Does the establishment in the world of psychology have all the wisdom? Or are other insights or experiences possible? I think the latter. I also think it is important to keep an open mind about this. I did not study psychology or psychiatry, nor was I influenced or imprinted with fixed theories that I should put into practice.

 

The insights I share in this blog come from observations made by Peter Schoeber in his book "Human Design Centers." And I include you in my translation of this because I found it incredibly inspiring and it really struck the right chord with me.

 

So it is absolutely not meant to damage (professional) people. I just note that I like to keep observing and keep asking questions, which will enable us to look at this together through different lenses. It makes it a lot lighter, when you don't take things directly personally.

 

So really think of it as inspiration, as food for thought (or rather, empathy) and not as criticism or attack, because that is not how I as a person approach anything. Although I really have a form of provocation in me, it is from the intention of approach rather than defensive behavior.

 

Peter discusses in his book that many people confuse feelings with thoughts, instinct with feelings or sacral responses (the response you can feel in your gut) with feelings. So the question is, if this is the case, how can we distinguish the many voices we have within ourselves? Which is which?

 

The first practical distinction is that emotions and the responses of your gut (in Human Design this is called the Sacral response), come from a motor and are therefore connected to power. Thoughts and instincts come from Centers that are not motors and thus they have no power. This is already the first insight that may raise eyebrows, because how do thoughts not have power? I will come back to this later because this really does require further explanation.

 

Emotions, according to Peter, not only have power but they also have value. Emotions like anger, sadness or joy can emerge in different strength. Emotions are always about quality (anger, joy or sadness) as well as quantity (very angry, a little angry, fairly angry).

 

Sacral responses are about two qualities (yes or no) and different strength associated with them. Response is always about how much energy you have for something. You have a lot of energy for one thing and thus respond with a more powerful YES than to the other. In our material world, a response to earning 10,000 euros is stronger than a response to earning 1,000 euros. In both cases there will be a YES response, but the strength of that response differs. The same, of course, is true of a Sacral NO response. There too the intensity may vary, but it is always either a YES or a NO in the case of the Sacral response (your gut feeling). Something turns you ON, or something does NOT turn you ON. The Sacral response can be compared to being pregnant. You are pregnant or you are not. There is no such thing as being a little bit pregnant.

 

In the case of intuition or instinct, Peter speaks of two qualities in one certainty. Intuition or instinct are always there only in the moment. They have no linguistics, so it is either in the moment a firm YES, or in the moment a firm NO. And with intuition and instinct, if you don't act on this, then the moment is over and it doesn't come back. It is a purely instinctive reaction of the body. There is no thought involved in this. The body reacts instinctively from a consciousness and you cannot control this with your thoughts, nor is it something for which you can find an explanation. The body feels and reacts to something that in THAT moment is a threat or an assurance of survival.

 

And then we come to thoughts. With thoughts we have endless possibilities, without power or certainty. And what really makes thoughts different is the fact that thoughts are always linguistic. They always arise from existing ideas and concepts, and that immediately indicates their limitation. To illustrate this, in his book Peter talks about "sugar" and about "death". Both words that come from thoughts and both are also names for something. And while thoughts have no power, the apparent power of thoughts comes from the value we ourselves have given to words. Namely, that we take death as an appearance more seriously than the appearance of sugar. Nevertheless, both death and sugar are still just names for something. We just think of one as being more valid than the other. Or weighs more heavily.

 

Further, the interesting thing about having thoughts is that they remain infinite at all times and can also always be manipulated. Purely theoretically, you could say "sugar is sweet" and "sugar is sour". Both are theoretically true. Only experiencing tasting sugar makes it possible to experience which of the two theoretically formed sentences is true.

 

In our rational society, where we have valued the mind and our thoughts immeasurably, it seems complicated to imagine that thoughts have no power. After all, if you think well enough about what you want to become, or if you use your imagination well enough to manifest, you will succeed. If you think about being happy then you are. So how come thoughts have no power? Anyone can just think what they want and then realize it based on those thoughts, right? Then what about mental power? Surely people who are mentally powerful can cope much better with setbacks, or changes they face in their lives?

 

Yes, that is absolutely true. Mentally powerful people have a tool at their disposal that allows them to really experience more strength than people who have less mental strength at their disposal. The point only is, that the issue here is not the amount of mental power that a person possesses but rather the power that we ourselves give to thoughts. If two persons think: I am capable of healing someone, that thought is equally strong for both persons. However, the one who has studied medicine gives greater value to his thought that he can heal the other person and thinks that this is actually something he can do, while the other who has not studied medicine does not give value to this thought and subsequently thinks that he cannot. Not to mention the social value attributed to this thought. Namely, that we all think that someone who has studied medicine can cure someone. This value of society is then added to that.

 

That the body is above all (and actually only) itself capable of healing itself does not even come to mind here, because we have already preformed the value of thought: "The one who has studied medicine is the one who can heal someone," and thus you unconsciously and perhaps unwittingly turn off all other possibilities.

 

The value of the authority of the truth of thoughts, believing in what your thoughts tell you, that is exactly where things can go astray in actual life, in experience itself. In that way you are living a premeditated life. A life which is determined by the rational distortion of it. And if you know that, and you also know that thoughts can exist endlessly and limitlessly and thereby all distortions of thoughts can also lead to distortions, which you take into account in deciding what your life should or should not look like. So how many distortions does each human being carry with him or her? Infinitely many! And all those distortions are just a theoretical telling of the truth. And that's all it is. But it does cause many people to go through years of therapy, talking sessions, thinking sessions, develop physical unexplained symptoms and then they can spend their whole life with that and forget that there is only 1 life. And that is the physical life. Life in the moment and not life in the future or the past or in the theory of the power of thoughts.

 

The power we attribute to thoughts never applies to ourselves and to the decisions we make. The power of thoughts is very great and valuable to someone else. The sharing of the thoughts, of the wisdom you get back through your body about what you can share with others when invited to do so. Once you give the thoughts less value to yourself, no longer give them authority, you no longer have to worry about them. The result is that this deprives the thoughts of their so-called power and they naturally extinguish.

 

Back to the difference between feelings, instinct, and thoughts. Then what about the order? Because aren't thoughts followed by a certain feeling? For example, when you think of someone you dislike, you feel anger rising, or sadness when you think of someone who has died. Isn't it true, then, that thoughts have the ability (the power) to arouse feelings? No, says Peter Schoeber in his book. He indicates that this is the "leap" the mental apparatus makes on the pre-existing body chemistry to find an explanation or reason or interpretation as the cause of this state. In other words, you are already feeling sad, at that moment you are thinking about someone and the mind then fills in, that you are sad because you are thinking about that person. The mental process is faster than the body chemistry but it always starts with the chemistry in the body.

 

For me every day this is an experiment I am doing to verify that this is correct. I try to see my mind as something that is beautiful for others but not for myself. I also notice that this is quite difficult at times. Because I am a thinker. However, more and more I catch myself thinking about things especially when I am in an environment where other people are. Then all kinds of thoughts come into my mind. When I am alone, sometimes it is just completely silent. Then there is nothing going through my mind at all, then it is quiet. Not in meditation, not in focusing, but just quiet. Quietness in my mind. And the result of quietness in my mind is that I can better feel what my body wants to tell me. Then I can actually feel what state of emotion I am in, whether or not I want to move towards or away from something AND then I can be aware of my body's well-being.