My way or the highway?

This is another post about free will and personal agency or responsibility. Just to make it interesting and yet clear I'm going to start with an old Frank Sinatra song sung by Elvis Presley... the song is of course titled 'My way'.

Are you actually living your truth?

Okay so let's jump right into the topic of this post. Please feel free to click on the link and listen to a Youtube video of Elvis Presley singing the song in Hawaii in 1973. While you're listening to the song, to which I'm sure you can relate and which is about free will, I want you to consider the question I've posed above.

Now please keep in mind I'm following on from my previous post titled 'The Texas Example' and looking at another side of the issue of a lack of free will. Now generally when people say there is no free will they also claim that there is no meritocracy either. I'm not going to make that claim because I don't need to. But what I am going to be writing about is competency and incompetency.

You see the song 'My way' is a very popular song and what makes it popular is that it contains a very powerful, inspirational message which most people appreciate on some level. But see as is often the case in life what seems powerful and inspirational very often isn't and there is a very fatal life flaw if you place too much importance in your own achievements, your own Ego and self-image, your accomplishments. This is because you can very easily get caught up in a sense of entitlement and general feeling that you are worth certain experiences and life events because you deserve them.

Furthermore you can get caught up in a need for validation, recognition, and become addicted to self-esteem. If you become too attached or addicted to a need for appraisal, approval, validation from others, recognition, you get caught up in the praise-blame dichotomy and trust me - once you start amassing supporters, followers and sycophants you're also going to attract critics, detractors and will find no shortage of people who are willing to put you down or 'put you in your place'.

All these are emotional and psychological needs which can seriously complicate your life and even mess up your life.

The simple life

So I'm going to give you another song, a Bob Marley song, to back up the point of this post. Now please keep in mind that you've probably become so attached to your Ego, self-image and self-worth because you've been raised and conditioned to live in a society based on predominantly capitalist values. It's important to understand that in such a society based on such values style often matters more over substance and imagery is especially important. It's also important to understand that what I'm writing about here is the root of all inequality in society.

More than anything else, inequality exists because people get conditioned to become far too attached to their Ego and self-worth and if you're going to 'play the game' (and capitalism is nothing more than a game, a real life version of the board game Monopoly) you're going to end up with winners and losers. But see you get caught up in duality in your thinking processes and in chasing self-esteem, self-worth, happiness, success and fulfillment, you're going to inevitably end up with experiences of struggle, doubt, anxiety, fear, and despair.

But see - especially in modern society - despair is a central human experience of life. Not everything is going to work out the way you envisage it. However if your thinking processes are off balance or your individual perspective is skewed despair can very easily turn into apathy, bitterness, resentment, anger, frustration, guilt, shame, and these are powerful feelings and emotions which can mess up your relationships with other people and even your relationship with yourself, whatever and whoever you assume your 'self' to be.

I'm going to give you the words of the second verse of Bob Marley's 'Small Axe' because it contains the core essential of any so-called spiritual path and that is non-duality in thinking processes. Terence McKenna, an American ethnobotanist and mystic often claimed that Nature and the universe is predicated entirely upon novelty and creativity. While I value many of his insights I disagree. Existence is predicated almost entirely on simplicity and this is where you generally find truth in life. If you have to go to great lengths to explain truth then chances are it's not truth but belief or even ideology. Truth is generally a simply realization or statement. In fact it is that simple momentary realization which can be reliably regarded as enlightenment.

So what is it that leads you to that enlightenment and truth? It's very simple - despair.

But what is it about despair that makes it so central to human experience and such a prevalent human emotion? I'm going to cut this short by quoting another song from 1969 by Joni Mitchell.

The wisdom of ambiguity

Despair is that what you feel when you don't have the answers and cannot see a way out of your predicament or situation. Let's take an example from childhood when you were trying to learn how to ride a bicycle. For most small children learning to ride a bicycle is difficult because you not only have to watch where you're going, you also have to keep your balance, keep holding the handlebars and also propel the bike forward using the pedals. That's four things you have to do all at the same time, and even for most adults handling four different variables at the same time is hard.

Stabilizers (training wheels if you're American) make it easier so you don't have to deal with the issue of keeping your balance, but you also don't learn how to sensitively hold the handlebars. It's still a jump in difficulty taking those stabilizers away. So you lose your balance, which means fear, cuts, pain, and grazed knees. Despair comes when you pick yourself up off the ground, look at your fallen bike, and start thinking you're going to be the weird kid who will never be able to ride a bicycle. But see how will you know for sure if you don't try again? However you do try again and out of nowhere you manage to ride a bicycle successfully without knowing how you managed it.

This is how quite often asking "How?" - which is one of the most important questions in life - doesn't help you. When I'm pitching Qultura methodology to new people I point out that existence is a principle and both creativity and interaction is a process. This is the Principle and the Process which is the title of Qultura methodology as a book. That book contains all the mystical principles you need to know in life. This is the 'what?' and 'how?' of life and existence. But see Qultura methodology just gives you the bare bones basic mystical principles. You've got to figure the rest out for yourself using your own perception and experiences.

My point here is that often people ask "How..?" or "How to...?" before they go through the experience of despair. They want a tried and tested method, a solution, a blueprint, a way, a model, and all too often life doesn't work out that way. Just because something works out for someone else and brings them success doesn't mean that it's going to work out for you. You can try out the recipe for a dish hoping to achieve the same photo image picture perfect result and usually what you come up with won't look the same and sometimes doesn't even taste the same.

I can give you another example, from my own experience. You're reading a post in my blog, which is you care to browse the different categories you will find well over 100 posts, possibly even over 200, across around 25 different categories. I design all my own websites. But there's no comments section attached to my posts because I'm still useless at coding PHP forms. I'm still struggling with figuring out a search engine which I feel this website needs. I've gone through dozens of different tutorials and explanations, made many attempts, downloaded lots of code and tried to modify it, but it still doesn't work the way I need it to work. PHP is still black magic to me. It's still a mystery. Maybe one day I will figure it out.

I'm sure there's things that you've tried to do, and failed, or you still struggle with, or even given up on. But see if there was such a thing as free will or freedom of choice there would be no such thing as failure because you would know everything and know what to do. But still people persist in believing in free will and freedom of choice and they believe in success and failure without understanding even the basics of how success and failure are all part of the exact same process.