Avoiding Being My Own Victim

If you watch yourself you will notice that whatever you think about you have a feeling reaction to. Obviously it is noticeable in regard to frightening film or dream images. And dreams are only your feeling reactions put into images and drama. If you watch a horror movie you may feel fear or even terror, yet they are simply images on a screen. Dreams too are simply images on the screen of your sleeping mind.

If the fear continues after the film it is because you keep thinking or feeling things that press the fear button. We all have a keyboard of feelings that when pressed can cause us to feel all manner of things. It is usually outside things that cause the reactions, so we may feel fear, sexy, hope, confidence, terror, wonder, curiosity, lost or courageous; so in a way we are victims of what other people and the world do to us. Dreams are a way of showing us what victims we are, running away when a wild animal chases us in the dream, or a demon says it will claim us – means all your buttons were pressed.

Perhaps without being really aware of it, you already know your body is a screen. When you see a film or read a book you might be moved to laugh or cry, or shout out in fear. Considering that the book and film is not reality, what is happening? Well, the outside images or words are helping you to experience things upon the sensitive screen of your body and mind. You had buttons pressed that produced fear, anxiety, sexual excitement or any mixture of feelings. Yet whenever we dream its images are not like real life, because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear. So all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind.

But because we are victims of our own feeling reactions we live an awful life. Someone says something critical and you feel low – something positive and your spirits rise. So maybe you go in constant search for the good thing instead of realising you are  a victim.

In becoming aware of such urges it is wise to not overlook the fact we are largely moved by our mammalian and reptilian brains. In the first place we are our own victims when we are directed by our instinctive reactions only. Other people can become victims if they are directed by the same things too. If they manage to become aware of how it affects them they can leave the dance of interaction that has triggered a response in us, then we can outgrow the game in which we trigger each other to re-act from our instinctive reactions and then to act with AWARENESS from our human brain. See Brain Levels and Dreams and Self Observation

We are all born victims of circumstance. But we need not remain a victim.

Your ‘natural’ response to your environment is to be influenced by it. A disturbing event would stimulate you to feel fear, a calming event to feel pleasure. Your moods are usually influenced by what happens to you. So being in prison would in general be more depressing than being free. Being rejected would cause more pain than being admired or loved. People go through extraordinary emotional pain when someone they ‘love’ leaves them or dies.

Our emotions and feelings about ourselves are like a keyboard that is played upon by people and events. If we are praised or rewarded our self confidence and therefore performance will usually be enhanced. That is fine except it means we will usually depend upon the world and events to create our moods and our sense of our own value. This makes us victims. We may not be dependent on a drug, but often we are dependent like a drug addict on praise, success, money, being admired or wanted. Without them we may experience the lows the drug user does on withdrawal.

However, the ancient explorers of the human mind discovered an extraordinary possibility. This dream of Ed’s explains it.

I was in a prison with several others – all in one cell. It felt as if I had been in the prison for years. I was standing near the bars angry and shouting about the injustice of my incarceration.

As I stood raging I suddenly realised that all my anger was having no affect on the world. I was the only one suffering it. I saw that the peace and freedom I wanted from release I could have now by letting go of my anger. I would then be in peace, and would be free of my own negative emotions. So I let go of he feelings I had about my judges and gaolers, and a change came over me. In the following years I learned to drop the other ideas and emotions I tortured myself with. Then one day I woke and was filled with joy until my bliss filled the cell. In this way all had changed for me. In a strange way I was now utterly free even though in prison.

The greatest prison of all, the greatest of torturers, is our own thoughts, emotions and our concepts or ideas. While Ed felt angry and held the idea he had been wrongly accused, he was tormented and trapped – imprisoned in his own ideas and emotions. To have received a public apology and released would have changed his feelings, but he would still have remained a passive victim of events. Instead he found in his dream the greatest freedom of all – a blissful freedom – the release from his ‘natural’ mind and emotions.

Our ideas, thoughts and beliefs are the main builders, and it is a world we then live in. We build an inner world that few people realise they have, and that inner world constantly controls how they relate to and deal with the outer world, the people, animals and events we meet. Unfortunately we often build a terrible world inside us, and this leads to sickness, despair and depression. So whenever we think we are bad, awful looking, a failure, not loved, are a hateful person or worse thoughts – remember that you are building them into realities in you. You are building a hell for yourself by your thoughts and beliefs. You need ot recognise the power of these thoughts and in recognising them, say to your self, “I have taken this path of thoughts so many times and it always leads to the same place – emotional pain and turmoil – so why do I keep pushing this crazy button over and over”?

For instance if a married woman with two children falls in love with a man outside of her marriage, and her family and cultural values stress the wrongness of such feelings, she is likely to experience enormous conflict. This conflict could lead to depression, withdrawal or suicide. But in the end what she is struggling with is the opposition between personal drives – her love for the man – and her cultural and family standards. If we look at the way men and women live and survive throughout the world, then such standards appear purely local. They are not innate. So underlying the ‘local’ customs she is trying to honour but is in conflict with, exists a human potential for many different ways of dealing with love and attraction.

 Example: We all have so many feelings, like keys that can be pressed, and when pressed by outer influences such as social pressure, beliefs or things said to us, we can be played like a merry or awful tune. We react to them all in various ways.

And nearly all reactions are habits, and the trick of shifting them is to start a new habit. Such habitual responses may be built into us as instinctive reactions – to scary circumstances, feeling hurt, the fight, flight or freeze response and so on.

 Maybe I am simplifying a little, but it is generally true. And nearly all reactions are habits, and the trick of shifting them is to start a new habit.

Also you need to realise that there is a huge difference between your ‘conscious life’ and your dream life. And to save me writing it all out again, will you please read Summing Up and You Are a Dual Being also see the example under prisoner  

Also, you need to realise that there is a huge difference between your ‘conscious life’ and your dream life. And to save me writing it all out again, will you please read Summing Up and You Are a Dual Being also see the example under prisoner

Example: I suffered torment for years, messing up my life, until a dream showed me what I had been doing. I had thought the pain and misery was from some earlier trauma but could not find one. And the dream showed me that it wasn’t a trauma but cultural programming that said that I was a bad father and also a bad husband, both true from a certain viewpoint.

The view that I was shown by the dream was that my pain was from habits created by the culture I grew up in. I realised that I could create a new life by changing the habits of a lifetime. So, every time I left the house and my children the old habits started tearing me apart again. I stopped just outside the door and looked at them. I had tried positive thinking and that didn’t work. What I saw and reminded myself was that I had gone down that road a thousand times and it always led to self-destruction. So by seeing that I decided to change the direction and reminding myself, not that I was a wonderful person, but that I was a human man, who did not want to make his wife suffer from my awful moods, and also I saw from the dream that we are always free to go in any direction, and that sense of freedom enabled me to start a new life.

It didn’t happen suddenly, but each day it got easier because I knew the attitudes and feeling that led me to misery and so tried another life direction until I could walk in peace. It was the recognition that my state of mind led me to self-destruction every time it took that road that resolved me to change outside the door.

The tremendous meaning and possibilities of that are amazing. Through the manipulation or observance of our own images, we can discover, trace, change our own innermost processes.

That is one of the great wonders behind our dreaming, it displays our fear and wonder, and if we use it we can change our whole reaction to fear. So try it with a real fear you meet in a dream, and play with it as you did with the care image, till you can feel all that wonderful energy that was held back by fear.

“The longer the neurons [brain cells] fire, the more of them that fire, and the more intensely they fire, the more they’re going to wire that inner strength –- that happiness, gratitude, feeling confident, feeling successful, feeling loved and lovable.”

But on a day to day basis, most of us don’t stay with our positive experiences long enough for them to be encoded into neural structure (meaning there’s not enough wiring and firing going on). On the other hand, we naturally tend to fixate on negative experiences. Positive and negative emotions use different memory systems in the brain, according to Hanson, and positive emotions don’t transfer as easily to long-term memory.

See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=im_SmDVn1ZI