How to Use the News

"If you're reading it, it's for you." - The Last Psychiatrist

An experiment with taking responsibility for my experience of current events.

Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes is a production of KCHUNG.

Loops by Chris Rogers. Written, performed, produced, and created by Emerson Dameron, who is solely responsible for its content.

References:
"Why You Should Quit the News" by Mark Manson
"Petition Urging City Leaders to Act on Boardwalk Crisis Hits 2,000 Signatures and Growing" by Jamie Paige
The ballad of Daniel Thorson
Fractal psychology

Levity saves lives.

Chapters

• 0:42 Welcome to Medicated Minutes
• 1:49 Too Plugged In: News Addiction
• 6:42 The Problem with Political Certainty
• 13:54 Breaking Free from News Cycles
• 17:22 If You're Reading It, It's For You
• 29:11 The Life Decoding Procedure
• 43:20 Local News and Self-Reflection
• 57:57 Embracing Change and Compassion
• 1:00:53 Final Thoughts: The Satanic Buddhist

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:42

The. You're listening to Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes on K-Chung 1630 AM in the Chinatown area of Los Angeles, california, also kchungradioorg, on the internet. The dedicated site for this show is medicated-minutescom. The music is by Chris Rogers. Everything else is written, performed, produced, curated, created and crafted with love by me, emerson Dameron. I'm solely responsible for the content of the show, at least in the case of this episode. Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes is done on the fly in loving and unapologetic courtship of failure. Levity saves lives. K-chung, los Angeles. Kchungradioorg medicated-minutescom.

Speaker 2: 1:49

I am Emerson Dameron and it has been brought to my attention on more than one occasion In fact, at separate times distributed throughout the last few years of my life, that I may be too plugged in. Some people are not that aware of what's going on with current events. They don't follow the news, they are out of it. I may have the opposite problem. I may be a little bit too plugged into the news, particularly stories that make me angry or upset about things that are outside of my control. I tend to follow a lot of current events, politics, things that I don't have a whole lot of influence over. I can vote in national elections, I can write letters to public officials, I can protest, I can make my feelings known. There are other things I can do, but I tend to get disproportionately worked up about things that are not really part of my purview, particularly national political stories. I read a lot of the news and sometimes I wonder, in this explosive age of information, when we suddenly have unfettered access to all of the classics of literature, most of which can be easily found and read online for free and discussed with groups of other folks who have read the work and absorbed it. You can compare notes on Stoic philosophy, great literature, the works of James Joyce, timeless material More than you could ever possibly read and absorb in one lifetime. I nevertheless frequently find myself reading articles on Fox or the Daily Beast, and I have trouble explaining why I'm drawn into this stuff. Maybe it's because I can't control it. Maybe it's so that I'll have things to talk about which, honestly, is of limited use.

Speaker 2: 4:36

The conversations that you can have about current events and politics are not great ways to get to know people. A lot of times things are so polarized and the current events of media thrive so much on negativity and certain kinds of stimulus response cycles that get people angry at each other and inhibit the sort of zoomed out thought and communication that would actually make it easier to get to know people. That doesn't necessarily make sense as a reason to get really absorbed in this stuff. To get really absorbed in this stuff Also, nobody cares. Nobody cares about my opinions about these things, unless I'm in some position to have some meaningful effect on these issues. I'm really not spending my time in ways that would be useful for me to pick up knowledge and skills and chisel away at my ideas and connect with people in ways that make meaningful, positive differences in my own environment. Maybe some local news is useful for that, but we will get to that in a moment. Some local news is useful for that, but we will get to that in a moment. I think even in a lot of those cases it does not pay to be as invested in news cycles and current events, particularly politics, as I tend to be.

Speaker 2: 6:22

I don't talk about it a lot on this show for a number of reasons. One is that I like to think that these episodes might be evergreen. Some of them are tied into particular times and places. I've talked about the pandemic a lot because it was on my mind and when I'm walking and talking around my neighborhood. I have observed boarded up storefronts and more recently I've observed things starting to reopen and that's relevant to the experience of absorbing a place. But and I might be delusional about this, but this is kind of a liminal show. I don't market it. I don't really tell people a lot about it. People find it by themselves and if you are one of them, you're welcome to get in touch. You can email me at edamarin at gmailcom if you got something to say about it. It's the few and the proud that find Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minute. It floats around on the internet. Some of the older episodes people still listen to, episodes people still listen to and you know if I'm talking about the elections for Dogcatcher in Venice, that's not going to be interesting a couple of years from now. Arguably it is not interesting right now either, but I like to believe that somebody could stumble on one of these episodes years from now and it could have some value, because I've not tied it too tightly into any particular current zeitgeist.

Speaker 2: 8:21

Also, I just don't have anything useful to say about politics. I've found I get emotionally wrapped up in it but, to be thoroughly frank with you, I have no idea what's going on most of the time my information comes from biased sources. I make a lot of assumptions. I'm not an expert. I don't know a lot about policy. I have a BA in journalism. My expertise lies in other areas and I think, from what I understand about in some realms of knowledge, if you're sincerely inquiring and if you are using the scientific method and the Socratic method and other methods that are effective for exploring fields of knowledge, you will find less certainty the deeper in and the further out you go. And I think when I have strong opinions I usually take that to mean that there's a very good chance that I have no idea what I'm talking about and that I believe with a strong level of confidence. There's just a high probability that there is nearly infinitely more that I don't know and I can share what I know. I can vent my feelings. Maybe that's entertaining, it can be cathartic for me, but ultimately I don't know that it's the best way to use my time, and I'm not the only person that struggles with being a little bit too plugged in.

Speaker 2: 10:24

I think, particularly in the last five years and really ever since the 24-hour news cycle picked up sometime in the I want to say the 1990s, definitely by the time broadband internet was a widespread thing and internet was a widespread thing. A lot of people have the experience of being overly invested in these stories, narratives, current events that just aren't too relevant to our lives in terms of being anything that we can meaningfully influence or control, and we get really angry. We get involved in little factions that are angry and very passionately promoting certain buckets of beliefs. We have one strong belief I believe, that climate change is really happening and that we've missed our chance to do anything about it in a way that's not going to be disruptive to the kind of lifestyles that we've gotten used to having Great, wonderful. There are things I can do to engage with society in ways that are in line with that belief, but there can be a whole bucket of beliefs that comes with that, based on affiliating with groups, particularly on the internet, when you don't really know the people and maybe you haven't paid a lot of attention to how they really interact with each other and really treat each other, which is something you should do. If you're planning on joining a group and if you haven't done that or you don't necessarily like the way that these people treat each other and the way that they communicate, then it's better to default to not joining a group.

Speaker 2: 12:36

I understand needing company and engaging with other people. I should probably do more of that. I need to get out of my hole. I've been cooped up during the pandemic times and I'm still just gradually getting used to the idea of getting back out there, and I crave social contact like anybody else. I also often desperately want to be left alone, which can lead to some hilarious mishaps when I'm pursuing those two things together. But I think it's a good idea to try to default to thinking for yourself, and the first thing that you should generally think for yourself is I don't know what's going on and in most cases, you don't either.

Speaker 2: 13:33

I'm a radical agnostic in that way. I, until proven otherwise, I'm going to assume that people with expertise engage with the world with the humility that is gained from really studying something in depth and, you know, getting knocked around in life in the ways that make you an expert, and people that are really certain probably don't know what they're talking about, because I one thing I believe is the world is an ambiguous place. All this is to say that, although I know that it's not necessarily productive to get really sucked into a news hole. It happens anyway, and I know that it happens for a lot of other folks as well, and that getting really into that sort of negative space is something that people find to be toxic and harmful, and in some cases there's nothing else for it but to do a full news detox. Just stop reading the news, stop reading about current events. Block those websites. Don't read Don't read the Federalist or the Nation or other sites about current events, particularly politics, maybe entertainment too. If you're really bothered by Post Malone, you should probably check out of that world. Whatever it is that keeps dragging you in.

Speaker 2: 15:23

One thing that works for some people is just going off of it cold turkey. The self-help writer, mark manson uh, wrote something a couple of years ago called why you should quit the news. That makes a pretty strong case for just cutting it out, and he claims that he did that and found himself happier and that some people were initially confused by it, but then they started to get used to it when they found out how much easier he was to talk to and you know how much more pleasant his mane became after he cut out the news. That was making him feel bad and angry all the time and I think this is worth trying. If you can, I think you should experiment with going entirely off the digital grid. There was a guy named Daniel Thorson who ran an internet-based community called Emerge, and then he just disappeared for a while and it turned out that he'd just gone into full seclusion digitally. He was not taking in information about what was going on, and then he came out and asked the world what did I miss? And the New York Times did something about it, and I'm a little envious. I'd like to try that and I might someday.

Speaker 2: 16:58

I'm planning on doing a long-term meditation retreat at some point. News detox is much cheaper than that. Long-term meditation retreats can be prohibitively expensive, but it doesn't cost you too much to just stop reading the news. You can block it the way that some people block pornography when they're trying to stop engaging with that. In some ways they are analogous, based on the relationships that people have with them, and the best thing to do if you're in a bad relationship is just cut it off, even for a while, and that could be with a person or a job, or the news in some cases. So if you're like me and you're overly engaged with the news. If you're like me and you're overly engaged with the news, particularly news that makes you angry, news that makes you sad, news that you have no real control over or influence on, consider just cutting it out. You can do that. That's one way to deal with the problem of excessive consumption of and engagement with the news.

Speaker 2: 18:19

I'm going to suggest another way to deal with this issue, because I think that anything that is drawing you in that way, anything that's hooking you in that way, is trying to tell you something. This is something I believe. Of course I don't know that that's true, something I believe. Of course I don't know that that's true. And I'm asking you to go with me and treat this as a thought experiment, to experiment with the idea that your experience of the outside world is trying to tell you something about your inner experience, parts of your inner experience that you might not be on intimate terms with or have a great working relationship with, and, of course, this is not an original idea.

Speaker 2: 19:29

We manufacture our experiences of the world. That is close to being objectively true, which is a little bit ironic, but we might take in like 3% of what's going on in our surroundings. The rest of what we experience is a story that is generated by our minds and our central nervous systems, which have the greatest storytelling abilities that we could possibly imagine. That form our entire experience of the world, based on a very limited amount of information that gets through our filters and a huge amount of assumptions that are made based on our priors, our experiences, things that have happened to us in the past, often when we were way too young to think critically about what was going on in our experience. All of that comes together and I can look out the window and see a parked motorcycle, and I can have an experience of that. That may be a little bit based on what I'm seeing, but is largely based on stories that I have in my mind about what a motorcycle is and means and what it says about me.

Speaker 2: 20:58

Am I not riding a motorcycle right now because I'm not tough enough to do it? Could I not dedicate myself to learning how to ride a motorcycle and getting a license? Is that just one more avenue in life that I haven't had the wherewithal or the follow through to explore? All of that just came out of my own head that has nothing to do with the motorcycle that's parked down there on the street where I live, and this is how it is when we take things in and that's how it is when we engage with the news, that's how it is when we're walking around and definitely that's how it is when we're dealing with other people. And that can be the most significant barrier to having a real, meaningful connection with another person is how much story, narrative noise is going on in our own heads while we're doing that. So I think it's worth it, just as an experiment, to zoom out and to see what happens when we take a little bit more responsibility for our own experience than we're used to taking Just as an experiment, just to see how it goes.

Speaker 2: 22:24

I'm not saying you are responsible for everything that happens to you. Obviously that's not true. Responsible for everything that happens to you? Obviously that's not true. But it can be informative and useful or at least interesting and sometimes funny to say what if I am responsible for a lot more of this experience that it feels like I'm having than it seems like I am?

Speaker 2: 22:59

It comes from the notion that if you're reading it, it's for you. That's from a blogger from the late aughties, late early teens, called the Last Psychiatrist who posited that your media consumption tells you something about yourself and if you're hate watching or hate reading or getting really sucked into news stories that make you angry, it might be telling you something you don't want to hear about yourself. But the only way to find out, the only way to earnestly inquire about this, is to start from the assumptions that if I'm reading it, it's for me. If I'm drawn to this, it's trying to tell me something and I am creating this experience. It is within me. I am engaging with other versions of myself. If I love people, it's because they represent some good thing. That's inside of me that I don't identify with myself, that I have alienated, projected and I'm now trying to reclaim. That's what a crush is.

Speaker 2: 24:18

More than anything else, you're trying to get back alienated aspects of yourself that you've projected onto another person who might be utterly confused by it and totally inappropriate screen for those projections when you really get to know them, and they might be totally confused by the way that you're acting as a result of having this experience, which really comes from your own shadow material, their own alienated aspects of yourself. Likewise, if somebody really grinds your gears, it might be that they're just doing something that's objectively somehow wrong and annoying. But I think it's interesting to at least toy with the idea that this might be something in your own psyche that you know is there but that you don't want to identify with Because it hurts to see that you can be greedy, that you can be mean-spirited, that you can be easily duped or led Weak. And so if you see someone else exhibiting those characteristics that you have alienated from identifying with yourself, that you know are within your psyche but that you try to ignore because it hurts to acknowledge that they're there when you see them on another person, it makes it really easy to project your own anger and frustration with your own characteristics onto that person and say I knew somebody around here was weak. I just knew it, I could sense it and it's you. And maybe if I punish you for that somehow, even if it's just by hating you, which makes me feel like I'm hurting you somehow, even if I'm clearly just raising my own blood pressure for no good reason, it makes me feel like I'm getting back at you and somehow punishing you for exhibiting this characteristic that I don't like. That that solves my own predicament of whether or not I have to confront this thing in myself and I think that it's at least worth messing around with the idea that when we get really hooked on some kind of negative news story, that if we zoom out and we take responsibility for having that experience and we realize that it's coming from inside of us and is reflective of priors and patterns and BS that we have in our own narrative noise in our minds, that we can learn something useful about ourselves from that experience.

Speaker 2: 27:40

And there are some systematic ways of sussing out the things that we pick up on in our own experience that are reflective of something that's going on in our own unconscious minds. I think the first thing to do is just to tune into that. Whether it's just from unplugging periodically or having a daily meditation practice of 30 to 60 minutes of just sitting, you'll start to notice the valence that certain experiences have for you and this will clue you in on where some of this information can be found about what's going on in your own subconscious as projected out into the world of yourself and books and works of art that you engage with, that you identify with, that are meaningful to you. And in the case that we're going to take on today, the news that hooks you, the current events, stories that make you angry, the public figures that you want to take down a notch because, based on our assumptions that we're making in the interests of self-inquiry, maybe they represent something that's going on in your own life, in your own head, in your own heart, that you don't want to reckon with on those terms. So you use these experiences that you're having of other people and public figures are particularly right for this because you don't know these people, you don't really know what they're like. You don't know what it's like to be in the room with them and engage with them one-on-one. You can make some assumptions about that and maybe sometimes you meet your heroes or you encounter the people that you hate and you might be really surprised at how much it's different from what you would have expected based on those assumptions that you had. But normally you're at a safer move from these people.

Speaker 2: 30:16

The exercise that we're going to try is called the Life Decoding Procedure and it comes from Fractal Psychology. The exercise was created by Mal is cheeky, who I had the distinct pleasure and privilege of studying with in a workshop a few years ago here in venice, and it runs on the hypothesis that, because we take in such limited information and it goes through so many different reality filters in our minds and our nervous systems and our bodies and our experiences. Much of what we perceive in other people, particularly distant public figures, consists really of reflections of our own deep consciousness, particularly characteristics we have alienated from ourselves which are then projected onto, perceived, others in a process of psychological projection. What we hate in other people particularly can hold valuable information about what's bubbling up in our own psyches. The further away these events and people are perceived to be, the more dramatic and exaggerated the projections tend to be the way that if you move the screen further and further away from the projection machine projector thing that's projecting the slides, the bigger they seem to get. So news stories, including stories about politics and war, celebrity gossip these provide some of our potentially most useful resources for exploring ourselves in more depth, when we can take responsibility for the outsized reactions that we're having to these things. They really have nothing to do with us. We have a lot to learn about what's going on inside of us that we may have not had the resources or the courage to confront through other means. Anyway, try this exercise and see how it works for you. You'll need something to write with. You can use your computer or your phone. You might get some interesting results, and I will be doing this with you.

Speaker 2: 32:53

To start, let's start with the question what is your intention? What would you like to get out of this? What would you like to change about yourself? I would like to go through life with more equanimity. I would like to be humble about with more equanimity. I would like to be humble about the things that I don't know and the things that I don't understand. I'd like to be open to other people and be better at listening to what they're saying and perceiving what they're not saying and getting in tune with their experience, because I think that kind of connecting with other people is what life is about. And I would like to stabilize my emotions. I've dealt with a lot of depression and anxiety most of my life. They've cost me opportunities. I would like to make peace with those things, not necessarily eliminate them, but understand that they're just thoughts and feelings, that what I'm experiencing is not necessarily real. It has run through my own experience. So think about what you would like to get out of this and how you would like to change, to be more like who you want to be and write that down.

Speaker 2: 34:16

And then the second thing you do in the exercise is to choose your news and pick something that makes you angry, just because I personally find that to be useful, or really any kind of strong emotional reaction is good, like hero worship, perfect example of this. I personally think that fandom is something that is okay for young people and should probably be avoided by adults. I think you should try to become someone that you can be a fan of, rather than being a fan of somebody, some millionaire, that you don't know. But if you find yourself feeling really worshipful of another person, particularly a public figure that you don't know, that can tell you a lot about good aspects of yourself that you've alienated. Falling in love can be like this too. Anyway, pick a news story that has a strong charge that you're drawn into, that has characters that you would like to confront in some way and, like I said, I think it's more interesting to go with a negative reaction. But just pick out a news story, something you read today, something you read this week that really got to you, and I am going to pick a story from the Venice Current, which is the local news outlet in my community of Venice Beach in Los Angeles, california.

Speaker 2: 36:06

I have issues with the Venice Current. By far the biggest story in this community right now is housing. Nothing else comes close and everything is related to that. There's a lot of homelessness. It's exploded during the pandemic. We have people sleeping outside all over the place, encampments any effect on the housing market that I could see, which makes me think there might be forces at work there other than supply and demand. Anyway, it's frustrating. There seems to be a widening gap between people that have more money than they will ever need, that can live in houses that cost millions of dollars, and people that are living on oceanfront, walk outside and dealing with crime and the other pathologies that come with that.

Speaker 2: 37:19

The Venice Current, in my opinion, tends to have a simplistic take on the issue of homelessness and other issues adjacent to that. There's a lot of what to me seems like whipping up anger toward the homeless population of Venice. This is a publication that is mostly read by owners of homes and property in Venice. It's sustained by business owners. A lot of those people have axes to grind with the homeless population.

Speaker 2: 38:13

Venice Current deals with the homeless issue. To my mind, relies on negativity, on whipping up resentment toward the homeless people, on cynicism about the solutions that are proposed to the homeless issue issue. As we speak there's a development that's being proposed that could be built on a space that right now is a parking lot that could be interim housing for a lot of people that are unhoused. They will have some low-income housing. The Venice Current seems somewhat hostile to that. They're cynical about the plan and they run a lot of stories about how this homeless issue is out of control. Something must be done.

Speaker 2: 39:00

But then when things are done that involve the approach of keeping these people in the community and giving them somewhere to live, the reaction tends to be well, that's never going to work. So it kind of boxes in the issue into a place where it doesn't seem like there's much to do except just incarcerate these people and put them out of sight in probably in jails but definitely not in venice anymore, because we just want them to go away. That's the feeling I get when I read the venice currents coverage of the homelessness issue, and I'm sure some of this has to do with. I'm confused about this. You know, I can be intimidated when I encounter people on the street that seem like they're having psychotic breaks. These people can represent things in my own psyche that I'm not totally comfortable with and not ready to deal with on a personal level, and then I can have a fight, fight, flight or freeze reaction, and the Venice Current seems to be playing to that in a way that seems toxic to me.

Speaker 2: 40:26

And the story I've picked out. The headline is petition urging city leaders to act on boardwalk crisis hits 2,000 signatures and growing. A new effort by a group of Venice stakeholders which what defines a stakeholder? I don know. Do you live here? Do you make money here? Do you contribute to the community?

Speaker 2: 40:54

If so, how hopes that what once was will be again for the boardwalk now? I think that we live in a time of discontinuity and I don't think that recreating the past is on the table. I think that things are changing really quickly and that there's no way to respond to climate change, as I mentioned, that's not going to be thoroughly disruptive of the lifestyle that many of us have grown up with and come to expect. So when I read, what once was will be again, that's just not going to happen. You can't step in the same stream twice, and I think that the people that want to bring back the past end up being evolutionary speed bumps. I think romanticizing the past and trying to bring it back is an impediment to achieving meaningful progress. But that's just my reaction. The group recently started an online changeorg petition asking city leaders to address crime, drug use and other issues they say have made the once famous boardwalk unsafe for residents, businesses and visitors alike. I think some of the city leaders are trying to address this. I think that's what building the housing structure, the Reese Davidson development is trying to do, but that's not what I think these people are trying to say with this petition.

Speaker 2: 42:51

Go into deconstructing your news story. Who is the villain in this story? To my mind, it's the not-in-my-backyard baby boomers that own property in the canal area of Venice that don't want to deal with change and don't want to risk their property values going down to come up with real, humane solutions to this problem. That is the villain in the story as I'm reading it. That lives in my experience that I'm imagining. What does this person represent? Selfishness, the sense that nothing is ever enough, that you can be wealthy beyond anything that you'll ever need and you'll still be worried all the time about losing it, about the looming threats, the barbarians at the gate, that you won't be able to relax, that nothing is ever enough, that material comfort doesn't really make you feel safe in a way that's meaningful. That's what that character represents to me.

Speaker 2: 43:59

What is it about this person that makes you angry or irritated? In my story, it's that I'm certainly very privileged. I live in an apartment in Venice that I can afford fairly easily, with work that is remunerative, possibly beyond what it should be. Based on what scheme of value you're using to determine what's valuable in the world? And I feel a little bit of shame, because what am I doing to help the homeless people? I polite when I encounter them, I treat them with dignity, but am I really doing anything to help? Or am I getting really fired up about an issue that I'm not really meaningfully engaged with outside of symbolic gestures like voting or smiling at people and treating them with basic respect and dignity, and imagining that that makes me some kind of a hero? In many ways, I am closer to the NIMBY property owners than I am to the people that live on Oceanfront Walk, and that bothers me a little bit sometimes because it makes me feel like a bit of a hypocrite. So what would I say to the person that represents this material in my own psyche that I'm not really ready to deal with?

Speaker 2: 45:37

And when you're talking to this person in your own version of this exercise, don't be afraid to get angry. How could you be this selfish? How could you sacrifice people's lives people in much more precarious situations than you're in because you're afraid to see your own life and your own self for what they are? You need to wake up and you need to learn compassion and accept that it's not just about you. You're part of this community. We're all interdependent nodes on a network and you need to change the way that you're looking at this and not be so selfish. Let it loose.

Speaker 2: 46:31

Now step five Imagine the response that you might get from this person. What is this person's point of view? Would they get defensive? Perhaps Somebody might say I worked hard to afford what I have and this is my home and you're building this thing here that's going to be dangerous to me. Take responsibility for these people that, from my perspective, are not taking responsibility for themselves, are not showing consideration for the community, are filling it with trash, are making people feel threatened, are driving away tourists and business.

Speaker 2: 47:26

I would expect that from these people. We're sick of this, something's got to be done and we don't think that building this housing right next door to us is the solution. We think that's going to cause more problems and I think it might sound a little bit defensive, but I think there might be some of that that's hard for me to argue with, since I'm not really educated on these issues and we haven't really dealt with this scope of this problem in the past and we are kind of just improvising Now. How would I respond to those excuses? I would say a lot of that is BS, because the important thing is that we be willing to change our lifestyles to roll with a rapidly changing world. We can't be afraid of change. We have to adapt. We can't bring back the past. We have to understand that Venice is changing, that we have to build more housing, that we have to be open to the community changing To be what it's going to be, because it's not going to be what it was again and it's not going to stay the way that it is. It will change and if we can accept that and we can participate in it In a productive, informed way, zoomed out, working from the height of our compassion and our intelligence that we can work with this, but that scapegoating people is not the way.

Speaker 2: 49:21

Now, as I reflect on my own life and I ask you to do the same thing, as I reflect on my own life, and I ask you to do the same thing we go to item seven in the exercise, which is think about the people you're close to, whether you're partners, coworkers, family members, friends, frenemies or anyone else who's part of your real life. Is there anyone in your real life to whom you'd like to say approximately what you said in item four, that is, get with the times, get with the change, embody your full compassion and intelligence and stop being a jerk. Yes, there are many people in my life who I would say these things to. Number eight is there anyone in your life parent, partner, teacher, friend, someone else who has said something like this to you? Sure, I've had dramatic wake-up calls administered by people who are close to me and people who are not so close to me.

Speaker 2: 50:36

When I had a severe problem with alcohol, I had people be honest with me and let me know that I was screwing up my life and that they were tired of caring about it, and that hurt a lot, and it took me a long time to accept the truth in that enough to start changing things. My reaction at first was, of course, to be very defensive and to think you're just. You think that you're tough, that you can talk this way to me. So, yeah, that's happened. I've been told that I need to evolve and I've been stunned by the pace of change. I still think that giving everyone internet access was making good on that hippie dream of dosing the water supply with acid, where we have suddenly this access to all of this information and it's insanity making. We're still trying to get our balance. I think, now that we've encountered all of these different perspectives and we're hearing from people that didn't have voices before and some of them are angry and activated and they want us to know, they want me to know that I've been acting in ways that have been hurtful to them and they want me to change and I want to change, but I'm also somewhat defensive about it and reactionary. So, yeah, people have said this to me. The world is saying this to me all the time. It's in some of these news stories that I get hooked into.

Speaker 2: 52:25

Now for the next part of the exercise go back to your childhood. This part is an inner child type of exercise. It's okay if you don't have precise memories of your childhood. As we've discussed, our memories are mostly constructed anyway, so feel free to make up something symbolic if it serves the purpose of self-inquiry and pursuit of greater equanimity. That is our motivation for doing this, or whatever your motivation for doing this is.

Speaker 2: 53:02

You can tell yourself a story that serves that Item number 10. You can tell yourself a story that serves that Item number 10. In your childhood, what is your earliest memory of incidents similar to those in number eight, where somebody said something like that to you, when you were told to shape up or get with the times or get with the program or be smarter, be more compassionate, be more in line with the best of who you are? Maybe you were told that in a harsh way. Number 11. Imagine yourself as a 3 to 6 year old child. Imagine yourself as a 3-6 year old child. Visualize yourself as clearly and in as much detail as you can and now tell this child what you wrote down in item number 6, which was how do you respond to the excuses that you hear from the villain in your story? Be present for your child. As you're doing this, be as a wise adult, caregiver, a sage with compassion, empathy, mindful awareness of another, more vulnerable creature's experience. Pay close attention and be very mindful of the child's reactions. Pay close attention to their facial expressions. Is the child smiling? If so, that's completion. You're done with the exercise.

Speaker 2: 54:49

If the child is reactive in an angry or confused way or has a neutral expression, we're not quite done yet. In this case, ask the child what do you need right now? If the child answers ambiguously, get more specific. Drive for specificity. Specificity kills ambiguity. Ask what emotional state would you like to experience? Maybe it's just fun. We could all use a lot of that right now. I believe I'll use a lot of that right now.

Speaker 2: 55:26

I believe, and, using your adult wisdom, explain to the child that there are different ways to achieve that emotional state. Let's call it fun, that he or she needn't be angry or defensive, needn't project or farm out his or her own shadow characteristics, which can in fact be very useful for meeting your desired ends if they are properly utilized and understood in a process of disciplined, rigorously honest self-inquiry. This is a little more open-ended, but it was never An easy ending, was never promised. And this is where the adventure begins. We tend to resist anything that conflicts with our dominant stories about ourselves. We want to believe that we are good, and thus we deny our own darker thoughts and traits because they suggest that we might be more complex than we realize or that we're comfortable with and change and getting to know parts of ourselves that we've alienated. But it's our best route toward becoming more interesting, becoming more self-actualized and knowing and getting what we actually want for ourselves and for others, and I think that it's our best hope for growing up and getting over ourselves and actually being in the world in a meaningfully significantly positive way.

Speaker 2: 57:15

Now the challenge here is to take ownership of these alienated shadow characteristics you would normally project outward onto other people and experience, through the seeming misdeeds and misadventures of others, especially celebrities and figures in the news, what is going on in our own psyches, so that we can hash it out and so that we can live with greater effectiveness and greater equanimity. If we want, we can stay the same. That's pretty easy. We spend a lot of times convincing ourselves that we're not enlightened, and that's very easy to do. We're habituated to it. We can keep on doing it if we want or we can embark on a process of becoming who we really are and want to be. How we perceive what's going on around us can help or hinder this process. Our emotional reactions to things in the news can tell us what we most need to know about ourselves if we're willing to be bold, to challenge ourselves and to hear it after that seriously, it's probably a good idea to consume less news. Most of it is empty calories, it gives us bad ideas, it makes us angry at each other and it makes us feel worse. So maybe now it's time for that news detox.

Speaker 2: 58:52

This has been Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes on K-Chung, los Angeles, kchungradioorg 1630 am in the vicinity of the Chinatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, california. My name's Emerson Dameron. I am the creator, writer, producer, director, facilitator, curator of the show Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes. I am solely responsible for its content. Aside from the music, which was created by my friend Chris Rogers, everything else is by me. Emerson Dameron. Levity saves lives.

Speaker 2: 59:36

I'm going to go ahead and do that. Thank you, the. Take a beat, breathe into the experience of being here and ask yourself what am I so afraid of? Maybe you're afraid of missing some essential life experience, or afraid you already have, or that it doesn't matter because nothing does. Maybe it's nothing, maybe you're just a regular nerves McGee, or maybe you're afraid of your own glorious cataclysmic power, the riotous multitudes you contain. You are smart enough to know how nearly infinitely ignorant you are, but you're not too smart to be hot, and you may already be a satanic Buddhist. Nothing is good or bad in isolation, only in context. The Buddha and the Beastmaster are a good team. This, right here, is all you get. Life is for living up down across, diagonally, sideways, because nothing matters. You may already be a satanic Buddhist.