Emotions and Exploitation

B

y placing value on women for their looks alone, it is certainly true that I left myself open to the worst kinds of exploitation – but the reality was that I only left myself open to being exploited

because I wanted to exploit the pretty women

.

I wanted certain types of women because of my own vanity. We all know that looks alone are not indicators of spiritual quality – in fact, quite the opposite appears so often to be true, except for my wife.

I wanted these women to go out with me because having them on my arm would make me “look good.” In other words, I wanted to use them to dominate others, to evoke envy and establish my own superiority.

Can you see why there are considerable secondary gains in repressing these

“negative” emotions?

Can you also see how far away from the truth my original

“explanations” were? By providing me with instant and comforting “answers,” they could not have been more opposed to the truth than if they had been direct lies, which at least can be seen and examined.

Even Deeper…

Furthermore, my father chose my mother – a thoroughly nasty and corrupt woman – largely for her looks, since she was very attractive.

Thus, I have seen the results of this kind of mutual exploitation

up close, and have lived through all the disasters of a nasty, brutish and short marriage.

However, if I were to cast aside my own shallow addiction to physical appearance, what would be the long-term result?

Having lived it now for over 20 years, I can tell you quite definitively.

When we begin to realign our standards of evaluation from inconsequential things such as appearance, status, money

and prestige, towards moral standards such as courage, integrity and virtue…

Well, as I said earlier, almost none of your relationships

will survive this transition – because, as you will very quickly discover, if you pursue this course, you think you have a relationship with others, but you really only have a relationship with your own illusions.

My particular illusion

was that physical beauty – and the envy it produces in others – creates value.

Sadly, this was like putting a Band-Aid over a sprained ankle, which only made that sprain worse over time.

If I say that I need a beautiful woman in order to have real value, then clearly I am saying that without that beautiful woman, I do not have value – or I have negative value.

If I want to wear platform shoes, it is because I feel that I am short.

Buying and wearing platform shoes does not get rid of my belief that I am short, any more than buying and wearing a wig gets rid of my belief that I am bald.

Acting in

“opposition” to an underlying belief only reinforces that belief.

Thus I pursued beautiful women because I felt that I lacked value, which arm-candy would somehow alleviate.

However, this pursuit only

reinforced

my belief that I lacked value – which is why it could never succeed.

As we talked about earlier, using other people to manage your own anxiety

is selfish and corrupt.

For me, using the physical attractiveness of women to avoid the anxiety

of my own low self-regard was selfish and corrupt.

Now – although this is of course a very painful experience to go through – and is also enormously humbling – is this not a far better approach to building a happy life than pretending to yourself that the girl just somehow

“lost your number”?

Even DEEPER!

Ahhh, but it went even

deeper

than that!

Like just about everyone else on the planet who was not raised by wolves, I was taught that my family

had value in and of itself.

I was

“taught” that my father, my mother, my brother, my half-sister – my extended relations of every kind – were valuable and deserved my love simply because they were members of my family.

Of course, as a criterion for love

, this is in fact as inconsequential as height, hair, or high cheekbones.

We tend to mock and ridicule the old man who dates the busty bimbo, since he is clearly communicating his shallowness, insecurity and silly vanity.

However, we tend to “cherish” and “respect” those who value family members for no reason other than similar DNA.

Beauty is accidental.

Family

is also accidental.

When I began to challenge my own vanity and greedy desire to exploit others – both the pretty women and those who would envy me for being with them – I began to understand that

virtue

was in fact required for love.

This is a strange, terrifying and disorienting realization.

If virtue is required for love, then

I cannot reasonably judge the value of my family by any standard other than virtue

.

How does

that

sit with you?

Your family

has no value.

Your country has no value.

Your religion has no value.

Your gods, governments, teachers and friends

have no value.

Only

virtue

has value.

Is it becoming clear to you just what an enormous minefield lay underneath my stab of disappointment in that long-ago sauna?

Can you begin to understand exactly why I felt such fear and trepidation about the very idea of

not

repressing my feelings anymore?

Deep, deep down, of course, I totally understood the road that I was taking my first step upon. I knew where it would lead, and I knew just how few people would be willing to follow me there. I knew exactly what kind of ugly and hellish confrontations awaited me down that road, how many subtle and vicious attacks I would endure, how many sleepless nights would torture me – and to what end?

Who knew?

And all this came to pass. That fateful night in that sauna, when I made the decision to stop repressing my feelings, every fear I had came true.

When I began to view and evaluate my family members, friends, girlfriends, dates and business associates by reasonable moral standards – nothing fancy, just honesty and integrity really – the whole magnificently empty house of cards that was my social world came fluttering and crashing down.

The world is well-armed against virtue

.

The world is so corrupt

because being good so often totally

sucks

.

None of this occurred overnight, of course. It was years before I began to really apply these values

to those around me – and it was another few years after that that I broke with my mother. Two years later, I broke with my brother – and the year after that, I broke with my father, which was less important, since I had never lived with him.

But it really does all come back to that first, fateful decision, to simply

start listening to what we already know to be true

.

The Truth Within…

Deep within our bodies, from the moment of our conception, lie all of the amazing biochemical functionality and potentiality of growth, puberty and maturity.

In the same way, within our unconscious minds, lies all the wisdom we could ever consume in a single lifetime.

We do not defend ourselves against our emotions; we do not defend ourselves against the pain of the past; we do not even defend ourselves against the discomfort of the present.

We always and only ever defend ourselves against the

actions of the future

.

If we have been hurt by a dentist and we fear returning, we do not fear the past, since that pain has come and gone.

We do not fear the pain of the past.

We fear the pain of the

future

.

Psychological defences do not exist to prevent us from feeling pain in the past; they exist to prevent us from acting with integrity

in the future.

Psychological defences do not prevent us from being exploited in the past – since that has already happened. Psychological defences ensure that we shall be exploited in the

future

– and that we shall exploit others, which is even worse.

An addict does not take his drug in order to feel bliss in the past, but in order to feel bliss in the present – and, as the addiction develops, in order to avoid the agony of withdrawal in the future.

In the same way, we avoid our feelings in the present because we wish to avoid ugly confrontations in the future.

We ignore our

“sinking feeling” when our mother calls because we wish to avoid the confrontation that will inevitably occur if we accept our feelings.

I desperately wanted to avoid my feelings of rejection

, because once I felt my own feelings of rejection, it turned out that I was going to have to reject others in the future – the corrupt, the false, the evil.

It was not this particular girl’s rejection

of

me

that I was avoiding – but rather, the inevitable rejection of

others

that would occur in the future, if I began to in fact judge people according to virtuous principles rather than shallow inconsequentialities.

Do you see

why

we avoid our feelings?

Do you see why thinking that our avoidance has anything to do with the

past

is so fundamentally counterproductive and erroneous?

Do you see how terrifying our true feelings are for those who exploit us?

Do you see how impossible it would be to exploit us if we truly

felt

our own emotions?

Do you see why I say that we must

be

slaves in order to

facilitate slavery

?

Do you understand why I say that we must first reject

ourselves

before we can be controlled by others?

We can do nothing about our enslavement in the past. We were children

, we were forced to go to school and church, we were surrounded by people that we never chose to have in our lives – our parents, siblings, our extended family, our teachers…

The slavery of the

past

is unalterable.

The slavery of the future can be changed.

We cannot be free in the past, or from the past.

We

can

be free in the future.

And our souls are constantly whispering in our ears the combination to the lock that will set us free.

Feel, communicate, understand,

act!