I just published two new memoirs

Greetings everyone! I wanted to let people know that I just published two new books—both memoirs. Both are quick but substantial reads that take place during a formative time in my life—my early 20s, right when my parents were breaking up and I was beginning my self-reflective life as an adult.

The first is a hitchhiking journey from 1993 called “Up the West Coast of Australia.”  (Click here to purchase on amazon as either a kindle or a paperback, or to read a sample.)

The second, “Five Weeks in China,” is a journey I took a year later, in 1994, to the People’s Republic of China via the Trans-Siberian Railway, after I’d studied Mandarin in my final year of university. (It’s also available on amazon as a kindle or paperback, and there’s a sample too!)

I’ve worked on both books for over twenty years—and finally decided the time was right to publish them. Enjoy!

P.S. I also made a little Youtube video sharing about the books.

The Dividing Line Between Crazy and Not Crazy

Crazy is not being in touch with reality.

Being in touch with reality means seeing things clearly, without the veils or filters known as defenses.

We employ defenses (e.g., denial, projection, dissociation) when reality is too painful to see.

Reality is too painful to see because we have unresolved historical traumas due to the actual horror of the realities we have experienced.

Our defenses make life more palatable to us, yet they’re all manifestations of our craziness.

To that end, we’re all crazy to some degree, to the degree that we have defenses.

However, part of the craziness of society is to only label as crazy a certain tip of the iceberg of the defenses.

The easiest people to label crazy are not necessarily any crazier than the rest of us, but only have defenses different from the norm, especially defenses that are difficult for the norm to understand or relate to.

On a macro scale, this is why it’s easier for people to label other cultures as crazy while failing too see the craziness in their own.

All of this, individually and societally, is a defense in and of itself, known as splitting (i.e., idealizing one’s own group or self and devaluing the “Other”).

By labeling some people as crazy and labeling “us” as sane or normal we don’t have to face our defenses, and thus our defenses can stay unconscious, comfortable, and intact.

Also, many people labeled crazy can’t function as well in society.

This doesn’t mean they’re necessarily any crazier than anyone else, and sometimes they may even be objectively less crazy, that is, better able to see reality.

To that end, a hypothetically completely sane person who pointed out others’ conventional defenses could infuriate them and cause them to project their craziness onto him or her and label him or her crazy.

Essentially, if a person stocked full of psychological defenses is just able to fit in and function, others like him or her will not consider him or her crazy.

This allows all sorts of objectively crazy behavior and attitudes and ways of thinking to fly under the radar of conventional consciousness.

Also, part of healing psychological wounds and the defenses holding them in place means slowly facing reality more.

This can be extremely painful, and for a time, sometimes a long time, this can make it more difficult for a person to function in society.

So even though a person is healing their wounds, that is, becoming healthier, they can be considered more crazy.

Also, many supposedly sane people are actually just one step away from being labeled crazy.

A few shifts in defenses, a slightly lessened ability to hide their defensive patterns, or a shift to an environment where different defenses are considered acceptable can lead others to look at them as crazy.

Essay on “Mad in America” titled “Is My Therapist Good or Not?”

For those interested, I just put up a new essay on the blog “Mad in America”, titled “Is My Therapist Good or Not?“. It was a risk for me to place this essay there, because some of the essay’s ideas, such as a good therapist wouldn’t have children and wouldn’t preach forgiveness of parents, are not in synch with conventional thinking.   I assumed these ideas would meet with backlash from more conventional readers, and from the comments of the first few hours, this has proven to be the case.  I am finding responding to be an interesting experience.  It gets me thinking – and offers me a chance to engage in dialogue.

Fear About My New Life: A Personal Essay

I am full of fear about my new life.  I am planning, with my friend Fred Timm, to start a not-for-profit organization called Conscious Community — a hub, online and also in-person, for people interested in and dedicated to becoming more conscious.  This is the first time I have spoken publicly abdaniel chillin in africa_smallerout this group.  We have been working hard on formulating its principles for some time and it’s almost ready to go.  I don’t want to say much more about it right now, beyond that its ideas are in synch with the values I have been espousing for the last ten or so years.

In framing this essay, I’d like to ask myself some questions about my fear.  Sometimes I find interviewing myself to be quite helpful.  So here goes. Continue reading

Inner Child Mortality

Child mortality has been dropping around the word for decades, but what about the mortality rate of the inner child?  From what I have observed, the inner child of most people, even in developed countries, gets stuck in a state of suspended animation forever, such that most people die inwardly before they even become adults.  Their emotional traumas overcome them and snuff out their spirit.  Their family systems convert their minds into deadness.  They lose their creativity and wildness, they block out the emotional reality of their childhoods, and they become automatons.  They survive in order to live for comfort, happiness, and emotional camouflage.  They become the norm. Continue reading

Don’t Be Afraid to Burn Your Bridges

I wrote this little essay half my life ago, back in 1993 when I was 21 years old.  I was then on the very beginning of my adult path, which I was manifesting by hitchhiking around the perimeter of Australia, starting and ending in Melbourne, where I’d been living as an exchange student in biology.  I wrote this essay one early morning in my tent in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory, having hitched there from Western Australia.  I’d already made it more than halfway around the continent.  Meanwhile, my parents had just split up not a few weeks before, and I found this out via telephone.  I knew that when I returned home to New York nothing in my life would ever be the same, myself included.  I knew that if I were to survive and thrive that I would have to look deep inside myself and know who I was, what I stood for, and where I was going.  And so I wrote, channeling the truth that was pouring out of me.  This gem, as I see it in hindsight, was one of my first clear expressions of that. Continue reading

An Open Letter to Humans of the Year 2100

Dear humans of the year 2100,

By the time you read this I will be long dead, probably forty or fifty years already.  The things about which I write are obvious to you.  To you it is obvious that we, your progenitors, failed.  We failed to make the changes necessary to allow our species to live sustainably on this planet.  We failed to use the technology at our disposal to live cleanly on Earth.  We failed to use farming and waste disposal methods that did not poison the land and water and air.  In our quest for lives of comfort we used our planet, and psychologically our children, as a sewer. Continue reading

Pros and Cons of Having Gone to Swarthmore

Twenty years ago this month I graduated from Swarthmore College with a liberal arts degree in biology.  I’d been well-trained to do everything and nothing:  everything because four years of Swarthmore convinced me that I could learn most anything successfully, and nothing because past that I really hadn’t learned much of practical value.  After leaving Swarthmore I entered the world with high confidence and major insecurity.  I had some wonderful and very rough years ahead.  Had Swarthmore prepared me for a balanced life as it so roundly promised or had it failed me?  Reflecting on those formative years of two decades back, I wish to study my college experience, in good Swarthmore fashion, logically. Continue reading

Most People…

[I wrote this poem four years ago today, on 12/27/2009.  I just dug it up….and liked it.]

••••    ••••    ••••    ••••    ••••

Most people stay in relationships because they are frightened of being alone…

…yet never acknowledge this to their partners.

Most people have children because they don’t know what else to do with their lives…

…yet are terrified to conceive of what this “what else” might be. Continue reading

In a Lost Stage of My Life

(written 8/29/13)

I’ve known for a while that I’m rather lost.  Not totally lost — but still, kind of lost.  I’m not sure exactly where I’m going or what path I’m on.  I would say that I have been kind of lost for about three-and-a-half years.  It’s a stage of my life.

Recently I have come to think of my conscious life as having been in four stages so far.

The first stage of my conscious life was from about age three or four to age twenty.  In a nutshell I guess you could call that stage my conscious childhood.  Continue reading

Where is the Evidence for my Point of View?

[Written in June, 2011.]

Over the years I have received emails from people (and had face-to-face conversations with many) who feel I present no evidence for the radical sides of my point of view.

These words provide a good challenge for me, and have inspired this essay.  What evidence do I have?  How have I arrived at my conclusions?  Why am I so confident, for instance, when I say that all parents, to varying degrees, are traumatizers? Continue reading

Fifteen Lies Debunked in Sixty-Five Words or Less

[Originally posted 12/26/09.]

Lie #1:  Romantic Relationships Help People Grow.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, romantic relationships help people become comfortable, and over the long haul comfort is contrary to growth.  Most people get into relationships in an attempt to create the safe, womblike childhood they never had.  In so doing, they never learn how to love themselves fully—from within.  That is the real relationship.

Lie #2:  We All Have Sexual Needs.

Sexuality is a misplaced lens through which we express of our desperate, anachronistic desire to have been loved fully as children.  Continue reading

Climate Change: The Gods Aren’t Punishing Us – We’re Doing it to Ourselves

[Written in 2008.]

“Primitive” people throughout history have had a tendency to blame themselves when things go wrong in their world. They struggled to appease angry gods for times of drought and disease and accident and famine, thinking their own moral imperfections and behavioral errors to be the cause. Yet all too often they, with their “self-centered” worldview, were blaming themselves for things which had nothing do with them. The irony is, our modern world, with its global warming, melting polar ice caps, radical loss of species, and massive pollution, is falling apart directly BECAUSE of humanity’s sick actions – and yet now we deny it! Continue reading

Overpopulation: It Is Time for the Old Species to Die Out

[Written around 2005.]

Signs of human overpopulation are everywhere, yet few talk about it. There are over six billions humans and their numbers are only expanding. Humans are destroying the balance of the planet at an alarming rate. Other species are going extinct faster than ever before – because of the insanity of Homo sapiens. Forests are being decimated, oceans polluted, ice caps melted, and the air and soil is growing toxic. None of this is a mystery, yet few do the math. Continue reading

Evolution Ain’t What It Used Be

[Written around 2006.]

In biologically evolutionary terms the fittest organisms are those that bear the most offspring surviving to reproductive age.  Many humans still believe this to be a worthy life goal, even an obligation, and feel they are letting down their species, their culture, their families, and their race if they don’t have children.  But how sickening this tribal attitude is!  What about the good of our world? Continue reading

Homosexuality: A Chance For Human Evolution

[Written around 2005.]

Gay people who have come out of the closet have one main evolutionary advantage over straight people: they have experienced a basic pattern of breaking from the family system, and this creates in them a template for truth-telling that can apply to all other areas of life. At some level they know firsthand what it feels like to be rejected and pathologized by the worst of the family, and because they know how to define a part of their identity in spite of it, they take one step closer to enlightenment. Continue reading

Being in Love is a Disturbed Ideal

[Written around 2006.]

Although society and most people – and of course popular music – hold being “in love” as the ideal state of human existence, they are all deluding themselves, literally.  Being in love is little more than the state of transferring onto some new person – your “love object” – all your repressed childhood hopes that your parents will finally come to rescue you.  This hope, which is the root of all addictions, is so intense that if you actually believe that it can be fulfilled it sends you into the deepest emotional orbit, more intense even than heroin.  No wonder most people desperately strive for it. Continue reading

If the Healthiest People Remain Celibate then What Happens to the Future of Our Species?

[Written around 2005.]

It is ironic that many people, when I speak of celibacy as an ideal, argue that following my lead would drive our species to extinction. In our overpopulated world of nearly seven billion people – who are driving us to the edge! – can we really fear celibacy and the path to enlightenment so much? Continue reading