Questioning the Need to Justify Feelings

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Have you ever been aware you had to justify your or another’s feelings? In my life, I feel the need to search for and find what aids my life to continue. All life must serve the purpose of fulfilling this need. This results in an expectation of continuation.

When I’m serving my life, I experience what feels like one purpose: to fulfill my need to continue. Yet, that need creates discomfort, which motivates action. In that action, I experience two things: emotions and justification.

How Might Feelings Justify Needs that Justify Feelings?

My investment of feelings justifies the motivation. Perhaps the motivation inherent in feelings justifies them – self-referential. Thus, creating a self-justifying sense of purpose.

I’m unaware of a need until I experience sufficient discomfort to take action. At that point, my emotions justify it. From there onwards, all my actions serve the purpose of quieting the discomfort and so, fulfilling that need.

Achieving a goal gives me a sense of purpose. My need to be right justifies it.

There are few actual life-supporting requirements to continue living. Yet, my emotions convince me to desire more. My sense of reason attempts to interpret emotions to justify a goal. I interpret that sense as wants. At times, I’ve felt I was defending my actions for need-fulfillment, when I was justifying emotional wants as needs.

I’ve justified my emotions in every case to be right! I may not fully justify my actions. Yet, I have always, without question, defended my feelings, which justify my actions.

What if I questioned my feelings? For example, “Why do I feel this way?” and, “What do I need or want?” This can affect my behaviors and attitudes. When I question what I notice, I can focus on what motivates me to act. This offers me an opportunity for new understanding and may present me with new options.

Certitude and the Pursuit of Understanding

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Two seemingly conflicting need aspects of my thoughts work together for my experience. One aspect is my need to defend what I am certain of – the foundation of my beliefs. The other aspect is my need to pursue meaning and purpose for my experiences.

Each aspect offers a specific perspective to my experience. Knowing follows a process of learned experience through actions to achieve a particular end, the what and how of causality. Understanding adds why to the process of knowing.

I resolve uncertainty by justifying the causality of my actions with reasons. Thus, I satisfy the need for certitude by providing meaning and purpose to my actions.

A Paradox of Conflicting Needs

In what seems like a paradox, my resistance to adaptation threatens my ability to defend my knowing. That threat fuels my need to attend to what challenges my certitude. That attention is my acknowledgement of what I feel threatened by. The more I acknowledge threats, the more I need to know why I feel threatened.

The pursuit of knowing edges my curiosity towards threats to my security, creating risk in its departure from the known. I defend my need to know at the expense of that security.

The greatest threat to my pursuit of understanding is my defense of certitude. And the greatest threat to my certitude is my pursuit of understanding.

Satisfaction and the Pursuit of Understanding

The pursuit of the unknown seeks to satisfy my need to know, which adaptation serves to fulfill. In my certitude, I tend to resist challenges that feel threatening to what I already know.

Those challenges that lead to greater understanding of self lead to the greatest defense, adding value to my certitude. And yet because of my need to know, I accept the risk of change in adaptation.

Thus, my certitude helps me live a life of satisfied ignorance in a reality of uncertainty.

Recognizing Justifications in My Accountability

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Sometimes justifications make accountability seem impossible for me to recognize. I’ve thought of accountability as some authority that subjects me and others to a power that intimidates and requires obedience. Yet,  I can learn to recognize my accountability even though I’m unaware of it now.

I am often unaware of my accountability in an experience until I become aware of it through my discomfort. This manifests as thoughts, feelings, and body stresses.

When I notice sensations like distress and discomfort, I look for a cause outside me. To confirm this awareness, I might hear these questions in my head:

  1. What has happened to me?
  2. How did this happen to me?
  3. Why did this happen to me?
  4. Who’s responsible? (Not me!)

The last thing I think or want to do is apply these questions to my accountability. These questions provoke a response to a cause someone other than me must account for. I may actively be avoiding the awareness that holds me accountable – denial. Thus, I turn questions outwards to defend against the discomfort that awareness of my accountability to my rightness presents me. By the time I’ve taken action, I’ve affixed blame and missed a vital conversation with my accountability.

Denials and Justifications

The effort I’ve put into denial has exacerbated my need to expend more effort in denial. I’ve invested in my failure of accountability because I was busy denying my defense of it. Thus, I can attribute the suffering I’ve endured in my life to my unaware accountability.

Unawareness of my denial has an addictive quality that sustains itself through repetition. In its unawareness, my accountability rewards the defenses of my beliefs with justification of them. Under the addictive influence of my unawareness, my accountability assumes authority for the beliefs my ignorance denies.

I need justifications for my beliefs. Justifications come from my accountability while hiding it. When I am unaware, I justify what I feel the need to defend. Coming from unawareness, my justification acts as a reward of authority to my beliefs. Justified, my beliefs assume an authority to act for my accountability. That authority validates itself through the repetition of the defenses serving those beliefs. Repetition manifests as patterns of defense that affect my understanding of an experience.

The more I recognize how convincing my belief patterns are, the more empowered I feel to challenge them. From that point of awareness, I can use my accountability to make changes.

How My Accountability Turns Things into Beliefs

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Is a rock “just a rock” until my accountability for its meaning turns it into “a thing of significance?”

My accountability manages my existence in terms of need fulfillment as authoritative, which cannot be experienced except through things. That which represents things is what makes accountability authoritative.

My senses acknowledge the authority of things by validating the properties expressed as their defense, with a twist. The twist is my addition of emotional and mental impressions to judge those things – based on my experiences with them. I create beliefs from this construct of sensory plus emotions and supportive thoughts.

Accountability Binds Me to My Beliefs

Because my experiences of things are bound together with emotional and mental judgments, I bind myself to them as beliefs. That binding is my defense of the belief – over which I have no choice but to obey. Thus, the authority of defense in belief of who I think I am.

Core beliefs bind me to their defense because I need them for my survival. I suffer when I resist serving these beliefs. To neutralize my suffering, I apply a thing that complements my need with fulfillment. Needs and their fulfillment are complements to each other.

Complements are things equal and opposite to each other that compete over authority for my attention. I must serve the authority of those complements by acknowledging the things that represent them. They manifest their conflict in my accountability that I experience as suffering.

When complements equally surrender to the authority of their counterpart, they become neutral. That neutrality is expressed in conflict resolution – change – as it is in need-fulfillment.

What Can I Do to Relieve My Suffering?

When I suffer from belief in lack of a thing I need, application of a complement to the need neutralizes the suffering. That neutralizing interaction represents success to which things I apply authority. How do I get out from under this system of belief and defense that keeps me stuck in my current condition of suffering?

As I neutralize those things I believe have authority over me, I experience freedom from suffering. What if it’s not a matter of belief but a matter of allegiance? After all, nothing has authority over me until I give it my allegiance. The question then becomes, “To what authority do I owe my allegiance?” And then, “Why have I given my allegiance to that authority (thing)?”

This is how my accountability turns things I perceive into things I believe. And what I can do about that — like ask a question!

Need Fulfillment and Conservation of Energy

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I PERCEIVE THEREFORE I AM. A cause-and-effect cycle that acknowledges the pattern of existence. HOW I perceive matters. My sensing is influenced (taken over) by belief – in order to conserve energy. How does this apply to need fulfillment and the conservation of energy?

Belief subverts sensory input through the power of imagination and expectation. My beliefs set up defenses to deal with the difference between sensory feedback and my expectations. Thus, I mostly perceive what I expect to perceive – which is what I already believe and defend.

Living within an Energy Budget

My experiences depend upon my ability to fulfill my needs. Fulfilling those needs provides a platform from which I can give meaning to my life in terms of value.

Efficient defense of my real needs helps conserve energy by protecting, preserving, and repeating only what actually fulfills real needs. The disciplined mind understands the difference between real and imagined, and so conserves energy.

The energy between need and its fulfillment allows energy to be applied to wants. The more efficient I am in fulfilling needs, the more energy I have available for fulfilling wants.

Effective Need Fulfillment

I actually have few real needs. I can imagine more – as I might when I turn a want into a need – yet that doesn’t make them real in terms of survival value. Efficiency dictates that I get maximum need fulfillment with minimal wasted effort. The disciplined mind seeks to fulfill only those needs that are real. Thus, fulfilling the dictate.

My Energy Budget Formula in terms of value:
What I can have – what I need = Energy available for optional wants

My defense of value gives meaning to my life and reason for my being. What seemed to start out as an existence by chance, becomes a life of predictable cycles, deliberate repetition of thought, and patterns of behaviors. This effectively eliminates the necessity for choice in need fulfillment and results in a significant conservation of energy.

The cyclical characteristics of everyday life validates my efforts to conserve energy. My value rests in my ability to predict, order, and defend my preferences.

I can, with confidence, make my daily experiences less surprising and more in my control. And fewer surprises means more reliability on my defenses and less challenges to my beliefs.

Thus, I get a rich life experience, expanding choices with the exploration of wants, and fewer needs to defend. Holding onto my value while conserving energy in need fulfillment.