Revision (current)
Last Updated by feos on 6/25/2023 7:56 PM
When something feels natural, it often means that it's good and fitting, both given the context and by itself. If it's natural, it often [Staff/SoftSkills/Wisdom|wisely combines] pleasure with business, play with functionality.
If we want to evolve, we want to expand what is natural to us, we want to learn to work with what was thought to be unnatural at first. Steadily expanding our [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_zone|comfort zone] by carefully working through problems brings us to points of personal growth, [Staff/SoftSkills/Talents|paradigm shift]. We learn to redefine our world in a friendlier way and to work together with objective reality for more common gain. After all, facts do care about your feelings, just like future depends on your actions in the present, and your actions depend on your feelings and facts of the past.
When redefining the world around us, the most productive step is [Staff/SoftSkills/Responsibility|taking responsibility] for whatever you feel uneasy about, first by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction|examining] that subject.
You take something that has influence on the part of the world you care about, something you don't have enough information about, something blocked by your fear and uncertainty, and then you try to peek behind that fear. Very often [Staff/SoftSkills/Truth|truth] is something you're afraid of knowing, something you you don't dare admit to yourself. And things that are "too scary to know" use to have negative nature. So you get disturbed by [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chthonic|chthonic] harshness and brutality that you can't see past, and the problem is not being fixed. The solution is finding something that needs __care__ behind the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment|ressentiment].
Lack of care and responsibility in the surrounding role models is what makes people think that feeling good is all that matters, because their background is pointless suffering, and egoism looks very tempting by contrast. They don't realize they just trade one pointless thing for another, and other people agreeing to act pointless is what caused the pain in the first place. If you don't want to become a clone of those you hate, you have to deconstruct the problem and attempt to fix it in the area you have access to. So you fight other people being careless and narrow-minded by you being careful and thorough. You deflect their approach and establish a more humane and more productive approach.
A good way to put the scary chthonic aspect aside is asking yourself what good you can learn from that person or phenomenon. That way you redefine the scary exterior as a red herring, distraction meant to protect the fragile internals from the careless. You also redefine yourself as the one who genuinely cares, so the scary armor is not needed. Much like a doctor who only wants to heal. And even if you don't find anything to learn from that person or phenomenon, at least you've learned to __see past the harshness__. So if you see the harshness again, it won't be able to disconcertingly occupy all your attention and cause you shock and stupor (which is what terrorism is aiming for).
Similarly to external events you may fear, your also have traits that scare you. But if you put the fear aside and introduce care, there's a sequence of actions that overcome the alienation.
# You try to stop participating in the thing that you find disturbing, not only by avoiding actions related to it, but also by avoiding thoughts and feelings that bring you closer to those actions.
# If you can't avoid it, you don't blame yourself or anyone else, you just try not to make the mistake again, much like rerecording the sub-optimality in TASing.
# If you can't avoid it no matter how hard you try, you will have to embrace it, and to repurpose that impulse, energy, power over onto something that's not damaging.
Just like you can't completely stop breathing even if you hate the smell, you can't stop doing things that are a part of your nature. And if you hate a part of your nature, that won't help you get rid of it, it will only make you suffer from failure. On the other hand, bringing your [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_(psychology)|negative trait] out of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repression_(psychoanalysis)|repression] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_(Freud)|denial] is able to cure it if driven by [Staff/SoftSkills/Care|care] and [Staff/SoftSkills/Purity|purity]. Purity is what the abstention steps are needed for: you establish that you really want to live without the negative aspects of the subject, yet you're not mad at it, so there's no need to be defensive. Defense is not put away if there's no proven [Staff/SoftSkills/Talents|purity of will], and you can only prove it by genuinely working on yourself.
So to summarize, calm and care can redefine a scary aspect and turn it back into something natural and friendly.