Two pure Thals speak about their lives and Koanic Soul
| August 5, 2012 | Posted by Koanic under Neanderthal Pride, Selling Koanic Soul |
Posted with permission. J writes:
I was homeschooled up to 16. I was also entirely surrounded by Christians. In my early teen years I had begun to notice that I was different and while included in the community that the inclusion was out of kindness and obligation, not genuine connectedness.
At 16 I found out how out of place I was. Since my parents were having difficulty teaching me a second language as well as not feeling equipped to teach me what I needed to know of science in the home; my parents and I decided that I would benefit from going to a private school. I went to an all boys Catholic military school and learned quite a lot. I was also emotionally destroyed. While I have since recovered to a degree, I can no longer remember my emotions from before that year. I’m told that I was a generally happy and content child, if a bit serious.
Another important point is that it was that year that I was separated from my closest friend, my younger brother. He is only a year and a half younger then myself and we were often mistaken for twins. Since we were homeschooled, we practically breathed the same air and were rarely apart for more then a few minutes. So that year I lost my closest ally and was then thrown to the lions.
The result of that year was that I decided that it was too dangerous to be vulnerable to others and that I was on my own. No one deserved to be trusted. I focused on being strong mentally and using that strength to manipulate others to do what I wanted. This worked to the degree that I did indeed get people to do what I wanted, I just wasn’t fulfilled by it.
When I was 22 I had a re-conversion experience and things actually got better for a while. I told God He could have all of me but in return I wanted to love, be loved, and be connected to others. I had recently had to look up love in the dictionary because I was no longer sure what the word meant. Soon after this I took part in an internship at my church because it seemed like as safe an environment as I could find where I would spend large amounts of time with a small group of people, talking and thinking about things I cared about. The other people were there to learn about God and get some college credit. It was a good plan and it worked. I gained a true friend from the experience, which in my book is worth the investment of 9 months.
However, after that year we all moved on to other things. I was better connected then before but it was not enough. I got depressed again and started drinking heavily. I never seriously considered suicide, I cared too deeply about the people around me to do that to them, but I was tired of having to fight so hard to even go through the motions of having a life.
I went to rehab, didn’t take and soon after lost my job. Since then I’ve been watching my savings disappear and trying to figure out how to get myself functional again. My family gently but firmly pushed me into some pretty intense therapy. I got some good ideas from it and it was nice to share with others without a lot of the pressure of social consequences but something was still not clicking.
Then my younger brother sent me a link to Koanic Soul. I was surprised how even though the verbage he was using sounded totally nutty to me how much it made sense and that he was experiencing the very things I had been experiencing. I realized that I had been doing some version of this for years, but not only were my Koans not in sync, some of them were actively destructive. To give credit where credit is due, my therapy had prepped me for this with discussions on positive and negative self talk.
In just the last week I’ve seen my life dramatically improve. I’m sure I’m not doing things optimally but even what I am doing is helping. I have my own rudiments of Koans I’m developing and would love to have all your input on it in another post.
I’m thankful to be here and look forward to benefiting from the wisdom and knowledge I gain from you all.
P writes:
My IQ is 136 on a good day. I am diagnosed with depression and ADHD. I have extremely high anxiety and have always struggled with low self-esteem; I can’t tell you how many times my loved ones told me that it isn’t healthy to always try to find valid points in what those who criticize me are saying.
I’m the most extreme introvert I’ve ever met (although I’ll bet every introvert thinks that about himself). I daydream all the time; everything else is just nuisance that gets in the way. What I care most passionately about are ideas. I become obsessed with them. I’ll dive into a topic and nothing else will matter for me. The topics change, but the intensity does not. For example, few months ago I started thinking about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics for some reason. For four months it was all I could think, read and talk about with any level of interest.
I hate talking to strangers. What makes things worse is that my name is very difficult for native English speakers to pronounce, so that every time I introduce myself to a stranger they invariably ask me to repeat my name. It makes me want to scream. Plenty of times I told strangers that my name was Joe or something, just so they would fuck off and not ask me to say it again.
No matter where I am and what I do, I have a constant and profound feeling of not belonging. It causes me great anguish to think that the human condition requires people to do things that I hate with a passion, like constantly seek alliances, work to maintain my social standing, play status games, etc. Before encountering Koanic Soul, it had never occurred to me that this may in fact not be the universal human condition. The thought blew my mind completely.
There are several reasons why Koanic’s writing resonated with me to the point of immediately deciding that I want to join the forum. One is that everything about how introverts perceive the world and themselves rings very true for me. Another is that I have always felt vaguely self-conscious about the weird shape of my head. There’s a small protruding bulge at the back of my skull, for example, and it bothered me a lot when I discovered that none of my friends seemed to have one of these. I always hated seeing my profile in pictures. So reading Koanic’s blog for the first time gave me the feeling of a bunch of pieces of the puzzle falling into place, and a very unexpected one at that because I hadn’t even realized before that all those pieces might belong to the same puzzle. But the main reason for wanting to be here is what Koanic wrote about the Neanderthal’s longing for home. This forum, to me, is a completely unanticipated hope of finding one.
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cleve_blakemore
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Koanic
