Bamboozled, hornswoggled and hoodwinked?

My "nothing" arose as a result of what I perceived to be the disparity between what I was taught about life and my reality in experiencing it. I cannot recall when I first read about nihilism. I know I was quite young. I know now my understanding of the concept certainly was imperfect. Even so, nihilism spoke to me about the deception and duplicity of life:

While nihilism is often discussed in terms of extreme skepticism and relativism, for most of the 20th century it has been associated with the belief that life is meaningless. Existential nihilism begins with the notion that the world is without meaning or purpose. Given this circumstance, existence itself–all action, suffering, and feeling–is ultimately senseless and empty. http://www.iep.utm.edu/nihilism/

After a time, I rejected nihilism because I needed a reason to live. Nonetheless, it was during the time of nothingness that I made decisions I cleaved to as a means to survive a time of great despair.

I do not know about the concept of universes or letting everything be OK. What I did know was something was terribly wrong and I did not know how to fix it.

Ps... I really like that graphic illustration Fool Zero of being present witin altered perceptions of NOW concurrently.

The author of the quote views procrastinating as a way of giving yourself permission to do a less than perfect job on a task that did not require a perfect job. Perhaps. Since I habitually viewed my performance at work as the measure of my self-worth, procrastinating was elevated to an overarching concern.

When I was at the high end of the bounce, procrastinating was less of a problem. I was motivated to do the work and do it well. It was when I was at the low end of the bounce that I found ways to put off tasks requiring attention. Negative chatter was part of the price of inattention, "You are worthless." "What makes you think you are qualified to give advice?" "Your clients will out you as a fraud." Even after I stopped working I was worried I would get sued for malpractice.

Frankly, I have no other explanation for procrastinating than my illness had a role.

Thank you for sharing the information about the Medicine Wheel and Seven Sacred Laws, sanityseeker. I think of indigenous peoples as the continent's first environmentalists. All of us may learn from what you have been taught.

My mother and father valued honesty and hard work. I was taught it was sinful not to use my God-given talents. I tried to. The hard part was wondering why doing what I was taught did not have me well on my way to living happily ever after. After all, David and Ann, the protagonists in my first grade primer, always did.

I remember watching Chariots of Fire and hearing a sermon that the Scottish runner was giving where he said that even sharpening a stick can be done to God's glory if done to perfection. That more or less sums up my spiritual training from my mother. That and "God must be trying to teach you a lesson." Most of my procrastination was and is simply dread. The knowledge that a screw up like me was simply a lower order being who could never aspire to perfection according to my mother and thus could never be able to offer anything to either God or my fellow human being. Conversely this has also driven me to study, to work, to refuse to accept the invalid role, to accept imperfection but to refuse to accept imperfection as the definition of my worth. I live in the tension of opposites, in the contradiction between theologies, on the point of grace, if you will. Without that, I am not, i have often felt. How is that for convoluted logic? Enjoy, folks!

I don't think there was ever a time in my life that I was so down on life that I would embrace nihilism. I may at times have been down enough to feel life was meaningless for me but I took that on as my flaw or so dirty rotten trick some higher power was playing on me or that maybe I didn't really exist at all. I was just part of someone or something's illusion.

I think for the most part I have always believed life had meaning and purpose. I just hadn't figured out what it was. I would often decide that it was beyond me to know and that life just was what it was. Life was a collection of experiences for a reason I was yet to discover. When my time was up is when I would know. I would understand when time was no longer a part of my reality.

The question I sometimes contemplate is how do I make this thing called my life meaningful, pleasant, satisfying, worthwhile to me personally while I experience it. Another is how can I use my life experience to help make someone else's life experience more worthwhile and meaningful for them? How do I bring into harmony what I think and feel, perceive and react to within my life experience so I do in fact have a sense a meaning, purpose and value in it? Or better still perhaps, how can I just live without bothering to contemplate any of that stuff? It seems only when I am in some state of anxt or dispair that I search for these kinds of answers. I seem never to question why when my life is fullfilled and I am satisfied with my journey.

Thinking some more about Fool Zero's comments about nothing having more then one meaning..... other then the first one, which sounds like it fits the definition of nihilism I can see how the other two can co-exist or rather..... be the same but different.

It comes full circle for me to ask what is the value or return to me by even questioning the purpose of life or assessing its value. I may have a craving for it to have meaning in which case I am free to determine for myself what makes my life worthwhile to me or to other's connected to me. Each of us determines for ourselves the measure of what is fullfilling, what is worthwhile, what is of value to us. It may or may not be the same as it is for someone else.

I have asked people this question, 'If you could live forever would you?' I am honestly surprised when they say without hesitation, 'I sure would!' I, on the other hand would not. Does that somehow reflect a difference in how well they manage to 'make' their lives worth living? Is it the difference between the mentally well and mentally ill? I have only asked mentally well people the question interestingly enough. Do the struggles imposed by mental illness, at least for some, just makes managing life too damned hard and too damned draining to imagine doing it forever. If I could image life beyond mental illness, if I could manage life 'better' would I too want to live forever?

Don't even get me started with perfectionism!! EEKS!! It took me most of my life to drop that unattainable standard of acceptability. My dad was and still is a perfectionist. It makes him sour. I am my father's daughter but the futile search just manifest itself in symptoms of mental illness and it was the first thing I let go of when my capacities began to deminish. I am not what I do or how well I do anything in accordance to any measurement but I am who I am and who I am is acceptable to me.

Back onto procrastination for a minute.... I used to really get pumped up with adrenolin racing to make a deadline. I think I subconsciously would put things off so that I could push the wire just to see if I could do it. Often it was in situation where not making the deadline wasn't an option. The wedding was tomorrow and the bride needed her dress. The proposal would not be accepted late.

The habit was very unhealthy for me. It would definately trigger manic behaviour to meet the deadline and it would almost always result in a crash into depression but for some reason I repeated the behaviour over and over again until it did in fact break me. I always felt I did my best work under pressure. I think I must have believed that when I was manic (without defining it as a manic state) I felt brilliant, I must have thought that if I could get to that state that I would actually be able to attain perfection. Either that or I just got off on the adrenoline high.

Although I have been alive for quite awhile, I am not sure if I have ever done well at living. For those who believe in an afterlife, would living forever preclude a closer communion with their maker? I do not relish the thought of living forever. I am tired of what too often has been an existence to endure.

A very real concern of mine is whether death in fact is the final chapter, or simply the beginning of a new one.

I believe it is a new chapter, and that is why I in part would say, nah, when it's my time to go, I'll go. The other reason why I'll go is that I believe that death is an effective limitation on the dmage we can do in this life. No matter how wonderfull we are, we require resources, we make mistakes, we leave marks good and bad and these are cumulative. At some point it is time to move over and make room. No one is so great and good that we do not risk making a Hell of Earth if we live forever.

Boy, we sure have a lot of messages to reconcil in our heads. I often wonder what I am planting in my own son's head that will stick with him and cause him to set unattainable bars or to feel badly about himself because of me. His account of things sometimes causes me to gasp. I didn't mean it that way but that is how it impacted him none the less. The way things have translated for him over the years blows me away and shames me even more.

So as cautious as I think I had been, and as determined as I think I am to spare him the hurts I felt by my own father's setting of unreachable standards and expectations, unfair criticisms and judgements, conditional and circumstancial love, my own son will say that he feels hurt by me in those very same ways sometimes.

I hope my praises penetrate deeper then any hurts I cause him without meaning to hurt him. I wonder if my dad ever praised me. I can't remember him doing so. I try to make a point everyday to tell my son that I love him and that I am proud of him. I can't remember my dad ever telling me he loved me when I was a kid or that he was proud of me for anything I did. Is it selective memory or what? I do remember following him around trying always to please him.

Either way my son, like me and each of you is challenged by our experiences especially those with our parents to balance the negative messages we picked up in our childhood experiences. We have the power to redifine our own measures of success and standards of quality. We get to decide what we need and how to meet those needs.

Going back to the 16 values the message for me is that what I identify as a value for me is legitimate for me and need not reflect anyone else's interests but mine. As I become more and more authentic my values become more and more apparent to me without the negative influences of voices from my past and my behaviour becomes more and more generous towards me without having to meet a standard imposed by someone else.

I think death is a final chapter of human life as we know it but a new chapter as spirit to exist and co-exist within another demension of sorts. Considering us as spirit might also suggest that human life has a higher purpose specific to spiritual growth. If this were so then it might also follow that as spirit we elect to participate in human experiences as needed for some higher purpose.

Most days I can't imagine doing this again no matter what circumstances I was plopped into. On the other hand I expect that in my present form and present limitations make for it all to be beyond my human understanding to grasp. I can only imagine and even my imagination is likely to be too limited in scope to really get it.

Another thing to consider about living forever.... like you say lonegael, we leave a mark, we do damage.... pretty selfish of someone not to step aside and make room for someone else to draw upon earth's limited resources. I mean lets not be greedy people.

I, too, have had decades of useless psychotherapy. After I had taken a class in abnormal psychology I diagnosed myself. I was correct, of course, because psychology has always been an easy subject for me. I know about almost every type of pathology, because I either have a natural affinity for psychology or I wanted to alleviate my symptoms, and I knew the psychologists I saw were incompetent.

Hello, christa. I am happy that you are able to understand and alleviate your symptoms.

In a three-part article on the arbitrariness of blame, the author tells us:

I've always believed that though we must--non-blamingly--take responsibility for our behaviors, as well as seek to improve them, that the endeavor to do so may be quite challenging, especially when the inward and outward circumstances of our lives have led us to feel disempowered. As a therapist, I've worked with many people unable to invoke any genuinely positive belief in themselves. They were burdened by self-defeating "tapes" that made them expect to fail, thereby sabotaging whatever chances they might otherwise have had to succeed. In such instances, my paramount task has been to assist them in getting out of their own way (which, of course, they'd been "pre-programmed" to do). And in my efforts I've needed to prompt them to stop defining themselves according to how their original family treated them, as well as how they'd lived their lives up till now. For it could be said that what was defeating them wasn't so much their unfortunate earlier experiences as their static, negatively distorted, self-concept based on these past circumstances.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...blame-part-1-3
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...blame-part-2-3
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...blame-part-3-3

I accept I am responsible for who I am and what I do. What I appreciate about this article is the how it may explain why I frequently was told I did not understand.

quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

For me to understand Seltzer's assertions about blame and how we can go soften blame with understanding I need to relate it to my own situations of attaching blame to someone for my own frustration, anger etc. Indulge me if you will.

I think I was finally able to forgive my dad for the consequences of his hurtful choices because I put myself in his shoes and found compassion. The blaming started when I was 15 and continued through until I was in my mid 40's.

I blamed him for what I believed were the consequences of his choice to abandoning my mother when she needed his support the most. I surmised that he choose instead to fulfilling his own desires. I blamed him for causing my mother's unhappiness, her addiction to psych drugs and her eventual death by suicide. I blamed him for my break up with my true love. I blamed him for me turning down the opportunity to study design at a prestigious college. He was to blame for my brother and sister following his lead and leaving me alone to care for mum. He was to blame for me failing my mum, for me being such and emotional basket case, for my low self esteem, my distrust of men and people in general. HE was to blame for everything that was wrong with me and in my life. I determined that he was selfish and weak and I vowed to punish him by cutting him out of my life thinking that would cause him at least some unhappiness.

Over time my blaming finger targeted my brother and sister, my mum's so called 'friends', her doctors, the medical system, anyone or anything else that, from my perspective had contributed to my mum's unhappiness, addictions and death. In the mix, with ever overdose, every flaming outburst at my dad or my siblings in my mum's presence, every accident that happened when I wasn't home, her death by overdose... I blamed myself.

In life I compensated for my anger and self-hate by becoming an over-achiever. I had to prove to everyone that I was better then them. I would never abandon anyone. I would never choose my own needs over another. I would never need anyone. I would never trust anyone. I would never bring a child into this ugly ugly world.

There were times when I would soften. I didn't get the satisfaction I had longed for seeing my siblings suffer guilt upon my mother's death. I comforted them instead. I found 'The Lord' and learned about forgiveness I went to my dad with an open heart to renew a relationship with him. While initially he seemed overjoyed he made no effort of his own to spend time with me. This new rejection returned me to the place blame had put me in before. When my son was born, at my partner's urging, though with much resistance, took my son to meet his grandfather. When my dad moved and didn't bother to tell me where I once again embraced the position of safety blaming had forged for me.

It took my partner's teenage daughter, who lived with her mom a province away to cause me to examine my own father differently. It ushered in the forgiveness for him that holds to this day. She was expressing some of the same blaming behaviours towards her dad as I had towards mine. I found myself trying to get her to understand that she had her father wrong. That he did love her even if he wasn't able to express it the way she needed him to. That his neglect wasn't intentional. That he wasn't the bad guy she was painting a picture of. That his upbringing had been hard. He his own dad had been a poor model of fathering. I wasn't making excuses for him but rather was sharing insights about him that might explain without excusing his behaviours. Out of the blue she said to me, 'Okay, I hear you so what about you and your dad?' WOW! This 15 year old is quick! She was so dead on. She caught me having compassion for one while harbouring blame for another. Sure the sins of one were a far cry from the sins of another but I knew that could not justify any exceptions. Within days I found within me the courage to call my dad. Somehow triggered by her question began a process in me that washed away the blaming which in turn allowed me to admit to myself even more then to hold on to the blaming. I told my dad that I missed him and wanted to see him. He was at my door not 15 minutes longer then it would have taken him to drive to my place.

Without making this post much longer then it is with more details I will tell you that perhaps the most interesting thing about our final reconciliation is that he more then I needed to talk through the past. He needed to explain why he did what he did and seek my understanding. He needed to go back more then I did. I didn't need to go through it all. I just needed to move forward with him in my life. I somehow had found forgiveness and was prepared to let the past be the past because from somewhere in me I had found compassion for him. The compassion I had felt for my partner and had tried to impart on his daughter had flooded over onto me. I think my dad needed to talk through the past because he feared our meeting was going to be another one of those one-off encounters. He was trying to ensure this reunion would stick. It did stick. Not because we talked through the past but I think because I put myself in his shoes and I found compassion and understanding. He is now my biggest supporter. He calls me regularly. He supports me in every way possible. I am blessed to have him back in my life.

I concur with Seltzer.... compassion trumps blame. It is a truth that took me 30 some years, and the insights of a child to learn. It's like the old adage says...... 'Do not judge a person until you have walked two moons in their moccasins.'

((((( sanityseeker )))))

In another situation where I slammed blame onto someone, a person whom I had known for a good part of my life, was like family in many ways taught me something else about blame. We need other poeple to help rationalize the blaming. In the situation with her my brother's response to me when I determined to cast her out of my life was, 'Friends are hard to come by, just let it go.' It infuriated me to say the least. I searched for someone to affirm my position so I shared my story with friends and other family until I found enough people to justify my position. I excused my brother by saying he would do anything to avoid conflict so how could I expect him to back me up. Peace at any cost is his motto. I still struggle with what this friend did to me and to some degree I am starting to feel some compassion. I acknowledge that to some extent she was programmed to act as she did because this is textbook behaviour for her mother. Unfortunately all that bit of understanding did was cause me to cast her mother aside along with her.

Clearly I have some further insights to learn more compassion to discover. I am in part open to that because my conflict with her affected more then just us, it affect our families. I think I can demonstrate humilty to acknowledge my part in the breakdown but I am not sure I am strong enough to manage the risk involved in takig her back into my life to potential do something similar again. I will need to believe I can respond differently and not so easily give up my own power. I work in progress.

It has been good for me to delve into this question of blame and its effects on me in my life. Thanks for the links byz.

Thank you Byz. Some reason the thank you button has vanished on me today. I am good with the looking back. Thank you for indulging me. I may have to name you my therapist.

I am going out tonight for a change of scenery so I will look forward to catching up with the thread tomorrow. Be well.

An adage of my own I just came up with..... "Choosing to blame and not forgive makes one's life harder to live."

A cleric writing a spiritual memoir notes:

One thing I have learned in this process is how important it is to “own your story.” I haven’t always done this well, and I fight the temptation to disown parts of my story everyday when I sit at my computer to write. The truth is we all have a past that is filled with mistakes we regret. Others have wounded us, sometimes profoundly, and we’ve done our share of inflicting pain on others and ourselves along the way as well. But rather than own our stories in their totality, most of us engage in some form historical revisionism. We edit out the parts of our past stories we don’t want to own.

Have you ever heard an actor in an interview bemoan the fact that a scene in a movie they just made didn’t make it into the final version of the film, a scene they really loved? In film making they say it, “ended up on the cutting room floor.” Writing this memoir I’m learning that there is a film editor in our hearts who snips away at the films of our lives, often choosing to leave the more painful parts (and even a bunch of the wonderful parts) on the editing room floor of our soul. I know firsthand that there is an enormous danger in not owning our whole stories, namely, if you don’t own your whole story, it will start to own you.

When you leave the most painful pieces on the editing room floor and don’t acknowledge they really happened, you literally become dis-integrated. To accept as a whole package the totality of everything we’ve done and that’s been done to us; to name it, own it, grieve it, celebrate it, this is where Shalom is found. Its also hell getting there. http://www.iancron.com/2010/07/21/owning-our-stories/

How easy it is for me to point and blame while shunting to the side my own transgressions. Even now I find it difficult to think about the pain and hurt I have caused. I feel shame. There is much I have sought forgiveness for.

Gershen Kaufman says, "Shame is the most disturbing experience individuals ever have about themselves; no other emotion feels more deeply disturbing because in the moment of shame the self feels wounded from within." http://www.psychologytoday.com/node/4799

Shame has many faces: http://psychcentral.com/lib/2006/the...aces-of-shame/

Kaufman:

With guilt, the response is a desire for atonement, to make amends, to correct a mistake, or heal a hurt.

With shame, there is just painful feelings of depression, alienation, self-doubt, loneliness, isolation, paranoia, compulsive disorders, perfectionism, inferiority, inadequacy, failure, helplessness, hopelessness, narcissism. "Shame is a sickness of the soul. It is the most poignant experience of the self by the self, whether felt in humiliation or cowardice, or in a sense of failure to cope successfully with a challenge. Shame is a wound felt from the inside, dividing us both from ourselves and from one another." Kaufman (1996).

Toxic shame:

Scott Peck describes both neuroses and character disorders as disorders of responsibility, Peck writes;

"The neurotic assumes too much responsibility; the person with a character disorder not enough. When neurotics are in conflict with the world, they automatically assume that they are at fault. When those with character disorders are in conflict with the world, they automatically assume the world is at fault."

From his book--"The Road Less Traveled"

"All of us have a smattering of neurotic and character disordered personality traits. THe major problem in all of our lives is to decide and clarify our reponsibilities. To truly be committed to a life of honesty, love and discipline, we must be willing to commit ourselves to reality. This committment, according to Peck, 'requires the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual self-examination.' Such an ability requires a good relationship with oneself. This is precisely what no shame-based person has. In fact a toxically shamed person has an adversarial relationship with him/herself. Toxic shame--the shame that binds us--is the basis for both neurotic and character disordered syndromes of behaviour." http://www.soulselfhelp.on.ca/tshame.html

The Damaging Effects of Shame:

To understand the damage wrought by shame, we need to look deeper than the goal of "good" behavior. If we think that verbal punishment has "worked" because it changed what the child is doing, then we have dangerously limited our view of the child to the behaviors that we can see. It is all too easy to overlook the inner world of children: the emotions that underlie their behavior, and the suffering caused by shame. It is also easy to miss what the child does once out of range of the shamer.

Even well-meaning adults can sometimes underestimate children's sensitivity to shaming language. There is mounting evidence that some of the words used to scold children - household words previously thought "harmless" - have the power to puncture children's self-esteem for years to come. A child's self-identity is shaped around the things they hear about themselves. A ten-year-old girl, for example, was overcome with anxiety after spilling a drink. She exclaimed over and over: "I'm so stupid! I'm so stupid!". These were the exact words her mother had used against her. She lived in fear of her parents' judgment, and learned to shame herself in the same way that she had been shamed.

If children's emotional needs are dismissed, if their experiences are trivialized, they grow up feeling unimportant. If they are told that they are "bad" and "naughty", they absorb this message and take this belief into adulthood.

Shame makes people feel diminished. It is a fear of being exposed, and leads to withdrawal from relationships. Shaming creates a feeling of powerlessness to act, and to express oneself: we want to dance, but we're stopped by memories of being told not to be "so childish". We seek pleasure, but we're inhibited by inner voices telling us we are "self-indulgent" or "lazy". We strive to excel, or to speak out, but we're held back by a suspicion that we are not good enough. Shame takes the shape of the inner voices and images that mimic those who told us "Don't be stupid," or "Don't be silly!"

Shame restrains a child's self-expression: having felt the sting of an adult's negative judgment, the shamed child censors herself in order to escape being branded as "naughty" or "bad". Shame crushes children's natural exuberance, their curiosity, and their desire to do things by themselves.

Thomas Scheff, a University of California sociologist, has said that shame inhibits the expression of all emotions - with the occasional exception of anger. People who feel shamed tend toward two polarities of expression: emotional muteness and paralysis, or bouts of hostility and rage. Some swing from one to the other.

Like crying for sadness, and shouting for anger, most emotions have a physical expression which allows them to dissipate. Shame doesn't. This is why the effects of shame last well into the long term.

Recent research tells us that shame motivates people to withdraw from relationships, and to become isolated. Moreover, the shamed tend to feel humiliated and disapproved of by others, which can lead to hostility, even fury. Numerous studies link shame with a desire to punish others. When angry, shamed individuals are more likely to be malevolent, indirectly aggressive or self-destructive. Psychiatrist Peter Loader states that people cover up or compensate for deep feelings of shame with attitudes of contempt, superiority, domineering or bullying, self-deprecation, or obsessive perfectionism. http://www.naturalchild.org/robin_gr..._children.html

http://www.dr-jane-bolton.com/non-vi...unication.html

Steven Stosny, Ph.D., believes anger problems are a smokescreen for fear-shame phobia.

Insensitivity to fear and shame produces enormous relationship problems. Anxiety in one intimate partner is liable to produce shame in the other and vice versa. If these valuable emotions are masked with entitlement and anger, the true cause of couple conflict - the interaction of fear and shame - is confused with communication problems or incompatibility.

By numbing or avoiding shame and fear, our highly contagious anger problems strip those important emotional signals of their capacity to motivate healing, correcting, improving, connecting, and appreciating. They make life defensive rather than enriching. They make us manipulative, controlling, and self-righteous. They make us disown a part of our soul. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...r-shame-phobia

Dare to be yourself:

Becoming authentic, then, means accepting not only contradiction and discomfort but personal faults and failures as well. Problematic aspects of our lives, emotions, and behaviors—the times we've yelled at the kids, lusted after the babysitter, or fallen back on our promises to friends—are not breaches of your true self, Moore insists. They're clues to the broader and more comprehensive mystery of selfhood. "In fact," he notes, "we are all very subtle and very complex, and there are forces and resources within us that we have no control over. We will never find the limits of who we are.

"People carry around a heavy burden of not feeling authentic," he says, "because they have failed marriages and their work life hasn't gone the way it should, and they've disappointed everybody, including themselves. When people think of these as just failures, as opposed to learning experiences, they don't have to feel the weight of their lives or the choices they've made. That disowning creates a division that becomes the sense of inauthenticity."

Kernis' studies show that people with a sense of authenticity are highly realistic about their performance in everything from a game of touch football to managing the family business. They're not defensive or blaming of others when they meet with less success than they wanted.

Eastern spiritual traditions have long furnished ways to glimpse the messiness of the self, and to view with detachment the vicissitudes of mind and emotion that roil human consciousness. Buddhism takes the self in all its variability as the principal subject of contemplation; the yogic tradition accords self-study great importance.

The Hindu Bhagavad Gita suggests we also have a duty to act: to realize our full potential in the world, to construct or discover a unique individuality, and thereby to live authentically. You have to "discern your own highly idiosyncratic gifts, and your own highly idiosyncratic calling," Cope elaborates. "Real fulfillment comes from authentically grappling with the possibility inside you, in a disciplined, concentrated, focused way."

That lesson isn't confined to Eastern spirituality. In The Way of Man, philosopher Martin Buber relates a Hasidic parable about one Rabbi Zusya, a self-effacing scholar who has a deathbed revelation that he shares with the friends keeping vigil at his side. "In the next life, I shall not be asked: 'Why were you not more like Moses?'" he says. "I shall be asked: 'Why were you not more like Zusya?'" http://www.psychologytoday.com/print/21307

http://www.psychologytoday.com/artic...and-eudaimonic

Sorry for the length.

With the kind of stuff you post, Byz, I think longer is better. The downside is that it may take me longer to read and respond.

For whatever reason, Cron really speaks to me here. I'd like to underline something he says that I've long agreed with:
That's really just one more way of saying what Alan Watts says here. Watts said at one point that he'd written 27 (I think) books, in each of which he was saying the same thing from a different direction -- the way, he said, that the spokes of a wheel begin at different places around the rim but all point to the same hub.

As usual, I find I have a bone to pick with Scott Peck:He may not mean that the way I think he does, but to me he seems to be speaking from within a moralistic framework: as if there's a "too much", a "not enough", and somewhere between them a vanishingly thin line of "just right", and he's better qualified to judge the exact position of that line than the rest of us.

I'd like to think I prefer a "Fourth St." perspective myself, so his authoritatively-stated "Main St." one grates on me.

Cron, for instance, speaks of integrated (or not) -- not of too integrated, not integrated enough, and integrated just right.

personally, i like to actually work on these things more than think about them... one of the best tools the universe ever handed me is a meditation, developed and taught by Lama Tsuiltrim Allione, whom i know personally,, called: Feeding the Demon. you can find the book online or in the library... it's really a guided meditation on accepting that dark side of ourself, and letting go of the anger, the hurt and the shame... i hope it is of use to you's,, Best Wishes~ Gus

Thanks, Gus. I will take a look.