Theos-Talk Archives (January 2007 Message tt00376)

5 of 7 - Inner Self


V. CHILDHOOD

    Starting as a child you seek guidance 
outside yourself because you know no better 
and you don't have the brain to even imagine 
being a source of your own guidance.  
Everyone wants to belong, and when you are 
a child you want to belong to all of the idiots 
who don't think, which is the whole crux of the 
problem.  Ultimately your own system is the 
guidance you're seeking and is perfectly 
attuned to your circumstance.


    In the short of it, without knowing it, a child 
thinks that its parents are god.  Only later 
does the brain develop to the point where the 
child can have a concept of god, beyond the 
concept of parents.  You must constantly 
keep this in mind when dealing with young 
children, because if you are harsh or strong 
with them, they think "god" is attacking them.  
They think god is all-knowing.  They think 
god's knowledge is absolute and infallible.  
So if god is attacking them, they must be evil.  
The reason you have to be careful with them 
is because they can fall into thinking they are 
evil and never know what happened.


    This carries into adulthood and when 
people throw god out the window.  It is 
because they cannot stand the pressure of 
feeling worthless, useless, evil, and they have 
to throw away the thing that is making them 
feel that way.  When one has the concept of 
an all-powerful god, and one sees people 
who are castingyou upon youself, and 
making you feel inferior, guilty, worthless, 
useless, evil, you have to throw away the 
concept as worthless.  You are going to try 
and maintain your own sense of worth.  You 
get to the point of not being able to tolerate 
the thought of not seeing an end to it all.  The 
"devil" exists because of frustration.  The real 
black forces of this earth are the pent-up 
forces of frustration.  'The desire to be 
positive forced to be negative.  It's a half-truth 
based on ignorance, and a half-truth can be 
more dangerous than ignorance.


    We are born with fantasies.  The child 
believes his parents are god, and they are 
exactly equal to the job.  The first time he 
suffers any discomfort, he can't make any 
sense of it.  It is in complete violation to the 
way his mind works.  The reason they give 
you the idea of "god on high" is because 
when you were a child you lived in a land of 
giants.  One of the most important things you 
can do with your children is to get down on 
the floor and play with them.  When you are a 
child, you have to get someone to do 
everything for you because you aren't big 
enough.  The child is constantly persued by 
the questions:  Am I doing all right?;  Am I 
holding my end up?  When you hold your end 
up as an adult, you don't question it, you 
know it. There's something radically wrong 
there.  I can remember these things very 
clearly.  The mind of a young child is a gold 
mine.  If you want to see where the main 
event is, just look.
 

    The new born infant only has wriggling and 
crying to signal that it wants something.  The 
infant's mind frame is one in which it knows 
of nothing but itself.  Everything is itself - the 
room, the world, the people, and it is the 
source of its own fulfillment.  In the best 
situation, the mother figure, whoever is taking 
care of the child, has to be someone who 
doesn't have an inner revulsion to 
expressions of individuality.  Most do and 
cannot tolerate individuality, because it 
reminds them of the fact that they were not 
allowed individuality.


   If the mother figure has a positive attitude 
toward the child and with experience is 
sensitive to the child's needs and wants and 
provides them, then the child starts off life 
with acquiring the attitude of achieving 
success in what it wants.  This attitude forms 
the basis for the rest of life.  It can form an 
attitude of being the one in control, of getting 
what it wants.  That is the whole issue and it 
starts at the very beginning.

   This is not spoiling the child.  You cannot 
spoil a child.  What people call spoiling a 
child, is the parent forcing the child into the 
desires of the parent and which are the ones 
he's allowed to have.  It is forcing the child to 
put all his desires into a particular pattern the 
parent decides upon.  That's why the "spoiled 
child" always has fits and tantrums.  It is 
because he is forced into a false self and is 
not allowed to be his real self.  You cannot 
fulfill a false self.  The spoiled child occurs 
from coddling and creating desires that are 
not real in the child.  They are fantasies and 
are only real in the parent's own mind.  The 
child is only allowed to want what they want it 
to want.  That's the whole problem in a 
nutshell.  The kid never gets what he wants, 
but only what he was allowed to want.  After 
awhile he no longer knows what he wants, 
and only frustration remains.


   It all starts in the mind set of the person 
tending the child.  If they can't tolerate "joie 
de vivre!", let go and let go, let her rip!, the 
rage to live... If they can't tolerate it and 
almost none of them can tolerate, then they 
just put a pillow on the child's face, no matter 
what it looks like, and that's the end of that.


    Parents beat their children because it is 
very well learned.  They've spent their entire 
life beating themselves.  You can't really 
separate between yourself and the child.  
There's no real guilt or pain involved in it, 
because in you inner mind you are chastising 
yourself - for things, I might add, the child may 
not have even done.  You project some 
failure of your own into the pattern.  You never 
see it objectively.


    The reason we are so long in raising 
children is that their brain has not developed 
the ability to answer to themselves.  You are 
actually an effective part of their brain. You 
have to do their thinking for them, because 
they don't have the ability to do it themselves 
but the need.  It is a tremendous and terrible 
task.


    You have a child, and the child is sick and 
you do not recognize the sickness, as was 
the case with me.  The child from that person 
cannot experience release from the 
sickness.  The child hungers for the release 
from its sickness without knowing that it is the 
need for the other person's mind in its life, to 
do what it can't do yet.  The child without 
exception is being denied the presence of 
another person in them and they in the other.  
Honorably to do so is the right thing for the 
child.  Honorably is the big word.


   The child by design sees itself as others 
see it.  If the child is seen as good and well, 
the child sees itself as good and well.  Most 
of us darn near had none of being seen as 
good and well.  The result is that most of us 
carry an unnamed burden throughout our 
lives.  It generates the sense that there is 
something wrong here.  The question of there 
being something wrong here is what ends up 
being answered to.


   The work of childhood is play.  The minute 
the play doesn't have that genuine sparkle 
and vivacity, they are off the track.  It has to 
be an on-going and constant thing because 
the child cannot stand the frustration.  
Children keep dealing with something until it 
is over.  Many traumas that occur in 
childhood aren't retained as psycholgical 
difficulties, but resolved right as they happen.  
Most serious things are post-pubescent.


   It doesn't take much positve reinforcement 
in the average child for them to reach the 
point of feeling good about themselves.  But 
if one runs into a negative aura in the father 
or mother, if the parent is the type of person 
who is so upset that they can't want to give 
the attention that is needed, they can't want to 
and there's nothing they can do about it.  The 
child will spend its life looking for an 
acceptance that even if it finds, won't fill them 
up.  I call this negative impression on the 
child "imprinting."  Imprinting is an over-riding 
subconscious determining factor.


   The thing about people who are really 
divorced from themselves is that they 
possess an almost psychic ability, being 
careful by what I mean by psychic.  They 
know how to hurt.  They are able through the 
bond that exists between parents and 
children, for instance, to be sensitive to when 
an action on their part will hurt the most.  They 
will pick the moment when you are ripe and 
hit you.  It is uncanny.


   An odd thing is that female to male 
imprinting is seldom accomplished, but when 
it is it is very obvious.  The female needs the 
constant presence and acceptance of a male 
figure.  The female, in my mind, is never 
capable of self determination.  It is always 
through the male figure.  It is because of their 
dependent role, I think.  I think it is chemical.


   When I see a woman who is headstrong, 
self-determined, independent, this is all 
hostility in my mind.  The difference between 
arrogance and humility is hostility in anybody.  
In women it is hostility over the fact that they 
never felt wanted securely by their male 
imprinters.  It could be a father, an older 
brother, an uncle.  The odd thing about it is 
that this state can transpire in a woman for 
forty years, and then they find a man and it 
can completely turn around, which is the 
unusual thing about it.  I've seen it happen 
several times.  Unlike men, they can turn 
around.  If men do not get a favorable imprint 
by the time they are two years old, there's 
nothing you can do about it.  If a man doesn't 
get favorably imprinted as a child, he ends up 
constantly trying to control his environment.  
They are motivated by a desire to "engineer" 
in people.  They want to be the pope.


   If you haven't spent a minimum of fifty hours 
thinking about the mother child relationship, 
you aren't going to have a nickle's worth of 
sense about what is really going on.  You 
can't understand psychology until you 
understand the mother-child relationship.  
You see yourself as others see you, period.  
That is what the mother-child relationship is 
all about.  If you don't get treated right from 
the start, you never get started.  It doesn't 
matterif you live to be a hundred, or what any 
therapist can do.  If it isn't done right in the 
beginning, it's never done right.  It starts with 
the first minute of birth and probably before.


   Ideally when the infant demonstrates that it 
wants something to change in its 
environment, someone is there who 
understands what the child wants and sees 
that the child gets it.  Mostly at the beginning, 
this is physical manipulation.  Importantly the 
person responsible to the child should be 
someone who does not have a deep-seated 
objection to independence, their own or 
anybody else's.  It's all there in the first six 
months for most people.  If the string of ego 
reinforcement, ego encouragement, ego 
building and ego support is broken at 
anytime between then and thirty, you are still 
in trouble.  That's how precarious it is.  
Nobody will make it through if it isn't - and 
people talk of a "beneficent god!"


   The child-like state is the state that every 
human alive is trying to get to.  When I was 
about twelve, I came to the conclusion that 
adults were insane.  They were as rammy as 
billy goats, and so is everyone I've ever met.  
Until I meet an adult with the flowering feeling 
and drive of a young child, I will know I've 
never met a sane person.


   There is a big difference between childish 
and child-like.  The general state of 
consciousness of the child is a state that we 
would label euphoric. the child avoids any 
training that tries to burst his balloon.  In our 
education system, all so-called learning is 
imposed upon the kids from without and they 
hate it.  If the desire to learn something 
comes from within, the kid will devour 
whatever it is.


   School was totally devorced from my 
questions.  That's why I hated it.  I had so 
many unanswered questions that I was 
hanging from the ceiling by my toenails.  In 
my last year of high school, I didn't go to five 
classes.  I'd come to school two classes late, 
and then hang out in the hall and smoke a 
pack of cigarettes.  A Catholic Brother would 
then come out and tell me I had another 
million years of detention.  I could pass the 
tests, but couldn't stand sitting in some class 
with some guy telling me how important an 
apostrophe was in a sentence, while 
meanwhile I'm feeling like my insides are 
falling out.  I had no one to talk to, so I had to 
get my answers from the inside.  I was an 
excellent student until I got into this, and then I 
didn't care if the place burned down.  To me, I 
had to totally understand everything I 
sutudied.  I didn't memorize.  I had to follow 
my own master.  There was absolutely 
nothing in this world I could permit to be more 
important.


   I escaped into my mind from a world I 
couldn't stand.  I forced myself to think.  I 
started out with a blank page and everyone 
who comes up with something new does the 
same thing.  I learned to notice when 
something important went by in my mind.  I 
stopped everything, even if it took hours, to 
track it back down and follow it up.  After a 
year or so of this, I never missed anything.  I 
came to the conclusion that I had to find all 
my answers from within, that I wasn't going to 
get them from anyone else.


   People were making me so miserable that I 
had to learn what made their heads tick.  I 
had to do it with no fantasy involved and 
strictly and clearly see what made them 
operate.  At the time I had never heard the 
word "psychology."  I had never heard of 
Freud.  When I fully understood people to my 
own satisfaction, and still it brought about no 
relief, it caused my inner death.  I went to the 
other side.


   Sometimes analysts claim that people or 
children imagine that they were abused and 
that this is the source of their problems.  No 
one ever imagines they were abused.  There 
could be a family of sixteen kids with only one 
that became a psychiatric patient.  All the 
psychiatrist would say is that it was genetic.  
It wouldn't be genetic, he was the one that 
was used.  He was the one that got all of the 
kicks.  I can never be convinced that anyone 
can imagine that they were abused.  If it is a 
hundred to one of people saying that he had 
a good home and the like, it's not possible 
that he wasn't abused.

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