relationship with my own inner critic

And the critical accusation of time-wasting

Lost at sea with family.

Trying to fathom the depths of broken relation-ships.

Trying to build a healthier relationship with my own inner critic.

It's a relationship with my self, and my self-deflections.

Ahh, but there's a subtle trick, for there is more than one self in The Self.

There are aspects and angles of sub-personalities, who speak among themselves, just below the level of conscious awareness, in a background noise that's mostly called the “monkey mind” chatter-box.

I've been hard on myself again, but not as hard as it used to be.

I been subtly self-sabotaging myself, but not as extremely as I used to.

I've been learning how to let my self be, to accept that some times, I don't feel so well, so deep, so healed, so vibrant, so wide awake.

Sometimes lately, I've gotten into a habit of watching a film in the evening.

It's a reprogramming for me, because a little voice in the mind has always criticised screen-watching in general.

It's gotta come from my dad originally.

It's the idea that watching a screen is not real, is not work, is not gonna improve my life or anyone's life, for that matter.

It's the critical accusation of time-wasting.

I've got the same conditioning around reading books, as if the reading of books is an avoidance of real work, of the material necessity to work in the material world.

Maybe many will laugh at the ridiculousness of these statements.

Certainly, I find it hard to see how such harsh generalisations can have lodged so deeply into my mind.

But that is the nature of youthful deference to parental influence.

My dad may never have even said a word against books and reading, or TV and watching films. It may have been just an attitude that I picked up on, a shrug or a grunt, a feeling or an unspoken thought-projection.

Perhaps I overheard some discussion between my parents.

Perhaps it was a judgement made against my elder siblings, which I inherited and internalised as normalised social behaviour.

I was chatting briefly with my life-partner, Tara, about this, and her response was so simple and direct; my dad used to watch the TV full-blast, anytime he felt like it, with total control over the remote-control, any amount of sports, of snooker, of dumb-ass quiz-shows, or the news.

It's the conflicting commands which cause the commotions.

I learned to melt into the background, to subdue my feelings in favour of avoiding conflict with my dad, an in-built loyalty to the ideas of honouring parenthood, even when it's un-fair, even when it's domineering.

So, here I am at 49 years old, still conflicted, still bouncing from pillar to post, still adhering to impulses which I take for granted, as if frozen images of my father and mother are the bedrock of the foundations of my character.

Last night, I watched a film, and then, instead of going to bed early, and being able to follow through with an aspiration to get up early, to tackle all the jobs I haven't yet finished, to tick off the items of my inner to-do lists, instead, I chose to stay up, to watch a series, to immerse my mind in abstraction and distraction, in the lure of an other's imagination, in fascination of the film-making process, to dream of directing my own films.

I got so tired, that I kept falling unconscious and rousing myself, to keep watching, hour after hour, until at 7 am, I finally mustered enough autonomy to finally go upstairs and climb into bed.

4 hours sleep, no remembering of dreams, and awakening to guilty feelings, of not serving family, but being foolish and impractical, of having wasted time, of being weak-willed in my avoidance of responsibility and respectability.

But, I recognise this morning, the wisdom of letting my self feel-guided, to let my Self feel like I felt as a teenager, to get down to the nitty-gritty of frozen-feelings, to un-earth the corpse of my dad's influence on my psychology.

And I know now, this morning, that I am making progress.

I have feelings of being unworthy of praise.

They are not truly logical beliefs.

Logic has had no real success in healing these feelings.

I am learning to re-member, to get to know my childhood Self, and to look again at the bedrock of my psycho-logical foundations of self-respect, and the lack of acceptance I felt as a child, which caused me to start smoking cigarettes, to start smoking marijuana, eventually, to drink alcohol, and eat mushrooms, to consume acid, and d.m.t. and whatever other “medicines” which would send me out into “other-worlds” of self-identity, seeking the escape from feeling unworthy and unwelcome in a mundane world.

I've awoken with a feeling, as if I'd been on a bender, as if I'd been drinking too much, or on a drug binge.

A guilty feeling.

So, today, I can reason with myself, and see that I am innocent, yet charged with guilty feelings, feelings which did not spawn from last night, but from my teenage years.

I'm so glad that I never got involved in taking powders, as so very many do.

I've never been tempted into taking pain-killers to numb me out.

My drug-taking has always been inspired by a desire to explore the subtle realms rather than simply to escape reality.

I much rather delve into difficult feelings than to try to avoid.

My drug taking has always been an endeavour to become more sensitive, rather than to become more numb.

My drug-taking has always been more in the frame of mind that seeks healing, and therefore views these naturally-occurring “drugs” as medicines.

I've been more interested in finding my center these days than finding compromises, more into meditation than medication.

Yet the urge to take wings and fly into otherworlds still persists, in my thoughts, in my imagination.

And thus, I've been judging watching films with the same guilt-mechanisms as I used to judge any other form of escapism.

I have story-addiction !

The same addiction that fuelled my social butterfly is now expressed with the 4th wall of virtual-realisms, of stories on screens, rather than real-life stories from real life conversations and observations.

From social butterfly to hermit-in-transit.

My dad was 30 years older than me.

I'm now older than my dad was when I was 15.

Instead of facing up to my dad's authority, I'm facing my own authority.

I'm a 49 year old, finally having a parental conversation with my inner-child, finally listening with compassion and empathy, to the child-self, who felt utterly mis-understood, mis-identified and pretty much discarded as a waste of time, a misfit, a missing piece of the family jigsaw picture.

Beware of The God.

Be aware of the Dog.

Be aware of the gods we make in our mind.

Be aware of the taboos which got installed in our preconscious womb.

Be aware that inside of every human, there is an operating system, which governs our self-reflection mechanisms.

I became a computer scientist, to try to understand how these psychological operating systems work. I went to a university, to learn what they had to teach. But I had my own specific questions

I had my own ideas, brought back from decades of psycho-nautical explorations of other dimensions.

I had ideas of how the 0 is female, and the 1 is male, of how the computer realms reflect our own creation.

“The Created, creating, in the image of our own Creation”.

These days, I accept the genius of a lot of what I have encoded into my awareness and imagination as possibly more realistic than the general artificial reality of the world around me, of the social-norms in which I used to feel inadequate.

I'm learning to speak to myself, with the same kind of encouragement and acceptance and delight with which I speak to my own children.

I am learning to take the advice that I can express so easily to others: to take it easy on yourself, to give yourself time to heal and to grow and to forgive, and to remember that life is a journey, not a test.

There's a layer of reality processing everything beneath the conscious mind, constantly comparing the present to the past.

I've got Bruce Springsteen singing in the earworms of my mind while writing this, “man, I'm just tired and bored of my self … can't start a fire without a spark … even if we're just dancing in the dark”, with musical chord-changes and melody riffs overlaying these contemplations.

Unconscious memories are like earworms in the instruction manual.

What causes certain songs to arise from the subconscious seas, to break through the surface waves with a sound track?

What causes certain moods to arise from the unconscious, to break through the surface waves of Time's ticking bombshells, to explode upon the shores, when and where the tides turn?

I've been learning to listen to the monkey-mind-chatter.

Watching films is actually a good way to do this.

Suspended dis-beliefs.

Allowing pennies to drop – “look after the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves”.

A pounding weight is lifting from off of my shoulders today, through d'elving-deep into the mines of my mind.

MinD the Gap. Bridge the Gap. Bring the Heart into the Gap, and nurture the bravery to exist, to choose look for Love where Love was lost.

There's a Gap of 30 years, between my age now, and my age as a fledgling bird who was just about to leave the nest and learn to fly, to follow the impetuous to find my own Way, to build my own life-nest.

There was a Gap of 30 years, between my self and my Father.

I am become my own iteration of The Father archetype.

Now that my Father has died, I am learning to allow my self to Rest in Peace, absolving myself from the purgatory of the Gap, for giving my Life-lived.

Life is for giving, how else can one come to feel accepted?

Why today? Why do these revelations finally lodge this morning?

I guess that these themes are going on for everyone, described by astrology, for those who look, but as predetermined as the newspaper headlines.

Issues around the father-figure, around male-domination, around children's absorption of parental judgements and of how these impressions linger on the dark side of the moon's emotional self-reflections.

I'm “coming to terms” with some of my own confusions about my writings, around why share such intimate insights around my own sub-stories.

I'm realising that these sub-stories are coming-up for everyone these days, and what I'm processing is a perspective upon what we are all processing:

the relation-ships evolving, and the personality catching-up with what the soul has in store, the unravelling of the ropes which bound our ancestors to the yoke of Sod's Law, to trudge through the generation-Gaps of compounded compression, the depressions, the survival mode of the Will-to-Live in the material world.

Fathoming the Ocean upon which our relation-ships either sink or swim.

An axiom: all outer relationships are reflections upon the sea of turmoil surrounding our relation-ships to Self.

The inner world is exfoliating, new growth from the compost toilets.

I'm gonna get on with some material labour now, in the out-side world, the sun has come out and there's plenty of chores to catch up with.

Here's a few bits from before, that randomly attune with what's written today.

Find your own centre, in the world you see yourself, and find strength from inside.

You don't have to convince anyone else, its enough to save your own sanity.

Others beliefs don't have to over power you, if you can accept that your own world view is as valid as anyone elses.

I keep returning to this insight/revelation :

Those who do not look for peace inside, will not find peace,

those who don't find peace, will look for an enemy to blame.

Eventually the blame game will cause all those who have no peace to find someone outside to wage war against.

The un peace full will wipe each other out.

Only the peacefull will remain at the end of this process.

Big statement of logic but the logic holds true,

especially regarding the military minded

Copied from facebook newsfeed...

"IMAGINED

Next time you look in the mirror,

Understand the

Relationship you

Choose to have

With your image.

Both your ego and

Your soul see the

Image in the mirror...

Your ego has a

Toxic relationship

With the image,

Looks for faults,

Compares the image to others.

The ego has

Anger issues and can be

So cruel to the image.

The ego looks

For judgements.

Your soul looks with love,

Looks straight into the eyes

And pierces the truth.

The soul just loves,

Doesn't look for signs of ageing,

Doesn't look for flaws,

Just sees love.

The soul looks

Beyond the image.

The image is in a

Codependent relationship with both your

Ego and

Your soul.

She looks outside of herself

For reassurance of

Who she is.

She believes everything

She feels from you.

You are her truth.

Next time you look in the mirror,

Choose the relationship

You want to have

With your image,

Because the mirror

Hears and feels everything,

The image

Becomes

What you

Believe her

To be,

And,

In reflection,

The voice you listen to

The most,

Becomes

The voice

That speaks

The loudest

Around you.

Is that image you,

Or is she just

All that you

Imagine

Her to be?

By Heather Lea"

and here's something just totally unexpected :

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2018844231708135