#Paul is a concept by which we measure our pain

[charlestrask]

paul is a concept by which we measure our pain

#* #i need to meet rob sheffield in person and shake his hand to thank him for this banger

[mydaroga]

I was watching a YouTube video yesterday about Paul is Dead and there was a section titled Paul Is a Concept By Which We Measure Our Pain and it was like he'd looked into my heart.

#kris talks a lot

[destinyimage]

Crush These 5 Demonic Lies that Sabotage Your Healing!

You might be thinking to yourself, I agree that with God all things are possible, but I’m not there.

And the way things are going, I don’t know if I ever will arrive to that level of faith. It’s been one attack after another, and I can’t seem to rise above it all. If this is you, it could be that your body is being buffeted by demons as the apostle Paul was, but you have not activated your faith for supernatural healing that flows from the throne of grace. You may be confused by false doctrine from the religious sector that accuses God of putting sickness on Paul, such as blindness, and that he endured with joy over this God-given thorn in the flesh against his body. Let’s bring correction to this false teaching so that you can be free from the ill effects of it.

And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong (2 Corinthians 12:7-10 KJV).

This portion of Scripture is talking about protecting Paul from becoming prideful and is not about God plaguing him with sickness or withholding healing from him as he begs God to take the thorn away from him. The “thorn in the flesh” is not sickness and disease such as blindness or any other type of eye disease, but a demon who buffets him—attacks Paul with one attack after another.

Many of God’s people believe that He has given them a thorn in the flesh—by which they mean an illness intended to teach them a spiritual lesson in patience and endurance and to draw them closer to God. This is a lie from the devil himself. And this type of belief turns many away from God. They blame Him for the devil’s work. It misconstrues their conception of Almighty God as one who does not care but is cruel and harsh and on the lookout for an opportunity to punish His people. In fact, with the payment of His blood Jesus purchased our healing for us at the whipping post.

But [in fact] He has borne our griefs, and He has carried our sorrows and pains; yet we [ignorantly] assumed that He was stricken, struck down by God and degraded and humiliated [by Him]. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was crushed for our wickedness [our sin, our injustice, our wrongdoing]; the punishment [required] for our well-being fell on Him, and by His stripes (wounds) we are healed (Isaiah 53:4-5 AMP).

Biblical Facts from Isaiah 53:4-5

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Jesus bore our griefs. This word griefs means sickness (Strong’s H2483). And what did He do with our sicknesses at Calvary? He bore them. This means our Lord carried them for us (Strong’s H5375).

This foundational portion of Scripture continues to explain what the Lord did for us. It says that He carried our sorrows, or He bore them for us on His back. And just what are those sorrows? Physical and mental pain (Strong’s H4341).

It goes on to say that we esteem or judge Him (Strong’s H2803) stricken, plagued (Strong’s H5060), smitten, slaughtered (Strong’s H5221) by God. Because Jesus was wounded, defiled (Strong’s H2490) for our transgressions—our rebellion (Strong’s H6588). He was bruised, crushed (Strong’s H1792) for our iniquities, our perversity, our sin (Strong’s H5771).

The chastisement, discipline, or correction (Strong’s H4148) for our peace, our welfare, health, and prosperity (Strong’s H7965) was upon Him. And by His stripes, bruises, and wounds (Strong’s H2250) we are healed, cured, and made whole (Strong’s H7495).

(These definitions are taken from the chart on pages 37-38 in Chapter 3, “The Power of the Blood,” from my book The Healing Creed. We will refer to this chart and the meaning of these powerful verses throughout this work.)

He Understands the Frailty of Humanness

Our Lord understands the frailty of our humanness. Remember, He chose to leave His God-powers in heaven and walk this earth in human form and, like us, face the same temptations and hardships and make the same type of daily decisions we face today: “Do I believe that with God this seemingly impossible situation can turn around? Do I deny this great healing power and cling to my human reasoning of unbelief?” Thanks be to God, He did not dwell on the impossibility of the situation but moved forward with great faith in a great God who empowers all who believe with healing power.

For we do not have a High Priest who is unable to sympathize and understand our weaknesses and temptations, but One who has been tempted [knowing exactly how it feels to be human] in every respect as we are, yet without [committing any] sin (Hebrews 4:15 AMP).

What a privilege it is to serve the living God who has experiential knowledge of the weakness that we face at times. The apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:10 (NKJV), “Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” While this man of faith was under great tribulation in his new life in Christ, he still was able to remain strong in the faith knowing no matter how the enemy came after him, his faith was not in himself but in Christ. This is where our strength to overcome the tribulations of this life comes from—even the power to walk in victory over that temptation of doubt and unbelief concerning healing of that disease.

Urgent Plea for Help to Believe

The people of this earth are in turmoil; so much has happened and continues to happen around us. It’s been one crisis after another with- out time to process, rest, and regain their strength. People are crying, weeping for the loss of what once was, what they once had, and more importantly, for the people they have lost. The pileup of grievous events has caused many to grow too weak in the faith to believe the promises found in God’s Word.

I receive many prayer requests, and this one arrives today: “Please pray that I may have the strength to believe God’s Word once again. I’m tired of wallowing in unbelief and doubt, but I just can’t seem to bring myself to believe what I read.” As I read this, I can’t help but think this is someone who has been beaten down by the enemy, the devil, and they are worn down and need a refreshing. This plea for spiritual help is not rare, but now common. If you are in this situation, I want to share with you what I share with this individual.

I’m not sure all that has happened to you, nor do I need to know, but I do know this: that the Lord will hear when you cry out to Him. He loves you with an everlasting love, and when you feel weak, He remains strong. I pray for you, for a renewal in your relationship with Jesus—that you will hunger and thirst for righteousness. As you read the Bible again, you will remember to ask Holy Spirit to lead you through the Scriptures, and you will learn to allow Him to speak to you, teach you, lead you and guide you, and comfort you. Knowing that you are unique (Psalm 139:13), you are precious (1 Corinthians 6:20), you are lovely (Daniel 12:3), and you are special to Him too (Ephesians 2:10). With a sincere heart, ask Him right now to help you through this dry season in your life, and for Holy Spirit to refresh you and bring joy back between the two of you.

Let’s pray about this right now. Father God,

In the name of Your precious Son, Jesus, I ask for Your forgiveness for waiting so long before reaching out for help. I don’t know exactly when things started to go sour between us, but I know that our relationship is not what it once was. I desire our relationship to be healed and strengthened. Holy Spirit, lead me back to my Lord. Help me to fall back into love with You.

Holy Spirit, lead me and guide me as I read the Word. Help me to see the truth and the reality that is penned within the pages of the Holy Bible. I long to see and to understand and to walk in the power of Your Word, in Your most holy name, I pray, amen.

I believe as you continue to call out to the Lord with an honest plea about what’s going on inside your soul, that barrier between you and God will start to come down, and that urgent cry for help to believe again will be answered. With time spent in prayer and in the Word, your faith will be strengthened once again.

Taste the Goodness of the Lord

You may have had a taste of religion, which has a foul flavor mixed with a bit of spiritual sugar, such as, “God is good, He loves you, but He’s testing your faithfulness with that cancerous tumor.” You see what I mean? It leaves a bitter aftertaste in the mouth. It’s time to spit that out and get a real taste of the goodness of God, who has good things in store for you and truly desires to fellowship with you.

David prays this encouraging verse found in Psalm 34:8 (AMP), “O taste and see that the Lord [our God] is good; how blessed [fortunate, prosperous, and favored by God] is the man who takes refuge in Him.” We are to perceive—become aware of by personal experience—the goodness of God so that we can come to believe that His nature is good, and He only has our best interests in mind.

The prophet Nahum, in the book named after him found in the Old Testament, writes this about God’s character during a time of great tribulation for his nation, while they were being ruled by an evil king: “The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble, and He knows those who take refuge in Him” (Nahum 1:7 NASB). This word stronghold in Strong’s Concordance means a place of safety, protection and refuge (Strong’s H4581). The goodness of God provides these things for us, and in His presence is where we find His protection.

Psalm 84 is a beautiful psalm about the goodness and faithfulness of God. In verse 11 it says, “For the Lord God is our sun and our shield. He gives us grace and glory. The Lord will withhold no good thing from those who do what is right” (Psalm 84:11 NLT). The author of this psalm speaks of the good things, the blessings of God that He gifts to those who enter the presence of God. He knows them, and He showers them with the necessities of life. Perhaps as you read this, you yourself are in great need for healing. Enter His presence with a heart of worship, be thankful for who He is, and allow Him to supply the need that you have.

Five Dangerous Lies People Are Taught to Believe

As you can tell, I am not a fan of religion, and quite frankly neither was Jesus. I have heard people share the most devastating lies that they were told by people who claim to be Christians and say they know the Word of God but spread the most outlandish lies to hurt people. I’m going to share a list of common lies that I hear from people needing a healing touch from the Lord.

Because you are sick, you must have done something wicked.

Just because someone is very sick does not mean they have done something wicked. Yes, sin does open the door to the enemy’s attack, but oftentimes these attacks of sickness come because we live in a fallen world. Jesus lets us know in John 16:33 (NKJV), “These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” When He says that you will have tribulation, He means you will have difficult times. Not because God has designed your journey on this earth to be filled with bad things, but because you have an enemy, satan, who is bent upon your destruction. Jesus says this about the devil in John 10:10 (NKJV), “The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”

Supernatural healing is not for today.

This is an especially dangerous lie to spread. I wonder just how many people have died needlessly because of it. God says of Himself, “I am the Lord who heals you” (Exodus 15:26 NKJV). Matthew 8:17 states this biblical fact, “He Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses.” We can rest assured that He has not removed supernatural healing from His list of goodness toward us, as it says in Hebrews 13:8 (NKJV), “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” And again, in Malachi 3:6 (NKJV) we read, “For I am the Lord, I do not change.” Simply put, healing is for today. God has not removed His healing promises from the New Covenant.

My needs are trivial and unimportant to God.

You are important to God, and He cares about every detail in your life. Here’s a verse about how deeply He cares about the little details concerning you: “But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not fear therefore, you are of more value than many sparrows” (Luke 12:7 NKJV). “Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Matthew 6:26 NKJV). And here is another portion of Scripture to help you know God considers you very valuable to Him: “How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand; when I awake, I am still with You” (Psalm 139:17-18 NKJV).

It’s God’s will that you are sick.

This is not what my Bible says! John writes in 3 John 1:2 (NKJV), “Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers.” So the next time someone says this to you, you rebuke them and say, “No, it’s not! With the shed blood of Jesus at the whipping post, and throughout the entire atoning process, I have been redeemed, my sins are forgiven, and my body has been healed too” (see Isaiah 53:4-5).

Prayer doesn’t change much.

Let me be clear—not all communication with God is prayer. A lot of what is said is whining and complaining, and you’re right—that doesn’t move God. Only faith moves God. So when we pray, we are to pray in faith, without whining, complaining, blaming Him for evil, and without doubt and unbelief. This is what faith-filled prayers accomplish, “And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven” (James 5:15 NKJV). Now, this verse alone undoes all the lies mentioned under this subtitle.

Have you been taught a dangerous lie that is preventing you from receiving your supernatural healing? Take some time to pray about this question, write it down, and look up one to three verses from the Bible to undo the lie that was planted within your mind and emotions.

If God says it, that settles it! He declares that by His stripes you are healed and that this healing power is for anyone who chooses to believe in it. Don’t allow anyone to talk you out of your right to be healed in Jesus’ name.

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[god-whispers]

jun 13

facing your trial with joy

"but the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.  against such there is no law." gal 5:22-23

every success in life is meaningless without joy.  joy is God’s dream for you.  heaven is called a “wedding banquet.”  and Jesus’ whole mission was to share that joy with you.  He said it himself.  “these things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full." john 15:11  think about that. the joy of God in YOU.  the experience of that joy eternal starts now.  and it doesn’t start with a change in your circumstances but a change in you.

joy is something we all long for but that often seems difficult to grab hold of.  experiencing joy should be a part of every Christian’s life.  joy is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, produced by God’s work in us, and it is part of God’s will for us.

we know that even the most mature of God’s people experience periods of joylessness.  for instance, job wished he had never been born (Job 3:11).  david prayed to be taken away to a place where he would not have to deal with reality (psa 55:6–8).  elijah, even after defeating 450 prophets of baal with fire called down from heaven (1 kings 18:16–46), fled into the desert and asked God to take his life (1 kings 19:3–5).  if these men struggled, how can we experience consistent joy in the christian life?

the first thing is to realize that joy is a gift from God.  the root word for joy in the greek is chara, which is closely related with the greek charis for “grace.”  joy is both a gift of God as well as a response to the gifts of God.  joy comes when we are aware of God’s grace and relish His favor.

with this in mind, it’s evident that one way to experience joy is to focus on God.  rather than dwelling on our difficulties or those things robbing our contentment, we should dwell on God.  this is not to say we should deny our discontentment or stuff negative emotions inside.  following the example of many of the psalmists, we can pour out our hearts to God.  we can tell Him bluntly all the things that ail us.  but then we submit those things to Him, remember who He is, and are happy in Him.  Psa 3, 13, 18, 43, and 103 are good examples.

joy is our weapon of warfare for all situations.  it exalts God and dampens the devil's intentions.  it is our recognition that God loves us enough to bother.  and, if you are blessed to be suffering for our Lord's sake, great will be your reward in heaven.  "so they departed... rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name." acts 5:41

my fellows, we are being trained up in the way we should go, "to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." eph 4:3  "my brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience.  but let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing." james 1:2-8   "now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it." heb 12:11

joy is a level above happiness.  it's fulfillment on top of happiness, triumph on top of happiness, elation on top of happiness.  happy is how you feel when you watch a funny movie.  joy is how you feel when you're living life in the will of God.

frequently, the bible uses the word joy rather than happiness.  happiness verses in the bible are scarce compared to the words “joy” and “rejoice.”  in society joy and happiness are frequently used interchangeably, but they are not the same.   in contrast to the world's conception of happiness, joy is a state of being, a state of peace and content.  it’s an internal choice, a characteristic of self that becomes a part of your nature — not some flimsy emotional response to some external stimuli.

perhaps our beloved apostle paul spoke it best:  "yet indeed i also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom i have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that i may gain Christ." phil 3:8

you see, Christ is our joy - our joy unspeakable.  as with all other things in the world, there is nothing outside of Him; only a void waiting to be filled.  "let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: fear God and keep His commandments, for this is man’s all." eccl 12:13

so, "in the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider: surely God has appointed the one as well as the other." eccl 7:14  joy that you are in His will, being perfected!

[thecoleopterawithana]

It was hard not to admire John’s wit and wisdom. But as I came to see him as a person and a human being, there were, of course, arguments, though never anything violent. There’s even a movie out there in which John’s character punches my character, but the truth is that he never punched me. As with many friendships, there were disputes and there were arguments, but not many. Sometimes, though, I certainly thought John was being a complete idiot. Even though I was younger, I would try to explain to him why he was being stupid and why something he’d done was so unlike him. I remember him saying things to me like, ‘You know, Paul, I worry about how people are gonna remember me when I die.’ Thoughts like that shocked me, and I’d reply, ‘Hold on; just hold it right there. People are going to think you were great, and you’ve already done enough work to demonstrate that.’ I often felt like I was his priest and would have to say, ‘My son, you’re great. Just don’t worry about that.’

Paul McCartney, in The Lyrics (2021).

#the beatles #paul mccartney #John Lennon #The Lyrics #the number one john lennon fan #i like intelligent people #that beatle humor #Nowhere Boy #i could just often be the 'baddie' #i was feeling insecure #Paul is a concept by which we measure our pain #it's the concept of it we inspire each other #I want to help you with your problem #the person I actually picked as my partner #introduction #solo #2021 #quote #my stuff

[amoralto]

BLACKBURN: [Athur Janov’s] ideas seem to have something in common with [R. D.] Laing in that he doesn’t want to reconcile people to their misery, to adjust them to the world, but rather to make them face up to its causes? JOHN: Well, his thing is to feel the pain that’s accumulated inside you ever since your childhood. I had to do it to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life – it’s excruciating, you are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. It’s the result of your parents and your environment. As I realised this it all started to fall into place. This therapy forced me to have done with all the Godshit. All of us growing up have come to terms with too much pain. Although we repress it, it’s still there. The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them. When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind. Janov doesn’t just talk to you about this but makes you feel it – once you’ve allowed yourself to feel again, you do most of the work yourself. When you wake up and your heart is going like the clappers or your back feels strained, or you develop some other hang-up, you should let your mind go to the pain and the pain itself will regurgitate the memory which originally caused you to suppress it in your body. In this way the pain goes to the right channel instead of being repressed again, as it is if you take a pill or a bath, saying, ‘Well, I’ll get over it.’ Most people channel their pain into God or masturbation or some dream of making it. The therapy is like a very slow acid trip which happens naturally in your body. It is hard to talk about, you know, because you feel ‘I am pain’ and it sounds sort of arbitrary, but pain to me now has a different meaning because of having physically felt all these extraordinary repressions. It was like taking gloves off, and feeling your own skin for the first time. It’s a bit of a drag to say so, but I don’t think you can understand this unless you’ve gone through it – though I try to put some of it over on the album. But for me at any rate it was all part of dissolving the Godtrip or father-figure trip. Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.

John Lennon, interview w/ Robin Blackburn and Tariq Ali for Red Mole. (March 8th-22nd, 1971)

#1971 #interviewed: john #arthur janov #paul is a concept by which we measure our pain

[realitysaconstruct]

“God is a concept, by which we measure our pain.”

—John Lennon, “God,” John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, 1970

#god #jesus #god is a concept #religion #philosophy #john lennon #plastic ono band #yoko ono #by which we measure our pain #i dont believe in god #the beatles #paul mccartney #lennon #lyrics #here comes the sun #abbey road #think for yourself #critical thinking #concept #mygif #sean ono lennon #lana del rey #classic rock #alternative rock #give peace a chance #woodstock #hippies #60s #70s

[idontwanttospoiltheparty]

what are your thoughts about yoko saying that john would sit her down to listen to pauls records and then cry while listening. do you think john regretted the way things ended up between the two of them? I mean by 1980 he was kinda back to saying a few things like the long and winding road was pauls last gasp and other than discussing bread from time to time, I don’t think they actually spoke or connected that much as they used to (and of course not seeing each other) + also accounts from ppl saying he didn’t like paul coming over or something so I just wonder what johns feelings for paul were at that time? did he just not like or care about him anymore?

I feel a bit out of my wits with this ask, tbh. I'm not super well-read on late-70s John, so it's hard for me to get into his headspace. From what I understand, reports on his feelings toward and relationship with Paul (and the Beatle era as a whole) during this period vary greatly. There's a post somewhere buried in my likes I have yet to get to that theorizes that perhaps John and Paul saw each other one last time mere months before December 1980. I'm also not quite clear on how definite their plans to work together again in 1981 were, though I've heard people refer to them.

(I guess what I'm saying is, I've seen a lot of stories about this period but I don't know much about the reliableness of the sources covering John's last years)

Regarding John being rude about Paul's music again during the 1980 Playboy interview: I get the feeling a lot of it is John generally expressing his frustration (with life as a whole, after many years of writer's block and ongoing mental health issues) and since the interview covers the entire Beatles discog, Paul was an easy target to project his issues onto.

Tangent-ish: I'm always struck by this comment of his on the Across The Universe recording being fucked where, only as a sidethought, he mentions that he was mentally destroyed at the time of recording, and says something ambiguous about nobody helping him, where it's not clear if he's referring to the song or his general state.

I think the thing with John is he liked simple explanations for things. He liked summarizing all problems in one sentence ("God is a concept by which we measure our pain") and having a one-size fits-all solution. This led him to many disappointments in life. (becoming disillusioned with the Maharishi, Paul [though obviously Paul also probably could have been more open towards John, but I have serious doubts about how effectively John communicated his needs to Paul], primal scream too probably. I'm feeling saucy, so throw in Allen Klein as well!) He also, by his own admission, let his current feelings taint his view of the past.

Basically, I think the Playboy interview is more symptomatic of his generally fragile state in 1980 than of some specific (new) issue with Paul. Also it's what happens when you let A-list celebrities with a habit of mouthing off without thinking answer questions however they want. SMH challenge this dude on some of his claims… Ask for clarification…

To go back to your first question, I also don't know how much of John crying while listening to Paul's music can be jotted down purely to his feelings towards Paul, rather than an amalgamation of many of his issues. Sometimes you listen to a sad song about a break up and end up missing your dead pet or something.

Feelings don't often make perfect narrative sense.

The bread situation was definitely not ideal, but I think that being able to talk normally about things like that can in fact be a road to healing a relationship. It's not the fastest, and yeah maybe something was fundamentally broken between them (but they did call. They lived on opposite ends of the Atlantic and could have easily just never talked, no?), but I do think even in the most vicious Before-After catastrophes between two people, it can be mended with time. And I'm speaking from my own experience. Love is always a choice you make. I don't know if they made that choice but I do think that at the very least, John was keeping that option, to choose to love again, open for himself until the end.

IDK Maybe this is too optimistic for some of you, but that's my gut feeling at the moment. Sorry that it was a bit all over the place.

#“too optimistic” this isnt even happy i just dont see these two as 100% doomed ig #definitely not later on; maybe they were never gonna make it through the 60s in one piece #but they were SUPPOSED to have all the time in the world to fix it #yeah paul is still closed off today………… but can a paul that didnt go through december 9th 1980 be compared to who we know him to be today #analysis #jp #mine #80 #ask #anon #john

[longforyesterday]

Is there anyone whose favourite Beatle is not Paul who has read Rob Sheffield's Dreaming the Beatles? (Two years ago I stopped reading that book right at the chapter about him - "Paul is a concept by which we measure our pain" - and I've just picked it up again. The problem is, as someone whose favourite Beatle is Paul, I have some issues getting what Sheffield says.) Do you feel the same way he does in that chapter?

#paul mccartney #dreaming the beatles #rob sheffield #beatles books

[depenacharm]

Reflection (chapter 1 to 11) De Peña, Erniel Charm Ubas. BsEntrep

A persons self-concept is their understandin of who they are and what makes them unique. This can include the physical self and the social self, the competent self and the inner, or psychological self, meanwhile, a persons self-understanding is about knowing what motivates his or her actions. Understanding the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, The main objective is to understand the meaning, importance and various factors related to self concept and self esteem.

Philosophical Perspective of the Self

Philosophy in " Greek Words" is "Philos" and "Sophia" (means: love and wisdom) study of acquiring knowledge through rational thinking and inquiries that involves in answering questions regarding the nature and existence of man and the world we live in.

•Socrates

-Happiness motivates us to act towards or avoid things that could have negative effects in our lives, he is the first martyr of educatio, knowledge and philosoph, for him, men's goal in life is to obtain happines.

•Plato

-Wrote several literature that that tackles politics, human nature, and established the idea of virtue and intelligence. According to him, a person who is a follower of truth and wisdom will not be tempted by vices and will always be correct, moral and ethical.

•St. Augustine

-Emphasized that we may not be able to give our agreement to everything other people tell us but we can still agree to those who we are from our own perception. We need to establish relationshi with God throug being virtuous.

•Rene Descartes

-Body and its perceptions cannot fully be trusted or can easily be deceived. We should focus on the mind in order to perceive as who we are or the essence of our existence because we cannot always trust our senses.

•John Locke

-The experiences and perceptions of a person is important in the establishment of who that person can become.

•David Hume

-There is no permanent self, because impressions of things are based from our experiences where we can create our ideas and knowledge. Self is accumulation of different impressions, and does not exceed the physical realm.

•Immanuel Kant

- Awareness of different emotions that we have, impressiona and behavior is only a part of ourself. We experience but still be alone to become aware of.

•Sigmund Freud

-Man has the different levels of conciousness that provides an idea how a person develops a sense of self. He believed We are a by-product of our experiences in the past and that are actions are driven by the idea of resisting or avoiding pain. And are molded from our need for being happy or pleasure.

•Gilbert Ryle

- Behavior that we show, emotions and actions are the reflection of our mind and as such is the manifestation of who we are.

•Paul Churchland

-Understanding the different neural pathways, how they work and what Implication are those movement to people is a measurable classification on ones behavior.

•Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty

-Self-regarded that the body and mind are not separate entities but rather those two components is one and the same perception guides our action based from our experiences. One's actions, behavior and language used could be said to be the reflection of our united perception of the world.

•Aristotle

-Each individual has built-in patterns of development, which help it grow toward becoming a fully developed individual of its kind. Happiness depends upon ourselves.

Sociological Perspective: The self as a product of Society

-According to Gerry Lanuza, the self in the modern world societies is freely chosen, because of the demand of the different societies where social contexts or issues are also belong.In this chapter I learned that, it also talk about the freedom, opportunities and problem of the self. The self develops with the Social experience and within the environment. The self also develops with help of the people he/she communicate with.

An Anthropological Conceptualization of Self: The Self as Embedded in Culture.

Embedded means to enclose or in as if in a matrix. to make something an integral part and culture is a system of human behavior and thought. Referring to a complex whole which includes the following and other capabilities acquired by a man as a member of society like knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law and custom cultural differences exist when groups of people assign different meanings to different life events and things. It is concerned with how cultural and biological process interact to shape human experience.

Western and Eastern Concept of the Self

I learned that western philosophy, is based on self-dedication to be of service to others. Life is Service to God, money, community, and so on. Due to its christian influence, there has to be a beginning and end to find meaning. Eastern philosophy also thrives on virtues. this would be explained with the selfless approach to life. Meanwhile, Eastern philosophy is also more about the spiritual while, Western philosophy is more of a hands-on style. The difference is the “i” of the west, and “we” of the east, as one focuses on finding truth and meaning. both philosophies center on virtues.

Psychological Perspective of the Self

The psychology of self is the study of either the cognitive, conative or affective representation of ones identity or the subject of experience. Current views of the self in psychology position the self as playing an integral part in human motivation, cognition, affect and social identity. Self perspective is a collection of beliefs about oneself. Generally self-concept embodies the answer to “ who am I? “

The Physical Self

Physical ability includes concepts such as physical strength and endurance, while appearance refers to attractiveness physical self is the individuals perception of themselves in areas of physical ability and appearance. I learned in this chapter that body image is the perception that a person has of their physical self and the thoughts and feeling that result from that perception.These feelings can be positive, negative or both, and are influenced by individual and environmental factors.

The Sexual Self

I learned that sexual self-concept refers to the totality of oneself as a sexual being including positive and negative concepts and feelings. Love is defined as to show or have deep attraction, affection or emotional attachment to a person, people or thing. Social exchange theory is like asking someone out on a date if the person says yes, you have gained a reward and are likely to repeat the interaction by asking that person out again.

The Material Self

According to William James, material self pertains to the objects, places, or even people which have the label “mine”. I learned in this chapter that materialistic person, is excessively concerned with material possessions, money oriented, or is a person who is focus on objects, ownership and wealth. An example of someone materialistic is a friend who is focused on only buying/wearing brand new shoes. Materialism is the philosophy that everything can be explained in terms of matter or the idea that goods and wealth are the most important things, example of materialism is explaining love in terms of material thing.

Spiritual Self

Spiritual Self is the activity we engage in to find and nurture a sense of connection to a higher power and deeper meaning for our lives. I learned that Religion is connected with spirituality, we need religion to be moral to give us a sense of right and wrong, and help us to be good. It sets a standard for good behavior and punishes the bad.

Political Self

Aristotle define politics “ He who has the power to take part in the deliberative or judicial administration of any state is said by us to be a citizen of that state and speaking generally a state is a body of citizens sufficing for the purpose of life” I learned that we should care about politics, because the decisions people make will affect many lives. Politics are very important and very complicated.

Digital Self

Digital self, exploring the complications and conflicts that technology presents in personal and professional relationships. We all have digital self like emailing or chat rooms. I learned that we should manage digital self and ensuring that should aware what we published about ourselves online. Time we spend using digital technology could well be spent in other more creative and productive ways.

I learned in this lesson that is a process by which can grow my understanding of who am I and what my values are. It is a form of personal analysis that allows us to bring our life into alignment with what we wish it to be. 

[myfriendpokey]

easy like sunday morning

I know it sounds funny but I just can't stand the pain.. Given the volume of critical writing on difficult games in recent years isn't it time to talk about some easy ones?  Everybody loves talking about, 'Sekiro', but no-one ever talks about, 'Felix The Cat (NES) (1992)', a delightful game with many levels that stands out in my childhood memory as being one of the very few games I was ever able to complete within the Xtravision rental window. In these notes I try to lay down a preliminary basis for felix the cat studies.[1]

1. Firstly what is easiness, is it a quality or the absence of a quality, of a texture? I'd like to focus here specifically NOT on games which deliberately avoid the idea of 'challenge' altogether (Proteus, etc) but instead on games where challenge is both theoretically present and totally perfunctory, where it's both possible to die, and just easier not to.

2. And the strange sense of waste that this creates - the waste in having something and not needing it, of having some productive capacity lie fallow. The dream is to always have both an affordance and something to flex it on, in perfect sync. There are situations where exercising some affordance might give a bad outcome (use sword on king to increase crime meter etc) but in general the universe is set up so that your acting, your being, your bodily striving has a useful and productive effect on the world at large – we hope, ha ha ha. We have no reason to doubt that we use our affordances, rather than that our affordances are using us. In an easy game this relationship becomes more uncanny - we get a sense of how an affordance can be baggage, a kind of painful excess of productive energy that comes with a vague, felt obligation to use it all up in some manner. The machine speaks through us just as much as if we were playing any bullet hell - but it does so less through an overload of stimulus than through lack of it, through opening a space, which the ambient noise of the body then rushes to fill. The aimless, stupid twitching of our flesh as it burns off all the energy which is socially and economically surplus to requirements is directed and made visible, jumping back and forth onscreen in the mocking form of a smiling platform cat, a form of automatic writing.

3. I'd actually like to avoid making a moral or political case for easy games as having some intrinsic social value (that they resist the 'investment' of skill mastery, that they undercut feelings of power and control, or that they indeed actually represent a new form of meta-difficulty in testing your ability to reject false measurements of success and artificial scarcity and that therefore playing Goldeneye with infinite ammo cheats on is praxis or something.[2]) These might be useful qualities at some moment or another - but I think they also show the strange, magic-eye effect, of trying to write about easiness in itself, writing about absence without just converting it into another kind of presence (I'm sure I have failed multiple times and will fail multiple more). So easiness in videogames is constantly at risk of becoming just a different kind of difficulty, or some form of symbolic content - rather than the lack of such difficulty, or the lack of such content... In the context of videogames, a new media form busily involved with stockpiling content and meanings and symbolism and justification of all kinds, in trying to fill itself up and out, the idea of their emptiness is somehow quite threatening.[3]

4. Difficulty in games tends to be framed as a challenge to the primacy of the self, or as an estrangement, something that pushes you out of your comfort zone. It wakes you up, makes you more alert. Easiness by comparison is a sop to the self - indulgent, a narrowing of horizons. Easiness is mainstream, difficulty is avant-garde - and discussions of difficulty in games tend to draw a lot upon comparisons to older avant-garde art or literature. I'm in favour of avant-garde videogames but i think part of claiming that tradition should be a willingness to critique it, too. For example, difficult games are some of the most popular ones to stream - are these challenging the self? To an extent they allow the performance of the self, as manifested in angry outbursts, "reacting" in some characteristic manner, individuating oneself through accomplishment or distinctive playstyle, demonstrating personal qualities such as persistence and strength of will, very little of which could be said to come through in your average Felix The Cat longplay. And while Marvel movies and longrunning tv shows are seldom difficult in the same way as experimental art they do at least tend to gesture at the idea and feeling of a certain difficulty, an emotional strenuousness, a conflict to overcome. We don't just get a whole movie of Spiderman trying on 100 different hats. Some kind of difficulty is prized in both cultures, with the difference being that of location and degree. The idea of the modernist shock, the abrupt estrangement that jolts the (presumably bourgeois, etc) viewer out of their habitual comfort zone, sits awkwardly against comparatively more recent concepts like Naomi Klein's idea of the “shock doctrine” or Paul Virilio's writings on the bombarded, exhausted viewer - or indeed with that most modern form: the hot take, the truly gratuitous and combative opinion, tossed at the unsuspecting for the sake of wreaking minor carnage. The succession of shocks here don't so much disturb the self as confirm it as a thing apart, defined in negative against the tumult outside and valued as a refuge from that outside. Maybe we take it to the gym now and then, we test it out upon some pre-selected object of difficulty to keep it in shape, but afterwards the gate goes down and the wall goes up. I don't think difficulty is bad or illegitimate but if psychic reconfiguration is the goal then how about a modernist slackening instead? In the vein of Stein, Pessoa, Walser, Musil - "the game without qualities". Lured into roaming outside of its protective carapace the brain starts to dissolve, sprawl, melt into gloop, be devoured by ants.

5. Experience of playing an easy game: there’s no pushback, there's no skill check , a string of easy victories lead you forward without realising, or leads a part of you forward, there's no moment where you have to pull yourself together and decide just how much more of your time you wanna spend on this thing, a chirpy character onscreen is declaiming "GREAT!" and "SUBURB!" as you shoot pellets at more enemies, whatever aimless drive or impulse you flicked toward this thing to test it has not yet slowed down or returned, it's like dropping a pebble down a well, and waiting for the sound, and waiting forever - and then there's a plop! and whatever the process was, it's finished, you blink, try to remember what you were doing, wander off, still adjusting to the light.

6. The history of aesthetics is that of converting new kinds of necessity into new kinds of virtue [4]. Difficulty is a virtue in videogames, but it started out as a necessity, as well - as a prefab form handed down from the old mechanical amusements, a way to aestheticise (and commercialise) material resistance at a time when material resistance was almost all that videogames had to offer[5]. As certain kinds of difficulty emerge as objects of attention a reversal takes place: instead of difficulty being a way to engage with videogames, videogames become a way to engage with a certain kind of difficulty. Difficulty becomes a sign that unites a diffuse and heterogenuous field of garish electronic debris into a single medium and an aesthetic – this becomes part of what videogames *are*, and persists even when the original reasons for that difficulty become less and less present, and as 'difficulty' comes to exist mainly as a set of inherited structures and modes of representation (health bar, life counter etc). To make something that looks like a videogame in every way but has no difficulty is in a way to re-historicise it, to cut the thread which holds all the parts together - now the game collapses into a set of disembodied effects, sounds, gestures, machinery, which exist not so much as the expression of an aesthetic as an expression of the material history behind that aesthetic. The easy game is not a game but a kind of game-byproduct, an industrial accident that gives clue to the inner workings of the machine.

7. The mysterious purgatory that is the solved or near-solved state of a videogame, aimless and uncanny, an image of fulfilled desire: maybe not your desire, but somebody's, or some part of you. Think of playing with cheat codes: a few minutes ago you might have been desperate to get BLUE SWORD [RARE], now you can't get rid of the things. A routine complaint in popular longform games is that people just end up getting too much money and not having enough endless pits to dump it all into (thorstein veblen real??). And this is a known thing and trite to even remark upon and usually the point where the discussion turns into pop-psychology liturgy of how the human brain is "broken" and "hard-wired" to need new challenges and etc. I don't care, I'd like to spend more time within this twilight area, to construct as diligent and thorough a map of its empty rooms and blockages and tiny, shifting, hypersubtle moments of enjoyment or deep melancholy as the one we  already have for Diablo clones and similar. I think here of stuff like EJ Gold's games which claim to depict (indeed, allow you to perform rituals within) the bardo realms waiting after this world, where you roll around endless corridors collecting icons to accumulate money and charisma for your next life, and where for some reason there's a button to fire out pellets despite there being no enemies to kill. Videogames are depressingly, predictably excellent at producing new manifestations of inferno; I think, for the same reasons, that they could produce some very interesting paradises as well.

Is Felix The Cat a good game? Or is it in fact the only game, and also i'm dead and my spirit has been trapped inside of it? I hope the above comments make my feelings known. All i can do from here is recommend you watch Docfuture's Sonic Easy Mode video, and contemplate the world that could have been.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-ef8SD9gUg

[1] Just imagine it - instead of endless essays on "how completing, not completing, not playing VIDEOGAME made me a better person, worse person, more divorced person delete as appropriate" we would instead get endless essays on "how playing VIDEOGAME left me more or less the same person, I suppose, I don't really remember. But I did like the beach level".

[2] Having said this I of course realise that this is totally inevitable and look forward to BABYMODECORE, the videogame movement for people who always instinctively pick the lowest difficulty setting and want to reclaim such powerful formative experiences as beating up on the test dummy character in Tekken (and being scared that one day he'd glitch out and hunt me down instead)

[3] I wonder if part of the hatred for "asset flips" that they just replicate the shape of a videogame without filling it up with justificatory content, abstracting it somehow.

[4] Mangled from a line in F. Jameson's "Marxism and Form"

[5] Like early digital forms of old mechanical arm wrestling machines and punching bags - which slowly became part of that mysterious stock repository of ancestral videogame dream imagery, the minigame collection.

#felix the cat #easy games #commodores 64

[karenwasadrummer]

"Paul is a concept by which we measure our pain."

-Quinton reviews

[fathersonholygore]

First Reformed. 2018. Directed & Written by Paul Schrader. Starring Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Antonio Kyles, Michael Gaston, Victoria Hill, Van Hansis, & Philip Ettinger. Killer FIlms/Fibonacci Films/Arclight Films Rated R. 113 minutes. Drama/Thriller

★★★★★

How do the holy remain so in the changing face of modernity? How can religion extend itself into an age of postmodern cities, pop culture, and the ravages of urbanity and capitalism? Paul Schrader may not have all the answers, though his latest film First Reformed does a fine job of exploring these themes. He’s returned to what he does best: questioning the fabric of America. The thread he pulls on this time is close to his heart, as Schrader grew up in a Calvinist home, part of the Christian Reformed Church. Father Gore suspects Mr. Schrader’s screenplay is a result of many dark nights of faith across decades of life, an accumulated set of anxieties he’s experience about his system of belief. Ethan Hawke gives a career best performance as Reverend Ernst Toller— a reference to the German Expressionist playwright of the same name. His crisis of faith is brought on by an unfortunate suicide and seeing his First Reformed Church perpetually caught in the gaping maw of capitalist industry. His journey is spiritual and corporeal all at once, confronted with the plight of Mary (Amanda Seyfried), whose husband’s suicide likewise is affecting Toller. First Reformed questions how the ancient world of tradition and the modern world of capitalism co-exist when they are fundamentally opposed in so many ways. Above all, Schrader examines how extremism can sprout from many dark corners of the human psyche, of which religion is merely one. He digs at the part of all of us which seeks to immerse itself in all aspects of a faith, whether that faith is in religion, activism, business, or anything else. At the heart of extreme belief is a pain— how we choose to soothe it ultimately defines us. From the start, Rev. Toller appears as the ultimate acolyte of Christ. He occasionally sleeps in the pews of the First Reformed Church. He’s writing in a book for a year as an exercise in prayer, among other things. He tends to the fallen headstones in the graveyard himself, propping them back upright. But soon it’s evident he’s doing so at the expense of his own health. Toller’s an alcoholic. He sits at the dinner table and – like every meal is the transubstantiation of Christ’s body/blood into bread/wine – soaks up whiskey from a bowl with bread. We see his alcoholism is related to a damaged past: he pushed his son into the military and feels perpetual guilt because his son died in the Iraq War. He put his faith in institutions he imagined would help him understand the world: church and military. Both failed. First, the military killed his son. Now the church starts failing him. He sees the First Reformed becoming a literal “souvenir shop,” which is the church’s nickname. People treat him more as a tour guide than a reverend. The land itself is owned by a megachurch, Abundant Life— a corporation, not a church, such is the case with all these modern religious institutions. Moreover, Abundant Life barely fixes anything at the First Reformed except for cosmetic reasons, like when a ceremony is coming up. A perfectly framed shot shows Toller walking into the megachurch with the logo upside down: Schrader could’ve filmed it right-side up, in not doing so he visually subverts Abundant Life to signify Christianity being subverted by capitalism and a general perversion of religion into a commodity. This conflict is drives the theme of the ancient v. the modern. Church traditions in general refer back to the past. Even the First Reformed Church itself is a relic, filled with souvenirs of the past – the land was part of the Underground Railroad, various parts of the church and items inside are more than a century old – and also filled with real souvenirs from the historical shop. Toller’s church is indicative of a general changing economic role in a lot of churches today, also representing the alienation of modern/postmodern churches from true Christianity in more ways than the effects of capitalism.

“Be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. Put on the full armour of God, so that you can take your stand against the Devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world.” — Ephesians 6:11

Mary becomes part of the plot when her husband Michael (Philip Ettinger) is going through his own crisis of faith due to his extreme activism. Michael cannot deal with the state of the world, neither does he want to bring a baby into it after discovering his wife is pregnant. Rev. Toller tries helping Michael, only to be the one to bear witness to his suicide later. Michael’s situation bridges the gap between the environment and religion. After the suicide, Toller and Mary discover Michael had a suicide vest. They try rationalising his goodness, believing he did not use it because he decided not to when it’s likely he hadn’t gotten the chance. After Michael found out the vest was gone he killed himself. This sends Toller into a worse crisis of faith once he begins questioning the church’s commitment to the environment versus its commitment to big business. Michael’s environmental activism is concerned with similar things as an authentic belief in religion. Environmental preservation is, in a sense, the act of protecting natural creation, and creation is a central part of Christianity. In opposition, capitalism involves what’s known as creative destruction, in the sense destruction (i.e. bulldozing forests/tearing down old buildings/etc) is a necessary process for the creation of the new, in turn generating new forms of capital. Creation from these two standpoints is where anxiety lies. Once Toller sees Abundant Life is a wholly corrupt corporate entity not at all interested in Christian goodness, his religious faith merges with the environmental faith of Michael, and his path becomes even more dangerous than it was already.

“The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment.” — Luke 12:23

Two images are significant in a visual representation of how Toller’s physical state comes to mirror the state of the environment. One depicts him pouring Pepto-Bismol into a glass of whiskey. After he’s ravaged his body with alcoholism, he uses Pepto-Bismol as a patch: it won’t fix anything, it’ll simply delay the painful side effects. The second image is a colourful reflection (seen above) of the Pepto-Bismol’s pink in a shot of an early morning sky, where Toller stands in the foreground and several boats float abandoned, rusting in the water behind him. This shot is representative of another quick fix. Today we know the environment is being destroyed beyond the point of repair, and all we’ve done is put temporary Band-Aids on the problem instead of fixing it. Today, people recycle plastic bags and they try not to drive too much, but the issues the environment faces are far beyond these types of individual, preventative measures, requiring life/society altering changes for anything significant to be done. The sky and the boat ruins v. the whiskey and Pepto-Bismol is an ingenious visual conveying so much theme in a matter of seconds. Prior to the film’s climax, Toller engages in a non-sexual, physical rite with Mary. This is a way of removing the sacred and the religious from the world of the ancient and bringing it into the postmodern, increasingly secularised world. Rather than performing a sermon for a church of people, removed from the congregation on a pulpit, Toller engages directly, literally, physically with another human being. Through this return to the human he also returns to a purer vision of Christianity, where the natural world takes precedence over today’s capitalist and increasingly urban world. He envisions floating first over beautiful, natural landscapes— one with each other/the world. Suddenly they’re above traffic in the city, floating over roads, a heap of tires reaching to the clouds like a mountain, smokestacks pumping fog, tree cutters devastating forests to make way for urban expansion, trash, and decaying ships in forgotten stretches of ocean. Toller bears witness to the devastation of the natural world through Mary in the same way he bore witness to its personal effects in the grisly suicide of Michael. During the film’s climax, the suicide vest returns as further connective tissue between conceptions of extreme faith. Toller makes the decision to blow himself up at the big Abundant Life ceremony for the First Reformed Church. When he sees Mary in the crowd, he opts not to keep the vest on. Instead, he opts for mortification of the flesh. There’s a juxtaposition between violence here, too. As the suicide vest represents an outward expression of pain, encompassing violence done to others, Toller’s act of mortification – barbed wire wrapped around his torso, mirroring the crown of thorns Jesus forcibly wore on the cross – is representative of inner pain, reflecting the pain of the Saviour and affecting only the individual. Schrader makes the point religion can remain a part of ourselves, we can believe what we believe and not affect others, or we can force our beliefs onto others, possibly hurtfully. Although holding beliefs to oneself can also do damage, it only involves the self rather than pulling others into the pain. The end of the film sees Toller embracing Mary, choosing not to drink a glass of drain cleaner and end his life like Michael did after his extremism was deflated. Like Michael, we can’t be sure Rev. Toller won’t do something drastic. As the screen cuts to black in the midst of a seemingly happy ending, the foreboding score rises up again over the credits, and there lingers a sense Toller hasn’t yet fully escaped his crisis, only put it aside to focus on his personal life.

“Can God forgive us for what we’ve done to this world?”

The way Schrader digs into his topics is always harrowing, in one way or another. First Reformed is no different. It isn’t only harrowing to those who follow a religious faith, in any way, shape, or form. Father Gore hasn’t stopped thinking of the film for a straight week. Its themes are so relevant to the current state of America, not even half of which is discussed in this article. Schrader’s genius here somehow grows after the film is over and the credits end, when we’re left in the dark with only our thoughts and his images occupying the mind. The story and Hawke’s performance are the sort to fester in your soul. It isn’t easy to say one Shcrader film is the best because he’s written, and also directed, plenty incredible cinema in the over four decades of his career. First Reformed is up there with Taxi Driver in its searing and (mostly) subtle portrayal of a man divided against himself, the institutions in which he placed his trust and the society which birthed them, as well as how extreme beliefs infiltrate every aspect of life. This film is necessary in an age where everybody – conservative/liberal/otherwise – wants to place whole blame for extremism on the doorstep of religion, Islam in specific since 9/11. All such a one-track perspective of the world’s issues achieves is destruction of the individual, alongside that of the collective. The world is burning. It isn’t only the religious institutions, or law enforcement, or the natural world— it’s all burning. The sooner we accept it, the sooner we might begin to fix it. Or maybe it’s all too late, and the only comfort now is not in religion but in each other and ourselves. Schrader doesn’t claim to have the answers. He’s trying to help us ask the right questions.

Nature’s Crucifixion by Capitalism in Paul Schrader’s FIRST REFORMED First Reformed. 2018. Directed & Written by Paul Schrader. Starring Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, Cedric Antonio Kyles, Michael Gaston, Victoria Hill, Van Hansis, & Philip Ettinger.

#Alcoholism #Capitalism #Commodity #Crisis of Faith #Extremism #Mortification of the Flesh #Organised Religion #Religion #Religious Imagery #Suicide Vest #Transubstantiation

[thecoleopterawithana]

I’m a new fan that’s become fascinated with the individual personalities of each member. I’ve found myself drawn to John because of all his faults. He’s just so interesting to me.

There’s never any way to prove this but a lot of his behavior reminds me of my own struggles with borderline personality disorder. All of nothing thinking, impulsivity, attachment issues and a warped self image.

Could he have suffered from BPD and just never knew it?

Hello and thanks so much to both of you for your asks!

I can really relate, @theguardianknux, as it was the members' personalities that captured my interest in the first place. And John Lennon sure is one beautifully complex human!

And thank you so much for such kind words, dear anon!

Now, regarding John and him having Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), upon a bit of research, it seems quite reasonable!

From the National Institute of Mental Health page on BPD:

Overview

Borderline personality disorder is an illness marked by an ongoing pattern of varying moods, self-image, and behavior. These symptoms often result in impulsive actions and problems in relationships. People with borderline personality disorder may experience intense episodes of anger, depression, and anxiety that can last from a few hours to days.

Signs and Symptoms

People with borderline personality disorder may experience mood swings and display uncertainty about how they see themselves and their role in the world. As a result, their interests and values can change quickly.

People with borderline personality disorder also tend to view things in extremes, such as all good or all bad. Their opinions of other people can also change quickly. An individual who is seen as a friend one day may be considered an enemy or traitor the next. These shifting feelings can lead to intense and unstable relationships.

Other signs or symptoms may include:

Efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, such as rapidly initiating intimate (physical or emotional) relationships or cutting off communication with someone in anticipation of being abandoned

A pattern of intense and unstable relationships with family, friends, and loved ones, often swinging from extreme closeness and love (idealization) to extreme dislike or anger (devaluation)

Distorted and unstable self-image or sense of self

Impulsive and often dangerous behaviors, such as spending sprees, unsafe sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating.

Self-harming behavior, such as cutting

Recurring thoughts of suicidal behaviors or threats

Intense and highly changeable moods, with each episode lasting from a few hours to a few days

Chronic feelings of emptiness

Inappropriate, intense anger or problems controlling anger

Difficulty trusting, which is sometimes accompanied by irrational fear of other people’s intentions

Feelings of dissociation, such as feeling cut off from oneself, seeing oneself from outside one’s body, or feelings of unreality

I mean, for almost every symptom a related quote from John came to mind.

As to why I never mentioned it before in any of my posts, it's mostly because it never occurred to me, the need to lump all of these characteristics under a single syndrome. And you're absolutely right, anon, that I'm not a mental health professional; but even in general, I'm not too knowledgeable about mental illnesses from a proper medical model point of view. Because of this, psychiatry shorthand is not particularly useful for me personally (in the sense that terms are useful as a shorthand when both communicating parties really understand what they entail when employing them).

Also, it's really fascinating that all the listed symptoms line up so well with what I've come to know of John; but that also means that none are exactly new information if that makes sense? And since (from my very limited foray into the matter) the causes of BPD don't yet seem clear, I don't know if a posthumous diagnosis gives me much further insight into John as a person. Though, of course, this could again be a result of my lack of knowledge in the matter. That's why I would very much appreciate it if you or anyone else would engage me in discussing how you gained a new perspective on John from looking at him through the lens of BPD!

Of course, all of the opinions expressed above on the "usefulness of diagnosis" relate only to my current personal goals in this blog. And are not at all a reflection on the usefulness of mental illness diagnosis for people in general or for John in particular. I mean, even John Lennon being posthumously diagnosed with BPD would not only help people familiar would the disorder understand him better (without needing to go conduct their own analysis) but it would also raise awareness about BPD and mental illness as a whole. Get it to be more accepted so that people can more easily find help.

On that, the NIMH page says:

Treatments and Therapies

Borderline personality disorder has historically been viewed as difficult to treat. But, with newer, evidence-based treatment, many people with the disorder experience fewer or less severe symptoms, and an improved quality of life. It is important that people with borderline personality disorder receive evidence-based, specialized treatment from an appropriately trained provider. Other types of treatment, or treatment provided by a doctor or therapist who is not appropriately trained, may not benefit the person. [...]

Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy is the first-line treatment for people with borderline personality disorder. A therapist can provide one-on-one treatment between the therapist and patient, or treatment in a group setting. Therapist-led group sessions may help teach people with borderline personality disorder how to interact with others and how to effectively express themselves. [...]

Two examples of psychotherapies used to treat borderline personality disorder include:

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT): This type of therapy was developed for individuals with borderline personality disorder. DBT uses concepts of mindfulness and acceptance or being aware of and attentive to the current situation and emotional state. DBT also teaches skills that can help: Control intense emotions; Reduce self-destructive behaviors; Improve relationships

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): This type of therapy can help people with borderline personality disorder identify and change core beliefs and behaviors that underlie inaccurate perceptions of themselves and others, and problems interacting with others. CBT may help reduce a range of mood and anxiety symptoms and reduce the number of suicidal or self-harming behaviors.

So yeah, there was hope for John and there is hope for everyone else out there that can identify with some of these characteristics or knows someone who does.

Thanks so much once again for this ask, it really gave me the opportunity to learn a lot! And like I said before, I welcome all thoughts and opinions that may educate me even more or give me a new perspective.

#asks me why #Borderline Personality Disorder #john lennon #the beatles #johnny #(Dear friend Throw the wine / Is this really the borderline) #i was swallowing my pain #i was feeling insecure #whatever i say now i'll change my mind next week #Am I crazy or am I a genius? #you may say i'm a dreamer #the dream is over #Paul is a concept by which we measure our pain #friendship is a romantic illusion #I was on a raft alone in the middle of the universe #meta #my stuff

[amoralto]

Lovely compilation! I can see the parallels in the characters/places of Rebecca and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, but what would those be in El Topo?

Ah. In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, when the protagonist Mizoguchi is paralysed before the act of arson he is about to commit on the Kinkakuji he recalls a famous koan from Rinzai:

Until now I had been speaking at great length about how impotent my memory had been since the time of my childhood, but I must point out that a memory which is suddenly revived carries a great power of resuscitation. The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.

While my body seemed benumbed, my mind was groping somewhere within my memory. Some words floated up to the surface and then vanished. I seemed to reach them with the hands of my spirit and then once again they were hidden. Those words were calling me. They were trying to approach me in order to put me on my mettle.

“Face the back, face the outside, and if ye meet, kill instantly!”

Yes, the first sentence went like that. The famous passage in that chapter of the Rinsairoku. Then the remaining words emerged fluently:

“When ye meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha! When ye meet your ancestor, kill your ancestor! When ye meet a disciple of Buddha, kill the disciple! When ye meet your father and mother, kill your father and mother! When ye meet your kin, kill your kin! Only thus will ye attain deliverance. Only thus will ye escape the trammels of material things and become free.”

The words propelled me out of the impotence into which I had fallen. All of a sudden my whole body was infused with strength. One part of my mind still kept on telling me that it was now futile to perform this deed, but my new-found strength had no fear of futility. I must do the deed precisely because it was so futile.

Mizoguchi thereby manages to convince himself that burning down the Kinkakuji is imperative to his own self-enlightenment, that it is the only way to extinguish his obsession with the temple and its cruel, deceptive beauty. And of course El Topo, in turn, is about killing your masters and gods, and in effect being reborn as an individual by overcoming that which has had mastery over you. This book includes an extended interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky from December 1970 on the signs and signifiers of the film, which is about as curious and problematic and mystifying as you would expect a dialogue with Jodorowsky to be, but he provides some salient points:

Ah! When El Topo says that too much perfection is a mistake. All Oriental culture is in that sentence. Right? I think that the Masters willed themselves to be killed. Because I think they sought out El Topo. They saw a sign in him. Gurdjieff says that when you are the right person, the Master seeks you out. And he gives you the possibility of killing him. The Master wants you to kill him because he wants to dissolve into you. That’s why Christ gives his flesh and blood to his disciples.

(Speaking of Christ, Matthew 10:37: “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” Which is very John and zero-sum and very “If you don’t love me most and to the exception of all others, you must not love me at all.”) How The Temple of the Golden Pavilion and El Topo both apply to John is the noticeable pattern that runs right through John’s life of embracing spiritual and emotional companions-teachers and violently relinquishing them once they turn into presumptive authority figures who have pulled the wool over his eyes and therefore have to be toppled. Like the Maharishi and Arthur Janov and Allen Klein, obviously, but conceivably even George Martin and Brian Epstein. And Paul. The underground journalist Felix Dennis, who was present for the ‘How Do You Sleep’ sessions, observed John’s approach:

Amusing or sadistic, depending on one’s distance from the line of fire, ‘How Do You Sleep’ was impassioned, armed with a string arrangement that cut as deep as the words, and more revealing than Lennon ever intended. Shortly before his death he hinted at a deeper knowledge of what lay behind the song: ‘I used my resentment against Paul that I have as a kind of sibling rivalry resentment from youth.’ Felix Dennis glimpsed a different relationship: ‘It’s quite obvious that Paul must have been some sort of authority figure in Lennon’s life, because you don’t take the piss out of somebody that isn’t a figure of authority … As I felt it, they were taking the piss out of the headmaster.’ The reference to an ‘authority figure’ was ironic, as that was exactly how McCartney viewed Lennon: ‘It was just a bit [like] the wagging finger, and I was pissed off about it.’

— Peter Doggett, You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles. (2009)

And John practically attested to this pattern himself:

The only things I regret in life are hurting myself, and hurting somebody else. And everything else is interesting to me. But I’m not looking for anything but myself, really. That’s the one thing I’ve found out at thirty-four. So, uh. And a lot of things one knew before, but you couldn’t live them, you know. Meaning that I’ve said things in songs which are perceptive, but I haven’t really understood it myself, for years later. So now I’m trying to live out all the things I’ve learnt in thirty-four years to apply it to every day. Things I’ve learned in the psychedelic era, from Maharishi, or Janov, or anybody that’s [inaudible]. Or a scientist, you know. And I think I’ll go check them out. And in El Topo, the guy goes and shoots them. And you have to fight every master that you meet.

— John Lennon, interview w/ Jean Francois Vallée for Un Jour Futur. (April 4th, 1975)

To end off, another excerpt from The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Conjure in your mind’s eye an image of John regarding Paul/the Beatles in 1969:

Never had the temple displayed so hard a beauty—a beauty that transcended my own image, yes, that transcended the entire world of reality, a beauty that bore no relation to any form of evanescence. Never before had its beauty shone like this, rejecting every sort of meaning.

It is no exaggeration to say that as I gazed at the temple, my legs trembled and my forehead was covered with cold beads of perspiration. On a former occasion when I had returned to the country after seeing the temple, its various parts and its whole structure had resounded with a sort of musical harmony. But what I heard this time was complete silence, complete noiselessness. Nothing flowed there, nothing changed. The Golden Temple stood before me, towered before me, like some terrifying pause in a piece of music, like some resonant silence.

“The bond between the Golden Temple and myself has been cut,” I thought. “Now my vision that the Golden Temple and I were living in the same world has broken down. Now I shall return to my previous condition, but it will be even more hopeless than before. A condition in which I exist on one side and beauty on the other. A condition that will never improve so long as this world endures.”

And from El Topo:

EL TOPO: Even if I won, I would lose.

#ask #i seen religion from jesus to paul #what am i even going on about #forgive me my dear anon #paul is a concept by which we measure our pain

[climbing-the-sycamore]

On Family and Martyrdom

You Were Not Made for Comfort

“The world promises you comfort, but you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.”

— Pope Benedict XVI

So your parents and family members want a “secure life” for you and your siblings. They set you up with an education, counsel you on a good career choice, and all the while they fret and worry needlessly. While none of this is bad in of itself, it is the aim of these things which ought to be measured. Will the life they are building for you lead to an active prayer life? Will it help you attain the fruits of of mercy? Will it win for you humility?

Saint Nikolai posed these questions to his faithful as he recounted a story from the early Church:

“In our day, you usually hear these words from parents: “We want to secure the life of our child.” That is why they work very hard to amass wealth, often unjustly, to educate their child in the vocation which brings the greatest physical security and material benefit. This is done by so-called Christians! They do this because their concept of a real life and the real security of life is erroneous. See, how a true Christian mother prepares her son for a real life. At the time of her death, Blessed Euphrosyne spoke to her son Clement of Ancyra:

“Do me the honor, my son, and bravely stand up for Christ and confess Him strongly and without hesitation! I hope, in my heart, that the crown of martyrdom will blossom on you in my honor and for the salvation of many. Do not be afraid of threats, nor swords, nor pains, nor wounds, nor fire. Let nothing separate you from Christ, but look up to heaven and from there await your great, eternal and rich reward from God. Let this be my reward from you, my sweet son, for my pain in child-bearing and effort surrounding your education that I may be called a mother of a Christian Man.” – St. Nikolai Velimirovich

If we really desired what is good for our children, we would not cause them to stumble. We would set them up for a life of holiness and not comfort John Chrysostom points out:

“Pray together at home and go to Church; when you come back home, let each ask the other the meaning of the readings and the prayers. If you are overtaken by poverty, remember Peter and Paul, who were more honored than kings or rich men, though they spent their lives in hunger and thirst. Remind one another that nothing in life is to be feared, except offending God. If your marriage is like this, your perfection will rival the holiest of monks.” – St. John Chrysostom

Martyrdom can take many shapes, but it has the same goal. It is the surrendering of our will to the love of God. By the giving of our life in the death of the body in the name of Christ, we become like Peter, being led where he do not wish to go, and suffering death in the name of Christ. It is a sacrifice to give up our will for God’s. In doing so we find His will slowly becomes our Will, and our new life puts to the sword all the passions we have accumulated in our living in the world. John Chrysostom reminds us that suffering with our ascetic struggle enjoins us to a life in Christ:

“How can we suffer for Christ, you ask? If someone accuses you falsely of anything, and if you bear it patiently, if you give thanks, if you pray for him; you do all this in humility, you do this for Christ. But if you curse him, if you speak against him, if you  attempt revenge, even if you do not go through with it, it is not for Christ’s sake, and you will suffer loss, and are deprived of your reward on account of your intention. It rests with us to either profit spiritually, or squander our blessings, by how we bear our afflictions. It depends not upon the nature of the affliction, but upon the disposition of our own hearts. Great were the sufferings of Job, yet he suffered with thankfulness; and he was justified, not because he suffered, but because in suffering he endured it thankfully.” – St. John Chrysostom

#prayer #family #grace #martyrdom