Principle 4: You can choose your mentality. It is not easy, it will take work, but you can do it.
Be like the greats and choose to align your thoughts, words, and actions with positivity and love. With that one change, you will become unstoppable.
1.
From The Analects of Confucius, Book IV: "If a man sets his heart on benevolence, he will be free from evil."
The human mind has a positive and negative side. The ancient Chinese recognized this and called it the straight and the crooked. Confucius and Lao Tzu believed this split affects our psychology and actions. If we follow the noble path and fill our hearts with charitableness and goodwill, we will live rewarding lives, which is a different concept than becoming rich. If we instead give into the crooked side, the side of robbers, as Lao Tzu calls it, we will become grotesque.
Many religions identify this as well, but in their own nuanced ways. The Zoroastrians, a religion dating back to ancient Persia and India, simplified their message as Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds. Their central belief was that we must align our thoughts, words and actions with the positive side of our spirit, of our mind. By doing so, one's life will have meaning.
Classic literature is full of this split in mind as well. We have all heard of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The potion that turns Jekyll into Hyde is a conceit for the processes inside of us that turn us from loving parents to road rage maniacs.
The crooked, as the ancient Chinese called it, can be brought out in mob scenarios. In Frankenstein, a mob of people with pitchforks and torches hunts down Dr Frankenstein's creation, although none of them know why they are hunting him. This same thing is seen in John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat.
2.
Mob mentality is just one part of this other side of the human spirit, of this dark side. There is another part that we are all familiar with, that causes damage every day in very small ways.
Carl Jung, the great psychoanalyst, believed, essentially, that we have two sides, a person A and person B. Jung uses the terms anima and animus. The eminent historian Robert Greene uses the terms A and B person. The A person is the person we desire to be. It is fun, confident, happy. It is the person our significant others fall in love with. We are this person a significant amount of time.
But at some point the B person shows up. This person is needy, insecure, argumentative for no reason. This person complains that a medium well steak is too well done, that the color of a pair of shoes is off by a few degrees from the picture. This person also can also take delight when plans fail, when some misfortune befalls an individual they are supposed to love.
Jung also used the term the shadow, as in we have a shadow side that has a certain darkness to it. This is the person inside of us who, upon meeting a friend or colleague, will silently insult them. This is the side of a person that day dreams of armed conflict.
We are taught today, implicitly and explicitly, to be the B person, to be the shadow human. If our consumer demands are not met instantly and with a very high fidelity, we revolt. We are led to believe we are justified in this behavior. Read though Yelp and notice all the people who take delight in predicting that a business will close. Over what? Somebody not answering a phone, or some soggy fries?
Take a look at our cultural idols. They are reality tv stars. We worship a genre of entertainment dedicated to the B person and shadow human.
Today, many of us live as the B person because we are taught to. Yet modern psychology and classical literature tell us that this is ultimately harmful.
3.
This split in the mind, this good and bad side, has captivated a great deal of classical writers. The greatest writers and thinkers in history either warn us of this split or tell us how to be on the straight and narrow, in both our psychology and actions.
Yet we can be dragged downward. We can, as the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu tells us, become robbers who have money, fame, fat pantries, while the fields rot, while our families crumble, while our spirits corrode. Money, vanity, power, anger, revenge: These will align our thoughts, words, and actions, but in a way that brings us nothing but misery.
Our society values anger, values revenge, values power, values extreme wealth. Many things today are aligned to make us crooked, to make us robbers, to bring out Mr Hyde.
But we are not beholden to this destiny.
4.
In John Steinbeck's East of Eden--a masterpiece for eternity--a group of friends meet to discuss The Bible, it's translations, meanings, and other religious ideas. One member is gripped by a particular passage in the American Standard Bible. In it, we are told that sin is ignorance and "thou shalt" overcome it. It is a command, a promise, as the speaker tells us.
Yet this English translation relies on what they consider a mistranslation of the Hebrew word timshel. Steinbeck writes:
"Lee’s hand shook as he filled the delicate cups. He drank his down in one gulp. 'Don’t you see?' he cried. 'The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin, and you can call sin ignorance. The King James translation makes a promise in ‘Thou shalt,’ meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ Don’t you see?'"
Steinbeck goes on:
"Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win."
What he means here is this: Our mind, our spirit, our soul, has a split. It has a positive side and a negative side. One way leads to success and happiness, the other to misery and ruin. This split affects our lives as we choose--or have chosen for us-- which side to live in, which side to act in. Ultimately, no matter how far down one has gone, an individual can choose to be on the right path.
5.
Good thoughts, good words, good actions.
With every thought, we can choose how to be. When we speak, we can choose how to speak. When we act, we can choose how to act. People have negative impulses and thoughts all the time. That's the point of the split in mind. However, one can choose to dwell in the mud, or to stand tall among the gods.
We know from our daily experiences that we often have a choice in how we respond. We can respond to somebody with positive emotions, with spirit building words, or we can drag them and ourselves down. We know we have a choice because we have felt those moments when we choose.
Everybody feels better, happier, loving when we choose to respond with love, and we begin to feel unhappy when we respond with negative words and actions. Yet we often react, even negatively, so fast that we do not give ourselves a choice.
6.
There are many reasons why we react so fast, none of them have to do with the caliber of our soul or the worth of an individual. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that we were created from gods, yet given flaws that we can overcome. Parents, preachers, authority figures like to say certain people are broken or bad or beyond redemption. They are wrong. Each of us has the ability to live and act among the best in history.
Yet daily life is full of examples of people living angry, mean lives. Modern behaviorists have demonstrated that we can fall into patterns of habit and behavior, and that these can be self rewarding, even if we are being harmed.
For example, there are people who, no matter what, will find fault with something, will throw up roadblocks, will unleash a stream of negativity, either subtle or obvious. These people--and many of us have fallen into this category at one point--can do immense damage.
This behavior often falls into a pattern that gets reinforced over time and creates its own rewards. In many cases the reward is power and control over a situation. When we damage something, we are in control, even if the result is harmful. To many people, power is the ultimate reward.
This reward mechanism is one of the flaws our species. What is often rewarded is the negative aspect of our spirit. Even though we can choose to have good thoughts, speak uplifting words, and act with love, many people get trained to react with venom.
7.
Cognitive ethologists--which is the study of the evolution of the mind in animals and humans--define cognition as the ability to gather information from our world. They define intelligence as the ability to use that information to make correct decisions. We are learning today that many animals posses cognitive abilities that we had never imagined.
Sharks, for instance, have an extreme sense of smell, and can detect prey from miles away. The information they pull in via smell creates thoughts and actions. They can trail prey for days and evade detection with such efficiency that even our modern sonar can miss them. Dogs and horses can often sense our emotions. They have developed the ability to know more about us in many ways than we know, and this knowledge goes into their brain and affects their behavior and moods.
We humans today pull in a lot of information from the internet. Cognition is the ability to take in information, and today we get it online. Our modern cognition goes from screen, though the eyes and ears, to the brain, heart, spirit. We take emotional action, often without thinking, from things we watch and read and comment on online. The internet works best when people are angry. Angry, emotive posts get the most reactions on Facebook and Instagram, which is a type of reward.
Yet what do you suppose happens when a person trains oneself to overreact, to become angry? We become part of an unthinking, fearful, angry mob. We give into the evil side of our spirit, the crooked side. The B person becomes the primary sense of self. The shadow person dominates.
But in a devilish way, when online, one rarely gets the chance to choose their state of existence. Instead, we are tricked, trained and rewarded. Today there are websites such as Youtube and Patreon that reward extreme anger with real money.
On live streaming websites users can pay hosts to perform tasks. These are mostly innocuous, such as taking specific actions in video games. But it is more and more common for this to bleed into real life. Live streamers now get paid by users to shout at people they dislike, to vandalize buildings, to steal items.
Today, when we see somebody recording something, it is likely they are recording themselves and taking instructions from the abyss of the internet. In these instances, a person's cognition comes partly from the internet, but their intelligence--how to decide to take the correct actions--comes entirely from the dark void of the shadow world online.
8.
It is not destiny that we fall victim to such programming. Life does not have to be this way.
As Confucius tells us, we can be free of evil if we choose to fill out heart with goodwill and charitableness. As Steinbeck points out, we have a choice--in every action and thought we can choose the right, not the evil. As Zoroaster tells us, we can align our thoughts, words, and actions with goodness.
When we go to work or see our friends, we can choose to meet with open arms, with a mind filled with love. When we do, we create a positive reward cycle, and our positive actions get easier and more consistent.
This cycle has a way of working something close to magic. Each of us--all people--have the ability to accomplish far more than we believe we can. We can live rewarding lives. We can live with meaning. We can enter what the ancient Chinese called The Way, what the ancient Greeks and Romans would call godliness.
It is not a coincidence or a quirk of history that the greatest thinkers and writers since the dawn of time have warned us about the positive and negative sides our mind, heart, soul. They have warned us that we can be manipulated by greed, by power, by anger.
They have also told us the secret to success.
Principle 4: You can choose your mentality. It is not easy, it will take work, but you can do it. Be like the greats and choose to align your thoughts, words, and actions with positivity and love. With that one change, you will become unstoppable.
Very best wishes from
your friend,
William