Someone can say “don’t be ashamed” in regards to some matter of abuse.
However, no one really means it.
The abused are to be distanced as quickly as possible. Of course, all manner of compassion can be expressed, but it’s of utter importance to dispose of the ‘shameful’ as quickly as possible.
The ‘shame-ful’ are the lowest class of ‘being’, so much so as to be quickly encouraged to engage in socially acceptable expressions of discontent, or “get the fuck out”.
Society will even elevate the most afflicted to glory and riches, if they are pretty enough. Create whole industries around the successful ‘shame-ful’
Kurt Cobain was pretty enough to be such a one.
To finally ‘redeem’ the shameful, to give them a path of redemption. As long as, of course, they agreed to being “angry”.
Angry is socially acceptable.
Shame is not.
One can test it out, by the way. Just listen to a rape victim speak on TED. This works best if the woman is ugly, or even better if the victim is an ugly man.
One can feel the shame, and just how quickly one’s psyche discards them.
Which, is probably the difference between full actual freedom and basic freedom; Richard never gives up when someone engages him. Even when he would rather be watching paint dry!
The years he spent engaging with the “trolls” , doesn’t this just stop one in the middle of the road?
Indeed, shame is a very particular feeling. It’s the very last thing anyone wants to admit to.
To be ‘ashamed’, and then encounter Richard?
I think I am finally starting to understand what @claudiu experienced when he felt Richard was insane.
It’s beyond comprehension that Richard has no favourites. The “can’t switch it off” aspect of actually liking one’s fellow human beings.
Utter madness! Don’t you know we are the scum on the shoes of the least esteemed?
One can see the social castigation of the ‘shame-ful’ in one of Annie Lennox’s songs
“Sometimes the greatest coward can hurt the most ferociously”
The coward is the ‘shame-ful’
Because shame is to be that broken mirror, and the avenues which are acceptable are primarily rage of sorrow, what better way to prove one exists but to hurt oneself and others?
In all sorts of ways, shame is avoided being addressed directly.
My father, and two of my brothers where so completely ashamed that they killed themselves. Either directly and overtly, or discretely via illness.
I was always convinced that my father’s cancer was psycho-somatic manifestation. It was only when he was months away from death that he had let my mother know that he had been raped by two men when he was 12. It was only weeks before his death he recounted his misdealings with the brother 1 down from me.
He never addressed the misdealings with myself.
Shame has been my constant companion for 47 years.
What is bringing this out is the renewed reading of Richards journal, and noticing the constant voice in my head which berates me 24/7. Because shame is fundamentally unacceptable, one must as a necessity, turn it into guilt. From guilt, one must blame (oneself and others), from blame, one can be angry. From anger, one can be seen as someone. One can feel there is meaning.
It’s perhaps precisely because the timing is right, that you are here.
There is indeed a way we can both find happiness. By acknowledging that society never had a solution for us -the ‘shame-ful’ - we too can go into the madness of being happy and harmless!
Indeed, to broaden this statement, and to allow more understanding;
One can feel shame for how one looks. Yet, it was precisely the instinctual drive, that is behind the very ‘shame’ itself, that is behind the reproductive drive that blindly produces those deemed ‘ugly’.
And so it is that individuals who cross any moral boundaries, should be ‘ashamed’ of themselves.
There is no higher condemnation than to fundamentally be ashamed. To be the very the reflection of blind nature, is to be the very lowest of the low.
Whatever the case, any reminder that blind nature’s ‘self’ is not what it cracks itself up to be is met with the “final boss” of the instinctual program; you do not exist really, and ‘you’ will not remind ‘us’ that we don’t either!
Which is of course, Buddhism. Deny ‘one’s’ own existence, to ensure ‘existance’.
I didn’t understand a lot of what he was writing at first. A lot of things didn’t compute.
I can see in myself than unwillingness to want to let go of my hate for humanity. Like my contempt for our species is so righteous and just…
The traumas that we go through and those of our families and friends, those closest to us, have such rippling affects. So much of our lives spent ill equipped to deal with the hurt.
The berating oneself, it is such a norm to me, I don’t even notice it often, like auto pilot, my personal default. Trying to be naive and friendly with myself, it is tricky, right?
I know I don’t have anyone to blame for my hurts. Those that hurt me, they themselves were victims of conditions out of their control, experiences that moulded them. I can see I am angry that I don’t have a scapegoat for my anger. I know I don’t need it but I cling to that anger still.
I seek punishment and vengeance upon them…I only really realised this recently. I hadn’t formed the clarity of thought to actually understand the implications of this. There is no peace in this route.
Yes, this is what I really started to actually notice, the constant tone in my inner dialogue. People close to me would say “you are so hard on yourself”, but I didn’t know what they meant. It all seemed so normal and rational. It seemed to be a fact that I was deficient in whatever way I was thinking of myself, so it seemed to me that others were just being “nice” saying I was a great guy or whatever.
It’s quite subtle though. It’s almost a “sub-thought” reaction. There has never been an overt “you stupid idiot” sorta self talk. It’s more the pre-thought selection process of what is thought about.
So the content itself forms the “being hard on oneself”, rather than any overt self-castigation.
For example, my taxes don’t get done. I have the inner “rebellion” and the inner “you need to do them” , both will swirl around. Neither are wrong, I do factually rebel, and I do factually have to do them.
So that goes on for years. What I am realising is this has been the way I punish myself. It’s really insidious. On both sides of the “facts” neither is incorrect. Both are facts. So it goes into the combined “you must sort your life out” nebulous basket of ineffective “actualist inspired-but not actualism” habits.
I am getting an accountant now.
What actually helped, ironically, was box jellyfish, scorpions, and disease carrying mosquitos.
I was thinking of escaping to the topics in the Philippines. Whilst investigating it, I discovered just how hard it is to live there. A wave of appreciation of just how good I have it in Perth, clicked something over.
The habit of escaping was always there, but usually a woman was involved. The action of just thinking about escaping without that motivation, seemed to bring a clarity that desire would normally have pasted over with blindness.
In other news, I had the most vivid “flying” dreams of my life last night. I was convinced I was awake.
My fingers in the dream were resting on the edge of a wall, and I said to myself “you hold on too tightly to this world”. Then I was flying. No effort, no weird struggling, or swimming. Just flying.
I’ve been been dreaming every night for a couple of months now.
I always took it to be a good sign that something is happening when there are a lot of dreams at night.
Before that happened in the dream, there was the huge salamander like Godzilla creature, whom I knew that anyone who looks at him dies, I dodged him for a while before laying down on the grass with my back to him, looking at some flowers laying in my hand. Then I noticed my fingers on the wall, and said “you hold on to this world too tightly”.
Around 42:12 Dr Krashen talks about the “affective barrier” in speaking in someone else’s language. How to speak with their accent, is almost an insult. It’s about belonging to the group.
I was reading old posts on the DhO when I was a swinging heavily between the Buddhist inspired practices and this weird “actualism” thingy.
I was embarrassed to read myself. Indeed, even in the privacy of my own home, I cringed when I picked up a 12 year old journal which had exactly the same insights as I have had recently.
So much of success in anything is about what side of the “group” I see myself to be. Am I in the group? Am I not?
Actualism isn’t rely that different to learning a language. Everything is strange. I am not one of them. The “affective barrier” is strong.
Tonight, I found my “singing voice”. Resurrecting a song and melody I had created 27 years ago. I stopped trying to be someone else.
I even made up a new verse for the song;
“They treat you like it’s a sin to be alive,
Make you out what they want when you die,
Stick with it now, we are not done yet,
Head in the clouds,
It’s a breaking set”
It seems like the way “ego” entitlement etc works is as a defence mechanism.
The more shame, the more narcissist traits (which is what psychology says), but the kicker is those who most need to get to that root of shame are the least capable, precisely because of the coping mechanism of a huge narcissistic ego.
I am of course, talking about me. I see it in others of course.
I had to block a meth-addict “friend” a while back precisely because of her huge impenetrable ego.
The real world view is that it’s only those at the “top” that have these huge egos with the intrinsic entitlement.
It’s just as much on the other end of the scale too.
Digging so much into my early 20s obsession with Kurt, and having deconstructed so much of the halo around him, simply by learning more, I see so much of my own narcissistic defence.
I try to take on the whole world. As if “they” are the ones who can stop the mayhem.
Busting bubbles isn’t a great idea without pure intent. At the very least, some solid self interest.
