We are all a little schizophrenic. I define this term as two or more voices (in one person) conversing with each other. Hearing voices is the most common type of hallucination among people with schizophrenia. When Adam and Eve stood before the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden they were pure, innocent and quite naive. They were only hearing and listening to the voice of God. When they partook of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil they didn’t become bad, they became teachable. They were now capable of hearing alternative voices. They were now capable of taking in alternative information. They were young gullible students. The problem was that the teacher who happened to be on the scene at the time was Satan, a willing teacher of false information. The problem with Satan as a teacher is that he is a liar and can only be depended upon to give us a slanted view. The first thing Satan said to these gullible children was, “You’re naked.” This was not hot news they had been naked all along but now they attached a new meaning to their condition.” The new meaning was, “There is something wrong with us. We are flawed.”
Satan introduced shame into their lives. Shame came from believing a falsehood about ourselves. The next things he says is, “Get some leaves and cover yourselves or God will see you nakedness.” The implication here is that when God sees you, he is going to know you are bad and be angry and punish you for what you have done. Satan creates in Adam and Eve a fear of God, the only one who can straighten out their thinking. They now have a problem of shame.
Guilt is defined as feeling remorse for what I have done. Shame is defined as feeling remorse for who I am. The lies of Satan have now effectively cut Adam and Eve off from the solution to their problem. In a two step process, Satan effectively introduces insanity into the world. Step one he helps Adam and Eve feel shame for the natural condition of being naked. Step two he convinces them that God will not be pleased and sees them as bad and will hurt or punish them so they had better avoid Him. They are now shameful and disconnected from God who is the only solution to their condition. That is what has happened to every child in the world who has been embarrassed, abused or molested or gone astray.
Perception number 1. There is something wrong with you. Perception number 2. If adults finds out about your problem they will punish you. What one of us on the planet is not suffering from this same kind of insanity?
The original sin was not sex or even eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The sin was believing the voice of the snake. The sin is believing the lie. How many lies do you believe in your own head on a daily basis? What are you trying to cover up? Who is it that is doing the judging? Who is talking and who is the one with all the opinions? The truth of the matter is you are valuable and worth while and your performance may need just a little tweaking.
We all have a negative voice in our heads, an opposition in all things. That voice doesn’t belong to us. When we were born, we didn’t have the voice. The voice comes after we learn language then the different points of view and all the judgments and lies from the tradition of our past. Even when we first learn to speak we speak only the truth. But little by little we get reprogrammed and the big lie is born. The big lie is, “There is something wrong with you and you had better cover it up. Hide or God will see your nakedness.”
God told Adam and Eve and all of us, “If you partake of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ye shall surely die,” We did eat of it and we are now dead. We are dead because our real authentic self covered up with lies is no longer there. The one who is living our life is the voice of the snake. We call it thinking. It isn’t thinking. It is just listening to the liar in our heads.
Why did God allow this to happen? 2 Nephi 2:14. For us to become as God wants us to be we must be able to choose. We need to either act or be acted upon. There must be a forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life. We had to have a choice and without the lie being introduced we had nothing to believe except the truth. We are not truly free unless we have a choice. We are here to choose which voice we are going to listen to and unless we have them both available, no choice exists. In order to make us free or give us a choice. The lie presented us an option. We have been exposed to and have believed many lies ever since. The liar is still lying.
The only real addiction is the minds addiction to the unquestioned stressful thoughts that cause all suffering our lives. All depression and anxiety is caused by unexamined thought primarily having to do with who we think ourselves to be. If we stop listening to what we have identified as thinking and question the validity of our thoughts and start thinking with intention – our lives will change dramatically. Stop listening to the lie.
Who are you? Palms 82:6 “I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. John 10:34 – Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?” What does this say about you and who you are? This means you are pretty special and at least you may have more potential than you realize. The potential of your possibilities are endless. The primary purpose of this project is to assist you in the rediscovery of those possibilities. With that rediscovery of possibilities will come the desire to pass that awareness on to others.
What happens to those individuals who come to really realize who they are? Law number one in The Three Laws of Performance, 1 indicates that “How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.” In other words, how we see ourselves determines how we react to the world. Law number two states, “How a situation occurs arises in language.”
When you showed up on the planet you were innocent and pure. You were not a mess when you got here. You were a pure unspoiled child. That innocence is not gone it just got covered up disobedience, falsehoods and darkness. What happened to that perception of your pure unspoiled child? What happened to you and me is the same thing that happened to the innocence of Adam and Eve. Satan showed up and told use a lie. He said, “There is something wrong with you and you had better cover it up or you will be punished.”
There are many examples of the dual voice in the literature. One is a story of Colin Wilson who is a prolific and influential British writer. Colin Wilson, a very brilliant individual had of goal of becoming the next Albert Einstein. Because he came from a relatively poor family he was forced to drop out of school at the age of 16. He working as a laboratory assistant and became very despondent and decided to commit suicide by drinking hydrocyanic acid. Just before he committed this desperate and final act he had a flash of insight. There were actually two Colin Wilsons. He felt like there were two people living inside the same body. One was a boy idiot filled with anger and self pity. The other was his real self.
The boy idiot, he realized, was about to kill them both.
From that moment on, Colin Wilson occurred to himself in a new way. He saw himself as the real Wilson instead of an idiot teenager. He later wrote that from that point, “I glimpsed the marvelous immense richness of reality, extended to distant horizons.” 1
One prominent writer tells of suffering from extremes anxiety up until just prior to his 30th birthday. “I awakened one night,” he says, “like I had for so many nights in complete excruciating anxiety. The noises of the night and the shadows in the room contributed to my feelings of dread and despair. The desire for annihilation had overcome the natural desire to want to go on living. I didn’t want to live this way anymore. The thought that kept going through my mind was, ‘I can’t stand myself anymore.’ Then it occurred to what an interesting thought this was. ‘Is there one of me or is there two? There must be two, The I and the me who can’t stand me.’ Maybe only one of them is real.”
This author concluded that there was a speaker and a listener. He identified his real self as the listener and an entity other than himself as the speaker. When he stopped listening to the speaker his whole life changed and his depression went away.2
This concept has given me a great deal of relief from many of my own anxious moments. Typically in the past I would awaken at about 4:30 AM. The voice screaming in my head would be reminding of all the things I did that I shouldn’t have done and all the things I didn’t do that I should have done and what a loser I was. Once I realized that this voice was an entity outside myself, and that it wasn’t even me talking, I could disassociate from it and stop paying attention. I was able to separate my Being from my Doing. Things got better in a hurry and the anxiety went away. I could then look at myself as basically a good person who wanted to do the right thing and needed to improve my performance in several areas. I identified the negative voice as “it.” Wanting to share my realization about the “it” – I went to my wife and said, “I have never said a mean or a cross word to you but “it” has. I have never knowingly done a dumb thing but “it” has. “It” wants me to accept responsibility for everything “it” thinks. My only responsibility is to choose to follow my real self and no longer have conversations with “it.”
Try this and see. Stop having conversation with “it” – who does not have your best interest at heart. This will give you a great sense of peace.
Think about it. The real you would never tell you that you are an idiot or dumb or stupid, but “it” would. You would never say or doing anything to harm diminish yourself worth but ”it” would . Any negative thing that you hear in your head is not coming from you. “It” is the culprit.”
Now you may be saying that this concept gives you an excuse to blame your negative behavior on something other than yourself. That idea is also coming from the ‘it.” What this separation of voices does is allows you to examine and improve your behavior without shaming your own identity. It allows you to look a behavior merely as performance and allows you to look objectively at a negative outcome without shaming yourself. Remember that Guilt comes from doing the wrong thing and shame comes from being the wrong thing. Don’t let “it” judge who you are by your behavior.