The World is A Prison
Seven years ago, this idea that the World was a prison became front and centre; it was then that I realised like a bolt from the blue that I had created my own environment and there was no escape unless I changed my central core-belief or schema. No amount of Goal setting, affirmation or subliminal programming was going to work while I held this core belief that was essentially "Me". This describes perfectly the concept of self-sabotage. I had set the plan and achieved it with the precision of a cybernetic servo mechanism first described by Norbert Weiner and made popular by the plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz in the acclaimed book Psychocybernetics.
I was first introduced by my father to the self-improvement industry, in the form of the late Paul J Meyer founder of SMI, in 1982. I was 23, and had just graduated from University with a bachelor of science majoring in Forestry, and was frustrated that in my eyes I wasn't ready or confident enough to be part of an adult world and all together to useless. One of the symptoms of Celiacs disease is late onset puberty and failure to thrive. So I was also small and unconfident within my peer group. The weed among Oaks. Generally a sorry example of a western economy male. The least likely to succeed.
I watched while various governments and their policies, in the infancy of my privileged era, interfered with my life through the destruction of the NZ Forest Service, the privatisation of the Electricity Department, the establishment of Wind Turbines above my home of 14 years in Ashhurst simultaneously while politicians meddled with the efficacy and intent of the ACC, that saw our family become statistics of poverty. Subjected to the whims of Government and derided by its twisted and selective, discriminatory maxims used to bludgeon the most vulnerable of a capitalist society.
Since that introduction to goal setting, I have been a student of many self-help writers. Eight years ago and four years after emigrating to Queensland and enduring yet more disappointment, I concluded that I was not like the writers of these books, that I was defective and destined for failure and a life of constant emotional pain and beyond help (That's 30 years of accumulated failure and pain). I reconciled myself to the concept that once I had successfully raised our last child I would be faced with homelessness as our income was below the poverty line and rents, as a result of a globally coordinated reflation strategy post-GFC, by the World Bank and the IMF where being raised alarmingly and had become seemingly inelastic.
In my opinion authors like the renowned and prolific business author Napoleon Hill, were already destined to succeed as they were born Type A personalities and had been blessed at birth. While I was to find out late in life that my slow growth, maturity and frailness were tied to the fact I was born with Celiac Disease - this explained lots (I was diagnosed by Biopsy in 2004 - and in the surprised words of the Surgeon "This patient even managed to graduate from University". I also have Osteoporosis that was diagnosed in late 2011 and being that I was a 53-year-old male at the time, this too is attributed to the very late diagnosis of Celiacs Disease.
It was then (1 Jan 2011) I threw in the towel and through an epiphany realised (By Googling) that the last 15 years since my family was destroyed by the revelation that my daughter, like my wife before her, had been sexually abused by her foster Grandfather; had been one of Martyrdom or more accurately, I had set my self up as a victim. I had created an environment where the chaos around me could explain my failure to reach my expectations and intrinsic potential. My failure to succeed materially was attributed to having to look after my wife and daughter who had been subjected to monstrous childhood abuse. We even ran away to live in another country and waste away out of site wallowing in self-pity, all the while keeping busy raising our boys. Meanwhile, my wife, released from the fear of coming face to face with her perpetrator and affected by a cocktail of drugs and alcohol became a stranger to me and our family and did as she pleased. All in a foreign country with no support. After all, ACC had unceremoniously cut us off after saying we would be covered in Australia and MSD doesn't pay that well especially when the exchange rate is $1.30.
As I mentioned it was seven years ago that I pieced the "Victim" (It's not possible to maintain the role of the victim once you have been revealed to yourself) and the "Earth is a prison" core belief together as the root cause of my unhappiness. That was the intellectual side of the discovery, however, more complicated to explain is the flash of awareness when the Ego simply is revealed as a mistake of interpretation.
That revelation turned up the obvious fact that all that surrounds us start's within before it is formed without, and the flash of insight to the beauty I was seeing out my window and had seen in my life as a Forester within the then aptly termed NZ Forest Service. It was then that I asked, "if all that is created started within then where did all things not created by man come from?"; as they had to, by law, have been created first within.
It was then that I realised that "I" was a self-created illusion and that I have now, by law, what I have created by my thoughts. You reap whatsoever you sow. That I can have whatever I can imagine, that all is as it should be at this moment, I am all I need to be and have all I need for now, without striving to be better as conception cannot be improved. The World is one big ball of abundance and we are each conceived not of man but of the Universe to be at birth, worthy of the presence of Kings. In the immortal words of the late Napolean Hill "Whatever the mind of man can conceive and can believe he can achieve."
It is a strange moment when you are free of the identity and aware of your body as a vessel from where you operate. A timeless thought in a finite physical form. The realisation that you are nothing but everything. That the past is an illusion as is the future neither are worthy of your time for more than a moment. Those emotional memories are subjective and irrelevant although fun to recall when they include others we are on this journey with. Now is where your attention must be so next time a driver makes a mistake, just as you will and meets with your conscious in the same moment smile, wave and thank them for giving you the chance to realise you are awake in the moment and not dwelling in the stale air of the past or the pointless fancy of the future. Your control every response when you are conscious, no one can push your buttons or harm you in this state.
Essentially you don't exist except in your constructed ego, your body may die, as will your memories but you will still exist to be conceived in form again just like in Michael Crichton's Westworld. A great author who was awake to the games of the powerful but unfortunately taken too soon. Just maybe conception is the time machine and the path to alternate physical experiences.
Don't be wooed by the dream of material wealth, it will take your life and lead you sleeping to the realisation of your dying breath that all you needed to do was Be. Don't be farmed by those who will gladly accept your life as theirs to plunder while you sleep hypnotised like a crayfish as they turn up the heat. The heat being the pursuit of never-ending economic growth that will always ensure you feel inadequate unless you are shaken from your slumber. Unfortunately, the only way I know to achieve this is through repeated mental pain and failure. I doubt that anyone coasting through their life will be able to join me, in that moment when you can see yourself from outside, looking back; as then you will be in the same place as I stand and you can be happy knowing that life is just semantics.
The semantics of i AM or SOIAMTHAT. Ponder it and then if you get it, you will be released to be like the wind, free for eternity. Flying with the Eagle, sensing its power and freedom or free to be the light that sparkles off the sea on a blue sky day. After all, we are just light congealed and organised into an immense cooperative cellular organism creating from the unceasing thoughts that are us. Sometimes we choose a thought and reveal it for all to see.