The Mechanisms of Hurt and Oppression

It is important to keep in mind that the following descriptions of how we get hurt, and what oppression is, are not intended to sink the reader into despair. Humans, as stated over and again in the preceding chapter, are miraculously elegant in their inherent nature, benign, good and intelligent in their inherent make up. What follows are descriptions of what causes our patterns of distress and oppression, and what makes it appear as though humans are by nature dysfunctional and irrational.

We know all too well the standard phrases that label hurtful and oppressive human behavior: "man's inhumanity to man," "evil", "they're just rotten," "they just like to kill," "There are good people and there are bad people," "they are just lazy," and, of course, many more.

Unfortunately, in society we don't generally supply the time and resources to educate ourselves and our young ones about the human condition and the factors that determine rational and irrational behavior or that shape happy or unhappy lives. This is why, for example, most parents haven't a clue about a rational way to raise their children. They are left to raise them according to how they themselves were raised and treated by their parents or child raisers.

Thus we are left in a social vacuum into which pour ideas and attitudes that are driven by bad and painful experiences encountered by people. These ideas are formulated into thoughtless clich"s, such as those noted above, and practiced widely until they become handy explanations. In turn, the explanations serve to perpetuate social unawareness and block society's intelligent processes towards awareness, remedy and solution.

We then see the continuation, generation after generation, of individual distress, family dysfunction and abuse, crime, drugs, class, ethnic and racial conflict, poverty, domestic and world wide neglect, war, terrorism and the many other forms of human suffering.

Before we discuss the main cause of such hurt and oppression, it is probably useful to describe how we humans basically function mentally and emotionally.

The basis of sound mental and emotional function

We have a fine battery of senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, movement and balance (kinetic). As soon as we have a nervous system in place we begin to react to conditions, situations and circumstances. These contain uncountable bits of information, the look, sound, smell, tactile feeling, the taste, the movement, the temperature, the place, the season, the entire environment contained within the experience, as well as the behaviors and emotional content of others.

These bits act as stimuli. The stimuli trigger the neural pathways of our senses which feed the information into our brain. If the situation or condition we are in is benign and nonthreatening the various structures of our brain work in concert to evaluate the information, create associations between all the information, formulate a sensible and rational (appropriate) scheme, that is, an organized pattern of the information. Our brain formulates a operational perception of the pattern. For example, how does it behave, what does it do, how is it used, e.g. when we encounter a ball for the first time, we discover that the ball is round, red, let's say, cool, fits in our hand, bounces and rolls, it's fun, it's not good to eat.

To this information, that is, the scheme or pattern, our brain attaches our emotional and behavioral reaction. Thus our emotions and behaviors in response to the pattern, to the stimuli, become flexibly associated with the pattern and with our perception of it.

The perception of the pattern, with all its bits of information, is then stored in our memory banks. Thereafter when we encounter the stimulus (in this case, the ball) again, we remember it and our experience of it. We also associate anything else with it that is similar enough to it. We have the ability to build on the information to formulate and create greater complexities from it, e.g. the roundness and rolling properties of the ball lead to the invention and use of wheels, ball bearings and the like.

Because of the benign nature of the experience, for example with the ball, the evaluation, association and storage processes were successful. Now we can recall the memory of it in its entire pattern, or just bits of the pattern, as we did with the two bits, above, i.e., the roundness and its movement.

Also when we encounter the whole or any of its bits we also automatically recall our feeling and reaction to it. For example, what comes up when we encounter or think about the ball, or any of it properties, is the pleasant feeling when we first encountered "ball" and the fun and joy of playing with it, manipulating it. We also recall, usually automatically, the eagerness to explore it for its further possibilities and uses.

This reflects our great inherent qualities of curiosity, imagination, invention and creativity.

The basis of dysfunctional mental and emotional behavior

It is important for the purposes of this writing that the terms hurt, oppression and trauma are clarified.

Oppression is a hurtful event that is caused by another person, group or social system that has an historical advantage over the victim of the oppression. For example, bigger kids over littler kids, adults over children, males over females, leaders over non-leaders, bosses and owners over workers, the group in a population that has a history of political and economical power over other groups within the population, people typical of the majority within a population over people of physical, ethnic, racial, religious, class or other differences. (Because of this last example of oppression, the writers of our constitution intended that the minority be protected from the majority)

All oppressions are hurtful.

An emotional hurt is not necessarily the result of oppression. For instance the loss of a loved one (if not caused by an oppressive agent) is generally felt as a hurt. Physical hurts, or illnesses, always have a component of emotional hurt, fear or loss, sometimes embarrassment, sometimes everything.

All hurts and oppressions are traumatic. That is, they are felt as upsets to one's psycho/emotional system and balance. They interfere with the business of living successfully.

If the upset is not addressed in a timely and healing way, the effects of the trauma become psychologically, and chronically associated with the hurtful experience and all its stimuli (information bits).

Such a trauma is life long lasting (until it is sufficiently healed) and influences one's reactions to anything similar enough to the original experience. For example, if a child is treated badly by his or her father enough times, that child could grow to have a general adverse reaction to older men, or older men who are in some way similar to "father." If the trauma is severe enough, there could be a general negative reaction to all males, and if the child is male, to his own maleness (this is a case of internalized, self identity oppression).

An unhealed trauma generally negatively influences one's mood, perception and behavior, relative to the severity of the trauma.

The fairly recently coined term "post traumatic stress disorder" is used to describe a severe, unhealed hurtful experience. Its use in the psychotherapy world has become widely applied to all sorts of chronic distress patterns. For purposes of this discussion let's call all hurtful and oppressive events "hurts." This includes prejudicial teaching and conditioning, because negative bias is contrary to our inherent intuition of justice and goodness. Cooperation, justice and goodness are fundamental to the best level of human survival.

How does this all work"

In the previous section how we develop successful responses to our experiences is described. Our mental/emotional system reacts very differently to hurtful experiences.

All hurts are painful to our system. Some hurts are severe, some are lighter, but our neurons that carry the information, the bits of the situations, to our brain, fire fully (an actual electrical charge that activates the neuron and moves the bit from one neuron to the next, to the brain). One person's hurt is as painful to her or him as a hurt is to another person. The real difference is in how intense and persistent is the event of the hurt experience.

To a baby the cross or disapproving look of its parent is felt as a deep hurt by the child. The mean look signals an intuitive message to the baby's system, that it is disliked or not wanted or to blame, and so could be abandoned by the very person upon whom it depends for its survival.

Generally the baby will spontaneously cry vigorously until it is gently paid attention to, until it has released (discharged, detoxified) the painful effects of the hurt. In such a case, the baby will then return to its balanced, happy state. (An important reason not to disrupt or interfere with the baby's discharge process)

The Mechanisms of the Hurt Process

Our senses carry all the information (bits) of the hurtful event, as stimuli, along the neural pathways to the brain.

The hurtful event is not internalized as a benign stimulus, but as a threatening one (as, for instance, in the baby example above).

Our system is equipped with a defense system, the well known "fight or flight" syndrome. Our baby is too small to flee, so it defends itself by engaging the alarm system we call "crying" in hopes of arousing attention and support, and as an effort to detoxify the chemical effects of the hurt. (It has been found that tears discharged from an emotional cause drain out enzymes that are associated with depression)

Our defense system triggers off the chemistry and hormones that enable us to take action in the face of threat, danger or attack. We know this chemistry and hormones as adrenalin, cortisol, norepinephrine, steroids and the like that prepares our muscles for the defensive action.

This chemistry floods our brain and shuts off the benign process of evaluating, thinking, appropriate perception (except for the danger itself) and eventual flexible memory storage.

We know all too well the syndrome of not being able to "think straight" when we are in the grip of painful emotion. This is exactly what's happening, i.e. the old instinctual survival mechanism is at work: not allowing time for calm thinking when what is called for is "legs (or fists) just do your work."

We do indeed, conceptualize and internalize the hurt event as a pattern with all it stimuli, but instead of flexible emotional and behavioral response being associated with the pattern, it is the painful emotional and defensive behavior that becomes attached to our perception of the event. The entire experience, the hurtful event, all its sensory bits, the emotional pain and the defensive behavior gets stored in the memory banks as a pattern of pain, a "distress pattern."

The distress pattern in not stored as a flexible resource, the bits of stimuli (information) are not available individually (as was the properties of the ball in the previous example of flexible recall), but when it is triggered off the pattern comes out, and plays out, as a whole unit of reactive painful memory, painful emotion and defensive behavior.

We are typically befuddled when some one we know launches into a pattern of behavior that is highly exaggerated in relation to the "straw" that sets off the behavior. What many describe as "inappropriate behavior." What is happening is that the "straw," that is, the stimulus, has some component that is similar enough in some way to an older painful, original, experience. The person did not receive proper attention to heal the pain. The hurt then got stored as a distress pattern in his or her memory system. Call such an event a "restimulation."

If timely, careful and gentle attention is offered, and the healing process is allowed to work fully, the effects of the hurt are released (detoxified, discharged - see the next chapter "Our Inherent Healing Mechanism"). Our brain system returns to a balanced, calm state, we are able to evaluate and think successfully again.

Without the opportunity for such healing other inhibiting functions occur. Certainly when the original hurtful event was experienced our pained and defensive reaction was natural and appropriate, but as we continue to live and grow, the internalized and unhealed distress pattern has consequences that further damage our lives, our health and our ability to live as joyfully and fruitfully as we may have imagined and wished for as children.

The Effects of Restimulation

Restimulation is the retriggering of the original distress pattern by any event (stimulus) that is in some way sufficiently similar to any part of the early hurt experience.

Let's imagine an original painful experience in a child's life. For example, the child's father comes home from work in the late afternoon. He is in a foul mood, gruff with his wife, harsh and rejecting to the child when the child needs his attention. The child starts to cry. The father becomes even more harsh and oppressive towards the child as well as the mother, storms out of the room and isolates himself from the others.

The hurt experience contains many bits of stimuli (information). The scary and rejecting emotions of the father. The tone of his voice, the look on his face, the aggressive gestures and "body english." The child's senses also picks up the painful emotions of its mother: anguish, anger, fear, and despair, perhaps even detachment (as a learned defense reaction) or whatever.

The circumstances of the hurtful experience also has many environmental stimuli: the time of day, the temperature, the season of the year, the sounds, the colors, the tastes (if the child had been eating) the odors in the room and even from the highly charged state of the father.

The child's full sensory battery is picking up every stimulus present in the hurt experience and transmitting them into its central nervous and brain system at flash speed.

All the sensory stimuli (information) become associated with the child's emotional and behavioral reactions. The child's fear, loss (the painful emotions and behaviors of the father and mother have transformed them into threatening and dangerous "apparitions" in the child's perception, and thus the loss of its caring parents), abandonment, perhaps anger, perhaps humiliation, feelings of helplessness, powerlessness and hopelessness.

The child also feels hopeless of being paid attention to, and hopeless of its own healing system. The painful event has triggered off the child's inner "fight or flight," defense chemistry and hormonal system: the adrenalin, cortisol, steroids and the like.

The child cannot flee, it cannot successfully fight the father. The child spontaneously feels the fear and cries fully and loudly trying to get proper attention, to stop the danger and to detoxify (discharge, release) the emergency chemistry from its system in order to return to a balanced - homoeostatic - calm, thoughtful state. In short, the psycho/emotional healing process.

In this case the child's crying did not obtain the caring attention, nor support for its healing, and did not stop the oppression.

All the stimuli and all the psycho/emotional reaction, the painful perception, and all the fear chemistry gets associated together and forms a rigid, distress pattern, which is then lodged in the child's memory.

Unhealed and inflexible the distress pattern sits in the child's memory like a bomb ready to explode.

If any subsequent event which the child encounters contains any stimulus sufficiently similar to any part of the original hurt, the entire pattern gets triggered off, that is, restimulated. Instead of a thoughtful, flexible reaction on the part of the child, he or she is caught in the grip of the distressful emotions and behaviors of the pattern. This reaction is generally perceived by witnesses as irrational and at best inappropriate if they are unaware of the original trauma.

For example, the child is out shopping at the mall with its mother. They are having a pleasant time. They encounter others. If another child or anyone regards the child with a sufficiently harsh and rejecting look, this will restimulate the child's distress pattern and trigger off its entire package of distressful chemistry, emotions, behaviors and perceptions similar to the original hurt experience.

The person wearing the harsh look may not have even intended to target our child, may have been thinking of something else. The harsh look may have etched in the other person's expression as a result of her or his own history of hurt.

It does not matter. So long as our child "perceives" that the look is directed at her or him, the pattern will be triggered.

In this example, all the new stimuli of the mall now becomes internalized and attached to the original pattern. The crowd of people, reacting to our child with disapproval or pitiable or befuddled looks, the noise, the new colors, the lights the stores, the odors and all the subtle sensory factors of the environment now are associated with the distress pattern.

Now, so many more triggers have been attached to the original pattern. Now the child is far more susceptible to restimulation, so much more vulnerable as the child lives her or his life.

Let's go back to the child's home. The child seems to have "gotten over" the pained reaction at the mall. Child and mother seem to have resumed their pleasant day. Now, the afternoon is wearing down. It's getting later. The child (and perhaps mother too) suddenly begins to feel uneasy or agitated, perhaps some depression begins to seep in. They are not aware of why, just that they are feeling their moods changing.

It is getting close to father's return from work. They sense this without being consciously aware of the association between the time of day and the painful potential of another hurtful time with father.

If the hurtful event occurs often enough, the distress pattern will be restimulated often enough, then the distressful pattern will eventually transform into a chronic distress pattern.

Before reaching puberty a child can heal even chronic patterns relatively rapidly with the proper support. After puberty, nature seems to send the message "OK, you are ready to start an independent phase of your life. Whatever you have learned, happily or unhappily will be the rules by which you respond to life's circumstance." For the post puberty person, healing is, of course, very possible. It just requires more time and persistence. See chapter IV, "The Mechanism of Healing."

A chronic distress pattern does not require external stimuli to trigger it off. This pattern is in perpetual mode. The chronic pattern is in automatic self restimulation.

It is this, the chronic, self restimulated distress pattern, that is at play when people are diagnosed as having such disorders as anxiety, depression, bi-polar, oppressive-compulsive, passive-aggressive, borderline and similar other labels. When the chronic distress pattern has existed for so many years, and the original trauma contains particular elements, the disorder may fit the symptoms we call senility or Alzheimer's. (See my article "Concerning Alzheimer"s" in the Healing section).

In the description of the restimulation process, just above, we see how with each new restimulation the distress pattern attaches more and more experiential information to its construction. Each bit of information occupies one or more neurons in our brain (brain cells). It has been estimated that when our brain and nervous system is established we generally have a hundred billion neurons for use, a vast potential.

We can only imagine how many bits of stimuli are contained in any situation a human being encounters from the moment our system is developed. In the mechanisms of hurt experience we see then that more and more of our brain cells become occupied, tied up, by distress and chronic distress patterns. These cells are no longer available for flexible, rational and balanced processes: evaluation, thoughtfulness, rational perception and behavior; no longer available for maintaining physiological health.

More and more of our brain mass is tied down by chronic distress patterns, unable to maintain clear, rational thinking, physical vigor and health. After so many years we become more and more entrapped in rigid behaviors, responses and habits.

It is this process of distress and chronic distress patterns, and the rigidity they produce, that drives our troubling behavior in our relationships, in our families, in our institutions, in our systems of business, education, politics, in our religious practices, as well as in our personal function.

Remember, the distress pattern also produces the fear, "flight or fight" chemistry and hormones. The chronic distress patterns produce this chemistry and hormones perpetually. It is this chemistry (that would be detoxified in a healing circumstance) that, undischarged and undetoxified, damages and destroys cells, in our brain, nervous system, in our organs, throughout our body. It is this erosion that lowers our immune system and leaves us highly vulnerable to bacteria, viruses and disease.

Those mainstream scientists who have been studying ageing and death for decades declare over and over they cannot find real reasons why humans age and die so prematurely and deleteriously.

As brilliant as our scientists are they, like most of us, have been conditioned to dismiss the importance of our psycho/physio- emotional system and its effect on our organic system and the vitality of our lives.

As in the baby examples above, most in the oppressive society are conditioned to shut down their healing system, i.e. their psycho/physio/emotional detoxification process. As in the example, the baby's crying was not only ignored but was rewarded by father"s harsher response.

We learn, conditioned, to control our "feelings." We are taught that to show feelings is a sign of weakness. This is an important contributor to illness and "ageing." This is an important factor that interferes with our desire and ease of engaging in a healing regimen.

The Contagion of Distress in Society

Each one of us affects everyone in our social group, and our social group affects all of society. It is like the proverbial pebble that's dropped in the pond; its waves touch every part of the pond.

We cannot avoid internalizing distress and forming distress patterns in our psyche. This is the nature of our human culture in present society which operates in a habitual, hierarchical, oppressive manner. It is a pattern of power and advantage. We see this struggle for power in our relationships, in our families, in all the institutions of society. We see this struggle for power and advantage between gender groups, class and socio/economic groups, racial, age, ethnic, religious, groups.

We see this in the hostile competition between political groups, businesses, between the various bureaucracies of government and in the public service sector. We certainly see this struggle between geographical areas and nations.

How this all got started relates to an ancient instinctual fear of non-survival. It will be discussed more fully shortly.

For now, let's revisit our example child who gets hurt and internalizes the distress in painful, rigid, habit distress patterns and dysfunctional behaviors. This is not the unusual case in society. This is the typical case. The real differences between one case and another is the severity and the consistency of the hurtful behaviors that the child encounters in the family and immediate environment.

Part of the internalized and learned pattern is the oppressive component. This consists of an older person inflicting hurts on a young person, the classic case of adultism, that is, an older child or an adult hurting a very young child.

Part of the distress, the learned pattern, is that of "scape-goating." This is what the therapy world calls "displacing." It means that one person(s) deals with her or his own distress by inflicting (what I call "dumping") the pain on another.

Instead of facing and taking responsibility, that is, healing, for one"s own distress (anger, fear, humiliation, grief or prejudices, distorted ideas, and dysfunctional behaviors) one inflicts them on another.

Where does one learn this behavior" Well, of course, from being treated and hurt this way when she or he was very young. Every study of habitual criminals in prison shows that their young lives were filled with abuse.

Typically we are not taught how to take responsibility for our own distresses and for healing them. If we were, we would have a far different, safe and peaceful world than we presently have. Why we are not taught nor shown (modeled) this rational, intelligent and moral lesson is precisely because of the habit of hurting and oppressing the young one. When the young one becomes old enough and big enough he or she dumps on the next young (or seemingly weaker) one, acting out what he or she learned and internalized as a distress pattern.

Multiply this contagion by the millions of families and young ones throughout the world and you have the oppressive society.

This is only the beginning of the mischief. Because humans are imaginative, creative and intelligent (much of our intelligence is interfered with or controlled by our distress patterns) we have far exceeded the blunt transparent behaviors of our early ancestors. We have created many ways, besides emotional and or physical attack, of dumping our distresses on others. We have learned to manipulate, deceive, lie, betray, propagandize, connive and contrive, even to "teach" half truths and distortions with gentle, even loving demeanor.

Because of the instinctual fear of non-survival, our patterns compel us to play out these warped habits in order to survive "one-up" or as best we can in the oppressive society.

These machinations are modeled by the older ones, learned and internalized as part of their patterns by the younger ones. They grow up and pass on the contagion to the next generation, generation after generation.

These distress behaviors are practiced by habit at every level of human relations, from the personal to the institutional; between leaders and members of the family, of our social institutions, of the community, the nation and the world's nations.

Internalized Oppression

The distress habits are practiced in our most intimate relations and against ourselves. This last is internalized, self targeted oppression.

Previously we discussed how every hurt is an invalidation of our worth. When our identity is targeted by hurts enough times we internalize the invalidation against our own identity. First as young ones, then our gender, our intelligence, followed by the socio/economic class we are associated with, our race, our ethnicity, religion, our physical appearance, our "disabilities" and any other factor of self identity.

We begin to "believe" the invalidations. We feel uncomfortable, even hateful towards our identity, or a particular part of our identity, if the invalidating hurts are persistent enough.

The next damage is that we target others who have similar identifying features. If our age or gender, or any other element is invalidated sufficiently we target others, just as we do ourselves, who possess that same element of identity: the restimulation mechanism.

We learn derogatory slanders and names, familiar slurs against females, races, class and the rest. We call one another such names and slurs. Often we claim that these are jokes that are understood and are OK among "ourselves." But they are not OK. The invalidations, slurs and names were originated by the "oppressor" and as such they add weight to our hurt and distress patterns every time we use them.

We sometimes favor "the other" against our "own." Sometimes we collude with "the other," often the oppressor, against our own. We are well aware of terms such as "Quisling," "Uncle Tom," that refer to those who do collude with the oppressive group.

Societal Oppression

From the first level of oppression we learn to scapegoat and displace our distresses and oppressions, first on the littler and apparently weaker one, then we are taught there are other handy scapegoats to oppress; people who are different than our own social group and who seem to have less power.

Traditionally and historically, in addition to children, these are the poor, the "lower classes," workers, the physically different, the aged, females (because for one thing they are "supposed" to be weaker), people of color or ethnically difference, certain religious groups, people of different sexual orientation.

Because of the ancient, instinctive fear of non-survival and the ensuing struggle for power and advantage, humans have expanded on the instinctive animal phenomenon of the "alpha" member, or leader that controls the group (the mating, food and territorial prerogatives). Our evolved mental and conceptual abilities devised pseudo-value systems for who should rule and have privilege, who should be worthwhile, who should be beautiful, smarter and better than the rest, who should serve, who should labor and toil, who should live and who should die.

Out of our fear and distress patterns we created gods and other mystic and unprovable powers to justify these trumped up values and respective treatment. We formed "strong armed" goons and armies, codes and "laws" to enforce our rules and regulations in order to keep our power and advantage in place. We called ourselves royalty, captains and generals, and ultimately presidents, legislators and judges to keep our power and privilege in place. We invented "patriotism" to exploit fear and anger and to goad the mass into scapegoating, hurting and attacking the "other," as well as to shame and ostracize any who see through the manipulation.

In any society the group that has historically held power and privilege has been driven by the old fear instinct, and these habit patterns, to become the oppressor in order to suppress any and all others who would otherwise challenge and compete for ownership of the wealth and resources.

Through the ages, the oppressive distress starts with conditioning each new generation to reenact the old habits that keep human society in painful tension, conflict and misery.

The engine of such conditioning is the same distress patterns of invalidation and hurt described above.

The Driving Force of Distress Patterns and Oppression

After thirty-five years of counseling and working with people on these concerns, I have come to the view that distress and oppression derive from an ancient and instinctive fear of non-survival. It is this force, I believe, that impels an organism to endeavor to control and manipulate its environmental resources in order to assure its survival.

In Nature's scheme, the primary purpose for survival is the perpetuation, and evolution, of the organism's gene pool, its progeny. The more evolved the organism is the more complex are its strategies for survival. The strategies are based on that which makes the organism more successful in its adaptation to its environment and more successful than rival organisms in competition for control over the resources in the environment. This assures its gene pool of a greater chance for evolving to greater complexity, a higher evolution, control and dominance.

This seems to be Nature's method of impelling her competitive organisms to advance in their evolution. An evolution that can be extrapolated as mutation towards greater and greater mastery of the environment as well mastery in its function and capability. This seems to be characteristic of that organism we call human.

This evolutionary process is not benign. It is characterized by competition, a competition for dominance. Such competition is filled with tension and conflict, components that are partly infused with the force we may call "fear," the fear of not "wining," and the fear of not surviving. This kind of fear is not felt consciously. It is an embedded, instinctual organic force.

These entities are not driven by benign forces such as cooperation and altruism. It is happily true that much of Nature's success in the maintenance of her environments is obtained through organisms that are cooperatively symbiotic in relation to one another, the shark and pilot fish for example. But struggle for domination is typically characterized by, as we say, tension, conflict and the fear of not succeeding, that is, not winning, not surviving.

The happy irony, if it can be said that way, is that the highest example of evolution, the human brain, is characterized by creative intelligence. What is happy about our intelligence is that it includes intuition and awareness. These are the latest products of Nature's process to date. Our intuition contradicts, and often overrides, instinct in many ways.

Our intuition, and awareness, decrees that human invention has provided the means for ultimate destruction in which nothing but insects may survive. Thus cooperation, intuition, i.e., awareness, is better than instinctual hostile competition for human and environmental survival. It is true that proponents of those distress laden forces of conflict and fear, conditioned to serve in the cause of (excess) profits and power over people, are still slaves of the old fear and its spawn, conditioned oppression. These proponents are agents for that ancient fear of non-survival and its product, oppression.

Our human intuition and awareness informs each one of us that we each are as good and worthy as any other, and thus impels us to fight for such recognition, equality and "liberty" by any means at hand.

For the child this means to put up a fuss when she or he is being hurt. For workers it often means strikes. For people in the ghettos, hoods and barrios, it means often to take the law into their own hands, in the face of being deprived of equal justice, opportunity and access.

For people living under the rule of despots or exploited by them in collusion with profiteers, it often means revolution and overthrow. For citizens of those nations which profess to liberty, democracy and civil rights, it means to persist in lobbying, demonstrating and continuous struggle to put the feet of leaders and politicians to the fire of those lofty principles; the very principles born out of the gifts of intuition and awareness that great Mother Nature has blessed us humans with.

The ancient, instinctual fear of non-survival drives distress and oppression. Distress and oppression drives the pattern to hurt and condition each new generation in order to fit the new ones into roles that preserve the status quo, that is, the habitual, historical and present system of social, hierarchical oppression.

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I strongly emphasize that these oppressions and behaviors are part of our learned distress patterns and are not part of our inherent nature. If there is confusion about this, I urge the reader to review chapter two again, "The Essence of Happiness."

Almost assuredly the reader will need to carefully review all this text, because the content is so contradictive to what we typically learn about what humans are really like, as we grow up in this present culture.

The next chapter, "The Mechanism of Healing" will offer great hope, and fits well with the remarkable and phenomenal intuition and nature with which we humans are blessed.