When we start to slip

It took a long time for me to notice this tendency, which also has been the theme for my previous two blog posts. And these posts are partially me trying to write myself out of my tendency to slip. I’m trying to understand the mechanisms behind it, so that I can more easily notice where things start to go “wrong”. 

It goes something like this: I decide to do something. Or adopt a certain attitude. It goes well at first. But then little changes to my original intent start to creep in. It always start with thoughts. Sometimes it’s pretty straight forward, with thoughts like: “Just this once” or “Maybe I can look at it this way instead.” And suddenly I’m somewhere where I don’t want to be.

But sometimes my mind is more insidious. One good example is that a while back I decided to just accept things as they are. When I did this and just focused on the things that I had direct control over, instead of things where other people were involved, I felt really good. My life felt easy and everything seemed to fall into place. I was in control and thinking happy thoughts.

Then I got a little annoyed over something. And then something came up that I felt that I just couldn’t leave alone. Even though it would in all likelihood not turn into a disaster, it might hinder or delay things that I found important. 

And boom! I was back in resistance. And this resistance sure created obstacles and things that delayed me. Had I chosen not to resist, things might have run smoothly. But because I resisted, I was sure to get exactly what I did not want.

I believe that something crucial here, is kindness towards ourselves. When we start noticing that we have fallen, it’s easy for us to beat ourselves up. It is for me at least. And since going against something that is good for ourselves and others already creates circumstances that make us feel bad, we make it even worse by trash talking ourselves. And this usually leads to even more “bad” behavior. Because the energy that we could have spent on picking ourselves up, is spent on getting ourselves down instead. 

I’m also thinking of something that I touched upon at the beginning of this post: the unconscious part. And this one is tricky. Because the distinction between conscious and unconscious is tricky. There are for sure many thoughts that just slip by unnoticed. But at some point, I do notice them. And when I do, I have the choice of letting them go or holding onto them. Then again, I might be only half-aware of my thoughts and have some awareness in the back of my mind, that I can do something about them, but it doesn’t go any further than that. It never occurs to me that this “something” could be to let them go. And before I’ve done something more with this awareness, something distracts me. And the next time the same or similar thoughts return, I might not at all be aware that I can do anything with them, except for believing them.

I thing that the best way to prevent slipping in the future, is to simply practice becoming more aware of what is going on on the inside. Aware and HONEST towards ourselves about what is going on on the inside. No one is going to do it for us. Because the only ones that know what is going on on the inside, are us and God. And the funny thing is, that we and God are also the only ones that we can never get away from. We and God are the only ones to whom, ultimately, nothing but the facts matter.

I did something bad a few days ago part 2

The final choice of doing what I did, can be divided in two. I first made an initial choice, telling myself that I’m just going to do this one thing. Just to see how it is. Then I’m going to let it go. But about five minutes later, I had gone through with the rest of it. 

As you can see, I managed to trick myself over and over again, slipping more and more. It is also worth noting that there is a potential continuation on a possible chain of events relating to the topic that I’m talking about. But I’ve decided to say no to my mind. No to my ego. And I pray to God that he will help me to stay committed to my “no”. 

I did something bad a few days ago part 1

Not something BAD bad. Not anything that most people wouldn’t find totally okay. But bad in a way that I prefer to leave it to your imagination to figure out what it was. So, why am I writing this post? Well, in the hope that I will learn something from the experience and that others might learn from it as well. By writing this down, making it clear that this was something bad and stating my clear intention of not doing what I did again, I hope to turn this fall into a fall forward. 

You see, it started in my thoughts several weeks before. And since the thoughts were connected with pleasant memories in the past, I chose to hold on to them. It was a choice. I could have chosen to just observe them and let them go. But this was not the choice that I made. 

Here is some context: As my two weeks vacation started, I started slipping back into some other old habits as well. These I wouldn’t call bad in the sense that I call that other thing bad. But they made me lazy and comfortable. And when you’re lazy and comfortable, you’re less observant and your will is weakened. 

How do I use text?

For someone like me, that works with producing text on a daily basis, this question is especially important. But I think that it is important to anyone. Because how we use text says something about who we are and what we believe.

For example: Do I sacrifice readability for style or fancy words? Do I write “The Bible” as “The Bible” or “the bible”? How bound up am I by language norms? How aware am I of them? When I choose to consciously break language norms or rules, why do I do it? For what purpose?

As stated in the beginning, these questions, especially the last two, can tell me something about who I am and what I believe. 

The truth is in our hearts part 1

There seems to, when I look inside and really feel how things feel, that there is a moral order that is not strictly related to what we do for others and the world. 

For example, all a person’s good deeds get soiled, if he or she is prideful about them, or even uses them to shame others for not being as good as he or she is. But it doesn’t seem to even have to result in actions or speech. Our mere thoughts seem able to soil a good deed. 

Why is this so? Can we explain this logically? I don’t think so. It seems as if we, on an intuitive level, can sense what is right and wrong. 

I wish to interject, that this post is not about a metaphysical discussion of right and wrong. But I think that it all comes down to how this or that affects our character. Does my thoughts, words and actions help me to get closer to become the person that I know in my heart that I want to be? Because, if we think and feel a bit about it, we know that there is such a person inside ourselves, don’t we?

Writing things down to create more inner order

Part of the point of this blog, is to put the things that I’m struggling into words. And I hope to do it in a way that others can learn from as well. I’m not the first person to realise that when you put your problems, struggles and your inner life in general into words, everything becomes easier to manage. If we look inside ourselves for just a little while, we will, at least if we are like most people, find that it is rather messy. We have a lot of half-digested opinions and beliefs and ideas about how the world and other people work. We have a few poorly defined goals and aspirations. We have made assumptions and arbitrarily chosen to believe some people over others. And to top it all off, all of this is in there in the form of an incoherent mess of words, sounds and mental images, that not seldom contradict each other.

This mess, in all its brokenness, can be quite elaborate, while we ignore such very basic and simple things, such as how we breathe, that we can never stop thinking (if we are like most people) or how our thoughts actually seem to work.

Writing down stuff about our lives, preferably on a daily basis, helps us to put things into perspective. We become more aware of our state and what it entails on both a collective and a personal level. We become more aware of which issues we share with other people, and which issues are personal to ourselves. And what unique shape the shared issues take in our own lives. In short, writing things down help us to put our inner lives in order.

What The Bible doesn't say

How do you approach The Bible? Or other religious or spiritual texts for that matter?

Let’s get a little wild here. I think we can afford it, as long as we try to refrain from drawing hasty conclusionst.

During biblical times, as far as we know, people had no idea about the vastness of the universe. So thoughts about UFO:s or inhabitants on other planets would at least have been very different fro our thoughts about such a subject and most people wouldn’t have thought of it at all.

For different reasons though, many Christians are skeptical about life on other planets. One of the main reasons seems to be the centrality afforded to the human race in The Bible.

On the other hand, most Christians also recognise that The Bible was written by humans. Humans that were faulty and that had limited knowledge of the world, trying to communicate something coming from an ultimate, perfect, unlimited reality. 

This also brings up two other questions. Namely why God chooses to make his presence known the way he does and what can be said about it. Ultimately, this leads to the question: Why isn’t God’s communication direct and clear? 

Since there is, as far as I can tell, no fully satisfying answer to these questions, even though many have tried to give such answers, I believe that this should call for some openness. Openness should though not be mistaken for permission to interpret everything any way that we want. And this is a very important point, so please don’t rush by it. Give it some thought. Because it is very easy to get confused about openness and permission to interpret everything in any way that we want. And it seems to me, as if it should be easier to interpret scriptures if we keep that distinction in mind. 

We make so many implicit assumptions about how to interpret The Bible and other religious texts. And any other information that isn’t crystal clear for that matter. Often without taking into account just how different the lives and understanding of the world, of those that wrote it were. We all bring with us our personal experiences and the beliefs that we have chosen to accept and reject. We bring with us our limited perspectives and degrees of openness. 

In this context, other questions could be asked: What theologians have shaped our thinking? Do we have primary or secondary knowledge about their ideas? Are we open to the texts that were excluded from The Bible it the first council of Nicaea? Why / why not? Did we know that such a council took place before reading this blog post? Did we know on what grounds the texts were accepted or rejected? Do we find those grounds reasonable? Reasonable enough to have complete faith in them? 

The answers to such question and how thought-through they are, all shape how we understand The Bible. Another interesting fact to consider, is the fact that the first council of Nicaea was instigated by the emperor Constantin I. In fact, this wa something that I had completely forgotten about, until I googled the council just now. Should we trust the converted pagan emperor that turned Christianity into a political religion? And yes, the last question was a loaded question. I believe that there is good support both in The Bible and in history, for the stance that politics and religion should not directly mix, even if that doesn’t necessarily mean that religious people should never act within the political sphere.

Furthermore, it seems clear that many parts of The Bible have both a literal and a symbolical interpretation. Sometimes it might even have many symbolical ones. We can also add the normative interpretations of mainly the New Testament, that go beyond the legalism of the Old Testament. And on top of the, we have the personal meanings that we find when we read The Bible and find books, chapters and verses that seem to speak directly to us and where we’re at.

All of the above serves to illustrate the argument that I wish to make here: that The Bible leaves room for much that many exclude. As said in the beginning, The Bible does not say that there can’t be life on other planets or whether the inhabitants of said planets might be visiting us. It does not give clear cut answers to what spiritual realities might exist beyond this physical one. 

It does also not set absolute limits for what humans are or what we can do. On the contrary, all the way from the beginning, it states that we were made in God’s image. Jesus says that other humans will be able to do what he did and more. The apostles Peter and Paul raised the dead, just like Jesus. Faith can move mountains. And so on. 

Slipping again part 3

This will be the final post about slipping for now, and it will consist of some concluding reflections. 

The first thing that comes to mind, is that there was no way for my wife to be aware of all the things that were bothering me. I wasn’t even aware of half of them before I wrote them down. 

Let’s pause and reflect on this a bit, because it seems somewhat relevant when it comes to negative emotions and conflicts in general. And if I can find the lesson that is to be learned from this, the fall might be a fall forward instead of backwards. And perhaps there is a lesson within the lesson. Namely that every fall contains a lesson, that can turn it into a fall forward, instead of a fall backwards.

The lesson seems to amount to these questions: How can we hope to resolve anything, when we’re not aware of what is causing us to act and feel a certain way? When we let our emotions get the best of us, start acting mindlessly and play the blame game, instead of actually trying to communicate what we feel and why, in an open manner, with the common goal of resolving the conflict and reach a mutual understanding. 

Finally, I want to return to the two tracks that I mentioned in the first post and talk about something that I’m starting to suspect, that I’m not really sure of. As I’m writing this, the time is 11:11. Just wanted to add that. 

What this concerns, is the details in the tracks. What I’m starting to suspect is that every little choice that we make, contribute to which track we are on. One good example, is that I used to make load of what you could call “immoral jokes” in the past. And the more you practice something, the better you get at it. And I’ve been able to get people to laugh quite a lot with these jokes over the years. I still give in to the temptation of telling such jokes from time to time, when an opportunity arises. No harm done, right? 

Right…?

What I think that I’m beginning to see, is that telling these types of jokes can get me into a mindset, where I’m more prone to do other things that get me away from the track that I want to be. The jokes might not in themselves be enough. But if I also choose to indulge in unhealthy food and overeating, let negative thoughts about people slip by my conscious awareness, watch movies with negative content for the sheer pleasure of it and maybe a few other things, it seems to start building towards something more serious. Something where I hurt myself, my relationships and those that I love and care for.

I don’t think that this means that I should just go cold turkey when it comes to any kind of negativity. Darkness is a part of the human experience and my discernment isn’t good enough to know when it’s time to let go of something, and when I’m simply pushing something down, that I for one reason or another am not ready to let go of yet. I, for example, am not convinced that I should just stop watching movies with dark themes and just watch ones with love and light in them. I’ve gained many insights and new perspectives from such movies. But I believe that I can definitely have more discernment as to what I choose to watch, than I’ve had in the past. 

But the jokes are probably not making anything better for anyone. And the thoughts definitely belong to the category of “things that should be let go of”. But I can’t beat myself up too much either. Constantly keeping the mind in check is difficult and requires practice. And I will just drive myself crazy if I don’t apply some acceptance to my inner life.

Right and wrong?

Is there such a thing as “right and wrong” in an ultimate sense? I don’t know. It seems as if there might be. And if there is, I’d rather try to be right than wrong, rather than to ignore the questions altogether. In an as humble and openminded way as possible, of course.

A flat tire

The other day I was late for work because of. Since I work for a staffing company, I fill out my own time. Of course I had to adjust for the 25 minutes that I was late, which I did. But before this obvious decision was made, a whole process happened inside my head. I thought: “Well, I’m ahead with my work assignments, so there was no harm being late. No one is going to check my time report or care anyway, as long as I’ve done my job. Besides, being late looks bad. And if anyone, against all odds, decides to check, I can just tell them that I made a mistake. Since it’s easy to just click ‘ok’ on the time report without adjusting anything, no one is going to believe otherwise. Especially since I’m a model employee.”

My thoughts were of course not as clear as they are now, when I put them into words. But this was basically the process that took place, before I overrode it with the principle of not being wilfully dishonest, that I try to follow to the best of my ability.

The interesting thing here, is that I was only partially conscious of my mental process. And had I not remembered the honesty-principle, I might have listened to the other voice. In this case, the chance was very little. But it could have happened. In a less clear case, maybe I would have not remembered my guideposts. Maybe I wouldn’t even have known what behaviour I let slip by my radar.