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Oct. 11, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:44
456 Dream Analysis - The Heart Is An Organ Of Fire

A listener's dream of volcanic love...

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. Just before we get started on this fine rainy day, I'm sure that it's a little dim on the video, we're going to do a dream, and I'm going to do a dream which I do not have any family history for, but it should be an exciting challenge to do it without all of that.
So we'll start with a little bit of background about the lady who sent the dream in.
I'm a 21-year-old, 5'2", independent female musician.
This is not me, but the woman.
Just recently, April, I graduated from the music diploma program at the Beep Beep in Beep Beep.
I've been living on my own for the past three years, jumping from roommate to roommate, place to place, trying to find the ideal living situation for myself.
This has been a great discovery about myself and continues to stand a challenge in my life.
I need to feel at home in my home.
Currently I am single and have been for the past year, although it wasn't always so.
I've been in two extremely emotionally attached relationships, first 15-18 high school, second 18-20 college.
Both relationships ended in great destruction, carrying on for months and months past their expiry date.
And, get this, both men had the exact same birthday, October 28th, separated by a year.
Weird. The greatest lesson I have learned about love is that I know absolutely nothing about it.
All I know now is that I have never felt the kind of love I know I need, and I have serious issues letting go of people.
I have several in my basement.
Oh, sorry, I misread that.
I don't like to give up.
I'm extremely romantic with myself, my friends, my lovers, and in the world around me.
I'm absolutely passionate about music.
I write my own and have done since I was 15.
I have some music posted here.
Oh, I'm not going to post the...
I write to release, to collect my experiences and learn from them.
I'm always thinking I have trouble sleeping because of it.
I feel before I think.
I seek out real minds slash hearts.
I love intellectual conversations of any kind.
Debates are wonderful. I am incapable of small talk.
And I don't believe in God.
No B. I have been thinking this one through for some time now, and it just doesn't fit into the Megan picture.
The Christian God doesn't make me feel good about myself, and so I say, be gone!
Currently, I am researching, experimenting with pagan beliefs, Reiki, and other methods of natural healing, girl power, wine, cigarettes, body art, sex, girls, guys, and, of course, music.
My boundaries have completely exploded in this last year, and I am feeling trapped between the excitement of it all and the fear that it all may be truly hollow.
Honestly, I love being in love.
The greatest adventures in my life are found within the hearts of those I learn to love.
I probably went in to do way too much detail, but now you know.
Thanks so much. Listener, so this is the dream.
I found myself in a house, one I have never been in before, surrounded by people my own age.
The people around me felt familiar.
I sensed that I was within the company of the usual people in my life now.
However, there was no faces and their presence was not important.
I was not interacting with any of them.
It was daylight and there was fire in the backyard.
The backyard was small but romantic looking.
There was no grass but a stone patio.
There were many green vines and hanging plants from the lattice surrounding the yard.
In the middle of the yard, flaming from a hole in the stones burned a very high fire.
I stepped up to it very close and burned the entire front side of my body.
This part of the dream happened very fast.
After realizing I was burnt, I ran inside to a mirror.
My face down to my toes was black and crisp, but the backside of my body was fine.
I am not bleeding and felt no pain, but I know I need to help myself now.
This is when the dream begins to feel extremely detailed and long.
Now, knowing that I am burnt, I try to call 9-11 because...
I know I need to go to the hospital.
I am now talking on the phone with a lady, but she needs the address of the house, and I don't know what it is.
People, they don't know.
I look at random bills sitting on the table and read off the address from them, but for some reason it is confusing to the lady on the phone.
Sorry, I don't quite understand that.
I've run out to the street to look at the street signs and relay the street and avenue, but still she seems confused.
This carries on and on for some time.
Finally, it seems she understands, but I hang up.
The ambulance does not come and no one in the house is affected by what has happened to me.
I'm feeling frantic to help myself but still in no pain.
The lady calls back saying she still cannot find the location of where I am.
Then I wake up. I'm going through many internal changes right now in my life, exploring my spirituality and my reality more so now than ever.
I believe this dream could be a reflection of that.
So she's in a house.
People around her are familiar.
No faces. The presence is not important.
Not interacting with any of them. Fire in the backyard.
Small and romantic looking.
No grass but a stone patio.
In the middle of the yard, flaming from a hole in the stones, burned a very high fire.
I stepped up to it very close and burned the entire front of my body.
She can't get help.
Nobody will give her help.
And the ambulance can't come.
Okay. Off we go!
Into the wild blue yonder.
It's quite remarkable when I look at my own videos how often I drive with no hands.
Don't worry. It's a very good car and goes in a beautiful straight line when I am not touching it.
And I have never been in an accident.
I have never had any problems driving.
I'm an excellent driver.
I'm an excellent driver. Kmart sucks.
Anyway. So...
This dream, let me sort of give you...
This is a very, very wide net that I'm casting here, but I did sort of want to point out...
What I think is important.
Obviously, this is a distress dream.
And obviously, it is a warning coming from the unconscious about a dangerous path in life.
And I do, for those who haven't listened to some of the series that I've done on psychology, I do generally approach the questions of psychology with the idea that the deepest selves that we have, something that I call the true self, the authentic self, the deepest selves that we have, Do actually unite with our senses, right?
So we have our senses which provide us continual and constant information, and then we have our deepest selves which receive that information, but in between that is a false self, right?
So we have our senses which process information, and we have our deepest and true selves which accurately receive and work with that information.
But then we have these false selves which are created through the need to conform to brutal social or familial or educational absolutes in sort of public school situation where we have to sort of lie to ourselves, right?
So, you know, when I was a kid, I remember one of the first things that I thought about war was just how completely baffling and irrational it seemed to be that you would get medals For shooting a guy in war, but you would go to jail for shooting a guy in the real world, right? So our senses will see a guy in a sort of costume shooting another guy and everybody cheering and giving them ticket tape parades when they get home.
So that's what our senses sort of give us directly.
And... Then we are sort of baffled and confused, right?
Like how could this be the case that in one situation you're shot or you're thrown in jail for killing a guy and in another situation you're not.
Let me just check all my power settings.
Suddenly panic. No need to panic.
There we go. I think we're fine. And so this basic sensual information that a costume, like a soldier's uniform or a costume, does not change a person's fundamental moral nature.
Oh, look, eye contact.
I've actually had a light here, so I can have a coffee and have some eye contact.
I've yet to figure out how to get this microphone to properly sit in front of my face without holding it.
So, yeah, so fundamentally, we know, based on sensual evidence...
That a uniform does not change a man's moral nature or a woman's moral nature.
So what is allowed, or what is demanded, really, what is considered moral for a man to do in wartime, which is to gun down other men that someone tells him to, in peacetime, would be called, he would be a hitman, and he would be considered even worse than a crime of passion type of murderer.
Like a stone-cold killer.
And so our basic sense evidence tells us these logical things, right?
That there's no huge difference between politicians and herself.
There's no such thing as the government.
And we have this basic common sense empiricism, which is...
There would be no such thing as a false self without false arguments for morality and false philosophies.
But what happens is an enormous amount of brutal emotional pressure is brought to bear on us.
To believe in all of this nonsense that isn't true.
Basically, the way that it works is we don't believe all of this nonsense.
We believe all of the basics, right?
That war is murder.
That the government doesn't exist.
Because, you know, these things are just silly, right?
And children don't believe in them.
But what happens, and God, of course, particularly so, right?
Children don't believe in God.
Because, you know, you try giving a...
And it's easy to figure this out, right?
You just sit down with a kid.
And you tell him that you are going to give him an invisible piece of candy in exchange for his real piece of candy and see if the kid says, sure, and if you tell him this invisible piece of candy and you pretend to eat it, taste the best thing ever, the kid will look at you kind of like suspiciously, but fundamentally you will not convince the kid that...
This invisible piece of candy should take the place of this real piece of candy.
So children from the age of three or so onwards, or four at the latest, are very able to distinguish between what is real and what is not, and to recognize that there's really not much value in things that aren't real, and you should never substitute things that aren't real for things that are real, right?
If you say to a kid, you can't go out and play with your friends, but we're going to pretend go out and play with your friends, and we're going to sit in a dark room and pretend that we're playing with your friends, they'll just be like, no, I want to go out and play.
They're perfectly comfortable recognizing that things which aren't real have no value and don't exist.
There's a very strong empiricism in children, which of course has to be scrubbed out with an extraordinary amount of emotional and psychological abuse.
And this is sort of why I say that the culture as a whole is a cult.
The society that we live in as a whole is a cult.
Because you don't believe any of this nonsense.
There's a podcast, I think it's podcast 73 or something, Human Nature Part 1, where I talk about you sit down as a kid at a table and there's this invisible apple that everyone tells you is real and you're bewildered and frightened and feel betrayed, but also terrified that the people who are in charge of your life are kind of liars, right? So... You might want to go and listen to that one, Human Nature Part 1, I think it's called.
So what happens is we are told as children we don't believe in all this nonsense, we don't believe in gods, and we don't believe in invisible things.
And we are frightened out of our empiricism through basically a massive...
It's not really a conspiracy because people believe...
Like, they're so scarred, they believe it too.
But it's this massive case of the emperor's new clothes.
Like, only bad children don't believe in invisible things, right?
That's the argument for morality.
And I won't love you if you don't believe in invisible things.
So, of course, the child...
Like, I won't love you if you don't believe in God.
I won't love you if you don't...
If you go up to a...
If you're a kid, right? And you go up to a...
If you're over at a family's place, let's say you're an American kid, you go over to some family's place and you see a picture of their son in uniform who's serving over in Iraq.
You know, I don't really think you should ever invade a country you can't even pronounce.
But anyway, you go over to this house and You, as a kid, say, oh, your son's over there killing people.
I mean, what would your parents say?
Would they say, that's a very astute observation.
I'm very glad that you can see things so clearly.
I do believe that these people's son is over there killing people.
And they'll say, no, it's not killing people.
Our son is a fine, noble, hero, warrior who's over there defending your freedom.
And there's this anger that is attached to the child or directed at the child.
There's this rage that is directed at the child.
Because the child is embarrassing the parents by pointing out the truth.
And the reason that the parents are embarrassed is because They themselves have swallowed all of these lies.
And you have to, right?
If you give any kid the choice, any kid, I don't care who that kid is, you give any kid the choice between speaking the truth on the one hand and pleasing his parents on the other, the child, for obvious biological reasons that children can't provide for their own food and shelter, that the child will always choose to please his parents rather than to speak the truth.
That's Completely inevitable.
There's no way around it. Children who were really keen on speaking the truth were kind of weeded out by being abandoned or by being killed or, you know, just not fed or they didn't get, you know, even if their food intake was reduced by 10% during times of food shortages in human history, those kids would just be eliminated completely, right?
That whole choose truth over conformity gene has been completely weeded out of the sort of soul of man, if it ever even existed.
I'm sure it would be a mutant gene that wouldn't even exist.
That is something that's still very common.
It's very common among adults as well, right?
So if you're some professor or some pundit or some public intellectual, if you actually speak the truth about things, then, I mean, that's not sort of part of the biases of whatever culture you're trying to court, right?
So you can be Bill O'Reilly and you can be Michael Moore appealing to the right and to the left, as long as you...
If you repeat the truths of the culture appealing to or trying to get money from, then that's fine, but you can't speak the entire truth, right?
You can't speak the basic truth, right?
Michael Moore and Bill O'Reilly can't say things like, the government doesn't exist, and God is a fantasy, right?
You can simply appeal to the prejudices of your cult, but you can't speak the truth.
That's a universal thing in human society, speaking the truth, which is natural to children, You know, like it's the old joke about the kid, not a joke, but sort of the observation about the kid who comes across a fat person and says, why are you so fat?
It's an innocent question, right?
The person is fat, but everyone's embarrassed because that's rude.
It's rude to point out the truth, to ask an innocent question about the world.
It must be crushed.
You know, a kid says, where is God?
God is everywhere. What does that mean?
It just means God is everywhere.
Now, shut up and sing your song, your hymns.
I mean, it's a little bit more gentle than that in many situations, but the essence is basically the same.
So we have our sense evidence, which does not support the existence of all of these fantasies that we're told to believe in.
So we have our sense evidence. And then we have our true self which gets buried under these cavalcading waves, these coruscating waves of social bullying that basically we get informed in no uncertain terms when we're children that it's I will not love you, I will not support you, you will not survive fundamentally.
Any threat to a child in terms of the bond, any threat To weaken or sever a parental bond of love and devotion is a death sentence to a child.
This is the fundamental power that drives all power in the world.
This is why I say it always starts with the family.
That any time a parent threatens a bond with a child, withdraws approval, withdraws affection, That's a death sentence to the child.
You might as well be pointing a gun at the child's head.
And this is invisible to most people, of course, because it's so common, so taken for granted, and such a vat of moral horror that we just don't see it.
It's just so common. And it's very hard, it's very painful to see it, to see our parents as the ultimate prison wardens.
I mean, no matter how nice they were, there's a reason why everyone conforms to social absolutes, despite there being no evidence for any of them, right?
And the reason that they conform is fear.
And the fear is that they will die if the parents withdraw their affection.
And that's why parents are so innately manipulative, because they hold so much power.
They hold the power of life and death over the child.
And please understand me, I'm not saying that parents threaten the child with death.
I'm going to kill you if you don't believe in God.
It's just that children are exquisitely sensitive to, for obvious biological reasons, are exquisitely sensitive to the stability and permanence and strength of their bond with their parents because they're helpless and dependent.
And, I mean, if you're bedridden and can't feed yourself, and a friend is coming over to feed you every day, and that friend just decides to up and say, forget it, I'm done, and you're broke.
I mean, you know what? Those metaphors don't even work, because you can always find somebody else, some charity, and so on, but that's not really the case with children.
The children are completely dependent upon the approval of their parents.
So this issue is quite powerful.
It's quite strong. And that's where the false self comes in.
The false self is what we erect to hide from ourselves the knowledge that we have been bullied into conformity by people who are claiming that they're acting in our interests.
The false self is the lie that becomes the truth about the virtue of the people who bullied us into believing false things and into losing our authentic and true selves.
So, in this lady's dream, I'm going to start with some of her history and I'm going to talk about the impressions that I get from this From this woman and her history, and then we'll talk about what might be going on in the dream.
I think most dreams are metaphorical communications from the true self, both as a warning and as a plea for release from the prison, the endless prison of the false self.
And I've been watching a couple of Prison Break episodes, which I'll talk about later in the week, but it's sort of that idea that you're unjustly imprisoned by people who think that they're acting justly, right?
That is the true self's view of the false self.
And so it's constantly trying to send you messages about dangers that you're in.
And because we don't have any social healing places for the psychic wrecking that occurs when we're children, we tend to be sort of lost and go on impulse and go on passion and so on, which is a mess, right?
You can't just go on passion.
You need reason and you need objectivity and you need ethics to live a happy life.
So this is all, I don't even know this lady's family situation, so So this is all flying a little bit blind but What I do get is that the woman was passionately in love and that the ending of these relationships, 15 to 18 and 19 to 20 I think it was, that the ending of these relationships involved months upon months of emotional ugliness.
And yet she still uses the term love and romance for what occurred.
Now that indicates to me somebody who does not have a very good handle on what is meant by love and intimacy and passion and caring and so on.
And this is sort of my particular approach to viewing this, right, which may be helpful to other people, may be helpful to this woman.
I think it's accurate, but of course she can correct me as always if I've made a mistake.
There is a psychological process called fusion.
Which occurs when people who do not have boundaries...
Again, I'm going to use a little jargon here, and I apologize for it.
But people who don't have boundaries, they go through a process called fusion.
Now, fusion is when you meet somebody, you're kind of lost, you're kind of ill-defined, you're really...
Adrift in a fog of fantasy about family virtue, about what is cool, about what is right, about what is good.
You don't really have much of a clue at all, and not because you're unintelligent.
I'm sure this woman's very intelligent, but simply because you've never been taught anything.
For most people, to understand any kind of rational approach to life, given that they're raised in this kind of culture, this kind of modern culture, Given that they're raised with this kind of foggy nonsense that goes on for the arguments for morality, self-serving manipulative nonsense, they end up in this situation where they simply don't have any clue about right and wrong.
And what comes out of that is that You would sort of more expect to come across this sort of alias Rambaldi guy who is writing 400 years ahead of his time.
For the average person to sort of invent moral philosophy from an irrational culture would be like expecting the theory of relativity to come out of a monk in the 12th century.
I mean, the monk wasn't less intelligent.
I'm sure there were many monks as brilliant as Einstein, but they simply didn't have the scientific method.
They didn't have a peer community of review.
They didn't have the learning of people who came before.
So you simply would...
I mean, it would be almost practically impossible for a monk in the 12th century to come up with the theory of relativity, even though they knew mathematics, they knew logic, they knew philosophy, they knew something about science.
It wasn't that they were completely scholastic.
And that would take a genius of the first order to invent moral philosophy from nothing.
I certainly don't claim to have done it.
So for the average person to have a value hierarchy that's rational and sensible and conforming to empirical evidence and the true self-rationality, It's impossible.
So I can with confidence say that a 20-odd-year-old woman who has not taken any moral philosophy courses or philosophy courses, oh, God, she probably would be even worse off if she had, given the state of modern moral philosophy.
But I can absolutely guarantee that this woman, especially because she has an artistic, passionate, and romantic nature, is in no way capable of determining right from wrong, true from false in any fundamental way.
And you can see this in the way that she says that she has rejected God and now is exploring alternate forms of mysticism.
So instead of organized religion, she's preferring disorganized fantasy, which I can totally understand.
Again, this is no insult to the lady in question, who is very intelligent, obviously, and passionate and cares about things and has dreams and goals, and that's all wonderful.
But it's no disrespect to her to say that she doesn't know much about true and false and right and wrong.
I mean, how could she? I mean, the culture we live in obscures those things with completely false lies that are presented as moral absolutes in a bullying manner when children are young and vulnerable and completely dependent.
So, fundamentally, she lacks a basic kind of identity, a basic kind of empiricism, a basic kind of organization.
And therefore, her personality...
A personality is like a liquid.
It doesn't have structure.
It doesn't have organization.
It doesn't have a hierarchy of values.
She's just kind of loosey-goosey, right?
So what happens is there is a constant sort of disintegration occurring within the personality in the absence of, you know, rational philosophy and ethics.
In the same way that there is a kind of disintegration within belief systems, theology, a kind of constant disintegration that occurred prior to the scientific method, right?
The real scientific method, not that sort of pseudo-Aristotelian thing.
And so there's a constant dissolution and a constant problem with identity, a feeling of non-existence, a feeling of emptiness, a feeling of hollowness, a feeling of lack of structure, a feeling of chaos, and a very...
A very much in the moment, pleasure-based approach.
And I'm not saying hedonistic or anything.
I'm not saying pure hedonism.
But in the absence of rational values, how do we organize our life?
Well, we sort of try and focus on our talents.
We focus on our relationships.
We focus on what gives us pleasure.
You know, she'll write music all night, but she'll think so much she can't fall asleep and so on.
She's just sort of following the moment.
There's no real sense of structure or future or plans or goals in this kind of life.
And so there's a kind of emptiness and a lack of structure, which in sort of psychological terms becomes a lack of boundaries.
And so what happens is that there's this desire to merge with another personality.
This is a very sort of strong kind of feeling.
There's water and there's gravity and it tends to collect in lakes, to use a metaphor.
And so there's a very strong desire to merge in a blissful kind of union that erases the panic of not having a real identity.
This is why people merge with crowds, people who don't have identities.
This is why really brutalized children tend to be drawn to fascistic structures.
Whether those be sort of pure fascistic or sort of fascistically anti-fascistic in the kind of commune approach kinds of structures.
But people who desire collectivism do so because they lack an identity.
They want to merge with a larger identity to pretend to themselves that They exist, right?
And I know that this all sounds very harsh to this woman, but it's not.
I mean, I do believe that this is the phone call from the hospital that she posted this in order to receive.
I do very strongly believe that I'm calling to get her to hospital in a way that, in her dream, she was not able to, nobody was able to help her.
So, in fusion, what happens is, you know, you meet someone and they're just perfect and you talk all night and everything's wonderful and there's no conflict and everything's perfect and everything's joyous and it's bliss and you found your soulmate and you can't believe and there's, you know, endless sex and there's, you know, this fusion, right? You fuse together.
You don't bring any separate identities to the equation.
There's no negotiation. There's simply...
There's instantaneous trust, there's instantaneous love, there's instantaneous joining together without any particular looking at people sort of objectively.
Right, so for instance, the second gentleman that this woman dated when she was 19 or so, 18 or 19, if he was a wise young man, which of course is not an easy thing to ask for, I certainly wasn't, but if he was a wise young man, then he would say, huh, okay, well you dated this guy for three years, And then it ended in this incredible bitter acrimony.
So unless you've really figured that one out, this might not be a very good situation for me to get into because obviously there's some instability in your relationship such that you can go from passionate devotion to enmity and that can drag on for months, right? So there's an instability.
There's a love-hate thing going on here, which is to use the words love-hate very loosely.
And this, of course, comes from a child who's not allowed to develop negotiation and a personal identity with regards to her parents.
This is a child who's either ignored or micromanaged to the point where she does not have the capacity to develop a separate identity, to think for herself, to question her parents, to oppose authority, not blindly, but with reason and with evidence.
So this is a child whose parents either did not pay much attention to her or micromanaged her but did not encourage her to develop a separate identity with her own thoughts and opinions and negotiations with her parents.
So this fusion is very dangerous.
It's very, very risky. People do this all the time.
They meet someone and everything's perfect and they're blissful and it's wonderful and it's perfect.
And this can go on for quite some time.
But what happens is they kind of get in each other's heads without setting up criteria for trust.
So they fuse, they merge, they surrender, they lower all their defenses, they have sex, they eat together, they spend 24-7 together.
And they completely fuse and merge together as two sort of empty personalities.
It's like two trees can't merge because they have boundaries.
They have bark. Whereas two fog banks can roll into each other and mingle and merge.
But the problem is that there's no real knowledge of the other person.
There's simply a fantasy projection of what that person is like.
And there's no real trust, right?
So there's devotion and a complete lowering of defenses, but there's no trust.
And so what happens, of course, is that when differences begin to emerge, as they inevitably do, there's no capacity to negotiate and there's a feeling of betrayal.
And that's followed by quite a bit of anger.
And so this sort of merging followed by anger is something that is indicative of an empty and irrational personality.
You could say almost an absence of personality, right?
A presence of talents and sort of desires and goals and immediate momentary pursuits, but not a personality.
In a way that has judgment, has value, views things objectively, requires that people prove their virtue before you get involved with them.
Things like that. Standards.
Personality is another word for standards, I think.
So, in the dream, we have a situation where there are all these people around this girl, a woman, and they're familiar to her, but they mean nothing, right?
So this is an indication that this woman's social circle and familial circle are kind of around, but don't have any values, don't have any selves, don't have any judgments.
And I would guess she comes from a, you know, don't judge others kind of, either hippie or Christian kind of world.
A little bit hippy-dippy, a little bit like judge not, lest ye be judged, right?
So, of course, if personality is standard, the absence of judgment is the opposition.
A hostility to judgment is a hostility towards personality.
Because personality really is about independent judgment and the hierarchy of values that flows from a rational examination of reality, of empirical reality.
And so if you have a cult around you, familial or social or otherwise, wherein judgments are always considered to be hostile, that of course is only ever put forward by people who are afraid of rational judgment, who are themselves irrational and have no boundaries.
And so these people are around this woman in this dream, but they mean nothing.
They have no faces. They have no identities.
They are empty oppositions to real personalities, to real judgments, to a real hierarchy of values.
And so she's in this garden, and there's a tall pillar of flame, and she started this relationship when she was 15.
Now, for me, 15 is a little bit too early.
I don't think it would be in a rational society, but in our current irrational society, 15 is way, way, way too early to get involved in heavy-duty romantic sexual relationships.
You don't have a clue what you're doing when you're 15.
You're just following hormones and fusion and you're coasting on all of the momentum of emotional scarring from your family of origin and you have no capacity to love or judge or value independently or objectively.
And, of course, the indifference of the people around her is sort of indicated in the fact that she did have a three-year relationship when she was 15 that was, you know, passionate and intense and stormy, and there was this horrible breakup, and then she had another age.
So this is a girl, and I can call her a girl at 15, this is a girl who has precious little intervention from those around her for her own self-interest.
Just judging by the fact that she has this tendency towards fusion, that she can have these long, intense, passionate relationships when she's in her mid-teens, she's barely out of being a girl, and have these long, ugly breakups, there's not a lot of intervention coming from her family and from her friends.
There's not a lot of people sitting her down and saying, girl, you're out of control.
You have a lot of problems that you need to address, and they're not your fault.
It's not that you're wrong or bad.
You're just fundamentally a wolf child when it comes to how to manage relationships because you've been taught all the wrong things and none of the right things.
And you can't be expected to invent all the right things on your own because that's asking way too much of a 15-year-old.
It's asking way too much of the vast majority of 50-year-olds, let alone 15-year-olds.
So, this is a woman who exists in spectacularly fundamental isolation.
This is sort of a very important thing to understand.
She really is inventing the wheel, the car, the roads, the highways, the tolls, the destinations, the cities.
She's having to invent everything from scratch.
And as I think Herman Hess said about his own childhood, he said, I was left to raise myself, and like most people left to raise myself, I did a very bad job of it.
And of course, that is the case.
Children can't parent themselves.
So this sort of wolf child is in this garden and the garden is romantic.
She mentions that. There's romantic roses and stuff like that.
So this is obviously an indication of sexual desire and sexual relationships.
And there's this tall column of fire which, you know, is phallic to some degree but definitely around the idea of romance and passionate intimacy and so on.
And she approaches this fire and very, very quickly And this is the indication that there's fusion followed by hostility.
She merges with someone, then finds that that person is inside her defenses and that she has no reason to trust them.
And the fact that they are inside her defenses without ever judging her objectively means that they're not to be trusted.
So there's intense, empty intimacy followed by a violent fear and reaction and hostility towards difference.
And that is sort of the nature of fusion followed by hostility.
And it can take a while, right, depending on how unhealthy the fusion is.
If the fusion is very unhealthy, then people will suppress their differences for quite some time, months, years.
Before, finally, the differences arise to the surface.
And then there's a sense of betrayal and hostility and instability and wild rage and wild upset and wild...
I mean, all this kind of stuff, right?
So, basically what happens is this woman's in a garden.
There are all these people around her who are familiar to her.
And she enters into a romantic relationship.
So there's this tall column of fire, and it happens very, very quickly that she fuses or merges and gets burnt, right?
The heart, as is mentioned in that movie about the plains and the desert, the English patient, Michael Ondaatje.
The heart is an organ of fire.
The idea of fire with romance is very fiery romance.
This is all very common.
And fire, of course, is a good servant and a bad master, right?
So love is great when it's following your values.
Love is not great, sort of quote, love is not great when it's driving you forward like you're strapped to a mad horse and you hope it doesn't plunge off a cliff or run too low under a branch and scrape you off and get you killed, right?
So this woman who's in this, this girl who's in this romantic garden faces this column of fire and almost instantaneously gets horribly burned on her front but not on her back.
So she faces this column of fire, she enters into a romance with a guy, and she gets horribly burnt.
And nobody notices. Nobody notices.
This is sort of why I'm saying she's probably in a situation, or I would say almost certainly in a situation, where she's operating independent of any adult wisdom.
She's just inventing the wheel as she goes forward, which is sort of not a good thing to do when you're in that sort of hormonal intense phase, especially if you've been raised in a very hands-off or micromanaged.
Either way, either extreme gives you no chance to develop an independent personality or value judgments of your own.
Nobody notices. Nobody notices that she's torturing herself in this fused followed by hostility kind of relationship.
And so she really is.
Nobody around her cares about her.
Nobody around her is giving her any kind of feedback or any kind of help in this kind of situation where she's been driven by hormones and agony and history and pain and abandonment and rejection.
She's been driven into the sort of foggy embrace of another wounded soul And it has ended in agony and brutality and pain for months upon months upon months.
And, of course, you can see that there's this strained bit that's going on where she says, and you know the weird thing was that both these guys have the same birthday, right?
Because she had another relationship that followed exactly the same pattern.
Now, of course...
I don't really think that the important thing is that they have the same birthday, but I can certainly see that she's straining herself to try and uncover a pattern that she really deep down knows all too well, but she's focusing on the birthdays, which is by far the least important pattern that's occurring here, that she had these two relationships that followed the same process because, of course, it's her empty self, the absence of her value judgments and independent thought, that is what is causing all of this mess to occur.
So she's burnt and nobody notices.
Nobody notices. Which is horrifying to a child.
Right? Because she's around these people.
Obviously, they claim to love her.
Obviously, they claim that, you know, we love her children.
And if somebody would ask them, do you love your daughter?
They'd say, well, yes, we do.
Of course we do. We love her to death.
We would do everything for her.
And the fact of the matter is, though, that she got involved in this horrible entangled relationship where there was joy and terror and bliss and rage and all of the standard what people mistake for love all the time.
Acting out scar tissue is not quite the same as being in love in a mature, wise, and passionate kind of way.
And so... People around her just didn't notice it.
They didn't care that she was wounded.
She says she loves to be loved.
She's very passionate. But she got really, really burned in her love relationship.
So she realizes that she's burned and she's casting about.
And I bet that she talked to people about The passion and what had happened to her with the idea of passing it across as a kind of virtue, right?
I'm very passionate. I'm very romantic as she says in this Post quite constantly.
That she's passionate, that she's romantic, and that she doesn't say, something's really broken in me because I keep having these relationships that end in emotional brutality or ugliness.
Something's wrong because this is occurring and that's not what I want.
Something's desperately wrong with my relationships.
No, she says that it's passionate and it's exciting and so on, but her true self, the dream, knows better.
Girl, you're burnt. Girl, you're injured, and you can't take much more of it.
And of course, she's really only half in this relationship, half in these relationships, because that's what fusion is.
You can't bring any kind of true self to your relationship, any kind of real self to your relationship, because you don't have a real self yet.
I mean, you're too young, and you're too badly raised.
It's not your fault, but it's something you need to sort of get a handle on.
That you're missing an identity.
You're missing a self. You're missing independent judgment.
You really can't think for yourself yet.
And so you act based on your history.
You act based on the lack of instruction you've been given.
You act on whim and hormones and impulse.
And you call it love and passion and you try to pass it across, which is perfectly understandable, of course, as a kind of virtue.
Yes, I had bliss that ended in horror, but that's because I'm a very passionate and caring and deep human being.
Of course, that's not true at all.
What I want for you is to have a really great love that only grows and deepens and widens and that you don't have to feel whenever you get into a relationship that it's going to end in flames, that you're going to get burned.
Particularly, this is bad for women to fear their own capacity for devotion.
This is a very bad thing.
to happen to women.
Definitely, you really want to avoid this kind of danger.
This is a very, very bad situation to get into where You are in this kind of mess.
Men can survive it a little bit more.
We're a little bit more constitutionally able to deal with these kinds of rejections.
But for women, it's very, very hard.
I mean, a woman's capacity for devotion has to include the man and has to include the children.
And in my view, right, humble view, it's sort of deeper and more powerful than a man's and also more prone to being damaged, right?
It's the old thing, right?
Men can sleep around a little bit and it doesn't really harm them, but if women do, don't get mad at me, it's just nature, right?
But if women do, that's usually more harmful.
So your true self is saying, look, we just got burned twice really badly, really badly.
And one more time, and we're really going to be damaged.
We might be able to survive it now.
We've had five years of relationships that ended in a brutal and destructive manner that went on for months, where there was this inability to let go, which is an indication of fusion to begin with, right?
And we really better not do this again, right?
So you're looking for help. You're saying, look, I'm burned.
I got really badly burned.
These relationships really hurt me.
And nobody cares, right?
And you're partly to blame in this sense, right, to be frank, because you're passing it off as a kind of virtue.
You're saying, yeah, I had these relationships.
I'm very passionate. They didn't work out.
There was lots of wrenching.
I have difficulty letting go.
So again, it's not viewed as I got into very unwise relationships and really got badly hurt because I'd rather still be in love and be moving towards marriage or something like that.
I got really badly hurt by these guys, and I'm just wretched, and there's something very fundamentally wrong with my decision-making process when it comes to getting involved with guys.
And if this girl is physically attractive or cute, then she's in even more danger, right?
Because she's going to have guys throwing themselves at her, and she's unable to choose wisely, which means that she's in continual danger of being really badly hurt.
So, you know, sister, I feel for you.
You're in a very dangerous situation.
You need to protect your heart.
You need to protect your capacity for love.
And you will not do that.
You will not be able to do that at all.
If you continue to portray your relationships as passionate, virtuous, exciting, deep, romantic flings, they weren't.
They weren't.
They were empty fusions followed by hostility and rejection and torture.
This is not a good thing.
This is not a good thing for you.
This will not make you happy.
And you have to really, totally, carefully protect your heart.
Don't keep putting it out there to get burned, right?
So far, you're not immobilized, right?
So far, you're only half burned, right?
Which means that you maybe get two more relationships before you're totally burned and you lose the capacity to love, even in the fantasy sense.
Don't go for the easy fusion.
Don't go for the instant merging.
Don't go for where your instincts right now tell you to go with guys.
Don't do it. Chastity for a little while with some therapy would be my advice.
That's the way to do it.
That was certainly my approach, and it worked beautifully, so I'm sort of trying to pass along something that worked for me.
But that would be my advice.
Stop being in relationships for a while.
And don't even be around like flirty guys who just want to be your friend or whatever.
But take a little time off.
Get some counseling for sure.
Get a good counselor. And don't pursue this mysticism that you're drawn to.
Because that's a reflection of the same.
That's your false self. Your false self is pulling you towards mysticism.
Because your false self is attempting to justify all the disorganization that's in your personality, and it's attempting to do that by universalizing the principles of irrationality and disorganization.
So we're not disorganized.
The universe is disorganized, and we're just, you know, that's my empiricism.
Don't let the false self substitute mysticism for empiricism in terms of justifying your approach to life.
That's a very bad idea.
So stay away from the mysticism.
That's absolutely going to toast your capacity to think for yourself.
And it's going to justify and universalize, as the false self always tries to do, is universalize what caused you problems, what was abusive in your history.
So irrationality and disorganization, which was a fundamental aspect of your childhood and being parented, your false self is drawing you towards mysticism in the desire to universalize that.
Don't let it. Don't let it do that.
Study some philosophy. Study some rationality.
And get some therapy with regards to relationships.
Because right now, you're only half-burned.
Nobody in your environment can help you.
Your dream is telling you that very clearly.
Nobody knows where you are.
You're just reading random addresses off, trying to get people to come and help you.
you, but that's an indication of how little you understand what is currently causing you pain and what is completely endangering your future.
I mean, let's not second guess or I don't want to minimize the danger that you're facing.
Your capacity for devotion and love, which is one of the most beautiful things in a woman or in any soul, is in severe danger of being destroyed.
And your false self is saying, look, we are only half burned.
We have two choices.
In this dream, the dream is presenting two choices.
We can be in this garden with people who have no faces and mean nothing to us.
Right? So emptiness, lack of connection, or we can throw ourselves at the intense fire of romance and get horribly burned.
Which nobody notices. And the false self is saying, yeah, okay, we're trying to get help, but nobody's helping us.
Nobody even knows that we're burned.
So in your environment, this story that you're passionate and this and that, this cover story that you have, this falsehood that you have, that it's just you're passionate, you're artistic, and that's what happens, people believe that.
And of course, that's why you use that story, because people believe it.
Well, I tell you, I don't believe it.
I don't believe it at all. I think that what you call passionate and romantic, I call destructive and abusive.
And you've got to stop doing that.
And first of all, you've got to stop pretending to yourself that there was this positive love and union that was going on with these guys and that it was romantic and so on, right?
If it ends the way that you say that it ends, and I certainly believe that it does, and your dream indicates that it does because you're half burnt to death, Then this is destructive.
This is not a wonderful, lovely, romantic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, this is just destructive.
So, stop doing that.
Your dream is very much indicating that you're burnt on the front, and you're trying to get help so you can be healed, but nobody's able to help you because nobody recognizes that you're severely injured.
Nobody is recognizing that you are severely injured.
You are because you've noticed that you're burnt.
But at this point, it's only unconscious.
It's only your true self. Your false self, fantasy of romance and passion and so on, is blinding you or is drugging you, is preventing you from feeling the horror of what is going on for you.
And I just sort of wanted to really point out that your true self, which perfectly is aware that you are in a very horrible and dangerous situation with regards to romance, and God help you if you're entering into another relationship right now, I would certainly put that on hold until you deal with all of these issues, or at least some of them.
But people around you can't help you.
And I can help you.
I can't do anything directly, of course, but I can certainly help you in terms of not buying into the false self-cover story of passion and romance when what is actually occurring is fusion and destruction.
And the destruction that has occurred in the past is bad enough, and you definitely need to grieve all of the mess that that represented.
But what's even more important, and frankly more dangerous, is the mess that is to come.
And the mess that is to come, just so you understand the stakes, just to sort of reiterate it once more, the mess that is to come, my friend, is not another messy relationship or another two or five or ten messy relationships that end in clingy horror.
The mess that is to come is that you cease to have the capacity to love.
I mean, you definitely don't want to get there.
I mean, that is horrifying enough for a man, but is even more horrifying for a woman.
So, you definitely don't want to get there.
And really, that is what is at risk here, right?
So don't, you know, I know you want to and I know that there's a great desire for you to get involved in relationships because that is the case with all people who are empty in soul or whose true self is buried beneath sedimentary layers of falsehood.
I totally understand that you have a very, very strong compulsion.
One might almost say, one might reasonably say addiction.
That you have a very strong compulsion to get involved in relationships that it gives you a blissful sense of relief from a kind of emptiness but it is absolutely self-destructive and your false self is telling you that very very clearly And you're feeling frantic to help yourself, as you say at the end, but still in no pain.
Well, the way that you get to the pain that you need to deal with is you stop telling yourself that it was romantic, and you start telling yourself that it's the result of abuse and it's destructive, and that's how you will save your heart.
Look forward to your donations.
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