reality

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.

Need Fulfillment and Conservation of Energy

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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.

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?

I Need to Compensate for My Lack

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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

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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.