Chapter 25 3.To combat uncertainty, we must re-order our minds and our relationship with the world

Living in an age where we encounter uncertainty in three ways. Please think about it, if you took the college entrance examination or the civil service examination, before you were admitted, unless you did too badly in the exam, or you were convinced that you did too well in the exam, would you feel that you were tied into a trap of hope and hopelessness? BBQ? From the bottom of your heart, after you walk out of the examination room, what you hope most is that you can "Fan Jinzhongju".Therefore, you will imply that you can change your destiny in one fell swoop with the help of this exam.But unfortunately, you don't know the outcome, and the outcome has the potential to destroy that hope.This creates anxiety for you.

In this case, you should seek psychological protection and tell yourself not to think about the consequences.If the anxiety is so severe that it is already a cruel psychological torture for you, then, in order to maintain psychological survival, you may simply imagine that you will do poorly in the exam, so as to determine a result and eliminate uncertainty for you. threat. In this way, a strange phenomenon occurs: you originally hoped that you would do well in the exam, but under the drive of anxiety, you simply think of it as the worst, because in this way you can tell yourself in your heart that you don’t need to think about it, and you can be relieved up.

In the eyes of Sartre, a master of existential philosophy, human beings are a "useless passion". The greater the hope for human beings, the more disappointed they will be.However, as a humanitarian, he still reminds people repeatedly that people must be aware of this: you have no freedom without freedom.This means that you are definitely free because you have free will.Let's put it this way, even if you want to turn yourself into a slave, it also shows that you have the freedom to want to be a slave.Moreover, life presents you with many possibilities at any time, and there are one after another choices waiting for you, unless you are completely like a machine from birth, there is a mysterious thing controlling you, telling you to go away , stop and stop, otherwise you are still free, because you are always making choices.

Existentially so.The human species is not like animals, he does not take the path of "specialization".We know that every animal has a very powerful organ, such as the sense of smell of a dog, the teeth of a wolf, and the legs of a rabbit. This "specialization" enables the animal to automatically adapt to the special external environment. It is embedded in the natural chain. , there is no uncertainty, just like a switch controls a light. Humans are inferior to animals in these organs, and their most powerful place is the brain and consciousness.But God is fair, and people can take advantage of it wherever they can.One has to pay a price for his "non-specialization". One of the costs is that he has to feel the uncertainty of the world psychologically and must make many choices.

Even under forced circumstances, people have the problem of choice, and they all have the freedom to choose life and death, food and shit.The revolutionaries engaged in underground work were arrested by the reactionaries, and the reactionaries even wanted to call beautiful women to test the revolutionaries first, to see if they were made of special materials, and whether they could resist the attack of sugar-coated shells, before they were used to burn red The soldering iron tested their strong revolutionary will. In daily life, the choices we face are even more common, from as small as which piece of clothing to wear to as large as which job opportunity to choose in the face of two job opportunities with their own advantages and disadvantages.For the latter, this situation makes us very painful, because in the case of two job opportunities that are not so competitive, there are risks in choosing which one to choose. What can they bring to you? What trouble, all this is unknown.

In this era, the most difficult thing for us is to stick to one thing all the time.There are two reasons: one is that if a person insists on doing the same thing, in the case of impetuous society and rapid changes, there will be psychological consequences of being "out of touch" with society, which many people fear; Success, or the ability to obtain the benefits that mark success, many people have lost their psychological expectations under the circumstances of many risks and variables.We are thrown into a world full of variables, and we can only be carried away by the tide of society.

How to fight the threat of uncertainty to us? As we said before, in the directional structure of "self-object" or "subject-object" between human beings and the external world, as long as the force is directed from the external world to our weak "self", as long as the external world appears mysterious and strange , Unpredictable, or too fast to grasp, uncertainty will eat us up.To combat uncertainty, we must re-order our minds and our relationship to the world. Let's take a look at the methods people use to combat uncertainty: Under the existing profit distribution rules, power can not only bring material benefits, but also give people a pleasure of controlling others and the situation. The illusion of controlling the world.And once a person feels that he can control the world in which his psychological situation is located, he has gained an order, he feels that he can dominate everything related to himself, and the threat of uncertainty to him disappears.

I have no intention of judging the great ambitions of many to seize power.But it must be said that this strategy for dealing with uncertainty is logically self-destructive and has dire psychological consequences, so be careful and put your mind at ease.A person's power is never independent, but deeply embedded in the system of the organization or the entire society. Being able to control others also means that he will be controlled by others.The director is indeed majestic in his territory, and everything can be settled, and the order is controlled by him.However, according to this logic, in front of officials above the director, he threw himself into uncertainty again, because he can't control anything, on the contrary, he can only be controlled by others, and his power depends on the evaluation of his superiors , which he cannot accurately grasp.In addition, if a person wants to establish an order with power, he will become a sadist, because only when he abuses others can he experience psychologically that he has established an order and has a dominant position.

For example, if a person is alone at home, he must keep the house spotless, everything must be placed in an orderly manner, and if it gets dirty or messed up, he will feel very uncomfortable. Hygiene and putting things in order are of course good habits, but if you make them so exaggerated, you have deviated from its purpose and developed into a psychological problem.To be precise, for those who are obsessed with cleanliness and order, he does not do this for hygiene and tidiness, but to eliminate anxiety and fear.The outside world threatens him beyond his control, and he resorts to an alternative plan to save his precarious self.After all, at home, in his small world, he can still gain a certainty and a sense of control over his life by creating an order by himself.

This strategy of combating uncertainty is of course less successful.The reason is very simple, it is a kind of evasion, a kind of ostrich tactics, once out of the house, this trick will not work. In addition, as I said before, knowledge is used to tame uncertainty, and many people do the same.It is the least bad weapon in the battle against uncertainty, for the more one knows, the more reliable one's judgments about the future will be.But the strange thing is, why are many knowledgeable people still empty, confused, and panicked in the face of change and chaos? There are three reasons.

(1) The knowledge he has mastered is only in the sense of "what is it now" and "what might the future be like", and does not involve the level of "what makes it what it is now and what it will become" , To put it bluntly, it is only a superficial description of the surface of the world, not a deep exploration of the essence of the world.The world is changing, so when the situation changes, his knowledge will no longer work, and the psychological order established with knowledge will collapse instantly. Forecasting the future is just a forecast, still guessing the trend of the world from the outside.We cannot build certainty into our mental fabric by means of prediction. If a person hopes to use knowledge to settle uncertainty, there is only one way, and that is to engage in philosophical thinking. (2) Modern society is very different from ancient times. Ancient people lived in a small area, and the world remained basically unchanged. His experience and knowledge were fresh, and he faced a concrete world.What he knows, not only the head knows, but also the heart can feel.But this is not the case at all now. The current world is very abstract and fragmented for people. People use knowledge to connect with such a world, which is only the connection of the mind. Psychologically, he is not like the ancients. In that way, firmly united with the world. (3) Everyone's knowledge is extremely limited, even "experts". An "expert" is basically an idiot in other fields besides knowing things in his field of expertise.Of course, in today's China, "experts" are "bricks", and they are inferior to ordinary people in some fields, because they don't even understand common sense, or, for the sake of profit, they pretend that they don't even understand common sense. Just because a person does not know many fields of knowledge, everyone has become a lost lamb in an abstract and risky modern society. In order to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages, many people need an "expert" to guide their daily affairs.It is precisely because of this situation that many people lose their independence psychologically. Organizations are unreliable, brothers are unreliable, leaders are unreliable, colleagues are unreliable, and experts are even more unreliable. There are only two things that can be relied on: reason and self-cultivation. Regarding rationality, I have already talked about some things before, and I can’t talk too much here, because after all, I am not talking about philosophy specifically.What needs to be emphasized is that when we think about something, it is best to have some logic.Why can we know this world?It is because the world has an "objective logical structure", which is isomorphic to the logical structure in our brains.If you respect logic instead of your emotions when looking at many things, you will have strong psychological power, because what you touch is the powerful laws of the world, not the things that change as it passes by. In addition to rationality, we have a more important method to fight against uncertainty: mindfulness. In India, in the Himalayas, spiritual masters and religious hermits generally use the method of mindfulness to train themselves to jump out of this troubled world, so that they can become very alert and approach the truth of existence.We still have to mess around in this world. There is no need to be so extreme and exaggerated, but it is still very necessary to borrow some of its principles and some profound insights from psychology and philosophy to change ourselves. What needs to be clarified is: what we are fighting against is not uncertainty itself, and we cannot fight against it, because it exists objectively; we are preventing and stopping it from working in our psychological structure and stirring up emotions.According to the psychological law of "if a thing does not exist in human psychology, it does not exist", we can eliminate the threat of uncertainty to us. If you are walking on a small road, like the French philosopher Rousseau, playing "the reverie of a solitary walker", and looking up, there is a person in front of you, are you just feeling him instead of thinking about him?And if after a few seconds, you start to wonder who he is and why he is here, does your feeling disappear?what does this mean?It means such a law: feeling and thinking cannot coexist!When you feel, you stop thinking; when you think about something, you no longer feel it. Similarly, when you meditate on something, you become aware of it; and when you become aware of it, your feeling for it disappears. Therefore, when uncertainty hits us, when emptiness, confusion, fear and anxiety flood our hearts, when life requires us to make difficult choices, we must train ourselves to look at them quietly. an illusion; on the other hand, maintain a strong mental concentration. Why do we have emotions such as emptiness, confusion, anxiety and fear?According to the principle that feeling and thinking cannot coexist, the reason is as we said in the previous chapters, our thinking cannot be activated instantly, and we are not aware of those things that stimulate us, such as uncertainty, and we lose our defenses. External stimuli enter our mental structure.Under external stimuli, emotions grow in our psychological structure, like sewage, making our psychological structure chaotic. What needs to be clarified further is that emotions carry psychological energy.In fact, things like our desires, our pursuits, our aspirations, etc. all carry a certain amount of psychological energy, and they must be invested to a certain point.Our desires, pursuits, and aspirations are invested in the external world, but the place where emotions are invested is precisely our entire body. Once it is generated, it will carry psychological energy to collide with our psychological structure, intellectual structure, and hands. Body organs such as feet. So, as long as your mental energy isn't aroused, the emotion goes away.Or, when you are emotionally stimulated by the outside world, as long as your mental energy can be transferred, the emotion will disappear.In both cases, the uncertainty that made you mentally weak is tamed. Why is a person who is enveloped by emotions in a state of confusion in his psychological structure?Because he just feels the emotion, he doesn't think about it, he doesn't feel it.However, as long as we look at it quietly, we can penetrate it.The reason is that when we observe and think about these emotions, our psychological energy has already been transferred to the meditation and thinking. If the emotional psychological energy is taken away, it will disappear. I believe you must still remember that there is a "law of conservation of energy" in middle school physics.I have already said that our desires, pursuits, aspirations, etc. are a kind of psychological energy in our psychological structure, which is invested into the external world.And as long as the energy is aroused, it will not disappear.But it can be transferred. The spiritual master Osho gave an example to the effect that if you were a man and saw a naked beauty in a room, would you have sexual impulses?Sex is a huge energy.But if you just quietly look at her and think about her, do you still have sex drive?there is none left!Energy is transferred from a certain part of the body to the brain and psychology.Why do some men and women feel that they have a common language in many aspects and can talk very well, but they can't generate the spark of love?The problem is that their mutual psychological energy has been taken away by the conversation at the brain level, and there is no feeling of love in the soul. After knowing the principle, on a technical level, we can do this. The first step is to tell yourself inwardly that you must be calm when an uncertain situation arises.The purpose of this step is to remind yourself to close the door of your mental structure and prevent yourself from experiencing the anxiety, fear and self-powerlessness. The second step, unfortunately, in the face of the attack of uncertainty, we are doomed, and we have to experience the impact of emotions on our bodies.At this time, immediately watch it quietly and don't suppress it. At this step, one of the most common mistakes is that we always think about what the consequences will be, worrying about this and that.For example, when you are not sure about your exam, you will imagine and reason about whether you will do well in the exam.wrong!Be sure to cut off the chain of emotional reasoning and imagination, because before the result is finally determined, it leads to self-torture. What we have to do is just the opposite, to go back to the source of the emotion, to think about why we have the emotion, what caused it, and what the emotion means.Once this is done, on the one hand, our psychological energy has been transferred; on the other hand, our rationality has touched those things that generate emotions, and we are psychologically far away from them! The third step is to break the inherent psychological model.The second step is very difficult, because it is difficult for a person to calm down at the beginning, you will feel confused, emotional, and anxious, and the emotions you have generated are colliding everywhere in your heart.The reason for this is that the training of mindfulness is about to disrupt your previous spiritual order and the way you relate to the world.And to break them, there must have been some degree of psychological disturbance in the beginning stages.But with persistence, slowly, a new order of mind and way of relating to the world will be reestablished, making you stronger psychologically.