Do you hate change? How to find stability in life:

Every time Facebook changes its layout, there will be tons of groups popping up demanding Facebook to “change it back”! This is a symptom of feeling anguish when things evolve, improve, in other words, but the improvement is overshadowed by the sheer fear of change. Some people feel the need to hang onto stuff and relationships that, to them, feel stable, because they hate change. This is linked to the Normal Person* thinking patterns, and can be quite harmful and distressing feeling to have on a daily basis, considering that you can count on things changing faster and faster as technology and science advances. So. What could you hang onto safely?

The truth never changes

The actual real truth never changes. Our idea of the truth changes all the time, and as the Normal Person* way of thinking usually hangs onto the popular opinion, you can trust that the popular opinion will change over time, albeit it changes slowly because a lot of people hate change… Unless something massive happens to make a difference in an instant.

The truth is something that keeps holding steady for all eternity, but what people SAY is the truth is very much a different matter entirely. As the Normal Person* tend to trust others to tell them what is true, they will have to learn to make this judgement for themselves. Let’s study the concept of truth for a while. What is it?

Let’s imagine we have a vase in front of us. We know for a fact it is a vase, it’s CALLED a vase. That is the truth. Now, we know that it’s function is to hold water and flowers in it. That is the truth. We know that it was made by someone, a human being at the level of probability that we can call to be so close to the expected reality that we can call it the truth. We might find it was made by a monkey perhaps, but it is highly unlikely. We can study  the vase further. It is made of porcelain, or other material that really looks like porcelain, but we can say, for a relative certainty it is porcelain. If we check the bottom, we see a marking, and we can assume that it is the mark of the maker of the vase, but we also know vases get faked a lot, particularly if we suspect that this is a valuable vase, so, depending on how expensive we THINK this vase is, we can correlate the likelihood of the stamp being fake. How big of a  motivation would someone have to create a fake of the stamp in the bottom of the vase? If the vase is not worth  much, we’ll just figure the stamp is most likely real and worry no more of it. If you hate change, you find it comforting to know that the history of this vase will never change. 😀

Now, how does this relate to your life? He says he loves you. The words came out of his mouth and you heard them. Is that true? The words “I love you” are equal to the stamp in the bottom of the vase. Anyone can put the stamp on your relationship, but why would they lie? A relationship is of a high market value. It nearly always is. The motivation of lying is super high. People lie about it simply to make you feel better, even, they lie thinking it doesn’t matter whether they love you or not as long as they play the part. Now… If you refuse to see the lie, if it is such, you will create a shaky foundation to your life and change will come when this guy falls in love for real… with someone else. INSISTING that his words are true won’t make your life stable, that makes your life very much unstable and your relationship unreliable.

The truth is stuff that is consistent with reality. Whatever can be proven is true, and then some stuff that might be true although it cannot be proven. You don’t need to worry about it, just acknowledge there are things we don’t know about or can’t prove, because if one day someone prove something you insist is not real to be real, that’ll be a nasty fall from the “reality you knew”, so keep in mind there are things we know and things we don’t know and between them… is the Doors. (Thank you, Jim.)

What do you know for sure?

Examine new things with this question in mind: What do you know for sure, and what have you been told about this thing? What you have been told is not worth much. They can point you towards NOTICING something you wouldn’t otherwise notice, but what you’ve been told is not something you should trust word-for-word. What do you know, for yourself, for real? Let’s take the book of all books as an example:

The Bible. Can I trust the Bible if I hate change?

What you know for sure is that you are talking about a book. A very popular book at that. The most sold and the most stolen book in the world. It is made of paper, covers and words by several different authors during different times in history. So we know this is a collection of work by several people. We know what is SAID about the book. We know the STORY surrounding the book. It is supposed to be true, but, quite frankly, we don’t know if it is or not. Our parents might have insisted it is true, the priests say it is true, but, in all fairness, these are simply people with their own motivations of believing whatever they are believing. DO YOU believe in the story? How much of it do you feel IS or MIGHT BE true?

How much do you accept that we don’t know for sure?

You can tell, for sure, how the book makes you feel when you read it. Anxious? Comforted? Good, bad, fearful? Is this the word of an infallible god or do  you think it’s words of absolute raving lunatics?

You know there has been a lot of people telling a lot of stories about the book, you know everyone has a slightly different idea of what is in it and which passages we should focus on. You know for real, that different people feel very differently about the contents of the book. How realistic is it, then, to believe that this book contains the message of an infallible god and his undeniable will? How many passages do you ignore, because they are simply lunatic and cruel? Then, why would you trust the rest of it to be real?

How do you feel about the book now? Does it contain the truth with absolute certainty?

No. It shouldn’t feel like the absolute truth with absolute certainty, so ignore it. If you like some passages, take them for their actual value, for what it says, rather than for being the word of God; you like what it says here, there, and there, the rest of it, who cares? You have no idea who wrote the book and how much they actually knew about God, and that is OK. People make mistakes, even those with all the best of intentions.

As mentioned, history won’t change

No matter what will happen, one thing is for sure. History won’t change. If you hate change a lot, you might want to take on a hobby studying history, because if there is one thing we can say for sure, that stuff has happened and the only thing that will change is how much we know about the past and how we interpret it. You can also study your family history, write in diaries, something stable so you know that although new things are happening, there is the past to rely on; it will never change; we will just constantly add to things that will never change as we go further down this road called life and time.

What do you know for sure about your life or whatever you feel nervous about?

Focus on the stuff that you Do Know For Sure. Then, understand that there are things you don’t know for sure but since you know that you don’t know for certain, even if it turned out to not be the way you wished would be, you were prepared to see it fail or crumble down. It won’t feel so bad when you knew all along that it might happen. Most things in life fit into that category, so you can at least know for sure, that sometimes, you will make mistakes and errors in judgement, and that is NORMAL. You are not infallible.

Even if it feels stupid, go through all the knowns and unknowns about a new situation, and, this sounds particularly counter-productive; imagine the worst case scenario. What could be THE WORST outcome possible? Scare yourself out of your wits about it, and see how it feels now. Was it too bad, after all? What would you do if it would actually happen? How would you cope?

When things catch you off guard, that’s when we feel the world is going to fall apart. Having thought about the possibility of things going wrong makes you prepared, not a pessimist.

That is why I hate the phrase “think positive” because it, so often, makes people ignore the potential failures and go about their life plans like Murphy’s nightmare student.

(Murphy was an engineer who jibed about one of his employees that if there was a way to do something wrong, this guy would find it. An electrical engineering teacher in Hobart, Tasmania, twisted this law whatever can go wrong, will go wrong into a more positive form: This was not a pessimist statement, but a reminder to know that if you put an electric device on a market and don’t consider all the possible ways that people will misuse it, they will get themselves killed with it, so think carefully, and make sure the device cannot be used unsafely.)

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