God forbade...must reading!

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  A key quality of unconscious thought, it takes liberty with what goes into it and whatever comes of it. It seems to have little regard for reality, for the normal rules of thought or communication. It seems to operate within its own set of rules. Unconscious thought is motivated by a natural desire to transform, to change, to make things different from the way they were. It’s a process with tendencies to destabilize structures, to break them down, render them less organized.



  The unconscious is always one step ahead of the conscious mind in the wrong or right direction. Since knowing is a function of consciousness, it’s impossible to know what you’re doing is right. If you suffer fully when the good is ambiguous and are with goodwill, unconscious will be just one step ahead of conscious to the good. Only you won’t have the luxury of knowing it, the Holy Spirit will lead without the luxury of knowing it.



   Deindividuation is a temporary loss of self-awareness, the self in a stand-by mode, powered down leaving the individual subject to influences of the situation and personal habit. With a diminished ability to think about themselves, they do not monitor or regulate themselves as they would. Impulses emerge that were previously held in check by deliberate self-control.



   Research shows people behave uncharacteristically dishonest, cruel and anti-social when they are deindividuated. At other times inhibitions are released in a positive pro-social behavior. Some people hold back expressing kindness, love and caring for fear of rejection or to appear soft-hearted. However if attention is diverted from themselves, they might not control their pro-social urges and may act more compassionately. So turning off the self is not always a bad thing, the costs often outweigh the benefits.



   People have goals for how they would and would not like to be in the future; future selves. People’s emotions are not simply reactions to the current state of their lives, but the result of believing that their lives are or are not moving toward their desired future selves. The self can curse people by conjuring up visions about what they might become in the future, thereby creating unhappiness even when everything is going well in the present.



   If you cannot let go of the idea that a parallel universe should be able to intercede for you, you will drown in worry or bitterness. Worry is the reverse of a coin whose other side is control. You got that illusion from the parallel universe. You got it from believing in a make-believe world full of ’shoulds’ and ‘oughts’.



  If you could decide to accept the real world whose happenings come to you one by one rather than the imaginary world whose terrors are under no such limitation- you might, by accepting those happenings, get a leg up on happiness. But most of us are far too much true believers in the religions of the parallel universe to do such a relatively simple thing.





   Its rare to meet someone who’s free and feels free, who takes responsibility for his actions and thoughts without overfrustrating himself, without showing inhibition in excitement. Both inhibition and license are easily bought cheaply by giving responsibility to an idealized leader or to a principle; the result, poverty of personality.



  Ego is something that covers your good personality. Everyone has character, but, if you don’t train yourself, your character is covered by ego. You can’t appreciate your personality.



   Incorporating others into your sense of self is a good thing that fosters happy relationships and kindness. The issue is more complicated. Relational problems can arise when incorporating another in one’s sense of self… too much. They truly feel they can not live without the other. They are chronically and heavily invested in the other person’s life. They literally feel they would be nothing without them and, from the standpoint of identity, they are right.


  To love and be loved, to respect and be respected, to desire and be desired, to cherish and be cherished ─ universal wishes ─ are synonymous with equal power relationships. Many women, even successful career women, relinquish their power and lose themselves in their partners. By losing themselves in their male partners, women lose their sense of self, their autonomy, their competency, their adequacy. When a woman risks her health by taking the pill, she is once more catapulting to the needs and desires of her partner. Not only that, but, the power differential in the bedroom continues out of the bedroom.


   In calm abiding, the mind should not be directed back into the past, nor influenced by hope or fears about the future. Once you prevent such thoughts from interfering with your focus, what is left is the interval between the recollections of past experiences and your anticipation and projections of the future. This interval is a vacuum we work from to maintain our focus on.


Frances Cohen Praver, Ph.D 

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