Your example is pretty accurate, as it’s also now the end of the year soon. But then I’m wondering what’s going wrong - is it the goals we set for ourselves, the expectations, not letting go of the past or something else?
There’s a difference between knowledge and being able to apply that knowledge. Why do you think you haven’t been able to translate that wisdom into something in your life?
An interesting thing that I learned is that people are motivated by different things. You give me the impression that you’re highly motivated by acquiring knowledge and coming up with new findings.
I’m similar in that regard, but opposite to that, I don’t get much motivation from most materialistic stuff or some in the social department.
My current theory is that the goals, both long-term and short-term ones need to include a big portion of goals that in align with what actually motivates/drives us personally. And that’s something everyone has to find out on their own.
So, thank you for giving me another puzzle piece, as I think my own curiosity and love for exploring/figuring out something helps me more to keep going than another value/motivator that a different person might have.
Don’t worry, I appreciate all the different takes and find them very interesting. It just takes me a while to respond, as I wanna really understand and think about them before I write something.
If I followed only my impulses, I’d be much more miserable, I’m pretty sure. I actually get a bad feeling each time, I’m losing touch to what I actually want and when I get pulled too much into certain directions by external things like media (phone, tv…), other people etc. or simply by my own autopilot (which is as you said genetically wired to fulfill those things and also influenced by past experiences.)
Sometimes I struggle to actually believe in something - a state of endless questioning the validity of each thought, perception, reality. Like missing an anchor - a reference point. But being alone, enjoying nature, well also other things, basically “being in the moment” resolves that.
So I pondered a lot on your question and I still don’t have a satisfying answer to that one. What I imagine the key to the next level is, that I can finally stop standing in my own way. As if I’m my own gatekeeper - in reality I’m the final boss of this current level that I’ve been stuck in for so long by self-sabotaging myself so many times - creating illusions of “enemies”, fake progress and debuffs.
The irony behind this: I probably know that I’m my own worst enemy. Thus I’ve developed all that self-hatred, BUT the way to advance to the next level is not through hating, hurting and defeating myself. However self-love alone doesn’t seem like the only required solution. So I guess the next level is simply reaching a state where I can consistently tackle certain things in my life without self-sabotaging myself, which will open more doors in the future with new challenges. But I can’t say what those will be, I can only make guesses based on stories of similar journeys/people.
how do you figure out whether something is an illusion or not? How do I see past the illusion and for what it really is without having the proper foresight?
So much food for thought in what you’ve typed. Like you, I want to take more time to reflect on what you’re expressing. But one immediate thing I can say is:
I don’t actually consider an illusion to be a bad thing. I think our happiness and wellbeing as much as our discouragement and despair are equally based on illusions.
I take a pragmatic approach (or I try to).
When my illusions are working for me and leading to solid, stable, effective states of mind, then I welcome them and even nurture them.
But if they start telling me that life is terrible or that I’m worthless, then it’s time for us to have a little talk together.
Our perceptions are mostly illusory. That’s not a flaw. They’re literally supposed to be like that.
Paintings in an art museum are all 2-dimensional. But when you look at them your brain transforms them into 3-dimensional perceptions. Same with movies. The entire movie is just shifting colors and shadows on a 2-dimensional plane. We transform them into richer perceptions.
They’re supposed to be like that.
And we’re supposed to learn the balance between being absorbed into these pictures and being able to stand apart from them and remember their illusory nature.
We do both.
We engage with the game, we absorb into the games, we play with heart, with courage, with commitment.
And at the same time, we hold that part of our awareness that remembers, ‘This is just a game’.
This applies to everything we do.
Some games are big and serious and life-changing. People will even end their lives over those games. The game of sex. The game of love. The game of business. The game of self-worth. The game of proving myself to Society or to family or whoever.
Other games are lighter and more obviously trivial. But they’re also important because they’re literal laboratories where we can practice our balance for the bigger games.
But it’s all games and it’s all illusions. It’s all art and it’s all artifice.
Images, painted in water.
I think we’re here to play the games well and with heart. And to make beautiful art with integrity.
That’s a good life.
But it’s still illusion, games, and art.
So when it knocks you down, always get up again.
Apply the same mastery and resilience you’ve practiced in your online games, when you’re playing your offline games.
Anyway, I’ll think more about the rest of what you’ve said, and hopefully learn from it and respond to it.
A person is walking across this river, and he slips and falls.
He was actually being pretty careful, but his foot hit one of the stones wrong and the force of the river knocked him off balance.
Does this mean that he is bad person?
Does it mean he is a good person?
Does it mean he is a low value individual?
Does it mean he deserves criticism? or praise?
Does it mean he was definitely careless? And that in general, he will be incompetent in most situations?
No.
None of those.
Many people, probably most people, will slip when they’re trying to walk across those river rapids. At least once. Possibly many times.
Because the rapids’re freaking slippery.
The waters are pushing you forcefully. The rocks are moss covered. And so on.
You don’t slip because you’re a good or a bad person. You slip because the conditions are conducive to slipping.
And yet, people can and do become skilled enough to cross sometimes without slipping. They develop the skills of balance, sensitivity, and strength, and learn to maneuver skillfully through the waters.
Some of us find other solutions. Some rare athletes build up enough explosive leg strength to be able to jump across. Some of us use cleverness to figure out how to build bridges or to use ropes to swing across. Some of us learn to find others who can help us across in some way. Or we find a team that can cooperate to find ways across.
(And each one of those innovations or achievements, 1) develops and applies our abilities, but also 2) robs us of the chance to learn the skill of walking across.)
Either way, we don’t need to think of it in terms of ‘becoming a better person’. We can think of it much more simply as developing the skills to deal with a particular problem or situation. Anyone who lacks those skills or those resources, no matter how “good” or “bad” they are, will slip and fall. Conversely, anyone who possesses those skills, again, no matter how “worthy” or “unworthy” they are, will navigate the waters without falling.
It’s not, fundamentally, a test of morality and character.
Though of course we can use any challenge as an opportunity for building morality and character. But that’s a choice.
We can also make the alternate choice and determine to keep our external challenges separate from our perceptions of our fundamental worth or sense of character.
We can choose to play the challenges of life and the challenges of our minds.
Hmm…not sure if the point is getting across here. But at any rate, I’ll stop now.
Well, since we’re very close to discussing the meaning of life, I might as well add a big post too. Although I may have gone completely overboard. Part of me likes the feeling of just letting the thoughts flow once I start typing…
I do hope there’s value here though and it’s not just me hearing myself type.
I don’t think anything is going wrong. It’s possible to treat life like a business project and set goals complete with plans to guarantee they get completed. With experience, training and extensive progress monitoring we could probably do that as well. But that would feel like going on a vacation and experiencing the entire thing through the lens of your camera. It prevents us from living the experience.
I suspect that even the most successful people don’t always reach their goals. They still keep setting them though. And they get there eventually. They might have goals which they know they will reach, a series of small goals to motivate them to keep going every time they complete one, and a couple large goals which provide direction more than anything else. Have enough of both and you’re riding a constant feeling of accomplishment.
Figuring out what is achievable and what isn’t is something which comes from repetition. At some point you just get a feeling of what you’ll be able to do and how long it would take you.
But all this still doesn’t explain why it feels so bad when we don’t reach our goals. Obviously if I knew the answers I would have told you already, but at this time I think it’s because we focus so much on what we have not (yet) accomplished that we become blind to what we have accomplished.
When we simply put one foot in front of the other and keep moving in the right direction, we tend to accomplish a lot of little things. We just don’t notice them. And so as the deadline gets near it feels like we haven’t done a thing. The experience and skill we gained, the meaningful moments with other people, all the times we worked out, it all came so naturally that it passed by unnoticed. And because of that, we don’t feel that sense of awe and pride to offset the feeling of disappointment. We never stop to think what our lives might have been like if we had done none of those things.
What a friend of mine does...
I know somebody who keeps a set of folders. Each folder represents an area of her life. Relationships, Career, Education, Health, Fitness, Creativity and so on. On the front of each of those folders is the goals she set for that area. And every time she accomplishes something of note, she either writes it down of collects some other form of “proof”, then puts it in the associated folder. When she does, she doesn’t consciously look at the list of goals.
At the end of the year she reviews her goals by taking the list of goals she had set for each of those areas and line up under it all the evidence of her accomplishments she has in that area. In some cases it turns out she either completed a goal, surpassed it and completed a bigger goal or even that it turns out the original goal wasn’t what she really wanted and she’d been subconsciously working towards something else which she can now see based on the evidence.
Finally, after taking note of everything, she creates new goals for the next year, archives the folders for times when she needs some reinforcement and puts the new list of goals on a new set of folders.
According to her it really skyrocketed how much she accomplishes. She describes it as gaining momentum, like a snowball rolling down a mountain those folders get bigger and bigger every year, even if she doesn’t necessarily achieve more of her goals each year.
The key is to be consistent. Forget logging your accomplishments for too long and part of your mind forgets about it with the idea of giving it another go next year.
This is one of the bigger questions in life. Even though we know what to do, why don’t we simply do it? Why is there an irrational river of thoughts getting in the way of ourselves? Why do we often place outside influences in a position of power, trusting them to guide us and determine our value, but won’t believe or trust a word of what we tell ourselves unless it’s something negative?
Most people with phobias will tell you that they are perfectly aware that it’s irrational and yet it doesn’t change how it feels. Many people are constantly obsessing over what other people think about them, it’s more important than how they think about themselves.
Although we logically know certain things to be true, we often can’t convince ourselves of this. We would much rather believe that someone or something else has a power over us which “makes” us do things. A deity, a coach or guru, a healer, a subliminal.
In fields like Chinese medicine, the healer will tell you that they aren’t actually healing you, they are simply helping you to heal yourself, to get out of your own way. Stories of how sick people got better simply by believing and never giving up and how healthy people got sick because they were giving up are plenty.
We put our faith in these tools we find, so we can say to ourselves that as long as we have the tool, we can do this thing. Until we liberate ourselves from those limiting beliefs, we need the tools.
This is where the concept of “I am” comes from often heard in meditative practices. The idea that you can identify with and become just about anything by first saying “I am” before it, they after enough repetitions dropping the “I am” and just repeating the word and finally even dropping the word and meditating solely on how that thing feels. Become the thing. Become health, become love, become wealth, become success. Identify with that thing so completely that suddenly your life is filled with it, it’s everywhere.
But I’m going off on a tangent here.
We block ourselves from applying what we’ve learned because we don’t consider ourselves the authority on it. After all, if we were we would not have needed to learn it, right?
And until we convince ourselves that we are indeed an authority, we will continue to seek out guidance rather than give it to ourselves. It’s hard to convince yourself you’re right when part of your mind is constantly telling you “Yeah, but what if you’re not? Better wait for someone with a proven track record. Or better conditions so we have a larger chance of success. Or both. It’s the smart thing to do.”
The 2 primary driving forces behind human behavior have always been pain/fear and pleasure. Both are manifested in us through chemical reactions in our body, although it is still uncertain if the chemical reaction causes the feeling or is caused by the feeling (each can trigger the other though). We are all running away from things and running towards things. Ironically, the methods which work to train dogs also work quite well on training humans. Variable reward and discipline, the carrot and the stick.
For all of us, one of these is more powerful than the other. Some people will be driven to action by being shown how their current way of life will lead them down a dark path and inevitable death, while other people need to be shown what their life would be like if they wanted to. I am a pleasure person, I actually have a very adverse reaction to fear-focused external motivators.
Considering adolescence
Humans between the age of 15 and 25 are actually almost completely driven by these things as the post-puberty brain is rewiring itself completely, starting at the back and ending at the front with the prefrontal cortex. Scientists have seen this process happen using a special MRI technique. The unfortunate part is that since the prefrontal cortex helps us make better choices and the back part of the brain is where our prime motivators live, these adolescents tend to take extreme, sometimes life-threatening risks in search of pleasure, and refuse to allow adults to act as the voice of reason.
Once the brain is done re-wiring itself, they become capable of mature reasoning. The pleasure they feel from this moment forward will never again be as intense as it was during those years, and will actually become less and less as we become more and more in control of ourselves as the years go by.
There’s a good reason why we don’t recommend the vast majority of subliminals to teenagers. We have no conclusive evidence about what subliminals do to a brain which is already rewiring itself.
When you set goals, they have to be based in a “why.” If your goal is wealth, are you setting it because of a fear of poverty or a desire for what wealth brings? Somewhere in the back of your mind there’s a movie running, and that movie is eliciting the driving force behind the goal. Often we only notice the goal pop up in our mind and don’t notice the underlying motivation until we start asking the question. Why do we want this? What does it make us feel? What does not having it make us feel?
For example, my thirst for knowledge comes from a need for control, which is a fear-driven one. I feel that I (my consciousness) am like a shell around my body and I need to understand everything inside so I can make sure it does what I need it to do. So I can make the most of it, and so I don’t have to worry about what’s inside and can focus fully on the outside.
My need for financial independence is a pleasure-driven one which has absolutely nothing to do with money. My need for fitness and health fear-driven ones. My spiritual goals are mostly pleasure-driven, governed by curiosity. My social goals fear-driven almost always.
Nope, and I really think I should keep at least a blog or something…
Do you think subliminals are also such tools, and that the mind once liberated can create changes as profound as subliminals, without using them? If so, is using subliminals a “limiting belief” as well?
I was busy writing another very large post, but it would be disrespectful to Vanno as it would go way beyond the scope of his journal.
Feel free to ask me somewhere else though.
Short answer:
Watch the 2014 movie Lucy with Scarlett Johansson. Imagine there is a subliminal that could cause the experience she goes through all the way up to the end, a subliminal which could unlock your total absolute potential, skipping the entire journey which we call life. Would you still be human? Would you still experience love? Joy? Curiosity? Would you feel any attachment to anything or anyone? Would you still need subliminals?
Yes, subliminals are tools in my opinion. Powerful tools. They act within the limits we have set for ourselves, while working to convince us to expand those limits. And yes, we possess deep inside the potential to do everything a subliminal can and much more without needing a subliminal. But you could spend the next 70 years mentally fighting the mechanisms which are put in place to protect you from yourself in order to achieve that. And once you do, what’s left for you to do?
Personally, I’ll take subliminals right now to make this journey we call life as effortless, fun and fulfilling as it can be instead of spending the next 70 years isolated in a cave. Not to mention subliminals are a lot safer.
At this point, you should consider seeing a qualified mental health professional. Subliminals aren’t designed to help prevent or cure suicidal thoughts – and when it gets to this point, PLEASE see someone qualified to deal with this unique situation. You are not a hopeless case. Subliminals and mind training just may not be the path you need right now. Talking with someone who can understand your situation and help is the way.
Please cut use of subliminals and see a qualified mental health professional before proceeding.
Thank you for your message. I’m already seeing one. Lots of things often make me think that I’m a hopeless case, however so far I’ve always been able to stand up again after a low phase. Is there an article here about subliminal usage and mental health? I’m curious about it, even if I know that there are certain things about subs like the exact script, that you don’t share, I’m just wondering how it all affects mental health.
hello mate, thank you for checking on me
I’m doing alright at the moment, just still putting my sub usage on hold. Not much to update, problems aren’t fully solved, but they are better now compared to 20days ago
New league season has begun, working towards becoming a diamond player this season! Played my placement games and looks like I’m starting in gold. I’m excited to surpass my peak from last season (platinum 2).
Additionally someone recommended me this note taking software called “Obsidian” and it’s very practical for studying, researching and structuring your notes. I use it both for games and my studies.
Looking forward following your journey.