Relationship Resource

Thank you for the response... Well to be honest with you as far as to what made her come back was that I had made some personal changes in that I wasn't letting the small things bother me and knew that If I made those personal changes that she would change as well, even though Royce warned me that she still needed to get professional help. She never did.

Royce was probably right, and in some ways that is what logo is referring to.  With the work you've done on yourself, her lack of change will remain the weakness in your R if you two reconcile. 

As far as what I doing to keep myself busy is keeping positive and staying the course with my job and my family but boy I do miss my wife and hope she feels the same... Should I reach out to her? yet? I mean I just found a new place to live and need my belongings that are at her place but again not desperate for them.. Your thoughts

There is no rush, and the more you wait, the greater the possibility that she has missed you as well.  Waiting is tough... but it'll give you time to read through the book from end to end a couple of times...     Technically you'll only need your stuff once you are fully set up in your new place... ideally she reaches out to you before.    One thing I have noticed from those who have reconciled, is that it usually happens when they have truly let go and often have begun to move on.  Time is your friend here...
ARb

I am not getting in touch with her but as I stated in my opening letter to you She did for the first time texted me. Please give me your opinion and share your thoughts. Should I reach out to her or wait? 

I don't know if I missed it, but did you text anything back when she did...  or you did not reply what so ever?

Hi Dojomom,

Welcome to our new forum… I just replied to your PM with more info about these forums and the FB page.  Given the high proliferation of electronic devices we leave constantly logged on to FB for prying eyes to see (the convenience and inconvenience of “apps”)… we recreated these forums to post updates we deemed a little more private…

Feel free to post a full update… and Welcome!
ARb

Message to those who are new to this forum, as well as the old veterans…

Veterans: If you are a veteran from the old forum, and are coming back to swap stories, tell us where you are at, and the great things life has brought to you… message one of the admins, and we will give you access to the veterans forum.   

Newcomers:  If you are new to this forum,  start a new thread in here… we are here to help you along.  Tell us what has brought you here, what is going on, vent, ask for advice, or whatever help you can use in dealing with your current situation.  I can assure you that the veterans are quite knowledgeable, active, and helpful.  Obviously we don’t get a lot of traffic in the newcomer’s forum since the demise of the original site and the passing of its founder, Royce Adams… but his knowledge lives on in his articles, original eBook, and the life experiences of us veterans, that he helped over the years.

ARb

as Posted by Royce Adams on RRR

Paul MacLean(neurologist) has proposed that the insides of our heads holds not one , but three brains, each one representing a distinct evolutionary stratum that has formed upon the older layer before it, like an archaeological dig...He calls this model the "triune brain." MacLean, the director of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behaviour says that three brains operate like "three interconnected biological computers, [each] with its own special intelligence, its own subjectivity, its own sense of time and space and its own memory". He refers to these three brains as the neocortex or neo-mammalian brain, the limbic or paleo-mammalian system, and the reptilian brain, the brainstem and cerebellum Each of the three brains is connected by nerves to the other two, but each seems to operate as its own brain system with distinct capacities.

This hypothesis has become a very influential , and has forced a rethink of how the brain functions. It had previously been assumed that the highest level of the brain, the neocortex, dominated the other, and could be likened to a policeman or goverment that controlled the lower levels. MacLean has shown that this is not the case, and that the physically lower limbic system, which rules emotions, can(lke a computer virus using the computer analogy) hijack the main programme of the higher mental functions........

Many esoteric spiritual traditions taught the same idea of three planes of consciousness and even three different brains. Gurdjieff for example referred to Man as a "three-brained being". There was one brain for the spirit, one for the soul, and one for the body. Similar ideas can be found in the Jewish Kabbalah, in Platonism, and elsewhere, with the association spirit - head (the actual brain), soul - heart, and body in the belly. For me personally with the mention of the snake(reptilian brain?) i hear echos of the story adam and eve in Genesis...eating from the tree of knowledge(neocortex?) and the knowing of being naked and shame and all that...

The Reptilian Brain.  archipallium or primitive (reptilian) brain, or "Basal Brian", called by MacLean the "R-complex", includes the brain stem and the cerebellum, is the oldest brain. It consists of the structures of the brain stem - medulla, pons, cerebellum, mesencephalon, the oldest basal nuclei - the globus pallidus and the olfactory bulbs(which may have something to do with the picking of sexual partners albeit at an unconscious level)). In animals such as reptiles, the brain stem and cerebellum dominate. For this reason it is commonly referred to as the "reptilian brain". It has the same type of archaic behavioural programs as snakes and lizards. It is rigid, obsessive, compulsive, ritualistic and paranoid, it is "filled with ancestral memories". It keeps repeating the same behaviours over and over again, never learning from past mistakes (corresponding to what Sri Aurobindo calls the mechanical Mind). This brain controls muscles, balance and autonomic functions, such as breathing and heartbeat. This part of the brain is active, even in deep sleep.

The Limbic System  Paleomammalian brain. In 1952 MacLean first coined the name "limbic system" for the middle part of the brain. It can also be termed the paleopallium or intermediate (old mammalian) brain. It corresponds to the brain of the most mammals, and especially the earlier ones. The old mammalian brain residing in the limbic system is concerned with emotions and instincts, feeding, fighting, fleeing, and sexual behaviour. As MacLean observes, everything in this emotional system is either "agreeable or disagreeable". Survival depends on avoidance of pain and repetition of pleasure.

When this part of the brain is stimulated with a mild electrical current various emotions (fear, joy, rage, pleasure and pain etc) are produced. No emotion has been found to reside in one place for very long. But the Limbic system as a whole appears to be the primary seat of emotion, attention, and affective (emotion-charged) memories. Physiologically, it includes the the hypothalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala. It helps determine valence (e.g., whether you feel positive or negative toward something, and in Buddhism is referred to as vedena - "feeling") and salience (e.g., what gets your attention); unpredictability, and creative behaviour. It has vast interconnections with the neocortex, so that brain functions are not either purely limbic or purely cortical but a mixture of both.

MacLean claims to have found in the Limbic system a physical basis for the dogmatic and paranoid tendency, the biological basis for the tendency of thinking to be subordinate to feeling, to rationalize desires. He sees a great danger in all this limbic system power. As he understands it, this lowly mammalian brain of the limbic system tends to be the seat of our value judgements, instead of the more advanced neocortex. It decides whether our higher brain has a "good" idea or not, whether it feels true and right

The Neocortex  Neopallium, cerebrum, the cortex , or an alternative term, neopallium, also known as the superior or rational (neomammalian) brain, comprises almost the whole of the hemispheres (made up of a more recent type of cortex, called neocortex) and some subcortical neuronal groups. It corresponds to the brain of the primate mammals and, consequently, the human species. The higher cognitive functions which distinguish Man from the animals are in the cortex. MacLean refers to the cortex as "the mother of invention and father of abstract thought". In Man the neocortex takes up two thirds of the total brain mass. Although all animals also have a neocortex, it is relatively small, with few or no folds (indicating surface area and complexity and development). A mouse without a cortex can act in fairly normal way (at least to superficial appearance), whereas a human without a cortex is a vegetable.

The cortex is divided into left and right hemispheres, the famous left and right brain. The left half of the cortex controls the right side of the body and the right side of the brain the left side of the body. Also, the right brain is more spatial, abstract, musical and artistic, while the left brain more linear, rational, and verbal.

Some thoughts about The Myth of Romantic Love: Living off the Fat of Infatuation


Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.
FRAN LEBOWITZ


Romantic love is, quite literally, a drug high. The intensely good feeling of "falling in love" is triggered by the same physiological reactions caused by free-fall in sky diving or winning a fortune in the lottery. Free-fall, fortune winning, and falling in love release into the bloodstream epinephrine, commonly known as adrenaline (the body's natural hey-hey-hey! chemical) and endorphins (the body's whoopee! chemical). These chemicals are just as pleasurable as any drugs (licit or illicit) you care to name--and just as addictive.

It's an addiction, however, our society not only tolerates, but encourages. According to cultural norms, addiction to heroin, ****, or alcohol is bad. Addiction to the thrill of falling in love is good. In fact, not being addicted to love is bad. Further, being "in love" is reason enough to do almost anything--from murder to abandoning one's career.

It is hard to name anything that gets more free positive publicity than romantic love. Every movie, commercial, TV show (sitcom, drama, or movie-of-the-week), popular song, billboard, and nine out of ten bestsellers sing the praises of romantic love.

It is painful to watch how tortured the plots become in order to work in the "love interest," as it's known in Hollywood. How is it that Indiana Jones always seems to find at least one gorgeous, intelligent, but otherwise romantically available woman in the midst of the jungle, desert, Incan ruins, Egyptian pyramids, or Peking opium den? Why? Well, as George Lucas once advised Steven Spielberg, "If the man and woman walk off into the sunset hand-in-hand in the last reel, it adds $10 million to the box office."

Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for the truth. One's only task is to realize oneself.
R. D. LAING


Romantic love is used so often because it sells so well, and the media always have something to sell. As they are using romantic love to sell what they want to sell (higher ratings, soap, Fenamint, books, tickets), they are also selling the notion of romantic love itself. This means romance sells better, which means it's used more often to sell, so it gets sold even more often, and so on. It's a very successful marketing tool.

From the consumer's point of view, however, there is only one small problem with romantic love: it's almost always doomed to failure.


Why Romantic Love Is Almost Always Doomed

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn't even want the beastly thing. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving towards self-sufficiency.

QUENTIN CRISP


Few enterprises fail as often and as traumatically as romantic love, yet are still considered by many not just a solution, but the solution.

Solution to what? You name it: love waltzes in and dances your problems away. From solving the fundamental "problem" of existence to renewed health to financial rejuvenation to a cure for loneliness, Prince Charming or Cinderella cureth all.

At the outset, perhaps this is true. The problem, however, with this all-purpose problem solver is that it is based almost entirely on illusion.

We are programmed with the illusion of romantic love from an early age. The same culture that programs us to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Free Lunch also programs us to believe in One Significant Other Out There Without Whom We Can't Be Whole, Much Less Happy. Minnie and Mickey, Olive Oyl and Popeye, Barbie and Ken, Lady and the Tramp--and they all lived happily ever after.

Right.

Mercifully, by the time we reach puberty and the advent of all those raging hormones that form the biochemical basis of romantic love, we have been disillusioned (probably traumatically) about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and (for some) Free Lunch. Alas, as the early teenage years progress and our throbbing hormones create desires for other people's bodies which easily surpass even the most meaningful childhood visitation to Toys R Us, the illusion of romantic love is not dispelled. In fact, the spell is cast deeper, stronger, in Technicolor, 3-D, Dolby ProLogic, Sensearoundsound, and feelaroundbound.

In real love you want the other person's good. In romantic love you want the other person.
MARGARET ANDERSON


We are taught (by songs, movies, TV shows) that the natural physical attractions of the early teenage years are all part of the romantic ideal. It is "the dawn of love," "love at first sight," or "if you call it **** your parents will ground you, but if you say you're in love your parents will say it's a crush and whisper `Oh, how cute!'"

We are told the attraction--which is biochemical and electrical, but feels downright magnetic--is just the start of Something Big. "You mean it gets better than this?" Oh, yes, the more deeply you fall in love, the more spectacular it becomes. "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing."

To quote another song (you can discourse on romantic love's philosophy by quoting almost any song), "Fools Rush in Where Wise Men Fear to Tread." If this is true (and it probably is, if you consider that even the wise can become foolish when hormones and cultural programming combine to lower the IQ roughly one hundred points, as it does when one is about to fall in love), the wise are distressingly silent when it comes to teaching us about a certain biological imperative common to all mammals.

Rather than saying, for example, "Yes, this is a perfectly natural, healthy reaction, but it is not practical to act on it every time you feel it any more than it is practical to eat every morsel of food you see. Sexual attraction is just energy; if the time is not right to express it sexually, for whatever reason, then the energy can be used to create something else that is productive, satisfying, and fun."

No, the wise seem to have had their wisdom co-opted by the Grand Illusion. Some of the wise tales sound more like old wives' tales. "This feeling you have will deepen into desire, ripen into passion, grow into fulfillment, and flower into love." That even the wise want to escape the birds and the bees and instead discuss flowers is indicative of just how far from reality those who sell us the notion of romantic love must go.

The message that "love" will solve all of our problems is repeated incessantly in contemporary culture-- like a philosophical tom tom. It would be closer to the truth to say that love is a contagious and virulent disease which leaves a victim in a state of near imbecility, paralysis, profound melancholia, and sometimes culminates in death.
QUENTIN CRISP


As animals, we have more in common with birds and bees than we do with flowers. Most birds pair up for a season. They build a nest, mate, lay eggs, sit on eggs, feed the young for a few weeks, kick the kids out of the nest, and fly south for a well-deserved winter vacation--alone. In the spring, they fly north and begin it all again, usually with a new partner. With the exception of a few species including some lesbian sea gulls off the coast of California, to birds "till death do us part" means that they are living amongst a larger-than-usual population of cat cats.

And of bees, well, allow Phyllis Lindstrom, of The Mary Tyler Moore Show to explain: Did you know the male bee is nothing but the slave of the queen? And once the male bee has, how should I say, serviced the queen, the male dies. All in all, not a bad system.

By the time we've reached dating age, the emotionally seductive concepts of "someone to watch over me," "in the morning, in the evening, ain't we got fun?" and "they all lived happily ever after" form an almost irresistible package, which has us by the end of the fifteen-year romance infomercial picking up our phones, dialing the number, and proclaiming, "I want it! I want it! I want it now!"

As with most illusions, reality inevitably intervenes, causing hurt, anger, and the exceptional success of broken-hearted love ballads. Unlike other disappointments, however, reality intervening in romantic love fails to bring disillusion. We still believe in romantic love; we just think we didn't measure up or they didn't measure up. Next time, we believe--next person, next weekend, next year, next lifetime it will be better, it will happen--true love, true love. To believe that the illusion is real, but that the loved one or our ability to love is inadequate, is of course all part of the illusion.

I'm not saying romantic love can't lead to solid, healthy, flexible, mutually nourishing relationships--sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. But it's not a sure thing. Fifty-four(and rising) percent of the marriages in this country end in divorce, and that's just the marriages. As we explored, if we add to that the number of people who fall in love "forever and ever" and break up before getting married, it's clear that what we are doing to achieve "happily ever after" ain't working.

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW



Jack Parr, who was raised vegetarian, said that, as a child, every time he passed a butcher's window he thought there had been a terrible accident. It is not hard to come to the same conclusion as one surveys the landscape of romantic love, littered as it always seems to be with wounded, broken, and bleeding hearts.

Those who say the solution is to return to "traditional family values," have obviously spent very little time studying tradition, family, or history. In fact, "the good old days" (whenever you want to peg the good old days to be) were terrible for almost everyone. To return to "the good old days" would require women to be treated as chattel; a significantly shortened lifespan; six-day, fourteen-hour-a-day work weeks; fifty percent of all children dying before the age of eight; increased disease, pestilence, suffering, and no VCRs.

Since we can't go back to an idyllic past that never existed in the first place, what can we do? We do what we usually do when we discover what we believed in, hoped for, longed for, and fully expected to happen (someday) is simply not true; a myth. Poof. We become the sadder, but wiser, rabbit. This prevents us from becoming the miserable and stupid rabbit who keeps banking on a payoff that is a long shot at best.

The fundamental problem with romantic love is that it is based on sexual attraction, which is, at its most reliable, fickle. Once desire dries up--in a week, a month, or a year--it's hasta la vista, baby. More scientifically stated, when the physical and aesthetic characteristics of the love object no longer trigger spontaneous emissions of pleasurable chemicals into the bloodstream, the amount of time spent with, and attention paid to, the former object of desire decreases in direct ratio to the decrease of pleasurable hormonal secretions. Put most simply--when lust hits the dust, it's a bust.

Personally, I like sex and I don't care what a man thinks of me as long as I get what I want from him-- which is usually sex.
VALERIE PERRINE

Ah, the old days of Royce and the RRR... 

ETA: Ironically, I believe this was one of Zonka's articles...