Where Your Energy Goes
You may be defending the very pattern you mistake for yourself.
People keep themselves apart from truth by loving what is false. In my account, pathological neural networks are organized collections of that falsehood.
If something inside you takes away access to knowledge and wisdom, what does it supply instead?
A distorted picture. And after living with that picture long enough, you can grow attached to it.
You love anxiety because you call it responsibility.
You love guilt because you call it conscience.
You love pity because you call it kindness.
You love dependence because you call it devotion.
You love the pathological network because you mistake it for yourself.
As long as you defend what is harming you, it stands between you and what is true.
Truth is life itself in the argument I am making. The network diverts that life into keeping itself running.
Energy does not simply vanish. Within the world of cause and effect, if your energy is unavailable to you, it is being used somewhere: maintaining anxiety, suppressing fear, fighting an internal battle, repeating obsessive thoughts, or holding a false picture of the world in place.
In my model, the pathological network consumes that effort. What is missing from your own experience appears on the other side of the struggle.
No confidence? Notice how confidently the network forbids you to act. It has no doubts. “You will fail,” it says, with absolute certainty.
No love? Notice how fiercely it clings to its own existence.
It feeds on your capacity for love, confidence, and energy, and it has no intention of leaving.
Why would it? From its narrow point of view, the arrangement is working.