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July 27, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:51
349 You Are Not Broken

What if there was *nothing* wrong with you at all?

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. 8.33.
Look at that. It's almost the crack of dawn for me.
Heading off to work is the 27th of July, 2006.
I hope you're doing well.
For those of you who are interested in following the free will versus determinism debate, there is a Skype chat.
No, actually, it was a messenger chat that I had last night with a fine listener.
Which I have put on the boards in the Free Will vs.
Determinism thread, which may be interesting.
It's sort of part one of how many parts we don't know where we're trying to find some common ground for understanding things.
And hopefully that will be of interest in helping people to define the debate as well.
And it certainly is the case that my definitions of free will can at times be seen as vague, of course.
I mean, that makes total sense.
We can describe free will.
It's very hard to say exactly what it is.
It certainly seems to me to be the ability to balance between long-term and short-term objectives and to make choices consistent with values or not consistent with values.
If you don't have the values, And you can't be responsible for the choices, which is why we don't blame chimps for biting people, but where we have stated values, but you deviate from them, then I think it's fair to say that you at least have a choice to follow your values or not, and also that when you...
When you balance long-term and short-term objectives, it's a delicate fulcrum point.
And I just remember, very briefly, one of my big sort of deciding points in my life was when I was in my early teens, I went through a nihilistic phase, and this was associated with a petty criminal phase.
And by that, I just mean sort of shoplifting and stuff like that.
And in hindsight, I look through this, and it seems perfectly comprehensible to me, In that I was miserable, you know, a fairly good brain stuck in a dismal backwater estate school.
You know, I never had a father, and my mother was in a catastrophic depression and unable to get out of bed.
This is what ended up with her being institutionalized.
And so I went through a phase where I felt that rules were stupid, right?
I mean, this is the Nietzschean perspective.
From a 12 or 13 year old.
That the only reason that you don't...
Like, everybody steals.
Everybody steals. Everybody bullies.
Everybody claims to be moral and nobody is.
And so to follow these moral rules would be...
It's a sucker's game, right?
I mean, this is the same thing as master-slave morality.
There's a reason that I understand where Nietzsche is coming from because I've gone through that phase myself for a brief period of time.
And then, I was never caught for the shoplifting, but a friend of mine was while I was with him.
I say silly stuff with due respect to retailers who face this kind of predation and shrinkage all the time, so, you know, due apologies to the retailers, but a friend of mine stole a candy bar, and I was with him, and he got nabbed, and then...
We got nabbed. Anyway, so I was nabbed for being with him, I guess.
Maybe they thought I was lookout, although I didn't actually want the candy and told them, let's just go home.
Anyway, so after that, I wanted some sunglasses, and I didn't have any sunglasses.
I was on a swim team, and we had lots of outdoor meets, and I was just going blind.
With being out in this glaring sun all the time, and I wanted sunglasses.
I actually wanted a baseball hat, too, because basically it was just me and the sun, and we didn't have any sunscreen either, so there was lots of problems.
I really had to work up to getting a decent tan so that I wouldn't burn, because, you know, we just couldn't afford anything, right?
Nobody was working. So, I wanted sunglasses, and I remember very distinctly being very young and being in a store and standing in front of a rack of sunglasses, and this is, I think, before the days of video cameras.
And so with the sunglasses, you know, that rotating little tree that sunglasses are on with all the mirrors.
So that's great, because what you can do is turn the sunglasses around, turn the tree around, and use the mirrors to scan for anyone who might be watching.
And it's pretty simple to pocket something from there.
And I remember looking at that, and I just remember...
I just started reading some deeper stuff, and I was just thinking about...
I was very afraid.
I was very afraid of being caught, and I was very afraid of a lot of things at this point in my life, but it really focused on being caught in this moment.
Then I had this choice.
I had this choice, and the choice was primarily around values.
I feel that I had this choice.
It's impossible to prove empirically, of course.
But I felt that I had this choice.
And this choice was, do I regard my fear as something petty and bourgeois and a sucker's ruse and something fundamentally to be overcome, to be dismissed, to be denigrated, to be overcome?
Or do I view my fear as a legitimate warning about my present and my future?
And it feels like that was a choice.
And it was a pretty fundamental choice, which I'll talk about sort of in a moment in sort of more general terms than free will versus determinism.
Do I look at my fear as something to be overcome or something to be heated?
That's sort of a fork in one person's life.
If I view my fear as something to be overcome, then I'm going to grab the sunglasses, and then I'm going to get caught or not, and then if I go and steal some lotion, go and steal some suntan lotion, because I really like being on the swim team, go and steal some suntan lotion, go and steal a baseball cap to shield my eyes, Then, every time I feel afraid, I'm going to have an oppositional, contemptuous, scornful regard towards that fear.
I'm just going to look upon that fear as I would look upon an old ache when I've got to do some gardening.
It's annoying, but you've just got to push through.
And that would develop every time that I took that choice, every time that I made that choice.
To try and overcome my fear, then my fear would become more repressed, more sublimated, it would somatize more, it would become physical in some manner.
And so that would be my fate.
And of course it could be the case that at some point in the future I would then try and reverse that feeling about my fear, but it would be harder.
Sort of the stuff that I was talking about in yesterday's podcast, the evening podcast.
So, when I stood on the brink of two lives at that moment when I was in my early teens, I think I was 12, maybe 13, and I decided to respect my fear.
And why did I decide to respect my fear?
Well, I feel that I chose.
And, of course, everybody on the determinist side is going to say, no, there's all of these things that you weren't aware of that made you feel like you were doing this, and so on.
Which is interesting, of course, and I certainly don't say that that's not the case.
You'd have to be religious to deny the possibility of determinism.
But... It is the case, for me at least, that I can't really understand that if I was not, like if I was destined to not be a thief, then why did I go through a phase of being a thief?
And, I mean, I don't want to sort of overblow this or make it sound more dramatic than it is.
It was like not much.
I was not much of a thief.
But if it's determined that I'm not going to be a thief, then why would I go through a process of being a thief?
And then why would I feel all this fear, right?
The fear arises as a prompt, and it arises as a methodology of saying to me, Don't do this, right?
This is sort of my unconscious or my true self or whatever you want to call it, my base identity, putting forward all this fear to help prevent me from universalizing this principle that everybody steals, which would have led to a miserable life.
So, was it destined that I was going to stop being a thief?
Well, yeah, sure, perhaps it was.
But if it was destined that I was not going to be a thief, then why was I a thief?
It doesn't make much sense.
But maybe I was destined to become a thief, and then I was destined to become very frightened, and then I was destined to make this choice to respect my fear, and then I was destined to begin dissociating from the friends that I had at that time, a rather scabby gang.
And maybe all of this stuff was destined.
But given the variations and back and forth in my life at that time and at other times, I'm currently trying to work out where I want to go in my career next.
Maybe it's all completely destined, but it sure as heck doesn't feel that way at the moment.
So basically what I want to get to is that...
I sort of want to put forward a radical proposal.
And this is not specific to free will versus determinism, although it's a superset of it to some degree.
But I'd like to put forward a radical proposal, and it's related to something that I asked a couple of weeks ago.
And talked about it myself.
You know, in that when you were being raised, you were told, you were taught quite a bit what was wrong with you.
You were selfish, you were not religious, you were skeptical, you were asked too many questions, you were stubborn, you were lazy, you were...
I mean, these are just the general epithets.
And you may not have been called these things, but generally, when you were growing up disobedient, disrespectful...
You know, whatever. Not a team player.
You were over-intellectualized things.
Well, that's when you got older, right?
And continued to think. So, fundamentally, in every human being's life, we are bombarded with this constant, constant, constant wave of denigration for our natural selves.
The natural selves of ours that is passionate and angry and happy and responsive and understanding and knowledgeable and incredibly quick and subtle and brilliant.
I think this is true of everybody's natural self.
Absolutely true of everybody's natural self.
And this is a great terror, of course.
Because the major institutions that are in the world that exercise unjust power are there because there's something fundamentally wrong with us.
Right? Religion is there because we're sinful and we don't believe in God and we're disobedient and we're willful and we, you know, we all masturbate.
Right? So, religion exists and gains force by telling us that there's something very fundamental.
Actually, pretty much everything except for our capacity to obey the church and give them money.
Everything in our nature is fundamentally wrong.
It needs to be fixed.
So this is why you see these Catholics in these endless wrestles of conscience where, you know, oh my heavens, I was walking down the street with my wife and I looked at another woman and felt lust in my heart.
And what if there was nothing wrong with that?
Just what if? We'll get to the thesis in a sec, but let me just point out that there is this constant stream of bullshit about how just wrong you are in a fundamental sense, how you need to be fixed, how you need to change your perspectives, how you need to fight yourself at all times.
Now, the state, of course, exists because we are fundamentally greedy and brutal and violent, and, you know, this is why, when people say, and you always get this, right, when you say, well, let's get rid of these institutions, the instant emotional response you get back is exactly what this person was told about themselves when they were children.
So, if you say, we should get, you know, we should stop being religious, and people are like, well, nobody would be moral.
Everybody would be immoral.
Nobody would be ethical.
Everybody would just do whatever they wanted without God.
Well, that's immediately you know exactly what they were told about a jillion times when they were a kid, which is that you are fundamentally sinful and you're only redeemed through God, right?
You're fundamentally wrong and evil and broken and bad and you're only redeemed through our Lord Jesus Christ or Vishnu or Krishna or Zeus, perhaps, for people whose parents are a little older.
So that's exactly what you know.
The other thing is that when you say to somebody, there should be no government, and people say, well, it would just be chaos, civil war, brutality, and so on, then you know exactly what this person has been told, and it's probably got something to do with religion, but maybe it's not.
This is what somebody has been told.
As a child, right?
That they're bad, and it's only through the authority of parents and the submission to parents that they can become good.
The children are naturally bad, willful, disobedient.
You can put in your favorite epithets that were hurled against you when you were a kid, either overtly or covertly.
And that is how people are told, sort of fundamentally, that they're wrong, and we need these power structures to make us better.
And this doesn't have to be an external power structure, right?
If you're a Catholic, you can leave the church.
You're still going to fight that guilt.
You're still going to fight that feeling that your emotional apparatus is out to get you.
That your feelings are fundamentally wrong, broken, flawed, right?
So if you've got a new toy and you don't want to share it because your brother's a jerk and you feel like, no, I don't want to share it.
I don't want to share it with this guy.
I don't even like him that much.
I don't even like him at all. But then you're told that you're selfish and you should share and your brother shared with you last year and it's good to share and you don't want to be bad.
This is just somebody riding roughshod over your emotions.
This is the continual process of childhood.
It's people telling you that your emotions are wrong, that your emotions are incorrect, that your thoughts are incorrect, that your feelings and your natural self and your true identity and everything that is organic and passionate to you is completely and totally incorrect and immoral.
So if I don't want to share, it's immoral to not share.
If I have a feeling like if I get angry, if I get angry at my mom, it's like, don't you talk back to me!
Don't you be disrespectful!
We don't raise our voices in this house!
It's wrong! It's bad!
Don't you dare get angry!
Don't you dare get covetous!
Don't you dare get any of these things!
The whole world is a whole set of charging cavalry spears against our natural feelings.
The whole world is entirely focused on telling us that we're wrong.
Now, this is not an argument, and I'm bringing this up, and I'm sure that there's some agreement in general about religion.
And this is not an argument before or against determinism, and this is not even what it's for.
Let me just dip into this for a sec.
Determinism, logically taken, right?
Because what happens with determinists is I end up in the seesaw, right?
Where I say, yes, it's true that the world seems flat, but it's actually round.
But once I figured out the world was round, I didn't have to get rid of pride and anger and joy and love and self-respect and ethics and, you know, my belief in a choice and an identity and virtue and vice and...
Like, I didn't have to get, when somebody said the world is round, it's like, oh, okay, so I guess I go back to being a moral guy who has free will, who knows that the world is round, right?
But determinism is quite the opposite.
Determinism strips all of those things from me, right?
And so, I'm just sort of saying these are the consequences.
And, of course, then when determinists act as if there's free will and get angry and so on, then I just say, well, you don't believe.
And you know these arguments. I've talked about them before.
So then determinists say, well, no, no, no, it's not the case that you have to give up on love or envy or pride or joy or any of those things.
You can have all of those things because it's your emotional makeup.
You just know that they're not true. Well, that's not the way that I want to live.
I don't want to live in a philosophy where...
I have these values and have to pretend that they're not true in order to live, right?
That seems like kind of a fundamentally incorrect way to live, like a fundamental break.
And also, of course, if it is the case that I can believe in determinism, but then I have to act as if it's not true in my daily life, in terms of my feelings, then to me, sort of, what's the point?
What's the point? If I end up exactly the same in terms of how I feel, if I don't have to change how I feel...
I mean, I had feelings of positive...
I have positive feelings towards war as recently as a couple of years ago, that war could be a just and moral enterprise.
And I believed in the state as recently as a couple of years ago.
Now, if...
Someone had told me, you should become an anarchist, but nothing in your life is going to change, then I would sort of say, well, what's the point?
Well, maybe you'll argue for anarchism, it's okay, but what feelings that I had before are no longer valid?
Because feelings that I would have before, like respect for war, or admiration for soldiers, which I had to a very small and limited degree, well, obviously those feelings I have to fight.
Those are unjust, incorrect feelings that arise from unjust, incorrect premises.
And so, also any kind of sympathy that I had for the state, any kind of respect I had for cops, which I also had up until a couple of years ago under limited circumstances, I had to fight all of those feelings.
I had to really fight my feelings of loyalty towards my family when I was breaking for my family.
I had to fight my feelings of guilt and shame about doing things that were considered to be wrong by the vast majority, if not everyone, that I'd ever met.
So I had to really work at changing my emotions when my thoughts changed.
That seems to me entirely correct and entirely suitable.
Because you want to have emotional integrity, otherwise you spend your whole life seesawing back and forth between intellect and emotion, between the mind and the heart.
So you want to get your emotions in line with your thinking.
So, to me, if somebody says, well, yeah, you believe in determinism, but you respect your emotions that tell you the complete opposite, you know, and so nothing changes, then, to me, that's creating a huge schism within my personality.
It's then saying, well, you know that all of your feelings are false, but you should respect them anyway.
Well, that's crazy.
I mean, frankly, that's just a crazy proposition for me.
Maybe if you're not big on your feelings, that's not such a cost for you, but I'm very passionate as a human being, and for me to set up a, to believe in a system...
Wherein I have to oppose all of my feelings that arise from any sense of personal responsibility, which is just about all of my feelings, that would be a sure recipe for me for a kind of mental illness.
I mean, whether of a low-grade or high-grade kind, I don't know.
But without a doubt, setting myself, my intellect in opposition to all my feelings and then say that I shouldn't be in opposition to all my feelings, but I should be, that's a contradiction that is simply going to be Now, if somebody does say, yes, you have to fight feelings of love and pride and joy and satisfaction and achievement and anger and ethics and retribution, you have to fight all of those feelings as false, in the same way that I had to fight my feelings of admiration for soldiers and cops and certain aspects of the state.
If I had to fight those as false, then I would at least respect their consistency.
But then they would have to demonstrate it to me that it worked and it made them happy at the end.
It doesn't have to be something that it was possible, right?
Because you get the same thing in Buddhism, right?
That your thoughts are bad, your stream of identity is bad, and what you need to do is live in the moment and not have this endless chatter of thoughts.
So your natural self then is wrong and needs to be fixed.
And, of course, the Buddhists would say, no, it's not that it's wrong.
It needs to be fixed. That's not true at all.
If you're saying that something is bad, that being lost in thoughts is bad, and you need to achieve oneness with the universe and break the subject-object dichotomy and so on, then, of course, your natural state of consciousness is incorrect.
And there's another state of consciousness that is better.
And this also has to be really willed to be achieved.
So you get this from every direction, and we could go to countless more examples like this, school and country, and of course Marxism as well says, in a kind of deterministic way, that you may think you have opinions, but it's really just class consciousness, and blah blah blah blah blah.
So, that's a pretty important thing to understand, that an enormous amount of thought is aimed at the idea that your emotional apparatus is completely incorrect, wrong, immoral, or at best foolish and ridiculous and erroneous.
And I just sort of want to put forward the radical proposition that maybe, maybe, maybe there's absolutely nothing wrong with your emotional apparatus.
Maybe. I just say take that as a possibility.
Try it on for size.
And just see how it feels.
How does it feel to imagine, as a mental exercise, that you're not broken?
That you're not bad.
That you're not oppositional.
That you're not fundamentally flawed and in need of fixing.
That the only thing that is wrong with you is that you think that there's something wrong with you.
Because you've been taught that you're broken by nature.
Whether individually as the thinker in the family or collectively as the guy with original sin or the kid in the madras who needs to take pleasure in rocking back and forth and mouthing ancient words that he or she doesn't understand.
But what if there's nothing wrong with your emotional apparatus?
What if what has been developed for you and provided for you by good old mother nature is all that you need and exactly what you need and there's nothing wrong whatsoever With your entire emotional apparatus.
What if it's perfectly well tuned to help you?
So what if every time somebody says, no, no, no, no, no, you're wrong.
That's wrong. That's bad.
You shouldn't feel that. Oh, that's wrong.
You know, that's no good.
That's no good at all. No, no, no, no, no.
You may feel you have free will, but you don't.
No, no, no, no. All these feelings that you have about people having personal responsibility, anger at your mother, it's all irrational.
You have to fight those feelings continually, forever.
And you will never be able to stop having those feelings, but you must fight them from now to forever.
Or you need to love your parents.
Yeah, so maybe you don't love your parents.
Maybe you feel dread or fear or boredom or anger when the phone rings and you see that it's them.
But you need to put those feelings aside.
You need to forgive them. Those feelings are wrong.
Those feelings are bad. You need to put those feelings aside and get new feelings.
Well, my friends, it can't be done.
You've got your feelings. You've got your emotional apparatus.
There's nothing you can do to change that.
We are not in control of our feelings.
The only way we can stop our feelings is through drugs or suicide.
And you can't control your emotional apparatus.
You can tune it with better thoughts.
And you can uncover the contradictions.
And that's well worth doing.
But I would say that, as we've talked about before, you feel like you don't want to go and see your parents, you don't enjoy chatting with them, you didn't like your teachers, you don't enjoy being in grad school, you think your professors are ridiculous.
Well, all of those feelings are perfectly, perfectly true.
And what if all of those feelings that you have are valid and helpful, and you should respect them and listen to them and have them help you inform your decisions, And that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with you.
When you look at the Earth and it looks flat and somebody says it's round, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with your perception at all.
It looks flat. Now, if you look at it from space and say it looks flat, then you might want to check an eye doctor.
But what if you don't have to live in the Buddhist moment and constantly fight distractions?
And what if you don't have to fight your feelings of not wanting to spend time with people who you don't like?
And what if... You're not fundamentally broken.
What if you don't have to go to church if you don't want to?
What if your feelings are not broken?
And yes, yes, I know people are going to say, well, what if my feeling is I want to kill someone, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, that's fine. Let's talk about that another time, because you're not a sociopath.
Sociopaths don't listen to this station.
Sociopaths recoil. Would recoil if you ever put them in this kind of material.
They would jump out of it like a carp out of an acid bath.
So what if you're not broken?
Somebody posted on the board this morning, a great post, and I say somebody not because I don't remember, just because I want to put out names without permission.
Somebody posted on the board this morning and said, you know, when I was a kid, I was talking about pride, right?
You can't adapt your circumstances to yourself.
You can't change your environment when you're a kid, so you adapt to your circumstances and so on.
I was talking about pride. And this gentleman was saying, you know, I studied my shoes the whole time I was a kid.
And I was shuffling along, and I was almost known as the hunchback.
It was so bad. And I was shuffling along ahead of the family one day, coming home from church.
And my father said, straighten up!
Show your pride! And I turned around and I yelled at my dad, what the hell do we have?
What do I have to be proud of?
What the hell does anybody have to be proud of?
And I don't know how old the person was when this occurred, but I assume not too old.
And he said, well, maybe I knew.
And it's like, yes, of course you knew. Of course you knew.
Of course you knew.
And your father knew as well.
And your father had one or two choices, right?
This is so typical of family stuff.
It's barely worth saying, but let's go ahead and do it anyway.
Your father had two choices.
You were broken at that point by your family.
Not broken fundamentally, because we can almost always heal.
But when harm is done unto us, we can heal.
When we do harm unto others, it's very hard.
But you were broken by your family, and your father had the key role...
In that with your mom. And you're broken by your family.
And so you shuffling along in an attitude of obvious depression is a very clear symptom of dysfunction, brutality, and violence within a family.
So your father has one or two choices at this point.
And I'm not going to say that he has a choice at this point.
I don't know, right? Because I don't know his history.
But let's just say that he did for the sake of argument.
Your father had a choice at this point.
He was receiving stimuli which said, my son is depressed.
Now, I can either sit down with my son and say, what's happening?
What's going on? How come you're feeling so down?
Talk to me. Or, I can tell him, I can yell at him to stop displaying the symptoms of being unhappy.
These are particular choices.
And... This gentleman then says, wow, you know, I wasted all that time, I knew it, and yet I internalized this lack of pride, and so on.
And yes, I understand that.
We face these enormous, enormous amounts of emotional energies that are all fired like a cannon into our natural emotional apparatus to break them, right?
To break them, to break us, to make us obedient, to make us easier to manage, to make us pay our taxes and go to church, and to make us give resources to our parents when they get older, even though we may loathe them to all of these things.
I mean, we're broken and we're turned into a species of craven sheep.
And the only way to prevent yourself from remaining a craven sheep is to not believe that you're broken.
Right? Now, someone's broken, for sure.
But it ain't us. It ain't those of us who are exploring the truth, who are learning about ourselves, who are not just working with arid intellectual ideas, but are facing head-on emotional difficulties and problems and histories.
That's not broken. There are lots and lots of broken people in the world, but the vast majority of people are totally broken.
And they're totally broken because they've participated in the breaking of others.
That's when your soul truly dies, right?
Your soul doesn't die when you're broken.
Your soul dies when you break others, or participate in that, or sanction it, or justify it, or ignore obvious evidence that is being brought up about it, as they talked about with the Columbine kids.
So I'd just like to put forward the radical proposition that there's absolutely nothing wrong with you, except that you believe that you're broken.
You know that old thing, we have nothing to fear but fear itself, but that's not true.
But... We are only broken, perhaps, to the degree with which we think we're broken.
And this is partly what I have with the determinists, and it's not an argument or anything like that, but they're basically saying that my emotional apparatus is entirely based upon an illusion, is entirely broken.
Which, I mean, maybe they can live with the split.
I can't. I can't live with the split.
If I believe in determinism, I have to believe in determinism.
And that has specific consequences with how I view my feelings, and whether I work with or against my feelings.
So if I get angry at somebody who's being unjust towards me, if I believe in determinism, I have to fight that feeling of anger.
I have to. Maybe other people can live with this kind of split.
I can't. Maybe other people can live with these kinds of contradictions.
I can't. Maybe other people can have ideas that they specifically deny whenever they act out in the world.
I can't. This is just my nature, and it's been my choice for about 20 years, so it's not about to change, right?
If you learn to become a great skier, you can't then become a bad skier, unless you get a brain injury or something, right?
So, having learned and worked for 20 years very, very hard to bring my emotions in line with my values, It would be to undo all of that work if I simply just said, well, you know, I'm determined so whatever happens, happens.
But if I then say, well, nobody's responsible for anything that they do, but I've entirely trained my emotional apparatus to respond to values of virtue and self-will and responsibility and so on, that's fine.
I mean, talking about the consequences, they're not small.
And saying to me that I don't have to pursue those consequences doesn't help, because the logic is that I do.
The logic is that I do have to fight feelings that I want to be just, I want to be fair.
And if I believe in determinism, then I have to be just and fair, which means I have to stop getting angry at people who do wrong.
And I have to stop feeling pride at what I've done with my own life.
And I have to stop feeling love for Christina, because I have to fight those feelings because they're based on an illusion.
And my whole point in the last 20 years has been to stop getting my feelings based on a delusion, which is why I'm able to get to where I get to, both intellectually and emotionally, in terms of, you know, anarcho-capitalism and stuff about the family and stuff about the church and stuff about the state and stuff about race and all that kind of stuff.
And, you know, the way that I work is that my feelings and my intellect are sort of, you know, two horses pulling the same cart called me, or maybe the army, who knows, And I can't have ideas which I then let my emotions act in complete contradiction to.
So I simply would have to get my emotions in line, which would be another 20 years.
I don't think I would ever change.
I think it was all about getting back to my original nature, which was the case of my pursuit over the last 20 years, as I've talked about.
It was all about getting back to my original nature and realizing that there was nothing wrong with me.
And then when I got angry, it was perfectly valid and fair and right to get angry.
It doesn't mean to get abusive, but it means that I don't find my feelings of anger.
And so I just sort of want to put forward the proposition that there's nothing wrong with you.
This is the Occam's razor thing, right?
We have all of these feelings that everybody tries to crush out of us.
We have all these feelings.
Maybe there's nothing wrong with our feelings.
Maybe there's nothing wrong with our basic nature.
We feel like we have free will.
Maybe there's nothing wrong with that.
We feel like people who do wrong are bad.
Maybe there's nothing wrong with that.
When people encroach upon our values or our persons or our property in an aggressive way, we feel angry.
Maybe there's nothing wrong with that.
Maybe there's nothing wrong with your emotional apparatus whatsoever.
And all of this tomfoolery about whether your emotions are right or wrong, maybe just accept that they're right.
Maybe. Maybe just accept that your emotional apparatus is perfectly correct.
I mean, that's sort of how I feel about myself, right?
So when I get angry at something, I'll say that I'm angry.
I'm conscious that I'm angry. I don't fight that I'm angry like it's a bad thing.
I shouldn't be angry. So I'm just putting it forward.
Maybe, just maybe, there's nothing wrong with you at all, other than the belief, which was pounded into you repetitively, if not by your family, then definitely by your school, That there is something wrong with you.
Maybe your total base nature is absolutely perfect.
Absolutely fine. Totally nothing wrong with it.
Maybe the Buddhists, the Scientologists, the religious, the statists, the educationalists, the parents, everyone, the Marxists, the determinants, maybe everyone who tells you that everything that you feel is an illusion, all of your natural feelings are incorrect or illusory or immoral, maybe all those people are just trying to put one over on you.
In a way. I mean, I don't want to put out, I mean, I know, I'm not sort of saying that the determinants are trying to do this because it's more of a personal debate with them, but certainly the state is.
I'm questioning your parents are, for sure.
But maybe it's just a kind of discomfort.
With emotional authenticity that causes this particular emotion to arise, or this anti-emotion to arise in yourself, this skepticism towards your own feelings, this constant management of your own feelings, this constant questioning of your own feelings, this constant back and forth, maybe, just maybe accept that your feelings are perfectly correct, trying to help you, there's nothing wrong with you at all, and there's nothing to be fixed.
And once you accept that, there really is nothing to be fixed.
So I hope that that's helpful. I had another sign-up for the $17 a month donation rotation.
Thank you so much. And I had another generous donation last night.
Thank you so much. I sent you off my novel and the first 16 chapters of it, an audiobook version.
If you want anything else, you just let me know, Martin.
Thank you so much for listening.
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