Solving the Problems of One's Own Living

It should come as no surprise to learn that each and everyone has their own unique challenges, problems and difficulties to overcome, and that is the ultimate meaning and purpose of their lives -- and in that manner, showing the rest, how it is done -- in their own efforts.  That is the value of learning from others -- and from everything in life.  All are engaged in their own unique struggles -- some more successfully than others, but we can learn from both the successful and the failings.  

Of course, we don't want to be the failing -- and not that we merely want to be successful at duplicating such failings -- in repeating what they do.  But many learn nothing else -- and that is why we call them dysfunctional: they fail to adapt successfully.  And if they persist, will soon become extinct -- unless the society enables such failures, rather than recognizing and favoring its successes.

It may be that instead of containing the failures and catastrophes it brings, society encourages its spread -- in ensuring that what has brought about such calamities, are the only way to go -- despite the disastrous results and consequences.  The people are implored to charge on -- as thought there are unlimited resources and lives to give to these hopeless situations -- until it is thought, that there must be another way.  And then history itself is changed -- and the memory of the failings, are extinguished and forgotten.

One doesn't have to remember and revere the failings -- lest people forget, because there are always a whole slew of new challenges to recognize and surmount.  Each generation's successes also sow their future challenges -- even as scarcity brings about abundance and a whole new manner of coping.  So in one generation, rampant starvation may give way to rampant obesity, and the strategies for dealing with that reality shift, is not just continuing what we've always done before -- as though that made sense anymore, and for all times and conditions -- no matter what.

Thus the ability to distinguish rapidly changing and different circumstances, is the greatest survival value and skills that need to be honed all one's life -- and especially, when one has grown immune from that responsiveness -- in thinking there is no more to be learned, and unvarying repetition will suffice -- no matter what.  That will not be a happy ending -- in anyone's life.  Those who will be most successful later in life -- who challenge the present paradigm of becoming less able, by becoming increasingly so -- whatever it takes.  It may take everything they have in life -- to ensure their own success.

What is more important for them to do?  Which means it can't be the end of learning and living, but a beginning for even better, and not a retreat and surrender -- that ensures their demise.  It's not that it is hard as much as it has not been done before -- but which is the only thing that makes sense to do.  It would not make sense to give up before one graduates from school, but it makes even less sense to give up when many feel that is the only thing they can do.  Then surely, one does not find out how it could have been otherwise.

That is the condition of aging as we've known it up to now -- and think it could not be any different, let alone better.  But the current outlook and prospects do not seem good -- so there is no harm in thinking any differently.  In fact, one has nothing to lose, and everything to gain -- in thinking differently.  So why not?  Nothing in life, has prepared us to think that way -- but that does not make it impossible, or even improbable.  It is just the way we haven't thought before -- but that has been true of every evolutionary leap in the improvement of life, both individually and collectively.  That is also the ending of the way we've always done it before -- and particularly if that's not working out so well and satisfactorily.

Defenders of the status quo will say that theirs is the only way -- even if it hasn't been working out so well so far, and their answer is that we simply have to try harder (increase funding) -- at what is not working, as though that is transformative at some miraculous point.  It's like dying doing what you love to do -- because that is the only thing one does.  But all that is certain, is the dying -- regardless of what they do, and then it doesn't matter.

Most never get beyond that resignation and acceptance -- thinking it is the ultimately wise thing to do.  But we are not talking about simply doing the same things we've done before without success -- merely thinking that we can get another result, but rather, doing what we have never done before, and finding out if there is any difference -- and that makes the difference!

Everything You Know Isn't True Anymore

Maybe it never was.  But ideas have a way of catching on -- despite the realities it purports to represent.  There is obviously what is happening out there -- but what we see and think of them, may be something else entirely.  It's not that it might never have been true before, or at any time, but it might not be true now -- for the best we know.  There is always a better truth that supplants all we previously knew.  So the proper question is not what is the truth for all time, but what is the truth, the best we know now -- and we can begin that inquiry by asking, "How do we know, what we think we know?"

More often than not, what we know, is what somebody else wanted us to know -- and not necessarily if it was the truth, depending on their motives and agendas.  That is, most of what we know, is what its promoters and advertisers would like us to know -- for their own advantage, and not necessarily our own.  That is why it is best not just to hear one perspective on the matter, but others as well, until the weight of evidence and testimony seems to mesh with everything else we know to be true in the world -- even if it is something new and different.

Thus it is not enough to know it has been an old or ancient knowledge that makes it valid -- but whether can be proven in the present moment -- and each experience (experiment) thereafter -- until there is a better truth and explanation -- which is always evolving to be better.  That alone is the hope for the future -- and not simply the young, rich or powerful.  Thus the great advantage, is finding the greater truth -- that is so much more than simply any single truth, or the sum of the parts.  The greater (integrating) truth, multiplies all the previous truths one had discovered -- and not simply adds to it.

Such increments, mean very little -- in the great scheme of things.  It is only a little truth, and not a great one -- that transforms one's world to something meaningfully different.  That is the difference between the thrill of discovery, and the agony of merely doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.  Real change doesn't happen that way.  That is the reason things stay the same, no matter how much we would like to change it.

But when you do something significantly different then everything changes -- because it is what matters, and makes the difference.  That is the kind of conditioning very useful to have because it makes improvement always possible -- and not all the effort that doesn't make a difference, or in fact, reinforces the status quo and is the probable cause of one's deteriorating condition.

In this way, one is always finding out many things -- whether it is the truth or not, and that is also useful to know -- whether one wants to or not, because then they don't have to go through the trouble of learning it.  It is theirs for the taking.  It is a convenient truth -- or falsehood, that one learns without effort and waste of time -- just going about one's business.  Many are determined not to see the true or false -- but only what they want to see, and that is to waste all one sees and does -- in the course of their living.  That would be paying attention -- to every present moment -- without regard to how they would like it other to be.

Those are the great lessons of life -- learning what is happening -- and not just working to change it into something else -- regardless of learning what it is already.  The powerful mind and life, is not those that can change something into what it isn't, but that which can fully appreciate what it is, as it is -- for that is the greatness and totality of the world.  At all times, something is already happening -- and never that nothing is happening, and so one has to make it -- out of nothing.  That manner of thinking, requires a lot of energy and resources -- to create something out of nothing, or to render something into nothing.

One of the hardest things to accept about the world, is that there is always change; that is the nature of the world, and universe.  The world is not static, unchanging, and one can move with it, or against it -- with great struggle and no guarantee or even chance of success.  But many will be given no options of anything to do besides that which will guarantee them failure -- at least so far.  There is always the hope that one will be the first to succeed -- in doing what has always failed before, but what else is one to do?

Those possibilities have to be created -- and tried, if they make greater sense to do so.  Frequently, that comes about because there is no hope otherwise.  One simply has to do what makes sense -- rather than to go down with what is not working.  At such times, something new is discovered -- and limits that were thought to be physical and immutable, are seen in a new light of being only the imaginary -- and not the only thing possible, and everything else hopeless.  There is another way.