Thought for the day - March 12, 2000

Subject: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: katlaughing
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 12:20 AM

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

- John Locke -

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: wysiwyg
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 12:25 AM

Yeah.

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Caitrin
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 12:40 AM

Generally true. I've heard something said about opinions going through 3 stages: obvious foolishness, hotly debated issue, and undisputable fact.

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Mbo
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 12:49 AM

Great quote about opinions by Igor Stravinsky. "You'd better not listen to that music. You might be compelled to listen to it more, and end by actually LIKING it."

--Mbo

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: wysiwyg
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 01:10 AM

Oh no! I was grinning and my face got stuck that way!

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Little Neophyte
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 08:17 AM

The problem with new opinions is that they may bring about a change in your perspective.
Change is confrontational for many and something people tend to avoid as much as possible.
If you do not want to question your point of view, avoid all new opinions or at least treat them with suspect.

Little Neo

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: kendall
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 08:25 AM

Experts are afraid to learn something new, because then they wouldn't be experts any more. Harry Truman

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: tar_heel
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 10:54 AM

two buffalos walking across the plains.one stops and says,"hush!i think i just heard a discouraging word!"

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Dave (the ancient mariner)
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 12:01 PM

Those who refuse to change, end up living in a world that no longer exists. Yours,Aye.Dave

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Amos
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 12:03 PM

Resisting change is like resenting air.

Amos

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: catspaw49
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 12:19 PM

We all act on feelings which are the result of beliefs. The action reinforces the feeling which then reinforces the belief. To do otherwise is angst and we are keenly aware of the unpleasantness of the turmoil angst creates. Thus, we rarely challenge a belief. Very sad. Life should be a continual challenging of beliefs, especially since we rarely know where beliefs come from. Here's a simplistic example.

For whatever reason, John is terrified of snakes. He has never had any experience with them, but he believes them to be vile, sinister, evil creatures who are laying in wait for him. The feelings he has toward them are not good at all and thus he completely avoids any interaction with them. If he encounters a picture of a snake, he slams the book shut (action) which makes him feel better but leaves a "Yecchy" feeling which reinforces the belief that snakes are blah, blah, blah. If John were to "eat the angst" so to speak, and study snakes and their characteristics, things would change because his feeling would become less negative and that would force an alteration of his belief which would make the feelings better yet and the next action would be less negative. Its a triangle....Beliefs-Feelings-Actions. What too often happens is that John hears a story of someone being attacked by hordes of Moccasins while fishing in Canada. Well there ain't no Moccasins in Canada and they are generally solitary to begin with. But why investigate...it gives him angst and its a lot easier to add this to his feelings of what this attack would be were it him and hence reinforce the belief that snakes are blah, blah, blah.

This is an old theory of behavior and I keep challenging it, but also find it seems to work in almost any situation (reinforcing my good feelings toward it and then my making my belief in the theory stronger).

Spaw

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Mbo
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 01:19 PM

Nothing endures but change.

--Mbo

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Amos
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 02:11 PM

Pat, you're commentary on beliefs and their profound impact on the patterns of life is a weiner, i believe.

//Wax On//Seriously, where beliefs come from is the unlimited and sometimes mad creative will of self. The problem evolves in creating from without and then identifying with the resultant construct, so the belief integrates with the identity, and thus becomes invisible....because you can't see it while you're being it.

To reverse this pattern (which leads into denser and denser corners of being) the algortihm has to be along the lines of recovering the creative level from which the create occured int he first place.

The hard part about this is it requires being willing to reexperience all the feelings associated with the belief, in order to move through them. If you just try to shove them aside you don't get back to point A, from which the original impulse of creation occurred. If you do recover that point of awareness, you then have the level of creativity from which you can redesign the belief into a preferabel one (such as "Snakes are cool and we get along well". Or dispence with it altogether.

But this path involves going through discomfort and out the other side of it, rather than just resisting it. A hard notion to get used to.

//Wax off//

A

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: wysiwyg
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 02:13 PM

Yeah, what he said.

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Little Neophyte
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 02:15 PM

Good point Catspaw.
If you take this one step further, life can get a little mucky when you take actions based on beliefs and feelings you are not even consciously aware of.
I have been amazed at some of the beliefs I unconsciously held about myself. By observing my actions and working backwards asking the question Why do I do what I do?, I have been able to better understand my true feelings and belief systems.
Once discovered, I started working on letting go of some of the old beliefs that were no longer useful.
This allowed me room for creating new belief systems, a change in feelings and growth from new actions.

Little Neo

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Little Neophyte
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 02:21 PM

Amos, I just read your posting and I guess I was trying to say the same thing as you were.
And no, the process is not that easy. It can be painful and leave you feeling very vulnerable

What do you mean by /wax on/wax off?

Little Neo

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: catspaw49
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 03:18 PM

Well put Amos and Neo dear.......

The process is circular around the triangle and it helps explain why so many people have gotten into the "I don't know why---It just feels good" mode. Also it goes a long way toward explaining the often "no thought" actions of a lot of young people. I'm not saying it is ONLY young folks, but I get tired of hearing, "I dunno'" as an explanation for some particular lunacy.

It IS painful to challenge belief. A lot of the educational process involves giving answers and not asking questions. Young tikes have a bezillion questions, then they go to school and they astutely realize the only reward is for answers. Add to this the fact that most of our "firmly held beliefs" have unknown origins. We don't really have a clue as to why or where the belief came from, but to challenge it takes effort and honesty.....both in short supply in a lot of us. As an elder in the "Church of No Redeeming Social Value," I know that there is but one "Cardinal Sin" within the tenets if the faith....Stupidity. Taking actions with no thought simply to make you feel good qualifies. Its not the easiest way to live, but somewhere along the line, the effort may pay off.

Spaw

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Irish sergeant
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 06:19 PM

Hi all; Like it or not, chang is a part of living and breathing. You don't have to like it but you sure aren't going to stop it. (Unless of course you die and don't believe in reincarnation) Let's face it. Change is what keeps life on this old rock interesting. THanks for the great things to thik about too. Neil

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 12 Mar 00 - 06:30 PM

I getb uneasy by people talking about change as if all change was the same.

You get it with politicians all the time - Tony Blair is always rattling on about on about being "a friend to change" and that kind of stuff.I think he picked it up from bill Clinton.

There's good change and you try to help that, and there's bad change, and you try to fight that and stop or reverse it.

When the boss tries to cut your wages and make you work longer hours, that's change. When Apartheid was introduced and extended, and black and brown people in South Africa lost the few rights they had, that was change. Hitler was a very active agent of change in his time, and so was Stalin. Tony Blair's mate Putin is really changing Chechnya quite radically at this very moment.

So you don't just say "change is good, we must accept change". You've got to look at what's being offered, and judge it, and make choices, because every change you accept will rule out other changes that might be a whole lot better) and there are some things that you don't want to change. Like having a breathable atmosphere.

And all that goes for ideas as well.

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Ringer
Date: 13 Mar 00 - 09:37 AM

All change should be resisted. And all new opinions ditto.

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Amos
Date: 13 Mar 00 - 10:09 AM

Neo:

It was a leedle joke -- I was waxing (meaning bloviating) and so I used a line from an old movie, "The Karate Kid", where a young boy learns karate by being forced to wax cars (wax on...wax off)..using the right hand motions. Also references the programmer's notation for turning on a mode in a program and is sometimes seen in email threads as "Rant On" followed by "Rant Off".

The pain is a byproduct of resistance and the notion that a certain experience is undesireable. When that opinion is modulated to a willingness to experience without judging positively or negatively, then it gets easier and less painful to explore the universe of beliefs and the experience that beliefs generate (or, more accurately, that we generate through the filters of belief). So if you elect the opinion that this "awful" feeling is, instead, an "interesting" feeling, the resistance comes off, and the discovery of what underlies it is accelerated.

A

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Amos
Date: 13 Mar 00 - 10:51 AM

Spaw:

John Wayne said it best in an old Marine Corps flick:

"Life is tough. It's tougher if you're stupid."

Another angle, though, is that stupidity itself is a byproduct of beliefs like "This is incomprehensible" or "This can't be confronted" or "I'm overwhelmed".

There's a kind of gleeful recklessness that comes when you are close to complete apathetic resignation -- if nothing matters and you can't do anything about it anyway, what the fock... -- and it is tragic that in many instances our parenting and our schooling methods produce this effect, instead of beliefs like "I can make it better if I keep my wits about me" or something similar.

The other side of the problem is that -- IMHO -- there is a place where you have to consult unarticulated affinities and the feel of things in order to know a scene beyond the scope of ordinary data analysis -- but it's one thing to follow your heart after due reflection, and another altogether to translate that into "do whatever you feel like". One is a sensitive path, and the other is the Philistine Way...I know it well, I live just around the corner...

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Little Neophyte
Date: 13 Mar 00 - 03:13 PM

Amos, what if the 'awful feelings' aren't so bad. Try sitting in your crap and realizing it is not going to kill you.
If I were to turn the 'awful feelings' into 'interesting feelings' I would be removing myself from the situation. Kind of like looking at myself intellectually rather than feeling the pain I have carried in my heart for many years. Looking at myself intellectually does not get me as far as when I allow myself to feel the awful pain in my heart. Once I do that, I have a chance to start letting that pain go.

Little Neo

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Amos
Date: 13 Mar 00 - 03:17 PM

LN:

We're approaching the same truth in different words. What I meant was that what makes the pain really worse is the unwillingness to feel it, which comes from thejudgement that it is unbearable, or whatever. Gettig over the refusal to feel is the only way through and out. I didn't mea to imply you should turn it into intellectual notions, because that too often rules out feeling itself, as well. I just meant getting over the sense of being unable to experience is a necessary prerequisite to rediscovering the beliefs behind the experience. Sorry I was not more clear.

A

Subject: RE: Thought for the day - March 12, 2000
From: Little Neophyte
Date: 13 Mar 00 - 03:25 PM

Thanks Amos, I understand

LN