Day 163: Mistaking Obsession for Passion

This blog is a continuation to:
Day 155: Introduction – Starving Myself
Day 156: Wanting Passion and Purpose in Life

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have separated myself from passion and purpose in Life – where I have accepted and allowed myself to believe that I must go and find something outside of myself that I can add / attach to me, to be able to get a purpose and passion in Life, instead of seeing and realising that the drive as passion, as a purpose comes from within me, and is a matter of making a decision within myself – rather than finding the ‘one thing’ that will trigger an experience of purpose/passion

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have looked/sought for passion and purpose as an energetic experience one can attain, instead of seeing and realising that passion and purpose does not exist within the realm of ‘experience’ but is a decision one makes within oneself, to be engaged, to be driven and that no-one or nothing can ‘give’ this to self, only self can gift passion and purpose to self

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have seen myself as incapable of passion and purpose, where I have accepted and allowed myself to believe that ‘this is not for me’, that ‘passion and purpose is for other people’ – not seeing and realising that I had interpreted passion and purpose almost as if it was a genetic characteristic which allowed some people to experience themselves this way, while others were ‘less lucky’

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to ‘look out there’ to find something to be passionate and purposeful about – instead of looking at what is here as myself, to be passionate and purposeful about myself as a being as who I am, and to get to know myself passionately, intimately so that I may support myself in becoming the best possible version of myself and to within that, prepare the way to stand/live as an example so that we may change the world to become the best possible version it can be

I forgive myself that I haven’t accepted and allowed myself to embrace passion and purpose as myself, where I interpreted and perceived passion and purpose to be an experience outside of myself – instead of seeing and realising that passion and purpose are not experiences, but applications and so I forgive myself that I haven’t accepted and allowed myself to have considered applying passion and purpose in my life as myself, as a living expression – as a statement of who I am

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to have mistaken obsession with passion and purpose – where I believed that the nature of obsession as being part of one’s every day moment as always being there, present – was what passion and purpose is about – not seeing and realising that obsession is about being controlled while passion and purpose is about being in control as being the directive principle in one’s life

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself, within the belief that I am incapable of passion and purpose, have gone into the complete opposite polarity point as obsession, where I put myself in a position of constant and continuous mind pre-occupation, and believed this to be passion and purpose, while all I was doing was further confirm and integrate the belief that I am incapable of self-movement, as the nature of obsession being one of extreme limitation and rigidity

 

Day 161: Become an Image and be Treated as an Image

This blog is a continuation to:
Day 155: Introduction – Starving Myself
Day 156: Wanting Passion and Purpose in Life
Day 157: Generating an Eating Disorder – The Power of Thought - Part 1
Day 158: Generating an Eating Disorder - The Power of Images - Part 2
Day 159: Generating an Eating Disorder – The Power of Writing – Part 3
Day 160: Eating Disorders and Contradictions

An interesting dimension within eating disorders, is that of trying to become / attain a particular image. Every day you weigh yourself, everyday you look into the mirror and check: Am I there yet?

‘Be careful what you wish for’ is a point that I faced within ‘experimenting’ with eating disorders.

I believed that if I would look a certain way, that I’d be happy. That people would be nicer to me, that everything would just go ‘easy’ in my life. Was I in for disappointment…

The thing with trying to become a picture, is that the closer you get to being that picture – the more people start treating like you a picture. I was getting ‘negative’ attention more and more in town, would get harassed more easily when I would go out – even in my own hometown. I had always seen my hometown as a ‘safe’ place, nothing ever happens. But now the streets I had walked through pretty much every day of my life where nothing ever happened – suddenly became full of incidents and I was not as comfortable walking through them every day, especially when it was dark (when you can’t see people’s faces in the dark, that sense of ‘anonymity’ really gets people to say things I’m pretty sure they would not have said in daylight).

So I never really considered this point when I embarked in this project. I thought getting skinnier and prettier was going to be a ‘good thing’ – but now I was just being harassed and if did meet new people that were nice to me, their genuineness was questionable and these relationships would be very superficial and not last very long.

I mean, where are ‘skinny pretty girls’ portrayed? It’s in the magazines, it’s on tv, it’s on ads – and it all comes down to using sex to sell. They trust that the particular image is going to prompt a particular experience within the consumer (which is in essence a sexual one), which the consumer then hopefully, misguidedly, connects to the product/service – so that they go and buy it.

So obviously, if you live in a society that uses pictures to stimulate particular mind experiences and behaviour – if you’re then going to go and try and be that picture – those type of behaviours become part of the ‘package deal’. You want to become a picture? Fine – go for it, but then know you are going to have to deal with the repercussions as some very nasty behaviour coming your way because you’ve just given yourself and everyone else they okay to diminish you and reduce to a mere object, an image.

This is now also not very cool for those people who happen to look like the people in pictures – as they now get a lot of the same negative attention and not being taken seriously simply because of that one point. I mean, it’s gotten to a point where ‘pretty people’ go and get plastic surgery, not because they want to get prettier, but because they’re begging the surgeon to please make them uglier – so they can finally be rid of all the nastiness and be taken seriously as a person rather than only being considered for their looks (and where in some cases the surgeon then doesn’t want to do it because apparently it’s “wrong”).

So this is another one of the little realisations/insights I got while going through my experiment. How getting what you want is not always what you wanted because you didn’t take all dimensions/variables into consideration, how people are completely picture driven and that people can be very nasty. I’ve always had a general belief that people are ‘good’ – and this was one of the first times that random people, strangers acted really strange and almost demonic around me, which you know, is not cool, but in a way it was cool to go there and see what actually goes on within people’s minds and realise that hmmm, this world is not such a cool place to live in.

Related articles

• Day 158: Generating an Eating Disorder - The Power of Images - Part 2
• Day 159: Generating an Eating Disorder - The Power of Writing - Part 3
• Day 160: Eating Disorders and Contradictions
• Day 157: Generating an Eating Disorder - Part 1
• Day 161: In Capitalism Everyone is a Beggar

“If God Wanted Us To Live Together In Harmony, He’d Made Us Look All The Same”

And God Created different Races...

I started reading the True Blood books not so long ago, and after having read for a while I decide that I also wanted to re-watch the previous seasons.

At some point in the first season Sookie (who can read other’s minds / hear thoughts), is busy waitressing at Merlotte’s and for a moment in the scene they show the various thoughts people are having at the bar.
One of those people is a man sitting by the bar having a beer. One of his thoughts goes something like this: “This isn’t right, all these people living together like they belong. Whites, blacks, vampires… If God wanted us to live together in harmony, he would have made us look all the same.”

And in that moment while I was watching that scene, what he was saying made sense and I agreed with his statement. Though – there are two ways one can look at his statement.

It is one thing to observe that “God” had made us in a particular design and ‘obey’ / ‘conform’ to this design and another to observe design “God” gave us and question its intentions.

Firstly, you could look at it the way the character in the story does: “God did not make us look all the same, thus – we should not be living together in harmony, it’s not right”.
And secondly you could look at the statement by investigating God’s role more closely: “If God wanted us to live together in harmony, he would have made us look all the same – so why didn’t he?”

So why didn’t God make us look all the same? Why did God make us look different, have different skin colours, speak different languages, have different religions, different cultures? What are “God’s” intentions really?

Because looking at the design and outflow of things, his intentions are revealing themselves to be quite questionable. I can only find one reason why God would have made us look all different – and that is that he is deliberately attempting to breed disarray. And why would he want to do that? Well, if I place myself in the shoes of God as someone who is deliberately trying to create chaos and conflict within the world, where entire Genocides manifest because of this singular point – and who is very much aware of the consequence as I, as God am omniscient and know the beginning and end of things – well then…I must be evil. It’s that plain and simple.

Being aware of this one point, seeing and realising that this singular point in existence is questionable in terms of God’s intentions and plans for existence – doesn’t it make you kind of wonder about everything else in the world? If God was being an asshole in this one point, what would keep him from screwing with Life on Earth in any other area? Then if you start looking at other facets of our reality you can really spot God’s great enthusiasm for screwing things up to the ultimate point of dysfunctionality and ruin: poverty, war, disease, pollution, scarcity, starvation, extinction – the list goes on.

The question that arises is whether we will sit back and allow this existence to be as is – as God intended it to be --  Or whether we will stand up and take responsibility for ourselves and our fellow beings on Earth and transform this planet to a place where all can live in harmony in fact.

Equal Money is the first step – investigate: www.equalmoney.org