Stalking our perception

[DoktorGreen]

I was thinking about the ways we deceive ourselves. It seems there is an endless list!
Here are 3 ways that come to me. What others are there? Maybe a list of reminders is valuable
as we stumble through our daily maze.

Dok

Self Deception
1- We think we feel love- it may really only be lust, security, or relief from loneliness
2- We want to help a cause- it may really be secretly seeking power
3- We seek justice- it may really be bitterness or seeking revenge

[serloco]

Seeking revenge used to be my way. If I met an evil being I would fight and curse them. I learned over time that love was the way in. I think every being wants to be loved and secretly seeks that. Now when I meet someone bad who does wrong I seek to teach them a lesson. I have given them the same treatment that they had given and let them see how it feels. I show them that being treated wrongly is wrong in itself. I make them feel sadness for causing another living being hardship. I show them just how sacred life is. 

You are right we often mistake lust and infatuation with love. In a way it is a form of love for we love pleasure, and beauty, and we love being treated as if we are important to another. However it is different then loving a person for who they are inside. Often lust and infatuation turn into genuine love given the chance. 

I think it boils down to knowledge. Love can be created with the right outlook, or perception. Many say I dont love people who are such and such etc. They set their intent, their mind, their belief to love a certain way. Then when they meet this criteria they fall in love. Careful observation shows that love is formed in many ways, and can be carefully controlled. 

I wanted, and still want, to help save the world. I started out being free and seeking the right decision to harness and form the outcome of that freedom. I sought righteousness. I sought to be the best person I could be. I went out and cured diseases and help my fellow man because indeed I was self -important. Over time I came to realize and understand suffering. I suffered myself and understood, thru suffering, that I wanted to help people live healthy, and have well being. I started out seeking to be the best i could be, and that was good. I wanted to be loved in God's eyes. However it wasnt totally pure. Now I understand suffering, and illness, and seek to help people based from love and not power.

[DoktorGreen]

It's sometimes very tricky to recognize motives. Another way we deceive ourselves is by suppressing things we don't want to deal with. We're really good at these things!
Dok

[Julio Juliopolis]

On Wednesday, I saw a boy celebrating his 9th birthday step on a small toy. He called out in pain and acted as though his foot were hurting. His mom immediately said "Well now you've broken your toy." with just a slight hint of an edge in her voice. Of course the boy got mad and yelled something at his mom. I took note of it because my own instinct would be not to do that and so I was wondering why the mom did. To me it would be obvious to let the boy deal with the pain for however many seconds that takes first then make sure he's alright and then let him know his toy was broken, (if I felt I needed to), in a way that didn't use blaming language. So, I figured my way of handling it and hers must stem from different goals. My goal would be to calm the boy down and try to keep him from getting overly upset. In her case my guess is she wanted to pick a fight in a way that she could deny to herself having done so afterwards. Since then, I've been thinking a bit about hidden motivations so this is a timely thread.

Don Juan talks to Carlos a bit about self-pity and how it serves a purpose because it supports self-importance and justifies our shortcomings. I think this comes up a lot in people's hidden motivations. They haven't achieved X, they feel self-pity for not having done so, so they actually end up sabotaging their own efforts at X in order to create a stronger argument for the self-pity they feel. For example, they might do something stupid during a job interview to prevent them from getting the job, then later blame it on the unreasonableness of the interviewer who would then be the last in a long list of co-conspirators who had kept our noble hero from getting the kind of job a noble hero deserves. Our hero thinks s/he wanted the job, and certainly didn't want to sabotage themself just so they could say they've been sabotaged.

I see this with people in domestic violence situations too. Nearly all of the time, both people in the relationship are violent and both start and escalate fights with the other. It is my estimation that people in those kinds of relationships enjoy the excitement and drama of it; the screaming, the battle of wits and wills, the risks, etc. Of course, because fighting with people is "bad" few will admit they enjoy it. IMHO, they'd be better off admitting that and then arranging some sort of regular fighting event using rules they can agree to which satisfies their own blood lust in a controlled manner. Sorta like safe S&M play.

Finally in regards to the topic I think people often have energetic needs they don't realize. Perhaps something they experienced once and never really worked through. Or they've created an energetic charge that they need to release. From a physical-and-what-people-do-world it might not be a good time to release these energetic charges, but the energy is such that it happens anyway.

[DoktorGreen]

Hey JJ! Great points. I think another way we might unwittingly deceive ourselves is through giving. I remember don Juan once said that the only truly generous person is the one who doesn't care at all. Caring and compassion have an underlying agenda.

[Guest]