Thursday 11 November 2010

Destiny vs. Determination

I was talking to withoutwriting about positivity and spirituality and interesting questions came up. The idea of success and positivity. Does spirituality hinder successful development? Is being religious a help or hindrance in creating the life we want? I have to say these questions have been on my mind recently when I was feeling a bit down in the dumps recently. You see for 98% of the world that believe in a spiritual entity most turn to him or her in times of crisis, myself included, hoping for guidance. However there have been times in the past few years where I have found myself questioning the very existence of a god. This is not something a good little boy should ever do.

I was raised in a very religious family and the belief in God was a given. It was a belief that was never challenged particularly in a small island. Everyone you knew had a belief system, whether they believed in your god or not. It was the belief in a god that united us and divided us. Religion and the church was something that was part of your life, like eating and breathing. You went to church and that was it. You could throw a "sicky" for school but never for church because "God was watching". They got you from the cradle so that to even think about not wanting to go to church was a sin. Religion and the belief in God was shoved down our throats, morning, noon and night. Every morning there were prays on the single television station in the island (we're talking the 70's and early 80's here) giving equal importance to the top three faiths in our country, The Christians, The Muslims and The Hindus. We were politically correct before anyone even knew what political correctness was.

So with my upbringing I never heard of an atheist until I was in my late teens. And that idea was like believing in the bogeyman. Ridiculous. People that didn't believe in God. Yeah, Right!! It was a concept so alien to me. How could someone even question whether there was a god?, I asked myself. Are they crazy? Am I? It was not a good place to be I felt sorry for these mysterious atheists. After all, I knew there is a god. Though I've never seen him. I knew there were miracles taking place everyday. Though I've never seen a miracle myself I've heard from lots of people who knew someone, who heard it from someone else, who knew the great aunt, twice removed of a god fearing, trust-worthy person who was lame and now healed when she saw an angel in the sky. What more evidence did I need? Now if that wasn't a miracle, what was it? A coincidence, synchronicity? You only think it was a coincidence or synchronicity because you don't believe. That's your problem. The lord works in mysterious ways and everything and everyone in my life reinforced this belief. I didn't get that top graded school I wanted but got something else. I was comforted by words like "It just wasn't meant to be. The lord have something better in mind for you."

Television was and still is heavily censored. No nudity, obscene language, and immoral situations so there were a lot of shows with blurred scenes of a sexual images, sudden bouts of silence (though I became very good at lipreading the curses) and huge cuts between scenes of an immoral nature. Of course who determines what is nudity, obscene and immoral are the pillars of morality themselves. The Inter religious Organisation. Strange though because if I looked out my windows I could see men's exposed penises as they boldly pissed up against a wall, I could hear them telling their friends to F**k off and read in the news papers about another religious figure who was caught with his pants down servicing one of his parishioners. AGAIN.  I just couldn't watch it on television.

So with a sheltered life, and bursting to the bits to find my own way I moved to the bright city lights of London. It was dark, cold, dismal, rainy, the air literally stank of cigarette smoke and my skin broke out. I LOVE IT. I was free. I could make my own way, carve a new direction in life for myself and turn over a new leaf. No one knew me and that was just the way I wanted it. I avoided my fellow countrymen like the plague. Most immigrants gravitate towards centres of the city where everyone was like them, in language, dress, culture and taste in food. They formed their little ghettos. And don't get me wrong. I get that. I totally understand why someone moving to a new country would want to be among people that they knew with  familiar sights and sounds. But I also knew that I wanted to assimulate as quickly as possible and I knew that hanging around people like me, telling the same old stories of the old country was not going to do me any favours. It's why some people have lived in England for 40 years and still don't know how to speak the language(What Now! EXCUSE YOU?) Even now so many years later I still only have one friend from my country and he's a handful ( D...You know I love you. :-)). But now with all these freedoms, new ideas kept coming into my mind. New ways of seeing the world. I actually began to meet people who were atheist and those who were agnostic (I had to look that one up). I felt as if they had killed God. To even talk about God was seen as shameful as if you were afflicted with a mental ailment. I wasn't hip or facing reality. My world was being turned on it's head. I could have just shut down and called them philistines but I realised that part led to unthinking blind devotion. And I think we all know where unthinking blind devotion to a god leads.

So over the years I've found myself facing challenges and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It is then that I have to find an inner strength within me to keep on going. Do i fall back on my tried (but unfounded) belief that it was meant to be, or do i embrace this new idea of determination. The idea that i am the captain of my own life. I had to challenge the very idea that I'm not getting the job I want because "It's up to God or that's just the way it is." I am constantly fighting within myself to overcome the whole idea that my life is predetermined and no matter how hard I try I will never amount to more than what i am predestined to be. I am getting angrier and angrier about it and one day i snapped. NO. HELL to the N to the O. NO. I will not lay down and accept this as my life. I can be better. I am deserving of achieving all my dreams and goals. I will never let anyone or being tell me who I can and cannot be. FREE WILL BABY!! Whether I succeed or fail it has to be my decision, a consequence of my choice.

It would be naive and too simplistic of me to say that a belief in a supernatural being is the reason so many people in the world live and and never attain their dreams but comfort themselves by saying "That's the way it is. It's God's Will." I don't think it is God's will. If a god was even remotely interested in your life, why would he or she want you to be Mr and Mrs Average. Why, if you believe you were created in His images would he want to be a slob vegetating on a couch in front of a television. No, you would be the best there is to be. You would grow constantly and become a shining example in your life and not be ants in an anthill. It's no big secret that throughout human history the idea of god and religion have been hijacked by the powerful to keep those less powerful in their place and from aspiring to be anything other that living off the scraps that fall from the powerful tables. The Opium of the masses, I believe Karl Marx called it. My friend put across the point that society has changed, revolutions that created a more just society and that we are more caring, rulers and leaders are not like the dark ages. No it's not. they rulers are just smarter. They don't always get it right. There are still protests but they don't worry much. After all once you control the mind you don't have to worry about that the body does. And they do control the mind, via propaganda, television and religion.

Do a quick search of all the powerful people(leaders, innovators) the people whose very word and ideas can affect your life. Find out how they got there and see how many of them actually have a belief in a supernatural being. I refer to leaders in the Western world because there are country in the east where religion and beief in gods are not encouraged yet their populations do not strive. This coud be because those same country do not allow individual expression of thought or grant it's citizens the educational oppportunities to grow. Still I do not know all the answers. What I do know is that for me I am still struggling with the idea of how to balance destiny vs determination. I may be a stubborn bastard but like the other 98% of the world's popultaion I rather be a believer than not.

Thursday 4 November 2010

Positive Thinking in Skill-Acquisition and in Life - Part 1

By WithoutWriting

1. Defining the Terms:

By way of introduction, I am a blogger who writes predominantly on martial-arts related topics; the acquisition of skill in the area of combat preoccupies me to an unhealthy degree.

In this guest article (Many thanks to the Man in a Bottle) I intend to discuss the reasons why I think a positive attitude is quite simply a pre-requisite of not only any learning process, but an advantage in several areas of daily life.

I should perhaps first make my position on positive thinking and optimism perfectly clear:
I don't consider myself to be a particularly optimistic individual. I consider myself a realist, and I react rather badly and in a knee-jerk way to self-help doctrines that demand that one take a positive outlook on EVERY circumstance in one's life, regardless of how difficult or painful that circumstance might be. However, either consciously or unconsciously, I have developed an extremely positive, nay, some would say an unreasonably optimistic outlook in several discreet areas. These areas are: My study of the martial arts, and my opinion of humanity which feeds directly in to both my political and philosophical beliefs.

Secondly I should define exactly what I am talking about when I use the terms "positive thinking" and/or "optimism":

To me, in all cases one should form one's opinions based on evidence. This is the only intellectually defensible way to form opinions in my view, and certainly the only way to learn about the world and oneself. Therefore- in my opinion- a positive attitude should not be held in regards to things, people or actions which have an overwhelming amount of negative evidence attached to them. An example: No amount of positivity will prevent one from crashing to the ground in a painful heap if one jumps from one's second floor window in the morning, instead of taking the stairs. The evidence of both the force of gravity and one's past experience with falling simply do not support a positive attitude to flinging oneself from high places.

However, when one moves away from such extreme examples, decisions about what attitude to take to events in one's life become blurred and difficult. Why should we keep forming relationships with people when we have been hurt in the past? Why should we keep trying to learn to ride a bicycle when we've fallen off so many times during the process? And why should we continue to train in say... a martial art, when for months and years we have been the veritable punchbag of everyone else in the gym/school/dojo?
Believe me when I say that unless you are formidably naturally talented, any complex skill will take serious time and effort to acquire. There are few skills more complex than martial skills, and few areas of study in which the consequences of mistakes are as painful. Why should one presume that one's skill will increase? Why should one be optimistic about one's progress in the art? Why should one be positive?

The answer is that observation of the success of others offsets and outweighs the evidence of one's past experience.

Positive Thinking in Skill-Acquisition and in Life - Part 2

By WithoutWriting
2. An Inspirational Example

A person considering taking up the martial arts might say "I'm unfit, so training would just be painful and annoying, I'm smaller than other people so I'm fighting at a disadvantage, and I'm not naturally aggressive so I'll find the whole experience upsetting and intimidating." These kinds of statements might well lead the person to not take up martial arts. And all of these statements might be true.

But none of these statements are valid reasons for not taking up the training, because none of these stated facts, even if true, would stop this individual from becoming a formidable fighter, or even a champion in one or more disciplines.

To this hypothetical person, I would retort: "All that may be true, but you do have one or more limbs, don't you?" And I would refer them to the case of Kyle Maynard. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyle_Maynard)

Mr Maynard is a quadruple congenital amputee. He was born with no arms and no legs. But in the highly competitive and athletically demanding world of mainstream American Collegiate Wrestling, he attained a record of 35 wins and 16 losses. His opponents (like every amateur wrestler in the US) were fighting for athletic prestige, academic opportunity and social standing. I highly doubt a single one of his opponents was willing to lose to a man with neither arms nor legs. This makes Mr Maynard's achievements all the more inspiring. He is an inspiration within the martial arts and the sporting communities.

My hypothetical naysayer might respond: "This guy is clearly one in a million. I'm not exceptional in any respect, so what good is this example to me?" And I would respond that while Mr Maynard is undoubtedly an exceptional case, his disadvantages in wrestling are so sizeable that it makes any excuses from any of us who possess limbs seem like childish whining by comparison.

And what exactly is exceptional about Mr Maynard? Well he said in an interview once that he lost every single match he ever fought in his first year of wrestling. This shows us that despite massive disadvantages, a positive belief that in the future he WOULD win, was enough for him to overcome those disadvantages and amass a more impressive record than many wrestlers who have no physical problems whatsoever.

For me, the only exceptional thing about Kyle Maynard is his staying power. His determination and willingness to carry on training, when many, many others would not only have given up: they would never have started in the first place. We can all possess such a power, if we are optimistic regarding the outcome of our effort.

3. The Interpretation of Evidence

But let us leave the example set by a single individual, and return to the realms of provable theory:

Once again, I don't believe in having a positive attitude if overwhelming evidence is against such an attitude. I believe that when there's a rough balance of evidence (i.e: Not much more evidence one way or another), one should by default take an optimistic outlook. This is because of the simple fact that without the attempt to accomplish something, there will be no positive outcome. In other words, if you try you may fail, but if you don't try, you will definitely fail.

The second theoretical point to be made is that often, people believe that there's an overwhelming amount of evidence stacked against them, when this simply isn’t so. It would have been easy for Kyle Maynard to say "all the evidence is against my succeeding; no congenital amputee has ever succeeded in wrestling". But while the statement is technically correct, it is incorrect in its substance. The facts are not: "no amputee has ever succeeded in wrestling", the facts are: that so few disabled people have ever TRIED competing in mainstream wrestling that no conclusions can reasonably be drawn. Therefore Kyle Maynard's positive attitude was intellectually defensible, and necessarily well-founded. And he succeeded. And now the next disabled person who considers trying their hand at any sport, or any martial art, will be able to look at Maynard's achievements and make their decision more easily.

On a larger scale, people look at the history of humanity and find almost literally endless cruelty, suffering, greed and war. From these terrible facets of human nature, so richly expressed throughout history, many people draw the conclusion that they should have no faith in human nature at all. But they aren't thinking critically. If one thinks critically and one REALLY knows history, a pattern is easily detectable: From ignominious beginnings where the strong and the wealthy universally preyed on the weak and the poor, we have moved forward to a time in which- despite the fact that we haven't totally escaped our animalistic drives- we have things like welfare states, public healthcare in several countries, campaigns for liberation of all peoples and campaigns for universal peace. (They may not have won their final victory just yet, but at least they exist.)

Throughout the vast majority of human history there was NONE of this. In fact, in the past hundred years, social improvements have been literally unfathomable compared to what came before. Therefore the real lover of truth, the true critical thinker, will be without hesitation optimistic for the future of mankind. All past evidence points towards improvement in the future.

And this is the lesson to take from history and from life, I think: When you think the evidence warrants negativity, look deeper. A scientific mind is a wonderful tool to have in all areas of life, but especially when addressing the question of whether one should be optimistic or pessimistic.