The evil of the century - The I and the self-flow: partners or enemies?
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An I that is healthy and smart witnesses the grandeur of existence. It knows that all human beings are like “children”, in the good sense of the word, “playing” on the theatre of time, buying, selling, establishing relationships with each other, enveloped in a sea of secrets that goes beyond the boundaries of your intellect’s comprehension.
An I that is healthy and wise guides its social schedule by having flexibility as a vital point, by having the ability to present its thoughts, instead of imposing them. Those who force their ideas, be it by using an exaggerated tone, on social pressure, financial pressure, excessive demands or opting for endless speeches, are not the authors of their own story, nor they have the ability to form thinkers, actually they form servants, passive, intimidated, submissive people.
There are lots of leaders who not even for once dignified the power that they had, because they weren’t able to release the intellectual potential of those who were led by them. They suffocate them and doesn’t supply enough oxygen for them to express their ideas, to be creative, proactive, entrepreneurs. They have the need to be the center of all. And nobody deserves the power they have if they happen to love it more than they love the people who they are leading.
An I that is self-aware, determined, a leader of its own in first place, in order to fulfill the role of leader to others. And, among all activities, a mature I applies an intelligence shock in the process of thought construction, conducted by this unconscious phenomena, which, in the self-flow, is the most important one. Let’s see.
The managerial I
These are people whose I has learned to manage their thoughts, to exercise the art of self-questioning. They release their imagination, they contemplate the self-flow movements, they are creative, inspired and they are also able to criticize their ideas, truths, beliefs.
They know that those who win without struggling, win without grandeur. So, they tear down the prison of the same old, they walk through spaces yet to be blazed, they are curious, they explore what’s beyond their own eyes but, at the same time, their I is mature enough to recycle and qualify their thoughts and mental images. They are aware that the self-flow phenomenon is a source of inspiration, entertainment and adventure, however they do not allow them to be dominated by it.
The managerial I performs a daily mental hygiene: it questions its haunting thoughts, it criticizes false beliefs and it determines, or strategically decides, the point that it wants to reach first; so, it uses a technique based on doubting, criticizing and determining.
The managerial I is free, light, loose, it looks at chaos as a creative opportunity, it has the resilience to use pain in order to build itself, it acknowledges mistakes, it apologizes and enchants people around, because it doesn’t have the neurotic need to be perfect. So, it can talk about its own tears, so its children and students can learn to cry about theirs. Because, one day, they will cry those.
The traveling or disconnected I
These are people who embark their I in all trips that are assembled by the self-flow, without promoting any sort of management. The emotional heaven and hell are very close to each other, to someone who has a disconnected I. These people have not lose their reality parameters, they are not amidst a psychotic break, but, since they travel throughout they own mind’s routes, they quickly shift between happy and stressful moments.
Since the traveling I doesn’t have any sort of management ability upon its own mind, depending on what spot of memory to which the self-flow anchors itself, people with this kind of I will be passive spectators of their thoughts, ideas, mental images and emotions, all built by this unconscious phenomenon.
People who have a disconnected or a traveling I live their lives plunged in their own psyche, thinking, imagining, fantasizing. They are so distracted and decentralized that when you talk to them for a couple of minutes, they don’t mind your words.
These people are not so uncommon, you even have geniuses with this sort of traveling I. But, because they are disconnected from reality, unfortunately they do not use their intellectual potential in a proper manner.
They are dreamers, but they lack the discipline to transform their dreams into reality. They are top-notch when it comes to speeches, but they aren’t productive. They love the applauses, but they don’t like to tune, carry and play the piano.
Lots of people have a disconnected I and at the same time they are affectionate, generous, calm, but often you can see that there is a case of egoism and a sort of egocentrism on the basis of their disconnection. They don’t care about the pain felt by others and, because of that, they don’t have useful measures to ease it. They are great when it comes to talking, but they take too much time to act. Learning the art of altruism and observation demands a sort of training that a disconnected I must perform on a daily basis.
Some students have such an intense Accelerated Thinking Syndrome, and they are so disconnected in classes, that I ask them to carry out the following technique in order to improve their focus and intellectual performance: elaborate, in their minds, a summary of what the teachers have been saying during the class and write it down quickly.
The floating I
The floating I, just like the disconnected I, doesn’t have an anchor, the safety, the stability and the clearness to know where it is and where it wants to go. It follows the random movements of the memory reading of the self-flow phenomenon. Not in even in an intuitive way it can orientate its ideas, thoughts, goals and projects.
People with a floating I doesn’t exercise their choosing ability. They don’t have the autonomy, nor their own ideas and intellectual guidelines. In one moment, the have an opinion; in the next one, when influenced by others or by the environment around them, they quickly change it. In one period, they dream of something; right next, when problems start heating things up, they give up and change their direction.
The floating I, due to its instability, destabilizes emotion itself, making it be volatile and floating. Because of this, people with this I are happy in a given moment and, in the following one, they are sad. In the morning, they feel motivated; in the evening, they are lacking energy; and, at night, they want to fall asleep because they have lost the “pike”. In one moment, they are affective; then, they become grumpy and even aggressive. Floating managers make their workers walk on quicksand. In some extreme cases, they make them neglect their spontaneity, creativity and the pleasure they experience by working in the company, because they just never know how the boss’s mood will be.
People with a floating I cause trouble in their own relationships, they upset the peace of mind and pleasure of their partners, children, friends.
Managing the mood and gaining emotional stability are two crucial goals for those who have a floating I.
The plastered I
These are people who cannot release the self-flow phenomenon and, because of that, they contract their own imagination and creativity. Its I is strict, closed, non-flexible. They have a great creative potential, but they are their own big punishers, they do not dream, they cannot inspire themselves, they are scared of being opened and think about other possibilities. They lived bored and they bore others.
A plastered I radically stands up for its political party, its convictions or its religion and, therefore, it doesn’t open room to respect what’s different. Those who are radical are not convinced about what they believe in, nor by their religion, because if they were they wouldn’t need to use pressure to express themselves. On the other hand, those who radically stand up for their atheism are emotionally immature, because they need to be coercive in order to underline their own convictions.
A plastered I is mentally robotized. It always wakes up the same way, it does the same complaints every day, it gives the same answers, has the same postures when facing the same problems. It’s a person imprisoned by routine. They have, sometimes, many reasons to be thankful for their lives, their work, children, but they just cover themselves with muddy complaints. Do you know somebody like that?
These people can even be successful on the “outside”, but they are miserable inside. Their biggest source of entertainment is affected, impoverished. Their I likes to anchor itself on killer windows which foster pessimism, dissatisfaction, irritability. Training the ability to change when it’s necessary, to think about other possibilities, having self-criticism, and acknowledging our own strictness are extremely wise decisions in order to remove our mental plaster.
The self-saboteur I
The self-saboteur I doesn’t manage the process of though construction in order to foster stability and emotional depth. As incredible as it looks, this type of I will go against freedom, it conspires against its joy de vivre, its calmness and social and professional success. People with a self-saboteur I are their own executioners. An I with these characteristics desperately needs to learn how to have a love affair with its qualities.
Thousands of overweight women have a self-saboteur I. They invest in dieting, they fight to drop weight and then, after so much effort, they achieve success. However, they do not keep their weight nor they get overjoyed with their victory, because the self-flow phenomenon anchors itself on killer windows, which produces self-punishment, and the fragile I subjects itself to these traumatic zones and, as a consequence, it doesn’t allow one to feel good, happy and it doesn’t enjoy being praised. Success makes them anxious. They start to sabot their diet, they start to eat compulsively. It’s as if they only feel alive when they’re punishing themselves. Often, they give up on their dreams halfway through.
The self-saboteur I doesn’t know how to give a management shock on the self-flow, which, in addition to self-punishment, carries on its back phobias, obsession, dependency, jealousy, envy, anger, self-flagellation.
A person who sabots his own emotional health lives scaring and tormenting himself with facts that have yet to happen, or grieves around problems that are already gone, regretting losses, failures, injustices.
An I that sabots its own happiness can be great to others, but it’s just awful to itself. It can be tolerant to their close ones and friends, but it’s just implacable to itself. It can give others a second chance when they are at fault, but it rarely gives itself a new opportunity.
One of the worst personality downsides of a self-saboteur I is self-charging. Since, unfortunately, most people have this sick characteristic, I’m going to reiterate what I’ve already said. One who demands too much from himself consumes the oxygen of his freedom, suffocates his creativity and, even worse, stimulates the memory’s automatic register, giving it the order to produce killer windows every time it fails, stumbles upon something, limps around or simply doesn’t meet its extremely high expectations.
An important warning: one of the most serious consequences of those who demand too much from themselves is to raise the requirement bar, which prevents them to relax, to feel accomplished and happy. Those who turn the little into something big are much more stable and healthier than those who need a lot to feel some crumbles of pleasure.
The self-saboteur I makes many successful professionals have a severe emotional failure. They sabot their vacations, weekends, holidays, their sleep and dreams.
The accelerated I
The accelerated I belongs to that vast group of people around the world, in all modern societies, from children to the elderly, who pack themselves with information, activities and concerns. And, as a consequence, they stimulate the self-flow phenomenon to produce thoughts in an unprecedented quickness, thus generating the Accelerated Thinking Syndrome.
The Accelerated Thinking Syndrome has become this century’s evil, generating an awful quality of life, perennial dissatisfaction, retraction of creativity, psychosomatic diseases, disruptions in interpersonal relationships and, above all, disruptions in the relation of the I with itself.
There aren’t multiple personalities
We should keep in mind that we can have several different stances of the I within the same personality. There are not multiple personalities, as some people, including workers of the psychology field, believe in. What you actually have is different housing kernels or memory platforms, where the self-flow and the I anchor themselves.
There are individuals who change their tone of voice and react in such a different way that it looks like there are two or more people living in the same brain. What actually happens is that, depending on the platform in which the self-flow is anchored to, the I feeds itself with information and experiences in order to produce thoughts and emotions and, therefore, it reveals characteristics of its own personality.
Some people are calm when they are anchored to a certain housing kernel; outside of it, they become stupid. There are people who are strong and confident in a given situation but, in some other, they become intimated as a child who has to face a beast. If the platforms are qualitatively very different from each other, the characteristic will also be.
The I can have several unhealthy postures
A person may have an accelerated I and, to aggravate their emotional health, has a plastered or a self-saboteur I as well, or one that is disconnected with the environment. In other words, in addition to being restless, agitated, that person is also strict, emotionally unstable and, at the same time, his worst enemy, his own executioner, he’s pessimistic and grumpy.
Even though the I’s stance reveals levels of creativity, maturity, resilience, and the ability to adapt to changes, in order to protect the psyche and to overcome conflicts, we cannot forget that, in psychiatry and psychology, nothing is immutable. The human psyche can go through a transformation process, particularly if the I recycles itself and becomes a builder of light window platforms, i.e., an edifier of new housing kernels inside the cerebral cortex.
One of the thesis that I support on the book The fascinating construction of the I is that, within a city’s metaphor, a human being doesn’t need to memorize all the city in a perfect way, one that includes bumpy streets, open sewers and traumatized neighborhoods, in order to have a decent life.
As in a physical city, if you build healthy housing kernels, it will be possible to have a pleasurable and acceptable life. If it wasn’t like that, the process of personality formation would be completely unfair. Children that were sexually abused, deprived of minimum life conditions, socially humiliated, mutilated in wars and terrorist attacks would not have the chance to have a free mind and healthy emotions.
In computers, we are gods, because we register and delete what we want at the moment we want; in human memory, it’s impossible to do the same. But this doesn’t mean that we are condemned to live with our psychic ills. We can fortify all the roles of the I already listed and, as a consequence, re-edit our memory and learn some tools, such as the DCD technique, the round-table of the I, the emotion’s protection, resilience, in order to assume the script of our story.
However, we can never forget that in psychiatry, psychology, sociology and education sciences there are no magic solutions. A new schedule is needed to create the housing kernels of the I. Daily educational exercises are necessary. We should always keep in mind this thesis: if society abandons us, solitude is treatable, but if we abandon ourselves, it’s incurable.