Emotional control

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The only way to control your emotions is to own them. Taking responsibility is the first and the most important thing about it. If you say “person x made me feel this way”, “the weather made me feel this way”, “the world situation made me feel this way”, you are demonstrating no responsibility for your emotions, and, as a result, you have no control.

The first thing you need to do in order to turn off an emotion, is to make it stronger. Amplify it, be in it completely. Ooops, apparently you’re not a mere victim of things that make you feel this or that way, because you can obviously crank it up. Now that you see that you have control over it, observe it from a distance. This makes you, the observer, separate from the emotion, and you can see it wind down.

That’s all you need to start. Sure, there’s more – perceiving the connection between thoughts, emotions and spiritual energy, learning the vipassana or inner space, learning how to use Kundalini up-stream kriya in order to release emotional energy without being overwhelmed by it, and so on, but what you need to start is the understanding that you in fact keep your emotions rolling for long after they would have naturally wound down, and if you can do that, you in fact have control. It’s just that you’re doing a poor job, and there’s room for improvement the size of a universe.

Principles

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I was just thinking about the reason why my religious opinions differ so much from the norm, and why I actually attained results in this sphere, unlike all those who might see my opinions as unpalatable.

You see, it’s very simple. It’s just that I had scientific training and adhered to the basic principles of sound engineering. So, let me try to write those down the best I can.

– Assume that the way physics explains the world reveals something fundamental that extends to spirituality; for instance, that high-level phenomena can be broken down, the way apples and oranges can be broken down to the fundamental particles, none of which have essence of apple and orange among them;

– Assume that experimentation and iteration along paths that show results are the way to go; also, assume that paths that show bad results, or no results at all, can be safely discarded unless there are very strong reasons to insist;

– Assume that people who did this before have relevant things to say, unless proven otherwise by direct experimentation and experience;

– Don’t try to have a working theory ahead of time. It is preferable to have good skill and poor understanding. People could shoot arrows at distant targets with great precision long before they had a strong theory of kinetic energy and gravity. It’s preferable to have experience of God without understanding what God actually is, to having all kinds of theology without experience. Don’t try to enforce elegance and parsimony ahead of time; rather, allow reality to reveal itself, however convoluted, inelegant, contradictory or whatever else it might appear to be. Gather facts first; everything else is a luxury. Poor and inelegant understanding of reality is preferable to having none whatsoever, or to having elegant illusions and falsehoods that explain everything.

– Test ideas by trying to imagine all kinds of ways in which they are wrong. If this doesn’t produce any immediately obvious downsides to the idea, then you’re likely on to something, and this path is worth exploring further.

– Believe in things that were revealed in the higher states of consciousness even when you are in a normal or reduced state of consciousness where evidence for it isn’t readily available, and in fact everything seems to contradict it. Essentially, if you’ve been to the Moon, believe you have been, even if you can’t repeat the experience because the funding for the Moon missions has been cut.

There’s probably more, but this is enough to demonstrate the general direction I was taking in my thinking. It’s less rigid thinking that what would pass for scientific these days, but it’s basically a practical application of scientific method and sound engineering principles, moderated and softened by the necessities imposed by the nature of the field of study.

Negativity

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Negativity came to some sort of a disrepute in the spiritual circles, thanks to the positivity being hyped up – and it’s not only in the 1990s, because I know that Yogananda, who preceded this trend by decades, gave his contribution. So, let me explain why negativity is a legitimate and useful thing.

First of all, Vedanta insists on it – “neti, neti” means “not this, not that”, and it’s one of the primary ways of discarding non-brahman entities from the mind. Also, Vedanta defines things negatively – brahman is “acintya” and “nirguna”. Acintya means “inconceivable” or “unimaginable”, and nirguna means “attribute-less” or “devoid of worldly qualities”. Those are all negative designations.

Buddhism, also, approaches things negatively, by deconstructing attachments and spiritual constructs, not even bothering to say that something will eventually arise that can’t be deconstructed – essentially, your job is to assume that everything you encounter is a compound structure that can be dissolved, and if there is a positive underlying principle, such as nirvana, that will be revealed in due course without any attempt on your behalf to visualize the goal.

So, the most intellectually and spiritually authoritative religious systems of the East couldn’t care less about positivity, and in fact promote negativity in a very obvious way. We know that Christianity couldn’t care less about the concepts such as “positive” or “negative”, and instead focuses on spiritually and morally relevant terms such as “good” and “evil”, or “truth” and “falsehood”. There’s no concept of a “negative person” in Christianity – a person is either good or evil. If someone’s words are unpleasant to you, the question is whether he’s right or wrong. If he’s right and his words are unpleasant to you, saying he’s “negative” doesn’t allow you to dismiss him out of hand, and instead it is quite obvious that you’re the problem.

So, if Christianity doesn’t recognize those designations as valid, if Buddhism and Vedanta use negativity as one of the primary instruments of detachment, deconstruction and discernment (all three words being negative, by the way), where did all the idolatry of positivity and contempt of negativity come from?

The answer is obvious – not from the ancient, traditional sources. It’s all New Age nonsense. By all means, you can believe in that stuff, just don’t try to convince people that it’s the spiritual main stream and something self-evident, because it’s not. In fact, it stands in opposition to all the religious philosophies I find compelling and impressive.

Positivity

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I was just thinking about all the virtue-signalling and posturing that is currently in vogue, and remembered that I’ve sen something similar before: the “positivity” trend of the 1990s.

Positivity actually has a legitimate purpose in psychology, as I would know, having been proficient in autogenous training, which is a form of self-hypnosis, where positive formulation of suggestions is paramount. By “positive” mean statements such as “my hands are warm” instead of “my hands are not cold”, and so on. It seems that human mind doesn’t really work well with avoiding undesirable outcomes; basically, if you tell it what you don’t want, you’re not really telling it what you do want, which is very much like telling your driver to go “not to London”. That’s hardly a useful instruction, because “not London” is quite a large place.

So, positive suggestions such as “drive me to Bristol” or “get me coffee” work, and negative suggestions such as “drive me away from here” or “get me something other than tea” don’t. However, a whole movement of abject charlatanry developed around those basic truths, and “positivity” and “negativity” became amoral substitute for good and evil, and right and wrong, in a moral framework that tried to avoid such designations at all cost, in order to avoid any notion of religion.

You see, there’s a problem with rejecting negativity in expression. While it is true that you need to positively formulate your ultimate goal in order to be able to get there, it is also true that we often don’t have enough knowledge of the goal at the beginning of the journey. For instance, let’s say that you want to reach God, but what is God, exactly, to someone who is a mere beginner? God is something awesome and magnificent at the very extreme end of a multidimensional coordinate system of values – greatest consciousness, greatest truth, greatest power and so on – but what does that actually mean? Here, negativity plays an important part, because you can see all kinds of evil and depravity and say, “I don’t know what God is, exactly, but let’s assume he’s in the opposite direction from this”, and such a statement will, of course, not lead you to God directly, but if you practice the virtues that are opposite to the wicked depravities that are abundant in the world and easy to perceive, it will certainly help to move you from the starting point, and trying to imagine virtues by rejecting sins will give you some idea of where you want to be, which is of course not perfect, but “not perfect” is much better than “horrible” already, and as long as you understand that this is a transitory position and not a destination, I see nothing wrong with it. Hate and disgust directed at evil things imply some sense of goodness and virtue, and this can later be properly formulated, but as beginnings go, hatred and disgust are effective and dynamic enough to give you some momentum. Certainly, that’s not where you want to be stuck permanently, and you do need to transition your understanding from, for example, “I am revolted by all the perversions in modern society”, to “those things are instinctively revolting because they lie in the direction opposite of God, who is truth, reality and fulfilment”.

My problem with the positivity movement is not as much that it is wrong; it’s an ideological poison, akin to the modern variety known as “tolerance” and “diversity”. Positivity on its own can actually be extremely harmful, if it stops you from recognizing and changing things that are obviously wrong; likewise, tolerance for bad things isn’t a good thing, and diversity on its own doesn’t mean anything good, because is it really preferable to have many different bad things, and not one good thing? If you have many things, is it preferable to see them all as equal, or to choose between them based on some criterion of merit? It all looks like some kindergarten ethical philosophy of “nobody is wrong”; in fact, everybody is wrong, and everybody stands to improve, and stupid flattery is of no use whatsoever.

Without an ethical framework based upon the referential target of the Absolute, all quantitative and qualitative designations are pointless and worthless. What is right and wrong without God as the referential truth? What is good and evil without God as the referential goodness? Of what use is positivity without a referential absolute target? Also, if you understand that a statement “Satan is beautiful” is positive, and a statement “Satan is not beautiful” is negative, it becomes apparent that the entire thing on its own has no moral reference, and is a mere linguistic gimmick. Positivity starts making sense only after you obtain your actual moral reference from a worthwhile theology.

Cherish trauma

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I was thinking about the extent to which past trauma and frustrations condition my actions, and whether that is something that should be remedied, or accepted.

You see, people usually assume that conditioning by trauma is a bad thing, but if you know anything about how neural networks are trained, you would know that trauma is an excellent way to condition a neural network to avoid a certain path. For instance, fall from great height is deadly. In order to avoid death, it would be a good idea to condition oneself to avoid situations that can lead to fall from height. In case of humans, it’s an instinct, hard-wired in our brains from the beginning, as something that is always necessary. Don’t fuck around at heights. Don’t eat foods you never ate before if you’re lost in the woods. Be afraid of the dark. Basically, try to survive long enough that your conscious mind can guide you, but before that, rely on instinct. Also, if you barely survived something, it creates a strong trauma-imprint in order for you to avoid things that might bring you close to such a near-miss in the future. You can see where I’m going there – fear and trauma can be a very good way not to get poisoned, raped, robbed or killed. It’s much safer for you to be afraid of snakes and spiders, than to handle them. The worst thing that can happen to you if you fear them is fear. The worst thing that can happen if you don’t fear them is death. From the evolution standpoint, fear is preferable, and trauma is a way to store personal experience in actionable, useful form – if you hit your toe on a rock once and broke it, trauma-caused imprint will make you careful about it in the future. If you got raped in a corn field once because you weren’t afraid to walk alone in the dark through desolate places, trauma will change your dangerous behaviour in a hurry.

The problem is neither fear nor trauma – rather, the problem are all those “positive thinking” nonsense books from America, authored in the 1990s or earlier, where fear, stress or trauma are seen as a philosophical substitute for evil in a worldview that tries very hard to avoid evil as a concept. They thought that, if you removed all trauma-imprints, you will psychologically return to the innocence of childhood which they for some reason see as perfection. I don’t share that opinion, because you know what the difference is between a child and an idiot? A child is younger; that’s all. I don’t wish to be an idiot again, because I worked quite hard to learn what I have, and if I have scars from trauma, they all contain a lesson – if you do this, you might get wrecked again.

Sure, sometimes trauma generalises things too much, to the point where very specific bad experience can “poison the well” in a very broad way that isn’t really helpful – for instance, you get scared of heights even when it’s pointless and not at all useful. Such things need to be worked on, of course, but if I have traumatic experiences caused by a computer that ran a shitty Win98 OS with too little RAM, and repeatedly froze and crashed when I tried to edit a 300DPI TIFF image for the cover of my first book, and as a result I couldn’t finish the edit in time and I ended up submitting the version that’s not properly sized and text ended up being too close to the margins, and so on? What if those traumatic experiences cause me to over-specify my computers in order to avoid situations of this kind, where the computer runs perfectly fine 99% of the time, but when I need to do some graphics work, it turns out to be unfit and causes me to fail at important tasks? What’s the worst thing that can happen if I listen to my experience and buy over-specced equipment whenever I can? I can waste some money, and that’s it. For 99% of the time, I will have a computer that’s vastly over-specified for the task at hand, but at that instance when I need to prepare a meter-sized high-res photographic print, I will be able to do it without a problem. Also, with cars – I have trauma caused by cars with insufficiently powerful engines, because my first car had 54HP and overtaking was always scary and dangerous. I also have issues with bad tyres. As a result, I avoid cars that are underpowered or in some other way unsafe, and I try to always have excellent tyres. Again, what exactly is the problem with trauma here? It causes me to spend more money on really important things that prevent dangerous situations? How terrible. 🙂 I also have trauma caused by food poisoning that makes me wary of things that caused food poisoning before – that jar of pickled olives with only a few remaining ones that’s been sitting in the fridge, or that opened cup of sour cream that’s been in the fridge for a week, especially in the summer, and stuff that tastes a bit “off” – what’s the worst that can happen if I “succumb to my fears”? I throw away suspicious foods and not get sick? That’s terrible, I must immediately return to childhood where I had no such fears and would eat any kind of toxic garbage including leaked batteries and dog shit. What an ideal state of spiritual perfection that was. 🙂

In short, we’ve all been told all kinds of stupid bullshit, and we need to un-learn it all, especially the stuff that came from America, because that’s simply a motherlode of nonsense.