The overwhelming majority of people today are assailed by choices wherever they turn. How someone wants their coffee, their clothes, their love life, every aspect of an outward life can be customized. We equate these choices with love–the more specific the more meaningful. In fact, focusing on the customization of everything is what some might do to feel love, because they don’t feel it in themselves. A quick dopamine hit that we blindly take as caring. This is not to say that these choices are wrong or should be demonized. Just that when you put too much seasoning on something high quality and fresh you take away from the taste. You are like literally the freshest ingredient. Too many choices can take us away of what’s actually happening. We need to realize that focusing on those outward choices is an easy way to not look at what is important. We misdirect our focus in order to feel secure. The feeling of security, by its definition, isolates us, alienates us from others and leaves us unable to realize our own denial of our true self. This leaves us grasping for whatever we can that we think will give us meaning and answers.
I have my own beliefs on religion and purpose and will share them soon, but regardless whether you believe the universe as senseless and empty or that it is ruled by a supreme being(s), we are still the ones accountable for our own life. We are the only living beings that suffer disconnect from meaning but who can also make meaning appear. To hammer and distill it into something we can attach ourselves to, what else could be the point of life? Happiness? All the pleasure we can get? Meaning sounds ominous, but looking for only happiness or pleasure, short-term or long-term, will have you always chasing something. It is running from you because you are chasing it. So if meaning is important, where can we find it?
Krishnamurti’s most well known statement is “Truth is a pathless land” and that is both an empowering and terrifying concept. There is no prescribed truth, no dogma you can blindly attach yourself to. The images and ideas held up by our belief systems are to possess the truth, instead of express it. Believing wholeheartedly in something that tells you how to live will always fall short. It falls short because it is not made by you. Nothing can encapsulate your wants, whims, and beliefs, your mistakes and regrets, your happiest moments, but yourself. The only container you can be poured fully into is you. Dogma is a boat that can take you to the other side, but you cannot carry it on your back and go inland with it.
We’ve all curbed our desires in order to adapt in society without realizing that everyone else has, too. That’s what society is. We’ve all, in different times of our lives, put our wants on hold or stamped them out–and sometimes for very good reason. Society, your environment, your parents all teach you how to be, but they should not teach you who you are. All we’re left with is to adapt and work within that structure while we grow and learn about ourselves. Do this enough and then you’re a grown up. Trouble is, being a grown up doesn’t provide any answers, and by the time you realize that you hopefully already are one. The answers you knew everyone would have, no one does. Realizing that makes it hard not to dismayed, filled with confusion and cynicism, drowning out reality in whatever way possible.
Who we are, which includes most of our actions, our beliefs, come from those who raised us – our parents or the people who took on that role. Though we often times can’t see how much, we push towards and away from their memories with most of our actions. The majority of things that we really hate about ourselves had their foundation laid by our parents. I am always a little awed at the influence of my parents and the memories of them on me, how much of that goes on without me realizing it, and how much I try to use that fact to not take responsibility for feeling depressed or angry. Not writing enough. Or not cleaning my place. Or like the majority of things I wish I didn’t do. Our parents did the best they could with what knowledge they had of life and themselves. Whether good or bad, they were mostly just carrying on what their parents did. Only you have the possibility to stop that cycle. You can find different ways to solve your problems. You’re a grown up. I have always beat myself up for not cleaning regularly and no matter how much I beat myself up, I still wouldn’t do it more often. My solution was to finally hire a maid. You know what – the peace of mind that provides makes it one of the best decisions I’ve made ever. Your personality, decisions, character, who you are attracted to, and who you may resemble are heavily affected by biology and your past, but it does not decide who you are or what you strive for. This is best explained by Sartre’s quote “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you”.
So why can’t you and I change? Realizing you need to, and that you want to, still seems sometimes like an impossible distance between you and the doing. One of the reasons is the finality of it all. Decisions cost you everything else, to decide one thing means to relinquish the other options. Sometimes we are paralyzed by the choices with anxiety or fear gripping us, even when we know what we should do. The only way to regain movement is to, umm, move. A first move can be to realize you are capable of owning a decision and that making one and learning from it grows you into being a more whole person. There’s got to be more than that right? Did I seriously read a page to be left with that bullshit? Wordy asshole – any reasonable person might be thinking.
Like most things worth doing, it is that simple. For it to be that simple, though, requires a revelation. As Alan Watts says, “…it requires a correction of mind, just as clear vision sometimes requires a correction of the eyes.”
The more inward you look, the more you can see the bad and good in every person is also in you.We must work with and see our uniqueness as a paradox: The more we grow into ourselves the more we can observe the connection we have with others. This connection with others can be fueled by the connection, acceptance and understanding you have with yourself and vice versa.
Realizing this brings another equally important fact of life to the forefront, something we all know but don’t like to think about. Our life is controlled not by what happens to us, but how we choose to respond. Respond knowingly.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
First, I want that boat. Second…what do you mean by dogma? Could you give some examples? There’s always been something very Eastern Philosophy sounding about that word to me. Is it that specific or does it encompass all religions/philosophies/ways-of-living that are organized and sorta dictate a “way of being”?
And, yeah, I feel over-stimulated by all the choices the world offers no pretty regularly. I think it’s a pretty significant part of my anxiety. I’m going to try to look at it differently now and see if that helps.
well dogma technically means just something that is irrefutably true if you believe in something, a requirement. So an Orthodox Christian would have a different dogma than say an orthodox Jew because they believe in two different belief systems. While dogma has a pseudo-mystic and Eastern style to it, Dogma as it is defined is easier seen in the Western world. One of my hopes is that through this blog we can start to get you away from belief, or dogma, and go towards faith. As Alan Watts describes it, “belief (dogma) is the insistence that the truth is what one would wish to be, while faith is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Thanks for asking the question! I’ll get more speedy on my replies next week, just you wait.