Anxiety is your friend

In my teenage years I hit a major problem in my life, It stopped me going out, seeing my friends, it affected me doing my school work and taking exams. 

It had been with me all my life but as I approached fifteen my worry about stuff got to the point where I could not function normally anymore.

I didn't really have a word for what I was suffering with but I now call it Anxiety.

anxiety
/aŋˈzʌɪəti/

noun

1.
a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome.
"he felt a surge of anxiety"


2.
strong desire or concern to do something or for something to happen.
"the housekeeper's eager anxiety to please"


What I had is described in definition one, I definitely didn't have definition two, I had no desire to concern myself with anything and my only desire was for the anxiety to stop.


Anxiety is like a dreaded realistion, it has it's roots in a day dream. Thoughts come from nowhere and your inner voice throws horrible scenarios into your imagined future. I call this catastrophising.


There is not only the thought that something bad is going to happen but also the though that you will not be able to cope if that bad thing does happen. In fact this bad thing will be your undoing, things are going to spiral out of control. It will be like stepping into quicksand and you won't be able to get out. In the end this thing will consume you whole. Into oblivion you go!


Last night I watched the brilliant film 'Gravity'. In this film an astronaut gets trapped out in space. The film is terrifying as it really conveys that feeling of spinning out of control into nothingness. The astronaut (brilliantly played by Sandra Bullock) who eventually gets trapped out in space all on her own starts out being trapped with another astronaut played by George Clooney. She is full of fear and this is based in her inexperience, where as George has no fear and seems to know what to do in every situation. But George eventually dies out in space and she is left alone. Alone, in the dark, with no one to help, and without the skills or knowledge to get home. This for me sums up the terror that can arise in catastrophising.


The film does offer a solution and I would love to examine the themes of rebirth and evolution that are so well explored in that film. But I won't so go and check it out.


Instead I want to look at how you can deal with Anxiety. I have never conquered my anxiety fully but I have learned to live with it by making it my friend. and it is your best friend as it is only trying to look after you in the end. Anxiety is there inside you for a reason. I imagine it to be a small frightened child tugging at your leg and telling you about all these terrible things that might happen. And what do you do with a frightened child? Protect them, reassure them, love them.
Your anxiety is the child in you and they are scared. You cannot ignore this child even if they start nagging you at the worst times, when you are trying so hard to be the grown up.
You still cannot ignore this scared little child. This child is you. It's you when you were little, frightened and afraid, all alone, in the dark, with no one to help without the skills or knowledge to to see rationally that it's just a shadow on the wall, or a strange sound the central heating makes.


Yes...anxiety is usually rooted in the irrational. Your catastrophising has lead you make two plus two equal five. And you know this too. But it is not you that is scared. It's the child in you. And that child is trying to warn you, to help you, to look after you. But they have got it wrong.
To beat anxiety you need to put them back to bed and make them realise they are safe and not alone. That there is an adult there that loves them and will protect them from harm. You are that adult. You have the ability and knowledge to look after yourself no matter what. You are no longer a child.


I believe it is this process of growing up that helps to control anxiety.


But before you can do this you need to realise what anxiety is and how it is your friend.


So let's imagine you were creating a human being. You have the body, the arms and legs, eyes and ears etc. You have made this human and you place it in the world. And it just sits there, it does nothing until it dies.
So you place in that human a thing called desire. Now the human wants things; food, comfort, sex, company etc. So now the human starts doing things. And this desire cultivates curiosity. The human begins to imagine ways to maximise the pleasure gained from attaining more and more of what they desire. More food, a better house, more sexual partners and loads of friends that don't ever get on your nerves. But this has a downside. Animals come along and eat the humans. Other humans kills them for their stuff but most strange of all, some humans kill themselves out of a curiosity to work out the biggest mystery of them all....death. Yes...without your fear of death what is there to stop you killing yourself right now?


Death is a real problem for these humans you have made, as you can see these humans keep compelling themselves into an early death.
So you put another thing into the humans to act as a balance to the all the desire and curiosity. You develop a death threat checker. This is a thing that scans the human's enviroment and situation and keeps tabs on anything that might lead to death. It also has a mechanism like an alarm system that will go off when threat is detected and prepare the human to either run away as fast as they can or in the worst case scenario, try and fight off what ever is trying to kill them.


This seems to work well, part of the human is full of curiosity and desires, exploring the world, finding things out, learning etc and balanced by the threat checker which learns also by experience, seeing what tends to kill other people and literally avoids these things like the plague.


But the humans now have another problem, every now and then a terrible unforseen catastrophe comes along (climate change, a strange virus, freak weather incidents) and wipes them all out. So you develop in the humans a really strange attribute....creativity.


These creative types are scattered through the community and come up with mad random ideas based upon mad random problems that rest of the group didn't even know were problems.These creative types scan for unforeseen problems. They come up with strange solutions to problems that the rest didn't see as problems. But, boy, do they come up with some cool stuff!
Instead of just picking the berries why don't we grow them instead? Let's not hunt and eat these animals, let's capture them and breed them, Why don't we try and ride on that horse? And isn't there a way we can put a delicious noodle meal in a pot that we can just add boiling water to?


Creative types ask new questions and try and come up with new solutions. Creative types need problems to exist and actively go out looking for them!


But in these creative humans there was another problem. They kept coming up with threats that weren't there. They spent their whole time worried about mad stuff that none of the others were worried by. Their desire for perfection turned in on itself and they began to criticise and loathe themselves. Any traumatic event, especially in their youth, acted as fuel to this fire. Their inner compulsion to fix everything finally turned itself in on their very being and they started to think they weren't good looking enough, clever enough, or even able to cope with all these threats that they now imagined were there.
They were pretty annoying and got on the rest of the groups nerves but every now and then they came up with amazing stuff like the wheel, or farming, or buildings, or art and music and even eventually Pot Noodles which pleased the group immensely.


So they put up with them.


So you can see everyone has anxiety, it is a very useful thing that checks for threats and stops you getting killed. But in people who have imagination and resourcefulness this mechanism turns into a monster. This ability to catastrophise is useful to the group but a pain in the arse to anyone who suffers with it.


So if this all sounds familiar then I am going to give you two pieces of advice that may help with your anxiety. One is easy, the other not so.


The first is the easy one...be creative!


Anxiety is only a problem when it is not acted upon. When that frightened child is pulling on your leg and you are trying to be grown up and so you tell them to shut up and be quiet, they are going to kick off, full on tantrum. So you need to be sympathetic to them. And you do this acting on their worries. And this does not mean running around panicking.
It means being creative and letting that mechanism have it's outcome in activity. The anxiety wants something to happen, so make something happen that expresses that anxiety. Paint a picture, write a poem. make some music, write a blog, make a sculpture, create a garden, design a thing that does something cool. Whatever floats your boat.
And when the catastrophising self loathing kicks in and tells you that whatever you create will be crap, just say to yourself you are doing this for therapy reasons. It's not for anyone else, it is for you and you alone to get you out of this horrible state.
In the film Gravity, Sandra Bullock saves herself with her own creativity, with her own strange idea that comes from an almost supernatural source.
This is so true of creativity.
You are not really the author of your creativity so don't judge yourself by it.
Let it flow...anxiety > creative thoughts > creation of things in the world.
For more about this please have a look here...


The Anatomy of Creativity


And now for second, the harder bit.


All anxiety, as we have discussed, is basically trying to avoid death. We avoid death by being frightened of it. All anxiety, whether it be worry about what people think of you or being alone etc, has it's fundamental root in the fear of death.
Fear of death is ultimately the fear of the unknowable.


To conquer anxiety you need to conquer your fear of death. Most people I know who suffer with anxiety have an exaggerated fear of death itself (the fear of a horrible death, like spinning helplessly out into deep space) or they fear what is beyond death.


In Gravity, after going through an almost embryonic rebirth, Sandra Bullock accepts she is going to die and it is that moment that she finds the solution to her problems (and this is by accessing the adult, brave part of her own nature)
We all need to accept we will die, we need to accept the unknowable.
In most cases we slip away into a peaceful sleep. I have told myself that death is a natural process and in that process we will have an inbuilt acceptance of our fate. That part of our nature is not apparent at this time because we still need to have a fear of death to keep ourselves alive. But that fear will go when the time comes and we will not enter into death in a scared state. My proof for this is that nobody ever does.
But the fear of the unknowable is really the fear of yourself before you were born. Accept the fact that the fear you have now about this huge unknowable void is a required fear. But that void is unknowable. When we take away all the things in nature that are trying to take us into that void (ie. the threats we spend our time trying to avoid) we are left with everything in nature that sustains us. We feel this when we walk into the sunshine.
The sun gives us life and fills us and our world with the energy to sustain life.
One day it will hurl everything we know into that unknowable void.
But could that not be a part of this beautiful sustenance that surrounds us?
Nothing nature is truly bad. from everything that seems to be destroyed we see the roots of the new. And so it will be with our own death. It may be unknowable but as everything that we see as bad is rooted in our own death, we can see that badness disappears once you accept your own death as part of this beautiful natural process that mysteriously is sustaining us right now.


This is the only thing you should have faith in. Learn to love your inner child and learn to look after them. And learn to see how everything around you is looking after you. We all have our place. Accept your place in the world, move forward and enjoy the ride, whatever that ride might be.


And learn to accept your death like George Clooney....(watch the film)

Why I am not a Christian

When I was about fourteen my mate at school starting going out with a born again Christian. 

She was in a club called The Christian Union and one dinner time she dragged me and my mate along to a meeting they were having.

During the meeting I pointed out a couple of things to them which to me at fourteen seemed quite obvious. They of course had no sensible answer to my points and so they told the rest of the group that I was in league with the Devil.

Now before I continue with this post I need to inform you that to the best of my knowledge I am not in league with the Devil or with anyone else for that matter.

And the reason for this is because is not because I don't have any allegiance to Satan but because he, like God, does not exist.

'How can you be sure God does not exist?' you might thinking....'just because there is no proof He exists doesn't mean there is any proof that He doesn't'

I hope in this post to show that is not true.

But whatever argument I come up with to show God does not exist, it will have no affect on your average Christian because, as my experience showed me that dinner time at the Christian Union, logical arguments don't work on christians. They have this thing called 'faith' where you believe something regardless...it's one of the things you need to have to be in the club. And believe me, it is a club. Most people I think are christians not because the doctine actually makes sense, but because they are in a club and their friends are in that club. And they have things they do together in that club together. To me being a christian is like being in the scouts, it's somewhere you go every week and see your mates and and discuss wholesome things. But with added guilt and dogma. (and of course a dash of pedophilia)

You might be wondering what I said to the people down the Christian Union that upset them? Well, it's not the argument that I'm going to expound today that shows how God cannot exist. It was another one (there are so many!). 

The argument I put forth is a famous one and it goes like this. If God is not omni-potent and omni-present then he is not a God. If he is these things then He has control over everything and so the fact that there is evil in the world fundamentally has it's source in Him. And even if he chooses not to act when there is evil it is still, if you are an all powerful entity, an evil act. 

Because God is all powerful and has control over everything He is controlling me writing this and He has chosen that I am not a believer. In other words there is no choice to be a christian because there cannot be free will in a universe created by an omni present and omni potent God. Again, if He chooses to give me free will (which logically He cannot do as he is by definition pulling all the strings) He gives away agency and is no longer all powerful and logically not God.

Now, of course, the christians how no argument for this that fourteen year old me could not easily counter. And so I got branded as evil.

For me this the real problem with Christianity (and many other religions). This branding of people as evil in the subjective viewpoint of your average dogmatic Bible interpreter (a much better name for them) is the source of much of the nastiness that has existed throughout history. I will not accept that every native American murdered in the name of God, or every person tortured in the Spanish Inquisiation, or any country that suffered under the imperialism of countries in the name of Christianity, or every war fought in the name of Christianity did not suffer at the hands of Christians. They did. And they did so because when you believe in dogmatic ideology that is based on YOUR interpretation of a book YOU have decided is the Word of God, you can brand anyone as evil and act in whatever way you want to deal with your subjective perception of 'evil' because you are 'doing the Lord's work'..............yack!

And yet this again is not the argument against Christianity I am going to explain today. 

My proof that God does not exist is based upon the fact that I do not need to prove He exists. It is as simple as that.

There are in fact an infinite number things of things that might exist. God is only one of those things. All these things that might exist only actually exist when there is proof for them. By proof we mean empirical evidence. Now empirical evidence can only be as good as the veracity of your evidence and the logic you use to interpret that evidence, but just because we can never be certain anything truly exists because the evidence may be misinterpreted, does not mean we can accept the existence 'all things that might exist of which God is one'.

So the burden of proof lands with the believer. If you are a Christian you need to come up with some proof God exists. And the proof of your feelings does not count I'm afraid. Feeling in your heart that He exists can also be applied to Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny (two concepts I'm sure are there only to indoctrinate young children into the habit of dogmatic belief).

So if the burden of proof lies with believer. And if you are are tasked with coming up with proof, the first thing you need to do is to define what it is you are about to go looking for evidence for.

And here is the rub...

YOU CANNOT DEFINE THE CONCEPT OF GOD THAT IS SATISFACTORY WITHOUT THAT CONCEPT BEING INHERENTLY CONTRADICTORY!

Now this idea is quite hard to grasp, especially if you have been indoctinated to think like a christian thinks. But I will try and explain this further. You need to be able to define what something is before you can claim it exists. If I say there is a thing called a 'kimeepatipoocha' but then I cannot tell you what a kimeepatipoocha is then you can automatically discount it's existence.

So I will tell you what a kimeepatipoocha is. It is an all powerful entity that is in everything. That's the same as saying it's everything. kimeepatipoocha=everything. It's just another word for everything. Then I get all upset and say 'No it is that but it is not the same as everything' and there we have a contradiction that cannot be gotten past. No entity can be both everything and not. In the same way that we know square circles cannot exist because of the logic that is inherent within any definition, and so it is with God.

You cannot have an all powerful God that grant's us free will. You cannot have an omni present God that is not completely a part of all the evil that has ever existed. 

It is for the believer to come up with a definition of God that is satisfactory and not based upon hunches or feelings. This argument also counters the arguments for God that come from the existence of things in the world (ie. the one that goes that the proof of God lies in the design of the Universe or the Word of God that has come to us in The Bible) because even if this proves that there is an entity that has created everything or transmitted an objective moral code to us in a book, these things still point to a being that needs to be defined. In other words I don't think saying God is just powerful wizard or ghost with magical properties is enough to satisfy anyone who actually believes in God, as a definition of what God is.

God needs to be contradictory conceptually. The God that is in everything must also have the potential to not be in everything, as He is all things. It is a mess conceptually. 

('Look, there is God!'...'No.that's a rock')

God does not have the attributes that Father Christmas or the Easter Bunny have (ie. defineability) and that is why we can easily disprove their existence. God is indefinable by His very nature. He is all things to all men. And the reason for this is simple. It is because he was invented by humans in their image. Stop looking for a more complex answer!

Despite the restrictions that religion has imposed on the respect and aquisition of facts, humans have been pretty good at aquiring them. And the method that has worked best for aquiring facts about the universe is to use science. Science is is basically a methodology for checking evidence. And this has worked. It has cured disease, taken us to the moon, created the internet and aeroplanes and pot noodles and all the incredible things that mean we don't have to spend all day looking for food until we died at thirty at the hands of some vicious animal, unamed disease or another human who wanted the bit of food we had found that day. 

And science has discovered things about the universe that are far more fantastical and mystical than some old, beardy father figure sat up in sky looking after us all. The world is a far more interesting place than that. And perhaps there are very powerful entities out there in the universe somewhere waiting to be discovered, but they aren't God.

God is a subjective creation of a species on planet Earth who transfered the feelings of parental protection onto the world around them. Science is the emulation of objectivity, the attempt to see things form God's viewpoint. But our viewpoint in the end is entirely subjective. In reality there is only 'out' and the all and everything is contained in our subjective viewpoint of 'out'. 

In that sense the whole universe is contained completely within ourselves. And so when you look and think you see God really you are seeing yourself. 

Now that IS a profound thought....

Why morality sucks

 

I have just seen this quote by Jordan Peterson...

“You're going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don't do. You don't get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you're going to take. That's it.”

Now I am not one of the anti Peterson brigade, you know the ones...the ones who's first line of criticism is to point out that his fan base is 'predominantly young white males who lack a father figure'. And I do find a lot of what he says interesting.

The father figure comment is interesting though...as though there is a current need for some benign authority figure to come along and tell you to stand up straight, tidy your room and get your hair cut.

Of course that benign father figure who told you what to do was not always Jordan Peterson, it was once God.

So let's start with the idea that morality is someone telling you what is right or wrong. Now that someone might be yourself, but even here we personify this with the tiny angel and devil on our shoulders. We need to be the one telling ourselves what is right or wrong but we'll get to that.

Through-out history the ones that told you what to do were those in authority. This dynamic must have started before humans emerged (Peterson's lobsters?). 

Actions would have had consequences. Someone ate poison berries and died. That consequence would have been noted in the collective viewpoint of the group and measures would have been taken to store this useful knowledge within the group. Natural hierachies would have emerged and those at the top would have had to transmit this useful knowledge of consequences to the group and create strategies to pass this knowledge down through the generations.

As nasty consequences emerged over and over again, the antidote to these recuring bad consquences would have been formed into an over arching framework of rules and restrictions. As good group consequences would have been favourable, these good group consequences would have needed to overide good personal consequences. If someone conveniently killed anyone in the group that got in their way the group would have had to kill or at least stop that person to save the group. And in many cases this would have been someone trying to usurp those in authority, and those in authority would have in some case been tempted to act in a way that was personally beneficial and not group beneficial by arguing there position as as representative of the group. (sound familiar?)

At times of scarcity other groups would tried to come and take your stuff so a tribal morality would have developed. They may have come in peace but brought with them diseases your group were not immune to and infected your group.  Tribes would have become self protecting and self identifying.

Here we can see how ideas of the group and personal liberty start to rub each other up. Group mentality is tribal mentality and this links to our disgust urge.

Disgust is the primal morality. It's deep within all our systems as it developed so long ago. It's what stops us eating the poison berries, it's what makes us suspicious of other tribes, it's what makes us want to kill the murderer and it is the poison of which Dr Peterson speaks.

I have always found the work of Julian Jaynes really interesting. Jaynes was a researcher that developed a theory about the development of our consciousness. It goes like this (from wikipedia)

Jaynes explains (his theory) as a learned behavior that “arises ... from language, and specifically from metaphor.” With this understanding, Jaynes then demonstrated that ancient texts and archeology can reveal a history of human mentality alongside the histories of other cultural products. His analysis of the evidence led him not only to place the origin of consciousness during the 2nd millennium BCE but also to hypothesize the existence of an older non-conscious “mentality that he called the bicameral mind, referring to the brain’s two hemispheres”.

An older. non concious mentality!? Bicameralism can be described as

(the condition of being divided into "two-chambers") is a hypothesis in psychology that argues that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys

I remember reading this book as an early adult and being shocked that this theory was not well known to the wider public. It got me interested in the idea of the 'esoteric'; that certain ideas inherently remain hidden from the wider public and are only accessible with special knowledge.

I think this is one of those ideas. 

We are so used to having an inner monologue (the angels and devils on our shoulder) it is hard to believe that for the most part of human history we acted under the influence of an actual voice at our shoulder (auditory hallucinations tend to emanate from the behind your head just above your shoulder) That we were not concious but automatons reacting to voices that we hallucinated and that these voices told how to act and what to think!

For me this has incredible ramifications to understanding morality if it is the case. Morality would have started out as a voice that told you what to do. It would have been so easy for primitive humans to believe in animal spirits or worship the sun as they may have heard these entities telling them what to do and what not to do. And when their group leader died they would have carried on hearing them tell them what to do. This explains why kings often became gods after they died.

And it is easy to see how morality stopped being advice for good living constantly negotiated by humans and turned in an objective set of rules set out by the authoritarian voice of God.

Jordan Peterson has gained fame by (perhaps correctly) pointing out the tribal morality of the woke left. His ideas have explained how the void created by the confusion that is post modern philosphy has been filled by a return to a pre enlightenment tribalistic morality where the percieved interests of any subjectively determined underpriveleged group are ideologically indisputable regardless of competing moral principles of personal liberty and (most worrying) empiricism and rationalism.

For the social justice brigade a new authoritarian god has emerged. And this a god that states that 2+2 does not equal 4 and that the XX and XY chromosone is a social construct. (yes this is real)

But they have begat a corresponding authoritarian god who warns us to make our bed and choose our poison wisely. It is not healthy.

But every action or inaction does not always have to correspond with the taking of poison either. Again this this is someone trying to tell you what to do by drawing on the disgust urge. And this is the problem I have with that quote.

The disgust urge can be seen as a primal urge that developed in us before we even were humans.

This is contrasted by what could be called a group morality and has been discussed a lot in this post. At it's best we could call it a communitarian morality. At it's worst a totalitarian tribal morality. We have seen an upsetting emergence of this in recent times on both sides of the political debate.

And these two types of morality can be seen as contrasting with a morality based upon personal liberty, at its best a morality of individual freedom, at it's worst the morality of unchecked hedonism.

But I hope we can just keep in our mind the reason why morality sucks, and that is when we forget it's core and roots are in our humanity. For those religious types or those who find solace in the ideas of the extreme right or left they will find this hard to swallow. 

But for the rest of us please try and remember...

Morality is just advice for good living constantly negotiated by humans for humans.

(and if God exists he does not give a toss what we do)