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Today’s post is another chapter from my book Liberation from the Lie. If you have been following these posts, you will already know that the key to understanding our search for purpose, meaning, and even awakening, is fueled by an underlying belief in our own inadequacy. In this chapter we discover the roots of that belief in a primal trauma that I have called the Wound. The Wound develops very early in life and is, over time, covered over by what is called the Fear-Selves. If we are ever to find our Authentic Self, that energy that is always there even underlying the Wound, we need to see these processes first hand in our own immediate life. That is the primary purpose of this book. See if what is described in this chapter is not true for your own experience and knowledge.

Beyond living and dreaming
Is what matters most
Coming awake.”
~ Antonio Machado

Are we born fundamentally perfect, or are we born wild and imperfect, requiring the graces of civilization to become good, productive human beings?
One advocate of the theory of primal inadequacy is Aristotle. In his treatise Politics, the Greek philosopher argues that we are born as savages. People without laws and permanent settlement need to be subjugated and ruled over, he claims; they are like children who are not habituated to civilized society. Our goodness, if it is to manifest in our lives, is solely a consequence of our exposure to the fruits of moral and ethical culture. We are, in other words, born insufficient. Most of us have accepted this belief without exploring our own childhoods, our relations with our children, or our view of humanity.
If we believe that all children are savages, then their transformation into civilized, moral beings should simply be a matter of teaching them the ways of civilization. Do our observations of everyday life and our knowledge of history support this statement?
When the “civilized” nation of Spain landed on an unknown island in the eastern Caribbean in 1492, Columbus noted the remarkable grace, positive spirit, and extraordinary kindness of the “savages” he encountered. He also noted that they would make excellent slaves.
When the Pilgrims were starving during their first, long New England fall and winter, not only did the “savage” Wampanoag Indians feed the “civilized” European newcomers, but they taught them how to plant and grow maize and beans, enabling them to survive future winters. When the “civilized” Portuguese first entered sub-Saharan Africa and encountered the “savages” who lived there, it took them less than 10 years to organize the first slave trade by paying off tribal leaders.
Earlier we examined the lives of hunter-gatherer children. Contemporary anthropologists consistently describe their placid but alert natures, their deep connections to their communities and the natural world, the absence of sibling rivalry and temper tantrums, and their easy smiles. These children possessed a sense of stability and balance that has attracted note from observers from the 17th century to the present.
When Europeans first landed in North America and Africa, they were greeted with kindness, curiosity, and care. They responded with ruthless violence, including genocidal massacres, cultural intolerance, and total subjugation of the native peoples who had lived on those lands for countless generations. Invariably, they used religion and God to justify their murderous intents and actions.
Who, exactly, is the savage?
Certainly these painful interactions occurred between two very different peoples. The Native Americans and Africans were relatively content. The Europeans, in dramatic contrast, were not. Their discontent was rooted in their sense of inadequacy, a quality the natives did not share. The Europeans sought to fill their empty feelings of “lack” with power and possessions. But their insufficiency was a bottomless abyss. It could never be filled. And the very actions through which they sought to fill the void inadvertently sustained its gaping emptiness. This is why the Europeans related via force, while the natives related through curiosity and care. The Europeans were already wounded by their culture. They were a restless people, always on the lookout to augment their riches and control. Their response to the gentle, satisfied souls they encountered in their explorations was to kill or enslave them. The taste of power created a rapaciousness for more power and possessions, a quality of imperial civilization from the dawn of history to the present.
Invalidation is born of a significant imbalance in power, and the consequence of that imbalance is violence. Secure people are not motivated to apply force against others as a way of expressing their inadequacy. The European settlers’ attitude and actions toward indigenous populations were paralleled in the relationships between parents and children in their “civilized” society. When adults see their children as “savages,” they project their own experience of self-contempt onto their children. In this way, the wound of invalidation is passed down through the generations.
Aristotle correctly points out that children act in a way that could be described as “deficient.” But he fails to understand the source of the deficiency. The “savage” children he observed had already experienced their infantile trauma, their emotional separation from their mothers, and pressures to change; thus they were already insecure in their standing with their parents and had begun to exhibit behaviors to compensate for their internal feelings of low self-worth. These characteristics are part of the price of civilization.
Because this phenomenon is both unintended and little understood, it is not surprising that we have adopted a belief system that seeks to explain what we think we are observing. By accepting the belief that children are savages, we justify the role of civilization to transform their “savageness” into more manageable personality traits. We do this through coercion, hard and soft. We remake people into the images projected onto them by civilization.
The collapse of our original sense of self occurs at a time before communication can occur between child and parent; the original person is already covered over by the Fear-Self before the child is able to protest. Children develop a sense of their inadequacy well before they can ever express their dissatisfaction in words. The child’s “savage” behavior is simply his expression of his despair. Some children will really persist in their “savagery,” acting out with “unacceptable” behaviors. But even the most docile child will express her anger and frustration in some form. The family uses the power of repression to control this anger and frustration, just as the larger society later uses its authority to manage her as an adult.
It’s time that we moved on to a more loving and accurate understanding of who our children are and who we are in relation to them. Children are not savages. They are human beings who already have been cut off from their Life Force. A child’s anger and frustration come from the struggle to learn new abilities in order to establish an identity designed to mollify the emotional pain she has experienced.
Keep in mind that not all children display in this way. Resiliency varies greatly from child to child, as does the fear of expressing one’s true feelings to parents who might be perceived as threatening or whose connection to the child is so tenuous that he fears loss of love if he is honest. Most of us become experts in the fine art of repression early in life. The problem of repression becomes much more serious when we begin to regard it as normal and rational—which is, of course, what most of us do.
Savagery, therefore, is in the eye of the beholder. The term “savage” is useful mainly to those who would like to manage another person or group through the use of the pejorative.
The next two posts will focus on the actual phenomenon of invalidation. Through these posts will you be empowered to see, precisely, how you yourself have been invalidate and in that seeing there is a powerful glimpse toward your own liberation.

Tags: invalidation, wound, Child-raising

Many years ago I read a small book that raised an incredible question. The questions was: who could have imagined this world - this world of endless strip shopping centers, the land gobbled up by vast swaths of single family homes, of the air and water hopelessly fouled, of the total assault on plants and animals, and all the rest of the life killing machinery of modern industrial civilization. Who could have imagined this world - what a great question.

This is one of the questions that I have sought to answer in my book Liberation from the Lie, but I would like to explore it in somewhat less depth in this post and several to follow.

I know of only one reliable method of inquiry and that is the Truth Way. This is a very simple method. It is based on only one rule and that rule informs us that we cannot know anything if we are relying on belief. Belief, we shall see, is based, exclusively on fear and my book and this blog has only one purpose; to expose fear - to see it exactly for what it is. Few of us have the courage to squarely look our beliefs straight on. Our beliefs give us comfort. Our beliefs give us hope. We are more comfortable with our beliefs than we we with what we can clearly see. So it’s probably best to sustain your slumber. If you’re very lucky you will be re-born and maybe you will be less likely to rest on your self-laziness in another life. But who knows if there ever will be another life?

As long as you clothe yourself in any belief, you will be living a lie. If you are ever interested in discovering your Authentic Self, you will need to fully explore every belief to the light of clear seeing. You must relentlessly ask yourself the question, “is this true?” and be willing to absorb and live the consequences of your inquiry. This is, ultimately, the only path, for only the truth will set you free.

We have only one God and that God is fear. We fear loss - loss of status, loss of possessions, loss of health, loss of a job, loss of our children, loss of our spouse, loss of our home, loss of our pride, loss of our friends, and loss of our own life. Fear is always the bottom-line. We dare not question the government or the media. We dare not risk the little we have amassed in this precarious life, because we could so easily lose it all.

So we hoard. We draw line between us and the ever-threatening world. We ceaselessly please those we project have power over us. We ceaselessly bully those who we project have no power over us. We are appeased through the shopping. We need to keep up with the neighbors. We need to assume that technology will eventually solve our ecological problems. Or we believe in a heaven, because our minister has told us that this world is sinful and is only a passage to the permanent place after death (how pathetic!). So we must placate our dangerous and powerful gods. That is living a humble and proper life.

In other words, we eviscerate ourselves on the alter of Fear. We have installed our beliefs in every aspect of our lives. Jesus might have said the truth will set you free, but we are so much more comfortable with our enslavement. We have forgotten that we are the light. But belief is the propagation of darkness. To truly be of the light we must see what truly is. But instead, we have become domesticated people and we believe that this is the only way.

Who could have imagined this world - who could have imagined this life?

When we are fully aligned with the fear-based personality, and let’s admit it, nearly all of us are, we are fully split from our Authentic Selves. We have lost touch with who we are. But the light that informs just this one, small seeing is the authentic self - alive in our life right now. It is still there waiting for us.

So what do we to remedy this problem? We do exactly what the power-brokers of this world tell us to do; we seek to transcend this word. We do this through sustaining our ignorance of how the world functions, we stay asleep by zoning out in front of our TVs, we stay asleep by going to church so we can be told how and what to think, we are drawn to eastern philosophies, which also tell us how to live and transcend the challenge of everyday life. The one place we tend not to check is ourselves.

We lose ourselves when we are invested in the external. We become the external.

We believe (this is a belief!) that we are not adequate to the task of self-knowledge. We must constantly seek externally. We must be told the how and what about everything. At least dogs unconditionally love, for we are no different from dogs, except our fear prevents us from loving unconditionally. We are loveless dogs.

How we love our leashes. How we love our masters. Our slavery has become so comfortable, so effortless. Please, please give me another treat. This is what our lives have become.

It need not be this way. We can wake up. But to truly wake up we need to fully see the play of fear in our lives. We must see every aspect of it. We need to disgust ourselves with ourselves.

In the next post, I will explore the roots of fear. When we are clear on the roots, we can pull up this weed of a life by the roots and take the first uncertain step to ourselves; a shining being free of fear, strong in her courage, steadfast in her self in this life.

Believe NOTHING in this post or any of my other posts. Test it all out for yourselves. That is the only reliable way. Be ruthless with my words.

Download post here: Fear1

Tags: Belief, Fear-self, Fear