You might like this; THE BIG PICTURE MY THEORY OF EVERYTHING (7-5-2018 and last updated 8-6-2018) dallentx@msn.com HUMANS OR HOMO SAPIENS ARE: • Humans are intelligent great apes. • We evolved from many different and some now extinct species as hunter gatherers over 6 million years and only in the last 10,000 years have we formed modern societies including different forms of government, separate countries, states, cities, suburbs, and even unique neighborhoods. • Our lives can be divided into stages: infancy, childhood, adolescence, early, middle, and late adulthood and eventually old age. We all are born and we all eventually cease to exist and die. • Reproduction or more specifically the sexual act that can lead to reproduction is our primary, and most dominant, instinctual guide or motivation. Testosterone is our most influential hormone and greatly affects many of our individual behaviors. These behaviors can be modified by our other basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter and sometimes by our individual spiritual needs. The male testosterone level, and therefor it’s influence, fortunately decreases with age such that by his late fifty’s most (not all) males can exert intellectual control over testosterones influence on their behavior. • Most of us do not ever consider ourselves mentally ill. We sometimes suspect we are not normal, but ‘mentally ill? Not me!’ However, mental illness affects all of us at some point during our life. Sometimes it is a temporary illness, but it can affect most of our life. Approximately 10-30% of us satisfy the criteria for a diagnosable personality disorder if we look hard enough for the signs, symptoms, and behaviors. This is likely to increase with time. These personality disorders are one of the ways the subconscious mind copes with childhood psychological trauma. • Almost everyone is psychologically traumatized or damaged as a child, most often unintentionally, by the members of their family of origin! Even those people we meet who we think are remarkedly well-adjusted. Most of these traumatic experiences are buried in our subconscious and we live our lives in a dissociated state that mimics enlightenment. Only a very small percentage of us work thorough the four stages of resolving our emotional traumas and reach the final stage of enlightenment. Our parents are the ultimate source of most of our emotional pathology! They, in turn, can blame their parents; the grandparents can blame their parents; and so on. This cycle is continuous and likely extends back to the origin of our species. The parentally inflicted psychological trauma or damage may have been intentional or, more commonly, completely unintentional. Unfortunately, the result is the same! Very few of us ever commit, have the financial resources, and the desire to do the introspective, extremely frustrating, extremely painful, and prolonged inner emotional work that is required to heal! To finally break the generational cycle of parentally inflicted trauma or damage. Instead, we tell ourselves and promise ourselves and our spouses (if there is one) we will be better parents than our parents were to us, without having done the necessary work to heal. A lot of people tell themselves their parents did the ‘best that they could.’ The few of us that commit to heal their inner emotionally damaged selves, unfortunately, often have already had children, unintentionally caused them damage, and now finally realize what has occurred. Ninety-five plus percent of the population could easily be classified as the walking wounded. It doesn’t have to be this way. Emotional healing leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment is beautiful and exhilarating. • Men tend age much more gracefully while women tend to age very poorly when it comes to sexual attractiveness. Unlike most males a female’s sexual attractiveness lasts around twenty years-- one fourth of her life expectancy. Women after age thirty-eight to forty years of age rapidly become sexually undesirable. By age fifty 99% of females are sexually unattractive to most males! This is a disconcerting observation! I easily can recall distant memories of intense sexual attraction for a specific woman when she was 20-25 only to find myself perplexed by finding myself sexually unattracted to the same woman by her different physical appearance when she had reached 38-45 years of age. Mother-daughter pictures confirm this observation. This 180-degree rapid change in sexual attractiveness is nothing short of profound and extremely depressing! Sexual attractiveness for women only lasts approximately 20-25% of a woman’s lifespan. Having personally witnessed this has significantly changed the way I interact with sexually attractive women. • In the USA our forefather’s chose capitalism as our economic system of trade and wealth accumulation. Because of the great depression capitalism was modified to be fairer to those society deemed less competitive and or those with a physical handicap. Thus, today we practice a modified capitalism. However, the conservative movement is rapidly leading us back to pure capitalism! The increasing financial inequality is a characteristic of this reality. • In the USA our predecessors also chose Christianity and to a lesser extent Catholicism as the predominate religions. In modern societies religion is best defined as a taught unrealistic belief system which then, for those believers (the faithful) serves as a coping mechanism for life’s difficulties and its inherent uncertainties. Organized religion strongly attracts the uneducated, the feeble-minded, the disadvantaged, those prone to authoritarian beliefs, sociopaths, con-men, and con-women. All forms of religion are susceptible to various degrees of radicalization. In this country we have chosen to call those affected by religious radicalization fundamentalist Christians. They tend to be a subset of a very religious group known as evangelicals. However, in predominantly Muslim countries, where the predominate religion almost always is Islam, those members of the religious group who have become radicalized are often known as radical islamist’s. Thus, in the USA we have a radicalized group called fundamentalist Christians and in Muslim countries we have a different radicalized group known as Islamic radicals. Lastly, the various religious dogmas tend to have their greatest effect on the young (immature secondary to age), uneducated, disadvantaged groups, and those prone to develop an authoritarian personality trait. • As hunter gathers we are motivated to form smaller groups often based on family of origin, marriage, religious beliefs, level of education, profession, wealth, special interests, and geographic location primarily to gain a perceived economic, spiritual and/or a reproductive advantage. • When our individual interests align we can easily form strong personal bonds. After these bonds form we can easily overlook newly identified character flaws. However, when our personal interests change over time the prior strong personal bonds can become strained and can even break. Afterward, these newly identified character flaws can no longer be ignored! Once close allies can with time become enemies! • Most, if not all of us, are capable of both very good and very bad behavior! Humans are after all great apes. We as a species can be barbaric to one another or extremely kind and commonly express all behaviors in between. • Every human being is unique! Genetics, nurture, physical attractiveness, circumstance, religious exposure, experiences, luck, culture at time of birth, education level attained, and wealth all contribute to various degrees to our make us unique. • The individual best defines for themselves a successful life. Often, a successful life for one person is not a successful life for someone else! • Each of us is presented with a unique set of problems throughout our lives. The problems are not equally dispersed. In other words, life is not fair! For me the members of my family of origin have caused me the greatest psychological harm during my life! I cannot overemphasize this. Most of this harm was unintentional, but still equally harmful as if it had been intentional. My father has Asperger’s syndrome and my mother has dependent personality disorder. Everyone except my sister has suffered because of their profound lack of parenting skills. My sister, 15 months older, inherited Asperger’s syndrome. After my sister and I both eventually left home, my younger brother was alone living with my psychologically dependent mother. This had a profound effect on him. He eventually became my mother’s surrogate husband and continued to live alone with her until his mid-thirties. Consequently, he developed a severe case of narcissistic personality disorder that has negatively influenced his adult life and ended any chance we as brothers may have had at an adult relationship. The disorder dramatically worsened and became malignant after my grandmother’s death in 2008 and immediately thereafter my DPD mother became his devoted enabler. I currently have a NO CONTACT policy regarding every member of my family of origin. This policy was implemented in 2014 at age fifty-three or four years ago and has been extremely beneficial to my mental health! I have had problems with C-PTSD, alcohol use disorder, victim mentality, validation of the extreme psychological trauma caused by my father’s relocation to become my neighbor, extreme animosity toward authority figures, and sudden unexplainable severe dysarthria. My mental health has significantly improved since initiating the NO CONTACT policy with every member of my family of origin (FOO). In other words, I have BROKEN AWAY from my parents and my FOO. I still consider the policy of NO CONTACT the best description of the relationship with my brother. Again, I cannot overemphasize the negative effect my FOO has had on my life! As more time passes the less I think about them. I have not, nor ever will forget, but I hope one day I think about them only a few times a year. To me the less I think about them the more AUTHENTIC I become. The ‘authentic me’ represents an EMOTIONALLY HEALED me and FREEDOM. • I define success for me as free-time, ability to continuously work on projects (usually associated with my home, but also art and intellectual pursuits), and ability for continued, daily self-reflection, and acquiring new skills. According to this definition I have attained my goal of living a successful life. However, it was NOT the life I envisioned for myself when I was a young man. I am only coming to accept it for what I have achieved during the last 1-2 years. D. Allen