A factor is that every life experience is a unique life experience. From my perspective I have seen excessive use of social undermining. Without going into details I know that people in my social context and in the family tree just can not stop putting up social obstacles to other people. They MUST prevent some people from achieving success and establishing other interpersonal relationships. The driving force is anger and feelings of dislike. It is like it is in their animal nature to stop other peoples actions and efforts. Their cultural "being" is tolerant and have a veneer of civilisation. But lurking behind it is that raging, hurt and crying animal, seething with a primitive venegance and incapacity to understand the consequences their hidden behaviour cause other people.

It is what keeps me loyal to the Son of God. The veneer and the seething animal hiding behind the fig leaf is the dead giveaway that makes me strong in my belief there was a fall.

If you've ever seen someone catch crabs, you can see them grabbing each other to stop them get away

My family is supportive of other family members, but they're not Mormon. Ditto for my friends, but I get to pick them. I do know that some people are not so lucky when it comes to family.

A "fall" presumes we were once better, that we had somewhere to fall from.

We like to imagine we once existed in a perfect state. It gives us hope that we can somehow climb back up there. But it's far more likely we started out low and have been trying to improve our lot ever since.

A problem with our big human brains is our ability to imagine things that don't exist. We can imagine perfection. Then our big human egos imagine we're somehow entitled to that imagined perfection. Then, no matter how good, how perfect, things get we can imagine something even better, and feel entitled to that too. And when we don't get it we imagine we've failed. Oh poor horrible, worthless, fallen us. We've failed to attain the impossible thing we made up. Then our big brains imagine a magical way to get there. And so on.

Thank you for the language warning!

LOL

I deleted a paragraph that contained the salty vocabulary but forget to change the alert. Oh well.

A very old human trait that plagues many humans. There are a lot of clever phrases to identify the condition. Two I hear a lot:

"Blowing out someone else's candle to make your own appear to shine brighter."

"Cutting off the legs of others to make yourself appear to stand taller."


We have seen a master of this type of thing at work lately. I could make a few metaphors from that quite easily but won't.

When people feel like they're in direct competition with those close to them they often undermine them as a survival instinct. It doesn't really matter if they are truly at risk, they only need to feel like they are at risk to adopt this behavior, in my opinion.

You mean like Jesus rejecting those who don't believe in him?

Talking about putting up social obstacles is often the designed impact of religion. The Jesus Kool-Aid people swallow and their relationships with invisible beings is by nature tribal and exclusionary.

When you aren't still at your center and constantly need feedback, good or bad, and reassurance that you exist - the important thing is to be the center of other's attention and powerfully negative attention is easier to get.

And some people, you could give them attention all day long, and it wouldn't be enough. I've heard that the Buddhists call them "empty ghosts" -- meaning that they can never be filled, but are always wanting.

summer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> And some people, you could give them attention all
> day long, and it wouldn't be enough. I've heard
> that the Buddhists call them "empty ghosts" --
> meaning that they can never be filled, but are
> always wanting.

Hungry ghosts is the usual translation of the term "preta"
. They are said to have mouths the size of straws and massive appetites.