Worried About Everything

[mando rando]

Hi Azaria,

Echoing what others have said, you've found a great place here.  I was almost 40 when I deconverted, and I can attest to how difficult it is to let go of the fears and doctrines told to us by the people we love and respect. 

 

You know, I started much of my doubt about the bible god when my daughter was about your age.  I started wondering if there was anything she could possibly do that would make me want to punish her with some type of erternal damnation.  I understood as a father I might have to see her go through hard times, and make bad decisions, but I knew she would learn things that would help her grow into a womderful young woman.  But I loved her so much that I couldn't posibly imagine sending her to an eternal (or even short term) hell to suffer with no more redemption possible.  There was no way I could do that to one I loved so much.

 

I also believed that god must love us as a father even more than I love my daughter.....If that includes erternal hell, then that's no match for human love.....so that started my journey toward being a very happy non-believer.  It seems strange that I had to be a parent to start understanding that.  So, I think you are very aware and intelligent to be on this path!   (PS- my daughter is a wonderful young non-believing woman now, and I'm so proud of her!)

[RipVanWinkle]

Azaria: You don't deserve the fear and anxiety you are now experiencing.You are one of those tender

people who feel things deeply. Trust yourself, that is, your rational thinking. Don't let fear or

anxiety imprison you. Your escape from your current emotional condition is self education as others

have said.Once you read for yourself what brilliant people both in the present and past have said about Xtianity, you will realize that they had the same thoughts that you have had. You are not off your

rocker. Parents mean well, but they are frequently screwed up themselves and are unqualified to tell

their children what to believe. People like Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln, Mark Twain, and many, many others wrote about the myth of Xtianiy years ago. The fact that the bible is myth has

been taught in theology schools across the Western World for many years, but the ministers, even the

ones who got that very education, do not teach their congregations the truth. Why? Because they would

lose the leverage of fear which is the main thing that brings people to church and to make donations.

So make yourself a challenge to become educated in Xtian history, the fabrication of the bible and

related subjects. Your fear will reduce itself substantially, if not disappear altogether.Good luck and keep coming back. bill

[gall]

Hi guys, I was a lurker here for awhile. I thought I'd join. I relate to others on this and it made me feel better. I want to hear other's opinion and advice. I have severe anxiety, I'm a young teen and I began reading the Bible and praying in April of 2013. I felt better but selfish. Why? because I had anxiety and I couldn't take it anymore. I thought God would simply take it away. That's selfishness. I prayed a few times for my anxiety to go away, but nope. It's still here. I had blasphemous intrusive thoughts, obsessions, fears, guilt, panic attacks, odd behaviors, prayed excessively, fear of being damned, etc. My grandma made it worse. She's a Christian. What she told me about Hell made me afraid more. I did a lot of praying and Bible reading in order to make God accept me and avoid the bad things. What's funny is that I did all of those out of fear and not out of love. My grandma told me there was a man from here that almost went to Hell. He was on a life support machine and almost died and she told me that God gave him another chance. That made me afraid more. I know the man and I'd get so scared and feel sorry for him every time I hear his name or see him. I would always convince myself "he must've been dreaming because God is love!" I made the mistake of hearing other people's testimonies about going to Hell and coming back. It made me so afraid. I cried a few times. Couldn't eat or sleep. The only time I would get peace and rest is when I slept and forget it all. I couldn't enjoy life. I heard this girl named Angelica, from Ecuador, went to Hell and Heaven for 23 hours. I read that she saw Selena, Michael Jackson and John Pope Paul II in Hell.  That made me feel sorry for them. I felt really sad. I'd jump and get sad if I hear about Selena or Michael Jackson. It really scared me and kinda does now. It's terrifying... I'm worried all the time. Anxiety makes it worse. 

 

Make some new friends, go have some drinks, talk some mad shit about god and see what happenes. Saying "god is love" is like saying cheese is apple. How is god love? Love is an emotion not a being even if supernatural. YOu may be able to love but god is love is a crock of crocks.

 

God made men murder other men...how is god love?

[SciWalker]

^{Fear of having committed the unforgivable sin is a recurrent theme here. The standard interpretation of what is meant by it is understood via context; this is that committing the unforgivable sin consists of witnessing a manifestation of the holy spirit and attributing it to the work of the devil. Christians who take issue with this interpretation generally appeal to Luke, where it is used apparently without context. However, its use in Luke falls within what one could call the Great Insertion: ten thousand words put into the gospel that was not in the earliest versions of the New Testament.}

^See

http://www.nexusmagazine.com/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=30&Itemid=71

^{-- it's at the bottom of page 58 of The Forged Origins of the New Testament.} 

[AzariaC7]

SchiWalker, I've heard other stuff about the unforgivable sin. Not trying to be rude, just informing you... but now I'm gonna have anxious and intrusive thoughts about what you said. :/ I hate those anxious feelings. I just can't seem to cope with anything and I wish I didn't get myself into this kind of thing.

[SciWalker]

There is not so much as the first shred of evidence to so much as suggest that Jesus actually existed. Go do a really good google of it.

[Deva]

Christianity seems to have different effects on different people.  For a shy, sensitive, worried person such as myself, it was really a disaster.  It certainly increased my negative thinking and anxiety levels. While some of this decreased overall as I got older, then I confronted other problems - anyway, the stress of living does not go away ever entirely, but getting rid of Christian ideas helped a lot.

 

It isn't easy, but you can almost completely rid yourself of these Christian thought patterns. They really are only mental habits and you can use many techniques to diminish or destroy them.   One thing you might try is to do something plainly contrary to the Bible that isn't harmful to someone else - things like study the occult, pagan religions, look into so-called forbidden subjects -depends on your Christian background - and then see that life goes on as always and God is not punishing you.

[asanerman]

SchiWalker, I've heard other stuff about the unforgivable sin. Not trying to be rude, just informing you... but now I'm gonna have anxious and intrusive thoughts about what you said. :/ I hate those anxious feelings. I just can't seem to cope with anything and I wish I didn't get myself into this kind of thing.

 

Azaria,

 

I'm providing excerpts I’ve put together from Paths Beyond Ego: The Transpersonal Vision, edited by Roger Walsh, M.D, Ph.D. and Frances Vaughan, Ph.D., that have been helpful in my inquiry of self-realization, integration and actualization.

 

I do so with the intent of encouraging you that there are avenues of inquiry worthy of your attention that are not bogged down in metaphysics, illusion, supernatural groping, magical thinking, etc.

 

All things change, including ideas about development. Contrary to long-held assumptions, psychological development can continue throughout the lifespan. Motives, emotions, morality, cognition, life tasks, and the sense of identity are all capable of growth in adulthood. It is increasingly clear that conventional adulthood does not represent full psychological maturity.

 

“Normality” is actually a form of arrested development.

Abraham Maslow’s said, “What we call normality in psychology is really a psychopathology of the average, so undramatic and so widely spread that we don’t even notice it.”

 

But if normality is a form of arrested development, then what arrests it? Retarding forces seem to operate within both individuals and society.

 

Growth involves movement into the unknown and often requires surrendering familiar ways of being. Consequently, we tend to fear growth.

 

The tragic result, as both psychologists and philosophers have recognized, is that we actually deny and defend against our greatness and potential. These metadefenses, as we might call them, have been described in many ways.

 

The humanistic psychiatrist Erich Fromm viewed them as “mechanisms of escape,” while Maslow called their net effect “the  Jonah complex.” after the biblical prophet Jonah who tried to escape his divine mission.

The existential philosopher Kierkegaard described how we seek “tranquilization by the trivial,” while others speak of the “repression of the sublime.” The crucial point is that our transpersonal potentials  do not remain undeveloped merely by accident; rather we actively defend against them.

 

We stand midway between on our developmental and evolutionary trajectory to full human potential. (Plotinus)

 

If we harbor undreamed-of  possibilities, if normality is actually frozen development and if much of our individual, social and global distress reflects this frustrated development, the next question is how do we overcome these blocks and foster individual and thus collective maturation?

 

Examples of advanced human development include Abraham Maslow’s metamotives, Lawrence Kohlberg’s postconventional moral thinking, and Ken Wilber’s postformal operational cognition. In addition, the world’s religious traditions offer maps of contemplative development.

 

Another means of fostering development maturation through (trans) personal experience (i.e. experiences in which the sense of identity or self extends beyond individual or personal (persona) to encompass wider aspects of humankind, life, cosmos) is by seeking out what Abraham Maslow called a eupsychian environment, namely a sharing environment optimal for psychological development.

 

Socially that means sharing the company of people who value transpersonal growth, who undertake practices to foster it and who provide an atmosphere of interpersonal safety that allows for defenselessness and experimentation.

 

Having said that, one must be consciously aware that a full spectrum theory of development also has implications for understanding and treating psychopathology.

 

Development can falter and pathology can result at any level of development. Diagnosis and treatment must therefore take this developmental fact of life into account.

 

For example, there has been considerable confusion over the relative effects and merits of psychotherapy and meditation. Some have proposed meditation as a psychological and spiritual panacea. Meditation may however, be most effective for transpersonal levels of growth and less effective for people fixated at earlier stages of development.

 

This makes sense when we remember that contemplative practices have traditionally been employed specifically as catalysts for transpersonal development. Indeed, a transpersonal developmental perspective allows us to recognize that the contemplative core of many religions offers road maps and techniques for inducing transpersonal growth.

 

While it is sometimes said that diverse practices and traditions are just different roads up the same mountain, it is increasingly clear that various traditions, and groups within traditions, may aim for different developmental levels. Thus there are not only different types, but also different levels, of transpersonal experiences across traditions and/or disciplines.

 

That is to say, that sensation, reason, contemplation disclose their own truths in their own fields of "reality" (realms).

 

This poses a great problem for both religious and spiritual traditions and their clams of “insights into ultimate reality" where these trans-verbal (beyond words or speech) invariable get mixed up rational truth and empirical facts. And because (for example) revelation was confused with logic and with empirical fact and all three were presented as one truth, then two things happened: the philosophers came in and destroyed the empirical side…From that point on, spirituality in the West was dismantled and only philosophy and science remained. (Wilber)

 

Hopefully this does further confuse things for you or cause you more anxiety!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Deva]

Asanerman: It took me years to realize this. You are dead on with this quote:

 

 

“Normality” is actually a form of arrested development.
Abraham Maslow’s said, “What we call normality in psychology is really a psychopathology of the average, so undramatic and so widely spread that we don’t even notice it.”

 

 

I call some people "conventional" - its just what they are - you could also say they are normal, with really they are not. These are people who tow society's line and are the same at 55 as they were at 17.

[asanerman]

Asanerman: It took me years to realize this. You are dead on with this quote:

 

 

“Normality” is actually a form of arrested development.

Abraham Maslow’s said, “What we call normality in psychology is really a psychopathology of the average, so undramatic and so widely spread that we don’t even notice it.”

 

 

I call some people "conventional" - its just what they are - you could also say they are normal, with really they are not. These are people who tow society's line and are the same at 55 as they were at 17.

 

Deva,

 

Here's a quote from page 6 of  Integral Spiritualty by Ken Wilber (2006) that illusidates that notion.

 

EGOCENTRIC, ETHNOCENTRIC, AND WORLDCENTRIC

To show what is involved with levels or stages, let’s use a very simple model possessing only 3 of them. If we look at moral development, for example, we find that an infant at birth has not vet been socialized into the culture’s ethics and conventions; this is called the preconventional stage.

 

It is also called egocentric, in that the infant’s awareness is largely self-absorbed.

 

But as the young child begins to learn its culture’s rules and norms, it grows into the conventional stage of morals.

 

This stage is also called ethnocentric, in that it centers on the child’s particular group, tribe, clan, or nation, and it therefore tends to exclude those not of one’s group.

 

But at the next major stage of moral development, the postconventional stage, the individual’s identity expands once again, this time to include a care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, sex, or creed, which is why this stage is also called worldcentric.

 

Thus, moral development tends to move from “me” (egocentric) to “us” (ethnocentric) to “all of us” (worldcentric)—a good example of the unfolding stages of consciousness.

Another way to picture these 3 stages is as body, mind, and spirit. Those words all have many valid meanings, but when used specifically to refer to stages, they mean:

Stage 1, which is dominated by my gross physical reality, is the “body” stage (using body in its pical meaning of physical body). Since you are identified merely with the separate bodily organism and its survival drives, this is also the “me” stage.

Stage 2 is the “mind” stage, where identity expands from the isolated gross body and starts to share relationships with many others, based perhaps on shared values, mutual interests, common ideals, or shared dreams. Because I can use the mind to take the role of others—to put myself in their shoes and feel what it is like to be them—mv identity

expands from “me” to “us” (the move from egocentric to ethnocentric).

 

With stage 3, my identity expands once again, this time from an idengral tity with “us” to an identity with “all of us” (the move from ethnocento

tric to worldcentric). Here I begin to understand that, in addition to the wonderful diversity of humans and cultures, there are also similarities

and shared commonalities.

 

Discovering the commonwealth of all beings is the move from ethnocentric to worldcentric, and is “spiritual” in the

sense of things common to all sentient beings.

 

That is one way to view the unfolding from body to mind to spirit, where each of them is considered as a stage, wave, or level of unfolding care and consciousness, moving from egocentric to ethnocentric to world- centric.

 

...all that is required is an understanding that by “stages”we progressive and pernanent milestones along the evolutionary path of your own unfolding.

 

Whether we talk stages of conciusness, stages of energy, stages of culture, stages of self realization, stages of moral development, and so on, we are

talking of these important and fundamental rungs in the unfolding of your higher, deeper, wider potentials.

[An intregal view]  can dramatically increase your likelihood of success, whether that success be measured in terms of personal transformation,

social change, excellence in business, care for others, or simple satisfaction in life.

 

Much of what passes as conventional thought is tantamount to childish or asolessents notions caught in adult brains..

 

 

Nice talking to you again Deva!

 

 

 

[Deva]

Thanks Asaner! I like your link (although I have some reservations about Ken Wilbur)  - at age 17 in '76, running around with American flag thinking how great it was to graduate on the bicentennial of the U.S., and I think of where I am today, and I hope this exchange is helpful to AzariaC7!