Black Holes

These are those heavily-concentrated, foundational definitions-of-self that we internalized as children. No-one told us that we didn’t have to internalize as part of our self-definition, the strong opinions of others.

That’s what kids do.

Examples:

I’m a piece of shit.
I’m pretty.
I’m smart.
I don’t deserve good things.
I was a mistake.
I’ll never amount to anything.
I’m not as good as my sister.
I’m better than my brother.
I make mommy miserable.
I make daddy happy.

There are tons of them.

You can look at them as the solidification of, “Why I am worthy/unworthy.”

Or the solidification of, “Why I am special.”

And just because you have one of these floating around in your reality doesn’t mean that it functions as a Black Hole.

I think it helps to think of them in terms of physical black holes, the ones in space.

Gravity is everywhere, it’s just super-concentrated with black holes.

You can’t actually see a black hole as we normally see things.

We normally see things because light gets reflected off of them.

Not so with black holes.

No reflection.

You know they’re there by the lack-of.

There is an event horizon with black holes.

Once you cross that line, you get sucked into the black hole.

No coming back.

With Internal Black Holes, the values-about-self are super concentrated.

With Internal Black Holes, you know they’re operational due to the relational effects/dances that they are creating, not because they stand up and say, “Hey, here I am.”

With Internal Black Holes, there are relational event horizons, that once you cross, chances are you’re getting sucked into a reactionary dance.

Easiest way to deal with internal Black Holes, is to become conscious of them.

Note where they are, how they get triggered, what kind of dance they create, and how best to exit them.

Once they’re on your relational maps, you can avoid them.

And if you want to speed up the evaporation of the Internal Black Holes?

(Yep, External Black Holes do evaporate.)

First of all, it’s not a bad thing to have IBHs.

It’s part of how human internal cosmology functions.

At least, it’s how human internal cosmology has functioned.

Second of all, it’s hard work.

It’s along the lines of Buddhist work on suffering.

Which is one of the ways that you can tell an IBH is operational, because of the grasping.

From a Dojo POV, IBH’s are the fundamental components of how humans self-identify with their Primal Character.

If you want more freedom, more range, more choice, there is going to come a time when you have to dance with these things in the attempt to make them less influential in your relational reality.

You are going to have to attempt to make their gravitational influences lesser.

You’re never going to make them go away completely.

The way that you decrease the influence of IBHs is to get bigger.
To get bigger is to increase your meaning-makings, vocabularies, and skill sets around the stuff that your IBHs are about.

You can’t intellectualize your way out of this one.

Def wish that we could.

Imagine that you have a IBH about racism.

You can’t just think your way out of being a racist.

You have to operationalize your being a non-racist in those setting that get caught up in the extreme gravitational pull of that IBH that defines your Primal Character as, “I am a racist.”

It’s not work that I would recommend to anyone.

As Jed says, if you have to, fine. If you don’t have to, don’t.

In my understanding, working with IBHs, in a serious way, is midlevel Red Belt activity.

You need a lot of looseness, a lot of flexibility.

Any questions?