A Man’s Body Should Be His Castle
It’s better than a castle really, it’s a whole universe – and it deserves everyone else’s respect. But this respect is not always forthcoming. What to do in cases like this?
Everyone has his own strategy, I suppose. But mine involves two steps: recognizing rejection when I feel it – this validates my feelings. Then, instead of thinking about it, which is what I always have done, I simply concentrate on my body, without much thinking. I am telling myself, without using words “I exist!” And immediately I am connected to my own world – which my social world often denies me.
I don’t have to kill everyone else, which is what I have always tried to do before. I think this is our normal, instinctive response to any external threat: destroy them, all of them! Much of our instinctual energy is geared for war. We will gladly risk our own lives to kill the enemy.
And one of our favorite enemies is the opposite sex. We hate them for the same reason our father or mother hated them – because that is the right way to be – murderous.
What does a person do when he is surrounded by the enemy permanently – as I believe most of us are? It does no good to deny this, as most do, and tell ourselves that the threat we feel is not real, that all those people do not really hate us. They really do – even though they usually are not aware of it, or anything else. This is what they feel (unconsciously) and how they are automatically reacting as a result – killing everyone in sight.
You may honestly object to this gloomy view, and I hope you can. But I remain convinced that many people, if not most people, actually feel this way – and in denying this we are doing them a great disservice. Recognizing this would be doing them a great favor – even if they would not recognize it as such.
So much for the first step, recognizing the problem: universal (or nearly universal) hatred. This is why I moved to Latin America – where (at least in the more undeveloped areas) people still like each other. They may not be very smart, but they instinctively like each other, and their children. It pains me to see the younger generation does not feel this way. They can see the larger, hostile world outside their parent’s world – and they shape their lives accordingly.
Their parents should be able to show them “Yes the world is bad, but we are not that way.” Instead, like parents everywhere, they are simply overwhelmed – and collapse. To be able to cope, they would have to be much wiser than they are.
The whole human race would have to start over in our late Medieval circumstances, and make the right decisions, based on what we now know. Perhaps this will happen, somehow, and new and better race will arise. Let us hope so.
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