[This text is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, ‘The Seven Laws of the Unconscious’]
– ‘Why is this happening to me?’
– ‘Why do I always end up doing what I don’t want to do?
– ‘Why Can’t I do what I intend to do?’
– ‘Why does everything that I don’t want to happen to anybody, happen to me?’
These are questions you may have asked yourself upon the evidence that things are happening in your life that you don’t understand and are not easy to solve.
The answer to these misteries is inside of you. Actually, it’s been inside of you for some ten million years. Each one of us carries the heritage of survival behaviours that have been succesful-ish up to this day. Well, properly speaking, up to a hundred years ago.
That inner monkey, used to operating a series of strategies fairly proven in Nature, is nowadays, utterly stunned. When, ten thousand years ago, it got furious in front of a predator besieging it and making any scape from its attack imposible, it probabilities of survival improved. However, when it makes you get ‘furious’ in the middle of a traffic jam you just ‘can’t scape from’ (a situation that is entirely equivalent for it to the previous one with the predator), your probabilities of survival do not improve. In fact, as long as you can’t reléase your anger destrying the driver ahead of you –which wouldn’t be so polite-, that visceral unrest stays within you. And your body keeps the score. This, in life amidst Nature, didn’t happen.
For each of the ‘modern’, ‘danger’ situations you go through each day, your stunned monkey instinctively identifies an archaic situation it knows. And, let to its own devices, it will start the best archaic strategy it knows. Be it or not appropriate for life in our day. That doesn’t matter at all to it.
You could then think that this inner monkey is a disturbance; that it might be better were it not to be here; that its presence is not needed any more today. When it is very much the opposite. Thank Goodness it’s there.
You could then think that the solution is to ignore it, or to punish it.
When it’s the utter opposite. A scared monkey will take control of you and your life.
So what’s the solution? To understand it. To comprehend how it thinks, how it feels and how it acts.
What??? How can I do that?
We’ll talk about it in our next conversation. Spoiler alert: it is very, very easy.
