Our previous article in this series ended with this line: How do you want your reality to appear?
Carrying on from this line, the number one thing in life is participating in reality. This would mean for ourselves and what is happening around us.
What is really going on? If we knew, many decisions would be different because we increasingly filter out reality from our mindset, in a similar way that people in love only see things “through rose-colored glasses.” That isn’t reality; it’s a filter they have placed on everything they’re viewing.
Every one of us has filters. This becomes evident when you interview witnesses at an accident or other occurrence—everyone reports something different. It is because of these filters.
Where Do Filters Come From?
Filters come about from how we were treated as children. Based on our treatment as children, we treat ourselves as adults. That treatment results in filtering out many factors of existence.
There is a way around this. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek said, “The only possibility of transcending the capacity of individual minds is to rely on those superior self-organized forces which create spontaneous order.”
Lack of Progress
We should have found broad ways to deal with these filters long ago. Over the last few hundred years, we have seen tremendous progress in society, especially in technology and ways of accomplishing daily life. Beyond simply washing machines, mobile phones, and the internet, we’ve gone to the moon and are on our way to Mars. At the same time, have we learned to handle ourselves better? Not really. We have more chaos in society and an increase in mental illness.
On the one hand, we have made enormous progress, but when it comes to the human being and the mind, even with all the advances in medicine and neuroscience, there has been no broad impact as far as I can see.
Detachment from Reality
Why are we so disengaged from our own reality? It is because we have become self-centered and ignorant. A major reason for this is that over hundreds and thousands of years, people have lost sight of the fact that not everything ends in our momentary lives. We lost sight of this and replaced it with the view that everything is only in the “here and now.” Since we only focus on the present, we have become so self-centered, willfully ignorant, and self-absorbed that we have forgotten to think about others.
We have the illusion that we live in a world of progress. Sure, we have made some progress, but we have yet to make progress as a human race. We must be very critical of ourselves.
The Human “Hard Drive”
From my view, the problem that has never been solved is that of our own “computer”—our own mind. The mind could be likened to a hard disk in a computer.
One fact we have taken up in previous articles in this series is negative feelings. People believe that a feeling comes first, and then comes thinking. It is the reverse—thinking is first, and then comes the feeling. A person thinks they are unworthy and, therefore, feels unworthy.
As you go through life, your “computer” is editing all of the information collected on your hard disk, your mind, that affects you as a human. This is why a mindset is so difficult to change—it’s on the hard disk. It would be a wonderful thing, for some, if one has had a hard life full of bad experiences, that their hard disk could be erased and replaced with a new one that is totally clean. Unfortunately, the mind is interconnected with life and so cannot be “erased.” It is influenced by all of life’s interactions—upbringing, siblings, parents, school, grandparents, and everyone that surrounds one. Today, it is theorized that the first few years of a person’s life result in how they think throughout the rest of their life.
Experience as Reality
I believe this is a core problem of our society. Because so many people are detached as adults because of their lives and upbringing, it becomes very complicated for them to show compassion, affection, or positive feelings toward another. Because of their experiences, they don’t want to remember, so they detach themselves. A person may be able to show some degree of empathy, but a deeper form is compassion. Compassion is one step further; a real connection is much more significant than empathy. One can empathize with someone who has experienced something terrible but feel no real connection to it. Compassion, though, allows you to truly feel what happens to others.
The “computer,” the mind, adds every moment and every item of life to the last, and all of these items add up to experience. In the end, a person’s reality is their accumulated experience.
I may have had little to no responsibility for events when I was growing up. But once I have grown up, I have the responsibility to rethink my hard drive, thinking, and mindset. Why am I acting the way I do? Why do I feel I always have to be the best, always have to win, and always be right? Or that I must always be perfect?
Others are always crying out for help and asking others to assist them with their problems. Yet others experience something beautiful in life and immediately repress it, thinking they are not allowed to be happy. Why is that?
Experience can create an automatic behavior pattern. It can run like a computer program, resulting in behavior opposite to how you would actually like to behave. It has been programmed in the past.
Only if you somehow become aware of this program can you change it. As long as you are not changing it, the program will remain part of your thinking.
Beneath the Pattern
As an example of such behavior, people have experienced the feeling that they must be perfect. The motivation for that feeling, though, is that underneath, they feel that they are unworthy. This motivates them to always try and be perfect. Such a mindset can only be changed if the person can reflect on why this behavior occurs.
We have not learned to do this. We see behavior daily in the news—“I punch you, you punch me, I punch you back harder.” As the human race, we have not learned to survive, be better, or learn. The knowledge we have inherited results in humankind becoming perhaps stupider than before, in my opinion.
People have an egocentric worldview. They want to have everything in this life—more vacations, more of everything, instant gratification—without doing anything for it. It is ruining our lives. We must stop behaving this way. If we don’t do it ourselves, we will be stopped. It isn’t a pattern that endlessly goes upward. What goes up must come down. And when it comes down, it will not be easy. It will not be fun.
Responsibility of Sales
I think sales has tremendous responsibility because we are customer-centric. If a salesperson has no empathy, lacks altruism, and is cold, people will turn away from them and never give them a recommendation.
A person taking that altruistic approach may find that the person they are helping will one day come back around to help them.
Becoming Human
Humans, of course, have different approaches. That’s what makes us humans.
Even though we have empathy, we seem to have lost compassion. It would be good for us to gain compassion once again.
Behavior has also been affected by the situation with the COVID pandemic of the past few years. In the beginning, people enjoyed that everything was slowing down. But then we realized it was unsustainable in the long term.
And now we find ourselves in a terrible situation of people violating boundaries, stepping on people, and living out their nightmares in some form. People will only be successful if they once again become real humans.
What does It mean to become an actual human? A real human grows holistically—in body, mind, and spirit. Too many feel that these are separate; for example, what is done with the body doesn’t influence the spirit. Today, we know that everything is interconnected.
Becoming human is more important than ever today, as we’re engaged in a battle of human versus machine. This is especially true with the advent of AI. We are fighting against the machine, and the machine has no empathy. A machine is only calculating basic information.
If we, as humans, want to survive as a race and be truly intelligent, we have to go to the core. The core of humans is taking care of each other. When a baby is born, it isn’t like the young of some animals born in the wild who can almost immediately stand and walk. A human baby is totally lost if it doesn’t have love and care for the first few years of its life. That is why, in my opinion, Jesus told us that we must become “like the little child.”
This is the mindset we should embrace, and this is where we should go.
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