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Daniel Mackler - Essays For The Enlightenment Seeker
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| PivotTechno |
My finding this site came as the result of mulling over Halcyon and nefardec's posts in this thread...
http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/...8&forumid=16&s=
...and watching the Gabor Mate vid Jennypie posted in this thread in the TOTA forum:
http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/...12&pagenumber=1
Essays For The Enlightenment Seeker - Healing From Childhood Trauma
I feel these writings are a must read for anyone who considers themselves to be on the path to self-healing. The insights he offers will be uncomfortable for many to read (and will outright anger some), and rightfully so - truth is a painful injection, but it's the only medicine that yields permanent, positive results.
On suicide:
Suicide: The Ultimate Way To Avoid the Painful Truth
People commit suicide when the pain of lying to themselves is unbearable and the pain of telling the truth is even worse. Here the journey to manifest enlightenment – to heal all one’s childhood traumas – feels hopeless. The person’s childhood cemented the notion that deep, consistent parental love was completely out the question and that his parents were nothing more than shams. But he could never face that fact, because it was too painful – and they would have only rejected him all the more. Instead he denies it and turns his hopelessness and rage and anger toward himself. He swallows us the worst of his parents into his psyche and he fantasizes that death will free him, and bring him peace. But it will not. Death is no relief. Death will only end his journey and kill his potential to grow.
Only a few of the truly suicidal, the most isolated and alienated, end their own lives. Most express their suicidality more acceptably, through extreme passivity or self-neglect, both of which go hand in hand with a desperate but silent cry for parental rescue. A flip side of this involves people who engage in risky acting-out behavior, such as driving dangerously, using drugs and alcohol excessively, heavy overeating or under-eating, fighting violently with others when true self-defense is not involved, having risky sex, climbing mountains… Such people let the world know how much they undervalue their own lives – which is exactly what they were taught in their childhood homes.
The cure for being suicidal is to heal the ancient wounds that caused the despair. This will not be easy for him, because his parents crushed the searching side of him, and subtly threatened him with full rejection if he tried to reconstitute his healthy and seeking side. But healing is possible. A suicidal person needs to find others who can hear him and believe him and trust him – trust every little bit of horror he’s gone through and still holds inside his psyche like a poisonous abscess – until he can learn to do this for himself. He must begin his growth process in a more enlightened setting that does not crush him anew. He must find ways to look honestly at the history of his demise and feel all his grief, horror, and rage. He may lose his old numb self in the process, but he will find his life. No one who finds the path to his legitimate anger and honest grief can ever stay suicidal for long.
On Addiction:
The Root Cause Of Addiction
The root of addiction is unresolved emotional trauma. When traumas, be they extreme or mild, are not resolved they leave behind a slew of painful, unprocessed feelings in the unconscious. These feelings are never content to remain silent and instead clamor for release. When they express themselves openly and without disguise this activates the healing process. The healing process, however, is so painful and potentially discombobulating that very few people, unless they have a great deal of mature external support and internal self-understanding, can dare undertake it.
But a person’s inability to heal does not stop his unresolved feelings from needing to express themselves. Lacking healing as an option, these feelings instead express themselves as symptoms, of which addiction is just one subset. The purpose of addiction is to divert and assuage painful, upwelling feelings into a seemingly comfortable alternative without allowing them to become conscious. In the short-run this feels much more placid than healing, but in the long-run it only prolongs underground psychic misery and adds new consequences to an already troubled life.
The scope of addictions vary in their intensity, side effects, and degree of societal acceptance. Some are clearly weighted toward the conventionally negative end of the spectrum, like heroin addiction or gasoline-sniffing. Others, like workaholism or membership in a cult or cult-like group, are not so definitively negative in society’s eyes, and can receive societal approval and even perks. And some addictions, like having children and being in unenlightened relationships, are so pervasive, accepted, and even lauded that they are rarely even considered addictions at all – and thus form the backbone of society as we know it.
At present our society, and most of our society’s healers, treat conventionally-accepted addiction by simply helping “sufferers” find milder substitute addictions or other milder symptoms. Alcoholics Anonymous is a great example of this: its members are encouraged and even pressured to learn dissociative techniques whereby they can replace their alcohol addiction for the addiction of membership in the cult of AA. Although this might make life more consciously peaceful for the addict – who has to admit that he remains an addict in order to maintain his membership in AA, which suggests that at least AA is honest in that realm – it falls far short of helping the human race optimally evolve, or helping the individual find any deeper or more honest peace. There is no substitute for the resolution of trauma, and symptom or addiction replacement is nothing but a substitute. Emotional wounds that are not grieved poison the psyche, poison the species, and ultimately poison our world.
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Sure, TA is full of party-people, friends keeping in touch with one another and fun-a-plenty, distractamacating diversions to make the dull work day a little more tolerable, but in reading this board on a daily basis I also see a lot of pain manifesting in very damaging attitudes and behaviour. Mackler's site may be of some help for those who are honestly seeking it. |
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| Lomeli |
Thanks for posting this. You'll soon realize that there are only a handful of people on this board who are eager seekers of Truth and Enlightenment. Some might even had had glimpses of the fundamental truth as to who we are, but those experiences are usually not permanent.
Self-inquiry is the beginning and the end of suffering. |
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| Silky Johnson |
Nice. 
Love how the consciousness bit ties into what Dr. Mate talks about. So ing true. |
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| Arbiter |
| The problem with this is that it begins with the wholly unsubstantiated premise that some nebulously defined past 'trauma' lies at the root of just about every problem. |
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| EddieZilker |
| quote: | Originally posted by Arbiter
The problem with this is that it begins with the wholly unsubstantiated premise that some nebulously defined past 'trauma' lies at the root of just about every problem. |
This is probably due to a childhood trauma experienced by the author of the being subjected to his own loosely defined traumatic experiences.:stongue: |
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| Silky Johnson |
| quote: | Originally posted by Arbiter
The problem with this is that it begins with the wholly unsubstantiated premise that some nebulously defined past 'trauma' lies at the root of just about every problem. |
You should read Dr Mate's book. |
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| PivotTechno |
| quote: | Originally posted by Arbiter
wholly unsubstantiated |
As jennypie stated in a roundabout way, this is where you're missing the mark. It's quite the contrary, actually.
For those who naysay without even bothering to read anything past the initial post, as you were - this thread isn't for you. For those who choose to read through Mackler's site, the key phrase which should be used to temper the reading of his essays can be found on the page, The Fundamentals of My Perspective:
Life has its own timetable. Honor your inner voice, follow its guidance, explore as it bades you, and you will honor life’s path. |
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| Arbiter |
| quote: | Originally posted by PivotTechno
As jennypie stated in a roundabout way, this is where you're missing the mark. It's quite the contrary, actually. |
Oh really? Then why don't you substantiate it for us here instead of just declaring it so?
However, don't bother trying to send me on a wild goose chase, because I'm not playing that game. If you can provide here, or at least cite to a proper scholarly source that provides on a specific page number, some kind of empirical or verifiable basis for the idea that "life’s basic conflicts are ultimately rooted in the traumas we suffer in childhood," then, I'd be happy to engage in a substantive discussion of the matter. Otherwise, don't waste my time.
Either way, however, I note that Mr. Mackler did not bother to support his claims with any such substantiation, which is exactly what I was pointing out to begin with.
| quote: | For those who naysay without even bothering to read anything past the initial post, as you were - this thread isn't for you. For those who choose to read through Mackler's site, the key phrase which should be used to temper the reading of his essays can be found on the page, The Fundamentals of My Perspective:
Life has its own timetable. Honor your inner voice, follow its guidance, explore as it bades you, and you will honor life’s path. |
Transcendental nonsense. But since you raised the issue, let's take a critical look at the "fundamentals of [his] perspective."
| quote: | What is enlightenment?
Enlightenment is the conscious awareness of truth. . . . Full enlightenment is a consequence of full resolution of one’s traumas. |
So, in other words, we don't need no stinkin' facts: all we need to do is fully resolve our "traumas" and we'll magically gain full conscious awareness of the truth. Nope, Mr. Mackler clearly doesn't have an irrational obsession with traumas. Not one bit.
| quote: | | Children are born connected to their spirits |
What exactly is a "spirit?"
Oh yeah, it's something only vapid airheads believe in.
| quote: | Is full enlightenment achievable?
Yes. My heart tells me that it is so. |
Well, my intestines tell me that Mr. Mackler is even more full of than they are, and it's been at least three days since my last bowel movement. Clearly the path to "enlightenment" doesn't involve looking for verifiable, real-world truths; no, we should just attribute random thoughts to our internal organs and take that as sufficient proof of a given proposition.
| quote: | What is God?
God - if you feel comfortable using such a loaded word - is the best part of us. |
I'm glad we had some random idiot with a website to sort that out for us.
| quote: | Isn’t your whole website reductionistic – like everything you say just comes back to parental trauma?
In my experience life’s basic conflicts are ultimately rooted in the traumas we suffer in childhood. These traumas play out on individual levels, cultural levels, and on the global levels of war, economics, and exploitation of the earth. For people who deny the significance of their own emotional traumas, a denial which is presently the standard of our world, my website certainly can look very foolish and naïve – and even axe-grinding – but the more I learn and the more I grow and the more I study humanity, the more I realize that if I have made any major errors here on this website it is because I have likely understated my case… |
Translation: "Take my word for it because it's true in my experience. If you don't agree, it's because you're in denial."
Nope, nothing fallacious there...
I hope you're not serious with this nonsense. Mr. Mackler doesn't even pretend to offer up any evidence for any of his claims, many of which are plainly incoherent. To call the man a crackpot would be a substantial understatement of the degree to which his ideas lack even the slightest semblance of intellectual rigor. He rather reminds me of ********, actually. Although, I think William is really just a troll seeking attention, whereas Mr. Mackler appears to believe that his rambling, incoherent musings actually constitute a form of intellectual inquiry. They do not, but thanks for bringing in the garbage anyway. |
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| Silky Johnson |
| Don't read Mackler, read Mate. His work is well supported by legitimate research. |
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| Arbiter |
| quote: | Originally posted by jennypie
Don't read Mackler, read Mate. His work is well supported by legitimate research. |
Which of his books do you recommend? I might have a chance to look into them after finals. |
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| Silky Johnson |
| In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. A must read for anyone, imo. Addicted or not. |
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| Kismet7 |
| quote: | Originally posted by PivotTechno
My finding this site came as the result of mulling over Halcyon and nefardec's posts in this thread...
http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/...8&forumid=16&s=
...and watching the Gabor Mate vid Jennypie posted in this thread in the TOTA forum:
http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/...12&pagenumber=1
Essays For The Enlightenment Seeker - Healing From Childhood Trauma
I feel these writings are a must read for anyone who considers themselves to be on the path to self-healing. The insights he offers will be uncomfortable for many to read (and will outright anger some), and rightfully so - truth is a painful injection, but it's the only medicine that yields permanent, positive results.
On suicide:
Suicide: The Ultimate Way To Avoid the Painful Truth
People commit suicide when the pain of lying to themselves is unbearable and the pain of telling the truth is even worse. Here the journey to manifest enlightenment – to heal all one’s childhood traumas – feels hopeless. The person’s childhood cemented the notion that deep, consistent parental love was completely out the question and that his parents were nothing more than shams. But he could never face that fact, because it was too painful – and they would have only rejected him all the more. Instead he denies it and turns his hopelessness and rage and anger toward himself. He swallows us the worst of his parents into his psyche and he fantasizes that death will free him, and bring him peace. But it will not. Death is no relief. Death will only end his journey and kill his potential to grow.
Only a few of the truly suicidal, the most isolated and alienated, end their own lives. Most express their suicidality more acceptably, through extreme passivity or self-neglect, both of which go hand in hand with a desperate but silent cry for parental rescue. A flip side of this involves people who engage in risky acting-out behavior, such as driving dangerously, using drugs and alcohol excessively, heavy overeating or under-eating, fighting violently with others when true self-defense is not involved, having risky sex, climbing mountains… Such people let the world know how much they undervalue their own lives – which is exactly what they were taught in their childhood homes.
The cure for being suicidal is to heal the ancient wounds that caused the despair. This will not be easy for him, because his parents crushed the searching side of him, and subtly threatened him with full rejection if he tried to reconstitute his healthy and seeking side. But healing is possible. A suicidal person needs to find others who can hear him and believe him and trust him – trust every little bit of horror he’s gone through and still holds inside his psyche like a poisonous abscess – until he can learn to do this for himself. He must begin his growth process in a more enlightened setting that does not crush him anew. He must find ways to look honestly at the history of his demise and feel all his grief, horror, and rage. He may lose his old numb self in the process, but he will find his life. No one who finds the path to his legitimate anger and honest grief can ever stay suicidal for long.
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Too me suicide is no form of enlightment nor is it any form of freedom. People who kill themselves give up on the search for truth, englightment, freedom, survival, etc. This guy's rhetoric is that of a fortune teller. The "painful truth" can be cured outside of the acceptence or nurturing of parents. If you've been through 'trauma', you can't reverse it by things going back to the way they were or the person that gave you trauma changing the way they behave towards you, you still have to create a different perception and knowledge of things to cure yourself.
And this is rather easy for most people, and what everyone does naturally. The small % of people who fail to do this are the ones who kill themselves. So this guys philosophy that the parent can change a persons trauma is the same he applied to AA and Alcoholics. However, a parent can't fix the problem, just like AA cant fix alcoholics. To fix suicidal tendency, you have to recreate a persons perception and intelligence of things. Again, this is what most people do to cope with 'trauma' naturally.
To me, a person's ability to perceive and envision things how they want to is a powerful trait. Because you can easily turn a negative into a positive this way. Fueled by intelligence, imagination, and creativity.
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