I have yet to come across anyone in this lifetime who did not feel that they were extraordinary. From plumbers to cops, from judges to homeless criminals…everyone’s story is the story they like best.
Fortunately or unfortunately – whichever way you want to look at it –we as human beings are obssessed with ourselves. The most amazing thing I find is that people with the most basic lives still have the ability to see others as less important. I was lucky enough to wake up the other morning and realize just how ordinary I was.
Sometimes it seems as though I think about sex way too much. The ironic thing is, that when I stop thinking about sex I wonder where my sex drive went. I can have both of these thoughts during the same day and believe that both of them are correct. Not only that, but I will do the same thing with food, exercise, money, or just about any of the other things that life requires.
The fact that I can be on both sides of the debate that takes place in my own mind would ordinarily lend to the idea that I have schizophrenia. The reason that doesn’t take place is because the rest of the world appears to be in the same unfortunate boat. What is this split that we as humanity are suffering from? I mean, doesn’t it make sense that one should just be able to have a thought, follow through with that thought, and get on to the next thought? How is it possible that an individual can be on more than one side of a debate in his or her own mind? The unfortunate answer is we are not individuals. The word individual implies an “undividedness.” But I have yet in this lifetime to meet anyone who is not divided against themselves. When this behavior is taken to an extreme people are medicated, hospitalized, or placed in therapy. The problem is, who said that the therapist themself was not divided?
Having worked in the mental health field for many years and being on both sides of a locked therapeutic door, I say from my own experience that those who we believe have our best interests at heart do not have the ability to do so. In other words, a 350-pound chain smoking psychologist is undoubtably more screwed up than any patient she sees. Now she may say that she is wearing her psychologist hat and that the way she feels personally doesn’t show in her treatment of clients, but it takes very little intelligence to realize that is untrue. Her fat miserable ass is going to see the world through her fat miserable eyes and she is going to make recommendations based on how she feels.
Since the day we are born, society begins to put ideas in our minds. They treat these ideas as though they are the “truth” and then begin to shove those ideas down our throats even before for we begin to speak. We are given names, nationalities, religions, families, towns, beliefs and all sorts of other nonsense and told this is who we are. Underneath all of that is a silent knowing, an animal instinct which humanity has not trusted for millennia.
Psychologists and psychiatrists are your new priests. They are your moralists and your politicians. They believe in an ideal which is unachievable and has never been achieved by humanity. And when placed against the ideal there is not a human being alive who does not fall short. It is a nonexistent set of ideas lending toward a perfect human being. Sigmund Freud said that the best humanity can hope for is that we can take man from a state of abnormal unhappiness and bring him to a place of normal unhappiness.
Here comes the point. We as human beings spend a lot of time and a lot of energy trying to adjust to an abnormal society. It is always the individual that is questioned and never the society itself and this creates a misery and an unneeded easiness inside of us as people. The only way I can see to move toward a direction of real freedom is to undivide one’s self and return to that state of quiet knowing. Otherwise we are forced to just chase our tails and to live forever underneath the weight of other peoples control.
