The Lies That Sit on the Throne of Your Mind

Perhaps one of the most important articles I've written?

Housekeeping

donations requested & happily received at venmo at dare-sohei or paypal.me/daresohei

you can check out the sessions tab if you are serious about getting real support to apply any of these concepts i write about in your own real life, right now. (in addition to polestar natal chart readings, I have developed a shorter, 3-4 month intensive onboarding of the practices to shift your patterns starting at around $1,000USD. email for details.).

Disclaimer:

Trigger warning: this article is for mature people and mentions various topics such as suicide, substance abuse, rape, etc. If you or anyone you know is experiencing crisis, please get off the internet asap and talk to someone with the skills, time, resources and patience to help you where you are at. There are various free help hotlines you can call that vary according to your location/country.

That being said, my general disclaimer:

This article and my work are directed towards people who practice cultivation deliberately.

My writing is primarily written to and for people who can take responsibility for their own life. People who work to help others - their students, clients, communities, etc. As such it may “skip over” very beginner level skills and ideas. You can search the vast archives of articles, YouTube videos, podcasts etc for more content that may help you if you are a beginner at managing internal phenomena/symptoms/pathologies. It’s my intent that by setting a higher standard your natural upright qi will follow and align to the standard! My work is for everyone, but not everyone is for my work. Thanks for practicing with me.

---

The Lies That Sit on the Throne of Your Mind

This is my current, most up to date takedown slash critique of one of the monuments, one of the bloody ten commandments of the 21st century mental health religion: the idea that the body keeps the score.

This idea, and the book and the book title that has spawned it, are almost amazing in its well-meaning grift of an entire industry of well-meaning grifters.

This linked article is but one takedown of the popular meme:

Does the body really “keep the score” of trauma? - Big Think

But they are still operating from a materialist perspective on reality, which still includes binary/dualistic ideas of pathology and embodiment itself. They are product-oriented, a hallmark quality of theist or creationist materialism.

My critique goes in a bit of a different direction.

I’m not saying any of these folks mean to be grifters, or even know that they are grifters, I’m talking about something far deeper and more insidious, the very reasons why a book about trauma with this title would catch on in this culture as something TRUE, REAL and MEANINGFUL. Something that seems to “explain” an ecosystem of pain, pathology and bad feelings to a culture of colonized people.

A phrase to go with a feeling that appears to be fact.

don’t worry buddy, it’s literally all in your indoctrinated colonized little head xo

If you look back at my opening paragraph, I’ve already given you all the associative metaphors you need to be able to see the emperor and the emperor’s new clothes for what they are.

You & me & probably all your friends & family have grown up in a culture whose cosmology is one of a creator-daddy that keeps the score.

Even if you are atheist, even if you say you aren’t catholic or Christian, all of us have grown up in a cosmological worldview and in institutional, economic and cultural systems that have been created in the image of a creator-daddy that keeps score.

All of Materialism, which is to say, Creationist Materialism is based on a powerful god-being(s) that keeps score.

Even if you “believe” in the Americanized version of reincarnation & karma, which have been borrowed for Hinduism, from which was eventually born Christianity & Catholicism (the toxic idea of an immortal soul), you have been handed down a philosophy of score keeping.

Your underlying philosophy, which is reinforced by a carceral justice system, and an economic system based on debts & loans & credit, are all based in this fundamental premise.

The belief that nature is “survival of the fittest” and “only the strong survive” and that evolution is a linear process of progression that rewards the winners and makes losers into failures that go extinct, is all based on this premise. (this is the medical philosophy of Rome and thus Europe/USA/Australia, etc)

And so, when it comes to pain, disease, trauma… you were primed to absorb the “truthiness” of the statement “The Body Keeps the Score.”

It is precisely because this seems to make sense that it makes sense.

In Marketing/Narrative Craft, this is called an “OPEN LOOP” because you want to know how this quote fits into the story which will close the loop.