I.C. Robledo's Blog, page 12

Controlling Our Emotions So They Don’t Control Us

I am sometimes surprised at how easy it is to manipulate a person. We all have a range of emotions, personalities, beliefs, desires, knowledge, understanding, and human connections. Yet despite our complexities, is it really so difficult to manipulate us? If someone hacks or invades our emotional centers, can’t they then hijack our mind and body?

It’s quite easy to make someone angry, if you think of it. This just involves calling someone a name, badmouthing their mother or other family members, insulting their intelligence or skill, making offensive gestures, or referring to a person’s most deeply held beliefs as nonsense or idiocy. If you make someone angry, they tend to lose control, yelling loudly, becoming offensive in their own word use or gestures, perhaps even willing to engage in a fight. They tend to get into a revengeful mindset – wanting to hurt the person hurting them.

Understand that to make someone angry is to poison them and those around them, and to make them do foolish things. So, if you anger someone, you have controlled them into taking actions that are against their own best interest. Of course, most people assume they are not being manipulated. Most people assume that the antagonist is legitimately being himself, and just by his own faulty character, that he happens to be anger-inducing. Somehow, that belief probably makes us even more angry, thinking, how could someone be such an imbecile, so uncaring, so offensive?

Perhaps much of the time the antagonist is legitimately being himself, but other times maybe he enjoys gaining control over others, knowing that if he doesn’t like someone, he can just make them angry and make them lose control, turning them into his puppets. As long as the antagonist maintains some control over himself, he will appear to be the better person in the end, perhaps even coming out to be a hero if he helps to calm down the person he has angered, or to stop the one he angered from causing too much trouble.

Anger is just one powerful emotion, but any other could be used just as well to shift someone into a different frame of mind where they cannot think clearly. Can you think clearly if you are feeling overwhelmingly sad, happy, jealous, embarrassed, hopeless, or scared? Don’t those emotions tend to put you on a one-track mind, where all you can think is of one thing? Generally, you will work toward alleviating that strong emotion, to get yourself back to normal, but in doing so, you may be easily manipulated and controlled into taking a course of action that works against your best interests.

I recently heard of a scam where people are contacted by the FBI, only it is not truly the FBI, but just an imposter who wishes to trick the target into transferring money to them. These villains are able to trick many people because they scare them. To many people, it is one of the scariest things to be contacted by the FBI, to be told that you are wanted for crimes – even of course when you are fully innocent. We will do anything to alleviate the overwhelming emotion of fear, even if that means telling these people all of our private details or transferring money to them.

It isn’t until later that we realize none of it made sense. The caller didn’t know the target’s name, but rather had to ask to confirm it. The caller didn’t know the target’s address, or social security number, or which bank he used, or anything at all about the caller, until the caller provided that information.

So why would the FBI call someone, if they did not know who they were calling, nor anything about them? Of course, they would not.

We must be wary of someone who insists on putting us into extreme emotional states. Someone who constantly reminds us that we should be scared, or worried, or sad, should not easily be trusted. These emotional states when taken to extremes do not help us to work our way through problems, or to see clearly.

One of the greatest skills anyone can learn then is emotional control. We have to practice this. When someone is yelling and behaving in a threatening way, a part of us must recognize that this is a potential threat, but it does not help to cower in fear and to panic.

Recently, I stopped at a gas station to fill my tank. While I was pulling into the gas station, I got an uneasy feeling, as there were four men that were partly blocking the entrance. One of them begrudgingly moved out of the way, in order to let me in. There was a very large truck to one side, blocking the view to the street – it crossed my mind that this may be on purpose, to obstruct the view so no one could see what these men were doing, but I ignored that idea. Some gas pumps were out of order and the one closest to the street was in use, so I pulled up to the one that was next to these four men. They were standing, appearing to do nothing. This struck me as a bit strange since we were at a gas station, but I reminded myself that they were not doing anything, so there was no problem.

As I parked my car at the gas terminal, I noticed that one of the men had his eyes on me. He was the biggest of the group, and only about 10 feet away from me. I stepped out of the car and in front of my door, and suddenly the man had one arm fully behind his back in an awkward manner – he was not stretching, nor was he just quickly pulling out some cigarettes. His hand was back there purposefully, as if he were holding something. He was smiling at me, inching forward very slowly, as if he didn’t want me to notice he was getting closer. He complimented my nice-looking car, and I said Thanks, man.

He continued to inch closer and closer, with his arm still behind his back. I was outwardly being as casual as possible, while at this point every red flag had been raised in my mind. I realized that my life was possibly in danger. On top of all these red flags, the man was smiling with a sort of grimace that did not seem right at all to me.

Somehow, through years of working on my emotions, to not allow them to go out of control, and to always keep composure over myself, I had been able to be fully calm in this moment where I realized I was in trouble. I had never been so sure in all my life that something bad was about to happen to me. The man was almost within arm’s reach now. In a flash, I had realized that the big truck blocking the view was not a coincidence. The four men clustered, doing “nothing” was not a coincidence. This man’s arm awkwardly behind his back could not be coincidence. I believe he wanted to threaten me with a weapon.

He was almost within arm’s reach.

I quickly yet casually stepped behind my car door (with it in between the man and I) and into my car. I imagined that from his perspective, he might have assumed I just forgot my wallet or something in my car. Of course, I was ready to leave. I put my keys in the ignition and got out of there as quickly as I could.

The first lesson here is I should have trusted my intuition earlier. I knew something was not right immediately when I saw these four men doing nothing, and then the big truck blocking the view from the street and the many “out of order” pumps were other signals. The man with the hand behind his back staring at me was another signal. I waited until the last possible moment, when he was almost within arm’s reach, and that was a mistake, but luckily nothing happened to me.

Emotional control is critical. If I had gotten too scared, I may have entered into the animalistic “fight or flight” response. As humans, we should remember that the options are actually endless, not binary. But if I had frozen there, obviously this would have been a mistake. If he had me scared and frozen, that was probably the perfect victim he was looking for. He could have taken all my money, my phone, and the car, in that case. If I had panicked and run on foot, they may have been ready to stop me. Even though I got back in the car, if I was too scared, not thinking clearly, I may have forgotten to lock the car, I may have dropped the keys or struggled to get them into the ignition properly, giving them enough time to open my door and force me out.

It was of utmost important that I remain calm and composed.

Luckily I did.

Just because the environment is moving us toward an emotion, does not mean was must let those emotions run out of control. Something in the environment may press our Anger button, or Fear button, or Embarrassed button, but we can rewire ourselves to not always need to respond with the same thinking patterns, and certainly to not always need to respond with the same behaviors and actions.

You can imagine emotional triggers as passing through you, not happening to you. This means if someone insults you, it goes through you. You do not need to take it in and respond to it. Similarly, if someone near you is fearful of many events: diseases, wars, financial troubles, you do not necessarily need to let this affect you. You can imagine those feelings passing through you, not needing to get entangled with your emotional self. The words and the fears of this person are just going through you, you are not adding energy to it by taking it seriously. You may even empathize with this person over their fears and try to help, but even then, you are not required to take in their negative energy.

Sometimes I have thoughts such as this:

This anger (or fear, or sadness, etc.) is not helping me to see clearly and behave rightly. I must let this feeling go so that I can move on. When I move on, I will be able to see clearly, and behave rightly once again.

When you feel the emotions start to run out of control, think the above thought (or read it aloud). Then talk to a loved one. Practice taking deep breaths. Go for a walk or jog. Watch stand up comedy, or a comedy film. These are the things that help me. Maybe they will help you too. And of course, if you have a problem with an individual, consider talking it through with them, after you have calmed down a bit.

The Forces that Pull Us Apart and Make Us Who We Are

In the modern day, we are pulled apart in many different directions. Religion tells us that there is a God looking out for us, with a larger purpose in mind for humanity. Science cannot give us a reason for being here, it can just examine our component parts, and the nature of matter. Philosophy has shown us many perspectives on thinking and being, but has not led us toward a particular direction for the future. History has told us how we got here, but not what we need to change in order to get where we need or want to be.

The other guiding forces are from our parents, peers, and society. Some people listen more to their parents, and some more to their peers, who could be friends, colleagues, or just the people one happens to be surrounded by for most of the day. Most of us listen somewhat to society, and those who stray too far often end up imprisoned or forgotten.

Often, neither our parents nor our peers quite have things figured out. They are just filling out their roles, as prescribed to them by their parents, peers, or society, which have been informed by their religion, science, philosophies, and histories.

People do not know themselves well. We are told who we are or need to be by our parents, our education system, our society, but we are not led to properly investigate who we are. We are told who we are (or guided into being who others think we should be), and then we become who we were told we were. This may just be a false self, created to appease the people around us, or society.

As individuals, we are whole universes unto ourselves, as the universe at large does not exist on its own. The universe at large exists as an interplay between the mind and the universe, which makes the universe what we experience it to be. Another mind of a different sort would fabricate an entirely different universe – for instance, different colors, emotions, intuitions, beliefs, and visual perceptions would completely alter one’s personal universe. I am in my own self-created universe, and you are in your own universe – but of course, they do overlap.

The question we must ask ourselves is how can we move forward as societies, when we are pulled apart by different personal universes, beliefs, and messages that do not coalesce on any particular point? Religion pulls us in one direction, science in the other, our peers in another, and our true selves likely in yet another direction. Many of us are being pulled apart from our core. And not only from ourselves, but by the people around us too.

It is no wonder that mental illness is so common. Perhaps individuals are not mentally ill, but rather society, which is pulling us in all directions, has made us this way.

Then we have an ongoing debate in the world about whether we should be led by reason or intuition, our analytical side or our emotional side. This provides us with another split in the psyche.

Are you man enough or woman enough (or masculine or feminine enough)? People who do not naturally fit their expected roles, may be made to feel that something is wrong with them, which of course harms the psyche.

Then we have ideas of sexuality, in that you are either gay or straight – sure, we acknowledge more types now, but many people still see this as mostly two types of sexuality. So you are one thing or another, which splits the psyche of many people as well. If you are part of both, or have different sides, then you may not be as well accepted or understood.

We have race – are you white, or not? Are you white enough? Black enough? You are artificially split based on skin tone, or possibly ancestry, even if that skin tone or ancestry may not represent who you are on the inside. Society tells us that to be white, you have to be pure (white from both your parents), otherwise you are treated as no longer truly white. A white and black person, for example, is treated as black, as was former president Barack Obama (who has a white mother). Often enough, other races or groups (e.g., Hispanic, Asian, Indian, Native American) are neglected from the general conversation, which could make them feel as if they are not relevant enough.

If you occupy two conflicting groups (as viewed by society) at once, society often decides what you are for you.

We are pressed to be in one of these poles, as the middle ground is often ignored. Are you rational or intuitive? Gay or straight? Black or white? Liberal or conservative? Religious or atheist? These are some examples of the categories of our lives. For every category you are in, there increases the chance that you will hate or be hated by individuals in the other group. We are all in multiple categories, so we all belong in groups that hate or are hated, and we tend to inherit that hate that our groups carry with them. We inherit this hate and are expected to carry it along, or we are treated as if we are not proper members of our group, and our own group will hate us. If that happens, then we will be treated as “other,” and destined to be forever lost and abandoned.

We grow up with this hatred all around us, and in the hearts of the people closest to us, and so it seems normal. In fact, we often end up carrying the hatred (or anger, fear, disgust, etc.) of our ancestors. We inherit this hate and then pass it on to our families, and they pass it on to the next generation. At some point, we must realize that every individual is a member of a variety of groups, and those groups may have longstanding problems with other groups. But there is no reason for us as individuals to absorb so much hatred and then pass it on.

How do we rise above the hatred? We pursue meaningful connections with more people. We pursue open-mindedness, empathy, deep listening, understanding, and we begin to acknowledge the role that we or our groups have played in causing problems. We consider deeply that some of the thoughts or beliefs of people in groups outside our own may be legitimate. At some point, our biases may have led us to believe that they were 100% wrong on everything, even when this is not reflected in reality. Likewise, they may have come to think that we were 100% wrong on everything, even when that was not the case.

One way to rise above all this is to see that we are not our categories. The categories are aspects of us, but they are not us. A book can be hard cover or soft cover. It can have a red, blue, or yellow cover. It can have a catchy title or a boring one. There are all kinds of books, but ultimately what should matter is if the content inside is true and useful, or entertaining, or whatever the objective may be with reading it. Just as with humans, we tend to forget that our personal content, or who we are at our core, is what actually matters, not all the superficial qualities that we happen to exhibit.

We must stop being blinded by the categories that people wear for us to see, often not even by choice. Instead, open your mind and look deeper into their true core of being.

Balance, Harmony, Contentment

We all want linear, steady growth in our lives. Some even want exponential growth, if they are not easily satisfied. Many of us do not feel that we can be happy unless we are growing at all times, in all ways. We think that our bank accounts must grow, we must be getting happier, we must be praised more, we must be getting healthier, we must stop aging, we must always be beautiful or physically fit, and we must find more free time to do what we enjoy. How can anyone be happy, with so many goals, and not enough time or ability to accomplish such extraordinary feats.

I have never heard of anyone who reached a point and said “this is enough. I finally arrived.” So does that mean there is no point to arrive at? That rather than end points, or goals to strive for, we are all actually more like the hamster on the hamster wheel? We get on the wheel, and not much is accomplished, but the next day we jump on again, because we don’t know what else to do, besides remaining in motion, appearing to make progress.

Ernest Hemingway said:

“Never mistake motion for action.”

Sometimes that is how we behave, though, as if mere movement indicated meaningful action. but of course we are not hamsters, so we should have more thinking and reflective capacities.

It seems as if our very happiness is refuted by the fact that we aim to be happy. For example, have you ever been unhappy because you attempted to be happy and failed at it? You expected happiness, yet did not receive it, and so this made you unhappy. Aside from that, everything was fine, and you had no other reasons to truly be unhappy.

Monetary wealth collapses on itself too. If a few people owned the vast majority of the planet’s wealth (so basically, the situation we are in), then it would be quite easy for those wealthy people to amass more and more wealth, by nature of their resources, and everyone else would increasingly feel as if they were poor and powerless in a rigged system. The rich are indeed getting richer, and everyone else is mostly working harder and harder to remain stagnant. Somehow with riches, we tend to carry the illusion that we are personally amassing something. But it ends up being an energy that is ultimately redistributed to others (even if that is to relatives or back to the government), just as everything else in life is.

When it comes to health, beauty, and fitness, we are also up against the clock. We can do our best to build and preserve these features in ourselves, but ultimately, all life perishes after a certain point.

If we look at the goal of life, from the universe’s perspective at least, it appears to be death. Yes, you read the statement correctly, although it appears nonsensical. Life leads to death with 100% accuracy. So life appears to cause death. Being born appears to result in death.

So the universe is telling us that goals don’t make sense. If the universe’s goal with life is to have it die, then why? Well, with every death, life is able to thrive. Organic matter (or at least matter that was at one time organic) is what living creatures eat. The more organisms die, the more other organisms can live. Perhaps the universe’s goal is to give us more life, even if that means death. However, the more life we have, the more it leads to death. If there are too many living organisms at once, then that means there is too much competition for limited resources and food, which would likely lead to rapid deaths – organisms killing each other to eat.

The universe presents us with many paradoxes, one of which is that more life leads to more death. And more death leads to more life. But ultimately, there is a balance.

And as with nature, which balances itself between life and death, I believe that a key purpose here in this life is to find our own balance and harmony. Shooting for endless growth in all areas of life is just futility. Extreme riches for one results in extreme poverty for others. Just as extreme poverty for some results in extreme riches for others. Aiming to be too healthy may strangely enough make your system fragile, if one’s system gets used to needing the perfect combination of exercise and nutritional value at steady intervals. What happens when you do not have access to that “perfect” health routine? You will not feel so healthy.

This is why intermittent fasting appears to be gaining popularity. Stressing your system is part of what it takes to be healthy. Seeking optimization in any form, however, often works against us. The more you reach states of perfection in any facet of your life, the more ripples of flaws you will create in your life and others’ lives.

Do not get me wrong, I still aim to do my best. But I realize that doing my best requires making mistakes, faltering, learning lessons and sometimes failing to learn them, struggling to be myself, wasting time, wasting energy, repeating the same cycles of futility, aiming to help people but in some way failing, and so forth. The harder I try to do my best, the more self-defeating I may become. In just doing alright and avoiding catastrophic mistakes, I am able to maintain balance in more aspects of my life. If you work too hard to do your best in any single area, other areas of your life may eventually collapse.

I have heard many times about business people who had high aspirations, and so they worked more and more, taking on too much. Then at some point, they had health troubles because they neglected to eat or sleep well, or they made no time for their loved ones and mental health. Then as their health faltered, they realized that they needed to cut back work, to have some form of balance in their lives. Sometimes our own nature guides us back to balance, even if we fight it.

Personally, I believe health is of the utmost importance. If we do not take good care of ourselves, then we will lose our focus, and be unable to make progress in the areas we find to be important.

Understand that the universe sets its limits. There is no such thing as endless growth in any direction. Eventually, all that is good comes to an end, just as eventually, all that is bad comes to an end. I believe the fruitful path is to seek some sort of balance, harmony, and contentment. Seek it with yourself, your loved ones, nature, and everything.

Find Your Inner Truth

The most important thing in life is to always pursue your inner truth.

Life throws much falseness at us. It presents us with false choices such as going along with your parents or against them. How can there be such a thing? If your parents taught you to stand up for yourself and to tell the truth, then if you go along with your inner truth and stand up to them, you are for your parents, even if you are against them, are you not?

Words themselves often present us with falseness. For example, the “mastermind” is a title often given to criminals, rather than people who have actually mastered their minds. A person who has truly mastered their mind would never mastermind a horrific crime. This is just one example of the falseness of language.

Why does the truth matter so much? I have noticed in my life that I am happy when I am pursuing my truths. When I am going along with my ethics, my beliefs, my deep needs (not just survival, but also intellectual and creative), then I am happy and feel fulfilled in my life, as if I am on the right path.

When I deny myself, my beliefs, my ethics, then I am in misery. You cannot lie to your true self, as your true self always knows if you are lying.

Understand that we live in societies full of falseness.

Corporations are looking for shortcuts to increase their profits while decreasing their expenses, meaning a degradation of the product, while making it appear to be of higher quality. The ones who best accomplish this are rewarded with greater profits. Politicians who tell the truth about their skills and motives will have the shortest careers. Unfortunately, the more lies they tell us, the more likely they are to have satisfying and full careers. Some musician’s voices are processed through software that helps to perfect the voice quality, regardless if the original musician has any talent or not. Those who make best use of the software may be more likely to succeed, rather than those with the best singing voices and technique.

There is much falseness, and we must learn to see it, so that we can move beyond it and wake up to the truth.

We are expected, if asked how we are doing, not to share our pains but only put on the façade that we are doing well. We must all wear masks that all is well, even if we are dying inside. We smile on the outside and frown on the inside.

Many groups will of course argue for their version of the truth. There are the materialists and the spiritualists, the liberals and conservatives, the countries that always seem to be at war with one another and insist they are right and the other is wrong, the majority and minority groups with their quarrels, and so forth. We always argue that we are right, and therefore other groups must be wrong. But in the end, likely everyone has some rightness and some wrongness to their beliefs and behaviors.

You may realize that I refer to truths when they are personal realities for ourselves, but these same truths turn into beliefs when viewed on a grander world platform. My truth may be that war is wrong for me. But to someone else who is forced into perpetual wars even though they hate it, war may simply be an uncomfortable truth. It cannot be wrong, because they did not choose it. To the person sucked into perpetual wars, they would say to me that I simply have a belief that war is wrong.

This is where language provides us with falseness once again. How can truth = belief? Well, even though it seems to be a contradiction, they sometimes do equal the same thing. This is a source of great misery in our lives. The truths which I may hold to be of the highest value, may ultimately just be my personal beliefs. And someone else in a different circumstance may be right to see my truths as wrong or naïve or even malicious. I do not intend any of my truths to be malicious, but someone else may interpret them in that way, if my truths function as an imposition on other people’s truths.

In sticking to your truth, it is important to commit to positive ways of being and seeing, that will not add pain to the world. If your truth is based in hatred, then I would urge you to find another way. Find a constructive use of your negative energy if you hold it, and morph it into something positive to help make things better for your people. Making things worse for someone else is unlikely to make things better for yourself in a way that is true to yourself.

The most important thing in life is to find our truth. No one is going to give it to you. The easy-made truths of following an ideology, a leader, a parent, and so on, can give us a starting point. But it is not always best to go with what is conveniently in front of you. Of course, if you are happy and fulfilled with what you have, it makes sense to stick with it. If you find yourself questioning and doubtful, and unhappy, it could make sense to explore other truths outside of the ones you have been exposed to.

In the end, I believe that we select our truths. As an example, one society may believe that thieves should have their hand cut off. They will justify this by showing that thieves can no longer steal so easily when they are missing a hand, making the rest of society happy. We end up justifying the truths we select for ourselves - if we cut off hands, then we have less thefts, meaning that we can continue to justify this course of action.

Another society may say that the punishment is too strict and that if we punish them that way, then will we punish all minor crimes with such violence, leaving much of society mangled and feeling bitter and hateful? This society does not cut off hands, and instead tries to help poor people so that they do not feel pressured into stealing. They implement this course of action, and it leads to less thefts. So again, they continue to justify this course of action.

No matter which course of action we take, if it is based on deeply held beliefs, then we will probably find a way to justify viewing it as a success, and wanting to continue in that direction.

We justify our beliefs and truths to ourselves everyday. So every day that goes by, our truths seem truer than ever. And anyone who disagrees, seems more wrong than ever.

Our minds want to see one pathway as correct, making all other pathways incorrect – but perhaps this assumption is itself false. There may be multiple competing truths, and some statements or paths which are more true than others.

Most of humanity’s misery is one group looking at a coin on its side and shouting that it is heads, and the other group looking at it and shouting that it is tails. From their own vantage point, both groups are right, but fail to realize that the other side is also right. Then, both groups fight over their truth, and belittle each other to get the other group to understand their viewpoint, and this just makes things worse.

We should trust others to know what is true for them, and stop imposing our truths onto them. Tell others what your truth is, without expecting them to follow you. And allow others to tell you their truth, but do not feel pressured into following it.

If I were to search for some basic truths, they would be as such: Treat others as you want to be treated. Do not harm anyone – it is most important to avoid physical harms, although of course we should avoid verbal abuse or emotional abuse as well. Do good deeds when you can, to whoever you can – such as helping someone to survive or to accomplish their goals.

The above truths are nothing new – many religions and philosophies point to some basic truths. And many of those truths overlap with each other. Obviously, basically everyone agrees that to kill is wrong and to steal is wrong. And even these basic truths may have their exceptions. Many people would agree that to kill in self-defense or in the defense of loved ones is acceptable. And to steal food when you are starving can also be viewed as acceptable.

Our task is to explore ourselves deeply to find what our inner truths are. What are the truths that we must actualize in our lives to feel whole? I recently spoke with a music lover who told me he had no access to music nor to learning it, and that he was faced with the choice of finding a well-paying job, or being a bad and poor musician. But our deepest inner truth isn’t just an abstract concept. It is who we are. Your deepest truths are an expression of who you are.

If music is in your soul, to deny yourself music is to deny yourself to yourself. It is to allow falseness in your life. Every day when someone asks how you are, and you say “fine,” then you are a liar, because you are never fine, since you do not have music. Choosing a paying job or music is a false dichotomy once again. You don’t have to choose. You can pursue both. You can pursue a solid job that involves music in some way (even if it is only in the background), and then pursue learning music on your own time. You can even play on the streets to earn extra income.

What are the most important truths of your life? Focus on the convergence of your thoughts, words, needs, desires, and actions. When your thoughts are in one place and actions in another, you are not living your truth. Do not lie to yourself.

If you privately think that it is wrong to curse, but you allow people to curse around you all day long without saying anything, then you are not living your truth. You may take a stand for yourself, and tell the people around you that this makes you uncomfortable, and you want a respectful environment. Importantly, you should not impose your truth on them, but rather just state your perceptions. Either that, or you change your view, that perhaps cursing is not worth raising a fuss over every time.

Perhaps you focus your truth elsewhere. You may decide to look for a positive thing to comment on about the people in which you find a negative flaw. Every time you hear someone curse, you may look for something to compliment them on. This may be a middle path where you guide people in your life away from cursing – by shifting their attention to something positive, rather than directly asking them not to curse. This may be wiser, as it is often more fruitful to ask people to do something, than to ask them to not do something.

Following your inner truth is the most important thing you can do.

However, this can be a challenge, as it is easier to go with the flow and to allow our surroundings to guide our behavior. Your family will have its own rules, written and unwritten, then your company has different rules, written and unwritten. Your government has rules, of course, and so does your religion, if you have one. It is easier to go with the flow, and follow the rules, than to stop and think about them, and realize that perhaps your personal truths do not always converge with those other rules.

And here we have the choice, or the question of our lives. Will we adopt the rules handed to us, without thought, and mindlessly follow them? Will we assume that the rules are all there for a reason, and abide by them? Our lives are of course, filled with endless rules. Every time you access a new forum online, or download a new app or piece of software, you may be urged to sign a 100-page document of rules. Even the people who write these Terms & Conditions do not expect you to read them, of course. It is all intended as legal protection for them.

Do not get distracted by the rule books that dominate our lives. It is easy to get frustrated and overwhelmed, and decide that the rules do not matter. Everyone has rules, and they often conflict. Yes, some agencies have gone overboard with their rules. It is ironic that there are so many rules in modern society that most people don’t know what they are, and don’t care. We only find out a rule, often, when we are being punished for not having followed it. Then we are always told that ignorance of the rules does not excuse you from them. We should have read the 100-page rule book, apparently. Or likely, thousands of pages when it comes to national, state, and local laws and regulations.

As strange as it may be, I would suggest that you form your own personal rule book of truths that you follow. We should all have this book of personal truths. The key question is, “What is my truth”? If you do not know your own truth, then you cannot live by it. If you don’t know your own truth, you cannot scrutinize it. And if you can’t scrutinize it, then you will stunt your growth as a person.

You may be living in falseness, if you have never consciously thought through your life and your core truths.

In time, your truths become your way of being. If one of your truths is that small matters in life should not cause you to blow up in anger, then reminding yourself of this will help you to actualize it.

A truth I find important is that we should be more aware of ourselves and our surroundings. Every day, I see people walking into the streets, absorbed with their phones. I feel that this is tragedy waiting to happen. People are so absorbed with their phones that they forget to check for oncoming traffic. They are much more likely to entrust their life to a green light or “walk” sign, forgetting that drivers often neglect these rules. My truth is that every moment of every day, something important and critical to our lives may just be about to happen. If you are not looking, you could miss the most important moment of all. Bad people with bad intentions rely on good people who are completely unaware of what they are doing. Also, children get into trouble when no adult present is aware of that child.

A strange thought that I have sometimes is that someone in my vicinity could be in big trouble, and they may be waiting for me to notice it. As an example, what if you are in a pool having fun, and while you are distracted, a child is drowning in the shallow end, and there is no lifeguard? What if there is a “missing child” poster, and you later see that missing child by chance, but you were not paying enough attention?

Imagine if every single day we were put in the position to save a life, and we had simply never realized it. A depressed friend may call you today, but absorbed in his own falseness, he may insist that everything is fine. If you do not read through the signs of despair carefully, that his tone of voice is defeated, that he has just lost his job and the rights to see his kids, then you will not be fully aware and present, and able to help him. Put aside the falseness, and see through the falseness, and you may find that you will save a life today.

One of the greatest truths must be that what we do matters, as it impacts ourselves and everything around us in some way. And so, this reality must be important in some way, if it is part of the collective truth that we are all living in. Then this means that we should work to help each other in this reality. We should give ourselves more to this real world, and stop escaping as much into the world of the phone and the screen and social media. These tools of escape often drive us further from the truth. There are surely some good resources online, but we tend to spend most of our time on the most superficial parts of the online world, such as social media posts that manipulate our emotions, and fill us with falseness. Most of the media, online and offline, seems to have an agenda, to teach us what it wants us to think. Rather than accepting what is given to us as truth, we must form our own basic truths, and stop being swayed like a leaf by the winds of superficiality.

I would caution you not to adopt someone else’s truth so easily. Many people or agencies want to teach us to hate someone or something. If someone teaches us to hate their competitors, it gives them time to rise to power. Also, it shifts attention away from the source’s possible incompetence or deceptiveness. Hate is used as a tool to gain money and power. But you do not need to be an instrument of hate, and should instead pursue your personal truth, to gain personal power so that you can nullify hate and the negative energies in this life.

From Feelings of Worthlessness to Worthiness

Sometimes we may feel a crushing weight of worthlessness. The problem with living for the future, as many people do is that we know where the future will end for all of us. Eventually, we will end up dead as everyone before us has ended up. Somehow, knowing our end destination can make the whole journey seem worthless. But perhaps this knowing of what will happen to us is meant to serve as a reminder that we need to focus on what is happening now. At any moment our whole life can be robbed from us, and we will pass on to the next dimension.

But this just means that our present, fleeting moment is truly valuable. The limited time we have is precious.

We can obsess over the end and whatever it may truly mean, or we can move beyond this, and live our lives fully in the Now.

If we bring our attention fully to the Now, then we are fully alive and not adding agonies about the past or the future to our lives. The other thing we can do to overcome this feeling of worthlessness is remember that we must make our own goals and pathways. We cannot rely on someone else, or another system to determine our worth and our path. For when they abandon us we are left feeling nothing but worthlessness. Our worthiness must emanate from within. We must define our life path and our life mission and pursue it wholeheartedly.

I often think of this quote by Henry David Thoreau:

“All men live lives of quiet desperation.”

What many of us fear most is what deep inside we desire the most. That is, to truly, truly live by breaking away from the daily grind of patterns we have set into like a stone. We are constantly doing things today based on all the things we have done in the past, finding it difficult to escape this shadow of the past that hovers around us.

Many of us want to get out of here.

We want to escape from ourselves – our lives, who we are, the daily pains and challenges of life, society, and everything.

The escapism that we see rampant in today’s society, where people are sucked into movies, reality TV, video games, sitcoms, drinking, drugs, and any sort of activity that removes us from our real lives just goes to show that many of us are living these lives of quiet desperation. We want to get out of here, but perhaps we don’t want any of the risk that comes with it. We don’t want to pack our bags and move out, only to have people say we went crazy or for our family to become upset. We want to quit that job but feel we can’t because we need the steady income to live our normal lives.

In a sense we feel trapped. I always thought that the wealthy must have found a way to escape this, but I feel that hearing about all the financial issues even the wealthy have, it makes me think that they get sucked into feeling that they need to maintain a certain lifestyle, and therefore they get trapped into their quiet lives of desperation as well. We come to feel that we need others to think of us in a certain way. If I’m the professor, I need people to think of me as a serious academic who has contributed unique and valuable research to the world. If I’m a businessperson, I need people to believe I am successful and to value my products. If I’m a parent, I need people to think that I am a good parent and that I do the best for my kids. This need to be perceived in a certain way just makes us feel trapped in the end.

In life, we acquire responsibilities and things we must do, and this is just what it means to be an adult. It seems that we do not have the real option to escape. But what about those people without obligations to others? They are young, without kids, without anyone that they must care for, but they tend to think that they are too young to know what they should focus on in life, and so they may look to their parents or elders. But what if all of their elders are living quiet lives of desperation? And what if these are the people guiding our youth?

For any stranger you see today, keep in mind that perhaps they are living a quiet life of desperation. Perhaps life is weighing them down. Maybe they’re using whatever energy they have left just to smile and pretend that everything is alright.

We all want something more, don’t we? We want something else, something other than what we have, something other than what we are, but then instead of working at it, we just escape our lives. This drives us further into the need to escape the pitiful lives that we create for ourselves.

Instead, we must double down on our own lives. We must invest the time in nurturing ourselves and the people we touch daily. This will result in a bettering of ourselves and our circumstances. Perhaps once in a while we should engage in a real-life escape or journey, rather trying to escape from our lives through media. The real-life journeys (e.g., travel, spiritual journeys, doing something you always wanted to do but never made time for) may nurture the soul and fill us with learning, understanding, wisdom, culture, and such good qualities, rather than just robbing us of our time. Perhaps in these real-life escapes, we will find that we want to escape that escape, and ultimately find ourselves pleased to be back home, the way things always were.

There are many times in life when we will be frustrated, tired, feeling unwanted or lost or as if we don’t matter. There are times when we may be tempted to give up hope. What we should always remember, no matter how hard things get, is that this is part of the journey too. Fiction writers understand quite well that they need to give their protagonist many obstacles, sometimes tremendous obstacles, for the story to be interesting. So just sit back and remember that you are part of the human story. And perhaps you have been given more obstacles than others to bear. And this is fine. This is just a part of your journey. The journey is moving you toward something greater and better, but you may have to get through the mud before you find your way.

The human mind and spirit is powerful enough, that if every time we falter, or find ourselves in difficult circumstances, we were to think Oh no, I am so dumb and I’m going to get fired, then I’ll lose my house, then the kids, then I’ll die in a ditch, how could we possibly expect to thrive under immense stress? We must always train the mind to do better, to be a beaming light in the face of darkness.

When an unexpected disaster happens, think: That’s alright. We’re going to come back stronger than ever after we get through this. When you are sick and have disturbing symptoms, you may think: That’s fine, my body is just purging this sickness from my body. And when you make a big mistake, think: That’s fine – I’ve had the opportunity to learn something here so that I can help make sure neither I nor my colleagues ever make this mistake again.

We must learn to train the mind to be calm through the storm. When we find ourselves in turbulent times, where everything seems chaotic and disordered, we must keep calm, composed, and figure out what the next step should be. It doesn’t help to allow the mind to run through all of the worse possibilities that may happen. If running through all the worst-case scenarios just makes you panicky and unable to think clearly, then this is not helping you or anyone.

We must stay calm through the storm.

Sometimes in truly difficult circumstances, we need to stay strong to survive the present, so that we can live another day and figure everything out with a calm, cool head.

The Pursuit of Higher Understanding

Pursuing information and knowledge is good, but pursuing wisdom and understanding is better. The world we live in is overflowing with information. More and more websites, books, music, social media posts, shows, and so forth are being pumped out into the world day by day to absurd levels where we cannot keep up with it all. Even keeping up with one medium is quite difficult. There are too many books to read, too many shows to watch, and too much music to listen to.

Foolishly, many of us do aim to keep up with it. We feel that if we don't know some piece of information then we will be left behind. At this point in human history, we have data that to some extent are immortal and indestructible. As with the cloud and internet, the data may live on forever. At the same time, the data is quite mortal because every time something new comes out, only moments later hundreds, or thousands, or more even newer and fresh productions are released, pushing the recently created ones out of our reach and out of our minds, deeper into our collective forgotten histories.

In this sense, Twitter seems to be a metaphor for our relationships with information. What is new becomes old almost immediately, goes out of reach, and then is forgotten. We are forever grasping for the new, but the new instantly becomes old. So our information and ideas always appear to be outdated.

Many of us are shouting louder and louder to bring attention to what we are doing, while people care less and less because there is so much new stuff out there all of the time. There are more and more bits of information floating around for us all to see and access, but most people lack direction and purpose for what we are supposed to do with this information. We mostly ignore the information, or it paralyzes us with fear, or we are perpetually talking about what is new and following the fads and trivializing this life, but either way the information is either worthless or not properly utilized. We are silly in that we value this information so much that we are always chasing it.

For what? Knowledge without know-how is what? Awareness without action is what? Data without direction is what?

Ignorance. Futility. Emptiness.

We are hyper-connected and disconnected at the same time. We are so into our devices, always connected to the digital world but lost from the real world in front of us. The real world has become a mirage that seems less real than the digital world that we prefer to inhabit. That digital world makes us feel useful because we are addicted to information. We must know what new recipe our neighbor is trying out to impress her mother in law. We must know which asteroid is almost coming to hit the planet and end it all. We must know which major attack happened without cause, it just happened. We must know these things and yet can do nothing about them but grow more and more upset and discontent with this limited life we have.

The information is limitless, but we are limited in our time, and we limit ourselves by focusing on the information itself as something to be valued, rather than what we will do with that information to actually make improvements. We must value true wisdom and understanding over the 0s and 1s of data and information. Wisdom and understanding transcends the information before it and will help us to rise up and do something greater in this world.

How do we pursue wisdom and understanding? Daydream, write down our thoughts, start conversations with and listen to our elders, distance ourselves from the frenetic pace of modern life where everything must be done right away, and we must be in a hurry and busy and worried or we are not normal and something is wrong with us. Be artistic, observe nature, people-watch, meditate, read from enlightened souls and classical works and not just the new passing fad.

It is important that we not pursue trivial and temporary factoids, and instead pursue knowledge that is practical and can have a true impact on our thoughts and actions. If we pursue enough of this kind of knowledge, it will lead to higher levels of wisdom and understanding.

The Busy, Entertained, Exhausted Cycle

The rabbit in Alice in Wonderland who is in a rush, worried about the time, and stressed, seems to represent all of us. We all have so much to do and so little time. Yet studies show that the maniacal stress is killing us – the pressure to do more, accomplish more, be more successful, and outcompete all the other people who are trying to outcompete us is in many ways bad for us and for society. This results in toxic and sabotaging cultures rather than sharing and collaborative cultures. In the end we want to take the credit, we want the reputation, we want people to like us or fear us or do as we say.

We seem to be an ego trapped in a shell of a body, in need of mental and spiritual growth, rather than more tasks to add to our to-do lists.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where people must be busy or entertained at all times. What we are busy with doesn't seem to matter that much. The busier we are, doing something for someone, the more productive we feel and the better we feel about ourselves. In the time when we are not busy, we feel that we have earned the right to be entertained. When we can, we pursue this escape from our busy lives, often through social media or television shows.

So, we cycle between busy and entertained and we no longer have tolerance or the ability to hold our attention on nature, which is not eager to entertain us or make us busy. We are unable to meditate because again, this is not about busyness or entertainment. We are unable to just be, to exist, to do nothing and enjoy that experience for whatever it may hold. Someone finds themselves with nothing to do for a few seconds, and they must pull out their phone to see how all their friends are being entertained on social media or to read the new sensational article that makes a crazy argument just because this is what people tend to click on.

We are thirsty for more and more and more stuff happening but where it is quite trivial. Our day to day cycle is work where our employers demand more and more and more for the sake of always making improvements, where improvement really means to make more dollars for the bosses. Our benefit is nothing other than to keep on working to repeat the vicious cycle. Then we go home and entertain ourselves, then we sleep and rest in restless fashion due to the excessive busyness and stress, and repeat.

The focus on busyness leaves us feeling unfulfilled. As eating popcorn may feel good but ultimately be unfulfilling to your appetite, being perpetually busy with stuff to do that fills your day can leave you feeling as if you accomplished little in the end. If at the end of the day, you’re just burnt out, dreading tomorrow, then you may have gotten caught in the Busy, Entertained, Exhausted Cycle.

When this happens, we are treated as basic systems of output (e.g., work), input (e.g., entertainment), rest, repeat, living like machines. We are treated like machines designed to produce stuff, and if we do not produce it, then we are dysfunctional, and society casts us away.

I feel that we are in a sort of trance or daze, of being busy and entertained perpetually, without much personal understanding. Understanding of our role in life, understanding of what it means to be alive, understanding of how to build a good society or even a good family. Our minds are always occupied with something, and so this gives us the impression that we are making true progress in our lives.

But are we really?

What if we were busy doing the wrong stuff, thinking the wrong way, and getting stuck in unfulfilling and vicious cycles? 

It seems that learning and wisdom and understanding happen in the gaps of time when we are not so busy doing and filling our brains with media and sounds and imagery and trivial matters. It seems that if we are able to slow down the influx of noise and take a moment to breathe and relax what our mind must process, that we could actually use that time to grow. As the brain needs so much sleep and we rest 8 hours a day, it seems hard to imagine that a constant stream of busyness, and influx of media noise, and always being entertained would be optimal for our growth as humans.