Spell Breaking Language-Keys to Unlock Language Locks
Unseen Stockholm Syndrome And Other Oddities of Being Alive in a MisSpelled See of Words
Words are Spells: In the Beginning Where Was The ‘Proper’ Spell Checker?
Now that I have in four parts really questioned the value of words and language, see
what I have left to do, obviously, is to write more words! ‘Good’ words would seem to be in order. And yet I find myself changing direction a little. Hence the discontinuation of the series from Good-Evil. Why? Because ‘words are spells’, or so I have recently heard spoken to me twice in the span of a few days from completely disparate sources.
And I agree completely that words are spells and our empowered use of them is important. Maajid Nawaz, in his interview with Jordan Peterson, gently albeit precisely castigated Peterson for Peterson’s failure to respect the magic of words by ‘othering’, unintentionally, the Palestinians in his interview with Benjamin Netanyahu about the Abraham Accords. Ostensibly those accords are designed to heal the rift and stop the grift of Israel’s illegal genocidal war against the Palestinians. Nawaz astutely argued that Peterson’s words by their exclusion of anything Palestinian energetically and/or psychologically put them in the ‘other’ camp: they had had even a token semblance of equality removed because of their lack of official presence in the Accord and the discussions.
And Nawaz displayed his own failure to see his misuse of word magic in his precise and detailed delineation of ‘othering’ in his own words and language. He is not alone in this action nor in the complete blindness to it that is ubiquitous in our bully culture. I’ve discussed how we are barely alive and mostly unwell in our state of being bullied and bullies in my series
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For this essay I will look at the following powerfully hurtful spell words:
Have to (a big one)
Should
Need
And the more subtle spell words:
Try
Thank you
Deserve
Never
And this will be a look at them not just as words fixed in meaning. It looks at these words as energy spells, as carrying an energy associated with their meaning and use that extends into the zeitgeist or extended aura or the collective unconscious or the field housing morphic resonance and thus affects all aspects near and far in our lives. Is the energy we are extending with our words supporting a joyful life with opportunity and freedom? Or are we extending word-energy into the energy field that is supporting the convidian oligarchy and other imperialists seeking to remove freedom and the joy of life?
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Bully Stockholm Syndrome. What Is It And Why Don’t We See It?
As I discussed in Obedience to Authority Part VI, we have adapted to being (partially) alive in our bully culture in the manner of the Stockholm Syndrome. And in that survival-mode as subjects to external empires, aka top-down governments, and to the top-down social requirements extant, we have taken into ourselves the language, the ‘magic’ words, of those empire bullies.
This essay is a look at seven key words or word phrases that weave the bully-spell and keep it alive and well in our words, minds, actions and relationships. In their magic these words subtly and effectively promote lack of internal integration and integrity, which pretty much eliminates the possibility of true intimate relations with people. Period. And I argue that eliminating their use in our day-to-day speech and writing is a huge step towards peace within and without our Selves by removing the distancing and isolating ‘bully’ language and associated energies in much the same that Maajid Nawaz suggested would happen with proper inclusionary language for the Arab-Non-Arab world. Nawaz simply hasn’t taken that idea far enough. He, like most of us in the west, are like fish unable to see the water they are in: we are in the bully Stockholm Syndrome that abounds and binds us, blinds us with the invisibility of its ubiquity.
Greater Spells
Have To: 1) Because Empire Tells Us What we Have to Do We are Surrounded by Bullies Kind and Cruel Who Simply Have To Infringe Against Our Sovereignty§
§I’m following Tereza Coraggio’s recent (and slightly synchronous with my essay) discussion on the separation between Empire as bully-dictator and Sovereign as referring to an individual’s agency independent of outside bullying (my slight paraphrase). See her challenging and important essay regarding the Empire-Victim situation loosely described as the trouble with the Middle East, “Whose Side Are You On?: Should We Be Taking Sides On Palestine And Israel?” (My emphasis in the subtitle.)
“Have to” is at its core and without equivocation a word-spell of the bully. It is an expression of force with the tacit or unspoken threat of violence behind it, of which we have become totally unconscious. If you are ‘lucky’ enough to meet me in person I will, depending on my intuitive sense of who you are, point out that you have said ‘Have to’ at least ten or fifteen times since we met. Invariably you would be surprised and even incredulous. And then kind of ask ‘So?’ or ‘So what?’ I would then explain to you the ‘So what’ (elaboration below) and every time, within two or three sentences, you will have said ‘Have to’ again. Often with the unconscious irony ‘I have to start that practice.’ I would then politely, albeit firmly, interrupt you and ask if you even heard your use of ‘have to’ again. I’ve extremely rarely heard the answer ‘Yes’ to that question, it is so invisible.
‘So what?’ you might be asking yourself, which is the typical initial rejection response to my questioning people on their use of ‘have to’. Although recently that has been far less and, when expressed, contains far less conviction. There seems to be a very hopeful change in consciousness that is happening because what used to take twenty minutes of ‘have-to-as-malevolent’ argument a few years ago now is often done in less than five minutes and is far more effective. I have been profusely thanked a few times after chance meetings with strangers in the last few months for my ‘have to lecture,’ something that did not happen a few years ago.
How do we use it? Let me count the ways! Ubiquitously, of course! Eg: You have to buy a ticket; I have to exercise more; You have to leave soon; I have to learn more Spanish; You have to remember your mother’s birthday; I have to go on a diet; They have to …. Endless.
And here I suggest an exercise: count the times you say ‘have to’ in a day. If that number is ‘zero’, record your conversations for ten or fifteen minutes and, with very few exceptions, you will be able to hear several times to many times that invisible word vocally expressed. Or ask someone to listen to you, although that is not fool proof either because most people do not actually hear it. I’ve tested this many many times. NB: I’ll write about ‘self-talk’ in a moment.
When I say to somebody ‘You have to…’ I have bullied that person. For example, if I were to say to you something like ‘you have to cut your hair’ or ‘you have to change your clothes’ what is your reaction? Usually it is something like ‘No, I don’t,’ or ‘Who are you to tell me what I have to do? It’s none of your business’. (Occasionally I get someone who simply wonders what’s wrong with them that I would say that.) These two questions are very personal and outside of our social norms and usually consciously trigger the ‘no I don’t, who are you to tell me what I have to wear or do with my hair?’ The inherent sovereign within us instinctively rejects the bully’s demands.
We have completely normalised ‘have to’ and so our rejection of being bullied typically rests in our unconscious. And yet we are born sovereign and we instinctively or intuitively reject or push back against the ‘have to’ language, even if we aren’t aware of it. From the unconscious what that means is we have rejected intimacy and ultimate trust. The bully has overruled personal sovereignty of the other and therefore the tendency by the bullied is not to trust him/her, even if unconsciously and/or subtly. And the bully, in being a bully, has unconsciously separated him/herself from the other person. There can be no real intimacy between the bully and the bullied, even when that is unconsciously done. Often this type of bullying is done with the ‘good intentions’ of the kindly helper-bully knowing how to fix the other! Yikes, is that a recipe for disaster and again, a big barrier to intimacy because it includes top down judgment between a knower and someone lower and that oh so soft threat of violence.
Now even when the so-called lower recognises cognitively that the bully was right about whatever directive has been pronounced, that bully push will consciously or unconsciously create the energy and attitude of ‘No I don’t!’ And that ‘No I don’t’ is an actual truth, a deep truth that is pretty unshakable and when violated enough creates much of the stress and anger and resentment of people who have abdicated their agency at the expense of victimising their own sovereignty to appease the ‘kind-hearted’ bully looking after the other’s own good.
’Good intentioned’ bullying creates a particularly enervating energy of separation from both people. And it creates energetic and undermining resistance within the bullied against ‘fixing’ whatever has been bullied as ’wrong’ in the eyes of the bully. Thus the person ‘successfully’ bullied to lose weight will struggle incalculably sometimes. And if the bully’s goal is achieved the success is at best muted, and often very disappointing, because the success also, and more powerfully, has concomitantly created a victim. The bullied has victimised themselves with their success at violating the truth of ‘No I don’t have to’ to the bully.
Have To: 2) Because Empire Tells Us What we Have to Do We Have In-Built Our Own Petty-Empires That Have To Forsake Our Sovereignty
When our wonderfully strong internally directed critical self-righteous bully voice kicks in with all those ‘have tos’ it is an even more troublesome bully. That bully knows intimately our most vulnerable spots and will often be relentless in grinding into them. And like with the external bully, especially the so-called good intentioned ones, any ‘have to’ success will be difficult to achieve because the resisting energy is aligned with the truth that we don’t actually have to do anything. And in the end, a ‘success’ means you have victimised yourself.
It is a very tough fight to overcome our body’s innate alignment with what is true. So tough that it often leads to rather poor outcomes, either in health or even in things like accidents or critical life changes such as job losses. Gabor Maté has explored this from a slightly different perspective extensively in his books, such as The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Alice Miller has also explored the toll on the body of misalignment from truth, especially in her book The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting. However I am not aware that either of them connected the toxicity of our culture to that of being in ubiquitous bully Stockholm Syndrome and they didn’t explore language in the way I am here. At least I haven’t seen them do it or seen references to them having made that connection.
We have been indoctrinated with the delusion that our minds are powerfully able to create our good, even though we don’t really know how to tame our minds because that skill has been displaced by maliciously distractive practices, intentionally developed or not. We have come to substitute bullying ourselves as a kind of coarse and ineffective way of abusing our minds into cudgelling ourselves into shape! And yet for thousands of years yogis have recognised that the mind is so easily bamboozled by lies and other gibberish when it is untamed that it is a relatively easy ‘victim’ of bully language, especially in our days of ‘experts’, the absolute social requirement to defer to experts, and the need for seemingly endless fear for some kind of safety net be it financial, spiritual or physical.
Only when we transcend thought, can we begin to witness our conditioning [and educational indoctrinations] and all of the old patterns we’re stuck in. In witnessing these patterns, by definition, they are no longer unconscious. Through a consistent meditation practice, the mind begins to clear, letting go of these once unconscious patterns that no longer serve us [by humbling the mind enough that it becomes our servant not our master].
I’m not saying don’t use the mind. Absolutely not! The mind is completely essential if we’re to successfully navigate our lives in space and time. What I’m suggesting is rather than existing with the false notion that you are your mind, learn to meet yourself before the mind. Don’t exist as the mind; use the mind… for the mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master (“The Mind – A Wonderful Servant But A Terrible Master”).
And the ease with which the human mind is bamboozlement is delightfully explored in Edward de Vere’s (aka Shakespeare’s) play Twelfth Night, for example, where tricks are played on the minds of several of the characters, perhaps most powerfully with the gulling of Malvolio that is both extremely funny and creates extreme sympathy at the same time.
Have To: 3) What a Pile of Wasted Energy
Our true nature is born into a body that knows it has been given both innate sovereignty and the power to express it. Indoctrination of the mind, including the splitting effects of trauma which includes educational indoctrination, at all levels suppresses or hides that. The separation of ego-mind complex from our somatic sovereignty awareness sets us up for one of those bizarre truth-traps whose truth keeps us stuck somewhat like the hamster spinning its wheel. We have adapted to being in a bully culture and we use that adaptation to keep us from claiming the responsibility for our sovereignty. One of the cleverest ways in which we do that is what I call the ‘have to’ pile.
Something somewhere inside us, beyond just our body that we disregard most of the time, knows the truth that we don’t have to do anything. And so when we encounter a something that ‘has to be done’ — such as join this, start that, leave that, begin that — we will most often simply half-heartedly agree to whatever thing it was we were being bullied with simply to shut up our external or internal bullies. And we add it to the ‘have to pile’ either half consciously aware that we have no real intention to do the thing, or the even less optimal manner, we keep ourselves in complete denial that our real intention is to not do it because we know the truth that we don’t have to. In both cases we have created an energy drain to maintain, to at least some extent, the ‘have to pile’ while continuously adding to it and rarely removing anything from it.
As well as being an energy drain, this also takes us further from alignment with our internal integrity because we are actively lying to ourselves about our intentions. Our body and spirit are not equipped to support an increasingly demanding set of lies, and the results of that are easily seen in the poor health statistics everywhere, that people like Gabor Maté cites, and the endless studies linking that poor health to a lack of integrity brought on by stress.
You may find it an interesting exercise to write out your ‘have-to pile’. And then look at it with a clear honest eye. Will anything on that pile be strong enough to engage your sovereign power to actively, energetically, determinedly CHOOSE it? Would a multiple of lifetimes be enough to complete that list?
Have To: 4) Lying to be Polite Is Not Going to Create Intimacy in Society
We have through some weird social pressure decided that it is better to lie as a kind of politeness to the people around us rather than to be truthful. Well, all the lying in the previous three ‘have to’ failures doesn’t help that, of course. This last one I have come to find very funny because we lie to be polite. Or rather give an impression of politeness when, after meeting someone we haven’t seen for a while unexpectedly, for example, we say ‘We have to get together sometime.’ That is almost 100% of the time a lie, and an unnecessary one. Instead of lying, say something like ‘I enjoyed seeing you again. All the best.’ Or ’That was great to see you. Who knows when next we’ll get a chance to catch up.’ Or a dozen other ways of politely recognising the event without faking a desire to repeat it when you don’t really want to repeat it.
Now it would be wonderful if every delicate situation could be addressed without lying. It is possible that life is too complicated for that to be realistic. So, when a lie seems like the best option, do it in a way that does not make yourself a victim, which is what ‘have to’ does. ‘Have to’ effectively says “I am too weak to avoid this, so I will say ‘have to’ in order to show the other person I’m too victimised by another circumstance to do whatever it is that is not be done here and now.” Very likely all of us have ‘have to’ excused ourselves often with some weird lie and in doing so we have literally and clearly displayed our lack of sovereignty, power and authenticity. We have made ourselves weak internally with the energy of lying and externally by not simply saying I choose x without lying about the choice. Energetically, consciously or not, the other people will distrust us to a greater or lesser extent.
In my almost twenty years of ‘no have to’ practice I have found that removing ‘have to’ from my vocabulary/language has reduced my lying to basically zero. I do not find myself in situations where lying seems the best course of action. When Yoshiko joined me in 2018 I shared the ‘have to’ argument with her. She thought, I was to learn later, paraphrased, ‘Oh yeah. Another talking head full of himself.’ She spent the next six months carefully listening to me in anticipation of my using ‘have to’. She didn’t hear me utter those words. She commented to people, four years later that, she had not heard me say ‘have to’ in that time.
In my personal experience this is perhaps one of the most powerful mindfulness and empowerment exercises I did: it stopped me from giving away my sovereignty and it stopped and began to reverse the ‘have to’ energy of isolation by undoing dishonesty inwardly and outwardly. It aligned my mind body spirit with an absolute truth, a rare thing in this physical existence: we don’t have to do anything unless we have chosen to do it. There are exceptions that people cite to prove the rule: breathing and eating. Once in a while someone remembers dying. No one remembers peeing, which I find very funny because, of those four, peeing is the most pressing! Yogis have been know to train themselves to suspend breathing for extended periods, weeks and months even, and their life spans too. Eating has well documented cases of people not eating for many years. I’m not referring to the ‘breatharians.
No Have To? What to Say Instead?
I choose to. I want to. I desire to. I don’t want to. I’m not interested … and the like. Each of these options reclaim ours sovereignty. At the beginning this may seem selfish, to actually claim what you are born into life to do, which is to live your life. And so by beginning the process of removing the ‘have to’ spell from your language you begin to see where you have been giving your life away. And that ‘gift’ is in reality the truest form of selfishness possible. And where you are giving away your sovereignty will become very evident because it will be comprised of the resistance you experience when you claim your sovereignty with choosing to act or choosing to decline an action. Each time you see yourself reaching for ‘have to’ as an excuse or as an internal or external motivator you will know that that action is grounded in giving away your power. And with that awareness you have the opportunity to stop it and opt to embody your life as the powerful human that you are.
Don’t You Should On Me! Nor On Me Myself And I.
Very likely people reading this who have been on a spiritual journey to recover their Self in some way will be familiar with the trials and tribulations of ‘shoulding’ themselves and others to death. This may be a review for some, although I’ll do my best to add my own expansion of the ‘should shit shill spell show’.
On the surface ‘should’ has a very similar function as ‘have to’ in that its spell creates disempowerment, separation, and disintegrity with self and others. The difference, and I think it is significant and more pernicious than the overt bully nature of ‘have to’ with its mostly unconscious threat of violence, is that ’should’ is bully language weaponising guilt in a kind of perversion of ethical integrity to ‘force’ a behaviour with or through initiating or expanding feelings of guilt.
The external ‘should’ bully is coming almost purely from the position of moral superiority. This othering, as Maajid Nawaz described it in the context of war and peace, has become almost as invisible as the ‘have to’ threatening bully spell, but not quite. That pinch of guilt has been felt by the self-help gurus who have pretty well exposed it as unhealthy to anyone beginning inner work.
I would like to elaborate on that because I have expanded my understanding of the pernicious nature of ‘should’ beyond what my early exploration of it revealed in association with guilt as an almost knee-jerk ‘new-agey bad’ kind of argument. I’m not sure that all guilt is all bad when it is seen as a clear expression of an important complex-aspect of our Selves that is forcefully asking us to look at something that has made us uncomfortable.
That discomfort is our opportunity to look at it and expand our experience-based wisdom. Instead of turning towards the discomfort, we humans have collectively practiced the infatuating embrace of distraction. That often or even usually becomes some kind of addictive behaviour that stops our emotional and spiritual growth and becomes malignant in some way. And even that malignancy is asking to be seen as a doorway towards the truth of our discomfort. And it is when the distraction no longer works at all, when life has entered a state of disarray that is almost, not quite in many cases, too obvious to ignore — the so-called ‘hitting bottom’ — and the will to live exceeds the desire to be distracted to death, that groups like AA help pick up the pieces and reorient towards integrity. And AA and other therapies understand that seeing what is true is the beginning of healing. And that the real healing is the return to a fully embodied integrity, the unification of thought, speech and action.
Back to the ’shoulding’. ’Shoulding’ gives us an opportunity to be an unproductive guilt collector, whether that source is coming from others or coming from ourselves. And with some kind of puerile hope and/or allopathic medicine, or shopping, sex and the like we do our best to calm the guilt enough to live productive lives.
The most harmful spell of ‘shoulding’ comes when we zap ourselves with it because it is another of those delectably lazy-person’s truth-traps. And Jung and others have argued that laziness to the point of torpidity is the humans’ strongest and most widespread characteristic. What’s this truth-trap? We have been given the spell-making tool that allows us to avoid uncomfortable things at the tiny cost of a twinge of guilt. ‘I should go and see my mother in the hospital.’ Zapped with guilt we find ways to not to go because we have paid the guilt price that allows us to avoid the conflict or despair or frustration or anger or whatever has displaced us from wanting to see our mother to not-wanting to see her so strongly that we prefer the short shot of guilt instead.
And thus ‘should’ keeps us blind to our real experiences of life while filling us with guilt. Each time we use ‘should’ we have a clue that we are hiding something about ourselves, about our lives and/or about the other people on whom we are casting the should spell.
Stop using should. There is no requirement under any circumstances to use it. I’ve not been using it for almost twenty years and there is no need. At the beginning it will call at you often. We are a bully culture steeped in guilt for many generations. In time I felt an easing in my heart and found the courage to really live life.
‘Should’ and ‘have to’ are simple spells of personal and extra-personal disempowerment and separation that with practice are relatively easily stopped and create huge returns of energy, agency and peace. And when we do hear it call, that is an ‘aha’ moment, a chance to see the truth of who we are, warts and all. From that place true-seeing, integrity is possible and with that healing the rifts between and within mind, body, spirit and action and each other.
Lesser Spells
On the Trail of the Try on Trial
The English word ‘try’ has several definitions. One of them is to run some kind of test. Another is to take someone to court. And yet another one, the interesting one for this effort is the one about ’trying your best’. In the woke world that has becoming especially meaningless as everyone finishes first regardless of effort and even starting. Woke is ‘try’ on steroids.
Do not use ‘try’ as an attempt to begin, do or finish something. The self-so, built-in meaning of ‘try’ is failure because the effort is focused on the trying more than on the completing. For example if I ask you to try to pick up the pen from the table, it literally has no meaning because you either pick up the pen or not. Here, and typically, ‘try’ may exist in some kind of word ghostland that causes serious grief in the writing of language and, more importantly, in the emotional and psychological commitment that gives language its power.
And because of that we love to use try as an excuse not to put our heart into something or actually committing to something. How do these sound: ‘we’ll try to get there on time’? Or: ‘We’ll get there on time.’ The latter has commitment and intention, the former waffling and the wiggle room to slack off and fail. Do the best you can. Or: try to do the best you can. The latter is again flaccid.
What I discovered when I removed ‘try’ from my vocabulary was that I became much more careful about making commitments. Before that change I could roll a try off my tongue for anything. And the commitment wasn’t there because all I had to do was ‘try’, even if less than half-heartedly, and that would be good enough. Now I am more careful with taking on tasks and I see that for me the psychological and emotional benefits of commitment have changed my ability to complete the challenges of life that genuinely belong to me, and by clarifying my ability to see when something does not belong to me.
Our physical expression are finite creatures in an infinite world. It is important to have the tools of vision that enables us to discern what is ours in this world to complete, and what is not. Removing ‘try,’ oddly enough, quietly and yet firmly assists with that.
When the Need Hits the Road Gimme All Your Love
The need to know. The need to love and be loved. The need for food, water, shelter. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Good enough parenting. The need to be touched. The need to grow up or throw up. The need to leave. The need to pee. The need to return. The need to shit and for our remains to decompose back into the soil.
‘Need’ is funny word. A bit slippery although at its core it feels grounded in a feeling of lack, of scarcity, even the threat of deprivation. It seems to me that, following from my last essay,
that the sense of scarcity comes from the false subject-object split of classical philosophy that Robert Pirsig deconstructed so well. With the objective world having become the totality of the perceivable, under classic philosophy, the objective is automatically bound by the limits of the arbitrary definition in a way that the proposed revision by Pirsig, that the subjective and objective perceptions are a subset of the unknowable quality, does not.
Need is mostly a false perception of reality. For example we are alive in the time of a global genocidal ‘health’ program which is being walked lockstep with the climate fear-mongering that hasn’t been even on the same planet of correctness as the earth since it began in the 1960s. And yet the ideology of ‘need,’ resting as it is on their perceived scarcity of the earth, is alive and well within the oligarch’s who have determined that they ‘need’ to reduce population, end farming and lock everyone into fifteen minute cities to save the world from a scarcity ‘need’ that doesn’t actually exist as advertised. Oil might be an issue of course, and will provide challenges that human ingenuity will likely find interesting solutions for. And despite the brouhaha, oil is not a ‘need’ as we have consumed it. It has been a transformative and challenging and distracting addiction that hasn’t existed for a smidgen of time in human existence.
There are the young, infants and children, who clearly ‘need’ to be attended to well up to a certain age. And the agéd will in time ask of us to meet their ‘needs’. And we may become one of those too, in our movement through life. Those are pretty unequivocal.
And yet, what about the adults? What else is a genuine ‘need’? Peeing would be one. And perhaps food and water. And we see that this has become much more nuanced. In most cases we artificially jack up something we want as if it is a ‘need’ to give it added importance in our hierarchy of wants. And that extra push of energetic wanting quickly slips into scarcity and having to have it. Paraphrased Gautama directed his monks to give relief from those suffering, be they old or sick. And for the rest, the individuals within the sangha were expected to provide what ever is required for themselves and the group.
I suggest that we stop using ‘need’ completely. It fosters thoughts and feelings of scarcity and that creates stress and that stress deranges our ability to think and see properly. I recognise that for some or many of you reading this that may seem like an impossibility. I assure you it is very possible, and I have felt much lighter and more alive for the practice. I have dropped it out of my vocabulary even when I am jiggling and dancing around when I’ve held my pee too long. And now it has become, in a very strange way, a form of choice that came into existence when I did. Peeing is no longer a ’need’ in conventional terms, it is simply a part of what is the choice of being alive.
And breath? Yes, breath is what keeps me alive at this time in my existence. And yet it is slowing and easing and with that a more stable calmness has arisen. Breath has become, at a fundamental level, an awareness that life is a choice within the infinitude of conditioned arising, of the interconnectedness of all things. ‘The opportunity is choice’ to misquote the Architect in the Matrix.
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Thank You? Why? You Are No More Deserving Than Me
A tricky one-two. The ever popular ’thank you’ as good mantra married to the greatness of ‘deservedness’. I’ve stuck these two together because they have a subtle energetic connection.
To begin with I start my day, each morning, with an extended gratitude ritual. So I’m not an ‘anti-thank you’ conspiracy theorist. As for ‘deserving’ it is another word I have removed from my vocabulary. So what is the connection and why are they here?
In
I went into detail about the energetic ‘problem’ I see with the words ‘deserve’ or ‘deserving.’ They are very popular in our culture especially as a tool of advertising propaganda. Everyone wants to be one of the deserving and most every product under the sun has likely been sold as a thing that we deserve in some way, especially in Coca-Cola breaks and vacations and expensive cars, etc. And why is this such a strong advertising pitch that has lasted for years? Because historically the undeserving are treated abominably and more often than not are killed. I have extirpated ‘deserving’ for the simple reason that the only way the deserving exist in our world is to have an undeserving. I have chosen to reduce the energy we put into creating groups of people who ‘deserve’ anything because that action by energetic necessity creates the undeserving who are being abused and killed even now. For a contemporary example a friend recently told me that a Rabbi described the Palestinians being killed as ‘just animals’, and by implication are part of an undeserving group that can be justifiably killed. This argument was used to kill the Jews in Germany. History is rife with other examples.
And I had come to this particular realisation long before convidiana. And so with convidiana it was a fascinating process for me to watch my fellow and sister citizens basically go crazy and easily assign me and my wonderful partner into the undeserving class. It was actually, in the end, frightening, with Trudeau initiating friendly concentration camps and the increasing vigour of the convidiana police harassing and even arresting maskless people in my community. I knew which class we’d been assigned to and that that was dangerous. We left Canada shortly before the truckers stopped the tipping into mass for-your-own-good corralling like they did in Australia. And then who knows what might have happened.
What about thank you? Another funny word that, as I said, has an odd connection energetically to ‘deserving’. And if you guessed ‘the thankless’ I would laugh because that is likely true. It is not what I’m pursuing though. David Graeber in Debt: The First 5,000 Years does a great job of describing a white man’s experience at an early Inuit camp whose hunters had been unsuccessful in their hunts. The people were hungry. Eventually a seal was killed, and the flesh distributed to every person in the camp. The white man expressed gratitude to the hunter for sharing the food. The hunter became angry and scolded the white man for having thanked him. ‘I am no better than you and you no better than me. We are human and to thank is to create a barrier of difference between us.’ (Paraphrased from memory.)
This had an interesting echo a few years later from Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the head of the multi-national Art of Living Foundation. In a book of his published sangha talks I heard someone read out loud Shankar’s reply to a question on the importance of ’thank you.’ Again, a paraphrase as I no longer have the book: ‘Yes, to be thankful is important, to appreciate that which is good. However it is important to not thank too much, because that builds a barrier of more than and less than between the person doing the thanking and the person being thanked. It creates inequality. So be careful and very light with your thanks.’
Deservedness and excess gratitude both create separation. And so I thank with a light heart and a sense of fun each morning.
I’ve noted Margaret Visser book on gratitude above. I read most of it many years ago, although I found my self distracted away from it before finishing it. And I don’t remember too many details. And within my ‘yoga’ personal development towards freedom circles there is great emphasis on the importance of thank you.
What is with all that, I wonder? Who’s right? Does a ‘right’ even exist? And where my thoughts have turned to is that the expression of gratitude is, as the Inuit hunter and Shankar said, a form of creating inequality between people. What does it mean to thank God, then? And is it important as an equaliser with people who have inflated themselves and are turning themselves around, like people in AA? Gratitude is very important there, and it does make sense in that context of the ego-centric addict coming back to earth, humbling their ego-minded ego-centric elevation of self off the earth.
To Ensure You Will Do Something, Swear That You Will Never Do It
And for a bit of fun. I noticed as my life moved into my thirties and forties, that just about every single ‘I never would do’ thing I did in fact do. And often that do turned out to be a great thing. I loved the VW Jetta I had, bought at a strange point in my life because it was the only car under $10000 on the lot. I loved that car after swearing I would never buy a VW because they were dishonest with the rusting gas tanks of their Rabbits fifteen years earlier. I swore I would never live in a small town again after a rough childhood in small town Canada and here I am living in a tiny village in Mexico. Those are two standouts of many nevers that eventually were embodied in my life that were personal to me. And I saw many instances become embodied to my ex and to the people around me.
So, use ‘never’ with caution. I’ve concluded that God or whatever the creative energy of Life is looks for anyone so bold as to dare it with ‘never.’ I hear a kind of roaring laughter from the heavens, saying, ‘I see you, I see you, you bold neverer you. Just you wait. When you least expect it - kapow, right in the kisser.’ So funny.
Thank you for reading.
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Playing With Words After Nagarjuna. Music: The Police - Walking on the Moon
What a beautiful essay. So much awareness and wisdom weaved with intentional experience, producing a mix of authority and lightness. I appreciate it, and will revisit. (I was reminded of Gurdjeff's practice of 'remembering' oneself, as you go through the day. It has an effect of not just becoming aware of how often we 'forget' ourself, but by recognizing in the in-and-out quality of 'self' how a deeper presence is always present and does not require 'self' at all. A hint, I think.
Maybe "We are finite creatures in an infinite world." is a a deep assumption? Maybe we are infinite creatures who sometimes experience the world as finite. Sometimes 'I' show up as a body, sometimes by body shows up in the larger space of me.
A conscious, 'thank you' for the reflection.
My sister told me a story years back. She told gramp she "has to" do something. In his playful, joking way, he said no, you "get to" do it.
I think "get to" fits in well with your deserving list. If it is said about something a person does not want to do, its almost a bullying positive affirmation, akin to you should be grateful you get to do this! Many kids/people arent so blessed as you!
Another word "need to" hmmmmm. Lol
Maybe it depends on the context. Some people use words passive-aggressively to manipulate others. You "need to" do this.
I'm rather attached to the word thank you. I use it mostly as an expression of gratefulness, valuing people who I admire and love.
*thank you*!! 🙏🤣