Emotional detoxing Intro continuation.

Is it easier to keep a small group of people happy, or a larger group? Clearly the smaller group as there’s less needs and wants to be juggled simultaneously. Much less friction, less compromises required. Similarly, our motivations are essentially individual entities with their own likes and dislikes.

We do not have to juggle the demands of someone that doesn’t exist, and nor do we need to try and satisfy motivations that don’t exist.

We only have a certain amount of time and energy which we want to spend on useful, beneficial motivations and not on accumulated junk ones. Yet what we deem useful and beneficial are themselves defined by our motivations; useful given what objectives?

Our objectives, decisions and actions are all downstream of motivations. Trying to change things midstream, at decisions, requires swimming against the current and is actually motivations vs motivations. Motivations for a different reality/experience vs motivations that have adapted to the status quo and want us to remain in our rut. Yet, many of those motivations, on both sides, are just accumulated secondhand junk motivations. Our motivations/horses pulling our carriage/body through the environment, seeking this and that, are all tangled up making the whole system dysfunctional. We need to stop, unhitch them all, and let the ones that don’t belong to us, that aren’t hardwired in, starve and wander off seeking their fortune elsewhere. When that confused tangled cluster reduces down to just our innate horses/motivations suddenly the clamour, conflict and stress is gone. We get that less is more - we’re experiencing the massive difference - and as now we’re orientated towards our actual interests we merrily trot off along the path that actually leads to an oasis as opposed to a mirage.

Yes, our ego is an innate motivation that tends to naturally conflict with our emotional motivations, but we can put our emotional motivations in front and tuck our ego in behind. If we’re defining smart, successful people as those who’ve made their way to a high level of happiness then there’s very little conflict between ego and emotions anyway. They’re aligned, seeking the same fields, now that our ego is deriving status from those beliefs and values.

Many people occasionally stop, detox and recalibrate. Sometimes involuntarily, sometime voluntarily. What’s the alternative if our life experience is sup par? Stay in our rut, keep going in tight circles but getting nowhere?

If we want to change the quality of our lives, before we roll up our sleeves and begin a motivation vs motivation fight, we need to sort the motivational wheat from the chuff or how we’re even defining 'quality' is contaminated. Detox, and we ‘magically’ find most of those battles no longer need to be fought as most of those motivations no longer even exist.

The notion we, or our brain, can sit midstream and effectively sort through our motivations is naive. Sort via which objectives? Our current objectives themselves come via our motivations and the current balance of power between them. We're limited to renovating our rut. Even if we do sort according to our current ideal what are we going to do with all the disgruntled motivations that don’t want to go along the shiny new path our brain has selected? They’re still there, still harnessed in. Is the plan to drag them along with us ? That doesn’t sound like fun, doesn't sound sustainable. They need to be deleted anyway, so do it once and do it right.

We don’t bother sorting through our overflowing trash can. There’s no point in juggling trash. We empty it and then see what we’ve got. Return to our core, experience the massive difference, recalibrate, and add in new, useful secondary motivations of our choosing. We’re then no longer a confused drone on autopilot programmed up by others.

I sought gold and diamond rings

My own drug to ease the pain living brings

I went from the mountains to the desert floor

Searching for my beautiful reward

From a house on a hill a sacred light shines

I walked through those rooms but none of them are mine

Down empty hallways I went from door to door

Searching for my beautiful reward

Now tonight I can feel those cold winds at my back

I’m flying high over those grey fields

My feathers long and black

Down along the rivers silent edge I soar

Searching for my beautiful reward

Springsteen 'Beautiful Reward'

There’s the cultural realities - those manmade bubbles that exist within the infinite reality. Mistake the cultural bubble we happened to be born into as the reality and we’re limited to life within those walls that only exist in our heads. Our emotions, that have existed as is forever, long before we evolved our turbo charged brain capable of generating labels and meanings, is blind to those labels and meanings. Our emotions are nourished on the organic, the raw, not the sauces our brain has been taught to pile on top. Our ego, on the other hand, only cares about those sauces which means, if our ego dominates us, we can end up with a lot of ego nourishing sauces but little that’s emotionally nourishing underneath. By detoxing we’re scraping off those sauces and reconnecting with what’s become buried. Our emotions are reconnected with light, oxygen and joy. Those smothered embers flare up and we get it. Less is more.

I want to run, I want to hide
I wanna tear down the walls that hold me inside
I wanna reach out and touch the flame
Where the streets have no name, ha, ha, ha

I wanna feel sunlight on my face
I see that dust cloud disappear without a trace
I wanna take shelter from the poison rain
Where the streets have no name,

U2. 'Streets with no name'

There’s nothing unique, or novel, about any of this. The issue, in part anyway, is that we evolved for a world that no longer exist. Our brave new world has much we're grateful for, but it is overly processed. We can run the risk of being trapped in our own zoo which looks, and feels, suspiciously like a prison.

“Five minutes after birth, they decide your name, religion, nationality and sect. And you spend the rest of your life defending what you did not choose. Arthur Schopenhauer

Aside from illness, or injury, happiness equals satisfied motivations minus dissatisfied motivations, but not all motivations are equal. We want to add to the first column and minimise the second one conscious that emotional satisfaction largely determines how big, strong and healthy the first column is.

Midstream, within our own momentum, and firmly within the cultural reality, we’re calibrating our motivations to that reality as if it’s the reality. We may accept we’re infected by motivations that don’t belong, and struggle against them, but the us, and not us, motivations have never being clarified. Most therapists can’t help us as they themselves are firmly in that cultural reality therefore seek to align their clients with the mainstream path. That’s all they know, from their perspective, that’s all there is. After all they themselves have plopped out from the same cookie cutter schooling we have been baked in.

The rat traps are filled with soul crusaders

Their circuits lined and jammed with chromed invaders.

Springsteen 'Night'

Many seek to be happy, and sense there’s something more. However, they’re limited to seeking it via the cultural template which, in many cases, is itself the problem. They’re limited to renovating their rut, which is satisfactory for many. Yet, that we learn there’s a door, a stairway out, doesn’t mean we have to stay outside. It just means we’ve got options we previously lacked. In practice it means we’ve learnt to directly access emotionally nourishing joy. When we fill up on joy the first part of the above equation - satisfaction - is significant thus reducing any dissatisfaction to being relatively insignificant. The net result is a very high level of happiness.

Fill up with love and/or joy and the rest is just logistics.

‘I sometimes wonder if all pleasures are not substitutes for joy. C.S Lewis