LIVING LIFE BASED ON OUTDATED PROGRAMMING
FROM 10,000 YEARS AGO, FIRST, AND THEN FROM BEING A CHILD
Draft, but the point is clear...
OUTDATED FEARS, BEHAVIORS, AND BELIEFS!
Most humans live their lives based on outdated fears and behaviors and beliefs that have not been reexamined since they were given to us or since they were made up by us as children - who did not yet have the life knowledge nor the logic to come up with good conclusions!
WE SHOULD UPDATE BASED ON REALITY, NOT FAIRY TALES
(Yes, I, too, had believed in Santa Claus and even took a few forays into "magical thinking", alot from the New Age type of thinking. I went down some tunnels that, in retrospect, seem to be incredibly foolish and naive, but I did not know better at the time - and I am a firm believer that until one knows better one does not know better - duh!
Interestingly, few people "get" the latter obvious, self-defining truth. See the basic truth that one must know to live the best life: Not Yet Knowing.)
I have asked you, on this site, to use the facts and evidence and logic and reasoning to see what works and what doesn't work - and to stop doing what doesn't work - duh!
As part of the What Is Reality? series, I refer to the fact that everything happens in the real world in a sequential series of steps that create the result at the end of the chain.
If we note that something doesn't produce the right (desired) result, then, logically we must look back in the sequence/chain to see what step(s) was wrong or missing and then construct a sequence that would work. (Duh! Of course!)
But it turns out that most humans keep getting the bad result (called a "problem") over and over, as they live the consequential life over and over in their version of Groundhog Day and of Living The Life Of A Gradually Boiling Frog.
This means that they didn't look (or just didn't see or just didn't ask) sufficiently to see that the result was bad and then did not decide, even if they did notice, to do anything about it. See the answer to "Why are rats smarter than people?" in Seeing Reality, Clearly (in reference to looking at the results for what they indicate!).
SO, NOW, LET'S APPLY THIS COMMON SENSE TO OUR BEHAVIORS
It seems that we humans will get an impulse from our primitive brain and "think" it is something valid that should be acted upon to get a desired result. But often these impulses are wrong and do not get us what we want. Often they are not even sound impulses based on the actual facts.
We "react", without higher brain thinking, in such a way that it will improve our chances of surviving 10,000 years ago - in those conditions and realities. Yes, we still have as our chief motivation in life assuring that we survive (or survive well). But many of the conditions and circumstances in life have changed from 10,000 years ago, while our primitive brain has barely evolved at all - it is essentially the same as 10,000 years ago.
Unless we give the primitive brain some "updated" programming, it will continue to cause us to have emotions that are totally not appropriate AND reactive behaviors that are not at all effective (and are often harmful!).
LET'S LOOK AT THIS IN ACTION
We have no tigers and, for most people, no life threatening circumstances or people. Yet we act as if we do.
We "fluff up" and make ourselves look threatening or powerful as if to scare away the tiger, but we are only experiencing somebody thinking less of us or mistakenly perceiving behavior as a threat, when it has no real impact in the real world. But we "think" it does - but the "thinking" is not thinking at all, it is just the primitive brain watching out for danger and associating what occurs with all possible solutions to protect us - with much error in the patterns (programming in a sense).
We react to a person who cut us off in traffic as if it were (after the fact) still a threat to us that could actually impact us - while the other driver just goes off on his merry way, hardly likely to be a future threat. D'ya think maybe we should re-think this process and install valid thinking in here or should we leave it as "well, that's just the way humans are", which is a total misbelief/myth/nonsense way of "thinking" that is actual "non-thinking". Automatic reactions occur from the primitive brain and come up in our minds in the form of thought. We create the form of thought to communicate with ourselves, but in truth the primitive brain does not really have language nor reasoning (other than a few small programs that look like logic) - and it does not "think", which lies only in the higher brain (at least comparatively in terms of its level).
If, as Stephen Covey suggests rather clearly in his The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, we just let our primitive thinking run us, we will be like an animal, reacting in a programmed (instinctual) manner to a stimulus or situation. But, he notes, that humans have the power to think and choose in between the stimulus and the response. [Video (3:00) - Covey On Choosing Success covers this (links of this sort often get broken) or, more specifically, the video (9:36) Stimulus Response.]
We want to "fit in" with our society, in the delusion that we need to please or look good to everyone so that we will not get kicked out of the tribe to die. But hardly ever is there a real threat of that.
