5 Principles for Keeping Life in Perspective

 These are some basic psychological realities that I wish I had assimilated long ago. I would have gladly traded my advanced degrees for an actual realization of these basic truths. I believe it would’ve made a real difference for me in how I operated in my life on a daily basis, including a significant reduction in needless mental suffering. Fortunately, as long as we’re alive and conscious, it’s not too late to grow and evolve.

These are taken from a book by Richard Carlson, Ph.D, and while it came out originally in 1997, some of these concepts have been articulated elsewhere by others, in some cases by ancient spiritual teachings. Carlson’s book expresses these concepts in very simple language that anyone can understand and relate to, no matter what their background. Some may seem so obvious that they feel simplistic when we read them, but the fact that we regularly fail to incorporate this wisdom suggests that these concepts need to be better absorbed.

I’m summarizing these principles here as briefly as I can, and have condensed them in order to present the highlights. Carlson chose the title “You Can Be Happy No Matter What”.  I wish he had used the phrase “at peace” instead of happy. Imo, what many of us think of as “being happy” comes and goes, but a sense of being at peace no matter what the trauma/drama du jour is, feels like more of a do-able thing.

Principle of Thought: Your thoughts are not “reality”, no matter how much you’ve convinced yourself that they are at any given moment. They are an attempt to interpret a given situation. Thoughts are cranked out by your mind every waking moment because that’s what our human minds do.  We think the way we do because of our own individual thought systems. Thought systems are complex, perfectly woven patterns of thought and past experiences, linked together into concepts, beliefs, expectations, and opinions. Your thought system uses past information to interpret the significance of everything that happens in your life. Our thought systems lead us to believe that we are realists and that the way we see life is the way life really is. (Buddhists know this as egoic mind, or conditioned mind).

Principle of Moods: Our moods change frequently. When you’re in a high mood, things look and feel good. When you’re in a low mood, things don’t look or feel good; you tend to start convincing yourself of what’s wrong with, well, pretty much anything. Or everything. And often, with the people in your life – and everyone else “out there”. Don’t make decisions about your life, try to solve problems, or tackle issues in a low mood. If there truly is an issue, it will still be there when you’re in a better place emotionally. We are never in one place emotionally for too long. Stop trying to “fix things” from a bad mood (which seems to be almost a compulsion for so many of us).

Principle of Separate Realities: It’s impossible for two human beings, no matter how much they have in common, to see things in precisely the same way. The nature of individual thought systems is such that no two people have the same thought system. Each of us sees life from our own separate reality, our own interpretation of life, our own frame of reference. We don’t question our own version of reality because to us, it always seems to be true. And people spend their lifetimes proving to themselves that their personal version of life is valid, realistic, and correct. We all do this; unaware until we bring this insight to mind.

Principle of Feelings: Our feelings tell us, with complete accuracy, when our thinking is dysfunctional. When we think, we immediately feel the effects of our thoughts; it happens in an instant. When we aren’t caught up in thoughts systems, our feelings remain peaceful, positive. This is the state of mind from which new, creative ideas evolve. Negative feelings let us know that we are seeing life in a distorted manner, and remind us to drop the thinking which is coming from a distorted and habitual frame of reference. Again: Don’t trust your feelings in a low mood. In a low mood, your thinking and therefore your feelings will always be distorted. When you’re feeling good, you are much better equipped to handle or solve any problem that arises.

The Principle of the Present Moment: The only way to experience genuine, lasting contentment, peace, satisfaction, or happiness is to learn to live your life in the present moment. When your attention is primarily in the present moment, the bulk of your experience comes from a place of wisdom rather than reactivity. Wisdom helps you keep your bearings and perspective. When your attention is mired in the past or future, it’s likely that your quality of life will diminish. This doesn’t mean that every moment of your life should (or ever will) be spent focused in this moment, only that it’s important that this happen more often than not. Many people live as if the past is the power running their lives. Your past, as it actually exists today, is nothing more than the thoughts you have about it.  When mind spins forward toward worries, concerns – or backwards toward regret and past hurts – we can actively observe our mind and make gentle mental adjustments, suggesting to ourselves that we bring our attention back to the present (“whoops, there I go again!”). The present is the only place our life actually exists.

A Culture of Unreality

 Our social milieu is delusional in so many ways, largely by design. Yet the toxic seepage from Bizarro World Academia into social media, schools, government, non-profit orgs, and overall culture cannot be overstated. People under 20 are probably the most influenced, but so are those in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and up.

If social media is any indication, what these cohorts have in common is an apparent total disconnect from nature, and from reality overall. They can’t tell the difference between fact and opinion. They’ve never learned to watch or question their own thoughts, thereby learning that much of what they think is fleeting and unreal. They never learned critical thinking or to challenge themselves.

They don’t have problem-solving skills because most of these coddled children never had to solve any. Someone always rushed in to do that for them. They didn’t get free play, especially outside, with kids of their own choosing. Unlike the baby boomer cohort, they never got to decide what to do with other kids, like make up games and the rules for those games, and together solve the problems that arose, or learn how to deal with the problematic kids. In person, face to face.

They didn’t build forts together with found materials, or play in the woods, pretending to be explorers or pioneers or Native Americans (all of which would now be considered very BAD, a violation of critical social justice theories and therefore akin to VIOLENCE). Besides, what woods in towns are even left now?

These kids played in adult-organized sports league teams, and in some cases there was no winning team or losing team, so the kids didn’t learn how to deal with disappointment and loss, or develop the qualities of good sportsmanship and behaving with dignity when things didn’t go your way.

So their earliest years, a critical time for free play and exploration, was given over to parent-arranged activities, with frequent adult input, and adult-selected playmates, adult-imposed solutions.

 These people as parents seem to have little if any grasp of developmental psychology or biology. They don’t seem to get how the imagination is a huge feature of early childhood, or the fact that the child’s brain is still actively forming and developing, and it will be years before they are capable of adult-level thinking. Years before the frontal cortex is finished at age 23-25.

There’s a reason children are not allowed to make their own legal and medical decisions. Why they’re not allowed to vote, operate complex machinery, or drive, even if they could do so without being able to reach the pedals.

When young children announce “I’m a horse”! Or "I'm Superman"! It doesn’t mean they’re expressing a wish to be implemented permanently for the rest of their lives, and for which they have no ability to even begin to comprehend what that means.

It’s NORMAL for young children to pretend they are someone they are not – it’s a key feature of the young child’s development. A little boy announcing he’s a girl, or Wonder Woman, or some other female, a little girl pretending she’s a boy because she likes to play with the cool “boy” stuff, is a normal developmental event. It does NOT mean the child is “trans”, or was “born in the wrong body.”

And what is the agenda of those asserting such nonsense, and hiding behind their professional titles to do so? Attention? Funding? Peer approval? Or something more insidious?

The acolytes of this cult of gender woo have wormed their way into every level of public life, especially public schools. The NGOs promoting this unproven theory have an open door to present this ludicrous storyline from the preschool level on up. They are misleading children, and confusing children with concepts that are beyond their ability to evaluate and question.

Young children generally believe adults without question, or try to, to the best of their abilities. Hence the push from these acolytes to access the youngest children possible.

Gender ideology, while claiming to support people “being who they are”, is in fact based on the oldest and most tired sex-based stereotypes of human behavior: Blue is for boys, pink is for girls. Toy trucks and tractors are for boys. Dolls and easy-bake ovens are for girls. Boys like building things. Girls like pretending to be mothers. Boys are strong and aggressive. Girls like to look pretty and cheer them on. And some of that can be seen in children’s play, but what seems to be ignored are all the kids who also like to play and pretend things outside these limited stereotypes.

But according to gender ideologists, any child not conforming to these limited, rigid sex-based stereotypes is possibly someone who should be evaluated for social “transition” as soon as possible. And of course what follows THAT? Medical transition, with puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones for life (and the attendant serious side effects, sterility, and inability to ever orgasm), and/or surgery. 

This. Is. Nuts.