From: ibshambat@gmail.com

From my autobiography at https://sites.google.com/site/ilyashambatbiography

Layo was posting under the name of her boyfriend George Kona, which I believed to be a pseudonym. She called me an “intensity addict” and made posts attempting to get my attention. Her work was quite insightful, and I was respectful of her
intelligence. She made a habit of standing up to people who were being bullies. She also had valuable input on different kinds of relationships.

Layo wanted me, so we started to correspond with each other. By one or another miracle, my company was moving to another building, and I had a week to myself. I got into my car and drove to Portland, Oregon to pick up Layo and her cat. At the door was
Layo and her good friend David. She was a short woman with long hair and a nice physique. We got into my car and drove.

We stopped at a beautiful river gorge. David was taking pictures of us cavorting. We dropped David off in Denver and then kept driving. While driving through West Virginia, I started falling asleep at the wheel, and I almost crashed the car. Layo was
telling me that the cat looked at us with contempt, as in, “These humans don't know anything at all.”

My mother was frantic, having attempted to reach me a number of times during that week. The folks at work envied me, saying that they wanted to have such exciting lives. Some people on the Internet kept going on about how internet-based dating was bad;
but here was a case to the contrary.

After Layo arrived in my place, the first things we did was go food shopping. She had been with a right-hand man of a Hindu guru named Adano Christopher Ley. Mr. Ley invented a nutritional system called solar nutrition. He believed that food needs to be
taken in ways that reflect its natural growth cycles. Thus, you eat things on trees in the morning; things growing on top of the ground during the day; and things growing under the ground in the evening. According to Mr. Ley, this put people into the
rhythms of the universe and allowed them to function at a better level.

One morning Layo asked me to bring her some nuts. I asked her, “How many”? She said, “Three.” I told her, “My little squirrel wants just three nuts.” After that it got stuck. She was now the squirrel.

The feeling at the time was quite a powerful one. We drove through the snow while listening to Bush. I would take a lunch off, and we would have sex in the car. We went to all sorts of parks in the area. One day she was yelling at me in the car, so I
gave her a big knife and said, “Kill me.” She thought that that was awesome.

Layo's mother had been a hippie, and she had spent her first year of life in a tree house. Then her mother left her father and took her to Seattle. When Layo was 9 her mother went insane; and Layo ended up moving in with her aunt. She described her aunt
as a tyrant. However when I took her words to heart, she started sticking up for her aunt. I could not make heads or tails of her behavior. I came to a realization later that children love their parental figures even if they are angry at them for one or
another reason, and that the correct solution to such conflicts is not breaking up families but helping the parties to get along and find a common ground.

Layo was jealous, and she especially had hatred for Kay. Having seen the damage that possessiveness had worked in the relationships of any number of people I've known, I decided to do away with possessiveness in my own character. Layo was allowed
whatever relationship she could have.

Layo was an astrologer, and she taught me a conceptual system that was completely in disagreement with that of my upbringing. She had a way of precisely explaining things that are often difficult to express. For a long time I made the error that many
others make – that of thinking that astrology and related things are a load of nonsense. Here however was someone who was in no way stupid, who practiced these disciplines and understood them. This influence on my life, for good or for ill, has been a
vast one. It has changed how I thought, and it has changed how I lived.

Besides being into astrology Layo was also into psychology; and it is here that we had our greatest disagreements. For example I took issue with Freudian analysis. That is for a very obvious reason. Freud made a wrong analysis, mistaking memories of
childhood sexual abuse for erotic fantasy. Based on this false analysis he made three other wrong analyses: That children are sexual; that women are an incomplete gender possessing a penis envy; and that children are in love with the parent of the
opposite gender, and that love in adulthood is transference of that love.

At that time I was not a father, but now I am; and I would know if my daughter was sexual. This analysis has supported horrible behavior such as pedophilia. With women, he took an accident of history – the early 20th century society in which men had
all the power and women were schooled enough in ideals of liberty and equality to want the same powers as with men – and ridiculously generalized it on all women. As for his most famous and most graphic claim, at that time there were few single-parent
households and homosexuals to study; now there are plenty of them. And what we see again and again is that women raised by single mothers, men raised by single fathers, homosexuals raised by the parent of the same gender, and people raised without
fathers or mothers, fall in love just as reliably as do the people raised in nuclear families.

With Maslow's hierarchy of needs, there are shortcomings as well. Certainly this models works for some people; however for many people it is completely inappropriate. Seriously religious people put their “higher needs” first and either have the “
lower needs” fulfilled as part of striving for these needs (as in, “seek ye the righteousness of God and all else will follow”) or denied as being contrary to them (overcoming “ego” or “flesh”). His model has applications for many people,
but in no way is it a universal human reality. It works for some people but not others.

Probably the most hateful – to me – concept to have come from psychology is Alfred Adler and his idea of “adequacy striving” - that people are driven by wanting to be adequate, and that anything else is compensation for inadequacy real or
imagined. By this standard, we should all be living in a cave. No man is adequate physical match for a tiger. He outsmarts the tiger using superior methodology and in so doing advances the lot of humanity. If such a thing is to be pathologized, then we
all have to be monkeys. And that is not a promising future into which to take the world.

Then there are claims such as that promiscuity is a result of sexual abuse. This is something that does not pass the muster of generational history. There have been promiscuous generations, such as the Flappers and the Boomers, and there have been non-
promiscuous generations such as the World War II generation and Generation X. If this were true, then the parents of the Flappers and the Boomers – the much-revered Victorian Generation and World War II Generation – were all rapists of children, and
the parents of the World War II Generation and Generation X – the much-maligned Flappers and Boomers – were all good parents to their children. I doubt that this is a conclusion with which people who believe such things will be comfortable.

There is the ongoing debate between the proponents of “indulgent” and “strict” parenting, with the first claiming that authoritarian upbringing destroys the person's ability to think and the second claiming that “indulgent” upbringing builds
fiends and monsters. There are many ways to refute both of these claims. The baby boomers were raised with the Bible and the whip, but they became a highly creative generation. Whereas many in Generation X – and in my generation – were raised in
kinder households, and most of them became good citizens.

But it is with personality psychology that real wrongs are seen.
With “antisocial personality disorder” - more often known as sociopaths – the claim is that some people are evil and can only be evil whatever they do. This of course contradicts most basic reason. If people are responsible for their actions then
anyone – including a sociopath – can choose to act rightfully; and if some people cannot choose to act rightfully whatever they do then people are not responsible for their actions. The attitude here denies people the right to the most fundamental
human reality – the reality of choice as to how to act and how to be. The result is a completely irrational and very cruel ideology that damns people for life for matters that aren't their fault.

An even bigger problem is that what we are seeing here is the Orwellian institution of crimethink. The claim being made here is that some people are criminal by virtue of their personality – meaning, by virtue of how they think. This creates a
totalitarianism so absolute that people are not allowed to be free from it even within the privacy of their minds.

With the narcissistic personality disorder, the biggest problem is that it would pathologize the world's most major contributors. If it is narcissistic to seek great success – or if it is narcissistic to have original ideas – then most people who've
had great success or original ideas is a narcissist. This would pathologize much of what made the world in general – and America in particular – great in the first place. The proponents of this disorder claim that they are serving society. They are
wrong. You do not serve your society by destroying what made it great in the first place.

With borderline personality disorder we see exceptional cruelty. People are told to stay away from them in relationships when these are the people who need such a thing the most. They are being ostracized from whoever might love them. As if they weren't
suffering enough already. It is just as bad as claiming that blacks are inferior or that the Jews are evil.

With schizoid disorder, the claim is that people who have spiritual experiences are sick. This would pathologize most of humanity. Most people believe in something spiritual or another, and usually for a very good reason or set thereof. The claim here is
that the only people who are sane are ones who have no religious or spiritual affiliations. I can think of no more arrogant or ignorant stance.

Finally, with histrionic disorder, I do not see why it should be a disorder at all. I see nothing wrong with calling attention to oneself, especially if one has something valuable to offer.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)