Spiritual Malady

Josh Yates
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

— Socrates

A individual’s reality constructs models which are approximations, metaphors, or allegories for what appears to be going on in the individual’s involuntary life. All individuals are born naked with a blank slate, but as their story progresses and experiences compound on one another, the nervous system can become a tricky proposition.

Eat, Reproduce, and Die.

This simple algorithm was created by Nature and has worked for billions of years on Earth. Nature appears very smart and has plenty of evidence dating back to the bases of all living organisms beginning with the single cell.

If an individual goes without eating food or drinking water, the nervous system of the molecular arrangement begins to respond with parameters from global functions that sends signals from different modules (organs). Genetic code has programmed tiny biological machines to do certain jobs within the individual’s water, calcium, and organic based assembly, but not a single one of the cells that compose an individual cares about what thoughts or feelings are being generated due to outside circumstances.

Within my reality, a spiritual malady has nothing to do with religion. I stole the term from Alcoholics Anonymous and have tweaked the definition to “Lack of control on the nervous system.”

The term emotions are energized states from the nervous system throughout the individual’s body. The emotional energies in their raw form are not much use for just maintaining primal functions. It appears there are no right or wrong outcomes for emotions because an individual writes their own story. Without emotions, homo sapiens would not exist. However, if the individual becomes a slave to emotions such as depression, then to live in the moment will be stripped away and the illusion of self can perceive as a form that functions as barely alive. At the other extreme, emotions such as happiness can blind an individual the same way, but at a different energized state (i.e. Cupid’s arrow, drugs, money).

I do not want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

— Oscar Wilde

My experience with a spiritual malady has included:

  • hate thyself
  • closed minded
  • relationships with individuals that were not genuine or authentic
  • alcoholism / xanax
  • loss of identity
  • people pleasing
  • social anxiety
  • emotional thinking out dueled logical thinking
  • bad situations
  • surfaced character defects
  • blind to Nature

My experience by taking control of my nervous system:

  • love thyself
  • open minded toward others
  • ended relationships with individuals that were not genuine or authentic
  • escaped the craving of alcohol (sober) and xanax
  • regained my identity
  • no more people pleasing
  • no more anxiety
  • logical thinking trumps emotional thinking
  • avoid bad situations
  • pocket my character defects so they do not surface
  • awareness of Nature

Individuals have internal wars with their nervous system. People, places, or things are not the issue. Socrates quote echos through my mind when I monitor individual’s behavior.

A few individuals who have influenced me on correcting my spiritual malady are Aristotle, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Boethius, Robert Anton Wilson, Buckminster Fuller, and Alfred Korzybski.

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