Give and take, Part I

The psychology of giving and receiving is an over-trodden path, I know, and I intend to get off at the next exit.  But the concept of giving and getting has been bugging me to do something with it, to give it some kind of treatment in relation to motives of mine that recently got highlighted.  There’s something to be worked out and written down that may be of some value.

So far I’ve not been able to nail that squirming something down.  It’s got tentacles—myriad, multi-angular thoughts around giving and receiving—so many that I can’t organize them.  An idea will come to me, not the idea I’m trying to nail down, but a good idea, and maybe where it fits will be revealed to me later.  So my brain, like a border collie, rounds it up and into the herd of other not-quite-it thoughts.  Thoughts keep coming rapidly, some of them unruly, some like slugs, sometimes in twos and threes, and soon the border collie looks more like a neurotically spinning circus dog in its efforts to round up, herd, and sort the incoming ideas while trying to keep the existing ideas from wandering off.

The thoughts started out in the world of weblogs, what is given and received there, and the quality of what is given and received, in direct relation or not.  These same thoughts seemed to bar-hop down the street to a dive in the world of psychology where they began to explore the true reason behind giving and receiving.

Do we, even though we say we don’t, give just so we can get?  Because even if we’re compelled to give to someone in need, we will get something.  At the very least, we’ll likely get a good feeling from having given wholeheartedly.  So even in the case of that seemingly purer form of giving, what’s happening on the ground floor?  Is that kind of giving something that just happens of itself and what we get, the good feeling, is a mere byproduct?  Or do humans subconsciously give to get even when they’re not admittedly giving to get?

Does giving and receiving involve these different levels—giving for the sole purpose of getting; giving spontaneously, without thought of reward; and attempting to receive without having to give anything—or are there more or fewer levels?

And why is this topic so touchy?  What’s behind it psychologically?  A large number of us feel we need to masquerade as giving-just-to-give saints.  I try to, for the most part.  When did we ever say we shouldn’t give to get?  Because that’s what naturally happens.  We learn by default that if we give, we’ll get.  The entire world seems to be powered by the energy around this exchange, this give-and-take, give-and-get, sow-and-reap.

We learn that if we plant high quality seeds, high quality crops will grow.  If we give something to someone—a gift, a blessing, a compliment, a thought expressed in a way or at an angle that’s meaningful—unconditionally from the heart, whether we want it or not, care or not, odds are that we’ll receive equal or greater.  Maybe not today, maybe not next month, but we find that what we dish out will come back at us.  So what is so bad about giving to get if you’re giving something of value because you want something of value?  Anything?

The preceding thoughts progressed to thoughts about what we’re trying to get and the reason we’re trying to get it.  And if we truly get real, if we come to terms with the real reason we’re giving and the real reasons behind what we want and why we want it, will we still want the same things?   

Stay tuned…

Photos from Getty Images

The rabid fox

New England is storybook status this winter.  And running is a dream on this snow-packed back road that weaves itself through the woods and around a water garden-sounding brook.  Only five driveways spur off this remote passage that never sees the town plow.  I’m running free and clear.  Not a soul around.  Just me, the snow, the trees, the brook, the birds, the fox… 

 Ahead of me, off to the left, in the distance, in a small clearing in the woods, I see a fox.  It looks completely grey, which is unusual.  Even the grey foxes I’ve seen have some reddishness to them.  All grey…  It couldn’t be a wolf, could it?  No, it’s too small and catlike.  And it is shadowy there where it sits, like a sentinel, head down a bit, hunched.  How odd that it hasn’t wheeled around and run back up the hill into the thick of the woods by now.  Surely it has long since caught and identified my scent.  It should have been gone way before I was even aware of its presence.

 How extraordinary nature is—we’re allowed to enter it and all its inhabitants quietly let us look around, let us feel like we’re alone to marvel at the intelligence behind its infinite beauty.  Often, we aren’t so kind when nature visits us.  That’s sad.   

Maybe the fox is nature’s revenge.  It hasn’t moved.  Run you silly thing!  I’m a fierce creature from the species Homo sapiens, with a history of hunting that goes back 350,000 years.  Some of us are black-hearted and kill just to kill.  I could be one of those!  Run, you foolish beast!  It doesn’t move.  I moderate my pace, for a thought crosses my mind to not look like I’m in serious flight, flight that may trigger the fox’s own killer instincts.  I adopt what I think might look like a casual trot, travelling more vertically than horizontally, and I try to clear a path in my mind, through the fearful thoughts, just wide enough to push to the forefront a certain coolness, an indifference.  I’m getting awfully close to this fox…  And now I see it’s holding a front paw forward and up a bit.  Maybe it’s hurt.  What would I do?  What would it do?  Certainly, it didn’t enter my mind to put an animal control number for this area in my cell phone.  I’m only here for a few weeks.   

 What if it’s rabid?  I squint to check for foam in the area of its mouth.  I don’t see anything, but really it’s still a bit too far to see that level of detail.  But something’s up with it.  It looks like a cat, frozen in a poised position, a retracted spring under pressure, waiting for provocation to tear toward its victim in a flurry, covering the ground from there to here in a helpless instant.  Then what would I do?  I slowly slide my cell phone out of my pocket and punch in 911.  Now I’m poised, my thumb over the “talk” button.  I’m walking now, trying to swing wide and as respectfully far away from the fox as I can given the limits of the snow banks along the road.  If I leave the road I’m in snow up to my thighs.  I’m not looking forward to getting adjacent to the fox, but if I go back I’m going further into the woods and farther from help.  And when I pass it, if I can pass it, I’m going to have to keep my eye on it, walk backwards or sideways or something.  That miserable fox still has not moved.  This is it.  Getting almost level with it.  Then I think by the time the 911 call went through, the fox would have already…

 

 

 THE “WHAT IF?” GAME: 

 

 What if a tree stump that looks like a fox is really a fox?  And what if the fox attacks?  What might be done with those thoughts? 

 

 A.  Play ostrich:  denial and avoidance rule.  What are the odds of a fox attack anyway, for crying out loud?  There’s no need to be inconvenienced with worry, no need to have to look up a bunch of stuff, no need to carry an arsenal when communing with nature.  Don’t think about it and it doesn’t exist. 

 

B.  Freak out:  get information from every source possible.  Call the state fish and wildlife department, the local animal control and local police, and find out the exact number of fox attacks that have occurred in the area for the past one hundred years.  Make a study, draw up a graph, create a what-to-do flow chart and print a bunch of copies—one to carry at all times, one for the car, and one for every relative and friend.  Go to guns—get mace, get a concealed weapons permit, and for those who are bad shots, buy a scattergun. 

 

C.  Find a happy medium:  get informed, be cool, and be prepared. 

 

D.  None of the above.

 

 

NOTES:

I did an internet search regarding fox attacks and I’ll be darned!  The little rascals are occasionally into terrorizing, especially when their minds aren’t right, when they’re ripe with rabies.  In the USA, except for rabies-free Hawaii, according to Rabies.com, foxes keep company with skunks, raccoons, and bats in the rabies hall of fame.  Foxes live in dens and roam, so if one unfortunate creature’s brain and nervous system has been attacked by the rabies virus, chances are a bunch of them in and around the area have the same fatal problem.  I understand rabies can show up in one of two ways:  sickly lethargy or blind-scratching-biting-mad aggression.  And apparently the best advice, if you’re faced with an aggressive rabid fox and there’s no escape, is to “fight it off as best you can, do as much damage as you can,” this, per Massachusetts’ Division of Fisheries and Wildlife biologist, Marion Larson.  And once you break loose, head straight to the doc for your battery of rabies post-exposure vaccinations!  But animal attacks are indeed rare so I’m going to take all that I learned with me into nature, be cool, and be prepared.     

Famous last words…or not

I still haven’t forgiven Ernest for not leaving a note.  I’ve softened a bit regarding it, however.  Some of the outer layers of offense have sloughed off over the years.  But the hard little seed of disquietude at the center of negligence still scratches and irritates.  No note!  Even the ultimate social and journalistic rebel, Hunter Thompson, the Gonzo King, left a note!  If Hunter would do something so conformational…  Never mind.  I just had a notion Ernest would be more attentive to details of that sort.  His medical history of depression and paranoia and his last days on record will have to suffice.

 

 Sylvia didn’t leave a note either.  But she was forgiven for that even prior to her birth, for she arrived on Earth painfully delicate and damageable, attractively soft-hearted, yet masterfully equipped at the very start of her journey to carry out her fateful legacy.  And all her poems are her explanation, the explanation.  She is Poetry’s darling, broken-winged black rook , in my book, and can do no wrong.

 

 Sylvia’s friend Anne didn’t leave a note.  She’s a harder-shelled bi-polar one.  Her poems bleed deep-woundedness exceptionally, albeit bawdily, but compared to Sylvia’s they seem more organized or controlled and therefore edge closer to mainstream.  Her word usage, her description, more tightly weaves the sick thing you either recoil from or recognize in yourself.  Whereas Sylvia screams her agonies through unique, infrequently used gems of words splashed deftly throughout a bizarre structure of sentences.  Because of Anne’s slimly surer and more worldly-wise grasp, I would have thought her one to have left a note.  And so I am disappointed and much less forgiving of her than Sylvia.

 

 Quietly now, reverence for one of the most beloved writers of all time, Virginia Woolf.  She left a note, bless her distraught heart.  But had she overlooked that element of respectful departing, surely the ripple it might have caused would have been so soft and died down so quickly.  As with Sylvia, she was never not forgiven.  Regardless, out of as much love and consideration as she could muster in her state, she addressed her husband for the last time, “Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again….And I shan’t recover this time…..I am doing what seems the best thing to do….I can’t fight any longer….Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer….I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”  Be still my heart.

 

 Brilliant, young Iris Chang left a note with similar sentiments, ending in, “…I had considered running away, but I will never be able to escape from myself and my thoughts. I am doing this because I am too weak to withstand the years of pain and agony ahead.”  Yes.  Without “Happy DNA,” it is so difficult.  That she was able, for the time she was here, to contribute immense value to the lives of others is a miraculous gift to humanity.  Reporter Richard Rongstad puts it well:  “Iris Chang lit a flame and passed it to others and we should not allow that flame to be extinguished.”

 

 Not like Welsh author, Dorothy Edwards, please!  She left a far more tragic explanation of her departure, “I am killing myself because I have never sincerely loved any human being all my life. I have accepted kindness and friendship, and even love, without gratitude and given nothing in return.”  Ouch.  May none of us die without experiencing true love and compassion even it it’s that that kills us.  May our lives be a rhapsody.

 

 

 

 

 

 

AFTERWORD 

 

 Long fascinated with the connection between brilliance in writing and mental illness, I occasionally flip a few stones looking for more fragments of information on these writers.  Today, in doing so, I found this phenomenal site called “Neurotic Poets.”  Under the title on the home page two sentences play with words, “Madness takes its toll.  Please have exact change.”  I love that.  It’s one of those now-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that? kinds of things.

 

 Also, in digging around Plath, I uncovered a brilliant person, student, writer, teacher, etc, etc, etc.  I think, although it’s as usual compulsively too soon to be certain, that if I could have picked my equipment before coming to earth, I would have chosen most, maybe all, of Zoë Brigley’s attributes.  Oh, we have our commonalities.  She appears to like red…and my especial favorite color, black…

 

 

 

 

  

 

All photos from Getty Images

 

OTHER LINKS 

 

ZOË:

Another of Zoë’s blogs:  http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/

A Zoë piece on Plath:  http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/ariel_the_restored/ 

 

FAVORITE POETRY LINKS:

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets.htm

http://www.poets.org/

http://plagiarist.com/ 

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/  This link is on recommendation from N.,  my far better half.  Start your day with this and you will be the better for it.  It’s true, so I rarely do it (fear of success).

 

VIRGINIA WOOLF:

“Audio: Virginia Woolf: Writing Life…celebrating the legacy of Virginia Woolf…” 1 hr, 38 min (If you’re registered with The New York Times online and are a fan of Woolf, this is fun.  If you’re not registered with nytimes.com you might consider it.  It’s free and a great life-line to all things going on in world.):  http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/woolf.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

A short bio (of particular interest is V’s quote in the 5^th paragraph on what a severe mental breakdown is like):  http://bipolar.about.com/cs/celebs/a/virginiawoolf.htm

 

ERNEST HEMINGWAY:  http://www.ernest.hemingway.com/

 

HUNTER S. THOMPSON:  http://www.gonzo.org/ (I’ve only just begun to cruise this site, so the jury’s still out, but it’s cool enough to introduce here)

 

Even dirt looks good when it’s on snow

On the way back from my morning run yesterday, almost to the house, dirt that had been sprinkled from a snowplow on fresh snow caught my eye.  I hadn’t noticed it on the way out.  But now the sun was on it.  Snow crystals were catching the light and the contrast of the matte brownness was striking against it.  How odd, this switch, a diamond backdrop to play up dirt.  And especially how odd since I’m at war with dirt. 

Dirt is the enemy.  It finds its way into the house on the bottoms of careless or oblivious feet.  Feet that have time only for the utility of life, not the fussiness of it.  Dirt goes everywhere the feet go.  It tramps across the kitchen floor to the table and falls off under the chair.  It sifts itself down the hall and deposits bits of itself in the bathroom.  It leaves a trail that divides the dining room in two.  Sweeping, then mopping, doesn’t get it all.  It’s insidious.  It finds its way into crevices and reveals itself there later, usually inopportunely.  It pollutes an environment that in dreams is pristine.  Just knowing that it’s always there mars interior life.  It haunts with dust if not openly rebelling with slashes of mud and grit.  It exemplifies futility.  It gets on bare feet, on hands, it colors in blotches, mixes with moisture and oils, becomes tacky, spreads plague-like.  It gets on clothes, makes its dark marks, labels us soiled.  And eyes can’t avoid it.  They snap straight to it like to a scarlet letter, relinquishing everything else. 

Sweeping, then mopping, is powerless to stop it coming in from the outside, from wherever the earth is torn up or laid bare.  But when snow falls, covering the vastness of a ravaged terrain, the expanse is made lovely—soft and sequined.  Packed, it’s a joy to run on, absorbing heel strikes better than anything.  Loose, it’s one of the most romanticized visions—a landscape frosted with gemstones.  Imagine my surprise when I found out the water droplets that form ice crystals that in turn form snowflakes are pure water and can’t freeze by themselves until they stick to a dust particle.  Instead of making me feel better about dirt, I felt more of a sense of futility in regard to the war against dirt.   

There’s no escaping dirt.  Snow starts with dirt.  The earth is in part made up of dirt.  Life is sustained from dirt.  Then Earth is the enemy?  I guess it must be on some level, dependent on how much life is valued.  

LINKS: 

How is snow made?  http://www.faqkids.com/idx/4/082/article/How_is_snow_made.html 

How do snowflakes form?  http://www.pa.msu.edu/sciencet/ask_st/100897.html   

 

OUTTAKES: 

[Dirt] gets on clothes, makes its black marks, labels us soiled.  And eyes cannot avoid it.  They snap straight to it like to a scarlet letter, relinquishing everything else.  They always find first whatever’s wrong in a picture.  They can sweep a person from head to toe in an instant, discover a finger is missing, and ever after can look at nothing else but the place where a finger should be.  Primitive instincts.  The strong has just singled out the weak.  Existence is full of real and imagined, silly and substantial invasions that offend and wound.  No one thing can be labeled the enemy, and too many things labeled as such makes the earth feel inhabitable. 

When snow covers the dirt and ugliness of a ravaged terrain, the terrain becomes lovely—soft and sequined.  But snow falls randomly, when conditions are right for it to be formed, and it stays on the ground as long as conditions remain right for it to stay.  When it goes away, it leaves behind more ugliness than was there before it came—grey slush, mud, and salt that gets on cars and feet and goes into houses. 

Love, like snow, covers a multitude of sins.  But what is love really?  Is it a thing that’s strong and steady, that lies beneath and regardless of the random and conditional thing we most often demonstrate as being love?  Is love the thing that leaves financial smudges and dirt piles of psychological damage behind it?  Or is it more like the thread that weaves daily through magazine and news stories that touch us all in the same place and leave us with a feeling of hope and connectedness?

The way the dog goes down

Ba-dump, ba-dump, head down, butt up, he goes chunkily, awkwardly, down slippery stairs that humans have devised.  He was meant for rocky terrain and a harsh climate with temperatures ranging from below zero to over 100 degrees Farenheit.  But in 1930, C. Sudyam Cutting, an American naturalist and world traveler, and his wife Mary, were given Lhasa Apsos, a gift from the 13^th Dalai Lama.  Now there’s a Lhasa Apso in my home. 

Humans have the intelligence to find ways to create their world and then to operate outside that world, outside their natural abilities and talents.  We enter the fish’s realm with the help of scuba diving gear or deep submergence vehicles.  We enter the birds’ realm via the airplane.  We walk on the moon in spacesuits. 

The fish and birds know no better than to just exist—find food, play, sleep, escape predators or be eaten.  And by defaulting to following the simple rules of existing, there is no trouble caused, no negativity created.  Their desires don’t conflict with the way the Universe works. 

Humans, for the most part, cannot just exist.  We know no better than to create expansion—bigger, more and better.  And our intelligence is no guarantee that our creations will be successful and not make a mess.  Jeff Epstein and Seth Tobias have been in the headlines lately.  Their high IQs could not alter the effects of what they caused. 

And collectively, in trying to make things better for others or just ourselves, the motives and mechanics behind outsourcing, energy costs, and sub-prime lending, for example, have contributed to effect an economic graveyard spiral, the graveyard being recession. 

Since there’s no going back, we have no viable choice but to learn from our mistakes and to use our creativity and intelligence to try to make better our past betters, biggers and mores.  And so it goes.  More cause and effect.  More reaping what we sow. 

Yeah, yeah, we know all that.  We remember it and we apply it in our lives every day, OK?  Prior to making the littlest choice we stop and take a “heart reading” to see if the choice feels right, is win-win for everyone involved.  So back off because we know what we’re doing.  Now, just who is Madam Simbi M’Arue anyway?  

LINKS: 

History of the Lhasa Apso:  http://www.barkbytes.com/history/lhasa.htm

“Hex factor cited in Seth Tobias’ death”:  http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2008/01/09/2008-01-09_hex_factor_cited_in_seth_tobias_death.html 

“The Fantasist” (re: Epstein):  http://nymag.com/news/features/41826/

Love your job? PHLBBBT!

Making money the conventional way—getting up at zero-dark-thirty, finding something to wear that no one will laugh at, getting in the car and driving to some tired-out place of business only to be hassled all day long by people whose needs are supposedly greater than yours such that you don’t get your own work done so you have to stay late so you can’t run the errands you were planning to run so that you won’t have to run them during your valuable weekend time for a change—is so 19^th century textile-industry old! 

Yes, some companies allow their employees to telecommute and you could be one of the lucky ones.  I’m one of those lucky ones and I’m still miserable and ungrateful.  Not only because I’m mentally burned out but because it’s not total freedom.  You’re still doing someone else’s work and the boss is still looking over your shoulder.  You still have to bust your butt for a good year-end review so you maybe can get a miniscule salary increase, keep getting healthcare benefits, keep contributing to your 401K, and keep getting any money left over from all that in the form of a paycheck. 

And the more time you spend in bondage to the boss, the more you almost begin to think you could ditch it all for one of those internet multiple streams of income-making schemes—Paid Surveys, Ultimate Wealth Package, Plug-in Profit Site, Automated Millions, Blogging to the Bank, EDC Gold, Orovo, The 7 Figure Code, Profit Monster, Project Black Mask…  Most of their sites are the same, color- and content-wise—one long page yelling at you in yellow and red (don’t they know red incites anger, not acquiescence?) with the occasional picture of a box of software that’s not really a box of software.  But you’re not nuts—you’re sane, you’re savvy, you’re sensible and wise to the ways of the scam artist—so you dare not go there.   

Then you think maybe you’ll make something people can’t live without and sell it online.  But what, exactly, would you make?  And you’ve heard that way to go is a long, hard, rocky, winding road if you want to make money soon, not in another lifetime.  Well, anyway, your lap’s empty and waiting for a hot opportunity to drop into it.  And you have a bag packed in the event a talent scout calls and needs you to relocate to Successville immediately.  But mostly you’re reasonable, so you begin to think of going back to school.  And two seconds after you do, you realize that your quality of life would be zero if you were to try to fit even a light school schedule into your already packed life schedule. 

So what can you do, where can you go to find a fun, fulfilling, exciting way to make a living if you’re not drop-dead gorgeous or rocket-scientist brilliant?  And what fool made up that rule in the first place?  The one that says you need money to live here?  That’s a scam in itself.  I was never told about that rule of the game of life before coming to Earth.  Maybe I would have chosen a different planet.  Or maybe I would’ve stayed “home,” in the nothingness of “out there” where all the creative writing and musical hooks are…  Hey Marci!

.

LINKS

Marci “The Slash” Alboher, bio:   http://www.heymarci.com/about.html

“Why Settle for Just One Line of Work?” BusinessWeek interviews Marci:  http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_49/b4061004.htm

“The Neurophysiology of Light…”  The effect colors have on us:  http://www.neuraltherapy.com/neurophysiologyoflight.pdf

The essence of a hook

 

Dostoyevsky spends chapters intertwining nets of the most intricate details, each minuscule, lengthily articulated one being integral to the whole in some way.  You have only to read on to find out where each and every detail matters.  And somehow it’s not work.  Somehow a thing way down the line triggers a link to its connection.  To me that’s juice in itself.  But to end each chapter with something that compels me to press on to the next chapter and the next…  That puts me over the edge.  It almost becomes a frustration.  I have things I should do, but I’m so invested now that I simply must go on to find out what happens with the people in Dostoyevsky’s world which has become my world.

Same thing with music.  Some hooks are so good they hurt.  What’s at the core of a hook?  And when we read or hear one, what’s that mostly dormant thing that leaps from the heart area the instant it recognizes true excellence, like a long lost soul running in slow motion toward its object of desire?  Does a hook that came from another person come from the same place in them as the place in us that recognizes it as being so irresistibly fine and wrenchingly compelling?  If the place from whence hooks come and are recognized and craved and loved so dearly is the heart area, the place that seems to be more in touch with the ethereal, can the same powerful stuff come from the head area, from the brain that likes to crunch and chew on the bones of logics and mechanics?

Any good words that ever came out of me either just popped into my head, interrupting the stress of a gritty, 100% cerebral word-wrangling session that was going nowhere; or they have come out of closing my eyes and typing out all the junk in my head until I start to relax into spiraling down and down and down through layers upon layers to the somewhere where I can see a thing that’s always been there stripped down waiting to be seen and appreciated and known as it is.  Mostly I’m too mental to do that, but when any good stuff does come to me, it never feels like I made it up.  It always feels like a big surprise, like a surprise gift.  And I’ll mentally comment on it like I’m reading something someone else wrote, “Oh, yes!  Oh, now that’s good!”

Does that mean hooks come from the ethereal, the ether, the “out there” and with our brains we organize the “filler” around the hooks?  Questioning is all well and good.  It can entice enlightening answers.  But at this point I think that I think too much.  And I think that’s what blocks creativity.  Listen…

Joe Satriani’s Super Colossal CD is playing right now, and a lot of the tunes are so packed with so many hooks that it’s practically killing me.  And how does Satriani dare dump a bunch of hooks into one song?  My scrounging, tight-wad brain thinks he should save the hooks, use only one per song so he can have more hits.  And that’s it, that’s exactly the mentality that kills creativity.  Look at Satriani’s career.  As an artist he knows, and because of him it’s possible for us to see, that there is no shortage of hooks to be snagged from the ether or the heart or the brain or wherever hooks come from.

That’s my perception.  And all I can see and be is me…  What’s your perception?  Where do your hooks come from? 

Self-help freaks who bought “The Secret” also bought “What The Bleep Do We Know!?” ™

  Photo from stock.xchng (http://www.sxc.hu/)
Taken by Thad Zajdowicz (http://www.sxc.hu/profile/thadz)

For those kinds of minds that tend more to tick to the rhythm of reason (as opposed to the indiscriminate acceptance of any touchy-feely fuzz-ball of a theory), What the Bleep Do We Know!? is the timely arrival of an EMT at the bloody scene of a head-on with The Secret, 2007’s mega-self-help fuzz-ball.

I’d ignored What the Bleep when it debuted in theatres in 2004, but now I’m all over it.  It’s the secret of The Secret in my opinion.  The Secret is like a whizz-bang GUI with glitzy but link-less widgets and What the Bleep is a direct link to the CPU.  The Secret tells us, for example, that thoughts cause feelings, and feelings cause reactions and choices from which our lives are created, and therefore we should think positive thoughts.  That’s just a Band-aid ® on a hemorrhaging blood vessel.  Pathology please!

And thank you to What the Bleep, although it takes its shot at fuzz and glitz, it predominantly splays out the mechanics of the brain and the chemicals it manufactures in direct relation to why and how thoughts and feelings are connected; why and how feelings cause predictable reactions that shape our lives; and why and how we can restructure our neural and chemical processes and sequences.

The odds seem stacked against humans from the get-go when you consider how our brains construct neural networks of connections and concepts that end up being skewed by individual experiences that are bad, good, or indifferent.  So the true essence of any given thing is interpreted in as many ways as there are people on the planet.  One person can hear the word “marriage” and run away screaming while another melts into a moony swoon.  

“The brain is made up of tiny nerve cells called ‘neurons.’  These neurons have tiny branches that reach out and connect to other neurons to form a neural net.  Each place where they connect is incubated into a thought or a memory.  Now, the brain builds up all its concepts by the law of associative memory.  For example, ideas, thoughts and feelings are all constructed and interconnected in this neural net and all have a possible relationship with one another.  The concept and the feeling of love, for instance is stored in this vast neural net.  But we build the concept of love from many other different ideas.  Some people have love connected to disappointment.  When they think about love, they experience the memory of pain, sorrow, anger and even rage.  Rage may be linked to hurt, which may be linked to a specific person which then is connected back to love.”

Dr. Joseph Dispenza

We seem to be so abysmally at the mercy of emotions, the majority of us letting them boss and yank us around sometimes to such horrible places, that it seems doubly, miserably unfortunate that emotions cause chemicals to be produced in the brain that match those emotions, and that we in turn can become addicted to those chemicals thus making it all the more difficult to quit our over-the-top trips.

“There’s a chemical that matches every emotional state that we experience.  And the moment that we experience that emotional state in our body or in our brain, the hypothalamus immediately assembles the peptide and then releases it through the pituitary into the bloodstream.  The moment it makes it into the bloodstream, it finds its way to different centers or different parts of the body.”

Dr. Candace Pert

And sad but true, shocking numbers of us feel so bored or so average that we’re just happy to have a heightened sense of aliveness, even if it does come in the form of rage or hate or desperation.  The feeling of a chemical rushing through our bodies and stirring within us something out of the ordinary and spurring us to glorious or malevolent action lifts us to real or imagined extraordinariness.  And once we get a taste of the thrill we’re dogs chasing our tails.  The emotions happen, the chemicals happen, we dig the rush, and we seek situations that cause the emotions.

“The thing that most people don’t realize is that when they understand that they are addicted to emotions, it’s not just psychological.  It’s biochemical.

“We bring to ourselves situations that will fulfill the biochemical craving of the cells of our body by creating situations that meet our chemical needs.  And the addict will always need a little bit more in order to get a rush or a high of what they’re looking for chemically.  So my definition really means that if you can’t control your emotional state you must be addicted to it.

“Think about this.  Heroin uses the same receptor mechanisms on the cells that our emotional chemicals use.  It’s easy to see then that if we can be addicted to heroin, then we can be addicted to any neural peptide, any emotion.”

Dr. Joseph Dispenza

Why, oh why must this be a part of our construction???  The What the Bleep folks don’t spoon feed the answer, but from what I can tell it has to do with those pesky primitive survival mechanisms we’ve had for 350,000 years, i.e. if we weren’t emotional about being pursued by perceived predators, we might be dinner.  And if love was only intellectual we’d probably not bother with something as peculiar as procreation.  And just for grins, if we got past that, we’d probably find no good reason to coddle our offspring.  OK, you get the idea:  it would be the end of the human drama.

The Secret’s layers of inspirational counsel build to a pep rally fever pitch by its end, and we’re thrust back into the real world elated with knowledge that everything will miraculously work itself out because “you are the master of the Universe.  You are the heir to the kingdom.  You are the perfection of Life.”  Whoa there!

What the Bleep manages a pleasant mix of elation and reality.  By the time the credits roll, we’ve seen that we have more power over ourselves, our lives and what we perceive as our world than we’d understood prior to watching the flick.  But we also see that it’s going to be a bitch to rewire our circuit board.  At least we know it’s possible and why and how…

“Who is in the driver’s seat when we control our emotions or we respond to our emotions?  We know physiologically that nerve cells that fire together wire together.  If you practice something over and over, those nerve cells have a long-term relationship.  If you get angry on a daily basis, if you get frustrated on a daily basis, if you suffer on a daily basis, if you give reason for the victimization in your life, you’re rewiring and reintegrating that neural net on a daily basis and that neural net now has a long-term relationship with all those other nerve cells called an ‘identity.’

.

“We also know that nerve cells that don’t fire together not longer wire together.  They lose their long-term relationship because every time we interrupt the thought process that produces a chemical response in the body, every time we interrupt it, those nerve cells that are connected to each other start breaking the long-term relationship.

.

 “When we start interrupting and observing, not by stimulus and response and that automatic reaction, but by observing the effects it takes, then we are no longer the body-mind conscious emotional person that’s responding to its environment as if it is automatic.”

.

Dr. Joseph Dispenza

LINKS:

What The Bleep Do We Know!? scientists:  http://www.whatthebleep.com/scientists/

What The Bleep Do We Know!? website:  http://www.whatthebleep.com/ 

What The Bleep Do We Know!? script, courtesy of the WWW’s beloved Drew:

http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/w/what-the-bleep-do-we-know-script.html 

Dr. Joseph Dispenza interviewed on Quantum Factor (video):

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4182921805952700020 

The currently sadly lacking The Secret website:  http://thesecret.tv/index.html