awareness

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.

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.

Solving My Problems by Defending My Defenses

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I live an equation-based life in limited awareness! It’s pretty simple – I solve problems by associating them in equation-form with what I perceive as their reasonable complementary solutions.

In equations, I balance values I perceive in problems with the values I perceive in their solution. Thus, I defend my equations because they represent my ability to solve problems. Might this be more about defending my abilities than seeking solutions?

I accept that I can turn to my problem-solving mind and ask it what I can do to compensate for the lack of awareness. I may add value to awareness with its defense in comparison. Thus, the more I defend, the more confidence in my defense I feel – and the greater value I place on that confidence. This creates a positive feedback loop that grows confidence in the value of defense of my rightness.

However, this confidence tends to restrict my equations to a narrowing field of possibilities. This is the essence of bias – where confidence inflates values to make my equations work.

Thus, solving a problem by defending its defense is an impossible problem to solve – no matter how much value I add to the equation.

I Need to Compensate for My Lack

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

I’m experiencing limited awareness because I compensate for what I lack. I compensate for what I need by defining them in terms of specific lack. For example, I need air, water, food, protection, and etc. to live in limited-awareness.

One of my first awarenesses is that I live in an environment – “not me” – to which I must relate. All this exists within the limited framework of me and my environment. This restriction on understanding applies to my perception of threat and benefit.

This restriction sets up my world view – how I behave, what form I take, why I do what I do, and etc. It also sets me up for a world-view of lack and a need to compensate for it.

Defending My Awareness

Once I become aware of what and how to get my lack filled, I defend that awareness without question – problem solved. This defense expands my awareness of other defenses of those truths while narrowing my perspective. At some point, I become so convinced I’m right in defending that my truth becomes the truth.

There’s a flaw in my limited-awareness strategy. Defending my compensation for a lack as a solution to it does not solve the problem of lack.

I perceive a problem, I apply a strategy to solve the problem, and I perceive a result. This is a mathematical equation in the form of a program. Due to limitations in awareness, I can never be 100% certain. No defense can compensate for lack of awareness. Thus, at some point, I’ll find that my equation is in error and I’m left with a solution that isn’t a solution.

In my rudimentary mathematical mind, I approximate truth and accuracy in what works for me. This is the essence of belief.

Circular Reasoning

Trust in this circular reasoning affects my perception and awareness for which I feel a need to compensate. Expanded defense and its compensation do not, however, get me any closer to the truth.

I compare the values of what I lack to serve the most vital first.

For example, air is the complement for needing to breathe. The complements are solutions to the needs they fulfill. Needs their complementary fulfillments are the paradox that makes up my existence. The result of existence is compensation and the defense of it,

From Need to Compensation for Lack

Compensation for lack begins and ends with a cycle from need to fulfillment. Every system must compensate for itself to validate its existence. The following are three interactive aspects of a system:

  • Need implies a state of lack requiring fulfillment.
  • Lack specifies the implications that need can only generalize.
  • Compensation – awareness and action taken in response to need through an application or a means of fulfillment (like feeding); sense of completion (like satisfaction).

My belief that I exist in limited awareness defines myself as lacking. This greatly affects my perception and my need to compensate. Thus, I am always in compensation of my definition.

It’s All in the Comparing

Posted on by — No Comments ↓

Comparing Is Natural

What are you doing right now? Notice the comparing you are engaged in after reading that question. Comparing is so natural to us that we are mostly unaware of just how much of it we’re doing.

All comparing is based on relationships between you and not you. Whether obvious or invisible to your senses, you’re always comparing.

We can compare because we are capable of separating our own experiences from those of others through judgments. Yet, we are just as capable of imagining the experiences of others, which seems to increase judgment capability.

The Dual Purpose of Comparing

Along with judging differences, which builds walls between right and wrong, there are judgments of sameness that help build connections. Practicing the latter can reveal how difficult it can be to create connections outside judgments of right or wrong.

Some of the ways duality shows up in comparing my reality of me to myself and me to others –

Me compared to myself:

  • Yesterday to today and tomorrow
  • Who I think I am to who I should be
  • My accomplishments to my failures
  • My intentions to my outcomes

Me compared to others:

  • Differences in authorities
  • Skills and talents
  • Education and training levels
  • Wisdom and understandings
  • Changes over time – who we were yesterday, are today and will be tomorrow
  • Who I think I am to how another should be
  • Accomplishments
  • Intentions and outcomes

In my bubble of limited awareness, I naturally compare what I perceive. From my perceptions, I create the need to divide and define every thing to validate that need. I assign a boundary to everything that I perceive can be separate from all other things. Thus, I divide up what I perceive as one whole – making separate through perceptual differences.

Knowing I Resist

Those perceived differences form the boundaries that define the means of resistance between me and everything else. Because I divide up wholeness, I can see more clearly how I associate likenesses and differences between things. Yet, knowing in some ways that they are the parts that make up the whole.

By seeing the contrast, I can experience relationships! Those relationships that define my defenses are my experiences. This allows me to define my reality and therefore my purpose within that reality.

My purpose is tied to my ability to maintain resistance, another word for defense, which includes:

  • Perceiving separateness
  • Dividing wholeness into things
  • Assigning boundaries
  • Perceiving characteristics that validate separation
  • Making sense of separateness as reality
  • Giving separateness a purpose in connection
  • Validating conflict
  • Resolving conflict by creating similarities
  • Supporting and focusing on similarities
  • Connecting similarities to create flow
  • Appreciating creations without judgment
  • Releasing the need to defend
  • Embracing change

Thus, I more clearly see who I believe I am. Because I’m capable of dividing wholeness into separate parts, I’m equally capable of uniting what was never truly separate. The connection of one thing to another begins a new adventure – that of putting back together what I have divided.