A HYPOTHESIS OF EVERYTHING: YOU ARE HERE

Chapter 1: Your Psyche and the Hero of Your Story

PART 3 of 5

YOUR PSYCHE

The human cell is a brilliant model to illustrate and symbolize the human psyche. Let’s take a look.

Imagine an illustration of a healthy cell. It has a thin membrane that is soft, flexible, and semipermeable. The organelles and nucleus are vital and functional. Nutrients can enter easily, and waste products can exit.

Now imagine the membrane of an unhealthy cell. It looks thicker and hard and rigid. As a result, only some nutrients can enter and most waste products are blocked from exiting.

In the illustration of the healthy psyche, there is first the semipermeable membrane. It selectively absorbs what is necessary to thrive and endure. Critical to the cell’s existence is also an external environment conducive to its survival as it interacts and cooperates with other cells for the health of that environment. Just like us in our multiple communities.

It seems that the human psyche is quite fragile and malleable. Here’s an example. In a world where individual identity is paramount, definitions of words change, and even the slightest hint of offense is met with a violent tantrum of resentment and anger. Whatever size your psyche is, it can fill up quickly with information and emotions. Suppose you don’t maintain a process of pushing waste out of your psyche. The results can be catastrophic. Those things can rot, fester, and infect you and everyone else close to you. A swift, fatal demise is inevitable. Think about it. In what context or environment does YOUR psyche dwell?

As with the human cell that houses organelles, there seems to be four in your psyche essential to life. The first one is your dreams and positive memories. The second is others in your life, and it’s not exclusive to other humans. Pets and sentient beings valuable to you are included. The third is your physical, emotional, and mental health. Finally, sexuality and spirituality are connected, responding to the effects of fear in oddly identical ways. Combined, it is the fourth essence of life.

The nucleus is the brain and heart of the cell. The DNA double helix inside your nucleus represents the Love/Truth imago Dei or the origin of your story’s hero. 

In the area on the left, there’s another oval with teeth in it. Above it is angry eyes. It’s not bad or mean; it’s just aggressive and wants to consume like PacMan eating dots.

I call this the “Fear Protein”. Unlike the nucleus containing your core hero’s intertwined love/truth DNA, fear is initially foreign to you and not part of you from birth. But, developmentally, it invaded your world when the protective word for your survival, “no”, was also used to defy you and your intentions. Then, you figured out that you could use “no” to defy others as well. Here is where the fear protein set up business with a limitless inventory of entitlement.

WAIT A MINUTE! WHAT? But I’m entitled to be entitled. No?

Oxford dictionary defines the adjective “entitled” as “feeling that you have a right to the good things in life without necessarily having to work for them.”

Dictionary.com says, “having a right or legitimate claim to something.”

Merriam-Webster: “having a right to certain benefits or privileges.”

Cambridge Dictionary: “feeling that you have the right to do or have what you want without having to work for it or deserve it, just because of who you are.”

Elements of fear are entitlement, equity, which is fair/not fair, and morality judging good and bad. But they all can be melted down into the first one; entitlement. Your sense of equity or fairness is a function of entitlement. You may think you are benevolent in your idea of equity for all, but if you look closer, it’s still all about you and what makes you feel better or more righteous. Entitlement is a vicious killer of your psyche and your fear protein’s primary weapon to wreak havoc and chaos.

Although most of the planet’s spiritual identity is based on some sense of morality, I believe that the source of morality is fear. English is an odd language. Morality is knowing the difference between good and bad and creating subjective values accordingly. The word “moral” invokes only positive sentiments and is similar to “virtuous”, “righteous”, and “upstanding”. All of these words are included in the language of sufficiency. So are “successful”, “abundant”, “powerful”, and “rich”. All efforts of sufficiency project themselves against the empty backdrop of lack and insufficiency. Fear is always the context.

Morality gives you an entitled license to judge, assess, validate, and condemn with steadfast positionalism – especially toward yourself. Morality is the structure for assigning labels and classes to people and all subsequent prejudice and racism. It’s also from where your sense of looking good and pee-your-pants fear of looking bad comes. Morality is one of the most insidious, perverse, and dark elements of fear because it is often cloaked in righteousness or correctness.

The core conversations of fear are “Something is wrong here.” and “I’m not ‘blank’ enough.” I’m not old enough. I’m not young enough. I’m not big enough. I’m not thin enough. I’m not rich enough. I’m not pretty enough. I’m not strong enough. I’m not smart enough. I’m not popular enough. etc.

By its nature, the egocentric appetite of the fear protein wants to consume your psyche. It starts with the four organelles previously mentioned: dreams/positive memories, others, your health, and your spirituality/sexuality.

The fear protein has already killed off your dreams for the future and suffocated your positive memories leaving only despair and regrets to taunt you and haunt you. Inside of your identity’s traumatic past, you have systematically obliterated your most precious relationships or are in the process of doing so – even to your pets. Your health is taking a blow because life is much smaller now and filled with little more than anxiety and stress. You have stepped into a bear trap that restricts any possibility of actions that support body health. With only negative memories left and no one to fight on your behalf, why should you be healthy anyway? Of all of the new things that you feel that you deserve in life, a positive self-image is not one of them.

Your spirituality and sexuality are connected, and both become blurry under the influence of the fear protein. The blurriness harbors an exaggerated hypersensitivity with the primal tendency of fight or flight to any disagreement or perceived condemnation. You train others to fear you and avoid any conversation about your spirituality or sexuality and possibly even politics. You force them to relate to you as someone they never knew you to be before. Your fear identity perverts your spirit and your sexual nature. And you wonder why people avoid you like a zombie that wants to eat their brain, yet you claim that it’s them that marginalized you.

The ultimate purpose of the fear protein is to kill the hero of your story. This is when you contemplate how useless or unfair life is or turned out to be. Ending it all is probably the best option. You might even follow through and attempt suicide. But you’re ALIVE today, so something is still protecting the sanctity of your soul. Your core hero isn’t dead quite yet.

The shell of your psyche thickens and hardens. It rejects any positive external stimuli, and anything less than positive stimuli is received as something personally annoying or offensive. Nothing meaningful can get out of your shell except useless or malicious speech and actions. Thus, the fear protein intends to create your own living hell and destroy everything you touch.

Symptoms of fear include selfishness, resentment, bitterness, hatred, betrayal, regret, superstition, anxiety, greed/corruption, a victim mentality, revenge, suspicion, contempt, boredom, judging/assessing, shame/guilt, addiction, and fearful anger. Emotions like anger, sadness, and grief happen frequently and call us to action or change. However, fearful anger is merely a temper tantrum designed to validate yourself and expand your sense of entitlement.

Useless speech is the predominant outcome. This includes complaining, gossiping, lying, making excuses, blaming, exaggerating, and sarcasm. Every symptom of fear finds solace in useless speech.

Fear, its elements, the core conversations, symptoms, and the outcomes make up your identity. It’s what you usually see in the mirror and it’s never pretty. How ironic that the ugliness of the fear context still avoids looking bad at all costs.

As your psyche’s walls continue to thicken, the inevitable result is depression, narcissism, mental illness, or suicide.