PP11: take-aways from the chapter “slavery”
Here’s the 11th sequel of my Epicurean happiness guidance “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness”
take-aways from the chapter “slavery”
* Until we take responsibility for much of what happens in our own lives, we are slaves to our feelings of fear.
* We must understand how our fears are manifest in our behaviors and thoughts before we can take steps to eradicate them.
* Happiness — that is, freedom from anxiety, or stress-FREEDOM — is impossible until we stop engaging in behaviors that perpetuate our anxieties.
* We must change our thinking so that we don’t see ourselves as victims of outside forces such as physical disabilities, others’ opinions, and heredity.
You may download now the whole the first chapter (“Slavery”) of my e-book “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness” FREE: http://stressfreedomguide.com/free/1/freechapter.html
PP10: to all who suffer from “victimitis”
Here’s the 10th sequel of my Epicurean Happiness Guidance “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness”
“Victimitis”
Especially susceptible to their fears are those with a condition known as “victimitis.” The term may not be in a medical dictionary, or any other dictionary for that matter, but it is, nonetheless, a serious condition. Victimitis experts theorize that sufferers have more of a struggle to break the chains of slavery and reach stress-FREEDOM than others because victims start their journey being less fit.
Victimitis is caused by a belief in one’s powerlessness and hopelessness while at the same time investing others with considerable, almost mythical, powers, including control over the patient’s life. Left untreated, victimitis usually causes paralysis of the cerebrum, the part of the brain that controls thinking and memory.
Symptoms include absence of self-confidence, loss of rational and logical thinking skills and occasionally bitterness, with petulant utterances like, “This is all your fault,” “She made me do it,” “It’s his own fault — he made me so angry I didn’t have a choice but to shoot him in the foot,” “I couldn’t help it – I’m just not good at keeping secrets,” and “Boys will be boys.” Victimitis sufferers believe that life is much easier when power and blame are delegated to others. Oddly, the part of the victim’s cerebrum that controls the ability to take credit is relatively untouched.
There are two reports of rare manifestations of victimitis. In the first case, the patient, a 400 lb. female, was interviewed on the Dr. Phil TV show, and responded to the question, “When did your weight start to get out of control?” by declaring in no uncertain terms that it began one day several years ago when she was bitten by a spider.
The second case manifested itself in a pop-rock song several years ago in which the singer subtly asks his audience to shed a few tears and shake their heads in knowing sympathy after learning of his pitiful victimitis (although the song does have a catchy rhythm and it’s easy to dance to):
And now you tell me that you’re having my baby,
I’ll tell you that I’m happy if you want me to…
Take one step further and my back will break,
If my best isn’t good enough
Than how can it be good enough for two?
I can’t work any harder than I do…
Somebody tell me
Why I work so hard for you -
Why do I do the things I do?
Tell you if I knew.
Wham!, “Everything She Wants”
Incidentally, this case is remarkable in another way as well: It is believed to be the first case in recorded history of an immaculate insemination.
If you feel yourself slip-sliding down a slope towards victimhood, ask yourself a very important question: What role am I playing in this situation? If you left an expensive bicycle propped up against a tree overnight in the neighborhood park and went back the next day to discover it missing, would you blame the rotten kids in the neighborhood, the negligent police, your mate for giving you the bike in the first place, and the people who live across the street for not watching closely enough? It may not be clear to you, but it would be to others: Your irresponsible behavior in forgetting to take it home played a significant role in its disappearance, independent of anyone else’s actions.
The only cure for victimitis is finding a mechanism to release the victim’s brain from its grip, thereby restoring rational brain function and allowing self-confidence to thrive. There are no pills or special herbs at this time (although someone somewhere is probably working on it).
You may download now the whole the first chapter (“Slavery”) of my e-book “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness” FREE: http://stressfreedomguide.com/free/1/freechapter.html
the pleasure of recalling pleasurable moments
One of my old friends in Budapest who survived Auschwitz at the age of 13-15, not unlike Imre Kertesz, impressed me always as a calm, almost serene person. He told me that he bore no feelings of revenge, not even resentment, against anybody. How was that possible, I wanted to know. He told me that he tried to fill his active life with as many pleasurable moments as possible. In his old age he would reserve some time every day to remember one or two of those pleasurable moments. He refused to recall the painful moments.
What a perfect Epicurean pleasure practice! Until my being diagnosed with cancer I considered myself too active for “”wasting” time on memories. Since I understood that my life could statistically end within the next 2-3 years I started reminiscing, deriving pleasure from remembering the pleasurable moments I spent with nice and decent people.
Yesterday one of my friends sent me a link that facilitates this process: http://upchucky.org/
Listening to the juke box of a certain year kick-starts the reminiscing process almost automatically. Yes, this is an American juke box and most of my Italian idols of the sixties (Domenico Modugno, Remo Germani, Gigliola Cinquetti, Adamo) are missing but our old radio stations in communist Romania and the less repressive stations from neighboring Hungary and Yugoslavia did play Harry Belafonte, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and many others. The gaps were filled by Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America. We even saw movies with Elvis.
All these pieces help me piece together my memories of a certain year. I have started systematically going back to a certain year every day. Today I am back in1956 and I remember the playmates from the nursery school (two of them are dead for years, and probably many more of those I lost track of). I also remember the fascination and thrill I felt watching the endless rows of Russian tanks, inhaling their smell and absorbing their sound, as they majestically rolled on the Calea Armatei Rosii (Avenue of the Red Army) of my hometown, Arad, westwards. I remember my father listening to squeaking radio stations in the night and wearing a kind of expectation on his face.
The tanks crushed the Hungarian freedom-fight in a few weeks and that special expression on my father’s face only came back in December 1989 as he found out that Ceausescu, one of the worst dictators of the century, was shot.
ambition is counterproductive for pleasure production
My wife and my daughter made me a joint Christmas present, David Sedaris’ book ”Me Talk Pretty One Day “and I started reading the shortest short story practically during the breaks of our Mad-Libs game laughing out loudly (LOL) occasionally, i.e. about every 23 seconds.
Between the age of 16 and 26 I was convinced that I would become a brilliant short story writer and stopped to simply and purely enjoy the short stories I was reading. Instead, I started studying the techniques used by the authors.
After having given up this ambition I could just relax and enjoy them again.
About two or three years ago I chanced upon Sedaris’ “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” in an airport bookstore but the book mysteriously disappeared as soon as I got back to Germany and miraculously reappeared again as I unpacked the cardboard box with my most beloved books in America. My wife and daughter must have seen it on my night stand and heard me chuckle while reading it so they decided to add another volume to my pleasures.
While enjoying every single sentence I remembered DeWitts’s words:
Epicureanism presented two fronts to the world, the one as repellent as the other was attractive. Its discouragement of the political career was repellent to the ambitious, its denial of divine providence to pious orthodoxy, and its hedonism to timorous respectability. Its candor, charity, courtesy, and friendliness were attractive to multitudes of the honest and unambitious folk. (Epicurus and His Philosophy)
…and I felt happy to belong to that multitude:-)
euchre for pleasure
Thursday, Dec 16, the blood test showed no liver problems, the chest x-rays showed that the lungs were clear. I will have to undergo a CT scan next Wednesday (12/22) and PET scan Thursday (12/23). My appointment with the oncologist is scheduled for Dec 30 to discuss the test results and what we can do about them. Radiation therapy and later maybe chemo-therapy might be needed, depending on the stage MCC my cancer reached (IIIA, IIIB or IV). see also >> http://www.merkelcell.org/staging/index.php
I am in very good spirits. Yesterday my wife started teaching me and the kids a card game called euchre and it was a real pleasure for the whole family. For me it definitely and largely outbalanced the light pain I still feel from the incisions. I further improved my pleasure balance reading some pages from Tim O’Keefe’s “Epicureanism”.
first sequel of my Epicurean happiness guidance
Here’s the first sequel of my Epicurean happiness guidance “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness”
SLAVERY (1)
You’ve probably never thought of yourself as a slave (unless you count cleaning toilets and ironing shirts). But you’re about to see how we’re all slaves — slaves to fear. I don’t mean fear of slimy swamp creatures and monsters in the closet, even of losing our jobs or becoming very ill. I’m talking about the same kind of fear Roosevelt referred to more than 75 years ago.
The fear we are slaves to is of something shapeless and cloudy inside our heads. The good news is we can break the chains of emotional slavery and find stress-FREEDOM if we:
* Understand how we got shackled in the first place
* Recognize that we’re the only ones who can set us free
* Have the tools to unlock the chains
* Commit ourselves to the task
We’ll define slavery in this particular context as:
A state of being deprived of freedom
Until we can break free from the chains of fear, we will continue to deprive ourselves of a pain- and anxiety-free existence. In other words, the life of happiness we all seek — a state of stress-FREEDOM.
WHAT WE’RE AFRAID OF
There are many slave drivers that have taken up residence in our heads, including fear of:
Pain
Loneliness
Disrespect
Failure
Poverty
Death
At first glance, you may scoff and say, “No, not me!” But if we examine the concepts further, you may adjust your thinking. This is a long list of questions, but it must be in order for us to fully explore our self-defeating behaviors.
Please answer with a “yes” or a “no”:
1. Do you regularly drink more than you intended to?
2. Do you dislike, and even try to avoid, criticism?
3. Do you worry about what others may be saying about you?
4. Do you believe some events are just a matter fate?
5. Are you comfortable taking risks?
6. Does someone in your life “have it in for you”? That is, does someone just not like you and want to cause you trouble and grief at every opportunity?
7. Do you sometimes berate yourself for spending too much on your wardrobe?
8. Do you change your hair color fairly often?
9. Do you want to have washboard abs?
10. Do you sometimes think of yourself as a loser?
11. Do you carry over credit card debt from month to month?
12. Do you envy others who are thin and trim?
13. Are you planning the-wedding-of-all-weddings?
14. Are you staying in an abusive relationship?
15. Do you pick up “dates” in bars?
16. Do you use hair growth formulas because you’re balding?
17. Do you whiten your teeth?
18. Do you occasionally get embarrassed by your spouse’s behavior at a party?
19. Are you afraid to be seen without makeup?
20. When another person dominates the conversation, name-drops, and brags about his accomplishments, do you respond in kind?
21. Do you ignore physical symptoms and avoid going to the doctor?
22. Are you reluctant to simplify your lifestyle in times of financial trouble?
23. Do you sometimes feel that you just don’t measure up, that you are not handsome or sexy or rich or smart enough?
24. Do you ever exaggerate your accomplishments or take sole credit for something you were only a part of?
25. Have you ever gone to a movie or out to a nice restaurant alone?
26. Do you tend to be offended by criticism?
27. Do you routinely cave in to pressure and then later want to kick yourself (e.g., drink more than you know you should just to be sociable at parties; agree to chair a committee when you know you don’t have the time to do a good job)?
28. Do you say “It’s just not fair” frequently?
29. Do you sabotage yourself, e.g., violate the terms of a weight-loss plan or drop out of a class you really wanted to take, for a flimsy reason?
30. Do you need to be right and to prevail in every disagreement?
31. Do you consistently blame other factors when things go badly for you?
32. Do you usually ignore the “small voice in your head” (your conscience) when it is saying something contrary to what you have made up your mind to do?
A “yes” answer to any of these questions does not automatically make you a slave, but you should ask yourself why you answered the question the way you did. Was it because you studied the benefits and consequences and then made a free and conscious choice after you determined it will help you along in your quest for happiness? Or was it because:
* You want your in-laws to know you are prosperous.
* You have an image of stylishness and attractiveness to maintain.
* You want people to think you are smart.
* You don’t want people to know how smart you are.
* You don’t want people to think you made a poor decision.
* You don’t want to die.
* You don’t want to be lonely.
* You want to meet others’ expectations.
* You believe the ads in magazines and on TV that attempt to persuade you of the importance of owning the latest electronic gadgets, driving a luxury car, transforming yourself into a silky blonde, drinking manly beer, being buff, thin, beautiful, well-dressed and fragrant.
* You must “keep up appearances.”
* You need to prove you’re “hip” or macho.
* The thought of meeting expectations — yours or another’s — is frightening enough to make you want to fail.
If you can see yourself in any of these statements, you are a slave to at least one fear, and probably more. This means you continually live in a state of stress, and when you are in a state of stress, you cannot find happiness. Only stress-FREEDOM can lead you to happiness. I’ll describe each of these fears in more detail so that becomes clearer.
<end of sequel 1 – to be continued>
stress-FREEDOM, pain, pleasure, happiness, Epicurus, Epicurean
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