Hi Sonya,
Welcome back to the forum.
If your self-respect allows, I would like to make one or two comments on what you wrote. I appears you are making good progress regarding your problem No. 2 and meet your fear of failing head-on – and you are succeeding. It’s really the only way to deal with such fear – look at it without blinking, so to speak, and you notice that its intensity will diminish right away, and then you can proceed to do what you want to do.
No. 1 is more complex. First of all, you will perhaps be relieved to learn that every single feeling being deep down feels that there is something wrong with ‘being’ here, with being ‘me’. The reason is that ‘I’ as a feeling being am an impostor, a fraud, an alien entity, having taken charge over your flesh-and-blood body. This feeling of something being wrong with ‘you’ will not disappear except in a PCE or when actually free.
What you can do is to diminish the strength and influence of ‘me’ in your daily life by enjoying and appreciating being here and thus reduce the identity-enhancing ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feelings and increase the identity-diminishing happy and harmless feelings.
I don’t know how much you read of Richard’s writing, or how much you are interested to read – I can post some quotes here and you let me know if that is explanatory and beneficial for you.
Richard: ‘Being a ‘self’ is because the only way into this world of people, things and events is via the human spermatozoa fertilising the human ova … thus every human being is endowed, by blind nature, with the basic instinctual passions of fear and aggression and nurture and desire. Thus ‘I’ am the end-point of myriads of survivors passing on their genes. ‘I’ am the product of the ‘success story’ of blind nature’s fear and aggression and nurture and desire. Being born of the biologically inherited instincts genetically encoded in the germ cells of the spermatozoa and the ova, ‘I’ am – genetically – umpteen tens of thousands of years old … ‘my’ origins are lost in the mists of pre-history. ‘I’ am so anciently old that ‘I’ may well have always existed … carried along on the reproductive cell-line, over countless millennia, from generation to generation. And ‘I’ am thus passed on into an inconceivably open-ended and hereditably transmissible future.
In other words: ‘I’ am fear and fear is ‘me’ and ‘I’ am aggression and aggression is ‘me’ and ‘I’ am nurture and nurture is ‘me’ and ‘I’ am desire and desire is ‘me’.
The instinctual passions are the very energy source of the rudimentary animal self (…)’. [emphases added]. (Richard, Homepage).
Richard: Yes, the sense of identity (‘I’ and ‘me’ or ‘self’ and ‘Self’ or ‘ego’ and ‘soul’ or ‘aham’ and ‘atman’ and so on) is the spanner in the works. I fail to see how anybody could even contemplate ridding this body of its alien entity without a clear and distinct knowledge of the ultimate goal. This is why I stress the importance of remembering one of your PCE’s (that all people have had at least once in their lives) and avoiding the cultural interpretations of the experience based upon the narcissistic tendency for the instinctual survival of ‘self’ in some (metaphysical) shape or form. Hence my exposé of the altered state of consciousness known as enlightenment. (Richard, AF List, No. 4, 26 Jan 1999).
Richard: I was born in Australia, of an English/ Scottish Hong Kong-born father and an English/English Australia-born mother. With this British background, I was enculturated into believing that I was, literally, an Australian citizen … but with British blood. Now, blood is blood … there is no such ‘thing’ as an ‘Australian’, an ‘American’, a ‘German’, a ‘Japanese’ and so on. Thus the wars and the suicides – the blood shed and the tears shed – are precipitated because of the absurdity of identification … is not all this acculturation ridiculous! However, as an infant, a child, a youth and then a man, I was so programmed as to be unable to discriminate fact from fiction. I had no terms of reference that I could use as a standard to determine which was which, as every single human being on this planet was not simply a flesh and blood body … but similarly conditioned into being an ‘ethnic’ human being.
Thus I bought the whole package. Hook, line and sinker.
As I slowly started to unravel the mess that humankind was deeply mired in by unravelling it in me, I discovered a second layer under ‘my’ acculturated ethnicity … ‘I’ was brainwashed into being a ‘man’ and not simply a flesh and blood male body. Under the enculturated layers lies a further identity … the genetically-inherited animal ‘self’. It took me years and years of exploration and discovery to find out that ‘I’ was a ‘me’ – a ‘being’ – and not simply a flesh and blood body. By identification as ‘me’, a psychological/ psychic entity was able to ‘possess’ this body. It is not unlike those Christians who are said to be possessed by an evil entity and require exorcism. Only this ‘possession’ was called being normal. Therefore, every human being is thus possessed by an ‘alien entity’ … I discovered that a ‘walk-in’ was in control of this body and that this ‘walk-in’ was ‘me’.
So, superficially there is a composite conditioned social identity that encompasses:
- A vocational identity as ‘employee’/‘employer’, ‘worker’/‘pensioner’, ‘junior/‘senior’ and so on.
- A national identity as ‘English’, ‘American’, ‘Australian’ and etcetera.
- A racial identity as ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘brown’ or whatever.
- A religious/spiritual identity as a ‘Hindu’, a ‘Muslim’, a ‘Christian’, a ‘Buddhist’ ad infinitum.
- A ideological identity as a ‘Capitalist’, a ‘Communist’, a ‘Monarchist’, a ‘Fascist’ and etcetera.
- A political identity as a ‘Democrat’, a ‘Tory’, a ‘Republican’, a ‘Liberal’ and all the rest.
- A family identity as ‘son’/‘daughter’, ‘brother’/‘sister’, ‘father’/‘mother’ and the whole raft of relatives.
- A gender identity as ‘boy’/‘girl’, ‘man’/‘woman’.
These are related to roles, rank, positions, station, status, class, age, gender … the whole organisation of hierarchical control. But behind all that – underlying all socialised classifications – is the persistent feeling of being an identity inhabiting the body: an affective ‘entity’ as in a deep, abiding and profound feeling of being an occupant, a tenant, a squatter or a phantom hiding behind a façade, a mask, a persona; as a subjective emotional psychological ‘self’ and/or a passionate psychic ‘being’ (‘I’ as ego and ‘me’ as soul) inhabiting the psyche; a deep feeling of being a ‘spirit’; a consciousness of the immanence of ‘presence’ (which exists immortally); an awareness of being an autological ‘being’ … the realisation of ‘Being’ itself. In other words: everything you think, feel and instinctually know yourself to be.
Your feeling of being – the real ‘me’ – is evidenced when one says: ‘But what about me, nobody loves me for me’. For a woman it may be: ‘You only want me for my body … and not for me’. For a man it may be: ‘You only want me for my money … and not for me’. For a child it may be: ‘You only want to be my friend because of my toys (or sweets or whatever)’. That deep feeling of ‘me’ – that ‘being’ itself – is at the core of identity. (Richard, AF List, No. 12a, 28 Jan 1999)
Cheers Vineeto