This quote has me in it’s clutches at the moment…it’s brilliant and potent and so resonant…“complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”…it’s my observation that we are currently gripped in a miasma of this attitude…and I can find myself there as well just as easily as those I point my finger at…imagined victimhood is a losers game and my pledge to myself is that I will become even more vigilant to ending the ways I allow myself to participate…
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Mmm.
My daughter has this story that if she asks “Please” that it should happen. And if it doesn’t, she SCREAMS “PLEASE!!!” And then repeats and repeats.
It makes me wonder how often I get stuck in a story that:
If _____, then _____.
Simple programming. Seldom covers the error conditions and events and other aspects.
I guess that is why being “savvy” is something I’ve brought into my awareness. It reflects the emerging game, emerging concepts and practicing that are ripe to evolve in order for me/we to be Thriving instead of surviving.
Even weirder is how “happy” feels different when we are actually thriving than the more “dramatic” contrast one has when we’re mostly miserable and have moments of happy.
Hmmm…
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Thanks for the response…as always lots to think about Rick…
My current thoughts on the matter…bear with me as this has turned into a long thought-stream…lol:
This is certainly at the heart of the matter. I’ve spent a lot of time over many years pondering this very thing from different perspectives and it seems to me that most of us are too easily caught in a ‘cause > effect’ type of thinking…'if I do/think/say ‘X’ then ‘Y’ should/must/will happen’. It’s a sort of emotional algebra we attempt to force on the universe…and in my experience the universe, at best, seems indifferent.
And so we end up, as George Bernard Shaw said, “…complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.” even though we’ve invoked the magical incantations of ‘emotional algebra’…‘if I do/think/say ‘X’ then ‘Y’ should/must/will happen’.…it’s a predictable recipe for frustration and unhappiness.
But here’s the catch…sometimes it actually appears to work!! And we like that…it feels powerful and easy and evokes strong feelings of certainty…I AM IN CONTROL!! And that’s what keeps us hooked into using our ‘cause > effect’ incantations as a strategy for getting what we want.
And the foundation of this type of thinking is very clear to me…it comes from the physical world that we live in… the world of ‘cause>effect’…Newtonian physics. If I throw a rock at a window the ‘cause>effect’ is predictable…if I touch my hand to open flame the ‘cause>effect’ is predictable. So much of the physical world is very predictable in a Newtonian physics ‘cause>effect’ way.
But the problem is we attempt to map across from the physical world to the internal, non-physical world using the same physics of ‘cause>effect’…but our inner world of emotions, memories, desires, thoughts operates more like Quantum physics…where Newtonian physics of predicatable ‘cause>effect’ no longer applies.
This mapping across from physical to non-physical reveals itself through our use of metaphor in language. All of our metaphoric language is derived from the external physical ‘cause>effect’ world. For example a common metaphor people use is “I feel like I’ve got the weight of the world on my shoulders” (or something similar to that)…that’s clearly mapping across from one reality into another…from the external to the internal…using Newtonian physics of the outter world to describe the Quantum physics realm of emotions. The language of ‘as if’. The language we use to describe our inner world all comes from the outter world. And so we try to control our emotional lives through ‘cause>effect’ incantations and behaviours…magical words like ‘Please!’…and then yelling ‘PLEASE’ is akin to throwing the rock harder to get the glass to break…but emotions don’t actually have weight…or velocity…or any of the attributes of the physical world…we just speak and act as if they do…and that’s fundamentally problematic…and very human…in fact I would say this challenge is unique to humans because of language…I don’t see this ‘mapping across’ issue with any other species…
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Incantations…
With the Stories workshop coming up, been pondering the stories we tell ourselves (and that culturally become a part of our mythology, tales – fairy and otherwise, and superstitions).
I can feel the part of me that wants a story to Explain. “If I dance like THIS, it will rain. Oh, it didn’t rain! I must not have danced right, or you must not have, or our faith or groveling wasn’t pleasing to the gods enough, or…”
Dang, so true of relationship weather, too. It seems so much easier to see superstitions in retrospect – and then turn around and adopt fresh ones if we’re not attuned to stories being a big part of the driving “programming” of our choices, actions, concepts, and attitudes…
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