ADVANCE COPY – IOWA BOOK TOUR SPEECH THREE
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN!
“Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our to-day.”
Nietzsche
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2007
What is forgotten about the human species is that we come in alone and we leave alone. The most important person for us to accept in the whole firmament of life is ourselves. The most important person to lead towards the harnessing of our attributes and talents away from our deficiencies and weaknesses is ourselves. The only person that matters in the eyes of God’s is what matters in our own eyes as revealed by our souls.
We spend our whole lifetime worrying about things that never happen. We build up anxieties and imagined fears. Like the slithering snake that happens to represent our primordial brainstem that slithers through our psyche, we are not in control.
We have to look for control outside ourselves. We have to have a personal trainer monitor and motivate our exercise; family and friends to flatter, forgive and protect us from awareness of our weaknesses. We need positive reinforcement to generate self-esteem, which becomes an oxymoron. We don’t recognize our worth until someone tells us. It is as if we are stuck with this stranger and forced to live with him, and, well, it is just not fair.
Control, you see, is not the absence of problems or highs and lows, failures and successes, disappointments and euphoria. Control is recognizing chronic occurrences that throw us off stride and off balance because we refuse to accept them as part of growing and the growing up process. It is why we are a nation of adults suspended in adolescence. Immaturity is nothing if it is not being stuck forever in adolescence.
We have situations or issues with people that constantly cause us great frustration because we have unresolved situations or issues constantly with and within ourselves. It is impossible to accept the behavior of others if we fail to be self-accepting of who and what and how we are.
I am thinking of the person that gives up drinking and that fraternizes with drinkers to his own constant punishment. I am thinking of the person who doesn’t choose his friends wisely and they become corrupted, and so by proximity, he is seen as being corrupted as well. I am thinking about the woman who marries an abusive husband, divorces him and marries another man who is equally abusive of her. I am thinking about people who get in debt, work their way out of it, and then fall into debt again. I am thinking about people who are so enamored of toys that they put themselves in jeopardy buying even more expensive toys although they can’t afford them, don’t need them, or don’t have time for them. This sends shock waves through the system, hidden by running faster while not moving forward at all. I am thinking about people who gamble and do drugs and other self-negating things when they think they are seeking release, relief and pleasure when they are actually driving pain and sorrow deeper into their souls. They are destroying the person whom they have never come to accept, themselves. I am thinking about people who are always looking for a bandwagon to jump on so that they might enjoy some legitimacy, some authenticity, and some identity. I am thinking about people who stay in a job they hate and then sabotage the job and wreak havoc around them until they are eventually let go. They see themselves as the victim not realizing it was only a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy. I am thinking about people that believe the world will get better when the right leader surfaces without them changing at all. I am thinking about people who refuse to accept themselves, as they are, which makes it impossible for them to accept others as they find them. I am thinking about people who are afraid to step outside convention or what others think important, failing ever to have an original thought. In this distress, they carp and complain for attention because they believe everyone else has it better then they do, are more gifted and better connected. I am thinking about people who have never come to accept that if they are not the leader of their destiny then who do they think is.
A first step in becoming unstuck is to accept your vanities, your human nature, indeed, your weaknesses. They don’t compel you to throw yourself against walls, but your blind strengths do. These strengths hide in the recesses of your mind like lurking villains. Once they come out of the shadows, and into the sunlight, you see them for what they are, your humanity naked and undressed, vulnerable and fragile, for they are no longer frightening.
The more you grow towards your origin the less remote you are to yourself and the less confused and traumatized you become by normal human events. A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD comes at a time when the reading of it will bring you into intimate contact with that person you are too busy to visit, yourself. It may startle you to discover that you are never alone or lonely when you are one with yourself.
Nietzsche put it best: One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear. To know thyself is not enough; accepting thyself as well must complement the knowing.
Dr. Fisher’s new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is available on line with http://www.authorhouse.com/, http://www.amazon.com/, or your favorite bookstore.
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