Life is counter-intuitive if your source of intuition is your mind
Most of what you call intuition, isn’t. It is, in fact, reaction. Mostly it is the reaction of your reptilian brain.
The reptilian brain seems to have retained the memories and the learned behaviors of our reptilian ancestors.
You hold your breath when there is danger. Make yourself unnoticeable and blend into your environment. That, unless you are ready for a confrontation. Then attack first ask questions later. these are all from the reptilian brain.
Depression, schizophrenia, maybe even ADD are reptilian brain reactions. And no, I am not a psychiatrist, but I do observe people, and I look deeper than most psychiatrist: I didn’t learn this, I distinguished this. This is Tree of Life knowledge, not dead like Tree of Knowledge.
When life looks unmanageable, we play possum.
We shrink, we start to breathe shallowly, we withdraw from life. We narrow our cone of vision as well. All ‘intuitive’ (reptilian brain!) and counter-productive.
These behaviors make sense (to your mind, that is!) and you come down with a serious case of procrastination or depression. Maybe even schizophrenia. Or ADD/ADHD. I may even add stupidity…
All of these get you off the hook, get you out of the way, and the reptilian part of you is successful. but you, the human, you are not. You are suffering. You are living in the gap, between your puny self and your potential self: a place with a lot of tension.
A watched a fantastic little known Korean movie, Castaway on The Moon.
I have read a few reviews, just now, and, as usual, everyone saw a different movie. Lol.
In the movie I saw there were two characters: one depressed, the other schizophrenic.
The story of the movie: a young guy, through his ineptitude, gets himself into serious debt. He attempts suicide but even fails at that: he ends up on a no-man’s land under a city bridge. He sets out to live the life of a shipwrecked person. He slowly gets into shape, he grows corn, makes his own noodles. Becomes capable.
A young girl living across the river in a high-rise apartment, watches our castaway through her Nikon 400mm lens. She is the schizophrenic, living as a castaway on the moon. She is totally bonkers.
She establishes contact with him, gets pulled out of her isolation, and in an amazing tour-de-force she runs through the town in daylight to meet the castaway boy who is banished from the island and returned to society.
Every time I think of this movie, I weep. I weep for the girl. I weep for her victory over isolation, over her fears, over her madness. I weep that with another oddball she manages to pull herself out of the place she escaped to, the tiny place her reptilian brain sent her to hide.
Why am I sharing this story with you?
Because you, most of you, have painted yourself into some corner of life. Thought that that is the life you are allowed to live, that is your safe life, and now you don’t know how to get out of that corner.
We all hope, like Chuchundra the muskrat from The Jungle Book (Kipling) that some incident will give us a sudden rush of courage, and we’ll be able to change our life. But it works in a different order. You create an act of courage, and the changes follow.
Your reptilian brain says that you can’t.
You need to prove that old brain of yours wrong.
Do something. One step at a time. Get outside of your comfort zone a little bit at a time, until you’ll be out of it, all of you, like the girl in the movie.
Oh, thank you, I needed that. I have so many layers of this. I do feel I have removed many of the hiding-out depressive strategies. I am still stuck with values conflicts, little sense of self, and not much will.