A Note on Abstraction and Closure

Since we, as humans, perfectly imperfect as we have come to evolve, abstract all sensory perceptions from the outside world, we also abstract our relationships with these perceptions as they are constantly formed and re-formed. If, like Ellis hypothesizes by way of Korzybski, insofar thoughts create feelings and our behaviors, we must learn to accept that we cannot explain the totality of the outside world and thus, accept the nature of the universe as one of uncertainty and probability, not fact and absolutes.

Many friends and relatives with myself included have gone through almost soul-shattering, life-altering break ups, deaths and other tragedies. Many seek "closure." They believe that healing words - the sounds that come out of our mouths - will cure what ails them as if they were a magic incantation.

My advice to those seeking closure is this:

1. Stand in front of a door. Push it open.
2. Pull the door towards you.
3. Realizing that the door has closed and the reality of your present situation has not changed, be content that you are a functioning human being with the ability to know better than to search for answers that have no sensible question.

I to elucidate further on constructing one's own reality, I was talking with my father the other day about time. He said to me that "whoever discovered that there was sixty minutes in an hour was a genius." I replied that he was a master manipulator. My father looked at me quizzically. "Well," I said, "If the dude can make people believe that time is specifically delivered in parcels of sixty minutes and divisions thereof, he should probably have been King of the World."

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Never Surrender

"An honest politician is a national calamity." - Robert Anton Wilson

Writing a piece on the Australian Government's proposed Internet Clean Feed for Onya Magazine, I quickly realized some things about governance in the 21st century. Governance is an annoyance at its best, a hindrance to personal and in some cases, small-collective satisfaction at its worst. There's a role for collective action in our civil society and in the cases where Governments overlegislate and create more problems for more people ala the Clean Feed, its time for many leaders both political, economic and civil to sit down and ponder the end of a "space-binding" method of governance replaced by "time-binding" governance, instituted and regulated by information technology mechanisms.

The mindset that space and the matter that resides in it should be the basis for its government has reached a halting limit. The Clean Feed is a blaring example. The old Magniot Line mentality has prevailed even now, in the 21st Century though one can still send a malicious payload wirelessly. Now we must explore other frontiers to govern ourselves both with a public service and without. Will we? Perhaps in a technologically backward-ass country such as my own, only time will tell, and for us time may come too late.

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A Distant And Worn Road

"All humans are out of their fucking minds – every single one of them." - Dr. Albert Ellis, Ph.D.

One of my favorite authors on psychology was attributed with that quote and after reading Watzlawick and Korzybski, I tend to agree; as humans, we are intentional creatures and our consciousness creates the perceptions of the outside world that largely govern our actions.

Talking to my dear friend Catchy and his housemate Tom about my new personal journey to becoming an integrated male, we discussed Albert Ellis and his Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Tom, a strident practitioner of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy hit upon one concept that had eluded me almost all my life; unconditional self-acceptance.

This basically means that no matter what one does, he accepts himself as perfectly imperfect, lovable just as he is, and able to handle all situations in a number of diverse combinations, probabilities and even uncertainties.

I applied this to my thinking as I continued to work through Dr. Glover's exercises that week. I have to say, I have never felt happier. By being honest with myself, I became honest with others. I spoke my mind; my befuddling, negative and toxic thoughts shined with renewal. By no longer tying my self-esteem to external events, it has afforded me a creativity that I have never previously experienced.

In walking down this distant and worn road, I also pick apart and deconstruct the sources and causes of all my misery and self-limiting beliefs. Its a liberating feeling. I also think that one of the major causes of the failure of my engagement to Elyse broke down because of my inability to know myself. To be intimate, one must know himself, knowing someone else, knowing you. I hid so many parts of myself off to so many people for so long, I seemed to dissolve among the ether, residing as fragments with no whole to base myself on. I'm slowly gathering myself together. For the first time, I'm doing it with a smile on my face and warmth in my heart.

"You'll have to take me just the way that you find me - what's gone is gone and I do not give a damn." - Peter Gabriel - I Don't Remember

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