Alligator Alley:Survivalism-a serialadventure

I think we all know what self defeat is. It is when we persist in doing something that not only is not working but can not work or will not work in the future. We are so personally invested in the situation that we refuse to cut our losses and free our selves. We remain in denial about the situation and never move forward.

This can be about jobs, relationships, money or even health issues. Currently its about my truck. I've been refusing to believe that it needs to be replaced even after I've been stranded with it four times in the last two weeks. The mechanic says the truck is not worth fixing and I'm in a tight spot. I need to listen and I need to move forward. If I had been willing to let go of the truck as soon as it started giving me trouble I could have saved myself almost $400. Now its too late for that. I put money into it that I shouldn't have. It still won't run and never will.

Sound familiar? I'm sure something like this happens to everyone sooner or later. Perhaps the better question is why? Why do we stay on the boat until it is sinking? Does some misplaced loyalty demand we go down with the ship?

My first marriage was the same way. I would never have left if she hadn't. I would have put up with pure hell for the rest of my life just to do the "right thing" for my children. It turns out that getting a divorce was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. Still I was forced into it. It was not something I would have done on my own.

How can we choose freedom from self defeat? I don't have a good answer. Maybe there isn't one. What I can say is that if you are putting out tremendous effort and not getting back anything in return something is wrong. That is a big red flag that needs to be paid attention to. It doesn't matter how emotionally attatched or invested we are. If nothing is coming back we need to seriously evaluate the wisdom of continuing the present course of action.

Jobs and employment have always been a weak area in my life. I am a hard worker and often work two jobs to make ends meet. Still, in the past I have always worked at jobs that were physically and emotionally draining to the point where I would not have the energy to do anything on my days off. I've also always been drawn to jobs where I was over qualified for the work I was doing.

My wife, Annie told me there are good jobs. She said I didn't need to put up with high stress and low paying jobs. She did her best to tell me that I was putting up with things I didn't need to put up with. I like my recent job or rather both of my current jobs even though the pay is modest. I'm good at what I do and respected. I also have good relationships with co-workers. I also have the freedom to do what I love the most, writing on the internet! This is actually a third job for me.

In the evenings when I get home I have enough energy to do things I want to do. This is a blessing that I had forgotten existed. Life is still hard but I am doing many of the things I love to do. That is the highest freedom of all.

Things may not be entirely the way I would like them but I am certainly moving toward some important goals. I am not currently a victim of self defeat.






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Who knows why one person gives up and dies while another struggles on through overwhelming odds and comes out on top? We all want to survive. But are we willing to do what needs to be done?

Alligator Alley Technorati Tags : survivalism, freedom, Rosicrucian, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Freemasons, conspiracy, opinion, mastery, alternative

We all know the feeling of working hard all day and not getting anything done. At least it seems that way. We don't need to keep spinning our wheels through ineffective actions. Study the experts and champions to find out how they do it. This is the research part of any goal. Before you can do it your way you need to understand how other people have done it in other ways.

Nature in the evolutionary process explores all possible options. There are no good and evil choices in nature. Everything is explored and success is rewarded. Failure to thrive leads to stunted and abnormal living situations.

We can apply this to our own lives as well. Are we enjoying a rich and rewarding lifestyle that we are comfortable with? Or do we live in stunted and abnormal living situations that are slowly choking our spirit and will to live?

For thousands of years the "Collective Soul" of the human race has worked for the good of the entire human race. This meant holding some people back until the rest of us could catch up. Society and culture had the final word on how far a person could go in life.

With the internet things have changed. The human race has gone global! For the first time ever you don't need to have the support of local community to become successful. You can gather the support you need from the far corners of the earth and you can support others as well. We can't even begin to comprehend just what this means.

There is a level playing field now and everyone has the same chance to make their mark in the world. Politics and social institutions still exist but as dinosaurs that are fast on their way to extinction. People will loose interest in them as they increasingly prove incapable of coping with today's social problems.

Self sufficiency and survivalism on an individual basis are going to replace wasteful government handouts. Family is going to take care of family. Local community is going to take care of local community. The solutions to humanities problems are going to appear at the grass roots level or not at all. Those waiting for government bailouts are going to be hurting. The policeman is never there when you need him, but he is there to fill out the paperwork after the fact.

Survivalism doesn't mean being able to live off the land. It means being secure in your ability to feed and clothe your family and keep a roof over their heads in the winter. It means having a job that is not going away to China or Mexico. It means being able to find a different job if your currrent one does. Survivalism means physically doing whatever it takes to survive.

This is a time to put down roots so you can be strong and support others when they need you. Keeping yourself strong allows you to be there for others. This is not selfishness. It is staying alive!

Cautiously explore every opportunity that comes your way and test it for response. Putting effort out and not getting anything back is a waste of time and energy. Study the results you do get and refine the process to get even better results.

Long term goals might not bring in immediate money but they should bring in something. My long term goals are to make a living as a writer. I'm not making much money now and I'm not trying to. My focus is on getting readers. If I was not getting readers I would not continue producing this material.

Success grows out of success not out of failure. Each small success leads to deeper understanding and insight into what changes need to be done next. Everyone has an area in life that is working for them. Expand that area to include others and see what happens. Make your physical actions count!


Anarchist World Live Join the Revolution today! Online rss community of free men and free women. Let Freedom Ring!

Who knows why one person gives up and dies while another struggles on through overwhelming odds and comes out on top? We all want to survive. But are we willing to do what needs to be done?

Alligator Alley Technorati Tags : survivalism, freedom, Rosicrucian, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Freemasons, conspiracy, opinion, mastery, alternative

During part of my life I worked as an in-home crisis counselor. I would visit families in crisis and try helping them sort the chaos out and find solutions the the crisis. Anyone working in this area knows that to be effective it works best if you have gone through similar situations successfully.

This means you can offer insights and suggestions from personal experience and not theory from some book. Fortunately or unfortunately I have struggled through a lot of dysfunction in my life and learned a lot the hard way.

Listening to family members tell their own side of the story made no sense at all. Every family member could justify their own position and say why other family members were at fault.

Time after time the situation would boil down to family members taking unfair advantage and manipulating other family members. People resent being manipulated, especially when it is unfairly done. Educating the family on unfair manipulations and teaching them healthy alternatives was an important part of resolving crisis.

The other factor was when family members would say one thing and their physical actions said another. Sometimes things were so bad that I couldn't tell who was lying and who was telling the truth. Everyone was very convincing.

That's when I told people to shut up. I was not interested in hearing reasons why things went wrong. I was only interested in physical actions and physical results. Who did what to who? I didn't need to know why. Child abuse or Parent abuse both happen. There are ways to get what you want without being abusive. There are ways to fight fairly and maintain self respect and self esteem. There are ways to create win-win situations. Abuse is abuse and needs to be confronted. It can never be justified.

In my own life I confronted the same weakness. I talk a good show and my actions are not always backing up what I say. In retrospect I will talk alot about what I am going to do, perhaps more than I should until people think I'm a windbag. But I reach a point where I will actually do it.

Writing is a perfect example. Since high school I said I was a writer and wanted to write books. I got into arguments and debates with other friends that wanted to be writers too. When I experienced my first heartbreak I did write some teenage angst poetry but that was it. I wanted to be a writer but I was not writing anything.

The desire to write would come and go in spurts. At the age of thirty I took some writing courses and completed the assignments graduating from the courses with honors but still not writing on my own. At the age of forty I seriously tried writing my first two books, OAK:Foundations and OAK:Magister Templi.

I finished them as rough drafts and called it good enough. Several years later I realized my wife was right. They were not readable. I still was not writing other stuff. I remained a writer that would not write. Consider Stephen King. He began writing as a teenager and continued all through his life. Many people think you need to begin when you are young or it won't work. They forget Edgar Rice Burroughs was forty when he began writing the Tarzan books.

I was getting old and still hadn't produced much of anything. Was I lying to myself? In a way yes and in a way no. I thought I knew what writing was about but I really didn't. In this respect I was lying to myself.

It was only when I turned forty eight and took three months off to write Anarchist Knight:Apprentice that I finally understood. Almost two years later I was holding the first copy in my hands. I never dreamed how much work it was to write a book and I never knew how rewarding it was.

There is a big difference between saying you are a writer and actually being a writer. For forty some years I was kidding myself about being a writer. It is only now that I understand the easy competence of writing something every day. Today for the first time I can say with honesty that I am a writer.

It was the same in families I was working with. Many family members were kidding themselves as well. They were saying one thing and not following through on their promises or agreements. It is better not to make a promise or agreement then to break it. It sounds so simple but these families simply needed to be reminded to keep their promises and agreements. They also needed to learn about being fair and allow win-win situations without trying to manipulate each other to get their own way.

Sometimes it helps to have someone tell us that we are not doing the things we say we are doing. This means confronting us and making us confront ourselves.

What are you doing to make your life better and richer? What are you doing to make your relationships with loved ones better? What are you doing that makes life meaningful and worthwhile? Are you taking the physical actions needed or are you lying to yourself?


Anarchist World Live Join the Revolution today! Online rss community of free men and free women. Let Freedom Ring!

Who knows why one person gives up and dies while another struggles on through overwhelming odds and comes out on top? We all want to survive. But are we willing to do what needs to be done?

Alligator Alley Technorati Tags : survivalism, freedom, Rosicrucian, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Freemasons, conspiracy, opinion, mastery, alternative

We all have false responses. That's when we feel one way and act another way. Someone might ask if we are ok and we tell them we are when we really are not ok.

Other examples of false responses are never completing things we start; feeling the grass is always greener somewhere else; never asking someone out on a date because we fear rejection.

Over and over again our false responses get in our way and cause us to trip and fall right before we reach the finish line. False responses are rationalizatons and lies that we tell ourselves to avoid confronting the things that need to be owned and accepted before we can move closer toward our goals.

In most cases our false responses are protection mechanisms created to avoid unpleasant situations. We live with someone we don't love for the sake of the children or stay at a job where we are not treated like a human being because we fear unemployment.

We are all blessed with a wide range of sensory awareness and life experience. Our physical human bodies are fully integrated and functional. At least they try to be unless we frustrate and block them with our false responses.

What I'm trying to say here is that our false responses divide and separate who we are and what we feel. They make us feel divided and lead to stress and perhaps mental or emotional illness. When we want something and can't get it there are two paths we can follow. The easiest option is to rationalize and lie to ourselves that someone or something is preventing us from the achievement of that goal. As long as the cause of our personal failure lies external to us we have no reason to change or try harder.

The second path is much harder. We have to own up to the fact that our own actions have brought us to our current situation and our own actions must carry us forward out of them. The reason we can't achieve our goal is because we are either doing something wrong or are not ready yet. When we hit the brick wall we need to realize that it usually manifests when we are going in the wrong direction.

Rationalizations and lies are mental in nature. This means that mentally we can't find a way that will reach our goal. It does no good to tell ourselves that our body is wrong or that our emotions are wrong. We sense what we sense and we feel what we feel. Those are true things. We just don't fully understand them.

The mental nature needs to be in harmony with the physical body and the emotions. This is obvious but how can we do this? Research and exploration. Research the goal and study how others go about achieving it. An in depth study of any subject will show that it is not exactly what we imagined it to be. Being a writer is much more hard work than I ever imagined it to be. I had no idea that material needed to be re-written up to ten times before it was presentable as a book.

Having a loving and sexual relationship with a partner has been nothing at all like I thought it would be. It's much more work than I ever dreamed but it is also much more satisfying.

When we first try to achieve a goal we don't know what it takes to reach that goal. Our expectations are not realistic. We can either stop trying and rationalize why we can't have what we want or we can research and learn to have more realistic expectations. False responses are when our mental nature gives up.

Learning by doing and having a gentle gradient are the most powerful ways of breaking through false responses. Taking things by baby steps and mastering each small step at a time will break through any false response and replace it with a true success. This is much better than wanting too much too fast and then crashing and burning.

At the completion of each baby step we learn more about our goal. Our expectations become more realistic and we might even find we only thought we wanted that goal. What we really want is something else entirely. We can't even discover that deeper truth until our curiousity is satisfied about the first one.

Learning and satisfying our curiousity clear the way for advancement to what really matters. This does not mean to give in to every stray whim and fancy. That is what our mental natures are for. When fully integrated they recognize these physical and emotional impulses and understand them for what they are, sensory data and impressions.

Our mental natures discern harmful or negative possibilities and steer us around bad experiences while affirming those feelings and impressions. It's ok to look as long as you don't touch. You've got your own at home.


Anarchist World Live Join the Revolution today! Online rss community of free men and free women. Let Freedom Ring!

Who knows why one person gives up and dies while another struggles on through overwhelming odds and comes out on top? We all want to survive. But are we willing to do what needs to be done?

Alligator Alley Technorati Tags : survivalism, freedom, Rosicrucian, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Freemasons, conspiracy, opinion, mastery, alternative