Asymmetric Warfare

Sometimes we get into such ruts in our lives that the Universe essentially gives up on trying to pound you in the face with its blatant attempts at making you realize what you need to do, what you need to change and switches its strategy up. There’s only so long that the Universe will continue to tell you something, have people and situations tell you what you know you need to know, but refuse, before it will modify its tactics and employ asymmetric warfare against your stubbornness.

When the Universe changes tactics to asymmetric warfare against your defenses which need to be broken down it attacks certain strategic points in your psyche at strategically vulnerable times. All to get you to the point where your defenses are finally broken so that you surrender to what you should be doing.

Let yourself be tackled finally so that you can reconvene in a new formation at the line of scrimmage and try a new play. Your defenses have been broken. You have to say uncle. Then and only then can you really start over for real.

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way. – Alan Watts

The Universe will attempt to breach your defenses at strategic points in your psyche instead of the head on waves of messages that it had previously sent. You already know what you need to do. It will send emissaries who will explain the terms of surrender and describe more explicitly what you need to work on once you finally raise the white flag.

You need to work on yourself. You need to better yourself. You must employ the modes of self-improvement – resources for which abound plentifully in this age of the internet – that deep down you’ve known that are necessary for you to move further. The sooner you respond to these attacks and pleas, the better able you are to assuage your pain and mitigate your losses.

Experience is a hard teacher because it gives the test first, and only then provides the lesson. – Vernon Law

Vigilance is the root of resilience. You can make it through these rough spots. You’ve possibly been in worse and made it out alive, but even if not, you do indeed have the wherewithal inside of you to make it through even if you’re completely alone in doing so. There are resources both internally and external to you to draw from.

You must cool down the obsessive thoughts and give up on negativity. When you’re in a serious mood it is easy to allow obsessive thinking and whereas emotions should not be repressed, they should also not be allowed to run the whole show.

Who said, “The mind is like a puppy. If you don’t train it, it will shit everywhere”? Well, it’s a bit true in the sense that, left untethered, the mind will take the inertia of negative thoughts and run amok throughout your whole system. It will affect your emotions, your focus, your relationships with others, your view of yourself, your view of what you know yourself to be capable of, your sleep, your overall physical body, and eventually, your humanity and the inherent will to live and persevere that exists in us all.

The easiest way to reverse this descent into negativity and ultimately madness is to simply give up. Give up to the forces both inside you – which desperately yearn for your survival and thriving – and that part of the Universe that wants the best for you that are attempting to get through to you information which you don’t want to process, but you know is right.

Experience is what you get when you get what you didn’t want. – Howard Marks

It’s all up to you. Say this to yourself because it really is. Any lasting change is going to have to come from you for you. We’ll skip the Hallmark card aisle palaver about loving yourself. No one needs to have their intelligence insulted any further with that as it doesn’t target the individual challenges that need to be met head on.

This is why we need to evaluate what obstacles need to be removed, which goals need to be striven for and the challenges that need to be overcome. You will need to craft self-discipline through showing compassion for your future self.

It might not be pleasant in the near-term, but you will feel gratitude in the future to yourself and your past self for it. As is said, self-improvement is the ultimate form of prepayment. Avoid Zero Days, i.e., do not go a single day without doing something to further your own goals; no days without doing something to get you closer to your Endgame.

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories. – Zadie Smith

Are your desires in line with your intention and vice versa? What does your ideal day look like? Is it really sipping mimosas on a beach? Or is it coming home to a house you love filled with a family you love after spending a day working on a project you love?

What fills you with passion? What is an outlet that expresses what makes you jump out of bed in the morning before the alarm even goes off? What was it that excited you to the point where you weren’t even aware of how tired you should have been or made you forget to eat?

Neurons that fire together, wire together, [the] process of imagining the future outcomes creates new neural networks in your brain that help you form new beliefs, take new actions, and adopt new perspectives – Melody Wilding

In terms of causation, it may be not so much of your present pushing you toward your intention, but rather your future pulling you towards it. For this reason, it is imperative that you are clear about your intention.

Employ second-order thinking to mitigate unforeseen and unwanted side affects or blowback from unclear or unwise intent. Getting specific about the future you want to create will help you craft a stronger mental picture. Be specific about the future you wish to make.

Use visualization to explore this future and clarify your desires for it. This will give you a stronger concept of what you truly desire for your future Endgame.

Everything goes backwards in time to conspire in just such a way that the future you intend for occurs. – Dean Radin

Develop a campaign, an overall strategy with this subsequent Endgame. Imagine ahead to what you want as your Endgame then reason backward as to what constitutes what would have to happen to achieve that. This will give you a better strategy to employ what you need to do in order to achieve your desired results.

Make sure that your desires are in line with your intent and that your intent is in line with your true desires. The clearer you are about what you want, the easier it is for the universe to do its job for you. Visualize what that desired future outcome looks like.

Remember that on the one hand, effective visualization is grounded in reality, but on the other do not let limitations such as your own present situation – however undesirable – dictate where you want to end up.

When we are fearful, we tighten our grip, hoping for more control of the chaos. Our grip strangles reality so tightly that nothing can change. When we are calm and expectant, we loosen our grip on reality. Strangely enough, the more we loosen our grip, reality gets loose and changeable. When we stop trying to force things to happen, they happen.– Adam Blackthorne

Adjust your preferred outcomes as reality changes. Be careful not to allow clouding in your view of reality. Be mindful and intellectually honest enough with yourself to allow this to be visible. Take your ego out of your line of sight. The better you understand a problem, the better you can choose actions which would embody a proper response.

Identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. – Susan Cain

Remember that manifestation must have a pathway. You must find what is required in order to achieve your results. You may need to expand your palette in order to paint the picture in reality that you see in your mind.

Also remember to show gratitude. Be grateful for everything that you do have. Be grateful for what remains and grateful for what you will become and achieve and acquire. Be grateful for things that are no longer in your life that could have caused even more harm.

In showing gratitude, you inherently change your mindset. Your mental picture of both the world in general, your immediate surroundings and your own self will get brighter. Your outlook will indeed change because you are focusing on the positives that exist and are going to exist as opposed to the negatives that may exist presently and that you fear will occur. Your capacity for optimism increases whilst pessimism decreases.

None is more impoverished than the one who has no gratitude. Gratitude is a currency that we can mint for ourselves, and spend without fear of bankruptcy. —Fred De Witt Van Amburgh

Whose Responsibility is it to Adapt?

Humans, having the faculties of reason, have over the course of our existence as a race furthered our knowledge of and, hence, our ability to manipulate nature, the Universe. We employ reason to develop technologies which aid in our survival, primarily (which is our primary purpose - the only inherent inborn purpose we have), and also aid and allow for the development of our own unique, individual, arbitrarily chosen purpose.

Even the most primitive jungle-bound tribes employ technology. These 'savages' reap the rewards of the capacity for reason their forefathers implemented ages ago when they developed the now primitive (in context with the 21st Century's Western civilization's high degree of sophistication) technology of spears, loin-cloths and thatched huts.

Many argue the traditional relevance of their culture and subsequent lifestyle and their 'right' to retain their primitive heritage, though it seems to only serve the status quo and an unwillingness to adapt to changing circumstances - i.e. changing realities.

When humans apply reason to a particular question they have about nature they can learn, i.e. increase their knowledge, new things about the way the Universe works, both micro- and macrocosmically. The more knowledge we have about the Universe, the more we are able to manipulate aspects thereof to serve our own purposes. This is how we develop technology.

As we implement new technologies, our lives too change as we are able to substitute one way of doing something for another via the implementation of said technology or are able to do things we weren't previously able to do at all in the first place.

This changes our situation in the world, it changes, morphs our circumstances and, thus we are in a situation where we have to adapt, or attempt to adapt.

Adaptation explains the do or die, the sink or swim aspects of reality. Adaptation consists of a system responding in the most preferential way for its own system as stimuli from res extensa are perceived within the sensory and conceptual parts of the system.

It is ultimately the responsibility of an individual to respond in the optimal way for oneself to external stimuli (changes in circumstances). Oftentimes, individuals do not have the requisite variety which comes with sufficient knowledge of a situation and the available knowledge surrounding its comprising parts to make a proper decision in terms of the long-term consequences.

Culture is a transient thing and changes as necessary to fit the changing times. As we employ our reason to increase our knowledge and then use this new knowledge (integrated with our previously gained knowledge) to create technology with which to make certain tasks easier or to allow us to perform erstwhile undoable tasks. This increase in our abilities leads to a new situation either subtle or extreme. Now we have altered our situation and must adapt to our new state of affairs.

What happens if we don't? Refusing to adapt to new realities implies an arbitrary refusal to perceive and conceive of reality as it is. This denial leads to the inconsistencies on par with trying to insert a square peg in a round hole. Either one can adapt as necessary to changes in reality and / or one can (within the reality of the situation) attempt through further reason to manipulate the reality to a way in which one wants it.

It must be noted that force / coercion are not viable options in terms of this second option (that of changing the circumstances to fit your preferred mode of being). Bear too in mind that this second alternative still requires varying degrees of adaptation to new circumstances.

Too often though, those who would prefer to keep circumstances at a status quo level disregard reason (and its implications of individual freedom and the respect subsequent thereof) in their attempts at reversion to preview circumstances.

It must be here said that the faculty of reason is what allows us to best deal with reality as it is, hence failure to apply reason to our situation as it is in reality leads inevitably to an inability to properly deal with situations in which we find ourselves. Our survival depends upon our application of reason.

We, of course, tend to employ greater and lesser degrees of reason in our quotidian lives, but the difficulty stems from prevalent mis-reasoned fundamental philosophical basics. What I am referring to here is the lifelong programming / conditioning process we go through.

As we enter this world tabula rasa in terms of concepts (discounting possibly inborn instinctual / response mechanisms) we are quickly bombarded with all manner of new sensations and subsequent perceptions upon which we, via our faculty of categorical perception, develop and integrate concepts to allow for an understanding, nascent though it may be.

With the development of linguistic capabilities our ability to grasp increasingly more sophisticated concepts grows and we are thus able to both receive concepts as well as clarify to others what our remaining questions are. Those questions being the knowledge gaps existing in our understanding of that which we perceive and the subsequent abstractions thereof.

The problem thus arises that we are at first depend upon others for our information (or rather, meta-information). The cause of the problem is not the dependence itself necessarily, but rather the reality that those upon whom we are dependent tend to have their own irrational understandings which they pass on to us.

Without necessarily malicious intent, our elders pass on faulty concepts and poor critical thinking habits which we habitualize and become to employ in a conditioned sense. This is why all mystical traditions first require deprogramming of the individual in order to rediscover the ability to perceive and conceptualize aspects of reality which are not 'visible' post normal Western lifelong conditioning. It should be noted more explicitly here that the majority of this conditioning occurs, more or less consciously (on the part of the 'elders'), early in life and become more rigid as one ages.

When culture is adhered to merely by virtue of tradition without regard to emerging realities then the fact that an irrational refusal to allow culture to modify or be modified will logically become obsolete as it does not conform to reality and thus hinders individuals involved in said culture from adapting to the new reality leading to a lack of proper / correct responses. This lack of correct response will inextricably lead, sooner or later, to difficulty in overall survival.

According to humans being rational, reasoning creatures, culture is an implement to be employed, updated and discarded as necessary to best allow for adaptation to changing circumstances. Toleration of emotionality dictating what we modify, or how or if we modify our culture, will inevitably disallow us from properly responding to changing realities because it is reason which enables us to know how to appropriately modify - via adaptation; correct responses - our culture.

Subcultures arise due to the fact that all societies with their cultures are comprised of individuals and individuals each have their own unique complexes of reason - i.e. differing degrees of the ability to correctly apply reason as well as deciding upon different things to apply reason to. With this being the case, it follows that certain individuals will develop differing concepts as to how or it a present culture should change.

This may be due to a better or worse grasp and application of reason or to the willingness to employ reason over emotionality or not.

As humans increase their knowledge of the Universe, i.e. the 'world we live in', it is inevitable that we will apply this knowledge to developing new ways of doing things and new implements to help us do them. These new implements we classify as technology. Knowledge and subsequent technology leads to changing realities and hence to the necessity for modified culture. When new technology is denied on the grounds of culture then we come to the aforementioned cundundrum, that is an irrational response system to the objective reality we find ourselves in.

If our new knowledge and subsequent technology abides by reason, and is acquired by way of reason, then a refusal to accept it is irrational.

Culture, like religions, which are 'designed' to disallow its adherents from updating it is response to changing realities are inherently 'built' to cause the overall downfall of its adherents. Abiding by a dogmatic, faith-based approach to reality will inevitably lead to this downfall because it refuses to accept changing realities and does not apply reason to understanding objective reality.

Faith insinuates the negation of reason for the purpose of understanding reality regardless of whether some of its claims turn out to be correct or not. Failure to apply reason to understanding reality is a set up for failing to respond to reality itself properly. 'Properly' in terms of the context of survival of any individual.

Primitive and developed cultures alike lose or decrease their ability to survive in a competitive world made of individuals (all out to survive, at least long enough to reproduce) when they arbitrarily decide not to do what it takes to adapt and respond accordingly to new realities. It is not the fault of those who do adapt and apply reason to acquiring new and more accurate knowledge of objective reality and implementing said knowledge as technology that other individuals / groups of individuals do not.

Those who do not adapt are not the responsibility of those who do.