You identified the question I was referring to, but I only wondered how long ago, not at what age. I suppose they aren't too different of a question if someone knew your approximate age, so I'm not sure if that matters for willingness to divulge the info. I was only curious.
The whole issue for me regards a wish not to be boxed and labeled. I will try to explain why. I had a friend who lived in a house in Half Moon Bay who had gotten involved with a group of people who had moved from NYC, a psychotherapist and his patients. The details I do not know, but this man gave a teaching lecture to this group in his yard and I happened to attend. He said things there that I felt could only be said by a person who was much deeper and wiser than me. He told me that I would be curious about him to categorize and label him as a part of my intention to keep from expressing to him my real feelings. He told me that my curiosity whole have a motivation behind it.
I have been exposed to other purportedly enlightened people who claim the same thing. Mulla Nasrudin painted a parrot brown trimmed its nails and beak and set it free, saying to it as he did so, now you look more like a bird. Where he was from there weren’t any parrots it seems.
Fresh tea will not pour in a full cup.
Since he died I have seen this phenomenon over and over again. He said there is no such thing as this kind of question, that there is an unconscious motivation. I stole his pen when I signed a check and he confronted me later about it but I am still in disbelief. He said it was an expression of my hidden need of wanting something from him, but my truth is that the pen I borrowed from him just happened to be the exact same kind that I had and not had with me. It was an innocent mistake and I stopped taking things when I got caught doing so by my Mom at age 5 give or take. I hate thieves. Must be a curse. My grand father it seems, on her side, was apparently a horse thief.
Anyway, it is profoundly personally insulting to be told that your innocent curiosity is other than you are aware of and that there are people who will help you see who you are by actively telling you why they avoid your questions.
It is much harder to box people up, label them and put them into categories previously dismissed as having value if you don’t have any personal data about them to work with. This is also how lots of psychoanalysts operate. It is a principle they use in transference.
Suppose a young man has deep wisdom and tells me he can help me to see in a way that will free me from ignorance and my real aim is not to see better but become better at being sick, another thing I was told I wanted to do despite protests to the contrary. I will simply write him off as too young to know anything. If he is old he knows nothing or a Trump supporter. I know now from posting here how everything that is wrong with the world is the fault of the Boomers. God help us all if I turn out to be one of them.
You know better than most I have too big an ego for that. I have told myself all my life I am hundreds of years ahead of my time. My truth is timeless. You can beat your chest or polish you nails on your vest after blowing on them.
So I think I was 21 or 22 and that was a good while back.
If you are single you can off nothing in the was of wisdom th the married about relationships and if married nothing to the single.
If you are white you don’t understand racism. If you are liberal you are un-American.
This need to categorize is the sickness. But when we do it we do so without recognition. Self understanding is hard on the ego. To discover the ‘possible’ truth that what we hate is what we were told is who we were when we were exposed to hate as children is not a pleasant idea. But it is a fucking relief to be told, or it was for me, I was only trapped by feeling the lies I was taught were facts and not attachment to false beliefs.
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