Decisions, Faith and Fate
I make a decision and I accept that it was my decision. Sometimes I feel into the Snake to help determine whether a desire is him or my heart feeling, but often recently I don’t.
Allow your decisions.
Keep the Snake in mind. Keep the neural conditioning and pathways in mind.
The “Snake” and neural conditioning is something explained in the link above, although you don’t need to read it in order to understand this post.
Disallowing and judging your decisions will consistently lead to misery.
Have faith in yourself.
Realistically, you’re not going to be able to have faith in yourself and have this acceptance until you’ve suffered. You’ll likely need to have minimal faith in yourself for several years until you come to know parts of your innate nature, including your general intentions, through life experience.
There’s no reason you’re not allowed to have faith beforehand, but it’s probably not going to happen. If you were to theoretically have faith in yourself as early as age 10, you’d be thinking something like, “I have faith that I’m a good person with good intentions who will figure it out”. Or “I have faith that I will do what I feel is right”.
This point about decisions made me think of something important but unrelated and meta:
When someone conveys one piece of information to you, it doesn’t automatically mean other pieces of information are also being conveyed.
For example, I can tell you that accepting all your decisions is a solid prerequisite to peace in mind. You might exclaim, “so you’re also saying that it’s good for me to watch porn or when I look at that I should just accept it? That doesn’t sound good”. I’ll hereon refer to this example as the Decision Advice.
I’m not saying that. You’re saying that.
In Systems Theory, Predictive Coding states that humans always try to piece together an understanding of the world and how to conduct themselves within it.
If I give you a new piece of information (in italics above), it might challenge parts of your developed understanding. There are now “gaps” in your understanding here and there. Imagine the holes in Swiss cheese.
To reduce uncertainty; which is seen as bad in a human’s psychology because it’s associated with fear, anticipation and consequentially a risk of death; you will fill the gaps in understanding with presumptions, things you fear to believe or want to believe are true or expectations. However, you don’t see that you’re the one who’s filled the gaps. Whatever you believe I’m implying when I give you the Decision Advice, you’ll think I believe that, when really I only said what I said and nothing more.
I call this Presumption Bias…
The bias here is that you interpret what I mean based on your presumptions used to fill in the gaps in your challenged understanding of life and how to conduct yourself.
In our example, I’m not telling you as a consequence of the Decision Advice that you must accept your pornography use. In fact if you asked me for detailed advice I’d probably say you should accept when you give into the urge to consume porn, but actively try to resist as often as possible. The more “reps” you get in, successfully allowing an urge to pass by like a cloud in your mind, the more the neural pathways associated with the compulsive porn use will weaken, meaning each rep gets you closer to being free of adult content as a coping mechanism you can’t resist.
But I’m not telling you that.
You can believe and do whatever you want in response to the information someone conveys to you, but just acknowledge that when you judge that person’s intentions or implications that weren’t directly spoken, you are making presumptions, which therefore may not be accurate.
Let’s talk about a mental model.
Faith Vs Expectation
Most people:
Think of what they desire
Expect it
Try to:
Think of what you desire
Have faith that it’ll be happen eventually
What do I mean by “eventually”?
If your desire from step 1 is something you want to happen next week, it won’t necessarily happen. Such as your plan to socialise more next week and so you set the desire to meet a girlfriend. It may not happen.
If you expect that desire of meeting a girlfriend to happen and it doesn’t, you’ll be very disappointed.
If you have faith that it’ll happen and it doesn’t, you’re less likely to be disappointed.
Reason being, when you really want something, your thoughts, intentions and actions will often lead to it happening in the future. You just can’t predict when that will be.
Also, let’s say you want a girlfriend. What you may really want is love and acceptance from yourself and so the feeling in your heart that you thought was related to needing a girlfriend suddenly turns into a sense of fulfilment when you decide to love and accept yourself without conditionally needing to achieve certain things first.
The feeling you wanted to address was successfully fulfilled, just not through the means you thought it would be. Sometimes you don’t want what you think you want.
But let’s say you do want a girlfriend and that’s your actual desire (related to belonging, social connection and acceptance from others), your actions will be subtly affected over time by that desire and so you can have faith that at some point your actions will result in meeting one.
If you never meet a girlfriend, which probably isn’t the case, oh well. If you’re on your deathbed, you may say “it is what it is”, because since meeting a girlfriend was faith rather than expectation, there’s no dissonance between what you thought would happen vs what did. This same logic is why exceeding customer’s expectations in business can be make customers come back for more and therefore help the business grow; because if you provide less than what was expected, people will often become frustrated and resentful; but if you provide more than the customer will feel a higher degree of certainty that paying you money will result in a positive ROI (Return on Investment).
Does having faith mean that you stop making active efforts to fulfil your desires? No.
If you had that thought while reading this post, you’re suffering from Presumption Bias, which we spoke about earlier. You’re presuming that I’m also saying that you should replace active decision-making with faith in a desire. To add more nuance, you make decisions that you believe will support your desires, yet after each decision is made, you accept that you made it and have faith that it’ll contribute to the desire being realised.
Contribute?
Yes, even decisions that afterwards make you think, “that probably wasn’t the best decision”, which means “that decision probably doesn’t align with my desire”, can contribute to what you want eventually. Look at this image:
Now, what desires are we talking about in this post?
Ones that you actually care about.
People say “I want to become a lawyer”.
Do you really?
Or is it more like this:
I want to become a lawyer.
Why?
I want to help people in need and ensure justice is brought to those who’ve done wrong
Why?
I don’t just want to do things for myself. Also I know that there are people who don’t get arrested when they should have.
Why do you care about those things?
For the first point, I don’t think I’ve done enough for other people.
When did you start feeling that way mostly?
Mostly when I was 16 or so, I started thinking about it and then thought “maybe I’ll be a lawyer”
What were you doing at 16 before you started thinking about this?
I guess I was just doing my thing, thinking about myself and what I wanted and needed
Why?
Well that’s just what people do I suppose. I wanted to have good days and happy times
What’s a good day and happy time to you?
Something where I’m entertained and often with people
What would happen in a day that was not good and not a happy time?
If I wasn’t hanging out with anybody, when I didn’t feel joy in the things I was doing, bored,
So yeh.
Bye!