School Talk 9 - Emotions and Ideals

(audience participation in parenthesis)

The subject today is going to be ideals and emotions. Fire away Katie:

Song: Go to sleep my little one, you’re passing through a stage not at all uncommon at your age.
These are traumatic days in oh so many ways.
Each new taboo comes to you as a shock, but rest secure in your little crib, rest secure, forget each little block, ‘cause Daddy’s reading Freud and Gazelle, while Mommy reads Adler and Spock.

Hush little sibling don’t you cry, you’ll be adjusted by and by.
I recognize that fretful look, Mommy’s going to try another book.
Mmmm, Mmmm, Mmmm.
Hush little sibling don’t you cry
Mmmm, Mmmm, Mmmm.
You’ll be adjusted by and by.

Hush little sibling close your eyes, Mommy will have you analyzed.
Daddy found something very new, we’re going to try it out on you.
Mmmm, Mmmm Mmmm
Hush little sibling, close your eyes
Mmmm, Mmmm, Mmmm.
Mommy will have you analyzed

Hush little sibling, don’t you cry, you’ll be adjusted by and by
You’re not returning to the womb, we’ve bought a mobile for your room
Oo Oo Oo Oo
Hush little sibling, don’t you cry Oo Oo Oo Oo
You’ll be adjusted by and by.

And so Dr. Bob begins his talk:

So the little one already has it’s ideals set up for it and, of course, all of us got our ideals set very early in life that we should have (what we refer to very frequently as) the four dual basic urges. The only thing about it is that we all feel we’re entitled to be non-disturbed all of our lives, and also that everybody should get with it and provide it. And so if I’m disturbed, it’s all your fault--so there!

So we have the ideal of having nothing but pleasure and comfort and no pain should ever come by. We should have lots of attention and no being ignored by anybody. We should have lots of approval whether we are "approvable" or not. We feel we should be approved of whether we do anything to be approved of or not; and we certainly should be appreciated whether we’re worth being appreciated or not—so we have the ideal.

Now once the ideal is established, we begin to expect it. So we expect the ideal. The ideal namely being the four dual basic urges which every person has unknowingly set up. When those ideals don’t happen--which is most every day because the ideal is merely an illusion—what happens then?. Instead we could possibly be wanting to earn a little pleasure or comfort or earn some attention or earn some approval. Maybe we could do something that would be slightly appreciated. Maybe we feel entitled to it without any effort on my part--no matter that I’m grumpy or gritching. So then when we fail to have the four dual basic urges totally and completely, we are disappointed and when we’re disappointed we feel hurt and when we feel hurt, we look for blame and when we look for blame, up comes an emotion—anger, guilt, fear or insecurity or a combination of the whole mess; and then, of course, we have totally justified having emotions.

Now any of us could, at any day, see that we could no longer justify having an emotion—“I can’t justify being angry and I can’t justify feeling guilty—I can’t justify being fearful and I can’t justify feeling insecure. To me, it looks like I’m being a horse’s ass, you know. I know better. I know not to do those things because they’ll kill you. So they are very painful. So once I see that I can’t afford them and that they are a totally unjustifiable type of behavior then the justification is gone. How would you justify being angry, Paulette? Just give me a for instance? You know better, and you know what it does to you. It doesn’t do the thing you want it to do as far as getting along with other people. So how could you justify being angry?

(I guess I couldn’t.)

Well, if you can’t justify it, then you wouldn’t do it, is that right because you always got to justify something. We either have to feel that something is right, proper or justifiable or we can’t do it. Now you can’t do something that you see is wrong, improper and unjustifiable. You simply cannot. (That is something to check out…Marsha) Nothing will move. The body won’t do the thing. X will not respond to bring the body into motion.

So when we see that we can no longer justify emotions, we see that they come to an end, and probably one of the things we could come up in each of us is ask ourselves, “How can I justify emotional behavior?” You got any justifications for that?

(I must.)

You still do it every now and then because you are entitled to the four dual basic urges just because you were born—obviously. Turned out to be a beautiful lady, so obviously you’re entitled to the ideals; and why don’t people get with it. If they don’t, you’re disappointed, you feel hurt, you look for blame and bang, all the emotions are there--and all of that happens like that, boom—a millisecond!

Now let’s say that we begin today to ask ourselves, “Can I justify this behavior?”, say the emotions of anger, guilt, fear, insecurity and the 1001 other names that you could call for these four basic emotions—the synonyms for it. If we begin to ask ourselves that one question, wonder how long you could keep it up? Glen, do you think you could keep it up very long if you had to answer how it was justifiable? Would it be too hard to say, “What’s the justification for this?” (Ah, something to use for an experiment……..Marsha) It’s too hard on the old bodies to do it, you know. When we were 14, maybe we could stand a little of it, but it’s getting rougher and rougher every year, isn’t it? Bodies just don’t tolerate emotions worth a durn anymore.

(I really, at first, wasn’t that caught up in it--this confrontation with him. I knew that he would turn around and do what I wanted, but I had to make all this noise and act upset in order to get it--although……..)

You didn’t have to be upset, did you?

(No.)

You could have put on a show.

(That’s what I meant, and I put on a show.)

Well, you could have kicked his legs out from under him and laughed at him and got the same results, you know. It would come out the same way whether you kick his legs out from under him while you’re screaming at him or while you’re laughing at him, wouldn’t it?

(Yeah.)

(Well, I was doing that, but I did get caught up in it.)

Pretty soon you were ready to cut his damn throat, is that right?

So let’s see if we can ask ourselves this one little question. “What justification do I have for having emotional behavior?” “What’s it going to do for me?”
“What’s it going to do for anybody else or anything else?”

Now somebody will say it does get results now and then like Glen’s just laying on me, but is that the only way to get it--you think--or is that just the old habitual way. And so we justified it just a little bit, you see? It always comes up that we justified it, Glen. So you just justified getting caught up in a little confrontation.

Now the not ‘i’s” do that justification. Everybody around here does the same thing. We’ll find a justification. So let’s see if we can get along without the justifications for it. We’re so mechanically into it that we don’t even notice that we’re justifying it all the time.

Now we say, well, it’s the only way to get it done was this anger.

I have reverted to pretended violence two or three times in my life to get something done, but I was laughing while I was doing it--only nobody could see it. I took a meat cleaver after a guy one night to get a water heater put in, and he got the job done; but it wasn’t because I was acting angry. It was because he thought was going to get his head cut off if he didn’t finish the long postponed job.

So you know, you kinda work that way. But I was laughing when I hung the meat cleaver up. I had a big belly laugh over it, and everybody around did too. I hung the meat cleaver up as soon he started putting the water heater in. He went down and told everybody if you ever go out to that place out there in the country and that guy wants something done, you’d better do it. So I wasn’t justifying the behavior because it was an emotion. I really had a lot of fun doing it.

You know, you can put on an act doing anything and you don’t have to get caught up in the emotion. So if we would like to get along without emotions and we have spent two or three times talking about that here==anger, guilt, fear, insecurity and all the synonyms that grow out of those basic ones. Everything else is a feeling.

So we’re going to have all the feelings in the world, but we don’t have to have emotions because emotions are a fit of madness. Madness means insanity. Insanity is a legal term. Madness is a medical term, so we have a fit of madness. We have a fit of insanity of which our behavior is to nobody’s advantage when we do that. Possibly if we called our emotional activity fits insanity, we would be more careful with them and not justify them quite so often.

But as long as we say it’s pure #human nature#, man will justify it, and then we can do it again and again. It is very hard on nice beautiful bodies to go through all that emotional stuff, and there is no earthly reason for it. We are just accepting that we believe in the ideal--the ideal meaning that we have a fantasy that we should have that “ideal” because we were merely born--that we should be blessed constantly with pleasure and comfort, attention and approval and appreciation—never have any pain, never have anybody ignore us, never have anybody disapprove of us and never have anybody think that we don’t matter very much. I don’t know that we are always guaranteed all that with being born, do you? Did you get papers to that guarantee?

(I think I need those papers.)

You got the papers?

(No.)

They forgot to give them to you. You got here like the rest of us--broke, helpless, naked and more than likely as a surprise. More than likely an unpleasant surprise for a few weeks anyway. So now we have looked at that and seen that the struggle towards an illusion which is an ideal—the ideal being an illusion and the struggle towards that results in disintegration. The way it works is we expect the ideal and it doesn’t happen so we’re disappointed; and when we’re disappointed, we feel hurt and it must be somebody’s fault that I’m hurt, so I look for blame. Now all of this happens in something like a split second—a microsecond. So we don’t go through a mental process, but the process goes through before we realize it.

We look for blame. I’m going to find it was you and I’m angry.
I find it was me and I feel guilty.
I can’t find what to blame it on, I feel fear, and
I’ve been this way many times, so I begin to feel insecure if I’m not in charge of what’s going on.

Those are all very stressful situations and the rest that goes with it which we know about from experiencing it; and then we expect that to all go away. I’ve had about eight calls from one man today who has been disappointed. He feels hurt and he’s looked for blame. He has found it---both outside and inside. I’ve had some sessions when it was this, (he’s probably pointing to the picture of man) some when it was this, some when it was this and always this. It’s been over and over and over through the day, and he experiences this because he feels threatened some way. He was disappointed, somebody didn’t do the ideal that he feels entitled to.

So I usually have considerable number of calls through the day, You ever kept a count of them? Every one of them says almost exactly the same thing. Now they may use different names, but they say the same thing, and each one feels their problem is totally unique--nobody else in the world ever had this to live up under--and here I am a poor victim crushed into the ground by all these terrible things that are happening to me. And, then, the same things going on with the next phone call—and the next is almost a dead repetition of the last one.

And of course, frequently it’s about boy/girl situations, you know. The girl has taken off or what-have-you So I frequently tell them the story about the guy whose girlfriend “live in” for years with him took off. She said, “It’s all over with.” When he came home from work on Thursday afternoon, a note was on the kitchen table. He said, I was just devastated—he was disappointed. He expected her to be there and have coffee made and the whole bit, and so he was devastated. He was disappointed, he felt hurt, he looked for blame—he was all
“torn up”, and he didn’t sleep all Thursday night. He couldn’t work Friday morning, but he said Friday noon , I kinda got a hold of myself. I decided “I’m not going to let this wreck my whole weekend.”

So, you know, if you don’t let things like that wreck your weekend, why everything will work out pretty good—so some people allow it to wreck many weekends, don’t they Glen?

(That’s right.)

So let’s have conversation. I’ve talked long enough, so we covered the subject--all the essential points; and as Miss Katie Lee told you, why the little folks are already being told that they’re victims of all kinds of circumstances. They are entitled to the ideal’ and sooner or later, she will have him psychoanalyzed or try out this new book on him whatever it may be. So now you got a question, comment?

(Bob, there’s so many of them.)

There’s only six of them honey. I’ve shown you a picture of them a great many times—it’s the picture of man.

(There’s so many offspring.)

Well, honey, there’s just this many. Now, of course, if I were in the psychoanalysis business, I would agree with you and I could analyze you like the little babies going to be; and I could find this in 20 ways. I could put plenty of different names on them, but he’s still the same complainer. I could find 100 names for this, but he’s still the sticker up for rights. I could find great number of names for this, but he’s still feeling obligated to please. I could find this one many ways because I could go through every authority that ever laid a word or wrote a book on self improvement, and I could have that laid out for you, and we could run this analysis on for at least three years. Well, preferably twice a week at $100 a copy, and I would get quite well financially, and you would be the same mess when you got through. You couldn’t get adjusted to the you that got adjusted to the you. So you’d still be in the same boat and that’s all there is.

We have people come tell us how I have some great hidden depth down in there in the subconscious because it has put on another face. You had some pretty little faces the other day when you were puttin’ on things. No matter which face, it’s the same dolly under it, is that right?

(True.)

Now all these not i’s put on gobs of faces, but they’re no different. Now the whole bit is, do you believe in an ideal that you should be totally lay-dee-dah all the days. If you do, you will be disappointed. We have related a few times that an easy way to do it, but don’t tell anybody what you’re doing—is that you see the world is populated with infants—quite a few of which have grown bodies and technical educations, ok? How do you expect them to behave?—as an infant.

Now when you meet somebody who doesn’t act like an infant, what a pleasant surprise; and whoever got torn up over a pleasant surprise. I have lots of pleasant surprises. I don’t get shook up about them. Do you? And when the others come along and they act like I expect them to, eh, what else did you expect—so what. So then you want to know can you justify getting all torn up because you believe in an ideal.

(I can’t do that.)

Well, all right, I bet you can’t do it, if you really see that.

You ask what justification do I have for getting upset because somebody didn’t pour the ideal on me, ok? Who has the next comment, question or refutation? You can put me down, it suits me fine.

Paulette, you in good gear there?

(No, I was thinking that somebody’s justifying an ideal.)

Yeah, you are. You got all kinds of nice little justifications. Anything from “It’s human nature”—“I can’t help it”—“Well, what would you do if so and so happened”. That’s a wonderful justification. I tell somebody, why make an issue out of it? Well, what would you do if it happened to you. I said it probably has a few thousand times—so what?

Yes sir?

(In the current medical technology, there’s a lot about getting down into old emotions and either expressing them or just recalling—becoming aware of the unconscious parts of us and it seems to be a fact of same in certain ways.)

You’re looking bold as a horse’s ass under therapy—that’s what they call it—being therapeutic and there is a group going around at the moment that says no matter what emotions come up, we express them goodly; and it’s a good thing, it’s illegal to kill these days because there would be a lot more dead people laying on the streets, but they’re still continuing with the idea--that’s true. We know the modern one—we keep up with it.

(Is there a value of going through these emotions or at least being aware?)

Well, it’s according to who you’re referring to as receiving the benefit. If I’m the therapist, you’re damn right, I get a benefit. If I’m the patient, to hell with it. As the therapist, I can keep it going for months while we’re looking for deep hidden things which are already on the top of the barrel if we would recognize it. I used to work as a therapist, so it was tempting every now and then to keep it going.

But the only thing that happened for me is that I get bored too easy. I couldn’t quite hack it, but if you don’t get bored too quick and you’re interested in making bundles, you could chose those deep hidden things from now on. Yes sir, very beneficial to the therapist and to the group who run them. Doesn’t do anything for the client, but that’s all right, who cares about him-- he’s just a source of money, that right?

(Is it true, Bob, that all we need to do is just observe how we act--I mean is that how we get out of this mess?)

Well, we observe and see if we can justify it.

(We’re not supposed to justify it?)

Justify it—I didn’t say you weren’t supposed to, I just said, “Can you?” When you see what’s going on, can you justify it? You know, you can’t justify everything--it’s a little hard to justify some things when you see what’s going on. We have talked in some of these little talks about being able to see what’s going on here and if we see what’s going on here, we start laughing instead of justifying--and we, then, that we can’t quite justify it, but you know that’s easy enough, you just look at it and see; “Well, how am I going to justify this one?”. I’m not saying you shouldn’t because if you can justify it, go right to it.

Only thing is justifications keep breaking down as you look at it a little bit, ok?

Ok, next comment, question. Yes sir?

(You can take a person and give them a chemical substance that will induce a feeling.)

Very true.

(Where there is no ideal, it’s almost the emotions are there—are emotions that are not induced, do they act similarly, I mean—it seems like emotions just come sometimes.)

Well, especially if you’ve had chemical agents in your body, yeah, they just come sailing in. You’d be surprised just what kinds of associations go on within all the time, and you can wind up with all these terrible emotions.

I’ve been around this world for several days and I’m acquainted with emotions arising; but I’ve also checked out to see generally where they came from. Now they may come from eating too much lox and bagels and dill pickles at night before you go to bed, but you know, you get over that in a little bit, so what’s the difference. The point of the source of it is still we believe in the ideal and a fleeting thought can run across your head that says you don’t have the ideal and you can wind up with the feeling of very victimized, pathetic, fearful, and apathetic which is a very deep form of fear--It’s a synonym for a deep fear.

But if you pay attention which seems to be the thing most of us don’t want to do. If we pay attention, we will find there’s always a thought or something goes by for this emotion to arise, unless you use chemical agents. You can use a certain chemical agent, and the person will start crying. You go to the bar tonight and you’ll see one of those chemical agents work pretty well. There are some of them over there sobbing and crying, and there’s some of them wanting to whip everybody in the place; and there’s some that are very frightened and want to hide in the corner--and so there are chemical agents that are fairly common. They sell them in most every bar up and down the street, and there are a lot of other places you can get them. So we won’t count the chemical agents because they do wear off after while when the body finally metabolizes the chemical agent.

Next question, comment.

(When you see you’re caught into one of these cycles, into one of these, Bob, in the vicious cycle………)

Then you stop.

(You just say that?)

Well, I can’t justify this, so I guess I’ll quit.

One time a lady called me and said, “Come quick, my father’s in a terrible shape.” I got out there and he had a hammer out of his tool box and he was beating himself on the head—literally—he had blood pouring all over his forehead and out of his scalp/ I said “Stop it.” He laid the hammer down. All you gotta do now, you know, if you find you were running your finger through a sewing machine and kept on stitching right down through the skin, would you say, “How in the world can I stop it?” or would you stop the damn machine.

Now can’t you do the same thing for any other painful situation and emotion that is going on. You can stop just like you stopped your machine.

Meat saws are a very good example—you get away from them when they start cutting your finger off, don’t you Glen? Glen got away from them fast. We had a guy that worked in the meat store that had a reoccurring nightmare of slipping on the floor and the ban saw cutting his head off. He had that reoccurring dream every night. That’s pretty rough, you know. If I had that every night, I think I’d stay awake.

Next Question? Ok, let’s call it a day.