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Our dark side


me-wonders

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Every one has negativity, and every one has feelings of inadequacy.. I experienced a very dark day a few days ago from various sources of stress. After meditating today and finding some serenity, I found how when we do not mind our passion it governs us. To be mindful is to accept and execute compassion, but not to be ruled by stress. We can act like someone else entirely different in the face of anger or strong emotion.. To find the small tide in the context of a huge and roaring storm is difficult, but in my case, the results are very rewarding..

Agreed. Sometimes I get a little irritated about my failure to have better control over my thoughts. Our brains chatter and it seems most of that chattering serves no useful purpose, and sometime it distracts use from useful thinking. I have a Buddhist chant sometimes quiets my mind. Also, when doing homework and having trouble focusing, it can be helpful to focus on a computer game for while and then return to studies. A game with math qualities would be best for shifting to analytical thinking. Perhaps if we better understood our brains, we could improve our use of them?

This is a nice explanation of mediation and disengaging from the chatter in our minds.

http://www.howtolearn.com/2011/02/the-importance-of-meditation

The man speaks of how exercising in a gym is at first difficult and how it gets easier each time. I have known people who don't like all the chattering in their heads, but neither do they want to practice the discipline of mediating. I must confess to that. Chanting is easy to do whenever I want to stop the voice, but I always desire to be busy. I can enjoy long walks alone the river or listen to lectures, and constantly remind myself to focus on the beauty of nature or the subject of lecture. But I don't do well at sitting still and trying to make my mind blank. I wonder why? It is my mind. Why is it so hard for us to stop the chatter?

Edited by me-wonders
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People talk like there is a "dark, animal" side to us and a "civilized, human" side. Nothing could be more ridiculous! How many thousands of years does it take for people to figure this out??

What you call "civilization" (domestication) is the SOLE root cause of all unnatural acts of aggression and over indulgences. All outbursts of needing to "have" something or be "better" than someone or any urge that causes unnecessary harm, is all born of how warped humans become by the idea of "property" (having or being). You see it all the time, in every other species, too. When you take animals and put them in fences and tell them what to do, they eventually do very strange things, that don't seem natural or make sense at all.

If humans were so horribly harmful to one another NATURALLY, then back when there were only a handfull of people, with no laws, civilization, regulation, AT ALL, they would have killed each other off, and not flourished into such a huge population. NO it is not the NATURE of humans that is "dark", it is what society does to them that makes them that way. It all began the first time someone said "Hey that piece of the ground is good, but it's MINE. I'll let you use it, if you....(whatever)", then evolved into the complex governing structures you have today.

"Oh but we need laws, otherwise people would all go crazy and do whatever they want." Yea, NOW they would. But what I'm saying, is that if people never started trying to control each other in the first place, no one would ever WANT to do these "dark" things. So I dont buy the whole "dark side vs civilized" thing and not really sure what occupy is.. wasn't that a protest on wallstreet or something?

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People talk like there is a "dark, animal" side to us and a "civilized, human" side. Nothing could be more ridiculous! How many thousands of years does it take for people to figure this out??

What you call "civilization" (domestication) is the SOLE root cause of all unnatural acts of aggression and over indulgences. All outbursts of needing to "have" something or be "better" than someone or any urge that causes unnecessary harm, is all born of how warped humans become by the idea of "property" (having or being). You see it all the time, in every other species, too. When you take animals and put them in fences and tell them what to do, they eventually do very strange things, that don't seem natural or make sense at all.

If humans were so horribly harmful to one another NATURALLY, then back when there were only a handfull of people, with no laws, civilization, regulation, AT ALL, they would have killed each other off, and not flourished into such a huge population. NO it is not the NATURE of humans that is "dark", it is what society does to them that makes them that way. It all began the first time someone said "Hey that piece of the ground is good, but it's MINE. I'll let you use it, if you....(whatever)", then evolved into the complex governing structures you have today.

"Oh but we need laws, otherwise people would all go crazy and do whatever they want." Yea, NOW they would. But what I'm saying, is that if people never started trying to control each other in the first place, no one would ever WANT to do these "dark" things. So I dont buy the whole "dark side vs civilized" thing and not really sure what occupy is.. wasn't that a protest on wallstreet or something?

Good post!

"The Dark Side" is rather a figure of speech. A convenient way to describe certain human behavior.

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People talk like there is a "dark, animal" side to us and a "civilized, human" side. Nothing could be more ridiculous! How many thousands of years does it take for people to figure this out??

What you call "civilization" (domestication) is the SOLE root cause of all unnatural acts of aggression and over indulgences. All outbursts of needing to "have" something or be "better" than someone or any urge that causes unnecessary harm, is all born of how warped humans become by the idea of "property" (having or being). You see it all the time, in every other species, too. When you take animals and put them in fences and tell them what to do, they eventually do very strange things, that don't seem natural or make sense at all.

If humans were so horribly harmful to one another NATURALLY, then back when there were only a handfull of people, with no laws, civilization, regulation, AT ALL, they would have killed each other off, and not flourished into such a huge population. NO it is not the NATURE of humans that is "dark", it is what society does to them that makes them that way. It all began the first time someone said "Hey that piece of the ground is good, but it's MINE. I'll let you use it, if you....(whatever)", then evolved into the complex governing structures you have today.

"Oh but we need laws, otherwise people would all go crazy and do whatever they want." Yea, NOW they would. But what I'm saying, is that if people never started trying to control each other in the first place, no one would ever WANT to do these "dark" things. So I dont buy the whole "dark side vs civilized" thing and not really sure what occupy is.. wasn't that a protest on wallstreet or something?

I guess it will take as many thousands of years to figure out what you are sure of, as it takes people to figure out how to discuss things without being offensive. I am not sure if being insulting comes naturally to humans, but I know they can learn to be pleasing and much more fun to engage with.

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My apoologies. That just seems so obvious to me, that it frustrates me when no one seems to realize it. Perhaps I should just keep my conclusions to myself on that matter.

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Even in following this It should be from the beginning of man .

and starting with the Core Primal Instinct , and that would be FEAR.

and from there .... ALOT of things stem from FEAR.

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Even in following this It should be from the beginning of man .

and starting with the Core Primal Instinct , and that would be FEAR.

and from there .... ALOT of things stem from FEAR.

I disagree with the Core Primal Instinct being FEAR. The Core Primal Instinct is SURVIVAL. Is the Rabbit exhibiting FEAR when he is running for his life from the coyote? I don't think so. The Primival Brain...that is our Core Brain...is about survival. Fear is an attribute of the evolved neo-cortex. As is Ego. Perhaps a math equation for The Dark Side might be: E(go) + F(ear) = The Dark Side.

Edited by joc
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I disagree with the Core Primal Instinct being FEAR. The Core Primal Instinct is SURVIVAL. Is the Rabbit exhibiting FEAR when he is running for his life from the coyote? I don't think so. The Primival Brain...that is our Core Brain...is about survival. Fear is an attribute of the evolved neo-cortex. As is Ego. Perhaps a math equation for The Dark Side might be: E(go) + F(ear) = The Dark Side.

The book "Emotional Intelligence" explains how the brain works, and that our survival sometimes depends on reacting without thinking. Unfortunately we do not use this science when judging why someone speeds away from police and the police react like a tiger about to loose its meal. The military trains people to react without thinking, and this training gets reinforced in combat, and then it discharges these people and put them on the streets without changing their programming. That is very irresponsible.

However, I think we can call the fight or flight response a fear response, if it is a rabbit or human. Because it is a hormonal response to a trigger. Immediately the body is flooded with hormones and the animal reacts without thinking. I think we call this sensation caused by this flood of hormones, fear? I had this intense hormonal response 24 hours after a crisis, and wound up in an emergency room explaining my sensation of panic to a doctor a couple of times, before I figured out this was a delayed reaction. Like the intense panic was completely disconnected from the experience that caused it by time, so went into the emergency room all I knew was that I was experiencing intense panic, and I didn't know why. The delayed reaction It has something to do with the hormones and how they build and are metabolized. Sometimes, thinking does not work in our favor, as it can keep us in situations we should leave. When we do this repeatedly, damage to our systems can occur.

Thank you all for bringing this up and causing me to think on it.

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I lived, for years, under a shroud of anxiety and aggression. But it was all over things that I find superficial, now. That anxiety seemed to actually be helping me, at the time. Making me very efficient at keeping my double (or quadruple) life, in check. From rehearsing all my lies, in my head, to thinking up who I should watch out for and why and what the odds of this & that happening, coming up with backup plans, etc. But this anxiety was also keeping me trapped in my ways. I went through another phase, later on, where I was having full blown panic attacks, and that was a totally "different animal" to me. There is no ability to think or reason or put together anything, like that. The only way I can describe it, is if you were affraid of heights and dangling from a building. It was the fear of death.. or maybe of NOT BEING (if that makes sense). Then I came to a realization that all the fear I ever experienced, throughout my life, somewhere at the root of it all, was a fear of ceasing to exist, in some way.

I wonder if perhaps, this is tangled in somewhere with why people have so much fear and anxiety, today.. Why people need to exist as much as possible, in the highest, most intense ways possible (by their perception).. I know that anger and frustration exist only in cooperation with fear and anxiety. So might this be the path to understanding where the "dark side" of people originates and grows into what it becomes..?

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Been to Munster, seen the cages still hanging from the tower of the Dom. Very nice city by the way. However, I do not believe we have an "evil side". I think individual evil acts, like some terrible murder, happen because the person is damaged, not acting on some under the suface evilness that the rest of us keep on a leash. When you look at the barbarity that occured in Munster, and other places in the same general time frame, Antwerp for instance, and modern horrors such as Auschwitz, then there is something else happening. What links these big scale horrors carried out by states, is that they all think they have some truth and that they are not doing evil, but doing good, because they see their victims as being the evil. I do not believe in any Satan, so I also do not believe in some evil force. Certainly individual people can be evil, though that is really a lack of morals and empathy for fellow humans, or animals. The problems occur when such people have power, and often such people gain power precisely because they have no morality. About them hover other such creatures, drawn like a moth to a flame. But I think it is all just personal imorality due to damaged minds, not anything that is potentially within all of us.

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My 5 year old grandson had a tooth pulled yesterday and the sedative he was given, made him an extremely unpleasant young man! It is well known the sedative will have this effect on children. It got me to thinking about how our sense of being is really chemical reactions. Molded rye can result in abnormal behavior, and may be behind witch hunts and stories of werewolves. Low blood sugar can make people crouchy and several crouchy or angry or scared people, can lead to a group action. For sure, because I spent a good part of my day with my grandson and another children, I know my reaction to a crouchy child is not good. As a single child feeling out of sorts, I could have dealt with grandson better than having to think of him and another small child too. For sure I will never again put a child on the sedative with another child. A child on this medication needs to have a day completely devoted to his needs, without a demand to cooperate with others. This is to say, we have so much to think about, from brain chemistry to group dynamics.

What was horrify about Munster was the group dynamics, and willingness to watch people suffer and even enjoy their suffering. The willingness to watch men, and mothers and the children starve to death in the area around Munster. Both sides of this conflict seemed to take pleasure in the suffering of those who left the city walls, but could not leave area that was surrounded by soldiers. These people were not allowed to leave the barricade created by soldiers, nor were they allowed to return to the city walls. It was a horrifying scene of days of suffering and people inside the walls jeering at those trapped between the conflicting parties. Occupy did not get this bad, but I think the group dynamics were similar. I may never forget the city councilors smiling after someone was killed and they were justified in closing the camp. There was a total disconnect between them and the people in the camp. I was so close to getting people in housing and this opportunity came to an end when the camp was closed. More than one woman there was made homeless by cancer. There I was working closely with desperate people, and the city councilors made promises they didn't keep, and were smiling when a death occurred. Disconnect! Morals? I am sure the city councilors and mayor see themselves as moral people, but they were disconnected from those who need our help.

On the other hand, the Occupy people were so non cooperative with the rest of society, that they totally failed to access resources that could have made a huge difference. They were on an ego trip, insisting on doing things their way, and failing to even look at all the services and organizations that are devoted to helping people in need. What a disaster! They were well meaning people who never needed services, so they didn't know about them, or needy people who didn't know of the services either. Disconnect! I tried to bridge, but Occupy folks made this impossible, because of their own ego trip and lack of education and experience with organizations. Telling them we have organizations that help people, and trying to get an organized group action was impossible. They took individualism too far. Anarchy can not achieve what organized people can achieve.

Edited by me-wonders
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I lived, for years, under a shroud of anxiety and aggression. But it was all over things that I find superficial, now. That anxiety seemed to actually be helping me, at the time. Making me very efficient at keeping my double (or quadruple) life, in check. From rehearsing all my lies, in my head, to thinking up who I should watch out for and why and what the odds of this & that happening, coming up with backup plans, etc. But this anxiety was also keeping me trapped in my ways. I went through another phase, later on, where I was having full blown panic attacks, and that was a totally "different animal" to me. There is no ability to think or reason or put together anything, like that. The only way I can describe it, is if you were affraid of heights and dangling from a building. It was the fear of death.. or maybe of NOT BEING (if that makes sense). Then I came to a realization that all the fear I ever experienced, throughout my life, somewhere at the root of it all, was a fear of ceasing to exist, in some way.

I wonder if perhaps, this is tangled in somewhere with why people have so much fear and anxiety, today.. Why people need to exist as much as possible, in the highest, most intense ways possible (by their perception).. I know that anger and frustration exist only in cooperation with fear and anxiety. So might this be the path to understanding where the "dark side" of people originates and grows into what it becomes..?

Consider that adults perpetually dissemble their real emotions, so that their real emotions are never observed by any other person ever. Add to this that all emotions you have experienced other adults,(since you were born) as feeling, were feigned emotions. No one has ever seen how an adult really feels, because it is more advantageous to Control reactions by feigning to feel otherwise. A question emerges regarding the origins of ones own feelings. For example, let's say they are imprinted. genetic, so that because your parent felt them you have no option but to feel them. You never experienced that the parent felt them, and so you can't trace back to that.

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They took individualism too far. Anarchy can not achieve what organized people can achieve.

Problem with those who say they are anarchists and wear masks and smash shops etc, is that they are either simply criminals using politics as cover, or they are actually Reds flying Black banner as disguise. It is well known that Kropotkin saw that communism was flawed and would lead to totalitarianism, and he hotly argued with Marx about this to the extent that he became almost an ideological enemy of Marx. The original anarchism as developed by Kropotkin and Bakunin, certainly puts the individual at the centre, but not at the expense of society. Anarchy was never meant to be anarchy as meaning a lack of responsibility and any laws. I suspect those calling themselves anarchists these days probably never even read Kropotkin and Bakunin, but likely are "champaigne socialists" who have had their heads filled with western versions of Marxism-Leninism

Edited by Atentutankh-pasheri
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