TRANSCRIPT
[Music]
It is amazing to see how addicted people are to their comfort, how their comfort is more important to them than almost anything else in the whole world.
Why, deep down, do they prefer comfort more than truth? Why do they prefer comfort more than growth? And the reason I’ve observed is that growth is terrifying. Letting go of comfort is just terrifying. It’s like swimming into the ocean far above your head, where there’s no ground to stand on. We don’t know what’s going to happen, and we might be swept out to sea. That’s the terror.
But below that, to let go of comfort is to enter the horror of the child’s fears. To go back into the little child that we were, who was abandoned and neglected and actually hated by the parents, and to feel that child’s horror and terror and pain. And people, of course, could argue, “Oh, well, very few children actually go through horror and terror and pain.” I, myself, never went through that kind of horror and terror and pain. But my observation is actually they did go through that horror and terror and pain; they just have totally blocked it out of their consciousness.
If people really could relate to their own child within their own childhood experience, they would certainly get why they like comfort. And when people actually do look within and really are able to look deep, deep down into their troubled sides, get into their more unconscious sides and their split-off horror, they can see why they have their problems, their addictions, their desperation to cling to comfort, to cling to relationships that even aren’t healthy relationships at all. To cling to that addictive quality of, “I need to be with this other person so desperately,” or to look at why they really had children.
I’ve asked a lot of people, “Why did you really want to have children?” Most people give facile surface answers. “I wanted to have children because I love children,” or “I wanted them because I wanted them,” or “It just happened,” or “That’s what we’re supposed to do,” or “That’s biologically healthy.” But the deeper reasons are they want children to plug up something in their own life, something that’s missing, and often to put a plug in the hole that their pain and their horror might escape through.
Then there are all the other addictions. You know, people who are alcoholics and drug addicts, they’re desperately striving to keep themselves living in a comfortable realm so they can avoid the horror that’s within them. No one, no one who is a drug addict or alcoholic or addict of any sort would have those kinds of problems unless they had a massive amount of pain and torment from their past that they were trying desperately to push aside.
Other addictions too work perfectly. I’ve seen gambling addicts. What are they really gambling with? What they’re really trying to gamble is how long they can keep their pain and their horror and their inner torment at bay.
Society actually encourages people to have mild addictions. And actually, if you’re a mildly addicted person and it doesn’t manage to destroy your functioning, then society doesn’t even consider that an addiction. Even though it’s actually, even though I say it’s a mild addiction, that’s from society’s perspective. From my perspective, it’s actually a severe addiction. And that is the goal of the norm: to have addictions that keep you comfortable and addictions that are societally acceptable.
The people who have one or two or three glasses of wine every night at dinner, the people who smoke a little bit of pot here and there, you know, keep their pain at bay. People who have children and don’t really nurture their children in the way the children need, but they create a family that looks very healthy and looks very happy and conventional, and the children are well-dressed and go to school and do what they’re supposed to do. These people, these low-level alcoholics, low-level drug addicts, average parents, people in average relationships, they’re all addicts, desperately striving to keep their comfort in order.
What happens if they drop their comfort, which is the prerequisite for growth? What if they start to make sacrifices of the things that are comfortable for them? That opens the door to their pain and their horror, and it is terrifying.
I could give a perfect example of a way to drop one’s comfort for value, to drop one’s comfort for the sake of personal growth. My example is making this video right now. The horror that I’ve been going through making these videos, the anxiety that I’ve gone through, the things that I can project are, you know, people are going to hate this. People are going to write me off as crazy. People are going to say, “Oh, he’s so immature. He’s just trying to work out his own issues externally. He’s trying to convince people of things that are ludicrous.” And the thoughts that come in my mind when I actually turn the camera off, you know, the embarrassment, the “Who’s going to watch this? Who’s going to think that I’m bonkers?” and, you know, find ways to write me off as crazy.
Yet why am I doing this? I’m doing this for the sake of sharing something of value, something that can possibly change the world. Will everybody listen to this? Absolutely not. Might some people out there listen to this? I sure hope so. That’s my goal. And also, it’s good for me because I believe there’s a great value in manifesting my true self at whatever the cost. And for me, the cost has been great. Mostly, the main cost that I’ve had is an incredible amount of anxiety about becoming real and being real because it doesn’t win friends. Or actually, that’s the funny thing; it actually wins real friends. But there’s very few people in the world who really have the capacity to be real friends because so few people are even interested in this stuff. Their whole purpose in life is to avoid this stuff and to keep their painful material far, far away from consciousness.
So I would guess that the average person who is watching this video right now, if they really want to avoid their pain entirely, they would have turned this off a long time ago and watched something else. There’s certainly no lack of things on YouTube to watch that can help keep you comfortable. And yet, I feel a need to do this anyway, both for myself and for the world. I’m fighting for me, for myself, to manifest truth and honesty at whatever the cost.