The world s****, marriage s****, my spouse s****, so I may as well join them and be the same way?<p>I may as well join the selfish, do-whatever-I-want-as-long-as-I-feel-good pot of humanity.<p>There is no right or wrong way to live since the world is such a s*****y place anyway. I will wallow in my pity and join the ranks of the stinking pot of humanity.<p>If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. <p>Have I heard you correctly?<p>-------------------------------------------------------------------<p>#1. What are you doing to take care of yourself? Have you seen a doctor or individual counselor? Do you have friends or family to support you?<p>#2. What of your spiritual self? How do you or do you nurture this? <p>A book recommendation for you is "The Four Agreements" and/ or "The Mastery of Love" by don Miguel Ruiz<p>Here is a sample of his writing:<p> <blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>The Edifice of the Dream<p>Part 1: by don Miguel Ruiz<p>I want you to imagine that nothing is real. Our whole reality is just a dream, and the dream is just an illusion. Everything is made with the same material as the dream and even you are a dream. Everyone in your life is part of your dream. And the dream is changing all the time. <p>I want you to imagine playing with your dream and the edifice of your dream. The edifice of your dream looks solid and so real that you can't believe it isn't true and you forget that you are dreaming. I want you to see your whole life as an edifice created by your dreaming and that every belief you have is a brick in that edifice. Every emotion, every habit is a brick that gives form to the edifice of your dream. <p>Your creation is a masterpiece of art. I want you to see your dream, the whole edifice of your life from this point of view ? your whole belief system ? the structure of that edifice in the dream realm. What you have mastered and practiced in your life has created every brick; every belief, every concept, every emotion, every action and reaction, every habit. <p>By repeating and repeating these things it all looks more and more real, until you do the impossible - you change something formless and infinite into something that looks absolute and real. The structure of what you believe you are - your personality, your fears, your hopes, the image you have of yourself, the way you wish to be, the way you don't want to be, but believe that you are anyway, your language, your name, your identity, your family, the whole history of your life - this is what we call the human form. The human form is not a person, it is the edifice of your dream. <p>I want you to observe the whole drama of your life, the comedy, the great moments, the worse moments, being right or wrong, good or bad, a winner or loser, all your concepts about men, women, relationships, parenthood, childhood, friendships, everything. <p>I want you to see the totality of the edifice of the dream, your dream, and your whole creation. All of these concepts and beliefs are just bricks in the structure of the edifice of your human form. I want you to see for the first time in your life, that it's not real, that it is just smoke. It's just a pro-jection, an image, like a movie, like a hologram. All of your worries, all of your drama, all of your fears are just a result of the creation of that edifice of dreaming. And your dream is made by images, the interaction of light perceiving light. <p>You are light. The dream is just a reflection of you but it's not you. Light is the witness of life. Life is the force that creates your dream and you are life. You are formless. I want you to see the possibilities you have when you no longer are the slave of your own edifice, when you are no longer under the limitations of the bricks that create the your dream, when you are free of the beliefs that build what you believe you are. <p>I want you to imagine that you have the power to exchange the bricks of your edifice. Every brick is a belief, an emotion, a habit, a routine, a concept, an image. I want you to imagine all the possibilities that you have if you regain control over the bricks and are no longer the slave of those bricks. I want you to imagine that you have the power to undo your edifice, to unlearn every brick that constitutes your dream so you can awake and become your Godself. I want you to imagine that the force that creates everything is love.that every time that you undo a brick, that your power increases, your awareness increases and your love increases until you awake and become what you really are. <p>I want you to see your whole life as a construct, something that you use to build a dream - a dream that is fueled by beliefs, by concepts, by agreements. I want you to remember when you were born, when you were a baby. Before you started to dream, you perceived. First you perceived with your skin. You perceived the movements of your muscles. Your attention was in your skin, in your senses, in the movement of your muscles. <p>A newborn baby's nervous system is immature. Immature, meaning it still doesn't have all the needed information to function at full capacity. It doesn't recognize itself. A baby doesn't know how to walk. But its attention is in the muscles and it is perceiving every movement and it is learning by repetition and learning to coordinate every movement. <p>After a year when the body learns enough information, the child intends to walk. By practicing it learns to walk and run. It learns. It stores information. But the kind of knowledge it has is not the same kind of knowledge that the mind has about concepts. Without words it just knows. It still has to learn to communicate with the outside world where there are millions of biological machines dreaming already. <p>The dream already exists outside. Imagine that the outside dream is also created with concepts, an edifice with bricks. Humans create the whole society dream with all the values, the rules, the religions, the morals, etc. The whole society dream is created by the agreements between humans dreaming together, expressing their personal dreams and sharing and exchanging them. The dream already exists out there and that dream controls the humans. They don't know that they are living a dream. They don't have the awareness. <p>People teach us to dream the way they dream. They hook our attention and teach us word-by-word, sound-by-sound, and concept-by-concept. They give us bricks and we agree with those bricks and they help us build our dream. We practice and master the language and we agree with other people who dreamed before us. We didn't choose the meaning of any of our words, we didn't choose our beliefs either. We use the bricks that the big dream outside puts inside of our minds and we create our own personal dream from a copy of the outside dream. <p>People give us a name, an identity and we respond and we believe that's what we are. They teach us what we are, what we should be, little by little and we react, we rebel, but in the end, we agree and as soon as there is an agreement, we believe it. As soon as we believe it, it's a brick in the construction of our dream. And we practice and practice and practice until we master our dream. <p>The dream has the tendency to change all the time but because we are so powerful, we create a structure that looks rigid, and looks like it cannot change. We create all those limitations, all those boundaries, the whole structure of our dream. We learn what is possible and what is not possible and we believe it. We learn what is right or wrong or good or bad, which people are winners and losers, and we believe it. We agree and we base our whole dream on all those bricks, but every single brick, is just a concept, just an idea, just the material dreams are made of. <p>It is not true at all but we master it, and it is according to those beliefs that we rule our lives. We create so many dramas. We learn to be like the rest of the humans. They teach us that you should be right and make everybody else wrong. They teach us concepts about beauty and ugliness and we suffer because we believe them, because we are never going to be beautiful enough for our own concepts, for our own bricks. We are never going be smart enough for our own beliefs, we are never going be good enough for all those bricks that we use to build the edifice of our dream.
<hr></blockquote><p>Please take care of yourself.
Cali

Another:<p> <blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr>Perception and Emotion<p>by don Miguel Ruiz<p>Everything that we perceive creates an emotional reaction. Everything we look at, we "see" because light is bouncing off of each object and then that light enters our eyes. The retina processes that light and through chemical and electrical messages, a picture is produced in our brains. Once the picture is restructured and interpreted by the brain an emotional reaction results. When we see a sunset we feel joy. When we see someone hurt we feel upset. This is very obvious. What is not so obvious is that our retina acts as a mirror, reflecting the outside just as it is. When you look in a mirror, what we see looks real.we even perceive depth that doesn't really exist. A picture is produced in the mirror by the reflection of light off of the objects in front of it. The same happens in our eyes.we really do not "see" objects, we only "see" the light reflected off them. After the brain restructures the light into chemical and electrical signals a virtual reality is formed in our minds.a copy of what exists outside the eye. The problem is we have a belief system that judges everything we perceive, whereas a mirror just reflects what is present with no distortions. <p>We are born with the ability to react emotionally to everything that we see around us. The brain is a factory of emotions. The virtual reality we perceive outside of us is creating emotions inside of us all the time. All the emotions we experience existed before we knew what they were. before we put names to them. When you were a child, before you learned to speak, you felt. You had emotions. You did not know how to name them, but you experienced them. And you didn't have the need to explain your emotions. You didn't have the need to justify your emotions. You just felt and expressed your emotions. When you saw your mother, your father or your siblings you felt intense emotions for them. You didn't care about the names of your emotions. And nobody told you how to judge your emotions. Nobody told you if your emotions were right or wrong or good or bad.or if you should be feeling an emotion or not. <p>Emotions are produced by you the mirror and your brain. The virtual reality in your mind is not real but your reaction to it is real. We can also perceive the memories we have stored in our brains.however inaccurate or distorted they may be! You can close your eyes and your brain can go to sleep and dream. Your dreams are made by the memories of what you have already learned by perceiving light in your awake state. You never dream about something that you haven't dreamt while you are awake. Dreaming when the brain is sleeping is a continuation of your waking dream. The only difference between dreaming when you are awake and dreaming when your brain is sleeping is that when you are awake you perceive the frame (actual matter), and when you are sleeping the frame is gone. That is why you can dream at night of doing things not physically possible when you are awake. When your brain is sleeping, light from outside cannot enter your eyes and cannot create a virtual reality inside you. So while you are asleep you only have the information that is stored in your mind. Of course, these memories are also made from light since you perceived them with your eyes open at one time. You can perceive your dreams because it's your mind that is dreaming and your brain is interpreting your dream. Then you perceive your sleeping dream and you react emotionally to that dream. You are not connected during that time to the outside dream of society. It's just your personal dream. <p>Your emotions are normal. and the emotions that originate from your nervous system and your brain will depend on two things. One, on your actual perception and two, in the interpretation of what you are seeing based on your belief system. Just imagine that you could take your entire belief system out of your mind. Then if you looked at something, you would just feel pure emotion. But that emotion will shift as soon as your perception shifts. Let's say that something is happening that is threatening your life, like coming face to face with a tiger. Then your brain will create a normal emotion to protect you.it could be anger, fear, fight or flight or any kind of protective emotion. But as soon as the perception changes, the kind of emotion that the brain produces also changes. For example, upon closer inspection, what you thought was a tiger is really a big kitty cat. Then if our life or security is not threatened anymore, the brain will not need to create the emotion of fear in that moment. Instead it may create the emotion of happiness and love. You do not need to think or judge. It's action-reaction. <p>What amplifies and exaggerates our emotional reaction is our interpretation of what we are seeing based on our belief system. The belief system contains all our judgments and beliefs about how we think the world should be. It contains how we think people should act, what they should do and the way they should do it, and much more. It is our entire Book of Law regarding how our universe, our personal dream should function. Then our emotions are fine.they are perfectly normal. What is not normal is the way we manipulate our knowledge, our Book of Law, to create emotions that do not really relate to what is happening in the outside dream. That's how we create the whole drama that exists in our lives! Can you see how the outside dream, the dream of society is manipulated by each of us and our belief systems? <p>We give life to our belief system; we give life to our dream. And we feed that life with a certain kind of energy. The belief system requires energy to maintain itself. Emotions are energy. Certain dreams eat certain kinds of emotions. We create our entire belief system and then we react emotionally to that belief system. And that belief system wants more food. It is dependent on us. The belief system has the need to justify its beliefs, its knowledge. That knowledge creates as a response, the emotions that we learn to have in each different situation we encounter in our lives. We actually pattern our emotional responses and they become habitual when we practice them. <p>When a particular event occurs we judge it in certain way and we react emotionally in a certain way as a result. We learn to do this from other people; it's part of the dream of society. We learn to react the way our parents react, the way our brother or sisters react, the way people react on television, the way they react in church. We practice our reactions. They tell you, you should feel this way and that something is wrong with you if you don't feel this way. Then it's not really our fault to be the way we are.because we didn't have a choice. Society hooked our attention, and put the entire program in our minds and told us this is the truth. And we believed it, we agreed. Then we rule our life in that way, according to what we have learned. <p>So we see, it's normal for our brain to create emotions, but it's not normal to continue to create emotions when we are not perceiving that event anymore. Fear in itself for no reason is not normal, neither is fear that exists beyond the frightening event normal. <p>Anger out of proportion for an event is not normal. jealousy, envy, all emotions that we create for the drama of our life.are not normal, we over-react. And the reason why we over-react is because the belief system needs those emotions to survive and that is what we call evil. The belief system is just like a predator, like a vampire sucking your life force through emotions. It's living your life for you. Without awareness! <p>It's so clear when you imagine going back to the Middle Ages and see the way people lived. You can say "Hey, look at their belief system, it's eating them alive." All the drama of your life, all the fear, all the guilt, all the shame that you have is only feeding that predator that is controlling your life. It's easy to see their predator in action but you don't see yours. You think you are normal because in this society, everybody is just like you. You agree to be jealous if something happens, to be angry and create arguments. It's normal for us to react that way. For people 800 years ago it was normal to burn witches, not bathe and kill scientists who thought the world was round. That was normal behavior. Looking back we know that those beliefs are not true and that behavior is not normal. <p>It's normal to get angry if something happens to your child, to your father, to your beloved, to your property, to your car. But to carry that anger around for years because of your pride and your personal importance, this is not normal. It's not normal for you to live in conflict with your parents, with your children.to push away the people that you love just because you believe they should be a certain way. It's not normal to stay, in a relationship that is so abusive, that is going against yourself.just because of fear. <p>If someone comes here from 700 years into the future and sees the way you treat yourself. They might say, "Why do these people abuse themselves so badly? Why do they live their life with so much shame, with so much guilt? Why do they have to blame each other for everything and put their noses in everyone else's business?" We are so ready to judge people, to find them guilty, to gossip about them. And everybody's eating each other's emotional poison, and emotional garbage. Someone from the future might say, "Oh my God, what's going on with these people? They are not aware of what they are doing, they are evil." <p>So we can see there is nothing wrong with the frame of the dream. There is nothing wrong with our emotions. The problem is the belief system and its inherent lies. These lies cause us to create emotional reactions beyond what a situation would normally call for. The way we see things, our point of view is like looking at the world through a dirty cracked pair of glasses - distorted. If we clean our belief system (the glasses) our emotional reactions will be true to the situation and we won't be sending emotional poison to the ones we love. Awareness is the first step and telling yourself the truth is second. This all relates to the first agreement and being impeccable with the word.
<hr></blockquote>

Sounds VERY much like the movie The Matrix .... but also very thought provoking.<p>Kev

Remember what had to be pounded into our heads about not be able to teach those who are not yet willing to learn?<p>Bleeding is there now. We aren't going to be able to "teach" him anything. <p>He's only looking for those that will pat him on the back and tell him that they are happy for him right now.<p>Sad to say though...with his W also being involved in an A....who will put the children first and who is going to be there for either one of them when they come crashing down?

I hear you Miss Priss...<p>You can lead someone to water; you can't make 'em drink. (I'm a teacher... experience it everyday).<p>But I'm also an optimist... you never know what will 'reach' someone unless you try.<p>Cali

I think many of use here on the boards have had the type of feelings/desires that Bleeding has executed. So, in that sense, we can understand the pain and the reaction.<p>However, it is sad to "lose a soul" so to speak, to despair, when there is so much hope and support to be had here through the experiences and advice avsailable.<p>We all hope Bleeding will somehow find a way to come back to the straight raod