purpose

Questioning the Need to Justify Feelings

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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

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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.

Choice, Belief, and Defense, Oh My!

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There seems to be three operating aspects of my mind in a matrix of thought that processes my experience. Together, they give everything I perceive value or purpose:

  1. Choice represents the comparing and choosing between ideas and concepts based on their value/purpose.
  2. Belief is the expression of a structured combining of similarly valued ideas and concepts used to support one another philosophically.
  3. Defense is the manifestation of resistance to change.

I use this process to guide me to right-thinking, to make sense of my experiences and achieve wholeness or rightness. My process offers me a sense of freedom to fashion my particular perspective into reality.

I can assign judgements of value/purpose to my perceptions of my experience and benefit from them as a sense of wholeness/rightness. The value I assign to my experience represents my personal value. The greater the value I perceive of myself, the greater the value I assign to my experience.

Choice

Ironically, my desire for independent thought conflicts with my intention for interdependent experience. So much so that I can’t:

  • imagine anything without choosing from options.
  • make a choice without comparing its values to other choices.
  • believe what I can’t defend for and against other beliefs.
  • re-choose the same choice.
  • defend what I haven’t chosen.
  • alter a choice without altering its fundamental value.
  • be fully aware of my choices.

If Heisenberg was right, there is always an element of uncertainty involved in any choice that no amount of computational effort can compensate. For example, I can’t know with certainty what will or won’t happen if I take or don’t take this or that action. There are too many possible timelines and outcomes for my limited mind to consider.

Yet, I can’t not try to know either. And because of my instinctive program to survive, I must find acceptable answers through choice. The beliefs I form I then defend with a sense of knowing. That knowing is about being right and being right is being whole.

Belief

I begin with a premise, if I am a living system and can validate that I’m right, I must endeavor to do so. I set myself up to defend a goal to achieve that end. My sense of lack challenges my ability to choose, believe, and defend a sense of wholeness. Wholeness, for me, can exist as value. Value is assignable and can be added up to represent wholeness. I get a sense of wholeness when I add up the value I’ve assigned to my experiences, which I then relate as my value. The more agreement I get for my value, the more value I have.

Defense

My process enables defense to express the collective value of my process through action. Three defined forms of expressing experience validate my three expressed forms of existence. My existence is defined by three expressions of intention:

  • Thought – defends for and against itself in its ideas and choices to create beliefs.
  • Emotion – defends beliefs by stabilizing ideas into feelings that motivate purpose.
  • Body – personifies physical responses that defend choice, belief, and defense.

The degree of value I assign to my needs and their fulfillment relates to the importance of their purpose. The value regulates the degree of energy invested in the defense expressed in the validation of my purpose. Resistance is the expression of need seeking fulfillment. Fulfillment cancels out need when the validation required is met.

Choice may seem to be a straightforward, “this or that” proposition. Yet, it involves such things as comparing the values of my choices with those I’ve previously defended. This I must defend as real to convince myself that my values are right, proper, and justified. Agreement adds authority to my value.

Choice funnels creativity by defining options. Defense of a choice further funnels wholeness to fewer and fewer options. Defining aspects as having value, purpose, authority, agreement, and etc. limits the potential of something to specifics. When I:

  • choose, I limit my thoughts.
  • create beliefs, I limit my creativity.
  • defend something, I limit what I defend.

I’m motivated to seek and find wholeness. The same is true for every operation of my process. The motivation behind my reasoning is why I choose to believe I have sufficient value to prove my wholeness. Each defense I create carries the energy of what motivates me to take action to protect and promote that value.

I interpret that which I believe has value. I use that value to add to mine to feel complete. Starting from a perspective of lack, my beliefs revolve around what reduces that lack. Seeking beliefs that validate my value motivates me to defend those values and convinces me of my wholeness. Is this process useful in actually understanding wholeness?

It’s All in the Comparing

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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.

A Relationship Between Intention and Purpose

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In my bubble of limited awareness, I have only one purpose in life: to fulfill an intention to be whole. This intention sets up a perception of lack forever seeking fulfillment.

Perhaps the first need that intention must satisfy in order to continue is its purpose. Intention sets up a structure in which it asks, “Why do I exist?” Purpose makes sense of the structure of intention with an answer in the format of, “…because…”

Intention and purpose set up a process that presents a lack and identifies what will satisfy it. Intention is like one side of a coin representing a deficit. And the other side, the purpose to complete it. In this way, each side of the coin serves as the complement of the other. Together, the two sides represent one coin.

Any action in service to a purpose is in service to an intention.

Seeing Both Sides of the Coin

In our coin example, only one side can be viewed at a time. For each side of a coin, there is a hidden other side.

Due to a limitation in attention, I can attend to only one thing at a time.  This is why I see one side of a coin and believe that’s all there is to it. This works to lock my awareness onto one side of the coin and lockout the other. Thus, eliminating the ambiguity.

An interaction between intention and purpose creates a process. That process results in a manifestation that gives a limited meaning to that interaction.

What am I NOT aware of in this intention? Why am I NOT aware of it?

For every intention, there is a purpose. For every what, there is a why. The flip side – for every purpose there’s an intention. And for every why there is a what. Due to this one-to-one relationship between intention and purpose, I might assume I can connect the dots.

I might assume I know an intention by looking at its manifestation. This assumes the reason why. Conversely, I might assume I know a purpose by looking at its manifestation – assuming the intention behind it. This is akin to looking at the heads side of a coin and assuming the other side is tails.

As a school kid, I lost a lot of lunch money to the kid who had a two-headed coin… Then, again…

What if there is no coin?