Overcoming the Amygdala Part 82

Have you had a look at your own life?

Take an area like your career.

What is the purpose of your current career?

What parts of your working life are contributing to that purpose? And what things are detracting from it?

Create an ideal picture of your career.

As soon as you do, you’ll be able to spot departures from that ideal.

They will be along the lines of:

• things missing that should be there (or present that shouldn’t be there)

• events out of an expected sequence

• something about Time — either there is too much of it, or too little, or none

• an apparent untruth has been added, something which seems out of place when other facts are known.

• significance has been exaggerated or reduced in some way.

You get an insane scene to some degree depending on how many of these departures are present.

Try to resist the temptation to start changing things randomly in the hope of improving something — your ideal picture might be way ahead of what you have, but at least what you have is working to some degree.

Obsessive change can destroy things very quickly and on a grand scale, based on ‘making something fit an ideal’. That’s because an ideal, if not worked out properly and sanely, can become a fixed idea of its own — and fixed ideas are always bad.

You see this in government all the time: someone comes along with a fixed idea of what would be ideal for an area or country and sets about wrecking what was working and replacing it with vast, expensive unworkabilities.

You need to carefully work out a sane ideal based on purposes and familiarity with what works.

There should not be too wide a difference between the ideal and the existing scene.

If you’re unhappy with your job as a sandwich-maker in a local café, for example, don’t set yourself an ideal scene of being a super-rich brain surgeon, in other words. Instead, look at your sandwich-maker life and see what is working and what isn’t.

If your job is functioning and fulfilling its purpose it might be called a relatively sane scene. Rather than jump to becoming a wealthy brain surgeon, you might want to explore the possibilities of removing what departures there are in your current environment first.

Calming things down and making things saner on a practical level defuses the amygdala to a large extent.

One way of doing this quite directly is to look for any insane situations, organisations or people to whom you might be connected in some way. How can you tell if they are insane? Look for departures.

In any person or organisation or group to which you are connected, are things missing that should be there (or present that shouldn’t be there)?

Do things tend to happen out of an expected sequence?

Is there is too much time, or too little, or none?

Do things seems out of place when other facts are known?

Has significance been exaggerated or reduced in some way?

By locating individuals or groups which contain these departures, you can handle them without drawing the conclusion that ‘everything is insane’.

By detecting and eliminating insane areas, while taking care not to destroy the sane things around them, you can gradually calm your amygdala and restore peace and order to your life.

Try it.