Posts mit dem Label emotions werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen
Posts mit dem Label emotions werden angezeigt. Alle Posts anzeigen

Dienstag, 18. April 2017

Day 212 - Am I my history? (pt.1)



Today I went through a situation of emotional stress, accompanied by intensive self judgement according to programmed and learned thought patterns that I constructed, accepted and allowed throughout the experiences of my past.

I will take this recent incident as an anker point to move from there in all dimensions of my current mental and physical state, which could be described as an insecure condition of my personality with a desperate search / longing for validation and reassurement from others, wherein that need for validation and appreciation has become a major influence on a main part of my whole inner and outer world, my perception of it, my actions and reactions according to my vague interpretations of this perception and all that already caused trouble, emotional turmoil and even harm to [others in my environment] my family and friends in many different ways and on multiple layers of interpersonal relations.

After these events or that chain of events that I was involved in today and that followed a decision I took earlier that day, I was sitting emotionally shattered in my room for many hours. I started thinking about what had happened and began to ask myself what would and could have happened if this or that hadn't happened or if I would have made a different decision in some case or another.
And all those speculations were followed by an immediate reaction of defense, namely searching for an excuse, a justification that would get this weight of responsibility for my living expression within all these moments off of my shoulders. And I noticed that after about half an hour of thinking and arguing with myself.
So I ralized how I was decieving myself and zoomed in more into the timeline of my memories of my experiences today, and that opened up a whole new bunch of smaller, but equally important decisions and considerations I made inbetween those that I first saw as the only relevant ones. By doing so I was able to come clear about my motivations, my deceptions about them and I clearly saw the decisions to blame the outside, i.e. The outer circumstances and other people's actions.

By figuring all this out I was able to stop myself from looking for justifications for the decisions I made; I stopped myself when I reached such a point where I was looking for excuses, took a breath and observed my emotional reaction, on the surface and as well when I saw that all these excuses aren't actually valid. The interesting thing is, that each loss of self-justification actually was a relief, even though facing the truth of yourself in moments of consequential but careless decisions is anything but a pleasant experience.

A further interesting and important point as I realized is, that the most difficult thing is to overcome these points of self justification where the excuse seems to be an obvious logical fact to oneself. We all live those unspoken laws, dogmas, belief systems, whose validity we take for granted without even thinking about them and if we questioned those systems we'd fear the loss of identity or individuality. It is distinctively unpleasant to stop yourself from ignoring these points or to simply skip them. The paradigm of self honesty is key here and once understood there actually is no way around it without compromising one's own self trust and self esteem in consequence.

Being a human, a human consciousness and in process as we all are, this time again I first walked the path into self torturing mind games where I flushed myself deep down the spiral of my history and into my memories of my history as well as into my usual habit of self pity, followed by a strongly emerging rejection of all that, while I try to block these thoughts and emotions.

(continued one day after the event)
When I got really exhausted just by thinking and triggering emotions and thought patterns for a long period of time I finally was able to slow myself down, calm down and to start writing as I did last night and as I am still doing right now. And although it seemed like I actually am my own history, the story that I told myself and that I still believe in, by writing about it and digging into my emotional experiences and reactions, realizing structures within my personal belief system I become aware of my potential to direct myself within all that and in that moment there is responsibility, acceptance of consequence and the dedication learnfrom that, to forgive and correct myself.

For reasons of privacy and protection of others' personal rights I will not go into thematic detail of the event neither will I mention any names of other people that were involved. This writing is for myself, to stop myself from running routines of self sabotage or walk backwards in my mind, restricting myself and not working with what is here as well as to stop repetition of the same patterns over and over again; to move on, develop my Self, create my Self so that I am not so much part of the problem, but rather a part of the solutions in a way that they are best for all.

To be continued!
 

Samstag, 29. September 2012

Day 51 - Ayn Rand and my reactions to the words 'selfishness' and 'self-interest' (part 1)




I was watching a documentary about Ayn Rand and her philosophy of 'rational self-interest'. Her idea was briefly that through rational self interest, when each individual cares for it's very own happiness and not for the happiness of others, a society would become stable and the economy would provide wealth and well being for everyone, self regulating only through the self interest motivation of each participant. The 'rational' within this term can be referred to as 'based on common sense' and a responsible and ethical attitude, which means that the only self-regulation within that personal striving for self interest and your own happiness would be to consider the consequences of your actions for others in a way that your actions should not harm anyone else or interfere with another's self interest. This self regulation includes of course the rigorous rejection of any interference of that kind in your own personal pursuit of happiness.
Very interesting aspects, but I will not go into the practicality of this philosophy or discuss the attempts to implement it into our capitalistic system in this blog.

My point is the reaction I had to the words selfishness and self-interest.

I experienced during reading and watching about Ayn Rand an emotional reaction towards the use of the term 'selfishness' or 'self-interest' in such a, as I saw it, 'positive' way. I was surprised that it could probably be considered that self interest and selfishness could lead to well being for all, maybe even a society full of happy people without exception.
I was nevertheless totally aware of the implcations how the terms are used and what is meant by 'rational self interest', I am clear about the meaning and the considerations, it is not even new, 'do your own thing', 'mind your own business', do not interfere, sounds ok, no problem with that - but: is it even possible? Who decides where the chain of responsibility starts and where it ends? Is that my own business too? Then I am free to shift the borders of my perception of my responsibility and consequence whenever I like.
But we do live in a world that is highly and deeply interconnected, many borders are merely existing on paper, on the world market simple and seemingly meaningless decisions can cause an extraordinary effect on whole countries far away, each and every consumer decision in our society has consequences reaching across the whole planet, can we even dare to believe we could foresee the possible harm that our decisions and actions can inflict on others? Or ist the term 'rational self-interest' nothing more than an excuse, an attempt to avoid to state the appearing inability of the human being to change itself, to be trusted, to becöme a trustworthy, reliable, reasonable and happy part of a functioning society and thus taking the bull by the horns, saying: "let's do the only reasonable thing left: everybody RUN!"?

Those were excerpts of my self interrogations when I saw the documentary and read a little more about Ayn Rand. So, this is obviously not an expertise. I just want to make clear that I did not 'reject' the whole idea and stopped investigating just because of my 'reaction' to the term 'selfishness' and 'self interest'. I would have done that probably, many years ago, when I saw myself more as an idealist, a young philosopher myself, when I saw 'importance' in my personality and used any knowledge, any reading, any debate as an extension for my own self-righteous 'character'.

So still I had this reaction and a prejudices to tackle this philosophy with a suspicious mind from the beginning. It was merly a slight tension, a slight feeling and when I became aware of it I could literally face each single automated program of my mind starting to block my view on what is really happening. I could deliberately follow the attempts of my mind and thoughts to judge the 'person' Ayn Rand, to make up images, speculations about her past, history, trying to find suitable self justifying interpretations of her mimic in the video which could make her look untrustworthy and so on. My self-righteous Ego started to straighten itself, thoughts of arrogant sarcasm and scornful comments turned up.
As I said before, I could deliberately follow those steps and initialised programs and I did not allow them to determine myself. I know, as maybe everybody knows, how such judgemental thought patterns take place and how they develop until one is totally convinced that the thoughts, justifications and judgements are absolutely real and true, while in fact one is just blocking oneself from reality and betraying oneself just to defend an image of oneself as a personality that one has grown fond of.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to charge the words selfishness and self interest with a negative value.

I forgive myself that I have accepted and allowed myself to become determined by my emotional reactions towards words that I have judged and charged with a positive or negative value.


to be continued with self forgiveness and self corrective statements...


Link to the original documentary: