Relational Paradox

One key to understanding life’s paradoxes is to see how “First-Person Experience” is different from “Second-Person Experience” in relationships.

For example, if you, in the First Person, genuinely don’t care about “getting respect” from others, then mature people, in the Second Person, will actually respect you more. But if you, in First Person, seek and strive to “get respect” from others, then mature people will lose respect for you in the Second-Person.

If you, in your First Person experience, genuinely humble yourself with no agenda within your social group, mature people will delight and want to lift you up in their Second Person experience of your self-humbling. But the moment you, in First Person, strive to lift yourself up above others in your social group, mature people, experiencing that in Second Person, would rather you to be humbled.

If you, in First Person, choose to be appropriately vulnerable in a safe setting, mature people will delight in how courageous you are in their Second-Person Experience of your vulnerability. But if you, in First Person, choose to be inappropriately invulnerable in a safe setting, mature Second Person observers will see how fearful you actually are.

Self-Flattery Gives Others Power Over You

When you idolize yourself, you have an image of yourself that is perfect. You become attached to that glowing, shiny image of yourself. When this happens, the slightest remark from someone that challenges that image torpedoes your nervous system. Hence, you end up giving immense, superhuman power to other people’s slight remarks. They end up having superhuman punching power on you. Ironically, idolizing yourself ends up giving power to the words of others over you.

Eternal Flow. You Know You Want It.

Only eternal flow will satisfy your soul. And an eternal God can provide it. But you have a part to play.

In order to feel this type of flow pumping and coursing through you, your whole mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical being must be immersed. Here, you’re met with a meaningful challenge that’s much bigger than yourself. With assistance from another realm, you push the boundaries of your uniquely developed gifts to match the challenge with an energizing momentum. Lightning from another world strikes the water of your efforts, producing liquid electricity. You feel intriguing paradoxes like being part of a movement that is both effortful and effortless at the same time. Your soul is fully concentrated while your mind is relaxed. You feel like you’re in control while your next actions are “automatic” with a “life of their own”. Time feels fast and slow like The Flash’s slow-mo. “Everything clicks” while you’re at one with the environment. That’s why your facial muscles smile on their own. For reasons you don’t fully understand, the deepest parts of you breathe the conviction “this is what I was meant for”.

Comfortable, lazy, and undisciplined people will never experience this. This is one of many reasons why complacency leads to soul-gnawing misery.

Discernment Training

Word archery keeps your soul discernment sharp. Only a direct, precise hit will pin the unconscious assumption. If your articulation is off, just a little bit, resonance deflects and the soul won’t feel a bullseye.

***Archer pins one assumption behind a mundane coping mechanism***

Seems easy? That was the warm up.

***Raw defense mechanism unleashed with multiple hidden assumptions activated***

***Archer trainee stunned***

The discernment armoury. Specialty Questions. Each one has a specific purpose.

What does this one do? 

Dream Symbolism Questions - bridge the conscious with the unconscious (e.g. “What is the most vivid image in the dream?” “What does [dream symbol x] represent to you?”) 

Emotional Time Traveling Questions - connect present day triggering to past significant events (e.g. “When you feel [disproportionate emotion], who else from your past is in the room?” “What message would you emphasize to your kids? Did you hear [that message] enough from your parents?”)

Meta Motivation Questions - expose the unconscious/shadow motivation pulling strings of conscious thoughts (e.g. “Do you want God to exist?” “If you could mind control [person x], what thoughts and feelings about you would you want them to have?”)

These questions are tools. If you rely on them too much, they become crutches. Then why use them? To potentially avoid 20 sessions of psychoanalysis chasing red herrings.

Weakness vs Vulnerability

 There is a difference between weakness and vulnerability. Vulnerability acknowledges one of many sides to your paradoxical and multidimensional self is tender and hurtable. Acknowledging this makes you human. Denying or disavowing it makes you unhuman. This understanding of vulnerability can coexist with courage. For it takes a lot more courage to fully reveal who you are and no courage to not reveal who you are. On the other hand, weakness has a very one-dimensional view of “a lack of strength”. It simplistically defines itself as the opposite of invulnerability. This leads to a very one-dimensional view of oneself, others, and the world. And it leads to an unhuman experience of life. And it takes away the kind of courage that coexists with vulnerability.

The Statue of Slavery

Our minds make representations of ourselves. These representations can be hijacked by defense mechanisms that protect us from facing our flaws, imperfections, and "personality pimples". When this happens, our self-images flatter us. We don't take into account the total sum of our personality acne and pimpled humanness. Only the things that reinforce the shine of our self-flattering representations. And we try to arrange circumstances to reinforce those glossy marble statues of ourselves.

The problem is that marble statues are fragile. When more or less "harmless" words or actions from others accidentally tip them over, they smash into a million pieces. But a flawed, imperfect, personality-pimpled human will not, and will stay intact.

The Stupid Thinking god

Intellectual pride can lead to stupidity. When someone idolizes their own thinking structures and glorifies them by making them equal to that of a “thinking god”, those thinking structures harden into statue marble. Those idolized thinking structures are persuaded that their thoughts - thoughts of a “thinking god” - can never be wrong, because a “thinking god” never has thinking errors. And when one cannot admit that one has thinking errors, one can never change. And not being able to change one's errors in thinking is the very definition of stupidity.

Here, intellectual pride trades a thinking posture that is open to correction with its “mental pimples” and “cognitive freckles” for a beautifully dead static thinking posture that is no longer alive.

God and Humour Revisited

Imagine you’ve never, ever experienced humour before. Ever. Pretend that not a single neuron in your brain has wired and fired to this foreign thing called “funniness” and “laughter”. For your whole life. Now imagine reading and hearing about humour and laughter. Picture yourself observing others “laugh” at this peculiar content called “humour” that you can't taste, smell, or touch. Your ability to “pick up” humour would be as good as that of a CCTV camera. You’d be confused because you’d try to use logic to understand the nonlogical (not illogical). You’d be at the mercy of non-humour categories to try to understand humour.

The same thing goes with God and experiencing him through Jesus. Millions of people in 2020 experience him everyday, regardless of age, ethnicity, culture, or political leanings. If you’ve never experienced him before, you’ll try to use logic to understand the nonlogical (not illogical). You’ll try to use non-God categories to try to understand God. The good news is that God sees the depths of each human heart. If he sees that we ultimately want him, he will reveal his living personality to us. But we must want him more than anything else.

Oh, and he happens to be a funny God too. I’m serious. Not joking.

The connection between overcoming idols and “repenting and believing in Jesus/the Gospel for salvation” with everyday language and no “Christianese”

(This originally was a response I wrote to a question in my small group)

Salvation in the Gospel = the quality of Jesus’ life in the Gospels (including his supernatural mental health) being available to us starting in this lifetime before we die.

Idol = A vision of what we think will give us “thick/vividly bright colours of satisfaction” (e.g. hedonism, being perfect, being right, being liked, being popular, being successful, being smart, being safe, being strong)

Idea of following Jesus = A vision of Jesus’ alternative

“believing in the Gospel” = not just cognitively believing the “theological multiplication table” but trusting Jesus with our heart and gut (which leads to action, otherwise there is no trust) that his vision for our life is more satisfying than the idol’s vision of our life.

Our flesh, the world, and the devil conspire to give us an “attractive car commercial” in our imagination of these idols. Bluntly speaking, at first, they seem more bright and sunny with splendour than Jesus’ alternative which may seem dim and cloudy with grimness. So when this happens, we need to “trust Jesus with our heart and gut (which leads to action)” that his quality of life/lifestyle leads to true and deep satisfaction. Even though that goes against our very persuasive imagination at the moment. After action (and some time, though the duration may vary) our heart, mind, and body will end up feeling the effects of Jesus’ alternative truly being more bright and sunny with splendour than the idol (which is actually the one that is dim and cloudy with grimness).

A concrete example is allowing the raw/authentic “unlovable” parts of us to be loved by God and his community. Even after we “say the sinner’s prayer”, it’s hard to show the emotionally naked/rawly vulnerable parts of us to other humans (and God too). We cognitively know that God unconditionally loves us and (some of) God’s community unconditionally love us, but our imagination is scared out of its wits with shame. Here, the idol is what the flesh/world/devil have conspired to embellish in our imagination – we cannot authentically and vulnerably show the “shamefully unlovable” parts of us. Because if we do, we will not be loved. So the idol of hiding these parts of us seems more bright and sunny in our imaginations (“show the acceptable and lovable parts of you to stay accepted and loved, your social life will be soooo good!”). The Jesus alternative seems more dim and grim of showing our “unacceptable”/”unlovable” parts of us so that those “unacceptable”/”unlovable” parts of us can viscerally feel unconditional acceptance/love from God and his community. So, even though our embellished imagination makes it extremely hard, we trust that Jesus knows his stuff, and that his alternative is better than our idol. So we act on it in “belief”/”trust” in Jesus. The duration of time varies, but sooner or later we realize that Jesus knew his stuff, and it turns out that his alternative was the actually the one with true splendour and thick/vivid brightness of freedom while the idol was actually the one that was dim, grim, enslaving, and heavy. This visceral realization can’t happen before trust-filled action. After we act and share who we truly are in our depths – our raw, authentic, vulnerable personality pimples with no social cosmetics on, we feel that it was actually the social cosmetics lifestyle that was truly suffocating, restricting, and heavy. Carrying that shame around constantly was like carrying a deadlift squat barbell with Olympian weights on wherever we went. And with Jesus, we release the deadlift and truly feel alive to soar in his freedom.

As "Luke Cage's" character in the new Primetime TV show "Evil" said, science is useful for studying repeatable things, but inadequate for the non-repeatable things in life. The latter includes certain areas of human relationships. No science can predict (other than in vague, non-specific generalities) how the uniqueness of two souls will have their individualities uniquely mix in 5, 10, or 20 years. How their quirks will affect each other. How their humour styles will integrate. How their creativity and originality will affect the creativity and originality of the other. How their free wills will respond to disappointment in the relationship. How their deepest passions will alchemically mix with each other (or fail to). You will never find a scientist who could comprehensively predict how their marriage with their partner would unfold in these areas (as well as some others) after a year. The soul transcends the "closed system of cause-and-effect in time and space". It receives influence, and influences, the spiritual realm in ways that transcend the ticking of time and the sensing of space. You take the originality of two souls and unify them together, and you'll get a drama full of unpredictable, non-repeatable transformations in relationships.

And supernatural life-giving miracles are relational acts from a relational God. They are not impersonal mechanisms.

(By the way, the show Evil is sooo good.)