The Bad Boy Fear

When culture takes advantage of your unexamined fear

You are lazy.

You are afraid.

You are not pushing it hard enough.

You are not being submissive enough.

You aren’t productive enough.

You aren’t disciplined enough.

You did not read books on successful people.

You did not cleverly try to replicate their lives without thinking.

And so we end up in the bad boy club.

But who wants to suffer being a bad boy. Seems no one.

So we soul-suckingly do the opposite that is fed to us to be in the good boy club.

And there begins our disaster.

It’s not about conforming to the opposite nor being discouraged by seeing our internal state.

To simply have the sense to see and connect with our internal state, be it laziness or being afraid.

Without succumbing to conformity within.

To honestly relate or connect with your internal state with your awareness is what gives you the energy and will.

And it isn’t quite easy because we rarely notice what’s happening but are busy being driven by compulsiveness.

When we feel a sense of lethargy or lack of will, we are also inflicted with the internal pressure (the call to conform) to brush it aside as evil or try to avoid it. But in giving into both of these compulsions, we aren’t honestly relating or being curious about it. It is energy wastage to avoid meeting ‘what is’.

It is not about cultivating opposites as taught by stupid improvement gurus.

If you conform to them, you might pretend you got into the good boy club.

But with zero zest and zero understanding for life.

And the only thing that you would find enjoyable in that case (conforming) would be video games, personal gratification (I did such and such so I must be good), mindless eating, rage porn, or frustrated sex with your partner to wind up the day — call it a grown-up lifestyle?

Or you might even be scared to act out such compulsions because you got to convince yourself that your internal reality is not that pathetic. Nevertheless, the internal state remains as it is.

It’s your choice here on.

We are scared to connect with our intelligence and wisdom within.

Thanks to our stubborn refusal in the matter.

Yet we are after confidence, while scared to connect with ourselves.

All we do, automatically and habitually, is to keep falling for the conditioned reflexes hoping it would save us one day as a pleasant surprise.

It is actually cruel to ask a tangled thread to untangle itself while all the time adding a new knot. So is the case when we use thinking-mind for curing the problems it has created while we lost touch with ourselves.

If this continues we become irreversibly enslaved in the mind’s knots forever.

Nevertheless, we shamelessly repeat Albert Einstein’s quote: “ a problem cannot be solved with the same mind that created it”

It’s like accidentally washing your mouth with soap, and compulsively driven to solve the situation by using soap again and again. Because we don’t know how to stop doing it anyway. Such is our over-dependency on the thinking mind to solve the very mental distress created by itself.

For example, everyone while relaxed would agree that it’s not wise to make a decision or expect to think clearly while in a panicked or hijacked state, yet we hope it is not true and that we can find our way out of such a state when we are suffering it, but only because we don’t know how to not do or how to bear a difficult state within. We don’t give it a chance to pause and look.

Instead, we are bombarded with temporary cheap fix tricks by improvement gurus, so that we can remain asleep and fall for their bullshit.

We aren't encouraged to look into our pathetic internal state without kidding ourselves that we are fine, instead, we are asked to brush it aside and force the opposite.

Even if we have the choice to be attentive and bring presence or consciousness into our fucked-up state, we won’t. We are too scared or even find it shockingly impossible. After all, we might shockingly realize we have lost our ability to pause and do nothing and to just see. I thought it’s a piece of cake, and so is what my mind convinced me, but to actually give it some space and time and see it for ourselves is a different beast altogether.

But to see that and admit it and to persist is a great opening than running even faster in the opposite direction.

Only we can block our internal freedom.

Falling for or only trusting our own thoughts is not even a conscious choice. Though we are even scared to see and admit it.

Obeying the conforming voice in the head helplessly can never be anything other than a pathetic mental health condition.

To even think clearly we need spaces of awareness or uncorrupted attention not fully swallowed by the thinking mind.

It isn’t hard to see our stubborn refusal to pause — just try to sit with a problem or engage in some creative work from scratch. Not researching, studying, and rearranging someone’s theories but to give space for something fresh, original, and new to arise within.

And then what we do when we see our stubborn refusal to pause? We immediately rationalize it away or try to pause with our mind, by forcing — which by the way is part of the problem we are trying to be freed from whether we see it or not.

It’s a risk because there is no how to do it ‘manual’. Just like there is no manual to bring something totally new — like a discovery.

Thought tricks are helpful to cling on to old but not to step into the unknown.

“Evil has ways of surprising one. Suddenly it turns round and says: “You have misunderstood me,” and perhaps it really is so. Evil transforms itself into your own lips, lets itself be gnawed at by your teeth, and with these new lips — no former ones fitted smoothly to your gums — to your own amazement you utter the words of goodness.”― Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks