Faith

[caspex]

Has it ever happened to you that constant failure hammered you down every time you mustered the courage to gather hope and stand up again? This cycle will eventually lead you to a point where you lose all hope. Hope and purpose are the fuel to your actions. Here stands a choice, either you give up or somehow try again by finding more hope.

Many give up, but those who choose to try again usually do not do so because they consciously chose it, but rather because they don't have the option in their psyche to let that go. They have to try again, there's no other choice. 

It is at this point you realize that up until now your hope was based on external objects. For example: The fruits of your actions, the end goal, inner peace, inner satisfaction, some elaborate worldview on how your actions are meaningful. No matter what it is, as long as your hope is derived from external objects, it'll always give out after X amount of failures.

For some it may take 5 failures, for another 10, maybe for someone else it takes 50 failures, and for another a 100. The bigger the task the more failures you'll encounter, and at that point, after 1000s of failures, you'll eventually run out of things to find hope in. If you're lucky you succeed before that happens. If you're not so lucky, you end up feeling hopeless. And because your attachment is deep, you can't let that desire go either. Here a person reaches a very dark place, where they find themselves incapable of both action towards their goals and letting that goal go. 

So what's the solution?

Faith. It is hope turned onto itself. Faith is that state of mind where the source of your hope has no basis. Faith is by design a strange loop.

When you have some hope for better times, you would have reasons to explain to another person as to why you believe that. But when you have faith in better times, there's absolutely no basis at all for why you think that. That is a feature. If you're looking for a base, a logic behind it, then it is not faith, you're still searching for hope and purpose.

Life is a balancing game between Faith and Doubt. Those who have no Doubt are blind, constantly stumbling into countless traps that life has laid out. Those who have no Faith are too slow to get anywhere and perish.

Those who strike the right balance achieve stuff really fast. You simply have faith in yourself, for no reason at all. There was never any need for a reason to believe you can achieve your goals. 

Many intelligent folk take pride in being able to question and doubt conditions. But that is precisely what holds them back from truly achieving their goals. 

You cannot achieve self-mastery until you master the mechanics of belief and faith.

One needs to be able to embrace uncertainty and the unknown head on, Faith is just that.

 

Edited 15 hours ago by caspex

[Cred]

There is exactly one leap of faith that you need to do to break out of the faith-doubt, success-failure spiral, which is the faith in letting go of all self-doubt.

Once you have faith that you deserve to exist purely by virtue of being yourself, you are liberated.

Once your only goal is non-doubt which is authenticity, you can not fail anymore.

This idea of asking yourself "do I deserve to live? What do I have to achieve to be able to prove that I deserve to exist?" is an idea that does only exist in humans. It does not exist in the animal kingdom and it also did not exist in humanity until it was corrupted by civilization and private property.

It is a narrative that is artificially perpetuated, so the working class keep serving those who own the means of production. In truth, the world does not need capitalism anymore. There exists enough wealth to make everybody on the planet self-actualize and live authentically on the long run. The only reason why capitalist ideology is still so prevalent is because western people are so propagandized by anti-communism propaganda.

[Cred]

2 hours ago, caspex said:

Those who have no Doubt are blind, constantly stumbling into countless traps that life has laid out.

There is a very important distinction between doubt and the dialectical method. The latter archives an accurate view of the world without ever having to doubt oneself. 

"I am not doubting my worldview, but I am acknowledging that I have not integrated its antithesis yet, but I am in the process of doing so"

Edited 13 hours ago by Cred

[caspex]

9 hours ago, Cred said:

There is exactly one leap of faith that you need to do to break out of the faith-doubt, success-failure spiral, which is the faith in letting go of all self-doubt.

Once you have faith that you deserve to exist purely by virtue of being yourself, you are liberated.

Once your only goal is non-doubt which is authenticity, you can not fail anymore.

This idea of asking yourself "do I deserve to live? What do I have to achieve to be able to prove that I deserve to exist?" is an idea that does only exist in humans. It does not exist in the animal kingdom and it also did not exist in humanity until it was corrupted by civilization and private property.

It is a narrative that is artificially perpetuated, so the working class keep serving those who own the means of production. In truth, the world does not need capitalism anymore. There exists enough wealth to make everybody on the planet self-actualize and live authentically on the long run. The only reason why capitalist ideology is still so prevalent is because western people are so propagandized by anti-communism propaganda.

Makes sense although I am not so sure about tying this in with the current state of society so much. I don't think that it is an artificially perpetuated narrative but rather a natural outcome as we shift from villages to civilizations. 

Moreover, my focus regarding Faith is not about fixing "Do I deserve to live?" or "What do I have to achieve to be able to prove that I deserve to exist?", it's more so about developing confidence in your own way of doing and thinking things. I had been so full of doubt that I constantly looked for validation about my way of doing things just so I know I am not fucking something up. 

I looked at people with the confidence to dive head first into any situation and it made me scoff at their stupidity "You have no real plan, you can easily fall into traps, there is no basis for your confidence as to why your actions would work." But it still worked for them. In fact I was the stupid one, making plans but never having enough confidence to see it all the way through. Turns out, it's a feature that confidence doesn't have a true basis to it. It's not stupidity but a deep sense of trust in yourself and in the future. This is where bravery stems from as well.

My mistake was to think everything needs to have a logical backing behind it. 

9 hours ago, Cred said:

There is a very important distinction between doubt and the dialectical method. The latter archives an accurate view of the world without ever having to doubt oneself. 

"I am not doubting my worldview, but I am acknowledging that I have not integrated its antithesis yet, but I am in the process of doing so"

Dialectic is more like a formalized doubt. Instead of aiming that doubt internally you aim it outwards. So there is a difference but not in the way you say it. It's all still a formalized doubting process though.
thesis → antithesis → synthesis
This process is about creating tension between views and revising them. The moment you acknowledge an antithesis in the hopes of a synthesis, you already acknowledge that your current worldview is incomplete. If there is room for more integration (which there always is) your worldview is provisional and open to revision. That there is an implicit doubt in your worldview, that something could be wrong. You can't pair epistemic certainty "I am not doubting" with Epistemic Incompleteness "I have not integrated its antithesis yet".

[Carl-Richard]

Perseverance is the #1 Stage Red virtue (probably hyperbole, but it could be true).

Edited 3 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[caspex]

5 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Perseverance is the #1 Stage Red virtue (probably hyperbole, but it could be true).

@Carl-RichardNever thought about it like that. Have any idea about the same for other stages?