Further more, material abundance often requires a person to be doing something that he truly enjoys doing, what he has an aptitude in doing and what there is a market for (that is, what is found useful by other people and they are willing to buy it).
It would seem that the individual has several career options to choose from. Actually, this is not quite so. The individual has only one vocation that suits his unique nature, a vocation chosen for him by his particular temperament and aptitude. The only choice the individual really has in the matter is to discover his real vocation, what he came to this world to do and embrace it with his whole heart; he cannot do other things just because other people do them and make a living from doing them.
The time at which the individual discovers and embraces his vocation may not be as random as appearances would make it seem. If he has to try many other professions, and by process of elimination discover what is for him, such is his game plan. Indeed, he may go through his life time on earth without discovering his true vocation.

I have had a difficult time making up my mind what to do with myself. I have been a dilettante all my life. In school, I found many subjects intriguing and found it rather difficult to limit myself to one discipline. I gravitated from one discipline to another and acquired several degrees. Generally, a field would fascinate me but when I come to understand it, as it is, I found it no longer fascinating. The same goes for my work life. I would go into a line of work, feel fascinated and, in fact, work hard but soon find it boring. I would start looking for something else to do with my life.
As I look back on my schooling and work history, indeed, on my entire life, what is self-evident is that I am an idealist in search of an idealistic profession.


THE ETIOLOGY AND NATURE OF IDEALISM

What is idealism, how did it originate and how is it that it predominates in certain individuals’ lives? Clearly, every human being is a bit idealistic, but some are overly so. The majority of mankind is realistic, perhaps, with a little idealism, but a small fraction of people are overly idealistic, so much so that nothing in the extant world satisfies them.
Idealism appears to originate in hatred and rejection of what is real. The idealist hates and rejects what is and yearns for what could become; he aspires for what, in his imagination, is better than what is existent in the real world. His whole life seems motivated by desire to transform what is into what could become ideal.

Karen Horney, in my opinion, is, perhaps, the psychologist that best captures the nature of idealism. Unfortunately, she gave it a psychopathological term, neurosis, hence alienates folks from embracing her wonderful hypothesis. Her most seminal book, Neurosis and Human Growth, gave me the greatest insight into me and I recommend it to all idealistic persons.
As Horney sees it, the idealistic child, in her Psychoanalytic terminology, the neurotic child hates and rejects his real self and uses his thinking and imagination to construct what seems to him an ideal self and strives to become that ideal self. What is ideal is not stable; it is always changing; as soon as one goal post is attained, another picture of what is ideal emerges hence the child, as it were, is on a perpetual trade mill, always striving to attain an ideal state that forever recede and eludes him. He is forever disappointed by his inability to attain the ideal self and is a frustrated person.
At all times, the neurotic child strives to become the idealized self and does not want to be his real self. Since the idealized self is an imaginary self, a mental construct, not a factual self, it is not ever going to be realized in the real world. In the real world, what human beings can be and or do is circumscribed by the limitations of space, time and matter. As long as the restrictions of the external environment are in place, human beings cannot possible do every thing; for example, they cannot fly, unless, of course, they grow wings. Nevertheless, the neurotic child and the neurotic adult are characterized by wish to realize his imaginary ideal self.
The normal pattern of growth, as Horney sees it, is characterized by a drive to realize the real self (what Abraham Maslow calls self actualization).
The neurotic pattern of growth, on the other hand, is characterized by desire to realize the ideal, but not real self.
As such, neurosis is a futile pattern of living; its idealistic goal is never going to be satisfied, yet the neurotic pursues it in an obsessive-compulsive manner, as if an inner pressure that must be obeyed, as primitive man obeyed his imaginary gods, a force that transcends reason compels him to pursue it. (See Eric Fromm, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.)
Neurosis is filled with anxiety, for the neurotic child and adult are afraid of not becoming their idealized selves. The neurotic has what Horney called basic anxiety: fear of not becoming the ideal self he wants to become. The neurotic, according to Horney, lives with constant free-floating anxiety (neurotic anxiety).
Horney provided a sociological and psychological etiology of neurosis. As she sees it, neurosis is caused by unreasonable parental expectations from the child that he become perfect. In her view, all children are aware that they need the adults in their lives to survive and, therefore, are motivated to do those things that the adults around them, particularly those that Harry Stack Sullivan called their significant others: parents, siblings, peers, authority figures like teachers and pastors etc ask of them.
If those on whom the child depends on to survive expect a high standard of behavior before they accept him, he strives to accomplish them least they reject him. As Horney sees it, this conditional acceptance of children disposes them to reject their real selves and use their imagination and thinking to construct alternative selves that they believe that the important persons in their lives would accept. Thus, at all times, such children strive to become the idealized selves that they think that if they become that their society would accept. In doing so, according to Horney, such children become neurotic in personality structure.
As Horney sees it, a neurotic is a person who hates and rejects his real self and strives to become an alternative self, perceived as ideal and acceptable to society, and experiences anxiety when he does not seem like the imaginary ideal self. Not being like the ideal self arouses fear of social rejection and abandonment, which amounts to fear of death, since the child needs other people to provide for him if he is to physically survive.

Carl Rogers (Client Centered Therapy) built on Horney to urge parents to accept their children in an unconditionally positive manner, if they want their children to accept their real selves and not pursue idealized neurotic selves that could never be attained but in the meantime produces anxiety for the neurotic child.

Whereas Horney’s causal hypothesis is strictly social psychological, Alfred Adler (Neurotic Constitution) believes that biology plays a role in the etiology of neurosis. Without denying the powerful role of society in the formation of the human personality, Adler believes that those children who inherited what he called inferior organs tend to find it extremely difficult to do what the exigencies of this world call for human beings to adapt to them. As he sees it, children who inherited organ inferiorities are likely to feel that the physical and social environment is very tough on them, feel their lives threatened and develop a feeling of personal inferiority.
To Adler, no child could ever accept a sense of inferiority. Why? To survive the impersonal exigencies of this world, the child must overcome them.
Adaptation to the realities of this world require that the child become strong and powerful. Since the child is, in fact, not powerful, he uses pure mentation to imagine himself powerful. The human child, and more so, the neurotic child feels inferior and powerless Vis a Vis the exigencies of this world and uses his thinking and imagination to come up with a self-concept and its pictorial form, self-image that seems to successfully cope with the intractable exigencies of this world. He construes a fictional self, a self that is all-powerful, intelligent, handsome, wealthy etc, a self that is everything that his real self is not.
To Adler, neurosis is characterized by rejection of the real self and pursuit of a compensatory imaginary, fictional, all powerful and superior self.
The neurotic child has an all or nothing approach to his imaginary ideal self; he must become it or he feels that he is nothing. As it were, his whole reason for existing is to become his idealized, imaginary self. Neurosis thus gives the individual purpose for existence. The neurotic exists to become his fictional superior, powerful, ideal and perfect self. If he did not have that ideal self to pursue, his life would suddenly seem purposeless and meaningless. Existing to attain insane goals is, apparently, a possible reason to live on earth. (If so, could all existence on earth be motivated by desire to attain insane purpose? Helen Schucman, in A Course in Miracles, says yes.)
The neurotic often behaves as if he is the idealized imaginary, all-powerful and superior self. He presents that superior self to other people to relate to and accept as who he is.
If other people collude with him and accept his idealized self concept and self image (personality is a mental construct, George Kelly says) he feels fine, but if they do not validate his fictional self, he feels threatened and unsafe.
The neurotic child is happy (false happiness) when his ideal self is affirmed by society and angry with those who do not tell him that he is his imaginary all-powerful self.
At school and play, the neurotic child wants to be treated as if he is the ideal and all-powerful self. He wants his peers and teachers to treat him as the important self he wishes that he were, but is not, in fact.
Of course, other people know that the neurotic child is not the all-important self he wants to become and pretends as. They treat him as an ordinary self and he resents realistic such treatment.

NEUROTIC SOCIAL AVOIDANCE AND THE GOAL OF SUPERIORITY
Since the neurotic does not want to be treated as an ordinary self, he often withdraws from play and school and other arenas where he may be evaluated as ordinary. Such children would develop what we now call avoidant personality disorder, and or obsessive compulsive personality disorder, dependent personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder.
These neuroses, now called personality disorders, are characterized by wish to be an ideal self and avoidance of society in an effort to protect the imaginary ideal, perfect self.
The shy child, aka avoidant personality, keeps to himself and in his social withdrawal, uses his imagination to see himself as perfect and ideal. He feels that if he comes close to other people that they would look through his sham ideal self and reject it. To avoid rejection of his phony ideal self, he avoids other people. In effect, his social avoidance is a maneuver to help him preserve and protect his wished for ideal, perfect self.
If the neurotic, shy person did not have a false ideal self to defend, he would not fear social rejection and would readily relate to other people.
Psychotherapy for the neurotic avoidant personality, shy person, is for him to give up his quest for an idealized self and accept his real self and become comfortable with it and present it to other people to relate to. He does not have to pretend to be who he is not, ideal; he has to accept his real self, imperfect as it may be, and leave it at that.
When the imperfect real self is accepted, as it is, and when one stops desiring the impossible ideal, perfect self, one no longer has fear of not becoming the imaginary ideal self. One no longer has anxiety neurosis.
Mental health is characterized by absence of neurotic anxiety, whereas neurosis is characterized by the presence of anxiety (excessive fear).
The normal person has realistic fear, not anxiety. He fears what could harm his body and avoids it and or seeks ways to protect his real, bodily self, but does not fear what could harm an imaginary perfect self. The normal person has a realistic self and realistic fears; he does not have neurotic anxiety (disorder).

Adler, Horney, Sullivan, Rogers, Kelly, Maslow and other ego-psychologists have useful points and need to be studied and understood. However, they did not completely explain the etiology of neurosis.
Neurosis is not only a social-psychological phenomenon; it has a biological component to it. Isaac Marks and other neuro-psychologists are elucidating the biological nature of anxiety disorder.
According to neuro psychologists, those who tend to be neurotic, who have anxiety disorder, tend to have inherited bodies that are prone to excessive nerve excitation. Their bodies have a tendency to readily elicit those stimulations found in anxiety, with or without social causal factors. They seem to have inherited rapid somatic excitability. The fear and anger alerting system in their bodies tend to be over developed. They quickly perceive danger and threat to their bodies and their danger signaling system goes to work and urges their bodies to fight or flee from the perceived danger.
How this system works is not yet fully understood. Some claim that it has to do with neurochemical balance, or lack of it, in nerve cells. Perhaps, such persons have a tendency to produce excessive neuroadrenalin (neuropiniphrine…an excitatory neurotransmitter) and less GABA (an inhibitory neurotransmitter)?
The jury is still out on the cause of anxiety; no one has fully explicated the biological origin of anxiety disorder. On the subject, lots of causal speculations abound, however, interesting that conjectures may be, they are not science. Science deals with facts, as they are, not mere speculation.

What is self-evident is that anxiety disorder is a biosocial, existential phenomenon. It has its origin in biological, sociological, psychological and existential causal factors. Clearly, Adler, Horney etc explained aspects of the causal factors implicated in the etiology of anxiety neurosis, but the biological aspect of it still needs to be fully understood.
In the meantime, we can best approach anxiety disorder, aka neurosis on individual-by-individual case.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

When I was a child (and now) my body was (is) prone to quick excitation. I was almost always aroused. Heat, cold, smell, paint, food etc aroused my body. I had physical and chemical allergies.
Being close to a woman who over perfumed her body and reeks of fragrances made me faint. Being in a house where certain types of food are cooked, the smell made me dizzy.
Hot summer days made my body feel irritated and uncomfortable. Cold days made my body itchy.
Running and other vigorous exercises made my muscles cramp up (perhaps due to lack of oxygen, a product of lactic acid metabolism in the muscles). Simply stated, I inherited a hypersensitive body. That over excitable body was not comfortable to live in.

I remembered always wanting to get out of my body and live outside it. That is correct: my body was so intolerable that I did not want to live in it. I wanted to jump out of my body and be bodiless. On hot summer days, my body felt so irritated that I had to douse it with cold water to feel tolerably comfortable.
By age six, when I started formal schooling, I was aware that I did not like my body. I admired those other boys who seemed at ease with their bodies.
I loathed my body and used my imagination to wish for a better body. I fantasized for an ideal body. By age nine, I was aware that I was not only wishing for a better body but a better self. I wished for a perfect psychological self, a self that is different from my imperfect self.
That is to say that I developed what Horney called neurosis: hatred and rejection of the real self and wishing for an ideal alternative, mentally constructed self.
However, Horney’s etiological analysis is only partially applicable to me for, clearly, my inherited problematic body had a lot to do with my self-rejection.
Obviously, my society is conditional in accepting children but that by itself is not the sole cause of my self-rejection. My self-rejection was caused by a combination of biological and social psychological factors: my inherited problematic body and my conditionally accepting society placed a role in my self hatred. Biosocial psychology, I believe, is a fuller explanatory psychology.

Biological psychology is still in its infancy; the various biochemical causal explanations of mental disorders (excess dopamine in schizophrenia, excess neurpiniphrine in mania, low serotonin in depression, excess neuro-adrenaline in anxiety etc) are not persuasive; they explain nothing. Let us just say that we have not yet explained the etiology of mental states; we may do so in the future.

This paper is not really devoted to causal analysis of neurosis, I made foray into some causal analyses to set the stage for the theme at hand: idealism and choosing a vocation.
I did not choose a vocation because I was seeking for an ideal body, ideal self, ideal other people, ideal society, ideal social institutions, ideal work situations and ideal everything. Nothing in the real world seemed good enough for me.
Just as I was seeking an ideal self, I was seeking an ideal vocation. As noted, I would go into a profession, like it for a while, and then find it not satisfactory, because it is not ideal. After obtaining my doctorate degree, I taught at a university for a while, and found what I was doing not ideal and quit. I went in search of ideal work. I worked in the mental health field. For a while, I enjoyed it and was rewarded with running a couple agencies. Many folks would be satisfied running a multimillion dollar agency, but that was not good enough for me. I left and went searching for an ideal vocation.
Over time, I learned that there is no such thing as an ideal vocation. Jobs are not the issue; the issue is I, my basic self-rejection and desire for an ideal self.
To find an ideal vocation, I must accept me. But the question is: what me am I to accept?
Accepting my real body is difficult to do; nobody in his right mind would accept my body. The best that can be done with my body is to subject it to rigorous scientific analysis, understand it and device a technology, (genetic engineering and or medications) to improve it.

NEUROTIC IDEALISM

In childhood, I escaped into neurotic idealism, and in my thirties I escaped into religious idealism. These two are fantasy and, as such, useless.
In maturity, I embrace the only methodological approach to phenomena that is realistic: the scientific method.
The scientific method studies phenomena as it is, and does not waste time and energy indulging in mentally constructed ideal versions of phenomena.
The science of psychology studies human beings as they are, not as they would like to become. Psychology is not idealistic philosophy where neurotics use their minds, thinking, to construe ideal selves, ideal social institutions and ideal world. The world is not what such idealistic philosophers as Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche etc made it out to be in their philosophical systems; the world is empirical and objective and independent of our imaginations.
There are essentially two types of idealism, secular and religious (aka spiritual) idealism. In secular idealism, the individual uses his thinking and imagination to wish how he, other people, social institutions and the world ought to become; in religious idealism, although it is still the individual that is doing the wishing, the individual attributes his ideal wishes to what he calls God, Spirit etc.
The secular idealist may wish for socialism as an ideal society; the religious idealist says that God intends for humanity to be in a certain manner, the manner his idealism tells him is what God would wish man and society to be.
Both secular and religious idealism are the products of human thinking and imagination; they are wishes of how the self and the world should be ideal and perfect.
The fact is that all the wishes in this word would not change a leaf from being a leaf. Perhaps, millions of years of evolution may alter the nature of leafs. In the here and now, one can wish all one wants, the fact is that human beings are the way they are and are not going to change and become ideal.
You cannot change yourself and other people by merely wishing that you and they became ideal. Conceptualizing ideals, although understandable, are really a waste of mental energy and time.

Instead of wasting ones mental energy and time imagining how human beings should be, at the individual and societal level, the individual is best served if he studied himself and human beings in scientific, that is, objective manner. He should study things as they are, and understand them as they are and stop wishing for them to be different.
You first have to understand phenomena as it is before you can change it; if at all change is possible.
You cannot change you; you cannot change other people and you cannot change the social institutions that responded to the way people are.
People are in varying degrees of normalcy, neurosis and psychosis and these states are due to their inherited bodies and social experiences. You cannot wish that people be angels.
For example, if you see a man who is, say, paranoid in personality structure, and you wish that he were not so, you are wasting your time. What you need to do is understand the nature of paranoia at both the psychological and biological level.
The paranoid person before you probably will always feel that he is a victim of others persecution and that other people are out to harm and or kill him. He actually wants to be attacked by other people and attack people to generate their counter attack on him. He then fears that those he attacked would counter attack him and hides from them to go protect himself. From his hidden corner, he feels justified in attacking other people, verbally or physically. Moreover, he wants to be very important, grandiose, in his and other people’s eyes. He over evaluates his worth (he feels inadequate and worthless and compensates with imaginary power and worth).
The paranoid person feels grandiose and persecuted. You cannot change him, for to change is for him to accept his underlying depressed self view, his self hatred and self rejection…what led to his compensatory latching unto imaginary superior self. If he gave up his deluded (grandiose, persecuted) self, he would become depressed, and develop low self-esteem and may even become suicidal.
To avert his underlying existential depression, his self evaluated valuelessness, and anxiety, he masks them with a fictional, all powerful self. His paranoid ideations serve a function for him: they make life tolerable for him. Paranoia gives the paranoid person purpose for being; he lives to become a grandiose self and to protect that self from imaginary persecutors.
What you can do is study him and understand the biological, sociological, psychological, and existential factors in the etiology of his mental disorder. If he is amenable to understanding facts, you can tell him about the factors implicated in the genesis of his paranoia, but the chances are that he may not listen to you.
It is not your function to change other people. It is not your job to change society. The individual’s only function is to study phenomena as it is, scientifically, struggle to understand it and struggle to come up with a technology to adapt to it. He then markets his understanding of reality, as it is, and if his understanding is realistic and useful to other people, they would buy it hence gives him money to meet his material needs.

GOD

Many human beings are preoccupied with the idea of God. They want to prove to themselves that God exists, that he created this world and that if they did the right thing by him, please him, that when they die that they would be welcomed into his heaven. They fear displeasing God, so as not to be relegated to his hell.

The human mind, ego intellectual processes, cannot prove the existence of God. The ego, the human thinking pattern, is individuated, and is a separated self.
If God exists, and I think that there is something that people call God, I call it life; he is all of us acting in tandem.
God is the whole of life as one life; one life that is simultaneously all of us. Because he is all selves in one self, the separated and individuated self, the human ego, our earthly thinking, cannot understand God. No amount of earthly intellectual thinking can explain God. This is because the part, human beings, is smaller than the whole, God, and cannot understand the whole.
It seems, therefore, a waste of time trying to understand and or explicate the nature of God.
On the matter of God, one should just keep quiet. Be quiet; in your silence you feel peaceful and happy.
Do not disturb your mind trying to explain God; you cannot do so. God exists all right; he is life, one life that manifests in all forms of life: us, animals, trees etc. The real God is not the God explained by the various religions of this world.
The God of the various religions of the world is nothing but the human ego projected out and attributed to what human beings call God.
Whereas the individual should gravitate to an idea of God that makes sense to him, mine is Gnostic Christianity, he should not have the illusion that he has explained God; he has not; no religion can explain God.


REALISTIC VOCATIONS MAINTAIN THIS WORLD

In seeking a realistic profession, ask yourself this question: does the vocation that you contemplate entering enable human beings to adapt to the exigencies of this world? Every realistic profession maintains this world, as it is, not transcend it.
We live in the world of space, time and matter. We are separated selves, egos and could, and do harm each other. We want to live in safety. Therefore, we seek protection from those who can harm us. We must apprehend, try and punish those who harm us. The profession of law enforcement: lawyers, judges, courts, prisons, prison guards, police etc is a realistic profession, for it exists to catch and punish criminals. The individuated self needs protection and must demand the services of law and order professionals.
Scientists study the world in an objective manner and understand it. Technologists devise techniques to adapt to the objective world, as it is. Thus, science and technology are realistic professions, for they give to men what they need to adapt to this world.
Businessmen produce goods and services and market them to people who need them to survive. Business is a realistic vocation, for it enables people to adapt to their world and survive.
Psychologists, provided they are realistic, that is, embrace biosocial existential methodological approach to understanding man, are useful to people. People have varying degrees of neurosis and psychosis and need psychologists to explain to them their mental states and help them cope with their world without excessive anxiety, paranoia, depression etc. However, since not too many folks buy the services of mental health professionals, they are not likely to become rich from their profession.

The relevant thing is for the individual to seek out a vocation that produces goods and or services that enable people to survive in this world.
If the individual goes into an idealistic but useless vocation, he will not sell his goods and services and will be poor. Consider professional socialists and communists. Who wants to buy their idealistic conceptions of how people and social institutions ought to be? Very few persons want to buy the services of socialists, so socialists tend to be unemployed. Some of them become professional revolutionaries and get other people to go work and earn a living and support them; Karl Marx fooled around in the Libraries writing idealistic materials, whereas his friend, Frederick Engels’ workers worked to support him. Socialists cannot make a living from their idealistic thinking and writing.
Religious idealists can make a living if they become ministers and, as clerical parasites manage to play on people’s guilt and fears and get them to support them.
If they are merely intellectual about religious idealism, as are many new age gurus, they starve.
However, religion has some utility. Human beings will always have fear of the unknown. Any religion that reduces their fears and enables them to develop peace of mind and have some happiness, even if ultimately it is a false religion, is useful and should be tolerated.

FORGIVENESS AND NIHILISM

Any philosophy or religion that teaches that people should negate this world and escape into its conception of heaven, oneness, peace and joy, as new age religions do, will not enable people to adapt to this world and, therefore, will not be bought by reasonable people who want to live in this world.
If you tell folks to forgive those who wronged them, to permit themselves to be killed without defending themselves, you are not going to enable them to cope with the real world and will not be listened to. People will listen to those who talk of crime and punishment, to lawyers and judges, for they enable them to adapt to this world.
Jesus talked about forgiveness and defenselessness. His gospel would lead to death and those who want to live in this world did not listen to him and will not do so in the future, for as long as they want to live on earth, in the realm of separated self.
Those who want to die and extinguish their separated self will listen to the philosophy of forgiveness and defenseless, a world negating religion.
The individual should have clarity about his wish to escape from this world and do it if that is what he wants to do and leave other people to adapt to the exigencies of a separated world.


REAL SELF-FELLOWSHIP


Real self-psychology teaches people to accept their real selves, which include their bodily selves and spiritual selves. It does not encourage people to negate their bodies and escape into idealistic, imaginary selves. It urges people to accept their bodies and study them scientifically and use medical technology to cope with their illnesses. It validates and affirms the human body.
It teaches that there is another self, the spirit self, a unified spirit self. That unified spirit self is not amenable to ego intellectual understanding and should be assumed while attention is paid to the physical real self. The reason the spirit self has to be recognized is so that people affirm an aspect of themselves that is also real, recognition of which tends to enable them to feel peaceful and happy.
In the here and now world, the neurotic ideal self, secular or spiritual, must be given up and not defended, for the individual to not feel neurotic anxiety, depression, paranoia and schizophrenia. All mental disorders are rooted in a misguided effort to become the ideal self, an imaginary self that could never be attained in reality.

My vocation is to teach people about their real self: the two sides of that real self, the physical, bodily self and spiritual non-bodily self. I am here to teach people to jettison their ideal self, secular and religious.
All mental illness arises from people’s desire to invent idealized selves and defend those false selves. Be they personality disorders, neurosis and psychosis, all mental disorders have something to do with efforts to become an imaginary idealized self. The mentally ill person thinks and acts from the perspective of his imaginary ideal self. The mentally ill person struggles to defend and protect his imaginary ideal self.
People become upset because their ideal selves are not validated and affirmed by other people.
Shyness, a seeming minor disorder, is an attempt to be ones ideal self, consciousness of it, and fear of not becoming it.
Stop trying to be an ideal self and simply be quiet and you would be peaceful and happy.
Do not expect other people to be ideal selves and just accept them as they are, even if they are crazy. In accepting people unconditionally, as they are, you give them your peace; you become a bringer of peace to their conflict ridden world.

All mental illness is healed when the ideal self is given up and not defended. In mental health, one no longer has emotional upsets: no fear, anxiety, anger, sadness, paranoia, mania, schizophrenia etc; one is peaceful and happy at all times.
Do not think and behave from the imaginary ideal self; do not judge from the imaginary ideal self. Do not see the world from the imaginary ideal self. Just tell yourself that you do not know who you are, who other people are and what the world is and means, and stay calm.
You are already seeing the world from the separated self, a self that is not real, but as long as you use that self to accept the world, as it is, not as you want it to become, approach the world scientifically and technologically, you will be calm.
Science and technology is the ego at its best, so become a scientist and or technologist. Nevertheless, the world of science and technology is the world of illusion, a dream world, for the real world is spirit, not matter.
The spirit world, however, should not be our concern, for if we seek it we color it with our ego wishes and distort it. It is enough to attempt to see this ego’s world objectively.

NO JUDGMENT

Every time one judges ones self, judges other people, as good or bad, one has wished that one and other people approximate ones ego ideal; one has attempted to be the author of ones self, and author of other people; one has disturbed ones peace and disturbed other peoples peace, for what one gives to ones self one gives to other people.
Do not judge you and other people; in doing so, you give your self inner peace and happiness.
By not judging you and others you are not playing God; you are not expecting the world to be according to your idea of good or bad; you are not disturbing your/other people’s peace; you are a bringer of peace to you and to other people.
What is my vocation? To teach folks how to attain peace and happiness through corrected thinking and behaving; to teach folks how to live through their real self, bodily and spiritual self. I do so from my understanding of what negation of this world and escapism means. I had negated this world and sought escape in idealistic thinking, philosophies and religion. I did nothing to effectively adapt to the realities of this world. I was out of this world; I was gone from it, mentally.
I got out of graduate school and worked hard for five years. I am a very hard worker for within five years of leaving graduate school I was the executive director of a very large mental health agency. If this world had made sense to me, there is no doubt that I would have worked my way to the top of things. But the problem was that the world made no sense to me. I could not take the world, as it is, seriously. I did not embrace the world’s philosophy and left the world in search of a better philosophy to live by.
Yet what I did was in my nature to do so; as it were, I was programmed to dream for a better world, and could not have not engaged in the long, arduous search for meaning and purpose in a meaningless and purposeless world.
But out of that futile searching for idealistic state, I learnt that if one wants to live in this world that one must embrace what makes for survival in it: holding grievances and punishing offenders, for it is in doing so that the ego’s separated world survives.
If you forgive the ego and do not punish it, when it offends you, it would keep doing so, even kill you. Forgiveness and lack of punitive behavior, as was my approach to people, leads to the end of the egos world and is an escape from what maintains this world.
(I once did group therapy for domestic violence convicts and did not want to punish them; I tried to reorient their thinking via cognitive behavior therapy but not through punishment; I was perceived as soft on criminals and was actually told to go. The psychologists running the show believed in punishing people; they are egotists who believe in punishment and were gratifying their desire to punish others by running those latest ego outfits for holding grievances, feeling guilty and being punitive. The normal psychologist and psychiatrist must believe in guilt and punishment, for guilt and punishment maintains the egoistic world he lives in. And since he believes in guilt and punishment, he must be found guilty and punished, for what one believes in happens to one. Abused persons who believe in guilt and punishment and punish their abusers will eventually be found guilty of a crime and punished, for what people believe in happens to them. The normal person is an egotist and believes in guilt and punishment, punishes other people and is himself punished.)

REAL VERSUS SHAM CHRISTIANITY

It should be noted that Jesus Christ actually negated this world and escaped from it. He taught a philosophy, Gnosticism that saw this world as valueless and negated it. He did not want to be part of this world. He wanted to negate his separated ego self. He overcame this world and was not fascinated by its attractions. He allowed himself to be murdered and did not fight to stay in this world. He had the common sense not to have children hence perpetuate this world.
The early apostles, those who knew Jesus first hand, knew that he taught an escapist philosophy. They sold their worldly goods and lived for the present moment, expecting the world to come to an end at any time. Of course, the world did not come to an end, for the world will be around for several more billion years. As long as the sun shines and it will shine for at least four more billion years, the world will continue to exist.
Disappointed that Jesus did not return to come get them out of what they saw as a corrupt world, Christians distorted the teaching of Jesus to make them adaptive to the exigencies of this world. They discarded Christian Gnosticism and what we now call traditional Christianity emerged.
What folks now call Christianity is really far from what the escapist, idealistic Jewish rabbi, Jesus taught his followers. Extant Christianity, like other religions, is now a mechanism for adapting to this world. True religion is almost always eventually distorted to make it maintain the separated, ego and its world. The religion of the founders of religion, like Jesus, is not always the religion practiced by those who call them their followers. That is the only way these religions can exist, for the alternative is idealism that does not cope with the realities of this world.
The Jews did not embrace the philosophy of forgiveness that their brother, Jesus taught. Instead, they preferred to retain their Mosaic view of guilt and punishment. As we choose is done to us. They chose what maintains this world, guilt and punishment, saw their fellow human beings as guilty and punished the; and their fellow human beings saw them as guilty and punished them hence all over the world they are usually punished, killed.

CONCLUSION

I have learned about the self defeating nature of idealism, secular and religious, and gave it up. What needs done in this world is to be realistic, to study science and technology and use it to adapt to this world while at the same time acknowledging the reality of formless spirit, without getting overboard about spirituality.
Spirituality does not enable any one adapt to this world, in fact, if taken seriously, it leads to escape from this world. Those who want to live in this world must do what living in this world requires, be realistic and operate according to the egos theology of crime and punishment.
Each human being is unique, and knows it. There is no other person like the individual; he is one in all time and in infinity. The specific combination of particles, atoms and elements in his body and his social experience disposes him to be who he is and to do ascertain type of work better than most other people. The individual is suited for a type of vocation; his first job is to ascertain his vocation on earth and subsequently to channel his energy into it, to the best of his ability. He cannot do well what others do well.
The idealist is readily able to perceive the imperfections in himself and in other people and feel motivated to change them, make himself and other people perfect. He cannot make himself and other people perfect. It is futile trying to change ones self and other human beings. The realistic thing to do is to accept ones self and other people as they are, not as they should become. One must accept all people despite their imperfections and insanities and not hope to make them sane and perfect, for one cannot succeed in that idealistic endeavor.
Yet there is hope for mankind. That hope is the scientific method: it studies people as they are, not as they should become; it does not moralize about how people should be and behave but embraces them as they are and behave. The scientific method studies people’s biology, chemistry, physics and psychology, and where changes are possible do so, but where not, accept them for being who they are. People are part of the natural universe of space, time and matter; they are imperfect creatures with an unknown perfect spiritual aspect. We must love all human beings and help them be the best that they can be.

Ozodi@africainstituteseattle.org

The ego and its world are very complex and complicated; their language must address the world of differences and multiplicity. Those who write in the egos frame of reference tend to write in complicated, sophisticated language. The language of metaphysics, on the other hand, tends to be very simple. This is because metaphysics deals with simplicity itself: how people came to this world and can escape from it. When I write on secular subjects, my language is sophisticated, but when I write about spiritual matters, my language is very simple, as in this essay.
Africans and African Americans are not a psychological people. They seldom bother trying to understand themselves. In the meantime, they present with varying degrees of psychopathologies; and the sad part is that they don’t even know it. In over twenty years work in the mental health field, I have not had an African as a patient; it is almost always white patients. Black folks mostly come in contact with the mental health system when they experience psychotic decompensation and have to be hospitalized and treated against their will, or, as in Nigeria, when their underlying untreated mental health issues dispose them to over eat and drink themselves to untimely death. I hope that I am doing my bit to alert the brothers and sisters to their mental health issues; that is my goal, any way.