 There is a constant dialogue, or shall I say polylogue, going on inside your head. It's between you and your introjects, the voices inside your mind. Some of these voices represent your parents, other voices represent powerful role models like teachers, and some voices represent influential peers. But all these voices are there. Your abuser's voice is also amply represented and amplified. All these voices populate what I call the ego system. Yeah, it's a little like eco ecosystem, but it's an ego system. And within the ego system everyone is constantly in tumult. Everyone is arguing with everyone. Values clash. Beliefs contradict each other. Information comes in which challenges some assumptions, undermines some others, and buttresses some of the beliefs and the aforementioned values. It's in constant flux. It constantly assembles, deconstructs, and reassembles, and this enormous racket this enormous roaring circus goes on inside your mind at every given moment, even when you sleep, when it manifests via dreaming. What can you do about this in a dialogue? Is it good for you? Is it a pathological feature or fixture? Is it on the other hand possibly a very healthy artifact of consciousness and and sentience? And what is the role of memories? What is what how is your identity formed? Does your identity the core immutable personality that allegedly you have? Does it interact with this dialogue? Is it influenced by it? In other words, does this dialogue change you or do you affect this dialogue? Do you remove this dialogue from reality? Do you keep it apart? Do you sequester it? It's not an easy, not an easy issue to discuss. It's not an easy issue to discuss because it has emotional overtones, reverberates emotionally, it causes emotional dysregulation in many people, but it's also not an easy issue to discuss because the very concept of inner dialogue is in great debate. Now people like Freud, for example, followed later by Jung and others, they postulated that there are constructs within the mind, there are structures and that these structures are the ones which interact with each other and create what appears to be a dialogue or a polylogue. Others, other people, other scholars disagree. They have dispensed with the tripartite, mechanical, analytical models of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic theories and instead they describe, they say that what goes only in the mind is not fixed structures which communicate with each other, it's processes. In other words, the mind is not a piece of land, it's more like a river. Okay, enough philosophizing. Let's get to the point. Your inner dialogue has two features, which you should really, really seriously consider on the way to healing. The two messages, the first message is be somebody. Don't just fritter your life away, be somebody, become someone. In other words, become distinguishable. We even have a word for it, individual, indivisible, like atom. Stand out. Stand out, be remembered, have a legacy, create something. Even if the only thing you create is children or your skill or something you have taught someone, leave something behind. And while you're alive, be memorable. That's the first message. The second message is do something with your life, make something of your life. Now, stop here, just stop, will you, and think for a minute. If I tell you be somebody, be someone, stand out. What am I telling you actually? I'm telling you do not be yourself. Do not be yourself. Be something that conforms to the expectations, the values and the reward system of your environment. It's to be somebody, to be someone. That's not for you to say. That's for people around you. The other ones are gonna say, yeah, well, he is somebody, he is someone. It's a social verdict. It's society passes judgment of you. So the meaning of being somebody or being someone resides not with you, resides with society. So be somebody simply means don't be yourself. Be what we expect you to be. And when I say do something with your life, make something of your life, it's like life is some kind of raw material. It's a kind of passive object. It's like Michelangelo used to say that when he sees him, when he sees a slab of marble, he sees the statue inside the marble. He just has to release the statue from the marble. So your life is like this slab of marble. And all you have to do is sculpt it, mold it. It's up to you in other words. You are in the role of an artist, a creator, and in many ways a godlike creator. It's a very narcissistic notion. But it's also very demeaning and very debasing because life is so much more than raw material. Life is such a miracle, such a wonder and to reduce it to a commodity. A commodity whose main role is to elevate you, to make you somebody, to make you some someone. And a lever to accomplish things which society will judge, you know, estimable and it's this is to subject yourself to socialization in its most pernicious and insidious form. Indeed, we are all encouraged by society to position ourselves relative to others. This is called relative positioning and the most extreme and sick form of relative positioning you can find on social media where everyone compares himself to everyone, everybody else. I mean, how many likes did I receive? How many people watched my video? How many people commented, etc., etc. Relative positioning. Numerous studies have demonstrated since 2008 that relative positioning is the main engine of anxiety and depression. The rates of anxiety and depression between tripled and quintupled among users of relative positioning of social media and its relative positioning. Also, relative positioning creates conditioning, operant conditioning. It transforms you into a salivating dog. It creates an addiction, but worse than addiction creates conditioning. So here we go. We have an inner dialogue that is essentially dictated by society, its expectations, its mores, its values, its beliefs as a form of social control to channel you, to make you conform, to make you perform. And you internalize these voices via the agents of socialization. Socialization is a process whereby society invades your mind and society uses everyone, parents, role models, peers, teachers. Uses everyone to invade your mind. You have your under pressure to conform. You are under pressure to collaborate with institutions. Things like mass media and social media are there to keep you in check. And if you didn't believe this until now, the pandemic has revealed the inner workings of these allegedly neutral free speech institutions. They are not. They are levels of social control. They have political agendas and other agendas, which are ulterior and divorced from their stated mission. So the inner dialogue is ego alien. It's ego discrepant. And it's ego congruent. In other words, it creates ego dystony, almost never ego symtony. Because the inner dialogue sets a bar which you can never attain. It sets you up for failure. Failure is the main engine used by society to prod you on, to make you work, to force you to contribute to society's goals, not to yours, God forbid. You are a creature of society in the sense that your mind is a hive mind. It's populated by hundreds of voices, none of which is yours. So the first thing that you could do is borrow a technique from cold therapy and it's called map of happiness. Write down everything without which you cannot be happy. Now pay attention. Not everything that makes you happy, but everything without which you could not be happy. Let me give an example. I like red wine. You may have noticed. I also like coffee. You will notice now. Fine. But I can be perfectly happy without red wine and without coffee, without both. So they will not make it to the list. They will not make it to the map of happiness. But I cannot survive a day without books. I will die. I will shrivel. I will vanish without books. So books make me happy, but without books I could never be happy. I would like to make a list of things without which you could never be happy. Could you be happy without your spouse? Could you be happy without your children? Could you be happy without your jobs? Could you be happy without your books? Could you be happy without your social media? Could you be happy without your friends, your neighborhood power? Whatever. Just make a list of things, not of things that make you happy but things without which you could never be happy and then find the common denominator. For example, if what makes you happy is, I don't know, travel, watch programs on natural geographic and history channel and so on and so forth, then maybe the common denominator is knowledge. If what you like is to travel and for example casual sex, you're promiscuous and without that you couldn't be happy, maybe the common denominator is freedom. If what you like is flashy cars and to do shopping, of course the common denominator is money. So begin to delete, begin to minimize your list, find the common denominators, what underlies the various manifestations, the various things without which you could not be happy. These common denominators are the preconditions for your happiness. Later on as we progress, you will discover that the main role of your inner dialogue is to suppress precisely these conditions for happiness because if you reach happiness you lose ambition and you lose incentive to work, you are disincentivized. Now society wants you to work, society wants you to produce and even more so, society wants you to make enough money to consume. These are the engines of society. It needs you to be in a constant state of unhappiness, of lack, of wish, of need, unsatisfied, ungratified need. It needs you to be incomplete, it needs you to be restless, it needs you to seek and never find. It is this path, this journey of seeking and never finding that constitutes and underlies social institutions, especially institutions in capitalist society, in materialistic societies. I said before that modern civilization is a death count. Modern civilization needs you to die in increments and profitably so. If your inner dialogue is eliminated, if your introjects are suppressed, if you know exactly what are the preconditions for your happiness, the things without which you could not be happy, then you will have attained happiness and the minute you're happy, trust you me, you become inert. You don't want to mess with the state of happiness, you don't want to experiment, you don't want to perchance, break it apart, break the magic, dispel, dispel this state of satiety and gratification. You don't want that, this blessed state. So a state of happiness is exactly as Eastern philosophies have told us for thousands of years. State of happiness is a state of non-motion, for what I call, as you will see much later, nothingness. Now society abhors nothingness. Society abhors a lack of motion, society constitutes itself on permanent perpetual mobility, permanent motion, permanent consumption, permanent, I mean people are encouraged to go out to spend money, to meet each other, to society relies as any device or machine does, as any technology does, society relies on constant operation. Society is not your friend, is not your friend, and the agents of society, including your so-called friends, including your own family, they are very frequently the agents of unhappiness, their demands, their expectations, their values and their beliefs, rarely tally 100% with yours, they drag you down, they distract you, they divert you, they are not helpful. Before we proceed I would like to discuss language and games. There is a hypothesis called linguistic relativity, it's also known as the Sapir Worf, Worf, W-H-O-R-F, the Sapir S-A-P-R-R Worf hypothesis, or Worfianism, it simply suggests that the structure of our language affects our worldview, our worldview, our cognition, the way we think, the way we structure our thoughts, the way we try to map our thoughts onto reality, in other words our theories of the world, our theories of mind, our working models, internal working models, all these are critically dependent on language, there's a debate, does language determine these models or does it influence them? That's besides the point, language is a critical component and makes a critical contribution, to the structure, the content and the operation of everything we think we know about the world and how we verbalize it and how we think about it. So language and world and worldview, Weltanschau and cognition, they are inseparable, your perceptions critically depend on your spoken language and so if you want to change your mind in the good sense, if you want to reach a locus of happiness, if you want to alter your locus of control from external to internal, for example, which is a healing process, if you want to change your life for the better and change the way you think about life, render it more functional, if you want to accomplish all these laudable goals of self-completing, becoming whole and healed, you need first of all to change your language or at least to understand what in your language constitutes an obstacle to these accomplishments, personal accomplishments, of course society, make sure that the language is constructed as an obstacle course so that you never reach a state of total happiness, total contentment and lack of ambition and lack of motivation to act, society doesn't want that, society doesn't want you to be happy with iPhone 11, society wants you to buy iPhone 12, how to make you buy iPhone 12, by altering the language, by changing the language, by choosing words which resonate with you in ways which alter your worldview, which force you to act, we'll come to it in this series of videos later and then I want to mention the concept of game, Eric Byrne, he wrote the founding text of transactional analysis, it's called Games People Play, one of the most brilliant books ever written about psychology and human affairs and this transactional analysis which in itself is a very fascinating treatment modality, psychotherapy, I'm not sure they would be happy with these labels but that's what they are, he says that there are two types of people who adamantly and proudly refuse to partake of games and so these two types of people are, they won't play the game, they refuse to be integrated into the ludic exchanges, the ludic exchanges, the exchanges of games, they refuse to play the game, it's quite a long story short, that's the narcissist and the psychopath, they're defiant, they're consummations, they hate authority, they won't accept and so they, they're out of the game, out of the game observing the game, out of the game obstructing the game, they're out of the game because they have their own game, they make the laws, when the psychopath and the narcissist refuse to play the game, they put a wrench in society's workings, is this a good thing? Up to a point and that's why narcissists are overrepresented among creative people, people who destroy and disrupt the old in order to create the new, what Schumpeter called creative destruction. So, narcissists and psychopaths, up to a point, are actually positive people because they provide us with an external gaze, with an external point of view and suddenly we see the society's game for what it is, manipulation, the problem with narcissists and psychopaths is that they go too far and they go too far at our expense, at the expense of normal people because they don't have empathy and they don't have emotions, so they don't care, they don't know where to stop and they don't care to stop, so they become predators, they start well, they end badly. Narcissists and psychopaths would not play the game called sex, they would not play the game called intimacy, they would not play the game called family with a woman or someone, so and when they refuse to play the game, your only way is to opt out, to resort to other playmates, when they decline to play business or when they decline to play French friendship with someone, very often the rejected parties revert to another part, these are ineluctable, self-inflicted losses and gradually they warp, they thwart and they stunt the minds and lives of narcissists and psychopaths. In his seminal survey of grandiose psychopathy, The Mask of Sanity, Harvey Cleckley branded this kind of non-game a rejection of life itself, the only game narcissists and psychopaths will participate in is let us all pretend that this is for real, a delusional shared fantasy with limited longevity and guaranteed expiry, a psychopath's only concession to human intercourse is a zero sum, let's play my game, you give it all and I take everything you have and then some, so it is true that narcissists and psychopaths challenge the game and in this sense they have a positive contribution, we call it creativity, imagination, but then they take it too far and again the narcissist game is let us all pretend that this is for real, it ends badly and the psychopath's game is zero, zero sum, play my game, you give it all to me and I take everything you have and then some, that's not a game, that is pillage and plunder, why am I mentioning this? Because it's easy to say the inner dialogue is a societal implant, I'm rejecting it, I'm not going to abide by it, I'm going to be my own man, I'm going to be authentic, I'm going to have an authentic inner dialogue and I'm going to reject my introjects and what they say because their voices are not friendly, they don't have my best interest in mind and I'm going to reframe and recreate an inner dialogue which is, which takes into account my happiness, all well and dandy, but be careful not to become a narcissist or a psychopath in this process because narcissists and psychopaths start exactly the same way, they reject the inner dialogue which is dictated by society and socialization agents, but then they go too far, don't go too far, while you should understand that the voices inside your head are alien to you and they don't seek, they don't have your best interests in mind, they have the best interests of society in mind, you should understand this, the solution is not to become a narcissist, the solution is not to become a psychopath, the solution is to become your own person by adopting nothingness which is something I will explain much much later in future videos, so don't say Sam, you are pushing us to become narcissists, you are pushing us to become psychopaths because defiance and hatred of society is rejection of life, like Klaikli said, no, that's all I'm saying on the contrary, I'm encouraging you to embrace life, what I'm saying is to purge your mind, to purge your mind of voices that are not you, this is called in existentialist philosophy and psychology lack of authenticity, inauthenticity, dead faith, this is what I'm telling you and of course the alternative to being authentic is not to be a narcissist or a psychopath, in many respects they are not authentic, for example the narcissist lives in fantasy land, that's not being authentic, that's totally denied who you are, the narcissist is void and emptiness and the psychopath is a predator, if you can't have any meaningful interactions with other people you won't as well die, meaningful interactions with other people are very critical to who you are but don't let these interactions be dictated by outside forces, expectations, morays, values, beliefs, dictates, rules, laws, threats, structures these interactions with other people based on who you are and structural identity, your essence on the principle of nothingness, we are now discussing how to practice nothingness, the first stage was to identify your shadow and this is the second stage, heal your inner dialogue, so there are many stages we can't get directly to nothingness, you need to go through these stages first because otherwise you would not be ready mentally and psychologically to accept the principle of nothingness, for example you may have narcissistic defenses, you want me to be nothing I'm somebody what do you mean I'm not nothing I'm not nobody I'm you know these are narcissistic defenses or you're going to have psychopathic defenses you're going to say you know f you I'm not going to be I'm not going to be a nobody I'm not going to be a nothing ironically the very rejection of society is a social role model you think you're rejecting society it makes you a rebel well a rebel is a role dictated by society society has a place for rebels a place for dissidents we are all captured in the social cage in this experiment the kalbun experiment with rats and mice so don't think that being a rebel or being a dissident it makes you stand out or makes you be your own man or your own you know it's not not true nothingness is totally different it's not about rebellion and not about dissidents because re re rebelling and dissenting is defining yourself via social roles and in contra distinction to society the rebel is defined by the very thing that he rebels against okay we need to think of the inner dialogue we need to scrutinize it as we would scrutinize a scientific theory the first question we need to ask is a question of attribution the inner dialogue is mine or others these voices in my head this sentence that just popped into my head is it what I would say or is it what my mother used to say when I was a kid or is it what my teacher once had told me or is it what a group of my peers forced me to do and to say when I was younger are these voices authentic are they an integral part of the fabric that is I or are they imports alien foreign goods that's the question of attribution the second question is ego syntony these voices do they make me feel uncomfortable unhappy discontent frightened pining tragic destroyed depressed dysphoric anxious if they do something wrong with something's wrong with these voices and even much more so something's wrong with the fact that I'm listening to these voices interacting with them considering what they're considering what I have to say these voices are bad for me they're wrong for me they have no place because inner voices could be critical inner voices could disagree with you inner voices could show you another way but if they do it with love you will never feel any of these negative emotions negative emotionality is when you perceive a threat when you're threatened you react with negative emotionality including anger and rage so really friendly inner voices they're like good friends they will give you good advice and sometimes this advice you're not gonna like this advice and sometimes this advice would would be critical would criticize you but it's going to be done with love and empathy and compassion and you're going to feel it voices that lack love empathy and compassion are not your friends so ego syntony is a critical test not happiness happiness is a goal happiness is like money you know it's a goal I'm talking about the means ego syntony to feel comfortable in your own skin the third test is fuzziness are these voices clear or are they ambiguous are they easily decipherable or are they equivocal do they leave plays for multiple interpretations or are they prescriptive they suggest a way forward which is you know laser like focused are they goal oriented or do they just you know decompensate you and disintegrate you and attack you fuzziness is a critical issue voices which are not good for you voices which are your enemies interjects which are there sadistically the inner critic the sadistic super ego they're fuzzy actually they're fuzzy also in the sense that you can never satisfy them never mind much never mind how much you accomplish never mind never mind how much you obey them never mind how much you try to conform never mind how much of an introject pleaser you are you never make it you always fail you always fail these inner voices you always disappoint them they always mad at you they will criticize you they will humiliate you sadistically and so these kind of voices you need to eradicate so what's what are the hallmarks of a healthy dialogue and I will show you in future videos how to construct a healthy dialogue a healthy inner dialogue what are the hallmarks of a healthy inner dialogue the parts of your mind that talk to each other how do we know if the dialogue is healthy or actually a figment of pathology if it leads to unfavorable outcomes if it is not self efficacious if it detracts from your agency if it reduces your intimacy this this is a sick inner dialogue pathological inner dialogue how do we distinguish this kind of unhealthy inner dialogue from a good productive constructive forward moving healthy whole wholesome and complete inner dialogue how do we tell them apart well these are narratives inner dialogues actually are about constructing narratives even in movies we have dialogues between characters but the dialogues between the characters in movies drive the plot forward there is a plot of your life your life is a story unfolding as the story unfolds various characters constitute integral parts of this story and they talk to each other and it is this uninterrupted stream of communication that actually constitutes the yarn of your life the fabric of your life so we need to inspect the plot the narrative and here are the hallmarks here are the tests of a healthy plot integrated narrative driven inner dialogue which I remind you is authentic it's your voice it's not fuzzy not sadistic and is eco-syntonic makes you feel good with yourself even when the voices disagree with you or criticize you you still feel good because you feel that you're surrounded with friends you're surrounded with voices we seek seek to help you love you and empathize with you okay so here's here are the tests first of all the plot and the narrative must be unamnetic in other words the plot and the narrative must be all inclusive it must encompass integrate and incorporate all the facts known about you every single incident that happened in your life every interaction you've had with everyone everything you've learned everything you've acquired everything you've lost everything you've forgotten everything unconscious unconscious everything must be integrated into the plot and the narrative so as to yield a healthy inner dialogue one of the major problems in psychopathology is that people exclude big parts of their psyche via dissociation for example so dissociation is an engine of disruption when we ignore deny repress forget dissociate uh refrain badly wrongly counterfactually adhere to fantasy and denounce and renounce reality when we do all these things when we become partial partial human beings not only that creates pathologies so a healthy narrative with a healthy inner dialogue is unamnetic all inclusive doesn't have an shadow area or a dark side that is utterly inaccessible and that is very big second thing it must be coherent it must be chronological structured uh causal adhere to causation the linkages must be clear a leads to b for good reason it your life must make sense and it must make sense sense in in every possible way and to do this it must be coherent it must be also consistent your narrative your inner dialogue must be self consistent the sub plots of your narrative cannot contradict one another cannot go against the grain of the main plot your narrative must see all the parts of your narrative must sit well together so that the various constructs in your mind and the introjects can co can communicate based on a common plot on a common narrative within the same movie or as we say you must be on the same page the various parts of your personality of your psyche whatever you want to call it they must be on the same page and we call this consistency or self consistency but they must also be consistent with observed phenomena both phenomena related to to you and phenomena pertaining to the rest of the universe other people so you can't have a plot or a narrative or an inner dialogue that's okay internally but conflicts of reality is counterfactual is conspiratorial is fantastic is delusional or in extreme cases psychotic all these are pathologies next your narrative plot and inner dialogue they must be logically compatible they must not violate the laws of logic both internally and externally internally your plot the story of your life the dialogue between the various introjects and entities they must abide by some internally imposed logic even crazy people like people with psychotic disorder there is logic to the madness in the madness and it must be externally logical there is totillion logic which is applicable in the observable world so logic is critical some people call it rationality but there's a difference next thing your plot or narrative or inner dialogue they must be insightful even i would say diagnostic they must inspire in you a sense of all sense of wonder and astonishment which is the result of seeing something familiar in a new light or the result of seeing a pattern emerging out of a big big data a big body of data insights patterns they must constitute the inevitable conclusion of the aforementioned logic the language and the inexorable unfolding of the plot put simply your plot your narrative your inner dialogue can go only one way there's only one correct way not hundreds correct ways this is one huge mistake of modern western psychology modern western psychology gives the impression that self actualization can go any way that there are like a thousand pathways to happiness and all you have to do is choose this is the consumerist approach because the typical consumer has multiple choices and then he can choose this smartphone or that smartphone this television set or that television set this vacation destination or that vacation destination so because we are used to choice we tend to erroneously believe that the path to happiness is one of many and we can choose path numbers it's like these boxes in a quiz you can choose what's behind door number one what's behind door number three and we're likely to get the same result wrong wrong the the logic the insights the everything leads to your particular idiosyncratic path that's why i am dead sent against prescriptive public intellectuals and philosophers and coaches and certified experts when they tell you this is what you have to do it's nonsense because every person has his own 12 rules every person is his own path to healing every it's impossible to generalize if you generalize you're wrong that's why psychology can never be a science one of the reasons one of the many reasons it can never be a science the insights they are the inevitable inexorable conclusion of the logic of the language and the plot unfolds as it should when you obstruct this when you divert the plot when you reframe it when you delete it when you forget it when you it's a pathology it's sickness next thing your narrative your plot your inner dialogue must be aesthetic it must be plausible it must feel right there must be beauty in it it it shouldn't be cumbersome clunky awkward discontinuous um it should be smooth parsimonious with minimum assumptions simple simplicity and beauty are the hallmarks of the right life eudemania the right the worthy life the worthy life as diogenes would have told you is a barrel all the sages in human history there's no exception all the sages in human history gave up material possessions and wanted to the forest to the deserts to the mountain tops why were all of them idiots why did they give up some of them were very rich some of them like buddha were princes why did they give up all these things why did they reduce their life reductionism simplifying life simplifying minimizing life minimum assumptions minimum outcomes minimum possessions minimum thoughts minimum principles minimum this is by the way the driving force in science we know we have something called occam's razor pass passimony we know that the theory with minimum assumptions the simpler theory i still said the beautiful theory is more likely to be true more likely to correspond more closely to reality simplify your life make it aesthetic think beauty apples dominance was constructed not on function but on beauty aesthetic and minimalism the first iPhones there was no copy paste function most of the functions were missing but they were the most beautiful objects you've ever seen and so here we are today iPhone 12 parsimony the plot must employ the minimum number of assumptions minimum number of entities in order to satisfy all the above conditions psychology has seen in this sense because we have multiplied entities and we have multiplied assumptions and we are in a bloody mess that's why this gave room to charlatans and dilatans with or without phd's because unlike for example in physics we don't have a reducible set of entities and assumptions with which we work but we keep multiplying them all the time i'm as guilty in the of this as as anyone else the plot of the narrative of your life and the inner dialogue that is derived from this narrative they must be explanatory they must explain the behavior of other people other characters in your plot they must explain your decisions they must explain your behavior they must account account for your contact for your choices why did events develop the way they did a good plot or narrative an inner dialogue would give you the answer it must be predictive prognostic your plot your narrative your inner dialogue they must possess the ability to predict future events the future behavior your future behavior and future behavior of other people significant meaningful figures in your life and the inner emotional and cognitive dynamics of everyone involved you and others it must be therapeutic your inner dialogue must be a healing dialogue it must have the power to induce change to encourage functionality to make the patient happier and more content make you happier and more content make you remember ego-syntonic you it must also make you more compatible and happier with others but not by way of obeying them conforming not by way of denying yourself for becoming inauthentic not via bad faith but and not via a leap of faith like Kierkegaard I think a good narrative a good plot and a constructive productive empathic loving inner dialogue they automatically drive you to fit in with others even if you don't comply you don't conform you don't obey you don't submit you don't subjugate yourself you still will be sought sought after this you still will be loved and liked and your company will be cherished why because you're authentic people react very powerfully to strong authenticity it's not honesty because you could be honest and sadistic like me it's authentic it's the it's you know this the silent the strong the silent strong type it's like a rock a rock doesn't talk much well the rocks I came across they don't talk much but you know you can rely on them and you know they're real and you know they're true and you know their feature of reality and of the universe and you you almost assume that they will always be there which is wrong never mind and so you know such people you seek their company because of their inner calm because of what they exude and what they exude is not self-confidence in the Tony Robbins sense and not dominance in the Jordan Peterson sense and not even oceanic feeling in the Sadguru sense or Osho or whatever other none of this what they exude is being existence pure purified being in other words they are integrated with the nothingness already they are not anything that is not themselves they are merely themselves they are coterminous and co-extant with themselves as far as the rest of the world it's nothingness because the world society human civilization we tend to analyze people by what they do what they consume what they produce how they conform how they integrate with others and so in other words we tend to we tend to judge the even the very existence of people by the impact and influence they have on their environment these people don't need to have impact and influence they don't need the environment they they're just there they are are and again we'll come to that in future videos you need to be happy and content with yourself with others with your circumstances but not like an idiot i'm happy but happy and content with existence existence i'm very very leery very hesitant to use the word that existence is a gift because a gift implies a giver someone gave you the gift and that's the last thing i want to imply i'm very much against fantastic infantile delusions like god and angels and other nonsense but existence is i would say the gift that the only gift that you can safely give yourself you cannot give yourself health health you know what you cannot even give yourself money you make money but it can be taken away or frittered away or disappear or whatever power over everything you have and everyone in your life is extremely limited there are there's only one thing of which you're in full control and can endow yourself bestow it bestow it upon yourself your existence and of course your existence manifests by your narrative plot and in the dialogue that i mentioned before so your mind what exists is your mind your body is a container very pleasurable container at times but still a container the ancients were right about this the body is nothing you can endow yourself with your mind and only you can the narrative and the plot the story of you the story of you must be imposing you must regard it as the preferable best possible organizing principle this is leibniz leibniz called it the best of possible worlds you must regard existence and especially your existence as the best of possible worlds as the organizing principle that you would have chosen if you had the choice anyhow you would have chosen it it's a principle that imbues your existence with structure with order with meaning with sense with direction with purpose it puts your life's events together in a way which is the only possible way and the best way at that and it's a torch it guides you guides you in the dark it's a vadme gu and finally the plot or the narrative or the inner dialogue must be elastic they must possess the intrinsic abilities to self organize exactly like the brain neuroplasticity the plot must must must be able to self organize deconstruct disassemble and reassemble reorganize give room to emerging order to new information accommodate new data comfortably and react flexibly to attacks from within and from without this is perhaps the most crucial test of whether you have the right healthy and happy narrative plot and inner dialogue or not because when you have a pathological inner dialogue pathological narrative or plot of your life you are likely to react aggressively to any of the aforementioned things you're likely to be unable to self organize unable to reorganize unable to reframe new data will feel like a threat change will feel like a like an ominous foreboding your your flexibility is lost and the attacks will be mounted from inside as well as from the outside when you have a rigid rigid plot or narrative something wrong indeed the diagnostic statistical manual opens the definition of personality disorder with the word rigid rigid patterns in all these respects your narrative your plot your inner dialogue it's a theory it's a theory in disguise it's a theory of your of mind in other words a theory of other mentalization how other people what makes them tick what is to be human what is to be another and it's also a theory of the world and in total is what is called internal working more scientific theories satisfy the above conditions as well but we must be very we must very be very careful because your plot your narrative cannot be subjected to the test that scientific theories are put to testability verifiability refutability falsifiability repeatability they all I mean you can't for example repeat your life several times to see if your theory is correct you can't falsify your life in the sense that you can't gamble your life on an experiment which will go wrong so you can't test your life the way you test or falsify a scientific theory there's no experiment that you can design to test the statements within your personal plot within your narrative you cannot establish the truth value of your narrative it doesn't have an objective ontological onto epistemological existence you cannot convert your your story into a hypothesis or a theorem or a theory it's not a scientific endeavor it satisfies some of the same conditions but it's not a scientific endeavor and there are several reasons why you cannot take your plot because there have been schools in psychology like behaviorism they try to take the inner plot the inner narrative the movie of your life and convert it into a science they said it's all objective it's all ontological we can measure we can test we can experiment it's wrong it cannot be done and it cannot be done for the following reasons first of all there's an ethical issue experiments would have to be conducted involving you and others if i want to tell you if your theory of yourself if your plot if your narrative is right or not i have to experiment on you and involve others in the experiment and to achieve the necessary results the subjects you and others will have to be ignorant of the reasons for the experiments and the aims of the experiment sometimes even the very performance of an experiment will have to remain secret we call it double double blind experiments some experiments may involve unpleasant or even traumatic experiences and of course this is ethically unacceptable second thing what is called the psychological uncertainty principle the initial state of a human subject you in an experiment is usually fully established but both the treatment both the experiment i mean the very experiment influences the subject so you start let's say i want to test whether the story of your life your narrative your plot in a dialogue is healthy for you or pathological and i want to test it in a scientific manner so i'll i'll interview you i'll i'll subject you to the mmpi which is like 700 questions and i will know everything about you i'll have your complete profile the very experiment the very interaction with me the very test will change you you will change you you will not be the same person at the end of the experience as you were when you have when you had entered the room experimentation interaction discussion conversation insights they transform the subject like in physics the very processes of measurement and observation influence the human subject and transform him in a way that renders the experiment invalid actually life circumstances and vcc use do the same so i can't test you one day after another assuming that you have the same person i don't know what happened to you in between the test the third issue is uniqueness psychological experiments are bound to be unique unrepeatable they cannot be replicated elsewhere and at other times even when they're conducted with the same people this is because the subjects are never the same i mentioned it before yes i explained it the subjects change this psychological uncertainty principle repeating the experiments with other subjects adversely affects the scientific value of the results so if i want to repeat the experiment with you you have changed and if i want to repeat the experiment with others they're not you so the experiments have no value and then any experiment i would make to determine whether your plot and narrative are okay would under generate testable hypotheses psychology does not generate a sufficient number of hypotheses which can be subjected to scientific testing this has to do with the storytelling fabulous nature of psychology in a way psychology has affinity with some private languages or with literature it is a form of art and as such it is self-sufficient and self-contained if it is if structural internal constraints are met a statement is deemed true even if it does not satisfy any external scientific requirements so i keep telling you that you should construct a proper narrative the correct inner dialogue and so on and i gave you a list of tests to see whether your narrative is healthy productive constructive saying or not okay so you can apply this test an amnetic parsimonious this that you remember but what is it good for there are instruments and they are used in procedures that induce peace of mind or happiness so if you have the right inner dialogue if you have the right plot or narrative of your life you will be happy you will be ego-syntonic you will have peace of mind you will have you will have restored inner calm it's these are laudable goals they're good goals everyone wants this but how is this achieved how how how what's the connection between the plot of the narrative or the inner dialogue and your happiness and your peace of mind first of all a good plot a good narrative a good inner dialogue helps you to organize the world it's an organizing principle a psychological plot offers you an organizing principle a sense of order a sense of meaningfulness justice inexorable drive towards well-defined though perhaps hidden goals the feeling of being part of something part of a whole this kind of narratives and plots and inner dialogues they strive to answer the why and the how of life they are dialogic that's why the inner dialogue is critical in constructing reconstructing and deconstructing the plot and the narrative you ask why am i suffering from depression from personality disorder and how can i successfully tackle it why and how and then i respond with a plot or with a narrative and it is like you're like this not because the world is whimsically cruel but because i don't know your parents mistreated you when you were very young or because a person important to you had died or was taken away from you when you were still impressionable or because you were sexually abused etc etc i provide you with a plot with a narrative i organize everything that had happened to you in a way that that renders it meaningful you extract meaning and sense from a proper healthy narrative plot and inner dialogue you are be calmed you become you restore inner peace by the very fact that there is an explanation to that which until now monstrously taunted and haunted you that you're not a plaything of vicious gods that there is a culprit a chain of events a causal chain of being from a to b it focuses your diffuse emotion negative emotions like anger your belief in the existence of order and justice and the administration and order and justice by some supreme transcendental principle your belief in this is restored it's very important for human beings to believe in order and justice jordan peterson was right about this order is critical justice is critical but it should not be generated from the outside it should be generated from the inside with the help of an order orderly plot just narrative and constructive loving empathic inner dialogue this sense of law and order is further enhanced when the plot yields predictions which come true either because they are self-fulfilling or because some real underlying law had been discovered about you specifically and then there's the issue of integration there's an integrative principle you are offered through the plot access to the innermost hitherto inaccessible resources of your mind the good plot good narrative leads you to the hidden chambers of your mind and you can finally hear you can finally eavesdrop on the inner dialogue you feel that you're being reintegrated that things fall into place that there's nothing hidden occult arcane and dark anymore in psychodynamic terms the energy is released from the unconscious in a process called ab reaction to to do productive and positive work rather than to induce distorted and destructive forces a good plot or narrative does another thing it purges you it's the purgatory principle in most cases you feel most most people feel somehow unworthy bad sinful debased partly inhuman decrepit inferior corrupt guilty punishable hateful alienated strange a strange derided decrepit i mean your name everyone everyone has one or more of these feelings of these bad bad sadistic hateful self-loathing voices and introjects it's impossible to go through life and be surrounded only by loving empathic people you come across bad people vicious people evil people manipulators haters and their voices penetrate and sometimes accumulate and so everyone has this the plot a good plot a good narrative offers you a solution your suffering is expurgated cleansed you're absolved you atone for your sins and handicaps you forgive yourself for being imperfect and disabled there's a feeling of hard-won achievement that accompanies a successfully constructed plot or narrative you shed layers of functional adaptive strategies rendered dysfunctional and maladaptive because for example you grew up strategy strategies designed in early childhood if they survive into adulthood that's pathology and this whole thing is inordinately painful you feel dangerously naked vulnerable precariously exposed and then you assimilate the plot you reconstruct the plot sometimes the plot is offered to you by a therapist or a good friend or a loving spouse or your own children or yourself when you ended when you have adopted the plot you enjoy the benefits emanating from what the plot can offer organization meaning justification integration that's what good plot does for you and then you can develop new mechanisms of copying what is therapy therapy is a mental crucifixion and resurrection it's the atonement for a patient's sins it is a religious experience in many ways psychological theories including your theory about yourself they are in the role of the scriptures from which solace and consolation can always be gleaned write your own bible be your own god be your own creator but not in a narcissistic way and not in a psychopathic way and not in a grandiose way not in a materialistic way and not in an outward facing way and not in a society dependent way or culture bound way and not just being leverage your being your existence to become whole make peace with you make peace with you smoke the peace pipe and seize the civil war that had been your defining personal history until now