Overcoming fear and the route to self-progression.

Pragmatism and superstition play a key role in self-progression. We tend to generalize our experiences onto the world around us in the form of projections. When we have experienced the success or failure of particular actions in life, based on what has worked and has not worked, we project this into our superstitions of what will work in the future. To be completely pragmatic would be to go through the actions we know work without questioning them, but never questioning the actions beyond knowing they work will likely not lead to better actions or improvements of actions. If we do not know why something works, we will never get to the root of experience. To be completely superstitious would be to base the future on things other than primary physical experiences, only on secondary experiences, or those further removed than secondary experience. To be this superstitious is to base reality on what friends tell us about the world from their own experience (secondarily removed from primary experience) or what someone tells us they heard about someone else (more than twice removed from primary experience). The overly pragmatic person is a slave to the grind. The overly superstitious are lazy and talk about their dreams with little action.

Going back to experience of the particular in the first paragraph, the point to be made is if we base the most likely future on our experience alone, we are being too pragmatic, and if we base what is possible on secondary experience or more alone, we are being too superstitious. We need a combination of our own experiences and secondary experiences. The problem with some is they claim that their way works so they should never try anything other than what they know works. The problem with others is they speak of what works based on what they hear, but they have nothing to show for it in their own life. The solution is obviously, to try as many things as possible, but always question the motivation behind the action, and ask others their motivations behind the same or opposite action; especially the opposite action, because the opposition of our actions being brought into question will either strengthen our motive, or it will cause us to take on new and better motives. This would of course be a form of virtue ethics that we come to an understanding of through dialectic with others, but not dialectic in speech alone, but also with application afterward.

The true root of action is motivation and desire. The problem many of us run into is we do not understand our true motivations and may be in denial of our desires. Many religions preach a message of denying or desire because it is bad. This only causes us to compensate for desire with a lower grade desire. All motivations are driven by desires. If we can be honest with ourselves about our true desires, we will not have to compensate for them. Another reason people may compensate for a desire is because, to accept we cannot have a particular desire is painful, so we tend to lie to ourselves about what that desire is to us in our lives, and compensate for it as well by performing actions around the desire instead of engaging the issue we have with it.

Nobody can have a holistic understanding of reality. We all have fragments of it based on primary and secondary experience or more. What we have not experienced in the primary, we fill in with information from the secondary about the world. Once we have experienced something, we tend to claim we know better than the secondary, but how do we know our experience was the best way to experience, or if it was a bad experience, how do we know it cannot be better? We do not know unless we can be superstitious enough to question if another action is possible, and it is an action we can actually attempt in the future.

The only way to overcome a particular experience is to stop living in insecurity and fear. Nobody is insecure or fearful as a whole. We are insecure and fearful about particular experiences we have had. For example, we may be fearful of marriage, because we always had bad relationships, and everyone we know has been divorced. This is pure pragmatism, and any superstition is filled in with the emotional bias of cognitive dissonance. We want to believe that the thing we would really like (marriage) is a bad thing or thing that does not work, because we fear being hurt again, and we look at any other secondary experiences we can use to support our fear. This is an example of lying to ourselves about our desire, which changes our surface motive, but not the true latent motive. Motives and desires are tied together. What happens instead is we deny our true motive to ourselves, and then replace it with a lower grade desire of being alone, and we preach the greatness of independence and the fallacy of marriage. It is the particular fear that causes insecurity and the ability to lie to ourselves, and this creates discomfort, depression, and anxiety, because we are changing our lives to be something other than we would like it to be by changing the meaning of what is desired.

The only way to overcome fear and insecurity is to first know thyself. Some people will preach the understanding of others, or your enemy, but we really do not need to understand others beyond what they state their desires are. If we know ourselves, we will be willing to admit our true desires to ourselves, and from there decide what actions need to be taken in order to be happier. It is not till we deconstruct the meaning of a desire to its simplest component that we can build the framework to best achieve that motive. Once we know ourselves when it comes to a particular desire, we can stop living in insecurity and fear. Building off the last example we can say, yes I have been hurt a lot by people, and I deny wanting to marry, because I fear getting hurt, so I convince myself marriage is bad, because I believe people will only hurt me. With understanding of the self, we need enough superstition to think of people who do have good marriages, and then pragmatically seek out people who are successful in marriage and ask what they do to make it work well. To understand a desire is to understand the meaning of that desire. If we understand the true meaning we desire in an action, we can stand by the meaning of how we would like the world to work in a particular situation. When confronted with a situation of a boy or girl that does not exist in our lives the way we want them to, we cannot give up our meaning of how we would like them, and surrender it to their meaning, or they have power over our actions. We need to put our foot down where we desire and tell them, you will be these things in my life, or you will not exist in my life, because this puts us in the position of power. It gives us power because we are not giving up wanting more than they do from us, and are now offering them more than they want or nothing. Nothing is less than the less they wanted to give us, and as long as we stand by our meaning people cannot take advantage of us, because it is they who want less that have power in an interaction, but the underdog can take power back if they find the will to declare putting them at a lesser desire than something not good enough.

Desire is inescapable, but desire can be put in the right place to satisfy us. If desire is put where long-term rewards are believed to be instead of short-term rewards, it means we need to put work into them, and hard work will pay off for long-term benefits where they will not for short-term happiness. It is pushing the rock up the hill over and over that brings satisfaction, and not quick rewards followed by stagnation. It is overcoming the fear of pushing the real rock and not the pseudo rock to compensate for the real rock that gives us the life we really want. We cannot overcome the fear of a particular till we blame ourselves for all the things that go wrong in our actions. Someone might argue that they did not know any better when they made a decision. None of us act against our interest on purpose when we make a decision, but if we deny ourselves the blame we will never correct ourselves if similar situations come up in the future. This is knowing thyself. If we always blame others for the situations we found ourselves in we did not like, we will continue to find ourselves in those situations. It is not, they took advantage of me, but I let them take advantage of me, and understanding how we can correct the action of others doing the same to us in the future is the only way to get past fear of a similar event in the particular past. Once we confront desire and motivation, we can put our foot down by action and meaning without fear, and what does not meet our expectations is not for us, and we need to move on till only the things that fit in the frame of our desire are present without lying to ourselves. Overcoming insecurity and fear is the only route to self-progression. If we cannot overcome these, it is because we live too pragmatic or superstitious, and without dialogue to share with others we can put into practice in, we will never gain the consciousness of our own actions the same.