'T NEED ANY.

― Brian Tracy

“You cannot change what you are, only what you do.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.”
― Chuck Palahniuk

MIND IS A MIRRORED VIEW OF LIFE. WE WANT TO BE HAPPY BUT WE THINK ABOUT UNHAPPINESS.
A SUBJECT BECOMES AN OBJECT.

Fear has a large shadow, but he himself is small.”

Ruth Gendler quotes In academic, we are tested after studying In life, we learn after we get tested.

Suffering

There are two kinds of memory, traumatic and non-traumatic memory. Non-traumatic memory is just that, a memory. This is the kind of memory that has neutral or positive feelings. This is "you can laugh at yourself" kind of memory. Any memory about past events that you can look back without negative feelings.

Traumatic memory is memory that still has negative feelings attached to it. Carl Jung call this a Complex, such as Inferiority Complex. This memory is actually about something that we were not competent about, such as problems or mistakes. This is the memory we haven't "let go". It is as if our mind is still trying to solve the problems. Our emotion takes over in moments of incompetence or our emotion let us know "Conscious Incompetence" and our mind picks up where it left off.

We misidentify with the 'Incompetent I" and call it the "I".

Stigma

What does it mean to be "normal"?  This idea of "Norm-al" gives rise to prejudice and discrimination that there is an abnormal population. This could be applied to groups of Race, Sex, Sexual Preference, Health, Age, and Disability. All group members share the same labels. These labels are called STIGMA. These stigmas create feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, confused, anger, depressed, frustration, anxiety, and fear.

When caring or helping persons with health challenges or who has disability, this is an important factor to consider, the PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTOR, the frustration they experience dealing with expectations to be "Normal". These feelings will create "Resistance" to the care or help they need. The resistance are not symptoms of their health problems or disability, they are symptoms to the "Expectation to be Normal" or our prejudice. They feel like a victim of prejudice/discrimination and they are. We treat them like there is something wrong with them and they have to "normal-ize" themselves. It is actually our own FEAR that put them in the box, like what we used to do to people who has Leper and Aids.

"To be sick, to have mental health problems, or disability" is a group that has a very strong stigma. They carry strong feelings aside from their "problems". These feelings need to be recognized and accepted before we can care or help a person. There are ways to manage this resistance. The best thing we could do is to ask ourselves: What does it mean to be "normal"?

SPIRITUALITY

There are two basic laws of nature (Law of Cooperation and Competition). There are five dimensions in human experience
1. Physical dimension - This is the foundation of our universe that we all are made of atoms. The atoms hit each other (Compete with each other) and some atoms get together (Cooperate) to create the next dimension.

2. Chemical dimension - Chemical reaction is collection of atoms neutron and electron. There are 3 chemical forms: Gas, Liquid, and Solid. The forms compete with each other and some cooperate with each other and create the next dimension (Organic chemistry).

3. Biological dimension - Biological entity has its own system to support itself, reproductive, digestive, respitory, and nervous system. This is the end of the Material Dimensions, dimensions made from matter. The next 3 dimensions are the System dimension. The biological systems compete with each other and need a system to manage their cooperation and gives birth to emotions.

4. Emotional dimension - Emotional system is part of biological system to manage biological systems. The main purpose of emotions is to prioritize our needs to help us survive. However, our emotion is involved in too much competition with others and develop a system to help manage emotions.

5. Mental dimension - Mental dimension is our abstract dimension, we can't see or touch it. If emotion is our chemical and physical phenomena, mental dimension is neither biological or chemical. Mind is different than brain. However, a biological with emotional and mental dimension are dangerous beings without a system.

6. Social dimension - Social dimension is higher in abstraction dimension. Our social dimension is made from rules to regulate behaviors, but we have no rules to regulate emotions or thoughts. Our social dimension requires civilization of its members. Eventually, they start to socialize and compete with each other.

7. Spiritual dimension - Spiritual dimension is higher in abstraction dimension. Our spiritual dimension is created to regulate society with the help of supernatural.


Science for the dimensions:
1. Physics for physical dimension
2. Chemistry for chemical dimension
3. Biology for biological dimension
4. Psychology for emotional/mental/social
5. Spirituality for spiritual dimension

In other words, spirituality is something that science can't explain.

The Most Dangerous Behavior

What is the most dangerous behavior? Stealing, raping, bullying, abusing, killing? They are dangerous behaviors. But I believe that the most dangerous behavior is Cheating. Cheating allows dangerous behaviors to continue without being noticed.  Dangerous behaviors are mistakes that we make, but cheating makes them unstoppable and unmanagable. Cheating hides and protect those mistakes from being corrected.

We can cheat ourselves and cheat others. We cheat ourselves by ignorance or denial. An ignorant simply does not know and believes what is seen as true. A denier is trying to avoid traumatic feelings.

"Cheaters hate honesty and honest persons hate lies"

 Self-cheating is the basis of all mental health problems and disorders. It has been mentioned in spirituality as source of suffering. Adam hid himself from God after eating the forbidden fruit. Jesus prayed to forgive his enemies for "they know not what they do", Buddha said that we are asleep.

Cheating others is the basis of relationship problems. We are not only talking about hiding affairs or other negative behaviors. We sometimes pretend to be someone we are not and people find out about who we really are after the fact. Cheating destroy trust, the main ingredient in relationship.

Cheating also occur in professional setting, in government and private sectors. This is a dangerous form of cheating because a person can hide behind his profession to do his cheating. For example, the priests who crucify Jesus, the priests who abuse children or government official who corrupt. They all use a mask of their "Profession" to do their personal act. At the same time, where a person have emotion to keep him honest (It's called guilt), a profession does not have emotion to keep him honest. A person by himself maybe unable to kill another human being, but he can use his profession to kill "because it's a job." or hire a professional killer to do the killing.

Corruption is a common cheating practice in professional setting where a person takes more than he earns or sell something that was not his to sell, like law or permit. What makes corruption dangerous is other than robbing the money is that a person deny the corruption. Now the cheater cheat about the cheating. It makes the behavior unstoppable and unmanagable. The persons hide behind the mask of his profession and deny the corruption.

Profession is more dangerous than a person. Profession has the authority, power, wealth that can be abused. The person and profession by itself is not dangerous, the person plus the profession makes a dangerous combination. Hitler by himself is pretty harmless. But Hitler as the leader of Nazi is a dangerous person.
Truth always have evidence and lies has no evidence and has to be created.

Cheating is subtle and secretive.It is contagious and spreads like wild fire. Nothing destroy a group faster than cheating. It is difficult to confront without evidence. Even with evidence, they will bargain or use excuses to justify their behaviors. We all makes mistakes, but cheating turn our mistakes dangerous.

There is a school in England called Summerhill where students can do whatever they want as long as they don't hurt others and they don't cheat. If only, we can apply those two rules in this world, how wonderful our world will be.

The best way to deal with cheating behaviors is to lay it up in the open. To make public what is private. It is better to feel pain but true rather than pleasure in lies. They will say that "we destroy their good names and accuse them". They will ask for evidence and it's true that we often can't come up with evidence of their cheating because they keep the evidence secret. Ask them for evidence that they don't lie and most of the time, they can't prove that they don't lie either because they have no evidence of their not-lying.

A liar usually keep the truth hidden and spread the lies. An honest person keep the lies hidden and spread the truth.

"If you stop telling lies about me, I will stop telling lies about you" - Gordon Gecko in Wallstreet II.