The War on Free Will

All violent acts, lies ever told, confrontations or wars ever waged are directs attack on free will. They are attempts in bypassing someones free will, making him do whatever the abuser wants instead of what that person considers to be the best action to take at the moment for his own well being.

This is why often victim of abuse are so dysfunctional and they have major deficiencies in their lives even after the abuse stops.

The purpose of free will is to facilitate self preservation and self correct when mistakes are made. Free will is what allows you to take better decisions when information about your potential flows or mistakes is presented to you. Long term victims of abuse tend to be trapped in a vicious cycle, because as a result of the abuse you often end up with confusion they become dysfunctional and self-sabotaging.

Which makes them believe that free will is something dangerous, if they are already so dysfunctional when they are trying to control and manage themselves if they would just allow themselves to do whatever they want when they want their lives must completely spiral out of control.

This is of course an error in those people perception, because free will is an insurance for self preservation it is what allows us to be so good at taking care of ourselves and everybody around us. What is causing the dysfunctionalities is the lyes that created the confusion.

If the purpose of abuse is to bypass free will, healing from abuse is to restore the ability to have free will. Which is what is going to allow that person to become functional again. The mind gets poisoned with lies, in order to restore the health of the mind you have to find out the truth. The best advice I can give you if you are suffering from mental illness is to learn how to think critically.

There is also a darker side of this problem, if you consider free will as being dangerous and destructive and you don't trust yourself to do what you want. You will also consider others people free will dangerous which could make you act in such a way to don't allow it in the people you have power over. Which is going to perpetuate the cycle of abuse, where victim of abuse left untreated eventually become the abusers.

This will affect the quality of your life and your relationships, people who are not used with abusive people won't tolerate it so the only people that will stay around you are victim from past abuse that haven't healed. In order to be around other free people you have to free yourself from your mind prison first.

This will also lead you to have deficiencies because you stifle the very own mechanism that is supposed to allow you to practice self preservation and when you have scarcity you are more likely to cheat so your integrity will be affected as well. 

Why do the rich get richer and the poor get poorer

It is a seemingly paradox the people who have the most tend to get even more resources while life goes one while the people with the least amount of resources and deficiencies just get worst over time.

You could say that the rich are exploiting and abusing the poor so they create uneven exchanges that allow them to profit from, this is certainly true in some cases but i don't think it is the only factor that contributes to this the people that are in a place of deficiency also have a part of responsibility and they are responsible for doing something that is detrimental for their well being.

On the other hand there is a tendency for opposite to attract like the way magnets do, so if the world would work from this principle whatever you have right know you would eventually have the opposite of it, but things don't really work like this. Because if they would work nobody would be able to achieve anything for a longer period of time.

It is an obviously true statement to say that nobody avoids negative things in their life, so it is not that successful people don't encounter negative experience they just seem to have more positive in their life than unsuccessful people do.

Life tends to happen in cycles you go through a series of positive experiences and eventually something negative will happen to you that will generally trigger a series of negative experiences. When there is a lot of resistance towards the negative, and someone is very unwilling to go through a negative series of experience this will tend to amplify the negative and make it last longer.

For example if you are very resistant towards failure, behaving in such a way to reduce failure in your life is going to lead to a lack of skills, because we learn through failure and when you end up being so deficient to the point of incompetency you end up with an excessive amount of failure in your life.

The same is valid for pain, violence or death. If you avoid discomfort you won't do the necessary things to grow so you will deteriorate and end up with way more discomfort in your future and decay. If you avoid confrontation your relationships could deteriorate so badly that you are going to be very unsatisfied and this creates more opportunity for conflict in your future.

Life will generally flow from pozitiv to positive to positive etc and eventually will switch polarity and is going to flow to negative to negative to negative etc. and then it will switch again. This cycle will happen through out your entire life.

According to the theory of the law of attraction, from books like "The Secret" teaches people to avoid negativity and pay attention to only positive things. Unfortunately you have no choice we all experience negative we live in a dualistic world, it is impossible to avoid either one of the negative or the pozitiv.

As a matter of fact avoiding the negative is what creates the scarcity in someones life, energy flows from negative to positive. If you are learning a new skill you have to fail over and over again before you can have any realistic chances at succeeding. 

What is the purpose of life

You might have asked yourself what is the best way to spend the time of your life. It is probably one of the most important question you have to answer.

Unfortunately there is no specific answer i could give you, there is no specific action that would represent this, like I couldn't tell you that the purpose of life is to become a doctor. But there are some generalities like your motivation in the activities that you chose.

As far as i know you have three options you can either try to become successful, take some big risks and hope that is going to work out and become a self made man or women, whatever you might be pursuing that is usually fame or money, the second option is to live for pleasure and happiness all that risk taking and hard work might not be worthed after all life is short why waste it, so you prioritize pleasure and happiness, the third option is to try to minimize unnecessary sufferance that is created by humans.

We live in a world that over appreciates heroes, just look at all the superhero movies that had become popular lately. A hero is someone that is taking really high risks to accomplish what most people can't, not necessarily someone who is sacrificing their lives for others. I could argue that the heroic pursuit is rather selfish, a hero could be anything from someone who is famous to an entrepreneur or a warrior etc. This people are not being admired because they are necessarily helping others as much as they inspire others to be like them.

The motivation of the hero is not always a positive one, Hitler matches the definition of a hero for the people who voted him in power and fought for him or listened to his orders it was their hero. When you end up with something as bad as this, and the only benefit to others is to make then aspire to be just like you, you end up with a pretty accurate description of hell.

The problem with living for pleasure and happiness is that sometimes things that are pleasurable or make you happy can be very bad for you in the future or the people around you. For example if you are dictator keeping the entire country poor and starving with a lack of consciousness could make you very happy, it is only a matter of time until there will be a revolution, where the people you have torture for years for your own pleasure and happiness will kill you. In my experience the end is never happy when you are a hedonist. This is why hedonism is still a form of vampirism, it creates an unfair exchange and sufferance.

Not all sufferance is created by humans, life is hard by itself before people start doing dumb things. To it is impossible to avoid pain, failure, violence and death, so by default everybody will suffer.

But a lot of sufferance is created by other people, dedicating your life to reduce man made sufferance gives you an are of activities in which you could practice trading value with other people in a fair way. In trying to reduce sufferance you include the well beings of others in the success of your life. Like this it becomes a win/win trade you gain friends and resources and as a result of that the world becomes a better place because of you.

How to stop dissociating

If in the past you suffer any form of abuse, which is generally inflicted through being a victim of a violent act or most common in our culture is to be through being lied.

We experience emotional pain whenever we lose something, like when someone close to you dies, at the end of a relationship, or when you lose money etc. The purpose of violence and lying is to create a win lose dynamic where the person that inflicts the abuse gains something from the other person in an unfair way. This is why abuse causes emotional pain, when emotional pain occurs we all have a coping mechanism. For some people that is drinking a glass of wine, eating chocolate or chatting with a friend.  

When the abuse is allowed to happen for a long period of time everything becomes chronic. What we call that coping mechanism when it becomes chronic is mental illness. All what mental illness is an attempt to control emotional pain regardless if you are talking of depression, anxiety, ocd, bipolar etc.

Even after the abuse is over and if you are not being harmed anymore, first of all there will be some confusion that will make you sabotage yourself that you need to clear up, but there it also will be emotional pain that comes out of your memory.

This is a mechanism that your body has in order to protect you from repeating the negative experience you had in the past. Sometime the pain is so intens that the person that experiences it will become absent minded and engage in some sort of pleasurable activity to distract themselves from the pain this could be everything from smoking, any other drugs, to more subtle things like daydreaming or absent mindedness. If you are as bad as I was you can have memory issues so bad that you could hardly remember what you did for days.   

This type of distraction makes you a poor performer in life it makes it hard to concentrate or be consistent in your actions, it also can make you hard to be around. This is why people who suffered from abuse struggle with relationships and in their career. 

Which is going to lead to a vicious cycle where in certain situation based on your negative past experience is going to bring emotional pain to the surface that will cause you to need to cope with the pain this making you an especially poor performance which is going to lead to further loss and more negative and painful experience which is going to create another painful memory.

This can make life quite unlivable, it is a vicious cycle where nothing seems to work the more negative memories you have the more negative experience you end up living.

The way out of these cycle starts with truth, by learning the truth about your situation you get a new image of what is possible to accomplish. Unfortunately your emotions are not responding to logic or reason they are mostly simple survival responses designed to keep you safe, they respond to your situation and the environment that you find yourself.

So when you revisit that situation that is making you dissociate, the intention in your head to act in a certain way is going to be one while your emotions are going to align with the past experience and contradict your intentions.

This is going to create hesitation which is crucial, we don't want to avoid hesitation we actually want to create it because through hesitation is how your brain relearns. You might find yourself going back and forth and pausing a lot if you are patient enough you will eventually reach the point of relief where your emotional pain is going to decrease dramatically.

Which means that you are much likely to perform well when you are not under emotional distress which is going to create a positive memory of you in this situation.

And when you have a big enough history of positive memories there will be no need for your body to warn you of any potential danger. So you will stop dissociating!

There is no way of erasing the past, the only way out is forward, by creating new positive memories the past loses some of his emotional charge so you can claim back your life and live a full life.

Hesitation is how your mind reprograms itself!

There is somewhat of a negative connotation surrounding the word hesitation. I am of belief that all the emotions and behaviours that exist actually have a practical purpose. It is true that we live in a rapidly evolving world to which our biology can keep up, but i don't think this makes all our instincts useless.

New information will almost always cause hesitation, if you have a series of positive or negative experiences in an area of your life. Learning information that contradicts that experience would cause you to pause before you act in order to gather more information directly from your experience to really determine if your experience with that thing is accurate.

Hesitation is a natural mechanism that help you reassess your situation, in order to make sure you are taking the best possible decisions. When you suffer from extended abuse, you will experience pain not only from direct experience but also from memory. For example if you had negative experience in the past with relationships, when you find someone new that you want to start a relationship with the painful memories from your past will surface causing you to act in strange ways making you a poor partner driving away the other person. This is how your negative experience from the past creates a vicious cycle that can ruin your present.

 If in the past you had a relatively happy life, the memories of your past will cause you to become nostalgic, when the past is not so pleasant and happy the memories will cause you to dissociate. We have to perform three major tasks avoid danger, provide for our needs to sustain ourselves and reproduce. When you are in a calm state you have integrity the mind is able to perform all three of the tasks without neglecting the other, however when you are in distress the mind will prioritize one of the task at the disadvantage of the others two.

This compromise of the mind happens whenever you experience emotional pain either direct from your present experience or from the past memories that worn you that your experience was negative in the past and is very likely to have another negative experience in the present.

Hesitation is like being on a seesaw moving between the negative experience of your past that it will cause you to dissociate leaving you to live in a compromise and the hope that you can built a new experience that will allow you to be happy and keep your integrity.

The past can be changed the only way to deal with the negative emotions from the past is to build new positive emotions, when you do that you will stop dissociating. In order to build diferit emotions that your negative experience you first need the knowledge that it is possible to do better in that area. But emotions are not logical you can't change emotions by reasoning with them, emotions respond to the environment and your relation relative to it.

So when you are going to act upon the new experience there is going to be a discrepancy between how you feel and how do you want to act, this is what hesitation is. It is the process through which your mind reprograms itself. Resisting it is resisting healing, it something that it should be encouraged because is how you heal.

In my journey I used to be confused and think that there was something wrong with me whenever i hesitated, that caused me to self-sabotage because, i would not allow this natural healing process to take place and this made it impossible to create new positive experiences. 

The cycle of abuse

There is a weird vicious cycle we are trapped in, people who suffered some degree of abuse in the past abusing the new generation causing them to have similar dysfunctionalities and problem. We are passing the abuse from one generation to the next like a virus.

Most of us seem to be completely oblivious even to what abuse is and what negative consequences it can create.

 This is why we make all kind of excuses or create all kind of scapegoats to blame the illness that originates with abuse. I don't claim to know everything but some things are so obvious that all what you have to do in order to understand the cause of them is to be willing to question things and make the obvious connections, that most people seem to refuse to want to make.

If you look at the past we have done a great amount of progress as far as reducing violence. If people that lived in the middle eves might wahe been traumatised by public execution, being stoned for adultery or being converted with force to whatever religion the king prefered etc.

It is not like we don't have any violence in the modern world but it is drastically reduced, unfortunately we replaced violence with lying. Punching someone in the face accomplishes the same thing as being lye.

If you are walking on a dark alley and someones holds you at gun point, does so because by doing so is going to make you do something you wouldn't do other wise it creates an unfair exchange between you too, where you are giving all the valuable you have with you at the time in exchange for nothing, the same can be accomplished through lyes. If you think you are going to start a business with someone and you put money in together to start the business, but your partner takes off with the money the outcome of these two is the same you still lost all your valuables without getting nothing in return.

Abuse is either done with a fist or is done with a lye. A lye can poison and traumatise you just as much as being punched in the face does. The only difference is that you are not going to get a bruise.

The virus of the modern world is not so much violence as much as it is lying, most of what we have functions on lyes from politics, marketing to the peoples individual relationships and the way they educate and raise their children.

 We are in the process of figuring out strategies that not only allows you to make a living, have a relationship but also it allows you to keep your integrity.

Most of the emotional and behavioural aberration you can see in the world today, is caused by lyes.  

The abuse is generally followed by confusion, after all how can you stay connected to reality when your perception of reality is being constantly poisoned with lyes. If you successfully confuse someone enough their perception of reality is going to be so distorted that they are going to do really hurtful things to themselves for the benefit of their abuser. This could lead to serious and dramatic negative consequences. Below there is a flow chart with some of the consequences chronic abuse can create.

I know some of these are generalisation and there are other contributing factors, but there is definitely a relationship between abuse, mental illness, poverty, psychosomatic illness, dysfunctional relationships and crime.

How to clear your own confusion

When you are a victim of abuse as a side effect of abuse you will experience confusion. This is why even if you are successful at practicing self-defense and you are no longer being abused you can still suffer from that abuse even years after the abuse was inflicted on you.

Confusion is the main reason why we self-sabotage ourselves, confusion means to perceive wrong things as right and right as wrong. Which is going to make one voluntarily do the wrong thing over and over again because he thinks it is the wright thing to do.

Clearing your confusion is what really allows you to recover after abuse and regain back your life and integrity.

In order to brake free out of this cycle you need to understand two things over what you are confused about. You have to understand the essence and the nature of that thing.

The definition for essence is the common key characteristics of a thing, for example the essence of a chair is that all chairs have a platform on which you can sit and some sort of legs that connects the platform to the ground. Only the common characteristics determine the essence a lot of chairs have backrests but not all of them so then backrests are not part of the essence of a chair.

When you don't understand the essence of a thing you could confuse it for something else, a bar stool looks very different from an office chair. If you would have an allergy to chairs and don't understand exactly what makes chairs you might think that avoiding office chairs is all what you have to do to protect yourself from your allergy, but of course sitting on chairs that look diferit of office chairs would still trigger your allergy because they are all chairs.

Of course this is a silly example nobody has an allergy to chairs, but it illustrate the mechanism a better example is when people don't understand the essence of abuse, which is someone subjecting you to a certain treatment either violence or lying in order to gain something from you in an unfair way. If you have problem understanding this you might tolerate it for years even think that the people who are abusing you actually love you.

Understanding essence gives you the clarity of what makes a thing so it is easy for you to identify it but it doesn't tell you what can you expect from that thing or what it is really possible to do with it.

This is why understanding the nature of things it is also important. The definition of nature is: all the usual and expected characteristics of that things. For example the nature of a chair is that it is made out of some sort of material that will eventually break and decay, it can hold only a certain amount of weight based on the material from which it is constructed it is also an artificial object made by humans it does not occur naturally etc.

By understanding the nature of things you have realistic expectation from that thing, if you know that human beings don't change for other human beings there is no point in attempting to change them, the best decision for you to take is to either accept that person or move on.

 Finding clarity is not happiness or bliss often reality is terrifying, this is what we are so willing to live our lives in ignorance. But ignorance only keeps you comfortable it doesn't make you happy!

How to solve your problems!

We all have problems, no matter who you are or what you do it seems that you will unavoidable end up with some sort of problems on your hand.

There are only three types of problems you can get:

1. When something is wrong with your body.

It could be a health problem or an insecurity you might have, this is for sure an infinite cycle. Because we age not only our bodies are more prone to illness when we get older but we also get less attractive, so the problems you have right know are nothing in comparison with the problems you are going to get in a few years.

2. You are in some sort of conflict with someone.

With enough discipline you can avoid most conflict in your life, but not all of it, beside there is conflict that you don't cause you sort of just find yourself in it without ever planing to cause anyones else problems. It is impossible to like everybody or be liked by everybody. If you are not causing any conflict there is a chance that at any point you will be the victim of a violent act.

3. You don't have enough of something you need or want.

Getting what you need to survive in the modern world is getting easier and easier, it seems that the more we get the more we want. It is hard to imagine that at a point people died of starvation or they were eaten by lions. The problem we have in today's world are more on the lines of not affording the latest generation of technology or dying of a heart attack because you can help yourself at shoving junk food in your face. No matter how much money and resources you accumulate there will always be something that you don't have enough of even if is something that you can buy with money like love and friends. Everybody is deprived in certain ways to a certain degree.

Solving your problem is impossible because they are infinite cycles, thees three problems you will always have a version of them to a certain degree. You can at best only manage them.

The biggest problem you can have however is when you assume that you are going to become happy when you have no more problem, which is never going to happen. Then life becomes a process of chasing the white rabbit you can hardly keep up with it and when you get close enough it just takes of and puts a significant distance between you again you will never catch it.

If you are not happy now with what you have you will never bee. True happiness comes when you own your emotions when you stop using scapegoats to blame your anxiety on and your lack of happiness. Because happiness is something internal you will never find it in the world through making a lot of money or a relationship etc.

The assumption that happiness is going to happen when you accomplish certain goals in your life and eliminate your problems is a coping mechanism for your anxiety that comes from the realization that you are not special. At the end of the day there is nothing that makes you immune to violent acts, pain, failure and eventually death. When you will stop distracting yourself with external distractions from your existential anxiety, not only you will become very functional and manage your problems better but you will also find happiness.  

How to change your life!

If you suffer of any mental health issues or you are in a dark place right know, what brought you in this position is not a conversation, reading a book, a blog article or any other activity considered therapeutic that people use to help them heal. What created the situation in which you are today was a series of negative experiences that created a bad momentum in your life.

After all your life is change by experiences, if anything else has any value is if it serves as a precursor for action to create a series of positive experiences which will change the negative momentum in your life.

Because we live in a bipolar world the best life you can have is one in which you have both negative and positive experiences, some of us get stucked in a negative momentum because we reject the negativity. By trying so hard to get out of the dark places you create a stucked in quick sand effect, the more you struggle the dipper you immerse yourself in the sand.

Opposites attract if you are in a certain emotional state right know it is almost certain that you will eventually be in the opposite emotional state in just a matter of time. This is an infinite cycle everybody goes through, until you die and nobody really knows what happens after.

It is easy enough to tell someone that it is trapped in to a negative cycle to just have some positive experiences and everything is going to be fine. The person that is in chronic negativity also has chronic emotional pain that blocks the possibility of enjoying almost everything.

Whenever you are in emotional pain you tend to see the world in a different way and other people see you differently, and this things diminish your experience. Nobody is trapped in any of the extremes but depending on how much do you reject the negative you will have the tendency to be predominantly more negative than positive.

In order to create the wright circumstances for positive experience to happen, you have to stop trying to get ride of the negative in your life but unfortunately this is harder than it seems because our bodies give us feedback based on how well we perform so you are probably in a considerable amount of emotional pain. In an attempt to get rid of the pain you struggle and sink even deeper in to the negativity.

The first step is to learn to control your emotional pain. After years of struggle and trial and error I discovered a process that yet failed to let me down. The process is composed out of four steps:

1. Stop all your distractions that allow you to sooth your emotional pain;
2. Focus on just the pain for a short period of time, no longer than a few seconds. Let the pain completely flood your body;
3. Allow yourself to go back in to your distractions and give you relief from the very intense pain;
4. Repeat the entire process for at least 20 times or until your pain has significantly decreased.

This simply works because by going in to the negative extreme in a gradual way, you attract the opposite of it. You should get relief relatively quickly, it is very important to don't stay for to long in the pain because it will become unbearable very quick and cause you to quit.    

After you get relief from your chronic emotional pain you can move with ease in life and bring a more positive energy in what you are trying to accomplish, which is going to increase the likelihood of a positive experience. 

How to change other people

Helping other human beings it is especially hard because they have this "strange" quality called free-will. Because of it you can't tell them what to do or what not to do. Telling them what to do or not do will only create conflict or cause them to rebel against what you tell them just to feel free.

We were design to be free, when someone is attempting to control you it is ignoring your need for autonomy, no matter what the intention of that person might be it is not going to feel good because you are no longer free. I am not talking only about the pain that comes when you realize that you are doing something wrong, interacting with people like this will add another level of pain.

Seeing other people that have problems, reminds us that it is impossible to avoid problems, the person that is trying to "help" the person who is attempting to control does so in order to control his own anxiety. Because if the other person is going to change and be well it maintains the denial of the person that was so benevolent and offered to help.

Not only there is a hidden intention between the action and the true intention of the people that are trying to help you by controlling you. It is also a very inefficient way to help.

By attempting to control other for their own good, doesn't respects them as actually human being that have free-will and are capable of self-preservation. The other person is going to feel it and become defensive.

It is impossible to save everybody, unfortunately this is the nature of the world some people will suffer and live horrible lives. This realisation can cause you some anxiety because you are no exception the only difference between you and the people who live in Africa that don't have enough to eat is simply luck, you were lucky enough to be born in a better place.

Learning to accept this is going to allow you to control your own anxiety and stop projecting it on others, which will allow you to interact with others in a way that is respecting them as human that are able to practice self-preservation and have free-will. Which is going to give them the highest chance to be receptive to what you tell them and give them the highest chance to change. It is not a guaranty that they will, it is not your responsibility to change others, you can only connect and give feedback if it is necessary. Because human beings have autonomy the only way you can help people is by helping them accomplish what they already attempting to accomplish anything else than that is either abuse or sabotage.

Why it is impossible to get TRIGGERED!

We live in strange times where you have to use trigger warnings and be careful to how do you address to other people to don't hurt their feelings.

Not wanting to get triggered is a form of controlling your anxiety, we all suffer to some degree of anxiety. Because it is impossible to fully avoid the negative, we all will eventually fail, feel pain, be a victim of violence and eventually dye. Things that reminds you of these facts will trigger episodes of anxiety. When you say triggered, you are technically assuming that something external caused your anxiety. The word trigere means to release a chain reaction, for example if i have a gun i point it towards someone and press the trigger i am responsible of injuring or killing that person.

On the other hand if i am wearing a t-shirt that is making you anxious, i am not at the cause of your anxiety i am only remembering you that there is a chance to be wrong and there are other people that have different opinions than yours. You already were anxious about this before you saw my t-shirt, this is more like if you were walking on the beach and stepped on a sharp rock that made your foot hurt, rather than the rock getting in your way to purposely cause you pain. To get ride of all the rocks from the beach so you can't risk stepping on them is pure insanity.

The source of anxiety it is always internal it is based on the inevitability of something bad happening to you, blaming external sources for it does nothing than serve as a scapegoat. Which is creating more violence because now you are living with the illusion that if you are going to make other people to accept your ideology or get ride of them we would finally end up with haven on earth.

In reality if you get ride of your opposition you will just feel anxious for the next thing that you assume it is dangerous for you.

Anxiety is an infinite cycle you will never get rid of it, there will always be two major groups competing, arguing or killing each other. So far this was pretty much a staple of history, externally controlling your anxiety is only going to make it grow in intensity and diminish the quality of your life even more.

Because we have very little control over external factors or our own emotions, controlling your anxiety is pretty much impossible which creates the seemingly paradox of control the way you will have the most control over something is by not proactively trying to control it.    
   

Acceptance is not passivity!

If you are attempting to change your life you might find yourself in the following scenario, you are struggling very hard yet forces over which you have no control constantly sabotage you and make you start from square one.

It is like a the rational part of you that is aware of the negative consequences is fighting over the apparently irrational part of you that would rather settle for less and just enjoy the cheap immediate pleasure that is going to slowly destroy your life.

This fight is hardly ever wined by anybody, because we have very little control over our bodies, if you are going to fight you will get your ass kicked over and over again, it is an unwinnable fight. There are some people that have stamina they can last in the ring for a very long time but they are far from winning.

The only wise thing to do with fights that you can't win is to don't even fight in the first place but then you are trapped between the self sabotage that is happening on a daily bases and your bodies instincts that are waiting for you to just try to go against them like a bully waiting to kick your ass.

This creates an interesting dilemma if you try you are very likely to fail if you don't it will just get worst. For decades self-help groups and various spiritual teaching told people to don stop resisting. Like for example the first step of AA is to admit that you have a problem, or it is quite a common theme in Buddhism to be present and learn to allow everything. Which is a rather strange thing to do because if you are trying to change yourself it is very contraintuitive to work on accepting what are you trying to change or go to meetings where they just talk about your problems rather than taking direct action. This creates the impression of passivity and indulgence rather then a very motivated group of people ready to squeeze the most juice out of life.

I am not a very spiritual and i don't like self-help gurus, it would be easy to dismiss everything but maybe there is a seed of truth in this, we don't want to throw away the baby with the bath water after all.  

We have very little control over ourselves this is why it is important to accept the things that you can't control. Yet at the same time it doesn't mean that you need to be passive, acceptance is about the things that you can't change while resistance is about what you can change.

 Things you can't control

Emotions

Your emotional system is part of the autonomic nervous system, which is wired to react to involuntary not your own will.  

Actions

Your actions are dependent on your emotions, the human brain is wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and this will trigger emotions that influences the way you behave for example when you are afraid you fight or flee.

Breath

In a lot of spiritual practice breath is introduced as the catalyst with which with practice you will gain control over certain factors like emotions or thoughts. This is of course false because you have no control over emotions and other things.  

Thoughts

Thoughts are often used in self help as a tool of control from making you happy in the present true positive affirmations or the law of attraction, which state that your thoughts create reality through thinking. Neither of thouse facts are empirically proven. First of all you have a very limited control over your thoughts, for example you can think right know of a house if you want but let's say you are unhappy trying to think positive thoughts won't do you much good, you will fail and lose self esteem because you are trying to respond to something you don't have control over.  

Perception

Your perception is also something you don't have control over because it is highly influenced by your emotions. There is something called reticular activating system that filter the information that is being picked by your senses from the environment. Like for example whenever you buy some new piece of clothing and you think that you haven't saw anybody wear it and after you buy it you see a lot of people wearing the same item. It is not like all boot the same item at the same time with you or they decided to wear it in the same day, it was there all the time it was just irrelevant for you before you boot it. You probably saw it but your brain just didn't gave any importance to that information. Consciously choosing on what to hold your attention or perception can be done only for very short periods of time, not a powerful enough tool to create any change in your life.  

Other people

Just a quick search on Amazon for self development books and you can see the volume of books focused on controlling and manipulating others. The problem with that is that human are design by nature to be free we all have a need for autonomy, you simply can`t tell people what to do and expect them to do it. You have to manipulate them to do it which often doesn't work and even if it does there are way too many negative side effects long term like resentment or rebellion. Think of all the parents trying to control their children this is why majority of us experienced a period of rebellion as teenagers, and often the manipulations techniques just failed.  

External factors

This should be obvious enough, but unfortunately from what i am seeing in the world not so obvious. Controlling external things like weather or traffic it is impossible, there are simply too many variable factors impossible to anticipate. Because of all the variable trying to control all this is simply delusional.

Skills and abilities

Your skills and abilities will vary from day to day and other factors like for example how often you practice, or with who you practice, your level of energy. There are simply too many variable to expect a very consistent performance level and expecting that can be very demoralizing especially because you have to put so much time and energy into it, which can cause people to quit when they see inconsistent results.

Body language

Body language is often presented in self help books as a tool of developing confidence on the premise fake it until you make it. Your body language will reflect your emotions to the outside world, you have very limited control over it i don't think you can fake a confident body language more then you can hold your breath. There is some scientific research out there that indicates some hormonal changes inside the body through certain postures though this changes are minor and non semnificative body language it is not an effective tool through which you can generate change or improve the quality of your life. I found in the past whenever i would try to control my body language that it would make my emotions worst because it would make me resist them. The purpose of your body language is to communicate to the outside world how you feel and you have no control over it.    

 Surrender

In some spiritual practices people talk often of surrender or maybe you heard of being present. This will only give people the wrong sense of responsibility because surrender is highly dependent on the environment. Surrender happens automatically when you realize that you can't avoid a conflict and have no chance of winning.

 Gratitude

Gratitude is another thing often mentioned in spiritual practices, it is presented as a way to keep you happy basically if you are in a state of gratitude you can't feel any negative emotions and i agree you can only experience one emotion at the time. The problem with this is that gratitude happen with a purpose is to reward you whenever you are happy where you are in life you can`t decide when to feel it and when not to. Sure at any point in life you have something to be grateful about but if you are faced with emotional distress your brain will automatically focus on the problem in order to solve it, to focus on gratitude during those moment doesn't help in solving your problems, and is also impossible because in order to focus on gratitude you have to change your perception over which you have very limited control.  

Outcome

We often enter in some situation in our lives, and because we are trying to avoid the negative consequences of failure, we deny the probability of failure. This creates a lot of anxiety in the moment because anxiety is a warning mechanism. As soon as you acknowledge all the possible things that could happen to you in any given moment, especially the negative ones, and recognise the fact that you have no control over the outcome. This tends to relief a lot of the anxiety.

Just because you temporarily accepted your emotions, thoughts etc. it dosen't mean that you can't resist your situation.  

How to self-sooth

If you are going trough hard times or you are dealing with just the usual discomfort of life, it can be overwhelming to deal with all of your emotions sometimes.

Your emotions come in waves, because we live in a bipolar world energy flows from one pole to the other. Finding emotional balance simply means flowing from one negative to positive.

People who have a hard time in usual with negative emotions, it is because they rejected the negative aspects of life so this stifle the emotional flow. Think of it like this, most people find the sound of the ocean waves pleasant and relaxing, if somehow you could convince someone that every time a wave reaches the shore a dolphin dies, if you like dolphins listening to the ocean waves is going to become a horrible experience.

Our bodies have the capacity to transform pain in too pleasure and pleasure in too pain through the endocrine system by secreting a class of hormones called endorphin's. There are two cases in which these hormones are being secreted, the first case is to serve as reinforcement for good behavior, the second reason is to stop pain. The same way exogenous morphine is used as an anesthetic in medicine, you can subject someone to very painful procedures under the effects of theses drugs that person won't feel a thing.

This is why pain always leads to pleasure and pleasure to pain, nobody is fully stuck in any of the extremes, however some people tend to be more predominantly in one extreme over the other. I never heard anybody complaining about being to positive, it is really a problem when you become predominantly negative.

If opposite attract in order to move from positive to negative, you have to first accept the negativity that you already have in your life.

Sometimes the pain is too intense and horrible to be accepted, if this is the case you have to expose yourself in a controlled gradual way, like this your energy is going to flow and change. We are constantly suppressing some degree of pain, suppression it is a normal mechanism of your mind that is allowing you to don't be to distracted by your pain in order to keep you functional.

Pretty much at any point if you get ride of all your distractions, you will find pain underneath unleas you have any special reason to be happy. If you put your attention on that pain for at least a second, the pain will eventually become unbearable and you will retreat in your distractions, after a while you can do the same thing stop all your distractions and place your attention on the pain for a second. If you repeat this process for as long as it is necessary you will eventually get relief from your pain.  

    

What does it means to be self disciplined

Reality is scary this is why nobody really wants to accept it for what it really is. Intelligence comes at a huge price, because human beings are the most intelligent animals on the planet this makes self preservation a lot harder.

Even if you get everything you need for your immediate survival you still know that you could fail in a horrible and unexpected way, or get sick, be a victim of a violence act and eventually die. Our great intelligence comes at the cost of our peace and sanity, it is true that ignorance is bliss.

When this anxiety is unmanaged can cause a great amount of dysfunction, this is why self-discipline is necessary. As mammal animal we are wired to avoid pain and seek pleasure, unfortunately pain is not completely avoidable, self-discipline minimizes your pain doesn't eliminate it. Because we live in a bipolar world you will experience both in your life, self-discipline allows you to don't get stuck in the negative for more than what is really necessary.

Like any other virtue it is between two other extremes, that if you are unbalanced and live by will create deficiency or excess in your life. In the case case of self-discipline the deficient extreme is avoidance and the other extreme that creates excess is obsession.        

Being under a certain threat disrupts your normal function of your body, and triggers the fight or flight response, which creates a purposeful unbalanced in you in order to help you survive. You can think of the two extreme as expression of your stress response, when you are in flight you will avoid and when you are in fight you will attempt to overcome something by being obsessed about it. For someone that is very avoidant can create the illusion of being lazy while for someone that is obsessive about certain things can create the illusion of a very motivated person however both of them are vices sub-optimal ways to live your life. If you avoid life you will hardly achieve anything and if you become obsessed with certain things you will spend to much time in a certain area of your life and neglect other important areas.

Energy is in constant motion, this makes it impossible to remain in any of the extremes of your behavior. This makes staying in balance a dynamic process, where you will find yourself in any of the other two extremes and slowly finding the equilibrium. Think of it like setting the right temperature in your shower, you have to slowly increase the flow of both hot and cold before you can find the middle.

When either of the left or right is being rejected, by the person being confused and thinking that there is something wrong that he is in a state of avoidance or obsession then you will tend to get stuck in the extreme that you rejected and it becomes impossible to find the equilibrium between them. In order to get unstuck you have to get in to the other extreme before you can find the middle. 

The truth about the truth

We are all on a journey in life to find the truth, we are born completely ignorant not knowing anything.

We learn things about the world and ourselves gradually, with our limited senses and based on what others tell us or treat us. It seems that reality is not something necessary for us to survive so we are not equipped in such a way to perceive reality for what it really is.

We created all kind of methods to distill reality from fiction like science it is all an attempt to figure out reality, yet no matter what we do is we still end up with two major groups of people that disagree with each others.

Because it is impossible to know everything there will always be something that we have to speculate about, when that happens there will be multiple opinions on what reality is like, so people will pick sides.

Not only this usually leads to arguments and conflict but it also leads to massive amounts of confusion. Just the simple task of finding the best diet to be on, it is an absolute nightmare if you look at the science for any published study that reaches a conclusion you will find at least one that reaches the opposite conclusion. Both sides saying that they are the impartial independent non bias researcher.

Not only people will lye to you, to protect their interest but they will also massively speculate and present you their belief system as being the absolute truth.

Because we can't know everything we are all relaying on speculation to some degree, we are all hypocrites the same all of us are liers, the best you can do with telling the truth is to say just the occasional white lie the same it is true for hypocrisy. It is impossible to don't accept speculation as truth, but to do it and say that you are telling only the truth it should be a crime.

The true danger trying to find out the truth comes from the people that are either going to lie to you or with the people that are so deep in to their belief system that they will confuse and detour you.

If it is impossible to know everything, to say that you should know enough is like saying that you should eat enough, you will never get enough food or truth. It is something that you pursue for your entire life, without ever felling satisfy for more then few hours until the day you die. Truth is not something you own it is a commitment.