notes for sanity

now --- given my swinging moods --- i am feeling better now -- after talking and consulting with many nice people and thinking over things -- here is a hurriedly written list of things to keep in mind -- i will try updating this later -- to always serve a reference

• the insecurity is normal, all people feel it
  
• i am fit enough to lead a happy life, be happy :)
  
• reason may not be the best way to approach the big questions of life -- attachment might be the better way -- detachment is bad. anything that makes you feel happy in the longer term is better, if psychological/philosophical reasoning isnt moving you towards that, it is bad -- yes false beliefs are okay if they make you happy -- we are in search of happiness out here and not truth -- if it makes me happy believing i have a bag of gold under bed, and i feel happy about it -- what the heck
  
• orient towards family, and believe in God. direct all your actions towards Self & Family (S&F). get involved with the world. let the economy run. for whatever reason the world runs, its okay to consider it good that it runs, [for want of better things]
  
• for 29$ a month, you can suppport a child in africa for life, including education, food, clothing etc. http://childafrica.org hmmm and what are you doing with your 29$?
  
• ego is not that bad an idea, reinforcing of ego feels good (dont let your ego make other people feel bad, in fact, feel egoistic pleasure in helping other people and making them feel better)
  
• Lets Walk Together
  
• make making other people happy a goal of life -- (dont try to think that they also might be making the same decision, so we are revolving in circles ... ;-) ... its okay if there are circular dependencies....there will be no deadlock here... ;-) )
  
• have fun, enjoy
  
• believe in God, have faith, listen to Aarti, meditate, read Hanuman chalisa
  
• get up early in the morning
  
• exercise
  
• listen to wonderful songs, read wonderful books (actually staying away from books would be a better idea, especially books with non-normal bent), play games!!!
  
• if in trouble, ask for people's help, its okay :)
  
• do better time managment, by stronger focus, and quick thinking and decision making. Present mindedness will help here
  
  

i feel that i may not be able to ever repay back this debt of wonderful help I got from people. Thanks!

This itself is something of a reason to rejoice, and makes you have more faith in life itself.

:)

Him

http://gaurang.org/pub/om_jagdish_hare.mp3

When you get up in the morning and get ready, start your day, by turning on this om-jai-jagdish-hare aarti. Stand upright, close your eyes, join your hands, look down, concentrate on God. Dont think of much anything else. Try breaking your chain of thoughts. Forget about the world. God is higher than all this. Ofcourse it is difficult to do, but you will succeed a little bit. Concentrate on what is being said in the aarti, word by word. And concentrate on God.

You will experience bliss.

Then when you open your eyes, the world will look different.

The world is not about us, it is about God.

Update:

This chanting of Hare Krishna Hare Rama is wonderful too.

http://krishna.org/RealAudio/HareKrishnaRKT.ram

one other thing

One other thing that made me suddenly loose hold of normality was when I started thinking about growth paths.

I found that reasons for happiness at a very significant number of situations is when people have been able to grow along their self defined growth paths. A person working in the cafe will be happy when he gets a job in a bigger, more properous cafe. A social worker will be happy when he will get to do social service in a more poor area. We will be more happy when we get higher posts within the company. Bill Gates will be happy when he posts higher growth this year than last year.

A wife will feel happy when she will be able to better manage the house, and make her child fare better at school. Grandpa will feel happy when he is able to see his grandchildren excel in life.

So the growth paths being subjectively defined, they loose all absolute meaning. So I suddenly felt that growth was a not a good reason for feeling happy. Then suddenly my whole growth path vanished under my legs. And I felt that keeping a job is not very important. Since I can change my growth path later.

When I saw my manager trying to perform well in his job, I said -- "hey look he is trying to become senior manager now". When my colleagues performed well,I said hey look this guy wants to become the manager. This with everybody. Then suddenly growth feels very non-absolute and not-the-most-important-thing.

Person Structures (PS)

I am learning to recognize a few different personalities within me. Ofcourse I dont think so this is anyway related to multiple personality disorder or something. Its just the different sets of "person structures" (PS) within me, wherein a person structure consists of a particular understanding of the world situation, and a particular direction of thought and action.

I am feeling that my troubles were basically because of not recognizing those person structures. And there were being overlaps, and conflicts between these structurs which I was not able to handle. I was not understanding what I am, and had terrible identity confusion.

But now I am feeling more and more confident that I will now be able to lead a happy life, by maximizing use of inner resources. ( Yes "maximizing use of inner resources" appears to be a good way of leading a happy life -- but actually it is more a personal fulfillment objective. I will be able to personally fulfill myself. But here this personal fulfillment will contain things which actually do not belong to the personal fulfillment category. So here is something to think about ... that even the things wich are not personal fulfillment related are coming under personal fulfillment -- i might have been confused about this term then -- i will have to choose between one definition of personal fulfillment -- whether personal fulfillment should be related to actions that are done for personal survival and enjoyment, hence everything that is ego-driven, or whether personal fulfillment is related to actions which one "wants to do" regardless of whether they correlate with personal survival and personal enjoyment. For example, a person may have altruistic tendencies and even masochistic tendencies. Are these ego-driven? Where should we place them? [incomplete] )

Ok the problem with these personal structures is that people will befriend only one person structure, and then I have problems completely relating to them because only a part of me is befriending them. And I couldnt tell them the problems in the other person structures because of they were not completely aware of them. Of course, and this caused problem in relationships, also because they were confused about who I am. My thoughts and actions were did not fit a logical self. Now I will have to think of revealing to them, more clearly, that I have other personal structures present -- and also I will have to control my existence in all these personal structures very well. I will have to understand that I do have these somewhat conflicting PS's and that it is natural for me to befriend people using one PS and not others. I will have to choose, and be in general more control about myself. I think after recognizing these PS's I am feeling better about myself. In other words, I will have to do "personal structures management'", or in short "personal management", which many people are good at.

Lets dive.

Person structure 1: narcissism

This provides all the "recognition" clauses to other PS's .

Person structure 2: love, family, sacrifice, closeness, oneness, etc :recognition - "love, sympathy"

This is a structure which has been formed over a long time remaining in a family and somewhat friends as well. In this, I love everybody. I think that love is the best emotion. I feel no difference between me and everybody else. I feel one with everybody. I feel that all people's troubles are my troubles. And that I should help everybody. I like family. I like when people can coexist and be mutually happy. "Mutual growth" of happiness -- I love it. I like sacrifice, when one person sacrifices his own, in order to keep the other happy. This specializes in completely ridding myself of any ego, and just finding happiness in making other people happy. And loving them. The "self" is given so low importance here, that I almost am masochistically helping people out.
The recognition that I seek in this PS is of "love". If other people love me, I am happy. I they do not, then I am very unhappy.

Person structure 3: friends, fun, enjoyment, adventure :recognition- "recognition of ability to serve as good company to other people, people should like me frienshipwise"
In this PS, I try to enjoy, have fun, enjoy with friends, go for adventure, etc. There is no need to describe this -- everybody in the world is famililar with this.
The recognition I see in this is to want that other people like me and enjoy my company, and want to befriend me.

Person structure 4: analyzing non-technical like psychological, spiritual, philosophical : recognition based on "awe, praise"
This is a crazy PS that I have -- which is highly abnormal. Here I try to analyze everything including behavior, purpose of life, philosophy, spirituality, psychology, etc. In this I have found too many answers which are more than healthy. For example, I found out it is possible to psychologically explain why everybody wants to find a job, wants to have a family, and almost everything else that a person wants, and never thinks about why he wants that. After finding the reasons, the desires appear to be no longer attractive. I found that ego is the basic driver behind everything, and since ego is the nothing but a result of evolution because of survival, everything is pointless. In this PS I analyze philosophical and spiritual reasons as well. For example, I found out that spirituality is nothing but going towards egolessness, which requires detachment from normal societal life, since everything that is done in society is ego-based. My recent Asaramji Bapu's sadhana shibir confirmed this.

Person structure 5: analyzing technical :recognition based on "awe, praise"
This is where I enjoy logical and analytically analyzing and indulging in technology, programming, science etc. (all the normal fields) This helps me do good in jobs, and studies (if I can subside other PS's and gather some will power from PS6).

Person structure 6: surviving, ego, self, personal fulfillment, growth, meeting targets, goals, achievement, getting what you want :recognition - success, fame, ability to create a survivable environment

This is what generally is a good drive for most normal people. in my case, this has subsided recently because of my strange beliefs/conclusions from PS4. In this PS, I will do somethings like aim for things I like, perform better, grow,


Now, these days, my dominating PS's were PS1 and PS4, both of which are very harmful. I need to get back to PS6, PS5, PS3, and PS2 in order to become normal and happier.

And I need to get them into a stable and long lasting mixture, so that I become a constant person and not a person with many heads.

Now I am finding that my intense identity confusion is reducing ... and I will try to tackle the interrelationships between these PSs more swiftly.

(Is this this separation good into PSs? Will this be a problem? Is a unified self better, like most people are?)

(incomplete)

I actually am feeling stronger now.

I am not feeling very alone now.

I am talking with people.

People are helping me out. People are replying. Thanks a lot every body..... I mean this is the normal thanks... this is something real....something straight from my heart - Thanks.

Life is great.

There are a few more people that I want to talk to.

After I have talked with everybody about my depression, then I will be freer, and I will feel better.

And hopefully I will in a better shape of things than earlier, and I will learn how to relate with people, and have a better understanding of what life is about. :)

For those non-existent readers who are not reading the Thought Blog, I will link to a recent entry in that blog. This is one of those things which feels nice when read.

http://gaurang.org/blog/2004_12_01_archive.html#110211523998739238

hello

i ran after this
i ran after that
in this race of superiority,
in this race of proving yourself,
in this race of getting ahead,
in this race of this, in this race of that,

i am now tired.

I now want to sit, relax and say hello to people around me.

[ofcourse this habit of writing to blogs and maintaining a website will be the toughest narcissistic habit that I will have tocrack, it might turn out to be the last one that I crack - it will be tough -- i will have to create a very supportive, nurturing and emotionally fulfilling environment directly around me which will give me the will power to rejoice and enjoy in the present rather than talking to this invisible and non-present reader for emotional feedback]

off that showy platform

Why I was finding it difficult to tell everybody that I was fired because of low performance was because I had been trying to form relationships with people based on display of intelligence -- by creating an image. When I talk with people, I try to show that I am smart -- the why of this is ofcourse covered in the early postings in this blog (d&d) -- and then try to create friendships based on this image that I created.

Now how can I tell that I am fired because the platform my friendships rest on is to be taken away?

Now I am learning that this whole method was wrong.

Friendships should not be formed on these "imagy" platforms. Friendships are emotional connections between people for mutual support, love, caring -- they form, because after all, everybody wants just the same things as everybody else: a nice, happy life, filled with some amounts of togetherness, love, fun, personal fulfillment, attachments.

Now that I am telling people about my firing from my job -- I am feeling better. Much better. It relaxes me to feel now that I dont have to create or maintain that showy platform any more. The friendship will now be based on a new idea, a new paradigm. It will now be based on growing together, being colleague in this long torturous as well as rewarding journey.

Lets do the best we can. :-)

truth should be told, and reasons for getting fired

I think enough is enough. I will try to stop Lying about my job loss now. I cant bear the guilt of lying to people that I was laid off or that I quit my job.

I was fired ... and thats that.....

To get more insight you can refer to these conversations --

http://www.gaurang.org/pub2

Now I will try to tell the truth to as many people as possible.