Kissinger and the peace prize

You cannot change your personality. You have to accept the way you are, like you have to accept the way you look. If you miss an arm or a leg you have to accept it. To be gay is as normal as being left-handed. To be very empathic is as normal as being a psychopath. You cannot change a psychopath to make him more kind. And a psychopath cannot change himself to become a kinder person. An artistic and bohemian kind of person cannot change himself into a well-structured social climber just because his family wants him this way. Fifty years ago, they tried to force left-handed kids in school to use their right hand when writing and they tried all conceivable ways to make the gays straight. It did not work. You have to accept your own personality and you have to accept that all people have different personalities. Animals have also different personalities. Some dogs are hyper sensitive and some dogs are lazy.

Anyway, Hitler was a psychopath, but the Germans in general were not. So why the hell did they vote for him. Why the hell did they get so hysterically enthusiastic about him? Henry Kissinger is a psychopath. How the hell could he be rewarded with the Nobel’s peace price after the Christmas bombings of Hanoi 1972? 40 000 tons of bombs were dropped in 12 days due to his advise. As I see it: Those who were fanatic Nazis during the Second World War and those who gave Kissinger the peace price were in a deep hypnotic trance. They lived in a fog or a deeply unawakened state of mind.

In the old days, and maybe even today, many gays were forced to create a false straight personality. They married someone they did not love and produced children just to please their parents. Many are the artistically bent people who have tried to make themselves into bankers or lawyers just to please their demanding mothers. Many are the left-handed people who have through big efforts learned how to write with the right hand. Many, many people have, through the years, been forced to change their personality into a false but more accepted personality. So many people have been forced to live their life with an false identity. Even today many people yearn to to come out from the closet.

Nothing is strange with this. All people are sleepwalkers. All people know what it feels like to pretend. All people have spent years of their life pretending that they are someone else. I am by no means different. Sometimes though, for short periods, I feel like I can see the sky. To wake up, I believe, is not impossible, and it is not like trying to change ones personality. Awakening is, I think, a change in the way we look at the world and ourselves.

I do not think, though, that awakenings or changes in the way we look at the world, is something that comes about through psychotherapy, meditation practice or by reading self help books. Some people meditate for years and years or spend years and years in therapy, and read tons of self help books, but still don't wake up. Why is it so? If people wake up, they seem to wake up because of no particular reason at all.

Well, an awakening can be small and concern only minor things and it can be dramatic and change a person’s life completely. An awakening can come and go; it can last for a few seconds or it can change someone for the rest of his or her life. In real life nothing is written in stone.

Some people believe that they will go to heaven when they die, some believe that they will reincarnate. Some believe that on the judgment day the dead will rise up from their graves, some believe that the dead turn into ghosts or spirits. I do not believe that any part of me will go anywhere when I die. I believe that I will simply disappear, disintegrate, dissolve. However, all these different beliefs are nothing but thoughts. All beliefs are made of thoughts, also my beliefs. I can see this now. All beliefs are nothing but speculations and imaginations. Not even science is of much help. They care only about things that can be measured. And what they know for sure today will be considered a misunderstanding tomorrow. Nobody knows for sure about anything, not even the great gurus. Gurus only pretend that they know. They are like priests or popes or mullahs, make-believers. This is of course also a belief. I am serious. Don’t try to understand what is going on. It is meaningless. It is ridiculous. Live life as you please. But don't be too egoistic. You will never find any happiness if you are too egoistic.

Where do all crazy ideas come from? Fundamentalist Christianity, Islamism, Neo-liberalism, all the weird religious and political crazyisms, neo-Nazism, libertarianism, biologism … What is wrong with us? Why do we feel that we absolutely have to invent a belief system to make life worth living? Why is it so difficult to live without a fantasy about how life ought to be lived? Why is it so difficult to be here and now without an explanation to it? Should I get myself a pair of Buddhist glasses or a pair of psychological middle class self-improvement glasses? Maybe I should try the tantric Hindu glasses? How am I supposed to look at the world?

In our western liberal culture, it is of utter importance to be someone. You cannot be just anybody. You have to be a lawyer, a doctor or a teacher; you have to be a movie star, a rock star, a poet or an artist. You have to be something. You cannot just be what you are, even if you have enough money. To simply be a human being is to be a loser. We are like ducks: Above the surface we look cool and calm, beneath the surface we paddle like hell.

Most people will eventually wake up from this hypnosis and realize that they have been completely crazy and that they have been driven by completely crazy ideas. Though it is probably not until we have to face death, our own or someone near to us, that we realize the futility with beliefs and ideas.

Marijuana is not harmless

Pot smokers hang out with other pot smokers and vinos hang out with other vinos. Left- wingers hang out with other left-wingers and neo-Nazis hang out with other neo-Nazis. A society consists of many different communities, religious, political and social.

Marijuana is not habit forming like nicotine or cocaine but an confirmed pot smoker will still find it almost impossible to give up his pot. Why would he like to give up his pot? I mean, most doctors consider it to be fairly harmless. Well, one reason could be because pot makes it impossible to experience the now clearly. Pot smokers live their life in a haze. It is meaningless to practice meditation if you are stoned or if you have smoked marijuana the past days. Anyway, it is difficult to give up marijuana for someone who has been smoking for many years, whatever reason he may have. Why is that? What makes it so difficult?

I think one reason is that marijuana has a numbing effect on unpleasant emotions, another more important reason is that the pot smoker is loosing his pot smoker identity when he give up his beloved drug. He do not belong to a group anymore. He is expelled, or rather,he has expelled himself. He feels like a wolf without a pack or a bird without a cage. He feels lonely and miss his friends.

It is ,for the same reason, difficult for a neo-liberal to give up his neo-liberalism and for a Catholic to give up his Catholicism. It is difficult to give up cigarettes and it is difficult to give up racism or judgementalism. It is a matter of identity. It is a matter of giving up a mental construction or illusion. The question is: What do you have to give up?
What do you have to realize?

If you are a smoker and give up smoking you will suffer from withdrawal symptoms. These symptoms can be terrible.You are able to endure this suffering only because you know that it will pass.You know that in three weeks you will feel fine again.
So, during the first weeks without nicotine there is not much point in bothering about the now. Eckhart Tolle says that only the now is real. OK. But when you give up your cigarettes it is good to now that things will be better in the future.

If you have a hard and lousy job to complete you can endure it only because you know that this job will not last forever, and at the dentist most people prefer the future to the present moment. Hope is very important to human beings. Hope is the wish for a better future. We are lost without hope. We are lost without the future.

However, if you never live in the now, if you always live in the future or in the past, it will become a habitual way of looking at the world. You will forget about the present now. You will loose it. You will forget about who you are. You will live your life in a fantasy world. You will end up as a zombie, as a living dead.

A human life consists of a lot of habits. We can get so used to hurrying that we hurry even if we don’t have to. We can get so used to being tired that we eventually don't know of any other state of mind. We can get used to living in a fog.

The autopilot mode is very useful. To learn how to drive a car takes time and energy. But after a few years you don’t have to think at all about your driving. It has become automatic. You can easily have a fiery conversation with someone while the autopilot is doing the driving for you. Isn’t this amazing?

So, the habits are OK, as I see it,and the dreams about a better future and all the fantasies. They are not our enemies. They are the sea we are swimming in. Problems appear only if we forget about the now completely. To wake up to the present now is to wake up for a moment from sleepwalking. It is to wake up from the hypnosis. Whales have to come to the surface to breathe. We have to visit the now every three to five minutes or so. And the Dolphins are making their jumps into the now
just for the fun of it.