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July 7, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:13
317 A Dead Sprint in a Foggy Cage - Escaping Corruption

To flee corruption, run towards it with your arms outstretched!

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It is the 7th of July 2006, 8.15 in the morning.
Another job interview today.
All too exciting for words.
So I have a second interview next week with a very interesting group that I met with last week.
And I won't sort of get into why I'm looking for work, because once this all shakes out one way or another, I can tell you the whole story.
It's nice, because they're actually in their early 30s.
I always sort of felt there's a bit of a generation gap in my business career between myself and the senior managers, or the senior senior managers, I guess you could say.
So I'm meeting again with them next week and going to go through their technology.
They would be a very interesting group to work with.
It's a smaller company that I'm at now, but with much more potential to growth.
They've already crossed the technical hurdle into .NET 2.0.
So...
So, we don't have to do all of that heavy lifting to get technology from older standards to new standards, which is sometimes like trying to use a guppy to raise the Titanic.
It's like, pull Nemo, pull!
I know Nemo isn't a guppy for those of you who are going to email me, but it just seemed like a funny joke.
So the work on the Free Domain Radio musical album is coming along.
We are going to pillage from a variety of musical sources.
So we have, from Les Mis, we have, Welcome, Monsieur, set yourself down and hear the most podcasting in town.
There's that one. And we also, to the song, We Are Family, you know, We Are Family.
We're going to go with Market Anarchy.
So, as you can tell, it's going to be a fabulous album, sure to hit the top six million.
So, I hope that you're doing well.
I had a check on the board when I had my coffee this morning, and I noticed that my podcast 316, I think it was, caused some mild consternation.
I guess people liked it, but they felt that they had perhaps...
That they may have, perhaps, run into this a couple of times in their own life, and they feel a certain amount of despair.
And I can understand that.
I really can. That's very healthy.
I know it sounds weird to say that pain is good, baby.
There's this film, Euro Road Trip or Euro Trip or something like that.
A damn funny film, if you don't mind lowbrow humor.
It's really well done. And one of them goes into an S&M house.
Not my place, but a...
It's a sadism, masochism house in Finland or someplace like that.
And they bring these massively powered-up dildos into the room with him.
And he says, what's my safe word?
What's my safe word? And they bring out some polysyllabic, it's like the Welsh nickname of an Aztec god, which is a joke I also make in The God of Atheists.
And it's like 54 syllables of really, really strangely accented Danish or Finnish or whatever it is, which of course he can't pronounce, although he desperately tries to if they get to work.
A very, very funny film.
If you get a chance to see it, it's well worth it.
They end up in some Eastern European country, and it's obviously broken down and poor, and they say, oh man, all we have is like $1.20 to our name, this group of people.
We have nothing left. It's like $1.20.
What the heck can $1.20 buy you out here?
And of course, they get seven-course meals, and they get...
All the clothes they want.
So it really is a funny film if you get a chance to see it.
I'm just driving past.
There are eight guys putting together, or I guess repairing a sidewalk.
And we have two guys holding signs, two guys leaning on shovels, two guys smoothing the surface, and one guy standing around the truck.
So that's your public sector at work.
Anyway, so there's a certain amount of, I think...
I would say, sort of trying to feel the pulse of the listenership as a whole, I think that the people who've come this far, who are on this Everest of language, have...
Obviously had some rattling of the cage as far as prior comfortable but alienated relationships in their life.
And so one gentleman is sitting and saying, well maybe I should quit my job.
Another one is, well, how would I get to date if I really went all the way to the true self?
And I sort of wanted to talk about at least my experience in that and see if it's of use to anybody.
I sort of traversed this particular chasm, I guess, about six years ago.
And I sort of wanted to...
I've given you a view from the other side, so I think that that sort of speaks for itself.
But... I wanted to talk about this question of the leap of faith when it comes to your relationships with your family, with your job or your friends or whatever.
To what degree is there a leap of faith that involves just letting these things go in order to grab something new?
Now, it has been my experience, and I remember, I'm not a huge fan of Jung, but I did read quite a bit of Jung about eight years ago, and he said something like, the personality is extraordinarily inert, and it only changes under the greatest of strains and pressures.
And I don't really accept that as far as the strains and pressures thing.
I think that the personality changes when we stop lying to ourselves.
I mean, that was my experience.
When I stopped bullshitting myself, my personality really began to change.
So for me, it's all around a relaxation.
of artificial strain rather than impacts from outside.
Now, I will tell you that it was not the easiest thing in the world for me to stop lying to myself.
It took an enormous amount of work for me to see some very simple truths, which is why I try to be patient with people who are going through this process, and I think I succeed in that because it is a very difficult thing to do.
But a change, sort of simply with the quotes around it, involves...
Relaxing your preferences, right, in the face of what is.
The scientific method is valid for everything, for everything.
And although people prefer that there is a God, The scientific method simply says, sorry, but...
Although people prefer that the government is good and takes care of them and is moral, the evidence is anything but.
Not only the theory, but the practice, in all situations.
So, working, sort of netting the scientific method into your family relations is...
In a lot of ways, for market anarchists, it's the last bridge to be crossed to the promised land, so to speak.
It is the last thing that we need to do to bring sweet reason into our souls.
We would prefer that our families be kind and loving and everything to do with what is depicted in the media and is talked about in these mythologies around family, but we need to simply work from the evidence.
Now, the way that people avoid letting go of illusions is they avoid experimentation.
And that you can see very strongly in the Church's massive opposition to the growth of the scientific method and to the growth of everything decent, good, and humane in history.
But if you look at the persecution of scientists, and in particular astronomers, during the sort of Tycho Brahi Copernicus Galileo movement, If you see how the church rails against experimentation, against adaptation, against rational examination, you can see that the church is preserving, those in the church are preserving their illusions by opposing experimentation.
The government says that it has value and then forces everyone to obey it.
In other words, the government has a claim which says, I provide value, And yet, at the same time, it forces people to obey it.
So, it is not allowing experimentation to occur on the premise.
If the premise is, I bring value to you, but I'm going to keep you locked in my basement, then I'm not really allowing the premise to be tested.
I'm not allowing the experiment to actually occur.
So, people say, I have value to you, I am your mother, I am your father, I am your politician, I am your union leader, I am whoever.
I mean, you're a priest. And then the real question is, okay, well, let's experiment.
Let's find out if you do in fact have value by taking the gun away from people's heads.
But people don't want to pursue those experiments in life.
This is the problem that market anarchists are constantly, constantly, constantly facing in our conversations with people.
Because everybody is trumpeting and braying around and saying, but people choose their government and society has value and people love religion and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So I find Then all we need to do is experiment with that, right?
So if religion is so innately valuable, then you don't inflict it on your children as an absolute, and you find out if they choose it later on in life.
If government is such a wonderful absolute, then let's take away the guns and see how much people love the government and need the government.
And if the family...
It's such a wonderful absolute.
Let's find out the true nature of your family.
And this is not hard to do.
And everybody knows exactly how to do it.
Everybody knows exactly how to find out the true value of the family.
And it's a very simple experiment.
It's a very, very simple experiment.
And everybody knows exactly what to do, and they just, they won't do it, right?
Because in this, we are the church and the state.
This is where the last infection of illusion and collectivism and subjugation and fantasy, the dangerous fantasy, not the good imagination, as we've talked about before, this is where the last...
Aspects of collective coercion and submission and all of that stuff that we fight against in the political and religious and philosophical and moral worlds, this is where it sits in our own lives.
And this is why our lives become problematic, and in some ways more problematic than those who simply accept all the illusions.
Like if you're Dr. Phil doing pop psychology, then you're out there praising the troops and praising God and going to church.
I mean, you have the entire...
Tidal energy of collective illusion behind you, so you're sort of swimming with the tide, right?
So you have an enormous amount of things that you say that people cheer about.
I mean, Dr. Phil doesn't say anything that people don't cheer about.
And he doesn't sort of, when he's got a soldier sitting there, he doesn't say, well, I think that your problem is that you're a paid murderer.
And that's kind of like, he would not get cheers if he said that.
So instead he says, look, I know that the war is controversial, but you are a hero nonetheless.
You know, never any disrespect to the men in uniform.
So he's an old-fashioned southern patriot guy with some psychological insights that are not bad, but he's not going to be rocking the boat in any fundamental way anytime soon.
So... We know exactly how to perform an experiment on our family and the fact that we don't perform these experiments is because we know the answer, right?
The reason that the government and the politicians don't take the gun away from our heads is they know that we'd all breathe a huge sigh of relief and wander off to do happier things elsewhere.
The reason that the church hated usury is because it knew that it would produce capitalism and thus reduce the power of the church.
The reason that the church hated science is because it knew that it would provide benefits that the church was actively preventing from coming into being, including medicine.
And the reason that families oppose any kind of honest and real interaction is because they know that it's a complete illusion and fantasy of progress, so there's an enormous amount of emotional bullying and propaganda in the realm of the family, and it's very easy to pierce through that.
The sort of metaphor that I'd like to use, and I'll just touch on it here, I don't think I'll be able to use it again, We are in a cage of illusion.
And the cage has these odd foggy bars that seem to give way, but don't really.
And the further we push against the bars, we get somewhere and then we slow down and then we stop.
It's like an event horizon.
We actually can't quite break out of the orbit.
It's more like a gravitational well.
But it is definitely a cell.
We can't escape it. And when we run at the bars and we push at the bars, they give way a little, but then we just sort of get stuck and enmeshed and we can't get away.
What I'm going to suggest is that we're taking the wrong approach.
The cell is actually, you get away from it by standing in the middle, by going to the center of your imprisonment is how you get out of the cell, not by pushing at the bars and yearning for what's beyond them.
So I'm going to suggest that, and I've suggested this in many different ways before, and I'll sort of be even more explicit about it now, that If you get stuck between these two worlds, you really are in a kind of purgatory.
Now, that's better than the hell that a lot of people live in, but it's not as good as the heaven that you can get to.
So, what you don't want, in my humble opinion, what you don't want in your life is to end up with this situation where you are not...
Even illusorily or imaginatively or fantastically close to your family in a fantasy kind of way.
So you don't have those illusions anymore.
But at the same time, you are not out of a family orbit and thus cannot develop new and better and stronger and deeper relationships.
That's why you don't want to, like, stay in the matrix or get out of the matrix is what I'm saying.
Don't get sort of stuck halfway in between because then you're content in neither world and you gain neither of the benefits.
Like, there are great benefits in illusion.
Let's not fool ourselves about that.
The matrix is pleasant and getting out of the matrix is...
It's hard, and once you're outside of the Matrix, I mean, the difference between the movie and...
The movie, you don't go to war against the...
You don't go to war against the masters of the Matrix.
You go to... You're done with the war, and you can lead by example.
And also, it's not this sort of computer vomit, post-apocalyptic thing that you'll see in science fiction films, where everything's dark and mechanical.
That's not what's on the outside of the Matrix.
And also, when you go back into the Matrix, it's purely horrible, right, once you're out.
But you don't want to get stuck between these worlds.
And so a lot of people might say, if they're going through this process, well, okay, I'm no longer close to my family.
I still hang around them a little, but it's not really that satisfying.
It's not at all satisfying.
And yet I'm not able to get great relationships.
And I'm just, this is worse than where I was before.
Or at least I could go over and pretend to have family dinners and pretend that my friends were my friends and so on.
But this is even worse.
What the hell are you doing to me? Well, I fully understand that.
You are pushing against the foggy barriers, the foggy bars of your cell, and finding that you can get some ways but not the whole ways.
And that's because you're facing the wrong direction.
You want to go to the heart of your cell.
You want to go to the core of it until...
You no longer want to be there, right?
Sort of a fundamental thing, right?
The cell is your will, and your will can't force you out of the cell.
You just have to not want to be there anymore.
And how do you end up in a place where you don't want to be there anymore?
Well, this is what they commonly call closure, and it's not, of course, what most pop psychologists talk about.
But what you need to do is, if you're stuck in this illusion of your family, you need to pierce that illusion.
And you need to find out if it's an illusion or not.
And you don't do that by arguing about politics with them.
And you don't do that by talking about the weather with them.
And you don't do that by going over and playing with their kids and saying, yeah, my job's fine, what's new with you?
You don't do that at all.
That is being stuck between the two worlds, or the one non-world and the world to come.
The way that you get free of your family, or free of the pain of having dysfunctional family relationships, is you become vulnerable with your family.
The only reason that we get stuck in these relationships is because part of us believes that there's value there.
I believe that's the false self part, but I'm not going to prejudge your family, of course.
But part of us believes that there is value there, and they do care for us despite everything, and they will be there for us in an emergency, and they will take care of us when we get sick, and they will help us, and they do love us, they just can't express it very well.
Or we just get tangled up in all this political stuff, or this, or this, or this.
But when push comes to shove, family is family, and by God they'll be there.
Well, that's a theory, right?
That's a theory which we want to put to the test, the same way that we want to use the scientific method everywhere in our life, and not just when measuring electrons.
So the way that you find out if your beliefs about your family, either belief, either that they don't care about you, what they do, the way that you find that out is to simply be honest with them.
And to be vulnerable with them.
Because if you can't be vulnerable with them and honest with them, then for sure you have no relationship.
And if you feel a great deal of fear and trepidation about being vulnerable and honest with them, frankly that's your answer, but it's not enough of an answer.
The false self dies through experimentation.
The false self dies through validation.
The false self dies through empiricism.
The false self is all about what you would prefer despite reality.
And the only way that you can beat that is to see what reality actually is so that you can get rid of these ridiculous preferences that make no sense.
Like, I think George Bush is a great guy.
Well, that's a theory. Let's put it to the test.
I would follow George Bush into the gates of hell itself.
Well, fantastic. And Americans would do the same.
We're all patriotic. Fantastic.
Then we need to get rid of the guns that make the taxes work and the guns that fund the military and the guns that run up the national debt.
Let everyone be free and then they can follow George Bush voluntarily and George Bush will save all that money from enforcement and get to expand his vision of making the world a land of milk and honey.
All you need to do is experiment.
All you need to do is validate.
So that's what you need to do with your family.
And this is what you need to do with your lover.
And this is what you need to do with your friends.
All you need to do is to be honest and vulnerable with them.
And to find out. This is going to the center of the cell.
This is not trying to get away from people.
I've never said to people, get away from your family.
I've said to people, talk to your family.
I've said to people, get close to your family.
I said to people, don't try and run away, run towards!
That's why I said in the podcast about this gentleman's mother, talk to her, tell her what you need to have the relationship become a positive thing for you and require specific action and not just words.
The soul is measured in action, it's not measured in words.
And so you need to ask of people, not that they say they love you, but you need to ask of them specific action which will validate that.
And so that's why I said that this gentleman needs to ask something of his mother to find out how much she cares about him.
And once he sees that she does not care about him, and once he sees that she lies to him about going to therapy, or she simply refuses to go to therapy, then he finds out where he stands in her hierarchy of values.
See, this is very, very important to understand.
If you believe that you are loved, if you believe that you are cared for, then put it to the test.
Not in an artificial way.
Go jump this canal and then I'll believe you.
Not a love test like you read about in the story of Job or in fairy tales.
Not those endless escalating love tests based on insecurity, but go with genuine needs and requirements to your family and be vulnerable and be open and talk to them honestly about how you feel.
So you could say, look, I've been having all these dreams.
I'm trying to analyze it.
This is where I am.
I'm really confused in my life right now.
I think I need to quit my job.
I'm having real problems with the family structure as a whole.
My particular speech to my brother went something like, just a small subsection of it, went something like this.
I said, you know, this family has never ever allowed me to be myself.
This family has always opposed my nature.
This family has always, it feels to me that this family has always resisted everything that I love.
Philosophy and psychology and absolutes and logic and I'm not saying everyone in the family is illogical, but I feel that my nature is to really explore and be drawn to and communicate about these things.
And I feel that every time I've ever opened my mouth about anything that I've loved, whether it's the band Queen, or whether it's a movie, or whether it's a book, or whether it's an idea, or whether it's something that I'm reading, every time I open my mouth to talk about it, people sort of kind of sneer or kind of...
So, yeah, yeah, well that's interesting, but I've got something much more interesting, which is my kid fell down yesterday.
I've always felt that, and I said this is true with the girls that I've gone out with, this is true with the friends that I've had, that I felt that there's always been a kind of put-down insignificance and inconsequentiality to me in regards to this family.
And that really makes me feel bad.
And it makes me feel insignificant.
It makes me feel small, sort of fundamentally, and inconsequential.
And that I have maybe these weird little hobbies, which is just my...
Particular way of dealing with stuff in an immature way that I should deal with in a better or more mature way or something.
And I just always feel like I'm fighting this tide or this constant pressure or this gravity or this heavy, heavy wind whenever it comes to something that I'm really interested in and passionate about.
I'm tired of that.
I don't want that anymore in my life.
It hurts too much. And so I need to understand, is there a possibility that what I am interested in is going to be valued and considered to be important in this family?
Because I've never really felt that I've ever had a chance to be myself.
I constantly have to adjust myself when I'm around my family.
I constantly have to bite my tongue.
I constantly have to pretend...
To be interested in things that I'm not interested in and to not be interested in things that I am interested in.
And every time I get a thought or an idea around my family, I really have to weigh the consequences.
Is it worth bringing up?
Is it going to create way too much conflict for me to be honest about what I'm thinking and feeling?
And I'm just tired of it.
I think it's really harming me overall.
And I don't want to sort of be in this relationship with this family where I'm constantly wrong in some fundamental way.
I'm just wrong. And everybody thinks that I just should be doing everything that's different, but I'm not going to change my nature and I'm not going to give up the things that I love.
So I'm kind of tired of it.
And I want to know if there's any possibility of anything different.
And that's going to be both a verbal commitment and some commitment to counseling because I don't think that you think it would be a good thing, or maybe you can tell me, I don't think you think it's a good thing to constantly denigrate someone that you claim to love and to constantly put down their interests and passions when you claim to think that they're a great brother or great son.
Now, I had this kind of conversation, and of course it went completely badly, as you would expect, and it was a terrifying conversation to have, because I knew the answer.
I knew the answer, but I didn't want to know the answer.
See, this is where you get stuck, between these two worlds.
You know the answer about your family, you know everything about your family, but you haven't proven it to yourself, so your false self can still cling to these illusions of a null hypothesis.
Well, it hasn't been put to the test, so it's possible, blah, blah, blah.
And this is exactly the same as people saying, well, I can't proof God, but you can't disprove God, so there's a possibility, so I'm going to stick with the God thing.
Or the people who say, well, no anarcho-capitalist society has ever come into existence, so it's not really a possibility, so I'm going to stick with what we've got.
In this case, it would be really combing over the theory and looking for the trends in the real world.
If you apply a certain medicine to a tumor and it shrinks enormously, then you say, well, I don't want to apply the final dose that's going to get rid of it because that's never happened before.
Well, I think it's worth taking a shot, right?
Rather than having it regrow.
And that's the metaphor, of course, with anarcho-capitalism.
The more freedom... It's the more peace and the more growth and the more happiness.
And so getting rid of the final areas of coercion within society of the state doesn't seem to me to be a crazy, crazy theory because we certainly had enough evidence throughout history to see that when we shrink the state, society gets a whole lot better.
So it doesn't seem to me that it would be too logical.
To then say, but if we get rid of the state society, we'll get a whole lot worse, right?
That's like, well, every time we apply this medicine, the tumor shrinks, and so we don't want to apply the final dose that's going to get rid of it completely, because that will make the whole body explode, right?
And that just seems kind of...
I mean, that's the tumor talking, right?
That's the tumor's voice.
Ah, if you get rid of me, bad things are going to happen, right?
And of course, that's the voice of the family as well.
So, I always, always have tried to suggest, though not quite so boldly, I have tried to suggest that what you need to do is you need to get close to your family.
You need to strive for intimacy with your family.
And the more you fear it, the more you should do it.
We should not be afraid of those in our lives.
We should not be nervous about being ourselves around those who claim to love us.
We should never, ever, ever Be afraid of those who we are close to.
I mean, how crazy and enslaved and fearful and terrifying is that to always be in relationships with people that if you are yourself, you are automatically opposed.
I don't have those in my life.
And it was as recently, I guess, as 18 months.
No, actually, not even.
I had started writing these Lou Rockwell articles.
I guess it was about 14 months ago.
And I had a friend We didn't argue politics much because he was a statist of one.
He was sort of a minarchist.
So I started writing these articles, and he read one or two of them with that kind of, okay, fine, I'll read them, but no openness, no curiosity.
And then he said to me when we were having dinner with some other friends, he said, well, yeah, I read these articles, but it's just like a thought experiment, right?
Like you're not really serious about this.
And I said, no, I'm very serious about it.
Why would I write it as a thought experiment?
I mean, what would a thought experiment help me understand what a thought experiment would mean?
And he's like, oh, it's just not going to work.
All of them are normal nonsense, right?
He did not ask me one single question, did not come up with one single disproof.
And unfortunately, I had to just stop seeing the guy.
I mean, it's sad, but why would I want somebody in my life who, whenever I talk about things that really matter to me, Things that I'm really passionate about who just automatically went, oh, come on!
Don't be such an extremist.
Don't be so simplistic. The world's more complicated than that.
Don't be so anti-family just because you had a bad childhood, blah, blah, blah.
Whoever is, they're going to take whatever random pot shots they can at the thing that I most treasure in my life, which is truth and philosophy and honesty and to the degree to which I can achieve all these things and integrity and so on.
These are the things that I love and that really make me passionate.
And why would I give all of that up just to be around somebody's snarkiness?
I mean, what? Maybe if they're paying me, like I don't talk politics at work very much, just a little bit on occasion, but I'm not being paid.
Friendships are voluntary. Family relationships are voluntary.
I guess you could get inheritance.
That's, of course, a choice that you have to make, and nobody can make that choice for you, whether it's worth sacrificing your true self for the sake of money.
There are certainly times when I could see that being worthwhile, like if you're going to starve to death otherwise, because starving to death is not exactly going to help your true self become free, but you are not going to get very far in life as a whole if you go down this road.
Don't have one foot on the pier and one foot on the boat, because they're falling apart.
Really unpleasant, icky and oily, dead fish heads.
And so you want to just continue this process of being honest with the people in your life.
If you want to get away from corrupt people, you run towards them with your arms outstretched.
If you want to get out of your cell, you go towards the center until you don't want to be there anymore.
You have to get through to your true self.
Your true self always fights the false self with experimentation.
That's the thing between scientific...
The scientific method is the true self.
The scientific method is the true self which is always connected with reality, which is always logical, which always bows to evidence, which always bows to rationality.
The true self is the scientific method.
And the false self is willful preference.
Conformity. I want it because I want it.
And that's nonsense.
I mean, that's not a life of strangled fantasy that leaves you ineffective and pushes the world that much closer towards the sort of horrors of the 20th century again.
So, the way that you get away from corrupt people is not by running away from them.
Because if you're running away from them, it's because you're frightened of them.
And you're frightened of them because you still want something from them.
And they have power over you.
And I'm not saying, look, I mean, I'm still frightened of my mother and my brother, but I'm not running away from them.
I'll pick up the phone if my brother calls.
But the way that you find out whether or not you have a relationship with someone is you actually try to have a relationship with someone, right?
I mean, this is not that...
It's not complicated in the abstract.
It's very hard to do. But you simply look at your premises and you say, I have a theory that there's still value in my family.
Fantastic. Then put that theory to the test.
Don't get stuck in the null zone of false self-fantasies, of unverifiable assumptions in any way, any place in your life.
If somebody says, does Christina love you?
I'd say, yeah, bet she loves me.
And they'd say, well, how do you know?
If I said, well, she tells me so, right?
That's not really very scientific.
But what you want to do is say, well, she does this, that, and the other.
She takes care of this. She's always there.
She does the other. Whenever we get a chance to spend five minutes together, we do that.
I wake up feeling joy and love to come home at night to her.
And I buy her flowers and she makes me lunch.
And we do what we can.
She manages the finances and I manage the relationship.
And we do whatever we can to each other.
And whenever we get free time, we'll leap into each other.
Whatever, right? So...
You simply have to look for verification.
Words don't count, right?
The words are mysticism, right?
Words are religious people saying God exists and thinking it's true because they say it.
And other people saying the state is virtuous and it's true because they say it.
No. No. That's all false self bullshit.
What you need to do is get to the true self, and the true self is the scientific method.
So if you have a theory that says there's value in my family, then that's fantastic.
Then go get that value.
Go get that value.
Don't sit there passively and talk about the weather with them and think that there's some abstract value that's not connected in any way to what you're actually doing with them.
But go get that value.
Go find out if you can have a relationship with them.
Run towards them with open arms.
Tell them you have a problem, even if it's not a problem with them.
Tell them you have a problem at work and see.
Do people actually listen to you?
Do they just give you, oh, just do this, oh, go talk to your boss or whatever?
Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to bring that one up again.
Do they listen to you?
Are they curious? Are they actually worth talking to you?
Do you feel better when you talk to them?
Or you just sort of feel shut down and humiliated and it's a bad thing to have brought up anything real that you're actually dealing with in your life.
And if you still want to go back, then go back again and do it again and do it again and do it again and do it again and do it again and do it again until you're done.
That's how you get away from corrupt relationships.
It's not a willed thing. If you're stuck at your job and you want to get out, but you're there, and obviously part of you wants to stay there, then figure out what value you see in your job and try and get that value.
And if you still feel drawn into relationships with a lover, that you have problems and this and that and the other, and you want things to be different, but you still feel there's value there, then great, go get that value.
Go get that value.
Put it to the test.
Find out for real.
Don't live in the world of, I would prefer it if...
But live in the real world of testability and hypothesis and verification.
I know that the scientific method sounds all cold and that, but it's really not.
It's really not. The scientific method is how you find out whether your relationships are real or false.
And that's what you need to do.
Run towards the people in your life that you have questions about.
Be honest. Be open with them.
Like my friend, I said, please go read these articles.
Because I wanted to find out, and I pretty much knew the answer, but obviously part of me didn't believe it.
I wanted to find out if...
There was a possibility of having real conversations with this man or not.
And I found out exactly what I suspected, and that made me free.
Then I could not be in the relationship with that gentleman and not feel, oh, there's unfinished business, there's this, there's that, there's the other.
And if the guy ever figures it out and gives me a call and says, you know, I really did kind of put down something that you're really passionate about, and I'm sorry.
I mean, that wasn't the right thing to do.
I guess I was just threatened.
Because it seemed so far out there and I couldn't handle it.
Oh, great. I'll chat with the guy.
It's not like I slam the door and lock it and bolt it.
Hey, any time the guy wants to call up and say, sorry for denigrating something that you'd poured a lot of time and energy into, which obviously wasn't, you know, you could pour a lot of time and energy into saying that redhead people should be shot, and I'm not asking anyone to respect that, but just find out.
You just find out about your relationships.
You experiment with them.
And you say, if you say, well, my family will be there for me in a time of crisis, then go and be honest with them about the crisis that you're having with your family, and find out if they're there for you.
Just put it to the test.
Live in reality. Release your true self from this false self prison of preference, of blind preference, of what you want rather than what is.
Because your true self conforms to what is.
Your false self creates this fantasy camp of what you want.
And never ever wants to put it to the test because it knows that it's false.
So that's how you become free.
You don't come free by running at the gates, you come free by running at the center.
You don't run at the cell bars, you run at the center.
And that's how you get out.
And if you're not destined to get out, or if you're not supposed to get out, or if your family will change, then you actually have done a great thing by running towards them with open arms.
Get close to your family.
Get close to your family.
Get close to your family, and then you find out if they have value or not.
Put it to the test. The more scared you are, the more you know it's nonsense that they're never going to be there for you, but you still need to put it to the test.
Because if you're still there, then you haven't got it.
You haven't understood it.
Your false self is still dominating your true self.
If you're terrified of being open and honest and vulnerable with your family, But you still go there, then your false self is totally dominating that relationship, and you need to throw that off.
And you can't throw it off by sitting in your room and thinking.
You have to throw it off using the scientific method.
Hey, if my family has value, I'm going to go talk to them, be honest, be vulnerable, and find out if it's true or not.
Because if I believe it enough to go there, then it's got to be true.
And if I find out that it's false, then I won't have any desire to go there anymore.
That's how you change. That's how the world changes.
You put things to the test. Use a scientific method.
Thank you so much for listening.
I appreciate it. I look forward to your donations.
I have... Ooh, my God, I've got something new.
Oh, for those who turn it off to not hear the donation talk, oh, you're going to miss something good.
Anyway, I set up a new FeedBurner account for FreeDomainRadio underbar1.xml, the feed for shows 272 and above, which you can get to by going to FreeDomainRadio.com and...
By clicking on listen to the show.
And there's a feed burner sign up on the right hand side above the second column of shows.
So you can get notifications about the new stuff.
Because of course no notifications are coming out about the old stuff anymore.
Because that feed was full.
And so do that and that would be great.
And also, if you could...
Oh, sorry, the last thing I'll say is that I did have...
The board did go down last night for a little while, and it turned out that there's a 10 megabyte limit on GoDaddy for community server.
Who knew? They said there's no way that I could increase it and I'd have to go elsewhere, but I guess they did find a way to increase it because I talked to a technical person and she wasn't able to help me, a help desk person.
She's just saying, oh yeah, go elsewhere.
It's like, well, what does that mean? How do I get the data?
How does it get transferred? She didn't know.
Oh, just go elsewhere. Like, I'm not losing this board that I spent months and months working to build up with everybody's participation.
But what happened was I just logged on later, and it's fine.
It was good. So, anyway, thank you so much for listening.
I appreciate it as always, and let me know how things go with these experiments.
But really, open your arms, run to your family, and find out if they're ghosts or flesh.
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