Chapter 45 Entropy and Original Sin

Speaking of mental maturity is obviously referring to the opposite of the same thing: obstacles to mental maturity.The biggest obstacle is laziness.As long as laziness is overcome, other obstacles can be easily solved; if laziness cannot be overcome, no matter how perfect other conditions are, we cannot succeed.Therefore, laziness is also a major theme of this book.I have already said that we tend to avoid necessary pain and choose the smooth path because of our inertia.Speaking of the topic of "love", I have also emphasized that many people's love is false love, because they do not want to face the pain of self-improvement.Laziness is the opposite of love.Mental maturity requires hard work.Now, we're going to explore the nature of laziness.Simply put, laziness is a terrible and negative force in life.

For many years, I have always believed that the so-called "original sin" concept of Christianity is actually meaningless and can only be disgusting.For example, I always think.Sex has nothing to do with original sin.Personally, my other hobbies, aside from sex, are equally innocent.I do not consider myself guilty if I indulge myself, indulge in a good meal, and suffer from indigestion at most afterwards.I know that the world is full of crime, deceit, prejudice, torture, and cruelty, but I can't see any inherent sin in babies.Nor do I believe that just because the ancestors ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of knowledge and evil, every child should suffer and be cursed from generation to generation.However, I also noticed that laziness is actually everywhere.In all my efforts to help my patients to mature, I have found that the greatest enemy is laziness.And I see in myself the traces of laziness, which prevents me from achieving self-improvement and taking on more responsibility.One of the traits I share with all people is an inability to escape laziness, and in this regard the story of the snake and the apple in Eden suddenly took on special significance.

The biblical story, perhaps missing the most important part.The Bible lets us know that God has a habit: at dusk, he likes to take a walk in the Garden of Eden, and his communication with human beings is also open.That being the case, why didn’t Adam and Eve, who were tempted by the snake to eat the apples, tell God frankly: “We want to know why you don’t let us eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of knowledge and evil. We love the Garden of Eden and are grateful for it, However, we can't understand your rule. Why can't we eat from the tree of the knowledge of knowledge and evil? Can you explain it to us?" Obviously they didn't.They blindly violated the rules of heaven.They don't understand God's rules, and they don't try to question God, to question His authority and concepts.Moreover, they have not communicated with God from the rational standpoint of adults.They only listened to the word of the serpent.Before stealing the fruit, and even after being punished, he did not listen to the voice of God and let God give a clear statement.

Why is that?Why are they tempted to act immediately, without taking some sort of buffering step?The absence of this step constitutes the essence of original sin.This step should have been a debate between them, the snake, and God.Adam and Eve could have joined hands and had a great debate among themselves in the presence of God and the serpent.Since they failed to do so, they had no way of knowing where God stood.Perhaps the debate between God and the snake is particularly significant, symbolizing the struggle between good and evil in the human mind.We avoid debating the good and evil in our hearts, and we produce many evil actions that constitute original sin.In such situations, if we weigh the rightness of an action and the wisdom of a choice, we fail to judge God's position and standards, and we fail to listen to the voice of God—the innate sense of justice—in us .Laziness is to blame for our failures.It takes effort, it takes time, it takes a strong will to complete the debate of the heart.If we listen to the voice of our inner God, we will receive this instruction: we need to choose the relatively difficult path.If we want to complete this path, we have to spend more time and suffer more pain.This of course makes us fearful and thus avoid suffering—just like Adam and Eve and our other ancestors.In this respect, from ancient times to the present, we human beings are all lazy.

Yes, we do have an original sin: laziness.Everyone has this original sin, including infants, children, teenagers, adults, the elderly, the wise and the stupid, the healthy and the disabled.Maybe some people are not overly lazy, but in essence, all people are lazy, just in different degrees.No matter how energetic we are, how ambitious we are, and how wise we are, as long as we reflect deeply, we will find our lazy side, which is the power of entropy in our hearts.In the process of spiritual evolution, it is always against us, preventing our mind from maturing. I'm sure you might say, "I don't agree with you. I don't think I'm lazy at all. I work sixty hours a week, work overtime every night, and don't even take weekends off. Even though I'm tired It sucks, but I still keep my spirits up, go shopping with my wife, take the kids to the zoo, and help them with the housework. There seems to be only one theme in my life, and that is busy! busy! busy!” You express sympathy, but I still want to point out that as long as you observe carefully, you can definitely see your own laziness.As far as laziness is concerned, it has very little to do with how much time you spend working and how conscientious you are to others.One of the main characteristics of laziness is fear.In order to illustrate this problem, we might as well quote the myth of Adam and Eve again.For example, some people think that Adam and Eve did not ask God why he made the law not to allow them to steal apples, and the reason was not because Adam and Eve were inherently lazy, but because of their inner fear.They dare not face the dreaded God, they are afraid of God's wrath.

Not all fears equal laziness, but most fears are related to laziness.I have pointed out that people always feel threatened by new information, and they have to do a lot of work to revise their map of reality.They instinctively avoid this situation, preferring to wrestle with new information rather than absorb it.Their resistance to reality is motivated by fear, but the basis of fear is laziness.They dread the enormous amount of work they have to do. In the section on love, I talked about extending ourselves into new areas, which means accepting new responsibilities, making new commitments, developing new relationships, reaching new levels, taking greater risks, and now we can think that : We are actually afraid of losing our current status or role.We fear switching to new roles, reaching new statuses.We are afraid of changing the status quo, afraid of losing everything we currently have.So, Adam and Eve's fear of asking God could have been entirely out of fear.They are afraid that once they question God, even greater accidents may happen.Therefore, they would rather choose an easy way out, an unreasonable "shortcut" that leaves silently instead of confronting them head-on.In doing so, they get perceptions that are of little use.They hope that they can live in peace with only their existing cognition.Questioning God may bring trouble to mankind, but this story in the Bible tells us: We must face our responsibilities and do our own work well.

Presumably a psychiatrist knows this best.Patients come to the therapist in search of some kind of change, when in fact they are terribly afraid of change, of having to suffer all kinds of things.This fear, or laziness, causes 90% of patients to rush out of treatment before recovering.Interestingly, most of this funk occurs during the first few sessions, or in the first few months of treatment.Quite a few married patients, after the first few treatments, realize that their marriage is in crisis. If they want to restore their souls to health, they can only divorce through agreement or accept extremely difficult self-treatment. Only in this way can they rebuild their ideals. marriage.Some patients intuitively realize the crux of the problem before seeing a psychiatrist.They go to therapy only to affirm a horrible reality of life that they have long been aware of.Regardless of the situation, they are always afraid of facing difficulties, such as having to live alone, or having to work together with their partners for months or years to overcome difficulties in order to improve the marital situation.Fear makes them often give up halfway, sometimes after two or three treatments, sometimes after ten or twenty.Also, when they decide to stop treatment, they always make up excuses like: "We thought there was enough money for treatment, but we were wrong." They also sometimes confess, "I'm afraid of treatment. I'm afraid of having to Only by making more efforts can we save the current marriage. I know this is getting cold feet. Maybe one day, I will have enough courage to continue to come to you for treatment." All in all, they would rather maintain a poor state than pass Try to get out of trouble.

At the beginning of psychotherapy, the patient may not know anything about the cause of "laziness".They may also admit: "I am like everyone else, and of course I can't help but be lazy sometimes." In fact, their laziness has exceeded ordinary people's imagination.Laziness is as cunning as the devil, making the person involved not only good at disguising and deceiving, but also finding ways to make laziness reasonable.Even if their conscious thinking has matured to a certain level, they may not be able to understand the nature of laziness and fight against it.If they have the opportunity to enter a certain field and acquire some new knowledge, they are prone to laziness and fear.They might say, "I've heard of a lot of people who have dabbled in this field of therapy, but never made it." "I know a guy who was in therapy, but he was still an alcoholic and killed himself." Or Yes, "Do you want me to change my face and become exactly like you? This is not what a psychologist should do." Answers such as these are all excuses for patients (or students) to avoid treatment (or study). Laziness makes excuses.The people they want to deceive are not so much the psychologist (or teacher) as themselves.To solve this problem, we must first recognize the nature of laziness, and we need to admit the existence of laziness.

For the above reasons, the more mature a person's mind is, the more he can perceive his own laziness; the more he introspects himself, the more he can find traces of laziness.Personally, the closer I get to the truth, to the facts, in my quest for intellectual maturity, the more I feel laziness at work, and the latest revelation I might have is slipping away from me at any moment.Sometimes, just when I'm about to get a constructive thought, my steps suddenly stop, or I involuntarily slow down.I believe that some extremely valuable ideas may disappear without knowing it, keep me busy for a long time, and finally lose a lot of money.To change this, whenever I find myself slowing down, I force myself to speed up and take strides in the direction I'm trying to stay away from.Fighting laziness is an eternal war, you never give up, you have to fight laziness to the end.

In our hearts, we all have a sick self and a healthy self.Even if our hearts are full of fear and our temperament is extremely stubborn, there is still some magical power in our body—maybe this power is small, but it is positive, healthy, and upward, it promotes the maturity of our minds, it likes change and progress, and yearns for new uncharted territory.It is willing to do its own job well, willing to take all the risks of maturity.In the same way, no matter how healthy we appear to be and how evolved our minds are, there is always another part of our body—it is also small, and it does not want us to pay any hard work.It clings to the familiar, stale past, fearing any change and effort.It just wants to enjoy comfort at any cost and avoid pain, and would rather pay the price of "ineffectiveness", "stagnation" or even "degeneration" for this.In some of us the healthy self may be pitifully small, completely dominated by the laziness and fear of a large, diseased self, while in others the mind matures rapidly and the dominant healthy self , always eager to progress and perfect, and finally reach the height of divinity.It should be pointed out that the healthy self must always be on the lookout for the lazy sick self that is always lurking in our bodies.We are all equal, everyone has two selves, one is sick and the other is healthy; one is living and the other is dying.Each of us is actually enough to represent the entire human race.In everyone's body, there is an instinct to yearn for divinity, and there is a desire to achieve perfection; and in everyone's body, there is also the original sin of laziness.The ubiquitous force of entropy is trying to push us back to the early days of human evolution - where we were young, our mother's womb, and the desolate primordial swamp.