Street Smarts for Challenging Times: Second Edition

By Paul W. Blythe PhD

Paul came out of nowhere. Inspired by helpful people and is wife, he earned BA,MA,PhD in Psychology, while feeding a family. Becoming a life long learner, he has lived a happy and successful life and is proud of his grown-up children in Australia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Aug 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452502311

Paul W. Blythe PhD

Paul, as he is known to his friends, walks us through a virtual minefield of potential suffering, as people struggle with their faulty "user manuals" for living. He sees this suffering as unnecessary. He ends on a topic of effective helping, because we often suffer other people's discomfort. Page by page, he offers alternative ways of seeing what's real and what's not. Now is the time to make a start. Make your life fulfilling!

Book preview

STREET

SMARTS

FOR CHALLENGING TIMES

SECOND EDITION

Paul W. Blythe, PhD

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Copyright © 2002, 2011, 2012 Paul W. Blythe, PhD.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Interior Graphics/Art Credit: Margi Prideaux PhD

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

ISBN: 978-1-4525-0230-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-0231-1 (e)

Printed in the United States of America

Balboa Press rev. date: 08/11/2011

Contents

… DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

… PREFACE

1 INTRODUCTION

2 HELL IS RIGHT HERE ON EARTH!

3 SATAN IS AMONGST US!

4 OVERCOMING HELL IN FAMILIES

5 WHO DO YOU THINK

YOU ARE?

6 OVERCOMING HELL IN PARTNERSHIPS

7 OVERCOMING HELL

AT WORK

8 GROWING AND DEVELOPING

9 HAZARDOUS IDEAS, SUCCESS & WELL-BEING

10 PURPOSE: THE KEY TO SELF-RESPECT

11 "LET THE FORCE BE

WITH YOU!"

12 EFFECTIVE HELPING

… EPILOGUE

… APPENDIX A: MORE HAZARDOUS IDEAS

… BIBLIOGRAPHY

… ABOUT THE AUTHOR

… DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This Book is dedicated to all who wish to overcome difficulties in their world, rather than complain. My difficulties early in life gave me the courage to do what is necessary. Yet, as is likely at some point in everyone’s life, I discovered the importance of inspiring friendship, especially when it gets too rough for rugged individuals.

I wish to honour the inspiration of my Wife, Libby; my Daughter, Margaret; Son, Joseph; Son-in-law Geoffrey; who have all stuck by me through good times and bad. Also, schoolteachers and friends, over the years insisted on honouring potentials in me, for no apparent reason except to be genuinely interested. I hope readers will see that this kind of support is one of the finest forms of friendship or love.

At times, I could not have carried on without the wisdom and guidance of Uranda, a great teacher, whom I never met. He died in 1954 but many faithful friends recorded his wisdom on tape and in print, thus many more were to benefit from his wisdom. They also expanded upon this, making it real and timely.

Other friends such as Irene Walker, John Morris, and Susan St. James have helped with editorial comments. So, this book is dedicated to friendship.

***

Many scholars have helped me and some will be listed in the back of the book. Yet, I am most indebted to Lloyd A. Meeker (pen name: Uranda) who founded the Universal Institute of Applied Ontology. Uranda, with the help of many followers, gave me wonderful keys to a fulfilling life. I have unashamedly borrowed liberally from these here; apparently adopting them as my own, but he taught me that no ideas belong to any person. They reside in the electro-magnetic field of the planet. As Galileo put it: No one can teach another anything! We can only help them discover it in themselves. I hope to show how you can discover all you need within yourself.

STREET SMARTS

"If you have life in you,

you have access to the secrets of the ages,

for the truth of the universe resides in each

and every human being."

Morihei Ueshiba, Founder of Aikido

… PREFACE

One winter day, when my daughter was six years old, we stood looking up at a clear blue sky. She asked: Daddy, why are we polluting the sky with our chimney? I was in hell and didn’t know it. I wanted, more than anything, for her to trust me to do the right thing, to be wise for her, to be someone she could be proud of. I remember feeling tormented and being at a loss for words. I likely mumbled something about not much pollution, or We don’t want to, but this is all we have to heat the house. What hope is there for us, regardless of health, wealth or anything, if our lives are filled with painful questions and with the answers out of our reach? For me it is a hellish torment when, I am powerless to do what I see needs to be done. It is even more tormenting when I can’t see the right way to go. For me, hell happens when our instruction manual to operate our life lets us down.

Over the next few years, I found that people’s experience in families, at work and in their quiet moments was all more hellish than seemed natural. I also found few answers to this dilemma for myself and for others. I couldn’t look to parents or leaders in religion, politics, business etc… While some were making it I also found an uncomfortable imbalance in their lives. Also, there are indications that many old ways of doing things in the 20th Century are no longer working. Yet, it seems this Century promises to be a happier time for we humans on the planet as we turn to cooperation, and set our minds to caring for the Earth. Also, we must find our way out of the old and into the new. In one Century, we have turned our back on our elders who may have been helpful in past centuries. We have retired them at age 65 and, as they too bought into this idea, they stopped developing and many have thus allowed themselves to become useless, for the most part. Our educational system also seems to have other agendas besides preparing people for life on the planet. It seems better to look for helpful ideas from the distant past because some of these are time tested and proved to be worth cherishing.

My daughter’s question and others like it, I recall, made me painfully aware that I was not providing her and her brother with the kind of parenting I lacked as a child. After all, like many others, I had made a vow to myself not to put my kids through the kind of experience I had. I was not aware at the time but my daughter had become my teacher, who would help me grow and develop. So, right off the bat, we must see that people who make us uncomfortable can bring us a blessing.

This book, I hope, will give some answers to the painful questions. However, the best answers will be your own after you explore mine and modify them to fit your uniqueness. By telling of my experience, I also hope you can save yourself the some discomfort. I want to keep it simple and user friendly. If I did it right, you ought to be able to read it out loud to someone who can’t read. I have a background in educational psychology, which may help. Yet, an academic background tends toward making it a scholarly thing that only a few would wish to read. In some ways, it may seem like I am pointing to almost everything in Western Society that someone holds as dear to their heart. I am not complaining about all those things but the way we see or experience them, can produce a hellish experience.

We seem to go through four stages when we learn something new:

1.    Unconsciously incompetent (Ignorance is bliss.)

2.    Conscious of our incompetence (Egg on our face.)

3.    Conscious of our competence (Look, Ma, no hands!)

4.    Unconsciously competent (So what’s new?)

In order to change we need to be aware of a possible new direction. To do this I am using an unusual concept of hell and Satan. I hope it is not overdone in the book, but will be up to you to judge if this is a true picture or just a metaphor. After I have explored the various forms of humanly produced hell and some consideration of the devil or Satan, as some think about him, I wish to explore how we can overcome our plight. I am sensitive to the issue gender specific language and will avoid this as it turns some people away from finding what they seek. Basically, I think developing and maturing is our only hope. Sadly, as I said, we can’t expect much help on this. Parents and other authority figures lack a total picture and a real mentor is rare for most of us.

Finally, I would like to leave you with a picture of High Level Wellness, as a target to shoot for. Over the centuries, many have excelled in some area but few have attained balance over their total life experience to reveal well-being in all areas. I admit I am still working on this one, too.

1 INTRODUCTION

This book is written in the spirit of GULLIVER’S TRAVELS. In his day, Jonathan Swift used his book to alert people to difficulties in his society. In the 1950s, Anthropologist, Edward Hall said something, which I have found to be a key to many of our dilemmas: Culture hides more than it reveals. And it hides most from its participants. Because we are in our culture, things around us just become normal and ordinary. Incidentally, what is normal may not be natural! For example, 50 years ago it was normal for people to smoke in public places and there were many more smokers than non-smokers.

We don’t see the way we are doing things because the doing becomes automatic. It’s like walking around in a supermarket. We are concentrating on what we want to buy; but the way we move around the aisles, being courteous to other shoppers, just goes unnoticed until something rude happens. So people go about their days in Western Society unaware of much of the things they are doing. Most of these things are harmless but some of them produce pain, unwittingly. I call these cultural blind spots. In pointing to these blind spots, I am not poking fun. There is nothing funny about them really, but a sense of humour always helps.

Most of us are actually unaware of it but each of our eyes has a little blind spot. It is caused by the need for bundle of nerves in the eye to go back and connect to the brain. That part doesn’t have any optic nerves on the surface and thus we have this small spot, which we get used to, where we can’t see. Fortunately, for most of us, the other eye sees in that area and we don’t lose any info because of the blind spot. Yet, to overcome our cultural blind spots, we need to adopt a different viewpoint. That often comes as a rude awakening. An important feature of this book is to help people see and overcome the blind spots. More important, we must recognize when and how we get used to pain and discomfort in our circumstances. We have become numb to our discomfort. Still, we must be aware of it, if we wish to change for the better.

While our Western society has been attractive to many for immigration, many are distressed by the lack of any sense of direction for society. Also, in spite of material wealth, people seem no happier than those in poor countries. Even very highly paid people are slaves to their job, working long hours, because there are things they can’t trust others to do for them. Governments seem unable to see beyond the next election and are not likely to think beyond their own existence to push for sweeping change.

Also, most of these people lack any sense that their ideas matter, and they lack any sense that, if they had valuable thoughts, these could make a difference. Some years ago, a young woman was raped and murdered in a New York street. Nearly a hundred people witnessed the event that took about half an hour. No one phoned the police. When questioned, many said they didn’t phone the police because they were sure that someone else had already done it. This kind of thinking in such a group of people is called "diffusion of responsibility." It seems when a group of people is sharing the same experience, each person believes that someone else will do the right thing.

Some of us look to business leaders for a sense of social direction. Alas, business (large and small) can’t see beyond the 90 day quarter. Their eyes are captured by the bottom line of their cash flow picture. They may wish to treat people better but it often seems impossible if they are to stay in business.

This book thus attempts to be a rude awakening about things in our Western Society that produce pain and torment. For the most part, this happens unwittingly, as I said. I feel particularly qualified to do this rude thing because I grew up in a very poor and relatively loveless home. So I rejected working class values because of the pain in my early experience. I also rejected most of the middle class values, because what middle class people had, seemed out of reach for me. That’s what some people do when they can’t get what the want.

I also felt I lived in a hostile world with people being unkind as they went about their dog-eat-dog ways, blindly of course. The media encourages us to see the world as a hostile place, by stirring people’s anger, fear, and resentment about events actually caused by people who are out of touch with Natural laws. These feelings seem acceptable and even entertaining to people in a world where politicians, lawyers, and almost everyone seems to need to fight other people and situations. We seem to be under constant threat. Everyone has their eye on what is wrong with "them" and all fail to look for common ground where they might agree. But, because I rejected working class and middle class values, I could stand back from it all and see how these values cause people trouble. One blatant example to me is the huge expenditure of money, by people who can’t really afford it, on Christmas gifts; in many cases thousands of dollars! The torment caused debt thus wipes out the love that people want to convey. My sense of a hostile world began at age 8, with school-yard prejudice because my family moved from USA to Canada.

There is a series of books called CULTURE SHOCK!, AUSTRALIA etc., one book for each country; 24 on my last count. All these books were written by people who were raised in another culture. Yet, that forced them to learn the hard way, as they made the new country their home. These foreigners, thus, had many rude awakenings as they found out what was special about these new cultures. With military service in Europe, and citizenship in three countries, I hope my reflections on Western Society will serve you in the same way. Also, overcoming blind spots we have a better chance for a full and rewarding life. If I seem to knock only Western Society, it is because I am not qualified to comment on Eastern Society. Yet, I have noticed that Asians, while alarmed at Western degradation, are generally eager to learn about the West.

Like it or not, we have been taught basic ideas on how to operate our lives. It’s like an instruction manual. Yet, I intend to show just how faulty our instruction manual has been. We will systematically examine many of our basic ideas. We took on many ideas, and accepted them as true before our brains were developed enough. Now that we are adults, we can be more deliberate about ideas we wish to accept and those we wish to reject.

If this seems impossible, remember these things:

1.    When asked to guess their IQ, people usually guess it is 8-10% less than it actually is!

2.    Even a small change for the better on these matters moves us away from torment and toward a more satisfying life! This also rubs off on those around us.

3.    As we relax, it gets easier to continue the work of choosing our basic ideas and not buying some superstition from the past that has been tormenting people for centuries.

4.    When thinking about who has the brains,