So here we are. We understand that the life we have been living is one that we did not choose. We are working on forgiving ourselves for wronging others in the past as well as forgiving others for wronging us. We cannot and will not be victims, no matter how much cover it provides us. We understand that while the programming of our subconscious may be extremely difficult to alter, we have much more control of our consciousness and its interaction with our subconscious.
Our conscious needs and desires can override and even take control of those of our subconscious.
We have determined that we do not want to keep traveling down the path we are currently on. We want to travel along a path of our own design and we have the power to make that happen. The trick is how do we make that happen. While the answer to this question will be unique for each of us, there are a few questions that are more universal that we can try to answer.
Who Do We Want To Be?
Up until this very moment in our lives, the answer to this question has always come from the person that has been programmed by our parents, our schools, our media, our government, and our society. And while we can never really escape this part of our nature, we can begin to question if who we think we want to be, better yet the life we want to live, is the life we really want to live, or just the one we are supposed to live.A great start to answering this very complicated question might be to ask ourselves - what makes me happy? Not what brings me pleasure, but what activities would excite me, create peak experiences, or put me in a state of flow? Discovering what would make us truly happy will go a long way in helping us figure out who we really want to be. We mustn't take this question lightly.
Read more - Pleasure vs. Happiness (coming soon!)
We may not be able to completely change the person we have become, the person we were programmed to be, but we can surely change the life that that person must live. We are what we do. Our behaviors determine who we are. We can change, and to say that we cannot is just the rationale that allows us to continue on the unfulfilling path that we are currently on.
Are We Defined By Our Needs?
We are all unique individuals, with unique tastes, and unique feelings, but we are also humans with core needs that transcend our uniqueness. When our uniqueness is in conflict with these universal needs, we find ourselves between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Truly understanding what our needs are as human beings can go a long way in helping us develop a lifestyle that is in harmony with our humanity and not in conflict with it.Living a lifestyle that’s in harmony with our physiological needs, our need for safety and security, our need for love and belongingness, and our need to feel important (our self-esteem) will free up our energy to satisfy our ultimate need, our need to become the person we are supposed to be. This is our need to be self-actualizing, or our need to be living a self-fulfilling life.
The key components of becoming a self-actualizing person are:
- Having a purpose.
- Unifying our subconscious with our conscious.
- Taking responsibility for oneself.
- Listen to one’s self.
- Having peak experiences is a necessity (what would excite us).
- Learning what we are good at and what we like.
- Being ourselves.
Let us think of life as a process of choices, one after the other. At each point there is a progression choice and a regression choice. There may be movement toward defense, toward safety, toward being afraid; but over on the other side, there is the growth choice. To make the growth choice instead of the fear choice a dozen times a day is to move a dozen times a day toward self-actualization. Self-actualization is an ongoing process. - From The Farthest Reaches of Human Nature by Abraham Maslow
Figuring out who we want to be is not something that can be accomplished over a few pints at the local pub. This will take time, a long time, the longer the better. The thing to keep in mind is that, since the “goal” is not to reach some finish line, we don’t have a fixed target to aim for. But knowing what kind of life we want to be living, what the path should feel like, will give us an “endpoint” from which we can work back from.
How Do We Get There?
Ultimately, our goal is to become a self-actualizing person, and the path to get there will be unique for each of us. So, each of us will have to figure out that path for ourselves and it could take some time, maybe a long time. But there are some valuable things that we can and must do in the meantime, and it’s those things that may provide us with the clues we need.Before we can become a self-actualizing person, we must feel confident that we are satisfying our deficiency needs (our physiological needs and our need for safety and security) as well as our higher needs for love, belongingness, and self-esteem. Satisfying these needs present substantial hurdles themselves that many, if not most of us, will struggle most of our lives to overcome.
Understanding why we struggle to satisfy these lower needs could probably fill a small bookshelf in a therapist's office, but here are a few things we might consider to get started:
- Wants vs. Needs - thinking we are satisfying a need when we are really just satisfying wants will keep us on the dissatisfaction treadmill until we finally figure out how to be happy when we get what we need, learn to want only what we need, or learn to be ok when we don’t get what we want.
- Getting Stuck on a Need - Spending time and energy trying to better satisfy a need that we have already satisfied. Maybe we are afraid to move on to a higher need?
- Using the Wrong Need Tool - Each of our needs, whether it’s our physiological, safety, love and belongingness, or esteem, requires a different tool for their satisfaction. The tragedy is that by the time we figure out that we have been using the wrong tool, it could feel like it’s too late to change tools.
- Bypassing a Need Altogether (Coming soon!)
Attitude
The one thing that we are guaranteed that we can control in our lives is how we think and feel. We may not be able to control every external stimuli in our lives, maybe not even most, but we can control how we react to those stimuli. Our reaction will play a major role in determining the outcome of that stimulus. Do we let it control our emotions, do we let it stomp all over us, do we take it personally?
Our attitude is how we act, react, and interact with the world around us. How we project this attitude towards life to the outer world will determine how we are treated by those around us. Interact with the world positively and we will attract positivity (mostly). Interact negatively, and that’s what we will get in return.
Side Note - There’s a lot of beauty in the world, and there’s a lot that sucks. If we focus on finding the good and surrounding ourselves with it, we can create our own oasis. If enough of us do this, maybe the bad stuff will run out of space and energy and decide to join the rest of us. There are a lot of people trying to fix what’s wrong with the world without realizing that it’s they themselves that are broken. We must fix ourselves before we can fix others.
Read more:
- The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz - Jim’s Notes, Get The Book.
- Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl - Jim’s Notes, Get The Book.
Gratitude
Most of us are, or have been, fixated on what’s missing from our lives. We become so focused on what’s lacking that we fail to see just how much we really have. This is not a Developed World versus Undeveloped World thing. In the West we may have an easier time satisfying our lower needs, but this comes at the expense of our higher needs. Working harder to satisfy these needs doesn’t prevent one from satisfying a higher level, in fact it may complement it. Walking to collect water for the day may suck to us, but it certainly guarantees a healthy level of physical activity. Who will be healthier in their 40’s and 50’s?
We all have things that we feel are lacking. For some, sadly it may be food or shelter, for others it may be love, or loneliness, or maybe not feeling like the world cares about us or even knows we exist. And for most, we will struggle our whole lives feeling like we are just a cog in the machine. Is being hungry but loved worse than being fed but unloved and lonely? We can always find the good in our lives, and if we can feel grateful for what we have, then maybe we can see the world in a more positive light.
Developing Our Core Value Set (Our Character)
Our character is who we are deep down inside, the person that only we can truly know. The strength of our character depends upon our belief system based on our morals and values. These are the rules our character must follow. Integrity is the degree that we live in accordance with these rules.
The result of a high level of integrity built on a strong character is a healthy self-esteem (how we feel about ourselves). Unlike esteem (how others regard us), which can come from external sources, self-esteem can only come internally.
There are many among us that are highly capable of projecting a persona of high morals and values that their character is lacking. They may be able to play out this charade, as long as things are going smoothly, but when a challenging situation presents itself, this is when a person’s true character will come out and their lack of integrity will present itself. In times of stress our true character reveals itself.
If we are living a life of integrity, our true character is always on display, and when things go South, the character that we project (our true self) will still be there. Failing to live a life of integrity will expose us for who we really are, for we can only hide the quality of our character, or lack of, for so long.
In the end, there is one person that has to live with the real you, and that’s you. We may be able to fool everyone around us, but we can’t fool ourselves, and living with a liar, or a cheat, or just someone we can’t respect will take its toll eventually. We can make all kinds of changes to how we live our lives, and who we live it with, but there’s one person we can’t expel and that’s ourselves.
If we violate our belief system and no one finds out, is it possible to judge ourselves less harshly than our friends and family would have, had we been caught?
Living in the Moment
"Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is." - Eckhart Tolle
The past and the future are mental constructs, perceptions and illusions that our mind creates to give it something to do. It is this construction that makes us who we are and it keeps us from going insane until it doesn’t.
Living in the past gives us guilt and regret, and living in the future gives us worry and anxiety, but these are not real, they are just things living in our memory and our imagination. They are usually things that are greatly exaggerated. Our past is what makes us who we are, and the future is what makes us do things, but more often than not, they give us excuses for acting in ways that we are not happy with.
The present, the moment we are currently living in is the only true reality. It is the only thing we physically experience. How we act in any given moment is who we truly are. When that moment gets logged into our memory, that reality starts its transformation. Over time this memory will become something completely different from its original form. Our conscious mind, who we think we are, only has access to this morphed form of memory, but our subconscious mind (who we really are) has access to what really happened, or at least a much truer version to it.
Deeper Dive - Our Conscious vs. Our Sub-Conscious (Coming soon!)
Living in the moment gives us a break from our mind and all the drama it creates for us. We know this to be true when we experience brief instances of it when we act out something that we did not tap into our past for permission and we did not look to our future to hold us back. We just acted and it felt incredible. Then we began assessing what we just did, we began logging the details into our memory, and we started imagining how this was going to affect our future. We exited the present almost as fast as we entered it.
When we convert this action into a memory, it becomes a part of who we are. If it was a positive, happy action, it should become something that we want to do again. If it is negative, unhappy, or even harmful, it should become something we don’t want to do again. Whatever it was, it will have an effect on our actions at some future moment in time.
If we dwell on this memory, we sacrifice our present self, to our past self, through regret or our future self through longing. We risk getting stuck living in the past, or living in the future, and failing to appreciate everything and every possibility that the present has to offer.
So, how can we live more in the present? How can we live without regret and without worry and just focus on the present?
By knowing who we want to be, developing a set of rules that that person needs to live by, and following those rules, we build integrity and character. By living by these rules, we have no reason to feel regret. If we break our rules, we must apologize to whoever we wronged (even if it was ourselves), rectify the wrong doing whenever possible, acknowledge the infraction so we don’t do it again, maybe make a change to our set of rules if necessary, and move forward. We change what we can and we accept what we can’t, without regrets.
If we find ourselves worrying about the future, it is because we have a problem that needs to be solved. There is some action, or series of actions, that we need to perform to solve this problem. Most likely, the anxiety comes from our not wanting, or being able to, perform this action. Upon reflection, the outcome of this action or inaction was usually not nearly as troublesome as we had made it out to be.
At some point we are either going to act, or we are going to not act, and whichever is the case, we need to accept and deal with the consequences, put it into the past, and move on.
Should we live without desire?
We humans evolved to satisfy our needs. We figured out how to hunt or gather the food we needed. We figured out how to create a safe environment for ourselves, our families, and even our tribemates. We figured out how to build friendships, a community, and even find love. We discovered what we needed to do to feel good about ourselves and our place in our community. None of these things were necessarily easy, but we knew what needed to be done and we set out to do those things. Our desire for these things made sense on every level.
Our desire for things outside our core needs is relatively new for us humans and it has ultimately led to ever increasing levels of unhappiness, anxiety, depression, psychological disorders, or worse. We did not evolve to satisfy wants, but it does seem human to want more than what we currently have.
Knowing the difference is the key. Being unhappy due to unsatisfied needs will drive us to become a better person, being unhappy due to unsatisfied wants will do the opposite, putting us on the hedonistic treadmill. We must avoid deriving our happiness from satisfying wants. Wanting what we have instead of having what we want may be the first step toward avoiding regrets, avoiding desires, and living in the present.
Read more - The Power of Now by Eckhardt Tolle and Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert
Starting Over - Creating a New Path
Whether we realize it or not, as we make improvements to our core values and beliefs, as we gain control over our subconscious, and as we learn to satisfy our needs, we will realize that we are not only becoming the person we want to be, but that we are already on our new path. But how can we be sure the path we are on will get us to where we want to be?Our goal is not what’s at the end of the path, or even the accomplishments along the way, our ultimate goal is to become the person who creates their own path. A path where our true character expresses itself freely. A path where we are satisfying our needs without reliance on others. A path that not only allows us to live a self-actualizing life, but projects it. The path is the goal.
But what would that path look like? What could it look like? What path could make us happy? That’s the most important question we can ask ourselves. Without knowing the answer, we could end up going down a lot of dead ends on the path we create.
Trial and error is going to be a big part of this path creating process, and figuring out who we really are may help prevent the creation of some of those dead end paths, or at least help make those dead end paths a bit shorter. But before we even start creating the goals for our new path, we can start to figure out what kinds of things we would like to be doing on our new path. Maybe, before we figure out who we want to be we can figure out what we want to be doing, maybe even what we want. Eventually.
Conclusion
The most difficult question we may ask ourselves is - “who do we want to be?” Followed by the second most difficult question - “how do we get there?” But if we break these down into smaller chunks, we can get some very helpful hints.- Do I want to be someone who is controlled by their programmed subconscious or do I want to live more consciously?
- Do I want to live a life of integrity, or do I want to spend my life trying to fool the ones around me?
- Do I want to live as a victim on the constant look out for villains to blame for my problems, or do I want to take on complete responsibility for my life?
- Do I want to spend my life on the treadmill trying to satisfy false needs disguised as wants, or do I want to focus my energy on satisfying authentic needs?
If we can find the answers to these questions successfully, odds are we will discover that we are already on the path that we desire to be on.
Life really is a game, and when we find ourselves losing, we just need to change the rules so we can win.
Next: Our Reprogramming - Part II (Coming soon!)