Hi pongo,

For a moment forget your past. If you woke up with amnesia and looked around, what would you find? You would find a beautiful wife and daughter, a nice home and a (yes, tedious) job. You would think “GREAT!” So let’s start there.

Everyday cast about for a less tedious job. But don’t pressure yourself. Enjoy the job you have because you know it’ll be temporary.

Every Friday night have Date Night with your wife. Every Saturday have Family Day with your family. And every Sunday Renew Your Spirit. Yes, I’m telling you to join a religious/spiritual community.

Just do those things and see what happens.

Blessings,

Inky

Hi pongo,

Reading your story and taking into account some esoteric (astrological to be honest) concepts (as to my level of knowledge) you seem to be in an vicious circle of ‘moving on from bullying and stagnation’ to ‘breaking the rules’ to ‘enforced back into stagnation by brutal force’.
Did you run upon this website called tiny BUDDHA by accident or the title attracted you somehow?
I know it sounds counterintuitive given that you constantly feel lonely, but, have you ever had any thoughts on spending some time of seclusion, for example in Indian ashram or anything like vipassana meditation?
If you don’t find meaning in our short and terminal existence for yourself, at least now you owe your wellbeing it to your daughter.
I’m curious of your thoughts

Pongo

1) The most important thing you can do to help your daughter is to help yourself. You will play a significant role in influencing who she becomes whether you want to or not. Understanding how your father’s past contributed to him becoming who he was and how your past has lead you down the path you have walked can give you a great deal of the wisdom needed to help raise your daughter and steer her down the right paths. We have far less control over what we communicate to each other than our conscious minds are aware of. The best way to communicate the right things to your daughter is to understand them yourself.

2) A good psychotherapist can be an enormous help in understanding yourself. Unfortunately, not all of them are good, so don’t feel like you can’t doctor shop when looking for a good therapist.

3) We all live our lives in what can be called the “theater of the mind”. In that theater you are the writer, set designer, protagonist, and you create the entire cast. The “self” you believe yourself to be is not who you truly are, but merely the main character created by the mind in this drama of you and it goes by the handle of “ego”. The mind creates the ego, and then identifies with it as self, forgetting that it is something it invented. This is often disparaged in spiritual circles, but I believe it is a necessary thing for us to experience life in a close and personal way (which you have). However, when you come to understand this, it becomes easier to not take this ego so personally, and to look at it with the mind with some degree of objectivity.
Since you are on a site called “Tiny Buddha” I would recommend reading up on the Buddha’s concept of “Anatta” or no-self. It is subtle, and I am not sure anyone truly understands it, but contemplating it does help the mind see beyond its fixation of the ego as “self”. I doubt you would lose the ego, but you might develop the ability to look inward (insight) with a better degree of objectivity. The mind is fully capable of examining its own creation with some degree of objectivity, it just needs to see it as such first. Also, key here is looking inward with an eye toward understand the ego (and the theater for that matter) rather than judging and condemning. The more we cast judgment on something, the more the mind paints it as we see it rather then what it is.
If you are interested in the “theater of the mind”, I would also recommend this guy, http://robertberezin.com/.

the sensory inputs were not real but were real to him, so in a sense this place that we call reality is not much different

Certainly the universe each of us live in (our theater) is the one created by our minds. It get’s its digital input from the firing or non-firing of neurons, and based on that data, and previous data driven experiences, it creates the holographic reality in our mind where we experience our lives. Yet most still believe in materialism, that there is an independent physical universe made of matter or “stuff” that is “real” and generating the physical phenomenon that feed our senses. However, over the last century, cosmology and physics have pretty much moved away from this view. Physics originally created materialism, but general relativity and quantum mechanics have since moved modern science away from it. The physical world “out there” can no longer be separated from the observing mind “in here”, the two are most likely, in fact, inseparable. So the metaphor of the matrix may fit a lot better then we think. Only there is no race of machines creating it, we all create it together. We and the universe all arise from the same universal consciousness, drawing our information from it and feed our experiences back into it. There is no true separation between me and the universe, and no true separation between each other. As they say, “all is one”.

I like rambling. Rambling is often how some of the best points are arrived at.

Scientists have been searching for the elementary building blocks of “reality” for a long time. Each time they think they get to the smallest, they start looking for and eventually find something a bit smaller yet. They thought that an electron is an “elementary particle” and that it cannot be divided into anything smaller, then someone discovered that under certain circumstances perhaps you can.
http://www.nature.com/news/not-quite-so-elementary-my-dear-electron-1.10471
Perhaps more interesting is that the electron may not even be there at all, until you go to look for it. It is not until you ask the universe where the particle is that it obligingly pops it into existence as an electron. (Google double slit experiment if you are interested).
Until then, only the potential for it to exist as a particle is there, and by there is meant, everywhere. Although it is far more probable to appear in certain places than others, the potential for it to appear anywhere in the universe is, though exceedingly small, never the less, non-zero. They say it is “non-localized” until you go to observer it. Or another way to look at it is that until you look for the electron and cause it to appear as a particle, it is as big as the universe itself…perhaps infinitely big. So the questions becomes, when scientist “discover” smaller and smaller particles, are they finding particles that are already there, or are they bringing them into existence by going to look for them. And if the latter is the case, will the universe simply continue to create smaller and smaller particles for science to discover for as long as we continue to look closer and closer.

Some say that “all is one” and that we are simply the universe’s way of looking at itself. Some say that physical reality is only a product of conciseness, created on the fly, that the moon is not really there when no one is looking at it, and that we ourselves are a part of this universal consciousness as it dreams up the universe. Silly universe, of course it is going to find a particle there when it goes to look for it, it is the one putting it there. And as for those quantum super computers, they, just like us, and everything else, would be a creation of the universal consciousness, drawn from the same well as everything else that “exists”. So who is to say that just like us, they will not in fact be, “conscious”.

Dear John:

What an interesting and unique share. It makes me think, that indeed, you have an opportunity every day to do something you never did before; make something happen that did not happen before.

You can be a faithful husband. And you can proceed to be the good father you want to be.

Those neuropathways I mentioned, and you mentioned as well, those pathways recorded experiences of the past and those experiences, those pathways get triggered in the present, keeping the past alive that way. We have the very strong tendency to do the things we did before simply because those things are built into our brains.

What you did with the moisture droplets that got caught in the spider web, was something new, something not previously done and recorded in a neuropathway.

Our abilities to do something new is our hope when the same-old-same-old keeps us in dysfunction and distress.

For new things, new pathways!

anita